Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris 9781442685130

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
1. Writing on the Image: How We Write and How We Might Write
2. (Dis)continuities: Arthur’s Tomb, Modern Painters, and Morris’s Early Wallpaper Designs
3. William Morris, Shaper of Tales: Creating a Hero’s Story in ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’
4. Medea and Circe as ‘Wise’ Women in the Poetry of William Morris and Augusta Webster
5. Morris and the Muse: Gender and Aestheticism in William Morris’s ‘Pymgalion and the Image’
6. The River at the Heart of Morris’s Ecological Thought
7. News from Nowhere as Autoethnography: A Future History of ‘Home Colonization’
8. Clothes from Nowhere: Costume as Social Symbol in the Work of William Morris
9. To Live in the Present: News from Nowhere and the Representation of the Present in Late Victorian Utopian Fiction
10. ‘Paradyse Erthly’: John Ball and the Medieval Dream-Vision
11. ‘To Frame a Desire’: Morris’s Ideology of Work and Play
12. History Becomes Geography: Tracing Morris’s Later Thought
13. Socialist Fellowship and the Woman Question
14. The Reception of Willam Morris’s Beowulf
15. Morris’s Compromises: On Victorian Editorial Theory and the Kelmscott Chaucer
16. ‘The Dream of William Morris’: Marya Zaturenska’s Lost Essay
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

WRITING ON THE IMAGE: READING WILLIAM MORRIS

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WRITING ON THE IMAGE: RE AD ING WILLIAM MORRIS David Latham

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN: 978-0-8020-9247-2

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Writing on the image : reading William Morris / edited by David Latham. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9247-2 1. Morris, William, 1834-1896. 2. Morris, William, 1834-1896—Criticism and interpretation. I. Latham, David, 1951PR5084.W74 2007

823'.8

C2006-905662-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Preface ix 1 Writing on the Image: How We Write and How We Might Write DAVID LATHAM

2 (Dis)continuities: Arthur’s Tomb, Modern Painters, and Morris’s Early Wallpaper Designs 17 D.M.R. BENTLEY 3 William Morris, Shaper of Tales: Creating a Hero’s Story in ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ 31 JANET WRIGHT FRIESEN

4 Medea and Circe as ‘Wise’ Women in the Poetry of William Morris and Augusta Webster 43 FLORENCE S. BOOS 5 Morris and the Muse: Gender and Aestheticism in William Morris’s ‘Pymgalion and the Image’ 61 JANE THOMAS

6 The River at the Heart of Morris’s Ecological Thought 73 DAVID FALDET

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Contents

7 News from Nowhere as Autoethnography: A Future History of ‘Home Colonization’ 85 KAREN HERBERT

8 Clothes from Nowhere: Costume as Social Symbol in the Work of William Morris

107

WANDA CAMPBELL

9 To Live in the Present: News from Nowhere and the Representation of the Present in Late Victorian Utopian Fiction 119 MATTHEW BEAUMONT

10 ‘Paradyse Erthly’: John Ball and the Medieval Dream-Vision

137

YURI COWAN

11 ‘To Frame a Desire’: Morris’s Ideology of Work and Play 155 DAVID LATHAM

12 History Becomes Geography: Tracing Morris’s Later Thought 173 FREDERICK KIRCHHOFF

13 Socialist Fellowship and the Woman Question 183 RUTH KINNA

14 The Reception of Willam Morris’s Beowulf

197

CHRIS JONES

15 Morris’s Compromises: On Victorian Editorial Theory and the Kelmscott Chaucer CHARLES LAPORTE

16 ‘The Dream of William Morris’: Marya Zaturenska’s Lost Essay 221 JANIS LONDRAVILLE

209

Contents

vii

Bibliography

229

Contributors

245

Index

249

Illustrations follow page 84

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Preface

I lived for two summers in Kelmscott House, William Morris’s Hammersmith home on the Thames. From 1975 to 1980, Kelmscott House provided a communal residence for people studying the work of Morris. With my wife and me, there were – from Canada, the United States, Hungary, and Japan – a weaver, a printer, an architect, a calligrapher, a librarian, and several students and professors studying Morris’s poetry, his textiles, and his politics. Each day we met visitors interested in the various aspects of Morris’s work as a poet, painter, architect, calligrapher, craftsman, manufacturer, translator, editor, socialist, printer, and fiction writer. The exchange of knowledge was invigorating and continually increased each resident’s awe for the breadth and depth of Morris’s interests. It was there in London that Sheila and I began writing our biennial annotated bibliographies of Morris, which we have continued to do for more than twenty-five years. Though we both love the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Tennyson, and the fiction of Alice Munro, I cannot imagine either of us continuing to read and annotate every new work of scholarship produced on anyone other than Morris. For Morris presents the challenge of detective work needed to search not only political weeklies and literary quarterlies, but those home-andgarden magazines found in the check-out lines of grocery shops. Moreover, there is no worry of growing weary of having to steel oneself for still another spin on a play, a poem, or a short story. Providing the endless variety of a jack of all trades and somehow a master of them all, Morris challenges us to stretch beyond the usual limits of our

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specialized scholarship. Among the most interdisciplinary figures in all of western culture, Morris is so interdisciplinary that we Victorianists must remind ourselves that we take his vast range too much for granted: no book on Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe would have chapters on painting and printing, on socialism and wallpapers. Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris is thus a book about a master of multiple trades, an influential figure in the varied worlds of poetics and politics who produced masterpieces of literature and furniture. Moreover, Morris stands remarkably at the forefront of five historic movements in western culture. As the author of The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems in 1858, Morris became a leading figure of the Pre-Raphaelite movement by contributing the first published book of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. As the co-founder of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company in 1861 (known as Morris & Co. from 1875 to 1940), Morris was the leading force in the Arts and Crafts movement, designing tiles, textiles, stained glass, wallpapers, carpets, and furniture. As the editor of The Commonweal for the Socialist League from 1885 through 1890, Morris was the leader of the socialist movement for revolution in Britain, lecturing several times a week at political meetings and rallies for more than a decade. As the innovative author of eight prose romances published between 1888 and 1897, Morris became the leading force in shifting the genre of fiction from the novel to the romance, providing the primary influence for the popular romances by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. And as the founder of the Kelmscott Press in 1891, Morris was the leading force of the fine-print editions of the private-press movement in the book industry, with his Kelmscott Chaucer now considered among the most beautiful books ever printed. The title of our book is a salute to this interdisciplinary versatility, epitomizing Morris’s most intimidating remark about texts and textiles: ‘If a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he’s weaving tapestry, he had better shut up, he’ll never do any good at all’ (qtd in Mackail 1:186). ‘The Writing on the Image’ is the shortest tale from The Earthly Paradise, the longest poem in the English language. It is an intricate narrative about what is ‘writ’ and what is ‘wrought,’ as a priest tells his Greek and Norse audience a tale about a solitary scholar’s too clever integration of word and image. Its conclusion draws a series of distinctions between artist and audience, between the solitary writer who posits a selfish moral and the community of readers whose dialogue leads them to counter-propose a socialist moral. It is an early

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example of Morris’s signature interest in the communal effort to establish a revolutionary social order. Morris envisioned the fundamental principle of this new social order as ‘the hallowing of labour by art’ (‘Preface to Nature’ 367). This principle is the key to his incredible ability to combine diversity with mastery. As his many socialist lectures suggest, he excelled in so many fields because of his steadfast devotion to the minute details of life: ‘The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life, in elevating them by art instead of handling the performance of them to unregarded drudges, and ignoring them’ (‘Aims of Art,’ CW 23:94). He tirelessly campaigned for the need to elevate all things in life to the realm of art, to live our lives as an expression of our love of life so that art, labour, and life become synonymous: ‘Art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labour’ (‘Preface to Nature’ 367). For us to live such lives, he understood the imperative to eliminate the hierarchical divisions that govern our capitalist system: the division of aesthetics that privileges the so-called greater arts over the lesser arts, the division of labour that privileges the designer over the craftsman, the division of classes that privileges the rich over the poor. As early as 1859, when the twenty-five-year-old newlywed moved into Red House – the paradigmatic Arts and Crafts dream-home he helped design with his friend Philip Webb, the young Morris had hoped to establish a Pre-Raphaelite community of artists with the Burne-Jones and Rossetti families, with whom he worked to create the domestic furnishings that would revolutionize the design of decorative art. We residents of Kelmscott House twenty-five years ago believed we were carrying on the communal tradition of those early years at Red House. The Edenic dream at Red House lasted two years; the communal experiment of the Morris Centre at Kelmscott House lasted five years, until the old home became too expensive to maintain. But the dream of a communal inn of craftsmanship and scholarship lives on through another venue, as the William Morris Society now sponsors a series of international conferences: the first in Oxford, the second in Toronto, and the third in London. Each conference is organized to inspire a different type of book: not a conference proceedings, but a book emerging from the communal effort of shared ideas, followed by the dialogues that continue through subsequent correspondence. The result is a book that is meant to be less the clever mark of the solitary scholar or artist-priest and more the communal

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readings and dialogues of the public forum exemplified by the fictional audience in Morris’s ‘Writing on the Image.’ The ambition of these readings is to share the legacy of William Morris, from the visionary motto of his Pre-Raphaelite youth at Red House – ‘If I Can’ – to the revolutionary motto of his political campaign for the Socialist League – ‘Education towards Revolution.’ I welcome the opportunity to thank Matthew Beaumont, David Bentley, Florence Boos, Wanda Campbell, Yuri Cowan, David Faldet, Janet Wright Friesen, Karen Herbert, Chris Jones, Ruth Kinna, Frederick Kirchhoff, Charles LaPorte, Janis Londraville, and Jane Thomas for their collective contributions to this volume. I thank Donalda Badoni, James Bailey, Richard Bishop, Laura Bright, Paula Browne, Pat Govaerts, Susan Pekilis, Paul Russell, Shirley Scott, Terry Wade, Elaine Waisglass, William Whitla, Gianna Wichelow, and John Wichelow of the William Morris Society of Canada for all their help and camaraderie in making it truly fun to organize an international conference. I am grateful for the assistance of Jill McConkey, Barbara Porter, and Miriam Skey of the University of Toronto Press in guiding this book through to publication. I wish to thank especially Sheila Latham for her work as co-chair of the conference, for her assistance as a librarian at George Brown College, for her interest as a fellow admirer of Morris, and, as always, for her patience as my wife.

Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris

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1 Writing on the Image: How We Write and How We Might Write David Latham

In ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’ William Morris explains why he has to talk of revolution despite his awareness that ‘people beg you to speak of reform and not revolution’ (CW 23:3). Morris’s fear is that reform is evolutionary, offering only modifying palliatives that will enable the present system to adapt, whereas what is needed is a revolutionary ‘change in the basis of society’ (23:3). He concludes with his characteristic denunciation of civilization, contending that if we cannot change the basis of this progressive civilization that our society has evolved into, then ‘let us as speedily as possible find some means of dying like men, since we are forbidden to live like men’ (23:25). With this sentiment in mind we need some explanation for why Morris scholarship appears to have undergone little of the poststructuralist upheaval that overturned literary studies thirty years ago. The shift simply made Morris more fashionable since Morris scholarship long ago had shifted its focus from the literary to the political, from the novel to the romance, from the lyric to the narratological, and from the text to the image. Instead of experiencing a paradigmatic disruption, Morris scholarship is remarkable for the continuities extending from the work of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams in the 1950s to the interdisciplinary work of the 1990s and the 2000s. It is therefore understandable that scholarship devoted to the revolutionary Morris has progressed at only an evolutionary pace. Until now. Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that showcases a significant progression in this evolutionary pace of Morris scholarship. Much has changed

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since 1996, when the last book of essays on Morris was collected, a collection inspired by the centennial conference at Exeter College, Oxford (Faulkner and Preston, William Morris: Centennary Essays). At that conference there was a contentious split between the academics and the artisans, with the artisans feeling that their interests were being pushed aside. The second international Morris conference, held in Toronto in 2000, was designed to foreground an interdisciplinary approach to Morris, and Morris has since become the focus of an interdisciplinary scholarship that still stresses the academic lines of enquiry but now acknowledges the need to reach beyond the narrow fields of academic disciplines. Poetry and politics, printing and prose romances, wallpapers and utopian fiction, feminism and socialism: all of these topics are equally central to Morris’s work and they present a challenge for the specialists of our century to integrate into some sense of a coherent whole. Such interdisciplinary stretches do not always work out. As the editor of an academic journal as well as this collection of essays, I have received manuscripts over the transom that promise to revolutionize scholarship. One such manuscript looked as if it was responding to Morris’s revolutionary cry for ‘some means of dying like men.’ It was an essay on Morris and Nietzsche and Wilde, beginning with Morris’s essay ‘Of Dyeing as an Art’ and moving on to The Birth of Tragedy and ‘The Decay of Lying.’ It quoted only the opening sentence from Morris: ‘Dying is a very ancient art; from the earliest times of the ancient civilisations till within about forty years ago there had been no essential change in it, and not much change of any kind’ (‘Of Dyeing’ 196). This dramatic start was followed with a reference to the popularity of those Victorian books on ‘The Dying Thoughts’ of reverends and the like, and immediately, I felt the excitement of an overworked editor, thinking perhaps perversely, ‘Oh, this is going to be fun, here is a daring sense of humour; wow, if the writer can pull this off ...’ But it was not humour; nothing held together. Morris was not only quoted out of context, but was clearly being read out of a context wherein no spell-checker could have saved the writer from dying, with or without the overlooked ‘e.’ I don’t know what this writer would have done with the very next sentence about ‘Prussianblue’ pigment, but think of the fun the writer could have had working with other sentences from Morris’s essay, by adding some Lazarus here or some Marx there (as Morris goes on): ‘The art of dyeing, I am bound to say, is a difficult one, needing for its practice plenty of

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experience’ (209); and, ‘capitalists in their hunt after profits have terribly injured the art of dyeing’ (197). I have intentionally selected an unfair example of decontextualizing Morris in order to accentuate the problem as the central issue in Morris studies. Morris may be the most difficult artist to contextualize, because to do so requires an interdisciplinary interest in all of his many skills. The increasingly interdisciplinary interest in Morris we find evolving now is bringing about a revolutionary change in the basis of Morris scholarship. This change began first on a national level. Whereas a decade ago we could categorize American and Australian studies of Morris as foregrounding his literature, Canadian and Japanese studies as foregrounding his decorative arts, and British studies as foregrounding his politics, his printing, and his decorative arts, now such categorization is no longer possible. These segregated categories were very much responsible for that alleged split between the academics and the artisans at the Oxford centennial conference, a divide which then may have looked insurmountable, but which our current scholarship of the past decade suggests is a perception already outdated, as interdisciplinary studies direct our focus on the integration of Morris’s interests. However much political governments continue to move further to the right, academics have continued to politicize their disciplines to the left, replacing specialized research with more inclusive cultural issues; thus, the artistic and literary and political Morris moves from a marginal to a central site for study. Still, the ‘post’ era of Pre-Raphaelite scholarship has nowhere decentred the margins far enough. An early breakthrough for me occurred in the British Library in 1979. I was interested in Morris’s poetry at the time, and I did not fully understand his development as an artist, a development that appeared to leap through a succession of stages from theology, architecture, and painting, to poetry and decorative arts, then to a whirlwind decade of political action, before finally winding down with printing and prose romances. E.P. Thompson’s monumental study of Morris’s conversion from romantic to revolutionary, with its climactic chapter on Morris’s crossing the river of fire to become a committed socialist, left me straddling an uncomfortable number of contradictions. As I was reading through the manuscript of a lecture entitled ‘Communism,’ only half mindful of the argument while noting the watermarks, paper size, and penmanship quirks, I came to this blunt sentence: ‘All workers are exploited.’ In writing the word ‘exploited,’ Morris crossed through the

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‘t’ with a line that continued over to the right margin where it then dipped and swirled into an elaborate pattern of acanthus leaves (BL Add. MSS. 45333). This was my first realization of Morris’s remarkable consistency. He remained committed to all of his many-varied interests throughout virtually all of his life. In 1955 we needed Thompson’s political emphasis as a counterbalance to the depoliticized Morris that had been strained down to us since J.W. Mackail’s commissioned biography, but here is an example forty years later of decontextualizing Morris from a student of Raymond Williams’s: Terry Eagleton in 1995. After complaining about Morris’s ‘unstaunchable stream of poetry’ and attributing Morris’s dislike of Italy to marital stress (‘because it reminded him of one of his wife’s lovers’), Eagleton labels Morris a Victorian entrepreneur whose company was the Habitat of its day: ‘No bourgeois home was complete without its chic artefacts.’ He sums Morris up as a Falstaffian subject who exhibits at best a ‘Blakeian vitalism,’ but at worst ‘the bluff camaraderie of the rugby club’ (‘Wallpaper and Barricades’ 8). When it comes down to details we are left asking ourselves what the glib student of Williams has learned. We might start by remembering to contextualize Rossetti’s jokes about Morris as his rival, a reminder that will turn our attention from the mockery of the caricature to the jealousy of its creator. So some things appear, alas, forever exempt from change. We still have scholars writing about Morris’s painting of La Belle Iseult as if it were Queen Guenevere, or as Guinevere spelt with a Tennysonian ‘i.’ The many editions of the Norton Anthology still spell the ‘Defence of Guenevere’ with an ‘s,’ as ‘Defense.’ Moreover, whenever there is a gathering of Morris scholars and artisans the informal conversations inevitably turn to the oft-reprinted comical anecdotes and cartoons that suggest the buffoonery of the bull in the china shop. Biographers will speculate that Morris’s raging temperament may have been a form of epilepsy, and that Morris no doubt felt responsible for his first daughter’s condition. But, again, when we consider the context of such anecdotes, we may surmise that his friends exaggerated his temperament as the butt of jokes, that such exaggeration arose because Morris was a genius whose good sense of humour provided the means for his talented friends to humanize a competitor in art and literature whom they held in awe. ‘Morris knows things,’ was the refrain his classmates uttered when he was a young student at Oxford.1 His old friends were still in awe a decade after his death. Few ninety-year-old

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mortals have known as many sages as William Michael Rossetti, who was well connected equally in the two worlds of arts and letters. His choice of words for his portrait of Morris is thus especially telling: I regard Morris as the most remarkable man all round – the most uncommon man – whom I have known. He was artist, poet, romancist, antiquary, linguist, translator, lecturer, craftsman, printer, trader, socialist; and was besides, as a man to meet and talk to, a most singular personality. Among my intimates he was one of the few who had some turn for sport: he would go out fishing, boating, and the like ... Dante Rossetti used to say that Morris looked like a knight of the Round Table, and this was not far from the fact. (1:214)

Another century later, we have the perspective to recognize William Morris as the Olympian figure who stands remarkably at the forefront of five historic movements in western culture: the Pre-Raphaelite, Artsand-Crafts, Socialist, prose-romance, and private-press movements. That sentence may sound as if it smacks of hagiography, because it is simply too overwhelming for us to absorb. We can comprehend these facts only at a slower pace, one at a time. As the author of The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems in 1858, Morris became a leading figure of the Pre-Raphaelite movement with the first published book of PreRaphaelite poetry. As the co-founder of Morris & Co. in 1861, Morris was the leading force in the Arts and Crafts movement, designing tiles, textiles, stained glass, wallpapers, carpets, and furniture. As the editor of The Commonweal for the Socialist League in the 1880s, Morris was the leader of the socialist movement for revolution in Britain, lecturing several times a week at political rallies for more than a decade. As the innovative author of eight prose romances in the 1890s, Morris became the leading force in shifting the genre of fiction from the novel to the romance, providing the primary influence for the popular romances by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. As the founder of the Kelmscott Press in 1891, Morris was the leading force of the privatepress movement in the book industry, with his Kelmscott Chaucer now considered among the most beautiful books ever printed. We might add more: that as the founder in 1877 of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Morris was an early and most effective advocate for the preservation of our architectural heritage, with his Society still vigilant today. Such are the facts, but it remains much easier to absorb the comical tales of the ‘turbulent, restless, noisy’ nature of

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Morris, ‘brusque in his movements, addicted to stumbling over doorsteps, breaking down solid-looking chairs the moment he took his seat in them’ (W.M. Rossetti 1:215). So, yes, some things indeed appear exempt from change. Nevertheless, there is much exciting scholarship to pursue. Remarkably, after 150 years of scholarship there is still fundamental work to be done to establish or to further problematize the authority of Morris’s primary works: of his texts, of his tiles, and of his textiles. In 1979 I found pieces of blue tile in the cellar of Kelmscott House, enough to piece together two tiles. When I showed them to the head of the Morris Society, he said they were Dutch tiles: ‘worthless – beautiful, but worthless.’ So I thought I could do no harm by gluing them together. Two weeks later I saw the Sunflower tile (fig. 1.1) displayed on the wall of the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was identified as one of William De Morgan’s earliest tiles, designed when he was a student of Morris’s. Later still, I examined with a magnifying glass an Emery Walker photograph of Morris’s library in Kelmscott House and I recognized these tiles decorating the fireplace. The Sunflower tiles, which I likely ruined with epoxy glue, are now attributed to Morris (Catleugh 47). Richard and Hilary Myers attributed the Oak, Bay, & Sunflower tile to Morris in their 1982 article on his thirteen tile-designs (‘Morris & Co’ 20), but in their more recent book on Morris tiles, they attribute it to Philip Webb (102–4). After years of Compton being praised as one of Morris’s most sophisticated designs, this 1896 design for cotton and for wallpaper was attributed by Linda Parry to Morris’s right-hand assistant John Henry Dearle (153). Now, Lesley Hoskins is questioning that attribution, thinking it may be Morris’s design after all (‘Stained with Poetry’). I have for a long time questioned May Morris’s 1883 design for the Honeysuckle wallpaper, ever since I compared its original drawing (fig. 1.2) at Kelmscott House with other drawings of Morris’s own designs. I believe father and daughter designed it together, with Morris initially encouraging May’s efforts, then revising them into what he liked, and finally praising May for doing it all herself. May was an expert embroiderer in charge of the embroidery works at the Firm and an excellent editor of her father’s collected writings, but she did no other designs for Morris & Co. other than those for embroidery. Eugene LeMire is completing a bibliography of Morris’s primary literary texts and he problematizes a basic question about the first edition of The Well at the World’s End. Its manuscript was ready for printing in 1892 for the Kelmscott Press, but Morris wanted Arthur

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Gaskins to revise the drawings. The Chiswick Press went ahead with printing a trade edition in 1893 but did not release it until after the Kelmscott edition appeared three years later in 1896. As Morris had revised the Chiswick sheets in 1893, they served as the copy-text for the Kelmscott edition. So, ‘which is the first edition,’ LeMire asks us, ‘the one first printed or the one first published, and how is the difficulty to be resolved?’ (185). After raising this tricky problem, LeMire later claims that the American Roberts Brothers published the first edition of Morris’s most popular book News from Nowhere (190), whereas others might well contend that the 1890 Roberts book is an unauthorized pirated edition because it was rushed into print from the Commonweal weekly instalments without Morris’s permission and, moreover, without the careful revisions he did for his authorized 1891 Reeves & Turner edition. Jerome McGann’s experimentation with hypertextual editing will not circumvent these difficulties, but rather it will help broaden the contextuality that I have been arguing is necessary for the future of Morris scholarship. W.B. Yeats, at the beginning of the twentieth century, identified the impact of technology on art: ‘English literature, alone of great literatures, because the newest of them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printing-press’ (‘Literature and the Living Voice’ 206). Not ‘convinced that the printing-press will always be victor,’ Yeats is confident that ‘our exaggerated love of print and paper’ will not last beyond the ‘passing conditions’ from which it arose (206–7). Hence, while acknowledging that Morris ‘did more than any modern to recover mediaeval art’ (220), Yeats is puzzled why Morris neglected the ‘essential’ oral style of the medieval bards: in contrast to the ‘old writers’ who ‘wrote to be spoken or to be sung,’ Morris ‘thought of himself as writing for the reader’ (221, 220). But Yeats is struggling here to articulate what Morris was among the first to fully practise, and the very first to comprehend the full implications of what Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed in a letter to Robert in 1845 – ‘this talking upon paper’ – and of what Tennyson called the ‘silent speaking words’ in In Memoriam. In his first book review (on Robert Browning’s Men and Women) and then in his first book, Morris reveals his steadfast concern with the printed voice – with the dramatic monologues in The Defence of Guenevere, with the closet drama of Love Is Enough – not only with the difference between the private internal contemplation of the printed voice on the page and the public performance positioned on the stage floor, but with a speaker whose

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rhetoric conceals more than it reveals, and with print that is continually in flight with the flow of each reader’s imagination. Morris writes for sound and sight and touch, for aural tales spoken aloud, for visual print read alone, and for tactile paper surveyed and turned. McGann has written about the ‘materialist aesthetic’ of Morris, explaining how Morris experimented with a new vision of poetic form in ‘three distinctive ways’: first, The Defence of Guenevere volume explores an ‘aesthetic of observation’ of minute details and small words that renovates vision; second, the handmade poems of A Book of Verse integrate the bibliographical features of the book with the texts of his verse; and third, the font, capitals, borders, and facing pages of the Kelmscott edition of Poems by the Way present words not as referential signs but as declarations of their ‘radical self-identity’ in a manner profoundly influential in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (‘Thing to Mind’ 55–74). But now, with the new forms of technology widely used in this new century, McGann has raised issues of radiant textuality that scholars will find especially relevant to Morris. Electronic pre-print forms of text, on the one hand, limit us to viewing a few sentences of text as opposed to the two-page spread Morris designed for his Kelmscott texts. On the other hand, a hypertext frees us by inviting us to situate a text within a multiplicity of historic contexts. A poem first published in the Fortnightly Review viewed as a text in the Fortnightly Review will be read within the context of all its original public associations. We are now beginning to publish the results of the new critical exchange McGann first identified on the internet: the shift from readerly to writerly criticism, as the interactive character of knowledge invites writer engagement rather than reader response. Authoritative sources are now questioned, challenged, and debated within days and hours rather than weeks and years. Northrop Frye used to say not only that good teachers had to publish but that good scholars had to teach (‘Search for Acceptable Words’ 7), because the classroom provides a forum for the questions and rebuttals required for fine tuning our research. Writerly engagement will extend the classroom beyond the locality of the campus, and interdisciplinary contexts stretch our understanding beyond the habitual boundaries of our own specialized interests. Frye also used to advise students to choose an author whose boundaries stretch beyond our own reach. As Writing on the Image so amply demonstrates, William Morris – the ‘artist, writer, socialist’ (May Morris’s title for the last two volumes

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of her father’s Collected Works) – offers just this challenge. The title of our book is a salute to this interdisciplinary challenge. ‘The Writing on the Image’ is one of the twenty-four tales from The Earthly Paradise, the work Morris was best known for during his own lifetime. George Eliot’s and George Lewes’s enthusiasm for the poem typified its popular appeal to many Victorians: ‘We take Morris’s poem with us and read it aloud, greedily looking to see how much more there is in store for us. If ever you have an idle afternoon, bestow it on The Earthly Paradise’ (George Eliot Letters, 27 June 1868). Eliot’s recommendation suggests the polarities responsible for Morris’s success as an artist: his simplicity and complexity made his work at once accessible and challenging. As popular fare for a Sunday picnic, the poem excited Eliot and Lewes for ‘how much more is in store for us.’ The shortest tale within the longest poem in English, ‘The Writing on the Image’ is narrated by a Swabian priest who was a student of alchemy and mystic lore. It is a tale about a ‘cornel image,’ a wooden statue standing in the middle of the town square with a pointing finger and inscription that no one understands until a clever scholar solves its mystery by discovering that the artist who created the image and text was daring curious onlookers to dig below the stone pavement to find a winding staircase to an underworld of bejewelled marble figures. When the scholar strips the figures of their jewels and gold to fill his sack with a fortune richer than that of any royalty, a shaft of light flies like an arrow from the bow of a marble knight, leaving the tomb ‘dark as pitch straightway’ (Earthly Paradise 290). The scholar is left entombed in the dark. The wooden statue above is then burned to the ground by a bolt of lightning, and all evidence of the scholar’s digging is washed away by the thunderstorm. The superstitious townsfolk replace the mysterious cornel image with a grander but more conventional stone statue ‘thickly overlaid with gold ... which, saith my tale, you may behold / Unto this day,’ although ‘some Lord or other, being in need, / Took every ounce of gold away’ (330–4). Morris humorously foregrounds the greed of the rich lords who feel they are in need of still more wealth, but the narrator self-referentially reminds his audience that what his tale ‘saith’ happened long ago, and that by now the weather-beaten stone statue as well as its gold overlay and the original cornel image are all long gone. The priest concludes with his carpe diem advice: ‘Be merry, masters, while ye may, / For men much quicker pass away’ (338–9). The artistry of this tale about the ‘writing on the image’ lies in the

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frequent references to what is ‘writ’ and what is ‘wrought’ (6, 10, 149, 336; 146, 176). As constructed by Morris, this is not a tale of morality but of metaphor – the sorcery of spells, letters, words, images – the mimetic likenesses of art. It is a self-referential tale about the disintegration of image and text, of structural design and the written word, of life and art into the undiscernable and the unreadable. These are the consequences when we forsake the effort to ascend to our potential as creative artists, and pursue instead a descent to an underworld where words are reduced to such spells of sorcery and can only be spelled out in hellish ways. Verbally, in the text of the ‘Argument’ and the text of the tale, Morris repeatedly foregrounds the self-referential: ‘certain words’ and their ‘uncertain’ meanings (9–10, 41, 88, 149). Only the clever scholar is able to decipher the ‘unknown words’ by integrating what is ‘writ’ with what is ‘wrought.’ Visually, Morris presents a circled shadow, a brazen ring, a winding staircase, a vortex of greed that alludes to Dante’s swirling descent into the Inferno. Word and Image: the relation between the two remains an enigma until the scholar recognizes that the ‘Percute Hic’ verbal inscription is related to the visual direction of the shadow cast by the pointing finger of the sculpture: ‘Strike Here.’ Though the scholar clearly understands the Faustian consequences of his descent in deciphering the Master artist’s mysterious work, the scholar arrogantly rationalizes the power of the vortex of imagery as a darkness he can enlighten and exploit. Hence, he is not the dupe of some demonic trick that leaves him entombed in the underworld, but rather the victim of his own plotting for power. The scholar mistakes the creative artist as a ‘Master’ of deceptive artifice whose words and images cast a spell he imagines must be mastered and broken. The scholar thus misreads the text of the tale for the shadow of the image, forsaking creative expression for selfish exploitation. Wealth tempts us as we pursue the glittering gold, the power of the royal guise, sacrificing the freedom and power of personal creation and social community for their opposites: mastery and slavery. The purpose of art is thereby perverted. The Earthly Paradise is often misread as merely a melancholy poem sung by ‘an idle singer of an empty day’ who seeks escape from the troubles of the world, a misreading encouraged by Walter Pater’s haunting review, which pinpoints the Pre-Raphaelite interest in the mutable moment as ‘the desire for beauty quickened by the sense of death’ (‘Poems by William Morris’ 309). But the poem continually transcends this initial mood with affirmations that exemplify the

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consistency of Morris’s political vision, as its communal values anticipate the socialist principles Morris would preach fifteen years later from Hyde Park corner to the assembly halls of the Socialist League and the Women’s Union across England, Scotland, and Ireland. As the Swabian priest concludes his tale of ‘The Writing on the Image,’ Morris contrasts the understanding of the individual narrator with that of the community of readers. After repeatedly referring to what the tale ‘saith,’ the priest concludes with his carpe diem moral, and hence succumbs himself to the folly of the scholar’s misreading of the writing on the image: ‘Be merry, masters, while ye may, / For men much quicker pass away’ (338–9). The priest recommends the scholar’s pursuit of the selfish grab, since life is too short to worry about the consequences. But the audience of medieval Norse wanderers and classical Greek settlers responds differently. They compare the priest’s tale with ‘other tales of treasure-seekers balked’ (341) and conclude that its lesson concerns the socialist value of sharing the bounty of the earth: ‘better it would be to give / What things they may, while on the earth they live / Unto the earth’ (352–4). The tale thus ascends from the personal realm of the individual narrator to the communal realm of the community of readers who raise the moral from selfish escapism of the individual to self-sacrifice for the good of the community. Morris presents a tale of the misguided ambition of a solitary scholar heard by a diverse community of medieval Norsemen and classical Greeks whose subsequent discussion sets the tale within the context of a community of readers: what we call scholarship. Writ and wrought, word and image, the individual scholar and the community of scholarship: the single tale of ‘The Writing on the Image’ leads us to the interdisciplinary canon of the artist, writer, and socialist. Poetry and politics, printing and prose romances, wallpaper and utopian fiction, ecology and translation, feminism and socialism: each of these topics is equally central to Morris’s work. With his interests so varied and yet so integrated, it is difficult to organize this collection of essays by topic or by their attention to a specific poem, decorative design, prose romance, Anglo-Saxon translation, or printed book. What follows is an arrangement that roughly corresponds with the chronology of his career, starting with his early poetry because he gained fame as a poet in the 1850s and ’60s, as a decorative artist in the 1860s and ’70s, as a socialist in the 1880s, as an author of prose romances in the 1890s, and as a printer and book designer also in the 1890s.

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Hence, the collection begins with four essays on his poetry: two on his dramatic lyrics of the 1850s and two on his narrative romances of the 1860s. David Bentley compares Morris’s early poem ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’ with his early wallpaper designs as well as with Rossetti’s watercolour Arthur’s Tomb. From the serpentine images and lines of his poem and wallpaper designs to the Christian and erotic connotations of the pomegranate, Morris explores the relationship of sacred and profane love praised by Ruskin in Modern Painters. Janet Wright Friesen considers masculine heroism in ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,’ a reflexive poem about ‘the shaping and crafting of a heroic tale,’ as Lady Alice frames the reputation for her defeated lover by modelling her account of his deeds after the heroic examples of Hector and Launcelot. Florence Boos and Jane Thomas turn to Morris’s longer narratives. Boos demonstrates that his unconventional treatment of the classical figures of Jason, Media, and Circe not only anticipated the egalitarian principles of his later political lectures but also influenced the poetry of Augusta Webster, whose feminist heroines contribute to an emerging feminist counter-tradition. Thomas pursues this feminist countertradition in The Earthly Paradise as Morris explores the Pygmalion myth with a feminist sensitivity that distinguishes him from other PreRaphaelites. Though he remained most widely known during his lifetime as the author of The Earthly Paradise, his most widely read work since his death has been News from Nowhere. The next four essays turn from poetry to this important utopian prose work. David Faldet insightfully links it with Morris’s Arts-and-Crafts work, which revolutionized decorative design, and with his pioneering commitment to ecology, epitomized in his eight designs for cotton chintzes patterned after the rivers he loved. Wanda Campbell looks at how the characters in News from Nowhere dress in harmony with nature, a principle that ‘permeates all of Morris’s art, from poetry to wallpaper,’ as Morris looks back to the ‘tribal communities of the Goths’ as inspiration for the manners of a socialist society of the future. Karen Herbert reads News from Nowhere according to Morris’s interdisciplinary terms of decorative patterns and imperialist politics, showing how the paradigms for art and socialism in his utopian society are consistent with E.M. Gombrich’s ‘counterchange’ theory regarding the perceptual inversions of figure/ ground relationships and Edward Said’s theory of the hierarchy of spaces regarding the metropolitan centre and the colonized periphery. Matthew Beaumont discusses News from Nowhere as an effort to

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historicize the present in response to the capitalist ‘conditions of modernity.’ The sudden interest in utopian fiction that Morris shared with other writers at the fin de siècle arose from their recognition that the empty present of capitalism was a void that left writers confronting a crisis in representation. The next four essays straddle the chronological age of the News from Nowhere essays. Yuri Cowan contextualizes A Dream of John Ball within the conventions of the allegorical dream-visions of the fourteenth century that Morris knew so well. Frederick Kirchhoff and Ruth Kinna search Morris’s prose romances from different perspectives. Kirchhoff asks the provocative question, ‘What did Morris really want?’ as he discusses how Morris grounds his parabolic visions for a socialist future by replacing history with geography. Kinna surveys Morris’s later romances for evidence of his understanding of the ‘Woman Question,’ finding him progressive in regards to labour practices and marriage rights, but reactionary in his notion of domestic gender roles. David Latham suggests that what Morris wanted was a revolutionary world wherein work and play are synonymous, and that his lectures on the decorative arts in the 1870s, his political lectures in the 1880s, and his prose romances in the 1890s exemplify a consistent progression through aesthetic, militant, and visionary socialist phases. The last three essays focus on Morris’s interests in the 1890s and their influence on future generations. The similarities in the style of translation practised by the elder Morris and the young but influential Ezra Pound lead Chris Jones to reassess Morris’s translation of Beowulf within the context of the theories of Victorian philologists who were advocating a ‘native’ vocabulary in a nationalist effort to rescue the English heritage from the decadent neoclassical influences of Latinate diction. Examining the compromises Morris made with medieval scribal culture in preparing his text for the Kelmscott Chaucer, Charles LaPorte similarly considers Morris as a transitional figure between Victorian editorial practice and modern textual theory. Janis Londraville documents a lost manuscript written in the twentieth century, as she discusses the influence Morris had on the PulitizerPrize winning poetry of a young immigrant from Russia and the fascinating web that connected her to the American woman who shared a lover with May Morris. Together these essays show why Morris has moved to the centre of interdisciplinary studies. To return to Frye’s terms for recommending a subject whose boundaries stretch beyond our own reach, it is the

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interdisciplinary nature of Morris’s work that prohibits anyone from ever reaching the boundaries of Morris’s literature, decorative arts, book design, politics, etc., ‘etcetera’ being a word on which I would never end an introduction for any other figure but Morris.

NOTE 1

‘How Morris seems to know things,’ admired Charles Faulkner. Richard Watson Dixon agreed: ‘I observed how decisive he was: how accurate, without any effort or formality: what an extraordinary power of observation lay at the base of many of his casual or incidental remarks, and how many things he knew that were quite out of our way’ (Mackail 1:44). ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1.1 William Morris. Sunflower. Blue tile painted by Morris & Co., c. 1870– 8. 6 x 6 in. Fig. 1.2 William Morris and May Morris. Honeysuckle. Original design for wallpaper. Trustees of the Kelmscott House Trust. William Morris Society, London. Pattern produced as a hand-block printed wallpaper by Morris & Co., 1883.

2 (Dis)continuities: Arthur’s Tomb, Modern Painters, and Morris’s Early Wallpaper Designs D.M.R. Bentley

Arthur’s Tomb (fig. 2.1; 1855) is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s first painting of an Arthurian subject and, as such, has been generally recognized as occupying a transitional position between the work of the first and second groups of Pre-Raphaelites. Although dated 1854 the painting was actually executed in the late summer and autumn of 1855, some two years after Rossetti had declared the ‘Round Table’ of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood ‘dissolved’ (Correspondence 1:163), and some two months before he made the acquaintance of Burne-Jones and, through him, Morris (Burne-Jones, Memorials 1:128–30). Nevertheless, as David Rogers observes, the ‘angularity of [its two] figures, particularly the Queen who was surely posed for by Lizzie Siddal, harks back to the early PRB style of 1849-50,’ and its subject – Launcelot attempting to kiss Guenevere over Arthur’s tomb – ‘inspired the poem of [nearly] the same title ... in The Defence of Guenevere, [Morris’s] first volume of poetry, published in 1858’ (44). Perhaps because it occupies a liminal position between two stages of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Arthur’s Tomb has not occasioned the commentary that David Latham suggests it deserves1 either as a work by Rossetti or as an inspiration to Morris, a deficiency that this essay will attempt to remedy as it places the painting, the poem that it occasioned (‘King Arthur’s Tomb’), and Morris’s wallpaper designs of the early 1860s in the context of Ruskin’s Modern Painters 3, 4, and 5 (1856, 1856, 1860). Despite the visual echoes of such works as John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50), James Collinson’s The Renunciation of

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Queen Elizabeth of Hungary (1848-50), and Rossetti’s own drawing of The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1849) that are generated by the angular postures of Launcelot and Guenevere in Arthur’s Tomb, several aspects of the painting detach it from the early Pre-Raphaelite style. First, the use of watercolours casts it in a relatively informal mode that is reinforced by the sketchy quality of the brushwork with which its background and foreground foliage are rendered so as to focus attention not only on Launcelot and Guenevere, but also on the effigy of Arthur that surmounts his tomb and the scenes from the history of the Round Table – the knighting of Launcelot and Galahad’s vision of the Holy Grail – that decorate its length. Second, the decoration of the tomb, its horizontal placement in the picture space, and the horizontal dimensions of the picture space itself (23.5 x 36.8 cm) are less evocative of the Early Christian art admired and emulated by the original Pre-Raphaelites than of the woodcut of the tomb of Adonis in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and Titian’s allegory Sacred and Profane Love (1514) (see Colonna 371–3, Bentley, ‘Hypnerotomachia’ 280–3, and Grieve 277), two products of the Venetian Renaissance, the characteristics and productions of which Ruskin had celebrated in The Stones of Venice (1851, 1853) and would celebrate again in Modern Painters 5. ‘It is in many ways a painful picture,’ observes Evelyn Waugh in his sensitively astute reading of the painting in Rossetti: His Life and Works; ‘three horizontals’ – the effigy and tomb of Arthur, and the branches of the apple tree that impinge on Launcelot’s shield, and Guenevere’s headdress – ‘constrict the composition until it aches with suppressed resilience ... A lesser artist, certainly any other PreRaphaelite, would have twisted [the trunk of] that apple-tree or gnarled it and made a beautiful decoration of it; all Rossetti wanted was a clamp’ (95). In characterizing Launcelot as ‘aflame with masculinity’ and Guenevere as an image of ‘threatened chastity,’ Waugh brilliantly captures the sexual drama of Arthur’s Tomb, but in failing to discuss its apple tree as a biblical allusion as well as ‘a clamp’ and in interpreting Arthur’s effigy and tomb merely as manifestations of ‘obtrusive mortality’ (94–5), he scants the Christian and moral dimensions of a painting whose formalistic and ethical resonances are very much a reflection of Rossetti’s preoccupation in (and after) 1853 with the eschatological consequences of sexual transgression and the tense relationship between sacred and profane love. The year 1853, it may be recalled, was when Hesterna Rosa was drawn, ‘The Honeysuckle’ composed, and Found begun; 1855, the year of Paolo and Francesca da

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Rimini, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and ‘Valentine – to Lizzie Siddal.’ Like all these and other works of the mid-1850s, Arthur’s Tomb occupies the transitional zone in Rossetti’s oeuvre between Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Bocca Baciata (1859). A third aspect of Arthur’s Tomb that detaches it from Rossetti’s earlier work, aligns it with his thematic and stylistic concerns of the mid1850s, and, as important, signals it as a possible precursor of Morrisian design is its use of an undulating or serpentine line of force to lead the viewer’s eye through the picture space and across the rectangular mass of Arthur’s tomb. Beginning near the top left of the picture, where Launcelot’s grazing horse provides both a spatial and a narrative prelude to the episode depicted, this line of force takes the viewer’s eye along the knight’s shield, across the thematically significant gap between his face and Guenevere’s, down the curvature of the queen’s headdress, and out of the picture near the bottom right of the picture space. Continuous despite interruption or, conversely, a form of interrupted continuity, the serpentine line of Arthur’s Tomb thus links Launcelot and Guenevere, reflects their separation, and invites meditation on the (dis)continuity between sacred and profane love. It is also a compositional allusion by way of the presence and shape of the serpent in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture space to the temptation and fall of Eve, a narrative to which the fallen apple beside the serpent and the apple tree behind the figures also alludes. As obviously as in Found, a moment of tension between sexual innocence and experience is insistently referred to a Christian context of judgment and consequences, though here, of course, it is the female who is (newly) innocent and the male who desires to continue a life of sin. That Guenevere wears a fastened girdle and Launcelot a passionate red tunic is fully in accordance with the iconography of clothes in relation to sacred and profane love that Rossetti began to develop with ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and used consistently in his poems and paintings of the 1840s and 1850s, as witness, for example, the fastened girdle of the innocent girl in Hesterna Rosa and the red flowers on the prostitute’s dress in Found.2 (That the red and white of Launcelot’s tunic and shield are also liturgical colours adds a degree of complexity to the painting that accords with its – and, later, Morris’s – suggestion of a continuity as well as a distinction between sacred and profane love.)3 Since Arthur’s Tomb so strongly evokes the biblical temptation and fall, there is something to be learned from comparing it with a

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medieval depiction of the Tree of Knowledge that was probably known to Rossetti at the time of the painting’s execution: the ‘somewhat late thirteenth-century Hebrew manuscript’ in the British Museum that Ruskin entitles ‘Appletree’ in Plate 7 of Modern Painters (3:208). Although Modern Painters 3 and 4 were not published until early 1856 (their prefaces are dated ‘Jan[uary]’ of that year), they were almost certainly a topic of conversation between Ruskin and Rossetti during their composition in 1855 when the two men were teaching together at the London Working Men’s College (from January to March they even taught on the same night);4 indeed, Jan Marsh goes so far as to suggest that ‘the inspiration [for Arthur’s Tomb] surely [came] from the Gothic carvings, illuminated missals and early German woodcuts Ruskin was currently studying, praising, lending’ (Dante Gabriel 148–9). (Ironically, it may have been Ruskin’s tutelage of Rossetti in medieval art that caused him to be dissatisfied with Arthur’s Tomb: ‘The Guenevere and Launcelot is not my pet drawing, though Mr. Browning could not say too much of it,’ he told Eleanor Heaton on 11 November 1855; ‘it is one of my imperfect ones ... Launcelot is so funnily bent under his shield, and Arthur points his toes so over the tomb, that I dare not show it to Anti-Pre-Raphaelites, but I value it intensely myself’ [qtd in Surtees 1:35].) Ruskin’s primary reason for reproducing the thirteenthcentury ‘Appletree’ in Modern Painters 3 is to illustrate the symbolic treatment of external nature in Christian art ‘from the earliest periods down to the close of the fourteenth century’ (after which imitation became the norm). His secondary reason is to refute Macaulay’s ‘very curiously foolish’ interpretation of the figure wound around the ‘tree of knowledge’ in a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript as a ‘snake’ (3:206–7). In correcting the ‘exquisite naiveté of the historian,’ Ruskin provides a valuable gloss on the disposition of the figures in Arthur’s Tomb: Mr. Macaulay is evidently quite unaware that the serpent with the human head, and body twisted round the tree, was the universallyaccepted symbol of the evil angel,5 from the dawn of [Christian] art up to Michael Angelo; that the greatest sacred artists invariably place the man on the one side of the tree, the woman on the other, in order to denote the enthroned and balanced dominion about to fall by temptation. (3:207)

In a realm that has already fallen by temptation, Launcelot and

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Guenevere are placed asymmetrically on the left (sinister) side of the tree of knowledge, as also are Launcelot’s horse and the serpent, which appears to be crawling away after accomplishing its task. Viewed as a dramatic tableau, Arthur’s Tomb is centred on the faces of Launcelot and Guenevere and the queen’s upheld hand; viewed in the context of the Christian narrative and symbolic formality evoked by its apple tree and serpent, its central concern is with the ‘fall by temptation’ that destroyed the ‘enthroned and balanced dominion’ of the Round Table and thus warrants typological referral to the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve. Not without reason does the shadow of the apple tree that falls across the depiction of the vision of the Holy Grail on Arthur’s tomb divide all the knights but one (presumably Galahad) from the vision and, indeed, overshadows the eyes of the knight whose red cloak associates him with Launcelot.6 II In Morris’s ‘King Arthur’s Tomb,’ the serpentine line of force that parallels Launcelot and Guenevere with the serpent (and, it may be added, with the undulating branches of the apple tree) in the painting finds powerful expression in two passages that are remarkable both as expressions of the tension and continuity between sacred and profane love and as verbal variations on the painting’s major thematic and formal elements. In the first of these, which is spoken after Guenevere has articulated her inability or reluctance to choose between sacred and profane love (‘If even I go to hell, I cannot choose / But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot Keep / From loving Launcelot’), Launcelot echoes Christ’s words on the cross7 as he attempts to kiss her and, in response, she characterizes both his appearance and his actions as serpentine: ‘Lord, forgive her now, That she not knowing what she does, being mad, Kills me in this way – Guenevere, bend low And kiss me once! for God’s love kiss me! sad ‘Though your face is, you look much kinder now; Yea once, once for the last time kiss me, lest I die.’ ‘Christ! my hot lips are very near his brow, Help me to save his soul! – yea, verily,

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In the second, which is spoken by Guenevere, her comparison of Launcelot with a viper 8 is reinforced by several references to serpentine shapes and supplemented by rhythmical repetitions – ‘Banner and sword and shield ... Body and face and limbs’ – whose undulations simultaneously echo those shapes and reflect the erotic physicality that she is striving to transcend: ‘Banner of Arthur – with black-bended shield ‘Sinister-wise across the fair gold ground! Here let me tell you what a knight you are, O sword and shield of Arthur! you are found A crooked sword, I think, that leaves a scar ‘On the bearer’s arm, so be he thinks it straight, Twisted Malay’s crease beautiful blue-grey, Poison’d with sweet fruit; as he found too late My husband Arthur, on some bitter day! ‘O sickle cutting hemlock the day long! That the husbandman across his shoulder hangs, And, going homeward about evensong, Dies the next morning, struck through by the fangs! ‘Banner and sword and shield, you dare not pray to die, Lest you meet Arthur in the other world, And knowing who you are, he pass you by, Taking short turns that he may watch you curl’d, ‘Body and face and limbs in agony Lest he weep presently and go away, Saying, ‘I loved him once,’ with a sad sigh – Now I have slain him, Lord, let me go too, I pray. [Launcelot falls]

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‘Alas! alas! I know not what to do, If I run fast it is perchance that I May fall and stun myself, much better so, Never, never again! not even when I die.’ (368–88; italics added except on ‘falls’)

The heraldic reference near the beginning of this passage (‘Banner of Arthur – with black-bended shield / Sinister-wise across the fair gold ground!’) echoes the asymmetry of Arthur’s Tomb as a formal representation of manifest evil and the allusion near its conclusion to Romeo and Juliet (‘Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast,’ 2.3.94) refers the relationship of Launcelot and Guenevere to another pair of rash and unfortunate lovers. The most remarkable aspect of the passage, however, remains the unifying presence of the same serpentine line that undulates through Rossetti’s painting with an equivalent erotic energy and typological resonance. The ‘governing lines’ that ‘rule the swell and fall and change’ of a ‘mass’ may not be discernible to a ‘careless observer’ or to ‘an ordinary artist,’ writes Ruskin in Modern Painters but they will be apparent to an artist who possesses the ‘acuteness of perception’ that recognizes in a thing’s ‘outward’ form the manifestation of its inner ‘growth and make’ (4:192). Clearly, Morris was no ‘careless observer’ or ‘ordinary artist.’ III Possibly ‘inspired by the rose trellises at the Red House,’ Trellis (fig. 2.2; circa 1862) was apparently ‘Morris’s first wallpaper design’ (Burdick 75) and certainly among the earliest produced by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company.9 Excluding the birds in various animated postures that were contributed to the design by Philip Webb, its most notable feature is not the trellis that gives it its title but the climbing rose that ascends vertically and diagonally through its space with its leaves and most of its flowers facing the viewer. Particularly when the stems, leaves, and background of Trellis are rendered in very muted shades of brown and green as is usually the case, the fact that the flowers and thorns of its climbing rose are the same vibrant colour (orange, yellow) associates the beautiful and attractive with the painful and dangerous, a theme found in many of the poems in The Defence of Guenevere volume and reinforced in the design by the presence of (delicate, vulnerable) mayflies and (robust, static) beetles as well as

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(energetic, aggressive) birds. The associative use of colour in Trellis thus provides the viewer with an interpretative entry point that is enlarged by other aspects of the design, including its reliance on a tension between the natural world of the birds, beetles, mayflies, and climbing rose and the artificial realm of the trellis itself and the supporting wall to which it is nailed: the overall effect is of a convergence of nature and culture in which the darker aspects of the former are by no means eradicated by the discipline and cultivation of the latter. The climbing rose that mediates between nature and culture in this scheme is a domesticated plant that is still very much a part of the natural world of display and defence, desire and threat, sexuality and violence that animates ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’ and other early Morris poems and prose romances. Here, as in The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, the imbrication of display and defence, desire and threat, sexuality and violence implies that no easy distinctions can be made among wild, domesticated, and human nature, house, garden, and beyond. That the serpentine and quadrangular shapes of Trellis are homologous with those of Arthur’s Tomb is not so much an indication of the wallpaper’s lineage (though it may be this) as a testament to Morris’s extraordinary and growing capacity in the 1850s and 1860s to recognize and redeploy patterns that could be said to reflect foundational structures and tensions in the human psyche (or at least imagination). If Morris’s other wallpaper design of circa 1862, Daisy (fig. 2.3), was partly inspired by the daisy wallhanging for Red House that Jane Morris may have helped to design as well as embroider in 1860 or, like the hanging, by an illumination in a medieval manuscript, then this might explain the absence in it of the serpentine line and thematic resonances of Trellis. Consisting of four different floral clusters arranged in horizontal lines so that they articulate but do not overlap, Daisy’s overall effect is one of stasis, tranquility, and harmonious coexistence. Like the daisy wallhanging, its major design elements are traceable to Modern Painters 3, though not so much to the reproduction of a ‘Cyclamen’ that shares Plate 7 (‘Botany of 13th Century’) with the ‘Appletree,’ as is the case with the wallhanging,10 as to Ruskin’s discussion of the medieval interest in flowers elsewhere in his chapter ‘Of Medieval Landscape: First, the Fields.’ Especially germane is his emphasis on two aspects of the mind and art of the Middle Ages: an exclusive attention to ‘what was graceful, symmetrical, and bright in colour’ in ‘Lower nature’ and a heraldic reduction of the complexity of

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floral and other natural forms to ‘disciplined and orderly pattern[s]’ (3:203–4). Indeed, Daisy fully exemplifies the ‘two everlasting laws of beauty’ whose discovery and application in ‘floral ornament’ by ‘mediaeval workman’ established for Ruskin ‘the principles of decorative art ... [and] mass arrangement in general’ ‘to the end of time’ – namely, the ‘law of growth,’ typified by the profiles of buds and leaves, and the ‘law of proportion,’ typified by the ‘series of three’ ribs in a leaf (that is, a central rib with ‘two ... and no more, on each side’) (3:211– 3). By the early 1860s, the Morrises would also have known that in discussing ‘the orders of leaves’ in Modern Painters Ruskin draws an almost explicitly moral contrast between, on the one hand, ‘the sweep of the chestnut and gadding of the vine,’ and, on the other, ‘the close shrinking trefoil, and contented daisy, pressed on earth’ (5:102). Both the daisy hanging and the Daisy wallpaper are pictures of rural and domestic contentment. Little wonder that Daisy became one of ‘ the most popular [wallpapers] ever produced by the Firm’ (Burdick 46). Morris’s third wallpaper design of the early 1860s, Fruit (or Pomegranate) (fig. 2.4; circa 1864), consists of four branches of fruit (oranges, lemons, peaches, and pomegranates) arranged diagonally across the design with most of their leaves and flowers flattened to face the viewer, and the pomegranates in various stages of ripeness and in various orientations. It is these that are the most striking (if not startling) feature of the design, for especially when ripening or opened to reveal their seeds they bear unmistakable resemblance to female genitalia, a visual metaphor also exploited by Rossetti in Proserpine (1873–7). To conclude that the pomegranates in either Morris’s wallpaper or Rossetti’s painting are merely metaphorical of female body parts would be erroneous, however; thoroughly conversant as they both were with Christian iconography, Morris and Rossetti would have understood ‘the pomegranate, bursting open, and the seeds visible ... [as] an emblem of the future – of hope in immortality’ (Jameson 1:35), a significance that it carries, not only in Proserpine, but also in Rossetti’s watercolour drawing of Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante (1852) and in the erotically charged girdle of his Astarte Syriaca (1875–7). More than any other fruit in Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, the pomegranate radiates both sacred and profane significances: an ‘image of temptation’ and ‘passion’ it certainly is in Morris’s wallpaper (MacCarthy 183),11 and also an image of present and future fulfilment. Although Fruit recalls Trellis in its evocation of the tensions and

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continuities present in ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’ and Arthur’s Tomb, it differs from the earlier wallpaper in the insistently diagonal patterning of the branches of which it is composed, all of which point upwards at almost precisely a forty-five degree angle from left to right. In this, Fruit recalls several of Rossetti’s paintings of the late 1850s and early 1860s that are either diagonal in structure, reliant on a diagonal movement, or graced by a diagonal ornament of some sort – for example, Mary Magdalene Leaving the House of Feasting (1857) (diagonal banisters), The Tune of the Seven Towers (1857) (diagonal pennant staff), and The Wedding of Saint George and the Princess Sabra (1857) (diagonal shoulder decoration and, as Waugh observes, ‘the design [as a whole] is built about the diagonal and nestles within its limits,’ 95). That Rossetti associated the diagonal elements of these and other works with the reconciliation of sacred and profane love is indicated both by their content and by their structural and thematic resemblance to his Dantis Amor (1859–60), where the figure of Love stands at the centre of the painting across a diagonal that divides and yet joins Christ and Beatrice, heaven and earth, the divine and the human (see Bentley, ‘Staff and Scrip’). First in Morris’s rooms in London and then in Red House, Dantis Amor graced a settle between panels depicting The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Florence and The Meeting of Beatrice and Dante in Paradise. Painted in the weeks following the Morrises’ return from their honeymoon in the early summer of 1859, it is an exalted and epithalamic vision of the sanctified human love denied to Launcelot and Guenevere and given its most tangible form in the furnishings, gardens, and architectural poetry of Red House (1859–64). But it is also unfinished, and when the Morrises vacated Red House in 1865, it was separated from its accompanying panels so that they could be ‘framed together with a partition ... on to which Rossetti painted a second version of Dantis Amor in a narrow oblong’ (Surtees 1:70): the lives and imaginations that had become irrevocably entwined a decade earlier had entered a new and less happy phase for which, ironically, Arthur, Guenevere, and Launcelot rather than Dante, Beatrice, and Dantis Amor would supply the pattern. Writing apropos of Morris’s wallpaper designs of the early 1860s, Fiona MacCarthy suggests that he ‘always asked for meaning in a pattern. It acted as a code; it gave a stab of recognition. It was a good way of making a connection with the past’ (182). ‘These early wallpapers,’ she adds, ‘show how he used his patterns as a form of reminiscence.’ MacCarthy’s comments refer primarily to the imagery

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of Morris’s designs, but they can be extended to the generative structures of his patterns, for surely their reliance on systems of repetition also reflects a disposition towards ‘reminiscence’ and ‘connection with the past,’ since each repeated element is no more or less than a return to what was before and still remains but at a different place and time of observation. In the wallpapers, as in the medieval recreations of The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, repetition combines with progression to suggest continuity and difference: the past persists, but only like it was. Seen or read in this way, Morris’s wallpaper designs are figures of the (dis)continuities from which they stemmed, extensions of the broken serpentine line that runs into and out of Arthur’s Tomb, ‘King Arthur’s Tomb,’ and Modern Painters, connecting and dividing the high and the low, the left and the right, the sacred and the profane. To borrow some phrases from Morris’s ‘Lindenborg Pool,’ his works of the late 1850s and early 1860s, like those of Rossetti and Ruskin from which they so often drew succour, are ‘strangely double’ – immensely appealing and semi-abstract artefacts of a ‘proper nineteenth-century character’ and repositories also of a ‘long-past age’ of turbulent feelings and high hopes (CW 1:247–8).

NOTES 1 David Latham introduces these issues ‘of love, sin, death, and redemption’ in his discussion of the ‘typological shadows that leave love haunted,’ as ‘Guenevere agonizes over her desire to kiss the lips of Launcelot “across my husband’s head,”’ with Morris’s ‘favourite preposition – “across” – exploited as a momentary crucifixion image’ (Haunted Texts 15–16). Numerous scholars have noted that the ‘particular episode depicted by Rossetti does not occur in Le Morte d’Arthur’ (Surtees 1:34), but this is only true in so far as the final meeting of Launcelot and Guenevere that occurs in Book 21 of Malory’s work takes place at Almesbury, where Guenevere had entered a nunnery, rather than Glastonbury, where Arthur was buried. In other respects, Rossetti is true to Malory in depicting Guenevere as ‘a nunne in whyght clothys and blak’ who at her last meeting with Launcelot denies his request that she ‘Kysshe [him], and never no more’ (Malory 718, 721). In the notes to her edition of The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, Margaret A. Lourie identifies the tree in the painting with ‘the Glastonbury thorn’

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D.M.R. Bentley and suggests an inspiration for its subject in the episode in Book 21 in which, after Guenevere’s death, Launcelot lies ‘grovelyng on the tomb of Kyng Arthur and quene Guenever’ (723). Although Rossetti may have come to Malory by way of the story of Paolo and Francesca (who, of course, were tempted into adultery by reading about Launcelot and Guenevere), he may also have been encouraged to read Morte d’Arthur by Ruskin or by Ford Madox Brown, whose diary entries for 21 March and 1 April 1855 state that he ‘read King Arthur (7½ hours)’ and ‘talk[ed] about King Arthur, in prais [sic] of, & how it would illustrate ... Rossetti abusing Mrs. Ruskin & praising Mr.’ (128, 130). Surtees interprets these statements as references to Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, notes that ‘one of Rossetti’s contributions to Tennyson’s Poems was an illustration of King Arthur and the Weeping Queens,’ and observes that both Arthur’s Tomb and Paolo and Francesca da Rimini were among the commissions that he received from Ruskin. It is possible, however, that Brown’s ‘read King Arthur’ refers to Robert Southey’s 1817 reprinting of Caxton’s edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur under the title The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of Kyng Arthur. See also Morris’s La Belle Iseult (1858), where Iseult wears a patterned dress with red sleeves and appears to be fastening or unfastening her girdle. In ‘Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery,’ which follows ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’ in The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, Christ wears a ‘raiment half blood-red, half white as snow’ in Galahad’s vision (CW 1:26). See also Collingwood 1:193–4 for Ruskin’s letter of circa October 1855 to Thomas Carlyle explaining that the new volumes of Modern Painters are ‘ready for press’ and will be dispatched on 5 November, and 1:199–203 for the letter of 10 December 1855 from Paris in which Robert Browning answers Ruskin’s comments on his poetry in Modern Painters 4. Ruskin regarded Browning as ‘unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages ... so that in the matter of art ... there is hardly a principle connected with the medieval temper, that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his’ (4:377). Just such a figure, flanked by two angels holding swords and by the words ‘Eritus sicut deus [sic] scientes bonum et malum,’ appears in Rossetti’s 1858 drawing Hamlet and Ophelia. Both the design for Arthur’s Tomb and the carving in Hamlet and Ophelia may owe a debt to Albrecht Dürer’s engraving The Fall of Man (1504) (or Adam and Eve, as it is sometimes called), which contains an apple tree that was greatly admired by Ruskin (see Modern Painters 3:121 and 5:68–9, and, for Rossetti’s as well

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7

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as Ruskin’s enthusiasm for Dürer’s engravings, see Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel 168). This effect is more obvious in the 1860 replica of Arthur’s Tomb (Tate Gallery), where the light falling on the tomb is brighter and the shadows darker. There are several other notable differences between the 1855 and 1860 versions of the painting, the most significant being the omission in the latter of the serpent, an absence counteracted formalistically by the addition of a serpentine ribbon flowing from a band on Guenevere’s left arm and iconographically by the addition of several more fallen apples in the forefront of the scene and by the addition of a head-like ornament to the end of Guenevere’s girdle. In the replica, the white covering of Launcelot’s horse is an insistent invitation to the eye to enter the picture at that point. In Luke 23.24: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’ See also Rossetti’s St. Cecelia illustration in Moxon’s Tennyson for the use of a sinuous line (from the angel’s wing through the saint’s face, neck, and body to her knee) in a highly eroticized depiction of the interaction of the heavenly and the earthly. Lourie suggests that a ‘”V” was supposed to distinguish poisonous snakes’ (190). The viper is the only poisonous snake in England. See also the omitted or cancelled opening of ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ where Launcelot’s ‘colours’ are a ‘great snake of green / ... twisted on ... quartered white and red’ (CW 1:xx). In her biography of Morris, Fiona MacCarthy observes that he was ‘not the first of the partners [of the Firm] to embark on [wallpapers]: already in January 1861 Rossetti was describing the paper he had made for his and Lizzie’s rooms in Blackfriars. This was a fruit design in yellow, black, and Venetian red, and Rossetti asked the paper manufacturer to print it on “common brown packing paper and on blue grocer’s paper,” to see which looked the best’ (182). MacCarthy observes of Morris’s first three wallpaper designs that ‘they are gentle flowing patterns which show Morris’s belief in the purpose of pattern to impose a rhythm, to soothe and civilize’ (182). MacCarthy describes the ‘rose bushes’ in Trellis as ‘obviously, ominously thorned’ (182). The birds in the design are usually assumed to be hummingbirds, but clearly this is not so; rather, they seem to be of two different species (perhaps swifts and woodpeckers). Both the individual clumps of flowers and their bright blue background in the daisy hanging are strongly reminiscent of Ruskin’s ‘Cyclamen.’ MacCarthy also interprets the pomegranate as an emblem of ‘loss’ for

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D.M.R. Bentley Morris (183). Given Morris’s admiration and emulation of Browning in the late 1850s, he probably knew the explanation of the significance of the pomegranate that appears in the last number of Bells and Pomegranates (1856). Noting that ‘Giotto placed a pomegranate fruit in the hand of Dante’ (in the so-called Lost Portrait of the poet in the Bargello in Florence) and that ‘Raffaelo crowned his theology (in the Camera della Segnatura) with blossoms of the same,’ Browning quotes ‘the Bellari and Vasari’ on the fruit as ‘simbolo delle buone opere [good works] – il qual Pomogranato fu però usato nelle veste del Pontefice appresso gli Ebrei’ (128; see Exodus 28.33–4, and also Browning’s Pippa Passes 138). Rossetti’s painting and drawing of Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante, which depict the poet with a pomegranate in his hand, were executed in 1852. ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 2.1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Arthur’s Tomb. Watercolour on paper, 1855. 9 x 14 ½ in. British Museum, London. © Copyright the Trustees of The British Museum. Fig. 2.2 William Morris. Trellis. Hand-block printed wallpaper. Morris & Co., 1864. Fig. 2.3 William Morris. Daisy. Hand-block printed wallpaper. Morris & Co., 1864. Fig. 2.4 William Morris. Fruit (or Pomegranate). Hand-block printed wallpaper. Morris & Co., 1864.

3 William Morris, Shaper of Tales: Creating a Hero’s Story in ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ Janet Wright Friesen

In ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ – the fifth poem in William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (1858) – Sir Peter Harpdon, the commander of a crumbling English fortress in France, confers with the leader of the besieging French army, Sir Lambert. Their situation reflects the complex alliances of the Hundred Years’ War, as these men are cousins serving opposing armies. Sir Lambert comes under the pretence of persuading Sir Peter to forsake the doomed English cause and to unite the family on the French side. However, as he speaks, Sir Peter suddenly interrupts their conference with a reference to an ancient precedent, and asks ‘but have you read / The siege of Troy?’ Then, speaking more to himself than to his opponent, Sir Peter observes that, in spite of the Trojans’ fatal support of Helen’s abduction, most readers sympathize with the Trojans and judge Hector to be a hero: take note How almost all men, reading that sad siege, Hold for the Trojans; as I did at least, Thought Hector the best knight a long way. (205–8)

Faced with his own inevitable defeat, Sir Peter entertains the question: What made Hector of Troy a hero? He observes that one’s cause need not be successful for one to be remembered as a hero. Rather, heroism is comprised of an extraordinary dedication to virtue and a performance of noble actions for which there are no obviously supportive conditions. He wonders whether he too might be remembered as a hero:

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Janet Wright Friesen Now Why should I not do this thing that I think, For even when I come to count the gains, I have them on my side: men will talk, you know, (We talk of Hector, dead so long agone,) When I am dead, of how this Peter clung To what he thought the right; of how he died, Perchance, at last, doing some desperate deed Few men would care do now, and this is gain To me, as ease and money is to you, Moreover, too, I like the straining game Of striving well to hold up things that fall; So one becomes great. (208–20)

This passage presents the poem’s definition of heroism. However, it also shows Sir Peter’s self-conscious interest in shaping the interpretation of his last days – of making himself into a hero. Hector did something that people have ‘talked of’: his actions reflected his dedication to principle – in spite of inevitable failure – and this nobility of character has appealed to the sympathy of readers for centuries. Consequently, Sir Peter chooses to adopt the noble spirit and actions of Hector as a paradigm for his loyalty to the failing English cause, so that he too may be remembered sympathetically and become ‘great.’ Few treatments of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ have examined the implications of Sir Peter’s notion of a hero for the rest of the poem. In fact, although it is the longest poem in The Defence of Guenevere, it has received little critical attention in comparison to the Arthurian poems in the volume.1 In the last thirty years, the criticism has judged Sir Peter to be a pitiful and pathetic character pursuing a path of failure. Charlotte Oberg has summarized the critical focus in this way: ‘“Sir Peter Harpdon’s End” is actually a rather cynical poem suggesting an underlying conception of basic human frailty and helplessness beyond the remedy of social reform based on medieval or any other models’ (131). While it would be fair to argue that the definition Sir Peter offers for heroism requires just such unaccommodating conditions, I wish to argue something rather different: Sir Peter is, in fact, a hero, and ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ is a reflexive poem about the making of a hero and about the shaping and crafting of a heroic tale. This interpretation of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ is first of all suggested by

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the characters’ own interest in the shaping of interpretation: the shaping of memory and reputation, and the crafting of narrative and story. However, the reflexivity – or the integration of medium and message – is dramatically signalled by Lady Alice’s self-referential comment at the conclusion of this work: Yea, some men sing, what is it then they sing? Eh Launcelot, and love and fate and death; They ought to sing of him who was as wight As Launcelot or Wade ... yea, perhaps they will, When many years are past, make songs of us; God help me, though, truly I never thought That I should make a story in this way, A story that his eyes can never see. (709–12; 715–9)

This declaration, that looks into a future when people will sing and tell stories of Sir Peter and Lady Alice, suggests that Lady Alice may well be the author of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End.’ In other words, here is a play about Sir Peter and Lady Alice in correspondence with Lady Alice’s speculation. Lady Alice’s closing words suddenly refocus the story of Sir Peter Harpdon and place his story within the framework of her own. At the very least, her speculation should prompt the reader to consider the extent to which the characters’ concern about the shaping of reputation and the crafting of story is played out on another level, that of the shaping and structuring of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End.’ As Sir Peter and Lady Alice struggle with the senseless events of war, both characters are concerned about how they will be remembered – how their actions will be interpreted in the future. Some of Sir Peter’s musings on this subject have already been observed, but it is critical to note how pervasive this concern is. Isolated in his outpost, Sir Peter entertains an imaginary conversation with Lady Alice which is prompted by his wish to dispel her doubts about his loyalties and to preserve her confidence in him. After his arrest, he hastily explains to Clisson – a knight who serves the French army but who offers a ransom for Sir Peter’s life because Sir Peter once saved his – that he weeps over his unfulfilled love for Alice rather than in response to Sir Lambert’s taunts, not wishing to leave him with the wrong impression. Still worried about how Lady Alice will remember him, Sir Peter requests that Clisson send someone to her to report his death and to convey his ‘last love.’

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Notably, Lady Alice is also interested in interpretation. At first, her concern is to piece together any interpretation of Sir Peter’s story in the face of confusion, despair, and possible deception. More than once, her desire for relief from her anxiety in the oblivion of madness or death shows how easily the memory of Sir Peter might be obliterated by a weaker woman. However, when she interviews Clisson’s messenger, she demands that he look her in the eyes as he delivers his message, so she can determine his sincerity and distinguish the truth from the lies. She further tests the integrity of his tale with accusations of treachery and jest. Then, as the poem closes, Lady Alice turns her attention to the idea of shaping Sir Peter’s memory. She overhears a song in the street: a song about Launcelot which preserves the memory of that knight as a hero in spite of his failures. ‘Love and fate and death,’ she observes, were the lot of both Sir Launcelot and Sir Peter. The only difference between their stories is the interpretation of their deeds and the crafting of Launcelot’s reputation as a hero by the songwriter. With her final speculation about their future reputation, Lady Alice intimates the ‘authority’ she would like, or intends, to command over the reputation of her lover. The notion of Lady Alice as the author and shaper of Sir Peter’s heroic reputation ought not to strike the reader as an anomaly. ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,’ after all, belongs to the same collection of poems in which Morris gives Queen Guenevere her own voice. Neither Thomas Malory, in Le Morte d’Arthur, nor Alfred Tennyson, in Idylls of the King, thought to give Guenevere an opportunity to defend herself. Like Lady Alice, Guenevere initially appears to be a victim of her gender and her circumstances, hopeless of changing her situation. However, the queen ultimately defends herself in a particularly artful and successful manner. Hence, Lady Alice can no longer be viewed as a victim of defeat and despair or as a secondary character if the correspondence of Sir Peter’s story with Lady Alice’s speculation is considered seriously. On the contrary, the various ways in which medium and message are integrated in ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ show that she is a clever woman who exacts a revenge on those who have destroyed Sir Peter’s reputation and her happiness. Jerome McGann has commented on the reflexive character of Morris’s work, observing the integration of medium and message. He observes that a key feature of a reflexive work is its ‘quoted’ or ‘secondary status’ which makes the ‘fundamental subject’ of a work ‘the craft and the art of making’(‘Thing to Mind’ 55–6). This ‘quoted’ or allusive

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characteristic is particularly apparent in the Arthurian and Froissartian poems from The Defence of Guenevere. In these poems, we are conscious of the difference between the ‘version’ of the story we are reading and some other version. In the case of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,’ The Chronicle of Froissart, to which Morris’s work alludes, does not mention a Sir Peter Harpdon. History has indeed forgotten him – perhaps because he was executed as a traitor, not celebrated as a hero. Regardless, the difference or tension between two versions of a story highlights the compositional aspect of Morris’s work, the notion that its medium might be encoded with a message. It raises questions about the manner in which Sir Peter’s story is presented: Why create fictional characters when there must have been many casualties of the Hundred Years’ War who aspired to heroism but suffered a traitor’s end? Or how much of history is fiction or interpretation? One of the most striking characteristics of the medium of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ is that it is a play with stage directions and speaking parts. Jean-Marie Bäisus, one of the few critics to comment on the dramatic aspect of the work, has suggested that ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ can be divided into five dramatic acts with a concluding song (1:59–60). The first four acts present the story of Sir Peter Harpdon who is ultimately captured by the French and executed for treason. The final act – and the act which forms a frame around the previous action – is set at the home of Lady Alice. In this act, the reader/audience first meets Lady Alice outside of Sir Peter’s imagination. There is a despairing monologue by Lady Alice as she overhears fragments of news about Sir Peter’s dire circumstances. She then receives a squire, from Clisson, a former friend of Sir Peter who now serves the French, with the report of Sir Peter’s death. In a further monologue, Lady Alice responds to the news of her lover’s death. The poem then concludes with a song about Sir Launcelot sung in the street below Lady Alice’s window. The dramatic medium calls attention to the crafted nature of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,’ to its material condition as a work of art. As a play, this work depends on dialogue, monologue, asides, and stage directions to present a tale for the reader’s/audience’s interpretation. The occasional disparity between the content of the monologues and the dialogue, the ambiguity of the second- or third-hand account of Sir Peter’s fate, and the shift to another genre with the concluding song are some of the characteristics of this work that draw attention to the fact that the hero’s story must be pieced together. The absence

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of any record of a performance of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ amongst Morris’s coterie of the Pre-Raphaelites also suggests that the purpose of a dramatic medium was not presentation or performance but something integral to the work’s message. Consequently, the dramatic medium engages the reader in a process of interpretation which highlights the malleable nature of meaning and the potential for shaping a story. A medium that challenges the notion that meaning/interpretation is self-evident is particularly suited to Lady Alice’s purpose of creating a hero’s story and shaping her lover’s reputation. Clisson’s account of Sir Peter’s fate, which a squire brings to Lady Alice, is a good example of how the ambiguity of the medium of this work is integrated with Lady Alice’s message. The integrity of the squire’s report cannot be fully verified. Lady Alice might visit the tomb Clisson has erected, but she must accept the possibly softened account of Sir Peter’s capture and plea for his life. Instructed by Clisson, the squire reports that Sir Peter’s plea for his life was marked by his desire to live for the sake of those he loved and who loved him: Within a while he lifted up his head And spoke for his own life; not crouching, though, As abjectly afraid to die, nor yet Sullenly brave as many a thief will die; Nor yet as one that plays at japes with God: Few words he spoke; not so much what he said Moved us, I think, as, saying it, there played Strange tenderness from that big soldier there About his pleading; eagerness to live Because folk loved him, and he loved them back, And many gallant plans unfinish’d now For ever. (636–47)

Possibly one of the most poignant passages of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,’ this portrayal of Sir Peter reveals a very noble knight and corresponds to the climax of sympathy for him. Without this sympathetic account of his last moments, Sir Peter might not be deemed a hero or to have died a hero’s death. However, having pleaded for Sir Peter’s life himself, Clisson is likely to want to alleviate Lady Alice’s grief with the image of a courageous and honourable knight. Consequently, the unreliable nature of the squire’s report indicates that

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the ‘truth’ is not necessarily the primary concern for either Clisson or Lady Alice. Instead, this medium of Sir Peter’s reputation demonstrates the malleable nature of interpretation and the opportunity Lady Alice has for determining Sir Peter’s future reputation. The reflexive nature, or ‘quoted’ status, of this work is also apparent in Lady Alice’s reference to the countess of Mountfort, someone whose story is found in Froissart (1:196–204, ch. 79–81). This allusion to a slightly older contemporary draws attention to the fact that Lady Alice’s interest in shaping a heroic reputation for Sir Peter is integrated with the medium of the story. In response to the news of her lover’s death, Lady Alice conceives a vision of the revenge she would take on Sir Peter’s executioners, if she took action in the manner of the countess of Mountfort: Eh Guesclin! if I were Like Countess Mountfort now, that kiss’d the knight, Across the salt sea come to fight for her; Ah! just to go about with many knights, Wherever you went, and somehow on one day, In a thick wood to catch you off your guard, Let you find, you and your some fifty friends, Nothing but arrows wheresoe’er you turn’d, Yea, and red crosses, great spears over them; And so, between a lane of my true men, To walk up pale and stern and tall, and with My arms on my surcoat, and his therewith, And then to make you kneel, O knight Guesclin. (680–92)

In this passage Lady Alice longs to emulate the countess of Mountfort who, in 1342 during the Hundred Years’ War, guarded her husband’s interests in Brittany when he was imprisoned by the king of France. Not only did the countess negotiate military relief from the king of England, but she also participated in the defence of her castle and its town. She led a raiding party that set fire to the French camp and then escaped to a neighbouring castle to recruit more troops. She dismissed the persuasive advice of her counsellors to surrender and eventually welcomed reinforcements from England led by Sir Walter Manny. When the French siege was dispersed, Froissart records, the countess of Mountfort ‘came and kyst sir Gaultier of Manny and his companyons one after another, two or thre tymes, lyke a valyant

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lady’ (1:204; ch. 81). Any identification with such a figure should surely contradict the notion of Lady Alice as a victim. Lady Alice’s comparison of herself with the countess of Mountfort is a similar appropriation of a model for action as was observed in Sir Peter’s comparison of himself with Hector. The notion that Lady Alice adopts the activism of the countess to vindicate Sir Peter has been overlooked because of her complaint that, as a woman, she is too weak to carry out such a revenge. She does despair: – alas! alas! when all is said, What could I do but let you [Guesclin] go again, Being pitiful woman? I get no revenge, Whatever happens; and I get no comfort, I am but weak, and cannot move my feet, But as men bid me. (693–8)

However, the dramatic contrast of this complaint with the preceding impassioned vision of heroic action, coupled with the reference to a female activist, ought to direct the reader to at least ask the question: If military action, in the style of the countess, is not an option, is there any other way in which Lady Alice metes out a revenge for Sir Peter? Or defends his honour? ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ is Lady Alice’s revenge to the extent to which it shines a sympathetic light on Sir Peter and shows him to be a hero, rather than the treasonous scoundrel Sir Lambert claims he is and for which he is hanged. The allusion to the countess’s story signals Lady Alice’s appropriation of authority to defend her lover’s honourable reputation and to perpetuate it in defiance of his enemies. In the context of her resolve for revenge, her digression on the powerless state of women takes on an ironic edge: she may not be able to don armour to make her point, but she can wield the power of an artistic medium to give meaning to her lover’s life and death. The parallel between Lady Alice’s and Sir Peter’s appropriation of a model for action further indicates a reflexive tale by virtue of the integration of both characters’ messages with the actions of the hero/heroine on which they model themselves. Sir Peter’s reference to Hector at the beginning of the poem introduces an extended comparison of the two men. As we have observed, Lady Alice understands the power of appropriating a model for action, and she now applies this strategy to her rhetorical presentation of Sir Peter. She shapes a poignant and sympathetic interpretation of Sir

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Peter as a hero by structuring her work around the story of a previously established hero, Hector. Sir Peter, like Hector, foresees the inevitability of his death with the success of the siege but courageously maintains his position. In The Iliad, Hector foresees the fall of Troy and relates this prophecy to Andromache: ‘For of a surety know I this in heart and soul: / the day shall come when sacred Ilios shall be laid low, / and Priam, and the people of Priam with goodly spear of ash’ (Iliad 6.447–9). Significantly, the hypothetical conversation Sir Peter imagines with Lady Alice, which would have been their last, is comparable to the final meeting between Hector and Andromache (Iliad 6.394–450). The poignancy of both these scenes stems from the clash between public duty and private loyalties and from a heroic dedication to principle. With Sir Peter’s integrity and courage now established, subsequent details of Sir Peter’s final days correspond to the story of Hector, portraying Sir Peter as a fourteenth-century Hector. The first battle Sir Peter fights is with Sir Lambert, who has come to him as the representative of Guesclin, the constable of France. This encounter, which results in Sir Lambert’s capture and mutilation, corresponds to Hector’s battle with Patroclus, the close friend of Achilles, and the shameful stripping of Patroclus’s dead body (Iliad 16.793–867). When Sir Peter is captured by the French, Guesclin’s refusal to spare his life because of his treatment of Sir Lambert parallels Achilles’ refusal of Hector’s request, out of honour to Patroclus, to return his body to his father (Iliad 22.261–6, 345–54). Even Clisson’s offer to pay ransom for Sir Peter’s life has a parallel in Homer, when Priam steals into the Greek camp to offer ransom for his son’s body (Iliad 24.477–506). Guesclin’s execution of Sir Peter as a traitor, refusing him an honourable death, is comparable to Achilles’ dishonourable treatment of Hector’s body, his dragging it around Patroclus’s funeral pyre behind his chariot (Iliad 23.183–91). Finally, even the scene in which Lady Alice momentarily takes refuge in unconsciousness, when she overhears the news of Sir Peter’s doom, corresponds to Homer’s scene in which Andromache rushes to the tower in time to see Hector’s body dragged to the Greek ships and then faints (Iliad 22.460–72). Set during the final days of the two heroes, these episodes revolve around the notion of honour due to heroes. Essentially, Lady Alice is carefully following the formula for a heroic reputation she has already put in Sir Peter’s mouth at the beginning of her work. Put another way, this referencing of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ to the story of Hector calls

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attention to how the work was constructed and to the fact that as a medium it is carefully integrated with its subject: the heroic nature of Sir Peter’s life and death. ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ is most certainly a reflexive work for those who can recognize the allusions to the story of Hector and to The Chronicles of Froissart.2 For Morris’s coterie, the story of Hector would have been familiar as it was to all Victorian schoolboys who studied Greek and Latin literature. More specifically, they may also have been aware of the contemporary drafts of Morris’s projected work Scenes from the Fall of Troy: three of these scenes focus on Hector (24:9–16, 16– 20, 21–5).3 However, readers are not solely dependent on an ability to recognize allusions to appreciate the reflexive nature of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End.’ As we have seen, Lady Alice’s ruminations on Launcelot’s heroic legacy suggest the prominent theme of shaping interpretation. They further suggest that Sir Peter’s tale is framed within his lady’s tale. The integration of message and medium is finally apparent in the song about Launcelot that concludes ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End.’ This song also contributes to the ‘quoted’ nature of the work as the shift from drama to song and from Sir Peter to Launcelot obliges the reader to reflect on the significance of the song to the preceding work. Here, the author of the song mentions Launcelot’s failings but perpetuates the memory of a heroic Sir Launcelot in the same manner that Lady Alice has tried to create a heroic reputation for Sir Peter. In the song, the writer asks for the blessing of the audience: All men pray for me, Who made this history Cunning and fairly. (745–7)

Lady Alice does not make the same request. She does not need to. She has not relied on mere assertion; she has integrated her message with her medium and shaped her story of a hero. It needs no defence; it is a ‘cunning’ tale that exacts a revenge as it perpetuates Sir Peter’s heroic reputation among future generations.

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NOTES 1

2

3

An early and relatively lengthy treatment of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ was afforded by John Drinkwater in 1912; this is primarily a summary of the plot. Generally overlooked by critics until the late 1960s along with the other poems in The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ has rarely been considered on its own, but has usually been examined as one of a group of poems (Ralph Berry; Patrick Brantlinger, ‘A Reading’; Peter Faulkner; Charlotte H. Oberg; Dianne F. Sadoff; Carole Silver; Lionel Stevenson). Classified as one of Morris’s Froissartian poems, it has been examined closely for its use of Froissart’s Chronicle by John M. Patrick and David Staines, and subsequent treatments have been influenced by this interest in the poem’s sources. This is an important point that deserves more attention elsewhere. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of The Defence of Guenevere, many readers of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ do not immediately grasp the degree of correspondence between Sir Peter’s and Hector’s stories. Perhaps fewer recognize the allusions to Froissart. However, there is no doubt that the story of Hector and at least some of The Chronicles of Froissart were familiar to the Second Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which gathered in Oxford in 1857 and to whom Morris read many of the Defence of Guenevere poems. Morris’s first audience for ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ would also have known The Chronicle of Froissart, as J.W. Mackail records that Morris read this work aloud to his friends that same summer (Mackail 1:136).

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4 Medea and Circe as ‘Wise’ Women in the Poetry of William Morris and Augusta Webster Florence S. Boos

The most popular literary works of William Morris in his lifetime were The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and The Earthly Paradise (1868–70). Seven reprintings of Jason appeared before Morris revised it in 1882, and eight more by 1923 (Forman). In 1942, E.K. Brown characterized Jason in his introduction to a standard anthology of Victorian Poetry as ‘one of the most beautiful and one of the best constructed poems in modern literature’ (463). In this essay I will not try to vindicate such assertions (though they seem to me more defensible than later canons might suggest), but examine instead Morris’s ‘defence’ of Medea and Circe, his implicit indictment of the ‘hero’ Jason in ‘life and [in] death,’ and resonances between his portraits of these two ‘wise women’ and counterparts in the work of Augusta Webster. An uncertain feminist but temperamental egalitarian,1 Morris portrayed Medea as a woman thwarted in the exercise of substantial powers and abilities, and driven to madness by the injustices she suffered at Jason’s hand; the example of this interpretation influenced subsequent Victorian representations of classical heroines in significant ways. ‘The Deeds of Jason’ was the eleventh-begun and first-completed of Morris’s early drafts for The Earthly Paradise, and he published the finished verse narrative in decasyllabic couplets as The Life and Death of Jason in 1867. The new work’s central metaphors of lifelong travel aptly reflected his emerging preoccupations with the pleasures of the senses, the intricacies of craftwork, and the complex labyrinths of greed and overarching ambition. He also dwelt at length on topography,

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anthropology, and the mechanics of ancient navigation, and provided long poetic tracking shots of the Argonauts’ awe and fear when they encountered snow near the Black Sea,2 and their labours to transport the vessel overland on rollers and ‘a stage with broad wheels.’ Morris’s epic also abounded in quasi-cinematic set-pieces – the ‘Snatchers’’ fierce attacks on the helpless Phineus, Glauce’s agony in her poisoned robe, and Pelias’ dismemberment and incineration in a cauldron – but the underlying detachment of his descriptions often suggested that allegorical resonances interested him more than familiar mythical plots. Many critics have commented on the abrupt transition from Morris’s ‘spasmodic’ style in The Defence of Guenevere to the narrative mode of Jason and The Earthly Paradise,3 but fewer have observed the ‘medieval’ preoccupations with love and struggle he transposed into the new work’s ‘classical’ setting. The anxiety and oppression of Guenevere in ‘The Defence,’ Ella in ‘The Dream,’ Alice of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,’ and Yoland of ‘The Tune of the Seven Towers’ evolved into Medea’s brooding struggles, and her travails in turn evolved into the aporiai Gudrun, Rhodope, and Stenoboea faced in The Earthly Paradise. The more daedal aspects of Medea’s ‘sorcery’ lingered on in rather different forms and venues, in the enchantments of Birdalone, Habundia, and other ‘wise’ and ‘cunning’ women of Morris’s later prose romances. Critical Responses to Morris’s Portrait of Medea Jason was conspicuously well favoured in the later fame of its reviewers. Twenty-four-year-old Henry James, for example, proclaimed in the North American Review that Morris had ‘foraged in a treasure-house ... visited the ancient world, and come back with a massive cup of living Greek wine’: From the moment that Medea comes into the poem, Jason falls into the second place, and keeps it to the end ... Without question, then, she is the central figure of the poem, – a powerful and enchanting figure, – a creature of barbarous arts and of exquisite human passions. Jason accordingly possesses only that indirect hold upon our attention which belongs to the Virgilian Aeneas. (688)

James also went out of his way to contrast Morris’s work with the then-controversial poetry of Algernon Swinburne, but Swinburne

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himself praised Morris’s portrait of Medea highly in the Fortnightly Review: The root of the romance lies of course in the character of Medea, and here, where it was needfullest to do well, the poet has done best ... For dramatic invention and vivid realism of the impossible, which turns to fair and sensible truth the wildest dreams of legend, there has been no poet for centuries comparable. But the very flower and crest of this noble poem is the final tragedy at Corinth. Queen, sorceress, saviour, she has shrunk or risen to mere woman; and not in vain before entering the tragic lists has the poet called on that great poet’s memory [Chaucer] who has dealt with the terrible and pitiful passion of women like none but Shakespeare since. (19)

Among Jason’s twentieth-century critics, Peter Faulkner has observed that Morris’s portrayal of Medea’s humanity ‘enhances the pathos of the story’ (39), and Carole Silver that, ‘Slayer and slain, victim and victimizer, Medea and her fate ... move ... the reader as Jason’s does not. She remains ... the center of interest and sympathy’ (52). Charlotte Oberg even found in Medea mythic forms of ananke: Medea’s charming of the dragon guarding the golden fleece may be considered as emblematic of her power over Time, or Chronos, who, according to the Orphic theogony ... was a serpent ... The witch Medea ... is in tune with Necessity, the unseen but finally omnipotent motive force of the cosmos, and it is therefore she who truly represents Morris’s ideal of heroism in The Life and Death of Jason. (85)

These iconographic qualities actually become more striking when one researches their origins, as several underappreciated scholars of its classical sources have done (Kermode; Arscott; Mench; Gibbs). It is known that Morris consulted Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, Apollonius Rhodios’s Argonautica, Pindar’s Odes, and Euripides’ Medea for his redaction of the tale, but he may have drawn also on the Odyssey, Ovid’s Heroides, Seneca’s Medea, Diodorus’s History, and the Argonautica of Apollodorus. The principal source for his decision to focus the legend on a single powerful woman was clearly Apollonius, mediated in part through Lemprière.4 Charles Beye, a twentieth-century classicist, has commented on Apollonius’ sympathetic portrait of Medea as follows:

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Florence S. Boos Medea is ... more active and decisive than Jason is anywhere. The result is to constitute her as a hero, at least equivalent to Jason in the narrative ... Peculiarly enough, for all the vivid characterization of his crew, Jason is quite alone. Into this void emerges Medea who develops in the fourth book into Jason’s absolute equal, if not superior, in power, energy, and daring. (135)

In other passages, Beye contrasted Medea with less active counterparts such as Penelope, Helen, and Dido, and interpreted the Fleece itself in Apollonius’s version as an emblem of sexual consummation, a reaction which effectively collapsed the erotic-encounter-and-adventure plot into a single, somewhat reductive allegorical frame (155–6). Morris almost certainly found his predecessor’s portrait of Medea congenial, but he also revised it in pointed and interesting ways. Apollonius’s Medea set marriage as an apparent condition for her aid, but Morris suppressed such quasi-‘Victorian’ preoccupations with marital status,5 echoed rather quaintly in Henry Ellison’s ‘The Story of Aeson Transformed by Medea: A Heathen Fable Christianly Moralized’ (1851). So pointed was Morris’s indifference to such matters, in fact, that his contemporary Henry Hewlett solicitously assured readers of the Contemporary Review that ‘in more than one passage wherein the limits of propriety are stretched to the full, it is evident that there was the strongest temptation to exceed them ... One is bound not to pass without notice these signs of his restraint’ (107–8). ‘Restrained’ or not, Morris created a Medea who was untrammelled by thoughts of prudence or safety as she set sail with nearly sixty men and Atalanta, the only female Argonaut. Even more pointedly, she dismissed Jason’s nervous promises of lifelong devotion as they warily made their way towards the well-guarded fleece: Nay ... let be; Were thou more fickle than the restless sea, Still should I love thee, knowing thee for such; Whom I know not, indeed, but fear the touch Of Fortune’s hand. (9.21–5)6

Such passages enhanced Morris’s expressions of respect or sympathy for his heroine, and rendered her characteristic self-awareness more plausibly essential to the tale’s evolution.

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Medea and Circe In the Argonautica, Medea incited Jason to kill and dismember her brother Absyrtus.7 It is Jason who in Morris’s text decides to kill Absyrtus, but Medea seeks absolution for them both from ‘my father’s godlike sister,’ Circe:8 But since upon us yet lies heavily My brother’s death, take heed that we must see My father’s godlike sister; no one less May wash our souls of that blood-guiltiness. (12.259–62)

Jason also assumed a distinctly protective role in the Argonautica and he and Medea visited Circe together,9 but Morris’s Medea ventures forth alone, to seek audience with the ‘God-begotten wonder, Circe ... the wise of women,’ and warns the Argonauts that ‘all that wander there / Are but lost men and their undoers fair.’ Her shipmates then watch her stride through ‘close-set ranks’ of ‘golden-collared sad-eyed beasts’ that importune her ‘with varying moan and roar,’ protected only by her headband of ‘Pontic Moly’ (13.65–6, 89–90, 97, 96, 98, 107). Circe was also an irredeemably vicious seductress in The Odyssey and Apollonius’s Argonautica,10 but she is an essentially honest and intermittently helpful if ambivalent figure in The Life and Death of Jason. The island’s hetairai, for example – not Circe herself – lead their victims down the garden path ‘Into the dark cool cloister, when again / They came not forth, but four-foot, rough of mane, / Uncouth with spots, baneful of tooth and claw’ (13.171–3). Lemprière’s Circe declined to expiate Jason and Medea at all, and Apollonius’s rather sanguinary counterpart rebuked Medea when she learned what she had done: ‘Poor wretch, an evil and shameful return hast thou planned ... begone from my halls ... and kneel not to me at my hearth, for never will I approve thy counsels and thy shameful flight’ (4.740–9). Morris’s Circe, by contrast, simply tells Medea that she must sacrifice a hundred ‘milkwhite bulls,’ a hundred sheep, and ‘many a jar of unmixed honied wine’ to her grandfather, ‘the all-seeing Sun,’ after which ‘the deed thy Jason’s spear has done / Mayst thou forget.’ Morris’s Circe also regrets that she cannot avert the crimes and sorrows she is able to foretell, and broods deeply about the burdens and complexities of her foreknowledge, much as the Icelandic

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spámaður Guest does when a graceful young woman serves him a meal in ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’: ‘What more? What more? I see thy grey eyes ask, What course, what ending to the tangled task The Gods have set before me, ere I die? O child, I know all things, indeed, but why Shouldst thou know all, nor yet be wise therefore? Me knowledge grieves not, thee should it grieve sore; Nor knowing, shouldst thou cease to hope or fear. (13.291–7) ‘But though full oft thou shalt lift hands in vain, Crying to what thou know’st not in thy need, ... yet oft, indeed, Shalt thou go nigh to think thyself divine ... For joy of what thou dreamest cannot die. Live then thy life, nor ask for misery, Most certain if thou knewest what must be. (Earthly Paradise 322–9)

Circe tells Medea bluntly that her least humane and most vengeful acts will be most remembered, but tries to reassure her – not very persuasively – that ‘thy name shall be a solace and a song, / While the world lasts.’ She also outlines a bitter theodicy of divine deception which has close parallels in ‘The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice’: Wherefore the Gods, wishing the earth to teem With living wills like theirs, nor as a dream To hold but beauty and the lives of beasts, That they may have fair stories for their feasts, Have given them all forgetfulness of death, Longings and hopes, and joy in drawing breath, And they live happy, knowing nought at all, Nor what that is, when that shall chance to fall. (13.303–10)

In Lemprière’s as well as Apollonius’s texts, Circe brusquely commanded Medea to leave. In Morris’s version, she simply urges Medea to depart for her own safety (‘Gird up thy raiment, nor run slower now / Than from the amorous bearer of the bow / Once Daphne ran,’ 13.349– 51), and offers a parting declaration of her affection (‘And well I love thee, being so wise and fair,’ 13.343).

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In effect, Morris’s Circe becomes Medea’s teacher – a more sophisticated counterpart of Charon and Juno, who had played similar roles for the boy-Jason – and as a result Medea fled the island, her ‘fair face shuddering and afraid,’ and ‘set herself her own vext soul to save.’ Circe’s predictions effectively enhance Medea’s character and stature within the poem, but her ‘absolution’ brings chilling foreknowledge of ineluctable guilt. Jason’s Betrayal and Medea’s Revenge Morris’s abandonment of his early draft’s initial title (‘The Deeds of Jason’)11 marked an implicit shift of focus from heroic ‘feats’ to their antiheroic undoing, and this change in the tale’s tonalities becomes especially clear in the work’s conclusion. Book 17’s account of Jason’s defection, Medea’s revenge, and Jason’s death form a quasi-medieval, Ring-like tragedy of rise, fall, and betrayal, which the narrator ‘tremble[s] in the telling’ and compares with the passion and estrangement of Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Creseyde.’ Jason, Medea, and their two sons have enjoyed ‘ten sweet years of rest and peace’ in Corinth,12 before Creon, the city’s ruler, pressures Jason to divorce Medea and marry his daughter Glauce. Jason protests at first: What is there dwelling above ground That loveth me as this one loveth me? ... For me she gave up country, kin, and name, For me she risked tormenting and the flame, The anger of the Gods and curse of man; For me she came across the waters wan Through many woes, and for my sake did go Alone, unarmed, to my most cruel foe ... Making me king of all my father’s lands: Note all these things, and tell me then to flee From that which threateneth her who loveth me. (17.126–7, 135–44)

Creon persists, however, and Jason finds himself quickly intrigued by Glauce’s youthful beauty and flattered by her artless interest in his stories. After he decides that his love for Medea has been ‘dying in the ten years’ space’ (and the narrator-chorus interjects, ‘Alas for truth!’), he calls himself in a brief moment of lucidity a

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In the end, he sends Medea a gratuitously graceless bill of divorcement, offers her money, condemns her as a recidivist sorcerer, and makes no men-tion of the future fate of their two sons (exiled with their mother in Euripides’ play). The only ‘reason’ he can contrive for this abandonment is that ‘the times are changed, with them is changed my heart’ (17.763) Morris had to find and adapt non-Apollonian models for all of this, for the Argonautica concluded with Jason and Medea’s return to Greece. Some potential sources were particularly ill-suited to his revisionist purpose – the quasi-vampiric exultation of Seneca’s Medea, for example, as she contemplated the murder of her sons: At last, powers of nature, you have been appeased. This is a real wedding-day of joy. The crime is now complete ... But no: I am not yet avenged ... And against my will a sense of pleasure subtly penetrates my being, and it grows, constantly grows. It lacked only one thing to be perfect. He should have seen it ... For any criminal act is just a waste without him here to see ... If, even now, there is, unknown to me, some fetus spawned by you inside my womb, I’ll use this sword and tear it out with steel ... Enjoy your crime, my aching heart, enjoy it to the full. The day is mine; I urge you not to hurry. We are using the time that we were given. (5.985ff, 1010ff)

No chorus comments on this sadistic rant, but the scene does conclude with Jason’s rather apt parting taunt: ‘Wherever you may go, you will be proof that gods do not exist.’

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A more amenable classical template offered itself in Euripides’ Medea, whose heroine holds her own in a vituperative final exchange with the ambitious and self-serving Jason, but Euripides’ Medea was hardly Morris’s tragically deranged ‘wise woman.’ She calculated her murders and planned her escape with minute care, for example, and reacted with sadistic relish to the news of Glauce and Creon’s deaths (‘A splendid report ... You will give me twice the pleasure if they died in agony,’ 1127–8), and tonelessly insisted that the children ‘must die at all events, and since they must, I who gave them birth shall kill them’ (1238–9). Morris, by contrast, struggled to construct allegedly extenuating circumstances and motivations for Medea’s murderous rage, as he had already done for Absyrtus’s murder in Book 12. Euripides had dwelt on the protracted agony of Glauce’s death; in Morris’s account, Glauce’s death occurs quickly: swiftly Jason ran ... Up to the dais, whence one bitter cry He heard, of one in utmost agony, Calling upon his once so helpful name; But when unto the fiery place he came, Nought saw he but the flickering tongues of fire That up the wall were climbing high and higher; And on the floor a heap of ashes white, The remnant of his once beloved delight, For whom his ancient love he cast away, And of her sire who brought about that day. (17.1073–84)

Seneca and Lemprière’s Medea, moreover, had murdered the children in full view of their father, and they screamed in terror offstage in Euripides’ play.13 Morris’s Medea, by contrast, insists (rather incongruously) that she ‘would have died to save’ her children,14 and tries to assign the guilt of their murder to Jason, that ‘traitor! who didst bring them here / Into this cruel world, this lovely bier / Of youth and love, and joy and happiness’ (17.971–3). The murders themselves occur offstage, and Morris depicted the dead children rather cloyingly as Two little helpless bodies side by side Smiling as though in sweet sleep they had died And feared no ill. (17.1185–7)

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Instead, he focused his narrative lens with solicitous care on Medea’s incoherent maternal grief:15 What! when I kneel in temples of the Gods, Must I bethink me of the upturned sods, And hear a voice say: ‘Mother, wilt thou come And see us resting in our new made home, Since thou wert used to make us lie full soft, Smoothing our pillows many a time and oft?’ ... ‘O sons, with what sweet counsels and what tears Would I have hearkened to the hopes and fears Of your first loves ... But now, but now, this is a little hand Too often kissed since love did first begin To win such curses as it yet shall win ... Praise to the Gods! ye know not how to curse.’ (17.927–56)

Lemprière provided a laconic and rather legalistic summary of the basic plot outlines Morris followed (with one exception) in his entry for ‘Jason’: Jason’s partiality for Glauce, the daughter of the king of the country, afterwards disturbed their matrimonial happiness, and Medea was divorced, that Jason might more freely indulge his amorous propensities. This infidelity was severely revenged by Medea, who destroyed her children in the presence of their father [a plot element omitted by Morris]. After his separation from Medea, Jason lived an unsettled and melancholy life. (319)

Morris constructed his protective ‘defence’ of Medea along similarly forensic lines, as a plea of temporary insanity, or at least tragic confusion. The result – as Martha Mench wryly noted – effectively ‘subdued [Medea’s] ferocious nature while retaining her ferocious deeds’ (206).16 Jason beneath the Mast In Morris’s redaction, Jason’s ‘unsettled and melancholy life’ is not nasty or particularly brutish, but it is certainly short. He briefly considers suicide, restrains himself when his old nurse comforts him,

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and wanders in distraction out to the Argo, beached near Corinth, where he loses himself for a moment in wistful reminiscence and counterfactual regret: ah, if I could but see But once again her who delivered me From death and many troubles, then no more Would I turn backward from the shadowy shore, And all my life would seem but perfect gain. (17.1271–5)

Morris effectively drew back his lens in the poem’s final lines to focus on Jason’s faithlessness, lack of resolution, and wavering awareness of his actions’ irrevocability. Constancy of attachment was a very deep virtue in Morris’s moral order: had his epic protagonist lashed himself more firmly to the Argo’s sustaining mast, it might not have killed him, and he might have enjoyed the ‘life and death’ of a genuine hero. In any event, Jason reaches the ‘shadowy shore’ soon thereafter, for the Argo’s mast falls on him later that night. The Corinthians discover his broken body in the dawn (‘Beneath the ruined stem did Jason lie / Crushed, and all dead of him that here can die,’ 17.1337–8), and decide to return the Argo to the deep, as a fit offering ‘to the Deity / Who shakes the hard earth with the rolling sea’ (17.1363–4). Webster’s ‘Medea’ and Other Victorian Classical Heroines Morris’s recalibration of the legend’s scales of guilt did not go unnoticed at the time. In Portraits (1870), Augusta Webster supplemented a powerful poetic portrayal of a reluctant and embittered prostitute, ‘A Castaway,’ with two dramatic monologues by Medea (‘Medea in Athens’) and Circe (‘Circe’).17 Webster was the wife of a Cambridge barrister, a friend of William Michael Rossetti, and an early advocate of significant feminist reforms, and she had already published a novel, three volumes of poetry, and a translation of Euripides’ Medea (1868).18 Clearly indebted to the Brownings for her interest in the dramatic monologue, she was also a member of the wider Pre-Raphaelite circle who would almost certainly have read The Life and Death of Jason. Morris’s example may have encouraged her to undertake her translation of Medea, and the appearance of Jason may have prompted her to add these two classical monologues to her Portraits.

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Most of Portraits’ reviewers preferred ‘Circe,’ in fact, in which a passionate but narcissistic sorceress expresses her disgust at her unfortunate victims, allegedly transformed by their own coarse and petty natures into the beasts they have become. She awaits with impatience the arrival of a more worthy lover, as the storm that shipwrecks Ulysses’ vessel rages in the poem’s last lines: Another burst of flame – and the black speck Shows in the glare, lashed onwards. It were well I bade make ready for our guests to-night. (208–10)

The exiled protagonist of ‘Medea in Athens’ denies at first that she is moved by the news of Jason’s death she has just received (‘And this most strange of all, / That I care nothing’), but quickly belies this in extended reveries in which she fantasizes that the dying Jason remembers their lives together, regrets his betrayal, and pleas for a final reconciliation (‘Where is Medea? Let her bind my head,’ 128). Webster’s thoughtexperimental conversation also provides a wistful antiphon to Morris’s earlier reconstruction of Jason’s last conscious moments, quoted above: ah, if I could but see But once again her who delivered me From death and many troubles ... How I should clasp again my love, mine own ... And with the eyes of lovers newly wed, How should we gaze each upon each again. (17.1271–3, 1290, 1292–3)

In Webster’s reverie, Jason’s wraith remembers Medea’s confidence when they were young, and sailed together toward the deadly Symplegades (wandering rocks): And now he speaks out of his loneliness, ‘I was afraid and careful, but she laughed: “Love steers,” she said; and when the rocks were far, Grey twinkling spots in distance, suddenly Her face grew white, and, looking back to them, She said, “Oh love, a god has whispered me ’Twere well had we drowned there, for strange mad woes Are waiting for us in your Greece”: and then She tossed her head back, while her brown hair streamed

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Gold in the wind and sun, and her face glowed With daring beauty; “What of woes,” she cried, “If only they leave time for love enough?”’ (56–67)

In her loneliness and isolation, Medea cherishes the integrity of things past (‘Ten years together were they not worth cost / Of all the anguish?’), and formulates a complex apologia in response to Jason’s ghost: Lo, I am The wretch thou say’st; but wherefore? by whose work? Who, binding me with dreadful marriage oaths In the midnight temple, led my treacherous flight From home and father? ... When have I been base, When cruel, save for thee, until – Man, man, Wilt thou accuse my guilt? Whose is my guilt? Mine or thine, Jason? (206–10, 215–18)

She blames him more for her guilt than for his own, for her shame and grief are unassuageable, and she ends the poem with a bitter valedictory: Oh, soul of my crimes, How shall I pardon thee for what I am? ... Never could I forgive thee for my boys; Never could I look on this hand of mine That slew them and not hate thee. Childless, thou, What is thy childlessness to mine? Go, go, Thou foolish angry ghost, what wrongs hast thou? Would I could wrong thee more. Come thou sometimes And see me happy. (218–19, 229–35) Go, go; thou mind’st me of our sons; And then I hate thee worse; go to thy grave By which none weeps. I have forgotten thee. (267-9)

She has not, of course, and never will. Webster departed from classical sources in ways that strongly suggest Morris’s example, but she also explored Medea’s retrospective

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emotions in strikingly original and nuanced ways, tempered with deeply held beliefs in the centrality of motherhood to human life. Webster’s complex monological portrait of Medea’s self-loathing can hold its own with Browning’s best monologues. In ‘Xantippe’ (1871), an ostensibly very different classical monologue, Amy Levy recast another, less sanguinary figure’s life circumstances along more pointedly feminist lines. Xantippe, Socrates’ widow, bitterly recalls on her deathbed her husband’s cold condescension and dismissal of her place in the life of the mind. Once she had hoped to participate in the school’s free-ranging debates, but Socrates’ sometime friend and would-be lover Alcibiades had dismissed her, and sneered that woman’s frail – Her body rarely stands the test of soul; She grows intoxicate with knowledge; throws The laws of custom, order, ’neath her feet. (168–71)

Worst of all, Socrates himself – the ‘midwife,’ the lover of wisdom, who knew that he did not know – sarcastically agreed, and ordered her out of the room. Then in my bosom there uprose A sudden flame, a merciful fury sent To save me; with both angry hands I flung The skin upon the marble, where it lay Spouting red rills and fountains on the white; Then, all unheeding faces, voices, eyes, I fled across the threshold, hair unbound – ... Flooded with all the flowing tide of hopes Which once had gushed out golden, now sent back Swift to their sources, never more to rise. (212–22)

Webster’s and Levy’s adaptations of very different classical sources also marked the emergence of a new revisionist motif, which deserves independent study in its own right: that of retrospective critique from the margin. Other realizations of this genre can be traced in Michael Field’s poems in the voice of Sappho (‘Long Ago,’ ‘Circe at Circaeum’), Edward Dowdon’s ‘The Prayer of the Swine to Circe,’ H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, Sylvia Plath’s ‘Medusa,’ Adrienne Rich’s ‘I Dream I’m the Death

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of Orpheus,’ Margaret Atwood’s ‘Circe/Mud Poems,’ Rita Dove’s ‘Persephone Abducted,’ and Diane Wakoski’s Medea the Sorceress (1991). At least two late twentieth-century novelists, moreover – Miranda Seymour in Medea (1982), and Christa Wolf in her powerful Medea: A Modern Retelling (1998) – also provided complementary accounts in prose of the interior life of the Argonaut’s most able science-officer. I have tried to demonstrate in this essay that the revisionist sexual economy of William Morris’s portraits of Medea and Circe in The Life and Death of Jason embodied newer, more egalitarian forms of poetic sensibility, and that these insights persisted in later portraits of strong-willed, tormented, and ‘interesting’ women – Stenoboea and Gudrun in The Earthly Paradise, the ‘other’ Gudrun in Sigurd the Volsung, and the ‘Lady’ in The Water of the Wondrous Isles. Morris did not characterize the figure of Medea in feminist terms, but her (relative) sexual autonomy and canny powers of uninhibited action were unconventional in their time. I have also argued that Morris’s intuitive empathy and sense of compensatory justice – rather drastically expressed in the emblem of Jason’s death – made oblique but significant early contributions to an emerging feminist counter-tradition. Morris’s and Webster’s Circe and Medea figures were more interesting than their classical prototypes – less brutal, more reflective, and more ambivalently ‘wise.’ In partial anticipation of Webster’s insights, Morris also took care to craft the bond between Circe and Medea in ways which added to the dignity of both, as flawed sages with insights into a future neither could alter. Finally, I have suggested that Morris’s cool examination of Jason’s ‘life and death’ expressed his emerging beliefs about ‘heroic’ adherence to companionate as well as erotic ‘fellowship’ – ideals which underlay his impassioned commitment to socialism, and effectively belied James’s much-quoted remark that The Life and Death of Jason opened ‘a glimpse into a world where [the jaded intellects of the present moment] will be called upon neither to choose, to criticise, nor to believe, but simply to feel, to look, and to listen’ (692). It may not be altogether unexpected that Morris’s earliest poetic explorations of classical settings expressed a preliminary version of his view of these affective and pragmatic ideals. It may be somewhat more remarkable that these ideals seem to have anticipated major motifs of some of his feminist successors, and prefigured a subgenre of revisionist poetic portraiture that lives on a century after his death.

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1 Critical examinations of Morris’s views on women appear in Sylvia Strauss; Florence and William Boos; Jan Marsh, ‘Concerning Love’; Fiona MacCarthy, 685–8; and Florence Boos, ‘The Socialist New Woman.’ 2 A description of snow and ice near the Euxine Sea appeared in Ovid, Tristia, III.x.13–4, 17–8, 25, 29–32, and Martha Duvall Mench notes that ‘it is not impossible that Ovid’s forced exile in a land which was bound within itself by winter cold suggested to Morris the Argonaut’s winter encampment beside the frozen river’ (88–9). 3 E.P. Thompson, 114–7; Michael Holzman; Florence Boos, ‘The Evolution of William Morris’s “Prologue: The Wanderers”’; David Latham, ‘Literal and Literary Texts: Morris’s “The Story of Dorothea.”’ 4 Another early counterpart of Morris’s kinder, gentler Medea appeared in her moving epistolary appeal to Jason in Ovid’s Heroides XII: ‘I do not implore you to go forth against bulls and men, nor ask your aid to quiet and overcome a dragon; it is you I ask for, – you, whom I have earned, whom you yourself gave to me, by whom I became a mother, as you by me a father’ (195–8). An allusion to the legend’s grim eschatology appears only in the letter’s conclusion, when Medea feels ‘something portentous, surely ... working in my soul!’ (212). 5 Medea promises, ‘And I will lull to sleep the guardian serpent and give you the fleece of gold; but do thou, stranger, amid thy comrades make the gods witness of the vows thou hast taken on thyself for my sake’ (Argonautica 4:87–9). In Morris’s version, Jason and Medea hastily arrange their wedding to propitiate Alcinous, king of Phaeacia, whose support they need on their return journey. 6 By contrast, Morris simply describes Jason after the return to Iolchos as ‘wedded to the fairest queen on earth’ (17.457). 7 Apollonius’s Medea tells him: ‘I will beguile Absyrtus to come into thy hands ... Thereupon if this deed pleases thee, slay him and raise a conflict with the Colchians, I care not’ (4.415–20). In the event, however, Absyrtus ‘dyed with red his sister’s silvery veil and robe as she shrank away ... And the hero, Aeson’s son, cut off the extremities of the dead man, and thrice licked up some blood and thrice spat the pollution from his teeth, as it is right for the slayer to do’ (4.474, 477–9). 8 In the Argonautica, Zeus, not Medea, had commanded that the Argonauts seek out Circe: ‘Zeus himself, king of gods, was seized with wrath at what they had done. And he ordained that by the counsels of

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Aeaean Circe they should cleanse themselves from the terrible stain of blood and suffer countless woes before their return’ (4:558ff). ‘Jason drew with him the Colchian maid ... Medea hid her face in both her hands, but Jason fixed in the ground the mighty hilted sword with which he had slain Aeetes’ son’ (4.688–9, 696–9). After the interview, Medea ‘cast her robe [over her eyes] and poured forth a lamentation, until the hero took her by the hand and led her forth from the hall quivering with fear’ (4.749–52) In the Argonautica, ‘with blood [Circe’s] chambers and all the walls of her palace seemed to be running, and flame was devouring all the magic herbs with which she used to bewitch strangers whoever came; and she herself with murderous blood quenched the glowing flame, drawing it up in her hands ... And beasts, not resembling beasts of the wild, nor yet like men in body, but with a medley of limbs ... monsters shapeless of form followed her (662–81). Morris’s first draft of ‘The Deeds of Jason,’ now housed in the Huntington Library, MS 6434, breaks off in Book 7. Morris suppressed Lemprière’s rationale for the couple’s departure, that Iolchian resentment of Medea’s sorceries had driven them into exile. Morris presumably considered the traditional account of the children’s murders too integral to omit, and did not avail himself of other alternatives, in the histories of Aelian (cited by Lemprière), and in Pausanias, who had the citizens of Corinth kill Medea’s children, then hire Euripides to indict their mother (Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2, trans. W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1935], 2.iii.6–11). At one point, Morris’s Medea also tells herself casuistically that she has saved Glauce from the betrayal she herself has experienced: at least I save thee this – The slow descent to misery from bliss ... And faint hope lessening till it fades away Into dull waiting for the certain blow ... And surely but a poor gift thou hast lost. The new-made slave, the toiler on the sea, The once rich fallen into poverty, In one hour knows more grief than thou canst know ... Kindly I deal with thee, mine enemy; Since swift forgetfulness to thee I send. (899–917, passim) Euripides’ Medea also dilates in effusions of self-pity before she com-

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mits the murders: ‘Give me your right hands to kiss, my children, give them to me! O hands and lips so dear to me, o noble face and bearing of my children! ... I can no longer look at you but am overwhelmed with my pain (5.1070–7); ‘Come luckless hand, take the sword ... Do not weaken, do not remember that you love the children, that you gave them life ... even if you kill them, they were dear to you. Oh, what an unhappy woman I am!’ (5.1244–50). 16 In the process, Morris also scrapped assorted continuations of the legend, in which Medea is rescued, is escorted in a divine chariot to Athens, becomes the wife of Aegeus, and bears a son Medus (Lemprière, ‘Medea’). 17 In 1870 the reviewer for the Examiner and London Review wrote dismissively that ‘there is a calmness and a coldness about Mrs. Webster’s Medea, which scarcely suggest the portrait of the burning passionate woman which the genius of Euripides has bequeathed to us. The agony here depicted is intense, but it does not adequately represent the revengeful tigress of Greek story’ (qtd in Christine Sutphin, ed., Augusta Webster, Portraits and Other Poems, 418–21). An enlarged edition of Portraits was published in 1893, and the Athenaeum review of this enlarged edition did not mention the classical poems at all (Sutphin, in Webster 421–3). 18 Webster published her novel Lesley’s Guardians under the pen name Cecil Home in 1864, and used the same pseudonym for Blanche Lisle and Other Poems (1860) and Lilian Gray, A Poem (1864). Dramatic Studies (1866) and A Woman Sold and Other Poems (1867) appeared under her own name.

5 Morris and the Muse: Gender and Aestheticism in William Morris’s ‘Pygmalion and the Image’ Jane Thomas

The myth of Pygmalion from Ovid’s Metamorphoses had a particular resonance for the Pre-Raphaelites. It recurs as a leitmotif in their art and literature, and can be read as an allegory of their aesthetic beliefs and sexual politics. William Morris’s revision of the myth in ‘Pygmalion and the Image’ provides a fascinating model of the relationship between aesthetics and sexuality in the Victorian period. At the same time it demonstrates the complexity of Morris’s understanding of the social, economic, and sexual oppression of the individual as well as the tendency towards the aesthetic and sexual idealization of women that was characteristic of his social and cultural milieu. Morris’s ‘Pygmalion and the Image’ – the eleventh of the twentyfour tales of The Earthly Paradise – is based on the legend of a Cypriot sculptor who turns in disgust from the sexual wantonness of the women of his island whom Venus has transformed into the first prostitutes for daring to question her divinity. Ovid’s Pygmalion lives a celibate life while he carves an ivory statue of ‘perfect shape, more beautiful / Than ever woman born’ (Metamorphoses 10.300–1). The image is so exquisite that he falls in love with it and prays to Venus for a bride who is ‘the living likeness of my ivory girl.’ Venus interprets his prayer literally and the image comes to life: beneath his touch the flesh Grew soft, its ivory hardness vanishing, And yielded to his hands, as in the sun Wax of Hymettus softens and is shaped

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Blessed by Venus, their union produces a child, Paphos, from whom the island takes its name. Morris’s interest in the ‘Woman Question’ may have originated early in his artistic career. In 1856 his friend and university colleague William Fulford directly addressed the topical question of women’s rights in an article entitled ‘Woman, Her Duties, Education, and Position’ for the August issue of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine financed by Morris.1 Fulford begins by pleading for better educational opportunities for women in order that they might fulfil their potential as mothers and the companions of their brothers and husbands, for ‘the most talented men, even the great geniuses, could find women as great in appreciation as themselves’ (464). He exhorts frustrated middle-class women, ‘sickening of a vague disease,’ to relieve their frustration by visiting the poor and the imprisoned, thereby helping in the extinction or mitigation of ‘the vices and miseries which degrade and oppress their fellow men and women’ (466). When women are seen to take a larger share in the work of human progress, Fulford argues, men will be more willing to grant them the ‘Rights’ they demand as their due. For women have a powerful ally in the heart of man himself, what Fulford in an excess of Comtean zeal calls ‘the woman-worshipping instinct’: ‘Woman-worshipping. It is a strange word; yet I think a weaker would not suffice. For does not a man feel for a woman (and the more manly he is, the more he feels this) a reverence, an awe, such as he feels not for men?’ (473).2 For Fulford, woman’s primary duty lies in ‘striving to attain the ideal which they may learn lives in the hearts of men, which surely must live in their own hearts ... well-knowing that an ideal is no vain phantom of imaginary perfection, but that which the creature was formed to be, which to a great extent it is still granted it to be, which it must never cease to strive after, on pain of perpetual regression’ (473). In order to support his observations Fulford quotes extensively from The Princess (1850), exhorting his female readers to model their own lives on the fictional woman described in Tennyson’s poem: No Angel, but a dearer being, all dipt In Angel instincts, breathing Paradise, Interpreter between the Gods and men,

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Who look’d all native to her place, and yet On tiptoe seem’d to touch upon a sphere Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce Sway’d to her from their orbits as they moved And girdled her with music. (477)

Here woman is identified as belonging to neither the human sphere nor the divine. Her specific function is to act as an intermediary between the two. Fulford suggests women might best fulfil this role not through any attempt to establish themselves as independent social and sexual beings but by striving to become the material manifestation of a masculine ideal. Woman must become the spiritual complement of man, the mirror in which he sees embodied his supreme and most perfect conception of himself purged of all grossness. In this respect woman is envisaged as man’s conception and creation – Galatea to his Pygmalion. The Pygmalion myth is also a useful figuration of dominant aspects of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic theory. Inspired by John Ruskin’s conviction that all truths, including higher forms, could be apprehended through the rigorous application of the visual faculty combined with a poetic sensibility, the Pre-Raphaelite painters rejected the inherited conventions of visual art in favour of the detailed observation of natural forms. The landscapes and, more famously, the figures in their paintings were drawn from life and it was Morris’s dissatisfaction with his own draughtsmanship that led him finally to abandon painting in favour of poetry and pattern design. The effectiveness of Pre-Raphaelite artwork was judged not merely by its ability to elicit admiration for its accuracy of depiction but the extent to which it produced a profound emotional response in the viewer. The PreRaphaelite economy of symbolism meant that scientific analysis and geological and botanical accuracy could be put to highly imaginative use in that close observation was regarded as a prerequisite for visionary revelation. To illustrate this, the critic Tim Barringer draws attention to the self-conscious symbolism of Dante Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9) – a visual manifesto of the aims and ideals of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood. The Virgin, who was modelled on the artist’s sister Christina Rossetti, is engaged in embroidering a faithful reproduction of a lily from life, under the guidance of St Anne. The flower that is the object of her intense scrutiny is itself painted with

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botanical precision and in this respect the Virgin could be seen as giving holy sanction to Ruskin’s aesthetic dictum. At the same time the lily is symbolic of the Virgin herself – pure and without stain and, as Rossetti himself suggested in a sonnet inscribed on the frame, ‘angelwatered’ (Barringer 8). The lily becomes a physical manifestation of a visionary truth for the discerning viewer. The aesthetic process apprehends the natural object, revealing the higher ideal behind its material surface whilst at the same time accurately reproducing that surface in all its delicate detail in order to communicate the ideal to the viewer. This aspect of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic theory is strongly linked to Neoplatonism which regards all forms of beauty in the material world – including the aesthetic object – as emanations from an Absolute or Ideal form of Beauty from which the human soul is permanently in exile. The artist is regarded as having a more sensitive connection with the Platonic Ideal than the ordinary man. This connection is expressed in the form of inspiration or divine influence and the artist is engaged in a perpetual struggle with his medium to express the Ideal in palpable form. The successful work of art acts in turn upon the viewer by virtue of its aesthetic properties, the profound emotional response it inspires allowing temporary access to the transcendental world beyond the world of appearances to which all human beings constantly aspire. Where the aesthetic appropriation of botanical objects appears relatively unproblematic, complexities arise when inspiration is provided by another human being. The depiction of women in PreRaphaelite painting and the role of the actual women associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood have been widely reassessed by feminist critics, including Jan Marsh (Pre-Raphaelite Women), Griselda Pollock, and Lynne Pearce. All three have drawn attention to the way in which the women featured in the life and work of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and their associates relinquish agency, control, and selfdelineation to the shaping gaze of the male artist/lover. In this respect the gender relationship between male artist and female model or muse appears to complicate Ruskinian aesthetic theory and reverse the hierarchical relationship of Life to Art. ‘Stunners,’ such as Lizzie Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Morris became transformed by art into passive reflectors of masculine desire. As Jeffrey Spear has suggested, Jane Morris herself became both muse and finished work of art – a product of the creative energies of Rossetti and her husband ‘who in paint, verse, costume, and setting made her into a type of beauty and,

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implicitly, a figure of inspiration ... Save with a few intimates, Jane Morris remained, willing or no, an icon, the type of her painted image, the silent goddess of an aesthetic shrine to which many a literary or artistic pilgrim came to pay homage and file a report’ (237–8). After a visit to the Morris household the novelist Henry James remarked: ‘It’s hard to say whether she’s a grand synthesis of all the Pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made – or they a “keen analysis” of her – whether she is an original or a copy’ (qtd in Latham, Haunted Texts 16). Here, the Ruskinian preference for Life over the traditional conventions of Art shifts, rather uncomfortably, into Aestheticism’s reverence for Art over Life. As Spear suggests, in his paintings of Jane Morris (and also Lizzie Siddal) Rossetti used myth, legend, and other incidents from literature to comment specifically on the personal situation of his model and his relationship to her (238). 3 Art becomes the inspiration and catalyst for life, eventually threatening to displace it altogether. Oscar Wilde was to describe this process several years later in his essay ‘The Decay of Lying’: ‘Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment’ (978). For Wilde, Pre-Raphaelitism demonstrated to perfection the theory of the subordination of life to art, in direct contrast to its professed aims and ideals. So influential was the movement that middle-class women in the drawing-rooms and galleries of London began consciously to imitate, in their dress and demeanour, the languid female forms depicted on the canvases of Rossetti and Burne-Jones: We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti’s dream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of ‘The Golden Stair,’ the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the ‘Laus Amoris,’ the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in ‘Merlin’s Dream.’ And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form like an enterprising publisher. (982)

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As far as Jane Morris was concerned, the masculine aesthetic gaze seems to have arrested the play of nature’s vital forces, displacing the multidimensional woman with a one-dimensional work of art and reanimating her in the prescriptive confines of the masculine imagination. Jane Morris and Burne-Jones’s mistress Maria Zambaco were transformed by their lovers into powerful visual icons, imitated in turn by Victorian women beyond the Pre-Raphaelite circle. However, unlike Jane Morris, Zambaco resolutely refused to play the role of Galatea to Burne-Jones’s faint-hearted Pygmalion.4 As an archetype, the Pygmalion myth appears to naturalize the unequal power-relations between the sexes that is implicit in the relationship between artist and muse. It specifies the male artist as the active human channel through which the Ideal is made manifest and genders the muse, the passive raw material, and the resulting aesthetic object as female. In Ovid’s tale the transition from ivory to statue to woman is effected by the male who is fired by inspiration (divine intervention) to shape the raw material into a living image of his own desire. But the process does not stop there. As J. Hillis Miller has noted, Ovid uses the metaphor of the ‘wax of Hymettus’ which softens in the sun and ‘is shaped by men’s fingers into many forms and usefulness acquires by being used’ to describe the sensation of the recalcitrant ivory softening into flesh beneath Pygmalion’s hands (Versions of Pygmalion 6–7). The flesh yields to his hands as the woman will yield to his desire and to his will, becoming ‘useful’ under his guidance and his shaping gaze. In the artistic realm, as well as in the wider social and political arena, man is invested with the power to shape the raw, unrealized potential of woman into something ‘useful.’ In Morris’s revision of Ovid’s tale, ‘Pygmalion’ is a myth of transformation: a representation of the seamless and perfect metamorphosis of the aesthetic Idea into tangible form with art playing the mediating role. Pygmalion shapes his raw material into a tangible representation of his Ideal, which is reanimated in fleshly form, offering him prolonged and blissful intercourse with the divine. In this respect the myth is an inspiration for all artists searching for the metaphorically elusive ‘vital spark’ that will make their work dynamic and meaningful. It is also an inspiration for lovers, particularly Platonic lovers for whom the physical beauty of the beloved is merely a manifestation of the deeper spiritual beauty that radiates out from the divine ideal, which is the true object of reverence and desire. Pygmalion offers consolation to those driven by the desire to achieve the impossible consummation:

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union with an ideal beloved whose very desirability is predicated upon her unattainability. The myth is also an inspiration for the Victorian male for whom threatening, troublesome feminine difference may be transformed through the aesthetic process so as to effect a reassuring and satisfying Narcissistic union between self and other. Finally, as Fulford’s article implies, the myth indicates the extent to which reverence for an increasingly discredited theological ideal was displaced onto women who were burdened with the responsibility for man’s moral and ethical integrity. Pygmalion is the quintessential artist, lover, and man, and the myth enacts and validates the process whereby the feminine is created and shaped entirely by, and as a necessary complement to, the masculine. In Morris’s version of the myth, Pygmalion is established as an artist of the highest order, having ‘wrought most godlike works in imagery.’ He rejects ‘life’ by rejecting the praise of his fellow men and turning away from the women of Cyprus who are firmly grounded in the material world by their blatantly material sexual transactions with the ‘dark-eyed merchants of the southern seas.’ The Propoetides represent the base erotic desire that the artist seeks to sublimate into the energy of aesthetic creation. They are identified, through his eyes, with the ‘unopened wealth of bales’ on the crowded quays (Earthly Paradise 16–17). For Pygmalion, material existence and material objects are ‘idle poor and vain’ and he turns instead to Art for solace. In the first painting in Burne-Jones’s illustrative suite Pygmalion and the Image – The Heart Desires – the sculptor turns his back on the girls outside his studio and away from the group of marble women whose pose is highly suggestive of The Three Graces. Instead he gazes thoughtfully on the empty plinth which will eventually display his new image. The sublimated eroticism that inspires Pygmalion is suggested by the two girls who brazenly watch him through the open door of his studio. Their linked posture of female solidarity is mirrored in the two figures on the left-hand side of the marble trio. Flesh has been sublimated, idealized, and recreated as marble, but this metamorphosis is incomplete as the ideal shapes are anatomized by their reflections in the marble floor into fetishistic parts: ankles, legs, buttocks. Here the erotic re-emerges to trouble and disrupt the harmony of the idealizing gaze. At the same time, the empty plinth indicates that Pygmalion’s new female image will be singular and unique – created by him for his sole use and set apart from the common mass of womankind united inside and outside his studio in sisterly or erotic affection.

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Guided by Venus (Plato’s ‘Heavenly’ as opposed to the ‘Common’ Aphrodite), Morris’s Pygmalion begins, automatically, to shape a block of marble into the image of a woman destined to stand in Venus’s shrine as her handmaid. The process is envisaged as the artist releasing the form of a woman already discernible in the ‘wandering veins’ of the untouched block of marble (46–7). As he works he languidly dreams of other matters while the goddess inspires: ‘Unto his hand such godlike mastery sent, / That like the first artificer he wrought, / Who made the gift that woe to all men brought’ (54–6). Here the artist is the channel for the divine impulse and his creative power renders him godlike. The ‘first artificer’ is a possible reference to Zeus who created the first woman Pandora (whose name means ‘all gifts’) and whose box contained all the evils and diseases of the world along with hope. She has, of course, close associations with the figure of Eve. The godlike male artist does not copy life, but creates the feminine aesthetic object afresh as a ‘gift’ to his fellow men, but one purged of her fleshly problematics – more of a ‘Bona’ than a ‘Pan’-dora. As the image takes shape Pygmalion applies his skill more deliberately until his pride and mastery combine with divine inspiration to give form to the feminine ideal. During the process of creating the image, Pygmalion abstracts himself more fully from the life around him until everything pales to insignificance when compared with the artwork whose form he continues to perfect: No song could charm him, and no histories Of men’s misdoings could avail him now, Nay, scarcely seaward had he turned his eyes, If men had said: ‘The fierce Tyrrhenians row Up through the bay; rise up and strike a blow For life and goods;’ for nought to him seemed dear But to his well-loved work to be anear. (85–91)

The sculptor rejects the natural world of the woods where he used to hunt, whose perfection is compromised by mutability and decay. He turns instead to the cold, white permanence of the marble image. The statue is an embodiment of the ideal of female sexual constancy and desire; the persistence of desire is guaranteed by the fact that it can never be assuaged. She is the virgin dreaming of ‘love unchanged for aye.’ The quiver and the bow – signs of masculine potency in the

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natural world – are replaced by the chisel, the tool of art which functions initially here as a phallic signifier rendered impotent by the image’s refusal to respond to her signification. Flinging the ‘useless steel’ to the ground, Pygmalion laments: why have I made thee then, That thus thou mockest me? I know indeed That many such as thou are loved of men, Whose passionate eyes poor wretches still will lead Into their net, and smile to see them bleed; But these the Gods made, and this hand made thee Who wilt not speak one little word to me. (155–61)

The sculptor is distracted to the point of madness by ‘vain desire, / The ever-burning unconsuming fire,’ which is the impulse to unite – libidinally and erotically – with his ideal. He visits the merchants to purchase precious jewels to hang on the image’s ‘rippled hair’ and to dress her ‘senseless’ arms and fingers. He has her carried to his bedchamber where he worships her with Arabian frankincense and the choicest flowers from his garden. Where the Propoetides of Cyprus signified base lust and inconstancy, the aestheticized female image signifies the spiritual or immaterial realm: the Platonic Ideal which is permanent and unchanging. In Morris’s version of the myth aesthetic desire (like the erotic) is stimulated by the female form which in its divine form, as opposed to its human or common form, offers communion with a higher state of existence beyond the purely material realm. Pygmalion visits the shrine of ‘Venus the mother of Desire’ and communes with her through another image carved by him on a previous occasion. As he prays, the goddess visits his studio in his absence and animates his marble statue. Ignoring the earthly revellers celebrating Venus’s feast day – the Bacchanalian lovers ‘waiting for the night’ and the girls ‘fit to move a moody man’s desire’ – he returns to his studio torn between the compulsion to embrace his ‘sole desire’ and the reluctance to confront once again the image’s frigidity. However, she greets him by name and recounts the process of her animation. Venus has displaced the image’s semiotic stammering with the language of duty and selfresignation that echoes the English marriage vow; the patriarchal shaping process is complete. Pygmalion the artist achieves his earthly paradise by communing through the aesthetic object with the divine

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ideal. Pygmalion the man enjoys heaven on earth through a fulfilling sexual union with an idealized and malleable woman. Contemporary reviewers praised The Earthly Paradise because its classical and medieval nostalgia provided imaginative relief and an escape from their own increasingly materialistic, godless, and sexually challenging age. Walter Pater recognized in Morris’s Earthly Paradise ‘the first typical specimen of aesthetic poetry’ which takes possession of the already transfigured world of Greek or medieval poetry and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or ‘earthly paradise’: It is a finer ideal, extracted from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal. Like some strange second flowering after date, it renews on a more delicate type the poetry of a past age, but must not be confounded with it. The secret of the enjoyment of it is that inversion of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous. (‘Poems by William Morris’ 300)

The ‘inverted home-sickness’ cited by Pater as the key to appreciating Morris’s poetry is reminiscent of Edward Burne-Jones’s definition of his art, itself a direct reference to William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegaic Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle’: ‘I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be – in a light better than any light that ever shone – in a land no one can define, or remember, only desire’ (qtd in Latham, Haunted Texts 5). Here art provides an escape from the crude material inadequacies of life. It offers an alternative reality in which anxiety, transience, and dissolution have no place, where the social, political, aesthetic, and emotional dissatisfactions with the present may be transcended or resolved and where troublesome erotic desire and its cause may be stilled, sublimated, and reanimated in a more reassuring form. In his review of 1869 Sidney Colvin claimed that Morris provided an escape to another world: ‘Every reader almost was glad to retire from the stress and the cares of his ugly workaday English life and be entertained for no matter how long, with that succession of gracious pictures and pleasant incidents of a remote romantic world … [where] the ethical problems that vex our souls and bend our conduct this way and that hardly made themselves felt there’ (26). During the 1850s and 1860s as the Pre-Raphaelite movement reached

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its zenith, feminism began to emerge as a powerful force for social and ideological change contributing its own set of vexatious ethical problems to the overtaxed Victorian consciousness.5 Radical changes in the material conditions of women’s lives gave them a greater sense of participation in the construction of their subjectivity and threatened to shift them out from under the shaping gaze of the male. The allegiance of many Pre-Raphaelites to the feminist cause was severely compromised by a type of masculine idealization that appeared to reinforce woman’s subservient position as passive muse and spiritual repository of man’s finer instincts. In contrast Morris was acutely sympathetic to many of the aims of the feminist movement, such as the right to engage in creative work, to wear rational dress, and to enjoy a degree of sexual freedom. Florence Boos has argued that the character of Ellen in News from Nowhere is Morris’s most convincing ‘New Woman’: ‘She is News from Nowhere’s truest wisdom figure, not a distant erotic ideal but the embodiment of William Morris’s self-conscious hope for future generations’ (‘Almost Egalitarian Sage’ 205). However, Ellen is primarily an embodiment of the Morrisian future that William Guest eventually comes to desire. It is striking that, in direct contrast to Pygmalion, it is Guest’s urge to physically embrace Ellen that breaks the dream and brings him back from paradise to his own earthly, metropolitan hell. In ‘Pygmalion and the Image’ and even News From Nowhere aesthetics, feminism, socialism, and masculine idealism combine to produce texts suffused with insecurity, uncertainty, and nostalgia. These texts reflect the varied and changing conceptions of the relationship between the individual and the social, political, and economic conditions that shaped his or her life.

NOTES 1

2

Morris had helped to launch the magazine by writing its prospectus and editing the first edition of January 1856. He resigned his position as editor immediately after and paid Fulford £100 a year to do the job. Morris continued to contribute to the magazine on an almost monthly basis until its demise at the end of the year. August Comte advocated the systematic worship of women in place of the adoration of a Christian God. As the ‘Spontaneous Priestess of Humanity’ women embodied ‘Social Feeling’ and were natural icons of

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Jane Thomas the ‘Religion of Humanity’ as elaborated in Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–42) and System of Positive Polity (1851–4). Rossetti, who discovered Jane Burden, was obsessed with the poetry of his namesake Dante Alighieri, particularly the Vita Nuova in which the narrator struggles to accommodate the conflict between the idealized Beatrice and the agony of sexual repression on which that idealisation is predicated. For Dante’s narrator, Beatrice symbolises not just love, or even spiritual love. She is the incarnation of spiritual perfection. For details of Burne-Jones’s affair with Maria Zambaco, see Wildman and Christian, 138–40. In 1851 John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor published ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ in the Westminster Review, in which they declared: ‘What is wanted for women is equal rights, equal admission to all social privileges, not a position apart, a sort of sentimental priesthood’ (311). In 1865 John Ruskin published his sentimentally reactionary essay ‘Of Queen’s Gardens.’ Mill responded with On the Subjection of Women in which he laid responsibility for the ‘nature’ of women firmly at the feet of the patriarchal gendering process rather than natural or divine ordination. A year earlier a group of Manchester women had initiated the movement for the enfranchisement of women in England by attempting unsuccessfully to place their names on the register of voters.

6 The River at the Heart of Morris’s Ecological Thought David Faldet

As Ellen and William Guest pause under the arch of Shillingford Bridge, in News from Nowhere, so that Ellen can get ‘a good look at the landscape through the graceful arch,’ Guest tells her, ‘It was one of the minor stupidities of our time that no one thought fit to write a decent book about what may fairly be called our only English river’ (News 204, 205). One of the minor missions of News from Nowhere is to rectify that lack of a book on the Thames. News is not, of course, a detailed guide. Such guides for boaters were amply supplied in Morris’s own day, from Dickens’ Dictionary of the Thames to Henry Taunt’s A New Map of the River Thames. News from Nowhere is instead a book that has the large aim of seeing both the river and civilization by a new light: by the light of what Florence Boos has called an ‘Ecocommunist’ future (‘Aesthetic Ecocommunist’). In that future, Kensington Wood ‘spreads out along the heights above the Lea marshes’ (News 64) and the salmon water is good on the Surrey banks of the Thames across from Hammersmith. The communism is embodied in the life and values of the characters who depend both materially and imaginatively on the River Thames, a stream which is at the heart of the romance and which embodies the environmentalism of Morris’s vision. Aldo Leopold has defined conservation as the ‘attempt to convert our collective knowledge of biotic materials into a collective wisdom of biotic navigation’ (189). A collective new ecological wisdom is demonstrated by the inhabitants of Nowhere as Guest makes his way around and up the Thames. The river figures in the late phase of pattern designs

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Morris did in the 1880s and in the ecological vision of News from Nowhere; it is, in fact, a unifying key to the romantic vision of that book. In his 1953 essay ‘The Round River,’ Aldo Leopold used the river metaphor to define conservation. Much ecological thinking since then has followed this example. Leopold describes environmental problems as changes or modifications in the ‘biotic stream’ that result in imbalances and blockages in the circular stream of living materials. Imbalances result in the destruction of pieces in the whole complex ‘land organism,’ and threaten its general health. Environmental stability is usually based on a well-tuned set of biotic relationships. Morris applied a round river view to society as well as to the natural world. His definition of socialism was all people ‘living in equality of condition,’ managing ‘their affairs unwastefully’ (‘How I Became’ 379). The savage inequalities of industrial capitalism are shown in Nowhere to have been guilty of causing human unhappiness as well as environmental havoc. Guest comes from a society out of balance and out of tune. In Nowhere social imbalances have been corrected and the healthy flow of life’s materials has been restored. Morris’s mature life was lived in a period that marked the first reclamation of the Thames from its worst extremes of urban pollution. The last Thames salmon at Boulter’s Lock had been caught in 1824 (Weightman 132). The foulness of the tidal waters of the Thames served as a lethal barrier to the migration of salmon, even if some of the waters further upstream remained acceptable. Asiatic cholera carried off over 30,000 Londoners in the 1840s and 1850s, and its source was linked to London’s foul water supply by Dr John Snow in 1854 (Halliday 124, 130). In the dry year of 1858, the choking stench of the exposed Thames bed inspired Parliament to charge Joseph Bazalgette with the construction of the sanitation system that would begin to divert urban waste from the river. Though his work was not completed in time to save the prince consort from water-borne typhus in 1861, over the next thirty years he would create 1200 miles of London sewer lines (Halliday 183). Bazalgette’s conduits diverted most sewage away from the London stretches of the Thames, and beginning in 1887 the solid sewage was settled out and dumped at sea before the waters were returned to the Thames (Halliday xiii). Though salmon could not be sustained in the Thames until the 1980s, due to continuing industrial pollution, the waters of the tidal Thames were cleaner in 1890 (the year News began serialization) than they had been in decades. Another important political response to the condition of the river

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was the Thames Conservancy Act of 1857, which placed the river under the care of a board of conservators. Though Morris resented their often misdirected focus on locks, weirs, and tree clearing, they were charged with preventing pollution, another sign of a dawning respect for environmental standards in mid- to late-Victorian England. By the 1880s, when Morris first travelled the upper river, it had become one of the chief recreation areas of Victorian England. The railways that had erased the barge and passenger traffic of the upper river were now hauling Londoners to such departure points as Henley and Oxford for leisure boating trips. The upper Thames represented, for the urban masses as for Morris himself, a site of pastoral rejuvenation. In his 1886/7 edition of A New Map of the River Thames, Henry Taunt wrote, ‘in an age so fast and energetic ... what greater pleasure can there be to a man ... than to throw himself on his back under some wide-spreading tree, and listen to the gentle stream that murmurs by?’ (Read 229). Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, the 1889 bestseller about a boat trip up and down the upper Thames, chronicled the congestion caused by steam launches full of tourists and the ‘various germs of poison’ resulting from dead dogs and suicides in the river (117). Yet Jerome and his companions went to the upper Thames in the 1880s for the same reason Morris did when he found time to leave Kelmscott House for Kelmscott Manor: for what Jerome’s narrator called ‘rest and complete change’ (5). For the 125 years prior to the composition of News from Nowhere, the Thames below Hammersmith was more and more built up with docks to serve the commercial interests of an increasingly industrialized country. Yet the portion of the river up which Guest would row in News from Nowhere was increasingly sought out as a place for regattas, scenery, and weekend angling. In all these, the river’s health made a difference. In his concern for the ecology of the river and in seeking rest there, Morris was in tune with his times, but his environmentalism was radical both in its depth and in its links to socialism. The environmental vision Morris applies to the Thames in Nowhere is well in keeping with ideas he had been refining through the socialist years of the 1880s. In his essay ‘Art under Plutocracy,’ which Morris delivered in a meeting chaired by John Ruskin at Oxford in November of 1883 and which created a storm of indignation because of his surprise appeal to the socialist cause, Morris argued that the duty of true civilization was

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David Faldet To keep the air pure and the rivers clean, to take some pains to keep the meadows and tillage as pleasant as reasonable use will allow them to be; to allow peaceable citizens freedom to wander where they will, so they do no hurt to garden or cornfield; nay, even to leave here and there some piece of waste or mountain sacredly free from fence or tillage as a memory of man’s ruder struggles with nature in his earlier days. (63)

In Morris’s dream, the freedom of citizens is equated with a new liberation of the environment from the unloving exploitation of the nineteenth century. Throughout the 1880s, Morris lived within throwing distance of the Thames at both Kelmscott House and Kelmscott Manor, and he first travelled between the two by river in 1880. The following year he bought and began to develop the Merton Abbey works along the Wandle, and used its waters in the dyeing work that went on there. In 1883 he wrote to Ruskin, who had cleaned up one of the source springs of the Wandle in a St George’s Guild project: I need not say that I should be very glad to see you at our place at Merton Abbey: though I fear it would be a grief to you to see the banks of the pretty Wandle so beset with the horrors of the Jerrybuilders: there is still some beauty left about the place however, and the stream itself is not much befouled: I am doing my best to keep the place decent, and can do so in the seven acres our works command; but as to the rest can do but little. (Letters 2:186–7)

Morris now lived in all seasons along the Thames and had his main works situated so as to use the waters of one of its London-area tributaries. The responsibility he felt for this piece of the environment rings clear in the mixture of pride and despair he voices in the Ruskin letter. The intimacy of Morris’s involvement with the Thames is celebrated in his ‘tributary series’ of patterns. In these tributary patterns the stems of plant and vine take on the meandering shape of a river: Evenlode, Wey, Kennet, Windrush, Lodden, Wandle, Cray, and Lea. These designs recreate in beautiful form the riverine environments upon which Morris’s existence depended and to which he had grown attached. Three of these patterns, all designed in 1884 and 1885, celebrate rivers that closely figured in Morris’s own life. Lea (fig. 1),

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registered in 1885, commemorates the watershed on which he grew up at Walthamstow and Woodford in Essex. Cray, from 1884, honours the watershed on which Morris lived at Red House in Kent, and the river that flows through Bexley, near the house he built there. In Wandle (fig. 6.2), which takes its name from the river on which the Merton Abbey works was located, Morris most clearly abstracted the stem shape into a stream shape. Morris’s pattern depicts three layers of flowers. In the most prominent layer, the diagonal meanders grow extravagant red poppies and push out small leaves. Between the double walls of the diagonal meanders runs a stream of bold stripes. In the middle ground, between the parallel meanders, twines an interlace of yellow poppies, anemones, and marigolds. At the base layer, as if in the shadow of the larger plants, spreads a white net of eyebrights against a blue background. The pattern is a microcosm: light in colour, the metaphorical meander of water, and the plants that convert light and water into the basic stuff of life. The meander, though a standard feature of pattern design, became a concrete reference to environmental principle in Morris’s Wandle. Morris hated stream straightening out of aesthetic intuition. Yet there is a sound environmental imperative for the meandering of rivers. A meandering stream is, as the word ‘meander’ suggests, a slow one. Its winding across the face of its descent decreases its rate of fall and its rate of flow. Whereas a straightened or ‘channelized’ stream carries away flood waters more quickly, it also deepens and scours its bed with increased force. The result is an environment less hospitable to vegetation such as rushes and cress or the simpler forms of animal life such as mollusks and crustacea upon which higher forms feed. The channelized stream is likely to be a more sterile aquatic environment. It also carries away water that enlivens the surrounding environments of wetlands and flood plains. Morris’s meandering river designs, bursting with flower and vine, are emblems of the fertile power of slowness and of the vitality that is concomitant with rest. In News from Nowhere the metaphor of the river, which typifies the utopian romance’s vision of renewal, begins in the form of its demonic contrary on the first page of the book. The twin images that provide a brief peek into the horrors of Morris’s contemporary life as the book opens are a fractious meeting of socialists and William Guest’s ride home from that meeting in a ‘stinking railway carriage’ (44). The underground railway is the demonized counterpart of the Thames, a metaphor for civilized humanity’s subjugation of the powers of Nature

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to its own infernal ends. The narrator of the first chapter calls the underground a ‘vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity’ which ‘civilisation has forced upon us like a habit’ (43). One only need remember that Morris wrote before the introduction of electric trains to the Metropolitan District line to realize that there is a literal as well as a figurative truth to his description of the ride on the underground steam train as a ‘vapour-bath.’ In this fast-travelling conveyance Guest ‘stew[s] discontentedly’ in the bad hot air of the carriage and in the remembered heat of the arguments with his socialist comrades (43). The vapour bath of the underground is the engineered and high-speed contrary of the natural highway of a watershed. Guest dispels his bad feelings with a wish that he might ‘but see a day’ of life in his ideal world, a wish he repeats in solitary muttering as he leaves the underground station. The immediate sign that his wish has been granted is a rejuvenated Thames. Counteracting the hurry of his journey by railway he walks, pausing to take in ‘the moonlit river, near upon high water’ (44). Here, we are told, he suddenly ‘felt as if he were in a pleasant country place – pleasanter, indeed, than the deep country was as he had known it’ (44). In this suddenly relaxed peace of mind Guest fails to notice the disappearance of the modern bridge at Hammersmith, though he does notice that the lights he is used to downstream are gone. When Guest retires to his bed his mood of heated agitation has been replaced by the pleasure ‘of peace and rest, and cleanness and smiling goodwill’ (44). Though he does not realize it, he has already been walking through a cleaner environment, less disrupted by urban intrusions. Without having seen another human being, he already feels much better disposed to his fellow humanity. The Thames is the symbol of what the subtitle of News calls an ‘epoch of rest.’ The meandering flow of the river, against which the characters row, provides Guest, as it did Jerome’s narrator, with ‘rest and a complete change’ (Jerome 5). Though the first half of News is largely taken up with the land journey to Bloomsbury and a long discursive explanation of the life and history of Nowhere, the book returns, in the final half, to the river where it began. In journeying up the Thames Dick, Clara, Ellen, and Guest recentre the reader’s attention on the river. During his brief visit to Nowhere, Guest fulminates on the political subjects dear to Morris: the social inequalities and suffering caused by industrial capitalism, but also tree cutting, water quality, green spaces, industrial pollution, and the ravishing of the countryside. In reimagining the landscape without its current

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problems, Morris needed to focus on the old lines of connection not only between person and person but also between people and what Ellen calls ‘the earth, and the seasons, and the weather ... and all that grows out of it’ (220). In the trip up the Thames, Guest falls in love with Ellen, knowing that he will be pulled back to the past that troubles him throughout the narrative. Guest is attracted to Ellen by more than her beauty. She understands him and shares his thoughts. Equally important, she shares some of the tragedy of his fate. As she rows up the Thames with him, she too is ‘as good as gone from the Thamesside’ (210). The past indirectly haunts her through her father, who longs for the civilization of the nineteenth century, and who hopes to alleviate his unhappiness by removing to Cumberland, away from the Thames which Ellen has grown to love. The past will pull both Guest and Ellen away from the brief pleasure they experience together on the Thames in Nowhere. Guest develops an intellectual admiration of Nowhere through observation and through conversation. This becomes paired with his love for Ellen, whom he meets on the journey up the Thames. His love for both Nowhere and Ellen is linked to his love for the rejuvenated countryside adjoining the Thames. All three are of a piece. The society of Nowhere is not industrial or urban or capitalist, and these changes have left their mark on the stream. From the river the first morning Guest notices that ‘the soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys were gone; the engineer’s works gone; the lead-works gone; and no sound of riveting and hammering came down the west wind from Thorneycroft’s’ (48). At the pottery and glass works in Westminster Guest is shocked at the absence of smoke (82). He later notices the absence of ‘the sprawling mess with which commercialism had lettered the banks of the wide stream about Reading and Caversham’ (186). The lack of heavy industry endears Guest to Nowhere’s society and the river that flows through it. He also is pleased to see the effects of de-urbanization. The orchard growing in Trafalgar Square is but one of a dozen signs that the population pressure has been removed from London. ‘The population,’ old Hammond says, ‘is pretty much the same as it was at the end of the nineteenth century; we have spread it, that is all’ (106). And finally, not one piece of Nowhere is owned and no one accumulates wealth. As Paddy O’Sullivan points out, ‘it is the removal of surplus production which enables the society of Nowhere to lighten the pressure it exerts on the rest of nature’ (176). The results of these changes charm William Guest

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as he moves through the countryside in his journey. The return to hand industry has erased industrial pollution. From the river on the first morning Guest immediately notices the ‘fresh air and pleasant breeze’ (45) and ‘no marks of the grimy sootiness which I was used to on every London building more than a year old’ (148). The rain and rainwater run-off that enters the river in Nowhere is therefore more free of corrosive particulate. So too the wetlands, forests, and meadows that have replaced the hard urban landscape of the crowded nineteenth-century population have allowed the natural purification systems, the green cells, of the environment to clean the waters before they enter the river. The waters themselves have been released from culverts to their natural green courses, as Guest notices immediately as he drives through Hammersmith. The result is a clear Thames that, again, on the first morning startles Guest as he bathes in it. The society and the river have been given a new life, a freshness and youth that also marks the countenance and bearing of the people of Nowhere. In the society of Nowhere, no person catches Guest’s eye more than Ellen, and in the scene where Ellen and Guest reveal their feelings and situation it is partly their words about the river that let them know they are united in feeling. In chapter 28, entitled ‘The Little River,’ Guest – alone in the boat with Ellen – confesses that he belongs to the ‘ugly past’ and resolves ‘to hide nothing from [her] at all.’ Ellen responds that she knew Guest was ‘not one of us’ and admits that this attracted her to him and made her desire to ‘make [him] as happy as [he] could be.’ She admits she wants to ‘make a proposal to [him]’ and he reciprocates that he ‘would do anything in the world for her’ (208). This string of passionate confessions has been inspired by Ellen’s statement that gives the chapter its title: ‘How pleasant this little river is to me, who am used to a great wide wash of water; it almost seems as if we shall have to stop at every reach-end.’ Ellen’s keenest pleasure is the meandering of the ‘little river’: the frequent turns and variations that mark its likeness to Morris’s pattern idylls of the 1880s. When Guest calls the countryside of the upper river ‘pretty,’ Ellen continues: ‘Don’t you find it difficult to imagine the times when this pretty country was treated by its folk as if it had been an ugly characterless waste, with no delicate beauty to be guarded, with no heed taken of the ever fresh pleasure of the recurring seasons, and changeful weather, and diverse quality of the soil?’ (208). So too, in the wash of feelings that follows their confessions, Guest pairs his view of ‘walls of tall reeds, whose population of reed sparrows and warblers

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were delightfully restless ... in the still, hot morning’ with Ellen, whose ‘lazy enjoyment of the new scene seemed to bring out her beauty doubly ... her idleness being the idleness of a person, strong and wellknit both in body and mind, deliberately resting’ (209). The woman and the riverscape around her are both filled simultaneously with rest and energy. The meandering river is a slowed or restful river, yet one charged like Nowhere, and like Ellen, with a stirring density of life. Ellen seems to recognize that she is like the land and the river. She tells Guest, once they arrive at Kelmscott, that in a past age ‘I should never have bought pleasure from the rich men, or even opportunity of action ... I should have been wrecked and wasted in one way or another, either by penury or by luxury’ (223). Society under capitalism would have used her as it had used the river. In chapter 30, it is following what Ellen calls Guest’s ‘history of the river’ (215) that she makes her proposal that he stay with her, moving with her to the north. In Guest’s history he has explained that until the advent of the railways the river was used as a highway, and therefore ‘some care was taken of the river and its banks’ (216). With the advent of the railways, however, ‘the river ... lost its practical or commercial value’ and therefore ‘it was utterly neglected, till it became a nuisance’ (216). In the system of capitalism, viewed from the Marxist perspective Morris had adopted by the time he wrote News from Nowhere, ownership and economic privilege grant agency and freedom on the one side, but take it away on the other. Poor but pretty women and a useless but pretty river suffered similar fates under the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth-century London in which Morris made his home. In Nowhere, however, neither the woman nor the river environment is treated in this way. Ellen enjoys the agency and pleasure that show in her manner and physical beauty. She is free to leave her father and row up the river by herself to catch up with the party of two men and a woman, strangers who had stayed overnight at their home: a freedom that would be shocking in a young woman of middle-class Victorian society. Under communism the river has regained some of its agency and freedom as well. Instead of being cleared and dredged, the river’s beauty is enhanced. Guest reports at the beginning of chapter 30: In spite of my new-born excitement about Ellen, and my gathering fear of where it would land me, I could not help taking abundant

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Morris takes care to make it clear that the river, in a society that no longer believes in private property and the accumulation of wealth, has regained both respect and love. Guest even adds a footnote that the mills on the Thames of Nowhere were often ‘strikingly beautiful; and the gardens about them marvels of loveliness’ (215). In short, though the river is used for both transportation and power, its beauty is also cultivated for its own sake. Part of Ellen’s spiritual unity with Guest is seeing this perfected river with him for the first time, a fellow guest and traveller on the river as it should be. Its very perfection sharpens their mutual sorrow and urgency, knowing that they must each soon lose the river in all its fully realized beauty because of the claims of the past only as they were each now seeing it for the first time. In addition to the perfect society and the perfect woman, Guest finds, in Nowhere, the perfect river. The condition of the Thames and the watercourses that empty into it indicates a wide social practice of environmental values that are the mark of ‘a collective wisdom of biotic navigation’ well in place. A group of girls, fresh from bathing in the river, prove ‘eager to discuss all the little details of life: the weather, the hay-crop, the last new house,’ and ‘the plenty or lack of such and such birds.’ And women, as well as men, ‘could name a flower and knew its qualities; could tell you the habitat of such and such birds and fish, and the like’ (193). Morris is quite calculatingly showing that haycrops and houses, matters of material well-being and human interest, are valued no more highly than the nesting habits of birds, whether the person be an adolescent girl or a middle-aged man. ‘It is almost strange,’ Guest records, ‘what a difference this intelligence made in my estimate of the country life of that day,’ for ‘here were people as eager about all the goings on in the fields and woods and downs as if

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they had been Cockneys newly escaped from the tyranny of bricks and mortar’ (193). In ‘The Land Ethic’ Aldo Leopold explains that ‘the land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community’ beyond the human community ‘to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land’ (239). Such an ethic is clearly at work in Nowhere. The result of this loving attention to the plant, animal, and mineral world is a richly diverse landscape where human predation and environmental pressure has relented. Besides being a place of orchards and woods, London has become a garden spot. Local producers fill its market spaces, and local produce makes up the breakfast Guest enjoys the first day at the Hammersmith Guest House, where fresh strawberries are brought to the table wrapped in an equally fresh cabbage leaf, and fresh lavender and balm are scattered around the room to perfume it. The lower Thames supports a native salmon population, and fresh perch is on the table at Runnymeade. In the shadows beneath the willows at Runnymeade, bleak feed on the flies, and chub splash ‘here and there at some belated moth’ (178). Besides the warblers and sparrows that he sees above Godstow and the blackbirds, doves, and swifts that inhabit the garden around Kelmscott, Guest sees kites, magpies, sparrow-hawks, ravens, and a merlin, all in more abundance than he was used to seeing in the bleak times of the nineteenth century. In short, Homo sapiens is not the only species to flourish with more vigour and life in the recharged environment of Nowhere. The ‘vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity’ with which the book begins is replaced in the ‘Epoch of Rest’ by a long, slow row against the current of a living river, musically alive with the twittering of songbirds, and continually surprising Guest and Ellen by the wild diversity of its meanders. Besides serving figuratively in ideas like Leopold’s ‘round river,’ actual rivers and their physical watersheds are a basic point of focus in ecological understanding and practice. Putting together the Greek words ‘oikos’ or ‘household’ and ‘logos’ or ‘study,’ German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel invented the term ‘oecology’ in 1866, to describe the scientific study of the way living things interact in and with their environment. A watershed is a natural ‘household’ within the larger ecosystem, biome, and biosphere. In News from Nowhere Ellen explains why she resents being uprooted by her father from her life along the Thames at Runnymeade: ‘One gets so pleasantly used to all the detail of the life about one,’ she says, ‘it fits so harmoniously

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and happily into one’s own life, that beginning again, even in a small way, is a kind of pain’ (210). ‘Fitting in’ is a biological necessity that becomes an imaginative and spiritual habit for people in tune with their environment. Morris’s ideal social reform, communism, extends beyond people to the life and elements around them. As Guest quizzes Old Hammond about Dick and Clara’s life together, it takes him some time to conceptualize their radical social freedoms. Guest cannot see how they can be married without legal contract and witnesses, how Clara has been free to leave Dick and free now to return, with their two children staying in the home of Clara’s sister, and in the meantime Dick stays in a household with a loose confederation of friends and acquaintances, who are neither legally nor biologically a family. In short, human households have been liberated from systems of property and control. This is the human equivalent of Kensington, where ‘naturalists haunt’ because it has become a ‘wild spot’ of woodlands where children tent like gypsies throughout the summer. The environmental ‘household’ has regained its wild status where water, soil, air, tree, bird, fish, and insect all have their original rights and freedoms. William Morris loved rivers. In particular, he loved the Thames along which he lived at Kelmscott House and Kelmscott Manor. Some of his best later fabrics paid honour to the Thames tributaries that figured most importantly in Morris’s life. In these he abstracted streams, such as the Wandle, into vegetative patterns with a meander as the prominent focal point. News from Nowhere is, in part, a picture of what Morris dreamed the Thames might be, if liberated from the burdens placed on it by urban and industrialized Victorian England. But the meandering upper river also provides an image of what Morris hoped from communism: a world where people, liberated from the overproductive demands of capitalism, find themselves recharged. In the book, he imagines a future where people care for the earth and its rivers. In that society of true equals, people regain a life of balance, even as they restore a healthy flow to the materials of the natural world. ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 6.1 William Morris. Lea. Hand-block printed cotton. Morris & Co., 1885. Fig. 6.2 William Morris. Wandle. Hand-block printed cotton. Morris & Co., 1884.

Fig. 1.1 William Morris. Sunflower. Blue tile painted by Morris & Co., c. 1870–8. 6 x 6 in.

Fig. 1.2 William and May Morris. Honeysuckle. Original design for wallpaper. Trustees of the Kelmscott House Trust. William Morris Society, London. Pattern produced in cotton by Morris & Co., 1883.

Fig. 2.1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Arthur’s Tomb. Watercolour on paper, 1855. 9 x 14 ½ in. British Museum, London. © Copyright the Trustees of The British Museum.

Fig. 2.2 William Morris. Trellis. Hand-block printed wallpaper. Morris & Co., 1864.

Fig. 2.3 William Morris. Daisy. Hand-block printed wallpaper. Morris & Co., 1864.

Fig. 2.4 William Morris. Fruit (or Pomegranate). Hand-block printed wallpaper. Morris & Co., 1864.

Fig. 6.1 William Morris. Lea. Hand-block printed cotton. Morris & Co., 1885.

Fig. 6.2 William Morris. Wandle. Hand-block printed cotton. Morris & Co., 1884.

Fig. 8.1 Edward Burne-Jones. Untitled drawing of Maid in the Wood with border by William Morris. The Wood Beyond the World. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1894. Frontispiece.

Fig. 8.2 Anon. ‘Dress and the Lady.’ Punch 23 August 1856: 73.

Fig. 15.1 William Morris. Border and typography design. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. Frontispiece.

Fig. 15.2 Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Illustration, border, and typography. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 1.

Fig. 15.3 Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Illustration, border, and typography. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 222.

Fig. 15.4 Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Illustration, border, and typography. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 223.

Fig. 15.5 William Morris. Typography. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 552.

Fig. 15.6 Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Illustration, border, and typography. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 553.

7 News from Nowhere as Autoethnography: A Future History of ‘Home Colonization’ Karen Herbert

Morris’s first known letter, written to his sister Emma from Marlborough College on 1 November 1848, may be read as a paradigm indicative of the directions of his later political and aesthetic thought. Because the letter’s script runs both vertically and horizontally, intersecting lines form a lattice or grid prefiguring not only Morris’s fascination with repeating patterns but also his interest in the cartographic capability of narrative forms to chart the coordinates of new worlds. A section of the letter’s content complements these predispositions: whereas the reference to the school’s closed gates suggests Morris’s early awareness of inside/outside, or the framed enclosure, his admonition to Emma (‘you must write and describe the place [Water House] exactly for I can’t for the life of me understand where it is’) indicates his inherent appreciation of the visual/verbal connection in the design of fictive topography. Moreover, his reflection that he is able to ‘do and say, and see’ chiefly during holidays when he is outside the school’s boundary anticipates his rejection of the confines of his contemporary political and cultural conventions (Letters 1:3, 5). The playful lattice convention indicates his early attention to the positions occupied by symbols on the blank space of a work surface. E.H. Gombrich, like Ruskin, argues that such ‘play’ lies at the origin of the decorative arts: ‘the smooth surface acts as an invitation to idle hands’ (166). Again following Ruskin, Gombrich considers pleasure to be a crucial motivating force behind decorative playfulness. Hence, Morris’s lattice letter may well prefigure his later theories of design, fully expressed in such lectures as ‘The Lesser Arts’ (1877) and ‘The Aims of Art’ (1886).

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Gombrich’s work on the ornament of an empty space finds an unlikely, but significant, ally in the political and cultural criticism of Edward W. Said: Culture and Imperialism is a study of imperialism’s cultural cartography in the context of the imposition of lines of political demarcation upon each ‘blank place’ (210) hitherto uncolonized by the Western world.1 Together, the approaches taken by Gombrich and Said to framing, perception, culture, and history provide insight into Morris’s politics and art. These three writers, each from his particular perspective, consider material or metaphorical design as it applies to the configurations of a nation’s exercise of its aesthetic traditions or practices; for each writer, the cultural, political, or historical implications of the narrative potential of design serve as indices of a nation’s ethics and morality. Accordingly, the figure of the ‘blank place’ or ‘empty spaces’ (for Morris, one such ‘blank space’ was the contemporary ‘dead blank of the arts’) is of primary concern to Gombrich, Said, and Morris alike (‘Lesser Arts,’ CW 22:11; Gombrich 111). The process of ‘framing and filling’ underlies the design theory of Gombrich as well as the politico-cultural criticism of Said: in each case, the focus is on the components of an enclosed space – whether that space is artistic or political (Gombrich 75).2 Morris’s thought, too, incorporates this process: in his prose and poetry, decorative arts, and socialist lectures, Morris frames and fills each work ‘space’ with designs of time and place as they were, are, or could/should be. Like Gombrich and Said, Morris foregrounds the relevance of history, the influence of tradition, and the frequently pernicious effects of contemporary habit or custom. Because framing and filling begin with uncharted space, they may be read as a form of cartography; the artist’s conception of ornament, the imperialist’s urge to partition the world map according to the colour of an empire, and Morris’s design of past or future cultures are all, although widely divergent, visual or verbal schemes of organization. In each case, the composer is both decorator and designer because, as Gombrich notes, the former begins with an unorganized space, the latter with a pattern of motifs; in the context of this essay, these motifs involve the emblematic propaganda of the imperialist as well as the aesthetic configurations of the artist (79). In accordance with socialist theory, dialectics, rather than symmetry, structure the design of this relation among theories of pattern, strategies of territorial expansion, and Morris’s work. This dynamic becomes apparent if News from Nowhere is read as the

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reclamation of the home colony from imperialist appropriation; from this perspective, News depicts the fictive history of the internal colonization of England, followed by the struggles which bring freedom, in the form of communism evolved from an initial period of socialism, to the domestic colony. To support and develop this approach, I turn to Gombrich’s figure/ground or ‘counterchange’ theory of perceptual inversion as well as to Said’s ‘hierarchy of spaces’ wherein the stability of the metropolis becomes dependent not only on plunder and power but also on its own conceptual control of the colonized periphery (Gombrich 89; Said, Culture 58).3 The positive and negative schema of figure/ground, like the mutual dependency between colonizer and colonized, reflects metaphorically the structural and thematic pattern of News from Nowhere: whereas the framing nineteenth century portrays the colonized periphery, the epoch of Nowhere reveals a post-colonial, autonomous communist ‘centre.’ Hence, the cycle of imperialist appropriation, colonization, and subsequent decolonization is accomplished fictively. In his 1885 lecture ‘The Depression of Trade,’ Morris indicates both his recognition of the interdependence between ruler and ruled and the shared predicament of workers at ‘home’ and abroad: because the enforcement of shoddy goods upon colonized populations ‘is getting now-a-days to be nearly indispensable if commerce is to be kept alive,’ the capitalists ‘force populations both at home and abroad to live a certain kind of life, the life namely which suits the profit-maker best’ (124).4 Gombrich’s figure of a ‘field of force’ and Said’s ‘structures of attitude and reference’ direct attention and meaning to the centre of a framed space: when given a socio-political (and material) translation, Gombrich’s conclusion that ‘the richer the elements of the frame, the more the centre will gain in dignity’ applies to Said’s charting of the movement of hegemonic discourse from the ‘metropolitan’ centre to the periphery, followed by a return flow in which this peripheral activity is represented to the home audience as being legitimate and necessary (Gombrich 155–6; Said, Culture 52–3). As a result, the locus of moral meaning, ethical sanction, and justifiable authority manufactures not only the mechanical means of colonization, but also the affirmative discourse that valorizes imperialist expansion. As noted above, the framing structure of News from Nowhere functions as a fictive replication of imperialism’s procedural design; however, because ‘colonization’ occurs within England itself, periphery and metropolis, or the outer frame and its enclosed narrative, are also

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temporal, or historical, rather than spatial topographies.5 As a result, Morris’s Utopia gives his nineteenth-century reader – and us – an alternative world wherein the contemporary, colonizing culture is viewed from the remove of the external perspective of the future because, as Said explains in his discussion of Conrad, ‘being on the inside shuts out the full experience of imperialism’ (Culture 28). The narrator reflects upon the resulting contrasts between his own century – the era when the effects of colonization at home and abroad by the commercial and cultural forces of capitalism are becoming all too clear – and Nowhere’s epoch, the period of the repatriation of society following the overthrow of the ‘domestic’ and overseas imperialists. This process involves Said’s bipartite pattern of primary, or martial, and secondary, or ideological, resistance; in the context of design theory, figure and ground invert as dominant and residual cultures change places.6 The opening frame in News from Nowhere encapsulates the concept of change in the motif of the bridge. The narrator’s repeated references to the architectural beauty of the stone bridge that has replaced the iron suspension bridge draws attention to the effect of political regimes on the cultural and natural landscape: because the elimination of capitalism’s manufacturing trade ended the need for railways as a transportation network, stone rather than iron is once again used to build bridges which, as a form of handicraft, are both functional and ornamental. The narrator’s waking journey in the underground, ‘that vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity,’ underscores this contrast between the industrial nineteenth century and the largely agrarian society of Nowhere (43). Symbolically, the bridge functions as the crossover point between historical periods, perceptions, and, as we are warned, misconceptions. This latter caution, subsequently voiced by Ellen, arises from an awareness that if society can choose architectural styles modelled on those of the past, it may, at some point, elect to return to those of the industrial present. At the conclusion of News from Nowhere, the substitution of a weir for the bridge suggests this possibility of retrograde movement: just as the weir holds back, or distorts, the natural flow of water (‘the river looked much bigger than its natural size,’ 224), so society may choose to reverse its natural movement towards socialism. Although Guest’s second (and framing) swim indicates symbolically that he will retain the hope for perceptual rebirth upon his return to his century, the opaque ‘black cloud’ (228) prefigures his inevitable encounter with

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the obfuscating and unidimensional perception of the figure/ground schema regimented by the metropolitan authority. A second crucial sign of the eradication of the imperialist conscience from the new society involves another perceptual inversion. The monetary value of coins has been replaced by their artistic, ornamental worth: the motif remains constant while its interpretation changes. Moreover, because coins are now ‘mementos of friendship’ (50) rather than instruments of commerce, in the terms of Ruskin and Morris they represent wealth instead of riches. This inversion necessarily undermines the basis of ‘commercial morality’ (74) by eliminating the commodification of objects, services, and people. Hence, except for a few essential or unpleasant tasks, work becomes play, and ‘toil’ and vice are largely unknown; here, it is relevant to note again how Morris’s understanding of the techniques of pattern design complements the circumstantial and semantic inversions required by the utopian genre, itself both a reflex and a reflection of the situational conditions of its production. In his ‘Address to the Men and Women’s College,’ Morris draws this analogy between political and visual design: ‘A state of things that produces vices among low people, will produce, not opposing virtues among high people, but corresponding vices; if you weave a pattern on a piece of cloth, and then turn it over and look at the back of it, you will see the back of the pattern, and not another pattern’ (AWS 2:66). Nevertheless, in Nowhere, some inversions are still to be accomplished: fear and dread, emotions associated with imperialism, linger as a premonition of a work shortage, not in our sense of the material hardships of ‘unemployment,’ but as the loss of pleasurable activities. Dick, Guest’s guide and a craftsman, welcomes the opportunity to work on community buildings because they invite unlimited ornamentation: ‘for in that direction,’ Dick explains, ‘I can see no end to the work, while in many others a limit does seem possible’ (70). Dick reiterates this belief when Guest suggests that the elaborate decoration on a pipe he has been given is unnecessary: ‘since there are plenty of people who can carve – in fact, almost everybody, and as work is somewhat scarce, or we are afraid it may be, folk do not discourage this kind of petty work’ (81). The point here is twofold: the innate inclination to ornament is universal, and the greatest wealth in Nowhere arises from the freedom and time to ‘work’ according to choice, interest, and talent. In a similar vein, Gombrich asks, ‘What are the psychological forces which appear to drive ornament forward towards such enrichment

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... Is it simply hard to give up any activity as long as there is no external pressure to stop? ... Why should he [the craftsman] relinquish work as long as it gives him pleasure to modify it even further?’ (166). For Gombrich, the answers lie in the pleasure such work gives the artisan, in the human instinct for the framing and filling processes of design, and in the satisfaction of acquiring skills and techniques appropriate for each medium. Thus, the correspondence between the design theories of Gombrich and those of Morris’s Nowhere (both owing a great deal to Ruskin) is primarily their infinite potential for extension and repetition, together with their gratification of the human ‘amor infiniti,’ a term which Gombrich suggests may be more suitable than the traditional ‘horror vacui’ (80). In a political translation of these terms, imperialism’s urge to extend its perimeter patterns of control and acquisition exhibits motivations analogous to the designer’s ‘love of the infinite’ and compulsion to fill an empty space. The mapping of the empire was, from the perspective of power and cartography, the creation of a repeating design of pink or red, capable of infinite extension. If, as Gombrich suggests, ornament is, in part, a demonstration of the human desire to acquire power over things, then the boundaries mapping territorial appropriation reflect the imperialist desire to frame national borders according to lines of power or influence, and then to fill these ‘blank spaces’ according to the legend symbols of desirable natural, cultural, and human resources or markets. Said’s analysis of the appropriation of the colonized territory’s culture, followed by the replacement of indigenous handicrafts with shoddy manufactured goods from the industrialized world, sheds light upon the accuracy of Hammond’s (Morris’s) description of the fate of the artisan in the colonized counties and countries alike. During the tyranny of capitalism, Hammond explains, the natural inclination to design and ornament was suppressed by the fear of poverty among the working classes and by the ‘cheapening of production’ when mass mechanization, together with the desire for surplus value, placed profit before the quality of the ornamented product and before the quality of life for the worker (News 124). Following the revolution, a period of lethargy or satisfaction with ‘a dull level of utilitarian comfort’ (159) threatened to overwhelm the early socialist society until the instinct for creative activity, along with necessity, led to the invention of handmade tools and ornament. Notably, this awakening of new forms of ancient skills revitalized the community by extinguishing the malaise and giving direction and hope to the new society.

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Morris’s use of the terms ‘slaves,’ ‘slave-holders,’ and ‘slave-wares’ (65, 118, 160) reinforces the impression that, while he regards his contemporary England as being colonized, the epoch depicted in News is to be interpreted as a period of decolonization when the rigid figure/ ground design of slavery and privilege is released into a free-flowing, symbiotic exchange between the individual and his/her social and natural environments.7 Linguistic revisions are a part of this comprehensive emancipation of culture from the forms and functions of the superstructure: because creative or imaginative pursuits are no longer separated from livelihood activities, the word ‘art’ now ‘has no name’ and, instead, is known as ‘work-pleasure’ (160). Similarly, whereas ‘Idleness’ was the ambition of capitalists in the ‘World-Market’ economy, the ‘disease called Idleness’ is the dread of the new communist society (124, 75). During the imperialist rule, profits were accumulated in order to facilitate the idleness of the rich in their class culture; custom decreed, as Robert the weaver explains, that manual work, such as that of the artisan, was despised during the nineteenth century. Hence, class and commercial ‘war’ suppressed the innate need for ornament. In a more overt but ideologically similar strategy of oppression, the visual and verbal culture of actual overseas colonies was destroyed by the agenda of imperialism which, in Said’s context of the prevailing structures of attitude and reference, assumed that ‘subject races should be ruled, that they are subject races, that one race deserves and has consistently earned the right to be considered the race whose main mission is to expand beyond its own domain’ (Culture 53). If we replace ‘race’ with ‘class’ and consider London to be the centre of imperialism (Guest reflects that London continues to be a centre, but now appears to be ‘an intellectual centre,’ 70) with the remainder of England as the colonized periphery, then Morris’s domestic imperialism corresponds closely with the pattern of international imperialism. As Guest asserts and Hammond later corroborates, the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist made all levels of subservience seem inevitable: ‘We had to put up with it; we couldn’t help it’ (78). Just as the imperialist drive to shade in the world map with the colours of ownership may be read as an analogy of amor infiniti so, indeed, may the colonial attitude towards the cultural heritage of indigenous populations. If charted on a hypothetical demographic map, this attitude would display yet another design constructed around the figure/void schema of colonial interests. Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis of the appropriation and

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settlement of the Americas suggests this type of schema when he describes the colonizer’s inability to acknowledge ‘resistant cultural otherness’: ‘On the one hand, there is a tendency to imagine the Indians as virtual blanks ... On the other hand, there is a tendency to imagine the Indians as virtual doubles, fully conversant with the language and culture of the Europeans’ (95, emphasis added). In this counterchange, colonized populations are seen as lacking the legend symbol labelled ‘culture’ and, therefore, open for inclusion within the boundaries of the encroaching culture. At ‘home,’ the reduction of the craftsperson to an industrial proletariat willing to produce and consume cheap manufactured goods repeats this erasure of foreign customs. Hammond describes this cultural and demographic mapping in terms of slavery, ‘private property,’ and the ‘artificial necessaries’ demanded by that ‘ravening monster,’ the World Market (117, 124, 124). Overproduction at ‘home,’ Hammond explains, led to the search for new markets and the subsequent ‘opening up’ of countries outside the ‘pale’ of the ‘organised misery’ of civilization (124). Following this extension of the bonds and boundaries of competitive commerce, ‘the hapless, helpless people had to sell themselves into the slavery of hopeless toil so that they might have something wherewith to purchase the nullities of “civilisation”’ (125–6). This sequence of events repeats the pattern of enforced consumerism which had taken place within England, the prototype of occupied territory. Hammond’s metaphorical allusions to the ‘ring’ and ‘pale’ of colonial expansion not only suggest cartography and pattern design, but bring to mind the Roman password, ‘no limit,’ in The House of the Wolfings, another of Morris’s tales in which imperialist aggression threatens indigenous cultures and redesigns demographic boundaries (CW 14:64–5). Like their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors, the Roman empire builders visualized ‘no limit’ to the frontiers of their territorial expansion; here, the designer’s amor infiniti acquires its most extreme (and literal) political expression. In his lectures and News from Nowhere, Morris designates the working class as ‘slaves,’ a class created by and for the capitalist system’s prerequisite of profit. The abolition of slavery in the British colonies (1834) gave the British the ideological opportunity, as Patrick Brantlinger argues, for self-congratulation on being morally superior to the other empire builders who had continued the practice until later dates (Rule 177). Underlying this hypocritical philanthropy was the economic realization that profit must now come from material,

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rather than human, commodities. Morris articulates his disgust with these imperialist policies through Hammond, his fictive descendant: ‘When the civilised World-Market coveted a country not yet in its clutches, some transparent pretext was found – the suppression of a slavery different from, and not so cruel as that of commerce; the pushing of a religion no longer believed in by its promoters’ (125). Trade with colonies who were now at once producers of raw materials and consumers of ‘artificial necessaries’ (124) placed the colonized populations in the same position as the English working-class. With the emergence of this new order of proletariat, racism became a more predominant element in the design of ‘class tyranny’ (95).8 Hammond’s description of the affluent manufacturers links overseas workers to their domestic counterparts: manufacturers are those ‘who are called slave-holders or employers of labour in the history books’ (75). As a ‘native from another planet’ (121) with first-hand experience of (its) imperialism, Guest functions as a ‘go-between,’ Greenblatt’s term for a token representative of a colonized population (199).9 Although he ‘play[s] the innocent’ (183) in order to hear Hammond’s unmitigated account of the nineteenth century as history from the future, Guest is both synecdoche and ‘token’ artifact; like Frobisher’s Eskimos and Cartier’s Indians before him, Guest is reclothed literally in the costume of his host culture and, figuratively, in the diction appropriate for the ethos of the twenty-first century. When he reawakens in his own century, the narrator (who, as a result of the pronominal confusion in the opening frame, may or may not be Morris’s persona) experiences a historical counterchange which continues the predominant perceptual pattern in News: now, he functions as a token or eyewitness from a future, decolonized society who has experienced the situation of a ‘slave’ liberated from class and commercial tyranny. In effect, Guest is now prepared to ‘educate, agitate, and organize,’ or in Said’s terms, to begin the work of ‘articulation and activation’ (Culture 48). As one who has seen beyond the present, Guest has participated in the interdependence called for by Said; that is, the ‘integration and connections between the past and the present, between imperializer and imperialized, between culture and imperialism’ (Culture 61). Such intersections of time and space, like those in News, bring to mind Morris’s ‘lattice letter,’ wherein form and content semiotically endorse a diachronic perspective involving both a lateral and vertical movement beyond conventional enclosures. The inhabitants of Nowhere learn to structure the routines and

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activities of their new world by observing the cycles and patterns of their natural and historical environments; as Morris had urged since his first public lecture, ‘The Lesser Arts’ in 1877, ‘for your teachers, they must be Nature and History’ (CW 22:15). This process of reading our environment, Gombrich explains, depends on our expectations of continuity. Without such confirmation, we would be required to map and remap our environment continuously. On the other hand, either consistent regularity or a surfeit of disorder tends to disrupt the ratio of repose and restlessness required for effective cognitive mapping of our surroundings. After the revolution, the people of Nowhere face both of these perceptual complications. However much their society is desirable, its ‘peace and continuous plenty’ is unfamiliar, yet uninterrupted (89); as a result, they experience an excess of change and monotony simultaneously. This doubling of contradictory stimulae presents a confusion of figure and ground (Gombrich 108– 13). As noted above, Morris concurs with Gombrich’s conviction that the need for pattern is instinctive, as well as with Said’s insistence that history, culture, and narrative are inseparable. Accordingly, the inhabitants of Nowhere turn to art (initially music and poetry) in order to introduce legibility and order into their lives: ‘a craving for beauty seemed to awaken in men’s minds, and they began rudely and awkwardly to ornament the wares which they made’ (160).10 Because time and art are no longer commodities, art regains its original function of use and beauty; in addition, and crucial to the thought of Morris, Gombrich, and Said alike, decorative art presents a visual narrative recording a people’s history and aspirations. ‘Work-famine,’ however, remains a threat in areas of the world which are foreign, as opposed to domestic, victims of imperialism (128). Notably, America suffers more from this effect of imperialism than do other areas of the empire. Great advances in industrialization and competitive commerce make America the most ‘backward in all that makes life pleasant’ (128). These backward countries present the opportunity for more ‘work-pleasure’ for the already decolonized society. In an inversion of the traditional imperialist pattern of territorial, followed by cultural, appropriation, the people of Nowhere enter an overseas land – the world is now in a period of global communism without international borders – in order to share their cultural talents and communal methods. Hence, cooperation replaces competition and acts of non-paternalistic fellowship replace acts of aggression. Under capitalism, countries beyond the ‘organised misery’ (125) of civilization

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served as opportunities for the exertion of power in the colonizer’s search for new resources, markets, and profits. In the ‘new world’ (50), colonization occurs only as a mutually agreed upon method of population distribution; proprietary mapping, whether individual, communal, or national, is unknown. Hammond’s description of the destruction caused by nineteenthcentury overseas expansion applies equally to the effects of domestic imperialism: ‘Some bold, unprincipled, ignorant adventurer was found (no difficult task in the days of competition), and he was bribed to “create a market” by breaking up whatever traditional society there might be in the doomed country, and by destroying whatever leisure or pleasure he found there’ (125). Domestically, this ‘adventurer’ would be an industrial or business entrepreneur. At the same time, in the ‘home’ colony, indigenous art was threatened increasingly by the extension of imperialism into culture: machine-made, mass-produced wares supplanted local and regional handicrafts. Following the revolution, these machines gradually became obsolete as manual skills were relearned from the elders or, ironically, from observing the machines in operation. In this way, the hierarchical division between intellectual and manual labour, like the division among classes, was overcome by the recovery of the artist’s role as ‘a man who works at useful work that is fit for him and according to his own will’ (Morris, ‘Talk and Art’ 404). As a result, art progresses from a shoddy commodity manufactured by ‘slaves’ to a natural outcome of the original perception of all work and all life as a useful and pleasant design. Fact and fiction, or life and art, intertwine when the twentieth-century revival of traditions and handicrafts in decolonized countries – albeit by promotions of the tourist trade and culture industry – appears to follow the patterns of cultural rebirth in Morris’s futuristic England. Recovery and reintegration structure the river journey to the haymaking festival. The Thames journey is also a cartographical expedition which charts the natural and demographic design of the English countryside following the withdrawal of imperialism. The account of the patterns of topography, vegetation, and settlements repeats and ‘corrects’ the accounts of journeys made by explorers into colonial territory. The same bourgeoisie who, either directly or indirectly, contributed to the corruption and plunder of the colonies also tainted, as Guest argues, the moral and physical beauty of the Thames. Because neither Guest nor Ellen is familiar with the post-colonial upper Thames region, they name or map features of the landscape in order to ‘know’

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(repetition emphasizes this verb) the river’s ‘character’ (207, 209). Their journey functions as a reversal of the imperialist pattern because their purpose is aesthetic and social instead of commercial and political: they appreciate rather than appropriate the landscape. The river journey is necessary because of the disorienting effects of the new society, as discussed above; however, the seasonal cycle remains a constant, thereby displaying an ordered frame of reference which allows ‘continuityprobing,’ a process, as Gombrich argues, of receiving assurance from gratified expectations (108–11). At first, Guest cannot understand Dick’s obsession with this cycle: ‘How strangely you talk ... of such a constantly recurring and consequently commonplace matter as the sequence of the seasons’ (emphasis added, 224). Within this familiar pattern, unfamiliar breaks or unexpected occurrences may then be accommodated perceptually. Furthermore, because architecture, ornament, and building materials repeat the pattern of the natural elements, dwellings ‘belong’ (208) to the landscape and supplement, rather than disrupt, the empathy between nature and civilization. Upon her arrival at the ‘old house’ (219) at Kelmscott, Ellen twice acknowledges this unity of form and function between the designs of the natural and human worlds: ‘How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather ... and all that grows out of it, – as this has done!’ (220). This accomplishment of the quest for meaning and order within the harmony between landscape and habitation has its antithesis in the penetration by European explorers into the interiors of overseas or peripheral territories. The expectations of these colonial ‘adventurers’ was for estrangement or otherness which set and kept them apart from their surroundings. Like the bourgeois owners of the ‘big and fine houses’ along the Thames (180), the colonial adventurers were observers rather than participants who superimposed the social and cultural continuity sequences of the metropolis upon the margins. From the naturalist’s urge to collect and identify specimens to the cartographer’s compulsion to chart and name topography, the explorer’s imperialist agenda began with acquisition in its multiple forms. Naming, as Mary Louise Pratt observes, ‘brings the reality of order into being’ (33).11 By replacing this imperialist sense of order with the collective patterns of communism, the Adamic naming ritual during the quest journey in News reinvests the river and its landscape with moral ‘beauty’ (180). Said identifies two stages of resistance culture: primary, or martial, and secondary, or ideological. In News from Nowhere, the revolution

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represents the primary stage of armed resistance and, as a written text, News embodies ideological resistance, or rather, Morris’s act of ideological resistance. Although Said excludes private and nostalgic ‘utopian regions’ from the secondary category, News would, I think, escape this stricture because Morris’s new world is a projection of the essence of a feasible, not a fantastic, future (Culture 209). If fantasy does indeed exist in News, it is in Morris’s premise that society ever could be satisfied with a culture bereft of commodity production, marketing, and consumption. To use Gombrich’s design terminology, Nowhere is framed with practical communism, filled with pragmatic and possible (if not probable) holistic lifestyles, and linked or supported with particular features of medieval and modern society selected for their use and beauty. Imperialism denigrates, silences, and eventually erases peripheral narratives; this power to nullify any culture which threatens the dominant ideology necessarily destroys history and, as a result, the periphery’s sense of self. News reinscribes and recreates this sense of identity by presenting not a template but an exemplary proposal for future history. For Morris, the genre of the novel is not suited to such a proposal, and he makes this quite clear in News. Although Dick’s dismissal of ‘silly old novels’ (56) may be Morris’s deliberately provocative disparagement of nineteenth-century fiction, the subsequent explanation that Boffin believes both Guest and the realist novel to be products of an unhappy civilization raises the question of the degree to which the genre is indeed contingent upon dissatisfaction and wish-fulfilment. Ellen’s criticism of ‘story-telling’ books, with their ‘dreary introspective nonsense’ involving protagonists who eventually live in ‘an island of bliss on other people’s troubles’ (175–6) supports Boffin’s opinion. Likewise, the Grumbler, Ellen’s reactionary grandfather, praises the excitement that had been present in the life and literature of the capitalist society. As one who has not yet acquired a perceptual revision of the figure/ground value pattern, the Grumbler fails to recognize the reconfiguration of ‘adventure’ (174) from the quest for the material profits of commercial and imperial war to the quest for the cultural and environmental benefits of global peace. According to Morris, unhappiness within a competitive society is directly responsible for the decline of ornamental art: ‘Popular art has no chance of a healthy life, or, indeed, of a life at all, till we are on the way to fill up this terrible gulf between riches and poverty’ (Letters 2:173). To a certain extent, books such as novels are a product of

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competitive commerce, created by an individual artist, manufactured, as a contributor to the Commonweal points out, by ‘scab labour,’ and purchased by a private, well-to-do consumer (‘Notes on News’ 130). In ‘Art under Plutocracy’ (1883) as well as in an autobiographical sketch sent to Andreas Scheu in 1883, Morris predicts that any art founded on such individualism, ‘must perish with the individuals who have set it going’ (Letters 2:230).12 Accordingly, the popular art in Nowhere is created within, by, and for the community. Predictably then, Morris considers The Novel on Blue Paper, his sole attempt at the individualistic art of the contemporary novel, to be a failure. Said, too, associates the novel with the acquisitive and domineering traits of imperialism: ‘The novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other.’ In his following paragraph, Said echoes the theory of the novel which the Grumbler condones and Ellen condemns: ‘Packed into it [the novel] are both a highly regulated plot mechanism and an entire system of social reference that depends on the existing institutions of bourgeois society, their authority and power. The novelistic hero and heroine exhibit the restlessness and energy characteristic of the enterprising bourgeoisie, and they are permitted adventures in which their experiences reveal to them the limits of what they can aspire to’ (Culture 70–1).13 Death for the revolutionary hero (pertinently, the revolution in Nowhere has no individual hero) or accommodation within the bourgeois system typify the novel’s outcome. Another outcome in fiction and in life was emigration, a recourse given empathetic coverage in the ‘Notes on News’ section of the 27 April 1889 Commonweal. In an inversion of the role of imperialist adventurers, the emigrants are viewed as slaves who flee from injustice at home only to find similar conditions of persecution and oppression under the capitalist system of their new country. This inversion of imperialism’s usual pattern – that is, with settlers not as plunderers but as refugees from the intolerable conditions at home – exposes the hopeless predicament of the working class in a world of global capitalism. By exchanging one form of slavery for another, the settlers share the situation of the colonized natives as an exploited class providing the ruling class with materials and commodities to further the mercantile war at home and abroad. Thus, the cycle perpetuates within the pink and red design of the empire’s historical and cartographic oxymoron, the Commonwealth. As a revisionary counterchange to this economically forced move outward from the centre, the

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citizens of Nowhere intuitively move to the rural areas of the home colony in response to their innate desire to return to the land. Unlike their imperialist ancestors, they make no attempt to impose the economic patterns of the metropolis upon their new environment; instead, their settlements reflect their harmonious participation in the landscape: they ‘yielded to the influence of their surroundings, and became country people’ (104). Hence, the river journey of the ‘explorers’ in News both commemorates and reenacts this original migration. The Grumbler’s praise of Vanity Fair as a ‘good old book with plenty of fun in it’ (182) contradicts Said’s view of this novel as a participant in imperialism: structural distance repeats the geographical distance between the periphery (India) and the metropolis by marginalizing the colony beyond the primary plot. Because novels operate from within their ideological structure of attitude and reference, their ‘main purpose is not to raise more questions ... but to keep the empire more or less in place’ (Said, Culture 74). In contrast to the affirmative function of the novel as a diversion which draws public attention away from existing to fictive colonial conditions, News directs attention to actual domestic misery by using historical distance to demystify the ‘hypocrisy and cant’ (125) used by the hegemony to disguise its true motives for expansion into uncharted territory. Morris’s symbol for this demystification is the dissolution of the railway system: as noted previously, without the railway, neither competitive commerce nor colonization could have penetrated the cultural, topographic, and natural landscapes as ubiquitously as they had by the mid-to-late nineteenth century. In the context of design, the railway violated natural, architectural, and demographic patterns; in the context of domestic and foreign imperialism, the railway was the agent responsible for the movement of raw materials, commodities, and populations required to maintain the land bases of exchange and consumption. Together, the replacement of cast iron by stone bridges and of novels by visual art and oral storytelling signifies the redesign of base and superstructure in accordance with a cooperative, instead of commercial, economy. In 1886 the Colonial Exhibition elicited a burst of satirical fury from Morris in the 15 May Commonweal; metaphorically, his column may be read in the combined context of Gombrich’s field of force, Said’s ‘consolidation of authority,’ and Nowhere’s recovery of an authentic civilization (Said, Culture 77). Morris begins by castigating Tennyson for his contribution to the ceremonies (‘Opening of the Indian and

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Colonial Exhibition by the Queen’) and then observes that included in the exhibit are ‘the last remains of the art of India which our commercialism has destroyed’ (‘Notes on Passing Events’ 50). An exhibition is, as Mieke Bal argues, essentially a narrative stemming from the collector’s urge to tell a story. The Colonial Exhibition’s ‘narrative’ not only gives official and royal sanction to the religious, moral, and economic propriety of the empire’s collection of populations, but also, by the synecdochic display of objects, attests to the inevitable and rational order of imperialism. Symbolically, the periphery is possessed, civilized, and relocated within the metropolitan centre where it is displayed as the legend (or key) legitimizing the cartographical borders of the empire. Similarly, Said argues that in the novel selfvalidation is part of the narrative’s ‘consolidation of authority’ (Culture 77); when applied to the narrative potential of the exhibition, this authority tells the self-confirming tale of material tokens which provide proof at home of success abroad. In addition, the exhibition’s location within the privileged centre of public observation, enclosed within the official architecture of the establishment, creates ‘positional enhancement’ within a framed field of force, to use Gombrich’s terminology (155). That Morris was not only adept at decoding such displays of imperialist propaganda but also able to identify how it inverts the figure and ground value pattern of public perception into false consciousness is evident in an 1885 letter to the chairman of the ‘Burma Question’ meeting: ‘Our populations at home are ignorant, and think that they also as well as their masters are interested in this market hunt’ (Letters 2:477).14 Whereas the Colonial Exhibition fostered this type of perceptual inversion, the museum collections in News offer a counterchange to remedy such ideological distortion. As autoethnography in which (and I use Mary Louise Pratt’s definition) ‘colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms,’ News from Nowhere presents its museums as framed collections of an historical anomaly (7). In other words, the empire itself is perceived reductively as artifact; its tokens of triumph now signify the ruin of an ephemeral and flawed historical epoch. The British Museum has become the repository of documents recording the imperialists’ devastation of the home colony, the revolution against capitalism, and the global ascendancy to international communism. Dialectical materialism, with its defeat of class consciousness, is shown as practice, rather than as theory alone; hence, Said’s resistance sequence of reclamation, renaming, and rehabitation, preceded by the

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perceptual recognition that all figure and ground patterns of history are relative, has been accomplished. The British Museum, with its resident political historian and his collection of documents, has its rural socio-cultural counterpart in Henry Morsom’s hall and its exhibition of textual records, machines, and manufactured commodities. Morsom is an ‘antiquary’ and ‘another edition’ (200, 198) of Hammond; his collection chronicles local and regional socio-economic changes, in particular the return of the population to rural areas after the revolution. This demographic change marks the replacement of factory, or slave, workshops with communal ‘Banded-workshops’ (81). Inferentially, this new cultural map reflects the perceptual release of those within the perimeters of the industrial domestic colony from imperialism’s panoptic surveillance. In his 1885 ‘Burma War’ letter, Morris argues for a ‘ring round that doomed thing capitalism’ as a step towards popular perception of the hegemony’s policy ‘of fleecing the workers every where & in all countries’ (Letters 2:478). As a work of ideological resistance, News depicts the drawing of this ring; as autoethnographical narrative, News deconstructs the visual and verbal patterns of the colonizer in order to show how selfdefinition requires the revision of perceptual habits. The inside/outside qualities of framed or repeating patterns fascinated Morris. In an 1876 letter, he expresses this visual interest philosophically: ‘Life is not empty nor made for nothing, and the parts of it fit one into another in some way’ (Letters 1:291). This reflection recalls Morris’s ‘lattice letter’ wherein lines of text ‘fit’ or intersect as lines of pattern in a visual and verbal design framed by the margins of the letter and paper. Morris’s acute sense of visual pattern prompts him to redesign the post-imperial map of Britain as a tableau with the garden as its principal motif; this cartographic revision is made possible by the elimination of industrialism’s grid of railway networks, as discussed above. A ‘garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt’ (News 105), is at once practical and decorative, framed and filled, work and art. Morris’s protest, in 1887, against the building of a railway from Windemere to Ambleside may be read in the context of the design and socio-political theories examined here, together with the pattern of landscape and community which Morris subsequently develops in News. He begins his protest letter with the argument that business interests do not have the right to deprive the individual citizen of the beauty of nature. He then points out that competitive commerce is at war with its own members, with each citizen, and with the wealth of

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nature which it consumes as a commodity. He concludes this statement of ‘deep-lying principle’ with a perceptual comparison involving the inside/outside dichotomy as well as the framed figure/ground inversion: those who associate beauty with the railway, Morris argues, must refer to the beauty of the landscape that they view from the train rather than to the ‘effect of the railway on the country. They forget that they are then on the right side of the hedge – that they see the country and not the railway’ (Letters 2:621). A perceptual blind spot such as this frequently hampered the vision of imperial explorers and, as the black cloud at the conclusion of Guest’s dream implies, the ideology of the designers of the empire who perceive foreign and domestic nature as being ‘outside of them’ and, accordingly, as ‘their slave’ (200). A Dream of John Ball, written before News from Nowhere in 1886–7, also uses the dream vision genre to demystify the blind spots and monocular vision of nineteenth-century propaganda. A brief consideration of how the work contributes to the already complicated political and perceptual design of News from Nowhere may be helpful here since, as A.L. Morton advises, the two works benefit from a conjunctive reading (Three Works 24). Whereas News offers a view of capitalism from the future, John Ball presents capitalism from the vantage point of the fourteenth century; hence, while each approach estranges us from our (Morris’s) epoch, together the works present the perceptual pattern of counterchange, or the ability to perceive the motif on each side of the boundary line (in this case, a temporal/historical boundary) in a positive and negative repeating pattern. Moreover, John Ball contributes a further dimension to imperialism’s ‘field of force’ and ‘structure of attitude and reference’ as these perform in News. Guest’s naivety (his claim that he plays ‘the innocent’ [136, 183] is deliberately misleading) replaces John Ball’s wonder at the ‘riddles’ (CW 16:275) explained to him by the wisdom figure of the time-traveller from the structural and temporal nineteenth-century frame. In the context of imperialism, both works function as cultural resistance by dissociating the reader from his/her location within the occupied territory of capitalism; in the context of political patterns, Said’s theory of the contrapuntal lines of history, culture, and narrative find a corollary in Morris’s belief in the historical, or taletelling, function of all decorative art and handicrafts designed by the interdependent members of a communal society. In addition, narrative mapping suggests that the temporal patterns in News from Nowhere and John Ball project a vision of global egalitarianism which challenges the Mercator projection’s

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grid of imperial self-aggrandizement and domination.15 Habit and custom are individual or local demonstrations of tradition. As both Gombrich and Said point out, tyranny operates not only through force but also through the expectations associated with the conventional everyday conduct and habits of individuals within a class or demographic group. In the opening frame of News, Morris’s description of his train journey home as ‘a means of travelling which civilisation has forced upon us like a habit’ (43, emphasis added) is more than fortuitous because, apart from an initial indication of Morris’s distaste for railways, it recognizes the behavioural and cognitive effects of hegemonic superstructures which subtly induce false consciousness as a conditioned response to ideology. Together with the annexation of territory, the metropolitan centre markets the annexation of expectations; as a result, the idea or ‘habit’ of an empire is as lucrative as are the territories of the empire. The oblique authoritarianism exerted by custom and etiquette dictates our response to the search for continuity in the decorative arts, Gombrich explains. Said, too, suggests that the power of imperialism’s ideology is self-perpetuated by the hegemony’s all-invasive concept of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ a perspective insidiously invading culture and perception. In his lectures, letters, and Commonweal notes, Morris reiterates the need for a change in perception, desire, and expectations in order to allow for the recognition that domestic and colonial ownership of ideas, people, and landscape is neither the natural nor the inevitable condition of society that imperialist propaganda would have it to be. Hammond describes the gradual replacement of this transient historical phenomenon of imperialist culture with new social customs and expectations: ‘A tradition or habit of life has been growing on us; and that habit has become a habit of acting on the whole for the best’ (112). Here, verbal repetition draws attention to Nowhere’s crucial need for rituals to sublimate the individualistic behavioural patterns induced by commercial ideology. The reconfiguration of work as neither a tyranny of habit nor a tyranny of the ‘slave-holders,’ but as ‘a pleasurable habit’ (122) is just one facet of the release from the empire’s perception of political and cultural economy, as well as from, in Morris’s words, the ‘habitual crime of capitalism’ (Letters 2:478). Brantlinger acknowledges Morris as one of the ‘unsung heroes’ of Rule of Darkness (16); as autoethnography, News from Nowhere justifies Brantlinger’s claim by using narrative patterns of frame, figure, and ground to reveal to the domestic colony how, to use Morris’s words, ‘the piratical plunder from abroad will be used ... as a means for

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winning virtuous humdrum everyday plunder at home from those who are too ignorant to resist, that is to say for the further enslavement of our own workers’ (Letters 2:478). As just one ‘motif’ in Morris’s design of subversive writing, News from Nowhere proposes an alternative social, cultural, and political future. In a further interpenetration of historical and narrative chronologies, it answers Said’s appeal to political and cultural critics: ‘May our critical models for the years ahead combine the richness of the past with the skeptical excitement of the new. One must not only hope but also do’ (‘Presidential Address’ 291). To return to Morris’s ‘lattice letter,’ if the horizontal lines are read symbolically as the diachronic historical continuum and the vertical lines as synchronic cultural coordinates, the letter does, indeed, anticipate News from Nowhere, Morris’s demystification of the colonial ‘moment’ in Britain’s domestic history.

NOTES 1 In addition to Said’s work, I am indebted to Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, James Buzard, ‘Ethnography as Interruption,’ and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. The idea for this paper originated in part with Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, specifically, with his chapter ‘The New Metropolis,’ 334–46. For further perceptive studies of Morris and imperialism, see Nicholas Salmon (‘Down-Trodden Radical’ and his introduction to Morris’s Political Writings), Jannett Highfill, and Peter Faulkner, ‘A Note on Morris and Imperialism.’ The Journal of the William Morris Society 9 (Spring 1991): 22–7. 2 In his ‘Patterns in Time,’ Norman Kelvin discusses Morris’s life and art in the context of visual and verbal framing. 3 Figure/void, figure/ground, or counterchange involve correspondences between positive and negative spaces (such as the duck/rabbit duality); as Gombrich points out, M.C. Escher popularized this design technique. 4 See also ‘Notes on News’ in Commonweal, 27 April 1889, wherein reference is made to colonization occurring not only in ‘far-off lands,’ but also in Ireland, ‘at our very doors’ (130). One of Morris’s numerous allusions to England as a victim of imperialism is particularly relevant: May Morris recalls that in a lecture on ‘War and Peace’ Morris asserted that ‘there is always a danger to great nations of some of their best qualities becoming over-masterful, and urging them first to make slaves of other nations, and then of themselves’ (AWS 2:54).

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5 For a discussion of the complexities of time and space in News, see Andrew Belsey. 6 I see the communist society in News as ‘residual’ rather than ‘emergent’ because, as Raymond Williams explains, in a residual culture there is ‘a reaching back to those meanings and values which were created in actual societies and actual situations in the past, and which still seem to have significance because they represent areas of human experience, aspiration, and achievement which the dominant culture neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses, or even cannot recognize.’ However, from a different perspective, an argument could be made for the ‘emergent’ qualities of society in News (Marxism and Literature 123–4). 7 Morris’s frequent allusions to the workers as ‘slaves’ in his fiction, letters, and lectures may be attributed in part to his reading of William Cobbett; see Morris’s 14 August 1883 letter to the Daily News, his 4 September 1883 letter to Jenny (Letters 2:215, 223–4), and A Dream of John Ball (CW 16:215). For a thorough analysis of the worker/slave rhetorical tradition, see Catherine Gallagher, 3–35. 8 See Brantlinger: ‘Racism functions as a displaced or surrogate class system, growing more extreme as the domestic class alignments it reflects are threatened or erode’ (Rule 184). 9 In ‘Art under Plutocracy’ (1883), Morris anticipates the time-traveller in News by an allusion to the nineteenth-century ‘disease, which, to a visitor coming from the times of art, reason, and order, would seem to be a love of dirt and ugliness for its own sake’ (CW 23:170). 10 Morris believed that the need for revolution, as well as for art, was innate. In the Editorial in the 1 May 1886 Commonweal, Morris and Belfort Bax argue that even the ‘stumbling’ movements toward bourgeois state socialism are noteworthy if only as indications of the general malaise prompting such ‘instinctive revolutionary attempts’ (33). Pertinently, in News, Hammond also refers to a child’s inborn ‘spirit of rebellion’ without which, as he explains, ‘I do not know that we should ever have reached our present position’ (97); accordingly, his subsequent reflection that ‘we have got back our childhood again’ (132) optimistically intimates that the revolutionary impulse continues to exist in Nowhere. 11 See also Greenblatt 82, 85. Also relevant to the mapping and naming of literary landscapes is J. Hillis Miller, Topographies. Of interest here is Joseph Conrad’s letter to Edward Garnett in December 1897, the year following Morris’s death: ‘I wait anxiously for the Morris book. I’ve an idea of him. He was an artist and a man of art’ (Conrad 428–9). According to the editors, there is no record of which Morris book Conrad had

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Karen Herbert requested; however, because Conrad began Heart of Darkness in 1898 (although the idea for the novel may have originated earlier during Conrad’s own Congo trip in 1889–90), some link between the river journey in News from Nowhere and that in Conrad’s work may be possible, if, indeed, News was the book requested. In 1897, as Kelvin notes, Conrad began his friendship with Robert Cunninghame-Graham, a follower of Morris (Letters 2:617). Pertinent here is Morris’s list of books which he considered to be more important than literature because ‘they are in no sense the work of individuals, but have grown up from the very hearts of the people’ (Letters 2:515). For further observations by Morris on art and individualism see ‘Art under Plutocracy’ (CW 23:166–9). Significantly, in keeping with its cooperative society, the most severe punishment in Nowhere is the isolation and silence of the traditional school ritual of being sent ‘to Coventry’ (189). For an in-depth analysis of the role of bourgeois realism in News, see Laura Donaldson. As well, Morris argues in the context of slavery and imperialism in several of his letters and lectures dealing with the ‘Eastern Question’; for example, see Letters 1:330–1 and his ‘War and Peace’ lecture (AWS 2:53– 62). For an intriguing examination of the map as propaganda, see Geoff King, especially his chapter 7, ‘The Imperialist Map: Beyond Materialism and Idealism’ (137–66).

8 Clothes from Nowhere: Costume as Social Symbol in the Work of William Morris Wanda Campbell

Clothing has always played an important symbolic role in utopian and dystopian works ranging from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), in which adults wear coarse, simple garments and leave jewellery and silks to children and criminals, to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), in which colour-coded uniforms indicate function and class. News from Nowhere, the utopian romance published by William Morris in 1891, is no exception. Thomas Carlyle, whose work Morris admired, wrote in Sartor Resartus (Tailor Retailored) that ‘Society is founded on clothes’ (159). In this work, Carlyle established costume as a legitimate metaphor for interpreting social structure. Morris’s understanding of the symbolic significance of costume, coupled with his personal interest in the design and creation of textile, made clothing a natural vehicle to communicate his vision of a post-revolutionary society. According to Fiona MacCarthy, one of the things that first attracted Morris to Edward Burne-Jones, back in their Oxford days, was that ‘they already spoke a shared language of clothes as social protest’ (56). As a visual expression of Morris’s artistic and political concerns, costume transcends its functional role in News from Nowhere to reinforce his expression of the dream of social revolution. In Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, which he wrote with E. Belfort Bax, Morris defends the importance of human adornment: ‘Though the question of costume may seem a petty one, it has much to do with the pleasure of life’ (234). If the purpose of a Utopia is to show a ‘good place’ then it is no surprise that costume is part of the pleasure of the new socialist world of Nowhere. What exactly do the inhabitants of

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Morris’s Utopia wear? The narrator, William Guest, describes their dress as ‘somewhat between that of the ancient classical costume and the simpler forms of the fourteenth-century garments, though it was clearly not an imitation of either’ (News from Nowhere 53). The bright beauty and practical simplicity of design are the antithesis of the Victorian fashion Morris considered ‘so hideous’ that it indicated his era’s ‘degradation in the scale of life’ (‘Makeshift,’ AWS 2:471). The costume of Morris’s Utopia is a return to that of the heroes of his romances, The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains, because the egalitarian ideals embodied by these tribal communities of Goths provided Morris with a model for a new society. Since Morris believed that apparel reflects attitudes, he insisted that the social revolution that transforms the political and economic structures of a society must also change the costume of its people. Morris’s choice of utopian costume might be dismissed merely as a reflection of his personal taste and his affection for all things medieval. According to Philip Henderson, ‘Morris still lived the most important part of his life in the Middle Ages, and gave the impression of having strayed into the nineteenth century by accident’ (xxi). His attraction to the period apparently began in childhood with a fondness for a suit of armour, a prop that allowed him to participate in the world of medieval splendour he had discovered in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. This fancy for the Middle Ages was reinforced by his exposure to Gothic architecture in Essex, and became a developed aesthetic through his association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who displayed an almost mystical devotion to this era in history. Yet, it was not until after his conversion to socialism in 1883 that this personal vision took on added significance because it gave him a social framework in which to place his aesthetic ideals. However, as Peter Stansky among others points out, Morris was not ‘foolishly romantic about the past’ (124), nor was his admiration for the Middle Ages unqualified. He recognized the oppression and superstition that darkened this period in history, but this did not deter him from admiring its positive characteristics including costume that combined beauty with practicality as a reflection of popular art. The hope he found in socialism gave the past he admired new meaning and purpose. The apparel he adored became a concrete symbol of the political doctrine he espoused and the ideal lifestyle he hoped to bring about. In both his artistic and political activities, Morris committed himself to the revolutionary side of the socialist movement in which

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the influence of Marx, ‘the author of the most thorough criticism of the capitalistic system of production,’ and Engels, ‘his life-long friend’ and collaborator, was deeply felt (Morris and Bax 230–1). Engels closes The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State with a quotation from Lewis H. Morgan: the new society that follows revolution ‘will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes’ (237). A close look at the clothing in News from Nowhere reveals how costume becomes symbolic of these three hopes of revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Morris believed the end of oppression and poverty that was to follow a socialist revolution would bring with it many liberties. The most basic of these liberties that Morris was to claim as the right of all the people was a healthy body. In fact, as Naomi Jacobs points out, Morris goes a ‘remarkable’ step further in his 1884 lecture ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’ to include beauty as a part of health (26): ‘Yes, and therewithal to be well-formed, straight-limbed, strongly knit, expressive of countenance – to be, in a word, beautiful – that also I claim’ (CW 23:17). Indeed it would be difficult to find a more healthy, wholesome, handsome group than the characters who populate his socialist romances. However, Morris carefully includes glimpses of those suffering under an economic system based on tyranny and greed to ensure the full impact of the contrast. Guest returns from his journey to the future to meet a Victorian factory worker, ‘his eyes dull and bleared; his body bent, his calves thin and spindly, his feet dragging and limping’ (News 227–8). The development of industry may have brought prosperity to England in the eyes of the world, but it brought wretchedness to many in the working class, creating what Carlyle called a ‘Communion of Drudges’ (Sartor Resartus 322). Guest describes the costume of the pathetic old man he meets upon returning to his own time as ‘a mixture of dirt and rags long over-familiar to me’ (228). In the socialist Utopia envisioned by Morris, the working man exchanges poverty for wealth, in the original sense of well-being, illness and premature aging for a healthy body, and ugly rags for beautiful attire. No longer forced to sell themselves to survive as they did under the old capitalist system, workers can use their new-found leisure towards the creation of art, including the art of self-adornment. Bright colours, beautiful embroidery, and delicately handcrafted girdles and buckles grace the new costume. This loveliness comes as a welcome contrast to the ugliness of the Victorian period in which, according to Morris,

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‘the general colour of the crowd is a dirty sooty black-brown-drab with a few spots of discordant and ill-chosen bright hues’ (‘Makeshift,’ AWS 2:471). In a post-revolutionary society, everyone would be free from both poverty and ugliness. Shabby and vulgar goods will no longer be produced in the hope that someone will want them. In the future, ‘the tyranny of convention will be abolished; reason and a sense of pleasure will rule’ (Morris and Bax 234). The most obvious victim of the tyranny of convention in costume was the Victorian woman, subjected as she was to a frightening combination of figure-shaping contraptions and overwhelming ornamentation. Most Victorian men, on the other hand, wore ‘some version of the plain, dark, uniform three-piece suit’ (Steele 52), a costume that marked its wearer as professional, intelligent, and practical, in contrast to the female fashion which suggested vanity, frivolity, and fragility. Elsewhere, Morris comments that in all ‘bad periods (as in the present), an extreme difference is made between the garments of the sexes’ (Morris and Bax 234). This discrepancy introduces the question of equality or, as the Victorians called it, the Woman Question. Guest is thrilled to find that the female inhabitants of Nowhere are ‘clothed like women, not upholstered like arm-chairs’ (53). Their loose kirtles and flowing gowns, unlike the corsets, crinolines, and bustles of Victorian fashion, do not inhibit activity and comfort. The women of Nowhere are free to row a boat, carve masonry, and participate in haymaking. In Morris’s historical romances, the women don male garments to facilitate the even more strenuous activities of hunting and war. In Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, Morris differentiates between bad and good costume: bad costume always ‘either muffles up or caricatures the body; whereas good costume at once veils and indicates it’ (234). Female Victorian attire that accentuated the bosom, falsified the slenderness of the waist, and shrouded the legs in yards of petticoats was at once prudish and lascivious, a tension that kept women in a desired state of submission as sexual objects. With the abandonment of private property that was to follow the social revolution, the idea of woman as the property of man was also to be abolished. She would no longer be his toy to be delicately kept and prettily dressed. However, equality in costume implies neither a confusion of gender nor a denial of sexuality. In fact, eroticism is very much a part of Nowhere, as Jan Marsh, Ady Mineo, and Michael Holzman point out. According to Holzman, Ellen is dressed lightly not because of poverty

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but ‘for aesthetic and, one suspects, erotic reasons’ (‘Pleasures’ 34). Ellen tells Guest that in another age she would be ‘wrecked and wasted in one way or another, either by penury or luxury’ (223), but now she is free to live in the fullness of her beauty as an equal citizen. In the new society, sensuous appreciation is not eradicated, but rather enhanced by becoming a privilege of both sexes. Just as Dick can compliment Clara for the skin ‘white as privet’ under her gown (163), Clara can boldly admire ‘his splendid form at its best amidst the rhymed strokes of the scythes’ (170). Both men and women are encouraged to dress beautifully, and both are allowed to admire the opposite sex without shame. Equality of the sexes, though important to Morris, pales in comparison with the necessary equality of function that is to be the very foundation of a new classless society. As John Reed remarks in Victorian Conventions, ‘Fashion was only one part, but an important one in a complicated code of distinction between the classes’ (334), a point which William Marshall reiterates: ‘As the task of identifying oneself with a class grew in difficulty, the attempts that many made to accomplish it increased in intensity, and clothes became a fully developed social symbol’ (94–5). Guest assumes that the waterman he meets must be some ‘specially manly and refined young gentleman’ (47) and the dustman must ‘be at least a senator’ (60) because of the magnificence of their attire. He discovers that they do dress more humbly when their jobs require it, in accordance with a rhythm of energy and rest, but in Nowhere, where all are equal, dress becomes an expression of taste rather than class. Boffin does receive some goodnatured teasing for dressing so ‘showily,’ with ‘as much gold on him as a baron of the Middle Ages’ (60), but his choice is respected. Old Hammond’s choice of threadbare blue serge, Morris’s own habitual costume, is similarly accepted. Since all are equal, individuals wear whatever they choose, and the new society encourages them to wear that which is most beautiful. Even the haymakers in the field are dressed ‘gaily and with plenty of adornment’ (185) in contrast to the ‘wretched skimpy print gowns’ of the haymakers Guest remembers from his own time (169). Morris believed that the equality between sexes and classes of the post-revolutionary society would extend beyond political borders to create equality among nations. Because people would no longer be coerced into artificial groups by the pressure of commercial competition on an international scale, they would be free to develop

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their own lifestyle. Guest is surprised to discover from Old Hammond that the new political system serves to enhance rather than destroy variety, ‘men and women varying in looks as well as in habits of thought; the costume far more various than in the commercial period’ (117). No longer threatened by tyranny or competition, citizens may allow costume to become, once again, a matter of taste rather than coercion. Fraternity, the final component of the threefold hope of revolution, was for Morris the ultimate goal of communism, but one that could not be achieved without liberty and equality. In his writing, costume comes to symbolize a fraternity between the individual and the natural world, the communal past, and other members of the human community. Where is the difficulty, Guest is asked, in accepting a world where men and women are free, happy, and ‘most commonly beautiful of body also, and surrounded by beautiful things of their own fashioning and a nature bettered and not worsened by contact with mankind?’ (159). He can hardly believe that Nowhere is the England he once knew, purged and revitalized. The workshop has become a garden; people have finally learned to live in harmony with nature. A recurring symbol of this harmony is the presence of flowers. Almost without exception, the women of Nowhere appear carrying bouquets or wearing flowers in their hair or on their figure. A group of gaily clad haymakers makes the meadow look ‘like a gigantic tulipbed’ (178). The seasons are often the topic of conversation and the people are clearly in tune with nature’s cycles. Guest sees a young woman dressed in green ‘in honour of the season’ (63) and Clara and Dick dress in brightly embroidered silks so as not to make the ‘the bright day and the flowers feel ashamed of themselves’ (168). Members of this new society are pagans in the original sense of the word with a ‘delight in the life of the world [and an] intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth’ (158). Everywhere he turns, Guest discovers visual delights, what he once described as ‘forms and intricacies that do not necessarily imitate nature, but in which the hand of the craftsman is guided to work in the way that she does, till the web, the cup, or knife look as natural, nay as lovely, as the green field, the river bank, or the mountain flint’ (‘Lesser Arts,’ CW 22:5). The desire for harmony with nature that is so central to his utopian vision permeates all of Morris’s creations from book design to wallpaper. He believed ‘everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if

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it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her’ (CW 22:4). Art in alliance with nature, Morris argues, awakens us to the ‘eventfulness of form in those things which we are always looking at’ (CW 22:4–5), things we might otherwise be tempted to take for granted or abuse. This awareness informs Morris’s significant contribution to environmental thought as explored by several scholars including Paddy O’Sullivan, who contends that Morris is ‘one of our greatest ecological thinkers’ (‘Struggle’ 5), Dennis Bartels, who argues that ‘the need for remediation of human-induced environmental degradation,’ which reaches its fullest expression in News from Nowhere, ‘was a constant theme in the writings of William Morris’ (39), and Nicholas Frankel, who relates Morris’s ecological perspective specifically to his understanding of design: In essence, News from Nowhere argues, the heightened environmental and moral consciousness that would constitute the humane mainspring of a new social order – at present, merely a revolutionary dream – could be brought about by a greater attention to art through the decoration of everyday life. News from Nowhere is by no means an isolated phenomenon, and represents the culmination of some thirtyfour years’ work in decorative design. (66)

By way of example, Frankel draws attention to ‘the ecological world view driving the book’s textual features’ (79), most notably the floral borders that both ‘lean heavily on “live” forms commonly found in nature’ and ‘actualize and interpenetrate the novel’s “text”’ (79). In the frontispiece illustration for the Kelmscott edition of News From Nowhere, showing a well-built house surrounded by gardens, trees, and birds all framed by a floral border, we catch a glimpse of how culture and nature might harmoniously coexist. In the frontispiece illustration for the Kelmscott edition of The Wood Beyond the World(fig. 8.1), in which the bare arms and feet of a woman, her loosely flowing hair and simple gown, and the charm of her verdant adornment all seem to merge with and echo a garden-like setting and floral border, we begin to see how this ‘full sympathy between the works of man and the land they were made for’ (‘Lesser Arts,’ CW 22:17) might apply to the realm of costume. Here is the Maid in a paradisal ‘fair place’ full of fruit trees, walking upon a greensward that is ‘both thick and much flowery’ (Wood 192) and adorned, like the women of Nowhere, beautifully and simply with Nature’s loveliness:

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The Maid arose and said: Now shall the Queen array herself, & seem like a very goddess. Then she fell to work, while Walter looked on; and she made a garland for her head of eglantine where the roses were the fairest; & with mingled flowers of the summer she wreathed her middle about, and let the garland of them hang down to below her knees and knots of the flowers she made fast to the skirts of her coat, and did them for arm-rings about her arms, and for anklets and sandals for her feet. (Wood 192–3)

Walter is understandably worried by the ephemeral nature of her embellishment: ‘But as to this flowery array of thine, in a few hours it shall be all faded & nought’ (194), but because the maid is ‘wise in hidden lore’ (195) she is able to magically keep all ‘as fresh and bright as if it were still growing on its own roots’ (194–5). In the penultimate chapter of The Wood Beyond the World, two neighbours debate the merits of the maid’s garments. One argues that despite her fairness she is ‘somewhat worse clad than simply. She is in her smock, man, and were it not for the balusters, I deem ye should see her barefoot. What is amiss with her?’ (249). The other responds ‘as to her raiment, I see of her that she is clad in white & wreathed with roses, but that the flesh of her is so wholly pure & sweet that it maketh all her attire but a part of her body, and halloweth it, so that it hath the semblance of gems’ (250). Like the tanned barefoot young women of Nowhere who, Guest realizes, are ‘very lightly clad ... from choice, not from poverty’ (News 173), the maid lives in full fraternity with the natural world. She is, as Clara says, ‘dressed deliciously for this beautiful weather’ (177). In striking contrast, the costume of a Victorian woman (fig. 8.2) consisted of cage-like undergarments, voluminous frills and flounces, and a shawl, bonnet, and parasol designed to protect and separate her from the natural environment as one ‘brought up in affected ignorance of natural facts, reared in an atmosphere of mingled prudery and prurience’ (News 96). By the end of The Wood Beyond the World, the ‘wizardry’ that allowed the Maid to maintain the freshness of her floral adornment has departed from her (258), but that magic is replaced by art. ‘Clad she was now, as when she fled from the Wood beyond the World, in a short white coat alone, with bare feet and naked arms; but the said coat was now embroidered with imagery of blossoms in silk and gold’ (258). Having travelled the two-way street between nature and art that exquisitely joins humans with the environment they inhabit,

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we return to Dick’s belt buckle ‘of damascened steel beautifully wrought’ (News 47) and Bob’s surcoat of ‘light green with a golden spray embroidered on the breast’ (51). An art that honours nature’s ‘eternal recurrence of lovely changes’ (‘Lesser Arts,’ CW 22:10) while defying time, argues Morris, ‘will make our streets as beautiful as the woods, as elevating as the mountain-side: all the works of man that we live amongst and handle will be in harmony with nature, will be reasonable and beautiful’ (CW 22:27). Our two great teachers in these matters ‘must be Nature and History’ (‘Lesser Arts,’ CW 22:15). Fraternity with nature implies a fraternity with the past. Men and women must go to the roots of the mountains to discover their heritage. News from Nowhere reveals that the significant human history is not that of the rise and fall of governments, but rather the childhood of the world, because, as Morris points out, ‘it is the child-like part of us that produces works of imagination’ (News 132) and reveals our capacity for play and for hope. This fabric of fairy tale lends romance to daily life. Ellen, the ‘fairy’ of Nowhere (179), warns against being ‘too careless of the history of the past’ (214) because the awareness that darkness may return must govern the way we live in the light. Therefore, history must be approached with understanding. Just as the garments of Nowhere are inspired by ancient classical costume and those of the fourteenthcentury without being ‘an imitation of either’ (53), the past is to be muse and not master. ‘Let us therefore study it wisely, be taught by it, kindled by it: all the while determining not to imitate or repeat it’ (‘Lesser Arts,’ CW 22:16). Morris is careful to stress that equality and fraternity do not signify a monotonous sameness. The inhabitants of Nowhere would have been surprised by the largely similar and sombre dress of the workers under China’s Maoist regime. ‘Variety of life,’ wrote Morris in his review of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, ‘is as much an aim of a true Communism as equality of condition, and that nothing but an union of these two will bring about real freedom’ (AWS 2:507). Old Hammond assures Guest that variety is encouraged in Nowhere: ‘You see in matters which are merely personal which do not affect the welfare of community – how a man shall dress … and so forth – there can be no difference of opinion, and everybody does as he pleases’ (118). Initially, it is not easy for Guest to accept the brilliant kaleidoscope of costume that he encounters in Nowhere because his sensibilities have been dulled by the ‘sombre greyness, or rather

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brownness of the nineteenth century’ (164). Slowly, he begins to see the appropriateness of the beautiful variety. Clara explains that the citizens of Nowhere do not stop at merely making clothes comfortable. Is there anything wrong, she asks, ‘in liking to see the coverings of our bodies beautiful like our bodies are?’ (165). Sameness in dress is not only a sign of the tyranny of fashion but also a symbol of the authority that once oppressed the people. Hammond remembers the blue-coated policemen and the red-coated soldiers who committed violence against unarmed crowds in Trafalgar Square (108). Under the old political system a uniform, a scrap of cloth of a certain colour, empowered men to wound and kill, but Morris dreamed of a time when people would no longer have to tremble before the ‘helmeted flunkies of the rich’ (‘London in a State of Siege,’ 206). In Utopia, ‘the tatters and rags of superannuated worn out Symbols’ described in Sartor Resartus (280) have been discarded, and the old symbols of division and tyranny are a thing of the past. Fraternity is the ultimate aim of communism, but it does not mean uniting to oppress, or denying individuality, but rather a joining of different elements into a strong, new, creative whole. The costume that Morris envisioned for a post-revolutionary world is an expression of the triple hope of the revolution: freedom from the harsh rags of drudgery; equality between sexes, classes, and nations; and finally, fraternity with the natural world, the mythic past, and the human community. As an artist with an integrated and holistic vision, Morris was actively involved in fields that ranged from decorative design to social design. His efforts to transform aesthetic ideals into reality are reflected not only in his creation of a design company but in his encouragement of the costume often called Pre-Raphaelite or Aesthetic Dress as an alternative to the Victorian fashion he detested. Though adopted by a small circle of artists, aesthetes, and health buffs, this loose-fitting apparel was largely ignored because, as one fashion historian expressed it, ‘Women were in no mood to progress thus backward’ (Steele 152). Morris would have seen the irony in that choice of words; he did not wish to regress, but to progress into a future that incorporated the best of the past. He believed that ‘the world cannot go back on its footsteps, and that men will develop swiftly both bodily and mentally in the new Society’ (‘Society of the Future’ 189). Morris’s choice of costume in News from Nowhere is more than an expression of his personal nostalgia for a bygone era of romance. The

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costume functions as a constructive symbol that embodies the ‘manners’ of a new society, which Morris defined as ‘the art of living worthily’ (‘Lesser Arts,’ CW 22:22). Though filled with detail, the utopian vision Morris offers is not ‘descriptive’ but ‘constructive,’ to use the terms of Northrop Frye (‘Varieties’ 117). He is not merely describing ‘something that does not exist,’ but is offering a hypothetical construction of the literary imagination, not just sharing a dream, but ‘communicating a vision’ (‘Varieties’ 117). News From Nowhere is not a blueprint but an imaginative rendering based on the belief that the external aspects of a society are a reflection of internal attitudes. Morris longed for a world in which all ‘miserable makeshifts,’ including ‘rotten raiment which does not shelter,’ would be replaced by that which was ‘necessary and decent,’ appealing and uncorrupted. ‘No one would make plush breeches when there were no flunkies to wear them, nor would anybody waste his time over making oleomargarine when no on was compelled to abstain from real butter’ (‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil,’ CW 23:103–4;118). By renewing the vision of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he wished to restore the hope. According to Morris, when ‘it’s nobody’s business to see to it or mend it,’ people will persist in ‘making the world hideous’ (my emphasis, ‘Lesser Arts,’ CW 23:24, 25). ‘What too are all poets and moral teachers but a species of metaphorical tailors?’ asks Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (325). Because he dreamed of ‘mending’ the world he loved, Morris worked long and hard to promote popular art, equality of condition, and variety of life. Hampered by the overwhelming difficulties of being a socialist visionary in a capitalist reality, he experienced limited success in his ventures. It was only through his imagination that he was fully able to re-tailor the world.

ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 8.1 Edward Burne-Jones. Untitled drawing of Maid in the Wood, with border by Morris. The Wood Beyond the World. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1894. Frontispiece. Fig. 8.2 Anon. ‘Dress and the Lady.’ Punch 23 August 1856: 73.

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9 To Live in the Present: News from Nowhere and the Representation of the Present in Late Victorian Utopian Fiction Matthew Beaumont The Here and Now stands too close to us. Raw experience transposes us from the drifting dream into another state: into that of immediate nearness. The moment just lived dims as such, it has too dark a warmth, and its nearness makes things formless. The Here and Now lacks the distance which does indeed alienate us, but makes things distinct and surveyable. – Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (180)

‘“I cannot make these present times,” he says once, “present to me.”’ Walter Pater quoted this statement by Charles Lamb – about the apparent impossibility of configuring the present as a distinct temporal category, in opposition to both the past and the future – during the course of a critical appraisal of the Romantic critic published in 1878 (Appreciations 111). Lamb’s comment clearly served as a kind of rationale for Pater’s aesthetic, which self-consciously revelled in the evanescent quality of the present as a lived moment, as the ‘Conclusion’ to his Studies in the Renaissance (1873) reveals. In the context of this essay, however, it serves to summarize my contention that under the everyday conditions of modernity in the late-Victorian period the present tends to disappear in the instant that it is apprehended. In an industrial capitalist society, the present cannot be made present. The Here and Now stand too close to us. It is in part this problem that lies behind the reappearance of utopian fiction at the fin de siecle. From the 1880s in particular there was a remarkable resurgence of the genre. ‘At the present day,’ wrote the secularist G.W. Foote in 1886, ‘social dreams are once more rife’

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(190). Looking Backward (1888), a conventional utopian narrative by the optimistic American ‘state-socialist’ Edward Bellamy, sold approximately 200,000 copies in the United States during its first year in print. In England, where it proved almost as successful, sales of 100,000 copies had been reported by 1890 (P. Marshall 87–8). On both sides of the Atlantic, and in continental Europe, it inspired numerous popular imitations. As the example of Looking Backward implies, utopianism at this time scarcely found expression in experimental literary forms. On the contrary, it was commonly reliant on narrative structures that reflected a view of history as a successive process, and it therefore was almost structurally incapable of capturing the impact of modernity on the experience of social life. But like the radical aesthetics decried by Max Nordau it was nonetheless a literary response to the challenge to conceptualize a present that seemed inaccessible to the habits of rational consciousness. Modernity might be said to mean immersion in the lived moment – in the absence of a reliable historical narrative. Utopian fiction sought to escape this miasmic condition. It purported to be clairvoyant; that is to say, not so much prophetic as simply clear-sighted. It was used to read an unreadable reality that, because of ‘the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions’ experienced in daily life (Nordau 175), seemed at the same time too abstract and too concrete to be understood. Utopia tried to grasp the fragmentary parts of the present as a singular totality by glimpsing it from an imaginary future. News from Nowhere (1891), which William Morris conceived as a deliberate critique of Looking Backward, has traditionally been regarded as one of the most backward-looking novels of the late-nineteenth century, mainly because it is ostensibly medievalist in form and content. But this assumption was undermined by Patrick Brantlinger in 1975 when he argued that, as ‘a conscious anti-novel, hostile to virtually every aspect of the “great tradition” of Victorian fiction,’ it is in some vital aspects closer to a modernist aesthetic (35). More recently, James Buzard has claimed in a persuasive account of the ‘ethnographic’ vocation of narrative in News from Nowhere that, though ‘not usually considered in connection with Modernism, [indeed] more often seen as quintessentially, quaintly Victorian in its nostalgia for preindustrial civilization,’ it is in fact a proto-modernist meditation on ‘the role of interruption in fiction’ (446–7). My own contribution to the critical reappraisal of Morris’s curious book is concerned not with its relation to the classical Victorian novel but to contemporaneous

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utopian fiction. By reconsidering it in this context, and in relation to the attempt in utopian fiction to represent an unrepresentable present, I hope to demonstrate, if not its affiliations to Modernist discourse, either literary or ethnographic, then its critical meditation on the conditions of modernity in the late-Victorian period. I interpret News from Nowhere as a solution to the problem posed by what Ernst Bloch, the philosopher of Utopia associated with the Frankfurt School, called ‘the darkness of the lived moment’ (Principle 180). Morris’s utopian romance historicizes the present in terms of an imaginary trajectory into the future. But in contrast to other utopian novels of the 1880s and 1890s, it also presents an ideal socialist society that repudiates or negates the empty present of capitalism. It is this political treatment of the time of modernity that marks the novel’s transformation of the utopian form. Morris’s ‘epoch of rest,’ to cite the novel’s subtitle, depicts a utopian temporality that is the positive opposite of capitalism. Rest in this imaginary epoch is characterized not by empty exhaustion, nor by mere leisure, but by a sense of plenitude and self-fulfilment. In Nowhere, the here and now are not alienated but disalienated. The present is not absent, but present to itself. News from Nowhere proposes no less than a redemptive ontology for Utopia. My argument unfolds in two main phases. I first examine the problem of the perception of the present, reviewing the Marxist theory of reification in order to propose a materialist explanation for the almost impenetrable opacity of the present in capitalist society. I then try to codify utopian thought of the late-nineteenth century in terms of its historicizing function, which I read as a response to the darkness of the lived moment. This forms the theoretical and historical basis on which my reading of News from Nowhere rests. The third section of this essay explores the way in which Morris’s utopian fiction depicts a world wherein the present is finally present to itself. But it also draws attention to the fact that Morris ultimately questions this fantasy of utopian presence. Finally, I conclude with a brief reflection on the possible implications of this interpretation of Morris’s Utopia for our understanding of his politics. The present appears to represent a well-nigh insuperable phenomenological problem. Any attempt to capture the presentness of the present results in something like a short circuit of the logic of cognition. Grasping the present is like trying to stop what William James called ‘the wonderful stream of our consciousness’ in order to subject it to

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‘introspective analysis’: ‘it is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks’ (3). And if we cannot conquer its fundamental resistance to signification, we are forced to accept that a concept of the present must be produced, constructed. ‘The problem of the present,’ as Georg Lukács counselled, must be treated as ‘a historical problem’ (‘Reification’ 157). In the Victorian period, the perceptual problem of the present is at some level the result of the reifying effects of commodity culture under capitalism. I want therefore briefly to explore its socio-economic preconditions. A crisis of representation is endemic to the capitalist mode of production, as the career of the term ‘ideology’ indicates. But this ideological deformation is not simply a species of ‘false consciousness,’ that is, the purely mental operation whereby capitalism produces its own misapprehension. As Marx reveals in the first volume of Capital (1867), the sense of alienation that haunts human beings is not a hallucination but instead a structural property of their social relations under capitalism. The theory of commodity fetishism (so-called) represents an attempt to come to terms with the interior hiatus of these relations. It explains that the exploitation of the proletariat, which establishes the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, is systematically concealed by the fact that commodities, the products of social labour, function as if they are subject solely to their mutual interrelation in the marketplace. In this way, as Marx says, the social relations between producers assume ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (165). But this fantastic form is not merely the lamination of reality with an illusory relation: it deforms reality itself. For to the producers, commodified as they are, ‘the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (166). In sum, if the commodity form ‘inevitably give[s] rise to an opaque society,’ as Henri Lefebvre affirms, then this opaqueness is ‘a social, or rather, a socio-economic fact’ (63). In ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,’ Lukács reformulated the ‘phantom objectivity’ of capitalist relations in terms of ‘the phenomenon of reification,’ the process of alienation whereby the fetishism of the commodity form diffuses into ‘capitalist society in all its aspects’ (83). According to Lukács’s article, the rational mechanization of capitalist production breaks up the labour process and corrodes

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‘the qualitative, human and individual attributes of the worker’ (88). Under the impact of this atomization, the worker’s activity becomes ‘more and more contemplative.’ And this attitude ‘transform[s] the basic categories of man’s immediate attitude to the world’ (89): in particular, ‘time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable “things”’ (90). In these desiccated conditions, the worker cannot totalize or intellectually transcend society. But the reification of consciousness is not restricted to the worker, because ‘the objective reality of social existence is in its immediacy “the same” for both proletariat and bourgeoisie’ (150). Thus bourgeois consciousness loses sight of the social totality too. Science ‘find[s] that the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which it is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp’ (104). And this obstruction to the totality of knowledge makes it impossible to ascertain the silent movement of reality. The present time, that is to say, becomes impenetrable; it is inapprehensible as an historical moment. The paradox of reification is that it naturalizes the present even as it alienates it from human understanding. Life is experienced as a plasmic flux beyond the power of human apprehension. Lukács captured this contradictory phenomenon when he proposed in another context that ‘when the surface of life is only experienced immediately, it remains opaque, fragmentary, chaotic and uncomprehended’; and, further, that ‘what lies on the surface is frozen and any attempt to see it from a higher intellectual vantage-point has to be abandoned’ (‘Realism’ 39). Utopian thought is an attempt to attain this ‘higher intellectual vantage-point,’ this transcendent perspective: it projects a fictional future from which it defamiliarizes the present state of society and reconceives it as an objective historical totality rather than a subjective way of life. In Utopia, the present is the past of a specific, fictional future. Time-travelling to the future, it turns out, is about the return journey to the present traced by the forward motion of the time machine itself. It is this problem of grasping the present in an estranged form with which William Morris and some of his contemporaries struggled in the late-Victorian period. In ‘The Hopes of Civilization’ (1888), Morris tried ‘to realize the face of mediaeval England’: ‘How strange it would be to us if we could be landed in fourteenth-century England!’ There was nothing nostalgic about this exclamation. Historicizing the past,

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he wanted too to historicize the present, ‘the great commercial epoch in whose latter days I would fain hope we are living.’ To this end, Morris there posited an imaginary people who in the future ‘will wonder how we lived in the nineteenth century’ (CW 23:61, 62). News from Nowhere, like other utopian fictions of the period, is an equivalent exercise in historicity. ‘No age can see itself,’ as Morris averred: ‘we must stand some way off before the confused picture with its rugged surface can resolve itself into its due order, and seem to be something with a definite purpose carried through all its details’ (‘Dawn of a New Epoch,’ CW 23:121). Utopia provides Morris and his contemporaries with a kind of metaperspective from which the present appears in its approximate proportions. Utopian thought is eccentric; or, as Morris’s friend and collaborator Ernest Belfort Bax phrased it in his Outlooks from the New Standpoint (1891), it is ‘a hybrid pseudo-reality ... which is neither past, present, nor future.’ Bax complained that contemporary utopian romances represented a pointless attempt to escape the inescapable opacity of the lived present: When we ourselves are part and parcel of a social state, when we ourselves are a portion of the reality of a given society, bathed in its categories and inhaling its atmosphere, our imagination cannot transcend it to any appreciable extent, if at all. Our logical faculty can, indeed, pierce through, or, as it were, dissolve the reality for abstract thought, and show the lines on which the new principle growing up within it is going, but our imagination is quite incapable of envisaging the reality in its final and complete shape. We can just as little conceive how the men of the future will envisage our civilisation of to-day – how they will represent to themselves our thoughts and feelings, aspirations and antipathies – for when all this social life has become objective, with all its categories stiff and lifeless, it will be seen in its true proportions and significance. (viii–ix)

Bax’s somewhat contemptuous comparison between, on the one hand, utopian thought, and, on the other, the hopeless attempt to conceive how the men of the future will envisage our civilization of today, is instructive. It provokes a suspicion that these imaginative gestures are in fact mutually complicit. To think of a future civilization is to think of the future of civilization – that is, to picture civilization in an historical context. It is an effort to freeze the flow of contemporary

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social life in order to identify its posterior significance. But the present is peculiarly resistant to this interpretative discipline. And in spite of his close attention to the darkness of the lived moment, Bax is insensitive to the fact that, as Bloch indicates, ‘the lived darkness is so strong that it is not even confined to its most immediate nearness’ (Principle 296). Not even the passing of time can be relied upon to resolve the present into its proper shape. Most importantly, Bax fails to appreciate that Utopia may be an important part of the struggle to apprehend reality. The utopian wager is that the imaginative faculty furnishes a more effective means than the logical faculty for penetrating what Morris called ‘the murky smoked glass of the present condition of life amongst us’ (‘On Some Practical Socialists’ 338). The best utopian fiction is about clairvoyance, seeing clearly. In H.G. Wells’s words, Utopias are ‘shadows of light thrown by darkness’ (‘Utopias’ 119). They try to detect, to quote Morris, ‘the silent movement of real history which is still going on around and underneath our raree [sic] show’ (‘Architecture and History,’ CW 22: 315). In this sense, they are less about the future (as a distinct category in opposition to the past), than they are about the outer limit or horizon of the present. Utopia creates a caesural space in the present, opening up a distance that is internal to it. Utopian writers react to the unrepresentable quality of the present with an anamorphic squint. They pull away from its patternless forms and try to reconfigure it from the optic of a hoped-for future. This is the process mapped out by the mathematician Edwin Abott in his fantasy novel, Flatland (1884). In Flatland itself, a two-dimensional land inhabited by animate, sentient lines, all figures appear to one another as points. However, from the perspective of Spaceland, the three-dimensional world to which the two-dimensional narrator is taken by a Sphere (‘Let us begin by casting back a glance at the region whence you came’), the figures in Flatland manifest their linearity (78). Trying ‘to diffuse the Theory of Three Dimensions’ to his fellow Flatlanders, the narrator writes ‘not of a physical Dimension, but of a Thoughtland whence, in theory, a Figure could look down upon Flatland and see simultaneously the insides of all things’ (96). Wells describes the same interrelationship of utopian and nonutopian perspectives in the concluding pages of A Modern Utopia (1905). The narrator notes that his utopian narrative ends, on its return to the present, ‘amidst a gross tumult of immediate realities,’ surrounded by ‘a great multitude of little souls and groups of souls as darkened,

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as derivative as my own’ (372). This optic corresponds to the perspective of Lineland. But, as he insists, it is unsettled by a flickering anamorphic perception of the total system of which he and his fellow citizens form a part: Yet that is not all I see, and I am not altogether bounded by my littleness. Ever and again, contrasting with this immediate vision, come glimpses of a comprehensive scheme, in which these personalities float, the scheme of a synthetic wider being, the great State, mankind, in which we all move and go, like blood corpuscles, like nerve cells, it may be at times like brain cells in the body of a man. (372)

This description corresponds to the perspective of Spaceland. Wells explains that the two viewpoints comprise a bifocal optic – like the vision of someone who is at the same time far- and near-sighted. The utopian capacity for ‘looking backwards’ from the future is something like this far-sighted perspective. In 1895 the novelist Grant Allen published The British Barbarians, a utopian satire on nineteenth-century social conventions from the vantage point of a visitor from the twenty-fifth century. His subtitle is ‘A Hill-top Novel.’ Frustrated with the censorious influence of magazine editors after the controversy surrounding his best-seller The Woman Who Did (1895), Allen formulated the phrase to identify novels that had not been interfered with before their publication. These novels were to be marked, he claimed, by their independence and ‘purity.’ It is no accident that he coined the term in conjunction with a fiction set in the future. As Allen explained, he picked his emblematic image because he wrote from a study high up above the city in the pellucid air of a hilltop: But away below in the valley, as night draws on, a lurid glare reddens the north-eastern horizon. It marks the spot where the great wen of London heaves and festers. Up here on the free hills, the sharp air blows in upon us, limpid and clear from a thousand leagues of open ocean; down there in the crowded town, it stagnates and ferments, polluted with the diseases and vices of centuries. (xvii–xviii)

The hill top is a Romantic vantage point from which contemporary society can be comprehended in its totality. It therefore functions as the spatial equivalent of the temporality of the future. The same principle

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shapes the symbolic landscape of Havelock Ellis’s ‘Dialogue in Utopia,’ The Nineteenth Century (1900), a novel that is set on a hill top that, emblematically, is ‘crowned by an observatory’ (1). The hill top symbolizes the objectivity of perspective realized in the critical gaze of both Allen’s alien visitor from the twenty-fifth century and Ellis’s twentyfirst-century student of nineteenth-century culture. This is the totalizing, historicist perspective of Utopia. This system of perspective forms the premise upon which Morris had himself founded the narrative practice of A Dream of John Ball (1888) in the previous decade. There, the nineteenth-century narrator tells John Ball that he can see the fourteenth century through the lens of future history: ‘And we, looking at these things from afar, can see them as they are indeed; but they who live at the beginning of those times and amidst them, shall not know what is doing around them; they shall indeed feel the plague and yet not know the remedy’ (CW 16:274). Romance, Morris wrote, ‘is the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present’ (‘Address,’ AWS 1:148). But as John Goode once stated, romance for Morris also ‘becomes a power for seeing the future in the present’ (239). ‘Utopian Romance,’ to cite another component of the subtitle to News from Nowhere, fulfils this capacity for history by making the present part of the future too. Like many contemporary utopians, Morris is in this sense the inheritor of a Romantic tradition central to his mid-Victorian forebears: his foray into a fictional future is equivalent to those ‘long, deep plunges into the past’ taken by Tennyson and Browning, as well as by Arnold and Carlyle, in the course of their search for what V.G. Kiernan calls ‘an observatory from which to survey their own epoch’ (147). The famous account of ‘How the Change Came’ in News from Nowhere is in effect a history of the turn of the twentieth century written in the future perfect tense. In this way, Morris may be said to interpret the present from what Adorno, in one of his melancholic attempts to redeem the hopes of the past, termed ‘the standpoint of redemption’ (247). Old Hammond, who is a professional historian, performs the quasihistoriographical function of News from Nowhere. He traces the revolutionary process whereby, sometime in the twentieth century, ‘a longing for freedom and equality’ was translated into a force for social transformation (104–5). In so doing, he penetrates what Morris elsewhere refers to as ‘the silent movement of real history’ (‘Prospects,’ CW 22:120).

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But Hammond is an anachronism in Nowhere. He is an anomalous presence precisely because of his passion for making the past part of the present. For if his narrative serves to historicize the late nineteenth century, then this series of ‘tales of the past’ cannot interest most of the inhabitants of Nowhere, since they have no sense of what Marx styled ‘pre-history.’ ‘The last harvest, the last baby, the last knot of carving in the market-place, is history enough for them,’ Hammond observes (89). Morris uses this comment to articulate Hammond’s criticism of the semi-conscious amnesia characteristic of Nowherean citizens. But, significantly, he also uses it to emphasize the fact that, in this future socialist society, history itself has been redefined. In Nowhere history is made not in the macrological events of an evolving civilization but in the micrological processes of daily life. Utopia, Morris implies, redeems history as the process by which we produce and reproduce ourselves in our everyday lives. So Morris’s utopian romance is more than an attempt to grasp the present of capitalist modernity as history. It is also an attempt to imagine a communist society in which it is possible to grasp history as the present, that is to say, in which history is simply being. The inhabitants of Nowhere, so Hammond says, are ‘assured of peace and continuous plenty’ (89). As Morris emphasizes in his lecture ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’ (1884), ‘when revolution has made it “easy to live,” when all are working harmoniously together and there is no one to rob the worker of his time, that is to say, his life; in those coming days there will be no compulsion on us to go on producing things we do not want, no compulsion on us to labour for nothing’ (CW 23:108). Impossible under capitalism, or any competitive system, these material and social circumstances are the foundation of a future socialist society in which all work is useful and every useful activity is a form of work. Work will at last fulfil its fundamental promises – ‘hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself,’ as Morris itemizes them (CW 23:99). For when capitalist relations of production are abolished, and labour is made ‘pleasant to everybody,’ people will be free ‘to take a pleasurable interest in all the details of life’ (CW 23:108). Morris associates these ‘details of life’ with what he subsequently calls ‘the ornamental part of life’: ‘We must begin to build up the ornamental part of life – its pleasures, bodily and mental, scientific and artistic, social and individual – on the basis of work undertaken willingly and cheerfully, with the consciousness of benefiting ourselves

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and our neighbours with it’ (CW 23:111). Morris’s celebration of ‘social’ ornament is based on his assessment of material ornament. He draws a crucial distinction between ornamental objects produced under alienated conditions on the one hand, and those produced under disalienated conditions on the other hand. In capitalist relations of production, ‘the workman is compelled to produce ornament, as he is to produce other wares,’ and ornament is therefore ‘but one of the follies of useless toil’ (CW 23:114). Ornament signifies the pretence of happiness in work, a forced declaration of satisfaction. It camouflages the exploitation structural to commodity production under capitalism, and consequently reinforces the opacity of social life. In communist society, on the contrary, ornament is an expression of the pleasure of production, and, paradoxically, of the transparency of non-exploitative social relations. And this aesthetic serves as a model for the ethic indicated by Morris’s injunction ‘to build up the ornamental part of life.’ In a future socialist society, even the most trivial aspects of everyday life will serve as an aesthetic pleasure, because they will embroider the basic activity of creative labour. Morris explores his conception of ornament in the episode from News from Nowhere in which William Guest is given a pipe in the little girl’s shop. The pipe is free, like all the products of labour in Utopia; but more importantly it is ornamental. It is ‘carved out of some hard wood very elaborately, and mounted in gold sprinkled with little gems’ (73). In Morrissian terms, this implies that it is stamped ‘with the impress of pleasure’ (‘Useful Work,’ CW 23:114). We are now in a world in which the act of production is rendered transparent to the consumer because, in a celebration of emancipated labour, it is openly inscribed into the commodity. The demise of commodity fetishism means that labour itself is returned from the realm of exchange-value to the realm of use-value. So the split between appearance and reality that is typical of capitalism disappears. Under capitalism, as Marx argues in Capital, ‘the products of labour become commodities, sensible things which are at the same time supra-sensible ... The commodity-form, and the valuerelation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this’ (165). In Utopia, the case is the opposite: the products of labour fully realize their physical properties. Appearance disappears into essence. ‘In the happy days when society shall be what its name means,’ as Morris once put it (‘Present Outlook’ 216), the signifier is finally conflated with its signified: Ceci c’est une pipe.

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History, to return to an earlier contention, and to cite the title of another well-known lecture by Morris, is in this sense merely ‘How We Live.’ In Nowhere, history is rendered ordinary, here and now. Returned to a people participating in pleasurable labour, it is the opposite of those epic spirals and crises typical of prehistory. To filch Hammond’s phrase, it is simply ‘the present pleasure of ordinary daily life’ (105) – a whole way of life, self-consciously felt in all its fibres. In ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil,’ Morris represents this utopian culture in terms of a holiday: How rare a holiday it is for any of us to feel ourselves a part of Nature, and unhurriedly, thoughtfully, and happily to note the course of our lives amidst all the little links of events which connect them with the lives of others, and build up the great whole of humanity. But such a holiday our whole lives might be, if we were resolute to make all our labour reasonable and pleasant. (CW 23:108)

In this glimpse of a utopian epoch of rest, the totality of social relations is not absent and unrepresentable, as it is under capitalism, but present and spontaneously apprehended. In his lecture ‘The Society of the Future,’ Morris reaffirms that, in a socialist community, ‘the social bond would be habitually and instinctively felt, so that there would be no need to be always asserting it by set forms’ (201). The present, that is to say, is transparent in Morris’s Utopia. News from Nowhere is a fantasy of effortless self-fulfilment. Terry Eagleton has proposed that it is possible to explain Utopia as ‘a condition in which Freud’s “pleasure principle” and “reality principle” would have merged into one, so that social reality itself be wholly fulfilling’ (Ideology 185). It is because of something like this lack of conflict that, for a moment, roughly halfway through his stay in Nowhere, Guest enjoys what he refers to as ‘a dreamless sleep’ (166). Successfully choking down his fears, as he himself phrases it, Guest briefly experiences the pacific harmony of Nowhereans like Ellen. Ellen is in fact the exemplary utopian. If she admits to Guest, as they travel up the Thames by boat together, that she doesn’t like ‘moving about from one home to another’ because ‘one gets so used to all the detail of the life about one,’ then she also happily contemplates the prospect of ‘go[ing] with [him] all through the west country – thinking of nothing’ (210). Rest of this sort is not a bestial stasis. As the metaphor of the drifting journey upstream emphasizes, Ellen is the model for a kind of

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dynamic immobility, outlined elsewhere by Morris when he rejects the notion that a state of plenitude necessarily results in stagnation: ‘to my mind that would be a contradiction in terms, if indeed we agree that happiness is caused by the pleasurable exercise of our faculties’ (‘Society’ 202–3). Rest is a familiar trope in Utopias of the fin de siècle. ‘We long to cast from our midst forever the black nightmare of poverty: we yearn for fellowship, for rest, for happiness,’ wrote the American Leonard Abbott in his book of 1898 on The Society of the Future (4). Utopian fiction of this period often projected what was in effect a mirrorimage reversal of life under capitalism. Consequently, rest most often resembled a state of blissful inertia. Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue probably offers the most programmatic expression of this tendency in The Right to be Lazy (1883). Morris, however, upset the convention when he depicted his epoch of rest (the book’s subtitle, as Buzard points out, is quite inappropriate, because Nowhere ‘is characterized, above all else, by constant work,’ 451). Morris had a dialectical, or perhaps processual, understanding of the utopian state of repose, in comparison with many of his contemporaries. A.L. Morton helpfully compares News from Nowhere with W.H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887), and maintains that ‘this time of rest, which for Morris is no more than a temporary and relative pause between periods of marked change ... is for Hudson unbroken, as far as can be seen, in either direction’ (English Utopia 159). In other words, where Morris sees the ‘epoch of rest’ as part of history – or, as I have proposed, as its deepening, or redemption, in opposition to prehistory – Hudson perceives it as a sort of homogeneous space outside history. In the lecture ‘The Society of the Future,’ Morris defiantly refers to his own notion of rest and asks, ‘Where would be the harm? ... I remember ... after having been ill once, how pleasant it was to lie on my bed without pain or fever, doing nothing but watching the sunbeams and listening to the sounds of life outside; and might not the great world of men, if it once delivered itself from the struggle for life amidst dishonesty, rest for a little after the long fever and be none the worse for it?’ (203). Morris here looks forward to his image of Ellen both attending to the details of life and ‘thinking of nothing.’ This form of rest is quite different from what Morris identifies as ‘leisure’ in ‘The Prospects of Architecture’ (1881). Under capitalism, leisure is a refuge from work, and Morris confesses that he himself spends part of it ‘as a dog does – in contemplation’ (CW 22:142). Ellen’s rest, by contrast,

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is an extension of the creative, quietly purposive activity of pleasurable labour. It is more closely akin to what Morris calls ‘Imaginative Work,’ because in its peaceful attention to life ‘it bears in its bosom the worth and the meaning of life and the counsel to strive to understand everything’ (CW 22:147). It is, precisely, ‘the pleasurable exercise of our faculties’ (‘Society’ 202–3). Life in Nowhere, as Lionel Trilling once wrote, ‘is lived for itself alone, for its own delight in itself. In the life of each individual, the past now exercises no tyranny and the future is not exigent. The present is all, and it is all-satisfying’ (219). In Utopia, real life is no longer absent, as it is in prehistory; it is present. But it is nonetheless necessary to recall that, before and after the fleeting self-forgetfulness of his ‘dreamless sleep,’ Guest is haunted by ‘a vague fear’ that he will ‘wake up in the old miserable world of worn-out pleasures, and hopes that [are] half-fears’ (166, 177). In this way, the half-forgotten, the repressed, in the form of his own empty present, the present of prehistory, foreshadows its return. If, in Bloch’s vocabulary, Morris’s epoch of rest embodies ‘the utopian primacy of rest, as the schema of fulfilment, over motion, as the schema of unfulfilled striving for something’ (825), then this state of rest is after all simply epochal and impermanent. Socialism, as Morris stressed, ‘does not recognize any finality in the progress and aspirations of humanity; and ... the furthest we can now conceive is only a stage of the great journey of evolution that joins the future and the past to the present’ (‘Theory’ 153). Morris’s Utopia is dynamic. (Wells subsequently insisted on something like this quality in A Modern Utopia, when he stated at the book’s outset that ‘the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages,’ 5.) In a perceptive essay on Morris, Miguel Abensour addresses this issue of impermanence by proposing that News from Nowhere comprises ‘a highly original utopian hypothesis on the “hazy realm of nonhistory,” that moment of forgetfulness that alone clears the way for a new history, an amazing history beyond everything it has heretofore told or produced’ (134). But if this interpretation is compelling, it has two problems. First, it fails to grasp the utopian paradox whereby the ‘hazy realm of non-history’ may in fact be this ‘amazing history’ to which Abensour refers. Morris is emphatic that our whole life might be a ‘holiday’ if all our labour is ‘reasonable and pleasant,’ in this way deconstructing the difference between work and play, history and nonhistory (‘Useful Work,’ CW 23:108).1 Second, if it freely acknowledges

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that, as Ellen puts it, ‘happy as we are, times may alter,’ it fails to recognize that this moment of forgetfulness may itself clear the way for a return to some more alienated, fetishized condition of life. ‘We may be bitten with some impulse towards change,’ muses Ellen, ‘and many things may seem too wonderful for us to resist, too exciting not to catch at, if we do not know that they are but phases of what has been before; and withal ruinous, deceitful, and sordid’ (214). Presumably, this refers to the fact that, as Hammond had earlier hinted, the inhabitants of Nowhere are increasingly fearful ‘of a possible scarcity in work.’ Competition may yet upset this realm of ‘peace and continuous plenty.’ Ellen’s comment therefore amounts to an implicit criticism of Hammond, who idealizes the past and so opens up the possibility of its return. At the same time, however, it is a guilty admission of her attraction to Guest, who is himself a fragment ‘of what has been before,’ appealing to her precisely because of his emotional complexity, his ‘hopes that [are] half-fears’ (177). Guest is a ghost, and he unsettles the tranquillity of Utopia. His very presence is a disruption of the epoch of rest. He is the mark of non-contemporaneity. In his person, the spectre of prehistory haunts the realm of a redemptive history just as the ‘ghost of London’ still asserts itself as a centre in Nowhere (70). This is the significance of Dick’s conversation with Guest about the cycle of seasons before the feast: ‘“One thing seems strange to me,” said he – “that I must needs trouble myself about the winter and its scantiness, in the midst of the summer abundance. If it hadn’t happened to me before, I should have thought it was your doing, Guest; that you had thrown a kind of evil charm over me”’ (225). Guest has interrupted the unity of subject and object to which Dick referred a moment earlier when he talked of being ‘part of it’ all, part of nature itself, in Nowhere (225). Like an anamorphic mark on a canvas, he unsettles the image of the ‘best ornament’ of the church in which the harvest is to be celebrated, that is to say, ‘the crowd of handsome, happy-looking men and women’ wearing ‘their gay holiday raimant’ (226). As ‘the guest of guests’ (226), Guest is also the ghost at the feast (as the common etymological root of ‘ghost’ and ‘guest,’ the word ghos-ti, indicates). So the minatory advice that Dick offers Guest in Runnymede, that ‘you had better consider that you have got the cap of darkness, and are seeing everything, yourself invisible’ (179), is, for a moment, fulfilled quite literally: he watches his physical presence fading quickly from the consciousness of his Nowherean friends, before experiencing his own

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painful apparition in fin-de-siècle London (227). An immaterial presence in Nowhere, he now returns to haunt ‘old London.’ Morris’s protagonist is spectral because he unconsciously announces that the present – even the utopian present of happy plenitude – is not as complete or self-sufficient as it appears. It is noticeable, however, that Dick draws attention to the fact that he has felt this disturbance before. In the past, Old Hammond, representing the link between prehistory and Utopia, has probably allowed a sense of the present’s possible incompleteness to leak into Dick’s consciousness. Guest is therefore not the cause of this spectral effect; he is merely a symptom of it. We might summarize this by saying that he is a sort of symbolic supplement to Utopia, conforming to Jacques Derrida’s logic of supplementarity, explained in ‘Speech and Phenomena,’ whereby an addition also makes up for a deficiency: ‘it comes to compensate for an originary nonself-presence’ (28). Guest’s very arrival in Nowhere reveals that the ‘filled present’ of Utopia is not in fact self-sufficient. He has broken through a crack in the outer walls of this world, like the crevice through which Edward BulwerLytton’s narrator breaches the hermetic kingdom of the Vril-ya in The Coming Race (1871). The appearance of Morris’s protagonist in Utopia testifies to the ultimate impossibility of complete utopian plenitude. The opaque spot on the lived present in prehistory stains the apparently transparent present of Utopia too. ‘For ultimately the influence of the lived darkness is not confined to the various foregrounds mentioned above,’ Bloch remarks; ‘but the blind-spot, this not-seeing of the immediately entering Here and Now, also in fact appears in every realization’ (Principle 299). Bloch clarifies this claim that the present is in some existential sense non-identical to itself, in his characteristically clotted, occasionally obfuscatory prose style: Everywhere else there is a crack, even an abyss in the realizing itself, in the actuated-topical entrance of what has been so beautifully foreseen, dreamed out; and this abyss is that of the ungrasped existere itself. So the darkness of nearness also gives the final reason for the melancholy of fulfilment: no earthly paradise remains on entry without the shadow which the entry still casts over it. (Principle 299)

In his utopian fiction, Morris plays with the idea of a utopian present that is fully present to itself. But he is finally too dialectical to accept

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the possibility of this concept. After all, News from Nowhere is a political tract as well as a phenomenological fantasy. It addresses a tight circle of committed readers, at least in its first, serial form of publication. And for these readers, the concept of the utopian present is, crucially, a heuristic possibility. In the words of Robert Musil, ‘Utopia is not a goal but an orientation’ (qtd in Suvin 131). In his writings for Commonweal, the organ of the Socialist League, Morris repeatedly criticized those whom he called ‘practical’ or ‘one-sided’ socialists, because ‘they do not see except through the murky smoked glass of the present condition of life amongst us’ (‘On Some Practical Socialists’ 338). This notion of what we might call one-dimensional socialism is the basis for his polemical review of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, printed in Commonweal in 1889: ‘The only ideal of life which such a man can see is that of the industrious professional middle-class men of to-day purified from their crime of complicity with the monopoly class, and become independent, instead of being, as they now are, parasitical’ (‘Looking Backward’ 354). News from Nowhere is in a dual sense an attempt to supersede this ideological impasse, and so to render the ‘smoked glass of the present’ transparent, so to speak. On the one hand, it is an exercise in clairvoyant historicity: the late nineteenth century, despite its opacity, is refocused from the perspective of its future history. On the other hand, it is an exercise in imagining no less than an alternative reality, in the form of a kind of communistic structure of feeling: it recuperates the present by making it present to itself in the utopian future, if only in some incomplete and finally illusory sense. This dialectical prospect, of a moment of utopian fulfilment that cancels itself out, generates the sense of poignancy that characterizes Morris’s socialist romance as well as inspiring its political urgency. As William Guest had feared, his dream of Nowhere fades, and he finds himself at home, inferring the following message from Ellen’s ‘last mournful look’: ‘Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness’ (228). All too quickly, Ellen’s recommendation recalls the reader of Commonweal to the mundane activity of building a socialist movement in lateVictorian London. But it is important to register the fact that the terrain of politics has itself been defamiliarized, and transformed, by the protagonist’s dream of the future – just as in daily life the people

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of whom one has dreamed seem subtly altered the following day. ‘Or indeed was it a dream?’ he wonders. If ‘it may be called a vision rather than a dream’ (228), if it is symbolic of some inchoate struggle for socialism, then it will have been imperceptibly transfigured by the future. Socialist politics in the present, according to Morris, are about helping to create those conditions of possibility in which the ‘great motive-power of the change,’ ‘a longing for freedom and equality,’ coincides with the objective conditions of capitalist crisis described in the discussion of ‘How the Change Came’ (News 134). What Guest imports from Utopia is a sense of the possibility of that redemptive present, and this in part redeems the present of capitalism from its emptiness. For Morris, ultimately, as for Walter Benjamin almost fifty years later, ‘history is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now’ (‘Theses’ 262–3). William Guest is an allegorical figure for this ‘conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time’ (266). For if he represents a spectral rupture of the utopian present while he is in Nowhere, on his return to Hammersmith he represents a spectral rupture in the capitalist present. And this breach marks out what Benjamin termed ‘the strait gate’ through which the Messiah, in the form of the moment of revolutionary transformation, might enter history (266). When old Hammond tells his kinswoman Clara to ‘go and live in the present’ during ‘the drive back to Hammersmith’ in News from Nowhere (162), he is not simply reassuring her that she must rest in Utopia’s happy state of plenitude; he is implicitly pressing Guest to return to his present, opening it up to this future.2

NOTES 1 2

For a discussion of Morris’s critique of the relation between work and rest, see Latham, ‘Reading Aright.’ I am grateful to Patrick Brantlinger, Frederick Kirchhoff, Ivan Kreilkamp, and David Latham for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. A version of this essay appeared in Victorian Studies 47 (Autumn 2004).

10 ‘Paradyse Erthly’: John Ball and the Medieval Dream-Vision Yuri Cowan

William Morris’s understanding of life in the Middle Ages was not restricted to an intimacy with Gothic architecture or a scholar’s knowledge of primary texts, although he had both of these. Morris immersed himself in the study of the concrete objects of everyday medieval life, surrounded himself with them, and, indeed, could make many of them himself; as a result, he could write as a modern writer in a relatively unstrained medieval idiom. It is significant that even during the 1880s, when his life was dominated by his agitation for socialist change, his interest in medieval culture never flagged: J. Bruce Glasier fondly recounts how Morris would occasionally at Socialist League functions ‘relate one or two of the old Norse legends’ (38). To see Morris’s medievalism as forming a sphere of his creative life apart from his socialism, as such early scholars as J.W. Mackail did, is misleading. Morris saw in the Icelandic Althing, for example, a form of mutual aid and democracy that he felt could be a partial model for a communist society. In the fourteenth-century European guilds Morris, like his Russian anarchist contemporary Peter Kropotkin, perceived another nascent model of mutual aid that would be nipped in the bud by the onset of early capitalism. Moreover, Morris’s interest in the art of the Middle Ages was not merely aesthetic but was based on his conception of craftsmanship and of the necessity for a popular art, both of which he saw inherent in medieval art and literature. From the intersection of his socialism, his interest in history, and his love of medieval art and culture springs the first of his two socialist dream-visions, A Dream of John Ball (the other is News from Nowhere). It

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is worthwhile to read it in conjunction with the extant body of fourteenth-century allegorical dream-poetry; not only does such a reading reveal Morris’s familiarity with that literature, but it provides a context both for the wealth of visual detail in A Dream of John Ball (the ‘wonders’ of the dream-vision genre) and for the work’s socialist underpinnings (the dream-vision’s idealism and didacticism). In his lecture on ‘The Beauty of Life’ Morris calls for art to be ‘made by the people for the people as a joy for the maker and for the user’ (CW 22:58), and he saw a clear manifestation of that organic and popular art in the art and literature of the Middle Ages. Following Ruskin, Morris saw the aristocratic classicism consequent upon the European Renaissance as an inorganic ‘break in the continuity of the golden chain’ of a popular art (22:58); significantly for his adoption of socialism, that break in the ‘golden chain’ occurred simultaneously in history with the rise of capitalism. He did not intend his own medievally influenced work to be an imitation of the medieval link in the golden chain, but to be a newly forged link in its own right. If he often used early techniques of dyeing in the making of his tapestries, medieval tales of chivalry as the inspiration for his prose romances, and the medieval form of the dream-vision for his socialist propaganda, he was always certain to put his own stamp upon the old tales and formulas; this is, in fact, the very nature of Morris’s concept of an organic ‘art of the people.’ The dream-vision genre that Morris adopted for his two long socialist fictions reached its peak of popularity in the fourteenth century, his favourite medieval era. Following upon the heels of the premier poem of the genre, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose, the genre spread rapidly from France to England, to be adopted by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Lydgate, and King James I of Scotland, among others. The genre was quickly adapted to various didactic purposes: while the Romance of the Rose was a love-vision, and many English writers also wrote love-visions (like Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls), the anonymous late fourteenth-century Pearl is a vision of the next world and of the New Jerusalem as described in Revelations, while Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman and its antecedent the anonymous Winner and Waster deal largely with social issues. In the conventional poetic dream-vision the narrator, wrestling with a particular question, goes to sleep and has a dream in which he encounters a guide and authoritative figures who lead him through a

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sequence of events in a fantastic landscape (usually a garden) and explain to him the answer to his question. The framing fiction of the dream may be open-ended (either intentionally ambiguous, as in Chaucer’s House of Fame, or fragmentary, as the unfinished Winner and Waster is) or, more often, closed by the dreamer’s awakening and a description of his reaction to the dream. Significantly, the narrator is rarely satisfied with his dream, and often remains wholly mystified, so that the final meaning of the vision is left to the reader to interpret. That emphasis upon the reader’s involvement makes the dreamvision useful for a didactic purpose, be it moral instruction or socialist propaganda. Peter Brown points out a few ways in which the dream and its wonders can draw the reader in: As a rhetorical device [the dream] has numerous advantages. It intrigues and engages the interest of an audience by appealing to a common experience and by inviting its members to become analysts or interpreters. It allows for the introduction of disparate and apparently incongruous material. It encourages and facilitates the use of memorable images. It permits the author to disavow responsibility for what follows ... It offers a point of entry into a representational mode (sometimes allegorical) which is less restrictive than, say, the conventions of realist narrative. (25)

The dream-vision is thus an ideal vehicle for a didactic core which deals with such intangible concepts as life after death (Pearl), conjecture as to the significance of the peasants’ revolts of the Middle Ages to the socialist movements of the nineteenth century (A Dream of John Ball), or the appearance of a future socialist society (News from Nowhere). Such abstract concepts are best approached allegorically: the dream-vision points towards an ideal (of behaviour, of society, and so forth), helping the reader to come to a greater understanding of an elusive concept. The dream-vision, like allegory, demands serious consideration on the part of its reader, and rewards thought with an insight into its particular concern (whether that be the nature of mourning, as in Pearl and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, or the distribution of wealth and work, as in Winner and Waster and News from Nowhere) that is thus individualized. It is easy to see how Morris, who professed that the first duty of the Socialist League was education – ‘to make Socialists’ (‘Where Are We Now?’ AWS 2:517) – saw the dream-vision as a didactic convention that nonetheless was directed towards making the reader think independently.

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To frame one’s didactic lesson in the form of a dream is at once to give it the immediacy of personal experience and to place it in the nebulous realm of fantasy, a state of affairs that is complicated slightly by the reader’s suspicion that the dream portrayed in the poem may not have truly occurred at all, but is a fiction created by the author. A.C. Spearing remarks that ‘insofar as the dream is a vision, a somnium coeleste, it claims to convey absolute truth, unmodified by the personal consciousness of the visionary; insofar as it is a psychological product, a somnium animale, it must inevitably reflect the relativism of the dreamer’s point of view … Fourteenth century dream-poems show a strong tendency to develop conflicts between absolutist and relativist conceptions of reality’ (72). The dreamer, although aspiring to absolute truth, even to paradise itself, is bound by his human nature to the corporeal world, or earth. Kathryn Lynch interprets the dream-vision as a liminal phenomenon, ‘an experience that happens to a man when he is between stable physical states – neither of the body nor removed from it’ (49). Elsewhere, however, she speaks of the relationship between flesh and spirit in the dream-vision as an interpenetration (16), which seems to me more apt. In Pearl, the dreamscape seems to be a place between heaven and earth, partaking of both. Although the dreamer in Pearl cannot cross the river and reach heaven from the dreamgarden, the poem’s final image is of the sacrament, symbol of the interpenetration of the real and the ideal. Like Morris’s ‘earthly paradise,’ the landscape of the dream-vision partakes of the ideal, remaining rooted all the while in the real. Although on the surface a dream-vision like A Dream of John Ball follows the same patterns of sleep, journey, and waking that are found in Pearl or the poems of Chaucer, with a guide, authoritative figures, and a beautiful dreamscape, Morris puts his own particular stamp on the genre no less than Chaucer does. Morris’s dream-visions are turned to the didactic purpose of socialist propaganda, and they seek to invoke the achievement of his ideal of a popular art. Moreover, to mould the medieval convention to his own ends was entirely within the tradition of the convention itself. A Dream of John Ball is the product of its author’s desire to portray the place of mutual aid and ‘fellowship’ in the Middle Ages, and to discuss the ‘encouragement and warning’ that history holds for the socialist (Morris and Bax, Socialism 497); News from Nowhere holds out the promise that an organic tradition of art will be able to arise under socialism while hinting that history will not end but will also be organic; and the secular, religious, and political dream-visions

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of the fourteenth century pointed beyond themselves in a similar manner toward their own individual ideals. Morris chose for the backdrop of his first socialist dream-vision the failed English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and one of its leaders, the priest John Ball, for his chief protagonist. The immediate cause of the revolt was an unpopular poll tax, and it was not only the working classes who threw in their lot with the rebels; the descriptions in the chronicles support to a certain extent Morris’s approximation of the revolt with a socialist-style uprising. Froissart describes the historical John Ball as saying, ‘Ah, ye good people, the matters goeth not well to pass in England, nor shall do till everything be common, and that there be no villains nor gentlemen, but that we may be all united together [tout-unis], and that the lords be no greater masters than we’ (qtd in Dobson 371). Whether Morris was historically accurate has been the subject of some debate. Margaret Grennan notes that several aspects of Morris’s interpretation of the 1381 revolt were later disproved by the historical scholarship of the 1890s (94) and that ‘many more levels of society were involved than the term “Peasants’ Revolt” suggests’ (87), while Rodney Hilton claims that ‘in examining the rising and John Ball in the light of new research, we do not correct Morris, but justify and expand his vision’ (8-9). A Dream of John Ball, however, is not historical scholarship but a fictional work, a dream-vision that, like allegory, points beyond itself towards certain conclusions on the tendencies of history and on the possibility of socialist fellowship. The action also follows the generic pattern of the dream-vision. The narrator (a type of William Morris) has a dream in which he finds himself in Kent in 1381, a few days before the climactic events of the Peasants’ Revolt. There he meets a guide, stout Will Green, and an authoritative figure, John Ball, whose speech at the village cross contains Morris’s most memorable call for socialist solidarity, or ‘fellowship.’ The dreamer is witness to a short skirmish, unrecounted in the chronicles, in which the fellowship of rebels is victorious. The vision culminates in a series of dialogues between the dreamer and John Ball, first on the fate of the revolt and finally on the fate of all those who work towards social change. The dialogue form of the last chapters is a significant transformation of the dream-vision’s conventional treatment of the authoritative figure, for in those dialogues John Ball learns hope from his time-travelling visitor and the narrator learns the lesson of fellowship from his counterpart in the past.

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Because neither of the central figures is meant to have the final word, A Dream of John Ball (a dream about John Ball, or John Ball’s dream) is not a definitive pronouncement by an authoritative figure – what the late-classical dream-taxonomer Macrobius called an oraculum – but a somnium, enigmatic, in the tradition of the most ambiguous of the fourteenth-century dream-visions. The engagement between the two perspectives of the medieval priest and the Victorian socialist in the dialogues which comprise the second half of the work are meant to engage the reader as allegory does. The reader is gradually made aware not only of the simple parallels between the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and a modern socialist movement, but of a theory of history which owes something to the Marxist view of the inevitability of social change and even more to Morris’s own conception of history as organic. So in the dialogues between Ball and the narrator we learn that the two characters find each other to be kindred spirits in their quest for justice (that fellowship can exist even across the centuries) and still more importantly that the ideals of a free society held by the socialists in late Victorian England have not just antecedents but roots in the hopes and fears of fourteenth-century artisans and peasants. This is the true significance of the oft-quoted passage wherein the narrator ponders ‘how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name’ (CW 16:231–2). Feudalism ended in spite of the defeat of the 1381 rebellion, but because it was replaced by competitive capitalism instead of by cooperative ‘fellowship,’ the activists of the 1880s were fighting for fellowship under the banner of socialism. Morris believed that history was not cyclical but organic; his medievalist socialism was not the ordinary ‘Whiggish celebration of the antiquity of British freedom’ (Chandler 2), but symptomatic of a socialist faith in the inevitability of historical change, linked in turn with his own conception of a cooperative ‘art of the people.’ While Alice Chandler effectively highlights Morris’s revolutionary medievalist message in A Dream of John Ball, she fails to recognize the complex nature of his medievalism, the ‘pragmatic concern for the past for the sake of the present and future,’ which Margaret Grennan points out (20). John Ball is not simply a register of the similarities between Ball’s message – as conveyed by Ball’s few extant letters and by Froissart’s reactionary interpretation of the revolt – and Morris’s

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own; it is about actively holding out the message of hope (encouragement and warning). The past is a basis for what is to come. Morris always had a firm sense that medieval men and women were not simply characters in a romance or history or tapestry, but real people. Like Thomas Carlyle’s contention in Past and Present that ‘these old Edmundsbury walls ... were not peopled with fantasms; but with men of flesh and blood, made altogether as we are’ (54), Morris recognized that ‘the men of those times are no longer puzzles to us; we can understand their aspirations, and sympathize with their lives, while at the same time we have no wish (not to say hope) to turn back the clock, and start from the position which they held’ (‘Preface to Steele’s Medieval Lore,’ AWS 1:287). Accordingly, John Ball is both a socialist dream and an ‘architectural’ dream (CW 16:215), conscious always of the flesh-and-blood nature of medieval men and women and their needs and desires. When Morris refers to architecture as he does in the prolegomenon to John Ball, he is not referring to the mere shell of a building: ‘A true architectural work is a building duly provided with all necessary furniture, decorated with all due ornament, according to the use, quality, and dignity of the building ... So looked on, a work of architecture is a harmonious cooperative work of art’ (‘Gothic Architecture,’ AWS 1:266). The same impulse had been at work when he and his friends began the outfitting of Red House, the project that launched him on his lifelong voyage into the realm of the decorative arts. Since healthy art was for Morris symptomatic of a healthy society, the importance of the characterization of John Ball as an ‘architectural dream’ should not be underestimated. He had immersed himself so fully in medieval art, architecture, and literature that he could imagine with ease the practical details of a medieval town. He had, after all, a knowledge of medieval dyeing techniques, of calligraphy, of stained glass, and of tapestry which was not simply the connoisseur’s, but the artisan’s own. His architectural dream of the Middle Ages is thus full of visual detail, from the girdle-book (‘a book in a bag’) at John Ball’s side, the ‘big salt-cellar of pewter’ that adorns the middle of Will Green’s table, and the inscription upon the cup in Will Green’s house (CW 16:228, 258, 260) to the ‘unhedged tillage’ of the Kentish village’s agriculture (16:217), an incidental criticism of the enclosed and covetous nature of farming practices in Morris’s day. No detail is too small for Morris’s architectural eye; the chancel of the church, ‘so new that the dust of the stone still lay white on the midsummer grass

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beneath the carvings of the windows’ (16:218), attests to Morris’s knowledge that a medieval church was built piecemeal and his recognition of the artisan’s silent role. The trope of the ‘architectural dream’ is in a sense a camouflage disguising the vision’s socialist core, part and parcel of the dreamvision narrator’s pretensions to modesty of purpose. Morris followed Ruskin in his perception of a clear link between a society’s architecture and its health. ‘The essence of what Ruskin taught us,’ he claims in ‘The Revival of Architecture,’ was simply ‘that the art of any epoch must of necessity be the expression of its social life’ (CW 22:323). He considered the art of the fourteenth century as far more healthy than that of the nineteenth because it was not only an ‘art of the people,’ but organic, a link in the golden chain of the Gothic tradition of art and artisanship. As such, it was tied very clearly in Morris’s mind to the art of socialism, expressing the freedom of the artisan as well as fellowship among artist-workers. The ideals of egalitarian fellowship are laid out in John Ball’s speeches at the cross; but Morris also asserts those ideals in the frescoes above the chancel arch, which figure forth ‘the Doom of the Last Day, in which the painter had not spared either kings or bishops’ (16:263). His architectural dream therefore includes both freedom (to paint as one wishes) and fellowship (in the egalitarian sentiment of the frescoes). A similar levelling appears in the third book of Chaucer’s House of Fame, in which Geffrey too has something of an architectural dream, fantastic architecture being one of the promised wonders of the fourteenthcentury dream-vision. Geffrey sees the slope of the icy rock ygrave With famouse folkes names fele That had iben in mochel wele And her fames wide yblowe, But wel unnethes koude I knowe Any lettres for to rede ... So unfamouse was wox hir fame. (1136–41, 1146)

The scene that Morris’s unnamed artist paints for the reader in the chancel, although not immediately recognizable as any one particular surviving medieval painting, is true in spirit to this egalitarian passage in Chaucer (with its pervading sentiment nihil est quod perstet in orbe), as well as to those passages in James I of Scotland’s Kingis

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Quair describing the wheel of Fortune (stanzas 159–72): So mony I sawe that than clymben wold, And failit foting, and to ground were rold. And othir eke that sat aboue on hye Were ouerthrawe in twinklyng of an eye. (1138–41)1

In its medieval form the painter’s having ‘not spared either kings or bishops’ is a reference to all men being equal in the eyes of God and fate; in the eyes of the nineteenth-century socialist, the inference is that authority will be overthrown, and that all men are and will be equal. In the prolegomenon to A Dream of John Ball, the narrator sets up the expectation of ‘an architectural dream,’ discussing the varieties of architecture which please him best and which he claims to have seen from afar in previous dreams: Elizabethan houses (like Kelmscott Manor), fourteenth-century churches, even an entire medieval city ‘untouched from the days of its builders of old’ (16:215–16). The progression from least pure to purest (the Elizabethan house with its later additions, the scattered fragments of medieval domestic architecture, and finally the untouched city) is obvious, and this particular dream’s actualization of the Middle Ages is the natural final step in the series. The prolegomenon also sets up the expectation of a socialist dream, however, in the intervening comic insomnium of the narrator’s speaking engagement (‘the earnest faces of my audience ... who ... were clearly preparing terrible anti-Socialist posers for me,’ 16:216). These are the two preoccupations – architecture and socialism – which the prolegomenon arranges as the subject matter of the dream-vision, just as the opening lines of The Parliament of Fowls figure forth the theme of love which is to be the major concern of the narrator’s vision. ‘I got up,’ says the narrator of John Ball, ‘and looked about me, and the landscape seemed unfamiliar to me, though it was ... an ordinary English low-country’ (16:216). The dreamer undergoes a displacement similar to Chaucer’s in The House of Fame (‘certeynly, I nyste never / Wher that I was,’ 128–9), preparing the reader for the marvels soon to be encountered. In John Ball, those marvels are first architectural (the medieval town), then social (the discovery of fellowship with the peasant rebels of fourteenth-century Kent); in The House of Fame, they follow the same pattern, beginning with Geffrey’s finding himself in a ‘temple ymade of glas’ (120) and ending with his allegorical visions of the houses of Fame and Rumour.

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If the conventions of the high-medieval dream-vision are to be faithfully adhered to, the reader will expect the entry of an authoritative figure or guide soon after the architectural scene is set in A Dream of John Ball. Indeed, as soon as the dreamer is acclimatized, we are introduced to Will Green. Like certain of the characters in News from Nowhere, Will Green seems to intuit that the dreamer is not entirely of his world – ‘“Well, friend,” said he, “thou lookest partly mazed”’ (16: 219) – and acts as the narrator’s passport into the peasant society of Kent in 1381. Although the narrator is characterized as ‘stammering’ and ‘shy’ (16:261, 263), as befits his outsider status, he is at the same time surprisingly comfortable in his strange surroundings. Morris is quick to note that the rosary at Ball’s waist would be called a ‘pair of beads’ (the Prioress in The Canterbury Tales bears ‘a peire of bedes gauded al with grene,’ ‘Prologue’ 159), rather than by its modern name; he recognizes by the figure of St Clement over a door that a blacksmith is housed therein; and in the tavern he tells a tale of Iceland that would be outlandish but not anachronistic to English peasants of the time (16:228, 218, 224). The one thing he could not have learned from Chaucer, Froissart, or an illuminated book is how to carve meat according to the fashion of 1381 and, accordingly, he fails in this (16:223). Such artlessness on the part of the narrator is an integral part of the dream-vision convention, serving to undermine the ‘authority’ of the narrator. Usually his clumsiness and tactlessness are cues for another character in the poem to set the errant narrator on the right path: the jeweller in Pearl is chastised numerous times by the pearlmaiden for selfishly mourning and for forgetting his spiritual duty to trust in God’s mercy. His words, ‘To be excused I make request’ (281), are echoed by one dreamer after another in the poetry of the fourteenth century. The narrator is regularly mystified by what he sees and hears; he often appears even to be deliberately naive. In The Book of the Duchess it is not clear to the dreamer until the end of the poem that the loss to which the knight refers is the death of his beloved (‘Is that youre losse? Be God, hyt ys routhe,’ 1310). The jeweller is equally obtuse: he ignores all his guide’s admonishments not to cross the river between earthly life and the next world, and suffers a rude awakening as a result. Similarly, the narrator of A Dream of John Ball views the battle at the township’s end from a safe but unglorious position at Will Green’s feet, suffering only the occasional taunt from his protector (‘thou art tall across thy belly and not otherwise,’ 16:227, reminiscent of the Eagle’s gibe in The House of Fame – ‘Thou art noyous for to carye,’

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574). Dream-vision narrators, from ‘Geffrey’ and the joyless jeweller to William Guest, are part of an honourable tradition of good-humoured, even self-effacing, self-creation. The narrator of A Dream of John Ball is unique among dream-vision narrators in that he teaches as well as learns from the authoritative figure of the dream. The narrator may well be the authoritative figure of John Ball’s own dream-vision, a fellow come from the future to give encouragement and warning, and to explain reluctantly, after the fashion of Macrobius’s visio or oraculum, the fate of the revolt (16:269). But Morris is not interested in writing an alternate history after the fashion of speculative fiction. His aim is to describe the place of the rebels in history and the relationship of their goals to those of his own revolutionary fellowship. As will become apparent, the narrator returns to John Ball not to save the rascal hedge-priest’s life, but to hold out to him a ‘little glimmer’ of hope (16:284). While the dialogue between the narrator and John Ball begins as a discussion of the significance of death, it becomes a discussion of history, since the revolutionary struggle is greater in scope than any one life. At first, the historical dialogue hinges upon the great differences between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries (epitomized by the title of chapter 9: ‘Hard It Is for the Old World to See the New’). Ball plays here the role of the medieval mirror, held up that the nineteenth century may see its own warts: no one, he says, aghast, is ‘so great a fool as willingly to take the name of freeman and the life of a thrall as payment for the very life of a freeman’ (16:273). In the dialogue’s final passages, the narrator sets forth an organic concept of history (epitomized by the wordy title of chapter 12: ‘Ill Would Change Be at Whiles Were It Not for the Change Beyond the Change’) in which fellowship endures and continues to strive for social change. Morris’s socialist thinking is similar to the twentieth-century Marxist Ernst Bloch, for whom hope is not only a sustaining social principle but a creative one as well. Behind Bloch’s pronouncement that ‘Thinking means venturing beyond’ (Principle of Hope 4) lies the same insistence upon the individual’s involvement that the allegorical dream-vision requires of its reader and that Morris’s Nowhere requires of its citizens, each of whom has a voice in the affairs of the community. The most dialectic of fourteenth-century dream-visions – the one in which the dreamer is most involved in conversation, and not as a spectator to absorb the wisdom of true or false authority figures – is Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. Its narrator makes several attempts at

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offering advice to the Black Knight (553–4), although the knight’s despair ultimately gets in the way of any true solutions. The hint is there, however, that the dreamer can play an active role, and Morris seizes upon it for A Dream of John Ball, wherein the dreamer and Ball play the authoritative figures of each other’s dreams. Each is able to partially answer the other’s questions. From the past, Morris desired a model for socialist cooperation and for a popular artistic tradition as an affirmation that his conjectures were correct. Beginning with the trope of the ‘architectural dream,’ the narrator of John Ball discovers that the objects he sees in the medieval village satisfy his desire to find an ‘art of the people’ (and satisfy Morris’s dictum, ‘have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,’ ‘Beauty of Life,’ CW 22: 76). Ball’s speech at the cross, the moment in which the priest speaks with most authority, provides the narrator with a model of cooperation, or ‘fellowship.’ From the future, Morris’s priest asks some foreknowledge of events (‘how deemest thou of our adventure?’ 16:267); and when the dreamer’s foretellings have disappointed him Ball requires some reason for hope (‘Canst thou yet tell me, brother, what that remedy shall be, lest the sun rise upon me made hopeless by thy tale of what is to be?’ 16:284). The narrator can speak with confidence about the history he knows so well, but the only prophecies he can make are of the ultimate failure of the rebellion, and of the paradoxical ‘free’ un-freedom of our modern times. Hope, however, he can offer, and he couches it in Ball’s own terms: ‘The Fellowship of Men shall endure, however many tribulations it may have to wear through’ (16:284). In the first half of A Dream of John Ball the narrator takes on the role of the dreamer and Ball the role of the authoritative figure. The tumult which greets the priest before his speech at the cross and the ensuing hush (16:228) are reminiscent of the deference shown to Nature in The Parliament of Fowls (617). Ball’s approach is as solemn as that of any figure ‘of grete auctorite’ in the corpus of fourteenth-century dreamvisions, and indeed he has ‘the sternness and sadness of a man who has heavy and great thoughts hanging about him’ (16:229). His demeanour, however, is ‘kindly’ and his face ‘not very noteworthy’; there is little of arrogance about him, as befits one who believes in the fellowship of all. Most intriguing of all is the description of his eyes, ‘at whiles resting in that look as if they were gazing at something a long way off, which is the wont of the eyes of the poet or enthusiast’

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(16:229, my emphasis). Such a description serves to underline the identification of Ball with Morris himself (E.P. Thompson 425). If we take ‘enthusiast’ in its sense of ‘mystic’ or ‘visionary,’ this description hints at the reversal of roles halfway through the work, when it begins to appear that the dream-vision is taking place for the instruction and encouragement of John Ball. In the second half of John Ball, Morris introduces a remarkable twist in the convention of the dream-vision, as the priest relinquishes his authoritative voice (after the discussion of his outlook on death, 16:263– 6), and meets his own authoritative figure – the narrator – in a private corner of the church. The narrator is reluctant at first, since the news he has is of the rebellion’s failure. He warms to his role when the conversation turns to the difference between the Victorian and medieval eras. ‘And now,’ proclaims the narrator, ‘hear a marvel: whereas thou sayest these two times that out of one man ye may get but one man’s work, in days to come one man shall do the work of a hundred men’ (16:278). As a visitor from 500 years in the future, the narrator can describe wonders both technological and social which surpass the wildest fancies of the fourteenth-century dream-vision, and which are all the more remarkable for being true. Neither figure is satisfied as a dreamer nor completely authoritative as a teacher, for as Ball says, ‘sorry and glad have we made each other’ (16:286). For Ball, disappointment lies in the fact that his attempt to understand the marvellous advances of the coming centuries results in a paradoxical frustration of his desire to see some gain in social equality resulting from them. The narrator may promise marvels, but he delivers only a ‘harvest of riddles’ (16:279). For the narrator (Morris), disappointment lies in the ending of the architectural dream (‘a great pain filled my heart at the sight of all that beauty,’ 16:287) and in the return to the sordid nineteenth century. Each speaker has something to learn and something to teach, as befits both the dream-vision’s use of authority and the very nature of the socialist dialogues. Moreover, each respects the other, and recognizes the value of what he is being told, in accordance with the socialist precept that all are equal. This mutual respect extends itself to Morris’s conviction that the denizens of the Middle Ages had a real flesh-andblood existence outside of the idealized pages of illuminated manuscripts and histories; accordingly, he has John Ball comment on the narrator that ‘thou art alive on the earth, and a man like myself’ (16:268). That is not to say that the narrator and John Ball may not be engaged

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in a mutual process of self-creation. As Ball tells the narrator, ‘thou hast been a dream to me, as I to thee’ (16:286); and it is certain that Morris created, as well as found, his medieval socialist precursor. The two seem to be constantly engaged in finding each other, from the moment in the church when, on the occasion of their inability to see eye to eye regarding the fate of the soul after death, Ball says, ‘there seemeth something betwixt us twain as it were a wall that parteth us’ (16:265). That wall never seems truly to go away, but grows and shrinks by turns: when he begins to prophesy the failure of the rebels, the narrator wonders that ‘somehow I could not heed him as a living man as much as I had done,’ even though he had a few moments earlier taken him by the hand (16:269, 264). In general, though, despite the talk of ‘walls’ between them, the two activists seem to have found fellowship with each other within the confines of their common dream-vision as well as in their having a common dream (of equality and social change). The narrator speaks of Ball as ‘the man himself whom I had got to know,’ and Ball’s last words to the narrator emphasize the kinship between the two still more fully: ‘since we have been kind and very friends, I will not leave thee without a wish of good-will, so at least I wish thee what thou thyself wishest for thyself, and that is hopeful strife and blameless peace’ (16:278, 286). Here again we see the theme of fellowship and, what is more, the close association of the narrator (Morris) with John Ball: ‘I wish thee what thou thyself wishest for thyself.’ The theme of hope is underlined again. ‘Now verily,’ says the priest, ‘hath the Day of the Earth come, and thou and I are lonely of each other again’ (16:286). Our revels now are ended, so the pattern goes, and we both return to our mundane everyday existence, bearing what we gained from our vision. But John Ball’s statement is an intriguing one for the dream-vision’s reader: if the ‘Day of the Earth’ has come, where were the two over the course of the nocturnal vigil in the church? It cannot be heaven, since Morris has gone to great pains to convey the impression of Ball and the narrator as men of flesh and blood; and it certainly takes place outside the everyday world of the two dreamers. The vigil seems to partake of both heaven and earth, of the ideal and the concrete, like the earthly paradise of the fourteenth-century dream-vision. In the dialogues of John Ball, Morris is not concerned so much with evoking a marvellous earthly paradise in the sense of a ‘garden dil[i]table’ (Chaucer, Romance of the Rose 1440) as with pointing the way

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to a socialist ideal. He is as concerned with a social earthly paradise as with an architectural one. When the narrator tells a tale of Iceland to the folk at the Rose, one of his listeners answers: ‘Yea, in that land was the summer short and the winter long; but men lived both summer and winter; and if the trees grew ill and the corn throve not, yet did the plant called man thrive and do well’ (16:224). The short summers and long winters of Iceland are a far cry from the blissful realms described in Pearl or The Romance of the Rose, but Morris still sees that society as ideal for its sense of fellowship and cooperation. In spite of the good weather for the duration of the dream’s action, Morris’s practical nature will not allow him to imagine a world with no ‘grevance ther of hoot ne colde’ (Parliament of Fowls 205). Lyman Tower Sargent characterizes the ideal life ‘when ye lack masters’ that John Ball predicts in his speech at the cross as ‘an idealized peasant society with a touch of the golden age or the Arcadia’ (66), but even the passage he quotes does not fail to acknowledge the possibility of times ‘when the seasons are untoward, and the raindrift hideth the sheaves in August’ (16:237). The architectural marvels of the town and church awe the narrator as well; when the narrator sees the church, which ‘quite ravished my heart with its extreme beauty, elegance, and fitness’ (16:218), his reaction is like that of the Romance of the Rose’s narrator, who is moved to exclaim of the garden ‘wel wende I ful sykerly / Haue ben in paradyse erthly’ (Chaucer 647–8). The narrator’s architectural dream is a pleasure to him, coming as he does from the sordid nineteenth century, but it is meant to move the reader towards a sense of the possibilities inherent in an art of the people rather than towards the return of some mythical golden age of medieval art. When Ball asks the narrator if he comes from ‘the King’s Son of Heaven,’ the answer is, of course, negative (16:268), and not only because Morris was a good socialist. The world of the dream in John Ball seems to be a world between heaven (the marvellous, the ideal) and the everyday (the human, the mundane), just as the concept of the earthly paradise recalls the interpenetration of flesh and spirit which Lynch recognizes in the dream-vision: ‘the relationship between [the dreamer’s] corporeal and spiritual natures’ (52). The earthly paradise as it appeared in the fourteenth-century dream-vision occupied an ideal between earth and heaven, partaking of both yet attaining to neither. None of Morris’s works dealing with the earthly paradise describe the attainment thereof. This, too, is in keeping with

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the spirit of the medieval visions. As Morris’s wanderers found in The Earthly Paradise and as the jeweller discovered in Pearl, the earthly paradise is unattainable for mortals. The earthly paradise exists then as something to be striven for. It is tied to a principle of hope very like Ernst Bloch’s: the ‘hopeful striving’ which John Ball evokes as the essence of his and the narrator’s philosophy partakes both of the ideal (Bloch’s ‘beyond,’ linked in medieval terms to the heavenly world of spirit) and the earthly (Bloch’s ‘what is,’ the everyday world of striving mortals). Like the wanderers in Morris’s Earthly Paradise, the socialists he describes in A Dream of John Ball are involved in a continuing process of venturing beyond: ‘If they have tried many roads towards freedom, and found that they led nowhither, then shall they try yet another’ (16:276). As Carole Silver remarks of the Prologue to The Earthly Paradise, ‘Morris’s use of the idea of perfect lives and perfect lands is tinged with irony, for he stresses the destructive aspects of man’s quests for them. To strive to build the age of gold in one’s own land is right; to seek escape from home and duty is to be doomed to waste and failure’ (58). It is an attitude which would remain with Morris into his later years of social activism, and it exonerates him from the charges of dreamy escapism which have dogged his writing since his death. Moreover, it follows that each person’s envisioned earthly paradise is unique to that individual, a fact which would be crucial to News from Nowhere, a work in which Morris developed his thinking on individual freedom and dissent. The ‘wall’ which exists between the narrator and John Ball is partly that of the great gap in time and social norms between the eras of Victoria and Richard II; but it is also the gap between two individuals, neither of whom, no matter how like-minded, can have precisely the same ideal as the other. Morris chooses to emphasize the similarities between his vision of an ideal world and Ball’s vision. The concept of ‘fellowship’ is meant to underline the notion that, in spite of any differences of socialist or religious doctrine, the rascal hedge-priest and the Victorian streetorator have certain aims (or ‘dreams’) in common. Such a call for cooperation would have appeared quite pointed in a movement plagued by internal strife from its inception in 1881. The dream-vision was a non-restrictive convention in spite of its didacticism. The dream-vision allowed for fantastic events, characters, and architectures; it made authoritative statements which were not meant as ‘final words’ on the subject, but were rather part of an

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ongoing dialectic; most importantly, like allegory it pointed towards an ideal which the reader was relied upon to discover actively. Although Morris believed he had an important message to convey, like his master Chaucer, he was under no illusions about the definitive nature of his message. When John Ball tells the narrator that ‘scarce do I know whether to wish thee some dream of the days beyond thine to tell what shall be, as thou hast told me, for I know not if that shall help or hinder thee’ (16:286), he is not only anticipating the yet-to-bewritten News From Nowhere, he is underlining the ambiguous nature of the dream experience as Morris and the fourteenth-century dreampoets saw it. The vision described in The Parliament of Fowls only made its dreamer desirous of dreaming more (692–4). Whether Ball’s and the narrator’s dream-vision is ultimately to be a help or a hindrance, its ‘true’ nature is purposely as elusive as the earthly paradise. Standing behind the solid visual detail in A Dream of John Ball is Morris’s ideal art of the people. For William Morris, the spirit of popular art expressed itself in those times when the worker was as free as possible to create; that spirit would thus be most fully developed in a communist society, attaining to new and ever-varied forms. To Morris, all this was inherent in the medieval literary tradition itself; his concern with the possibilities of life as they had been and as they might one day be in more creative epochs is a natural outgrowth of his immersion in the art and literature of the Middle Ages and of the dream-vision’s concern with the real and the ideal. The tangible relics of the past, the hopeful strife of the present, and the possibilities of the future combine in Morris’s dream-visions, which are no more imitations of Chaucer than his socialism is an imitation of Marx.

NOTE 1

In August 1887 Morris received from William Bell Scott a copy of the Kingis Quair that Scott had illustrated himself and printed privately for his friends. From Morris’s letter of thanks to Scott for the volume, it appears that Scott had sent a number of his etchings for the poem on to Morris some time before (Letters 2:685). This particular dream-vision may have been before Morris in a very visual form during the writing of A Dream of John Ball.

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11 ‘To Frame a Desire’: Morris’s Ideology of Work and Play David Latham

Debates over the extent to which Marx may have influenced Morris begin with Morris’s modest disclaimer about enjoying the historic parts of Das Kapital but finding the economics beyond him (‘How I Became a Socialist’ 380). Morris’s modest disclaimers should never be taken literally. He well understood the analysis of economics, but the question of whether it is correct to call him a Marxist is beside the point. The continuity of his interests in Gothicism in his early poetry and barbarism in his later prose romances suggests that Morris was a Marxist before he ever heard of Marx. Yet in his reaching beyond economics for his primary issue, he may be considered more than a Marxist. By examining the concept of work as a human activity, Morris, in Northrop Frye’s words, ‘started out, not with the Marxist question “Who are the workers?” but with the more deeply revolutionary question “What is work?”’ (‘Varieties’ 129). This is the revolutionary question Morris leaves us with at the awakening end of A Dream of John Ball: As the ‘frightful noise of the “hooters”... call[s] the workmen to the factories ... I grinned surlily, and dressed and got ready for my day’s “work” as I call it, but which many a man besides John Ruskin (though not many in his position) would call “play”’ (CW 16:288). Morris’s political vision may have been too original and profound for Friedrich Engels to understand when he dismissed Morris as typical of the sentimental English socialists. With his careful articulation of the beauty of natural life and the ugliness of the perverted system, of methods for evaluating work by measuring the quality of hope in it, of distinctions between idle dreamers who remain

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passively wistful and visionary artists who inspire change, Morris provides a most practical analysis of the most profound question concerning our basic need to integrate the deeds and dreams of our daily lives. His steadfast pursuit of this integrity may be documented by following the three political phases he moved through in his effort to inspire a socialist revolution: his aesthetic (1877–82), militant (1883– 90), and visionary (1891–6) phases. Morris is the first artist to devote an extensive body of literature to the question so fundamental to our well-being: how may we eliminate the distinction between work and play, between labour and pleasure in our lives? Until the industrial revolution extended the influence of the capitalist system over the majority of lives, work was seasonal by nature: people worked hard when there was work to be done and rested when the work was completed. Holidays were holy days for communal celebrations and festivities. They were busy days, not intended as a relief from work. The industrial factory-system changed the nature of work, regularizing it into a daily routine. The machines originally envisioned as freeing us from menial work instead have kept us busy every day. Agitation for a return to a mere semblance of the seasonal nature of work – in the form of a sequential row of holidays – was among the palliative measures Morris rejected as seducing the worker into coping with the capitalist system rather than rejecting it. This palliative ‘vacation’ – a word meaning ‘empty’ time – has become a fixture since the twentieth century. That the majority of a community could work for the purpose of enjoying an annual vacation, an empty time of rest from work, would have been incomprehensible to the Goths of the Mark. Morris saw it as living proof of the absurdity of the capitalist system. When ‘labour’ and ‘leisure’ are degraded as words, one as toil to be endured, the other as time to be slept or drunk away, then we are deprived of the vocabulary with which we articulate our thoughts and shape our dreams. What shall we do with our daily labour, Morris asks in ‘The Art of the People,’ when we become ‘wholly free and reasonable?... Shall all we can do with it be to shorten the hours to the utmost, that the hours of leisure may be long beyond what men used to hope for? and what then shall we do with the leisure, if we say that all toil is irksome? Shall we sleep it all away – yes, and never wake up again, I should hope, in that case’ (CW 22:33). In ‘Making the Best of It’ he continues the search for meaningful words to discuss our meaningless lives: ‘I was going to say leisure hours, but I don’t know how to, for if I were

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to work ten hours a day at work I despised and hated, I should spend my leisure I hope in political agitation, but I fear – in drinking’ (CW 22:115). His first public lecture was the first of his many critiques of the consequences of the capitalist system – the death of art – and his visions of the new socialist system required for a renewal of art. ‘The Decorative Arts’ was delivered on 4 December 1877 to the Trades Guild of Learning and published as a pamphlet in 1878 and as ‘The Lesser Arts’ in his collection of five lectures, Hopes and Fears for Art, in 1882. This discomfort with the name of his subject is the first point of the lecture: the decorative arts should not be some lesser subsection of art. The severing divorce of the greater arts of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting from the ‘so-called Decorative Arts’ (by which we strive ‘to beautify the familiar matters of everyday life’) bodes ‘ill for the Arts altogether: the lesser ones become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent,’ and subject to ‘fashion or dishonesty’; while the greater arts become elite and pompous, the ‘ingenious toys for a few rich and idle men.’ ‘Divorced,’ ‘severed,’ ‘fallen apart from one another,’ the arts cannot survive (CW 22:3–4). Morris next outlines the consequences such loss means for humanity. That too many of us give little notice to ornament signifies that the consequences are already upon us, since the very function of ornament is to sharpen our senses to prevent them from being dulled to ‘those things which we are always looking at.’ The arts provide the means by which humanity maintains its harmony with nature: ‘Everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent’ (CW 22:4). If we allow ourselves to grow dull and indifferent, oblivious to beauty and ugliness, then how can we recognize goodness from evil? Without the arts, humanity is left in isolation to become unnatural, perverse, demonic. Art is our saviour enabling us to live as godly creators in harmony with nature. The creative process is a godly activity: the craftsman weaves intricate patterns and invents strange forms in the way that nature does, ‘til the web, the cup, or the knife, look as natural, nay as lovely, as the green field, the river bank, the mountain flint’ (CW 22:5). When art is popular, when we all become artists, then ‘art will make our streets as beautiful as the woods, as elevating as the mountainsides’; it will make the streets where we live as beautiful as ‘the fields

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where beasts live’ (CW 22:26, 25). Our hellish civilizaton can look to the earthly beasts to find its heavenly direction. Morris never directly promises this apocalyptic earthly paradise, but rather evokes it subtly through his language. ‘Godly’ and ‘demonic’ and ‘saviour’ are words which Morris resists using, but they are the archetypal implications he exploits to inspire us to envision our resurrection from hellish hovels to a heavenly paradise on earth. Art is the aesthetic complement of beauty and nature, its creative process being the moral complement of goodness and godliness. Though couched in a discussion of the best kind of drawing to practise for ornamental work, the following is a rare instance of Morris moralizing aloud: ‘Teaching the scholar to draw the human figure’ would develop the ‘habit of discriminating between right and wrong,’ which ‘would really ... be an education in the due sense of the word’ (CW 22:20–1). The subtle apocalyptic allusions to spiritual resurrection are supported by the more obvious organic metaphors for natural renewal. But for the rhetorical power of the former, Morris is more comfortable with the Darwinian framework of the latter, revealing throughout his essay what would later be called a Spenglerian notion of civilization as an organism. The growth of art is ‘like all growth’ (CW 22:9): it blossoms for a season (22:6) and flourishes fruitfully for awhile, then grows into decay, but will ultimately ‘grow into something new’ (22:9). The death of art ‘will be but a burning up of the gathered weeds, so that the field may bear more abundantly ... Amidst its darkness the new seed must sprout’ (22:11). So full of hope is Morris that he cannot bear to speak of the winter of death that should follow the decay and burning of the fields; rather he turns from seasonal to diurnal imagery: we shall awaken from the dark night to a new dawn (22:12). The allusions to spiritual resurrection and the metaphors for natural regeneration prepare us to anticipate social revolution. Morris begins his lecture with a disarming disclaimer. Though his listeners may very much disagree with some of what he has to say, they should take faith in his belief that ‘all the change and stir about us is a sign of the world’s life’ and will lead ‘to the bettering of all mankind’ (CW 22:3). Hence, however disagreeable his ideas may be, they are part of the ‘change and stir’ of life. When later he returns to the imagery of this rhetorical disclaimer, he is much more forceful: ‘it is not by accident that an idea comes into the heads of a few; rather they are pushed on, and forced to speak or act by something stirring in the heart of the

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world’ (22:13). But first he further prepares us for the change and stir by surveying the relation of art and history in Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Scandinavia, and so forth. This survey places his own age in perspective: the present condition is not the condition of life, but merely a passing fashion; hence, we can shape our condition, revolutionize it. Anticipating the response of his audience, he confronts head-on the concept of ‘change’ as one that threatens us with fear of the unknown: ‘We who believe in the continuous life of the world, surely we are bound to hope that the change will bring us gain and not loss, and to strive to bring that gain about’ (CW 22:10). He sets the concepts of change within the context of images of continuity and progression contrasted with images of gyration and stagnation. Hope is not found in the sisyphusian-like circle ‘going on round about us.’ Encircling ourselves with stability is an act of fear. Hope lies in the evidence of change, of growth, of future development, and in the ‘little unexpected things’ that ‘have come to pass’ from ‘but a little way ahead’ (22:10). To resist change is to risk the damnation of the earth. That we can no more envision a world without art than our ancestors could imagine their fair county degraded into the hideous hovel of London should warn us of the consequences of maintaining the policies of our present system. What follows is Morris’s first critique of the capitalist system. He addresses the ‘counting-house’ mentality of commerce on its own terms: why can’t we ‘adorn life with the pleasure of cheerfully buying goods at their due price; with the pleasure of selling goods that we could be proud of both for fair price and fair workmanship; with the pleasure of working soundly and without haste at making goods that we could be proud of?’ (CW 22:22). With a measure of dispassionate control he answers with a paragraph-long critique of the passion of greed, the commercial ‘greed of unfair gain.’ Greed cumbers our path with the tangle of sham, the worst hindrance to overpass. Greed gathers ‘into heaps little and big’ worthless currency gathered for its own sake. Though attributed with false distinction, this rubble of money is not negligible, but rather as ‘tons upon tons of unutterable rubbish,’ it is a costly barrier raised up against the arts. Utility is the remedy for such vulgarity and pretence: ‘nothing can be a work of art which is not useful: that is to say, which does not ... amuse, soothe, or elevate’ the health of the mind (22:22–4). But this remedy is unattainable without popular support. Art cannot be cultivated in isolation

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by an elite: ‘I do not want art for a few, anymore than education for a few, or freedom for a few’: No, rather than art should live this poor thin life among a few exceptional men, despising those beneath them for an ignorance for which they themselves are responsible, for a brutality that they will not struggle with – rather than this, I would that the world should indeed sweep away all art for awhile, as I said before I thought it possible she might do; rather than the wheat should rot in the miser’s granary, I would that the earth had it, that it might have a chance to quicken in the dark. (CW 22:26)

Morris concludes with an assertion of his faith in humanity, imagining us as growing wiser and thereby working to establish a new society, one which acknowledges the centrality of art. At the beginning of this lecture he defined the two great offices of decoration that make it essential to our lives: ‘to give people pleasure in the things they perforce use’ and ‘to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make.’ Without these two great offices, ‘our rest would be vacant ... our labour mere endurance’ (CW 22:5). If we let the arts grow popular then they will beautify our labour, making it not a curse but a blessing. Now, at the conclusion of his lecture, he asserts that simplicity and utility will make labour and creativity one and the same, and that everyone ‘will have his share of the best’: ‘It is a dream, you may say, of what has never been and never will be; true, it has never been, and therefore, since the world is alive, and moving yet, my hope is the greater that it one day will be’ (CW 22:27). Recalling Tennyson’s Camelot (the city ‘built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built forever,’ ‘Gareth and Lynette,’ 272–4) and anticipating his later distinctions between dream and vision, Morris here delineates the nature of his dream and his practical hope. ‘And I am here with you tonight to ask you to help me in realizing this dream, this hope’ (CW 22:27). It is the request he would make again and again throughout the rest of his writings, keeping alive the hope for the duration of his life. ‘The Decorative Arts’ begins the early phase of his political prose, a five-year phase culminating in the 1882 publication of the collected volume Hopes and Fears for Art. We may call this his aesthetic-socialist phase, wherein he could still be considered as an aesthete whose topic was the death of art, a topic less disconcerting than political

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revolution. A reviewer of ‘The Decorative Arts’ thus entitled his review ‘The Decoration of Houses’ and found the pamphlet inspiring: Morris dreams that all public buildings will have beauty and splendour and all private dwellings reveal ‘every man’s share of the best’ (‘Decoration’ 127). A reviewer of ‘Some Hints on House Decoration’ (retitled ‘Making the Best of it’ in Hopes and Fears for Art) praised the lecturer as noble: the greatest living master of house decoration is like the perennially attractive wild rose that never succumbs to the whims of fashion (Review of ‘Some Hints’ 14). The reviews of Hopes and Fears for Art were predominantly positive: Morris is applauded in the Athenaeum for writing with refreshing optimism about the beautification of labour through art (Review of Hopes 374–5) and in the Fortnightly Review for his ‘unextinguished hopefulness’ that life can be improved by changing our notions about the three categories of work – ‘mechanical, intelligent, and imaginative’ (Simcox 771). The next phase of his political prose begins in 1883 and may be called his militant-socialist phase. It is not a phase he passed through and abandoned, but its focus extended from 1883 through 1890. Thereafter his focus on fiction might be called his visionary-socialist phase, though he continued to lecture occasionally, delivering his last addresses in January 1896. Predictably, the militant-socialist lectures were less well received. ‘Art under Plutocracy’ was delivered on 14 November 1883 at University College, Oxford, and pleased John Ruskin (Art of England 236)1 but not the college administrators: ‘Mr. Morris announced himself a member of a socialistic society and appealed for funds for the objects of the society. The Master of the University then said to the effect that if he had announced this beforehand it was probable that the College Hall would have been refused’ (‘Mr. W. Morris at Oxford’ 7). When seven of these socialist lectures were collected for publication in 1888 as Signs of Change, the reviews ranged from the damning – ‘Morris’s facts’ are wrong, his suggested reforms are unnecessary, his aspirations are bloodthirsty, and his view of human nature is entirely mistaken (‘Earthly Inferno’ 607–8) – to the bemused: ‘The charm of his pure, strong literary style’ makes this book a handy explanation of socialist doctrines and the transformation of this well admired man, carried away by his hatred for a system requiring complete change rather than tinkering, is of psychological interest (Westminster Review 130 [July 1888]: 237–9). Though these militant-socialist lectures have essentially the same message as the earlier lectures, Morris had now refined his appeal for

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social revolution with such clear, straightforward prose that his topic could no longer be safely rationalized as an aesthetic issue peripheral to society. ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil,’ ‘True and False Society,’ ‘How We Live and How We Might Live,’ ‘Work, as It Is and as It Might Be,’ ‘Misery and the Way Out’: the titles typify the dialectical approach he takes in identifying the absurdities of capitalism and in envisioning the socialist alternative. ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’ will serve as an example of his procedure. It was first delivered on 16 January 1884 to the Hampstead Liberal Club, published as a pamphlet in 1885 by the Socialist League, and reprinted in the Signs of Change in 1888. A semblance of the disarming rhetoric of his earlier lectures is exploited briefly in his introduction, but only in the form of a humorous portrait of the ‘happy worker’ cheered on by the well-to-do. This image of the work ethic – ‘the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself’ – is derided as ‘a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others’ (CW 23:98). But it is derided with humour; it is not yet condemned as the ‘semi-theological dogma,’ the ‘hypocritical praise of all labour’ (23:119, 98). Morris begins with the leavening humour of Horatian satire, moves on to the objective tone of a deductive analysis of the nature of work, and reaches the climax with a Juvenalian irony that is momentarily more bitter than Jonathan Swift’s darkest moments: more bitter because Morris is speaking openly and directly without the comforting distance of a persona when he envisions ‘the slaughter of men by actual warfare’ as all we can presently hope for: ‘the best we can hope to see is that struggle [to end class strife] getting sharper and bitterer day by day, until it breaks out openly at last into the slaughter of men by actual warfare instead of by the slower and crueller methods of “peaceful” commerce’ (23:119). A pacifist by nature, Morris was forced by his analysis of capitalism to recognize with heart-wrenching reluctance that a violent revolution was inevitable. Otherwise the capitalist system would continue to destroy the lives of multitudes. He could only hope to limit the resistance by inspiring the vast majority to support the revolution. Hence in this lecture he analyzes how we waste our lives through useless toil and demonstrates how we could elevate our lives through useful work. The subtext of the whole lecture is the dichotomy of the natural life and the perverted system. Thus, when he begins with the hypothesis that man ‘must either labour or perish’ as one that should be met with common agreement, he is leaving aside for the moment the reality

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of our system wherein the working class supports a leisure class. If man must labour or perish, then nature should ‘give some compensation for the compulsion to labour,’ as she does with other ‘acts necessary to the continuance of life,’ making them ‘not only endurable, but even pleasurable.’ Yet if it is in man’s nature to take pleasure in his work, then why is work so often considered as more a curse than a blessing? The answer is that natural work has been degraded to useless toil. Useful work is blessed with hope in it, is a lightening of life, and is manly to do; useless toil is a curse, a burden to life, and is unmanly to do (CW 23:98–9).2 To restore pleasure and dignity to labour, Morris establishes a means to evaluate our work by measuring the quality of hope accompanying it. The quality is found to be threefold. Its first degree is the hope of rest: this is the hope of animal relief which must be long enough to enjoy without anxiety. If we have this first hope, then ‘we shall, so far, be no worse off than the beasts.’ Second is the hope of product: this is the hope of productive achievement, producing something really worth having and using ‘by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic.’ If we have this second hope, then ‘we shall, so far, be better than machines.’ Third is the hope of pleasure in the work itself: this is the hope of ‘our daily creative skill,’ the conscious pleasure in the creativity of exercising the mind and soul as well as the body. Memory, imagination, and the tradition of the human race help him as he works, as he creates. If we have this third hope, ‘we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful’ (CW 23:99–100). This threefold hierarchy of the work ideal counters the threefold hierarchy of our class system. The first is meant to establish a trinitarian depth of hope in rest, productivity, and creativity which should be the universal experience of our daily lives. The other is the stratifying hierarchy of the capitalist system that segregates us into classes pitted against one another. The working classes merely hope for animal rest, but because they must work to produce the waste of luxuries for the leisure class and then produce cheap sham to feed, clothe, and house themselves as slaves, they have no rest and are therefore ‘worse off than mere beasts of the fields’ (CW 23:100). The middle classes live under the pretence that they are productive, but their competitive salesmanship – ‘the puffery of wares’ – makes nothing other than profits, so that ‘there are many things which cost more to sell than they do to make’ (23:103). These middle classes work hard, produce nothing, and hope only to gain for their children the status of

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the idle aristocracy – ‘the proud position of being obvious burdens on the community’ (23:102). They are therefore worse off than the machines. As for the leisure classes, if any of them live under the pretence that they cultivate their minds and souls, Morris wastes no words to even hint of any such delusion. He defines them merely as burdensome consumers, wasteful parasites, shameful robbers. The degradation from the natural life of useful work to the perverted system of useless toil is thus complete. This degradation extends to our language, as the derivation of words reveals how our present misuse of a word distorts its root. ‘Manufacturer’ is ‘most absurdly so called, since a manufacturer means a person who makes with his hands’ (CW 23:109). A modern manufacturer has no interest in producing real ‘goods.’ Rather, as the master of a monopolized labour-power, he produces profits by creating a false ‘demand’ for sham ‘supplies’ in a rigged ‘market’ (23:110). To rectify this degradation, ‘we must be resolute in getting rid of’ the capitalist system. Then to make ‘labour attractive’ we must ‘get the means of making labour fruitful, the Capital, including the land, machinery, factories, etc., into the hands of the community, to be used for the good of all alike, so that we might all work at supplying the real “demands” of each and all – that is to say, work for livelihood ... instead of working for profit – i.e. the power of compelling other men to work against their will’ (23:110). As with his evaluation of useful work by means of his analysis of the threefold quality of hope, Morris again moves beyond economic analysis to ask how can ‘all labour, even the commonest ... be made attractive’ (CW 23:111). His answer is fourfold: work must have a useful end; work must be short in duration; work must have variety; and work must have pleasant surroundings. Though he elaborates on each of the four criteria, their virtuous simplicity aptly answers the despair of those who know not where to begin. Another fourfold set of criteria ‘for decent life’ was made in his lecture ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’: ‘First, a healthy body; second, an active mind in sympathy with the past, the present, and the future; thirdly, occupation fit for a healthy body and an active mind; and fourthly, a beautiful world to live in’ (CW 23:25). These two passages differ in tone more than in content. They mark the carefully limited bounds within which Morris ranges between the practical and the idealistic tone. While the idealist inspires us to envision new orders, the practical socialist must prove they are within our reach. ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’ is persistently practical. Even when Morris envisions the

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day when labour will be synonymous with art, enabling art to arise ‘again amongst people freed from the terror of the slave and the shame of the robber,’ we feel the burden of the present more than the flight of the future. Having started gently with an amused observation of the irony of our condition, the lecture now concludes with an urgent plea to accept the shocking reality of the paradoxical solution – ‘the strife for peace.’ The ‘perpetual strife of opposing classes’ must be replaced with peace, but we cannot ‘win peace peaceably’ (23:119). The vague hope of ridding ourselves of the burden of capitalism ‘as if by magic’ by making changes in the voting system is nothing more than a superstitious faith in magic (23:101). We cannot hope that the defenders of a system devoid of reason will be reasonable men with whom we may negotiate; rather we are ‘hemmed in by wrong and folly’ and must ‘always be fighting against them.’ Or at least until we live to see the rich classes slaughtering men by warfare rather than by commerce: ‘then the end will be drawing near’ (23:119). The lecture closes with another development in Morris’s pursuit of hope and vision. Dream is now replaced by a definition of vision. We begin with steadfast commitment, the eye keeping in view the single aim for the future. The reflection of the future will illuminate the reality of our present condition and thereby inspire others to envision a new social order. To inspire others to share the socialist vision: such was the duty, Morris contended, of the nineteenth-century socialist. When people are ‘prepared to manage their own business themselves ... to believe in their own capacity to undertake the management of affairs, and to be responsible for their life in this world,’ then we can expect to rid ourselves of the master-slave system (‘Where Are We Now’ 362). This was the argument he repeated in his last editorial for The Commonweal (15 November 1890), a moving but sobering editorial written amidst the disintegration of the Socialist League by anarchist factions. He warns that neither palliation by the Parliamentarians nor partial rioting by a few anarchists will disturb the masters who control us. Socialists must therefore continue their duty to educate the public for mass revolution. His editorial was answered in the next issue by the anarchists who accused him of committing ‘a gross abuse of language’ (29 November 1890: 381–2). Clearly they wanted to fight with Morris. One anarchist refuted the power of the master’s control on the grounds that death enables any rebel to end such control. Another anarchist added that scientific force enables anyone to carry enough dynamite

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in his pocket to destroy a thousand soldiers. With such comrades as these, Morris withdrew from the Socialist League to form his own Hammersmith Socialist Society, and turned his attention from Commonweal lectures to Kelmscott romances. This political transition is nearly as misunderstood as his alleged ‘revolt’ in poetry from The Defence of Guenevere to The Earthly Paradise.3 Socialists, like E.P. Thompson, regretted it as a self-indulgent return to irrelevant art, dismissing the romances as fairy stories written for Morris’s private pleasure. Conservatives, like J.W. Mackail, welcomed ‘the full and unreserved return of the author to romance ... that glittering world, rich with all imagined wonders, into which Morris had entered long ago, and the doors of which always remained open to him’ (2:242). The transition to fiction was neither sudden nor reactionary. While he was writing his militant-socialist lectures, he was writing his fictional account of the revolutionary peasants of fourteenth-century England in A Dream of John Ball (1886–7 [serialized], 1888); his fictional account of the ‘tribal communism’ of barbarism in The House of the Wolfings (1889) and The Roots of the Mountains (1890); his fictional account of the socialist society of twenty-first-century England in News from Nowhere (1890 [serialized], 1891); and he returned to mythical barbarism in The Glittering Plain (1890 [serialized], 1891). Wherever one may dare to locate the transition, it led to the culmination of his political development from aesthetic socialism, through militant socialism, to visionary socialism. The initial reviewers had no trouble recognizing the continuity in his thought. The Story of the Glittering Plain was read as presenting Morris’s views on the socialist cause with ‘genuine poetic quality and fragrance’ (Westminster Review 138 [July 1892]: 102–3). The Wood Beyond the World was interpreted as a socialist allegory in which the Maid, personifying Labour, wins the Lady, personifying Capital (Spectator 13 July 1895: 52–3). Though Morris responded with a letter in the next issue indignantly refuting this allegorical interpretation, his refutation is not a denial of the romance’s social significance. The prose romance is not a lecture cloaked in romantic garb, nor a didactic fable with a specific message. Rather the romance provides the medium for Morris to express and to experience his social values. His lectures incite discontent with the brazen world; his romances inspire us to envision a golden world. Yeats described The Well at the World’s End as Morris’s prophetic vision of a perfect life, and said that Morris ‘more than any man of modern days tried to change the life of his time into the life of his dream’ (37).

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Like all great artists who turn from tragedies to romances as the culmination of their careers, Morris embraced the romance genre as the most self-consciously artistic, the genre least bound by the strictures of verisimilitude, thus freeing himself from the hindrances of reflecting the routine details of a recognizable life. Stressing instead the communal values of equality in relationships, Morris turns to the ideal art of romance as a means to express his own vision of reality more clearly. In his essay on ‘The Society of the Future,’ Morris distinguishes visionaries from dreamers. Visionaries are practical people (190). And he distinguishes art from academicism. Genuine artists are not ‘mere rhetorical word-spinners and hunters of introspection [but are] masters of life’ who ‘make the eyes tell the mind tales of the past, present, and future’ (199). The prose romances serve this practical purpose, providing what ‘Ellen’s last mournful look seemed to say’ to the awakening guest of News from Nowhere: ‘Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship – but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives – men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness.’ Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream. (228)

If literature is so practical and prophetic, clarifying our own sense of reality and inspiring visions of the ‘past, present, and future,’ then why is it not central to the lives of the characters who inhabit the socialist society of News from Nowhere? The first reference in News from Nowhere to literature is dismissive: an inquisitor is chided for behaving like a character in those ‘silly old novels’ (56). It is further dismissed as a weakness to spend ‘time in writing reactionary novels,’ an antiquarian hobby ‘on much the same footing’ as mathematics (60). When an old ‘grumbler’ is nostalgic about

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the good old days, he complains that the books of the competitive presocialist age ‘are much more alive than those which are written now ... There is a spirit of adventure in them, and signs of a capacity to extract good out of evil which our literature quite lacks now’ (174). His conclusion that ‘such splendid works’ must mean that historians have exaggerated the ‘unhappiness of the past days’ undermines his credibility and prepares us for Ellen’s response: ‘Books, books! always books, grandfather! When will you understand that after all it is the world we live in which interests us; the world of which we are a part, and which we can never love too much? Look!‘ she said, throwing open the casement wider and showing us the white light sparkling between the black shadows of the moonlit garden, through which ran a little shiver of the summer night-wind, ‘look! these are our books in these days! – and these,’ she said, stepping lightly up to the two lovers and laying a hand on each of their shoulders. (175)

As the guest listens to her he cannot help ‘thinking that if she were a book, the pictures in it were most lovely’ (175). She is compared to a picture because she is designed to demonstrate her argument that those who inhabit the happy and healthy world of fellowship are living lives that are the embodiment of art. Ellen continues with a contrasting critique of the alleged ‘social realism’ of Victorian novels whose closures provide the predictable reconciliations that lend stability to the prevalent social order: As for your books, they were well enough for times when intelligent people had but little else in which they could take pleasure, and when they must needs supplement the sordid miseries of their own lives with imaginations of the lives of other people. But I say flatly that in spite of all their cleverness, and capacity for story-telling, there is something loathsome about them. Some of them, indeed, did here and there show some feeling for those whom the history-books call ‘poor,’ and of the misery of those lives we have some inkling; but presently they give it up, and towards the end of the story we must be contented to see the hero and heroine living happily in an island of bliss on other people’s troubles; and that after a long series of sham troubles (or mostly sham) of their own making, illustrated by dreary introspective nonsense about their feelings and aspirations, and all the rest of it; while the world must even then have gone on its way,

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and dug and sewed and baked and built and carpentered round about these useless – animals. (175–6)

The social relevance of serious art, the social role of the serious artist, the liberal notion that cultural pursuits can elevate humanity: Morris dismisses our patience with such conventional dreams as the delusions of Fabian-like reformists who place their faith in evolutionary progress. The ideal society is not one that cultivates an appreciation of literary genius but rather one that encourages everyone to be imaginative. In News from Nowhere fairy tales are more appreciated than novels, folk art more appreciated than the neoclassical. Of the two BMs, the British Museum is now considered as ‘rather an ugly old building’ (86), whereas the Bloomsbury Market is decorated with murals and friezes depicting subjects from fairy tales. When William Guest is surprised that everyone now knows these tales ‘from the childhood of the world, barely lingering even in his time,’ his host responds: ‘I think them very beautiful, I mean not only the pictures, but the stories; and when we were children we used to imagine them going on in every wood-end, by the bight of every stream: every house in the fields was the Fairyland King’s House to us’ (130). The fairy tales are more relevant than novels because the adults of the socialist society have lost none of their childhood wonder for the world. Seeing Ellen in the hayfield, the host, with his wife, imagines they are in fairyland: ‘Look, Guest,’ said Dick; ‘doesn’t it all look like one of those very stories out of Grimm that we were talking about up in Bloomsbury? Here are we two lovers wandering about the world, and we have come to a fairy garden, and there is the very fairy herself amidst of it.’ (179)

In ‘How I Became a Socialist,’ Morris defines ‘the province of art’ as setting the ‘true ideal’ before us, helping to ‘frame a desire’ for a ‘full and reasonable life’ (383). In News from Nowhere this noble aim is no longer needed, for the characters have achieved the true ideal, their lives being the embodiment of their imaginations. The ideals of love and beauty once found only in the imaginations of a few geniuses and recorded in their books to share with us are now embodied by every man and woman alive. In this new society, carving a pipe and cutting a field of hay are no less artistic activities than writing a novel. But can the pretty pipe be

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as important as the serious novel? Can the child’s delight in a fairy tale approach the adult’s appreciation of an epic poem? Morris’s analysis of work, of the relation of life and labour, provides a revolutionary answer. The aesthetic question is answered with a political question. Whether or not we agree that the condition of the worker will improve the aesthetic quality of art is immaterial, because Morris denies the commercial contention that the aim of society is to produce the best possible product. He considers the process as more important than the product, the worker as more important than the work. If in our commercial society the province of art is to inspire visions of the ideal, in the ideal society of the future art assumes its proper definition: ‘Art is mankind’s expression of his joy in labour’ (‘Art under Plutocracy’ 67). Art then will no longer be sundered into the greater and lesser arts; it will be the universal labour of love. In The Story of the Glittering Plain, Hallblithe arrives at an island in search of his kidnapped betrothed. Its glittering plain is precisely the paradise dreamed of and searched for by the Wanderers of The Earthly Paradise: it is ‘the acre of the undying,’ the land of eternal life. As Hallblithe compares his homeland with this paradise, he reveals himself as belonging not with the idle-dreaming Wanderers of The Earthly Paradise but with the haymaking artists of News from Nowhere: He fell a-pondering what they twain, he and the Hostage, should do when they came together again; whether they should abide on the Glittering Plain, or go back again to Cleveland by the Sea and dwell in the House of the kindred; and for his part he yearned to behold the roof of his fathers and to tread the meadow which his scythe had swept, and the acres where his hook had smitten the wheat. (CW 14:263)

Hallblithe is an artist in search of the ideal social order: ‘I seek no dream but rather the end of dreams’ (14:273). This same distinction between the wistful dreamer and the active artist is made by John Ball: ‘It is for him who is lonely or in prison to dream of fellowship, but for him who is of fellowship to do and not to dream’ (CW 16:234). ‘To do and not to dream’: by now we recognize that the distinction is not between the political and the poetical. Aside from those casual readers over the years who have accused Morris of abandoning his political commitment for an escapist pastime of printing Kelmscott editions of his prose romances, there are more careful readers who

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have accused him of abandoning his purist commitment to socialist revolution to support an evolutionary process of electing reformists in Parliament. This alleged reformist phase would suggest an aboutface turn-around, a fourth phase of Morris’s socialism that would signal an awakening from his visionary dream of the ideal to the rude reality of pragmatic compromise. Some of his statements in 1894 might indeed suggest such a disillusionment with his visionary aims and a resigned acceptance of what he had steadfastly warned against: a pragmatic pursuit of palliatives for labour reform as the stepping stones for an evolutionary path towards socialism. In January 1894 he acknowledged that there were ‘two methods’ for implementing socialism: ‘open armed insurrection on the one hand; the use of the vote, to get hold of the executive, on the other hand’ (qtd in E.P. Thompson 611). Because the workers had chosen to pursue the Parliamentary vote, Morris conceded that socialists would have to support this clearly voiced choice. But his support marked no serious abandonment of his original aims; it reveals rather his determination to pull together the competing factions of socialists. His last repeated political speech, delivered on 30 March and 30 October 1895, is a direct address to the workers, and it is a careful balance of the militant and the visionary. Exploiting the monetary discourse of evolutionary progress practised alike by the reformists and capitalists, Morris professes his reaffirmation that a socialist order can be achieved only through revolution: the ‘upward movement of labour’ cannot continue to progress ‘otherwise than by disturbance and suffering of some kind.’ Its triumph ‘will have to be paid for like other good things, and that price will be no light one.’ Acknowledging the reluctance of labour reformers to pay such a price, he sharply challenges them to consider exactly what kind of seductive palliatives will they lobby for: Higher wages; more regular employment? Shorter working hours – better education for your children – old age pensions, libraries, parks, and the rest ... What else do you want? If you cannot answer the question straightforwardly I must say you are wandering on a road the outcome of which you cannot tell ... If you can answer it, and say Yes, that is all I want: then I say here is the real advice to give you: Don’t meddle with Socialism: make peace with your employers, before it is too late, and you will find that from them and their Committee, the House of Commons, you will get such measure of these things

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as will probably content you ... I must own that sometimes when I am dispirited I think this is all that the labour movement means: it doesn’t mean Socialism at all, it only means improvement in the condition of the working classes: they will get that in some terms or another – till the break up comes, and it may be a long way ahead. (‘What We Have to Look For’)

The stepping stones of small palliatives may mean some movement, but movement with too little direction, leading the lost over no new ground. Moreover, such movement is misdirected because it originates in the misguided polarization of labour and leisure. Such short-sighted dreams only prolong the wandering of the exiled. Morris challenges us to dream beyond the economic visions of Marx: we must dream not to improve the conditions of the working class but to utterly change the nature of work.4 Early in his career, as a twenty-two-year-old student of architecture, Morris identified his interests in life as ‘love and work; these two things only,’ and described the nature of his work: ‘My work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another’ (Letters 1:28). Throughout the rest of his career he lived the life of the political visionary holding up the hope and preparing the way for a future when we may all make our lives the embodiment of our dreams.

NOTES 1

2

3

4

Ruskin understood the ‘significant change which Mr. Morris made in the title of his recent lecture from Art and Democracy, to Art and Plutocracy’ and noted how Morris identified ‘excellence of work’ as being in ‘proportion to the joy of the workman’ (The Art of England 228, 236). A survey of his lectures demonstrates that Morris does not use ‘manly’ and ‘unmanly’ as gender distinctions, but rather as terms to distinguish the creative human from the bestial and the mechanical. For a discussion of Morris’s misunderstood shift from the dramatic intensity of his early lyrics to the ‘slackening’ muse of his later narratives, see Latham, ‘Literal and Literary Texts: Morris’s “Story of Dorothea.”’ For a discussion of Morris’s theories about the relationship between work and rest, see Latham, ‘Reading Aright,’ especially 122–5.

12 History Becomes Geography: Tracing Morris’s Later Thought Frederick Kirchhoff

The question that continues to intrigue me is ‘What did Morris really want?’ To some extent, the answer is not hard to find. If his socialist essays and works like News from Nowhere continue to ring true, it is because Morris grounded them in his own desire. He imagined a world in which he could imagine himself happy. But this happiness depends on a coming together of two things: knowing what you want and finding yourself at a time and place where you can have it. For a number of reasons, Morris was inclined to imagine the route to that time and place as a movement through time: in his earliest writings, a return to the Middle Ages; after he had become a socialist, a movement through history as conceived in Marxist thought. But these different routes are not alternate ways to the same place. The places they reach may have much in common, but they are not identical. ‘What Morris wanted,’ in other words, is not a constant, but an evolving goal. As he learned more about himself and the world, the goal, very naturally, changed. But within this process of evolution, Morris’s writings were not merely expressions of modified desire – the signs of what he thought he wanted at a particular time in his life; they were also efforts to explore and grapple with desire. To find out what he really wanted, he tested alternative possibilities in narrative. For Morris, I believe, the ultimate test of a proposition was not theoretical proof, but whether it felt right in a story. For this reason, one better understands Morris’s evolving sense of what it was he wanted by examining the representations of fulfilled desire in his writings. And in the case of his later work, these

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representations, as I suggested above, depend upon some form of history. In the present essay, I am interested in the ways in which Morris employs geography as a trope for this history. The trip to the backwoods or the wilderness that becomes a metaphoric journey backwards in time is a literary device of long standing. I want to focus on the function of this journey in two related works, the relationship between which has not always been appreciated: The Roots of the Mountains (1889) and News from Nowhere (1891). In the first, the journey is a trip upcountry to the origins of tribal culture; in the second, it is the well-known river journey up the Thames to Kelmscott. Both narratives depend upon history. One takes place in a reconstructed past, the other in an anticipated future. In addition, both also narrate experiences of historical recovery, in which a central figure returns in some way to a cultural past. It is in respect to this experience of recovery that travel becomes a trope for history. In News from Nowhere, general history consists in the various means – including extended historical narration – through which Guest is able to piece together the events that led to the future. But this information-gathering stage is replaced by something different in the final third of the book, in which Guest moves towards a more experiential grasp of what it means to live in Nowhere. But, of course, the effort notoriously fails. Guest never makes the ultimate connection and is, in the end, cast out. It may be useful to compare this failed quest with the successful quest Morris had just imagined in The Roots of the Mountains. Here, too, history plays two roles. Not only is the romance set in a particular historical period that determines its action, but Face-of-God’s personal narrative also entails his own discovery of tribal history. For the romance to work, history in both senses must be aligned with the workings of desire. (Face-of-God must learn what it is he should want and, at the same time, learn how to go about attaining it.) I would argue that Morris achieved this alignment by changing history itself. First, there is the matter of general history. The romance, which treats Germanic tribal culture at the time of the fifth-century Hun invasions, is a sequel to The House of the Wolfings (1888), in which Morris dealt with earlier conflicts between Romans and Goths. Ostensibly, both romances depict stages in the process through which Germanic tribes evolved into Gothic nations in the early Middle Ages.1 May Morris observed that the period covered by the two gothic romances was ‘of great interest to [her] Father,’ noting ‘many

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discussions ... at home on the facts and probabilities of these great folk-struggles’ (AWS 1:508), and she expressed a hope that ‘they will stand for something more than fantasy’ and ‘count a little as a contribution towards the study of early races and their doings’ (1:512). But, despite this link in purpose, the two narratives are really quite different. The House of the Wolfings is a socialist parable about the sacrifice of individualism for the well-being of the tribe. The Roots of the Mountains, while celebrating an ideal of tribal solidarity, demands nothing akin to this sacrifice. A kind of Bildungsroman, centring on the development of its central figure, Face-of-God, it balances an affirmation of tribal solidarity with an equally powerful affirmation of the role of the individual. It says – in other words – that you can have both things. Indeed, it may suggest that happiness itself depends on having both things: that in imagining ‘what he really wanted’ Face-of-God proved a more believable model than the Wolfing Thiodulf. Historically, men like Face-of-God parlayed tribal leadership into hereditary kingship. Morris sidesteps this outcome. This in itself may signify little, but, put together with other elements of the romance, it suggests that The Roots of the Mountains is less an attempt to dramatize a certain moment in early medieval history than it is a carefully conceived alternative to the events that actually happened. There is, admittedly, little effort to connect the narrative with recorded history. In explaining why The Roots of the Mountains relied less on poetry than The House of the Wolfings, Morris observed that ‘the condition of the people I am telling of is later (whatever the date may be)’ and described them simply as ‘people living in a place near the great mountains’ (Letters 3:24). The setting – which I take to be somewhere near the high Alps – is deliberately obscure, as is the time at which the events take place. Burgdale, where the action begins, is a valley with mountains to the north and east, hills to the south, and an opening in the west to ‘the great plain’ (2) with its cities, from which merchants come annually to trade and to which the Burgdalers and their allies contribute mercenary soldiers. These cities, I assume, are what is left of the western Roman empire. But the romance never mentions Rome and, while it seems reasonable to place Burgdale in northern Italy where there is, indeed, a ‘great plain’ and where, in the fifth century, there were indeed prosperous cities, Morris does not make this identification explicit. Similarly, the Hun invasions are portrayed, not as the quick attacks May Morris refers to by ‘wild

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horsemen,’ but as a gradual infiltration here and there by companies of men.2 Indeed, the romance does not give these invaders the name ‘Huns,’ but instead refers to them simply as the ‘Dusky Men.’ Nor does their invasion correspond to the actual Hun invasion of Roman territory – their sudden incursion into Gaul in 451, where they were defeated by a ‘Roman’ force that was largely German, or their abortive invasion of northern Italy the following year, which saw the sack and pillage of Milan, all terminating in Attila’s death in 453. Indeed, the only reason to call the invaders ‘Huns’ is their ugly appearance – the one feature of the Huns about which there seems to have been general agreement. Face-of-God’s first sight of the Dusky Men emphasizes this fact: ‘they were short of stature, crooked-legged, long-armed, very strong for their size: with small blue eyes, snubbed-nosed, wide-mouthed, thinlipped, very swarthy of skin, exceeding foul of favour’ (Roots 90).3 While it would be a mistake to hold Morris to a strict historical accounting, his revisions of history deserve notice. The real enemy of the Burgdalers would not have been Huns, but other Germanic people displaced by the Huns. At the same time, if the Burgdalers actually fought Huns, they would have done so with other Germanic peoples in league with the Romans. By ignoring these facts, Morris’s alternative history accomplishes two significant ends: it makes the Burgdalers’ defence of their homeland a conflict between different races (rather than an internal Germanic conflict), with the racial difference underlined by the physical repellence of the Dusky Men – the description of which recalls Nazi depictions of Jewish physiognomy; and, at the same time, Morris’s revision of history also denies the Burgdaler’s connection with the Romans. This is not the only sign of Morris’s effort to deny the influence of Rome on his happy tribesmen. The German peoples who made homes for themselves within the borders of the Roman Empire had high respect for Roman technology, which they adopted whenever possible. Many of them were also Christianized. The tribesmen of Burgdale hold to their old religion and have little use for anything Roman – although their stone buildings, particularly those with lead roofs, show a distinct Roman influence. Remarkably, the merchants come to Burgdale to buy swords made by the alderman Iron-Face, which appear to be of better manufacture than those forged in the cities. In other words, Morris depicts a society that has adopted – even improved upon – Roman technology without compromising its

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primitive Germanic culture, one that has become medieval (or quasimedieval) without becoming Christian. The Burgdalers – and related tribes – worship the god of earth, a version of the god Tuisto described in Tacitus’s account of Germanic religion. As an historical moment, the romance pretends to depict the circumstances through which isolated tribes were united into a larger people, and this, to some extent, is what occurs. But Morris portrays this unification as a casting out of the alien and a reaffirmation of traditional values shared by closely related and pretty good-looking tribes. The narrative explicitly questions the value of assimilation that goes beyond this rule. Intermarriage by the Men of the Wolf with a tribe not close of kin resulted, we are told, in a ‘blended Folk,’ who, ‘as the generations passed became softer than our blood, and many were untrusty and greedy and tyrannous, and the days of the whoredom fell upon us’ (114). Racial purity, in other words, is a definitive value – and a value linked, at least in this context, to Morris’s notion of fulfilled desire. But, in fact, the unification of tribes occurred precisely through a process of wide-scale assimilation that replaced traditional Germanic values with the amalgam of the Germanic and the classical we know as the Middle Ages. A history that sought to trace this process would point to this outcome. But The Roots of the Mountains celebrates a return, rather than the movement to a new stage in history. As such it offers less an alternative history of the early Middle Ages than an alternative to any such history. It describes precisely what did not happen. It does not lead to the present as Morris knew it but to an alternative present, for the conclusion of the romance – its integration of history and desire – depends on the rejection of the historical record itself. And in this respect, Burgdale is less the model of a real Germanic community than it is another version of Nowhere. If you try to get there by going backwards in history, you will not find the place. The other aspect of history in The Roots of the Mountains takes us to a similar end. Seen as a Bildungsroman, the romance traces Face-ofGod’s passage from adolescence into adulthood. Early in the narrative, his father, noting the young man’s restlessness, offers to let him go back with the merchants to experience the life of the cities and possibly earn glory for himself as a soldier. In other words, he offers him the process of assimilation that was in fact the historical fate of the Germanic tribes. Face-of-God prefers to travel in the opposite direction. Exploring the mountain forest, he has already encountered a mysterious and irresistibly beautiful woman and her warrior

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brother. His attraction to this woman leads him to break with the woman of his own people he was expected to marry (the Bride), and in this respect his heroism violates a tribal and familial bond. But, in fact, Sun-Beam belongs to a kindred tribe that, largely on account of adversity, has preserved traditional ways more successfully than the Burgdalers. Moreover, the place where she promises to meet him, a narrow dale high in the mountains with ‘a doom ring of black stones’ (104) represents a return to this common past. (One should note that this doom ring has symbolic value akin to Kelmscott village in News from Nowhere.) The alternatives, in other words, are either descent to assimilation or ascent to racial purity, and Face-of-God chooses ascent and purity. For Face-of-God to climb up the mountain was in effect a rejection of the processes that shaped the history of early medieval Europe. Moreover, here, explicitly, the recovery of a cultural past is imaged as a geographic journey. History has become geography. Arguably, a rejection of the historical process is the project of the romance itself. At least one might draw this conclusion from the verse Morris printed on the title page of the romance: Whiles carried o’er the iron road, We hurry by some fair abode; The garden bright amidst the hay, The yellow wain upon the way, The dining men, the wind that sweeps Light locks from off the sun-sweet heaps – The gable grey, the hoary roof, Here now – and now so far aloof. How sorely then we long to stay And midst its sweetness wear the day, And ‘neath its changing shadows sit, And feel ourselves a part of it. Such rest, such stay, I strove to win With these same leaves that lie herein.

Here, the railway – that typical Victorian symbol for historical change – is juxtaposed to the timeless world of traditional agricultural England. To read the romance is to make oneself a part of that world, to enter into a state of ‘rest’ and ‘stay.’ But do not these terms also apply to News from Nowhere, which Morris subtitled An Epoch of Rest? And is not reading The Roots of the Mountains therefore another way to

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get to Nowhere – an alternative to history – an alternative to socialist revolution itself? There are no mountains in News from Nowhere, but there is a journey upstream towards the source of a river that is equivalent to the mountain ascents of The Roots of the Mountains (which characteristically follow the bed of a stream). Ascending the mountain, journeying against the current up the River Thames to a grey-gabled house with a hoary roof, reading the ‘leaves’ of this romance – all have a similar purpose: the recovery of stasis through disconnection from historical process. And when history becomes geography, this is precisely what happens. Time stops. Or at least it becomes a matter of choice. The passenger does not have to stay on the train. The real world is static; the experience of time, an accident. Put another way, when history is replaced by geography, time loses its power to dominate human activity. Obviously time continues to pass, but human beings experience it in a different way. Within history, the awareness of time creates a consciousness that disconnects one from the world. One is aware of loss and change and difference – the components of an essentially tragic vision. In contrast, the comic vision of Nowhere sees time as a cycle of aesthetic permutations. And, significantly, they are permutations in which human beings participate. ‘I can’t look upon it as if I were sitting in a theatre seeing the play going on before me, myself taking no part of it,’ Dick says. ‘I am a part of it all’ (News 225). At the conclusion of News from Nowhere, the timeless world of the utopian future, where everyone seems eternally childlike, gives way to ‘a black cloud rolling along to meet’ the narrator (228). It is significant that this cloud is ‘rolling along’ – that it is a thing in motion. The thrust of the preceding narrative has been away from motion. The journey up the Thames takes the narrator to a place where movement is no longer necessary. Having got back to Kelmscott, what is there for the narrator to do? Essentially nothing. The narrative grinds to a halt because there is nothing of significance that can happen – at least in the way ‘significance’ is defined by nineteenth-century narrative art. But the ‘static’ end of Guest’s journey is also a clarification of his own desire: the confrontation with what it is he really wants – or does not want – as a human being. But what he really wants turns out to be a kind of fixed anteriority: a primal human relationship to ‘the earth, and the seasons, and weather’ (220). He confronts, in some sense, the Burgdalers’ worship of their God of Earth, now redefined as

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a provincial English love of the natural world. But attaining this new understanding also entails his exclusion from Utopia. The very fact that he learns something means that he does not really belong there. Because his first-hand knowledge of the past gives Guest an understanding of history, he is ultimately excluded from a world in which a complex modern consciousness, with its grasp of loss and difference, has no place. To consider what it takes to stay in Utopia, I would like to return to The Roots of the Mountains. One of the first things that strikes the reader of this romance is the significant role played by physical geography. This role is suggested by the title itself. ‘The Roots of the Mountains’ is a place but it is also the geological origin of a place. But the romance is about cultural roots as well. Geology and culture are thus in a strange way interchangeable. Significantly, the romance begins with a long account of Burgdale, starting with a detailed survey of its geology and, eventually, moving on to some general statements about its human inhabitants and their socio-economic relationships. No named character appears until the second chapter. It is as if Morris needed to construct this place in his imagination before he could invent the characters who live there: characters who belong to this place in a way that Guest was never able to belong to a post-revolutionary Upper Thames Valley. Moreover, physical geography also plays an important role in the narrative proper. Face-of-God’s journey to the Shadowy Vale – the place where he encounters the ring of black stones – is characterized by a careful depiction of the mountain terrain through which he passes. Page after page, the narrative ignores the consciousness of the hero and instead focuses on rocks and vegetation. There are similar transitional passages elsewhere in the romance. This turning away from the consciousness of its central figures is a way, of course, to avoid turning the romance into a novel. I have always admired Patrick Brantlinger’s 1975 article treating News from Nowhere as an ‘anti-novel.’ One might build on this interpretation by reading the descriptions of physical geography in a work like The Roots of the Mountains as a substitution for the portrayal of consciousness as it had come to be defined by the psychological novel: a consciousness characterized by its awareness of change and alternative possibilities. So conceived, the perception of geography is not a metaphoric representation of thought. Rather, it is a special kind of thought that has been liberated from the modern consciousness of

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time and thus leads to things like worship of the earth god or an unmediated appreciation of Kelmscott Manor. In other words, where Morris had used the re-creation of history in his earlier writing to get at what he wanted to believe was some basic truth, in the late romances, he uses geography. And this substitution entails a transformation of the nature of that basic truth itself, which is now linked to notions of racial origin and a racial ideal of physical beauty as immutable as stone. Face-of-God, a man whom all women and many men seem unable to resist, embodies this ideal. And, as his name implies, it is also the look of God. You would not want to change that look, even if you could. The romances Morris wrote after News from Nowhere and The Roots of the Mountains explore and thereby complicate these issues. The subordination of the hero to geographical determinants breaks down even in The Roots of the Mountains, both as Face-of-God emerges as a more strongly defined individual and as the need for leadership becomes a factor in the social organization of his people. In The Well at the World’s End the special nature of the hero and heroine is a given, as is the ambivalence of a geographical world that contains both wastelands and life-giving springs. Although Ralf and Ursula have human adversaries, the experiences that account for their growth have at least as much to do with geography as with people. If we read these romances as efforts to solve the problem posed by News from Nowhere – the union of knowledge and immediacy – one finds oneself addressing a set of interesting questions. How is it, for example, that Ralf is able to return to Upmeads in a way that Guest is not able to return permanently to Kelmscott Manor? Do Morris’s accounts of fulfilled desire suggest a belief that such fulfilment is possible? Or do they instead argue very much the opposite? I wish I knew the answer. But one thing is clear. Morris, during the final years of his life, continued to test for that answer, trying out a succession of variations on what is probably a single narrative theme, always in search of the right formation, always in search of a surer sense of what really made him happy.

NOTES 1

Just how familiar Morris might have been with Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State is unclear, since Morris did

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Frederick Kirchhoff not read German and Engels’s book was not translated into English during Morris’s lifetime. However, Engels’s central argument, which treats the Germanic gens as a protocommunist social organization, is echoed in the articles Morris coauthored with Belfort Bax and published, first as Socialism from the Root Up (1886–7), and later as Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (1893). Possibly Morris knew Engels’s primary source, the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. In any case, it is important to note that the link between Germanic tribal culture and socialist utopianism was not purely of his own invention. My primary source here and elsewhere for information relating to the Germanic tribes in the late Roman Empire is Herwig Wolfram’s The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples. Morris’s description echoes Gibbon’s, according to whom the features of Attila ‘bore the stamp of his national origin: and the portrait of Attila exhibits the genuine deformity of a modern Calmuck; a large head, a swarthy complexion, small deep-seated eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, and a short body, of nervous strength, though of disproportioned form’ (2:246).

13 Socialist Fellowship and the Woman Question Ruth Kinna

William Morris’s treatment of the woman question has sometimes been called reactionary. I wish to offer a qualified defence and suggest that his solution to the problem of the woman question is insightful. Morris believed that the woman question revolved around two evils: exploitation in the labour force and subordination in bourgeois marriage. He believed that the resolution of these issues required socialists to recognize that women were naturally different from men. Work and romance were the two principal realms of this difference and he matched them to the problems of capitalist exploitation and marital oppression respectively. This pairing led him to argue that the emancipation of women required a dual liberation, through the implementation of a natural division of labour and the realization of free love. These ideas were not easily reconciled: after all, the first implied the maintenance of the domestic sphere and the second its abandonment. Morris sought to defuse this contradiction through his idea of fellowship. In his late prose romances he argued that socialist fellowship would lead women to adopt a new domestic role, linked to motherhood. The Woman Question The woman question, as debated in the 1880s and 1890s, had a number of dimensions, including the nature of women’s work, the extension of women’s rights, and the position of women in the family. Even in these late decades of the century, none of these issues was new. Fifty

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years earlier, Owenites like William Thompson and Anna Wheeler had pushed the issue of women’s emancipation to the forefront of the socialist agenda (Taylor 5–9). Similarly, non-socialists like Emily Davies, Frances Cobbe, Josephine Butler, and Millicent Fawcett had led a variety of campaigns in the 1860s and 1870s to focus attention on the exclusion of women from the public sphere and on the double standards of Victorian sexual morality (Caine 1–17). But in the later decades of the century, a number of new phenomena rekindled interest in these issues. In the 1880s the appearance of the ‘new woman’ stirred debate about the status of women in Victorian society and the nature of female sexuality (Bland 141–65). Likewise, the fashion for sociological investigation raised awareness of women’s social and economic conditions: even though W.T. Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ gave a lurid and titillating account of prostitution, it stimulated a major debate of one of the central issues of the 1880s (Walkowitz 42–3). Finally, the development of pseudo-scientific thought, encouraged by the popularity of Darwinian ideas, raised questions about the biological differences between the sexes and the naturalness of existing social roles (Walkowitz 37–59; Brandon, ch. 2). Morris took a keen interest in all of these issues. Picking his way through the tangled thickets of debate, he identified two central issues for socialism: the exploitation of female labour and the institution of bourgeois marriage. His treatment of these problems had much in common with the analysis presented by Eleanor and Edward MarxAveling in their popular review of August Bebel’s enormously successful book, Woman Under Socialism (Hunt 33–6). They boldly asserted that the woman question ‘rests, as everything in our complex modern society rests, on an economic basis’ (Marx-Aveling 4). Though they admitted that women were subject to ‘an organized tyranny of men’ they believed that this tyranny was less important than the ‘organized tyranny of idlers’ which preyed on the workers and they concluded that the liberation of women would be secured only through the liberation of the working class. Morris followed suit. He, too, acknowledged that women were often treated less well than even the most ill-treated men, that a large number of women were forced into prostitution, for example, and, that elsewhere, women were viewed merely as the cheapest source of available labour. In capitalism, monopolists employed women for the same reasons that they introduced machinery: in order to ‘dispense with skilled labour’ and to slash labour costs. Yet for all the extreme deprivations they suffered

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in the market, Morris still treated women as a special component of the working class and insisted that the most important causes of their oppression were economic. The ‘causes that drive girls and women into the streets to sell their love,’ he argued, were the same as those which made men degrade themselves ‘by over-hours and competition’ (Contributions 27). Prostitutes, he observed, were ‘as necessary’ in modern society as ‘the banker who looks after the money that pays them, or the policeman who runs them in’ (Contributions 616). Morris also compared women to workers in the context of bourgeois marriage. Here, however, he was concerned to examine the motivation that explained the inequities rather than the exploitation that resulted from it. His principal objection to bourgeois marriage was that it was based on force. In bourgeois society, women were ‘compelled’ to marry just as workers were compelled to labour (Letters 2:404). Both marriage and labour were free, in the sense that they were regulated by legal contracts, but neither was entered into freely. With no rights of ownership to the means of production, workers were coerced into labour by the threat of starvation. Similarly, women entered into marriage because they had no other means of supporting themselves. The vast majority of women, Morris noted, pursued ‘marriage ... as a profession’ (Contributions 259). Naturally, polite society fostered the view that marriage was based on everlasting love, just as individual employers maintained the idea that labour relations were based on class cooperation. In Morris’s view, however, both ideas were fictions. In so far as romance was concerned, there was little difference between marriage and prostitution. Indeed, Morris told George Bernard Shaw that for most women marriage was best described as ‘legalized rape’ (Letters 2:404). And, since divorce was still a virtual impossibility, large numbers of women were forced to endure a lifetime of continual assault. Tracing the roots of women’s oppression to capitalism, Morris concluded that the struggle for women’s liberation was part of the class struggle to ‘free labour from the tyranny of monopoly’ (Contributions 259). Equally, when he looked forward to socialism, he assumed that men and women would both enjoy ‘inalienable rights of livelihood’ and that there would be ‘nothing to force people into legal prostitution or tempt them into irregular venal do. [sic] which for the rest they couldn’t have as it ... is simply a form of ordinary market exploitation’ (Letters 2:584–5). Yet Morris also argued that the resolution of the woman question required the recognition of natural

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sexual differences as well as the abolition of capitalism. What were these differences? Morris did not always make his understanding clear. On one occasion he carelessly assumed that all women were potential mothers and argued that ‘childbearing makes ... women inferior to men, since a certain time of their lives they must be dependent on them’ (Letters 2:545). More typically, he suggested that women were not less able than men but that the conditions for their well-being and freedom were not the same as they were for men. For Morris the two principal areas of natural difference were art and romance. In art, the difference was largely a natural inequality: women, he argued in an interview, did not ‘excel in ... inventive power’ and were unlikely to become ‘first-rank’ musicians or painters. In particular, owing to their ‘more nervous and less muscular structure,’ they lacked the strength to develop the lightness of touch that craftwork demanded (Tooley 260–1). In the same interview, Morris suggested that women had a talent for business, management, medicine, and, above all, for the ‘difficult and important’ task of housekeeping (Tooley 261). The distinction he made here between artistic and domestic labour seemed to fly in the face of his own experience. Morris had seen how some women excelled in certain crafts, notably embroidery. Yet, insisting on the idea of artistic difference, he designated embroidery a ‘domestic’ art and insisted that women were incapable of producing the ‘fine and delicate work’ demanded of the ‘building’ or ‘workshop’ arts like weaving and tapestry (‘How Shall We Live Then’ 230–1; Tooley 260). The inconsistency in Morris’s understanding was his belief that women made poor cooks and that only men could be creative in kitchens. He told Mackail that women knew ‘absolutely nothing’ about cookery: ‘their twist isn’t that way.’ Indeed, priding himself on his own culinary skills, Morris protested that a woman had ‘never invented a new dish or failed to half spoil an old one’ (Mackail 1:230–1). His mocking tone carried a serious message. As Mackail noted, Morris thought that cookery was one of the important ‘arts of human life’; and his estimation of women’s skills in this area perhaps helps explain his eagerness to encourage men in socialism to take a part in domestic labour. But whatever the root of his concern, cookery was the exception that proved the rule about domestic art. In socialism, Morris insisted, housekeeping would become woman’s ‘special’ domain: men would ‘never be any good at it’ (Tooley 261). Although he was committed to realize a condition of ‘absolute equality ... between women & men, as

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between other groups,’ Morris accordingly told Bruce Glasier that it would ‘be poor economy setting women to do men’s work (as unluckily they often do now) or vice versa’ (Letters 2:545). Morris’s reflections on the differences between men and women in respect of love or romance were perhaps shaped by his own experience of marriage to Jane Burden, whom he married in April 1859. The couple were never well-matched: Jane liked music, theatre, warm weather, and Mediterranean landscapes – date palms, ‘olives, lemons, oranges ... blue mountains – blue sea’ (Bryson and Troxell 172). Morris, on the other hand, was indifferent to music and only tolerated the theatre. Thinking of himself as ‘a man of the North,’ he was ‘disappointed’ when the weather was fine, preferring instead to sit indoors watching the rain ‘beating on the windows’ (Blunt 283). While their evident incompatibility did not prevent them from developing an affectionate and companionable relationship, it symbolized a basic difference of temperament and spirit (Marsh, Jane and May 174–5). Both were passionate, but Janey was sensuous and outgoing, whilst Morris was in some respects ‘a puritan of puritans’ (Glasier 127) and emotionally reserved (Marsh, Jane and May 63–5). By marrying Morris, Jane had made a calculated match, securing social advancement. For his part, Morris had won a ‘stunner,’ a physical beauty whom he worshipped as an object of desire (MacCarthy 135–7). The tragedy of the match was, as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt suggested, that Morris knew that he ‘had married for love, and his wife had never loved him’ (Marsh, Jane and May 73). Still worse, he knew that Jane was ‘too lovely and noble not to be loved’ (Bryson and Troxell 11). Captivated by her beauty, he had become love’s willing pawn, ultimately doomed to suffer his wife’s indifference and infidelity. Regardless of his own situation, Morris believed that while women were capable of both love and of forging lasting relationships, they did not love in the same way as men. Men were the heroic victims of love, magnetically attracted to their lovers and prone to idolize them. Women were the knowing objects of men’s desire and were able to govern and direct their passions in a way that men were unable to do. If forced by circumstances, they became sly, wily creatures, using their insight into men’s desires to win advantages for themselves. In the Old North, for example, Morris suggested that ‘women claimed and obtained immunity for responsibility for their violence on the score of their being ‘weak women’ (‘Early Literature of the North – Iceland’ 185). In bourgeois society this problem was more acute and

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women exaggerated their coyness in order to secure special legal rights. Lending support to his friend Ernest Belfort Bax, for example, Morris pointed out that women enjoyed exemption from military service. And in love, women could be both calculating and inconstant. As Morris made clear in his novels, women were capable of ensnaring their lovers and of switching their affections to reject them. Morris’s conception of natural difference significantly complicated his treatment of the woman question. When he thought of women as a special cohort of the working class, Morris argued merely for the realization of ‘certainty of livelihood’ and the abolition of ‘bourgeois property-marriage’ (‘Manifesto of the Socialist League’ 6, 12). From this point of view, women’s liberation was a matter of equal employment and non-coercive relationships. Socialism promised a future when ‘the economical position of women would be the same as that of men,’ with ‘one moral law’ serving to regulate the behaviour of ‘both sexes’ (Tooley 260–1). Yet Morris also argued that socialist women would not find fulfilment in labour as such, but primarily in domestic labour. Equally, women would not flourish in what Lenin called proletarian marriages (35:182–5) – life-long, monogamous relationships – but only in free love, or relationships that enabled them to indulge their fleeting passions. In other words, Morris’s analysis suggested that the solution to the woman question did not lie simply in negating the evils of bourgeois-capitalist society, but in designing a new social system that enabled women to fulfil themselves in the domestic sphere without sacrificing their sexual independence. In Morris’s view, these aims could only be realized in the fostering of fellowship. As G.D.H. Cole noted, Morris identified fellowship as a primary socialist value. John Ball’s cry that ‘fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death’ is one of the keynotes of his socialism (Cole 419; A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:230). At one point he even defined the battle between capitalism and socialism as one between ‘mastership or fellowship’ (‘Dawn of a New Epoch,’ CW 23:124). Morris understood fellowship as a principle of duty. In the political sphere, for example, he believed that fellowship held out the hope that communists would eventually be able to secure cooperation in the community without coercion. Fellowship underpinned the morality that, in his famous dispute with the anarchists, he referred to as the public or social conscience (Letters 3:86). In the economic realm, fellowship described the basis on which work would be performed. In the future, when individuals worked in fellowship, the community would benefit from

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‘each man’s diverse talents developed for the use and advantage of the common good’ (Letters 2:289). In communism, there would be no contention of man with man, but association instead; so only can labour be really organized, harmoniously organized. But harmony cannot co-exist with contention for individual gain: men must work for the common gain if the world is to be raised out of its present misery; therefore that claim of the workman ... must be subject to the fact that he is but a part of a harmonious whole: he is worthless without the cooperation of his fellows. (‘Dawn of a New Epoch,’ CW 23:133)

Similarly, in the domestic realm, Morris believed that fellowship described the duty that women would feel towards the wider community. In fellowship, women would discover how to direct their inconstant romantic passions to secure communal well-being. Morris’s literature provides the best guide to his understanding of the relationship between fellowship and the woman question. Admittedly, his views changed dramatically over time. In his presocialist writings, especially The Life and Death of Jason (1867), The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), and Sigurd the Volsung (1876), he distinguished fellowship from romance, suggesting that fellowship governed relations between men but excluded women. Fellowship developed from a conscious desire to live in community with one’s fellows and it was distinct from the uncontrollable romantic impulses which governed male-female relations. Indeed, in Morris’s view, fellowship and romance usually conflicted. In pursuit of fellowship, men often deserted their lovers and weakened the bonds of romance. By the same token, men otherwise united in fellowship would fall out over a shared romance. In ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ (from The Earthly Paradise), Morris painted both scenarios: Kiartan’s quest in Norway first leads to the undoing of his love for Gudrun; Bodli’s love for Gudrun subsequently leads him to sacrifice his fellowship with Kiartan. More strongly, Morris argued that women were excluded from fellowship because they lacked the virtues demanded of it. Morris equated fellowship with what he regarded as manly traits, like heroism and courage, but above all, he believed that fellowship required a sense of justice. In Sigurd the Volsung, he described Guttorm, the only Niblung brother to be excluded from fellowship with Sigurd, as ‘fierce and strong,’ but ‘blind-eyed through right and wrong’ (CW 12:202, 226). Whilst Guttorm demonstrated that some men were incapable of either justice or fellowship, Morris

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held that the majority understood the standards that justice imposed and that women did not share the same understanding. The difference turned on the contrast that Morris drew between manly justice and unmanly vengeance. In his early story ‘The Hollow Land,’ the heroes Sir Florian and Hugh mistakenly appoint themselves as God’s agents for the murder of Queen Swanhilda. After killing her, they repent their act, realizing that it was a ‘poor cowardly piece of revenge, instead of a brave act of justice’ (CW 1:273). Here, the men act wrongly, but do not put themselves beyond the bounds of justice. Morris’s women, by contrast, are unable to evaluate their actions dispassionately and their crimes are characteristically vengeful. When Gudrun discovers that Kiartan has deserted her, she swears by Thor ‘That the false foster-brother shall be slain / Before three summers have come round again, / If by my hand must bring him to his end’ (CW 5:387). Sigurd’s wife Gudrun similarly acts in vengeance and, on hearing of Guttorm’s murder of her husband, plots the downfall of the Niblung family. Admittedly, both stories were drawn from Icelandic mythology where vengeance was a common theme (Latham, Poems by the Way xix–xx). Yet Morris’s portrayal of women as vengeful was not confined by this particular context. Medea, too, is vengeful. Betrayed by Jason, she kills their children and murders Glauce, his second wife. When he became a socialist Morris revised this position and began to see that fellowship and romance could be reconciled. In his late prose romances, The House of the Wolfings (1888), The Roots of the Mountains (1890), The Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World’s End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), and The Sundering Flood (1897), the potential for conflict between romance and fellowship is denied altogether. When Ralph, the hero of The Well at the World’s End, is accused of preferring romance to fellowship, he rejects the charge and explicitly ties his quest to find his love, Ursula, to his knightly duty (CW 23:266). Similarly, while the marriage between Gold-mane and Sun-beam, hero and heroine of The Roots of the Mountains, is arranged to seal an alliance between their two villages, the couple satisfy the duty imposed upon them by also celebrating their love (CW 15:374–9). In these stories, Morris also reconsidered his depiction of women and, in particular, their potential for justice and honesty. In contrast to his early literature, he now distinguished between good and evil women. Women in both categories are characteristically beautiful, but his heroines match their physical

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beauty with a pureness of heart. In The Water of the Wondrous Isles, for example, Birdalone has a close affinity with nature and, wandering about the woods, she finds that ‘the rabbits and squirrels ... come to her hand and sport with her’ (CW 20:15). The Lady of Abundance, who first captures Ralph’s heart in The Well at the World’s End, is similarly a gentle soul, ‘kind and proud at once’ (CW 18:157). By contrast, the Lady who pursues Walter in The Wood Beyond the World is physically beautiful but ‘hateful, and nought love-worthy’ (CW 17:40). Looking at herself through the hero Ralph’s eyes, the Queen in The Well at the World’s End discovers that she is likewise not uncomely ... but coarse and little-minded. I rage in the household when whim takes me, and should belike be untrue if there were any force to drive me thereto. And I suffer my husband to go after other women ... so that I may take my pleasure unstayed with other men whom I love not greatly. Yea, I am foolish, and empty-hearted and unclean. (CW 18:311–12)

While these evil women show themselves to be vengeful and unable to overcome the disappointment or frustrations of love, the heroines of Morris’s stories display temperate understanding in the face of adversity. In The Roots of the Mountains, the Bride eventually overcomes Gold-mane’s betrayal of her love and leaves Gold-mane and his new love, Sun-beam, to live in peace. Also involved in a triangular affair, Birdalone believes that her friendship with Atra will be destroyed by their competing love for the knight Arthur (Wondrous Isles, CW 20:253). In time, however, Atra, too, reconciles herself to the loss of her love and her sisterhood with Birdalone survives (20:378). Morris’s interest in women’s capacity for honesty ran counter to his intuitive sense that women were crafty and manipulative. He had expressed this idea in his early literature, denoting cunning in the attribution of supernatural powers, but in the later prose romances the theme became dominant, as Morris felt able to both confront and modify his previously negative views. He described most of the heroines in these later works as witches. In his last, unfinished romance, The Sundering Flood, Elfhild, for example, has a magic pipe, a gift from cavedwelling dwarfs (CW 21:34–5). In The Well at the World’s End, the Lady of Abundance is a herbalist, versed in ancient lore (CW 18:185). Though she possesses none of the blackness of her step-mother, Birdalone has access to the magic contained in the ‘book of the earth,’ and is described

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as a spinner who produces embroidery so beautiful that others believe ‘that the Faery must have learned her that craft’ (Wondrous Isles, CW 20:42, 139). These women invariably use their powers to good ends, usually in an effort to find love or to cement the fate of their lovers, as circumstances dictate. With the help of her Woodmother, Sun-beam lures the heroic Gold-mane into her clutches with spells and songs of the ‘wild-wood, and what was therein of desire and peril and beguiling and death, and love unto Death itself’ (Roots of the Mountains, CW 15:118). Yet, more importantly, once these women are secure in love, they also sense the fraudulence of their powers and give them up. Birdalone chooses to live in fellowship with Arthur and the other knights even though she knows that she can live in sisterhood without giving up her magic (Wondrous Isles, CW 20:55). In The Wood Beyond the World, the Maid tells Walter that she will her call a halt to her use of magic lore on the day she is ‘made all happy’ (CW 17:97). Accordingly, upon their marriage, ‘all wizardry left her’ (17:128). Admittedly, some of Morris’s heroines are more reluctant than the Maid to relinquish their magic. Once united with Osberne, Elfhild is ‘a little grieved’ to find that she has lost the power of the dwarf pipe. Nevertheless, in common with Morris’s other leading ladies, she consents to her disempowerment and watches Osberne cast the pipe into the caves (Sundering Flood, CW 21:247). Emphasizing the reasonableness of women and their capacity for honesty, Morris also demonstrates that women are fit for fellowship and the duties it imposed. Having overcome her grief for Gold-mane, the Bride marries Sun-beam’s brother, forging ‘a very good alliance for the Burgdalers and the Silverdalers’ (Letters 3:42). In The House of the Wolfings, the goddess Wood-Sun demonstrates a similar sense of sacrifice. Though she tries to protect the warrior Thiodolf from death by casting him under her dreamy spell, she is eventually persuaded by Hall-Sun, their daughter, that she must give him up and allow him to die for the sake of the folk. In fellowship, moreover, Morris argued that women spontaneously tailored their interests to suit those of the community. In this respect, most of Morris’s heroines discover that fellowship is best served by motherhood. Admittedly, Birdalone eventually assumes a wifely, not a motherly role and, having rescued Arthur, she happily devotes herself to his every need, busying herself ‘about the housekeeping ... to provide ... dainties of their meadow and woodland husbandry, as cream and junkets and wood-fruit and honey, and fine bread made for that very occasion’ (Wondrous Isles, CW 20:352).

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More typically, Walter’s Maid becomes ‘the land’s increase, and the city’s safeguard, and the bliss of the folk’ (Wood Beyond the World, CW 17:128). At her journey’s end, Ursula, ‘valiant and true,’ bears Ralph eight children (Well, CW 19:244). After her marriage to Gold-mane, Sun-beam presses her kinswoman, Bow-may, to follow her example. Accustomed to the idea that women had a duty ‘to bear more warriors to the folk,’ she holds fast to the tradition that encourages ‘strong and goodly women ... women so kind and friendly’ to think of themselves as mothers (Roots of the Mountains, CW 15:110, 410). Morris did not explain the mechanisms that would lead to the blossoming of fellowship in communism. Looking at the problem in relation to labour he merely argued that workers would come to their ‘right senses’ and that, after the revolution, the communal ties that workers ‘ought to feel’ were those that they ‘will feel.’ Having overcome the compulsion of capitalism each would recognize ‘that he is working for his own interest when he is working for the community’ (‘Dawn of a New Epoch,’ CW 23:133). Morris expected that the transformation of the domestic realm would follow the same pattern and that material changes would provide a basis for the development of a new social conscience, but here he was perhaps more interested in the effect of the changes than he was in their operation. In so far as the woman question was concerned, fellowship perfectly eased the tension between his demand for free love and the natural division of labour. Since it pointed to motherhood, fellowship provided women with a strong incentive to maintain the domestic sphere without compromising the demand for free love. In bourgeois society, women had been compelled by marriage laws and the operation of the market to work as housekeepers. Unlike their bourgeois sisters, socialist women faced no such compulsion. Yet, economically independent and free to enter into ‘genuine unions of passion & affection,’ they would not destroy the home by confusing free love with recreational sex or promiscuity (Letters 2:584–5). Women would maintain the domestic sphere for two reasons: because domestic work was fulfilling and because domesticity enabled them to spend time with their children. Fellowship as a Solution to the Woman Question In the past, critics have accused Morris of supporting a regressive, pre-industrial model of social relations that consigns women to ‘a particularly unradicalized position’ (Swindells and Jardine 57). Jan

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Marsh’s analysis of News from Nowhere echoes this conclusion. Morris’s Utopia, she argues, offers ‘regrettably a masculine vision of paradise’ (‘Concerning Love’ 121). Morris’s analysis of the woman question and fellowship provides a good deal of fuel for this criticism. His insistence that women were, by virtue of their biological makeup, suited to a particular social role seems extremely conservative. Equally, his idealization of family life and his suggestion that women were not equipped to perform ‘men’s work’ typically ignored the drudgery of housework and the real lack of opportunities faced by the majority of women who assumed this role. Morris was aware of the apparently reactionary overtones of this solution to the woman question, just as he was conscious of the conservative and sentimental implications of his desire to revitalize the handicrafts (‘The Revival of Handicraft,’ CW 22:331). But he did not temper his belief that housework was the natural realm of womanly excellence or that a woman’s natural vocation was to provide ‘help and comfort’ for her children and the ‘head of the family’ (‘True and False Society,’ CW 23:223). In News from Nowhere he openly rejected the movement for emancipation, characterizing its central demand as the right to free ‘the more intelligent part of their sex from the bearing of children’ (News from Nowhere 95). Indeed, his descriptions of the domestic sphere were clearly imbued with the ‘feeling and language of male desire’ (Marsh, ‘Concerning Love’ 121). Like the women in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic, Herland, the domestic workers in Nowhere are independent, athletic, active, and passionate. Not in the least worn down by their labours, they are also good-natured and extremely beautiful. The idea that such vigorous and self-willed women would consider domestic service as a form of flirtation, as Old Hammond claims, can be construed as Morris’s fantasy (News from Nowhere 94); and it is perhaps not surprising that Morris confessed that he had fallen in love with Ellen, the heroine of News From Nowhere (Glasier 140). Yet for all its difficulties, Morris’s treatment of the woman question should not be dismissed as mere conservatism but considered as part of the aesthetic romantic tradition in feminist thought. This marginalized the political sphere as a space for the realization of human potential, but remains relevant (Vogel 17–46). However crude Morris’s biological essentialism and understanding of female psychology, his model of social organization supports a forwardlooking set of social arrangements, flexible enough to allow women to question the social roles that he would have assigned them and, as

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importantly, predicated on a fundamental change in human relationships. The key to the success of the social arrangements in News from Nowhere lay in the choices that women (and men) were able to exercise: they would not be coerced into becoming domestic slaves. Of course, if fellowship failed to provide the sense of duty Morris anticipated, the hard question of how to reconcile women’s choices with domestic labour remains unanswered. Nevertheless, in Morris’s ideal, women were able to follow their chosen vocations in a framework that gave them – as he saw it – the whip-hand in love. In News from Nowhere, Clara initiates both her ‘divorce’ from Dick and their reconciliation. Ellen tells Guest that she has ‘two or three young men’ who have taken a ‘special liking’ to her. Had she been born into Guest’s age, she realizes that she would have been ‘sold to rich men’ and her life ‘would have been wasted’ (223). In her own age, she keeps all her admirers keen, without choosing to stay with any. While women like Ellen balance complicated affairs, the men in Nowhere remain both obsessive and possessive in love; they may even murder each other in passionate struggles for the love of their women. But in contrast to the so-called radicals like Edward Aveling, Morris’s men did not neglect the importance of love, leaving women to bear its pain. And in contrast to bourgeois men, who strove in vain to control their women, these men have largely reconciled themselves to women’s apparently inconstant passions. Discussing ‘the trouble that bests the dealings between the sexes,’ Old Hammond tells Guest how men prepare to face disappointment in Nowhere: Calf love, mistaken for a heroism that shall be lifelong, yet early waning into disappointment; the inexplicable desire that comes on a man of riper years to be all-in-all to some one woman, whose ordinary human kindness and human beauty he has idealised into superhuman perfection, and made the one object of his desire; or lastly the reasonable longing of a strong and thoughtful man to become the most intimate friend of some beautiful and wise woman, the very type of the beauty and glory of the world which we love so well, — as we exult in all the pleasure and exaltation of spirit which goes with these things, so we set ourselves to bear the sorrow which not unseldom goes with them also. (91)

In sum, while crude in its assumptions, Morris’s model granted women the power to enter into relationships when they liked and

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with whom they wanted. The community would have an interest in ensuring the well-being of children, but not in ensuring that women remain locked in unhappy relationships (Letters 2:584–5). The most controversial aspect of Morris’s solution to the woman question was his desire to counter what he saw as the destructive attempts of some feminists to emancipate women from motherhood. Morris did not discuss this demand in any depth but he clearly objected to the idea of liberation that lay at its heart. In Morris’s view, material change held the key to emancipation: in socialism, he argued, women would have sufficient resources to ensure that both they and their children flourished. With this economic security, women would then be free honestly to explore their sexuality. Admittedly, Morris’s economic theory was utopian and he failed to devise any way of realizing this aim apart from suggesting the need for revolution. Nevertheless, his warning that the reaction against motherhood might lead feminists to take a wrong turn was surely prophetic. Morris’s fear was that women, frustrated by the constraints of bourgeois society, would find a solution to their problems in the relaxation of marriage laws and the opening up of employment opportunities. Leaving home for work, they would find a kind of equality, but one that left the social and economic fabric of society largely unchanged. The worst possible outcome was that women would end up facing a double burden of paid and domestic work whilst still competing for the favours of men. Suggesting that his feminist opponents had been ‘brought up in an atmosphere of mingled prudery and prurience’ (News from Nowhere 96), Morris hinted that the rejection of maternal roles would leave women trapped in a system which encouraged promiscuity without legal or social restraint. Morris’s alternative vision of the future was romantic, but is it any worse than the existing models that have left ‘working’ women largely responsible for the care of children while emphasizing the importance of sex as the primary means of empowerment?

14 The Reception of William Morris’s Beowulf Chris Jones

First published in 1895 by the Kelmscott Press, William Morris’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf has had a chequered reception among critics and scholars over the course of the last century.1 This essay investigates the varied and extreme reactions the poem has elicited since its publication. ‘Few people,’ Fiona MacCarthy cautions us, ‘have had a good word to say for Morris’s “Beowulf”’ (649). In 1975, Jack Lindsay politely called it ‘one of [Morris’s] least successful productions’ (365); in 1967, Paul Thompson condemned it as ‘the worst thing [Morris] ever wrote,’ ‘incomprehensible,’ and ‘gibberish’ (163). More recently, Michael Alexander, another translator of Beowulf, confesses his perverse fondness for one of Morris’s lines concerning the hero’s fight with Grendel’s mother: ‘Then she sat on the hall-guest and tugg’d out her sax’ (‘Sheen on the Mere’ 81–2, quoting Morris, CW 10:225). MacCarthy herself adds that The Tale of Beowulf is ‘Morris at his most garrulous and loose,’ concluding that his translation is ‘an unexpected failure’ (649). Chief among the criticisms are that Morris does not so much translate as transliterate, making the diction obscure and the syntax archaic and affected. Yet the work was not always judged harshly. An early review by Theodore Watts made great claims for Morris’s translation, calling it ‘an entire success’ and suggesting that the archaisms ‘bring his readers far nearer to the original than any later form could have done’ (181). When Chauncey Tinker published a critical bibliography of all the translations of Beowulf up to 1903, he censored Morris’s version for its

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strange diction and ‘avalanche of archaisms’ (108), but admired the accuracy of the translation and metre, concluding that ‘Morris’s verse is the best of all the “imitative” measures’ (109). In 1908, Stopford Brooke floridly praised Morris’s versions of Beowulf, The Aeneid, and The Odyssey for the traces of ‘Morris’s soul flitting through the translations like a dim scent of forgotten leaves’ (Four Poets 197). However precious this remark may seem, it is insightful: the artist’s personality is present in his translation of another’s work, but not overbearingly so. Brooke had made his own translations of Anglo-Saxon poetry for his History of Early English Literature (1892), a study read by Ezra Pound in 1904 and 1905 at Hamilton College, New York (Fred Robinson, ‘Might of the North’ 207). In 1912 Pound published a translation of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Seafarer,’ which was ridiculed by early twentiethcentury Anglo-Saxonists. Pound’s translation is characterized by many for the same equivocal traits as Morris’s translation: archaic inversions (‘Bitter breast-cares have I abided’ and ‘Did for my games the gannet’s clamour,’ Poems 64); revived inflexions on the end of verbs (‘moaneth’ and ‘cometh,’ 65); and translations of Anglo-Saxon words with virtually identical modern English homophones (‘reckon’ for AngloSaxon wrecan, ‘tell’ or ‘relate’; and ‘mood’ for Anglo-Saxon mod, despite the word having undergone a considerable semantic shift from its original meaning of ‘heart,’ ‘mind,’ or ‘spirit,’ 64).2 That Morris was one of Pound’s first poetic loves is well documented: the poet H.D. recalled how Pound recited ‘The Haystack in the Floods’ to her with great passion (Doolittle 23). Fred Robinson takes it for granted that, as a translator of Anglo-Saxon, ‘Morris was certainly a major influence on Pound’ (‘Ezra Pound’ 272). The similarity of technique between Pound and Morris is illustrated by the following two passages (which do not translate the same lines of Anglo-Saxon): My lord deems to me this dead life On loan and land, I believe not That any earth-weal eternal standeth Save there be somewhat calamitous That, ere a man’s tide go, turn it to twain. Disease or oldness or sword-hate Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body. Good men did get to them; now war-death hath gotten,

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Life-bale the fearful, each man and every Of my folk; e’en of them who forwent the life: The hall-joy had they seen. No man to wear sword I own, none to brighten the beaker beplated, The dear drink-vat; the doughty have sought to else-whither.

I deliberately delay citing the line references for these two passages, encouraging you first to guess their authorship. Certainly they share much in flavour, mood, and mod. The slightly longer line of the second passage may lead you to guess that it is from Morris’s hand. It is indeed his translation of ‘the lay of the last survivor’ from The Tale of Beowulf (CW 10:246–7), while the first is from Pound’s translation of ‘The Seafarer’ (lines 65–71). Pound’s translation appeared at the start of his career, and several critics have seen his ‘Seafarer’ as a formative experiment, important not only to Pound’s later style, but to the whole of twentieth-century poetry. The poet Thom Gunn finds in Pound’s translation an embryonic rhythmic form, which he considers the most significant technical development in the history of free verse (98). Morris’s Beowulf, on the other hand, was finished only a year before his death and, despite Robert Boenig’s intriguing suggestion that work on the poem may have influenced the lexis of his last romances (11), it is tempting to see the work as a dead-end. Pound’s stock as a translator of AngloSaxon remains high, while Morris’s reputation continues to slump in the doldrums, despite the best efforts of a minority of Morris scholars like Boenig.3 Is the comparatively poor reputation of The Tale of Beowulf deserved? Is Morris’s version doomed to remain buried, like the hoard in Beowulf’s barrow, ‘gold in the grit,’ ‘useless to men-folk’? (Morris’s translation of phrases from lines 3167–8.) If we can recover something of the philological context in which the translation was produced then we may better understand why it seems so strange and unsatisfactory to many later readers. Morris’s translation appears at the end of a century during which Beowulf scholarship had steadily grown in sophistication from a state of near non-existence. An edition of the text did not exist until Thorkelin’s, published in Copenhagen in 1815, which contained errors of transcription. In 1894, the year before Morris’s translation was published, his collaborator, A.J. Wyatt, had produced a thorough and respected edition of the poem, and there had been several other editions

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published in England in the interim (notably by Kemble in 1833 and Thorpe in 1855). By the end of the nineteenth century, British scholars were starting to wrest supremacy of the subject away from German philologists. R.W. Chambers’s bibliography of Beowulf criticism shows that little secondary literature in English had been published before the appearance of Morris’s translation (395–413). Furthermore, Morris’s was only the ninth full translation into Modern English. Only four of the previous versions were verse (Wackerbath, 1849; Lumsden, 1881; Garnett, 1882; Hall, 1892), the first two in inappropriate rhyming, balladic metres. None of the previous translations had been by a major poet (although in 1830, Tennyson had tried his hand at ten lines of the poem, Poems 1235) and Morris complained to Wyatt that ‘no one can appreciate [the poem] in the present versions’ (Letters 3:436). Clearly the comparatively late rise of interest in Beowulf in Britain is an important part of the context for Morris’s translation. Scholars were beginning to compare the poem to Homer, yet it was still largely unread in the country which had produced it. The imperative of national pride meant there was a need for a serious verse translation of England’s earliest epic, as part of the appropriation of the poem from Germanic interests. Morris himself had publicly championed the poem on at least two occasions. In his lectures to the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1884, he had said that among the songs of the ancient Germanic peoples ‘towers majestic the noble poem of Beowulf, unsurpassed for simplicity and strength by any poem of our later tongue’ (‘Gothic Revival I’ 57). Addressing the Hammersmith Branch of the Socialist League two years later, he called it ‘worthy of a great people’ (‘Early England’ 163). That he intended his translation to reach a wide audience can also be inferred from the absence of line numbers referring to the original poem and by the addition of titles to the numbered fits and marginal summaries of the poem’s argument. One is not expected to read the translation in conjunction with a scholarly edition of the text: Morris wished to popularize the poem beyond the confines of the academy. While English interest in Beowulf was slowly gaining momentum, a considerable amount of work had been done on other Anglo-Saxon poems, and even more into the Anglo-Saxon language. In 1880 Tennyson had published his own patriotic version of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Battle of Brunanburh (Alexander, ‘Tennyson’s “Brunanburh”’ 151). Morris too had demonstrated a wider awareness of Anglo-Saxon before he and Wyatt began to plan their translation of Beowulf in

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1892. The ‘Early England’ lecture of 1886 shows that Morris was already familiar with the lyrics of the Exeter Book, at least in the translation of Charles Elton, whose The Origins of English History had been published in London in 1882. In particular Morris marks for special praise the Anglo-Saxon elegy ‘The Ruin.’ The undoing of the buildings of Roman Britain would appeal to the author of News from Nowhere, who entertains the un-building of British cities. The title of ‘The Wanderers’ prologue to The Earthly Paradise recalls another poem from the Exeter Book, ‘The Wanderer,’ which, like Morris’s prologue, deals with an old speaker who has gained wisdom through bitter experience, who insists he must not unburden his grief in speech, yet does so, and who hopes to find a paradise (in this case heavenly, rather than ‘earthly’) at the end of his seafaring. Morris’s interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry clearly pre-dated the Beowulf project, but Wyatt accelerated his education in the subject considerably. Wyatt was heir to the great philological enterprise of the nineteenth century, and the general bent of the expert advice he undoubtedly passed on to Morris about diction may be sought in the work of the philologists active during the second half of the century. Many philologists during this period shared a concern for ‘native’ vocabulary. Purity of an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, or ‘word-hoard,’ was frequently advanced as one of the highest goals to which a writer of English could aspire. Apart from nationalistic reasons, strong appeals were made to linguistic science in its support. Richard Trench’s immensely popular On the Study of Words is typical. (Published in 1851 and into its 26th edition by 1899, it was familiar to a young Morris who encouraged Cormell Price to write a review of it for the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Letters 1:13.) Chief among Trench’s themes is the Emersonian view that individual words are fossil poems (Emerson 215): when a word’s meaning has evolved and changed over time, the ‘original’ meaning is supposed to be richer and more pregnant; closer in its relationship to the world of referents. Hence, making the etymology of words more visible brings these fossilized poems back to life: ‘in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished’ (Trench 5). It follows that the preservation and reactivation of earlier lexis will preserve and reactivate the thoughts and imagination of our ancestors. Trench often seemed to be writing with poets in mind: ‘the old and the familiar will often become new in the poet’s hands ... he will enrich his native tongue with words

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unknown and non-existent before – non-existent, that is, save in their elements’ (202). As Trench argued, the use of the etymological roots of old words to coin new words is desirable poetic practice. Trench’s radical opinions soon became the norm. George Marsh expressed similar views in his Lectures on the English Language (1859). He repeatedly makes the claim that words of Anglo-Saxon origin are more forceful, fit, and honest than those derived from Latin and Latinbased languages. Etymological knowledge of words derived from Anglo-Saxon reactivates powerful metaphorical associations. He claims to detect an increase in the proportion of ‘native’ vocabulary in nineteenth-century writers and finds this an encouraging trend. Furthermore, Marsh suggests that even obsolete Anglo-Saxon words are intelligible to modern, native speakers: Deep in the recesses of our being, beneath even the reach of consciousness, or at least of objective self-inspection, there lies a certain sensibility to the organic laws of our mother-tongue, and to the primary significance of its vocabulary, which tells us when obsolete, unfamiliar words are fitly used, and the logical power of interpreting words by the context acts with the greatest swiftness and certainty, when it is brought to bear on the material of our native speech. The popular mind shrinks from new words, as from aliens not yet rightfully entitled to a place in our community, while antiquated and halfforgotten native vocables, like trusty friends returning after an absence so long that their features are but dimly remembered, are welcomed with double warmth, when once their history and their worth are brought back to our recollection. (176)

Such ‘nativist,’ pro-Anglo-Saxon views became predominant in nineteenth-century discourse on language. Morris’s 1873 letter to Frederick Furnivall in support of Furnivall’s application for the post of Secretary to the Royal Academy demonstrates Morris’s strong connections with this philological movement (Letters 1:190).4 Implicit in these philologists’ arguments is that modern, non-Saxon English is in a state of decadence and degeneracy. Morris concurred, for he complained that the English of eighteenth-century poetry is too romantic in terms of the Romance languages and in too high a register to nourish a living literature (‘Gothic Revival I’ 69–70). It is little wonder that a Victorian poet, steeped in medievalism and the cult of the ancient North, and advised by a philologically minded

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scholar, would choose to translate the Anglo-Saxon eam not as ‘uncle’ but as ‘eme’; herian not as ‘praise’ but as ‘hery’; and, indeed, seax not as ‘knife’ but as ‘sax.’ Morris is simply part of that movement which thought, like Robert Bridges commending the archaisms in Pound’s early poems, that ‘we’ll get ’em all back!’ (as Pound suggests in ‘Canto 80’). Morris’s style of translation was entirely vindicated by Victorian linguistics: a ‘purity’ of diction made his words more ‘forceful and fit’ (George Marsh 105–6, 127) and the use of the oldest forms of words lent his vocabulary a more authoritative purchase on the things it describes. Two major barriers to our appreciation of this method have interposed themselves since 1895. Throughout the nineteenth-century the search for a language of undecayed, radiantly significant words by investigation of etymological roots was a respectable scholarly pursuit. However, in the twentieth century, Saussurean linguistics undermined the idea that even very old words might have some atavistic bond to their referents. A more specific assault on Morris’s nativist methods came in 1940 with J.R.R. Tolkien’s critique of translating old words by their modern cognates, a tactic guided by what he termed ‘the etymological fallacy’ (56). Quite simply, Tolkien argued that such a method ignores the blunt fact of historical linguistic change. ‘Mood’ no longer means what it once did: to pretend otherwise would require an end to the passage of time. To a linguist, such etymologizing may be based on fallacious fancy, but the method rarely results in such spectacular failures as the rendering of seax (knife) as ‘sax.’ Morris’s choices can be both intelligent and effective. Having defeated Grendel, Beowulf is entertained with the other members of the Danish court by a bard who sings of the terrible blood-feud between the Danes and the Frisians, which culminated in the fight at Finnsburg. The poem tells us that wig (‘war’ or ‘battle’) takes away almost all of the Frisian thanes (lines 1080–1). Morris translates wig as ‘war-tide,’ presumably expanding the term in order to reproduce the alliterative link between both halves of the line, which was necessary in Anglo-Saxon prosody (‘Of world’s bliss. The war-tide took all men away,’ CW 10:211). Here, ‘tide’ appeals to its archaic (Anglo-Saxon) sense of ‘time’: war-time takes men’s lives. Yet in a poem so dominated by the sea and seafaring it is hard not to read ‘tide’ in its more recent sense too. Moreover, ‘war-tide’ begins to take on an apt ambiguity when we consider that bloody destruction is visited on the Danes and Frisians by the ship-borne arrival of the

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former into the lands of the latter, and that the ensuing slaughter is ultimately protracted in part because the winter seas are too inhospitable for the Danes to return. The temporal duration of war may take lives, but the sea itself brings death: the Danes arrive on a tide of war and are prevented from retreating by a contrary tide of war. In the same anecdote the singer tells how Hnaef, the dead Danish leader, is placed on a funeral pyre. The Anglo-Saxon word is bael, normally translated as ‘pyre’ or ‘fire’ (the sense of a stack of material survives in a ‘bale of hay’). Here, and elsewhere in the poem (the dragon’s fire is also referred to as ‘bale’), Morris merely modernizes the spelling, translating the two lines as ‘Of the bold Here-Scyldings / All yare on the bale was the best battle-warrior’ (CW 10:212). The OED lists three ‘bales’: the funeral pyre comes under the second entry, noting it is now ‘Obs. exc. in W.MORRIS.’ This sense might be comprehended from the context, and a dictionary would clarify the matter, but it is difficult for a modern reader not to consider the relevance of the more current meaning of ‘bale,’ which the OED gives first: that of ‘evil,’ ‘misery,’ or ‘grief’ (as in ‘baleful’). This fire (and that of the dragon) may be funereal, but it is also woeful and grievous. Morris’s choice of word here suggests a rich range of appropriate meanings. Earlier in the poem, when Healfdene’s sons are mentioned, we are told that ‘four bairns are forth to him rimed’ (CW 10:180). Again, Morris has simply updated the spelling of Anglo-Saxon gerimed (‘told,’ ‘reckoned,’ or ‘counted’), but it is not too fanciful to note that Healfdene’s sons are, metaphorically, rhymes of their father, being similar to him, but not identical. Morris uses the etymological fallacy to create resonances between early and late meanings present in a single ‘native’ root. However, we should not presume that Morris always pursued the most ‘pure’ Germanic form of a word in dogmatic fashion. Polysyllabic, Latin-derived words are not entirely absent from his translation. When Beowulf and his Geatish men first land in Denmark, the road they take to Heorot Hall is said to be stan-fah (line 320 of the original). Fah has a wide range of meanings, including ‘stained,’ ‘spotted,’ ‘dappled,’ ‘shining,’ and ‘gleaming.’ It is difficult to know the precise sense in which the street is stan-fah. ‘Paved with stone’ is one possible solution, but the road may consist of many different kinds of stone, or it could be that the stones variously catch the sun and glint to the eye. Morris boldly opens the fifth fit of the poem with ‘Stone-diverse the

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street was’ (CW 10:188). This compound adjective is far from stan-fah etymologically and will not satisfy every reader, but it does plumb unequivocally for a definite interpretation of the problematic word, it is highly imaginative and creative in tackling the Anglo-Saxon, and it produces a memorable phrase. While it is true that words with Romance origins are rare in Morris’s Beowulf, the inclusion of such exceptions as ‘diverse’ reminds the reader that Morris is not inflexible in following the nativist linguistic program. Much of the pleasure in reading the work derives from a peculiar kind of tension in anticipating those words which are permitted into the text and those which are kept out. In terms of its rhythm, Morris’s accentual verse is frequently stately, dignified, and entirely appropriate to the original poem. There are lapses, normally due to the introduction of redundant syllables, and these can give an impression of the ‘loose and garrulous’ verse of which MacCarthy complains. Note, for instance, the expansiveness of Morris’s ‘There then did they lay him, the lord well beloved’ (CW 10:180), with its double adverbial opening and redundant auxiliary verb and pronoun, none of which are licensed by the sparse aledon þa lefone þeoden (‘then they laid down the dear prince,’ line 34). Such a proliferation of unstressed syllables lightens the line and gives a false impression of the sonority of Beowulf. Fortunately, much of the verse rises above this tendency. Particularly effective is the manner in which Morris places prepositional particles before a verb, often compounded with the verb so that they are accorded secondary or even full stress: ‘who the keel high up-builded,’ ‘then was the mood all up-stirred,’ ‘so uprose the roar,’ ‘out then spake Beowulf’ (CW 10:186, 195, 202, 234). This weighting of particles serves to make the verse more terse: particles which are normally unstressed (‘up’ and ‘out,’ in the examples above) assume stronger degrees of stress, slowing down the movement of the verse and ensuring that rhythmic periods tend to end more dramatically with strongly stressed syllables (‘stirred’ and ‘roar,’ for example). It is a pity that later translators of Beowulf have not borrowed this technique from Morris. Syntactically, Morris’s translation contains as many archaisms as its lexis. The majority of these are subject and verb inversions and arguably ‘poetic’ rather than deliberately archaizing. More deviant structures are also used though: the verb-complement-subject order of a line like ‘Hung upon hawser the wide-fathom’d ship’ (CW 10:187), has the flavour of the original syntax, despite actually being a

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relatively uncommon structure in Anglo-Saxon. ‘Stone-diverse the street was’ is a more authentic Anglo-Saxon construction and is representative of the kind of grammatical patterns Morris employs. These ‘irregularities’ may cause contemporary readers some difficulties, but Beowulf, preserved in a tenth-century manuscript, was recorded in language which was already archaic at the time it was written down. (Wyatt believed the composition of the poem to date from about 700 AD [see 266]), and it is impossible to know how remote or difficult it was to an average, tenth-century West Saxon. Arguably, Morris’s translation preserves a similar distance between the language of the reader’s world and the language of the poem’s world. Certainly it preserves some of the linguistic difference that exists between the poem and its modern student, even if such a student is equipped with a working knowledge of Anglo-Saxon. After all, few read Beowulf without difficulty; even scholars of the poem have to cope with obscure passages, hapax legomena, and variant transcriptions of barely legible sections of the manuscript. A translation which forces a reader to puzzle over some odd syntax or occasionally consult a dictionary is arguably more faithful to the experience of reading the original poem than a translation which smooths out these knots of interpretation. The crucial issue is whether one practice of translation is more desirable than another, or whether several forms of the art can coexist for several purposes. Clearly then, there is a tension at the heart of Morris’s Beowulf and the aims which motivated its production. On the one hand, it is written in fulfilment of the desire for a pure and poetically forceful Saxonized diction, part of the project to reinvent a language undiluted by the passage of time. Pulling against this intention is Morris’s other purpose: to popularize the earliest national epic with a suitable verse translation which respects the original poem, yet is still readable. To readers a century later, these two aims may seem irreconcilable. Yet in the late nineteenth century there was good reason for supposing that the educated literate classes were increasingly likely to read Anglo-Saxon and be able to interpret Anglo-Saxon-derived words. The position of Anglo-Saxon language and literature on the education syllabus was much debated. George Marsh advocated the teaching of Anglo-Saxon over and above Latin and Greek. James Murray did teach Anglo-Saxon to his schoolchildren at Hawick Academy, long before he took over the editorship of the Oxford English Dictionary (Murray 54). Throughout the latter years of the century, establishment figures at Oxford

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University feared that the new English School, with its compulsory Old English component, would come to replace the study of the classics (Palmer 77, 83, 87, and 92). Justifiably, Morris might have felt that the poetry-reading public would become more familiar with the linguistic resources he uses in The Tale of Beowulf as this trend continued (rather as Milton could count on his seventeenth-century audience to appreciate his Latin puns). Yet the trend did not continue. Partly for ideological reasons there is less sympathy today for a ‘pure’ Anglo-Saxon diction: the phrase carries distasteful associations of the more brutal agendas in twentiethcentury Europe. Moreover, contemporary readers expect much less from literary translations, or at least something much more conservative. A taste for faithful, if unoriginal, prose versions of foreign poems has been cultivated by a diet of the Penguin Classics series and by an educational establishment which enshrined accurate rendering of semantic content under examination conditions as a test of a student’s understanding. A century after Morris it is commonly thought that a translator’s style and personality should interfere as little as possible in the transmission of the original text to the reader, even though this is logically impossible. Stopford Brooke’s detection of the soul of Morris ‘flitting through [his] translations like a dim scent of forgotten leaves’ would not be understood today as praise: a translation such as Morris’s is simply too ambitious in its aim, regardless of how one judges its execution. Notwithstanding this, Fiona McCarthy’s outright dismissal of The Tale of Beowulf as an ‘unexpected failure’ needs modification on two counts. I have demonstrated that Morris’s translation is consistent with the main thrusts of philological theory in his time. Furthermore, although some passages may be disappointing, in many instances Morris translates sympathetically and with much skill. Future translators should find the reception of Morris’s Tale of Beowulf instructive. The Whitbread Book of the Year award for 1999 was presented to Seamus Heaney for his version of Beowulf. Eric Anderson, the chairman of the judges, was reported as saying ‘this was a master poet breathing life into a great work of art which has only been known to a small number of academics. He has retrieved a buried golden treasure’ (The Guardian, 26 January 2000: 1). Such a pronouncement can be compared fairly with Theodore Watts’s review of Morris’s translation, insisting ‘the only modern poet’ capable of this difficult task was ‘the author of Sigurd, the one great epic of the nineteenth

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century’ (181). Arguably, for all its failings, Morris’s Beowulf is truer to the original than Heaney’s Beowulf. Yet Heaney’s smooth, idiomatic translation is the translation our age seems to require, whereas the late nineteenth century wanted a translation such as Morris’s. How will the reception of Heaney’s Beowulf compare with that of Morris’s a century from now?

NOTES 1

2 3

4

Throughout, the translation is referred to as Morris’s work. Strictly speaking it is a collaborative effort, undertaken with the scholar A.J. Wyatt, although there is good evidence that both men regarded the creative input as Morris’s solely. I wish to thank William Whitla and David Latham for generous advice on earlier drafts of this chapter. Morris translated in the same way. See The Tale of Beowulf (CW 10:190), where modþraece (line 385) is rendered as ‘mood-daring.’ Robert Boenig mounts a partial defence of Morris’s Beowulf, arguing that, although faulty, the poem is ‘the best translation available’ (12). P.M. Tilling also mounts a partial defence of Morris’s methods, although I am not convinced by his argument that understanding Morris’s respect for the original text makes his translation less difficult to read. I thank David Latham for drawing my attention to these two articles. Furnivall’s role was central. He was the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, founder of the Early English Text Society, and the advocate of a purer English in which ‘fore-words’ (a ‘native’ equivalent of the Latinate ‘prefaces’) were to front English books.

15 Morris’s Compromises: On Victorian Editorial Theory and the Kelmscott Chaucer Charles LaPorte

A great deal of twentieth-century William Morris scholarship is devoted to celebrating the Kelmscott Chaucer as the closest semblance of the medieval manuscript found in printed books since printed books began. This essay proposes to reexamine Morris’s difficult position as editor-in-chief of the Chaucer project and, more specifically, to call into question the singleness of purpose we have come to associate with Morris in this role. I begin with the illustrator Edward BurneJones’s famous commendation of the work to his daughter: ‘I want particularly to draw your attention to the fact that there is no preface to Chaucer, and no introduction, and no essay on his position as a poet, and no notes, and no glossary; so that all is prepared for you to enjoy him thoroughly’ (qtd in Duncan Robinson 35). This remark is often cited (and correctly, I think) as the most succinct formulation of Burne-Jones’s and Morris’s shared belief that an illuminated Chaucer in what today would be known as ‘clear-text’ format (that is, without preface, introduction, notes, glossary, or marginalia) is not only truer to the medieval manuscript tradition than a critical edition, but also truer to the poet’s goal of entertaining readers and listeners. Conceivably, Chaucer would have agreed, as he writes in his Legend of Good Women: ‘For myn entent is, or I fro yow fare, / The naked text in English to declare’ (Morris, Works of Chaucer 417). Yet by 1896, the difficulty of using Victorian editorial theory to found a revival of centuries-old bookmaking processes was much greater than has generally been recognized. Surely Morris’s choice of ‘clear-text’ pages is the most straightforward way to revive an older

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tradition, yet this choice necessarily belies his understanding of the fragmented history of Chaucer’s oeuvre. There is no fifteenth-century Collected Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, and the very idea of such a monument to the father of the English poetical tradition invariably loses or hides the textual economy that the fifteenth century did possess. Morris’s design entails a single, resonant text, while medieval manuscript culture afforded only fragmented and often contradictory Chaucer texts. Unwilling to surrender the monumental aspects of the work, but unable to reconcile his designs to the text’s medieval roots and history, Morris resorted in several instances to undermining and concealing that history itself. I wish to consider here a small number of such instances in the light of Victorian editorial theory. In particular, I wish to call attention to two parts of the Chaucer which present unique editorial difficulties: the Canterbury Tales Retraction and the Troilus ‘Envoi.’ If it is not surprising to us that Morris begins his Chaucer with the famous Canterbury Tales (figs. 15.1 and 15.2), this is in part because the Kelmscott edition helped establish what is today the prevalent editorial tradition, one that ignores chronological order to begin with works which have retained the most literary significance. Why Morris should begin there is obvious enough: he was interested in celebrating Chaucer’s literary and cultural significance. A problem with this beginning, though, is that it places Chaucer’s notorious ‘Retraccioun’ to the Canterbury Tales in the first half of the book (222). In his Retraction (fig. 15.3), Chaucer categorically renounces the secular works that secured his posthumous reputation, recommending instead his less esteemed religious pieces. The medieval religiosity of this renouncement was as distressing to the Victorian reader as it is to the modern, and it was surely bothersome for Morris. An awkward situation presents itself when any author, midway through a book, denounces all the material that follows that point, and the Kelmscott poem-sequence seems to make Chaucer do just that. While Morris could not omit this important text, his editorial choices serve to hide it, and to limit its significance. The Retraction appears on the verso of an illuminated opening, at the beginning of a series of Chaucer’s minor lyric poems, starting with the translated abécédaire of Guillaume de Deguilleville (fig. 15.4). The Kelmscott edition introduces this short poem as ‘AN A.B.C. OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER,’ affirming Chaucer’s authorship in a way that has manuscript precedent, but that still seems odd when we consider that by Morris’s time the work was

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widely known as a translation. (Morris’s source text, the 1894 Oxford edition of W.W. Skeat, includes de Deguilleville’s poem running along the bottom of the eleven pages, 1:261–71.) This text is followed by The Compleynt unto Pite, The Compleynt of Mars, The Compleynt of Venus, and others, and the minor poems end with Womanly Noblesse, which in turn precedes Chaucer’s major translation, The Romaunt of the Rose. The Retraction has no place in this series of minor poems. Nonetheless, the heavily ornamented, double-engraved opening – in which the verso of page 222 (‘Here taketh the makere of this book his leve’) faces the recto of 223 (‘A.B.C. of Geoffrey Chaucer’), with a rambling rose trellised about both leaves to connect the pages of the opening – invites the reader to read it as the first of the series of minor poems that follows The Canterbury Tales. This impression is encouraged in spite of the text at the bottom of 222: ‘Here is ended the book of the Tales of Canterbury, compiled by Geffrey Chaucer, of whos soul Jhesu Crist have mercy. Amen.’ What we have here is an incongruity between what editorial theorists now call the ‘linguistic’ and the ‘bibliographic codes’ of the text (McGann, Textual Condition 60). The linguistic code is the aggregate meaning of the words on the page; the bibliographic code is that of the non-linguistic signifiers: the type, the images, the frames, even the margins. Here the two codes function at cross purposes with one another: the linguistic code presents the end of a major text and the beginning of a minor one, while the bibliographic code invites us to connect them. The disjunction between these two codes is conspicuous in the first words on page 222 – ‘Here taketh the makere of this book his leve’ – for we are not at the end of the book. It is more important, though, in the final words: ‘of whos soule Jhesu Crist have mercy.’ The most vexing aspect of Chaucer’s Retraction, after all, is not that he preemptively ends his book, but that he ends it to obtain ‘grace to biwayle my gilts, & to studie to the salvacioun of my soule’ [grace to lament my sins, and to study to the salvation of my soul]. The ornament of the Kelmscott opening on these two pages addresses both the religious and the terminal aspects of Chaucer’s text in such a way as to discourage a face-value reading of either aspect. Burne-Jones created for the opening a pair of framed images, in each of which the poet is greeted by the ‘blissful mooder’ of page 222. This is to say, he is greeted by a woman resembling the blissful mother as she has been depicted in centuries of Christian art spanning from early Byzantine icons to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla

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Domini! On the recto, there is no ambiguity at all about this: she appears above the line ‘ALMIGHTY AND AL MERCIABLE QUENE,’ crowned and carrying the holy child in her arms. Lilies, as in Rossetti’s painting, sprout from her feet so as to extinguish confusion about her identity. This heavy-handed symbolism on the recto side is particularly important in so far as it lends attention and significance to the parallel figure on the facing verso, a figure which also seems, at first glance, a stock Virgin of nineteenth-century Catholic art, complete with halo, veil, and what might be taken for a flaming Immaculate Heart. The verso Virgin gestures upwards, in fact, seemingly to draw Chaucer’s and the reader’s eye towards the heavens. Yet Burne-Jones inscribes ‘POESIS’ in her halo, as though to conflate this Virgin with Calliope, to suggest that the mother of God appreciates a good secular lyric as much as anyone, and to imply that Chaucer ’s repudiation of ‘enditynges of worldly vanitees’ is not necessarily sanctioned by the divine powers for whom he repudiates them. Burne-Jones, to be sure, did not believe that it was, and he creates with the two images a visual narrative that shows Chaucer realizing the error of his former piety. On the recto, the Virgin’s reprimanding air disappears because the situation of Chaucer’s writing desk, parchment, and pen suggests that he has once more taken up his poetry. These images of the Virgin’s literary enthusiasm have more to do with Victorian reverence for Chaucer than with Chaucer’s for the Virgin – more to do with Victorian bibliolatry than with medieval religious perspective. In the text of the Retraction, we can also see that for all his rigour in pursuit of a more authentic Chaucer, Morris ignores elements of medieval scribal culture that his close acquaintance with Chaucer manuscripts affords him. Morris deferred to W.W. Skeat’s conviction that modern spelling mars the beauty of medieval poetry: he held Skeat’s text to be ‘as good as possible’ (Letters 4:188) and turned to Skeat for help with the glossary of the Kelmscott Psalmi Penitentiales, while dismissing readers ‘who would want every word respelt ... or praphrased [sic]’ (Letters 4:227). Yet Morris often follows Tyrwhitt’s popular modernized editions in capitalization and abbreviation. As Morris knew, nineteenth-century editors were compelled to make distinctions which medieval scribes would not recognize; for instance, they uniformly capitalized references to the deity, and considered this practice semantically important.1 Stormonth’s popular 1895 Dictionary of the English Language quaintly specifies that ‘the word God, designating the Supreme Being, begins with a capital letter, thus, God; but

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when an idol or false god is meant the word is wholly in small letters, thus, god’ (407), and the 1902 Rules for Compositors and Readers employed at the Clarendon Press, Oxford maintains even that ‘pronouns referring to the Deity, should be capitals’ (19). When on page 222 Morris prints ‘Lord Jhesu Crist,’ he follows nineteenth-century conventions, rather than medieval ones: the Ellesmere manuscript (for the Victorians, the most authoritative manuscript) has ‘lord Ihesu crist’ (Furnivall 8:684), and Skeat compromises with ‘lord Iesu Crist’ (4:644). Morris similarly eschews scribal abbreviations for religious formulas, even when these are found in his copy-text and in the best manuscripts. ‘Qui cum patre &c,’ generally concludes these manuscripts. Yet, as if such abbreviation might appear too casual in a textual monument of this order, the Kelmscott instead follows nineteenth-century editorial precedent (viz. Tyrwhitt) with ‘Quicum Patre et Spiritu Sancto vivis et regnas Deus per omina seclua. Amen’ (222). It might be argued in such cases that the Kelmscott Chaucer records what was understood by the fifteenth-century scribes, rather than what they wrote, yet this same argument should be extended to modernized spelling, which Morris rejected, following Skeat. It is therefore helpful to see Morris as a middle ground between most nineteenth-century Chaucer editors (the successors of Tyrwhitt) and modern textual theorists. The Kelmscott Press helped perpetuate the position that such features as spelling are meaningful to the substance of a text, a position which was dominant by the mid-twentieth century, when W.W. Greg designated such formal features as ‘accidentals’ (21). Greg himself does not discuss such formal features for their semantic importance, but rather for their unique value in showing scribal departures from earlier copies of a work; Morris partially saw this fifty years previously. And since Greg, bibliographical theory has reaffirmed the meaningfulness of such accidentals (Williams and Abbott 71–3), further vindicating Morris’s practice. Yet such vindication also suggests where Morris falls short of his own theory. His choice not to reproduce manuscript features in a uniform fashion – all the textual accidentals found in the best manuscripts – shows the limits of his willingness to present a medieval text in all its foreign oddness. The editorial choices represented by these accidentals and these images are noteworthy because Morris was so historically rigorous in other particulars of the Kelmscott text – textual and decorative. In pictorial images also, Morris was usually exacting. Burne-Jones’s

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images of Chaucer, for instance, closely adhere to the Harley manuscript illuminations reproduced by F.J. Furnivall’s London Chaucer Society. (He takes 20 lbs. off the figure of Chaucer from the Harley manuscript, but his poet is meticulously groomed and attired in precisely the fashion suggested by the medieval illuminations.) Why should Burne-Jones be so scrupulous with Chaucer’s attire, and yet so freewheeling with the Virgin? Why would Morris be so attentive to the beauties of Middle-English spelling, and then cede to the niceties of nineteenth-century capitalization? I suggest that the explanation presents itself in the conflicted needs of bibliographical and linguistic codes in the page 222–3 opening. Morris’s desire to monumentalize Chaucer in a fashion congenial to the nineteenth century meant that he had to sacrifice certain aspects of medieval scribal culture and even of medieval religion. Burne-Jones famously called the Kelmscott Chaucer ‘a pocket cathedral,’ and he was fond of quoting Spenser in his opinion of Chaucer as a ‘well of English undefiled.’ Yet he and Morris cannot construct a ‘pocket cathedral’ of ‘English undefiled’ if they acknowledge Chaucer’s apparent rejection of the secular poems which are their chief materials. Something very similar to the recontextualizing project enacted in the Retraction may be found in Kelmscott’s ‘Envoi’ to Troilus and Criseyde, the final poem of the Chaucer (figs. 15.4 and 15.5). The situation of this envoi demands that Morris re-encode it in precisely the opposite way he had re-encoded the Retraction. Rather than beginning his volume with what was chronologically Chaucer’s latest poem, here Morris desired to conclude his volume with a chronologically early poem. Unfortunately, this situation tends also to obscure a section of text that was already a difficult blend of religious argument and extratextual reference. Every feature that Chaucer scholars normally associate with the difficult Troilus ‘Envoi’ is here thrown into conflict with new contextual signifiers which complicate and sometimes veil their original meaning. The Troilus ‘Envoi’ in some sense functions like the Retraction. Troilus, the Trojan hero, dies, rises to the seventh sphere, and returns long enough to see life on earth as a vain and foolish charade. The passage is something of a meditation on pagan virtue, but one pointedly qualified by its meditation on Christ and its famous denunciation of the pre-Christian world: ‘Lo here, of Payens corsed olde rytes’ (Kelmscott Chaucer 553). Given the complicated relationship in Troilus and Criseyde between Christian salvation and pagan virtue, Burne-

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Jones’s final image from the Kelmscott volume is cleverly expedient – is it a Christian angel, who reminds Chaucer of the higher realms? Initially that might seem the case, but if so, this Christian messenger bears a striking resemblance to Burne-Jones’s earlier images of Venus’s son, the god of love, from such earlier poems as the House of Fame and the Roman de la Rose. Burne-Jones makes these figures so similar because he did not particularly believe in a theological difference between Venus’s son and Mary’s, at least as far as Chaucer’s art was concerned. But Chaucer wrote the Troilus meditation to suggest just the theological problem of this difference. Here, still more than in the Retraction, the Kelmscott edition obscures Chaucer’s Christological religious understanding and replaces it with a Victorian religious understanding, in which ‘Love’ in all his guises is supposed to manifest the divine. This final Kelmscott image, indeed, clearly encourages a misreading of the famous passage beginning the second column of 552 (fig. 15.5): ‘Go, litel book, go litel myn tregedie, / Ther God thy maker yet, er that he dye, / So sende might to maken som comedie!’ In these lines, Chaucer addresses the Troilus to suggest its unworthiness. Morris, however, by putting the poem in the rear of the Kelmscott text, transfers the apostrophe to the entire collected works (most of which were written after the Troilus). Indeed, Burne-Jones draws Chaucer holding a volume that looks remarkably like the finished Kelmscott. That this is meant to be Chaucer’s life work is beyond dispute; observe from the first two openings (figs. 15.1 and 15.2) that the progress of this book forms its own visual narrative throughout the Kelmscott images, growing commensurately with its place in the Kelmscott text: a little diarysized volume at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales is moderately sized by the Retraction, is quite heavy by the House of Fame, and is Morris’s own Kelmscott Chaucer at the end. The comical thing is that John Gower, to whom the courtly Troilus is dedicated in the penultimate stanza (‘O moral Gower, this book I directe to thee’), in the fourteenth century had expressed ambivalence about the dedication. Now in the nineteenth century he inherits as well Chaucer’s lewd fabliaux and the proto-feminism of the Wife of Bath – indeed, the whole of Chaucer’s oeuvre. In light of these examples and the questions that they raise, I wish briefly to address Victorian editorial theory in general. Although Victorian scholarship has been often maligned for a bungling, pedantic, and anachronistic approach to medieval poetry, with regard to Chaucer it was impressively forward-thinking. It was Victorian

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scholars who first deduced in what order the major works were written, Victorians who discovered most of Chaucer ’s source materials, Victorians who crafted the first self-identifying eclectic texts from the various manuscripts in which Chaucer’s work exists, and certainly Victorians who established most of our current ideas of Chaucer as a ‘canonical’ author. To say that their work was carefully done understates the case: the Victorians treated Chaucer with the same attention and scholarly exactitude with which they approached biblical literature, and indeed it was from their study of biblical and classical manuscripts that their methods primarily derived. Morris’s source for the Kelmscott text, Skeat’s erudite Oxford edition, is a classic model of Victorian scholarship. Like the biblical scholars who sought to establish the most reliable incarnation of the word of God, Skeat essayed to pin down the most coherent, most reliable, and most genuine text that could be reproduced from the many and conflicting Chaucer manuscripts at his disposal. Doing so demanded that he confront variations in individual words and passages, and also face difficult questions regarding the order of Chaucer’s works. What marks Skeat’s work as particularly Victorian is that in it this quest for a unified text is checked and balanced by his deliberate reminders that such a text remains on some level illusory. He thus signals each point at which he departs from the Ellesmere manuscript in the Canterbury Tales, for instance, and explains at length why his Troilus is composed of a hybrid of the Campsall and Corpus Christi manuscripts (2:lxvii–lxix). His full title, printed on every volume, is The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited, from numerous manuscripts. It contrasts interestingly with Morris’s Kelmscott title: The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer now newly imprinted. Skeat displays the limits of his project in a way that Morris’s vision does not permit. By reproducing Skeat’s highly regarded text without reproducing Skeat’s textual variants, Morris retained the cultural cachet of the best and most reliable text, while he conceded nothing of the elusiveness of Chaucer’s historical transmission. Morris’s well-known letter to the Oxford University Press requesting permission to use Skeat’s text contains assurances that the Kelmscott Press was making a very different sort of Chaucer: ‘[We] by no means intend to produce a literal reprint of his text’ (Letters 4:188). Arguably, the difference to which Morris refers is less to be found in the Kelmscott paper and ink than it is in the idea of Chaucerian textual authority. Burne-Jones famously claimed that he meant by a picture ‘something that never was, never

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will be – in a light better than any light that ever shone – in a land no one can define or remember, only desire’ (qtd in Latham, Haunted Texts 5). Morris thought similarly of a text – or at least he produced a Chaucer that has never existed in time before, and eradicates the manuscript history from which its elements were retrieved. Morris’s solution is especially dissatisfying because from the 1860s through the 1910s, Furnivall’s Chaucer Society was publishing paralleltext editions of Chaucer’s manuscripts, the most important of which is the 1869–77 ‘six-text Chaucer.’ These parallel editions grew out of the Victorians’ sensitivity to the bibliographical problems inherent in a single, eclectic text crafted from sometimes incompatible manuscripts, and they were in many senses more theoretically sound than today’s critical editions of many English poets. Though Skeat in the Oxford edition produced what became an authoritative edition, it is doubtless owing to the Chaucer Society’s theoretical rigour that Skeat took such pains to emphasize the manuscript choices that he made. If Skeat resembles the nineteenth-century biblical scholar in his anxieties about variations in the words of his text, Morris responds with an approach to the literature that is almost evangelical. Consider how the Bible traditionally circulated in the nineteenth-century evangelical tradition – not as an enormous set of variant biblical manuscripts written in ancient Hebrew and Koiné Greek, but rather as a literary monument of immeasurable significance, as a single text, as ‘the Word.’ Morris understood as well as anyone that literature in the nineteenth century was coming to usurp the cultural position once held by the sacred text (Eagleton, ‘Rise of English’ 20–1; Prickett 6). In the wake of the nineteenth-century biblical crisis, acknowledgment of hermeneutic instability in pre-modern texts appeared antithetical to the generation and retention of cultural power. The Kelmscott Chaucer exploits, rather than deflates, this false antithesis. If these textual conditions are not mutually exclusive, the Protestant evangelical tradition had taught Morris that they often resided in different spheres, and the monument of the Chaucer leaves no doubt that Morris was willing to sacrifice the former if it would help him achieve the latter. In conclusion, I must say that these questions would not matter so much if Morris and Burne-Jones had not had such an enduring effect on subsequent perceptions of Chaucer, and upon our sense of Chaucer’s monumental, canonical status. Joseph A. Dane rightly points out that the Kelmscott Chaucer’s appearance remains today ‘probably more familiar to modern readers than that of any other Chaucer edition’

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(220). Since the Kelmscott edition did so alter posterity’s image of this poet, it seems valuable to inquire to what extent, and for what reasons, and upon what bibliographical premises this shaping influence occurred. The point of this line of questioning, then, is by no means to denounce Morris and Burne-Jones for making their beautiful and hugely influential work. It is rather to examine the problems inherent in a ‘cathedral’-like, aesthetically based edition of the complete works of a medieval poet. Any attempt like Skeat’s or Morris’s to craft an authoritative text from Chaucer’s multiple and conflicting sources may be called dubious, but tacitly to insist on Chaucer as the author of a coherent oeuvre, as the Kelmscott does, increases that dubiousness. And if Skeat forcibly compromised in picking an order and a text, then Morris further compromised in enshrining the order that Skeat picked. Had Morris and Burne-Jones in the 1890s conspired to produce an enormous shelf-full of interchangeable Chaucer fragments, as one textual theorist has recommended (Williams and Abbott 61), one wonders if our notions of Chaucer’s canonicity and authorship would have descended to us from the Victorian era in quite the fashion that they did.

NOTE 1

N.E. Ossleton shows that throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, increasing numbers of English printers capitalized nouns, but that this practice declined through the later half of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Many eighteenth-century printers composed rules for capitalization, but no eighteenth-century system became so completely established as the modern practice of distinguishing proper nouns from common, which emerged in the nineteenth century.

ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 15.1 William Morris. Border and typography design. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. Frontispiece. Fig. 15.2 Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Illustration, border, and typography. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 1. Fig. 15.3 Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Illustration, border, and

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typography. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 222. Fig. 15.4 Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Illustration, border, and typography. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 223. Fig. 15.5 William Morris. Typography. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 552. Fig. 15.6 Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Illustration, border, and typography. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 553.

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16 ‘The Dream of William Morris’: Marya Zaturenska’s Lost Essay Janis Londraville

The year is 1907. A five-year-old child is sailing to America from Russia, where her mother had been an embroiderer for a member of the Radziwell family, and her father a groundskeeper. We do not know exactly when the little girl’s mother died – perhaps on the voyage, perhaps shortly after arrival. But we do know that too soon the father was widowed and the child was sent to work in a garment factory, pulling bastings to help her father with the cost of living in a new country. It was a difficult beginning for a life that would have captured William Morris’s imagination. One day in 1913, when Marya Zaturenska was only eleven, Jeanne Robert Foster (1879–1970), a volunteer social worker in New York City, visited the family and noticed in Marya some light not yet extinguished by the exhausting work. Mrs Foster arranged other work for Marya – at Brentano’s Bookstore – and encouraged her to use the job to educate herself. Just as important, Mrs Foster began to introduce Marya to her literary and political friends of the time: Vachel Lindsay, Nicaraguan-American poet Salomón de la Selva, John Butler Yeats. One evening at Mrs Foster’s apartment, the young Russian met Eamon De Valera (Phillips, ‘Real Thing’ 36). Soon, Zaturenska’s head was swimming with ideas instigated by these people. Jeanne Foster had come from a working-class background herself. Born in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state, she was sent out to relatives for much of her young life because her farmer, carpenter, lumberman father could not afford to feed her. Her mother, though, encouraged her to read, and she became especially enchanted by the

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adventurous tales told by a contemporary English poet, William Morris, in his Earthly Paradise. She read other Morris writings, and he instilled in her a strong social conscience that led her to volunteer for social-work duties when she had time off from her regular employment. At the age of seventeen, Jeanne Foster had married a man twentysix years her senior to escape the bonds of poverty, and she shortly thereafter moved with her husband to New York City, where she modelled for Charles Dana Gibson and Harrison Fisher, and wrote for the Review of Reviews. By the time she met Marya Zaturenska, Mrs Foster was already good friends with John Butler Yeats (who lived near her in the city and is now buried next to her in Chesterton, New York) and his poet son Willie (Butler Yeats). She shared her interest in Morris with the Yeatses, and she and Willie often discussed Morris’s desire to promote a love of beauty in working-class men and women. Mrs Foster, then, was arguably the most important person elevenyear-old Marya could have met on that fateful day in 1913 – because events from that moment culminated in Zaturenska’s award of the 1938 Pulitizer Prize in Poetry for her collection, Cold Morning Sky. Between 1918 and 1924, Mrs Foster was the mistress of John Quinn, the noted American patron and art collector who, among his collection, owned a number of Morris’s manuscripts. At the time Mrs Foster found Zaturenska, Quinn was involved in another affair, one which lasted until he met Mrs Foster through the instigation of his friend, J.B. Yeats. Quinn’s paramour – at least one of them – from 1909 until 1918 was William Morris’s daughter, May. The Foster-Zaturenska friendship began a strange interconnectedness – Morris to Foster to Zaturenska, and from Foster to John Quinn, to Foster as an old woman in the 1960s, when she gave Richard Londraville a stack of papers to look through while he was working on a book about W.B. Yeats. Included in the papers were love letters from May Morris to Quinn, and several letters from Zaturenska to Foster. These coincidences – quirks of fate, if you will – helped me, several decades later, to locate Zaturenska’s ‘Dream of William Morris.’ Near the end of Zaturenska’s life, she began work on a book of essays – with the intended title ‘A Gallery of Poets’ – about writers whom she particularly admired. One was William Morris, and she chose to examine the ways in which his ideas had shaped her own work. But she put the book away as she grew more and more frail, and when she was asked about it a year or so before she died, she could not

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remember where she had put it (Phillips, ‘Visiting the Gregories’ 32). Syracuse University bought her papers, and those of her husband, editor and author Horace Gregory, and I found most of the draft for the ‘Gallery’ book in those archives at Syracuse. Zaturenska had titled one chapter ‘The Dream of William Morris.’ Zaturenska focuses primarily on the essence in Morris that exerts such a powerful influence on the community of artists, writers, philosophers, designers, and politicians. She thinks that most of our activities in life are mindless, especially in our working life, but art imbues every activity with significance. As John Quinn had cited in a 1921 brief that argued against the imposition of duty on original works of art, Morris brought ‘art to the people’ and promoted ‘art by the people and for the people, as a joy to the maker and to the user.’ He again quoted Morris: ‘I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few’ (Quinn 3). After we working beings see art, read poetry, or are instilled with the beauty of dance or song, we have inspirations to create this art ourselves. Morris, says Zaturenska, wanted to give the working man a job in which he could have pride, in which his life would be made more beautiful. Any man can make art. Work, even menial work, could be and should be satisfying, not boring, if only the captains of industry could be urged to enlightenment. Morris gave the working class the opportunity for inspiration. He was the poet who spoke to every man. Zaturenska’s essay examines Morris’s ability to excite the mind. Perhaps like Matthew Arnold, even though Morris may not have been a ‘great’ poet, he wrote some great poems; and perhaps more importantly, something in this story of Morris’s life and in his work inspires. In the beginning of her essay, Zaturenska writes: Morris had called himself ‘the idle singer of an empty day’ and indeed he was the type not uncommon in romantic poetry whose obsession with the past flooded his emotions with dark prophecies and gave him an occult penetration into the future, for those who live in the future or in the past have one thing in common – their worlds are out of the range of living memory. Yeats suggests that Morris created new forms of melancholy and that the frail languid knights and ladies of his friend the painter Burne-Jones were the shadowy reflections of Morris’s dreams. In their shrinking light, tinctured by faint running silver, and fading gold atmosphere, their febrile delicacy is held up by the influence of Morris’s personality.

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Zaturenska attributes Morris’s great drive, energy, and talent to three motivating forces. He saw ‘the exploited farm laborer too exhausted to see the beautiful world around him’ and he ‘watch[ed] the workmen in his father’s mines and reflected on their lives. They adhered to his imagination, and afterwards to his compassion.’ In his later years when ‘the comfort, the luxuries, the easy self-satisfaction of a rich Victorian establishment’ surrounded him, he remembered those labourers and was driven to provide them with at least a glimpse of beauty. The second motivating force – and more personal conflict – that Zaturenska considers is Morris’s feelings for his wife, Jane: Morris’s burly physique, his boisterous activity, hid a nature as fine and sensitive as a girl’s. He admired women but their beauty troubled him. With a kind of wistfulness and even timidity, he followed them with his eyes; but he was afraid of them and it led to the strange unhappiness of his marriage with a beautiful woman of exotic appearance and a rather commonplace mind. This shyness or clumsiness may ... have hidden strong feelings of frustration and made him turn to the sensuous delight in the beauty of nature, his exquisite feelings for flowers and foliage, the flowing lines of a riverbank, the natural richness of Gothic traceries, the wood engravings, or wood-carving, his natural gift for a design that seemed as simple and as intricate as Nature itself.

Although Jane Morris may not have been as responsible for Morris’s ‘drive to genius’ as Zaturenska implies, there is some truth in what she says. He was a man of powerful emotional and intellectual drives, whose mind was filled with a mad rush of ideas. He would need satisfaction, if not with Jane then through rich creative experience. The third spur was Morris’s reaction to the pragmatism and utilitarianism of an age of reason. Morris, by his freedom of spirit and expression, encouraged his readers to salvage their troubled spirits: It was better to dream of Robber Knights, of fierce heroes of the Crusades, of fierce battles and chivalrous tournaments, of holy Pilgrims braving dangers on the way to the Holy Land, of great abbeys, and monasteries perched high on inaccessible mountains, sacred to St. Bernard and St. Benedict – the blood, the darkness, the violence ... The image of the Blessed Damozel leaning from the golden bar of

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heaven with the seven stars in her hair represented for the PreRaphaelites their symbols of the Middle Ages, symbols of vague sexual mysticism.

It is this violence and vigour that make real art, which for Zaturenska is a Morrisian reversal of the hierarchal privileging of the fine art of an oil canvas over the craft of stained glass: Like a conjuror, Morris displays a vision of stark reality from the age of faith – its deep spirituality that flowered in art and architecture, its sudden explosions in violence and blood. It makes the Idylls of the King sound anemic and suggestive of a historical painting by the smooth conventional Lord Leighton, while William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere has the glowing color and vigor of 13th century stained glass.

Whether Morris is recalling atrocities from medieval history or anticipating the theatrics of modern television, Zaturenska prefers his art to Tennyson’s domestic sentimentality and saintliness: All these blood feuds, foul deeds, battles, visions of sudden death are far from the sentimentality of the day. Morris’s Guenevere is not the weak erring lay figure of Tennyson’s Idylls, but a passionate woman who justifies her adultery with Sir Launcelot, a most un-Victorian thing to do. Nor is his King Arthur the saintly, forgiving, Victorian husband of Tennyson. Instead he is jealous, angry, passionate, condemning his wife to be burnt alive because she has caused the death of so many valiant knights. Sir Launcelot comes to the rescue (one can hear the trumpets blowing), silences the Queen’s dastardly accusers, mollifies the King (temporarily at least). It is all good television drama, but it is real poetry, too.

What interested Zaturenska about Morris is what attracts many of us to his work. In ‘The Dream of William Morris’ she is intrigued by his synthetic mind. He took images, ideas, and stories already well told and put them in a new time or a new culture or a new frame. She comments on his ‘long, dreary epic poems about Iceland and Norway,’ calling them ‘synthetic sagas’ that ‘deserve long and careful attention’ to ‘draw out their hidden excellence.’ She agrees with Andre Gide, whom she calls ‘the most penetrating of French critics, though not always right,’ that the most difficult art is ultimately the most

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rewarding. But Zaturenska’s particular interest focuses on the Greek themes in Morris’s poetry, interwoven with ‘medieval gardens thick with colored flowers, and overshadowed castles enveloped in dark foliage.’ ‘Atalanta pursues her fallow deer’ through Gothic woods, she notes, and ‘Jason pursues the Golden fleece through lands and seascapes that are closer to Chaucer.’ We are reminded of Morris’s advice to read the source, then close the book and make it our own – an idea that Ezra Pound later condensed to ‘Make it new.’ Think, for example, of a poem from Zaturenska’s Modernist era, Pound’s ‘In a Station at the Metro’: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

The synapse between the two images creates a new emotion. Although Zaturenska does not specifically refer to Pound in her essay on Morris, one example of Morris’s use of this type of synapse that she does mention occurs in a poem from The Defence of Guenevere, ‘Old Love.’ An aged warrior, Sir Giles, is at home in his castle in England, and he asks questions of a visitor who has returned from the court of a lady Sir Giles loved in his youth. She is now married to a duke. Morris juxtaposes images of the fall of Constantine with the aging beauty of the woman. The tension created by the two ideas exaggerates the sense of inevitable doom. Miscreants are dragging Christ’s cross upon the ground, and ‘things outwear / I thought were made for ever’ (27–8). This lament is placed next to Giles’s memory of his love: And she – she was changed more; her hair Before my eyes that used to swim, And make me dizzy with great bliss Once, when I used to watch her sit – Her hair is bright still, yet it is As though some dust were thrown on it. (35–40)

Zaturenska thus delineates Morris’s use of imagery, which we can see differs from Pound’s. Pound simply places objects next to each other, as he learned in his study of the Chinese character: ‘mother’ next to ‘child’ compounds for the emotive character of ‘love.’ In Morris, images

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are piled on top of each other, or each image is described in detail (as with ‘her hair’ in the passage above). As often as he employs imagery, Morris also uses complex emotions that, when placed next to each other (as with the miscreants dragging Christ’s cross and Sir Giles’s memories of his love), heighten the tension of the poetry. Morris’s technique is different from Pound’s but anticipates Pound and the Modernist movement’s synaptic use of image. What Zaturenska says, finally, is that William Morris’s dream is his ability to imagine and explore the minds of different characters – and through these characters to enter the minds of his readers, thus inspiring them to create their own stories, their own art. Morris provides the images and portraits upon which they can build. This idea may have meant salvation to Zaturenska in her darkest moments, when she had lost her inspiration in the midst of the Great Depression. In several excerpts from her diaries written between 1933 and 1936,1 she records her pain: [10 March 1933] The bank holiday has filled everyone with gloom and fear. One feels as if the end of the world has come. We are paralyzed at the insecurity of everything. Is it worth while to save desperately for one’s children, one’s old age, to provide insurance against disaster if in one day they can all be wiped out through no fault of one’s own? We were left with one dollar in our pocket in cash. (Zaturenska, ‘Depression Diary’ 138) [3 May 1933] There is no spot to love, nowhere in which the soul, the heart, the mind can take roots in and grow; all becomes thin now, sterilizing and lifeless in one. (138). [22 January 1936] I must do my work – I must complete another book – I must pull myself out of languor, weakness, and futility and write for dear life. (Horace Gregory Papers) [3 March 1936] I belong nowhere – my poems seem forced and unnatural, diseased, and trivial. (Horace Gregory Papers)

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Janice Londraville

[12 March 1936] I am alone too much – maggots on the brain are the result – when I meet anyone I talk too much and too wildly the result of too many days of silence. Can’t write – feel as if some inner strength has been sapped. (Horace Gregory Papers)

In 1938 Zaturenska won the Pulitzer Prize for Cold Morning Sky. The determination she expressed in January 1936 triumphed over the despair she still felt in March. She wrote and she rewrote; she discarded and began again, finally compiling her finest collection of verse. In an interview with me in 1999, Patrick Gregory indicated that his mother’s love of William Morris’s verse, and Morris’s record of production even during difficult personal times in his life, was like a beacon to her.2 Zaturenska fought the depression that isolated her even from her husband and children. She worked more diligently in the late 1930s, beginning her biography of Christina Rossetti (Christina Rossetti: A Portrait with Background, 1949) and another book of poetry. How much influence the example of Morris actually had on her during this time is cause for speculation, but the life of her favourite author certainly provided her with at least one example of potentiality and possibility, the natural concentric circles that send ripples through our entire world – a process directly opposed to the idea of the artist working in isolation. It is possibility, said Zaturenska, even more than production – it is, to paraphrase Robert Browning, the reach rather than the grasp – that gives us a path through this sometimes dark world.

NOTES 1

2

I thank Syracuse University Library for permission to publish excerpts from Marya Zaturenska’s essay ‘The Dream of William Morris,’ and from her 1931–6 diary. Patrick Gregory, interviewed by Janis and Richard Londraville, 10 March 1999, Venice, Florida.

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Contributors

Matthew Beaumont is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900 (2005), and is currently editing Looking Backward for Oxford World’s Classics. D.M.R. Bentley is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of numerous articles and books on Canadian literature and Victorian literature and art, including The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880-1897 (2004) and ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Anglo-Dutch Emblem Tradition’ (2005). Florence S. Boos, Professor of English at the University of Iowa, has edited scholarly editions of Morris’s The Socialist Diary (1985) and The Earthly Paradise (2002), as well as collections of essays on his writings. She is the author of The Design of William Morris’ The Earthy Paradise (1990) and articles on Morris, Pre-Raphaelitism, and Victorian working-class poetry. She is currently working on an edition of The Life and Death of Jason for the Morris On-Line Edition. Wanda Campbell is an Associate Professor of Women’s Literature and Creative Writing at Acadia University. Her books include Sky Fishing (1997) and Hidden Rooms: Early Canadian Women Poets (2000), and her work has appeared in numerous academic and creative journals across Canada. Yuri Cowan is completing his dissertation at the University of Toronto

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on ‘William Morris and Medieval Material Culture.’ His article on ‘William Allingham’s Ballad Book and its Victorian Readers’ appeared in University of Toronto Quarterly (2004). David Faldet is Professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He has published articles on William Morris and John Ruskin, and is working on an environmental history of the Upper Iowa River. Janet Wright Friesen wrote her doctoral dissertation on Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems at York University. She has taught at York University, the University of Toronto, Saint Mary’s University, and currently teaches English at the Halifax Grammar School, Halifax, N.S. Karen Herbert is a retired teacher in Kingston, Ontario. Her articles on Victorian and Canadian literature have been published in Canadian Poetry, English Studies in Canada, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, The Journal of the William Morris Society, and Names: A Journal of Onomastics. Chris Jones lectures in English at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006). Ruth Kinna teaches political thought in the Department of Politics, International Relations, and European Studies at Loughborough University. She is the author of William Morris: The Art of Socialism (2000). Frederick Kirchhoff, former Dean of Arts and Sciences at Metropolitan State University, St Paul, Minnesota, is now retired from academia. He is the author of William Morris (1979), John Ruskin (1984), and William Morris: The Construction of the Male Self, 1856-1872 (1990). Charles LaPorte is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington. He has published articles and reviews in ELH, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, and Victorian Studies, and is presently writing a book on Victorian poetry and biblical hermeneutics. David Latham teaches English at York University and edits The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies. His recent books include An Annotated Critical

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247

Bibliography of William Morris with Sheila Latham (1991), an edition of Morris’s Poems by the Way (1994), Magic Lies: The Art of W.O. Mitchell, edited with Sheila Latham (1997), Scarlet Hunters: Pre-Raphaelitism in Canada (1998), and Haunted Texts: Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism in Honour of William E. Fredeman (2003). Janis Londraville teaches English at the State University of New York at Potsdam. She has edited John Quinn: Selected Irish Writers from His Library (2001) and Prodigal Father Revisited: Artists and Writers in the World of John Butler Yeats (2003) and has co-authored with Richard Londraville Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford: Jeanne Robert Foster and Her Circle of Friends (2001) and The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Paul Swan, from Wilde to Warhol (2006). Jane Thomas lectures in English at the University of Hull. She has published on Thomas Hardy, including Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the Minor Novels (1999), and on contemporary British women writers, including Caryl Churchill, Carol Ann Duffy, and Michèle Roberts.

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Index

Abbott, Leonard 131 Abensour, Miguel 132 Abott, Edwin 125 ‘Address to the Men and Women’s College’ 89 The Aeneids of Virgil 198 ‘The Aims of Art’ xi, 85 Allen, Grant 126–7 Apollonius 45–6, 47, 48, 58 ‘Architecture and History’ 125 Arnold, Matthew 127, 223 ‘The Art of the People’ 156 ‘Art under Plutocracy’ 75, 98, 105, 106, 161, 170 Arthur’s Tomb 14, 17–21, 23, 24, 26–30 Atwood, Margaret 57 Bäisus, Jean-Marie 35 Barringer, Tim 63–4 Bax, E. Belfort 105, 107, 109, 110, 124, 140, 182, 188 Bazalgette, Joseph 74 Beaumont, Matthew xii, 14, 119–36, 245 ‘The Beauty of Life’ 138, 148

Bebel, August 184 Bellamy, Edward 115, 120, 135 Bentley, D.M.R. xii, 14, 17–30, 245 The Tale of Beowulf 15, 197–208 Beye, Charles 45–6 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen 187 A Book of Verse 10 Boos, Florence S. xii, 14, 43–60, 71, 73, 245 Brantlinger, Patrick 41, 92, 103, 104, 105, 120, 136, 180 Bridges, Robert 203 Brooke, Stopford 198, 207 Brown, E.K. 43 Brown, Ford Madox 28 Brown, Peter 139 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 9, 53 Browning, Robert 9, 20, 28, 30, 53, 56, 127, 228 Burne-Jones, Edward xi, 17, 65, 66, 67, 70, 72, 107, 117, 209, 211–15, 216–19, 223 Butler, Josephine 184 Buzard, James 104, 120, 131

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Campbell, Wanda xii, 14, 107–15, 245 Carlyle, Thomas 28, 107, 109, 116, 117, 127, 143 Chambers, R.W. 200 Chandler, Alice 142 Chiswick Press 9 Cobbe, Frances 184 Cobbett, William 105 Cole, G.D.H. 188 Collinson, James 17 Colvin, Sidney 70 The Commonweal x, 7, 9, 98, 99, 103, 104, 105, 135, 165, 166 ‘Communism’ 5–6 Compton textile, wallpaper 8 Conrad, Joseph 88, 105–6 Cowan, Yuri xii, 15, 137–53, 245–6 Cray textile 76, 77 Cunninghame-Graham, R.B. 106

127, 137–53, 155, 166, 170, 188 ‘The Dream’ 44 Drinkwater, John 41

D., H. (Hilda Doolittle) 56, 198 Daisy wallpaper 24–5, 29, 30 Dane, Joseph A. 217–18 Davies, Emily 184 ‘Dawn of a New Epoch’ 124, 188–9, 193 De Morgan, William 8 Dearle, John Henry 8 ‘The Decorative Arts’ (‘The Lesser Arts’) 85, 86, 94, 112, 113, 115, 117, 157–61 ‘The Deeds of Jason’ 43, 49, 59 The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems x, 6, 7, 9, 10, 17, 23–4, 27, 28, 31–2, 35, 41, 44, 166, 225, 226 ‘The Depression of Trade’ 87 Derrida, Jacques 134 Dixon, Richard Watson 16 Dowdon, Edward 56 A Dream of John Ball 15, 102–3, 105,

Fabian Society 169 Faldet, David xii, 14, 73–84, 246 Faulkner, Charles x, 4, 16, 23 Faulkner, Peter 4, 41, 45, 104 Fawcett, Millicent 184 Field, Michael 56 Foote, G.W. 119–20 Foster, Jeanne 221–2 Found 18, 19 Frankel, Nicholas 113 Friesen, Janet Wright xii, 14, 31–41, 246 Froissart, Jean 35, 37, 40, 41, 141, 142, 146 Fruit (or Pomegranate) wallpaper 25– 6, 30 Frye, Northrop 10, 15, 117, 155 Fulford, William 62–3, 67, 71 Furnivall, Frederick J. 202, 208, 213, 214, 217

Eagleton, Terry 6, 130, 217 ‘Early England’ 163, 201 ‘Early Literature of the North – Iceland’ 187 The Earthly Paradise x, 7, 11–13, 14, 43–4, 48, 57, 61–72, 140, 152, 166, 170, 189, 190, 201, 222, 226 ‘Education towards Revolution’ motto xii Eliot, George 11 Ellis, Havelock 126–7 Engels, Friedrich 109, 155, 181–2 Euripides 45, 50, 51, 53, 59, 60 Evenlode textile 76 Exeter Book 201

Index Gaskins, Arthur 9 Gide, Andre 225–6 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 194 Glasier, J. Bruce 137, 187, 194 The Story of the Glittering Plain 166, 170, 190 Gombrich, E.M. 14, 85–7, 89–90, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103, 104 Goode, John 127 ‘Gothic Architecture’ 143 ‘Gothic Revival I’ 200, 202 Greenblatt, Stephen 91–2, 93, 105 Gunn, Thom 199 Haeckel, Ernst 83 Hammersmith Socialist Society 166 ‘The Haystack in the Floods’ 198 Heaney, Seamus 207–8 Henderson, Philip 108 Herbert, Karen xii, 14, 85–106, 246 Hesterna Rosa 18 Hewlett, Henry 46 Holzman, Michael 58, 110–11 Homer 39, 45, 47, 200 Honeysuckle wallpaper 8, 16 ‘The Honeysuckle’ 18 Hopes and Fears for Art 157, 160, 161 ‘The Hopes of Civilization’ 123 Hoskins, Leslie 8 The Tale of the House of the Wolfings 92, 108, 166, 174–5, 190, 192 ‘How I Became a Socialist’ 74, 155, 168 ‘How Shall We Live Then?’ 186 ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’ 3–4, 109, 130, 162, 164 Hudson, W.H. 131 ‘If I Can’ motto xii

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James, Henry 44–5, 57, 65 James, William 121 Jerome, Jerome K. 75, 78 Jones, Chris xii, 15, 197–208, 246 Kelmscott Chaucer x, 7, 15, 209–19. Kelmscott House ix, xi, 8, 16, 75, 76, 84 Kelmscott Manor 75, 76, 81, 83, 84, 96, 145, 174, 178, 179, 181 Kelmscott Press x, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 113, 117, 166, 170, 197, 209–19 Kelvin, Norman 104, 106 Kiernan, V.G. 127 ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’ 14, 17, 21–4, 26, 27–8 Kinna, Ruth xii, 15, 183–96, 246 Kirchhoff, Frederick xii, 15, 136, 173–82, 246 Kropotkin, Peter 137 La Belle Iseult 6, 28 Lafargue, Paul 131 Lamb, Charles 119 Langland, William 138 LaPorte, Charles xii, 15, 209–19, 246 Latham, David ix-xii, 3–16, 17, 27, 58, 65, 70, 136, 155–72, 190, 208, 217, 246–7 Latham, Sheila xii, 247 Lea textile 73, 76–7, 84 Lefebvre, Henri 122 LeMire, Eugene 8–9 Lemprière, John 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 59, 60 Leopold, Aldo 73–4, 83 ‘The Lesser Arts’ (see ‘Decorative Arts’) Levy, Amy 56 Lewes, George 11

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Index

Lewis, C.S. x, 7 The Life and Death of Jason 14, 43–53, 57-9, 189–90, 226 Lindsay, Jack 197 Lindsay, Vachel 221 Lodden textile 76 ‘London in a State of Siege’ 116 Londraville, Janis xii, 15, 221–8, 247 Lorris, Guillaume de 138 Lourie, Margaret A. 27–8 Love Is Enough 9 ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ 44, 48, 57, 189, 190 Lukács, Georg 122–3 Lydgate, John 138 Lynch, Kathryn 140, 151

Mineo, Ady 110 ‘Misery and the Way Out’ 162 More, Thomas 107 Morgan, Louis Henry 109, 182 Morris, Emma 85 Morris, Jane 24, 64–5, 66, 72, 187, 224 Morris, Jenny 6, 105 Morris, May 8, 10, 15, 16, 104, 175, 222 Morris & Co. (Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.) x, 7, 8, 16, 23, 25, 29, 30, 84 Morton, A.L. 102, 131 Murray, James 206 Myers, Richard and Hilary 8

Macaulay, Thomas B. 20 MacCarthy, Fiona 25, 26–7, 29–30, 58, 107, 187, 197, 205 Mackail, J.W. x, 6, 16, 41, 137, 166, 186 ‘Makeshift’ 108, 110 ‘Making the Best of It’ (‘Some Hints on House Decoration’) 156, 161 Malory, Thomas 27–8, 34 ‘Manifesto of the Socialist League’ 188 Marsh, George 202–3, 206 Marsh, Jan 20, 29, 58, 64, 110, 187, 194 Marx, Eleanor 184 Marx, Karl 4, 81, 108–9, 121, 122, 128, 129, 142, 153, 155, 172, 173 Marx-Aveling, Edward 184 McGann, Jerome 9–11, 34, 211 Meun, Jean de 138 Mill, John Stuart 72 Millais, John Everett 17 Miller, J. Hillis 66, 105

News from Nowhere 9, 14–15, 71, 73– 136, 139–40, 152, 166–70, 173–4, 178–81, 194–6, 201 Nordau, Max 120 ‘Notes on Passing Events’ 100 The Novel on Blue Paper 98 Oak, Bay, & Sunflower tile 8 Oberg, Charlotte 32, 41, 45 The Odyssey of Homer 198 ‘Of Dyeing as an Art’ 3–4 ‘Old Love’ 226–7 ‘On Some Practical Socialists’ 125, 135 ‘The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice’ 48 Ossleton, N.E. 218 O’Sullivan, Paddy 79, 113 Ovid 45, 58, 61, 66 Owen, Robert 184 The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine 62, 201

Index Paolo and Francesca da Rimini 18–19, 28 Parry, Linda 8 Pater, Walter 12, 70, 119 Plath, Sylvia 56 Poems by the Way 10, 190 Pound, Ezra 15, 198–9, 203, 226–7 ‘Preface to The Nature of Gothic’ xi ‘Preface to Steele’s Medieval Lore’ 143 ‘The Present Outlook in Politics’ 129 Preston, Peter 4 Price, Cormell 201 ‘The Prospects of Architecture’ 127, 131 ‘Pygmalion and the Image’ 14, 61– 72 Quinn, John 222–3, 247 Red House xi, 23, 24, 26, 77, 143 Reed, John 111 Reeves & Turner 9 ‘The Revival of Architecture’ 144 ‘The Revival of Handicraft’ 194 Rich, Adrienne 56–7 Roberts Brothers 9 Rogers, David 17 The Roots of the Mountains 108, 166, 174, 175, 177–9, 180–1, 190, 191–2, 193 Rossetti, Christina 63, 228 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel xi, 6, 7, 14, 17–21, 23–30, 63, 64, 65, 72, 211, 212 Rossetti, William Michael 7, 8, 53 Ruskin, John 14, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24–5, 27, 28–9, 63–4, 65, 72, 75, 76, 85, 89, 90, 138, 144, 155, 161, 172 Said, Edward 14, 86–8, 90, 91, 93, 94,

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96–8, 99, 100, 103, 104 Salmon, Nicholas 104 ‘Scenes from the Fall of Troy’ 40 Seymour, Miranda 57 Shaw, G. Bernard 185 Siddal, Elizabeth 17, 19, 64, 65 Signs of Change 161–5 The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs 57, 189, 207 Silver, Carole 41, 45, 152 ‘Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery’ 19, 28 ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’ 14, 31–41, 44 Skeat, W.W. 211, 212, 213 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (also Socialism from the Root Up) 107, 110, 140, 182 Socialist League x, xii, 7, 13, 135, 137, 139, 162, 165–6, 188, 200 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) 7, 127 ‘The Society of the Future’ 116, 130, 131, 167 Spear, Jeffrey 64–5 Spengler, Oswald 158 Stansky, Peter 108 Stead, W.T. 184 Stevenson, Lionel 41 The Sundering Flood 190, 191–2 Sunflower tile 8, 16 Surtees, Virginia 20, 26, 27–8 Swift, Jonathan 162 Swinburne, Algernon 44–5 ‘Talk and Art’ 95 Taunt, Henry 73, 75 Taylor, Harriet 72 Tennyson, Alfred ix, 6, 9, 28, 29, 34, 62–3, 99–100, 127, 160, 200, 225

254 Thomas, Jane xii, 14, 61–72, 247 Thompson, E.P. 3, 5, 6, 58, 149, 166, 171 Thompson, William 184 Tinker, Chauncy 197 Tolkien, J.R.R. x, 7, 203 Tooley, Sarah 186, 188 Trellis wallpaper 23–4, 25, 29, 30 Trench, Richard 201–2 Trilling, Lionel 132 ‘True and False Society’ 162, 194 ‘The Tune of Seven Towers’ 44 The Tune of Seven Towers 26 ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’ 117, 128, 129, 130, 132, 162–65 Wandle textile 76, 77, 84 ‘War and Peace’ 104, 106 The Water of the Wondrous Isles 44, 57, 190–2 Watts-Dunton, Theodore 197, 207 Waugh, Evelyn 18, 26 Webb, Philip xi, 8, 22 Webster, Augusta 14, 43, 53–6, 57, 60 The Well at the World’s End 8, 166, 181, 190–1, 193 Wells, H.G. 125–6, 132 Wey textile 76 ‘What We Have to Look For’ 172 Wheeler, Anna 184 ‘Where Are We Now?’ 139, 165 Wilde, Oscar 4, 65 Williams, Raymond 3, 6, 104, 105, 213, 218 Williams, William P. 213, 218 Windrush textile 76 Wolf, Christa 57 Women’s Union 13

Index The Wood Beyond the World 113–15, 117, 166, 190, 191, 192, 193 Wordsworth, William 70 ‘Work, as It Is and as It Might Be’ 162 ‘The Writing on the Image’ x–xi, xii, 11–13 Wyatt, A.J. 199–201, 206, 208 Yeats, John Butler 221–2 Yeats, W.B. 9, 166, 222, 223 Zaturenska, Marya 221–8