Those of us who turned up at the John Rylands Library in Manchester on Saturday 4th July for the talk by John Hodgson, Keeper of Manuscripts, on ‘”A Pocket Cathedral”: William Morris and the Kelmscott Chaucer’ were rewarded with an entertaining and learned discussion of the Kelmscott Press project in general as well as of its most single famous artefact. The John Rylands possesses a complete run of Kelmscott Press books, and John Hodgson was therefore able to illustrate his talk with copies of The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, King Florus and the Fair Jehane, and two versions of the Kelmscott Chaucer itself laid out on a table before us and available for close personal inspection.
I was most struck by the vellum version of the Chaucer, which I hadn’t seen before – both the creamy richness of the pages and the gleaming blackness of the ink upon them (since ink is not actually absorbed by vellum but sits upon its surface). The visual magnificence of the volume and its sheer physical bulk (for one would have to be in serious weight-training indeed to haul this tome around one’s study) are extraordinary; and it is indeed more an aesthetic monument than any kind of practical book.
Morris scholars have written recently about the effects on readers and reading of only being able to access Kelmscott Press books in specialist libraries such as the John Rylands; but in fact the Kelmscott Chaucer has recently turned up most unexpectedly in popular culture too. At the very beginning of Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling novel The Time Traveller’s Wife (2004), Clare Abshire, the ‘wife’ of the title, goes into the Special Collections room of Newberry Library: ‘I’m writing a paper for an art history class. My research topic is the Kelmscott Press Chaucer. I look up the book itself and fill out a call slip for it’.
Why should the Kelmscott Chaucer be the appropriate research topic for this Time Traveller’s wife? Perhaps, pedestrianly, because the novel’s author is Professor at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. Or perhaps, more speculatively, because the Kelmscott Chaucer is itself a time-travelling artefact. Reaching back to the Gothicism of the Middle Ages in its literary content and style of production, it also comes to us from some fabulously far distant socialist future (now, in our postmodern and post-marxist present, more distant than ever, of course) when such gorgeous artefacts will be the social norm, the ‘invisible colour of everyday life’, in an unhurried culture where the skill, time, materials and creativity to craft such works will be universal.
In the Kelmscott Chaucer, then, the deep past and the far future, a lost happy Hobbitland and a longed-for utopian future, come paradoxically together – which, I would suggest, makes this unique volume or literary time machine the very apt object of study for a Time Traveller’s Wife.
Monday, 6 July 2009
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
William Morris Society Activities: 1
Having just been to my first-ever William Morris Society Committee meeting, I found myself speculating, on the train back to Lancaster, as to what possible new directions the Society’s Programme Sub-Committee might venture into. I think we would want to be faithful to the stress in News from Nowhere on the holistic nature of creative human activity, i.e., that it should involve the body as much as (or more than) the mind, and that it should ideally take place outdoors – in that perpetual Nowherian June sunshine! – rather than indoors.
So among my preliminary thoughts on this topic would be:
Fafnir hedge-clipping competition – reach for your shears and, re-enacting Morris’s own annual ritual at Kelmscott, we see who can carve the most persuasive hedge decoration in the shape of Sigurd the Volsung’s dragon, Fafnir.
Singlestick demonstration and training – this was, after all, Morris’s great passion in MacLaren’s gym in Oxford and singlestick is, one gathers, making something of a contemporary comeback as a native British martial art.
Outdoor bathing and swimming – as happens in News from Nowhere, over and over in Morris’s late romances, and on Morris’s own expeditions up the Thames on the Ark.
Society camping expeditions – as in News from Nowhere itself, where ‘tenting’ is a very popular pastime, and as organised by the William Morris Labour Church after WM’s death.
Searching for snakeshead fritillaries in the Oxfordshire countryside – as May Morris was wont to do during her years at Kelmscott after her parents’ deaths.
Pike-fishing on the Thames – but I have written about this in this blog already (see entry for 9.10.07).
Outdoor political preaching – as among the 1880s socialists themselves. Perhaps, as a charity, the Society could not be too directly political, but it could preach a Morrisian message of craftsmanship under a suitable banner at various London pitches.
Cycling from Oxford to Kelmscott – which admittedly wasn’t something that Morris himself did, but cycling was popular among young socialists in the 1890s and several of them did arrive at Kelmscott Manor by this means.
Please add your own suggestions to this list via the ‘comments’ facility. Several of the ideas above could be combined together, of course, and what a healthy and wholesome vista then opens. If I could but see a day of it, if I could but see it!
So among my preliminary thoughts on this topic would be:
Fafnir hedge-clipping competition – reach for your shears and, re-enacting Morris’s own annual ritual at Kelmscott, we see who can carve the most persuasive hedge decoration in the shape of Sigurd the Volsung’s dragon, Fafnir.
Singlestick demonstration and training – this was, after all, Morris’s great passion in MacLaren’s gym in Oxford and singlestick is, one gathers, making something of a contemporary comeback as a native British martial art.
Outdoor bathing and swimming – as happens in News from Nowhere, over and over in Morris’s late romances, and on Morris’s own expeditions up the Thames on the Ark.
Society camping expeditions – as in News from Nowhere itself, where ‘tenting’ is a very popular pastime, and as organised by the William Morris Labour Church after WM’s death.
Searching for snakeshead fritillaries in the Oxfordshire countryside – as May Morris was wont to do during her years at Kelmscott after her parents’ deaths.
Pike-fishing on the Thames – but I have written about this in this blog already (see entry for 9.10.07).
Outdoor political preaching – as among the 1880s socialists themselves. Perhaps, as a charity, the Society could not be too directly political, but it could preach a Morrisian message of craftsmanship under a suitable banner at various London pitches.
Cycling from Oxford to Kelmscott – which admittedly wasn’t something that Morris himself did, but cycling was popular among young socialists in the 1890s and several of them did arrive at Kelmscott Manor by this means.
Please add your own suggestions to this list via the ‘comments’ facility. Several of the ideas above could be combined together, of course, and what a healthy and wholesome vista then opens. If I could but see a day of it, if I could but see it!
Monday, 1 June 2009
Disappointment in Utopia
The title of the fifth chapter of H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905) asks us to think the unthinkable: ‘Failure in a Modern Utopia’. This surely does not, cannot, compute: how after all can there be failure in utopia? Isn’t failure there, of all places, definitionally out of the question, generically ruled out of bounds from the start by the assumption of human perfectibility built into this literary mode? Wells’s oxymoronic formulation, ‘failure in utopia’, is thus, like any literary oxymoron (cf W.B. Yeats’s ‘terrible beauty’ in ‘Easter 1916’), an Eisensteinian montage which clashes discordant ideas or images together to prompt us into new thought or, in this particular case, into a new, less absolutist concept of utopia.
All well and good; but didn’t William Morris, I find myself pondering, get here first? I am thinking of that extraordinary moment in News from Nowhere when Old Hammond announces to his visitor, William Guest, that ‘I am old and perhaps disappointed’ (ch. IX). I have read a good deal of the criticism on News from Nowhere, though by no means all of it; and I haven’t anywhere yet found this remark of Hammond’s commented upon. But surely it is no less startling than H.G. Wells’s chapter title: how can there be disappointment in (or with) utopia any more than there can be failure there?
So we need to ask ourselves two questions, one analytic, the other more speculative. First, what is Old Hammond disappointed about? Is this some personal sexual issue (the remark is made in a chapter ‘Concerning Love’), or does it bear upon the world of Nowhere more generally? I believe it does, and would wish to relate it to his later observations on the loss of historical consciousness among the younger Nowherians and to Ellen’s own anxieties on this score much later in the book. But one thing we can be sure about: if the expositor of utopia, the very torch-bearer of its history and conscience, is ‘disappointed’ with it, then goodness me, the world of Nowhere must indeed be in trouble!
Secondly, however, since Old Hammond is a hale, hearty and active 105-year-old, what does he intend to do about this ‘disappointment’? How might it be remedied, not in the text we have, but in a text we might imagine beyond the borders of Morris’s own utopia? To be ‘disappointed’ in something is simultaneously to wish to repair it, to restore it to what it ought to be; and thus Old Hammond’s enigmatic declaration prompts us to write more Morrisian text, to follow the issues through beyond what Morris himself has given us.
All well and good; but didn’t William Morris, I find myself pondering, get here first? I am thinking of that extraordinary moment in News from Nowhere when Old Hammond announces to his visitor, William Guest, that ‘I am old and perhaps disappointed’ (ch. IX). I have read a good deal of the criticism on News from Nowhere, though by no means all of it; and I haven’t anywhere yet found this remark of Hammond’s commented upon. But surely it is no less startling than H.G. Wells’s chapter title: how can there be disappointment in (or with) utopia any more than there can be failure there?
So we need to ask ourselves two questions, one analytic, the other more speculative. First, what is Old Hammond disappointed about? Is this some personal sexual issue (the remark is made in a chapter ‘Concerning Love’), or does it bear upon the world of Nowhere more generally? I believe it does, and would wish to relate it to his later observations on the loss of historical consciousness among the younger Nowherians and to Ellen’s own anxieties on this score much later in the book. But one thing we can be sure about: if the expositor of utopia, the very torch-bearer of its history and conscience, is ‘disappointed’ with it, then goodness me, the world of Nowhere must indeed be in trouble!
Secondly, however, since Old Hammond is a hale, hearty and active 105-year-old, what does he intend to do about this ‘disappointment’? How might it be remedied, not in the text we have, but in a text we might imagine beyond the borders of Morris’s own utopia? To be ‘disappointed’ in something is simultaneously to wish to repair it, to restore it to what it ought to be; and thus Old Hammond’s enigmatic declaration prompts us to write more Morrisian text, to follow the issues through beyond what Morris himself has given us.
Thursday, 7 May 2009
Oxford Professors of Poetry
On Saturday May 16th 2009 the members of Convocation of Oxford University will be turning up at the Examination Schools building in the High Street to vote for the next Professor of Poetry, now that Christopher Ricks’s five-year term in the post has come to an end (so no more Bob Dylan analysis, alas). The contest always evokes a good deal of media interest, around certain predictable topics: will we get our first female Professor of Poetry (we now have our first female Poet Laureate, after all), or might we get our first black or Asian incumbent?
Early in 1877, as Matthew Arnold’s tenure as the Oxford Professor of Poetry came to its end, William Morris was mulling over an invitation from James Thursfield on behalf of some members of Convocation to stand for election to the post. After long deliberation he chose not to, doubting whether ‘the Professor of a wholly incommunicable art is not rather in a false position’, among other objections; and J.C. Shairp, whom J.W. Mackail coolly describes as ‘of some merit both as a critic and as a poet’, succeeded to Arnold.
But let us suppose, by virtue of a Star Trek-style rift in the space-time continuum, that Morris had accepted Thursfield’s invitation and had won the ensuing election. Could we speculatively reconstruct the lectures which he might have given in this prestigious Oxford post? I have suggested elsewhere in this blog (entry for 12.12.07) that there is a good deal more literary criticism, both in Morris’s early Pre-Raphaelite milieu and in his later Socialist one, than his own dismissive remarks about the critic’s profession might lead us to believe.
I therefore think we both could and should have a stab at reconstructing Morris’s career as the Oxford Professor of Poetry he never was, though I should be the first to admit that had he accepted a subsequent invitation in the late 1880s or early 1890s as a specifically socialist poet and critic he would have been a much more substantial figure in the post than he would have been in 1877. So in the long list of Morris’s unfinished or (in this case) unstarted works his ‘lost’ Oxford lectures as Professor of Poetry 1877-1882 might not be at the top of the list for reconstruction, but it would none the less be an illuminating task to attempt to sketch out how they might have gone. Watch this space!
Early in 1877, as Matthew Arnold’s tenure as the Oxford Professor of Poetry came to its end, William Morris was mulling over an invitation from James Thursfield on behalf of some members of Convocation to stand for election to the post. After long deliberation he chose not to, doubting whether ‘the Professor of a wholly incommunicable art is not rather in a false position’, among other objections; and J.C. Shairp, whom J.W. Mackail coolly describes as ‘of some merit both as a critic and as a poet’, succeeded to Arnold.
But let us suppose, by virtue of a Star Trek-style rift in the space-time continuum, that Morris had accepted Thursfield’s invitation and had won the ensuing election. Could we speculatively reconstruct the lectures which he might have given in this prestigious Oxford post? I have suggested elsewhere in this blog (entry for 12.12.07) that there is a good deal more literary criticism, both in Morris’s early Pre-Raphaelite milieu and in his later Socialist one, than his own dismissive remarks about the critic’s profession might lead us to believe.
I therefore think we both could and should have a stab at reconstructing Morris’s career as the Oxford Professor of Poetry he never was, though I should be the first to admit that had he accepted a subsequent invitation in the late 1880s or early 1890s as a specifically socialist poet and critic he would have been a much more substantial figure in the post than he would have been in 1877. So in the long list of Morris’s unfinished or (in this case) unstarted works his ‘lost’ Oxford lectures as Professor of Poetry 1877-1882 might not be at the top of the list for reconstruction, but it would none the less be an illuminating task to attempt to sketch out how they might have gone. Watch this space!
Saturday, 2 May 2009
The 'Romancing' of News from Nowhere
I want to suggest a new hermeneutical principle for the reading of News from Nowhere, which goes as follows: one takes narratively similar episodes from Morris’s late romances, sets them beside their equivalents in his utopia, and lets the complex implications of such episodes in the romances play illuminatingly upon their News from Nowhere counterparts, where they may not, on the face of it, seem initially to be as semantically rich.
How would this method work in practice? When Walter arrives in the ‘wood beyond the world’, in Morris’s romance of that title, the sinister Mistress at whose castle he stays eventually remarks: ‘Wherefore now I ask thee, art thou willing to do me service, thereby to earn thy guesting’ (ch.XIII). An innocent enough request in context, one might think; but suppose now that we let the notion of ‘earning thy guesting’ radiate over William Guest in News from Nowhere itself?
If a guest cannot simply take for granted, but must actively earn, the hospitality he receives, whether from the eerie Mistress of the romance or from the genial neighbours of the utopia, then we must think of William Guest as playing an active rather than just passive role in the post-revolutionary world he visits. We must see him as playing a positive function there, actively changing the place by his presence, not just admiringly gawping at it. No room here, naturally, to go into what this might be; but it is the formulation from the romance, transposed across to Nowhere, which has suggestively opened this possibility to us.
Another instance. The Lady later tells Walter to ‘Go to thy chamber, and there thou shalt find raiment worthy of thee’. He does so and finds ‘raiment ... rich beyond measure; and he wondered if any new snare lay therein’ (ch.XX). Should William Guest have had similar misgivings when he comes across that handsome blue suit that the Nowherians lay out for him? I suspect he should; for dressing like his hosts contributes to making him feel he can belong permanently in the new utopian world (like Julian West in Looking Backward) and thus in part leads to all the later heartache he will endure in relation to Ellen.
The rich semantic potential of the late romances can thus open new vistas on Morris’s utopia, alerting us to a necessary ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ which the genial, sunlit vistas of Nowhere might not themselves propose to us.
How would this method work in practice? When Walter arrives in the ‘wood beyond the world’, in Morris’s romance of that title, the sinister Mistress at whose castle he stays eventually remarks: ‘Wherefore now I ask thee, art thou willing to do me service, thereby to earn thy guesting’ (ch.XIII). An innocent enough request in context, one might think; but suppose now that we let the notion of ‘earning thy guesting’ radiate over William Guest in News from Nowhere itself?
If a guest cannot simply take for granted, but must actively earn, the hospitality he receives, whether from the eerie Mistress of the romance or from the genial neighbours of the utopia, then we must think of William Guest as playing an active rather than just passive role in the post-revolutionary world he visits. We must see him as playing a positive function there, actively changing the place by his presence, not just admiringly gawping at it. No room here, naturally, to go into what this might be; but it is the formulation from the romance, transposed across to Nowhere, which has suggestively opened this possibility to us.
Another instance. The Lady later tells Walter to ‘Go to thy chamber, and there thou shalt find raiment worthy of thee’. He does so and finds ‘raiment ... rich beyond measure; and he wondered if any new snare lay therein’ (ch.XX). Should William Guest have had similar misgivings when he comes across that handsome blue suit that the Nowherians lay out for him? I suspect he should; for dressing like his hosts contributes to making him feel he can belong permanently in the new utopian world (like Julian West in Looking Backward) and thus in part leads to all the later heartache he will endure in relation to Ellen.
The rich semantic potential of the late romances can thus open new vistas on Morris’s utopia, alerting us to a necessary ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ which the genial, sunlit vistas of Nowhere might not themselves propose to us.
Friday, 10 April 2009
Canadian Aesthetics Journal: Morris Issue
A special issue of the electronic journal Canadian Aesthetics Journal/Revue Canadienne D’Esthétique (AE) on William Morris has just gone online (vol 15, Fall 2008). It is edited by Michelle Weinroth and contains:
David Mabb: Introduction to Rhythm 69
David Mabb: Rhythm 69 Slideshow
Colin Darke: David Mabb’s Rhythm 69
Michaela Braesel: William Morris and “Authenticity”
Tony Pinkney: News from Nowhere, Modernism, Postmodernism
Phillippa Bennett: A Legacy of “Great Wonders”: The Last Romances of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press
John T. F. Lang: Excerpt from John Lang’s doctoral dissertation: “Art and Life in Nineteenth-Century England: The Theory and Practice of William Morris”
Michelle Weinroth: William Morris’s Philosophy of Art
See the journal’s website at: http://www.uqtr.ca/AE/Vol_15/ReadingMatters/ReadingMattersCover.htm
David Mabb: Introduction to Rhythm 69
David Mabb: Rhythm 69 Slideshow
Colin Darke: David Mabb’s Rhythm 69
Michaela Braesel: William Morris and “Authenticity”
Tony Pinkney: News from Nowhere, Modernism, Postmodernism
Phillippa Bennett: A Legacy of “Great Wonders”: The Last Romances of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press
John T. F. Lang: Excerpt from John Lang’s doctoral dissertation: “Art and Life in Nineteenth-Century England: The Theory and Practice of William Morris”
Michelle Weinroth: William Morris’s Philosophy of Art
See the journal’s website at: http://www.uqtr.ca/AE/Vol_15/ReadingMatters/ReadingMattersCover.htm
Wednesday, 8 April 2009
Police Violence 1887/2009
If William Morris would have been interested in Slavoj Zizek’s recent ‘Idea of Communism’ conference (see entry for 22 March), so too would he have had a sickening sense of déjà vu as he watched the police handling of the April 1st G20 demonstrations in London.
Today’s main editorial in the Guardian newspaper, in the course of a reflection on ‘violent deaths at police hands during London street protests’, makes just such a link between Morris's experiences in the late 1880s and our own in 2009:
‘the names of some of the victims – Alfred Linnell in the pitched battles with the unemployed in 1887, Kevin Gately and Blair Peach during the anti-Nazi protests of the 1970s – are still remembered. To these we may have to add the name of Ian Tomlinson, who died in the City of London during the G20 demonstrations a week ago. Mr Tomlinson, who was not taking part in the protests, died from a heart attack. However, according to numerous witnesses and to new video evidence which the Guardian is preparing to pass to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, he also died shortly after being struck and knocked to the ground by Metropolitan police officers’ (p.30).
Morris acted as a pall-bearer for Linnell’s coffin, spoke eloquently at the funeral, and composed a ‘Death Song’ which was sold as a one penny pamphlet to raise money for Linnell’s orphans. Let us hope that some contemporary poet can rise as adequately to the challenge of Mr Tomlinson’s untimely death.
Today’s main editorial in the Guardian newspaper, in the course of a reflection on ‘violent deaths at police hands during London street protests’, makes just such a link between Morris's experiences in the late 1880s and our own in 2009:
‘the names of some of the victims – Alfred Linnell in the pitched battles with the unemployed in 1887, Kevin Gately and Blair Peach during the anti-Nazi protests of the 1970s – are still remembered. To these we may have to add the name of Ian Tomlinson, who died in the City of London during the G20 demonstrations a week ago. Mr Tomlinson, who was not taking part in the protests, died from a heart attack. However, according to numerous witnesses and to new video evidence which the Guardian is preparing to pass to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, he also died shortly after being struck and knocked to the ground by Metropolitan police officers’ (p.30).
Morris acted as a pall-bearer for Linnell’s coffin, spoke eloquently at the funeral, and composed a ‘Death Song’ which was sold as a one penny pamphlet to raise money for Linnell’s orphans. Let us hope that some contemporary poet can rise as adequately to the challenge of Mr Tomlinson’s untimely death.
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