Radio 4: 'Our Mutual Friend'

So BBC Radio 4’s wonderful dramatisation of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend has finally ended, alas! It has been such a delight over the last four weeks, and makes one wonder what one will now find to fill the 15 minute gap each evening when it has been broadcast. ‘He do the police in different voices’, as Betty Higden remarks of Sloppy; and there were indeed some truly memorable voices coming through in this production, with Silas Wegg, Bradley Headstone and of course the Golden Dustman Boffin himself among the most haunting of them all.

I found myself turning back to Laura Donaldson’s essay ‘Boffin in Paradise, or the Artistry of Reversal in News from Nowhere’ (1990), which is still, as far as I know, the fullest account of Morris’s transformation of Our Mutual Friend in his utopia. Morris’s Boffin – or Henry Johnson, to give him his real name – makes a dazzling appearance to William Guest in the Hammersmith Guest House, hoping to lemon-squeeze plenty of information from Guest for the historical novels he, Boffin, is so fond of writing.

Donaldson gives an excellent account of Morris’s reworking of the 19th-century realist novel in his utopia, and at the end of her essay speculates on Nowhere’s political future beyond the last page of the book itself: ‘Recognizing the possibility that Nowherian society might grow too complacent in its utopian perfection, thereby losing its social vision, Morris ingeniously creates Boffin’s “curious” habit [of novel-writing] as a preventive measure against such a tragic loss’.

Food for thought here, indeed. If we should ever get a sequel to News from Nowhere (and I increasingly feel, 120 years after its publication, that we need one), and if in that sequel Nowhere does indeed politically degenerate, then its Golden Dustman Henry Johnson might, on Laura Donaldson’s showing, be a crucial figure in recognising and challenging those reactionary tendencies. He is certainly, we can say with confidence, far too memorable a character altogether to be introduced for two pages in chapter III and to be more or less entirely dropped thereafter!

Kelmscott 'News from Nowhere'

Professor Antoine Capet’s fine lecture on ‘William Morris and the Arts of the Book’ at Kelmscott House on Saturday 28 November was illustrated for a good stretch of time on a screen behind the speaker by the first page of the Kelmscott edition of News from Nowhere. Gorgeous decorated borders surround the heavy Kelmscott typeface of the text itself, and the first two letters of the first two words of the first two paragraphs become enormous and elaborately floriated initials, visually dominating the entire page.

And how do those first two paragraphs begin? Well: ‘Up at the League’ kicks the first one off; and ‘Says our friend’ is the beginning of the second. So the giant letters U and S spring at us from the first page of the Kelmscott utopia. U and S or, since the eye slides so readily from one to the other, US. In a chapter which tells of a deeply divided socialist meeting (‘six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented’), the visual layout of the Kelmscott page asserts, against the grain of the printed text itself, that a profound collective identity or ‘US’ underlies the immediate political dissensions.

Morris thus beautifully takes advantage of the serendipity of writing (the letter ‘u’ starting one paragraph, ‘s’ the next) to affirm a serene message of confidence about socialism’s longterm future which still speaks to us so compellingly from the Kelmscott page.

Ghostly Goings-On At Kelmscott

I’ve just been reading a collection of Victorian Ghost Stories, first published in 1936 and then reissued as a Senate/Random House paperback in 1996. It features such spine-chilling tales as Le Fanu’s ‘The Dead Sexton’, Sutherland Menzies’ ‘Hugues the Wer-Wolf: A Kentish Legend of the Middle Ages’, Mark Lemon’s intriguing ‘The Ghost Detective’, and many others. Just the volume to curl up with in an arm-chair with a mug of steaming ovaltine on a dark winter’s night while the wind howls eerily outside!

Perusing this volume reminds me that ghost-stories were popular reading material in the Morris family circle. May Morris recalls that in Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus volumes ‘there is a certain ghost-story ... told by the negro African Jack, that father used to read impressively and dramatically, so that when the crisis came, one was positively stiff with excitement, and the pursuing horror of a corpse seemed to be actually wavering on the threshold of the room’ (CW, XXII, xvii).

However, the Morrises not only enjoyed literary ghost-stories, they sometimes found themselves in the midst of what may well have been actual ones. For as Fiona MacCarthy informs us, ‘The occult was a bond between Janey and Rossetti who used to go to séances together. Janey had a definitely spiritualist tendency, giving vivid accounts of ghost activity at Kelmscott: mysterious carriages being driven to the house’ (p.347).

There is a fine Victorian ghost story in the making here, clearly! Could not the Journal of William Morris Studies organise a creative writing competition based upon this snippet from MacCarthy’s biography and offer to publish the entry (no more than 8000 words, say) which most vividly gives us ‘The Strange Adventure of the Ghostly Carriage at Kelmscott Manor’?

Tennyson in Utopia

In this year of Tennyson’s bi-centenary it is appropriate that we should think through again the relation of William Morris’s verse to that of his great Victorian predecessor, as Peter Faulkner has admirably done in the Summer 2009 issue of the Journal Of William Morris Studies, in an article that ranges across Morris’s letters and prose writings as well as his poetry. Peter’s contrasting of Tennyson and Morris’s Galahad poems, and of their treatments of the Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere triangle, could hardly be bettered; and we would all surely concur with his conclusion (which was also that of most Victorian commentators) that, while Tennyson reworks his medieval poetic materials in contemporary, and often moralising, manner, Morris more radically takes us right back into the alien mind-set of his remote Arthurian or Sigurdian epochs.

But there is one significant Tennyson reference in Morris’s works which Peter Faulkner’s very full essay does not pick up. It occurs in News from Nowhere when William Guest admires the sky on the upper Thames: ‘the sky, in short, looked really like a vault, as poets have sometimes called it, and not like mere limitless air, but a vault so vast and full of light that it did not in any way oppress the spirits. It was the sort of afternoon that Tennyson must have been thinking about, when he said of the Lotos-Eaters’ land that it was a land where it was always afternoon’ (ch. XXVII).

Graceful casual allusion to a long-superseded Victorian wordsmith, or worrying suggestion that Morris’s Nowhere, like Tennyson’s Lotos island, may in fact tediously be ‘A land where all things always seemed the same’? Could the utopian ‘epoch of rest’ even conceivably one day slide to and beyond the delicious languor of ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ towards the more morbid stasis of Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ or ‘The Lady of Shallot’? Is Nowhere after all, for all the social advance it represents upon Victorian London, in the end perhaps too pastoral, too placid, lacking sufficient challenge or stress – as a fair number of critics have over the years alleged?

Morris had certainly by 1890/91 long left Tennyson behind as an active poetic influence, yet his brief Tennyson allusion in News from Nowhere is still capable of pointing us to the most fundamental interpretive and political questions about that utopia – questions on which, even 120 years later, the jury is still out.

Masters of the Microphone

In a wartime radio broadcast on the tercentenary of John Milton’s famous defence of freedom of speech, Areopagitica, E.M. Forster provocatively asked of Milton, ‘And would he have approved of the wireless?’ Can we ask the same question of William Morris, I wonder?

The question is, of course, slightly less anachronistic in Morris’s case than it is in Milton’s. Radio was invented as a technical possibility in 1895, one year before Morris’s death; but more importantly he was well aware of a developed literary representation of something rather like a wireless broadcasting system in the form of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889). Edith Leete takes the visitor to utopia, Julian West, into her music room in chapter ten and, after twiddling a few knobs, floods the space with organ music being relayed by telephone from a live orchestra elsewhere in the city; Bellamy’s editors usually refer us to Marconi at this point.

Historically, there have been two major opposing positions among Left intellectuals in regard to new communications technologies. There are those, such as Walter Benjamin, who are inclined to see a democratising and liberatory potential in new technologies; and on the other hand, those, like Theodor Adorno, who incline to view the mass media as producing passive, one-dimensional audiences. Given Morris’s preference for hand-craftsmanship over industrial production, we might see him as belonging to the latter, Adornian camp; but recent studies have shown that in the case of photography, at least, his attitude was more positive and exploratory than one might expect.

I like to toy, then, with the notion of Morris being open to developments in wireless technology, if he had lived into his late eighties and heard the BBC’s first radio broadcast in 1922 or somehow broken through into Bellamy’s new Boston and enjoyed a broadcast concert with Julian West. Perhaps he might have rewritten The Tables Turned or even News from Nowhere itself as radio plays – and the Radio 4 reading of the latter a few years back certainly showed just how effective it can be in that medium. His younger socialist colleagues Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells certainly became left-wing ‘Masters of the Microphone’, to borrow a phrase from a 1939 issue of The Listener.

And how, after all, could the tall, handsome, grey-eyed woman in chapter XXX of News from Nowhere have possibly been expecting Dick’s arrival by boat at Kelmscott Manor unless there had been some form of wireless communication between them beforehand?

William Morris and 'Adam Bede'

Today’s Institute of English Studies conference devoted to George Eliot’s Adam Bede affords us an opportunity to think through William Morris’s judgement on this novel, which is recorded in May Morris’s account of her father’s literary enthusiasms in volume XXII of the Collected Works: ‘Of George Eliot he could only read with any great enjoyment the “Scenes from Clerical Life” and “Silas Marner”. “Adam Bede” he thought cruel and perhaps this irked him the more because he knew that cruelty was no part of the writer’s character’ (p.xxvi).

May does not elaborate further, but I would imagine that it was the novel’s treatment of its ‘fallen’ 17-year-old village lass Hetty Sorrel, who is first sentenced to death for the murder of her baby, then transported to Australia, which struck Morris as cruel – an assessment in which many later readers of the book, and particularly feminist critics, have also concurred.

I wonder, then, whether Morris in his own ‘Pilgrims of Hope’ isn’t trying to tell the Adam Bede story differently, with a more positive and less ‘cruel’ inflection. His hero Richard is, after all, the illegitimate offspring of a country woman and her rich seducer; so that this Hetty Sorrel figure not only does not kill her child, but gives birth to a son who heroically commits himself to the forward movement of history in his own society and who aims ultimately to abolish the very class divisions which made his parents’ own flawed relationship possible in the first place. Had the mother known of her son’s future, he tells us later, ‘As some old woman of old hadst thou wondered, who hath brought forth a god of the earth’ (XI). This is a powerful rewriting of George Eliot’s Hetty indeed!

But, alas, such cross-class sexual tragedies are not so soon abolished after all. Richard’s mother may be a redeemed Hetty, but his wife later turns out to be a Hetty Sorrel too, as a lower-class woman who gets emotionally and perhaps sexually involved with the suave gentleman Arthur when the latter joins the socialist movement. Is Morris’s use of the same Christian name as Hetty’s seducer Arthur Donnithorne in George Eliot’s novel just accident here? I suspect not. You can rewrite or mend one aspect of Hetty’s sad and ‘cruel’ fate, it seems, but it then only crops out again elsewhere in the text. Insofar as ‘Pilgrims of Hope’ is a reworking of Adam Bede, it can thus alas only be a flawed and partial one.

Happy Birthday, Ursula Le Guin!

Today is Ursula Le Guin’s 80th birthday – happy birthday, Ursula! She is, as far as I am aware, still hale and hearty, and new books in her distinctive veins of science-fiction and fantasy continue to emerge from the press – Lavinia, a retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid, being the latest (2008). Why, then, should Morrisians concern themselves with this festive occasion?

First, because Le Guin is the author of the most important utopia of our times, The Dispossessed (1974), which tells the tale of the physicist Shevek’s return journey from the troubled utopia of the moon Anarres to the decidedly dystopian capitalist home planet Urras. This rich book is surely the wisest and deepest of the 1970s generation of ‘critical utopias’ which Tom Moylan has rightly insisted have powerfully remade the genre for the late 20th and early 21st century.

We don’t yet have an adequate account of Le Guin’s relationship as utopian writer to William Morris and News from Nowhere, though there are some glances in this direction in Laurence Davis’s admirable collection, The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’ (2005). Nor do we yet have a fully developed ‘Le Guinian’ reading of News from Nowhere itself, though my own hunch is that Shevek and his Syndicate of Initiative in The Dispossessed would tell us a great deal about where Ellen might politically end up in Morris’s utopia.

But there is another strong connection between Morris and Ursula Le Guin, for both are authors of remarkable fantasy fictions as well as utopias. In a very general sense, of course, all twentieth-century fantasy is indebted to that extraordinary series of late writings which Morris inaugurated with The Wood beyond the World in 1894. But the connections may be more specific and illuminating than that; for as John Purkis noted in 1994, ‘the Earthsea tetralogy of Ursula Le Guin … is far more worth reading [than Tolkien or C.S.Lewis] as an example of a distillation of Morrisian romance at its best’ (Morris Society Journal, 11.1, Autumn 1994, p.17).

Morrisians thus have good cause to celebrate the 80th birthday of Ms Le Guin and to wish her many more years of productive living and writing.