William Morris’s social vision in News from Nowhere is sometimes seen as technologically backward and excessively pastoral, with its Utopians flitting among the Thames-side fields and flowers in Dylan Thomas mode, ‘happy as the grass is green’.
I have written about this issue elsewhere, since I feel there are ways in which the book itself incorporates and actively responds to this kind of critique. But if Morris’s utopia truly were as technologically simplistic as its detractors suggest, then it would have an eminently appropriate inhabitant in the person of his closest friend, Edward Burne-Jones; for, as we learn in Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography of the painter, ‘he was defeated by the simplest mechanical devices, even drawing-pins’ (p.35).
The mind boggles. I sometimes struggle with the DVD recorder or with putting a new battery into my mobile phone or with the complexities of page set-out on the laptop – but drawing-pins ... ?
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4 comments:
I'm wondering why Penelope Fitzgerald thinks that drawing pins are 'mechanical devices' of any kind (even simple ones).
Can drawing pins be something else (than drawing pins)? Also it's not on p.35 of my 2003 paperback.
BJ was a technically gifted painter (if very slow) and I suspect his attitude towards 'technology' was deep seated and rooted in his romanticism. I used to say I couldn't cook peas!!
you might take issue with the ignorant Ian Jack in yesterday's Guardian, referring to 'Golden Agers such as William Morris and G K Chesterton lamenting lost crafts and rural traditions.'
I have the 1997 revised edition of the book from Sutton Publishing, David. The quote comes on p.35 in the second chapter, in the context of Burne-Jones attempting to join the army during the Crimean war: "neat though he was in all his movements, he was defeated by the simplest mechanical devices, even drawing pins". Good job he didn't lay hands on a rifle ...
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