I have
sometimes toyed with the idea – especially now that my granddaughter is growing
up there – of writing a book on William
Morris in Cambridge as a counterpart to my William Morris in Oxford: The Campaigning Years, 1879-1895
(Illuminati Books, 2007). What has
stopped me so far, I suppose, is a sense of disproportion in the materials
across the two universities: Cambridge did not have the deep emotional
resonance for Morris that Oxford so abundantly did, and in his later,
campaigning years he only spoke there twice as opposed to seven times amidst
the Arnoldian dreaming spires.
None the
less, there would be interesting research questions to pursue in relation to
those Cambridge visits, and some of them are actually posed to us by the
participants themselves. Here, for instance,
is H.M. Hyndman, fellow-leader in the Democratic Federation, reflecting on the
Cambridge political debate of 5 February 1884 in his The Record of an Adventurous Life (1911): ‘It is a little strange
to recall now that in 1883 or 1884, I forget which year at the moment, I
proposed an out-and-out Socialist Resolution at the Cambridge Union, of which I
am a member, and Morris and J. L. Joynes came down to support me. It was not a bad debate, and we actually took
thirty-seven men into our Lobby. What
has become of those revolutionary undergraduates of more than a quarter of a
century ago?’
Yes indeed:
where are the snows – or in this case, revolutionary undergraduates – of yesteryear? Would it be possible for the assiduous researcher
to track down the names of Morris and Hyndman’s 37 youthful supporters that day,
and then to follow through their subsequent careers to see to what extent the
rest of their lives embodied (or not) the progressive politics they had displayed
on that memorable occasion? So whether
there is or isn’t a full book’s worth to be written on ‘Morris in Cambridge’,
there are still plenty of local tasks left to carry through under that suggestive
rubric.
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2 comments:
Tony, why not write up the story of those 37 radical students (as you have often recommended in this blog) in creative writing mode rather than in standard scholarly terms? Raymond Williams in ‘Politics and Letters’ talks about wanting to write a novel following through the careers of a group of six radical Oxford students of the 1950s, so how about a much more complex, much more multi-voiced version of that kind of novel following the subsequent trajectories of all 37 Cambridge youngsters who backed Morris and Hyndman that day?
Thanks for the intriguing suggestion, and it's true that I have rather let the creative writing emphasis of this blog lapse for a while - so you nicely revive it for me! But, turning up my copy of 'Politics and Letters', I note that Williams remarks about his idea for a novel on the Oxford group that "I then found the familar problem that if I was to pursue this project with enough people, the result would be an impossibly long novel" (p.285). If that was true with his half dozen or so characters, how would it work out with thirty-seven different figures to pursue?!
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