History in 100 Objects

The BBC series on ‘The History of the World in 100 Objects’ has been deservedly popular over the last few months, and Radio 4 this morning celebrated the 100th object, which completed the series: a solar-powered lamp. Could we, I wonder, envisage a History of William Morris in 100 Objects, and which would be the one object that might most evoke his presence and activities for us?

Some of the earlier biographers of Morris, including J.W. Mackail himself, have argued that Morris’s real relationships were indeed with objects rather than with people, that he was somehow strangely detached from the human and only fully himself when engaged with the tools, materials and products of his various craft enthusiasms across the years. As Mackail himself bluntly puts it, ‘He was interested in things much more than in people’ (vol II, p.93). So the notion of doing a Biography of Morris in 100 Objects should certainly, on this showing, be plausible enough.

As for a single object that might most represent our hero, well, we will all have our personal favourites and preferences here. My own special Morrisian object would be the battered brown satchel in the collection at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. In this Morris carried his socialist newspapers and leaflets (and his pipes) when he went campaigning and lecturing around the country, so – humble artefact though it is in itself – it vividly evokes for me the extraordinary political commitment and personal energy that Morris put into the British socialist movement in its formative early years. But I’m sure that you, dear reader, will have your own view here!

The 'Miracle' in Chile

It is a great joy to see the 33 trapped Chilean miners being brought to the surface today – a shared joy across the world, indeed! With the international mine-workers’ union estimating (conservatively) that 12,000 miners die in accidents across the globe each year, we can see just how lucky those Chileans have been. But miners die slowly as well as quickly because of their profession, just as my grandfather Henry Smith Pinkney died in his early 70s because of the coal dust that had accumulated in his lungs after 50 years working down the pit, first in High Spen in County Durham and then, from 1932 onwards, in the Kent coalfield at Betteshanger Colliery.

So it was a great shock to me, reading my way through William Morris’s political journalism in Commonweal a few years back, when I first came across his article on ‘Coal in Kent’ (8 March 1890, p.77). ‘The news that coal had been discovered in Kent, and that it would probably prove to be workable, has no doubt sent a shock of hope and expectation to some hearts and of terror to others’, Morris announces; and thus he seems to predict my family’s future history in the 1930s and 40s, as my grandfather and his two eldest sons, my Uncles Harry and Jack, were working down the mine. Grandad, I’m glad to say, was a Communist Party member and was still, even after his retirement, selling The Daily Worker outside the colliery gates in the 1960s.

Nothing survives of the Kent coalfield today except a ‘Miners Way’ country walk linking some of the old pit villages (I did part of it with my Auntie Dorothy some years ago). Whether anything survives of the political militancy that the miners once embodied is an even more moot question. Let us at least hope that the rescue of the Chilean miners today fans the flames of anger against the capitalism that put them in such desperately unsafe working conditions in the first place.

Jane Morris, Novelist?

I’m glad to learn that a complete collection of Jane Morris’s surviving letters, edited by Jan Marsh and Frank Sharpe, is going to appear in 2011, in a sumptuously illustrated edition.

In the Jane Morris letters that are already out in the public domain there are certainly some intriguing statements. For example: ‘I am always inventing plots for novels, and if I ever find myself anywhere in peace I believe I should develop them’ (26 October 1895); ‘I have been thinking of writing a little book of reminiscences (not for publication) but just to beguile the weary hours’ (23 December 1908).

If only she had written the books she promises us here! We must hope, therefore, that in the fuller edition of her correspondence that is on its way she may give us more clues as to what the contents of these unwritten novels and volume of reminiscences might have been.

Cowslips in and out of Literature

In Morris’s early short story, ‘Frank’s Sealed Letter’, the hero Hugh one morning remembers how, in the fields all about, "it was the cowslip time of the year”. This is a delightful phrase, and certainly cowslips do seem to be pervasive in Victorian literature. There are cowslips bound around the Maypole in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native; the children in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss drink cowslip wine; and Matthew Arnold has surely given us the most memorable cowslips in all nineteenth-century literature in his poem ‘Thyrsis’. He evokes the Oxford hills “With thorns once studded, old white-blossomed trees,/Where thick the cowslips grew”, and he notes of the goddess Proserpine that “of our poor Thames she never heard!/ Her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirred”.

The good news for us, in the early twenty-first century, is that cowslips are returning to the English countryside, after almost disappearing from British pastures because of intensive farming methods. Farmers who plant them are now paid a one hundred per cent subsidy, and companies like Emorsgate Seeds near Bath are making cowslip seeds available to British farmers in bulk. Whether the subsidy will survive current public spending cuts, I do not know; but there is at least a chance that, at some point in the not too distant future, we too will be able to celebrate Morris’s “cowslip time of year” again.

Raymond Williams on Utopia

I have just returned from a conference in Tokyo on Raymond Williams’s novels, organised at Japan Women’s University by the indefatigable Professor Yasuo Kawabata. Not having re-read Williams’s novels carefully since I wrote my study of them for Seren Books in 1991, I had forgotten that Morris gets an interesting mention in Loyalties (1985).

At an anti-Suez demonstration in Trafalgar Square in 1956 the Cambridge historian Mark Ryder has a brief discussion with the militant upper-class Communist Emma Braose. Mark informs Emma that:

‘Since Bloody Sunday it [Trafalgar Square] has been a sacred place.’
‘That’s a historian’s point of view.’
‘Or in fiction. Four years ago, wasn’t it, 1952, Morris had the English revolution start here.’
‘Morris,’ Emma said, ‘was a Utopian.’ (p.181).

And that dismissive adjective, as far as the orthodox Emma is concerned, thoroughly puts paid to Morris and News from Nowhere!

Raymond Williams himself, however, was a good deal more sympathetic to Morris’s utopianism, but looking again at his writings on News from Nowhere I find myself dissatisfied with them. Williams criticises Morris’s yoking of the idea of social simplicity to socialism, which is fair enough; but then makes no mention at all of that decidedly non-simple figure Ellen in discussing Morris’s utopia (despite Ellen, oddly enough, being a recurrent name in Williams’s own fiction).

Yet Ellen, I would suggest, brings real complexity into News from Nowhere; she is a token that Morris himself has deep reservations about the genial neighbourly world of Nowhere, that he feels it needs gingering up by someone like Ellen, who has ‘often troubled men’s minds disastrously’, as she cheerfully informs us. She may trouble Nowhere itself disastrously too, I suspect, though we would need a sequel to Morris’s great work to see how that might pan out in practice.

Nature vs Culture

The excellent ‘Calligraphic Masterpieces’ exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow contained some intriguing surprises as well as many of the familiar treasures of Morris’s calligraphic phase in the 1870s. A Winsor&Newton ‘Illuminating Kit’ - an elaborate folding wooden box with compartments full of colours, brushes and gold leaf - reminded us what a popular middle-class pastime calligraphy was in the mid-Victorian period; it certainly wasn’t a stray discovery of Morris’s own. And a delightful embroidered book bag made by Jenny and May for their father was nice testimony to the closeness of the Morris family circle in the 1890s.

As for the Morris decorated books in the exhibition, one could not help but be astonished at the intricate craftsmanship they displayed; but it was the tension between the elegantly formed letters and the rich floral decoration, between Culture and Nature as it were, which intrigued me most. May Morris describes her father’s Rubaiyat as ‘a flower garden turned into a book ... wonderfully harmonious’, but I’m not so sure about that harmony; often the vigorous vegetation breaks into the frame of the writing and even at times threatens to engulf it. Splendid floriated initials in the Odes of Horace and the Story of Howard the Halt are so intertwined with stems and vine decoration that they are nearly overwhelmed; and one remembers those unsettling late Kelmscott Press initials in which the flamboyant capital letters are actually stabbed through by alarmingly active tendrils of vegetation.

Nature thus subjugates Culture in the end, and perhaps the play of floral decoration against writing in these painted books gives us in miniature a version of that post-apocalyptic image that Morris so relished in Richard Jeffries’s After London (1885): the great city, i.e. Culture, reduced back to a miasmic swamp by the resurgent forces of Nature itself.

The Theological Turn

There has been talk recently of a ‘theological turn’ in literary and cultural studies, just as there has been a resurgence of the ‘God debate’ in our culture more generally. Questions of religion seem back on the agenda in ways they have not been for a long time; and no wonder, given the extraordinary roles of the US Christian Right and of Islamic insurgencies and terrorism in shaping world history over the last decade or so.

How might such a theological turn affect readings of Morris’s News from Nowhere, which has surely seemed to so many of its readers one of the most resolutely secular utopias in the entire tradition (it refers dismissively to the Bible as ‘the old Jewish proverb-book’, after all) ? We can predict, I suspect, that more weight will begin to be given to the fact that Morris’s masterpiece ends, not at Kelmscott manor as we lazily assume, but at Kelmscott church, where William Guest fades into invisibility on the threshold of the utopian feast and plunges back into the class-ridden nightmare of his own nineteenth century.

Why should utopia end thus at a sacred site? Can it be that such buildings, and the religious values that have attached to them for centuries, cannot be so briskly secularised as Morris, the Nowherians themselves and we as readers would all like to think? Is it possible to elaborate a reading of News from Nowhere beginning, not with the Socialist League meeting or the new Hammersmith Guest House, but with Kelmscott church itself, which might then radiate back retrospectively into the text in surprising ways and alert us to religious significances we had not previously fully picked up (bathing in the Thames as baptism, for example)?

I am not going to offer such a reading myself, but I feel sure that, under the weight of today’s ‘theological turn’, we will be seeing them come through in future years.