In early spring 1887 Sydney Cockerell visited John Ruskin at Brantwood: ‘We were soon talking of men that I admired. Morris was “beaten gold”, he said, “a great rock with a little moss on it perhaps”. His “love of Turner, primroses and little girls” had prevented his ever being Morris’s close friend…’ (cited in Tim Hilton, John Ruskin, 2002, p.817).
We know that Burne-Jones was certainly very much closer to Ruskin than Morris ever became, but could it truly have been the issue of ‘little girls’ that played a part in the relative distance between the two men? How much did Morris know of what Hilton himself, Ruskin’s best recent biographer, terms his ‘paedophiliac’ sexual orientation (p.253), or of Ruskin’s disastrous passion for Rose La Touche, who was a girl of nine when the 39-year-old Ruskin first met her in 1858?
We are used to thinking of Morris’s News from Nowhere as a Ruskinian utopia in terms of its medievalism and its work-practices; but might we also have to begin to think of it as a Ruskinian utopia in sexual terms too? For the central emotional relationship of that work develops between the 20-year-old Ellen and a William Guest who is ‘hard on fifty-six’, an age difference even greater than that of Ruskin and Rose La Touche; and one might even sense a certain progressive ‘girlification’ of News from Nowhere as the text proceeds. The indeterminate ‘children on the road’ in Kensington wood in the early chapters become the three girls and a boy on Greylocks outside the British Museum half way through, who in turn later become the eroticised ‘half a dozen girls playing about on the grass’ up the river near Goring and Streatley (‘they had been bathing, and were light clad and bare-footed’).
So it may be that if the issue of Ruskin’s predilection for ‘little girls’ was indeed a distancing factor in Morris’s relationship to him, the younger man makes what amends he can to his mentor in this respect in News from Nowhere – all the while, however, ensuring that a sexual barrier between the generations is firmly in place after all, by having Guest vanish away from Ellen at the end of his utopian vision.
Friday, 25 April 2008
Wednesday, 9 April 2008
Imaginary Conversation 2: In Praise of Wine
In an earlier posting (12.01.08) I suggested that some enterprising Morrisian might write for us a conversation between Oscar Wilde and William Morris on his death bed, a meeting several times referred to after Morris’s death but which in fact never took place (so all the more scope for imagination, one would think).
May Morris seems to have enjoyed the same game of inventing imaginary conversations for her father. Here, for instance, are her reflections on how a genial chat between Morris and the literary critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933) might have gone: ‘It seems a pity that the late George Saintsbury, who wrote with such brilliant discernment about my Father’s poetry, did not come into contact with him then. A third in company might have listened with refreshment to the poet and critic exchanging thoughts about grands crus and vintage-years’ (William Morris: Artist Writer Socialist, I, 64).
William Allingham wrote in his diary for 1st August 1866, ‘At dinner William Morris, pleasant, learned about wines and distilling’. We have some fine contemporary memories of Morris coming up from the cellars in Red House hands full of wine bottles and others tucked under his arms; more research could be done on Mr Diosy, Morris's wine supplier; and H.G. Wells in A Modern Utopia (1905) is shrewdly aware that ‘a News from Nowhere utopia with the wine left out’ would be a totally different, and presumably much lesser, thing (ch.2, section 6).
Saintsbury’s own side of this conversation can be gleaned from his Notes on a Cellar-Book, first published in 1920 and kept in print by wine enthusiasts intermittently since. ‘Wine has been stinted of its due literary sizings’, Saintsbury there complains, and Morris might well have agreed. But it’s clear that political differences would have troubled their oenophiliac exchanges. While Morris celebrated Ruskin calling him ‘the ablest man of his time’ with a bottle of his favourite Imperial Tokay, Saintsbury writing many years later reflects dolefully that Imperial Tokay ‘will probably never recover the disappearance of those Hapsburgs, with whom it was so inseparably connected. Republican Tokay would be a contradiction in terms’.
The raw materials, on both sides, are richly there. May Morris’s imaginary conversation simply awaits its writing up!
May Morris seems to have enjoyed the same game of inventing imaginary conversations for her father. Here, for instance, are her reflections on how a genial chat between Morris and the literary critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933) might have gone: ‘It seems a pity that the late George Saintsbury, who wrote with such brilliant discernment about my Father’s poetry, did not come into contact with him then. A third in company might have listened with refreshment to the poet and critic exchanging thoughts about grands crus and vintage-years’ (William Morris: Artist Writer Socialist, I, 64).
William Allingham wrote in his diary for 1st August 1866, ‘At dinner William Morris, pleasant, learned about wines and distilling’. We have some fine contemporary memories of Morris coming up from the cellars in Red House hands full of wine bottles and others tucked under his arms; more research could be done on Mr Diosy, Morris's wine supplier; and H.G. Wells in A Modern Utopia (1905) is shrewdly aware that ‘a News from Nowhere utopia with the wine left out’ would be a totally different, and presumably much lesser, thing (ch.2, section 6).
Saintsbury’s own side of this conversation can be gleaned from his Notes on a Cellar-Book, first published in 1920 and kept in print by wine enthusiasts intermittently since. ‘Wine has been stinted of its due literary sizings’, Saintsbury there complains, and Morris might well have agreed. But it’s clear that political differences would have troubled their oenophiliac exchanges. While Morris celebrated Ruskin calling him ‘the ablest man of his time’ with a bottle of his favourite Imperial Tokay, Saintsbury writing many years later reflects dolefully that Imperial Tokay ‘will probably never recover the disappearance of those Hapsburgs, with whom it was so inseparably connected. Republican Tokay would be a contradiction in terms’.
The raw materials, on both sides, are richly there. May Morris’s imaginary conversation simply awaits its writing up!
Tuesday, 8 April 2008
Under Another Name ...
The Dream of John Ball contains one of Morris’s most profound political meditations: ‘I pondered … how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name’. It is a reflection that has resonance well beyond the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which is so vividly dramatised in John Ball itself.
‘Turns out not to be what they meant’. So it is that the great electoral defeat of the Thatcher government in 1997 and the arrival of Tony Blair and the Labour Party in power, in which so many on the Left had invested such hopes (I remember friends confidently telling me that the Party had only used Blair to win the election and that, now in government, it would ditch him for a man of the Left like Robin Cook), has led to a decade-long right-wing “New Labour” project which has in some respects (creeping privatisation of the National Health Service, say) gone further than Thatcherism itself would ever have dared.
‘Have to fight for what they meant under another name’. At which point, it seems to me, politically active Morrisians have increasingly invested their own dreams of transformation in the emergent politics of the Green movement. And, as a little historical footnote to this shift of allegiances, I offer the following eco-socialist motion put to the conference of the Green Party of England and Wales in 1996, the year of Morris’s centenary:
“Conference celebrates the centenary of Green Left pioneer William Morris, and his artistic and political work. Conference reaffirms the Green Party’s commitment to building a sustainable society based on the values we share with William Morris and those who came before and after him.
“In particular we share Morris’s vision of:
“ - an equitable and just society based on co-operation, peace and harmony with nature,
“ - sustainable production for need in harmony with the environment, not exploitation of planet and people for individual greed and corporate profit,
“ - a commitment to usefulness and beauty, not the ugliness of throw-away mass production for naked materialism,
“ - participation in a living community empowered to make their own decisions, not least through community ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange,
“The Green Party Executive is instructed to give priority to coalition building with others who share these values and this vision of the future basis of society and the economy.
“Proposed by John Norris, Penny Kemp, Johann Sikora, Tony Martin”.
‘Turns out not to be what they meant’. So it is that the great electoral defeat of the Thatcher government in 1997 and the arrival of Tony Blair and the Labour Party in power, in which so many on the Left had invested such hopes (I remember friends confidently telling me that the Party had only used Blair to win the election and that, now in government, it would ditch him for a man of the Left like Robin Cook), has led to a decade-long right-wing “New Labour” project which has in some respects (creeping privatisation of the National Health Service, say) gone further than Thatcherism itself would ever have dared.
‘Have to fight for what they meant under another name’. At which point, it seems to me, politically active Morrisians have increasingly invested their own dreams of transformation in the emergent politics of the Green movement. And, as a little historical footnote to this shift of allegiances, I offer the following eco-socialist motion put to the conference of the Green Party of England and Wales in 1996, the year of Morris’s centenary:
“Conference celebrates the centenary of Green Left pioneer William Morris, and his artistic and political work. Conference reaffirms the Green Party’s commitment to building a sustainable society based on the values we share with William Morris and those who came before and after him.
“In particular we share Morris’s vision of:
“ - an equitable and just society based on co-operation, peace and harmony with nature,
“ - sustainable production for need in harmony with the environment, not exploitation of planet and people for individual greed and corporate profit,
“ - a commitment to usefulness and beauty, not the ugliness of throw-away mass production for naked materialism,
“ - participation in a living community empowered to make their own decisions, not least through community ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange,
“The Green Party Executive is instructed to give priority to coalition building with others who share these values and this vision of the future basis of society and the economy.
“Proposed by John Norris, Penny Kemp, Johann Sikora, Tony Martin”.
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
Board Games in Utopia
Board games have been a significant element of the utopian imagination since the very inception of the genre with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). After their six-hour working day More’s utopians settle down to some postprandial recreation, which may involve playing: 1. a game of numbers, in which one number eventually captures another (we might expect Bob the weaver in Morris’s Nowhere, with his passion for mathematics, to be a grandmaster at this); or: 2. a game in which the vices fight a battle against the virtues, which sounds a good deal more complex, and edifying, than its simpler numeric counterpart.
In an intriguing article on ‘How to Play Utopia’ (1971), Michael Holquist has developed a whole series of analogies between chess and literary utopias – to the point, indeed, where utopia becomes, generically speaking, a kind of fictional chess. It is as if for Holquist board games, in their stylisation of a messily contingent world, are the secret inner generative principle of utopia itself. [It is then a minor disappointment in Ursula LeGuin’s otherwise magnificent The Dispossessed (1974) that its imagination of board games, in what is in all other respects such a richly created fictional world, should be so thin. The boy Shevek notices ‘two old men at the other end of the room cackl[ing] over their game of “Top ‘em”’ - and that is all! (ch2).]
What kind of games, then, can we imagine the Nowherians playing in Morris’s utopia? Well, we can certainly extrapolate forwards from his own personal favourites. J.W. Mackail tells us that ‘his chief indoor games were backgammon, draughts, and cribbage’; and Sidney Cockerell gives a fine sketch of Morris and Janey together in their later years: ‘When I went up into the drawing room to say goodnight Morris and his wife were playing at draughts, with large ivory pieces, red and white. Mrs. M. was dressed in a glorious blue gown, and as she sat on the sofa, she looked like an animated Rossetti picture or page from an old MS of a king and a queen’. Morris gives us some fine depictions of board games in his Icelandic translations (‘Now Gunnlaug and Helga would be always at the chess-playing together’), and we can assume that all these old favourites persist even in his post-revolutionary 22nd century England.
However, News from Nowhere is in some respects higher-tech than one is inclined to remember. There are force-vehicles or force-barges ploughing their mysterious way up and down the Thames, and therefore I delight to imagine (to borrow a Yeatsian phrase) that there may be ‘force-games’ in Nowhere too, complexly powered by the new energy source of the novel, whatever that is. So we might envisage Ellen and Guest in the Tapestry Room of Kelmscott Manor playing something like the complex game vlet in Samuel Delany’s astonishing ‘heterotopia’ Triton (1976):
In an intriguing article on ‘How to Play Utopia’ (1971), Michael Holquist has developed a whole series of analogies between chess and literary utopias – to the point, indeed, where utopia becomes, generically speaking, a kind of fictional chess. It is as if for Holquist board games, in their stylisation of a messily contingent world, are the secret inner generative principle of utopia itself. [It is then a minor disappointment in Ursula LeGuin’s otherwise magnificent The Dispossessed (1974) that its imagination of board games, in what is in all other respects such a richly created fictional world, should be so thin. The boy Shevek notices ‘two old men at the other end of the room cackl[ing] over their game of “Top ‘em”’ - and that is all! (ch2).]
What kind of games, then, can we imagine the Nowherians playing in Morris’s utopia? Well, we can certainly extrapolate forwards from his own personal favourites. J.W. Mackail tells us that ‘his chief indoor games were backgammon, draughts, and cribbage’; and Sidney Cockerell gives a fine sketch of Morris and Janey together in their later years: ‘When I went up into the drawing room to say goodnight Morris and his wife were playing at draughts, with large ivory pieces, red and white. Mrs. M. was dressed in a glorious blue gown, and as she sat on the sofa, she looked like an animated Rossetti picture or page from an old MS of a king and a queen’. Morris gives us some fine depictions of board games in his Icelandic translations (‘Now Gunnlaug and Helga would be always at the chess-playing together’), and we can assume that all these old favourites persist even in his post-revolutionary 22nd century England.
However, News from Nowhere is in some respects higher-tech than one is inclined to remember. There are force-vehicles or force-barges ploughing their mysterious way up and down the Thames, and therefore I delight to imagine (to borrow a Yeatsian phrase) that there may be ‘force-games’ in Nowhere too, complexly powered by the new energy source of the novel, whatever that is. So we might envisage Ellen and Guest in the Tapestry Room of Kelmscott Manor playing something like the complex game vlet in Samuel Delany’s astonishing ‘heterotopia’ Triton (1976):
‘He gazed over the board: within the teak rim, in three dimensions, the landscape spread, mountains to the left, oceans to the right …micro-waves lapped, micro-breezes blew, micro-trees bent, and micro-torrents plashed and whispered down micro-rocks …Lawrence assembled the astral cube: the six-by-six plastic squares, stacked on brass stilts, made a three-dimensional, transparent playing space to the right of the main board, on which all demonic, mythical, magical, and astral battles were enacted … Lawrence turned a switch: the grid flickered over the board...’.
Gripped by the epic struggles of such a high-tech game, William Guest might, one can’t help hoping, have sufficiently overcome his obsession with the Victorian past to have remained contentedly in utopia thereafter.
Monday, 17 March 2008
William Morris on Youtube
Morris is not yet well represented on Youtube, which is surprising given the visual as well as literary dimensions of his imagination. Among my trawl of sites - and avoiding such misdirections as the William Morris advertising agency in Los Angeles or William Morris the contemporary American glass-blower - I can only usefully come up with:
1. 'William Morris', posted by Mariangels, 7mins 59 secs. Attractive series of Morris-related images, covering Red House, his design work (furniture, textiles, stained glass wallpapers, Kelmscott Press books), his collaborators, and with a feeble glance at his socialism. Makes me wish I'd extended my school languages beyond French and German so I could read the Spanish (?) captions - though one can usually deduce the meaning from the visual context.
2. 'William Morris in Oxford', posted by buntworthy, 2mins 24 secs. Tony Pinkney introduces his new book on William Morris in Oxford: The Campaigning Years, 1879-1895 (Illuminati Books, 2007, £12-95, ISBN 978-0-9555918-0-8), which shifts the emphasis from Morris the Oxford undergraduate (a story we've had told many times) to Morris the middle-aged Oxonian activist, architectural and political. See further http://www.illuminatibooks.co.uk/
3. 'The Romantic Spirit: The Pre-Raphaelites', posted by MrPogle, 6mins 52secs. Six minutes on the 'Romantic journey', narrated by Anthony Andrews, from a 1982 Anglo-French series, with some emphasis in this episode on Morris. Contrasts his attempt to bring the Romantic vision into confrontation with industrial realities rather than cultivating it as an escape. Oddly ends up with Alice in Wonderland ...
If you know of other rewarding Morris Youtube sites, please do post an announcement here to share them with us. Otherwise, make one yourself and post it for us to enjoy!
1. 'William Morris', posted by Mariangels, 7mins 59 secs. Attractive series of Morris-related images, covering Red House, his design work (furniture, textiles, stained glass wallpapers, Kelmscott Press books), his collaborators, and with a feeble glance at his socialism. Makes me wish I'd extended my school languages beyond French and German so I could read the Spanish (?) captions - though one can usually deduce the meaning from the visual context.
2. 'William Morris in Oxford', posted by buntworthy, 2mins 24 secs. Tony Pinkney introduces his new book on William Morris in Oxford: The Campaigning Years, 1879-1895 (Illuminati Books, 2007, £12-95, ISBN 978-0-9555918-0-8), which shifts the emphasis from Morris the Oxford undergraduate (a story we've had told many times) to Morris the middle-aged Oxonian activist, architectural and political. See further http://www.illuminatibooks.co.uk/
3. 'The Romantic Spirit: The Pre-Raphaelites', posted by MrPogle, 6mins 52secs. Six minutes on the 'Romantic journey', narrated by Anthony Andrews, from a 1982 Anglo-French series, with some emphasis in this episode on Morris. Contrasts his attempt to bring the Romantic vision into confrontation with industrial realities rather than cultivating it as an escape. Oddly ends up with Alice in Wonderland ...
If you know of other rewarding Morris Youtube sites, please do post an announcement here to share them with us. Otherwise, make one yourself and post it for us to enjoy!
Friday, 7 March 2008
Morris returns to Manchester, March 6th 2008
On Thursday March 6th 2008 William Morris stood at a lecture podium in Manchester for the first time in well over a hundred years. In frock coat and with bristling beard, he glared around at us intensely in the Friends Meeting House and then launched into an impassioned discourse on ‘Art, Wealth and Riches’. In a mood of fierce indignation Morris denounced the ‘competitive commerce’ that had destroyed popular art from the Renaissance onwards. With raised index finger he stabbed accusingly at the middle class who had brought such a dire state of affairs about; with gruff humour he mocked its hypocritical pretensions; and with great sweeping gestures of his arms he opened to us alternative horizons, better possibilities of social living. This was indeed the archetypal Victorian Sage or Prophet, alive, alert, exasperated and denunciatory in every last fibre (and beard hair) of his outraged being.
Naturally, however, it wasn’t that William Morris himself had acquired an early prototype of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine and whizzed vertiginously forwards in it to our own postmodern Mancunian present to harangue us in 2008 as forcefully as he tackled his original nineteenth-century audiences on his one great theme, the relation of Art to Labour. What we were witnessing in the Friends Meeting House was the lecturer and actor Paul O’Keefe, togged up in Victorian costume and Morrisian false beard brilliantly performing ‘Art, Wealth and Riches’ on the very day (March 6th) and in the very city in which it had originally been delivered. The sweat glistened on O’Keefe’s forehead afterwards, as he painfully peeled off his beard, so astonishingly energetic and stentorian had been his rendition of the Morris text – and the audience was almost as emotionally exhausted as he was. None of us, certainly, will ever read the printed words of that lecture in the same way again; they will stir into uneasy, agitated, accusing life before our eyes, and resonate with O’Keefe’s memorably emphatic delivery.
How accurate was such a mode of delivery to what we know of Morris’s own lecture style? There are a vast number of contemporary responses to Morris as a public speaker, and he may himself have had different styles for different subjects (architecture, crafts, socialism), different audiences (middle-class, proletarian) and different locations (indoors, outdoors). I have not been back to check out all the potential references here, but my sense would be that the broad consensus is that, while everybody who heard him was deeply affected by Morris’s evident sincerity of belief and depth of content, they also tended to contrast him with the more flamboyantly and grandly rhetorical speakers of the socialist movement (John Burns, say). He seems not to have held forth in that charismatic, Barack Obama fashion, grandstanding his audience, but rather, I suspect, won them over more gradually, by the cumulative persuasive force of what he was saying and by the doggedly workmanlike manner of delivery; and there are even some contemporary voices who regard him as an ineffectual presence on a public platform. That, at any rate, is my offhand recall of my desultory reading in this field, and I certainly stand open to correction.
So it may be the case that Paul O’Keefe (who also performs Ruskin lectures) played his role with more impassioned fluency and flamboyancy than Morris himself could muster on similar occasions; and perhaps it is indeed that, at this distance in time, we have acquired a powerful generic sense of the post-Carlylean Victorian Sage, savagely indignant about the human abuses of his own period, a Platonic essence or Form which then overrides the particularity of the individual figure being dramatically re-enacted. But whether this is so or not, O’Keefe certainly mesmerised all of us in the Friends Meeting House, and when he turned on us, as Morris eventually in that text does to his audience – ‘You in Lancashire’ – we were jolted momentarily back in our seats with an alarmed sense of self-recognition and class-guilt!
Naturally, however, it wasn’t that William Morris himself had acquired an early prototype of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine and whizzed vertiginously forwards in it to our own postmodern Mancunian present to harangue us in 2008 as forcefully as he tackled his original nineteenth-century audiences on his one great theme, the relation of Art to Labour. What we were witnessing in the Friends Meeting House was the lecturer and actor Paul O’Keefe, togged up in Victorian costume and Morrisian false beard brilliantly performing ‘Art, Wealth and Riches’ on the very day (March 6th) and in the very city in which it had originally been delivered. The sweat glistened on O’Keefe’s forehead afterwards, as he painfully peeled off his beard, so astonishingly energetic and stentorian had been his rendition of the Morris text – and the audience was almost as emotionally exhausted as he was. None of us, certainly, will ever read the printed words of that lecture in the same way again; they will stir into uneasy, agitated, accusing life before our eyes, and resonate with O’Keefe’s memorably emphatic delivery.
How accurate was such a mode of delivery to what we know of Morris’s own lecture style? There are a vast number of contemporary responses to Morris as a public speaker, and he may himself have had different styles for different subjects (architecture, crafts, socialism), different audiences (middle-class, proletarian) and different locations (indoors, outdoors). I have not been back to check out all the potential references here, but my sense would be that the broad consensus is that, while everybody who heard him was deeply affected by Morris’s evident sincerity of belief and depth of content, they also tended to contrast him with the more flamboyantly and grandly rhetorical speakers of the socialist movement (John Burns, say). He seems not to have held forth in that charismatic, Barack Obama fashion, grandstanding his audience, but rather, I suspect, won them over more gradually, by the cumulative persuasive force of what he was saying and by the doggedly workmanlike manner of delivery; and there are even some contemporary voices who regard him as an ineffectual presence on a public platform. That, at any rate, is my offhand recall of my desultory reading in this field, and I certainly stand open to correction.
So it may be the case that Paul O’Keefe (who also performs Ruskin lectures) played his role with more impassioned fluency and flamboyancy than Morris himself could muster on similar occasions; and perhaps it is indeed that, at this distance in time, we have acquired a powerful generic sense of the post-Carlylean Victorian Sage, savagely indignant about the human abuses of his own period, a Platonic essence or Form which then overrides the particularity of the individual figure being dramatically re-enacted. But whether this is so or not, O’Keefe certainly mesmerised all of us in the Friends Meeting House, and when he turned on us, as Morris eventually in that text does to his audience – ‘You in Lancashire’ – we were jolted momentarily back in our seats with an alarmed sense of self-recognition and class-guilt!
[Left click on image to enlarge it].
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
William Morris in the Novel
Morris has appeared in novels occasionally over the years. The earliest examples include Hubert and Edith Bland's Something Wrong (1886), which contains a depiction of Morris as a socialist leader, and George Gissing’s Demos (1886), where the writer and socialist Westlake (‘long-haired, full-bearded, he had the forehead of an idealist and eyes whose natural expression was an indulgent smile’) is loosely modelled on Morris, as is his sister Stella on Jane.
Morris then features very briefly, as an ‘enthusiastic angler’, towards the end of Theodore Watts-Dunton’s Aylwin (1899), when the heroine Winifred recovers from her dementia at Hurstcote Manor (Kelmscott) under the benign care of Mr D’Arcy (Rossetti). Morris would certainly not have been amused by the little piscatorial vignette in which he appears, since it shows him as out-fished on his very own Kelmscott waters by a girl in a trance! Linda Miller, in her excellent series of articles in the UK Morris Society Newsletter, has recently drawn our attention to William Cameron’s novel The Day is Coming (1944), which depicts a meeting between Morris and C.R. Ashbee at Kelmscott in December 1894, and in which Morris is a lifetime inspirational presence to the working-class hero, Arthur Cullen (based on Cameron’s own father). The American modernist poet H.D. has an unpublished novel about Morris, Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal, and no doubt there are other examples to which learned colleagues could draw our attention.
But it may be that we stand on the brink of a whole new manifestation of William Morris in the novel. For a new genre of the “historical-figure-turned-detective” is emerging all around us. As straws in the wind, we might take Michael Gregorio’s Critique of Criminal Reason (2006), in which the ageing philosopher Immanuel Kant comes out of retirement to help the detective Hanno Stiffeniis in Königsberg in 1804; Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006), in which Sigmund Freud is drafted into a criminal investigation on his trip to New York; and Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (2007), in which both Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle turn detective in fin-de-siècle London and Paris. The more intelligent works in this genre naturally try to tell us something interesting about the historical figure-cum-detective’s thought-system in the process of generating a gripping detective narrative – all the more readily where that thought-system itself, as with psychoanalysis, is from the start a mode of decoding tiny clues and signs and parapraxes.
Is it not time, then, that William Morris himself emerged into this new fictional sphere of writers and philosophers turned detective, in a criminal plot that would both be revealing about his own thinking and, conceivably, about the fate of socialism more widely? Morris himself, as I have suggested elsewhere, was a keen reader of the detective novels of Emile Gaboriau, so he might well relish such an early twenty-first century fictional reincarnation.
Morris then features very briefly, as an ‘enthusiastic angler’, towards the end of Theodore Watts-Dunton’s Aylwin (1899), when the heroine Winifred recovers from her dementia at Hurstcote Manor (Kelmscott) under the benign care of Mr D’Arcy (Rossetti). Morris would certainly not have been amused by the little piscatorial vignette in which he appears, since it shows him as out-fished on his very own Kelmscott waters by a girl in a trance! Linda Miller, in her excellent series of articles in the UK Morris Society Newsletter, has recently drawn our attention to William Cameron’s novel The Day is Coming (1944), which depicts a meeting between Morris and C.R. Ashbee at Kelmscott in December 1894, and in which Morris is a lifetime inspirational presence to the working-class hero, Arthur Cullen (based on Cameron’s own father). The American modernist poet H.D. has an unpublished novel about Morris, Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal, and no doubt there are other examples to which learned colleagues could draw our attention.
But it may be that we stand on the brink of a whole new manifestation of William Morris in the novel. For a new genre of the “historical-figure-turned-detective” is emerging all around us. As straws in the wind, we might take Michael Gregorio’s Critique of Criminal Reason (2006), in which the ageing philosopher Immanuel Kant comes out of retirement to help the detective Hanno Stiffeniis in Königsberg in 1804; Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006), in which Sigmund Freud is drafted into a criminal investigation on his trip to New York; and Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (2007), in which both Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle turn detective in fin-de-siècle London and Paris. The more intelligent works in this genre naturally try to tell us something interesting about the historical figure-cum-detective’s thought-system in the process of generating a gripping detective narrative – all the more readily where that thought-system itself, as with psychoanalysis, is from the start a mode of decoding tiny clues and signs and parapraxes.
Is it not time, then, that William Morris himself emerged into this new fictional sphere of writers and philosophers turned detective, in a criminal plot that would both be revealing about his own thinking and, conceivably, about the fate of socialism more widely? Morris himself, as I have suggested elsewhere, was a keen reader of the detective novels of Emile Gaboriau, so he might well relish such an early twenty-first century fictional reincarnation.
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