One of the
founding impulses of this blog way back in 2007 was a sense of the
unfinishedness of Morris’s oeuvre, both literary and political – the former
entailing further creative writing on our part, the latter new projects of
social involvement. However, I’ve
perhaps lost sight of that literary unfinishedness in recent years, so a minor
example comes opportunely to hand to remind me of it. On 7 October 1892, the
day after Tennyson’s death, Morris wrote to George Bernard Shaw: ‘Just think if
I were still Editor of Commonweal I should have had to write something about Tennyson. As it is I needn’t and flatly, as you have
guessed, I won’t’ (Kelvin, III, 453).
Well, he won’t,
but we could. Would it be worth an effort at drafting this Tennyson
obituary that never happened? We have
the three articles on Tennyson which William Fulford contributed to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in 1856 to
give us a pretty good idea of what Morris and his set made of his verse
in those early days. But what of the
later, socialist Morris? Can we
speculate and set out at some length how his views of Tennyson might have developed? And if we accept Norman Kelvin’s editorial
suggestion here that ‘Apparently Shaw wanted to interview Morris about Tennyson’,
we might even cast our creative writing project into that particular format,
which will require us to ventriloquise the nimble wit of Shaw’s questions as
well as the ponderous content of Morris’s answers.
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