If I wake up
unusually early in the morning, I sometimes catch BBC Radio 4’s ‘Farming Today’
programme. With its lively discussions
of food production, forestry policy, environmental concerns, etc, it never
ceases to fascinate, and indeed makes me wish I were an earlier riser in
general, so that I could catch more of it on a regular basis.
Farming
practice and policy is alas one of the telling absences of Morris’s News from Nowhere. It is true that we get glimpses of great
herds of cows on the Essex marshlands at the start of the book and then hear a
good deal about the hay-making up country towards its end; but there isn’t any
detailed account of how food production might be organised in utopia – and there
couldn’t be a more fundamental topic than that.
Nor am I aware of much discussion of the topic elsewhere in Morris, in
his political lectures, say.
And yet the
utopian tradition has had a good deal to say about agricultural practices in an
ideal society, following on from Thomas More’s splendid suggestion that
everybody in his Utopia has to work
on a farm for two years in the course of their working life, so the whole
society understands the practical skills and vital social significance of food
production. That sounds as though it
would be an admirable policy to introduce in the wake of Brexit next March,
when all the East-European fruit-pickers in this country suddenly vanish!
It is
curious, then, to find May Morris early in the twentieth century taking up the
topic that her father had neglected in his writings. On New Year’s Eve 1916 she wrote to John
Quinn: ‘Our agricultural question is enormously interesting – and enormously
serious. I see no way out of it but a
genuine universal cooperation’. Whether
any detailed writings by May on agricultural policy survive I do not know, but
in this field, as in several others, it may be that we need the work of
Morris’s younger daughter to supplement trends of thought that he broached but
did not quite follow through.
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