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!
Monday, 17 March 2008
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.
Wednesday, 20 February 2008
Umberto Eco asks ...
In a fine essay on 'Dreaming of the Middle Ages', Umberto Eco asks (in his husky, sexy Italian accent): 'What would Ruskin, Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites have said if they had been told that the rediscovery of the Middle Ages would be the work of the twentieth-century mass media?'
Has anyone ever answered that challenging question?
Sunday, 17 February 2008
Hours of Work in 'Nowhere'
In The Great Society: A Psychological Analysis (1914), Graham Wallas remarks that ‘once, while I listened to him [William Morris] lecturing, I made a rough calculation that the citizens of his commonwealth, in order to produce by the methods he advocated the quantity of beautiful and delicious things which they were to enjoy, would have to work about two hundred hours a week’ (p.326). And since News from Nowhere is the fleshing out of the economic, social and political principles of Morris’s lectures, we must assume that Wallas’s calculation of hours of work applies to it too.
200 hours a week – in a week of only 168 hours (=7x24)?! Good grief, it’s almost enough to send you scuttling back, with William Guest, to nineteenth-century capitalism as some sort of escape from this overwhelming utopian work schedule. Or we might exclaim: come back Looking Backward, all is forgiven, since there at least one retires from the utopian work-force at the age of forty-five. It’s true that work in Morris’s utopia is indistinguishable from art, creativity and pleasure; but even so, two hundred hours of it seems rather too much of a good thing. Whatever happened to the high ideals of the Socialist League manifesto, which argued that when labour was distributed fairly two to three hours work per person per day would be enough to produce the necessaries of life?
Graham Wallas had been a Fabian, and May Morris in her Artist, Writer, Socialist mocks the Fabians’ habit of taking their slide rules to her father’s utopia: ‘The materialist frame of mind was amusingly shown by the Fabian criticism that the economic process by which the inhabitants of News from Nowhere got wine from France was never known: people didn’t seem in that happy country to be producing for exchange, and some active young minds were anxious about it. My Father often laughed over this’ (II, 334).
Well, it’s difficult to defend Wallas’s point against William Morris’s own robust laughter, and nowadays we often invoke Miguel Abensour’s notion that Nowhere is a heuristic ‘education of desire’ which is not subject to a Wallasian hours-and-minutes critique that might indeed be apt enough for the more detailed blueprints of the classical utopian tradition. But even so, I find myself intrigued by Graham Wallas’s calculation of two hundred hours: is there any way, I wonder, in which we could retrace the steps by which he arrived at that figure, or even boldly venture an independent, new calculation of our own (Bob the Yorkshire weaver, with his passion for mathematics, would be the character in Nowhere most likely to help us with this)? For if Morris’s utopia, with its radical simplification of life, does indeed require more work to sustain it than there are hours in the week, then its ‘dream’ is likely to remain just that, and never arrive at the status of a shared ‘vision’ after all.
200 hours a week – in a week of only 168 hours (=7x24)?! Good grief, it’s almost enough to send you scuttling back, with William Guest, to nineteenth-century capitalism as some sort of escape from this overwhelming utopian work schedule. Or we might exclaim: come back Looking Backward, all is forgiven, since there at least one retires from the utopian work-force at the age of forty-five. It’s true that work in Morris’s utopia is indistinguishable from art, creativity and pleasure; but even so, two hundred hours of it seems rather too much of a good thing. Whatever happened to the high ideals of the Socialist League manifesto, which argued that when labour was distributed fairly two to three hours work per person per day would be enough to produce the necessaries of life?
Graham Wallas had been a Fabian, and May Morris in her Artist, Writer, Socialist mocks the Fabians’ habit of taking their slide rules to her father’s utopia: ‘The materialist frame of mind was amusingly shown by the Fabian criticism that the economic process by which the inhabitants of News from Nowhere got wine from France was never known: people didn’t seem in that happy country to be producing for exchange, and some active young minds were anxious about it. My Father often laughed over this’ (II, 334).
Well, it’s difficult to defend Wallas’s point against William Morris’s own robust laughter, and nowadays we often invoke Miguel Abensour’s notion that Nowhere is a heuristic ‘education of desire’ which is not subject to a Wallasian hours-and-minutes critique that might indeed be apt enough for the more detailed blueprints of the classical utopian tradition. But even so, I find myself intrigued by Graham Wallas’s calculation of two hundred hours: is there any way, I wonder, in which we could retrace the steps by which he arrived at that figure, or even boldly venture an independent, new calculation of our own (Bob the Yorkshire weaver, with his passion for mathematics, would be the character in Nowhere most likely to help us with this)? For if Morris’s utopia, with its radical simplification of life, does indeed require more work to sustain it than there are hours in the week, then its ‘dream’ is likely to remain just that, and never arrive at the status of a shared ‘vision’ after all.
Monday, 4 February 2008
Things That Go Bump On Your Head
In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) the provincial doctor, Charles Bovary, receives a memorable birthday present: ‘Il reçut pour sa fête une belle tête phrénologique, toute marquetée de chiffres jusqu’au thorax et peinte en bleu’. Thirty pages later, disturbed by his wife’s mysterious ailments, Charles takes refuge in his office, ‘et il pleura, les deux coudes sur la table, assis dans son fauteuil de bureau, sous la tête phrénologique’. And towards the close of the novel, as the bailiffs arrive to seize Charles’s goods to settle Emma’s massive debts, his birthday present has a lucky escape. The bailiffs ‘n’inscrivirent point la tête phrénologique, qui fut considérée comme instrument de sa profession’.
Charles Bovary’s phrenological head can thus serve as a reminder to us of just how pervasive the pseudo-science of phrenology was in the nineteenth century, and it often had a distinctly radical edge to it. Phrenological lectures were popular with working-class audiences; the Owenites of New Lanark welded phrenology and utopian socialism together for a time; and even Karl Marx cheerily announced in a letter to a friend: ‘So you see, phrenology is not the useless art which Hegel imagined!’ This radical phrenological tradition came through to William Morris and his circle in the person of E.T. Craig, elderly Chartist and Co-operator, who used to offer readings in the garden of Kelmscott House. As May Morris recalls: ‘one time when we were having our characters described by the bumps on our heads, Shaw, who was one of the company and also undergoing examination, naughtily asked if he had a bump of veneration. “A bump?” shrieked the old gentleman, “why it’s a ‘ole there!” and stuck his stick into the ground to emphasise the answer’.
Did Morris ever have his own head read by Craig or anyone else? Not as far as I know; or if he did, we seem to have no record of it. Is, then, the chance of a phrenological analysis of William Morris gone for good? Not necessarily. The Phrenological Magazine published in June 1880 a four-page ‘Phrenological Description of Mr. John Ruskin’ by L.N. Fowler. It is an impressively detailed piece of work: ‘His brain is of full size and of peculiar shape, being long, high, and narrow … Form is very large …He is equally large in the organ of Size, giving fullness to the corner of the eye, next to the nose … the largest of these [faculties] is Benevolence, as seen by the extreme height of his head above the forehead’, etc. Yet far from running his fingers and calipers patiently all over the Sage of Brantwood’s face and skull, Fowler has concocted his analysis, as he himself admits in a footnote to his article, ‘from photographs’. So all is not, after all, lost in the case of Morris. A trained phrenologist, or even just a keen amateur, should be able to sit down with his or her copy of Fiona MacCarthy’s well-illustrated biography and write out a detailed phrenological study from the assorted Morrisian photographs collected there. We await results with interest!
Charles Bovary’s phrenological head can thus serve as a reminder to us of just how pervasive the pseudo-science of phrenology was in the nineteenth century, and it often had a distinctly radical edge to it. Phrenological lectures were popular with working-class audiences; the Owenites of New Lanark welded phrenology and utopian socialism together for a time; and even Karl Marx cheerily announced in a letter to a friend: ‘So you see, phrenology is not the useless art which Hegel imagined!’ This radical phrenological tradition came through to William Morris and his circle in the person of E.T. Craig, elderly Chartist and Co-operator, who used to offer readings in the garden of Kelmscott House. As May Morris recalls: ‘one time when we were having our characters described by the bumps on our heads, Shaw, who was one of the company and also undergoing examination, naughtily asked if he had a bump of veneration. “A bump?” shrieked the old gentleman, “why it’s a ‘ole there!” and stuck his stick into the ground to emphasise the answer’.
Did Morris ever have his own head read by Craig or anyone else? Not as far as I know; or if he did, we seem to have no record of it. Is, then, the chance of a phrenological analysis of William Morris gone for good? Not necessarily. The Phrenological Magazine published in June 1880 a four-page ‘Phrenological Description of Mr. John Ruskin’ by L.N. Fowler. It is an impressively detailed piece of work: ‘His brain is of full size and of peculiar shape, being long, high, and narrow … Form is very large …He is equally large in the organ of Size, giving fullness to the corner of the eye, next to the nose … the largest of these [faculties] is Benevolence, as seen by the extreme height of his head above the forehead’, etc. Yet far from running his fingers and calipers patiently all over the Sage of Brantwood’s face and skull, Fowler has concocted his analysis, as he himself admits in a footnote to his article, ‘from photographs’. So all is not, after all, lost in the case of Morris. A trained phrenologist, or even just a keen amateur, should be able to sit down with his or her copy of Fiona MacCarthy’s well-illustrated biography and write out a detailed phrenological study from the assorted Morrisian photographs collected there. We await results with interest!
Friday, 1 February 2008
Questions in 'Pickwick'
May Morris narrates an entertaining battle of wits between her father and a Birmingham acquaintance. The latter 'prided himself on his knowledge of Dickens, and was rather given to displaying it. This he did by putting (as his own) the questions he got from Calverley's Examination Papers. "He put them," says a friend, "to your father, who had no difficulty in answering all of them. He doubtless knew all about Calverley's questions, and having disposed of them, he proceeded to test M's knowledge of the book [Pickwick] and he put to him question after question which M could not answer. The questions seemed to show that your father knew Pickwick pretty well by heart"'.
The Pickwick examination, thirty questions long, was set in 1857 by the eccentric Cambridge don, Charles Stewart Calverley. It was first held, as a mock-formal exam, in his rooms at Cambridge where the undergraduate Walter Besant won first prize for his answers and refreshed himself after his Dickensian labours with a supper of oysters, beer and milk-punch. This gruellingly detailed test on the novel subsequently achieved considerable notoriety, though by 1889 Andrew Lang was writing mournfully in his Lost Leaders that 'The number of people who could take a good pass in Mr Calverley's Pickwick Examination Paper is said to be diminishing'.
We are fortunate today that Calverley's Pickwick questions are readily available in an online edition of his Fly Leaves at: http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/etext03/fllv10.htm, so that Morris fans who share their hero's passion for Dickens can now test themselves out on the book. Immediately following the thirty questions is the set of authorised answers to them, so take care how you scroll down into the site.
The Pickwick examination, thirty questions long, was set in 1857 by the eccentric Cambridge don, Charles Stewart Calverley. It was first held, as a mock-formal exam, in his rooms at Cambridge where the undergraduate Walter Besant won first prize for his answers and refreshed himself after his Dickensian labours with a supper of oysters, beer and milk-punch. This gruellingly detailed test on the novel subsequently achieved considerable notoriety, though by 1889 Andrew Lang was writing mournfully in his Lost Leaders that 'The number of people who could take a good pass in Mr Calverley's Pickwick Examination Paper is said to be diminishing'.
We are fortunate today that Calverley's Pickwick questions are readily available in an online edition of his Fly Leaves at: http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/etext03/fllv10.htm, so that Morris fans who share their hero's passion for Dickens can now test themselves out on the book. Immediately following the thirty questions is the set of authorised answers to them, so take care how you scroll down into the site.
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