WM's Book of Ballads

In an interview on the Kelmscott Press given to the journal Bookselling in 1895 William Morris declared cheerfully that 'The books I would like to print are the books I love to read and keep. I should be delighted to do the old English ballads - and I will some day'.

In fact, however, he never did so: his death in October 1896 put an end to this proposed ballad collection, as it did to so many other Kelmscott Press projects; it became yet another Morrisian Book That Never Was. Of all the lost Kelmscott works, it was this one which his daughter May most lamented in editing her father's Collected Works: 'Of all these, I think the non-fulfilment of the Ballad volume is most to be regretted; it would have been a mirror of his taste in traditional poetry, and interesting to see what he chose and what left out'.

We will certainly never now get that lost ballad book back in anything like its full form. But may it not be possible to collect the references to both ballads in general and individual ballads across Morris's copious writings and reconstruct from these something like the lost volume? A glancing mention of a ballad in, for example, a political lecture is a clue that Morris may have been sufficiently interested in it to have included it one day in his ballad collection. To be sure, as Morris and SPAB so often reminded us, a restoration or reconstruction is a poor substitute for the original itself; but in this particular instance, where no original now remains, a speculative reconstruction is the best we are ever going to get.

So there is double task here: for a determined reader to glean all those scattered references to ballads across the immense reaches of the Collected Works, and for an enterprising publisher to get the results - William Morris's Book of Ballads - out into the public realm.

Utopia's Minor Characters

Utopias frequently contain minor or even marginal characters who have very much more narrative potential than the books’ main plot lines (insofar as utopia does have a plot) seem to allow for them.

Take, for instance, the child Ini, whom the utopian anarchist Shevek meets on his visits to the Pae household in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. ‘He represented something to the child which Ini could not describe. Even much later in his life, which was profoundly and obscurely influenced by that childhood fascination, Ini found no words for it, only words that held an echo of it: the word voyager, the word exile’ (ch 7).

Or take, from Morris’s News from Nowhere, the daughter of Philippa the Obstinate Refuser: ‘a taller woman, quite a girl she seemed, who was at work nearby, had already knocked off, and was standing looking from Clara to Dick with delighted eyes. None of the others paid much heed to us … she turned out to be Philippa’s daughter, but was a tall strong girl, black-haired and gipsey-like of face and curiously solemn of manner … [Philippa] only shrugged her shoulders when her daughter came up to her and touched her’ (ch XXVI).

Such intriguing details may be no more than what Roland Barthes terms the ‘effet du réel’, whereby, through its surplus of signification, a narrative attempts to give persuasive groundedness to its fictional world. But Ini and Philippa’s daughter surely also take us beyond that immediate world, whether Le Guin’s Urras or Morris’s Nowhere. We want to know what kind of profound and obscurely influenced life the boy Ini subsequently leads, and we ask ourselves why Morris’s young woman is so fascinated by Dick and Clara, why her manner should be so curiously solemn, why her mother’s final gesture to her is so cold and unfriendly, and above all what may become of such a tantalising figure in the years ahead.

Such narrative promises are not kept, in either text, but they have none the less been made; and in such tiny ways, I would suggest, utopias begin to sketch the outline of possible sequels to themselves, sequels which might build systematically on the latent but undeveloped narrative potentials all such works secrete in the margins of their major or ‘official’ story-telling projects.

Eros and Psyche

Edward Thompson's enjoyable critical biography of the poet Robert Bridges - Robert Bridges 1844-1930 (OUP, 1944) - at one point throws down the gauntlet to enthusiasts for Morris's poetry. For Thompson writes: 'Of Eros and Psyche, which Bridges published in 1885, Mr de Selincourt says, "There is no more delightful long narrative poem in our language". William Morris's rendering of the same story, in The Earthly Paradise, he remarks justly, "seems heavy and mannered beside the swift movement and exquisite grace" of Bridges's version. Mr Brett Young, too, considers the latter "if not the best, the most beautiful narrative poem in English". I think it may be' (p.34).

Has any close reader of Morris's verse taken up this comparative challenge?

The Savage Train

The Liverpool Walker Art Gallery's exhibition on 'Art in the Age of Steam' was an extraordinary gathering of visual art devoted to trains and railways from the 1830s onwards. Early railway landscapes show this terrifying force of modernity violating the traditional sanctities of nature (scaring horses in the fields, swathing peasants in steam). Later Impressionist images of the Gare Saint-Lazare glean fleeting moments of urban beauty from the new technology. Futurist paintings flamboyantly celebrate the dynamism and power of the locomotive in jagged, angular images that turn the entire canvas into an angry swirl of sharp edges and motion. Eerie Surrealist images distil the possibilities of anxiety or oneiric liberation that trains and their settings surreptitiously offer. And busy realist canvases from William Powell Frith's great image of Paddington Station onwards explore railway stations or train compartments as places of class confrontation and sexual opportunity.

Making one's way around this wonderful exhibition in its closing days, one couldn't help but think of William Morris's own attitudes to trains. For the most part resoundingly negative, to be sure, as the recurrent phrase in his letters - 'the savage train' - indicates well enough, and the railway is after all abolished entirely in News from Nowhere. But might there be other possibilities here too? After all, trains made the great socialist lecturing tours of the 1880s possible in the first place, and Morris did much literary composing upon them, by all accounts. Arthur Compton-Rickett wrote that Morris was 'keenly alive to the minutest points of railway organisation, which always interested him', and there even seems something of a match or analogy or even causal relationship between Morris's own jerky energies and the dynamism of the railway itself. At any rate, George Wardle noted that Morris would arrive at work 'as if he would go at 20 miles an hour and rather expected everything to keep up with him. This was, I think, the effect of the railway journey'.

Trains could be places of uncanny mystery for Morris too. May Morris tells of her father getting in to the wrong carriage on a train journey: 'the first thing he saw was his own name scratched on the glass with a diamond, "WM" ... it remains as half a story'. One could imagine De Chirico making a vividly unsettling Surrealist canvas out of this incident, with Morris bumping into evidences of an eerie urban Doppelganger haunting his every move.

Savage trains indeed, then; but beneath the kneejerk Morrisian indignation at a noisy and dirty modernist technology (which in his later years he also saw as a tool of capitalist colonisation, whether of the Lake District or of India), it might be just possible to elaborate a more nuanced account of William Morris on trains, one which would be more faithful to the whole rich spectrum of artistic responses on display at the Walker Gallery's exhilarating show.

Cycling around Kelmscott

In a little piece entitled 'Cycling in Nowhere' (Journal of the William Morris Society, 13.2, Summer 1999, 29-33), I lamented the absence of bicycles in News from Nowhere, despite the emergence of a culture of socialist cycling around Morris in the years preceding its composition. Commonweal itself, for instance, contained an appeal 'To Socialist Cyclists' on 30 July 1887 (p.245); and I speculated that if Ellen were indeed some sort of 1880s 'New Woman', then we might have expected her to cycle, rather than to row, up the Thames in pursuit of William Guest.

I should, however, have taken the time and trouble to pursue these issues into the next generation of the Morris family. What Morris did not give us in News from Nowhere his younger daughter May in a sense gives us in the years after his death. In her later years at Kelmscott, as she narrates them in her letters to John Quinn, May Morris emerges as an intrepid cyclist, braving the most inclement conditions on two wheels: ' riding home from the station in inky darkness, my lamp blown out, and no possibility of lighting again - wondering which was ditch and which was road - all this was the best part of the day'. On Easter Monday 1912 she was attending a festival of dancing at Cirencester, fifteen miles from Kelmscott Manor, and made a bold choice of two wheels over four:

'I got my guest, Miss Sloane, up somehow … by seven in the morning, and sent her off with friends who were driving, while I started on my cycle. It was a beautiful day, but with a fearful, icy, violent head wind blowing … But there is a sort of primitive pleasure, is there not?, in battling with elements, esp. if one is a bit out of sorts; I got there somehow - rather dishevelled, and left far behind by the carriage-folk, but enjoying the free air, and the wide lonely country …then the beautiful ride home - no wind, a solemn sky and glorious moon, and all down-hill'.

Cycling seems, indeed, to denote in her mind a peculiar loyalty to her father, as in the case of her visits to the White Horse at Uffington. First, the bare facts of the trip: 'it is some 12 miles south from here, and I cycled & got sunburnt & still have a red nose'; and then a sense of its emotional meaning, as she reflects that Morris himself had 'always paid it a yearly visit, & I have done so ever since - mostly alone on my cycle, in all sorts of weather'.

So our disappointment that Ellen does not cycle in News from Nowhere can be somewhat tempered by these vivid images of May Morris, a decade and a half after her father's death, bicycling staunchly across the very landscapes of his utopia, thereby keeping faith with an ethics of cycling that News from Nowhere itself could sadly not quite encompass. And if we want to strengthen this image of May Morris as cycling eco-warrior, we need do no more than turn to Elfrida Manning's comment on May in her diary entry for March 1925: 'She cannot bear driving in a car' (Society Journal, 4.2, summer 1980, p.19).

The Old Man Who Knows Everything

Early on in News from Nowhere Old Hammond declares to William Guest, 'I am old and perhaps disappointed' (ch IX). Nothing seems to me more important in the interpretation of Morris's text than establishing exactly what the 105-year-old Hammond means by this. If the Old Man Who Knows Everything (to borrow H.G. Wells's fine phrase for the utopian expositor), the figure who more than anyone else is the keeper of utopia's flame and conscience - if he is 'disappointed' with the way things have turned out, then you surely know you're in trouble!

So, what Hammond means is one key question; but what he might do about it is another. And here we might need to turn to contemporary utopian writing to give ourselves some possible narrative models. In Kim Stanley Robinson's fine ecological utopia, Pacific Edge (1990), the elderly Tom Barnard, who has retreated from the activism of his earlier years into a depressed, silent, detached existence on the top of Rattlesnake Hill after the death of his wife, will painfully have to descend that hill, reintegrate himself in society, return to the political struggle as capitalism begins to reassert its ugly head behind disputes about local zoning and water laws.

Can we write a future narrative for Old Hammond along such lines? Can we imagine him as having dispiritedly shut himself away from Nowhere in the dusty and claustrophobic vaults of the British Museum? Why is he worried, in chapter XV, about 'how ... you prevent the counter-revolution from setting in'? To what developments elsewhere in the text does this anxiety correspond? Will he accordingly need to sally forth again, imparting his long historical perspectives to a culture of younger Nowherians who seem dangerously oblivious to them? And in so doing will he, like Robinson's Tom Barnard, recapture the fire and fervour of his early political days, inspiring a younger generation of activists in the process?

News from Nowhere declares itself on its title page 'some chapters' from a utopian romance. Clearly, there are others to be written...

Ruskin, Morris and the Terraforming of Mars

Abstract of a paper to be delivered at the 'Persistent Ruskin' Conference, Lancaster University, 18th-19th July 2008:

This paper aims to construct a Ruskinian tradition in utopian writing around the issue of work practices. It sees William Morris's News from Nowhere as the first Ruskinian utopia, but one which is twisted awry in its very moment of conception by the impact upon Morris of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. That archetypal clash between utopias of sustainability and utopias of scientific advancement (going all the way back to Thomas More versus Francis Bacon) is then re-enacted, but also partly reconciled, in some of the great utopias of the second half of the twentieth century. Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed and above all Kim Stanley Robinson's great Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) will be shown to provide a complex contemporary home for Ruskinian-Morrisian ideals of unalienated labour, as the Gothic craftsman unexpectedly mutates into Martian terraformer.