Every Morris fan will have his or her own mental list of the phrases which, according to contemporaries and biographers, were constantly on Morris’s lips. I offer my own haphazard gleanings from the field (with a brief indication of their sources) and hope that readers of this blog may add to them, so that we shall eventually between us compose a full chrestomathy of William Morris’s recurrent phrases:
‘“When I was a little chap” was a phrase constantly in his mouth …’ (J.W. Mackail)
‘So much as I seem to have to do! – the words were in one form or another habitually on his lips … ‘ (Mackail)
‘… the work of Wren and his successors down to Wyatt, the architects of “the ignorance”, to use that Arabian phrase which Morris was so fond of quoting …’ (Mackail)
Phrases which Morris used from Dickens: ‘Morning, morning!’ (Boffin in Our Mutual Friend); ‘Wot larks!’ (Joe Gargery in Great Expectations); ‘Bring him forard, and I’ll chuck him out o’winder’ (Mr F’s aunt in Little Dorrit). Mackail is again the source.
‘… a phrase that was constantly on Morris’s lips was that, according to the French proverb, “Better is the enemy of the good”’ (F.S. Ellis)
When F.S. Furnivall objected to the colours of a cabinet Morris was painting in Red House ‘the only reply was “Don’t be a
d[amned] fool”. Morris generally set you down in that way if you did not agree with him’ (F.S. Ellis)
‘A favourite expression of his in starting one of his tirades was: “The fact of the matter is – “’ (Arthur Compton-Rickett).
'The ipse dixit of Morris was usually preceded by the phrase "in point of fact" which became one of the Society's catchwords' (James Alfred Wilkes)
Saturday, 17 January 2009
Thursday, 1 January 2009
New Year's Greeting
Warm greetings to all readers of this Morris blog from its author on New Year’s Day 2009! It seems a long time indeed since I put up the first of its 41 entries on 2nd October 2007, and occasionally it has felt hard to sustain under the pressures of a busy academic teaching career. What has kept me going – appropriately enough for a Morrisian blog site – is fellowship, your genial fellowship as readers from across the globe, and particularly the active fellowship of those who have commented on the blog entries (AliasGuenevere has distinguished herself here, with owlfarmer offering some very helpful thoughts too).
I have tried to keep a rough balance in my entries between the historical and the utopian, between a scholarly interest in William Morris in his own historical moment and a more urgent sense that he must be rewritten, reworked and remade in our own time. And I have been constantly inspired by Fiona MacCarthy’s stress on ‘the detail of his idiosyncracy and strangeness … his oddities and quirkiness of language’. So, if you don’t feel I’ve got the balance right, please tell me; better still, why not start a Morris blog of your own? It is, I think, a quite new form of writing, an interesting, perhaps even therapeutic amalgam of the journalistic, the scholarly and the creative; so the more of them we have around Morris’s giant figure and copious oeuvre, the better.
Sincere thanks to you all, at any rate, for visiting this site to date, and I hope it may continue to be of interest in the months and years to come. Best wishes too for all your own Morris- and utopia-related projects in 2009.
I have tried to keep a rough balance in my entries between the historical and the utopian, between a scholarly interest in William Morris in his own historical moment and a more urgent sense that he must be rewritten, reworked and remade in our own time. And I have been constantly inspired by Fiona MacCarthy’s stress on ‘the detail of his idiosyncracy and strangeness … his oddities and quirkiness of language’. So, if you don’t feel I’ve got the balance right, please tell me; better still, why not start a Morris blog of your own? It is, I think, a quite new form of writing, an interesting, perhaps even therapeutic amalgam of the journalistic, the scholarly and the creative; so the more of them we have around Morris’s giant figure and copious oeuvre, the better.
Sincere thanks to you all, at any rate, for visiting this site to date, and I hope it may continue to be of interest in the months and years to come. Best wishes too for all your own Morris- and utopia-related projects in 2009.
Thursday, 11 December 2008
Mrs Dalloway, London, William Morris
In their iconoclastic youthful days at the country home Bourton, the characters of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) secretly read the political writings of William Morris. Clarissa Dalloway recalls that ‘Aunt Helena never liked discussion of anything (when Sally gave her William Morris it had to be wrapped in brown paper) ... They meant to found a society to abolish private property’.
Given Morris’s intense presence in Clarissa and Sally’s youth, does he still somehow survive 30 years later, in the novel’s present, the London of 1923? Clarissa does at one point conclude that there is ‘an unseen part of us, which spreads wide [and] might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death’. Might Morris, then, haunt the London of Mrs Dalloway?
As Peter Walsh strolls into Trafalgar Square should we be spectrally aware of the events which took place there on Bloody Sunday, 13 November 1887? Well, perhaps, since Peter, after all, ‘had been a Socialist’. When Miss Kilman takes refuge in Westminster Abbey should we be latently aware of Morris’s own efforts on behalf of this building, in his campaigns for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings? And is it just accident that Richard Dalloway will later order up Imperial Tokay, William Morris’s favourite wine, from his cellars?
What is certain, at any rate, is that the latent Morrisian presence in this book is strong enough to generate the curious family – Mr and Mrs Morris and their children Charles and Elaine – that Peter Walsh meets at dinner in his Bloomsbury hotel towards the end of the novel. These 1920 Morrises have nothing much in common with the family of their great socialist namesake, yet, as Peter Walsh concludes, with an ardour that seems more appropriate to the nineteenth-century Morrises than to their Bloomsbury hotel counterparts, ‘no family in the world can compare with the Morrises’. Amen to that!
Dallowayan London is thus arguably also Morrisian London, and the 1920s are haunted by the 1880s. We would therefore benefit from a more systematic Morris-orientated reading of Mrs Dalloway and of Woolf in general, and there might be a more far-reaching lesson here about the persistence of a Morrisian spatial and political ‘unconscious’ in modernist works that may, on the surface, seem to have spurned his social and aesthetic legacy.
Given Morris’s intense presence in Clarissa and Sally’s youth, does he still somehow survive 30 years later, in the novel’s present, the London of 1923? Clarissa does at one point conclude that there is ‘an unseen part of us, which spreads wide [and] might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death’. Might Morris, then, haunt the London of Mrs Dalloway?
As Peter Walsh strolls into Trafalgar Square should we be spectrally aware of the events which took place there on Bloody Sunday, 13 November 1887? Well, perhaps, since Peter, after all, ‘had been a Socialist’. When Miss Kilman takes refuge in Westminster Abbey should we be latently aware of Morris’s own efforts on behalf of this building, in his campaigns for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings? And is it just accident that Richard Dalloway will later order up Imperial Tokay, William Morris’s favourite wine, from his cellars?
What is certain, at any rate, is that the latent Morrisian presence in this book is strong enough to generate the curious family – Mr and Mrs Morris and their children Charles and Elaine – that Peter Walsh meets at dinner in his Bloomsbury hotel towards the end of the novel. These 1920 Morrises have nothing much in common with the family of their great socialist namesake, yet, as Peter Walsh concludes, with an ardour that seems more appropriate to the nineteenth-century Morrises than to their Bloomsbury hotel counterparts, ‘no family in the world can compare with the Morrises’. Amen to that!
Dallowayan London is thus arguably also Morrisian London, and the 1920s are haunted by the 1880s. We would therefore benefit from a more systematic Morris-orientated reading of Mrs Dalloway and of Woolf in general, and there might be a more far-reaching lesson here about the persistence of a Morrisian spatial and political ‘unconscious’ in modernist works that may, on the surface, seem to have spurned his social and aesthetic legacy.
Monday, 8 December 2008
'Envisioning Utopia' Conference
The Whitworth Art Gallery’s well-attended event on ‘Envisioning Utopia: Art and Socialist Politics, 1870-1900’ on December 5-6th was built around its 5000-piece Walter Crane visual archive, some of which was simultaneously on display in a fine exhibition entitled ‘Art and Labour’s Cause is One: Walter Crane and Manchester, 1880-1915’.
Professor Tim Barringer of Yale University kicked off the conference with a learned overview of ‘Ford Madox Brown in Manchester’, demonstrating how consistently across his career Brown had sought to produce ‘history painting for the industrial age’. In a session on ‘The City’ Matthew Beaumont offered an astute analysis of ‘Socialism and Occultism in late-Victorian London’, in which the young W.B. Yeats turned out to be a crucial figure in mediating between William Morris’s Socialism and Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy; ‘universal brotherhood’ was a central value for both movements, as Annie Besant would proclaim when she herself converted to Theosophy. Ruth Livesey followed up with a study of ‘Art and Socialism in Leeds: The Ford Sisters and the Leeds Art Club’, which persuasively showed what a slippery mode allegory was for political artists like Emily Ford, how it could be reinscribed by different verbal captioning in different contexts of reception.
A session on ‘The Country’ then had Michael Hatt celebrating Edward Carpenter’s enthusiasm for songs and singing. If democracy, for Carpenter, involves new somatic and sexual as well as political relations, then the act of singing, as it roots one joyously in the body, provides a utopian experience of what the desired political future might actually feel like, here and now. Anna Vaninskaya gave an illuminating analysis of the Socialist Sunday School movement, persuasively demonstrating that its stress on the cycle of the seasons, on Nature and fieldwork for children, was always kept in dialectical relation to the ‘human note’, to a concern for the social relations of rural life and agricultural labour.
In the final session on ‘The World’, Jo Briggs looked at the ways Walter Crane’s doubts during the Boer War about the political efficacy of his lifelong anti-imperialism found expression in, among other things, his Don Quixote illustrations of 1900; and Sarah Turner showed that Crane’s involvement with the India Society and the Festival of Empire in 1910-11 was part of his ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’, as expressed earlier in his India Impressions of 1907 and later in his designs for a ‘World Order of Socialism’ badge.
Pushing the story into the early twentieth century in this way reminded us that a whole new socialist visual culture was about to come into being, that associated with Bolshevism: the Tatlin Tower, Soviet posters and film, Constructivist design. And the more pastoral tradition of Crane and Morris, with its gently meandering stems and leaves, its winged figures and fruit trees, its slow rowing expeditions up the utopian Thames, was then shouldered aside by the leaner, meaner, more industrial and urban Soviet iconography.
For us in the early twenty-first century, both traditions are compelling, as is beautifully demonstrated in the contemporary visual work of David Mabb. In Mabb’s powerfully unsettling images, Morrisian pastoralism and Constructivist avant-gardism exist tensely side by side: there is no easy either-or choice between them, but no glib Hegelian synthesis of the two visual languages is possible either. In our environmentalist age, the Morris-Crane tradition has acquired new pertinence, but we shall also want our utopias to go through and beyond industrial modernity, not just to revert primitivistically behind it.
To what extent the Whitworth conference truly illuminated its overt topic, ‘Envisioning Utopia’, I’m not sure; the term ‘utopia’ didn’t actually get used a lot during the event. But it did abundantly demonstrate just how lively the oppositional visual cultures of the 1880s and 1890s were, and how much intense scholarly interest there is in this field today.
Professor Tim Barringer of Yale University kicked off the conference with a learned overview of ‘Ford Madox Brown in Manchester’, demonstrating how consistently across his career Brown had sought to produce ‘history painting for the industrial age’. In a session on ‘The City’ Matthew Beaumont offered an astute analysis of ‘Socialism and Occultism in late-Victorian London’, in which the young W.B. Yeats turned out to be a crucial figure in mediating between William Morris’s Socialism and Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy; ‘universal brotherhood’ was a central value for both movements, as Annie Besant would proclaim when she herself converted to Theosophy. Ruth Livesey followed up with a study of ‘Art and Socialism in Leeds: The Ford Sisters and the Leeds Art Club’, which persuasively showed what a slippery mode allegory was for political artists like Emily Ford, how it could be reinscribed by different verbal captioning in different contexts of reception.
A session on ‘The Country’ then had Michael Hatt celebrating Edward Carpenter’s enthusiasm for songs and singing. If democracy, for Carpenter, involves new somatic and sexual as well as political relations, then the act of singing, as it roots one joyously in the body, provides a utopian experience of what the desired political future might actually feel like, here and now. Anna Vaninskaya gave an illuminating analysis of the Socialist Sunday School movement, persuasively demonstrating that its stress on the cycle of the seasons, on Nature and fieldwork for children, was always kept in dialectical relation to the ‘human note’, to a concern for the social relations of rural life and agricultural labour.
In the final session on ‘The World’, Jo Briggs looked at the ways Walter Crane’s doubts during the Boer War about the political efficacy of his lifelong anti-imperialism found expression in, among other things, his Don Quixote illustrations of 1900; and Sarah Turner showed that Crane’s involvement with the India Society and the Festival of Empire in 1910-11 was part of his ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’, as expressed earlier in his India Impressions of 1907 and later in his designs for a ‘World Order of Socialism’ badge.
Pushing the story into the early twentieth century in this way reminded us that a whole new socialist visual culture was about to come into being, that associated with Bolshevism: the Tatlin Tower, Soviet posters and film, Constructivist design. And the more pastoral tradition of Crane and Morris, with its gently meandering stems and leaves, its winged figures and fruit trees, its slow rowing expeditions up the utopian Thames, was then shouldered aside by the leaner, meaner, more industrial and urban Soviet iconography.
For us in the early twenty-first century, both traditions are compelling, as is beautifully demonstrated in the contemporary visual work of David Mabb. In Mabb’s powerfully unsettling images, Morrisian pastoralism and Constructivist avant-gardism exist tensely side by side: there is no easy either-or choice between them, but no glib Hegelian synthesis of the two visual languages is possible either. In our environmentalist age, the Morris-Crane tradition has acquired new pertinence, but we shall also want our utopias to go through and beyond industrial modernity, not just to revert primitivistically behind it.
To what extent the Whitworth conference truly illuminated its overt topic, ‘Envisioning Utopia’, I’m not sure; the term ‘utopia’ didn’t actually get used a lot during the event. But it did abundantly demonstrate just how lively the oppositional visual cultures of the 1880s and 1890s were, and how much intense scholarly interest there is in this field today.
Sunday, 23 November 2008
To boldly William-Morris ...
The only use I know of Morris's full name as a verb is in F.R. Leavis's Nor Shall My Sword (1972), which forthrightly declares: 'I have not been William-Morrising, and I have proposed no ideal condition of humanity to be found in any past'. Leavis's strong rejection of Morris here is a curious one, however, given that two of the book's three epigraphs actually refer to him in positive terms.
We have an excellent survey by Peter Faulkner of 'William Morris and the Scrutiny Tradition', where he persuasively demonstrates that Leavis and the Scrutineers 'failed ... to recognise what a vaulable ally they might have had in William Morris' (Journal of William Morris Studies, XVI, 4, Summer 2006, 27-46).
This is certainly true at the level of explicit social attitudes, but I wonder if there might be another way of telling the Morris-Leavis story, with T.S. Eliot as a necessary intermediary. For it seems to me that the utopian values that Ruskin and Morris find in the labour of the medieval craftsman on the Gothic cathedral - the union of artistic creativity with manual skill, in effect, of intellectual and manual labour - comes through as a linguistic value in Eliot and Leavis.
In Eliot's great 'Metaphysical Poets' essay the witty conceit in Donne or Chapman achieves 'a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling'. Only thereafter does the famous 'dissociation of sensibility' set in, whereupon thought and feeling go their own tragically separate ways, as intellectual and manual labour will under capitalism for Ruskin and Morris. Leavis's own term for this holistic poetic integration of senses and intellect is 'Shakespearean English'.
What is a fully social position in Ruskin and Morris dwindles to a position about language in Eliot and Leavis; but it is the very same utopianism, none the less, with the medieval cathedral metamorphosed into the more portable Metaphysical conceit or challenging modernist metaphor. So for all his overt repudiations or silences about Morris, Leavis is in the end, with this holistic utopianism at the very core of his thought about language, no less of a romantic anti-capitalist than Morris himself. Leavis thus after all William-Morrises a good deal more than he realises!
We have an excellent survey by Peter Faulkner of 'William Morris and the Scrutiny Tradition', where he persuasively demonstrates that Leavis and the Scrutineers 'failed ... to recognise what a vaulable ally they might have had in William Morris' (Journal of William Morris Studies, XVI, 4, Summer 2006, 27-46).
This is certainly true at the level of explicit social attitudes, but I wonder if there might be another way of telling the Morris-Leavis story, with T.S. Eliot as a necessary intermediary. For it seems to me that the utopian values that Ruskin and Morris find in the labour of the medieval craftsman on the Gothic cathedral - the union of artistic creativity with manual skill, in effect, of intellectual and manual labour - comes through as a linguistic value in Eliot and Leavis.
In Eliot's great 'Metaphysical Poets' essay the witty conceit in Donne or Chapman achieves 'a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling'. Only thereafter does the famous 'dissociation of sensibility' set in, whereupon thought and feeling go their own tragically separate ways, as intellectual and manual labour will under capitalism for Ruskin and Morris. Leavis's own term for this holistic poetic integration of senses and intellect is 'Shakespearean English'.
What is a fully social position in Ruskin and Morris dwindles to a position about language in Eliot and Leavis; but it is the very same utopianism, none the less, with the medieval cathedral metamorphosed into the more portable Metaphysical conceit or challenging modernist metaphor. So for all his overt repudiations or silences about Morris, Leavis is in the end, with this holistic utopianism at the very core of his thought about language, no less of a romantic anti-capitalist than Morris himself. Leavis thus after all William-Morrises a good deal more than he realises!
Tuesday, 18 November 2008
Utopias Editor Recants
Readers of John Carey's splendid Faber Book of Utopias (1999) will have been struck by how dismissive he is in his editorial comments to the section of News from Nowhere that he presents in his book. Morris's utopian scheme, Carey remarks, 'ignores virtually every basic factor of social and economic reality', and displays 'in its adequacies, the confusion and hypocrisy that have dogged the course of English Socialism' (p.316).
These are hard words, but it appears that the former Merton Professor of English at Oxford University has mellowed over the years; for more recently he writes (in a personal communication to the author, 6.03.08): 'You should not pay much attention to my views on WM. My main grudge against him is that he is so rude about Hammersmith Bridge, to which I fondly recall being taken to feed the seagulls when I was a child'.
Perhaps we could have this comment appended to any future edition of the book itself...?
These are hard words, but it appears that the former Merton Professor of English at Oxford University has mellowed over the years; for more recently he writes (in a personal communication to the author, 6.03.08): 'You should not pay much attention to my views on WM. My main grudge against him is that he is so rude about Hammersmith Bridge, to which I fondly recall being taken to feed the seagulls when I was a child'.
Perhaps we could have this comment appended to any future edition of the book itself...?
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
Lectures in Japan
Tony Pinkney will shortly be giving the following lectures in Japan:
1. 'Greening News from Nowhere: Morris's Utopia and Contemporary Ecotopias', Ruskin Library of Tokyo, Saturday 1st November 2008, 1pm onwards.
2. 'Postmodernising News from Nowhere: Morris, Jameson, Utopia', Keio University (Mita Campus), Sunday 2nd November, 2pm onwards.
3. 'Japanising News from Nowhere: Japan in Morris's Utopia', Otani University, Kyoto, Wednesday 5th November, 1.30pm onwards.
1. 'Greening News from Nowhere: Morris's Utopia and Contemporary Ecotopias', Ruskin Library of Tokyo, Saturday 1st November 2008, 1pm onwards.
2. 'Postmodernising News from Nowhere: Morris, Jameson, Utopia', Keio University (Mita Campus), Sunday 2nd November, 2pm onwards.
3. 'Japanising News from Nowhere: Japan in Morris's Utopia', Otani University, Kyoto, Wednesday 5th November, 1.30pm onwards.
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