Universities: What's in a Name?

‘These are the neighbours, and that like they run in the Thames valley’, remarks Dick Hammond proudly as he sets off across a transfigured London with William Guest in Morris’s utopia (ch. IV). But Thames Valley University, I learnt today, doesn’t want to keep a name that thus finely resonates with Morrisian utopian values. Instead, orienting itself rather to what Morris, after William Cobbett, contemptuously referred to as ‘the Great Wen’, it wants to rename (or should that be rebrand) itself as the University of West London.

The change of name, the University’s website tells us, is not just a matter of geographical reorientation. Rather does it also signal a ‘change of emphasis in terms of its mission with a strong focus on employer engagement’; and since the new Chancellor Designate of Thames Valley/West London University is the President and CEO of Strategic Hotels and Resorts, it certainly sounds as though they have the right kind of man for the job.

In short, to rename yourself as the University of West London is to play your own bit part in that wholesale commercialisation of British universities which Laurie Penny finely exposed in her ‘Dispatches’ programme on Channel 4 this evening. One might think the scale and cynicism of all this (especially as reflected in Vice Chancellors’ pay and perks) is far beyond anything that Morris himself could have imagined; and yet since Old Hammond informs William Guest in News from Nowhere that in the Victorian period British universities ‘became definitely commercial’ (ch. X), Morris might in fact not have been that surprised after all.

Morris among the Pinkneys

Did any of my family members, I wonder, ever hear William Morris at one of his innumerable socialist lectures up and down the country in the 1880s? There is a possibility – just a faint one – that my great-grandfather Mark Pinkney may have been in the audience when Morris addressed striking miners at Ryton Willows on 11 April 1887.

The day before Morris had travelled down from Glasgow to Newcastle. On the morning of the 11th he headed north to Horton in Northumberland, where he and other speakers addressed a huge crowd of between 6,000 and 10,000 people. Morris then returned to Newcastle and in the evening spoke again at Ryton Willows, ‘a piece of rough ground by the Tyneside under the bank by which the railway runs’, as he describes it in his Socialist Diary. And, he continues, ‘we had a very fair meeting there of most attentive persons’.

Now Ryton Willows is only some three miles from High Spen, the colliery village where my grandfather Henry Pinkney grew up and later, working as a miner, raised his own family; my Uncle Harry used to recall his boyhood there fondly in later years. So the geography works nicely, but does the chronology hold up? Grandad himself was born in 1894, so it is a question of whether his father Mark Pinkney, who was also a miner and would have been in his early twenties when Morris spoke at Ryton Willows in 1887, might have attended that event.

I can’t be sure. My great-grandmother Mary Pinkney is buried in High Spen, but I suspect that my great-grandparents in 1887 were living further to the south in County Durham (their third child, my Grandad, was born in Wingate seven years later). Still, no matter; next time I revisit our old family mining haunts in High Spen I shall think of Morris speaking to striking miners at Ryton Willows just up the road, and that will be almost as good as my great-grandfather actually having been there!

The Next Thirty Years

One’s thirtieth wedding anniversary seems a good moment for reflection and taking stock – not just in marital and life terms, but even for one’s Morris-and-utopias blog too. How, after all, can a blog really hope to contribute to William Morris studies, given both the brevity and transience of its entries? Perhaps this is a question I should have asked myself long before now, having posted 140 entries over the last few years; but it poses itself more sharply today, in the midst of personal celebrations.

Thirty years of marriage takes us to our pearl wedding anniversary; and no doubt blog entries are, ideally, pearls of a sort too, lustrous miniatures that one can appreciate for their compact artistry. But I would like to think that they can (again ideally) be more than this, be outward-looking and impactful rather than nacreously self-contained. I like to imagine them as tiny grenades of meaning, that can explode transformatively in the reader’s mind if all goes well.

Blog entries can, I would hope, illuminate the strange by-ways of both Morris’s writing and utopia as a genre, their peculiarities and perversities, all that crucial semantic potential which can at times get lost in mainstream scholarly criticism. They can also, at their best, sustain a Morrisian and utopian political commentary into our own historical moment, into a postmodern capitalist present vastly more complex than Morris himself could ever have imagined (or, it can sometimes seem, than utopia itself can cope with). They should certainly also test both Morris and utopia against the best thought and theory of our own time, but they will of course do this in short and snappy, heuristic and suggestive, rather than systematically elaborated ways.

And lastly, they will aim, while doing all these things, to entertain, to contribute to a Morrisian fellowship in the blogosphere which can sustain us in difficult political times. For as Folk-Might wisely announces in The Roots of the Mountains, ‘in that fellowship shalt thou find both the seed of hope, and the sun of desire that shall quicken it’ (ch. 36).

Right, enough reflection: time now to climb a Lake District mountain by way of strenuous celebration; for I am not at all sure that we will still be up to that on our fortieth wedding anniversary and beyond.

Another Blog Entry There!

Hearing the ‘sudden thunder of the mounting swan’ as he looks over the lake in his wonderful poem ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats declares excitedly, ‘Another emblem there!’; and in the lines that follow he transforms the swans into an image of the human soul flying off into the unknown. This is a splendidly high-handed Yeatsian moment, as he magically transmutes the natural object into an ‘emblem’ or metaphor of his own preferred psychical realities. Ecological critics have deplored the way he rides roughshod over the natural creature at such moments, but such is the energy of Yeats’s poetic rhetoric that one suspects he could pull off the same metamorphic trick with any stray bit of nature that he happened across.

Does a blog today have the same extraordinary (but also possibly high-handed) power of transmuting any random fragment of reality it comes across into its own substance? Is there any bit of the objective world out there, or any topic of debate, that could in principle not find its way into a blog, Morrisian or otherwise; that could resist to the death and not in the end be transmogrified? In his seminal ‘Metaphysical Poets’ essay in 1921, T.S. Eliot proposed that ‘The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience’; and I wonder if that is not true of the genre of the blog today, that it can devour and digest anything whatsoever that it serendipitously happens across.

Is there any item or any topic out there, then, that could absolutely not, under any circumstances whatsoever, find its way into this blog, into ‘William Morris Unbound’? In the months and years ahead, dear reader, we shall surely find out!

Tolkien and Languages

J.R.R. Tolkien once remarked of his literary writings that ‘the invention of languages is the foundation. The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows’ (letter of 1955). William Morris may not have been a philologist of Tolkien’s stature, but, as I have noted above, he certainly had a lively interest in nineteenth-century philology; so could we try out the same Tolkienian hypothesis in his case? In News from Nowhere, for instance, could we, as a thought-experiment, play with the idea that language comes first and that everything else just provides a convenient world for it?

The ‘invention of language’ in News from Nowhere is the resurgence of Anglo-Saxon. Characters go round giving each other the ‘sele of the morning’, attending ‘motes’, or referring to each other as ‘old carles’. At the same time, what Old Hammond refers to as the ‘long-tailed words’ of a polysyllabic Latinate vocabulary are fading away. If such is the basic philological impulse of the book, Morris then as it were has to ask himself: what social conditions would I have to put in place to make such linguistic developments likely, what political changes would have to occur to de-Latinise and re-Saxonise English in this way? And the answer then is the socialist revolution of 1952, which is now, on this showing, nothing more than what the Russian Formalist critics would have called the ‘motivation of the device’, or mere pretext, of the linguistic innovations of the News from Nowhere world.

When Morris intervened in debates about English studies at Oxford in 1886 he spoke forcefully in favour of philology rather than criticism. That being so, it is a salutary exercise, I think, to consider even the great works of his socialist period as being initially philological rather than political works, as needing to invent that particular brand of politics purely in order to provide a plausible frame for their strange linguistic experiments – which then explode even more forcefully through into the last romances themselves.

Size Matters; or, Morris's Rudest Moments

We know that Morris had hopes that Burne-Jones would do some illustrations for the more improper moments of the Canterbury Tales for the Kelmscott Chaucer, but the latter declined, averring that Morris ‘ever had more robust and daring parts’ than he did. But if he thus failed to get his old friend to liven up the Kelmscott Chaucer, Morris had none the less got some pretty rude moments of his own into some of his earlier literary works.

My own personal favourites come from his translation of the Grettir Saga. We have first Grettir’s finely contemptuous vision of the cowardly Gisli propelling himself away by farts from Grettir’s rage: ‘And sweating o’er the marsh with fear,/He helped the wind from mouth and rear’.

But we also have a nicely sceptical moment about Grettir himself, put into the mouth of the handmaiden at Reeks when she sees him naked in bed the morning after his great swim from the island of Drangey: ‘So may I thrive, sister! Here is Grettir Asmundsen lying bare, and him I call right well ribbed about the chest, but few might think he would be so small of growth below; and so then that does not go along with other kinds of bigness’.

So size does matter, though Grettir might perhaps have offered in defence of his shrivelled manhood that he has just had a long exposure to what James Joyce once memorably called ‘the scrotum-tightening sea’. However, he does then pull the handmaiden into bed to show her just what he is capable of with what he’s got; she shrieks out, ‘but in such wise did they part that she laid no blame on Grettir when all was over’.

Any other candidates buried in the Collected Works for Morris’s rudest moment?

A Syllabus for Utopia

Education is always a delicate, not to say positively tricky, issue for utopia. On the one hand, utopia certainly wants to inculcate its own benign values deeply into its young people; for how else could it make sure there will be no political backsliding to the bad old society it has left behind? On the other hand, it just as certainly does not want to impose these values too monolithically on its young; for that would, in effect, be to brainwash their innocent spirits into its ways and values, which would be totalitarianism rather than utopia proper.

Utopia must therefore find ways to educate its young people sensitively and discretely; and I think this is also true of the manner in which literary utopias educate their readers. Such utopias not only discuss education as an explicit theme within the book, they must also delicately educate their readers as they go along, subtly emitting signals as to what an appropriate ‘syllabus for utopia’ might look like.

Thus when Old Hammond in News from Nowhere twice mentions the French utopian writer Charles Fourier within twenty pages – first to criticise his notion of ‘phalangsteries’, second to praise his insights into creative labour – we must imagine the text saying to its readers: dig here, check this out, investigate further, explore the whole range of Fourier’s ideas and debate them with your comrades as impassionedly as the Socialist Leaguers argue out their visions of the future on the opening page of this book itself.

If we totted up such references across News from Nowhere, we would indeed arrive at a reading programme or syllabus for utopia, which would culturally qualify us as readers of the genre and as political participants in the present. Thus it is that utopia gently educates us even as it holds forth about the teaching of its own youth.