Morris and his Glasses

A visit to the city of Carlisle has many pleasures: strolling along the banks of the river Eden, admiring the stained glass and the blue ‘starred’ ceiling in the cathedral, spending much more than you’d ever intended in the stunningly good secondhand bookshop in Castle Street, and enjoying the fine architecture of the historic quarter between cathedral and castle. These were all bonuses, however, since my main motive in finally visiting Carlisle today was to pop in to the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery to see the 1875 right-profile pencil drawing of Morris by George Howard, made on one Morris’s sojourns at Castle Howard, near Brampton. Its claim to fame is that it is the only image we have of him which shows him with his spectacles on.



The Howard drawing is surrounded by the Tullie’s Pre-Raphaelite collection, which is a matter of interesting oddments (such as an unfinished version of Rossetti’s Found from 1854 or Arthur Hughes’s tiny ink-on-paper La Belle Dame Sans Merci of 1862) rather than major holdings. But Morris in 1875 was no longer in any straightforward sense a Pre-Raphaelite. He had made the two Iceland trips, reorganised the Firm, was working on Sigurd the Volsung, and would soon become treasurer of the Eastern Question Association and founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. So as I peered close up at the Howard drawing was it fanciful to detect a new, middle-aged determination and steeliness behind those spectacles? Was I responding to what was genuinely in the aesthetic object before me, or projecting what, historically, I know is to come and what, politically, I want to come?

Terry Eagleton at 70

As Terry Eagleton celebrates his 70th birthday today, there are certainly no signs of his extraordinary intellectual productivity slowing down at all. This sapient sutler of Marxism remains as polyphiloprogenitive as ever, and since I frequently find myself absorbing new ideas from him which can then be applied to William Morris, I for one am certainly glad of this.



How to Read Literature (a follow-up to his 2007 poetry book) comes out this Spring, closely followed by Across the Pond: An Englishman’s View of America. Then there’s one in the pipeline on culture replacing religion - or trying to, anyway; and one also hears of new writing projects under way on the politics of the scapegoat and on the idea of hope. There’s Morrisian mileage in that notion of the scapegoat, I should think. Perhaps we could imagine Ellen, immured in her Runnymede cottage in News from Nowhere, as a kind of scapegoat, whose reintegration into the utopian community at the Kelmscott church feast can only be won at the cost of the eventual scapegoating and expulsion from utopia of William Guest himself. Scapegoats of a feather flock together, in that text.

As for a book on hope, well, that sounds like a Morrisian theme in its own right, but after the bloody political history of the twentieth century – the crimes of Nazism, but even more the crimes of Stalin and Mao – the hope available to us is likely to be a much more straitened thing than the socialist hopes of the 1880s. For, as Eagleton puts it in a 2006 essay on ‘Political Beckett’: ‘Like Freud and Adorno, Beckett knew that the sober, bleak-eyed realist serves the cause of human emancipation more faithfully than the bright-eyed utopians’. So: I wish you a happy and in that politically chastened sense hopeful 70th birthday, Terry.

What is to be Done?

It was certainly a fine idea of Ruth Levitas’s to convene a Society meeting about Morris’s political lectures, and the twenty or so people who turned up on Saturday to this discussion enjoyed into the bargain a splendid rendition by Rob Hunter of the ‘Death Song’ that Morris wrote for Alfred Linnell, who was killed by police on Bloody Sunday in November 1887. That reminder of the violence that ruling classes are always prepared to unleash when seriously challenged served as a sombre backdrop to Ruth’s 12-page handout of key passages from Morris’s lectures, which ranged from the breathtakingly utopian to the hard-headedly pragmatic – his 1896 insistence that we ‘organize a real definite Socialist party’ being both at once, I suppose.

Without organisation, you don’t make much headway against a still powerful capitalism, as the Occupy movement sadly demonstrated to us. But are there any real signs of an effective Party emerging to the left of Labour in the British political spectrum? I used to feel that the Green Party might be that, but I don’t now believe it has an analysis adequate to the global economic crisis we’ve faced since 2008. The Respect Party successfully got George Galloway returned to Parliament in March 2012 and he is an important, if controversial, voice for the Left. But Respect’s aim is to occupy the space of the Labour Party before it became New Labour under Tony Blair, i.e. to be a social-democratic party aiming to curb or humanise capitalism, whereas what we want (just as Morris did in 1896) is a real party of the socialist Left aiming to replace it.

The two successor organisations to the original British Communist Party don’t seem to be making much headway, though it is certainly my own personal hope that communism is now a political term we could start using again. On the Trotsykist Left, the Socialist Workers Party is in crisis, as internal difficulties over its handling of a rape allegation have spiralled into a general challenge to its version of Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’; let’s hope that the wider membership can overcome the sclerotic Central Committee on this issue and renew the SWP’s energies. As for the independent or libertarian Left, it looks longingly at the Syriza coalition in Greece as a possible model for a new start (see Hilary Wainright’s article in Red Pepper). So our Morrisian utopian values, now as in 1896, lack a plausible political embodiment, though we can be sure that the capitalist ‘age of austerity’ will generate new forms of class consciousness that will eventually find a vehicle of their own.

Harold Bloom's Last Poems

In his days as an important literary theorist in the 1970s, Yale critic Harold Bloom showed no discernable interest in William Morris. In that decade he elaborated a complex psychoanalytical account of the ‘anxiety of influence’ between poets in the Romantic tradition. If you were thinking through the relations between Shelley and Wordsworth in Bloomian terms, you would need a whole arcane terminology of clinamen, tessera, kenosis, askesis and apophrades at your disposal. Bloomianism in those days was a strange but exhilarating theoretical system.

More recently, however, Bloom has abandoned literary theory to become one of the crustiest conservative critics around, cantankerously devoted to ‘the western canon’; and as he has done so, oddly enough, his interest in Morris appears to have grown. In The Anatomy of Influence (2011) he remarks that ‘Sigurd the Volsung, the marvellous verse epic of William Morris, has few readers that I have met, but I go back to it every year or so’ (p.173); and in his intriguing anthology Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems (2010) he represents Morris by the last page or two of Sigurd, in which Gudrun kills Atli and then commits suicide.

A ‘last poem’ for Bloom is either one that definitively sums up the overall impulses of a poetic career or one which is literally the last text that particular poet wrote. I’m not convinced that his chosen pages from Sigurd work as the former, and if we want the latter we will have to turn to the poem ‘She and He’, which Morris wrote in early January 1896 and immediately posted to Georgiana Burne-Jones. That strange, intense work, with its bitter ‘farewell to hope’ in the last line, gives little sense of consolation or completeness as its author entered the final year of his life.

Eirikr Magnússon 100 years on

On this day one hundred years ago, Morris’s Icelandic teacher and co-translator of the sagas Eirikr Magnússon died in Cambridge, where he is buried in the Mill Road cemetery. Whether any events are being mounted in Iceland to commemorate this centenary, I do not know; there certainly aren’t any over here. So could we at least invent a new Morris-and-Iceland research project to celebrate the day?

I have a feeling that we should be taking a closer look at the work of some of Magnússon’s pupils. Shortly after Morris’s death, the early English and Shakespeare scholar Israel Gollancz published Hamlet in Iceland: Being the Icelandic Romantic Ambales Saga (1898), a book which is dedicated to Magnússon, who had taught him at Cambridge, and which traces ‘Iceland’s long and painful struggle for a Hamlet Saga’ (p.vii). This field of argument was later developed by another important Magnússon student, Bertha Phillpotts, who published The Elder Edda and Ancient Scandinavian Drama (1920) and Edda and Saga (1931). Of the latter, the English literary critic F.R. Leavis once remarked that ‘I and my wife are always pushing it’, and he explains its significance for them in English Literature in our Time and the University (1969): ‘Miss Phillpotts’ book (I wonder it is not used more by literary students) establishes that there was a second ritual origin of tragedy in the North, and that a continuity of dramatic tradition runs down through the Middle Ages to Shakespeare’ (p.162).

One imagines Morris, who himself tried to displace Greek and Roman epic by a Northern version of the form in Sigurd the Volsung, being wholly sympathetic to such arguments; and any Morris student who tracks through the detail of the case as developed by Eirikr Magnússon’s protégés would be doing us all a favour.

Audiences for Socialism

In his 1996 essay ‘The Morris Who Reads Us’ (which is certainly a neat title), Norman Kelvin remarks that ‘As for the late audiences for socialism, they heard him [Morris] at the Hammersmith Socialist Society (his last, smallest and most congenial socialist group). They were composed for the most part of loyal friends and employees of Morris and Co. (for several of whom attendance might have been prudence only)’ (p.347). That’s a rather peculiar final comment, surely, which potentially undermines the authenticity of Morris’s socialist meetings. It’s the kind of remark that you might expect from an avowed political opponent, from some snide Tory hack on Rupert Murdoch’s The Times newspaper, rather than from one of our best Morris scholars (who gave us the marvellous Collected Letters, after all).

So I think we have to insist that in this matter Professor Kelvin should either put up or shut up. He needs to produce documentary evidence that some of Morris’s workmen attended meetings purely for ‘prudential’ reasons – i.e. under real or perceived threat of reprisal from their employer if they didn’t - or he should withdraw this claim. And his speculative ‘might have been’ formulation here suggests to me that there is no such evidence. Morris gives us a graphic portrayal of an employer victimising an employee for his political views in section VI of The Pilgrims of Hope, so he hardly seems likely to have indulged in the same practice.

Manifesto for a Museum of Utopias

With the refurbished William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow emerging (as it should) as a significant force in Morris studies, it may well be time for the Kelmscott House Museum in Hammersmith to rethink what it is all about, to refocus its identity and move forward accordingly. It could concentrate on its west London locality, on the Hammersmith printing and publishing community that Morris and Emery Walker built up between them, on book arts and the private press movement. Indeed, it should do this, but only up to a point – to go too far down this route would risk parochialism.

In my view, we should rather think of Kelmscott House as News from Nowhere gives it to us, as the portal to utopia, the place where you might go to bed tonight and wake up bewildered two hundred years hence in a genuinely liberated human future. To conceive of the house in such terms is to invent a quite different and more ambitious future for it; it is in effect to make its future the very category of the future itself, as a place of utopian study and imagination. Let us by all means keep the basement and Coach House as they essentially are at present, as spaces for the historicist exploration of Morris and his circle, or of the book arts or 1880s socialism or Victorian poetry or arts and crafts. But let us take back the upstairs Coach House flat into Society usage as a new space for utopia, as a portal to many futures.

A Museum of Utopias, then. As far as I know, there isn’t one already in existence; and heaven knows, given the economic and environmental disasters we face, we need active utopian thought and experiment more than ever. There’s a lot of space in that upstairs flat, much potential therefore for the celebration of utopias past and the encouragement of utopianism present and future. I’m not sure I fully know what a Museum of Utopias should look like (though I have some hunches), but I don’t believe it is beyond our collective wit to dream one successfully into being. Let us even give ourselves a deadline: 2016, the five-hundredth anniversary of the founding work of the genre, Thomas More’s Utopia, as the date by which a fully functional museum of the future in Hammersmith should be up and running.