John Ruskin and William Morris: Institutional Departures

We will be thinking closely about the relationship between Ruskin and Morris during this, the former’s bicentenary year; and such thought will mostly address the two men’s aesthetic and social positions.  Could Morris have been Morris without Ruskin-on-Gothic in the background?  Did he need Marx to sharpen up his thinking in ways that Ruskin alone couldn’t or, conversely, did his debt to Ruskin allow him to bring to Marxism things that that more explicitly political tradition had hitherto neglected?  Or, in the most contemporary formulation of all, can a new, bicentenary rethinking of Ruskin in our age of climate crisis, social media and rising rightwing populism, lead to new insights into Morris’s utopianism which might make it tell more, socially and politically?

Another way of thinking about the Ruskin-Morris relationship, though, is through the institutions which help to sustain both men’s reputations today – which I am taking here to be the Morris Society at work in the basement of Kelmscott House and the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University.  At the Society’s AGM a few weeks back, the former trade-unionist and Labour Party General Secretary Tom Sawyer eloquently launched an appeal for funds to strengthen the Society’s library and reading-room - the latter being a very pleasant, book-lined space which opens out into the stretch of back garden that the Society has available to it.

In referring to the Ruskin Library at Lancaster, however, I am being deliberately anachronistic, since that building has recently rebranded itself.  It has become ‘The Ruskin’, dropping what it seems to regard as the antiquated term ‘library’ just as it has ripped out its former, spacious and well-lit reading-room and turned this into a lecture- and performance-space as the building metamorphoses, under the energetic directorship of Sandra Kemp, into a ‘Museum of the Near Future’.  Its most recent seminar theme, in keeping with this new, contemporary focus, has been ‘Ruskin and Steampunk’.

There could hardly be two more different directions for these institutions to go in, with the Morris Society asserting the civilised value of the quiet, private reading of physical books, and The Ruskin shifting to bold, iconoclastic, collective explorations of early-twenty-first-century culture and politics instead.  I’m not here recommending one over the other.  Indeed, they strike me, in Theodor Adorno’s great phrase, as the ‘torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up’.

The Poetry of the Thames

In her section on ‘Likes and Dislikes’ in the second volume of Artist Writer Socialist, May Morris shows us her father ‘slashing at the eighteenth century in England’.  To sum up what she terms ‘Morris’s “annihilation” of the eighteenth century’, she cites a remark of his which includes a dismissive sweep at the poetry of Alexander Pope: ‘We have gone a long and weary way, certainly … from Beowulf to the Rape of the Lock’.

I wouldn’t disagree with any of this, of course, but it does strike me that there is one aspect of Pope’s verse which Morris might in fact have responded to rather more warmly than such reflections suggest.  For Pope wasn’t just a master of the heroic couplet, which Morris would certainly have regarded as a frigid verse form, he was also a poet of the Thames, that river which provides the main narrative and emotional thrust of Morris’s own utopia.  Even The Rape of the Lock itself, after all, contains Belinda’s invigorating boat trip upriver, and The Dunciad has those splendid satirical scenes in which Pope’s dunces dive down into the mud and filth of the Thames in the mock-heroic games, scenes which might have had a resonance for Morris as he contemplated the industrially polluted river of his own time.

But it is Pope’s Windsor Forest which may have had most impact on him.  The poem contains a fine vignette of a Thames fisherman and his catch which couldn’t but appeal to a fanatical angler like Morris, and it also evokes the Thames tributaries in a stirring passage which one might even see as a possible origin of Morris’s own later Thames tributary textile designs.  William Guest’s journey upriver to Windsor in News from Nowhere could then be viewed as a socialist rewriting of the imperial centre that Pope constructs his Windsor as being.

So there might be more to Morris’s relation to Alexander Pope than we have hitherto assumed.  And he would certainly have relished that wonderful couplet from Pope’s ‘Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace’, which runs: ‘Tis true, no turbot dignifies my boards,/But gudgeons, flounders, what my Thames affords’.  Morris pulled gudgeons without number from the upper Thames at Kelmscott, I pulled many flounders out of the Thames estuary in my teenage years, so we could both happily agree that there are poetic merits in Pope beyond his elegant versification and satiric venom.

Florence Boos at Kelmscott House

‘I’m with the people … the working class people who have been left behind economically … The elites have tried to silence my own voice … I’ll represent you, the working class of England … just another millionaire stockbroker who looks down at the working classes’.  These remarks are not, as you might have thought, quotations from the uncollected Morris lectures that Professor Florence Boos eloquently set before us at the Morris Society AGM on Saturday.  At that event the admirable socialist content of her talk made a welcome contrast with its politically anodyne first half, devoted as that was to Society business and chaired by Stephen Bradley.

No, the class-oriented quotations above are from the European election leaflet from notorious far-right activist Tommy Robinson that I found on my doormat a few days ago.  Fascism is clearly now on the move in this country in a way and to a depth that we haven’t seen for some years; and its rhetoric cunningly ventriloquises aspects of socialism’s own appeal to working-class people.  We always knew there were nasty, dangerous, far-right individuals out there.  Now, however, as Robinson’s North-West election leaflet shows, they have serious money and organisation behind them.

This alarming fact suggests that we recalibrate the purposes of the William Morris Society.  While celebrating the 125^th anniversary of the Kelmscott Chaucer in 2021 is a worthy project in itself, at a time of political emergency such as our own, when the Brexit impasse is allowing the far-right to emerge again (though this is, of course, a global as well as a British trend), a society devoted to the life and work of Britain’s foremost Communist will need to be rather more politically interventionist than that.  It should surely also aim to renew left-wing and utopian thinking in the present – a task in which recovering it from the past, as Florence Boos so skilfully did, is a necessary first step.

Communism and Poetry: Writing against Capital

It looks as though the very book that we need to identify the twenty-first-century successors to William Morris’s militant narrative poem ‘The Pilgrims of Hope’ is on its way to us.  Edited by Ruth Jennision and Julian Murphet, it appears in Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics’ series and will hit the bookshelves in late August this year.  The publisher’s blurb describes the collection as follows:

‘Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives―poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists―these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative forms of thought and activity, supercharging the utopian imagination. Drawing inspiration from past connections between communism and poetry, and theorizing new directions over the years ahead, the volume models a much-needed critical solidarity with creative strategies in the present conjuncture to activate movements of resistance, on the streets and in verse’.

The only problem with this admirable volume is that you need to be a bit of a capitalist yourself to afford it, since it costs a hefty £89-99 hardback.

Counter-Revolution in Venezuela

In News from Nowhere old Hammond asks William Guest: ‘how can you prevent the counter-revolution from setting in except by making people happy?’  But fortunately for his utopians, Morris does not depict his socialist England as being neighboured by a capitalist superpower which is ruthlessly determined to do everything in its power to destroy their revolution.  If there were such a superpower in News from Nowhere, it would have used every means of economic sanction and sabotage it had at its disposal to subvert the Nowherian economy.  It would also have reached out to the ‘old grumbler’ at Runnymede as its useful idiot or figurehead within Nowhere itself, and he in turn might have persuaded a few ‘obstinate Refusers’ in the Nowherian military to launch a coup in the Thames valley.

All this the United States has been and is doing in Venezuela, of course, in its bid to destroy the Bolivarian revolution through its puppet Juan Guaido; and that process has now reached a critical flashpoint.  Aldous Huxley’s utopian island Pala has an authoritarian military power on its doorstep, Colonel Dipa’s Rendang-Lobo, but Pala’s quietistic Buddhist philosophy means it takes no steps to guard itself and it is ultimately crushed by its neighbour.  Ernst Callenbach’s west-coast Ecotopia is much more aware of the danger from the United States it has broken away from; and its secret police and decentralised militia seem up to the task of defending the ecological revolution against that powerful hostile neighbour. 

How Juan Guaido’s attempted counter-revolution will play out in Venezuela itself, we cannot yet know.  Nicolas Madura is a much less charismatic leader than Hugo Chavez himself, and there are deep internal problems with the Bolivarian revolution which exacerbate the external sabotage it has been subject to; but for now the bulk of the military seems loyal to the government.  Keeping the people happy to avert counter-revolution, yes indeed – old Hammond is surely right.  But what happens when the regional superpower, with its eye on your immense oil reserves, makes even that virtually impossible?