Medieval Ructions at Leicester

The Morris Society online talks in March and April to celebrate the achievements of the Kelmscott Press look good, and since the ultimate artefact produced by that Press was the Kelmscott Chaucer, the Society might also pay some heed to developments in English Studies currently going on at the University of Leicester.  For the English Department there is planning to close down provision of courses in medieval literature and English language in the quest for a curriculum devoted to ‘diversity’ and ‘decolonisation’.  Hackles have been mightily raised by this plan: the MA external examiner Catherine Clark has resigned, and lit-crit luminary Professor Isobel Armstrong has handed back her honorary degree from Leicester in protest.

 

 

Current medievalists have pointed out that much good work is being done in that field under the very labels of ‘diversity’ and ‘decolonisation’, a fact which thoroughly undercuts the Leicester rationale for these cuts.  Recalling my own undergraduate enthusiasms for the medieval side of my Bristol English curriculum, I would point to the remarkable sense of linguistic expansion and gusto early-period literature can offer – Basil Cottle, John Burrow and Myra Stokes, a belated but deep thank-you for all that!  But then, perhaps I was an unusual student, with A-levels in French and German testifying to a pre-existing passion for language work.  That is something I didn’t see so much of in my own recent undergraduates, but that’s all the more reason why they need it as a curriculum possibility.

 

 

But for Morrisians, the crucial defence of medieval studies must surely involve ‘diversity’ too, but not quite in its current sense, of gender, racial, class and other identities.  Medieval study has the capacity has to lift us bodily out of the capitalist-individualist categories that have dominated Western thinking since, say, the sixteenth century, to turn our minds inside out and open us to the possibility of other modes of social organisation, other ways of collective being.  And from ‘diversity’ of that kind – reculer pour mieux sauter – a utopianism of the future might arise too.  Did not Morris try to show exactly how this could be so in News from Nowhere, after all, where so much of his twenty-second-century socialist future has a faint fourteenth-century resonance to it too?  So, Leicester University English Department, back down!

 

Stories in Verse

The image I have attached to this post gives a sense of Morris's commanding position - for one poetry editor at least - in the tradition of narrative verse.  It is taken from George G. Loane's little volume Stories in English Verse (1925), from the 'King's Treasuries of Literature' series general-edited by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch.

 

 

The actual Morris texts in Loane's collection are 'The Writing on the Image' and an extract from 'The Doom of King Acrisius', both from The Earthly Paradise, of course.  But those particular choices are less important for us than the rousing visual image with which the book opens.  It should surely serve as a clarion call to the William Morris Society to make more of Morris's poetry than it currently does.  I intend to see that it achieves precisely that!

 

 

 

 

 

In Memoriam: 1 in 100,000

My dear mother Gloria Jean Pinkney died of Covid pneumonia in Southend Hospital on New Year’s Day and her body was cremated this morning.  She was eight-seven years and four months old and, being down in Essex, it seems likely that she succumbed to the new UK variant of the virus, though I can’t be sure.  Blessedly, it was a very short illness, but it’s also an immensely painful loss because she was so close to vaccination, so near to getting through this crisis; she and I were discussing my post-lockdown Easter visit to Southend, and she was planning a trip down to the New Forest in May.

 But our deep family grief is cast into another dimension by the fact that yesterday the UK reached the grim official milestone of 100,000 Covid deaths.   Personal grief is transmuted by statistics – above all that statistic - into analysis and politics: Mum’s cremation took place against a background of intense media discussion of why we have one of the worst Covid fatality rates in the world, possibly the very worst per capita.  For Labour, Jonathan Ashworth spoke of Boris Johnson’s ‘monumental mistakes’; the Independent assailed his ‘dither and delay’ throughout this crisis; health professionals on the radio gave stark accounts of existing health inequalities and long-term cuts to public provision which had left this country so badly equipped to face a pandemic.

Even now our borders are not adequately closed, something other countries did ten months ago.  We had an ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ policy which basically meant: Eat Out to get infected and spread infection.  Our test-and-trace programme was farmed out to a bunch of private-sector cowboys who pocketed huge public funds and delivered a shambles.  Over and over again, the interests of business have been prioritised over public health.  Capital has reigned supreme, and working-class people in frontline roles of all kinds have born the terrible brunt of the pandemic. 

I can’t quite say ‘Boris Johnson killed my mother’ because I suppose that Mum could in fact have improved her personal Covid security by a few notches, which might have made a key difference.  But we certainly can say that Johnson, the Tory government, UK capitalism in general left us disastrously exposed to potential medical danger and have proved serially incompetent to protect us from it once it arrived.  My Mum, in a sad irony, was herself a Tory voter, but if we are to have a truly worthwhile future on the other side of Covid, then Morrisian communism and utopianism will have to be at the very informing core of it.

 

Routledge Companion to William Morris

The Routledge Companion to William Morris, which will be published in 2021, is a spectacular work.  Handsomely produced and richly illustrated, it encompasses pretty well all facets of Morris’s complex and many-sided life in its five hundred and thirty pages.  Familiar topics like interior design, poetry, Iceland, socialism, the late romances and printing are well represented; but less predictable ones, like Morris biographies, the Culture Industry and the Classical Tradition, feature strongly too. 

I must at once declare an interest in the volume, having a piece in it on News from Nowhere, but I think that I am being objective rather than subjective in declaring the book as a whole a marvellous tribute to its editor Florence Boos.  No one but Florence, surely, could have pulled off the massive feat of organisation and sheer hard work which such a mighty tome represents; and the book is an outstanding monument of her lifelong dedication to William Morris studies.

That being said, there are still areas of Morris’s life that would bear further examination.  One that has always intrigued me is the topic of angling, which comes up here and there in the Routledge Companion, but not in a systematic way.  It would be a mistake, I think, to regard fishing as some minor, private hobby separate from the main public concerns of Morris’s life.  He always aspires, after all, to undo such rigid dualisms as private/public, serious/frivolous, work/pleasure. 

I did once have the notion of writing a fullscale study of Morris and Victorian angling, and indeed, in retirement, may now take it up again.  So I offer the proposed chapter headings of that book as an illustration of how the theme might be approached.

1.      The Mania of Fishing: Boyhood to Bad Ems, 1834-69

2.      The Hook in his Behind: Fishing in Iceland

3.      Study to be Quiet: The Victorian Cult of Izaak Walton

4.      The Brotherhood of the Angle: Fishing at Kelmscott, 1871-1896

5.      The Merton Abbey Fishery and William de Morgan

6.      Cooking the Catch and Catching the Cook

7.      A Literary Piscatory: Fish and Fishing in Morris's Literary Works (a: Early Writings; b: Middle Period Writings; c: Socialism and Angling; d: Late Romances)

For, as T. Westwood and T. Satchell flamboyantly declared in their Bibliotheca Piscatoria of 1883, ‘angling has become a force in literature, greater far than that of its kindred sports’. 

 

 

Towards the Proletarocene: New Initiatives for the Left

It’s good, in a variously dark time, to see the new Left initiatives that are under way all around us.  Salvage Magazine announces itself as a ‘journal of revolutionary arts and letters’, and features leading weird fiction writer China Miéville on its editorial board.  It is devoted to what it enigmatically terms ‘a communism of the ruins’, and its full manifesto (from which I have pinched the title of this post) appears from Verso in July 2021: The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene, edited by Rosie Warren and others.

Meantime, the Cambridge Marx Reading Group continues its good work and has, like so many other such projects, gone online during the Covid lockdowns.  You can, for example, chase up Cat Moir discussing Ernst Bloch’s utopian mode of Marxism on Youtube, under the aegis of this group.  Ruth Levitas has for a long time tried to make Bloch’s work count in William Morris circles, so the more we learn of it, the better.

And Jeremy Corbyn is launching a new online Peace and Justice movement in January 2021.  This initiative, of course, at once bears upon much wider political questions.  Whether there is any way back for Corbyn to the Labour Party whip, one may doubt.  Keir Starmer’s purge of the Left means that the conditions for a return of the whip to Corbyn are likely to be so onerous and humiliating that he couldn’t possibly accept them, which neatly gets rid of him (from a rightwing Starmeresque viewpoint, that is).

But getting rid of him thus might open opportunities to the rest of us – ‘us’ here being those who, like me, left Labour as the extent of the Starmer purge became clear (his early move against Rebecca Long-Bailey was the flashpoint in my case).  There appear to be something like fifty or sixty thousand of us now.  Corbyn’s leadership qualities are certainly mixed, but he is enough of a national figurehead to be probably the only person who could start a new political party to the left of Labour - an ‘Independent Labour Party’, to borrow Tariq Ali’s phrase here.  If a new formation of this kind could pull some existing leftwing MPs away from Starmer’s Labour and sign up most of the recently lapsed membership, it might well be a viable organisation for Left ideas and values.  As the Covid darkness of 2020 begins to cede to a hopefully brighter 2021, one can only hope, and, if Corbyn makes such a move, pitch in.

 

Radicalising the Troops?

What, the Times newspaper sending excerpts from a communist utopia to British frontline troops during the First World War?  One could well imagine the Bolsheviks smuggling out such extracts to Russian troops on the Eastern front in the run-up to October 1917, but that pillar of the English Establishment, the Times?

But, yes, a section from Morris’s News from Nowhere did indeed form part of Broadsheet XXVIII for the troops (who included my paternal grandfather, Henry Smith Pinkney).  These Times­-sponsored publications were, according to their historian Geoffrey Dawson, ‘printed during the autumn of the year 1915 in the form of a “broadsheet” – a single page of thin paper suitable for inclusion in a letter – and distributed in hundreds of thousands to the forces in the field or at sea’.  Broadsheet XXVIII contained both material from News from Nowhere and Morris’s poem ‘O June’ from The Earthly Paradise.

Needless to say, however, and as the attached poem indicated, it was not the most energizingly revolutionary sections of Morris’s utopia which got posted out to the troops - ‘How the Change Came’, say - but rather an excerpt entitled ‘The Upper Thames’, which thus fits into a conservative vision of settled rural Englishness promoted by other broadsheets in the series.  Broadsheet I contained ‘A Choir Practice’ from early in Thomas Hardy’s novel Two on a Tower, and Broadsheet IV featured ‘On Birds and Trouts’ from Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, and so on.

Given that the later pages of News from Nowhere were seen by the Times as lending themselves to such nostalgic, politically pacifying purposes, we ought perhaps to look at these closing chapters set in the upper Thames valley and at Kelmscott Manor with a rather more sceptical eye ourselves.  My Grandad, I’m glad to say, was not pacified in this manner, but – more in the spirit of the first page of Morris’s utopia, with its Socialist League meeting – joined the Communist Party of Great Britain some years after his return from service with the Royal Artillery in France.