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This biographical study is a window into 19th-century British society and the life of William Morris—the great craftsman, architect, designer, poet, and writer—who remains a monumental and influential figure to this day. This account chronicles how his concern with artistic and human values led him to cross what he called the “river of fire” and become a committed socialist—committed not only to the theory of socialism but also to the practice of it in the day-to-day struggle of working women and men in Victorian England. While both the British Labor Movement and the Marxists have venerated Morris, this legacy of his life proves that many of his ideas did not accord with the dominant reforming tendencies, providing a unique perspective on Morris scholarship.
- Sales Rank: #575788 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-03-01
- Released on: 2013-03-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Two impressive figures, William Morris as subject and E. P. Thompson as author, are conjoined in this immense historical study, and both of them have gained in interest since the first edition of the book was published." New York Times Book Review
About the Author
E. P. Thompson was an English historian, socialist, and author of Making of the English Working Class. Peter Linebaugh is a social historian and a professor at the University of Toledo. He is the author of London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. He lives in Toledo, Ohio.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A monumental study of a great socialist idealist
By Ralph Blumenau
Roughly two-thirds of the book's main text (762 pages) are devoted to the last thirteen years of Morris' life, with 210 pages - a quarter of the book - given to a massively detailed account of the six and a half years from 1884 to 1890 in which Morris was involved with the Socialist League.
Before that he had been preoccupied with other things - with the Firm he had established in 1861 to produce craft-produced furniture, tapestry, stained glass, tiles, and all manner of household articles. He had written about the philosophy behind this work: his disgust with mass-production and how this damaged the dignity of labour, with inauthentic gothicism, inauthentic "restoration" of ancient buildings, and with vulgarity ("shoddiness") of design. At this stage his hatred of the market was for the debasement for which it was responsible.
He was also a prolific poet, and Thompson, who has a fine eye for literary criticism, analyzes (and sits in judgment on) much of this at length. He also discusses at length the writings, for example, of Keats, Ruskin, Carlyle and other authors who influenced Morris. We also have a good deal about the Pre-Raphaelites, to whom he was very close in his early years and with one of whom, Burne-Jones, he worked in close friendship and partnership throughout his life. Morris was rather unhappily married to Jane Burden, who had modelled for most of the other pre-Raphaelites. There is a touching account of Morris' reactions when his wife had an affaire with Rossetti. He believed in the equality of the sexes and in women's liberation, but he tortured himself with the question of whether he was being "manly" or "unmanly" in his acquiescence - he had even twice left Jane and Rossetti together in his house in Kelmscott while he went off to Iceland (the home of the Nordic sagas which portrayed a type of hero that a grip on his imagination comparable to the grip of the Arthurian Legend.) All this occupies the first third of the biography.
But the main thing that interested Thompson was Morris' embrace of Socialism. Morris had come to the conclusion that there was a need to go beyond escaping from the ugliness of the outer materialist capitalist world merely by entering into an inner world of the imagination, and to do something active to overthrow that outer world.
In January 1883, at the age of 48, he joined Hyndman's not quite two-year old Social Democratic Federation. At the time Morris was totally ignorant of Marxist theory, but he now read it up. Marxism showed him how "all his previous thought came into unity". Though "much of it [Marxist theory] appears to be to be dreary rubbish, I am, I hope, a Socialist none the less." He defined his own views as Practical Socialism - and very theoretical and impractical it would turn out to be!
The market was now identified as being not only debasing, but the very essence of capitalism and imperialism. By May he was on the executive as Treasurer. But in December 1884 he split with the SDF and formed a rival socialist movement, the Socialist League. At issue had been the Etonian Hyndman's dictatorial behaviour, his jingoism (he supported Imperialism, patriotism, a strong navy and was opposed to Home Rule), his dislike of and intrigues against the foreign members of the executive, and his patrician attitude to the working class and the trade unions.
It was only after the split that rival ideologies between the two bodies developed. The League was "purist": it renounced reformism and parliamentary engineering, proclaimed that the old order can be overthrown only by violence, and identified the "aristocracy of labour" and their use of trade unionism as enemies of the working class: strikes should be aimed at capitalism, not merely at getting a better wages or working conditions within capitalism. The League rejected jingoism and capitalist imperialism, and thought Home Rule was "humbug" if it did not also embrace socialism. In 1886 the League had perhaps 600 to 700 members, the SDF 1,300 to 1,400.
But this extreme purism which was preached by Morris was not shared by about half the League's members who still believed in parliamentary action. In May 1888 the majority on the League Council drove out the "parliamentarians".
This gave dominance within the League's executive to the Anarchists. They repudiated all authority and all collective discipline. Morris was not an Anarchist, and he now began to feel uncomfortable being associated with them. The Anarchists in the League rejected all social bonds, whereas Morris believed that men could only develop their full individualities in the framework of communities. In 1889 he defined himself as a Communist (and attended the Marxist Second International that year). The Socialism he worked for would be an essential but only transititory phase: the bureaucracy of State Socialism could be as stifling of individuality as was that of the capitalist state. In November 1890 he severed his relationship with it. Only his own branch in Hammersmith remained as a platform from which he could carry on, in a much less active form, his own brand of socialism. As for the League, it finally collapsed amid the squabbling of those who had remained behind, just two months after Morris had left it.
In the meantime the labour movement was making gains which sidelined British Marxism in general and "purism" in particular: the great dock strike of 1889, the development of New Unionism, the growing influence of the Fabians, the appearance of "Lib-Lab" members of Parliament, the rise of the number of workingmen adopted as parliamentary candidates by the Liberal Party (13 were returned in 1892); the foundation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. All this Morris wryly appreciated, with the hope that genuine socialist theory would one day permeate these new structures.
He now entered a new phase in his artistic work to which he now gave more time. But he no longer saw, as he once did, the Arts and Crafts movement as a force that might transform a philistine society: he plunged back into it simply because he enjoyed it. He now turned to the creation of the Kelmscott Press and the production of fine books.
In 1890 he had published "News from Nowhere", a novel which takes the form of a dream in which a future world has become socialist. But then he wrote several novels in which he also escapes into a dream world, but now into one in which politics as such does not figure; instead he portrays an idyllic mythical past world, complete with archaisms of speech, which is in contrast to the real world of his time: he returns to the romanticism which had inspired his poetry before he became politically active.
Morris comes out of this book as an admirable, rounded, humane, lovable, larger-than-life, idealistic and hugely energetic personality, and the generous quotations from his writings show how magnificently he expressed himself. Of course his purism meant that, for all the inspiration he provided to Socialism, the effective working class movements in every country left him behind - but it also meant that sooner or later in every country they compromised with bourgeois capitalism - sooner in the West, later in Russia and in China (not that Bolshevism and Maoism ever allowed for the dignity of individualism within the community which was so dear to Morris). They have all become servants of Capitalism. No working class movement dares to challenge it, and none claims these days that it even wants to: the most they aspire to is "fairer capitalism", "responsible capitalism"; the markets continue to rule supreme; the banks and economic imperialism carry all before them. One warms to Morris in part because he had warned in vain against all that.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A highwayscribery "Book Report"
By Stephen Siciliano
"History has remembered the kings and warriors because they destroyed; Art has remembered the people because they created."
William Morris
William Morris sits atop the house of history like a weathervane turning against the prevailing winds rather than with them.
One of the earliest British socialists, he abhorred modernity. An entrepreneurial spirit of manifold passions, he preferred the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
To the manor born (1834), cultivated as an effete poet with other rich and eccentric boys (Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti)of the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" at Oxford, Morris spent his middle- and old-age calling for revolution from street corners in working class districts of London.
This essay is derived from a book written long ago, 1955 to be exact, by E.P. Thompson entitled, "William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary," purchased for a mere $2.95 at Labyrinth Books.
A citizen of Victorian England's roaring industrial empire, Morris could not abide by the times and spent his youth fancying life in the olden days; crafting poems in the style of Lord Alfred Tennyson, replete with knights errant and creamy damsels making loving in limpid streambeds.
The society he loathed lauded him, blessed him with the poet's special fame, and validated the writings through which he sought to escape contemporary surroundings.
His Medievalism, Thompson wrote, was typical of the late-Romantic period in mid-nineteenth century England, an impulsive revolt against the Railway Age that hailed an older society of values finer than profit and capital utility.
Departed from academia, Morris built "Red House," with an eye to infusing architecture with something of the Romantic revolt; adapting "late Gothic methods of building to the needs of the nineteenth century," said Thompson.
A visitor to Red House in 1863 describe it thusly:
"The deep red colour, the great sloping, tiled roofs; the small-paned widows; the low, wide porch and massive door; the surrounding garden divided into many squares, hedged by sweetbriar or wild rose, each enclosure with its own particular show of flowers; on this side a green alley with a bowling green, on that orchard walks amid gnarled old fruit-trees; all struck me as vividly picturesque and uniquely original."
Formation of the firm Morris & Co., followed as he and his partners set out to establish a company of artisans with an eye to reviving the minor arts in England during, "an age of shoddy," according to Thompson.
Medievalism again provided the recipe.
"I have tried," Morris wrote, "to produce goods which should be genuine so far as their mere substances are concerned, and should have on that account the primary beauty in them which belongs to naturally treated substances: have tried for instance to make woollen substances as woollen as possible, cotton as cotton as possible, and so on; have used only the dyes which are natural and simple, because they produce beauty almost without the intervention of art; all this quite apart from the design of stuffs and whatnot."
Glass-firing, woodcutting, bookbinding, pottery, tile-glazing, weaving, embroidery and tapestry all came in for study under his industrious gaze.
He labored, with mixed success, to erase the line separating designer from studio craftsman so that the firm's employees might tap their own creative abilities and thereby alleviate the more grinding aspects of the work.
The venture was met with professional hostility as the product of intruders lacking commercial credentials, but soon enough challenged decorative art's reigning principles.
Again, the wealthy social creatures Morris loathed bucked up his bank account and acclaimed his creations.
Never grateful, Morris found himself pushed; first toward the ineffectual liberalism of William Gladstone; and finally toward Marx as the Victorian era lurched deeper into violent foreign adventurism and greater abuse of working people.
"We are," he wrote, "living in an epoch when there is combat between commercialism, or the system of reckless waste, and communism, or the system of neighborly common sense."
Bet you never heard it put that way before.
Morris' communism was not the mid-century 20th century brand the mature among us became familiar with; the collective mass crushing the beleaguered individual.
A walking paradox, his collectivist vision could not be distinguished from his approach to the arts and was focused upon the individual. It guaranteed the single person rights and comforts and, most importantly, the fullest realization of one's talents.
"Education," readers of his socialist tribune, Justice, were told, "must of necessity cease to be a preparation for a life of commercial success on the one hand, or of irresponsible labour on the other. It will become rather a habit of making the best of the individual's powers in all directions to which he is led by his innate disposition; so that no man will ever 'finish' his education while he is alive."
The revolution he foresaw would restore a pre-industrial community still in existence, but ravaged by the commercial Mammon to which every able body was obligated to consummate itself.
His Socialist miracle did not propose the erection of a new structure upon the old, rather reinforced that which had been weakened by economic materialism:
"That true society of loved and lover, parent and child, friend and friend, the society of well-wishers, of reasonable people conscious of the aspirations of humanity and of the duties we owe it through one another..."
His biographer observed that Morris' utopia called for the reestablishment of the personal and voluntary bonds of society and a doing away with the "impersonal and compulsive" relations rooted in a rule by the owners of property.
His thoughts, mostly old and long-forgotten, bear a contemporary ring in many passages.
"Civilization," Morris said, "is simply an organized injustice, a mere instrument for oppression, so much the worse than that which has gone before it, as its pretensions are higher, its slavery subtler, its mastery hard to overthrow because it is supported by such a dense mass of commonplace well-being and comfort."
Morris' alternative served those to the right and left, secular and devout alike. It entailed a "remedy to be found in the simplification of life and the curbing of luxury and the desires for tyranny and mastery it gives birth to."
So much of his effort would be lost in the silly, internecine debates that have come to characterize left-wing politics. He endured and played a leading role in the split of the original Socialist League, fought the idea of running labor candidates for politics until that became the chosen road and bent to it again.
Morris fought the anarchists of Prince Kropotkin on one side, acolytes of the still-living Freidrich Hegel on another, and the Fabian Socialists of George Bernard Shaw to his right.
He was caught in a terrible "Bloody Sunday" police riot in London, which caused a severe curtailing of his belief in the ability of civil movements (read: unarmed) to bring about revolutionary change, and spent himself silly on the "Justice" publication until he was rudely moved off its board of editors by men of different mien.
He died in his sixties, spent with efforts in so many of life's theaters, his legacy in poetry secure, his influence upon design engrained in the minds of those who launched the Bauhaus, the force of his belief in the working man evident in the gains made over the ensuing century.
Said the poet William Butler Yeats of Morris, "No man I have known was so well loved; you saw him producing everywhere organization and beauty, seeming almost in the same instant, helpless and triumphant."
And that is living.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A Warehouse of Information on Morris, His Life, and His Work
By loce_the_wizard
To chronicle the life of William Morris, his biographer, E.P. Thompson, purposely reminds the reader that the English Romantic period in literature strongly influenced Morris, from his childhood on. Tracing the steps of Morris' formal education, he documents how Morris was deeply affected by his studies of medieval art and literature and deeply influenced by the writings of both Carlyle and Ruskin, influences that had repercussions for the direction of Morris's artistic and political life.
Thompson worked from a treasure trove of material: letters, public documents, articles about William Morris, and, of course, the vast collection of literary works and political articles and speeches that Morris published.
He shows Morris as being at odds with Victorian sensibilities, both as an artist and political reformer, all tempered to some degree, by his illusory yearning for an ideal love, a yearning that doomed any hope of true happiness in his marriage to Jane Burden but made him an ardent reformer striving to bring about more equality for his fellow man.
Thompson chronicles specific incidents, such as Morris infamous arrest under false charges, with reams of details and viewpoints. This technique, while thorough, does not make for easy or quick reading. This biography is heavily weighted toward Morris's activities as a socialist reformer, and at times Thompson's commentary on Morris's literary output seems unduly colored by these socialist beliefs. This argument may be valid, as Thompson notes about Morris: "He looked upon the history of arts, not---as did many of his contemporaries---as the record of individual geniuses, each "inspired" and each influencing each other, but as part of wider social processes."
Likewise, he quotes Morris as saying "I never set up for a critic," by which me means that art is a "solace," an expression of "pleasure," thus, in some measure, confirming that Morris trivialized both the creative process and the role of art in society.
There is, in my view, not enough balanced information on the myriad contributions Morris made to literature---especially The Wood beyond the World, The Well at the World's End, and The Water of the Wondrous Isles---and other novels he wrote during the final decade of his life. Those works are worth more scrutiny, if for no other reason, because they clearly and firmly are the seminal works in what is now the genre of fantasy, in which Tolkien, deservedly so, reigns supreme. Yet without Morris, who was the first to combine elements from classical epic and medieval romance with conventions of the novel, this genre may not have taken form until much later.
I would also have expected more about the magnificent work from the Kelmscott Press, especially the much-revered Kelmscott Chaucer (if you are a book-lover, you owe it to yourself to see if a library near you has a facsimile) instead of a detailed footnote citing the various works of other experts.
More could have been done with the vast accomplishments Morris was responsible for in the visual arts, in his design of wallpapers, chintzes, and tapestries, as well as his furniture designs (the Morris chair indeed comes from this William Morris).
One other shortcoming, in my view, is that one gleans little about what Morris experienced as a child or adolescent. Also, surprisingly, there is much less detail about his marriage, his wife's affair, and his children than one would expect from a book of this scope.
Still, this biography is an excellent reference for the, I suspect, ever-dwindling number of scholars reviewing William Morris and his life. Bibliophiles who love biographies will not, I also suspect, readily enjoy Thompson's writing style, in which passages sometimes seem welded together with multiple colons, and who writes much more like a reporter than in the biographical style elevated by writers such as Walter Jackson Bate or David McCullough. Thompson had a daunting task before him in attempting to distill, to a single volume, the life of William Morris, of whom, upon hearing of Morris' death, remarked, "I consider the case is this: the disease is simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men."
Thompson no doubt did much of his research in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as the first copyright date for this book is 1955, and his writing style may seem at times harsh if compared with current biographical writing. Still, this volume is a virtual warehouse crammed with facts, accounts, details, and remembrances.
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