William Morris in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Phillippa Bennett and Rosie Mills (review)

This collection originated in a conference the William Morris Society, founded in 1955, held to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Morris has always been a major and unforgotten figure. He may have been of greatest interest in his lifetime and even through the first half of the twentieth century as a poet. His roles as a designer and businessman as well as, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, a Marxist socialist, had never been neglected. But there was a tendency to put his life into compartments, with those concerned with the literary and artistic sides of his life inclined to be somewhat uncomfortable with his politics. The founding of the Society can be taken to mark a search for a more integrated and a more accurate Morris. In the 1950s his anti-state socialism became increasingly appealing to both ends of the left-wing political spectrum, perhaps particularly in Britain. The Labour government of 1945 through 1950 had created a semi-welfare state but it was clearly not the new Jerusalem. Though earlier some may have hoped to the contrary, the Soviet Union was also clearly not the new Jerusalem. Perhaps it was more than a coincidence that 1955 also marked the publication of E. P. Thompson’s great William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. It presented a Morris shaped by his political thoughts and actions. Interest in Morris has continued to build into the twenty-first century. In 1996, a major conference marked the centenary of his death, as did quite a few splendid exhibitions. The essays in the volume that resulted from that conference (William Morris: Centenary Essays [1999]) tended to emphasize particular aspects of Morris. It was co-edited by Peter Preston, the present chair of the William Morris Society, who provides the afterword here, and Peter Faulkner, a doyen of Morris studies and the dedicatee of this collection.

What is the state of Morris studies at present, based on these essays? The authors are mostly British but two prominent American scholars are given credit for their activities: Florence Boos, as the central figure in the ongoing Morris Online Edition, and eminent scholar and collector Mark Samuels Lasner, for his web activities. (He also ran the splendid William Morris in America conference at the University of Delaware a few years ago.) I would conclude that the desire to create an integrated Morris is stronger than ever but that we are now investigating him through our present-day concerns with the city, the environment, ecology, and so many other areas combining politics and art in which Morris was a pioneer. Morris wrote on these issues in his fiction, most notably in The Dream of John Ball (1886–87) and News from Nowhere (1890), in his magnificent essays, and in his poetry. Perhaps more vividly than ever he speaks to our discontents.

A section on “Architecture and Utopia” leads off the collection with essays by Maria Isabel Donas Botto on Morris and the city and Ruth Levitas on Warwick Herbert Draper (who was involved with buildings in Hammersmith and the opposition to the construction of the main road that truncated the garden of Kelmscott House). The fine scholar Jan Marsh writes on Morris’s Red House and a newly discovered letter by its architect, Philip Webb, found in the course of the recent work on the house. The Arts and Crafts aspect of Morris is hardly present, except for a descriptive piece on May Morris’s embroideries by Hilary Laucks Walter. Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps refreshingly, no mention is made in the essay of feminism and the vexed question of whether Morris discriminated against women in confining them to embroidery in his firm and to traditional feminine pursuits in News from Nowhere. Two of the three essays that deal with Morris’s writing concentrate on the comparatively neglected last romances. Anna Vaninskaya’s “William Morris’s Germania: The Roots of Socialism” discusses the implications for socialism to be found...