Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris (review)

David Latham does not conceal his irritation with ‘casual readers’ of William Morris who always seem to get the facts wrong; but those contemned readers might forgive Latham for being frustrated with careless or half-baked scholarship that uncritically retreads threadbare portions of the Morris legend or, perhaps more grievously, fails to see Morris whole. Latham has spent a lifetime getting to know Morris, and his collection, Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris, is bracketed, appropriately, by moments of intimacy. Fortunately, this collection does not use its intimate framing to create distance for the uninitiated; in general, the essays do not presume the reader’s familiarity with all of Morris – with ‘the Olympian figure who stands remarkably at the forefront of five historic movements in western culture: the Pre-Raphaelite, Arts-and-Crafts, Socialist, prose-romance, and private-press movements.’ Still, the question of proximity underlies Latham’s contention that Morris scholarship has to be interdisciplinary. In one sense, this assertion is unlikely to make a ripple of disagreement. Scholars in the humanities take it for granted that interdisciplinarity is a very good thing. But in another sense Latham’s demand for ‘contextualized’ Morris scholarship is as revolutionary as he claims: ‘Morris may be the most difficult artist to contextualize because to do so requires an interdisciplinary interest in all of his many skills.’ Responsible interdisciplinary scholarship requires unusual erudition, extraordinary breadth. In short, it requires us to be like Morris – identity politics in a new guise.

Two essays in the collection are especially notable for their efforts to encompass the diversity of Morris’s career. David Faldet’s best represents the potential of ‘contextualized’ criticism. A social, medical, and environmental history of the Thames underlies Faldet’s exploration of the dominance of the river as symbol and image in News from Nowhere and in Morris’s pattern designs. The ‘contextualization’ in D.M.R. Bentley’s ‘(Dis)continuities: Arthur’s Tomb, Modern Painters, and Morris’s Early Wallpaper Design’ is equally ambitious, but more telegraphic. One should not teach Morris’s poem ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’ in the future without referring to the ‘visual echoes’ Bentley discovers in Rossetti’s painting.

Two essays are likely to become important within Morris studies: Matthew Beaumont’s accomplished reading of News from Nowhere and David Latham’s wide-ranging analysis of ‘Morris’s Ideology of Work and Play.’ Beaumont places Morris within a late-nineteenth-century utopian revival that tried ‘to represent an unrepresentable present’ by historicizing it from the point of view of the future. News from Nowhere goes a step further by trying to imagine a condition of life where ‘the totality of social relations’ is ‘present and spontaneously apprehended.’ Latham’s essay works well in tandem with Beaumont’s because both authors uncover a radical and under-theorized aspect of Morris’s thought – the necessity of making work feel like play, and eliminating the distinction between them. In Latham’s view, it is this desire that really unifies Morris’s career. He breaks the whole into three distinct phases: the aesthetic, the militant, and the visionary. He gives a particularly good account of the turn to romance – why romance helped Morris ‘to express his own vision of reality more clearly.’ Indeed, it is a shame that the collection as a whole deals so scantily with the final phase of Morris’s literary career, given Latham’s strong argument for its continuity with the whole.

Several essays deal with women and the woman question in Morris: Janet Wright Friesen on the power of the female storyteller; Florence Boos on the influence of Morris’s ‘revisionist poetic portraiture’ of Medea and Circe on one of his ‘feminist successors,’ Augusta Webster; Jane Thomas on the important (and familiar) problem of women in the aesthetic movement through Morris’s ‘Pygmalion and the Image’; and Ruth Kinna on the way Morris’s letters alongside the romances demonstrate that his desire for ‘a new social system that...