In Our Time - William Morris

Episode Date: July 5, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of William Morris, known in his lifetime for his poetry and then his contribution to the Arts and Crafts movement, and increasingly for his political activism. He felt the world had given in to drudgery and ugliness and he found inspiration in the time before industrialisation, in the medieval life which was about fellowship and association and ways of working which resisted the division of labour and allowed the worker to exercise his or her imagination. Seeing a disconnection between art and society, his solution was revolution which in his view was the only way to reset their relationship.The image above is from the Strawberry Thief wallpaper design by William Morris.With Ingrid Hanson Lecturer in 18th and 19th Century Literature at the University of ManchesterMarcus Waithe University Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene CollegeAndJane Thomas Professor of Victorian and Early 20th Century Literature at the University of HullProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, William Morris 1834 to 1896, is best known now as a designer of wallpaper and for his advice to have nothing in your house

that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. Look beneath that wallpaper and you'll find a Victorian socialist, appalled by the lives of factory workers. He contrasted their conditions with the medieval world where he pictured craftsmen taking pleasure in their work and working for pleasure. For whom the aesthetic was political. He thought, if workers were more aware of beauty and its value,

they would agitate them, and make them notice what the rich had in abundance and which they too might have if a revolution came. We admit to discuss William Morris, Marcus Weath, University's senior lecturer in English literature at the University of King, Cambridge and fellow of Moreland College, Ingrid Hanson, a lecturer in 18th and 19th century literature at the University of Manchester, and Jane Thomas, professor of Victorian and early

20th century literature at the University of Hall. Marcus Waite, can you tell us about William Morris' early life? Yes, Morris was born in 1837. Both of his parents were of Welsh extraction. Morris became very aware and proud of that heritage as his life proceeded. He was born in Walthamstow, now East London, and he was born into a very wealthy upper-middle-class background. His father was a stockbroker, but he also bought some shares in a mining company called Devon Great Consuls, which was mining copper, and those shares grew in value tremendously, and the family were able to move to a very grand mansion with quite a lot of land round. round it called Woodford Hall.

The figure of the capitalist looms large in Morris's life in the socialist imagination that develops later on. And he was evidently marked, I suppose, by his father's wealth and standing and reacts against it. But he also develops a friendship with his father based on going to churches, taking brass rubbings. He was taken to Canterbury Cathedral by his father. He was then sent away to school to Marlborough College in 1848 in the year of revolutions.

Well, you just touched on, beginning to touch on, the Christian bellows. It was an evangelical household, wasn't it? And therefore going to churches, taking brass robbing. He's taking brass robbins, you could say, is the beginning of the Ascent Krauts movement in his mind. This was a potent part of his life, wasn't it? Yes, an evangelical background, but also in the Anglican church, and that allows Morris to move towards a kind of high Anglican position based on that antiquarian interest that moves into tractarianism,

the Oxford movement, the increase of interest in vestments, buildings, the ritual, I suppose, and the architecture, the ritual architecture of religion. He went to Oxford and met people there with whom he stayed friends for the rest of his life and who influenced him as he influenced them. Can you tell us about that? Yes, when he goes up for his Oxford exam, he meets Edward Byrne Jones, who remains a friend for the rest of his life. They collaborate for the whole of their lives in various ways. But Byrne Jones brought with him,

Byrne Jones and Morris were both at Exeter College, but Bone Jones brought with him a group of friends who were at Pembroke College Oxford, who had come from King Edward's grammar school in Birmingham. So they came from a slightly a social background where, well, they didn't have quite the financial resources that Morris had. And Morris was, at first of all, he was interested in their interests, but he was also able to make things happen because of his wealth. So he was able, for example, to support a magazine called the Oxford and Cambridge magazine, which this group, who called themselves the set, or the Birmingham set contributed to.

And they had quite a big influence on them, didn't they brought a new world breath of pressure into this hall in Epping Forest, riding around in his pony, dressed in armour, all that sort of stuff. That's right, yes. Well, in some ways they help him to connect with that childhood in Epping Forest, to reconnect with the interests in poetry, medievalism generally. he gets them interested in architecture and they get him more interested in Tennyson and in that kind of literary medievalism. But they all in various ways start to, well at least he and Bern Jones start to fall away

from their original intention, which was to become priests in the church. And they decided to become artists. Whereas some of those other folk, William Falford, for example, Richard Dixon do end up becoming priests. Thank you very much. Jane Thomas. At Oxford he met Jane Burden, a stable man's daughter,

whom he worked at whom he married. What was the nature of their relationship? Was it almost an ideological marriage? Well, it's Dante Gabriel Rossetti who introduces Jane Burden to William Morris. As Marcus said, when they decide to give up holy orders, Morris and Byrne Jones, they travel around Europe,

and then they decide to devote themselves to art. Morris is going to become an architect, which he does for only nine months. Edward Ben Jones goes to study painting with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who they've been introduced to via Ruskin, modern painters. Rosetti takes his muses from the working class. Lizzie Siddell was a milliner's daughter. Jane Burden was an Osler's daughter, and she was one of what the group called Stunners,

these unusually looking rather beautiful women from the working class. Why did they decide on that that they had to come from working class? Because they were anti the Victorian tradition of the angel in the house and Victorian ideals of beauty. And Jane Burden was very striking. She was not the Victorian ideal of beauty. She was tall. She was very dark-haired, masses of dark, crinkly hair.

Apparently she had a monobrow, but she had these dark, soulful, deep... I don't get monobro, sorry. I'm not up in that. A bit like Frida Carlo, brows, straight across. Oh, I see, yeah, yeah. The thick, dark brows joined at the top of the nose, that's right, got it. She had these deep dark Swinburne and eyes and this rather marvellous, wonderful, sensuous mouth.

So she looked very unusual. So Rosetti introduces her into the group as a model. there's a deep attraction between them but of course Rosetti is himself still connected and bound dutifully to Lizzie Siddell so Rosetti can't marry Jane as Lizzie Siddell calls Rosetti

away from the group and so in order to secure Jane's presence in the group William Morris Mariser because William tended to do everything that Gabriel Rossetti did he falls very much under Rosetti's So it's worse than I thought it's tactical Well, on Jane Morris's part it is, because she's a young working class woman.

She's only 18 when she meets Rosetti. And she makes a very good marriage with Morris because he's extremely worthy. Of him being tactical, not her. Of Morris being tactical. Oh, yes, he wants to keep her. Morris is infatuated with Jane. Whether or not she reciprocated their arrangement is not clear. Anyway, they man...

I was not going to be infatuated. There she was. They got married. They got married, yeah. Which is rather conventional. They got engaged in 1858. They had a year-long engagement so that Jane could be trained in what would be expected of her as an upper middle-class wife. Really? I didn't know that bit. How did they train her? Oh, just in the niceties of hostess. She was a great hostess, particularly at the Red House.

Then they went on a honeymoon in Europe for six months and came back and then they moved into the Red House, which I think we're going to talk about a bit later maybe, where they had a five-year iddle. Their two daughters were born there, including May, who was herself quite a formidable young woman. And then Lizzie Siddled dies and Rosetti comes back to claim Jane in 1865. And really they have a tormented sort of romantic triangle from that point onwards, which seems to drive them all to a picture of emotional and physical despair. On the other hand, Morris behaves in a... Morris is one of the things is that his marriage is legalised prostitution. And he doesn't, that's a quotation.

You're agreeing with that. He said that. And he thinks, well, okay, I'm not going to be proprietorial about this. So where you go? Yeah, well, he's against all forms of property, particularly the idea of women being the property of men. I mean, Morris, you have to admire him for his earnestness. So I have a compromise he is.

He's one of the most earnest of the Victorians. He's always trying to do the right things. in complex circumstances. He doesn't believe, and there's the couple in News from Nowhere, Dick and Clara, which seems to shadow his and Rosetti's relationship a little bit. So we have him there, we have him at Oxford, he's got his friends, he's got his strong friends, he's interested in the arts, he's got married to the Stunner, as you call that.

They have children, things are going well, Rosetti turns up, and she goes away, and that's where we are at the moment. Okay, Ingrid Hanson, let's bring in Roskium, the great Victorian art critic and philosopher really. And he was an influence there. Can you tell us what influence he was, please? Absolutely. He was a huge influence on Morris. Morris and his friend Bern Jones first came across Ruskin

when they were students at Oxford, his magisterial series of works on modern painters. And in particular, Morris and Byrne Jones were interested in and influenced by the nature of Gothic, which is a chapter of the Stones of Venice. And the nature of Gothic is really the work in which Ruskin sets out the connection between art and a kind of theory of social responsibility, and it's the work in which he starts to critique Victorian social,

whereas through the medium of architecture. So in that work, Ruskin suggests that there's a connection between Gothic architecture and the northern people from whom Gothic architecture arose. So he suggests that Gothic architecture is characterized by changefulness, savageness or rudeness, who created that architecture are also characterized by love of change, love of nature. So he points to the naturalness of Gothic architecture too and its quality of ornamentation.

And so he suggests that the workers of the Middle Ages who built Gothic cathedrals, for instance, were working with a kind of freedom that the Victorian worker doesn't have anymore. He also points to the quality of imperfection in the work of Gothic, as opposed to the perfect roundness of the sunny work that arises out of Greek and Rome, at Greece and Rome. And this is really important to Morris, this idea of Ruskin's that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It's a sign of growth and change. That follows Morris all of his life. And actually very much later, looking back on the influence of Ruskin, Morris says how dull life would have been without Ruskin. And he also says,

this really crucial thing, art is an expression of man's pleasure in labour. And he says, if that's not Professor Ruskin's words, that's certainly the gist of them. And he talks about the significance of people being connected rather than disconnected from their work in a way that later on when Morris becomes a Marxist would really reflect Marxist's idea of the alienation of labour. But Morris already gets this from Ruskin. And in terms of the ideas of art that Morris is assembling, getting from himself, Ruskin's notion, you tell me, obviously, if I'm wrong, that being true to life was vital for him and he took care of.

And actually he didn't see life, he and his friends, and didn't see life around them in the work of the time? No, absolutely. And for Ruskin, truth to nature is really important too, and he talks about that. Ruskin is key in defending the pre-Raphaelite, so that earlier generation of artists, Santa Gabriel Rosetti and his friends, defending them from charges of sort of producing art,

which is distasteful, because it's dealing, the way in which the angles are in the pictures, the way in which people are portrayed there, is dealing with the kind of rawness, of life. Ruskin defends the pre-Raphaelites on that front and Morris really takes up this idea of art which is simple in a way, art that has a simple connection to nature, art which is not characterized by a kind of separation between the worker and the thing that he produces, but also art, and this is important point from Ruskin, that art is not something for the elite, art

is not something separate from everyday life. Art arises out of the character of the people and their daily work. And this becomes crucial for Morris all the way through his work from his very earliest romances in which he has people making their own weapons and using them through to his latest socialist utopia in which unalienated work is a central part of the life there. You also declared that one of his main passions was his hatred of modern life. That's right.

He says one of the leading passions of my life has been his hatred of modern civilization. And he starts prefaces that by saying the parts of the desire to produce beautiful things. So what did you mean by that? So he takes up again Ruskin's idea about the ugliness really of Victorian industrialisation. Morris talks quite often about smoke. In news from nowhere, his 1890 utopia, when the traveller arrives in that beautiful remade world, it's London but transformed. He says what has vanished is the smoke vomiting chimneys.

So the sense that some are rich, some are poor, and industrialisation has brought this massive division between the rich and the poor. is a real problem for Morris. He talks about how the Whig idea is to have champagne for the rich and margarine for the poor. It is marginally important, the irony involved of him benefiting from some of the worst run minds in Devon and Cornwall.

It is. Let's leave it at that for a moment, shall we? Marcus, what did he find in the medieval world that inspired him? In his early work was about the medieval world and so on, and so on. Yes, and indeed, he continues to be preoccupied with the medieval world all through his life.

And I think it's easy to dismiss medievalism as a form of nostalgia. But I think for Morris, even from the early point in his life, it's an active engagement with the present. He begins by being fascinated by the romance as a literary form. But quickly the romance comes to... We're talking about Mallory and the Knights of the Roundtable, Gwynabee and Lancelot and that stop. Yes, I mean, he's interested in chivalry.

I mean, there's a boyish delight in it. but he comes to see that he says that romance is a power of making the past part of the present. So for him, the Middle Ages is always acting on the present in the sense that they are alerting him to something that's wrong. It begins as a kind of discomfort with the present, but becomes something theorised. Morris thinks that the Middle Ages,

well, he sees the Middle Ages were a time of inequality. He's aware of, you know, that feudalism was a sort of structured a brutal hierarchy. But while he acknowledges that, he also says, well, the Middle Ages were a time when people were involved in patterns of association based on that kind of working culture that Ingrid was referring to earlier.

So the guilds become a very important symbol, but for him of... That's nothing to do with the working class, the guilds. Well, Morris does slightly allide that difference between... He was wrong, though, isn't it? I mean, well, he... The working class is, obviously,

they are, in a sense, a concept. That's an anachronistic concept. The working class is, you know, in a sense, come into being with industrialisation. But certainly, he thought that there was a connection between the world of the fields and a kind of craft culture, which was nurtured in the guilds, in his mind.

Well, he's correct about that is another matter, but that's the way he saw it. He wrote what can be called a novella, or a little omis at treatise, treatise, sorry, called the dream of John Ball. John Ball was the leading figure next to what Tyler in the Miss Cold Peasance Revolt of 1381

which almost toppled the whole regime at that time. What did he find that, what did he say, can you be succinct? What did he say about that, that backed up, or backed up the ideas he had about the virtues of medievalism? Well, he saw in the Peasants

Revolt the expression of a spirit of discontesuit of A holy flame of discontent, he calls it. So while this wasn't a Marxist revolution, it was for him a revolution. And therefore, it bore a connection. There was a continuity with the socialist cause that he was invested in. This, in a sense, is, you know, in some ways a heterodox position,

but that's the position that he tries to push in a dream of John Ball. Ingrid, you wanted to come in. Yeah, I also wanted to add that he also sees in, in a dream of John Ball is a representation of fellowship. And again, that comes back to the point about the guilds. One of the things that's important for Morris, in the imagination of those medieval guilds, is the idea of people working for each other,

being willing to share their life. So the character in John, the preacher character in John Ball, which is who John Ball is. He's the preacher who stirs up the working classes to go to the revolution, says fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death. He says fellowship is heaven and lack of fellowship is hell. and the deeds that you do on this earth, it's for fellowship's sake that you do them.

So that sense is really important, and that ties into Morris's idea of socialism as well. And Morris is a subject of this programme, but there's a disjunction in what he thought and what was really happening. Most of the working class were in states of different degrees of servitude at the time, and association was actually they couldn't move from the estates.

They were on without permission for their owner, and so on and so forth. But so we'll just have to say this is verging on fantasy, although it has roots somewhere or other, especially in his imagination. Well, I think there's a really important point that Morris makes, which is he contrasts, for instance, the violence of the Middle Ages with what he calls the civilised soldiering of the Victorian period. So what is important for him is that in the medieval period,

this inequality is open and acknowledged. It isn't, as he sees, it kind of cloaked between a sort of different kind of relations that come up in capitalism, the sense that people could better themselves. It's open, and for him that's important. What's honest and open and acknowledged can be challenged. challenged. Jane, Jane Thomas, we bear now between the political thing which is getting entering into an association and the art. And the Red House you referred to earlier is a step in that direction. Can you just tell us a bit more about that and why that matters? Well, it matters because it, in a sense, it's Morris, it's the embodiment of all of Morris's ideas about how architecture can work best to connect people to the earth, to the surroundings in which they live. But it also embodies the idea of fellowship that Ingrid was talking about. It was designed by Philip Webb, who was part of the circle. It was built in local materials, red brick and red tiles.

It had a gothic design. It was irregular. It was cunningly irregular, according to that Ruskinian idea. It had little turrets, and it was archaic in its look and in its field. It was built in an orchard in such a way as to necessitate the felling of as a few apple trees as possible. A lot of guests there were surprised in hot weather by apples falling through their windows. But it was the scene of a real fellowship and friendship until Rosetti comes in, of course, and sported.

It was a remarkable thing, but was he saying, I am showing you how great the past was, or was he saying, I'm showing you what the future can be? I think he's showing us what the present can learn from the past, to what the present can take from the past and develop. for the future. Marcus. This is a very early point in Morris' thinking,

but it's noticeable there's a connection between the modern world and the medievalism in that the house has sash windows. The house is on the medieval road to Canterbury,

but it's also close to a railway station that Morris needs to get into London when he sets up his firm of decorators. Sorry, I was going to say that the house was furnished by Morris and Jane during this five-year iddle with paintings by Byrne Jones, even Rosetti contributed a painting,

Webb designed the furniture. And it was out of that cooperative endeavour that the firm of Morris Marshall, Faulkner and Co. was born because they couldn't find anything that was manufactured that suited their tastes, they developed their own furniture, and then they turned that into a non-profit or profit-sharing cooperative enterprise.

So I'm trying to keep this Troika of his life together. There was the artist himself, there was a sort of businessman artist as setting up magazines with his friends, funding things for them and that sort of thing. And so there was a socialist as well. Right. Can we go into a different area

because he seemed to be fascinated by violence and thought that, would you tell me why I was fascinated by violence? I know why I think it was, but you're the guest. Thank you, yes. I think an important moment when Morris kind of articulates something about this is at the end of a lecture called the Ames of Art that he gives in 1883.

He implores his listeners at the end. He says, I ask you to think with me that the worst that can happen to us is to endure the evils that we see tamely. No trouble or turmoil is so bad as that, he says. And he goes on to say that everywhere, we must be resolute in church, in state, in the household, to endure no tyranny,

accept no lie, quail beneath no fear. And I think it's that where Morris sees violence and turmoil as necessary correlatives of change. He says elsewhere, hope, times of trouble and turmoil are always also times of hope. So in his early days, he's looking back to those stories by Mallory, he's looking back to the Knights of the Round Table, and the turmoil and change that comes through battle, the ways in which knights, first of all, express their own identity in battle.

Again, they're using their hands. it's hand-to-hand warfare rather than something distance and alienated. So he sees this as a kind of representation of honest connection with their world, with the things that are happening around them. But he also brings in some complications into that, right, in that early literature. So one of his early poems, The Defence of Gwynnevere, has Queen Gwynnevere, obviously accused of adultery with Lancelot defending herself. And at the very end of that poem, she hears Lancelot coming,

and she turns to listen to him as a man might turn to hear the sound of his fellow... How can't a woman turn? Sorry? Why can't a woman turn? Because she's listening to him as though she were a knight, and in those days there are no female night. So she listens to him, as one might hear the sound of a fellow knight's charger. So Morris sees in his early days violence as representative of change and turmoil,

and that's a good thing. But also as he comes to think about it through the course of his work, it's representative of a hope for change and a willingness to bear pain rather than endure evil. And that was a fundamental. we need to go back to it a fundamental reason for his attraction to the Peasants' Rebels because, and also he said out of that the violence, although it might not succeed then,

it will come back if it's planted properly. Other people will do it in other ways, but it is the way through. Absolutely, men fight and the thing they fought for doesn't come. Let's switch to the other area now, almost to the wallpaper, but to his developing those artistic notions and what he did in his business, as we've heard from Jane. Yes, if I could dwell on the wallpaper,

because I think that's an important area and one that it's easy to dismiss as a kind of ornamentalism. And we often see his patterns in, you know, gift shops transfer to different media. It's not very kind to the patterns often. But Morris didn't think of wallpaper or any other kind of pattern as simple ornamentation,

though he did take ornamentation seriously. Essentially, he thinks that wallpaper patterns are an attempt to bring something from the outside world, that world of nature we're hearing about, out earlier into the inside world, into a room. But he makes it very clear that if we're in the business of simply representing things in a meticulous or scientific way, we would actually nail bits of tree onto the wall of our rooms or take in flower cuttings.

We don't do that. So rather we conventionalise the things that we see. So he's, in a sense, steering a middle course between the French wallpapers, which were very kind of floral and illusionistic in their depictions and the design reformers. So Owen Jones, who wrote a book called the Grammar of Ornament, it's very geometric. So Morris wants to move away from the illusionistic approach, but not go all the way to the geometric, because he's committed to some kind of relationship with nature, but it has to be conventionalised. And he believes that good pattern should embody order, imagination, and beauty. He doesn't, he's not very interested in defence. He doesn't,

finding the word beauty, interestingly. But he explains that imagination is a matter of communication and of meaning. Our papers should mean something. And they should be ordered. There should be a connection, a kind of binding agent between imagination and beauty. And they should be restful. Can I turn to Jane on that one, the beauty? I just mention one other little irony.

We're the irony of the factory workers in his own minds being appallingly treated. And we have a little irony here that this artist for everyone, and yet he's creating wallpaper that can be purchased only by rich or even very rich. Just, I think we, if you want to develop, that's fine. Otherwise, I just think it should be noted. Well, he, again, earnestness, you know, he realizes that the kind of designs that he's doing can only be afforded by the rich, and he gets exasperated at pandering to the swinish luxury of the rich at some point.

That's his quotation. That's his quotation. He's also, of course, running factories where the tapestries are produced, which employ child labour, but then he's not alone in that. Everybody's employing child labour, but he is, trying to make the conditions within which these children are working amenable. He's giving them a trade. He's treating them well.

It's quite difficult to get a grip on history, which is so alien to why we do things like that. And I notice the tentativeness with the child, and I sympathise with you. It's a difficult one, too. You did it very well. Well, he's so compromised all the way through, but I mean that makes him, in a sense, more admirable.

he could have done a lot of things with the money that he inherited from the copper mines but he decides to put it into the benefit of all as much as he possibly can. Everywhere everything he tries to do he gets caught up with these compromises in his personal life, his

industrial life, his artistic life it's Marcus I think so he wasn't he didn't define beauty either I quite like you'd have a go at that Okay so this is where the muse comes in

of course because these stunners seem for Morris as well as for Rosetti to embody they're the earthly embodiment of beauty because they are the muse for the artist. So as the earthly embodiment of beauty, they become a means through which the artists can gain access to a kind of platonic world of beauty. It's a bit like pigmalion in the image, Bern Jones's a great quartet of paintings based on Morris's poems of pygmalion in the image. So beauty, it's a subjective concept, but it's something that elevates the mind. So the usefulness panders to the body, beauty panders to the mind.

It elevates the mind. If you want to be brief, that's fine, Marcus. Just I think the reason that he's not so keen on, you know, offering us a treatise and aesthetics is because he always refers beauty to labour. If labour relations are good and healthy, then we will have beauty. He goes to Iceland. Now, he wants to explore the great sagas, as you mentioned before, when you mention the Gothic, what they're doing.

He thinks that this is a representation of medievalism at his best. He likes the violence. He likes the fact they give them their own names of sorts. Let's keep going with that. And also he wants to get away from the torment of seeing Rosetti with his wife. So there you are plenty of reasons to go to Iceland. He goes there. What does he find?

So he goes, first of all, in 1871, and he goes again in 1873. And he's interested also. So, yes, partly he's going, things are going badly at home. He and Dante Gabriel Rossetti have brought together. Kelm's got Manor just outside Oxford, and Rossetti and Jane Morris are having a relationship there. So he goes away, in part, to leave them to it. He goes away because he's been feeling, which is very unusual for Morris, depressed and low in spirits, he writes to his friend Aglaio Coronio.

And so he sets up a trip with his friend Charlie Faulkner from Cambridge, another acquaintance, W.H. Evans. And he also goes with Erica Magnuson, who is an Icelander, who's working as a librarian at Cambridge University, who Morris had met in 1868, and with whom he'd started to study Old Norse, and he'd started to undertake some translations of the Icelandic sagas, which Morris loves because of what he calls the Old Norse worship of courage,

the sense of drama and the commitment, again, of the people to fighting their own battles. Why do you think he liked that so much? for him courage and hope are really important qualities. He writes actually at one point to Edward Byrne Jones' son, Philip, when he's away at school, and says that he's hearing that Philip is having trouble with some of the other boys. He says that he himself, Morris, didn't fight enough at school from want of hope, let us say, not want of courage, he says. So for him often fighting and being willing to fight is an expression of courage, of connection to one's own body and one's own environment,

and a willingness not to be alienated. But typically of him, he threw himself into the Icelandic sagas and got busy with them. He absolutely did, yes. He produced with Erica Magnuson a number of the sagas towards the end of the 1860s and into the 1870s. And then when he goes to Iceland, he finds a connection between the land and these stories.

He comes back and writes about the terrible and tragic but beautiful land. Marcus, he's going into different paths it's like several people we're talking about, about the one person. In his lifetime, his reputation was based on his poetry, his early poetry. He was known as the poet of Dundumden, wasn't he? He was usually introduced in public as the author of the earthly paradise. That's it. And actually, I mean, the strengths of Morris's poetry are very intimate with the weaknesses.

So the first book, The Defence of Gwynover and other poems, I don't know if it was only published in about 250 copies and was badly reviewed. Morris was shaken by that. In 1868, between 1868 and 1870, he publishes the Earthly Paradise, which is a collection of stories, a bit like Boccaccio's The Cameron or the Canterbury Tales with a framing narrative. And that turns out to be an enormous success. The narrative hungry Victorian audience lap it up.

He makes a lot of money from that. But serious intellectual figures like George Eliot, you know, are very keen on it. She speaks of being hungry for it and saying, you know, if you have an idle afternoon, you should bestow it on the earthly paradise. Mine doesn't a great compliment to say, if you have an idle afternoon.

It isn't exactly saying, go. No, absolutely. But at the same... Never mind, I mean, she's a fan. That's okay. But at the same time, I mean, Walter Peter says that the earthly paradise is water to bathe and swim in.

And that doesn't sound like a compliment either. But he thinks of it as a compliment. It's a total immersion experience. that afternoon. Jane Thomas. I think Morris is writing in the oral tradition and there are stories of Rosetti saying to Morris, come on, Topsy,

read as one of your grinds. And Ruskin himself said, well, Morris's poetry is very, very, very good in its own peculiar way. I mean, he was offered the poet laureateship in 1891 and he turned it down because he didn't want to give up lecturing at Kalmscott for, quote, writing songs

about royal weddings. So, you know, he was, you know, I think it is of its time. Let's talk about property's best known book, News from Nowhere. What was, what strikes you about that? Well, it's about as compromise as his poetry is. You know, is it a utopian fiction? Is it a romance? Is it a fray narrative?

Well, it's, okay, so it was serialized, first of all, in the Common Wheel in 1889. The magazine, which he subsidizes. Yeah. So the narrator, is it a frame narrator, is it not, comes away from the League, could be the Socialist League, where they have had an argument about violence, about anarchy. Morris is turning away from notions of violence and anarchy after Bloody Sunday of 1887 when he sees a peaceful demonstration

ruthlessly put down by the police and the militia. So our narrator, who we later call William Guest, comes away feeling very dispirited about the revolution. and as he's walking home through dirty, grimy, industrial London, he wishes that he could see the future. And he feels the kind of change in the air before he goes to sleep, so it's not just a waking up. So he wakes up the next day and everything's transformed into the future.

He learns about how the revolution happened from somebody who may be a distant relative of the narrator. Why did it catch people's imaginations at the time? I think, well, it's, interestingly, it's part of a whole group. group of stories around that time, the time machine, heart of darkness, that are kind of odysses, their trips up rivers to different worlds, most of them dystopic, of course. And I think it captures the Victorian imagination because it's dreamy, because it's because it is Morris's vision embodied in prose. I mean, it's not for me, for me, it's not an untroubled read. It's a difficult read to get through. And there is a,

bits of it. It did have quite influence, isn't it? Which will continue with it being read in World War Warned by reading groups of prisoners and all the country. Well, it embodies an ideal of England. It embodies an ideal of rural England. I mean, London is turned to a kind of rural paradise in a way.

Let's be able to use the word socialist, Ingrid. Why did he become a socialist? Why and when? So he became a socialist in 1883 when he joined the Social Democratic Federation, which was started by Henry Hindman in 18. 1880, 1881 as the Democratic Federation and then became the Socialist Democratic Federation. And this is one of the really, one of the first Marxist socialist organizations.

And one of these books is why I became a socialist. Well, he wrote a, yes, he wrote a short piece for justice, which is the newspaper that started by the Social Democratic Federation on why I became a socialist. He writes that in 1884. And he talks about the influence of Ruskin. He talks about how his, that's where he talks about his hatred of modern civilization and how he gradually came to see that socialism was the way forward for him. What he wanted, he said, was not to see a world in which there are no brain-sick brainworkers or heart-sick hand workers, but where people live in an equality of condition where there's neither rich and poor. This time had a red mark, because in red marks he said it was like a conversion, is the word you.

So we're back to his childhood in a way. In the evangelicalism, in the Christian idea that you're converted. Yes, absolutely. Yes, for lots of socialists at this time, the idea of the religion of socialism is very important. And Morris talks indeed about his conversion to socialism and then about preaching. socialism. But it is again about discovering, when he comes back from Iceland in fact, he's developed his ideas

about community, he sees the all thing in Iceland, the place of the all thing where the tribes came together to share communal government, and he brings that back in news from nowhere, and socialism for him starts to embody a way forward for breaking down that

world in which some have a load, a lot of stuff and some have very little. The misery that he sees of modern civilisation. Marcus, he seems to moved from one party to another. Why did you do that? He did. One party, one socialist party to another. Yes, he moves from the Social Democratic Federation in a kind of breakaway group to form the Socialist League in 1884. And from the Socialist League, he ends up in his own local branch renamed the Hammersmith Socialist Society. In the first case, it's because he becomes this illusion with the machinations

of Hyman. He thinks of him as having dictatorial tendencies. The Socialist League breaks up because an anarchist, a faction in the party, gains the ascendancy. And Morris is always, he leans towards individuality, not individualism. He has that sympathy with the anarchist, but that belief in fellowship and association and informal structures means that he can't go that far. So when they take over the party, he's forced out of his editorship of Commonwealth and, in a sense, retreats to Hammersmith. And there's a sense in which Morris's localism is kind of borne out in that series of schisms. It ends up in his own party, which is, you know, ironic. And it's something he nods towards at the beginning of news from nowhere that there were six people present and therefore six factions of the party.

I'm so sure. Anyway, Jane, can you develop that for us? As we come to the end of the programme, we've talked about, I perhaps jumped around a little too much, or perhaps I'm jumped around, maybe no perhaps excise up, anyway, there's this man business, there's this man artist, there's this man lover, there's this man rejected lover, this man, this man, isolated sagas, there's this man, blah. Can you get inside his head for us for a minute or two? I think it's a lust for life on Morris's part.

It's an earnest lust for life. I'd like to talk a little bit about Morris and women because I think what's extraordinary about the relationship between him and Rosetti and Jane is that he defends Jane, he protects Jane. I mean, she's at this point an upper-middle-class Victorian adulterous wife and Morris doesn't, you know, he protects her and in News from nowhere he talks about how women should not be criticised or ostracized for following their own natural desires.

and I mean it is this desire to experience what he can and to really get in touch with the energy of human life which he sees embodied in work and in their love for beauty and he's just looking for that wherever he can Yes, wherever he can, yes Did he feel any tensions between what he did and what he was? Right from the very start.

He is a deeply compromised man. from the very start. But as I say, this is, I mean, I don't mean sort of Oscar Wilde's type of earnestness. It is a very endearing earnestness that I think does cause him a great deal of physical and mental distress at certain points in his life.

Can you briefly, England, I know you're tumultuous about Morris and that's absolutely fine. Can you give us some final idea of his legacy? What's the most important legacy is left? Yeah, I mean, I think, as we've covered in this programme, Morris has so many facets to his life and work and his influence is great not only on the arts and crafts movements,

which now continues to influence the ways in which people view beauty and the usefulness of objects, the purposes of art, the connection of art with life, but also he's had a huge influence on politics. It's worth saying neither anarchism nor socialism are necessarily associated with violence. He is mainly about social change. That's what his socialism and anarchism are about,

and that continues to influence people up to today. Well, thank you all for taking that. for taking that on. Thanks to Ingrid Hanson, Jane Thomas and Marcus Waith. We now take our annual break and we're back on the 13th of September. Please join us and in the meantime. You can listen again to any and all of the 810 programmes in our archive and download them to listen wherever you are this summer.

Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Thank you very much, you dear. You can sell, now all the things you really wanted to say, bags of time now. we are, the podcast goes on. What would you most like to have said that you didn't get the opportunity because of my

appearance to say it, Marcus? I'd like to have said something about Sigurd de Vauxhall Song, which was the poem that he published in 1876, which is where I think some of the virtues of the earthly paradise and of the defence of Gwynnevere come together. There's the directness and the kind of, I suppose, vitality of the defence of Gwynnevier combined with that sense of a total world that you get in the earthly paradise. So the poem begins, there was a dwelling of kings ere the world was wax and old. Dukes were the door wards there and the roofs were thatched with gold.

Oles were the rites that wrought it. And there's a sense in which Queen's daughters strewed the floors in the next line. And the masters of the songcraft were the mightiest men that cast the sails of the storm of battle are down the bickering blast. There's a sense there, yes, of a tragic world and a world with a tragic momentum, but also a world where the particularity of, in particular, this sort of folkloric household

is coming through very strongly. Morris is attracted to the idea that the poet might also be a sailor and a warrior. He's attracted to the idea that dukes are the door wards there, owls are the rights that wrought it, that these are not simply removed aristocratic figures, but they are makers and doers. I wanted to bring him into our time really

and talk a bit more about his influence architecturally through Charles Rennie McIntosh, through the Bloomsbury Group, through Charleston, if you think about what the Bloomsby Group were doing in, because this goes out to several million people, so you're not right, and you're being listened to. Morris should be listened to. And right the way through to Frank Lloyd Wright,

I mean, you could say that Morris kind of lays the ground for modernist architecture. I think, I mean, Morris predicts the downfall of capitalism. When we think about the banking crisis of 2008, you could say that the hippie generation, the flower generation are deeply influenced by Morris's ideas and news from nowhere. I mean, it all happens. I think Morris is also very unspecific about timelines, like he is unspecific about beauty. It's very difficult to work out precisely where William Guest is, but it's something like 2040.

William Guest is the protagonist. The protagonist is the sort of narrator. No, he's not the narrator. He's narrated in News From Nowhere. The kind of craft movement, the cooperative movement, from small local shops where communities, where local shops are closing and communities are banding together to actually run these shops for non-profit-making purposes.

The interest in artistism, and bread and craft beer. You're thinking this all stems somehow from Morris. I mean, you're claiming that. I'd like to think it stems partly for Morris. But I mean, if you believe that in Morris's idea that human beings are essentially crafters, they're essentially makers and their energies

are essentially about dramatizing their testimony in the making of beautiful things, hence this thing about alienation of labour. Then I think you can see it happens. all around you. I think he had a terrific effect on Lawrence, didn't you? On D.H. Lawrence, yes. Yes, indeed. Yeah, he did.

Both the peccaside and the making side. And Hardy as well, actually. Huge effect. I mean, Hardy begins by thinking he's going to take holy orders. Then he goes into architecture and then he builds his own house, Max Gates. You know, he writes, he describes Eustacia Vi like Jane Burden. The well-beloved is a bit like pig malin.

It's huge effect. on Hardy, which hasn't really been looked at. Did you leave anything out? I did. I did. I did. I'd just like to say something that arises a little bit from Jane's discussion of news from nowhere, and also just to come back briefly for a moment to the question of violence. Morris highlights in a number of his articles for the Common Wheel,

which is the Journal of the Socialist League, which he sets up and underwrites, and which runs from 1885 to 1890 under his editorship and then carries on for a little while after that. But he writes in there very well and in a number of his essays as well about the commercial war of capital. So drawing in a way on Engels' idea about capitalism is the war of each against all. He sees that as a kind of cloaked and hidden war, the violence of the state against the people, the violence of the masters against the workers. And so for him, in news from nowhere, the way in which people rise against that is about the kind of hopeful overthrow of what is already violent action but is cloaked.

So for him, the violence that he represents is about something bringing out into the open, he talks about what is already hidden. And then the work that arises out of that is work to which people are connected. Clara in News from Nowey talks about how little by little we got work we got work we got pleasure, we got pleasure into our work. And he's not anti-machine, sorry,

also the thing about using machines, if we're talking about contradictions. I mean, he's not a Luddite in the sense of not going with machines. Machines are there to do the onerous and unpleasant work to liberate people from onerous and unpleasant work so that we might have a four-hour working day and in that four-hour working day, we spend our time making beautiful and useful things

instead of surplus excess. People have always predicted these shorter days, haven't come about yet, haven't been? No, no, I need a three-day week. What do you think of one of the things seem, and the condemnation of a factory was a very... A lot of those factors, let's take shipbuilding, in Tyneside, for example,

there are about 150 different sorts of carpenters. Now, those men were very skilled and very proud of their work, so they were doing what he was doing and he seems to wipe them all off with the same swipe. But it's, as you say, they're skilled handicraft people. They're not working, they're not cogs in a machine. I mean, Ruskin says you can... Well, they're not causing the machine of building the ship, yeah, but I mean, he's got a lot.

We didn't talk about Carlislew, did we, and about signs of our times and about how man has grown mechanical in heart and mind and hand, and, you know, they just become cogs in a machine. They do the same role repetitively. There's something sweeping about Morris's analysis sometimes. He doesn't give the factory system quite the credit that it deserves in certain areas. I think if he visited his shipyard, he would have recognised the kinds of skill and craft involved there. But there was something a bit high-handed about his analysis sometimes.

So I think it's right to point that out, actually. And also beautiful things come out of factory. The designer Christopher Dresser uses factories and uses mechanisation to produce some of the most beautiful objects of the late 19th. century, early 20th century. I mean, you can't do without machines, can he? But at the same time, he's kind of in despair. It's wonderful...

I mean, there's more handicraft in machine tools that we tend to recognize. You know, the first machine tool has to be handicrafted. And then it can become... No one do you think of the factories... My mother worked in a factory, and it was making clothes and stuff. She made buttons, buttonholes, actually.

But when you went in there, I mean, there were men with love... huge scissors, cutting cloth to specific lengths and doing it without chalk marks anymore, they were so good at it. So there's none of you could call crap there, turning out serviceable suits and jackets. If you think about the weaving mills and looms of the Victorian period

the way they're producing cheap cotton. I mean, the other thing that Morris, of course, draws attention to is industrial diseases, white-led poisoning. We didn't talk about the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Which is really important. A huge legacy. A huge legacy. the anti-scrape and buildings are not there as ecclesiastical toys.

They're a kind of testament of the history of humankind. So the difference between hand-weaving tapestry and wall hangings, whether you use little boys or not, and working in a mill where you're likely to get your head knocked off by a mechanical shuttle or a loom is, I think that's where he sees the difference. But also it's about the conditions of the kind of conditions. of labour, isn't it? And the question

of whether people are free to choose their own work and to enjoy their own work, to be connected with their work, or whether they're making, you know, following Ruskin on that. Another thing he doesn't, when he maybe does in works of his that you've read and I haven't addressed the fact that they should do this, it's, the choice of a lot of it was

severely limited. Whereas his was not limited. Yeah. Which was a huge difference. I think he was aware of that. I mean, that's in a sense his problem. Why did he write about that? Well, he writes a whole range of of lectures on the development of economic civilization in which he goes into great detail about the development of the factory system, about the dissolution of the guilds. And his whole argument,

really, is based on a claim that the workplace divorces intelligence and freedom from the work of the hands. And he wants to reunite those faculties. I think one of Morris's great legacies is this insistence that on a socialist tradition which puts art in the forefront of things. So this idea that quite a lot of us, I think, have inherited from

recent history that a socialist society has to be drab and has to be utilitarian is one that Morris would find very alien. I mean, it's also there in certain writings of Marx, but Morris really insists on it. And I think that's something that he can bring to present analysis.

his idea of folk art depends on a revolution. He understands that he's ministering to the swanish luxury of the rich because this is a pre-revolutionary situation and afterwards things will be put right. So in a sense it's based on an idea of deferral, but that's the destination he has in mind. I think we have to give way to the producer who's making an offer you can't reviews.

It comes off for you tea or autismal coffee. Oh, that's a partisanal. Have you ground the beans yourself, Simon? We agree with ourselves. See what coffee, anybody. I love coffee. Coffee would be lovely. Water's fine for me.

In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. It was twilight and Bailey was late. An extraordinary real life story. The black woman in the south who raises sons, grandsons and nephews, has her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose. The author of Maya Angelou's memoirs on BBC Radio 4 across the coming year. I will be a conductor. I will.

Well, nothing beats a child but a failure. Give it everything you got. Beginning with Maya Angelou, I know why the caged bird sings. Search for the amazing Maya Angelou, wherever you get your podcasts.