William Morris looked forward to a day when parliament would become a storehouse for horse manure.
Born on this date, Morris eventually became one of Britain’s most significant and influential early Marxists, an uncompromising revolutionary, who today is mainly remembered for his wallpaper. I prefer to remember him for the day he ceremoniously crushed his top hat with his large bottom, to symbolise his final rejection of all that the headgear represented: capitalism, conformity and drudgery. He had bought it to attend board meetings of a company, shares in which he’d inherited; having resigned his directorship, he vowed never to own a topper again.
The son of a financier, William (“Crab” at school and “Topsy” at university) grew up in bourgeois comfort. In conventional terms he was not much educated, having attended Malborough College and Oxford University; he learned next to nothing, he later claimed, because next to nothing was taught.
As with many people who are not trammelled by formal education, it’s difficult to say, in a single word or phrase, what Morris was, what he did. There was the communism, of course, and the wallpaper. He was also a designer, an architect, an artist, a craftsman, a printer, a decorator, a furniture maker, and more. In his own time he was probably most famous as a poet; he was even offered the Poet Laureateship in 1892, on Lord Tennyson’s death. He declined, of course – whatever else William Morris was, he was never part of the Establishment.
His political views matured from a reformist liberalism at university into a belief that only total revolution could bring liberation to the human race. He opposed what he called “amelioration,” arguing that neither gradual reforms nor charity could effect long-term change. Even if the Rothschilds were to give all their money to the poor, he said, it would make no lasting difference because the underlying causes of inequality would still be in place. Over his lifetime, Morris joined and left several socialist groups because he found them insufficiently committed to revolution over gradualism.
During the violent, repressive 1880s, Morris the activist – constantly marching on demonstrations, addressing picket lines and writing for socialist journals – was under frequent secret police surveillance, and was on at least one occasion fined in court for his actions.
From early childhood he had been entranced, both in books and in the physical world, by nature and by mediaeval England. He loved studying wild plants and old churches. His rejection of the capitalist system was informed and given structure by the writings of Marx and Engels, but it had a very different flavour to it.
Morris imagined and described a post-capitalist world (the one in which parliament is full of shit, instead of shits) where fulfilling work, instead of exploited labour, is at the centre of everyone’s life. Later Marxists have sometimes dismissed Morris’s vision as almost feudal, as idealistic and bucolic. It’s true, he saw the ecological cost of 19th century industrialisation – the pollution, the human ill-health, the exhaustion of natural resources. But his hatred of modern life wasn’t a call to go backwards to an imagined idyll, but forwards to a time when class had been abolished and work was carried out for purpose, not for profit. It was a little more common in those days than it is now for rebels to speak of beauty and joy as goals of the revolution.
Another difference he sought all his life to undermine was that between art and craft, and between the various individual arts and crafts. Beautiful things should be useful, and useful things should be beautiful. He considered capitalism's separation of mental work and physical work to be disastrous, for the worker and for the community.
He had no patience for the individualistic artist, waiting with hand to fevered brow for his muse to move him. Creativity was a collective act, and doing the craft was what led to the art. There was no such thing as inspiration: he famously said “If a chap can't compose an epic poem while he’s weaving tapestry, he had better shut up, he'll never do any good at all.” Just get on with it: make something beautiful, make something useful. Make it with others. Make it with your hands and your brain.
Morris died of tuberculosis in 1896, his last recorded words being “I want to get mumbo-jumbo out of the world.” The cause of death, according to his doctor, was “his enthusiasm for spreading the principles of socialism” – overwork, in other words.
Obituaries in the conservative and liberal press praised his artistry and damned his politics. The Times mourned “a man whom we do not hesitate to call a great artist,” and brushed aside “the unpractical extremes to which his industrial and political opinions tended” as “only the result of a warm heart and a mistaken enthusiasm.”
The obituarist fundamentally misunderstood Morris, as so many commentators still do. To try and treat his activism and his creativity as detached was to miss the whole bloody point of William Morris: art, craft, work, politics – for Topsy, all were one. There were no boundaries separating them, they all flowed together as elements of a full life.
The socialist press served him better, the Clarion noting that “Morris was not only a genius, he was a man. Strike at him where you would, he rang true.”
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Sources:
www.apollo-magazine.com/preview-william-morris-national-portrait-gallery
www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1996/isj2-071/mahamdallie.htm
Great Victorian lives edited by Andrew Sanders (Times Books 2007)
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/was-william-morris-a-marxist
The QI book of the dead by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson (Faber 2009)