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The Myth of William Morris*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Martin J. Wiener
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Extract

A few years ago the iconoclastic architectural scholar Reyner Banham declared: William Morris's “ruralizing vision of John Ball's other island as a vast medieval dude-ranch full of bit players addressing one another as ‘Neighbour’ just doesn't stand up.” Surely not, if this indeed was Morris's vision. Yet did this vision originate with Morris or with certain of his interpreters?

E. P. Thompson has called attention to the growth of a “Morris myth.” Thompson argued that William Morris's revolutionism, and specifically, Marxism, had been buried under layers of praise (and disparagement) for a fictitious—and socially harmless—character. This mythic Morris was a mixture of romantic poet and traditional craftsman, in love with old English countryside and old English folk life. As such, he could be—and was—embraced by Liberals, Tories, and right-wing socialists.

Thompson's observation was not the first such, nor the last. By now these protests have altered the commonly accepted view of Morris, and we see the revolutionary within the medievalist, the communist within the craftsman. Yet no one has asked why the myth flourished. Thompson, like R. Page Arnot more briefly before him, saw this myth, properly, as something more than a simple mistake. Thompson followed the Marxist lead of Arnot in implying deliberate distortion for class purposes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , Spring 1976 , pp. 67 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1976

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Footnotes

*

This article is based on a paper read to the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, Santa Barbara, California, April 5, 1975.

References

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3 The first was Arnot, R. Page, William Morris: A Vindication (London, 1934)Google Scholar, a 30-page pamphlet. The most recent—and lengthiest—Meier, Paul, La Pensee Utopique de William Morris (Paris, 1972)Google Scholar. See also Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London, 1958), pp. 167–68.Google Scholar

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7 As has, of course, been noted, in various formulations, by many observers. “England has managed to modernize herself,” one of the most recent of these has concluded, “…and yet, in so many ways, for both better and worse, has changed far less than one would have imagined possible.…” Stansky, Peter, England Since 1867 (New York, 1973), p. 175.Google Scholar

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46 “The Great Morris,” Time and Tide, 15 (1934):320.Google Scholar

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48 See his several volumes of collected speeches, from On England (1926) to Service of Our Lives (1937).

49 See, for example, At Home and Abroad (London, 1936), p. 11Google ScholarPubMed. The essays and speeches in this volume were written between 1925 and 1935.

50 The Economic Consequences of Progress (London, 1934), pp. 209–10.Google ScholarPubMed

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55 Portsmouth Evening News, June 5, 1940.

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61 Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London. 1958), p. 155Google Scholar. See. for instance, Eugene Le Mire. The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, introduction.

62 London, 1947. Appropriately, Meynell had previously written on country cottages and “country ways.”

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