William Morris

Currently on display at the Morgan Library in NYC is a centenary exhibit of William Morris's arts and crafts called "Being William Morris." It is well worth a trip for people in the greater New York region.

William Morris was part of the "Pre-Raphaelite" school of the late 19th century in England that was founded by John Ruskin and which also included poets Dante Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne. Ruskin was appalled by the ravages of industrialism of his contemporary England and felt deep nostalgia for a more rustic and untroubled past. Specifically this meant the middle ages which he saw filtered and romanticized through the great art of the period rather than through any deep acquaintaince with the social and economic reality.

Morris combined this "reactionary" tendency with unabashed support for socialist revolution. He was also a fervent environmentalist. Morris's love for the culture of the middle ages inspired him to learn the craft techniques of the period, many of which had been forgotten. He was an accomplished printmaker, fabric designer, bookcover designer, etc. He is most famous for his wallpaper designs, which can to this day be purchased from an English company that received a license from Morris and Company when Morris was still alive. You can find them on the Web where they advertise their wares.

Morris foreshadows some of the neo-Luddite tendencies of our contemporaries such as Kirkpatrick Sale. Unlike Sale, Morris did not think that a simple life close to nature was possible without a victorious revolution. In his utopian "News from Nowhere", the citizenry of a 21st century England live an idyllic life and pass the day at simple but rewarding work. They wear clothes that they craft by themselves and food that they grow in their own gardens. This utopian society has been instituted after a violent conflict which left the British bourgeoisie on the late 19th century defeated, powerless and expropriated.

Another dialectically opposed tendency in late 19th century socialist thought can be found in the utopian vision of Edward Bellamy, whose "Looking Backward" projects a future society in which technology and modernization provide plentiful consumer goods and a sharply reduced work-week. Morris found this vision philistine and attacked Bellamy in a review of "Looking Backward" that appears in the Penguin collection of his writings.

One of the questions that I have been preoccupied with over the last several years is the possibility of a "red-green" synthesis. A possible clue to such a synthesis can be found in the writings of Bellamy and Morris, both of whom I am sympathetic to. Isn't it entirely possible that a socialist vision for the 21st century will have to incorporate as much Morris's approach as Bellamy's? Technology should be seen as a means to an end: the unhurried enjoyment of life in a context of natural beauty.