William Morris: the dreamer of dreams

The Paul Richards column

In the third of a weekly series of essays on some of the inspirations for the Labour movement, Paul Richards looks at the Victorian prophet William Morris.

William Morris (1834-96) hated the age he lived in. He hated its architecture, its commerce, its poverty, its politics, its industry, but most of all he hated its individualistic, selfish system of values. At the end of his life he explained:

“The study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of the civilisation which, if things were to stop as they are, would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, and make art a collection of the curiosities of the past.”

He was famously a designer, artist, poet and writer, linked to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and later the Arts and Crafts Movement. He longed for pre-industrial forms of production and craftsmanship, and tried to use traditional methods and ingredients in his workshops (including liberal amounts of arsenic). He wrote long Icelandic sagas, romantic verse and regular columns for leftwing publications. Aneurin Bevan learned to conquer his stammer by learning and reciting long passages of Morris’s poetry.

Morris was a political activist, beguiled (if not completely seduced) by Karl Marx, and involved in the various socialist sects of his time. He left the Social Democratic Foundation (SDF), a quasi-Marxist group, to form the Socialist League in 1885. It ran local branches and a weekly newspaper subsidised by Morris’s profits from selling wallpaper. It was in turn taken over by anarchists, and Morris left. Towards the end of his life, Morris recanted on his opposition to parliamentary routes to socialism, and conceded the need for a single socialist party. His very last lecture in January 1896, in Hammersmith, took as its theme the need for ‘One Socialist Party’. It is doubtful he would have welcomed the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), had he lived to see it. He was suspicious of the socialist purity of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893, which espoused a much more robust, evangelical form of ethical socialism. Despite being influenced by the Christian socialist Charles Kingsley, and going up to Oxford to train for the priesthood, Morris’s religiosity was reserved for socialism. The Labour Party’s blend of liberalism, trade unionism, Fabianism and parliamentarianism (in his News from Nowhere Parliament has become a storage facility for horse manure) would have no doubt had him reaching for his pen.

In 1894, he wrote an account of his political journey in Justice magazine, the publication of the SDF, which he had left some years earlier. How I Became a Socialist explains his starting point:

“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”

The alternative to the ‘filth’ of modernity is socialism, which in Morris’s mind is an agrarian, communistic form of life, with small-scale production, a premium on craftsmanship and artistry, and no state. He defines it:

“What I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brainsick brain workers, nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all – the realisation at last of the meaning of the word COMMONWEALTH.”

I consider his greatest legacy to the Labour movement News from Nowhere (1890), an account of an activist returning home from a branch meeting of the Socialist League in Hammersmith to fall into a deep sleep. When he awakes, he is in the socialist future:

“The soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys were gone; the engineer’s works gone; the lead-works gone; and no sound of riveting and hammering came down from the west wind from Thorneycrofts.”

Hammersmith Bridge is an ornate paragon of craftsmanship; there are salmon in the clear waters of the Thames. The activist is taken on a journey around London, with healthy citizens living in pure equality, no money, no government, no marriage and no politics. The people live in harmony with nature, work because they enjoy it, take pleasure in crafts, and have few conflicts with one another. Morris’s vision echoes Marx’s idea that under communism people would be able ‘to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.’

Unfortunately for women in Nowhere, they still have to do all the housework, bring up the children and serve the men with food, but in Morris’s vision they seem to enjoy it. Morris looked like an Old Testament prophet and fulfils that role in the Labour tradition. His vision is inspiring. His politics are uncompromising. He could be dismissed as utopian or ‘impossibilist’, if it were not for the amount of time, effort and money he expended on what he called ‘practical socialism’: printing newspapers, leaflets and pamphlets, organising meetings, giving lectures and building socialism as a political force, not just a late-Victorian daydream. He called himself a ‘dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time.’ Yet he was also every bit as much a political organiser as Keir Hardie, MacDonald or Bevin. His desire to see an end to mass production and voracious industry, and a return to small-scale local production, seems like a very modern view. His socialism was imbued with environmentalism and an understanding of the brutalising nature of the modern city. He railed against pollution, the destruction of ancient buildings, shoddy goods and poor design. He was a ‘green’ long before the term was invented. One of his very last lectures was for the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, a thoroughly 21st century matter of concern.

His work directly recruited GDH Cole to the cause of socialism, and he has influenced many thousands of socialists since, not to mention designers, writers and poets. Despite years in the most sectarian of political environments, he retained his faith in humankind and an innate sense of decency. WB Yeats wrote of him:

“No man I have ever known was so well loved. He was looked up to as to some worshipped medieval king. People loved him as children are loved. I soon discovered his spontaneity and joy and made him my chief of men.”

Kelsmscott Manor, the Gloucestershire palace to arts and crafts that he shared with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is open to the public. In Bexleyheath you can visit The Red House, which Morris designed and lived in. On Upper Mall in Hammersmith is Kelmscott House, where he died in 1896. Above the coach house, the William Morris Society has created the sign that the traveller sees in News from Nowhere:

“Guests and Neighbours, on the site of this Guest-Hall once stood the lecture room of the Hammersmith Socialists. Drink a glass to the memory! May 1962.”

Paul Richards’s latest book Labour’s Revival is out now.