From WolfWikis

ENG 463

Benjamin Abbott

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Topics 2.1 Class, Tradition, and Money 2.2 Working Life 2.3 Science and the Urban World 2.4 Government and the Law 2.5 House, Food, and Clothes 2.6 Family and Social Rituals 2.7 Education 2.8 Health and Medicine 2.9 Holidays, Sports, and Recreation 2.10 Religion and Reform 2.11 Morality 2.12 England and Empire 3 References 4 Sources

Introduction

Basic information about William Morris on the web:

• Wikipedia entry: William Morris
• Victorian Web: Brief Biography of William Morris

Topics

All topics are based on chapter titles of Sally Mitchell's Daily Life in Victorian England (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).

Class, Tradition, and Money

As a committed socialist by 1883, William Morris held decidedly unusual views about class and money. There has been much scholarly debate about the exact nature of Morris’s socialism, especially its relationship to his Romanticism and art. Though not an anarchist, Morris’s creative and political works show he favored a more decentralized form of socialism. He mixed Marxism with his love of medieval and Gothic culture and aesthetics.

Morris’s synthesis of these values can be seen in The Glittering Plain, a fantasy story published in 1891. As Ruth Kinna writes, in this story and other written late in his life, Morris “underlined the continuity between his own struggle for communism and the age-old utopian struggle for fellowship and equality.”^[1] Cleveland by the Sea, the community of The Glittering Plain’s hero, Hallblithe, reflects Morris’s vision of an ideal society. The nature and details of this society appear subtly as the story unfolds, as Morris skillfully blends fantasy and social commentary. At the start of the story, when Hallblithe sees three travelers approaching, he says to them:

Ye are way-worn, and maybe ye have to ride further; so light down and come into the house, and take bite and sup, and hay and corn also for your horses; and then if ye needs must ride on your way, depart when ye are rested; or else if ye may, abide here night-long, and go your way to-morrow, and meantime that which is ours shall be yours, and all shall be free to you.^[2]

Hallblithe offers these complete strangers whatever they need. No exchange of money is involved or even contemplated. The goods in question are communal; there is no indication of individual property. After some intercourse with the travelers, Hallblithe says:

And as for Lord, I know not this word, for here dwell we, the sons of the Raven, in good fellowship, with our wives that we have wedded, and our mothers who have borne us, and our sisters who serve us.^[3]

As well as having communal property, generously given to strangers, Hallblithe’s society lacks class divisions. All the sons of the Raven live together as equals. They have no lords, no aristocrats, among them. It is an egalitarian association of free men. In the story, Morris contrasts Cleveland by the Sea and its virtues with the Glittering Plain, a land of immortals ruled by a king. Men and women could gain eternal youth by entering the land and subjecting themselves to its king, but lost their individuality and freedom in the process. The parallels are rather distant, but the society of the Glittering Plain shows some of the negative qualities Morris ascribed to capitalism. Most notably, he considered it to be a dehumanizing system, leading to a similar loss of identity and liberty as remaining in the Glittering Plain.

Though born into a solidly middle-class family and educated at Oxford, Morris, at least later in life, had no taste for his country’s class structure and industrial capitalist economy. He struggled for society freed of such restrictions, where fellowship and creativity could flourish.

Working Life

As a socialist, Morris considered most of the work of his age to be ugly, dirty, and dehumanizing. He thought that capitalism and industrialization had driven all the art and pleasure out of work. As Ruth Kinna writes, "Morris's critique of capitalism was designed to show how the development of modern production techniques had destroyed the conditions for art's creation."^[4] He rejected capitalism largely because he felt capitalism rejected art. This principle is key to understanding Morris's view of work.

His opinion of the working life of his time is clear in News From Nowhere, the work detailing Morris's utopian vision. In the text, a nineteenth-century Englishman travels forward in time and sees the England of the future and its radically different social structure. For example, describing the history of England, Hammond, one of the guides describing this future England, says, "It then became a country of huge and foul workshops and fouler gambling-dens, surrounded by an ill-kept, poverty-stricken farm, pillaged by the masters of the workshops."^[5]

Later on, in describing the transition into capitalism, Hammond says the following:

Why, then, once they had forced themselves to stagger along under this horrible burden of unnecessary production, it became impossible for them to look upon labour and its results from any other point of view than one - to wit, the ceaseless endeavour to expend the least possible amount of labour on any article made and yet at the same time to make as many articles as possible. To this `cheapening of production,' as it was called, everything was sacrificed: the happiness of the workman at his work, nay, his most elementary comfort and bare health, his food, his clothes, his dwelling, his leisure, his amusement, his education" - his life, in short - did not weigh a grain of sand in the balance against this dire necessity of `cheap production' of things, a great part of which were not worth producing at all.^[6]

So, in Morris's view, the horrible material conditions of nineteenth-century capatialism went hand-in-hand with the decline of the moral and intellectual value of creation. Morris believed capitalism had seriously undermined art. The same system that exploited workers' bodies also removed all beauty from production. According to Morris, Capitalism's fierce competition and focus on volume of sales made almost everything ugly and often useless as well.

In News From Nowhere, When the narrator asks why people work, Hammond responds as follows:

"Plenty of reward," said he - "the reward of creation. The wages which God gets, as people might have said time agone. If you are going to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the begetting of children."

Science and the Urban World

Morris disliked many aspects of technology and urban development. He considered these supposed advances dirty and ugly. This connects to his belief that capitalism cheapened the value of craft by focusing on mass production of often low-quality items. Machines, of course, were key for mass production. In many cases, these machines used and emitted harmful chemicals, the exposure to which caused countless health problems among factor workers and even city dwellers in general.

In News From Nowhere, Morris writes the following exchange between the narrator and Hammond, his guide to future England:

His estimate of the life of the nineteenth century made me catch my breath a little; and I said feebly, "But the labour-saving machines?"

"Heyday!" quoth he. "What's that you are saying? the labour-saving machines? Yes, they were meant to `save labour' (or, to speak more plainly, the lives of men) on one piece of work in order that it might be expended - I will say wasted - on another, probably useless, piece of work. Friend, all their devices for cheapening labour simply resulted in increasing the burden of labour.^[7]

As this passage shows, Morris thought that technology often created undeeded and ugly solutions to problems that could be solved more simply. Even when machines did save labor, the system of capitalism and its endless thirst for production meant workers would simply be assigned some other unpleasant task. Again from News From Nowhere, Morris writes:

"You see, guest, this is not an age of inventions. The last epoch did all that for us, and we are now content to use such of its inventions as we find handy and leaving those alone which we don't want. I believe, as a matter of fact, that some time ago (I can't give you a date) some elaborate machinery was used for the locks, though people did not go so far as try to make water run uphill. However it was troublesome, I suppose, and the simple hatches, and the gates, with a big counterpoising beam, were found to answer every purpose, and were easily mended when wanted with material always to hand: so here they are, as you see."

"Besides," said Dick, "this kind of lock is pretty, as you see; and I can't help thinking that your machine-lock, winding up like a watch, would have been ugly and would have spoiled the look of the river: and that is surely reason enough for keeping such locks as these."^[8]

These passage reflects Morris's disdain for the aesthetic qualities of nineteenth-century technology. Even where machines might have been more efficient than older methods, the older ways were more attractive. Also:

He told us also that the townspeople who came into the country used to pick up the agricultural arts by carefully watching the way in which the machines worked, gathering an idea of handicraft from machinery; because at that time almost everything was done by elaborate machines used quite unintelligently by the labourers.^[9]

Also, Hammond says:

So that it may be fairly said that the great achievement of the nineteenth century was the making of machines which were wonders of invention, skill, and patience, and which were used for the production of measureless quantities of worthless make-shifts.^[10]

However, Morris did not completely reject even machines. In News From Nowhere, the utopian society of the future still used a few machines. Hammond says:

Moreover, as aforesaid, we have now found out what we want; and as we are not driven to make a vast quantity of useless things, we have time and resources enough to consider our pleasure in making them. All work which would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery; and in all work which it is a pleasure to do by hand machinery is done without.^[11]

Government and the Law

Morris's opinions about the law of his time can be seen in his play, The Tables Turned; or, Numpkins Awakened. As Morris scholar Pamela Bracken Wiens writes, "Morris's opinion of the government and the judicial system is evident in his satiric portrayal of 'a court of justice in The Tables Turned." The play paints the picture of a court completely biased in favor of the upper classes. It begins with a gentleman, Mr. La-di-da, sentenced to a month in jail for robbing the widow and orphan. The judge, Justice Numpkins, says the following:

I repeat I do not wish to make your sentence any heavier by forcing a hard construction upon it. I give you a week to make arrangements necessary for your peace of mind and your bodily comfort.^[12]

It was common practice for members of the upper classes to use their financial resources to make such a punishment little more than a minor inconvenience. The injustice of the situation is highlighted by the case brought before the court in the play, that of Mary Pinch. She is a poor woman accused, probably falsely, of stealing three loaves of bread. When addressing her, Justice Numpkins rhetorically supports the even application of the law. He says, "We all have our troubles to bear, and you must bear your share of them without offending against the laws of your - the equal laws that are made for rich and poor alike."^[13]

The course of the case, however, and the constrast with the previous one, makes it clear that the law is not applied evenly to rich and poor. About the previous case, Numpkins says:

Mr. La-di-da, if you were less self-restrained, less respectful, less refined, less of a gentleman, in short, I might point out to you with more or less severity the disastrous consquences of your conduct; but I cannot doubt, from the manner in which you have borne yourself during the whole of this trail, that you are fully impressed with the seriousness of the occasion.^[14]

Numpkin is moved by Mr. La-di-da's status and behavior. His offense would be more serious if it had been committed by a person of lower station. This conflicts with the advice he gives to the jury in the Pinch case. Numpkin says:

Dismiss all these non-essentials from your minds, gentlemen, and consider the evidence only; and show this mistaken woman the true majesty of English Law by acquitting her - if you are not satisfied with the abundant, clear, and obviously unbiased evidence, put before you with that terseness and simplicity of diction which distinguishes our noble civil force.^[15]

The court, as Morris describes it, is in fact profoundly biased in favor the rich. After Pinch is convicted of stealing the bread, Numpkins says the following:

Convicted of such a serious offence, this is not the time and place to reproach you with other misconduct; and yet I could almost regret that it is not possible to put you once more in the dock, and try you for conspiracy and incitement to riot; as in my own mind I have no doubt that you are in collusion with the ruffianly revolutionists, who, judging from their accent, are foreigners of a low type, and who, while this case has been proceeding have been stimulating their bloodstained souls to further horrors by the most indecent verbal violence.^[16]

He sentences Pinch to eighteen months of hard labour, which contrasts dramatically with the light sentence Mr. La-di-da recieved. Morris viewed the law primarily as a means reinforcing the established unjust order.

House, Food, and Clothes

Morris considered a house to be a work of art. As an architect, he appreciated the design of a building as well as its decoration. Morris and his family spent a great deal of time, money, and effort in decorating their summer home, Kelmscott Manor. Morris loved the old house, and he was annoyed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's complaints about it. The home and its decorations were important to Morris. This comes through in writings. For example wrote a poem about the bed at Kelmscott Manor, which his daughter and wife decorated. Morris writies:

The wind's on the wold

And the night is a-cold,

And Thames runs chill

Twixt mead and hill,

But kind and dear

Is the old house here,

And my heart is warm

Midst winter's harm.

Rest then and rest,

And think of the best

Twixt summer and spring

When all birds sing

In the town of the tree,

As ye lie in me

And scarce dare move

Lest earth and its love

Should fade away

Ere the full of the day.

I am old and have seen

Many things that have been,

Both grief and peace,

And wane and increase.

No tale I tell

Of ill or well,

But this I say,

Night treadeth on day,

And for worst and best

Right good is rest.^[17]

As the poem suggests, Morris appreciated the long history of the bed and of Kelmscott Manor in general, which was built in the sixteenth century. The house pleased Morris's aesthetic sensibilities. He considered it the work of master craftsman. He especially liked how the house was in harmony with both nature and the community. Morris praised buidings that seemed in tune with nature, almost more grown than built. In "Gossip About an Old House on the Upper Thames," he writes the following about Kelmscott Manor:

Here then are a few words about a house that I love; with a reasonable love I think: for though my words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I assure you that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown up out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it; needing no grand office-architect, with no great longing for anything else than correctness, and to be like Julius Caesar; but some thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of the meadow and acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much let us hope) of common sense, a liking for making materials serve ones turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment.^[18]

Family and Social Rituals

Morris envisioned a radically different family structure than the one common in Victorian England. He rejected the institution of marriage itself, the foundation of Victorian society. Explaining their views, Morris and Bax wrote the following:

The present marriage system is based on the general supposition of economic dependence of the woman on the man, and the consquent necessity for his making provision for her, which she can legally enforce. This basis would disappear with the advent of social economic freedom, and no binding contract would be necessary between the parties as regards livelihood; while property in children would cease to exist, and every infant that came into the world would be born into full citizenship, and would enjoy all its advantages, whatever the conduct of its parernts might be.^[19]

In this system, marriage is a primarily economic arrangement. Freed of economic considerations, Morris believed unbreakable monogamous sexual relationships would fade way. Morris and Bax suggest what is basically a system of free love, in which unions are based on mutual attraction and last only as long as that emotion does. They describe it as follows:

Thus a new development of the family would take place, on the basis, not of a predetermined lifelong business arrangement, to be formally and nominally held to, irrespective of circumstances, but on mutual inclination and affection, an association terminable at the will of either party. At present, in this country at least, a legal and quasi moral offence has to be committed before the obviously unworkable contract can be set aside.^[20]

Underlining the radical character of this position on sexual relationships and family structure, Kinna writes, "Indeed, Morris even supported free love where couples had produced children."^[21] About the new system, Morris and Bax write the following:

There would be no vestige of reprobation weighing on the dissolution of one tie and the forming of another. For the abhorrence of the oppression of the man by the woman or the woman by the man (both of which continually happen to-day under the aegis of our would-be moral institutions) willl certainly be an essential outcome of the ethics of the New Society.^[22]

In his personal life, it is interesting to note that Morris's wife, Jane Burden, had affairs with at last two men: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Morris knew about her relationship with Ressetti and had forgiven both of them. It is interesting to think how this personal circumstances may have influenced Morris's view of marriage. Perhaps his support of free love made him less inclined to take action against his wife for her affairs. He seems have been upset her relationships, but did not confront Rossetti or Blunt about it. Indeed, while Rossetti was with his wife at Kelmscott Manor, Morris went off to Iceland. This could be because, as a socialist, Morris did not believe he owned his wife; rather, he considered her free to make her own choices, even if they hurt him. ^[23]

Education

As he spent time in Marlborough College and Oxford, Morris had considerable experience with the educational establishment of his day. According to News From Nowhere, Morris had little respect for this educational system. He considered it an unjust, coercive tool of capitalism, designed to mold people into cowed supporters of the existing order.

Speaking to the story's narrator, Hammond says the following in News From Nowhere:

But of course I understand your point of view about education, which is that of times past, when `the struggle for life,' as men used to phrase it (i.e., the struggle for a slave's rations on one side, and for a bouncing share of the slave-holders' privilege on the other), pinched `education' for most people into a niggardly dole of not very accurate information; something to be swallowed by the beginner in the art of living whether he liked it or not, and was hungry for it or not: and which had been chewed and digested over and over again by people who didn't care about it in order to serve it out to other people who didn't care about it.^[24]

In this passage, Hammond paints an extremely negative picture of eduction under capitalism. The struggle for survival made education both rigid and trivial. Continuing to expound on the problem, Hammond says the following:

But, however, to put it in a cooler way: you expected to see children thrust into schools when they had reached an age conventionally supposed to be the due age, whatever their varying faculties and dispositions might be, and when there, with like disregard to facts, to be subjected to a certain conventional course of `learning'. My friend, can't you see that such a proceeding means ignoring the fact of growth, bodily and mental? No one could come out of such a mill uninjured; and those only would avoid being crushed by it who would have the spirit of rebellion strong in them. Fortunately most children have had that at all times, or I do not know that we should ever have reached our present position. Now you see what it all comes to. In the old times all this was the result of poverty. In the nineteenth century, society was so miserably poor, owing to the systematised robbery on which it was founded that real education was impossible for anybody. The whole theory of their so called education was that it was necessary to shove a little information into a child, even if it were by means of torture, and accompanied by twaddle which it was well known was of no use, or else he would lack information lifelong: the hurry of poverty forbade anything else. All that is past; we are no longer hurried, and the information lies ready to each one's hand when his own inclinations impel him to seek it. In this as in other matters we have become wealthy: we can afford to give ourselves time to grow.^[25]

Here Hammond (and, by extension, Morris) argues for a more natural and holistic approach to education. He says that different people have different needs and different rates of growth. Capitalism, in its typically mechanical fashion, tried to force everyone to learn the same thing at the same thing. Indeed, Hammond explicitly compares the educational system to mill. Capitalist education treated humans as if they products in a factory. According to Morris, that tactic is deeply flawed. It comes from the poverty associated with capitalism. The struggle for survival created by capitalism made it required to force certain bits of supposedly useful information on children.

In a wealthy society, the ideal one of News From Nowhere, such coercion is unheard of. In the text, the rejection of force is almost universal. The society encourages freedom. Hammond even praises the rebelliousness of children. Consider the contrast between Morris's view and common Victorian ideas about discipline and respectibility.

Health and Medicine

In News From Nowhere, Morris connects disease with the old capitalist society and beauty with health. For example, Hammond says to the narrator, "You must remember, also that we are long-lived, and that therefore beauty both in man and woman is not so fleeting as it was in the days when we were burdened so heavily by self-inflicted diseases.^[26] Here Hammond suggests much sickness was directly caused by the poor living conditions of workers under capitalism. This a fairly reasonable assertion. Sally Mitchell writes about malnutrition, overcrowding, overworking, and dangerous work environments shorted the lives nineteenth-century labourers. People from the country were widely and correctly believed to be more healthy than city dwellers.^[27]

Morris certainly seems to have thought that country life promoted health. In News From Nowhere, health and beauty also tied to exercise and work. Ellen says, "You, grandfather, have done no hard work for years now, but wander about and read your books and have nothing to worry you; and as for me, I work hard when I like it, because I like it, and think it does me good, and knits up my muscles, and makes me prettier to look at, and healthier and happier."^[28] This is consistent with the Victorian notion that country people, doing vigorous work in clean air, were the healthiest. However, it goes against traditional ideas about how women of certain classes should not perform manual labor. Morris seems to have believed that all people should engage in enjoyable physical work.

He did not, of course, encourage overworking, a chronic problem in capitialism. According to Morris, the structure of the capitalist society of his day led to sickness and ugliness. Overworking was a key cause of this. Ellen says the following:

But in those past days you, grandfather, would have had to work hard after you were old; and would have been always afraid of having to be shut up in a kind of prison along with other old men, half-starved and without amusement. And as for me, I am twenty years old. In those days my middle age would be beginning now, and in a few years I should be pinched, thin, and haggard, beset with troubles and miseries, so that no one could have guessed that I was once a beautiful girl.^[29]

In this fashion, Morris criticizes capitalism for forcing both the young and the eldery to work unhealthful amounts in dangerous conditions. He connects this overworking with the loss of beauty, arguing that a healthier society would lead to significantly more beauty among its people.

Holidays, Sports, and Recreation

In News From Nowhere, Hammond describes one of the holidays of the new society. He says:

Once a year, on May-day, we hold a solemn feast in those easterly communes of London to commemorate The Clearing of Misery, as it is called. On that day we have music and dancing, and merry games and happy feasting on the site of some of the worst of the old slums, the traditional memory of which we have kept. On that occasion the custom is for the prettiest girls to sing some of the old revolutionary songs, and those which were the groans of the discontent, once so hopeless, on the very spots where those terrible crimes of class-murder were committed day by day for so many years.^[30]

Morris seems to have favored simple, natural forms of recreation, such as singing, dancing, feasting, and enjoying the beauty of the outdoors. For Morris, the creation of art of all kinds was surely the greatest pleasure. He believed work should be enjoyable, and that it was the coercion inherent in system of capitalism that prevented people from taking pleasure in work. This views appears in News From Nowhere. In the story, Dick says, "Excuse me, neighbours, but I can't help it. Fancy people not liking to work! - it's too ridiculous."^[31] Hammond explains this view of work in detail. He says the following:

This, that all work is now pleasureable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable habit, as in the case with what you may call mechanical work; and lastly (and most of our work is of this kind) because there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work itself; it is done, that is, by artists.^[32]

Thus, in Morris's view, pleasant work, especially when done along with friends, was the chief form of recreation. In the ideal society in News From Nowhere, people amuse themselves by doing whatever type of work they personally favor. The Hammond's standards, anyone who creates anything is an artist, at least if he or she takes pleasure in the work and does it well. In this view, creation is its own reward. This is how addresses the problem of incentive to work under communism in News From Nowhere. It is easy to see why he would have put forth such an idea, as it is consistent with his own attitude toward work. Morris was always busy, working on some project or another. He lead an extremely productive life. He surely found work pleasurable himself.

Religion and Reform

Earlier in his life, Morris expressed religious sentiment. He even initially intended to take Holy Orders at one point in his life. His belief seems to have changed by the time became known as a socialist. Wilfrid Blunt wrote that Morris had lost his faith in the supernatural by the late 1880s. Their relationship cemented Blunt's abandonment of religion.^[33] Morris's support of free love and rejection of marriage, discussed in a previous section, certainly conflicted with any sort of Christian doctrine on the subject. Such views provide more evidence that Morris mostly gave up religion later in his life. In News From Nowhere, Morris connects religion with capitalist oppression. Hammond says:

It seems, then, my son, that the government by law-courts and police, which was the real government of the nineteenth century, was not a great success even to the people of that day, living under a class system which proclaimed inequality and poverty as the law of God and the bond which held the world together.

Morris and Bax write:

As regards the future form of the moral consciousness, we may safely predict that it will be in a sense a return on a higher level to the ethics of the older world, with the difference that the limitation of scope to the kinship group in its narrower sense, which was one of the causes of the dissolution of ancient society, will disappear, and the identification of individual with social interests will be so complete that any divorce between the two will be inconceivable to the average man.^[34]

Morris and Bax write the following:

It will be noticed that we have above been speaking of religion and morality as distinct from one another. But the religion of Socialism will be but the ordinary ethics carried into a higher atmosphere, and will only differ from them in degree of conscious responsibility to one's fellows. Socialistic Ethics would be the guide of our daily habit of life; socialistic religion would be that higher form of conscience that would impel us to action on behalf of a future of the race, such as no man could command in his ordinary mode.^[35]

All of this leaves little room for Christian religion in the society Morris and Bax describe.

In a letter to readers of the Commonweal, Morris writes the following about the future communist society:

Communism also will have to keep itself free of superstition. Its ethics will have to be based on the recognition of natural cause and effect, and not on rules derived from a priori ideas of the relation of man to the universe or some imagined ruler of it; and from these two things, the equality of condition and the recognition of the cause and effect of material nature, will grow all Communistic life.Norman Kelvin, ed., The Collected Letters of William Morris (New Jersey: 1996), 62.

Here Morris argues for a secular morality.

Morality

As described in the above section, Morris had different ideas about mortality than most Victorians. His views on marriage and loss of faith surely would have shocked and disgusted many. For Morris, the most important type of morality was empathizing with others and working for social change. From his socialist perspective, the system itself was immoral. Because of this, he criticized the common Victorian charitable works in inadequate diversions. In a letter to H. M. Hyndman, Morris writes the following:

Many schemes are on foot for removing the discontent which our masters are beginning to feel as a burden on them and a threat also; between the preaching of thrift to day-labourers, and the making of the world happy by the aggregation of all fiscal burdens into the single tax; from the Charity Organisation Society to Mr. Henry George,--there are many and many idiotic evasions on foot; all of which have for their basis the improvememnt of the condition of the pooor, at their own expense, for the peace and happiness of their masters.^[36]

Morris thought the charitable work many Victorians took part in was basically a distraction from the root cause of poverty and other problems: capitalism. By slightly improving the status of workers without question to system itself, such charity could streghten the grip of the established order by reducing discontent. While seemingly moral, Morris such charity as deeply misguided. Morris considered it critical to look at the big picture.

Morris stressed the importance of the social ethics for the ideal communist society. In a letter to readers of the Commonweal, Morris writes the following:

Surely we all of us feel that there is a rascal or two in each of our skins besides the other or two who want to lead manly and honourable lives, and do we not want something to appeal to on behalf of those better selvers of ours? and that something is made up of the aspirations of our better selves, and is the moral conscience without which there can be no true society, and which even a false society is forced to imitate, and so have a sham social conscience, - what we sometimes call hypocrisy.^[37]

England and Empire

Morris strongly condemned imperialism as yet another horrible aspect of capitalism. He saw it as mainly driven by capitalism's apparently endless need for new markets. Morris associated imperialism with mass production and loss of art in work that he so hated. In News From Nowhere, Hammond expounds on this view, saying the following:

The appetite of the World-Market grew with what it fed on: the countries within the ring of `civilisation' (that is organised misery) were glutted with the abortions of the market, and force and fraud were used unsparingly to `open up' countries outside that pale. This process of `opening up' is a strange one to those who have read the professions of the men of that period and do not understand their practice; and perhaps shows us at its worst the great vice of the nineteenth century, the use of hypocrisy and cant to evade the responsibility of vicarious ferocity. When the civilised World-Market coveted a country not yet in its clutches some transparent pretext was found - the suppression of a slavery different from, and not so cruel as that of commerce; the pushing of a religion no longer believed in by its promoters; the `rescue' of some desperado or homicidal madman whose misdeeds had got him into trouble amongst the natives of the `barbarous' country - any stick, in short, which would beat the dog at all.^[38]

In this passage, Morris singles out imperialism as perhaps the worst expression of nineteenth-century capitalism. He accuses Western rulers of hypocrisy on all fronts, rejecting any kind of pretext for war as dishonest. This is consistent with his belief that capatialism drove imperialistic expansion, not the desire to spread Christianity and promote justice. The passage even questions the idea that the West is superior to supposedly barbarous. It suggests that those outside the sphere of the market are better off. This was, of course, a radical view of England's cherished and vaunted empire. Morris, through Hammond, continues the critique. Hammond says the following:

Then some bold, unprincipled, ignorant adventurer was found (no difficult task in the days of competition), and he was bribed to `create a market' by breaking up whatever traditional society there might be in the doomed country, and by destroying whatever leisure or pleasure he found there. He forced wares on the natives which they did not want, and took their natural products in `exchange', as this form of robbery was called, and thereby he `created new wants', to supply which (that is, to be allowed to live by their new masters) the hapless helpless people had to sell themselves into the slavery of hopeless toil so that they might have something wherewith to purchase the nullities of `civilisation.'^[39]

This passage cleary assigns moral superiority to the victims of imperialism. From Morris's point of view, traditional societies, while lacking in many ways, were still better than England's wild capitalism. He assigns only negative effects to imperialism. The colonized countries do not benefit. Instead, they are robbed and forced to fight. In all, these lines from News From Nowhere are a compact but thorough attack on Western imperialism.

References

1. ↑ Ruth Kinna, William Morris: The Art of Socialism (Cardiff: 2000), 185.
2. ↑ William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain. Online at Marxists Internet Archive.
3. ↑ William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain. Online at Marxists Internet Archive.
4. ↑ Ruth Kinna, William Morris: The Art of Socialism (Cardiff: 2000), 122.
5. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
6. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
7. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
8. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
9. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
10. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
11. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
12. ↑ William Morris, The Tables Turned, or Numpkins Awakened: A Socialist Interlude by William Morris (Athens, Ohio: 1994), 35.
13. ↑ William Morris, The Tables Turned, or Numpkins Awakened: A Socialist Interlude by William Morris (Athens, Ohio: 1994), 42.
14. ↑ William Morris, The Tables Turned, or Numpkins Awakened: A Socialist Interlude by William Morris (Athens, Ohio: 1994), 33-34.
15. ↑ William Morris, The Tables Turned, or Numpkins Awakened: A Socialist Interlude by William Morris (Athens, Ohio: 1994), 43.
16. ↑ William Morris, The Tables Turned, or Numpkins Awakened: A Socialist Interlude by William Morris (Athens, Ohio: 1994), 44-45.
17. ↑ William Morris, For the Bed at Kelmscott, accessed on March 23, 2007 at J.R. Burrows & Company.
18. ↑ William Morris, "Gossip About an Old House on the Upper Thames," accessed March 23, 2007 at J.R. Burrows & Company.
19. ↑ Morris and Bax, 299.
20. ↑ Morris and Bax, 299-300.
21. ↑ Kinna, 152.
22. ↑ Morris and Bax, 300.
23. ↑ Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (New York: 1980), 278-81, 323.
24. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
25. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
26. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive.
27. ↑ Mitchell, 41-79, 189-208.
28. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive.
29. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
30. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
31. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive
32. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive.
33. ↑ Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (New York: 1980), 278-81, 323.
34. ↑ Morris and Bax, 298.
35. ↑ Morris and Bax, 298-299.
36. ↑ Norman Kelvin, ed., The Collected Letters of William Morris (New Jersey: 1996), 45.
37. ↑ Norman Kelvin, ed., The Collected Letters of William Morris (New Jersey: 1996), 64.
38. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive.
39. ↑ William Morris, News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive.

Sources

J.R. Burrows & Company.

Kelvin, Norman, editor. The Collected Letters of William Morris. New Jersey: 1996.

Kinna, Ruth. William Morris: The Art of Socialism. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000.

Longford, Elizabeth. A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. New York: 1980.

Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Morris, William, and E. Belfort Bax. Socialism: Its Growth & Outcome. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893.

Morris, William. Atalanta's Race: And Other Tales from The Earthly Paradise. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1894.

Morris, William. News From Nowhere. Online at the Marxists Internet Archive.

Morris, William. The Glittering Plain. NJ: Wildside Press, 2001. Online at Marxists Internet Archive.

Morris, William. The Tables Turned: or, Numpkins Awakened. Edited and with an introduction by Pamela Bracken Wiens. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994.

Vallance, Aymer. William Morris: His Art His Writings and His Public Life.