Today was the last day of an exhibition at the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, dedicated to May Morris, Morris's younger daughter. This was the first time I had been to Walthamstow for over 20 years, and it was a welcome opportunity to see the gallery again – and to discover that admission is still free.
The exhibition, not surprisingly, is rather
autobiographical, blending works by May Morris with her politics and her life.
The exhibition was quite small and there was the chance to see the main display
about William Morris himself. In the bookshop there was a very small collection
of books for sale, including the biography of William Morris by Fiona McCarthy
(1994). For someone of my generation, it is impossible to think of William
Morris without the E P Thompson biography, first published in 1955 but
extensively revised in 1976. Which is
the one to read? Each of them is vast (McCarthy, the shorter, is 780 pages).
I discovered reviews of both titles. Broadly speaking, and
simplifying somewhat, McCarthy provides the creative artist without the
politics, and Thompson provides the politics without the creative artist. Does
this matter? Well, according to Terry Eagleton, it does.
There is a TLS review (by James Pope-Hennessy) of the first
edition of E P Thompson’s book that, unsurprisingly for its period, dismisses it. “In spite of
its inordinate length, this is not even a complete study of Morris, for it
largely confines itself to his socialist theories.” This review complains about
Thompson’s lack of impartiality and complains “how fluffy were Morris’s
socialist views” – and claims the prose romances are largely unreadable. For
Pope-Hennessy, “Mr Thompson is too shrill to be persuasive”. This review
betrays its age. For this reviewer, the best approach to Morris is “to deny his
socialism, to forget the prose romances, and remember only the poems, the
textiles, the tapestries, and the typography”.
In contrast, Terry Eagleton’s review engaged more with its
subject. Eagleton claims that Morris is “one of the greatest Marxist cultural theorists
Britain has ever produced, which is not perhaps saying a great deal for British
Marxist cultural theory.” “His achievement was to take the Romantic critique of
industrial capitalism and harness it for the first time to a progressive
political force, the British labour movement. He was thus medievalist and
materialist together”. That sounds more interesting. Eagleton complains that
McCarthy fails “to reflect on his elusive inner being” – whatever that was.
Perhaps Morris was summed up by his external activities.
Perhaps the most balanced judgement is Ruth Levitas, of the
University of Bristol, in a 1996 review. She points to
Thompson’s revision of his biography in 1976. In this revision, “Thompson insists that
Morris is both a utopian and a Marxist, with neither a hyphen or a sense of
contradiction … between the two terms” …. “Morris’s particular contribution was
to sustain this synthesis”. Perhaps there might be a view of Morris that doesn't just see him as the last champion of Ruskinian craftsmanship, before the modern world was overwhelmed by machine manufacture.
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