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William Morris - the incredible life of the man who influenced the Inklings · Mythmakers

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Hello and welcome to the Mithmakers Podcast.
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Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy, my name is Julia Golding, I'm an author
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but also I don't direct her of the centre.
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Now here's a little quote for you, see if you recognise it.
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This is the great story of the North, which should be to all our race, what the tale
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of Troy was to the Greeks.
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Now perhaps some of you are sitting there thinking that J.R.R. Tolkien talking about Lord
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of the Rings where he wanted to write a story for the North, but actually it's by William
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Morris, his Victorian predecessor, and today we're going to spend time with William Morris
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in this podcast.
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And to tell us through this enormous subject because William Morris was a man of so many
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talents, we just couldn't possibly cover them all, is Dr. Ingrid Hanson, who is a lecturer
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of English literature at the University of Manchester and also a very old friend of mine,
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so hello Ingrid.
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Hi, nice to be here, Julia.
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So first of all, let's put William Morris in context.
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He's a figure that people may have heard about, but they may not know him so much as a writer.
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Looking up his dates, if I've got this right, he was born in around 1834 and lived to 1896.
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But let's think about him first as a poet and prose writer.
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So can you give a little sketch of the range of his works under that title?
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Absolutely.
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So I'll just kind of dive in for a moment where you started, which is to say that, yeah,
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in the 1870s, and then I'll go backwards to the beginning, but in the 1870s,
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Maurice got really excited about Iceland and Icelandic literature.
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So that quotation is about the saga of the Valsums, which he translated with Icelandic scholar,
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Erika Moundsson, and he also went to Iceland, and then later produced an epic Icelandic poem
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telling the story of the Valsums and the Nibblums called,
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Sigurd the Valsums and the fall of the Nibblums.
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So he first translated the saga with Moundsson, called Valsums saga,
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and then he wrote his own version of it.
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That's in kind of the middle of Maurice's career that Sigurd the Valsum comes out in 1876.
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But let's go back to where he started.
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So yes, he was born in 1834 into a kind of upper middle class family.
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His father had made a load of money in a mining interest called Devon Consoles.
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And Maurice was sent to a minor public school, I think it's a minor, Marlborough,
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and I wish he hated, called it a boy farm, spent all his time escaping
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and getting out into the countryside, having a look at historical buildings
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and old barrows on the hillsides and so on.
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And then he went up to Oxford in 1852 or 53,
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and 53 I think he actually went up and to read greats.
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But it was there that he met the Edward Bern Jones,
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who of course became a very well-known artist,
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and a group of other young men with whom he got really excited about literature.
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And so Maurice had written a few things early on in his undergraduate life.
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There's a few poems that he wrote then.
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And he started reading Malarie's more doth,
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and that really excited him, as well as Ruskin, the artist and art critic.
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And also Tennyson, Browning, and all kinds of other writers of the day.
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He and his friends used to read them out loud to each other.
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Or at least Maurice did most of the reading out loud.
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He was very keen on reading and less keen on listening.
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Yes, go on.
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Could I ask you about the group of friends?
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Did they have a name?
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So, because obviously Tolkien and Lewis,
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who we often talk about on these podcasts,
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name themselves the Inklings.
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I'm just wondering if there's a precursor inklings
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also in Oxford that we've forgotten about.
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I mean, it was very much that kind of group.
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They didn't really have a name.
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They started off wanting to call themselves the Brotherhood,
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and they temporarily called themselves the Brotherhood.
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Edward Bernjohn said, we must take segala haves our model.
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And they thought about having us.
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At that time, very early on,
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Maurice was thinking about going into the church,
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and they were thinking they were influenced by
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our fury and ideas of Brotherhood,
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and also an idea of a kind of holy fellowship.
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But they very quickly dropped that actually,
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and instead poured that kind of Brotherhood energy
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into a magazine called the Oxford and Cambridge magazine.
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It was called the Oxford and Cambridge,
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because although almost all of them were Oxford,
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there were a couple of Vernon Lushington and his brother,
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were at Cambridge, and a couple of others
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who were part of that sort of Brotherhood as it were.
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But they didn't, so they didn't end up calling themselves
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the Brotherhood.
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They started the Oxford and Cambridge magazine,
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which they brought out in 1856, 12 issues in 1856.
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That's as long as it lasted.
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And when Maurice looked back on it later,
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he wrote to somebody later in about 1868,
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I think he'd written to him asking about starting
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his own magazine, and Maurice said,
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oh, I wish you hadn't looked at it really,
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it wasn't that great.
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But that's where he published his first work,
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which was a series of short stories, actually.
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He published a few poems in there,
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but also wonderful short romances.
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One of them, which is about a church,
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a builder, or a decorator, carving designs
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on a church in the Middle Ages,
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and one of his friends coming back from the Crusades,
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who's also the lover of his wife.
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So a lot of those stories are where you start to see Maurice
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is interested in the work of the hands,
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in the relationship between art, architecture, landscape,
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and romantic relationships, but also relationships
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of Brotherhood, so the narrator of that story,
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and Amiart, the friend who come back,
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are obviously really close and loving,
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and that idea of male friendship
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runs through Maurice's work.
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So there's a series of books.
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You can see the influence of Ruskin, as well,
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with the idea of the medieval craftsman,
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which is like his ideal idea of creativity for a public use,
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but also having an individual imprint, as opposed to the era
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in the Victorian times, when you're getting mass produced things,
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which remove the individual expression.
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So it's all part of a reaction to industrialization
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amongst other things.
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Yes, completely.
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So that obsession with the Arthurian stories
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and the past is about saying, yes, the way things are now,
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what Bernard Jones called an article,
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Kant and hypocrisy, and a kind of sense of people
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being removed.
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In a way, it removed also from their bodily experience.
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So Maurice is always, I mean, hands are huge,
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and he's working another one of those stories,
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girthers, lovers.
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We have lots of different iterations of people's hands
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and how their hands, the way that their hands are,
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show what kind of people they are.
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And he himself is going, as he writes to one of his friends,
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I went to Brassing the other day.
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So he loves going and rubbing grasses in churches.
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And so that physical contact with the past
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and with story and myth is really important for Maurice.
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And so then once he finishes Oxford,
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and the Oxford and Cambridge magazine
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closes, he publishes in 1858 his first collection
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of poetry, The Defense of Guinevere and Other Poems.
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So a lot of those are Arthurian, they're all medieval.
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All his stories, actually, in Oxford and Cambridge magazine,
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are set in the distant past, apart from one
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called Frank Sealed Letter, which is in the contemporary moment,
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very rare for Maurice.
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He's got a couple of other things that are contemporary,
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but they're almost all in the past.
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Could we just have a little pause?
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As I said, there's so much to talk about.
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But I just want to pause so people
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do note The Defense of Guinevere, which
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is such an interesting text, particularly
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because it is putting quite a feminist spin.
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You might think all these buff-looking Victorian gents
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of beards are all going to be very anti-women.
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But of course, Maurice was not at all.
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He is an equal opportunities person at heart.
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And his defense of Guinevere is pleading her case
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from her point of view, if I'm correct.
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Catch you with us.
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I'm not the expert.
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You tell us about The Defense of Guinevere in Guinevere.
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It's a fascinating poem.
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And I think there's a number of things going on there.
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I think there is a really interesting proto-feminist reading
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going on, although there are also
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some more complicated males, men looking at women,
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looking beautiful matters going on.
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So it starts, but it starts off giving Guinevere a voice.
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I love that.
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It starts in the middle of the action
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where Guinevere is on trial for her adultery with Lancelot
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and it starts off, but knowing now
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that they would have her speech through her wet hair backward
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from her brow, her hand, close to her mouth touching her.
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This incredibly associated had there a shameful blow.
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So this wonderful immediately kind of we see her body.
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And the kind of distance is those she had had there
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a shameful blow, but she feels she must a little touch it.
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So it's a Tertzerima poem as well,
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which means that the three line stanzas
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and the middle line of one stanza
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links to the first line of the next stanza
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in terms of the rhymes.
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And that's a form that was used by Dante.
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So it's reaching back to Dante in the 15th century as well.
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And it's so knowing now that they would have her speak
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for quite a few lines, Guinevere doesn't.
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I love that beginning.
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She takes her own time.
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And then when we do get to her speaking,
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she does a fantastic thing where she says,
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you know, I know that you're all great lords.
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And I ought to apologize for what I've done.
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But imagine this.
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And then she sets up a scene where
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imagine that your time would come to die
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and you're lying there and an angel appears.
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And he's got two cloths and one of them's red
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and one of them's blue and says, choose.
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And so you think, oh, heaven's color, blue.
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After half an hour of wondering about it.
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And he says, hell, it's a great moment again.
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Absolutely refusing the kind of moral structure
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that would say, OK, we know how things work
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and we know what you've done.
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And she starts to go, OK, where does meaning lie?
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And how do you know what I've done wrong?
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So there's this one.
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It's a wonderful poem.
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And she keeps coming back to Galwayne,
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the knight who's her key accuser in Morris' version of it
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and says, you were so Galwayne lie.
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But at the same time, she tells the story of her romance
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with Lancelot.
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So there's a lot of questions raised.
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And the one last thing that I want to say about it,
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I mean, do go and read it.
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It's wonderful and glorious.
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But what's really interesting to think about
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is this is called the defense of Guinevere.
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And her defense is not, let me tell you why I'm right
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or let me tell you what I did or why I did it.
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Her defense is, look at me.
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I'm a beautiful queen.
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I can't possibly have done anything wrong,
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which is a kind of medieval beauty.
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You don't look at my body.
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I can't have done anything wrong.
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Yeah, oh, I did all kinds of things.
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But you know what, you're still lying.
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And so she's defending herself like a nut.
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And at the very end of the poem, Maurice makes it.
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He says that she turns, she's waiting for Lancelot to come
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and she listens like a knight listening out
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for the sound of his brother, his brother warrior.
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So in fact, it's like a trial by combat.
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And she's in combat again and again.
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She's on the attack here as well as the defense.
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So yeah, it's complicated and glorious as a poem.
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And then there's a whole load of other Arthurian poems
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in that collection as well.
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Right, I stopped you on Guinevere.
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So let's kind of run because we've got a long career
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to follow.
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So after the Arthurian poems.
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So after the Arthurian poems, he goes on to write some really,
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well, so the Arthurian poems kind of,
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you know, in terms of critical reception,
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people were a little bit puzzled by them.
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Thought they kind of fell under the slightly sort of
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sensorious views of the preraphalites
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that people held at that time.
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You know, and they're odd.
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And I mean, angles are fantastically important
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to Morris as they are to preraphalites, you know,
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odd angles.
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The description of her kiss with Lancelot,
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with her mouths wondering in one way.
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And it's very interesting.
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So but they were critics weren't terribly pleased with them.
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But then he goes on to write the earthly paradise,
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which is a series.
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It's a sort of, you know, short series
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and you have a prologue with wanderers
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and then each one of them tells a different story.
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And there's a whole collection of both classical
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and then northern tales told in verse.
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And this was hugely popular, hugely successful.
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He published it between 1868 and 1870
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and that really made his name.
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And he also published some, again,
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some classical works for life and death of Jason,
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which was very well received.
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And by now he started collaborating
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with Edward Bern Jones as well.
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So Edward Bern Jones was doing woodcuts for his work.
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So these were beautifully produced works.
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And you know, he was praised for being
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malifluous and melodious and sort of sweet and beautiful
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and such a wonderful voice.
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And then he, so that was a kind of really sort of high period.
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And then in 1868, just as he was sort of, you know,
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bringing out the earthly paradise,
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that's when he met Erica Malnison, the Icelander,
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and became really interested in Iceland,
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started doing translations of Icelandic prose tales.
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And then became interested in kind of what he talks about,
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the worship of courage of the north of Iceland.
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And he went on two trips there, 1871 and 1873,
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and was just stunned by the landscape.
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And so again, you know, the importance always,
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by this time Morris was working,
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he'd gone on leaving the university,
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he'd gone first for all to work for an architect, GE Street.
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And then he left that architect and became,
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set up his own firm, again,
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with several other of his friends and associates.
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They set up in 1861 and then in 1865.
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This was really jiktic, so it was just Morris,
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it's called Morris and Co.
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So they were producing wallpapers and stained glass windows.
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And by 1875, when Morris started writing Siga,
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the vault and this fantastic story of, you know,
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revenge and drama and so many kind of talkiness motifs
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in Siga, the vaulting as well.
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You know, we have the kind of, you know,
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faff me and the serpent and all kinds
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that the sort of hidden treasure,
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lots of bewitchment, lots of traveling through landscapes,
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which are very, you know, I'm sure,
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talking to you on some of those landscapes
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for his own landscapes too.
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Could we just ask two things there I'd like to draw out?
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Because one, we're going to go back to the north in a second,
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but you mentioned that with his collaboration
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with the pre-Rapha lights and burn Jones,
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is that he begins this emphasis in his work
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on the presentation of it,
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which carries on all the way up to the end of his life
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and particularly typeface and woodcuts.
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And I think it's worth putting him in a tradition
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of other poets.
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So you've got another poet you need to see the visual
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as well as the word is someone like William Blake
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earlier to him.
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But going forward, he also does remind me
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of talking himself who spent a lot of time on his,
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creating his own calligraphy, his own languages
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and of course illustrating.
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In a sense, he's quite a good, William Morris
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is quite a good bridge between those two figures.
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But so it do look up the visuals everyone.
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That's the top tip really.
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But going back to where we want to spend in the north,
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I think it's, we've forgotten now just how well known,
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William Morris was as a writer at the time.
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So the later generation coming along,
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thanks to this golden period of the Arthurian tales
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leading on to the other stories you've just talked about.
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He was actually thought of in sort of poet laureate terms,
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wasn't he?
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Absolutely, yeah.
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So the next generation, when they are reading
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Arthurian romances, they're reading him as well as Tennyson.
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So someone like Charles Williams amongst the inklings
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would have had all of this in his background,
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and CS Lewis, this medieval version
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filtered through the pre-Raphaelites.
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But let's talk about the north and go back there
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because this I think it's, you know, talking as a boy,
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this is where he would have first found these stories.
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It was the way they were coming into the English language.
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And as well as the translations,
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he also wrote a fantastic diary of his voyages,
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which I wish I went to Iceland a few years ago.
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I wish I'd had them because I can recognize every place
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he talks about reading it.
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So he's also a notable travel writer
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if there wasn't already enough on his very heavy, heavy plate.
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So what do you think he admired in the Icelandic culture?
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You mentioned the courage factor.
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What are the sort of themes as he bringing into an audience
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who've not heard these stories before
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because they've not yet been translated for a mass audience?
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So he's interested in a couple of things, actually.
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And again, his interest in the relationship
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between landscape and people comes out here.
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And that's why that moment that you quoted at the beginning,
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which is at the beginning of his first translation
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of the Valsungas, I wrote Ericka Magnuson,
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is important because he's interested in a relationship
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between people and the land in which they live.
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So he's a kind of internationalist.
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Later he becomes very interested in international relations.
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He's anti-imperial, but he's interested also in people's own
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kind of belonging to their land.
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So one of the things that he sees in Iceland
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is a kind of consonance between people's lives and their land.
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He likes the old kind of styles of governance,
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of old Iceland, the all thing, the way in which people
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met together kind of communally to make,
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to discuss the way that things were going to be governed.
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He likes the stoicism of the people.
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He talks about the terrible and tragic land.
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He goes there himself to kind of find some courage.
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He writes that in letters.
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That's why he's going there in a way to find some courage.
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And he comes back feeling renewed and revitalized.
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He goes off to Iceland, in fact, leaving his wife,
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Jane Morris, in Kelmscott Manor, the house
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that he's bought recently with his friend,
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Antigabra Lizetti, who, by that time,
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is having an affair with his wife, Jane.
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And he leaves them there together,
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kind of goes off to find some courage,
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you know, to feel, OK, because he talks elsewhere
18:57
about how he doesn't, you know, Morris is not keen
19:00
on the idea of the pro-crusty and bed of marriage,
19:03
where people are kind of forced into something.
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And kind of once people to be, he expresses later
19:08
in his sort of great utopian novel news from nowhere
19:11
that people should be free to choose their loving relationships.
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But of course, within the context of his own sort of Victorian
19:18
period, you know, people are not moving around so freely,
19:21
but he kind of chooses in a way to live with that.
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So he admires the stoicism of the people.
19:27
And he admires the sort of connection between their stories,
19:31
their landscape, and the way that he sees them living.
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Those are some of the things that he likes.
19:35
And he loves the landscape.
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He loves the barrenness of the landscape.
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And the way you have to force yourself
19:41
through difficult paths.
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And yeah, in his account, those diaries
19:45
are so fascinating on those travel diaries,
19:47
because he figures himself, quite often,
19:50
as a little bit of a sort of, you know,
19:51
a little bit feeble, a little bit lacking in courage.
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And there are moments when he sort of says,
19:55
oh, you know, I really didn't want to do it.
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Or, you know, I felt too, but he sort of forces himself.
19:58
So that's really interesting, that.
20:00
And always, with Morris, that sense of the connection
20:02
between the body, the landscape,
20:05
and that the art or myth or story runs through it.
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So, and of course, in Sigurd the Valsk,
20:11
I mean, it's a fantastic tale of kind of,
20:13
you know, love and betrayal and revenge.
20:16
And it's a beautifully told story,
20:18
absolutely cracking.
20:19
So I really recommend that to people too.
20:21
It's long, but it's beautiful.
20:24
Well, I think this is, you know,
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we're doing this stuff before Christmas.
20:27
And so it's something to put on the wish list, definitely,
20:30
a nice long read for the new year.
20:32
Okay, so my understanding is,
20:35
and you correct me if I'm wrong,
20:37
that sort of the later decades of Morris's life
20:40
were definitely dominated by his interest
20:42
in social socialism and politics.
20:45
So is the 1870s the pivot,
20:47
or has he already started being interested earlier on?
20:50
Yeah, I mean, I think there's just a complete continuity,
20:53
really, because he's always interested.
20:55
He's always, you know, struggling against,
20:59
it's really what he later came to understand
21:02
as Victorian capitalism, you know,
21:03
the rise of industry, alienation of labor,
21:07
all of those things which are really identified
21:09
in kind of Morris's socialism,
21:11
but he's always struggling against it.
21:12
He's always looking for a way of greater human connection
21:16
and he's bothered by inequality and injustice.
21:20
And you see that in his early works.
21:21
And even the fact that he gives a voice to Guinevere,
21:23
you know, he's kind of giving a voice to people
21:25
who don't have a voice early on in his work.
21:28
1876 is really the turning point.
21:30
He gets involved in the Eastern question,
21:33
kind of agitation at the time about Britain's relationship
21:37
to Turkey and Russia.
21:40
And Britain at that point is supporting Turkey.
21:42
Morris sees Turkey and the Ottoman Empire
21:44
as it is at that point is a sort of a pressing power.
21:47
So some massacres have taken place in Bulgaria
21:51
and Britain was supporting Turkey against Russia
21:54
and Morris speaks out against.
21:56
He gets really involved in agitation
21:58
about the Eastern question.
21:59
So that's really, and at that point he's a great supporter
22:03
of Gladstone, he thinks he's a fantastic outstanding politician.
22:06
He's really in support of the liberals,
22:08
but very quickly gets disillusioned with the liberals,
22:10
not least because of what he calls their stock job
22:12
in war in Egypt.
22:14
So they go off, once he starts to see that the liberals
22:16
actually, they're not against oppression and empire.
22:21
And he finds that he gets put off by that.
22:23
And he writes in a letter later at that point in the 1870s,
22:26
I was just looking for some kind of body to join
22:29
where I could express the things that mattered to me.
22:32
So then in the early 1880s, in 1883,
22:36
he finds the Social Democratic Federation,
22:40
which is really the first sort of post-mark socialist body
22:45
in Britain set up in London, and he joins that.
22:47
So he's not just interested in socialism.
22:49
He is body and soul, because that is really
22:51
how Morris does things.
22:52
And he's body and soul committed to socialism from then on.
22:55
He finds that as a way of trying to change the injustices
23:01
that he sees, and he catches those injustices
23:03
often in terms of ugliness.
23:06
And by ugliness, he means a kind of a smallness of life,
23:11
a diminishment of the quality of life
23:14
that he sees for particularly for the working class in Britain.
23:19
And so he then spends the 1880s traveling
23:21
the length and breadth of the country.
23:22
He goes up to Scotland.
23:24
He goes all over the place preaching socialism as he puts it.
23:28
That becomes his real focus.
23:31
And a lot of his writings then start
23:33
to deal with socialist themes.
23:37
I think as well as sort of talking about him as a precursor
23:40
to the sort of inkling circle and some of their interests,
23:44
it's also worth at this point when you're saying that
23:47
is pointing out the difference.
23:49
I think one of the things that you get hold of when you read
23:51
about Morris is just how hard he worked.
23:55
I mean, incredibly hard, because he is running a business,
23:58
which still has a recognisable, the William Morrison
24:03
Co is still a brand today.
24:05
Look it up.
24:06
You all recognise the fabrics.
24:09
But this unpaid work, really, for a socialist cause
24:15
is phenomenal, which he is doing on top of everything else.
24:19
And this is very different from the professorial lives
24:22
of the inklings.
24:23
I mean, it's more like Charles Williams, actually,
24:25
of the inklings who carried on being a full-time editor.
24:29
But the actual intensity of his work
24:33
with this industrial, he would say, handcraft,
24:39
industry, shall we say, which he's also running,
24:42
trying to make financially sustainable.
24:44
He's very much well in the full flow of society.
24:49
He is not in his ivory tower.
24:50
He's not sitting in Oxford or somewhere.
24:53
He's fully engaged and a real powerhouse.
24:59
Press at this point would be quite good
25:00
to have a little think of what he was like as a person,
25:03
because people might not know about him as a physical presence.
25:06
He was often caricatured, for example, wasn't he?
25:09
Because he was quite memorable to look at.
25:11
Would you like to have a go at describing him?
25:14
Yeah, absolutely.
25:15
And again, for people listening to this podcast,
25:17
go and just look up online.
25:19
Edward Bernjones is caricatures of Morris,
25:22
who he called Topsy, his friends from his youth
25:24
called him Topsy, which his later socialist friends
25:27
found a bit shocking.
25:29
But Edward Bernjones has a whole series of caricatures,
25:33
Topsy in various different positions.
25:35
So as he got older, I mean, he was a good looking guy
25:37
with a great big beard in that common Victorian way,
25:41
quite a high forehead.
25:42
And he became reasonably stout as he got older.
25:45
And he used to go around in a kind of blue,
25:49
a kind of blue fairly coarse material,
25:51
blue top and blue trousers at some point.
25:55
He's got a description in his great utopian novel news
25:58
from nowhere about a character in these blue clothes,
26:01
looking at a ship's purse.
26:03
And in fact, Morris describes himself like that
26:05
at some point.
26:06
And in his letters quite frequently, he's writing to his wife
26:10
and he's like, oh, I'm going to get my hair cut.
26:12
I know I need to get my hair cut.
26:13
So he's got quite a lot of hair and looks a bit wild.
26:17
And I think he seems to be all accounts
26:21
to have been a really big physical presence.
26:24
He responded to things hugely.
26:27
Again, in news from nowhere where the cat central character
26:30
in there is clearly modelled on Morris.
26:31
He talks at one point about how he's in a socialist meeting
26:34
and he loses his temper and tells them all for fools.
26:38
And this is clearly from his daughters accounts
26:40
from other people's accounts clearly.
26:41
This is one of Morris's ways of responding to things.
26:44
But he is, as he was saying, he's absolutely.
26:47
He's in the swim of life.
26:51
He's really committed to the cause that he's working for.
26:54
So by the age of eight, he's not,
26:57
I'm so sorry, I can't second that.
27:02
Oh, I'll have my cup of tea.
27:07
Not only is he whining the firm and going out
27:10
literally speaking on street corners for socialism
27:12
and on occasion getting arrested for doing so
27:15
because he's taking part in demonstrations.
27:18
And again, there are caricatures in the newspapers
27:20
in that the poet of the earthly paradise
27:22
being taking part in these demonstrations.
27:25
And of course, lots of his other friends
27:27
from those kind of more respectable echelons of society
27:30
are a bit kind of shocked at this,
27:32
but he carries on regardless.
27:34
He's also in the 1870s, as part of his work for Morrison Co,
27:39
he'd started rediscovering methods of dying.
27:43
So he spends a whole load of time
27:45
in sort of between 1875 and 1880 with his hands buried
27:48
and that's of dying.
27:49
Start signing himself to his daughter,
27:50
your Prussian blue, because he's discovering.
27:54
And he's wanting to discover natural life.
27:55
So he's funny as well.
27:57
I think that's important to say, as well as all of these things,
28:00
he's also set up the society for the protection
28:02
of ancient buildings, protesting against kind of work
28:06
to what was seen as sort of improved buildings.
28:10
He wants to see no kind of adding stuff to old buildings
28:15
or cleaning them off in any but the most necessary way
28:17
because he wants to preserve that kind of link
28:20
between their past and keep them as they were.
28:22
So that's an organization that draws in all sorts of people
28:25
from Ruskin to Disraeli at various points.
28:28
So he's kind of a leading figure in that writing letters,
28:31
sending out campaigns.
28:32
But at the same time, he's also taking care of his family.
28:34
So he has two daughters by this time, Jenny and Mei.
28:37
Jenny had epilepsy, which at a time was not very well understood.
28:41
So she was often kind of sent away
28:45
to try and find places that were better for her
28:47
and Morrison's letters to Jenny.
28:49
A beautiful letter's full of affection.
28:51
He often signs off using the words of Joe
28:52
from great expectations.
28:54
What locks?
28:55
Oh, I'm looking forward to seeing you, my dear.
28:56
And then what locks?
28:58
So there's a lovely sense of warmth and affection,
29:01
although this kind of complicated family life
29:04
because of the relationship that his wife is having
29:07
with other people.
29:08
He has some kind of various close relationships
29:12
with other women as well as men in his life.
29:14
So it's a really, it's a really busy and full life,
29:18
all sorts of things going on.
29:21
And he also sets up.
29:23
Yes, another connection here.
29:24
We can make just thinking about connection
29:26
to other fantasy writers with the Society
29:30
for Protection of Ancient Buildings,
29:32
is I may be think of Beatrix Potter
29:34
with setting up the National, or helping
29:37
establish the National Trust, which is, for those of you
29:40
outside the UK, it's one of the main charities
29:43
that protects large areas of land as well as buildings.
29:48
And Beatrix Potter, the famous illustrator and writer,
29:53
coming shortly after William Morris' life, of course,
29:57
she helped establish that by buying up
30:00
a certain amount of farmland in the late district
30:04
that was going to be developed.
30:06
A very, very much a kind of cause, which I'm sure
30:09
William Morris would have approved of as would the later writers
30:13
we often talk about, Tolkien in particular.
30:16
So we have this man who is, it's like stepping
30:21
in front of a furnace when you start looking at his life.
30:24
It's so much rushing out at you,
30:25
so many things you could talk about.
30:27
But I think it's worth spending some time now
30:30
thinking about his art and design,
30:32
because this isn't separate at all.
30:35
It's all part of the same aesthetic,
30:37
the same kind of sensibility that's producing this poetry.
30:41
And one of the really enjoyable things
30:43
about following William Morris is that you can, of course,
30:46
now go and see things that he helped design.
30:50
And they're often in quite unremarked places.
30:53
So there's a set of burnjos and William Morris windows
30:58
in the Unitarian Chapel.
31:00
I think it's Harris Manchester College here in Oxford,
31:03
which I only just happened to see
31:05
because I was there for an event.
31:08
And they're fantastic.
31:10
They're so beautiful.
31:11
And that's just one small example.
31:13
And another place you can go when it's open
31:16
is Kalmscott Manor, which is further up the Thames
31:19
from Oxford, near a place called Letchlaid,
31:25
which is a house that kind of represents the soul
31:29
of his work, I suppose.
31:31
It's full of his design, as well as, of course,
31:36
the architectural work he did with the street practice
31:40
in Oxford.
31:41
So there's so much you can actually see.
31:43
But let's have a think about his design.
31:46
You talked about the hands-on exploration of old ways
31:51
of dying.
31:52
So that's one thread, which is rediscovering old techniques.
31:57
Where do you think this fits with his kind of approach
32:01
to art and craftsmanship?
32:04
I mean, again, it's really part and parcel
32:05
of his concern about the connection between people,
32:09
their work, and the land.
32:11
He's really interested in the environment.
32:13
I mean, his first biographer, Mikhail writes of him
32:17
that somebody who knew him, when he was a young man in Woodford
32:19
in Essex, where he lived for a while,
32:21
said that he always knew the names of birds.
32:23
I love that about Morris.
32:24
He's really precise about his knowledge of nature.
32:28
And this comes through into his artwork.
32:30
So he has wallpapers and fabric designs, which
32:36
are named after rivers.
32:37
So he's got cray and he's got way.
32:40
He's got wallpapers and fabric designs, which
32:43
are named after plants.
32:46
You've got even load.
32:47
You've got the lovely well-known one, which
32:49
probably many people will know, called Strawberry Thief,
32:51
which has brushes on it, which are related to blackbirds.
32:54
Morris is fascinated by blackbirds, endlessly
32:56
writing letters about the blackbirds in the garden.
32:58
And if you look across his works,
33:00
often we have the sound of blackbirds.
33:02
So a kind of a relationship between people
33:05
and the specificity of the things of the earth,
33:08
he's really interested.
33:09
Again, if you look across his works,
33:10
it's extraordinary how specific he is
33:13
about the kind of trees that are growing there.
33:15
Plains and sycamores, but maybe slightly too many
33:18
of the larger ones.
33:19
And beach trees, he's got a wonderful description
33:22
in the hollow land, one of his early stories,
33:24
about the way that the light filters
33:26
through the leaves of a beach tree
33:28
and the way that the beach nuts that
33:29
have fallen underneath start to produce sapling.
33:33
So he's really interested in author.
33:34
And those natural shapes come into all of his work as well.
33:39
And it's just worth saying there that as well as
33:41
all the other stuff that he's doing across the 1880s,
33:44
he's also lecturing up and down the country
33:46
both on socialism and on art.
33:49
And so in lectures like The Beauty of Life
33:52
or also how we live and how we might live,
33:54
he's making connections between the earth
33:57
that belongs to everybody and the politics,
34:01
socialist politics, suggesting that we need
34:04
to change the way people work.
34:06
We need to change working conditions radically
34:08
so that people are not disconnected from the earth,
34:12
people are not rewarded for the labor that they're doing.
34:18
And that's really important for him.
34:19
So it comes into his design.
34:22
Also, of course, there's stories in his design.
34:24
There's lots of new dots of those stained glass windows
34:26
drawn off urine themes as well.
34:28
So the sense that there's a connection between story, art,
34:34
the land on which you live and the way in which you live it,
34:37
and that work is really important.
34:40
So the idea of work across all these things,
34:42
you know, Morris is doing his own work with his hands,
34:45
he's revitalizing old methods and he's interested in work
34:48
that's connected, work that has pleasure in it.
34:50
He quotes Ruskin saying that, you know,
34:53
we work must be pleasurable.
34:56
That's a really important aspect of Morris' understanding
34:59
of work and Ruskin's understanding of work.
35:01
And Morris says, no, don't come back and say,
35:03
well, people can't enjoy their work.
35:05
What about the dustman?
35:05
He says, okay, fine, we can organize it.
35:07
We've got to do some unpleasant work, fine.
35:09
So let's organize it so that that kind of work
35:11
is done on a rotor.
35:12
Or that kind of work is done for short periods of time.
35:15
I mean, he's very practical too.
35:16
He's not some kind of, you know, dreamer
35:18
in the earthly paradise.
35:19
He calls himself in the idol singer,
35:21
but he's not at all.
35:22
He's a real practical man thinking about,
35:26
you know, he's thinking about the kind of thing
35:28
we might think about now in terms of a four-day week
35:30
or changing the structures, changing the structures of work,
35:33
so that everybody gets to enjoy the beauty of the earth.
35:36
And that makes me laugh because my academic background
35:40
involved the sort of Kola Ridge Wordsworth connection.
35:44
And when they were in their radical phase,
35:46
they had this idea of pantheosocracy.
35:48
They were going to go off in the 1790s.
35:50
We're going to go off to America
35:52
and set up an ideal community on the banks
35:55
of the Susquehana River.
35:56
They hadn't been there.
35:57
I think they like the sound of the word.
36:00
But I always remembered Kola Ridge estimating
36:03
that in this ideal society,
36:04
you just needed to do two hours of manual labour
36:08
to make it work.
36:10
And I remember thinking, hmm,
36:12
someone's never raised a child or, you know, a garden,
36:17
two hours, but just doesn't cover it.
36:18
It's hung glad that William Morris,
36:20
in a later generation of poet, was a bit more,
36:23
well, from his life, his practical experience,
36:25
you can see that he would have been a much more practical man.
36:27
And in fact, probably would have run the community single
36:30
handedly and done all the jobs himself.
36:33
So I'd have joined his commune, not Kola Ridgees,
36:36
definitely not Kola Ridgees.
36:39
England, there's so much to talk about.
36:41
So we probably have to invite you back on an other occasion
36:44
and actually do a deeper dive into one of these things
36:46
we've talked about.
36:47
And now I'm going to spring something on you,
36:49
which I forgot to mention is that always at the end
36:52
of the podcast, I ask someone,
36:55
where in all the fantasy world save ever been
36:58
is the best place to go?
36:59
And it might be something like,
37:00
where's the best pub to go and drink in
37:03
or the best library to go and read a book?
37:05
I think because we've been talking about William Morris,
37:09
I'd like to ask you where you think in all the fantasy worlds
37:13
that you've ever read about in literature,
37:15
all the way from the beginning, you know,
37:17
literature to the present day,
37:19
is the best place to be a crafts person, craftsman,
37:22
craftsman because we've been talking, obviously,
37:24
around the arts and crafts movement with William Morris.
37:29
And so that's a good thing to think of.
37:31
To allow you to think, I'll give an answer,
37:34
which is I actually wrote a whole book about this.
37:38
I think I was, it's called The Glass Swallow
37:41
and it's about someone who makes stained glass windows,
37:44
a female character in a world where women aren't allowed
37:48
to be crafts people.
37:49
And she goes off to a place where that's allowed,
37:51
a place called Madonna.
37:52
So in my own, I'd be selfish once
37:55
and normally choose somebody else's world,
37:57
but I'll choose the world I thought of,
37:59
which would be a good place for a crafts person.
38:02
And that's Madonna, where you can do the most
38:03
beautiful stained glass windows, if, you know,
38:06
as long as the economy is there to pay for you,
38:09
which is the problem in the particular book.
38:12
So where do you think would be a good place to be a crafts person?
38:15
Well, strangely enough, Juliet, the thing that came to my mind,
38:18
and perhaps this is right you and I have been friends
38:20
for a long time, the thing that came to my mind
38:22
is the moment in Morris' utopian novel news from nowhere,
38:25
which is set in a future period, but kind of draws
38:29
kind of drawing on a medieval past.
38:30
So it's a future post-industrial period
38:33
where people work in banded workshops rather than factories,
38:36
where work can pleasure or continue
38:38
as people make things that they like to make.
38:41
People are able to be individuals while also living communally.
38:45
And in that world, so guests, who's a visitor
38:48
from the 19th century, goes there.
38:50
He arrives in London in Hammersmith,
38:52
where Morris' own house is.
38:53
And he travels down the river to Comscot Manony,
38:56
a letter late.
38:57
And while they're on their way there to see the harvesting,
38:59
that everybody takes part in, they meet a few people
39:03
in a way that's so unusual in a utopia
39:06
who dissent from the general way in which the world works.
39:08
And some of those people are the obstinate refuses.
39:11
And I would love to be one of the obstinate refuses.
39:14
The main one of them is a woman called Philippa.
39:16
They call the obstinate refuses
39:17
because they're not joining in with the harvest,
39:19
which is sort of what everybody's doing.
39:21
And that's okay in this world.
39:22
In this utopia, you're allowed to 20%
39:24
and what Philippa and her obstinate refuses
39:26
is they're carving on a new building.
39:29
So like going back to Morris' very early story,
39:33
the story of the unknown church with the carver,
39:35
Philippa and her women are carving on this building
39:38
and someone else is putting the roof on.
39:39
And they're too busy, sorry,
39:41
they're not going to join in with the harvest.
39:42
What a fantastic place, you know, validating,
39:45
women's work, women's choice,
39:47
the capacity to do your own thing in a world
39:50
where people are communing.
39:51
So I love that.
39:51
That's the place to go, very simply to your heart.
39:53
Okay, so shall we make this the first meeting
39:55
of the obstinate refuses?
39:57
I think this definitely needs to be agreed.
39:59
Absolutely.
39:59
I'm joining.
40:00
And you still, I think, yeah.
40:02
Yeah, thank you so much, Ingrid.
40:04
It's been lovely to talk to you
40:05
and thank you to everybody who's tuned in to listen.
40:09
Goodbye.
40:10
Bye.
40:12
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40:16
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