WMS
@ 60
THE
PRESENT WILLIAM MORRIS SOCIETY, successor to earlier groups and fellowships,
was launched in 1955 to celebrate his life, works and continuing impact on
politics, design, conservation, crafts and critical thought.
For a single, long-dead, bearded Victorian,
William Morris’s ideas have enjoyed an astonishing multifarious afterlife, and
the diamond ( = enduring) anniversary of the Society is being marked this 5
September with a whole-day symposium William
Morris in the 21st Century.
The focus
is on radicalism and future perspectives regarding political action,
environmentalism, education, utopian designs and human relations with the
natural world.
Details
of when and where are on the attached pdf . Everyone
is welcome to what is hoped will be a stimulating day of discussion and
debate. There are many points of contact
between the turmoil of Morris’s time, before the formation of any Labour or
Communist parties, and that of today, when new approaches to local and global
situations are being formulated.
This is part of my introduction to the day:
WM's life and ideas remain
startlingly in fashion, in quite
disparate ways. Last month the Daily Telegraph listed his bedroom at
Kelmscott Manor among its top 50 ‘Hidden Gems’; and in July Country
Life celebrated 60 things it declared ‘the best of Britain’. Grouse moors, tea at
the ritz, hunting horns and the monarchy. Then, flanked by public schools and
parish churches, was WM wallpaper, his instruction about what to have in your
house and the declaration that the Arts and Crafts movement was ‘part of a wider
socialist vision for moral improvement and wholesome living,’ that still
inspires today. And so he is beloved even by the reactionary press.
Just weeks earlier, a leader column
in the Guardian written by Charlotte
Higgins proposed WM’s ‘splendidly
bearded visage’ for the new £20
note. She argued:
‘Morris would
be a hearteningly radical choice, despite the chintzy reputation. Stanley
Baldwin might have failed to mention Morris’s politics when he opened the V&A’s
centenary exhibition in 1934, but … he was a revolutionary socialist who wrote
and lectured tirelessly, who addressed the striking miners of Northumberland in
1887, who marched on Bloody Sunday to Trafalgar Square. He wished to see a
world in which there were neither “brain-sick brain workers, nor heart-sick
hand workers … in which all men would be living in equality of condition.” Of course there were contradictions in this
revolutionary-cum-luxury-retailer. But these would be elegantly encapsulated by
his gracing the currency. In short, Morris was, “one of
those men whom history will never overtake”.
This all might
make one suspect that WM is ‘all things to all men’ – somewhere we can each find confirmation of
our likes and dislikes, prejudices and preferences. But I think his legacy is more stimulating
and provocative. One cannot like
everything that WM said or produced; indeed, one must often argue with his
politics and his patterns.
And it is
something of a mystery to me why the Society founded to promote the
contemporary relevance of his life and work (to quote the recent business plan)
has not over six decades split into constituent strands or sects – some to
celebrate stained glass, others to debate anarcho-syndicalism; some to study
the Sagas, others to build new cities; some
to analyse utopias, others to print beautiful books. There are these tensions and complexities as
there have been ever since Morris’s time, at least, when Bernard Shaw divided
the progressive movement between those idealists who wished to sit among the
daisies and those who wished to organize the docks. But the Society has room for all in a spirit
of diversity within commonality.
Above all,
WM’s legacy remains powerful because we
do not regard it as primarily historic.
It belongs to the present and future as well. Recently I was invited to a symposium, on the
theme ‘Would WM have used an i-pad?’
Well, it’s an interesting question with a less simple answer than might
at first appear.
While I think
that i-pads will possibly have a fairly short life-span, owing to the speed of
change in an electronic, digital and frankly astonishing age, we must also
contemplate ‘how we live and how we might live’.
