iMorris

A song appears in chapter six of Morris's The Well at World's End, and like so many of Morris's poems, the words suggest a rhythm and melody right from the first verse :

Art thou man, art thou maid, through the long grass a-going?

For short shirt thou bearest, and no beard I see,

And the last wind ere moonrise about thee is blowing.

Would'st thou meet with thy maiden or look'st thou for me?”

Happily, someone has heard the cry of Morris's poetry, and set it to music. The Kurt Henry Band includes this very song, titled “An Evensong of Upmeads”, on their album, Heart Mind & All.

“Unlike musical settings of Morris I have heard,” Kurt Henry explained, “this setting is more folkloric and natural--I like to believe that Morris would approve. … I believe Morris scholar Fred Kirchhoff complimented me on this in a demo I sent him years before I seriously recorded it. I would be very pleased if society members heard this recording. It truly evokes the fresh, new (if nostalgic) world of the Morris romance. So yes, Morris IS available on iTunes.”

(Image: Age-old music from the Cantigas de Santa Maria Manuscript)

New book: The Multifaceted Mr. Morris

Easily the most ambitious book project by Ray Nichols & Jill Cypher of Lead Graffiti, The Multifaceted Mr. Morris is the catalogue of the William Morris exhibition mounted in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware for the “Useful & Beautiful” conference held in October 2010. More than 30 books, manuscripts, drawings, and other works are described and an introduction tells the story of how the collector came to collect Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. The author, Jane Marguerite Tippett, is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Delaware.

As Lead Graffiti approaches printing via letterpress as designers, they wanted to find an interesting way to incorporate visual elements into the project. Many of the pieces included in the book are fabulous, often either one-of-a-kind or ones with an important provenance. The designers took each entry and looked for some visual element they found interesting. Often it was typographic, in the instance of a photo or a drawing it might just be a small area or a word from a letter. These images were printed in a light tone to complement the main text. It will be interesting for someone who visits the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection to look through some of the pieces and see if they can find the image. Sometimes it will be obvious and sometimes obscure.

The July 2012 print edition of Fine Books & Collections included a nice review of the book along with some additional information about Lead Graffiti, which is located in Newark, DE.

Printed via letterpress in Caslon type in two colors with eight color plates, The Multifaceted Mr. Morris is issued in an edition of 150 copies hand-bound copies: 100 in wrappers ($50) and 50 signed hardcovers ($125) bound with parchment spines.

The book is available from

Lead Graffiti
(302) 547-6930
info@leadgraffiti.com
www.leadgraffiti.com

or from Oak Knoll Books, New Castle, DE.

"Emery Walker, William Morris and the Best Surviving Arts and Crafts Interior in Britain"Lecture by Christopher Wilk in New York, 10 September 2012

The William Morris Society will sponsor a lecture by Christopher Wilk in New York on the 10th of September. Our co-sponsors are the Grolier Club, and the American Friends of Arts and Crafts in Chipping Campden, with the support of the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms.

Sir Emery Walker, a distinguished printer and later the co-publisher of the Doves Press, was the man who provided both the inspiration and practical advice to William Morris to found the Kelmscott Press in 1890. Walker and Morris were close associates until Morris's death and the latter said of his neighbor and friend that he “did not think a day complete without a sight of Emery Walker.” Walker lived on Hammersmith Terrace, West London, overlooking the Thames from 1879 until his death in 1933. His house, 7 Hammersmith Terrace, is without doubt, the most intact surviving Arts and Crafts interior in Britain. This is owing to the fact that the house was lived in continuously by Walker, by his daughter, and then by his daughter's companion until 1999. This talk will focus on the Walker family, their house and its history—including its close association with William and May Morris, Philip Webb and with the Arts and Crafts in the Cotswolds—while also considering Walker’s crucial role in the Revival of Printing.

Christopher Wilk is Keeper of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a trustee of the Emery Walker House.

Monday, 10 September 2012
6 p.m.
The Grolier Club
47 East 60th Street
New York, NY 10022
(212) 838-6690
www.grolierclub.org

Tickets $12 for members of the sponsoring organizations, $18 for others. To order send a check to William Morris Society, P.O. Box 53263, Washington, DC 20009 or go to www.morrissociety.org to pay using PayPal or a credit card. 

Socialists at Play

May Morris, husband H. H. Sparling, Emery Walker, and George Bernard Shaw. 

Over a hundred years ago this month, Morris published his poem "Socialists at Play" in the July 1885 issue of The Commonweal. The Commonweal, edited by Morris, was the official newspaper of the Socialist League, and Morris published a good deal of original poetry and essays in its pages. While "Socialists at Play" is a little known, minor work of Morris's, it captures his spirit of fun and camaraderie even amidst his sincere and robust political commitment. What I like most about the poem is that it shows the high value Morris put on pleasure. Pleasure was, for Morris, a political goal as well as an end in and of itself. The poem begins,

FRIENDS, we have met amidst our busy life
To rest an hour from turmoil and from strife,
To cast our care aside while song and verse
Touches our hearts, and lulls the ancient curse.

For Morris, literature's capacity to produce rest and enjoyment was crucial; ideally, it was a means of creating pleasure for both the author and the reader. In the end, the poem suggests the essentially Morrisian idea that pleasure and work are interchangeable:


So through our play, as in our work, we see
The strife that is, the Peace that is to be.

At play, Morris and his fellow socialists can find enjoyment and rest as well as political meaning. The two are not mutually exclusive:


... Let the cause cling
About the book we read, the song we sing,
Cleave to our cup and hover o’er our plate,
And by our bed at morn and even wait.
Let the sun shine upon it; let the night
Weave happy tales of our fulfilled delight!

contributed by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
(Photo via the Arts & Crafts Museum flickr feed)

Johanna Lahr (1867-1904)

Very few women members of the Socialist League have been identified, and these few are mostly middle-class. It has been exciting to learn from the researches of German labor historians Gerd Callesen and Heiner Becker of a Socialist League member who was the wife of a journeyman baker as well as fervid union organizer. Born Annie Klebow in Germany in 1867, she emigrated to England around 1885-87. There she married her common-law partner in 1895 and gave birth to sons in 1899 and 1903, dying in childbirth in 1904 at the age of 37.

Lahr was a member of the Bloomsbury branch of the League and active speaker between 1888 and 1890, when she would have been 21-22 years of age. Commonweal records that she delivered 13 speeches during March 1888 alone! During this period she corresponded with Friedrich Engels, asking for his advice in understanding Marx’s theories. She would probably have known Morris briefly before he left the Socialist League in 1889; like Morris she was an anti-parliamentarian, but most likely a member of the League’s anarchist wing.

There were about 2000 German bakers in England and Wales in the period 1880-1910, and they formed a familiar presence in London’s east end, as memorialized in Israel Zangwill’s account of east London Jewish life in Children of the Ghetto (1892) and in exhibits at the present-day London Jewish Museum. Lahr’s 1889 leaflet, “The Poorest of the Wage Slaves,” is a rare extant instance of a polemical essay by an impoverished working class woman of the period. It describes with indignation the conditions of labor experienced by those in her husband’s occupation, and urges all journeyman bakers to unionize in order to gain better conditions.

Because Lahr’s leaflet may be difficult to read, a few passages are excerpted here:

The journeymen bakers must admit that they are, in comparison with any other skilled workers, the poorest, the most sweated, wretched slaves; that their present condition is a most deplorable one, and a disgrace to civilisation. The extraordinary long hours, varying from 14 to 16 hours a day, for the first five days of the week, 22 hours on Saturday, and Sunday work as well, makes up an average of from 90 to 120 hours each week; and in most cases the poor wretches have to work in filthy, unhealthy bakehouses not fit for a dog, let alone a human being. These wage-slaves are injured in health, and are broken men before they enter into full manhood; their lives cut short, and an early grave their reward. Now, lads, the time has arrived when you should bind yourselves together under the Banner of Unity, and strike the blow. God knows, your demands are too moderate; but as the saying goes, with eating commences a craving for more. . . .

Men and women, you are the producers of all wealth; therefore courage, brothers and sisters! Come and join hands with your fellows, no matter what creed or nationality they belong to, and we will win the battle.

Have no trust in your Houses of Parliament. The sooner they are turned into a washhouses or bakehouses the better for the workers. I am with you heart and spirit, and will never tire of helping you to a brighter future, where freedom, love, and harmony shall reign; where the dawn of the morning shall be greeted with gladness, and work be only a pleasure; and where the burden of life and sorrow-stricken faces shall disappear like a snow-white mist in the morning. 

JOHANNA LAHR.
Henry Detloff, Printer. 18 Sun Street, Finsbury, London. E.C.

In November 1890 a widespread strike for bakers’ union rights was conducted in London, and Johanna Lahr’s flyer might well have been distributed during this strike. The bakers won the conflict, in part because of the support of London Trade Union Council and trade unionist leader John Burns, who addressed assemblies of the bakers. One can only regret that this firm-minded and courageous woman died at 37, perhaps a victim of the difficult conditions under which women gave birth.

We owe thanks to Gerd Callesen for sending us this information, and to Ms. Sheila Lahr for this image of her ancestor’s pamphlet. A longer article on Lahr will appear in the July 2012 Newsletter of the William Morris Society in the United States. Mr. Callesen is eager to learn more about Lahr, and may be reached at gerd.callesen@chello.at. 

Martha Nussbaum, Comte, Mill, Tagore… and William Morris

           Martha Nussbaum’s “Reinventing the Civil Religion:  Comte, Mill, Tagore” in the most recent issue of the scholarly journal Victorian Studies (54.1 [dated Autumn 2011], pp. 7-34) is an important and fascinating analysis of attempts to form a “humanistic ‘civil religion’ to counteract the power of egoism and greed” (7) in the nineteenth century.  Critiquing Auguste Comte (as did J. S. Mill) for almost comically appropriating concepts of ritual from traditional religion to inculcate civic virtue, Nussbaum prefers Mill’s posthumously-published essay, “The Utility of Religion,” which conceded the need to have some form of communal celebration but evaded Comte’s attempts at rigid control and shaping of subjectivities.  The most constructive, practicable, and humane conceptualization of a civic religion, according to Nussbaum, was undertaken by Rabindranath Tagore, whose The Religion of Man (1931), unlike Comte’s “Religion of Humanity,” celebrated artistic creativity, the importance of the individual, and inclusiveness  (women as well as men, for example).  Commenting on Tagore’s indebtedness to the religious sect of the Bauls for his conception of civic religion, Nussbaum connects this source to the idea that “society must preserve at its heart, and continually have access to, a kind of fresh joy and delight in the world, in nature, and in people, preferring love and joy to the dead lives of material acquisition that so many adults end up living, and preferring continual questioning and searching to any comforting settled answers” (23). 

I wonder how many others, like me, thought of William Morris’s News from Nowhere and its representation of communal joy, fellowship, and delight in work and nature in reading Nussbaum’s article.  Indeed, Chp. 18 of News from Nowhere explicitly takes up the topic of “The Religion of Humanity”:

‘More akin to our way of looking at life was the spirit of the Middle Ages to whom heaven and the life of the next world was such a reality, that it became to them a part of the life upon the earth….now, where is the difficulty in accepting the religion of humanity, when the men and women who go to make up humanity are free, happy, and energetic at least, and most commonly beautiful of body also, and surrounded by beautiful things of their own fashioning, and a nature bettered and not worsened by contact with mankind?’

Indeed, the last chapter of News from Nowhere involves the “haysel” feast, a communal celebration held in a medieval church that is “gaily dressed up for this latter-day festival, with festoons of flowers from arch to arch” (Chp. 32).

            Perhaps other Morriseans will know whether Morris exerted any direct influence on Tagore; my sole knowledge of a connection is the mention of Morris in 1 or 2 letters from Sir William Rothenstein to Tagore.  In any case I hope that Martha Nussbaum will reconsider Morris’s own role in creating an important paradigm of civic religion founded in creativity, inclusion, and social justice.

--Linda K. Hughes

Declutter for Civilization's Sake

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

In the years since William Morris first delivered his “The Beauty of Life” lecture in 1880, this quotation has taken on a life of its own. People put it on their bulletin boards, transcribe it in their diaries, and tweet about it on Twitter.

For many, it also helps them to change their lives. “The William Morris Project”, on a blog called “Pancakes and French Fries”, was created by a former lawyer named Jules, who found herself disturbed by the death of her friend's parents in 2011, and the things they had left behind. Instead of a carefully curated collection of objects that could have told volumes about their lives, they had left a white noise of designer handbags, eighties clothes, and redundant kitchen utensils.

With Morris's quotation as her guide, Jules set out to escape the fate of her friend's parents. Naturally, her project focused on de-cluttering her home, keeping only useful or beautiful things. Her project is still going today, and has a large following—it's even inspired others to follow suit.

At first, it may seem that the people involved in the project are overlooking Morris's depth by focusing on a piece of interior decorating advice, but Morris wouldn't think so. He dubbed his quotation “a golden rule that will fit everybody”, calling upon people to follow it not just for their own well being, but to help revive true art, and to save Society from the oblivion of consumption. At least, that's the message he brought to his Birmingham audience in 1880:

“that message is, in short, to call on you to face the latest danger which civilisation is threatened with, a danger of her own breeding : that men in struggling towards the complete attainment of all the luxuries of life for the strongest portion of their race should deprive their whole race of all the beauty of life...”

By forgoing lots of silly luxury items in favor of a few useful and beautiful things, Morris's followers would be resisting the tide of Victorian Capitalism, and they would become the saviors of Society. Perhaps Jules and her followers are the same: tidying up our culture of excess, one drawer at a time.