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The 50th-Anniversary Conference of the William Morris Society
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey, UK: 7-10 July 2005
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
--with presentation abstracts--
Thursday, 7 July 2005 1400 onwards: Arrival and Registration 1600-1715: Tea 1830-2000: Dinner 2000-2115: Welcome and Plenary Lecture 1
Friday, 8 July 2005 0800-0900: Breakfast 0930-1100: Session 1a: Contemporary Thinkers and "Nowhere"
Session 1b: Morris and the City
Session 1c: Morris and the Book Arts
1100-1130: Coffee 1130-1300: Session 2a: Science, Modernity, Utopia
Session 2b: Morris and Europe I
Session 2c: Poetry
1300-1400: Lunch 1415-1545: Session 3a: Art
Session 3b: Design
Session 3c: Morris's Early Literary-Political Influence
1545-1615: Tea 1615-1745: Session 4a: Arts and Crafts Circles
Session 4b: Virtual Paradise
Session 4c: Art, Politics, Labour
1830-1945: Dinner 2000-2115: Plenary Lecture 2
Saturday, 9 July 2005 0800-0900: Breakfast 0930-1100: Session 5a: Morris and Europe II
Session 5b: How We Live and How We Might Live
Session 5c: The Late Romances
Session 5d: Women in/and the Arts and Crafts
1100-1130: Coffee 1130-1300: Session 6a: Fantastic Journeys
Session 6b: Radical Visions
Session 6c: Morris Places
1300-1400: Lunch 1400: Afternoon free, or trip to Kelmscott House, Hammersmith.
1930 for 2000: Conference Banquet Sunday, 10 July 2005 0800-0900: Breakfast 0930-1100: Session 7a: Literary Influence in the 20th Century
Session 7b: Tapestry
Session 7c: Utopia, Genre and Reception
1100-1130: Coffee 1130-1245: Plenary Lecture 3
1300-1430: Lunch and Farewell
--alphabetical by last name of presenter-- Florence Alibert-Dutrévis, 'William Morris and the Art of the Book: The European Connection'. Sarvenaz Amanat, 'Reflections on Persian Art and Design in the Works of William Morris'. Caroline Arscott, 'Strategy and Ornament'. Jenny M. Band, 'Morris & Co's Studio at Hampton Court Palace'. Matthew Beaumont, '"A Little Shopping": Morris, Bellamy, and Arcadian Dreams'. They are however shops, and Guest's description of them evokes a sneaking suspicion that the people are in fact perfectly adept at buying and selling. 'Wares were displayed in their finely designed fronts', he observes, 'as if to tempt people in, and people stood and looked at them, or went in and came out with parcels under their arms, just like the real thing.' At least superficially, therefore, there appears to be a close equivalence between shopping in this socialist utopia and shopping in late nineteenth-century capitalist society. In the 'finely designed fronts' depicted by Morris, as in the grand facades of Picadilly at the fin de siècle, the commodity, artfully displayed behind glass, tempts susceptible passers-by. In a double sense, then, Nowhere is an arcadian dream. Of course, it subsequently transpires that there are absolutely irreducible differences between the shops in Nowhere and those that are typical of the emergent consumer economy in the late nineteenth century. And in this respect, as in others, News is a riposte to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. The utopian arcades in Picadilly present a non-industrial alternative to the mechanized department store that is at the ideological centre of Bellamy's utopian fiction. But for all that Morris's utopian image of the arcades constitute a critique of Bellamy's dream of a city of streamlined consumers, it is itself indebted to the cultural logic of late nineteenth-century capitalism. Perhaps because of his considerable commercial skills, and in particular his responsibilities for Morris & Co.'s shop on Oxford Street, not even a committed communist like Morris could quite escape the dreamscapes of capitalism in an epoch increasingly shaped by mass consumption. The introductory paragraphs of the chapter on shopping in News from Nowhere have been overlooked in previous accounts of the novel. This paper will excavate their underlying contradictions, comparing them to Bellamy's treatment of shopping in his utopia, and exploring them in relation to Morris's contemporaneous business concerns. Hannah Bennett, 'Muse of the North: Morris's Rediscovery of Iceland'. In 1871 and 1873, Morris left Kelmscott Manor for the harsh landscapes of Iceland. While his interest in the Middle Ages and the Icelandic sagas preceded these journeys, these trips prompted a shift in Morris's creative stasis that resulted in a new artistic and political outlook. I will address the artistic changes seen in Morris's work as a result of his Icelandic excursions. The overall change will be discussed by contrasting Morris's artistic context (through images/slides) and preconceived (if not idealized) notions of Iceland before he set sail with his actual experiences in Iceland and long after his return to Kelmscott. Iceland's beguiling otherworldliness that Morris anticipated finding and the stark, ascetic place he actually found prompted an introspective journey that will be evidenced in excerpts taken from Morris's Icelandic journals. Accompanying Morris's firsthand accounts will be images of 19th century Iceland such as the Laxriverdale, the plain of Thingmeads, and Thorsmark. I will conclude by discussing how these journeys affected his aesthetic values - including why certain artistic areas were more influenced than others-which resulted in a renewed imaginative insight and appreciation for medieval culture, 19th century Icelandic culture, and Kelmscott. Philippa Bennett, 'Resuscitating Don Quixote's Burnt Library: Morris, the Last Romances and the Reclamation of Wonder'. Drawing on a range of critical and philosophical discourses of wonder, I will argue that wonder as attitude, experience and praxis is a central dynamic in Morris's work as a writer, an artist and a socialist, and achieves its most potent expression in the consciously wondrous narratives of his final years. In their emphatic celebration of wonder as physical, topographical, aesthetic and political experience, my paper will propose that the last romances offer a powerful challenge to social injustice, artistic degradation and environmental degeneration that is as relevant now as it was at the end of the nineteenth century. Far from indulging the consolations of nostalgia or providing the refuge of fantasy, I will suggest that these narratives, with their focus on what Ronald Hepburn has called wonder's 'questioning and questing' aspect, continue to generate that 'hope and promise of a new and higher life' articulated in Morris's lectures. I will assert the particular need for such 'questioning and questing' at the outset of a twenty first century dominated by cultural sensationalism and political disengagement, concluding that Morris's last romances remain an essential demonstration of the revitalising and revolutionary potential of wonder and offer a timely reminder that, in Howard Parsons' words, 'the will to wonder' is, 'the will to consider great alternatives for self and society and the will to try them out.' Amy Bingaman, 'The "Infinite Boon of Bliss": Jane Morris, Astarte Syriaca, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'Abject' Approproation of Classical Sources'. By invoking the post-Freudian, post-Lacanian discourses of abjection, masochism, and monstrous femininity utilized by Kristeva, Slavoj Zizek, and Barbara Creed, this paper will examine the painting (and its partner poem) as emblematic of Rossetti's reaction to Jane's rejection of him because of his choral addiction and her dedication to her children. In the winter of 1875-76, Jane spent several weeks with Rossetti at a lodge on the Sussex Coast. It was during this time that she sat for Astarte; at the end of this period, she ended the affair. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt reports her telling him some two decades later, "When I found he was ruining himself with choral and that I could do nothing to prevent it I left off going to him-and on account of the children." Jane took charge of the relationship, refusing the object role and calling Rossetti's masochistic bluff. Whether because he saw his soul in her face or because his more public identity was constructed so tightly around representation of her, this role-reversal abjectified his already unstable psyche. The representation of Jane/Astarte as the phallic woman speaks to and of Rossetti's abjection. The original myth of Astarte is that of the Syrian goddess who was both a fertility deity and a cruel seductress who lured her beholders to their destruction. Rossetti's pictorial and poetic depictions of this mythic figure draw particular attention to this duality. Like Medusa, Astarte symbolizes the fertility, procreation, and maternity-creative attributes that, in both the Gorgon and the Syrian Venus, threaten the male subject because, by way of mysteriously alluring power, each also seduced men to their deaths. Rosalind P. Blakesley, 'William Morris and the Russian Arts and Crafts'. The paper will begin by examining the spread of Morris's influence in Russia by considering both the activities of Russian travellers who encountered his work in Britain, and Russian periodicals which acted as conduits of his ideas. Attention will then focus on the way in which Morrisian initiatives were either echoed or consciously emulated in two key centres of the Russian Movement, namely Moscow and its environs, and the estate of Talashkino outside Smolensk. Drawing on original research carried out in both places, the paper will assess the extent to which artistic colonies as influential as that at Talashkino, and buildings as high-profile as the Historical Museum in Red Square, reflect the ideals of Morris and his circle. Particular efforts will be made to familiarise the audience with the more inaccessible works by illustrating them with original slides. By moving beyond the geographical boundaries in which Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement have hitherto been considered, the paper hopes to expand our understanding of the range of his influence, and to assess the extent to which Arts and Crafts practitioners acquired a distinct identity in Russia in their pursuit of both Morrisian and Slavic ideals. Florence Boos, 'News from Nowhere: An Illustrated Virtual Utopia'. Aware that many twenty-first-century students unfamiliar with the London and Oxfordshire of 1890 will find Guest's departure point as recondite as its "epoch of rest" is counterfactual, I have prepared an on-line edition of News from Nowhere-http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Ewmorris/news/index.html-whose maps, notes and illustrations are designed to help readers appreciate the temporal and spatial range of Guest's journey. There are, for example, photographs of the nineteenth-century underground; Morris' city house in Hammersmith on the river; contemporary prisons whose principles and practices he condemned; Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly as they were in 1890; the small towns Guest, Ellen and Dick observe and describe on their slow journey upriver; Kelmscott Manor; the nearby village of Kelmscott; and its tiny church, site of the work's concluding feast and Morris' own gravesite. Others identify many of the artifacts, people and events Morris's work evoked-the tenth-century Persian Shahnameh; the Baptistry at Florence; Fourier's communal phalansteries; Karl Marx; Ebenezer Howard; and the Trafalgar Square massacre. I will display many of these links onscreen as I talk, and hope glimpses of them will prompt teachers as well as their students to use the site. Isabel Donas Botto, 'On (Re)Building the City: William Morris and the Regeneration of the British City'. As men and women of the 21st century, human beings are increasingly defined as urban beings. And yet, many cities in Britain, as in the rest of Europe, are threatened by congestion, pollution, decay and deserted city centres. It is imperative to reverse this tendency, and to recuperate cities. The acknowledgement of this fact has for some time led to a wide debate over methods and strategies to achieve this, arguing for the need to rethink and regenerate the post-industrial city. This process is led, as is to be expected, by architects and urban planners, working with government at central and local level, although there is growing awareness among the public, especially owing to media attention. This could, however, and should be a more participatory process on the part of urban dwellers-in the UK, around 90 % of the people. Could William Morris be a source of inspiration? In spite of its appeal for early 20th century generations, most notably in Britain, it's not Morris's idealised vision of a 21st century London full of gardens and beautiful, organic architecture that I invoke, but rather his comments, in his essays, on the need for people to work together to build a better society. In short, I would like to claim Morris not for those who enthuse about the beauty and pleasures of the countryside, but for those who claim the necessity of regenerating and, indeed, of reinventing the British city. Noelle Bowles, 'The Nightmare of John Ball: Collars for the Working Class and Morris's Vision of Social Justice'. Morris's medievalism presents a check to the "compassionate conservatism" of paternalism which touts the "moral advantages of resulting from superior inspection and general observation" (Disraeli Sybil 225) in the work environment, and he points out the failures of a government that forces "the public to pay the expense of a luxurious life [. . .] for a few cliques of ambitious persons" (News 118). Morris's sentiments are, unfortunately, as relevant in the early years of the twenty-first century as they were in the nineteenth. George W. Bush's comment "'I've never been around poor people. I don't know how they think. I've never lived in a poor community'" (Wallis) reveals the extent to which the 'haves' are divided from the 'have nots'. In a post-September 11th world where paternalistic rhetoric and politicians encourage us to sacrifice independence for security, Morris permits us to see that the language of righteous empire may contain the seeds of its undoing, for A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere form the bookends of a revolution during which the ruling class is literally and metaphorically hoist with its own petard. Annette Carruthers, 'William Morris and Scotland'. The paper will also consider Morris's reception and influence in Scotland and, perhaps more importantly, the influence upon him of Scottish ideas and attitudes. Morris never warmed to Scotland as a place but it can be argued that Scottish ideals absorbed from Scott and Carlyle (as well as from Ruskin, the son of Scots) underpinned his views on art and society and were essential to his belief in the importance of craft skills in everyday work. Irene Cockroft, 'New Dawn Women: A New Light on William Morris and Women's Rights'. The 1851 census revealed there were far more young females in the British population than males. In an age when 'kept wife' was the only respectable role for a woman, the spinster problem loomed large. The dawning fashion for handcrafted wares encouraged by John Ruskin, suggested craft training for surplus women. The popularity of William Morris's arts and crafts manufactures of the 1860s, and the subsequent employment of his wife and daughters, lent respectability. By the 1870s, many art schools were open to the fair sex. In the ensuing decades, successful female graduates became working taxpayers with a need for, and a right to, parliamentary representation. Like membership of male craft guilds, citizenship of their country was denied women. They hoped a new century would bring male enlightenment. An incidental benefit to women attending art schools was the opportunity to socialise and share ideas. As the 20th century dawned on continued parliamentary intransigence, women felt driven to unite and actively campaign for their rights. In the early 1900s the Artists' Suffrage League and Suffrage Atelier were founded. With the design of banners, posters and postcards, distinctive jewellery and dress, and liveried merchandise, suffrage activity stepped firmly into the arena of mass propaganda. Suffrage campaigners changed society's perception of women's capability. In 1928 their efforts were rewarded with the right to the vote 'as it is or may be granted to men'. Women not only adopted the arts and crafts ethic of William Morris, they adapted it to forge the more equitable society that Morris envisaged. Arts and crafts became elevated by Morris-influenced women, from an art movement into a political force in history that, one feels, would have gladdened the old Socialist's heart. Laurence Davis, 'Art and Labour in the Political Writings of William Morris'. In this paper, I propose to take up Gorz's challenge by considering the role of labour in the political thought of William Morris. In the course of his life, Morris was by turns one of the leading poets and prose writers of his day; a pioneering craftsperson; a translator of Norse sagas; a businessperson; and one of the most important printers the world has known. He was also a democratic socialist who articulated a powerful, original, and compelling critique of capitalist modernity. The key to this critique, I will argue, is Morris's practical utopian vision of a society in which obstacles to pleasurable labour distinctive to capitalist society have been removed, and work re-united with art and nature. Against those who would dismiss this vision as "utopian" in the bad sense of the word implied by Marx and Engels's polemic against the utopian socialists, I will argue that Morris's ideas retain the potential to stimulate a democratic dialogue about the relationship between art, work, nature and society that is still of urgent relevance today. Drawing on the work of contemporary deep green thinkers and radical labour theorists inspired by the anarchist and socialist traditions, I argue more specifically that Morris developed a powerful and original "artistic" morality of production diametrically opposed to the morality of consumption that has since has since become dominant in advanced capitalist societies. This artistic morality of production implies that a lifestyle of ever increasing orgiastic consumption ought to be replaced by a lifestyle of frugal consumption using ecologically sensitive technologies sufficient to meet genuine human needs. It also suggests that the extreme and absolute separation between "work" and "art" in contemporary civilization poses a grave danger to democracy and has prepared the way for a new slave civilization. This danger may be averted only when labour partakes of the essential quality of art, and all people have the opportunity to make their own sense of beauty and value a power in their lives. I intend to develop my argument in three stages. First, I will situate Morris's late Victorian ideas about art and labour in relation to the most current developments of the wage-based society. Second, I will elaborate his artistic morality of production and explore its relevance to a world in which "work" and "art" are dangerously divided from one another in both theory and practice. Third, I will point to the limitations of Morris's ideas by suggesting that he needlessly embraces the opposite extreme of merging art with work. I illustrate the dangers of this position by contrasting Morris's aesthetic ideas with those of his contemporary Oscar Wilde, whose essay 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' may be read as a playful warning of the perils involved in conflating socialized labour and aesthetic individualism. More generally, I argue that Morris's art and labour critique of capitalism ought to be amended in order to take into account the radical transformation of Western social and cultural values that has occurred since the Enlightenment. I conclude by fleshing out this theoretical argument with a consideration of the more dialectical relationship between art and labour implicit in Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. David Faldet, '"The Land They Were Made For": Morris, Jane Addams and Norwegian-American Craft'. One of the disciples of Morris in the United States was Jane Addams, the Chicago social reformer. She respected Morris's ideas about the dignity of labor and the importance of traditional craft, and her earliest collaborator at Hull House, Ellen Gates Starr, studied directly under Morris's friend Cobden-Sanderson. Followers of Morris in America often, and quite unwisely, turned to vernacular traditions to inform their work. Gustav Stickley turned, for his prototype in furniture design, to the oldest blend of European and Amerindian culture in North America, the missions of California. Jane Addams decorated the "Indian Room" of Hull House with items she purchased from native craftspeople of the Southwest. Her fellow-Chicagoan, Frank Lloyd Wright, developed the Prairie Style of architecture to create homes that had sympathy for the landscape of the western United States. However, Addams chose to also revive in European immigrants the craft skills they brought with them from other countries. The Labor Museum at Hull House was her attempt to "build a bridge between European and American experiences". In particular, she hoped to impress the factory-working children of immigrants with the design skills their parents brought with them from the Old World. Some of those immigrants were Norwegian. Addams' project paralleled the work of Arts and Crafts leaders in Norway, such as Gerhard Munthe, who in the 1890s promoted the "farmer culture" of the rural peasantry, that was being lost with urbanization and industrialization. Celebrating the art of the Norwegian peasantry helped generate public antagonism for Norway's union with its larger neighbor, Sweden (dissolved in 1905). Nationalist sympathy was also reflected in the Norwegian "dragon style", art that reconnected with the design tradition of the Viking era. Norwegian-Americans in Chicago and elsewhere promoted Norwegian design as an act of patriotism for their ancestral homeland. When Norwegians in Chicago built a social center, the Norske Klub, they decorated it with dragon-style carving. Norwegian design in America built a bridge that connected and continues to connect Norwegian Americans to the rural culture and peasant traditions of the Norway of their ancestors. Through institutions like the Vesterheim museum, which has always had a strong base of Chicago supporters, folk handicraft traditions have been maintained that make up, in America, for the lack of a deep American history of handicraft design for descendants of European immigrants. This perpetuation of Norwegian design tradition links Americans of Norwegian descent with the physical culture of their peasant ancestors, and informs American design even as it is transformed by American traditions and materials. Michael Farrell and Robert Allen, 'The Changing Roles of William Morris in his Collaborative Circle'. In this paper, using SYMLOG diagrams (Bales, 1988), we compare the development of this early arts and crafts group to single-discipline circles, highlighting the unique crises and strains that affect interdisciplinary collaboration. Focusing on Morris's role in the group, we examine the changing ways the group used him and he used the group. Though Morris was sometimes perceived as the group scapegoat and clown-less adept than the others as both artist and architect, and often the butt of jokes and cartoons-he became the executive manager of the group, generally identified as the founder of the arts and crafts movement. Peter Faulkner, 'Morris and the Scrutiny Tradition'. Richard Frith, '"Queen Iseult": Swinburne and Morris in 1857'. 'Queen Iseult' is manifestly a piece of juvenilia, simultaneously an act of homage to the elder poet and a precocious literary experiment; and to this fact can be attributed some of the differences in intellectual texture between Swinburne's poem and Morris's contemporary works. Swinburne is both more bookish and more iconoclastic, drawing on a wider range of medieval sources for his treatment of the legend he retells, whilst also eschewing the note of ambivalence which prevents Morris's poems from becoming simplistic. To some extent these divergences also reflect lasting contrasts between the temperaments of the two poets; yet the ideals and literary enthusiasms which bound the young Swinburne and Morris together remain more important than their differences. Haruhiko Fujita, 'William Morris, Arts & Crafts, and World Settlement of the 21st Century'. The Settlement Movement that had also started in London, at Toynbee Hall of East End where C. R. Ashbee formed the Guild of Handicraft, soon spread to the United States, and in the late 1890's reached to Japan where Sen Katayama founded Kingsley Hall in Tokyo in 1897. The turn of the last century was a very interesting period of time, when ideals of art, craft, private as well as social life were searched for all together and all over the world. Art and welfare were not separate issues for leading figures of those British movements such as Morris or Ashbee. Suggested by those movements, more or less associated with Morris, we started a new UK/US/Japan project in 2001. Our first meeting started in Chicago on March 1st, 2001. Celebrating the centennial of a promising young architect's lecture "The Art and Craft of the Machine," an international conference "Frank Lloyd Wright at Hull House: 1901, 2001" was held at the University of Illinois at Chicago with the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum on its campus. Hull House was not only an important settlement house in the US but also the headquarters of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society. It was followed by "The Arts and Crafts Movement and Social Reform in Victorian and Edwardian England" held at Toynbee Hall in July 2002, and "Art and Society in Modern Japan" held in Yokohama and Osaka in July 2003. In July 2004, we met again at Toynbee Hall where we held the 4th International Conference on the History of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the 1st International Conference on the History of the Settlement Movement, formally separated from the former for the first time. We are going to hold another pair of international conferences, the 5th ICHACM and the 2nd ICHSM in Kurashiki, Japan, in July 26-29, 2005. We are still keeping "Art and Welfare" together, following the ideals of our 19th century pioneers. Comparative studies of Morris/Arts & Crafts movement and the Yanagi/Mingei movement are now becoming active in Japan and its neighbouring countries. This academic trend is certainly related to the modern situation since the days of Morris where people are, regardless of various disparities in class, race, or nationality, in search of the Beauty of Life as well as the Beauty of the Earth. It seems to be further reinforced in industrial and post-industrial East Asia.
Wim Gerlagh, 'A Footnote to a Footnote; William Morris and Richard Roland Holst'. It can easily be determined that Morris's visitor had been Richard Roland Holst. We can be quite certain of this because Roland Holst has recorded this encounter. In a review of the Dutch translation of five of Morris's lectures in November 1903, Holst recollects how 'ten years ago' he had met with Morris and spent 'a couple of hours with him in his house in London'. In 1940 Holst's widow published The childhood and youth of R.N. Roland Holst. In this book Holst's meeting with Morris, 'on a grey winter day in 1894' is also recalled. From there we learn that this brief encounter with Morris and 'the sturdy power that was shining from this brilliant man' has worked on in the deepest layers of her late husband's mind.' (H. Roland Holst van der Schalk, Kinderjaren en jeugd, p 113). Richard Roland Holst was one of the few Dutchmen who actually met Morris, and for sure the one who for the rest of his life has never stopped disseminating Morris's ideas and thoughts. Therefore I think, that it might be interesting for Morris students to know a little bit more about him. In the paper and lecture I intend to write for and deliver at the Fiftieth Anniversary Conference, I want to present a brief sketch of the man and his life, I want to tell what he was doing in London in the winter of 1883-4 and I also want to describe briefly how the meeting with Morris has affected both his later professional and his personal life. George Gopen, 'The Fractal Folktale Structure of The Water of the Wondrous Isles'. This paper does not attempt to "prove" or even support Propp's analyses and conclusions. Rather it uses his formalist insights to demonstrate the psychological complexity of the Morris works that so influenced J.R.R. Tolkien and led Yeats to call them the only works he read intentionally slowly so as not to come to the end of them too quickly. Piers Hale, 'William Morris, Socialism and Biology: Utopia on the Other Side of Nowhere'. However, Morris did not counter Huxley's attempts to naturalize competition and the struggle for existence with an anti-scientific and utopian romanticism, but instead asserted a different understanding of the natural history of life and its development. George Bernard Shaw and John Bruce Glasier both observed that Morris took a keen interest in the scientific questions of the day, a suggestion born out by his close acquaintance with the Russian-born geographer Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin, a frequent guest in the Morris household, authored a series of essays for the Nineteenth Century in direct response to Huxley's aggressively Darwinian conception of nature, later published as Mutual Aid (1902). In this paper I explore the assumptions about biology and social development that are at the heart of Morris's work and suggest that contemporary developments in evolutionary biology played a significant part in marginalizing Morris's utopian aspirations as Marxism and Fabianism came to dominate British socialism politics. I contend that Morris is not only a significant figure in the history of the relationship between biology and socialism, but more importantly argue that an appreciation of this can give us a fresh perspective on Morris's relevance to the politics of social change for the 21st Century. Trevor Harris, 'The Utopiate of the People'. That tension-for which we should be grateful since it produced such a rich œuvre-whether viewed from the standpoint of political science or that of the history of ideas, provides a most useful insight into the difficulty British intellectuals faced when responding to "the modern". Commerce, science, technology, industry, Empire: these created a realignment of values which was powerful enough to undermine mid-Victorian, Liberal individualism and propose collectivist solutions in its place. The contours of that collectivism resist any straightforward classification in terms of "Liberal" and "Conservative", as is clear from the disparate political provenance of the members of, for example, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the devotees of Toynbee Hall, or (later) the Coefficients and the members of the War Propaganda Bureau... The various attempts to develop collectivist solutions, premised on a revised definition of authentic Britishness, were to split along a number of different fault lines-militarism and pacifism, for example-which later congealed into a recognisable "left" and "right". For Morris, however, and more broadly for a context which we might define as (eighteen)-"nineties" thinking, authenticity (and with it [national] self-image) had not yet been articulated around such oppositions. This paper aims to explore Morris's place (and especially that of News from Nowhere) in this developing realignment of political allegiances within the British ideology. His "regressive" aesthetics and socialist ideal illustrate, no doubt, a nice dichotomy. But they also illustrate the way in which Morris responded to what John Wolffe has called the "quasi-religion" of late-Victorian England, that de-institutionalised religious sentiment which was as much a part of "Greater Britain" as it was of the "Little England" to which Morris, by temperament, felt himself attracted. His political and aesthetic preferences, that is, far from being some form of bad faith, or closet Toryism-a conclusion to which the cultural thought-police might be tempted to jump-are an illustration of the great difficulty which Morris, his contemporaries and their many heirs, have had in constructing a viable communitarian politics. Carola Hicks, '"Very Quaint and Rude"-William Morris and the Bayeux Tapestry'. He was also the ultimate inspiration behind the replica of the whole work that Elizabeth Wardle and a team of embroiderers created in 1885/86. She was the wife of Morris's distinguished dyeing colleague, Thomas Wardle, silk and textile manufacturer of Leek, Staffordshire. Developing printed textiles in the 1870s but dissatisfied with modern, chemically-based dyes, Morris contacted Wardle (the brother in law of Morris' business manager) to help him recreate natural dyes, and established a remarkable collaboration. This extended to interest in the work of Mrs Wardle, a skilled embroiderer, whom Morris advised and encouraged. In 1879, she established the Leek School of Art Embroidery, and in 1885 decided to embroider a full-size replica of the Tapestry "so that England should have a copy of its own." Her aims were educational and patriotic: she wanted to celebrate the historical craft of embroidery with the aid of the best products - she used over 100 lbs of wool that Thomas Wardle had dyed in the traditional manner worked out with Morris. She worked with a team of 37 women, they finished in June 1886, and exhibited the replica in Leek. It became a local then a national touring attraction, at last accessible to British people without having to travel to France. Bought by Reading Museum in 1893, it continued to tour into the 1980s. As her family recognised, the inspiration and friendship of William Morris were the source of this important monument. David A. Hill, 'Morris's Ideas in Hungary: The Work of the Gödöllõ Artists' Colony'. As elsewhere in continental Europe, the Art Nouveau/Secession movement was very much wrapped up with broader political aims, in particular that of producing a national style. Much of the output of the Gödöllő Artist's Colony was based upon, and, indeed, was a continuation and modernisation of, the traditional Hungarian folk designs which they admired. This talk will introduce the audience to the work of the Gödöllő Artist's Colony, which is relatively unknown outside Hungary, through a historical and artistic overview and a series of slides illustrating various aspects of their artistic production. This tradition has been continued up to the present day, and there are a number of descendents and followers who still work in the traditions laid down by the founders of the Colony. Ellen Van Impe, '"Le respect des principes retrouvés dans la bonne tradition": The Reception of Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement in the Belgian Catholic Gothic Revival (1890-1914)'. Yasuo Kawabata, 'Kenji Otsuki and the Tokyo Centenary of the Birth of William Morris'. Recent research done by me has revealed that Otsuki corresponded with several Britons concerned with Morris-May Morris, Sydney Cockerell, J. W. Mackail, to name but a few-to whom he sent a copy of the catalogue and bibliography. As late as 1961, R. C. H. Briggs, the then Honorary Secretary of the Morris Society, wrote to Otsuki about the forthcoming first issue of the Journal and invited him to contribute to the second issue, although for some reason Otsuki did not contribute. Still later, in 1966, Briggs wrote again to Otsuki to ask him if he was still in touch with some of those who had assisted him with the Morris centenary exhibition in Tokyo in 1934, hoping in this way to make contact with Japanese people who were interested in Morris. During his lifetime Otsuki was evidently regarded by Briggs and others as a representative of Morris scholars in Japan. This paper will investigate his unique, and almost forgotten, contribution to the study of Morris in Japan. Richard Kaye, 'William Morris, F. Holland Day, and the Invention of an Aestheticist-Decadent Publishing Tradition, 1893-1899'. In my paper I argue that Day's relatively short career in publishing helped to shape a uniquely American (and in some ways given its high-minded ethos of social consciousness, highly Bostonian) synthesis of Morris's aesthetic ideals and fin-de-siècle Aestheticist and Decadent artistry. But even as Aestheticisma and Decadence had come to acquire an aura of scandalousness in England in the wake of the Wilde trials, Copeland and Day were able to refashion Aestheticist and Decadent ideals for an American reading public unfamiliar with the Aestheticist and Decadent Movements' associations of dissident sexuality increasingly prevalent in Britain. Moreover, with the collapse of Copeland and Day in 1899 due to financial constraints and Day's intensifying interest in the New Pictorialist Photography, Day found himself drawn to many of Morris's socialist ideals, as he sought to wed aesthetic principles in art to egalitarian ideals of social reform. His pictorialist photographs of Black Americans in 'authentic' African dress, for example, intimated that African-Americans had their origins in an exalted African past, one that rendered them more than entitled to full citizenship. Drawing on origin al research at the Library of Congress (where most of Day's archives are housed), and building on the scholarship of writers on Day such as Estelle Jussim, my paper explores the afterlife of William Morris's aesthetic aspirations outside of Britain in the work of a neglected American artist and publisher. Terry Kidner, 'Deposition and Diversion: Rhetorical Distraction in "The Defence of Guenevere"'. Much has been made of the "Pre-Raphaelite pictoriality" of this poem, its tableaux of color confronting color and swinging cascades of hair assaulting knightly armor, and, again, rightly so. In this paper, however, I would like to stress instead Morris's skill as a verbal strategist, a skill that has kept the poem more immediate for a C21 reader than, as reviews indicate, it was for most of its original critics. Ruth Kinna, 'Morris and Bax'. The paper suggests that the divergence between the two rests on their different understanding of historical development. Morris's diary suggests that Bax was responsible for much of Morris's understanding of Marxism. And his influence on Morris is undeniable. What this paper suggests, however, is that Morris inherited certain concepts from Bax and interpreted them in a unique way: whereas Bax adopted a strongly philosophical view of historical change, Morris did not. Whilst Bax consequently believed that there was no constancy in history, Morris took the contrary view. In News From Nowhere, he draws on this idea of constancy to shape his idea of socialism. Bax could not follow him. John Lang, 'Depending on the Independence of William Morris'. A perfect example of someone suffering the effects of this kind of polar affiliation or interpretation is represented by the German philosopher Hegel. The polar opposition, understood as the Left and Right Hegelians, formulated during Hegel's lifetime, was solidified soon after his death in 1831 and remains in existence even to this day in Hegelian scholarship. Exactly the same phenomenon exists with respect to interpreters or followers of William Morris, especially when one reviews the political and social activist components of his life. This paper presents a new approach or attitude to understanding the true character of Morris, found under the rubric of 'The Independent Morris'. One can understand William Morris's life, aesthetic theory and social expression in the same way that Hegel's thought operates, that is - dialectically. The thesis position is young Morris (1854-66) as a Romantic: A term often used to describe an escapist dreamer who is not committed to social concerns or political change of any manner. This view is distorted but will stand for now. The antithesis position is the mature Morris (1883 - ), a time when he is generally construed as a Marxist: A term often used to describe a revolutionary thinker whose sole commitment in all aspects of life is to radical political change-typically understood as a product of violence. The interesting feature of the present analysis is that we find the synthesis moment of Morris, otherwise known as the 'Independent Morris', in the middle period of his life-roughly 1867-1882. Why does it not occur after the antithesis, where it typically should fall? This concept of an Independent Morris denotes the synthesis of Morris involving two other periods but, peculiarly enough, this seems to place his synthesis prior to the antithesis. In fact, the radical political revolutionary ethos (typically understood as the Marxist Morris) had been percolating across Europe and within England since the French Revolution as a direct consequence of the Enlightenment thinkers and Romantic writers such as Rousseau and Goethe. The English Romanticism of Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, to name a few, was not merely literary escapism, but can often be understood as subliminal political radicalism. Indeed, the triadic structure to justify the Independent Morris as chronologically correct synthesis would be the Enlightenment (thesis), Romanticism (antithesis) and then the period of 1867-1882 (synthesis) for our purposes. The point that must be noted at this juncture is that regardless of which affiliation is at play to abduct Morris-the Romantic Right or the Communist Left - he and his thought always were depending on the concept of independence. The philosophical character that underlies and defines the Independent Morris is the idea of aesthetic self-consciousness involving the Hegelian concept of recognition. I have dealt with this position in other papers. The term 'independent' is poignant because it implies the nonsense of viewing Morris as being alone. It therefore immediately reminds or informs us of the consistent and radically interdependent nature of all experiences in which Morris engaged throughout his life. Indeed, no person is literally independent. No woman is an island. The independence of Morris' philosophical aesthetics is that it is new, revolutionary and clearly presented for the world in the period labeled as 'Independent'. In effect, the aesthetic perspective that Morris champions is a true synthesis that weaves multiple strands of artistic endeavours and social awareness together as a unified piece of artwork. His aesthetic theory and practice both reflect key elements of Romanticism and Socialism, but they do so in a uniquely independent manner. David Latham, '"Between Hell and England": Finding Ourselves in the Present Text'. Consistent with his understanding that originality requires a return to origins, Morris sought to revolutionize the "province of art" by reviving and integrating two classical literary genres as the means for channelling his creative artistry for a political newspaper. His two prose views of the past and the future exemplify the two elite genres of prose reserved for serious subjects that correspond to the epic and tragedy genres of poetry: the Socratic dialogue and the ideal commonwealth narrative. Morris's focus on serious "matters of concern" clarifies and re-directs Latour's argument within a more radical context by distinguishing concern from anxiety. Morris indicates that concern is the heartfelt response to social problems and responsibilities. Anxiety is based on the desire to exclude or subordinate, to preserve the values or benefits of society for an elite group of citizens who believe they have the right answers. Anxiety is the centralizing base of political and economic movements that have built up the assimilating global centres championed by the Bushes and Blairs of the world. As an artist Morris counters such anxieties by practising the paradoxical cultural principle that the more a work of literature is rooted in a regional setting the more universal its communicative power; thus Morris is the champion campaigner for a decentralizing cultural movement. Morris recognized that the answer to the political question "where are we going?" is best found by asking the historian's question: "where are we now, and how did we get here?" The analogy of the past serves as our only guide to the future; but because our view of the past is narrowed by prejudice, the future is always unexpected. Through his dream of the past in A Dream of John Ball and his dream of the future in News from Nowhere Morris delivers us to the unknown realm of the present, revealing the present as a presence, not an impersonal cause in which to lose ourselves, but a person in whom to find ourselves again. I shall focus my discussion of A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere on Morris's metaphors for this elusive present moment and how they emerge from the "sunder betwixt" image patterns of past and present, dream and deed, and hell and heaven. Ruth Levitas, 'After Morris: Utopian Legacies in Hammersmith'. Anna Matyukhina, 'William Morris and Tapestry Weaving: The View from Russia'. My paper will consider the Adoration Tapestry woven for S. I. Schyukin, now in the State Hermitage collection-the single Merton Abbey Tapestry in Russia- as well as Russian historiography on the problem of tapestries in Morris's work (A. Anikst, E. Nekrasova, V. Savitskaya, etc.) and finally Morris's influence on Russian weavers (mainly, by the example of St.Petersburg). Rosie Miles, 'Editing Morris for the 21st Century'. In the twenty-first century scholarly editing is changing, and increasingly major projects are being undertaken that incorporate the possibilities of hypertext into their conceptualisation and making. My paper will introduce the Morris Online Edition-www.morrisedition.org-a project which plans to rectify the surprising fact that there has never been a major, critical, scholarly edition of the works of William Morris. I will discuss what I see as some of the possibilities that an online Morris edition will offer, in terms of the visual qualities of Morris's texts, and also in relation to new and emerging reading practices. Elizabeth C. Miller, 'How We Might (Not) Read: William Morris's Textual Dystopia'. Morris serialized News from Nowhere in his socialist newspaper The Commonweal, which was part of an explosion of radical political periodicals in late-Victorian London. Cheaper and easier printing technologies, the reduced cost of paper, public education, and newly widespread literacy had all contributed to a surge in activist publishing in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This sudden proliferation of texts, pamphlets, and journals was a boon to minority political platforms such as anarchism and socialism. Morris favored a two-stage process to achieve socialism: education and propaganda would precede the revolution, thus preparing the masses to assume power and wield it responsibly. In his political writings, Morris was thus keenly aware of the importance of texts to achieve socialist ends. At the same time, Morris cared about books and texts as material objects of beauty that were ends in themselves. Only two years after the initial serialization of News, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press, which was dedicated to reinvigorating the art of the book in an age of debased taste and sensibility. This life-work makes his depiction of texts in News all the more surprising. The denizens of Nowhere obviously have no more need for radical journals, pamphlets, or educational propaganda, but given Morris's other area of textual interest, one might expect them all to be reading handcrafted book-art in the tradition of Kelmscott. Instead, however, Morris's utopians barely read at all. Most have very little interest in books, and those that do usually have something wrong with them. In Nowhere, reading is a symptom of a diseased mind; it represents an inability to achieve unmediated union with nature and humanity. The novel, in particular, is singled out as a pernicious literary form: individualist, anti-socialist, and tending toward the production of "sham wants" or "sham troubles." It is perhaps to be expected that Morris would expose Victorian novels as bourgeois and capitalist, but all forms of reading and writing are debased in his story. Morris depicts reading as the pathological compulsion of our imperfect world. Like all manifestations of industrial technology, print is a debilitating barrier between humans and nature. As a writer, this claim is perhaps the bravest that Morris can make, but it serves another purpose as well. Morris subtly calls into question his novel's success as a novel, and at the same time makes a virtue of its failure. Mervyn Miller, 'Building the Earthly Paradise: William Morris and Raymond Unwin'. Raymond Unwin (1863-1940) was an eager acolyte of Morris. Growing up in Oxford, he long remembered the lectures of Morris and Ruskin, and became a member of the Socialist League. Returning northward he served an engineering apprenticeship, before joining his brother-law Barry Parker (1867-1947) in architectural practice. Unwin's objectives as an architect were strongly influenced by Morris, and by Edward Carpenter, at Millthorpe, outside Sheffield. Ebenezer Howard's Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898 presented the Garden City as innovative community development, integrating town and country in 'a joyous union'. In 1902, Unwin became involved with the search for a site, and the planning of Letchworth Garden City. Together with Parker, his master plan (1904) reshaped Howard's mechanistic diagrams, incorporating Arts and Crafts values as a practical demonstration of Morris's Earthly Paradise. Unwin also planned New Earswick (1902) Joseph Rowntree's model village, north of York, and Hampstead Garden Suburb (1905-7). These communities demonstrated the benefits of development on the basis of an environmentally sensitive master plan, in contrast to the feeble regulation of Victorian laissez faire through bye-laws. The Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 was matched by the publication of Unwin's seminal masterwork, Town Planning in Practice, and affirmed Unwin's role and influence in setting Morris's environmental values at the heart of the planning system. Eamonn O'Machail, 'Placing William Morris: Representing Radical Heritage in Walthamstow's Cultural Policy'. As an enquiry directed towards the examination of meanings articulated by social actors a qualitative research strategy was pursued involving the sourcing of discourse texts from archive source, interview method and observation. The research findings indicate that in the local heritageisation of Morris discourses of local governance centred on civic pride and of Morris as creative entrepreneur have been the dominant considerations of municipal practice, obscuring Morris's radical heritage. The determination of a Museum to William Morris in the form of a Gallery to his arts and crafts reproduces aesthetic ideology maintaining actual discourse within conservative discourse boundaries. However, an oppositional discourse claimed Morris as a champion of the labour movement and that opposition is still evident in local community practice today, albeit limited. A discourse of pluralist education that is permissive of the consideration of conflicting political ideologies understands Morris's radical heritage as a resource in citizenship education and the wider task of democratic renewal. Within this intellectual space there is the possibility of securing sustained representation of radical heritage in local cultural policy. However this requires sustained commitment from social actors in the locality. For the present the research process has succeeded in placing the radical Morris on the agenda of local cultural policy. Ji-Hyae Park, 'Mastership or Fellowship?: Aesthetic Critics and their Audiences'. In his lectures on art and society, Morris addresses his various audiences as if he is one of them, but in order to motivate them to transcend a particular group identity: he invokes the craftsmen to become social agitators, and the middle class to "cast in their lot with the working men," just as he did. Morris emphasizes what he has in common with the audience rather than what makes him uncommon. His lectures on aesthetics are, therefore, notably depersonalized, although his arguments are clearly based on his own artistic experience and knowledge. Is, however, the absence of Morris's personality and personal testimony a problem? Is his relationship with his audiences, therefore impersonal, even as he attempts to establish fellowship with them? In order to highlight the dynamics of Morris's interaction with his audiences, I will compare them to Ruskin's in Fors Claivigera, a monthly newsletter addressed "to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain." Although both Ruskin and Morris praise creative labor, as well as claim an alliance with the laboring class, they diverge dramatically in the ways they address their audiences, which can be summed up as "Mastership" and "Fellowship." In Fors Clavigera, Ruskin, the "Master," assumes absolute authority over his readers, yet the autobiographical style of the letters makes his interaction with them intimately interpersonal, a quality lacking in Morris's lectures because of his emphasis on the "common." In this paper, I intend to analyze the ways in which Morris addresses his audiences, which he, like other aesthetic critics, is invested in re-forming. I propose that the belief in the potentially transformative effects of art on the individual led aesthetic critics to critique society from a uniquely (and perhaps problematically) utopian perspective. Although E. P. Thompson's provocative definition of utopianism as "the education of desire" is often cited, I would like to reconsider it in this particular context, the complex dynamics of interaction between aesthetic critics and their audiences. Nic Peeters, 'Women of the Firm: An Assessment of Female Artistic Contributions to Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co and Morris & Co.'. In News from Nowhere William Morris made it clear that he saw housekeeping as an ideal occupation for women. Nevertheless, in life he stimulated women to take part creatively in the manufacture of decorative art. It is, for example, well known that he introduced his wife to medieval embroidery techniques. One of the aims of my paper is therefore to assess how the work of women artists within the Firm fitted into the context of William Morris's ideas about women, craftsmanship, and design. Primarily I want to draw attention to the importance of their artistic creations as well as to their groundbreaking role for later generations of women in the decorative arts like Margaret and Frances Macdonald of the Glasgow School. Marilyn Pemberton, 'Mary De Morgan: Out of the Shadows'. Tony Pinkney, 'H.G. Wells's A Modern Utopia and Morris's News from Nowhere: Principles of a Kinetic Utopia'. A Modern Utopia not only develops its own detailed blueprint of the good society, but is also a 'meta-utopia', a broad philosophical meditation on the entire preceding utopian tradition from Plato onwards. As part of this overview of the tradition Wells devotes close attention to Morris's News from Nowhere at several points in his work, displaying considerable ambivalence towards it. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues - attitudes to human perfectibility, questions of narrative representation in utopian writing, etc - which they raise. Crucial to Wells's own project in A Modern Utopia is the idea of a 'kinetic' utopia, one which would break with old Platonic notions of perfectibility and stasis and, true to a Darwinian intellectual epoch, will incorporate possibilities of dynamic self-transformation within itself. I will briefly consider to what extent the depicted world of A Modern Utopia itself lives up to this criterion. But my central purpose will be to re-read News from Nowhere as a kinetic utopia in this Wellsian sense. I will reflect on time travel versus spatial travel within the utopian tradition, and interpret the journey up the Thames in News from Nowhere as a second utopian project, one which introduces the extraordinary figure of Ellen and provokes us to profoundly revalue the London sections of the book. Through Ellen, I suggest, Morris attempts to build into his work the kind of kineticism which A Modern Utopia extols, withimportant political consequences for both him then and for us now. John Plotz, 'From Chartism to Modernism: The Genealogy of Impersonal Socialism in William Morris's Late Romances'. Morris is interested in the phenomenology of sensory perception (how does a face, a shoe or a sunset strike an observer?), but he is leery of charting the presumptive psychological depths into which such sensoria travel. He loves bodies, but distrusts any idea that such bodies distinguish us from one another: rather they are the general property of all who share a social universe; kiss one pair of beautiful lips, and you've kissed the human race. Such an aesthetic approach clearly helps us to identify Morris as a contemporary of Wilde, and as an intriguing forebear of the Modernist novel practiced by Stein, Joyce, and Woolf. Moreover, in ways that critics are just beginning to elucidate, William Morris's entire oeuvre stands deeply indebted to Chartist and early working-class writing, a corpus rendered no less remarkable by virtue of its submersion in near total darkness from its day to our own. Chartist fiction is marked, like Morris's work, by a stubborn refusal to admit particularities, and a fascinating flirtation with the delineation of individual character, personas who seem almost individual, only to be depersonalized again by their reimmersion in the larger body of struggling English workers. Simon Poë, 'Venus Rising from the Waves: Morris, Stanhope, Botticelli and Aphrodite Anodyomene'. In my paper I argue a connection between Morris's painting and a Venus by J. R. Spencer Stanhope (present whereabouts unknown, but reproduced in Percy H. Bate's The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters, their Associates and Successors, 1899, and in an article by T. Martin Wood from The Studio in 1910) which it resembles very closely. I connect both paintings to the Venus Pudica sold as an autograph Botticelli at Christie's in 1863 (but now accepted as being just a workshop painting). I support the connection between Morris's and Stanhope's paintings, based first of all on their extreme similarity, with material drawn from published sources such as Stanhope's niece Anna Stirling's A Painter of Dreams, Georgiana Burne-Jones's Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Mary Lago's Burne-Jones Talking, Diana Holman Hunt's My Grandfather, his Wives and Loves and David Elliott's biography of his grandfather Charles Fairfax Murray. I suggest that in 1870 Morris joined Stanhope and Burne-Jones in the large studio built for Stanhope at Little Campden House by Philip Webb in 1869, and that, while Burne-Jones worked on Love Among the Ruins, the other two artists painted versions of Aphrodite Rising from the Waves derived from Botticelli. Lynda Prescott, 'Evelyn Waugh, Morris, and the ideal of craftsmanship'. Was this supposed similarity with Morris confined to a fleeting youthful phase, or was there any lasting connection? Recent re-evaluations of Waugh's character and literary reputation, whilst they scarcely go as far as endorsing Acton's speculations about connections with Morris, have certainly decreased the distance between the two artists. If the utopia that Morris envisioned in News from Nowhere becomes, in Waugh's fiction, a lost and idealised past, there is still another way in which Morris's ideals impact positively on Waugh's work. Throughout his career Waugh emphasised the idea of craftsmanship in writing, and an intense preoccupation with his medium, language. It is here, arguably, that the real influence of Morris can be seen. Peter Preston, 'William Morris and G. D. H. Cole'. Eleonora Sasso, 'William Morris and Gabriele D'Annunzio: Kindred Spirits?' David Saxby, 'William Morris at Merton'. William Morris signed the lease to the site on 16 June 1881. He refused to pull down any of the existing buildings and apart from some minor alterations they remained unchanged until the works closed in 1940. He needed works near a river suitable for vegetable dyeing, workshops for cloth-printing, textile, carpet and tapestry-weaving, and a stained glass workshop. At the time William de Morgan was also looking for premises to manufacture tiles which were sold at Morris's Oxford Street shop. After rejecting premises in the Cotswolds and at Crayford, Kent, Morris visited the printing works at Merton Abbey and found that it exactly suited his needs. William de Morgan leased an area of land at Merton Abbey and set up his Fine Art Pottery (1882-88). Archaeological excavations in 1993 revealed some of the buildings Morris used including the dormitory, design and drawing room and the office. The dormitory was older than the photographs suggest and dated to the 16th-17th century and built from stone from Merton Priory. Artefacts from the earlier calico printing activities were also found. Contemporary accounts, photographs, maps and archaeological evidence provide vivid images of Morris's workshops at Merton. M. P. A. Sheaffer, 'William Morris's Impact Upon the Jahrhundertwende Art World of Vienna'. The first impact came through the founding of the South Kensington Museum in 1862. The German exile, one of the Viennese Ringstrasse architects and mentor of Otto Wagner, would have encountered the work of William Morris during Semper's involvement with Prince Albert in setting up what would become the foremost institution for the education in and support of the decorative arts in Britain. He had also surely heard of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co.-Fine Art Workmen, established in 1861 . He would also have heard of Morris's Art Worker's Guild (1861) and the sensational Red House (1859). So would have Rudolf von Eitelberger, first professor of art history in Vienna, who had visited the "Exhibition of All Nations" of 1862 in London. He returned to Vienna to convince Emperor Franz Josef I to establish the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Kunst in 1863 in Vienna on the model of the SKM. Central to the philosophy of the school attached to it were Morrisian Arts and Crafts principles. This school would graduate some of Vienna's most outstanding decorative artists of the end of the century, some of whom then became instructors at the same school. Some of Morris's principles would be carried on at the Jahrhundertwende and into the 20th Century by Otto Wagner and his students, also through Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, and the Wiener Werkstätte, founded in 1903. Pete Smith, 'The Situationist International and William Morris: The Dialectic of Work and Art'. My argument is that labour is a means though which the subject constructs itself and yet this very thing is an absent or excluded middle term in the Situationist project. Although the Situationists' polemicisation of work is a central concern for the group, it tends to appear in their writing in the exclamatory and rhetorical form of intellectual negation ("Never Work!"). In contrast Morris exalted the aesthetic dimension in labour as potentially liberating. This notwithstanding I will argue that in their different ways they confronted the bourgeois cult of art and its alienation from lived experience. The SI established a model of aesthetic and interventionist practice and confronted the rituals and institutions art-their œuvre is itself an "exercise in liberty"-but (despite this) it failed to produce a detailed analysis of work as a disalienated and constructive term. The SI-influenced banality of "playful creation" that informs some current postmodernist practice will be contrasted with Morris's deeper study of the conditions and culture of labour. Mike Smith-Rawnsley, 'Unpicking the Threads: Tracing Morris in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists'. In fact, the only other writer mentioned by name in Tressell's novel is the nineteenth-century historian James Anthony Froude, who is quoted in the 'Great Oration' delivered by Barrington, the middle-class socialist towards the end of the book. This same lecture, which details the workings of a Utopian Co-operative Commonwealth, contains much material from Chapter 23 of Socialism from the Root up and closes with an unattributed quotation of some twenty lines from Morris's poem 'The Day is Coming'. An earlier lecture, 'The Oblong' owes a lot to the essay 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil' and there are many other evident traces of Morris throughout the book. During my own research on Tressell, I had hoped to find some work detailing his sources, but since this does not appear to exist, I have undertaken a preliminary comparison of Tressell and Morris, a summary of which forms the basis of this paper. I hope that it may stimulate others with greater knowledge of Morris to conduct more exhaustive research. Martin Stott, 'How Morris's Thinking has Helped to Shape the Sustainability Agenda in the Twenty-First Century'. It will explore the extent to which Morrisian ideas have informed current thought and practice e.g. through the actions of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, local government, institutions like Government departments (DEFRA etc) and regional development agencies, and will examine the extent to which his ideas remain relevant to the circumstances of the 21st century. There is an interesting debate to be had about the extent to which the decentralised model can 'work' for a subject that arguably has such national and indeed global dimensions. I'd like to explore Morris's perspectives in the 21C context and see what they have to contribute to our present situation. Yasuko Suga and Sonia Ashmore, 'Red House and Asia'. |