William Morris: The Man and The Myth. R Page Arnot 1964
Morris was a guest-friend of Dr Glasse in Edinburgh from the first time that he went up and down the island, giving lectures on socialism; that is, from the spring of 1883 onwards. But the extant letters Morris wrote to his friend (made available by Dr Glasse’s daughter in 1951) do not begin until three years later, in the spring of 1886. All are addressed from Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith.
Dr John Glasse had been attached to the Social-Democratic Federation whence he had gone into the Socialist League. He was the minister of the Old Greyfriars Parish Kirk, in which the Covenant of 1638 had been subscribed and in whose kirkyard, forty years later, over a thousand Covenanters had been confined for months in a primitive concentration camp. He was born in 1848. The present writer remembers him, when he was nearing sixty, as a man with a noble brow and an aureole of silver hair who gave greeting and countenance to a number of young socialists at a gathering one evening in Edinburgh. Glasse, in the recollection of an old member of the SDF who joined the Edinburgh branch in 1906, remained true to the outlook of the Socialist League, and, though he did not attach himself formally to either ILP or SDF, could always be relied upon for help in difficulties.
Glasse’s later writings included John Knox: A Criticism (1905) and a couple of other books published after his death in 1918. His earlier writings included Pauperism in Scotland, Past and Present; Robert Owen and His Life Work; Modern Christian Socialism; The Relation of the Church to Socialism. Many of his writings are as yet unpublished.
It was with Glasse that Morris stayed when his tours of agitation took him to Edinburgh, as Morris tells in a letter to his daughter Jenny:
So to Edinburgh with a nice innocent comrade of that branch, Gilray, [1] who dropped in upon me the day before: you know one has about 30 minutes sea from Fife across the firth to Granton, whence of old times I set sail to Iceland. I stayed [with] Glasse at Edinburgh and had a meeting in the evening (Tuesday, 5th) not very well attended, but interesting because it seems the audience was a new one, and a good [?deal] hostile so that Glasse was afraid of putting our resolution, which however we carried after a rather stormy debate, owing to the stupidity of a cut and dried opponent one Job Bone, who always opposes everything, and is known in Edinburgh as the ‘Bone of Contention’. [14 April 1887]
The first letter is dated little more than a year after Morris, heading a majority of the Council of the Social-Democratic Federation, had founded the Socialist League. The new body at this stage had the support of Frederick Engels. Hyndman, leading the Council’s minority that retained the title of Social-Democratic Federation, plunged into adventurous courses that would bring publicity. The rest of the background to this first letter is shown clearly in correspondence [2] between Engels and Bebel, the leader of the German Social-Democratic Party. On 15 February 1886, Engels writes that the Social-Democratic Federation ‘which, despite all self-advertising reports, is an extremely weak organisation’ was brought ‘to the verge of dissolution’ at the November 1885 general election, when Hyndman ‘had taken money from the Tories’ and with it put up Social-Democratic candidates in two London constituencies, where they got thirty-two and twenty-seven votes respectively. Three months later, on 8 February 1886, HM Hyndman led ‘a procession of “unemployed” through Pall Mall, the street of the big political, aristocratic and high-capitalist clubs’. When the ‘aristocrats at the club windows sneered at them, they broke the said windows, ditto the shop windows’. Afterwards, these ‘masses of the lumpen-proletariat, whom Hyndman had taken for the unemployed’, streamed through the West End, ‘looted jewellers’ and other shops’, and then dispersed. It is with this West End riot of 8 February that Morris’ first letter deals.
10 February 1886
My dear Glasse
Thank you very much. I know that you will do what you can in spreading the light. As to Monday’s riot, of course I look at it as a mistake to go in for a policy of riot, all the more as I feel pretty certain that the Socialists will one day have to fight seriously because though it is quite true that if labour could organise itself properly the enemy could not even dream of resisting, yet that organisation could not possibly keep pace with the spread of discontent which will accompany the break-up of the old system, so that we shall be forced to fight. Well, it is a mistake to try to organise riot; yet I do not agree with you that Monday’s affair will hurt the movement. I think it will be of service: any opposition to law and order in the streets is of use to us, if the price of it is not too high; in this case I don’t think it will be; the worst part of it being that it rather rehabilitates Hyndman: if they try him it will be a misfortune from that point of view: but I don’t think they will. I believe by the way from all I hear that the outbreak was a surprise to the interviewer. I don’t think there was much exaggeration in the papers, but considerable misstatement. The mass of the crowd, from what I can hear (I was not present), was composed of workmen, but of course there were bound to be a certain number of professional thieves (who after all are a necessary product of our society). For the rest an English mob is always brutal at any rate till it rises to heroism. Altogether taken I think we must look upon this affair as an incident of the Revolution, and so far encouraging: the shop-wrecking was partly a grotesque practical joke (quite in the English manner) at the expense of the upper classes. At any rate it is a glimpse for them of the bed-rock of our present society, and I hope they like it. Yesterday they were gibbering with terror in spite of the sham calm heroics of the newspapers. I shall say frankly what I think about the affair in the next C, must in fact.
Yours fraternally
William Morris
In the next Commonweal (journal of the Socialist League, issued from February 1885 onwards), Morris as editor duly issued a statement of policy in which he put forward the hope for ‘a strong party, educated in economics, in organisation, in administration'; but, perhaps with a side-glance at the newly-formed Fabian Society, stated: ‘We must be no mere debating club, or philosophical society; we must take part in all really popular movements when we can make our own views on them unmistakably clear; that is a most important part of the education in organisation.’ He ends with summing-up ‘our policy’ in three words – ‘Education towards Revolution’.
Over a year elapses before the next letter in which, amongst League matters, there is a reference to ‘your Odyssey’. Morris, it would seem, had promised Glasse a copy of The Odyssey of Homer Done Into English Verse, the first volume of which had been published early in April.
14 April 1887
My dear Glasse
After all I stayed in Scotland till Sunday, as I was so earnestly pressed to assist at the Easter Monday meeting in Northumberland. It was a capital meeting, and there is no doubt that Mahon has done well there, and that the movement has taken hold. I send you a copy of the N Chronicle which has a good report of Hyndman’s and my speech but has omitted Donald’s which was very good. The Easter Monday in London was a great triumph for the Socialists at any rate.
I send you the leaflet mentioned by me; Binning at the League will deal with you if you want any; it is now called ‘What the Socialists Want’.
I am not forgetting your Odyssey.
Don’t forget that we ought to have a delegate from the branch up at Whitsuntide.
Yours ever
William Morris
The 1887 annual conference of the Socialist League was now approaching and Morris was uneasy about it, lest a decision be taken about ‘parliamentary action’ which might be a throw-back to the tactics which had been such a discredit to the Social-Democratic Federation.
These tactics by which, in the two London constituencies contested at the 1885 General Election, they had received a ludicrous total of less than sixty votes, were obviously a blunder. Place and time were both wrong, conditions were not ripe (the seed was hardly sown) and from the point of view not only of Morris but also of Engels, it was done by the wrong people. But Morris then went to the other extreme. He conceived such a dread of the corrupting influence of the Westminster Parliament that he came out against present participation in it or in electoral activities concerned with it. He felt that the small band of socialists and the workers they influenced should ignore Parliament till a very much later stage: but in taking this standpoint he himself ignored the need of the workers to experience all the good and all the bad that could come from Parliament. Morris, however, took this leftist standpoint, which invited the retort of the old Russian proverb: ‘If you are afraid of wolves, don’t go in the woods.’
With his mind thus beset by fears, Morris pressed for Glasse, who had been one of his main supports, to come up for the conference which fell at Whitsuntide on 29 May.
19 May 1887
My dear Glasse
Am I to have the pleasure of seeing you in London at Whitsuntide? I hope so. If so you understand of course that you will come to my house, and I need not say that we shall be glad to see Mrs Glasse also. My wife has now returned from Italy and will be pleased to know her.
I am very uneasy anent the conference. The parliamentary people are looking like driving matters to extremity, which means driving me out of the League if they succeed. I am quite ready to let the matter rest if they will really leave it alone, but I cannot support a ‘Stepping-Stone’ policy which for me (since I don’t believe in them) would mean acting a lie.
I hope your people will be prepared to support the mild negative which the Hammersmith Branch will move, in case the question comes up for discussion. I have no wish to quarrel with the SDF but I cannot swallow my words and rejoin them; and to have two organisations holding the same tenets and following the same policy seems to me absurd.
Of course if any other comrade comes up with you I shall be very glad to house him.
With best regards to Mrs Glasse.
Yours very truly
William Morris
Glasse, however, was unable to come; and in the next letter Morris sets forth to him very clearly his standpoint on the function and limitations of the parliamentary activity of a socialist party.
23 May 1887
My dear Glasse
Of course you are quite right not to shove your head into the noose: I by no means approve of men running to meet martyrdom. I shall hope to see you later on in the year, when I suppose you will be coming to London. Will you kindly forward to Tuke the accompanying note, so as to put him at his ease as to coming to a strange house.
My position to Parliament and the dealings of Socialists with it, I will now [try] to state clearly. I believe that the Socialists will certainly send members to Parliament when they are strong enough to do so: in itself I see no harm in that, so long as it is understood that they go there as rebels, and not as members of the governing body prepared by passing palliative measures to keep ‘Society’ alive. But I fear that many of them will be drawn into that error by the corrupting influence of a body professedly hostile to Socialism: and therefore I dread the parliamentary period (clearly a long way ahead at present) of the progress of the party; and I think it will be necessary always to keep alive a body of Socialists of principle who will refuse responsibility for the action of the parliamentary portion of the party. Such a body now exists in the shape of the League, while germs of the parliamentary side exist in the SDF, Fabian and Union. Now why should we try to confound the policy of these bodies? The opinion, or if you please sentiment, will exist in any case, and must at some time or another give rise to definite organisations. I appeal to those who doubt the usefulness of such a body of principle at all events to stand aside and not to break it up but join other bodies now existing for whom I for my part feel complete tolerance, so long as they are not brought inside ours. But if that is done the League will sooner or later be broken up, because, I repeat, the non-parliamentary feeling will assuredly not be repressed entirely.
All this has nothing to do with the question of Collectivism or Anarchism; I distinctly disagree with the Anarchist principle, much as I sympathise with many of the anarchists personally, and although I have an Englishman’s wholesome horror of government interference and centralisation which some of our friends who are built on the German pattern are not quite enough afraid of I think. I agree that it would be not so much impolitic as impossible to pronounce on the matters of religion and family. People’s instincts are I think leading them in the right direction, in these matters, and yet the old superstitions, as they have now become, have such a veil of tradition and literature about them it is difficult to formulate the probabilities (they can be no more) of the new order in words that will not be misunderstood, and so cause offence.
As to my behaviour in this difficult crisis, I can only say that I do not feel the least bitterness to anyone, and shall do my best to get people to find a peaceable solution for present trouble, or even to accept a staving off loyally and with single heart. But indeed I cannot go on nagging for ever. I loathe contention and find it unfits me for serious work. My own belief is that we shall avoid a split but I may be forced to leave the League; but you may depend on it that I will not do so till I am driven out of it. On the other hand it may become necessary for me to withdraw from the Council, and cultivate my own and other branches; in doing which hitherto I have had nothing but pleasant experiences and mostly helpful ones, too.
If any of the branch are wishful to know my opinion and position further than they do know it, you are quite at liberty to show them this letter.
With best wishes to you and yours and greeting to all members of the branch.
I am
Yours very truly
William Morris
This was followed by a letter written on the eve of the Socialist League conference, in which Morris is in less uneasy mood about the outcome of it. He wants above all to get rid of two discordant policies being voiced by the League.
28 May 1887
My dear Glasse
You see this is the crux: if the League passes a Parliamentary resolution the League, that is, all members of it, are pledged to support that policy: but I think that policy is a mistake and cannot accept that pledge; if asked whether I agree with such a policy I must either answer no, or lie. This is no mere abstract difficulty, for during the past year Donald and others have been lecturing to branches (with mixed audiences at them of course) and have been preaching a policy which I and others have been attacking, to the great puzzlement of the lieges. What’s to be done? We can’t say yes and no to this question. I think the best way is for the differing individuals to join the differing bodies, and for those differing bodies to do each their own work without any hostility to each other: to work together wherever possible indeed, which can often be done.
I hate schism as much as you do, as all our people know well: indeed our parliamentary friends have been rather speculating on this knowledge; which I admit is more my fault than theirs; but now I must put my foot down. However, I don’t think you need fear a split: a general negative to parliamentarianism will, I think, be carried, which will not press on individuals unless they are on the Council. As to that body I think it would be far better for it not to have a ‘government and opposition’, and to cease to trouble itself about anything but obvious business. Heaven knows we can find plenty of that to do. Keep up your spirits.
Yours ever
William Morris
The last letter of 1887 opens with a reference to a hymn. Edward Carpenter, the writer of England, Arise, had appealed in a letter to The Commonweal (27 August 1887) for contributions toward a socialist song-book which he was preparing. John Glasse responded. A month later (22 October) The Commonweal printed A Processional Hymn, written by ‘JG of Edinburgh’, to the tune St Gertrude by Sir AS Sullivan. The rest of the letter is interesting not only for its remarks on Bernard Shaw [3] and the Fabians but also for yet another statement on the question of parliamentary action.
23 September 1887
My dear Glasse
Many thanks for the hymn which is an acquisition. As to Sir A Sullivan I don’t know him, perhaps Carpenter himself might write to him: but I will find out if a friend or two that I know, may chance to know him.
As to Commonweal we will keep it up if possible: but of course it cannot be kept up at a weekly loss by a few donations: the whole body must help us to tide over the deficit and above all to sell the paper: the circulation is increasing however slowly, and I really think if we can keep it up for another year we shall have founded a self-supporting Socialist paper. As for ‘our differences’, I feel nothing but conciliation about them: and in London I am sure that is the general feeling. As to what can be allowed, I don’t think anyone ever proposed to interfere with the way in which private members might vote. But I don’t see how any formal permission can be given to the branches to follow their own course of action (though I have no doubt they will do so). Because you see each branch ought to represent the general policy of the whole League being an integral and responsible part of it. However you may be sure that if the ‘parliamentary’ section let the matter drop we shall not stir it; I can only hope that they will, and that our next conference will concern itself wholly with means of propaganda and the support of Commonweal. I repeat that everybody up here belonging to the League are heartily sick of quarrelling. Perhaps that disreputable dog Aveling may try to stir up something though: and also there is a danger ahead in a kind of informal conference now going on at Zurich, which I fancy has for its object an attack on the ‘Anarchists’, that is, all who will not swallow the German ‘Social Democrat’ doctrines whole. I think that you will agree with me that this sort of pedantic tyranny must be resisted.
The attitude of Shaw also and his Fabians is rather difficult to get over: they are distinctly pushing forward that very useful association of lecturers as the only sound Socialist body in the country: which I think is nonsense. For myself as I have told you before I have no wish to attack any body of Socialists: all I can say is that I would prefer to belong to a body that held aloof from parliamentary work, if such a body existed; and I think it very desirable, to say the least of it, that such a body should exist.
Of course, it’s clearly no use talking of parliamentary action now: I admit, and always have admitted, that at some future period it may be necessary to use parliament mechanically: what I object to is depending on parliamentary agitation. There must be a great party, a great organisation outside parliament actively engaged in reconstructing society and learning administration whatever goes on in the parliament itself. This is in direct opposition to the view of the regular parliamentary section as represented by Shaw, who look upon parliament as the means; and it seems to me will fall into the error of moving earth and sea to fill the ballot boxes with Socialist votes which will not represent Socialist men. However, let them try it. I don’t care so long as the League exists with the other aim of getting the workmen to look after their own affairs and thereby building up the new society in the shell of the old one.
Excuse this long yarn.
With kindest regards and best wishes
I am
Yours fraternally
William Morris
Soon after the last letter Morris produced (on 15 October 1887) his socialist play The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened, a Socialist Interlude, for the benefit of The Commonweal. It was performed in the Socialist League headquarters in the Farringdon Road. Morris himself took the part of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a purse-proud and wooden-faced prelate. Bernard Shaw, who attended as a dramatic critic, witnessed it with delight and proclaimed Morris to be in the front rank of European playwrights. John Turner, founder of the Shop Assistants Union (now merged in the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers) and for several years on the Trades Union Congress General Council from its formation in 1921, told me he had played a minor part in the performance. Like many actors of minor parts he remembered more than anything else the strong language used by the producer at the rehearsals and how fiercely Morris stamped and shouted when things went wrong. AA Purcell, who as Chairman of the Trades Union Congress in 1924 headed an official delegation (of which the same John Turner was a member) to the Soviet Union, also had vivid and somewhat similar recollections of the master-craftsman ('none better’ he said) for whom he had worked at Merton Abbey. But, he said, he would never forget the day when Morris in a rage at bad workmanship threw the offender into a dyeing vat from which he emerged ‘a Green Man’.
The great event, however, of the early winter of 1887 was ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Trafalgar Square on 13 November: and to this in these letters Morris several times makes reference.
The right of public meeting in Trafalgar Square within sight of the seats of government in Whitehall, which had been enjoyed for over a generation, was suddenly challenged by Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. The ban imposed on such meetings was of doubtful legality: but in any case Londoners were not disposed to submit to it. A demonstration was organised. To disperse it the Home Office used an overwhelming force of policemen, infantry and cavalry. Blood was shed and the name of ‘Bloody Sunday’ came to be attached to that November day.
For some weeks before that there had been a growing agitation on two issues, the coercion in Ireland, on which the Metropolitan Radical Association were making public protest, and the death sentences passed in Chicago on working-class agitators accused of incitement and violence. On this the Socialist League had supported the following resolution, ‘adopted at a meeting in South Place Chapel on 14 October, organised by Radical and Socialist bodies’:
That the English workers in this meeting desire earnestly to urge on their fellow workers in America the great danger to public liberty that arises from suffering citizens to be punished for resisting attempts to suppress the rights of public meeting and free speech, since a right that the people are punished for enforcing is evidently thereby made no right at all, but a crime. That the fate of the seven men now under sentence of death for holding a public meeting in Chicago, at which certain policemen were killed for attempting forcibly to disperse the people and silence the speakers, is of deep concern to us as English workers, because their case is the case of Ireland today, and is likely to be ours tomorrow unless the workers from both sides of the Atlantic declare with one voice that all who interfere with the rights of public meeting act unlawfully and at their own peril. We cannot admit that the political views of the seven condemned men have anything to do with the principle involved; and we protest against their sentence, which, if carried out, will practically make the holding of meetings by working men in their own interests a capital offence throughout the United States of America, since it is always possible for the authorities to provoke a crowd to reprisals involving danger to life.
At this point the Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, [4] had suddenly imposed his ban. Partly on the right of free speech and partly on the burning questions aforesaid, processions led by William Morris, John Burns, RB Cunninghame Graham and others marched to Trafalgar Square on Sunday, 13 November 1887: and meantime the news had come that on the Friday the death sentences had been carried out in Chicago. In those days, however, it would be unlikely that any pressure from the United States Embassy could be the originating cause of suppression or brutality in Britain.
On that ‘Bloody Sunday’, writes May Morris, onlookers saw ‘the extraordinary sight of citizens of London chased and driven by bodies of mounted police and squadrons of glittering Life Guards who charged round and round the Square scattering all who happened to be in their way’. The scene was described and commented upon by Morris in the next week’s Commonweal and by many others at the time and since. In the annual report of the Socialist League to its conference six months later it is briefly related, and the statement is made:
Two working men – Linnell and Curwen – met their death through the action of the police. The funerals of both these were attended by members of the Executive. The funeral of Linnell was made the occasion of probably the largest public demonstration ever held in London.
Morris spoke at Alfred Linnell’s grave on 18 December: and wrote for that day the famous ‘Death Song’. Three weeks later Morris wrote the following letter in which, after lecture arrangements and remarks on provincial organiser Mahon, he speaks of the League being in an eddy after the turbulence of the previous weeks.
9 January 1888
My dear Glasse
Many thanks for your letter and kind wishes which I reciprocate. As for my lecture for you, you may reckon on it, but I can give you no date just at present.
I intend to avail myself of my journey North to try a more extended lecture-tour in the N generally: am prepared to spend a fortnight on it. This comes of a suggestion made to me that if I put myself into the hands of an agent he could arrange paying lectures for me in some places without which indeed I could not afford to do it. Of course I shall not make any charge to you or the Glasgow brethren. The time of this tour would depend a good deal on what you two sets of people thought the best time for up there: so you might write to Glasier and see what they think.
As to Mahon, I like him also, and when I last saw him had no doubt of his sincerity: but I think as I always thought that as things are the career of a professional agitator is not good for him, and I am afraid that he will do nothing else now. Also somehow he has (though a good-natured fellow enough) a fatal gift of breeding squabbles, I scarcely know how. I suppose you know that the Glasgow chaps fairly quarrelled with him; of course I don’t know all the story, but judge from a moderate account of it that I have had that he, knowing the turn of mind of our friends there, unnecessarily irritated them. When he was up in London he used to have ‘ideas’ from time to time, which always ended in a quarrel. However he is still very young and if, as I hope, he is really ‘straight’ he will no doubt better.
We are rather in an eddy here as far as the League is concerned; but I am not at all discouraged; for I think we can yet give a lift to it as an organisation; and, which is of more importance, the general feeling is gaining ground much. The recent high-handedness of the government will do us good with the Radicals; and indeed it is coming to this that there is little difference between the ordinary uneducated Socialist and the Radical. This may be rather a slur on our followers, but it cannot be helped, and is after all the natural lines for the general movement in this country. Our own branch here is doing very well – which means simply that there are half a dozen energetic and painstaking men in it. Don’t forget to do what you can for Commonweal up there. These winter months slacken off our sale and we are getting very hard up: and I suppose your sale falls off too.
Yours fraternally
William Morris
The editor’s anxiety about The Commonweal was warranted. In the fifty-two weeks to May 1888, there were printed 163,500 copies, of which 152,186 were sold. There was a ‘gross loss’ of about £270 which was partly met by donations of £188, leaving a net loss of a little over eighty pounds.
Meantime, arising from Trafalgar Square, a new organisation, the Law and Liberty League, was formed, consisting chiefly of radical and socialist bodies. ‘Your Executive took no inconsiderable part in its formation and elected delegates, one of which (W Morris) is a member of its Executive’, says the Report to the League’s fourth annual conference. This, as well as a vexatious libel action (which, however, came to nothing), is touched on in the next letter.
10 February 1888
My dear Glasse
Thanks for your note: I am trying to get the Glasgow people to get an invitation to me to give a lecture on art there, so that I may get part of my expenses paid; could the same thing be done in Edinburgh do you think? I should go down with a better conscience if I felt that the bourgeois were paying for my journey.
I may as well tell you that I am in somewhat of a mess. I am to have an action for libel brought against me for that article in the C by one Reuss who is mentioned there and who was once a member of the SL. I have no doubt myself of my facts, but proving them in a law court is a different thing, and it will in any case bleed me seriously: hence my wish to spend as little as I can help on my northern tour.
Also as I am not sure when the case is to come on my dates may be interfered with. However I had better make them in spite of all that.
I am glad to hear that you have been doing well on the whole; the opinions are spreading fast, but for my part I can see nothing to be done but spreading the opinions: what we want is more intelligent men who can talk and argue on the matter.
This opening of Parliament is very discouraging to those who think much can be done at once. I really think that the Tories are firmer in their seat than I supposed even, some time ago. However there is no reason for discouragement for those who have always thought that the acceptance of the principles must be the first step: only the queer spasmodic action into which we are forced is very harassing to a quiet man like myself.
I suppose you saw that I am on the Executive of the LLL and in close alliance with Mrs Besant and Stead. In short I have little life now outside the movement – which is as it should be.
Yours very truly
William Morris
PS – I think I had better settle for March: some time after the 15th.
Burns and Cunninghame Graham were sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment for their share in Trafalgar Square ('unlawful assembly’) and on 20 February 1888 the Law and Liberty League celebrated their release with a meeting in Seymour Place Riding School. Michael Davits was in the chair and among the speakers, including William O'Brien, WT Stead and Mrs Besant, was also to have been Morris. But an ‘injudicious’ speech by Hyndman brought an abrupt ending to the meeting, which was, says Morris, ‘very variously composed of Irish, Radicals and Socialists’. To this meeting Morris refers.
20 February 1888
My dear Glasse
Thank you for your note. I leave it entirely in your hands to make any arrangements you think favourable for me. All I want is to be as little out of pocket as possible by the northern journey.
Will you kindly communicate with the Glasgow friends. I am now prepared to come on any date after 20 March. I put it off till then because of the Commune Celebration in which this year we are going to join with the SDF so I would not like to be absent, as that might be put down to hostility.
Events are rather stirring here again: our meeting of tonight is an important one since William O'Brien is coming; as it brings up London coercion into line with Irish. The Radicals too will be in good heart after the successes at Southwark and Edinburgh, and I think we shall make a mark.
Thanks for the Arbroath correspondence. I should think that such letters would do much good.
By the way, I have promised Mr Forrest to lecture at Kilmarnock. Also I want to see an old friend now house-fast near Girvan in Ayrshire. These two visits must be taken into consideration by you and the Glasgow ‘bodies’.
Yours fraternally
William Morris
A rapid succession of letters follow, mainly about dates of speaking engagements – complexities for speakers which (like the boycott he mentions) have altered very little after seventy-five years.
28 February 1888
My dear Glasse
Thanks for note: I am not quite sure that I can get away on the 21st as I am pledged to speak at the Commune Celebration, and owing to our being boycotted as to halls there is some doubt as to the day on which it will come off. So if the next week were feasible it might be better: but I may be able to be more certain after Thursday next. If I am not you had better settle for the later week though I should prefer the earlier. I will write on Friday as to the art lecture if the Edinburgh architects have such bad taste as not to be anxious to hear me. I think we had better not risk it. If the Edinburgh branch has a successful meeting and can stand anything towards Commonweal, well and good. If not it can’t be helped.
In haste
Yours very truly
William Morris
PS: I have not heard from the Glasgow folk yet.
The experience of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Trafalgar Square was lodged firmly in his mind. A couple of years later Morris was able to build upon it in his News from Nowhere for an imaginative description of a crowd shot down by machine-guns, and so achieved a vision of what actually did happen thirty years afterwards not in Trafalgar Square but in Chillianwallah Bagh, commonly called the Amritsar Massacre.
2 March 1888
My dear Glasse
I am still unable to say whether I can get away on the 20th as I shall have to do if I am to speak at Kilmarnock or Glasgow on the 21st (you said Glasgow in your last). I have had no letter from Glasgow yet, and don’t know what to do. I think I might make a week of it if I could have work found me: but it will be a great mistake to hurry it: I see then that the Glasgow Architect people like the Edinburgh ones don’t like paying for me: this comes of my making myself too cheap: I shall never lecture gratis again except for a Socialist body, and I shall charge £20 and my expenses elsewhere.
I don’t think the Glasgow people have chosen a good subject: who cares about history? I think I shall refuse to give it them. I think I might make Trafalgar Sq the subject for the lecture at Edinburgh. I notice that out of London people are quite ignorant of the subject.
Yours very truly
William Morris
Will write probably tomorrow.
Post Card, 14 March 1888
As to Girvan I did not intend staying more than one night there, but should like to get there earlyish one day and not depart very early the next so as to get a few hours with my friend. I thought of leaving London on Tuesday night: so if Forrest has fixed for 23rd I might go to Girvan first: however I will wait till I hear from you.
Yours fraternally
W Morris
17 March 1888
My dear Glasse
I will go wherever I can be of use during my stay: only I have a letter from Glasier today asking me to make one at a gathering at Glasgow of Glasgow and Edinburgh friends which of course I should be glad to do if it can be managed, as I think a talk might be of service. Will you settle all this with Glasier and I shall be quite pleased with whatever you settle. As to the lectures I thought of giving: here they are. Art and Industry in the fourteenth century (Glasgow) (only good for Glasgow or Edinburgh); Society of the Future much the same; 3: Monopoly suitable anywhere; 4: What Socialists Want, very elementary; 5: Socialism, an old old lecture, but would do where new to audience; 6: Socialism Its End and Methods: didn’t I give this last year in Edinburgh? Wants a rather advanced audience. I could also give half-hour’s talk on Trafalgar Sq and free speech, though I have no lecture.
Thanks for your invitation. I shall be very glad to see you – if I get to Edinburgh or indeed to Scotland at all. Whereof there seems some doubt in these snowy days: I look on it as quite an adventure putting myself on board a train. However I shall get there somehow I suppose.
Yours fraternally
William Morris
Eighteen months elapse before the next letter. Just in this interval there were big developments both at home and abroad. Of these the most important was the convening in Paris for 14 July 1889 – the centenary of the storming of the Bastille that began the great French Revolution – of an ‘International Socialist Workingmen’s Congress’ in these words:
The Socialists of France could not permit the centenary of the bourgeois revolution to pass without asserting the close approach of a working-class revolution which, over the ruins of capitalist society, will proclaim equality for all men and women in the right to work, to the means of subsistence and to enjoyment.
But before it could be held one of the splinter parties of France called the ‘Possibilists’ claimed sole right to organise such a congress. Engels and the French socialists in touch with him found themselves compelled to bend every effort to deal with this schism. Engels had to lay aside for the time being his urgent work on the second and third volumes of Capital. It may be said, indeed, that just as Karl Marx was the moving spirit of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) so Frederick Engels and the Marx family were the creator spirits that brought into being what came to be called ‘the Second International’. They had to fight against opportunists and faint-hearts and, in Britain, against the Social-Democratic Federation which supported the ‘Possibilist’ congress. The leaders of the bigger European parties followed the advice and promptings of Engels, and so did William Morris representing the Socialist League. When the summoning manifesto went out it was signed by names famous in the annals of European socialism: by Bebel and Liebknecht for Germany; Victor Adler for Austria; by Anseele for Belgium; by Domela Nieuwenhuis for Holland; by August Palm and Hjalmar Branting for Sweden; and in the case of Russia by Vera Zasulich, Plekhanov, Axelrod and Stepniak for the Union of Russian Social-Democrats. There were three organisations from Britain – the Socialist League, the Labour Association and the Ayrshire Miners Union – the chief signatories for which were respectively William Morris; Cunninghame Graham MP, HH Champion and Tom Mann; and J Keir Hardie. The summons went on to say:
Only the English Democratic Federation, setting itself in opposition to all the Socialist organisations which exist in Europe and America, has espoused the Possibilists’ cause, without, however, claiming that its mere presence will give an international character to a Possibilist congress so destitute of any international element.
Morris attended that Paris congress out of which came the decision to set 1 May as the International Day of Labour. This accorded well with the outlook of Morris. The next year, in 1890, at Clerkenwell Green he headed a demonstration. In 1891 he spoke from one of the platforms in Hyde Park, and again in 1894. His poems and articles about May Day infused into it a revolutionary socialist content which has never been wholly lost.
At home also the ‘new unionism’ had taken root, and the whole working-class movement was taking strides forward. In May 1889, the Gas Workers Union headed by Will Thorne came into being and won a strike in August. In August began the famous strike of the London Docks, led by John Burns, Tom Mann and Ben Tillett. In both of these Marx’s daughter Eleanor was active. Morris realised its importance immediately (’the real point of the strike is the sense of combination which it is giving to the men’): and in the following letter the question comes up, along with a reference to the struggle of the ‘new unionists’ against the old Lib-Labs in the Trades Union Congress.
9 September 1889
My dear Glasse
By all means use me as much as you can: I would not have thought of going to the Art Congress unless I had hoped to have been some use to our Scotch Comrades. I have a good lecture called the Origins of Ornamental Art which has a Socialist sting in his tail. I don’t think I have delivered it at Edinburgh: I will give you that, and trust to impromptu (I am pretty good at it now) for my Socialist lecture if there is time for it. I hear that my Art Congress duties will not take more than three days, including a lecture ‘to the workmen’ in the evening on some art-technical subject, for example, dyeing. If the Glasgow people want me let us try to fit it in. I am writing to Glasier by this post.
As to the march of affairs the London strikes far outweigh in importance the TU Congress. Of course we all know how conservative British workmen are: and I think the attack on Broadhurst went on wrong lines; he should have been attacked for his opinions and the actions resulting from them: I mean as being an obstructive and a Whig.
Thank you. I will accept with pleasure your invitation to come to your house. It is kind of you to keep me out of the hands of the Philistines. I hope however it will not inconvenience Mrs Glasse.
Excuse haste. I am going out of town for a week and am much cluttered up with business.
Yours ever
William Morris
It is clear from the recollections of May Morris (as also from these letters) how much Morris enjoyed staying at 16 Tantallon Place with the Glasse family. Dr Glasse himself had a fine voice and liked to sing old Scottish songs and ballads, not unexpectedly from one born in Auchtermuchty in ‘the kingdom of Fife’. An Edinburgh correspondent, Mr HA Scott, has given some further recollections about him, notably a meeting addressed by Hilaire Belloc on ‘The Socialist State’ where Glasse from the chair ‘disassociated himself with some of Belloc’s remarks’.
The Art Congress mentioned in the letter of 9 September and then in the letters of October brings up yet another example of the stimulus Morris had given to the arts and of how he linked all up with socialist propaganda. Influenced by Morris a number of the younger men and women had organised an arts and crafts exhibition. This then resulted in the formation of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society of which one of the energetic organisers was Walter Crane, whose designs adorned socialist cards and journals three-quarters of a century ago. A second exhibition, to which Morris contributed both woven stuffs and printed cottons as well as the opening address (on Gothic architecture) in a course of lectures, was held that autumn of 1889 in the New Gallery in London. Meantime in Edinburgh an Art Congress was being organised under the ultra-respectable presidency of the Marquis of Lorne. Glasse was keen to secure not only Morris but other speakers from amongst the visitors from London.
3 October 1889
My dear Glasse
As to date, the Congress opens on 29 Oct, and I suppose I shall be on show for about three or four days: but I only have one night engagement as far as I know: for you had better in any case avoid any grand function for my date. I suppose I had better go to Glasgow after I have done with Edinburgh. Mr Macartney [5] is the Sec of our section:* he would tell you what are the dates of my evening engagements: however I will ask him as soon as I get back to town, as I am in the country at present. I would by all means ask Crane to speak for us: his address is Beaumont Lodge, Shepherds Bush. You might also get some work of T Cobden Sanderson, Goodyers, Hendon, though that is more speculative. Dundee I cannot manage this time.
With best wishes
Yours ever
William Morris
* I suppose this address will find him. National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry, 22 Albemarle St, London, W [Morris’ footnote]
In the next letter there is again mention of the ‘art-technical’ lecture on dyeing which he had promised in September 1889. The substance, if not the actual wording, of this lecture was published four years later in the volume edited by Walter Crane and entitled Arts and Crafts Essays. To this Morris wrote a preface, and contributed three essays, namely, Of Dyeing as an Art, Textiles and, with Emery Walker, Printing.
11 October 1889
My dear Glasse
It seems that I am on on Wednesday and that after my address Crane reads a paper: which certainly would not be over till four as the Congress keeps up till five or past. Isn’t it doubtful in that case whether the afternoon would be a good time as it would compete with the Congress? Let alone that Crane could not come on the Wednesday unless he could get his time. As for me of course I can do whatever you think best, remembering always that I am Congress engaged on Wednesday afternoon (not Tuesday: this has been altered) and Friday evening which same is the lecture on dyeing to working men, as you might hint to our folk.
Excuse haste
Yours ever
W Morris
Post Card, 12 October 1889
Dear G
My letter crossed yours, but to prevent mistake I repeat that Mr Conway called on me on Thursday and told me that my special days were to be Wednesday afternoon and Tuesday evening. The former date of Tuesday afternoon having been changed. I leave you to do what you think best.
W Morris
Post Card [postmarked 16 October 1889]
Dear G
All right I will be at your disposal on the Friday; will go to Glasgow; I have written to Crane about it also. Am coming on the Monday by the 10am train from Euston.
WM
Morris found the Art Congress ‘rather a dull job’. Writing home about it he says:
Imagine one in the chair hour after hour listening to men teaching their grandmother to suck eggs, and I on my good behaviour too! I am very tired of it; but since the Tory evening paper here declares that Crane and I have spoiled the Congress, you may imagine we have not let all go by default. In point of fact, with the exception of Richmond, who gave a good address yesterday, there was nothing of any interest said except by Crane and me; and my lecture on dyeing to the workmen was really a success.
In more detail in his letter to his elder daughter (2 November) he reports:
The Congress is now over, and Crane, Walker, Sanderson and myself go to Glasgow this afternoon. The Congress has not been much of a success, I fancy: I was in the chair at some monumentally dull papers; and you may imagine how I fidgeted, my dear. However I behaved pretty well and did my best to keep the dull times off them; apparently with some success, since the Dispatch, a Tory evening paper here, declares that the ill-success of the Congress is owing to Crane and me and our Socialist vagaries: and in fact we managed to get a good deal of Socialism into our discourses. The Socialist meetings were quite successful. Walker after much suffering seems to have got through his lecture with credit...
Immediately after leaving Scotland Morris was in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire giving lectures, all of them carefully prepared and usually written out. For though he says in the next letter that he was ‘on the stump’ Morris was incapable of treating an audience of working men with anything other than the best he could do.
21 November 1889
My dear Glasse
I am sending you a large paper copy of my new book (which I hope will not lumber your shelves too much) as a memento of the jolly week we had together.
I have been on the stump since at Liverpool, Chesterfield and Sheffield; and it seems to me as if the provinces were on the move; at Sheffield especially I had a large and enthusiastic audience. This is good since the movement cannot entirely live on London. Here I must say I think we are rather in an eddy, but I don’t think it will last long.
Wishing you luck all round and plenty of encouraging work for the cause, and with kindest regards to Mrs Glasse.
I am
Yours fraternally
William Morris
The reference to ‘my new book’ was to The Roots of the Mountains which Morris had been writing throughout the year of 1888 and which was published in November 1889, with a special edition of 250 copies in quarto. Morris came to regard it as the best of his prose romances.
These romances, written in the last ten years of his life, have often been considered as something quite separate from his other work. Actually, throughout the 1880s there is a close linkage between his activity and the romances. This is fairly obvious in the first of them as it appeared weekly in The Commonweal in 1886; all that Morris knew of English history and all that he had been learning from Marx’s Capital are combined and flowering in A Dream of John Ball. But surely it should also have been clear that a peculiar aptitude in dealing with historical materialism would be shown by Morris who from boyhood had made the past his own, [6] who had respired from ‘every holt and heath’ the past life of mankind on the earth and the deeds they had done. His Marxist studies in this field bore fruit in his next romance, The House of the Wolfings. This was published in December 1888, and followed hard upon the publication in The Commonweal, from May 1886, onwards, of the long series by Morris and Bax on Socialism from the Root Up.
But there was more to it than that. In The Mark, published in 1883, Frederick Engels had given a sketch of ‘primitive agrarian conditions’ which all through the Middle Ages served as ‘the basis and as the type of all public institutions’ and this ‘not only in Germany, but also in the north of France, England and Scandinavia’. Its propagandist purpose was stated right away to be that ‘socialist working men, and through them the peasants, should learn’ how the existing system of landed property had arisen in contrast to ‘the old common property of all free men’. It begins with ‘two fundamental facts’ as governing primitive history: the grouping ‘according to kindred’ and ‘common property’ in the soil. Thus The Mark chimed in with all that Morris knew or had imagined.
On this there needs no argument: for the full title makes all clear: A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and all the Kindreds of the Mark, Written in Prose and in Verse by William Morris. The technical terms then coming into use, endogamy and exogamy, matriarchy and patriarchy, totemic clans and all the rest, lurk unseen and unmentioned behind the vivid description of how Goths early fought against the aggressors of the Roman Empire. Instead we have one enlightening sentence:
Also (to make an end at once of these matters of kinship and affinity) the men of one House might not wed the women of their own House: to the Wolfing men all Wolfing women were as sisters: they must needs wed with the Hartings or the Elkings or the Bearings, or other such Houses of the Mark as were not so close akin to the blood of the Wolf; and this was a law that none dreamed of breaking. Thus then dwelt this folk and such was their Custom.
So, too, it was with the next romance which tells how some centuries later another free Gothic people, now become dwellers in Burgdale, are able with their allies to withstand the murderous assaults of the Huns. This was The Roots of the Mountains.
Early in 1890 Morris, who had by that time received a ‘good word’ from Glasse about the romance, is grateful for continued support but anxious about The Commonweal’s future. No longer editor (he was to be thrust out by the anarchist section now dominant, and domineering, within the Socialist League), Morris nevertheless contributes News from Nowhere serially in 1890 and does the best he can for the paper, until the long-expected break comes in November of that year.
17 February 1890
My dear Glasse
I have already written to Mr Morrison (not the brother) advising him by all means to steer clear of such a damnable business as ‘decoration’. Of course he won’t follow my advice, and then I shall be very happy to give any other advice as to details, most of which he will not be able to follow, but he is quite welcome to any of my barrenness. As to the article for Mr Russell, I am so busy just now that I can promise nothing which involves a date. He had better write to me and give me particulars as to length and so on. I will get the last Christian Socialist and read your article, I am sure with pleasure.
Thank you for the good word about News from Nowhere: and also, and very specially, for that about the Roots: it gave me great pleasure to write it. I am glad you managed to shake off your blackguard, and that you are getting on well: please do what you can, you good folk to push the Weal, we are in low water as to funds. I shall print the News from Nowhere in a book from 1/- or perhaps 6d.
Again thanks and best wishes.
Yours fraternally
William Morris
Thereafter there is a gap of five years in the correspondence. Much happened in these five years. Quite apart from the foundation of the Kelmscott Press, the originality and significance of which [7] was brought out in the exhibition The Typographical Adventure of William Morris organised by the William Morris Society in 1957, there was the continuance of his other multifarious activities in Hammersmith and elsewhere. Communist writings were on a diminished scale (with no weekly paper making its insistent demands and with his health already impaired). Now came the prose romances. These no longer dealt directly (as did the first four of 1886 to 1890) with the same Marxist themes as he had been handling in weekly journalism and in agitation and propaganda up and down the country.
The skill of the artist was now expended on telling a story, for Morris was of the mould of Walter Scott or Homer in his power of story-telling. So there followed prose romances – which brought the fullest praise from the much-influenced WB Yeats, beginning with The Story of the Glittering Plain in 1891 and The Wood Beyond the World and culminating with The Well at the World’s End on which he was busy at spare hours over several years. Posthumously printed were The Water of the Wondrous Isles and, partly unfinished, The Sundering Flood. Disdainfully regarded by modern critics – but not by poets – they are yet gems of literature and may one day be so acknowledged.
Of his communist writings and other activities of the 1890s, a few only need be singled out, and those only from the one year – 1893. That year had begun with the formation at Bradford of the Independent Labour Party. This led to a joint manifesto drawn up by William Morris for the Hammersmith Socialist Society, HM Hyndman for the Social-Democratic Federation, and Bernard Shaw for the Fabian Society. It was published on 1 May as The Manifesto of English Socialists.
The feeling for a united socialist party was now much in Morris’ thoughts. Three months later he wrote to Emery Walker: ‘Whatever other people do, we the Hammersmith people must be careful to make as little quarrel with either party as we can help.’ (9 August 1893) This sentiment comes out strongly in the conclusion of one of his lectures on communism to ‘the Hammersmith people’ as follows:
Well, since our aim is so great and so much to be longed for, the substituting throughout all society of peace for war, pleasure and self-respect for grief and disgrace, we may well seek about strenuously for some means for starting our enterprise; and since it is just these means in which the difficulty lies, I appeal to all socialists, while they express their thoughts and feelings about them honestly and fearlessly, not to make a quarrel of it with those whose aim is one with theirs, because there is a difference of opinion between them about the usefulness of the details of the means. It is difficult or even impossible not to make mistakes about these, driven as we are by the swift lapse of time and the necessity for doing something amidst it all. So let us forgive the mistakes that others make, even if we make none ourselves, and be at peace amongst ourselves, that we may the better make war upon the monopolist. [8]
It is in that lecture on communism that passages occur which have often been cited (partly because they were made readily available after Bernard Shaw had edited the lecture in 1903 as Fabian Tract, no 113) and may now be quoted again:
For I do declare that any other state of society but communism is grievous and disgraceful to all belonging to it.
Communism is in fact the completion of Socialism: when that ceases to be militant and becomes triumphant, it will be communism. The communist asserts in the first place that the resources of nature, mainly the land and those other things which can only be used for the reproduction of wealth and which are the effect of social work, should not be owned in severalty, but by the whole community for the benefit of the whole.
Intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel. If our ideas of a new society are anything more than a dream, these three qualities must animate the due effective majority of the working people; and then, I say, the thing will be done.
Morris, who had conducted some of his earliest agitation amongst workers in the coalfields, now championed their cause in the great lock-out of 1893. An autumn impulse from the mines, seen in the resistance of the colliers from the end of July to mid-November, brought from Morris a penetrating letter of support. After an opening paragraph it said:
Where is the bettering of condition for such indispensable workmen as the coal miners going to stop? Doubtless the gentlemen who live on their labour have asked themselves this question, and this lockout of their men has not been taken up only with a view to raising the price of coal (in which object they have been successful), but still more for the purpose of breaking down the power of the Miners’ Federation, so that they (the owners) shall henceforth have the labour market wholly in their power. Most happily, it seems likely that in this latter aim they will be unsuccessful, in spite of the tremendous expenditure of their resources that the men have been driven into. The truth is that in this aim of establishing a grinding tyranny over the workers which shall be stable they are too late; the day is gone by for it.
The industrial tyranny of the individualist capitalist, masking itself under the guise of economic necessity, is bound to go the way of feudal tyranny appealing to the sanction of religion to justify itself.
The rallying conclusion was as follows:
I say, then, that we owe to the courageous and steadfast workmen who are now struggling in the interests of one and all a reward quite different from the semi-starvation which the gambling coal-owners would impose on them, and that to support them by all means in our power, pecuniary and otherwise, is a plain duty to all who are not pledged to the upholding the last and worst of the great tyrannies of the world, the plutocratic, to wit. [9]
Other socialist or communist concerns went on steadily in the 1890s: and it was to one of a convivial nature that the poet invited Glasse who was on a visit to London. On this occasion Dr Glasse met Sydney Cockerell, then Morris’ secretary, who was in his late twenties. He was to keep the memory of Morris undimmed for over sixty-five years till his death in 1962. The letter of invitation ran:
11 March 1895
My dear Glasse
I shall be very pleased to see you on Wednesday: only I may have to go to the Socialist Supper Club to dinner, as I have been remiss in attendance of late. In that case I propose to take you with me as a guest, as they will be very glad to see you. In case, come not later than, say, 6pm and then if you don’t like to go, we will stay at home.
Yours very truly
William Morris
Seven months later, on 13 October 1895, Sidney Webb was billed for a Sunday evening lecture to the Hammersmith Socialist Society and was there suitably entertained. Many years afterwards, when asked by the present writer what had been Morris’ comment, Webb replied that Morris had said to him as they parted: ‘The world is going your way at present, Webb, but it is not the right way in the end.’
1. John Gilray died at the age of ninety-four in 1951.
2. Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, edited by Dona Torr, 1934.
3. Over half a century later Bernard Shaw (in a letter to Hesketh Pearson) wrote that: ‘Morris knew by instinct that the Westminster parliament would sterilise the socialists, corrupt or seduce them, and change them from intransigent revolutionists into intriguers for Cabinet rank as Yesmen and bunk merchants in the service of the governing class, claiming all the time that they represented the interests of the proletariat. I was twenty-two years younger than Morris, and had not then gone into the history and nature of the Westminster party system...’
4. Warren’s resignation was accepted a year later, in November 1888; it was occasioned, however, in connection with the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders.
5. Mervyn Macartney was to be architect to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral, 1906-31.
6. In an autobiographical sketch of September 1883, Morris wrote: ‘I went to school at Marlborough College, which was then a new and very rough school. As far as my school instruction went, I think I may fairly say I learned next to nothing there, for indeed next to nothing was taught; but the place is in a very beautiful country, thickly scattered over with prehistoric monuments, and I set myself eagerly to studying these and everything else that had any history in it, and so perhaps learned a good deal, especially as there was a good library at the school to which I sometimes had access.’
7. In his Edinburgh lecture ‘The Typographic Arts’ in 1944 Stanley Morison, for many years foremost among European typographers, made reference to Morris as ‘one from whose life and example came a new and powerful and indeed permanent inspiration’.
8. ‘Communism’ – lecture to Hammersmith Socialist Society (1893). Published and sold by the Fabian Society as Tract, no 113 in 1903.
9. The Sun, 16 October 1893.