William Morris: The Man and The Myth. R Page Arnot 1964
Bernard Shaw wrote of Morris some thirty years ago that ‘he towers greater and greater above the horizon beneath which his best-advertised contemporaries have disappeared’. And that is still true today.
This book owes its appearance to several factors. The first is the finding in the latter part of 1962 of long-lost holograph letters of William Morris to John Lincoln Mahon, who was the first Secretary of the Socialist League, founded 30 December 1884.
The second is the opportunity thus afforded to have within the covers of a book the letters of Morris to Dr Glasse, which received magazine publication (together with a handsome offprint) a dozen years ago.
Third, is the further opportunity to respond to insistent requests for a reprint of a booklet written by me many years ago. A reissue of this (William Morris: A Vindication) was out of the question: old polemics reprinted taste like a rehash: it would only have been ‘cauld kale het again’. On the other hand it was necessary to furnish full explanation of each of the letters: and, more than this, to give the background without which it is hard to understand how the great poet and artist and master of design came to call himself a communist in the last twelve years of his life.
I have therefore cast the book in the form of six chapters, embodying in two chapters the newly-discovered thirty letters of William Morris as well as the twenty made available at the beginning of the 1950s shortly after the first extensive publication of the poet’s intimate (family and friends) correspondence. These two chapters, together with passages cited from published works, make up nearly three-quarters of the book.
The first three chapters are introductory, clearing the ground from accumulated myths and giving also something of the necessary background. In these, as also in the sixth chapter, I have made some considerable use of my old pamphlet: but, of course, much has to be said now that is new: and I have had to take account of the dozen or so excellent publications over the last thirty years. I acknowledge my debt to these good publications amid so much inferior stuff by listing them at the end of the sixth chapter.
The Mahon documents number thirty in all (twenty-nine letters and one resolution) of which twenty-eight are letters from Morris. Of these all with the exception of one headed with the firm’s notepaper seem to have been written from Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith. They run from March 1884 to April 1888. Beyond the day and month Morris, like so many others, never added the year. In most cases internal evidence would have eased matters for a date-diviner. But this was rendered largely unnecessary by the fact that JL Mahon had kept the letters carefully and had added the date. Consequently there were only three letters in which there could be any dispute as to their location in time.
I have to thank his son, John A Mahon, for making available in print these letters which bring up vividly the clash of personalities as well as policies in the 1880s, the season of the revival of socialism in Great Britain.
The letters to John Glasse, twenty-one in number (including three postcards), run from February 1886 to March 1895. For the most part they are concerned with arrangements for lectures and journeys in Scotland, but amongst them over a dozen contain statements of the poet’s outlook as well as details about the progress of his gospel, or, sometimes, about the obstacles and hazards. Finally, my thanks are due to Labour Monthly, in which two-thirds of these letters originally appeared, and to Freeman Bass (honorary treasurer of the William Morris Society) through whose kindness they were made available for publication.
RPA
24 March 1964