Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste Elizabeth C
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The Journal of Modern Craft Sustainable Socialism: Volume 4—Issue 1 William Morris on March 2011 pp. 7–26 Waste DOI: 10.2752/174967811X12949160068974 Elizabeth C. Miller Reprints available directly from the publishers Photocopying permitted by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is Associate Professor of English at licence only the University of California, Davis. She is currently working © Berg 2011 on a book titled Slow Print: Print Culture and Late-Victorian Literary Radicalism. Her first book, Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle, was published in 2008, and her articles have appeared in Modernism/Modernity, Feminist Studies, Literature Compass, Victorian Literature and Culture, The Journal of William Morris Studies, The Henry James Review, and elsewhere. Abstract While William Morris has long been recognized for his radical approach to the problem of labor, which built on the ideas of John Ruskin and informed his contributions to the Arts and Crafts philosophy, his ideas about waste have received much less attention. This article suggests that the Kelmscott Press, which Morris founded in 1891, was designed to embody the values of durability and sustainability in sharp contrast to the neophilia, disposability, and planned obsolescence of capitalist production. Many critics have dismissed the political value of Kelmscott Press on the basis of the handcrafted books’ expense and rarity, but by considering Morris’s work for Kelmscott in light of his fictional and non-fictional writings about waste around the time of the press’s conception, we can see how Kelmscott laid the groundwork for a philosophy of sustainable socialism. Keywords: William Morris, Kelmscott Press, printing, waste. The origins of what we now call William Morris’s “Arts and Crafts” philosophy of production can be traced to The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 7–26 8 Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste Elizabeth C. Miller the “expressive” theory of labor that he consideration, but is especially apparent in inherited from John Ruskin: the idea of Morris’s attention to the problem of waste. labor as a form of artistic expression vital Critics have sometimes viewed Morris’s to human dignity, which leaves a trace of late career as incongruous or hypocritical, individual workmanship in all created goods.1 since he continued to pioneer expensive Through Ruskin’s conceptual marriage of hand production while openly denouncing “art” and “work,” Morris voiced an early luxury and economic inequality on the disgust for industrial capitalism and its socialist platform. By focusing on Morris’s eradication of creativity in labor, and an early, ideas about waste, however, we can see that related rejection of the artistic and literary his late career was in many ways prescient conventions that had flourished under rather than paradoxical. Morris’s thematic capitalism. These convictions persisted from and aesthetic emphasis on durability, his the initial years of Morris’s career in the predilection for preservation, and his respect 1850s and 1860s—which focused on the for materials all add up to a profoundly launch of the firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner radical philosophy of things, the counterpart & Co., the revival of handcraft methods, and to his radical philosophy of labor. Morris’s the writing of Pre-Raphaelite poetry—to the version of the Arts and Crafts ideal not only latter part of his career, which focused on the articulated a critique of capitalist labor and socialist campaign and the writing of political production, but a corresponding critique of novels and communist poetry. If Ruskin was capitalist waste, which attempted to lay the the leading light in Morris’s thinking from groundwork for what we might today call a his student days at Oxford, Karl Marx was sustainable socialism. perhaps an equal influence after Morris’s Morris spent the 1880s deeply immersed conversion to socialism in the early 1880s, in socialist propaganda: editing the socialist and yet his politics and aesthetics remained newspaper The Commonweal, serving as chief closely knit together throughout his career: pamphleteer for the Socialist League, and “seamless,” as Peter Stansky has put it, within maintaining an intensely demanding schedule his evolving beliefs.2 of political lectures and debates. As Florence Because of Morris’s central place in the Boos notes in her introduction to Morris’s history of early British socialism, Arts and socialist diary of 1887, “Morris’s achievements Crafts aesthetic ideals have played a role in routinely exhaust the enumerative abilities the broader history of the British left. As of his biographers.” (The diary itself, indeed, Tim Barringer notes, largely because of had to be given up after three months, due Morris, Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic” to Morris’s pressing public commitments as a became one of “the founding texts of writer and a speaker.4) In the 1890s, however, British socialism, enshrining at its core a during the final years of his life, Morris linkage between aesthetics and the ethics embarked on a print venture that many have of labour.”3 The Arts and Crafts ideal as viewed as a departure from this intense expressed by Morris, however, offered a political work: the Kelmscott Press, which critique of capitalist consumption as well as produced the most expensive and exclusive capitalist production, which has received less books of its day. These lavishly decorated, The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 7–26 Elizabeth C. Miller Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste 9 handmade editions included the Kelmscott the work was finished (Figure 1). Thirteen Chaucer, the press’s largest, grandest, and additional copies printed on vellum sold costliest book. When published in 1896, for the even more exorbitant price of 120 it sold for the steep price of £20 (£33 if guineas (approximately £125). The “paradox bound in pigskin) and its limited edition of price” has been a longstanding puzzle for printing of 425 copies sold out before critics interested in the social implications of Fig 1 Kelmscott Chaucer (1896). From Works. A Facsimile Edition of the William Morris Kelmscott Chaucer. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1958. The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 7–26 10 Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste Elizabeth C. Miller Morris’s design work for Morris & Co., but These products, since they require hand it is an even more pressing problem with labour, are more expensive; they are also respect to the Kelmscott Press, given Morris’s less convenient for use … they therefore active engagement in socialism by this time, argue ability on the part of the purchaser and given the problematic nature of books— to consume freely, as well as ability to understood as repositories of knowledge waste time and effort … The Kelmscott and enlightenment—as commodities.5 No Press reduced the matter to an absurdity other Kelmscott books were as expensive … by issuing books for modern use, as the Chaucer, but many were priced edited with the obsolete spelling, printed by the guinea (worth 21 shillings) rather in black-letter, and bound in limp vellum than the pound, and while the use of this fitted with thongs. currency measurement fit with the press’s neo-medieval aesthetic and sporadic use In handmade paper and hand-bound of archaic language, the guinea also evoked books, Veblen saw only “waste,” waste the class distinction between “trades” and that produced nothing except “pecuniary “professions” that Arts and Crafts professed distinction” for its consumer, and waste that to undo by raising the status of skilled labor. exemplified the perverse “exaltation of Even the most evidently socialist of the the defective” which Morris had inherited Kelmscott books were priced by the guinea; from Ruskin.7 Veblen insists that his use the 1892 Kelmscott edition of Morris’s of the term “waste” is “technical” rather utopian novel News from Nowhere was priced than “deprecatory” (98), but the term was at 2 guineas for its 300 paper copies and 10 obviously a loaded one in the context of guineas for its 10 vellum copies (Figure 2). a nascent “throwaway ethic” or “culture of The Kelmscott Press attracted accusations disposability” in the late nineteenth century.8 of hypocrisy because of the nature of books Like Veblen, I want to consider Morris as ostensibly utilitarian objects, capable (from and the Kelmscott Press in relation to the a socialist perspective) of serving a liberatory idea of waste, but from a very different purpose for the newly literate working perspective. In a moment of acute classes. Arthur Pendenys published an open environmental crisis, “waste” has taken letter to Morris in 1901, stating: “If you were on a new resonance, one that Veblen consistent your Printing Press would exist did not predict—though Morris, I would for the sake of spreading knowledge. As it suggest, did. Struggling with the problems is your publications appeal to capitalists and of overproduction and superabundance others of the wealthy classes.”6 Thorstein that characterize capitalism, Morris Veblen, the early theorist of capitalism who pinpoints capitalism’s ideological reliance coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” on a faulty conception of waste, wherein likewise indicted the Kelmscott Press in his material goods are imagined to be capable 1899 book Theory of the Leisure Class. He of disappearing without consequence. called the Press a prime example of the Threaded through Morris’s late career, and “conspicuous waste” that characterizes perfectly exemplified by Kelmscott Press, modern forms of consumption: is a counter emphasis on durability and The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 7–26 Elizabeth C. Miller Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste 11 Fig 2 Frontispiece for the Kelmscott edition of Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere (1892).