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Title Sustainable : on waste

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Journal Journal of Modern , 4(1)

ISSN 1749-6772

Author Miller, EC

Publication Date 2011-03-01

DOI 10.2752/174967811X12949160068974

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ISSN: 1749-6772 (Print) 1749-6780 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmc20

Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste

Elizabeth C. Miller

To cite this article: Elizabeth C. Miller (2011) Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste, The Journal of Modern Craft, 4:1, 7-25

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/174967811X12949160068974

Published online: 16 Apr 2015.

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Download by: [University of California Davis] Date: 07 February 2016, At: 18:25 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 /Modernity, Feminist Studies, Compass, and Culture, The Journal of William Morris Studies, The 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 and informed his contributions to the and 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 in sharp contrast to the neophilia, disposability, and of capitalist production. Many have dismissed the political of Kelmscott Press on the basis of the handcrafted books’ expense and rarity, but by considering Morris’s for Kelmscott in light of his fictional and non-fictional writings Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 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

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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 “” and “work,” Morris voiced an early luxury and economic inequality on the disgust for industrial 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 , 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 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

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 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,

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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. Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016

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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

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 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 “,” 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

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Fig 2 Frontispiece for the Kelmscott edition of Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere (1892). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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preservation, challenging prevailing notions rejection of mass print was not mere anti- of waste and offering a distinct theory of democratic sentiment, but a stand against socialist consumption. the kinds of production and consumption Veblen’s failure to question the capitalist that were presumed to naturally accompany model of efficient production impedes his . Political shifts that expanded understanding of Morris. Yet he was correct the reading audience, such as the repeal to identify waste, especially conspicuous of restrictive duties on paper or the waste, as an effect of class. Waste interacts establishment of universal public , with class not only in the direction that need not have correlated with a decline Veblen outlines—the more wealthy and in print standards, yet in this context, print leisured one is, the more one can afford ephemerality figured as a supposed effect of to waste—but in the opposite direction mass reading. too. As Michael Thompson has described, At the same time, however, another trash can align with economic and class dynamic is at work: as Veblen suggests, characteristics such that “transient” objects waste and transiency are also associated are low-class while “antique” or “durable” with the leisure classes, who can afford to objects are high-class.9 In the historical consume profligately. Socialists of Morris’s context of late-Victorian print, this dynamic day sometimes described their conversion translated to a dichotomy between to socialism in terms of a confrontation with cheaply produced books and periodicals this kind of conspicuous waste. In an 1892 that were priced to be accessible to all interview, for example, Robert Blatchford, classes but were fundamentally ephemeral, editor of the Clarion, the most widely and finely produced books that were less circulated and mass-oriented British socialist accessible but built to last. The era saw newspaper of the day, responded to the an incredibly sharp decline in the price of question of how he became a socialist with books and periodicals generally, due to new the following story: technologies for the mass production of paper and the mechanization of print. This I was travelling at the time. There were made for increasingly inexpensive but also two men in the carriage beside me. They shoddy and ephemeral reading products: the were talking and smoking. One of them

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 “ugly” Victorian print that Morris so hated.10 struck a match, went on talking, and forgot The 1890s revival of print and the book arts to light his pipe until the match burnt led by Kelmscott Press thus emerged, in a away. He struck another and another, with sense, in reaction to the democratization the same result. About twenty matches of print, which is ironic given how many of were wasted. This led me to ask myself the print revival’s key figures were socialist the question why we are so wasteful – for or anarchist in their political views: Morris, I have done the same thing myself. It was C.R. Ashbee, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, and because matches were cheap. Then it is Lucien Pissarro, to name a few.11 None not always good to have articles cheap. of these men were working-class, but It encourages waste. It set me thinking of their political affiliations suggest that their matchmakers and – so on … millions of

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people having the same flesh and blood as without waste.14 Inequality and wastefulness you and I are starving daily, while a few are go hand in hand. wasting enough to feed these millions …12 This is just one example of a major preoccupation in Morris’s late career: The 1888 Matchgirls Strike formulating a socialist analysis and was a key event in the rising labor agitation condemnation of waste. His 1884 lecture and “New Unionism” (the organization “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil” employs of unskilled trades) in the late nineteenth the word “waste” eighteen times, registering century. For Blatchford, the light that this a contempt for “those articles of folly and strike cast on the girls’ labor was part of luxury … [that] I will for ever refuse to a chain of connections that led him to call wealth: they are not wealth but waste. reflect on the great paradox of capitalism: Wealth is … what a reasonable man can the persistence of want within a culture of make out of the gifts of Nature for his overabundance. In this, Blatchford was not reasonable use.”15 In another example, alone. Clementina Black and other advocates doodles that are visible on the manuscript of of Co-operativism were also making the Morris’s lecture notes for “Art and Industry socialist case against “cheapness.” in the Fourteenth Century,” a lecture Blatchford’s story prefigures Morris’s he presented in 1887, reveal him to be own conversion story, “How I Became a ruminating distractedly on the word “waste”: Socialist,” which was printed in the Social Spare-time gardening Democratic Federation’s newspaper Justice Black Death – waste in 1894. Here, Morris attempts to define Waste – waste – waste – waste what he means by the term “socialist,” and a Waste similar sense of “waste” figures prominently W would want in his formulation: “Well, what I mean by W A N Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, The words and lettering are surrounded neither master nor master’s man, neither by Morris’s trademark botanical imagery.16 idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain What “spare-time gardening” and “W A N” workers nor heart-sick hand workers, in a signify is debatable, but Morris appears to

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 word, in which all men would be living in be reflecting on the production of food equality of condition, and would manage as a leisure activity for some (“spare time their affairs unwastefully.”13 In truth, Morris’s gardening”), in contradistinction to the idea of socialism was much more precisely “want” and hunger faced by many others. formulated than this essay implies, as was At any rate, it is clear from these notes that demanded by the complex internal politics “want” and “waste” are connected in Morris’s of the movement; but the central point he thinking. Later, in 1893 and 1894, Morris wanted to make here is that his socialism is gave two lectures entitled “Waste,” indicating predicated on the idea of balance. A society that the topic had remained a central with a balanced distribution of goods, he preoccupation during his years at Kelmscott argued, will be a society without want and Press. Sadly, no text of these lectures remains,

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but we can glean Morris’s conception of for example, reads: “Here ends the Book of waste from his other writings, and infer its the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by centrality to the Kelmscott enterprise.17 F.S. Ellis; ornamented with pictures designed Morris’s ongoing thinking about waste by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and engraved illuminates a central tension of his late on wood by W.H. Hooper. Printed by me career: how to privilege the durable and William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, the sustainable without privileging those Upper Mall, Hammersmith, in the county of who can afford those qualities. Many critics Middlesex, finished on the 8th day of May, have reasonably argued that the Kelmscott 1896.” Press failed to adequately negotiate this Of course, plenty of other workers tension. William Peterson’s history of were involved in the press beyond those Kelmscott says its books were “intended acknowledged on the books’ final pages. to symbolize a protest against the ethos of Typically, the books recognize only Morris Victorian industrial capitalism [but] became and the book’s artist and/or editor, if there themselves, in all their opulent splendour, an is one. Engravers are not always recognized, example of conspicuous consumption.”18 and compositors and pressmen never are. E.P. Thompson’s biography of Morris figures But if the books did not openly acknowledge Kelmscott as a fundamentally apolitical every hand that touched them in their enterprise, “founded in a different spirit making, they did exemplify in their material from that in which the original Firm had being a kind of production associated— been launched thirty years before. Morris through the work of Ruskin as well as now had no thought of reforming the Morris—with worker-friendly ideals of labor world through his art … The Press was and a critique of mass production. The simply a source of delight and relaxation.”19 Kelmscott workforce itself, moreover, was More recently, however, critics such as unionized and paid a good wage. To head Jerome McGann and Jeffrey Skoblow have its printing operations, Morris brought in found in the Kelmscott Press a sensibility Thomas Binning, a staunch trade unionist that is political and even revolutionary who had also been the foreman printer of in its deliberate attention to materiality. The Commonweal. Production proceeded in Kelmscott’s artisanal methods and a friendly workshop manner, as John Dreyfus

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 handcrafted materials presented a sharp notes: contrast with other books of the day, prompting recognition of the invisibility of … industrial relations at the Kelmscott labor in almost all mass-produced objects Press were normally very good. Morris and all fields of material production. enjoyed talking and listening to his They ask us to think about the book as a compositors, and has been described manufactured object, and to reflect on the by an eyewitness as ‘taking in every kind of labor involved in its production. The movement of their hands, and every detail last page of each book locates the work of their tools, until he knew as much as that went into its making quite specifically. they did of spacing, justification and all The final page of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the rest.’ He also spent hours with his

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pressmen, familiarizing himself with every apt to prompt thoughts about prolonged peculiarity of their doings.20 preservation.”22 Yet “prolonged preservation” was exactly how Morris began to think of Of course, the press was still capitalist— books and paper, and exactly what he began Morris supplied the and paid others to aim at as a printer. for their labor, though he also worked beside In his 1892 essay “Some Thoughts on them—but it pointed the way toward the Ornamented Manuscripts of the Middle another possible world of production, where Ages,” Morris bemoaned “the present age the workers and the materials mattered of superabundance of books,” and “the more than profit or scale. utilitarian production of makeshifts,” which Morris spoke openly of the conflict “has swept away the book producer in its Kelmscott faced between materials and current.”23 Morris has often been accused production on the one hand and cost on of elitism, for being a socialist who seemingly the other. In “A Note … in Founding the prefers books to be rare and artistic, yet here Kelmscott Press,” he describes how the press it is not the abundance of books that bothers used handmade paper, natural inks, and hand him, it is the “superabundance.” This term labor to make things of beauty that would echoes the Communist Manifesto’s disgust be a joy for—perhaps—ever. Kelmscott’s at the absurd “epidemic of overproduction” prices were thus a necessary evil to model that characterizes capitalist modernity: the a form of production driven by sustainability waste, glut, and superfluity that coexist rather than volume. As Morris said in an with want and privation.24 This paradoxical 1893 interview: “I wish – I wish indeed that connection between overabundance and the cost of the books was less, only that is want, which Marx and Engels saw as a impossible if the printing and the decoration constitutive feature of capitalism, signals that and the paper and the binding are to be deprivation in the modern era does not what they should be.”21 What they should result from scarcity, but from distribution. be, for Morris, are not disposable waste More cheap books and more cheap goods products, like most books of his day, built to will not balance the ledger of social equality, sell and not to last. In this sense, Kelmscott Morris suggests; an entirely new calculus was a direct attack on print’s apparently is required. This was a central concern of

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 disposable nature. Elizabeth Eisenstein has Morris’s work following his conversion to argued that the printing press had always to socialism. In his novel A Dream of John Ball, some extent been imbued with an ideology which was serialized in Morris’s socialist of disposability: “printing required the use newspaper The Commonweal from 1886 of paper – a less durable material than to 1887 and later published in a Kelmscott parchment or vellum to begin with, and one edition, the narrator travels back in time to that has become ever more perishable as the fourteenth century and tries to describe the centuries have passed and rag content the economic conditions of late-nineteenth- has diminished.” When paper reached the century England (Figure 3). His medieval point where it might be “consigned to trash peasant listener is confused by the horrific bins or converted into pulp,” it was “not idea that “times of plenty shall in those days

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Fig 3 The first installment of Morris’s novel A Dream of John Ball in The Commonweal (November 13, 1886). Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.

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be of famine.”25 In Morris’s 1891 perhaps—was to create a durable, timeless romance The Story of the Glittering Plain, style. which was also produced in a Kelmscott Obsolescence in all its forms, by contrast, edition, the titular land is supposedly is key to capitalist models of consumption. a place of superabundance, leisure, and Bernard London’s 1932 pamphlet Ending “pleasure without cease”—not unlike the the Depression through Planned Obsolescence, department stores that had begun to appear for example, promoted obsolescence as a in late-Victorian cities—yet Morris’s narrative means of artificially stimulating consumption, unmasks it as a corrupt place, a “land of thereby stimulating the demand for labor.31 lies.”26 As London noted, workers appear to need Morris’s loathing of overabundance in overconsumption to protect employment, juxtaposition with want—the same divided but Morris saw this as a waste of labor and social condition that bred an aesthetic of a waste of material. His lecture “Art under montage, according to Sergei Eisenstein, Plutocracy” challenges the assumption that all in nineteenth-century novels and in early labor is necessarily a good regardless of how film27—may have begun as an aesthetic its products are consumed, a theme that repulsion against mass-produced objects. But appears in many of his lectures and essays: in his late work, Morris was more alert to the This doctrine of the sole aim of ethics of waste under capitalism than to its manufacture (or indeed of life) being the aesthetic failings. He has not been alone, of profit of the capitalist and the occupation course, in conceptualizing waste as an effect of the workman, is held, I say, by almost of capitalism: the result of overproduction, every one; its corollary is, that labour is created needs, and a culture of advertising. necessarily unlimited, and that to attempt As twentieth-century industrial designer to limit it is not so much foolish as wicked, Brooks Stevens famously argued, “planned whatever misery may be caused to the obsolescence” is perversely good marketing: community by the manufacture and sale of if a product is not sufficiently transient—in the wares made. design, function, or performance—people will have no reason to buy another a few years Thus, in Morris’s words, “the very essence down the road.28 As a book designer, Morris of competitive commerce is waste.”32 In a

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 worked along opposite lines. Many critics better world, workers’ livelihood would not have noted the neo-medieval aesthetic of depend upon overconsumption and a dearth the Kelmscott books, but Morris’s goal was of leisure. actually to “move out of the historical style, But can waste ever really be overcome? particularly the eclecticism that characterized Is it always an evil? Morris’s utopian novel the Victorian age, into a more ahistorical News from Nowhere is his longest and most style.”29 He drew on older forms in an comprehensive account of the future socialist effort to evoke a kind of temporal neutrality. society that he believed was imminent, The types that he designed for Kelmscott and the novel reminds us that waste can were meant to be “pure in form,” without also have use. As literary William excessive protuberances.30 His goal—unmet, Cohen has argued of the term “filth,” it can

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suggest either a “pollutant” or something Kelmscott Press. Achieving such a balance “conceivably productive, the discarded requires a resistance to novelty as well as sources where riches may lie.”33 This is the a commitment to making objects that bear fantasy of waste, I would argue, that underlies conserving. News from Nowhere: the idea that waste can In one illustrative scene, William Guest, be recycled, reused, and recovered, not just a visitor from the nineteenth-century past abandoned. Morris envisions a future socialist and the novel’s central character, goes utopia where nothing is wasted yet nothing is “shopping” for a new pipe. Morris counters wanted: a perfect material equilibrium, where the inevitable objection to “communist production-consumption cycles are balanced shopping”—that if all goods are free, people as an effect of social health. Of course this will be wasteful—by depicting the residents is a fantasy, written in a novel; yet it reminds of Nowhere as frugal preservationists, who us that depends on expect their commodities to be durable art an opposite fantasy of waste, which de- rather than novel ephemera. When Guest is emphasizes the longevity of objects and offered a beautiful pipe from a young shop- obscures the material problem of garbage. In girl, he initially demurs, fearing the pipe is too Morris’s socialist utopia, by contrast, things do valuable for his own use: “Dear me … this not simply disappear when discarded: objects is altogether too grand for me … Besides, endure, and people expect them to endure. I shall lose it – I always lose my pipes.” The Considering that Morris wrote the novel shop-girl responds, “What will it matter if just when he was devising his plans for you do? Somebody is sure to find it, and Kelmscott Press, News from Nowhere tells he will use it, and you can get another.”36 us a great deal about the importance of In Nowhere, a pipe does not magically durability and sustainability in the Kelmscott disappear: it is picked up by someone else project and within Morris’s broader vision of who will dust it off and use it. In a society socialism at this time.34 News was originally without private property, where ownership published serially in The Commonweal and purchasing power are not indexed to beginning with the January 11, 1890 issue self-worth, used goods and old goods do not (Figure 4); a Kelmscott Press edition followed attract the stigma of dirtiness or defilement in 1892. Indeed, a letter from Morris’s wife that they do in a capitalist society. Morris

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 indicates that Morris planned News from offers a vision of a future where the lines Nowhere to be the first book published between “trash” and “treasure” have become by Kelmscott, suggesting how closely the blurred as a consequence of communal life; novel was tied to Morris’s idea for the press “waste” is not opposed to “wealth.” William (though it ended up being the twelfth book Guest need not hoard his pipe, nor be a instead of the first).35 The future society vigilant custodian of this precious object, of Nowhere, which Morris set in 2004, because the desirability of goods is no longer has fought environmental degradation indexed to their pristine or unused history. and overproduction by thoroughly Morris’s utopia is an attack on the internalizing the values of craft, durability, neophilia, or love of the new, engrained in and preservation—central values of the consumer capitalism. Those critics who

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Fig 4 An installment of Morris’s novel News from Nowhere in The Commonweal, with a cartoon embedded in the text (May 24, 1890). Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.

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fault Morris for on the medieval of the book: superfluous production wastes past in creating his utopian world, rather not only material, but labor. Indeed, in an than creating an ostensibly new world, are ironic foreshadowing of Bernard London, perhaps missing a key point of Morris’s early champion of planned obsolescence, novel: innovation for the sake of innovation some residents of Nowhere worry about is a market culture value, and Morris’s the possibility of a “work-famine,” in which aesthetic task is to subvert, not uphold, optimum levels of production simply do not such values. One character in the novel, demand enough labor to give everyone as indeed, articulates this purpose quite clearly much work as he or she would like. The in an attack on the nineteenth-century shortage is only a problem because the manufacturing practices of the past/present: residents of Nowhere actually enjoy their labor, and do not seek to avoid it: … the horrible burden of unnecessary production … the ceaseless endeavour to All work which would be irksome to do expend the least amount of labour on any by hand is done by immensely improved article made, and yet at the same time to machinery; and in all work which it is a make as many articles as possible. To this pleasure to do by hand machinery is done ‘cheapening of production’, as it was called, without … From time to time, when we everything was sacrificed: the happiness have found out that some piece of work of the workman at his work, nay, his most was too disagreeable or troublesome, elementary comfort and bare health, his we have given it up and done altogether food, his clothes, his dwelling, his leisure, without the thing produced by it … under his amusement, his education – his, life, in these circumstances all the work that we short – did not weigh a grain of sand in do is an exercise of the mind and body the balance against this dire necessity of more or less pleasant to be done: so that ‘cheap production’ of things, a great part instead of avoiding work everybody seeks of which were not worth producing at all. it … (142) (138–9) The society of Nowhere manages to The “cheap production” that Morris’s novel avoid a “work-famine” by treating all forms places at the core of nineteenth-century of labor as worthy of constant practice

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 labor exploitation contrasts sharply with the and perfection for their own sake. The production practices underlying Kelmscott manufacture of goods has largely been Press, and the novel, itself published in a replaced by artistic craftsmanship, and all Kelmscott edition, demonstrates how such forms of production are given the time, an apparently luxurious enterprise actually care, and attention typically reserved for modeled what were for Morris crucial artistic creation.37 Indeed, the word “art” socialist ideals: durability and sustainability. barely exists anymore, having been replaced Because the residents of Nowhere do by the term “work pleasure.” Necessary not spend all their time overproducing cheap work that cannot be turned into art—such and redundant objects, they have a great as road-mending or harvest-reaping—is deal of leisure time, which is a key argument done in groups and approached as a kind of

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exercise or sport.38 When material creation is wasted and nothing is spoilt” (119). of all kinds is treated as an art, durability and In a garden, even waste can be fruitfully permanence become primary aims, and the employed as compost, and it is this kind of waste that comes with overproduction and circular pattern of waste redemption rather shoddy production is minimized. than disposal that we find in Morris’s post- In another discussion of News from lapsarian version of paradise. Nowhere, literary critic Natalka Freeland The dainty digestive systems of shows how art functions as a solution to Nowhere’s residents offer a metaphor for the problem of overproduction in the this consumption-waste cycle, for if we novel, since “surplus productive capacity is don’t know how they go to the toilet, we absorbed by labor-intensive craftsmanship.”39 do know where they store animal manure: But in focusing on waste as a historical in the old Houses of Parliament. Ever the category rather than a material and anti-parliamentarian, Morris is clearly being environmental one, Freeland finds principles satirical here, but underlying the joke is a of “disposal and innovation” in the novel key point about the value of salvage. At rather than preservation (235). Situating one time, the novel tells us, the people of News within a wide array of late-Victorian Nowhere planned to tear down the Houses utopias, she claims that the genre is fixated of Parliament, since they no longer needed on gutters, sewers, and improvements to the buildings and considered them ugly, but waste management, which she considers a “queer antiquarian society” stepped in to the “cornerstone of their of prevent their destruction, “as it has done alternate worlds” (225). And yet crucially, with many other buildings, which most unlike the other novels Freeland discusses, people looked upon as worthless” (81). News from Nowhere offers no insight into They preserved the Houses of Parliament post-revolutionary toilet arrangements. Its for the storage of dung, just as they save future people apparently produce very little Windsor Castle, transforming it from private waste in the first place, rather than creating to collective space: “we wouldn’t pull the elaborate means of waste disposal. Consider buildings down, since they were there; just how Morris uses digestion, for example, as a as with the buildings of the Dung-Market … metaphor for the production-waste cycle: in A great many people live there [in Windsor

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 describing the Nowherians’ meals, the novel’s Castle] … there is also a well-arranged narrator continually uses the word “dainty,” store of antiquities of various kinds that and says, “everything was cooked and served have seemed worth keeping – a museum” with a daintiness which showed that those (202). This is the sensibility that dominates who had prepared it were interested in it; in Morris’s socialist utopia: even with but there was no excess either of quantity objects that appear to be waste or trash or or of gourmandise: everything was simple, obsolete, the instinct is to salvage. “Dung,” though so excellent of its kind” (146). (Note one character says, “is not the worst kind of the rhetorical similarities to the corruption; fertility may come of that” (121). movement today.) Likewise, he describes This penchant for building preservation Nowhere as “a garden, where nothing clearly echoes Morris’s own active history

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with the Society for the Protection of standpoint. For the people of Nowhere, Ancient Buildings, familiarly known as the instead of viewing the objects they produce “Anti-Scrape” Society, which he founded in as potential waste, imagine past events, 1877 and remained involved in until his death objects, and people as present in the in 1896. Morris’s work in establishing this materiality of the present day. They do not society was simultaneous with his increasing read or talk about the past, but it exists all involvement in leftist politics, culminating around them: a carving in a dining hall that in his conversion to socialism in the early honors late-nineteenth-century socialists, 1880s. The concurrence was not accidental. a holiday practice of singing the words to As E.P. Thompson notes in discussing Thomas Hood’s 1843 anti-sweatshop poem Morris’s rage at the possible destruction of “Song of the Shirt.” Carolyn Steedman has a beautiful, old Berkshire barn: “It may seem identified two different cultural conceptions an unlikely road to by way of of the archive, which she calls “dust” and Great Coxwell Barn,” yet “Morris’s work “waste”: dust is the “movement and for the Anti-Scrape contributed as much to transmutation of one thing into another”; it bring him on the final stages of his journey “is about circularity, the impossibility of things as any other influence” because it brought disappearing, or going away, or being gone. him “directly into conflict with the property Nothing can be destroyed,” whereas “waste” sanctions of capitalist society” and “deepened refers to the fear that things will disappear his insight into the destructive philistinism of all too easily, that they can be destroyed.41 capitalist society.”40 Morris’s perseverance in Steedman’s terminology provides a window preserving old buildings went hand-in-hand into Morris’s understanding of history not with his commitment to common wealth and as a metaphorical dustbin, but as a material shared public good over and above individual recycling bin. The Nowherians’ entire property. The very idea of the Anti-Scrape worldview rests on a radically different Society was infused with a respect for the notion of “waste” as that which cannot workers that had produced the buildings disappear. A similar idea is at work in A in the first place, and the materials used to Dream of John Ball, which finds the presence produce them. As one of Morris’s utopian of a fourteenth-century revolt in events of characters says of the Morris’s own time. As Morris wrote in 1884:

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 (another building kept standing though the “John Ball was murdered by the fleecers of people of the future find it ugly), “it is not a the people many hundred years ago, but bad thing to have some record of what our indeed in a sense he lives still, though I am forefathers thought a handsome building. For but a part, and not the whole of him.”42 there is plenty of labour and material in it” Morris’s late writings call our attention to (99). material persistence, and to the limitations of Morris’s work for the Anti-Scrape Society a capitalist conception of waste as that which also bespeaks his dedication to preservation readily disappears. His meditations on such as a form of historical memory, which we questions bespeak his broader engagement see in News from Nowhere too, despite with the problem of waste in his work the narrative’s “post-history” historical for the Kelmscott Press, which modeled

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fair labor practices as well as sustainable household objects with the aura of artistic production practices. Still, a central tension creation, as he did in his work for Morris & endures in Morris’s work regarding the Co.; he brought this aura to print, too, to accessibility of sustainable goods, and this demonstrate that even an area of production tension is particularly poignant in the arena thought to be essentially indifferent to beauty of bookmaking, given the struggles of so and craftsmanship could be transformed many nineteenth-century working-class through a new approach to labor and readers to get hold of the time and even materials. the ability to read. Certainly, Morris was not able to democratize durability, but during Notes the time he was working on the Kelmscott Press, he did continue to produce low- 1 See especially Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic” cost socialist literature such as the penny from the second volume of his Stones of . For more on the influence of Ruskin’s expressive pamphlets published by the Hammersmith theory of labor, see Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Socialist Society. Kelmscott allowed Morris Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: to make a point, however, that could not be Yale UP, 2005). made by way of cheap print: that waste is a 2 Peter Stansky, Redesigning the World: William problem of production, that longevity and Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts disposability must be taken into account (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), reprint (Palo Alto, at the genesis of an object’s life, not just CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and the end. In capitalism, waste disposal has Scholarship, 1996), 7. traditionally been viewed as the province 3 Barringer, 255. of the consumer rather than the producer, 4 William Morris, Socialist Diary, ed. Florence Boos and environmental measures have long (Iowa City, IA: Windhover Press, 1981). emphasized responsible consumption 43 5 “Paradox of price” is Stansky’s term (47–8). The while ignoring production. Today, “cleaner firm was founded in 1861 and Morris’s peak production” and “cradle-to-cradle” design years of work there were in the 1870s, before his are recognized as key environmental conversion to socialism, whereas the Kelmscott measures, but Morris’s analysis of waste Press was founded in 1891. suggests that this kind of thinking was 6 Quoted in Colin Clair, A History of Printing in

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 already germinating in his nineteenth-century Britain (London: Cassell, 1965), 246. critique of capitalism. Morris offers a vision 7 Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899 of production in which an object’s future life, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), in all its half-lives, is of more concern than 162–4. scale and speed of manufacture. In this way, 8 For more on disposability and the “throwaway the Kelmscott Press articulated a central culture,” see Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology premise of Morris’s socialism. It modeled and Obsolescence in America (: Harvard a form of production grounded in beauty, UP, 2006). materials, durability, and good labor practices, 9 Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation even for bookmaking, that most utilitarian of and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford UP, arts. It was not enough for Morris to imbue 1979).

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10 For more on these shifts, see chapters 12–15 socialism, though not with the same degree of of Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: intensity as Morris’s earlier groups. A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 15 William Morris, “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil,” 1800–1900, 2nd ed. (Columbus: Ohio State UP, in Political Writings, 91 (see note 13). 1998). For Morris on the Victorian period’s “ugly books,” see for example his 1893 lecture “The 16 British Library, MS Add 45331. Ideal Book,” in The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book, ed. William S. Peterson 17 Morris’s lectures turned to the topics of (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982), 67. “Waste” and “Makeshift” (a term for cheap goods) in his final years, even as his speaking 11 For more on these presses, see for example engagements were decreasing due to poor Clair (note 6); Marcella D. Genz, A History of the health. He presented, for example, two Eragny Press (London: Oak Knoll, 2004); In Fine lectures in in 1894: “Waste” at the Print: William Morris as a Book Designer (London: Manchester Free Trade Hall, and “Makeshift” for London Borough of Waltham Forest, Libraries the Ancoats Brotherhood. Edmund and Ruth and Arts Department, 1976); or Roderick Cave, Frow, William Morris in Manchester and Salford Fine Printing and Private Presses (London: British (Salford: Working Class Movement Library, Library, 2001). 1996), 22–3. 12 “Local Labour Leaders: ‘Nunquam’ (Mr. Robert 18 William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press: A Blatchford),” in the Ashton under Lyme Herald History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure (May 28, 1892), collected in An Introduction to (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 275. Robert Blatchford and the Clarion Newspaper, ed. 19 E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Mike and Liz Sones (Harrow, Middlesex: Clarion Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon, 1955), 583. Workshop Press, 1986), 12. Blatchford would repeat a version of this story in Merrie England, 20 John Dreyfus, “William Morris: Typographer,” in his widely read series of socialist letters to the William Morris and the Art of the Book (New York: fictional John Smith, originally serialized in the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1976), 82. Clarion from 1892 to 1893. After the release of 21 “‘Master Printer Morris’: A Visit to the Kelmscott a penny edition in 1894, the book sold over a Press,” in The Daily Chronicle (22 Feb 1893), million copies. reprinted in Morris, The Ideal Book, 98 (note 10). 13 William Morris, “How I Became a Socialist,” 22 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A.L. in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Morton (New York: International Publishers, Cambridge UP, 2005), 88. 1973), 241. 23 William Morris, “Some Thoughts on the Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 14 Morris, along with a group of others, had left Ornamented Manuscripts of the Middle Ages,” in the Social Democratic Federation in December Morris, Ideal (see note 10), 1. 1884 to form the Socialist League, largely over the question of electoral politics and running 24 Karl Marx and , The Communist socialist candidates (which he was against); he Manifesto, 1848, in Marx, Selected Writings, ed. then left the Socialist League in 1890 when it Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), came to be dominated by anarchists; his final 163. socialist affiliation was with the Hammersmith 25 William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, in Three Socialist Society, a group that met in Kelmscott Works By William Morris, ed. A.L. Morton (New House and reflected Morris’s particular blend York: International Publishers, 1986), 100. of anti-parliamentary/revolutionary/aesthetic socialism. The Hammersmith Socialists 26 William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain continued the print and speaking propaganda for or the Land of Living Men, facsimile of the 1894

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Kelmscott edition (New York: Dover, 1987), consciousness,” since “the hobbyist is the positive 99–100. mirror image of the worker who has been made redundant at the factory,” and “the successful 27 Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film displacement of unused time into harmless Today,” 1944, in Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in leisure activities has been vital to the project of Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego: capitalist expansion.” In Morris’s socialist utopia, Harvest, 1977), 195–255. however, hobbies persist after the revolution, 28 For more on Brooks Stevens, see Glenn as Morris’s means of suggesting that all labor Adamson, Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks need not be purposeful or even communal in Stevens Shaped Your World (Boston: MIT Press, a socialist society. The only distinction between 2003). these hobbies and “work” proper, indeed, is that hobbies are performed for individual as opposed 29 Stansky, Redesigning, 45 (see note 2). to collective pleasure. Glenn Adamson, Thinking 30 Dreyfus, “William Morris,” 78 (see note 20). Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 140. 31 Slade, Made to Break, 75 (see note 8). Slade 38 In one scene, a group of young men mending notes that this pamphlet was published twenty a road are said to look like “a boating party at years before Brooks Stevens claimed to have Oxford,” and they use terms from competitive invented the term “planned obsolescence.” rowing to describe their work as “right down good sport” (94–5). 32 “Art under Plutocracy,” Collected Works of William Morris vol. XXIII (London: Longmans, 39 Natalka Freeland, “The Dustbins of History: 1915), 180, 186. Waste Management in Late-Victorian Utopias,” in Cohen and Johnson, Filth, 227 (see note 33). 33 William A. Cohen, introduction to Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. Cohen and Ryan 40 Thompson, William Morris, 231, 233 (see note Johnson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005), x. 19).

34 Kelmscott was founded in 1891, but Morris’s 41 Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural idea for it probably stretches back to November History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002), 15, 1888, when he saw Emery Walker’s lecture 164. on letterpress printing at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Stansky, Redesigning, 222. 42 William Morris, Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton: Princeton 35 William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press, 98–9 UP, 1984), 2: 326. (see note 18). 43 Only in 1989 did the United Nations 36 William Morris, News from Nowhere, ed. Stephen Environmental Programme launch its “Cleaner

Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 18:25 07 February 2016 Arata (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003), 86. Production” initiative, in an effort to generate 37 Because of their ample leisure time, many “a preventative approach to environmental residents of Nowhere also pursue odd hobbies: management.” United Nations Environmental one character, for example, enjoys writing archaic Programme, and historical novels that nobody else reads. Glenn Production Branch, “Understanding Cleaner Adamson has argued that in its modern form, Production,” http://www.unep.fr/scp/cp/ “hobby craft is the very embodiment of false understanding/

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