Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 235

Certain towns and villages are known to people outside their regions mainly for having been the homes of great writers or artists; and so deeply informed have been our perceptions of some broad landscapes – most notably Wordsworth’s Lake District and Hardy’s Wessex – by their imaginative representation that, when we visit them, many of our own impressions are essentially predetermined. Furthermore, the artistic or literary associations of a place might be seen to have influenced local demography, planning decisions, priorities in conservation, and the development of tourism, as well as the more recent interpretations of the environment and its human inhabitants. The publication of a book entitled William Morris’s Kelmscott. Landscape and history clearly demonstrates that a famous inhabitant can affect both the character and identity of a place more than a century after their departure.

The thirteen chapters collected here originated as papers delivered at a conference, News from somewhere: William Morris and the Kelmscott landscape, organized by the Society of Antiquaries and held at Kelmscott Manor in 2003. The contributors are archaeologists, historians and architects of various kinds, possessing expertise in their fields, one trusts, yet, with the exception of Linda Parry (a past President of the William Morris Society), no obvious affinity with Morris nor special facility for analysing his work. This is strange, in a situation where Morris is one of the most studied Victorians, with a twice-yearly scholarly journal and a quarterly newsletter devoted to him, besides a steady stream of academic and popular books examining various aspects of his life and work. There is a guaranteed market for a book on Morris’s Kelmscott; but will its purchasers’ expectations be satisfied by its actual contents?

Addressing the Ancoats Brotherhood in 1894, Morris declared that ‘through forty years of my life I have diligently and affectionately noticed the countryside in its smallest detail’. There are many passages in his writings which support this claim. Indeed, Morris’s modern biographer Fiona MacCarthy has remarked on ‘the mixture of succinctness and deep feeling that made him so exceptional a writer about landscape’. Therefore it is remarkable that in William Morris’s Kelmscott very little of Morris’s poetry or his prose romances are considered, and his lectures, essays and journalism are virtually ignored. As a writer, he is treated principally as the author of News from Nowhere, and even with this novel the contributors’ engagement is superficial and often careless.

There are times when the contributors seem unable to distinguish between Morris’s depiction of the countryside as, in News from Nowhere, he fantasised how it could be in a utopian future and how it actually was in Victorian England, so that his appreciation of the contemporary rural situation, his knowledge of local landscape history, and even his reliability as an observer, are all called into question. For example, Robert Parkinson remarks: ‘Ironically, Morris idealized country life at a period of dramatic decline in agriculture’ (p.174). Similarly, Mark Robinson argues: ‘This idyllic countryside of William Morris’s time was almost entirely artificial, the creation of millennia of human activity’ (p.30). It was not idyllic and Morris did not represent it thus. He was well aware of the human activities which had shaped the countryside (this is acknowledged by Tom Hassall, pp.5–6) and, unusually at that time, appreciated the roles of people in all social classes, in a wide variety of occupations, working upon and from the land. He also delighted to observe the trees, flowers and birds around him; and almost always, when these are mentioned in his writings, it is by their particular species. Thus it was for Morris a living landscape in several respects, which is profoundly different from regarding it as ‘almost entirely artificial’, a surprising – nay, alarming – assertion from a palaeo-botanist who has in his previous sentence mentioned the fritillary and ox-eye daisy.

Within the confines of a review, it is impossible to present a comprehensive rebuttal of the assessment of Morris given in this book. Let it suffice to point towards his journalism and lectures, in which he repeatedly describes the hardship of agricultural workers and the mismanagement of farmland. For example, Morris rails against the situation in which, whilst politicians feast in London, out in the countryside there are field-labourers ‘Rubbing through life toward the workhouse and the grave on ten shillings a-week’ (Commonweal, 16 June 1888), ‘their slavery to the farmers being so direct that it presses on them every day’ (Commonweal, 10 December 1887). He yearns for the time when they might ‘no longer fear starvation as a penalty for not working more than enough’ (‘The Aims of Art’, 1886 lecture), and advocates ‘the ennobling of daily and common work, which will one day put hope and pleasure in the place of fear and pain, as the forces which move men to labour and keep the world a-going’ (‘The Beauty of Life’, 1880 lecture).

In News from Nowhere, the idyllic rural scenes, set in a utopian future England, are explicitly contrasted with the nineteenth-century reality, yet Morris’s graphic descriptions and scathing criticisms of his contemporary countryside have received scant attention in William Morris’s Kelmscott.

There is a wealth of published scholarship concerned with the various aspects of Morris’s life and work, yet not much of it has been incorporated into this volume. Notable omissions from the chapter notes and bibliography include E.P.Thompson’s intellectual biography, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, and Peter Faulkner’s insightful studies of the poetry and fiction. Nicholas Salmon, a brilliant scholar who specialized in Morris’s political ideas and activities, and who edited his contributions to Justice and Commonweal for publication in book form in 1994 and ‘96, is cited only as a co-author of The William Morris Chronology. Jan Marsh’s biographies have been used, but not Back to the Land, her study of radical agrarianism from 1880 to 1914, which identifies Morris – with John Ruskin – as one of the two leading prophets and original inspirations for this movement. Most glaringly of all, John Payne’s eclectic and thought-provoking book, Journey up the Thames: William Morris and Modern England, has been omitted, even though its topic and method could hardly be more pertinent to the present study. Payne’s invisibility has a sinister aspect, for – unmentioned anywhere in this volume – he delivered a lecture on ‘Kelmscott and Englishness: a sideways look at the English Countryside’ at the 2003 conference from which William Morris’s Kelmscott is derived. Payne tells me that he wrote up and submitted his lecture to form a chapter in this book, but it was rejected for being too polemical and not properly historical in its method and focus.

This brings me to the heart of my discomfort with William Morris’s Kelmscott. Morris’s intense engagement with politics, as a leading revolutionary communist, during the very period that he was co-tenant of Kelmscott Manor, is barely admitted, let alone discussed by any of the contributors. Instead, Morris is presented as a would-be country gentleman who enjoyed fishing, visiting old churches and designing wallpaper. By, in effect, denying Morris’s passion for social justice, underplaying his commitment to conservation (hedges and public footpaths as much as historic architecture), and not recognizing his blunt contempt for the privileges conventionally demanded by social class and monetary wealth, this great man is grossly misrepresented. The book is blatantly revisionistic.

Moreover, its tone is often identifiably that of the establishment, conservative and occasionally reactionary. To say, as does Hassall, that the earth ‘had been shaped for millennia by Man’ (p.5) is surely nowadays unacceptable in its use of this gendered and capitalized form. John Cherry tells us that a display, arranged by the Oxfordshire War Agricultural Committee in 1916, of women agricultural workers in the district ‘was attended by important people such as Sir Sydney Olivier, Secretary of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, Lord Jersey, Sir John Dashwood and others’ (p.171; my italics); and referring to the same event, Mary Hodges says that ‘The great and the good attended’ it (p.80). It seems we are being instructed to be deferential towards our superiors. Ironically, Hodges’s chapter is entitled ‘Kelmscott: The people in their place’.

The value of this book consists mainly in the chapters which concentrate on aspects of local history and heritage, where Morris features only incidentally. Of these, Simon Townley on ‘Medieval and modern settlement at Kelmscott’ and Julian Munby on ‘Vernacular architecture in Kelmscott’ are the most commendable. ‘The Morris family and Kelmscott’, by Linda Parry, is reliable and appreciative, though it attempts little more than a biographical narrative. Her account is ably complemented by Nicholas Cooper on ‘Kelmscott Manor’ itself, and Cherry’s chapter on ‘Kelmscott depicted’ contains interesting information about the artists who worked there in Morris’s time and subsequently. In the final chapter, on ‘Kelmscott and conservation policy’, Parkinson’s observations upon the current situation are banal and his vision for the future is lamentably restrained, in both respects rather less inspiring than what might have been provided by Ken Worpole or Colin Ward (both of whom are Morrisians) or – I hardly need add – John Payne.

Lavishly illustrated, including many fascinating photographs and reproductions of some little-known artworks, William Morris’s Kelmscott is an attractively produced volume, in this respect worthy of the subject. Its textual content offers quite a lot for the residents of Kelmscott and its surrounding area, and possibly also for some visitors to Kelmscott Manor; but unfortunately Morris – as a writer, thinker, campaigner and credible countryman – is very poorly served, as are his scholars and his many admirers who will be disappointed by this book.