William Morris’s Revolutionary Narratives

Page references are to Three Works by William Morris, a paperback published by International Publishers with an introduction by A. L. Morton. I have included poem and chapter numbers for the convenience of those using different texts.


     A popular poet in his own day, William Morris is now more celebrated for his designs for wallpaper, textiles, and books as well as for his socialist activism. This political commitment shaped his three revolutionary narratives The Pilgrims of Hope (1885), A Dream of John Ball (1888), and News from Nowhere (1890), all of which foreground theme. As these works were meant to be agitprop weapons in service to radical social change, their persuasiveness is a reasonable focus for analysis, though not necessarily the primary criterion for judgement. As it happens, I have just read (or reread) the three in a 1968 edition from International Publishers with a very sympathetic introduction by the British historian A. L. Morton who approvingly quotes Morris’s choice of the word communism to describe his ideology. The political tendency of these books is thus generously overdetermined.
     Incongruous as the combination of his refined aestheticism and the cause of the working class may seem to some, Morris was, of course, far from alone in his day. Ruskin, Walter Crane, and Wilde were among others who sought to combine the love of beauty with that of justice, yet in each case tensions and incongruities lingered. Each naturally developed an idiosyncratic social vision in accordance with his own sensibility. Such variation is properly viewed not as a defect, but as an advantage, with every writer, indeed, in the broader sense, every citizen, adding, not assent to a predetermined party line, but an individual proposal that might, by respecting such differences, form a contribution to the construction of a socialism that approaches most closely to the goal of serving the needs of all.
     William Morris was born, like many radicals [1], into an affluent family, the scion of a wealthy bill broker, comparable perhaps to a Wall Street arbitrageur today. His emphasis on the beautiful as opposed to the practical and his fundamental lifelong distaste for industrialization might make him an unlikely militant; indeed, his own company made luxury goods, necessarily catering to the wealthy. Yet he was earnest and resolute in his writing, propagandizing while also organizing to bring about greater felicity for all. These three works provide views from different angles of his vision of that future and of the values that underlie the social and economic revolution Morris favored.
     The Pilgrims of Hope is transitional, Morris’s last verse narrative and his first major work in praise of socialism. In a modern pilgrimage, an idealized couple go not to Canterbury or Santiago de Compostela, but to Paris to join the short-lived 1871 Commune. To Morris the communards, while “they failed in conquering immediate material freedom for the people” nonetheless “quickened and strengthened the ideas of freedom by their courageous action and made our hope of to-day possible.” Their defeat was to him “the greatest tragedy of modern times.” [2] The French setting is a rare example of internationalism for Morris, for whom as for Blake the New Jerusalem was firmly set in “in England’s green and pleasant land.”
     The poem deals with events of the recent past and concludes with the protagonist and his son looking forward to the struggles of the future. Their devotion to change arises not so much from their own want as from their alienation from the avarice and ugliness of capitalism. While they are déclassé and must work for bread, their need for change arises from suffering that is not material, but rather psychological, or what some might call spiritual.
     Other significant patterns emerge as well that offset, undermine, or interrogate the poem’s forward-looking associations. Most fundamental is Morris’s pastoralism which recalls Blake as well as the entire romance tradition descending from Hellenistic times. The poem begins, repeatedly returns, and ends in an idyllic locus amoenus. One of these Edenic scenes occurs during the calm before the storm, prior to the party’s departure for France. [3] For all the narrator’s languorous delight in “a place of happy rest,” as he lies stretched out on the lawn, watching the haymakers, he is aware that his experience is reserved for those who “need not work.” In fact, as he gazes at the farm laborers, he muses, not on his solidarity with all productive workers, but rather on how “far from them have I drifted,” his radical consciousness severing his tie with the community rather than strengthening it. Similarly, even among the radicals at the meeting, the persona is pointedly said to be the “only one” to respond to the “Communist” speaker. “Bitter to many the message but sweet indeed unto me.” [4] Morris is apparently so strong a collectivist as to find himself isolated.
     While his opposition to industrialism and individualism may seem in tension with his devotion to socialism, he also introduces elements with little direct relation to social justice. This is hardly the place for a general consideration of the association of left-wing factions with such non-political beliefs and practices such as yoga, vegetarianism, and esotericism. Many have been drawn to the cause of socialism whom a ‘thirties Stalinist might condemn as “bourgeois individualists.” [5] While advancing the people’s movement was clearly the primary motive, the plot of The Pilgrims of Hope contains idiosyncratic elements such as the couple’s transformation into a ménage à trois, inevitably reminding the reader of Morris own domestic arrangements.
     The verse form is a long, loose, and mostly anapestic line with some iambs and, in general, six beats per line recalls Homer while retaining the caesurae and some of the alliteration of Old English verse. [6] While many have found the form cumbersome and particularly unfit for prosaic passages, the impression arises in part because we are today unaccustomed to lengthy verse narratives in any meter while such books could be bestsellers in Morris’s day. Morris is one of the last English poets who could write narrative in poetic lines as naturally as in prose, but of course the elder portion of his readership was the last broad audience with a taste for such things as Browning’s The Ring and the Book.
     The poem employs a good many familiar conventions of romance apart from rural idylls. The pattern of thwarted love ending in felicity is one, though here the conclusion is merely peaceful, with a decisive conflict (to be followed by presumably unending peace) projected into the future. The main character’s wise advisors, first the aged Frenchman, then the Communist speaker have seemed to many to be variants on the wizards or seers of legend. The device of making the hero a bastard who is descended from a ruling class father is similar to the many legendary lost princes and princesses, brought up in obscurity.
     Calling the trip to Paris a pilgrimage recalls the Middle Ages, and the goals of the lovers indeed seem more spiritual than political. The poem proceeds with sustained echoes of religious language, such as “tonight I am born again” or “How long, O Lord! how long?” [7] The most significant Christian theme, however, and one with a conflicted relation to revolutionary secularism, is the theme of redemptive suffering and self-sacrifice. Many passages indicate that the three comradely pilgrims each expects to find a Christ-like martyr’s end in the Commune. The hero is determined “in Paris to do my utmost, and there in Paris to die.” Though as it happens he survives, he had expected all three “there to die like men.” [8] Morris lauds “the lovers of earth” for having paradoxically exchanged the good things of life for the “bitter pain” of a transfiguring death in combat. “The day of the deeds and the day of deliverance is nigh." Nature itself is voluptuously entangled with this impending love-death. “Earth kindled to spring-tide with the blood that her lovers have shed.” [9]
     Their reward is in the intensity of their feelings, not the advances secured by their actions. It is only in accepting what he regards as his own “foredoomed” end that he can say, “at last of all days I knew what life was worth.” Like a religious convert, he exults, “yea the life had we attained to could never be unlearned.” [10] The revolutionaries in Paris exhibit sublime elation: “Such joy and peace and pleasure!” [11] Acting in solidarity provides a feeling of love that provides a motive markedly stronger than the recovery of a worker’s surplus value.
     The fourteenth century peasants in A Dream of John Ball (1888) are likewise heading into slaughter and betrayal, though here Ball’s status as a priest makes the religious coloration of motive natural. Speaking with the narrator, a visitor from the future, he mirrors Christ’s view, looking beyond crucifixion to resurrection and the second coming, and finds his own approaching end acceptable in view of the eventual victory of his followers’ cause. Ball’s resolute fortitude with full foreknowledge of his own impending doom (the historic Ball was in fact hanged, drawn, and quartered, and his head displayed on a pike) remind the reader of Achilles as well as Christ. Morris assimilates medieval piety to nineteenth century socialism by displacing the Christian emphasis on Christ’s divinity with a concept of all-embracing “fellowship” [12], a word that generally translates the Greek κοινωνία, familiar from the New Testament.
     A more convincingly integrated Christian socialism had, of course existed for many years, arguably since apostolic times. Morris’s rhetoric, however, does not guide his readers to Christ but rather uses Christian language to gild his politics with a numinous glow satisfying to readers, at least to those whose enthusiasms resemble his own. A contemporary reviewer thanked Morris for celebrating a nearly forgotten people’s hero and said with confidence that the poem provided “an earnest of the near triumph of the true cause.” The critic managed to praise even the qualities that might have given some revolutionaries pause, noting that, while most people come to conclusions only after “research and ratiocination,” Morris’s poetic inspiration amounts to a “spiritual insight that guides him straight to a truth.” Readers of many of Morris’s non-political romances might with some justice complain of the fact that a “vague illusive atmosphere of dream-land surrounds us all throughout the story,” but to the reviewer “this is just as it should be when the narrator is a poet telling his dream.” [13]
     News from Nowhere is so tendentious it is scarcely a novel at all. The sensational “news,” that all might live in harmonious plenty, so dominates the description of settings and of characters as to leave little room for surprise or subtlety. Yet Morris’s vision is sufficiently sweet, especially for readers who share his sensibility, to lend his utopia a specific charm. There is such a poignant hope in his insistence that beauty belongs to all people and to every day and that all work might be pleasure and all people brothers and sisters that the reader becomes as indulgent of the book’s vulnerabilities as the citizens of the new England are of the peculiarities of their time-traveling guest.
     Yes, Ellen seems a manufactured love interest, oddly insubstantial and disinterested as though she might be a creature of virtual reality. The book’s thematics can seem something of an apparition as well, particularly to readers less disposed to be friendly to Morris’s vision. Whatever is the mysterious source of power that seems to support industry and transportation with no apparent human effort? The book’s account of the transition to socialism is fairly detailed, yet no satisfactory explanation of the economic or political organization ever appears. How is production governed? Does anyone assign people their tasks? Does a magic Quakerly consensus seize hold once we are all on the same side?
     The role of the story as agitprop is nonetheless clear. It was published in Commonweal, the journal of the Socialist League, and, in fact Morris’s semi-pastoral ideals bore fruit in the Garden Cities Movement of Ebenezer Howard and others. [14] The year before News from Nowhere appeared, Morris published a story of its origin as “Under an Elm-tree.” [15] In this lyrical piece, none the less moving for its free hand with history, [16] Morris constructs the loveliest idyllic scene as he observes the hay-making that for him represented the glorious collective work of the countryside. The details of flora and fauna are so accurate, the enthusiasm clearly heart-felt, such that the author’s delight in nature convincingly becomes a motive for action, a conviction that he views “a country-side worth fighting for.” From imagining the valor of the Anglo-Saxons he turns to the oppression of the farm laborers before his eyes, dramatically conveyed in a few brief conversational exchanges.
     The germ of News from Nowhere stands out. “Suppose the haymakers were friends working for friends on land which was theirs, as many as were needed, with leisure and hope ahead of them instead of hopeless toil and anxiety . . .” Apart from this positive motive, Morris’s book was a polemic response to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) which projects a bureaucratized, technocratic utopia, a sort of state capitalism in which society becomes the alpha monopoly. [17] To the twenty-first century about which he wrote, Bellamy's scheme savors at its best of Walden Two and at worst of paternalistic authoritarianism, but Morris was most of all outraged by Bellamy’s philistinism. Bellamy was an enthusiastic admirer of industrialization and vast, anonymous production. To him just as “the machine is truer than the hand, so the system . . .turns out more accurate results.” [18] The cash nexus that led to alienated labor in Marx’s analysis is invisible, and all are paid alike, but the human element so important to Morris, in the mark of the maker on the finished product and the affectionate linkage of fellow citizens, has no significance for Bellamy. It is hardly a surprise that Morris’s prose is lyrical and, on occasion, grandly rhetorical, and that his work bears a gilded margin of pure fancy, while Bellamy is practical, utilitarian and flat with an excess of common sense. His Dr. Leete in the future may be solicitous and polite, but he sometimes sounds arrogant and self-righteous.
     Morris, on the other hand, who thought beauty should be everywhere, enjoyed his French edition of Karl Marx's Das Kapital hand bound by Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson in turquoise goatskin with gilt tooling. And why not? Morris may have idealized his farm laborers, but he listened to their real complaints and based his socialism on the economic realities of his day. If he can detail an aesthetic paradise, and Bellamy a technocratic one, let a hundred others likewise add voices that each may contribute to a more fully human future for all.





1. Marx himself was the son of an upper middle class lawyer. The fathers of Trotsky, Mao and Castro were wealthy farmers, members of the class that might in Russia have been called kulaks. Those of us who participated in the movement of the sixties did not need the studies of Kenneth Kenniston to tell us that most of the young radicals, even the “red diaper babies,” enjoyed similarly privileged backgrounds.

2. These quotations from “Why We Celebrate the Commune of Paris,” Commonweal III, 62 (March 19, 1887).

3. Page 151, Poem VIII, “The Half of Life Gone.” The rural British variety of Paradise is briefly recalled in Poem XI “A Glimpse of the Coming Day.”

4. Page 138, Poem V “New Birth.” A capitalization in most of the twentieth century would indicate membership in an explicitly “Communist” party. For Morris did it indicate acceptance The Communist Manifesto or of Marx in general?

5. I will mention here only the emergence of the Fabian Society, the moderate socialist organization whose members were typically affluent and well-educated. Many shared such non-economic concerns as spiritualism and vegetarianism. The Theosophist Annie Besant was an early member and the Fabians themselves had evolved out of a group called the Fellowship of the New Life which declared its first principle to be “the subordination of material things to spiritual things.” Its founder Thomas Davidson advocated a philosophy he called apeirotheism, which had, of course, nothing to do with the Second International or any other political organization. Closer to the present, the potent countercultural strains of ‘sixties radicalism were and are obvious to all.

6. Morris was a translator, of course, from Old Norse, Old English, and Ancient Greek.

7. In page 138, Poem V “New Birth” and page 151, Poem VII “In Prison – And at Home.” Compare, among other passages, John 3:3, 1 Peter 1:3, Psalm 13, and Habakkuk 1:2.

8. From page 163 and 165, Poem X “Ready to Depart.”

9. Page 170, Poem XII, “Meeting the War Machine.”

10. Page 172, Poem XII “Meeting the War Machine.”

11. Page 170, Poem XII “Meeting the War Machine.”

12. Morris’s universal fellowship resembles the I. W. W.’s exalted concept of “One Big Union” (regularly so capitalized).

13. In To-Day No. 55, for June 1888. While this journal called itself the “Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism,” oddly, the very same year of its founding Jerome K. Jerome began publishing a journal with the same name (including the dash and the capital D). Unsurprisingly, Jerome’s proved the longer-lived.

14. When actually built, Howard’s developments encountered an obstacle. His clientele (like that for Morris’s design workshops) was necessarily affluent and jealous of their prerogatives, leading the planner to drop the most progressive aspects of his plans, most significantly cooperative ownership.

15. Commonweal, Vol 5, No. 182, 6 July 1889.

16. As did others of his time, Morris associates the Iron Age White Horse of Uffington with the time of King Alfred and the Viking invasions. He claims of an era that had not only lords and peasants, but masters and slaves as well, that “there was more equality amongst them than we are used to now.”

17. However it may strike us now, Looking Backward struck an American chord, leading to a nationwide organization and newspaper. With the rise of the Populist Party and Bellamy’s failing health, the movement, socialists who eschewed the term socialist, declined. It was a rare example of a radical organization that had little to do with the industrial working class.

18. Looking Backward, Ch 5, p. 43 in the Modern Library edition introduced by Robert L. Shurter.