‘Sentimental Socialism’? Morris, Marx, Engels, and Mill

Flaherty, Seamus

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-42339-1_11

‘Sentimental Socialism’? Morris, Marx, Engels, and Mill

Seamus Flaherty²

Chapter
First Online: 21 May 2020

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Abstract

Unlike Hyndman, Morris never met Marx, and unlike Bax, Morris and Engels never formed much of a relationship. As we saw in Chap. 6, Morris joined the DF in 1883, before leaving two years later to form the SL, in 1885. While Bax left the SL in 1888 because of the preponderance of anarchism within the organisation, Morris stayed put until 1891, when he was finally purged from his position as editor of Commonweal. Morris was converted to socialism by Mill’s Chapters on Socialism. But, before that, John Ruskin had exercised a decisive influence on Morris’s worldview, easing the transition from political radicalism to socialism. In 1883, Morris began to study Marx’s Capital. While Morris ‘thoroughly enjoyed’ its historical parts, he suffered, he confessed, ‘agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the pure economics of that great work. Anyhow’, Morris recorded in 1896, ‘I read what I could, and will hope that some information stuck to me from my reading; but more, I must think, from continuous conversation with such friends as Bax and Hyndman and Scheu, and the brisk course of propaganda meetings which were going on at the time … Such finish’, Morris concluded, ‘to what of education in practical Socialism as I am capable of I received afterwards from some of my Anarchist friends, from whom I learned, quite against their intention, that Anarchism was impossible, much as I learned from Mill against his intention that Socialism was necessary’.

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Notes

1.
William Morris, ‘How I Became a Socialist. Written for “Justice,” 1894’, in Collected Work of William Morris, Vol. 23, p. 278.
2.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 47, p. 105.
3.
Ibid., p. 155.
4.
Ibid., p. 471.
5.
Ibid., p. 484.
6.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 48, p. 70.
7.
A. L. Morton, ‘Morris, Marx, and Engels’, Journal of William Morris Studies, 7/1 (1986), p. 48. Quoted in Kinna, ‘Morris and Anti-parliamentarism’, p. 603.
8.
William Morris, ‘Correspondence’ (1889), in Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal, 1883–1890, ed. Nicholas Salmon (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1994), p. 414. For a discussion of the disputes over Morris’s relationship to ‘Marxism’ and anarchism see Kinna, ‘Morris and Anti-parliamentarism’.
9.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 50, p. 83.
10.
Bax, Outlooks, p. viii.
11.
Krishan Kumar, ‘News from Nowhere: The Renewal of Utopia’, History of Political Thought, 14/1 (1993), pp. 133–143; Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), pp. 40–41; and Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 125.
12.
For the publication history and the reception of Looking Backward in Britain see Peter Marshall, ‘A British Sensation’, in Sylvia E. Bowman (ed.), Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophets’ Influence (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962), pp. 86–118. For Fabian Essays see Asa Briggs, ‘Introduction’, in Shaw (ed)., Fabian Essays, pp. 11–29.
13.
William Morris, ‘Looking Backward’ (1889), in Morris, Political Writings, p. 425.
14.
Ibid.
15.
Ibid., p. 458.
16.
Ibid.
17.
As Shaw wrote, Morris disliked the Fabians ‘as a species’. ‘However, there was no love lost on the other side’. Bernard Shaw, ‘Morris as I knew him’, in Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, Vol. 2, p. xi.
18.
William Morris, ‘Where Are We Now?’ (1890), in Morris, Political Writings, p. 493.
19.
Shaw , ‘The Fabian Society’, p. 19. Thompson noted how already ‘in September, 1887’, Morris ‘was identifying his real theoretical opponents as being among the Fabians, and this despite the fact that Shaw was a close personal friend’. William Morris, p. 459.
20.
William Morris, ‘On Some ‘Practical’ Socialists’ (1888), in Morris, Political Writings, p. 337.
21.
William Morris, ‘Fabian Essays in Socialism’, in Morris, Political Writings, p. 462.
22.
Paul Meier, ‘An Unpublished Lecture of William Morris’, International Review of Social History, 16/2 (1971), p. 222.
23.
Morris, ‘“Practical” Socialists’, p. 338.
24.
Ibid.
25.
Annie Besant, ‘Industry under Socialism’, in Shaw (ed.), Fabian Essays, p. 184.
26.
Ibid.
27.
Ibid.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Morris, ‘“Practical” Socialists’, p. 341.
30.
Besant, ‘Industry under Socialism’, p. 185.
31.
H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, eds. Gregory Claeys and Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, [1905] 2005), p. 72.
32.
Besant , ‘Industry under Socialism’, p. 195.
33.
Ibid., p. 196.
34.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 159.
35.
Morris, ‘Correspondence’, p. 416.
36.
Besant described the ‘great farms’ that she envisaged for the rural unemployed as ‘improvements of the Bonanza farms in America’. ‘Industry under Socialism’, p. 191.
37.
Ibid., p. 189.
38.
Ibid. Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 98.
39.
Ibid.
40.
Ibid. The same, of course, is true of Bellamy’s Boston. In Bellamy’s utopia evening meals are, however, taken at a ‘general-dining house’, but each family is assigned a separate room for its exclusive use. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 87, 90.
41.
Besant, ‘Industry under Socialism’, p. 195.
42.
Ibid. Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 199.
43.
Ibid., pp. 124, 192.
44.
Ibid., p. 122.
45.
Ibid., p. 123.
46.
Morris, ‘Art under Plutocracy’, p. 168.
47.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 160.
48.
Ibid., p. 159.
49.
Ibid., p. 201.
50.
Ruth Kinna, ‘William Morris: Art, Work, and Leisure’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 61/3 (2000), p. 493.
51.
Ibid., p. 494.
52.
Ibid.
53.
This paragraph is based squarely on Kinna’s careful analysis. For a fully developed account of the intricacies of Morris’s changing views and the contradictions in them see Kinna’s article.
54.
Ibid., p. 123.
55.
George Bernard Shaw, ‘The Transition to Social Democracy’, in Shaw (ed.), Fabian Essays, p. 235.
56.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 123.
57.
Morris, ‘Fabian Essays’, p. 463.
58.
Shaw, ‘Morris as I knew him’, pp. xxiii, xx.
59.
Morris, ‘Fabian Essays’, p. 463.
60.
Ibid., p. 462.
61.
Shaw, ‘Morris as I knew him’, p. xi.
62.
Shaw, ‘Transition’, p. 235.
63.
Shaw, Major Barbara, p. xi.
64.
Ibid., p. xii.
65.
Shaw, ‘Transition’, p. 235.
66.
Ibid., p. 214.
67.
Ibid., p. 218.
68.
Ibid., p. 214.
69.
Ibid., p. 218.
70.
Ibid., p. 222.
71.
Besant, ‘Industry under Socialism’, p. 186. Shaw, ‘Transition’, p. 222.
72.
Ibid., pp. 224, 225.
73.
Ibid., p. 225.
74.
Ibid., p. 226.
75.
Ibid., p. 227.
76.
Ibid., p. 230.
77.
Ibid.
78.
Ibid.
79.
Ibid., p. 231.
80.
Morris, ‘Looking Backward’, p. 422. Morris, ‘Fabian Essays’, p. 458.
81.
For contemporary objections to the expansive use of the word socialism by extreme individualists like Spencer see John Rae, Contemporary Socialism (London: Swan Sonnenschein, [1884] 1908), p. 12; and, more particularly, Brodrick, ‘Democracy and Socialism’, pp. 628–629. For a historical appraisal see Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, pp. 13–50.
82.
Morris, ‘Fabian Essays’, p. 459.
83.
Kumar, ‘News from Nowhere’, p. 138. For Morris’s relationship with violence see Ingrid Hanson, William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890 (London: Anthem Press, 2013).
84.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 134. John Crump, for instance, fails to even mention the Fabian Society in his analysis of Morris’s view of the transition to socialism. ‘How the Change Came: News from Nowhere and Revolution’, in Stephen Coleman and Paddy O’Sullivan (eds.), William Morris & News from Nowhere: A Vision for Our Time (Bideford: Green Books, 1990), pp. 57–73.
85.
Bellamy was strident in his advocacy of cross-class party-political action. In Looking Backward the ‘followers of the red flag’ are depicted as having not only hindered ‘the establishment of the new order’, they are also supposed to have been subsidised to persist in their strategy by the opponents of change. Bellamy, Looking Backward, pp. 148–149.
86.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 134. The right-wing group among the Fabians put out a journal called The Practical Socialist. See McBriar’s remarks. Fabian Socialism and English Politics, pp. 19–20.
87.
Shaw, ‘Transition’, pp. 235–236.
88.
Ibid., p. 236. Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 135.
89.
Ibid., pp. 133–134.
90.
Ibid., p. 134.
91.
Shaw, ‘Transition’, p. 235.
92.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 135.
93.
Ibid.
94.
Ibid.
95.
Webb, ‘Historic’, p. 92.
96.
Engels, ‘Introduction’, in Marx, Civil War in France, p. 17. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels famously posited that the ‘executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 221; and Engels elaborated on this foundation in the chapters of Anti-Dühring later republished as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, where, as we have seen, he formulates the proposition that the ‘state is not ‘abolished” but ‘withers away’. Engels, Socialism, p. 107.
97.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 108.
98.
Ibid., p. 111.
99.
Bax, Reminiscences and Reflexions, p. 81.
100.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 156.
101.
Ibid., p. 155.
102.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 223.
103.
Ibid., p. 272.
104.
Ibid., p. 245.
105.
‘But as to this allotment scheme, J. S. Mill said all that was necessary’, Morris wrote, revealing his knowledge of Mill’s Principles, ‘when he said it was simply allowing the labourers to work to pay their own poor rates. The bill is really in the interests of the employing farmers and the rack-renting landlords’. Morris, ‘Notes on News’ (1887), p. 266. Morris was referring to the Labourers’ Allotment Bill of 1887. Mill’s critical remarks on ‘the much-boasted Allotment System’ are set out in Book 2 chapter 12. Mill, Principles, in Collected Works, Vol. 2, pp. 362–366.
106.
William Morris, The Collected Letters of William Morris, Vol. 2, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 293. MacCarthy, William Morris, p. 474.
107.
Persky, Political Economy of Progress, p. 169.
108.
Ibid.
109.
Morris, Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, Vol. 2, p. 109.
110.
Ibid., pp. 173–174. The closeness of their relationship is documented in Morris’s correspondence. See, for instance, the letters dated 2 September 1888 and 30 December 1888 in Morris, Collected Letters, Vol. 2. For an effort to rectify the ‘Stalinist air-brushing’ of Bax from Morris’s life see Roger Aldous, ‘“Compulsory Baxination”: Morris and the Misogynist’, The Journal of the William Morris Society, 12/1 (1996), pp. 35–40; and for a measured response see Ruth Kinna, ‘Time and Utopia: the gap between Morris and Bax’, The Journal of William Morris Studies, 18/4 (2010), pp. 36–47.
111.
For an account of how Morris dramatised Bax’s ideas in his late Germanic romances see Vaninskaya, William Morris and the Idea of Community, pp. 77–87.
112.
Morris, News from Nowhere, pp. 112–115, 125, 137, 159.
113.
We know, in fact, that this was almost certainly the case, for, during Morris’s tenure as editor of Commonweal, the paper ran a list of ‘Books for Socialists’ that were ‘distinctly helpful to a right understanding of the social problem’, which included Mill’s text. The Commonweal: The Official Journal of the Socialist League, 2/22 (12 Jun. 1886), p. 88. Thanks are due here to Peter Halton for very kindly pointing this reference out to me.
114.
Morris, News from Nowhere, pp. 118–119.
115.
Mill, On Liberty, pp. 225, 226.
116.
Morris, News from Nowhere, pp. 118, 119.
117.
Ibid., p. 196.
118.
Ibid., p. 93.
119.
Ibid.
120.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 223.
121.
Ibid., pp. 223–224.
122.
Ibid., p. 224.
123.
For the logic of question and answer see the brief summary in Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol. 1, pp. 115–116. Skinner argues that ‘we need to understand why a certain proposition has been put forward if we wish to understand the proposition itself. We need to see it not simply as a proposition but as a move in an argument’. ‘Here’, he goes on, ‘I am generalising R. G. Collingwood’s dictum to the effect that the understanding of any proposition requires us to identify the question to which the proposition may be viewed as an answer. I am claiming, that is, that any act of communication will always constitute the taking up of some determinate position in relation to some pre-existing conversation or argument’. Ibid., p. 115.
124.
Ibid.
125.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 276.
126.
Ibid., p. 277.
127.
Ibid.
128.
Ibid., p. 278.
129.
Ibid.
130.
Ibid.
131.
Morris, News from Nowhere, pp. 89–90, 114.
132.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 276.
133.
Ibid., p. 263.
134.
Ibid.
135.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 97.
136.
Mill, On Liberty, pp. 265, 271.
137.
Ibid., p. 263.
138.
Ibid., p. 261.
139.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 93. Here, my argument departs slightly from that laid out by R. Jayne Hildebrand. Morris by all means repudiates the ‘standards of honour and pubic estimation’ built on ‘success in besting our neighbours’, associated with the humanist tradition. But he does not embrace as wholeheartedly as Hildebrand suggests ‘unreflective behaviour’. Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 113. R. Jayne Hildebrand, ‘News from Nowhere and William Morris’s Aesthetics of Unreflectiveness: Pleasurable Habits’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 54/1 (2011), p. 3.
140.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 262.
141.
Ibid.
142.
Ibid.
143.
Ibid.
144.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 112.
145.
Ibid., p. 112.
146.
Ibid., p. 113.
147.
Ibid., p. 63.
148.
Ibid., p. 117.
149.
Mill, Chapters, p. 270. See, for example, William Morris, ‘The Dull Level of Life’ (1884), in Political Writings, pp. 28–31.
150.
William Morris, ‘A Factory as it Might be’ (1884), in Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, Vol. 2, p. 131.
151.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 272. Mill applauded ‘energy’ as evidence of ‘character’. ‘Energy’, he conceded, ‘may be turned to bad uses’. But ‘more good may always be made of an energetic character’, he argued, if only energy ‘is guided by vigorous reason, and strong feelings controlled by a conscientious will’. Ibid., pp. 263, 272. As we shall see, both conditions have been fulfilled in Nowhere.
152.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 222.
153.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 272. Morris insisted that ‘it would be a contradiction in terms’ to describe the condition of ‘rest and happiness’ depicted in Nowhere as ‘stagnation’. William Morris, ‘The Society of the Future’ (1888), in Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, Vol. 2, pp. 467–468. Mill, of course, did not use the term ‘stagnation’, using ‘stationary’ instead. Mill, On Liberty, p. 273.
154.
Ibid., p. 268.
155.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 120.
156.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 269. In his review of Looking Backward, Morris described Bellamy’s ‘government by alumni’—inaccurately—as ‘a kind of aristocracy’. Yet his description of choosing out, or breeding, ‘a class of superior persons’, combined with his use of Mill’s text up to that point and after, suggests that Morris’s utterance was probably provoked by Mill. Morris, ‘Looking Backward’, p. 423.
157.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 267.
158.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 120.
159.
Ibid., 102, 121. These arguments were aimed at the anarchists in the SL. But Morris was no doubt helped in bringing them into focus by engaging with Mill’s warnings about ‘the tyranny of the majority’, one of ‘the evils against which society requires to be on its guard’. Mill, On Liberty, p. 219. For Morris’s engagement with the anarchists see Michael Holzman, ‘Anarchism and Utopia: William Morris’s News from Nowhere’, ELH, 51/3 (1984), pp. 589–603; and Trevor Lloyd, ‘The Politics of William Morris’s “News from Nowhere”’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 9/3 (1977), pp. 273–287.
160.
Ibid., p. 250.
161.
Ibid., p. 252.
162.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 117.
163.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 254.
164.
Ibid., p. 272.
165.
Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 117.
166.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 253. Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 118.
167.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 258.
168.
Ibid., p. 230.
169.
Ibid., p. 229.
170.
Ibid., p. 251.
171.
Matthew Beaumont, ‘News from Nowhere and the Here and Now: Reification and the Representation of the Present in Utopian Fiction’, Victorian Studies, 47/1 (2004), p. 40.
172.
William Morris, News from Nowhere, ed. David Leopold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. xxix. See, also, David Leopold, ‘William Morris, News from Nowhere, and the Function of Utopia’, Journal of William Morris Studies, 22/1 (2016), pp. 18–41.
173.
Beaumont, ‘News from Nowhere’, p. 39. Miguel Abensour, ‘William Morris: The Politics of Romance’, in Max Blechman (ed.), Revolutionary Romanticism (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1999), p. 145.
174.
Marcus Waithe, ‘The Laws of Hospitality: Liberty, Generosity, and the Limits of Dissent in William Morris’s ‘The Tables Turned’ and ‘News from Nowhere’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 36/2 (2006), p. 225.
175.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 245.
176.
Julie Camarda argues, for example, that Guest, indeed, ‘acts as an ideal Millian ‘eccentric’, whose questions and dialogue are never completely suppressed or dismissed, allowing him to illuminate Nowhere’s historicity and inherent flaws’. This interpretation, however, while correct insofar as it identifies the ‘socratic dialectics’ at the core of Morris’s book, is not ultimately convincing. Camarda overstates the extent to which Morris identifies with Guest and ‘Nowhere’s exceptional and dissenting individuals’. As she herself concedes, ‘Morris did not view Nowhere as a dystopia’. Julie Camarda, ‘Liberal Possibilities in a Communist Utopia: Minority Voices and Historical Consciousness in Morris’s News from Nowhere’, Nineteenth Century Contexts, 37/4 (2015), pp. 303, 310, 307.
177.
Morris, News from Nowhere, pp. 176, 174.
178.
Ibid., p. 176.
179.
Shaw, ‘Morris as I Knew Him’, p. ix.
180.
Ibid.
181.
See Thompson, William Morris, p. 786.

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Flaherty, S. (2020). ‘Sentimental Socialism’? Morris, Marx, Engels, and Mill. In: Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42339-1_11

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