William Morris: The Man and The Myth. R Page Arnot 1964
The revolutionary socialist writings or, as we may now call them, the communist writings of William Morris, are to be found chiefly in The Commonweal (1885-90) and other socialist journals. In The Commonweal he poured forth editorial articles, political notes, serial articles (several reprinted afterwards as pamphlets or in book form), dialogues, old stories retold, such as the Revolt of Ghent, short occasional poems, one long serial poem, The Pilgrims of Hope, and serial stories such as A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere.
But anyone who seeks to find Morris’ standpoint on war, on the colonial question, on the monarchy, etc, etc, as revealed in his current comments (the liveliest vehicle of man’s thoughts), will look in vain in the Collected Edition published in 1910-15. For the principle followed in these twenty-four thick quarto volumes was to exclude much that did not appear to the publishers to possess ‘literary merit’. At any rate this was the explanation furnished by the publishers (that they did not wish to publish anything ‘beneath the dignity’ of the poet’s reputation) in a letter to the late Joan Tuckett, who, herself a talented theatrical producer, had asked why Morris’ socialist play was not made available in a reprint. This play, The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened, a Socialist Interlude, was thus quietly dropped out of the canon of Morris’ writings.
The Collected Edition, taking up over a yard of bookshelf, had been edited by his younger daughter, May Morris, who tried in other ways also to keep her father’s memory green, and even to carry on his work as opportunity offered. When it seemed to her, in the postwar year of 1919, that Britain was nearing a revolutionary situation she helped to found the Kelmscott Fellowship, some of whose members, and prominent amongst them JL Mahon, brought out a special number of the old Commonweal. Not content with the incomplete edition, the indomitable [1] May Morris bided her time; and twenty years after, at the centenary wave-crest of her father’s renown, gladly accepted the proffered help of Sir Basil Blackwell. Hence the magnificent pair of supplementary volumes, published by him in 1936.
Apart from what had been reprinted from The Commonweal at the time, or later, the political notes and editorial articles in it by Morris are dismissed by JW Mackail, his chief biographer, with the bookish man’s lofty contempt: ‘There is little to say except that he, no more than other men, escaped the vices of journalism when he took to being a journalist.’
Now when Mackail took to being a biographer there was little to say except that he, no more than other men, escaped the vices of biography. Yet these were not so much positive vices as defects which might have escaped notice to the present day (except perhaps amongst those whose political affiliation would make them treasure Morris’ communist comment on current affairs in the 1880s) but for the fact that a friend of Morris was able to review The Life of William Morris on its appearance in 1899. This was Bernard Shaw, who exactly fifty years later was able to recall that Mackail looked upon Morris’ communism ‘as a deplorable aberration, and even in my presence was unable to quite conceal his opinion of me as Morris’ most undesirable associate. From his point of view Morris took to Socialism as Poe took to drink.’ [2] Similarly in his 1899 review, Shaw showed, while acknowledging the excellence of the book, that Mackail was aloof and unconsciously disdainful of Morris’ activities. For example: ‘Fortunately for himself, Mr Mackail knows little more about this part of Morris’ life than might be gathered by any stranger from the available documents.’
Morris in the book is shown ‘as going through a certain curriculum of lectures and propaganda, like a man who takes up a subject and works his way through it much as a university student does, except in a rather eccentric and ungentlemanly way, and in a perhaps rather shady set’. The biography sometimes ‘treats the street corner exploits on which Morris rightly valued himself with an indulgence which implies that Mr Mackail regards them as slightly vulgar follies... In fact, not being interested himself in this part of his work, he does not make it very interesting to others, and makes Morris’ Socialism produce, on the whole, the effect of a mere aberration.’ On the contrary, as Shaw put it, in 1936, with an insight that had grown greater with the years: ‘Morris’ writings about Socialism, which the most uppish of his friends regarded as a deplorable waste of the time and genius of a great artist, really called up all his mental reserves for the first time.’
Actually, it is in some of these current ‘journalistic’, ‘ephemeral’ comments and notes in The Commonweal that the man comes alive as much as anywhere. One of the best ways to gain a picture of the workers’ struggle in the 1880s, of the doings of the socialists and of Morris’ own revolutionary activities, is to turn over the pages of The Commonweal.
Take the year of 1887 at a venture. Open the first number, published on 1 January, and on the first page the war danger then threatening is dealt with by Morris in these words:
Meanwhile if war really becomes imminent our duties as Socialists are clear enough, and do not differ from those we have to act on ordinarily. To further the spread of international feeling between the workers by all means possible; to point out to our own workmen that foreign competition and rivalry, or commercial war, culminating at last in open war, are necessities of the plundering classes; and that the race and commercial quarrels of these classes only concern us so far as we can use them as opportunities for fostering discontent and revolution; that the interests of the workmen are the same in all countries and they can never be really enemies of each other.
‘Opportunities for fostering discontent and revolution.’ It is twenty years later that the Seventh International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart passes the famous resolution for the prevention of war, with its final clause:
Should war break out, it is their duty [that is, the duty of the workers and their Socialist leaders] to intervene for its speedy ending and with all their powers to use the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the overthrow of capitalist rule.
It is thirty years later that Lenin, fighting stubbornly against all those leaders of the Socialist International who abruptly changed over in a week from being pacifists into becoming warmongers and recruiting sergeants, carries through the international socialist decision, deepens and sharpens the struggle, and thereby hastens effectively and indeed leads the workers in bringing about the ‘overthrow of capitalist rule’. Surely this thirty-year-old thought of William Morris would not have seemed just ‘one of the vices of journalism’ amid the war crises of 1914 onwards.
If, however, anyone would suggest that Morris was simply a pacifist or a Tolstoyan in his attitude, let him turn to the article written to celebrate the men of the Commune of Paris – ‘We honour them’, says Morris, ‘as the foundation stone of the new world that is to be’ – and read how he bids his readers think that it would be ‘well for them to take part in such an armed struggle within Britain’.
‘Remember’, he says in another place, ‘that the body of people who have, for instance, ruined India, starved and gagged Ireland, and tortured Egypt, have capacities in them – some ominous signs of which they have lately shown – for openly playing the tyrant’s game nearer home.’
To linger over the pages of The Commonweal to recover those buried thoughts of the 1880s is tempting: but we may take leave of it with one last citation. When modern socialists hasten to defend the British monarchy; when so many, too, of Morris’ old associates had taken knighthoods from ‘the Fountain of Honour’, it is refreshing to quote Morris’ own attitude on the monarch of the day, who was not to be given the gratification of snubbing her Liberal ministers for nominating Morris Poet Laureate. [3] ‘What a nuisance’, he says, ‘the monarchy and court can be as a centre of hypocrisy and corruption, and the densest form of stupidity.’ The Jubilee of Queen Victoria is for Morris ‘hideous, revolting and vulgar tomfoolery’. ‘One’s indignation’, he writes, ‘swells pretty much to the bursting point.’ The ‘great Queen’, Victoria, for him was a representative of capitalism; and her life was that of ‘a respectable officer, who has always been careful to give the minimum of work for the maximum of pay’. In the very height of the loyalist orgy, today paralleled by the vamped-up excitement of royal weddings and parturitions, Morris dismisses ‘this loathsome subject of the Jubilee’ with the hope that it ‘may deepen the discontent a little... when people wake up as on the morning of a disgraceful orgy’.
When we turn from these least-known writings of Morris to his best-known writings – the serial stories in The Commonweal – it might seem that these, in their wide circulation, would have killed the Morris-myth. Anyone who thinks so does not realise how persistent and all-pervading has been the anti-Marxist propaganda around the name and fame of Morris, does not remember that ‘the lie is a European power’.
Take News from Nowhere: Or an Epoch of Rest, Being some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, which has gone through many reprints and is his best-known work. [4] It was translated into German by Marx’s old friend Liebknecht and was circulating in Russia for years before the revolution. Yet, in the case of this book, the poison ivy of the myth has completely hidden the oak. Almost everyone appears to have read News from Nowhere under the domination of the Morris-myth and have, in consequence, read not what was in the book but what they expected to find there.
The essence of the presentation of the change from the old society to the new in News from Nowhere is through the development of revolutionary class struggle up to the establishment of working-class power. [5] In the tale, the workers at last learn ‘how to combine’ and, with betterment of their conditions ‘forced from the masters’, get so far that there is alarm in the master class, and novel steps have to be taken. In passages of almost uncanny insight Morris tells how a ‘mixed economy’ brought about by the reformists (’the State Socialists’) ended in muddle. Then comes a further development of class struggle, a period of vast unemployment, strikes and demonstrations met by repression and armed force leading to a successful General Strike; after which the counter-revolutionary measures by the most reactionary sections were defeated by the working class, concentrated in militant struggle against the capitalist class. When in the end it reaches the stage of civil war, ‘the greater part, certainly the best part, of the soldiers joined the side of the people’ and the issue was not long in doubt.
Thirty years later it took all the force of Lenin’s genius and profound knowledge of Marxism to restore in a revolutionary epoch the actual teachings of Marx and Engels.
The vindication of this teaching was shown in the victory of the Russian Revolution; the defeat of the wars of intervention and of fascist counter-revolution and the extension of communism in Europe and Asia with the further victories of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 and the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
The fact that these victories have brought such a transformation in the balance of the world situation that the possibility has now arisen in given concrete conditions in given countries for a peaceful transition to socialism, is not a refutation of these teachings of Marx and Lenin, or of the picture presented by Morris, but rather a vindication of their triumphant outcome. [6]
The vulgarity of the Morris-myth appears particularly in its treatment of Morris, who had written these romances, as thereby belonging to the school of Utopian Socialism – which, as a Marxist, he so explicitly and strongly condemned. See especially his painstaking analysis of the chief Utopian Socialists in Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome. One chapter of it (’the Utopists: Owen, Saint Simon and Fourier’) deals with the school of thinkers who preceded the birth of ‘modern scientific or revolutionary Socialism’ and says:
These men thought it possible to regenerate Society by laying before it its shortcomings, follies and injustice, and by teaching through precept and example certain schemes of reconstruction built up from the aspirations and insight of the teachers themselves. They had not learned to recognise the sequence of events that forces social changes on mankind whether they are conscious of its force or not... They hoped to convert people to Socialism, to accepting it consciously and formally, by showing them the contrast between the confusion and misery of civilisation, and the order and happiness of the world which they foresaw. From the elaborate and detailed schemes of future Society which they built up they have been called the Utopists.
Then, of the various communities which owed their origin to Utopian Socialism, it is said clearly and bluntly that:
Their conditions of life have no claim to the title of Communism, which most unluckily has often been applied to them. Communism can never be realised till the present system of society has been destroyed by the workers taking hold of the political power. When that happens, it will mean that Communism is on the point of absorbing and transmuting civilisation all the world over.
In the late 1880s Edward Bellamy, a citizen of Boston, Massachusetts, wrote Looking Backward (that is, from the year AD2000) and the book ran into several editions. Looking Backward described a socialist society which had developed without class struggle out of the growth of bigger and bigger monopolies until there was only one monopoly – which would include the whole people. Morris, who could not abide this ‘cockneyfied paradise’, made a kindly enough but extremely searching criticism of the book in The Commonweal in June 1889, saying:
The only ideal of life which such a man can see is that of the industrious professional middle-class men of today purified from their crime of complicity with the monopolist class, and become independent instead of being, as they now are, parasitical.
Once Morris had published his review of the Bostonian’s Utopia, he had, like all critics, set himself a challenge. This challenge he met magnificently six months later when he began to publish News from Nowhere as his ‘chapters from a Utopian romance’, showing how the thing should be done and laying stress not on machinery but on the relations of man to man.
Morris set out in News from Nowhere to write a Utopian romance about a communist society, about what Marx called the ‘higher phase’ of communism. A romance is not to be judged like a treatise, and clearly some of the matters in News from Nowhere are set down by Morris just as they came to his mind. Yet much in it answers to the indications given by Marx in his notes on the ‘Gotha Programme’. [7] It even anticipated some of the features already beginning to show themselves in embryo as soon as the First Five-Year Plan in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had laid the material basis for socialism.
Those who failed to see the insistence upon the proletarian class struggle as a central feature of News from Nowhere also blamed Morris, because, unlike Anatole France, in his White Stone, he did not draw a picture of the marvellous machinery of the future society. But since it is precisely the same type of people who omitted to note, in the case of Anatole France, the insistence on the proletarian dictatorship as a preliminary to his future society – and this in a book written ten years before the Russian Revolution – their views of Morris can have but little value. Supposing Morris had made his book hum with machines and complicated metal devices, what would have happened? Such machines, imagined before the age of X-rays or radio-activity, of automobiles or flying machines, of wireless waves or television, would have been not the machines of a communist society, but of a decade, or at most, of two decades, ahead of 1890. Morris did not care to display the wooden imagination of an HG Wells in his Anticipations, which would have made his book take on the peculiarly ephemeral quality of Wells’ early twentieth-century writings. Thus Morris, while missing the local popularity of the man who can tell what the parson is going to have for dinner by virtue of having peeped over the vicarage wall and seen the cook plucking the mint, did work of a more lasting value. What Morris says is that the productive forces have enormously developed in communist society. ‘The great change in the use of mechanical force’ which he mentions was the basis of his conception of work ceasing to be useless toil and becoming a healthy need like play. As for the new power and the actual machines, he says simply that they were beyond his comprehension or capacity to explain.
For Morris was not concerned simply with the improved and novel machinery which he assumed as the basis of heavy industry and transportation, but with the relations of men in the process of production. Given these developed productive powers, his business was to imagine a world with no exploitation of man by man, with no birthmarks of capitalism, or – to give it a local habitation and a name – to picture the lower and upper reaches of the Thames as they would be in the higher phase of communism.
Morris goes on to make one assumption, which is unlikely enough, namely, that after the material basis of communism is laid there comes to mankind an epoch of rest wherein men express their joy in labour largely through handicraft. Nevertheless, this assumption of a temporary epoch of rest before the advance of mankind to further heights of communist development is an essential part of Morris’ picture. Once this assumption was made, what else was to be expected but that Morris would hark back to the London as it once was, where ‘Geoffrey Chaucer’s pen moves over bills of lading’, to get some concrete idea of what it again might be. So the stones of his buildings seem hewn out of the masonry of the Middle Ages, and the picture recalls the opening lines of his Earthly Paradise:
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small and white and clean
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.
There is a prevalent objection to the absorption of Morris in the Middle Ages, partly due to the myth-mongers, and also in part due to the lack of understanding of Utopias and how they are made and imagined. After the Renaissance Utopias of Sir Thomas More and Rabelais, the first great outburst of Utopian thoughts and imagination was in the writings of the French revolutionaries, who imagined ‘justice’, ‘equality’ and all other ‘republican virtues’ to be just round the corner. But when they wanted symbols of their dreams they evoked the ancient republics of Rome and Sparta, the toga and the Phrygian cap. Utopians all look back to a golden age and then project it into the future.
If the ancient world of the slave-holders may be used in a transfigured form by other writers, then William Morris may evoke John Ball instead of Spartacus, or Chaucer’s London instead of Lacedaemon. So presently, in this romance, some of the atmosphere of the transfigured Middle Ages is built up as the antithesis to the atmosphere of London seventy years ago. But this atmosphere, this fragrance of the Garden of England wherein this communist dialogue is held, so overpoweringly assails the senses already drugged by the pervading myth that, seemingly, many who wander there hear the News from Nowhere but do not hearken to it; remember the fragrance of the garden, but nothing of the men who dwell therein. It is as though readers of the Dialogues of Plato were to remember only their setting – the shady plane tree beyond the banks of the Cephisos and Socrates paddling his feet in the burn – but forget what the Dialogue was about.
We, who can look back over the developing years since Morris wrote, can see with what insight he beheld the class struggle in Europe. Had he lived another ten years he would have seen many features of his chapter ‘How the Change Came’ enacted in the year of 1905 in Russia, from the January massacre in St Petersburg, through the mutinies of the armed forces and the General Strike to the creation of Soviets ('Workers’ Committees’, Morris called them), the formation of the Black Hundreds (the ‘Friends of Order’, Morris called them), and finally the armed rising.
Again, the growth of fascist gangs in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s is evidence of the poet’s foresight; in News from Nowhere old Hammond in AD2112 tells the story of what happened:
A great part of the upper and middle classes were determined to set on foot a counter-revolution; for the Communism which now loomed ahead seemed quite unendurable to them. Bands of young men, like the marauders in the great strike of whom I told you just now, armed themselves and drilled, and began on any opportunity or pretence to skirmish with the people in the streets. The Government neither helped them nor put them down, but stood by, hoping that something might come of it. These ‘Friends of Order’, as they were called, had some successes at first, and grew bolder.
A sort of irregular war was carried on with varied success all over the country; and at last the Government, which at first pretended to ignore the struggle, or treat it as mere rioting, definitely declared for ‘the Friends of Order’. [8]
It can be seen with what insight Morris could pierce the veil of the future, with what skill he was able to ‘state the case’ for communism and also to show how the struggle of the working class was the only means to lead the whole people to that final aim. In different circumstances, but still in the same country, The British Road to Socialism claims to show to a later generation not only the way forward but the aim worked out in detail.
Britain is a country where the older political parties hark back many a generation for their political progenitors, the Tories to Burke and Bolingbroke, the Liberals to Cromwell and Charles James Fox. It is not so with the younger parties. The Labour Party occasionally goes out of its way to claim Marx and Engels (and more often disclaims them) while Morris (usually in the trappings of the Menshevik-myth) is now and again called upon for sentences or lines to garnish a platform oration: but no more than that. The Communist Party, on the other hand, while insistently claiming Marx and Engels as guides to action (as do also eighty other Communist parties), makes a special claim of affiliation to William Morris. In a London conference held in May 1948, ‘under the auspices of the National Cultural Committee of the Communist Party’, this affiliation was stressed by Professor George Thomson (speaking on ‘Our National Cultural Heritage’) who was followed by architects and painters, authors like Jack Lindsay and Andrew Rothstein, and others, nearly all of whom (apart from JD Bernal, FRS, on ‘Britain’s Heritage of Science’) followed on the same subject until the historian AL Morton could say:
William Morris, whose name has so rightly run through our conference like a red thread, taught us one thing above all: that it is not work which is the curse, but servile, joyless work in which the man becomes a hand.
A Dream of John Ball has also suffered from the myth-makers. It is highly praised as a dream of beauty, as a vessel of wonderful thoughts on mankind and its destiny, as a work of artistic perfection; and amid these generalities of praise for its form the revolutionary content is forgotten.
Certainly it is a wonderful piece of work. The revolutionary socialist falls asleep and dreams; and in his dream awakens on a highway in Kent in the year of the Peasants’ Revolt (for in 1381 the peasants overthrew their lords, came to London, captured it and executed the Archbishop of Canterbury). Then he hears an agitator of the time, John Ball, just released by the rebels from the Archbishop’s prison, stand up and exhort the armed peasants in words that have the double quality of heartening the workers in their struggle today, as well as of summoning to life the struggle of the oppressed five centuries and more agone:
Forsooth, in the belly of every rich man dwelleth a devil of hell, and when the man would give his goods to the poor, the devil within him gainsayeth it, and saith, ‘Wilt thou then be of the poor, and suffer cold and hunger and mocking as they suffer, then give thou thy goods to them, and keep them not.’ And when he would be compassionate, again saith the devil to him, ‘If thou heed these losels and turn on them a face like to their faces, and deem of them as men, then shall they scorn thee, and evil shall come of it, and even one day they shall fall on thee to slay thee when they have learned that thou art but as they be.’
And how shall it be then when these are gone? What else shall ye lack when ye lack masters? Ye shall not lack for the fields ye have tilled, nor the houses ye have built, nor the cloth ye have woven; all these shall be yours, and whatso ye will of all that the earth beareth; then shall no man mow the deep grass for another, while his own kine lack cow-meat; and he that soweth shall reap, and the reaper shall eat in fellowship the harvest that in fellowship he hath won; and he that buildeth a house shall dwell in it with those that he biddeth of his free will; and the tithe barn shall garner the wheat for all men to eat of when the seasons are untoward, and the rain-drift hideth the sheaves in August; and all shall be without money and without price.
Some seventy pages long it is, and in this short compass the great opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, ‘the history of all human society, past and present, has been the history of class struggles’, is illustrated from the climax in England of the struggle between baron and serf.
Then a marvellous change takes place in the story, marvellous in that without any clumsiness or any sense of anachronism the dreamer and John Ball begin to talk of the days to come and in this talk five hundred years or more of the future are unrolled. In the language of the greatest simplicity and beauty the beginnings of capitalism, its primitive accumulation, its driving of the peasants from the land and the formation of a class of ‘free labourers’, its enormous heaping up of wares of all kinds, its extraction of surplus value, its development into cyclical crises, its trickery of capitalist democracy and its final defeat by the workers are foretold. Morris had been studying the first volume of Marx’s Capital with some care, had been arguing out all the analyses of capitalist society with his associates in the Socialist League; and those who are curious may trace how the chapter headings of Capital run like themes through this part of the vision, and are ever reinforced by the faith in the struggle of the workers and their ultimate victory. Everything that Morris knew of the Middle Ages – and that was more than any other artist of his time – combines with all his experience of work and struggle and all his learning of Marxism to make one of the great imaginative books of the world, as true to life as the most painstaking scientific research [9] and itself alive.
In all Morris’ writing during his great period, the poet has become the revolutionary fighter whose special skill, energies and insight are devoted to the class struggle. A Dream of John Ball is revolutionary. A King’s Lesson – that marvellous picture of the life of the lord and the serf – is a revolutionary lesson. The poems he wrote were chants for socialists who were then revolutionaries; or, as in his larger unfinished poem, The Pilgrims of Hope, devoted to the life of a proletarian and the struggles of the workers, culminating in the Paris Commune. If Morris, the ‘implacable enemy’ of Victorian civilisation, could be deemed by Bernard Shaw to have been ‘the greatest poet, the greatest prose writer and the greatest craftsman of the reign’, then surely it may be said, not only of his poetry, but of all his manifold genius, of his whole high power of communication in prose and verse, that it had been turned by Morris into a revolutionary weapon.
1. Once at Kelmscott Manor, where the writer was discussing with May Morris its future custody, she referred suddenly to the other William Morris (the motor multi-millionaire, then a supporter of the Blackshirts) and said explosively: ‘This Lord Nuffield, with all his money – not his money, but money that he stole from the workers.’ Clearly, a chip off the old block.
2. Observer, 6 November 1949. Two weeks later in The Observer Sir Sydney Cockerell, who had that year written a preface to a reissue of Mackail’s book, wrote a letter in which he sought to controvert Shaw’s suggestion.
3. Morris, a few years later, on the death of Lord Tennyson, was ‘sounded’ by the Cabinet as to whether he would take the Poet Laureateship if offered. Morris declined.
4. For many years I made it a practice to ask three questions, which were almost invariably answered as follows: Question 1: Have you read News from Nowhere? Answer: Yes, a long time ago. Question 2: What would you say about it? Answer: A beautiful dream of a future society, but quite impossible. Question 3: Do you remember how the change took place to the future society? Answer: No, I can’t say that I do remember.
5. It calls to mind Marx’s letter to Weydemeyer of 5 March 1852, where Marx says ‘the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and ‘this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society’.
6. ‘Today, in a number of capitalist countries the working class, headed by its vanguard, has the opportunity, given a united working class and popular front or other workable forms of agreement and political cooperation between the different parties and public organisation, to unite a majority of the people, win state power without civil war and ensure the transfer of the basic means of production to the hands of the people.’ (Declaration of Eighty-One Communist Parties in 1960)
7. ‘In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of individuals under division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour, from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"’ (Critique of the Gotha Programme)
8. The Fascist Weekly at the time of the Morris Centenary had the impudence to claim him as a forerunner of fascism on the ground that he was ‘imbued with the Viking spirit’. This was ‘canonisation’ with a vengeance!
9. A tribute to ‘William Morris’ unforgettable picture’ (of the dinner in the harvest field) in Part II of The Earthly Paradise was paid in The Medieval Village (1926) by GG Coulton who wrote in 1934 to say: ‘I still think his The Man Born to be King one of the most (if not the most) Chaucerian of narrative poems.’