Footnotes

'WE HAVE RICH MEN AMONGST US BUT THEY ARE ENEMIES OF THE COMMUNITY' – WILLIAM MORRIS ON SOCIALIST IDEALS OF TOWN AND COUNTRY. This draft is for an address posthumously published as 'Town and Country (Portions)', which he delivered on 29 May 1892 at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, at a meeting sponsored by the Hammersmith Socialist Society.

Morris had committed himself to socialism only seven years earlier in what Fiona MacCarthy describes as 'a decisive move out of his class, entailing rifts with many friends, professional opprobrium, and absence from many of the places and activities that Morris depended on and loved' and 'an act of almost insane courage' (ODNB). The present text has been marked up in pencil for publication (possibly by May Morris), with extensive passages marked for omission, a notable victim being the incendiary concluding paragraph:

"Some of you may say this is but an impossible ideal. But that is a mistake it is impossible to a poor community but not to a wealthy one. But are we not a wealthy community? far from it. We have rich men amongst us but they are enemies of the Community, & keep everything from it that they can; and as they are its masters they can keep most things from the Community & make it poor. Working men, as you have often been told make at present by their labour chiefly two kinds of wares, make-shift necessities for the poor, slave-wares in short, and make shift luxuries for the rich. The workers have no customers for genuine useful wares. Change all that by realizing true society, and we shall be wealthy & able to have what we want; and as all sane men desire the beauty of the country & the brisk vivid life of the town, we shall get these to interpenetrate and all will be won." (This desire to reconcile conflicts between "the beauty of the country & the brisk vivid life of the town" echoes of course a principal theme of News from Nowhere, serialised between 1890 and 1891, as well as Ebenezer Howard's garden city movement of later that same decade.)

Another victim of the editorial pencil is Morris's indictment of the London press: "Its intellectuality seems more & more to drift in the direction of newspaper twaddle and scrofulous inquisitiveness into the weakness of those citizens whose good & evil fortune has made them conspicuous. The utterances of its public men are always taken by sensible persons with due deduction made for the shear [sic] lying which they contain. Its newspaper press to pass by other matters in it – does anybody ever see any statement in a newspaper relative to an art or occupation which he understands which is not so stuffed with ignorance and inaccuracy as to be wholly misleading and useless?... Need I go on with the indictment? What should come of a centre of intelligence where the useful people are outcasts from society?"

Among the material that has been left in is Morris's attack on what he describes as "the make-shift stupidity of the epoch", reflecting the centrality to his vision of good craftsmanship allied to concomitant worries that had led to the setting up of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings fifteen years earlier: "I know the Country well: and even for a rich man, a well to do one at least it shares in the make-shift stupidity of the epoch. Amongst all the superabundant beauty of leaf and flower, all the wealth of meadow & acre & hill side, it is stingy O so stingy. In an ordinary way not an hour's work will be spent in taking away an ugly dead tree, in mending a shattered wall, setting a tottering vane straight (even if it be pulling down the roof beam it is fastened to) in short in mending any defacement caused by wind and weather. Not a moments consideration will be given as to whether the sightly material should be used if the unsightly one be a fraction cheaper for the time being... I say this is the ordinary rule: it is true that when there is a rich squire that he does sometimes take some pains in beautifying his cottages, restoring his church, and so forth – with the result in all cases that the village he has so dealt with has become as vulgar as Bayswater".

Provenance
Bookplate of Marion C. Walker.