Kelmscott House...

Kelmscott House

An armoury of weapons against the weariness of life; such was the metaphor used by William Morris to describe the ideal book. How weary would he feel today, if he could merely glimpse our present society? He who fought for ‘beauty accessible for all’ in a world where art, design, form and content would together embellish and enhance the life of all social classes, what would he say? 

                                      

This great man, born into Victorian England (1834-1896), battled for reform against the social hardship, material poverty and cultural and spiritual impoverishment that arose as dehumanizing externalities from the great industrial and technological advances that marked Queen Victoria’s reign. For him, these wrongs could be largely redressed by the arts in their purest form, created and crafted by human hands to serve the people, far from the enslavement of industrial-scale manufacturing and consumption. 

I love the man standing proud up on the roof to watch the race!

It seems to me that the only thing clutched in a human hand today is some smart device that saps away our attention span and real-life exchanges so that we depend on it for every conceivable form of social validation, stimulation and even self-identity. Any kind of creative process is now readily handed over to some labour and time-saving AI app, freeing us to indulge ourselves in something supposedly more meaningful and worthwhile. But with our curiosity, focus and general interest in the world in front of us in real-time shot to pieces, what is there left that has genuine enduring meaning and actual worth in our lives? 

The Morris & Burne-Jones families - 1874

As for the social aspect of social media, do we truly have better relations today than in the past? Is communication better, even if the means to communicate have undeniably been facilitated beyond expectation? For all that we have gained, I think we have given up far more, imperceptible aspects of normal life that have been lost, and that loss will only become apparent once the ugliness and emptiness have taken a firm grip on so many areas of life these days. 

Edward Burne-Jones & William Morris

Visiting Kelmscott House, Morris’s final home, set by the Thames in the Hammersmith district, is an antidote to all that ugliness around us in the present. Although probably best known for his aesthetic vision and Art & Crafts decorative art – especially the Strawberry Thief motif – Morris was also a writer, poet, printer and socialist and, for his last 18 years, this house was where he pursued and developed this amalgam of interests. 

For Morris, art was the expression of Man’s joy in labour, a devotion of which the worker had been robbed due to the industrial capitalism that drove Victorian England. As the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood before him, Morris was driven by a quasi-religious vision of artistic creation in Medieval times – prior to 16th century Renaissance art. Just how ‘joyful’ the creative process actually was for the average Medieval craftsman is questionable, but it can probably be safely assumed to differ with Morris’s notion!

Nevertheless, the purity of Medievel art with its breathtaking realism and stunning detail rendered in vibrant, bright colours inspired Morris just as it had his Pre-Raphaelite brothers. For Morris, however, this inspiration was more than purely aesthetic, it was social too and it is interesting - and perhaps not entirely surprising - to learn that he had initially wished to join the clergy before devoting himself to art and design and specifically the Arts & Crafts Movement. By the time Morris and his family – wife Jane and their two daughters, Jenny and May – had settled in Kelmscott House, the decorative arts firm Morris & Co was fully established, having taken over from the initial business Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co had set up in 1861 with artists including Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 

Before moving into the Thames-side house, Morris expressed the intention to ‘make it beautiful with a touch of my art’, giving it the name Kelmscott House in honour of Kelmscott Manor House, his idyllic Cotswold retreat which had inspired a number of his famous designs, notably the Strawberry Thief! The interiors were duly transformed in line with Morris’s aesthetic vision, but it was clear that the home was to be more than a mere family residence, decorated to his personal taste.

 Indeed, Kelmscott House would become the place where designs and projects were brought to life through experimentation in craftsmanship and social thought carried out by Morris, his daughters and visitors; artists and social activists alike. The house became the physical expression and catalyst for Morris’s philosophy, to create a world of beauty and fairness ‘By people, for people’. 

His daughter May stated ‘Our home was a workshop of love; where art and life were inseparable’, having grown up in a unique universe, which was both rich and yet strangely pure, compared to stifling Victoriana homes with their predilection for clutter. Jane Morris, former muse and model to the Pre-Raphaelite artists, taught her daughters embroidery following traditional techniques and May proved to be so gifted that she was appointed head of the embroidery department at Morris & Co in 1885, at the age of 23, and herself designed the wallpaper design ‘Honeysuckle’. 

'Honeysuckle'

Prior to his Kelmscott years, Morris attempted to master the technique of hand-knitted carpets inspired by Persian rugs and large-scale tapestries following Medieval tradition and work practices – he even set up a loom in his bedroom! He experimented with natural pigments for the dyeing process with his daughter, May, believing that modern chemicals could not match the quality and beauty that emanated from the integrity of ‘honest’ materials and ancestral methods. 

The production facilities of the William Morris company moved to Merton Abbey in 1881 in order to follow through this practice of time-trusted techniques that had fallen by the wayside in the pursuit of speed efficiency and cost-effectiveness. In the former monastic grounds, the water flowing from the River Wandle was used to carry out hand block-printing and weaving in the same manner as in previous centuries, contrary to the modern practices employed by the fellow textile printing company, Liberty.

Steps up to the back garden at Kelmscott

With the same intense devotion, Morris turned to his other great interest during his Kelmscott House years; book-printing. With a reverence for books that were ‘a well of life’ and a ‘mirror of the soul’, Morris stated that a library was a creative well-spring, and he hoped to live in a society ‘with a public library on each street corner’. 

Drawers of movable type sorts

Certainly the library in the Morris household was a revered place of beauty and reflection, a sanctuary that held his precious collection of works that embodied his creative vision; Medieval manuscripts, historical tomes, a 15th century illuminated Book of Hours, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales…

In 1891, Morris set up his own private press in the family home with three Albion machines – the Kelmscott Press – in order to create the ‘ideal book’ that would reject the contemporary industrial process and produce, in favour of the beauty of medieval-inspired design, poetic and historical content partly influenced by Icelandic sagas and mythology, original typefaces and wood-block illustrations. I loved the fact that the very press itself had large squat paws on the base of its strong legs, showing again that there could be beauty in design and utility. 

What would Morris make of the extensive closure of public libraries across the UK, that has been taking place over the last decades due to financial pressure and budget prioritization? The creation and funding of free libraries for all, established by the successive Public Libraries Acts from the mid-19th century is slowly being over-turned and these grand civic buildings are now turned over to other activities or sold on for lucrative property development. Meanwhile, the book itself has suffered an insidious decline as the physical text is often perceived as too time-consuming, cumbersome and slow-to-deliver in a world that demands stimulation and rewards at a click, a swipe and a like. 

A wearisome world indeed…. And while we often feel enslaved to our jobs, surely we have already become slaves to our screens and apps, becoming dumber as they become ever smarter? What would Morris have to say to Elon Musk, I wonder?