Reclaiming William Morris: Englishness, Sublimity, and the Rhetoric of Dissent

Jeremy Caple is an assistant professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier
University in Waterloo.

Connecting Kant with Communist Englishness might be considered a
stretch, but Michelle Weinroth’s book does so very successfully. Part
of that connection lies with the attempt on the part of English
Communists to recapture the radical legacy of William Morris from the
celebratory smugness of English Conservatism resulting from the Morris
centenary commemorations of 1934. In a superb analysis of Baldwin’s
inaugural speech, Weinroth argues that Morris “received [his] almost
indelible seal as a repository of artistic genius and English character.
Nationalism and beauty were coalesced in one cultural profile.” Such
appropriation of the corpus of Morris’s work, and in particular the
manner in which his work was subsumed under an insufferable and banal
Englishness, created a dramatic and sustained response from the
Communist left.

Page Arnot, a Communist journalist, replied to Conservative nationalism
in a polemical piece that claimed for Morris a more internationalist and
far more radical perspective. Arnot’s work was continued in the
following decade by Jack Lindsay and subsequently by E.P. Thompson in
the early Cold War period. All these attempts at rewriting the Morris
influence were themselves greatly influenced by the vicissitudes of the
international Communist movement during this period, particularly in
Thompson’s final piece, in which Morris comes full circle by being
claimed as a symbol of Englishness against the threat of Americanization
at the height of the Cold War.

Developing a theory of propaganda derived from a reading of Kant’s
Critique of Judgement, Weinroth stresses the aesthetic character of the
ideology found in both the Conservative and the Communist
representations of Morris. The rationalist dialogue that Marxism claims
for itself, she argues, betrays a substantial commonality with
Conservative rhetoric. In fact, she writes, “like its Conservative
counterpart, Communist propaganda does not persuade cognitively ... for
it is quintessentially a discourse of self-affirmation and inclusion [in
which] cognitive mediation is subordinated ... to the pleasures of
sharing in the warm embrace of community beliefs.” The vehicles used
to develop this theory share assumptions about the nature of Englishness
and the manner in which Morris might be claimed to represent that
particular idea.