Drawing on under-studied periodicals and archives, this book uncovers a largely forgotten literary-political context. It looks at the extensive debate within the radical press over how to situate radical values within an evolving media ecology, debates that engaged some of the most famous writers of the era (William Morris and George Bernard Shaw), a host of lesser-known figures (theosophical socialist and birth control reformer Annie Besant, gay rights pioneer Edward Carpenter, and proto-modernist editor Alfred Orage), and countless anonymous others.
Drawing on under-studied periodicals and archives, this book uncovers a largely forgotten literary-political context. It looks at the extensive debate within the radical press over how to situate radical values within an evolving media ecology, debates that engaged some of the most famous writers of the era (William Morris and George Bernard Shaw), a host of lesser-known figures (theosophical socialist and birth control reformer Annie Besant, gay rights pioneer Edward Carpenter, and proto-modernist editor Alfred Orage), and countless anonymous others.
Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture
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Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture
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Overview
Drawing on under-studied periodicals and archives, this book uncovers a largely forgotten literary-political context. It looks at the extensive debate within the radical press over how to situate radical values within an evolving media ecology, debates that engaged some of the most famous writers of the era (William Morris and George Bernard Shaw), a host of lesser-known figures (theosophical socialist and birth control reformer Annie Besant, gay rights pioneer Edward Carpenter, and proto-modernist editor Alfred Orage), and countless anonymous others.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804784085 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/09/2013 |
| Pages: | 392 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Slow Print
Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print CultureBy Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8408-5
Chapter One
No News Is Good News William Morris's Utopian Print
The 7 January 1893 issue of the Workman's Times, a socialist newspaper aimed at working-class trade unionists, features an illustration of a manual artisan in an apron who has carved in stone: "Life without industry is guilt. Industry without art is brutality" (Figure 3). The artist-worker, depicted with a mallet and chisel, is burly yet sensitive, muscular yet mustached, with downcast eyes and a jaunty cap. A second illustration depicts another artist-worker—similarly brawny but now bearded and wielding a sledgehammer—standing beneath a banner that reads, "By hammer and hand all arts do stand" (Figure 4). The illustrations and their accompanying sentiments are clearly indebted to a Ruskinian ideal of manual labor as a form of artistic expression and a manifestation of the worker's innate dignity, yet they also refer to Walter Pater in their underlying perception of art as the pinnacle of human experience and individual pleasure. Such a philosophy of "socialist aestheticism" was everywhere apparent in radical papers aimed at working-class audiences. In the 2 May 1891 issue of Workers' Cry, J. Runciman argued in "Art for the Workers" that, although some may scoff "at the notion of Art of any sort for the workers, ... it seems to me that the cry for leisure is an expression of the longing for a life of fuller and intenser enjoyments—that is to say, of enjoyments such as can only be found in Art, and will ultimately be found there by all" (13). This idea was also expressed in "Art and the Mob" from the 4 October 1884 issue of Justice: "With labour free, when every man has to do his share of the world's work, and there is leisure for all, then and then only will the cultivation of art be within the reach of all, when art is followed for its own sake and not for gain" (1). The idiom of art for its own sake summons the project of aestheticism, but in service of democratizing and universalizing art.
The Workman's Times, Workers' Cry, and Justice all target a radical working-class audience and express a vision of art—as the source of purest pleasure, as an object of highest value for its own sake—clearly indebted to Pater and the aesthetic movement. But the socialist aestheticism of the radical press derived from William Morris, not Pater, and the passage of such ideas into working-class-oriented papers is a historical rejoinder to the prevailing notion of fin de siècle aestheticism as politically disengaged. Morris has long posed definitional difficulties for theorists of fin de siècle aestheticism. As a Pre-Raphaelite, he was considered an aesthete—"the idle singer of an empty day"—but the revolutionary aesthetics of his later career are often taken as being opposed to aestheticism. Oscar Wilde's articulation of "The House Beautiful" and "The Decorative Arts" on his 1880s lecture tour of America was deeply influenced by Morris's Arts and Crafts ethos, and in this sense Morris was the font of a popular 1880s aestheticism of which Wilde was emblematic. But beginning in the early 1880s, Morris was a revolutionary socialist who spent the last thirteen years of his life formulating what Caroline Arscott has called "the first English-language attempt to produce a Marxist theory of art" ("William Morris" 9). I would suggest that recognizing the interconnections between Morris's aestheticism and his revolutionary socialism is crucial to understanding Morris's print politics.
Morris's revolutionary response to mass print culture is discernible in his two major experiments in what I call slow print: the Commonweal newspaper and the Kelmscott Press. Socialist aestheticism, as formulated by Morris in these print projects, is a utopian aestheticism, understood to be incomplete until after the revolution. The difference between a conventional aestheticism—"art for art's sake," art as a system of value, art as preeminent human experience—and Morris's socialist aestheticism is chiefly a matter of timing: All these things will be true of art after the revolution. Until that time, real art is impossible, but there are things that art can do to hasten the revolution. Realism is not one of these things. Instead, Morris draws on the forms and sensibilities of aestheticism to print literature that allows readers to imagine what art might be like in the socialist future to come. Morris's print ventures in the 1880s and 1890s expose and critique the political effects of mass print culture, but they also establish print literature as a utopian space in which one can imagine the possibility of a future detached from present conditions.
Morris, Print, and Utopia
Morris's print work reveals a political resonance to aestheticism's insistence on a schism between art and social reality: that this schism is what allows art to think outside the capitalist "march of progress." Writing and printing in the 1880s and 1890s, Morris confronts the failure of liberal notions of print as an agent of progress and tries to reinvent print at the level of production. This inward recoil has been viewed by many as evidence of naiveté or hypocrisy on Morris's part, because it resulted in print products with a limited audience, such as the Commonweal and Kelmscott editions. At the same time, however, the move renders print literature as a utopian space in which to imagine postrevolutionary art and politics.
Fredric Jameson's book on Utopia, Archaeologies of the Future, suggests how a text can at once be seemingly freestanding from the social world as such and yet still be politically revolutionary. Beginning with the long-standing problem of how "works that posit the end of history can offer any usable historical impulses" (Archaeologies xiv), Jameson argues that the creation of utopian space involves "the momentary formation of a kind of eddy or self-contained backwater within ... seemingly irresistible forward momentum" (15). This "pocket of stasis within the ferment and rushing forces of social change may be thought of as a kind of enclave within which Utopian fantasy can operate" (15). This fantasy work is politically productive, because it "allows the imagination to overleap the moment of revolution itself and posit a radically different 'post-revolutionary' society" (16). Paradoxically, this aligns utopianism with revolutionary rather than reformist thought: "One cannot ... change individual features of current reality. A reform which singles out ... this or that flaw or error in the system ... quickly discovers that any given feature entertains a multitude of unexpected yet constitutive links with all the other features in the system" (39). Thus "the modification of reality must be absolute and totalizing: and this impulsion of the Utopian text is at one with a revolutionary and systemic concept of change rather than a reformist one."
It is no revelation to say that Morris was a utopian thinker. His 1890 novel News from Nowhere is a classic of the genre, and many of his political essays and lectures have a utopian flavor, focusing on what life would be like after the revolution. But Morris's theory of print literature was itself utopian, productive of a kind of utopian space on the page. Morris thought that print in his day was politically incapacitated by capitalism, putting writers like himself at an impasse; this is precisely the sort of condition, according to Jameson, under which utopianism thrives, moments when change seems impracticable and the status quo entrenched. At such moments "the very principle of the radical break as such, its possibility ... is reinforced by the Utopian form.... The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system" (Archaeologies 231–32). Morris's Commonweal and Kelmscott Press enact the utopian strategy that Jameson calls disruption: The print pages become self-contained, enclosed spaces irrevocably separated from present-day reality. Locating this utopianism within Morris's literary practice allows us to see how he used medium and production to articulate a revolutionary rather than a progressive politics of print.
Morris's print interventions emerged at a moment of seemingly inevitable, invulnerable capitalist print progress—progress toward a bigger, faster, more commercial, and more profitable print marketplace. As discussed in the Introduction, early nineteenth-century debates about print politics tended to polarize into two positions: a radical position that viewed an abundance of print as necessarily democratic and progressive, and a conservative position in which abundant print was an anarchic and dangerous force. However, the nature of this debate changed over the course of the Victorian era, as mass print became aligned with capitalist, not just democratic, ideology. With the surge in cheap print and periodicals that followed the dissolution of the stamp tax, the newspaper tax, and the paper duty, the years between 1860 and 1890 fomented a genuine mass reading public. By the end of the century left-wing reformers like Morris were less inclined to see plentiful print in and of itself as a progressive social force and more inclined to see it as an effect of unrestrained capitalism.
Morris at times wondered whether print itself was part of the problem, that is, whether a reproducible medium tied to industrial modernity could be expected to produce anything but apologies for capitalism. In an unpublished essay titled "Some Thoughts on the Ornamented Manuscripts of the Middle Ages," written around 1892, Morris reflects on "the present age of superabundance of books" and argues that "the utilitarian production of makeshifts, which is the especial curse of modern times, has swept away the book producer in its current" (1). He contrasts this condition of modern print with bookmaking in the Middle Ages, when a book was "a palpable work of art, a comely body fit for the habitation of the dead man who was speaking to them: the craftsman, scribe, limner, printer, who had produced it had worked on it directly as an artist, not turned it out as the machine of a tradesman" (2). Morris's suspicion of print reproducibility prefigures Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who often use images and metaphors associated with printing to express the homogeny and uniformity of the culture industry—for example, "Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything" (Horkheimer and Adorno 120)—as though the mechanism of removable type determines the conditions of its cultural realization. Morris also prefigures the conclusions of critics such as Walter Ong, who would argue that the advent of print "created a new sense of the private ownership of words.... Typography had made the word into a commodity. The old communal world had split up into privately claimed freeholdings" (131).
Morris's horror at the "superabundance" of books echoes Marx and Engels's disgust at the "epidemic of overproduction" that characterizes capitalist modernity (Communist Manifesto 163), the waste and superfluity that coexist with want and privation. Yet books proved to be a problematic commodity for such analysis. Progressive reformers had long presumed that widespread desire for books reflected a natural hunger for knowledge rather than a created need or, as Marx and Engels put it, a "new want" summoned forth by capitalism (162). Advocates of democracy and classlessness had argued that literacy and widespread reading materials went hand in hand with social and economic equality, forming the very basis of an equitable society. As the Democrat, a radical but not socialist journal, argued in 1887, "In past days literature has been for the cultured view, and in the eyes of the Quarterly Reviewer and men of that ilk, such is the ideal state of affairs. The people, forsooth, are to wallow in ignorance and darkness lest haply they should offend the muses by their vulgar gaze" (1 September 1887: 310). Under such conditions, how could a socialist object to the overproduction of print?
Morris was often caught on the horns of this dilemma. In an 1891 interview with the Pall Mall Gazette, his hostility toward small type prompted the interviewer to ask, "But, Mr. Morris, is it not better to give [the millions] books with small type, which they can buy cheap, than to prevent them from reading at all, which would be the case if there were no small type and consequent cheap editions?" (Morris, "Poet as Printer" 92). In many ways Morris's ambivalent relationship with print and mass print culture reflected his growing sense that books and periodicals were not passive vessels of ideas, as progressive campaigners preceding him had conceived of them, but media commodities subject to the logic of their mediation. For Morris print was not a transparent delivery system for knowledge and information, and he questioned whether the mass print marketplace had not undermined the political gains of widespread print. Indeed, remarkably for someone so famed as a printer, Morris often spoke disparagingly of print. He claimed in an 1895 lecture that when movable type was first invented, it did not serve a fundamentally different cultural role than writing: "The difference between the printed book and the written one was very little. ... The results of printing, although considerable, were nothing like so considerable as people tried to make out" ("Early Illustration" 20). Morris believed that print as a medium was historically synthesized with capitalism. In an 1895 interview he said that print's "history, as a whole, has practically coincided with the growth of the commercial system, the requirements of which have been fatal, so far as beauty is concerned, to anything which has come within its scope" ("Mr. William Morris" 102). The implicit question here is whether the medium itself is indelibly marked by the economic or political structures that facilitate the circulation and production of print.
Morris's response to this chicken-or-egg scenario was not to abandon print altogether but to turn inward, in the manner of aestheticism, and reform print at the level of production with two "backwaters" of utopian print: the socialist newspaper Commonweal in the 1880s and the Kelmscott Press in the 1890s. In these venues and in his novels News from Nowhere and A Dream of John Ball, both of which were published in Commonweal and Kelmscott editions, Morris's antiprint sentiment became productive of new print and literary forms. These print works construct themselves as utopian spaces outside the "march of progress" narrative that had accrued to print and to capitalism and pointedly remove themselves from the general flow of mainstream print. The Commonweal was printed cheaply in large quantities, whereas the Kelmscott books were printed in limited numbers of handmade materials and were quite expensive—reaching the exorbitant price of £20 for the famous Kelmscott Chaucer. Yet both ventures appeal to small, specialized audiences, and both are characterized by a utopian impulse to create whole cloth a new print reality, outside the existing culture of print.
The Commonweal
One of Morris's duties as editor of the Commonweal, the official journal of the Socialist League, was to write the weekly "Notes on News" leader for the newspaper's front page. On 17 March 1888 Morris devoted this column to the recent death of Wilhelm I, emperor of Germany, and titled the week's segment "Dead at Last." The piece is typical of the radical press in that its upshot is a biting critique of the "bourgeois press," and its general effect is to separate the Commonweal and other socialist newspapers into an oppositional, alternative print sphere.
The flood of cant and servility which has been poured out by the bourgeois press during the last few days, because [of] the long-expected death of a tyrant ... disgusts one so much that at first one is tempted to keep silence in contempt for such degraded nonsense.... Yet though silence may be best in the abstract it may be misunderstood at a time when even democratic papers ... profess to share more or less in the sham sentiment of the day which weeps strange tears indeed over [his] death-bed.... As a Socialist print, the Commonweal is an outlaw from the press, and its poverty and desolate freedom compels it to speech, though but of a few words. (81)
Rather than directing his anger at the antisocialist policies of the emperor himself, Morris addresses the emperor's idealized afterlife in the sycophantic mainstream press, including ordinary "democratic" papers such as the Daily News. The Commonweal, in contrast, is "outlaw" from the capitalist press, cut off in a space of "desolate freedom." The piece demonstrates Morris's pervasive conception of socialist print as a separate sphere apart from mainstream print.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Slow Print by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 No News Is Good News: William Morris's Utopian Print 32
Chapter 2 The Black and White Veil: Shaw, Mass Print Culture, and the Antinovel Turn 82
Chapter 3 Living Language: Print Drama, Live Drama, and the Socialist Theatrical Turn 122
Chapter 4 Measured Revolution: Poetry and the Late Victorian Radical Press 167
Chapter 5 Enlightenment Beyond Reason: Theosophical Socialism and Radical Print Culture 221
Chapter 6 Free Love, Free Print: Sex Radicalism, Censorship, and the Biopolitical Turn 257
Conclusion 299
Notes 307
Works Cited 341
Index 359