To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams ed. by Michelle Weinroth, Paul Leduc Browne

Abstract

Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne, eds. To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris's Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's up, 2015. 378 pp. $39.95. The aim of this book is show that William Morris's politics, artistic, and literary endeavours, his understanding and practice of craft design, and his essays on the arts and industry are intimately and, if not always obviously, substantively interrelated. The fractured Morris, the Morris of disconnected passions and projects across his life is a common idea that has been held for a long time and some degree still is, although not among knowledgeable Morris scholars. It has taken specialized digging in many areas bring out and give expression the wholeness that is Morris. E.P. Thompson's magisterial biography, perhaps more than any other work, signaled the need see the integrative nature of Morris's life, personality, and work. To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss falls within this broad characterization of contemporary Morris scholarship. And for this reason the collection of essays is be welcomed. The twelve essays (including an introduction and conclusion) are, with one exception, the work of literary scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Victorian studies. The editors characterize the collection as being pitched the specialized scholar, but also a wider readership Morris is such a large figure across so many disciplines that almost anyone looking into his work will, sooner or later, and usually sooner, feel themselves, in some respects, be part of a wider readership. I imagine that Morris felt this way himself from time time; after all, his painterly talents were modest and did not develop (amusingly perhaps, he could not draw birds and relied on his architect friend Philip Webb for this sort of detail), by his own admission the classical political economy of Marx literally made his head hurt, and he had work hard, and did so successfully, connect with audiences far removed from his own class experience. Even Morris was not an expert in everything that he did. The book sets out make manifest the impulses of Morris's life-long radicalism in the literary and design arts and show their anticipations and reverberations in his later political activities and interventions. In a clear statement the introduction defines the objective of the collection thus: to delineate and define Morris's unorthodox radicalism and, in doing so, uncover the consistency and precocity of his innovative social thought For the most part the essays are faithful this task. Illustrating this approach, for example, Florence Boos's fine opening essay states her intention examine the apparent paradox of Morris's representations of violence, interpret them as sublimated expressions of personal and political conflicts, and argue that his increasingly explicit abhorrence of . …