In 1884, William Morris gave a lecture to the Hampstead Liberal Club with the title of ‘Useful Work Versus Useless Toil’. His remarks were typically damning of what he saw as the crude philistinism of Victorian capitalism with its mass production of fripperies and of what Marxists call the alienation of labour – the psychological and material disconnection between the worker and the product of his work. Morris offered an alternative, utopian vision, in which everyone would have access to fulfilling, productive work suited to their skills and nature and where there would be no idle rich and no boss class stealing the value of the labour of the working classes. In other lectures and in his writings he lamented the decline of the individual craftsman caused by the industrial revolution.
There is an undeniable charm to Morris’s worldview and an accompanying temptation to be rather sniffy at commodifying his artwork
One can only imagine, then, what this embodiment of high-minded Victorian socialism would make of a mass-produced football shirt bearing a floral pattern produced by one of his partners, J.H. Dearle. Walthamstow FC, a semi-professional football club based in the north-east London suburb where Morris spent his teenage years, commissioned the shirts from a local graphic artist. The great man’s views on football itself have not, as far as I am aware, been recorded by posterity. All the same, as a bohemian aesthete with a fondness for poetry and Icelandic mythology, it would not be enormously surprising to find he wasn’t an assiduous follower of the game.
Mass production was one of Morris’s great bugbears. Like other romantic-minded artists and writers, including his older contemporary Ruskin, he reacted viscerally against the relentless growth of industry and big cities in his time – London’s population increased sixfold in the 19th century – and the disappearance of cottage industries. Like the pre-Raphaelite painters, he sought inspiration in a semi-imagined past, of guilds, fine arts and skilled craftsmen whose work bore the stamp of their individuality. His later turn to socialism was inseparable from a profound dissatisfaction with capitalism’s perceived hostility to finesse, skill and personal fulfilment.
There is an undeniable charm to Morris’s worldview and an accompanying temptation to be rather sniffy at commodifying his artwork and slapping it on a shirt with a retail price north of £50 (the printing was at least done in London rather than a south Asian sweatshop). All the same, some further reflection on the football shirt matter does expose some of the limitations of the Morris-Ruskin worldview.
Fundamentally, the shirts are attractive. However much we may wince, the designs that Morris and Co. produced are of enduring worth and loveliness and their existence makes the world a slightly better-looking place. And this in itself points to a significant benefit of the industrial revolution. Morris popularised the ethos that ‘you should have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’ and yet it is the mass factory production he found so intolerable that has enabled working people to have beautiful and useful things in their homes. I have a mass-produced calendar in my kitchen featuring prints by Morris and his collaborators. Millions of other people have similar items bearing the work of thousands of different artists. Many have in their homes first-rate prints of some of the most beautiful paintings ever created, available for the equivalent of a few hours’ wages. No doubt the people who create those prints and calendars do not feel a strong and enduring attachment to them as pieces of art but they have nevertheless added to the beauty in the world.
The insistence on quality over quantity raises its own knotty little problems with which Morris and those like him never quite came to terms. It is not quite fair to call Morris an elitist, but there is an undoubted paternalist streak in his views on what kind of things the emerging working class should prefer. Then of course there is the problem that individual craftsmanship is expensive and so is inherently exclusive, whereas the point of large-scale line production is to lower per-unit cost in order to make the product more affordable. The benefits of industrial civilisation – not simply attractive things but labour-saving devices and communications – can only be widely shared through the impersonal but efficient work of the factory. That is a hard truth for romantic nostalgists, among whom I normally count myself, but the way back is closed.
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