“Using the Internet as a Morrisian Socialist Tool”
Thomas J. Tobin
The William Morris Society in the United States

[SLIDE 1: TITLE SLIDE]

[AUDIO 1: TOM PHOTOGRAPH] Hello, my name is Tom Tobin, and I am the webmaster for the William Morris Society. I’d like to talk to you today about how the Morris Society is “Using the Internet as a Morrisian Socialist Tool.”

[AUDIO 1a: TITLE CARD] Since its inception, the William Morris Society web site has served one of the chief aims of the Morris Society, namely, to harness new technologies in service of the principles of beauty, utility, and openness. It may at first seem strange to pair Morris’s passions for medievalism, handicraft, and ecology with a medium often thought of as futuristic, technological, and artificial; however, Morris’s own practices and works reveal several uses of new media to further Socialist aims. My talk today will focus on the ways in which the Morris Society web site echoes and extends Morris’s image, ideas, and practices for a global audience.

[SLIDE 2: MORRIS & TECHNOLOGY]

[AUDIO 2] Although William Morris lamented the loss of craftsmanship inherent in the mechanization of labor, he was not always averse to using new methods.  Three examples may help us to contextualize Morris’s relationship to technological developments.

[SLIDE 2a: FONT MICROPHOTOGRAPH]

[AUDIO 2a] When Emery Walker delivered a series of lectures in 1888 on the structure of medieval and Renaissance font design, he used photography to create a series of magic-lantern slides that enlarged the letter-forms so that they could better be studied. Morris later asked Walker to help create microphotograph templates during the design of the type for the Kelmscott Press.

[SLIDE 2b: BARGE]

[AUDIO 2b] In News from Nowhere, Morris envisions a future world in which much of the industrialization of England has been allowed to subside. Society is arranged on a socialist plan, with great value placed on handwork and artisan labor, but the use of technology is not wholly abandoned. Morris quietly mentions the use of “force barges,” which we might recognize even today as the powered craft that move heavy loads on our waterways. 

[SLIDE 2c: COMMONWEAL]

[AUDIO 2c] We often think of Morris painstakingly hand-crafting books at the Kelmscott Press, one at a time, in very limited numbers. However, Morris edited the Commonweal, mass-printed on modern equipment, in order to reach out to as wide an audience as possible. Roger Coleman has argued that “Morris was no Luddite, and no opponent of technology and design” (29). Morris’s ideals were founded on beauty, quality, and craft, but they also included utility and appropriateness in the process of making.

[SLIDE 3: THE EARLY MORRIS SOCIETY]

[AUDIO 3]  The William Morris Society was founded in 1955 in order to keep alive Morrisian ideas about art, design, craft, language, bookmaking, ecology, and socialism. Since it was—and is—possible to be an admirer of so many different William Morrises, so to speak, the Society acted as a single point of contact for Morris enthusiasts of several different stripes.

[SLIDE 3a: S. C. COCKERELL QUOTATION]

[AUDIO 3a] Sidney Cockerell, in writing about the aims of the early Society, said in 1955 that
The Society provides a meeting place for the large number of people who believe that Morris’ work and ideals are of value to the world of today. . . . It enables those interested in Morris to become known to one another and fosters the exchange of ideas about him.
Many of the early projects of the Society—including exhibitions, collections of essays, and visits to sites of Morrisian interest—were undertaken in just such a spirit of fostering dialogue about the many sides of Morris.

[SLIDE 4: DEVELOPING THE MORRIS SOCIETY WEB SITE]

[AUDIO 4] Catherine Moody, in a 1962 essay on the aims of the Society, implores her colleagues, “As the direct personal influence of his life grows fainter and those who knew Morris become fewer, it behoves us to be alert and make certain that all he rediscovered does not again escape us” (17). However, in the same year, Roberta Buchanan cautioned the early Society to attain toward something better than mere hero-worship, asking “MUST we have this ostentatious licking of a dead man’s boots with one eye cocked upon the living?” (30).

[SLIDE 4a: EARLY WEB SITE SCREEN SHOT]

[AUDIO 4a] The Morris Society web site was begun with both the imperative and the caution in mind. In 1996, Mark Lasner inaugurated the “William Morris Home Page,” which was designed and hosted on the Internet by the Robinson Center for the Graphic Arts of the City College of New York. Mark described the site’s original goals as to “provide biographical and bibliographical information, reproductions of Morris’s work, news of Morris and Victorian-related events worldwide, links to other resources, and not-very-subtle inducements to join the Morris Society” (Lasner 7).

The early web site, seen here in 1998, was really an experiment, in the best Morrisian tradition, to employ a useful technology in order to bring Morris’s ideas to a wider audience. Over time, two patterns emerged regarding the role and aims of the Society web site.

[SLIDE 4b: UK/US FOCUS]

[AUDIO 4b] First, the site had begun as a way for Society members in the United States and Great Britain to communicate with each other. It was a thing “for us and by us.” However, we soon found out that we got a LOT of email from people who were not members, but who were interested in Morris for a variety of reasons—completing school projects, identifying antique furniture, locating poems and essays, and finding like-minded wallpaper fans/socialists/Victoriana buffs/devotees of the Kelmscott Press in Japan. 

[SLIDE 4c: SHIFT TO GLOBAL FOCUS]

[AUDIO 4c] While the Society wasn’t always the place where inquiries eventually ended up, we soon established a reputation as being welcoming and helpful, and we began to gain more and more members who came to know about the Society through the information on the web site and through interacting with the governing committee by email. Between 1999 and 2004, the web site wen t from 20 visits, or “hits” per day to over 1,900 per day, and we have been able to confirm forty-two members who joined the Society after first experiencing it through the web site.

[SLIDE 4d: NARROWLY INTERESTED MEMBER FOCUS]

[AUDIO 4d] A second shift in the web site’s aims had to do with its audience.  The early web site was, as I’ve mentioned, designed to be a members-only benefit, like the Newsletter and the Journal. Even though the web site was accessible to the general public, the news contained in had primarily to do with members-only events, meant for, as we see here (and with apologies to Harry Potter fans), scholars and aficionados with rather . . . specific and narrow interests.

[SLIDE 4e: SHIFT TO WIDER AUDIENCE]

[AUDIO 4e] It soon became apparent, however, that people beyond the Society’s membership were using the William Morris Web Page. Mark Lasner’s stories of some of the odder requests the Society received via email are entertaining—as the newly minted webmaster in 1997, one of my first contacts was from a poor fellow who wanted the Society to “officially” change the name of the Hudson River art movement to the Eternal Kingdom School of Art. 

Although neither I (nor, apparently, a team of psychologists) could help in that case, the vast majority of e-inquiries the Society received were from people interested in learning more about Morris’s connection to their own lives: including students writing term papers on Morris, people who owned houses with Morris papers on their walls, artists interested in Morris’s dyes, craftspeople who wanted to share their wares, and scholars organizing exhibitions.

[SLIDE 5: THE MORRIS SOCIETY WEB SITE]

[AUDIO 5] The Society’s web site rapidly became a gathering place for Morrisians of many interests, and the governing committee of the US Branch of the Society were careful to grow the site to include new materials that helped to bring Morris’s life, ideas, and legacy to a wider audience.  In 2001, we were fortunate to be able to move the web site from the City University to its own URL at morrissociety.org, and in the process, re-designed it to make it more accessible to disabled visitors. In 2004, the US and UK Branches of the Society joined together to co-sponsor the web site.

Since the Society is celebrating its 50th anniversary, it is an appropriate time to think toward the future. This screen shot of the Morris Society Web Site shows a few of the new directions for the Morris Society on the Internet: outreach to non-English speakers, outreach to young people, positioning the web site as a socialist tool for communication, and creating scholarly editions of Morris’s work to share freely with the world.

[SLIDE 6: NEW PROJECTS 1: LANGUAGE PAGES]

[AUDIO 6] In the 1960s, the Society had a strongly international bent, with articles published in the Journal in several languages.  In order to revive that spirit, one of the online goals of the Society is to bring an appreciation of Morris to those who speak languages other than English.  Many web sites these days offer “translation” tools, but such machine-translations are often laughably inadequate.  What the Morris Society aims to do is to craft or translate materials in the native languages of Internet users. The Society currently has Morris pages and materials in French, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Polish, Japanese, and Russian--all of which were written by or translated by native speakers.

[SLIDE 7: RUSSIAN SAMPLE PAGE]

[AUDIO 7] For example, here is a page in Russian, with an article by Anna Matyukhina on the Morris & Co. Adoration tapestry currently owned by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.  Not only does this help to bring Morris to a Russian audience—we also have links to his biography and to the text of News from Nowhere in Russian—but it also helps to expose us English-speakers to the impact Morris had on Russian culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[SLIDE 8: NEW PROJECTS 2: FRENCH AGREGATION PROJECT]

[AUDIO 8] In France, Morris’s News from Nowhere is one of the featured texts in the Agregation project, a national examination for prospective teachers. When the Society learned that French students would be studying News in a concentrated way, our response was to help them to understand the book (and Morris) in a wider context.

[SLIDE 9: AGREGATION SAMPLE PAGE]

[AUDIO 9] The Society’s web page for French readers of News from Nowhere offers links to online texts, scholarly criticism, and resources related to Morris’s socialism and artistry.  The Society also added value to the French readers’ web page by re-publishing seven scholarly articles on News From Nowhere for free use by Agregation students (and the public at large).

[SLIDE 10: NEW PROJECTS 3: WEB SITE AS INFORMATION COMMONS]

[AUDIO 10] The public at large becomes larger and larger as the Internet expands into the lives of more and more people, either through home connections or public access at libraries, schools, and other institutions. As the Society moves forward into the twenty-first century, one of its principal aims is to act as an “information commons,” linking people not only to each other, but allowing them the freedom to explore and learn from the past.

[SLIDE 11: SAMPLE JWMS ARTICLES PAGE]

[AUDIO 11] Too often, in order to research historical figures like Morris, people need access to fee-based library databases or pay-per-use online full-text resources. The portion of the Society’s web site devoted to the Journal of William Morris Studies is currently under development as a repository of the content of the Journal over its 40-plus year history. Although it is impractical to include the most recent issues of the Journal online gratis, the aim of the Society is to make freely available the content of the Society’s official record.  This screen shot shows the sample articles that are currently available in the pilot project.

The web site also contains a full, cumulative, and searchable index to the journal, which has already produced several inquiries from scholars and researchers who want to make more use of the contents of the Journal, now that they know what’s in it!

[SLIDE 12: NEW PROJECTS 4: MORRIS ONLINE EDITION]

[AUDIO 12] Making the Morris Society more accessible to the general public is a laudable goal, but it must be secondary to making Morris more freely accessible. Keeping in mind Sidney Cockerell’s words from the beginning of this presentation that “Morris’ work and ideals are of value to the world of today,” the Society  has asked leading academics to create scholarly editions of Morris’s works, so that they can be published online and used freely. This project is still in its beginning phases, with the first texts scheduled to appear in 2006.

[SLIDE 13: THE SPIRIT AND THE LETTER]

[AUDIO 13] Each of the four foregoing goals for the Morris Society Web Site demonstrates that a Socialist approach to the design and content of the Society’s web site can have lasting and profound effects. Recent studies by the American Library Association have shown that the free access to information online correlates to an increased use of and awareness of that information in the works of scholars, students, and the general public. 

[SLIDE 13a: COMMONWEAL]

[AUDIO 13a] Morris himself employed technology in order to spread his ideas and encourage discussion and action toward creating a socialist society.

[SLIDE 13b: SOCIETY WEB SITE]

[AUDIO 13b] The Morris Society also uses technology to spread and encourage Morrisian ideals. Making information about and by Morris freely available to everyone, encouraging communication among admirers of Morris from all walks of life, and promoting Morris’s vision of a just, equal, and beautiful society are all ways to keep Morris in the public eye and the public imagination.

[SLIDE 14: URLs]

[AUDIO 14] To conclude my talk today, I’d like to invite you to visit the Society on the Internet, at both of the URLs you see on the screen: morrissociety.org and morrisedition.org. On both web sites, you’ll find much more than I’ve been able to talk about today, and, of course, I am always happy to receive your comments and your help—the reason the web site has been so successful over the years is because its shape and direction came from those who have used it, both within and outside of the Society. 

It is perhaps appropriate that my talk on the “Virtual Morris” is delivered by virtual means. I regret that I can’t be with you all in person, and I want to thank the conference committee for graciously allowing me to speak to you today. As the Society’s webmaster, I pledge to continue to develop our web site as a Socialist enterprise, and I welcome your suggestions and your involvement.  Thank you.

Works Cited

Buchanan, Roberta. “Correspondence: What I Expect of the William Morris Society.” The Journal of the William Morris Society 1.3 (Summer 1963): 30-31.
Coleman, Roger. “Design and Technology in Nowhere.” Journal of the William Morris Society 9.2 (Spring 1991): 28-39.
Lasner, Mark Samuels. “Mark Samuels Lasner Steps Down as President.” The Newsletter of the William Morris Society in the United States (Summer 2004): 5-8.
Moody, Catherine. “Let Us Get Clear of the Fog.” The Journal of the William Morris Society 1.3 (Summer 1963): 14-18.