Introduction

Chapter 1 examined the medievalist idealization of hospitality evoked by ia irange of Romantic and Victorian writers. The use to which Morris put this complex and politically diverse legacy in formulating his own ‘utopia of strangers’ forms the focus of what follows. The decision to accord Morris a central position is justified on two grounds. First, his works form an effective bridge between Cobbett's old English hospitality and late-nineteenth-century socialism. His importance is ensured, in addition, by consistent sensitivity to the political ramifications of hospitality in a utopian setting.

Readers approaching the previous chapter with a strong sense of Morris as a practitioner of aestheticism would be entitled to question the compatibility of the Ruskinian ethic of openness, tentatively posited, with the premium placed on inwardness and high art values popularly associated with Pre-Raphaelitism. There is, admittedly, a certain amount to be said in support of such observations. Morris's artistic allegiances may seem far removed from aesthetic isolationism of the kind associated with James Whistler or Oscar Wilde. This impression appears especially warranted when one considers that he took Ruskin as his ‘master’, a figure whose reputation evokes the questing spirit of the socially concerned Victorian, the communal ethic of guild socialism and a notorious legal stand-off with the new aestheticism (the Ruskin v. Whistler Trial of 1878). Yet one should not lose sight of Morris's familiarity and sympathy with the other side of the question. Early friendship and collaboration with Dante Gabriel Rossetti had ensured that he became acquainted with aestheticism at a formative stage in his career.

Even after becoming a socialist, Morris retained an awareness that certain things might not be achieved in the public arena. ‘Art for Art's Sake’, it is true, became anathema to him. As a theory of the aesthetic, or an artistic ideal, it was everything he held in contempt. But aesthetic separatism as a way of working, as a determination to resist the encroachments of ‘shoddy’ commercial manufacture, remained an essential feature of his artistic practice. Like those he later criticized for attempting to ‘cultivate art intellectually’, Morris was in this respect ‘living in an enemy's country’. Though certain that art was essentially the property of all, he recognized that under prevailing conditions, artists who relinquished control of their work did so at the risk of accepting externally imposed standards.