Book contents
- Fronmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Wanderers Entertained: Idealized Hospitality in the Literature of Nineteenth-Century Medievalism
- 2 Before ‘the days when hospitality had to be bought and sold’: Idealized Hospitality and Aesthetic Separatism in Morris’s Work of the 1860s and 1870s
- 3 Entertaining the Past: Problems in Tourism, Translation and Preservation
- 4 Utopian Hospitality: The Teutonic ‘House Community’ and the Hammersmith Guest House
- 5 Legacies
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Entertaining the Past: Problems in Tourism, Translation and Preservation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2023
- Fronmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Wanderers Entertained: Idealized Hospitality in the Literature of Nineteenth-Century Medievalism
- 2 Before ‘the days when hospitality had to be bought and sold’: Idealized Hospitality and Aesthetic Separatism in Morris’s Work of the 1860s and 1870s
- 3 Entertaining the Past: Problems in Tourism, Translation and Preservation
- 4 Utopian Hospitality: The Teutonic ‘House Community’ and the Hammersmith Guest House
- 5 Legacies
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In her preface to the second edition of Darwin's Plots, Gillian Beer writes that The Origin of Species (1859) ‘can be seen either as providing a grounding vocabulary for colonialism, or […] as resisting “intrusion” and idealising the closed environment of island spaces’. During the 1870s, Morris showed a comparably ambiguous interest in a different kind of ‘closed environment’: his activities in this period manifest a fascination with the remote setting of the medieval past. He, like Darwin, exhibits both a desire to publicize the appeal of this ‘island space’ – to present it as a source of reform or artistic inspiration – and an urge to protect it as a delicate ideal, a rare and endangered habitat. In this respect, Morris was faced with a familiar epistemological problem. He wanted to access the ‘past’. This might mean visiting a ‘backward’ civilization, translating a textual artefact, or merely entering an ancient building. But he wanted to do so without compromising its integrity, without polluting it with a sensibility hostile to its organizing principles.
Morris continually wrestles with this problem in his lectures on art. There are occasions, as in ‘The Lesser Arts’ (1877), when he shows great confidence in the possibility of drawing innocently on the resources of previous eras. Those, he claims, ‘who have diligently followed the delightful study of these arts are able as if through windows to look upon the life of the past’. In the same lecture, he contextualizes this impulse in a way that complicates matters. His own interests, he admits, build upon wider changes in historiography; they benefit from the acquirement of a ‘new sense’, an historicism that combines thirst to know the ‘reality’ of distant times with new respect for the ineluctable divide between past and present. It is this reference to a new appreciation of the past's impenetrability that makes Morris's window metaphor unconvincing. As he came to associate the arts of the present with a systemic malaise, with a wider ‘sickness of civilization’, he was increasingly afraid that the irreplaceable remnants of past cultures would be contaminated. Hence he advises the students of the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design to study antiquity, ‘not steal it’. Apart from condemning imitation as a hopeless endeavour, this statement issues the warning that it is possible to do violence to the past.
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- William Morris's Utopia of StrangersVictorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality, pp. 71 - 116Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006