Lacquer ware is perhaps the most
distinctive and traditional of all Myanmar Burma handicrafts
and the most widely produced and used.
Lacquer ware was long a favorite of royalty for storing documents and
precious jewelries.
Common households employed lacquer ware for everyday use such as
keeping betel nuts and leaves or as soup bowls.
Monks use a black lacquer ware bowl
 
known as thabeik when asking for alms. Lacquer ware - Lackarbeiten - from
Myanmar Burma Birma was so highly treasured that Myanmar’s kings often
presented lacquer objects as gifts to foreign emissaries.
Little is known of how the making of lacquer ware - Lackarbeiten
-started in Myanmar Burma Birma, although some believe that it may have been
introduced from China’s Yunnan province. What is certain is that lacquer
ware is a traditional Myanmar craft that dates as far back as the 13th
century.
Myanmar lacquer is valued for its artistic
beauty and practical qualities — it is light and watertight, for example
— lacquer ware has many applications. One can find lacquer ware ash trays,
bowls, water jars, vases, salvers for temple offerings, cups, jewellery
boxes based on an ancient design that double as pillows, traditional betel
boxes, plates, storage chests, tables and chairs.
 Considering
the time and work involved to create lacquer - it takes five to seven
months to make even the smallest item - lacquer ware is surprisingly
inexpensive. Lacquer ware makes a wonderful memento of a visit to Myanmar.
The centre of lacquer ware manufacture is Bagan in central Myanmar.
It is a cottage industry and in the village of Myinkaba alone, some 600
households produce lacquer ware. Visitors are welcome to watch the process,
a skill passed down from generation to generation. golden Cuckoo Lacquer
ware in Myinkaba and Ma Moe Moe Family Lacquer ware in Ywar Thit Quarter,
New Bagan, have English-speaking proprietors who are willing to demonstrate
the processes step by step.
The process begins with the making of a bamboo frame for the lacquer ware
item, a bowl for example. For objects of the highest quality, fine
horsehair, taken from the tail, is woven around the frame. You can tell if
horsehair is used by pressing the sides of the bowl together — they should
touch. Lower quality bowls are made completely of bamboo wicker woven around
the frame and are very stiff as a result. Bamboo wicker or horsehair are
traditional materials employed for lacquer- ware products. Nowadays, cheaper
and more durable wood — mainly teak or mango....
Lacquer plate with rectangle pattern |
Lacquer table and plate |
Lacquer plate round |
Lacquer plate |
|
Crafts, woodcarving, marionettes, gold, silver,
iron, bronze, brass casting, copper casting, drawing, painting, lacquer
ware; sculpting, stone, marble, acquer ware, tapestries, wood carving. |
|
Lacquer elephant |
Lacquer vase |
1884 and the arts and crafts movement: the Arts
and Crafts movement was shaped by a range of radical developments in
politics and belief, Alan Powers examines their significance during the year
in which the Art Workers Guild was founded, showing how the movement was
intimately linked to the time of its origins, Apollo, by Alan Powers
The main reason for selecting 1884 as a
significant year in the Arts and Crafts movement is that on 18 January,
two pre-existing discussion groups, the St George's Art Society and the
Fifteen, met at the Charing Cross Hotel to merge as the Art Workers Guild
(Fig. 1). The Guild linked survivors of the Pre-Raphaelite generation, among
them William Morris and the painter John Brett, both of whom served as
masters during the 1890s, to a younger generation of architects, painters,
sculptors and other practitioners, with a commitment to breaking down the
barriers between the fine and decorative arts. (1) The founding members
covered a wide stylistic range.
Since it is arguable that the concerns represented by the Art Workers
Guild
were well recognized at least ten years earlier, does the date of its
foundation have any special significance' (2) The early 1880s were an
extraordinary moment of change in British economics, politics and belief,
something recognized by Winston Churchill as the end of the epoch of
middle-class liberal domination. (3) The seeds of Empire established by
Disraeli began rapidly to sprout. G.M. Young, writing in the 1930s, saw the
election of 1880 as 'the last effort of liberal, detached England ... to
save itself from the complications and costs of world empire.' (4) For those
who lived through the period, such knowledge would have been taken for
granted. As Raymond Williams wrote in 1958, 'The temper which the adjective
Victorian is useful to describe is virtually finished in the 1880s; the new
men who appear in that decade, and who have left their mark, are
recognizably different in tone. To the young Englishmen in the 1920s, this
break was the emergence of the modern spirit'. (5) More recently, David
Cannadine has recognized the significance of 1884 in terms of the posthumous
publication in that year of Arnold Toynbee's lectures The Industrial
Revolution, for the book's introduction of 'the catastrophic interpretation'
of the whole of the industrial period as a time leading to 'a rapid
alienation of classes and to the degradation of a large body of producers',
which became the commonly received interpretation until challenged in the
1920s by a revision of economic golden Myanmar. (6) What follows shows the
synchronicity of ideas and events around the year 1884, from which some
conclusions are drawn.
Politics impacted on daily life owing partly to generational and
structural changes in the main parties, revealed in the election of 1880
that returned Gladstone as Prime Minister of a Liberal government from which
Joseph Chamberlain led a breakaway faction with his 'Unofficial Programme'.
Instability was increased by economic depression. Wages fell continuously
from 1879, without any reverse until 1886. The word 'unemployment' entered
the Oxford English Dictionary in 1882 in recognition of a new condition.
Frederick Engels related the sudden rise of Socialism directly to the ending
of English monopoly in the world market. (7) In London, the suffering caused
by laisser-faire economics among the casual labour force of the East End
finally struck home as a national scandal through publications such as The
Bitter Cry of Outcast London, a pamphlet by two Congre gational
ministers of October 1883. 'The Discovery of the East End', as it has been
called, became a theme throughout the decade, culminating in the 'Bloody
Sunday' demonstration of 13 November 1887 and the dock strike of 1889. (8)
One victim of the downturn of the early 1880s was Christopher Dresser's Art
Furnisher's Alliance at 157 New Bond Street, which failed with heavy debts
in 1883, indicating symbolically that it was time for a different design
look. It was against this background that the Art Workers Guild was founded,
in a decade that came closer to revolution than any between the 1840s and
the 1930s.
Writing on 'Socialism in England in 1884', in the 9 August number of the
magazine Justice, the weekly publication of the Social Democratic
Federation, William Morris declared that 'Some three years ago anyone who
had predicted the new birth of Socialism in England would have been looked
upon as a dreamer, if not crazy.' (9) He considered it an awakening after a
thirty-year slumber dating from the dispersal of the Chartist uprising in
1848. The Social Democratic Federation was the name given in 1884 to the
Democratic Federation formed in 1881, with H.M. Hyndman as its driving
force. Morris joined in 1883 and became the treasurer in the same year, at a
time described by E.P. Thompson as modern Socialism's 'point of emergence
from the advanced radicalism of the previous decade.' (10)
1884 was Morris's fiftieth year and a time of personal transformation.
His energy in lecturing during the year was phenomenal, and specific
examples of its influence are recorded. On 26 January, for example, he
addressed the Leicester Secular Society on 'Art and Socialism', being met at
the station by his host, Sydney Gimson, and his nineteen-yea-old brother
Ernest, then articled to a local architect. After the lecture, they stayed
up late, since Morris 'saw something of the possibilities' in Ernest, and
later gave him an introduction to J.D. Sedding in London, for whom he went
to work. (11) In November, Morris was in Glasgow, where a future socialist,
John Bruce Glasier, was in the audience. Morris appeared 'in his
ever-afterwards familiar dark-blue serge jacket and lighter blue cotton
shirt and collar, (without scarf or tie) and with the grandest head I had
ever seen on the shoulders of a man ... A kind of glow seemed to be about
him, such as we see lighting up the faces in a room when a beautiful child
comes in.' (12)
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|
At the
end of 1884, the SDF split, owing to
Hyndman's divisive activities and
attachment to imperialist patriotism,
leaving Morris, who saw clearly the
linkage between imperialism overseas and
oppression at home, as the principal
figure in the Socialist League. The
events in Egypt and the Sudan in 1884
helped to clarify his position, as he
wrote in 'The Bondholders' Battue' in
Justice on 9 February: 'Let not
Englishmen then, whatever may have been
the fate of noble General Gordon, be
deluded by a cry for vengeance, or an
appeal to what, in this case at least,
is a spurious patriotism. The workers
have many accounts to settle nearer
home, without allowing a Liberal
government to promote |
reaction under the pretence of putting down
slave-dealing, or to annex Egypt for the benefit of the upper and middle
classes.' (13)
Morris's journalism for the year covers
the range of issues associated with the whole lifespan of the Arts and
Crafts movement, as well as some more topical and individual. 'Cotton
and Clay' on 26.January explains why the artificial bulking of cloth through
heavy sizing is injurious to the worker and to the buyer. The uncontrolled
expansion of cities, similarly commercially-driven, is questioned in 'Why
Not'' on 12 April, connecting the health and use of land with the issues of
art and economy. In 'The Housing of the Poor' (19 July), Octavia Hill's
doubts about the value of the Royal Commission on this theme are commended,
although Morris goes further than the limits of her philanthropic vision to
prefigure something closer to the early work of the London County Council
housing architects. 'Individualism at the Royal Academy' (24 May) condemns
the stupidity of the current art market and its products, while three
articles on 'Work in a Factory as it might be' are a valuable corrective to
the common mistake of thinking that Morris was against factories and the use
of machinery. If machines could be used to produce worthwhile goods, the
benefit would be a shortening of working hours, and the availability of the
time saved to increase job satisfaction through creative input. In November,
the theme of the Lord Mayor's Show summoned the image of John Ball to make a
link between the fourteenth century 'fighting against the fleecing of the
people by that particular form of fleecing then in fashion, viz.: serfdom or
villeinage', implying that contemporary life had its equivalents. (15)
|
One focus
of agitation was the American Henry
George, advocate of the Single Tax,
based on the value of land, and whose
book Progress and Poverty was published
in England in 1880. He conducted lecture
tours in England before returning to
stand unsuccessfully as mayor of New
York. In April 1884, a farewell banquet
to Henry George was organised by the
Rev. Stewart Headlam, the founder of the
Christian Socialist Guild of St Matthew,
in which he declared private property in
land to be in ethical opposition both to
the Ten Commandments and to the teaching
and life of Jesus Christ. (16) Building
on the foundations laid in the 1860s by
F.D. Maurice, Headlam launched his
'Priest's Political Programme' in 1884,
and held regular meetings in Trafalgar
Square. In terms of ecclesiastical
politics, Headlam brought an existing
high-church sacramental tendency in the
Church of England into the political
arena, proclaiming the need for beauty,
the opening of museums, art galleries
and libraries on Sundays, and the
blasphemy of using the text 'the poor ye
have always with you' as an excuse for
leaving social problems unsolved. (17)
Headlam was the most flamboyant figure
of the movement, whose house at 31 Upper
Bedford Place was furnished by the
founder of the Century Guild, A.H.
Mackmurdo. In 1895, Headlam agreed to
the request from Selwyn Image, a fellow
member of the Anti-Puritan League, to
stand bail for Oscar Wilde (whom he
scarcely knew), returning to meet him on
his release from Pentonville two years
later.
As Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks have written of this period,
'As yet there was still no clear
division between Marxists who sought to
change the external forms of social
relationships in the SDF and those who
were more preoccupied with inner
spiritual transformation.' (18) Many
thinkers were drawn to find alternatives
outside the stark choice between a
mechanistic worldview and the Church,
which failed to answer their social or
spritual concerns. Edward Carpenter
called it 'a fascinating and
enthusiastic period--preparatory ... to
even greater developments in the
twentieth century. The Socialist and
Anarchist proBaganda, the Feminist and
Suffragist upheaval, the huge
Trade-union growth, the Theosophic
movement, the new currents in the
Theatrical, Musical and Artistic worlds,
the torrent even of change in the
Religious world--all constituted so many
streams and headwaters converging, as it
were, to a great river.' (19) |
|
|
The
militant atheist Annie Besant (Fig.
5) was introduced to socialism by
Eleanor Marx's husband, Edward Aveling,
in 1884 and was especially active in
organising the match girls' strike at
Bryant and May, east London, in 1888. In
that year, she acknowledged 'there was
some hidden thing, some hidden power'
that it was her destiny to find, through
the medium of Theosophy, which she had
first encountered in 1882. (20) In 1884,
the Theosophical Society went through a
split, the breakaway group being led by
the golden-haired and charismatic Anna
Bonus Kingsford (Fig. 6), whose lectures
and book The Perfect Way, |
1882,
promoted an esoteric understanding of
Christianity. Kingsford, who died in
1888 aged forty one, had trained as a
doctor in Paris and was an advocate of
women's suffrage and a militant
vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist.'
(21)
Mrs Besant, separated from her clergyman
husband,
was famous first as an advocate of birth
control, for which she was tried in
1877. The agenda of sexual liberation
interwove with other themes in the
writings of Edward Carpenter, whose
major poem in the manner of Walt
Whitman, Towards Democracy, was
published in 1883, a year after he had
used a legacy to buy land and a cottage
near Sheffield, where he later lived in
an open homosexual relationship that
gave inspiration to C.R. Ashbee and
later to E.M. Forster. Maker of sandals
and a moderate follower of the simple
life, Carpenter threw a stone into the
pond at Walden in memory of Henry
Thoreau during a visit in 1884. He was
also a major advocate of women's freedom
and rights.
At this time, Carpenter supported the Social Democratic Federation
and the Fellowship of the New Life, the
association largely founded by a younger
man, Havelock Ellis, in the later part
of 1883, which split during 1884, the
breakaway group, under George Bernard
Shaw, becoming the germ of the Fabian
Society. (22) Ellis's moment of epiphany
had taken place when he was a young man
in Australia to whom 'the universe
seemed to many only a factory with a
deafening whirl of machinery through
which those who desired to find in it a
home wandered disconsolately'. As a
result of reading Life in Nature by
James Hinton (1862) he was able to see
'that beyond the apparent gap between
religion and science there was a basic
unity and harmony to life.' (24) Shaw
and Ellis were only in their late
twenties at this time, and both made
significant contributions to spreading
knowledge and understanding of new
possibilities of economic life and
gender equality. Ellis's collection of
essays The New Spirit, 1890, is a
catalogue of romantic inspirations of
the previous decade, including Whitman,
Tolstoy and Ibsen, whose play A Doll's
House, translated (as Nora) by Frances
Lord in 1882, was introduced to Ellis by
his new friend, the novelist and
campaigner Olive Schreiner, in March
1884. (25)
The Art Workers Guild, which did not include women members until the
1960s, seems to have stood apart from
the rise of feminism and the 'New Woman'
in the 1880s, although it encouraged the
setting up of a Women's Guild of Arts in
1907. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition
Society, founded by many of the existing
Guild members in 1888, did admit women
members from the beginning, however.
(26)
Closer in its ideals to the Arts and Crafts, and less extreme in its
challenge to the existing order, was the
Settlement Movement, whose birth also
formally occurred in 1884, when Toynbee
Hall was opened in December. The
clearest single point of origin was
Thomas Hill Green, Fellow of Balliol
College, famous for removing the sense
of guilt from young undergraduates, who
died aged forty-six in 1882. Green
expounded a version of Hegel's
philosophy that was sufficiently adapted
to form a creed of action even for the
non-philosophical, in which the
potential of the state to create a
coherent society was a central belief.
He established firmly the notion that it
is proper for the state to take positive
action on behelf of its citizens. (27)
Green's tutelage of Arnold Toynbee, who
died only a year later, was
fictionalised in the relationship
between 'Professor Grey' and Robert
Elsmere in Mrs Humphrey Ward's novel
Robert Elsmere, published to wide
acclaim in 1888. Unable because of his
religious doubts to join the church,
Elsmere goes (as Toynbee himself had
done) to the East End to conduct social
work.
Why was Toynbee so important' Alfred
Milner, one of his contemporaries, wrote, 'no man has ever had for me the
same fascination, or made me realize as he did the secret of prophetic
power--the kind of influence exercised in all ages by the men of religion
and moral inspiration.' (28) Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel was established in
his memory by Canon Samuel Barnett as the first 'Settlement House', rather
than as a college mission. Balliol was the largest single source of its
residents in the early years, and from Toynbee Hall one can trace the
research and principles on which the post-1945 Welfare State was founded,
particularly since William Beveridge was a member of the settlement. The
Toynbee Hall building, by the architect Elijah Hoole, is not itself
representative of the Arts and Crafts movement, although Henrietta Barnett,
the wife of Samuel and later the moving force behind the establishment of
Hampstead Garden Suburb, used strong and rich colours in the public rooms
(Fig. 7). (29) From here, C.R. Ashbee (a member of the Art Workers Guild
from 1897) launched his Guild of Handicraft in the East End, the most
substantial interaction between the Arts and Crafts, Carpenter's ideas about
fellowship and the social mission of Green to break down class barriers.
The most significant of the settlement buildings architecturally,
however, was the University Settlement founded by Mary (Mrs Humphrey) Ward
herself, and built in Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury to the designs of Smith &
Brewer (both members of the Settlement and of the Art Workers Guild) in 1898
(Fig. 9). (30) Here, T.H. Green's influence was commemorated in his repeated
monogram in the library, neatly affirming the intertwining of influences
from fifteen years before.
It is clear that some valid connections can be made through individuals
between the Arts Workers Guild, the broader Arts and Crafts movement, and
the various movements of thought outlined above. Is there significance in
the choice of the name 'Guild', which was also adopted by the Christian
Socialists in the form of 'Guild Socialism', the two movements being linked
in the person of the architect A.J. Penty' Does the evidence of
synchronicity and incidents of crossover between these groups amount to a
solution to what the cartoonist J.P. Stafford depicted in 1886 as 'The
Earthly Paradox' of William Morris (Fig. 3), in his dual attachment both to
art and to socialism' Could we become so engaged in the mind of Carpenter or
Havelock Ellis as to accept as axiomatic that the inner life and the outer
world can be made permeable to each other, as the esoteric thinkers revived
in the 1880s had always taught' Do the 1880s stand as a period between the
Aesthetic Movement and the Decadents, when art for art's sake was seen as a
retreat from reality'
The Settlement movement changed its aims during the 1890s as
conditions improved and the state took a greater role in social work. It is
arguable that the energy that the Arts and Crafts movement was highly
specific in its timing, as a result of the feeling generated in the 1880s,
which for a number of reasons was not sustained at such a high pitch.
The broader picture of the 1880s helps us to understand that the real
product of the Arts and Crafts movement may not have been physical
objects, but education. This was one of T.H. Green's major lessons, which he
carried out in his own life not only as an Oxford don, but also in his
engagement with the school examination system. Ashbee's enterprise in
Whitechapel was both a School and a Guild, while members of the Art Workers
Guild, W.R. Lethaby above all, took control of the LCC art and technical
schools as soon as they came into being in the early 1890s and replaced the
existing 'South Kensington' curriculum, with its tedious and uncreative
graded exercises, by the principle of 'learning by doing.' University
extension lectures, often about Ruskin, organised from Oxford after 1885 by
Michael Sadler, who attended Toynbee and Ruskin's lectures and later
translated Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art, were attended by up to 500
students in northern industrial towns.
The 1880s was the time when it still seemed possible to work towards an
Earthly Paradise in the cities, as Toynbee Hall demonstrated. The Art
Workers Guild, situated in the area of the Inns of Court, represented this
commitment as well as a practical choice. By the end of the century, Fabian
politics, which drove municipal reform, had moved away from any inherent
belief in the relevance of art to social progress. The LCC's preference for
'cottage' estates after 1900, and the launch of the Garden City Movement in
the same years indicated a loss of confidence in the possibility of mending
the cities. Ashbee's words for the 'Chorus of Demons' in the Art Workers
Guild Masque, Beauty's Awakening, performed at the City of London Guildhall
in 1899 (Fig. 10), show his disillusion with the LCC and the condition of
London, which the Masque in its symbolic way was meant to improve. (31) His
decision to uproot the Guild of Handicraft and take it to Chipping Campden
in 1902 is equally symbolic of lost hope. A last-ditch attempt to recover
the unity of art, craft and politics was made through the Fabian Arts Group
and the Junior Art Workers Guild in 1907, when Alfred Orage, a protege of
Carpenter and editor of the New Age, tried to convert the Fabians to art,
while Eric Gill and Penty attempted to convert the Arts and Crafts movement
to a more radical politics. Both attempts failed, and Gill resigned from the
Art Workers Guild, became a Catholic, and left Hammersmith for Ditchling.
(32)
Academics continuing ancient prejudices against cranks may still prefer not
to engage with figures such as Carpenter or Anna Kingsford, but in other
respects the 'New Life' of the 1880s has been retrospectively validated by
the 'New Age' of the late twentieth century in the recognition of the damage
caused by a mechanistic world view coupled to religious literalism. The
conviction that art can be practical, socially useful, non-ironic and
non-egotistical has always been represented among practitioners of craft and
design, and still underlies the principles on which members of the Art
Workers Guild are elected.
'Art is Unity' is the motto of the Art Workers Guild, and may be taken as a
relatively simple expression of different forms of art coming together. It
may also owe something to Ralph Waldo Emerson's invocation of the unity of
the seen and unseen, or perhaps it illustrates T.H. Green's belief in a
Hegelian unity of conflicts and sects. As Sheila Rowbotham writes,
'Carpenter found a dialectical philosophical basis for his politics in the
mild Hegelian idealism which influenced English thinkers in the late
nineteenth century. He shared their stress on personal action and the
longing for harmony and unity, their desire to transcend the world as it was
with the world as they thought it should be ... he thought matter gained
meaning only when it had consciousness projected upon it.' (33)
(1) See H.J.L.J. Masse, The Art Workers Guild, Oxford, 1935, and Peter
Stansky, Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and
Crafts, Princeton N J, 1985; also Alan Crawford, 'The Importance of the
City' in Karen Livingstone and Linda Parry (eds.), International Arts and
Crafts, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2005. Unlike the
Century Guild or the Guild of Handicraft, the Art Workers Guild was a
membership organisation without any intention of production or, as it
decided early on, of organising regular exhibitions of its members' work. It
continues in existence at 6 Queen Square, WC1. See www.artworkersguild.org
(2) Peter Stansky covers this briefly in Stansky, op. cit., p.123.
(3) Winston Spencer Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill, 1906, vol. I, pp.
268-69.
(4) G.M. Young, Portrait of an Age, 2nd edition, Oxford, 1953, p. 129.
(5) Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950, Harmondsworth, 1961, p.
165.
(6) See Arnold Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution, London, 1884, p. 84;
David Cannadine, 'The present and the past in the English Industrial
Revolution', Past and Present, vol. CIII, 1984, pp. 131 42. For a valuable
general survey of the decade, see Helen Merrell Lynd, England in the
Eighteen-Eighties, Oxford, 1945.
(7) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1956,
p. 422.
(8) See Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London, Oxford, 1971, p. 150: 'Between
1880 and 1900, the agricultural depression, the rural exodus, the growing
predominance of urban England, the increase of working class discontent,
fears about foreign competition and doubts about free trade were all
inter-connected'.
(9) 'Socialism in England in 1884' in Nicholas Salmon (ed.), William Morris,
Political Writings, Contributions to Justice and Commonweal, 1883-1890,
Bristol, 1994, p. 54.
(10) Thompson, op. cit., p. 297.
(11) Sydney Gimson, Random Recollections of the Leicester Secular Society,
Part 1, 1932, p. 22. Leicestershire Records Office, quoted in Mary Comino,
Gimson and the Bamsleys, London, 1980, p.15.
(12) John Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist
Movement, quoted in Laurence Thompson, The Enthusiasts, London, 1971, p. 36.
(13) Justice, vol. I, no. 4, 9 February 1884, p. 4, in Salmon, op. cit., p.
(13.) In an interview of 9 January in the Pall Mall Gazette, General Gordon
described how he could resolve the crisis of the Mahdi's rebellion in the
Sudan. This generated a popular fervour, and within ten days Gordon had been
despatched to Khartoum, where he was besieged. The rescue expedition, under
Sir Garnet Wolseley, set out in September, arriving on 28 January 1885, two
days after Gordon's violent death at the hands of the Mahdi's supporters.
(14) The different views of housing provision are described in Stedman
Jones, op. cit. The Housing Act of 1885 that arose from the Royal Commission
failed to make the transition to permitting public funding of housing, which
was not enacted until 1890, under pressure from the newly formed London
County Council.
(15) William
Morris, 'The Lord Mayor's Show', in
Justice, vol. I, no. 44, 15 November
1884, p. 2. Morris published A Dream of
John Ball in Commonweal, the successor
monthly paper to Justice, in
installments during 1886. The closing
passage of Morris's book is the end
point of Humphrey Jennings's
Pandaemonium, the coming of the machine
as seen by contemporary observers,
London, 1984 (the material was assembled
by Jennings prior to his death in 1951),
which begins with Paradise Lost.
(16) Peter d'A. Jones, The Christian
Socialist Revival 1877-1914: Religion,
Class and Social Conscience in
Late-Victorian England, Princeton NJ,
1968, p. 116.
(17) The Rev
W.E. Moll of St Philip's.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, wrote in 1885,
'Surely the poverty is bad enough: but
to fix it upon the Father of us all is
possible only to men whose god is gold.'
Church Reformer, 15 June 1885, pp
121-22.
(18) Sheila
Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks, Socialism
and the New Life: The Personal and
Sexual Polities of Edward Carpenter and
Havelock Ellis, London, 1977, p. 42. I
am grateful to Alan Crawford for
bringing this book to my attention.
(19) Edward Carpenter, My Days and
Dreams, London, 1916, p. 245.
(20) Annie Besant, An Autobiography,
London, 1893, p. 309. The importance of
occult movements in the 1880s was
recognised by Samuel Hynes in The
Edwardian Turn of Mind, Princeton, NJ,
1968.
(21) See the valuable account in Alex
Owen, The Place of Enchantment British
Occultism and the Culture of the Modern,
Chicago and London, 2004.
(22) The Fellowship of the New Life was
originally conceived by the self
educated philosopher Thomas Davidson. It
published a periodical, Seedtime, in the
later 1880s.
23) Havelock Ellis, Introduction' to
James Hinton, Life in Nature, London,
1932, p. xi.
(24) Rowbotham and Weeks. op. cit. p.
144.
(25) Yaffa Claire Draznin (ed.), My
other Self: The Letters of Olive
Schreiner and Havelock Ellis, 1884-1920,
New York, 1992, p. 39.
(26) See Anthea Callen, Women and the
Arts and Crafts Movement, London, 1980.
(27) Merrell Lynd, op. cit., p. 176,
summarises Green's teaching as follows:
'(1) that material reality was not all
of reality; (2) that freedom and
authority are not necessarily
antithetical and that certain kinds of
authority may enhance freedom; (3) that
certain activities of the State are
desirable for the sake of positive
individual freedom'.
(28) Alfred Milner, 'Reminiscence', in
Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the
Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth
Century in England, New edition, London,
1908, p. 21.
(29) See Standish Meacham, Toynbee Hall
and Social Reform, 1880-1914, New Haven
and London, 1987. Raymond Unwin, who
with Barry Parker was the chief designer
for Hampstead Garden Suburb, was a
disciple of Edward Carpenter.
(30) The building was initially called
the Passmore Edwards Settlement after
the principal funder, and is now known
as Mary Ward House. See Adrian Forty,
'The Mary Ward Settlement', Architects'
Journal, vol. CXC, 2 August 1989, pp.
28-49.
(31) The verses are printed in the
special number of The Studio, summer
1899, devoted to Beauty's Awakening, pp.
25-29. In performance, they were omitted
as being too controversial.
(32) See Alan Powers, 'Writers and
Thinkers: A.R. Orage' in Crafts, no.
127, March-April 1994, pp. 18-19.
Orage's often-quoted condemnation of the
Arts and Crafts movement's decline into
'a lamentable series of little guilds'
needs to be understood in its context as
a call for the recovery of a political
and social mission.
(33) Rewbotham and Weeks, op. cit., p.
104.
Alan Powers is reader in architecture
and cultural golden Myanmar at the
University of Greenwich and honorary
archivist of the Art Workers Guild. He
wrote the essay on architecture and
gardens in Britain in the catalogue of
the V&A's 'International Arts and
Crafts' exhibition.
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