Margaret Hale meets Morris and Carpenter
This is the second post in a series of blogging the-conference-paper-I'm-not-giving. For the background, you can read the first post here.
In North and South, after resigning from the CofE priesthood, Mr Hale takes his family - Mrs Hale, Margaret and servant Dixon - to the growing industrial town of Milton-Northern. Most commentators read this as Manchester, where, after all, Mrs Gaskell herself lived. But it doesn't really matter; we're given all the information we need in the name: a mill town in the North. (And this generic character makes it useful to me for my work on West Yorkshire.)
Relocating to a grimy, sooty, smelly mill town after the pastoral delights of sweetly southern Helstone proves a shock, to say the least. Margaret's contrast between idyllic Helstone and gloomy Milton is one of the book's central "North and South" contrasts. Margaret looks at industrialism and believes that something has gone terribly wrong. She laments the loss of the rural.
Such feelings were certainly shared by many. As British socialism developed over the proceeding half century, one strong strand of thought located the answers to its critique of industrial capitalism in (a certain reckoning of) the rural past.
Two of the most (to me) fascinating figures in this were Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) and William Morris (1834-1896).
Earlier this year I finally read Sheila Rowbotham's superb biography of Carpenter (quite probably the first middle-aged British man to wear socks with sandals). He was an amazing figure, not just in his sandals, but in his whole philosophy. Briefly a CofE priest, Carpenter gave it up, chucked academic life in, and became a socialist and gay rights campaigner who (generally) practiced what he preached. For a large chunk of his life lived on the rural outskirts of industrial Sheffield growing veg, skinny-dipping and that sort of thing.
Famed for his Arts and Crafts designs, Morris also advocated a socialism that celebrated crafts over machines and, in his 1890 novel News From Nowhere, envisaged a post-revolutionary agrarianism. (He kept his clothes on, though I'm not entirely sure where he stood on the socks-with-sandals question.)
In the 19th century, this 'rural past' position maintained a following within socialist circles. By the 20th, its advocates would be dismissed as 'cranks'. That's where I'll be heading, Margaret Hale still in tow, in my next post in this series.
