Terry Eagleton is, among other things, professor of cultural theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His latest book is Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.
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Biography and memoirs, Biography, 1800-1899, 1860-1879, 1800-1899, 1880-1899, Morris, William
Vol. 17 No. 4 · 23 February 1995
page 8 | 2410 words
Wallpaper and Barricades
Terry Eagleton
- William Morris: A Life for Our Time by Fiona MacCarthy
Faber, 780 pp, £25.00, November 1994, ISBN 0 571 14250 8
The Left has always been uneasy with aesthetics. The very word suggests privilege, preciousness, a remoteness from the real. Even when radicals respect culture, they assign it, quite properly, a secondary place to social utility. If it’s a choice between snatching from the flames the Holbein or the hippie, the radical is a mite less agonised than the aesthete. Almost everyone agrees that a museum is not as fine a thing as an orphanage; what differentiates Left from Right is just the degree of mental reservation you feel about the proposition.
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 5 · 9 March 1995
From Peter Faulkner
I was surprised by Terry Eagleton’s view of Kelmscott Manor as a kind of Factory as It Might Have Been (LRB, 23 February). He is of course right to point out that we have no complete edition of William Morris’s political writings, but the recent publication by the Thoemmes Press of Bristol of Nicholas Salmon’s Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal has added over six hundred valuable pages to our knowledge, and more is to come in the Morris centenary year of 1996. Meanwhile, A.L. Morton’s Political Writings is a stimulating and accessible selection from Lawrence and Wishart.
Peter Faulkner
University of Exeter
