  |
Traditional handicraft skills
are carefully preserved in families and passed
down from generation to generation. Most of the artisans are simultaneously
at home and at work in their residence. Further info more at e-books
This group of smiling artisans is
simultaneously at home and at work in
their residence located close to the
Shwedagon pagoda |
Today there is a tremendous diversity in the subjects that are carved. There
are Buddha images, altars and other religious figures, nats or spirits;
elephant, oxen, buffalo, tiger, bullock cart and peacocks as souvenirs for
tourists; chinthes and other objects of Burma legends. Orders can be
placed for almost any model, at very reasonable prices.
Wood is cheaper
- in Burma- and softer than other materials but can be difficult to
handle. Carvers carefully select wood with the right degree of hardness,
grain and hue for each object. Burma carvers prefer to work with rosewood,
ironwood, teak, tamalan (Dalbergia oliveri), hpaw (Adina cordifolia) and
yamanay (Gmelina arborea).
Lacquer ware is perhaps the most distinctive and
traditional of all 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 Burma Birma was so highly treasured that
Burma’s kings often presented lacquer objects as gifts to foreign
emissaries.
Little is known of how the making of lacquer ware - Lackarbeiten -started in
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 Burma craft that dates as far back as the 13th century.
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 — 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 Burma.
The centre of lacquer ware manufacture is Bagan in upper Burma. 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....
Crafts, woodcarving, marionettes, gold,
silver, iron, bronze, brass casting, copper casting, tapestry, relief,
stucco, turnery, drawing, painting, lacquer ware;
 sculpting, stone,
marble, lapidary work, lacquer ware, tapestries, wood carving,
sandal wood, textile, mother of pearl, tribal, paintings, silver ware,
jade ware, antiques and reproduction, Ivory, pearls, marble carvings,
gem painting, puppets, other souvenir items, souvenirs.
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 chief 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 recognised 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 recognised 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
recognisably 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 recognised 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 history. (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 Congregational 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)
At the end of 1884, the SDF split, owing to Hyndman's divisive activities
and attachment to imperalist 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 propaganda, 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 realise
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 history 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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