Arts, Crafts And Socialism

Sheila Rowbotham introduces the ‘hands-on’ utopian, C.R. Ashbee, and the Guild of Handicraft he established in 1888, shedding light on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Arts and Crafts ideas about work, consumption and society.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - One of many movements aiming to transform society in the 1880s and early 1890s, Arts and Crafts was marked by the utopian hopes of the era. Thoughtful and sensitive members of the upper-middle class like the artist and writer William Morris (1834-96) were becoming disenchanted with the social order. Amid depression, unemployment was mounting and the unemployed, led by the newly formed socialist organizations, were angrily protesting on the streets of the West End of London. Panic about foreign agitators spread and on Sunday November 13th, 1887, Morris took part in a demonstration against coercion in Ireland, led by the socialists, and by Radicals in the Liberal Party, along with Irish Nationalists. It was cleared from Trafalgar Square by a violent police charge followed by Guardsmen with drawn bayonets. Three people died and hundreds were injured on what came to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

The following month, William Morris (who was trying desperately to build up the small revolutionary organization, the Socialist League, that he had founded three years earlier) was still pondering the lessons of ‘Bloody Sunday’ when a young architect, Charles Ashbee (1863-1942) came to see him with an idealistic plan for a Guild and School of Handicraft in the slums of London’s East End. To Ashbee’s profound dismay, Morris dismissed the project with derision, sweeping aside the idea that a small experiment such as a craft guild could help the suffering of the unemployed. Ashbee was not as convinced as Morris about the need for a socialist revolution but as a student at King’s College Cambridge, he had been affected by the mood of class guilt and social unease which troubled the young intelligentsia. Voluntary work in Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel (the social settlement established in 1884 for Oxbridge graduates to live and work among London’s poor in the East End), and contact with Radical working men’s clubs had made him aware of the consequences of poverty and inequality. Appalled by the waste of ability and inadequate training available to the working class he decided to start his own classes, and lectured to workers on his heroes John Ruskin and Walt Whitman. Despite his admiration for Morris, he ignored his mentor by setting up the Guild and School of Handicraft in the East End with just five members in June 1888. It operated from an empty warehouse opposite Toynbee Hall at 35 Commercial Street and soon expanded.

Initially Ashbee envisaged that the Guild would provide a means of livelihood for the most wretched slum dwellers. While some members were recruited from among the very poor, he also collected cabinet makers, wood carvers, metal workers and silversmiths who already possessed some skill. Over the years the Guild produced pianos, bedsteads, wallpaper and clocks displayed at Arts and Crafts exhibitions and sold at first through commissions and later in a Bond Street shop.

In 1891 Ashbee broke away from Toynbee Hall and moved the Guild to Essex House, a large building on the Mile End Road. In 1902 the Guild migrated to the Cotswold village of Chipping Campden. Though not all the Londoners were happy about being transported to the countryside, new members arrived including a few women. With over seventy workers the Guild was bigger than other craft guilds, a factor which contributed to its collapse. But it survived until 1908 and acquired an international reputation, inspiring artists in Europe and North America.

From the start the Guild adopted an experimental, unconventional approach to production. Ashbee believed in co-operative labour and an organic connection between design and manual craft. In practice however he played a key role as co-ordinator and designer, conceiving the Guild’s celebrated ‘Arts and Crafts’ silverware with its delicate flowing lines and intricate patterns set with semi-precious stones. Ironically, because he was trained as an architect, not a silversmith his visions could cause the craft workers problems. In the late 1960s when I interviewed one of the former Guildsmen, George Hart in Chipping Campden, he was still complaining about Ashbee’s impractical designs.

Ashbee believed work and art were inextricably linked. Pragmatically the aim was to improve the design and quality of goods, and behind this lurked an aesthetic of daily life which owed much to Morris. Though Arts and Crafts enthusiasts took Morris’ ideas about art on board, they were not always prepared to accept his socialism. Ashbee, for example, though a socialist was a more conciliatory one than Morris. Ashbee’s biographer Alan Crawford has observed that his Guild was in the more radical wing of Arts and Crafts because it set out to solve the problem posed by the writer John Ruskin (1819-1900) of how to secure satisfying work in industrial conditions. Throughout the 1860s and 70s, Ruskin had been denouncing what he called the ‘Occult Theft’ of market capitalism and insisting that a true political economy should be concerned with the production, preservation and distribution of useful and pleasurable things. In his long work Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871), Ruskin insisted it was impossible to paint, read, examine the beautiful patterns of minerals or do any of the things he liked, amid environmental blight and human misery. In November 1883, he had famously taken the chair of a meeting in Oxford when William Morris had stunned the audience with his lecture on Art and Democracy by saying that the much vaunted economic progress of British capitalism produced only waste. Morris even invited Ruskin to join the first Marxist organization to be formed in Britain, the Social Democratic Federation, though Ruskin declined.

The rise of the socialist groupings in the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a rethinking of Liberalism. A key figure was the Oxford Idealist philosopher T.H. Green who sought to add a social dimension to individualism. His concept of social citizenship pervaded social settlements such as Toynbee Hall along with a movement for adult education, University Extension, which provided courses for thoughtful artisans and lower-middle-class students unable to gain access to universities. As well as propagating his ideas through the Guild, Ashbee gave lectures for Oxford University Extension, in which he fused arts and crafts with Green’s conception of social citizenship. The course on English Handicraft in West Wickham run by Ashbee in 1892-93, attracted local furniture workers and examined the relationship of the designer to craft workers and suggested how trade unions could contribute to developing design skills.

Eventually Ashbee, like others, would become disillusioned by the failure of the Extension movement to reach workers, but in a 1905 course aimed at carpenters, joiners, cabinet makers, metal-workers, masons and builders at the South West Polytechnic, The Workman and Craftsmanship, he made another attempt. The ambitious Ashbee took his students through the economic and social history of industry in Britain, including the medieval Guilds and raised contemporary sociological questions about the role of machinery and what he called the ‘humanizing’ of modern industry. Disdaining the demarcations of academic disciplines, along with mundane details like a reading list, Ashbee took a practical approach which included visiting buildings and museums.

Ashbee’s approach to education was innovative. Critical of the purely academic, as well as the narrowness of existing forms of craft education, he believed in learning through practical activity and his University Extension lectures show him dealing with specific crafts and then moving outwards to wider social and historical questions – a unity of hand and brain. He was in accord with progressive educationalists of the day who were rejecting purely academic ways of learning. The influence of Ruskin encouraged efforts to make the upper and middle classes less parasitic on manual workers’ labour. A pioneering progressive school for boys, Abbotsholme, was started by the educationist Cecil Reddie in Derbyshire in 1889 with a curriculum which taught a range of manual skills, from cookery to potato picking. A carpenter was recruited from the Guild to go up and help with the teaching of furniture making and pieces of Guild work are still at the school.

Ashbee saw the Guild as an educational and social model of how co-operative association could develop every individual’s creative capacity. It was to be a site for nurturing new relationships of social citizenship in practice. In an 1892 lecture to the Architectural Association, published in his A Few Chapters in Workshop Re-Construction and Citizenship (1894) Ashbee insisted that those who argued ‘social questions and ethics’ had no place in art was wrong. No doubt thinking of his ongoing argument on this very topic with his close friend, the art critic, Roger Fry, Ashbee used the platform of the A.A. to assert:

The origin of style lies not in the theories, not in the forms of Art, but in the social relations of men to men … in the leisure they may have for the thinking out of problems and the creation of forms. In short, the origin of style is a social not an artistic question.These new social relations for Ashbee were not just about external change, they involved inner, spiritual and personal sentiments. Here, too, he was in tune with a wider cultural radicalism. During the late nineteenth century a questioning of established religion contributed to interest in unorthodox Christian doctrines and Eastern religion. A secular search for alternative personal ethics led to attempts to find new simple lifestyles in country cottages, to experiments with free love, with vegetarianism and bohemian clothing. Heterodoxy thus extended beyond the distribution of material goods to debates about how to live and how to be. This rethinking of relating and being included efforts to comprehend all forms of sexual desire.

While he was at Cambridge, Ashbee had come under the influence of the socialist advocate of the simple life and sexual freedom, Edward Carpenter. Carpenter, too, had taught in University Extension and then escaped to a small holding in Millthorpe in Derbyshire. When the socialist movement formed in the 1880s, he became known as an advocate of ‘simplification’ in everyday life, proposing stone floors, bees-waxed boards, recycled clothes and nudism. Carpenter was inspired by the American poet, Walt Whitman’s vision of personal fellowship and union with nature. He cultivated Ashbee and his friends at King’s, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Roger Fry, and encouraged Ashbee to see love between ‘comrades’ as the source for new kinds of human relationships. Carpenter’s comradeship was not only political and spiritual but sexual. In 1894, he wrote a pamphlet called Homogenic Love, a remarkably courageous defence of homosexuality which was then a criminal offence.

Entwined in Ashbee’s vision of the social citizenship fostered by the Guild was his own homoerotic attraction to young working-class men. Fellowship was at once social and personal; recruitment was based partly on the intuitive rapport Ashbee felt towards a potential Guildsman. In 1894 he described the spirit of direct, open community which would presage social relations in the future as the ‘Whitmanic love of comrades’.

On the sexual aspect of this love he was circumlocutory; not only was homosexuality illegal it tended to enter public discourse in the context of scandals or denunciations of decadence. This made it all the more important to stress the lofty spiritual character of attraction to one’s own sex. When Ashbee was courting Janet Forbes, a stockbroker’s daughter, in 1897, he offered her loyalty and reverent affection, while issuing the announcement:

Comradeship to me so far – an intensely close and all-absorbing personal attachment ‘love’ if you prefer the word, for my men and boy friends, has been the one guiding principle in life. 

It was a bewildering statement for a Victorian woman, still in her teens and shielded from sexual knowledge.The marriage survived, albeit with some tensions, and the resourceful Janet Ashbee became a committed supporter of the Guild in Chipping Campden. She was also an advocate of lifestyle changes such as dress reform, adopting bohemian sandals along with fishermen’s smocks which enabled her to move freely, though she possessed a strong streak of commonsense and joked about the stringencies of some simple lifers who adopted diets of bananas and brown bread.

In a less extreme form, ideas of an alternative lifestyle, along with Arts and Crafts designs featured in both the socialist and the feminist movements of the 1900s. While the upper middle class bought the new décor in Liberty’s elegant department store, lower middle-class and working-class Manchester vegetarian socialists could sit proudly in the Clarion newspaper’s café in Market Street, with its arts and crafts decoration. For women of slender means there were the aesthetic dresses designed by Ann Macbeth at the Glasgow School of Art made from cheaper materials like linen and cotton with detachable embroidered collars.

However the high cost of most Arts and Crafts products jarred with Ashbee’s social aims. The Achilles heel of the movement was that working-class people were unable to afford the aesthetic commodities produced by craft labour. The Arts and Crafts Guilds were competing with the machine in a period when scientific management was beginning to break down skills and replace them with repetitive actions which could be reproduced exactly. This way of organizing the labour process greatly enhanced the possibilities of mass production. It did not however provide for the creative skill of workers to be expressed.

Some Arts and Crafts enthusiasts saw the introduction of machinery into production as a kind of contaminating blight, but this was not Ashbee‘s position. While he had been profoundly influenced by Ruskin’s rejection of modernity, he had acquired, from his liking of Walt Whitman, a fascination with the energy and majesty of new forms of technology and production. 

The Arts and Crafts Movement which took off in the United States during the 1890s wrestled with precisely these polarities. As in Britain, it emerged alongside ethical and social anxieties about the human devastation which an unbridled capitalism left in its wake. The influence of Arts and Crafts extended beyond art institutions to community projects. Among these was the social settlement Hull House, modelled on Toynbee Hall and set up in Chicago in 1889.

In 1900, on a trip to America, Ashbee met the then relatively unknown architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who showed him round Chicago. Though Wright was inclined to scoff at arts and crafts as sentimental and argue that the artist should be in control of technology, the two men became close friends. Ashbee never celebrated the machine as Wright did, but, like Morris and Carpenter, he did not dismiss technology either. In his An Endeavour Towards the Teaching of John Ruskin and William Morris: Being a Brief Account of the Work, the Aims and the Principles of the Guild of Handicraft in East London (1901), Ashbee explained:

‘Broadly, the revival [of Arts and Crafts] implies a rebellion against inutilities, a conviction that machinery must be relegated to its proper place as the tool and not the master of the workman, that the life of the producer is to the community a more vital consideration than the cheap production which ignores it, and that thus the human and ethical considerations that insist on the individuality of the work man, are of the first importance.’The machine, of course, was to win. Technological imperatives and the drive for profit, rather than the human needs of workers determined production processes. In 1908, during an economic downturn, Ashbee’s Guild was forced to close, though individual craft workers stayed on in Chipping Campden. With hindsight it is evident that the economic odds were stacked against the Guild of Handicraft; indeed it is a tribute to Ashbee and the Guild members that it survived so long. 

Arts and Crafts’ protest against how things were made and consumed had arisen in a period when the capitalist economy seemed to be stagnating. In the years of the Great Depression an excess of competition was reducing the profitability of commodities. However, from the mid 1890s, capital was finding ways of increasing productivity through technological innovation and new kinds of organization of the labour process. A ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ was underway and nowhere was it more evident than in the United States, able to attract wave upon wave of young eager immigrant labour and able to rely on a vast internal market. By 1920 the vibrant, if brutal, American economy had overtaken Britain to become the main global power. Against the mighty Massachusetts mills, arts and crafts workshops looked puny indeed.

The social vision of Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft, with its emphasis on every worker as an individual with creative potential came to seem irrelevant in the era between the wars when scientific management ruled supreme. The argument over the relation of craft skill to the machine was increasingly fought out on the sidelines of the productive system in craft workshops which were divorced from production. Henceforth modernity belonged to the machine, rather than the establishment of new patterns of work for all workers. Over time Ashbee would move closer towards Walter Gropius’ early vision of the Bauhaus – the designer-craft worker in close connection to modern industry, attuned to, rather than subordinated by, technology. Mass production had become an established fact which might be modified but was not going to be transformed.

Towards the end of the 1930s in Britain and in North America, clashes between labour and capital eventually forced big employers to concede higher wages and shorter hours. This new working class, having learned the rules of the game, knew how to bargain for cash and time through increasing productivity. They were not out to make labour more joyous, they were after monetary rewards and leisure.The Arts and Crafts Movement, along with the simple life associated with it, came to seem cranky and backward-looking.

In recent decades however the social wing of the Movement that Ashbee represented can be seen as containing a critique of production for production’s sake. Modern capitalism has proved adept at generating things and devising new types of technology, yet the escalation of productive capacity has not been accompanied by a corresponding enhancement in the quality of human relationships and daily life. New technology determines the patterns of work in more and more kinds of jobs, including the professions. Instead of enabling human control and creativity, it increasingly determines how employees’ activities are structured and how both public and private services are provided. Dissatisfaction with work and stress in the workplace are pervasive and go too deep to be wafted away by aromatherapy.

Hence the questions Ashbee posed about the purposes of production, about the workers’ relation to technology, about the creative expression of skill and about the human relations of the work place are not of purely historical interest. Though the circumstances of the early twenty-first century differ, his preoccupations are still relevant. The arts and crafts effort to connect art, labour and living may have vanished into an underground stream for several decades, but it contains insights much needed today. Further Reading 

Sheila Rowbotham is currently working on a biography of Edward Carpenter. She would like to thank Felicity Ashbee for her assistance with this article.