Conclusion

Summary

Morris placed a premium on the openness and tolerance of any society worthy of the adjective, utopian. Individuality would be prized above conformity; neighbourliness and fellowship would prevail over self-interest and resignation; hospitality would guard against insularity and protectionism. Although these values are most fully expressed in Morris's late political fictions, there is a close affiliation between them and the medievalism that informs the achievements of his entire career. One facet of this medievalism – a recurring interest in the archaic ideal of unconditional hospitality – proves particularly responsive to analysis of Morris’s ‘tolerance’. I have argued that Morris moved from a medievalist concern with monarchical, monastic and aristocratic largesse towards less hierarchical formulations of this ideal. The first change occurs when Morris visits Iceland and witnesses the extramural conception of home favoured by the society of farmers he found there. With the growth of his interest in socialism, he came to favour a communitarian attitude towards guests, informed less by noblesse oblige or tribal conceptions of the folk than by the traditions of the socialist meeting house and the popular myths of collective effort invoked by guild socialism. The great hall thus becomes the guest house. It is clear, nevertheless, that Morris's capacity for accommodating difference was not limitless; and indeed that the concept of hospitality itself depends upon exclusivity, no matter which interpretation of it one considers. Morris unashamedly emphasizes the continued importance of the home and the household in the utopian situation. In so doing, he confesses pragmatic as well as principled reliance on limits, on a sense of belonging and community.

Considered in a wider historical context, Morris's interest in ‘guesting’ represents but one of a range of aesthetic and political evocations of hospitality, taking as their source the Romantic fascination with, and re-evaluation of, outsiders. When combined with the social organicism favoured by commentators like Pugin and Cobbett, and with the age-old tendency to associate a perceived decline in manners with a descent into atomism, this way of conceiving relations between house and world informs a range of agendas. What Radicals, Tory Radicals, neo-Catholics, Pre-Raphaelites, ethnographers of the Germanic world and guild socialists had in common was a conception of the Middle Ages that emphasized a superior way of organizing relations between men.