Posted by Duncan on November 16, 2002 at 17:29:52 from 205.188.209.46 user Duncan.
In Reply to: Re: HULLABALOOS posted by Duncan on November 16, 2002 at 17:09:37:
Just a thing on the elitism of the question of 'frivolous' or 'unproductive' or 'uneducative' 'fun'.
It's probably elitist whether it comes from an 'old' paternalist 'centre-right' perspective or the inter-war radical perspective BUT... the William Morris/Ruskin tradition as it entered the labour movement after the first world war was very into 'rational recreation' and even the idea of recreation and work 'merging' - work would be transformed as to become a pleasure. Therefore rational recreation would often be hard work but would be enjoyable because of its ability to 'improve' or to result in a material product (therefore horse-riding would be elevated above gambling - unless somebody could prove that gambling improved your Maths I suppose, but they didn't really think about that...) Not having read the right books (in this specific area) I've never known what W.G Collingwood made of the reappearance of Ruskin's ideas in the political setting of labour politics. There is no doubt that Ruskin did, himself, take some interest in radical and embryonic labourist politics but by the 1920s he was being tied together with Morris (who would seem to be one of AR's political educators) as the parental figures of a peculiarly English version of radical socialism that set a lot of store on art and aesthetics and was sometimes accused of being a touch Utopian, although often in a 'romantic' ruritanian tradition, preferring country societies to urban societies when imagining the 'Socialist Commonwealth' to come... Sorry - I realise other people may not be as interested in this side of things as I am, but I think there's a lot more for us to learn here, in the context of AR. It was the socialist romantics (after Morris, people like Edward Carpenter, and Robert Blatchford who edited the Clarion newspaper which is our only evidence of AR being interested in socialist politics before his Russian adventures - he was a subscriber) who championed the promotion of often very wholesome art in the name of socialism which was taken advantage of by the likes of Edith Nesbit, who wrote socialist songs...
An interesting, if entirely irrelevent 'N.B': bizarrely there was another Arthur Ransom (no 'e') who wrote for the Clarion around the time AR was subscribing; there's one reference in the autobiography of them meeting during the 'bohemian' days. AR knew Nesbit and her nasty husband (!) quite well; they were socialist activists, many of their 'bohemian' friends were active either in the socialist or the theosophist (!) or sometimes both movements. I haven't read Bohemia in London sadly - is there much reference to these activities?
Duncan