Oscar at the Nicholson 1880s

In 2000 the British Library held an exhibition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of Oscar Wilde. One of the flyers at the exhibition advertised a public meeting that Wilde spoke in Leek in the early years of his fame.

The meeting held on Monday February 25th 1884 at the Temperance Hall in Union St saw the Irish born writer lecture on ” the House Beautiful” for members of Leek Art Classes. William Challinor chaired the meeting. Among the sponsor of the event were much of the establishment of the town including the Challinors, Thomas Wardle, Thomas Shaw and the Nicholson family.

A number of local clergymen also attended the event including the Reverends Berrisford, Wright and Evans Belcher. The cost of attending the meeting was 2 shillings and 6 pence for an adult and 11 shillings for families.

The poster printed by Mr Marks of 6 Derby St requested the audience to be in their seats by 7.30pm. “Carriages may be ordered by 10”. The site of the Temperance Hall is now occupied by Leek College extension”.

Oscar returned to Leek in March 1885, this time the lecture he delivered was held at the Nicholson Institute which had opened the previous autumn. The meeting on that occasion was chaired by Joseph Challioner. Wilde at one point in the proceedings commented on the beauty of the Nicholson commenting that few towns could have boasted of such a wonderful facility. Challioner at the beginning of the meeting commented that the attendance was limited due to unforeseen circumstances. I wonder what they could have been. The weather, the room, or the lack of advertising for the event? It seems curious that the attendance was down on his visit from the previous year as Wilde had established almost celebrity status both in the UK and abroad. He had met such distinguished writers as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain on the American tour and had his artistic sensibilities had been parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan in “Patience” a few years earlier.

One interesting fact is the interesting choice of material that Wilde choose for the subjects of both talks in Leek “ The House beautiful” and “Dress” were both the subjects of lectures he gave in the US 18 months early so they lectures he gave in Leek were of rehashed material and not new.

Wilde rose to applause and began to speak on the chosen topic of dress. He would have given a polished performance as he lectured on this subject on his tour of the US in 1882. He spoke on the different types of costume worn by the Ancient Egyptians and the Greek as being the most beautiful and natural there had ever been. He also mentioned the disposable nature of fashion and that an item of clothing could be fashionable one moment and then outmoded the next. He felt that men took a delight in being behind the times in matters relating to clothing.

“Art would gain immensely by improvement in dress. Art was now an affair of the studio, but the proper place for its study was the streets of our towns and cities”

Image especially dress was an important aspect of the personality that Wilde created for himself. It gives no account in the March 1885 newspaper of the clothing that wore but studio photographs taken 3 years earlier give a clear impression of the type of clothing that Wilde wore when giving a lecture. He dressed flamboyantly. At 6 foot 3 inches Wilde cut an imposing figure when the average height for a man would have been 5 foot 7 inches. It would seem that he based his dress on the Masonic dress that he wore when a member of a Masonic lodge in Oxford especially the knickerbockers and the short jacket. He also pioneered men wearing a fur coat. One was especially made for the American tour of 1881-2: the coat meant a great deal to Wilde and he asked about its whereabouts when he was released from Reading Jail shortly before his death in 1900.

There is a mystery surrounding the second visit that Wilde made to Leek in that his name does not appear in the Nicholson Institute visitors book despite the fact that the Nicholson had opened in October 1884. Why should be the case? It may well be that the unforeseen circumstances mentioned in the opening remarks by Challioner may not have made the visitors book available

A possible reason why Wilde’s name does not appear in the Nicholson Institutes visitor book is that the building was only completed in the autumn of 1884 some months after Wilde’s visit. I have been carrying out some research on the 1890s in North Staffordshire and what does seem clear that many well known writers passed through the area in the period before the First World War such as Wilde, Shaw, Wells and I had heard an interesting story that Conan Doyle got the idea for the plateau in “ Lost World” following a walking tour of the area in 1910 and admiring the outline of the Roaches. Anyway, back to Oscar and one always is at risk fiddling with Oscar and facts. After the great man said that the truth is rarely pure and never simple.

William Morris and Japan

The great Victorian artist, designer, poet, writer and socialist William Morris founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, lived and worked in Leek between 1875 and 1878.

Morris interest in Leek was the consequence of an interest in returning to the colours in dyes derived from natural materials. He came to the town several times from February 1875 onwards some time staying for several weeks working with Thomas Wardle the brother in law of his works manager George at his dye works at Hencroft.

 Morris was faced with working conditions that were the consequences of industrialisation. He regarded one of the worst aspects of factories was the tendency to chain workers to a single repetitive task. Morris would describe in a lecture of the 1880s that the modern factory as “a temple of overcrowding and overwork” His anti factory system writings drew on his Leek experience. For the first time he came across the social consequences of capitalism and its impact upon people. The poor huddled together beside gigantic factories in houses the size of dog kennels. He also saw the spoliation of rivers and the increase in atmospheric pollution which he concluded were the consequence of unrestricted capitalism. The 19th century had a profound impact upon Leek, in the 1870s has seem its population triple from the beginning of the century. This growth in its textile industry would result in it becoming one of the centres of the British silk industry. At the start of his first stay Morris initial opinion about Leek was favourable. He thought the town not nearly as bad as he anticipated and in a letter to his wife described the countryside around as being beautiful.

He lodged with the local industrialist Thomas Wardle  in his substantial house in St Edward Street. Morris became obsessive with the goal of producing prefect original colours naturally. Both Wardle and Morris spoke to older dyers who remembered how they did things before synthetic dyes were introduced. Morris would write back to friends and family chronicling the experiments and the search for natural dyes that he and Wardle were enthusiastically embarking upon but it was the search for the perfect blue that dominated Morris’s time and energy.

 He became an expert at the process, one could almost say obsessive, knowledgeable on the problems of oxidation identifying the smell of “stinking meat” which indicated that the dye was ready. He was” hands on” in this hunt and when he returned to London it amused his friends to discover that his hands were bright blue. It caused embarrassment to him when he was out and about in the capital and he was nervous about gaining admission to the premier of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera “The Sorcerer” because of the state of his stained hands. While away from Leek he fretted and became engaged in a protracted correspondence with Wardle about the experiments in colour this correspondence is described by Morris’s biographer Fiona McCarthy as being amongst the most remarkable business letters ever written. Morris became more and more demanding and began to loose his temper

“They have been very trying: but I wish I hadn’t been such a fool: perhaps they will turn me out tomorrow or put me in a blue vat”.

Ultimately Morris was dissatisfied with the Leek experience although he continued working on these problems during the following decade.

They are a number of tangible legacies of William Morris time in Leek one being the interest he took in the Leek School of Embroidery which was founded by Mrs Wardle in the 1880s. He offered to design a rug for her woolwork and sending items to a textile museum that she created. Fiona McCarthy believes the most moving aspect of his time in Leek is the existence of so many Morris style church embroidered items- many of them still in use in local churches.

Another monument to Morris in the town was the establishment of the William Morris Labour Church shortly after his death by Larner Sugden. The art work in the church owed a great deal to many followers of Morris in the Arts and Craft movement.  The church had red painted walls with stencilled tracery. Woodwork was painted green and the curtains that hung there were blue velvet of one of Morris’s designs.

Interest in William Morris in Japan was evident within a few years of his death. 316 studies on Morris were published there between 1897 and 1975, the majority of which were written before the outbreak of the Second World War. Early interest in Morris’ writings primarily had to do with his social thought, which was described in Japanese as “artistic socialism”. The 1930s were the golden decade for Morris studies in Japan. In 1934 as a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of his birth, an exhibition of the works of William Morris was held in Maruzen, Tokyo.

In 2008 a major exhibition of work by Morris was held at  Momak Kyoto entitled Arts & Crafts from Morris to Mingei

On reclaiming William Morris

During the early 80s my parents visited the dacha or summerhouse of the Russian composer Tchaikovsky outside Moscow. My father commented about the homosexuality of the composer. Despite all the evidence to the contrary the guide declared that Tchaikovsky was not gay.

This anecdote came into my mind following a visit to the National Trust property Wightwick House just outside Wolverhampton. It id a splendid Arts and Craft inspired house built in the 1890s by the paint manufacturer Manders family. It was inspired by a Oscar Wilde lecture that one of the family attended in 1884 on the House Beautiful. The house is filled with the art of the Pre Raphaelite Movement central to which is William Morris. The influence of Morris in the place was palpable. There was a plaque of Morris with the words “artist, craftsman and designer” surrounding his image. The house and its contents were certainly beautiful. But there is one think that is missing in all the displays that was that Morris was a socialist and a Marxist one at that. Incidentally so was Oscar Wide!  In the same way that the Soviets were pained by Tchaikovsky’s sexuality it seems that the National Trust appear embarrassed by Morris’s political belief. It was central to his work. A driver of the Arts and Craft movement was a rejection of the excesses of late capitalism of the Victorian era. Fiona McCarthy’s biography that came out in 1995 has a chapter on the impact that witnessing the living conditions of the workers in Leek had on leading Morris to embrace a radical response. We do a great injustice to Morris if we attempt to neuter him by overlooking his politics. He saw his passion for the cause as an extension of his work as an artist and a designer. He put it very simply: "nothing can argue me out of this feeling," he wrote, "which I say plainly is a matter of religion to me: the contrasts of rich and poor are unendurable and ought not to be endured by either rich or poor." It could serve as a creed for today