The Conspiracy of Good Taste: William Morris, Cecil Sharp, Clough Williams-Ellis and the Repression of Working Class Culture in the 20th Century.

The Conspiracy of Good Taste examines the process by which middle-class intellectuals, artists, and philanthropists effectively suppressed the development of a coherent working-class culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Szczelkun focuses on three paradigmatic figures: the writer and designer William Morals; educator and folk-song collector Cecil Sharp; and town planner Clough Williams-Ellis. Szczelkun begins by analyzing the way in which Morris, the "icon of the truly socialist artist," attempted to revive a mythic pre-industrial past in which work and art were united in a utopian form of creative labor. Morris's ultimate aim, as Szczelkun notes, was not the encouragement of a proletarian culture, but rather the "moral improvement" of the working class through exposure to this organic art. The elitism of Morris's outlook is evident in his belief that only a handful of particularly gifted members of the working class can be expected to "elevate their means of expression from the daily jabber to which centuries of degradation have reduced it."

Szczelkun's second subject, Sharp, is one of the originators of the institutionalized concept of "folk music." Sharp was engaged in a search for the "roots" of a British national culture. Along with several other collectors, he took control of the English Folk Song Society in order to promulgate his belief that "traditional songs are a great instrument for sweetening and purifying our national life and for elevating and refining popular taste." During the early twentieth century Sharp emerged as an important theorist concerned with re-structuring musical education in Great Britain. In his influential book English Folksong: Some Conclusions (1907), he notes: "Let the Board of Education introduce the genuine traditional song into the schools and I prophesy that within the year the slums of London and other large cities will be flooded with beautiful melodies, before which the raucous, unlovely and vulgarizing music hall song will flee as flees the night mist before the rays of the moming sun." Sharp's version of the "traditional" folk song required the suppression of all sexual and class-specific references and the regularization of oral singing traditions through the imposition of a strict harmonic code. Szczelkun describes this as part of the process whereby the culture of the working class is "stultified, backdated, modified, cleaned up" and then "sold back" to them as the "genuine article."

Szczelkun's final study is of Williams-Ellis, an influential urban theorist and designer during the mid-twentieth century. Like Morris (and Prince Charles today) Williams-Ellis was a stern opponent of the dehumanizing effects of industrialized society on the built environment. But, as Szczelkun points out, he failed to differentiate in his criticism between the deleterious effects of real estate speculation and attempts by workers of limited means to create their own architectural styles. Thus he castigates the aesthetically insensitive working-class home owner whose "pink asbestos roof [screams] its challenge across a whole parish from some pleasant upland that it has light-heartedly defaced."

One of the chief targets of Williams-Ellis's outrage were the shacks, shanties, and "chalets" built by the urban working class on small plots of land on the outskirts of cities such as London. These structures, which proliferated during the 1930s and '40s, were made possible in part by the growing leisure time enjoyed by the working class as the result of decades of organized struggle. As Williams-Ellis writes, ". . . it is chiefly the spate of mean building all over the country that is shriveling up old England--mean and perky little houses that surely none but mean and perky little souls could inhabit with satisfaction . . . Cultivated people of all classes must deplore what is happening." During the 1940s and '50s the "self-building" movement faced growing opposition from organizations such as the National Trust and Council for the Preservation of Rural England. Williams-Ellis played a central role in this process, which was accelerated following the passage of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act that advocated the "deconcentration" of urban, working-class housing. Where Williams-Ellis saw a "blot on the landscape" in shanty housing, Szczelkun views it as the "beginning of a new postmodern urban vernacular. A real working-class architecture."

Szczelkun's book concludes with a useful, albeit brief, outline of the development of the concept of "taste" in modern aesthetic philosophy. Using Howard Caygil's important book Art of Judgment (1989) as a starting point, he attempts to relate the work of English and German Enlightenment philosophers (Alexander Baumgarten, Immanuel Kant, Lord Shaftesbury, Johann Herder, Frances Hutcheson, and David Hume, among others) to the social and economic context in which it was produced, specifically the emergence of a politically coherent "middle class." He also provides a spirited critique of Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of taste in Distinction (1979). The Conspiracy of Good Taste manages to condense a vast range of material into a very succinct analysis. If there is some sacrifice in depth it is more than compenseted for by the fact that Szczeikun advances an intelligent and provocative argument about the interrelationship of class and the aesthetic at a time, in the U.S. at any rate, during which issues of class are increasingly seen as either passe or irrelevant.

Szczelkun is the founder of Working Press, a press founded in London in 1987 that is committed to "questioning and challenging the existing definition of working class identity . . ." and "bringing to light working class artists." Working Press publications include Merylyn Cherry's study Towards Recognition of Working Class Women Writers (1991), that responds to the general neglect of working-class women novelists within literary studies and examines the work of writers such as Ethel Carnie, an early Trade Unionist, and Ellen Wilkinson, a Labor MP, as well as Francis Reed's On Common Ground (1992), which examines the historical and current function of "commons," or public lands, in Great Britain. The press has also published a collection of posters produced by the international anti-copyright network; Conrad Atkinson's State of the Art & Art of the State (1990); and Crossing Black Waters (1991), a book by Shaheen Merali and Allan DeSouza that offers an analysis of the culture of British imperialism from the point of view of two contemporary Asian artists. Working Press can be contacted at 85 St. Agnes PI., London, SE11 4BB, U.K. U.S. distribution is through AK Distribution, P.O. Box 40682, San Francisco, CA, 94140-0682.