The Routledge Companion to William Morris 2020025276, 2020025277, 9780415347433, 9781315229416

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Visions Not Dreams: Morris as Designer, Socialist, Entrepreneur, Poet … 
Part I: Morris’s Life, Family, and Environs
Part II: Art: Preservation, Interior Design, and Adaptation
Part III: Literature: Poetry, Art, Translation, and Fantasy
Part IV: Literature and Socialism
Part V: Books: Collecting and Design
Note
Part I Morris’s Life, Family, and Environs
Chapter 1 Morris Biographies
Notes
References
Chapter 2 Business in the Creative Life of William Morris
Introduction
The Morris Family in Business
Morris and the Firm
Morris the Business Leader
Establishing the Morrisian Community of Taste
Morris as Cultural Icon
The Kelmscott Press
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 3 Morris, Gender, and the Woman Question
The Women in Morris’s Life
Morris and Socialist Feminism
Patterns in Morris’s Literary Portrayals of Women
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 4 ‘Kelmscott Manor. Mr Morris’s Country Place’ (1871–1896)
The Question of Sources
PART I. Literature Review: State of Knowledge on Morris at Kelmscott
PART II. New Study on Morris’s Relationship with Kelmscott
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
References and Further Reading
Chapter 5 ‘What came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire’: Morris and Iceland
Synopsis
Introduction: Why Morris Went to Iceland and Why It Matters
Iceland in the Victorian Imagination
Earlier Discussions of the Icelandic Journals
The Personal and the Spiritual
The Journalist, the Poet and the ‘Travel Writer’
Morris’s Impact in Iceland
Sustaining Morris’s Legacy
The 1960s Revival of Fantasy Fiction
Morris the ‘Travel Writer’ Rediscovered
Morris’s Influence on Fantasy Genres: Literature, Games, Comics and Film
Iceland Today
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography of Readings and Works Cited
Part II Art: Preservation, Interior Design, and Adaptation
Chapter 6 Morris and Architecture
Literature Review
Notes
Chapter 7 William Morris and Stained Glass
Morris’s Role in the Manufacture of Windows
Art, Decoration and Medievalism: The Status of the Medium
All Saints Selsley
All Saints Middleton Cheney
St. John, Torquay
The Later Years
Notes
List of Works Cited
Chapter 8 William Morris and Interior Design
Design in Britain 1850
William Morris and Design
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (1861–1875)
Morris & Co. (1875–1940)
Conclusion
Notes
References and Further Reading
Chapter 9 William Morris and the Culture Industry: Appropriation, Art, Critique
Introduction
1 Gardens
2 The Red House
3 The William Morris Gallery
4 Kelmscott House
5 Kelmscott Manor
6 Morris & Co.
7 The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings
8 The Bauhaus
9 William Morris and the Atom
10 Morris Kitsch
11 Jewel Point
12 Big Red Propeller
13 Announcer
14 We sit starving amidst our gold
15 Love is Enough: William Morris & Andy Warhol
16 The World Stage: Jamaica
17 ‘I do not want art for a few any more than I want education for a few or freedom for a few’
References and Further Reading
Part III Literature: Poetry, Art, Translation, and Fantasy
Chapter 10 A Question of Ornament: Poetry and the (Lesser) Arts
Notes
References and Further Reading
Chapter 11 Making Pictures: Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite Poetics and Its Reception
Notes
References and Further Reading
Chapter 12 William Morris and the Classical Tradition
Formation
Translations
Adaptations
Polemics
Calligraphy: Horace and Virgil
Notes
References and Further Reading
Chapter 13 A Very Animated Conversation on Icelandic Matters: The Saga Translations of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon
Notes
References and Further Reading
Chapter 14 Rewilding Morris: Wilderness and the Wild in the Last Romances
Wild Writing
Wild Places
Wild Selves
Wild Societies
Notes
References and Further Reading
Chapter 15 Windy, Tangible, Resonant Worlds: The Nonhuman Fantasy of William Morris
Hope, But Not For Us
Disconnections
Subcreation and Secondary Worlds
Battle of the Books
After Morris
Conclusion: The Case for Anemia
Notes
References and Further Reading
Part IV Literature and Socialism
Chapter 16 William Morris and British Politics: From the Liberal Party to the Socialist League
William Morris and the Liberal Party 1876–1883
The Shift to Socialism
Morris’s Engagement with Politics as a Socialist
Notes
Further Reading
Chapter 17 News from Nowhere in the Museum of Literary Interpretations
Objects
Role of William Guest
Genre
Characters
Gothic
Conclusion
Notes
Further Reading
Chapter 18 William Morris and THE Literature and Socialism of the Commonweal
The Pilgrims of Hope
A Dream of John Ball
News from Nowhere
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited:
Further Reading:
Chapter 19 Desire and Necessity: William Morris and Nature
Introduction
Development of Morris’s ‘Green’ Thought
Acknowledgements
Notes
Further Reading
Chapter 20 Morris and Marxist Theory
I. Marx, Morris and the Socialist Movement in Fin-de-Siècle Britain
II. ‘Socialism from the Root Up’
III. Romanticism and Marxism: Morris’s and Marx’s Elective Affinities
IV. Alienation, Production and Sensuous Emancipation
V. Revolution, Dual Power and the Transition beyond Capitalism
Notes
References and Further Reading
Part V Books: Collecting and Design
Chapter 21 William Morris’s Book Collecting
Notes
References and Further Reading
Chapter 22 William Morris and The Kelmscott Press: Towards an Aesthetics of Environment
Notes
References and Further Reading: William Morris and the Kelmscott Press
Index of Proper Nouns
Index of Places
Index of Selected Titles of Creative Works

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO WILLIAM MORRIS

William Morris (1834–96) was an English poet, decorative artist, translator, romance writer, book designer, preservationist, socialist theorist, and political activist, whose admirers have been drawn to the sheer intensity of his artistic endeavors and efforts to live up to radical ideals of social justice. This Companion draws together historical and critical responses to the impressive range of Morris’s multi-faceted life and activities: his homes, travels, family, business practices, decorative artwork, poetry, fantasy romances, translations, political activism, eco-socialism, and book collecting and design. Each chapter provides valuable historical and literary background information, reviews relevant opinions on its subject from the late-nineteenth century to the present, and offers new approaches to important aspects of its topic. Morris’s eclectic methodology and the perennial relevance of his insights and practice make this an essential handbook for those interested in art history, poetry, translation, literature, book design, environmentalism, political activism, and Victorian and utopian studies. Florence S. Boos is the author of two books on Morris’s poetry. She has also edited several of his works, and is the general editor of the William Morris Archive. Cover image credit: William Morris, portrait by George Frederic Watts, 1870. National Portrait Gallery.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO WILLIAM MORRIS

Edited by Florence S. Boos

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Florence S. Boos to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boos, Florence Saunders, 1943- editor. Title:The Routledge companion to William Morris/ edited by Florence S. Boos. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge art history and visual studies companions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020025276 (print) | LCCN 2020025277 (ebook) | ISBN 9780415347433 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315229416 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Morris,William, 1834-1896–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR5084 .R68 2021 (print) | LCC PR5084 (ebook) | DDC 821/.8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025276 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025277 ISBN: 978-0-415-34743-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-22941-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To all who have taken inspiration from Morris’s works Nay, with the dead I deal not; this man lives

CONTENTS

List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgments

x xvii xxi

Introduction: Visions Not Dreams: Morris as Designer, Socialist, Entrepreneur, Poet … Florence S. Boos

1

PART I

Morris’s Life, Family, and Environs

25

1 Morris Biographies Michael Robertson

27

2 Business in the Creative Life of William Morris Charles Harvey, Jon Press and Mairi Maclean

40

3 Morris, Gender, and the Woman Question Florence S. Boos

58

4 ‘Kelmscott Manor. Mr Morris’s Country Place’ (1871–1896) Julia Griffin

87

5 ‘What came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire’: Morris and Iceland Martin Stott

vii

145

Contents PART II

Art: Preservation, Interior Design, and Adaptation

167

6 Morris and Architecture Chris Miele

169

7 William Morris and Stained Glass Jim Cheshire

188

8 William Morris and Interior Design Margaretta S. Frederick

207

9 William Morris and the Culture Industry:Appropriation,Art, Critique Compiled by David Mabb

227

PART III

Literature: Poetry, Art, Translation, and Fantasy

259

10 A Question of Ornament: Poetry and the (Lesser) Arts Elizabeth Helsinger

261

11 Making Pictures: Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite Poetics and Its Reception David Latham

278

12 William Morris and the Classical Tradition William Whitla

302

13 A Very Animated Conversation on Icelandic Matters: The Saga Translations of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon Paul Acker 14 Rewilding Morris:Wilderness and the Wild in the Last Romances Phillippa Bennett 15 Windy,Tangible, Resonant Worlds:The Nonhuman Fantasy of William Morris John Plotz

332 343

368

PART IV

Literature and Socialism

385

16 William Morris and British Politics: From the Liberal Party to the Socialist League Frank C. Sharp

387

viii

Contents

17 News from Nowhere in the Museum of Literary Interpretations Tony Pinkney

404

18 William Morris and the Literature and Socialism of the Commonweal Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

422

19 Desire and Necessity:William Morris and Nature Patrick O’Sullivan

442

20 Morris and Marxist Theory Owen Holland

465

PART V

Books: Collecting and Design

487

21 William Morris’s Book Collecting Yuri Cowan

489

22 William Morris and The Kelmscott Press:Towards an Aesthetics of Environment Nicholas Frankel

501

Index of Proper Nouns Index of Places Index of Selected Titles of Creative Works

523 530 532

ix

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

4.6

William Morris. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Emma Morris, Morris’s mother. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery Emma Morris Oldham. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery Jane Morris, 1879. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery May Morris, 1886. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery Georgiana Burne-Jones, Photograph: Frederick Hollyer, 1882. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery Aglaia Coronio, carte de visite. Courtesy of the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery Illustration based on a drawing by William J. Stillman, in Emma Lazarus,‘A Day in Surrey with William Morris’, The Century Magazine, 1886 May Morris, Kelmscott Manor, reproduction of untraced watercolor. James Douglas, Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet Novelist Critic, 1904 Gordon Bottomley, W.M’s Dragon, from the south-east, photograph, 8 May 1923. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest Edward Hort New, pen and ink drawing, Tapestry Room, Kelmscott Manor, October 1895. Courtesy of the Clark Memorial Library Hanslip Fletcher, Green Room at Kelmscott, watercolour, 1899.This shows Morris’s work table in the middle, relocated from the Tapestry Room within three years of Morris’s death. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest Hanslip Fletcher, Tapestry Room at Kelmscott, watercolour, 1899. Showing the no longer extant guest bedroom, also known as the Batchelor’s Bedroom, on the far left. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest x

59 61 62 66 69 70 94 110 111 120

121

123

Illustrations

4.7

4.8

4.9 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8

Hanslip Fletcher, William Morris’s Bedroom at Kelmscott, watercolour, 1899. Showing the ‘Workman’s’ washstand designed by Ford Madox Brown, used in conjunction with German stoneware. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest Edmund Hort New, Dining Room at Kelmscott, original pen and ink drawing, 1898. Showing Strawberry Thief (1883) wall hangings. Unused illustration originally commissioned for John William Mackail’s Life of William Morris (1899). Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest Jenny Morris in the Panelled Room at Kelmscott, March 1902. Courtesy of the Cheltenham Trust Diary, 1924, May Morris. Society of Antiquaries. Photograph: Martin Stott Diary, 1924, May Morris. Society of Antiquaries. Photograph: Martin Stott a: Chris Leo, architect, Elm House,Walthamstow. J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 1899. b: Plaque at former location of Elm House,Walthamstow. Photograph: Chris Miele G. E. Street,All Saints, Boyne Hill, Maidenhead, early 1850s. Courtesy National Monuments Record, Swindon. Kelmscott Church, conserved by Micklethwaite. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery St. John,Torquay, tracing of original design for east window by Edward Burne-Jones. Photograph: Jim Cheshire Drawing of Red Lion Square, Edward Burne-Jones. Courtesy of the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection The Attainment, from the Holy Grail series, Stanmore Hall. Morris & Co., 1891–94. Courtesy of the University of California, Haithi Trust Garden, Red House, 2017. Photograph: David Mabb Red House Jigsaw, Red House, 2017. Photograph: David Mabb William Morris Gallery. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest William Morris Behind the Curtain at Kelmscott House, 2017. Photograph: David Mabb Harold Wilson, 1976. Harold Wilson MP is shown here pointing to socialist ephemera during the Society’s opening event at Kelmscott House in 1976. Photograph:The William Morris Society Kelmscott Manor, Boerkevitz at the English language Wikipedia CC-BY-SA-3.0 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons /c/cf/KelmscottManor1.JPG Morris & Co. 17 George Street, Hanover Square, London. Photographer and date unknown Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 2017. Photograph: David Mabb

xi

125

128 135 155 156 170 174 184 199 211 219 228 229 231 233 234 235 236 237

Illustrations

9.9 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13 9.14 9.15 9.16 9.17 9.18 9.19 9.20 13.1 18.1 18.2 22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4 22.5

Bauhaus building, Dessau,Walter Gropius (1925–26),Von Lelikron - Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Bauhaus_Dessau#/media/File:Dessau_Bauhaus_neu.JPG Senior Ratings Mess with William Morris ‘Rose’ Fabric Seat Covers, HMS Courageous. Photograph: Ele Carpenter David Mabb, A Provisional Memorial to Nuclear Disarmament, 2016. Photograph: David Mabb Daisy Print Wellington Boot. Photograph:Tamara Henriques Gisele Amantea, Jewel Point, 1996 installation, Burnaby Art Gallery Left to right: daisy, bunny, lizard, cray flower, acanthus. Flock on paper backed fabric. Photograph:Trevor Mills David Mabb, Big Red Propeller 2001, paint on fabric 48”× 60”. Photograph: David Mabb David Mabb, Announcer, 2014, facsimiles of ‘Kelmscott Chaucer’ mounted on canvas, acrylic glue, paint wood.William Morris Gallery, 2015. Photograph: David Mabb David Mabb, Announcer, Page 2, facsimiles of ‘Kelmscott Chaucer’ mounted on canvas, acrylic glue, paint wood. Photograph: David Mabb Jeremy Deller, We sit starving amidst our gold, painted by Stuart Sam Hughes, 2014. Photograph: Paul Tucker, courtesy Jeremy Deller Love is Enough:William Morris & Andy Warhol, curated by Jeremy Deller, Modern Art Oxford, 2015. Designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio. Photograph: Modern Art, Oxford Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, 2013, oil on canvas, 72”× 60” ‘I do not want art for a few any more than I want education for a few or freedom for a few’. Poster by Jeremy Deller, Scott King and William Morris Eiríkr Magnússon, before 1872, Saga Eiríkr Magnússon, 1933. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery Opening Chapter, A Dream of John Ball, Commonweal, November 13, 1886. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive Opening Chapter, News from Nowhere, Commonweal, May 24, 1890. Image courtesy of the William Morris Archive Colophon, The Story of the Glittering Plain, Kelmscott Press (1894). Univerity of Iowa Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive Opening, The Earthly Paradise, Kelmscott Press, 1896. University of Iowa Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive Opening, A Dream of John Ball, Kelmscott Press, 1892. University of Iowa Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive Frontispiece, News from Nowhere, Kelmscott Press, 1892.Washington University Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive Acanthus Wallpaper, Morris & Co., 1875. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum xii

239 241 241 243 245 246 247 248 249 251 254 255 333 428 432 503 506 508 510 512

Illustrations

22.6 22.7

Opening,“From the Upland to the Sea,” in Poems By The Way, Kelmscott Press, 1892. University of Iowa Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive Opening, The Poems of John Keats, Kelmscott Press, 1894. University of Maryland Library

513 517

Tables 4.1 4.2 19.1 19.2

Schedule of William Morris’s Documented Visits to Kelmscott Manor (1871–1896) Selection of Morris’s work undertaken at, and/or inspired by, Kelmscott ‘Modes’ of modern environmentalism and their ideological underpinnings ‘Green’ themes and ideas detectable in News from Nowhere

104 114 443 445

Plates 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

4.7

4.8

4.9

Frederick Evans, Kelmscott Manor, east façade, 1896. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest Kelmscott Manor Visitors’ Book, entry documenting the Morrises’ visit, 1896. B.L.Add. MS. 45212, f. 6. Courtesy of the British Library Kelmscott Manor Visitors’ Book, 1892. B.L.Add. MS. 45212, f. 2. Courtesy of the British Library Frederick Evans, Kelmscott Manor: Side from Garden, detail, 1896. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest Morris’s work table, Dining Room, Kelmscott Manor, 2018. Photograph: Julia Griffin Frederick Evans, Tapestry Room, Kelmscott Manor, photograph, 1897. North-east corner showing one of two writing tables, which the photographer erroneously intended to title the ‘Bard’s “Writing Corner”.’ Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest Frederick Evans, Tapestry Room, Kelmscott Manor, photograph, 1896. Morris’s work table with newly printed copy of the first Kelmscott Press publication, The Story of the Glittering Plain. Courtesy of the Morgan Library Frederick Evans, William Morris’s Bedroom, Kelmscott Manor, photograph, 1896. Showing the four-poster in the final year of Morris’s life covered with his Wandle printed cotton. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest Frederick Evans, Green Room, Kelmscott Manor, photograph, 1896. Showing Kennett (1883) wall hangings. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest xiii

Illustrations

4.10

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10

7.11

Frederick Evans, The Panelled Room, Kelmscott Manor, photograph, 1897. Showing Morris & Co. printed cottons, including Rose and Thistle (1881) curtains. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, David Hunter McAlpin Fund Map of Morris's 1871 Journey, Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 8, 1911, p. 251a Þingvellir. Photograph: Martin Stott Þórsmörk. Photograph: Martin Stott Diary, 1924, May Morris. Society of Antiquaries. Photograph: Martin Stott Norwegian House, Stykkishólmur. Photograph: Martin Stott Philip Webb, Red House. Photograph: Stephen Cadman, CC BY-SA 2.0 Kelmscott Manor, 2017. Photograph: Julia Griffin All Saints Selsley, Nave South Window, designed by Edward BurneJones, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1862. Photograph: Jim Cheshire All Saints Selsley,Apse Window, designed by Ford Madox Brown, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1862, Photograph: Jim Cheshire All Saints Selsley,Apse Window, designed by D. G. Rossetti, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1862. Photograph: Jim Cheshire All Saints Selsley, Chancel South Window, designed by William Morris, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1862. Photograph: Jim Cheshire All Saints Middleton Cheney, East Window made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire All Saints Middleton Cheney, East Window detail of St. John, designed by Ford Madox Brown, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire All Saints Middleton Cheney, East Window detail of King David, designed by Simeon Solomon, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire All Saints Middleton Cheney, East Window detail Eve and St. Mary, designed by William Morris, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire All Saints Middleton Cheney, East Window detail of the Tribes of Israel, figures by Simeon Soloman, banners by Philip Webb, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire St. John,Torquay, East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.With the kind permission of the churchwardens of St. John’s, Torquay ‘Courts of Heaven’ design by Edward Burne-Jones for St. Michael Lyndhurst, c. 1862 copyright Fitzwilliam Museum (object 721, dept of Paintings Drawings and Prints,‘record id 26631’)

xiv

Illustrations

7.12

7.13 7.14 7.15 7.16 7.17 7.18 7.19 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 12.1 12.2 12.3

12.4

St. John,Torquay, detail of St.Agnes Panel East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.With the kind permission of the churchwardens of St. John’s,Torquay St. Peter and St. Paul Over Stowey, Somerset. North Aisle East Window, designed William Morris, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1872. Photograph: Jim Cheshire St. Mary, Nun Monkton,Yorkshire, East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1873. Photograph: Jim Cheshire Church of Jesus,Troutbeck, Cumbria, East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1873. Photograph: Jim Cheshire St. Martin, Brampton, Cumbria, East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris & Co., 1880–81. Photograph: Jim Cheshire St. Paul, Morton, Lincolnshire, North Transept North Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris & Co., 1892. Photograph: Jim Cheshire St. Philips Cathedral Birmingham, Chanel East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris & Co., 1885. Photograph: Jim Cheshire St. John,Torquay,West Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris & Co., 1890. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.With the kind permission of the churchwardens of St. John’s,Torquay “If I Can” tapestry wall hanging, 1857. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive “La Belle Iseult,”William Morris, 1858. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery Murals, Oxford Union Debating Hall. Courtesy of Oxford University Library King Rene’s Honeymoon Cabinet. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum Green Dining Room,Victoria and Albert Museum. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum Hammersmith, woven-wool carpet by Morris & Co., Holland Park, 1883 Morris, Illumination of Horace, Odes (1874), Bk I, Odes xxvi–xxviii. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library Morris, with Edward Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, Horace, Odes (1874), Opening of Bk II. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library Morris, Burne-Jones, and C. F. Murray; border by Graily Hewitt, illumination of Virgil, Aeneid (1874–75), opening of Bk I, ll. 1–5, Venus disguises Aeneas with mist on the shores of Libya. Private Collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images Morris, Burne-Jones, and C. F. Murray; gilding by Graily Hewitt, illumination of Virgil, Aeneid (1874–75), Bk I, ll. 6–33. Private collection, UK. Juno in her peacock chariot outside Carthage. Private Collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images

xv

Illustrations

13.1 13.2 13.3 22.1 22.2

Calligraphic Manuscript,“Ballad of Christine,” A Book of Verse, 1870. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum Odin, Charles Fairfax Murray, Calligraphic Manuscript, The Story of the Ynglings. Courtesy of the Society of Antiquaries, MS. 906 Initial Calligraphic Manuscript, The Story of the Ynglings. Society of Antiquaries, MS. 906. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive Opening, The Glittering Plain, Kelmscott Press, 1894. University of North Carolina. Courtesy of Archive.org Opening, Child Christopher, Kelmscott Press, 1892. University of Iowa Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive

xvi

CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Acker is professor emeritus of English at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Revising Oral Theory and co-editor of both The Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Mythology and Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend. He has translated two Icelandic sagas and is currently translating a selection of Icelandic ballads. Phillippa Bennett is senior lecturer in English at the University of Northampton. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of William Morris Studies and has previously served as honorary secretary and vice chair of the William Morris Society in the United Kingdom. She was awarded the Peter Floud Memorial Prize in 2004 for her research on William Morris, and she has since published widely on Morris and his last romances, including her book Wonderlands, The Last Romances of William Morris (2015) and William Morris in the Twenty-First Century (2010), which she co-edited with Rosie Miles. Florence S. Boos is professor of English at the University of Iowa and the general editor of the William Morris Archive. She is the author of The Design of Morris’s The Earthly Paradise and History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1856–1870, as well as the editor of Morris’s The Earthly Paradise and Socialist Diary. She has also published an anthology of poems by Victorian working-class women and Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women:The Hard Way Up. Jim Cheshire is associate professor of Cultural History at the University of Lincoln and works on nineteenth-century visual and material culture,Victorian medievalism, and literary celebrity. His latest monograph, Tennyson and Mid-Victorian Publishing: Moxon, Poetry, Commerce was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016, and he has recently written essays for the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, the Bloomsbury Cultural History of the Interior, and 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Yuri Cowan is professor in the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, specializing in book history, nineteenth-century literature, and medievalism. He has published articles on topics including William Morris, the Aesthetic Movement, ballad anthologies and the history of editing, Victorian sporting periodicals, and the reprinting of Victorian fantasy in the 1970s. His current book project is titled William Morris and Medieval Material Culture, and he is beginning to write about the portrayal of book technology in science fiction. He is also a founding editor of the xvii

Contributors

online peer-reviewed open-access journal Authorship and is currently co-editor of Book History, the journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). Nicholas Frankel teaches English at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of many books and essays on Victorian aestheticism and book design, particularly as they concern the work of Oscar Wilde. These include Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (2000), Masking the Text: Literature and Mediation in the 1890s (2009), a facsimile edition of Wilde’s The Sphinx (2010), Charles Ricketts: Everything for Art (2014), Oscar Wilde:The Unrepentant Years (2017), The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde (2018), and The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Selection (2020).An annotated edition of Wilde’s short fiction is forthcoming from Harvard in 2020, followed by The Invention of Oscar Wilde (Reaktion Books) in 2021. Margaretta S. Frederick is the Annette Woolard-Provine Curator of the Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art at the Delaware Art Museum. Her published and exhibition work has focused on all aspects of the collection with particular emphasis on women artists of the PreRaphaelite circle, including Marie Spartali Stillman and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. She is currently co-editing the collected letters of May Morris with Anna Mason. Julia Griffin (née Dudkiewicz) is a Courtauld-trained art historian and curator specializing in Victorian art and design. Her PhD explores William Morris and D. G. Rossetti’s occupancy of Kelmscott Manor (Central Saint Martins, UAL). She is academic co-editor, with Andrzej Szczerski, of Young Poland:The Polish Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890–1918 (Lund Humphries, 2020), and co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition under the same title at the William Morris Gallery opening in autumn 2021. Other publications include contributions to May Morris. Art and Life (William Morris Gallery, 2017) and William Morris (Thames and Hudson and V&A, 2021.) She was previously principal curator at the Guildhall Art Gallery, collections manager at the Society of Antiquaries and assistant curator at Watts Gallery. Charles Harvey is professor of Business Strategy at Newcastle University Business School. He holds a PhD in International Business from the University of Bristol. His research focuses upon the historical processes that inform contemporary business practice, entrepreneurial philanthropy, and the exercise of power by elite groups in society. He has a longstanding research interest in the life and career of William Morris. Elizabeth Helsinger is professor emerita of English, Art History, and Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. A co-editor of Critical Inquiry, she is the author of Poetry and the PreRaphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (2008), Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013), and other books and articles on literature and other arts. Current projects include a monograph, Conversing in Verse: Poetry and Conversation. Owen Holland has taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature at Jesus College, Oxford and in the English Department at University College London. His first book, William Morris's Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics and Prefiguration, was published with Palgrave in 2017, and his second monograph, examining British responses to the Paris Commune of 1871, is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press. Since 2015, he has been the editor of The Journal of William Morris Studies. David Latham teaches Victorian studies at York University in Toronto and edits The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies. He is the co-general editor, with Lesley Higgins, of the ten-volume edition of The Collected Works of Walter Pater (Oxford). His books, chapters, and articles are on Victorian and Canadian literature; three of his books and more than thirty of his chapters and articles are on Morris. xviii

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David Mabb is an artist and Reader in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. He works with appropriated imagery to rethink the political implications of different aesthetic forms in modern art and design history. His work has been established internationally, most recently at Bildmuseet, Umeå (2016–17); Z33, Hasselt (2017); and Konstmuseum, Malmö (2018). Recent solo exhibitions include Focal Print Gallery, Southend (2014) and the William Morris Gallery, London (2015). Mairi Maclean is professor of International Business and associate dean of faculty in the School of Management, University of Bath, the United Kingdom. She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her research interests include historical organization studies, business elites and elite power from a Bourdieusian perspective, and entrepreneurial philanthropy. Chris Miele is an architectural historian and town planner.Trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, he has lived and worked in central London for many years.There he is a partner in a property consultancy where he specializes on projects involving new development and historic buildings and conservation areas. Alongside that, he continues to work as an independent scholar and has published widely on Victorian and Georgian architecture. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (2013) and Framed:The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2008); co-editor of Teaching William Morris (2019); and editor of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Political Writings (Oxford UP, 2021). Currently she is completing a new monograph titled Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, 1830s–1930s. Patrick O’Sullivan taught Environmental Science at various UK colleges and universities for some thirty-five years, and was co-editor, with Stephen Coleman, of William Morris and News from Nowhere (Green Books, 1990). He is a former editor of the Journal of William Morris Studies. He spent much of the first half of 2019 helping to write the British Labour for a Green New Deal, adopted as policy that September. Tony Pinkney is senior lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He has published William Morris: The Campaigning Years, 1879–1895 (2007) and William Morris: The Blog (2011), and has written a good number of theoretically oriented essays on Morris’s work. He is looking forward to imminent retirement when, as at the end of Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, he wants ‘to try out some different kinds of writing’. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University; his books include Time and the Tapestry: A William Morris Adventure and, most recently, Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. He edits the B-Sides feature in Public Books and hosts the podcast Recall This Book. Jon Press is the managing director of GrangePark Consulting and also runs a business restoring vintage musical instruments. He was formerly registrar and professor of Business Entrepreneurship at Falmouth University and higher-education strategy consultant for Tribalgroup PLC. He has co-authored many books and articles with Professor Charles Harvey on topics ranging from design history to international mining, business ethics, and corporate governance.

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Michael Robertson is professor of English at the College of New Jersey. He is the author of three award-winning books; the most recent is The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy (Princeton UP, 2018), a group biography of William Morris and three contemporaries. His current book project is a biography of Morris. Frank C. Sharp is an independent scholar who has written on many subjects relating to William Morris and his circle. He is co-editor of The Collected Letters of Jane Morris, and he is currently editing The Further Collected Letters of William Morris. Martin Stott is a former chair of the UK William Morris Society. He organized the Society’s trip to Iceland in the steps of William Morris in 2013, and his photographs illustrate the ‘Icelandic Journals’ in the William Morris Archive. He had a career in UK local government responsible for the delivery of environmental services including planning, waste management and sustainable development, latterly as director at Warwickshire County Council. He lives in Oxford and is chair of his local Labour Party. William Whitla is professor emeritus and senior scholar in English and Humanities at York University,Toronto, with graduate degrees in English and Theology from Toronto and Oxford. He has published five books and numerous articles on critical thinking, literary study, and Victorian studies, most recently Victorian Literature: An Anthology (with Victor Shea, 2014).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Over the years since the initiation of this project and publication, many persons have contributed significantly to its completion. I owe most to my twenty-one fellow authors, from whose insights here and in other contexts I have learned much. My association with the William Morris Societies in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States has also enabled me to meet and benefit from the work of scholars in varied fields and several countries, many of whom are represented in this volume. The William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow has been especially generous in providing images and information, and in addition I wish to thank all those contributors who provided photographs, among them Paul Acker, James Cheshire, Nicholas Frankel, Julia Griffin, David Mabb, and Martin Stott. I am especially grateful to Kimberley A. Maher, the project manager for the William Morris Archive and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, for her expert completion of the months-long task of preparing and documenting our illustrations.Additional appreciation must go to Angela Jeannette, for her helpful suggestions and aid in organizing the index, and finally, to the several editors at Routledge, especially Katie Armstrong and Christine Selvan, for their meticulous suggestions and help with many details. The dedication, a fitting epigraph for the ideals of this volume, is taken from Morris’s sonnet “To Grettir Asmundson,” first published in A Book of Verse and later included as the prefatory poem to his co-translated The Story of Grettir the Strong. For nearly 50 years, all my acknowledgments have included reference to my late husband William Boos (1943–2014), who on the completion of a project always invoked Chaucer’s “Go (not-so) little book!” In this spirit, my contributors and I ardently hope this new Companion to William Morris will aid many to a fuller appreciation and enjoyment of Morris’s work. Florence S. Boos September 1st, 2020 Iowa City, Iowa and Gibsons, British Columbia

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INTRODUCTION Visions Not Dreams: Morris as Designer, Socialist, Entrepreneur, Poet … Florence S. Boos

As most who open this volume will know, William Morris (1834–1896) was an English poet, decorative artist, translator, romance writer, calligrapher, book designer, preservationist, journalist, political leader, and theorist of socialism and the decorative arts. For what is now approaching a century and a half, his admirers have been drawn to the beauty, interconnectedness, and farsightedness of his artistic endeavors and efforts to live up to radical ideals of social justice. Influential in his day as a major literary figure, avant-garde designer, and socialist polemicist, in recent years Morris has also attracted further attention as the author of fantasy narratives, travel writings, and utopian literature. He is widely credited as a pioneer of modern fine press book design and major instigator of the Arts and Crafts movement. Moreover, as a social thinker whose blend of egalitarian and artistic ideals offered a flexible alternative to doctrinaire political systems, he is remembered as one of several nineteenth-century pioneers who campaigned for communal ideals and the preservation and renewal of natural and built environments.The sheer multiplicity of Morris’s endeavors has repeatedly intrigued observers, who have sought to grasp their underlying patterns and sources of creative power and, even more importantly, to apply these in variegated ways in the present. In the immediate decades after his death, Morris’s artwork, writings, and memory remained directly influential in Britain, Europe, North America and elsewhere, and after a slight dip in favor at midcentury, these have all enjoyed a remarkable resurgence of attention since the 1970s. Some attempts have been made to chronicle and assess a part of this trajectory, for example, in major bibliographies such as Gary Aho’s annotated William Morris: A Reference Guide (1985), David and Sheila Latham’s An Annotated Critical Bibliography of William Morris (1991) with biannual supplements in the Journal of William Morris Studies from 1992 onwards, or Peter Faulkner’s short but useful Fifty Years of Morris Studies: A Personal View (2013), which reflects on the many volumes devoted to Morris that the author has read, edited, or reviewed over a long scholarly career. Notably, over the ten-year period 2004–2013 alone, the Lathams identify no fewer than 796 articles, books, and exhibition catalogues devoted entirely or in part to Morris’s works. Even these comprehensive guides are, moreover, more inclusive of scholarship in English than in other languages, and more often identify works of criticism or history rather responses in the form of art or other creative works. Morris referred to himself as an artist (letter to Andreas Scheu, 15 September 1883, Kelvin 2: 230), and his wide influence on the decorative arts has been honored in a series of major 1

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exhibitions of his works and those of his fellow Pre-Raphaelites held in recent years in Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These have variously emphasized his chosen environments, such as Red House and Kelmscott Manor; his work as architectural preservationist, interior designer, and pioneer of fine book design; and, to a lesser degree, his socialist ideas and activism. Several of these have attempted to trace a genealogy of successors, among them Beauty and Anarchy:William Morris and His Legacy, 1860–1960 (National Portrait Gallery, 2014–15), in which its curator, Fiona MacCarthy, identifies twentieth-century design successors in such enterprises as the early-twentieth-century Garden City Movement, the Dartington Hall crafts community founded in the 1920s, and contemporary low-cost modern furniture designs intended to bring beauty to the masses. Moreover, recent artists have approached Morris designs from interestingly varied viewpoints; in “We Sit Starving Amidst Their Gold,” Jeremy Deller (b. 1966) images a dark-haired anarcho-revolutionary Morris hurling a large yacht into the sea; David Mabb (in this volume) explores some of the paradoxes of tribute and appropriation against a background of twentieth-century Morrisean/Marxist imagery; and Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) inserts his portraits of contemporary Jamaicans into lushly rendered Morris-patterned settings. Morris and Co. designs have similarly inspired Russian furniture designer Dmitry Naydenko (b. 1981) and have been reworked in the decorative art and paintings of Russian-Swiss Polina Demidova (b. 1986). Nor has Morris’s poetry been entirely neglected by musicians; following in the tradition of Gustav Holst’s Three Songs [by Morris] and Cotswold Symphonies and Imogen Holst’s Homage to William Morris, in 2010 Ian McQueen’s The Earthly Paradise premiered with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in London, and in 2014 Mike Roberts’“Fellowship Symphony” in honor of News from Nowhere was performed by the Cantate Youth Choir and Fellowship Orchestra. Some causes and/or results of this wider popular recognition may include the public reopening in 2011 of the newly restored Red House, originally designed in 1859 by Morris, Philip Webb, and their friends; the renovation and expansion of the William Morris Gallery, reopened in 2012; and the efforts of the Kelmscott House Museum and William Morris Societies of the United Kingdom (founded 1955), the United States (founded 1971), and Canada (founded 1981) to publicize Morris’s legacy through lectures, publications, and tours—for example, to retrace the itinerary of his 1855 tour of French cathedrals and his 1871 journey to Iceland. In addition, several symposia and international conferences in 1996 (Oxford), 2000 (Toronto), 2005 (London), 2005 (Birmingham), 2010 (Delaware), and 2010–11 (Montreal) have brought together those of kindred interests and prompted the publication of several essay collections (William Morris Centenary Essays, eds. Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston, 1999; Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris, ed. David Latham, 2007; William Morris in the 21st Century, eds. Phillippa Bennett and Rosie Miles, 2010; To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss:William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams, eds. Michelle Weinroth and Paul LeDuc Browne, 2013). In addition, a burgeoning reprint market has made Morris’s literary works more conveniently available, though often in editions sadly lacking in care and design.The rise in digital editions has also made it possible to envision the gathering of Morris’s vast writings and images of his calligraphic manuscripts and book designs in more accessible form, as in the William Morris Archive (ongoing, founded 2005). Likewise, the explosion of digital media has made Morris designs more available for websites and general use, prompting Facebook pages and appreciation groups, in one case as far afield as Russia (on VKontakte). And as Morris moves into the classroom, aided by youthful interests in fantasy and alternative-world fictions, new collections and instructional videos and recordings explore ways of presenting his works to university and younger audiences (Journal of William Morris Studies, special issue 17.2, ed. Rosie Miles, 2007; Teaching William Morris, eds. Jason Martinek and Elizabeth C. Miller, 2019). Meanwhile, Morris’s 2

Introduction

political, utopian, and romance writings have been provided with new translations in German, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, as well as first translations into Romanian, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. Equally important may be shifts in political concerns, at least in Britain and the United States, where increasing income inequality, militarization, intensifying environmental depletion, and the monolithic stranglehold of neo-liberal political parties make Morris’s appeals for revolutionary change in economic and social relations seem urgently relevant. His political prose has aged well in its clear-headed rejection of a social order based on competition, and its counterbalancing, deeply felt imaging of a new society of radical equality and meaningful work for all. In the introduction to her 1994 biography William Morris: A Life for Our Time, Fiona MacCarthy suggests that “What is special about Morris is the way in which his ideas and personality have outlasted events and issues of the time into our own aspirations and concerns.” She adds that quarrels over individual issues should not distract from the vigour and to many the terror of his underlying message, which was the abandonment of capitalism itself and its replacement by more equitable, humane social structures. It is to this generous, immense and sweeping challenge that the left in Britain has returned, with a curious compulsion, through the century.William Morris has provided a voice of inner conscience. (xvi, xviii). The vastness and multiplicity of Morris’s endeavors precludes any one writer from dealing adequately with all, or even many, of these initiatives, and thus suggests the value of a volume such as this Companion to draw together critical responses to Morris’s multi-faceted accomplishments. Each of the following chapters, all by authorities in their field, provides necessary historical and/or literary background detail, reviews some of the relevant late-nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century contributions, and offers new insights into its subject. Inevitably, critical and scholarly emphasis on the different aspects of Morris’s personality and work has shifted over time in line with the drastic alterations in the political and artistic landscape throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and these essays confirm and extend some of these trends. On the one hand, the precision and scope of what is now known about mid- and latenineteenth-century Britain has increased remarkably during recent decades, offering continual surprises even to those who have devoted their lives to this field. Accordingly, the study of Morris and his circle has benefitted from important research aids; these include the five volumes of Morris’s Collected Letters, edited by Norman Kelvin from 1984 to 1996 (with another volume edited by Frank C. Sharp expected soon); the previously-mentioned acclaimed 1994 biography, William Morris: A Life For Our Time, by Fiona MacCarthy (discussed by Michael Robertson in Chapter 1), followed by Robertson’s own more compact portrayal in The Last Utopians: Four Late-Nineteenth Century Visionaries (2017); and the 386-page A Bibliography of William Morris by Eugene LeMire (2006), supplanting earlier, less accurate and incomplete accounts, and supplemented by his 1969 checklist of Morris’s lectures and socialist manuscripts. Other major compilations and histories include William Peterson’s 1991 The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographic Adventure, and two works co-edited with Sylvia Holton Peterson, The Kelmscott Chaucer: A Census (2011) and The Library of William Morris: A Digital Catalogue (ongoing); a useful compilation of contemporary reviews of Morris’s works, William Morris: The Critical Heritage, edited by Peter Faulkner; and related editions such as the Collected Letters of Jane Morris, edited by Jan Marsh and Frank C. Sharp. As mentioned earlier, the William Morris 3

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Archive seeks to make available online images of Morris’s articles and books published in his lifetime, including Kelmscott Press editions, as well as all available manuscripts and other supplementary materials. In this context, several essays in the Morris Companion significantly extend our factual knowledge of Morris’s environs (Chapter 4, Julia Griffin; and Chapter 5, Martin Stott), art production practices (Chapter 7, Jim Cheshire; and Chapter 21,Yuri Cowan, book collecting), and education and self-education (Chapter 6, Chris Miele; and Chapter 12,William Whitla).Increasingly, too, critics of Morris have sought to place him in the context of wider political, literary, and artistic movements, viewing him not only as an outstanding individual but also as a moving force within the cross-currents of his time. Morris appears in this volume against the broader backgrounds of Victorian business (Chapter 2, Charles Harvey, Jon Press, and Mairi Maclean), preservationist practices (Chapter 6, Chris Miele; and Chapter 7, James Cheshire), interior decoration (Chapter 8, Margaretta Frederick), Liberal Party and socialist thought (Chapter 16, Frank C. Sharp; Chapter 17,Tony Pinkney; and Chapter 20, Owen Holland), and book design (Chapter 22, Nicholas Frankel). Morris’s sometimes-marginalized contributions in translation are assessed in Chapters 12 (Whitla) and 13 (Paul Acker), and the less-explored qualities of his increasingly respected prose romances/fantasy writings are featured in Chapters 5 (Stott), 11 (David Latham), 14 (Phillippa Bennett), and 15 (John Plotz). Several authors also interpret Morris’s ability to merge genres and centuries (Chapter 10, Elizabeth Helsinger; Chapter 11, Latham; and Chapter 15, Plotz), while these and others ponder Morris’s contemporary reception and its implications for the present (Chapter 5, Stott; Chapter 9, David Mabb; and Chapter 15, Plotz).Two major trends in the wider critical landscape are also reflected in the excitement generated by the utopian implications of Morris’s socialist writings (Chapter 17, Pinkney; Chapter 18, Elizabeth Miller; and Chapter 20, Holland) and his pioneering and prescient eco-socialism (Chapter 19, Patrick O’Sullivan; also a motif in Chapter 8, Frederick, and Chapter 22, Frankel). My own essay, Chapter 3,“Morris, Gender, and the Woman Question,” offers tribute to feminist readings of Morris’s work as well as his contributions to the socialist-feminist debates of his time. I have arranged this volume into five parts: “Life, Family, and Environs”, “Art: Preservation, Interior Design, and Adaptation,” “Literature: Poetry, Art, Translation, and Fantasy,” “Literature and Socialism,” and “Books: Collecting and Design.” Each of these categories inevitably overlaps the others to some degree, and the essays themselves complement and support one another from varied perspectives. In what follows, I will give brief comments on some notable features of each chapter, and in conclusion will gather suggestions and observations for future Morris criticism.

Part I: Morris’s Life, Family, and Environs Chapter 1: In opening this volume, Michael Robertson’s “Morris’s Biographies” explores three topics at once: Morris’s life, his biographers and critics, and the art of biography itself. He assesses each of the three great biographies—those by J. W. Mackail (1899), E. P. Thompson (1955, rev. ed. 1977) and Fiona MacCarthy (1994)––as products of the intellectual currents of their time, but also notes the many other contributions provided along the way by Morris’s family, political associates, editors, critics, and less-remembered biographers. Robertson points out Mackail’s striking silence regarding Morris’s private life, revealing “the way in which Victorian biographical conventions of reticence colluded with patriarchal ideology to erase women from the accounts of men’s lives,” and notes the counterbalancing contributions made to an understanding of Morris’s personal qualities by May Morris, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Bernard Shaw, and J. Bruce Glasier. He explains the debates over the degree to which Morris’s socialism was 4

Introduction

Marxist and revolutionary, explicitly addressed by R. Page Arnot’s 1964 William Morris: The Man and the Myth and E. P.Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955, 1977), but he also gives credit to the alternative approaches of now-superseded biographies by Philip Henderson and Jack Lindsay. He especially admires Norman Kelvin’s introductions to his fourvolume edition of Morris’s letters for their assessments of the latter’s work for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Kelmscott Press, his book collecting, and his response to the artistic modernism of the fin de siècle. Most notably, Robertson traces the rise of feminist criticism in the context of revelations about the Morrises’ private life and Jane Morris’s affairs with Dante Rossetti and Wilfred Scawen Blunt, discussing more recent contributions by Jan Marsh,Wendy Parkins, and, especially, Marsh and Frank C. Sharp’s Collected Letters of Jane Morris (2012), which allowed Jane for the first time to speak for herself but also exposed the deep pain that Jenny’s illness caused to both her parents. Robertson also identifies a second suppressed narrative in Morris’s business career, considered for the first time from an economic perspective by Charles Harvey and Jon Press’s William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain (1991). And finally, he applauds the originality and agenda of Fiona MacCarthy’s 1995 William Morris:A Life for Our Time “to present Morris in all his complexity”; her discerning interpretation of the artistic and sensuous aspects of Morris’s socialism; and her tact in acknowledging the uncertainties of his personal life. Interestingly Robertson notes that hers is a characteristically contemporary biography in its plenitude and “novelistic concern with character,” citing John Updike’s view that in their rich detail and attention to setting, such recent biographies approach “novels with indexes.” Chapter 2: In “Business in the Creative Life of William Morris,” Charles Harvey, Jon Press, and Mairi Maclean explore an aspect of Morris’s life often taken for granted, his thirty-five-year career as a businessman. The authors argue that this was not a backdrop to his other activities but an important part of his identity, enabling many of his other endeavors, and they illustrate their claims through a careful account of his business decisions and practices, examining the stages of his biography and artistic career from the perspective of his economic choices. They note Morris’s familiarity with business practices through his family background, his careful initial marketing of the products of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company to Gothic Revival firms and others, the ways in which the reorganization into Morris and Company enabled him to increase his range of products as markets shifted to serve both middle-class homes and elite country houses, and his skillful advertising of both high-end and more affordable products to appeal to different clientele.The authors provide information on Morris and Co.’s rising profits, network of clients, distinctive pricing and business practices, and careful preservation of its reputation. They also explain how Morris’s transformation of his business into a partnership during the late 1880s and 1890s enabled him to maintain his income while freeing himself for his socialist endeavors even as his health declined. The authors’ account of the finances of the Kelmscott Press is especially interesting, as they refute prior assertions that the Press had been intended as a hobby without commercial aims; Morris used long-familiar forms of pricing and marketing for his new venture and, in most instances, obtained considerable profits. They observe that “Morris, as ever, was prepared to invest heavily in products about which he cared deeply,” and that like his other business ventures, this one enabled him to research craft processes and to further his literary and artistic projects. They conclude that Morris could easily have expanded Morris and Co. to increase his profits rather than preserving his time for his political and artistic pursuits, but the model of a “small and independent” enterprise expressed his preferences and offered “support, in one way or another, for all his artistic, cultural, literary, and political ventures.”The authors’ account of the consistency and ambition of Morris’s business practices leads one to wonder to what extent he 5

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sought to redirect his organizational and marketing skills when turning to his boldest venture, the promotion of socialism. Chapter 3: In “Morris, Gender, and the Woman Question,” I suggest that Morris’s views on gender, sexuality, and women’s roles developed largely in parallel with his life experiences, family relationships, and formulation of socialist ideas. He was never fully a feminist in the modern sense, but a comparison of his earlier and later literary works and public statements reveal that he adapted significantly in response to his experiences as husband, father, and political activist. New details on the lives of Jane (1830–1914), Jenny (1861–1935), and May Morris (1862–1938) confirm their active participation in his work and activities. In particular, May’s career, which extended into the third decade of the twentieth century, can be viewed as the embodiment of several of Morris’s ideals for women of the future. Morris’s literary works pay special heed to the psychological oppressions experienced by women within a patriarchal society, and his reflections on gender relations in News from Nowhere offer a nuanced response to the avant-garde socialist-feminist ideals of his day. His last completed prose romance, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, notably presents a genuinely socialist feminist view of an egalitarian communal society, in which equals of both sexes combine their efforts for the common good. Chapter 4: Julia Griffin’s “Kelmscott Manor: Mr. Morris’s Country Place (1871–1896)” provides a full account of Morris’s tenancy of his most famous home, associated intimately with his ideals and the setting of his utopian romance News from Nowhere. Many of the actual details of Morris’s residence at Kelmscott Manor have remained unexamined, and Griffin challenges several earlier claims, including the view that Morris initially leased the house with Rossetti chiefly in order to permit his wife to pursue an affair with the latter; that from the beginning, Morris preferred Kelmscott Manor above other locations; that he spent a great deal of time there throughout his tenancy; and that Kelmscott Manor represented a place of leisure rather than work. Griffin presents two tables to illustrate her points.The first indicates that in some years, Morris visited the Manor for as little as a week, but that after 1887, as he divested himself of the direct management of Morris and Co., his visits became more frequent, rising to a peak of 93 days in the last year of his life.The second table lists the literary and artistic works with which he engaged at Kelmscott—17 designs for Morris and Co., eight books, a poem and an essay, and several items for the Kelmscott Press—confirming that for him, Kelmscott was a working retreat. Morris also used the Manor for entertaining friends and business associates, and excursions to the surrounding area inspired a high proportion of the cases that he documented for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Increasingly, too, the Manor was used as a refuge for Jenny, whose epilepsy evoked stigma elsewhere. Griffin also examines contemporary records to uncover what is known of the Manor’s interior during the Morris tenancy and which features have since undergone alteration. Finally, she provides an account of life at the Manor after Morris’s death and considers the reasons which have led to its close association with his memory. Chapter 5: Martin Stott’s “‘What came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire’: Morris and Iceland” discusses Morris’s 1871 and 1873 Journals of Travel in Iceland in many contexts: biographically, as a transformative experience; as a source for his narrative poems and romances; as an outgrowth of his Icelandic readings and translations of medieval Icelandic literature; and as a partial influence on his developing political views. In addition to laying out Morris’s itineraries and emotions during his journeys, Stott examines some of the poetry these inspired and considers the Journals’ belated publication history and the reactions of modern critics. He also documents the favorable response of Icelanders to Morris’s visits, his fundraising campaign on behalf of Iceland during the famine of 1882, and the moving tributes paid to Morris by Icelanders at his death. He records May Morris’s three later visits to the island (in 6

Introduction

1924, 1926, and 1931), and explores the continuing resonance of Morris’s eco-socialism with the platform and ideals of contemporary Icelandic Greens, including a former prime minister. Stott also moves beyond Morris’s Victorian period to consider earlier and later accounts of Iceland, especially those of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice (Letters from Iceland, 1937) and most recently of Lavinia Greenlaw (Questions of Travel, 2011); changing public views of the island during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and the recent phenomenon of popular literature set in Iceland as represented by J. R. R.Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, G. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, and the television series by David Benioff and D. B.Weiss, Game of Thrones (2016–ongoing).An important feature of this chapter consists of Stott’s account of his own responses to the places visited by Morris, the mixed effects of increased theme-related tourism on the Icelandic landscape and economy, and the continuing influence of Morris’s Journals on several strands of contemporary culture.

Part II: Art: Preservation, Interior Design, and Adaptation Chapter 6: Chris Miele’s “Morris and Architecture” places Morris’s lifelong love of architecture, designs, and preservationist activities within a detailed account of the architectural fashions of his day. He notes Morris’s early emotional responses to buildings, suggesting that his family’s move from an original lovely home may have prompted his sensitivity to buildings and their demise. Miele explains the projects with which Morris would have been familiar as an assistant in the firm of G. E. Street, the level and nature of the tasks likely assigned to him, and the thencurrent highly-colored styles in Gothic restoration which influenced his later work. He differs from those who have found the design of Philip Webb’s Red House truly distinctive, noting that this resembled a larger version of Neo-Gothic vicarages of the 1840s designed by A.W. N. Pugin and William Butterfield, and observing the extent to which Webb’s design for the house’s frame determined much of its interior decoration. Miele also ranks G. E. Street and Gilbert Scott among the more careful and less destructive Victorian restorationists, and notes the extent to which Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. relied on such Victorian Gothic restorationists for early commissions, a dependence which would have been less necessary at the time of the founding of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Miele considers the rise of preservationist groups such as the Commons Preservation Society in the 1870s as a background for the formation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). Unlike the Anglican Church, the SPAB viewed ancient buildings not as structures for present-day use but as historical monuments, and the resulting clashes with ecclesiastical authorities limited the number of successful appeals in the Society’s early years. Miele identifies the organization’s most active members, including Morris, Webb, Morris and Co.’s business manager George Wardle, Thomas Wardle, surveyor Charles Vinall, and architect Hugh Thackeray Turner, and describes its then-innovative use of casework, with information acquired through press-clippings and local correspondents. Early successes came most often when the vicar was himself a restorationist, but as church attendance declined in rural areas and less money was available for ambitious renovations, the more preservationist practices of the SPAB gained increasing favor. Facing some backlash, Morris separated his political and restorationist activities so as not to harm the latter, but in essays such as his 1884 “Architecture and History,” he laid out a neo-Ruskinian, Marxist view of the relationship between buildings and the context of their construction. Miele concludes that although in the heat of forming the SPAB, Morris had “attacked the very idea of Gothic Revival,” his 1889 essay on “Gothic Architecture” represented a rapprochement with its ideals, and that his final views of architectural conservation, as embodied in the settings 7

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of News from Nowhere, reflect a return to his youthful ideals and passions. Morris’s legacy remains in modern-day expectations for preserving ancient sites, the SPAB’s promotion of high technical standards for conservation work, and the energetic networks of environmental and preservationist activism in the United Kingdom and North America. Chapter 7: Jim Cheshire’s “William Morris and Stained Glass” provides a detailed analysis of the developments in artistic glass manufacture represented by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company (after 1875, Morris and Co.) and identifies Morris’s own contributions at each stage. Early windows featured a variety of artists and styles, a practice which Cheshire traces in part to Morris’s admiration for Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic,” with its praise of autonomous artists collaborating, at times with rough rather than uniformly polished work, to create a harmonious whole. During the late 1860s, the range of artists used by the Firm became more restricted, and by the mid-1870s, Burne-Jones was its chief designer. Cheshire identifies a final stage in the 1880s and 1890s in which Morris and Burne-Jones collaborated to produce spectacular, less mimetic designs influenced by early medieval sources, including Byzantine mosaics. He also identifies an important paradox: although Morris firm designs were allegedly “medieval,” they departed from other revivalist work of the time in refusing to adhere to specific historical models, instead claiming status as the work of independent creative artists. Cheshire explains the processes used in preparing and mounting windows, including Morris’s role in selecting colors, supervising glass preparation, arranging leading, and ensuring an overall complementarity of individual panels. Morris contributed figure designs to early panels and at each stage provided patterned decorations and natural foliage to adorn and balance human figures. To trace the Firm’s development, Cheshire presents case studies of windows executed for St. Michael and All Angels (1861–62),All Saints Selsley (1862),All Saints Middleton Cheney (1865–93), and St. John’s Torquay (1865) as well as several commissions from the 1870s, all of which illustrate the sometimes fraught negotiations between patrons, architects, and the Firm, intensified by rifts between different branches of Anglicanism. Cheshire explores the complex symbolism and color arrangements needed for each separate design, as well as noting ways in which Morris’s bargaining skills ensured that Morris and Co. was most often able to fulfill commissions in accord with its own preferences. In addition to offering a history of Morris and Co. stained glass, Cheshire’s exposition provides a template for appreciating the dramatic emotion encoded in specific features of these magnificent artworks. He concludes that Morris “not only envisaged new ambitions for the medium, he also successfully implemented them by masterful collaborations with artisans, clergymen, architects and artists in a wide range of contexts.” Chapter 8: Margaretta Frederick’s “William Morris and the Rise of Interior Design” explores the aspect of Morris’s artistry for which he is best known: harmonious and beautiful designs combining artworks in several media to compose a unified environment. Frederick argues that at every stage, Morris’s collaborative methods were especially important in creating these interiors, helping him to revive craft processes, cross generic boundaries of the visual and other arts, extend the range of products, and influence his contemporaries and later designers. She examines the economic and artistic culture from which the Morris aesthetic was formed and chronicles Morris’s early experiments in a variety of media: literature, figure painting, manuscript illumination, embroidery, painted furniture, and wall decoration.These culminated in the first large artistic project of Morris and his confederated friends, the building and decoration of Red House in a romantically medievalized yet subtly neo-modern style and its offshoot in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. Frederick next considers the early labor and design practices of the Firm, including the employment of several women designers such as Lucy and Kate Faulkner, Mrs. George Camfield, Jane Morris, Jane’s sister Bessie Burden, and Georgiana Burne-Jones, and traces the 8

Introduction

Firm’s participation in successive exhibitions and early commissioned work.The relocation to new premises in 1865 accompanied a movement toward more secular themes, as seen in designs for the St. James’s Palace Armoury and Tapestry rooms and the Green Dining Room of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Firm’s 1870s interiors were also less medieval in tone and more directly inspired by natural phenomena as Morris and Co. moved toward a more aesthetic mode of home decoration. Frederick discusses the new designs created after the Firm’s reorganization into Morris and Co., including the refined patterning of its layered wallpaper designs. She suggests that this more naturalistic tone was also associated with Morris’s leasing of Kelmscott Manor, where “the relationship of the interior design to the exterior landscape is particularly evident,” as his environs became source material for later patterns. A few years later, Morris’s redecoration of his family’s new home at Kelmscott House reflected his concern for simplicity and a paring down to essentials.Though the Morrises’ residence contrasts with interiors he designed for wealthy clients at the time, these larger installations nonetheless maintained a sense of fitness and harmony with their surroundings. Frederick describes Morris’s final new ventures in weaving, tapestries, and carpet design, items which complemented and drew together other elements of room furnishings, and his quite different venture in designing simple, less expensive furniture for a “model workman’s small house.” Frederick concludes that Morris’s belief in the need to eliminate “troublesome superfluities” and his comprehensive approach to the design of interiors may have been even more important than his role in the reform of specific household furnishings. She finds that his legacy continues in the modern design movement and in his contextual view of design, including consideration of landscape, the physical and emotional health of a home’s inhabitants, social justice, and the preservation of nature itself. Chapter 9: David Mabb’s “William Morris and the Culture Industry: Appropriation, Art, Critique” takes on the vast topic of Morris’s visual and cultural imprint—on his residences, the heritage industry, and on later artists who seek alternately to appropriate, recuperate, or recontextualize his work in contemporary art forms. Mabb is a noted artist, and his chapter takes the partial form of collage, as in a series of seventeen sections he juxtaposes photographs with quotations and commentary in accord with the epigraph by Walter Benjamin,“But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them” (Arcades, 460). The separate sections move from Morris’s environments to his accomplishments and, finally, to recent artistic responses. Early sections consider (1) his appreciation of gardens and (2) the importance of Red House to the later Arts and Crafts movement, its recent restoration by the National Trust, and––the wasp in the ointment––the extent to which preservationist efforts overlap with commercial ones. Section 3 provides an account of the William Morris Gallery’s fraught history, near-closure, and successful renovation as a site for the reinterpretation of Morris’s life and work. Similarly sections on (4) Kelmscott House and (5) Kelmscott Manor detail the close relationship between the preservation of Morris’s London residence and the William Morris Society, including its partial return to private hands; and the extent to which attempts to draw tourists to Kelmscott Manor have de-politicized Morris’s memory. Section 6,“Morris and Co.,” documents the contemporary use of mechanized, less individualized technologies to produce imitative Morris-design products; and Section 7,“Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings,” cites selections from Morris’s original manifesto and documents the Society’s continued pursuit of these aims. A final commentary by Philip Venning suggests, “Had Morris been less abrasive and more wiling to work with these apparent allies [conservative nineteenth-century architects], the Society’s driving purpose would have been swallowed up.” In Section 8, Mabb considers the paradoxical relationship of Bauhaus designs 9

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to those of Morris and Co., as both sought to provide products for ordinary life, although the Bauhaus fully embraced industrial means of mass production. The final sections explore installations by modern artists that encode Morris images or designs to express social commentary. Section 9, “William Morris and the Atom,” features Mabb’s 2016 series, “A Provisional Memorial to Nuclear Disarmament,” which protests the misappropriation of Morris textiles by the British Ministry of Defence to decorate a nuclear submarine. In Section 10,“Morris Kitsch,” Mabb critiques the exploitation of Morris designs in inappropriate places, on bad, vulgar, or out-of-context merchandise, and in Section 11, “Jewel Point,” he presents an art installation by Burnaby artist Gisele Amantea which employs elements from Morris wallpapers to express, in her words, “abundance and exuberance in decoration.” Section 12 presents Mabb’s series “Big Red Propeller 2001,” in which a massive ship’s propeller is layered over mass-produced Morris fabrics, allegorizing the need for artisanship rather than the alienated labor of industrial production. Section 13, “Announcer,” features Mabb’s 2015 exhibition, which inlays illustrations from Russian artist Eli Lissitsky’s 1923 For the Voice on images of Morris’s 1896 Kelmscott Chaucer to offer contrasting visions of resistance to capitalist social relations. Section 14, “We sit starving amidst our gold,” juxtaposes commentaries on Jeremy Deller’s famous representation of Morris hurling the yacht of Roman Abramovich into the Venetian lagoon. For Deller, the painting encourages us “to turn the mirror on ourselves and ask questions of the society in which we live,” but at least one reviewer pushed back; Tony Pinkney (see Chapter 17) notes that the image falsely presents Morris as a rage-driven individualistanarchist. Section 15,“Love is Enough:William Morris & Andy Warhol,” explores an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford that postulated significant comparisons between the two artists; some reviewers were skeptical of this link, and in one case suggested that the exhibition presented “two [separate] narratives” (Laura Harris, 2014). Section 16,“The World Stage: Jamaica,” examines Kehinde Wiley’s portraits of contemporary Jamaican men and women against a backdrop of lush Morrisean patterns, affirming Wiley’s aim of binding together temporal, cultural, and racial divides. Finally, Section 17, “I do not want art for a few any more than I want education for a few or freedom for a few,” presents a poster by Jeremy Deller, Scott King, and William Morris that accompanied a protest by artists against government cuts in arts funding. In its reminder of the continuing relevance of Morris’s advocacy for the role of the arts in social transformation, Mabb’s conclusion provides a fitting closure to the chapter’s artistic/political critiques.

Part III: Literature: Poetry, Art, Translation, and Fantasy Chapter 10: Elizabeth Helsinger’s “A Question of Ornament: Poetry and the (Lesser) Arts” probes the fundamental question of what constitutes “ornament,” as conceived by Morris and other aestheticians of his century, and explores how Morris altered his use of ornamentation in successive poetic works. Among other definitions of the term as applied to architecture, music, and even pottery, she cites Jonathan Hay’s description, “rhythmic affirmation of motifs across a surface in tension with a limit,” as suggestive of the crafted forms of Morris’s poetry and its emphasis on audience and its work in the world. She identifies some recent central strains in Morris criticism, including Jerome McGann’s claim for the materialist aesthetics of Morris’s verse, Jeffrey Skoblow’s identification of the radical politics of The Earthly Paradise, and Elizabeth Miller’s account of Morris’s dual anti-capitalist print ventures in Commonweal and the Kelmscott Press. Helsinger notes that criticism of The Defence of Guenevere has centered on its roughness and “narrative difficulty,” a form of imperfection Ruskin had identified with Gothic architecture and the creativity of its craftsmen, but which, as Isobel Armstrong observes, also reflects an 10

Introduction

oppressed consciousness under a profit-driven system. Similarly, Lindsay Smith has argued that the Defence poems present an imagery of “perceptual aberration,” contrasting intense detail with an “elusive depth of field” that suggests the inadequacy of mechanical models of vision, and Helsinger herself has observed the significance of color arrangement as an expressive language for conveying psychological disturbance. Such forms of “peculiar intensities, repetitions, and compulsive patterning” are central to Morris’s early work, but are modulated in The Earthly Paradise to cultivate a sense of unfulfilled desire which in his later works will be used to advocate for political change. In this context, Helsinger argues that Morris’s longest unbroken narrative, Sigurd the Volsung, represents an altered view of ornamentation as a form of popular art which moves its audience to action. Nineteenth-century architects and theorists had agreed that ornament in all cases must be subject to a total design; in Sigurd, this total design is conveyed through a propulsive metrics that enforces a relentless cycle of fate even as its verbal surfaces signal the saga’s “social, aesthetic, and ethical otherness.” The poem’s verbal figures resemble Morris’s designs of the period in giving a sense of movement through patterned repetitions, prolongations, scene patterning, and repeated invocations of the tale as tale, suggestive of a cycle whose readers must enact “a tale still to be told.” Morris’s new form of ornament, then, is devoted to prolonging his readers’ expectations “even beyond the needs of the poem” and into a revolutionary future, in accord with his aims in the final decades of his life. Chapter 11: David Latham’s “Making Pictures: Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and Its Reception” tackles a major gap in the study of Pre-Raphaelite poetics—What precisely is Pre-Raphaelitism in poetry, and how do Morris’s works participate in this movement? Latham cites John Ruskin’s perceptive identification of “grotesque idealism,” imagery that reaches toward mysterious truths not rationally accessible, and Walter Pater’s identification of “convulsed intensity” and “opposite excellences” in Morris’s early poetry.These perceptions enable Latham’s fresh readings of major poems of the Defence of Guenevere, whose imagery he finds confirms Morris as stylistically “the most revolutionary of the major Victorian writers.” As he evaluates the reactions of successive critics to Morris’s writings, he observes that the Defence evoked more insightful and praiseful contemporary reviews than has been recognized. Latham next contrasts the intense imagery and tone of Morris’s early writings with that of the narrative poems of his middle period, The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise. In these, Morris moves from the lyric poetry of unresolved tensions to “a narrative surface of clear plotline,” influenced by his design work of the period, which Latham characterizes as “a return to the origins of art in terms of archetype and mythology.” In their measured rhythms, these later poems anticipate the pace and ornamentation of his later prose romances and help “develop the prose poems as a new genre of art.” Latham notes that through the Earthly Paradise’s frame of Nordic and Greek tales, integration is regained through the songs and stories of our communal roots, a perception later translated into Morris’s lectures on art and socialism. He finds Morris’s last epic, Sigurd the Volsung, to be an innovative combination of hexameter rhythms and rugged Anglo-Saxon alliterative lines that expresses an ethos of self-sacrifice for the good of the community. As a neo-medieval morality play, Love Is Enough anticipates Morris’s later fantasy tales, and Poems by the Way draws together poems composed over thirty years that anticipate the concerns of his lectures, romances, and designs; in shifting emphasis from love to art, moreover, these provide a means of finding hope through the sharing of tales. Latham provides a close reading of the ornamental syntax of the opening lines of the prose romance Child Christopher, organized to evoke an experience through imagery rather than grammar. He argues that in minimizing dramatic conflict to represent instead a shared community of language, Morris disrupts realist 11

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literary decorum, a pattern yet further developed in the artful self-referentiality of Kelmscott Press editions. In their structure, diction, and presentation of alternative worlds, these romances resemble Poems by the Way, and Latham suggests that these should be viewed as Morris’s final major poetic works. Chapter 12:William Whitla’s “William Morris and the Classical Tradition” explores the close relationship between Morris’s early classical education and his lifelong linguistic and literary pursuits. Whitla demonstrates the increasing depth and sophistication of Morris’s response to Greek and Roman literature and history, exploring his affinity with the populist roots of classical epic, his interest in ancient slavery as a pre-figuration of modern wage labor, and his efforts to pioneer forms of language and prosody that would bridge older and modern linguistic traditions. After reviewing previous scholarship,Whitla’s discussion is arranged in five sections.The first,“Formation,” explains the curriculum Morris studied in public school and at Oxford, necessary for gentlemanly status.At Marlborough he had studied the syntax of a considerable range of Latin and Greek authors, translating prose and verse both from and into these languages, and though he stood only in the middle of his class,Whitla summarizes that he “must have learned far more than the ‘next to nothing’ that he claimed.” At Oxford, the impressive list of readings required for the “Responsions,” “Moderations,” and “Finals” centered almost entirely on Latin and Greek translation, with only incidental attention to aesthetics or history. (Logic was taught in part from a Latin text dating from 1691, and science was entirely omitted.) Morris had begun his book collecting by this period, including volumes in classical and medieval Latin, often in early printed versions of the type he would later use at the Kelmscott Press, and throughout his life he continued to collect Latin, French, Italian, and other older printed books. In Section 2, “Translations,”Whitla explains contemporary debates about the authorship, dating, and historical status of classical epics, then considers in detail Morris’s translations of three of these: the Aeneids, which Morris presents as a great people’s saga rather than a defense of empire through his choices in meter, prosody, and diction; the Odyssey, likewise represented as an expression of early Greek folk culture; and an aborted Iliad, abandoned in the throes of his political work. Section 3,“Adaptations,” discusses Morris’s adaptation of sources for “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” The Life and Death of Jason, and the medieval frame and pastoral tone of the classical tales of The Earthly Paradise, which Whitla posits as a kind of inverted Odyssey, as the Wanderers flee rather than seek their homeland. And in Part 4, “Polemics,” Whitla traces Morris’s Marxist readings of ancient history as these inform his definition of “civilization” as a state of society in which privileges for a few are built on widespread enslavement. Moreover, the cultural monuments of these ancient societies have been misappropriated by a contemporary elite, distorting a people’s tradition of continuing stories. Morris also joined other eighteenth and nineteenth-century thinkers in differentiating the handicrafts of the mid and late middle ages from the allegedly more artificial art and culture of the Renaissance, the period of capitalist and imperial expansion. A final section,“Calligraphy: Horace and Virgil,” reviews the range of Morris’s classical manuscript illuminations. Whitla characterizes features of his renderings of the Odes of Horace and (with Burne-Jones) of Virgil’s Aeneids, arguing that his influence on later calligraphers helped guide the calligraphic conventions of the next century. He concludes that through his literary writings, Morris “remade the classics for his own age” and represented its historical roots in ways that “resisted the dominant mode of adulatory absorption of the ancient past.” Chapter 13: Paul Acker’s “A Very Animated Conversation on Icelandic Matters: The Saga Translations of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon” follows the impressive trajectory of Morris’s more than thirty saga translations. Acker discusses the lingering linguistic traces of the Vikings in Britain, Morris’s early readings in English translations of Old Norse literature, and the influence of such sources on his early romance, “Lindenborg Pool” and two tales in The 12

Introduction

Earthly Paradise. He describes the content and manner of Morris’s studies in Icelandic, beginning in 1869 under Magnússon’s tutelage, and details their early joint publications, The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue, The Story of the Dwellers at Eyr, The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, and Three Northern Love Stories, with its Pre-Raphaelite emphasis on romantic conflicts and illfated love. Acker provides details of Morris’s concurrent work with calligraphic manuscripts, some left incomplete and others finished in collaboration with Charles Fairfax Murray, George Wardle, and others; these help in dating Morris’s translations and also show his care with historical details, as when in a leaf of the Ynglinga saga, he has penciled in seven panels with the names of the Norse gods. Acker next reviews prior critical responses to Morris’s archaized word choices, which were generally disliked by modernist critics. Others have noted in their defense that Morris’s choices were not coinages but words in prior use, so that he was attempting to revive as well as create an alternate linguistic tradition.Acker also finds that Morris’s method is more successful in translating poems, such as those from the Elder Edda, than in his longer prose narratives. Although in the years directly after 1873, Morris turned his attention to other endeavors, in the 1890s he and Magnússon returned to the task of publishing much of their joint work in the six volume Saga Library (1891–1901), completed by Magnússon after Morris’s death. Even in old age,Acker suggests, Morris retained his identification with the bluntness and broad humor of the sagas, as well as with its oft-beleaguered but courageous heroes. Chapter 14: Phillippa Bennett’s “Rewilding Morris: Wilderness and the Wild in the Last Romances” interprets Morris’s last romances—from The Glittering Plain (1891) through The Sundering Flood (posth. 1897)—as attempts to imagine alternate societies whose denizens engage constructively with the natural and social world. She argues that earlier critical claims that Morris’s final literary works are escapist fail to engage their ecologically and socially revolutionary content, and she suggests that works in Morris’s “late style” offer not closure but inspiration, even disruption, to the conventional expectations of realist fiction and the society which has produced it. She notes that the flexibility of the romance genre permitted Morris to experiment with a wide variety of plots in a vigorous, simple style employing new forms of language. Characters in the late romances engage with nature in its less settled, “wilderness” aspects as well as with the “wildnesses” within society and their own selves. Bennett demonstrates that Morris’s profound experience of the landscapes of Iceland—characterized by anxiety and strain as well as excitement—heavily influenced the settings of the prose romances.Their protagonists must engage with overwhelming spaces without being intimidated by them, and must learn to read the wilderness signs which indicate danger or safety.They must also differentiate accurately true nature from malicious imitations, as when in The Well at the World’s End, Ursula saves her own life and that of Ralph by recognizing the poisoned water in the well beneath the Dry Tree. Most important, humans must understand that they are a part of the wilderness, not something alien to it; the protagonists of The Water of the Wondrous Isles and The Sundering Flood, among others, experience an uninhibited physical joy within nature and commune with woodand nature spirits who reinforce their strength and sense of identity. Other values in this alternative world include nudity (as a symbol and form of physical renewal), mutual sexual feeling (as a positive expression of our animal nature), and, conversely, the “courage to travel alone” in pursuit of one’s quest, even at the cost of renunciation and sacrifice. Bennett argues that Morris sought not to abandon civilization but to transform it, so that the boundaries between built environments and wild spaces remain permeable, lessening our fears of the unknown and ensuring a balance between our imaginative and social selves. Morris’s protagonists return from their journeys to fulfill active roles in their communities, and Bennett suggests that if we desire a wilder, more authentic, world, Morris’s last romances grant “a vision of what that world could be.” 13

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Chapter 15: In “Windy, Tangible, Resonant Worlds: The Non-Human Fantasy of William Morris,” John Plotz attempts to account for the strangeness as well as the appeal of Morris’s later romances. He explores the history of fantasy as a genre, suggesting that emerging fields which study the “nonhuman”—such as animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and other materialisms—provide a basis for considering alternate forms of human subjectivity which merge the self and outer world. For Plotz, late-Victorian fantasy is in part a reaction against Darwinianism and realist fiction and is allied with fin de siècle decadence; accordingly, Morris’s imagined worlds offer hope, not for our world as it now is, but rather (in Kafka’s words) “plenty of hope, only not for us.” Morris’s characters share an intuitive knowledge of these worlds, with a sense of full immersion, whereas his readers can only feel disconnection from a “world without us” framed as the antithesis to our capitalist, liberal-bourgeois existence.The power of such representations derives from the fact that we remain acutely aware of the gap between dream and reality; similarly, in Morris’s Prologue to The Earthly Paradise, a “wizard to a northern king” creates a magical Christmas panorama of spring, summer, and fall, yet still “in its wonted way, / Piped the drear wind of that December day.” Plotz traces a line of critical response to the perceived existence of this alternate world from George Marsh’s 1864 Man and Nature through the writings of J. R. R.Tolkien, Margaret Atwood, Eugene Thacker, Kate Marshall, and others. After considering the origins of prose fantasy from the late eighteenth century onwards, he argues that the “tangibility, resonance, and nonhuman” aspects of Morris’s imagined worlds have been more influential than is generally credited, since modern prose fantasy began only in the aftermath of Morris’s romances, with their neo-medieval settings, multiple subplots, and focus on northern European mythologies. He counters the criticisms of Christian apologist Colin Manlove, who dismisses Morris’s prose as “anemic fantasy” for its lack of overt allegory; in rejoiner, Plotz argues that Morris’s characters must accept the sheer facticity of their physical environment. He identifies successors in this tradition in Evangeline Walton’s The Virgin and the Swing (1936), Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan and other works (1946–1959), and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), which prioritizes “world building over plot.”Whereas authors such as Tolkien and Lewis import a recognizable this-world moral scheme into their imagined secondary worlds, Plotz finds that Morris pioneered a vision of true alterity in which the “people-forthe-world” inhabit a truly dehumanized, and thus “planetary,” space.

Part IV: Literature and Socialism Chapter 16: Frank C. Sharp’s “William Morris and British Politics: From the Liberal Party to the Socialist League” provides a valuable account of Morris’s early political career and its relationship to his later socialist advocacy. Noting that Morris spent seven years as a spokesperson for the Radical wing of the Liberal Party (1876–83), Sharp explores the motivations for his early political activism, the causes which most engaged him, and the motives for his later deep and abiding disillusionment with parliamentary politics. In tracing the stages of Morris’s shift from radicalism to socialism, Sharp also explores the continuities in Morris’s thinking, as many of the causes he had hoped to further as a member of the Liberal Party—anti-imperialism, Irish independence, an end to sexual oppression, and the provision of education and non-oppressive labor for all— continued as animating ideals throughout his years as a socialist (1883–96). Sharp concludes that “it seems clear that many of Morris’s endeavors as a socialist were diverted towards an expanded conception of the aims which had prompted his original Liberalism,” and that his period of Liberal activism provided him with insights that “colored his reaction to political events long after he had left Liberal politics.”

14

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Chapter 17: In “News from Nowhere in the Museum of Literary Interpretations,” Tony Pinkney takes the reader on a tour of possible alternative readings of Morris’s most famous work. He foregrounds his method of analysis, described as Althusserian-Machereyan (from Louis Althusser’s Reading Capital and Pierre Macherey’s Theory of Literary Production) and, more broadly, as postmodern; this involves a dialectic of probing for possible contradictions, gaps, or oppositional responses to the text’s surface. Such a process opens a cornucopia of alternative possibilities for interpreting familiar incidents, which Pinkney postulates might properly constitute a “Museum of Literary Interpretations,” similar to Nowhere’s evocation of the British Museum or the Wallingford Museum as sites for confronting the past; here visitors would ponder “the conundrum as to what you do with contradictory interpretations of a single textual phenomenon offered by equally well-qualified interpreters.” As Pinkney demonstrates, these are legion; he cites amusingly contradictory responses to the utopia’s serial publication (the weekly chapters invite audience response or, alternately, are merely structurally flabby); the tone of its opening scene at a Socialist League meeting (despairing, or self-ironic); the individuality or lack thereof of its characters; the tone of its famous ending (“Go back again, now you have seen us … ”); or its ideological clarity. True to his desire to link methodology and text, Pinkney turns to the narrative for features of the new society which can be also used to interpret News from Nowhere itself: the lack of haste, decentralization, and the inhabitants’“intense earnestness in getting to the bottom of some matter which in time past would have been thought quite trivial.” Since Pinkney notes that “everything in this remarkable text requires a twofold reading,” reacting back on an initial perception, its green-socialist vision is countered by objectors such as the old Grumbler, Ellen’s grandfather. This double effect is subtly evident in the treatment of objects––sensuously present in creating a realistic world, but also capable of evoking a sense of claustrophobia—as well as in the portrayal of William Guest, who both takes lessons from the new society and imparts his own, possibly disruptive or recidivist assumptions. Similarly open-ended is the issue of the genre of Nowhere, which as a “utopian romance” and dream vision suggests the reconciliation of opposites; however, the new society struggles to contain its disagreements, and its triadic generic structure is mirrored in the text’s several unhappy, even murderous erotic triangles. Pinkney further suggests that the conjunction of genres creates “grinding tensions” among them, as well as between the narrative’s major characters—perhaps, Pinkney speculates, Old Hammond feels potentially supplanted by the new visitor. Remarking that Nowhere contains a greater profusion of characters than other utopias, he notes that these exemplify the text’s message of equality and decentralization but can unexpectedly reveal hidden discontents, as when the head-carver Philippa shrugs her shoulders when her daughter invites her to join the others in a toast; or at the dream’s conclusion, when on returning to his own nineteenth-century world, Guest hurries in shock and discomfort past the prematurely aged worker who salutes him—possibly even, Pinkney hints, an image of himself. A final section, on the “Gothic,” explores the temporal displacement of Morris’s utopia, as well as Guest’s presence as a “ghost” within Nowhere, evoking a sense of the claustrophobia characteristic of gothic fiction, as well as Guest’s unstable identity and presence, which inspire imagery of evil spells and even a final exorcism. Pinkney concludes his sympathetically quasi-psychoanalytic readings with the postulate that an essentially anarchist, or freely associative, quality of Morris’s text demands decentered interpretations.These have dominated critical approaches to Morris’s work since the 1970s and will inevitably take new forms (he suggests perhaps “queer,” Deleuzian, or even religiously inflected modes of interpretation) in a future literary Great Change.

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Chapter 18: Elizabeth Miller’s “William Morris and the Literature and Socialism of the Commonweal” explores the ways in which Morris promoted an expansive, internationalist, and ecologically-minded version of nineteenth-century socialism through the artistry of his Commonweal writings. She examines the newspaper’s origins, its cosmopolitan content—including translations of German and French revolutionary poetry—and its appeals to affect and sensuous experience in the three important literary works serialized in its pages. In the 1885–86 The Pilgrims of Hope, Morris portrays three English citizens—man, wife, and friend—who join the French Communards in their struggle. After the wife and friend (also lovers) are killed, the protagonist, Richard, returns home to gather strength and continue the workers’ struggle. Miller observes that Pilgrims marks a transition between Romantic views of nature and late-Victorian social protest poetry, and, as “an eco-poetic, collectivist epic,” the poem’s merging of AngloSaxon alliteration with epic hexameters helps construct an internationalist literary tradition. Similarly, its images evoke an erotically charged, liberating relationship between the human world and nature, expressing the multispecies entanglement that interests contemporary theorists of ecology and capitalism. In its appeal to Earth as the repository of memory beyond our own lives, Pilgrims also envisions a post-human world:“Till shrunk are the floods of thine ocean and thy sun is waxen pale.” Morris’s second major work serialized in Commonweal, A Dream of John Ball (1886–87), employs a dream vision of time travel to explore another revolutionary moment, that of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It positions early English anti-feudal protest as a forerunner of the nineteenth-century worker’s movement, and both within the longue durée of socialist struggle. Miller notes that Morris’s medieval period is not idealized but presented as a time of political persecution and oppression, thus forming a fit historical analogue to Morris’s own day. In its attention to details of the architecture, agriculture, communal spaces, and other landscape features of its imagined world, A Dream also reflects an environmental awareness of the mingling of human and natural spheres.Although the Peasants’ Revolt is local, John Ball’s words reach out to a wider, and thus international, world, offering solace and hope to the nineteenth-century visitor who has experienced the ravages of global capitalism. In his 1890 News from Nowhere, Morris presents an ecotopia which posits humanity as a part of the natural world. Like The Pilgrims of Hope and A Dream of John Ball, its goal is to persuade his contemporary Commonweal readers to focus on their ultimate goals and interconnectedness rather than on temporary divisions. In this it succeeds, for Morris’s vision of a new society was widely inspirational in the 1890s and thereafter, even for those whose immediate politics differed significantly from his own. Miller notes that as he revised his original text, Morris further emphasized the internationalist and visionary qualities of the narrative, moving the date of its imagined revolution forward into the future even while modeling aspects of the Great Change on the events of the Paris Commune of 1871. She finds that its serial publication encouraged a view of history as open-ended and ongoing, thus encouraging a trans-historical and internationalist vision of socialism. And finally, its imagery of gardens, orchards, and hay harvests; its critique of extractive capitalism and coal-smoke pollution; and its ecological vision of the interpenetration of nature and humanity as enunciated by its central characters all suggest the centrality of natural renewal to his vision of socialism. Miller concludes that in all three literary works written for Commonweal, Morris creates a model of humanity that “extends backward into the past, forward into the future, sideways to other nations, and upward and downward into the very atmosphere and soil that constitute the earth”—a speculative and artistic feat which could not have been achieved through journalism alone. Chapter 19: Patrick O’Sullivan’s “Desire and Necessity:William Morris and Nature” presents Morris’s views on nature and the environment against a background of recent environmental 16

Introduction

thought. After explaining the divergences between several factions of environmentalists (technocentrists, ecocentrists, Cornucopians,Accommodaters, Mainstream and Dark Greens, Gaians, etc.), all of which focus on economic scarcity (i.e., demand), he defines eco-socialists as those who identify the problem elsewhere: in the tendency of economic systems, especially capitalism, to overproduce.The remedy to alleged scarcity, then, is the overthrow of capitalism, since “the liberation of nature and the liberation of human beings are one and the same.”Against this background, O’Sullivan finds Morris to be the most “green” of the nineteenth-century utopian theorists. His environmental ideas address most of the issues later publicized by radical environmentalists, including the advocacy of simplicity in lifestyle, production for need alone, use of alternative technologies, local production for local consumption, and respect for the natural environment. O’Sullivan outlines the development of Morris’s ecological thought in his writings from his early 1877 essay on “The Decorative Arts” (later “The Lesser Arts”) onwards. In a first phase, from 1877 to 1883, Morris attacks “competitive commerce” as a foe of the inherent “beauty of life,” advocating instead “simplicity of life,” a limitation of wants, and an end to the division of labor which requires “mechanical toil.” He expands on these ideas in his 1882 “The Lesser Arts of Life,” noting that we should make do “with as few things as we can,” and correlatively,“take active interest in the arts of life which supply (our) material needs.” O’Sullivan notes that at this stage, Morris was still a member of the Liberal Party, and that he identifies the source of the problem in “civilization,” which “cannot mean at heart to produce evils.” A major shift occurred, however, after Morris joined the (Socialist) Democratic Federation in 1883. He now finds that these evils arise from competition within a system driven by the profit motive, as he states in his 1884 essay “How We Live and How We Might Live”: “It is profit … which turns beautiful rivers into filthy sewers, [and] which condemns [some to live] in houses for whose wretchedness there is no name.” He notes that machines have thus far been used not for liberation but to displace skilled work and increase the precariousness of employment, but under socialism, alternative technologies will flourish and labor again produce pleasure. Capitalism is inherently wasteful, on the one hand promoting the production of luxuries, and on the other, the making of inherently shoddy products for those who can afford no more. In essays of 1886–87, Morris develops the ideas which later inform News from Nowhere, as he explores the moral and ecological implications of socialism and the nature of socialist polity: land should be treated as a “fair green garden” and preserved from pollution and disfigurement; each family should be granted adequate space in pleasant surroundings and children enabled to play in gardens near their homes; the huge aggregations of manufacturing districts will be broken up; and a federation of independent communities will organize labor and ensure wider cooperation between groups. Similarly in Nowhere, the fullest embodiment of these views, Morris projects a society without cash exchange, in which goods and services are provided on the basis of need; decisions are made directly, not through representatives; and the rights of dissidents are preserved. O’Sullivan also argues that in Nowhere Morris “intended to signify” women’s full political, social, and sexual emancipation, for despite the text’s frequent eroticized allusions to women’s appearance and a largely gendered division of labor, the work which Nowhere’s women perform is highly respected and they are granted entire freedom of choice in partners. Food is grown locally and intensively throughout the city, the landscape has been altered through woodland management, rivers have been purified from pollution, and wastes and wildernesses are carefully preserved. O’Sullivan observes the Nowhereians’ use of “permaculture” and “agroecology,” and their identification of the Thames valley as a bioregion.A final section of the chapter considers the application of these principles in anarchist Republican Spain in 1936–37. O’Sullivan notes the power 17

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of a more ecological society to generate moral change, including the relative emancipation of its women and the redirection of work toward fulfilling local human needs. He concludes that Morris’s assertion of our ethical obligation to protect nature from exploitation may ultimately be his greatest contribution to the future. Chapter 20: In “Morris and Marxist Theory,” Owen Holland identifies the many correlations between Morris’s socialist views and those of Karl Marx and “Marxism.” He distinguishes these strands with care and places them within the context of competing late-nineteenth-century socialist parties and the views of later commentators such as E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and Paul Meier. In the first of the chapter’s five subsections, “Marx, Morris and the Socialist Movement in Fin-de-Siècle Britain,” Holland observes the extreme marginality of socialist views at the time; in speaking to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1884, for example, Morris referred to Marx as “a great man, whom, I suppose, I ought not to name in this company.” Nonetheless, Morris consistently gave Marx credit for the latter’s insights on labor, class struggle, and the historical development of capitalism, as well as for the establishment of socialism “on a scientific basis.” Holland notes that News from Nowhere’s critiques of imperialism and the destructive effects of global markets are indebted to ideas emphasized in the Communist Manifesto, and that in associating with contemporary Marxists such as Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx, and Ernest Belfort Bax, Morris participated in a socialist culture in which Marx’s ideas were becoming influential but not yet codified. Holland also points out that the Socialist League formed its closest contacts with the Marxist (as opposed to the anarchist) groupings on the continent, and that Morris served as a Socialist League delegate to the 1889 Paris conference held by the Marxist Worker’s Party of Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, later recognized as the founding conference of the Second International. In Section 2, “Socialism from the Root Up,” Holland explains the centrality of Marx and “scientific socialism” to Belfort Bax and Morris’s Commonweal series of the same title. The authors devoted an entire chapter to expounding Marx’s theories of use, exchange, and surplus value, and the Communist Manifesto, scientific socialism, and the Marxist German Workers’ Party are featured in their historical account of the development of socialism. In Section 3, “Romanticism and Marxism: Morris’s and Marx’s Elective Affinities,” Holland traces some commonalities between the ideas of the two socialists, both indebted to a strain of revolutionary-utopian romanticism characterized by opposition to capitalist modernity. They assumed contrasting roles, however: Marx as a theorist of alienation, production, and revolution; and Morris as a propagandist for revolutionary communism with a deep grasp of the social reality of alienation. Section 4, “Alienation, Production and Sensuous Emancipation” compares Morris’s and Marx’s reflections on the sensory deprivation of workers. Holland notes the emphasis on sensuous experience central to News from Nowhere, including its repeated references to sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste, an immersion through which “the aestheticism of Morris’s pre-socialist years takes on definite political value as a rhetorical means of persuasion.” Similarly, both Morris and Marx assert the human need for beauty; Marx uses aesthetic production as a model of non-alienated labor, and Morris endorses the Ruskinian maxim that “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labour.” Both also view human nature as capable of change and expansion through circumstances, as Morris posits that a new social order will bring changes in “ethics and habits of life,” and Marx asserts that a communist society would heal the individual’s alienation from nature, from his own creativity, and from his fellows. Both of course attack the cash-nexus, division of labor, and an inhumanely extended work day. Finally, both assume that non-alienated labor will be desirable and sought for its own sake; under communism, the worker becomes, in Marx’s words,“a different subject,” and for Morris, labor and leisure will blend into one. 18

Introduction

In Section 5, “Revolution, Dual Power and the Transition Beyond Capitalism,” Holland asserts the importance of Morris’s commitment to revolution, conceived as “a change in the basis of society” instituted by workers themselves, a view which led him to reject alleged solutions that failed to attack the structural unity of the capitalist order.What Holland describes as the “drama and intensity” of the account of revolution in News from Nowhere,“How the Change Came,” also exemplifies Marx’s description of periods of “dual power”—revolutionary eras during which new representative bodies compete for authority with an existing state. In the early stages of “the Change,” the counterweight to existing authority is provided by a Committee of Public Safety, supplemented by a network of workingmen’s associations capable of organizing a producers’ strike. Finally, Marx and Morris both share an ultimate goal: the withering of the state as an instrument of oppression. Holland concludes that although Morris does not reproduce Marx’s formulations exactly, the striking affinities in their thought help illuminate the grounds of Morris’s political imagination.

Part V: Books: Collecting and Design Chapter 21: In “William Morris’s Book Collecting,” Yuri Cowan explores Morris’s collecting practices and indicates ways in which these illuminate his artistic and literary activities. He notes that it is important to consider equally the content, form, and history of the books which Morris owned, and observes that it is not only the medieval manuscripts and incunabula which should receive attention, but also his ordinary reading copies and nineteenth-century resources on medieval and art history.The medieval texts, for example, show his interest in all aspects of the past, including hunting, gardening, painting, dyeing, medicine, and cookery. Although Morris’s chief period of collecting was directly before and during his work on the Kelmscott Press (1889–96), he had begun to collect rare items much earlier, since an early catalogue of 1876 includes several incunables and Icelandic works. Unfortunately, since much of our information comes from sale catalogues, less is known about the dates of his acquisition of books than about those owned at the time of his death, and Cowan suggests that more research into his relationship with booksellers such as F. S. Ellis or J. and J. Leighton might clarify some of this chronology. At Morris’s death, his executor Robert Steele made a plea for the collection to be purchased in entirety by a library or other institution, as not only “a worthy tribute to [Morris’s] memory, but an absolutely unparalleled education in taste.” Unfortunately this opportunity was lost, and an industrialist, Richard Bennett, bought the collection, later selling many books which were purchased by Morris’s friends or whose fates are now unknown. A large number of the medical and other books ended up in the Wellcome Library in London, including geographies, herbals, medical treatises, and books on dyeing. Bennett sold his larger collection to J. Pierpont Morgan in 1902, and the Morgan Library prepared a printed catalogue of the Morris items, supplemented by a 1976 exhibition catalogue by Paul Needham. Cowan summarizes that “all the major incunables and manuscripts that belonged to him can be found there”; these include many bestiaries, psalters, and books of hours. Other items pertaining to the Kelmscott Press and Morris and Co. arrived at the Huntington Library through the sale of the Helen and Sanford Berger collection. In addition, items originally at Kelmscott Manor and sold after May Morris’s death included many manuscripts as well as books read by the family, such as ballad collections, works edited for the Early English Text Society, books on plants, and a fifteenth-century Latin geometry text with intricate woodcut designs. Others were retained by the Society of Antiquaries, and May Morris bequeathed some to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Cowan also notes that for Morris, a library was always a social environment where he discussed books with his co-workers and friends, so that his collaborators in design, such as Emery 19

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Walker and Edward Burne-Jones, also benefited from access to his collections. Moreover, he clearly enjoyed giving books as presents, as testified by the many inscribed copies to his family, friends, and fellow authors. He also kept copies of Kelmscott Press books for himself, especially vellum editions, not all of which have been located, and in a few cases made up bound collections of proof illustrations and other texts in preparation for potential catalogues of incunabula and rare woodcuts. Many of his books remained “uncut,” that is, with the edges untrimmed, an instance of Morris’s preservationist instincts and care with binding. Cowan concludes with suggestions for what might be learned from further explorations in Morris’s use of books, for example, from his catalogues of handicraft and antique material culture from the South Kensington Museum, his illustrated antiquarian histories of medieval dress and art, and his many works on popular medieval life which informed his later theories of art and society. He notes that although scholars have explored Morris’s many indebtednesses to more famous literary sources, Morris “also built up his own canon, a more wide-reaching and inclusive one, exemplified in the great diversity of his reading interests,” and that in his writings and personal life, he created a community within which rare books could be shared and experienced. Chapter 22: In “William Morris and the Kelmscott Press,” Nicholas Frankel explores Morris’s ambitions in founding the Kelmscott Press, which included not only his stated aim, the desire to produce books which “would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type,” but also the creation of art works which would provide an alternative to the printing practices of his day and thus an intervention in the history of Western bookmaking. He remarks that the political implications of Morris’s printing experiments had not been observed until the advent of late-twentieth-century critics such as Jerome McGann, Michelle Weinroth, and Elizabeth C. Miller (see Chapter 18), and that the cooperative labor practices of the Kelmscott Press, modeled on a medieval guild or artisan’s workshop, radically departed from the isolating, near-industrial conditions under which Victorian books were generally produced. Indeed, Kelmscott books deemphasized single authorship; Frankel notes that a few even lack title pages, ceding importance to the elaborated colophon that emphasized the facts of printing and bookmaking, so that even a literary work became a communal enterprise. He summarizes Morris’s stated principles for print design: the use of fonts devised to avoid narrow and small type, the control of spacing to avoid unsightly rivers of white space, and the arrangement of layout by openings rather than separate pages; most importantly, ornament should be “architectural” rather than separate from the text. Beyond basic design, illustrated books were further desirable as “intimately connected with the other absolutely necessary art of imaginative literature” (“The Ideal Book,” 73). Previous critics have remarked on the significant materiality of Morris’s Kelmscott Press books; according to Jerome McGann, Morris “wants us to read … as much with our eyes as with our minds,” and thus anticipated the modernist, imagist, visual and concrete poetry of the next decades. Jeffrey Skoblow finds that the “pervasive materiality” of Kelmscott books provoke sensory derangement, and this resistance to normative reading practices forms a critique of sensory alienation and commodification. Michelle Weinroth adds to these insights a recognition of the political intention of these printing practices, the re-enchantment of the rhetoric of social and political change.The Kelmscott Press version of A Dream of John Ball, for example, evokes expanded “epistemologies of time” and a new mode of “three-dimensional thought,” removing the reader from capitalist time. And Elizabeth C. Miller also notes that the Press’s productions are both archaic and futuristic, incarnating a political vision earlier thwarted by mass print and circulation practices. In contrast to the compromised newsprint spaces of Commonweal, in the Kelmscott Press version of News from Nowhere, for example, we view an alterity in order “to highlight our own alienation from the present it depicts,” an alternate reality which, as Frankel 20

Introduction

notes, is also rendered concrete and tangible through the frontispiece drawing and the inclusion of familiar settings in the text. Miller observes that such anti-capitalist print practices also encouraged discontent with realist fiction and other forms dependent on mass print, influencing the “anti-novel” turn among early-twentieth-century writers as well as other radical forms of cultural and political activity. To these insights, Frankel adds recognition of the importance of Morris’s plant designs and floriated forms to the effects created by the Press. No mere devices or decorations, for Morris these patterns evoke our alliance with nature, and should remind us of “the outward face of the earth” (“Some Hints on Pattern Designing”) and its patterns of growth and change. Frankel notes that it took some time for Morris to figure out how to replicate the dynamic effects of his wallpapers and fabrics within the confines of a book, as he experimented with chintz covers and other discarded bindings and initially eschewed all use of color. Instead, through their use of foliated printed borders, Kelmscott Press volumes create a natural and protective habitat for the text, and the intertwining boundaries between border and text simultaneously immerse the reader both in its immediate language and the outer world. As instances, Frankel points to the Kelmscott Press presentation of “From the Upland to the Sea,” whose floral border invites the reader to join the speaker in his imagined visit to the countryside; and that of the “Prologue” to The Earthly Paradise, (“Forget six counties overhung with smoke”), nested in a tangle of floriated forms suggestive of the epic’s appeals to imagine an alternate, more natural world. Similarly, in the much smaller sextodecimo Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, the short text on each page places greater emphasis on the border and initial illuminated initial, and the text itself seems visually enjambed in consonance with the woodland “Oakenrealm” it celebrates. Such practices accord with the celebration of floriated ornament expressed in John Ruskin’s Nature of Gothic (the fourth book published at the Press)—which Morris praised as “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.”To Ruskin, such vegetative forms suggested the arts of a “tranquil and gentle existence,” including those of literature, science, and domestic and national peace. In addition to heightening the meanings within his own works through their designs, Morris’s Kelmscott Press versions also reinterpret the works of others, for example, lending new political urgency to the opening lines of Keats’s “Endymion,” and exemplifying through its designs the poem’s claim that imagination may “wreath a flowery band to bind us to the earth.” Frankel concludes that Kelmscott Press books not only strive to reclaim the printed word from the constraints of capitalist production but also to create a symbiosis between the natural environment, text, and reader, so that a printed book may, in Morris’s words in “The Lesser Arts,” be made to “look as natural, nay as lovely, as the green field, the river bank, or the mountain flint.” ***** In pondering these chapters, I have been repeatedly impressed by the instances of convergence and interrelationship between Morris’s multifaceted activities––in the decorative arts, business, travel, translation, poetry, prose, and the promotion of socialism—all of which evince his sense of immediacy and concreteness on the one hand, and, on the other, an unstated aspiration toward something beyond.As many have noted, such a unity-in-difference forms an analogy to the urgency and duality of his decorative patterns: reposeful and restless, evoking growth and development, but never entirely renouncing their source. In an 1876 letter written from Leek cited in J.W. Mackail’s Life of William Morris, Morris reaches out to what his biographer describes as “a friend who was passing through one of those darknesses in which the whole substance of 21

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life seems now and then to crumble away under our hands.”As he strives to comfort his friend, Morris makes a rare attempt to explain what for him are the inner principles of life itself:1 I wish I could say something that would serve you … and indeed I entreat you (however trite the words may be) to think that life is not empty nor made for nothing, and that the parts of it fit one into another in some way; and that the world goes on, beautiful and strange and dreadful and worshipful. “That the parts of it fit one into another in some way” is of course an apt description of a Morris design, or even of his vision of a transformed society of fellowship; “that the world goes on, beautiful and strange and dreadful and worshipful” could well describe the ethos of his poems and romances. Morris’s works also embody a coherent historicist/futurist vision—something close to a totum simul perspective—the belief that all history occurs at once, and that we who are now living are implicated in it.This view is both terrifying and consoling (“strange and dreadful and worshipful”): terrifying because deeply rooted, obliterating evil seems likely to recur; and consoling because we have a part and a duty within this process to act heroically for the good. Moreover, we are not alone in this effort, but surrounded by the community of all who have similarly acted from time immemorial into the indefinitely extending future. As we have seen, in addition to providing a fuller understanding of Morris’s contributions in interior design, stained-glass artistry, and several interrelated genres of writing, these chapters also amplify several recent cultural and critical preoccupations. The latter include the increasing emphasis on Morris’s pioneering eco-socialism, his ecological and holistic worldview, and the latter’s influence on his travel and fantasy writings, textile and book designs, and imagined futures. Moreover, in recent years, the idea and practice of utopia has been the subject of renewed attention on the part of critical theorists such as Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson, political philosophers such as Ruth Kinna and Ruth Bristow, and literary scholars such as Kristin Ross, Owen Holland, and Michael Robertson (Communal Luxury; William Morris’s Utopianism; The Last Utopians). The Companion essays on Morris’s socialist writings indicate a clear resurgence of interest in the utopian-socialist aspects of Morris’s thought, defining this within the leftist intellectual currents of his day, projecting present-day applications, and advancing “strong” creative interpretations of his utopian romance.And from different quarters, as Morris designs continue to circulate in various popularized and commercial forms, these also inspire both historical research and concern for the preservation of artistic integrity in new contexts. In addition, the proliferation of digital media has given increased focus to the study of the book, and thus to Morris’s practices of manuscript illumination, book collecting, and designing for the Kelmscott Press—in turn prompting concomitant questions of the extent to which his works may be creatively adapted within new forms of print and distribution technologies. And what of the future? As News from Nowhere’s Henry Morsom replies to Guest’s query about the future of the new society,“I don’t know … We will meet it when it comes” (chapter 27). Some initial suggestions for new approaches have been made in these chapters, however; for example, Michael Robertson observes that more could be said on the homosocial bonding of Morris’s early friendships and collaborations; Tony Pinkney envisions the possibility of Deleuzian or religious studies approaches; Martin Stott finds Morris’s continuing presence in travel literature and fantasy more broadly; and Yuri Cowan suggests that Morris’s day-to-day use of the books he possessed deserves more scrutiny. Other gaps include a full study of Morris’s shorter political journalism (apart from the directly literary works), which remains consistently pithy, caustic and biting in humor, and graceful and powerful in style. Though Morris’s translations from Old Icelandic, Latin, and Old French have been individually well studied (as 22

Introduction

in the chapters by William Whitla and Paul Acker in this volume), the remarkable range of his translation work—from the Danish, Greek, and Anglo-Saxon as well as the aforementioned languages—suggests the need for a synthetic study of the development of Morris’s translation practices and their clear effect on his other writings. Perhaps most urgent, however, would be an attempt to trace more fully the international aspects of the affinities of Morris’s writings, artwork, and socialist ideas, not only in Ireland, the United States, and other English-speaking countries but also in Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan, China, and beyond, itself a heroic effort which would require far more than a single volume or exhibition. At 21, Morris tried to console his mother for the fact that he no longer intended to be an Anglican cleric, as she had hoped. In a letter which blends earnestness, a bit of defensive pleading, and some gentle sarcasm, he lays out his life hopes:“Perhaps you think that people will laugh at me, and call me purposeless and changeable … but I in my turn will try to shame them … by steadiness and hard work. … I will by no means give up things I have thought of for the bettering of the World in so far as lies in me—Stanley and Rendal, and Arthur, and Edgar [his brothers] shall keep up the family honour in the World … and sometimes when I am idle and doing nothing, pleasant visions go past me of the things that may be” (Kelvin 1:25, 11 November 1855).The following volume bears witness to the importance of these “pleasant visions,” as well as to the original insights of the scholars, critics, and artists who have explored and interpreted them anew for our own time.

Note 1 Life of William Morris, 1.327. For a fuller discussion, see my History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015, 285fn. Since Mackail was the BurneJones’ son-in-law and the letter is cited without salutation, its likely source was the Burne-Jones family. Also Edward Burne-Jones apparently experienced moods “in which the whole substance of life … seem[ed] to crumble away.”

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PART I

Morris’s Life, Family, and Environs

1 MORRIS BIOGRAPHIES Michael Robertson

William Morris, it is generally agreed, has been the subject of three great biographies: those by J. W. Mackail (1899), E. P.Thompson (1955, rev. ed. 1977), and Fiona MacCarthy (1995).1 It would be possible to write a Whiggish history of Morris biography, tracing a steady upward trajectory from family friend Mackail’s detailed but discreet two-volume Victorian “life and letters” to Marxist historian Thompson’s revisionist, politically oriented study to professional biographer MacCarthy’s perceptive, artful, “definitive” work.The history of Morris biography is, however, more complicated.The works of Mackail,Thompson, and MacCarthy are indeed great books— Morris has been fortunate in his biographers—but each is a product of its cultural moment, and each has distinctive strengths and limitations. Moreover, the great-men-and-one-woman model of Morris biography ignores other crucial contributors: a daughter, a female friend, two business historians, and a variety of other writers and scholars. When Morris died in 1896, it was inevitable that a major biography would soon appear.The Times obituary called him “a great artist”; the Manchester Guardian regarded him as “one of the most gifted survivors of a great generation.”2 Within a week of his death, Morris’s family and circle of close friends settled on J.W. Mackail as official biographer. Mackail, thirty-seven years old at the time of Morris’s death, was a brilliant Oxford graduate—considered the outstanding classical scholar of his generation—who had passed up the opportunity to remain at Oxford as a don in order to join the civil service, where he shaped national education policy while publishing books of translation and criticism. Mackail had known Morris personally; he was, moreover, the son-in-law of Morris’s oldest and closest friends, Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones. Some critics have treated Mackail’s closeness to the Morris/Burne-Jones circle as a lamentable conflict of interest, but this is to misapprehend the conventions of nineteenth-century life-writing. As Trev Broughton points out, throughout the century “literary sons, sons-in-law, nephews, admirers and intellectual protégés, and … daughters, wives and nieces produced biographies as part of the fabric of social obligation.”3 Victorians would have been horrified at the idea of a disinterested biographer; burnishing the halo of the deceased was understood to be part of the job description.“The hallmarks of Victorian biography,” writes Hermione Lee,“were morality and reticence.”4 The sentiments expressed by a writer for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1849 were echoed for the rest of the century:“Whatever refers to public life is public, and may be printed; whatever refers solely to domestic existence is private, and ought to be held sacred.”5

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Yet as Broughton notes, the ideology of Victorian life-writing was, like all ideologies,“unstable and contested.”6 Conventions of reticence were challenged by the publication of John Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne (a “hideous breach of the sanctities of life,” one reviewer wrote on the letters’ publication in 1878) and, most of all, by the controversy surrounding John Anthony Froude’s remarkably frank four-volume Thomas Carlyle (1882–84).7 Shortly before issuing his first two volumes, Froude also published Carlyle’s Reminiscences (1881), which described in frequently blunt detail his unhappy marriage to Jane Welsh, and while completing the biography, he published Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1883), which more fully revealed Carlyle’s cruelty to his wife. Critics coined the term “Froudacity,” a signifier of biographical treachery and immorality. Mackail began his biography of William Morris only a dozen years after the controversy over Froude’s Carlyle. He was well aware that Morris’s marriage to Jane Burden was, if not as explosively disastrous as that of the Carlyles, less than blissful. Jane Morris was intimately involved with Morris’s friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti for years; in response, Morris turned for emotional comfort to Mackail’s mother-in-law, Georgiana Burne-Jones. Mackail opted for reticence. His Life of William Morris offers no hint of domestic strife.When a close friend of Morris complimented him on the biography soon after its publication, he confessed to her that his difficulties in writing it had been considerable, especially in the constant need for what is called ‘tact,’ which is a quality unpleasantly near untruthfulness often: and especially I feel that my account of all those stormy years of the Earthly Paradise time & the time following it [i.e., the years of Jane Morris’s affair with Rossetti] must be excessively flat owing to the amount of tact that had to be exercised right & left.8 Mackail was not merely tactful about Morris’s marriage; he avoided the topic altogether, aside from dutifully noting the date of the wedding.Thereafter, Jane Morris is mentioned only once in Mackail’s two volumes. Mackail’s treatment of Morris’s family, his silence about not only Jane but also Morris’s daughters Jenny and May, reveals the way in which Victorian biographical conventions of reticence colluded with patriarchal ideology to erase women from the accounts of men’s lives. Mackail’s “tact” about Jane Morris leads to the suppression not only of her marital infidelity but also of her background, her personality, her artistic gifts, her very selfhood. He is equally dismissive of May, the younger of Morris’s two daughters, an intelligent, strong-willed person who, as a young woman, played an important role in her father’s life, joining him in his socialist activities and serving as a designer and department head in Morris & Co. May’s sole appearance in the biography is at her birth. Jenny is mentioned occasionally, but only as a source of concern to her father after she is struck down, at age fifteen, with an unspecified illness. Jenny’s illness was epilepsy—a disease considered shameful at the time—and Morris’s anguished love for his ailing daughter was a central fact of his life for his final two decades. Mackail’s silence about his subject’s domestic existence distorts the essence of Morris’s life and contributes to patriarchal conceptions of the self-reliant Great Man. Despite its strategic omissions, Mackail’s biography was hailed as a “classic” and considered a “masterpiece of English prose,” according to Morris’s friend and associate Sydney Cockerell.9 This is laying it on a bit thick. Mackail’s prose is excellent, but his biography falls squarely into the Victorian “life and letters” format, with over half its length devoted to extensive quotations from letters and other primary documents. Still, unlike most of his Victorian peers, Mackail establishes a strong and frequently witty authorial presence. He is a master of the quick character sketch, writing of Rossetti during the 1850s, 28

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For him, at that time, English society was divided into two classes. The duty of the one class was to paint pictures … The duty of the other class was to buy the pictures so painted.This amazingly simple scheme of life he enforced with all the power of his bewitching personality.10 Mackail’s gift for deft—and sometimes devastating—characterization extends to his portrayal of Morris. Bucking the hagiographic conventions of Victorian biography, Mackail refers to Morris’s “self-centred nature” early in the book, and in the concluding chapter writes about his “unique self-absorption” and his capacity for “the most amazing and almost supernatural rudeness towards both men and women.”11 One suspects that Mackail was on the receiving end of this rudeness on one or more occasions. His testy interactions with Morris seem to have skewed his judgment, given that Morris’s letters from boyhood onward reveal a fundamentally kind and affectionate nature. Mackail, in any case, manages to combine awareness of Morris’s faults with a genuine appreciation of his achievements, opening the book with a brief and penetrating summary of his life work: “the whole of [his] extraordinary powers were devoted towards no less an object than the reconstitution of the civilized life of mankind.”12 Mackail’s acknowledgments of Morris’s faults heightens readers’ confidence in his judgments, as when he says that Morris’s embrace of socialism, far from being the “aberration” that some—including Mackail’s fatherin-law Burne-Jones—thought it to be, was “innate” to Morris: it “was, and had been from his earliest beginnings, the quality which, more than any other, penetrated and dominated all he did.”13 Such statements contradict the consensus in Morris scholarship that Mackail was unremittingly hostile to Morris’s socialism—a view reinforced by Bernard Shaw’s frequently quoted comment that “from [Mackail’s] point of view Morris took to Socialism as Poe took to drink.”14 It is clear, nevertheless, that Mackail prefers Morris’s poetry to his politics. He treats Morris’s socialist activism respectfully but briefly. He tells us that socialism dominated all Morris did, but he shows relatively little of Morris’s intense involvement in socialism from 1883 onward. The full extent of Morris’s socialist activities would not be revealed for over half a century. In the meantime, publications about Morris proliferated during the years after his death. Among the first and most important was Georgiana Burne-Jones’s two-volume biography of her husband, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (1904). Edward Burne-Jones has a significant role in Mackail’s biography, but Mackail offers no memorable description of his father-in-law, and Georgiana figures only as a recipient of letters from Morris. In contrast, Morris is a major figure in the Memorials, and the work offers a vivid portrait of the friendship between him and the Burne-Joneses. In Fiona MacCarthy’s trenchant summary,“The Memorials tells a subtle story of a strange blameless Victorian ménage à trois.”15 It was not uncommon for the widow of an eminent Victorian to write his biography; however, it was unusual for the ensuing product to have any vitality. Edmund Gosse complained in 1901,“It is to the Widow that we owe the fact that a very large section of recent biography might pass for an annex to Madame Tussaud’s gallery.”16 In contrast, Georgiana’s biography is vivid, candid, and personal. She uses first person and calls her subject “Edward” throughout. Mackail erased Morris’s domestic life and the women and girls at its center; Georgiana highlights Burne-Jones’s playfulness with his children, his grandchildren, and a succession of other young people. Georgiana knew Burne-Jones from childhood and became engaged to him when she was only fifteen, but she generously characterizes Morris as his “life’s companion,” and their friendship is at the heart of the Memorials. In a moving scene near the biography’s end, Georgiana quotes from a letter she wrote soon after Morris’s death: “I am taking all the care I 29

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can of Edward—feeding as far as he will let me—companioning as far as may be.” But, she adds, “his cry was:‘I am quite alone now, quite, quite.’”17 May Morris also made a major contribution to Morris biography during the decades immediately following his death, and like Georgiana Burne-Jones’s Memorials, her work is vivid and personal, a lively counter to Mackail’s erasure of his subject’s domestic life. Her biography of her father took the form of introductions to her twenty-four-volume edition of The Collected Works of William Morris ( 1910–15). To readers’ good fortune, May had an elastic definition of what belongs in an introduction. She generally—although not always—discusses the work included in the volume, and the volumes devoted to poetry contain sophisticated textual criticism and analysis. At the heart of her introductions, however, are memories of her father, along with unpublished letters and discarded drafts. “I am still telling my story from the child’s point of view,” May reminds readers at one point.18 The introductions often portray William Morris from a child’s perspective, conveying May’s and Jenny’s delight in their unconventional, kind, tale-spinning father, who made such beautiful things and knew such interesting people. May’s stories of life in the Morris family are detailed and affectionate, with scenes as vivid as a Dickens novel. Consider, for example, her account of her first trip abroad, when her father and mother squired the Morris and BurneJones children around Brussels and northern France. As the children “squeaked with delight” at their first sight of the Dover ferry that would take them to Calais, “Father smiled across at Mother above the scrambling swarm and said, with his heart in his voice,‘It’s worth anything to take the kids a treat, Janey, and see the little rascals enjoying it so.’”19 Now that Morris’s letters have been published in a scholarly edition, much of the material in the introductions has been superseded. Still, the volumes contain treasures like Sydney Cockerell’s “Notes of a biographical talk by William Morris at Kelmscott House,” one of only two autobiographical summaries by Morris. (The other is in a letter to Andreas Scheu of September 15, 1883.) The introductions need to be used, however, with a degree of caution. May offers strong judgments that heavily influenced twentieth-century views of Morris but that are now disputed. She dismisses the later prose romances as mere “holiday-work,” and, like Mackail, she downplays the significance of Morris’s socialism.20 Moreover, as editor of the Collected Works, she chose to exclude most of the socialist lectures and essays that Morris produced from 1883 on, incorporating into her edition only the volume Signs of Change (1888) and eight lectures. Twenty years later, May remedied the exclusion of Morris’s political writings with a two-volume supplement, William Morris: Artist,Writer, Socialist (1936). The first volume collects papers on arts and design and previously unpublished poems, accompanied by May’s extensive commentary.The second volume is devoted entirely to lectures, articles, and letters about socialism, prefaced by a 369-page introduction that constitutes an informal biography of Morris’s socialist years. Volume Two concludes with several appendices, including a better-late-than-never index to the Collected Works and a miscellany of biographical anecdotes. The volume opens with Bernard Shaw’s lengthy essay “Morris as I Knew Him,” a witty performance that must have tested May Morris’s editorial indulgence, since it includes a comic account of their chaste romance during the mid-1880s, which Shaw characterizes as a “Mystic Betrothal.”21 If the works by Mackail, Georgiana Burne-Jones, and May Morris were the only major biographical works during the half century following Morris’s death, nevertheless there were numerous other publications: both shorter biographies, which were for the most part little more than condensed versions of Mackail, and memoirs by those who had known Morris personally. The most significant of the latter is J. Bruce Glasier’s William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement (1921). Glasier, a Scottish socialist, was to become famous as a founder, along with J. Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden, and Ramsay MacDonald, of the Independent Labour Party, 30

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forerunner of the modern Labour Party. During the 1880s and 1890s, his political evolution corresponded with Morris’s, as he moved from the Social Democratic Federation to the Socialist League to nominal membership in the Hammersmith Socialist Society. Glasier’s memoir of Morris is as entertaining as Shaw’s, filled with lively anecdotes that reveal Morris’s famous hairtrigger temper. Glasier’s goal was not only to bring Morris to life but also to argue that Morris’s socialism was identical to his own. Glasier was a leading advocate of what historian Stanley Pierson has described as “ethical” socialism, a distinctively British, non-Marxist socialist tradition.22 Glasier’s book is the source of the frequently reprinted account of Morris’s reply to the question,“Does Comrade Morris accept Marx’s theory of value?”According to Glasier, Morris replied, To speak quite frankly, I do not know what Marx’s theory of value is, and I’m damned if I want to know. … It is enough political economy for me to know that the idle class is rich and the working class is poor, and that the rich are rich because they rob the poor. That I know because I see it with my eyes. I need read no books to convince me of it.23 Glasier’s Morris has little sympathy with the Marxist wing of British socialism, a portrayal endorsed by May Morris in her preface to the book, in which she claims that her father’s socialism was, like Glasier’s,“fundamentally ethical.”24 Morris’s views certainly overlapped with Glasier’s, but as later writers would reveal, they were not identical. The centenary of Morris’s birth in 1934 prompted an outpouring of official tributes, including one by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, whose mother, a sister of Georgiana Burne-Jones, was a close friend of Morris. Speaking at the opening of the Morris exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Baldwin praised him as a great poet, craftsman, and artist, but the Conservative party leader said nothing about Morris’s socialist politics. R. Page Arnot, a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain with a longstanding interest in Morris, was infuriated, and that same year he published William Morris: A Vindication, a polemical pamphlet devoted to destroying what he called “the Morris myth” and establishing Morris as a “revolutionary Socialist fighter.”25 Thirty years later,Arnot expanded his essay into William Morris:The Man and the Myth (1964).There he argued that there were actually two Morris myths.The first he labels the “bourgeois myth” that Morris’s socialist activism was an insignificant aspect of his career, a myth he claims was established by Mackail. The other he calls the “Menshevik myth,” propagated by Glasier, that Morris was a gentle socialist in the Ramsay MacDonald mold and not a revolutionary Marxist.26 Arnot’s argument was elaborated by the great labor historian E. P.Thompson in his massive, powerful study William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955; rev. ed. 1977).The two editions of Thompson’s work need to be treated as two separate books.The first edition was completed when Thompson, then thirty-one years old, was a fervent Communist Party member. It was the height of the Cold War, and Thompson wrote the book, he said later,“in an embattled mood.” Looking back on his younger self twenty years later, in a postscript to his revised edition, he ruefully admitted that he had allowed “some hectoring political moralisms, as well as a few Stalinist pieties, to intrude upon the text.”27 For his revision,Thompson cut nearly one hundred pages, but he did not change his complex and closely argued thesis.The heart of his argument is that Morris began his career as a late Romantic, “the true inheritor of the mantle of Keats.” Thompson traces a tradition of Romantic revolt running from Keats to Morris—an individualistic revolt against the Railway Age, centered in a self-contained world of art and imagination. When Morris came into contact with Marxist socialism in the early 1880s, he encountered 31

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people who shared his hatred of the Railway Age, but who had a historical theory to explain its existence and a revolutionary program for its transformation.Thus, explains Thompson,“the Romantic in revolt became a realist and a revolutionary.”28 Thompson’s book, in both its versions, falls into two principal parts.The first part is as much literary analysis as biography.Thompson felt that Mackail had written a thorough and sympathetic biography of Morris’s life up to 1880, and so he used his first two hundred fifty pages to make an argument about Morris’s evolving Romanticism, focusing on his poetry. The second part, which takes up some five hundred pages in the revised edition and almost six hundred in the original, is a biography of Morris interlaced with a history of British socialism in the 1880s and 1890s. Thompson’s book had a major effect on Morris studies; in the years following, it became difficult to argue that Morris was not a revolutionary socialist. Other parts of his study have fared less well.Thompson’s opinion of the late romances was essentially identical to that of May Morris, who called them light “holiday-work,” whereas recent criticism of the romances has argued for their political significance.29 And his insistence on the importance of Keats to Morris has not been widely taken up; the most recent study of Morris’s early poetry, which includes a chapter on the sources of The Defence of Guenevere, does not include Keats among them.30 Thompson called his book “a study of William Morris rather than a biography,” leaving the field open for a post-Mackail full-scale biography.31 Philip Henderson, who had edited a selected edition of Morris’s letters, was the first to take up the challenge. Henderson’s biography (1967) is conscientious and reliable, but little more than that. His primary interest is in Morris’s design work, to the point that the best assessment of Morris’s overall significance that he can offer in the book’s concluding paragraph is that Morris was “the greatest pattern designer we have ever had.”32 He accepts Thompson’s argument that Morris was a revolutionary Marxist, but he gives little attention to Morris’s socialist activism and virtually none to News from Nowhere, now Morris’s best-known literary work. Jack Lindsay’s William Morris: His Life and Work (1975) is more original. Like Thompson, he writes from a frankly Marxist perspective, but given the existence of Thompson’s study, he sees no need to crawl through the weeds of Socialist League factionalism. Instead, he offers a sophisticated dialectical interpretation of Morris’s career and argues that Morris himself had a deep grasp of Marx’s dialectical understanding of historical development.To this Marxist framework, he joins a Freudian analysis of Morris’s childhood. Lindsay makes much of the fact that Morris was close to his oldest sister, Emma. He quotes Mackail’s statement that the two were “closely intimate in all their thoughts and enthusiasms,” as well as an unpublished note by Mackail that Morris “felt deserted after her marriage” in 1850, when he was sixteen. Based on this evidence, Lindsay constructs what he calls the “Emma-complex,” which set a pattern for Morris’s adult life, in which he would vie unsuccessfully for a woman’s love with another man (in the case of Emma, her husband; in the case of Jane, Rossetti).33 In Lindsay’s Freudian/Biblical interpretation, Morris’s life began in a paradisiacal garden of childhood that was shattered by a fall— Emma’s marriage—and his career can be seen as an effort to regain the paradise lost. Lindsay does not push his Freudianism too far, and he acknowledges the variety of forces, aside from the Emma-complex, that shaped Morris’s adult life. Lindsay’s biography is incomplete—perhaps in reaction against Henderson, he gives little attention to Morris’s design work—and too often he reads Morris’s poetry as a reliable guide to the life. Still, his biography remains a valuable contribution to Morris studies. The most significant biographical publication of the 1980s was Norman Kelvin’s edition of Morris’s letters.The four-volume Collected Letters (1984–1996) stands among the great scholarly editions of the late twentieth century. Kelvin collected over 2400 letters, some 1500 of which 32

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had not been published before. The letters are fully and scrupulously annotated—a notable achievement given the edition’s pre-Google origins. Kelvin notes in his first volume that the collection is the fruit of fifteen years’ searching for Morris’s correspondence; twelve years separate the publication of the first and final volumes. Given the scale of the task and his day job as a professor of English at the City College of New York, twenty-seven years seems a modest amount of time. Kelvin’s edition would be a great achievement if it consisted of the letters alone, but it also includes four lengthy introductions that constitute, collectively, one of the best and most eloquent interpretations of Morris’s life and work. Based on the letters, Kelvin establishes the centrality of architecture and of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in Morris’s career. He offers a perceptive analysis of Morris’s work with the Kelmscott Press, and he highlights the importance of Morris’s efforts in the final years of his life to build a great private library of illuminated manuscripts and early printed books. Kelvin’s introductions offer a corrective to previous biographies and a guide for future work; they also provide powerful and provocative interpretations of Morris’s career. In multiple volumes, he takes on one of the central questions in Morris studies: What are the connections between Morris’s artistic and political activities? Moreover, he explores fascinating but less studied issues such as Morris’s theories of language and his relation to the emergent artistic modernism of the 1890s. The years following Lindsay’s biography were notable not only for the Collected Letters but also for publications devoted to the previously neglected subject of Jane Burden Morris. Mackail’s biography virtually erased Jane Morris from the record of her husband’s life.Thompson, aware of her affair with Rossetti, blamed Jane’s “melancholy self-absorption” and “air of aloof discontent” for the failure of her marriage. Henderson paid scant attention to her, but he described Morris as a man “tied unwillingly to an invalid.” Lindsay offered, at times, an empathetic understanding of Jane’s perspective, but he also labeled her a “neurotic invalid,” commented on her “aloofness and snobbism,” and accused her of “abysmal coldness and complacent hypocrisy.”34 John Bryson’s 1976 edition of the Rossetti–Jane Morris correspondence opened the door to a re-assessment. Rossetti’s letters, addressed to “Funny sweet Janey” and “Dearest kindest Janey,” raise questions as to whether she was as melancholy and cold as Morris’s biographers depicted her.35 Her own letters to Rossetti—though relatively few were preserved—reveal an intelligent, highly cultured woman who read Dante in the original Italian and was keenly interested in the arts. Jan Marsh’s dual biography Jane and May Morris (1986) was the first book to capture Jane’s complexity. It documents her keen intelligence and curiosity, her political awareness, her artistic talents, and her sexual autonomy. Frequently recounted anecdotes by Henry James and Bernard Shaw painted Jane—in broad, easily quotable strokes—as silent, serious, and isolated. Marsh highlights her sense of humor, which was pronounced enough that her obituary in the London Times referred to her “girlish sense of fun, which remained hers until the end of life.”36 Marsh’s fine biography sweeps away myths surrounding Jane, though it is marred by its seeming certainty that the Morrises’ marriage was “loveless” and a “failure.”37 The many genial, affectionate, intimate letters from Morris to Jane on evidence in Kelvin’s collection (her letters to him have been lost) suggest that their marriage is not so easily summed up. Fortunately, Marsh later offered a more rounded analysis in her introduction to The Collected Letters of Jane Morris (2012), co-edited with Frank C. Sharp. Marsh and Sharp write,“The Morris marriage should not be described as a failure, nor even as broken, but as a relationship of true affection that weathered and withstood serious stress without a decisive rupture, maturing into tender lovingness”—a view supported by the evidence offered in Marsh’s biography and in her and Sharp’s excellent collection.38 Jane Burden Morris was one of two subjects rescued from decades of biographical neglect and misapprehension in the late twentieth century; the other was Morris’s business career. Until 33

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the 1990s, most Morris scholars agreed that he was a great designer but an amateurish businessman, that he was hostile to machine production, and that his commercial undertakings and his socialist politics stood in unresolved contradiction.With William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain (1991), business historians Charles Harvey and Jon Press called each of these ideas into question. Employing commercial expertise and wide-ranging, rigorous scholarship, Harvey and Press produced one of the most important and revealing books in Morris studies. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.—known as ‘the Firm’—was not established until 1861, when Morris was twenty-seven, but Harvey and Press begin their biography in Morris’s childhood, focusing on the death of his financier father when Morris was only thirteen. One week after his father’s death, the London firm in which William Morris Senior was a partner suspended activities, acknowledging liabilities of over £2.6 million. Fortunately, his investment in a Devonshire copper mine paid off handsomely, starting in the year after his death, and the family earned a solid and increasing income in the years following. Harvey and Press argue that this early brush with financial near-disaster helps to explain why, as an adult, Morris was so anxious to maintain a high income and ensure his family’s financial security. When Morris turned twenty-one, his mother gave him thirteen shares in the copper mine, which yielded over £700 a year at that point—an immense sum for a young man. His personal wealth fueled the myth propagated by Rossetti and repeated by Mackail that the Firm was “mere playing at business” and that the partners “had no idea whatever of commercial success.”39 Rossetti may have been playing at business, but Harvey and Press offer overwhelming evidence to prove that Morris was not. During the 1860s, Morris took advantage of the Church of England’s campaign to extend its presence in the face of growing Dissent; in the middle decades of the century, the Church built over 1700 new churches and restored or enlarged more than 7000 others. Morris & Co. vigorously pursued ecclesiastical commissions and gained a reputation for its stained glass. In the early 1870s, as these commissions declined, Morris transformed the Firm from “a small, specialised concern known mainly to artists and architects” into “a diversified and lucrative enterprise” that vigorously marketed its products to newly affluent members of the rapidly expanding salaried middle class.40 Harvey and Press show Morris’s hard-headed practicality in dissolving the partnership in 1875 and reconstituting the Firm under his sole ownership, and they explode the myth that Morris disdained machine production of his goods. In an effort to expand his market, he subcontracted most products to manufacturers, made a design for inexpensive linoleum, and aggressively promoted the Firm’s machine-made carpets.When he turned to older techniques, as for tapestries, it was not out of pure Ruskinian pleasure in handicraft but because he recognized that traditional techniques could produce superior results. At the height of the Firm’s success, which coincided with his turn to socialism, Morris was criticized as a hypocrite for not running his business on an egalitarian profit-sharing model. Harvey and Press argue that his ownership of the Firm, far from being at odds with his socialism, directly contributed to it. Morris saw from experience that any attempt to transform society through the efforts of enlightened entrepreneurs was doomed to failure, because market forces would inevitably overwhelm any individual efforts. His business experience convinced him that the only path to a just society lay through revolutionary socialism. In their final chapter, Harvey and Press destroy one last myth: that the Kelmscott Press represented a turn to pure craft work by an ill and aging man interested only in the pleasures of the process. Like all Morris’s enterprises, the Press was a profit-making operation run by a man with a “sharp eye for commercial opportunity.”41 In their Acknowledgements, Harvey and Press note that they follow the model of E. P.Thompson, who produced a study of one aspect of Morris’s life—his intellectual and political development—through the form of biography. Their work, 34

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though only a fraction of the length of Thompson’s, stands alongside his in its scholarship and importance. By the 1990s, the time was ripe for a new biography that made use of the Collected Letters and took advantage of the scholarship on Morris’s politics, family, and career that had been produced during the preceding decades. In 1994, Fiona MacCarthy published William Morris:A Life for Our Time, hailed by reviewers as a “masterwork” and ranked among the great “definitive” biographies of the late twentieth century, along with Michael Holroyd’s Bernard Shaw (3 vols., 1988–1991) and Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde (1988).42 Like those biographies, MacCarthy’s William Morris is lengthy, scrupulously documented, and beautifully written.Victorian “life and letters” biographies were as long as their late-twentieth-century counterparts, but their length came from their documentary approach, which dictated the inclusion of lengthy quotations from letters and other documents.The doorstop heft of more recent biographies comes partly from their heavily researched detail but also from their novelistic concern with character. John Updike characterized these biographies as “novels with indexes.”43 He did not mean it as a compliment, but readers have embraced the contemporary biographical style, with its colorful descriptions of setting, its rich characterization, and its attention to the most intimate details of its subjects’ lives. MacCarthy came to her biography of Morris with a background as an arts journalist, a historian of design, and a biographer of British artists C. R.Ashbee and Eric Gill. Her biography is, as one would expect, extremely perceptive in its description and analysis of Morris’s design work. Remarkably, it is equally fine in its discussion of his prose and politics. MacCarthy writes with equal ease and authority about stained glass and lyric poetry, the weaving of tapestry and the founding of the Socialist League. She captures Morris’s largeness, the full range of his intellect and passions and activities. Mackail, Glasier,Arnot,Thompson, and Lindsay came to Morris with an agenda; MacCarthy’s agenda is to present Morris in all his complexity. As a post-Thompson biographer, she acknowledges that of course Morris was a revolutionary socialist, and she then goes on to reveal how inadequate that label is to convey the originality of Morris’s political contribution. He invented, she explains, a socialism that married revolutionary struggle and sensual fulfillment. She acknowledges the grain of truth in Engels’s characterization of Morris as a “sentimental socialist,” but she also contends that Engels was unable to comprehend Morris’s “imaginative force …, his characteristic and erratic combination of Marxism with visionary libertarianism.”44 MacCarthy’s biography moves fluidly among the different parts of Morris’s career, offering illuminating juxtapositions and deftly making the case for his contemporary relevance. Her interpretations of his marriage and friendships are sensitive and appropriately tentative. “Has any other biography ever asked itself so many questions?” Tony Pinkney admiringly put this query, noting that some of MacCarthy’s questions are rhetorical—she proceeds to offer a brilliant answer—but others indicate genuine puzzlement.45 MacCarthy is attuned to the pastness of the past, the impossibility of pinning it all down, and her book can serve as a pedagogy of life-writing, a guide to illuminating what can be explored and a lesson in acknowledging what can never be known. William Morris:A Life for Our Time remains, more than two decades after its publication, the fullest, most engaging, and most artful of all Morris biographies. No full-length biography of Morris has been published since the appearance of MacCarthy’s work. Nicholas Salmon’s The William Morris Chronology ( 1996) offers a detailed year-by-year account of Morris’s early life and a day-by-day record of his later one. Unfortunately, the volume’s lack of an index and documentation limits its utility. Florence Boos’s History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris (2015) is not a life study, but its initial chapters constitute an important revisionist biography of Morris’s life through his time at Oxford. 35

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Wendy Parkins’ Jane Morris:The Burden of History (2013) is a major revisionist work. Parkins calls her book a “biography at the level of the signifier”—that is, she analyses visual and textual representations of Jane from Rossetti to MacCarthy.46 Parkins, who grounds her work in feminist and post-structuralist theory, argues that previous portrayals of Jane Morris reduced her to one or more stereotypes: class-jumping striver, unfaithful wife, melancholy invalid, iconic siren. Parkins organizes her book thematically, titling its five chapters ‘Scandal,’‘Silence,’ ‘Class,’ ‘Icon,’ and ‘Home.’ Her prose can be dense, and the book sometimes hovers uneasily on the boundary between dispassionate analysis and partisan apologia, but her highly original feminist study is likely to be as influential on future biographies of Morris as Thompson’s Marxist interpretation. Future biographies of William Morris will be able to take advantage not only of Parkins’ insights but also of much other recent work in Victorian studies and Morris scholarship. Every biographer has noted the importance of the Oxford Brotherhood and Morris’s intense friendships with men, but none has yet adequately placed Morris in the context of the construction of Victorian middle-class masculinities and of the era’s pervasive culture of male homoeroticism. Similarly, future biographies may well locate Morris’s fascination with the Nordic “race” within the racialist discourse of Victorian Britain. In addition, scholarship on the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings by Chris Miele (1996, 2005) and others has demonstrated how central architectural preservation was to Morris during the last two decades of his life. Reviewers in the 1990s praised MacCarthy’s biography as “definitive,” but the notion of a definitive biography can be understood as a cultural and historical construct, a sort of last gasp of naïve positivism. As Lisa Tickner wrote of a frequently studied Victorian artist important in Morris’s life,“Each age gets—or makes—the Rossetti it desires.”47 Twenty-first-century desires are bound to make much of so great and protean a figure as William Morris.

Notes 1 See Charles Harvey and Jon Press,“Morris and His Biographers” in Art, Enterprise, and Ethics:The Life and Work of William Morris (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 1–27; and Fiona MacCarthy, Telling the Tale of Topsy:William Morris’s Biographers (London:William Morris Society, 1996). 2 “Death of Mr.William Morris,” The Times (London), October 5, 1896: 8;“William Morris,” Manchester Guardian, October 5, 1896: 5. 3 Trev Lynn Broughton, Men of Letters,Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/Biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999), 11. 4 Hermione Lee, Biography:A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 57. 5 Quoted in Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Knopf, 1965), 239. 6 Trev Broughton,“Life Writing and the Victorians,” The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. Juliet John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 48. 7 Quoted in Altick, Lives and Letters, 154. On Froude’s Carlyle, see Altick, Lives and Letters, 232–38; Broughton, Men of Letters, 83–172;A. O. J. Cockshut, Truth to Life:The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 144–74; and Lee, Biography, 69–71. 8 J.W. Mackail to Aglaia Coronio, May 12, 1899,William Morris Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 9 Sydney Cockerell, introduction to J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), v, ix. 10 J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 2 vols. (London: Longmans Green, 1899), 1:112. 11 Ibid., 1:22, 2:356, 2:361. 12 Ibid., 1:2. 13 Ibid., 2:24, 1:348–49. 14 Bernard Shaw, “More about Morris,” Bernard Shaw’s Book Reviews, vol. 2, 1884–1950, ed. Brian Tyson (State College: Penn State University Press, 1996), 532.

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Morris Biographies 15 Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 512. 16 Quoted in Altick, Life and Letters, 187. 17 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (London: Macmillan, 1904), 1:71, 2:289. Julie Codell comments extensively on the Memorials in her chapter on “Family Biographies” in The Victorian Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 172–203. 18 May Morris, The Introductions to the Collected Works of William Morris, ed. Joseph Riggs Dunlap, 2 vols. (New York: Oriole Editions, 1973), 1:231 (vol. 8). Dunlap’s edition is the most convenient way to read the introductions. For readers who wish to consult the introductions in their original form in the 24-volume Collected Works of William Morris (London: Longmans Green, 1910–1915), I include the volume number in parentheses following the citation to Dunlap’s edition. 19 Ibid., 1:289 (vol. 10). 20 Ibid., 2:474 (vol. 17). 21 Bernard Shaw,“Morris as I Knew Him,” in May Morris, William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 2:xxvii. 22 See Stanley Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973) and British Socialists: The Journey from Fantasy to Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). Pierson’s division between ethical and Marxist socialism has been complicated by Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) and Anna Vaninskaya, William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 23 J. Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement (London: Longmans, Green, 1921), 32. 24 May Morris, preface to Glasier, William Morris, vii. 25 R. Page Arnot, William Morris:A Vindication (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934), 31, 3. 26 R. Page Arnot, William Morris:The Man and the Myth (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964), 10. 27 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, rev. ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 817, 769. 28 Ibid., 85, 2. 29 See Phillippa Bennett, Wonderlands:The Last Romances of William Morris (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015) and Carole G. Silver, “Socialism Internalized:The Last Romances of William Morris,” in Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, ed. Florence S. Boos and Carole G. Silver (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 117–26. 30 Florence S. Boos, History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015). 31 Thompson, William Morris, 817. 32 Philip Henderson, William Morris: His Life,Work and Friends (London:Thames & Hudson, 1967), 369. 33 Jack Lindsay, William Morris: His Life and Work (1975; New York:Taplinger, 1979), 29, 63. 34 Thompson, William Morris, 159, 160; Henderson, William Morris, 100; Lindsay, William Morris, 138, 288, 191. 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris:Their Correspondence, ed. John Bryson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 34, 35. 36 Quoted in Jan Marsh, Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story, 1839–1938 (London: Pandora, 1986), 269. 37 Marsh, Jane and May Morris, 118, 62. 38 Frank C. Sharp and Jan Marsh, eds., The Collected Letters of Jane Morris (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 12. 39 Charles Harvey and Jon Press, William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 38. 40 Ibid., 66. 41 Ibid., 234. 42 See jacket copy of Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris:A Life for Our Time (1994; New York: Knopf, 1995) and review of MacCarthy, William Morris in Booklist, September 15, 1995. 43 Quoted in Lee, Biography, 7. 44 MacCarthy, William Morris, 579, 509. 45 Tony Pinkney,William Morris Unbound blog,February 28,2016,http://williammorrisunbound.blogspot .com. 46 Wendy Parkins, Jane Morris:The Burden of History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), xiv, 2. 47 Lisa Tickner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London:Tate Publishing, 2003), 72.

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References Altick, Richard D. Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America. New York, NY: Knopf, 1965. Arnot, R. Page. William Morris:A Vindication. London: Martin Lawrence, 1934. ––––. William Morris:The Man and the Myth. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964. Bennett, Phillippa. Wonderlands:The Last Romances of William Morris. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015. Bevir, Mark. The Making of British Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Boos, Florence S. History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2015. Broughton, Trev. “Life Writing and the Victorians,” The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. Juliet John. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. ––––. Men of Letters,Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/Biography in the Late Victorian Period. London: Routledge, 1999. Bryson, John, ed. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1904. Carlyle, Jane Welsh. Letters and Memorial of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. James Anthony Froude. London: Longmans, 1883. Carlyle, Thomas. Reminiscences. Ed. James Anthony Froude. London, Longmans, 1881. Cockerell, Sydney. “Introduction to J. W. Mackail,” The Life of William Morris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950. Cockshut, A. O. J. Truth to Life: The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Codell, Julie F. The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. “Death of Mr.William Morris,” The Times (London), October 5, 1896: 8. Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988. Froude, James Anthony. Thomas Carlyle. 4 vols. London: Longmans, 1882–1884. Glasier, J. Bruce. William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement. London: Longmans Green, 1921. Harvey, Charles and Jon Press. Art, Enterprise, and Ethics:The Life and Work of William Morris. London: Frank Cass, 1996. ––––. William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Henderson, Philip. William Morris: His Life,Work and Friends. London:Thames & Hudson, 1967. Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw. 3 vols. New York: Random House, 1988–1991. Kelvin, Norman, ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris. 4 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, vol. 1, 1984; vol. 2, 1987; vols. 3 and 4, 1996. Lee, Hermione. Biography:A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Lindsay, Jack. William Morris: His Life and Work. London: Constable, 1975. MacCarthy, Fiona. The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. ––––. Telling the Tale of Topsy:William Morris’s Biographers. London:William Morris Society, 1996. ––––. William Morris:A Life for Our Time. New York, NY: Knopf, 1995. Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris. 2 vols. London: Longmans Green, 1899. Marsh, Jan. Jane and May Morris:A Biographical Story, 1839–1938. London: Pandora, 1986. Miele, Chris “The Conservationist,” William Morris, ed. Linda Parry. London: Philip Wilson/Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996. ———, ed. From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2005. Morris, May. The Introductions to the Collected Works of William Morris, ed. Joseph Riggs Dunlap. 2 vols. New York, NY: Oriole Editions, 1973. ––––. William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist. 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1936. Morris, William. The Collected Works of William Morris. 24 vols. London: Longmans, 1910–1915. Parkins, Wendy. Jane Morris:The Burden of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pierson, Stanley. British Socialists:The Journey from Fantasy to Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

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Morris Biographies ––––. Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. Pinkney, Tony. William Morris Unbound. http://williammorrisunbound.blogspot.com. Salmon, Nicholas. The William Morris Chronology. Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1996. Sharp, Frank C. and Jan Marsh, eds. The Collected Letters of Jane Morris.Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012. Shaw, Bernard.“More about Morris,” Bernard Shaw’s Book Reviews, vol. 2, 1884–1950, ed. Brian Tyson. State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 1996. ––––. “Morris as I Knew Him,” William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, by May Morris, vol. 2. Oxford: Blackwell, 1936.. Silver, Carole G.“Socialism Internalized:The Last Romances of William Morris,” Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, ed. Florence S. Boos and Carole G. Silver. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Thompson, E. P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, rev. ed. New York, NY: Pantheon, 1977. Tickner, Lisa. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London:Tate Publishing, 2003. Vaninskaya, Anna. William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. “William Morris,” Manchester Guardian, October 5, 1896: 5.

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2 BUSINESS IN THE CREATIVE LIFE OF WILLIAM MORRIS Charles Harvey, Jon Press and Mairi Maclean

Introduction Business is perhaps the least studied and, for many, least interesting facet of the multi-faceted career of William Morris. Wikipedia (2018) is typical in describing him as “an English textile designer, poet, novelist, translator and socialist activist”, omitting from this litany one of the most salient facts of his life: that for 35 years he was an entrepreneur, the “managing director” of a socially prominent and commercially successful business venture. It is wrong to conceive the business dimension of Morris’s career simply as a means of earning a living. His firm was a pioneering vehicle for creative expression in the decorative arts, and its products and practices continue to inspire designers, craft workers, consumers and art lovers across the world (Fiell and Fiell 2017;Todd 2012). In this chapter, we suggest that business, contrary to the impression conveyed in much of the literature, was fundamental to the creative life of William Morris. It was through business that Morris, “an entrepreneur of unusual creativity”, imparted his most important messages with respect to the decorative arts, simultaneously shaping tastes and professional practice (Ormiston and Wells 2010, 8). The contrary viewpoint, portraying Morris as a reluctant business leader who succeeded mainly by virtue of creative talent rather than entrepreneurial ability, stems from his first biographer, J.W. Mackail (1899). Mackail, the son-in-law of Morris’s closest friends, Georgiana and Edward Burne-Jones, was an insider. He wrote a celebratory account glossing over potentially sensitive issues, like Morris’s deep commitment to socialism and the unhappiness of his marriage. He dealt with business matters cursorily, conveying the impression that Morris was an amateur in matters of business, a view that has echoed down the years (Henderson 1967; Stansky 1983). Mackail was aware of the bias within his narrative, remarking in a letter to Sydney Cockerell, who became Morris’s secretary at the Kelmscott Press in 1894, “how extraordinarily interesting one could make the story if one were going to die the day before it was published” (cited in Harvey and Press 1996, 2). In failing to tackle sensitive issues, however, Mackail contributed to what Fiona MacCarthy (1994, x) calls a “conspiracy of memory” about his subject. He was not alone in this. Cockerell, when serving as director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, discouraged Morris’s daughter May from including unpublished socialist lectures in her edition of the Collected Works (Morris 1910–15). May was complicit. In 1938, shortly before her death, she wrote in a letter to Cockerell of the acrimony surrounding the reconstitution of the Morris 40

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enterprise in 1874–75 that she “would never want gossip-mongers to pick up anything in the future, so I always took care to write nothing counter to Mackail’s statements.”1 Her portrayal of her father as a man whose life was “unhindered by disappointments and enriched by generous and unclouded friendships”2 has progressively given way to more realistic assessments recognising “the full extent of his unhappiness, and his fortitude and generosity in facing it” (MacCarthy 1994, xii). Research by the authors of this chapter on the business career of William Morris, together with that of other researchers, has helped to see Morris more completely and in context, not as a singularity, but as an innovative leader within the interrelated fields in which he operated (Harvey and Press 1991a, 1996). This is not to deflate completely the Morris myth. His combination of talents was truly remarkable. It is, however, to recognise his immersion in the political, economic, social and cultural currents of Victorian Britain. On this view, for example, he was not the “creator” of the Arts and Crafts Movement, but an inspirational figure within it (Greensted 2010), just as he was one amongst many voices, however distinctive, within the early socialist movement (Yeo 1977). Likewise, we do not claim that the business Morris created was alone in responding to changing tastes and market opportunities. His was one of many designdriven, lightly mechanised craft enterprises formed to satisfy the burgeoning demand for decorative art products and services in mid-Victorian Britain. Our purpose, then, is not to lionise the business achievements of William Morris, but rather to show how his business dealings informed and enabled other parts of his life and with what consequence.

The Morris Family in Business Morris was born into a solidly middle class commercial family whose financial fortunes were on the rise during his youth.At the time of his birth in 1834, his father,William Morris Snr, was a partner in Sanderson & Co., a successful firm of discount brokers with an office in Lombard Street in the heart of the City of London. Discount broking played a vital role in the development of the national economy of nineteenth-century Britain (King 1936). Sanderson & Co. assembled portfolios of bills of exchange, facilitating trade by creating liquidity, and derived its profits from the margin between buying and selling prices.William Morris Snr became a partner in 1826 when just 28 years old and shortly thereafter married Emma Shelton, initially living above the office in Lombard Street where Morris’s elder sisters, Emma and Henrietta, were born. In 1834, the family moved to Elm House,Walthamstow, where Morris was born, followed by four brothers and another two sisters (MacCarthy 1994).Walthamstow was then a suburban village on London’s northeast periphery, close to Epping Forest, and it was popular with wealthy financiers who travelled daily to the City by stagecoach. The reward for success in business was an affluent lifestyle. In 1840, the family moved to Woodford Hall, a large Georgian mansion in the Palladian style, which stood on the edge of Epping Forest in its own 50-acre grounds and surrounding farmland (MacCarthy 1994). William Morris Snr had assembled an extensive network of business connections and began to invest in new ventures together with his brothers,Thomas and Francis, who were active in the coal trade. In 1845, they became principal investors in a new copper-mining enterprise known as Devon Great Consols, with Morris Snr taking up 272 of the 1,024 £10 shares issued. The venture was an immediate success, exceeding all expectations, following location of a thick seam of rich copper ore (Boos and O’Sullivan 2012, 13). Devon Great Consols paid a dividend of £71 per share in its first year of operation, and before 1861, it regularly paid out between £43 and £62 per share annually (Harvey and Press 1990). The share price escalated, providing the Morris family with financial security even after the premature death of Morris Snr in 1847 on 41

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the eve of the financial crisis of 1847–48 that led to the collapse of Sanderson & Co., then the second ranking discount house in Britain behind Overend, Gurney & Co. (King 1935, 322– 323). Loss of income meant forfeiting Woodford Hall. In the autumn of 1848, when Morris was aged 14, the family moved to a smaller but still luxurious home,Water House, in Walthamstow. It was then decided to safeguard the futures of the nine Morris children by distributing 13 Devon Great Consols shares to each when aged 21, still leaving Morris’s mother Emma with sufficient funds to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. The significance for Morris’s future career of coming from a family grounded in business is threefold. First, we might reasonably conjecture that he was never naive financially or completely disinterested in commerce.That he went on as a young man to serve as family representative on the board of Devon Great Consols between 1871 and 1875 supports this view (Boos and O’Sullivan 2012, 22). Second, his “inheritance” of 13 valuable mining company shares gave him the confidence and wherewithal needed to launch his own business career.Third, it meant that he acquired at an early age an appreciation of the rewards of success in business. In 1855, following receipt of his shares in Devon Great Consols, he was paid £741 in dividends, his income from that source peaking at £819 in 1857. This was a substantial income when compared to those of his friends, affording him pleasures unavailable to them. He built up a personal library and bought the works of Pre-Raphaelite artists, including in 1856 alone five works by Rossetti for £200, Ford Madox Brown’s ‘Hayfield’ for £40 and Arthur Hughes’ ‘April Love’ for £30 (Henderson 1967, 37).

Morris and the Firm Morris, as we have seen, was acquainted with the realities of business success and failure at an early age. He also acquired during his childhood and at school, Marlborough College, a profound love of art, architecture and literature, especially that of the medieval period (Richardson 1990). It is likely that his taste for the medieval drew him for a time to contemplate a career in the Anglican Church before realising, during his time at Exeter College, Oxford, that a love of beautiful artefacts is not the same as belief in God (MacCarthy 1994). His intellectual journey at Oxford, which involved reading aloud with friends like Edward Burne-Jones works such as Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Bulwer Lytton’s popular tales of King Arthur and Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”, eventually took him away from the spiritual toward the more practical creative worlds of art and architecture (MacCarthy 2011, 26–57; Salmon 1998).At first, he considered a career as an architect, and, in 1856, he became articled to G.E. Street, one of the leading figures of the Gothic Revival. Then, at the instigation of the charismatic Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he tried his hand at painting before turning finally to a career in the decorative arts (Harvey and Press 1991a, 5–37); this long process of self-discovery was made easier by his personal wealth. The prestige of the decorative arts was then growing rapidly. Street himself insisted that a good architect should understand the principles of decoration, and have a knowledge of relevant crafts, particularly stained glass, metalwork and embroidery (Hitchcock 1960). However, the most influential advocate of the decorative arts was John Ruskin. In The Two Paths, he rejected the idea that decoration was an inferior form of art, arguing that every aspect of a building should form “a great and harmonious whole” (Cook and Wedderburn [2009] 1905, 320). One principle, which made a lasting impression on Morris, was that designers should be entirely familiar with the processes and materials involved in decorative work (Harvey and Press 1995). Morris was swift to put what he learned from Street and Ruskin into practice, beginning with the building and decoration of Red House at Bexleyheath, Kent. His friend, the architect Philip Webb, designed Red House for Morris and his wife Jane, whom he married in 1859, and 42

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members of his circle executed a rich variety of decorative artworks for the house (Marsh 2010; Wild 2018).The project directly inspired the formation in 1861 of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (MMF & Co.), a partnership comprising Morris;Webb; the Pre-Raphaelite artists Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Burne-Jones; the engineer and amateur painter Peter Paul Marshall; and Charles Faulkner, a mathematician and friend from Oxford (Harvey and Press 1986). “The Firm”, as partners and supporters called MMF & Co., launched with the issue of a prospectus to potential clients (Harvey and Press 1991a, 41–43).This asserted that the partners “having been for many years deeply attached to the study of the Decorative Arts” had been unable to “obtain or get produced work of a genuine and beautiful character” and so had entered the market as suppliers of mural decoration, carving, stained glass, metalwork, furniture, embroidery and jewellery.They proposed that the time had come for “artists of reputation” to enter the field in the service of like-minded architects, dismissing the efforts of established suppliers as “crude and fragmentary”, an appropriately subversive market entry strategy designed to curry favour with Gothic Revival architects like Scott, Butterfield and Street (Finkelstein, Harvey and Lawton 2006, 39–42). These men had gained in power and influence consequent upon the dramatic increase in church building to cater for the rapidly growing population, fuelled by philanthropic funding and intense competition between different sects, especially during the boom decade, 1865–75 (Brooks and Saint 1995, 1–50).Their quest for historic and symbolic accuracy meant that churches had become more elaborate and costly, requiring a wide range of decorative work, including wall-painting, stained glass, carving in wood and stone, brass and iron work, church plate and embroidery (Hall 2000). This development had its counterpart in the domestic arena. Sustained economic growth went hand-in-hand with urbanisation and the rise of the middle classes – professional, industrial and administrative (Gunn and Bell 2002). Rising living standards in turn created new markets and new possibilities for the formation of specialist fields of economic activity. The Victorian upper and upper-middle classes attached enormous importance to the symbols and trappings of prosperity (Thompson 1988). Houses and the decorative arts were an important concern and a focal point for conspicuous consumption (Richards 1991, 17–72). Even amongst those of relatively modest means, the maintenance of a respectable household in the third quarter of the nineteenth century required expenditure on a broad range of items, including furniture, wall coverings, carpets and rugs, paintings and musical instruments. However, while much of the demand for original decorative artwork was metropolitan or centred on the major provincial cities, it is noteworthy that close to 2,000 country houses were built or completely rebuilt between 1835 and 1914. Until mid-century, members of the old landed classes built most, but this proportion declined sharply as the century progressed, and the patronage of “new money” became more important (Wilson and Mackley 2000). Morris & Co. was not alone in responding to the opportunities presented by market growth and changing tastes (Harvey and Press 1986). In the early years, for example, when most commissions came through supportive architects, stained glass was the firm’s staple product. Rossetti, Madox Brown and Burne-Jones had already designed biblical figures and scenes for leading makers like Powell & Sons of Whitefriars, which had learned how to manufacture coloured glass near equal in quality to the best medieval examples. Powell & Sons and other competitors like Lavers & Barraud and Clayton & Bell, perhaps six firms in all, were in tune with the standards and artistic requirements of the Gothic Revival (Cheshire 2004, 155–178). Morris & Co., at its inception, did not have a unique value proposition nor was it the first in the field; it was part of a more general entrepreneurial response to escalating demand. Its immediate trading advantage stemmed from the depth of the cultural, social and symbolic capital possessed by the partners (Harvey, Press and Maclean 2011, 256–59). Romanticism, combined with a deep 43

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familiarity with ecclesiology, medieval architecture, history, myths and legends, infused the look, feel and subject matter of their work. Artistic substance and a distinctive (Pre-Raphaelite) style set Morris & Co. apart from its rivals, confirming Morris’s belief that “beauty is a marketable quality, and … the better the work is all round, both as a work of art and in its technique, the more likely it is to find favour with the public” (Harvey and Press 1994b, 36). Morris’s role in establishing the firm as a serious player in the decorative art market was principally that of business organiser. He had the capital needed to rent premises and hire craftspeople, but more importantly, as business manager at an initial salary of £150 per year, he had the dedication and skills needed to make the business work (Harvey and Press 1991a, 38–40). While Rossetti, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Marshall and Webb supplied many of the designs needed to fulfil commissions, Morris took responsibility for the entirety of decorative schemes and project management. He was the dedicated presence at the heart of the business, which, for the other partners, was but one strand of a portfolio career.Yet the established reputations of Rossetti and Madox Brown were an indispensable form of symbolic capital during the early years. Higher design fees served as recognition and reward, and the same increasingly applied to Burne-Jones and Webb as they rose in status within their respective fields of art and architecture. Each of the partners, though in differing degrees, brought the cultural capital needed to win business from leading architects and their patrons.At the time, the Cambridge Camden Society, later known as the Ecclesiological Society, and the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture were having a profound impact on British architecture and decorative art (Eastlake 1872).They demanded a more imposing, spiritual and symbolic form of worship within the Church of England, and “dreamt of converting England by repeating the architectural triumphs of the Middle Ages and by placing the Prayer Book services in a setting of medieval ceremonial” (Addleshaw and Etchells 1948, 203–04). No detail of church buildings escaped their attention. For those who wished to supply the market, it was important to have a deep understanding of religious iconography and symbolism (Hall 2014). This was something that MMF & Co. could readily demonstrate. Morris and Webb won commissions from Street, Bodley and other architects of their acquaintance. Rossetti, with his wide social circle and ready charm, helped win contracts in the secular market. His greatest coup came in 1866 when he persuaded William Cowper, First Commissioner of Public Works, to engage the firm to carry out redecorations at St. James’s Palace in preference to Crace & Co., which had previously carried out decorative work at the Palace (Harvey and Press 1991a, 57–60).

Morris the Business Leader Within a few years of its formation, however, the firm ran into trouble. Its dependence on stained glass and other large commissions led to financial problems when the market slumped in the later 1860s (Harvey & Press 1991a, 62–63). For some partners, this hardly mattered. Faulkner took up a fellowship in mathematics at University College, Oxford, in 1864. Marshall continued to earn his living as a civil engineer (Gibeling 1996). For Madox Brown and Rossetti, the firm was never more than a modest source of income. Burne-Jones and Webb, however, depended more heavily on their earnings from the firm and were hard hit by the downturn. In 1867, Burne-Jones actually ended the year with a deficit of £91 on his partnership account, having withdrawn more than he had earned. In May of the same year, Webb, who typically worked for scant return, became “consulting manager” at £80 per annum to relieve his financial plight. The downturn hit Morris particularly hard because his unearned income from Devon Great Consols was rapidly shrinking, falling from £682 in 1865 to £396 in 1869 and just £187 in 1870 (Harvey and Press 1991a, 77–80). He had little choice but to turn MMF & Co. around. 44

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This meant opening up new markets and the creation of an improved range of domestic products to underpin its interior decorating service. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Morris worked hard, producing new designs for wallpapers and chintzes, and spent a good deal of time getting suppliers to meet his needs. He was sometimes disappointed with the results, but nonetheless, according to his general manager, George Wardle, he managed to impart a distinctive style to his interiors (Harvey and Press 1996, 88–94). His customers responded with enthusiasm, and, once again, Morris took advantage of his social capital.Webb, as architect, introduced important clients, like the fashionable George and Rosalind Howard and friends like the Ionides family, wealthy members of the Greek merchant community in London, spread the word that MMF & Co. was the only truly artistic design firm in London (Harvey and Press 1994a).Within the space of a few years, Morris succeeded in creating a new template for the business, reviving its financial fortunes in the process. Business recovery brought with it interpersonal difficulties. For though the firm was legally a partnership, meaning that each partner was entitled to an equal share of the profits, almost all the industry came from Morris. Now that the firm was his main source of income and set fair to grow in scale and scope, he became dissatisfied with existing business arrangements (Harvey and Press 1991a, 87–89). In August 1874, he declared his intention to reconstitute the firm under his sole ownership.The result was a prolonged and acrimonious argument. Madox Brown, Rossetti and Marshall demanded compensation. Morris considered their demands unreasonable, perhaps undervaluing prior contributions (Gibeling 1996). As risk-sharers, the aggrieved partners felt entitled to an equal share of the rewards, just as formerly they had accepted, in theory at least, responsibility for potential losses. Morris made the mistake of not acting sooner, before the decorating business had really taken off and profits were flowing in (Harvey and Press 1991a, 90–92). Even so, the balance of sympathy must lie with him, for while the other partners had been building their own careers, he had devoted much of his time to MMF & Co. In the end, however, fearing the damage an allout legal battle might cause, Morris agreed in March 1875 to buy out the partners for £1,000 each, although his close friends, Burne-Jones, Faulkner and Webb, declined the payoffs.The firm now traded as Morris & Co. with Morris as sole owner-manager. Liberation from the shackles of partnership unleashed in Morris a remarkable burst of creative energy as he strove to realise his commercial and artistic visions, the two inseparable and intertwined. Within a decade, his designs and products had become widely admired throughout the Western world.The strenuous efforts made during these years to master new techniques in dyeing (Davis 1995), block printing, weaving and tapestry making set the firm apart from its rivals, yielding a formidable competitive advantage; its textiles, carpets and tapestries in particular were sought after for their exquisite design, vibrant colouring and exceptional quality (Parry 2005, 2013;Thompson 1993; Watkinson 1990 [1967]. Morris produced many of his finest flat-pattern designs during the late 1870s and early 1880s, securing his reputation as master designer of wallpapers, printed and woven fabrics, carpets and tapestries (Harvey and Press 1991a, 95–127). He opened a fashionable shop in Oxford Street in 1877 and another in Manchester in 1883 (Harvey and Press 1991b). His market reach extended further through the appointment of agents in fashionable cities such as Boston and New York. From a base of stained glass, hand-painted tiles, furniture, and wallpapers in the 1860s, he added block-printed fabrics, woven fabrics, handmade carpets and machine-made carpets in the 1870s, and tapestries in the early 1880s (Fairclough and Leary 1981).There were six Morris designs for wallpaper and just one for fabric in 1868, growing to 25 for wallpaper and 29 for fabric in 1880. In 1881, he began to manufacture directly on a larger scale at Merton Abbey in Surrey, in premises described as idyllic by many visitors (Harvey and Press 1991a, 128–157). By 45

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1894, he had 52 designs for wallpaper and 62 for fabric in regular production. Sales grew from £3,000 in 1868 to £140,000 in 1894, and net profits increased from £200 to £9,750 over the same period. At the heart of the growth of Morris & Co. after 1875 was the pursuit of a dual commercial strategy (Harvey, Press and Maclean 2011, 262–66). On the one hand, Morris continued to supply elite clients with exclusive goods and services at the conjuncture of the fine and decorative arts. On the other, he actively sought to promote sales of less exclusive products – wallpapers, printed fabrics, less elaborate woven fabrics, serially produced furniture, painted tiles, machinemade carpets, linoleum and embroidery sets – to aspiring members of the middle classes.These were families headed by salaried professionals, company executives, public servants and the owners of smaller enterprises (Thompson 1988). Market segmentation along these lines made financial and reputational sense. By increasing the reach of the business, at home and abroad, he could extend production runs for standard items, increasing cash flow while reducing unit costs. The middle-class market was growing apace (Thompson 1988). By investing in tasteful home decoration, the upwardly mobile legitimised their hard-won social position. Morris took advantage by writing evocative brochures describing his products, methods of manufacture and principles of design.The firm continued to emphasise the “luxury of taste” rather than the “luxury of costliness” (Harvey and Press 1991a, 95–127). The sought-after qualities of originality, beautiful design and colouring, hand manufacture and the use of natural, high-quality materials attached themselves to all Morris products whatever the cost. Hence the enduring attraction of Morris wallpapers and fabrics. At the lower end of the printed fabric range, designs like Brother Rabbit and Iris sold for as little as £0.07 per yard, while at the upper end of the spectrum, silk fabrics like Oak and St James sold for £2.25 per yard, beyond reach of all but the wealthiest customers (Parry 2013). Morris recommended combining lower-priced goods like wallpapers and printed fabrics with simple furniture to create harmonious interiors. He sought to educate customers as a means of inspiring customer confidence and loyalty.This extract from the Morris & Co. brochure for the Boston Foreign Fair of 1883 is illustrative: In the Decorative Arts, nothing is finally successful which does not satisfy the mind as well as the eye. A pattern may have beautiful parts and be good in certain relations; but, unless it be suitable for the purpose assigned, it will not be a decoration. Unfitness is so far a want of naturalness; and with that defect, ornamentation can never satisfy the craving which is part of nature (Harvey and Press 1996, 132). The need for commercial success became even more important with the move to Merton Abbey in 1881. Though an essential step if Morris was to take full advantage of his years of experimentation, this was a bold move for a small firm (Harvey and Press 1991a, 131–36).There is no record of what it cost to renovate the Merton Abbey works, but the outlay must have been substantial. The old buildings had to be thoroughly overhauled and modified, and new tools and equipment acquired (Saxby 1995). Many months were to pass before the works were operational, and block printing did not begin in earnest until late in 1882 (Kelvin 1987, 143). George Wardle, Morris’s general manager from 1870 to 1890, then took control of operations at Merton, meticulously enforcing manufacturing standards. J.H. Dearle supervised the tapestry, weaving and fabric printing departments. He also became proficient in design under Morris’s tutelage. By the end of the 1880s, designs made by Dearle had begun to enter production, and following Morris’s death in 1896, he became the firm’s principal designer (Parry 1986). Though Morris may have looked to past ages for technology and artistic inspiration, the commercial side of his business was very much of the present. Morris knew his markets, and he 46

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knew how to arrest the attention of those who could afford to purchase his goods.The shop in Oxford Street, not the factory at Merton, was the strategic hub of his operations, his creations displayed there in a tastefully fashionable setting. Apart from Wardle, his best-paid employees were Robert and Frank Smith, the commercial managers based at Oxford Street. In 1884, when Morris himself drew £1,800 from the business and Wardle £1,200, the Smiths earned £600 each (Harvey and Press 1991a, 142).These high salaries were paid in recognition of the critical importance of the functions controlled by them: advertising; sales; liaison with clients for internal decoration; stock control; scheduling of production; showroom displays; handling customer accounts; dealings with overseas agents and shipping; purchasing from outside suppliers; warehousing; supervision of embroidery, upholstery and cabinet-making activities; book-keeping; and general financial management.That Morris fully recognised the importance of the Smiths became clear in the late 1880s, when he decided to bring them in as partners, thus ensuring that his income from the firm would continue unabated whilst leaving day-to-day management in the hands of others. The deed of partnership signed by Morris and the Smiths enabled the brothers to buy into the business on very favourable terms, and the firm continued to develop in the 1890s under their leadership, despite Morris’s withdrawal from active management.3 The Smiths managed the business in a prudent and professional manner. Due attention was paid to costs, prices, profit margins and the preparation of detailed estimates (Harvey and Press 1991a, 167–70). If an estimate exceeded £500, advances were required as the work progressed, to ease the problem of cash flow. Additional charges applied “for attendance to view such buildings or rooms as are proposed for us to decorate”.4 Terms of business were plainly stated. Morris & Co. never sold at discount prices, and prompt payment was demanded of all customers, whatever their rank or social standing. Prices were “for ready-money payments,” and the warning was issued that “all sums unpaid after one month from the delivery of the account will be charged with interest at the rate of 5 per cent per annum” (Kelvin 1987, 591). These terms broke with the extended periods of no-interest credit to which wealthy patrons had become accustomed. Another break with convention was to label the names, dimensions and prices of all items sold at the shop in Oxford Street.At the time, it was still the practice in high-class shops to avoid labelling, although the Morris approach was shared by the newer types of retailers, like the multiples and department stores established during the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Masset 2010). Morris & Co. made the most of its symbolic capital, exploiting the reputations of its principal designers, Burne-Jones and Morris. Originally, when the main task had been to establish the identity of the firm, the partners had agreed to keep secret the names of individual designers, a policy later reversed. In the 1880s and early 1890s, Burne-Jones’ reputation was at its peak, and his work commanded high prices (Fitzgerald 2014, 203–26). Morris & Co. announced in 1882 that “Mr Burne-Jones entrusts us alone with the execution of his cartoons for stained glass”.5 Morris likewise had become famous, and his celebrity drew people to take an interest in his work, whether or not they agreed with his political ideas. His conversion to socialism appears to have done little to deter customers. Nor did his lofty attitude and forthright opinions. Rossetti was surely correct in observing that Morris’s “very eccentricities and independent attitude towards his patrons seems to have drawn [them] around him” (Thompson 1993, 109). Morris personally advised wealthy customers on big decorative schemes and expensive purchases. In a brochure of the early 1880s, the firm announced that interior design would henceforth “be under the special supervision of Mr WILLIAM MORRIS, who will personally advise Customers as to the best method and style of Decoration to be used in each case”.6 In the later 1880s, he rationed his time by charging fees for personal visits to the homes of clients – five guineas (£5.25) in London, and £20 elsewhere, though charges did not apply to “well known and useful customers … [it was] only to stop fools and impertinents” (Kelvin 1987, 622). 47

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Establishing the Morrisian Community of Taste Morris moved confidently in high society in London and at the country retreats of wealthy landowners, industrialists and financiers, extending the social network that underpinned the commercial success of the business (Maclean, Harvey and Kling 2017).A typical example stems from the firm’s dealings with George Howard, later ninth Earl of Carlisle, and his wife, Rosalind, who visited the MMF & Co. workshops in 1866 and became regular customers for the next 20 years, furnishing their homes at Castle Howard in Yorkshire and Naworth Castle in Cumbria. Morris wallpapers and fabrics adorned their London home at Palace Green, serving as a showcase for the firm. One of the Howards’ first guests was HRH Princess Louise, who had married Howard’s cousin, the Marquis of Lorne. She especially liked the wallpapers and subsequently visited the firm’s showrooms to select papers for her rooms at Kensington Palace (Surtees 1988). The Howards’ close friendship with Percy and Madeleine Wyndham further extended Morris’s sphere of influence. Percy Wyndham was the younger son of George Wyndham, first Baron Leconfield. He and his wife were members of the intellectual and aesthetically minded aristocratic set known as the Souls (Abdy and Gere 1985, 82–101).Their admiration for Morris’s work at Palace Green led them to draw up ambitious plans for their country house, Clouds, in Wiltshire.Work started in 1876, though it was nine years before the house was ready for occupation. It was an important commission for Morris & Co. As Girouard (1979, 80–81) observes, Clouds set the style for country house life: “political entertaining combined with artistic discrimination. The style, sensibility and relative informality with which the two were pursued made Clouds one of the most famous country houses of its era”. Morris supplied fabrics for curtains, chair covers, tablecloths and screens and manufactured two large custom-designed hand-woven carpets. That for the drawing room, renowned as the Clouds carpet, featured an arabesque floral design on a blue ground with a grey border and was the largest carpet Morris & Co. ever manufactured (Dakers 1993, 63–64). It is possible through scrutiny of surviving diaries, memorials, social reports and other sources to trace further the Morris client network stemming from the Howards, who were just one node within a complex web of social interaction that reached beyond the aristocracy to elite members of society from all quarters (Harvey, Press and Maclean 2011, 259). Morris clients included the iron and steel magnate Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell (Rounton Grange in Yorkshire), the illustrator Myles Birket Foster (The Hill in Surrey), the financier Edward Charles Baring (Membland Hall in Devon) and the shipping magnate Frederick Leyland (Speke Hall in Liverpool). In the majority of cases down to 1890, Morris himself took charge of major decorative schemes, working closely with collaborators like Webb as architect, Burne-Jones as figure designer and William De Morgan as tile maker. Many of the products used – fabrics, wallpapers, carpets, tapestries and stained glass – came directly from Morris & Co.’s own workshops. Personal visits from Morris became social talking points;Walter Bagehot, the lawyer and constitutionalist, remarked in 1875, “the great man himself,William Morris, is composing [my] drawing room, as he would an ode” (Barrington 1915, 412). Once established as an arbiter of legitimate good taste amongst the more intellectual, artistically minded sections of the upper classes, Morris had the cultural authority needed to orchestrate the market (Bourdieu 1986, 230–232). Morris products never became ubiquitous, universally accepted or appreciated, but for leading-edge consumers within the ruling class, they spoke of distinction, understood as symbolic of high status and refined good taste. Only through the activities of market makers can decorative art products become entirely legitimate, whose possession is a true mark of distinction.Within the cultural field, as Bourdieu (1993, 75) observes, “the only legitimate accumulation consists in making a name for oneself, a known, 48

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recognized name, a capital of consecration implying a power to consecrate objects”. Morris had the power to consecrate objects as beautiful (or not), tasteful (or not), making the case for distinctive designs in harmony with nature, use of the best materials, alignment of form and function and use of appropriate production methods. Morris’s brand identity spoke of integrity, boldness, originality, naturalness and lack of pretension, qualities valued then as now by the Morrisian community of taste (Harvey, Press and Maclean 2011). Morris & Co., in cultivating the rich and powerful, can be seen to have traded cultural capital (in which it was rich) for social capital (prospective clients) and economic capital (commissions) (Harvey and Maclean 2008). From the client perspective, identification with cultural leaders like Morris offered a number of powerful yet subtle advantages.Within the Morrisian community of taste, appreciation of the decorative arts was a signifier of belonging; as Bourdieu remarks,“taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (Bourdieu 1986, 6). It was a neutral topic of conversation, shared by men and women, industrialists and bankers, landowners and city dwellers.When, for example, Walter Bagehot visited the Earl of Carnarvon at his country house, Highclere in Berkshire, he noted,“they are doing a heap of improvements, and among others have gone into Morrisianism … They are much amused here at my knowing anything about it” (St John-Stevas 1986, 640).This snippet, unimportant in itself, is revealing because Highclere was a pioneering venue for weekend house parties, which became a distinctive feature of upper-class life in late Victorian Britain (Hardinge, 1925, 323–324). Conversation about art, architecture and literature, as expressions of common cultural dispositions, served as a mechanism for elite cohesion, reinforcing its legitimacy and separation from the lower orders (DiMaggio, 1987). It did not matter whether members actually liked what they saw; what mattered was whether they knew about what they saw (Erickson 1991, 275–276).As Calhoun and Wacquant assert (2002, 7), it is knowledge that determines all forms of judgement and “buttresses the hierarchies of the social world”. In various ways, the growing reputation of Morris within the decorative arts resembled the spreading of a cult. Morris certainly had some of the qualities of a prophet. His literary works, especially The Earthly Paradise, made him famous as an author (Boos 1984). He was an educator and interpreter of complex social ideas, as his later writings on socialism confirm (Thompson 1993). In the decorative arts, his views on design and craftsmanship were the subject of public lectures. The first, “The Decorative Arts”, given before the Trades Guild of Learning in 1877, was reprinted in the Architect and as a pamphlet with a print run of 2,000 copies in 1878.This and others, such as “Making the Best of It” (c.1879), were collected and published as a book under the title Hopes and Fears for Art (Morris 1882). Morris’s admirers were quick in spreading further his beliefs and artistic principles. Numerous writers took up the theme of excellence in interior design, frequently citing Morris as a model to follow. Longmans published Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste in 1869; it became a long-running best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic. Rhoda and Agnes Garrett’s Suggestions for Home Decoration in Painting,Woodwork and Furniture followed in 1876. Both books offered advice along Morrisian lines and targeted “the cultivated middle class, able to enjoy leisure, refinement and luxury in moderation” (Garrett and Garrett 1876, 7–8).The Garretts emphasised simplicity and the avoidance of cheap imitations, as did Lucy Faulkner Orrinsmith (1877, 1), who castigated the solid comfort of the early Victorian period as “the very headquarters of commonplace, with its strict symmetry of ornament and its pretentious uselessness”.The trend was away from ostentation and display in favour of “art furnishing”, which favoured decluttering rooms by having less and lighter furniture, lighter colours and an air of casualness in the choice of patterns and objects (Forty 1986, 111–112). Robert Edis (1881) pursued the theme in Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses, as did Moncure Conway (1882) in Travels in South Kensington. Conway (199–210) noted that possession of something from Morris & Co. was de rigueur for every 49

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“artistic” middle-class household in London.Articles about Morris & Co. in The Art Journal, The Studio, The Spectator, The Architectural Review and other periodicals, often featuring photographs by photographer Bedford Lemere, equated the firm with decorative art at its best (Harvey and Press, 1994a). The Morrisian community of taste, inspired dialogically and discursively by the media, spread progressively from the upper classes to the middle classes during the 1880s and 1890s. In producing lower priced goods, “lesser emblems of distinction”, alongside expensive luxury goods, Morris & Co. brought large numbers of additional customers within its reach.The elevation of taste over costliness resonated with aspirational people educated in the decorative arts, confirming the argument made by Trigg (2001, 113) that “lifestyles can vary horizontally, cutting across the social hierarchy”. The wealthy continued to patronise Morris & Co. because it supplied exclusive goods at the top of the market, unavailable to the vast majority of the population and a continuing source of distinction.Those from the aspiring middle classes, meanwhile, equally could identify with the firm and its ideals in pursuing a lifestyle giving practical and symbolic expression to the exercise of discernment.

Morris as Cultural Icon The elevation of Morris to the status of cultural icon began in the 1880s when a broad cross-section of architects, designers and craft workers, collectively known today as the Arts and Crafts Movement, began selectively to champion his ideas on design and manufacture. Amongst the most important were the Century Guild, the Art Workers’ Guild, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and the Guild of Handicraft. Each, in different ways, acknowledged Morris as a source of inspiration, actively propagating his ideas and working methods (Naylor 1971; Stansky 1985; Cumming and Kaplan 1991). One of the staunchest advocates of Morrisian principles was the architect and designer W.R. Lethaby, who became Head of London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1894, infusing the curriculum with Morris’s beliefs and working methods, and in turn influencing the thinking of future generations of designers (MacDonald 1970, 292–293; Rubens 1986, 173–198). Lethaby’s influence on design education spread throughout Britain to mainland Europe, where the Central School provided “if not the model, certainly the inspiration of much continental teaching and training in design and the crafts” (Watkinson 1990 [1967], 173–198). This process of cultural diffusion was not one that Morris sought to control. He was neither founder nor moving spirit of any organisation formed to promote the arts and crafts, and aspects of his own practice – serial manufacture, sub-contracting and the use of machines – did not conform to stricter principles of craft manufacture, attracting criticism from some quarters (Blakesley 2009).What was crucial was the agency of cultural actors like Lethaby for whom he satisfied a continuing need. Each of these actors was in one way or another involved in codifying and simplifying, deriving historical categories of artistic perception (Bourdieu 1986, 466–484) with respect to Morris himself or the movements he symbolised. Such simplifications do not serve history well, expunging other actors and their achievements from popular memory, only recalled in specialist texts as characters of substance. This is structuration in action within the cultural field (Giddens 1984, 16–28; DiMaggio and Powell 1983), through which a natural order emerges, with its own mythology kept fresh by cultural authorities such as museum curators, designers and architects, media arts gurus and historians (DiMaggio 1987). Morris thus found his place in history as the inspiration and leading figure of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the main reference point in conversations about the decorative arts in Victorian Britain (Pevsner 2005, 12–57;Todd 2012). 50

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Through the processes of cultural reproduction, the Morrisian community of taste has reached across generations. Biographers and historians of art and design have revered his memory since his death in 1896 (MacCarthy 1994). Television and radio broadcasters have joined in more recently (Akhtar 2009). Others in the heritage industry have projected Morris as a cultural icon, notably the keepers of Morris collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and elsewhere (V&A 1996).There is a William Morris Society for the true cognoscenti.7 Meanwhile, at the commercial level, it is remarkable that many of Morris’s best-loved designs for wallpapers and fabrics have remained in near continuous production. After his death in 1896, the business was taken over by his partners, Frank and Robert Smith, continuing under their management, and from 1905 that of Henry Marillier, without any “deviation whatsoever in the traditions and methods of manufacture …” as in William Morris’s lifetime (Morris & Co. 1911). However, with the loss of creative force so implied, without fresh designs from Morris or Burne-Jones, at a time when tastes in the decorative arts had moved on, the business went into gentle decline, entering liquidation in 1940 (Parry, 1986).The commercial rights to Morris’s original designs passed in due course to Sanderson & Co., which has maintained production of his wallpapers and fabrics.The designs remain in use not only for their original purpose, but also as images for the decoration of scarves, ties, cushion covers, mugs, bags, diaries and all manner of paraphernalia – the “sentimentally evocative goods” found in museum shops and other cultural venues (The Met 2018;V&A 2018).These products, however derivative, serve symbolically to make a direct connection in the minds of purchasers between themselves and William Morris.Thus, in keeping his designs in the public eye, educators, cultural professionals and entrepreneurs have together maintained widespread appreciation of the essential character of Morrisian design.

The Kelmscott Press The reorganisation of the firm in 1890 left Morris free to concentrate on the final achievement of his life, the establishment of his second business, the Kelmscott Press. As decorative artist, he designed elegant fonts, page layouts, borders, title pages and special lettering. As scholar and man of letters, Morris was the author of 23 of the 66 Kelmscott volumes, the editor of one and the translator of another four. It was he, moreover, who determined what books the Press should produce. Indeed, his personality so dominated the enterprise that following his death, his executors decided that it should close following completion of work in hand (Peterson, 1991). Morris’s literary and artistic achievements at the Kelmscott Press depended in considerable part on his talent as an entrepreneur. In his final venture, he naturally took the same methodical approach, including preparatory research and mastery of relevant techniques, which had elevated the fortunes of Morris & Co. His offerings, moreover, appealed to the same middle and upper-class constituencies. Just as the firm sold goods at a range of prices and qualities, from high works of art down to simple domestic articles, so too the Kelmscott Press produced books of differing sizes, lavishness of illustration and price. The average price of a paper volume was £2.19, with considerable variation, such that 36 titles went on sale at £1.50 or less.A few – 11 volumes printed on paper – cost more than £5, with the Chaucer in a league of its own at £20. A vellum edition of any work cost between five and six times its paper counterpart, appealing to wealthy collectors. In his book on The Kelmscott Press and William Morris (1924, 75–78), Sparling suggested that Morris never intended the Kelmscott Press to make money, stating that “he [Morris] had never contemplated the sale of any book whatever at any price, until forced to do so by finding that there was a real and widespread demand for his books”.The idea that the Kelmscott Press was in essence non-profit-making has been reiterated by later writers, most notably by William 51

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Peterson, whose Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press (1982) contains a wealth of detail on all aspects of the books produced by Morris. Peterson (1982, xi) states that the Press “was in effect an amusing diversion for Morris” that he expected would cost him money. Its commercial success accordingly is seen as an incidental consequence of artistic genius rather than something which Morris may have striven for as a matter of course.There is some evidence to support this interpretation. Morris himself rejected any suggestion that high prices meant large profits:“if the people who go about talking of my profits could see my balance sheet, they would speak quite differently”. In the case of the Chaucer, the “cost will hardly be covered by the subscriptions”, and with the Beowulf, the effect of several sheets having spoiled in the printing was to convert a profit into a loss so that “the book is sold at less than what it cost me to produce it” (Peterson 1984, 111). The Kelmscott Press, it is quite clear, was no ordinary commercial venture. Morris’s primary objectives were artistic, not financial.This said, it is hard to believe that Morris, with all his experience of marketing high-quality goods and services, set up this complex and costly enterprise in entire innocence of the notion that the books would find a ready market. All Morris’s creative endeavours gave him pleasure, but this did not relegate them to the status of amusing diversions. His was a serious purpose, and that purpose demanded that he stay in business. To do this he had to trade at a profit.To trade at a profit, he had to keep down costs, stimulate demand and fix his prices at a remunerative level.The Kelmscott Press was a remarkable creative adventure, but it was also a commercial concern with orthodox financial aspirations (Faulkner, 1986, 53). All the signs are that the business operated on sound commercial lines, notwithstanding significant risks. Morris invariably followed the achievement of one ambitious goal with another yet more ambitious; and in this case, ambition dictated the production of an edition of Chaucer that would rank amongst the finest books of all time. After two financially successful years, in 1892 and 1893, a large part of the resources of the Kelmscott Press was turned over to the project. Morris, as ever, was prepared to invest heavily in projects about which he cared deeply. No expense was spared. The direct cost of producing 425 paper copies and 13 vellum copies was a staggering £7,217, expended over three years.The books had a gross value of £10,128, trimmed by 25 per cent to cover costs of distribution, making £7,596. Morris was not exaggerating when in 1895 he claimed that the Chaucer would yield little or no profit.The reason for this is almost certainly that Morris announced his prices and took orders at too early a stage, before the full costs of the project were known. Its instant success suggests he may readily have made a good profit simply by charging more or printing more copies.The steep rise in prices in the second-hand market immediately following release of Kelmscott Press editions to subscribers, with prices quickly doubling or trebling, supports this view (Franklin 1968). In the main, however, most Kelmscott books were profitable even if under-priced.The surviving data provide detailed information of only half the Press’s titles, but this does permit us to calculate the ratio of gross income to operating costs for 33 Kelmscott books, both individually and collectively. The weighted average ratio for all 33 titles is 1.94 to 1. In other words, gross income from sales was almost double the sum needed to meet costs of production. Even factoring in overheads and distribution expenses, including trade discounts, there was still a fair margin for profit. Of course, there was considerable variation between titles.At the upper end of the profit range were some of Morris’s own works. The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise had gross income to cost ratios of 3.47 to 1 and 3.46 to 1 respectively, compared to 1.4 to 1 for the Chaucer and 1.46 to 1 for Beowulf. The highest income to cost differential, with a ratio of 12.79 to 1, was that of the 26-page Syr Isambrace; the lowest ratio, at 1.31 to 1, was that of the three-volume Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which cost £832 to produce (Sparling 1924, 148–174). 52

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The overall picture is that of a financially healthy business with considerable scope to charge premium prices for its products.The only surviving financial statement for the Kelmscott Press, a balance sheet drawn up at 31 December 1895, confirms this assessment. It shows a firm in a very solid financial position, with plant and machinery written down to a low figure, and sufficient liquid assets to cover its debts many times over.8 For Morris, the success of the Kelmscott Press may have been the most satisfying aspect of his whole career – notably, an achievement that depended on his entrepreneurial flair just as much as it did on his artistic expertise.

Conclusion The success of Morris & Co. in advancing the cause of the decorative arts owed much to the sagacity of Morris’s business ideas and the aptness of his methods. Morris fully appreciated that if the firm was to succeed in meeting its wider objectives, then it must trade profitably and secure a strong position in the marketplace. From the late 1860s onwards, when Morris really began to take its affairs in hand, the firm was consistently profitable, and after the mid-1880s, it was very lucrative indeed. Morris knew his markets, and he knew how to exploit them. He kept the name of the firm before the public, winning and maintaining a reputation for the highest standards of design and manufacture. Equally, he knew his costs, and he was vigilant in keeping them down. Neither suppliers nor workers found Morris an easy touch, though he was always willing to pay well for work of the highest standard. He was obsessive about quality, and he turned his obsession into a business asset.The firm became known for its use of traditional methods, machinery and processes. Its hand-woven fabrics and carpets, and its hand-printed textiles and wallpapers, all fetched premium prices.Vegetable dyeing was not an easy craft to master, but it helped give the Morris range of goods a distinctive quality for which the firm’s customers showed no hesitation in paying. Morris & Co. was a highly innovative small business, which, if its owner had so desired, could have grown into a much larger concern. More designs could have been turned over for machine production; more shops could have been opened; more agents could have been appointed overseas. All these were possibilities that Morris recognised and rejected. He was never interested in growth for its own sake.When the firm did grow, it was not through increasing the scale of production per se, but through widening its activities to control quality or extend the range of products. Growth beyond this point would have required changes that Morris could not have tolerated. Drawing in capital and professional management from outside would have reduced his personal freedom, and, worse still, would have made even heavier demands upon his time. Detachment from the everyday realities of design and manufacture would have followed, leaving him in a position no different from the ordinary commercial manufacturer. Living small but certain was a far more enticing prospect, made manifest in business strategy. His customers were privileged members of society with relatively high and secure incomes. They could afford the prices needed to cover the costs of producing high-quality goods in limited quantities, or in providing labour-intensive decorative art services. Thus, while Morris cut himself off from the much bigger markets served by mass production suppliers, he had the compensation of never having to reduce his standards below a level acceptable to himself. Furthermore, his markets, except for stained glass, were relatively free from the regular fluctuations in demand that characterised the lower end of the luxury trades.This was certainly comforting to him; he was throughout anxious to maintain his income at a level that kept him in the upper reaches of Victorian society. He was far from being an avaricious man, but from his earliest days had enjoyed a high standard of material wellbeing, and he had no wish to lower his sights, either for himself or his wife and children.This explains the sheer effort Morris put into building up his business between the late 1860s and mid-1880s. 53

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How does this square with Morris’s championing of revolutionary socialism after 1883? Was he disingenuous when writing to Charles Maurice (Kelvin 1987, 199) that “the contrasts of rich and poor are unendurable and ought not to be endured by either rich or poor”? The answer emphatically is no. Morris was utterly sincere in his political quest for social justice. His personal knowledge of the demands and constraints of capitalist enterprise – gained on the front line at MMF & Co., Devon Great Consols and Morris & Co. – led him to the conclusion that system change demanded systemic, political action. Voluntarily redistributing his personal wealth to workers or good causes could only be a futile gesture, making, as he wrote to Georgiana BurneJones, “a very small knot of working-people … somewhat better off amidst the great ocean of economic slavery” (Kelvin 1987, 283). Better by far, he reasoned, was to apply his time, creativity and financial resources in support of the political struggle for socialism. Morris & Co., in remaining small and independent, enabled him to do just that. Morris delegated routine administrative and supervisory matters to George Wardle, the Smith brothers and, later, J.H. Dearle, dividing his time during the 1880s between higher value-adding business activities and politics, and focusing during the 1890s on the Kelmscott Press.The firm offered support, in one way or another, for all his artistic, cultural, literary and political ventures, for the greater part of his adult life. It was, indeed, part of the weave of his life, the overarching project which of necessity consumed a large part of his waking hours. It provided him with a vehicle for his researches in the history and methods of the decorative arts. It gave him a clear sense of direction, making demands, setting challenges and offering tangible rewards. It represented security, a base from which he could step out and engage with the world without threatening his livelihood. He could use his resources – his money and his time – as he saw fit.The independent spirit that pervaded all his work is that of a man in command of his own destiny. Business was foundational to the creative life of William Morris.

Notes 1 Hammersmith and Fulham Archives, DD348/14, letter from May Morris to Sydney Cockerell, 11 May 1938. 2 William Morris Gallery (WMG), Walthamstow, J191, speech delivered by May Morris in 1934 celebrating the centenary of her father's birth. 3 PRO (Public Record Office), IR59/173, Morris & Co.,Articles of Partnership, 19 March 1890. 4 WMG,Walthamstow, File 11a, Morris & Co. circular, 9 April 1877. 5 Victoria and Albert Museum, Box 126a, Morris & Co. brochure, 1882. 6 WMG,Walthamstow, File 11a, Morris & Co. undated circular, c. 1881. 7 WMS (William Morris Society, website, https://williammorrissociety.org/. 8 PRO, IR59/173, Kelmscott Press, Balance Sheet, 31 December 1895.

References Abdy, Jane and Gere, Charlotte. The Souls. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985. Addleshaw, G. W. O. and Etchells, Frederick. The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship. London: Faber & Faber, 1948. Akhtar, Navid. 2009.“William Morris and the Muslims.” BBC World Service Online. Accessed 16 April 2018. Barrington, Russell, ed. The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot.Vol. 10. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1915. Blakesley, Rosalind P. The Arts and Crafts Movement. London: Phaidon Press, 2009. Boos, Florence. “Victorian Response to Earthly Paradise Tales.” Journal of William Morris Studies 5(4) 1984: 16–29. Boos, Florence and O’Sullivan, Patrick.“Morris and Devon Great Consols.” Journal of William Morris Studies 19(4) 2012: 11–39.

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Business in the Creative Life of William Morris Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. ——— . The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Brooks, Christopher and Saint, Andrew, eds. The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Calhoun, Craig and Wacquant, Loïc. “Social Science with a Conscience: Remembering Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002).” Thesis Eleven 70(1) 2002: 1–14. Cheshire, Jim. Stained Glass and the Victorian Gothic Revival. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Conway, Moncure. Travels in South Kensington. New York, NY: Harper Brothers, 1882. Cook, E.T. and Wedderburn,Alexander, eds. The Works of John Ruskin:‘A Joy Forever’ and The Two Paths.Vol. 16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [2009], 1905. Cumming, Elizabeth and Kaplan,Wendy. The Arts and Crafts Movement. London:Thames and Hudson, 1991. Dakers, Caroline. Clouds:The Biography of a Country House. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1993. Davis, Virginia. “William Morris and Indigo Discharge Printing.” Journal of William Morris Studies 11(3) 1995: 8–18. DiMaggio, Paul.“Classification in Art.” American Sociological Review 52(4) 1987: 440–455. DiMaggio, Paul and Powell, Walter. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review 48(2) 1983: 147–160. Eastlake, Charles. Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1869. ———. A History of the Gothic Revival. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1872. Edis, Robert. Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses. New York, NY: Scribner and Welford, 1881. Erickson, Bonnie.“What is Good Taste Good For?” Canadian Review of Sociology 28(2) 1991: 255–278. Fairclough, Oliver and Leary, Emmeline. Textiles by William Morris and Morris & Co. 1861–1940. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981. Faulkner, Peter. Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt:The Letters of Jane Morris to Wilfred Scawen Blunt,Together with Extracts from Blunt's Diaries. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1986. Fiell, Charlotte and Fiell, Peter. Morris. Köln: Taschen, 2017. Finkelstein, Sydney, Harvey, Charles, and Lawton,Thomas. Breakout Strategy: Meeting the Challenge of DoubleDigit Growth. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Fitzgerald, Penelope. Edward Burne-Jones:A Biography. London: Fourth Estate, 2014. Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society, 1750–1980. London:Thames and Hudson, 1986. Franklin, Colin. “The Kelmscott Press: An Album for the Nineties.” Journal of William Morris Studies 2(2) 1968: 14–18. Garrett, Rhoda and Garrett, Agnes. Suggestions for House Decoration in Painting, Woodwork and Furniture. London: Macmillan, 1876. Gibeling, Keith.“Peter Paul Marshall:The Forgotten Member of the Morris Firm.” Journal of William Morris Studies 12(1) 1996: 8–16. Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Girouard, Mark. The Victorian Country House. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1979. Greensted, Mary. The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain. Oxford: Shire, 2010. Gunn, Simon and Bell, Rachel. Middle Classes:Their Rise and Sprawl. London: Cassel, 2002. Hall, Michael. George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Hall, Michael. “What do Victorian Churches Mean? Symbolism and Sacramentalism in Anglican Church Architecture, 1850–1870.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59(1) 2000: 78–95. Hardinge, Arthur. The Life of Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, fourth Earl of Carnarvon, 1831–1890. Vol. 2. London: Oxford University Press, 1925. Harvey, Charles and Maclean, Mairi. “Capital Theory and the Dynamics of Elite Business Networks in Britain and France.” The Sociological Review 56(s1) 2008: 103–120. Harvey, Charles and Press, Jon. Art, Enterprise and Ethics:The Life and Works of William Morris. London: Frank Cass, 1996. ———. “The City and Mining Enterprise:The Origins of the Morris Family Fortune.” Journal of William Morris Studies 9(1) 1990: 3–14. ———.“The Ionides Family and 1 Holland Park.” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 18 (1994a): 2–14. ———. “John Ruskin and the Ethical Foundations of Morris & Company, 1861–96.” Journal of Business Ethics 14(3) 1995: 181–194.

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Charles Harvey, Jon Press and Mairi Maclean ———.“Morris and Co. in Manchester.” Journal of William Morris Studies 9(3) 1991a: 4–8. ———. William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991b. ———.“William Morris and the Marketing of Art.” Business History 28(1) 1986: 36–54. ———. “William Morris and the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction.” Journal of William Morris Studies 11(1) 1994b: 31–44. Harvey, Charles, Press, Jon, and Maclean, Mairi. “William Morris, Cultural Leadership, and the Dynamics of Taste.” Business History Review 85(2) 2011: 245–271. Henderson, Philip. William Morris: His Life,Work and Friends. London:Thames and Hudson, 1967. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. “G.E. Street in the 1850s.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 19(4) 1960: 145–171. Kelvin, Norman, ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris.Vol. 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. King, W. T. C. “The Extent of the London Discount Market in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century.” Economica 2(7) 1935: 321–326. ———. History of the London Discount Market. London: Routledge, 1936. MacCarthy, Fiona. The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. London: Faber & Faber, 2011. ———. William Morris:A Life for Our Time. London: Faber & Faber, 1994. MacDonald, Stuart. The History and Philosophy of Art Education. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1970. Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899. Maclean, Mairi, Harvey, Charles, and Kling, Gerhard.“Elite Business Networks and the Field of Power: A Matter of Class?” Theory, Culture & Society 34(5–6) 2017: 127–151. Marsh, Jan.“Red House: Past and Future.” In William Morris in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Phillippa Bennett and Rosie Miles. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Masset, Claire. Department Stores. Oxford: Shire, 2010. The Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art). William Morris. https://store.metmuseum.org/search?q=William +Morris.Accessed on 15 April 2018. Morris & Co. Brief Sketch of the Morris Movement. London: Morris & Co., 1911. Morris, May, ed. The Collected Works of William Morris. 24 vols. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910–15. Morris, William. Hopes and Fears for Art. London: Ellis and White, 1882. Naylor, Gillian. The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of Its Sources, Ideals and Influence on Design Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. Ormiston, Rosalind and Wells, N. M. William Morris:Artists, Craftsman, Pioneer. London: Flame Tree, 2010. Orrinsmith, Lucy. The Drawing Room: Its Decorations and Furniture. London: Macmillan, 1877. Parry, Linda.“Morris and Company in the Twentieth Century.” Journal of William Morris Studies 6(4) 1986: 11–16. ———. Textiles and the Arts and Crafts Movement. London:Thames and Hudson, 2005. ———. William Morris Textiles. London:V&A, 2013. Peterson, W. S. A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———. The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book by William Morris. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. ———. Kelmscott Press:A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Pevsner, Nikolaus. Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2005. Richards,Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England:Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Richardson, Linda. “William Morris’s Childhood and Schooling.” Journal of William Morris Studies 9(1) 1990: 15–19. Rubens, Geoffrey. William Richard Lethaby: His Life and Work, 1857–1931. London: Architectural Press, 1986. Salmon, Nicholas.“A Friendship from Heaven: Burne-Jones and William Morris.” Journal of William Morris Studies 13(1) 1998: 2–13. Saxby, David. William Morris at Merton. London: Museum of London Archaeology, 1995. Sparling, H. H. The Kelmscott Press and William Morris, Master Craftsman. London: Macmillan, 1924. Stansky, Peter. Redesigning the World:William Morris, the 1880s and the Arts and Crafts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

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Business in the Creative Life of William Morris ———. William Morris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. St. John-Stevas, Norman, ed. The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot.Vol. 13. London:The Economist, 1986. Surtees,Victoria. The Artist and the Autocrat: George and Rosalind Howard, Earl and Countess of Carlisle. Wilby, Norfolk: Michael Russell, 1988. Thompson, F. M. L. The Rise of Respectable Society:A Social History of Britain, 1830–1900. London: William Collins, 1988. Thompson, Paul. The Work of William Morris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Todd, Pamela. William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Home. London:Thames and Hudson, 2012. Trigg, Andrew. “Veblen, Bourdieu, and Conspicuous Consumption.” Journal of Economic Issues 35(1) 2001: 99–115. V&A (Victoria & Albert Museum). William Morris: Exhibition Catalogue. London: V&A, 1996. V&A. William Morris & Friends. https://www.vam.ac.uk/shop/gifts/william-morris-friends.html.Accessed on 15 April 2018. Watkinson, Ray. William Morris as Designer. London:Trefoil Books, 1990 [1967]. Wikipedia. William Morris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris.Accessed 10 April 2018. Wild, Tessa. William Morris and his Palace of Art:Architecture, Interiors and Design at Red House. London: Philip Wilson, 2018. Wilson, Richard and Mackley,Alan. Creating Paradise:The Building of the English Country House, 1160–1880. London: Continuum, 2000. Yeo, Stephen. 1977. “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896.” History Workshop Journal 4(1) 1997: 5–56.

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3 MORRIS, GENDER, AND THE WOMAN QUESTION Florence S. Boos

From his first volumes of poetry through his final prose romances, Morris’s writings often featured portrayals of complex and striking women. An understanding of the possible influences on these representations is thus central to a full interpretation of his work. In addition, recent biographers and other critics have devoted much attention to the women in Morris’s life. As background for this chapter, I will review what is known about his relations with female family members and friends and consider how these may have shaped his later views on sexuality and marriage. In the chapter’s next section, I will compare Morris’s stated views on female equality with the goals of late Victorian feminists in general, as well as with emerging nineteenth-century socialist feminist thought. Finally, I will identify underlying patterns in several of his more dramatic literary representations of women and consider the extent to which these shifted as Morris began to formulate explicitly egalitarian socialist views. I will argue that although from the first Morris showed recognition of the ways in which women were forced into confined and unequal social positions, under the influence of life experiences and contemporary socialist debates on marriage, his later writings manifest an increased appreciation of women as autonomous sexual beings and political agents. Nonetheless, Morris retained an imaginative preference for conventional gender divisions: within his literary works; men are more often warriors and travelers, and his women, with some exceptions, are aligned with forces of nature and love. It has often been noted that bipolarities are central to his thought––struggle and achievement, energetic action and rest, oppression and utopia—and his men and women are similarly dichotomized, with males assigned roles of aggression and females the arts of peace.As he moved toward the more socialist-influenced imaginations of his later work, however, these dualities, though not erased, are softened to endow his female characters with greater inventiveness, active force, and prophetic wisdom. Although Morris cannot be claimed as a modern feminist, I suggest that he was instead a proto-feminist whose attitudes closely ally with the tenets of nineteenth-century socialist feminism.

The Women in Morris’s Life Morris’s relationships with female family members and friends were generally affectionate, though on occasion these required negotiation and adaptation. Though it would be overly literal to seek direct correlations, arguably he learned from these experiences, and his writings 58

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portray female characters who exhibit an array of alternately benign and destructive qualities. Whatever their actions, however, these women are often represented as limited in their choices and threatened by potential sexual victimization in a violent and male-directed world.

Morris’s Mother and Sisters Morris’s father died when he was thirteen, and as a result his mother may have assumed a more significant role in his life during his adolescence and early manhood than might otherwise have been the case. Physically vigorous, Emma Morris (1805–1894) was to maintain cordial relationships with her family of nine surviving children (out of ten) and their descendants throughout her long life. Fiona MacCarthy maintains that “William Morris’s relations with his mother were peculiarly tortuous,” (MacCarthy, 10), but evidence for this is uneven. During Morris’s childhood she would have been busy with the care of his younger siblings (he was the third child and eldest of five living sons). Nonetheless she provided for him in important ways: she paid for William to attend a day boarding school beginning at age 11 (Ibid., 20), contributed the annual stipend for his education at Marlborough College, and, when the latter proved unsatisfactory, arranged for him to board privately with a tutor to enable him to pass his Oxford entrance exams. She underwrote his three years of university instruction—the only Morris son to be so prestigiously educated—and insisted that he complete his final year of university and take his degree. Despite what were likely some misgivings, she also invested 200 pounds1 in the initial business enterprise of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. In a short biographical sketch addressed to fellow socialist Andreas Scheu in 1883, Morris later wrote that he had strongly disliked the “rich establishment Puritanism” of his childhood

Figure 3.1 Emma Morris, Morris’s mother. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery.

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(Kelvin 2:227), as enforced by his devout mother. Still, one might argue that the moralistic tone of his mother’s religion influenced her son at some level, acting to moderate what might otherwise have been the more self-indulgent lifestyle of a son of the wealthy upper-middle classes. She had wished him to become a clergyman, and when he resisted, had clearly expressed her distress, as shown in an 11 November 1855 letter to her in which he announces his intention to become an architect. His letter is a model of tact, and its language of appeal (“sin,”“God being my helper”) is not one he was to use later or in other contexts: You said then, you remember, that it was an evil thing to be an idle, objectless man; I am fully determined not to incur this reproach. … [B]esides your money has by no means been thrown away, [since he has met loving friends at Oxford]; if moreover by living here and seeing evil and sin in its foulest and coarsest forms, as one does day by day, I have learned to hate any form of sin, and to wish to fight against it, is not this well too? … it will be rather grievous to my love of idleness and leisure to have to go through all the drudgery of learning a new trade … I in my turn will try to shame [those who criticize me], God being my helper, by steadiness and hard work. (Ibid., 24–25) These claims seem more than special pleading, for it is hard to imagine a less “idle, objectless man” than Morris was to become; and notably two of Mrs. Morris’s other children, Emma Morris Oldham and Isabella Morris Gilmore, were also distinguished by active social or philanthropic endeavors. Observers noted that Mrs. Morris was attached to her eldest son; Georgiana Burne-Jones recorded that when Edward first visited the family home, his mother “would willingly have told many stories of his childhood,” (Memorials 2:87). May Morris remembered her grandmother’s “fond pride in the son who had once disappointed her by giving up the church as a career … ‘why, my dear, he might have been a Bishop now!’ she exclaimed to me once with plaintive affection” (CW 4:xvii). Less complicated were May’s memories of visits to Mrs. Morris’s house in then-rural Leyton “with the grandmother who spoilt us so outrageously and adorably” (Ibid.). Morris’s mother distributed a large portion of her wealth to each of her children equally on their maturity, a bequest which allowed her son financial and thus artistic and professional independence. Among other freedoms, it enabled him politely and firmly to ignore her advice, as well as to subsidize The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in which he published his first poems and romances, and to obtain some training as a painter and architect before settling into his life’s work as a designer and entrepreneur. On the other hand, Mrs. Morris’s views on finance aligned with those of her class; it may be on her account that Morris served briefly as a director of the Devonshire Great Consols mine, the source of his family’s sudden accession of wealth. He reportedly said in later life that his relatives had thought he was “both wicked and mad” to sell the shares he had inherited (the value of which soon plummeted), and his mother would likely have been foremost among these critics (MacCarthy, 171). Emma Morris senior was thus clearly more conventional than her son; her absence at his wedding to a woman of lower social station seems marked, although she socialized pleasantly with Jane and his family in after years. His many preserved letters to her are cordially affectionate, but also relatively brief and devoid of controversial subjects. Nonetheless Frank Sharp has observed that in 1888, he sent her two copies of his volume of socialist essays, Signs of Change, something he presumably would not have done had he believed its contents would distress her.2 Jane Morris described her mother-in-law five years before her death:“she walks and takes drives in an open carriage … and reads and talks incessantly; she is quite happy and I really think 60

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she expects to live another twenty years at least” (13 February 1889, Salmon and Baker, 213). Somewhat cryptic are Morris’s remarks at her death in December 1894: Tuesday I went to bury my mother, a pleasant winter day with gleams of sun. She was laid in earth in the churchyard close by the house, a very pretty place among the great wych-elms, which, if it were of no use to her, was softening to us. Altogether my old and callous heart was touched by the absence of what had been so kind to me and fond of me. (Kelvin 4: 290–91) Why his heart was “callous” cannot be known, but despite their differences in outlook, descriptions of the elder Mrs. Morris suggest that at least some of Morris’s traits––energy, intelligence, firm-mindedness, and ambition—were those he had shared with his mother. In boyhood, Morris was closest to his eldest sister Emma (1830–1915), described by May Morris as “a gentle nature and specially fond of him” (AWS 2, 613).Two of his earliest poems, “Fame” and “The Three Flowers,” may describe his sadness when her marriage to the Rev. Joseph Oldham removed her from the vicinity. Emma preserved copies of Morris’s earliest verses, transcribing several in her own hand;3 in later life, when on a socialist speaking tour, he visited Emma and her husband in Clay Cross, Derbyshire, and in his will he left her an annuity of 100 pounds (Lawrence, 55). Morris’s elder sister Henrietta, described by May as “more given to ruling” (AWS 2, 613), reportedly objected to William’s refusal to attend the Duke of Wellington’s funeral in 1852 and expressed unhappiness when he decided not to enter the clergy; in mid-life, Henrietta converted to Roman Catholicism (Lawrence, 55). She had accompanied him on his first trip

Figure 3.2 Emma Morris Oldham. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery.

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to France in 1854, and their later relations seem to have been cordial; in 1893, he thanked her by letter for a “nice neckerchief,” and on their mother’s death, he helped her locate a suitable home. She must have felt him to be a source of support, for on his death she wrote Sydney Cockerell, “[T]he world is different to me now in every way and I feel utterly lost and alone” (Ibid., 56). Deprived of the opportunity for further education, Henrietta spent her life as her mother’s companion, perhaps serving for Morris as an example of a strong-minded woman sadly confined to her home by Victorian conventions for unpartnered women. And finally, Morris’s younger sister Isabella Gilmore (1842–1923) helped raise their brother Thomas’s eight children after his death and that of her husband. In 1887 she was ordained as an Anglican deaconess, founding an order of women dedicated to helping the poor of Battersea; Morris contributed designs for two rooms of the order’s home and chapel (Ibid., 67, 69). Unlike Morris in his adulthood, Emma senior, Emma, Henrietta, and Isabella were all devout, but as mentioned, it seems noticeable that both his sisters Emma and Isabella similarly devoted much of their lives to efforts to aiding the less fortunate. Jane, May, and Jenny Morris

Beginning with Jan Marsh’s pioneering Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (1985), much has been written on the character of Morris’s wife Jane Burden Morris (1839–1914) and Morris’s relationship with her. Her Collected Letters, meticulously gathered and annotated by Marsh and Frank Sharp (2012), reveal a serious, intelligent, and friendly woman, though in later life somewhat confined by her role as partial caretaker to her epileptic daughter. Jane was the daughter of

Figure 3.3 Jane Morris, 1879. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery.

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Robert Burden, an Oxford stableman, and Ann Maizy, whom Marsh and Sharp surmise was a former domestic servant, and they note the skill with which she adapted to her new marital circumstances: Far more remarkable than any iconic image or romantic legend … is her rise from poverty in the slums of Oxford to life in both Bohemian artistic circles and in respectable, even aristocratic,Victorian society.This transformation was made possible by Jane’s keen intelligence, warm human sympathy and common sense as she adapted to her changing fortunes. (LJM, 1) Jane was courted by the young William while he was living in Oxford in 1857–58. He admired her appearance and may also have been attracted by her mixture of sweetness and reserve; an early Defence poem,“In Praise of My Lady,” describes the speaker’s beloved thus: Her great eyes standing far apart, Draw up some memory from her heart, And gaze out very mournfully, —Beata mea Domina! So beautiful and kind they are, But most times looking out afar, Waiting for something, not for me. (ll. 25–31) The heroes of Morris’s early poems and romances exhibit a protective and unselfish love for their intended partners and often hope to rescue them from some form of confinement or poverty; for example,“Gertha’s Lovers,” one of Morris’s tales in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, portrays a peasant maid Gertha who is courted by the noble King Olaf, and who after Olaf ’s death in battle becomes the champion and spiritual leader of her people. Marsh and Sharp suggest that Jane was likely privately educated for her new role before the Morrises’ April 1859 wedding. The marriage began well, with the couple enjoying life among friends at Red House; Georgiana Burne-Jones recalled Jane’s playfulness and her happy companionship with Lizzie Siddal and Georgiana. Jane soon learned to manage competently the Morris household, which eventually employed as many as five servants, as well to execute embroideries for Morris and Co. and oversee the Firm’s embroidery section.Two children were born to the couple, Jane Alice (Jenny) in 1861 and Mary (May) in 1862. Unfortunately, for the next several years, perhaps as a result of childbirth, Jane suffered from a spinal or back condition, and in later life was subject to bronchitis and rheumatism; attempts to improve her health brought the Morrises to Bad Ems, Germany in 1869, and in later years Jane made four visits to Italy in the company of her aristocratic reformist friend, Rosalind Howard. As is widely known, Jane was the object of the attentions of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), who had been a mentor to the younger Pre-Raphaelites and contributing member of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. She served as the model for several of Rossetti’s paintings, and the two conducted an affair from sometime in 1868–69 through 1873–74. Since both partners apparently had serious health problems, it is unclear how physically intimate the relationship may have been, but it certainly excluded Morris, who expressed his sadness and grief in a series of poems written between 1869 and 1873 (Boos 2015). An unpublished poem of 1869,“Alone, Unhappy By the Fire I Sat,” describes the speaker’s anxieties after the undesired visit of a “friend”: 63

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Then when they both are gone I sit alone And turning foolish triumphs pages oer And think how it would be if they were gone Not to return, or worse if the time bore Some seed of hatred in its fiery core … (ll. 50–54)4 Notably, the poet fears less the loss of love (now an accomplished fact) than permanent isolation and bitterness; instead, he struggles to expel the “seed of hatred” within himself, as he later wrote Aglaia Coronio on 25 November 1872, after his wife’s return from a visit to Italy with the Howards: I am so glad to have Janey back again: her company is always pleasant and she is very kind & good to me … another quite selfish business is that Rossetti has set himself down at Kelmscott as if he never meant to go away. … There, dear Aglaia see how I am showing you my pettinesses! Please don’t encourage me in them. … O how I long to keep the world from narrowing on me, and to look at things bigly and kindly. (Kelvin 1:172–73) In coded language, these ungathered poems also convey his determination to remain with his wife; in “Hapless Love,” for example, when a deserted lover is chided by his male friend for foolishness in not seeking another partner, he responds sharply: “Art thou a God? Nay, if thou were, / Wouldst thou belike know of my hurt, / And what might sting and what might heal? / … To my heart / My love and sorrow must I press” (ll. 136–38, 141–42). Morris and Rossetti became co-tenants of Kelmscott Manor in 1871; biographers have speculated that this permitted Jane and Rossetti freedom to cohabit away from the prying eyes of London society, though in this volume, Julia Griffin argues that the tenancy may instead have preceded and fostered the affair. Rossetti experienced a breakdown in 1872, and apparently Jane broke off the relationship, perhaps motivated both by his erratic behavior and concern for the effect her actions might have on her growing daughters. Nothing in Jane’s letters or the recollections of others suggests that she felt ambivalence about her relationship with Rossetti on Morris’s behalf; even so, one cannot but wonder if the increasingly troubled and inwardly divided women of Morris’s literary works from the period may reflect recognition that she too suffered the tensions of competing claims. Friends and later visitors to Kelmscott Manor remembered Jane as a kindly and good-humored hostess (rather like Annie in the Guest House in News from Nowhere), and several noted William and Jane’s mutual affection and respect (LJM, 12). Jane also maintained a wide variety of interests in addition to her work for Morris and Co.: she supervised her daughters’ early education; organized collections for progressive causes; read literary works in English, French, and Italian; and enjoyed gardening, occasional sketching, and playing the piano and mandolin. In later life, Jane was to spend much of her time at Kelmscott Manor with Jenny, whose epileptic or epileptic-like symptoms had begun as early as 1876.These caused her mother great pain, as Jane wrote in 1888: It has been a dreadful grief for us all, worse for me than for anyone, as I have been so constantly with her, I never get used to it. I mean in the sense of not minding, every time the thing [epileptic fit] occurs, it is as if a dagger were thrust into me. (LJM, 169) From at least 1887 until 1892 (MacCarthy, 651) Jane apparently conducted a second affair with Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840–1922), and her letters to him are preserved in Peter Faulkner’s 64

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1981 Wilfred Scawen Blunt and the Morrises and Marsh/Sharp. As a Tory anti-imperialist, unsuccessful parliamentary candidate, and supporter of Irish independence, Blunt would have seemed a romantic figure; he was also a womanizer, and in later years an alcoholic who spent his final years in lawsuits against his wife, daughter, and granddaughters, and whose condescending remarks on Jane in his Diaries (Blunt 1919) make unpleasant reading. Though Jane’s politics were progressive, they were not socialist, and she was apparently lukewarm to some of Morris’s working-class socialist friends; after his death, she became a Fabian. Her views on the “woman question” were also slightly more conservative than her husband’s; although several of her friends were suffragists, in 1907 she wrote Cormell Price: I can’t make up my mind about our vote … I object to these noisy women having an increased power because they only want to reverse things and spitefully trample on the men. I want both sexes to have equal rights when the women are better educated companions and housekeepers. (LJM, 401) When Morris died Jane Morris was only 57, and she lived for 20 more years at Kelmscott Manor, apparently remembering her husband fondly, preserving his manuscripts and artworks, arranging for various charities, and purchasing the lease of Kelmscott Manor. It is unclear how close she and May were in earlier life; she disapproved of May’s marriage, and her letters at times criticize her daughter. In later years they were clearly at peace, however, and after 1909, May relied on her mother’s help in contributing recollections for her edition of Morris’s Collected Works. In fact, Jane’s sole recorded expression of irritation to Blunt appears in a 13 January 1913 letter in which she chides him for providing his recollections of Morris to another writer: “When May is writing an important book on her Father, and is glad of all fresh matter—it vexes me to find that old friends have contributed anything to an unknown author” (Ibid., 459). In all, the complexities of the Morrises’ ultimately stable and affectionate marriage recall Morris’s praise for the inhabitants of Nowhere, who have overcome “the unhappiness that comes of men and women confusing the relations between natural passion, and sentiment, and the friendship which, when things go well, softens the awakening of passing allusions” (chapter 9). May Morris

May Morris (1862–1938),William and Jane Morris’s younger daughter and a professional art embroiderer, has been the subject of several recent edited collections and exhibitions of her artwork. First educated by her mother and governesses, then for a time at Notting Hill High School, May also learned art embroidery from her mother and from her aunt Bessie Burden. She studied embroidery at the National Art Training School, precursor of the Royal College of Art, and in 1885 at the age of 23 she assumed direction of the embroidery section of Morris and Co. May was also an active member of the Socialist League and, later, the Hammersmith Socialist Society, and in 1894 she ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Hammersmith Vestry under the joint sponsorship of the Independent Labour Party and the Hammersmith Socialist Society.5 In 1890 she married a fellow socialist, Henry Halliday Sparling; Morris had not been enthusiastic about the engagement since Sparling had no steady employment, but after his daughter’s marriage, he employed his son-in-law at the Kelmscott Press. In a letter recommending Sparling for a post as librarian, Morris described him as “a man of high principle and very industrious and painstaking, and … remarkably good-tempered” (Kelvin 2: 666).6 Although her letters to Andreas Scheu from this period reveal May’s excitement and pride in the engagement, the marriage itself was brief. 65

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Figure 3.4 May Morris, 1886. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery.

May left her husband in late 1894 after a period in which they had shared a house with George Bernard Shaw, although the formal divorce did not occur until 1898. May Morris continued her embroidery career, teaching at the London Central School of Art from 1897 to 1905 and briefly at other locations; in 1893 she published a handbook, Decorative Needlework; between 1888 and 1905 she contributed a series of articles on embroidery to English periodicals; and in 1907 she was a co-founder of the Women’s Guild of Arts. In addition to executing embroideries and designing jewelry, May completed a body of watercolors, and in 1903 she wrote and acted in a one-act melodrama, White Lies. In 1909 May toured the United States, attending suffrage rallies, living briefly at Hull House, and lecturing in favor of trade unionism and equal remuneration for women artists. During World War I she helped organize activities in support of England’s war effort, and after her retirement, she lived at Kelmscott Manor, engaging in activities for the benefit of her community and enjoying visits to Iceland with her companion Mary Lobb. Her sister’s collapse in health left May Morris as the custodian of her father’s legacy, and with only limited help from Sydney Cockerell and her mother, she completed the massive task of editing the 24-volume Collected Works of William Morris, issued 1910–15. For the introductions to these volumes, May organized a wealth of material invaluable to later biographers, editors, and critics, including letters, anecdotes of Morris’s family life, and information about his writing practices. Nonetheless, under pressure from her publishers, who believed that additional volumes would make the Collected Works difficult to sell during wartime, May had been forced to omit many of Morris’s ungathered writings. She preserved this material, however, and in 1936 at the age of 74 brought out her masterwork, William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist, a two-volume, 66

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1328-page compendium of Morris’s unpublished writings on art and politics with extensive prefaces and commentaries. May’s reflections offer full and insightful glosses on details of Morris’s life, literary development, and political activities, many of which remain the most accurate accounts of their topics. Indeed it is doubtful whether Morris’s reputation would stand as high as it now does were it not for his daughter’s editorial labors and perceptive commentaries. Nonetheless, a few of her editorial decisions may be regretted. She was not a trained editor, and she had been left with a massive number of manuscripts, books, and artifacts to sort out and distribute. The discussions in her introductions and in Artist Writer Socialist are on occasion factually inconsistent, although the awkwardness of returning to the same topics in different volumes has been partly overcome by Joseph Dunlap’s index to her introductions (Dunlap, ed., 1973). May’s memories of her childhood and father largely exclude her mother, thus contributing to Jane Morris’s near-erasure from the biographical record. In addition, May also gave away and sold many of Morris’s literary and calligraphic manuscripts.These were eventually dispersed to repositories in the Netherlands and several parts of England and the United States, and the relative inaccessibility of these materials has hindered full appreciation of the coherence and scope of Morris’s creative processes. As she edited his works, May discovered Morris’s many ungathered personal poems from the period 1869–73, which, as mentioned, express dismay at his wife’s preference for another and his protracted efforts to find solace in a more enduring and universal form of love. She published only a few of these poems, obscuring their number and chronological order, thus suppressing a major part of her father’s emotional history and some of his more interesting works. Her introductions and biographical anecdotes also ignore her family’s chief affliction, Jenny Morris’s mental degeneration. Understandably, May Morris might have wished to shield her family from potential embarrassment on both counts—from revelations of her mother’s affair with Rossetti and her sister’s epilepsy—but these choices also prevented recognition of aspects of Morris’s life which reflect favorably on his character: his willingness to grant his wife sexual and emotional autonomy without withholding his own affection, and his steadfast concern and love for his increasingly isolated and dependent daughter. Moreover, failure to acknowledge the importance of William and Jane’s shared love for and protectiveness toward their disabled daughter has deflected attention from one of the more creditable and enduring aspects of their relationship in favor of a preoccupation with its sexual strains. Despite these lapses, Morris was very fortunate in his younger daughter, who through her artistry, political activism, preservation of Kelmscott Manor, and loyalty to his socialist as well as literary writings helped extend his memory and legacy, as well as her own, into another century. Jenny Morris

Jane Alice (“Jenny”) Morris (1861–1935), William and Jane Morris’s elder daughter, was a bright, serious child, considered more intellectual than May, and keenly interested in her father’s political and artistic activities. Her parents had hoped to send her to Girton College, Cambridge, which their friend Barbara Bodichon had helped to found. Unfortunately, in 1878 Jenny began to suffer from a mysterious syndrome which resulted in violent seizures, and eventually—perhaps also as a result of heavy medication—in progressive physical and mental deterioration. Morris believed her condition had been inherited from his family and blamed himself.Although her illness is sometimes diagnosed as epilepsy, surviving documents are reticent about the details of her condition, and so it is difficult to be certain of its nature. Amidst Morris’s many activities and travels of the 1880s and 1890s, he faithfully wrote long, affectionate, and politically detailed letters to Jenny; these missives to “Dearest own child” were among the fullest and most uninhibited he ever wrote. During the 1890s and after Morris’s death, 67

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Jenny increasingly lived at Kelmscott Manor under the care of Jane Morris and a nurse, and eventually she was placed in private care. As his health failed, Morris was concerned to leave enough money to support his family after his death, and he gathered a collection of incunabula and rare manuscripts which, when sold, provided among other things for Jenny’s lifelong care. A few of Jenny’s letters, preserved in the British Library and Victoria and Albert Museum, reveal her efforts to continue serious reading in literary and historical topics for as long as her faculties permitted.

Friends and Associates Georgiana Burne-Jones

Georgiana Macdonald Burne-Jones (1840–1920) played a significant role in Morris’s life as his closest female friend and kindred spirit.The daughter of a Methodist minister and his wife, Georgiana lived with her family first in Birmingham and later in London, where she studied art at the Government School of Design; her surviving work includes woodcuts and drawings. She became engaged to Edward in 1856 at the age of 15, and after their marriage in 1860, she joined in the early artwork of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., and the couple’s two surviving children, Philip and Margaret, were born in 1861 and 1866. Edward was Morris’s closest friend, and they collaborated on artistic projects, often working out details at the Burne-Joneses’ Fulham home,The Grange.The Morrises and Burne-Joneses socialized frequently during the 1860s, and Morris continued to visit the Burne-Jones home weekly throughout his life. During the late 1860s, however, these relationships became fraught as Edward pursued an affair with Marie Zambaco, a sculptor and relative of the Greek Ionides family, while as mentioned, Jane Morris became attached to Rossetti. This left Georgiana and William, who drew close as they confronted similar problems. Morris gave her his calligraphic manuscripts and copies of his poems from this period, and in 1870 he presented her with the birthday gift of a hand-decorated illuminated volume of a selection of his recent poems,“A Book of Verse.”The unpublished poems of the period, which, as mentioned, allude to Morris’s unhappiness at his wife’s desertion, apparently also convey his gratitude for Georgiana’s steadiness—“For you alone unchanged now seem to be / A real thing left of the days sweet to me.”7 Similarly the poem “Hope is Dead, Love Liveth” praises a loved one who, though “wed to grief and wrong,” continues on as a “silent wayfarer,” retaining love despite the death of hope.”8 Georgiana claimed not to have retained Morris’s letters from this period (MacCarthy, 249), but his candid and introspective letters to her from 1876 onward include many details on his artistic work for Morris and Co. and socialist activism. From the years 1881 to 1888 alone, for example, 43 letters have been preserved, many quite lengthy. Often he appears to be thinking out loud, and at times fending off suggestions that he should moderate his views; for example, on 9 August 1882, he explains why, in a period when the “surroundings of life are so stern and unplayful,” the only valuable art is that “rooted deepest in reality” (Kelvin 2, 119); on 30 August 1882, he declares that he seeks a life of “simplicity, and free from blinding entanglements” (Ibid., 122); and on 31 October 1885, he explains why he “can’t help” his commitment to a new birth of society (Ibid., 480). He also conveys his moods: when in Italy to join his wife and children, he writes Georgiana on 15 May 1878 that “I am more alive again, and really much exited at all I have seen and am seeing, though sometimes it all tumbles into a dream” (Kelvin 1, 486).Although Edward strongly disapproved of his friend’s political interests and associates, Georgiana was more supportive; when Edward refused any association with Morris’s socialist endeavors, she ordered a Commonweal subscription addressed solely to her. On his deathbed one of Morris’s last requests was that Georgiana visit him again:“Come soon, for I want a sight of your dear face” (MacCarthy, 670). 68

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Figure 3.5 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Photograph: Frederick Hollyer, 1882. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

In her own way, Georgiana followed Morris into political activism; a staunch anti-imperialist, she opposed the Boer War, and after the Burne-Joneses purchased a home in Rottingdean on the southern coast of England, she became a parish councilor who campaigned for better housing, sanitation, and health care for the town’s inhabitants (Williams, 2013, 2014). After her husband’s death, Georgiana devoted herself to memorializing the ideals of her husband and his associates, especially Morris. Her beautifully written two-volume Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (1904) pays tribute to William’s memory as Edward’s closest comrade from their initial meeting at Oxford onwards: “seeking his way in unlooked for loneliness of spirit, … there, shoulder to shoulder, stood [Edward’s] life’s companion” (Memorials, 1: 72). Although on occasion Georgiana conflates Morris’s responses with those of Edward, the Memorials convey the originality and idealism of the Oxford Brotherhood, the intensity of the two men’s shared enthusiasms, the initial camaraderie of the Red House circle, and the collaborative excitement of the Firm’s early days. Georgiana was also a primary source of materials and perspectives for the official biography of Morris, J.W. Mackail’s The Life of William Morris, published three years after Morris’s death. Aglaia Coronio

Aglaia Coronio (1834–1906) was a member of the Holland Park Ionides circle, bookbinder, embroideress, and patron of the arts. Married to Theodore Coronio and the mother of a daughter, Calliope, and a son, John, she served as official hostess to her father Alexander Ionides, the 69

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Figure 3.6 Aglaia Coronio, carte de visite. Courtesy of the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery.

Greek consul-general in London until 1866, and as of 1869 lived next to her parents at 1A Holland Park. According to Linda Parry (ODNB, Coronio), Morris supplied her with embroidery threads, and she secured for him samples of the rare red dye kermes and packets of unspun Levantine wool. The only known sample of her work which has been preserved is a pair of embroidered curtains designed by William Morris in the 1870s. As Aglaia and William became friends, he read Chaucer to her (Kelvin 1:116), on occasion dined at One Holland Park (Ibid., 120), and confided in her during Jane Morris’s absences in Italy. Twenty-five letters to her from the 1870s are preserved; these record his family life and moods, including the previously quoted letter in which he expresses his desire, despite frustrations, to “keep the world from narrowing on me, and to look at things bigly and kindly!” (25 November 1872, Ibid., 173) Morris describes to Aglaia his family’s move from Queen Square to Horrington House in detail, noting that “as I looked out of my window on Sunday, I pictured you coming into the little garden till I could almost see you standing there” (Ibid., 178). He also expresses concern for her various troubles; in February 1878, for example, on hearing that her family’s business might have suffered reverses, he writes that “I am really very much grieved that you should be in trouble, though my ignorance of City business keeps me from knowing how serious the matter may be” (Ibid., 445). Although biographers have speculated that theirs was a romantic attachment, the fact that Morris’s letters dwell frequently on his wife and family suggest a desire to remind Aglaia of his primary attachments. Later letters also apologize for his failure to write, pleading a lack of subject matter, a concern absent from his letters to Jenny, Georgiana, or his wife. In later life Aglaia was given to depression; her husband died in 1903, and after the death of her daughter in 1906, she committed suicide at the age of 72. 70

Morris, Gender, and the Woman Question

Women Socialists and Anarchists During his period of socialist activism, Morris met and shared speaking platforms with a variety of women reformers, including socialists Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx and anarchists Lucy Parsons, Louise Michel, and Charlotte Wilson. He would also have met former women Communards and other female émigrés, such as Socialist League member Jeanne Derain, a veteran of the French June Revolution of 1848, and as mentioned, May Morris was an active member of the Socialist League who later ran for a position on the Hammersmith Vestry in 1894. Despite his occasional private reservations about their differing views—for example, in February 1887, he noted of a speech by Annie Besant,“she was fairly good, though too Bradlaughian in manner; she has advanced somewhat in her socialism”9—it seems likely that these experiences influenced his later literary portrayals of women, such as the female Communard in The Pilgrims of Hope, the prophetess Hall-Sun in The House of the Wolfings, and the adventuress Birdalone in The Water of the Wondrous Isles. As we have seen, Morris’s relationships with family members, friends, and political associates provided him with examples of strong-minded, talented, and at times rebellious women. Of those closest to him, Georgiana Burne-Jones, May Morris, and his wife had experienced varying degrees of marital unhappiness; Aglaia Coronio reportedly suffered from depression; at least two of his sisters had been constrained by or rebelled against Victorian codes for upper middle-class women (Henrietta, Isabella); and the Morrises’ wider social circle included energetic women philanthropists and political activists such as Rosalind Howard, Jane Cobden, and Barbara Bodichon, as well as women anarchists and socialists. Morris’s literary representations of women often intensify these qualities of restlessness or discontent, as his generally sympathetic portrayals of female characters dramatize forms of passionate intensity and determined resistance that arguably also express aspects of his own sensibility.

Morris and Socialist Feminism As mentioned, Morris’s views on women’s roles should be placed within several contexts: presentday definitions of feminism, nineteenth-century socialist feminist thought, and Morris’s empathetic, if sometimes male-centric, literary portrayals of female characters. To the question of whether Morris was a feminist in the modern sense, the answer must be, only partially, since he was admittedly unconcerned with some of the topics of interest to twenty-first century feminists, including notions of gender and sexual fluidity and the limitations of binary sexual divisions.10 On a pragmatic level, as a member, first, of the radical wing of the Liberal Party and later as a socialist, Morris supported many of the reform efforts of his day on behalf of women, including the campaigns for women’s higher education, unionization, and rational dress.An 1881 speech in support of an early women’s trade union, the Women’s Protective and Provident League, for example, expresses firm support of equal remuneration:“Now until the market value of the wages of women is advanced to the same rate as that of the wages of men, for the same work, they have a wrong to be righted,”11 and a female worker at the Kelmscott Press reported in the 8 October 1892 The Queen that Morris and Co. paid men and women compositors at the same rate.12 In 1882, Morris lectured at the Kensington Vestry Hall in support of women’s freedom to choose simple, natural, and comfortable clothing according to their own tastes.13 Nonetheless his 1886 statement to Scottish socialist Bruce Glasier that under present economic conditions women would need special protection during childbearing years—a paternalism based doubtless in part on his own experiences—could under some circumstances have justified an unequal economic order.14 Over the years, Morris’s literary portrayals and hopes for women shifted somewhat, as lateVictorian attitudes towards gender roles broadened and, as mentioned, he encountered many 71

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independent women active in the public sphere. Accordingly, in his later writings, he turned increasingly to projecting peaceful, overlapping roles for members of both sexes within imagined communal societies. Moreover, in a period in which women had limited legal rights to leave abusive husbands and even to guardianship of their own children, Morris’s firm belief in women’s right to complete freedom of choice in sexual matters was distinctive even within the progressive circles in which he moved. In general, nineteenth-century socialists and anarcho-socialists shared the view that contemporary marriage laws were oppressive, though they often differed over whom and how these oppressed. As an extreme case, Marxist theorist Ernest Belfort Bax, Morris’s Socialist League colleague and author of The Fraud of Feminism (1913), maintained that Victorian laws were weighted entirely in favor of women,15 and even George Bernard Shaw, a champion of women’s right to economic equality, exclaimed with irritation in a letter to Ellen Terry that “Marriage is not the man’s hold on the woman, but the woman’s on the man” (CLGBS, 777). By contrast, two works published in 1879 and 1884 by German authors, August Bebel and Friedrich Engels, more accurately represented advanced socialist views of the time, and both provided insights which may have influenced Morris’s writings on the topic. Bebel and Engels advocated women’s political equality and freedom of choice, positing female emancipation as necessary for a fully socialist society, yet both often seemed oblivious to the immediate problems of their women contemporaries such as wage discrimination or domestic violence. Perhaps the more influential and broadminded of the two treatises was August Bebel’s 1879 Die Frau und der Socialismus, translated in 1885 as Women and Socialism, which predicted that in a socialist future women would assume a wider variety of active and creative roles: The woman of future society is socially and economically independent; she is no longer subject to even a vestige of dominion and exploitation … Her education is the same as that of man … Living under natural conditions, she is able to unfold and exercise her mental powers and faculties. She chooses her occupation [in accord] … with her wishes, inclination and natural abilities, and she works under conditions identical with man’s. (344) Bebel envisioned a society that would make childbirth and maternity desirable to women; like his fellow socialists of the period, he saw no reason to limit population artificially, but nonetheless he was farsighted in predicting that “intelligent and energetic” women might decide to limit childbearing (Bebel, 370). He was myopic, however, in proclaiming that women’s entrance into the industrial labor force had already granted them full equality—ignoring the vast disparities in female wages and working conditions. And although like other socialists of the period, he identified both prostitution and marriage as economically driven sexual slavery, he asserted that sexual frustration remained the chief form of female oppression—not poverty, domestic violence, sexual assault, grueling workdays, the physical toll of multiple pregnancies, or the threat of death in childbirth. Bebel was progressive, however, in specifying that maternity should not limit women’s occupational choices, though like other nineteenth-century socialist feminists, he imagined that women “[n]urses, teachers, female friends, the rising female generations” 347) would combine to raise children, but specified no co-participation by fathers or men in general. Morris purchased a copy of Bebel’s book in July 1885 (Richardson, 293), and would also have learned of its contents through Eleanor Marx’s enthusiastic April 1885 review in Commonweal. The second major socialist feminist treatise of the period was Friedrich Engels’s Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State), which appeared in 1884. Although it was not translated into English until 1902, Engels’s 72

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views would have been well known to his fellow London socialists. At once bolder and somewhat more eccentric than Bebel’s treatise in its claims, the Origin argues (following Lewis Morgan’s depictions of Iroquois tribal structure) that an original form of permissive “group marriage” practiced in primitive societies had been overturned by the present capitalist economic order, which now assigned women to individual owners in order to ensure the transmission of property in the male line; in Engels’s words: “the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male” (Origin, 58). Enforced monogamy, described by Engels as an institution entirely devoid of love or sentiment, existed solely to perpetuate property, as did its concealed double—widespread prostitution. As an advocate of sexual choice for both men and women, Engels usefully points out both the double standard employed to judge sexual conduct and the unrelieved nature of domestic labor, and he asserts that for women to be emancipated, society must accept responsibility for the rearing of children. On the other hand, he blames domestic violence largely on monogamy, and ignores evidence that women had been oppressed even before the advent of capitalism. He expresses romantic nostalgia for the satisfactions of a primitive sexual freedom, according to which all men and women of a given tribe had equal sexual access to one another (free love or gang rape?), and his view that present-day lower-class women have attained equality since “no basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian household” (Ibid., 64) ignores such factors as unequal pay, heavy domestic duties, or the effects of multiple pregnancies. Like Bebel, Engels sees no reason to limit childbearing, since under socialism, economic factors will no longer “prevent a girl from giving herself to the man she loves” (Ibid., 67). And finally, like Bebel, Engels does not consider how women as active agents might help enable their own liberation; this must presumably wait for a change in the social order. Linda Richardson, Anna Vaninskaya, and others have noted that aspects of Morris’s historical Germanic romances, The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains, both published in 1889, may have been influenced by Engels’s account of the relative respect accorded to women by primitive tribes. Morris’s idealized tales of primitive Germanic communities do include women warriors, farmworkers, shepherds, and sages, though Morris’s tribal peoples notably refrain from the happy promiscuity that Engels celebrates as a feature of pre-capitalist societies. The final socialist-feminist treatise of the 1880s was composed by Eleanor Marx, who in 1887 published an expanded version of her Commonweal review of Bebel’s Woman and Socialism as The Woman Question, co-authored at least nominally with her partner Edward Aveling. Some of the claims of The Woman Question seem to echo Bebel’s ideas; like him, Marx/Aveling find sexual frustration and celibacy a major source of female suffering, even insanity, and like Engels they note the harm wrought by a double standard in judging women’s sexual behavior.Also like its predecessors, The Woman Question assumes that other women and young girls, but not men and young boys, will assist mothers in childcare, and predictably they dismiss reformist efforts to grant women access to all occupations, higher education, and political participation as of minimal value, since even if such reforms were enacted,“the actual position of women in respect to men would not be very vitally touched” (14). Still, Marx/Aveling’s treatise differs from its predecessors in its references to women authors, in its awareness of and interest in the initiatives of the women’s movement of its day, and in its sincere and pained appeal for honest sexual education for children:“With the false shame and false secrecy, against which we protest, goes the unhealthy separation of the sexes that begins as children quit the nursery, and only ends when the dead men and women are laid in the common earth” (22). Its final idealistic tribute to monogamous relationships of intellectual equals, offering “the love and respect that are … lost today, … the product of the commercial system of society” (28), seems sadly 73

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wistful in view of Eleanor Marx’s later fate at the hands of her allegedly socialist partner.16 It is also notable that the sole partly or entirely female-authored socialist treatise of the period idealizes mental companionship rather than children as the goal of marriage. A less admirable feature of the treatises of Bebel, Engels, and Marx/Aveling is that all stigmatize any form of “effeminacy” or homosexuality; to Marx/Aveling, for example,“The effeminate man and masculine woman … are two types from which even the average person recoils with a perfectly natural horror of the unnatural” (23).Although Morris’s imaginative works contain no transgender characters or same-sex couples, it is commendable that in this, as in other matters, after carefully considering the ideas and writings of others, he avoided repetition of their less substantiated or more prejudiced claims. As we have seen, Morris was thus surrounded by Socialist League members—Bax, Engels, Eleanor Marx—who held strong views on the status of future women, and his imaginative writings from the late 1880s onward reflect an interest in imagining such socialist “new women.” The most overt presentation of his views occurs in his 1890 pastoral utopian romance, News from Nowhere, and two scenes from News have been often cited by critics as representing the polarities of Morris’s thought regarding women’s future roles. In the first of these (chapter 4), after awakening in the new society, the protagonist William Guest meets his guide, Dick, and the men enter the Hammersmith Guest House on the Thames River. There three friendly women greet him and serve breakfast to them and other visitors. Since Morris is, after all, fictionalizing his own Hammersmith home where his family consisted of three women, and since the handsome woman serving breakfast may be based on his wife (he kisses her), matters might have stopped there. However, in chapter 9, after Guest is taken to meet Dick’s grandfather, Old Hammond, he observes that “I saw at the Guest House that the women were waiting on the men; that seems a little like reaction, doesn’t it?” but Old Hammond brushes off his concerns,“don’t you know that it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skillfully, and to do it so that all the house-mates look pleased, and are grateful to her?” (CW 16:60) Since this interchange precedes a passage on the importance of maternity, Morris may intend to pay tribute to the importance of the roles usually assigned to women, including his own wife, but he also evades the issue of why both servers and guests could not have been comprised of both sexes. Hammond’s views on childbearing, however, deserve quotation as Morris’s own: How could it possibly be but that maternity should be highly honoured amongst us? Surely it is a matter of course that the natural and necessary pains which the mother must go through form a bond of union between man and woman, an extra stimulus to love and affection between them, and that this is universally recognised. … So that, you see, the ordinarily healthy woman (and almost all our women are both healthy and at least comely), respected as a child-bearer and rearer of children, desired as a woman, loved as a companion, unanxious for the future of her children, has far more instinct for maternity than the poor drudge and mother of drudges of past days could ever have had; or than her sister of the upper classes, brought up in affected ignorance of natural facts, reared in an atmosphere of mingled prudery and prurience. (61–62) In addition, Morris does not entirely neglect the independent “new woman,” for the second scene most often cited in this context occurs in chapter 26,“The Obstinate Refusers.” During the travelers’ visit to a building site, they meet the region’s head stone carver, Philippa, who refuses to join the communal hay festival so that she may continue her carving: 74

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“I am sure that you won’t think me unkind if I go on with my work, … and this open–air and the sun and the work together … make a delight of every hour to me; and excuse me, I must go on” (174). In the society of News, the ornamental carving of an important building would have been among the most highly regarded occupations; Philippa’s name also pays tribute to Philippa Fawcett, daughter of the reformers Henry and Millicent Fawcett, who in 1890 had earned the highest scores in the Cambridge mathematical tripos. Philippa herself is attended by a young woman who models for her when needed; by her 16-year-old daughter, also a carver; and by a foreman, who explains that since Philippa is the group’s finest artist, they have waited for her recovery from an illness in order to execute their best work. No unfavorable notice is taken of the fact that Philippa may be a single mother, and as John Bellamy Foster has recently observed, this group is served refreshments by a small boy rather than a female attendant (Foster, 30).“The Obstinate Refusers” was the sole chapter Morris added in revising his 1890 Commonweal text for publication in 1891, and arguably may have been intended to balance News’s earlier portrayal of women in more traditional roles. The clearest statement of Morris’s views on the issues of marriage and sexual freedom, however, is provided in Old Hammond’s further remarks in chapter 9. Hammond tells Guest that Dick’s former wife Clara had deserted him for another man, but now wishes for a reconciliation; during the interim, their two children have been living with Hammond’s daughter, and Clara has joined them for most of the time.When Guest inquires whether Clara’s actions will lead to divorce, Hammond demurs at length: You must understand once for all that we have changed these matters; or rather, that our way of looking at them has changed, as we have changed within the last two hundred years. We do not deceive ourselves, indeed, or believe that we can get rid of all the trouble that besets the dealings between the sexes … but we are not so mad as to pile up degradation on that unhappiness by engaging in sordid squabbles about livelihood and position, and the power of tyrannising over the children who have been the results of love or lust. … [I]t is a point of honour with us not to be self-centered; not to suppose that the world must cease because one man is sorry; therefore we should think it foolish, or if you will, criminal, to exaggerate these matters of sentiment and sensibility: we are no more inclined to eke out our sentimental sorrows than to cherish our bodily pains; and we recognise that there are other pleasures besides love-making. … As on the other hand, therefore, we have ceased to be commercial in our love-matters, so also we have ceased to be ARTIFICIALLY foolish … . But I do say that there is no unvarying conventional set of rules by which people are judged; no bed of Procrustes to stretch or cramp their minds and lives; no hypocritical excommunication which people are FORCED to pronounce, either by unconsidered habit, or by the unexpressed threat of the lesser interdict if they are lax in their hypocrisy.Are you shocked now? (56–59) Through the voice of Hammond, Morris here addresses many topics at once: women’s right to select new partners, social sanctions that enforce a double sexual standard, divorce and marriage, parental responsibilities, and—what none of his predecessors had admitted—the inability of any form of social organization, however ideal, to resolve all conflicts. Morris shared the limitations 75

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of his predecessors in failing to imagine how a truly egalitarian society would deal with issues of joint housekeeping and parenting, or to envision the need for restraints on conception and population growth. Still, his opinions are remarkable for their rejection of conventional views on fidelity, their recognition of the degree to which economic factors constrain women’s choices, and their realism in acknowledging that greater independence for women will require a corresponding acceptance and adaptation on the part of men. And finally, as Guest’s journey nears its end, Ellen, the young woman who embodies the ideals of the new society, explains to the visitor how her present life contrasts with that of nineteenth-century women: My friend, you were saying that you wondered what I should have been if I had lived in those past days of turmoil and oppression. Well, I think I have studied the history of them to know pretty well. I should have been one of the poor, for my father when he was working was a mere tiller of the soil.Well, I could not have borne that; therefore my beauty and cleverness and brightness (she spoke with no blush or simper of false shame) … would have been sold to rich men, and my life would have been wasted indeed; … I should have had no choice, no power of will over my life … I should never have bought pleasure from the rich men, and even opportunity of action, whereby I might have won some true excitement. I should have been wrecked and wasted in one way or another, either by penury or by luxury (Chapter 31, 204) Ellen is the socialist woman envisioned by Bebel, Engels, Marx, and Morris himself—intelligent, self-directed, devoid of prudery, freed from economic pressure in choosing a mate, and eager for “opportunity of action” and “true excitement.” Thus, despite his frequent representations of women in relatively conventional gender roles, Morris’s stated views on marriage and women’s future contributed to an emerging body of socialist feminist thought. Moreover, as he argued that an egalitarian, socialist society should provide for women the same liberty of action assured to its men, his later writings increasingly model the qualities appropriate for the liberated women of a new, socialist society.

Patterns in Morris’s Literary Portrayals of Women Since women, and male responses to women, are central to Morris’s imaginative writings, any discussion of this topic must be selective.As the author of hundreds of poems, shorter tales, and romances, Morris created characters of all levels of virtue and vice, simplicity and intelligence, loyalty and treachery, timidity and ambition. Several patterns do emerge, however: he often seeks to understand, rather than judge, the crimes of his most enraged and murderous women characters, such as Medea in The Life and Death of Jason, and from his early Defence poems onward, he foregrounds the threats posed to women by their sexual vulnerability and socially dependent status. And finally, his projected models for a future alternative society feature women of intelligence, independence, and communitarian ideals who are effective in achieving their goals.

Early Poems Of the Defence of Guenevere’s thirty poems, at least nine represent female characters who experience some form of forced marriage, imprisonment, situation-induced suicide, prospective rape, and threatened or actual murder. Most famously, the heroine of “The Defence of Guenevere” is trapped within a loveless marriage and faces potential death by burning; the female protagonist 76

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of “King Arthur’s Tomb” is ensconced within a convent until death; that of “Rapunzel” is imprisoned in a tower; the heroines of “The Blue Closet” are entombed within an underground sea cave, then escorted to their deaths; Margaret of “The Wind” has been murdered by her remorseless supposed lover; the speaker of “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire” encounters the corpse of a woman who has been killed along with her male partner; Jehane of “Golden Wings” commits suicide; and Alice of “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End” helplessly awaits the fate of her lover, knowing that it will determine her own. One can argue that these medievalized scenes allegorize psychological states of entrapment or longing, but for several, the social context for these oppressions is also made explicit. Although male characters also face imprisonment (“In Prison,” “Riding Together,” “A Good Knight in Prison,” “Spell-Bound,” “The Tune of Seven Towers”) or are killed in battles (“Near Avalon,” “Golden Wings,” “The Eve of Crecy,” “The Haystack in the Floods,” “The Judgment of God”), it is notable that several of Morris’s heroines openly resent their dependent status as women, actively resist their oppressors, and make calculated choices even within their limited circumstances. An instance of such resistance occurs in “The Haystack in the Floods,” set during the waning years of the Hundred Year’s War. Jehane and her lover Robert have been captured by a particularly cruel French commander Godmar as they flee from their home in French territory toward the English border. Both immediately perceive the hopelessness of their situation, and although Robert bravely attempts resistance he is beheaded and eviscerated in the poem’s final section. Morris’s portrayal of Jehane is more complicated, as unlike Robert, she is offered a seeming choice: she can witness Robert’s immediate death, or agree to become Godmar’s paramour on the promise that Robert will be spared.When she refuses Godmar’s advances, however, he taunts her with the fact that even this proferred “choice” has been deceptive: red Grew Godmar’s face from chin to head: “Jehane, on yonder hill there stands My castle, guarding well my lands: What hinders me from taking you, And doing that I list to do To your fair wilful body, while Your knight lies dead?” (ll. 81–88a) Under such circumstances, Jehane’s response is remarkably courageous. She threatens to murder him, and if that fails, to commit suicide: A wicked smile Wrinkled her face, her lips grew thin, A long way out she thrust her chin: “You know that I should strangle you While you were sleeping; or bite through Your throat, by God’s help—ah!” she said, “Lord Jesus, pity your poor maid! For in such wise they hem me in, I cannot choose but sin and sin, Whatever happens: yet I think They could not make me eat or drink, And so should I just reach my rest.” (ll. 88b–99) 77

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Godmar then threatens to turn her over to a Paris mob:“You know, Jehane, they cry for you, / ‘Jehane the brown! Jehane the brown!/ Give us Jehane to burn or drown!’ (ll. 106–108)—at which point Robert rushes at him and is beheaded, and his body is then trampled into pieces. For Jehane, the results of this traumatic event are imprisonment, near madness, and likely death: Then Godmar turn’d again and said: “So, Jehane, the first fitte is read! Take note, my lady, that your way Lies backward to the Chatelet!” She shook her head and gazed awhile At her cold hands with a rueful smile, As though this thing had made her mad. (ll. 152–58) Morris’s Jehane is coolheaded, resolute, and capable of aggressive self-defense, qualities which, while they fail to preserve her freedom or her lover’s life, do protect her from rape. Notably Robert does not expect her to choose to delay his death, and nothing in the narrative suggests that Jehane should have succumbed in the hope of softening her or Robert’s fates. Jehane’s firm resistance, swift protection of her sexual integrity, and plausible counterthreat of murder render her an active agent rather than a passive victim.

Poetry of Morris’s Middle Period As we have seen, Morris was unusual in having accepted his wife’s infidelity (sexual or emotional) during the years 1869–73 without apparent complaint, although his personal and unpublished writings indicate that this response resulted from choice rather than weakness or lack of concern. In addition to inspiring introspection, this experience apparently prompted him to brood on the nature of female sexual desires and the potential frustrations women experienced as a result of limited choices. If the women of Morris’s early poetry are often victimized by male violence, sexual and otherwise, the poetry of Morris’s middle period presents several women who are impervious to male desires, or alternately, driven by vengeful and jealous passions. On the one hand, in the Earthly Paradise, he imagines several seductive Venus-like figures who prove alluring to men but are ultimately unresponsive and heedless of their happiness (“The Watching of the Falcon,” “The Man Who Never Laughed Again,” “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” “The Ring Given to Venus,” and “The Hill of Venus”). More dramatically, between 1867 and 1876, he also created a series of intense and passionate women characters who are propelled by lust, rage, and jealousy to destroy the objects of their former attachments and/or themselves, a pattern represented by Medea in The Life and Death of Jason, Stenoboea in “Bellerophon at Argos,” Gudrun in “The Lovers of Gudrun,” and Brynhild and Gudrun in The Story of Sigurd the Volsung.To a surprising extent, these representations of violent and passionate women are characterized by empathy, or at least suspension of judgment, toward those who actively harm others and themselves. Whether Morris identified with the turbulent emotions of these women, or embodied them in literary form as a means to understanding them, cannot be known, but his efforts during this period produced some of his most fully realized women characters. An example of this pattern is found in the portrayals of Brynhild and Gudrun in Morris’s 1876 poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, a four-part epic he considered his finest literary work. Sigurd is based on the Völsunga saga, a late-thirteenth-century Icelandic epic which in 1870 78

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Morris had co-translated with Eiríkr Magnússon as The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs. In a 21 December 1869 letter to Charles Eliot Norton, he poured out how deeply he had been moved by “the depth and intensity of the complete work”: [T]he scene of the last interview between Sigurd and the despairing and terrible Brynhild touches me more than anything I have ever met with in literature; there is nothing wanting in it, nothing forgotten, nothing repeated, nothing overstrained; all tenderness is shown without the use of a tender word, all misery and despair without a word of raving, complete beauty without an ornament. (AWS, 1:472) In the introduction to the translation, he describes the tale as the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks … and afterwards, when the change of the world has made our race nothing more than a story too, then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us, and his prefatory poem enjoins his audience to hearken sympathetically “Unto the best tale pity ever wrought”: Of how from dark to dark bright Sigurd broke, Of Brynhild’s glorious soul with love distraught, Of Gudrun’s weary wandering unto naught, Of utter love defeated utterly, Of grief too strong to give Love time to die!17 Sigurd’s women characters assume more active roles than in Morris’s sources, and they determine much of the epic’s action.This tale of “utter love” resists brief summary, but a uniting motif of the plot is that all three of its passionate royal heroines have been forced, pressured, or deceived into a hated marriage for dynastic reasons. All react violently to their emotional pain, plot to cause the death of others, and are eventually driven to suicide, immolating the objects of their hatred and/or being immolated by fire. The first, Signy, the Volsung princess of book one, is forced by her empire-seeking father to marry the hated Siggeir, King of the Goths, and later incestuously conceives a son with her brother Sigmund, who is then groomed for the later murder of her husband and his family. In book two, Sigmund’s son, the Volsung hero Sigurd, enters the fiery ring which protects Brynhild, Odin’s earthly daughter, and the two pledge undying love. In book three, the Niblung queen Grimhild, eager to unite the Volsung and Niblung tribes, plies Sigurd with a drug that erases all memory of his prior troth to Brynhild. His subsequent marriage to her daughter Gudrun precipitates the grief, remorse, and jealousy of all three major characters. In an attempt to cement this misconceived tribal alliance, Sigurd himself becomes a betrayer. Disguised as his brother-in-law Gunnar, he treacherously re-enters the fiery ring in order to induce Brynhild to marry the latter. When after her reluctant marriage she discovers his deception, the enraged Brynhild goads Gunnar and his brothers Hogni and Guttorm to murder her former lover, an act which renders Gudrun a grieving widow, precipitates Brynhild’s own suicide, and ultimately destroys the fortunes of both kingdoms. In book four, finally, the widowed Gudrun is pressured against her will to marry the outland King Atli in order to further extend the Niblung line. She takes revenge both for Sigurd’s death and her 79

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own unhappiness by inducing her husband to kill her brothers during a state visit to their kingdom. She next murders Atli, sets fire to the royal compound, and plunges to an ocean death, thus obliterating both the Volsung and Niblung royal lines. All of these vengeful acts flow at least in part from the repressed energies of women exploited as sexual pawns in the competition for gold and empire. Although she has been wronged, one might also condemn Brynhild, who has not only precipitated the murder of Sigurd, but by so doing has also doomed the Volsungs to ultimate destruction. Morris nonetheless presents “the despairing and terrible Brynhild” in an essentially sympathetic light. As Sigurd’s complement, she serves as a vatic figure, able to intuit and communicate profound truths that he can only embody: But thy heart to my heart hath been speaking, though my tongue hath set it forth: For I am she that loveth, and I know what thou wouldst teach From the heart of thine unlearned wisdom, and I needs must speak thy speech. (Bk. 2, canto 10,“How Sigurd awoke Brynhild upon Hindfell,” CW 12: 128) Moreover, she has learned these inner secrets from “Wisdom,” a supernatural figure who conveys to her truths beyond language: I saw the body of Wisdom and of shifting guise was she wrought, And I stretched out my hands to hold her, and a mote of the dust they caught; And I prayed her to come for my teaching, and she came in the midnight dream— And I woke and might not remember, nor betwixt her tangle deem: She spake, and how might I hearken; I heard, and how might I know; I knew, and how might I fashion, or her hidden glory show? (Ibid.) On viewing Sigurd’s dead body, Brynhild first stabs herself with Sigurd’s sword, then uses her last breaths to demand that her aghast and grieving husband bury her on the same pyre as Sigurd. The narrator closes with a forgiving and cathartic tribute to the lovers’ best qualities as “the hope of the ancient Earth”: They are gone—the lovely, the mighty, the hope of the ancient Earth: It shall labour and bear the burden as before that day of their birth: It shall groan in its blind abiding for the day that Sigurd hath sped, And the hour that Brynhild hath hastened, and the dawn that waketh the dead. (Book 3, canto 15, CW 12: 244) Although Brynhild’s actions have hastened Sigurd’s death, they have also served the more benign purpose of moving the world closer to its appointed end. For Sigurd’s narrator, human actions are ultimately inscrutable, driven by passions beyond human control, and inextricably woven by fate into the web of life. Another heroine driven by twisted passion but viewed by the narrator with considerable empathy is Sigurd’s tortured wife Gudrun. It is she who had jealously informed Brynhild of Sigurd’s trickery, thus indirectly provoking violence.Yet she is also capable of genuine love; it is she, not Brynhild, who delivers the most eloquent tribute to the character of her murdered husband, and after his death she flees the corrupt court environment into a forest until forced once again to serve her family’s exploitive ambitions. Isolated, unyielding, and fearlessly committed 80

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to the revenge codes of her line, Gudrun is portrayed with pity as well as horror as she arranges for the violent destruction of her brothers, husband, home, and self.As she leaps into the sea, she cries out her husband’s name, loyal to her own vision of justice: She hath spread out her arms as she spake it, and away from the earth she leapt And cut off her tide of returning; for the sea-waves over her swept, And their will is her will henceforward; and who knoweth the deeps of the sea, And the wealth of the bed of Gudrun, and the days that shall yet be? (Book IV, canto 7, CW 12: 306) Gudrun too belongs to the future, her passions and crimes now rendered harmless as the cycles of love and wrong begin anew.

Later Writings: As we have seen, Morris had always identified to some degree with the constricting life circumstances of women, and the poetry of his middle period further dramatizes the degree to which sexual emotions could prove destructive to women, men, and society itself.As he aged in the company of socialist women and reflected on their place in an egalitarian society, however, Morris’s later prose romances fashioned energetic, forthright, and wise female characters who model many of the qualities ascribed to Ellen in News from Nowhere. His last fully completed romance, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, finished directly before his death in 1896, is also his only long prose tale with a female protagonist. In creating Birdalone, Morris strives to imagine the psychological traits as well as the special difficulties faced by a mostly “new” woman as she undertakes a search for adult identity and maturation that parallels the explorations of his male heroes. In particular, Birdalone faces threats of servitude, physical confinement, potential sexual exploitation, unwanted male attention, harassment, and possible rape. Moreover, she must learn the arts of peace and fellowship as she acquires skills of survival and artistry, forms a community of supportive women friends, runs a successful craft business with her fellow women, forges a loving tie with the mother from whom she had been separated as a child, and experiences the guidance of a female wisdom-figure, Habundia, who helps forge Birdalone’s spiritual bond with nature and aids her successful courtship and reintegration into her community. Birdalone is the first Morrisian heroine who presumably continues her active employment after marriage, as Bebel and Marx/Aveling had predicted would be the case for the socialist women of the future. She is also his first heroine whose loving companionship with other women is central to her happiness and to the tale. And though at times she requires the aid of armed men to rescue her, Birdalone is physically vigorous, decisive, and quick-witted in selfdefense. Remarkably, too, the tale ends not with childbearing, rulership, or references to the future family life of Birdalone and her partner, but with the friends’ joint efforts to clear the dark wood Evilshaw, and the continued harmony by which “their [shared] love never sundered, and … they lived without shame and died without fear” (CW 20:387). The tale begins in Birdalone’s girlhood as she is stolen from her mother by the Witch-wife of Evilshaw, who forces the child to perform heavy labor. In contrast to the Victorian ideal of idle femininity, Birdalone “was not slack nor a sluggard, and hated not the toil” (Ibid., 9). Bright and eager to acquire skills, she becomes adept at tilling, harvesting, cooking, fishing, shooting deer, and tending to animals; her ability to fend for herself off the land later stands her in good stead 81

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throughout her adventures, and enables her to convey these skills to the more helpless women she encounters on the Isle of Increase Unsought. Not work but the threat of prostitution goads her to flee from the Witch-wife’s home, as she realizes that the Witch “not only used her as a thrall in the passing day, but had it in her mind … to bait the trap with her for the taking of the sons of Adam” (Ibid., 10). After escaping the Witch’s home and landing on the Isle of Increase Unsought, Birdalone becomes deeply attached to its three female inhabitants, Aurea, Atra, and Viridi, who, before helping her escape their malign mistress, recount stories of their absent lovers—the first of many interchanged tales which bind the romance’s characters to one another. Birdalone’s onward journey now becomes a quest to locate her friends’ lovers—a rare Morrisean subplot representing a female journey in the service of friendship rather than love. As she enters new territory, Birdalone seeks shelter at the Castle of the Quest; here she is kept a virtual prisoner by its castellan, who fears that if she leaves she will be captured or harmed. Nonetheless she escapes to the nearby Valley of the Greywethers in search of solitude and communion with nature, and there encounters the knightly lovers of her three women friends. On learning their betrotheds’ whereabouts, the knights depart in order to rejoin and rescue them, thus leaving the Castle undefended. When Birdalone next ventures forth, the castellan’s fears prove prescient as she is captured in succession by the Black and Red Knights.The first of these threatens her sexually, and although she seizes his armor during the night and prepares her bow and knife for use in self-defense,“she, for her part, was silent, partly for fear of the strange man, or, it might be, even for hatred of him, who had thus brought her into such sore trouble” (Ibid., 170).When the even more malicious Red Knight surprises them both and attacks the Black Knight, Birdalone shoots an arrow at the attacker and stabs him in the shoulder with her knife. He thrusts her off, however, murders the Black Knight, and, after many salacious jibes, threatens her with further cruelty:“[I]t is not my pleasure to slay thee, rather I will bring thee to the Red Hold, and there see what we may make of thee” (Ibid., 210). Matters are righted only when the three knights return with Birdalone’s women friends and are able to rescue her from the Red Knight, but not without loss, for Aurea’s betrothed Baudoin dies in the attempt. Birdalone has thus needed male intervention to deliver her from imprisonment and humiliation, her desire for independence has led to a friend’s death, and she is further troubled by the growing reciprocal attachment between herself and Atra’s former lover Arthur. In striking contrast to the rivalries which drive both Brynhild and Gudrun to destructive acts, Birdalone flees the Castle in distress to prevent further emotional harm to her companions, and five years of separation and healing ensue before the friends are again united. These years bring several intervening changes necessary for Birdalone’s maturation and the rekindling of the fellowship. After departing from her companions, Birdalone earns her living for five years in the City of the Five Crafts as the manager of a weaving establishment, receiving honor for her creative nature-based designs (in this way resembling Morris’s daughter).The master of the embroidery guild notes that Birdalone’s designs resemble those of an older woman, Audrey, and when Audrey later visits, she recognizes Birdalone as her long-lost daughter. The bond between the two women is instantaneous and deep; when Audrey asks her daughter not to desert her, Birdalone responds with fervor, “I love thee dearly, and never, never shall I leave thee” (271), and she refrains from seeking her former friends and lover until her mother dies five years later. Several other nineteenth-century narratives with a woman protagonist also represent a reunion with a lost mother-figure as central to female identity-completion, as in Tennyson’s “Lady Clare” and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Shirley. In this case, after Birdalone recovers

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her proletarian history as the daughter of a peasant farmer and needlewoman, she is emotionally freed to seek other relationships. The first of these is with a supernatural, more elevated mother-figure, Habundia, who since Birdalone’s adolescence has appeared to help her in times of greatest need, and who serves as wisdom-figure, tutor, protectress, and source of love. Her interventions are more concrete than those of Brynhild’s tutelary “Wisdom,” for when Birdalone expresses her fear of permanent separation from both her friends and Arthur, and further, that any relationship with Arthur would further alienate her from her other friends, Habundia offers guidance and help in accomplishing both reconciliations. Meanwhile, after Birdalone’s flight Arthur had undergone a period of despair and madness, but Habundia has nursed him to health and now guides him to where Birdalone resides.After the lovers unite, she leads them to where Aurea,Viridis,Atra, Hugh, and Aurea’s new partner, the Green Knight, presently reside.After some initial awkwardness in Atra’s re-encounter with Arthur, the fellowship is reestablished, with Atra assuming a special relationship with the spiritual feminine spirit of Habundia.As mentioned, the friends live together until death, maintaining themselves peacefully as they slowly overcome the menacing forces of the nearby forest. Unlike the many plots which achieve closure by representing the deaths or unions of a single pair of lovers, The Water of the Wondrous Isles seems a truly egalitarian tale in representing a community’s shared achievement of cohesion and a sense of purpose, as the many individual stories which the characters have told to one another throughout are folded into a single narrative. It also embodies the ideals of socialist feminism in that a woman’s pursuit of vocation, identity, and love is subsumed into a wider tale of harmony with her fellow women and with nature,Arthur’s adventures are made subordinate to those of his future partner rather than the reverse, and the stain of violence, which in previous narratives had often tragically severed men and women, has been overcome by the softer virtues of mutual attachment and loyalty. The Water of the Wondrous Isles is thus the story of the formation of a proto-socialist community and of the egalitarian gender relations which sustain it.

Conclusion Morris’s early writings manifest a temperamental identification with many forms of entrapment, expressed in representations of the violence and confinement inflicted on both sexes by the problematic nature of gender polarities as well as an unforgiving external world.Tempered by his personal experiences, Morris’s writings of the late 1860s and 1870s exhibit a similar empathy with the pain caused by the social and sexual oppression of women. Set within tragic and mythic plots which intensify the contradictions of character and fate, the enraged women of the poetic epics of his middle period—Medea and Gudrun, Stenoboea and Brynhild—also reflect their creator’s ambivalence about the erotic passions as necessary but destructive forces inhibiting happiness and survival. Thus when, in the late 1880s, Morris came to the debates surrounding marriage and feminist socialism, he had already thought deeply about how class hierarchies and other forms of social constraint distort sexual relationships and familial ties. As he envisioned a new “epoch of rest,” he formulated guidelines for how freedom of attachment might be furthered without imposing unrealistic expectations of complete accord. Through the voice of the elderly sage figure Old Hammond, News from Nowhere addresses issues of central concern to socialists of the period, especially the need for human relationships to be freed from restraints of property, class inequities, and social conventions. In their exploration of the psychological and practical adaptations

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required for “freedom,” these commentaries remain among the more nuanced and powerful socialist feminist statements of their time. In his writings of the 1890s, Morris strove to envision the application of such principles in a yet-unrealized world—although with uneven results, as many of the active and beneficent women of his later romances still function largely as helpmates. In his last fully completed work, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, however, Morris creates a tale of female maturation which is arguably his most feminist literary work.The choice of a female protagonist prompts him to recast the achievement-through-combat plot common to many adventure tales, and instead to place emphasis on the heroine’s inventiveness, active artistry, and search for sustaining human ties.The result may be Morris’s most fully socialist feminist plot, in which both women and men achieve fulfillment through the integration of egalitarian personal relationships and a shared commitment to the common good.

Notes 1 Charles Harvey and Jon Press, William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991, 47. 2 Letter to author, 3 August 2019. 3 “The Early Poems of William Morris,” William Morris Archive, http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/ Poetry/Early Poems/earlypoems.html.All or part of seven poems are copied in Emma’s hand, the sole copies to survive. 4 William Morris Archive, http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/listpoemsepperiodcontents.html#A-25. 5 West London Observer, 22 December 1894, 6. She ran in Ward 3, polling 414 votes, 215 less than needed. Stephen Williams, letter 12 August 2019. 6 See also Peter Faulkner,“In Defense of Halliday Sparling,” JWMS 23.1 (2018), 39–68. 7 “Alone, Unhappy by the Fire I Sat,” ll. 33–34,William Morris Archive, http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa .edu/listpoemsepperiodcontents.html#A-25. 8 The poem continues,“Behold with lack of happiness / the Master, Love our hearts did bless / Lest we should think of him the less — / Love dieth not, though hope is dead!” (ll. 45–48). William Morris Archive, http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/listpoemsepperiodcontents.html#A-10. 9 William Morris, Socialist Diary, ed. Florence Boos, 2nd ed. (Nottingham: Five Leaves Press, 2019), 65–66. 10 See, for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990, and Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 11 “A Morris Speech on Women’s Trade Unions,” ed. Florence Boos, William Morris Society U.S. Newsletter, July 2008, 21–23. 12 Frank C. Sharp, letter to author, 17 August 2019. 13 “A Morris Speech on Women’s Trade Unions”. He praises the Union for addressing the root causes of inequality:“Any association which seeks to penetrate to the root of a mischief, and to help people till they themselves can put themselves into a position in which they no longer need help, is worthy of consideration very different from what should be given to most so-called charities.” (22) He further criticizes male unionists who would narrowly exclude women, and concludes that “in all classes every woman should be brought up as if she might not marry and keep house; as if she might have to earn her own living. I know that in the middle classes this would often save much wretchedness and degrading dependence; and … in the working classes it would create a body of independent, helpful, well-organized workers, who would raise the character of the life of the whole nation.” (23) “The Author of ‘The Earthly Paradise’ on Ladies Dress,” Glasgow Herald, 3 April, 1882, 3. 14 During the period in which as editor of Commonweal he sought to keep the peace between warring factions, Morris declined to print a rebuttal by Bruce Glasier to an article by Ernest Belfort Bax, writing perhaps his most unfortunate statement on the topic to Glasier on 24 April 1886: “you must not forget that child-bearing makes women [economically] inferior to men, since a certain time of their lives they must be dependent on them. Of course we must claim absolute equality of condition between women and men, as between other groups, but it would be poor economy setting women to

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Morris, Gender, and the Woman Question do men’s work (as unluckily they often do now) or vice versa” (Kelvin, 2: 545). In 1888, Bax left the Socialist League, and Morris’s 1890 News from Nowhere presents children (though not infants) benefitting from the instruction and companionship of adults of both sexes. 15 Especially disturbing was his objection to laws punishing domestic violence. In 1877, Bax had married Emma Wright, who died at the age of 36 after bearing seven children, whom their father then sent to live with others. Four years later in 1897, he married a German woman, Maria Henneberg, and later died within hours of her death in 1926. 16 After learning that her long-term partner, Edward Aveling, had secretly married another woman, Marx committed suicide under suspicious circumstances in 1898 at the age of 43. Aveling himself died four months later. For a fuller exploration of the events leading up to her death, see Stephen Williams and Tony Chandler,“’Tussy’s great delusion’: Eleanor Marx’s Death Revisited,” Socialist History, forthcoming. 17 Völsunga Saga:The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda. Translated by Eiríkir Magnússon and William Morris. London: Ellis, 1870.

Selected Bibliography Bebel, August. Women under Socialism, trans. Daniel DeLeon. New York, NY: New York Labor News Co., 1904. Bennett, Phillippa. Wonderlands:The Last Romances of William Morris. London: Peter Lang, 2015. Blunt,Wilfred Scawen. My Diaries: being a personal narrative of events, 1888-1914. NY: Alfred A. Knoff, 1922. Boos, Florence. “The Socialist New Woman in William Morris’s The Water of the Wondrous Isles.” Victorian Literature and Culture, 23 (1995): 159–75. ____. “Unprintable Lyrics: Unpublished Poems of William Morris, 1869–1873.” Victorian Poetry, 53.2 (2015): 193–225. Boos, Florence and William Boos.“Victorian Socialist-Feminism and William Morris’s News from Nowhere.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 14.1 (1990): 3–32. Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1904 (Memorials). Coles, Dorothy.“‘My Dearest Emma’:William and Emma Morris.” JWMS, 16.1 (2004): 45–60. Dunlap, Joseph, pref. Introductions to The Collected Works of William Morris. New York, NY: Oriole Editions, 1973. Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. Ernest Untermann. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr, 1902. Faulkner, Pater. Wilfred Scawen Blunt and the Morrises. London:William Morris Society, 1981. Foster, John Bellamy. “William Morris’s Romantic Revolutionary Ideal: Nature, Labour and Gender in News from Nowhere.” JWMS, 22.2 (2017): 17–35. Harvey, Charles and Jon Press. William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Kelvin, Norman, ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987–1996 (Kelvin). Lawrence, Barbara.“Mrs. Morris’s Other Children.” JWMS, 22.4 (2018): 47–83. MacCarthy, Fiona. William Morris:A Life for Our Time. New York, NY:Alfred A. Knoff, 1995. Marsh, Jan.“Concerning Love: News from Nowhere and Gender.” In William Morris and News from Nowhere: A Vision for Our Time, eds. Stephen Coleman and Paddy O’Sullivan. Bideford, Devon: Green Books, 1990, 107–125. ____. Jane and May Morris:A Biographical Story 1839–1938, 2nd ed. Horsham:The Printed Word, 2000. ____. Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Marsh, Jan and Frank C. Sharp, eds. The Collected Letters of Jane Morris. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2012 (LJM). Marx, Eleanor and Edward Aveling.“The Woman Question.” In Thoughts on Women and Society, eds. Joachim Müller and Edith Schotte. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1987. Mason, Anna, Jan Marsh, Jenny Lister, Rowan Bain and Joseph Stulholme. May Morris: Arts and Crafts Designer. London:Thames and Hudson, 2017. Morris, May. William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist, 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwells, 1936 (AWS). Morris,William. The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris. London: Longmans, 1910–15 (CW).

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Florence S. Boos Parkins, Wendy. Jane Morris:The Burden of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Richardson, Linda. William Morris and Women: Experience and Representation. Diss., Oxford University, 1989. Salmon, Nicholas and Derek Baker. A William Morris Chronology. Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1996. Shaw, George Bernard. The Collected Letters of George Bernard Shaw, ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York, NY: Dodd Mead/Viking, 1965 (LGBS). Vaninskaya, Anna. William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History, and Propaganda 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. William Morris Archive. “Early Poems” and Supplementary Articles, News from Nowhere. http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu. Williams, Stephen. “‘A Clear Flame-Like Spirit’: Georgiana Burne-Jones and Rottingdean, 1904–1920.” JWMS, 20.4 (2014): 79–90. ____. “Making Daily Life ‘as useful and beautiful as possible’: Georgiana Burne-Jones and Rottingdean, 1880–1920.” JWMS, 20.3 (2013): 47–65.

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4 ‘KELMSCOTT MANOR. MR MORRIS’S COUNTRY PLACE’ (1871–1896) Julia Griffin

In the period between 1871 and 1896, Kelmscott Manor was variously jointly occupied by the designer, writer and socialist, William Morris (1834–1896), the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), the bookseller and publisher Frederick Startridge Ellis (1830–1901), and their circle of friends and family. During the initial three years (1871–1874), the tenure was shared by Morris and Rossetti. It has been previously unacknowledged that the house was originally rented on a one-year trial basis (summer 1871–summer 1872), only subsequently giving way to more entrenched occupancy (Bornand 1977, afterwards WMRD: 63). By September 1872, Rossetti renewed his lapsed lease for another three years (Fredeman et al. 2002–2015, afterwards DGRCC, vol.VI, 2006: 477, no. 74.118). However, after the two men had fallen out, the painter departed in July 1874, never to return, curtailing their joint tenancy. Consequently, Ellis replaced Rossetti, yielding a harmonious arrangement for ten years, until 1884 (Doughty 1928: xiv). The motivation behind the publisher’s withdrawal was most likely dictated by his plans for retirement and relocation to rural Devon as a cure for incipient tuberculosis. Regular travel to Kelmscott would not only become impracticable due to distance, but also unnecessary as Ellis would now have his own “healthy” residence on the coast. Afterwards Morris retained the sole use of the manor until his death on 3 October 1896, having held it for some twenty-five years. Kelmscott was rented alongside a sequence of the Morrises’ permanent homes in and around London—at 26 Queen Square, Bloomsbury (1865–1872), Horrington House, Chiswick (1873–1878) and Kelmscott House, Hammersmith (1878–1897). Today, Kelmscott Manor is not only inherently associated with Morris, but it is also undoubtedly the most famous of his houses. Unlike any of his other residences, it features in the Collins English Dictionary as ‘a Tudor house near Lechlade in Oxfordshire: home (1871–96) of William Morris’.1 The polymath chose to immortalise Kelmscott in what would become his most widely disseminated literary work, the utopian fiction News from Nowhere (Morris 1891a), where it embodies his ideal of the new social order. Furthermore, he chose to name his London home as well as his arts press after the manor. Even though Morris died in his main residence at Hammersmith, his funeral and burial took place at Kelmscott. The manor and village became the sites as well as chief vehicles for the posthumous memorialisation of Morris (Dudkiewicz 2017: 209–235). As early as 1912, the Countess of Warwick described

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Kelmscott as ‘the home with which Morris is most closely associated by the world at large’ (Greville 1912: 24). By 1919, the reformer’s daughter, May Morris, conceived the idea of preserving the manor for posterity as an ideological homage and memorial to her father. She wished to ‘keep the “atmosphere” of his life’ there, safeguarding the future of the very historic building he cared most about, whilst perpetuating its use as an inspirational domestic dwelling to others (Dudkiewicz 2017: 221–226). Accordingly, on her death in 1938, May Morris bequeathed Kelmscott to the University of Oxford as a ‘house of rest for artists, men of letters, scholars and men of science’, on condition that the manor would be maintained unchanged and that visitors would be admitted ‘at reasonable times’ (M. Morris 1939: 24). Due to the apparently impracticable terms of the bequest, by 1962 Kelmscott passed to the Society of Antiquaries of London (Dufty 1963: 97–114). After several decades of informal access arrangements, the house became a registered museum in 1993.2 This chapter investigates the place of Kelmscott in Morris’s life and its history during his lifetime (1871–1896). It comprises two parts—a comprehensive literature review of existing scholarship on Morris at Kelmscott, followed by a study of largely unexplored aspects of the topic. His association with the manor has been the subject of various articles and book chapters.The great majority of these have focussed on exploring the influence of the house on the formation of Morris’s ideology and on his public life, namely in relation to historic buildings, society and the countryside. The manor’s impact on the Arts and Crafts Movement in the Cotswolds has also been investigated. Due to this focus in the scholarship thus far, paradoxically, very little is known about the nature of Morris’s stays at, and lived-in experience of, Kelmscott, which I seek to address in this chapter. Specifically, I will interrogate the circumstances behind Morris’s rental of the manor, the reformer’s perception of the function of Kelmscott in his life and his evolving attitude to the house. Consideration will be given to the frequency and duration of his visits and Morris’s uses of the manor, most notably as an important site of work. I will also examine the little-studied subject of the appearance of key Kelmscott interiors under the Morris family’s occupancy, based on contemporaneous life writings and various visual depictions dating primarily from the 1890s.This chapter will aim to recover the reality of Morris’s tenure of Kelmscott, whilst illuminating the manor’s role in his life as well as its wider cultural significance as a literary house, an artist’s house and a Morris memorial. In doing so, it will also allude to the subject of the manor’s reputation in the Victorian public consciousness. I will attempt simultaneously to challenge some assumptions about Morris and Kelmscott perpetuated in modern scholarship, such as the notions that from the moment he first saw it, the manor became his ‘most-loved house’, or that it was solely a place of recreation. It will be argued that Morris did not, in fact, fully embrace Kelmscott until the final years of his life—following his withdrawal from active management of, or semi-retirement from, Morris & Co. in 1890. It was only then that he was able to spend a considerable part of the year there, and he appears to have developed undivided affection for the building. Furthermore, from the outset of the tenancy until the end of Morris’s life, the house served as a significant site of all aspects of his design and literary production, and to a lesser extent, his activism. Last but not least, the manor bore witness to several suppressed narratives, not least as a site of Jane Morris’s (1839–1914) infidelities, which are irreconcilable with the romanticised notions of the Morrises’ carefree domesticity at Kelmscott. Countering the relatively recent yet already entrenched proposition that Kelmscott had been knowingly and altruistically taken out by Morris as a love nest for his wife’s extramarital affair with Rossetti, it will be argued that, ironically, it was the newly found shared tenancy that provided the inevitable catalyst for the intimate relationship to begin, and that Morris was initially unaware of it.

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The Question of Sources Previous studies have relied almost exclusively on four groups of material—Norman Kelvin’s edition of William Morris’s collected letters (Kelvin 1984–1996, afterwards WMCC), the literary account from News from Nowhere (Morris 1891a), Morris’s antiquarian article ‘Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames’ (1895: 5–14) and May Morris’s (auto)biographical ‘Introductions’ to The Collected Works of William Morris (1910–1915).The use of all four of these sources is problematic from the methodological point of view. Whilst Rossetti, who resided at Kelmscott for extensive periods of time in isolation from his London contacts, spent a considerable time letter writing, leaving behind detailed reports of his daily activities there, the opposite was true for Morris. Morris used Kelmscott as an escape from the city, whilst his much-treasured visits to the country were mostly short. It has been previously unacknowledged that he therefore rarely chose to write letters whilst at Kelmscott. Morris’s surviving missives relating to Kelmscott, usually penned shortly before or after rather than during his visits, are therefore a fragmentary resource.They are nevertheless insightful. It is notable, yet frequently ignored, that Morris authored ‘Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames’ just a year before his death. It was intended as a contribution to the arts magazine The Quest, published by The Birmingham Guild of Handicrafts. Rather than being an autobiographical account of Morris’s occupancy of Kelmscott, the article’s main subject was the appearance and architectural history of the building and its environs. Even so, the frequently quoted final paragraph contains the reformer’s declaration of his love for the manor:‘Here then are a few words about a house that I love; with a reasonable love I think’ (Morris 1895: 13–14). Whilst Morris’s feelings, expressed above, convey the nature of his relationship with Kelmscott in the penultimate year of his life, the statement cannot be deemed representative of his 25-year tenure. Moreover, having been intended for publication, the content of this text would have been carefully edited by Morris to a considerably greater extent than his personal papers. The pitfalls of using News from Nowhere—a fictitious literary account conceived in the final years of the reformer’s life in the genre of a utopian romance—as valid autobiographical/documentary evidence of the nature of its author’s long-term tenancy of Kelmscott need not be expanded upon. Finally, May Morris’s ‘Introductions’ to The Collected Works of William Morris (1910–1915) need to be cited with caution, as they are not entirely reliable for at least two reasons. Firstly, they were written several decades after the events portrayed, frequently recounting her recollections as a child, and therefore calling into question their reliability. Secondly, and more importantly from the methodological viewpoint, they have been arguably constructed as a key vehicle for memorialising Morris. As the chief keeper of her father’s flame, May Morris’s priority as their author was to project and disseminate a favourable image of Morris by means of controlling his reputation rather than adhering to historical accuracy. For example, she stated: I do not think he ever felt in his heart that the house he named Kelmscott House was our real home;* it was … at best a temporary abode, as all building would be to him in modern London—‘the wen’ (M. Morris 1910–15, vol. XIII, 1912: xvj). She adds that ‘writing from London to us at Kelmscott he often spoke of “coming home”’.This assertion does not seem to be supported by a single of Morris’s published letters reproduced in Kelvin’s edition (Kelvin 1984–1996). Even in his final years, when his affection for Kelmscott considerably strengthened, he invariably reserved the descriptor ‘home’ for his London residence. There may have been multifold reasons for May Morris’s idealised treatment of Kelmscott

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Manor in the ‘Introductions’. Apart from the need for a suitable vehicle for the commemoration of her father, she may have been projecting her own personal feelings for the house. Evidence for the Morris sisters’ attachment to the manor is adduced further on. For this reason, the present chapter draws on several additional sources, previously largely unused for the study of Kelmscott. They include unpublished manuscripts such as the reformer’s five surviving work diaries for the years 1881, 1887, 1893, 1895 and 1896 (BL,AddMS45407B, AddMS45408–45411), the Kelmscott Visitors’ Book (1889–1904) (BL, AddMS45412), Sydney Cockerell’s miscellaneous papers and his diaries for the years 1890–1896 (BL, AddMS52772; AddMS52627–52633), surviving reminiscences of selected visitors to the manor, the newly published correspondence of Philip Webb (Aplin 2016, afterwards PWCC) and Jane Morris (Sharp & Marsh 2012, afterwards JMCC) and the recent edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s letters (Fredeman et al. 2002–2015, DGRCC), as well as magazine and newspaper interviews with William Morris himself. It also interrogates Morris’s above-mentioned correspondence, whilst understanding its limitations.

PART I. Literature Review: State of Knowledge on Morris at Kelmscott Recent decades have seen several distinctive upsurges of scholarship on Morris’s association with the house, reflecting revivals of interest in the Victorian period and in the study of his life and work.There are three resulting collections of essays—William Morris & Kelmscott (Stoppani 1981), William Morris: Art and Kelmscott (Parry 1996b) and William Morris’s Kelmscott: Landscape and History (Crossley, Hassall & Salway 2007). The first two explore design history, biography and economic and social history, whilst the latter focuses mainly on the landscape history of the parish in its archaeological, historical, architectural and ecological contexts. Further findings on the local, social and architectural history of Kelmscott Manor and parish can be found in Volume 17 of the Victoria County History series—A History of the County of Oxford (Broadwell, Langford, and Kelmscott) (Townley 2012: 111–145). Linda Parry’s William Morris, the catalogue to the ground-breaking V&A centenary exhibition, presents illuminating research about the design and provenance of some key furnishings from the manor (1996a). Since taking over the ownership of the house from the University of Oxford in 1962, the Society of Antiquaries of London has produced a number of guidebooks written by Arthur Richard Dufty, including Kelmscott. A Short Guide (Dufty 1969a) and Kelmscott. An Illustrated Guide (Dufty 1969b), the latter subsequently revised and expanded by John Cherry (Dufty and Cherry 1996, 1999), as well as the more recent account by Christopher Catling (2010).They all offer a room-by-room tour of the modern arrangement of the house. Jonathan Howard’s study ‘Kelmscott Manor As William Morris Never Knew It’ focuses mainly on the architectural changes to the fabric of the building made throughout the course of the 20th century, rather than the original interior decoration scheme, discussed in the latter part of this chapter (Howard 2007: 131–145). The Society also published Kelmscott Manor & Estate Conservation Management Plan, co-written by John Maddison and Merlin Waterson (2013), outlining plans for the redevelopment project ‘Kelmscott and Morris: Past, Present and Future’. Its authors acknowledge seminal research on the architectural development of the house conducted by Nicholas Cooper (2005). Despite the scholarly interest in Kelmscott, there are no comprehensive analyses of Morris’s 25-year tenancy of the manor.The fact that the comprehensive biography of Morris by Fiona MacCarthy only discusses the first five years of his occupancy, focussing on his absences during his two Icelandic trips and his wife’s extramarital liaison with Rossetti, reflects the scholarly lacuna concerning the reality of Morris’s own tenure of the house (MacCarthy 1994: 311–347). 90

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Instead, modern scholarship has largely centred on the influence of Kelmscott on the development of Morris’s thought and professional activities, exploring the mutual impact that the local area and Morris exerted on one another. Specifically, historians have proposed that ‘it was certainly Kelmscott Manor that in part led to “Anti-Scrape”, otherwise the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings’ (e.g., Marsh 1996: 73). The most up-to-date monograph on the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), From William Morris. Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity, 1877–1939, does not ascribe a role to Kelmscott (Miele 2005b: 30–65). Miele traces Britain’s gradual awakening to the need to protect its built heritage to 18th-century antiquarian literature, and the rise of the anti-restoration movement back to the mid-1850s. The book compellingly argues that Morris’s commitment to conservation had long predated his rental of Kelmscott, originating in his teenage years. It found an early manifestation in his joining the Oxford Archaeological Society in 1855. Miele concurs with Mackail that the direct impetus behind Morris’s foundation of the SPAB was witnessing an unsympathetic restoration of Lichfield Cathedral, followed by concern about Burford Church and Tewkesbury Abbey. However, irrespective of the original impetus behind the foundation of the SPAB, Frank Sharp perceptively observes that the Society did clearly favour the area around Kelmscott, safeguarding the largest number of buildings in this part of England (1999: 49): The geographic concentration of buildings near Kelmscott on which the Society took action is unparalleled throughout Britain … . A review of the SPAB’s files shows his [i.e. Morris’s] direct involvement in virtually every case. The local buildings meant a great deal to Morris.Visitors to Kelmscott were routinely taken to local sites such as Great Coxwell Barn, Inglesham Church or Burford Church. In his … essay ‘Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames’, Morris follows each side of the Thames near Kelmscott, listing the picturesque villages and their history and important buildings.Virtually all of these sites became SPAB projects. Morris himself frequently prepared SPAB’s reports on local buildings, including Kelmscott Church and the churches of East Leach Martin and East Leach Turville. (Sharp 1999: 49–50) Jenny West’s quantitative study of ‘Cases before the SPAB Committee: Numbers and Location, 1877–97’ confirms that the collective number of ‘new & repeated’ cases in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire—counties surrounding Kelmscott—did indeed comprise the single greatest concentration of buildings in any one region of the United Kingdom (2005: 318–320).3 Secondly, the environment of Kelmscott has been deemed as a formative influence on Morris’s socialism. Specifically, stays at the manor have been credited for shaping his outlook on society, mainly by means of crystallising his views on the exploitative nature of agricultural work, and his belief in the need for a housing reform that would provide everyone with a ‘beautiful’ home (MacCarthy 1994; Marsh 1996; Sharp 1999; Faulkner 2008). For example, Sharp argues that through his association with the hamlet, Morris became acutely aware of the labourers’ plight, whilst the Morris family began philanthropic work in the village, supporting ‘the Kelmscott poor people’ (Sharp 1999: 49).The evolution of his views found numerous expressions. For instance, in an 1891 lecture on the Pre-Raphaelites, Morris stated: ‘If you go down into the country you won’t see Hardy’s heroes and heroines walking … you will see a very different kind of thing’ (Sharp 1999: 49). 91

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It has also been suggested that Kelmscott was vital in the formation of Morris’s pioneering ideas about the countryside. In her chapter on the manor, MacCarthy states: From the 1870s he [i.e. Morris] came to define his vision of the country with a sharpness of a man who actually lived there and who knew the intimate detail of the landscape being dangerously threatened by inertia and greed. When he spoke about England, it was Kelmscott he returned to … . Years later in The Commonweal, his Socialist propaganda paper, Morris evoked exactly the sights, smells, sounds of Kelmscott in the course of a diatribe against ruthless commercial developers. (1994: 315) In William Morris and the Idea of England, Peter Faulkner agrees with Stephen Yeo that to Morris ‘Englishness’ was ‘“an exemplary combination of love of place (mainly bits of England) with principled resistance to Nation and to State”’, the latter specifically in relation to imperialism (Faulkner 1992: 5). This position was best expressed in his lecture of 1886: ‘I am no patriot as the word is generally used; and yet I am not ashamed to say that as for the face of the land we live in I love it with something of the passion of a lover’ (Faulkner 1992: 5). MacCarthy additionally credits Kelmscott as Morris’s inspiration behind foreshadowing the garden city movement: Morris’s view of the countryside roamed further onwards from these grey stone villages of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire to all the variations of land and architecture that made up the texture of England as a whole. It was now that one of his most influential concepts, the ideal of the network of small ruralist communities began to surface … . Morris wrote in those early Kelmscott years: ‘but look, suppose people lived in little communities among gardens and green fields, so that you could be in the country in 5 minutes walk, and had few wants … and studied (the difficult) arts of enjoying life, and finding out what they really wanted: then I think one might hope civilisation had really begun.’ (MacCarthy 1994: 314–315) Tony Pinkney’s William Morris in Oxford: The Campaigning Years, 1879–1895 (2007) argues that in choosing to rent Kelmscott, the polymath viewed its locality as an extension of Oxford. As such, it would provide him with an impartial platform to re-connect with his university city in the capacity of an architectural and political activist. Morris strived to have an impact on Oxford ‘students, dons and townspeople’ in the areas of SPAB work and socialism. He not only campaigned against alterations to the Magdalen Bridge (in 1881) and St Mary’s Church (1893), but also lectured to various local socialist groups. Although Morris largely failed in his lifetime, Pinkney traces his living influence in the city. As the embodiment of Morris’s ideas about vernacular architecture, Kelmscott’s aesthetic, construction and location exerted an enduring influence on the younger generation of Arts and Crafts Movement architects and designers. A number of them settled down in the surrounding area and/or adopted working practices sympathetic with the ethos of Morris’s house. Nicholas Mander’s Country Houses of the Cotswolds argues that around 1900, the Cotswolds ‘became the rural centre of the radical renewal in the decorative arts’ (2008: 157). Citing Powers, he calls it one of the biggest paradoxes of the Arts and Crafts Movement for ‘one of the most backward parts of the country’, unscathed by the Industrial Revolution, to become ‘the right place to start 92

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a modern art movement’ (2008: 159). Mander credits this development to the lasting legacy of Morris’s Kelmscott: The elevation of the Cotswolds in the imagination from the ‘ugly country’ of William Cobbett in 1826 to the idyll of the late nineteenth century, glorying in the lyrical beauty of its limestone and landscape, is a direct result of the advocacy of William Morris. He arrived at the edge of the Costwolds in 1871 … . Inspired by the social and moral commitment of William Morris … in the next generation two concentrations of artistic settlement and activity developed in the Cotswolds: at Chipping Campden in the North Costwolds, under C.R. Ashbee, and … in central Cotswolds, under Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers. (Mander 2008: 159) After Kelmscott.The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Cotswolds by Alan Crawford elaborates on the subject (Crawford 2009). The monograph Wandering Architects. In Pursuit of an Arts and Crafts Ideal investigates a coherent group of itinerant architects, revolving around Detmar Blow (1867–1939) (Drury 2000). Following the teaching of Morris and Webb, they worked on site with their own hands, alongside their masons. Blow’s devotion to Morris extended to his vital involvement in the reformer’s funeral, having driven the harvest cart carrying his coffin. Crucially, Michael Drury demonstrates that Kelmscott Manor was the key influence behind the home Blow built for himself near Painswick, Gloucestershire, only 30 miles from Morris’s house: There is no doubt that Hilles was Blow’s Kelmscott. Anachronistic when seen alongside the work his practice was producing elsewhere at the time, it was nonetheless a true reflection of his own steadfast underlying values … The spirit of Morris stayed with Blow and appears most readily in his most private moments. (Drury 2000: 248) Elsewhere Drury states that Blow’s earlier commissions, comprising his most significant work in south Wiltshire,‘Wilsford and Little Ridge, like Hilles, owed their inspiration, ultimately and perhaps most of all, to Morris’s Kelmscott Manor’ (2005: 182). The above topics are undoubtedly an important part of understanding the role of Kelmscott in Morris’s public life and the formation of his ideology, as well as—to use Nicholas Cooper’s expression—‘the place of the image of Kelmscott in other people’s beliefs and teaching’ (2007: 110). Moreover, both of these interrelated roles fulfilled by the house are one of the key measures of its cultural significance. However, the reality of Morris’s tenure of Kelmscott and the manor’s place in Morris’s private life remain largely understudied. On the whole, early biographers and modern scholars alike have focussed on a handful of aspects of Morris’s association with the house reviewed below, namely the building’s external appearance, architectural style and history; Morris’s feelings towards the manor; his motivation behind renting it in 1871; and the role of Kelmscott as a place of leisure.To a lesser extent, academics have touched upon the level of Morris’s physical presence at the house, and have indirectly addressed the question whether it was the physical site of his work. Amongst the numerous publications on the architectural style and features of Morris’s house, Nicholas Cooper’s essay ‘Kelmscott Manor’ presents the most accessible and authoritative technical account (2007: 110–130). Kelmscott is a vernacular building made of grey uncoursed limestone rubble (Townley 2012: 122). It was originally built by the Turner family as an ordinary 93

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yeoman farmhouse, sometime after 1600,‘to a familiar U-plan, with the hall at the centre entered by a screens passage’ (Cooper 2007: 116). Around the time of Thomas Turner’s grant of arms in 1665, it was extended by a large wing protruding to the north-east. Featuring double gables with little aedicule windows, the new block was a ‘piece of calculated display’, consistent with other local gentry houses (Cooper 2007: 116–119). Despite its later dating, Kelmscott is characterised by predominantly Elizabethan features such as gables and stack chimneys as well as the sympathetic blending of medieval and Renaissance influences, such as the coexistence of triangular pediments alongside square hoods over the mullioned windows (Sherwood and Pevsner 1974: 666). A photographic series depicting Kelmscott Manor and environs, taken by Frederick Evans largely in 1896, conveys the characteristics of the house which appealed to Morris.The latter’s own set of these photographs is preserved at the William Morris Gallery [see Plates 4.1 and 4.4]. The subject of the appearance of Kelmscott has generated great interest from at least the 1880s, when it began to be renowned for its ‘beauty’. For example, as early as 1883, the American poet and writer Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) wrote in a letter that Morris ‘has even held out the hope to us that we may visit him in his own home in Kelmscott, which is said to be the loveliest house in England’. Elsewhere she called it ‘the prettiest house in England’, again based solely on hearsay (Young 1995: 111, 114). The fact that Lazarus subsequently incorporated an illustration of Kelmscott into her article exclusively dedicated to Merton Abbey is testament to the manor’s aesthetic appeal (‘A Day in Surrey with William Morris’, The Century Magazine, July 1886: 395) (Figure 4.1). The article otherwise made no references to the house.The caption for the drawing—‘Kelmscott Manor. Mr. Morris’s Country Place’—deserves attention as it accurately conveyed the manor’s status as complementary to his principal residence at Hammersmith.

Figure 4.1 Illustration based on a drawing by William J. Stillman, in Emma Lazarus,‘A Day in Surrey with William Morris’, The Century Magazine, 1886.

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The aesthetic of the manor has dominated historical as well as biographical studies up to the present day. It is notable that Morris’s Victorian biographers chose to dedicate a better part of their chapters on Kelmscott to physical descriptions of the house instead of factual information about Morris’s tenure of the manor. For instance, the first ‘unauthorised’ biographer, Aymer Vallance, as well as the ‘official’ biographer, J.W. Mackail, adopt this approach.They both unanimously extol the attractive appearance and historical appeal of the house, drawing mainly on Morris’s own literary and/or architectural accounts of the building from the utopian novel News from Nowhere (1891) and ‘Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames’ (1895), as if the above sources were valid documentary evidence of his long-time occupancy of Kelmscott (Vallance 1897: 183–190; Mackail 1899, vol. I: 225–231). Similarly, MacCarthy’s chapter on Kelmscott opens with an extensive architectural and topographical description of the manor and its environs, emphasising its ‘great charm’ and ‘ordered beauty’ (1994: 311–315; 312). In her essay ‘William Morris’s Houses and the Shaping of Aesthetic Socialism’, Vita Fortunati explores both Kelmscott Manor and Red House as Morris’s ‘recipients for ideals’ (2009: 163–173). She perceptively observes that ‘the idyllic beauty of these places conceals turmoil and distresses, which shed an intriguing, disquieting shadow on their Arcadian quality’. Fortunati thus draws attention to the discrepancy between the ‘beauty’ of their physical appearance and the not so entirely idyllic existence of their inhabitants. Consequently, she proposes that both houses are more convincing as exemplary models, rather than as ‘practical solutions to the problems of alienation and ugliness in an industrial society’, as they were certainly not places that bore ‘witness to a harmonious relationship between their dwellers and the surrounding nature’ (Fortunati 2009: 163–173). Morris’s feelings towards the house represent another topic which has dominated historical accounts from the end of the nineteenth century until the present day. The scholarly consensus appears to be that from the moment Morris first saw the manor, it became his favourite or ‘most-loved house’ (MacCarthy 1994: 629). For example, Mackail refers to the building as Morris’s ‘loved place’ (1899, vol. I: 227) and professes: For the twenty-five years during which this beautiful old house was his country home, he found in it a peace and joy that no other place gave him … for with him the love of things had all the romance and passion that is generally associated with the love of persons only. (1899, vol. I: 225) His most recent biographer concurs, elaborating on the subject: Kelmscott Manor, the ‘beautiful and strangely naïf house’ in Oxfordshire, was from now on [i.e. beginning of lease] the object of Morris’s deep affection. Perhaps no other Englishman, apart from the owners of truly ancestral homes, has ever felt such passionate attachment to a building. (MacCarthy 1994: 311) According to Catling, when Morris ‘spotted the farmhouse in an estate agent’s particulars, he fell instantly and passionately in love’ (2010: 2). With the exception of Fortunati’s proposition, the question of whether Morris’s tenure of Kelmscott was a happy one does not seem to have been interrogated in the scholarship, apart from the occasional passing mention. For instance, in describing the 1880 boat trip from Hammersmith to the manor, Mackail concludes,‘all cares were put aside for it, and the light-heartedness of fifteen years before resumed its sway for a happy week’ (1899, vol. II: 8). Crawford remarks that ‘there are stories of him happy there [i.e. at Kelmscott] fishing in the Thames’ (2009: 12). In other words, Morris’s ‘happiness’ at the manor appears to have been inferred as a given—based on the ‘beauty’ of the building and the reformer’s ‘love’ for it—notwithstanding the initial period of distress brought about by Rossetti. 95

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Crucially for the construction of the modern history of Kelmscott, due to the dearth of archival evidence, there is no scholarly consensus regarding Morris’s motivation behind the joint rental of the manor with the painter. According to Mackail, the Morrises’ primary motivation was to secure a country getaway from ‘that incubus of middle class London life’ and a more comfortable alternative to holidays in lodgings.The partnership with Rossetti was dictated by the painter’s own poor health, requiring ‘quiet life in a remote country house’. Splitting the costs of the rent was a further consideration to Morris (Mackail 1899, vol. I: 225, 236). In Vallance’s view, Morris was yearning for a country house that would replace Red House, whilst Rossetti’s priority was to secure a studio in the countryside where he could work and leave his painting equipment permanently (1897: 183). Since Oswald Doughty’s exposition of the Jane Morris–Rossetti extramarital affair (1949), modern scholarship has speculated about the causal link between the rental of Kelmscott and the above-mentioned liaison. Opinions vary regarding the sequence of unfolding events. The interrelated question of when William Morris became aware of his wife’s relationship with the painter, before or after the decision to rent Kelmscott, remains unresolved. Marsh (1986) and MacCarthy (1994) propose that the affair had not only predated the rental of Kelmscott but also that Morris had in fact envisaged the manor’s purpose as a discreet love-nest for his wife and long-time associate, deliberately departing for Iceland to leave them alone. In Jane and May Morris.A Biographical Story 1839–1938, Marsh argues that Morris must have been fully aware of the liaison between Jane and Rossetti as early as 1868 and tolerated it since at least 1870, with Kelmscott thus becoming a premeditated solution to a socially unacceptable situation (1986: 81, 91–92).This interpretation has been upheld by MacCarthy, who stated that the house in the country was an attempt to find a civilized modus vivendi for Morris, Janey and Rossetti, giving the triangle the stamp of permanence and at least a veneer of respectability. Morris and Rossetti could be seen as nothing more than brother artists and partners in the Firm. (1994: 276) MacCarthy interpreted the following letter sent by Morris, on route to Iceland on 6 July 1871, in response to Jane’s first, now lost, missive from Kelmscott, as evidence for his acceptance of the affair.Acknowledging the good news from his wife, Morris wrote: I am so glad all is going well & that you are so cheerful: as also I am … . How beautiful the place looked last Monday: I grudged going away so; but I am very happy to think of you all happy there, and the children & you getting well … . Live well & happy (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 139, no. 141). She argued that Morris’s ending of that letter with the words ‘Live well and happy’ signified his seal of approval for Jane and Rossetti’s happiness together and ‘generosity’ verging ‘on sublime’ (MacCarthy 1994: 275–276). This view has since been accepted as fact, even though archival clues suggest an alternative reading. Marsh’s dating of the origin of Jane Morris’s extramarital affair was mostly based on Rossetti’s ‘revival of his poetic impulse’ in 1868, effected ‘through the inspiration of love’ for Jane Morris (1986: 81). Marsh also notes that in the spring of 1870, Mrs Morris and the painter spent a month in a secluded cottage at Scalands on their own, with Morris’s blessing, therefore evidencing not only their liaison but also Morris’s tolerance of it (Marsh 1986: 77–78, 89–90). However, Marsh’s subsequent research revealed that it is in fact not clear if they holidayed in one or in two nearby houses on the same estate (1999a: 389; JMCC 2012: 465). The interpretation of the above event must therefore 96

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remain inconclusive, especially given that Barbara Bodichon had variously offered to lend her properties on the Scalands estate to D.G Rossetti and his circle as well as his family members specifically as sites of convalescence. In the spring of 1870 both Rossetti and Mrs Morris were ill. Jane Morris only moved to Scalands after a period of recuperation in nearby Hastings. Bodichon subsequently extended an invitation to Christina Rossetti, who was suffering from Graves’ disease. Based on the nature of Morris’s ‘grieving and introspective’ poetic output drafted between 1867 and the publication of his Earthly Paradise 1868–1870, Florence Boos irrefutably demonstrates that he was experiencing and expressing feelings of loneliness and unrequited love from the late 1860s onwards (Boos 2015: 193–225).This implies that by this time, the Morrises had experienced marital estrangement. Nevertheless, there is no definitive evidence to ascertain if Jane Morris’s affair itself pre- or postdated the rental of Kelmscott and at which stage Morris became aware of it. Crucially, Morris had conceived and booked his trip to Iceland before beginning his search for a country retreat and finding Kelmscott (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 132-133, no.133). Neither has it been acknowledged that ending the first Icelandic letter to his wife of 6 July 1871 with the words ‘Live well & happy’ was by no means unique. Just two days later Morris is known to have used a very similar expression - ‘be well and happy’ - in his letter to Philip Webb (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 141, no.143). Moreover, the same letter to Jane Morris, also stating ‘I hope you are all happy and getting better’ could only be referring to the wellbeing of his wife and daughters, as it had predated Rossetti’s arrival at Kelmscott by a week. Significantly, the first recorded mention of the extramarital relationship and/or Morris’s awareness of it was not until 23 October 1871, several months after the decision to rent Kelmscott.W.B. Scott’s letter in question, which constitutes the earliest evidence of the liaison, states: I went to Morris to dinner at 6. I asked Gabriel the evening before if he was to be there … . His reply was ‘Oh I have another engagement.’ This engagement was actually, Janey at his own house for the night! At Top’s there were Jones, Poynter, Brown, Hüffer, Ellis and Green. Of course no Janey. Is it not too daring …? (Fredeman 1970: 103) This led William Fredeman to conclude that it was in fact the joint lease which became the unplanned if unavoidable catalyst for the start of the affair, which had been on the cards for some time. He argues that, in the course of the first summer stay at the manor, in 1871 the heightened propinquity afforded by the Kelmscott ménage, coupled with Morris’s timely hegira to Iceland, had worked the inevitable and the pair had almost certainly gone ‘further than they had gone’ … (1970: 102) Fredeman asserts that ‘whatever Morris’s feelings may have been, he was no willing partner in a ménage à trois’ (1970: 105). My research concurs with, and builds on, Fredeman’s interpretation. Even though Rossetti’s long-time pursuit of Jane Morris, documented in W. B. Scott’s correspondence, began around November 1868 (Fredeman 1970: 100), reviewing the fragmentary evidence suggests that this had been in vain until the first summer at Kelmscott proved pivotal in bringing about the intimate relationship between Morris’s wife and the painter, providing suitable ground for its development, and finally bringing Rossetti a sense of fulfillment. This proposition is further supported by a number of clues. Crucially, as Florence Boos demonstrated, Rossetti’s complex “House of Life” sonnet sequence can be clearly divided into distinct periods in terms of stylistic traits as well as the poet’s emotive preoccupations, with a marked change falling on the year 1871. Accordingly, the 40 sonnets written between 1868 and 1870 appear troubled and ‘relatively colourless’, engaging with the theme of regret over love that ‘had not been 97

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realized’ and featuring ‘images of death’. It was not until the Kelmscott period between 1871 and 1873, that Rossetti created 34 quite different sonnets. Characterised by ‘colour’,‘light’ and ‘incantation’, these later sonnets imply that the artist finally found his peace. After 1873 the sonnets virtually ceased (Boos 1976: 20–21, 18–101; Peterson 1961: 376, 387). I would like to argue that this changing nature of the sonnets supports a different chronology of the affair – postdating the rental of Kelmscott – and in keeping with both Fredeman’s findings as well as the newly re-evaluated archival clues, including those contained in Rossetti’s and Morris’s personal papers.An analysis of Rossetti’s changing behaviour as the first summer at Kelmscott progressed is particularly insightful (see Griffin 2021).This proposition is also consistent with what Jane Morris herself allegedly revealed to her subsequent lover, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922).The wording in Blunt’s manuscript diary appears to link the beginning of Mrs Morris’s affair with Rossetti specifically to Kelmscott. Describing Rossetti’s enduring ‘presence’ at the manor long after the painter’s death, Blunt noted that ‘it was there that he [i.e. Rossetti] and Janey had had their time of love’ (Parkins 2013: 45).4 Despite his feelings of rejection recorded in his poetry, it appears that Morris may not have originally realised that the (budding) love affair had been played out at Kelmscott during his first Icelandic trip in the summer of 1871. It was not until the autumn of 1872 that he declared his increased awareness of the situation to Aglaia Coronio:‘I know clearer now perhaps than then what a blessing & help last years journey was to me; or what horrors it saved me from’ (emphases added) (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 173, no. 180). Whilst the truth must remain veiled in speculation, the questions surrounding the causal link between the rental of Kelmscott and the above-mentioned liaison are factors which have a significant bearing on the modern understanding of the manor.The relatively recent interpretations of Morris’s ‘sublime’ ‘generosity’ in accepting his wife’s extramarital affair, and of the role of the country house as a socially progressive ‘solution’ to accommodate a ménage à trois (MacCarthy 1994: 276), remain unsupported by evidence. Crucially, the question arises: if Kelmscott had been taken out as an extramarital hideout, and hence tarnished from the beginning, would Morris have sent his children there or kept the house on for another 20 years, after his wife’s liaison had run its course in 1876 (FM WSBD, 1885, Fols 15–17)? And would Morris have been capable of developing the deep affection for the house that was evident in the latter part of his tenancy? ‘Morris Family at Kelmscott’ (Parry 2007: 94–109), ‘William Morris’s Kelmscott Connections’ (Sharp 1999: 44–53) and ‘William Morris at Kelmscott’ (Faulkner 2008: 5–32) are the only essays which address the reality of the reformer’s tenure of the house. Linda Parry discusses Morris’s ‘keenness to enjoy the spartan life of the countryside’ and his all-embracing ‘fascination with nature’, as well as his enjoyment of the manor’s peace and ‘relaxed and unselfconscious country living’ arrangements. Parry also notes the fact that it was not until after William Morris’s death that Kelmscott ‘became firmly established as the Morris family home’, ‘more than ever before’ (2007: 94–109). This is because the manor became Jane Morris’s principal residence from 1897 onwards. Sharp meticulously charts Morris’s social networks in the surrounding area, including his relationships with the local clergy, aristocracy and farmers, mainly in the context of Morris’s public life—the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, socialism, and Morris & Co. Building on Sharp’s research, Faulkner’s essay treats the more abstract issue of whether Morris idealised the house and village. It investigates his efforts to prevent change to the built and natural environment in the area by pleading with the local inhabitants not to poll willows and to re-thatch roofs instead of replacing them with galvanised iron. Faulkner concludes that Morris benefitted from a dual vision, being enchanted and soothed by the beauty of the manor and the local area, in parallel with developing a deepening awareness of the plight of rural labourers. 98

‘Kelmscott Manor. Mr Morris’s Country Place’ (1871–1896)

Marsh’s article ‘Kelmscott Manor as an Object of Desire’ explores the paradox of the reformer’s absence from Kelmscott, concluding that the manor ‘was somewhere William Morris wanted to be, but mostly could not be: an unattainable ideal, in fact—always desired, never permanently achieved’. This was due to his work commitments in London (Marsh 1996: 71–81). The frequency, duration and times of Morris’s stays at Kelmscott have not been systematically analysed, although various scholars have generalised about his pattern of visits. MacCarthy, Marsh and Parry all state that Morris’s trips to the manor were ‘spasmodic’ (1994; 1996; 2007). Sharp observes that Morris ‘spent considerably more time at Kelmscott Manor’ after Rossetti’s departure (1999). Faulkner proclaims that the reason why there is not much evidence about Morris’s occupancy of Kelmscott in the 1880s in his letters is because he did not go there very much due to his involvement with socialism (2008). Similarly, Marsh claims that due to socialism, ‘from 1883 to, say, 1888 he paid relatively few visits here’ (1996: 74). The predominant view amongst Victorian and modern biographers alike has been that the manor was Morris’s place of regeneration rather than work. For example,Vallance stated that Morris went to Kelmscott ‘whenever he was overworn with too much work … he had only to go down there and find the rest and refreshment that he needed’ (1897: 183). Similarly, Mackail called the house Morris’s ‘haven of rest’, naming observation of nature—mainly birds and plants in the garden—as his favourite pastime there (Mackail 1899, vol. I: 236, 234, 235, 237–239). Faulkner claims that: Kelmscott was to be a place of relaxation; his favourite activity while there was fishing … . His other main sources of pleasure were, as we know from his writings, the Manor and its garden. Kelmscott was also a place in which the Morris family could get away from the pressures of London (2008: 8). In ‘William Morris. Kelmscott Manor, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’ (Writers and their Houses), Penelope Fitzgerald asserts that Kelmscott was primarily Morris’s house of rest:‘From necessity he worked among the ‘smoke-dried swindlers’ of London. He rested—so far as he was capable of resting at all—at Kelmscott’ (1993: 295). She argues that Kelmscott nevertheless inspired Morris with ideas: What Morris asked for from Kelmscott was what he called its ‘kindness’ … a precious sense of tradition, space for his daughters to ‘lark about’ and for himself, too, when an idea struck him, to pace up and down. (Fitzgerald 1993: 298) Fitzgerald touches upon Kelmscott’s role as a literary house, acknowledging its influence on two of Morris’s works. She discusses the long-unpublished, abortive The Novel on Blue Paper (1872), the manuscript of which she had prepared for publication (1982), and News from Nowhere (1891).Without addressing the question as to whether any of the writing was completed on site, Fitzgerald comments of the former: although when he wrote it he had only just begun his tenancy of Kelmscott, he gives a faithful picture, described almost as if in a trance, of the house and its river-meadows through the slow-moving days of high summer. (Fitzgerald 1993: 300) Both Jan Marsh and Linda Parry do, however, acknowledge that Kelmscott was a place of inspiration and/or physical site of Morris’s work. Marsh suggests that it was not until Morris’s ‘manic engagement in socialist propaganda began to wane’ that ‘he turned more and more to Kelmscott 99

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Manor as a place not for leisure—Morris was singularly unable to be idle—but for work as well: writing and designing’ (Marsh 1996: 78).The main example given is Morris’s work on the manuscript and decorative borders of the Kelmscott Press edition of The Well at the World’s End (1896) whilst at the manor in 1892 (Marsh 1996: 79). Parry explores the creative impact of Kelmscott on Morris. She presents evidence demonstrating that right from the beginning of the tenancy, Morris found the house ‘very stimulating to the imagination’ (2007: 102). Parry also argues that Morris had ‘deep emotional and spiritual feelings’ about Kelmscott, which consequently strongly influenced his design work, as well as his romances, poetry and articles (2007: 102). Parry considers Kelmscott as one of the key factors behind his peak productivity as a designer of wallpapers and printed cottons inspired by nature between 1872–1885 (Parry 2007: 103–104). In this next section, I will endeavour to illuminate the circumstances behind renting Kelmscott and the reality of Morris’s lived-in experience of the house throughout the 25-year tenure.

PART II. New Study on Morris’s Relationship with Kelmscott Re-evaluation of Joint Lease Arrangements: A ‘Healthy’ Place in the Country and Kelmscott’s Appeal to Morris According to the diary of William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919), on 21 May 1871 his brother, D.G. Rossetti, and Morris were proposing to take an old house near Faringdon, Kelmscott Manor-house, of about the time of Elizabeth: the rent is only £75, and they would take the place for a year, with the expectation of renewing it in future years if suitable. It seems a very jolly old place, from what he says of his inspection of it (WMRD 1977: 63). In the absence of the original lease document, the above entry is important. Not only does it confirm the shared nature of the agreement, but it also records its duration as a one-year trial period, with a view to extending, at the bargain cost. Moreover, the diary conveys the appeal of Kelmscott as a historic building in the Elizabethan style.The short-term and conditional nature of the initial lease calls into question the popular view that Morris embraced Kelmscott uncritically from the outset. Rossetti later noted that he and ‘Morris … had been for some little time in search of a place to take jointly in the country’ (DGRCC, vol.V, 2005: 126, no. 71.130).The first surviving mention of either man looking for long-term country quarters appears in Rossetti’s correspondence of 1870, referring to his rental of a cottage at Glottenham in East Sussex, which he nevertheless gave up within a few months due to not being able to get away from London (DGRCC, vol. V, 2005: 30, no. 71.28). Rossetti had not, however, abandoned his ‘country plans’ (DGRCC, vol. V, 2005: 49, no. 71.53). Between April and May the following year, the artist repeatedly referred to being ‘decided as to getting a house in the country’ (DGRCC, vol.V, 2005: 49, no. 71.53). Doughty demonstrated that by 1868 Rossetti had been suffering from serious health problems, which had led him to undertake a number of trips for his health to locations ranging from Stratford-upon-Avon,Warwick and Kenilworth to Penkill Castle in Scotland in 1868 and 1869 (1928: xviii–xx). In this context, there is no question that a retreat in the countryside would have been desirable to the painter. Linda Parry outlines the timescale of Morris’s determination to find a country house (2007: 94–95). On 10 May 1871, he stated that due to the continuing poor health and bad coughs of 100

‘Kelmscott Manor. Mr Morris’s Country Place’ (1871–1896)

his young children, he will ‘have to find a little house out of London for them to live in mostly’, as he was ‘beginning to be nervous about London for them’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 132, no. 133).At this time, his older daughter, Jenny (1861–1935), was ten, and her younger sister, Mary, known as May (1862–1938), was nine. By 16 May 1871, Morris had not only embarked on a search for a possible second home in the country, but had already found and viewed Kelmscott in the company of his and Rossetti’s mutual friend, artist and connoisseur Charles Fairfax Murray (1849–1919) (Salmon and Baker 1996: 54) (Parry 2007: 95).5 That month Morris made two further site visits—with his wife and Rossetti, and subsequently with Philip Webb, who advised him the house was in a sound condition (Mackail 1899, vol. I: 239). Morris described his first impressions of Kelmscott in the frequently quoted letter to his friend, Charles Faulkner (1833–1892). Outlining his motivation, first impressions and evident enchantment with the house, Morris conveyed its key selling points: I have been looking about for a house for the wife and kids, and whither do you guess my eye is turned now? Kelmscott, a little village about two miles above Radcott Bridge—a heaven on earth; an old stone Elizabethan house like Water Eaton, and such a garden! close down on the river, a boat house and all things handy. I am going there again on Saturday with Rossetti and my wife: Rossetti because he thinks of sharing it with us if the thing looks likely. (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 133, no. 134) By this stage, Morris reiterated that the country residence was primarily intended for his children, whilst also benefitting his wife, Jane Morris, with the possibility of Rossetti becoming their co-tenant. From 1869, Jane Morris’s health generally deteriorated. She developed an unidentified, possibly gynaecological condition (Marsh 1986: 78; MacCarthy 1994: 201). Consequently, she relied on a series of regular convalescence sojourns in England as well as abroad, such as the German spa at Bad Ems—two months in 1869; seaside locations such as Hastings and Torquay in spring and autumn of 1870; or country retreats such as Scalands in East Sussex the same year. In this light, Kelmscott also had a justified use as a healthy country destination for Morris’s wife. Moreover, Morris’s and Rossetti’s joint tenancy of the house was, in fact, in keeping with the ethos of artistic collaboration and communal living championed by the avant-garde PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, their circle and their equally unorthodox disciples (Griffin 2021). In describing the manor elsewhere, Morris spoke enthusiastically of a little house deep in the country … a beautiful and strangely naif house, Elizabethan in appearance … it is on the S.W. extremity of Oxfordshire within a stone’s throw of the baby Thames: in the most beautiful grey little hamlet called Kelmscott. (emphases added) (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 153, no. 154) Collectively, the above letters reveal that Morris was taken by the building’s age and traditional English architectural features. Moreover, he was equally impressed by its garden and location in a small and picturesque village on the upper Thames. His rhetorical question ‘whither do you guess my eye is turned now’, posed to Faulkner—his fellow University of Oxford alumnus and don—highlighted the appeal of the village’s familiar Oxfordshire location. Morris had known Lechlade, the nearby town, since at least August 1869, when he described it as a ‘jolly place’ to his publisher, F.S. Ellis (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 85, no. 84). The mention of Radcott Bridge implies that it may have been another local landmark familiar to both men. Morris therefore viewed Kelmscott as part of the Thames-side Oxfordshire landscape. Contrary to the common 101

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misconception, there is no evidence he ever associated it with the Cotswold Hills.The village was not included in early guides to the Cotswolds as it lay outside the boundary of this area. It is noteworthy that the letter to Faulkner anticipating a ‘heaven on earth’, frequently quoted by Morris’s later biographers, expressed Morris’s great hopes and expectations in relation to Kelmscott prior to the tenure commencing, rather than the lived-in reality of his occupancy to come. The house held a multi-faceted appeal to him. Since his teenage years, Morris had had a keen interest in historical architecture as well as built and natural topography, and especially waterways. For example, as a 15-year old, he made expeditions to historic villages and buildings around Marlborough College such as Avebury, describing his delight at seeing ‘a very old church’ or ‘a pretty little Parsonage’, and the joy of walking through water meadows (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 7, no. 3).At this time Morris was already a keen angler, willing to risk dubious business transactions to be able to afford a fishing rod (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 6, no. 2). During his studies at Oxford, Morris went on brass-rubbing expeditions alongside the river Thames (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 133, no. 134). His childhood passion for historic buildings gradually extended to their preservation. For example, as early as 1855, aged 20, he criticised the restorations of Ely Cathedral, calling it ‘horribly spoilt’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 13, no. 7).The above examples demonstrate that Kelmscott clearly combined and embodied Morris’s key long-standing preoccupations, rather than awaking these interests and concerns in him.

‘The village where I spend my holidays’: Morris’s Outlook on the Function of Kelmscott in his Life Kelmscott was to be rented alongside a sequence of the Morrises’ principal residences in and around London.Yet from around the time of Morris’s death, the manor would come to be variously misconstrued and misrepresented as William Morris’s primary residence, quickly becoming the property most strongly associated with his person. For instance,Vallance’s obituary of Morris ended with the statement: ‘It is perhaps not inappropriate that his last resting-place should be near the grey home he loved’ (1896: 8). May Morris was perhaps the most responsible for consistently propagating the notion of Kelmscott as Morris’s definitive home. She proclaimed that whilst Kelmscott House ‘was a place of sojourn on the life’s journey’, the manor ‘was ‘home’’ (M. Morris 1916: n.p.). She went as far as to state that ‘only in Kelmscott can those who knew him say,“Here William Morris was at home”’ (M. Morris 1928: n.p.). An understanding of Morris’s own perception of the function of Kelmscott in his life thus deserves attention. As previously established, Morris initially took out Kelmscott not for himself, but primarily for the sake of his family’s health, envisaging that it would be mostly used by his wife and daughters, who would ‘spend some months there every year’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 153, no. 154). After he and his family made a few visits to Kelmscott in the summer and autumn of 1872 and his wife’s condition visibly improved, he commented that ‘when one thinks why one took the place … this year it has really answered that purpose’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 172, no. 180).When attempting to curtail the joint lease arrangements with Rossetti in April 1874, Morris argued that the painter had ‘fairly taken to living at Kelmscott, which I suppose neither of us thought the other would do when we first began the joint possession of the house’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 222, no. 233).The above quotations evince that from the outset Morris clearly intended for Kelmscott to be primarily a holiday retreat, and viewed it in these terms in the early years of the lease. His position did not alter throughout the rest of the tenancy. In interviews given in the 1890s, he referred to Kelmscott as ‘a jolly old house I go to in the summer’ (Anon, Daily Chronicle 22 Feb. 1893: 3) and ‘the village where I spend my holidays’ (Anon, Cassell’s Saturday Journal, 9 Oct. 1895: 62). Elsewhere he described it as ‘the House … which I have held for twenty-three years’ (emphasis added), conveying the relationship of possession and custodianship rather than habi102

‘Kelmscott Manor. Mr Morris’s Country Place’ (1871–1896)

tation (Morris 1895: 7). In his correspondence and work diaries, Morris invariably referred to the manor by its proper name—simply as ‘Kelmscott’ rather than calling it ‘home’—a descriptor reserved for his permanent London residences. Even after his tenure of the manor had become more entrenched in his final years, as late as June 1895, he noted in his work diary, ‘Jenny & I came home from Kelmscott’ (BL,AddMS45410, Fol. 24r). Moreover, despite his professional background as a designer, his pervasive interest in the aesthetics of everyday objects and his business outlook, Morris never commissioned headed paper for Kelmscott Manor, even though he held the lease for 25 years—his longest association with any one house. Since he had stationery made for his other houses and commercial premises, this is a notable exception. In the case of family or occasional professional correspondence written from Kelmscott, however, Morris would either use blank sheets of paper or variously customise the Kelmscott House stationery with the printed address ‘Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith’. For example, he would cross out ‘House’ leaving in just ‘Kelmscott’ and/ or replace ‘Upper Mall’ with ‘Upper Thames’. This fact supports the argument that Morris did not view Kelmscott as a permanent base or a home. It also implies that he did not envisage letter writing whilst at the manor, perhaps affirming his outlook on its function as an escape from the duties and chores of daily life. By the autumn of 1872, Morris called it a ‘harbour of refuge’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 172, no. 180). It is notable that in the spring of 1896, the Morris family signed the surviving Kelmscott Manor Visitors’ Book (BL,AddMS45412, Fol. 6r) during what was to be his last visit to the house (22 April–5 May 1896) [see Plate 4.2]. Given that Morris was terminally ill, it is possible the motivation behind this entry was to memorialise his association with Kelmscott before his death.William Morris’s name is written in his wife’s handwriting, perhaps due to his frail condition. The entry also appears to reflect the spouses’ perception of the house’s role as a getaway and their status as chiefly visitors and custodians of this historic building. May Morris had developed the habit of signing the Kelmscott Visitors’ Book since at least 1892. The fact that Morris’s older daughter, Jenny, annotated the entry with the comment ‘under protest—I am not a visitor at home’, implies that Kelmscott held a special place in her life and heart, a subject touched upon in the final part of this chapter.

Twenty-Five Years Amounting to Just Over Two Years: Frequency and Duration of Morris’s Stays at Kelmscott The accompanying schedule of Morris’s visits aims at establishing a fuller understanding of the extent of his physical presence at the house.The findings are approximate and only reflect the surviving evidence, derived from the collected correspondence of William Morris, Jane Morris and Philip Webb; the diaries of Morris and Cockerell; miscellaneous personal papers of Morris’s circle; and The William Morris Chronology (Salmon & Baker: 1996). It is almost certain there were more visits than the documented ones. Table 4.1 presents the data, in a chronological breakdown, summarising the overall number of days Morris is known to have spent at Kelmscott each year, the number and duration of individual visits and the time of the year when he holidayed there. The schedule of Morris’s visits shown in the table evidences that he was able to spend only a small fraction of his time at Kelmscott, collectively amounting to a few days up to several weeks every year, altogether adding up to approximately two years and three months throughout his 25-year tenure. His stays varied in length from one, two or three-day breaks to more extended sojourns, falling on weekends as well as weekdays. The manor was not just Morris’s summer retreat as he used it throughout the year. 103

Julia Griffin Table 4.1 Schedule of William Morris’s Documented Visits to Kelmscott Manor (1871–1896) Year

Overall number Number of of days individual visits

Duration of individual visits Times of the year (no. of days)

1871 1872

20 42*

8 7

1, 1, 1, 1, 4, 3, 7,‘3’ ‘19’, ‘4’, ‘4’, ‘4’, 4, 4, 3

1873 1874 1875 1876

7 0 4 20

2 N/A 3 5

1877

67

At least 7

1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886

8 28 18 47 10 7 13 18 19

2 2 3 5 2 2 5 2 6

1887 1888

19 35

4 6

1889

29

6

1890

58

9

1891 1892

16 87

4 12

1893

42

9

1894

89

14

1895

93

16

1896

14

1

May, July, September, December February, August, September, October, November ‘4’, 3 January, June N/A N/A 1, 2, 1 September, October, November 1, 3, 6, 5,‘5’ January,April, July, September, November 4, 3, 3,“25”,“28”, 4 February, March, June, July, August, September, December 3, ‘5’ February, September 3, 25 August, September, October 14, ‘3’, 1 August, September 3, 14, 3, “13”, “14” June, August, September 1, 9 July, August 2, ‘5’ August, December 2, 3, 2, 3, 3 August, September, October 3, ‘15’ February, September 1,‘3’, 2, 5, 5, 3 May, August, September, October 4, 5, 7, 3 April, May, September, October 2, 7, 8,‘6’, 7, 5 May, August, September, October 1, ‘11’, ‘3’, 6, ‘3’, 5 March, May, June,August, September, October 8,‘2’,‘6’, 4, 5, 12, 8,‘4’, 9 April, June, July,August, September 1, 2, 1, 12 June, September, October 8,‘3’, 12, 8, 10, 8, 10,‘8’, April, May, June, July,August, 4, 8, 4,‘4’ September, October, December 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 9, 1, 5,‘6’ January, February, March,April, August, September, October 11, 4, 4, 2, 5, 4, 3, 8, 8, 8, March,April, May, June, July, 6, 9, 9, 8 August, September, October 3, 4, 9, 3, 5, 4, 10, 9, 5, 10, March,April, May, June, July, 4, 11, 5, 6, 2, 3 August, September, October, 14 April–May

Approximated durations of visits given in single inverted commas; extended intermittent stays involving toing and froing between Kelmscott and London marked in double inverted commas. Stays at the nearby Broadway Tower and duration of boat trips from London to Kelmscott are counted towards stays at the manor.   *  Based on the estimate of three four-day visits in the summer and autumn based on Morris’s account that ‘I have been backwards and forwards to Kelmscott a good deal this summer and autumn’ of 1872 (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 165, no. 171).

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‘Kelmscott Manor. Mr Morris’s Country Place’ (1871–1896)

The majority of his stays occurred mainly in the summer and autumn, presumably due to the difficulty of heating the house in the colder months.The appeal of surrounding nature, and especially the garden in bloom, in those seasons would have also been a consideration to Morris. Consequently, August and September appear to have been the most regular time of the year for his trips. He also visited in the spring on a number of occasions.Although Morris did not refrain from travelling to Kelmscott in the winter, the house was the least occupied in the period from November to February. Morris’s use of the manor in the first four years of sharing the tenure with Rossetti (1871– 1874) fluctuated. For example, in 1871, in addition to the three well-documented joint stays with his wife and Rossetti throughout September, Morris also headed to Kelmscott shortly after Christmas (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 154, no. 155). He returned the following February for an extended stay of at least two weeks (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 155, no. 158). In October of 1872, he commented: ‘I have been backwards and forwards to Kelmscott a good deal this summer and autumn; but shall not go there so often now as Gabriel is come there’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 165, no. 171). Morris, had however, spent approximately six weeks at the house throughout 1872. His stays not only became sporadic but also eventually ceased during the second phase of Rossetti’s occupancy—between September 1872 and July 1874. In fact, it is very telling that Morris does not appear to have visited Kelmscott even once between 17 June 1873 and 27 September 1875—a period in excess of two years. By this stage the two men clearly avoided one another.As early as 25 November 1872, Morris explicitly stated that ‘it is really a farce our meeting when we can help it’, blaming the rift on Rossetti’s ‘unsympathetic’ ways ‘with the sweet simple old place’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 172, no. 180). For his part, by June 1873, the painter instructed Ford Madox Brown: Please don’t let it enter your head to suggest his [i.e. Morris] coming down with you [to Kelmscott] on Tuesday … as it’s a bore showing him my work, and not to do so is awkward. (DGRCC, vol.VI, 2006: 167, no. 73.158) Rossetti may have usurped the Panelled Room, Morris’s drawing room, for a studio, temporarily blocked windows for the winter and brought a small circle of his family and friends, as well as animals, into the house. But in doing so he was merely striving to turn it into a habitable and functional year-round home (Griffin 2021). It seems that the real underlying reason for Morris’s frustration was not Rossetti’s usurpation of the house, but rather of his wife. In fact, it has been previously unnoted that Morris did not seem to have gone back to Kelmscott for another 14 months following the painter’s departure.This suggests he may have been left traumatised by the shared tenancy and its aftermath. He only resumed regular visits in autumn 1875. Morris’s time spent at Kelmscott fluctuated throughout the 1870s and 1880s, considerably increasing in the 1890s. From 1877 onwards, the pattern of the visits suggests at least one extended trip per year, frequently involving toing and froing between Kelmscott and London. For example, it seems that in 1877, Morris spent a better part of August and September travelling between town and the village. On 28 September, he wrote to his mother: ‘I am back (we I should say) in London: I have had a very long holiday this time, which I must say I decidedly enjoyed’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 398, no. 438). In 1879, he benefitted from a consolidated stay of about three weeks from late September to mid-October (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 522, no. 576; 526, no. 582). Similarly, in both 1880 and 1881, Morris undertook boat trips from Hammersmith to Kelmscott combined with a holiday at the manor. As documented in his work diary, Morris remained there intermittently throughout the better part of August and September in 1881 (BL, AddMS45407B. Fols. 33v–35v, 36v–37v, 39v–40v). 105

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This trend appears to have been curtailed by Morris’s involvement with socialism.Whilst it is true that in the years of his most intensive political activism, 1882–1887, the amount of time at Kelmscott diminished, Morris was nevertheless able to continue visiting periodically, collectively managing to spend between one and three weeks there each year, usually in the course of several shorter breaks. For example, he stayed there at least four times in 1887: in late April, mid-May, September and October (WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 648, no. 1348; 650, no. 1350; 687, no. 1396; 696, nos. 1407a & b). The evidence for the 1890s shows an unprecedented increase in Morris’s use of the manor. Between 1892 and 1895, his time at the house amounted to circa 87, 42, 89 and 93 days respectively, as he revisited it from nine to sixteen times a year. His illness in the last year of his life meant that he was only able to visit it once, for two weeks in the spring of 1896. This is the only decade for which comprehensive records of Morris’s trips to Kelmscott survive. This is largely thanks to Sydney Cockerell (1867–1962), whose diary meticulously noted many details of his employer’s daily movements. Cockerell did not become a fixture in Morris’s life until 1890 as a newly recruited SPAB member, when the bulk of these useful documentary references begins. His involvement with Morris soon intensified. From 1892, Cockerell undertook work for him as library cataloguer and subsequently private secretary, and from 1894 as secretary of the Kelmscott Press (Blunt 1964: 46–58). Due to the complementary evidence from Morris’s own surviving work diaries for the years 1893, 1895 and 1896, the 1890s is the best documented period of Morris’s physical presence at Kelmscott. However, such a dramatic increase in the reformer’s apparent use of the manor is not solely due to the unprecedented completeness of the data. An analysis of Morris’s fragmentary correspondence for the last 25 years of his life and a comparison of his work diary for 1881 with the diary records from the 1890s confirm that his visits to the house did indeed considerably intensify in the last five years of his life. Although Morris never fully ceased working, in March 1890 he handed over the management of Morris & Co. to junior partners Robert and Frank Smith, formally stepping down from the active supervision of the business (Harvey and Press 1991: 195–198).6 In this light, his choice to spend significantly more time at Kelmscott in his final years may be perhaps considered as a form of semi-retirement and the need to slow down in old age. By this time, Morris suffered from bad health.This change may also have been partially down to the increasing commercial success of his design firm, whose annual profits were largely on the increase, averaging £8,868 a year, compared with ‘in excess of £6000’ at the end of the previous decade (Harvey and Press 1991: 194, 198). As William Morris. Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain demonstrates, thanks to bringing in junior partners,‘Morris could look forward to wealth, security and abundant free time’ (Harvey and Press 1991: 196). Morris continued to receive an annual salary of £3,000 from the firm as well as a share of profits, amounting to in excess of £5,000 per annum between 1890 and 1896 (Harvey and Press 1991: 197–198).This allowed him great freedom in his final years as to where, and how, to spend his time, and Kelmscott became his go-to place.

Morris’s Uses of the Manor a. A ‘Healthy’ Place in the Country? : ‘the place was like a bog and … they all got rheumatism’

Despite his earlier claims of wishing to terminate his share of the lease in the spring of 1874 on account of being ‘too poor &, by compulsion of poverty, too busy to be able to use it much in any case’, Morris chose to retain the tenure of Kelmscott for another 21 years after Rossetti’s permanent departure in July 1874 (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 222, no. 233).This fact calls into question modern biographers’ assertions that the manor was taken out specifically as a premeditated ‘love nest’ for his wife’s affair with the painter. So why did Morris continue to rent the house? 106

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Although Morris’s stated reason for taking on Kelmscott was to serve as a ‘healthy’ country retreat, it soon transpired that its climate and situation proved of little medicinal benefit. As early as 18 December 1872, Dr Thomas Gordon Hake (1809–1895) expressed his misgivings about the local environment and recurrent floods, commenting on ‘the continuous moisture of a liquid atmosphere, earth, and sky’ at Kelmscott (BL,TGH-GGH, 18.12.1872,AddMS49466, Fol. 34r–v). It is ironic that the manor appears to have benefitted Jane Morris’s and Rossetti’s health for only as long as they had each other’s company, that is, during the summer of 1871 and between 1872 and 1874. For instance, in the autumn of 1872, Morris commented on the visible medical improvement and contentment of both of them: ‘Gabriel … is quite well and seems very happy’, whilst ‘Janey has just come back from Kelmscott last Saturday, and is very well apparently, and in good spirits certainly’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 165, no. 171; 171, no. 180). As soon as their regular rendezvous at the house became less frequent by spring 1874, however, the environment of Kelmscott seems to have lost its medicinal properties and the health of both deteriorated. Correspondence reveals that by at least 1876, Jane Morris turned to a number of alternative places of convalescence in a multitude of locations, ranging from the local area, through different parts of England, to abroad.This quest for variety was only partly dictated by the Morrises’ desperate attempt to find a cure for Jenny’s newly diagnosed epilepsy.The letters equally refer to Jane and/or May’s ongoing health problems.7 Commenting on a recent holiday at the Howards’ Naworth Castle in August and September of 1879, Morris wrote: ‘I … found my babies very flourishing but my wife so, so,: I think she will take a turn at the sea-side presently’ (emphasis added) (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 523, no. 577). His wording suggests that Jane Morris was actively trying out various locations to improve her health. In 1894, Jane Morris remarked that whilst she ‘was very ill at Kelmscott’ it was the subsequent stay at the Burne-Joneses’ cottage at Rottingdean which made her feel ‘like myself ’ again (JMCC 2012: 256, no. 253). Jane Morris was not the only person for whom the manor held dubious medicinal benefits. When Philip Webb headed to Kelmscott in September 1875, in the hope that ‘the rest and fresh air’ would ‘shortly’ improve his health, there was still no detectable improvement two weeks into his stay (PWCC 2016: 93, 95; nos. 90, 92). Even in the first year of renting Kelmscott, Morris himself remarked:‘This is a very beautiful place here and I enjoy it very much, though I feel the climate rather’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 147, no. 149). By 1890, he reportedly stated that ‘the place was like a bog and that they all got rheumatism and all sorts of isms’. Morris apparently made this comment directly to Alfred Darbyshire, who related it to Samuel Bancroft in a letter of 13 June 1890 (DAM, AD-SB, 27948a) in connection with the latter’s pending acquisition of Rossetti’s painting Water Willow, featuring the manor in the background (1871, Delaware Art Museum). There are numerous contemporaneous reports of Kelmscott Manor having been damp, cold and draughty. Whilst Kelmscott was originally taken out for Jane Morris and her daughters as a ‘healthy’ place of convalescence, when it became clear it could not fulfil its original purpose, it was William Morris together with May and Jenny who were insistent on not giving it up. For her part, Jane Morris displayed a longing for a second home by the sea. By 1881, she confided in Rossetti that ‘the sea-air is the only thing that braces up the nerves’ and that she wished she had a cottage near Brighton like the Burne-Joneses: ‘I wish that … Kelmscott was off my hands— but they are all obstinate and love it more than ever’ (JMCC 2012: 117, no. 98).This not only explains why Kelmscott was retained, but also raises questions about Jane Morris’s reluctance to spend time at the manor by the 1880s. Perhaps the environment of the house evoked painful and/or uncomfortable memories of her times with Rossetti. Kelmscott nevertheless continued to be a recurrent destination for the Morrises, with different family members putting it to various uses. For William Morris, it served as a site of rest and leisure as well as work. 107

Julia Griffin b. Kelmscott as an Egalitarian Place of Leisure: More than Just Fishing

Morris’s use of Kelmscott as a site of leisure, for fishing and observing nature, is one of the few aspects of his tenancy to have been accorded some scholarly attention. This chapter will therefore interrogate his previously unidentified or understudied pastimes with particular reference to entertaining. The Morris family members did not always visit the manor at the same time. Morris appears to have spent less time there than his wife and daughters, undoubtedly due to his work commitments in London.Apart from staying at Kelmscott with Jane Morris and/or one or both of their children, it was common for him to visit the house either by himself or in the company of his friends. Surviving evidence shows that entertaining played an important part in his lived-in experience of the manor. Morris’s country house became a potent site of communal living, and was frequently made available for extended stays to intimates and associates, both in the presence and absence of the Morris family. The contemporaneous correspondence of William and Jane Morris and of their circle, in conjunction with the only surviving Kelmscott Visitors’ Book kept during Morris’s lifetime (BL,AddMS45412), offers an insight into the Morrises’ wide social network of guests.This is a large and multi-faceted subject which would require a separate research project; suffice it to say that visitors to Kelmscott reflected Morris’s evolving, if largely overlapping, social and professional circles. Guests ranged from the spouses’ extended family members (e.g. Morris’s brother, Edgar Morris; Jane’s sister, Elizabeth Burden), through their longest-standing Oxford friends, to Hammersmith neighbours, professional associates from Morris & Co., the SPAB, socialist societies and the Kelmscott Press, as well as their respective families in many cases. Regulars included Charles Faulkner, Crom Price, Philip Webb, the De Morgans,Vernon Lushington and his daughters, the Middletons and the Stillmans, amongst many others. The Burne-Joneses also came, although less often.After giving up his share of the lease in 1884, Ellis nevertheless continued visiting Kelmscott, on average once a year. The Kelmscott Visitors’ Book records his return visits every year, apart from 1891, mostly coinciding with William Morris’s holidays at the manor (BL, AddMS45412, Fols 1r, 2r, 3v, 4r, 5r, 6r). Emery Walker and Sydney Cockerell were there frequently. Morris’s accountant, Newman Howard, and his lawyer, G. Rutter Fletcher, as well as his Morris & Co. partners, Frank and Robert Smith, also stayed, as did his collaborator Thomas Wardle, illustrating the merging spheres of leisure and work. Unlike that of most other country-house owners, Morris’s approach to entertaining was egalitarian, arguably rendering Kelmscott more relatable to wider sections of society. When trying to encourage Crom Price to visit her in 1893, Jane Morris argued:‘You know that you really rest here and recruit before going to the gayer & more aristocratic circle at R’dean’ (emphases added) (JMCC 2012: 244, no. 238).This comparison of Kelmscott with the Burne-Joneses’ residence in Rottingdean is insightful. Not only does it highlight the manor’s main appeal to guests as a place of rest, but it also appears to convey Morris’s inclusive approach—perhaps in keeping with his socialist outlook. Under the Morris family occupancy, the manor became a meeting place for a diverse group of major cultural and political figures of the day, including artists, writers, craftsmen and socialists. Sheila Kirk highlights the dual appeal of Kelmscott for Philip Webb as a place of rest as well as a non-aristocratic country house. She argues that the architect ‘loathed country-house life’, finding it ‘restrictive and dull’, with no place for ‘honest jesting retort … partly because it wd. not be understood’ and partly due to stiff social conventions of politeness (2005: 61). Kirk concludes that ‘far more to his taste were the two or three days that he usually managed to spend annually at Kelmscott’, frequently in the company of Morris and Faulkner (2005: 61). Due to Webb’s work ethic, the architect only ever took six proper holidays during a 42-year career. Notably, two of these rare breaks were ‘a month’s rest at Kelmscott Manor in 1875 after overworking and again in 1876’ (Kirk 2005: 61). 108

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Nevertheless, the diverse group of Kelmscott visitors did include a few aristocrats, for example George Howard, ninth earl of Carlisle (1843–1911), an artist, MP and a SPAB Foreign Committee member (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 208, no.220a). Poet and diplomat Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922) was a regular. A cousin of Percy Wyndham (1835–1911), Blunt came from an old family of Sussex landowners, with seats at Crabbet Park, Poundhill and Newbuildings Place, Southwater. In 1869, he further elevated his social status by marrying into the rich family of Lady Anne Isabella Noel King (1837–1917), daughter of William, first earl of Lovelace.8 In addition to visiting by himself on numerous occasions, in October 1893 Blunt holidayed at Kelmscott with his wife and daughter Judith (BL, AddMS45412, Fol. 3v). There would have been nothing unusual about this event except that Blunt and Jane Morris had for some time been engaged in an affair, largely played out at Kelmscott, discussed further on (Faulkner 1981). Kelmscott also hosted visits from a number of young illustrators from the Birmingham School of Art, some of whom Morris involved in various publishing projects, most notably the Kelmscott Press.They included Charles March Gere (1869–1957) and Edmund Hort New (1871–1931), as well as Arthur J. Gaskin (1862–1928), his designer wife Georgie Cave Gaskin (1866–1934) and Robert Catterson-Smith (1853–1938). Gere and New would produce images of the manor which became widely disseminated. Catterson-Smith not only contributed to the illustrations for the Kelmscott Chaucer but also became an ardent socialist. Morris’s future biographers Aymer Vallance and John Mackail also visited in Morris’s lifetime. On account of their devotion to Morris and their literary, artistic and architectural backgrounds, many of these individuals would go on to memorialise Morris through Kelmscott. By publicising their impressions, recollections and illustrations of the manor, they would shape the house’s public image. The Kelmscott Manor Visitors’ Book offers a comprehensive record of the ‘life’ of the house in the 1890s, and specifically from August 1889 to Morris’s death in October 1896. Although not completed by every guest, there are no fewer than 135 recorded visitors in the period of just over seven years, conveying the extent of the Morrises’ rich social life.9 The entries in 1892 comprise an insightful sample of the guests [see Plate 4.3]. Despite the common misconception, Kelmscott was not just a site of leisure for Morris, but also an important place of work.Wilfrid Blunt’s biography of Cockerell appears to be the only publication to have identified the key characteristic that uniquely distinguished Kelmscott from Morris’s London residence. Crucially, the manor provided Morris with a rare balance between work and recreation, the latter mostly absent from his London life: At Hammersmith Morris sought little relaxation beyond a change of occupation— from designing to writing, or vice versa. But at Kelmscott Manor … there were also walks and drives, fishing, reading—and sometimes sheer idleness. (Blunt 1964: 59) Pastimes not identified by Blunt included cooking, which Morris had taught himself during the first Icelandic expedition, as well as conversations with family and friends about ‘old books, buildings, and saints’ (BL,AddMS52772, Fol. 31r).Whilst the evenings were frequently reserved for playing various games ranging from whist through draughts and dominoes to 20 Questions, a proportion of each day was spent outdoors. Morris was keenly interested in the mature garden at Kelmscott, and regularly noted the state of plants and any new work undertaken, including events such as the delivery of new trees for the orchard.The manor garden became Morris’s ideal, gradually affecting the way in which he began to view its Hammersmith counterpart. From 1880 onwards, Morris started referring to the grounds around his London residence as a ‘very tolerable substitute of a garden’ and ‘substitute for the real thing’, indicating its inadequacy in relation to Kelmscott (emphases added) (e.g. 109

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WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 579, no. 640; 1987: 47, no. 704). He remarked that he enjoyed the manor garden so much that he ‘should never be bored by walking about and about in it’ (WMCC, vol. IV, 1996: 369, no. 2464).This included mainly naturally grown British flowers, reminiscent of an Elizabethan garden, such as tulips, delphiniums, anemones and old varieties of roses, rather than exotic plants grown in hot-houses, which had become a fashionable component of conventional Victorian gardens (Parry: 1987). The Kelmscott garden became an inspiration for a number of painters and photographers, who depicted it in their art. For example, Marie Spartali Stillman’s watercolours, executed around the turn of the century, convey a sense of its overall character, the ‘wild garden’ arrangement of flowers, plants and topiary, as well as the specifics of the colour schemes. Whilst Morris took pride in his knowledge of plants, it is not known to what extent he may have partaken in gardening. This question remained unclear even within living memory. According to Mackail,‘it is very doubtful whether he [Morris] was ever seen with a spade in his hands’. However,‘in later years at Kelmscott his manual work in the garden was almost limited to clipping his yew hedges’ (Mackail 1899, vol. I: 143). In the latter part of the tenancy, Morris embarked on shaping the hedge under the east gable of the Tapestry Room into a topiary dragon (Mackail 1899, vol. II: 317; M. Morris 1910–15, vol. II, 1910: xvij). Its creation appears to have post-dated William Stillman’s accurate drawing of the house and garden produced in 1885, from which it is prominently absent, even though the base of the yew hedge is in place on the far right (Figure 4.1).The painter George Dunlop Leslie RA (1835–1921), who visited the manor in 1889, remarked on one hedge being ‘the form of a dragon, which Morris had amused himself by gradually developing with the clippers’ (Leslie 1893: 151). Due to the relatively slow pace of growth, the lengthy process ‘had been for some years in progress’, but by the summer of 1895, Morris ceased working on it due to ill health (Mackail 1899, vol. II: 317). It is not clear if he had a chance to fully realise his design concept for the dragon in his lifetime.10 Two complementary images of the manor garden reveal the state of the topiary’s development around the time of

Figure 4.2 May Morris, Kelmscott Manor, reproduction of untraced watercolor. James Douglas, Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet Novelist Critic, 1904.

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Morris’s death. Frederick Evans’s photograph taken at Easter 1896 [see Plate 4.4], together with May Morris’s watercolour completed sometime before 1904 (Figure 4.2), show the base of the hedge doubling as the dragon’s snake-like, undulating body resting directly on the ground. Facing the manor is what appears to be an overgrown head, sprouting out into bristles. Following Morris’s death, the topiary continued to be cultivated (M.Morris 1910, vol. II: xvij). By the 1920s, the yew dragon had grown to considerable proportions and significantly changed its form, as evidenced by a previously unpublished photograph (BL BP,Add MS 88957) (Figure 4.3). This later incarnation of the topiary, supervised by May Morris, is indicative on the one hand of her commitment to keeping her father’s legacy alive, but on the other hand to the extent of the numerous changes she introduced into Kelmscott. Morris’s deep interest in the cycle of nature also manifested itself in his keen observation of the harvest. His attitude to watching agricultural labourers at work changed dramatically throughout his tenure of the manor, however. In 1881, he considered the sight as pleasing, thus describing it: It has been a great pleasure to see man and maid so hard at work carrying at last … the thatchers were putting on the bright straw cap to the new rick: yesterday they were carrying the wheat in the field along our causeway and stacking it in our yard: pretty as one sat in the tapestry-room to see the loads coming on between the stone walls (WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 63, no. 726). Within less than a decade, by 1889, he could not bring himself to watch them anymore, due to his realisation of their inhumane exploitation.This ideological shift occurred clearly due to Morris’s exposure to the working conditions in the village of Kelmscott. Nevertheless, he continued to record the stages of the harvest in his work diaries as well as letters. Antiquarian expeditions to places of architectural, archaeological and topographical interest in the surrounding area were another prominent pastime. Countless destinations in nearby villages and towns ranged from the Great Coxwell Barn, through Chastleton House and

Figure 4.3 Gordon Bottomley, W.M’s Dragon, from the south-east, photograph, 8 May 1923. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

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Chedworth Roman Villa, to the old churches of St. John Baptist in Cirencester and St Mary’s in Fairford. Buscot Woods was a frequent destination. Morris developed a holistic approach to Kelmscott and its environs—the latter becoming an extension of the appeal of the manor itself. As MacCarthy previously noted: At Kelmscott Morris came to see himself as living at the mystic centre of a country of immense beauty and complex interconnections. He looked beyond the manor to the village. Still within his near vision was the sequence of other small villages around it. (1994: 314) The Coln and Windrush valleys were part of this landscape. There is, however, little evidence of Morris’s social interaction with the local villagers.There is no record of his ever visiting the village pub, The Plough (Faulkner 2008: 7). He did, however, go to The Swan at Lechlade and King’s Arms at Faringdon. Morris did not meet Reverend Horace Meeres, who was in charge of the Kelmscott St George’s Church, until 1885. It is therefore unlikely the Morrises attended the Sunday service (Sharp 1999: 47). c. A Literary House and an Artist’s House: ‘partly working and partly lazying’

The notion of Kelmscott as a place of Morris’s professional activity is virtually absent from modern scholarship, due to the widespread belief that it was just a place of relaxation for him. To date there have been no studies of the scope and/or significance of Morris’s output produced at Kelmscott. This section seeks to illuminate Kelmscott’s role as a site of Morris’s work, thus evaluating the manor’s importance as a significant writer’s and designer’s house. Morris’s own personal papers include references to both ‘extreme laziness’ and ‘loafing’, as well as carrying out ‘hard’ and ‘important’ work whilst at Kelmscott (WMCC, vol. III, 1996: 434, no. 2029; BL, AddMS45410, Fols 23r–v;WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 69, no. 735b). Due to the scarcity and vagueness of archival references, it is difficult to establish a full understanding of what Morris produced at the manor. However, the surviving mentions in his previously understudied work diaries and Cockerell’s personal diaries, coupled with Morris’s correspondence, are sufficient to indicate the wide scope of his output carried out during his stays right from the outset. An understanding of Morris’s definition of work will help illuminate the role of Kelmscott in his life as the site of merging spheres of leisure and work.To Morris, work was effectively a pastime. He enjoyed keeping busy and thrived on work, frequently acknowledging its greater social value.The notion of deriving pleasure from work became central to his socialist doctrine. He thus explained his approach in 1883: I could never forget that in spite of all drawbacks my work is little else than pleasure to me; that under no conceivable circumstances would I give it up even if I could. Over and over again have I asked myself why should not my lot be the common lot? … I have been ashamed when I have thought of the contrast between my happy working hours and the unpraised, unrewarded, monotonous drudgery which most men are condemned to (WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 173–174, no. 854). Nevertheless, by at least 1875, he had created a hierarchy of his professional activities, drawing a distinction between ‘my pleasure work of books’, referring to his literary production, and the ‘bread & cheese work’ of running the Morris & Co. design firm (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 248, no. 266). It appears that the ‘bread and cheese work’ related mainly to the business rather than the design aspects of Morris & Co.; he admitted to loving ‘art and manufacturers’ and hating ‘commerce and moneymaking’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 262, no. 283). In this context, it is unsurprising 112

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that Morris wrote very few business letters concerning the firm from Kelmscott, choosing to focus on more pleasurable professional pursuits instead. Crucially, what transpires is that Kelmscott served as a major site of Morris’s work throughout the whole duration of his tenure—from literary production to designs for Morris & Co. and the Kelmscott Press—as well as his activism on behalf of the SPAB and the socialist cause. The manor not only served as a physical site for design work, but a number of Morris & Co.’s most prestigious and historically significant commissions and/or designs were also created there. Moreover, it was also a go-to place for completing particularly challenging work. Frederick Startridge Ellis thus summarised the role of Kelmscott for Morris in his article ‘The Life-Work of William Morris’ (1898: 625):‘To escape to Kelmscott from the smoke and turmoil of London when he had any special work, literary or graphic, on hand, was of the greatest benefit to its successful accomplishment’. Table 4.2 charts some of Morris’s documented work undertaken at Kelmscott or inspired by the manor (see next page). Morris quickly realised how ‘very stimulating to the imagination’ the house would prove to be (Kelvin: 1984, 150, no. 152; Parry 2007: 102). He wasted no time in utilising its properties. In a letter of 9 November 1875 written from Kelmscott, Morris expressed a desire to apply himself to work during his stay:‘I took out my work and looked at it … I don’t think I shall come back [to London] before Saturday, as I really hope to do a pile of work here’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 276, no. 299). In a letter to George Hake, written shortly afterwards, Morris refers to the abovementioned trip having comprised ‘nothing but hard work’ and ‘no fishing’ (BL, WM-GGH, 30.11,1875,Add Ms 49470, Fols 240r–v).11 Two years later, during a summer in London, Morris concluded:‘I may just as well be at Kelmscott as here since everybody is away, & in consequence I have nothing to do: however I shall be able to bring a bit of work with me’ (emphasis added) (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 394, no. 432). Although there are no further details, it transpires that from the early days of the lease, Morris used the house for a combination of work and leisure.This also shows that the manor served as Morris’s elected site of work, even in the absence of pressing professional priorities. Linda Parry demonstrates that Morris’s tenure of the manor coincided with his most productive period as a designer of wallpapers and textiles. Parry credits the environs of Kelmscott as the inspiration, as well as important source material, for three groups of these patterns—those featuring local vegetation, British garden birds and a group of designs named after the tributaries of the Thames (2007:102–104). Parry gives examples of several printed cottons directly inspired by Kelmscott, namely Tulip and Willow (1873), Strawberry Thief (1883), Windrush (1883) and Evenlode (1883), as well as the Willow Bough wallpaper (1887). May Morris’s William Morris. Artist Writer Socialist (1936) identifies two further patterns derived from the Kelmscott garden. She states that Wild Tulip (1884) wallpaper is: all ‘Kelmscott’ … the peony and wild tulip are two of the richest blossomings of the spring garden at the Manor, and in this pattern Morris gives the lovely network of growth in the tulip-beds with the minimum of convention. (M. Morris 1936: 36) Similarly, the Brer Rabbit printed cotton (1882) originated in response to reading Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings:The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation (1881) at the manor (M. Morris 1936: 44). In his letters to his daughter Jenny, Morris refers to conducting design work on site at the manor. For example, he states: ‘I have got my work to do down here … a piece of designing work for Oxford St. to which I have done some few hours work, as that is morning work’ 113

Julia Griffin Table 4.2 Selection of Morris’s work undertaken at, and/or inspired by, Kelmscott Type of work

Title and year of publication or registration, where applicable

Morris & Co. Tulip and Willow printed cotton design (1873) Dying experiments with poplar twigs (1876) Snakeshead printed cotton design (1876) Honeysuckle design for printed cotton (1876) and embroidery (1880s) Peacock and Bird carpet design (1881) Lanercost Priory Dossal embroidery design (1881) St James’s Ceiling wallpaper design (1881) Brer Rabbit printed cotton design (1882) Strawberry Thief printed cotton design (1883) Windrush printed cotton design (1883) Evenlode printed cotton design (1883) Kennet printed cotton design (1883) Wild Tulip wallpaper design (1884) Fritillary wallpaper design (1885) Willow Bough wallpaper design (1887) Batchelor’s Button wallpaper design (1892) Lechlade wallpaper design (1893) Literary Production Love is Enough (1873) The Novel on Blue Paper (1982) (composed 1872) The House of the Wolfings (1889) The Roots of the Mountains (1890) News from Nowhere (1891) (The Commonweal 1890) ‘The Wind’s on the Wold’ (composed c. 1892–1893) Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895) ‘Gossip About an Old House on the Upper Thames’ (1895) The Well at the World’s End (1896) The Sundering Flood (1898) Kelmscott Press News from Nowhere frontispiece – although the illustrator Charles March Gere is solely credited for this drawing, Morris was closely involved in its design The Well at the World’s End decorative borders The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer now newly imprinted decorative borders and designs edition of Rossetti’s Hand and Soul (1895)

(WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 803, no. 1520). Elsewhere, he alludes to having lost his brushes for drawing, but having found some others he can work with (WMCC, vol. III, 1996: 376, no. 1966). Kelmscott and environs saw the creation of several wallpaper designs. In August 1881, Morris recorded doing a ‘design for St James’s ceiling paper’ whilst staying at Kelmscott (BL, AddMS45407B, Fol. 36v). The St. James’s Ceiling wallpaper, featuring large yellow sunflowers against a white background, was intended to hang with the red St. James’s wallpaper in the Waterloo Room of St James’s Palace. Due to the timing of the visit, the ceiling design was most likely inspired by the sight of sunflowers in the manor garden, in bloom in August. Redecorating the entrances and state apartments of St James’s Palace was not only one of the firm’s most 114

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prestigious secular commissions, but also yielded significant profit. Morris & Co.’s original estimate amounted to £4,868, with additional works incurring £2,747 (Rodgers 1998: v). The paper subsequently entered Morris & Co.’s stock range (Parry 1996: 217–218). Snake’s head fritillary is a plant typically found in ‘alluvial Thames-side meadows’ around Kelmscott (Robinson 2007: 32, 38). Accordingly, both the Snakeshead printed cotton (1876) and the Fritillary wallpaper design (1885) would have also originated in the ‘Kelmscott country’. After his semi-retirement from Morris & Co. in 1890, Morris occasionally conceived pattern designs, but due to his eagerness over book printing Morris no longer found the designing of papers and chintzes so amusing, and we find in some of them an echo of former work, though the craftsman’s skill never failed him. (M. Morris 1936: 42) For instance, in May 1892, he wrote to Jenny about ‘working hard at my paper hanging all day’ before reporting its completion: ‘I shall be at home Saturday … Work all right. Paperhanging done so far: so that I can make sure of terminating the interminable before I come back’ (WMCC, vol. III, 1996: 403, 405, nos. 1996, 1997).Whether this could have been a design for Stanmore Hall—according to Parry ‘the most extensive decoration scheme that Morris & Co. completed’—is debatable, since he delegated the bulk of this commission to Henry Dearle (Kelvin 1996: 406; Parry 1996: 146–147; Harvey and Press 1996: 203). What is noteworthy is that Morris seems to be keen to finish his work at Kelmscott to be free when he returns to his family in London.This confirms that the manor was at times specifically his go-to site for completing challenging work. According to Cockerell’s diary, in August of 1892, Morris was preparing a new wallpaper design with a blue background, involving his protégé in the process whilst at the manor: ‘spent the morning and part of the afternoon … in washing in a blue background to an elaborate new wall paper design of WM’s’ (BL,AddMS52772, Fol. 31r).This must have been Batchelor’s Button, featuring the motif of the cornflower against the backdrop of light blue, designed around this time. The Lechlade (1893) design was also conceived with the environs of the manor in mind, as it is named after a neighbouring village. During the years of developing vegetable dyes in collaboration with Thomas Wardle of Leek, Morris even conducted experiments at Kelmscott. For instance, in the autumn 1876, he wrote to his partner: I was at Kelmscott … and betwixt the fishing, I cut a handful of poplar twigs & boiled them, and dyed a lock of wool a very good yellow: this would be useful if fast, for the wool was unmordanted. (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 333, no. 357) The dye appeared successful, with Morris offering Wardle a further update a fortnight later: ‘Poplar-twigs: the pattern dyed among the perch showing no sign of yielding to 12 days window’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 337, no. 361). There are also references to Morris designing embroideries at the manor, some of which drew directly from the garden. Honeysuckle is a prime example: the crown-imperial with its graceful top-not, the great poppy whose leaves form an inner net, the honeysuckle, the fritillaries, the background of yew-twigs, all these elements, look […] as if they were copied straight from the garden. (M. Morris 1938: 36–37) 115

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Morris’s design drawing survives at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. A version worked by his wife and daughter Jenny in the 1880s was displayed at the inaugural Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1888 as a ‘portiere’ (cat. no. 276). It was acquired by the William Morris Gallery in 2013.As Parry demonstrates, the embroidery displayed great artistic accomplishment: ‘May [Morris] described this as “one of the finest of all Morris embroideries” … . It was sent by May to the Louvre exhibition of British and Irish Decorative Work in 1914’ (1996a: 242).The design was so popular that it was sold through the Royal School of Needlework (Parry 1996a: 242). Honeysuckle was also used for a printed cotton, registered in 1876. In August 1881, Morris recorded in his work diary that he had begun the ‘G.H. Embroidery’ (BL,AddMS45407B, Fol. 35v).This was the design for the Lanercost Priory Dossal, commissioned by George Howard.This embroidery, which counts among the firm’s most accomplished ecclesiastical textiles commissions, was conceived at Kelmscott. Parry outlines the particulars of its creation by local Cumbrian embroiderers over the next six years, using the ‘scaled cartoon, background and yarns’ provided by Morris & Co. (2013: 23–24). Parry rates the Lanercost Priory Dossal design as an ‘exceptional’ example of ‘Morris’s work at its most confident and mature’ (2013: 24). Moreover, it appears to have been one of a handful of bespoke altar designs produced by Morris & Co., as most were available in the firm’s catalogue. Morris also worked on designs for carpets and tapestries at the manor. On 3 September 1881, he was working on an unidentified ‘tapestry design’ as well as a ‘Sq. carpet,’ later referred to as the ‘big Vanderbilt carpet’. Due to not being pleased with his first attempt, by 22 September he conceived ‘2nd design for big V carpet’, which he ‘pretty much finished’ by the next day (BL, AddMS45407B, Fols. 37r–v, 39v, 40r, 53r–v).This was in fact the Peacock and Bird carpet, as Anna Mason has established on the basis of Morris’s subsequent references to his being ‘at work pointing Vanderbilt Peacock’ back in London at Christmas that year.12 The original sketch as well as the carpet itself are at the William Morris Gallery. According to Parry, ‘it is an exceptionally fine carpet, beautifully designed’ (2013: 113). It is not known how many carpets Morris & Co. delivered to the American residences of the Vanderbilt family, but these references are testimony to the high profile of work designed at Kelmscott. During his stay in February 1885, Morris ‘designed a carpet, and prepared a speech’ (WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 388, no. 1058).The latter was presumably a socialist lecture, as the year in question marked the height of his socialist activity. On 25 February 1885, Morris was due to speak at the Music Room, Holywell, at Oxford at the invitation of the Oxford Socialist Society, and it is this event that he had most likely been preparing for at Kelmscott. Sharp and Pinkney illuminate Morris’s activism in the vicinity of Kelmscott in the areas of socialist lectures and SPAB campaigns, so there is no need to recount it here (1999; 2007). In addition, from the earliest years of Morris’s tenure of Kelmscott, the manor became a potent place of literary production. For example, in February 1872, Morris went there for at least a fortnight, reporting to Louisa Baldwin that it was at Kelmscott where he overcame (at least temporarily) literary difficulties: Been in trouble with my own work, which I could not make to march for a long time; but I think I have now brought it out of the maze of rewriting and despondency, though it is not exactly finished … I … am writing among the grey gables & rook haunted trees, with a sense of the place being almost too beautiful to work in. (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 155, no. 158) Although he does not give particulars, his main literary work at the time was Love is Enough, which he may have been composing, especially as he hoped to publish it by November that 116

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year.13 Equally, he may have been writing his ‘abortive novel’, which he would give up by the summer, describing it as ‘a specimen of how not to do it … nothing but landscape and sentiment: which thing won’t do’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 162, no. 167). Eventually published in 1982 under the title The Novel on Blue Paper, its editor Penelope Fitzgerald argues that the descriptions were largely drawn from Kelmscott Manor and its surrounding landscape, whilst the theme of the love triangle may invite autobiographical readings. Morris’s retrospective account of the novel’s writing process—making ‘a desperate dash at the middle of the story to try to give it life when I felt it failing’—is consistent with the account of his creative struggles at the manor quoted above (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 162, no. 167). From the late 1880s, thanks to Morris’s gradual withdrawal from his now very profitable firm, he was able to resume his literary career, creating his own genre of prose romances (Harvey and Press 1991: 192–193). Morris frequently worked on these at Kelmscott. For example, in October 1888, he asked the Chiswick Press to send him proofs of The House of the Wolfings (1889) (WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 827, no. 1544). The following spring he was writing The Roots of the Mountains there (1889)(WMCC, vol. III, 1996: 42, no. 1597). In May 1892, Morris was composing The Well at the World’s End (1896), which he in fact finished at the manor on 28 April 1893 (BL, AddMS52772, Fol. 31r; BL, AddMS45409, Fol. 19r). Morris’s work diary for 1895 records that whilst at Kelmscott—in April and June—he was working on Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, another romance which was completed there (BL, AddMS 45410, Fols 17v, 19r, 23r–v).That the manor was conducive to the completion of literary works suggests that it not only inspired Morris, but also provided him with an environment where he could concentrate. In the final year of his life, Morris composed part of his last work, The Sundering Flood, at Kelmscott (1898) (BL AddMS45411, Fol. 18r). He was to dictate the ending on his deathbed in Hammersmith, and it was published posthumously. Most importantly, Morris’s most famous literary work, the utopian fiction News from Nowhere, could not have been created had Morris not taken out the lease of Kelmscott. The manor became the culmination of the book’s narrative, serving as a symbol of the new social order. The description of its appearance dominates chapter XXXI, ‘An Old House Amongst New Folk’, whilst the local St George’s Church served as inspiration for the final chapter of the book. Morris’s two boat expeditions from Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, to Kelmscott Manor (in August of 1880 and 1881 respectively) were also fictionalised in the literary account. The river Thames had held a great appeal for Morris since his teenage years.14 News from Nowhere was also partly penned at Kelmscott, and its Kelmscott Press edition of 1893 included an illustration of the house as its frontispiece. Morris closely liaised with the Birmingham artist Charles March Gere over its creation. He made a special site visit to Kelmscott to oversee its design in January 1893 (BL, AddMS45409, Fol. 7).The wide dissemination of different editions of the text and the frontispiece illustration itself soon became powerful vehicles in shaping Kelmscott’s public image. Following his withdrawal from active management of Morris & Co., in 1891 Morris founded a fine arts press called the Kelmscott Press. According to the Press’s former secretary, Henry Halliday Sparling: ‘that it should be thus named was inevitable; whatever came near to Morris’s heart must be named after Kelmscott Manor’ (1924: 73).Although the press was based in Hammersmith, evidence suggests that Morris conducted much of the design work at the manor. For instance, from October 1892 until 1895, he was working on the decorative borders intended for the Kelmscott Press edition of The Well at the World’s End (BL, AddMS52772, Fol. 35r; BL,Add MS 45410, Fol. 37r, 39r). Between 1894 and spring the following year, there are numerous references to Morris ‘working hard’ at the manor on the borders and other designs for the Kelmscottt Press edition of 117

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The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer now newly imprinted (1896), also known as the Kelmscott Chaucer. This was the Press’s most ambitious undertaking and was issued shortly before Morris’s death. For example, in April 1894, Morris wrote:‘I have been working hard at Chaucer to-day & am now in the anxious stage about it: however I think it will come right’ (WMCC, vol. IV, 1996: 154, no. 2253). In 1895 he was also at work on the Kelmscott Press edition of Rossetti’s Hand and Soul (1895) (BL,Add MS 45410, Fol. 42r). Although Morris wrote few letters from Kelmscott, his surviving correspondence includes a few missives regarding pressing SPAB matters. For example, on 19 July 1895, Morris wrote a formal letter to petition the Thames Conservancy to use local materials for rebuilding the Lock-Keeper’s Cottage at Eaton Weir (WMCC, vol. IV, 1996: 294, no. 2386). Significantly, on at least two occasions he contemplated relocating his businesses nearer to the manor. In 1881, when looking for appropriate premises for the Morris & Co. workshops, Morris hesitated between Merton Abbey and the village of Blockley, a few miles away from Kelmscott. For pragmatic reasons, he opted for Merton, stating: ‘adieu Blockley and joy for ever, and welcome grubbiness, London, low spirits and boundless riches’ (WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 42, no. 697). However, he repeatedly regretted it, blaming Merton for his being bound to a life in London.A decade later—in 1892, within just a year of setting up the Kelmscott Press—Morris was contemplating if it ‘could not be moved from Hammersmith & set up in the meadow’ in the vicinity of his country house (BL,AddMS52772, Fol. 33r). His idea did not materialise.The manor (and its environs) did, nevertheless, serve as a site of his work throughout the whole 25 years of his tenure. Due to the fragmentary nature of surviving evidence, the above merely signal the types of professional output executed at Kelmscott. It is clear that Morris created and/or advanced a number of acclaimed designs, high-profile commissions, and significant literary works at the house, alongside working on less absorbing tasks such as Kelmscott Press decorative borders. Rather than its previously acknowledged role as a rural getaway, Kelmscott can be considered as an important literary and artist’s house. Crucially, what distinguished Kelmscott’s role from his life in London was the fact that at the manor he was able to alternate between work and leisure, as opposed to just switching between different types of work whilst in town. Reporting on one of his stays at Kelmscott, in February 1894 Morris confided in his daughter Jenny:‘I have been partly working & partly lazying’, which best summarises his typical use of the manor (WMCC, vol. IV, 1996: 125, no. 2221).

Appearance and Uses of Kelmscott Manor Interiors under the Morris Family Occupancy (1875–1896) The functions and appearance of the manor interiors under the Morris family occupancy is a little studied subject which deserves attention. I will next examine the key spaces which were most used by William Morris. I will also discuss the use of Morris & Co. fabrics to decorate the house in the latter part of Morris’s lifetime.The omnipresence of the firm’s printed cottons would have served as the single most tangible (trade)mark of Morris’s tenure of Kelmscott.The earliest evidence of their use dates from 1892, but they may have been introduced at any time after their registration a decade earlier. Ongoing scholarly speculation about the Kelmscott interiors has given rise to the fallacy that Morris left them ‘plain’ and ‘simple’—as he had found them—resulting in ‘spartan’ and minimalist spaces, characterised by sparseness of furniture, and the dual ‘lack of ornament’ or

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‘saturated colours’ (e.g. Acheson 1981: 34; Howard 2007: 132). As a consequence of these misconceptions, based mostly on the literal interpretation of the utopian fiction News from Nowhere, it has been proposed that the Kelmscott decorative scheme foreshadowed modernism. Imogen Hart argues that the fallacy concerning Morris’s dislike of decoration, and by extension, the myth of ‘Kelmscott Manor, “whitewashed walls”, and modernism’, can be traced to the writings of William Lethaby (1857–1931), Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) and May Morris (2010: 78–84).Analysing numerous contemporaneous visual depictions of Kelmscott, this chapter will demonstrate that far from leaving the interiors untouched, Morris extensively beautified the manor with his designs. The two spaces Morris most used were the Tapestry Room and the adjacent northfacing passage room, which became his bedroom and, following his death, a potent site of memorialisation. Crucially, after Rossetti had moved out of the manor, the Tapestry Room, which had previously served as one of the painter’s two studios, became Morris’s ‘work room’. The Tapestry Room on the first floor was the largest room in the manor, with a high ceiling and a double aspect. It took its name from a 17th-century Flemish tapestry by an unknown maker left over by the manor’s owners, the Turner family. The hangings represented the Biblical story of Samson, the Israelite judge and warrior of extraordinary strength derived from his hair and his betrayal by Delilah (Book of Judges, chapters 13–16). The history and aesthetic of the tapestry deserves attention as it would become one of the defining features of Kelmscott in public consciousness—acquiring signification as an emblem of the manor’s romance and history. The tapestries could not have been especially commissioned for Kelmscott as they ‘are very much cut about to fit’ (Cooper 2007: 125). Opinions differ as to when they would have entered the manor. Cooper proposes they would have been hung early in the eighteenth century (2007: 125), whereas Maddison and Waterson argue that as the ‘hangings were not mentioned in the 1833 inventory but give the room its name in the 1870 inventory’, it is likely they would have only been installed at the house a century later, sometime between those dates (2013: 97). Although Morris acknowledged the artistic shortcomings of the tapestries, he felt that the aging process had increased their appeal, enhancing the ambience of the room: they were never great works of art, and now when all the bright colours are faded out, and nothing is left but the indigo blues, the greys and the warm yellowy browns, they look better, I think, than they were meant to look: at any rate they make the walls a very pleasant background for the living people who haunt the room … and in spite of the designer, they give an air of romance to the room which nothing else would quite do. (Morris 1895: 11–12) Morris used the Tapestry Room for artistic as well as literary production. Edmund Hort New’s drawing, produced under Morris’s supervision as an illustration to the antiquarian article ‘Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames’ (1895), is the only surviving source for the longoverdue identification of Morris’s work table. It shows that Morris used the circular Pembroke table—placed in the middle of the room—for his work (Figure 4.4). Since at least 1899, this important table has been relocated, first to the Green Room, as evinced by Hanslip Fletcher’s watercolour (1899, William Morris Gallery) (Figure 4.5) and subsequently to the Old Hall, the family’s dining room, apparently without acknowledgement of the fact that it was once Morris’s main writing desk as well as work table used for designing Morris & Co. patterns and Kelmscott Press book arts.

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Figure 4.4 Edward Hort New, pen and ink drawing, Tapestry Room, Kelmscott Manor, October 1895. Courtesy of the Clark Memorial Library.

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Figure 4.5 Hanslip Fletcher, Green Room at Kelmscott, watercolour, 1899.This shows Morris’s work table in the middle, relocated from the Tapestry Room within three years of Morris’s death. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

It seems that by at least 1912, May Morris adopted this piece of furniture as her own work table. This is suggested by a watercolour of the Green Room by Mary Annie Sloane (1867– 1961), showing the table covered with art materials, which Morris’s daughter is known to have used for embroidery designs (Private Collection, 1912, illustrated in Aucott 2016: 31).A photograph published in the Country Life feature on Kelmscott in 1921 documents the ongoing use of this table by Morris’s daughter (More 1921b: 258). Her paint brushes and squared tracing paper, as well as what looks like completed designs or design cartoons, are shown. May Morris’s 1926 inventory of Kelmscott (Memorandum) lists it in the Green Room as ‘Gateleg table’ with no indication of its cultural significance.The table has survived in the house, on display in the dining room since at least 1964 until the present (i.e. 2018 visitor season) [see Plate 4.5]. In fact, it appears that within living memory of Morris’s death, there was an attempt to identify his work table as a way of memorialising him. But even then it proved problematic, despite the overt iconography of New’s published drawing. Within less than six months of Morris’s funeral, by March 1897, the photographer Frederick Evans mistook one of the two small tables located in the north-east and/or north-west corners of the Tapestry Room for Morris’s desk [see Plate 4.6]. In response, two of the reformer’s closest associates pointed out his error. Cockerell commented: When I was at Kelmscott with W.M. [William Morris] he did all his writing & designing on the table in the middle of the room, & I do not remember to have seen him at work in the corner (MET, SC-FE, 19.05.1897, 68.519). 121

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Ellis seconded him by stating: it is a mistake to call it the Bard’s ‘writing corner’. I never saw him write in this room except at the middle table.The writing materials were placed on the table in this corner for others rather than himself. (MET FSE-FE, 04.06.1897, 68.519) Ironically, an earlier photograph by Evans, taken in the last few months of Morris’s life, shows the circular table in question [see Plate 4.7]. Its title, inscribed on the mount ‘Kelmscott Manor:The Tapestry Room’, implies a lack of appreciation for its significance as Morris’s desk. However, its iconography, featuring a copy of the Kelmscott Press edition of its first publication The Story of the Glittering Plane (1891), penned by Morris, together with an empty chair, hints at the absence of the book’s creator. In addition to serving as Morris’s study and design studio, the Tapestry Room was his favourite spot for observing the harvest. It also doubled as the main sitting room for his family and guests.This is where socialising, conversations and games took place, especially in the afternoon and evenings and/or during days with bad weather, when outdoor recreation was not an option. For example, in September 1881, when Jane Morris was staying at Rottingdean, her husband, daughters and Crom Price made a trip to Kelmscott. Morris reported: ‘sulky and cold as the day was we had a very happy afternoon in the tapestry room: I gave them a lecture on archaeology’ (WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 64, no. 728).The contemporaneous account of a first-time visit to Kelmscott, written through the eyes of a guest, confirms the central role of the room. On arrival in October 1895, Edmund Hort New was welcomed by Mr and Miss Morris and was taken up to the Tapestry room where we found Mrs Morris … Tea was prepared for me in the dining room below and Mr and Miss M. sat with me; we then adjourned to the tapestry room where Mr and Mrs Morris continued their game of draughts, their regular evening employment, and at intervals we conversed. (Cox 1974: 6) Hanslip Fletcher’s watercolour of the Tapestry Room not only conveys its spacious feel and main decorative and architectural features, but also offers a unique view into the location of the previously unidentified ‘Batchelor’s Bedroom’. Being one of the Morrises’ guest bedrooms, it could be accessed through an opening in the tapestry on the far left (1899, William Morris Gallery) (Figure 4.6). This is where New as well as Charles March Gere slept in the 1890s, the former noting My bedroom led out of the tapestry room through a secret door and its dimensions were small.The only other door led through Mr Morris’s room, so that no one could leave the room except by passing through his bedroom. (Cox 1974: 6) Gere described it as ‘the little powder closet which opens from the Tapestry Room’ (Gere 2010: 169).This small adjoining guest bedroom ceased to exist when a partition wall was demolished during the 1960s refurbishment. As a result of the alterations, it now forms a window niche in the Tapestry Room. It is not certain at which stage Morris adopted the large north-facing passage room adjacent to the Tapestry Room as his bedroom. Notably, Rossetti’s correspondence evidences that this room had originally been the painter’s own bedchamber, a fact with wide-ranging historical implications, discussed further on. Rossetti’s culturally significant occupancy of Kelmscott 122

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Figure 4.6 Hanslip Fletcher, Tapestry Room at Kelmscott, watercolour, 1899. Showing the no longer extant guest bedroom, also known as the Batchelor’s Bedroom, on the far left. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

(summer 1871; September 1872–July 1874) is typically accorded little attention and is associated solely with the Tapestry Room. However, the painter’s references to his fear of finding ‘some one else installed in my rooms’ reveal that his accommodation at the manor comprised more than just one chamber (DGRCC, vol. V, 2005: 341, no. 72.134).Whilst Rossetti viewed the Tapestry Room as a cross between his private ‘drawing room’ and a ‘studio’, he also mentioned using a distinct space as a ‘bedroom’ (e.g. DGRCC, vol. V, 2005: 154, no. 71.149).Amongst several complementary clues, the painter’s reference to hanging bookshelves ‘outside the studio door on the walls of those steps to the bedroom’ provides definitive evidence that it was Rossetti who originally slept in the adjacent north-facing passage room (DGRCC, vol. VI, 2006: 211, no. 73.217). At this time, Rossetti referred to Morris having his own room elsewhere in the house, but further details are not given as to where this would have been (DGRCC, vol. V, 2005: 300, no. 72.93). It appears that a considerable amount of time had elapsed between Rossetti moving out, thus vacating his Kelmscott bedchamber, and Morris taking it over. For example, in the 1880s, before visiting the manor, Morris sometimes asked his wife and/or daughter whether there would be a bed for him, showing flexibility about sleeping arrangements. For instance, when planning to join his wife at Kelmscott in September 1880, accompanied by a larger group of friends, including William De Morgan and his mother Sophia De Morgan, as well as the Richmonds, Morris was keen to ensure there would be space for everyone, offering: ‘I could sleep in the cottage or preferably in the little garret if it could be got ready for me’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 590, no. 651). Similarly, speculating about the possibility of joining his family in the summer of 1886, he inquired of Jenny: ‘mind you mustn’t expect me, but I may come—will there be a bed for me? by the way?’ (WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 556, no. 1252). This implies that Morris did not feel proprietorial about any rooms, an attitude observed by his regular visitor,Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. 123

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Blunt does, however, record that by (at least) 1889—the time of his first stay at Kelmscott—the north-facing passage room adjacent to the Tapestry Room had indeed become Morris’s bedroom. My Diaries. Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888–1914, based on a contemporaneous manuscript, outlines Morris’s uses of the two key spaces at the manor: The rooms … on the upper floor were all passage rooms opening one into another, and in order to reach the tapestried chamber in which we sat in the evenings, it was necessary to pass to and fro through Morris’s own bedroom, in which he lay at night in a great square Elizabethan four-poster bed, an arrangement which would have been of extreme discomfort to anyone less tolerant of such things than he, and less indifferent to his personal convenience. It was the same thing in the day time. He worked at the designs he was making for his carpets, and at his drawings, and the corrections of his proofs in a room where he was liable every minute to disturbance [i.e.Tapestry Room]. Such discomforts had been submitted to by our forefathers, and why not, he thought, by us. It was this insensitiveness to his surroundings that enabled him to deal with the prodigious volume of work which he daily assigned himself, both manual and intellectual. (Blunt 1918: 29) Frederick Evans’s photograph (1896) [see Plate 4.8] and Hanslip Fletcher’s watercolour (1899) (Figure 4.7) show two different views of Morris’s bedroom in the north-facing passage room. The ‘Workman’s’ washstand, designed by Ford Madox Brown for the firm, can be seen by the window, used in conjunction with German stoneware utensils. In both images, the four-poster takes centre stage. It is a carved bed in a predominantly Jacobean style, although assembled at a later date. It is shown customised with Morris-style embroidered hangings and a valance designed by May Morris and stitched by her and others around 1893. The valance in turn features lines of a poem about this very bed written by Morris himself sometime between 1892 and 1893. As the poem in question,‘The Wind’s on the Wold’, had not been included in Morris’s book of poetry, Poems by the Way (1891b), containing many similar verses written about decorative objects, it seems most likely that it post-dated the above volume. One of the curtains and the valance were showcased in the 1893 Arts & Crafts Exhibition, the catalogue of which also printed the text of the poem.The bed hangings and the verse can therefore also be dated as circa 1892–1893 (Dudkiewicz 2017: 228, 234). The poem is an ode to rest.The first stanza is apparently spoken by the owner of the ‘kind and dear … old house here’ praising its benefits as a cosy shelter, whereas the latter two stanzas are narrated by the antique bed itself replying. Having witnessed vicissitudes of history, the bed extolls the timeless benefits of sleep and regeneration, urging its occupant to have a good night’s rest: Rest then and rest And think of the best … And ye lie in me And scarce dare move … I am old & have seen Many things that have been Both grief & peace, And for worst & best Right good is rest. 124

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Figure 4.7 Hanslip Fletcher, William Morris’s Bedroom at Kelmscott, watercolour, 1899. Showing the ‘Workman’s’ washstand designed by Ford Madox Brown, used in conjunction with German stoneware. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

‘The Wind’s on the Wold’ lends itself to being interpreted as the reformer’s eulogy to the restorative role of Kelmscott in the final years of his life. May’s embroidered hangings reproducing her father’s poem appear to have been her tribute to Morris himself and his affection for the manor. Although the design is May Morris’s, the hangings heavily referenced her father’s work, including the Trellis wallpaper (registered in 1862) and the fruit-tree motif first developed for the projected Red House dining room embroidery scheme. Similarly, the imagery of the valance echoed the calligraphy of an illuminated medieval manuscript, reflecting Morris’s great interest in antiquarian books, which culminated in his founding of the Kelmscott Press. The archaic aesthetic and workmanship of the bed itself also embodied Morris’s sympathies, namely his dislike of modernity, coupled with a passion for history and handiwork. Collectively, the imagery of both the draperies and the bed thus brought together Morris’s key preoccupations. Later around the time of Morris’s death, the bed was to become an emblem of his identity.The iconography and dissemination of Evans’s photograph of the four-poster contributed to this item of furniture becoming synonymous with Morris [see Plate 4.8]. Its history and role as a key vehicle for the posthumous memorialisation of Morris are discussed in the essay ‘Memorialising her father’s legacy: May Morris as curator and gatekeeper of William Morris’s estate and the role of Kelmscott’ (Dudkiewicz 2017: 228–229). Morris’s use of the carved four-poster, and its later symbolism, are somewhat ironic, as it had been originally acquired and used by Rossetti in what used to be the painter’s bedroom at Kelmscott. Even though the subject of the manor interiors has been little studied, it is generally assumed that, as a house decorator, Morris would have been principally responsible for creating the 125

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manor’s interiors from the outset. For example, Rossetti’s biographer stated that having signed the lease, Morris ‘arranged for local workmen to redecorate and furnish, with supplies from the Firm’ (Marsh 1999: 416). Scholars have also speculated as to what extent the contents and overall appearance of Kelmscott remained original to the Turner family’s occupancy and how the Turners’ decorative schemes and left-over contents would have exerted a powerful impact on Morris’s design practice. It will be demonstrated that it was, however, primarily Rossetti who should be credited for supplying most furniture and laying the foundation for Kelmscott’s distinctive interior aesthetic. Offering the only known proof that Kelmscott was, in fact, completely empty when the Morrises and Rossetti took out the lease, the painter noted: ‘My studio … is hung with old tapestry which has I suppose been there since the house was built, but otherwise we did the furnishing’ (DGRCC, vol.V, 2005: 174, no. 71.172).15 It is noteworthy that it was Rossetti who assumed the role of the manor’s chief decorator in Morris’s absence and gladly took credit for it: But this place needed so much getting in order to make it habitable, that Morris my joint tenant having taken himself to Iceland, my services became necessary as factotum in furnishing and ordering the place. (DGRCC, vol.V, 2005: 101, no. 71.117) The artist further specified the types of redecoration work, which kept him busy:‘We are doing a good deal in papering & painting here, as well as other repairs, so time does not run to seed’ (DGRCC, vol.V, 2005: 87, no. 71.107). Rossetti chose paint colours which remained in evidence until at least the 1920s (Griffin 2021). In fact,William Morris’s early input appears to have been limited to putting instructions in place for his wife to order (his own) wallpaper designs from Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., and authorising her to oversee some works such as the renovation of the attics and unblocking a historic window (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 139, no. 141). Crucially, it was specifically Rossetti who became the supplier of contents, which in his own words was ‘a matter however of no great difficulty to me, as this house was full of superfluities which turned out very useful there’ (DGRCC, vol.V, 2005: 174, no. 71.172).The painter was referring to the abundance of furniture and decorative arts at his permanent residence in Tudor House, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The fact that Rossetti hired a ‘van’16 to supply furnishings to Kelmscott evidences his key contribution to decorating the manor (DGRCC, vol.V, 2005: 73, no. 71.90; 75, no. 71.94). Treuherz, Prettejohn and Becker (2004: 229–231) have discussed Rossetti’s eclectic and avant-garde taste for English, European and Eastern antiques and decorative arts, displayed throughout his London townhouse.There is no scope to recount it here. Notably, unlike the Morrises, Rossetti had a taste for Jacobean-style furniture, which he had been collecting since the 1860s. On 13 November 1862, George Price Boyce remarked that Rossetti had ‘furnished his house most picturesquely, mostly with fine old Renaissance furniture’, bought from a man called Minister at 8 Buckingham Street (Surtees 1980).Two ‘antique bedsteads’ for guest bedrooms were procured from this supplier. The aesthetic of the four-poster preserved in what is now Morris’s bedroom is consistent with these acquisitions, as well as with Rossetti’s own bed at Cheyne Walk, described by his brother as a ‘5ft. 4in. mahogany four-post bed-stead with rich tapestry hangings’ (T.G.Wharton, Martin and Co 1882: 7).17 At the same time, this style was inconsistent with the simple metal bedsteads that both William and Jane Morris opted for in their Hammersmith home, documented in the photographs of their respective bedrooms taken by Emery Walker (Negative 997 & 2302; Neg. 1229, Hammersmith and Fulham Archive). Having visited Kelmscott around the turn of the century, when Mrs Morris was in residence,William Holden Hutton recorded the distinctive features of the manor, referring to ‘the gloomy four-poster bed with curious carvings, in which Rossetti slept’ (1903: 65). His book By Thames and Cotswold: Sketches of the Country is a rare record of the bed’s association with the painter. By this time, most books and newspapers were reproducing images and/or descriptions 126

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of the four-poster in connection with Morris (e.g.Vallance 1896: 6–8; Mackail 1899, vol. II: 268–269). May Morris’s embellishment of the bed with iconography inherently associated with her father had, arguably, played a part in turning this object, previously associated with another cultural figure, into a Morris relic.William Morris had also contributed to this process by not only composing the verses inscribed on its valance, but also additionally decorating it with his own Wandle printed cotton. First registered in 1884, Wandle would have been used by Morris as the bedspread by at least spring 1896, when it was photographed by Evans [see Plate 4.8]. This would have further strengthened the bed’s association with Morris amongst visitors to Kelmscott and through the reproduction of the four-poster’s image. Taking over Rossetti’s bedroom and bed, and covering the latter over with his own design, may have been Morris’s way of finally reclaiming and asserting his ownership of his house, and of his wife, following the painter’s extended usurpation of both in the early 1870s. Had Rossetti’s former bedroom remained empty, the painter’s memory would have been perpetuated in the house, with the unoccupied space acting as a memorial cue. Instead Rossetti’s memory was overwritten by Morris’s. Morris’s act of covering the bed up with his Wandle cotton and adopting the bed as his own may have been a pre-meditated measure to banish Rossetti’s memory, whilst at the same time ‘covering up’ his wife’s affair with the painter (Griffin: 2021). Fredeman illuminates the Rossettis’ and Morrises’ determination to keep the affair a secret for the sake of both families’ reputations, especially as Jane and William Morris were alive long after D.G. Rossetti had died (Fredeman 1970: 96–98). Wandle was just one of the numerous examples of Morris introducing his patterns into Kelmscott. After several years of experimenting with natural dyes (1875–1878) and perfecting the textile block-printing process at the newly opened workshops at Merton Abbey, from 1881 Morris threw himself into designing and producing numerous printed fabrics (Parry 2013: 56–59). These progressively populated the manor interiors, providing wall hangings, curtains, cushions and upholstery on furniture in the later years of the Morris family’s occupancy. In this way, Morris was able to surround himself with, and enjoy, the prized products of his art, many of which had been inspired by the very environment of Kelmscott and of the ‘Thames country’. As the house was used for entertaining Morris’s social circle, including his clients such as George Howard and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, arguably it would have also provided an informal showcase for Morris & Co. products. Moreover, covering up a large proportion of surfaces with his designs may have been Morris’s continuing attempt to purge traces of Rossetti’s one-time occupancy of Kelmscott. The Strawberry Thief printed cotton would have been introduced as wall hangings into the Old Hall (the dining room) at some time after the pattern’s registration in 1883. New’s illustration of the room depicts how the fabric lines the better part of the wall space (1898) (Figure 4.8). A sketch of the Kelmscott dining room by Charles March Gere (1892, Cheltenham Trust) reveals that Strawberry Thief was in situ by at least 1892. Evans’s photograph shows that the same approach was adopted for the Green Room by decorating it with the Kennet wall hangings (a design also registered in 1883) [see Plate 4.9]. Hart observes that both in its ‘wavy’ pattern as well as in the folds of the draped fabric, Kennet evokes the movement, ripples and reflections of the river. She argues that through the use of Kennet in the Green Room, Morris was ‘recreating indoors one of his favourite features of outdoor life at Kelmscott’ (Hart 2010: 84–85;Van der Post 2003: 71). The source of the river Kennet near Silbury Hill,Wiltshire, is only 30 miles from Kelmscott, so the pattern was part of the local ‘Thames country’. Evans’s view of the south-east corner of the Panelled Room, one of the family’s principal sitting rooms, offers a number of clues about its decorative scheme [see Plate 4.10].The white 127

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Figure 4.8 Edmund Hort New, Dining Room at Kelmscott, original pen and ink drawing, 1898. Showing Strawberry Thief (1883) wall hangings. Unused illustration originally commissioned for John William Mackail’s Life of William Morris (1899). Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

George I panelling was complemented with a number of Morris & Co. patterns: Rose and Thistle (registered in 1881) used as curtains, Brother Rabbit (1882) as upholstery for the winged armchair and Medway (1885) covering the seats of the chairs. All three designs relied on the indigo discharge technique and featured a blue background. Crucially, the room would have featured a great deal of colour, including blue, red, pink and green, an effect strengthened by the rich eastern rugs.These findings counter the speculation that the decorative scheme of the Panelled Room would have been primarily white, an effect that Morris allegedly enhanced by hanging white linen curtains at the windows. The visual evidence demonstrates that the manor interiors were not plain, sparsely furnished and lacking ornament and colour. On the contrary, during the latter part of his occupancy of Kelmscott, Morris and his family made a distinctive mark on the decorative scheme of the house by embellishing wall surfaces and furniture with a number of distinctive Morris & Co. fabrics and embroideries.

Morris’s Evolving Attitude toward Kelmscott Manor: From a Substitute for Iceland to ‘a house that I love’ As the literature review has demonstrated, the scholarly consensus is that from the moment Morris laid his eyes on Kelmscott, it instantaneously became his ‘most loved house’ and his favourite destination.An analysis of his personal papers suggests otherwise. 128

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There is no doubt that Morris was from the outset enchanted by the external appearance of the manor and garden, repeatedly referring to them as ‘beautiful’. An analysis of his personal papers suggests, however, that he would only gradually develop the deep affection for it which he expressed in the penultimate year of his life, in the frequently quoted passage from ‘Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames’ (1895). His words would become key source material for Victorian and modern biographers alike, establishing a basis for the widespread conviction of Morris’s love for the house. He concluded the article with the following paragraph: Here then are a few words about a house that I love; with a reasonable love I think: for though my words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I assure you that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown up out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it; needing no grand office-architect, with no great longing for anything else than correctness … but some thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of meadow and acre and wood and river; a certain amount … of common sense, a liking for making materials serve ones turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment. This I think was what went to the making of the old house; might we not manage to find some sympathy for all that from henceforward; or must we but shrink before the Philistine with one,Alas that it must perish! (Morris 1895: 13–14) Suffice it to say, that rather than revealing anything about his tenure of the house, Morris’s account is an encomium of the vernacular character of the building and its locality in an unspoilt part of England in preservationist terms. In fact, in the initial years of tenure, until at least 1876, Morris considered Kelmscott as a substitute for Iceland, with varying degrees of satisfaction. For instance, shortly after returning from the first Icelandic trip in 1871, he described his attitude to the manor thus:‘This is a very beautiful place here and I enjoy it very much, though I … miss the mountains somewhat’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 147, no. 149). The following autumn, Morris remarked that if he cannot revisit Iceland then he ‘shall have a fortnight or so on the river as a pis aller’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 173, no. 180). In the spring of 1876, he once again viewed Kelmscott as an inadequate alternative to Iceland, commenting: ‘my rebellious inclinations turn towards Iceland, though I know it to be impossible, so I suppose it will be Kelmscott & the river someday soon’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 287, no. 311). In this period it was the Nordic island where Morris apparently wanted to be the most. For example, in the summer of 1876, he confided in his wife: I am longing for that tail of the glacier in Thorsmark, or our camp in the wilderness at Eyrindarkofarver under the snow mountains: In fact though I don’t feel unwell … I am depressed and languid. (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 310, no. 336) Kelmscott sometimes rose to the challenge, especially in severe weather conditions. On one such occasion, during particularly heavy rain and high floods, Morris reported in delight: When I got here … and, as it were, made myself free of the river by an insane attempt to fish, I began to feel very comfortable … and as it is certainly going to rain for the nex[t] 24 hours I expect to see something curious … the wind right in ones teeth and the eddies going like a Japanese tea-tray: I must say it was delightful: almost as good as Iceland on a small scale … (emphasis added) (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 276, no. 299) 129

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Equally, even until about early 1878, there were many times when Morris appeared disappointed with Kelmscott. For example, during a solitary trip in the summer of 1876, he was critical of both the fishing and the weather, describing Kelmscott as ‘depressing’ and his afternoon as ‘diabolically unpleasant’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 308, no. 334).The following June, he did not enjoy a short fishing break, again by himself, complaining to his daughter Jenny: my two day’s holiday is coming to an end, and I am not very sorry, though I have fished diligently both days with moderate luck: the weather has been very disappointing I must say: grey & dull, & today quite cold … There are not many flowers out in the garden here … (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 377, no. 409). During his wife’s and daughter’s extended trip to Italy, Morris was once again discontented with a fishing trip, this time in the company of his brother Edgar and Ellis, in March 1878: ‘I duly went to Kelmscott … the fishing was not very good … somehow I don’t seem to care about fishing like I did: I suppose I am getting too old for it’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 452, no. 499). Other letters from this period suggest that his mood may have been caused by missing his family. In fact, during the first decade of his tenure of Kelmscott, when visiting a multitude of locations, either for business or leisure, Morris would frequently express his great admiration for their appeal, apparently emulating the language he used for describing Kelmscott, and once again prompting comparisons with Iceland. For example, his early trip to Naworth Castle in the summer of 1874 was a case in point. It left him enchanted with the building and surrounding countryside, stating ‘the whole place is certainly one of the most poetical in England…I sniffed the smell of the moors & felt in Iceland again’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 228, no. 242). Moreover, during this time Morris fantasised about having his dream home elsewhere. During a riding trip around Wales with Faulkner in the spring of 1875, exploring his Welsh roots, Morris wrote: ‘The Dyfi Valley was most beautiful, & I thought that it would be so nice to have a little house & a cow there, & a Welsh poney or two’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 251, no. 269). On joining his family on the Italian Riviera in May 1878, he marvelled at his surroundings, stating:‘when I wandered among the olives above the sea the other day, felt as if I should be well contented to stay there always’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 483, no. 527). He concluded:‘I found the place at Oneglia a most beautiful spot to live in: I don’t think I should ever have tired of the olive-woods’(WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 485, no. 530). Again in 1879, during an antiquarian tour in Britain, Morris expressed his great admiration for Salisbury Plain: up on the downs rain really don’t matter, for there are no nasty sloppy trees or things about: ‘tis nearly as good as Iceland (and much drier) … I should like to live on Salisbury Plain, (since I can’t live on Bláskógaheiði) I should be so well, and the scent of the wastes is delightful. (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 517, no. 571) In this light, throughout the 1870s, Kelmscott was by no means Morris’s be-all and end-all place to live in and/or holiday destination. During those years, Morris’s letters display a certain ambivalence about the house, acknowledging the intermingling of ‘beauty’ and sadness. For instance, he observed that the manor ‘has a sadness about it which is not gloom but the melancholy born of beauty’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 150, no. 152). On another occasion, he remarked that the ‘place looks as beautiful as ever though somewhat melancholy in its flowerless autumn garden’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 167, no. 173). Morris’s first recorded passionate statement about Kelmscott, made after rather than before the commencement of the tenure, did not occur until the summer of 1877, when 130

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he wrote to his wife: ‘I confess I sigh for Kelmscott’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 392, no. 428). He was preparing for a family holiday with a few friends. The following autumn Morris stated ‘I can’t imagine greater pleasure than Kelmscott under such weather’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 499, no. 545). According to Jane Morris, her love affair with Rossetti continued for another two years after he had left the manor. Eloping together was still on the cards until 1876, when their liaison finally ceased. She reportedly confirmed this to Blunt, stating: I was the only person … who had any influence over him [i.e. Rossetti], but I [could] not prevent him from killing himself with choral. I found out how much he took of this in 1876 when I was staying with him in the country … He often promised me to give it up, but he [could] not.When I was staying with him in 1876, May … was with me & he wanted me to go away with him altogether, to leave my children & everything. But you know I [could] not do that. He said I [could] cure him, but I [should] not have been able to do it. After that … I did not see him (FM, WSBD, 1885:15–17). If this was so, the question arises whether in Morris’s mind, his wife’s liberation from the painter’s charms may have freed Kelmscott from the painful associations of the previous years. This interpretation is supported by the fact that not long afterwards, he chose to name his newly acquired Hammersmith residence after the manor, calling it ‘Kelmscott House’, an undeniable sign of his strong affection and attachment to his country home by this time. Even so, the healing process took time, as Morris’s first recorded declaration of love for the manor does not seem to appear until around 1881, when he wrote during a solitary stay there:‘I love the place very much even now when the waters are out: I expect them to be very high tomorrow, but don’t care a pin’ (emphasis added) (WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 69, no. 735). In 1882, the year of Rossetti’s death, Morris observed that Kelmscott has come to be to me the type of the pleasant places of the earth, and of the homes of harmless simple people not overburdened with the intricacies of life; and as others love the race of man through their lovers or their children, so I love the earth through that small space of it. (emphasis added) (Mackail 1899, vol. I: 225) Morris’s wording points to the fact that his deep devotion to the building had not been instantaneous. It is notable that in 1879 Morris contemplated giving up Kelmscott, as evidenced by his letters to Georgiana Burne-Jones (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 524–525, nos. 580a,c,d). His motives are not further documented in his personal papers. Financial considerations may have played a part as Morris was striving to develop his newly-restructured business, whilst his private income from Devon Great Consols had ceased by 1877 (Harvey and Press 1996: 41–42). Given that this was around the time when he was getting increasingly involved in politics, might his change of heart been due to finding the manor too extravagant an expression of his privileged lifestyle? Nevertheless, Morris chose to retain Kelmscott. Right until the late 1880s, when planning for a break from work, Morris would put Kelmscott on a par with other possible destinations.This would suggest that he did not yet consider it as infinitely superior. For example, in February of 1887, after a busy schedule of lectures, he was hoping for a short break and wrote in his diary ‘Try for Rottingdean or Kelmscott’, hesitating between the manor and the Burne-Joneses’ seaside cottage (BL,AddMS45408, Fol. 7r). 131

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It is true that Morris had certainly developed ‘love’ for Kelmscott by the 1880s and endowed it with special values by the 1890s, when it became the symbol of an ideal social order in News from Nowhere (1891) and the trademark of Morris’s fine arts press, the Kelmscott Press, founded in 1891.The extent of Morris’s devotion to the building in the final year of his life, during his terminal illness, is best evidenced by his wife’s letter of 20 April 1896:‘My husband has been ill for about 3 months and he is only just able to take a little journey to Kelmscott, he refuses to go anywhere else (emphasis added) (JMCC 2012: 269, no. 267). It is telling that when in ill health, and most likely aware of his life nearing its end, Morris desired to visit the manor.18 The question arises why Morris never moved to Kelmscott permanently. Mackail argues that even though by the early 1880s Morris’s business was sufficiently well established for him to have been able to give up ‘the conditions of active production to settle down in quietness at his beloved Kelmscott’, he chose not to because of his social conscience. Morris apparently remained in London, the epicentre of social problems and activist efforts, to keep abreast of, rather than retreat from, them (Mackail 1899, vol. II: 30).

Place of Ideal Domesticity versus Suppressed Narratives There is no doubt that by the late 1870s, Kelmscott became a site of celebrating idyllic domesticity, although due to a combination of work commitments and health problems, the Morrises were rarely there together as a complete family unit.There are few surviving contemporaneous accounts of specific visits to the manor. Ancoats founder Charles Rowley’s recollections offer one such rare ‘memory of a tranquil moment of family life at Kelmscott’: After a while Morris slipped off, and soon afterwards we saw him in a summer bower with his head bowed in his wife’s lap, having his hair cropped. What a subject for a picture flashed upon one … wherever either or both of them were it seemed to be supremely perfect and to leave an impress never to be effaced. (Boos 2009: 14) This memory seems to be testament to the charisma of the Morrises, rather than domestic bliss. As Boos notes,‘Rowley was perhaps aware of the tensions in Morris’ marriage’ (2009: 14). Arguably, Philip Webb’s letter offers the most evocative insight into domesticity as one of the defining features of Kelmscott.Webb chose to describe his experience in sensory terms.Writing to Jane Morris and her two daughters on 25 December 1877, he lists what he calls the ‘visible signs’ of the manor: The fire, the draught board, the kittens, & mother Janey coiled up on the sofa—To say nothing of ladders in apple trees, starlings, shooting the foot bridge at the weir, feasts in the dining room, & plum cake in tapestry chamber—Jenny poring over her book, & when disturbed saying ‘bosh’ & May drawing & when criticised saying (internally) ‘bother the fellow’. How much easier is it to remember a picture than a sentence! (PWCC 2016: 134, no. 130) There is no evidence of whether William Morris was present on that occasion. The fact that he is a notable omission from the above picture raises the broader question as to what extent Morris himself was party to the familial domesticity described by Webb. As this chapter has shown, there is certainly evidence of Morris using Kelmscott and environs as a site of quasiIcelandic adventures on the river and antiquarian expeditions. 132

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Moreover, the house bore witness to several suppressed narratives which clash with the romanticised notions of the Morrises’‘happy’ and carefree domesticity at Kelmscott. One prominent example is the use of the manor as a site of Jane Morris’s infidelities.Whereas the subject of Jane Morris’s extramarital affairs with Rossetti in the 1870s, and with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in the 1880s and 1890s, has been accorded ample scholarly attention (Faulkner 1981; Faulkner 1986; Marsh 1986; Marsh 1999a; Parkins 2013), the role of Kelmscott in the latter liaison has not been fully explored. For example, in her monograph Jane Morris.The Burden of History, Parkins addresses the topic in passing: continued visits both to Kelmscott House and Kelmscott Manor allowed Blunt to pay attention to Jane while also developing a friendship with her husband. During a visit to Kelmscott Manor in September 1891, for instance, Blunt effortlessly combined the social conventions of a country-house stay with that of adulterous dalliance: ‘It was very perfect weather, and we [William and Wilfrid] did our gudgeon fishing and walks as usual and I made a little love to Mrs Morris, poor woman, for the quite last time.’ (2013: 45–46) Blunt’s account emphasised the challenging logistics of conducting the affair at Kelmscott, including the inconvenience of passage ‘rooms opening into each other & difficult to be alone in’ and creaking floors (2013: 44–45). He recalled Jane Morris’s habit of leaving a pansy on the floor of her lover’s bedroom at Kelmscott, as ‘a symbolic gift … a signal that Blunt would be welcome to visit her room at night’—a practice which continued until at least 1894 (Parkins 2013: 51). Such a narrative is certainly irreconcilable with a vision of idyllic family life. The Rossetti affair did not come to light until 1949, whilst the Blunt liaison remained a secret until 1972, when the Fitzwilliam Museum lifted the embargo on his diaries. Whilst Morris would have become aware of his wife’s relationship with Rossetti sometime between the autumn of 1871 and the autumn of the following year at the latest, it is not certain if he ever learnt of that with Blunt. Although the latter’s reputation as a philanderer preceded him (Longford: 1979), it is also true that Morris remained friendly with Blunt until the end of his life. He mentioned Blunt’s patronage of Morris & Co. in interviews, took him fishing, and even stayed at his home at Newbuildings in 1896 (Blunt 1918: 282). Blunt’s own thoughts on Morris’s lack of awareness of his involvement with Jane Morris as late as 1889 offer a first-hand perspective: What had taken place between her and Rossetti he knew and had forgiven. But he had not forgotten it. I used to think too that he suspected me at times … even to the point of jealousy. More than once, after having left us alone together, I noted that he had returned suddenly on some pretence … Finding nothing, he was far too generous not to put the thought aside either with her or me—And yet there was reason. (Faulkner 1981: 24) This account seems to suggest Morris never found out. Another suppressed narrative is the role of Kelmscott as both a hideaway and place of recuperation for Morris’s epileptic daughter Jenny, diagnosed with the condition by 1876.This topic has been accorded very little attention. Research into any aspect of Jenny Morris’s life is inhibited by scarce documentary evidence, caused by the censorship of records due to the stigma of epilepsy (Bain 2017: 42–43; Davies 2018b: 31, 41). Moreover, the subject does not fit into the entrenched paradigm of Kelmscott as Morris’s uninterrupted idyll. Marsh hints at this use: 133

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Kelmscott became even more valuable and valued … when Jenny developed epilepsy, in due course becoming permanently disabled by mental impairment. To the end of her long life, it remained her greatest pleasure to be at Kelmscott. (1999b: 5–6) MacCarthy observes that the ‘epileptic attacks which dramatically affected’ Morris’s elder daughter were a taboo subject to Victorian biographers. For instance, Mackail considered references to Jenny’s health in Morris’s intimate letters a source of ‘embarrassment’ (1994: xiii). In his article ‘A Fit of Mania: Epilepsy,Violence and Murder in the Victorian Imagination’, Jack Gann demonstrates that epilepsy was the object of social stigma, being considered a contagious mental health condition in nineteenth-century Britain (2016).19 Some epilepsy sufferers were committed to an asylum, whilst their seizures were believed to be ‘inextricably linked to … violent and aggressive character’. Dickens’s character of Monks from Oliver Twist (1838) contributed to such associations (Gann 2016). According to Celia Davies, ‘sufferers were regarded … as mentally defective or morally degenerate … Segregation and incarceration seemed the only answers’ (2018b: 41). Jenny’s violent seizures reportedly caused much distress not only to the onlookers but also to her mother. In the annotated edition of Jane Morris’s correspondence, Marsh elaborates on the nature of Jenny’s condition and specifically on how her seizures impacted her mother and sister, drawing on a number of testimonials from their friends: Rosalind Howard witnessed one. ‘Several of us were sitting in the garden,’ she wrote, when Jenny ‘had one of her fits. I have never seen anything of the sort before & was horrified.What a horrifying thing it is & how hard it must be for her sister and delicate mother to bear such shocks.’ (Sharp & Marsh 2012: 8) What has not been fully acknowledged in modern scholarship is that, as a consequence, from the late 1870s onwards, Morris frequently looked after Jenny to relieve her mother, whilst Kelmscott became their destination of choice. Blunt remarked on this, stating that Morris had a strong and affectionate heart, and had centred his home affections on his two children … the elder, Jenny, who had been his pride as a child for her intellectual faculties, had overworked her brain and was now subject to epileptic fits. It was touching now at Kelmscott to watch Morris’s solicitude for this poor girl. (Blunt 1918: 29) In fact, both Cockerell’s and Morris’s diaries contain countless references to Morris’s stays at Kelmscott with Jenny, as does Morris’s correspondence. For example, in the spring of 1890, Morris wrote to his mother that Jenny I am glad to say is much better:We think of going to Kelmscott again for Easter. She enjoys the country so much and is so fond of the old house and the garden. (WMCC, vol. III, 1996: 150, no. 1708) He also explained to Kate Faulkner: ‘Janey does not go with us: in fact I am going there to give her a rest as she is far from well’ (WMCC, vol. III, 1996: 151, no. 1710). Morris’s statement implies the detrimental effect of Jenny’s condition on his wife’s health. A contemporaneous account implies that Jenny’s seizures involved an element of delusions and violence. In 1893, Blunt recorded in his diaries:

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Mrs Morris tells me that Jenny really went mad a year and a half ago, thought she had murdered her father and tried to throw herself out of the window. She was so violent she had to be tied down to her bed—she is liable still to returns of it and was in an excited state today. (Faulkner 1981: 33) Kelmscott thus effectively became a place of safe isolation for Morris’s older daughter, a hideaway which provided a pleasant alternative to a lunatic asylum (Griffin: 2021). A previously unpublished photograph of Jenny in the Panelled Room at Kelmscott in the spring of 1902 documents her ongoing association with the manor following her father’s death (Figure 4.9). By 1901, Jane Morris wrote from Kelmscott that Jenny ‘never wearies of this place—where she knows every tree and plant’ (JMCC 2012: 350, no. 388).This level of familiarity implies extensive occupancy of the manor by Jenny by this time. Crucially, when first contemplating the purchase of Kelmscott in 1904, eight years after Morris’s death, one of Jane Morris’s main arguments in favour was not the preservation of her husband’s memory, but rather the fact that the house gratified Jenny. Writing to Cockerell from the manor, Jane Morris thus expounded her three reasons: one is that I think I am just as well at Kelmscott as any:where else in England. The other is that I suppose it will be possible to re-sell the place in case of absolute need … I must keep Jenny with me as long as I find it possible to make a home for her, and she is happy here (emphasis added) (JMCC 2012: 380, no. 427).

Figure 4.9 Jenny Morris in the Panelled Room at Kelmscott, March 1902. Courtesy of the Cheltenham Trust.

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There are three recent studies of specific aspects of Jenny’s condition and life. Celia Davies considers her trial epilepsy treatment at Malvern (Davies 2018a), as well as her life between 1897– 1899, as recorded in rare surviving correspondence with Sydney Cockerell (Davies 2018b). Davies states that after William Morris’s death, ‘decisions about Jenny and her care now fell largely to her mother’, and that from 1897 they spent summers at Kelmscott (2018b: 33–34). Notably, there is evidence of both Jenny Morris hiding from visitors in 1899, as well as Jane Morris shielding her daughter from contact with strangers whilst at Kelmscott in 1909, apparently on account of protecting her from ‘painful experiences’ (Davies 2018b: 39, 42). I would like to argue that these accounts, however, seem to point back to the social stigma of epilepsy and the role of the manor as a hideaway. Rowan Bain’s ‘A tale of two sisters: May and Jenny Morris’ outlines the care arrangements, explaining that for various reasons, following Jane Morris’s death in January 1914, May Morris chose not to take over the care of her sister from her mother, especially as by this point ‘Jenny was already spending extended periods of time away from Kelmscott Manor with her primary carer Ada Culmer’ (Bain 2017: 49). Instead, Jenny was destined to residential care away from Kelmscott, undertaken by the Culmers. Moreover, within several months of Jane Morris’s death, by November 1914, it was decided that the manor set off too painful associations in Jenny (due to grieving for her mother as well as her father), and her visits to Kelmscott were discouraged (Bain 2017: 50). Notably, when Jenny’s carer, Ada Culmer, fell seriously ill in 1917, May Morris did consider whether she should take over her sister’s care arrangements and move her back into Kelmscott, but concluded: I haven’t the training—if I had the strength—to undertake such a serious case as Jenny’s, though I suppose that now I shall have to take up the burden in some form … Jenny is so dependent on intelligent and affectionate care. She is always ill here [i.e. at Kelmscott], and I very much fear if I have to live with her, I shall have to shut up Kelmscott, and I don’t know how to bear that. (emphasis added) (WMG: MM-SC, 02.09.1917, S4.3.16) The context of the above letter implies that by this point, May Morris’s attachment to the manor and the memorialisation of her father’s legacy through Kelmscott took precedence over safeguarding her sister’s comfort. Other correspondence with Cockerell in this sequence reveals that by this time May kept open house, providing access to Morris pilgrims. For example, John de Navarro was ‘to stay the night, so that he could have a quiet time with Father all at his leisure’ (WMG: MM-SC, 02.08.1917, S4.3.16). In another missive, she mentions posting out the ‘Kelmscott leaflet’—an illuminating insight into May Morris’s efforts to promote Kelmscott as a memorial to her father (WMG: MM-SC, 03.02.1917, S4.3.16).The reference to Jenny being ‘always ill’ at the manor relates to the apparently painful associations of the house. Nevertheless, when May was formulating her will and testament in 1926, bequeathing Kelmscott to the University of Oxford, she stipulated that whilst ‘the rooms now shown to the public should be open to visitors at reasonable times’ the University ‘would provide for … Miss Jane Alice Morris … having the entire use of the house for a month in the summer, should she so desire’—if she outlived the testatrix (M. Morris 1926, n.p.; Dufty 1963: 114). In the light of the place of Kelmscott in Jenny’s life and heart, May Morris’s stipulation sought to ensure continuing access to the manor for her.

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Conclusion Although Morris never considered Kelmscott as his ‘home’ or intended to live there permanently, he chose to retain the lease for the last 25 years of his life, the longest period he was associated with any one property. During this time, the manor proved not only restorative and inspirational, but also an important site of his work, seeing the production of a number of his prose romances and several significant Morris & Co. designs and commissions. In addition to offering Morris a rare chance to rest, Kelmscott also became a hub of his social life, providing a meeting place for a number of cultural figures of the day. It was only during his semi-retirement from Morris & Co. in spring 1890 that Morris was able to make the most of Kelmscott, finally being in the position to spend a considerable proportion of the year there. Contrary to a common view, Kelmscott did not instantaneously become Morris’s ‘most loved’ house. Instead, he developed an increasing attachment to the manor over the years, with the house becoming his favourite location in the final decade of his life. *** Given some of the suppressed narratives played out at the manor, and the fact that it never served as Morris’s principal residence, the question arises of why it was Kelmscott Manor which was ultimately considered as the most fitting contender for the status of a Morris memorial in the aftermath of his death, and how the house has come to be intrinsically associated with Morris to the detriment of D.G. Rossetti’s memory.This complex subject is investigated in the Ph. D. thesis ‘Between History and Cultural Memory: Dante Gabriel Rossetti,William Morris and the Making of Kelmscott Manor (1871–1938)’ (Griffin 2021). Here I argue that a number of historical, cultural, social, circumstantial and economic factors contributed to this result.The vicissitudes, appearance and connotations of Morris’s remaining properties no doubt played a part in what became a process of elimination. For example, two of Morris’s residences—26 Queen Square and Horrington House—had been demolished not long after the Morris family’s occupancy. Red House was likewise impracticable, despite Morris’s vital input into its creation, his great attachment to the building, and the property’s significance in design and iconographic terms (Kirk 2005: 20–35; Dudkiewicz 2016: 3–18; Wild 2018). Not only was it solely representative of his early life, but it had remained in private hands following Morris’s departure in 1865 and throughout the 20th century. It was not until 2003 that it was finally opened to the general public, following its long-overdue acquisition by the National Trust.20 Kelmscott House was also problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, Morris had ambivalent feelings about it. He viewed it satisfactory as far as London properties were concerned, but inadequate by the standards of a country house, referring to his Hammersmith garden as a ‘substitute of a garden’. Morris also considered some of its internal architectural features as ‘ugly’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 457, no. 503). Its plain external appearance of a ‘Georgian box’ was not deemed remarkable, picturesque, or historic by the Victorians (Anon, Pall Mall Gazette 1891: 1–2; Anon, Cassell’s Saturday Journal, 1890: 80–82; Burton 2005: 238–240, 247). For instance, Mackail described it as ‘ugly without being mean’ (Mackail 1899, vol. I: 371). Moreover, by the 1890s, the house had become widely known as the ‘centre of Socialism’ when this political orientation was a taboo and a threat to the Establishment (Anon, Pall Mall Gazette 1891: 1–2).The above considerations would have imbued it with ambivalent and controversial connotations. Kelmscott, on the other hand, had the ‘romance’ of an authentic ‘Old English’ building, displaying a number of ‘Elizabethan’ architectural features, despite its somewhat later construction.

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From 1890 onwards Kelmscott became closely associated with Morris thanks to its literary depiction in his most famous literary work, News from Nowhere (1891a), becoming the symbol of preindustrial England and the ideal of simple life in unspoilt countryside. Given that Morris held Kelmscott for 25 years, and that the house encapsulated his ideas about history and society, it was only appropriate that Kelmscott village became his final resting place. Notably, an extensive section of Morris’s obituary, written by Aymer Vallace, elaborated on his commitment to the preservation of historic buildings, portrayed as closest to his heart:‘the cause which all who desire to interpret aright his life’s work will place first in any memorial to him’ (Vallance 1896: 6). In this light, turning Kelmscott into a Morris memorial was a literal embodiment of his prime preoccupation and commitment to the safeguarding of historic monuments. Out of all of his houses, Kelmscott was the only truly historic building. After Morris’s death, the manor came to be the last residence of his widow and daughters. It thus not only became the repository of the Morris family possessions and the ‘headquarters’ of Jane and May Morris’s memorialising practices, but also a destination for Morris pilgrims. And finally, the village of Kelmscott further became the site of multiple physical memorials to Morris—the Philip Webb Memorial Stone (i.e., Morris’s grave), Morris Memorial Cottages, and the Morris Memorial Hall—helping to keep the reformer’s memory alive.

Acknowledgements This chapter is dedicated to Florence Boos and Linda Parry, whose mentorship and encouragement with my Kelmscott research has kept me going.Thanks are due to my Ph. D. supervisors at Central Saint Martins (UAL)—Professor Caroline Dakers, Dr Michaela Giebelhausen and Judy Willcocks, as well as Rowan Bain, Roisin Inglesby, Ainsley Vinall, James Gray and Mhairi Muncaster (William Morris Gallery), Janet Frost, Sir Donald Insall, Stewart Grimshaw, Dr Patricia Morison, Betsy Newell, Patricia O’Connor, Sally and David Sandys-Renton, Dr Alison Smith and Hilary Underwood. The Monument Trust and the Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship have kindly supported this research. Anna Mason offered comments on the draft of this chapter. Last but not least, I would like to thank my husband,Ted Griffin, and my parents Anna and Piotr Dudkiewicz for their invaluable support.

Notes 1 http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/kelmscott-manor, accessed 30 September 2015. 2 Kelmscott Manor was awarded Provisional Registration as a museum in 1993, followed by Full Registration in 2002. Information provided by Anooshka Rawden, Society of Antiquaries of London, on 12 September 2016. 3 In comparison to considerable levels of SPAB’s involvement with geographically distant/isolated counties such as Yorkshire, Devon or Kent.West’s presentation and calculation of data in the table of ‘Cases before the SPAB Committee: Numbers and Location, 1877–97’ employs division into regions developed by English Heritage. Nevertheless, an independent analysis of the data presented by West proves Frank Sharp’s argument, even though West does not present this conclusion. 4 Scholars have also cited significant gaps in the Morrises’ correspondence as well as the publication of the cartoon series ‘A legend of Camelot’ (Punch, 3–31 March 1866) as clues in support of an earlier start of the Rossetti–Jane Morris relationship (e.g. Parry 2007: 95).The dating of the extramarital affair must ultimately remain inconclusive due to dearth of evidence. 5 Having previously served as Rossetti’s studio and literary assistant (1869–70), Murray also undertook work for the prospective co-tenants’ interior decoration firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. 6 Harvey and Press also state that from 1889, a year before Morris’s retirement, J. H. Dearle had taken charge of all important Morris & Co. commissions (1991: 194).

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‘Kelmscott Manor. Mr Morris’s Country Place’ (1871–1896) 7 For example, in the summer of 1876, Morris’s wife and daughters chose to spend the summer by the seaside—in Deal, Kent (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 309, no. 336). The following year, Morris remarked: ‘My wife is bound to the Broadway Beacon for her health’s sake’ (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 386, no. 422). Other destinations included the residences of George and Rosalind Howard in Cumbria and Italy.The Howards were not only friends of the Morrises but also important clients of Morris & Co. Expressing his great thanks to Rosalind Howard in 1877 for inviting his family for a winter at their home in Oneglia on the Italian Riviera, Morris acknowledged that the trip would undoubtedly ‘do them all good’ as his wife and daughters were all poorly (WMCC, vol. I, 1984: 394, no. 433). Both Italy and the British coast became recurrent destinations. For example, Lyme Regis in Dorset served the Morris women as a ‘healthy’ getaway for about five months in 1883, from around January to May (WMCC, vol. II, 1987: 145, no. 835; 196, no. 875). From 1880, when the Burne-Joneses took on a cottage in the coastal Rottingdean (Sussex), it became a frequent holiday location for the Morris family members (e.g. JMCC 2012: 108, no. 85). 8 Elizabeth Longford,‘Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008, accessed on 1 June 2018. 9 135 visitors excluding the Morris family members. 10 There are also several contemporaneous references to Morris’s peacock topiary design. 11 This letter, unpublished in Kelvin, has been discovered by Frank Sharp. 12 Many thanks to Anna Mason for bringing this to my attention. 13 His political activism had not begun by then. 14 The spirit of the first trip was captured in a contemporaneous account jointly created by the travel companions.The manuscript (BL Add MS 45407A) was reprinted in an abridged form in the William Morris Society Journal in 1977 (Baïssus 1977: 2–11). 15 May Morris’s inventory of the manor (Memorandum, 1926) ascribes one piece of furniture to the Turners, referring to the ‘round table’ in the Dining Room as an ‘old Turner table fixture when we came’. May Morris was nine years old when Kelmscott was rented. Her Memorandum, compiled 55 years later, cannot be deemed reliable as it contains a number of factual errors (Dudkiewicz 2015). 16 I.e. a horse-drawn wagon used in Victorian times to carry goods. 17 The appearance of Rossetti’s bed from Tudor House was depicted by his studio assistant, Dunn, in a watercolour of the artist’s bedroom of 1882.The bed had been in situ since circa 1862 (DGRCC, vol. 2, 2005, no. 62.69; see also 62.65). 18 Morris eventually succumbed to medical advice regarding the benefits of sea air, undertaking trips to Folkestone and Norway. 19 http://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/blogs/a-fit-of-mania-epilepsy-violence-murder-victorian-imagination; accessed on 1 June 2018. 20 In the 1930s, there was an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Red House for public benefit (Marsh 2005: 126).

References and Further Reading Primary Sources Anon (1890), ‘Representative Men at Home: Mr. William Morris at Hammersmith’, Cassell’s Saturday Journal, 18 October. Anon (1891),‘The Poet as Printer:An interview with Mr.William Morris’, Pall Mall Gazette, 12 November. Anon (1893),‘Master Printer Morris:A Visit to the Kelmscott Press’, Daily Chronicle, 22 February. Anon (1895), ‘Do People Appreciate the Beautiful? A Chat with Mr. William Morris’, Cassell’s Saturday Journal, 9 October. Aplin, John (ed.) (PWCC) (2016), The Letters of Philip Webb, Routledge, 4 vols. Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society (1888), Catalogue of the First Exhibition, Chiswick Press. Baïssus, J. M. (ed.) (1977), ‘The Expedition of The Ark’, The Journal of William Morris Studies,Vol. 3, No. 3, Spring, pp. 2–11. Board of Trade (1914), Arts Décoratifs de Grande-Bretagne et d’Irlande. Exposition Organisée par le Gouvernement Britannique, Palais du Louvre, Pavillon de Marsan,Avril-Octobre. Bornand, Odette (ed.) (WMRD) (1977), The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–1873, edited with an introd. and notes by Odette Bornand, Clarendon Press.

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Julia Griffin Cox, David (ed.) (1974),‘Edmund New’s Diary of a Visit to Kelmscott Manor’, The Journal of William Morris Studies,Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring. Ellis, Frederick Startridge (1898),‘The Life-Work of William Morris’, published in the Journal of the Society of Arts, 27 May. Fitzgerald, Penelope (ed.) (1982), The Novel on Blue Paper by William Morris (1872), Journeyman Press. Fredeman, William (et al.) (DGRCC) (2002–2015), The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, D. S. Brewer with The Modern Humanities Research Association, 9 vols. Kelvin, Norman (ed.) (WMCC) (1984–1996), The Collected Letters of William Morris, Princeton University Press, 4 vols. Lazarus, Emma (1886),‘A Day in Surrey with William Morris’, The Century Magazine. Morris, May (1916), A Visit of the Workers’ Educational Association to Kelmscott Manor, 15 July 1916. ––––– (1926), Memorandum, 17 June (part of Will and Testament of Mary Morris), London Probate Department (HM Courts & Tribunals Service). ––––– (1928), Morris Memorial Hall Fundraising Leaflet, dated March 1928. ––––– (1939), Will and Testament of Mary Morris, Died 16 October 1938, Probate 27 January 1939, London Probate Department (HM Courts & Tribunals Service). Morris,William (1891a), News From Nowhere or an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, Reeves & Turner. ––––– (1891b), Poems by the Way, Reeves & Turner. ––––– (1895),‘Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames’, The Quest, November. Sharp, Frank and Marsh, Jan (eds.) (JMCC) (2012), The Collected Letters of Jane Morris,The Boydell Press. Surtees,Virginia (ed.) (1980), The Diaries of George Price Boyce, Real World. Vallance, William Howard Aymer (1896), ‘The Late William Morris. Art Craftsman and Poet’, The Artist, Extra number, 12 October. Wharton,T. G. and Martin and Co. (1882), 16, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The Valuable Contents of the Residence of Dante G. Rossetti, (Deceased),To be Sold by Auction, 5, 6, 7 July 1882.

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‘Kelmscott Manor. Mr Morris’s Country Place’ (1871–1896) West, Jenny (2005), ‘The SPAB: Committee, Membership and Casework 1877–96’, in Chris Miele (ed.), From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity, 1877–1939, Yale University Press, pp. 299–322. Wild, Tessa (2018), William Morris and his Palace of Art: Architecture, Interiors and Design at Red House, Philip Wilson Publishers. Young, Bette Roth (1995), Emma Lazarus in her World: Life and Letters, Jewish Publication Society.

Manuscripts and Archives Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum: Diary of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (FM WSBD) Cheltenham, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum Archive: Emery Walker Library Archive. Delaware, Delaware Museum Archive, USA,The Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Pre-Raphaelite Manuscript Collection (DMA): Alfred Darbyshire’s correspondence with Samuel Bancroft. Delaware, Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware, USA: William Morris, ‘The Wind’s on the Wold’ also known as ‘To the Bed at Kelmscott’ manuscript, circa 1891–1893. London, British Library (BL): Add MS 45338–45341: Family correspondence between William Morris, his wife and daughters. Add MS 45407: Descriptive Account by William Morris of an Expedition by Boat from Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith, to Kelmscott Manor, Lechlade, Oxon.; 10–16 August 1880. Add MS 45407B: William Morris’s Work Diary for the Year 1881. Add MS 45408: William Morris’s Work Diary for the Year 1887. Add MS 45409: William Morris’s Work Diary for the Year 1893. Add MS 45410: William Morris’s Work Diary for the Year 1895. Add MS 45411: William Morris’s Work Diary for the Year 1896. Add MS 45412: Kelmscott Manor Visitors’ Book, Kelmscott Manor (1889–1904). Add MS 88957/5/44: Gordon Bottomley: Kelmscott Ephemera, 1895–1931. Add MS 49466: Hake Papers. Correspondence of Dr Thomas Gordon Hake with his sons, 1868–1887. Add MS 49470: Hake Papers. Correspondence of Dr Thomas Gordon Hake. Add MS 52627–52633: Sydney Cockerell’s Diaries for the Years 1890–1896. Add MS 52772: Sydney Cockerell’s Miscellaneous Papers. London,William Morris Gallery (WMG): S4.3.16, S4.3.20, S4.3.21 & S4.3.23: Ronald Briggs Gift of Morris Papers. Frederick Evans:‘Photographs of Kelmscott’. Set given by Evans to William Morris (1896–1897). Edmund Hort New: Original Illustrations for Mackail’s Life, including unpublished designs. Los Angeles, Clark (William Andrews) Memorial Library, University of California, USA: MS.2011.003: ‘Illustrations of the Homes of William Morris’: Memorial Album Compiled by Sydney Cockerell, circa 1900. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA (MET): 68.519: Photographs of Kelmscott Manor by Frederick Evans Compiled into a ‘William Morris Memorial Album’, c. 1897. New York, Morgan Library, USA: PML 77311.1:‘Kelmscott Manor’ Photographs by Frederick H. Evans, c. 1897.

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Abbreviations for Published Editions of Personal Papers Published editions of personal papers, including collected correspondence, are abbreviated as follows (initials of the historical figure followed by suffix: CC for Collected Correspondence; D for Diary): DGRCC Collected Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti Fredeman,William (et al.) (2002–2015), The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, D. S. Brewer with The Modern Humanities Research Association, 9 vols. JMCC Collected Correspondence of Jane Morris Sharp, Frank and Marsh, Jan (eds.) (2012), The Collected letters of Jane Morris,The Boydell Press. PWCC Collected Correspondence of Philip Webb Aplin, John (ed.) (2016), The Letters of Philip Webb, Routledge, 4 vols. WMCC Collected Correspondence of William Morris Kelvin, Norman (ed.) (1984–1996), The Collected Letters of William Morris, Princeton University Press, 4 vols. WMRD Diary of William Michael Rossetti Bornand, Odette (ed.) (1977), The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–1873/Edited with an Introd. Notes by Odette Bornand, Clarendon Press.

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5 ‘WHAT CAME WE FORTH FOR TO SEE THAT OUR HEARTS ARE SO HOT WITH DESIRE’: MORRIS AND ICELAND Martin Stott

Synopsis This chapter explains why the four months Morris spent in Iceland in 1871 and 1873 were so transformational for him. It focuses on the prose and poetry he wrote during and immediately after these journeys, particularly his Journals. It situates his interests in Iceland and the sagas in the context of the Victorian-era enthusiasm for them. It examines his subsequent output of narrative poetry based on the sagas, the political impact on him of these visits, and the extent to which the latter provided inspiration for his fantasy writings, the “late romances.” The essay also considers the impact of Morris both on Iceland and its people, and his influence on travellers to and travel writers on Iceland from his death in 1896 to the present day. It explores whether a thread of Morris’s experience of Iceland can be drawn through his descriptions of Iceland in his translations, narrative poetry and fantasy writing and the influence these had on the subsequent work of writers such as Tolkien, through to current trends in popular culture such as graphic novels, games and visual media such as Game of Thrones. In raising these questions, the chapter sets out some possible directions for future research for Morris scholars interested in Iceland and its impact on him.

Introduction: Why Morris Went to Iceland and Why It Matters William Morris travelled to Iceland twice, once in 1871 and again in 1873. Essentially there were two reasons, one negative and one positive. The negative motivation was the strains in his marriage to Jane Morris, ‘Janey’ to all who knew her, and her relationship with the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Morris had left Janey, their children Jenny and May, and Rossetti in residence at Kelmscott Manor, a house he had taken in joint tenancy with Rossetti just a few months before, perhaps even then recognising the reality of their affair, something which he considered to be a deep personal failure. By leaving them in seclusion together, he had hopes that something that had been dragging on for long enough could lead to some kind of definite conclusion. He also may have felt the need to undergo a ‘trial by ordeal,’ a psychological compensation for his “failure.” Such a trial could of course have involved a trek across the Sahara or 145

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similar physical challenge, but Iceland was chosen as the destination for more positive reasons. His expedition was a definite quest, a desire to find something in the wilderness of Iceland. Morris’s journey was also in part a response to his intellectual engagement with Iceland’s culture and language. Indeed his language teacher and collaborator in translations, Eiríkr Magnússon, himself an Icelander, accompanied him, along with his old friend from university days, Charlie Faulkner, and a third travelling companion,W. H. Evans, who had been invited to share the expense.With these three as company, the journey was not as grief-stricken as its initial motivation might suggest. Morris, who was 37 at the time of the first trip, was cutting himself off decisively from old allegiances. His new passion for the sagas was in itself a discarding of Rossetti,‘the man of the South,’ and Italianate Pre-Raphaelite influences, in favour of the bluntness of Old Norse literature and the carefree nature of male comradeship. Morris was a designer and a craftsman, and it was characteristic of his practical and resilient nature to reconfigure and reconstruct. The journey was by mail boat,1 the 240-tonne Diana, which set off on the evening of Saturday 8 July from Granton Harbour, Edinburgh, to Iceland via Torshaven in the Faroe Islands, arriving in Reykjavik on Friday 14 July. When in Iceland the party travelled on horseback. Including mounts for guides and pack animals, they numbered 20 ponies in all. Morris became so attached to the latter that he brought back to England one ‘Mouse’ for his daughters, which lived out its days at Kelmscott Manor.The party mostly camped, and from time to time stayed in farmsteads, or occasionally in more salubrious circumstances with a local official.The expedition lasted just over two months, from 6 July to 7 September 1871, and throughout that time Morris, who was in charge of the cooking, kept a journal. It was intended to be a private record for his close friend Georgiana Burne-Jones rather than for publication, and along with its companion journal of his 1873 trip, it was not published until 1911, 15 years after his death at the age of 62. His time in Iceland amounted to barely four months, including the sea journeys to and from Edinburgh, but the impact on his life and works was out of all proportion to its duration. Morris was a major figure in the late nineteenth century; by 1871 he was already well known for his poetry and decorative artwork. His reputation in these fields enhanced the impact of his Norse and Icelandic-related work. Nowadays he still is a major figure in the worlds of design, literature, conservation and arguably politics – the quintessential English socialist immortalised by E. P.Thompson. But the interpretation of the legacy of his Iceland-related endeavours has been much more mixed, even speculative. In this chapter, I will try to set out the various strands to that legacy, evaluate their current significance and suggest some fruitful areas for future research.

Iceland in the Victorian Imagination William Morris was not the first English ‘man of letters’ to visit Iceland, but arguably his visits have had the greatest lasting impact both in Iceland and abroad.As mentioned, he travelled there in 1871 and again in 1873, and his experiences of those journeys are recorded in his Icelandic Journals as well as in the poems that the trips inspired, ‘Iceland First Seen’ and ‘Gunnar’s Howe above the house at Lithend.’ In Iceland, both trips commenced and finished in Reykjavik. The first journey focused on the south and west of Iceland, with the Morris party setting out south and east into Njáls saga country, including a short visit to the Þórsmörk valley. At this point, the party headed north as far as Hnausar and then west to the Snæfellnes peninsula, then turned south to return to Reykjavik via Þingvellir. The 1873 journey was more ambitious in scope, taking in much more rugged country. It included a longer visit to the Þórsmörk valley before turning north to cross the central Icelandic desert on the Sprengisandur, a route which is open even nowadays for only about eight weeks a year, then venturing east to Lake Mývatn 146

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and the Dettifoss waterfall. From there the travellers turned west to Iceland’s second settlement Akureyri, before returning cross-country to Reykjavik, again via Þingvellir [Plate 5.1]. Morris’s interest in Iceland sprang from his interest in the sagas and the Edda. By the mid1860s he had read Thomas Percy’s translation of Paul Henri Mallet’s Northern Antiquities (1847), which Karl Anderson describes as ‘a vast storehouse of information on which … Morris seems to have drawn in writing both versions of the prologue to the Earthly Paradise.’2 (Anderson 1940, 44) During and after the publication of The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), which included two saga-based tales, ‘The Story of Aslaug’ and ‘The Lovers of Gudrun,’ Morris threw himself into learning Icelandic and then translating Icelandic sagas with his collaborator Eiríkr Magnússon. Together they published The Story of Grettir the Strong in 1869; The Völsung Saga, which included their translations of 13 poems from the Elder Edda, in 1870; and Three Northern Love Stories in 1875.They also translated a further five sagas which were not published until 20 years later as the first two volumes of the six-volume Saga Library (1890–1905), with parts of the Heimskringla (vols. 3–5) also worked up in this early period.At the same time, Morris was producing his own extended narrative poems, the most complex of which was his 1876 epic Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, which was profoundly influenced by his two trips to Iceland.3 As in so many other fields of endeavour to which he turned his hand, Morris was prolific.The Victorians, as so ably demonstrated by Andrew Wawn in his book The Vikings and the Victorians, had a strong affinity for the north and the Vikings in particular, and Wawn makes the case for Morris as the Victorian Old Northernist: He wrote by far the best Victorian poems on eddic and saga subjects. His Icelandic journals, with their arresting personal subtext, offer a unique blend of complex responses to ancient saga-steads, and sharp eyed sensitivity to the shifting moods and colours of modern Icelandic nature. By their philological alertness the saga translations of Morris and his (too easily ignored) collaborator Eiríkr Magúusson earned an honoured place in the history of attempts to tune in the English language to these elusive narratives – ‘Morrisian’ language, for all the disdain it could generate, attracted many admirers. (Wawn 2000, 249) It is worth rehearsing the grand scale of Morris’s contribution to, and engagement with, Icelandic culture.Wawn itemises these writings: translations of some two dozen sagas, verse translations of Danish ballads, sonnets on saga heroes, lyrics triggered by saga reading and saga-stead visits, translations and reanimations of eddic legends, prose romances set in misty old northern locations, lectures about old Iceland culture, Iceland diaries, journalism about modern Icelandic famine and a hefty bundle of Icelandic-related letters to Icelandophile friends. [Wawn 2000, 249–50] As he puts it, the stuff of a big book rather than a single chapter. Morris was however far from being the only eminent Victorian to travel to Iceland.The path had already been well trodden from the 18th century onward, including by the notable botanist Sir Joseph Banks in 1772, and another botanist William Hooker in 1809, who published a twovolume Recollections of Iceland in 1811.The Rev. Ebenezer Henderson spent the winter of 1814– 15 in Iceland and published Iceland: Or a Journal of a residence in that Island during the years 1814 and 1815 (2 vols, 1818), which ran to four editions and was widely admired in Iceland. Icelandic academic J. K. Helgason characterises these early descriptions as ‘the product of expeditions 147

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which were particularly motivated by an interest in the country’s geology and nature. Most of the parties arriving between 1772 to 1834 headed for one or all of the “lions” of Iceland: Mt Hekla, Geysir and Þingvellir in the south of the country.At this time however Iceland’s ancient literature and culture were rarely mentioned.’ (Helgason 2017, 107) Lord Dufferin visited on his private yacht in 1856 and his Letters from high latitudes was published in 1857. Sir Richard Burton followed Morris in 1872, publishing Ultima Thule; or a summer in Iceland in 1875, and Anthony Trollope also visited in 1878. In fact the path to Iceland was so well-trodden that Morris found his visit to Geysir disappointing because of the tourist litter he found in what he had hoped to be an unspoilt wilderness.While other Victorian writers and artists such as George Dasent (1861 and 1866) Samuel Waller (1874) and W. G. Collingwood, whose book A pilgrimage to the saga-steads of Iceland (1899), written jointly with Jón Stefansson, certainly influenced the Victorian and subsequent imaginations of Iceland, Morris’s influence is the easiest to trace and by far the most prominent today. In the nineteenth century, the British liberal tradition saw Iceland as the birthplace of democracy and the source of the third set of great classics – alongside those of Greece and Rome – the sagas. They admired Iceland for these contributions to western civilisation and wanted to celebrate them and give them the prominence they felt they deserved in the wider canon of European intellectual thought. Iceland, home of the Edda and the saga, was practically a household word to the educated Victorian, arguably more so than it is today, despite the writings of Sjon, the music of Bjork or the art of Ragnar Kjartansson, all figures with worldwide reputations. Morris’s poetry, translations, and essays thus all fed a public appetite which had been nurtured over several decades by a host of enthusiasts including antiquarians, historians, naturalists, explorers, poets and authors. But Morris was very much the lodestar. His narrative poems earned him an international reputation as Victorian Britain’s most arresting poetic spokesman for the old north, and according to Fiona MacCarthy, The Earthly Paradise, which included two Scandinavian tales, was reportedly the mainstay of mid-Victorian picnics and the work that George Eliot used to take out into the woods to read aloud (MacCarthy 1994, 264). An obsession with ‘Vikingism’ was a reflection of the era, and at a time of bewildering social change, it was quite possible to read into the sagas whatever social construction the reader sought, as Wawn puts it:‘variously buccaneering, triumphalist, defiant, confused, disillusioned, unbiddable, disciplined, elaborately pagan, austerely pious, relentlessly jolly or self-destructively sybaritic’ (Wawn 2000, 4).

Earlier Discussions of the Icelandic Journals A common interpretation was that Nordic culture had been one of benevolent despotism, exemplified in the Norse god Odin, the strong inspired leader, the firm-willed man of action and saviour of his people who appealed to the Victorian imperial instinct. But as television host Magnus Magnússon reminds us in his introduction to the 1996 edition of the Icelandic Journals,4 Morris had a rather different agenda: ‘To Morris … the Viking was the emblem of the hard working iron-willed Socialist who respected individuality, but had no time for individualism’ (Magnus Magnússon, xix). In fact Morris did not say a great deal in public about how Iceland influenced his later socialism, but in a letter to his friend and comrade in the Social Democratic Federation, Andreas Scheu, on 15 September 1883, he wrote: ‘In 1871 I went to Iceland with Mr Magnússon, and, apart from my pleasure in seeing that romantic desert, I learned one lesson there, thoroughly I hope, that the most grinding poverty is a trifling evil compared with the inequality of classes’ (Kelvin 1987, 2: 229); and in an 1887 lecture to the Hammersmith Socialist

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League entitled “The Early Literature of the North – Iceland,” Morris concluded with some decidedly political observations for his Socialist League audience: I may finish by saying a word on the present condition of Iceland: they have suffered very much there from bad seasons of late: but I cannot help thinking that in spite of that they could live there very comfortably if they were to extinguish individualism there: the simplest possible form of co-operative commonwealth would suit their needs, and ought not to be hard to establish; as there is no crime there, and no criminal class or class of degradation and education is universal: and unless by some special perversity should the question of politics stand in the way: the only persons who would be losers by it would be the present exploiters of this brave and kind people and if these men were all shipped off to – well Davy Jones, there would be many a dry eye at their departure. (LeMire 1969, 198) Before his trips to Iceland, Morris was viewed by himself and others primarily as a poet and artist, and his first approach to Iceland was as a poet and translator, which was how he was received in Iceland. But the experience of Iceland itself, a centrepiece of Morris’s mid-life, enabled him to draw, as E. P.Thompson put it,‘a draught of courage and hope which was the prelude for his entry into active political life in the later 1870’s’ (Thompson 1955, 186). Magnus Magnússon points to Morris’s major Norse-inspired work, his 1876 Sigurd the Volsung, described by George Bernard Shaw as ‘the greatest epic since Homer,’ as the poem where he welded his own social vision:‘There budding from the unlikely stalk of tough Norse heroic legend, is the social dream which was to define itself into a Socialist programme and become the vision of all the political writing of Morris’s last twenty years’ (Magnus Magnússon, xxi).This then is ‘what we came forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire’ (“Iceland First Seen”).

The Personal and the Spiritual Apart from a short-lived Socialist Diary covering about three months in early 1887, Morris’s Icelandic Journals are the only reflections on his life written primarily for a personal audience. As such their unmediated style shines a particularly intimate light on him at a time of personal turmoil. MacCarthy explains their significance: this is the only part of Morris’s life for which we have his own record of day to day events written with a sympathetic female reader in his mind.The journal has a wonderful immediacy, consisting not just of its conventional traveller’s descriptions of the passing scene, though these must rate amongst the best prose Morris ever wrote. Its peculiar quality arises from the subtext, revealing the responses he kept from his fellow travellers, emotions that in a sense subverted the male camaraderie, whole networks of private apprehensions and joys. (MacCarthy 1994, 281) Morris wrote his 1871 journal at high speed and in conditions that were far from ideal. Making it readable for its intended audience, Georgiana, was more of a struggle, and he only completed the fair copy (Fitzwilliam Library 25 C) days before his departure on his second trip in 1873.The traveller’s first view of Iceland was on the morning of 13 July from the deck of the Diana, which had brought them from Scotland via the Faroe Islands. Morris records the moment:

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It was about three a.m. when I went up on deck for that great excitement, the first sight of a new land.The morning was grey still, and cloudy out to sea but though the sun had not yet shone over the mountains on the east into the firth at whose mouth we were, yet patches of it lay upon the high peaks southwest of where we were: on our left was a dark brown ragged rocky island, Papey, and many small skerries about it, and beyond that we saw the mainland, a terrible shore indeed: a great mass of dark grey mountains worked into pyramids and shelves, looking as if they had been built and half ruined; they were striped with snow high up, and wreaths of cloud dragged across them here and there, and above them were two peaks and a jagged ridge of pure white snow. (Collected Works 8: 19) Throughout, the journals focus on descriptions of sky, sea and emerging landscapes, interspersed with observations on who would have been there a thousand years earlier rather than the people of his day – ‘the grey peak is Svinafell, under which dwelt Flossi the Burner,’‘ahead there lies now a low shelf of rock between jokull and sea, and that is Ingolfshofði, where Ingolf first sat down in the autumn of 874’ – but of the locals, practically nothing.The trading station Djúpivogur, their first landfall, is encapsulated as just ‘half a dozen wooden roofs, a flagstaff and two schooners lying at anchor.’The contrast between this spare prose and the impact this first sighting of Iceland had on his poem “Iceland First Seen” is striking. Lo from our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen; Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea, And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green: And a peak rises up on the west, from the meeting of cloud and sea, Foursquare from base unto point like the building of Gods that have been, The last of that waste of the mountains all cloud-wreathed and snow-flecked and grey, And bright with the dawn that began just now at the ending of day. Ah! What came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire? It is enough for our rest, the sight of this desolate strand, And the mountain-waste voiceless as death but for winds that may sleep not nor tire? Why do we long to wend forth through the length and breadth of a land, Dreadful with grinding of ice and record of scarce hidden fire, But that there mid the grey grassy dales sore scarred by the ruining streams Lives the tale of the Northland of old and the undying glory of dreams? (CW 9: 125) In this there is a much more personal response, one that MacCarthy characterises as being of awe, alarm and self-questioning, an internal debate between horror and hopefulness (MacCarthy 1994: 286). Morris’s knowledge of and instinctive sympathy for the sagas had instilled in him a desire to see the land in which these remarkable narratives had been played out, and indeed travellers like Morris, drawn to Iceland primarily by its literary heritage, frequently saw their visits as having an element of pilgrimage, a term Morris quite readily accepts for his own adventure:‘I was quite ready to break my neck in my quality of pilgrim to the holy places of Iceland; to be drowned in Markfleet or squelched in climbing up Drangey seemed to come quite in the day’s work’ (CW 8: 67). Indeed, in “The Early Literature of the North,” Morris introduces the subject by referring to his affection for Icelanders, whose “country is to me a Holy Land” (LeMire 1969, 181). 150

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Philippa Bennett argues that the spiritual nature of the experience was crucial to Morris’s understanding of the place:“Whilst other visitors looked at, rode through, took samples from, sketched and wrote about Iceland, Morris wondered at it” (Bennett, 62). She identifies a series of occasions on his journeys when he experienced moments of ‘infinite wonder’ such as when on his arrival at the Þingmeads plain, the site of the AlÞing established in 930, he wrote,“that thin thread of insight and imagination, which comes so seldom to us, and is such a joy when it comes, did not fail me at this first sight of the greatest marvel and most storied place of Iceland” (25 August 1871, CW 8: 168). Bennett argues that this epiphanic response explains the notable influence of Iceland’s landscape on the series of romances he wrote near the end of his life. With his last romances, Morris is credited with being a major figure in the emergence of the science fiction and fantasy genres that were developed in the twentieth century by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and which include figures as diverse as H. G.Wells and recent American writers Ursula Le Guin and Marge Piercy. Morris wrote a series of seven fantasies at the end of his life which can be broadly divided into two groups: The Story of the Glittering Plain, considered to be the most Icelandic of Morris’s prose narratives; The Roots of the Mountains and The House of the Wolfings,5 written between 1888 and 1890, a relatively heroic group; and from 1894, a further four volumes, The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, The Water of the Wondrous Isles and The Sundering Flood, all in a more romantic style. The Sundering Flood was left uncompleted on his deathbed. The presence of Icelandic landscapes in these romances is clear, with striking similarities between passages in the Journals and Morris’s final narratives. Bennett remarks that ‘It is in the mountainous regions of the last romances that this wondering engagement with the landscape is at its most intense.This is by no means surprising in the context of the marvelling responses that mountains have for centuries evoked in the human mind as geological structures representative in Ruskin’s words of “a link between heaven and earth”’ (Bennett, 65). She further argues that the tenacious impact that Iceland’s mountains maintained on Morris’s imagination and emotions meant that mountains provided some of the most memorable landscapes in the last romances, especially the Great Mountains in The Well at the World’s End. Bennett also identifies significant Icelandic influence in the landscapes of The Story of the Glittering Plain and The Sundering Flood, concluding that ‘Iceland thus provides the uncompromising terrains which simultaneously test and intensify the protagonists’ wondering engagement with the natural world in these final narratives, and in his letters and journals there is a distinct sense that the country functioned in a similar way for Morris during his own extensive travels across its landscape’ (Bennett, 72). In her introduction to the Journals, May Morris suggests that Morris experienced something profound in Iceland, particularly on his second journey.The strangeness of the land had worn off by then, leading to a sort of detachment, in which ‘he had withdrawn into the frame of mind in which he saw the wilderness in its real loneliness, awful, unloveable and remote from human life – the elemental horrors had seized upon him and perhaps he saw sights and heard sounds from another world than that in which he and his fellow travellers were moving’ (CW 8: xxxiii). Ruth Levitas’s direct experience confirms this quality in the present day (Levitas 2014, 14). Describing her visit to Iceland in 2013, she foregrounded the transcendental nature of the experience in a landscape that is thin in the literal sense, with ‘The earth’s crust ruptured by boiling mud, spouts of water, volcanoes.’ She also found ‘the landscape thin in that other sense of numinous. Here the barrier between the physical world and some other dimension seems a mere veil through which you could, quite easily slip into blue’s transcendent promise of infinite possibility and touch, finally, what it is that is missing’ (Levitas 2014, 14). 151

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The Journalist, the Poet and the ‘Travel Writer’ In his 1962 Icelandic Jaunt, John Purkis considers the Journals to be Morris’s ‘most successful application of his principles in writing English prose; clarity and the dislike of the ornate – the return to simplicity in furniture design mirrored in the drive to simplicity and virility in words and syntax’ (Purkis 1962, 6). In doing so, he argues that Morris devises an example of ‘anti-travel writing’ by adopting what he characterises as a ‘throwaway attitude’ to the experience, ‘avoiding vague gush over “the wonders of Iceland,”’ and as a result, Morris has in the Journals, partly by accident, created one of his great books.As he puts it:‘Morris … this strange combination of poet and cook traverses the deserts of lava, plunges into strong flowing glacier-fed rivers, crawls painfully through the caves of the Fire Giant, endures sleet, snow, fog and volcanic dust, carefully records all that happens for posterity and emerges at the end of this physical and emotional purgatory a bigger man having taken to himself as carapace the craggy unyielding landscape of Iceland, and forming his character thereafter on the model of its courageous and active heroes’ (Purkis 1962, 5). Far from being ‘anti-travel writing,’ this approach has practically become the norm in the intervening years. Purkis’s description of Morris’s approach to the experience of travel could be that of Beat Generation writer Hunter S. Thompson – Morris as first gonzo journalist? MacCarthy is sympathetic to this characterisation too. Morris travels with the journalist’s and novelist’s antennae:‘What makes him so compelling and believable as a travel writer is his delight in the unexpected detail.The rainbows in Iceland are like no other rainbows; flat and segmental instead of arced and soaring.They lie low over the country and they appear to follow you. From the cliff top at Búlandshofði Morris watches a seal eating a salmon; “a black head down in the green sea, dubbing away at a big fish”’ (MacCarthy 1994, 305). Morris visited two areas of Iceland on both journeys: Þingvellir, home of Iceland’s democratic soul the AlÞing [Plate 5.2]; and the Þórsmörk valley, an area in southern Iceland known both for its associations with the Njáls saga and for the dramatic landscapes of the Markarfljót and Krossá valleys, whose rivers meet at Þórsmörk before flowing across a huge flood plain to the sea [Plate 5.3]. Even more than at present, the Þórsmörk valley was in Morris’s time hemmed in by steep cliffs and the towering glaciers of Mýrdalsjökull and Eyjafjallajökull (whose volcano sprang to world-wide attention when it erupted in 2010). Morris was enchanted by Þórsmörk. He spent two days exploring the area in July 1871. His journal entry for 22 July records his impressions of entering the valley: [W]e rode over the shingle which sloped a little up to the cliffs, on to the other shingle, which marked where the valley was free from water by being covered with bright yellow-green moss, thickly sprinkled with pink and red stone-crop of a very beautiful kind: the mountains on our right were both steep and high and just before us ran up into a huge wall with inaccessible clefts in it projecting into the valley and crowned by a glacier that came tumbling over it: but round the valley-ward tongue of this, lay fair grassy slopes, under a cliff of red with [volcanic] burning, where we rested presently gladly enough, for the day was very hot by now: this is called Goðaland, and a glacier above [the afore-]mentioned Goðalands-Jokull.Then on again, and past this the cliffs were much higher especially on this side, and most unimaginably strange: they overhung in places much more than seemed possible; they had caves in them just like the hell mouths in thirteenth-century illuminations’ (CW 8: 52–53). Two years later he returned for a more extensive exploration, from 23 to 28 July. On the first journey, Magnússon had introduced Morris and his party to a local guide, a saddler called Jón 152

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Jónsson, a distant relation of his wife who lodged at a farm called Lithendcot, ‘a man deep in old lore: he was very shy but seemed a very good fellow: he talked a little English and offered to guide us the next day to a place called Thorsmark, a wood up in that terrible valley to the east of the Lithe’ (CW 8: 48).This time Jón, who was famous for his knowledge of the remote areas of Iceland, especially Þórsmörk, took them on a much more extensive exploration, ‘this wild place being a sort of pet enthusiasm of his’ (CW 8: 55). On 26 July they reached Þórsmörk on horseback, ‘and after two hours very rough ride including the venomous little Steinholtsá came to the smooth grass of Goðaland just where a ridge divided the two valleys of Markfleet and Crossá, and presently we were in that awful place: all along we had had before us of course that terrible ice-capped wall I have told you of before: though I remembered it so well from last time my wonder at it had lost none of its freshness’ (CW 8: 202). Having got to a point ‘about opposite to where we mounted up before to the glacier-tail, having crossed Krossá once, Jón declared it would be impassable higher up, and we turned perforce into a little green valley … and fell a-riding over a most tumbled set of hills and dales of sand with huge masses of conglomerate stone-making monstrous caves every here, then and there; now and again were patches of deep grass sprinkled with white clover, and the beautiful horned sheep were feeding everywhere’ (CW 8: 202).As the day progressed, they climbed until ‘one could see how the whole place really went and the great glaciers above the rugged wall of rock running up in one place into the flat cone of Eyjafell: but first where the glaciers did not come low down was a great table-land at the top of the cliffs with peaks of its own and its own plain below them, and from that the buttresses of the higher dreadful ice-crowned mountains went up, and most marvellous all this was to see, a world of mountains, like, above the mountains, all utterly inaccessible apparently’ (CW 8: 202–203). Morris was more accurate than perhaps he realised. Jon had taken them on a route that was just opening up as the glaciers began to retreat after over three centuries of the ‘Little Ice Age’ and was becoming accessible for the first time since the fourteenth century.The area was unmapped and its features unnamed. After Morris returned to England, Jon was consulted on significant features by Icelandic map makers, and he named the area they traversed Morrisheiði, ‘Morris heath,’ in honour of his important guest. (Stott 2017, 21) The name remains on Icelandic maps to this day, though a mis-spelling in the 1920s has now rendered it ‘Morinsheiði.’6 It is not just as a journalist or ‘travel writer’ that Morris brings Iceland alive to readers. His poetry is equally inspirational, and he combined that with a knowledge of the sagas unrivalled by other British visitors of the time.This is best seen in his poem “Gunnar’s Howe Above the House at Lithend.” The original version, sent to a Danish publisher in 1872 but rejected on the grounds that it was too gloomy, with too many references to grey (a very important colour to Morris, especially as a designer of textiles), had been simply titled “Gunnar’s Howe” on the grounds that everybody, that is, everybody who was familiar with the sagas, knew where that was.The ‘above the house at Lithend’ was a compromise with his public when it finally appeared in his 1891 Poems by the Way almost 20 years later. Ye who have come o’er the sea to behold this grey minster of lands, Whose floor is the tomb of time past, and whose walls by the toil of dead hands Show pictures amidst of the ruin of deeds that have overpast death, Stay by this tomb in a tomb to ask of who lieth beneath. Ah! The world changeth too soon, that ye stand there with unbated breath, As I name him that Gunnar of old, who erst in the haymaking tide Felt all the land fragrant and fresh, as amidst of the edges he died. Too swiftly fame fadeth away, if ye tremble not lest once again 153

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The grey mound should open and show him glad-eyed without grudging or pain. Little labour methinks to behold him but the tale-teller laboured in vain. Little labour for ears that may harken to hear his death-conquering song, Till the heart swells to think of the gladness undying that overcame wrong. O young is the world yet, meseemeth, and the hope of its flourishing green, When the words of a man unremembered so bridge all the days that have been. As we look round about on the land that these nine hundred years he hath seen. (CW 9: 179) Morris records his first visit to the site on 21 July (he visited again in 1873):‘we come at last to a big mound rising up from the hollow, and that is Gunnar’s Howe: it is most dramatically situated to remind one of the beautiful passage in the Njála where Gunnar sings in his tomb; the sweet grassy flowery valley with a few big grey stones about it has a steep bank above, which hides the higher hilltop; but down the hill the slope is shallow, and about midways of it is the Howe; from the top of which you can see looking to right and left all along the Lithe, and up into the valley of Thorsmark’ (CW 8: 48–49). After their time in Þórsmörk and on the way back to their camp, the party were waylaid by an intellectual local farmer (not so uncommon in Iceland) anxious to meet Morris and discuss the Njáls saga, seeing him as an itinerant poet in the Icelandic tradition and referring to him as a ‘skald’ (bard). Indeed an Icelandic newspaper had welcomed his arrival as the ‘English Skald’ (MacCarthy 1994, 298). Referred to as ‘Vilhjálmur Morris’ in Iceland, Morris was seen as something of a celebrity because of his championing of their old literature, and he retained the affection of Icelanders throughout his life as a result of his active campaigning for their interests during the 1882 famine.With Magnússon he established a Famine Relief Appeal which raised half as much money as was raised in all Denmark, then Iceland’s colonial ruler.

Morris’s Impact in Iceland For a population of only 78,000, Iceland was amazingly well served by newspapers and literary and cultural magazines, and when Morris died in 1896, there were a number of obituaries and generous tributes published in Iceland. Ruth Ellison (1988) reports that six newspapers and one magazine recorded Morris’s death, some with substantial obituaries.The weekly Fjalkonan, which like all Icelandic newspapers was compact in size, reported current foreign news crisply, thus ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has died,’ or ‘Presidential elections are in progress in the United States, outcome not yet known,’ but Morris’s death merited a two-paragraph article of over 160 words. Recalling Morris’s visits, Matthías Jochumsson wrote in his obituary,‘No artist more renowned than he has graced our country with his presence in this century,’ and further described his contribution to Iceland: ‘Art, sagas, freedom, goodness of heart, were the philosophies of this great man. His excellent works and translations from our literary heritage will continue to carry the name of our country and his around the world … The name Vilhjálmur Morris should be written in gold on the shield of Icelandic history’ (Jochumsson, reprinted in WMSN, Iceland supplement, 23). While “Iceland First Seen” did not appear in England until 1891, it was published in Icelandic in 1872 and was well known in the country. At the time of Morris’s death, Jochumsson also wrote a commemorative poem which remained unpublished until 1923. Celebrating him as the champion of both the old northern muse and the modern socialist cause, it is written in Old Icelandic meter and features revered Icelandic poet-historians such as Snorri Sturluson and saga heroes, including characters from 154

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“The Lovers of Gudrun,” who all sing Morris’s praises, and ends with Morris dying a heroic death (like his Volsung, Sigurd), but living on in the mind of Iceland: May high in praise Braggi’s art-rich hero, may men teach this to man – Morris in Snorri’s land. (Wawn 2000, 258–59)

Sustaining Morris’s Legacy Back in England, the task of sustaining Morris’s memory and building his legacy fell mainly on his daughter May and his biographer J.W. Mackail. May spent a large part of the next 15 years drawing together and editing his Collected Works, which appeared in 24 volumes between 1910 and 1915. The Journals of travels in Iceland 1871–1873 appeared as volume eight in 1911, the first time that these had been published. However, before the complete Works had seen the light of day, the First World War had broken out, and immediately after the Great War, the celebration of Old Norse-inspired heroism largely went out of fashion in Britain. May, ever loyal to her father’s memory, finally made a trip to Iceland herself in 1924, some 50 years after Morris’s, followed by two further journeys in 1926 and 1931 (Gíslason 2014, Jonsdottir 1986). Handwritten diaries of these journeys have recently been discovered; neatly written and extensively illustrated with May’s drawings and contemporary postcard scenes, they record her and her companion Miss Lobb’s journeys throughout Iceland [Plate 5.4, Figs 5.1 and 5.2]. These journeys were very much in her father’s footsteps, as they paid visits by automobile to both Þingvellir and Þórsmörk in the first ten

Figure 5.1 Diary, 1924, May Morris. Society of Antiquaries. Photograph: Martin Stott.

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days of their first trip.They managed to meet a number of now very elderly people who had met Morris in the 1870s, and at the end of the final journey, May signed off her last diary,‘The last of Iceland – my father’s “holy land” and grown very dear to me’ (May Morris 1931). May Morris maintained contact with people she met there up to her death, donating five volumes of Morris’s works to the Snorri Sturluson Museum and Library at Reykholt, inscribed and dated ‘Kelmscott 1932’ (Stott 2013, 19 July) and a further 400 books to the library in Húsavik in 1936. She was awarded the Order of the Falcon by the Icelandic Government in 1930 as part of its celebration of the 1000th anniversary of the founding of the Althing, in recognition of her contribution to promoting Iceland abroad. A decade or so after the end of the First World War, however, according to Peter Davidson, ‘The compass needle of the 1930s pointed unequivocally northwards’ (Davidson, 83). And plenty of writers and artists travelled north in the 1930s, including the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who very nearly died in Spitzbergen, and British modernist artist Eric Ravilious, a lover of the sparseness of northern landscapes, who died in an air-sea rescue off Iceland in 1942, having been posted there as a war artist. But the literary baton was picked up by modernist poets Louis MacNeice and W. H.Auden.The latter’s father, G.A.Auden, was something of an expert on Old Norse myths, possessed several Morris works in his library and even corresponded with Eiríkr Magnússon on the likelihood of ‘Auden’ being a derivation of the Old Norse name ‘Audun,’ so Wystan would have grown up in a saga-influenced household. Although this was one origin of his attraction to Iceland, Auden was also inspired by Morris’s Journals, and in this context was more of a travel writer, a genre that has been described as ‘the most important literary form of the 1930s’ (Youngs 2006, 68).

Figure 5.2 Diary, 1924, May Morris. Society of Antiquaries. Photograph: Martin Stott.

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Auden and fellow poet Louis MacNeice travelled to Iceland in 1936 in a context in which Old Norse mythology, and arguably Iceland as a place, were being appropriated by the Nazis. The three-month journey was recorded in their 1937 Letters from Iceland, the structure of which is resolutely modernist; a mixture of serious advice for tourists; an anthology of quotations, verses and letters, including one supposedly addressed from one schoolgirl to another; diary entries; and oddly-perspectived and mainly out of focus photographs, it is by turns camp, serious, comic, factual and fanciful. It remains an important and innovative travel text. Letters from Iceland is in many ways a stark contrast to Morris’s work, though its spirit is partly modelled on Morris’s Journals. In mock-comic verses in the “Letter to Lord Byron,” Auden places himself in a tradition of Icelandic travellers who style themselves as poor successors to more famous predecessors: And even here the steps I flounder in Were worn by most distinguished boots of old. Dasent and Morris and Lord Dufferin, Hooker and men of that heroic mould Welcome me icily into the fold; (Auden & MacNeice 1967, 21) In the poem “Letter to Graham and Ann Shepard,” MacNeice explicitly identifies Morris’s choice to travel north as a rejection of the ‘soft option’ of the Mediterranean: Yet further if you can stand it, will set forth The obscure but powerful ethics of Going North. Morris did it before, dropping the frills and fuss, Harps and arbours,Tristram and Theseus, For a land of rocks and sagas. (Auden & MacNeice 1967, 30) The Journals themselves receive a favourable mention in the collection of ephemera titled “Sheaves from Sagaland.” In Letters, Auden makes it quite clear that he aims to write a fresh, alternative kind of travel book:‘The trouble about travel books as a rule, even the most exciting ones, is that the actual events are all extremely like each other – meals – sleeping accommodation – fleas – dangers etc, and the repetition becomes boring. The usual alternative, which is essays on life prompted by something seen, the kind of thing Lawrence and Aldous Huxley do, I am neither clever enough, nor sensitive enough to manage’ (Auden & NacNeice, 140). But Morris was. By the time he had written Letters, Auden was already somewhat ambivalent about Iceland. It was as if he felt it had been spoiled before he got there – a view dramatically reinforced about half-way through the book, where in chapter nine he records finding himself staying in the same hotel as Hermann Goering’s brother. He comments,‘The Nazis have a theory that Iceland is the cradle of the Germanic culture. Well if they want a community like that of the sagas they are welcome to it. I love the sagas, but what a rotten society they describe, a society with only the gangster virtues’ (Auden & MacNeice 1967, 117).Apparently Goering and his party, on a reconnaissance of Iceland in hope of finding the true Aryan race, were very disappointed with what they found. While admiring the apparent racial purity of the flaxen-haired Icelandic children, they considered the rather poor and not very hierarchical society (too similar to the egalitarian Canadian-style frontier spirit, and lacking in high culture) too degenerate for their taste. Morris’s conception of Iceland as a land of democracy, equality and heroic masculinity was widely shared for 50 years by liberal intellectuals interested in the birth of democratic institutions as well as the romance of a rival set of myths to those of Greece and Rome. His vision of 157

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Iceland attracted visitors to the country in a steady stream – mainly to visit saga sites, but also the great natural wonders – from Victorian times right up to the Second World War. But this positive image of Iceland as the land of the sagas basically died as a result of the baleful influence of the Nazis and the Second World War.The sagas were now considered too embarrassingly male and all about killing people, and no longer fitted with the post-war social democratic sentiment. Iceland itself arguably benefitted economically from the War, its location being a crucial staging post in the Battle of the Atlantic with both British and US forces successively occupying it to pre-empt the Nazis from doing so themselves. Bringing investment and money with them, the British and Americans used its deep, sheltered and ice-free fjords as warship and submarine bases to protect merchant shipping in the Arctic convoys.After centuries of colonial occupation by Norway and then Denmark, Iceland gained its independence in 1944, but then proceeded to drop off the map of European perception, literally in some cases. Perceived as a cold, isolated place, and not really considered as part of Europe, it was excised from some maps entirely.

The 1960s Revival of Fantasy Fiction Interest in Morris’s writings has waxed and waned over the years. His political rehabilitation came with the 1955 publication of E. P.Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. Almost in parallel, the cultural and intellectual upheavals of the 1960s were a moment when Norse-inspired heroism and the mysticism of the ‘summer of love’ combined to make Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series the go-to fantasy novels for a generation of baby boomers on both sides of the Atlantic. Morris’s own fantasy novels also saw a dramatic revival in interest at this time. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series republished four of them between 1969 and 1974 with suitably hippie-style cover illustrations for their new audience, with the others being republished in the Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library between 1973 and 1979. All seven are still readily available today on Amazon, in paperback editions or on Kindle.

Morris the ‘Travel Writer’ Rediscovered It is not surprising that Morris’s Journals too was finally published as a standalone book at this time. In 1969, the Centaur Press published the Icelandic Journals of William Morris with an introduction by the well-known journalist and travel writer James (now Jan) Morris. James Morris characterised the Journals as ‘a travel book in the purest sense – a diary of movement, describing a journey step by step or meal by meal,’ (James Morris, xvi) in what was almost certainly an intended dig at the Auden and MacNeice volume.While the Journals were reviewed favourably, it was as ‘travel writing.’ Geoffrey Grigson asserted that ‘The best book of travel written by an English poet is William Morris’s Icelandic Journal [sic] which is also one of the least known … he arrived bereft, his marriage in disarray, in emptiness of love without hope. So Iceland entered him, lava, gravel, tufa, flow, mountain – detail clearly seen, and the condition of man meditated upon, past and present, between grizzly and glum immensity, vast chilled indifference and tiny nooks of green gentleness’ (Greenlaw, ii). It was another 25 years before Fiona MacCarthy’s 1994 magisterial biography William Morris:A Life for Our Time introduced Morris to new audiences, integrating his political, artistic, poetic and environmental concerns –and Iceland was a significant element in the story. MacCarthy describes his experience of arriving at Thingvellir: ‘It was a sunny afternoon. They rode along the narrow pass, dismounting to lead their ponies down steep slopes. They saw on their left the small peaked hill known as the Maiden’s Seat, from which the women used to watch the games in the Hoffmannflöt (the Chieftains Plain) below.Then suddenly beneath them was the great grey plain 158

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itself, stretching out to the west. Morris had hoped for the moment and found it. Þingvellir was “a beautiful and historical looking place.” He saw it with his usual pictorial sense of history envisaging the cohorts of the tribesmen, the unfurling of their banners, a crowded, surging, almost operatic scene’ (MacCarthy 1994, 306–307). MacCarthy observes that ‘Morris found much to admire in the primitive democracy of Iceland. So much so that he would explain it in laborious detail to his Socialist audiences of the 1880s, making the implied comparison between Victorian Britain and this orderly and equitable social system which respected the personal rights of all freemen. Morris dwelt especially on the fact that crime in his contemporary sense had no meaning in Iceland, where morality was enforced purely by public opinion. People could be outlawed but they could not be arrested. He returned to these themes of criminality and violence in News from Nowhere, the utopian novel which is infused with Morris’s Icelandic ideals’ (MacCarthy 1994, 307–308). A new edition of the Icelandic Journals was published in 1996, the centenary of Morris’s death, with a foreword by MacCarthy and an introduction by ‘Mastermind’ host Magnus Magnússon. Between them these books have revived interest in Morris and given some focus to travel writing about Iceland. Poets Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell’s 1996 Moon Country: Further Reports from Iceland echoes quite explicitly the work of Auden and MacNeice in Letters from Iceland, hence the subtitle ‘further reports.’The book’s structure reflects that of their illustrious predecessors right down to the elaborate kit list. This tradition has been recast by several subsequent writers, including Joanna Kavenna in The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule (2005), Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough in Beyond the Northlands:Viking voyages and the Old Norse Sagas (2016), which like the Vikings, ranges far beyond the northlands, and Sarah Moss in Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland (2012). Moss and family arrived in 2009 shortly after the time of the ‘pots and pans revolution’ and the worldwide financial crash, known as the kreppa in Iceland.They experienced the eruption of Ejyafjallajökull, the volcano that grounded all European flights for a week. It is a take on life in Iceland at a time of crisis, when Icelanders were being forced to look at themselves under the spotlight of worldwide attention, and while Moss was at the same time engaging with the demands of two small children in an unfamiliar culture. Names for the Sea mixes travel writing with autobiography. But for contextualisation, Moss reaches for Morris. Her first chapter is entitled ‘Iceland first seen,’ and in it she reproduces Morris’s famous poem. Kavenna spends only a small part of her journey in Iceland – there are plenty of other contenders for the designation of ‘Thule,’ and she visits them all, but Morris follows her around in Iceland.Visiting Thingvellir, she combines the modernday cinematic with her imagination of Morris’s reaction to the place:‘he imagined immense crowd scenes with thousands of extras,Viking warriors lurking in every rift. Morris worked himself into a thrilling frenzy, gasping at the cracked earth and the rivers of fire’ (Kavenna, 92). Lavinia Greenlaw uses Morris’s 1871 Journals to bend and shape our conceptions both of them, and the nature of travel itself, in Questions of Travel:William Morris in Iceland (2011), a book which uses the Journals as a means of meditation on the wider issues of travel. In Questions of Travel, Greenlaw counterposes on facing pages lengthy extracts from Morris’s work with a short phrase, to which she adds her own reflections, sometimes in prose, sometimes in poetry. Thus, on 8 July 1871, while still in Edinburgh’s Granton Harbour before departure, Morris frets on the chaos of waiting,‘the luggage undiscoverable.’ Greenlaw extracts this phrase and riffs; Missing the wherewithal The impossibility of the journey. It cannot begin, it is over already, you are over already. Unlocatable luggage; the fear of missing the boat, the fear of the boat, the fear for others more casual. 159

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The bravado of travel. Personality simplifying itself, hardening its surface. Safety found in ridiculously small things. Anything is going to happen. Over 191 pages, Morris and Greenlaw skirmish, Morris describing his experiences at length, Greenlaw picking out a telling phrase and re-framing it: ‘Ingeniously useless,’ ‘nothing mean or prosaic,’ ‘nowhere to put things,’ ‘the astounding nature of the road.’ She subtly extracts the general issues of travel that get lost in the details that Morris presents us with on his travels.Tony Pinkney puts it this way: ‘What Greenlaw does to Morris is effectively what Roland Barthes did to Balzac in his wonderful study S/Z in 1971; break the primary text up into fragments and offer a subtle commentary on those discrete units.’ Greenlaw, in her introductory note to the text, seems to agree,‘It is the document of a journey that becomes a description of all journeys: the tensions that set in once the decision has been made, the hope that something will keep you at home coupled with the fear of missing your plane or boat or train, the realisation that you are dis-equipped however much luggage you have brought along with you, the dropping away of habits and coordinates, the ease with which you cobble together new ones, and the point at which you stop travelling and start heading home’ (Greenlaw, xxiii). We can all relate to these insights. My own Icelandic journey started with the careful photocopying of my passport details and a panicky realisation on the bus to the airport that I had left the passport itself on the photocopier at home (8 July, Stott 2013). Greenlaw is ambitious on Morris’s behalf, characterising her innovative approach to the original text as an intention ‘to direct the reader towards what Morris didn’t know he was writing about’ (Greenlaw, xxiii). If this all sounds just a little patronising, Greenlaw nonetheless considers Morris’s Journals to be exemplary. Writing on one of the introductory panels in the 2014–15 National Portrait Gallery exhibition on Morris,‘Anarchy and Beauty,’ she says,‘Morris never stopped testing himself or the world in the pursuit of the answer to the question of how to live. His heroic vision was matched by a gift for clear-sighted description, shown at its best in the journals of his travels in Iceland, an inspiring account of why we travel and why we return.’

Morris’s Influence on Fantasy Genres: Literature, Games, Comics and Film Contemporary travel writing and fantasy merge in Alex Jones’s novel Morris in Iceland (2009). The novel relocates Morris’s travels to a Sydney suburb where it records the activities of a group of students who are wrestling with turning Morris’s Journals into an opera to be performed in a local park. The narrative is interspersed with lengthy extracts from the real Journals and features a fantasy ‘second Morris’ figure who weaves imagined events in Morris’s life into scenes from the sagas. Reviewing the novel, Gary Aho is unimpressed, observing of the opera scene, ‘Disappointing to say the least, this is grand opera become masque, and then appendage to a strange wedding in a public park on a hot summer afternoon in Sydney’ (Aho, 2013: 110).The novel seems to assume that readers will have both a highly developed knowledge of literary theory and a very good knowledge of the life and works of Morris – a niche market. But it does exemplify just how diverse is the range of Morris’s contemporary influences. However, the themes explored by Bennett in her analysis of the influence of Iceland, its landscape and its sagas on Morris’s late romances have perhaps had their most significant cultural impacts in the cinema and in computer games. Norse fantasy has made a very successful transition into the cinema and the worlds of computer games and graphic novels. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has been the dominant literary reworking of Old Norse myth in the past 50 years and 160

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has been described as the most popular work of fiction of the twentieth century. It has inspired a powerful and popular series of films by Peter Jackson in the twenty-first century (Lord of the Rings trilogy, 2001–2003). In From Asgard to Valhalla (2008), Heather O’Donoghue considers that it derives its legacy very much from Morris’s late romances. Fantasy writing, itself a blurring of the line between adult and children’s fiction exemplified by Lord of the Rings, has strikingly morphed into the sub-genres of fantasy comics and games. O’Donoghue argues that it is relatively easy to place Tolkien’s work in a line of descent from the utopian fantasy writings of Morris and his reaction against Wagner’s Ring cycle on the one hand and, on the other, to the innumerable ensuing fantasy novels with a Norse or vaguely medieval setting ‘which involve dwarves and giants, and highly symbolic dangerous rings and broken swords which need mending’ (O’Donoghue, 188). In this context, graphic novels, comics, computer games and role-playing games such as ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ clearly owe a good deal to Tolkien, but their links to Morris are generally less clear. However, this older Nordic saga tradition has also thrived in more mainstream culture, not only in Tolkien-derived fantasy gaming but also, and most spectacularly, in the TV series Game of Thrones (GoT), the latest series of which is estimated to have had an audience of well over seven million per episode in Britain. Game of Thrones derives its title from volume one of the epic fantasy novel series by George R. R. Martin on which the series is based, A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–ongoing). At April 2015, the five books in the series had sold more than 60 million copies worldwide and been translated into at least 45 languages. The GoT Wikipedia page is amongst the ten most visited sites in English, German, French, Italian and Russian, and GoT has been described as the world’s single most popular mass cultural product today. A Song of Ice and Fire author George R. R. Martin is known to admire Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, and while the GoT series, the TV adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, focuses to an almost mind-boggling degree on violence, blood lust and sex, alongside these motifs run narratives of family sagas and battles and a pervasive concern, more prominent in the books than the TV series, with how communities should be ruled. This preoccupation traces its lineage from late-nineteenth-century debates about the respective merits of different societies reflected in Morris’s fantasy writings: where wealth should be concentrated, the (im)permanence of benevolent tyrannies, the workability of anarchist models of governance, the nature and morality of serf and slave societies and the recurrence of fantasies of utopian future societies. In the Morris tradition are to be found in A Song of Ice and Fire both the Free Folk from north of the Wall, who call those south of it “kneelers” because of their obedience to authority, and the Brotherhood Without Banners, a guerrilla force who, like Robin Hood, stand up for the vulnerable and the poor against the rich and powerful and defend ordinary people caught up in the feuds that form the basis of the narrative.There is no shortage of comment in cyberspace on the links between Morris and GoT. For example, in response to Guillame Durocher’s 2015 blog, one 2016 post commented,‘IMO [in my opinion] everyone should pass on Martin and Tolkien and go back to fantasy’s founder – William Morris. His epic poem ‘The Story of Sigurd the Volsung’ has all the pros of Game of Thrones with none of the cons; it’s probably [the] greatest long poem in English since Paradise Lost.’ The links to Morris’s influence in fantasy novels and computer games are speculative but are fruitful areas for future research.

Iceland Today The impact of GoT on Iceland has also been very significant. ‘Game of Thrones’ tours, which visit sites where filming took place, particularly in the north and east of the country, are booming, and are part of the reason for the doubling of tourism numbers between 2011, when the 161

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first series came out, and 2016. Iceland’s infrastructure is struggling with the impact of the unexpected arrival of mass tourism. The significance of Morris’s contemporary relevance in Iceland was brought into focus during a trip organised by the William Morris Society in 2013, when the group was instructed and entertained one evening by the country’s recently retired Minister for Education, Science and Culture in the 2009–13 Left Government, Katrin Jakobsdóttir, leader of the Green-Left Movement or Vinstri Graen (VG) and the 28th Prime Minister of Iceland (2017). In a lecture entitled “Good afternoon Mr Morris,” she demonstrated an extraordinary knowledge not only of Morris’s range of contributions to society, culture and politics, but also of their continuing impacts in Iceland. She structured her talk after the time travel of News from Nowhere around the idea of Morris’s reappearance in present-day Iceland,‘our demented age,’ where he joins her and her two brothers in a discussion over dinner. The themes of their ‘discussion’ ranged over what she considered likely to be Morris’s chief interests on his return: the survival of the Icelandic way of life, including the way Icelandic embroidery has influenced modern Icelandic design; the preservation of historic houses and the pressures of redevelopment; Morris’s views on how to build new businesses based on beauty and quality; the importance of the local as opposed to the mass-produced; the difficulties faced by socialism, particularly ‘the fragmentation that seems to be a constant of the political left wing, exactly as he experienced in the late nineteenth century’; democracy and the role of the media, including social media, and the experience of direct democracy in Iceland’s recent history; the chasm between the power of big corporations and the working class; the integration in perspective between ‘domestic beautification’ and the class struggle and equality; sustainability and the intrinsic value of wilderness; and finally, his likely views on Game of Thrones. It is hard to imagine her counterparts in the United Kingdom or the United States being able to give such a talk, or indeed anyone without specialist knowledge of Morris so precisely addressing his interests or contemporary relevance to their country. In a completely different context, Morris is still very present in Icelandic culture. The 1967 BBC Omnibus programme film Dante’s Inferno, about Rossetti’s relationship with Lizzie Siddal, directed by Ken Russell and starring Oliver Reed as Rossetti and Andrew Faulds as Morris, has been something of a staple of Russell fan retrospectives. Less predictable was finding extracts from it being broadcast in a ramshackle corrugated iron shed decorated inside and out with Morris wallpaper, on an ancient black-and-white television at the back of the ‘Norwegian House’ in Stykkishólmur where Morris himself stayed for several days in 1871 [Plate 5.5].The house itself is now a museum of the town’s history with a ground floor art gallery.The ‘Morris shed’ turned out to be a temporary ‘installation’ (20 July: Stott 2013) and the centrepiece of the summer exhibition. The artwork assumes of its visitors more than a passing knowledge of Morris.

Conclusion Morris’s cultural influence has changed substantially in the more than 120 years since his death. At the end of the nineteenth century, he was a towering figure, respected for his poetry, design, business acumen, printing innovation, conservation work, politics (by some) and his work in translating, reclaiming and reinterpreting the Icelandic sagas. His work with Magnússon, which bore fruit as the Saga Library, and his extended narrative poems such as Sigurd the Volsung, which became a school set text during his lifetime, were very much part of the Morris ‘persona’ and his legacy.As mentioned, the Victorian interest in Iceland and the sagas was intense. Morris rode that wave rather than creating it.

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Morris’s journeys to Iceland were known about by his friends and associates, and insightful comrades would have been able to see the links between them and his subsequent political development. But of the journeys themselves there was no public consciousness. His three Icelandic poems had only been published four years earlier in Poems by the Way, and the Journals were still 15 years away from publication. However, when they were finally published, taken in the context of Morris’s well-known interest in Iceland, its literature and history and the respect in which he was held, their influence was significant. Magnus Magnússon calls the Journals ‘a series of incomparable descriptions of the large drama and little lyrics of the Icelandic landscape, in language as taut and sinewy and sensuous as anything that has ever been written about Iceland.’ High praise from a native.The Journals have certainly inspired subsequent writers about Iceland, from Auden to Greenlaw, acting both as a point of departure and as a source of inspiration. The Journals also represent Morris at his most exposed emotionally, and the power of the writing has influenced the way travel writing as a literary form has developed. Morris’s contribution is sometimes explicitly acknowledged, but there remains an unmined seam of research to explore how much influence he had and its nature and development over time. Equally important has been the impact of Morris’s experiences in Iceland as expressed in the late romances. Seen at the time of publication as rather slight in their significance, even as a retreat from politics by Morris, this fantasy genre has endured and has had enormous influence on a range of fantasy and sci-fi writers subsequently, many of whom have acknowledged their debt to Morris. Less explored has been the development of these genres into games, comics, graphic novels and film and other visual media, mainstays of contemporary popular culture.The links to Iceland are inevitably more speculative, and Iceland’s significance as a place is mediated through the prism of fantasy. Nevertheless, Morrisian themes and concerns, such as the nature and exercise of power and the way societies are or might be organised, emerge in books such as the A Song of Ice and Fire series and spin-off programmes such as Game of Thrones.Whether there is any evidence of a clear intellectual link may be another area of fruitful research for Morris scholars. A final word on the Iceland experience from Morris himself is appropriate. In the very last sentence of the very last entry of his 1871 Journals, as the party were disembarking back in Granton, Edinburgh, he summarised his experience, saying Iceland is ‘a marvellous, beautiful and solemn place, and where I had been in fact very happy’ (CW vol 8 185).

Acknowledgments This chapter has grown from a paper I gave to the ‘William Morris and Old Norse’ strand of the MLA Conference in Vancouver, Canada on 8 January 2015, titled “Morris’s Icelandic Journeys 1871 and 1873.” I am grateful for help, advice, leads, introductions and productive conversations I have had with Professors Florence Boos (University of Iowa), Peter Davidson (Oxford University) and Alexandra Harris, (Birmingham University), and to Jan Marsh at the National Portrait Gallery, London, for access to the May Morris diaries and archive. I am also grateful to friends including Hilary Simpson, especially for illuminating discussions on contemporary culture, Neil Spencer and Sue Gwilliam for constructive and critical perspectives on the text and, in Iceland, to Kristinn Arnar Guðjónsson. Finally, thanks to Penny Lyndon, librarian at the William Morris Society, for assistance in navigating the Society’s library.

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Notes 1 Steamships began scheduled sailings to and from Iceland in the summer of 1856,‘ensuring that travellers could rely on relatively inexpensive fares and predictable arrival and departure dates’ (Helgason, 109). 2 Gary Aho in his introduction to Three Northern Love Stories states that Morris knew most of the important saga translations of the preceding generations: the Heimskringla (Laing 1844), Gisli saga and Njala (Dasent 1861 and 1866); and that in the work that established his reputation as one of England’s premier poets, The Earthly Paradise, his descriptions of the Wanderers, ‘gentlemen and mariners of Norway’, reveal a broad knowledge of Norse myth and history derived from works like Percy’s translation of Mallet’s Northern Antiquities (Percy 1847), Thorpe’s Northern Mythology (Thorpe 1851), and Cottle (1797), and Thorpe’s (1866) translations of the Elder Edda (Aho 1982, v–vi). Anderson asserts that Morris became familiar with Thorpe’s Northern Mythology as early as during his time at Oxford University. 3 Litzenberg’s view was that ‘Sigurd the Volsung not only crowned Morris’s noble career as a poet; it also climaxed a comprehensive and serious study of Scandinavian literature which no English poet before or since 1876 has equalled’ (105), an opinion that arguably still stands. 4 To avoid confusion between Magnus Magnússon and Eiríkr Magnússon, I refer to Magnus Magnússon in full. 5 Tolkien selected The House of the Wolfings, along with The Life and Death of Jason and the Volsunga Saga, for his Skeat Prize for English when at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1914. 6 I am grateful to Kristinn Arnar Guðjónsson, geologist and mountain guide, for this story.

Bibliography of Readings and Works Cited Aho, Gary.“Following in the Footsteps of William Morris.” Atlantica and Iceland Review 20 (Winter 1982), 84–93. ———.“Review of Alex Jones, Morris in Iceland.” Journal of William Morris Studies 20.2 (2013), 103–10. ———.“William Morris and Iceland.” Kairos 1.2 (1982), 102–33. Anderson, Karl. Scandinavian Elements in the Work of William Morris. Diss., Harvard University, 1940. http:// morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/OldNorseAnderson.html. Armitage, Simon and Glyn Maxwell. Moon Country: Further Reports from Iceland. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Auden,W. H. and Louis MacNeice. Letters from Iceland. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. Barraclough, Eleanor Rosamund. Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Bennett, Philippa. Wonderlands:The Last Romances of William Morris. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015. Burton, Richard F. Ultima Thule; or a Summer in Iceland, 2 vols. London and Edinburgh:William P. Nimmo, 1875. Collingwood,William G. and Jón Stefánsson. A Pilgrimage to the Saga-Steads of Iceland. Ulverston:W. Holmes, 1899. Dasent, George W. The Story of Burnt Njál: or, life in Iceland at the End of the Tenth Century, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1861. ———. The Story of Gisli the Outlaw, trans. Benjamin Thorpe. London:Trübner and Sons, 1866. Davidson, Peter. The Idea of North. London: Reaktion Books, 2005. Dufferin, Lord [Frederick]. Letters from High Latitudes: Being an Account of a Voyage to Iceland, Jan Mayen, and Spitzbergen in 1856, 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1857. Durocher, Guillaume. Traditionalist and Degenerate Themes in Game of Thrones. San Diego, CA: CounterCurrents Publishing, 2015. https://www.counter-currents.com/2016/02/traditionalist-and-degen erate-themes-in-game-of-thrones/. Ellison, Ruth. “Icelandic Obituaries of William Morris.” Journal of the William Morris Society 8.1 (1988), 35–41. Gíslason, Örn.“With May Morris in Iceland.” William Morris Society Newsletter-US, January 2014, 25–27. Greenlaw, Lavinia. Questions of Travel:William Morris in Iceland. London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011. Harris, Richard L. “William Morris, Eiríkur Magnússon, and Iceland: A Survey of Correspondence.” Victorian Poetry 13.3 and 4 (Fall–Winter 1975), 119–30. Helgason, J. K. Echoes of Valhalla:The Afterlife of the Eddas and Sagas. London: Reaktion Books, 2017.

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Morris and Iceland Henderson, Ebenezer. Iceland: or, the Journal of a Residence in that Island During the Years 1814 and 1815, 2 vols. in 1. Edinburgh: Oliphant,Waugh and Innes, 1818. Henderson, Philip, ed. The Letters of William Morris to his Family and Friends. London: Longmans, 1950. Hooker, W. J. Journal of a Tour in Iceland in the Summer of 1809, 2 vols. in 1, 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1813. Jakobsdóttir, Kristin. “Good Afternoon Mr Morris.” William Morris Society Newsletter, Iceland Supplement, New Year 2014, 18–21. Jochumsson, Matthías.“An Obituary of William Morris.” Stefnir, 10 December 1896. Repr. William Morris Society Newsletter, Iceland Supplement, Spring 2014, 22–23. Jones, Alex. Morris in Iceland. Sydney: Puncher and Wattmann, 2009. Jonsdóttir, Gudrun.“May Morris and Miss Lobb in Iceland.” JWMS 7.1 (Autumn 1986), 17–20. Kavenna, Joanna. The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule. London: Penguin, 2005. Kelvin, Norman. The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols., vol. 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Laing, Samuel. The Heimskringla, or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, trans. and intro. 3 vols. London: John C. Nimmo, 1844. LeMire, Eugene, ed. “The Early Literature of the North – Iceland.” The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris. Detroit, MI:Wayne State University Press, 1969. Levitas, Ruth.“Arctic Blue.” William Morris Society Newsletter: Iceland Supplement, Spring 2014, 12–14. Litzenberg, Karl. “William Morris and Scandinavian Literature: A Bibliographical Essay.” Scandinavian Studies 13 (1933), 93–105. MacCarthy, Fiona. William Morris:A Life for Our Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Mallet, Paul Henri. Northern Antiquities: Or a Historical Account of the Manners, Customs, Religion, and Laws, Maritime Expeditions and Discoveries, Language and Literature of the Ancient Scandinavians. London: H. G. Bohn, 1847 (trans. from original by Thomas Percy, 1755, with additions by I.A. Blackwell). Martin, G. R. R. A Game of Thrones. London: Bantam. 1996 (The series is titled “A Song of Ice and Fire”, and of six projected volumes, GoT and four others have been published). Morris, James, ed. Icelandic Journals of William Morris. Fontwell: Centaur Press, 1969. Morris, May. Iceland Diary, 2 vols. Unpublished MS, 1931. Morris, William. The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910–15. vol. 8: Journals of Travels to Iceland 1871–1873. Morris, William. Icelandic Journals, intro. Magnus Magnússon. London: Mares Nest, 1996. Morris, William. Poems by the Way. London: Kelmscott Press, 1891. Morris,William. Three Northern Love Stories and Other Tales, intro. Gary Aho. Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1996. Moss, Sarah. Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland. London: Granta Publications, 2013. O’Donoghue, Heather. From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths. London: I. B. Taurus, 2008. Pinkney,Tony.“Questions of Travel” in Morris Unbound blog, 16 September 2011. www.williammorrisunbound.blogspot.co.uk. Preston, Peter. “‘The North Begins Inside’: Morris and Trollope in Iceland.” JWMS 14.2 (Spring 2001): 8–28. Purkis, John. The Icelandic Jaunt: A Study of the Expeditions Made by Morris to Iceland in 1871 and 1873. London:William Morris Society, 1962. Stott, Martin. Faroe and Iceland Diary July 2013. Unpublished MS. ———.“Thorsmork and the Story of Morrisheidi.” William Morris Society Magazine,Autumn 2017, 20–21. Thompson, E. P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955; 2nd ed. London: Merlin Press, 1977. Waller, Samuel Edmund. Six Weeks in the Saddle: A Painter’s Journal in Iceland, 1874 (illustrations available on Google). Wawn, Andrew. The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Wiens, Pamela Bracken. “Fire and Ice: Clashing Visions of Iceland in the Travel Narratives of Morris and Burton.” JWMS 11.4 (Spring 1996): 12–18. Youngs, Tim. “Auden’s Travel Writings.” The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, ed. Stan Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 68–81.

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PART II

Art: Preservation, Interior Design, and Adaptation

6 MORRIS AND ARCHITECTURE Chris Miele

William Morris was passionate about architecture, its past, present and future. His youthful engagement with it was intensely romantic, sensual even. Later he came to understand it as a particular expression of the time and place of its making, though without losing that earlier strength of feeling for it. In both respects, he was walking a well-worn path.The Romantic poets and painters of two generations earlier had described architecture in emphatic, emotive terms. And an earlier generation of historians and critics had developed the notion that architecture reflected the spirit of the age, what a later generation of art historians would call the Zeitgeist. John Ruskin combined both ways of seeing, and in that way too provided a model for Morris’ approach. Like A.W. N. Pugin, Morris believed that design had an operative power, that it was part of the solution to what some today call the ‘broken society’. Was Morris anything more, then, than a follower of advanced fashions? Before I can answer that question, I have to put another. Just how can we define Morris in relation to architectural culture? As a matter of fact, he was not an architect, though he tried briefly to be one. Neither was he an architectural critic, though he dabbled here too. Different words might apply. ‘Thinker’ is one. ‘Activist’ is another and fits his work as a building conservationist. Consider, too, that his creative achievement and business success worked themselves out in an architectural context, and so ‘decorator’ is a perfectly fair description. He worked amongst architects his whole life and inspired a younger generation of them, sometimes working in concert with his friend and one-time business partner, the architect Philip Webb. Indeed, at one point Morris was an architectural client, instructing Webb to design a very special and unusual house for him and his new wife Jane, Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent (now Greater London). Later in life he funded the careful conservation of Inglesham and Kelmscott churches according to the strict conservation principles he and Webb promoted through the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB).1 Unquestionably, Morris’ work for the SPAB represents his most sustained and extensive engagement with architectural culture, and perhaps also ultimately his legacy to it. Actually, all these terms to some extent apply when we think about Morris and architecture. Furthermore, his relationship with the latter helped to define his aesthetic vision across different media. This search for meaning in any person’s life takes us back to their early circumstances.The first point to make about these is that Morris was raised in a well-off family. Later he described that background as providing ‘an ordinary bourgeois style of comfort’. Fiona MacCarthy 169

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observed that Morris’ father was doing rather better than that, ‘making a small fortune’, as she put it, working in finance in the City of London.2 The Morrises’ status improved, and the young Morris, as the eldest surviving son, would have expected to be able to live well. Indeed, even after his father’s death in 1847, the income from the family’s investment in copper mining was considerable.3 This background of even relative affluence was unusual amongst professional architects and decorative artists of Morris’ and an earlier generation. Indeed, most Victorian architects came from a trade background and were the sons of surveyors or other architects or contractors or builders. During the 1830s, an increasing number of architects in articles were the sons of other professionals.Webb’s father was a doctor, for example, and so was that of the architect George Edmund Street, in whose office Morris and Webb met. Gilbert Scott, Morris’ bête noire in later life, was the son of a clergyman, albeit a penurious one.They were, however, still the exceptions, and none of those had a university education. The ebb and flow of these early changing fortunes were reflected in the family’s homes. Morris’ birthplace was a respectable, comfortable late-Georgian villa, Elm House, at Clay Hill north of Enfield, on land that today lies at the edge of London’s Green Belt. His recollection of this property forms the basis of the rectory described in The Novel on Blue Paper. For all the fictionalised house’s boorish, middle-class qualities, its garden in high summer was full of beauty and memory. In 1840, when Morris was aged six, his father rented a grand house with extensive grounds at Woodford, Woodford Hall, on the edge of Epping Forest. It was a privileged environment that Morris enjoyed, but it was not to last. In his first term at Marlborough in 1848, seeking to economise after the death of his father, his mother moved them to Water House in Walthamstow.4 ‘Economise’ in this case is a relative term.Water House is a grand house by most standards, a villa, and it is full of Palladian pretence.Today it is owned by the local authority,Waltham Forest, and is open to the public as the William Morris Gallery. The south front has a monumental quality, four-square and set behind gates, the elevation defined by two bulbous, full-height bays. That is, the showy public side and the double bays have a certain pleasure in them. The rear elevation facing the family’s private pleasure grounds is a contrast, irregular and expedient, not particularly pleasurable to look at all. For our purposes, the most important thing to note is that Morris was away when the move took place, and indeed it was not entirely clear to him where the house was or what it looked like. His very earliest surviving letter, to his sister Emma, opens with anxious questions about the property. It is this one or is it that?

Figure 6.1 a and b a: Chris Leo, architect, Elm House, Walthamstow. J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 1899. b: Plaque at former location of Elm House, Walthamstow. Photograph: Chris Miele

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Consider this sequence of events: the sudden death of his father, a question mark over the family’s future security, and then a move from the grand and beautiful palace to a new place when Morris, aged thirteen, is away at boarding school.These circumstances could account for the anger Morris expressed in later life when he saw an ancient building he loved suddenly subjected to ‘restoration’, an often harsh process that stripped away familiar associations.5 There is in so many of Morris’ letters on behalf of the SPAB a sense of emotional disquiet, of personal loss, even mourning.What has happened, he seems to be saying, to the familiar and cherished scene I knew in my youth? (It is a familiar lament amongst conservation activists who use highly emotive language.) I think it is a reasonable working proposition to conclude that restoration triggered a return of Morris’ repressed youthful anxiety, and this resonated particularly with those in Morris’ class, who saw themselves reflected in their houses and the objects in them. Morris himself later realised his artistic genius, after all, in the realm of home furnishings, in objects of everyday use that formed the intimate backcloth of family life. Sadly, we have no Morris juvenilia at all and so no idea really what impression his home or other buildings he saw made on him. Morris’ first biographer, Mackail, records a visit he made, aged eight, in the company of his father to Canterbury Cathedral and the Abbey at Minster in Thanet on the Isle of Sheppey.This might have been a business excursion. Sheppey was the site of a major port and Royal Navy installation.6 There followed then, in 1848, matriculation at the newly founded Marlborough College.This had at its core another eighteenth-century building, and a new block, where Morris boarded, in the early-eighteenth-century manner designed by a worthy architect, Edward Blore, who worked happily in classical and Gothic styles according to client requirements.The school has a pretty air about it today but it appears not to have stimulated Morris much.The surrounding landscape filled with prehistoric features must have captured the imagination just as it does even today. One of the most remarkable is Silbury Hill, the enigmatic earth mound built in the Neolithic period and recognised as prehistoric in Morris’ own time. Morris had left Marlborough by Christmas 1851 and spent the first half of 1852 studying for his Oxford entrance exam under the guidance of the Rev. F. B. Guy of the Forest School in Walthamstow. Morris stayed on with him for another six months.We know that Guy had an interest in architecture because in the 1840s, studying at Lincoln College, Oxford, he had joined the Oxford Architectural Society.7 This was one of the first amateur societies devoted solely to medieval buildings, and its express intention was to promote the Gothic Revival. It did this by encouraging the scholarly restoration of medieval buildings and the design of new churches in an authentic ancient style.8 Morris matriculated in January 1853 at Exeter College.There was then no better teaching lab for someone interested in ancient and modern architecture. The University and city were rich in medieval remains, but the latter was also expanding at a fast pace through the growth of an industrial base, first stimulated by the opening of the Oxford and Coventry Canal in 1789. This linked Oxford to the industrial belt in the Midlands.Then came the railways, first the Great Western in 1844, and then further connections in 1850. In the meantime, during the 1820s and 1830s, the University began a long period of expansion. Many of the colleges were rebuilt or refaced, and this process continued throughout Morris’ time at Oxford. The city itself was growing through the activity of speculative developers, who were building smart, metropolitan terraces in the land between St Giles and the canal and railway lands to the south.When Morris matriculated, then, Oxford would have been a hive of building activity, new buildings in different styles, old buildings restored to meet modern requirements, commercial, institutional, residential, some bespoke, some speculative.9 There is no evidence that Morris joined the Oxford Architectural Society or even that he ever attempted any serious, scholarly study of medieval buildings in his free time. Whilst at 171

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Oxford, however, he made two trips to France, one in 1854, about which we know little except that he visited Rouen.10 There was a long trip the following summer, July and August, with his friends Edward Burne-Jones and William Fulford, focusing on the churches of northern France. His impressions are recorded in four letters, three to his mother and the last to his friend Cormell Price, written from Avranches in Normandy on 10 August 1855. This suite of letters is very important.11 They are the only evidence we have to demonstrate the young Morris’ familiarity with the details of medieval architecture, and they are written in the context of Morris’ then stated desire to become a Church of England priest. Here are the traces of that cultural cocktail of the 1840s and 1850s, of Romantically-minded Oxbridge undergraduates imagining religion as the best way to realise their aesthetic urges and to do so in a respectable way. The one to Price is more direct and worthy of close study for what it reveals about Morris’ artistic temperament and aesthetic vision.12 It is densely written, almost trancelike.The narrative weaves architecture into the teeming landscape of high summer. Sensuality washes across the two.The way of conceiving architecture in a lush naturalistic setting might not be new in itself, drawing as it does on the picturesque tradition. But what is remarkable is the intensity of expression. Shortly after, Morris writes his mother to explain why he is no longer contemplating life in the Church.Aged 20, that summer journey in the company of university friends opened the way to his true feelings, which were artistic and secular but with a longing for a life that had some deeper purpose. This tour in the company of his friends was transformational and it led directly to the earliest prose pieces we have from Morris, both of which were published in the short-lived Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which Morris underwrote and helped to edit. First there is the ‘The Story of the Unknown Church’, in the first number of January 1856.13 This is a fantasy, the narrative moving between the present and the past, where the narrator recounts the thoughts and feelings of a medieval stone carver as he sets about his work. Poised to strike his mallet, he has an explosive vision of nature unbounded. Here is Morris giving literary form to what he felt the previous summer, and drawing inspiration from Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’. Nearly forty years later, in 1892, Morris would republish this chapter from the 1855 volume of The Stones of Venice in a lavish Kelmscott Press edition of 500, writing in the preface that it was one of the very few ‘necessary’ architectural utterances of the nineteenth century. The other piece was published in the journal’s second number, of February 1856, and titled ‘The Churches of North France, No. 1, Shadows of Amiens’. Here Morris turns the unknown church on its head, writing from the present and trying to imagine the mentality of the medieval workman. The emotion he records is ‘love’ and ‘longing’, anthropomorphising them: ‘I think those same churches of North France the grandest, the most beautiful, the kindest and most loving of all the churches that the earth has ever borne’.Then there is melancholy.Through the hewn, patinated masonry, Morris can just dimly make out ‘some little of the medieval times’. These are, sadly,‘gone from me for ever – voiceless for ever’. Reading this, we have to make an allowance for the way a young and emotional undergraduate expresses himself. Notwithstanding that, it hints at something just a little troubling and which shows itself in later life, a too strong engagement, even fixation, on things, buildings and places.14 That to one side, and more pertinently, the sensual engagement with buildings demonstrated in this early material stayed with Morris, and it returned, with particular force of feeling, in the conservation activism to which he devoted so much time in his forties. This love of architecture would wind up setting the course of Morris’ life. His impulse was plainly not going to be satisfied by playing the artistic country vicar running a ministry from a hoary, ancient parish church. The next best thing, or so it must have seemed to him, was to 172

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become an architect.That had an air of respectability and offered the promise of a secure professional life, one realised through a medium he loved. He was not the first, or indeed the last, Oxbridge undergraduate to entertain a Romantic fantasy about entering the profession. In the mid-1840s, another architectural enthusiast, E. A. Freeman (later the noted historian of the Norman Conquest and Regius professor) followed an almost identical trajectory, first toying with the Church, then briefly taking drawing lessons in a local office before realising that he was unsuited to it.15 Morris did Freeman one better. In January 1856, having taken his degree, Morris entered into articles in the Oxford office of George Edmund Street (1824–1881).16 The fees were of course met by his mother. Street must have been Morris’ choice, not his mother’s, and it shows he had good judgment. In the mid-1850s, Street was the most innovative architect of the Gothic Revival. He had trained in a provincial practice, then joined George Gilbert Scott’s London office in 1845 and left four years later to set up on his own, but not in London as one might expect. He chose Wantage in Berkshire before moving, in 1852, to Oxford.The house in Beaumont Street where he lived and worked was part of a very elegant speculative development in the Regency style (begun in 1828). It was located centrally, and not far from the new passenger station which provided a good direct service to London. This move out of London was less risky than it at first sounds because Street was a devout Churchman and aligned with the then Bishop of Oxford, the Rt. Rev. Samuel Wilberforce.The latter’s was an entirely new diocese, created in 1845.Wilberforce was determined to make it a model of administrative efficiency in order to promote a new kind of committed parson, passionate, devoted to the forms of worship, a leader in his community, whose example would revitalise the fortunes of an Anglican Church losing ground to Non-conformists and secularists.17 Wilberforce used architecture to support institutional reform and to that end appointed Street as Diocesan Architect, one of the first such posts in England.This required him to approve proposals for new churches and alterations to existing ones through the special system of licencing under what is known as the faculty regime. Unsurprisingly, being the favourite architect of a dynamic, reforming Bishop was a very good business model, and through this connection Street himself received many commissions for new churches, church restorations and related commissions, the most notable being one for Wilberforce himself: a new theological training college at Cuddesdon, which commenced in 1852. Alongside this work, Street became a leading architectural theorist, publishing a series of articles on Continental Gothic churches in France, Germany and the Low Countries, and then in 1855 his ground-breaking Brick and marble architecture in the middle ages: notes on tours in the north of Italy.This study followed the lead set by Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, which relied on many Italian (and also northern French) examples, and then of course the first volume of The Stones of Venice. Street’s particular architectural achievement in the early 1850s was to derive a new form of expression based on Continental examples, a dramatic and muscular Revival architecture which was highly colouristic, helping to define the manner later writers have come to call High Victorian Gothic, an eclectic style that was based on a wider range of medieval sources than had previously been the case. Street was also known for his interest in internal decoration and the use of colour. His best known early work in this manner is the complex of buildings comprising the new parish church of All Saints at Boyne Hill in Berkshire.18 This project (which would take more than a decade to complete) commenced in 1854 and would have been one of the most important in the Oxford office when Morris was there. The large complex at Cuddesdon would just have been finished (1854), and the most ambitious project in hand would have been the competition design for the new cathedral at Lille (1855) and the English Memorial Church in Istanbul (1856). 173

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Figure 6.2 G. E. Street, All Saints, Boyne Hill, Maidenhead, early 1850s. Courtesy National Monuments Record, Swindon.

In this desire to unite decorative art and architecture, Street was, as Sheila Kirk has observed, following in the footsteps of A. W. N. Pugin, the Roman Catholic architect and theorist who in the late 1830s was arguably the most influential architect promoting the Gothic Revival and who likewise produced, when the funds were available, interiors of remarkably intense and vibrant colour.The early colourism of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.’s interiors come directly from Street’s office. The room the firm decorated in the new South Kensington Museum of Decorative Art (now the V&A) has the same tonal palette as a mid-Victorian town church built dripping with coloured stones, stained glass and stencilled surfaces.19 We do not know exactly what Morris did in Street’s office.As a pupil in articles he would have been set certain rudimentary tasks, copying drawings, measuring buildings, preparing contract documentation according to set forms and probably attending site visits. One experience he had there would prove to be life changing, and that was his meeting Webb, who was some five years into his professional training and so would have been more involved in supervising work and developing design details.Webb was born and bred in Oxford, the son of a local physician. After articles in Reading and a brief spell in a Wolverhampton practice,Webb entered Street’s office as a qualified assistant in May 1854.Though he was Morris’ near contemporary,Webb had by then five years of professional experience and an aptitude for drawing, particularly from nature. We can only guess whether Morris was an accomplished draughtsman by this point. It appears that whilst with Street, Morris began to study fine art with Dante Gabriel Rossetti.To judge from the painting of Iseult he made in 1858 (Tate Gallery, London), Morris clearly had some ability.20 (Plate 8.2) A feeling for fine art can be helpful to an architect but it was not, and is not, essential. 174

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And whilst most Victorian architects excelled at perspective renderings – street’s sketchwork was outstanding in this respect – even that requires a degree of specificity and the submersion of individual expression in favour of accuracy.21 Architectural drawing per se (plan, section, elevation, detail) is different again and markedly. It is a rules-based, technical skill, and a very great deal turns on accuracy and clarity and the relationship of the drawing to the written specification for the work. These observations provide some context for Webb’s anecdote about Morris in Street’s office. Though published decades later by Lethaby, the vignette rings true: ‘Professionally’, [Morris] was occupied for much of the time … in copying a drawing of the doorway of St Augustine’s Church, Canterbury. He suffered much tribulation in delineating the various mouldings, and ‘at last the compass points nearly bored a hole through the drawing board’.22 Here in a single image is a depiction of Morris’ frustrated desire to penetrate beneath the surface of medieval buildings in search of the spirit of the past, a yearning expressed in his earlier writings. There is also here, too, a reference to the attack Morris would mount on the whole profession of architecture, which he accused of mechanically reproducing the forms of antiquity but missing the real spirit that lay behind the beauty of this work. The particular associations of that site, St. Augustine’s, have gone unremarked, I believe, by Morris scholars. St. Augustine’s was the site of Christianity’s introduction to the British Isles, and in 1844 the Tory and High Church MP Alexander Beresford-Hope purchased the site and hired William Butterfield to design and build a missionary training college on and within its ruins.23 This opened in 1848. Street was a High Church Tory too and then had in hand the design of the theological training college at Cuddesdon for Wilberforce.This anecdote captures two things. It stands as a metaphor for Morris’ rejection of professional life. Second, and more expressly, the image also represents Morris’ recent rejection of the ministry. It is hard to imagine that the bread and butter of professional life, the drawing in plan, elevation and section, the detailed specification, would have been too congenial to the young Morris. Still, he could not have but admired the young Webb’s professionalism, particularly where that was combined with the skills of a fine draughtsman with an artistic sensibility. I agree, too, with Sheila Kirk, in her wonderful book on Webb, that the two men must also have had a shared sensibility born of a similar social background. It is noteworthy that Webb visited Morris’ family home in Waltamstow twice in their early acquaintance.24 Whatever the exact nature of their relationship, Morris and Webb went with Street in August 1856 when he moved his practice to London, taking offices in Montague Place in Bloomsbury near the British Museum. Webb settled in rooms in Great Ormond Street nearby. Morris settled with his old friends from Exeter College, Edward Burne-Jones and Richard Watson Dixon, at no. 17 Red Lion Square to the south. Out of office hours, Morris and Burne-Jones studied life drawing with Rossetti. By the end of 1856, Morris had resigned his articles. His first work as a decorator would turn out to be furnishing Red Lion Square with painted furniture made to Morris’ own designs by a commercial studio. From what we know of this period, Morris worked himself into an artistic frenzy, painting, drawing, carving, writing poetry. It was as if he was purging himself of the strictures of professional life and also proving his resolve to become a fine artist. 25 In summer 1857, Morris and Burne-Jones joined Rossetti in Oxford and contributed to the scheme of mural decoration of the newly completed Oxford Union, a Gothic Revival building designed by the architects Deane and Woodward, who would build the Natural History 175

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Museum a few years later in the north of the city26 (Plate 8.3). The following spring of 1858 Morris became engaged to Jane Burden, the daughter of a working-class family which had moved from the countryside to Oxford in search of work. She had modelled for Rossetti the previous summer. So the stage was set for Morris’ first and only work of architectural patronage. He purchased land near Upton in Kent, a declining apple orchard, in 1858 as the site for a family home. The land was about 3 miles from Abbey Wood, where there was a railway station with a connection to London and the studio lodgings at Red Lion Square. Morris and Jane married on 26 April 1859 and lived a few doors down from Webb, who had by this point prepared contract drawings for what would be known as Red House (Plate 6.1). The project, Webb’s first independent design, was completed in 1860. Webb was responsible for the design of the building and Morris for its interior decoration, or so it is generally said. In practice, however,Webb’s interiors were distinguished by a strong architectural character, the product of exposed structural details, contrasting materials and elegantly proportioned spaces accessed off a grand entrance hall with large timber stairs open to the underside of a steeply sloping roof. The interior character of the building was, then, set by Webb’s architecture, and any decoration had to fit within that framework.27 It is no exaggeration to say that Red House is one of the most celebrated buildings in the whole of architectural history, a Victorian Villa Savoye. That said, Red House was far less revolutionary than is commonly assumed.The plain brick exterior, simple detailing, pointed arches, asymmetrical composition and steeply tiled roof are derived from a group of Gothic vicarages of the 1840s which were designed by Pugin and by William Butterfield. They devised a particular building form that inspired countless examples by other architects working across the country.28 It is not a typical middle-class villa of the kind Morris would have known from his childhood or which he would have seen in Oxford. It is not modelled on the vernacular architecture of the Kentish Weald; indeed, there is nothing locally distinctive about it save the red brick. Red House is in essence a large vicarage but without the accompanying parish church and village school. Morris and Burne-Jones collaborated with friends on the furniture design and surface decoration which drew on those same sources, and that experience of working together here, on the house Morris built for himself and his young wife, led in turn to the creation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in the following year, 1861.The workshops were based in London in Georgian Bloomsbury, but early success led to the need for larger premises, and in 1864 the firm decided to relocate the whole of its operations to Red House.Webb prepared plans to expand the original house to provide workshops and accommodation for Burne-Jones and his family. The growing workload included designs for stained glass windows, many for church projects (including restored church interiors). Morris was excited. Red House would become a home and a workshop, the two families living to some extent communally in a way that continued the life of making that Morris and Burne-Jones had shared as young men in their London digs. In the event, Morris’ personal finances would not bear the strain of the project and relocation. Family illness stifled Burne-Jones’ plans.29 And so it was that in summer 1865, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. let no. 2 Queen Square, close by Red Lion Square. Morris and his family were settled back in Bloomsbury, at no. 26. The contrast between the rolling countryside of Kent and the rigid framework of Georgian streets and squares losing their original shine of gentility could not have been more striking. Burne-Jones and his family, meanwhile, settled far to the west, Kensington Square. Morris and Jane, and their young family (Jane Alice, or ‘Jenny’, born in 1861, and Mary, or ‘May’, born in 1862) would spend the next seven years here, during which time the Morrises’ marital relations deteriorated. Morris’ business enjoyed more success, aesthetic at least, with an increasing number of stained-glass commissions, other church decorations (notably at Jesus College Chapel, 176

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Cambridge) and significant secular commissions.30 A very important one was the redecoration of the Armoury and Tapestry Room at St James’s Palace (September 1866–January 1867), which Fiona MacCarthy described, aptly, as ‘almost overpoweringly Gothic and tenebrous, rich, dense and highly patterned’.31 This interior was novel in its time, and the ideas were developed further in the next one, the Green Dining Room, one of three in a suite of refreshment rooms at the new museum at South Kensington (discussed above) (Plate 8.5).At about this time came a series of domestic commissions, all showcases for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.’s work: Birkett Foster’s house, the Hill, at Witley in Surrey; the studio house Webb designed for the painter Val Prinsep at no. 1 Holland Park Road; and another interior in a Webb-designed house, for George Howard, on Crown land at no. 1 Palace Green. On that project, the Crown estate’s surveyors, establishment architects all, refused to grant a licence to build because they considered the exterior detailing too radical.32 These private commissions were undertaken in much the same way as the firm’s church work: a complete design service was provided, working as part of an architectural ensemble.They signal, however, the future direction of the firm and Morris’ eventual success as a designer, which lay practically in the evolution of a domestic, off-the-shelf product range of furniture, fabrics and wallpaper, which would be purchased individually, much as one can buy Morris’ paper or fabric today, or which the firm could combine into a complete interior. Remarkably, during this period marked by marital problems and business difficulties, Morris established himself as a literary figure, a poet. During this challenging and busy time of his life, if Morris thought architecturally at all, it was probably in professional terms. There is very little about architecture per se in his correspondence from the late 1850s and 1860s, and nothing really to indicate his views on the direction the Gothic Revival was taking. To the extent that buildings featured in Morris’ thinking it would have been as ‘sites’, projects, in other words, which were the object of his attention professionally. The firm owed a lot to the efforts of the Revival architect G. F. Bodley, a contemporary of Street.The two had met in Scott’s office, which they had joined in 1845 to assist him with the Nikolaikirche competition in Hamburg. One of the most important early projects Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. got through Bodley, for one of his churches, was a complete set of glass and related decorations for the new church of All Angels in Brighton, a building very much cast in the mould of Street’s colourism.There shortly followed a complete scheme for the ancient parish church of All Saints Selsey in Gloucestershire, where Morris was careful to adjust the tonality of the glass to the ancient interior then being restored by Bodley33 (Plates 7.1–7.4). Much of the church work extended beyond stained glass to include wall painting and stencilling, embroidery and tiles.The ecclesiastical stained-glass commissions peaked in 1865 and 1866. It must be said that Bodley and, for that matter, Street were very sensitive in their restoration of ancient buildings, but that was relative to the standards of the time. Still, it is ironic, given Morris’ later involvement with the ‘anti-restoration’ movement through the SPAB, that more of the decorative work from this early period went into ancient than modern churches.34 Morris and his colleagues were certainly aware of the debate around restoration which had been gathering in intensity during the 1850s and early 1860s. Indeed, Morris discusses the subject in his letter from northern France to Crom Price during that important summer tour. Certainly after this, the topic came to be the subject of much debate as antiquarians and artists began to realise just how many ancient parish churches were being modernised to suit the newly reformed standards of Anglican worship. In August 1862, Burne-Jones, Morris and Webb together visited St Cross in Winchester, newly restored by William Butterfield and featuring an elaborate painted scheme purporting to be based on medieval precedent.They were shocked by the hard bright design.35 The firm’s business manager Warington Taylor wrote disapprovingly of modern restoration practice to Webb over the winter of 1866–67 during a visit to Rye, and in 177

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March 1867,Taylor specifically criticised Bodley’s work with no thought, it seems, for biting the hand that had fed the firm in its early days.36 We have no direct evidence for what Morris himself thought about these matters in response to Taylor, assuming he spoke to him about them in the first place. Morris’ mind was, frankly, elsewhere, engaged in literary activity and distracted by the affair which had developed between his wife Jane and Rossetti, who was also of course one of the partners in the firm. Morris appears to have accepted this infidelity without challenge and indeed with some sensitivity, as MacCarthy has perceptively analysed. In any event, the two, Morris and Rossetti, jointly leased an old stone house in a small village in Oxfordshire, near the headwaters of the Thames, Kelmscott.This was in June 1871, immediately after which Morris left for the first of two visits to Iceland, so leaving his wife and the painter alone. Kelmscott Manor is a beautiful house of typical Cotswold character, part sixteenth, part seventeenth-century, the largest dwelling in fact in what is still a small, quiet village (Plates 4.1 and 6.2). The manor lies at the southern end of the settlement, and at the other end is the ancient parish church. In high summer, the place is intensely verdant, almost unbelievably lush, full of fat bird song and gentle breezes. Morris never lived in Kelmscott permanently, visiting only on weekends and for short holidays. Still it was a special place for him. In 1872, he leased a new London house, right by the river in Hammersmith, and named the Georgian property Kelmscott House. The Thames linked the two directly, and the journey upstream, effectively from one to the other, is a central event in News from Nowhere of 1890–91.The real Kelmscott, the welcoming stone house in Oxfordshire, became Morris’ spiritual home. Looking forward, it is where he would spend his last days, and he would be buried in the village, in the churchyard, under a tomb slab designed by Webb.As it happened, and unsurprisingly, the church would be restored in line with advice from the SPAB, the works partly funded through Morris’ anonymous donations.37 Kelmscott Manor and village were central to the aesthetic and political vision which Morris developed in the last third of his life.We should remember that to this point Morris had lived either in suburbia or in cities. He was, really, more a Londoner than anything else. Here now he had a strong, personal connection to a beautiful property in then relatively undeveloped countryside. Finally, he was immersed in that Romantic image he tried so hard to describe in his early writing. Fiona MacCarthy has, I think, written most perceptively about this connection between him and the region. The dispersed rural settlement pattern of which Kelmscott was part, each complete in its own right and beautiful, is the model for the way he would organise his utopia.Their visual qualities were the product of an indigenous building craft, making use of locally available materials in a distinctive way that reflected their methods of construction.Time and weather had worked their way across these structures, so that they had settled into perfect harmony with the surrounding environment to produce what for us, today, is the very epitome of homely comfort and happiness. Morris would now have before him, on regular visits, an object lesson in what architecture could be like, and it was clear to him that few of the buildings of his own time could compare in terms of sheer beauty, even allowing for how they would look over time. It must have felt to Morris, a man raised effectively in an outer London suburb, that he had arrived at the place he had been meant to be all along. At about this time, the firm’s output was shifting decidedly to the off-the-shelf, domestic product line with which it would come to be associated, and then came the dissolution of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. and the creation of Morris & Co, with Morris in control of the creative direction of the company.38 In the early and mid-1870s came great experiments in the art of making things with the craft of decorative art. Church commissions would continue, for stained glass mostly, but their percentage of the firm’s overall turnover would decrease.Thus, the hold of the Gothic Revival slowly loosened itself. Not surprisingly, the way was open for 178

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Morris to take a stand against the practice of church restoration, a practice which had, contributed so much to the growth of his reputation and financial stability. The point must be made that Morris invented ‘Anti-Scrape’, his word for what we would today call ‘conservation’, at the moment when he could do so, with no risk to his business particularly. The first evidence we have that Morris was moving towards conservation work comes in a letter he wrote to his mother from Florence at Easter 1873.39 It records the disappointment he and Burne-Jones felt visiting San Miniato al Monte. That it comes from Italy is prescient, given that during the SPAB’s first years, Morris established an overseas committee looking in particular at Italian practice (see below). In 1874, Morris signed a petition against the restoration of Hampstead Parish Church, adding weight to a campaign led by the architects Basil Champneys and George Gilbert Scott Jr, who lived in Church Row nearby.The younger Scott promoted Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. on a number of his father’s church projects, notably at Chedleton in Northamptonshire.40 This was the same year that saw the formation of the Commons Preservation Society, whose initial object was to prevent Epping Forest from becoming housing development. Morris’ beloved family home,Woodford Hall, lay on the edge of the Forest, and he had spent time wandering in it as a boy.This activism probably caught his attention, but we have no evidence he was a member. To this point most campaigns against restoration were discrete, focusing on a particular project and locality. One event of 1874 galvanised public opinion and provided a focus for objection.This was the publication of The Parliamentary Return of Church Building and Restoration since 1840. A. J. Beresford-Hope, Conservative MP and High Churchman, had ordered it to refute charges that the church building and restoration boom had been funded out of parish rates.41 In fact most had come from church settlements and fund-raising campaigns. There was, however, one unintended consequence of the survey. For the first time, the chattering classes could understand the scale of transformation worked on England’s ancient churches as a group. The arts editor of The Athenaeum, F. G. Stephens, took up the cause, pointing out the considerable fees that architects, who charged fees generally of a flat 5.5 % of the capital cost of construction, had made from this work. At this point Sir George Gilbert Scott, then president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, offered Ruskin the Institute’s prestigious Gold Medal. He declined it in protest of the role which the profession had played in harshly restoring ancient buildings.Word of this slipped out and attracted some notice in the broadsheet press.42 Mackail, Morris’ first biographer, put his change of heart just slightly later, in 1876, following a visit to Lichfield Cathedral he had made on one of his trips to consult with his colleague Thomas Wardle, the dyer based in Leek.43 In September 1876, on a trip up river with his lifelong friend Crom Price, Morris stopped at Burford Church and was agitated by the work he saw there. There followed, in March 1877, Morris’ letter to The Athenaeum objecting to the proposed restoration of Tewkesbury Abbey by Gilbert Scott and proposing an organisation of some permanent nature to oppose what he considered the overly harsh treatment of ancient buildings and churches in particular.44 Long ago, E. P.Thompson put the point that the SPAB was part of Morris’ political awakening, a step on the road to Socialist agitation.45 No one writing since has seriously questioned that, and the journey was not unusual. The 1870s saw the rise of the pressure group in its modern form, a dedicated collection of interested individuals, what we today call ‘third parties’, promoting a single interest through concerted action and in a determined, organised manner. The examples already cited, the formation of the Commons Preservation Society and the campaign to save Hampstead parish church, were examples of this trend. Morris had prior experience of one working on the national stage. In 1876 he was one of the founding members and treasurer of the Eastern Question Association, a ‘Gladstone-inspired’ pressure group dedicated to 179

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opposing Disraeli’s pro-Turkish policy in the Balkans. Here was a perfect example of how a society dedicated to a different purpose could be run in an organised way to shift public opinion. Like so many agitational campaigns, the SPAB’s ideology turned on a stark view of things. Its criticisms were fair but to a point only. Morris and his associates overlooked the fact that the architectural profession had been evolving new and more careful approaches since the 1850s at least.46 This was what Scott achieved more than anyone else, notwithstanding he was the Society’s bête noire, and so also Morris’ one-time master Street, whom the Society also criticised repeatedly. Both felt aggrieved, and reasonably so. Within a few weeks of Morris’ letter, he,Webb and a handful of others met formally to form a Society dedicated to what they called ‘protection’. In April, Morris and Webb, between them the Society’s stalwarts for the next 20 years, wrote a manifesto to describe what they meant by this term.47 That short statement of intent is still in wide circulation; it is published on the Society’s website and studied in conservation courses. Despite the continued interest it attracts, however, the SPAB’s manifesto was a direct response to Gothic Revival theory.This movement had in effect made medieval buildings too familiar, and so led architects to presume to be able to interpret the intentions of their medieval predecessors and, more than this, actually to bring a dead style back to life.As a result, modern architects felt able to treat old work in cavalier fashion, or so it was alleged. They did not hesitate to replace worn, original fabric with new material, calling that careful restoration.Worse, some believed they had the right to complete an unfinished or damaged design on the basis of their scholarly understanding and conjecture. However, accurate the designs might have been, the activity falsified history and destroyed art.That some of this work was done in the interest of making buildings, mostly churches, fit for modern use did not matter. The present had no claim on the past. ‘Protection’ was an imperative. In one sense, it brooked no compromise with practicalities. Ancient buildings were monuments to art and history first and foremost. The idea was a rejection of the status quo, and its claims were based on what Morris and his associates described as an absolute public interest. In that sense, ‘protection’ looks forward to contemporary practice, which restricts private property rights in historic buildings because of a generalised public interest.48 Morris and his colleagues wanted not just to bring about a sea change in the way old buildings were repaired. They also wanted to change the way their contemporaries conceptualised them. An earlier generation saw these sites in two ways, as containers of historic information and associations, yes, but also as social commodities. The continued use for an analogous purpose justified changes to them, even far-reaching changes where, for instance, ancient fabric was unable even to begin to meet new requirements. Morris and his fellow conservationists believed that the care of ancient buildings should be driven first and foremost by the conservation of their material integrity and historic character. The requirements of the present had to be balanced against those considerations, and the balance struck in favour of the building, whose conservation in itself was a public good irrespective of any present need. To achieve this objective, the Society devised new techniques which they applied on a relatively small number of demonstration projects where, through one means or another, they were able to exercise influence. This ethos unquestionably shaped our modern understanding of the historic environment and our approach to the practical work of conservation, particularly in respect of really ancient fabrics. In itself, the very articulation of these ideals, at a time when the pressure to modernise ancient churches was decreasing, had an effect over time. In the short term, however, the Society’s influence was in fact limited. This was partly down to the uncompromising attitude Morris himself took in his public and private correspondence.The converted must have enjoyed reading his missives. The unconverted could only have thought them rude and presumptuous in the few minutes before they tossed them in the proverbial bin. Fiery self-belief is fine for 180

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preaching to the converted. One could debate whether it is the best way to influence public opinion. Morris’ openly left-wing views did not help, it must be said.This was the case with the Society campaign he led against the demolition of redundant ancient churches in the City of York.This attracted considerable public interest and some support in the press. Morris, however, had to step away from addressing a public meeting attended by the Archbishop promoting the initiative because the Society’s cause was in effect tainted by Morris’ radicalism.49 A similar lack of political awareness comes across in the evidence he gave to the select committee looking into proposals to conserve Westminster Hall in Parliament Square. The solution Morris offered, on the Society’s behalf, was to leave the scarred west elevation of the Hall, showing evidence of the Norman original, open to public inspection as a ruin, possibly running a footpath along the base of the structure.This, he believed, was a better way to express the antiquity of the site and its historical place in English civilisation.50 Morris did not mind, it seems, that the Society’s was an outsider activity. He did not mind that it was secular in intent and profile, and he made no concession to the requirements of the only institution expressly charged with the care of these magnificent buildings, the Church of England. Indeed, the only legal mechanism then available to regulate any ancient building at all was the Church of England faculty system. Reforming bishops such as Street’s former supporter, Wilberforce of Oxford, used this regulatory system to modernise ancient fabrics to meet the needs of the present and in so doing encouraged the sort of restoration the Society rejected. The Society, under Morris’ and Webb’s stewardship, made no concession at all to the legitimate interests of the one body in a position to effect their ideas. It was a zero-sum game. In this context, given the very considerable difficulties the Society faced, one measure of success was sheer survival, and that was down to the determination and organisational ability of Morris, assisted by Webb and Morris & Co.’s business manager, George Wardle. There was no shortage of members, and from them subscriptions to provide operating capital. How to make decisions corporately was the first challenge. After experimenting with committee structures, the Society’s regular work in the first decade of its activity came down to a small group of men who regularly attended fortnightly meetings, first at Morris & Co.’s premises and then in dedicated offices in Buckingham Street, near Charing Cross Station and the underground station. Morris’ associate Thomas Wardle was part of this core group, along with Charles Vinall, an obscure surveyor at the Metropolitan Board of Works in London.51 The next challenge was to work out a modus operandi. It was all very well presenting a new theory. How could it be promoted practically? The answer was through regular casework, a method which seems obvious today but which was not in its time because there was no mechanism requiring proposals to be publicised or even advertised locally. The promoters of restoration only had to seek permission from the Bishop who issued faculty licences for works. The nearest there was to any form of publicity were fund-raising campaigns the promoters of works advertised in local and national papers. So it was that the Society’s casework was at first mostly generated in this way, in response to newspaper articles soliciting donations for building works. Surveying the whole of the national and local press was practically impossible for Morris and his colleagues, so one of the very first investments the new society made was a subscription to a press clipping service, which was itself a modern innovation. The trouble was that the published notices were not very detailed. Someone interested in contributing could write requesting a brochure describing the work, but that often assumed some degree of local understanding. Within a few years, the Society set up a network of socalled ‘local correspondents’, faithful supporters who lived outside London and were generally well informed and culturally connected. They made inquiries, visited the site, talked to local contacts and posted written notes back to the Society in London. Suitably informed, the Society 181

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then wrote in specific terms to the scheme’s promoter to discourage proposed works it considered harmful and so to encourage a different approach. To explain its philosophy, the Society would enclose a copy of the manifesto which included its published membership list.This was important to demonstrate that the new group was properly constituted and supported by leading individuals, including members of the aristocracy. Occasionally, the technical nature of these issues required professional oversight of the advice.Webb’s architectural skills were invaluable in this regard, and so too the professional training of the younger designers who were drawn to his and Morris’ company. Within a few years, the Society had actually extended this system to other countries, first to Italy, then France and parts of Germany, and then in particular to areas of British interest in the eastern Mediterranean, to Cyprus and Egypt. This required affiliate members resident in other countries, sometimes working with Society supporters who had just visited one or another overseas site. Morris obtained translations of the manifesto into French and German and Italian specifically to support this work. The first really significant public campaign abroad was against works proposed to San Marco in Venice. As it turned out, though, he had got the facts wrong. Worse, the tone of his engagement was dismissive and had exactly the opposite of its intended effect.The whole thing turned out to be a publicity disaster for the Society, as Frank Sharp has written.52 By the early 1880s, most of the Society’s correspondence was done corporately, through a casework secretary.The architect Hugh Thackeray Turner, who with his partner Eustace Balfour did a lot of work for the Duke of Westminster in London, settled into this role in 1883 and was instrumental in extending the Society’s influence through careful and judicious correspondence. A part-time secretary with a paid office assistant was essential because the Society’s casework grew quickly in its first few years. During this period, Morris himself contributed to correspondence sent out under the secretary’s name but he would from time to time sign letters to the newspapers in his own name, on behalf of the Society.The minutes of the Society, held still in its archive, show that Morris,Wardle and Webb devoted hours and hours to the cause.When Morris stepped back from this work in the mid-1880s in favour of his political activism,Webb took over his mantle as leader and drew into the Society’s orbit a circle of younger architects attracted to the Arts and Crafts ideals and the Society’s philosophy of repair.The two went hand in glove. In the short and medium term, during the late 1870s and well into the 1880s, the successes the Society achieved were almost always because one of its supporters was himself a promoter of works of restoration, and so contacted the Society to involve them directly.The best example of this is undoubtedly the case of Inglesham Church in Wiltshire, a beautiful little country parish church left alone by the Victorian reformers.The vicar was a political contact of Morris, the Rev. Oswald Birchall, who was also the Society’s local correspondent for the area. The building needed repair.The local population were farmers, and there was no donor eager to spend significant sums for elaborate works (as was so often the case). The circumstances were right, then, to turn this into a SPAB demonstration project. The whole approach was, however, so contrary to accepted norms that the Bishop of Oxford wrote expressing dismay at the nature of the works, though practically he could not withhold the necessary permission.53 Fund raising was slow because the parish was poor, but the work proceeded in stages from the mid-1880s through several donations, including anonymous ones from Morris himself. Morris also turned his hand to the fund-raising brochure, itself a fine piece of writing on architectural aesthetics. The architect was J.T. Micklethwaite, a student of George Gilbert Scott, the very figure whom the Society had set up as a foil to promote its ideals. The SPAB came gradually, however, to exercise more practical influence, as Alan Mackley’s recent study of repairs to Blythburgh Church demonstrates along with Andrea Donovan’s study 182

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of the Society and its cultural context.54 A younger generation found its ideals more congenial, but there was more than generational change at work.The militant Anglicanism that had fuelled the restoration boom of the mid-nineteenth century was waning in the face of rising secularism and a consequent decrease in attendance, particularly in rural parishes which were suffering from a long decline in agricultural prices and depopulation.There was less money available for the sort of work in which Scott, Street, Bodley and others had specialised.The low-key repairs the SPAB had promoted suited these new, limited budgets, and what money the Church of England had went into building new, sometimes lavish parish churches in the fast-growing outer suburbs of London as well as in Liverpool and Manchester. As a consequence of all this, there was a marked shift towards the more conservative practice the SPAB promoted during the 1890s, at which point Morris became active once again in its work. Ultimately, then, and as a result of these changing sensibilities, the SPAB turned out to be a perfect vehicle for Morris. It combined his love of the past, of craft and of political engagement. He used it to argue for the appreciation of handicraft, for its beauty and for its social benefits as an antidote to alienated mass production. He did this just as he was himself pushing the limits of handicraft through the work of Morris & Co. Conservation was, in short, a practical wing of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and many of the figures who worked for the Society or were drawn to it were steeped in the aesthetics which Morris and his cohort had been promoting for years. Morris’ increasingly left-wing politics are there just below the surface of his public pronouncements for the SPAB, but early on he realised that he had to keep these two areas separate or risk undermining the Society’s goals. In Morris’ own mind, however, the two issues were closely linked.Those connections came out most forcefully in a series of lectures Morris delivered in the 1880s. First, in 1881, was ‘Art and the Beauty of the Earth’, which encourages the conservation of ancient buildings and unspoilt countryside, and the construction of new things emulating the simple qualities of what we today call ‘vernacular architecture’. In Morris’ time, surprisingly, there was no one word to describe the ordinary buildings designed in the late medieval and early modern periods. 1882 saw the publication of ‘The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation’, which rejected contemporary practice as the product of an alienated society. The buildings of the time were no different to the poorly designed products of the consumerist society to which Morris objected. In 1884, Morris’ now developed Marxist ideology is reflected in his most considered architectural essay, ‘Architecture and History’.This explored the link between buildings and the social circumstances of their production, as the products, a Marxist might say, of the social relations of production. But the essay is more than that, because in this piece Morris returns to certain concepts he would have absorbed from Ruskin, from his first essays on architecture, of 1838 and 1839, that posited it as a manifestation of climate, place and social mores.Those ideas were current in Oxford in the 1840s and in the 1850s when Morris would have encountered them, and certainly in Street’s office if nowhere else.This 1884 essay deserves to be better known because of the compelling way that Morris combines within it the two traditions of Marxism and the English design reform tradition.55 In ‘Architecture and History’, Morris looks favourably on the Gothic Revival that had stimulated his youthful imagination and inspired Webb’s Red House and the firm’s early designs. This approach provided a model for a simple and efficient way of building, though it had not achieved the simple elegance of Morris’ own beloved Kelmscott Manor, the nearby parish church or any of the myriad, humble buildings of the Cotswolds.The Revival had focused too much on high-style buildings and so missed the essential lesson of those traditional buildings we today refer to as vernacular (though as the type was understood in Morris’ day, there was no one word to describe it). As a matter of fact,Webb and Morris between them would inspire a 183

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new generation of younger men who would move the Revival on in that hoped-for direction. Indeed, I am inclined to think that the enthusiasm of this new generation probably was the source for Morris’ optimism in his two final architectural essays, ‘The Revival of Architecture’ of 1888 and ‘Gothic Architecture’ of 1889.The latter is nothing less than a rapprochement with that older generation of revivalists who had nurtured his aesthetic ideas in the mid-1850s. In the heat of forming the SPAB, Morris had attacked the very idea of Gothic Revival. By his midfifties, Morris appears to have mellowed. It may have been no more than the change that takes place to most of us in middle age, which brings with it a deepening sense of self-awareness and greater appreciation of one’s ‘roots’. Morris’ view of conservation was far-sighted. Medieval buildings were beautiful and useful and, more than this, they were practical demonstrations of what labour, freely given (as Morris believed), could achieve in the future after the end of capitalism, and had done previously, before it emerged.Thinking of the hoped-for society of the future, a properly conserved ancient building was an example of what the liberated individual could build, the paradigm of social realism in architecture perhaps. Morris describes this vision in his utopian classic News from Nowhere. In it, the hated speculative suburbs that Morris believed blighted the landscape are gone, and so too all rail infrastructure. His narrator specifically calls attention to Hammersmith roadbridge, an iron suspension bridge which is today recognised as a cherished and familiar part of the local scene (and officially protected as an historic building). Some bank buildings in the City survive because they are solid in construction and so both robust and serviceable for new uses. The Houses of Parliament are there too but abandoned.The quay adjoining it is used to store manure.The buildings of the future are simple structures reflecting the craft-based architecture

Figure 6.3 Kelmscott Church, conserved by Micklethwaite. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery.

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that Morris and the Society sought to conserve. Communal halls resemble medieval tithe barns but are decorated with paintings and tapestries – Morris had in mind the magnificent medieval grange at Great Coxwell. These buildings sit easily, at a low density, in the countryside. Here modern architecture has achieved that happy integration with nature that Morris described in his letters from France to his mother and Crom Price so many years before. It is, really, a return to youthful passions and interests when Morris was in his fifties. The legacy of Morris’ engagement with buildings is perhaps his most enduring gift, or at least perhaps the most tangible.The Ministry of Works responsible for so many ancient sites in the twentieth century applied the standards Morris and Webb pioneered.56 The Society’s work continues, its advice on conservation supporting very high technical standards of care. More significantly, perhaps, is the example of environmental activism the Society set in the United Kingdom and North America.There is now a thriving network of societies devoted to preservation, and in different ways their activities are traceable back to the model Morris and Webb established in 1877.

Literature Review The present author’s several articles and collections, many cited here, present the fullest picture of Morris’s engagement with architecture and particularly with building conservation. Individual contributions to the author’s 2005 essay collection deserve particular attention (see Alan Crawford and Frank Sharp as cited herein). Andrea Donovan’s William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (Routledge, 2008) contextualises the Society’s work and chronicles important campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s. Dr Donovan’s research is particularly important in establishing the influence of the Society in Morris’ later years and after. Since the mid-2000s, the archives of the Society have been explored by many scholars working on particular buildings and an especially comprehensive and well researched study of a particular case is Alan Mackley’s piece on the restorations of Blythburgh Church. Early Society approaches in the mid-1880s fell on deaf ears. By 1900 the restoration committee and vicar were much more receptive. Michael Drury’s Some Wandering Architects (Stamford, Shaun Tyas, 2000) is essential reading on that younger generation drawn to Morris and Webb in the 1880s and 1890s. Sheila Kirk’s excellent study of Webb remains unmatched. Scholars of Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement are, however, even more deeply indebted to Jon Aplin’s very fine collection of Webb’s letters published in 2016.These tell us a great deal about the man but also show the extent of his involvement with the SPAB. E. P. Thompson’s heroic biography of Morris remains the best source describing the interaction of his political and conservation activities, and the catalogue to the V&A’s centenary exhibition (1996) on Morris’ life and work brings together the most up-to-date and comprehensive description of his work as a decorative and visual artist. It is, however, hard to imagine a better guide to Morris’ life, character and art than Fiona MacCarthy’s superb biography of 1994.

Notes 1 ‘Inglesham Church’, SPAB; see also C. Miele, ‘”A Small Knot of Cultivated People”:William Morris and the Ideologies of Protection’, Art Journal, 54/2 (Summer, 1995), 73–80, 77, and Miele, ed., From William Morris. Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity, 1877–1939, Paul Mellon Centre, Studies in British Art 14 (Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 2005), 52–53. 2 F. MacCarthy, William Morris. A Life for Our Time (Faber and Faber, London, 1994), 6–7. In 1899, Morris’ first biographer, J.W. Mackail, wrote more simply that Morris Sr was a ‘wealthy man’. See his The Life of William Morris, 2 vols (Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1899), vol. 1, 10.

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Chris Miele 3 F. S. Boos and P. O’Sullivan,‘Morris and the Devon Great Consols’, The Journal of William Morris Studies, 2012, 11–39, esp. 13–15. 4 MacCarthy, 33–34. 5 W. R. Lethaby, Philip Webb and His Work (Oxford University Press, London, 1935), 150. 6 Mackail, 10. 7 C. Miele, ed., Morris on Architecture (Sheffield,The University Press, 1996), 8–9. 8 For the Gothic Revival promoted by the Society, see, most recently, C. Miele, ‘E. A. Freeman and the Culture of Gothic Revival’, in A. Bremner and J. Conlin, Making History: Edward Augustus Freeman and Victorian Cultural Politics (for the British Academy by OUP, Oxford, 2015), 139–156. 9 C. Miele,‘Freeman and the Culture of Gothic Revival’, 141–142. 10 MacCarthy, 82. 11 N. Kelvin, ed., The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 volumes (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984–1996), vol. 1, 15–22, nos. 8–11. 12 Kelvin, 1, no. 11. 13 As reprinted in Miele, ed., Morris on Architecture, 42–51. 14 Reprinted in Prose and Poetry by William Morris, 1836–1870 (London, Oxford University Press, 1920), 617–631. 15 Miele, ‘Freeman’, 150–151. 16 There remains no comprehensive survey of this great Victorian architect’s life and work. His son’s, Arthur Edmund’s, posthumous Memoir of George Edmund Street, R.A., 1824–1881 (London, John Murray, 1888) is notoriously unreliable and difficult to read. The Oxford years are covered at pages 14–16. The best overview of Street’s work remains in D. Brownlee’s excellent The Law Courts. The Architecture of G. E. Street (Cambridge, MA, the MIT Press, 1984). See 19–35 for an overview of his approach to design and medieval precedent. Sheila Kirk’s excellent study of Webb provides the most up-to-date and authoritative account of Street’s early career and time at Oxford. See Philip Webb. Pioneer of Arts and Crafts Architecture (Chichester, John Wiley and Sons Academic, 2005). 17 For this Oxford phase and Morris’ time in Street’s office, see Kirk, 13–15 and MacCarthy, 103–108. 18 For Street in this important decade of changing practice, see H. R. Hitchcock, ‘G. E. Street in the 1850s’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 19 (1960), 145–171. See also Brownlee above. 19 See L. Parry, ‘Domestic Decoration’ in L. Parry, ed., William Morris (Ex. Cat., London, Victoria and Albert Museum with Philip Wilson), 136–154, at 139–141. 20 R.Watkinson,‘Painting’, in Parry, ed., 90–106, entry G.10. 21 Parry, ed., reproduces a Street perspective from the early 1850s, G.2. 22 Lethaby, 15–16. 23 G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic. Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, 1840– 1870 (London and New Haven,Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre, 2013), 334–340. 24 Kirk, 15–16. 25 MacCarthy, 110–129. 26 MacCarthy, 130–134. 27 See Kirk’s authoritative analysis, pages 20–35. 28 For the types on which it is based, see T. Brittain-Catlin, The English Parsonage in the Early Nineteenth Century (Reading, Spire Books, 2008), 247–297. 29 Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite. Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (Faber and Faber, London, 2011), 168–173. 30 See, for example, M. Harrison in Parry, ed., ‘Church Decoration and Stained Glass’, 106–135, and L. Parry,‘Domestic Decoration’, 136–154. 31 MacCarthy, 211. 32 J. Aplin, The Letters of Philip Webb (London and New York, Routledge, 2016), 4 vols., vol. 1, 9–20, letters 9 to 16, 3 October 1867 to 28 March 1868. 33 M. Hall, George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America (London and New Haven,Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre, 2014), 63–65, 73–75. 34 C. Miele,‘Morris and Conservation’, in C. Miele ed., From William Morris, 30–67, at 38–42. 35 P. Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones.A Biography (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 107. 36 Miele,‘Morris and Conservation’, 40-41. 37 SPAB Archive, Kelmscott Church file. 38 C. Harvey and J. Press, William Morris. Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain (Manchester, the University Press, 1991), 70–94.

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Morris and Architecture 39 Kelvin, vol. 1, no. 190, pages 184–185, dated 9 April 1873. 40 G. Stamp, An Architect of Promise. George Gilbert Scott Jr (1839–1897) and the Late Gothic Revival (Donnington, Shaun Tyas, 2002), various, e.g., 212–213. 41 Parliamentary Accounts and Papers, ‘Survey of Church Building and Church Restoration, 1840–1875’, vol. 58 (June 1876), as discussed variously in Miele,‘The Gothic Revival and Gothic Architecture.The Restoration of Medieval Churches in Victorian Britain’, unpub. Ph.D. thesis (New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 1992), variously and at 542–545. Initial returns were published in 1874, prompting extended correspondence and the crystallisation of opinion that led to the formation of the SPAB. 42 ‘Ruskin and the RIBA Gold Medal’, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. Cook and Wedderburn, vol. 35, 513–516.These letters were republished in The RIBA Journal, vol. 7, 3rd series, in 1900. 43 J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (London, Longmans, Green and C0., 1899), 2 vols., vol. 2, 350. 44 The Athenaeum, 10 March 1877; Kelvin, vol. 1, no. 382, 351–352, written from 26 Queen Square and dated 5 March 1877. 45 E. P. Thompson, William Morris. From Romantic to Revolutionary (New York, Pantheon Books, 1976), 192–242. 46 C. Miele, ‘“Their Interest and Habit”’: Professionalism and the Restoration of Medieval Churches, 1837–1877’, in C. Brooks and A. Saint, Building the Victorian Church.Architecture and Society (Manchester, the University Press, 1995), 151–172. 47 For the founding and early working methods of the Society, see Miele, ‘Morris and Conservation’, 44–52. 48 C. Miele, ‘Heritage and Its Communities: Reflections on the English Experience in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in M. Hall, Towards World Heritage. International Origins of the Preservation Movement, 1870–1930 (Farnham in Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2011, part of the series Heritage, Culture and Identity), 155–180, at 174 and ff. 49 Miele,‘A Small Knot of Cultivated People’, 76–77. 50 C. Miele,‘The Battle for Westminster Hall’, Architectural History, 41 (1998), 220–244. 51 A. Crawford, ‘Supper at Gatti’s:The SPAB and the Arts and Crafts Movement’, in C. Miele, ed., From William Morris, 101–128. 52 F. Sharp,‘The Work of the SPAB outside Britain, 1878–1914’, in Miele, From William Morris, 187–212. See also A. Donovan, William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (New York and London, Routledge, 2008), chapter 5,‘The SPAB in France and Germany in the Nineteenth Century’, 89–104. 53 SPAB Archives, Inglesham Church file. 54 A. Mackley, ed., The Restoration of Blythburgh Church, 1881–1906 (Woodbridge, England, the Boydell Press, for the Suffolk Records Society, vol. 10, 2017); and A. Donovan, as above, especially 64–88, 105–124. 55 These several essays are reprinted in Miele, Morris on Architecture (1996). 56 Simon Thurley, The Men from the Ministry (Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 2013).

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7 WILLIAM MORRIS AND STAINED GLASS Jim Cheshire

William Morris and his associates produced some of most remarkable stained glass of the nineteenth century. These windows have been widely celebrated and researched but still present a series of challenges to historians, some of them specific to the Morris firm and some generated by the nature of the medium. In some senses, Morris windows are hard to place within standard historiography; they are undeniably different from the work of the other mid-Victorian studios and yet never analogous to the windows that later typified the Arts and Crafts movement. This chapter will explore the nature of the firm’s work in the context of other stained-glass studios and, through focussed analysis of a relatively small number of windows, point to areas of potential for future scholarship. Methodological problems inherent in studying stained glass will be explored though analysis of three early commissions, followed by a more general discussion on how we can understand the more deeply embedded nature of Morris’s influence on the later windows. Something like a consensus has been achieved about the broad stylistic developments within the stained glass produced by the Morris firm1 (Cormack 2015, 19–20; Sewter 1974; Harrison 1980). Major early commissions were often associated with new churches or restorations as the Morris firm supplied stained glass for architects such as G. F. Bodley, G. E. Street and George Gilbert Scott.These architects, to a greater or lesser extent, may have contributed to the design process. Early commissions used a range of designers and artists: Edward Burne-Jones, D. G. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb and Morris himself regularly drew cartoons, while isolated commissions also included work executed by Paul Peter Marshall, Albert Moore and Simeon Solomon.These early windows are notable for their variety – a direct consequence of the number of artists employed. Some early windows used historicist features such as gothic canopies, while others are notable for the absence of medievalism. By the later 1860s, Morris’s foliate backgrounds became a marked feature of many commissions, and the range of artists involved became more restricted. By the time that Morris reorganised the firm under his sole proprietorship in 1875, most of the cartoons were already being drawn by Burne-Jones. From this point, the style of the firm echoed Burne-Jones’s own stylistic development, and the windows reflect his fading interest in the medieval period and his increasing admiration for the Italian Renaissance. In the 1880s, a re-evaluation of the firm’s approach is evident: Burne-Jones and Morris embraced the technical challenges of the material and demonstrated a new interest in Byzantine and early medieval sources, leading to the spectacular and monumental windows of the 1880s and 1890s. 188

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Morris’s own attitude to stained glass is recorded only in glimpses. Sewter identified the three central documents: a letter to John Ruskin in 1883, a piece of promotional literature from an exhibition in Boston in the same year (which may not have even been written by Morris), and an encyclopaedia entry written by Morris from 1890 (Kelvin 1984, 2: 184–6; Morris 1892a; Sewter 1974, 21–2). Memoirs, biographies and correspondence provide anecdotal information that, in some respects, adds to our understanding of the firm’s activities, but no manifestos, statements of intent or published philosophies of artistic practice survive as convenient records of Morris’s aims or intentions with respect to stained glass, especially in the earlier years of the firm. Studies of the Morris firm are far more numerous and comprehensive than scholarship documenting the work of other Victorian studios, where extended studies are still relatively sparse (Haward 1984, 1989; Harrison 1980; Cheshire 2004; Crampin 2014; Allen 2018). All accounts of the Morris firm are dominated by A. C. Sewter’s Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, which established an authoritative and comprehensive body of information about the windows (Sewter 1974, 1975). A special edition of the Journal of Stained Glass has proved enormously beneficial, especially Donald Schoenherr’s transcription of Burne-Jones’s account book and his analysis of the contents (Schoenherr 2011a, b). Essays in exhibition catalogues make useful contributions, as do focussed studies of the architects who were heavily involved with the Morris firm (Harrison 1996; Hall 2014; O’Connor 1984). Other publications on the Morris firm’s windows have proved far more problematic both in terms of accuracy and acknowledgment of existing research (Waters 2012, 2017).The key sources, of course, are the windows themselves. Most of these remain in good condition and in their original positions, although the breadth of geographical distribution will present a challenge to most researchers.

Morris’s Role in the Manufacture of Windows A stained glass window is the result of a complex set of processes and cannot be attributed accurately to a single creator. Until the early twentieth century, very few designers or artists painted the glass themselves; most windows were designed by one person and painted by another. Often, more than one individual was involved in the design process; a designer might draw a small-scale design before passing it on to another practitioner to make into a ‘cartoon’ – a full-scale drawing that normally included the lead lines and details of the painting. Someone would then determine the colour scheme, which in practice meant choosing appropriate sheets of coloured glass from which to cut each piece of glass. While the misleading phrase ‘stained glass’ implies that colours are generated by stains, in fact most of the colour in stained glass comes ready made in sheets of ‘pot metal’: glass coloured while still molten.The exception to this rule is ‘silver stain’, which could result in anything from a deep orange to a pale yellow depending on the exact composition of the stain and the heat and duration of firing. Once the glass had been chosen, each piece could then be cut to shape, at which point the glass painter could start work. After the paint had been applied, the glass was fired in a kiln; this fused the enamel paint to the surface of the glass. The fired glass was then cemented into ‘cames’ (‘H’-section strips of lead) which were soldered together to make up the panels comprising the window.The panels would then be transported to the building for an artisan to fix into the window opening. An awareness of this process shows that, even if we restrict our vision to the atelier, a range of different designers, artists, draughtsmen, glass painters, kiln men and glaziers would have been involved in the production of a window. Tony Benyon has researched the background of the known employees of the Morris firm in some detail, but in most cases, especially in the early years, it is unclear who painted specific windows (Benyon 2011 244–9). Even once the practices of the atelier have been established, external factors need to be considered. Stained-glass 189

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windows are a functional part of a building: they need to let light in and keep weather out, and stained glass is rarely the only artistic or decorative element to an interior, meaning that the semantic content of windows needs to be understood in the context of other furnishings.Two further layers of interference need to be acknowledged. Firstly, ecclesiastical interiors were often co-ordinated by assertive architects, who are often understood to have influenced the glazing scheme. Secondly, both architects and glass painters were answerable to clients, who had the final say about designs proposed by the studio. Mackail’s biography has left an account of Morris’s contribution which still forms the basis of our understanding. He claims that ‘the interpretation of the design and the choice of the glass came under his [Morris’s] own eye’, a slightly ambiguous statement explained in more detail in a subsequent passage: When the cartoons for a window had been drawn … Morris personally ‘coloured’ the window; that is to say he dictated in detail to Campfield, the foreman of the painters, what glass was to be used for each part.The various parts were then distributed to the painters, whose work he watched as it went on, though he usually reserved any comments till the painter had done all that he could. Retouches were then made under his direction, and the glass was burned and leaded up. (Mackail 1899, 2: 41–2) Sewter supports Mackail’s claims by citing one of Morris’s notebooks, which demonstrates that he demanded numerous detailed alterations to the windows executed for St. Michael and All Angels, Scarborough, in 1861–62 (Sewter 1974, 92 n. 15). Morris’s management of the palette is further corroborated by the fact that Burne-Jones’s cartoons for other firms were executed in colour, while almost all his cartoons for the Morris firm were monochrome (Sewter 1974, 18). This implies that there was an understanding that Morris would be responsible for overseeing the colour scheme of a window, not surprising given his outstanding ability as a colourist that became so evident in his flat pattern designs. Sewter also observes that Morris was often responsible for inserting the lead lines, which were often absent in cartoons prepared by the firm’s artists. Mackail downplayed Morris’s role as a draughtsman, a claim contested by Sewter, who demonstrated that he drew about 150 cartoons. Morris designed many of the quarry patterns and foliage backgrounds to the windows, which are frequently vital to the success of the windows. There is no doubt that Morris’s contribution to the firm’s stained glass changed; in particular, he drew fewer cartoons from the late 1860s and had ceased completely by 1873.As a consequence, there are two fruitful lines of enquiry when trying to evaluate Morris’s contribution to the firm’s stained glass: one centred on his active contribution to early windows and another on evaluating the nature of his creative partnership with Burne-Jones in the later windows.

Art, Decoration and Medievalism: The Status of the Medium Following the revival of interest in stained glass in the 1840s, a fierce debate emerged about the status of the medium: was stained glass art or merely one of the decorative elements of a building? Charles Winston, a barrister by profession who became one of the most respected authorities on the subject in mid-Victorian England, was adamant that stained glass be evaluated by ‘those sound rules of criticism, which are alike applicable to all works of art; and not by the sole standard of antiquarian conformity’ (Winston 1847, 283). Assertive architects were often opposed to treating stained glass as art, notably George Edmund Street, the employer of both Morris and Webb in the 1850s, who insisted that it was important to avoid shading or perspective: ‘the first, because it darkens and makes dismal what should be clear and brilliant; and 190

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the second, because it can never be so managed as to look correct, or to harmonize with the straight lines of the architecture or the stiff lines of the saddle bars etc.’. He argued that stained glass should not be considered as art: ‘high art in the ordinary sense, cannot co-exist with the proper use of the materials at our disposal’, and he went on to suggest that glass painters were at best artisans working for architects:‘Stained glass ought to be simply an architectural decoration, schemed out by the architect, forming part of his entire plan, harmonizing with the architecture, and capable of being executed to a great extent by workmen whose powers are little above being merely mechanical’ (Street 241). As we shall see in relation to the Morris windows in St. John’s Torquay, Street did not always get his way. The Morris firm was unusual in the way that they presented their work to clients.Victorian stained-glass studios would often orientate the style of a window to the date of the building or the window tracery. For example, Clayton and Bell installed two windows in Lincoln Cathedral in 1863, but in contrasting styles. One window, comprising small pictorial panels within circular medallions against a grid of densely leaded mosaic pattern, was installed in the nave, while another was installed in the north choir aisle, this time structured by a framework of canopies and borders that enclosed a series of relatively large pictorial panels (Cheshire 2012, 70). The former window was designed to relate to a ‘lancet’ window, typical of ‘Early English’ gothic, while the style of the latter window mirrored the geometric tracery of the window that signalled the ‘Decorated’ gothic style. The approach of most firms was similar to that of Clayton and Bell: they offered a range of medieval styles that echoed the ornament and composition of different medieval periods. A Heaton, Butler and Bayne catalogue from 1868 offers windows that are described at ‘Third-pointed’ and ‘Second-pointed’, which would have corresponded roughly to the ‘Decorated’ and ‘Perpendicular’ gothic styles (Heaton, Butler and Bayne 1868). The Morris firm never marketed their stained glass in the same way and deliberately limited the client’s input when it came to the style of the window.The firm’s windows were sometimes informed by historical precedents, but they were rarely conceived as direct attempts to reflect the historical period of the tracery or architectural context. The Morris firm’s refusal to relate their products to specific varieties of gothic signals a bold departure from contemporary practice, but this stance arguably created as many problems as it solved. How could an ardent admiration for medieval art be reconciled with departing from the precedents that it set? This contradiction was perhaps most noticeable when Morris became critical of the over-zealous restorations of medieval buildings and founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) in 1877. Related to this stance, he decided to distance his firm from projects of this sort, and in 1876 sent around a memorandum stating that ‘we are prepared heretofore to give estimates for windows in churches and other buildings, except in the case of such as can be considered monuments of Ancient Art, the glazing of which we cannot consciously undertake, as our doing so would seem to sanction the disastrous practice of so-called Restoration’ (Sewter 1974, 56). This clearly had an unwarranted effect as they were forced to advertise in subsequent years:‘Morris & Company believe there is a mistaken idea that they have given up the production of stained glass windows. They beg therefore to announce that they are ready to accept commissions for painted windows in churches or other buildings, excepting such as can be considered Monuments of Ancient Art’ (Saturday Review). Morris’s problem was that many of the firm’s stained-glass commissions in the 1860s were associated with heavily restored medieval buildings. They had supplied windows for Street at Ladock and St. Michael Penkevil and for Bodley at Coddington; these medieval churches would probably have been considered over-restored by the SPAB. One thing was very clear: the Morris firm considered their stained glass to be art.They promoted the artistic qualities of their windows in what Cormack has described as ‘self-consciously, 191

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even boastfully, artistic terms’ (19). This comment is based on a letter from Morris to Rev. Frederick Guy, a young high-church clergyman who had prepared Morris for his Oxford entrance exams: You see we are, or consider ourselves to be, the only really artistic firm of the kind, the others only being glass painters in point of fact, (like Clayton and Bell) or else that curious nondescript mixture of clerical tailor and decorator that flourishes in Southampton Street Strand; whereas we shall do–most things. However what we are most anxious to get at present is wall-decoration. (Kelvin 1984, 1: 37) This letter reminds us that the prospectus of the firm showed that it had ambitions to execute ‘Mural Decoration’, which came first in the list of their products, while stained glass came third and was implicitly subordinate: ‘Stained glass, especially with reference to its harmony with Mural Decoration’ (Mackail 1899, 1: 151). This probably reflects contemporary debates that suggested ecclesiastical art should reside in fresco, which implicitly relegated stained glass to decoration. The firm’s ambitions for mural decoration were thwarted by commercial factors: the market for stained glass was well developed and Morris’s collaborators were forced to adapt their painterly talents to a stubborn medium that was arguably not their first choice. But their aspiration to create art rather than decoration was sustained. If anything, this attitude was reinforced as the reputation of the firm grew. In the 1870s, Bodley stopped using the firm in favour of Burlison and Grylls because, as he explained to a correspondent: ‘I find I can get my own way more than I can with Morris’. (Hall 2014, 159) In 1879, Philip Webb schooled a potential patron about the firm’s artistic autonomy in a letter concerning a window installed in Brampton in Cumbria: The practice of sending out designs for stained glass windows from which donors may select what most pleases them, is only followed by the regular manufacturers of stained glass in the gross – It would not be done by artistic workmen, such as Messrs Morris, who have to pay very highly for their designs. (Penn 2008, 41) Although they defended their right to determine the aesthetics of the windows, this did not give the firm complete control, as they often had to defer to the opinions of their patrons when it came to iconography. In many ways, the stance of the Morris firm was contradictory: they positioned themselves as guardians of medieval art but rejected medievalist styles in favour of original art. Both contemporary and more recent commentators have often suggested that Morris’s stained glass was medieval in spirit without literally being medieval, but this approach merely restates the dilemma – how could art be characteristically medieval without visually resembling medieval art? This is essentially the same dilemma that faced the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood a decade earlier and arguably gave rise to solutions such as the ‘outline’ drawing style. (Cruise 2012) As the Pre-Raphaelites discovered, reacting against an established manner was relatively easy, but coming up with a credible alternative was far more difficult, and it is this problem that forms the background to the firm’s fascinating responses to stained glass in the 1860s.

All Saints Selsley All Saints Selsley in Gloucestershire was glazed in its entirety by the Morris firm in 1862, making it the most complete example of their early work. All Saints was arguably the first 192

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great church built by G. F. Bodley, who was to become one of the leading architects of the period. His decision to use the firm was a seminal moment: their first commission in any medium. Selsley underlines the collaborative nature of the early commissions. Philip Webb’s account book itemises ‘Designs for scale drawing of arrangement of Nave windows with a scheme for the whole church’ and further designs for ‘pattern work’ in the nave and chancel (Sewter 1975, 173). Webb drew small-scale designs that seem to have determined the basic appearance of each window and other cartoons for evangelist symbols and panels in the west window. The configuration of the windows drew on medieval precedents; the distinctive band of coloured panels against a background of patterned quarries has visual resonances with the stained glass of c. 1300 at Merton College Oxford, which Webb is known to have copied into his sketch book. This ‘band of rich colour’ was specifically referred to in G. E. Street’s article on stained glass, published in The Ecclesiologist in 1852 (Street 1852, 242). Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Madox Brown drew cartoons for figure groups which varied from Webb’s sketches; for example,‘Christ Blessing Children’ by Burne-Jones includes adult figures in the side lights, while Webb’s sketch only had children (Hall 2014, 73, 76–77) [see Plate 7.1]. The church was funded from two sources.A subscription fund initiated by Samuel Lloyd had reached £1500 by 1857, when it was taken over by the new vicar, John Gibson. In 1858, Gibson commissioned Bodley to design the new church, but when the estimates came out much too high, the difference was met by S. S. Marling, the biggest textile manufacturer in the region. Marling in effect paid for the embellishments to the church, including the stained glass. Both Marling and Gibson had the power to insist on changes to the designs, but there is no evidence to suggest that they intervened. Michael Hall interprets All Saints Selsley as an attempt to build according to the idea of ‘developed Gothic’ (Hall 2014, 18–22). ‘Development’ is a theological concept that contests the absolute authority of historical doctrine, arguing instead that new interpretations of ideas should modify ancient concepts. Development justified the evolution of historical precedents in response to the contemporary world, an idea introduced into Victorian architectural discourse by E. A. Freeman in the 1840s and rapidly adopted by Anglo-Catholics eager to reform the architecture and liturgy of the Anglican Church (Hall 2000, 79–80). Hall argues that the iconographical scheme at Selsley and the distinctive nature of the windows show Bodley’s influence and reflect Morris ‘striving to fulfil the aim of ‘developed’ Gothic that he would have learnt in Street’s office’ (74). Hall is almost certainly correct about the iconography, but associating the Morris firm with ‘development’ is only tenable in an indirect sense, as the theological roots of this discourse are unlikely to have been attractive to artists like Morris who had deliberately moved away from religion. The ‘delicate transparency’ so typical of Bodley, and apparent in other commissions, is less obvious in the colouring of the Selsey windows, where intense primary colours are very much in evidence, again questioning the level of direct influence that Bodley exerted over these windows. While Hall’s arguments are plausible and constitute the most nuanced account of this commission to date, they are far from conclusive, showing that even a well-documented and extensively researched commission like Selsley remains ambiguous in some respects. Detecting the work of different artists is not difficult in the Selsley glazing scheme. This is particularly apparent in the apse, where five windows have figure groups designed by Morris, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown and Rossetti. While the two northernmost groups by Morris and Burne-Jones are comparable in their simplicity, adjacent depictions of the Nativity and the Visitation by Madox Brown and Rossetti are complex and contrasting [see Plates 7.2 and 7.3]. 193

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Webb’s framework of canopies, borders and quarries imposes a uniformity of sorts, but the autonomy afforded to the artists amounts to the rejection of a house style, or, seen in another way, the adoption of a house style that deliberately embraced the individuality of different artists. The south chancel window contains an Annunciation by Morris, typical of his spirited early designs [see Plate 7.4].The attractive naivety of the composition is accentuated by the angular figures, lively dove and a background formed by a trellis that resembles Morris’s wallpaper pattern of the same date (Hoskins 1996, 206).The trellis necessitated a grid of angular lead work that adds to the window’s blocky feel. Morris seems to have based his figure of the archangel Gabriel on Van Eyck, probably via an illustration in Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, a source used by other glass painters for designs (Harrison and Waters 1989, 60; Cheshire 2004, 59–62).

All Saints Middleton Cheney Six windows by the Morris firm were installed in the church of All Saints, Middleton Cheney, Northamptonshire, between 1865 and 1893. All Saints is a medieval church, restored nominally by George Gilbert Scott, although work is likely to have been carried out by his son, George Gilbert Scott junior (Stamp 2002, 210).The Pevsner guide notes that the incumbent, William Edward Buckley, was a friend of Burne-Jones, but given that Scott junior commissioned Morris stained glass for a restoration at Cheddleton, Staffordshire, in 1864, the link between the church and the firm seems likely to have come from the young architect. The earliest window, installed in the east end of the chancel in 1865, is of particular pertinence to this chapter due to the relative absence of Burne-Jones’s involvement; in this instance, we can develop a good sense of Morris’s contribution as an artist, designer and co-ordinator of the firm’s windows [see Plate 7.5]. Sewter described the east window of Middleton Cheney as ‘one of the most splendid achievements in all English stained glass’ and suggested that ‘it was most likely Morris himself who conceived the plan’ (Sewter 1974, 29).There is no documentation to prove this definitively, but the extent of Morris’s involvement and the absence of any other credible candidate suggest that this is a sound conclusion. Phillip Webb’s account book specifies ‘scale drawing and full size pw [pattern work]’, suggesting that he scaled up existing drawings rather than conceiving the design, as well as contributing the ‘Signs of the 12 Tribes of Israel’, which were initially drawn for embroidery (Sewter 1975, 133). Four figures were contributed by Ford Madox Brown, and the Adoration of the Lamb in the tracery quatrefoil was designed by Burne-Jones, although this is documented only through the reuse of the same cartoon in another commission. Uniquely in Morris stained glass, Simeon Solomon made a major contribution to the window with four figures in the lower tiers and the entire Twelve Tribes of Israel in the upper tier of the window.2 Morris drew cartoons for seven figures and a subtle foliate background.While it is possible that Scott junior was involved, Morris windows influenced by Scott junior are typified by gothicstyle canopies – the absence of antiquarian features in this instance makes his direct involvement in the design unlikely (Harrison 1996, 111–2). The design of the window shows some interesting developments in the firm’s approach to stained glass. The colour is beautifully handled, a hallmark of Morris’s ability. The saints’ garments in the lower tiers frequently contain large pieces of red and blue pot metal, giving these rows a dark feel, which is relieved sporadically with lighter-toned garments.The Tribes of Israel in the top tier are clothed predominantly in white, while small pieces of ruby pot metal pick up the palette of the lower tiers.The brighter tone of the upper tier creates a notable contrast;

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the palette graduates from intense dark colours in the lower tier to light monochrome above, an effect amplified by the fact that the upper sections of windows are typically more strongly lit. The handling of light and colour in the window is moderated and enhanced by the foliate background. This is painted predominantly upon pale-blue pot metal, which has been treated with silver stain in places to create green. Oak, pomegranate and apple trees interspersed with fruit help to create coherence in the lower tiers. In places, the fruit are leaded in as flashes of ruby and yellow pot metal; at times they are subtler, as in the silver-stained acorns among the oak leaves behind St. Peter and St. Paul. This background evolves into grass interspersed with flowers in the upper tier, based on either a pale-blue or light-green pot metal, at times treated with silver stain. The semantics of the window are supported by both the composition and the control of light.The quotation beneath the upper tier relates the imagery to the worship of the Lamb in the book of Revelation. Pairs of figures face towards the centre of the window, but there is no focal point or central pictorial panel in the lower sections of the window; the figures appear as in a procession towards something that cannot be seen. And this is central to the conception of the window – the saints and tribes have a common purpose that is not obvious until the viewer’s eye is drawn upwards to the lighter sections of the window, which culminate in the quatrefoil at the apex, depicting the Lamb surrounded by 24 elders. By resisting an obvious depiction of the iconography in the main lights, the window articulates a sense of religious abstraction and generates an evocative spirituality. The figures vary in their posture, character and orientation, and these differences were compounded by the technical handling of the glass. Plates 7.6 and 7.7 show details of two faces. St. John drawn by Madox Brown has an elegant linearity; the strong jawline and nose combined with large eyes and heavy lashes give the face a charismatic feel. The face is relatively flat and sparse on detail and has been treated with quite a deep red-brown enamel to create the flesh tone. Morris later described this technique in a letter: ‘Finding that it was difficult to get a flesh-coloured glass with tone enough for the flesh of figures, we use thin washes of a reddish enamel to stain white glass for flesh-colour’ (Kelvin 1984, 2: 186).This flesh enamel is one of the features of Morris windows that gives the figures a distinctive degree of naturalism. Simeon Solomon’s King David has more detail and perspective within the drawing; the numerous wavy lines used to delineate the hair and beard contrast dramatically with Madox Brown’s treatment of the same features.The tone of King David’s face is completely different: no flesh enamel, just an icy white skin achieved through a ‘matting’ layer of white enamel, relieved by silver stain to represent golden-toned hair, beard and crown.This is a remarkable contrast and not common to the figures supplied by Solomon, as the Tribes in the upper tier and the David’s adjacent figure Isaiah include a reddish flesh enamel while Moses and Isaiah in the lower tier have the same white faces as David.The flatter manner of Madox Brown’s St. John implies that he was aware of the linear style of medieval glass painting, while the angle of the head and the detail in David’s face suggests that Solomon’s drawing was conceived in a more painterly manner. These variations can be explained to some extent by the way that the glass painters interpreted the cartoons, but we should remember that Morris would have personally approved each piece of glass. If this were the case, Morris would have been acutely aware of this artistic variety, and we can assume that it was a deliberate effect.The same variety was apparent at Selsley but in different windows – at Middleton Cheney, the diverse manner of different artists seems to have been juxtaposed deliberately, and it is well worth speculating what lay behind this approach.

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Characterisations of Morris’s stained glass as ‘English Vernacular’ or reflections of the ‘domestic revival’ or ‘developed gothic’ all point towards the originality of the firm’s windows but arguably obscure a more direct source of inspiration (Harrison 1980, 39; Harrison 1996, 111; Hall 2014, 74). John Ruskin’s influence on Morris is well documented and acknowledged, especially that of his famous chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’ from his threevolume work The Stones of Venice. Morris’s preface to his Kelmscott edition in 1892 described this influence in no uncertain terms: ‘To some of us when we first read it, now many years ago, it seemed to point out a new road on which the world should travel’ (Morris 1892b, i). Ruskin’s comments about the nature of artistic production are particularly pertinent to the east window of Middleton Cheney. In a famous passage, Ruskin gives his readers a lesson about how to interpret objects. He instructed them to understand the homogenous machine-finished ornaments of their bourgeois interiors as the product of dehumanised labour and then advises them to go and ‘gaze upon the old cathedral front’. Here the reader is forbidden to laugh at the ‘fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors’, because, if interpreted correctly, the incorrect anatomies and fanciful forms are ‘signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone’ (Ruskin 1851–3, 163). The cathedral front is not the work of one artist but a collective of ‘old sculptors’ whose varied figures are offered as a direct contrast to the homogenous and uniform work of the factory ‘operative’. Ruskin’s vision is analogous to the collaborative nature of the drawing in the east window of Middleton Cheney. Distinctive figures by Morris, Solomon and Madox Brown are individuated by colour, posture, character and style; the window was designed to be read as the work of different artists, although the firm typically resisted revealing the identity of individual contributors. This window was offered as a collaborative effort by anonymised artists, in many ways analogous to Ruskin’s ‘old sculptors’. Ruskin’s singular description of the medieval figures as ‘anatomiless and rigid’ is an extraordinary moment, notable for readers partially because this phrase is hard to pronounce fluently. Ruskin created the first word specially for the passage – his neologism highlighting the phrase’s idiosyncrasy and importance within the passage (anatomiless 2018).‘Anatomiless and rigid’ is a particularly apt way to describe Morris’s figures of Eve and the Virgin Mary, which form a panel in the lower tier [see Plate 7.8]. The static feel of the figures, encouraged by the silhouette-like aspect, is only partially due to the painting of the glass, as the same characteristics are evident in the cartoon (Sewter 1974, plate 238). Assessing Morris’s drawing and composition, Sewter identified a ‘gawky expressiveness’ and attempted to chart Morris’s acquisition of skills in drawing figures and draperies. Specifically describing the figures at Middleton Cheney, he suggested that ‘the figures have dignity and the draperies fall with pleasing rhythm, but the figure of the Virgin especially is too much like a bas-relief, and one is not altogether convinced that she has a further side’ (Sewter 1974, 63). While the technical shortcomings of the drawing are evident, Sewter’s interpretative framework arguably misses the point.Viewed through a Ruskinian rationale, artwork produced with integrity, even if this results in technical deficiencies, is superior to the homogenised products of large-scale production.This implies that we should not be asking why Morris’s conceptions lacked academic correctness so much as questioning why he continued to draw cartoons himself rather than hand them over to more fluent artists. Different modes of face painting and varied conceptions of anatomy create tension between the figures at Middleton Cheney.This deliberate individuation, pursued at the expense of technical accomplishment, is the direct result of the way that the window was conceived, and suggests an attempt to implement a Ruskinian aesthetic: individual artistic freedom within a unified whole. Historians have identified several 196

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architects who sought to realise the kind of projects that Ruskin envisaged in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (Hall 2003, Snell 2003). Morris, Madox Brown, Solomon and Webb were nothing like the medieval artisans that Ruskin invoked, and none of them could undo the fact that they were creative intellectuals from bourgeois backgrounds, and yet there is something so distinctive and beautiful in the tension between the individuality of the figure work and the unity of the design that this window can be usefully understood as an inspired attempt to realise Ruskin’s vision. In churches like St. Martin Scarborough, the Morris firm’s products could function to detract from the integrity of the interior, to ‘overwhelm a sense of the church as an integrated whole’, but at Middleton Cheney, at least in the east window, the relationship between individuality and coherence is beautifully balanced (Hall 2014, 99). The inclusion of Simeon Solomon could be seen as an attempt to broaden the window’s collaborative aesthetic, and his involvement made a distinctive impact on the window.The Twelve Tribes of Israel in the upper tiers is a skilful and beautiful composition. Although each panel depicts between nine and ten figures, the design combines visual clarity with a convincing sense of the massed tribes by foregrounding three figures in each panel and indicating others with great economy in the background [see Plate 7.9]. The fact that Solomon’s contribution comprised the Tribes of Israel and four Old Testament figures shows that his Jewish ethnicity determined the subjects that he was offered. This use of the artist mirrors his Jewish-themed contributions to the Dalziel’s Bible Gallery, which were published in the periodical Good Words and separately as photographs in 1862, which may have alerted Morris to Solomon’s potential as stained-glass designer (Cruise 2005, 59). Colin Cruise has shown that Solomon’s paintings depicting religious ritual were often interpreted as allusions to the Anglican controversies surrounding Ritualism and Tractarianism in the 1850s and 1860s, which corresponds in interesting ways to the use of his figures by the Morris firm at Middleton Cheney (Cruise 2005, 60–3).

St. John, Torquay The east window of St. John’s Church, Torquay, presents a complete contrast to Middleton Cheney and Selsley [see Plate 7.10]. Here Burne-Jones executed all the cartoons and, as a consequence, the window has a graphic unity that is absent in the more collaborative commissions at Selsley and Middleton Cheney. This type of commission, with Burne-Jones in control of the drawing, came to typify the work of the firm in later years, but this was not a simple case of the artist getting his own way, as the details of this commission make clear.This window has failed to stimulate commentary in any of the major critical evaluations of Morris stained glass but needs to be understood as it offers an alternative perspective on the firm’s work in the 1860s. St. John’s was one of most notorious centres of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism.The incumbent, Rev. William George Parks Smith, had a series of public clashes with Henry Philpotts, the Bishop of Exeter.They disputed the legality of altar decorations in 1847, and Parks Smith was also associated with other high church practices such as preaching while wearing the surplice and the defence of auricular confession (Boggis 1930, 40–81). These early controversies took place when Parks Smith was the Perpetual Curate of a small chapel of ease, but the expanding population of Torquay subsequently necessitated the establishment of an independent parish, which was created in 1861. In 1862, Parks Smith started fundraising for a new building and commissioned the eminent architect George Edmund Street to design a church.3 The chancel of the ambitious Gothic Revival church was erected first and temporarily joined to the nave of the existing (and diminutive) Greek Revival chapel. At the time of chancel 197

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consecration (November 1864), the scale of the new chancel dwarfed the modest nave of the former church, signalling in no uncertain terms the architectural and sacramental significance of the new structure. Philpotts and Parks Smith clashed again over the reredos for the new chancel, which Philpotts considered too like a crucifix and not enough like a representation of the crucifixion.The reredos had to be draped with a sheet during the opening ceremony, and a compromise was eventually reached through the addition of extra figures (Boggis 1930, 98–101). Parks Smith probably intervened in the iconography of the stained glass, but in order to understand why this was significant, we need to examine how Burne-Jones’s design was rejected to make way for new figures. The east window was installed sometime between the preparation of the cartoons in May– June 1865 and the end of that year, implying the window was installed late in 1865, after the official opening of the chancel but long before the entire church was built (Sewter 1975, 188; Boggis 1930, 102–3). Drawings and cartoons that relate to the extant window are listed by Sewter, but more importantly, previously unexamined evidence within the church archive documents a relationship to another famous Morris window at Lyndhurst in Hampshire. A book within the church entitled ‘The Archives of the Church of St. John the Evangelist Torquay’ contains a wealth of information, including metalwork designs by Street, photographs, manuscript letters from Burne-Jones and printed material relating to the church.The ‘Archive’ was compiled from 1919 by Basil Reginald Airy, incumbent of the church from 1886. He wrote a history of the church in 1901 and pasted sections of this booklet within the ‘Archive’. Of great interest are three pen-and-ink images, which appear to be tracings of the designs for the windows.Two of these relate to the central panels of the window as executed and are labelled ‘Centre of East Window of St. John’s Torquay’.These are exact copies of the figure groups but are clearly not in Burne-Jones’s hand: the details are correct but the skilful delineation is absent.This evidence signals that they are tracings, probably made on ‘drafting linen’ or ‘tracing cloth’, a translucent woven material often used for architectural drawings or copies in the nineteenth century.The most significant tracing was probably a copy of the original design for the east window. The motivation for tracing a design can be explained by the fact the firm typically retained ownership of designs; many extant designs include the statement ‘The Property of Morris and Company’, showing that patrons were expected to return designs to the firm.4 At this point we need to consider how this design and the finished window relate to another early Burne-Jones design and the east window of Lyndhurst in Hampshire, executed in 1862–63, which has been researched in detail by several historians (Christian 1976; Bond and Dear 1998; Harrison 2011). Rev. John Compton, the vicar of Lyndhurst, corresponded at some length with Burne-Jones, whose preliminary design (titled ‘The Courts of Heaven’) survives in the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum but differs significantly from the executed design [see Plate 7.11]. Burne-Jones’s delicate maidens dancing in circular groups in the ‘Courts of Heaven’ design were replaced with more densely packed and substantial figures in the window as executed at Lyndhurst. Burne-Jones described the new design as ‘Paradise itself with a thick crowd of the Blessed, nimbus behind nimbus, both men and women (some such figures as you find in Angelico’s pictures)’, thus signalling his debt to Fra Angelico. Martin Harrison has suggested that the revised design was influenced by Burne-Jones’s second visit to Italy, in 1862, when he was accompanied by John Ruskin. Ruskin and Burne-Jones made copies of Bernardino Luini’s frescos in Milan, an activity which resulted in the ‘more solid anatomies and rounded facial types’ in the Lyndhurst east window (Harrison 2011, 68). In the tracing at Torquay, the outer lights and the central light correspond very closely to the main lights of Burne-Jones’s ‘Courts of Heaven’ design for Lyndhurst; in fact, allowing for the 198

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Figure 7.1 St. John, Torquay, tracing of original design for east window by Edward Burne-Jones. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

fact that these are tracings, the figure groups are identical.The presence of these groups within a tracery pattern clearly modelled on the east window of Torquay shows that Burne-Jones attempted to reuse his rejected ‘Courts of Heaven’ design.The differences between the tracing and the executed window show that again his proposal was rejected.This implies that whatever Burne-Jones learnt from his second trip to Italy, he still favoured the delicate and ethereal figure groups of his original design for Lyndhurst. As executed, the window at Torquay still has an intimate relationship with the east window of Lyndhurst; three out of the four pairs of figures in the outer lights at Torquay reused BurneJones’s cartoons from the earlier window. But although these cartoons are identical, the colours are different.At Lyndhurst, the angels in the upper right-hand panel wear deep green and ruby cloaks over light inner clothes, while at Torquay, the outer garments are of clear glass with light patterns over a ‘murray’ (or purple-brown) pot metal. The deep green background foliage of Lyndhurst is replaced at Torquay by a pale-blue and yellow scheme, and Phillip Webb’s heavenly cloud motif was lightened from red and blue to pale yellow and white. Although the ‘subdued’ palette of the Lyndhust window has been proposed as an anticipation of ‘Aesthetic’ taste, alongside Torquay it looks strident (Harrison 2011, 70).The tone at Torquay is dominated by subtle tertiary colouring, greyish blues, rich but pale browns, purples and silver stain. If Lyndhurst anticipated the distinctive colours of the Aesthetic movement, then at Torquay this palette had arrived. All the evidence suggests that G. E. Street had little involvement in the design at Torquay. Authors have claimed that Morris windows commissioned for projects orchestrated by 199

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G. E. Street at locations such as Amington, Staffordshire (1864) and Catton,Yorkshire (1866) are characterised by dense foliage backgrounds and rich colours, but this is not true of Torquay (Harrison 1996, 113; Hall 2014, 75). The implication is that although St. John’s Torquay was Street’s building, the appearance of this window was determined by a process initiated by BurneJones and then modified by the patron.The agreed design was then made under Morris’s supervision and translated into a window with exquisite drawing and a subtle tonal balance. Morris’s progressive use of colour is very clear, a feature picked up in Airy’s account of the window:‘the window is a very striking one, and its colouring very restful to the eye’. The iconography of this window has been largely ignored and in some ways misunderstood. Misconceptions surround the focal point of the window, the upper figure group in the central light, which is significantly wider than the other four, giving the panel particular prominence [see Plate 7.12]. In the dryly humorous manner that characterises his account book, Burne-Jones described the panel as ‘Angels with kids’ while Sewter describes it as ‘Virgins, Matrons and Children’ (Sewter 1975, 188; Schoenherr 2011b, 129). Airy’s 1901 guide adds an important detail: he describes the panel as ‘Virgins, Matrons and little Children, the figure in the foreground being S. Agnes’. The lack of a halo can be explained by the depiction of the figure as a child before her martyrdom, in contrast to the firm’s contemporaneous depictions of the saint at Middleton Cheney and All Saints, Cambridge, as a haloed adult. In addition, the figure bears a longstemmed flower, visually hinting at a saint’s symbol, although the usual symbols of the martyr’s palm and lamb are omitted. Understanding this figure as St. Agnes makes visual sense; after all, if she is just an anonymous child, why place her in the foreground of the focal point of the window? And if this figure is St. Agnes, then the visual emphasis unifies and underlines the coherence of the iconographical scheme, which is partly about commemorating children.The funding for the window came from two sources: the four outer lights were donated by Rev. Alfred and Lady Emily Lawrence ‘as a memorial of three of their children and a grand-child’, while the central light commemorated two generations of vicars and ‘their children and grandchildren’ (Boggis 1930, 156).This theme is picked up with the figure of St. Nicholas embracing a child, a cartoon adapted from a figure executed the previous year in Henley on Arden. The commemoration of children might be described as the secondary semantic of this window, one necessitated by the interests of patrons.Airy describes the overall subject as the ‘Church Triumphant in the Heavenly Jerusalem’.The two outer lights show angels; in the lower panels, they lead human figures towards the ‘Golden City’, while in the upper panels they are in the ‘act of adoration’.The six remaining panels (including the St. Agnes panel) ‘contain representative characters of various orders of men and women who will be found in the New Jerusalem’. Many of these are standard choices – St. Peter and St. John for apostles and Isaiah and Ezekiel to represent prophets – but the singularity of other figures can be linked to Parks Smith and his Tractarian sympathies.To understand this aspect of the window, we need to turn to the inscription of the central light, which reads: ‘To the glory of God and in Memory of Rev. Philobett Domett and the Rev. Joseph Domett MA, vicars of Bovey Tracey Devon 105 years the latter Born Aug 8 1756 Died Oct 19 1835 Also their children and grandchildren’. Parks Smith had been assistant curate to Joseph Domett at the Devon parish of Bovey Tracey between 1833 and 1835. In 1834, he married Domett’s daughter, and upon his death in 1835, the parishioners petitioned the patrons of the living to appoint Parks Smith as vicar, but this request was ignored.The rejection of Parks Smith by the establishment of the Anglican Church meant that he took the next opportunity of a clerical appointment, the curate’s position in Torquay, where he moved with his wife and widowed mother-in-law (Boggis 1930, 156). This family narrative segues smoothly into a more doctrinal matter. The ‘Apostolic Succession’ was one of the 200

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key tenets of the Oxford Movement; this idea basically emphasised the authority of Anglican priesthood by stressing the idea that their authority descended from the Apostles through the Bishops via ordination. The Apostolic Succession was linked to the sacramental emphasis of the high Anglican church; authoritative priests performed powerful mystical transformations within a liturgy that dramatised the sacramental elements of the service.This drama was created largely through architectural spaces like the chancel of St. John’s Torquay, intensely decorated and spectacular interiors that played a major part in generating the experiential aspects of sacramental worship. The Morris firm’s east window functions as a backdrop to the Eucharistic transformations performed by Parks Smith and his curates, but the controversial reredos carried the Eucharistic iconography and freed the east window to make other doctrinal allusions.The stained glass arguably alludes to the Apostolic Succession in several ways. Firstly, the inscription of the central light highlights the continuity (or succession) of one family of priests: a father and son who had served one parish for over a century, followed by a son-in-law who celebrated the line of descent in the window. On a more formal level, this idea was represented by the selection of the figures; directly below the St. Agnes panel (and replacing Burne-Jones’s proposed group of angels) are St. Boniface and St. Richard to represent Archbishops and Bishops. Crucially, both these saints were English: Boniface was born in Wessex and may have been trained in Exeter, while St. Richard was Bishop of Chichester.This selection was not accidental, the implication being that the authority of Anglican priests such as Domett and Parks Smith was descended from the Apostles via English bishops – an oblique claim for the authority of the Church of England as a discrete entity. Burne-Jones’s original design was an aesthetic response to a biblical subject; this was rejected in favour of an intricately devised iconographical scheme that allowed the artist only one figure group, and one that bore little resemblance to the original proposal. The semantics of the window conflate a family narrative about priesthood, inheritance and continuity with an iconographical justification of the authority of the Anglican Church, but this was a subtle gesture that avoided the controversy generated by the reredos. Burne-Jones’s wry comments about the figures that he was forced to draw are well known: ‘A very choice and exquisite treatment of Fogies – in six panels of 2 Fogies each’, but considered in the context of the rejected design, this cynicism becomes more understandable: once more his ‘Courts of Heaven’ figure groups had been rejected and replaced largely with ‘fogies’ chosen specially to communicate a partisan conception of the status of the Anglican church (Schoenherr 2011b, 129). Burne-Jones’s design, which was driven by aesthetic priorities, was overruled by the ideological agenda of a patron. At Torquay, Burne-Jones created a subtle rhythm throughout the main lights by subtle variations in posture and expression – this type of effect would not have been possible in the east window of Middleton Cheney, where the production of the window was set up in a very different way.Torquay is notable for the beauty of the drawing and the delicate tone of the palette. It produces a harmonious effect and that grew with familiarity;‘many years’ after its installation Airy told Burne-Jones in person that he had ‘grown to love the window more than I can say’.5

The Later Years A sense of the direction that the Morris firm took in the 1870s can be gauged from three commissions executed in 1872–73: Over Stowey in Somerset, Nun Monkton in Yorkshire and Troutbeck in Cumbria. At St. Peter and St. Paul, Over Stowey, Morris’s development as a stained-glass artist is evident in the north aisle east window, which depicts Mary Magdalene at Christ’s tomb [see Plate 7.13]. 201

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This window is based on a cartoon originally used at St. Michael and All Angels, Brighton, in 1862, but Morris revised the cartoon in interesting ways. Most obviously, the right-hand panel contains only one figure as opposed to the ‘Three Maries’ at Brighton, and the palette and pictorial space of both panels was developed in significant ways. At Brighton, red glass was used for sections of the angel’s wings, fruit in the background trees, garments and halos.At Over Stowey, red was omitted in favour of a harmonised palette dominated by yellow and green.The greens were varied through different tones of pot metal, while silver stain was used for garments.The Brighton window has the vigour that we associate with Morris’s early drawing, but the Over Stowey version captures more of his ability as a colourist. The later window depicts a more three-dimensional space: the addition of the bushes to the foreground of the left-hand panel and the landscaped background of the right-hand panel both push the spatial properties of the image in this direction. This example suggests that it was not just Burne-Jones’s designs that became more pictorial in the 1870s. One of the best combinations of artwork by Morris and Burne-Jones was produced in the wonderful east window of Nun Monkton in Yorkshire [see Plate 7.14]. The group of three tall ‘lancet’ windows presented an unusual space, which the pair overcame with great skill. The cartoons had been used before but never combined with so much effect, arguably due to Morris’s foliate background.A vine and a dog rose interlace within each tall light, creating a series of vesical shaped panels that frame Morris’s angels and Burne-Jones’s figure groups.The only awkward element of this design is the scale of the central Nativity panel, which leaves no room for the foliage, detracting from its relationship with the rest of the composition.The height of the lancets allows Morris’s foliage to breathe in a way that makes some of his other backgrounds seem too dense and allows the figures to inhabit the luxuriant vegetation in an elegant and highly original manner. As Morris became more preoccupied with other media from the 1870s, Burne-Jones increasingly assumed control of the drawing, which allowed him to express his artistic preoccupations more freely, notably his interest in the Italian Renaissance.The emergence of this manner can be seen at Troutbeck in the carefully modelled anatomy of the crucified Christ [see Plate 7.15]. But windows of this period could also be wonderful celebrations of intense colour, as at Brampton in Cumbria, where Burne-Jones’s east window for Philip Webb’s church is a masterpiece by any standards [see Plate 7.16]. Assessing Morris’s contribution to the later windows is difficult, but a shift away from the Renaissance in the final decade of the firm’s work suggests a renewed level of collaboration between Morris and Burne-Jones.This phase is often understood to have been initiated by the mosaics that Burne-Jones carried out at the American Episcopal Church in Rome. Georgiana Burne-Jones’s account of this project recounts a conversation in which Burne-Jones claimed to relish working in a ‘fettered way’, signalling an appetite for working within the technical restrictions of a medium (Burne-Jones 1904, 2: 159).Working in mosaic seems to have reinvigorated both Morris and Burne-Jones and redirected their attention to the quality of Byzantine art and the properties of early medieval stained glass. A description of the firm’s process by Morris at around this date signals a desire to return to a less painterly manner: ‘the more the design will enable us to break up the pieces [of glass], and the more mosaic-like it is, the better we like it’ (Kelvin 1984, 2: 186). Reflecting on the firm’s late work, Cormack has argued that Morris was still heavily involved in the late windows: the later idiom of the firm’s windows, which are characterised by increasing emphasis on jewel-coloured glass and forceful leading rather than just refined painting to

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emphasise expressive qualities, must have been largely the response of Morris as master craftsman to the opportunities presented by Burne-Jones’s changing style as designer. ‘Response’ is perhaps the wrong word.The symbiotic working relationship of the two was so intense that the new idiom can be more properly seen as a joint and simultaneously evolved creation. (23) The later windows were seen by Sewter as a drift towards ‘pictorialism’, but this is simplistic, as others have pointed out. (Harrison 1980, 42) A late window such as the Stoning of St. Stephen in the north transept of St. Paul in Morton, Lincolnshire, demonstrates the point [see Plate 7.17]. This window has stylised, almost academic figure drawing and exhibits spatial recession, but there is no attempt to deny the structural aspects of the window. In fact, the stylised grass interspersed with stones necessitates a fracturing of the foreground and middle ground with irregular lead lines. This is in no way illusionistic or painterly; on the contrary, it functions to dissipate the illusionism of the image, breaking up the glass, as Morris’s letter suggests. In a similar way, the sky is expressively leaded with flowing curved lines, which work to heighten the viewer’s sense of the fragmented nature of the window rather than to create a pictorial illusion. The late manner of the firm was not an attempt to imitate painting – it was something far more complex. Caroline Arscott’s analysis of the creative relationship between Morris and Burne-Jones is pertinent here. Unusually, she subjects Morris’s ‘decorative’ art to the kind of close analysis normally reserved for fine art and in doing so raises new questions about the dramatic but elusive collaborations between the two artists. While discussing the later stained glass of the firm, Arscott explores the formal differences between images in stained glass and drawing on opaque media: the bold leading of the later stained glass ‘represents a reorganisation of vision and a redefinition of drawing’, while the grid of lead lines and glazing bars is described as ‘a conceptual envelope for imagined form and not a record of vision’ (Arscott 2008, 213–4).While Arscott understates the degree of shading necessary in stained glass and misrepresents some technical issues, her work stimulates interesting questions in relation to the power and singularity of the late windows. She is surely right to point out that stained glass of this kind is not mimetic. Lead lines were used to create ‘rhythmic ornament’ and had ceased to function just as a means of holding the glass together.Windows such as the Ascension at St. Philip’s Cathedral Birmingham, installed in 1885, make little attempt to conform to the spatial qualities of an academic canvas [see Plate 7.18]. The linearity of the design is structured and accentuated by the lead lines and glazing bars, while the radically restricted palette and the attenuated figures simplify the pictorial elements but amplify the power of the window.The heavenly host hovers strangely above the earthbound saints in a manner that makes little attempt to conform to the spatial qualities of a drawn image. The effect of standing before this window – and the other three of equal quality and scale in the same church – is unforgettable and, as Arscott’s analysis suggests, this is not comparable to standing in front of a painting; this kind of experience is specific to the medium. The west window of St. John Torquay was installed by the Morris firm in 1890, funded by Mrs Gamble in memory of her husband, who had been one of the churchwardens [see Plate 7.19]. She specifically asked for the window to executed by the firm, and Morris travelled down to Torquay to discuss the commission with Rev.Airy, who described the occasion:

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I met him [Morris] in the church, and he asked what was to be the subject. I told him Street had arranged for ‘The Last Judgement’.‘Well’, he said,‘if you must have that it will cost you another hundred pounds or more, for I will do nothing but Burne Jones’s design, but I will tell you what I will do if you are not set on having ‘The Last Judgement’. Do you know his ‘Nine Choirs of Angels’ in Jesus College Chapel at Cambridge? Very well. Burne Jones made me a present of that design, and if you will consent to that for the subject I will not charge you a penny more than the cost of filling the window.’ Of course we accepted the offer. Even allowing for a bit of embellishment by Airy, this rare first-hand account of Morris’s sales pitch allows a fascinating insight into how Morris negotiated with a client and the way that he represented the work of his friend. He gives the impression that anything but Burne-Jones’s design would be inexcusable, and in the context of a lack of funds, cites what was by then a canonical design at Jesus College. By this stage, the status of the firm had secured the artistic autonomy that they desired: Morris was able to overrule Street’s recommendation and champion the manner that the firm had developed through a sustained and intense collaborative enterprise. William Morris and his associates set out to redefine the role of the artist within stained-glass manufacture, and early commissions such as Selsley and the east window of Middleton Cheney celebrate the diversity of individual artistic contributions. Parallel to these collaborative commissions, Edward Burne-Jones, the artist with arguably the greatest aptitude for the medium, developed a narrower but more intense relationship with Morris that lasted more than four decades. The products of this partnership changed as familiarity with the medium increased. The elegant and balanced compositions of the early years evolved into monumental works of extraordinary power. Burne-Jones’s aesthetic ambitions were frequently thwarted by patrons, which underlines the complex nature of the commissioning process. The insistent materiality of stained glass meant that it was impossible for one figure to control the appearance of a given window – a warning to historians to resist interpreting stained glass purely in terms of aesthetics. Stained glass in the Victorian period required collaboration between artists, designers, craftsmen, architects and patrons. The windows produced by the Morris firm demonstrate the variety of collaborations involved and show that the relative power of each participant varied with the cultural context of every commission. William Morris contributed to the firm’s collaborations in a number of ways. His drawing is apparent in the earlier windows, he supervised the translation of cartoon into painted glass and he co-ordinated the colour schemes. In commissions such as the east window of Middleton Cheney, he combined the work of an eclectic range of artists through pattern, colour and effective control of light. Through stained glass, Morris demonstrated his capacity for constructive cultural collaboration, for working with clients of different political and cultural persuasions and for providing an effective interface between client, artist and workshop.The development of the firm’s stained glass was integral to Morris’s professional life; it was the product that launched the firm, and it is worth asking what he learnt through the process. Morris managed to translate the concepts of artists into a product that was commercially successful within a highly competitive market. His product was original, ambitious and technically complex. The sustained success of the Morris firm’s stained-glass operation, which survived until 1940, underlines William Morris’s phenomenal ability as a cultural entrepreneur: he not only envisaged new ambitions for the medium, he also successfully implemented them by masterful collaborations with artisans, clergymen, architects and artists in a wide range of contexts. This ability to navigate through a complex range of social, material and cultural situations perhaps allows us a glimpse of how Morris developed into such a remarkable writer, artist, designer and socialist. 204

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Notes 1 From 1861, the firm was styled ‘Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.’, a title changed to ‘Morris & Co.’ in 1875, when the original partnership was reconstituted. 2 Photographs of the cartoons show that Solomon’s figures were superimposed onto Morris’s foliate background, implying that Solomon drew the figures which were then combined with Morris’s work, possibly by Webb: see BMAG 1940P604.5 (illustrated in Cruise, 2005, cat. Nos 51a and 51b, p. 101); Solomon’s cartoons for the individual figures were reused at Greenock, Renfrewshire in c. 1865 (Sewter, catalogue, 85). 3 Boggis states that Street was recommended by Mr and Mrs Alfred Barton, who had previously commissioned him to build a house, ‘Longsmead’ in Hampshire, but in fact this was not until 1865, by which time the plans for St. John’s Torquay were well underway, see https://www.britishlistedbuildings. co.uk/101402414-peach-house-bishopstoke. 4 See for example exhibits H.39 and H.40 in Harrison 1996, 133. 5 Airy recounted an anecdote in the ‘Archive’ about having lunch with Burne-Jones during which he expressed his admiration for the window but questioned a detail – the apparent lack of a moustache on the figure of St. Peter. Burne-Jones blamed the faint moustache on Morris’s supervision of the firing:‘it must be Morris’s fault in the burning’ – again confirming that it was Morris’s responsibility to oversee the manufacturing process in considerable detail.

List of Works Cited Airy, Basil Reginald (1919) The Archives of the Church of St. John the Evangelist Torquay, MSS book held in the Church of St. John the Evangelist,Torquay. Allen, Jasmine (2018) Windows for the World: Nineteenth-Century Stained Glass and the International Exhibitions, Manchester, Manchester University Press. ‘Anatomiless, adj.,’ OED Online, March 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry /7171 (accessed April 26, 2018). Arscott, Caroline (2008) William Morris & Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings, New Haven, CT,Yale University Press. Benyon,Tony (2005) ‘The Development of Antique and Other Glasses Used in the 19th and 20th Century,’ The Journal of Stained Glass 29: 184–98. ———. (2011) ‘Stained Glass Workers Employed by James Powell & Sons and by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company and Morris & Company:A Biographical Listing,’ Journal of Stained Glass 35: 242–56. Boggis, R. J. E. (1930) History of St. John’s Torquay,Torquay, Devonshire Press. Bond, David and Glynis Dear (1998) The Stained Glass Windows of William Morris and his Circle in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight,Winchester, Hampshire County Council. Burne-Jones, Georgiana (1904) Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2 Vols., London, Macmillan. Cheshire, Jim (2004) Stained Glass and the Victorian Gothic Revival, Manchester, Manchester University Press. ———. (2012) ‘The Post Medieval Period,’ in Stained Glass of Lincoln Cathedral, edited by Carol Bennett, 48–81. London, Scala. Christian, John (1976) ‘The Literature of Art,’ Burlington Magazine, March 1976: 159–61. ———. (2011) ‘Painter-designer or Designer-painter?’ Journal of Stained Glass 35: 18–42. Cormack, Peter (2015) Arts and Crafts Stained Glass, New Haven, CT,Yale University Press. Crampin, Martin (2014) Stained Glass from Welsh Churches,Talybont,Ylolfa. Cruise, Colin (2005a) Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, London, Merrell. ———. (2005b) ‘“Pressing all Religions into his Service”: Solomon’s Ritual Paintings and Their Contexts,’ in Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, edited by Colin Cruise and Victoria Osborne, 57–63. London, Merrell. ———. (2012) Pre-Raphaelite Drawing, London,Thames and Hudson. Hall, Michael (2000) ‘What do Victorian Churches Mean? Symbolism and Sacramentalism in Anglican Church Architecture, 1850–1870,’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59.1: 78–95. ———. (2003) ‘G. F. Bodley and the Response to Ruskin in the Ecclesiastical Architecture of the 1850s,’ in Ruskin and Architecture, edited by Rebecca Daniels and Geoff Brandwood, 248–76. Reading, Spire. ———. (2014) George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.

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Jim Cheshire ———. (1980) Victorian Stained Glass, London, Barrie and Jenkins. ———. (1996) ‘Church Decoration and Stained Glass,’ in William Morris, edited by Linda Parry, 106–35. London, Philip Wilson. ———. (2011) ‘“Pure Gold, Clear as Glass”: Burne-Jones in Transition and the Lyndhurst New Jerusalem,’ Journal of Stained Glass 35: 67–76. Harrison, Martin and Waters, Bill (1989) Burne-Jones, London, Barrie and Jenkins. Harvey, Charles and Jon Press (1991) William Morris, Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Haward, Birkin (1984) Nineteenth-Century Norfolk Stained Glass, Geo. ———. (1989) Nineteenth-Century Suffolk Stained Glass,Woodbridge,VA, Boydell. Heaton, Butler and Bayne (1868) Designs for Works in Stained Glass, London (Somerset Record Office, Taunton DD/MK/107). Hoskins, Leslie (1996) ‘Wallpaper,’ in William Morris, edited by Linda Parry, 198–223. London, Philip Wilson. Kelvin, Norman (ed) (1984) The Collected Letters of William Morris, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Mackail, J.W. (1899) The Life of William Morris, 2 Vols., London, Longman. Morris,William (1892a) ‘Glass, Painted or Stained,’ in Chamber’s Encyclopaedia,Vol. 5, Edinburgh, Chambers & Co. ———. (1892b) ‘Preface’ to The Nature of Gothic A Chapter of the Stones of Venice by John Ruskin, London, Kelmscott Press. O’Connor, David (1984) ‘Morris Stained Glass:An Art of the Middle Ages,’ in William Morris and the Middle Ages, edited by J. Banham and J. Harris, 31–46. Manchester, Manchester University Press. Penn, Arthur (2008) St. Martin’s The Making of a Masterpiece, Stavely, Mill Yard Studios. Ruskin, John (1851–53) The Stones of Venice, 3 Vols., London, Smith Elder, 1851–53: II 162–63. Saturday Review, 3 May 1879, 570 (Vol. 47, issue 1227). Schoenherr, Douglas E. (2011a) ‘Edward Burne-Jones’s Account Books with Morris & Company: An Introduction,’ Journal of Stained Glass 35: 78–119. ———. (2011b) ‘Transcript: Burne-Jones’s Account Books with Morris and Company,Vol. 1 (1861–82) and Vol. 2 (1883–1900),’ Journal of Stained Glass 35: 123–83. Sewter,A. C. (1974) The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, New Haven, CT,Yale University Press. ———. (1975) The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle – A Catalogue, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press. Snell, Paul (2003) ‘John Dando Sedding and Sculpture in Architecture: The Fulfilment of a Ruskinian Ideal?’ in Ruskin and Architecture, edited by Rebecca Daniels and Geoff Brandwood, 321–53. Reading, Spire. Stamp, Gavin (2002) An Architect of Promise: George Gilbert Scott Junior (1839–97) and the Late Gothic Revival, Donnington, Shaun Tyas. Street, George Edmund (1852) ‘On Glass Painting,’ The Ecclesiologist 13: 237–47. Waters,William (2012) Angels and Icons: Pre-Raphaelite Stained Glass 1870–1898,Abbots Morton, Seraphim Press. ———. (2017) Damozels and Deities: Pre-Raphaelite Stained Glass 1870–1898, Abbots Morton, Seraphim Press. Winston, Charles (1847) An Enquiry into the Difference of Style Observable in Ancient Glass Paintings, Oxford, Michael Hall.

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8 WILLIAM MORRIS AND INTERIOR DESIGN Margaretta S. Frederick

There is but slight necessity to enumerate the horrors proper to the early Victorian period – the Berlin woolwork and the bead mats; the crochet antimacassars upon horsehair sofas; the wax flowers under the glass shades; the monstrosities in stamped brass and gilded stucco; chairs, tables, and other furniture hideous with veneer and curly distortions; the would-be naturalistic vegetable-patterned carpets with false shadows and misplaced perspective … It is sufficient to say that love nor money could procure beautiful objects of contemporary manufacture for any purpose of household furnishing or adornment when William Morris undertook the Herculean and seemingly hopeless task of decorative reform.1 In 1861,William Morris rallied a group of like-minded artists and designers pledging to design, craft, and market a selection of home furnishings for the creation of “useful and beautiful”2 living environments attainable for all. Morris’s contribution to the perceived British design deficiency took the form of individual objects—a broad offering of furnishings which shared inherent naturalistic kinship, allowing for myriad relationships to be formed within the interiors in which they were placed. Similarly, the environmentally inspired aesthetic of the talented circle of designers with whom he collaborated, creating ceramic ware, lighting elements, decorative friezes, and fabrics, contributed to the harmonious interiors which are so recognizable today. The collaborative nature of Morris’s working method is, I believe, particularly significant in contributing to the creation of his seamless interior aesthetic, one that is easily recognizable as “the Morris Style.” In gathering around him a corpus of artistic talent, he was to a certain extent summing up in totality the creative ethos of the period, resulting in a unified representation of the moment. With the founding of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., a design revolution was touched off, reflecting a national hunger that was based as much in economics as aesthetics. Much has been written since on Morris’s role in the design movement of the second half of the 19th century in England, and more broadly in what was to become an international crusade. The scope of products for the home which issued from “the Firm” (in both its early and later iterations) was panoptic, reflecting Morris’s polymathic zeal for reviving and adapting traditional craft processes. Drawing inspiration and utilizing techniques from the past in the making of furniture, embroidery, and tapestry, among others, he was able to adapt them to the social and 207

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cultural circumstances of the industrial age in which he lived. Historically, these designs have been interpreted separately by media—wall coverings, furniture, tapestry, lighting, ceramics, and so on. More recently, discussions have focused on how these furnishings combined en masse to affect the interior space of the British home. Fiona MacCarthy has described Morris’s embrasure of the “total architectural mise-en-scène.”3 Others, including Imogen Hart, Sally-Anne Huxtable, and Judith A. Neiswander,4 reaffirm the harmonious cross-pollination of design within Morris & Co. furnishings. The design reform movement in Britain, launched with the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, supported new approaches to the interior, in which consideration of concepts such as the aesthetic harmony of interior and exterior design and the relationship of living space to landscape were promoted. That Morris thought in terms of the whole as well as the individual parts is reflected in the cohesive style which extended across media in the products offered by the Company.5 This seamless merging of objects and materials reflects a broader cross-pollination between fine and decorative arts and visual art, literature and poetry—boundaries that were challenged and tested by artists of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and the Aesthetic Movement. Morris’s interiors could be likened to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “double work of art,” in which painting is merged with poetry; or James McNeill Whistler’s coalescences of image and music as manifested in his painted “Symphonies” and “Nocturnes.” Morris’s artist and artisan-propelled company provided a selection of fabrics, furniture, and decorative objects that could be paired harmoniously with one another in various combinations. He presided over the design of numerous “themed” interiors, a habit which began in his own living accommodations in Red Lion Square, followed by Red House, Kelmscott House, and Kelmscott Manor. This chapter will provide a chronological account of Morris’s work in the field of decorative arts, preceded and contextualized with a brief outline of the state of design in England at the outset of his venture. The Firm’s broad spectrum of interior furnishings stretching across media placed a new emphasis on the interior as a whole, anticipating and advancing Aesthetic Movement strivings for the creation of environments of transcendent harmony. Morris’s accomplishments in the field of design reform will be interwoven with an explanation of how individual products were intended to synchronize within a single interior space, despite the contributions of many designers. Morris’s holistic interiors created within this 19th-century paradigm of the uninterrupted sensory experience can be viewed as a precursor to the modern age and professionalization of interior design.

Design in Britain 1850 The mid-19th century was a period of significant design reform in England. Largely driven by economics, government and industry jointly acknowledged the need for better product design in order to compete with European markets. In 1837, a national design education program was launched under the Board of Trade, taking the form of the Government School of Design. Further initiatives included the establishment in 1857 of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the placement of a school within for direct study of objects from the past. Under the administration of Henry Cole, the school expanded with branches in provincial locations throughout the country. In May of 1851, again with the strong backing of the government (and the monarchy), the Crystal Palace Exhibition opened in Hyde Park.This international showcase of decorative and applied arts featured the latest in technology and products, presenting the finest in English industrial design.The estimated six million visitors included the young William Morris.While economically induced, it has been argued that these design reform initiatives reflected a broader 208

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cultural and social need in an “age of disquietude and doubt”6—a consciousness of the need for some salve to the ugliness and greed, the “avalanche of materialism,”7 that the industrial era kindled. This longing for beauty was manifested in a national nostalgia for the past, apparent even earlier, in the 1820s, in the Gothic Revival movement in architecture.8 Perhaps the single most important feature of the 1851 exhibition was the ‘Medieval Court’ arranged by the architect and leading proponent of the Gothic Revival,Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852). For Pugin, the Gothic aesthetic was a principle, a moral crusade, as detailed in his The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841). Pugin’s most public contribution to this movement was his participation in the design and rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, which had been destroyed by fire in 1834.The reconstruction of this important national structure, awarded to the architect Sir Charles Barry (1795–1860), was for almost 30 years a visible part of the daily life of Londoners. Pugin assisted Barry in the exterior details and, more importantly, in the interior design—including Gothic paneling, patterned floor tiles, stained-glass windows, and medieval-style furniture. Morris could be said to have inherited and advanced Pugin’s crusade to alter the course of British interior design, although he would reject the latter’s zealous inspirations in favor of a more “genuinely organic art.”9 The art and architecture of the Middle Ages was similarly extolled by the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) with particular effect in The Stones of Venice (1851–53)—a celebration of Venetian architecture, but also a thinly veiled diatribe on the subject of contemporary English design. In Chapter 6 of the second volume,“The Nature of Gothic,” Ruskin proposed that the appeal of this earlier art lay in its having been made by ordinary men working with their hands together in harmony. Emphasizing the artisan’s quality of life, he asked, “Was the carver happy while he was about it?”10 In addition he advanced a moral component, concluding, “All art is great, and good, and true, only so far as it is distinctively the work of manhood in its entire and highest sense; that is to say, not the work of limbs and fingers, but of the soul.”11 Ruskin’s writings were to have particular influence on Morris, who first read his work when at Oxford, describing them as “a sort of revelation to me.”12 Several decades later, Morris would echo Ruskin’s sentiments, writing, The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life … the aim of art is to increase the happiness of men by giving them beauty and interest of incident to amuse their leisure.And prevent them wearying even of rest. And by giving them hope and bodily pleasure in their work: or, shortly, to make man’s work happy and his rest fruitful. Consequently, genuine art is an unmixed blessing to the race of man.13

William Morris and Design In January 1853, Morris entered Exeter College, Oxford, with the intent of studying for the priesthood. At Oxford, he met the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), with whom he shared and developed a passion for the medieval period.The walls of his room were hung with brass rubbings, and he discovered and closely studied illuminated manuscripts housed in the Bodleian Library. Burne-Jones introduced Morris to his circle of friends from King Edwards’s School, Birmingham, including William Fulford, Cormell Price, and Charles Faulkner. Referring to themselves as “The Set,” and later “The Brotherhood,” all shared his interest in the past, gathering in the evenings to,“read Chaucer … [o]ld chronicles … and anything of any kind written about the Middle Ages.”14 209

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A tour of Belgium and Northern France in 1854 allowed Morris to see first-hand the paintings of Jan Van Eyck and Hans Memling and the medieval architecture of Amiens, Rouen, and Chartres cathedrals. In Paris he visited the Louvre and the Musée Cluny, where further marvels of the Middle Ages were discovered.15 A second excursion in the summer of 1855 with Burne-Jones and Fulford gave birth to the idea of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,16 a short-lived publication—12 issues running from January through December 1856—indebted to if not modeled on the earlier journal of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, The Germ.17 BurneJones explained, “We have such a deal to tell people, such a deal of scolding to administer, so many fights to wage and opposition to encounter that our spirits are quite rising with the emergency.”18 The Magazine initiated an introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882).19 Rossetti was flattered, and when Burne-Jones sought him out in London, introductions to Morris ensued. It was also during the same 1855 summer excursion on the continent that Morris and Burne-Jones made the decision to “begin a life of art,”20 leaving all prior plans for clerical life behind. Soon after their return, Morris was articled to the Oxford architect George Edmund Street (1824–1881), whose extensive knowledge of Gothic architecture, similarly fortified by regular visits to the continent, was demonstrated in The Brick and Marble Architecture of Northern Italy (1855).As Morris’s most recent biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, explains, from Street Morris learned through practice “that natural materials have their own inherent qualities, dictating the limits of the use designers make of them. He and Street shared the religion of the right use of materials.”21 It was in this environment that Morris began what would become a lifelong pattern of achieving a comprehensive understanding of any given craft or media through hands-on experience. From Street, he also learned that architecture included both the exterior construction and the interior fittings. Many years later, Morris would articulate this understanding, explaining that the decorative, or “popular,” arts “are all parts of that great whole, and the art of house-building begins it all.”22 In Street’s office, Morris met another nascent architect, Philip Webb (1831–1915), with whom he would develop an enduring friendship.When Street moved his firm to London in the summer of 1856, Morris followed. He and Burne-Jones took rooms at 1 Upper Gordon Street, Bloomsbury, which the latter described as “the quaintest rooms in all London, hung with brasses of old knights and drawings of Albert [sic] Dürer.”23 Having been convinced by Rossetti that he should learn to paint, Morris worked for Street by day and attended life classes at Leigh’s Academy in Newman Street, Bloomsbury, at night. In London he met other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle including Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893) and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) and, at the end of the year, their great advocate and patron, John Ruskin. In November 1856, Morris and Burne-Jones moved into unfurnished rooms at 17 Red Lion Square, Holborn, an apartment which had been occupied in earlier days by Rossetti. As described by Morris’s early biographer, J.W. Mackail, It was a first-floor set of three rooms: the large room in front looked north, and its window had been heightened up to the ceiling to adapt it for use as a studio; behind it was a bedroom, and behind that another small bedroom or powdering closet.24 Morris ordered a suite of furniture—some chairs, a table, and a large settle—from a local cabinetmaker, based on his own designs.They were designed in medieval style, “as firm and heavy as a rock” and “such as Barbarossa might have sat in.”25 Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones collaborated in the painting of the furniture with similarly archaic subjects, patterns, and calligraphy. 210

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Figure 8.1 Drawing of Red Lion Square, Edward Burne-Jones. Courtesy of the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection.

Although suggestions have been made with regard to the specifics of authorship, this is somewhat to miss the point, as the endeavor was meant to be “an exercise in creative interplay and exchange,”26 much in the manner of a medieval craftsman’s guild, and reflective of their shared interest in the art and culture of the Middle Ages.This experimental exercise included the blurring of traditional definitions of fine and decorative art, as well as those of the visual and literary arts—furniture could be painted or could become the vehicle for literary contemplation.27 The aesthetic conceit of the suite of furniture was a continuation of Morris’s use of medieval design in the decoration of his living quarters, following on from the brass rubbings in his rooms at Exeter College Oxford and the “brasses and old knights” at Upper Gordon Street. Historians have been unanimous in interpreting the Red Lion furnishings as the beginning of Morris’s understanding of the need for interior design reform at the most basic human level.As Mackail explains, While he was living in furnished rooms it was easy to accept things as they were; but now, when furniture had actually to be bought, it became clear that nothing could be had that was beautiful or indeed, that was not actively hideous. Nor was it possible even to get so simple a thing as a table or a chair.28 In these early days, the medieval period was the inspiration for the decorative impulse to play out.Towards the end of 1856, Morris ceased working for Street and began experimenting in a variety of creative media including painting, illumination, and embroidery. Mackail describes a first experiment in “reviving the decayed art of embroidery,” using a frame made from an old pattern and special wool prepared by “an old French dyer.”29 The result was a repeating design of birds and fruit trees with the motto “If I Can” above each [see Plate 8.1]. The pattern was inspired by the “Dance of the Wodehouses” in Froissart’s Chronicles, and the phrase is an anglicized adaptation of Jan van Eyck’s motto “Als ich kanne” which Morris dis211

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covered on a trip to the Low Countries with Street in the Autumn of 1856—another merging of literature and design. Linda Parry explains that this experimentation with embroidery was an attempt to “bring to life his own idea of the British medieval interior, and in the absence of existing examples, the type of wall hangings that would have been used.”30 The “If I can” embroidery is the only known example to have been executed entirely by Morris,31 reflecting his tendency to lose interest in hands-on creation once he had mastered a craft sufficiently to understand the process. This was also a period in which his interest in the art of illumination was piqued.32 His study of early manuscripts at the Bodleian Library in Oxford continued at the British Library when he moved to London and informed his visual literacy and designs to come. Encouraged by Rossetti, he determined to pursue a career as a painter—“Rossetti says I ought to paint, he says I shall be able; now as he is a very great man, and speaks with authority and not as the scribes, I must try. I don’t hope much, I must say, yet will try my best.”33 A number of drawings by Morris from this period are documented, all medieval in subject.To date, however, only one oil painting survives, “La Belle Iseult” [see Plate 8.2], a full-length portrait of Jane Burden in medieval dress. Drawn from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Iseult is depicted standing in front of her unmade bed on which a tiny greyhound sleeps, ostensibly mourning Sir Tristram’s exile from court.34 Malory’s compilation of tales of the legendary King Arthur was discovered by members of “The Set” during the Oxford years, fueling their romantic notion of chivalric medieval culture. The Morte d’Arthur was, not surprisingly, the source for much of Morris’s ensuing pictorial imagery culminating in the decoration of the Oxford Union Debating Hall. In the summer of 1857, Morris accompanied Rossetti and the architect Benjamin Woodward to Oxford, where they viewed the latter’s newly constructed building.Woodward was pleased when Rossetti suggested that the upper walls be decorated and agreed to the proposed project.35 Scenes from Morte d’Arthur were chosen for the decorative scheme [see Plate 8.3], and Rossetti quickly assembled a group of enthusiastic participants including, in addition to himself, Morris, Burne-Jones, the young artist Valentine Prinsep (1838–1904), and several others. Morris’s subject was “Sir Palomydes’ Jealousy of Sir Tristram.”36 The end result was not entirely successful given Morris’s inexperience as a painter. He wrote to a friend some years later, “I confess I should feel much more comfortable if it had disappeared from the wall, as I’m conscious of its being extremely ludicrous in many ways.”37 According to Georgiana Burne-Jones,“Morris began his picture first and finished it first, and then, his hands being free, he set to work upon the roof, making in a day a design for it which was a wonder to us for its originality and fitness.”38 Morris’s inclination to further adorn the surfaces of the building in repeated pattern is an early indication (as in the “If I can” embroidery) of his interest and facility in interior ornamentation and would become a hallmark of his mature design work extending to tiles, textiles and wallpaper design. Charles Faulkner, Cormell Price, and Richard Watson Dixon assisted in the completion of the roof painting.As with the decoration of the furniture for Red Lion Square, the venture, a “jovial campaign,” was from the start conceived as a collaborative endeavor.39 Collective enterprise was similarly brought to bear in the next significant undertaking in Morris’s life. During the mural project, he had become romantically attached to Jane Burden, daughter of an Oxford groom, who had been recruited to model for the mural.The two were engaged in February 1858, necessitating the planning of a future home. The project for what would become Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, was conceived during a summer holiday on the continent in 1858, when Morris was visiting medieval churches with Webb and Faulkner. Webb agreed to carry out what would be his first full house design and the launch of his independent career, leaving Street’s office when the building process began in June the following year. Rossetti described the completed design as “more a poem than a house,”40 and indeed the 212

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medieval spirit in which it was conceived and decorated could be likened to the chivalric verse of an ancient troubadour’s ballad.As recounted by his daughter, May, Laughter sounded from the half-furnished rooms where the young people painted the walls with scenes from the Round Table histories … laughter over every new experiment, every fantastic failure … And though they one and all settled down to the responsibilities of London life very soon, the Red House days remain typical—an intensified illustration of much that William Morris felt and said later regarding the nature of human toil.41 Webb’s red-brick design is subtly referent of the Gothic with arches and oriels, while retaining an openness and simplicity that is unpretentious and engaging. The house exterior was completed in June of 1860 when the Morrises took residence.The interior decorative scheme, medieval in theme, was “conceived to cover all surfaces.”42 Ceilings were decorated in repeat patterns, and walls were painted with ancient scenes, reminiscent of the Oxford mural project. The contributors to the interior decoration included Rossetti and his wife Elizabeth Siddal, Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones, and anyone else who happened to visit, with many hands working towards one common end, echoing Ruskin’s appeal for communal enterprise rather than the industrial division of labor.43 As was the case at Red Lion Square, much of the interior furnishing had to be created, as nothing that was readily available appealed or harmonized with the unusual design of the building. Embroidered textiles including the “If I Can” hanging created at Red Lion Square and the Chaucerian-inspired “Legend of Goode Wimmen” worked by Jane Morris and others covered the walls. Morris’s own collection of antiques, prints, and paintings was integrated with medieval-style furniture designed by Webb.Thus, Dürer prints were hung beside pre-Raphaelite paintings,44 blending contemporary and traditional.45 This contrivance of juxtaposing present and past is repeated throughout Morris’s career and contributes to the timeless resonance of his interiors. As May Morris explained,“In the decorating of Red House we have a microcosm of all the activities that were to come.”46 The outfitting of Red Lion Square and Red House drove home the need for finely made, aesthetically pleasing designs in home furnishings.Years later, Morris recollected the chain of events that led to the establishment of “the Firm” in April of 1861 at 8 Red Lion Square. At this time the revival of Gothic architecture was making great progress in England and naturally touched the Preraphaelite [sic] movement also; I threw myself into these movements with all my heart: got a friend to build me a house very mediaeval in spirit in which I lived for 5 years, and set myself to decorating it; we found, I and my friend the architect especially, that all the minor arts were in a state of complete degradation especially in England, and accordingly in 1861 with the conceited courage of a young man I set myself to reforming all that: and started a sort of firm for producing decorative articles. D. G. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, and P.Webb the architect of my house were the chief members of it as far as designing went.47

Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (1861–1875) The idea for the business seems to have been mutually arrived at within the Red House coterie. As Mackail explains, it 213

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sprang up amongst the friends in talk, and cannot be assigned to any single author. It was in a large measure due to Madox Brown; but perhaps even more to Rossetti, who, poet and idealist as he was, had business qualities of a high order, and the eye of the trained financier for anything that had money in it. To Morris himself, who had not yet been forced by business experience into being a business man, the firm probably meant little more than a definite agreement for co-operation and common work among friends who were also artists.48 A circular was prepared and distributed introducing Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company, in which it was explained,“The growth of Decorative Art in this country … has now reached a point at which it seems desirable that Artists of reputation should devote their time to it … These Artists having for many years been deeply attached to the study of the Decorative Arts of all times and countries, have felt more than most people the want of some one place, where they could either obtain or get produced work of a genuine and beautiful character.”The following artists in addition to Morris were listed as participants: Burne-Jones; Faulkner; Ford Madox Brown; Peter Paul Marshall (1830–1900), a surveyor by profession; Rossetti; and Webb. Other artists also contributed on occasion, including Albert Moore (1841–1893), William De Morgan (1839–1917), and Simeon Solomon (1840–1905). Continuing the tradition established at Red House, wives and sisters were also involved in various aspects of the production process. These included Jane Morris and her sister Bessie Burden; Georgiana Burne-Jones; Lucy and Kate Faulkner, sisters of Charles; and Eliza Fanny (née Beal) Campfield, wife of George, the foreman of the Firm.49 The products offered included mural decoration; architectural carving; stained glass; metal work, including jewelry; furniture; embroidery; and leather work, “besides every article necessary for domestic use.”50 The medieval inspiration for their proposed products was quite prominent in the early days, as was the partnership business model, which aligned with medieval craftsmen’s guilds or artist’s workshops. The Firm’s premises at No. 8 Red Lion Square consisted of an office and show room on the first floor and workshops on the third floor and in a portion of the basement, including a kiln for glass and tile work.51 The first significant public presentation of their wares occurred at the 1862 International Exhibition, with two stands, one for stained glass and one for embroideries and painted Gothic furniture, situated within the larger “Medieval Court.” Included in the display were the St. George’s Cabinet (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), Backgammon Players Cabinet (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), English Life 1810–1860 Bookcase (unlocated), and the Rossetti Sofa (unlocated).52 Perhaps the most interesting contribution to the exhibition, the King René’s Honeymoon Cabinet [see Plate 8.4], was displayed in the stand of the architect J.P. Seddon, although the painted decoration was done by the Firm. The panels, depicting scenes from the life of the 15th-century King René of Anjou, were designed and painted by Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Madox Brown.According to Seddon, Morris was responsible for the decorative patterning which integrated all the panels, including the arches and corbels at the top of each, imitative of a medieval manuscript, and the use of gilt background.53 Morris’s aptitude for envisioning the whole design, unifying the individual components, would play out in the execution of larger interior projects.As MacCarthy has summarized,“Morris had a great feeling for the interflowing of spaces.”54 The Firm’s earliest commissions were largely ecclesiastical, primarily attained through the recommendation of Gothic Revival architect George Frederick Bodley (1827–1907), whom Morris and Webb had met through Street. All Saints in Selsley, Gloucestershire (1861–62), an early building in Bodley’s career, was the first glazing commission received. Of the partners, only Burne-Jones and Madox Brown had any experience in glass design. Despite the potential 214

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practical pitfalls, the result was a success.The format was based on the late-13th-century windows at Merton College, Oxford, a favorite haunt of their university days.55 Throughout the church, Old and New Testament themes were placed centrally within horizontal bands flanked above and below by grisaille quarries, or areas of clear geometric patterning. Despite the participation of many—including Burne-Jones, Morris, Madox Brown, Rossetti, and Webb—the close alignment with medieval prototypes resulted in a seamless harmony with Bodley’s Gothic Revival structure. A similar balance was struck in the window designs for Bodley’s St. Martin-on-the-Hill, Scarborough. Here, the Firm was also responsible for much of the interior scheme.The glazing included Madox Brown’s “Christ on the Cross with the Virgin and St John,” surrounded by Rossetti’s idiosyncratic treatment in seven panels of the “Parable of the Vineyard.” Morris and Webb designed the roof decoration in the chancel with a repeated gold star patterning evocative of the heavens.Three arcaded niches underneath the high sill of the chancel east window are decorated with Burne-Jones’s “Adoration of the Magi” with angels designed by Morris on either side. Other contributions to the interior fittings included the altar frontal, the Firm’s first documented textile, thought to have been designed by Morris—the design and technique steeped in the late medieval opus anglicanum tradition;56 and a pulpit with painted panels jointly designed by Rossetti, Madox Brown, and Morris. A commission for the decoration of the 14th-century All Saints Church, Middleton Cheney, Northamptonshire, undergoing renovation by the Gothic Revival architect Sir George Gilbert Scott (1865), included the decoration of the nave and chancel roof.57 The highlight of the commission, however,58 is the east window incorporating the designs of figures by Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Morris, and Simeon Solomon and depicting a procession of saints and martyrs (the Twelve Tribes of Israel) and a host of New Testament figures. Albert Charles Sewter, the author of the definitive text on Morris stained glass, attributes the success of this multi-artist collaboration to the oversight of Morris, whom he believes conceived the plan, inspired by 15th-century designs.59 In summer 1865, the Firm moved to new premises at 26 Queen Square, and the Morris family moved into apartments on the first floor over the shop below.The dream of Red House was abandoned, and the carefree days of spontaneous creativity were left behind.The religious commissions which dominated the first few years of the Firm’s existence were followed in the second half of the decade by a number of prominent secular projects. Two were carried out simultaneously beginning in 1866—the interior furnishings for the St. James’s Palace Armoury and Tapestry rooms and the Green Dining Room at the South Kensington Museum. It was these two secular but public endeavors which established the reputation of the Firm. The Royal commission for the Armoury and Tapestry rooms was obtained through Rossetti’s having serendipitously made the acquaintance of William Cowper, the First Commissioner of Public Works. It was surely a notable circumstance for the young, unproven enterprise to be entrusted with such an important project. Webb and Morris worked together on the design, although it was the former who oversaw the day-to-day work.The decorative scheme was aptly regal in complexion. The Armoury featured black woodwork overlaid with gold patterning below walls of deep yellow on which the armaments were displayed.60 MacCarthy describes the rooms as “… overpoweringly Gothic and tenebrous, rich, dense and highly patterned … strange and magical, stagy, a bit preposterous, like the over-ornate palaces in Morris’s fairytales.”61 The work for what came to be called the Green Dining Room in the young South Kensington Museum (begun 1866) [see Plate 8.5], one of three refreshment areas—a novelty in early museum facilities—is of a completely different character.The design was unlike anything seen before, a radical reconfiguration of a public interior. As the first secular space accessible to 215

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a broad public, it was extremely impactful in the success of the company. Exuding a light but sophisticated atmosphere suitable for thoughtful contemplation and shared conversation, the scheme was intended to reflect the historic creativity illustrated by the Museum’s collections. Still largely in situ today, the wall decoration consists of a series of horizontal strips of patterning, beginning at floor level, with painted blue paneling surmounted by a single row of zodiac images interspersed with variations on a pattern of tree and fruit branches, heralding future Morris wallpaper designs.A stylized repeating sunflower motif appears above.The cornice takes the form of a frieze with a dog chasing a hare, designed by Webb after stonework on the façade of the Cathedral of Newcastle upon Tyne.62 A stained-glass window comprised of circular patterning at top and bottom and a horizontal band of female garland weavers designed by BurneJones illuminates one wall. While Webb, and the Firm’s business manager, Warington Taylor, handled the day-to-day administration,63 the close working relationship between Webb and Morris can be gleaned from a drawing for the ceiling decoration (Victoria and Albert Museum, E.1170–1940)64 in which Morris’s informal charcoal sketch is visible beneath Webb’s more detailed painted rendering. Recently, Sally-Anne Huxtable has posited that “if a predominant figure had to be named, there is some evidence from the designs themselves … that Morris was very much involved.”65 The result is a cohesive and harmonious design described by Huxtable as “the first ‘Aesthetic interior’” in Britain.66 The commissions received in the 1870s were largely residential dwellings—surely a result of the success of projects outlined above—and continue the gradual stylistic distancing from the medieval installations of the previous decade. Patterning continued as a hallmark but was newly inspired by elements drawn from the natural world.The company was now both internalizing and taking a leading role in the development of the Aesthetic interior. New friendships led to a series of commissions for private residences including designs for the studio house of fellow Oxford murals comrade Valentine Prinsep in Holland Park (1 Holland Park Road, 1864–66). Webb designed the building, the interior of which was fitted out in an amalgam of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. products, old tapestries, and blue-and-white china.67 Here Morris’s designs were seamlessly merged with the contemporary taste for japonaiserie as well as medieval decorative arts. Morris clearly had the pulse of the cultural aesthetic of the period. Prinsep’s home was at least partially the instigation for the design of the much grander studio home of the artist-aristocrat George Howard and his wife Rosalind (née Stanley).The couple began looking for a London home in early summer 1866, visiting Prinsep’s recently completed dwelling in June. George Howard was a practicing artist,68 exclusive of his aristocratic heritage, and he and Rosalind made the round of artists’ studios, becoming quite close to the BurneJoneses and Morrises. Rosalind’s diary notes a visit to “Morris and Webb’s furniture place in Queen Square” on 8 November 1866.69 The couple purchased a plot at 1 Palace Green in the Holland Park neighborhood of Kensington,70 and Webb was hired as the architect. Building began in 1868, extending to 1881.Webb was responsible for the interior scheme as well as the exterior design, described by early biographer and student W.R. Lethaby as “both sane and ornamental.”71 The contributions of Morris and Burne-Jones can be seen in the decoration of the dining room. Burne-Jones and Walter Crane (1845–1915), a frequent collaborator, created a painted frieze encircling the walls just below the ceiling on the theme of Cupid and Psyche. Morris was responsible for the remaining ceiling and wall coverings, including the panels below the frieze in red and silver on a gold ground and lettered verses from his poems on the rail below. The Studio exclaimed,“the whole appears to glow like a page of an illuminated missal.”72 For the outfitting of Rosalind’s boudoir, Morris advised,“I think it would make a pretty room with the woodwork painted a light blue-green colour like a starling’s egg & if you wanted drapery about it we have beautiful stuffs in shades of red that would brighten all up without fighting with the 216

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wall hangings.”73 As naturalistic elements came to dominate the Firm’s patterning aesthetic, the harmonious possibilities increased. This can be seen in the wallpaper designs on which Morris focused—and at which he excelled—in the 1870s.The Firm began offering wood-block printed paper wall covering, produced by Jeffrey & Co., as early as 1862. Morris “took the greatest personal interest in the production”74 with his first three designs—Trellis, Daisy, and Pomegranate—created between 1864 and 1866/7.These early patterns combine medieval elements, a holdover from Oxford enthusiasms, with naturalistic features, exemplifying the subtle change in overall design philosophy that was taking place within the Firm. During the 1870s, patterning was refined, featuring schemes comprised of two layers, one overlaid upon the other—an overly simplistic description which, however, conveys the basic concept. One could attribute the naturalism that came to distinguish Morris designs in the 1870s to the inspiration of a new living environment.The need for an escape from the pressure of work prompted a search for a second home outside the city. Morris described his discovery to Charles Faulkner—“I have been looking about for a house for the wife and kids, and whither do you guess my eye is turned now? Kelmscott, a little village about two miles above Radcott Bridge—a heaven on earth; an old stone Elizabethan house like Water Eaton, and such a garden!”75A joint three-year lease was signed with Rossetti, an arrangement perhaps initiated in part to accommodate the growing relationship between Rossetti and Jane Morris.The interiors at Kelmscott, although not entirely verifiable,76 reflected its purpose as a place for rest and refuge.While the living quarters above the shop in Oxford Street necessitated a visual experience appropriate to a designer of sophisticated metropolitan interiors,77 Kelmscott could be more tailored to the private life of the family.The underlying objective in the design seems to have been minimal, in respect of the extended and layered history of the dwelling. At Kelmscott, the relationship of the interior design to the exterior landscape is particularly evident. Parry suggests that the most important effect of Kelmscott Manor in the life of William Morris was the impact which the surrounding landscape made on his development as a designer, “providing constant source material for his work.”78 Morris’s accounts of the place, more often than not, reference exterior details, as when describing the walled garden surrounding the house:“if not a part of the house, yet at least the clothes of it.”79 This corroborates MacCarthy’s interpretation of Morris’s concept of architectural design as extending beyond the physical footprint to the landscape beyond. His view extended further afield—from the inside, looking out—as when he wrote from the Tapestry Room of “the moon rising red through the east-wind haze, and a cow lowing over the fields … feeling chastened by many thoughts, and the beauty and quietness of the surroundings.”80 It was the garden, the countryside around Kelmscott and the creatures within it, the Thames tributaries filled with fish, and the abundant plant matter which became the source material for the patterns in wallpapers and textiles which he created in such abundance during the 1870s and early 1880s.81 For instance, the decoration of the Green Room at Kelmscott Manor featured the Kennet chintz, a design evocative of the nearby river, which Imogen Hart describes as being “like ripples on water … recreating indoors one of his favourite features of outdoor life at Kelmscott,” and blurring the boundaries between inside and out.82

Morris & Co. (1875–1940) Termination of the joint lease with Rossetti in 1874 coincided with the rumblings of change in the organization of the Firm. At this time Morris was entirely reliant on profits from the business for income. He also had his own views on the direction the work should follow, and he proposed to buy out his partners and reorganize under his sole proprietorship. Burne-Jones, 217

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Faulkner, and Webb were in agreement. Marshall, Rossetti, and Madox Brown were not. The ensuing debate left friendships in disarray.83 On March 31, 1875, a public announcement of the reorganization and formation of Morris & Co. was made. In April 1877, the shop was relocated to the heart of a fashionable London shopping district at the corner of Oxford and North Audley streets. The range of products was expanded, with the addition of a number of wares created by other craftsmen including ceramic tiles by William De Morgan (1839–1917) and the metalware and lighting designs of William Arthur Smith Benson (1854–1924).The expansion of offerings opened up the possibilities of the Firm as a stand-alone one-stop-shop for homeowners anxious to create an integrated living environment. In 1878, the Morris family moved to Kelmscott House, located by the Thames on Hammersmith Mall. The social life necessary for the owner of an interior furnishings company mandated invitations into the private sphere. As his personal residence, it was the rare opportunity for Morris to execute a regime entirely his own. At Kelmscott House, Morris could visually affirm his dictum to “have nothing you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Imogen Hart describes the rooms at Kelmscott House, in which each object was part of a unified interior, particularly as exemplified in the drawing room extending the width of the first floor. In this most public of personal spaces, the Bird wall hanging is the foundation to which all other objects relate, from the Prioress’ Tale wardrobe to the smallest details such as vases and plates. Hart posits that the design represents a paring down to the essentials, a point perhaps not immediately comprehensible to inhabitants of the post-modern era. But one must read the rooms as Morris’s aesthetic correction to the interior clutter of industrial bric-a-brac so common at the time. A comparison of Kelmscott Manor and Kelmscott House also reveals the importance that environmental setting played in Morris’s interior design.84 Although vastly different, each interior maintains an indisputable harmony achieved through this sensitivity and understanding of the exterior surroundings. The restrained interiors of Kelmscott House could not be more in contrast with Morris’s ornate designs for the interior of 1 Holland Park carried out from 1880–88. Continuing the collaboration of earlier years, Morris & Co. was commissioned to fit out the structural alterations Webb had designed for the London home of Aleco Ionides, a wealthy Greek merchant and patron of the arts. Morris was integrally involved in the project, which was widely reported in the press, gaining the Firm further publicity and additional clients.The design commenced with the entry hall, decorated with tiles by De Morgan and gilded ironwork, in turn leading to Webb’s new staircase design, the steps covered in a Morris’s Kidderminster carpet.85 The Antiquities Room included a painted ceiling, Hammersmith carpet, silk damask hangings, and lacquered wallpaper, all offered by Morris & Co. The drawing room adjacent included a Broadwood piano with the case designed by Burne-Jones and Benson and decorated with gold and silver gesso by Kate Faulkner (Victoria and Albert Museum, W.23-1927). The floor was covered in the company’s Holland Park carpet [see Plate 8.6], one of four hand-knotted tapestries designed by Morris and woven at Merton Abbey.86 Despite the seeming overabundance of furnishings, period photographs suggest that the resulting interiors, which included Ionides’ extensive painting collection, reflected the patron’s sophisticated taste without becoming precious, overwhelming, or vulgar. Morris’s interest in weaving began in the late 1870s, as did his customary hands-on investigative experimentation. In 1881, he began looking for premises outside of London which would be conducive to the production of woven textiles.Through De Morgan, he discovered Merton Abbey, a group of factory buildings dating to the early 18th century near Wimbledon on the banks of the River Wandle, the latter an important feature, as water was a necessary requirement for the washing of the cloth before and after production. All aspects of the Firm’s fabrication 218

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could now be accommodated at one site, including stained glass, dyeing, textile printing, and carpet and fabric design. De Morgan set up his own ceramic enterprise nearby. Merton provided the space to create large-scale carpets. It was here that the magnificent Holy Grail tapestries, woven for Australian mining and oil speculator William D’Arcy’s Stanmore Hall in Middlesex, were completed.The 1887 commission for portions of the interior of Stanmore was the most extensive and extravagant received by the Firm, as well as the last before Morris’s death. The Firm provided designs for a staircase, ceilings, fireplaces, and mosaic floors. Morris visited D’Arcy in December, 1888, describing with irony the ostentatiousness of his patron,“the country is pretty … but much beset with ‘gentlemens houses’ … Our client sent his carriage to meet me and I couldn’t help laughing to see the men I met touching their hats, clearly not to me, but to it.”87 Aside from this initial meeting, it is generally believed Morris had very little to do with the project, leaving the majority of the design work to his assistant Henry Dearle.88 The exception was the creation of the tapestries for the dining room, the theme derived from his favorite text of Oxford days, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.The series was comprised of one narrow and five large narrative scenes designed by Burne-Jones (each 8 feet in height) and six smaller non-figurative panels (5 feet in height) with deer and trees designed by Dearle, with shields of the various participating knights designed by Morris. The two levels of decoration were separated by a woven band of identifying inscriptions.Thus the dining-room walls were almost completely obscured in thick, dark coverings in what must have been a fantastic and bewildering combination of exquisite workmanship and outlandish expenditure. Sadly, the series was broken up and sold after D’Arcy’s death in 1920.

Figure 8.2 The Attainment, from the Holy Grail series, Stanmore Hall. Morris & Co., 1891–94. Courtesy of the University of California, Haithi Trust.

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Another late commission came from old friends and patrons Percy and Madeline Wyndham for Clouds, their Wiltshire country house, again designed by Webb.The commission, beginning with Morris’s first visit in 1886, consisted of carpets, curtains, chair covers, and tapestries. In the spectacular central hall, a version of the Holland Park carpet designed for the Ionides home was partnered with the 15-foot long commissioned Greenery tapestry, designed by Dearle.The massive drawing room was outfitted with Webb’s plaster ceiling design and Clouds, the longest carpet (at 39 feet) woven by the Firm. Madeline Wyndham, a talented needlewoman and patron of the Royal School of Art Needlework, mixed embroidery pieces, patterned fabrics, and lace with Morris designs throughout the house,“just as the designer intended.”89 The ever more lavish interiors implemented by Morris & Co. in these later years can be contrasted with Morris’s growing participation in the Socialist movement. His decision to engage in the design of a “model workman’s small house” displayed at the recently opened Art Gallery in Queen’s Park, Manchester, in 1884 might well be interpreted as an exercise in mitigating the conspicuous consumption to which he was contributing in his entrepreneurial life.The gallery was “an unprecedented experiment in art education” for the working classes,90 the brainchild of Thomas Coglan Horsfall, a Manchester merchant and philanthropist. Morris worked with Benson on the project, which consisted of two rooms: a bedroom and a living room.The furnishings provided included Sussex chairs and a wash-stand designed by Madox Brown as well as wallpapers and chintz fabrics.The result, while admirable, was disappointingly well out of the financial range of the working-class audience to whom the project was directed.

Conclusion This chapter addresses a comparative handful of Morris’s interiors and the objects associated with them.The choice of the specific projects discussed, however, was made with the intention of foregrounding Morris’s accomplishments as a designer of interiors over and above his role in the reform of household furnishings. While the latter has been discussed in multiple volumes, and Morris’s impact is widely acknowledged, it is the conceptualization of interior design which has only more recently been brought to the fore and is deserving of further emphasis.The design of the interior as a whole was in the Victorian period as much in need of reform as the objects therein when Morris commenced his professional life. One might argue that Morris’s contribution to the development of the idea of interior design was equal in significance to his reform in the design of objects. MacCarthy has described Morris’s holistic designs as “a disciplined amalgam of patterns, colours, textures: wallpapers, friezes, curtain fabrics, wall-hangings, painted ceilings, layer upon layer.”91 In Morris’s conceptual outlook, this integrated approach towards the interior extended also to the exterior, including the fabric of the building and the landscape in which it was positioned. In addition, Morris was sensitive to the nature of the lives to be led within, as seen in the comparison of country and city dwelling spaces. He was unarguably a man in and of his time, responding to the social and cultural constrictions and developments it produced. His work acknowledges and responds to the ugliness industrialism begat—“the spreading of the hideous town”; the doubt fostered—“I cannot ease the burden of your fears”; and the nostalgia for the past that both provoked—“a dream of London, small, and white, and clean.”92 And yet he has been positioned as the founder of the modern design movement. Pevsner understood “the revival of decorative honesty in Morris’s designs” as integral to this Modern Movement.93 I would suggest that Morris’s comprehensive approach to the interior is the basis for this modernity. His efforts to simplify, to clear away the “troublesome superfluities”94 of the age, is the strongest argument for his progressive philosophy and should 220

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be considered as a harbinger of the sleek designs of Bauhaus interiors of the next century.That Morris understood the vast possibilities of the future in architectural and spatial design is perhaps best illustrated in the words of Dick in Morris’s utopian News from Nowhere, to whom I leave the last word:“I am a little cracked on the subject of fine building; and indeed I do think that the energies of mankind are chiefly of use to them for such work; for in that direction I can see no end to the work.”95

Postscript – Morris Today While the origins of today’s DIY enthusiasm can be linked to Morris’s medieval inspired antiindustrial emphasis on handicraft, I would hazard that this is but a small portion of the magnitude of his lasting impact. Morris was at the forefront of the professionalization of interior design. His understanding of the creation of an interior as an art form in itself—an environment both reflecting and serving (form and function) the desires and needs of the dwellers therein—is truly revolutionary and is reflected in philosophical approaches to the interior as various as Bauhaus and Martha Stewart. Morris was a pioneer whose multifarious lines of inquiry 150 years ago can be seen reflected in 21st-century interior-design reform, including the consideration of the physical and emotional health of inhabitants, social justice, and the preservation of natural resources. Morris’s stated belief that “ornamental architectural art” requires “the interchange of interest in the occupations of life; the knowledge of human necessities and the consciousness of human good-will”96 rings true today, signifying the legacy of his life’s work.

Notes 1 Aymer Vallance, William Morris: His Art, His Writings, and His Public Life,A Record (London: George Bell, 1898): 55. 2 “The Beauty of Life,” in Hopes and Fears for Art (1882; London: Longman Green, 1908): 108. 3 “The Designer,” in William Morris, ed. Linda Parry (New York: Harry N.Abrams, 1996): 32. 4 See Hart, Arts and Crafts Objects (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010) and “An ‘Enchanted Interior’: William Morris at Kelmscott House,” in Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896, ed. Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart (Farnham:Ashgate, 2010); Sally-Anne Huxtable,“Re-reading the Green Dining Room,” in Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896, ed. Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); and Judith Neiswander, The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home, 1870–1914 (New Haven/London: Paul Mellon entre/Yale UP, 2008). 5 See for instance George Wardle, Morris Exhibit at The Foreign Fair Boston, 1883–84 (http://www.burrows.com/mor.html) which describes versatility of products. 6 Bulwer Lytton, England and the English 2 vols. (London: J. & J. Harper, 1833): II:108. 7 Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006): 17. 8 One could argue that this reawakening interest in the art and architecture of the late medieval period was as much a product of the Tractarian movement as nostalgia for the pre-industrial world. 9 Morris, “Preface,” in The Revival of Art in Craft (1893; [London]:Wynkyn de Worde Society, in association with the William Morris Society, [1968]): 6. 10 The Seven Lamps of Architecture in E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds., The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–12):VIII, 218. 11 The Stones of Venice, vol. 3 in Cook and Wedderburn, XI: 201. 12 Norman Kelvin, ed., The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols. (Princeton UP, 1984–1996): II: 228. In a tribute to his early mentor, Morris published “The Nature of Gothic” in a Kelmscott Press edition (1892). 13 The Aims of Art, 1887. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1888/signs/chapters/chap ter5.htm 14 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2 vols. (1904; London: Lund Humphries; 1993) I: 104.

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Margaretta S. Frederick 15 J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1899): 48. 16 According to Mackail,“the first suggestion of this magazine was made by [Richard Watson] Dixon to Morris.” 68. 17 The Oxford coterie had first discovered the Pre-Raphaelites through the reading of Ruskin’s Lectures on Architecture and Painting, delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1854). 18 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials, I: 121. 19 In the first issue of the Magazine, Burne-Jones praised Rossetti’s illustrations for William Allingham’s “The Maids of Elfinmere,” asking, “Why is the author of the Blessed Damozel, and the story of Chiaro, so seldom on the lips of men?” For more on the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, see Patrick C. Fleming,“William Fulford,“The Set,” and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” Rollins Scholarship online, Faculty Publications (Fall 2012): 301–319. 20 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials I:114–5. 21 Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris:A Life for our Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1994): 107. 22 “The Beauty of Life,” 107. 23 Mackail I:107–8. 24 Mackail I:112. 25 Mackail I:113.Two of the chairs are now in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum; a third, semicircular chair is in the William Morris Gallery, London; the table is in the Cheltenham Art Gallery; and the settle is in Red. House, Bexleyheath, Kent. 26 Marsh (1999): 29. 27 See for instance Morris’s calligraphy for “Glorious Gwendolyn’s Golden Hair” on one of the two chairs from Red Lion Square (Delaware Art Museum 1997-13). 28 Mackail I:112–13. 29 Mackail I:129. 30 William Morris Textiles (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983): 11. 31 For a synopsis of Morris’s early experimentation in this media see Ray Watkinson,“Morris’s beginnings in Embroidery,” Journal of the William Morris Society, 8.1 (Autumn 1988): 25–28. 32 See Evelyn J. Phimster, “John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Illuminated Manuscript,” Journal of the William Morris Society, Vol. XIV/No. 1 (Autumn 2000): 30–36. Renewed interest in illuminated manuscripts was undoubtedly inspired by his reading of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and the Edinburgh Lectures or, as Phimster suggests, having heard or read the reviews of Ruskin’s lectures on the subject. 33 Letter, Morris to Cormell Price, July, 1856. Kelvin I: 28. 34 For a concise summary of Morris’s work in the fine arts, see Marsh, “William Morris’s Painting and Drawing,:” Burlington Magazine,Vol. 128/No. 1001 (August 1986): 569–75; 577. In addition to documenting Morris’s painting activities in the 1850s, Marsh amends the oft-quoted supposition that Morris gave up painting at this juncture; his intent to continue was indicated by the inclusion of a studio in the conception of Red House. 35 Rossetti records Woodward agreed as “his principle was that of the mediaeval [builders?] to avail himself in any building of as much decoration as circumstances permitted at the time & not to prefer uniform bareness to partial beauty.” Letter D.G. Rossetti to Alexander Gilchrist, 18 June 1861, in William E. Fredeman, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 10 vols. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002–15) II:377; 61.43. 36 Much personal biography has been read into this story of the rejected lover, although as Mancoff suggests,“it is only hindsight that confirms the Arthurian parallel to the later disaffection in the marriage.” Debra N. Mancoff,“Problems with the Pattern:William Morris’s Arthurian Imagery,” in Arthuriana, vol. 6/No. 3 (October 3, 1996): 58. 37 Letter, Morris to James Richard Thursfield, 1869 in Kelvin I: 101; 105. 38 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials I: 161. 39 For what is still the most accurate account of this project see John Christian, The Oxford Union Murals (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 40 D. G. Rossetti to Charles Eliot Norton, 9 January, 1862, in Fredeman II: 441, 62.3. 41 May Morris. The Introductions to The Collected Works of William Morris, 2 vols. (New York: Oriole Editions, 1973): I: 8. 42 Marsh, Red House, 39. 43 “The Nature of Gothic,” Stones of Venice, Cook and Wedderburn IX:196]. 44 Jan Marsh, William Morris and Red House (London: National Trust Books, 2005): 35, 37.

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William Morris and Interior Design 45 Nikolaus Pevsner. Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936):56. See for instance Webb’s early designs for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in which elements of 17th-century furniture design are present; or the so-called “Rossetti armchair” (c. 1863) based on early 19th-century French furniture. 46 William Morris Artist,Writer, Socialist I:11–13. 47 Letter enclosure to Andreas Scheu, September 15, 1883. Kelvin II; part 1: 228–29. 48 Mackail I:145. 49 Letter, Jane Morris to May Morris [1909?] in Frank C. Sharp and Jan Marsh, The Collected Letters of Jane Morris (Woodbridge, Suffolk:The Boydell Press, 2012): 422–24. 50 Transcribed in Mackail I:147–52; 154. 51 Mackail, I:148. 52 Joanna Banham and Jennifer Harris, eds., William Morris and the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984): 129. 53 John P. Seddon, King René’s Honeymoon Cabinet (London: B.T. Batsford, 1898): 5. 54 MacCarthy in Parry (1996): 32. 55 Morris’s design for the Ascension, the first window in the chancel, is thought to have been inspired by miniatures in the 14th-century Queen Mary’s Psalter in the British Library. Sewter I: 61. 56 Parry (1996): 238. 57 This may have been Morris’s design, although Webb seems to have had a hand as well.A drawing relating to the ceiling theme can be found in the collection of the William Morris Gallery,Walthamstow. 58 The windows at All Saints Church Middleton Cheney are described as “a triumphant success, a masterpiece, and one of the most splendid achievements in all English stained glass.” Sewter I: 29. 59 Parry (1996): 112. 60 See Kirk, who credits Webb for creating a design “rich enough not to be overwhelmed by the weaponry.” 45. Certainly the success of the project can be measured in the Firm’s reengagement in the 1880s to carry out the decoration of the throne and banqueting rooms. 61 MacCarthy (1994): 211. 62 Kirk 46. 63 The primary documentation for the project is in the form of Webb’s letters to the business manager of the Firm,Warington Taylor. See Linda Parry, “William Morris and the Green Dining Room,” The Magazine Antiques, vol. 150/no.2 (August, 1996): 201. 64 See Parry,V&A, p. 151. 65 Huxtable 31. 66 Huxtable 37. 67 Giles Walkley, Artists’ Houses in London, 1764–1914 (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1994): 52. 68 For more information on George Howard’s artistic practice, see Alison Brisby, George Howard 9th Earl of Carlisle (1843–1911):Artist and Patron (Carlisle:Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, 2013). 69 Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1999): 84. 70 During the second half of the 19th century, Holland Park became a prestigious address. Residents included many of the most renowned artists of the day, including Frederic Leighton and George Frederic Watts. For an in-depth study, see Dakers (1999). 71 W.R. Lethaby, Philip Webb and his Work (1935, Oxford UP: London: Raven Oak Press, 1979): 88. 72 “The Cupid and Psyche Frieze by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, at no. 1 Palace Green,” The Studio, vol. XV/No. 67 (October, 1898): 3. 73 Letter, Morris to Rosalind Howard 15 December, 1879, in Kelvin I: 550, no. 604. 74 Lesley Hoskins,“Wallpaper,” in Parry,V&A (1996): 198–99. 75 Letter, Morris to Charles James Faulkner, [May 17, 1871] in Kelvin I: 133, no. 134. 76 Frederick Evans produced a series of photographs of the interior of the house in 1897 which gives some idea of its appearance, but several decades and ostensibly many transitions later. 77 Linda Parry, “The Morris Family and Kelmscott,” in Alan Crossley, Tom Hassall, and Peter Salway, William Morris’s Kelmscott: Landscape and History (Macclesfield:Windgather Press in association with The Society of Antiquaries of London, 2007): 98. 78 Parry in Kelmscott, 102–3. 79 A.R. Dufty,“William Morris and the Kelmscott Estate,” Antiquaries Journal, vol. 43 (1963), reprinted in Crossley, Hassall, and Salway, Kelmscott 83. 80 Letter, Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, late Autumn 1879, in Kelvin I: 525, no. 580d.

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Margaretta S. Frederick 81 Parry, (2007): 101. 82 Hart (2010): 84. 83 A decade would pass before the relationship with Madox Brown recommenced, and as was predictable, irreparable damage brought an end to his already strained friendship with Rossetti. 84 See Parry,“Domestic Decoration,” in V&A (1996): 145. 85 The carpet was an early example of Morris’ offering of Kidderminster carpets, woven by the Heckmonwike Manufacturing Company Ltd. of Yorkshire. See Parry, William Morris Textiles (NY: Viking Press, 1983): 77. 86 For more detail on this extravagant interior, see Charles Harvey and Jon Press,“The Ionides Family and 1 Holland Park,” Research Gate (January 1994): 1–14. 87 Letter, Morris to Jenny Morris, December 23, 1888 in Kelvin II: 843. 88 Parry describes Dearle’s interiors at Stanmore as “unoriginal and typically Victorian,” explaining, “Through inexperience Dearle included everything he found admirable in Morris’s work, neither selecting nor truly understanding the basic principles on which such ideas were based.” Parry in William Morris (V&A): 147. 89 For extensive coverage of the Clouds interiors see Caroline Dakers, Clouds:The Biography of a Country House (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1993): 90–96. 90 Sally MacDonald, with help from Michael Harrison, “For ‘Swine of Discretion’: Design for Living: 1884,” Museums Journal, vol. 86/No. 3 (December 1986): 123. 91 MacCarthy (1994): 107. 92 Prologue to The Earthly Paradise. 93 Penguin edition (1972): 53. 94 “The Beauty of Life”: 107. 95 Penguin ed. (1998): 70. 96 “Art and its Producers. A Lecture Delivered in Liverpool in 1888 by William Morris,” in Art and its Producers and The Arts and Crafts of To-day, two addresses delivered before the National Association for the Advancement of Art (London: Longmans & Co. 39, Paternoster Row, 1901): 5.

References and Further Reading [Anon]. “The Cupid and Psyche Frieze by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, at no. 1 Palace Green,” The Studio XV.67 (October, 1898): 3–13. Banham, Joanna and Jennifer Harris, eds. William Morris and the Middle Ages. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Brisby, Alison. George Howard 9th Earl of Carlisle (1843–1911): Artist and Patron. Carlisle: Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, 2013. Bulwer Lytton, Edward. England and the English, 2 vols. London: J. & J. Harper, 1833. Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2 vols., 1904. London: Lund Humphries, 1993. Christian, John. The Oxford Union Murals. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Cohen, Deborah. Household Gods: The British and their Possessions. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Dakers, Caroline. Clouds:The Biography of a Country House. New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press, 1993. Dakers, Caroline. The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society. New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press, 1999. Dufty, A. R. “William Morris and the Kelmscott Estate,” Antiquaries Journal 43 (1963) reprinted in Tom Hassall, Peter Salway, and Alan Crossley, Kelmscott Manor: History and Landscape,Windgather Press, 2007. Fleming, Patrick C.“William Fulford,“The Set,” and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” Research Society for Victorian Periodicals 45.3 (Fall, 2012): 301–319. Fredeman, William E., ed. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 10 vols. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002–2015. Hart, Imogen. “An ‘Enchanted Interior’:William Morris at Kelmscott House,” in Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896, ed. Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart. Farnham:Ashgate, 2010. Hart, Imogen. Arts and Crafts Objects. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.

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William Morris and Interior Design Harvey, Charles and Jon Press. “The Ionides Family and 1 Holland Park,” Research Gate (January, 1994): 1–14. Huxtable, Sally-Anne. “Re-reading the Green Dining Room,” in Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896, ed. Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart. Farnham:Ashgate, 2010. Kelvin, Norman, ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984–1996. Kirk, Shiela. Philip Webb: Pioneer of Arts and Crafts Architecture. Chichester:Wiley-Academy, 2005. Lethaby, W. R. Philip Webb and his Work. 1935, Oxford University Press. London: Raven Oak Press, 1979. MacCarthy, Fiona. William Morris:A Life for our Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. MacDonald, Sally with help from Michael Harrison.“For ‘Swine of Discretion’: Design for Living: 1884,” Museums Journal 86.3 (December, 1986): 123–130. Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1899. Mancoff, Debra N. “Problems with the Pattern: William Morris’s Arthurian Imagery,” Arthuriana 6.3 (October 3, 1996): 55–68. Marsh, Jan. “The Red Lion Square Chairs: Chronology and Iconography,” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 8 (Fall, 1999): 29–48. Marsh, Jan. William Morris and Red House. London: National Trust Books, 2005. Marsh, Jan.“William Morris’s Painting and Drawing,” Burlington Magazine 128.1001 (August, 1986): 569– 575, 577. Morris, May. The Introductions to The Collected Works of William Morris, 2 vols. New York, NY: Oriole Editions, 1973. Morris, May. William Morris Artist,Writer, Socialist, 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1936. Morris,William.“Art and its Producers. A Lecture Delivered in Liverpool in 1888 by William Morris,” in Art and its Producers and The Arts and Crafts of To-day,Two Addresses Delivered Before the National Association for the Advancement of Art. London: Longmans & Co., 1901. Morris, William. Hopes and Fears for Art, 1882. London: Longman Green, 1908. Morris, William. “Preface,” in The Revival of Art in Craft (1893; [London]: Wynkyn de Worde Society, in association with the William Morris Society, [1968]). Morris, William. The Aims of Art. London: Office of the Commonweal, 1887. Morris, William. The Earthly Paradise,A Poem. London: F.S. Ellis, 1868. Neiswander, Judith A. The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home, 1870–1914. New Haven, CT/London: Paul Mellon Entre/Yale University Press, 2008. Parry, Linda. “The Morris Family and Kelmscott,” in William Morris’s Kelmscott: Landscape and History, ed. Alan Crossley, Tom Hassall, and Peter Salway. Macclesfield: Windgather Press in association with The Society of Antiquaries of London, 2007. Parry, Linda, ed. William Morris. New York, NY: Harry N.Abrams, 1996. Parry, Linda.“William Morris and the Green Dining Room,” The Magazine Antiques 150.2 (August, 1996): 198–205. Parry, Linda. William Morris Textiles. London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983. Pevsner, Nikolaus. Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius. London:Yale University Press, 1936. Phimster, Evelyn J. “John Ruskin,William Morris, and the Illuminated Manuscript,” Journal of the William Morris Society XIV.1 (Autumn, 2000): 30–36. Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore. The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. London: J. Weale, 1841. Ruskin, John. “Lectures on Architecture and Painting, delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853,” in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903–12. Ruskin, John. “The Seven Lamps of Architecture,” in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols., vol. 8. London: George Allen, 1903–12. Ruskin, John. “The Stones of Venice,” in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols., vol. 11. London: George Allen, 1903–12. Seddon, John P. King René’s Honeymoon Cabinet. London: B.T. Batsford, 1898. Sewter, A. C. The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, 2 vols. New Haven, CT:Yale UP, 1974–75. Sharp, Frank C. and Jan Marsh, eds. The Collected Letters of Jane Morris.Woodbridge,VA and Suffolk,VA:The Boydell Press, 2012.

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Margaretta S. Frederick Valance, Aymer. William Morris: His Art, His Writings, and His Public Life, A Record. London: George Bell, 1898. Waggoner, Diane, ed. ‘The Beauty of Life,’William Morris and the Art of Design, 1996. London:Victoria and Albert Museum/New York, NY: Harry Abrams, 2004. Walkley, Giles. Artists’ Houses in London, 1764–1914.Aldershot and Hants: Scolar Press, 1994. Wardle, George. Morris Exhibit at The Foreign Fair. Boston, 1883–84. http://www.burrows.com/mor.html (accessed March 24th, 2019). Watkinson, Ray. “Morris’s beginnings in Embroidery,” Journal of the William Morris Society 8.1 (Autumn, 1988): 25–28.

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9 WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: APPROPRIATION, ART, CRITIQUE Compiled by David Mabb

Introduction Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them. (Benjamin, Arcades, 460) The sections are arranged as follows: 1 Gardens; 2 The Red House; 3 The William Morris Gallery; 4 Kelmscott House; 5 Kelmscott Manor; 6 Morris & Co.; 7 The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; 8 The Bauhaus; 9 William Morris and the atom; 10 Morris Kitsch; 11 Jewel Point; 12 Big Red Propeller; 13 Announcer; 14 We sit starving amidst our gold; 15 Love is Enough:William Morris & Andy Warhol; 16 The World Stage: Jamaica; 17 ‘I do not want art for a few any more than I want education for a few.’

1 Gardens The founder of the Arts and Crafts movement had Red House built for his family in 1860 and many of his design ideas were first realised here. Morris considered the garden inseparable from the house and rejecting the formality of High Victorian fashion, he drew inspiration from medieval and Tudor gardens. He planted old-fashioned flowers, such as roses, honeysuckle and lavender which continue to be grown here, and the garden inspired many of Morris’s designs, including his first wallpaper pattern,‘Trellis’ in 1862. (‘William Morris’ Garden,’ National Trust) The garden was designed to “clothe” the house with a series of sub-divided areas, which still exist. House and garden now provide an oasis in an suburban environment. (‘Red House Gardens,’ Great British Gardens) As you wander through the gardens, you can begin to see how he was inspired to create so many of his now internationally famous and much-loved designs from plants, trees and shrubs grown in the Manor gardens, such as Willow Bough (1887); Strawberry Thief (1883) and Kennet (1883). These designs are all reflected in his textiles once you enter the Manor. (‘The Garden and Grounds of Kelmscott Manor’)

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Figure 9.1 Garden, Red House, 2017. Photograph: David Mabb.

Morris’s first wallpaper design was Trellis, a pattern suggested by the rose-trellis in the garden of his house in Bexleyheath, Kent. (‘William Morris & Wallpaper Designs,’ Victoria and Albert Museum) The garden was as unconventional as the house, designed on the medieval principle, resembling the trellised enclosed gardens of illuminated manuscripts:“four little square gardens making a big square together, each of the smaller squares having a wattle fence round it, with roses growing thickly”, as described by Burne-Jones’s wife, Georgiana. The National Trust is now working towards the restoration of Morris’s influential garden as it was. (MacCarthy,‘Garden of Earthly Delights,’ Guardian) Early on it dawned on Morris, through his ramblings round the countryside, that art was not a matter of painting on an easel; it was far from being merely a commercial commodity. Art was landscape, it was buildings. He developed profound feelings for the art of architecture, understanding how the physical form and the positioning of buildings related to communities and people’s recognition of the histories they shared. (MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty, National Portrait Gallery, 11) Proof of the foresight in his garden principles is the quickening pace around the world today of the trend toward natural gardening. … Morris’s ideals continue to reverberate in Australia and the United States, for example, where his plea to preserve the landscape has been readily accepted. Native plants in particular-which need no artificial chemicals to flourish, survive with little water, feed wild creatures, and satisfy the senses-have come to be appreciated. Increasingly, gardeners perceive what Morris preached: that a garden should be a provider of food; a source of pleasure; and a part of nature’s greater whole. (Duchess of Hamilton et alia, The Gardens, 92) 228

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2 The Red House The only house commissioned, created and lived in by William Morris, founder of the Arts & Crafts movement, Red House is a building of extraordinary architectural and social significance. Designed by Philip Webb and completed in 1860, it was described by Edward Burne-Jones as ‘the beautifullest place on earth’. Acquired by the Trust only 10 years ago, the rooms at Red House give a unique view of William Morris’ earliest designs and decorative schemes. Its secrets are slowly being revealed, conservation work in 2013 uncovered an unknown Pre-Raphaelite wall painting and a very early Morris repeating floral pattern.These original features and furniture by Morris and Philip Webb, stained glass and paintings by Burne-Jones, the bold architecture and a garden designed to ‘clothe the house’, add up to a fascinating and rewarding place to visit. (‘Iconic Arts and Crafts Home,’ National Trust) The plan of the building was poetic in its references. Red House was built in the style of the 13th century, the architectural period that Morris, a Renaissance-hater, felt to be the purest. The two-storey L-shaped building is in effect two sides of a quadrangle. The overtones are Arthurian, chivalric. Remember that William Morris, while at Oxford, had contemplated forming a monastic community, a brotherhood of chastity, with his friend Edward Burne-Jones. (MacCarthy,‘Garden of Earthly Delights’) The reputation of Red House is such that first time visitors may expect to see something with the capacity to amaze in the manner of a prodigy house, cottage ornée or even a fairytale dwelling. Rather, Red House is a plain brick house that, to be frank, is neither curious nor welcoming. It might, indeed, house a miser or maybe a small religious community. First, there

Figure 9.2 Red House Jigsaw, Red House, 2017. Photograph: David Mabb.

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is the high, excluding wall and gate; no glimpse of Red House for passers-by. Once through the gate, the approach still deters.The elevation is severe: is this the front door, or is there another door round the side? The porch is low, dark, uninviting; the windows plain and uninformative. Red House is in no sense a ‘show house’ presenting a best feature for public admiration. Walking round outside, it remains private. To the right, along the west elevation, are pleasant brick paths and lawns. But no doors open onto the garden, there are no wide windows or sunny terrace; only an enclosed kitchen yard with outhouses beyond. Further round to the east is the well-garden which feels more hospitable. But the windows are all high, there are no interesting rooms to look into and the porch entrance is half hidden. From this viewpoint, Red House looks secretive and very tall with steeply pitched roofs, hipped gables, double ridges, a squat pyramidal stair-tower and conical well-head like a witch’s hat. (Marsh, William Morris and Red House, 22–23) Red House was a thoroughly co-operative effort, an early exemplar of Morris’s ideas of joy in labour. (MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty,’ 19) Viewed in longer perspective, the gathering of talents at Red House prefigures the Arts and Crafts Guild movement and indeed the mid–twentieth-century design consultancy. (MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty, 37) Many of Red House’s original furnishings were gradually dispersed, some to Kelmscott Manor, some to the V&A.Tate Britain has the central panel of Rossetti’s Dantis Amor painting for the settle in the drawing room. The Ashmolean in Oxford has the wonderful Chaucerian Prioress’s Tale wardrobe painted by Burne-Jones for William Morris’s wedding.This is surely the time to reassemble them. (MacCarthy,‘Garden of Earthly Delights’) We owe it to him that an ordinary man’s dwelling-house has once more become a worthy object of the architect’s thought, and a chair, a wallpaper, or a vase, a worthy object of the artist’s imagination. (Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, 15) The transfer of Red House to the National Trust in 2002 opened a new chapter in its history, and in its future, in terms of both research into the past and decisions regarding conservation, display and interpretation to prospective visitors. Heritage projects, while seeming to preserve the past untouched, are in fact indelibly marked by their very interventions. William Morris, through his opposition to restoration and his foundation of the modern conservation movement with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, was acutely aware of these issues, if not their manifestations to day, so the case of his own house, built to his specifications 150 years ago, is a nice example of a more general topic. (Marsh,‘Red House: Past and Future’, 53) Our shop has moved into the coach house, which suits its new rustic style. It’s larger and brighter to make browsing and shopping a more relaxing experience and it’s full of textiles, ceramics and notepaper decorated with Morris & Co’s well known designs. (‘The Shop at Red House,’ National Trust)

3 The William Morris Gallery From 1848 to 1856, the house was the family home of William Morris (1834–1896), the designer, craftsman, writer, conservationist and socialist. Morris lived here with his widowed mother and his eight brothers and sisters from the age of fourteen until he was twenty-two. (‘History and Development,’ William Morris Gallery) The Gallery underwent a major redevelopment during 2011–12. The project was led by Waltham Forest Council, which owns and manages the Gallery, and was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Friends of the William Morris Gallery and numerous charitable

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Figure 9.3 William Morris Gallery. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

trusts, sponsors and individual donors.The historic house was fully refurbished, with new collection displays being created on the ground and first floors. The top floor was turned into a learning and research centre, with staff offices being relocated to the refurbished basement. A new extension was built on the site of the old east wing, housing a tea room, a special exhibition gallery and a collection store. (‘History and Development’) The house is set in its own extensive grounds and features permanent displays of printed and woven fabrics, rugs and painted tiles by Morris and other members of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as humble domestic objects including Morris’s coffee cup and the satchel he used to distribute his radical pamphlets. (‘William Morris Gallery’, Time Out) Back in 2007,Waltham Forest council cut back the opening hours, wound down the learning, and downgraded the curatorial staff. Councillors spoke darkly of focusing on the future not the past.They wanted festivals and arts trails, not fusty old museums about dead white men.The subtext was clear: the life and art of William Morris had nothing to offer modern, multicultural, multi-ethnic Walthamstow and it was easier just to do Zumba and face-painting. It was all the more shocking, given that this was a Labour council thinking about terminating a gallery focused on the legacy of Morris – a man who founded the aesthetic tradition within the Labour movement.What was more, the gallery had been opened by Clement Attlee in 1950 as part of the Labour party’s postwar commitment to ensuring popular appreciation of the arts as part of a social democratic state. Rightly, the response from the arts community was damning. However, even more encouraging was the response of local people, who regarded the gallery not as a paternalistic embarrassment – but as a source of intense civic pride in an otherwise culturally deprived part of the capital.As protest organiser Ian Dungavell put it:“The council should be developing the gallery

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and getting more people in it. It may be beautiful, but it is not art for the elite.William Morris thought it was art for the people.” So, under council leader Chris Robbins’s street-savvy leadership, the Labour group performed a welcome about-turn. Wisely, they saw the gallery as an asset rather than drain on resources – and decided to allocate £1.5 m of council tax funds to the museum, securing a matching £1.5 m from the Heritage Lottery Fund.The money paid for a total refurbishment, new collection displays, a learning and research centre and new school resources. The result is a triumph.The gallery does so much: it positions Morris within the topography of north-east London as it edges into Epping Forest and Essex; it explains the roots of his gothicism and relationship with Ruskinian design; it describes the birth of his commercial practice and commodification of style; it deftly charts the nature of his socialism and how his art interacted with his politics; and it explores his remarkable cultural legacy. The gallery does all this with scholarship and insight in an open and accessible style.There is no dumbing down here, but a great programme of outreach. No compromise on aesthetic and curatorial excellence, but an equal commitment to ensuring that as many people as possible come to understand the importance and wonder of William Morris. (Hunt, ‘Don’t Patronize Urban Communities,’ Guardian) The William Morris Gallery was crowned Museum of the Year 2013 for its major renovation and creative reinterpretation of the life and work of Morris. (‘William Morris Gallery’,Art Fund)

4 Kelmscott House The William Morris Society aims to perpetuate the memory of one of the greatest men of the Victorian, or any, age.The life, work and ideas of William Morris (1834–1896) are as important today as they were in his lifetime.The Society exists to make them as widely known as possible. The variety of Morris’s ideas and activities bring together those who are interested in him as a designer, craftsman, poet, and socialist, who admire his robust and generous personality, his creative energy and his courage. His ideas on how we live and how we might live, on creative work, leisure and machinery, on ecology and conservation, on politics and the place of arts in our lives remain as stimulating now as they were over a century ago. The Society, established in 1955, publishes a Journal, Newsletter and commentaries on all aspects of Morris’s work and runs a varied series of talks and visits throughout the year. It encourages the re-publication of Morris’s works and the continued manufacture of his textile and wallpaper designs.The Society’s office and museum are in the basement and Coach House of Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, Morris’s London home for the last eighteen years of his life. During this time he ran his manufacturing company, Morris and Company, at Merton Abbey, he founded the Kelmscott Press and he held Socialist League (later the Hammersmith Socialist Society) meetings in the Coach House. Today the Society’s talks and other events are held in the Coach House; it also hosts exhibitions of works by Morris and his wider circle. (‘About the Society,’ William Morris Society) The Shop at the Society sells key texts, books, journals and publications covering the life and work of Morris and other leading figures of the Arts & Crafts movement texts.Alongside this we also sell handmade textile items, mugs, postcards and other gift ideas.The shop is also the only destination where you can buy all of the range of The William Morris Society’s publications … (‘Shop,’ William Morris Society) The impetus for founding the Society in the 1950s was a desire to liberate Morris from what communist historian Robin Page Arnot called a ‘bourgeois myth’. In the 1930s there was fierce

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Figure 9.4 William Morris Behind the Curtain at Kelmscott House, 2017. Photograph: David Mabb.

debate over whether Morris was merely a sentimental socialist or a man with revolutionary zeal. (Straughan,‘Labour of Love,’ HuffPost) Although the society’s early pioneers included communist architects like Graeme Shankland and John Kay, I think it’s fair to say that Crick’s book (The History of the William Morris Society) is dominated by personalities rather than left-wing politics. Over the past 50 years, the society has attracted support from distinguished historians, publishers, writers and architects. Names like John Betjeman and Nikolaus Pevsner appear in these pages, along with that of Hollywood actress Faye Dunaway. (You’ll have to read the book to find out how the star of Bonnie and Clyde fits into this very English story.) Past presidents of the society include the typographer Stanley Morison; Morris’s secretary and executor Sir Sydney Cockerell; and Fiona MacCarthy, biographer of Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and the scandalous Eric Gill. ‘It is difficult to overestimate the passionate feelings which the issue of Kelmscott House had aroused’ writes Crick of the most controversial episode in the Society’s history. The Georgian house, situated near Hammersmith Bridge, was Morris’s final home and he died there on 3 October 1896. It was bequeathed to the Society in 1969, sparking a long-running dispute between the committee and the Kelmscott House Trust that lasted into the 21st century. The Kelmscott House affair was obviously painful for those Morrisians who were involved in deciding whether the Society could afford to retain all or part of the house and in what capacity. Some are unhappy that Crick’s research risks stirring up old controversies. I think he’s been respectful of all viewpoints.After all, who wants to read a book about people agreeing with each other? (Straughan,‘Labour of Love’)

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Figure 9.5 Harold Wilson, 1976. Harold Wilson MP is shown here pointing to socialist ephemera during the Society’s opening event at Kelmscott House in 1976. Photograph: The William Morris Society.

5 Kelmscott Manor Kelmscott Manor was the inspirational Cotswold retreat of William Morris and his family, friends and colleagues. When Morris first saw the Manor in 1871, he was delighted by this ‘loveliest haunt of ancient peace’; he signed a joint lease for the property with his friend and colleague Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite artist. (‘Welcome to Kelmscott Manor,’ Society of Antiquaries) Visitors today can still experience the beauty and seclusion that inspired many of William Morris’s most important designs and writings and influenced his ideas on conservation for both the built and natural environments. This seventeenth-century, Grade 1 listed Manor house on the river Thames – perhaps the most evocative of all the houses associated with Morris – contains an outstanding collection of the possessions and works of Morris, as well as of his family and associates (Benson, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Webb among them) that includes furniture, original textiles, pictures and paintings, carpets, ceramics and metalwork.The estate also boasts a beautiful garden with easy access to the Thames Pathway, as well as a licensed Tearoom and Shop. (‘Welcome to Kelmscott Manor’) As part of your visit to the Manor, visit our licensed Tearoom and enjoy morning coffee or delicious home-cooked food, including hot and cold light meals, soups, cakes and cream teas. We also offer vegetarian options. We hold a five-star (excellent!) food hygiene rating and have a policy of sourcing – where possible – local and fair-trade supplies. (‘Tearoom,’ Society of Antiquaries) 234

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Figure 9.6 Kelmscott Manor, Boerkevitz at the English language Wikipedia CC-BY-SA-3.0 https://up load.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/KelmscottManor1.JPG

On a recent trip down to the Cotswolds […] I picked up a leaflet for ‘Kelmscott Manor:The Inspirational Cotswolds Retreat of William Morris’ in the pub where we had arranged to have lunch.This leaflet has a splendid photo of the porch and gables of the building on its front cover, pretty much the same view in fact as serves for C.M. Gere’s design for the engraved frontispiece to the 1893 Kelmscott edition of News from Nowhere. But of Morris’s socialism, you will not find a trace in this document; it has all been edited out. We read that ‘William Morris – writer, designer and craftsman – first saw it [the Manor] in 1871’.Well, I suppose it’s technically correct to leave ‘socialist’ out of that list of Morris’s activities, since he did not commit himself to the revolutionary cause until 1883. But when the text continues: ‘It became his country retreat and inspired many of his designs and writings, influencing his thinking on environmental issues and building conservation’, then we clearly see a sanitising of Morris’s politics, a substitution of vaguely Green concerns for what were in his case also militantly Red ones. Had that last sentence read ‘influencing his thinking on environmental issues and building conservation, and affording a major focus for his communist utopia News from Nowhere’, then we would have had the full actual range of Morris’s thinking and activity. (Minow-Pinkney,‘Sanitising William Morris’)

6 Morris & Co. Morris designs seem to have satisfied a widespread desire for pattern in a way which the more formal and didactic designs of the reformers such as Jones and Pugin never did. The next 235

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Figure 9.7 Morris & Co. 17 George Street, Hanover Square, London. Photographer and date unknown.

generation of designers were conscious of working with Morris’s legacy. For example, Charles Voysey, later described by Essex & Co. in advertisements as ‘the Genius of Pattern’, produced designs which show clear evidence of Morris’s influence in the mastery of flat but complex patterns and in the preference for stylised organic forms and motifs from nature. Morris also transformed the way in which people of relatively modest means decorated their houses. By designing and selling all the ingredients of the Morris style in a single outlet, first in the relative obscurity of Bloomsbury, and from 1877 in premises on Oxford Street, he allowed the householder to furnish in a co-ordinated fashion. His was thus one of the first ‘one-stop shops’ for interior decoration. Liberty’s, opened in 1875, and specialising in oriental arts, was the other. (‘William Morris & Wallpaper Design,’ Victoria and Albert Museum) Like many aspects of our modern life it is interesting to imagine what William Morris might have thought about the phenomena of blogging in our digital age, had he been alive today.As a socially inclusive medium for communication we like to think he would approve of the tool as a means for disseminating information and ideas! Through these pages we aim to bring you the latest news from inside the Morris & Co. business, covering new launches and reviews of recent exhibitions and events. We will report on inspirational projects and design collectives practising in the UK today. Through fascinating interviews with people working in the Arts and Crafts tradition, and linking with heritage houses and organisations connected to William Morris, this is an essential port of call for anyone interested in the design, philosophy and legacy of Morris and his contemporaries. Get creative with our fun decorating projects to do at home! 236

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With suggestions on where to source furniture and accessories, easy upcycling ideas and simple makeover tips, we’ll help you find new ways to bring objects into your home that are both beautiful and useful. (‘Welcome to the New Morris and Co. Blog!’ Morris & Co.) These newly interpreted designs use modern production techniques to produce fabrics and wallpapers closer to the originals than ever before.The embroideries include two adapted from those in Morris’ bedroom at Kelmscott Manor and of the seven weaves, two have been woven in wool as the originals. Others are adapted from wallpaper designs and have been woven as tapestries, velvets and damasks. The depth of colour and definition of the hand block printed wallpapers has been reproduced using a combination of surface and flexo printing techniques. Multi-coloured designs such as Golden Lily and Pimpernel are almost indistinguishable from the originals with a richness of colour and authenticity not previously possible with machine printing. Bringing old Morris & Co. designs back to the marketplace is always a pleasure and his unique design philosophy seems as relevant today as ever. New production techniques now make these originally hand crafted designs affordable – just as William Morris always hoped they would be. (Cann, in Morris & Co., 63)

7 The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Morris’ whole attitude to the restoration of ancient buildings derives from Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture. “I never intended to have republished this book’, says Ruskin in a preface to a later edition, ‘which has become the most useless I ever wrote: the buildings it describes with

Figure 9.8 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 2017. Photograph: David Mabb.

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so much delight being now either knocked down or scraped and patched up into smugness and smoothness more tragic than uttermost ruin.’ Here we find the spark which later produced Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings … (Henderson, William Morris, 15) The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was founded by William Morris in 1877 to counteract the highly destructive ‘restoration’ of medieval buildings being practised by many Victorian architects.Today it is the largest, oldest and most technically expert national pressure group fighting to save old buildings from decay, demolition and damage. We advise.We educate.We campaign.We offer help when it’s wanted and informed resistance when we are alarmed.We encourage excellence in new design to enrich and complement the historic environment. We represent the practical and positive side of conservation.We have a firm set of principles about how old buildings should be repaired and the practical knowledge to show how these can be put into effect.We are training the next generation to do the job with discernment and care and we are helping many others, who own or live in old buildings, to understand them better. Our membership includes many of the leading conservation practitioners as well as home owners, living in houses spanning all historical periods, and those who simply care about old buildings. Our successes are visible across the country. Thousands of historic buildings survive which would have been lost, mutilated or badly repaired without our intervention. Today, the Society has a statutory role as adviser to local planning authorities. We must be notified of listed building applications that involve total or partial demolition. We are also informed by those religious bodies, that have an exemption from the secular system, of certain types of proposals for listed places of worship. In addition, our Casework includes campaigning to protect historic buildings at risk. (‘What is’) The manifesto of the SPAB was written by William Morris and other founder members and issued in 1877. Although produced in response to the conservation problems of the 19th century, the manifesto extends protection to ‘all times and styles’ and remains to this day the philosophical basis for the Society’s work.Applicants for SPAB membership must sign to say that they agree with the manifesto’s conservation principles. A society coming before the public with such a name as that above written must needs explain how, and why, it proposes to protect those ancient buildings which, to most people doubtless, seem to have so many and such excellent protectors.This, then, is the explanation we offer. No doubt within the last fifty years a new interest, almost like another sense, has arisen in these ancient monuments of art; and they have become the subject of one of the most interesting of studies, and of an enthusiasm, religious, historical, artistic, which is one of the undoubted gains of our time; yet we think that if the present treatment of them be continued, our descendants will find them useless for study and chilling to enthusiasm.We think that those last fifty years of knowledge and attention have done more for their destruction than all the foregoing centuries of revolution, violence and contempt. (‘The SPAB Manifesto,’ SPAB) Someone will always be needed to set and uphold the highest philosophical standards to which others aspire. Such a body must be fiercely independent, however close and productive its links may be with others at any one time.William Morris knew that, for the embryonic Society to become established and grow, it had to reject the siren calls of all those nineteenth-century architects who spoke the language of conservative repair but in practice did otherwise. Had Morris been less abrasive and more willing to work with these apparent allies, the Society’s 238

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driving purpose would have been quickly swallowed up. It would have degenerated into a narrow, insular, professional body. (Venning,‘The Continuing Work of the SPAB,’ 296)

8 The Bauhaus The Bauhaus only existed for 14 years: from 1919 to 1933. Despite this, it became the twentieth century’s most important college of architecture, design and art. For political reasons, fresh starts had to be made repeatedly in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, but under its three directors – Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – the college continued to develop further.The intention to rethink design from the bottom up and not to accept any traditional certainties not only opened the way to a fresh start in modern art, but also enabled the influence of the ‘Bauhaus experiment’ to continue right down to the present day. (‘Idea,’ Bauhaus Archive) One of the preoccupations of the movement that flourished in the wake of William Morris was the revival of the useful crafts, such as ordinary artifacts as walking sticks and hats, and simple, functional, unornamented furniture actually needed for people to carry on their daily lives. (MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty, 63) … “So far,” he writes,“Morris is the true prophet of the twentieth century.We owe it to him that an ordinary man’s dwelling-house has once more become a worthy object of architects’ thought.” What in Morris is prophetic of the twentieth century is the idea that art should be equitably distributed.This goal was taken up by the Bauhaus.“However,” Pevsner goes on,“this is only one half of Morris’ doctrine. The other half remained,” Pevsner thought, “committed

Figure 9.9 Bauhaus building, Dessau,Walter Gropius (1925–26),Von Lelikron - Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus_Dessau#/media/File:Dessau_Bauhaus_neu.JPG

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to nineteenth-century style and nineteenth-century prejudices.” It “is part and parcel of nineteenth-century ‘historicism.’ Proceeding from Gothic handicraft, he defined art simply as ‘the expression by man of his pleasure in labour’”.This for Pevsner was a dead end. (Banfield,‘Two Politics of Modern Design,’ 63) What was new about the school was its attempt to integrate the artist and the craftsman, to bridge the gap between art and industry. The unity of arts had of course been a central tenet of the late 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement, and the ideals of William Morris influenced Gropius’s planning for the school. But the Bauhaus was the antithesis of the Arts and Crafts movement in fundamental ways. No more romance of handmaking in the countryside: its emphasis was urban and technological, and it embraced 20th-century machine culture. Mass production was the god, and the machine aesthetic demanded reduction to essentials, an excision of the sentimental choices and visual distractions that cluttered human lives. (MacCarthy, ‘House Style,’ Guardian) The designer emerges, then, as the essence of the modern style out of the logic of one half of Morris’ theory of art and society, and the movement from Morris to Gropius becomes that from artisan to designer. Gropius’s 1919 manifesto had proclaimed craftsmanship the ‘source of creative design’:“This world of mere drawing and painting of draughtsmen and applied artists must at long last become a world that builds.” Now the direction was reversed. Although deploring the separation of design and execution, Gropius wanted the architect to become ‘a legitimate member of the team to which he belongs, along with the scientist, the engineer and the business man’ thereby placing the architect/designer not, as Morris did ‘side by side’ with the workers, but with the capitalist. (Banfield,‘Two Politics,’ 67–68)

9 William Morris and the Atom Courageous was a formidable underwater weapon. Her time submerged was limited only by the food that could be carried and the endurance of the crew. Her nuclear reactor was a virtually limitless power supply driving both the propulsion and the life support systems onboard. Making fresh water and even oxygen from the sea water around her, she could remain beneath the surface for months at a time. Her sonar allowed Courageous to listen quietly for the sounds made by other ships and submarines and her weapons meant that she carried a real sting with which she could both defend and attack.The small nuclear reactor (about the size of a household dustbin) provided heat to produce steam for the turbines which drove the propellor as well as for the turbo generators which produced enough electricity to supply a small town. (‘The Boat,’ HMS Courageous Association) On my visit, we climbed down a steep ladder just in front of the conning tower.Although I expected to see Morris’ fabrics, it still came as a shock to see them in this context.We had come straight into the officers’ wardroom. All the seat covers and back rests were covered in Morris’ Rose fabric.The fabric was used on every upholstered surface, from the seats, chairs and even beer barrels. I told the guide that I had come on the tour of the submarine to see the Morris fabrics. Unperturbed, he showed me other uses of the fabrics, as curtains in the officers’ bunk spaces and as covers on some of their mattresses.The Rose was even used to cover one of the seats that the sailors used to ‘drive’ the submarine.At least in this part of the submarine the fabric was everywhere. (Mabb,‘Protest and Survive’) … artist David Mabb investigates the aesthetics of William Morris designs within contemporary political culture. William Morris (1834–1896) was an English designer, poet, utopian novelist and socialist. Extraordinarily, Morris’s Rose fabric was used to upholster the interiors of British nuclear submarines from the early 1960s to the mid 1990s. In response to a visit to the 240

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Figure 9.10 Senior Ratings Mess with William Morris ‘Rose’ Fabric Seat Covers, HMS Courageous. Photograph: Ele Carpenter.

Figure 9.11 David Mabb, A Provisional Memorial to Nuclear Disarmament, 2016. Photograph: David Mabb.

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HMS Courageous submarine, Mabb created a new series of works to investigate the Navy use of the Morris print to furnish the Vanguard class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines.As a socialist and an anti-imperialist,William Morris could never have anticipated that his designs would become the symbol of English homeliness in a nuclear submarine. Prompted by the work of British historian EP Thompson, whose biography of Morris was republished in the 1970s when he was a leading intellectual in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Mabb re-appropriates Morris fabric from the Ministry of Defence, bringing the designs into conjunction with a range of anti-nuclear protest signs and slogans. The sculpture utilizes fifteen late 20th century film projection screens, and a public seat using fabric reclaimed from a submarine.A selection of reference materials is presented in a vitrine. (Perpetual Uncertainty, Bildmuseet Gallery Guide) A Provisional Memorial to Nuclear Disarmament was made in response to a visit to HMS Courageous, a decommissioned nuclear powered submarine furnished with William Morris ‘Rose’ fabrics.The Ministry of Defence commissioned the fabric for its nuclear submarines for over 30 years, from the 1960s through to the late 1990s, including the Vanguard Class nuclearpowered ballistic missile submarines that are armed with Trident nuclear-armed missiles. … The works consist of old projection screens in which the white screen fabric has been removed and replaced.The fronts of the screens are mostly painted black, with some Morris patterns. On the back of the screens William Morris patterned fabrics have been painted with anti-nuclear slogans and signs. (Mabb,‘William Morris and the Atomic’, 23) A multitude of projection screens, facing away from the gallery entrance, initially appear as blank objects. On the other side, however, each one unveils itself to the viewer. Painted upon each screen is a variety of anti-nuclear imagery and slogans, ranging from ‘Scrap Trident’ to ‘Ban the Bomb.’The charged imperatives are balanced by Mabb’s floral designs, which take inspiration from the work of William Morris.Through the use of Morris’s Tudor Rose print, Mabb cleverly re-appropriates the artist within the context of nuclear power. Over the latter half of the twentieth-century, the Ministry of Defence commissioned the same print to furnish quarters within nuclear submarines. An ardent socialist, it is difficult to imagine Morris himself granting such use of his design.Through Mabb’s series, the work of William Morris becomes – not an environment of homeliness for the MOD – but a visual backdrop to charged political protest. (Szwarc,‘Material Nuclear Culture’)

10 Morris Kitsch Culture and Society, art and everyday life: Morris refused these distinctions and the banal division between works of art and mere artifacts which they support. He refused to accept as desirable, or necessary, a world in which culture is privilege, art is luxury; in which the makeshift is commonplace. (Lipman and Harris, ‘Social Architecture,’ 46) Inspired by our fabric and wallpaper collections, the Morris & Co. Accessories range is of exceptional quality and includes beautiful bedlinen and towels, rugs, toiletries and home fragrances. Classic patterns have been expertly re-worked by design studios to co-ordinate with your scheme, or to add a decorative accent to the home, bringing the unique heritage of Morris & Co. to every room. (‘Home Accessories,’ Morris & Co.) William Morris is a problem. At least he is a problem for those English radicals interested in modern art. In England Morris is everywhere. Exhibitions are the least of it. Morris’s classic designs have become a staple of domestic furnishings: cushions are covered in Bird; curtains made from Pomegranate; sofas from Strawberry Thief.Walls appear smothered in Honeysuckle. Almost any fabric available to be printed on – from tea towels to bedding – has been Morrised.

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Figure 9.12 Daisy Print Wellington Boot. Photograph:Tamara Henriques.

Domestic interiors seem to be drowning under the weight of his fussy beauty. This is also the Morris of the export industries that circulate his designs, along-side Shakespeare and the Cotswolds, as consumable signs of a pleasant England that never was. In the world of the new middle class Morris goes with the National Trust, restored Victorian houses, Liberty carrier bags, holidays in France … This is, admittedly, only a section of the English middle class – the young and thrusting have recently developed a taste for loft-living and minimalism, as if carefully arranged storage could provide a solution to commodity culture. (Flush MDF cupboards seem a perfect homology for the prevailing cynicism that would pack capitalism out of sight.) But despite the fashion for Eames chrome and leather, or Panton plastic, there is no escaping the Morris industry: his characteristically intricate designs are to be found on coffee mugs, diaries, stationary and the rest.This is to say that Morris has become prim and proper.Worst of all he has become tasteful. (Edwards,‘The Trouble with Morris,’ 16) Morris’s designs were radical, and certainly not popular when they first appeared, yet they have now become the essence of conservative good taste. Where once they were adopted by those seeking something new and original in art and design, Morris papers now represent a ‘safe’ choice, a decorating decision that comes with the National Trust seal of approval. (Saunders, ‘Mining Morris,’ 80) Wastepaper bins, paper napkins, tea towels, oven gloves, mugs, ring binders, stationery, packaging have all been transformed into ‘gifts’ by the addition of a Morris pattern, and we see how Morris has become a brand, an instantly identifiable logo, used (ironically, given the liberties the manufactures have taken with his designs) to denote ‘quality’. Museums themselves, as well

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as the wider heritage industry, are amongst the worst offenders, co-opting Morris to boost the balance sheet, with little regard to the integrity of his designs. Here we have Morris’s designs democratised, and available to all – but in the process irredeemably debased. (Ibid.) These objects invariably miss the point. For example, the slogan ‘Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful or believe to be useful’ is printed on t-shirts and aprons-in ugly layout with bland font. This would have displeased Morris the typographer, whose Kelmscott Press produced stunning traditionally-printed books. And yes, Morris was an advocate of making things by hand, but why have his designs been printed on the business ends of tools so they cannot be used? Some objects idiotically blend Arts and Crafts and contemporary urbanity.Take for example, a pair of Nike shoes embellished with a Morris pattern or a ‘William Morris is my homeboy’ apron. Others would make us snicker and the Victorian Morris blush – like skimpy women’s underwear sporting his designs on the crotch. (Epstein,‘David Mabb,Wilmington,’ 58) It is worth having a look at what happens to Morris’s designs when they are applied to consumer objects.V&A Enterprises Ltd license a variety of tools in the Daisy print. Their ‘Daisy Print Garden Tool Set’ consists of a hand trowel and cultivator that is packaged in a robust cardboard box, also covered in a miniaturized Daisy pattern.The tools, whilst functional, are not the height of modern garden tool engineering. Made from a single piece of aluminum, they are described on the box as ‘lightweight and strong with an ergonomic grip,’ but lack a separately formed handle made of another material such as wood, plastic or rubber, which you might expect to grip.They look like a starter tool more likely to be given to a child – the shiny enameled miniaturized Daisy pattern gleaming around every surface – and are in fact reminiscent of toys such as shiny painted model cars and buses.The Daisy Wellington boots, mentioned above do look rather better made and are more up-market, with a buckle at the top, which enables the size of the top of the boot to be adjusted for easier access.They both are and look quite expensive and require a fairly affluent customer. (Mabb,‘Notes on the Morris Kitsch Archive’, 321)

11 Jewel Point A flock of birds and flowers converges on the walls of the gallery, as if something inbred and long hidden breeds through into ribald being.The effect is surprisingly refined looking, despite being monstrous in proportion to the rooms it inhabits. Each of the proffered emblems originated as a minute motif from the British Arts and Crafts period, and when the visitor learns that the Burnaby Art Gallery (built as a private estate in 1910) is itself a fine example of this style, the visual paradox of monstrosity and refinement begins to makes sense.William Morris (1834–1896) is generally avowed as the father of the Arts and Crafts style, and most of the details Gisele Amantea is using in Jewel Point have been taken from one or another of his celebrated wallpapers. These vastly blown up ‘things’ might look, at first glance, like something imported, as if they were, say, flattened out remnants of Mardi Gras costumes.Their formal properties – bright, even gaudy colours applied by flocking the surfaces of the motifs – evoke popular rather than high cultures while giving counterpoint to the ‘tastefully muted’ tones used in the Arts and Crafts style. Rather than simply functioning like ‘imports’ then, the work oscillates between ‘High’ and ‘Low.’The motifs are more like free floating fragments – loosed, if somewhat lewdly, from the archives of the historically constricted. (Campbell, Gisele Amantea, Burnaby) … my intent is to introduce the gaudy patterns of bad taste and at the same time to suggest a sense of beauty that complicates refinement through aspects of abundance and exuberance in decoration. In being confronted with this site it seemed important and even necessary to disrupt 244

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Figure 9.13 Gisele Amantea, Jewel Point, 1996 installation, Burnaby Art Gallery Left to right: daisy, bunny, lizard, cray flower, acanthus. Flock on paper backed fabric. Photograph:Trevor Mills.

its aura of assured tranquility and to question the sense of nature and beauty as cultivated artifact that it proposes. (Amantea, Jewel Point, Burnaby, 3)

12 Big Red Propeller By painting over mass-produced Morris fabrics, Mabb asserts Morris’s original emphasis on artisanship over the alienated labour of industrial production. Mabb also ruptures the fabrics’ surfaces, a process that obliterates Morris’s totalizing utopian vision, which is itself largely based on the all-encompassing divine vision of medievalism. Moreover, this layering of imagery from different cultural and historical periods is consistent with Mabb’s desire to disrupt the conventions of art history, including the linear, chronological development of style and iconography within national or ethnic parameters. (Patten, David Mabb,A Factory as It Might Be, 13) Mabb describes Big Red Propeller for example, as ‘a play on Social Realism,’ those painfully cheerful, propagandistic paintings of happy workers that proliferate under communist regimes. In this painting, a swath of Morris’s Golden Lily Minor fabric is impregnated with the image of a behemoth ship’s propeller, tended by an engineer. … The colour red here makes obvious allusion to leftist politics, while the heroic scale of the object, and its seductive, volumetric whorl, echo the swirling floral vortices in the Morris fabric. Fragments of Morris’s original design are left to peek through the painting, interrupting the visual field. (Milroy,‘A Morris Dance’) Propeller:‘The propeller shape is a bit like the lily design around it.The lily has the propeller’s shape. What I wanted to do was put the aestheticized image of industry in opposition to an image Morris preferred, of nature in all its glory.’ (Goddard,‘Getting Crafty with Morris’) A dialectical image, writes Benjamin,‘is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill.’ Such images achieve a momentary halt to the continuum of history by bringing fragments of the past into our present view. In this manner, dialectical images subvert the flow of time: they ‘blast open the homogeneity of the epoch … (They) saturate it with … the present.’ By making time 245

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Figure 9.14 David Mabb, Big Red Propeller 2001, paint on fabric 48”× 60”. Photograph: David Mabb.

seem to stand still, dialectical images reveal the gaps and silences in contemporary culture: those moments when the boisterous and gaudy world of commodities does not quite succeed in distracting us from the longing for a better world. Dialectics at a standstill allows us to retrieve the past – its catastrophes as well as its utopian potential – so that it may be redeemed in the present: ‘the most radical procedure is to make events simultaneous.’ By spatializing time, by bringing the past forward into the present, by breaking up the reified dream-images of our current world, dialectical images open up the possibility of historical reversal, of redeeming the past by remaking the future. (Mooers,‘Dialectics at a Standstill,’ 34–35)

13 Announcer In this exhibition, Mabb overlays pages from a facsimile edition of Morris’s most celebrated book design, the Kelmscott Chaucer (1896), with enlarged recreations of Russian artist El Lissitzky’s acclaimed illustrations from For the Voice (1923), a book of revolutionary poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Morris and Lissitzky both used their art to promote their socialist politics. Yet whilst Morris saw beauty in the past, wanting to elevate Victorian society from the ugliness imposed by industrial manufacturing, for Lissitzky, the Russian revolution (1917) and the rapid advancement of science and technology meant the old world was no longer recognisable. He sought an entirely new visual language that could express the socialist world he believed he was helping to construct. 246

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Figure 9.15 David Mabb, Announcer, 2014, facsimiles of ‘Kelmscott Chaucer’ mounted on canvas, acrylic glue, paint wood.William Morris Gallery, 2015. Photograph: David Mabb.

Mabb draws our attention to the different directions of Morris and Lissitzky’s influences. Although on the surface they become collaborators, their designs remain distinct, never able to fully merge or separate. (Announcer,William Morris Gallery) David Mabb’s artwork often stages complex interactions – synergies, conflicts, resonances, even fights – between the aesthetic vocabularies associated with significant moments in socialist history. … Announcer comprised 30 large canvases with backgrounds made from rows of textladen pages from the Kelmscott Chaucer in facsimile edition. … Over these pages, Mabb has painted copies of some of El Lizzitsky’s designs in complex ways: each canvas is like a dance between quite unequal partners. Lissitsky’s geometric forms interrupt the flow of the Kelmscott Chaucer pages. Illuminated first letters from the Chaucer (designed by Morris) peek through the harsh, geometric forms of Lissitsky’s compositions.White paper covers Edward Burne Jones’s illustrations in the Chaucer leaving only the text and Morris’s surrounding decorative flourishes. The brilliant white rectangles repress the illustrative scenes in the Chaucer, but also extend upward, engulfing parts of Lissitsky’s shapes in the pictorial foreground, and striking up conversation with their bold, constructivist geometry. (Rosamond, ‘The Background Speaks,’ 21) In terms of Morris, it is worth registering how artisan authenticity currently exists as a significant part of the mainstay ‘branding’ for the retail arm of gentrification in cities like London. In this respect, it is difficult to imagine making a political investment in the significance of craft due to its current association with the matrices of fashionable consumption. However, the productivist agenda of the constructivists – the positioning of ‘artist as worker’ – is equally difficult to affirm in light of the compulsive professionalization of artists. In this respect, Mabb’s intention to bring together these traditions so that they might radicalize one another anew seems clear enough. In combining these objects and aesthetics, Mabb’s intention is to create ‘… active 247

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Figure 9.16 David Mabb, Announcer, Page 2, facsimiles of ‘Kelmscott Chaucer’ mounted on canvas, acrylic glue, paint wood. Photograph: David Mabb.

socialist objects that purposely suggest an emergent transformation of the world’. This aim is common enough with his source material, but Mabb recognizes that the relation of form to politics is historically contingent. Perhaps what is being suggested here, then, is less that either pole can counter the commodity fetish, or offer an image against the reproduction of capitalist social relations. By bringing these models into friction, their redundancy is exposed with each pole becoming a document of stunted, revolutionary attempts to transform daily life. In the present, where artists increasingly pursue images of transformation through de-materialized, ‘social’ encounters, Mabb’s work reminds us that objecthood is not the problem, but rather the processes that underpin their production. The problem of the aesthetic remains one to be 248

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worked out in life, rather than fixed into an image that can supposedly conjure up revolutionary zeal. In terms of the temporality established in Announcer, Mabb fruitfully stresses the continued need to enliven the past as well as turn towards the future. (Abse Gogarty, ‘Announcer’ Focal Point Gallery. 88)

14 We sit starving amidst our gold For Jeremy Deller, Morris’s art and politics are inseparable, both expressions of his rage against the excesses and iniquities of Victorian Britain. In English Magic, the Turner Prize-winning artist brings Morris ‘back from the dead’, encouraging us to turn the mirror on ourselves and ask questions of the society in which we live. (Jeremy Deller, ‘We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold,’ English Magic) The colossal figure of William Morris stands at the centre of Jeremy Deller’s exhibition. We sit starving amidst our gold, a mural executed by Stuart Sam Hughes, depicts Morris as a giant hurling Roman Abramovich’s yacht into the Venetian Lagoon. This refers to an incident in 2011 when Abramovich, a Russian oligarch, had moored the huge vessel alongside the Giardini, where the Biennale is held, preventing the public from enjoying the view or accessing the promenade. Deller imagines Morris as an avenging force, returning from the dead to punish the oligarch’s selfishness. (Oldham,‘Political Arts’) In June 2011 Roman Abramovich’s 377-foot yacht Luna was moored alongside the Giardini quay. It blocked the view for many and a security fence was erected around it, restricting the use of the promenade by locals, tourists and visitors to the Biennale.This act enraged William Morris, the Victorian designer and socialist, who, though long dead returned as a colossus and threw the yacht into the lagoon. (Deller,‘We Sit Starving’, 37)

Figure 9.17 Jeremy Deller, We sit starving amidst our gold, painted by Stuart Sam Hughes, 2014. Photograph: Paul Tucker, courtesy Jeremy Deller.

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Well Morris came to Venice, and loved aspects of it, and he was apparently a great chucker around of things. I had the sense this yacht and its connection to the art world was the kind of thing that would have pissed him off. So I kind of summoned him up. (Adams, Deller, ‘Jeremy Deller’s Visions of England’) Where is the power? Is it with Morris or with Abramovich? Will we know about Abramovich in 50 years’ time? We will certainly know about Morris … . (Ibid.) The cheery tone continues in the next room with another skillful wall painting, depicting the artfully radical socialist, William Morris as a King Kong like giant, except standing in the waters of Venice with the Russian Oligarch and keen art collector Roman Abramovich’s yacht between his hands. Deller’s criticism of Abramovich and his peers is illustrated further by a bank of framed Russian rubles, bonds, and ponzi scheme tokens from the early 1990s, displayed alongside footnotes as to their origins and value.The various currencies act as material evidence to the collapse of the Russian socialist state economy, and its replacement with the monopoly money of the current day oligarchy.The wall of crafted monies contrasts nicely with a framed section of original textile design by Deller’s hero William Morris. Among his many ambitions, we are informed in the generous interpretation panels, was for art and design to be accessible to all. Ironically, the famously recognisable floral print is now protected under a velvet curtain. (Staunton-Price,‘Venice Biennale 2013’) A wall is given over to a lurid, deliberately amateurish painting of a wild-haired, giant-sized Morris throwing a miniaturised luxury yacht into the Venetian lagoon. The yacht is named Luna; it belongs to the Russian super-rich art collector Roman Abramovich. Deller is making his protest against the privileged few who descend on Venice for lavish parties and big spending, but the gesture seems somewhat facile. (Pilger,‘Venice Biennale Review’) I’m not so sure about Jeremy Deller’s painting of a giant William Morris hurling Roman Abramovich’s yacht Luna to the bottom of the ocean, grand ebullient image though it most certainly is. Firstly, the painting plays into a familiar stereotype of Morris’s eccentric rages and tantrums, as when ‘at Red Lion Square he hurled a fifteenth-century folio, which in ordinary circumstances he would hardly have allowed any one but himself to touch, at the head of an offending workman. It missed the workman and drove a panel out of the workshop door’ (Mackail, I, 215). Deller’s image of Morris manhandling the Abramovich yacht thus risks reducing politics to personality, or even pathology (Shaw believed that Morris at such moments suffered from a form of epilepsy). Secondly, if we do interpret the painting politically, it strikes me as dramatising an individualist-anarchist gesture, a terroristic ‘propaganda by deed’ of the kind against which Morris himself polemicised vigorously in the 1880s and 90s, recommending in its place the slow, patient, frustrating but essential work of building up a collective socialist movement (though to articulate that is perhaps more a task for narrative than image). Thirdly, though I too certainly want to take Abramovich’s yacht out of private super-rich ownership, I don’t want to send it plunging to the bottom of the sea, even in fantasy, but rather to turn it into a floating oceanographic research institute, staffed with unemployed youngsters from east London investigating the effects of global warming upon marine life – roughly on the model of the ship Ganesh in Kim Stanley Robinson’s ecotopia Pacific Edge. (Pinkney,‘Jeremy Deller’s Colossus’)

15 Love is Enough: William Morris & Andy Warhol Love is Enough draws together iconic and rarely seen works by two giants of the 19th and 20th centuries.This unconventional combination of artists’ work is curated by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller who cites Morris and Warhol as his two greatest artistic influences. 250

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Figure 9.18 Love is Enough:William Morris & Andy Warhol, curated by Jeremy Deller, Modern Art Oxford, 2015. Designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio. Photograph: Modern Art, Oxford.

Deller draws many surprising connections between these two artists who left an indelible mark on their generations and arguably those that followed. Morris and Warhol both established printmaking businesses and distributed their work through new forms of mass production. Both were natural collaborators who worked with the prominent artists of their time to develop working methods that did much to redefine the artist’s relationship to the studio and factory. Morris achieved this through his mastering of craft techniques and his rejection of industrial processes and Warhol through the activities of the Factory, which often parodied the industrial culture of the mid-late 20th century. (Love Is Enough, Exhibition Guide) Love Is Enough investigates the working practices of both artists in great detail, unearthing notes, works in progress, early designs and other ephemera to reveal the inner workings of Morris & Co. and The Factory, respectively. Neither artist worked alone. In fact, both Warhol and Morris relied heavily on larger systems of production, working with teams of staff and developing mass-production technologies in order to execute their ambitious designs. (Love Is Enough, Exhibition Guide, 1) There’s a quote from William Morris that goes:‘In the future, the best thing will be a mixture of the artist and the designer.’ Basically, that’s what Warhol was. In a way, Morris was predicting the career of someone like Andy Warhol, who started off as a commercial artist; a graphic designer, and ended up being a fine artist who was very highly regarded. He might understand that idea, but might also have been slightly upset with the technical elements of it … (Deller, ‘Interview’, 9) The exhibition succeeds in its first task, that of making a combined Warhol and Morris exhibition seem conceptually viable, and thoughts of an overlap between the two artists start 251

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to appear obvious: both set up printing businesses, both toyed with the parallel ideas of the factory and the workshop, both used similar motifs (flowers and mythical people – whether they be King Arthur or Marilyn Monroe) and, most strikingly, each created work in mediums that reached a mass audience – Warhol set up Interview magazine, Morris designed wallpaper and home furnishings. (Swann,‘Love In’) Tenuous though the curatorial gesture may be, the exhibition is well worth a visit; although I may suggest you treat it as two narratives, rather than getting bogged down in the comparisons. (Harris,‘Love Is Enough’) Nothing I’ve seen in any medium begins to touch the depths of the exhibition Jeremy Deller has put together about what he conceives to be the many points of similarity between two great artists,William Morris and Andy Warhol. But these exist only in his own mind.Virtually every comparison he draws between the two either in the catalogue or in interviews is at best a halftruth, which he then justifies by blatant sophistry. Deller distorts even simple statements of fact. Both Morris and Warhol came from industrial backgrounds, Morris from a wealthy mine-owning family, Warhol from the steel town of Pittsburgh. But Morris was the son of a London discount broker who had invested successfully in a Devon mining operation. Far from growing up in an ‘industrial’, background, he was raised in a large villa in a salubrious London suburb and at 12 was sent to Marlborough, then Oxford. Warhol was the son of working-class Polish immigrants living in a truly industrial town. How their backgrounds can be said to be similar is hard to understand. Time and again, Deller will make an apparently straightforward point that on closer examination turns out to be meaningless. Warhol and Morris, he tells us, both worked collaboratively – Warhol in his Factory, Morris with fellow artists and professional craftsmen. But in the case of Morris isn’t this how any businessman works? Does anyone really think that Morris made every piece of furniture and fabric he sold in his Oxford Street premises with his own hands? Warhol called his studio the Factory, but in fact he ran it along the lines of a studio system whereby a famous artist (Cranach, Rubens, Kiefer, Koons) turned out paintings in great numbers with the help of studio assistants.The way each man worked was not so unusual that comparing the two gets you anywhere. And on it goes. Deller thinks it is significant that both Warhol and Morris were attracted to flowers and floral motifs.Wait a minute.Warhol’s photos of his flowers were in effect ready-mades. He found them reproduced in colour in a book about photography. By contrast, Morris was the most brilliant pattern maker who ever lived. It’s not flowers per se that are important in Morris’s fabrics, but the stylised patterns he made with them. To compare one of Warhol’s psychedelic flower paintings to Morris’s bold and rhythmic acanthus design woven in silk velvet, brocaded in gilt thread and partly block-printed in deep saturated colours is unfair to both artists. Where they differ so profoundly is in their artistic intentions.The single most original thing about Warhol’s paintings was not the subjects he chose to treat but his use of silk screening, a simple reproductive technique that at the time was associated with imprinting images on cheap T-shirts or greeting cards. No one before him had made fine art in this way. To compare Warhol’s silk-screened images of Jackie Kennedy with Morris’s Holy Grail Tapestries provides no insight into either.Warhol was the single most significant artist to inherit the legacy of Marcel Duchamp: the ultimate importance of his paintings, prints and films lies not in the works themselves but in the complex ideas they generated.The Grail Tapestry is the opposite: a precious objet d’art of incandescent beauty that we look at in a completely different way than we do a Warhol silkscreen. And speaking of which, Deller hardly acknowledges that it was Edward Burne-Jones, not Morris, who was responsible for drawing the cartoons from which the tapestries were woven, 252

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whereas it was unthinkable that anyone but Warhol would have worked on the acetate or ‘negative’ from which the image was then printed. Finally, let’s look at Deller’s bald statement that Warhol, like Morris, was a political artist. Beginning in 1883, Morris joined forces with the handful of early Socialists who made up the Democratic Federation. For more than a decade, he travelled up and down the country lecturing on issues such as the need to improve housing for workers, free compulsory education, an eight-hour day, and state ownership of banks and railways. His days and nights were spent in meeting halls, preaching on street corners and marching in rallies and demonstrations in support of the principles of ‘Revolutionary International Socialism’. Morris despised the rich. He believed in the overthrow both of the state and the capitalist system.Warhol loved wealth, glamour and conspicuous consumption. He idolised Ronald Regan. Nowhere is the gulf between them more apparent than in the differences between the magazines each edited. Morris founded Commonweal in 1885 as ‘The Official Journal of the Socialist League’; Warhol founded Interview in order to meet celebrities such as Ryan O’Neal and Cindy Crawford. As evidence of Warhol’s political sympathies, Deller shows those extraordinary pictures of race riots and the electric chair. But to interpret these important works as statements against racism or capital punishment is to take them out of the context in which they were made. For they belong to a period in his work when Warhol was exploring the theme of America – not from a political perspective but (as usual) from that of the impassive, neutral observer. Before them,Warhol had looked at the American dream and the price of conformity it exacts in paintings based on cheap advertisements for nose jobs and dance lessons. Having shown the dark side of America, he also celebrated its obsession with glamour and celebrity in portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. It is simply not true to say that Warhol was politically engaged – or even that he was interested in social reform or doing good deeds. (Dorment,‘Andy Warhol & William Morris’) … you at once see a vivid Warholian image of actress Joan Collins set next to a Rossetti painting of Jane Morris as a Dantesque ‘Donna della Finestra’; and that seemed entirely as it should be – at least to my preconceptions about how a show like this might work.The mournful enigmatic depth or Walter-Benjaminian ‘aura’ of the Victorian work contrasts so strikingly with the glittery, cheery, in-your-face one-dimensional brashness of the 1980s celebrity image, just as Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes contrasts with Van Gogh’s dour but resonant painting of a pair of peasant boots in Fredric Jameson’s now canonical analysis in his great Postmodernism essay of 1984. (Pinkney,‘Chairman Mao Smiles Down on William Morris’)

16 The World Stage: Jamaica The exhibition features Jamaican men and women assuming poses taken from 17th and 18th Century British portraiture, the first one in the ‘World Stage’ series to feature portraits of women.The juxtaposition between the sitter and the art historical references reflects on the relationship between the island and her former colonial power.Wiley is restaging this history, transforming the race and gender of the traditional art-historical hero to reflect the contemporary urban environment. The subjects’ proud posturing refers to both the source painting and the symbolism of Jamaican culture, with its singular people and specific ideals of youth, beauty and style. Wiley embellishes his paintings with intricate, ornate backgrounds that contradict the sombre posturing of the subjects and allude to the bold styles of urban fashion. In this new body of work, lavish patterning informed by the iconic British textile designer William Morris surround, 253

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Figure 9.19 Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, 2013, oil on canvas, 72”× 60”.

overlay and entwine the figures. Pieces of these symbolic patterns both harmoniously fuse and create dramatic opposition between the two contrasting elements that form the work. (Kehinde Wiley, The World Stage: Jamaica) In the new show, all the paintings are based on great British portraits by Joseph Wright of Derby and other masters, and the backdrops are like William Morris on acid. (‘Luke’) I’m in love with the tricks of coaxing paint into form, and making something that’s almost a Trojan horse. (Wiley in Jan Marsh,‘We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold’) And what would William Morris think about his imagery being utilized in this way? I think that he would be quite pleased: Morris was a socialist who wanted to bring about a change in the art world and society.William Morris felt like the arts, particularly the decorative arts,‘were “sick” as a consequence of the split between intellectual and mechanical work that occurred during the Renaissance.’ Perhaps in a similar vein, Kehinde Wiley seeks to bind together racial divides and ‘heal’ stereotypical assumptions about what constitutes art and portraiture. So when Wiley’s paintings are considered in terms of social unity, Morris’s designs are very appropriate.Art historian Caroline Arscott has analyzed Morris’s designs in relation to the social climate of his day, finding that the designs “imagine an overcoming of social contradictions in an allegory performed ‘through the twists and turns of plants.’ In this way his aesthetic stands as a powerful equivalent for the recovered wholeness of men and women, of their relations to their fellows and to nature.” In many ways,Wiley is also suggesting similar themes of “wholeness” by binding different cultures together within his paintings. It isn’t surprising, then, that Wiley is inspired by designs of plants which repeatedly interconnect, wind, and bind themselves to each other. (‘Kehinde Wiley and William Morris,’ Alberti’s Window) 254

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Figure 9.20 ‘I do not want art for a few any more than I want education for a few or freedom for a few’. Poster by Jeremy Deller, Scott King and William Morris.

17 ‘I do not want art for a few any more than I want education for a few or freedom for a few’ Proposed arts cuts prompted a campaign by artists. (‘Arts Council England,’ BBC News) It has taken 50 years to create a vibrant arts culture in Britain that is the envy of the world.We the undersigned appeal to the government not to slash arts funding and risk destroying this longterm achievement and the social and economic benefits it brings to all. (‘About me’, Save the Arts)

References and Further Reading ‘About me’. Save the Arts. http://savethearts-uk.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/jeremy-deller-poster.html, accessed 18/7/17. ‘About the Society’. The William Morris Society. http://williammorrissociety.org/about-the-society/, accessed 18/7/17. Adams,Tim and Jeremy Deller.‘Jeremy Deller’s visions of England’. The Observer, 2nd June 2013. https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jun/01/jeremy-deller-venice-biennale-interview, accessed 21/7/17. Amantea, Gisele. Jewel Point. Burnaby: Burnaby Art Gallery, 1996. Announcer, wall text,William Morris Gallery, 2015. ‘Arts Council England outlines cuts plan’. BBC News, 26 October 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ entertainment-arts-11627452, accessed 19/7/17. Banfield,Ann.‘Two Politics of Modern Design. From William Morris to Walter Gropius or from Designer/ Artisan to Designer Manager’. River of Fire. Commons, Crisis and the Imagination, ed. Carl Winslow. Arlington, MA:The Pumping Station, 2016.

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David Mabb Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Campbell, Kati. Gisele Amantea, Jewel Point. Burnaby: Burnaby Art Gallery, 1996. http://giseleamantea.ca/? projects=jewel-point, accessed 21/7/17. Cann, Liz.‘In Parry, Michael’. Morris & Co:A Revolution in Decoration. Denham: Morris & Company, 2011. Crick, Martin. The History of the William Morris Society, 1955–2005. London:William Morris Society, 2012. Deller, Jeremy. ‘Interview, Jeremy Deller & Rhys Coren.’ Love is Enough, William Morris & Andy Warhol. Exhibition Guide, Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2015. Deller, Jeremy. ‘We sit starving amidst our gold,Venice, Italy, 1 June 2011’. English Magic. London: British Council, 2013. Dorment, Richard.‘Andy Warhol & William Morris, Modern Art Oxford, review: a half-baked, self-indulgent mess.’ The Daily Telegraph, 8 December 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews /11274959/Warhol-and-Morris-a-half-baked-self-indulgent-mess.html, accessed 20/6/17. Edwards, Steve.‘The Trouble with Morris’. The Decorating Business, David Mabb. Oakville: Oakville Galleries, 2000. Epstein, Edward.‘David Mabb,Wilmington’. DE, Art Papers, January–February 2011. Goddard, Peter.‘Getting Crafty with Morris,Art By Numbers’. Toronto Star, Saturday, 11 December 2014. Gogarty, Larne Abse.‘Announcer Focal Point Gallery, Southend, United Kingdom, 14 April–12 July 2014’. Art & the Public Sphere, 3.1, 2014. Hamilton, Jill.‘Duchess of Penny Hart, and John Simmons’. The Gardens of William Morris. London: Frances Lincoln, 2006. Harris, Laura. ‘Love Is Enough: William Morris & Andy Warhol—Reviewed’. The Double Negative, 19 December 2014. http://www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/2014/12/love-is-enough-william-morris-an dy-warhol-reviewed/, accessed 28/7/17. Henderson, Phillip. William Morris. His Life,Work and Friends. London:Andrew Deutch, 1986. ‘History and Development,William Morris’. William Morris Gallery. http://www.wmgallery.org.uk/about, accessed 18/7/17. ‘Home Accessories’. Morris & Co. https://www.william-morris.co.uk/home-accessories/, accessed 17/6/17. Hunt, Tristram. ‘Don’t Patronise Urban Communities – Give Them the William Morris Gallery’. The Guardian, 6 June 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/06/william-morris-g allery-museum-of-year, accessed 17/6/17. ‘Iconic Arts and Crafts home of William Morris – writer, artist, craftsman and socialist’. National Trust. https ://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/red-house#Overview, accessed 17/6/17. ‘Idea’. Bauhaus Archive. http://www.bauhaus.de/en/das_bauhaus/44_idee/, accessed 27/6/17. ‘Jeremy Deller, English Magic’. William Morris Gallery. http://www.wmgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibiti ons-43/jeremy-deller-english-magic, accessed 21/7/17. ‘Kehinde Wiley and William Morris’. Alberti’s Window, 24 February 2016. http://albertis-window.com/201 6/02/kehinde-wiley-and-william-morris/, accessed 27/7/17. ‘Kehinde Wiley:The World Stage: Jamaica’. Stephen Friedman Gallery. http://www.stephenfriedman.com/ exhibitions/past/2013/kehinde-wiley-the-world-stage-jamaica/, accessed 21/7/17. Lipman,Alan and Howard Harris.‘Social Architecture:William Morris our Contemporary’. William Morris Today. London: ICA, 1984. Love is Enough William Morris & Andy Warhol. Exhibition Guide, Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2015. Love is Enough: William Morris & Andy Warhol, Oxford: Modern Art Oxford. https://www.modernartoxfo rd.org.uk/event/love-is-enough-william-morris-andy-warhol-curated-by-jeremy-deller/, accessed 21/7/17. Luke, Ben. ‘Kehinde Wiley on his first UK solo show for Frieze week’. The Evening Standard, 11 October 2013. http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/exhibitions/kehinde-wiley-on-his-first-uk-solo-show -for-frieze-week-8873818.html, accessed 27/7/17. Mabb, David.‘Notes on the Morris Kitsch Archive’. Textile:The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 7.3, 2009. ———. ‘Protest and Survive: Reclaiming William Morris from Britain’s Nuclear Fleet’. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 20 September 2016. https://thebulletin.org/2016/09/protest-and-survive-reclaiming-wi lliam-morris-from-britains-nuclear-fleet/, accessed 24/7/18. ———.‘William Morris and the atomic’. Journal of Contemporary Painting, 3.1 and 2. Bristol: Intellect, 2017. MacCarthy, Fiona. Anarchy and Beauty,William Morris and his Legacy 1860–1960. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2015.

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William Morris and the Culture Industry ———. ‘Garden of earthly delights’. The Guardian, 26 July 2003. https://www.theguardian.com/artandd esign/architecture, accessed 18/7/17. ———. ‘House style’. The Guardian, 17 November 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/nov /17/architecture.art, accessed 17/7/17. Marsh, Jan.‘Red House: Past and Future’. William Morris in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Phillippa Bennett and Rosie Miles. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, NY and Wein: Peter Lang, 2010. ———. William Morris and Red House. Swindon: National Trust Books, 2005. Milroy, Sarah.‘A Morris Dance’. The Globe and Mail, 26 November 2004. Minow-Pinkney, Makiko.‘Sanitising William Morris’. William Morris Unbound. http://williammorrisunbou nd.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/sanitising-william-morris.html, accessed 18/7/17. Mooers, Colin. ‘Dialectics At a Standstill:The Art of David Mabb’. A Factory As It Might Be or The Hall of Flowers.Windsor, Ontario:Art Gallery of Windsor, 2003. Oldham, Martin. ‘Political Arts’. Apollo, 25th January 2014. https://www.apollo-magazine.com/political -arts/, accessed 21/7/17. Patten, James. David Mabb, A Factory As It Might Be or The Hall of Flowers.Windsor, Ontario: Art Gallery of Windsor, 2003. ‘Perpetual Uncertainty’. Bildmuseet Gallery Guide. Umea: Bildmuseet, 2016. Pevsner, Nikolaus. Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press, 2005. Pilger, Zoe.‘Venice Biennale Review: Jeremy Deller’s English Magic is Eccentric Rather than Trailblazing’. Independent, 28 May 2013. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/venice -biennale-review-jeremy-dellers-english-magic-is-eccentric-rather-than-trailblazing-8634934.html, accessed 21/7/17. Pinkney, Tony. ‘Chairman Mao Smiles Down on William Morris’. William Morris Unbound, 7 September 2015. http://williammorrisunbound.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/chairman-mao-smiles-down-on-willia m.html, accessed 21/7/17. ———.‘Jeremy Deller’s Colossus’. William Morris Unbound. http://williammorrisunbound.blogspot.co.uk /2014/11/jeremy-dellers-colossus.html, accessed 21/7/17. ‘Red House Gardens’. Great British Gardens. https://www.greatbritishgardens.co.uk/england/item/redhouse-gardens.html, accessed 3/7/17. Rosamond, Emily.‘The Background Speaks: David Mabb’s Announcer and the Emergence of Information’. Message, 2.3/8, 2015. Saunders, Jill.‘Mining Morris’. Wallpaper History Review, 2004–05. ‘Shop’. The William Morris Society. http://williammorrissociety.org/our-museum/shop/, accessed 28/7/17. Staunton-Price, C.‘Venice Biennale 2013: Jeremy Deller, English Magic’. This is Tomorrow, 3 June, 2013. http: //thisistomorrow.info/articles/venice-biennale-2013-jeremy-deller-english-magic, accessed 21/7/17. Straughan, Susannah.‘Labour of Love:The History of the William Morris Society 1955–2005’. HuffPost, 31 March 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/susannah-straughan/william-morris-society-labour-of -love-history-of_b_1242037.html, accessed 17/6/17. Swann, Thom. ‘Love In’. Grafik, 18 December 2014. https://www.grafik.net/category/exhibitions/love-i n, accessed 18/7/17. Szwarc, Eva. ‘Material Nuclear Culture’. This is Tomorrow, 11 August 2016. http://thisistomorrow.info/art icles/material-nuclear-culture, accessed 7/7/17. ‘Tearoom’. Society of Antiquaries. https://www.sal.org.uk/kelmscott-manor/things-to-do/tearoom/, accessed 26/6/17. ‘The Boat’. HMS Courageous Association. http://www.hmscourageous.co.uk/html/the_boat.html, accessed 29/6/17. ‘The Garden and Grounds of Kelmscott Manor’.Society of Antiquaries.https://www.sal.org.uk/kelmscottmanor/things-to-do/garden/, accessed 28/6/17. ‘The Shop at Red House’. National Trust. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/red-house/features/the-shop -at-red-house, accessed 7/7/17. ‘The SPAB Manifesto’. SPAB. https://www.spab.org.uk/what-is-spab-/the-manifesto/, accessed 16/7/17. Venning, Philip.‘The Continuing Work of the SPAB’. From William Morris, Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity 1877–1939, ed. Chris Miele. Studies in British Art. New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press, 2005.

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David Mabb ‘Welcome to Kelmscott Manor, About the Manor’. Society of Antiquaries. https://www.sal.org.uk/kelmscott-manor/, accessed 26/6/17. ‘Welcome to the New Morris & Co. Blog!’ Morris & Co. https://www.william-morris.co.uk/blogs/, accessed 26/2/17. ‘What is SPAB’. SPAB. https://www.spab.org.uk/what-is-spab/, accessed 16/7/17. Wiley, Kehinde. ‘In Marsh, Jan. We sit starving amidst our gold’. Jan Marsh Blogspot, Tuesday, 28 January 2013. http://janmarsh.blogspot.co.uk/2014_01_01_archive.html, accessed 21/7/17. ‘William Morris’ Garden’. National Trust. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/william-morris-gar den, accessed 28/6/17. ‘William Morris Gallery’. Art Fund. https://www.artfund.org/what-to-see/museums-and-galleries/wi lliam-morris-gallery, accessed 27/7/17. ‘William Morris Gallery’. Time Out, 6 October 2014. https://www.timeout.com/london/museums/willia m-morris-gallery, accessed 27/7/17. ‘William Morris & Wallpaper Design’.Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articl es/w/william-morris-and-wallpaper-design/, accessed 27/6/17.

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Plate 4.1 Frederick Evans, Kelmscott Manor, east façade, 1896. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

Plate 4.2 Kelmscott Manor Visitors’ Book, entry documenting the Morrises’ visit, 1896. B.L.Add. MS. 45212, f. 6. Courtesy of the British Library.

Plate 4.3

Kelmscott Manor Visitors’ Book, 1892. B.L.Add. MS. 45212, f. 2. Courtesy of the British Library.

Plate 4.4 Frederick Evans, Kelmscott Manor: Side from Garden, detail, 1896. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

Plate 4.5 Morris’s work table, Dining Room, Kelmscott Manor, 2018. Photograph: Julia Griffin.

Plate 4.6 Frederick Evans, Tapestry Room, Kelmscott Manor, photograph, 1897. North-east corner showing one of two writing tables, which the photographer erroneously intended to title the ‘Bard’s “Writing Corner”.’ Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

Plate 4.7 Frederick Evans, Tapestry Room, Kelmscott Manor, photograph, 1896. Morris’s work table with newly printed copy of the first Kelmscott Press publication, The Story of the Glittering Plain. Courtesy of the Morgan Library.

Plate 4.8 Frederick Evans, William Morris’s Bedroom, Kelmscott Manor, photograph, 1896. Showing the four-poster in the final year of Morris’s life covered with his Wandle printed cotton. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

Plate 4.9 Frederick Evans, Green Room, Kelmscott Manor, photograph, 1896. Showing Kennett (1883) wall hangings. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

Plate 4.10 Frederick Evans, The Panelled Room, Kelmscott Manor, photograph, 1897. Showing Morris & Co. printed cottons, including Rose and Thistle (1881) curtains. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, David Hunter McAlpin Fund.

Plate 5.1 Map of Morris's 1871 Journey, Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 8, 1911, p. 251a.

Plate 5.2 Þingvellir. Photograph: Martin Stott.

Plate 5.3 Þórsmörk. Photograph: Martin Stott.

Plate 5.4 Diary, 1924, May Morris. Society of Antiquaries. Photograph: Martin Stott.

Plate 5.5 Norwegian House, Stykkishólmur. Photograph: Martin Stott.

Plate 6.1 Philip Webb, Red House. Photograph: Stephen Cadman, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Plate 6.2 Kelmscott Manor, 2017. Photograph: Julia Griffin.

Plate 7.1 All Saints Selsley, Nave South Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1862. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.2 All Saints Selsley, Apse Window, designed by Ford Madox Brown, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1862, Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.3 All Saints Selsley,Apse Window, designed by D. G. Rossetti, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1862. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.4 All Saints Selsley, Chancel South Window, designed by William Morris, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1862. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.5 All Saints Middleton Cheney, East Window made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.6 All Saints Middleton Cheney, East Window detail of St. John, designed by Ford Madox Brown, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.7 All Saints Middleton Cheney, East Window detail of King David, designed by Simeon Solomon, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.8 All Saints Middleton Cheney, East Window detail Eve and St. Mary, designed by William Morris, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.9 All Saints Middleton Cheney, East Window detail of the Tribes of Israel, figures by Simeon Soloman, banners by Philip Webb, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.10 St. John, Torquay, East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.With the kind permission of the churchwardens of St. John’s,Torquay.

Plate 7.11 ‘Courts of Heaven’ design by Edward Burne-Jones for St. Michael Lyndhurst, c. 1862 copyright Fitzwilliam Museum (object 721, dept of Paintings Drawings and Prints,‘record id 26631’).

Plate 7.12 St. John, Torquay, detail of St. Agnes Panel East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1865. Photograph: Jim Cheshire. With the kind permission of the churchwardens of St. John’s,Torquay.

Plate 7.13 St. Peter and St. Paul Over Stowey, Somerset. North Aisle East Window, designed William Morris, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1872. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.14 St. Mary, Nun Monkton,Yorkshire, East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1873. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.15 Church of Jesus,Troutbeck, Cumbria, East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1873. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.16 St. Martin, Brampton, Cumbria, East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris & Co., 1880–81. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.17 St. Paul, Morton, Lincolnshire, North Transept North Window, designed by Edward BurneJones, made by Morris & Co., 1892. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.18 St. Philips Cathedral Birmingham, Chanel East Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris & Co., 1885. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.

Plate 7.19 St. John, Torquay, West Window, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris & Co., 1890. Photograph: Jim Cheshire.With the kind permission of the churchwardens of St. John’s, Torquay.

Plate 8.1 “If I Can” tapestry wall hanging, 1857. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive.

Plate 8.2 “La Belle Iseult,”William Morris, 1858. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery.

Plate 8.3 Murals, Oxford Union Debating Hall. Courtesy of Oxford University Library.

Plate 8.4 King Rene’s Honeymoon Cabinet. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum.

Plate 8.5 Green Dining Room, Victoria and Albert Museum. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Plate 8.6 Hammersmith, woven-wool carpet by Morris & Co., Holland Park, 1883

Plate 12.1 Morris, Illumination of Horace, Odes (1874), Bk I, Odes xxvi–xxviii. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library.

Plate 12.2 Morris, with Edward Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, Horace, Odes (1874), Opening of Bk II. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library.

Plate 12.3 Morris, Burne-Jones, and C. F. Murray; border by Graily Hewitt, illumination of Virgil, Aeneid (1874–75), opening of Bk I, ll. 1–5,Venus disguises Aeneas with mist on the shores of Libya. Private Collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

Plate 12.4 Morris, Burne-Jones, and C. F. Murray; gilding by Graily Hewitt, illumination of Virgil, Aeneid (1874–75), Bk I, ll. 6–33. Private collection, UK. Juno in her peacock chariot outside Carthage. Private Collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

Plate 13.1 Calligraphic Manuscript,“Ballad of Christine,” A Book of Verse, 1870. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Plate 13.2 Odin, Charles Fairfax Murray, Calligraphic Manuscript, The Story of the Ynglings. Courtesy of the Society of Antiquaries, MS. 906.

Plate 13.3 Initial Calligraphic Manuscript, The Story of the Ynglings. Society of Antiquaries, MS. 906. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive

Plate 22.1 Opening, The Glittering Plain, Kelmscott Press, 1894. University of North Carolina. Courtesy of Archive.org.

Plate 22.2 Opening, Child Christopher, Kelmscott Press, 1892. University of Iowa Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive.

PART III

Literature: Poetry, Art, Translation, and Fantasy

10 A QUESTION OF ORNAMENT: POETRY AND THE (LESSER) ARTS Elizabeth Helsinger

Nothing, surely, could be further from a description of William Morris’s aesthetics than his praise for the final scene between Sigurd and Brynhild in the Icelandic Völsunga Saga: “complete beauty without an ornament.”1 Ornament, most scholars would agree, is central to Morris’s work. Morris was, after all, a tireless advocate for the “lesser” arts of ornament and decoration, “that great body of art, by means of which men have at all times more or less striven to beautify the familiar matters of everyday life.”2 Indeed, he insisted, not only art intended for everyday life but also “all real art is ornamental”: including the “great arts,” the paintings and poems that offer “stories that tell of men’s aspirations for more than material life can give them, their struggles for the future welfare of their race, their unselfish love, their unrequited service.”3 “It is only in latter times, and under the most intricate conditions of life,” Morris maintained,“that [the greater and lesser arts] have fallen apart from one another; and I hold that, when they are so parted, it is ill for the Arts altogether” (“Lesser Arts,” 3). Composing and designing his first books of poetry, from The Defence of Guenevere (1858) to The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), A Book of Verse (1870), and Love is Enough (1873), Morris approached poetry as inseparable from craft work, an idea that looked back to medieval models where the separation of ornament from text, and the eventual disappearance of the latter or its degeneration into what he called the “oratorical” (with the rise of capitalism in the sixteenth century), had, he believed, not yet begun.4 The work of ornamentation, as he interpreted it in his own practice, is the responsibility of the poet even when the hand is that of the scribe’s, the illuminator’s, or the printer’s. From his earliest work, Morris attended to his poetry’s material forms, meticulously planning the look of page and book – its graphic or typographic design, lettering and margins, textual ornaments, illustrations and borders, paper and ink – plans that he was only able to fully realize in his hand-illuminated A Book of Verse, or much later with the establishment of the Kelmscott Press in 1890. I would also argue, however, that the intricate poetic structures he devised, where narrative is interspersed with passages of lyric, arranged in complex combinations of multiple metrical and stanzaic shapes and punctuated with striking verbal patterns in color and sound, might be fruitfully considered as no less a part of Morris’s craft work of ornamentation, for reasons I argue more fully below. I use the term “ornament” in a neutral sense, provisionally free of the connotations of the superficial and unnecessary which it often acquires when used dismissively:“merely ornament.” Sir John Summerson, speaking of architecture, defines the simplest, and in fact, he argued, 261

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indispensable kind of ornament as “surface modulation.”5 Jonathan Hay, deriving his definition from a consideration of Chinese vases, says that ornament is a “topography of sensuous surface.”6 Ornament is what in certain kinds of vocal music provides the expressive coloring (coloratura) or the partly abstract beauties described as the flowering (fioritura) of a musical line of thought or feeling. Ornament also has a long tradition in the verbal arts, for which we need look no further than classical and Renaissance rhetoric, where verbal ornament comprehends the substitutions and arrangements of words so that rhythms and meanings are set in play through tropes and schemes and prosody. Each of these accounts of ornament in different media opens up the possibility that ornament is more than simply added, possibly excessive, decoration.Together they suggest that good ornament belongs to that which it adorns, bringing out its features while remaining shaped by and to those features. Hay offers a minimalist definition that might apply in all three media – visual, musical, and verbal: rhythmic affirmation of motifs across a surface in tension with a limit.7 Ornament often is patterned: regular and rhythmical variation decorating a surface, a musical phrase, or a line of poetry that serves to elaborate a current of thinking or feeling, yet is responsible to it, in tension with its limits. What these accounts also suggest, however, is that ornament is transitive, that it does its work at the site of an object’s reception. Ornament always exists for viewers or listeners or readers. The verbal ornamentation defined by rhetorical treatises has designs upon its readers: it seeks to convince, to persuade, or simply to move. In Morris’s terms, ornament exceeds not only its intentionally (or unintentionally) expressive aims but also its responsibilities to that which it ornaments in order, in his view, to share the workman’s pleasure in his work with others – even, or especially, in the ordinary objects and sites of domestic life. It is “that great body of art, by means of which men have at all times more or less striven to beautify the familiar matters of everyday life.” Reviewing previous scholarship on the work of the visual in Morris’s books of poetry, I suggest that “ornament,” reconsidered from a medially expanded perspective, offers an alternative way of thinking about the crafted forms of Morris’s poetry and its work in the world. One significant line of Morris arts criticism for recent literary scholars can be represented by an essay by Jerome McGann. In “‘Thing to Mind’:The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris,” included as the first chapter in his Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, McGann emphasized Morris’s radical reconception of the poem as inseparable from its material embodiment on the page, evident as early as his unrealized plans of the 1860s for The Earthly Paradise but most fully visible in the books he designed and printed at the Kelmscott Press.8 By insisting on visual surface (dense blocks of thickened black type, surrounded by elaborately patterned borders or headed by bold woodcut illustrations, interwoven with typographic ornaments), McGann argues, Morris’s realized books “call our attention to poetry as a materially-oriented act of imagination. In them ‘meaning’ is most fully constituted not as a conception but as an embodiment” (49). So, in Poems by the Way, one of the first of Morris’s books to be printed by the Press,“Morris wants us to read this typographically rendered poetry as much with our eyes as with our minds.This is what he had done with the illuminated manuscript A Book of Verse, but while he was seeking for a similar effect in his earlier printed works, his desires went largely unrealized” (69). One cannot speak, McGann would argue, of the meaning of one of his poems apart from its material embodiment – the poem lives there, not in a vaguely conceptual or merely verbal space that can be separated from the page and the book in which it appears. In the Kelmscott editions, McGann continues, this radical unity of poem and material embodiment is insisted upon.The poetry is made deliberately “hard to read … too thick with its own materialities. It resists any processing that would simply treat it as a set of referential signs pointing beyond themselves to a semantic content.This text declares its radical self-identity. … The work forces us to attend to its immediate and iconic condition, as if the words were images or objects in 262

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themselves, as if they were values in themselves (rather than vehicles for delivering some further value or meaning)” (74, 75). A number of critics have taken up McGann’s challenge to study the design of the poetry through its material forms and, in some cases, his suggestion that Morris’s poetry, in its printed forms, anticipates the “visible language” of typography and spacing that characterizes strains of modernist (and post-modernist) poetry. Some of these have pushed his focus on “material” art in more explicitly political directions. Jeffrey Skoblow’s Paradise Dislocated: Morris, Politics,Art takes account of The Earthly Paradise’s material embodiments, both as originally planned in the 1860s and as later realized in the 1890s, to argue that it is Morris’s most radical book, a critique not only of the capitalist order of nineteenth-century England but also of fundamental presuppositions of Romanticism that are intricately linked to the social dynamics of capitalist culture.9 More recently, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, in her Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture, compares the material forms of works Morris published in Commonweal (which “relied on a template of mass mediation, selling for one penny with a small circulation of 2,500 to 3,000 a week”) with the versions he printed later at the Kelmscott Press (“unique objects using preindustrial methods, handmade materials, and ornamental typography and illustration”), concluding that both projects were “at heart, anticapitalist”: they “construct themselves as utopian spaces outside the ‘march of progress’ narrative (predicting endless expansion)” of print and literacy.10 “Morris’s career in radical print demonstrates his perception of the failure of liberal notions of print as an agent of progress and his effort to reinvent print as an ideal practice at the level of production” (26) – to reinvent it, I would add, in the spirit of labor that is free to express pleasure with work well done by ornamenting it for others. Morris’s idea of radical print was intended not only to agitate, organize, and educate (as the slogan of Commonweal proclaims) but also to seduce and persuade, to move readers to desire those different social conditions where work might be pleasure and could bring pleasure to others, adorning the ordinary activities of daily life for all.11 Morris himself was not shy of the term “ornament” when he wrote about the visual arts or about the material forms of illuminated manuscript or book. But both he and subsequent critics have been wary of extending the term to the verbal arts in the wake of Romantic poets’ rejections of the artificial diction and stale figures that, they believed, characterized too much eighteenth-century poetry. Morris himself called ornament that failed to move “oratorical,” suggesting that he too rejected the ornaments conventionally associated with rhetoric.Yet there are continuities between Morris’s practice as a designer and his practice as a poet that go beyond his attention to poetry’s material forms.To think of Morris’s poetry before 1875 as ornamental in its verbal forms – modulating the poetic artifact’s verbal surface, presenting for readers that poem’s “sensuous topography” – should not appear strange to those familiar with scholarship studying his poems. Many have drawn attention to connections between Morris’s designs in the decorative arts, his contributions to Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic art, and the peculiarly varied verbal forms of his poems. Under a title that itself implies similarities between Morris’s career in the visual arts and his poems, for example (The Design of William Morris’s ’The Earthly Paradise), Florence Boos points to that poem’s nested frames within frames, where the alternation between lyric and narrative voices, expressed to the eye and ear in differing metrical and stanzaic forms, serves to draw readers and listeners gradually into the world of the poem.12 In a subsequent essay, whose title similarly gestures to Morris’s pre-eminence as a pattern-designer,“‘The Banners of the Spring to Be:’ The Dialectical Pattern of Morris’s Later Poetry,” she finds the same “fractal iterations of art within art and stories within stories” still more evident in Love is Enough, Morris’s verse drama, where such “diffractions” of voice both express the tensions acted out by its characters – the alternation between disappointment and hope that sustains love as unfulfilled desire – and still more obviously appeal “for universality and audience participation.”13 263

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Most scholars have focused not on the later poetry, however, but on the obtrusively “patterned” poems in The Defence of Guenevere. In a recent essay, Alexander Wong writes, in a typical description, of the “deliberate roughness, brokenness, obliquity: the narrative difficulty” of the poems in The Defence of Guenevere, their “patterned intricacy, narrative confusion and rearrangement – indeed, sometimes lack of narrative; their bright colouring, and emphasis on sound and music; their awkward angularity and twistiness of structure, rhythm, perspective, emotion.”14 Isobel Armstrong’s chapter on Morris for her Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993) has been an important inspiration for a number of later scholars who interpret such oddities in the poems of Defence – their “patterned intricacy, the awkward angularity and twistiness of structure, rhythm, perspective, emotion” – as a deliberate aesthetic that, Armstrong suggested, is itself a form of cultural critique explicable in terms of John Ruskin’s theories of the grotesque.15 Ruskin (in both The Stones of Venice and the slightly later Modern Painters III) sees the “twistiness” of vividly energetic surface in Gothic architecture – particularly as manifest in the window tracery and sculptured ornament of its doorways and capitals – as the creation of the craftsman-laborer who retains sufficient imaginative autonomy to express, but in distorted and limited form, the transcendental natural or spiritual meaning for which he longs.16 The important thing about Ruskin’s theory of the grotesque, Armstrong points out, is that it “is a theory of representation based on a social and not a psychological analysis, seeing psychological experience as determined by cultural conditions” (240). Morris’s poems in his Defence,Armstrong goes on, extend Ruskin’s perception of a strong link between visual deformations of the individual artifact and the underlying social and cultural conditions of its making. Morris’s Defence poems, with their strange shifts between dream and real, strong undercurrents of sexual desire and sudden irruptions of violence, their repeating verbal and visual patterns displaying a general “twistiness” of form and color, are a symptom of more comprehensive conditions of oppression which Morris has analyzed. Ornamental distortion is one consequence of the desire for transcendence in persons of limited vision under various forms of repression and oppression, including, in the middle ages, the sexual repressions of the Church and an oppressively violent feudal culture. But for modern readers and viewers – as Ruskin points out – there is another lesson: their own taste for the intensifications of experience to which grotesque ornament (like sensational matter in poetry or fiction or the law courts) responds is a symptom of the system of unfree labor under which they now live. It points to what Armstrong calls “the numbness of being experienced by oppressed consciousness” which life under industrial capitalism – or as Morris referred to it, the present system of commerce driven by the desire for profit – produces, and the hunger for exaggerated intensities in art or life that that numbness fosters (243). “Violence” of acts but also of the forms of art and poetry, Armstrong suggests,“is the Grotesque’s over-simplification of the complexities to which the numbed consciousness cannot respond” (245). Following Armstrong, Lindsay Smith, in her striking 1995 study Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry:The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, called attention again to the troubled surfaces of the poems in Defence, pointing to what she called an imagery of “perceptual aberration” where, she argued, Morris deliberately brought an “enigma of visibility” to readers’ attention.17 The poems, she argued, dramatize a clash between hyper-intense, grotesque imagery of startling detail and an “elusive [and often, in early Pre-Raphaelite work, absent] depth of field” that is both literal and figurative (17). She refers to that “elusive depth of field” as the “transcendental” (Armstrong’s term) but gives it a more literal application as the representation of what is distant from the eye, which, at its most extreme, escapes geometrical perspective into vagueness and is better conveyed through atmospheric blurring, the distance where clear detail dissolves into light or the veiled light of mistiness.Thus for Smith, the gap or 264

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mismatch (as Armstrong calls it) between visually, verbally, and psychologically troubled surface, on the one hand, and “transcendent” (social and political, or perhaps religious and cultural) meaning, on the other, is deliberately foregrounded in Morris’s poems in part to point up the failure of geometrical perspective and the inadequacy of the mechanical and monocular model of vision on which it relies. For Morris, as for Ruskin, that failure of accepted models of vision and conventions of representation is also a more far-reaching ontological failure of perspective, which Smith connects to their awareness of photography’s challenge to received models of understanding opticality. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Art for Art’s Sake. Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, 2007) begins from Walter Pater’s descriptions, in an 1868 review of Morris’s poetry, of the difference between the atmosphere and imagery of the Defence poems and those of his recently published Life and Death of Jason (originally drafted in 1866–67 and intended as one of the tales of The Earthly Paradise).18 Prettejohn reads the distinction Pater draws between the psychologically overwrought medievalism and disturbed imagery of the former and the more frankly sensuous, passionate classicism, rejoicing in the beautiful for its own sake, of the later poem as Pater’s first formulation of a stylistic and philosophical change observable in 1860s British art more broadly, as it moved away from Pre-Raphaelite-inspired hyper-realism of the early 1850s toward what Pater called Aestheticism in the later 1860s. Morris’s poems in the Defence, with their vivid color imagery and general “twistiness,” occupy for Prettejohn a transitional phase, with the distortions and grotesqueness of those poems expressing an unresolved conflict between the styles and aspirations of successive movements in art and philosophy.While her interpretation is recognizably akin to the readings of Armstrong and Smith, Prettejohn shifts the focus to Pater’s influential critical re-formulation of what the artists and poets were doing and why. My own account of what I called “lyric color” in the Defence poems (Poetry and the PreRaphaelite Arts, 2008) similarly reads effects of disturbing intensity as an expressive language or style conveying at once a profound sense of psychological dis-ease (on the part of characters) and a metaphysical uncertainty that implicates readers as well.19 The introduction of strongly contrasting colors in a poem, I argued, frequently signals an abrupt shift between states and levels of consciousness or between past and present – moments that can, like the socially symptomatic irruptions of what Walter Benjamin, reading the poetry of Morris’s contemporary, Baudelaire, called the phantasmagoric or spectral in the midst of the urban real, be traced to social and cultural conditions that deform perception. In Morris’s Defence poems, such irruptions of the unreal take the form of the peculiar intensities, repetitions, and compulsive patterning of both objects and poems. In The Earthly Paradise, I went on to argue, the play of light and color is much more gradated and less disruptive. There, color is used therapeutically to cultivate a continued sense of generalized desire closely tied to sensory pleasures (including those derived from beautiful ornamented objects and rooms), a desire intended to counteract the numbing effects of modern life and labor while cultivating hope for a better future. In another recent study, poet and critic Julie Carr extends this line of argument further while comparing the effect of Morris’s poetically complicated early writing to “difficult” contemporary poetry (where what she terms such poetry’s “surface tensions” slow the reader down) and arguing that those “surface tensions” create “a state of suspended expectation” – an energy of readerly desire that, in his later books of poetry, Morris used to arouse in his readers desire for political change.20 What these critical accounts (including Pater’s) share is an interest in those aspects of Morris’s poetical work that recall, or resemble, or can be described in the language of art, and particularly of visual ornament and design. All focus on features that might be said to stand out from the text, to command attention in their own right as a troubling, a complication, or an elaboration of its narrative or lyric movement. 265

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Given these two different ways of thinking about the visual in Morris’s poetry, the first focusing on its elaborated manuscript or printed material forms and the second on its elaborated verbal patterns, what should we do with Sigurd the Volsung? It was Morris’s next long poem after the Earthly Paradise and Love is Enough. Based on the Völsunga Saga, that long poem “without an ornament” that had so impressed him in 1869, it is his first and perhaps only poem to rely on unbroken narrative, the “glorious simplicity” of story unfolding in many hundreds of long rhythmic lines.21 Sigurd’s images and figures are spare; the bleakness and violence of its landscapes, acts, and feelings are neither pleasingly elaborated nor intensified into the grotesque for a later audience. There are no lyric interpolations, no nesting sets of singers and narrators or frames within frames, using different metrical and stanzaic patterns, to draw readers into the poem. Nor were there plans at the time for an illustrated edition; it was not until years later, at the Kelmscott Press, that Morris designed the appearance of the printed poem to give pleasure by completing poetic with graphic and typographic arts. Arthur Clutton-Brock – journalist, essayist, art critic, and one of Morris’s great admirers – wrote in 1916 that Sigurd’s “excellence is in the whole, not in detachable parts, in design, not ornament”;“Morris drew poetry out of the story rather than embroidered it with versified ornament.”22 Herbert Tucker argues still more strongly that Sigurd is “‘all for the tale’.”23 It’s a poem,Tucker goes on, where the telling itself, of a story whose fated unfolding its greatest heroes and heroines never forget as they confront the painful sacrifices that story demands, provides for both heroes and audiences the only means of either knowing or valuing their lives. Sigurd’s “macropoetics,” are, Tucker argues, unapologetically those of old epic, demanding that its audience embrace the tale’s austere mythos, ethos, and aesthetics as their own (379). One might conclude that in Sigurd, Morris was concerned primarily to render poetry’s surfaces more transparent for the sake of the tale. But is Sigurd really a tale without ornament? Morris’s retelling of the old Story of the North – like his work in poetry over the following decades, from The Pilgrims of Hope to Chants for Socialists and Poems by the Way – does not, I would argue, forsake ornamentation, but he does develop new ways of shaping his poem’s “sensuous topography” that suggest a changed idea of what ornamentation might accomplish. Writing Sigurd and the poems and translations that followed, Morris thought more deeply not only about what counts as ornament but also about what ornament does – its transitive functions: not only how it enhances the story it adorns but also how, and to what end, it might move its audiences. Ornament viewed this way is Janus-faced, looking two ways; it is a contact zone between two cultures or times, those by whom it is first made and used and those who come later (and sometimes, among three: aware of a still different culture or time represented in the poem).To follow Morris’s evolving ideas, we will need to consider not only the poem itself but also the lively discourse around ornament in the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century, to which Morris’s own lectures on ornament (beginning in 1877, just after Sigurd was completed) responded. For ornament was indeed a prominent topic of conversation in the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain. Its significance in architectural practice (whether derived from the classical “orders” or as part of the Gothic revival), combined with its commercial importance for industrial production (in Britain’s flourishing textile, furniture, pottery, and cutlery trades), led to a great deal of talk and theorizing about ornament from the mid-1840s on.24 John Ruskin insisted that ornament provides a crucial part of the meaning of architecture: ornament is language.25 Ralph Wornum, British artist and art historian, called ornament “one of the mind’s necessities,” while warning that “Ornament is essentially the accessory to, and not the substitute of, the useful; it is a decoration or adornment; it can have no independent existence practically.”26 Gottfried Semper, who lived in London for several years between 1850 and 1855, where 266

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he wrote his first books on the theory of architecture and ornament, argued that the forms of walls in architecture were evolved from ornamental motifs used in weaving, so that ornament could be said to be more fundamental than structural form.27 All of the many writers on ornament agreed that good ornament should not be directly imitative of natural forms; ornament was not a matter of realistic illusion but of stylization and simplification, perhaps suggesting natural forms, but forms ordered into pattern. The most comprehensive of many publications on ornament at mid-century (lavishly illustrated in color) was Owen Jones’s magisterial chromolithographed collection The Grammar of Ornament (1856). Organized by period and culture, the Grammar covered not only classical and Gothic but also Islamic and Persian ornament. Hugely influential, it was accepted as a definitive sourcebook for ornamental motifs. Jones’s book derived from Enlightenment dreams of a general grammar; the patterns of any particular country or period, ordered according to visual resemblance, taken together were evidence of a comprehensive syntax of ornament whose elements were logically related.The Grammar was prefaced with a long list of principles meant to call attention to the laws or syntax of ornament.28 While most architects and artists could agree with the more general of these, many – including Ruskin and Morris – found his more detailed principles, spelling out laws of line and color, unduly rigid. Jones was clear that he did not want students to imitate his examples but rather to know the history so as to derive the grammar of ornament and absorb its principles. Nonetheless, the danger in Jones’s Grammar of Ornament was precisely that students found there ornamental patterns divorced from what Semper called the “tectonics” of the object to be adorned. Semper insisted that ornament is not an abstract ideal pattern but a concrete artifact. Discussions of ornamentation should not address flat disembodied patterns whose geometric contours follow the equally static principles of classical aesthetics; on the contrary, Semper argued, adornment materializes in concrete artifacts that have mass, direction, and movement. And what of Morris? Like his contemporaries, Morris assumed ornament was both necessary and pleasurable, and, Morris also insisted, not just for the rich. (“I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few,” “Lesser Arts,” 26). For Morris, good ornamental art was popular art; art by and for (all) the people.The pleasures of good ornament should form part of everyday domestic activities for everyone, decorating not only churches and public buildings but also domestic dwellings, furnishings, clothing, utensils, and books. He certainly knew Jones’s Grammar, and while agreeing that ornament must be abstracted from natural models, not reproduce them realistically, he too feared that works like Jones’s did not sufficiently emphasize the importance of fitting ornament to the designs and uses of the objects it was meant to adorn. But unlike Wornum or Jones or Semper, he stressed ornament’s responsibilities not only to object, building, or story but also to workman and beholder, and with these in mind, he was increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of any good industrial ornamental art under capitalism.29 Morris knew Ruskin’s Stones of Venice well, of course, particularly its central chapter on “The Nature of Gothic” (he cited it directly in his “Lesser Arts” lecture), where Ruskin argued for the expressive and linguistic functions of architectural ornament. In Ruskin, he would have found not only an insistence that ornament is a major source of meaning, but also the critical, and less usual, arguments that ornament is an index to the conditions of labor under which it is made and that it can in turn deeply affect those who consume it. Morris insisted that ornament should express the pleasure of the workman while offering pleasure to everyone: “To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is the one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it” (“Lesser Arts,” 5).And all art should be useful, in both these senses:“nothing can be a work of art which is not useful: that is to say, which does not minister to the body when 267

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well under command of the mind, or which does not amuse, soothe, or elevate the mind in a healthy state” (“Lesser Arts,” 23). Ideally an artist’s designs, Morris urged, should take account of the demands of materials and technology on the workman; at the same time, the design should not be too finished, so that the workman would be free to realize the artist’s sketch by exercising his own skills and imagination.30 This condition of freedom, Morris came to believe, was not available under the profit-driven division of labor required by capitalism. The ornament produced under modern industrial and capitalist systems was all too often appallingly ugly. In the 1890s, with both his own collections of old books and manuscripts and his experience at the Kelmscott Press to guide him, Morris argued that the “epical” – story – and the ornamental had once been united in both manuscripts and early printed books, with picture, story, and ornament subordinated to a conception of the whole, and the craftsman-workman given sufficient autonomy to exercise mind and imagination no less than hands. Working as a free-workman, or artist, amidst just the amount of traditional skill and mechanical appliances best fitted for making an ordinarily intelligent man an artist; organized (as far as he was organized) politically and socially rather than commercially, his relation to art was personal and not mechanical. So that he was free to develop both his love for ornament and his love for story to the full.31 After the fifteenth century, however, printed books reduced or suppressed ornamentation for the sake of mass production for profit. Book ornament ceased to exist or became simply “oratorical,” conventional rhetorical gestures no longer attentive to the needs of workman, of story, of readers, or of the design of the whole.32 The verbal ornamentation of Morris’s Defence poems – the general twistiness, the aberrations of perception, the strong contrasts of color described by the scholarship summarized above – might, from the perspective of Morris’s later lectures (as we’ve seen Armstrong and others argue) be characterized as diagnostic both of the repressions of Church and feudal lords in the middle ages they portrayed, and of differently oppressive conditions afflicting work and consumption under modern systems of commerce, industry, and capital. Good ornament seemed to Morris at first to offer one response to the numbing of the senses among modern laborers and consumers. The verbal ornamentation of the poems in The Earthly Paradise and Love is Enough – the multiplication of frames within frames, marked off by different stanzaic and metrical patterns, the lingering upon beautiful objects of desire – might from Morris’s later perspective be described as therapeutic, intended to cultivate a generalized desire for beauty that could restore hope for a better future to disillusioned auditors and readers both in and beyond the story’s multiplying frames. “One of the chief uses of decoration, the chief part of its alliance with nature, [is] to sharpen our dulled senses” in respect to the “eventfulness of form in those things which we are always looking at” (“Lesser Arts,” 5) – to reawaken senses dulled by the mind-numbing repetitiousness of labor divided under capitalism and the overwhelming proliferation of visual and audial noise, much of it generated by machines and advertising that penetrated deep into the countryside. In his own pattern-designs for wallpapers and fabrics – as Morris elaborated in his 1881 lecture “Some Hints on PatternDesigning” – respecting “eventfulness of form” meant mediating between workman, object, and viewer by providing beauty, order, and imagination: beauty to convey a sense of pleasure; a wall of order guarding against vagueness (by balance, symmetry, and clearly defining lines and colors); and a door provided for the imagination – the imagination both of the workman and of the viewer (“Hints,” 179–81). 268

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It also meant – particularly in his pattern work beginning in the mid-1870s – creating an illusion of continuous growth across repeating patterns that might give life and motion even to a wall or a page, an illusion which he described as a development of Gothic art (“Hints,” 199). Ornament should move, in more than one sense. In writing Sigurd, Morris dispensed with both the general twistiness of the Defence and the frames within frames of The Earthly Paradise and Love is Enough. Reflecting on ornament in his lectures and prose writings from the later 1870s through the 1890s, Morris came to see good ornament as one important tool in what was at first a diagnostic, then a remedial, and finally a revolutionary task. What is verbal ornament that moves in Sigurd? The poem offers a stripped-down narrative in a single metrical form – flexible, long-lined rhymed hexameter couplets, with a punctuated medial caesura in most lines and a usually punctuated, rhyming pause at line’s end.The mix of dactyls and anapests lends rhythmic variety within the recurring repetition of two not-quitebalanced phrases that make up the hexameter line (the medial pause usually occurs after an extra unaccented syllable); with the pauses, the rhythm also recalls the four-beat underlying rhythm of the Anglo-Scottish ballad.33 G. B. Shaw (observing Morris rocking from foot to foot as he read his poem aloud) accurately noted how the poem’s metrical peculiarities encourage a physically embodied, rhythmic propulsion that helps move readers and listeners through many hundreds of lines.34 Within a few years, Morris will put the power of measured rhythmic propulsion to different use in his Chants for Socialists, where physically compelling rhythms help to bring about what they call for, urging listeners to join in marching with fellow socialists.35 In Sigurd, however, the propulsive force of meter and rhyme is used to convey the relentless working out of the will and wisdom of the Norns or Fates.Youth,love,hope,and courage overcome guile and greed, only to be overcome by them in turn, leaving the glory of their struggles to continue in the tale to which their individual sorrows must be subordinated. Sigurd, with its metrical allusions to classical epic and English ballad, its alliterations, occasional epic similes, heroic epithets, kennings, and archaic diction, uses its verbal surfaces to signal the boundaries between the world of its readers and the saga’s social, aesthetic, and ethical otherness – as a story which has nonetheless survived to be retold in their different age. Its burden, in more than one sense, is the compelling force of a story that must be heard, just as it was once lived, so that it may be told and retold. Morris’s major new concern in writing Sigurd seems to have been that verbal ornament should move not only the story but also its readers beyond grief and knowledge to the desire to act. Implicit in the retelling of the tale is the message that the corruption of craft skills and knowledge by greed, guile, and the pursuit of profit, embodied in Regin and Grimhild, present a challenge once again to a later age. But how does this work? A rocking rhythm may have its own propulsive force, but readers also need other stimuli to sustain the tension of their expectations across a very long poem. We might say that verbal ornamentation in Sigurd is newly devoted to moving the tale and its modern readers by giving verbal form to the sense of continuous growth or movement across patterned repetitions for which Morris was then striving in his visual designs. Syntactic, thematic, and rhythmic expectations are repeatedly prolonged across longer passages of verse, suspending closure on both small and larger scales. Locally such prolongation (the term is Richard Cureton’s) is at work in passages where sentences are extended across several lines, often by phrases set in parallel and rhythmically enjambed or linked by anaphora: Then they wend up higher and higher, and over the heaths they fare Till the moon shines broad on the midnight, and they sleep ‘neath the heavens bare; And they waken and look behind them, and lo, the dawning of day And the little land of the Helper and its valleys far away; But the mountains rise before them, a wall exceeding great.36 (II.6, 3219–3223) 269

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While Morris uses enjambment sparingly, its effects are the more marked because he regularly pauses only at the ends of lines and after the third foot.When the line is enjambed, it runs without pause across a line and a half or even two lines, lengthening out substantially what Morris rendered in recitation as his meter’s rocking rhythm. Similarly, anaphoric repetitions often link both parts of a line divided by a marked syntactic caesura but also connect a series of lines, of which some will omit the medial pause; the two are often used in combination, setting up an alternating rhythm that can build (from shorter to longer phrases) as it too propels readers across longer passages: So on they ride to the westward, and huge were the mountains grown And the floor of heaven was mingled with that tossing world of stone: And they rode till the noon was forgotten and the sun was waxen low, And they tarried not, though he perished, and the world grew dark below. (II.6.3360–63) Stichomythia – the rapid exchange of line for line or couplet for couplet between two characters, usually in particularly charged confrontations (what Florence Boos refers to as “antiphonally rhymed interlocution”37) – is another of Morris’s devices for binding together, in longer passages of increasing tension, a run of lines: As she spake unto nothing but him and her lips with the speech-flood moved : “O, what is the thing so mighty that my weary sleep hath torn, And rent the fallow bondage, and the wan woe over-worn?” He said:“The hand of Sigurd and the Sword of Sigmund’s son, And the heart that the Volsungs fashioned this deed for thee have done.” But she said:“Where then is Odin that laid me here alow? Long lasteth the grief of the world, and man-folk’s tangled woe!” “He dwelleth above,” said Sigurd,“but I on the earth abide, And I came from the Glittering Heath the waves of thy fire to ride.” (II.10.3893–3901) But effects of prolongation are also produced across a longer arc that links book to book to carry readers across the poem by the accretive effects of repeated epithets (Regin the guileful, the crafty master, the Master of Sleight, the Master of Masters; Sigurd the glorious, the shining) and color associations for particular objects, characters, tribes, and landscapes, so that purple (the indigo-dyed ornaments of palaces and kings), green (the rare pastoral landscapes like Lymdale, where peaceful cooperation replaces the reigning ethos of heroic warfare to suggest possibilities for past or future cultures), light (the shining hero, Sigurd), cloudiness (Odin and the gods, the Nibelungs and their cloud-wrapped, cliff-top land), and black darkness (the crafty, greedy Regin and his father Fafnir, set against the glitter of gold and the startling red of blood) form running motifs whose recurring clashes help carry the story across the poem’s four books.38 When “little and black goes Regin by the golden Volsung’s side” (II.6.3349), we know that though these two appear to be companions, teacher and pupil, the dark dwarf must eventually be destroyed by the shining hero. Recurrence, in fact, creates another pattern of expectation, as scenes of confrontation between opposed forces are more than once repeated by mirroring scenes much later in the poem (what Florence Boos calls 270

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“scene-patterning”).39 Sieggeir the Goth’s guileful invitation to King Volsung to visit, after Siggeir’s marriage to Volsung’s daughter Signy, leads – despite Signy’s dream-warning – to Volsung’s death and the defeat of the Volsungs in Book I.When, at the end of Book IV, King Atli invites Gunnar, Sigurd’s slayer, and the Niblungs to visit his land after Atli’s marriage to Gunnar’s sister Gudrun (who is also Sigurd’s widow), and both the wives of Gunnar and Hogli dream ominous dreams, we know to anticipate the outcome despite Gunnar’s and Hogli’s confidence in their victory. Atli will indeed betray and slay these last of the Niblung kings. A third device by which expectation is created and prolonged is the invocation of tale itself by the most significant actors in it, at moments when accepting their roles is difficult and requires a conscious choice (a pattern to which Herbert Tucker has called attention).40 Tale is invoked – by Signy,Volsung, and especially, Brynhild, but also by Sigurd, Hiordis, Grimhild, and Hogli – not just as something that has been told but also as something that will be told by others about them and which therefore holds them to the demanding ethics and aesthetics of their heroic culture. King Volsung’s decision, in Book I, to keep to his promise to visit Siggeir despite Signy’s warning is representative: Then sweetly Volsung kissed her:“Woe am I for thy sake, But earth the word hath hearkened, that yet unborn I spake; How I ne’er would turn me backward from the sword or the fire of bale; I have held that word till to-day, and to-day shall I change the tale? (II.2.425–28) Farewell! as the days win over, as sweet as a tale shall it grow, This day when our hearts were hardened; and our glory thou shall know, And the love wherewith we loved thee mid the battle and the wrack.” (11.2.439–43) These anticipations of the tale that will be told are perhaps the most demanding moments of ornamental elaboration for later listeners and readers as well.They draw attention to the otherness of the values in which this tale’s actors believe, just as do the heroic similes and epithets, the arresting landscapes and buildings, the archaic diction and the meter (with its strong memories of both classical hexameter and traditional ballad). But they also demand that readers and listeners recognize in that alien world an allegorized story about conflicting forces that are not so strange. Craft and craft wisdom, corrupted by greed and the lust for gold or power, degenerate to guile and trickery, leading to the tragic failure of love and the enslavement and destruction of heroes – but not to the death of their story. In Sigurd, Morris was working on a newly enlarged scale and with a newly expanded sense of history, embracing past, present, and a future yet to be achieved. His verbal ornaments heighten tensions, setting “opposites in suspension” (Boos) and creating through such “surface tensions” “a state of suspended expectation” (Carr).41 By these means, he arouses expectations but prolongs tensions before fulfilling them, either at the level of prosody or at that of plot, carrying readers rhythmically forward while delaying final closure through the course of a very long poem. Good ornament, I have suggested, is transitive; verbal ornament is responsible to story and story-teller but fulfills its purposes through its effects on readers. In the Defence poems and then in The Earthly Paradise, prosody and imagery work in the first case to diagnose and in the second to compensate for the numbing social conditions of medieval and modern life. In Sigurd, Morris called on verbal ornament to energize not only characters’ but also readers’ desires for the sake of a tale still to be told. Ornament here points beyond the poem to life: to a history of the social organization of labor that is not yet complete. It indicates a set of present circumstances that echoes the past but awaits resolution in the future. Sigurd’s unevenly balanced, rocking lines, 271

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combining ballad with epic measure in a propulsive movement that avoids monotony while pointing ever forward; its extended passages of expectant lines joined in anaphora or stichomythia; its repeated patterning of character and action by opposing colors and into matching scenes; these are Morris’s new form of verbal ornament, devoted to prolonging tensions and readers’ expectations even beyond the needs of the poem. In Sigurd, Morris adapts verbal ornament to what will shortly become the literally revolutionary aims of his literary work in the last two decades of his life.

Notes 1 Morris, The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 99. 2 William Morris,“The Lesser Arts” (lecture given to the Trades Guild of Learning, London, 1877, under the title “The Decorative Arts”) in The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (London: Longmans, Green, 1910–15), 22.4. 3 Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing” (Lecture given at The Working Men’s College, London, 1881), in The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (London: Longmans, Green, 1910–15), 22. 175, 176. 4 Morris,“The Early Illustration of Printed Books” (report of a lecture delivered in 1895):“There was a sort of sensual feeling for ornament and story-telling which went together, and the epic and ornamental art were displaced finally by what he would call oratorical art, which put flourishes round about the story; it did not tell you the story or anything particularly to do with it, but introduced all sorts of ordinary incidents into the work which had nothing to do with the story.” See William Peterson, ed., The Ideal Book. Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book by William Morris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 22. Morris used the term “rhetorical” frequently in disparaging the arts of the Renaissance. See, for example,“the rhetorical conventional art of the Renaissance” (“Ornamented Manuscripts of the Middle Ages”), Ideal Book, 4. 5 Sir John Summerson,“The Mischievous Analogy” (lecture of 1941), rev. for Heavenly Mansions (London: The Cresset Press, 1949), p. 215. Summerson also writes of a second, more playful form of ornament (which he calls the “subjunctive”),which goes beyond simply modulating a surface with patterns or designs to make that thing appear other than what it really is – a kind of ornament he traces through classical to Gothic architecture where “the structure was made slave to [the ornament]” of pointed arches, with “their air of fantasy” in niches, porches, and portals with their sculpture. Modernist architecture sweeps away this “subjunctive” form of ornament-as-fantasy or play, but cannot dispense with some form of “surface modulation” (13, 14). 6 Jonathan Hay, Sensuous Surfaces:The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), p. 12. 7 Jonathan Hay,“The Passage of the Other,” paper delivered at a conference on “Ornament as Portable Culture: Between Globalism and Localism,” April 14, 2012 (available from the author’s New York University Website, https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/people/faculty/hay.htm), p. 2. 8 Jerome McGann, “‘Thing to Mind’: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris,” Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 45–75.The essay was first published in Huntingdon Library Quarterly (winter 1992): 55–74. 9 Jeffrey Skoblow, Paradise Dislocated: Morris, Politics, Art (Charlottesville,Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1993). 10 Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 4, 26. 11 Among other scholars who have studied Morris’s manuscript or printed designs for his texts, see, for example, Rosie Miles, “‘The Beautiful Book That Was’: William Morris and the Gift of A Book of Verse,’” in Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston, eds., William Morris: Centenary Essays (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), pp. 133–43; Kyle Schlesinger,“Letterpress Printing in the Postmodern Era: Poetry, Media and Typography,” Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2006; Terence Hoagwood,“The Art of Printing and ‘The Land of Lies’:The Story of the Glittering Plain,” JWMS 18 (winter 2008): 8–21; and Elizabeth Miller’s “Collections and Collectivity:William Morris in the Rare Book Room,” JMWS 17 (Summer 2007): 73–88.

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A Question of Ornament 12 Florence Boos, The Design of William Morris’s “The Earthly Paradise” (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991). 13 Boos, “‘The Banners of the Spring to Be:’ The Dialectical Pattern of Morris’s Later Poetry,” English Studies 81.1 (2000): 14–40; p. 19. Boos describes the displacements of lyric voice “in imbricated series of narrative frames” as diffractions or refractions, see p. 15 and elsewhere in the essay. 14 Alexander Wong,“Aesthetic Effects and Their Implications in ‘Rapunzel,’‘The Wind,’ and other poems from William Morris’s Defence of Guenevere,” JWMS 19 (winter 2010): 52–65; p. 53. 15 Isobel Armstrong,“A New Radical Aesthetic.The Grotesque as Cultural Critique: Morris,” in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 232–51. 16 Ruskin wrote about the grotesque in “Of the True Ideal: – Thirdly, Grotesque,” Modern Painters III, and “Grotesque Renaissance,” Stones of Venice III. 17 Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry:The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 2, 5. See also her article, “The Elusive Depth of Field: Stereoscopy and the Pre-Raphaelites,” in Marcia Pointon, ed., Pre-Raphaelites Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 83–99. 18 Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake. Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007). See also Prettejohn, “Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting, in Prettejohn, ed. After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 36–58. 19 Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 55–86, and “Lyric Colour: Pre-Raphaelite Art and Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere,” JWMS 15.2 (2004): 16–40. 20 Julie Carr, Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry ([np]: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013), esp. pp. 147–88; p. 23. 21 Morris, Collected Letters, ed. Norman Kelvin, vol. 1, p. 99. 22 Arthur Clutton-Brock, William Morris: His Work and Influence (London: Williams and Norgate, 1914), pp. 134, 132. 23 Herbert Tucker,“‘All for the Tale’:The Epic Macropoetics of Morris’ Sigurd the Volsung,” Victorian Poetry 34.3 (Autumn 1996): 372–94. 24 Demand for training workmen in the principles of good ornament led the government in 1845 to fund Schools of Design in both London and the provinces. In 1849, Henry Cole – who had already made a name for himself as “Felix Sommerly,” winner of an 1845 competition sponsored by the Society of Arts for designs for commercially reproducible objects – co-founded with the painter Richard Redgrave The Journal of Design and Manufacturers. Cole, whose own principles of design were elaborated in a series of articles in 1851, was a key figure in the planning for the Great Exhibition of the same year.The Great Exhibition further stimulated discussion; intended to showcase the superiority of British manufactures, the displays convinced some that British design lagged far behind that of nonindustrialized countries like France and India. In 1852, Cole proposed that the Board of Trade set up a Department of Practical Art with a school and accompanying exhibitions of good (and bad) ornament; this became the South Kensington, later the Victoria and Albert, Museum. 25 Ruskin wrote about ornament frequently in the context of Gothic architecture, in both The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1848) and The Stones of Venice (1851–53). Morris particularly revered his essay on “The Nature of Gothic” in volume 2 of the latter, where architectural ornament is treated as an expressive and symbolical language to be read. 26 Ralph Nicholson Wornum, Analysis of Ornament.The Characteristics of Styles:An Introduction to the Study of the History of Ornamental Art. Outline of a course of lectures given at the Government Schools of Design in 1848, 1849, 1850 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1856), pp. 6, 11. 27 While in London, Semper designed exhibition sections for several nations in the Crystal Palace, where he was most impressed by the contributions of non-industrialized nations like Turkey, Africa, and Persia. For Semper’s anthropologically derived account of the elements of a building, see Semper, Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (The Four Elements of Architecture), 1851; and the more fully developed theory of art-forms evolved from craft motifs in Der Stil in der technischen und tektonischen Künsten; oder, Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, Or, Practical Aesthetics) (1860–63), trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2004). Semper – who was invited by Henry Cole to lecture on ornamental arts at the Schools of Design – was stimulated by the Great Exhibition to sketch a relation between ornament and national taste, linking a people and their ornament-derived art; see his 1852 Wissenschaft,

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28 29

30 31 32 33

34

35

Industrie und Kunst:Voschläge zur Anregung nationalen Kunstgefühles, bei dem Schlusse der Londoner IndustrieAusstellung (Science, Industry and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition). On the significance of Semper’s ethnographic and historical derivations of structure from ornament, see the introduction by Harry Mallgrave to Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts (pp. 1–67) and the entry for Semper in James Stevens Curl, A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; second edition, 2007). On the linguistic paradigms behind theories of ornament including Jones’s Grammar, see Debra Schafter, The Order of Ornament, the Structure of Style:Theoretical Foundations of Modern Art and Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). One can trace the growth of this pessimism in his lectures within a few short years, from the first in 1877 (“The Lesser Arts”), where Morris called for cooperation to replace competition and took a relatively optimistic view of the future prospects for art and ornament, to “The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization” (1881), where such art is “sick” and like to die: “the many millions of civilization, as labour is now organized, can scarce think seriously of anything but the means of earning their daily bread; they do not know of art, it does not touch their lives at all: the few thousands of cultivated people whom Fate, not always as kind to them as she looks, has placed above material necessity for this hard struggle, are nevertheless bound by it in spirit: the reflex of the grinding trouble of those who toil to live that they may live to toil weighs upon them also, and forbids them to look upon art as a matter of importance. … it may be she [Art] will die, but it cannot be that she will live the slave of the rich, and the token of the enduring slavery of the poor,” Morris, Collected Works 22.123. “Hints on Pattern-Designing,” 199; “The Woodcuts of Gothic Books” (1892), in Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, pp 38–40. “Some Thoughts on the Ornamented Manuscripts of the Middle Ages,” Ideal Book, p. 2. “Ornamented Manuscripts,” p. 14. In his discussion of Sigurd in Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 512, Tucker (using Derek Attridge’s beat prosody and particular attention to the four-beat, four-line stanza Attridge calls the dolnik, the base measure of the ballad) describes Sigurd’s as a “sixstress line [that] freely varies an ambling Greekish-Latinate hexameter, typically in triple anapesticdactylic rhythm, over a constant eight-beat structure that stems from vernacular English balladry and takes as its unit three firm stresses plus an equally firm pause, two such foursquare units forming each poetic line.” For Attridge on beat prosody and the four-beat, four-line stanza, see, among many works that forward his views on the topic, “Rhythm in English Poetry: Beat Prosody” and “An Enduring Form:The English Dolnik” in Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 103–26 and 147–87. May Morris attributes Sigurd’s peculiar swinging movement to “the ‘ringing anapests’ of the poem [that] carry the reader unconsciously over the long line”; see her “The Influence of the North,” William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Blackwells, 1936), vol. 1, pp. 468–92; p. 476. She also quotes George Saintsbury’s puzzled but delighted description, equally attentive to movement or pacing, as a reinvention of “the old equivalenced fourteener … with its obvious central stop” of the fifteenth century, combined with “that form of the resolved fourteener metre, or ballad couplet, which arranged itself so that the odd lines of the ballad form have a syllable short and a quasi-trochaic ending” and “a much larger proportion of anapestic equivalence than was usual in the old fourteener … but with retention of sufficient iambic feet to steady and indeed check the measure from too cantering a pace (477; quoted from George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 3 vols. [London: Macmillan, 1906–10], vol. 1, p. 329).Tucker calls the line with its strong medial caesura a “two-step prosody” that establishes, within each line, a “symmetrical interdependence of rise and fall,”Tucker,‘All For the Tale’,” 384. He also notes that it demands “if not reading aloud, then reading at oral-delivery pace” – lest the rhythm vanish into doggerel or disintegrate into prose – and suggests that Morris, who consistently sought “rapprochement … between a popular and a noble style, between the classical epic heritage and the vernacular forms of his own land,” “elicits a prosodically working faith in the tale spoken: set down in print so as to be taken up in voice, a measured yet pervasive surround” (384). Tucker cites Shaw’s description of Morris “rocking from one foot to the other like an elephant” while he read Sigurd aloud, part of Shaw’s essay “Morris as I Knew Him,” which opens the second volume of May Morris’s William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist (Tucker, Epic, 384; May Morris, Artist,Writer, Socialist, vol. 2, xxxvii). I have argued this point at greater length in “Telling Time:William Morris,” Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), pp. 149–65.

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A Question of Ornament 36 All quotations from Sigurd the Volsung are taken from the line-numbered edition, edited by Stuart Blersch, available from the William Morris Archive, ed. Florence Boos, at http://morrisedition.lib. uiowa.edu/sigurd.html. Book, section, and line numbers given in the text. For Richard Cureton’s analyses of the large-scale rhythms of longer poems, and particularly the phenomenon of prolongation, see his Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (London: Longman, 1992). 37 Boos, “‘Banners of the Spring to Be’,” p. 29. Perhaps Sigurd’s earliest close reader, Richard Green Moulton (a professor of Literature in English at the then-new University of Chicago), pointed out the prevalence of stichomythia in the pamphlet he published as accompaniment to a course focused on Sigurd that he taught through the university’s extension division in 1904; see his The Poetry and Fiction of William Morris: Syllabus of Private Study or to Accompany Lectures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904). 38 On color symbolism in Sigurd, see Stephen Sossaman, “William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and the Pre-Raphaelite Visual Aesthetic,” Pre-Raphaelite Review 1.2 (May 1978): 81–90; Jane Ennis, “Imagery of Gold in Sigurd the Volsung,” JWMS 11.4 (spring 1996): 20–26; and Mark Cumming,“The Structure of Sigurd the Volsung: A Re-Appraisal,” Victorian Poetry 21.4 (winter 1983): 403–14. Cummings notes that “in Sigurd … colors act as threads in reintroducing characters or in differentiating locales” (89). Cummings describes verbal repetitions of this sort as a “melodic repetition creating a chant-like surface patterning which dominates whatever sparse contributions the words may make to narrative matters … Words … frequently take on an ornamental rather than integral role in the epic” (87). Moulton (Poetry and Fiction of William Morris) points out that unlike traditional epic, Morris puts the material that would once have been introduced through epic simile, such as descriptions of landscape or of tribes, directly into his story as part of what Moulton describes as dramatic heightening through the changing appearances of the background to scenes and episodes. 39 Boos,“‘Banners of the Spring to Be’,” p. 23.Again, see Moulton’s Poetry and Fiction of William Morris for an early diagram of the complicated structure of repeating scenes; also Cumming’s “The Structure of Sigurd.” 40 See Tucker, “‘All For the Tale,’” p. 376: “in Sigurd awareness of the tale is the normative habit of the mind; it forms the horizon delineating consciousness itself. … When Morris has his characters do more [than simply act, as functions of the plot], departing from action into the privileged consideration of action, this consideration typically means discerning their role as plot functionaries, only to embrace it wholeheartedly and recommit themselves to its course.Their consistent rule for judgment is how the tale they inhabit is to be retarded or advanced, their rationale what part in its unfolding they will have played.” 41 Boos,“‘Banners of the Spring to Be’,” p. 30; Carr, Surface Tension, xxvi.

References and Further Reading Armstrong, Isobel. “A New Radical Aesthetic. The Grotesque as Cultural Critique: Morris,” in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1993, 232–51. Attridge, Derek.“Rhythm in English Poetry: Beat Prosody,”“An Enduring Form:The English Dolnik,” in Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 103–26, 147–87. Boos, Florence. The Design of William Morris’s “The Earthly Paradise.” Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. _____.“‘The Banners of the Spring to Be:’The Dialectical Pattern of Morris’s Later Poetry,” English Studies 81.1 (2000): 14–40. Carr, Julie. Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry. N. p.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013. Clutton-Brock, Arthur. William Morris: His Work and Influence. London:Williams and Norgate, 1914. Cumming, Mark.“The Structure of Sigurd the Volsung: A Re-Appraisal,” Victorian Poetry 21.4 (Winter 1983): 403–14. Cureton, Richard. Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse. London: Longman, 1992. Curl, James Stevens. “Gottfried Semper,” in A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; second edition, 2007. Ennis, Jane.“Imagery of Gold in Sigurd the Volsung,” JWMS 11.4 (Spring 1996): 20–26. Hay, Jonathan. Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010.

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Elizabeth Helsinger _____. The Passage of the Other, April 14, 2012. https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/people/faculty/ hay.htm. Helsinger, Elizabeth.“Lyric Colour: Pre-Raphaelite Art and Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere,” JWMS 15.2 (2004): 16–40. _____. Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press, 2008. _____. “Telling Time: William Morris,” in Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Hoagwood,Terence.“The Art of Printing and ‘The Land of Lies’:The Story of the Glittering Plain,” JWMS 18 (Winter 2008): 8–21. Jones, Owen. The Grammar of Ornament. London: Day and Son, 1856. McGann, Jerome. “‘Thing to Mind’: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris,” in Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, 45–75. Miles, Rosie.“‘The Beautiful Book That Was’:William Morris and the Gift of A Book of Verse,” in William Morris: Centenary Essays, eds. Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999, 133–43. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn.“Collections and Collectivity:William Morris in the Rare Book Room,” JMWS 17 (Summer 2007): 73–88. ———. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Morris, May. “The Influence of the North,” in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris. Oxford: Blackwells, 1936, 468–92. Morris,William.“The Lesser Arts,”“The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization,”“Some Hints on Pattern Designing,” in The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris.Vol. 22. London: Longmans, Green, 1914. _____. “The Early Illustration of Printed Books,” “Ornamented Manuscripts of the Middle Ages,” “The Woodcuts of Gothic Books,” in The Ideal Book. Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book by William Morris, ed.William Peterson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. _____.. The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. _____. Sigurd the Volsung, ed. Stuart Blersch. http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/sigurd.html. Moulton, Richard Green. The Poetry and Fiction of William Morris: Syllabus of Private Study or to Accompany Lectures. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1904. Prettejohn, Elizabeth.“Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting,” in After the Pre-Raphaelites:Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Prettejohn. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999, 36–58. _____. Art for Art’s Sake. Aestheticism in Victorian Painting. New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press, 2007. Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 Vols. London: George Allen, 1903–12. Saintsbury, George. A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day.Vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1906. Schafter, Debra. The Order of Ornament, the Structure of Style: Theoretical Foundations of Modern Art and Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Schlesinger, Kyle. Letterpress Printing in the Postmodern Era: Poetry, Media and Typography. Ph. D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2006. Semper, Gottfried. Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst:Voschläge zur Anregung nationalen Kunstgefühles, bei dem Schlusse der Londoner Industrie-Ausstellung (Science, Industry and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition). Braunschweig, 1852. _____. Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (The Four Elements of Architecture 1851), trans. Henry F. Mallgrave and Wolfgang Hermann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. _____. Der Stil in der technischen und tektonischen Künsten; oder, Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, Or, Practical Aesthetics 1860–63), trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2004. Shaw, George Bernard.“Morris as I Knew Him.” in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris. Vol. 2. Oxford: Blackwells, 1936. Skoblow, Jeffrey. Paradise Dislocated: Morris, Politics,Art. Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 1993.

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A Question of Ornament Smith, Lindsay. “The Elusive Depth of Field: Stereoscopy and the Pre-Raphaelites.” in Pre-Raphaelites Reviewed, ed. Marcia Pointon. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989, 83–99. _____. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the PreRaphaelites. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Sossaman, Stephen. “William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and the Pre-Raphaelite Visual Aesthetic,” PreRaphaelite Review 1.2 (May 1978): 81–90. Summerson, Sir John.“The Mischievous Analogy,” in Heavenly Mansions. London:The Cresset Press, 1949. Tucker, Herbert. “‘All for the Tale’: The Epic Macropoetics of Morris’ Sigurd the Volsung,” Victorian Poetry 34.3 (Autumn 1996): 372–94. Wong, Alexander. “Aesthetic Effects and Their Implications in ‘Rapunzel,’ ‘The Wind,’ and other poems from William Morris’s Defence of Guenevere,” JWMS 19 (Winter 2010): 52–65. Wornum, Ralph Nicholson. Analysis of Ornament.The Characteristics of Styles: An Introduction to the Study of the History of Ornamental Art. Outline of a Course of Lectures Given at the Government Schools of Design in 1848, 1849, 1850. London: Chapman and Hall, 1856.

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11 MAKING PICTURES: MORRIS’S PRE-RAPHAELITE POETICS AND ITS RECEPTION David Latham

“Wisdom first speaks in images,” as W.B. Yeats observed,1 an insight most appropriate to the aesthetic style of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Its influence would extend from William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems – the first book of Pre-Raphaelite poetry2 – through John Ruskin and Walter Pater to Yeats (“I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite”3),T.S. Eliot (“Let us go, You and I” is from Morris’s “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End” 218–19), and Ezra Pound. Ruskin’s identification of “grotesque idealism” as an oracular expression of imagery that reaches towards mysterious truths not yet entirely grasped would become an integral characteristic of the new Pre-Raphaelite poetics: A series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination … All noble grotesques are concentrations of this kind, and of the noblest convey truths which nothing else could convey; and not only so, but convey them, in minor cases with delightfulness, – in the higher instances with an awfulness, – which no mere utterance of the symbolized truth would have possessed, but which belongs to the effort of the mind to unweave the riddle.4 T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” is his comparable term for Ruskin’s and Yeats’s search for an image to “express the inexpressible”; Prufrock’s frustration – “it is impossible to say just what I mean”5 – is a verbal articulation of Ezra Pound’s definition of the Modernist image: “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”6 “Symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connections … gaps … overleaped … concentrations” that mark the “effort of the mind to unweave the riddle”: adapting Ruskin’s description of the unconscious effort to express the inexpressible, Walter Pater recognized the literary grotesque as the self-conscious technique practised by the Pre-Raphaelites. “Symbols thrown together” in a convergence of seeming incongruities is the essence of Pre-Raphaelite poetry; its fulcrum is the jarring juxtaposition of such incongruities as the cellars, attics, and closets of Camelot, a fusion of aesthetics and politics, the spiritual and the sensual, an ethereal symbolism and an earthly verisimilitude. 278

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In his review of Morris’s poetry – “Poems by William Morris” – Pater cites examples of the “electric atmosphere” and “convulsed intensity” of this liminal imagery that haunts the new poetry.7 In The Renaissance, he returns repeatedly to the centrality of the grotesque:“Everywhere there is an unbroken system of correspondences,” with “grotesque emblems” that overcome the boundaries of “rigidly defined opposites” through the “picturesque union of contrasts,” the “strange interfusion of sweetness and strength,” the “interfusion of the extremes of beauty and terror.”8 Pater would continue to extol such juxtapositions as the essence of the new aesthetics of a paradigm of art for art’s sake, a reflexive art based on art that owes allegiance to the integrity of the creative work of art beyond the realm of mimetic, didactic, or self-expressive paradigms. Thus, for Pater, the Pre-Raphaelite focus on the convergence of incongruities transcends the quest for a central truth:“In style, as in other things, it is well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as possible – opposite excellences, it may be – those other beauties of prose.”9 “God’s curses” epitomizes the Pre-Raphaelite grotesque as an oxymoronic convergence of incongruities. “They cling, God’s curses,” sickening Guenevere and preventing her from embracing her beloved Launcelot: “not / Ever again shall we twine arms and lips” (“King Arthur’s Tomb” 195–97).Another image epitomizing the grotesque arises from Morris’s favourite preposition.When Launcelot and Guenevere meet at long last at Arthur’s tomb, Guenevere agonizes over her desire to kiss the lips of Launcelot “across my husband’s head” (209). Not “over,” but “across”: Morris exploits his favourite preposition as a momentary crucifixion image. Their meeting at the tomb is presented as a coincidence of the plot, until we recognize the tomb is an image that will arise as a psychological barrier between them wherever they may meet. The stone tomb thus stands as a metaphor for the presence of the dead husband looming more overwhelmingly now than ever before: a powerfully bold image of a lover’s guilt.The kiss is a social vision, drawing separate souls together, but here it is thwarted by this imagery of such torn emotions felt across the tomb, epitomizing the jarring juxtaposition of physical love and spiritual devotion. Morris exploits the same linguistic crucifixion image in “The Haystack and the Floods” (another of his poems depicting the entrapment of a triangular love affair), when the hellish fate of two lovers in flight from enemy territory during the Hundred Years War is foreshadowed by the parodic image of two “cross’d” roads, as Robert and Jehane fear “what might betide / When the roads cross’d” (18–19). Next, with a more allusive parody of their demonic world fallen beneath the floods, they envision their “wretched end” when “they saw across the only way / That Judas, Godmar” (33–34). Yeats made his epigrammatic observation in an essay on “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”:“There is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images.” Morris would be the first to agree that Yeats’s comment applies more aptly to Morris than to Shelley. As J.W. Mackail, Morris’s commissioned biographer, tells us, Shelley “‘had no eyes,’ Morris used to say.”10 Poetry works not with ideas, but with images. It is not simply the effort to verbalize what we visualize; not intended to express the world we experience, but the realm we envision: how we see what we say. “‘Swinburne,’ said Morris, ‘is a rhetorician; my masters have been Keats and Chaucer, for they make pictures.’”11 It is Pater who provides us with a sophisticated summation of Morris’s pictures: the recurrent imagery through which Morris speaks. The Defence of Guenevere volume is “a thing tormented and awry with passion, like the body of Guenevere defending herself from the charge of adultery, and the accent falls in strange, unwonted places with the effect of a great cry.”The imagery is “surest of effect in places where river and sea, salt and fresh waves, conflict” (“Poems” 306). With its “delirious ...‘scarlet lilies,’ the influence of summer is like a poison in one’s blood” (303). Marking the “reaction from dreamlight to daylight” (305), “everywhere there is an impression 279

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of surprise, as of people first waking from the golden age” (306). Mixing the “mystic religion” of Christianity with the “mystic passion” of paganism (301), “the two threads of sentiment are here interwoven and contrasted ..., the two worlds of sentiment are confronted” (308–09).The confrontation that characterizes “these new poems” of the Pre-Raphaelites (309) is epitomized in two of Pater’s most haunting examples.The first is taken from The Defence of Guenevere: “The strange suggestion of a deliberate choice between Christ and a rival lover” (301).The second – a beauty and death dichotomy – “forms the chief motive of The Earthly Paradise”: “The continual suggestion ... of ... the sense of death and the desire of beauty; the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death” (309). Pater repeats the word “convulsed,” describing the aforementioned liminal imagery as “a wild, convulsed sensuousness,” wherein the lilies are scarlet, the fresh-water waves of the river confront the salt of the sea (306), the dreamlight conflicts with the daylight, the awakening from the golden realm of art is struck with the shock of physical reality.Yet night is the psychological realm of reality; day is the social construct we escape to, the details that distract us from our nightmarish lives. Pater’s details are drawn from many of the thirty poems of The Defence volume besides the title poem. Launcelot recalls the “scarlet lilies” in “King Arthur’s Tomb” (79); this moral ambiguity of the conventionally pure lily is repeated in “Rapunzel” when Rapunzel sings an erotic prayer with the declarative urgency of a commandment to God: “Give me a kiss, / Dear God ..., bring me that kiss / On a lily! Lord, do this!” (166–67, 180–81). Characters torn “between Christ and a rival lover” include, again, Guenevere and Rapunzel, as Guenevere confesses that in the past “every morn I scarce could pray at all ... for thoughts of Launcelot mingled with the priest’s words,” and still now “I cannot choose / But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot keep / From loving Launcelot” (“King Arthur’s Tomb” 305–08; 173-75); and Rapunzel confesses her erotic prayer: “Send me a true knight, / Lord Christ, with a steel sword, bright..., / Such a sword as I see gleam / Sometimes, when they let me dream” (168–69, 174–75). Rapunzel’s erotic prayer will be answered, as Prince Sebald’s “rough hands” that “used to grip the sword-hilt hard / [now] Framed her face” (296–97). However, the poem ends with the cry of the witch, an ominous threat the now newly wed princess may be unable to forget. Both poems exemplify as well the awakening from a golden age, Pater’s term for the realm of art, of walled gardens, and the riddles, ballads, and tales that characterize Pre-Raphaelite art. Morris’s career as a poet follows a political progression that marks Morris as the most revolutionary of the major Victorian writers.As the author of the first Pre-Raphaelite book, he was identified right from the start as one of those young rebels intent on revolutionizing the arts by practising the new paradigm: a reflexive art based on art, with an art-for-art’s-sake ideology. Morris, however, did not limit his rebellion to the principles of aesthetics; he politicized the movement more than any of his Pre-Raphaelite colleagues as a “[w]arfare against the age,”12 starting at the fundamental level of our language: “Now [that] language is utterly degraded in our daily lives ... poets have to make a new tongue each for himself.”13 This chapter will follow Morris’s progressive shifts of interest from the dramatic conflict of intense lyrics with compressed metaphors to the decorative artifice and archaic diction of leisurely paced verseromances; from a southern classical mythology to a nationalist and then socialist interest in the northern mythologies of Arthurian romances and Icelandic sagas; from revising the traditional conventions of literature to transforming the social order of our lives. In addition to these shifts, the essay will review the insightful comments by the earliest Victorian critics of each of his six books of poetry and suggest their implications for future directions in Morris scholarship. Among his earliest critics, H.F. Chorley discerned a new direction that Morris was forging for art: “The Laureate’s ‘Lady of Shalott,’ that strange Dream-land to which sane Fancy can penetrate, has been ‘the point of departure’ for Mr. Morris.”14 Prince Sebald’s narration 280

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of “Rapunzel” is typical in its departures from tales to riddles, from dreams to journeys, from heaven to artistry, from starlight descending to golden chords ascending: I have heard tales of men, who in the night Saw paths of stars let down to earth from heaven. ... as I lay a-dreaming, I tried so hard to read this riddle through To catch some golden chord that I saw gleaming Like a gossamer against the autumn blue. (51–52; 99–102) The fogland of dream that was for Chorley a mindscape beyond the rational edge of Tennyson is for Pater a revolutionary paradigm for art, a reflexive art based on art:“Golden art surround[s us] with an ideal world, beyond which the real world is discernable indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it comes to us.”15 Pater would champion this new golden realm of art as the “kingdom of reveries” wherein we are “distracted, as in a fever dream, into a thousand symbols and reflections” (“Poems” 302), and thereby achieve the “multiplied consciousness” derived from “the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake” that intensifies our lives by “giv[ing] nothing but the highest quality to [our] moments as they pass” (312). But Pater would not articulate his understanding of this golden art until he read The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise.We may better understand the young Morris’s development if we imagine reading his first volume upon its release in February 1858. It is a commonplace in Morris criticism to overstate the negative reception of The Defence,16 a misconception that has led some readers to believe that Morris changed his choice of genres from intensely dramatic lyrics to leisurely paced romances in reaction to negative criticism. A re-reading of these reviews reveals that such is not the case. The first review, a mere notice of one paragraph in the Spectator, was indeed hostile – “The style is as bad as bad can be”17 – but it was followed a few days later by a positive, nine-paragraph review with the ultimate praise of Morris as a poet’s poet: “Mr. Morris is an exquisite and original genius, a poet whom poets will love.”18 May Morris recounts her mother remembering Morris’s delight: “how my father came to her one day in a great state of excitement, waving the paper containing the notice of ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ and the excitement was no less over Dr. Richard Garnett’s cordial and discriminating review of the poems.”19 Few young poets find their first book heralded with such praise:“The Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters have made the Arthurian cycles their own,” a forgotten mythology which they have succeeded in elevating to the biblical “scenery of Palestine” (226). He prefers the young Morris to Tennyson, who first developed the dramatic monologue alongside Browning:“Tennyson is the orator who makes a speech for another; Mr. Morris is the reporter who writes down what another man says” (226). Garnett praises “Golden Wings” as a ballad that exemplifies the best Pre-Raphaelite characteristics: it “seems to conduct us through a long gallery of Mr. Rossetti’s works, with all their richness of colouring, depth of pathos, poetic but eccentric conception, and loving elaboration of every minute detail” (227). Garnett here is a closer reader than Yeats, who years later would quote the opening stanzas from “Golden Wings” to support his envy of Morris as the “Happiest of the Poets”20: Midways of a walled garden, In the happy poplar land, Did an ancient castle stand, With an old knight for a warden. 281

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Many scarlet bricks there were In its walls, and old grey stone; Over which red apples shone At the right time of the year. (1–8) Yeats forgets that beauty, for Morris, is always threatened. Jehane’s unrequited love in “Golden Wings” leads to her suicide and the exile of all from the walled-garden paradise, the loss of personal love ending in public war.The imagery is most poignant, as the apples now decay before they ripen (231–33), imagery more allusively haunting than the stark Gothic corpse of the conclusion:“Inside the rotting leaky boat / You see a slain man’s stiffen’d feet” (237–38). The third and fourth reviews were negative, though the third – the one by Chorley – was perceptive in recognizing that Morris was developing a romantic, primitivist interest in the “Gothic traditional” style rather than the “Greek academical” (428). Like Garnett’s recognition that Morris was developing a national Arthurian mythology and making it as vivid as the established biblical mythology, Chorley is helpful in understanding a distinction associated with the Pre-Raphaelite school. Morris would later explain that this interest in the Gothic traditional is based on a Ruskinian Gothic spirit that “depended not on individual genius but on the collective genius of tradition.”21 The fourth review, in the Ecclesiastic and Theologian,22 is mixed with complaints about the poet lacking the “finish of execution” but with praise for several poems. “In the ‘Defence of Guenevere’ there is evidence enough both of the originality, force of expression, and power of composition which the author possesses” (160); “Sir Galahad: a Christmas Mystery” is “a perfect picture ... thoroughly medieval, and all in perfect keeping, oneness and harmony” (160); “‘The Wind’ ... reminds us ... of Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, and Bailey ... [but] we venture to doubt if any would have been more successful than our author” (168). The next review, in the April issue of The Tablet, is full of praise: “There is amazing variety in this volume, but there is power everywhere” (266).23 Starting with the dedication to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Morris boldly aligns himself with the controversial Pre-Raphaelite movement of artists intent on revolutionizing the arts in England.The reviewer appreciates how the “homely diction and quaint simplicity of the style not only satisfy the ear, but stir the heart,” explaining that the “few bald lines” of halting rhythm and diction are necessary to preserve a fidelity to “the language of the interlocutors (almost all the poems are in the first person singular)” (266). Generously quoting admired passages from the poems, the reviewer adds that “few volumes have been published of late years containing more passages which haunt the memory and constrain the tongue to unconscious repetition of them after one reading” (266). Robert Browning was one of those reciters; he explained a decade later how his delight in The Earthly Paradise was a “double delight” because of his love for Morris as the author of The Defence “whose songs I used to sing while galloping in Fiesole in old days, – ‘Ho, is there any will ride with me’” (a line from “Sir Giles’War Song”).24 A sixth review did not appear until late November, a full seven months later. By this date it would have been easy for Morris to dismiss it because of its biased context: an attack on Pre-Raphaelite art, and, moreover, an attack which misunderstands Pre-Raphaelite art. After acknowledging that the book is worth reviewing “partly” because its author “has some real and substantial poetic merits,” the reviewer announces his agenda:“and partly because he represents, we suppose for the first time, in one department of art, what has made a very great substantial revolution in another of its kingdoms. ... Mr. Morris is the pre-Raffaelite poet. So he is hailed, we believe, by himself and the brotherhood.”25 Not understanding that the Pre-Raphaelite style is a paradoxical mixture of the three opposing elements of the literary, the naturalistic, and the decorative – a literary subject in a naturalistic setting with a decorative style – the reviewer 282

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follows Ruskin’s misguided notion that the Pre-Raphaelites were practising a mimetic copy of nature: “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing” (Ruskin, Works 12:339). The reviewer condemns this alleged Pre-Raphaelite extravagance of “painting every stain on every leaf, as well as every leaf on every tree,” as an “ignoran[ce] of what artistic imitation is.”The interest in Arthurian mythology is also targeted:“The whole story of the Knights of the Round Table” is “a tedious affair” from which “Milton resigned in despair” (507). Morris is targeted because the reviewer believes these Pre-Raphaelite revolutionaries must be stopped. This condemnation of the Pre-Raphaelite movement is pursued without close attention to Morris’s poetry.The reviewer wrongly describes “The Defence of Guenevere” as a “disjointed series of unrhymed triplets”; Morris likely heard consoling words from friends like Swinburne who would enjoy pouncing on the reviewer’s uneducated reading of Morris’s use of Dante’s terza rima rhyme scheme. Moreover, the young Morris may have felt a sense of pride in this evidence that his bugle-called assault on conventional poetry was indeed heard as a threat by the establishment. In contrast to Rossetti, who remained reluctant to exhibit his artwork and publish his own poems, Morris was courageous in promoting the new paradigm for literature. The last review appeared more than a year later. Under the pen-name “Shirley,” John Skelton writes a positive assessment of a collection that “rings like true metal.”26 Skelton’s one reservation arises from his recognition of the nationalist ideology of the Pre-Raphaelites: as “the poet of pre-Raphaelitism,” drawing his “inspiration from the fount of the Morte d’Arthur” (823) in aspiration “to write the songs of a nation,” Morris must learn to be less obscure by “us[ing] the plain words that plain people can read” (825). However, his obscurity has “an intelligible cause”: its source is the demands of the new genre, the conventions of the unnamed dramatic monologue: “Most of the poems are soliloquies,” and to preserve the dramatic effect, the narrative context must be left to the reader to presume, as the poet “must plunge abruptly into the heart of the story” (825). But other faults that some readers raised are explained here as the necessary strengths of good poetry. A vivid colourist whose “antique words and habits” provide “living insight” into the distant culture of Arthurian mythology (824), the young Morris bodes well for the future of poetry (828). Morris could not have felt discouraged by such criticism; rather, the evidence suggests how misconceptions become critical commonplaces, with scholars more than a century later repeating the same negative phrases without consulting the actual reviews, as if literary scholarship is less serious than medical research. His earliest critics were guilty of too much consulting. After Richard Garnett warned his readers that “Rapunzel”“will be a fearful stumbling-block to prosy people” (227), the reviewer for The Tablet a month later repeats the warning that “Rapunzel” “will be a stumbling-block to those who did not know her in their nursery days” (266). Perhaps we should appreciate the evidence that suggests we are a community of critics who are reading each other. Northrop Frye provides an inspiring note of support for a scholarly Research Companion:“Creation includes criticism as a part of itself. ... Critics ... do not judge the writer, except incidentally: they work with the writer in judging the human condition.”27 Following these early reviews, the canon of criticism of The Defence is vast. Only News from Nowhere (1891), Morris’s utopian romance, has attracted more critical attention. The Defence is the volume that Yeats and Pound were reading in 1929, with Yeats concluding despondently:“I have come to fear the world’s last great poetic period is over.”28 Critics from the first half of the twentieth century focussed on Morris’s treatment of his sources from Malory and Froissart, and preferred Morris’s rude and passionate treatment of Arthurian mythology as more appropriate than Tennyson’s didactic tone.29 By the 1960s, they were debating the issue of adultery – whether Guenevere was guilty or innocent.These are not the questions that inspired Yeats. As Yeats had done with Shelley, we should survey the general imagery of the collection as a whole. 283

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The volume is full of walls, from garden walls to imprisoning walls. As Launcelot rides all day long to meet Guenevere after Arthur’s death, he tries to order his swirling thoughts about their love, at one point telling himself to “Keep this till after” and think rather of some joust to dwell on, as “I tell myself a tale / That will not last beyond the whitewashed wall” (“King Arthur’s Tomb” 33; 30–31).This walled garden is the border of artifice, enclosing the visionary tales of the golden realm of art which will not endure the intrusions of life, as “other thoughts will rise ... so fast ’twil end right soon” (36–37). Later in the poem, Morris shifts to Guenevere’s corresponding thoughts as she refers to a similarly enigmatic image of a wall – to a painted chapel wall where the shadow of Launcelot’s hair would play “instead of sunlight” (306–307) – and Guenevere then recalls “another sort of writing on the wall, / Scored deep across the painted heads of us” (311–12).The wall that Guenevere perceives is not one of golden sunlight but one that casts the shadows of entrapment. The word “paradise” originates from the Persian word for a “walled garden,” but even the “whitewashed wall” of the golden garden is a defensive image, suggesting that the ideal garden generally remains a “paradise lost” in the long-past years of our childhood innocence. With the references to her own beauty and self-expression, Guenevere’s defence may be considered within Morris’s broader concern with the defence of art, an apologia as those mounted by Philip Sidney and Percy Shelley, but a defence supported with imagery rather than political rhetoric. The Defence of Guenevere is a defence of poetry waged during its initial demise in the late medieval age. Set within the decayed orders of walled gardens in autumn and lands lost in war, the poems depict physical and psychological imprisonment. Framed with singers and storytellers, with old men’s memories and young women’s dreams, lives can be turned into legends and visions turned into chronicles. A pair of skeletons stirs the teller of the tale “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire” to imagine the story behind the bones, until he no longer sees “the small white bones that lay upon the flowers, / But evermore ... saw the lady” (143–44). Geffray is merely an incidental concern as the imagined lives of the lovers become a tale to tell John Froissart who “knoweth not this tale just past” (191).Too often the artists lose their way amidst decay. Oppressed by the conventional social order, struggling to rise above the timid, some fail to sustain their artistic integrity; others confuse art with dream and thereby awaken to a nightmarish world.Art is reduced to the fragments of literary conventions, to the allusions that mock lives as fittes to be read.The sense of loss is thereby intensified in a world so newly fallen from the communal ideals of a Gothic vision. Morris’s defence of poetry presents a trellised imagery of the opposing forces of repression and self-expression. His poems are set in autumn or winter with the corresponding scarlet and gold or white colours.“Near Avalon” is typical:“The tatter’d scarlet banners there, / Right soon will leave the spear-heads bare” (13–14).When the setting is summer, it is a golden summer after the greenery is supplanted by the bowed locks of the corn and goldenrod.“Riding Together” is the exception that remains in a spring setting and yet, still, it represents the time of spring when the buds and the flower blossoms are rained to the ground:“Down rained the buds of the dear spring weather, / The elm-tree flowers fell like tears” (31–32).And by the end of the poem, the knight takes leave of the spring: “My prison-bars are thick and strong, / I take no heed of any weather” (50–51). Guenevere’s clinging to the memory of springtime – “Do I not know now of a day in Spring? / No minute of that wild day ever slips / From out my memory” – underlines her sense of loss, as she feels the “Autumn, and the sick / Sure knowledge things would never be the same” (“The Defence” 104-106; 71–72). From the very beginning of his career, Morris was concerned not with the process of growth but with the consequences of the aftermath.Though the condition is one of defeat and decay, resistance has not been abandoned. Morris returns us to a world in which the communal ideals of the Gothic are lost but not forgotten.As he would say years later,“the arts have got to die, what is left of them, before they can be born again.”30 The 284

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hope for their recovery resides in the tradition of the story-teller.The poems generally present characters, whether old or young, not in the midst of action nor of introspection but recollecting aloud to others the scenes from their past. Details of love said to be “all gone now” remain alive as memories passed on to others: Ah! sometimes like an idle dream That hinders true life overmuch, Sometimes like a lost heaven, these seem. (“Old Love” 57; 69–71) The heavenly memories are passed on and preserved in the form of the story-teller’s goldenrealmed similes. Margaret A. Lourie’s critical edition of The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (1981) is a safe starting point for readers of the thirty poems. Its detailed annotations restore both the medieval and Victorian contexts and show how Morris adapted his sources to create “a new kind of poetry ... by ignoring the claims of intellect and morality, by elevating human passion and perception.”31 Looking over criticism during the past thirty years from the 1980s to 2015, Florence Boos summarizes nine categories of critical responses to the title poem alone. Eve Sedgwick’s warning that “sex, gender, and sexuality [are] three terms whose usage [for] relations and analytical relations are almost irremediably slippery” reminds Boos that differences among the nine categories should not be surprising.32 I further condense here her nine brief summaries: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Guenevere’s focus is a legal defence distinguishing her adultery from treason. Her specious digressions reveal her as repressed and dishonest. Her masterful self-deconstruction is similar to that of Browning’s Duke of Ferrara. She reconciles Malory’s incompatible evidence of her guilt as an adulterer and innocence as a platonic lover. She violates the common-sense canons of realism, as no woman would dare claim that her beauty exonerates her. She is a Victorian stereotype of the weak but wily female who tries to seduce the judges. Rejecting the court’s laws, she appeals to the true law of the loving heart that “God knows.” She transcends our social notions of lying by subverting the referents of language and identity. As this is Boos’s own view, I quote it:“Morris conceived Guenevere’s Defence in part at least as a critique of arranged marriages, sexual double standards, repressive social hierarchies, and ‘Arthur’s great name and ... little love,’ as well as an oblique comment on Robert BulwerLytton’s ‘Clytemnestra’ (1855) and the contemporary debates that preceded passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857” (222).

This variety of critics whose articles and chapters debate the poem, the poet’s viewpoint, and the character of Guenevere may suggest some directions to pursue for studies of the volume as a whole. Ingrid Hanson has stirred controversy with her thesis that Morris was committed to an ideal of violent battle, with combat paradoxically presented as “a renewing and regenerative force.” She begins her argument with perceptive readings of The Defence poems that show Morris detailing the pain and passion of the human body as a means of connecting the “perceptions of the body, the incarnations of the imagination, and the understanding of truth” in a brutal and de-spiritualized world. She then proceeds to contend that The Defence, the epic Sigurd the Volsung, and the utopian romance News from Nowhere all demonstrate that, for Morris, it is 285

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not peace but violence which provides a “physical experiential basis for knowing”(32). Boos counters that Morris does depict “a corrupt war-torn society in which women suffered and exhausted men strove for power and position in a ‘chivalric’ warrior-culture in which ethical coherence was water in the desert” (History 161). But Boos adds that “it would be hard to argue that Morris’s Defence poems advocated such a world; rather, his enactments are a cry from within.” She points to poems in The Defence and passages in “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,”“some of the autumn and winter tales from The Earthly Paradise, the first part of Love Is Enough, and several of his essays on art and socialism” where he reveals “something close to anguish and grief at the betrayals of art and human effort” (161). Scholars approaching Morris with the wish to map out their own territory may prefer to study Morris’s next project in poetry: the much-neglected “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” a projected series of twelve dramatic poems, of which fragments of seven are extant, with two versions of “Helen’s Chamber.”The “Scenes” continue Morris’s treatment of the dilemma of the triangular love poem.The image of heavenly paradise is epitomized by the marriage of two lovers; the image of hell is the impossible triangle of three lovers. But the focus for students of Morris’s poetry may be better aimed at a comparison of these abandoned “Scenes” alongside The Defence poems with which he began his career and The Earthly Paradise tales he turned to next. We might start with its genre.The seven scenes are more like Shakespearean dialogues than like dramatic monologues. The subject of a dramatic monologue is the mask of the speaker whose argument is gradually subverted by the poem; the speech is a self-concealing, self-justifying rationalization, rather than a self-revealing, self-exploring quest for understanding, as these Troy poems are. On the other hand, these poems do resemble the plot-line of the dramatic monologue in that they begin after the dramatic moment of crisis has passed, not in media res, but rather following the structure of the dramatic monologue in their focus on the aftermath of the consequences.As Jehane foresaw “at once the wretched end” in “The Haystacks and the Floods,” a poem which begins with its conclusion – “Had she come all the way for this, /To part at last without a kiss? ...This was the parting that they had / Beside the haystack in the floods” (1–2; 159–60) – Morris begins the first scene of Troy – “Helen Arming Paris” – by introducing us to a Helen who foresees the imminent unfolding of the tragic end:“I shall live a Queen while you lie slain” (73). Only the means of her lover’s execution remains unanswered: In what way, love Paris[,] Will they slay you, I wonder? will they call, “Come Helen, come to this our sacrifice, For Paris shall be slain at the sea’s foot”? Or will they wake me from my weeping sleep Dangling your head above me by the hair. (95–100) Paris too sees little else but the bitter end, even within the intimate realm of Helen’s chamber: “The dust of Troytown shall be blown across / The bitter waters by the cold east wind” (“Helen’s Chamber” 70–71). He leaves her chamber with a final wish before the battle: “One kiss at last, one bitter bitter kiss, / O life and death together. Sweet Helen!” (“Helen’s Chamber” second version, 78–79). Morris exploits a grotesque detail of violent war, rivetted incongruously to beauty and innocence, when Helen envisions the “bones of women ... [and] bones of young children / Born in the siege, who never knew of peace” (“Helen Arming Paris” 79–81). Morris had exploited a similar and equally effective image in “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire”: “These loose-hung bones seem strangely still, and tall, / – Didst ever see a woman’s bones, my lord?” (95–96). 286

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As he defended Guenevere, Morris defends Helen from similar charges lodged throughout the literary canon, including Dante’s depiction of her as condemned to the Hell of the lustful. And in contrast with Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Morris transfers Hector’s complex personality to Helen, transferring the conventional heroic struggle from the hero to the heroine, as Morris does so typically in much of his literature.To understand his shift from the psychologically intense and dense dramatic and balladic lyrics of The Defence to the leisurely pace of the storyteller tales of The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), students might read these Shakespearean scenes of dramatic soliloquies within the context of a close comparison with “The Death of Paris,” a September tale from The Earthly Paradise. And note too that the song Helen sings of “Love, within the hawthorn brake” (“Helen’s Chamber”) is one that Morris revised for the August tale of “Ogier the Dane” as “In the white-flowered hawthorn brake” (1335–58). Morris’s next two books should be read as a linked pair because The Life and Death of Jason began as one of the twenty-four tales designed for The Earthly Paradise. Initially titled “The Deeds of Jason,” it grew too long in proportion to the other tales and was thus published as a separate book, one that served like a pilot episode for television to promote the new series of narrative poetry to which Morris had turned.The surprising shift in style is a progression that Walter Pater called a “revolt,” an “entire” change from “dreamlight to daylight” (“Poems” 305). Swinburne described the shift by comparing the poetry of The Defence to a naked body with the turbulent passion of the ocean, in contrast with the poetry of Jason, which he compared to the steady flow of the river, the diffusion of the purest romance since Chaucer.33 Other reviewers were equally perceptive. Henry James was an early observer of Morris’s habit of shifting the conventional focus from the hero to a heroine, noting that Morris’s central figure is not Jason but Medea. James notes too that the classical tale is told in a medieval manner with an AngloSaxon style.34 Joseph Knight attempted to compare Jason with the Odyssey but concluded that it is different from any literary model.35 In his description of the “utter unworldliness” of Morris’s poetry, Knight anticipates, a year in advance, Pater’s unsurpassed criticism of Morris as the author of a new “aesthetic poetry”: This poetry is neither a mere reproduction of Greek or medieval life or poetry, nor a disguised reflex of modern sentiment.The atmosphere on which its effect depends belongs to no actual form of life or simple poetry. Greek poetry, medieval or modern poetry, projects above the realities of its time a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or “earthly paradise.” It is a finer ideal, extracted from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal. (Pater,“Poems” 300) What Chorley a decade earlier had described as a departure to fogland was now trumpeted as a bold challenge to traditional literature, a revolutionary art, a self-reflexive poetry wherein dream and vision create the “still fainter and more spectral” realm of a new paradigm, the decorative and mythological world of an art based on art. But the “revolt” from the first book to the next two is an unusual development for a poet, turning as Morris did from a lyrical poetry of intense passion, full of unresolvable tensions and vividly jarring metaphors, to a narrative poetry ostensibly dull, whose muse was one Swinburne would grow tired of: she “drags her robes as she walks. ... It looks as if he purposely avoided all strenuous emotion or strength of music in thought and word.”36 Georgiana Burne-Jones confessed sharing similar troubles with the new style:“I remember with shame, when falling asleep 287

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to the steady rhythm of the reading voice, or biting my fingers and stabbing myself with pins in order to keep awake.”37 But it was this relaxed style that the public took to. After the startling, haunting, metaphorically complex, and rhythmically awkward lyrics of The Defence of Guenevere, it was this uniformity of Morris’s verse romances that emphasized continuity, a narrative surface of clear plotline, and a polished veneer of conventional rhythms that had such popular appeal. George Eliot and G.H. Lewes were typical in their enthusiasm for these narrative tales of The Earthly Paradise: “We take Morris’s poem into the woods with us and read it aloud, greedily looking to see how much more there is in store to us. If ever you have an idle afternoon, bestow it on The Earthly Paradise.”38 One of the factors in this unusual development from the lyrics of the 1850s to the verse romances of the 1860s is the simultaneous design work Morris had been practising since the founding of his decorative arts firm in 1861. For Morris, this design work introduced a new challenge to understanding the wisdom of the image.As the two most basic conventions of literature, any modification of conflict and metaphor is a radical departure from the fundamental traditions of artistry. Like his new approach to narrative conflict, Morris pursued an original approach to metaphor, involving a return to the origins of art in terms of archetype and mythology. Unlike other Pre-Raphaelites who were poets and painters too often accused of painting their poems and writing their paintings, and thus steeped in the literary conventions of narrative whether they were writing or painting, Morris was a writer and designer whose furniture does not draw on the narrative conventions of literature. He learned from the decorative arts to rely in his literature more on the artifice of rhyme and rhythm, as he abandoned the intensity of lyric for the continuity of story, mastering the leisurely pace that balances anticipation with the unexpected. Most often, the unexpected has less to do with a narrative turn of the plot than with the sound of a word and the rhythm of a phrase. His shift from the passionate lyrics of The Defence of Guenevere volume to the narrative tales of The Earthly Paradise and finally to the still more leisurely pace of the prose romances of the 1890s involves a shift in the fundamental genres of literature from the intense compression of metaphor in arresting phrases to the relaxing accumulation of ornamental details in a rational progression of sentences.The first style we associate with poetry, the second with prose, but for Morris the distinction marks a shift in the structure of literature, as he would in his last years develop the prose poem as a new genre of art. Its decorative artifice is a combination of the enchantment we experience when we hear sung as a song the trance-like refrain of a ballad and when we see hung on a wall the jewel-like silk of a tapestry. A reading of a few passages from Jason demonstrates how Morris has mastered the transition from lyrical tensions to narratological issues, as he juxtaposes whole verse paragraphs to create patterns of dramatic contrast. Book 4 is a good example because it contextualizes “The Nymph’s Song to Hylas” that T.S. Eliot condemned. Entitled “The quest begun,” Book 4 distinguishes the heroic quest of the Argonauts from an adventuresome excursion. Morris first contrasts the connotations of land and sea, with the sea alleged to be a bed of death.The priests must appease its gods with sacrifices “of spotless beasts / White bulls and coal-black horses” (4.60–61). The following passage moves from one set of sounds to another, one from the land, the other from the sea: But silent sat the heroes by the oar, Hearkening the sounds bourne from the lessening shore; The lowing of the doomed and flower-crowned beasts, The plaintive singing of the ancient priests, Mingled with blare of trumpets, and the sound 288

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Of all the many folk that stood around The altar and the temple by the sea. So sat they pondering much and silently, Till all the landward noises died away, And, midmost now of the green sunny bay, They heard no sound but washing of the seas And piping of the following western breeze, And heavy measured beating of the oars: So left the Argo the Thessalian shores. (4.83–96) Here the land appears to be the abode of death – its inhabitants are the mourners and the stranded.The cleansing sounds and labours of the waves, breezes, and oars suggest that the sea is the realm of life.The remainder of Book 4 elaborates on the opposing elements of the land and sea by juxtaposing a series of scenes in a regressive cyclical sequence. Orpheus sings a seafarer’s song embracing the quest of life.With praise and respect for the sea, his song includes a defiant claim for the immortality of the Argonauts – “hast thou felt before such strokes of the long ashen oar?” – made by those “enduring not to sit at home” (4.140, 153). For the song asserts that the sea can overwhelm them but can never obscure in others the memory of such fine seafarers. The ship next passes an island where the Argonauts pause in response to an eager Lemnian islander shouting over the waters for their attention. Jason tells the islander that he can be “strong of heart” and join the Argonauts on their quest or he can “sit in rest and peace within a fair homestead” (4.339–43). Vowing to join their quest rather than “sitting still / Among such goods as grudging fate will give,” the islander “sprang into the sea, and beat about / The waters bravely, till he reached the ship” (4.354–55; 228–29). By the end of the day, the seafarers anchor at another island. Here the cycle of events begins its regression. One of the worthiest seafarers, Hylas, being “governed by some wayward star ... wandered in heedless mood” into the haunted wood of the sea nymphs (4.384–88). His “mighty arms down-swinging carelessly” (4.395), Hylas is depicted in direct contrast to the willful action of the Lemnian islander. A sea nymph invites Hylas to “lie / Beneath these willows while the wind goes by” where she promises to “soothe [him] with some gentle murmuring song” (4.513–14, 569). As Hylas consents, he turns from his ambitions for the future to nostalgia for a present which he imagines to be already receding into the past: “Sing on,” he said,“but let me dream of bliss If I should sleep, nor yet forget this kiss.” She touched his lips with hers, and then began A sweet song sung not to any man. (4.573–76) The song she sings serves its purpose, casting Hylas into a deep sleep in which he will be “quick to lose what all men seek” (4.601). It is this “Nymph’s Song” that T.S. Eliot, initiating in 1921 the agenda of the “new critics,” condemns in his comparison of it with Andrew Marvell’s “Nymph and the Fawn.” Eliot notes Morris’s indecisive focus,“the vagueness of allusion ... to some indefinite person, form, or phantom. ... The effect of Morris’s charming poem depends upon the mistiness of the feeling and the vagueness of its object, the effect of Marvell’s upon its bright, hard precision.” In the verses of Marvell, Eliot finds the “suggestiveness of true poetry.” But “the verses of Morris, which are nothing if not an attempt to suggest, really suggest nothing.” Eliot would thus have us conclude that Morris’s verses, because they do not deal “with that inexhaustive and terrible rebuke of 289

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emotion which surrounds all our exact and practical passions,” are not “true poetry.”39 A later critic defends Morris with an anti-analytical argument:“The world of Morris’s poem ... appears to have no meaning or precise symbolic value.” Any attempt to analyse the poem, Andrew Rutherford concludes, only emphasizes its weaknesses and destroys its charm.40 The criticism is curious because the song, aside from its integral relation to the other scenes within Book 4 of Jason, reads well as a separate poem; indeed, Morris selected and titled it “A Garden by the Sea” for inclusion in his calligraphic book of illustrated poems,“A Book of Verse,” his gift for Georgiana Burne-Jones in 1870, and revised it slightly for his Poems by the Way (1891). A careful reading reveals the murmuring threats that emerge from beneath the gentle surface (Morris “dark”-ened the “hills” and “shore” when he revised the third stanza). “A Garden by the Sea” presents an image of paradise as the walled garden increasingly threatened by the flooding sea. The seductive imagery of the first three stanzas obscures the nature of this paradise, where forbidden fruit grows beyond reach. Its nature is foreshadowed in the first stanza by the speaker’s grammatical fall from the declarative “I know” to the subjunctive “I would ... if I might” (4.577, 579).The imagery arouses suspicion in the second stanza as “no birds sing,”“no pillared house is there,” and neither blossoms nor fruit grace the bare apple-boughs.The allusion to Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” reminds us that a dream of an illusive ideal can destroy such real delights of life as the beauty of the spring blossoms and the nourishing full granary of autumn fruit.With the sea murmuring its ceaseless whispers of mortality, the fall is completed, as paradise is lost in the past, with time forever passing.The speaker has suffered a visibly physical fall from his wish to “wander” blissfully with a lover in the first stanza to his “tottering” grievously alone with the “unforgotten face / Once seen, once kissed, once reft from me” in the last stanza. Paradise is revealed to be not a presence but an absence, the ultimate release from life through death.When life is reduced to a memory of what is lost, then the garden-close becomes but a grave. Returning to the song as an integral segment in the series of juxtapositions that comprise Book 4 of Jason, we see the leisurely pace of verse, the continuity of story, and the decorative pattern of scenes that typify this revolt in Morris’s style of narration.The nymph’s song of rest (4.577–608) is contrasted with Orpheus’s song of the quest (4.109–70). Orpheus appeals to the ambitious worker. He sings of the hearty, the defiant, the immortal.The sea nymph appeals to the contented sleeper. She sings of the dreaming, the passive, the vague state of oblivion.The two songs represent a gain and a loss for the Argonauts. At the first island, they pick up an islander who leaves the land in search of a life of active commitment. At the second island, they lose a sailor who opts for a passive submission to slumber. The land proves indeed to be the setting for the complacence of death, while the sea proves to be the setting for the commitment to life. In The Earthly Paradise, Morris explores this same dialectic but reverses the roles of the land and the sea. As the social quest for paradise is an extension of the individual’s quest for identity, the most revealing record of a civilization is the cultural imagery of its imaginative experiences. Its visions must be firmly rooted in its history and traditions.These roots are exactly what the Wanderers in search of the earthly paradise fail to recognize when they ask the natives of a distant island for directions: Now when we tried to ask for that good land, Eastward and seaward did they point the hand; Yet if they knew what thing we meant thereby We knew not; but when we for our reply Said that we came thence, they made signs to say They knew it well, and kneeling down they lay Before our feet, as people worshipping. (“Prologue” 1207–13) 290

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As the native islanders mistake the Wanderers for Gods, the Wanderers mistakenly presume that paradise is an elsewhere which they must leave home to find. That they are deluded in their pursuit of paradise in some foreign land is underlined by the names of the two ships that part in opposite directions. Those Wanderers who abandon the quest leave the “Rose-Garland” to return to Norway on “The Fighting Man.”They will return home to face the conflicts of life, leaving the escapist dreamers to temper their flight from fear with the facts of fate: As still the less of ’scaping death we dreamed, And knew the lot of all men should be ours, A checkered day of sunshine and of showers Fading to twilight and dark night at last. (1728–31) But Morris does not succumb to despair.41 The steadfast idealist is prominent in The Defence, wherein Morris tells of Sir Peter Harpdon identifying with the Trojan Hector and his commitment to “the straining game / Of striving well to hold up things that fall” (“Sir Peter Harpdon’s End” 218–19), and persists through The Earthly Paradise with the sentiment repeated in “The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice,” a tale that, like “The Deeds of Jason,” he did not find space for in this longest poem in English. Here is the typically Morrisian description of heroism: While thou thyself, a waif cast forth, shalt fare Alone, unloved thou knowest not why or where. Come then today and strive and strive and fail, Beat down and conquered yet of more avail, Sweeter and fairer to the world than though In triumph thou thy short life passedst through, Glad every day and making others glad. (“The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice” 322–28) Curiously, considering Morris’s commitment to both idealistic and practical politics, critics have long debated the role Morris adopted as the narrator of The Earthly Paradise: “The idle singer of an empty day” (“Apology” 7, 14).We should remind ourselves of the confession at the end of the poem by the Chaucerian persona:“No little part it was for me to play” (“L’Envoi” 111). We see from the start of Morris’s career not an idle singer but the active story-teller committed to experimenting with the fundamental elements of his media in his effort to establish a new paradigm for the reflexive poetics that would come to characterize Pre-Raphaelite art. It is an ambition that is above all a political effort to change literature and transform the social order of our lives. His poetry marks his initial effort to express his “hopes and fears for art” to provide redirection for the decadent culture of his age.To combat the fragmentation of nineteenth-century society and identity, of unity and paradise, of self-expression and tradition, Morris begins in The Defence of Guenevere with a dramatization of the decaying world of Camelot. He next proceeds in the aborted “Scenes from the Fall of Troy” to the dying world of Troy about to be levelled after a decade of siege. The imminent collapse of the dying Troy anticipates the dead society of Morris’s London, those six dehumanized counties of smoke and assembly lines which are forever on Morris’s mind: Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting of the piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town. (“Prologue” 1–3). 291

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The subject of all three works is the loss of paradise. Only the third embraces its rediscovery. The gathering of Nordic sailors and Greek settlers results in the mutual exchange of tales from Classical and Gothic mythology that provides a framework for Morris to explore the relation between personal vision and cultural tradition.The tales reveal the difference between a culture that has maintained its heritage and one that has lost it.The Greek settlers tell of accomplished quests, whereas the discontented Nordic Wanderers tell of failed quests. In the nuptial month of June, for example, the Greek settler tells of the consummation of an unselfish love in his tale of “The Love of Alcestis,” whereas the Wanderer tells of the failure and death of a mariner in his quest for the love of a damsel in “The Lady of the Land.” The contrast serves to demonstrate that an earthly paradise must be based on the renewal of traditions through the songs and stories developed from cultural roots.The Greek settlers represent a society in touch with its ancient culture despite its isolation, underlining again that paradise is not a geographical location.The Wanderers learn to reject their quest for personal immorality in favour of the higher realm of a state of mind informed by the Gothic spirit of their culture which depends on “the collective genius of tradition” (“Gothic Revival I” 67). Morris would go on to write political lectures that would directly address the way to reach the collective idealism of this socialist world. Scholarship on The Earthly Paradise in the twentieth century underwent a major change after Northrop Frye’s restitution of the romance genre shifted attention to the narratological issues of literature, evident in such studies with similar titles as Blue Calhoun’s The Pastoral Vision of William Morris:The Earthly Paradise (1975), Carole Silver’s The Romance of William Morris (1982), Amanda Hodgson’s The Romances of William Morris (1987), Florence S. Boos’s The Design of William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1991), Jeffrey Skoblow’s Paradise Dislocated: Morris, Politics, Art (1993), and Boos’s two-volume edition of The Earthly Paradise (2002). Students in the twenty-first century may find new approaches by returning to some of the earliest criticism.The editors of Atalanta’s Race and Other Tales from The Earthly Paradise (1888) – Oscar Fay Adams and William J. Rolfe – corresponded with Morris about various details of the poem; Morris’s scholarly replies are printed in the annotations. For example, in reply to a question about “the fell Persian rod” from the interlude after “The Proud King,” Morris wrote the editors the following: I meant simply the king’s or satrap’s sceptre, symbolizing the Persian tyranny over the Ionians.You see the people of the city were supposed to be some Ionian kindred (like the Phoceans) who fled before the Persians, and I was putting them beside the Norsemen whose kindred fled before Harald Hair-fair and the feudal system.42 In addition to the expected comparisons of Morris with Swinburne and Tennyson, the editors’ annotations draw parallels between Morris’s lines and the verses of several less familiar contemporaries: Edward Arnold,Will Wallace Harney, Jean Ingelow, Joaquin Miller, Lewis Morris, and Anne Whitney. This 1888 scholarly edition is now reprinted by Florence Boos for the online Morris Archive. The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876) completes Morris’s shift of focus from his classical education to his medieval heritage.43 He began his preparation for this topic, which he considered the most appropriate for his northern civilization, by learning Icelandic and translating with Eiríkr Magnússon the Grettis Saga:The Story of Grettir the Strong (1869) and the Völsunga Saga:The Story of the Volsungs and the Niblungs with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda (1870). In considering his many accomplishments, he ranked Sigurd as his best poem, because it is based on the neglected Völsunga Saga, an epic that should be celebrated for its noble ethics and grand passions as well as its position as a cultural monument for the literature of the English nation. Here are his defences of these two positions: 292

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I must unhesitatingly call it the noblest and in a sense completest story yet made by man, embracing the highest range of tragedy; passion, love, duty, valour, in strife with the blind force of fate, vanquished by it, but living again in death in the souls of all the generations.44 For this is the Great Story of the North which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks – to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has been – a story too – then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us.45 Explaining the different sources for his retelling of this northern epic, Morris exemplifies the poet’s comprehension of the basic storytelling principles of literature:“The terrible incestuously begotten Sinfjotli is, I think, the original Sigurd (so to say).”46 Poets are habitually drawn to the fundamental experiences of mythology for their source of a story, but they then use that source as their starting point for a new story. Morris clarifies this point memorably: “When you are using an old story, read it through, then shut the book and write it in your own way.”47 Though The Earthly Paradise was by far the most popular of his poems during his lifetime, we should take Morris seriously in his belief that Sigurd is his most important poem. Hence, it should attract more critical attention in the future, its strengths still wide open for discussion from many different approaches. Sigurd is a poet’s poem in terms of its style and its storytelling. Morris creates a remarkable fusion of two genres by combining his ballad rhymes and rolling hexameter rhythms with the rugged Anglo-Saxon alliterative lines and monosyllabic tongue of an archaic diction. Students will want to pursue its pervasive self-reflexive elements consistent with Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite paradigm, an ars poetica that is unexpected in an epic so raw in experience. The imagery of similes works less through likeness than through unlikeness, the imagery that harnesses together a cosmos from a world that otherwise appears as chaos. Dylan Thomas thus described poetry as “the colour of saying.”48 Morris’s imagery anticipates Thomas more than it recalls Homer. In the epic, the Homeric convention of the extended simile generally acts as a digression from the plot, used as often for a description of a cultural artifact as for an elevation of the heroic. But, as Herbert Tucker has shown, the epic simile, for Morris, typically reflects on the tale itself. In a first instance, when Signy declares against affection and for glory, she set into motion a destructive dynamic that Morris anticipates by simile: She spake, and the feast sped on, and the speech and the song and the laughter Went over the words of boding as the tide of the norland main Sweeps over the hidden skerry, the home of the shipman’s bane. Morris’s simile does not detour from the episode, in classical fashion, but rivets the episode into the plot as a portent.49 Further studies of the hybrid genre of Sigurd might explore the conventional epic genre and its relation to the history of a people; in the case of Morris’s epic, it is the relation of the mythologies of the Icelandic and Teutonic sagas with Englishness and empire. As an anti-imperialist, Morris socializes the heroic ideology of the genre by championing the cooperative values of self-sacrifice for the good of the community. Students of manliness and Victorian masculinities may peruse as their starting point the conclusion of an early reviewer for the Literary World who 293

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described Sigurd as “the manliest and loveliest” of Morris’s poems.50 And typical of Morris’s feminist interests from Guenevere in The Defence to Ellen in News from Nowhere and Birdalone in The Water of the Wondrous Isles, the strong female characters of Signy, Brynhild, and Gudrun share the warrior courage of the traditional manly heroes. Morris’s two other books of poetry have attracted still less discussion than Sigurd. His Love is Enough (1873) is a medieval morality play that was well received by its initial critics as a daring departure for the master storyteller with its vagueness of incident and puzzling motives,51 a “novel experiment” featuring shadowy, intangible characters in a world described with “imaginative mastery.”52 Others observed his rendering of each character’s dialogue in a Northernsounding blank anapestic metre new to the English language,53 a style of language derived from Icelandic and Old English poetry (Spectator, 49), producing “an unusual and a truly magnificent form.”54 This early recognition of a new setting within the realm of fantasy, a new style for the English language, and a new form of genre was prophetic of the directions Morris would continue to pursue in his poetry and fiction.These stages in the development of his experimentation invite further study of his steady progression towards the prose poem. For later criticism of Love Is Enough, the best study remains Florence Boos’s analysis of the thematic arguments of the poem within its generic context of the morality play and a polyphonic elegy, its courtly love context wherein the victims of an unrequited love remain faithful as a process of devotion, and a biographical context of Morris’s personal struggle to reconcile love with loneliness.55 Poems by the Way (1891) is the volume that is most curious in its neglect. Having written elsewhere an introduction to the volume,56 I will be brief here, but add that little scholarship on these fifty-five poems has been written during the past twenty years. I had said in 1994 that this first full book of poetry since 1876 provides his six books of poetry with a definitive shape: four long poems – The Life and Death of Jason (1867), The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), Love is Enough (1873), and The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876) – are bracketed by two collections of short poems: The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (1858) and Poems by the Way (1891). Not a sudden outpouring of poetic inspiration, this last book is a selection of poems composed over a period of thirty years, poems that did not fit the framework of the other five books. It is this last fact that ties Poems by the Way closer to the political lectures and prose romances than to most of his other poetry. Rather than representing the conclusion to his poetic canon, it provides poems that share the concerns of his lectures, romances, and designs.Though all of Morris’s poetry is an expression of his hopes and fears for redirecting the decadent culture of his age, in Poems by the Way he shifts his hopes and fears from love to art. This shift gives the selection of ballads and lyrics a generally different tone from the vivid, brutal, psychological dramas of The Defence of Guenevere volume and from the languid, melancholy tales of The Earthly Paradise, wherein the root-words “love” and “lone” are so often interchangeable. By shifting its emphasis from love to art, Poems by the Way inspires hope, encouraging the reader to share through the tale-telling, to embrace others not for consummation through love during one’s own life, but to inspire faith in a community spirit. Individual defeats will lead to communal victories for future generations.The subtext is not the urgency of personal renewal through love, but the resolve for social renewal through revolution. The poems divide into five categories, three identified by their subject matter – ten Socialist (including some from his penny pamphlet Chants for Socialists), eleven Verses for Pictures (for Pre-Raphaelite paintings and tapestries), and twelve Scandinavian (which Morris called Northern) – and two categories identified by their style: thirteen concrete narratives (lyrical ballads of a narrative situation) and nine abstract lyrics (personifying love and replacing the dramatic with apostrophes and introspection). In my 1994 introduction, I analyzed a selection of poems from each of these five categories; I wish now to discourage reading Poems by the Way as 294

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his last book of poetry, but to draw attention instead to the new genre in English literature that Morris helped to popularize – the prose romance – and to read the new genre in the style of a prose poem, a genre set within the poet’s own imaginary world.With this development, Morris is most like Shakespeare. Serious artists abandon in their maturity the themes of tragedy and the techniques of verisimilitude for the imaginary realms of their own creation. Morris’s first experiment with the prose romance is not especially successful; it is a trellis of two opposite genres identified in its title: A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse (1889). Oscar Wilde praised it as a triumph of artifice, “a piece of pure art workmanship from beginning to end. ... We breathe a purer air, and have dreams of a time when life had a kind of poetic quality of its own.”57 Wilde noted “how perfectly the poetry harmonises with the prose, and how natural the transition is from one to the other” (3). However, the opening pages alert us too overtly to these transitions:Thiodolf “spake, but in rhyme and measure”; “Therewith he laughed out loud amid the wild-wood, and his speech became a song”;“Then she spake, and again her words fell into rhyme”58; what follows each of these stage-like directions is not the blank verse of Elizabethan theatre, but the long alliterative hexameters of rhyming couplets that Morris had perfected in Sigurd the Volsung. As Morris refined the prose romance as a new genre, his progression from the elevated verse of the House of the Wolfings to the simpler songs of The Roots of the Mountains (1890), and then to The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891, considered the first prose romance, and limited to six songs), indicates that he understood his hybrid of prose and verse was not altogether successful. Rather he came to recognize that the poetic diction and rhythm of his prose could sustain the “purer air” of an art that no longer needs transitions to verse. A few passages from his prose romances of the 1890s will exemplify Morris’s progressive experimentation with this new genre of the prose poem. The opening sentence of Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895) sets the leisurely pace of a tale told for the beauty of an ornamental pattern: Of old there was a land which was so much a woodland, that a minstrel thereof said it that a squirrel might go from end to end, and all about, from tree to tree, and never touch the earth: therefore was that land called Oakenrealm. (1) Trinitarian patterns – “there was ... thereof ... therefore,” “was a ... was so ... was that,” “land ... woodland ... land,”“that a ... that a ... that land” – are reinforced within a sequence of seven internal rhymes:“land ... woodland ... end ... end ... and ... and ... land.” Such hypnotic patterns transport us from our physical location to a realm of enchantment.The squirrels “never touch the earth” in this Oakenrealm, nor will readers touch the mimetic side of reality, as the tale we are reading belongs to the golden realm of minstrel lore: others have told and sung and woven the events from the dreamland of this tale.The only metaphor in this ornamental sentence is “Oakenrealm,” a primitive kenning, the figure of speech that Morris came to favour as he pursued his determination to change the direction of art by challenging the two most basic tools of art: the drama of conflict and the imagery of metaphor. For Morris, the kenning is a device that preserves the ancestral English manner of creative expression.To “ken” means to know, and the kenning is a poetic way of knowing, of understanding in memorable, new ways. Kennings act not so much like the double-tongued ambiguity of metaphor, which Aristotle identifies as error, the mistake of saying this is that;59 rather the kenning presents the purity of direct images comprised of the compound word, each side of it being a direct image (as in “womb-man”).60 The kenning epitomizes the poetic essence of literature, with its language being representational rather than referential, experiencing with the magic of images rather than explaining with the logic of grammar. 295

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Morris’s challenge was not well understood, as some readers could not see any political agenda beyond the artifice of a new rhetoric for which the term “Wardour Street English” was coined: “A perfectly modern article with a sham appearance of the real antique about it.” Archibald Ballantyne coined the term in his complaint that Morris’s language is full of “dights,” “mayhappens,” “menfolk,” and “smithing carles.”61 A reviewer of The Roots of the Mountains repeated the charge in 1890, but over the years it turned from a complaint to a compliment.62 John Drinkwater recognized the revolutionary approach to language: rather than use conventional words, Morris “threw poetry over words that had hitherto gone naked.”63 The following passage from The Wood Beyond the World (1894) reveals how the poetic artifice of this alleged “Wardour Street English” serves a political challenge to change the conventions of art: “Is all well with ship and crew then?” said Walter. “Yea forsooth,” said the shipmaster;“verily the Bartholomew is the darling of Oak Woods; come up and look at it, how she is dealing with wind and waves all free from fear.” So Walter did on his foul-weather raiment, and went up on the quarter-deck, and there indeed was a change of days; for the sea was dark & tumbling mountain-high, and the white-horses were running down the valleys thereof, & the clouds drave low over all, and bore a scud of rain along with them; and though there was but a rag of sail on her, the ship flew before the wind, rolling a great wash of water from bulwark to bulwark.Walter stood looking on it all awhile, holding on by a stay-rope, and saying to himself that it was well that they were driving so fast toward new things. (23–24) Alongside the “verily” and the “darling”/“dealing” duo, the shipmaster’s reply to Walter is a monosyllabic line of alliterative “w”s and “f ”s, assonantal “e”s, and consonantal “t”s and “r”s that makes no pretense of conveying with verisimilitude the character of a credible shipmaster. In the descriptive paragraph that follows, the ship Walter is invited to view is revealed to be “but a rag of sail” overwhelmed by the vast sea and sky.The ship is in flight from the rolling, heaving waves of the sea and the raining, blowing winds of the sky. In the previous sentence before our excerpt, the ship was said to “be running before the wind” (23); now, as Walter observes from the deck, the ship “flew before the wind.”The sea transforms into a metaphorical geography of mountains and valleys, and “the white-horses were running down the valleys,” as the stampede of stallion-like surf assaults the raggéd ship.Against this tumult of active verbs goes Walter amidst an accompaniment of prepositions that calms the pace: he “did on his foul-weathered raiment, and went on up to the quarter-deck” and “stood looking on it all awhile, holding on by a stayrope, and saying to himself ...” He is determined to maintain his semblance of permanence amid the drive and heave and whirl of the world, though he acknowledges that “there indeed was a change of days.”Wondering what this upheaval of the world will mean to his life,Walter concludes with a bathetic musing,“saying to himself that it was well that they were driving so fast toward new things.” Morris deliberately leads us to the inarticulate ambiguity of “new things,” a phrase that belittles the momentous change of life the young Walter is about to experience. Morris is concerned with change of a different order. He minimizes the suspense and fear that arise from the conventions of dramatic conflict, his characters faced less with suffering and death than they are with the challenges of telling their tale well.The focus is thus not on individual fortune but on the shared experiences of the social community.Weapons are no longer sharpened to “rent” the earth but become the tools for expressing heavenly celebrations, the means for the city to show itself as a communal unity of tossed, brandished, and outstretched spears, swords, and hands:“Straightway then arose a cry, and a shout of joy & welcome that rent 296

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the very heavens, & the great place was all glittering and strange with the tossing up of spears & the brandishing of swords, & the stretching forth of hands” (248). The Kelmscott editions of Morris’s romances further reduce the dramatic sense of conflict by summarizing each page in a phrase posted as a running header set within the margin.This narrative device serves less as a commentary than as self-referential intrusions that draw attention to the textuality of the plot and the presence of its author:“Now shall the story be told” (Wood Beyond the World 165). Conflict is thus limited to the style of language, as Morris relies on the trope of the Pre-Raphaelite grotesque – the jarring juxtaposition of incongruities – to disrupt our conventional perspectives and our sense of decorum. With conflict and metaphor being the two central tools of literature, Morris’s transformation of them is a daring approach intended to revolutionize the basic structure of literature. His spokesperson for the utopia of his News from Nowhere is a woman (which in itself was a challenge to the patriarchal tradition of literature) who gives a devastating critique of the alleged social realism of Victorian novels and their treatment of conflict as “a long series of sham troubles,” a critique that suggests why Morris resists in his romances a straightforward political passion: As for your books ..., there is something loathsome about them. Some of them, indeed, did here and there show some feeling for those whom the history-books call ‘poor,’ and of the misery of those lives we have some inkling; but presently they give it up, and towards the end of the story we must be contented to see the hero and heroine living happily in an island of bliss on other people’s troubles. (175–76) Some of Ellen’s angry impatience is an expression of Morris’s self-deprecating humour, as two of his most profound loves – history and literature – are dismissed as no longer important in a utopian world. But here, through Ellen, he acknowledges that novelists intent on raising and resolving a series of conflicts are practising a profession that promises no hope for a revolutionary future. His prose romances inspire us to envision an alternative order. Yeats praised these visionary stories as showcasing the most beautiful language ever written, so beautiful it must be read slowly, as every reader will be reluctant to reach the end.64 Hence, at the end of his life, Morris was working to produce the opposite effect of the political agenda of his lectures by encouraging the reader to be slow, to ponder, instead of stirring the reader to action. Resisting archetypal metaphors with biblical and classical frames of reference, Morris was creating verbal visions of alternative worlds that were imaginary and eternal, like Camelot, built to music, built forever, and therefore never built at all, but always about to be.65 He starts one romance with the sons of Adam in a commercial seaport and moves to the people of the Bear in the Wood beyond the World. In another romance,66 Hallblithe of the House of the Raven and Hostage of the House of the Rose are to wed on Midsummer Night, as Morris replaces the spiritual order of Christianity not with pagan religion, but with the cooperative order of folk rituals, of communal customs. His is not a green Edenic garden or a golden Arcadian pasture or a new Jerusalem, but the land of the Glittering Plain, the Acre of the Undying, the Wood beyond the World, the Well at the World’s End, the Water of the Wondrous Isles: the realm of words and rhythm.What the prose romances most resemble – in subject, in structure, in diction, in all but their rhythm – is the final poem of Poems by the Way: his fairy tale of “Goldilocks and Goldilocks.”To recognize the affinity of Poems by the Way with The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood Beyond the World (1894), Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895), The Well at the World’s End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), and The Sundering Flood (1897) is to acknowledge the number of major poems Morris produced during the last years of his life. 297

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Notes 1 W.B.Yeats,“The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry,” The Collected Works of W.B.Yeats, vol. 4, ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein (London: Macmillan, 2007), 4: 71. 2 Until Morris’s publication in 1858, the new style of Pre-Raphaelite poetry had appeared only as individual poems in a few short-lived periodicals like The Germ (four issues in 1850) and The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (twelve issues in 1856). 3 Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1926), 141. 4 Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: G. Allen, 1903–12), 5:132– 33;“grotesque idealism has been the element through which the most appalling and eventful truth has been widely conveyed, from the most sublime words of true Revelation, to the ... [words] of the oracles, and the more or less doubtful teaching of dreams; and so down to ordinary poetry” (Works 5:134). 5 T.S. Eliot,“Hamlet and His Problems” in The Sacred Wood [1920] (London: Methuen, 1950): 100;“The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,” line 104. 6 “A Retrospect” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed.T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions,1954), 4. 7 Walter Pater,“Poems by William Morris,” Westminster Review, 90 (October 1868): 304; 305. 8 Walter Pater, The Renaissance.The 1893 Text. Ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 29, 38, 17, 31, 62, 67. 9 Walter Pater,“English Literature” in Essays from ‘The Guardian’ (London: Macmillan, 1910), 15. 10 J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (London: Longmans, 1899), 1:178. 11 Qtd in Yeats, Autobiographies, 3:145. 12 Qtd in Mackail, 1:63. 13 Morris, 6 November 1885; Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 2:483. 14 H.F. Chorley, Athenaeum, 3 April 1858: 427. 15 Walter Pater, Imaginary Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1887), 127. 16 See, for one of many examples, Peter Faulkner, William Morris:The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1973), 1. 17 Spectator, 27 February 1858: 238. 18 Richard Garnett, Literary Gazette, 6 March 1858: 227. 19 May Morris, Collected Works of William Morris (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 1:xxi. 20 Yeats, “The Happiest of the Poets,” Fortnightly Review, 1 March 1903. Rpt. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, vol. 4, ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein (London: Macmillan, 2007), 4: 42; 46. 21 Morris, “The Gothic Revival I” in The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, ed. Eugene LeMire (Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1969), 67. 22 Ecclesiastic and Theologian, 20 (March 1858): 159–70. 23 The Tablet, 19 April 1858: 266. 24 Qtd in May Morris, William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 1:642. 25 Saturday Review, 20 September 1858: 506. 26 Shirley [John Skelton],“A Raid among the Rhymers,” Fraser’s Magazine, 61 (June 1860): 823. 27 Frye, The Double Vision (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 38. 28 Yeats, 2 March 1929; Letters of W.B.Yeats, ed.Allan Wade (London: Hart-Davis, 1954), 759. 29 Swinburne dismissed Tennyson’s Idylls of the King as the “Morte d’Albert.” See A.C. Swinburne, Under the Microscope (London: D.White, 1872), 34. 30 Morris, 21 August 1883; Collected Letters, 2:217. 31 Margaret A. Lourie (ed.), The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (New York: Garland, 1981), xv. 32 Qtd in Florence S. Boos,History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 222. 33 Swinburne, “Morris’s Life and Death of Jason,” Fortnightly Review, ns. 2 (July 1867): 19-28. 34 Henry James, North American Review, 106 (October 1867): 688–92. 35 Joseph Knight, Sunday Times, 9 June 1867: 7. 36 Swinburne, 10 December 1869; The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Lang (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1959), 2:68. 37 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (London: Macmillan, 1904), 1:297. 38 George Eliot, 27 June 1868; George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1955), 4:451. 39 T.S. Eliot,“Andrew Marvell,” Times Literary Supplement, 31 March 1921: 201–02. Reprinted in Selected Essays 1917–1932 (London: Faber, 1932), 299–301.

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Making Pictures: Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite Poetics 40 Andrew Rutherford, “Morris’ ‘The Nymph’s Song to Hylas’ (‘A Garden By the Sea’),” Explicator, 14 (March 1956): 36. 41 “The repulsion to pessimism ... is, I think, natural to a man busily engaged in the arts” (Morris, “Preface,” Signs of Change [1888]; reprinted in Collected Works, 23:2). 42 Qtd in Atalanta’s Race and Other Tales from The Earthly Paradise, ed. Oscar Fay Adams and William J. Rolfe (Boston:Tichnor, 1888), 231. 43 And yet, how daunting it is to remind ourselves that less than one year before 1876 Morris published his translation of The Aeneids of Virgil Done into English Verse. 44 Morris, “Early Literature of the North – Iceland” in The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, ed. Eugene LeMire (Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1969), 192. 45 Morris and Magnússon, Völsunga Saga:The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda in Collected Works, 7:xvi. 46 Morris, 12 September 1894; Collected Letters, 4:206. 47 Morris, Collected Works, 3:xxi–xxii. 48 Dylan Thomas,“Once It Was the Colour of Saying” (1). 49 Herbert F. Tucker, “All for the Tale: The Epic Macropoetics of Morris’ Sigurd the Volsung.” Victorian Poetry, 34 (Autumn 1996): 382. 50 Literary World, 7 (February 1877): 136. 51 Sidney Colvin, Fortnightly Review, ns. 13 (January 1873): 208. 52 Spectator, 11 January 1873: 49. 53 London Quarterly Review, 4 April 1873: 243. 54 Athenaeum, 23 November 1872: 658. 55 “Love Is Enough as Secular Theology.” Papers on Language and Literature, 24 (Winter 1988: 53–80. 56 David Latham, “Introduction.” Poems by the Way (Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1994), v–xxxiv. 57 Oscar Wilde,“Mr. Morris’s Last Book.” Pall Mall Gazette, 2 March 1889: 3. 58 A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse (London: Reeves and Turner, 1889), 9; 14; 18. 59 Aristotle, Rhetoric and Poetics.Trans.W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1984), 186. 60 Golden Walter in The Wood Beyond the World is “sword-bitten” by “sea-thieves” during a street brawl with pirates (15). In a single paragraph of his account of “Early England,” Morris uses the following kennings: “seaboard,” “seamen,” “strong-thieves,” “yeomen,” “field-work,” “shipwrights,” “the sea that fed them drew them on to waylaying its watery roads” (Unpublished Lectures, 168–70). 61 Archibald Ballanytine, “Wardour Street English,” Longman’s Magazine, 12 (October 1888): 585. Shopkeepers on Wardour Street in London were notorious for selling fake antiques. 62 Spectator, 8 February 1890: 208–09. George Saintsbury praised Morris’s Wardour Street prose as a remarkably unmetrical, natural, and conversational prose tinted with the colour of romance (A History of English Prose Rhythm [London: Macmillan, 1912]: 435–37); and John Drinkwater praised the “Wardour Street diction” for providing the peculiar, cumulative power of another era (Victorian Poetry [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923]: 169–73). 63 John Drinkwater, William Morris:A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1912), 192–93. 64 “Preface.” Cuchulain of Muirthemne (London: J. Murray, 1902). Reprinted in Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), 4. 65 Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King,“Gareth and Lynette” (lines 272–74). 66 Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain Which Has Been also Called the Land of Living Men or the Acre of the Undying (1891).

References and Further Reading Aristotle. Rhetoric and Poetics.Trans.W. Rhys Roberts. New York, NY: Modern Library, 1984. Ballanytine,Archibald.“Wardour Street English.” Longman’s Magazine, 12 (October 1888): 585–94. Boos, Florence S. History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2015. –––––. “Love Is Enough as Secular Theology.” Papers on Language and Literature, 24 (Winter 1988): 53–80. Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1904. Chorley, H. F.“Review of The Defence of Guenevere.” Athenaeum, 3 April 1858: 427–28. Colvin, Sidney.“Review of Love Is Enough.” Fortnightly Review, ns. 13 (January 1873): 147–48. Drinkwater, John. Victorian Poetry. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923.

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David Latham –––––. William Morris:A Critical Study. London: Martin Secker, 1912. Eliot, George. George Eliot Letters. Vol. 4. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1955. Eliot, T. S. “Andrew Marvell.” Times Literary Supplement, 31 March 1921: 201–02. Rpt. in Selected Essays 1917–1932. London: Faber, 1932, 299–301. –––––. Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 1909–1962. London: Faber, 1963. –––––.“Hamlet and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood. 1920. London: Methuen, 1950. Faulkner, Peter. William Morris:The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1973. Frye, Northrop. The Double Vision.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Garnett, Richard.“Review of The Defence of Guenevere.” Literary Gazette, 6 March 1858: 226–27. Hansen, Ingrid. William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890. London:Anthem Press, 2013. James, Henry.“Review of The Life and Death of Jason.” North American Review, 106 (October 1867): 688–92. Knight, Joseph.“Review of The Life and Death of Jason.” Sunday Times, 9 June 1867: 7. Latham, David. “Introduction.” Poems by the Way by William Morris. Bristol:Thoemmes, 1994, v–xxxiv. Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris. 2 vols. London: Longmans, 1899. Morris, William. The Aeneids of Virgil Done into English Verse. London: Ellis & White, 1876. –––––. Atalanta’s Race and Other Tales from The Earthly Paradise. Ed. Oscar Fay Adams and William J. Rolfe. Boston, MA:Tichnor, 1888. –––––. Chants for Socialists. London: Socialists League Office, 1885. –––––. Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1895. –––––. Collected Letters of William Morris. Ed. Norman Kelvin. 4 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984–96. –––––. Collected Works of William Morris. Ed. May Morris. 24 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1910–15. –––––. The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems. Ed. Margaret A. Lourie. New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 1981. –––––.“Early Literature of the North – Iceland.” In The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris. Ed. Eugene LeMire. Detroit, MI:Wayne State University Press, 1969, 179–98. –––––. The Earthly Paradise. 1868–70. Ed. Florence S. Boos. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 2002. –––––.“The Gothic Revival I.” In The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris. Ed. Eugene LeMire. Detroit, MI:Wayne State University Press, 1969, 54–74. –––––. The Life and Death of Jason. 1867. In Collected Works of William Morris.Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. –––––. Love Is Enough; or the Freeing of Pharamond: A Morality. 1873. In Collected Works.Vol. 9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. –––––. News from Nowhere and Other Writings. Ed. Clive Wilmer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. –––––. Poems by the Way. 1891. In Collected Works of William Morris. Vol. 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. –––––. The Roots of the Mountains. London: Reeves and Turner, 1890. –––––.“Scenes from the Fall of Troy.” In Collected Works of William Morris.Vol. 24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. –––––. Signs of Change. 1888. In Collected Works.Vol. 23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. –––––. The Story of the Glittering Plain Which Has Been also Called the Land of Living Men or the Acre of the Undying. London: Reeves and Turner, 1891. –––––. “The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice.” 1869. In Collected Works.Vol. 24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. –––––. The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs. 1876. In Collected Works.Vol. 12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. –––––. The Sundering Flood. 1897. London: Longmans, Green, 1898. –––––. A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse. London: Reeves and Turner, 1889. –––––. The Water of the Wondrous Isles. London: Longmans, Green, 1897. –––––. The Well at the World’s End. London: Longmans, Green, 1896. –––––. William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist. Ed. May Morris. 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1936. –––––. The Wood Beyond the World. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1894. Morris, William and Eiríkr Magnússon. Völsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda. 1870. In Collected Works.Vol. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pater,Walter.“English Literature.” In Essays from ‘The Guardian.’ London: Macmillan, 1910. –––––. Imaginary Portraits. London: Macmillan, 1887.

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Making Pictures: Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite Poetics –––––.“Poems by William Morris.” Westminster Review, 90 (October 1868): 300–12. –––––. The Renaissance.The 1893 Text. Ed. Donald Hill. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980. Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York, NY: New Directions,1954, 3–14. “Review of The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems.” Ecclesiastic and Theologian, 20 (March 1858): 159–70. “Review of The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems.” Saturday Review, 20 September 1858: 506–07. “Review of The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems.” Spectator, 27 February 1858: 238. “Review of The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems.” The Tablet, 19 April 1858: 266. “Review of Love Is Enough.” Athenaeum, 23 November 1872: 657–58. “Review of Love Is Enough.” London Quarterly Review, 4 April 1873: 243–46. “Review of Love Is Enough.” Spectator, 11 January 1873: 49–50. “Review of The Roots of the Mountains.” Spectator, 8 February 1890: 208–09. “Review of Sigurd the Volsung.” Literary World, 7 (February 1877): 136–37. Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1903–12. Rutherford,Andrew.“Morris’‘The Nymph’s Song to Hylas’ (‘A Garden By the Sea’).” Explicator, 14 (March 1956): 36. Saintsbury, George. A History of English Prose Rhythm. London: Macmillan, 1912. Shirley [John Skelton].“A Raid among the Rhymers.” Fraser’s Magazine, 61 (June 1860): 814–28. Swinburne,A. C. “Morris’s Life and Death of Jason.” Fortnightly Review, ns. 79 (March 1903): 19–28. –––––. The Swinburne Letters.Vol. 2. Ed. Cecil Lang. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1959. –––––. Under the Microscope. London: D.White, 1872. Tennyson, Alfred. Idylls of the King. In Poems of Alfred Tennyson. 3 vols. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Longmans, 1987. Thomas, Dylan. Collected Poems. New York, NY: New Directions, 1957. Tucker, Herbert F. “All for the Tale:The Epic Macropoetics of Morris’ Sigurd the Volsung.” Victorian Poetry, 34 (Autumn 1996): 373–94. Wilde, Oscar.“Mr. Morris’s Last Book.” Pall Mall Gazette, 2 March 1889: 3. Yeats, W. B. Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1926. –––––.“The Happiest of the Poets.” Fortnightly Review, 1 March 1903: 535–41. Rpt. in The Collected Works of W.B.Yeats.Vol. 4. Ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein. London: Macmillan, 2007, 42–50. –––––. Letters of W.B.Yeats. Ed.Allan Wade. London: Hart-Davis, 1954. –––––.“The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry.” The Collected Works of W.B.Yeats.Vol. 4. Ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein. London: Macmillan, 2007, 51–72. –––––.“Preface.”Cuchulain of Muirthemne. London: J. Murray, 1902. Rpt. in Explorations. London: Macmillan, 1962, 3–12.

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12 WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION William Whitla

William Morris identified himself as one who “loathe[s] so all Classical art and literature” (Socialist Diary, 26 January 1887) because “the highly cultivated Greek citizen … was mostly a prig … [and] the energetic public-spirited Roman … was mainly a jailer. … Roman civilised society had come to be composed in the main of a privileged class of very rich men … of their hangers-on forming a vast parasitical army; of a huge population of miserable slaves; and of another population of free men (so-called) kept alive by doles of food, and … theatrical and gladiatorial shows” (Commonweal 26 July, 1890).1 Nevertheless, in his list of “100 Best Books” submitted to the Pall Mall Gazette (2 February 1886), Morris includes the Homeric epics, Hesiod, and Herodotus as “Bibles,” as having “grown up from the very hearts of the people.” He also includes Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes,Theocritus, Lucretius, and Catullus, as well as Plutarch, amongst the ancients. Most of the Latin (that is, Roman) writers he calls “sham classics,” perhaps because of their imitation of Greek precedents, while admitting Virgil and Ovid for their “archaeological value.” It is clear from such passages—and there are many more that analyze chattel-slavery in ancient cultures—that a large part of Morris’s dislike for the literature, art, and architecture of Greece and Rome came from his antipathy to the social conditions in which it flourished. Morris was himself educated in the classics, and he kept up a lively interest and activity in Greek and Latin throughout his life. Furthermore, he shared with his own nineteenth-century culture the weight of classicism in so many areas of life; to the landed aristocracy and the moneyed bourgeois, the classics were the entry into elite and cultured society, the world of literary learning, studied allusion and reference in speech and writing, and differentiation on the basis of classical education from those who had it not. It was the prerogative of men, and only a few women.2 It was expected of the governing class, at all levels; it was a requirement for the professions and institutions of the land, and for the civil and foreign service. Its marks were cultivation, taste, and refinement both in personal pursuits like reading, hobbies, and entertainment as well as in domestic and public life (Stray 58−82).Yet he was, as J.W. Mackail (himself a noted classicist and Morris’s first biographer) says,“a very fair classical scholar” (1.26), contributing substantially to Victorian interest in and knowledge of the classical world, and known for a now lost emendation to Pindar (Mackail 1. 180). Hitherto, little attention has been devoted to Morris’s exposure to the classics at either Marlborough College or at Oxford, apart from brief allusions by his biographers to his dislike 302

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of his studies there and in short annotations to some of his letters of the period. It is a different matter with his writings from The Life and Death of Jason (1867) on, including The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) and related poems. An older study in German deals with Morris and the ancient world and the Middle Ages (Küster). Morris’s translations of The Aeneids of Virgil (1875) and The Odyssey of Homer (1887) received both contemporary reviews and one critical article each in 1937 and 1941, and some very recent renewed interest; his calligraphic manuscripts of Virgil and Horace have continued to attract critics and admirers (see below). Critics are now examining an early poem from the 1850s,“Scenes from the Fall of Troy” (Wright), and one late classical translation, part of Homer’s Iliad (Whitla, Iliad).The single recent overview of Morris’s debt to the classics is by Stephen Harrison, though this short essay neglects a number of areas discussed below. This chapter outlines Morris’s often ambivalent relationship to the classics of Greece and Rome by examining five categories: first, his formation in the classics; second, his direct translation of them; third, his adaptations of the classics; fourth, their influence on his polemical writings; and finally, his calligraphic manuscripts of classical writers.

Formation Throughout Morris’s education at his public school and at Oxford, the emphasis was almost entirely devoted to the Greek and Latin languages and had almost nothing to do with what was written about, or with historical contexts. Such were the requirements at Oxford, Cambridge, and the Scottish universities, so the public and grammar schools had to comply to place their students there.Writing of his experiences of this system, Morris’s friend, classmate, and life-long collaborator Edward Burne-Jones candidly told a friend in 1854 of what was required: “The chief points will be the Latin writing and accuracy of translation. In both, the first aim must be to render the meaning of a passage as plainly and perspicuously as possible: then ornament of diction, periods, antitheses, &c. may come in, but above all let the first attention be given to the [grammatical] matter, not the [poetic] form of either” (Burne-Jones 1. 98). Corroboration came from Adam Storey Farrar in 1856:“It may seem almost superfluous to remark that the acquaintance with the [Greek and Latin] authors required in his first examination is almost entirely restricted to a knowledge of the languages in which they wrote and has little concern with the subject matter of their works” (9).The exhausting ordeal of cramming for Finals and the barren fixation upon philological disputes and cruces pushed the assimilation of classical culture far from the minds of undergraduates. What was required was that a student had to translate “backwards and forwards from Xenophon and Thucydides or Plato in Greek, and from Cicero in Latin” (Farrar 20). For the Gospels, “accurate knowledge of the text only” was required, it being “the object of the student to obtain such an acquaintance with the [Gospels] … as may enable him to pass creditably to himself and to the Christian character which we all profess” (Farrar 22). Morris was appalled with the casual neglect of real learning and scholarship and the historical context that would bring the classics to life. He never recovered from this intellectual abuse.To the end of his life, the educational system and the intellectual life of modern Oxford were matters about which he remained bitterly prejudiced, and the name of “Don” was used by him as a synonym for all that was narrow, ignorant, and pedantic (Mackail 1. 34).

Marlborough College Having entered Marlborough College at the age of thirteen in February 1848, only five years after its founding, Morris stood seventh out of fourteen boys at the end of his first term in 303

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midsummer 1848. Thrown into the turmoil of a new school, vastly over-enrolled and grossly understaffed, he had to present his daily lessons orally, amongst boys from each form—some three-hundred plus of his school-mates from the second to the fifth forms, crammed into the same noisy and almost unheated great schoolroom. From the beginning he was required to parse and explain the grammar and syntax of a range of Latin and Greek authors: Sophocles’ Oedipus and Ajax, Thucydides, Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, Horace’s Odes, and Livy, together with the Gospel of Mark (in Greek), and accompanying commentaries, like Ernst Bojesen’s Roman Antiquities and Barthold Niebuhr’s Lectures on Roman History. His standing ranged from his worst (13th out of 13 boys) at Christmas 1850 to his best (3rd out of 15) at midsummer 1849. By and large he stood, as he claimed, about the middle. Some of the examination papers on which Morris was examined have survived; they required a detailed knowledge of the grammar and syntax of the set texts, some historical and literary background, and double translation of prose and verse from and into both Greek and Latin. He must have learned far more than the “next to nothing” that he claimed (for details of his classical studies and life there, see Whitla “‘I Learned’”).

Exeter College, Oxford Admitted to an over-crowded Exeter College, Oxford, by the matriculation or entrance examinations of June 1852, Morris was subject to the New Examination Statute of 1850 that mandated three sets of examinations for classics (called Literae Humaniores [humane letters] or “Greats”). Responsions tested a student’s working knowledge of Greek and Latin, written when a student first came into residence. Morris wrote his Responsions about 21–24 March 1853. He was examined on one Greek author (chosen from among Homer, any two plays by an ancient Greek dramatist, or any two to four books of one of the Greek historians); one Latin author (chosen from Virgil’s Aeneid*3 —five books—Horace’s Odes,* Juvenal,* three plays by Terence and specified selections from the Roman historians and essayists—such as Livy, Sallust, and Cicero—all of which he had in numerous editions in his library at his death*); on Euclid* (books 1 and 2); and in arithmetic. He also had translation from English to Latin, a grammatical paper, and a paper on mathematics (“Questions for Responsions”). About a year later, Morris sat his first “public” examinations (written papers followed by oral or viva voce examinations) in what were called Moderations (or “Smalls”)—very likely just before Easter 1854, on 10–13 April—covering Greek and Latin languages and literatures, especially the poets and orators. The set authors were those listed for Responsions, with extended selections—for instance, for Homer, six more books; and Virgil, six more books of the Aeneid as well as the Georgics. Translation from Latin and Greek was required— from Virgil* (Aeneid and Georgics), and Cicero* (five orations), and from Homer* (Odyssey), Sophocles (Oedipus and Electra), and Euripides (Hecuba, Medea, and Alcestis), as well as at least two more Latin authors (one from Horace,* Juvenal,* Lucretius,* Terence* (four plays), Plautus (four plays), and Propertius; and one of Livy* or Tacitus* (Annales 1–6 or Histories). As with Responsions, there was a comprehensive examination paper on Greek and Latin grammar as well as a paper on either the Logic (in Latin, dating from 1691) of Henry Aldrich or two papers on mathematics—on Algebra and Euclid’s Geometry*; and Divinity (the four Gospels in Greek). Morris sat his Finals in December 1855, covering Greek and Roman history (Herodotus,* Thucydides,* and Livy*) and philosophy (Plato’s Republic,* Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics,* Politics and Rhetoric), a paper in Divinity, and the four Gospels in Greek. In each case, he was writing the examinations shortly after the new reforms in examinations had been inaugurated.4 304

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By 10 December 1855, Morris had emerged from the flames newly forged, his name written among those who had satisfied the requirements for the degree, signing his name in the University Register as “Gulielmus Morris e Coll. Exon” and dated “April 2 E/1856 Termino S. Hilarii 1856.”

“The Mosque Rising in the Place of the Temple of Solomon” While at Oxford, Morris experimented with writing both verse and prose—the former as his entry for the Newdigate Prize in poetry and other early poems, and the latter as contributions to the new journal that he founded, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, whose first number appeared on 1 January 1856. The topic for the Newdigate Prize Poem competition for 1855 was “The Mosque Rising in the Place of the Temple of Solomon,” highly relevant in light of the Crimean War and the Eastern Question concerning the role of Turkey and Russia in limiting access by Christians, Jews, and Moslems to the holy places of Jerusalem. In addition, archaeological disputes raged about the Temple Mount itself. Although Morris did not win, his entry has survived (for an edited version discussing sources and context, see Whitla, “Mosque Rising”). Morris drew on numerous biblical sources for the history of the site as well as a wealth of other references. He used Josephus* and probably the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius,* but he also began to draw on medieval Latin sources like William of Tyre’s thirteenth-century Historia [History of the Deeds Beyond the Sea], translated by William Caxton (1481)* and later printed at the Kelmscott Press in 1893. While distancing himself from approving of the Crusaders’ violence, Morris retains some of the descriptions of bloodshed in the medieval Latin and Old French chroniclers. At the same time, he avoids conventional racialist positions and the nationalistic partisanship of contemporary politics and religion as they reacted to Moslem control of the holy places and the plight of the Jews in contemporary Jerusalem.

Morris’s Library Morris’s formation and development as a solid classicist was supported by his own library. From an early age, certainly from his time at Oxford, when he had signed his name in his copy of Horace,* he collected books. He continued to acquire books that were useful to him in his writing, design work (like the family copy of John Gerard’s Herball* of 1633), and political activities, as well as for recreational reading, like his collection of Walter Scott.* From his time at Red House (1860–65), Morris had been acquiring early printed books, many in classical and medieval Latin like Sebastian Brant’s Stultifera Navis* (1497)—and others that interested him. Late in his life, he became a voracious manuscript and book collector to furnish materials for his study of early printed books, typography, and book design for the Kelmscott Press. But he also collected nineteenth-century books, possessing more than a thousand of them. Morris first began buying important early printed books in about 1864, when he was introduced to the bookseller and printer F. S. Ellis, by Algernon Swinburne (Needham 22). Among the books he bought was a copy of Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus* (Ulm, 1473), a book he parted with, but reacquired as a better copy later and claimed as one of his favourite books:“The subject-matter of the book also makes it one of the most interesting, giving it opportunity for setting forth the medieval reverence for the classical period, without any of the loss of romance on the one hand, and epical sincerity and directness on the other, which the flood-tide of Renaissance rhetoric presently inflicted on the world.” Here Morris’s affection for story-telling draws an important connection between medieval Latin books and classical progenitors, as well as an antipathy for later (“Renaissance”) rhetorical over-elaboration. Such Latin texts from the Middle Ages and 305

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early Renaissance are part of his debt to Latin as a classical language filtered through the medieval world, as Mackail says:“His reading in mediæval Latin had been immense” (1. 321–22). The first catalogue of his books was written by Morris and his daughter, May (1876), containing thirteen manuscripts and 291 printed books (Needham 22–25) that included a Latin manuscript of Xenophon* in a humanist script, several other Latin texts (French and Italian Bibles—bought chiefly for their illustrations), and other works by the early printers. Probably it was a small part of his library that he disposed of in 1880, not, as Mackail claimed (as in 2. 97) to lay the proceeds on “the altar of Socialism,” but, as daughter May claimed, “for the cares of a house and of business,” the family having just taken over Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, and the Firm having acquired Merton Abbey for larger-scale fabric and wallpaper printing, weaving, and stained-glass production. Other small catalogues followed, but the largest account is the sale of books after his death, now numbering over 2,400 printed books and manuscripts— all described on-line, cumulating many other sources at The Library of William Morris:A Catalogue by William S. Peterson and Sylvia Holton Peterson at https://williammorrislibrary.wordpress. com/ (accessed 3 March 2020). In the 1890s, Morris collected especially in two areas, medieval manuscripts and incunabula (books printed before 1500).At his death in 1896, Morris had well over 800 early printed books, including some very fine early sixteenth-century copies and over 100 manuscripts. Morris had a large and fully representative and valuable collection of early printing from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; a working library on early woodblock illustration; a strong collection of the classics, many in fifteenth and sixteenth-century printings; the major works of English literature; and a specialized collection relating to his hobbies and work. For instance, he had seven copies of Livy’s History of Rome, five in Latin dating from 1484 to 1539 and two in English (1600, 1686); and seventeen copies of Cicero’s works, ten from the fifteenth century and five from the sixteenth century. Such early printings were important in establishing the reception of classical authors in Europe. More or less the same tale could be told for Plato, Aristotle,Thucydides, Caesar, Lactantius, Pliny, Ovid, Plutarch, Boethius, and others, many with humanist introductions, as well as a representative collection of the Greek and Latin Church Fathers, including Basil (3),Augustine (15 texts),Ambrose (4), Bonaventura (5), and Jerome (11) through to Thomas Aquinas (11). Morris’s library contained books that had important typography, some later used as models for his own fonts at the Kelmscott Press (Pietro Aretino’s Historia Fiorentina, Venice: Jacobus Rubeus, 1476 and Pliny’s Historia Naturalis,Venice: Nicolaus Jenson, 1476, in Italian). Among his Latin texts were several important devotional Books of Hours, the Nottingham Psalter, the Windmill Psalter, the Grey-Fitzpayne Hours, the Huntingfield Psalter, and the Tiptoft Missal and the Sherbrooke Missal—all with magnificent illuminations—as well as an English Bestiary. The last manuscript he bought was a twelfth-century psalter from St. Albans that Morris called “The Golden Psalter” (BL Add. MS 81084) because of the illuminated initial letters in gold for each psalm. As his daughter recorded,“It was, I believe, the last manuscript he handled and talked of a day or two before his death” (Collected Works 24. xxvii) on 3 October 1896.

Translations In the nineteenth century, and especially from the 1860s, in the midst of a Hellenic revival, the translation of Homer or Virgil, as well as the metrics used in long poems with a classical setting, had fairly direct political implications, becoming aligned with one of two sides of the critical establishment. On one side were the “analysts,” the followers of F.A.Wolf who, in Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey were compiled long after “Homer,” who 306

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himself had been a simple and illiterate bard who sang heroic lays that now, with their innumerable accretions over time, became the objects of scientific, historical, and philological excavation. On the other side were the “unitarians” who, as Robert Fowler claims,“argued for a great poet’s involvement at a late stage in their [the Homeric poems’] evolution [and identified aspects of] Homer’s literary art” (221; West 386). A host of other questions arose: Is Homer describing a literal war based on fact, or is he entirely mythological? Are the events and society depicted located in the Bronze Age (1700–1200 BCE) or the Iron Age (1200–800 BCE)? When did Homer live? When were the poems composed? When were they written down? (see Cline).The issue came to be known as “The Homeric Question,” greatly proliferating in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, with questions about the oral transmission of long poems and many other problems (Fowler 220−32; Nagy;West). Gladstone tried to accommodate the pantheon of Homeric gods to the Christian Trinity as part of the divine dispensation. Matthew Arnold’s polemical defence of the unitarian position in On Translating Homer (1860–61) tended to relocate Homer to an ideal of Hellenism located in fifth-century Athens (Turner Greek 170–86), declaring that his epics—and so also his translators should be—“rapid in movement; plain in speech; simple in thought, and noble” (1861: 66). Such reinscription of Homer was called into question by the evidence of the spade when Heinrich Schliemann excavated Troy and other ancient cities, published his results, and reanimated Homer’s descriptions as valid historical accounts of late Bronze-age culture, and in particular the validity of Homer’s description of Odysseus’ house in Ithaca and its likeness to the hall of the Sagas,5 with which Morris agreed, as he argued in “Art and Socialism” (1884). Wolf ’s questioning of Homer raised questions about other received texts, such as the Bible (see Shea and Whitla 57–58) and Virgil (see Turner Greek 284–321).Was B. G. Niebuhr right that his History of Rome (3 vols. 1847–51) could reconstruct Rome’s early history from even earlier ballads—an oral tradition that was denied to Virgil who had to borrow so much from Homer? Was Virgil’s praise of Augustus mere sycophantism, or did his prophecy of empire provide a precedent and even an analogy for the British Empire (Victoria was declared Empress of India in 1876), as some critics suggested later in the century (Turner Contesting 293−302, 304, 311; Vance Victorians 222−46)? Morris translated three texts from the classics, publishing two: from Latin,Virgil’s Aeneid; and from Greek, Homer’s Odyssey. He also began a translation of the Iliad but abandoned it part way through book 1.There are only five studies about these texts.6

The Aeneids of Virgil (1875) Morris noted the beginning of the Aeneid translation:“1874, December 14th. Monday I began my translation of the Aeneid and did that week 131 lines” (Collected Works 11. xxi). He used the second edition of Virgil with notes by John Conington and Henry Nettleship (Conington Virgili Opera (1865–71)* in three volumes. He also had a copy of Conington’s two volumes of Micellaneous Writings.* A year later Morris published The Aeneids of Virgil Done into English Verse on 4 November, 1875, dated 1876. Morris translated Virgil in rhyming iambic heptameters, the metre chosen by George Chapman for his Iliads of Homer (1598–1616)* and influenced by both the title and the heptameters of The Thirteene Bookes of Aeneidos by Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne (1620).* We know that he was often designing while simultaneously reading or repeating Virgil’s Latin or Homer’s Greek, jotting down lines of translation, and taking up his brush again (Sparling 37). From the heptameter metrics it is evident that Morris is repudiating Matthew Arnold’s championing of the use hexameters for translations of Greek and Roman epics into English (Arnold). Furthermore, Morris is making a point about his position 307

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in relation to scholarship about the early history of Rome, the development of Virgil’s text, and the place of Virgil in Victorian culture.7 The reception of Virgil by Victorian readers had long been ingrained through schoolboy lessons and parliamentary debate, but his denigration when compared to Homer’s original and supposedly primitive genius and exciting narrative was characteristic of the first half of the century. Only from the writings of Conington, Charles Merivale (Romans under the Empire, 1856), Henry Nettleship, and William Sellar did Virgil’s star rise, based on a re-examination of Aeneas’ piety and sense of duty, Rome’s providential destiny, and the increasingly favourable estimate of Augustus and the Roman Empire (Vance Victorians 139–43; 222−46; Turner Contesting 296–317). Among these other issues was the question of whether Virgil used or neglected the legendary history of Rome from Ennius and others, and the relation of Virgil to the prose histories of Varro and Tacitus (Momigliano).Two problems were central: how far was Virgil reshaping traditional folk materials into his poem as opposed to writing a civic epic, and how far is the Aeneid to be identified with the triumphs of Augustan imperial expansion as opposed to a mythological recounting of originary myths? Translations of Virgil’s Latin hexameters and diction in the Aeneid raised the question about whether Virgil could be read as harking back to the folk historical ballads of the founding of Rome, or the polished verse of a civic elite. Morris’s translation of Virgil, as we shall see, identifies him with the advocates for the theory of the “primitive cultures” hidden in the classical epics in a suppressed stream of history, one that Morris links with the Gothic and the barbaric energy of northern invaders that led to the collapse of Roman civilization, and hence suggests a critique of British imperialism.This point comes out more clearly in his views on the classical world in his lectures of 1884 (see below). This Virgilian Question was articulated by John Conington, from the moment he was appointed to the Corpus Chair of Latin at Oxford in 1854, the first such chair in Britain. In his inaugural lecture, he makes a case for the study of Latin, stressing its value as a transmitter of the culture of the classical world to modern Europe. He also draws attention to Latin as an instrument of “culture” and “cultivation” in contemporary England. Conington is describing an ancient trope, known as translatio studii, the transmission of culture, with all of its authority and prestige from a source to a target culture that welcomes it, seeking to accommodate and naturalize it as its own, seen in the transference from Greece to Rome, and pre-eminently from Rome to the court of Charlemagne (Conington Miscellaneous 2. 214; Curtius; Budick and Iser; Rogerson). Conington’s successor and collaborator in his edition of Virgil, Henry Nettleship, and a wide range of classicists and historians increasingly read Virgil as the apologist for imperial Rome, conscripting his epic for British imperial projects at home.They read it as a potent instrument in the transfer or transmission of imperial rule (translatio imperii). So J. R. Seeley in “Roman Imperialism” (1869) drew comparisons between the Augustan empire and those of modern Europe, especially the British Empire.William Sellar’s The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age:Virgil (1877) identifies Virgil with the imperial aspirations of the Augustan Age, and by strong implications with the British Empire: “The germ of the Aeneid … is to be sought in the national idea and sentiment, in the imperial position of Rome, in her marvellous destiny, and in its culmination in the Augustan Age. … The Aeneid is the epic of national fortunes” (297). Closely resembling Seeley, Sellar explains:“The higher and humaner belief [is] that the ultimate mission of Rome is to give law and peace to the world. … In this way Virgil softens and humanises the idea of the Imperial State, representing her as not only the conqueror but the civiliser of the ancient world, and the transmitter of that civilisation to the world of the future” (324–25). A similar argument is made by Morris’s friend and biographer, the classicist, J.W. Mackail:“[Virgil] was from the first the prophet of Roman Empire; and he was accepted later as the precursor or 308

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herald of the spiritual Rome, in which the divine will was to be accomplished and the divine order made manifest to the world. He fixed for the imagination of the Roman race, and of the nations which it subdued or incorporated, the limit of its aspiration and achievement, the very sea-mark of its utmost sail” (Virgil 14). To Mackail, “Virgil … is joint creator of a present and actual ideal, the largest perhaps which has yet been placed before mankind; he is the poet and prophet of no mere League of Nations, but of a single world-commonwealth, and of the fulfilment of the divine purpose in an ordered and universal peace” (140). Against this imperial reading of Virgil, Conington translated The Aeneid of Virgil in 1866 into the thirteen-line extended ballad metre, as in Scott’s Marmion (1808). In his preface Conington writes that above all,“even the ballad-like peculiarities of Scott have some similarity to the epic common-place which Virgil felt himself obliged by the nature of his work to borrow from Homer” (xi). By choosing a variant of the ballad stanza, as elaborated by Scott, Conington is standing against Arnold on Homer in the metrical battles over the classical epic: Arms and the man I sing, who first, By Fate of Ilian realm amerced, To fair Italia onward bore, And landed on Lavinium’s shore … (Conington 1.1–4) 8 Morris’s own choice of metre, then, suggests, like Conington’s, that Virgil’s epic is a composite work from many sources, made up of layered materials drawn together from more ancient folk traditions.The point is re-enforced by Morris’s rhymed heptameters with their varied use of the caesura. Morris makes it possible for two of his lines to be read as the conventional ballad metre, four and three-stress lines (alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines) with the second and fourth rhyming. Contemporary critics noted this very point:“Mr. Morris’s metre, the long ballad verse, sets the whole poem … to a national and popular music” (Nettleship in Faulkner 222). He thereby identifies by his prosody his alignment with the “primitives” and also with Conington, whose Latin text he used to make his translation: I sing of arms, I sing of him, who from the Trojan land Thrust forth by Fate, to Italy and that Lavinian strand First came: all tost about was he on earth and on the deep By heavenly might for Juno’s wrath, that had no mind to sleep: And plenteous war he underwent ere he his town might frame And set his Gods in Latian earth, whence is the Latin name, And father-folk of Alba-town, and walls of mighty Rome. (Morris 1. 1–7) The difference between Morris and Conington’s translations, of course, is that Morris’s is usually a line-for-line translation, as Stephen Harrison says,“generally close to the original” (572), while Conington’s extends over many more lines because of his verse form.9 Morris is careful not to fall prey to conventional metres for Virgil, or, as Arnold advocated, hexameters—or heroics or blank verse (as in translations by Singleton, 1855; Miller, 1863; Rose, 1867; and Cranch, 1872; see also Prins; Tucker 602–26). Contemporary critics praised Morris’s general literalness, his effort by and large to give only words for which there are corresponding words in the Latin, and to keep to a line-for-line equivalence, no mean task. Furthermore, his edition is line-numbered, so easy comparison with the Latin editions is available for anyone to check. In his diction, Morris extended the conventions he had experimented with earlier in “Scenes from the Fall of Troy” (see below). Using language that echoes the sagas and imitates to some 309

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degree Middle-English alliterative verse, he is able to suggest that Virgil’s settings, both geographical and psychological, as well as the descriptions of locale, occur within a northern and popular-folk tradition but that they also capture Virgil’s own archaism. Although Arnold had rejected with hostility archaism in translating the classics, other contemporary reviewers praised Morris for it. The reviewer in the Athenaeum praises Morris’s “exceeding literalness” surpassing “all Vergilian translators” in “fidelity and accuracy,” and his “use of archaic words” which is “at least as defensible as Vergil’s own” (Faulkner 218–19). Nettleship refers to Morris’s “most Virgilian choice … of antiquarian language” (Faulkner 223).10 Morris was not alone, for his friend Dante Rossetti had called the third poem in his 1870 Poems “Troy Town,” telling of Cupid’s arrow that strikes both Helen and Paris, and its resulting catastrophe: “Tall Troy’s on fire!” Stephen Harrison points out the debt here to Chaucer’s “Troie town” (Troilus and Criseyde 4.5; 574).A recent biographer, referring to the “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” describes Morris’s Troy as “spired, gabled, redroofed and filled with towers, turn[ing] out to be a town like Bruges or Chartres” (MacCarthy 190–91). Others, less kind, claimed he employed “Wardour-Street English,” named after a street of London furniture dealers who specialized in reproduction “antique” furniture—hence a fake colouring of archaisms to lend a vintage flavour. 11 Hence, by Morris’s metrics—and by his diction in such decisive passages as Aeneids 6: 847–53: “But thou, O Roman, look to it the folks of earth to sway” (not translated as Rome’s wielding rule over the nations by means of supreme power)—Morris is adopting an oppositional stance to the imperial view, the translatio imperii, of Virgil, and is translating him as one of the poets of the people.

The Odyssey of Homer (1887) During the twelve years after the Aeneids in 1876, Morris continued his numerous designs for the Firm; he published Sigurd the Volsung in 1876, dated 1877, The Pilgrims of Hope (1886), and A Dream of John Ball (1888); he visited Italy (for the second time); he read Karl Marx; he became deeply involved in political issues, first as a liberal over the Eastern Question, then as a socialist; he lectured up and down the country; he contributed almost 500 signed articles to two journals (Justice and Commonweal); he established several art and political societies (the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Hammersmith Branch of the Social Democratic Federation, and later, the Socialist League); and, amazingly, he found time to translate the Odyssey. When the Aeneids had come out, Morris sent a copy to Swinburne, who wrote back to thank him and asked for “a Homer, or at least an Odyssey: I am certain that no poet was ever born who could do his country that service better or so well” (Swinburne Letters 3. 85). Morris worked on the translation for over a year, from December 1885 (Collected Works 13. xxiv). By the end of October 1886, he had reached the end of Book 10. By the end of March 1887, he thought he could get volume I from the publishers, and he had finished by the end of August (Collected Works 13. xiv). All was completed in a year and a half; the first volume was issued in April and the second in November 1887 at 12/a volume on handmade paper, the popular edition in one volume later in the same year. Morris used the same metre he had worked out for Sigurd the Volsung, rhyming accented hexameters made up of irregularly occurring anapestic and iambic feet with occasional amphibrachs to suggest something of the classical quantitative hexameters (with their dactyls and spondees).While this measure was not the hexameter recommended by Arnold—he wanted a version of the dactylic hexameter (Prins)—in Morris’s hands, it lacks the strict regularity Arnold wanted. Morris, however, controls its cadences and varieties of feet with great dexterity, as in the account of the still concealed Odysseus who is recognized by his old hunting dog,Argus:

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Lo a hound his head was uplifting and pricking his ears as he lay, E’en Argus, the hound of Odysseus, whom he bred in the earlier day … But now so soon as he noted Odysseus drawing anear He wagged his tail, and fawning he laid down either ear, But had no might to drag him nigher from where he lay To his master, who beheld him and wiped a tear away … But the murky doom of the death-day of Argus now took hold When he had looked on Odysseus in this the twentieth year. (17:291–327) As in the heptameters of the Aeneids, in these hexameters the caesuras are distributed occasionally away from after the fourth foot to avoid monotony and to vary the musical and rhythmic cadence, and they are linked with alliteration and assonance, sometimes carried over from line to line for aural continuity. Reviewers singled out and quoted for special praise such narrative and descriptive high-points as the embarkation of Telemachus (2: 420–28); the landing of Odysseus on Phaeacia (5: 391–405); Circe (10: 506–18); the visit to Hades, especially to Tiresias (11: 100–37); the slaying of the Suitors (22: 241–90); and the description to wondering Penelope of the great bed that Odysseus had made for her (23: 181–208). Throughout, the delicacy of the descriptions of the goddesses, especially Athene, and the intimacy in which Penelope is portrayed give the greater contrast with the way that Morris aligns the representation of masculine violence with the ‘primitive’ Homer, depicted particularly in Morris’s Anglo-Saxonisms. Morris’s opening lines again exposed him to the charges of archaism, despite his efforts at linefor-line translation: Tell me, O Muse, of the Shifty,12 the man who wandered afar, After the Holy Burg,Troy-town, he had wasted with war; He saw the towns of menfolk, and the mind of men did he learn; As he warded his life in the world, and his fellow-farers’ return, Many a grief of heart on the deep-sea flood he bore, Nor yet might he save his fellows, for all that he longed for it sore. (1: 1–6) The text of Homer that Morris used was very likely the small two-volume Greek text edited with annotations by W.W. Merry for the Clarendon Press Series (1870–78), just the kind that Morris could take with him in his pocket on the train for a bit of translation on the journey to the next lecture, as we know he did.13 His library lists no printed Greek text of either the Iliad or the Odyssey except for an inter-paged translation with the Greek text of the first six books of the Iliad (1841).* Morris did have a number of other translations, however: of the Odyssey by George Chapman ([1616]1857*), Theodore Buckley (two copies, 1853* and 1884*), Butcher and Lang (1879*), and Arthur S. Way (1886*). Of the Iliad he had George Chapman ([1598] 1865*), Kennedy-Bailie (1846*), and Lang, Leaf, and Myers (1883*). Contemporary critics (Faulkner 293–309) lined up to praise Morris’s Odyssey as “the best verse translation of any part of Homer that I have ever seen,” the diction being a “careful approximation to Homer’s manner” (E. D.A. Morshead);“the most perfect and the most satisfying … a true work of art. …These old words … can be amply justified upon historical grounds” (Oscar Wilde).At the same time, Morris’s diction is guardedly praised as “rather Norse than Greek, yet with “a vigour of life in every line” (Wilde), or roundly condemned for “all the grotesqueness, the conceits, the irrationality of the Middle Ages” (Mowbray Morris)—and with this last comment, modern readers have seemed to agree, and have left it largely unread.

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The Iliads of Homer (1887) Morris intended to continue working on Homer with a translation of the Iliad—his title Iliads borrowed from Chapman’s translation of 1598–1616.* He had written to Ellis in February, 1886, “I may do the Iliad afterwards” (Collected Letters 2. 525), and May Morris says that he intended the same thing, even completing some 200 lines probably late in 1887 after the publication in November of the second volume of the Odyssey. A critical text of this fragment covering Iliad 1: 1–212 has been published recently, with a discussion of its context, metre, and diction (see Whitla “Homer’s Iliad”). On the basis of specific words, and from a note in the catalogue of the May Morris Bequest to the British Library, it is probable that Morris used the edition of Iliad I by D. B. Monro (1878).The metre is the same as that in his translation of the Odyssey, anapestic and iambic rhyming hexameters: Sing of the wrath, O Goddess, of Achilles, Peleus’ seed, Baleful that laid on Ach⌒ æ ans ten thousand folded need That so many valiant spirits of warriors cast away Untimely unto Hades, and themselves gave to be a prey To the horned & all the fowl kind.And the will of Zeus was done. (1: 1–5) Morris’s translation is an interesting pendant to his Odyssey and gives a clear picture from the MS of his efforts to shape the lines while remaining true to his metre and literal to his source text in a line-for-line version. But the pressures of politics demanded more and more of his time, so the translation was left incomplete. He had seen the need for an Odyssey as much greater than that for an Iliad (perhaps almost over-translated): “The Odyssey is to my mind much the most interesting of the two” (Collected Letters 2. 525).The poem also meant more to him, offering as it did parallels not only with the northern sagas he was translating, but also with his own Earthly Paradise.

Adaptations From about the time that he published The Defence of Guenevere (1858), dealing in part with the great traditional medieval store of Arthurian legend, the “matter of England,” Morris also turned to the other tradition, the classical one, “the matter of Troy,” continuing with it until his final creative outburst in the Kelmscott Press, when he published William Caxton’s translation of The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in 1892. Between them came an early experiment,“Scenes from the Fall of Troy” that he never published, and two of his longest poems, The Life and Death of Jason and his vast cyclical poem of twenty-four tales, The Earthly Paradise. For all three of these poems, all written before his classical translations but in the light of the classical debates around him, Morris drew on two large bodies of Greek and Latin materials. One was the recognized corpus of classical materials from ancient Greece and Rome, from Homer to Ovid; and the second was more arcane, the body of classical and medieval Greek and Latin resources that retold the story of the Trojan War to a medieval world that did not know Homer.That tradition told of the story of Jason and the Argonauts chiefly from three classical Greek authors (Pindar, Euripides, and Apollonius of Rhodes), and one Roman, Ovid—as well as, more surprisingly, a late-medieval Latin tradition of the popularity of the Jason story at the court of Philip III of Burgundy in support of his succession. So too the twelve classically-based narratives of The Earthly Paradise rely on a variety of ancient sources, but set the narratives they tell in the context

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of a world-weary flight from disease in the fourteenth century, tales from the origins of one of the contributing civilizations to this epic Sängerkrieg or song contest. Myths of origins were important to nineteenth-century European nation states, especially as they embarked on imperialistic rivalries later in the century. Accordingly, they invoked classical and medieval myths as precedents to make claims about the transmission of power and legitimacy from other and earlier dynasties (translatio imperii) to their own. Debates about Victoria as Empress of India in 1876 and Tennyson’s appeal to Arthurian origins in The Idylls of the King are examples. Medieval England and France both invoked the matter of Troy through a Virgilian historiography that enabled the foundational genealogy of England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire to be traced to the successors of Aeneas—hence the pre-eminence of Troy rather than Greece. The Aeneid recounted how Aeneas had escaped from burning Troy, carrying his father Anchises on his back with his household gods and holding the hand of his little son, Ascanius (2: 692–730). His destiny in founding Rome, a second Troy (3: 135–91; 6: 781–853), was taken as an instance of the transference of power, authority, or sovereignty from one dynasty on the decline to another on the rise. It was also read as a translation of the culture of the former to the later, translatio studii, in which the culture of the Trojans and Greeks is translated into the culture of Latium, and thence, through the descendants of Aeneas, to medieval Europe. European nations claimed Trojan lineage, inherited through the grandson of Aeneas, Brutus of Troy, as recounted in the History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regem Britanniae, c. 1136)* by Geoffrey of Monmouth and from another mythical Trojan hero, Francio, in the Burgundian Chronicle of Fredegar of the seventh century (MacDougall; MacMaster).14 Yet another thread involved the narratives about Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece that became enmeshed in the mythology of France, especially concerning the Dukes of Burgundy. Duke Philip III (1396–1467) established in 1429 the Order of the Golden Fleece (perhaps chosen to reflect his great prosperity through the wool trade). The materials celebrating that link became important to Morris as part of the background to Jason and his links to Greek and especially Trojan material, accomplished, as we shall see, through his reference in Jason to Chaucer.15 A similar link to Chaucer (as well as to the Odyssey) is also made in The Earthly Paradise (in “L'Envoi,” and see below, p. 317).

Scenes from the Fall of Troy (1856–58?) In about 1856 or 1857, Morris began an extensive poem, “Scenes from the Fall of Troy.” May Morris describes it as “a poem in dramatic form from the story of Troy.This poem … is in blank verse with lyrics interspersed” (Collected Works 2. xiv). She says it was planned in twelve episodes: 1. Helen Arming Paris. 2.The Defiance of the Greeks. 3. Hector’s Last Battle. 4. Hector Brought Dead to Troy. 5. Helen and Paris [first draft]; [a second draft, entitled “Helen’s Chamber”]. 6. Achilles’ Love-Letter. 7.The Wedding of Polyxena. 8.The Last Fight before Troy. 9.The Wooden Horse. 10. The Descent from the Wooden Horse. 11. Helen and Menelaus. 12. Aeneas on Shipboard. Parts 4, 7, 8, 9, and 12 are marked as incomplete. Morris reversed the conventional narrative events from the position of the Greeks, perhaps to gain the vantage point of an unusual perspective, perhaps to propose an oppositional reading: both effects are achieved. His dramatic dialogues or discourses are focalized from the position of the Trojans, mostly within the city of Troy, not on the plain of battle outside the city. For the narrative content, Morris has largely abandoned Homer, going instead to four major sources, Ovid’s Heroides,* Virgil’s Aeneid,* Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,* and the late-classical and medieval re-tellings of the Troy narratives mentioned above. One further precursor, suggesting

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form as well as content, is the “Imaginary Conversation” genre developed extensively by Walter Savage Landor. These are partly modelled on the imaginary epistles of Ovid in Heroides, supposedly written by sorrowing heroines of ancient Greek and Roman mythology. One pair of double epistles is from Paris to Helen and her reply, foreshadowing Morris’s first and fifth episodes. Landor wrote some of his Imaginary Conversations first in Latin, changing the Ovidian epistle into dialogue, and later experimented extensively with them in both prose and iambic pentameter verse (1819–59). His Conversations included “Menelaus and Helen at Troy” and “The Espousals of Polyxenia” (see Landor; Peterson), covering the topics of Morris’s 7 and 11. From Aeneid 6 Morris derives material for part 11 (“Helen and Menelaus”), the narrative of Helen’s helping her erstwhile husband Menelaus to kill Deiphobus, her current lover, while he is sleeping, exhausted from the defense of Troy. From Shakespeare, Morris has derived material for Part 2 “The Defiance of the Greeks” from Troilus and Cressida 2.2 (Fontana 54–56). The late classical and medieval narratives of the story of the Trojan War derive from two supposed diaries written by a Greek participant in the war, Dictys the Cretan, and a Trojan, Dares the Phrygian, both alleged eye-witnesses.The former wrote a Chronicle of the Trojan War [Ephemeris Belli Troiani*] and Dares wrote The History of the Destruction of Troy [De Excidio Troiae Historia*], both in Greek, but surviving in Latin translations. Morris owned two early printed copies of the former and one of the latter. He used Dictys’ Historia 1:7–11 and 5:14–15 as well as Dares’ De Excido 16–17 for the content of Part 2,“The Defiance of the Greeks.” These accounts were translated and expanded into French (Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Le Roman de Troie, c. 1160) and another still later Latin version.This was Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae* [History of the Destruction of Troy] (1287; see Dictys; Guido; Benson). It was from Guido that William Caxton translated The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye* in 1475; Morris printed Caxton’s translation of Guido at the Kelmscott Press in 1892.The works by Dictys and Dares, especially as reinterpreted by Guido, changed the inherited narrative and interpretation of the Trojan War when the Iliad of Homer was only known through a Latin abridgement, and many other classical sources, especially Greek dramatic texts, were unknown in the Middle Ages. On these Morris drew for his re-interpretation of the matter of Troy as scenic dialogues, relocated in the medieval setting where the medieval Troy narratives also placed them.

The Life and Death of Jason (1867) Morris began work on his contribution to the Hellenic revival of the 1860s with The Life and Death of Jason, probably after 1865. May Morris tells us that the early title for the tale was “The Deeds of Jason”—the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, of their quest for the Golden Fleece and their return, of Medea and her relationship with Jason, and of their future destiny at Troy. From the beginning, Morris thought of Jason as the first part of The Earthly Paradise plan that he was evolving, with its mid-fourteenth-century setting. For that purpose he composed a “link” lyric to join Jason to the month poem of March at the beginning of The Earthly Paradise, a rime royal as in all of the later link poems—one omitted from both Jason and The Earthly Paradise, but one that sets the scene of the elegiac mood, the end of days, of times past, the tale told: Now must we tell what life those old men had While from the glass the last sands quickly ran Of their loved lives; they dwelt there scarcely glad And scarcely sorry, loved of every man

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In such like joyance as these elders can; Feeble, and willing life should pass away In peaceful ending to a stormy day … “Fair Sir, we hearken.”Then the kingly man The story of the Argo thus began. (Collected Works 2. 49, 52) To fit with the fourteenth-century time period of its proposed setting in The Earthly Paradise, Jason required some suitable anachronisms and archaisms. Accordingly, Morris appropriately included various details of description, action, and feeling which would be more fitting in the court of Edward III or, even more properly, a nineteenth-century view of that court as painted in Ford Madox Brown’s Chaucer Reading the Canterbury Tales at the Court of Edward III (1848–51). Because of its great length, Morris decided to publish Jason as a separate poem in late May 1867. It ran to 10,524 lines in seventeen books, in the heroic couplets that Pope had used to translate Homer, but without his rhetorical devices like chiasmus and metaphors, instead depending upon alliteration, including from line-to-line, assonance, internal rhyme, verbal repetitions, contrapuntal metre, and internal echoes, all making the poem flow back upon itself, echo itself, become retrospective, like the tale itself told back again, not acted and narrated in the present so much as a reflection on past action recalled in the present, like the following: Therefore he bade them spare The wine that night, nor look on damsels fair; But that, the feast done, all should stealthily Get to the quay, and round about to sea Turn Argo’s head, and wait like hounds in slip, Holding the oars, within the hollow ship.

[assonance: a] [assonance: a, i, o] [alliteration: s; rhyme y] [rhyme: quay, sea; assonance ou] [alliteration: h, s; assonance: i] [alliteration: h, s; assonance: o, i]

(8: 394–400) Anachronisms and medievalisms have continued to raise questions. Robert Graves, for instance, objects to Morris’s lack of historicity, for not showing “at what vantage-point of time he is standing” (26). Nor do all readers find the classical atmosphere absent: Lionel Stevenson, for instance, comments: “Anyone who can afford enough time to read the whole poem will be rewarded with a sense of having lived for a while in the clear sunlight of the ancient Aegean” (156–57). May Morris says that the classical stories in The Earthly Paradise (where Jason was originally to be placed) “are mostly taken from the obvious sources, very often from the familiar Lemprière, which I suppose this generation scarcely knows by name. But sometimes two versions are merged into one or the story-teller’s licence in modifying a legend is taken” (Collected Works, 3: xviii–xix).16 But as well as John Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica or Classical Dictionary,* it seems likely that Morris also turned to the extensive entries on Jason’s story in William Smith. He had known Smith’s volumes since his days at Marlborough, where the Adderley Library had Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (3 vols. 1849), and Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities ([1842]1853).* Morris used three major Greek sources from Pindar, Euripides, and Apollonius of Rhodes.17 The most important of Morris’s Latin sources was Ovid’s Metamorphoses* (7: 1–403), beginning with the encounters between Jason and Medea, the achieving of the fleece, and the return to Colchis. Morris used many details from Ovid not in Apollonius—the king’s pall and sceptre, details in the descriptions of Jason and the

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brazen bulls, the rising of the Earthborn (the name from Apollonius), the dragon-seed warriors and their self-slaughter, and the enchantment of the never-sleeping dragon. Ovid also supplies details about Medea’s flowing garments and bare feet when preparing her enchantments, and her plotting the death of Pelias. Morris’s apostrophe to Chaucer at the beginning of Book XVII (1–24) pays explicit tribute not to the Canterbury Tales but to Chaucer’s version of the matter of Troy in his Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385). Chaucer’s medievalizing anachronisms locate Troy in the Middle Ages and the courtly tradition as securely as Morris’s version of the Jason legends, and, of course, Morris later printed Troilus as part of his masterpiece The Works of Chaucer at the Kelmscott Press in 1896. Morris also drew on a later medieval Latin sources for the Jason material, as set down by Raoul Lefèvre, the chaplain to the cultured art patron and prince Philip III le Bon, Duke of Burgundy (1396–1467), namely L’histoire de la Conquête de la Toison d’Or [The history of the conquest of the Golden Fleece]. Lefèvre wrote to honour the Duke’s establishment of the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1429. Lefèvre was well known for his earlier Recueil des Histoires de Troyes, which Morris had in a 1702 edition.* As already mentioned, Caxton had translated it under the title of The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye* and Morris later printed this at the Kelmscott Press in 1892. The Historyes helped provide the atmosphere and setting of Jason as a knight engaged in courtly activities and conversation, very different from the classical atmosphere of Apollonius. And, of course, Lefèvre’s Conquête was almost contemporaneous with his temporal setting for The Earthly Paradise about 1400. Late in his life, Morris had prepared a type-copy of the Caxton translation of the Jason which he hoped to print, as Sydney Cockerell reports.18 It was later issued in 1913 by John Munro for the Early English Text Society. Two other late classical accounts of Jason and the Argonauts and the story of the Trojan War had changed the interpretation of the Jason story—already known to Morris from his work on the Scenes from the Fall of Troy (see above).These two late classical accounts by Dictys and Dares provided only the barest outline for the medieval expansions of the Jason story during the Middle Ages (see [Dictys and Dares] Trojan War 133–35). Dares* elaborates the story of Jason in books I–IV, concluding with the account of the first destruction of Troy by Jason and Hercules, an episode that Morris omits.We have already shown how Dares was re-translated into Benoît’s French and back again into Guido’s Latin Historia.*19 While maintaining the conventions of medieval warfare (that Morris elaborates), Guido’s popular version subverts the optimistic vindication of Trojan genealogy maintained by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and so, as Mueller argues, supports an anti-imperial genealogy in subsequent English alliterative romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the alliterative Morte Arthure, and the Siege of Jerusalem (Mueller; Benson). Morris’s Jason also repudiates any dynastic glorification and any notion that Jason is involved in any translatio imperii. At the end of the epic, Jason sits alone on his throne, longing for the lost Medea, and is unwitting of his impending demise when he is crushed by the stempost of the Argos, once the second rafter in Pelias’ hall, a symbolic termination to genealogical succession: And, ’midst all this, what honour I may win, That she may know of and rejoice therein, And come to seek me, and upon my throne May find me sitting, worshipped, and alone … Beneath the ruined stem did Jason lie, Crushed, and all dead of him that here can die. (17. 1283–1338)

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The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) By the spring of 1868, a year after Jason was published, Morris had already completed seventeen of the twenty-four tales for The Earthly Paradise, the longest poem in the English language. In their final arrangement, the tales are paired with a monthly poem, alternating the classical and northern traditions. Introduced by an “Apology,” the prologue (called “The Wanderers”) tells of a group of fourteenth-century travellers who are fleeing the bubonic plague in Norway. Having arrived at an island in the Adriatic, they meet monthly for a feast with their hosts, the Elders, to tell their reciprocating tales, framed by monthly lyrics and connecting narratives.20 Morris’s design, the telling of tales of old exploits at a feast in a context of a failed heroic quest, is a convention clearly derived from the classical epic. This central convention of the Earthly Paradise is analogous to Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, but above all to the major structural device in The Odyssey. Homer does not tell the straightforward journey of the adventures of Odysseus on his return from Troy to Ithaca. Instead he devotes an elaborate break in the narrative hitherto largely devoted to the efforts of Telemachus to facilitate his father’s return.The break recounts Odysseus’ shipwreck on Phaeacia, his discovery by Nausicaä, and his arrival at the court of Alcinoüs (Book 6).There he is received as a guest and is entertained with gymnastic displays, a feast in the assembly, and the telling of tales (Book 7).There are already some apparent links with The Earthly Paradise: the Wanderers’ quest is a kind of inverted Odyssey (Oberg 35). Odysseus is seeking home; he wishes to return to Ithaca, to Penelope and his kingdom, and he achieves his goal with the help of the gods and his legendary craftiness, slaying the suitors, reclaiming both throne and bed.The Wanderers have fled repeatedly from home territories and are on a quest not to return home, but to avoid it, and instead to achieve the most elusive of home-substitutes, paradise; thereby they are doomed to fail. Having admitted defeat in all their frustrating adventures, the Wanderers are incapable of going on, their minds broken by their shattered dreams, their bodies “old and gray before our time” (3: 79), their ship broken and leaky from the tempest; out of food and water for three days, they are delivered just at their last extremity. So, Odysseus’ mast on his raft breaks, he loses his sail and is cast adrift on a raft provided by Calypso; for two days he is protected by Poseidon, and on the third day he is cast ashore. Like the Wanderers, Odysseus is given meat and drink, like them brought with a wagon (Odysseus beside it, the Wanderers in it) to the chief city.There each is received as guest among the councillors (Book 7: 136 ff.) and tells the tale of his wanderings by sea. The Wanderers are welcomed to the city as “our living chronicle” (Collected Works 3. 80), tell the tale of their own wanderings over the sea in search of their heart’s content, and pass the time at the feasts with the telling of tales of heroes of great renown, tales “of times long passed away.” But the legends told by the Ionian Elders are part of their own inheritance, so they are hearing of their own past no less than Odysseus heard his.The central convention of the tale-telling in the context of the failed quest, then, is both a substitution—telling stories about action rather than doing deeds of action—and a self-reflexive re-telling of the same or parallel/similar stories of reiteration, whose locus classicus is the Odyssey. More obvious is the fact that Morris took his tales from the store of legend, “of stories oft besung” (Collected Works 6. 331), partly because they were familiar, partly because they come from a world already deeply immersed in the mythology of the Wanderers or their hosts, closer to the Golden Age for which they yearned. Twelve of the tales are classical in inspiration and in source material.21 For The Earthly Paradise, May Morris indicated that her father paid more attention to John Lemprière’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology than to his classics, though she also

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explains how Morris took some details in “Atalanta’s Race” from Pseudo-Apollodorus (already used in the Jason poem) and from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.22 EARTHLY PARADISE TALE

CLASSICAL REFERENCES

“Atalanta’s Race”

Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca* 3.105–9 Ovid, Metamorphoses* 10.560–707 Hyginus, Fabulae* 185 Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca* 2.34–5; 47–8 Ovid, Metamorphoses* 4.664–72; 5.1–235 Hyginus, Fabulae* 63–4 Apuleius, Metamorphoses* [Golden Ass] Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca* 1.105–6 Hyginus, Fabulae* 50–1 Euripides, Alcestis Aelian, Varia Historia* 14. 45 Herodotus, Historiae* 1.34–45 Ovid, Metamorphoses* 10. 243–95 Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose* 106–7 Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca* 3.12–16 Ovid, Heroides,* Epistulae* 5, 16, 17 Ovid, Heroides* 20–21 Aristaenetus, Epistolae 1.10 Strabo, Geographica* 17.1.33 Aelian, Varia Historia* 13.23 Herodotus, Historiae* 2. 134–5 Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca* 2.119–21 [2.5.11] Homer, Iliad* VI. 144–95 Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca* II.3.1 Hyginus, Fabulae* 57 (157?) Horace, Odes* IV.2.v26 See “Bellerophon at Argos”

“The Doom of King Acrisius”

“Cupid and Psyche” “The Love of Alcestis”

“The Son of Croesus” “Pygmalion and the Image” “The Death of Paris” “The Story of Acontius and Cydippe” “The Story of Rhodope”

“The Golden Apples” “Bellerophon at Argos”

“Bellerophon in Lycia”

Hence most of the classical tales are greatly expanded from Pseudo-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca* (for seven tales), Ovid’s Metamorphoses* and Heroides* (for five tales), the Fabulae*of Hyginus (for four tales), and specific classical texts for other tales: Apuleius’ The Golden Ass* (for “Cupid and Psyche”), Euripides’ Alcestis (for “The Love of Alcestis”), Herodotus* (for “The Son of Croesus”), Ovid’s Heroides* and Aristaenetus’ Epistolae (for “The Story of Acontius and Cydippe”),Aelian* (for “Rhodope”), and Homer’s Iliad* (for the Bellerophon tales).23 However, Morris has often re-structured the tale and developed his characterization with respect to motivation, emotions, and reactions to events. He also elaborates extensive dialogue where little or none existed in his sources. He also adds descriptions to accentuate a pervasive pastoral convention (“Atalanta’s Race”), omitting important events which did not suit his purpose (Heracles wrestling with Death and so saving Alcestis24 or Bellerophon’s assault on Olympus with Pegasus); arranging others for cumulative decorative, thematic, and dramatic effect (the gardens of Cupid,Venus, and Persephone in “Cupid and Psyche”); or extending an idea into a much larger narrative (the long debate between Paris and Oenone in “The Death of Paris”). Critics have also recognized the presence of the classical genre of the pastoral in The Earthly Paradise with its debts to Theocritus* 318

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and Virgil’s Eclogues,* both of which Morris admired. In the pastoral, the heroic gives way to the arcadian (Calhoun 146–77). The heroic themes of war, and even the romance quest, are converted into the tale of love, whether fulfilled or thwarted. Description, particularly of landscape, takes over from the presentation of feats of arms. Personal battlefield jealousies and animosity become the blocking of the course of true love by the angry father (like Schoenus and Acrisius in tales one and three), moving into the subjection of all to simple fatalism, change, and death, just as Panovsky has argued that “even death is in Arcadia” (“et in Arcadia ego”).

Polemics Hitherto we have seen how Morris has been indirectly political in his allusions to the classical tradition, but in his lectures, he becomes directly polemical. When he was preparing his first public lecture in 1877, he was for the first time also involved in public speaking and became treasurer of the Eastern Question Association (EQA), hoping to move the Liberals against Disraeli in his appeasing of the Ottoman Turks. Disillusioned with the EQA, he sought a better foundation for his political views, began to read Karl Marx’s Capital in French in 1883, and joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1883, thereafter embarking on an exhaustive lecturing career on behalf of the cause. From the beginning, however, his lectures connected aesthetic analysis, political theory, and the study of the past. In his first public lecture,“The Decorative Arts” (4 Dec. 1877; later called “The Lesser Arts”), Morris refers to the decorative arts as “windows to look upon the life of the past … the free vigour and glory of Greece; the heavy weight, the firm grasp of Rome, the fall of her temporal Empire.” To him, the “interweaving of the Decorative Arts with the history of the past” is inevitable: “So strong is the bond between history and decoration, that … we cannot … wholly shake off the influence of past times over what we do at present” (Morris Hopes 8). As Morris developed both his theory of art and of history, he argued that genuine art arose from the lives of free people, while the art of luxury was “rhetorical” (the word he used for the process of painting by rules in the High Renaissance) and mechanical, the production of machine workers meeting capitalist demands. He condemns the society created by riches as “civilization,” opposed to a society of equality and justice that eventually he names “Nowhere” in his Socialist utopia, News from Nowhere (1890)—a society built upon true “wealth,” that is, the moral virtues of free people. He outlines this relationship in two lectures, “Art, Wealth, and Riches” and “Art under Plutocracy,” both delivered in 1883 as he had begun to read Karl Marx’s Capital. From such studies he had a more salient framework in which to place his analysis of the role of Greece and Rome in the development of Western culture. To Morris, the pre-classical Mediterranean was a period in which people were free to develop specific arts and crafts, like pottery and its decoration.25 The advent of “civilization” there meant for him a marked progress in writing, thought (literature and philosophy) and the arts, but also a loss of freedom when subjected nations became slaves. Such civilization could only develop when it was supported by “chattel slavery,” in which slaves are the property of their owners and can be bought and sold like commodities. Human bondage, therefore, was the terrible social hallmark of classical civilization, and he recurs to it over and over in his lectures, as in this sample from 1880 where he traces the translatio imperii from Athens to Rome to the Gothic (and English) north and to modern “civilization,” a degradation in which a slavery of another kind dominates—to machines and the cash nexus: We talk of the civilisation of the ancient peoples, of the classical times, well, civilised they were no doubt, some of their folk at least: an Athenian citizen for instance led a 319

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simple, dignified, almost perfect life; but there were drawbacks to happiness perhaps in the lives of his slaves: and the civilisation of the ancients was founded on slavery. Indeed that ancient society did give a model to the world, and showed us for ever what blessings are freedom of life and thought, self-restraint and a generous education: all those blessings the ancient free peoples set forth to the world—and kept them to themselves. … Therefore did the descendants of those stern and self-restrained Romans, who were ready to give up everything, and life as the least of things, to the glory of their commonweal, produce monsters of license and reckless folly. … Ancient civilisation was chained to slavery and exclusiveness, and it fell; the barbarism that took its place has delivered us from slavery and grown into modern civilisation; and that in its turn has before it the choice of never-ceasing growth, or destruction by that which has in it the seeds of higher growth. (“The Beauty of Life” 1880; Hopes 64−65) In “Art and Labour” (1 April 1884), Morris distinguishes between the primitive Greece of the Homeric epics and Greece “of the time of Pericles.” He contrasts the Homeric age with “the classical civilization of Greece” when “the labour of the people” had been “exercised under … chattel slavery” (LeMire 96–97).This post-Homeric Athenian civilization had a direct link, he argues, to the second “classical civilization,” that of Rome.The “domination of Rome, mightiest of cities,” came under Morris’s even more drastic condemnation as a “Roman tyranny” whose “chattel slavery … [which was] considered the effect of eternally natural laws … was more dangerous to the state than it had been under Greek civilization” (99). Hence “civilization,” classical or otherwise, is a reprehensible term, the monuments of which enable him to construct his opposition to Victorian imperialism. The monuments of ancient civilizations—even Homer and Virgil—have indeed been adopted, adapted, and translated by Victorian Britain as inherited examples of cultural capital from Greece and Rome, but to Morris they are “storehouses of encyclopaedic knowledge” or “Bibles,” as he claimed in the Pall Mall Gazette (2 Feb. 1886), from the “very hearts of the people” [Morris’s emphasis]. The institutions of power, like the schools and universities that mandated them for entry into an elite social class, have, by acts of translatio studii, transmitted and canonized them as “cultural and hence political continuity” (Frow 181). These views continued throughout his lectures and writings, everywhere that his expositions needed a historical explanation for a specific problem in contemporary art or society. For instance, he writes harshly in “The Development of Modern Society” (13 April 1890) of “the Romans [who] … must be credited with the preservation of the art and literature of Greece (though with its corruptions and stultification as well) and for the rest I think the world owes them little but its curse” (Salmon History 111–13). In a late essay, “The Socialist Ideal: Art” (1891),26 he makes the connection to the grounds for popular art, once again drawing on the historical analogy with the classical world to stress the importance of the art of the people in literature, architecture, and every art form: “No worthy popular art can grow out of any other soil than this of freedom and mutual respect. … because … that expression of pleasure is art, whatever form it may take. … After all the earliest art which we have record of is still art to us; that Homer is no more out of date than Browning; that the most scientifically-minded of people … the ancient Greeks, are still thought to have produced good artists.” Morris had a lengthy precedent for discussing the characteristics of the classical period, though the separation from it of pre-Classical Greece was a recent innovation.A quite different matter was the revival of classical learning in the period known to him as the Renaissance, a 320

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period that raised difficulties for him of definition and analysis. For instance, in his two 1884 lectures on “The Gothic Revival,” he vigorously attacks the Renaissance as the period which both imposed on the West the slavery of labour and also propagated all forms of “pseudo-Classical stupidity.”Yet, in another lecture, he praises the “splendid and copious genius which marks the Italian Renaissance” (“Art under Plutocracy,” 14 November 1883; Kelvin 117).While he adopts the conventional period division between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance promulgated by the historians and institutions of his day, he reacts uncomfortably against that definition with its conventional art-historical and historical models. In his letters, Morris explains that he is searching through his programme of reading for better reasons for his own historical judgments. Through his reading of Marx’s Capital, his construction of the disjuncture between the classical period with its chattel slavery, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance is clarified, particularly concerning the relation of the art of the Renaissance to emerging capitalism.27 In part because the rebirth of classical learning, literature, and art occurred along with the division of labour and emerging capitalism, Morris is able to condemn parts of Renaissance classicism. Morris’s view was associated with the emerging analysis of the Renaissance and the revival of classical learning under the guidance of both historians and art critics. German philosophy and aesthetics, French and English historiography, and developments in art history on the continent and in England had been defining the Renaissance as an historical period since the late eighteenth century. Such definitions were being formulated by the major theorists: Friedrich Schlegel, Alexis-François Rio, Alexander Lindsay, John Ruskin, Jules Michelet, Jacob Burckhardt, John Addington Symonds, and Walter Pater, amongst others, with Raphael as the transitional figure to the new school (who, although reaching the pinnacle of perfection, yet bore within his work “the seeds of decay” (Schlegel 49; see also Ferguson 139–42). So, it is not surprising that Morris, as a second-generation member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, should follow Schlegel’s lead, available to him through the mediation of Ruskin who had read Schlegel, Rio, and Lindsay. Morris is quite precise in signalling the period before Raphael as one of great accomplishments, drawing comparisons with Greece and with Homer, and that period after him, because of its reliance upon the rules of perspective, proportion, and colour—“academicism” as he called it—as degraded: It has become clear that the “new” school [the Pre-Raphaelites] which was received at one time with such volleys of scorn and has since made its way so vigorously, was really nothing more or less than a branch of the great Gothic Art which once pervaded all Europe. … These qualities [love of nature, epical quality, and ornament] you may say it shares with the ancient organic Schools of Art, the Greek above all. … It is an element of the epical quality (as notably in Homer), though it is not the whole of it; and is necessary to the utmost refinement, abundance and enduring interest of decoration; though I admit that it is rather to be felt than defined.28 So, there is continuity in his theoretical and practical exhortations about the study of the ancient world. In his first lecture, “The Decorative Arts,” he urged his audience to study “Nature and History,” continuing,“I do not think that any man but one of the highest genius could do anything in these days without much study of ancient art. … If we do not study the ancient work directly and learn to understand it, we shall find ourselves influenced by the feeble work all round us” (Hopes 15). In July 1896, just five months before he died, Morris wrote an article for an American publication, The Forum, on “The Present Outlook of Socialism in England.”This article begins with the traditional comparison so often made by his contemporaries comparing 321

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the British Empire favourably to that of imperial Rome, but not so Morris. Consistent with his earliest repudiation of translatio imperii and its accompanying theory of transferred glory, power, and cultural capital, he writes: “The Whig revolution, which began on the fall of medieval society and culminated in the French revolution, on the one hand, and the establishment of the factory organization of production amidst the ruins of handicraft, on the other, seemed in the first half of this century to have stranded the civilized world on a period of academical coma, having some analogy to the great period of the classical civilization inaugurated by the accession of Augustus” (193).The social analysis of the means of production of handiwork by the people in ancient societies has yielded the polemic promoting social action in the present.

Calligraphy: Horace and Virgil In the two decades after The Earthly Paradise, Morris had turned to two of the storehouses of legend upon which the tale-tellers, the Wanderers and the Elders, relied: the Icelandic Sagas and the classical epics. In The Earthly Paradise, Morris adapted both the classic and northern stories and in the following decades he moved to actual translation—publishing twentyseven of the sagas with the help of Eiríkr Magnússon, and two translations of the classical epics, in 1875 (the Aeneids) and 1887 (the Odyssey). From 1869 to 1875, exactly when he was completing The Earthly Paradise and his translation of the Aeneids, he was first becoming aware of the relationships among craftsmanship, aesthetics, and politics. At this time, Morris also taught himself calligraphy, transcribing sixteen of the saga translations into calligraphic manuscripts in four different scripts with elaborate decoration. At the end of this period, he also worked on two calligraphic manuscripts of the classics, Horace’s Odes and Virgil’s Aeneid, both in Latin. While calligraphic documents, often single leaves of testimonial, were popular Victorian keepsakes, a complete manuscript was a tribute item of esteem: hand-made, private, and valuable. Calligraphy to Morris was opposed to the utilitarian mechanical reproduction of print in newspapers, journals, and even books—and, of course, he was later to bring craftsmanship and control over the material conditions of book production at the Kelmscott Press, commissioning special paper, designing type, importing special ink, and designing, with Burne-Jones, illustrations. Unlike the commodity text, a calligraphic manuscript displayed the scribe’s control over all of the modes of material production, over the choice of vellum, inks, design and spacing, the application of colours and gold leaf—and over the very shapes of letters that best mediate a text’s meaning to a new readership. Calligraphy with its illumination and ornament is the mediating act of the scribe that transmits meaning from one culture to another.To honour a text with a calligraphic embodiment is to signify that a public text is a permanent document, distinct from the private and the ephemeral. In Morris’s calligraphic manuscripts, the semantic meaning is always overdetermined by the semiotic system of signs—the letters and ornamentation—that draws attention to its own material conditions of existence, production, and dissemination. Morris began work on the illuminated Odes of Horace in March 1874.29 Aside from his early experiments of 1856 and the transitional calligraphic pages of 1868–69, when he was perfecting his scripts and technique, he began lettering and decorating his vast saga translation project and other books in 1869 and continued for about six years.30 Written with a crow quill on fine vellum in his fourth italic script with roman capitals, the Horace is one of his smallest manuscripts, measuring only 16.8 cm × 11.7 cm. The text is complete with eighty-six ornamental roman initials, most with white-vine decoration [see Plate 12.1]. Morris probably knew such twelfthcentury models in the Bodleian Library (like the Latin Gospels, MS. Laud. Lat. 25) or humanist versions in one of his favourite books, the Douce Pliny (MS Douce 310—Jenson’s printed text 322

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of 1470 adorned with illuminations, or his own copies). He must also have known sources for the inter-linear decoration of flowers and sun-bursts as in the humanist Douce Plutarch of about 1440 (MS Douce 214). May Morris describes the opening page of Book 2 that Morris himself completed [see Plate 12.2]: “The page has a gold and silver initial M of most lovely quality, and the first two lines of the poem are written in gold and silver capitals.The border, painted quite solid, is made of blue and green acanthus leaves heightened with white, on a background of black relieved with minute white flower-sprigs. The medallion heads are greyish and low in tone and admirably in keeping with their frame” (Collected Works 11. xxviii). The capitals alternate gold and silver on this opening, but elsewhere are gold and blue, or gold and red. He had planned elaborate openings for each of the four books, but only the opening for Book 2 is completed, and other decoration is incomplete. May Morris included an illustration of two illuminated letters for Book 1, Odes 26 and the beginning of 27. His copy-text was almost certainly the 1844 Horace that he used as a schoolboy at Marlborough and in preparation for his Horace paper on entering Exeter College. In late 1873 and early 1874, when he was working on his calligraphic MS of The Story of Gunnlaug, he inserted into the text two extracts from the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid, testing both an italic and a roman hand.Then later in 1874, he began the last and greatest of his illuminated books, the Latin text of the Aeneid written with a swan quill on vellum, working on it for over a year.31 The Aeneid (formerly in the Doheny Memorial Library, California; now in the collection of Andrew Lloyd-Webber32) is written on 370 vellum pages, measuring 35 cm × 22.3 cm, in what has been called Morris’s second roman script, a minuscule possibly based on a fifteenthcentury manuscript of St. Jerome in the British Library (MS Harley 45309). On 11 March 1875, he wrote to Charles Fairfax Murray in Rome about vellum that Murray had sent him from the Vatican supplier:“The vellum seems very good though as you say rather over thin for my present needs; but I daresay I can pick out enough middling thick for my Virgil.” On each page, the running title and author are in blue (versos) or gold (rectos) capitals.Text capitals in gold, blue, and silver are completed to page 72; they also decorate proper names, and larger capitals introduce paragraph divisions.The traditional lineation is retained.Twenty-eight illuminated and foliated initials are placed in the margins.There were supposed to be twelve much larger designs, one for each book, designed by Burne-Jones. Only the opening for Book I is completed [see Plate 12.3]; the rest, except that for Book III, which is missing, are incomplete in various ways. Most of the designs are now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.This decoration does not reproduce elements from the time of either Aeneas or Virgil, but uses Gothic armour and pseudo-Greek flowing robes for the women and goddesses, conventional in Victorian paintings of classical subjects, another mark of the accommodation of Virgil to Gothic sensibilities and Victorian norms [see Plate 12.4]. Morris completed 177 pages of text to the mid-point at the end of Book 6, and did some of the decoration.33 He had already secured help in painting the illuminations from Charles Fairfax Murray, one of his friends and an assistant of Burne-Jones, and to him he sold the incomplete manuscript. Under Murray’s direction, the lettering was subsequently completed by Graily Hewitt, who also filled in the blue outlined capitals in the first six books and did some of the gilding; Louise Powell added border decoration. The text Morris used for his illuminated Aeneid was Conington’s first edition (1865–71), the most up-to-date edition available to him (Conington and Nettleship*). The edition was in his library at the time of his death (Auction lot #1035), with his signature at Cambridge, 1873, as also were the two volumes of Miscellaneous Writings of the Late John Conington,* ed. J. A. Symonds, containing in Volume 1 Conington’s essay on “The English Translators of Virgil” (from the Quarterly Review of July, 1861) and in Volume 2 Conington’s prose translation of Virgil. 323

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In the “Notes” appended to the Christie’s auction catalogue of 2002, the writer comments: Morris’s individuality of approach and divergence from any renaissance precedent is particularly evident in the page lay-out.With capitals of gold and blue sprinkling the text, and large illuminated initials in the left margin, the completed manuscript would have had much more the appearance of a medieval prose work than a humanistic copy of classical poetry. It was to allow this profusion of gold and colour that he not only abandoned the capitals that customarily began each line of verse but also adopted the paragraph divisions of his printed exemplar by marking them with large illuminated initials. He had entirely turned his back on the restraint of renaissance examples. (Christie’s Auction Catalogue) Hence, the Aeneid is a Latin text set out in a roman script based on late medieval examples and revived by the humanists to copy classical texts in a style that they thought was classical. It remains a collaborative book in which he and Burne-Jones worked out the design, and he later conscripted Fairfax Murray to help with the painting of the illuminations, a collaboration that was again to flower in the work of the Kelmscott Press in Morris’s last years. Although little known in his own day—and still under-recognized—Morris’s calligraphy, and his influence on Sydney Cockerell and Edward Johnston, “opened the way to the calligraphic reforms of the 20th century” (Gaur 184). Morris’s own comment on his early Boccaccio (the work is De Mulieribus Claris* 1473) perhaps sets the tone with which we can end, pointing to his love and use of the classics, to early printing, to his fascination with content as well as design, and to his attitude to the Renaissance: [This is] a very old friend of mine, and perhaps the first book that gave me an insight into the essential qualities of the mediaeval design of that period.The subject-matter of the book also makes it one of the most interesting, giving it opportunity for setting forth the mediaeval reverence for the classical period, without any of the loss of romance on the one hand, and epical sincerity and directness on the other, which the flood-tide of renaissance rhetoric presently inflicted on the world. (“The Woodcut Books of Ulm and Augsburg” 445) By a lifetime of exposure to the classics, from Marlborough and Oxford, through the re-telling of the tales of Greece and Rome from “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” Jason, and The Earthly Paradise, through re-reading the classics as re-imagined by later Greek, and especially medieval Latin writers, Morris remade the classics for his own age, dressing them often in the images and language of the northern mythology that he loved. But he also committed himself in direct confrontation to the major epics of the ancient world, to translating Virgil and Homer, and to transforming Virgil and Horace into calligraphic masterpieces. He collected the classics in both manuscript and early printed form, forming one of the most important libraries in the nineteenth century that belonged to a man of letters. And finally, in the last twenty years of his life, he set out a theory of history and design that invoked his knowledge of the classics and the cultural and social context of their means of production—a theory that resisted the dominant mode of adulatory absorption of the ancient past, or of utilitarian reproduction. Instead, Morris’s analysis privileges a pre-historic past, a barbaric origin in the Gothic north, art forms arising from the crafts of the people, and a social order that gives them responsibility for the social good.

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Notes 1 I am grateful for the assistance of the archives at Marlborough College, the Falconer Madden Collection at the Bodleian Library, the Manuscript Room at the British Library, and the late Ray Watkinson; and, for a helpful reading of this essay in an earlier form,Victor Shea. For general background, see Vance and Wallace’s Oxford History of Classical Reception,Vol. 4, and France and Haynes’s Oxford History of Literary Translation, Vol. 4. See also Edwards; Goldhill Victorian; Jenkyns; Stray;Turner Greek;Vance Victorians. 2 Some women writers, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Augusta Webster, and ‘Michael Field,’ had an excellent grasp of the classics. Women, however, were denied places at the boys-only public and grammar schools and were thus less exposed to formal classical trainings until special institutions opened for them, like the Cheltenham Ladies’ College (1853) and the North London School for Ladies (1850). Later in the century, the new university colleges and halls like London University (admitted women to degrees, 1878), Newnham and Girton at Cambridge, and Somerville Hall (later College) and Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford admitted women to study, though Oxford did not award degrees to women until 1920. Jane Ellen Harrison of Cambridge was one of the very few professional women classicists—in archaeology rather than philology. See Hurst; Breay; Dyhouse. 3 The star mark * after an author or title signifies that it is recorded as part of Morris’s library in the Petersons’ online catalogue. See https://williammorrislibrary.wordpress.com/ 4 Oxford’s New Examination Statute (1850) introduced the new regimen gradually: Responsions in the Lent term of 1851, Moderations in 1852, and Finals in 1853.The Royal Commission on Oxford was formed in 1850 and the Oxford Reform Act was passed in 1854 (G.R.M. Ward 1. 294; W. R. Ward 180–209; Stray Classics Transformed 93–96). 5 See Turner Greek 181;Taplin 74–79; Latacz 143–287; and Jablonka. 6 Geoffrey B. Riddehough published a highly critical article on Morris’s Aeneids in 1937, declaring that Morris lacked the necessary “scholarly equipment” and committed numerous blunders with too many “Teutonisms” and medievalisms. Mitchell’s article of 2015 deals with Morris’s Aeneids as an effort “to make ideas concrete through their expression as physical objects” and discusses archaizing in detail, comparing Morris with George Chapman and Thomas Phaer, and the layering of historical diction. He also discusses Morris’s calligraphic MS of the Aeneid. Sean de Vega has completed a Ph.D. dissertation (2017) on Morris’s Aeneids and from that research has published online a “Reader’s Apparatus” for reading the poem. Riddehough has also published (1941) a short critique of Morris’s Odyssey, taking the same line that he did with the Aeneids. Stephen Harrison gives it three pages in his account of Morris’s classicism (573–75). Morris’s translation of the opening lines of the Iliad has been edited with a commentary by the present writer (Whitla “Homer’s Iliad”). Sean de Vega has compiled a concordance of Morris’s archaisms and compounds in Book VI (see de Vega “Comparative”). 7 On Rome,Virgil, and the Victorians, see Vance Victorians Ch. 6 and Turner Contesting, especially Ch. 11 “Virgil in Victorian Classical Contexts” 284−322. 8 A major review of Conington’s Aeneid was that in Macmillan’s by Francis Turner Palgrave, who absolutely rejects Arnold’s advocacy of quantitative hexameters as the most suitable metric form for English translation of classical epics. Conington avoids vulgar notions of imperialism, and his verse form (of which Morris’s is an extension) is still “on the whole, the best English translation of any among the great ancient poets” and offers “so distinctly the best vehicle for this and similar versions” (407). 9 Morris prefaces his translation with the four lines (in italics) found in late manuscripts of Virgil beginning Ille ego qui quondam, as in the margin of the ninth-century Berne Stadtbibliothek MS 172. Conington’s long note (Vergili* 2. 30, n. 1) indicates their dubious Virgilian authorship. The lines are now rejected as being not by Virgil but deriving from a fourth-century life of Virgil by Donatus the Grammarian (see Austin). Finally, in the twentieth century, they have been omitted from the standard Oxford edition. In Morris’s own fair-copy manuscript, the lines are written in red ink and marked “Italics” with a bracket indicator and are so printed in his translation: Lo I am he who led the Song through slender reed to cry, And then, come forth from out the woods, the fields that are thereby In woven verse I bade obey the hungry tillers’ need: Now I, who sang their merry toil, sing Mars and dreadful deed. (Aeneids 1. A–D) 10 For detailed appraisal of Morris’s use of Latinate, archaic, Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian, and other registers of diction, see de Vega,“Reader’s Apparatus.”

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William Whitla 11 The historian Archibald Ballantyne coined the phrase in reference to Morris’s later translation of Homer’s Odyssey. He characterized Morris’s translation as “not literary English of any date; this is Wardour-Street Early English—a perfectly modern article with a sham appearance of the real antique about it” (Ballantyne 585–94). Sean de Vega lists numerous examples of supposed Wardour-Street English in Morris’s Aeneids, concluding that most are faithful translations of the Latin into a Germanic or Anglo-Saxon term or an archaism, such as troth (39 times in Morris’s translation), wax (161 times), bane (54), wot (9), happed (12), and burg (21). 12 This much-criticized epithet in Morris is based on the unique epithet for Odysseus, the Greek πολύτοπος (polu-topos; only here and at 10:330): [man] of many turns, ways, devices, or places, and, in some translations, “much-travelled” or “ingenious,” changed by Morris into the highly appropriate patronymic,“Shifty” (Heubecck,West, and Hainsworth 1. 69−70). 13 For instance, Merry refers to an unusual textual reading from Zenodotus, 3rd c. BCE, that Morris incorporates at Odyssey 3:378, where his compound epithet describes Athena as “warglorious”(κυδίστη = kudistē, most honoured, most glorious), combined with the unusual reading (ἀγελείη = ageleiē, driver of spoil). 14 Another tradition claims that France inherited a similar Trojan–Roman lineage through Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire through the same line to the Emperor Charles IV, and thence reconnected to England. Charles IV’s daughter,Anne of Bohemia, married England’s Richard II, who himself had claimed Trojan ancestry through Edward III, bolstered by Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Riccardian poets (see Mueller; Ingledew; Federico;Tanner; and Benson). 15 Alex Mueller argues: “Geoffrey [of Monmouth] articulates a common twelfth-century reception of Virgilian history, which traces the providential transfer of power [translatio imperii] from Troy to Rome to London, and sets the precedent for future British writers and rulers to lay claim to Trojan and Roman origins in order to legitimate their ideologies and imperial designs” (22–23). 16 Morris’s sources for Jason were outlined in the school edition of Jason, ed. E. Maxwell. Fuller treatments are in Kermode. Neither, however, outlines the Middle English and medieval Latin sources; see also Gibbs. Peter Wright has added extensive notes about Morris’s sources and treatment in the William Morris Archive edition of The Life and Death of Jason, http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/jason.html 17 Morris relied on Pindar’s fourth Pythian Ode (fifth c. BCE) in his Book II; Euripides’ Medea (fifth c. BCE) for parts of Book XVII; and Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica (ca. 200 BCE) that supplied the main outline of the story from Book III to Book XIV, as well as some details, like the catalogue of heroes, the slaying of Cyzicus, the deliverance of Phineas from the Harpies, and the romantic love of Jason and Medea. On the other hand, Morris suppresses many complex narrative asides in Apollonius where Jason does not appear. One exception is the story of Hylas and the nymphs (IV: 360–714), which is retold in full. Morris almost certainly knew and used the Latin re-working of Apollonius, the Argonautica* by Gaius Valerius Flaccus (died c. 90), as well as a Greek prose version of the story of Jason, in the Bibliotheca* of Pseudo-Apollodorus (first or second c.), which Morris also used later for “Atalanta’s Race” in The Earthly Paradise. 18 “Among the works that Mr. Morris had some thought of printing may also be mentioned the Bible, Gesta Romanorum … Caxton’s Jason” (Sparling 174). 19 Morris’s library contained other Jason material, including Guillaume Fillastre’s La Thoison d’Or,* a fifteenth-century history of the Order of the Golden Fleece (see Gruben). 20 Studies of Morris’s sources for The Earthly Paradise include Riegel; Mauer “Treatment”; Bellas; and Boos, Earthly Paradise, and a broad range of materials on particular tales at the William Morris Archive: http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/eptextssupplesources.html. 21 Morris also draws on other Latin sources, chiefly medieval, for some of the northern tales. For “The Man Born to be King,” “The Proud King,” and “The Writing on the Image,” he uses the Gesta Romanorum,* an early fourteenth-century compilation of tales in Latin. Morris greatly admired this collection and had four printed editions in his library, along with translations in Old English, English, and French. He also considered printing it at the Kelmscott Press. In “The Writing on the Image” and “The Ring Given to Venus” Morris used William of Malmesbury’s De Gestis Regum Anglorum* (early twelfth century) that he had in his library in a translation by John Sharp (1815). 22 William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology sometimes gives information used by Morris that is not in Lemprière, as in “Atalanta’s Race” at l. 306; for “The Doom of King Acrisius” (ll. 652–4) Smith as well as Lemprière, alone among the sources, say that Perseus was raised in the temple of Pallas Athena (Smith:“Pallas”; Lemprière: “Minerva”).

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William Morris and the Classical Tradition 23 Two other classical tales were not included in the completed Earthly Paradise: “The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice” (based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses* 10) and “The Story of Aristomenes” (derived from Pausanias’ Periegesis Hellados* [Description of Greece]). For editions see Latham “Variorum”; versions in May Morris (Collected Works 24) and Latham’s edition in the William Morris Archive: http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/Poetry/EPUnpublishedTales/ep.html 24 Robert Browning used Euripides’ Alcestis in his Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) and Frederic Leighton depicted the scene in his painting Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis (1869–71). 25 See “The Lesser Arts of Life (23 Jan. 1882): “Now all nations, however barbarous, have made pottery, sometimes of shapes obviously graceful. In favour of this art the classical nations relaxed the artistic severity that insisted otherwhere on perfection of figure-drawing in architectural work; and we may partly guess what an astonishing number of capable and ready draughtsmen there must have been in the good times of Greek art from the great mass of first-rate painting on pottery, garnered from the tombs mostly, and still preserved in our museums after all these centuries of violence and neglect.” https ://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1891/ideal.htm See also “Of the Origin of Ornamental Art” (23 November 1883): https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1883/ornament.htm 26 In The New Review, January 1891: https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1891/ideal.htm 27 See Ste. Croix. 28 “Address on the Collection of Paintings of the English Pre-Raphaelite School” (2 October 1891 Birmingham) https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1891/english.htm 29 Location: Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS Lat. Class. e. 38). For a facsimile, see The Odes of Horace. For further discussion and illustration see also William Whitla, “‘Sympathetic Translation.’” Some leaves from the Horace were displayed at the first exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1888. 30 See Coomans and De Maeyer; Braesel. 31 See Dunlap “Book Arts”; Dunlap “Calligrapher”; Brinton; Mickelsson;Tittle; Braesel 322−88. 32 It was bought from the Doheny sale in 1988 by Andrew Lloyd-Webber for $1,320,000 and was put up for sale at Christie’s by him in 2002, but it did not sell: see [Christie’s Auction Catalogue] and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2518745.stm 33 For a complete description see [Christie’s Auction Catalogue] at https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/the-aeneid-manuscript-10-c-f05 56aeik

References and Further Reading Arnold, Matthew.“On Translating Homer.” In The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Ed. R. H. Super. Vol. 1: On the Classical Tradition.Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, [1860–62] 1960. –––––. On Translating Homer:Three Lectures Given at Oxford. London: Longman, 1861. Austin, R. G.“Ille Ego Qui Quondam.” Classical Quarterly, N.S. 18:2 (May 1968): 107–15. Ballantyne,Archibald. “Wardour-Street English.” Longman’s Magazine (October 1888), 585–94. Banham, Joanna and Jennifer Harris. Eds. William Morris and the Middle Ages. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Bellas, Ralph A. William Morris’ Treatment of Sources in The Earthly Paradise. Dissertation, University of Kansas, 1960. Benson, C. David. The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s “Historia Destructionis Troiae” in Medieval England.Woodbridge,VA and Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1980. Blackie, John Stuart. Homer and the “Iliad.” 4 vols. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1866. Boos, Florence S. “The Earthly Paradise” by William Morris. 2 vols. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. Braesel, Michaela. William Morris und die Buchmalerie [William Morris and the Illuminated Book]. Wien and Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2019. Breay, Claire.“Women and the Classical Tripos 1869–1914.” In Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community. Ed. Christopher Stray. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999, 48–70. Brinton, Anna Cox. A Pre-Raphaelite Aeneid of Virgil in the Collection of Mrs. Edward Doheny of Los Angeles, Being an Essay in Honor of the William Morris Centenary 1934. Los Angeles, CA: Printed for the Author by the Ward Ritchie Press, 1934.

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William Whitla Budick, Sanford and Wolfgang Iser. Eds. The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1904. Butcher, S. H. and Andrew Lang. The Odyssey of Homer Done into English Prose. London: Macmillan, 1879. Calhoun, Blue. The Pastoral Vision of William Morris.Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1975. Christie’s Auction Catalogue. The William Morris Æneid:The Property of the Lord Lloyd-Webber (November 27, 2002). London: Christie’s International UK, 2002. Lot 10.The Aeneid Manuscript. https://www.inv aluable.com/auction-lot/the-aeneid-manuscript-10-c-f05x56aeik. Cline, Eric H. The Trojan War:A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Conington, John. “The Academical Study of Latin.” In Miscellaneous Writings of John Conington. Ed. J. A. Symonds, 2 vols. London: Longmans, 1872. –––––. The Aeneid of Virgil, 1866. –––––. Miscellaneous Writings of the Late John Conington. Ed. John Addington Symonds. 2 vols. London: Longmans, 1872. Conington, John and Henry Nettleship. Eds. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. 3 vols. 2nd ed. London: Whittaker, 1865–71. Coomans,Thomas and Jan De Maeyer. Eds. The Revival of Mediaeval Illuminating in the Nineteenth Century. Leuven, Belgium: KADOC Artes, 9, University Press of Leuven, 2007. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, [1948] 1963. de Vega, Sean. “A Comparative Concordance of Archaisms and Compounds in Book VI of Morris’ Odyssey.” In William Morris Archive. http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/OdysseyVariants.pdf (Accessed July 16, 2017). –––––.“A Reader’s Apparatus of Morris’s Translation of the Aeneid.” In The William Morris Archive. http:// morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/aeneidapparatus.html (Accessed July 16, 2017). –––––. Translation and Transgression in William Morris’s The Aeneids of Vergil (1875). Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Iowa, 2017. Dictys and Dares. The Trojan War:The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian.Trans. R. M. Frazer Jr. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966. Dunlap, Joseph.“William Morris and the Book Arts before the Kelmscott Press.” Victorian Poetry 13 (Fall - Winter, 1975): 141–57. –––––.“William Morris: Calligrapher.” In William Morris and the Art of the Book. New York, NY: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1976, 48–70. Dyhouse, Carol. No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870–1939. London: University College London Press, 1995. Edwards, Catharine. Ed. Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Farrar, A. S. Hints for Students in Reading for Classical Honours in the University of Oxford. Oxford: Vincent, 1856. Faulkner, Peter. Ed. William Morris:The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Federico, Sylvia. New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1948. “First Public Examinations. Easter Term. 1854.” Oxford University Examination Papers. 1851–58. Oxford: Vincent, 1853, 1–15. Fontana, Ernest. “Reinventing Helen: Morris’s Scenes from the Fall of Troy.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 4 (Fall 1995): 51–65. Fowler, Robert. “The Homeric Question.” In The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Ed. Robert Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. France, Peter and Kenneth Haynes. Eds. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English.Vol. 4: 1790– 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Frow, John. Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Gaur, Albertine. A History of Calligraphy. New York, NY: Cross River Press, 1994. Gibbs, A. William Morris’s Use of Classical Sources in The Life and Death of Jason: A Classicist’s Reading. Dissertation, Edinburgh, 1993. Goldhill, Simon. Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. –––––. Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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William Morris and the Classical Tradition Graves, Robert. The Golden Fleece. London: Cassell, 1947. Gruben, Françoise de. Les Chapitres de la Toison d’Or à l’Époque Bourguignonne (1430–1477). Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1977. Guido delle Colonne. Historia Destructionis Troiae.Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1974. Harrison, Stephen. “William Morris.” In The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. Eds. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace.Vol. 4: 1790–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 559–78. Heubeck, Alfred, Stephanie West, and J. B. Hainsworth. A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988–1992. Hurst, Isobel. Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ingledew, Francis.“The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History:The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae.” Speculum 69:3 (1994): 665–704. Jablonka, Peter.“Troy.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean. Ed. Eric H. Cline. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010, 849–61. Jebb, Richard. Homer:An Introduction to the “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” Boston, MA: Ginn, 1887. Jenkyns, Richard. Ed. The Legacy of Rome:A New Appraisal. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1992. ———. The Victorians and Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. Kelvin, Norman. Ed. William Morris on Art and Socialism. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999. Kermode, Helen Sybil. “The Classical Sources of Morris’s Life and Death of Jason.” In Primitiae: Essays in English Literature by Students of the University of Liverpool. Liverpool and London, 1912, 158–82. http:// morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/jasonsuppbibliokermode.html (Accessed June 10, 2017). Küster, Elisabet C. Mittelalter und Antike bei William Morris: ein Beitr. zur Geschichte des Mediaevalismus in England [Medieval and Antique in William Morris: A Contribution to the History of Mediaevalism in England]. Berlin:Walter de Gruyter, 1928. Landor, Walter Savage. The Complete Works of Walter Savage Landon. Ed.T. Earle Welby.Vol. 14 (Poems,Vol. 2). Ed. Stephen Wheeler. London: Chapman and Hall, 1933. Lang,Andrew.“The Poetry of William Morris.” Contemporary Review 42 (August 1882): 200–17. Lang,Andrew,Walter Leaf, and Ernest Myers. The Iliad of Homer, Done into English Prose. London: Macmillan, 1883. Latacz, Joachim. Troy and Homer:Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Latham, David. A Variorum Edition of the Omitted Prologue and Tales of William Morris’s Earthly Paradise. Ph. D. Dissertation,Toronto,York University, 1982. Lekas, Padelis. Marx on Classical Antiquity: Problems of Historical Methodology. Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1988. Lefèvre, Raoul. L’ Histoire de Jason: Eine Roman aus der 15. Jahrhundert. Ed. Gert. Pinkernell. Frankfurt: Athenäum-Verlag, 1971. LeMire, Eugene. Ed. The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris. Detroit, MI:Wayne State University Press, 1969. MacCarthy, Fiona. William Morris:A Life for our Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. MacDougall, Hugh A. Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982. Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1899. –––––. Virgil and His Meaning to the World of To-Day. Boston, MA: Marshall Jones, 1922. MacMaster,Thomas J.“The Origin of Origins:Trojans,Turks and the Birth of the Myth of Trojan Origins in the Medieval World.” Atlantide 2 (2014): 1–12. Mauer, Oscar. “William Morris and Gesta Romanorum.” In Studies in Language, Literature, and Culture of the Middle Ages and Later. Ed. E. B.Atwood.Austin,TX: University of Texas Press, 1969, 367–81. –––––.“William Morris’s Treatment of Greek Legend in The Earthly Paradise.” University of Texas Studies in English 33 (1954): 103–18. Merivale, Charles. A History of the Romans under the Empire. 7 vols. London: Longmans, 1850. Mickelsson, Ulla. “Virgil’s Aeneid—The Culminating Achievement of William Morris’s Illumination Work.” Libri: International Library Review 29 (October 1979): 260–70. Mitchell, Jack.“William Morris’s Synthetic Aeneids: Virgil as Physical Object.” Translation and Literature 24 (2015): 1–22. http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/mitchell-synthetic-aeneids pdf. Momigliano, Arnaldo D.“Perizonius, Niebuhr and the Character of Early Roman Tradition.” [Ballads and Early Roman History]. Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography Chap. 14 (1977): 231–52.

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William Whitla Morris, May. Ed. William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist. 2 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936. Morris, William. The Aeneids of Virgil Done into English Verse. London: Ellis and White, 1876. –––––. Collected Letters of William Morris. Ed. Norman Kelvin. 4 vols. in 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984–96. –––––. Collected Works of William Morris. Ed. May Morris. 24 vols. London: Longmans, 1910–15. –––––. A Dream of John Ball and A King’s Lesson. London: Reeves & Turner, 1888. –––––. “Development of Modern Society.” [Part II] Commonweal 6:237 (26 July 1890): 237. See https:// www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/commonweal/devel2.htm. –––––. Hopes and Fears for Art & Signs of Change. Intro. Peter Faulkner. Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1994. –––––. The Life and Death of Jason. Ed. E. Maxwell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914. –––––. The Life and Death of Jason. Ed. R. W. Jepson. London: Macmillan, 1923 [English Literature for Schools Series]. –––––. The Odyssey of Homer Done into English Verse. 2 vols. London: Reeves & Turner, 1887. –––––.“On the Artistic Qualities of the Woodcut Books of Ulm and Augsburg in the Fifteenth Century.” In Bibliographica. London: Kegan Paul,Trench, and Trübner, 1895.1, 437–73. –––––.“The Pilgrims of Hope”. Commonweal, (March 1885 - June 1886). –––––.“The Present Outlook of Socialism in England.” The Forum [United States] (April 1896): 193–200. See https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1896/present.htm. –––––. The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, and the Fall of the Niblungs. London: Ellis and White, 1877. –––––. William Morris’s Socialist Diary. Ed. and annotated Florence Boos. Marxists Internet Archive, 2005. [Entry for January 26, 1887]. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1887/diary/diary.htm #diary. Second edition, Nottingham: Five Leaves Press, 2018. Mueller,Alex. Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Nagy, Gregory.“Homeric Questions.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 122 (1992): 17–60. Needham, Paul.“William Morris: Book Collector.” In William Morris and the Art of the Book. New York, NY: Pierpont Morgan Library and Oxford University Press, 1976, 21–47. Oberg, Charlotte. A Pagan Prophet:William Morris. Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 1978. The Odes of Horace:William Morris. Intro. Clive Wilmer. 2 vols. Oxford: Bodleian Library [Folio Society], 2016. Palgrave, Francis Turner. “On a Translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Part I.” Macmillan’s Magazine 15 (January 1867): 196–206. –––––.“On a Translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Part II.” Macmillan’s Magazine 15 (March 1867): 401–12. Panovsky, Irwin.“Et in Arcadia Ego.” In Meaning in the Visual Arts. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Peterson, Doris Evylene. Landor’s Treatment of his Source Materials in the Imaginary Conversations Greek and Roman. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1942. Prins,Yopie. “Nineteenth-century Homers and the Hexameter Mania.” In Nation/Language and the Ethics of Translation. Eds. Berman, Sandra and Michael Wood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005, 229–56. “Questions for Responsions. Hilary Term. 1853.” Oxford University Examination Papers. 1851–58. Oxford: Vincent, 1853, 1–4. Riddehough, Geoffrey B. “William Morris’s Translation of the Aeneid.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 36 (1937): 338–46. –––––.“William Morris’s Translation of the Odyssey.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 40:4 (October 1941): 558–61. Riegel, Julius. Die Quellen von William Morris’“The Earthly Paradise.” Erlangen:A. Deichert’sche, 1890. Rogerson, Anne. “Conington’s ‘Roman Homer.’” In Oxford Classics:Teaching and Learning 1800–2000. Ed. Christopher Stray. London: Duckworth, 2007, 94–106. Salmon, Nicholas. Ed. William Morris on History. Sheffield:Academic Press, 1996. Schlegel, Friedrich. Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works. London: Cambridge University Press, 1848. Seeley, John R.“Roman Imperialism.” In Lectures and Essays. London: Macmillan, 1870, 1–88. Sellar,William Young. The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age:Virgil. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1877. Shea,Victor and William Whitla. Eds. Essays and Reviews:The 1860 Text and its Reading. Charlottesville,VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Sommer, H. Oskar.“Raoul Lefevre and ‘Le Recuil des Histoires de Troye.’” In Bibliographica. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1895.1, 31–43.

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William Morris and the Classical Tradition Sparling, H. Halliday. The Kelmscott Press and William Morris Master-Craftsman. London: Macmillan, 1924. Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de.“Karl Marx and the History of Classical Antiquity.” Arethusa 8 (1975): 7–41. Steiner, George. After Babel. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1975. Stevenson, Lionel. The Pre-Raphaelite Poets. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Stray, Christopher. Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Swinburne,Algernon Charles. [Review] Fortnightly Review (July 1867): 19–28; in Faulkner. See also http:/ /morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/jasonsupp19thcentreviews.html. –––––. The Swinburne Letters. Ed. Cecil Y. Lang. 6 vols. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1959–62. Tanner, Marie. The Last Descendants of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Images of the Emperor. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Taplin, Oliver. “Homer and History.” In The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Eds. John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Tittle, Miles.“Illuminating Divergences: Morris, Burne-Jones and the Two Aeneids.” In To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss:William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams. Eds. Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne. Montreal: McGill University Press, 2015, 56–84. Tucker, Herbert F. Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Turner, Frank M. Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. –––––. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1981. –––––.“Why the Greeks and Not the Romans in Victorian Britain?” In Rediscovering Hellenism:The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination. Ed. G.W. Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 61–81. Vance, Norman. The Victorians and Ancient Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Vance, Norman and Jennifer Wallace. Eds. The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature.Vol. 4: 1790–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Virgil [Publius Virgilius Naso]. P.Vergili Maronis Opera. Eds. John Conington and Henry Nettleship. 3 vols. 2nd ed. London:Whittaker, 1865–71. Ward, G. R. M. and J. Haywood. Oxford University Statutes. 2 vols. London: Pickering, 1845–51. Ward, W. R. Victorian Oxford. London: Frank Cass, 1965. West, Martin. “The Homeric Question Today.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155:4 (December 2011): 383–93. Whitla, William. “‘I Learned Next to Nothing There’: William Morris at Marlborough College.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies n. s. 26 (Spring 2017): 50–100. ––––.“‘Sympathetic Translation’ and the ‘Scribe’s Capacity’: Morris’s Calligraphy and the Icelandic Sagas.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies n. s. 10 (Fall 2001): 27–108. ––––.“William Morris’s ‘The Mosque Rising in the Place of the Temple of Solomon’:A Critical Text.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies n. s. 9 (Spring 2000): 43–82. –––––. “William Morris’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad 1: 1–214.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies n. s. 13 (Fall 2004): 75–121. Wilde, Oscar.“William Morris’s Odyssey.” Pall Mall Magazine xlv (April 26, 1887): 5. Wolf, F. A. Prolegomena to Homer: 1795. Trans. Anthony Grafton, Glen W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Wright, Peter.“Sources for the Argonauts” and “The Route of the Argonauts” in “Supplementary Material: The Life and Death of Jason.” See: http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/supplementary.html (Accessed March 6, 2018). Yoon, Sun Kyoung. (Re)-Constructing Homer: English Translations of the Iliad and Odyssey Between 1850 and 1950. Ph. D.Thesis, University of Warwick, 2011.

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13 A VERY ANIMATED CONVERSATION ON ICELANDIC MATTERS: THE SAGA TRANSLATIONS OF WILLIAM MORRIS AND EIRÍKR MAGNÚSSON Paul Acker

William Morris, in common with all the Pre-Raphaelites, prized medieval art and literature: the frescoes of Giotto as well as anonymous miniatures in manuscripts; the literary works of Chaucer, Dante and Malory. More unusually for a Pre-Raphaelite, Morris read medieval Icelandic sagas in the available translations, as did many another Victorian enthusiast, as Andrew Wawn has shown in The Vikings and the Victorians (2002).After all,Vikings were in their blood, at least for those in places the Scandinavians had settled, from Shetland and Orkney on down through Scotland and northern England. Norse had even penetrated the English language, in words as basic as they, them, sister, husband, sky, egg and take. But Morris would become one of the few Victorians who went so far as to learn the Icelandic language, travel to Iceland, and translate the sagas, with help from an Icelander who had moved to England, Eiríkr Magnússon. As an undergraduate (1853–55), Morris read Benjamin Thorpe’s Northern Mythology (1851; see Mackail, 46), which would have introduced him to the Eddas, to Völsunga saga, and to the story of Aslaug from Ragnars saga loðbrókar. Thorpe, via a brief Danish folktale “The Sunken Mansion” (2.214), also provided the germ of an idea for Morris’s story “Lindenborg Pool,” published in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (put together by Morris and his “Brotherhood”) in September 1856.At some point before he began studying Icelandic in the original, Morris read A. S. Cottle’s (free) translations of the mythological poems of the Edda (1796);Thomas Percy’s translation of Paul Henri Mallet’s Northern Antiquities (1847 edition by I.A. Blackwell, which reprinted Walter Scott’s abstract of Eyrbyggja saga); and Samuel Laing’s translation of Heimskringla (1844).1 In the 1860s, Morris read George Dasent’s translations of Njáls saga (1861) and Gísla saga (1866);2 not much else was available. But by the mid-1870s, Morris had greatly expanded the number of available English translations of Icelandic sagas.3 In 1868, Morris met the Icelander Eiríkr Magnússon (1833–1913), thus initiating what Karl Anderson calls “a great stroke of luck … for all lovers of literature” (41).4 May Morris called the 332

Saga Translations of Morris and Magnússon

Figure 13.1 Eiríkr Magnússon, before 1872, Saga Eiríkr Magnússon, 1933. Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery.

meeting “a poet’s entering into possession of a new world, only partly his till now” (CW 7.xv). Warington Taylor, business manager for Morris’s design firm, arranged the introduction at Morris’s workplace at 26 Queen Square in London. The meeting occurred in the summer of 1868, sometime before July 26 (Einarsson, 23). In his account, Eiríkr emphasizes Morris’s energy:“With a manly shake of the hand he said,‘I’m glad to see you; come upstairs!’And with a bound he was upstairs and I after him … A very animated conversation ensued on Icelandic matters, especially literature” (7.xv).5 According to Mackail (217), Morris “plunged into the study of Icelandic” after a vacation in the autumn of 1868; Morris first mentions their lessons and translating activity in a letter from October 12, 1868 (Letters, no. 64). He had proposed they read Icelandic “three times a week,” which presumably they did to begin with, until sometime before they went to Iceland together in July 1871.6 From their letters in 1872 and 1873, it does not sound like Morris “went down” to Cambridge – where Eiríkr had been appointed Under Librarian at the Cambridge University Library in 1871 – more often than about once a week.7 By that time, they had settled into a routine where Eiríkr would send Morris drafts for him to revise (on their method, see further below). They set to publishing their co-translations almost immediately, beginning with Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (as The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue) in the journal Fortnightly Review in January 1869.8 The saga is on the short side, occupying thirty printed pages. Morris’s manuscript translation of Eyrbyggja saga (The Story of the Dwellers at Eyr; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam MS 25F) is dated “15 Feb to 15 March 1869” (Whitla, 82),9 but it was not published until 1892, in the Saga Library, vol. 2 (along with Heiðarvíga saga). Unlike the comparatively brief Gunnlaugs saga, Eyrbyggja was a full-scale saga, famous for its many encounters with the living dead. The next 333

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published saga had similar ghostly encounters as well as an outlaw hero, namely Grettis saga, with a preface dated April 1869.10 In the summer of 1869, the team worked on a translation of Laxdæla saga which was never published,11 but Morris used its plot as the inspiration for “The Lovers of Gudrun” section of his long compendium The Earthly Paradise (Whitla, 58-59).12 Next to be published was the legendary-heroic saga Völsunga saga (The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs; with eleven heroic poems from the Poetic Edda) in May 1870.13 The summer of 1870 was taken up with Morris’s production of A Book of Verse, a birthday gift for Georgiana Burne-Jones of calligraphic copies of his own poems but also of two ballads translated from the Icelandic14 [see Plate 13.1]. Friðþjófs saga frækna (The Story of Frithiof the Bold) appeared in the March/April 1871 issue of Dark Blue Magazine; it is perhaps the most romantic of the sagas and had been adapted in 1825 as a poem in Swedish by Esaias Tegnér. In the summer of 1871, Morris took his first trip to Iceland, after which he began writing his long poem Love is Enough, published at the end of 1872.The two translators then worked on the massive Heimskringla in 1872–73 (see Letters, nos. 163, 170, 175, 184, 186) but did not finish it (presumably) nor publish it until 1893–95 in their Saga Library, vols. 3–5. This collection of sagas of Norwegian kings, such as Haraldr fagrhár and Óláfr Tryggvason, had been translated previously by Samuel Laing in 1844. So too, Morris and Magnússon worked on the family sagas Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings, Bandamanna saga and Hænsa-Þóris saga in 1873–74 (Whitla, 51) but did not publish them until 1891, in the Saga Library, vol. 1.Translations of Egils saga skallgrímssonar and Kormáks saga were begun perhaps in 1873, and of Vápnfirðinga saga in 1874; none were finished or published during Morris’s lifetime (Whitla, 90, 84).15 The unfinished translation of the short tale Halldórs þáttr Snorrasonar I probably also dates from 1874 (Whitla, 88).16 The next and final publication for this first spate of translating activity (the second would be for the Saga Library in the 1890s) was called Three Northern Love Stories, published in 1875. It included republications (with revision) of Gunnlaugs saga and Friðþjófs saga, as well as Víglundar saga (The Story of Viglund the Fair). While Völsunga saga was no doubt Morris’s favorite (he called it “The Great Story of the North”),17 these three more romantic sagas suited Morris’s PreRaphaelite tastes particularly well, with an emphasis on medieval chivalry rather than heroic action. Like Kormáks saga, Gunnlaugs saga is a ‘skald saga’, dealing with a tragic love triangle between two skaldic poets and a fair lady. Víglundar saga tells of a Norwegian bastard son who elopes to Iceland; his own son wins the neighbor’s daughter after various hostilities are worked out. Added to these sagas were the þættir or short tales “Heðins þáttr ok Högna” (a. k. a. Sörla þáttr), “Hróa þáttr heimska”, and “Þorsteins þáttr stangarhöggs” (translated as “The Tale of Hogni and Hedinn,”“The Tale of Roi the Fool” and “The Tale of Thorstein Staff-Smitten”).18 As Willian Whitla makes clear, this first spate of translation activity coincided with another of Morris’s enthusiasms, namely teaching himself the medieval crafts of calligraphy and manuscript decoration. Morris and his artist friends put together sumptuous manuscripts of his own poems in A Book of Verse; of Latin works in Horace’s Odes and Virgil’s Aeneid; and of Persian works by way of FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The bulk of Morris’s calligraphic output, however, recorded his saga translations. Most of these manuscripts and fragments did not have finished decorations and illustrations, in large part because his collaborator Charles Fairfax Murray, who in 1870 had done all but one of the illustrations for A Book of Verse, had begun living in Italy (eventually he would have a wife there as well as another in England; see Elliott). He could not begin to fill with watercolor paintings all the spaces Morris left for him in these saga manuscripts. Morris’s first calligraphic manuscript was for Eyrbyggja saga (1869; Oxford, Bodleian MS Eng. misc. c. 265); he provided his own decorated initial letters and marginal decorations (mainly floral, reminiscent of his wallpaper designs).19 On the first page of his next manuscript, Völsunga 334

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saga (1869; Bodleian Eng. misc. d. 268), Morris sketched eight female minstrel figures, but Fairfax Murray painted over only one of them.20 On that page he also provided a painted initial of Sigurd sitting on the head of the dragon Fáfnir, whom the hero had just killed, thus earning his name Sigurd Fafnir’s Bane.The initial should require a letter H (for “[H]ere begins the tale”) but the painting does not provide it, so in fact it is not a true historiated initial but rather a (tiny) miniature placed where an initial should be. The floral decorations in this manuscript were not drawn by Morris but rather by George Wardle, who would do most of them for A Book of Verse in 1870. Wardle also did some decorative initials and one historiated initial, with Queen Borghild bearing a cup against the letter N (f. 18r).We know that Morris planned one miniature for the manuscript; in a letter to Fairfax Murray, probably written on November 15, 1869 (Letters, no. 94), Morris writes cryptically, “Herewith the space for the picture for the lay of Gudrun.” Sure enough, on f. 61 of the Völsung manuscript, above what in the printed version is called “the Lamentation of Gudrun over Sigurd dead” (ch. 31), Morris has left two ruled lines for the chapter number and heading, and a space of seven lines for a miniature. Sadly, Fairfax Murray never painted the miniature of Gudrun lamenting over Sigurd, a subject at once central to Old Norse heroic legend and eminently suitable for a (second-phase) Pre-Raphaelite treatment.21 The Pierpont Morgan Library owns Fairfax Murray’s sketchbook from 1868–1872. In it he gives a list of fifteen illustration topics for The Saga of Frithiof, one per chapter (f. 82). For the 1871 calligraphic manuscript of this saga translation (owned by the Getty Wormsley Library near Oxford), however, Fairfax Murray completed only two (rather nice) illustrations, for chapters one and fourteen.22 For his manuscript of Snorri Sturluson’s Preface and Ynglinga saga (1873; Whitla, 93), now owned by the Society of Antiquaries (MS 50), Morris left spaces for historiated initials depicting the Norse gods Odin, Njörðr, Freyr and Freyja. Of these, Fairfax Murray painted only the god Odin, shown with his blind eye, his beard and a raven on each shoulder23 [see Plate 13.2]. As with the Sigurd “initial” mentioned above, this painting fails to provide its initial letter (O for Odin). For this manuscript, however, Morris then decided to undertake some of the marginal decoration himself. Beside the square initials that George Wardle managed to complete, Morris provided minstrel ladies – one apparently modeled on his wife Jane (p. 10) – amidst vines, flowers and fruits [see Plate 13.3]. In Morris’s calligraphic manuscript of Gunnlaugs saga (Bodleian MS Eng. misc. e. 233),24 Fairfax Murray made a watercolor sketch of a miniature but never completed it, depicting the hero standing near the heroine, Helga. Later, however, he reworked the subject into a large-scale painting called “The Last Parting of Helga and Gunnlaug,” now housed at the Delaware Art Museum. The Pierpont Morgan Library owns a number of Morris’s more fragmentary calligraphic manuscripts, most of which had been given to his secretary, Sydney Cockerell. PML manuscript MA 1804, which contains Kormáks saga, also has the first leaf of Ynglinga saga, the mythical prelude to Heimskringla.The top of the recto leaf (f. 23r) is divided into seven panels with spaces left for (tiny) paintings of the principal Norse gods. Morris has penciled in their names: 1 [nothing], 2 Thor, 3 Freyia (but Thor written above that), 4 Odin, 5 Frigg, 6 Baldur, 7 [nothing].As in the Society of Antiquaries Ynglinga saga, these godly images have been left to our imagination.25 The calligraphic manuscripts can also give us a better idea of when Morris translated those sagas that he does not mention in his letters. We know he was translating the compendium Heimskringla in 1873, but which individual sagas in particular?26 I mentioned above Morris having translated the first two parts of Heimskringla, the Preface and Ynglinga saga; these are followed in the text by the sagas of Halfdan the Black and Harald Hairfair, and we find calligraphic versions of these in New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS MA 3471 (olim Crawford).27 The three family sagas that are later published in the Saga Library, volume 1, are also found in calligraphic 335

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manuscripts, namely The Story of Howard the Halt (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam MS 270* and another in The Wilson [Cheltenham Art Gallery] MS 1991.1016.996.Z2); The Story of the Banded Men (Fitzwilliam 270*, and also Oxford, Bodl. Eng. misc. d. 267, incomplete); and The Story of Hen Thorir (Fitzwilliam 270*, and also Bodl. Eng. misc. d. 266).28 We can gain insight into Morris and Magnússon’s method of translation both from statements made by each of them and by examining their many collaborative manuscripts that survive. In an 1879 letter to The Athenaeum, Morris felt obligated to give Magnússon due credit for his part in their collaboration:“when we set about these joint works, I had just begun the study of Icelandic under Mr. Magnússon’s mastership, and my share in the translation was necessarily confined to helping in the search for the fittest English equivalents to the Icelandic words and phrases, to turning the translations of the ‘vísur’ into some sort of English verse, and to general revision in what might be called matters of taste” (Letters, no. 567). Magnússon for his part had this to say in his preface to the final volume of the Saga Library in 1905, reprinting his own obituary of Morris:“I suggested we had better start with some grammar.‘No, I can’t be bothered with grammar; have no time for it.You be my grammar as we translate. I want the literature, I must have the story. I mean to amuse myself.’ I read out to him some opening passages of the saga, in order to give him an idea of the modern pronunciation of the language. He repeated the passus as well as could be expected of a first beginner at five-and-thirty, naturally endowed with not a very flexible organ. But immediately he flew back to the beginning, saying:‘But, look here, I see through it all, let me try and translate.’ Off he started, translated, blundered, laughed; but still, he saw through it all with an intuition that fairly took me aback. Henceforth no time must be wasted on reading out the original. He must have the story as quickly as possible. … In this way the best of the sagas were run through, at daily sittings, generally covering three hours, already before I left London for Cambridge in 1871. And even after that much work was still done, when I found time to come and stay with him” (CW 6.xii–xiv). J. N. Swannell described the Leeds manuscript of The Story of Olaf the Holy thus:“the righthand pages contain the translation in Magnússon’s neat, flowing handwriting; Morris’s corrections and emendations are written, between the lines or wherever there is room for them, in a bolder, more flamboyant script … it is clear that Morris is emending with the Old Norse by his side” (378). Swannell gives many examples of Morris’s phrasal and lexical replacements and makes the cogent remark that “Morris’s close watch on the Norse text has its disadvantages” (380). For instance, Magnússon writes that the character Ragnhild was “about to give birth to a child”; Morris changes this to “should be lighter of a child,” matching the Icelandic idiom “skyldi léttari verða” (380).The Leeds manuscript is reproduced in the online Morris Archive, and on the very first page one can see Morris changing “happened” to “befell”;“wanted to” to “would”; “ordered” to “bade”; “strong” to “stark.” Swannell concludes, “And so the process continues, page after page, until Magnússon’s unambitious but very creditable prose is transformed – and in some places contorted – into the characteristic, highly criticised dialect of William Morris” (381). (The style has had its supporters, then and now; see Felce.) The William Morris Archive reproduces Huntington MS HM 6463 of The Story of King Magnus, Son of Erling, which manuscript James Barribeau examined in the manner of Swannell, if more sympathetically. He discusses four types of changes: corrections; retention of Icelandic syntax and of word order; cognates; and archaisms. Of the last type, he notes Morris’s “use of ‘fare’ for the Icelandic fara; no one ever ‘goes’ anywhere in Morris’s saga – one always ‘fares’” (246). Morris translates Norse flokkr as “flock,” where Magnússon has (more correctly) “band”; ráð as “rede” instead of “counsel”; týnt as “tyned” (a Northern dialectism) instead of “lost”. Barribeau concludes with an emphasis opposite to that of Swannell: “though one might not always agree with Morris’s predilection for adapting cognates, the point is that Morris clearly 336

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follows his Icelandic original closely” (246). After discussing Morris’s skaldic verses, Barribeau adds that Morris “was a much more conscientious translator than many have implied … Even his controversial use of cognates is founded on the principal that the fullest possible representation of every aspect of the Icelandic text is of primary importance” (250). Neither Swannell nor Barribeau assigns a date to these collaborative manuscripts, which is unfortunate if one would like to know, as I do, when exactly Morris and Magnússon translated which parts of Heimskringla – towards the end of their main period of translation, from 1873–1875, or just before publishing the Saga Library beginning in 1891.29 Ian Felce also examined the Huntington manuscript of The Story of King Magnus. He characterizes Morris’s style as stemming from an “ideal of literal translation,” which at the very least resulted in, as Eiríkr Magnússon said, “an interesting and amusing experiment” (Felce, 222). This brings us of course to the controversial question of Morris’s style of translation. It is best known for its archaisms and Icelandic calques, meant to convey a sense of the original language and time period but famously called “Wardour Street antique,” for a district in London where sham artefacts were sold. The phrase was used by reviewers of Morris’s translations of classical works, in a field that debated the merits and demerits of the archaistic approach.30 In defense of this style, Karl Litzenberg set out Morris’s archaisms according to where they could be found in Chaucer, Malory and English and Scottish ballads, with the aim of showing that Morris employed few out-and-out neologisms, despite accusations to the contrary.31 Litzenberg (1937) supplied references from Morris’s translations, mainly of the sagas, but also some Eddic poetry and his two ballad translations. As examples from the last of these, Morris employed archaic words or senses such as agone, a-land, a-riding, bare (for bore), bide/bode, eyen, game, garth, gat, ill, mind, mould, sea-strand, shapen, sithence, syn, swain, trow, win away and ware.32 The linguist Randolph Quirk remarked, “many of the most striking and unfamiliar words in Morris are not, properly speaking, archaisms at all: they are rather cases of the re-introduction … often with new meanings and into new environments, of words or word-elements from a past so distant that they are virtually new words to the modern reader” (70). For instance, in the stanza from Völuspá which I cite below, Morris uses “spill” where the Icelandic has spilla, to destroy. The Oxford English Dictionary records that the meaning of English spill as “destroy” fades out around the year 1600. It reappears in the nineteenth century but only in two quotations, from Morris himself! As Swannell argued above, the strangeness of the archaisms is compounded by the use of cognates or calques on Icelandic words. Morris’s translation of Heimskringla in a manuscript version (PML M.1804) begins,“The round world whereas menfolk dwell is, as is told much sheared apart by bights.”The 1844 translation by Laing had read “It is said that the earth’s circle which the human race inhabits is torn across into many bights,” which is far more comprehensible, especially when we realize bights are inlets.The word “sheared” is calqued on Icelandic skera, “to cut,” but it is used unidiomatically here. As I have argued recently (Acker 2016), the archaic vocabulary, much more of which was still employed in Romantic and Victorian poetry than in modern verse, can be more effective in Morris’s translations of Eddic poems such as Völuspá than when suffered through in long stretches in his saga prose. For instance, this famous stanza (44) comes off rather well, even with its sprinkling of archaisms or poeticisms, which I have highlighted: Brethren shall fight And be bane of each other, Cousins moreover Kinship shall spill: 337

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A hard while in the world, A while of great whoredom; An axe-age a spear-age; Shields shall be cloven; A wind-age a wolf-age Ere the world sinketh! Morris himself tempered the effect when he wrote his medievalist prose romances such as The House of the Wolfings from 1889. But even if Morris’s style can be explained (see Felce), it can’t really be justified, at least not by most current theories of translation.33 John Kennedy in his historical survey of saga translations (95) quotes Halldór Hermansson (an Icelander who was a librarian at Cornell University) as saying in 1930 that Morris’s style “was apt to convey to the reader a totally wrong impression of the simple, clear, concise and direct saga style” (95).34 In 1959, poet Kenneth Rexroth said of the Saga Library, “there the great sagas are, locked up in that ridiculous language” (96). Arguably of course these opinions reflect the modernist preference for unadorned, even colloquial styles. Nonetheless, the saga translations of Morris and Magnússon are still in print as well as online and thus are still being read, no doubt by Viking re-enactors as well as by ordinary contemporary folk. What made Morris end his amazingly extensive first run of saga translations? Already in a letter from February 1873 (no. 184), Morris complains to Aglaia Ionides Coronio that “My translations go on apace, but I am doing nothing original: it can’t be helped though sometimes I begin to fear I am losing my invention … I certainly enjoy some of the work I do very much, and one of these days my ‘Heimskringla’ will be an important work.” It may indeed have been the massive Heimskringla that bogged him down, until he and Eiríkr Magnússon managed to finish it, toward the end of his life, for his Saga Library. Morris turned to more “original” work in his long poem Sigurd the Volsung, begun in 1875 and published in 1876.35 And as usual he began to acquire new enthusiasms and new skills, turning from calligraphy to fabric dyeing and carpet making and expanding his famous series of wallpapers. The original Firm was dissolved in 1875, leaving Morris and Burne-Jones to handle all the orders for stained glass.36 Morris also became more involved in political activities, founding the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877 and then working with the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League in the 1880s.37 When at the end of that decade he began working on his prose romances, he finally turned again to his leftover saga translations. Before that, Morris must have felt a little as he did when leaving Iceland in September,1873: “I feel as if a definite space of my life had passed away now I have seen Iceland for the last time … it was no idle whim that drew me there, but a true instinct for what I needed” (Letters, no. 209). Altogether, William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon collaborated on over thirty saga translations.39 In an unpublished lecture given in 1887, Morris commented on many of these sagas, whereby we may get a sense of their appeal for him. He remarks for instance that “The Tale of the Banded Men is an exceedingly humourous account of another old man’s triumph, this time by the exercise of his mother wit over a set of powerful but somewhat stupid chieftains who had got on the hip the gaffer’s son, a man of the same quality as themselves” (196–197). By that time in his life, Morris must have identified a bit with “the gaffer.” He concludes this lecture by speaking of “the sincere affection I have for the Icelandic people who treated me so kindly when I was among them, and who are the descendants, and no unworthy ones, of the bravest men and the best tale-tellers whom the world has ever bred” (198).

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12

13

14

15

See Eiríkr Magnússon in CW 7.xvi. Morris never attempted his own versions of these two sagas. See the bibliography of saga translations by Donald K. Fry and the survey by John Kennedy. On Eiríkr Magnússon’s career before meeting Morris, see Stefán Einarsson (who also published a book in Icelandic on Eiríkr Magnússon in 1933). Eiríkr first went to England in 1862 “to supervise the printing of the Icelandic New Testament” (18). He met George E. J. Powell and co-translated Icelandic Legends with him in 1864. They also worked on some saga translations, which, however, were never published. Eiríkr tells of his first meeting with Morris in a letter to May Morris (CW 7.xv–xx) and in his November 1896 obituary of Morris in the Cambridge Review, reprinted in his preface to the Saga Library, 6.xi–xvi. Morris wrote a diary for this visit and his subsequent visit in 1873; see Gary Aho http://morrisedition .lib.uiowa.edu/icelandicdiaries.html. See Kelvin, ed., Letters, vol. 1: nos. 171, 172, 174, 175, 178, 184, 186, 188a, 193, 195, 197, 198. According to its title-page, the issue covers Jan. 1–June 1, 1869, but Eiríkr Magnússon in a letter dated Jan. 21, 1869, mentions the translation having already appeared (Einarsson, 23). Whitla (82) and others (Mackail, 217) think the translation of Eyrbyggja saga began in 1868, perhaps as the first project, before Gunnlaugs saga. Morris’s fair copy of The Story of Grettir is found in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam MS 25F. His draft with Eiríkr is found in MS 1991.1016.819 in The Wilson (Cheltenham Art Gallery), reproduced in the Morris Archive http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/Images/Grettir/GrettisSaga_Cheltenham/ pageflip1-50.html). There is a fair copy in Morris’s hand of chapters 28–33 of the translation, in BL Add. MS 45317, ff. 29–44. Since the unfinished, unpublished translation of Norna-Gests þáttr also appears in this MS (ff. 19–28), it may have been worked on at the same time. Morris considered including it in Three Northern Stories (Letters, vol. 1, no. 223, Jan. 27, 1874). For remarks on “The Lovers of Gudrun” and Laxdæla saga, see the introduction by Boos (Morris Archive, http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/epintrogudren.html); Oscar Maurer, “William Morris and Laxdaela Saga.”; and Julian. Influence from Morris’s translation activity is also detectable in The Earthly Paradise, principally in “The Fostering of Aslaug” from Völsunga saga and Ragnars saga loðbrókar (see Anderson, 120); and the unused “The Wooing of Swanhild” from Völsunga saga (edited by David Latham in the Morris Archive, http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/Poetry/EPUnpublishedTales/Swan hild/swanhild.html). According to a letter dated Feb. 15, 1870, Völsunga saga was by then “in the press” (Letters, vol. 1, no. 103). In a letter to Jane Morris dated April 26, 1870 (no. 112), Morris says “I don’t suppose the Volsungs will be out till the end of next week.” Morris appended ten Eddic heroic poems and embedded one other (plus stanzas from three others; see Litzenberg 1935, 101). Probably at this same time, Morris worked on three translations of mythological poems from the Edda, two of which May Morris published in CW 7 and another, Völuspá (The Prophecy of the Vala), in AWS, vol. 1; see Acker.The Völsunga saga translation was published again in 1888 with an introduction by H. Halliday Sparling; this and the 1870 edition are reproduced at http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/volsungasaga.html The ballads are Kristínar kvæði (“The Ballad [or Lay] of Christine”) and Sonar harmur (“The Son’s Sorrow”). I am preparing a separate study of these two translations.There is another draft of the former in Huntington HM 6427, f. 142r–v and a fair copy of the revised version in McGill Univ. MS 567. There is a draft of “The Son’s Sorrow” in British Library Add. MS 45318, f. 88r–v and a fair copy in HM MS 6427, f. 147r–v. The unfinished translation of Egils saga was published in 1936 by May Morris in AWS 1:564–636 as The Story of Egil the Son of Scaldgrim (forty chapters). See the Morris Archive for a reproduction of the calligraphic manuscript, Society of Antiquaries MS 49; there is also a MS with Morris’s fair copy of chapters 1–13 and part of 14, BL Add. 45317, ff. 3–18. Kormáks saga was published in 1970.The fragmentary, calligraphic manuscript of “The Story of the Men of Weaponfirth” (The Wilson, Cheltenham Art Gallery MS 1991.1016.996.Y7) is reproduced and transcribed by Marjorie Burns in the online Morris Archive, along with the calligraphic MS in the Morgan Library MA 1804, http://morrisedition .lib.uiowa.edu/translationsstoryofmenweaponfirth.html.

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Paul Acker 16 MS owned by Mark Samuels Lasner (olim Breslauer); reproduction of the calligraphic MS and transcription by Acker at http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/haldor.html. 17 Preface to The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs. 18 There was a fair copy of these tales sold to Sydney Cockerell at Sotheby’s, December 4, 1906, Lot 450. 19 Online digital facsimile of the first page (detail, top half) and of p. 26 in the Digital Bodleian collection (digitalbodleian.ox.ac.uk). Morris made a more deluxe copy of the same saga in 1871 (Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery 92.1920; repro. of f. 1 online at pre-raphaelites.org). 20 There is a fragmentary MS of this saga with some “calligraphic MS experiments” in Bodleian, MS Eng. misc. g. 59; and another “cancelled fragment” in the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow J578a, ff. 1v–2. 21 In another letter (no. 103, referred to above), Morris mentioned including a poem on this subject in his translation of Völsunga saga, Gudrun’s “lamentation over Sigurd dead: it is a wonderful poem, entirely free from any affectation or quaintness.” 22 Reproduced in Needham, XLVIII and Nash in Parry, 350 respectively. A few additional leaves of Frithiof are in Morgan Library MA 1804 and MA 4163, and The Wilson (Cheltenham Art Gallery) MS 1991.1016.996.Y7 (part of one leaf only; see their website). 23 Reproduced in Acker, 20. 24 There is also a four-page calligraphic fragment of The Story of Gunnlaug in British Library Add. 45317, ff. 45–46v. 25 The Morgan Library has another fragment of Snorri’s Preface and Ynglinga saga in MA 4011; The Wilson (Cheltenham Art Gallery) has a calligraphic MS of Snorri’s Preface and Ynglinga saga (1991.1016.996.Z2). 26 Morris mentions working on the verses in Olaf ’s Saga (Letters, vol. 1, no. 186), which Kelvin takes to mean Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, although it could just as easily be Óláfs saga helga, of which there is an autograph MS at Leeds, reproduced at http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/Felce_Olaf_the_Holy. pdf. Other autograph MSS of sagas within Heimskringla, all them written out by Eiríkr Magnússon with corrections by Morris (according to Rosenbaum 4.3; most of them are incomplete), include (in Heimskringla textual order) The Story of Hakon the Good and The Story of King Harald Greycloak (Huntington Library, HM 6428); The Story of King Olaf Tryggvason (HM 6437); The Story of Magnus the Good (King’s School, Canterbury); The Story of Harald Hard-Rede (New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke vault Morris); The Story of Olaf the Quiet (Maggs Cat. 388, Spring 1920, lot 670); The Story of King Magnus Barefoot (Princeton University, Taylor Collection); The Story of Sigurd the JerusalemFarer (Boston University, Richards Collection; diss. ed. by Karl Anderson, http://morrisedition.lib. uiowa.edu/oldnorseandersonPDFs.html); The Story of Magnus the Blind (New York Public Library, Berg Collection); http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/Translations/OldIcelandic/SagaLibrary/Images/Magnus_Bli nd_NYPL.pdf; The Story of King Magnus Son of Erling (HM 6463; http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/ Images/HM6463/HM6463.html). 27 According to Whitla (93), the Morgan MS contains only chapters 1–20 of the latter saga, which is completed in Bodleian MS Eng. misc. d. 265, ff. 9–24v. A facsimile of The Saga of Halfdan the Black in Morgan Library MA 3471 is online at http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/Images/MA3471/pageflip1 -50.html. Unfortunately it has no decoration, although spaces were left for gilt lettering. 28 Rosenbaum (697) notes that Fitzwilliam 270* is dated February 1874. Part of “The Story of Howard the Halt” is also found in HM 6426. 29 See above for a list of the Heimskringla translation manuscripts, any of which could profitably be examined in the manner of Swannell and Barribeau. According to the Brotherton Library webpage, the Leeds manuscript has the date 1891 stamped on its binding. Anderson, based on the listing of a translation “down to the end of the saga of Olaf Tryggvason” in the two manuscript catalogues of Morris’s library (one of them now owned by Lasner [olim Breslauer], transcribed by Matthew Runkle at http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/BookArts/Catalogue_Transcription.html), suggests that before he resumed in 1890, Morris had translated “only the ‘Preface’ and the first six sagas of Heimskringla” (346). 30 The term was made more widely known by its treatment in H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford, 1926), p. 700. 31 Some of this vocabulary would also go back to Old English, from which Morris also translated, notably in his version of Beowulf (published by the Kelmscott Press in 1895, then Longmans in 1898, then CW, vol. 10 in 1911).

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Saga Translations of Morris and Magnússon 32 Swannell (379) gives his own list of Morris’s favorite archaic substitutions: aware: ware; anything: ought; nothing: nought; much: mickle; when: whenas; whenever: whereso; later: sithence; happened: betid; went: fared; custom: wont; between: betwixt; counsels: redes; fields: acres; wealth: fee; get ready: dight (me); got: gat; (they) thought: were minded; vowed (or accepted): yeasaid. 33 Kennedy outlines seven approaches to saga translation; he treats Morris under type 7, translation into an Icelandicized form of English (33–36). 34 Cf. Dorothy Hoare, 52:“In the ingenious search for the words which come nearest to the actual form of the Icelandic, the life and nearness, the directness has vanished.” See also Gary Aho (1982), 106–111. 35 Sigurd the Volsung derives of course from Völsunga saga, but with much original material. See Sigurd the Volsung in the Morris Archive, with bibliography; and David Ashurst. 36 Morris also began to produce more wallpapers, although he had begun a few of these in the 1860s (see Nicholas Salmon, The William Morris Chronology, https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works /chrono.htm). 37 For Scandinavian concerns and references in Morris’s political writings from this period, and his activities on behalf of the Icelandic Relief Fund, see Anderson, 268–303. 38 See Anderson, 304–342, 367–388 for a discussion of the Scandinavian elements in Morris’s prose romances. 39 Eiríkr Magnússon published one edition and translation on his own, of Thómas saga erkibiskups, for the Rolls Series (1883). In addition, according to Kennedy (81), the translations in John Coles, Summer Travelling in Iceland (1882) of Þórðar saga hreðu, Bandamanna saga, and Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða may have been his “in large measure.”

References and Further Reading Works on the William Morris Archive are marked WMA. Acker, Paul. “William Morris’s Translation of Völuspá.” Useful and Beautiful 2016.1 (2016): 18–22. http:// www.morrissociety.org/publications/magazine.html. Aho, Gary, ed. Icelandic Journals. WMA. Aho, Gary.“Morris and Iceland.” Kairos 1 (1982): 103–33.WMA. Anderson, K. O. E. Scandinavian Elements in the Works of William Morris. Diss., Harvard University, 1942.WMA. Artist,Writer, Socialist: see May Morris. Ashurst, David.“Wagner, Morris and the Sigurd Figure: Confronting Freedom and Uncertainty.” Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend. Ed. Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington. London: Routledge, 2013, 219–37. Barribeau, James L. “William Morris and Saga-Translation: ‘The Story of King Magnus, Son of Erling’.” The Vikings. Ed. R.T. Farrell. London: Phillimore, 1982, 239–61.WMA. Boos, Florence S., ed.“Introduction.” The Earthly Paradise, 2 vols. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002.WMA. Collected Works of William Morris: see May Morris. Cottle,A. S., trans. Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda of Saemund. Bristol: N. Biggs, 1797. Dasent, George Webbe, trans. The Story of Burnt Njal. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1861. _____. The Story of Gisli the Outlaw. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1866. Einarsson, Stefán. “Eiríkr Magnússon and His Saga Translations.” Scandinavian Studies and Notes 13.2 (1934): 17–32. WMA. _____. Saga Eiríks Magnússonar. Reykjavík: Ísafold, 1933. Elliott, David. Charles Fairfax Murray:The Unknown Pre-Raphaelite. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2001. Felce, Ian.“The Old Norse Sagas and William Morris’s Ideal of Literal Translation.” Review of English Studies 67 (2016): 220–36. Fry, Donald K. Norse Sagas Translated into English:A Bibliography. New York, NY:AMS, 1980. Supplement by Paul Acker in Scandinavian Studies 65.1 (1993): 66–102. Hoare, Dorothy Mackenzie. The Works of Morris and of Yeats in Relation to Early Saga Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937. Julian, Linda. “Laxdaela saga and ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’: Morris’ Poetic Vision.” Victorian Poetry 34 (1996): 355–71. WMA. Kelvin, Norman, ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris, vol. 1: 1848–1880. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

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Paul Acker Kennedy, John. Translating the Sagas:Two Hundred Years of Challenge and Response.Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Laing, Samuel, trans. The Heimskringla or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, 3 vols. London: Longmans, 1844. Online https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Heimskringla. Letters: see Kelvin. Litzenberg, Karl.“The Diction of William Morris.” Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi 9 (1937): 327–63.WMA. _____. “William Morris and Scandinavian Literature: A Bibliographical Essay.” Scandinavian Studies and Notes 13.7 (1935): 93–105.WMA. Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris, 2 vols. London: Longmans, 1899.WMA. Maurer, Oscar.“William Morris and Laxdæla Saga.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 5 (1963): 422– 37.WMA. Morris, May, ed. The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols. London: Longmans, 1910–1915. _____. Introductions to The Collected Works of William Morris. WMA. Morris,William. A Book of Verse:A Facsimile of the Manuscript Written in 1870. Ed. Roy C. Strong and Joyce Irene Whalley. London: Scolar Press, 1981.WMA. _____. “The Early Literature of the North – Iceland.” The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris. Ed. Eugene D. LeMire. Detroit, MI:Wayne State UP, 1969, 179–98.WMA. _____. “Lindenborg Pool.” Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, September 1856: 530–34.WMA. Morris,William and Eiríkr Magnússon, trans. Grettis Saga:The Story of Grettir the Strong. London: Ellis, 1869. Also in CW 7. Online via Hathi Trust; text online,WMA. _____. “The Saga of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and Rafn the Skald.” Fortnightly Review 11 (January, 1869): 27–56. Online via Hathi Trust. _____. The Story of Frithiof the Bold. The Dark Blue 1.1 (March–April, 1871): 42–58, 176–82. Online via https://babel.hathitrust.org. _____. The Story of Kormak and Ogmund. London:William Morris Society, 1970.WMA. _____. Story of the Men of Weaponfirth. Unfinished.Transcribed by Marjorie Burns.WMA. _____. The Tale of Haldor Son of Snorri the Priest. Transcribed by Paul Acker. WMA. _____. Three Northern Love Stories and Other Tales. London: Ellis and White, 1875.WMA. _____. Völsunga Saga:The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs. London: Ellis, 1870, 2nd ed. 1888.Also in CW 7. 1888 ed. Online Gutenberg.org.Text of both eds.WMA. Morris, William and Eiríkr Magnússon, ed. and trans. The Saga Library, 6 vols. London: Chiswick, 1891– 1905. Online https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010664505. Nash, John. “Calligraphy.” William Morris. Ed. Linda Parry. London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1996, 296–309. Needham, Paul. Morris and the Art of the Book. New York, NY: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1976. Percy, Thomas. Northern Antiquities. Trans. Paul Henri Mallet. Rev. I. A. Blackwell. London: Bohn, 1847. Online https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011923629. Quirk, Randolph. “Dasent, Morris, and Problems of Translation.” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 14 (1953–57): 64–77. WMA. Rosenbaum, Barbara and Richard Pearson. Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. 4.3. London: Mansell, 1993. Runkle, Matthew. Transcription, Catalogue of Morris’s Books. Mark Samuels Lasner Collection.WMA. http:/ /morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/BookArts/BookArtsPortal.html. Salmon, Nick. The William Morris Chronology.William Morris Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/ archive/morris/works/chrono.htm. Swannell, J. N.“William Morris as an Interpreter of Old Norse.” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 15.4 (1961): 365–82. WMA. Thorpe, Benjamin. Northern Mythology, 3 vols. London: Lumley, 1851–52. Online https://archive.org/detai ls/northernmytholog01thoruoft/page/n6; 02, 03. Wawn, Andrew. The Vikings and the Victorians. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002. Whitla, William. “‘Sympathetic Translation’ and the ‘Scribe’s Capacity’: Morris’s Calligraphy and the Icelandic Sagas.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 10 (2001): 27–108.WMA.

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14 REWILDING MORRIS: WILDERNESS AND THE WILD IN THE LAST ROMANCES Phillippa Bennett

In William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), Old Hammond describes England as ‘a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt’. His companion Guest, a time traveller from the nineteenth century who has already been entertained with a brief tour of twenty-second-century London, questions this description.‘One thing, it seems to me, does not go with your word of “garden” for this country’, he observes; ‘you have spoken of wastes and forests, and I myself have seen the beginnings of your Middlesex and Essex forest.Why do you keep such things in a garden? And isn’t it very wasteful to do so?’The explanation Old Hammond offers is that, as a society, Nowherians ‘like these pieces of wild nature and can afford them, so we have them; let alone that as to the forests, we need a great deal of timber, and suppose that our sons and sons’ sons will do the like.’1 The wild thus has its place in Nowhere, serving both an aesthetic and a practical function. It meets, as Paul Meier observes, ‘a dominating and impelling human need to draw from nature the means of existence as well as visual pleasure and healthy well-being’.2 Living in an age in which, Morris claimed, ‘if the air and the sunlight and the rain could have been bottled up and monopolized for the profit of the individual it would have been’, it is no surprise that his vision of the future is one in which humanity has found a more appreciative and constructive engagement with the natural world.3 News from Nowhere is largely regarded as Morris’s culminating, if highly personalized, vision of Socialist ideals in practice. In May Morris’s words,‘it epitomizes so much’ in terms of Morris’s thoughts and activities as a political campaigner in the 1880s, offering an imaginative interpretation of the ideas he had explored in his political lectures regarding how human beings might organize their communities and their interactions with Nature in a post-revolutionary society liberated from the constraints and injustices of capitalism.4 News from Nowhere is not, however, Morris’s final work of literature, although some critics seem rather to wish that it was. Between 1890 and his death in 1896,William Morris wrote six further stories: The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood Beyond the World (1894), Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895), The Well at the World’s End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897) and The Sundering Flood (1897), the latter two being published posthumously. Now most commonly grouped together under the title of ‘prose romances’, they remain one of the most contested elements of Morris’s literary legacy but also one of the most important, not least because in these stories Morris broadens his vision of the natural world and humanity’s place within it.Whilst the Nowherians 343

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enjoy at leisure their ‘pieces of wild nature’, the protagonists of the last romances are forced to confront the realities of wilderness in all its awful splendour, and in doing so they learn what it means to be truly wild themselves. I wish to propose in this chapter that understanding the last romances as wild works can generate a new appreciation of them in the twenty-first century, the early decades of which have seen a growing ecological and cultural fascination with wilderness and the concept of wildness.We have, in recent years, also witnessed the coining of a new term,‘rewilding’, which relates originally to proposals for the rewilding of our landscapes but which has subsequently been applied more broadly to consider how we might re-energize our own overly regimented and largely urbanized lives. At the heart of the concept of rewilding is a desire to transform our relationship as human beings with the natural world. As George Monbiot, one of the most influential proponents of rewilding, has explained:‘Some people see rewilding as a retreat from nature; I see it as a re-involvement. […] I see rewilding as an enhanced opportunity for people to engage with and delight in the natural world’.5 Mark Bekoff extends Monbiot’s application of the term further, arguing that ‘rewilding means appreciating, respecting, and accepting other beings and landscapes for who or what they are, not for who or what we want them to be’.6 With their ebullient celebration of the natural world and their protagonists’ appreciative and respectful engagement with it, Morris’s last romances might indeed serve as a manifesto for rewilding over a century before the term or the ideas and practices it denotes became part of our cultural discourse.With his political acumen, his awareness of historical processes and his understanding of social and cultural dynamics, Morris was often far ahead, rather than merely against, the age in which he lived, and we still have much to learn from his ideas regarding the inherent value of wild places and the need to remain open and responsive to the influence of the wild.7

Wild Writing Wildness is not, admittedly, a quality we might readily expect from a writer or his works in his final years. As Edward Said observes, ‘the accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works, often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of reality’, as manifested for example in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale.8 Perhaps unconsciously motivated by such an expectation, several critics have identified these qualities in Morris’s last romances. E. P.Thompson writes of their ‘prevailing mood of calm and fulfilment’; Dorothy Hoare proposes that they exude a ‘mature autumnal quiet’; and Amanda Hodgson suggests that they move towards a ‘point of rest’ and a creative ‘stasis’.9 There is certainly some material to support a ‘Late Style’ theory in the last romances; their magical elements, for example, gesture at Said’s ‘miraculous transformation of reality’, whilst the quests of the protagonists invariably end in personal fulfilment and social reconciliation. But there is also a danger in interpreting the last romances exclusively in these terms; to do so is to suggest that they offer closure rather than inspiration, that they espouse rest rather than action and that they have more to say about the end rather than the totality of life.We are hereby left uncomfortably close to George Bernard Shaw’s reductive view of the romances as a ‘refuge from reality’, a position which enables us to forgive their idiosyncrasies and accord them an untroublesome minor place in the Morris canon.10 The last romances might indeed have received a rather more generous reception from some critics had they readily embraced such quiescence and offered their readers an escape from the world, rather than demanding a transformed engagement with it. But in the true spirit of wildness, the last romances refuse to conform to expectations and have, in consequence, generated a range of critical responses, from outright ridicule and bemused incomprehension to various 344

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attempts to justify or explain them away. A.T. Quiller-Couch, writing in 1896, concluded that they could only be ‘preserved from general derision’ by the fact that Morris must have ‘a pathetic conviction that he is doing the right thing, odd as it may appear’; by 1977, Paul Thompson still felt able to dismiss them as ‘gothic fancies of his old age, created for his own pleasure’, whilst his more recent biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, suggests that we view them as ‘dream worlds’ which are ‘out of place and out of time’, thus saving us the trouble of trying to understand their relevance for Morris’s own age or for ours.11 This is not to say that the last romances are without their stalwart champions, for there have been many of them since these remarkable stories were first published. W. B.Yeats, one of their most enthusiastic readers, claimed that ‘they were the only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to the end’, whilst C. S. Lewis celebrated them as ‘the real crown’ of Morris’s work.12 In the last three decades of the twentieth century there was a renewed – if modest – flourish of interest in the last romances, possibly influenced by a burgeoning interest in literary fantasy more generally and Ballantine Books’ decision to publish new editions as part of their Adult Fantasy series.13 Carole Silver and Joseph Dunlap edited a fine collection of essays in Studies in the Late Romances, published in 1976, and these works subsequently enjoyed a resurgence of sorts in terms of serious scholarly attention, as evidenced in various book chapters and articles. Happily, such appreciative scholarship continues in the twenty-first century, although in the broader context of both Morris studies and the field of nineteenth-century literary studies, the romances remain something of a minority interest. Writing at the end of the 1960s, Norman Talbot exposed the ‘inadequacy’ of much of the criticism of these stories which focuses repeatedly on their supposedly awkward language and apparent lack of realism, and his comments remain relevant and instructive today.‘It may be true that they make special demands upon the reader’, Talbot concedes, but then reminds us that so do ‘many other works of extraordinary merits’ which do not attract the same ‘desperate partisanship’. Far from being a deluded attempt to ‘escape from an undesirable world’, as some critics claim,Talbot argues persuasively that these are stories that move us ‘into a richer and more human world’.14 They also move us into a wilder, less predictable and less comfortable world, and they do this at the very level of form and language.15 Morris found himself temperamentally and creatively unable to write a realist novel, the dominant fictional prose form of the nineteenth century. The one he began writing in 1872 was abandoned after fifteen chapters, with Morris claiming it was ‘nothing but landscape and sentiment’, and consequently signified ‘an end of my novelwriting’.16 Irrespective of the merits or otherwise of this unfinished work, Morris found in the romance a far more amenable vehicle for his fictional writing; News from Nowhere openly declares itself a ‘utopian romance’, and although Morris himself never specifically categorized them as such, the works of his final years have been readily accommodated under that title, with May Morris identifying them as a distinct phase of her father’s ‘romance-writing’.17 Indeed, Morris’s creative engagement with the romance began with his very earliest fictional works, the stories he wrote for the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine published in 1856.These are stories in which, as Eugene LeMire notes,‘the conventions of medieval romance and courtly love’ are ‘deliberately evoked’, both in their detailed attention to the colours, forms and textures of the ‘accoutrements’ of the Middle Ages and in ‘the protagonists’ heroic aspiration to achieve honour’.18 Nonetheless, even in these earliest works, Morris experiments with the traditional romance form, and these short stories read as strikingly modern with their intensely evocative dream-like and hallucinatory episodes, their uncompromising representation of the brutality of medieval life and their stark emotional and psychological realism. Morris returned to the romance in the 1880s in A Dream of John Ball (1888), The House of the Wolfings (1889) and The Roots of the Mountains (1889), its flexibility enabling him to combine imagination and historical documentation in recreating 345

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those earlier communal forms of social organization and social protest that had inspired him in his study of history and politics after joining the Socialist movement in 1883.The romance thus appealed creatively to Morris in different ways at different times of his life, but it is in his final prose works of the 1890s that he achieves his most fertile and accomplished relationship with the romance and demonstrates most profoundly its capacity to re-envisage and recreate the world on wilder terms. The romance is by very nature a wild mode which refuses to be reined in. In its medieval form, as Eugene Vinaver observes, there is often ‘no single beginning and no single end’ to a story; knights ‘are apt to abandon at any time one quest for another, only to be sidetracked again a moment later’, and ‘any theme can re-appear after an interval’.19 Such narrative dishevelment is anathema to the chronological precision, plot structure and thematic cohesion of the nineteenth-century realist novel, and whilst Morris’s last romances certainly borrow something from the orderliness of the novel, they enthusiastically espouse the long journeys, interrupted quests and multiple adventures of the medieval romance. Similarly in terms of content, the romance challenges and discomfits its readers; Northrop Frye has described the world of the romance as an ‘improbable, desiring, erotic, and violent world’, a description readily applicable to Morris’s final works, which incorporate magic, unabashed sensuality and the uncompromising conflict of battle.20 But the wildness of the romance is expressed most significantly of all in what W. R. J. Barron calls its ‘revolutionary instinct’.21 As Kathryn Hume observes, when popular realist fiction ‘offers us a world whose values basically agree with our own, we feel no pressure to review our assumptions about reality’; in contrast the romance rejects complacency and conformity, and it questions rather than confirms our understanding and acceptance of so-called reality by presenting us with ‘an alternative model based on other ideals’.22 If we can be open and responsive to this alternative model, we can fully appreciate the purpose and power of the romance. To appreciate fully the purpose and power of Morris’s own romances does, however, require us to be open and responsive also to their language and style. For some critics, the language of the last romances seems to be an insurmountable obstacle to the enjoyment of the stories. It is a ‘language to be abhorred’ declared one early critic, with several later ones concurring censoriously that the archaisms and ‘wilfully unusual sentence-construction’ render them very difficult, if not impossible, to read.23 Those more attuned to the beauty of the language of the romances have offered an equally vigorous defence. H. G.Wells celebrated their ‘clean strong sentences and sweet old words’, claiming that the act of reading them served as a form of ‘purification’, and C. S. Lewis argued that their language and style are ‘incomparably easier and clearer’ than much modern prose due to ‘their careful avoidance of rhetoric, gloss, and decoration’.24 In an attempt to settle the matter of the supposed difficulty and obfuscation of the last romances once and for all, Norman Talbot provided an extensive and illuminating analysis of their language in a 1989 article in The Journal of the William Morris Society, and this is still the best resource for readers interested in understanding, in Talbot’s words,‘how Morris’s style works, and what it works at’.25 Talbot notes that etymologically, the romances employ ‘a basically Anglian and Norse vocabulary’, whilst stylistically, they have ‘no great care for when one sentence might stop, so that two or more sentences may make up one periodic structure’.26 Morris also, as Dustin Geeraert has noted, ‘uses features characteristic of Old Norse poetry such as kennings’ and ‘a great deal of alliteration’.27 Why Morris chose to write in this way at the end of the nineteenth century remains open to speculation, but his choice of language certainly reflects his own interest in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature and draws on his experiences of translating both Beowulf and the Icelandic Sagas.28 There is also a vigour and simplicity about the style of the romances and a straightforward honesty in the conversations of his protagonists which are essential in conveying the spirit and purpose of these stories. In The Wood Beyond the World, for example, 346

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Walter tells the Maid only minutes after meeting her in person,‘thou art indeed my love, and my dear and my darling’, and she in turn confesses,‘I also […] have cast mine eyes on thee to have thee for my love and my darling, and my speech-friend’.29 There is neither time nor inclination here for the tedious to-ing and fro-ing of an elaborate and extended courtship, only a forthright expression of feeling and intention. In their language as well as form, the last romances thus offer us a wilder type of narrative, invoking both the cultural and linguistic vitality of an earlier age and demonstrating how a dynamic language unfettered by grammatical niceties can convey the immediacy of human experience free from the ‘introspective nonsense’ and ‘rhetorical word-spinn[ing]’ which Morris so abhorred in the nineteenth-century novel.30 We might consider Morris’s mode of writing in the last romances therefore as an act of narrative rewilding – a means of rethinking and reinvigorating what we read and how we read it.

Wild Places In its flexibility, adaptability and expansiveness, Morris also found in the romance the ideal literary mode through which to explore the nature and experience of wilderness.Wilderness is the archetypal wild place, but it is also a problematic and contested concept, for as Max Oelschlaeger observes,‘a definitive idea of wilderness does not exist […] the idea of wilderness is what anyone or group cares to think’.31 To speak of wilderness is to speak of the myriad historical, cultural and economic processes that have shaped our conception of wild places and our relationship with them over thousands of years, and it is thus important to recognize that our understanding of wilderness at both the personal and the social level will inevitably be ideologically inflected and most likely influenced by a good dose of nostalgia.We also, according to George Monbiot, have conveniently short memories when it comes to our conception of wild places.Writing in twenty-first-century Britain, Monbiot laments that ‘the ancient character of the land, the forests that covered it and the animals that lived in them – which until historical times included wolves, bears, lynx, wildcats, boar and beavers – have been forgotten by almost everyone’, meaning that after centuries of clearing and exploiting the landscape, ‘open, treeless hills are widely seen as natural’.The consequences go far beyond perpetuating faulty memories; ‘spend two hours sitting in a bushy suburban garden anywhere in Britain’, Monbiot claims, ‘and you are likely to see more birds, and of a wider range of species, than you would while walking five miles across almost any open landscape in the uplands’.32 What we now travel to, photograph, picnic at and generally enjoy in our leisure time as a ‘natural’ wild landscape reconnecting us to an ancient past may well, in actuality, be a bleak memorial of ecological decimation on the part of humanity. Whilst wilderness and what constitutes a truly wild space is thus clearly a complex and indeed emotive subject, the American writer and environmentalist Gary Snyder provides us with a cogent and concise working definition, proposing that ‘a Wilderness is always a specific place, and it is there for the critters that live in it. In some cases a few humans will be living in it too’. But defining wilderness is only the starting point; as Snyder concludes, ‘such places are scarce and must be rigorously defended’.33 The defence of the wilderness did in fact begin in earnest in North America in the latter half of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the first National Parks, the inaugural Yellowstone being established in 1872 and Rock Creek, Sequoia and Yosemite in 1890.34 Motivated by the same desire to preserve the wild places of his homeland, the writer and environmental campaigner John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892, an organization still active in the United States today, the website of which proclaims it as ‘the nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization’, successfully ‘protecting millions of acres of wilderness’.35 Britain witnessed a similar growth of interest in the 347

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preservation of open and wild places during the late nineteenth century, and its own embryonic environmental movement found a voice and a purpose in organizations such as the Commons Preservation Society (now the Open Spaces Society), founded in 1865 to campaign against the enclosure and development of common land; the Kyrle Society, founded in 1877 to combat urban squalor and protect urban green spaces; and the National Trust, founded in 1895 to protect Britain’s natural and built heritage, its first acquisition being five acres of Welsh coastline. Morris was actively supportive of the Commons Preservation Society and the Kyrle Society, attending meetings of both organizations and addressing the Kyrle Society in London and Nottingham in 1881.36 A ‘campaigner for the English countryside’, as Martin Haggerty describes him, Morris raged repeatedly in his political lectures against ‘common-stealers’, ‘railway Philistines’, ‘smoke-nuisance-breeders’ and other greed-driven enemies of the natural world, and his contribution to the early environmental movement has seen him recognized in the twenty-first century as one of our most influential Green thinkers and activists.37 Morris loved the natural landscape and the wild places of England with a fierce and visceral passion; when Ellen in News from Nowhere cries out ‘Oh me! Oh me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it’, it is Morris’s voice we hear as much as hers.38 Nonetheless, Morris conceded that England is ‘a little land’ in the scheme of things; whilst the National Parks testify to the staggering variety of wilderness on the North American continent, from the tropical Everglades in Florida to the hot dry sands of Death Valley and the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska, England has ‘no great wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden mountains’.39 In the future England he envisages in News from Nowhere, there has clearly been some rewilding of the landscape as the regenerated forests of Middlesex and Essex confirm, but Old Hammond’s reference to the ‘pieces of wild nature’ [my italics] the Nowherians enjoy is telling; rather like an orderly jigsaw, these pieces fit neatly into a land which by its very nature refuses the disorderly energy and boundlessness of wilderness – it is, after all, still a country ‘too much shut up within the narrow seas […] to have much space for swelling into hugeness’.40 It was in Iceland that Morris experienced at first hand the reality of finding oneself in the midst of a wilderness, with all the ambivalent responses that provokes. In the journal he wrote during his first visit there in 1871, he records how after having left the Geysirs (which Morris scoffed at as a tourist attraction), he and his fellow travellers arrived at ‘a great plain of black and grey sand’ with ‘grey rocks sticking up out of it’ and ‘tufts of sea-pink, and bladder campion’; further on, there are ‘cliffs and mountains, whose local colour is dark grey or black (except now and then a red place burnt by old volcanic fires)’ rising up on each side,‘an enormous wall-sided mountain with a regular roof like a house’ which ‘has never been scaled by anyone’, and, in the distance,‘the waste of Long-Jokul, that looks as if it ended the world’; it was, Morris, concludes, ‘the most memorable first sight of the wilderness to me’.41 This is clearly a dramatic, alien and disorientating landscape for Morris; in his description of its constituent parts, his attention to the details of colour and texture, of shape and perspective, he is attempting to describe the indescribable and, in doing so, to accommodate and engage with the wilderness psychologically as well as physically, rather than being overwhelmed and intimidated by it. With its structural organization around what Robert Fraser describes as ‘the onerous journey across unchartered regions’, the romance mode allowed Morris the opportunity to revisit the features of the Icelandic wilderness which made such a lasting impact on his imagination.42 We find them in the rocky wastes of The Story of the Glittering Plain, the treacherous mountains of The Well at the World’s End and the fierce eponymous river of The Sundering Flood, and we also find Morris’s own psychological and emotional response to them replayed in the responses of the protagonists. In The Story of the Glittering Plain, as Hallblithe pursues his quest to find the Hostage, he is 348

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compelled to leave the fertile lands of the plain and venture into the Icelandic-inspired wilderness of rock beyond. Sitting exhausted after walking for hours through gruelling terrain, At last he looked, and saw that he was high up amongst the mountain-peaks: before him and on either hand was but a world of fallow stone rising ridge upon ridge like the waves of the wildest winter sea. The sun not far from its midmost shone down bright and hot on that wilderness; yet there was no sign that man had ever been there since the beginning of the world, save that the path aforesaid seemed to lead onward down the stony slope. Hallblithe is initially overcome and demoralized by this vision, believing ‘this was the last he should see of the Glittering Plain’ and proclaiming aloud:‘Now is my last hour come’.43 It is a response which revisits, if in rather more dramatic terms, Morris’s own response at times to the landscape of Iceland; he wrote in his journal of the ‘grisly desolation’ of the Icelandic wilderness and understood the sense of oppression and dread it could evoke. In letters to Aglaia Coronio written before his second trip there in 1873, Morris described how ‘Iceland gapes for me still this summer’, admitting ‘sometimes I like the idea of it, and sometimes it fills me with dismay’.44 Despite his reservations about his second journey through Iceland, Morris told Philip Webb that he hoped ‘to get something out of it all’, and assured Aglaia Coronio ‘’tis pretty certain to do me good’.45 There was something necessary it seems for Morris about confronting, traversing and inhabiting the Icelandic wilderness once more, and though he never returned after 1873, the profound influence of his time there, as his biographer J.W. Mackail notes,‘can hardly be overestimated’, and ‘was not wholly intelligible’ even to those who knew him best.46 The importance of experiencing wilderness first hand in this way was, however, entirely intelligible to Morris’s American contemporary Henry David Thoreau, who claimed, ‘we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast, and drear, and inhuman’, and there is certainly in Morris’s Iceland journals evidence of the ‘attitude of reverence and humility’ which Greg Garrard identifies as the foundation of ‘a post-Christian covenant’ in which wilderness ‘holds out the promise of a renewed, authentic relation of humanity and the earth’.47 Such an attitude is also displayed by the protagonists of Morris’s last romances, who move beyond seeing the wilderness as a hostile space to be endured and overcome, and recognize the need to respect and learn from it. In The Story of the Glittering Plain, Hallblithe eventually meets three wayfarers similarly stranded in the barren mountains and likely to perish there with him, but as one of the wayfarers notes, the way through ‘is not utterly blind’ for those who can read the landscape. Through close observation, they find ‘a track that led through the stony tangle of the wilderness’, and eventually Hallblithe sees and hears ‘two ravens in a cranny of the stone, flapping their wings and croaking’; Hallblithe, whose clan is the House of the Raven, interprets this as a good omen, but he also understands that the presence of the birds indicates that food and water cannot be too far away.48 Thus attuned to the signals of the wilderness, Hallblithe finds his way to the fertile hinterlands of the plain and lives to accomplish his ‘errand in the world’.49 Reading and understanding the ways of the wilderness is also essential to the survival of Ralph and Ursula in The Well at the World’s End as they move through the Thirsty Desert and the scattered bodies of those who have failed to traverse it.The Thirsty Desert is an Icelandicinspired ‘stony waste’ similar to that which Hallblithe encounters, in that it ‘lay in ridges as the waves of a great sea’, although here ‘the face of the wilderness was covered with a salt scurf ’, and has ‘a sprinkling of small sage bushes’.50 Even the small, seemingly insignificant aspects of the landscape are detailed by Morris, because wilderness is never merely a stage set for events in the last romances – it is as vital and individual as his protagonists, with its own distinct features 349

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to be known and understood. Arriving at a ‘huge and monstrous tree’, its fifty great limbs ‘leafless’, but ‘behung with blazoned shields, and knights’ helms, and swords, and spears, and axes, and hauberks’, Ralph bends to drink from the pool of clear water at its foot.51 Ursula, having already noted that the faces of those who perished nearest to the Dry Tree were ‘drawn up in a grin, as though they had died in pain’, observes the pool more keenly than Ralph and calls out: “O Ralph, do it not! Seest thou not this water, that although it be bright and clear, so that we may see all the pebbles at the bottom, yet nevertheless when the wind eddies about, and lifts the skirts of our raiment, it makes no ripple on the face of the pool, and doubtless it is heavy with venom”. As Ralph draws back, a crow flies down to drink and immediately afterwards ‘fell down stark dead’, leading Ursula to exclaim,‘“Yea, thus are we saved from present death”’.52 Ursula understands that the wilderness is not ‘made’ for the needs or service of humankind; it exists in and for itself, and if we enter it we must do so on its terms and not ours.The armour and weapons that hang from the lifeless tree testify to the failure of human beings to watch, listen to, feel and thereby understand the wilderness; it is the paraphernalia of human aggression and domination aimed at conquering rather than working with the natural world. To work with rather than against the wilderness means not only surviving it, but also feeling oneself a fundamental part of it, with all the sense of privilege and reward that brings. Garrard warns of the ‘pernicious consequences’ of regarding the wilderness as something other, and believing that ‘nature is only authentic if we are entirely absent from it’. These consequences can be cultural and historical, as has happened at times with the ring-fencing of wilderness into designated protected areas; hence in the establishment of Yosemite National Park, Garrard argues that ‘this myth of an “uninhabited wilderness” meant that both the Ahwahneechee Indians and the white miners who had lived and worked there were expelled’.53 But the consequences are also deeply personal and affect us all. Centuries of human exploitation and unsympathetic activity have undoubtedly ravaged the wilderness, but whilst excluding humanity from it as far as possible might seem a necessary if regrettable response, it risks perpetuating the idea that we exist apart from the natural world and leads ultimately to an impoverishment of human life. The protagonists of the last romances in contrast understand their profound connection to the wilderness and indeed at times find in it a welcome home, for as Florence Boos notes, Morris consistently ‘offered a view of the environment as a social dwelling’ and ‘spoke clearly of the need for a proper harmony of people and the natural order they live in’.54 Whilst the rocky wastes and deserts might not be readily hospitable territory, the vast wildwoods that populate several of the last romances are, and George Monbiot would be pleased to know that Morris was not one of those who had forgotten the history of the British landscape.As Old Hammond tells Guest in News from Nowhere, England ‘was once a country of clearings amongst the woods and wastes’, and in his final works Morris recreates that landscape in exuberant detail, with the opening lines of Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair describing how ‘of old there was a land which was so much a woodland, that a minstrel thereof said it that a squirrel might go from end to end, and all about, from tree to tree, and never touch the earth’.55 Christopher has lived amidst this wildwood since childhood and has a visceral connection to it; hence, having lain ill for several weeks following an assassination attempt, his joy at being able to travel back into the woodland is potent as he delights in the fair show of the greenery, and the boles of the ancient oaks, and the squirrels running from bough to bough, and the rabbits scuttling from under the bracken, and the 350

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hind leaping in the wood-lawn, and the sun falling through the rustling leaves, and the wind on his face, and the scent of the forest, yea, and his fair companions and their loveliness and valiancy and kindness. The movement and energy of the wildwood is captured for the reader in the momentum of the sentence which builds with its repeated conjunctions, each clause conveying the varied details of the woodland and the aesthetic and sensory pleasure Christopher derives from it. Notably, travelling with his companions contributes actively to this pleasure, the ‘yea’ celebrating their human presence and confirming that they belong here as much as the squirrels and the rabbits and the deer. For a man recently ‘come from the peril of death and the sick-bed’, the return to the wildwood signifies a return to life at its most vital, and to his own rightful place in the world.56 The wildwood is also a significant landscape in The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and of all Morris’s protagonists, Birdalone demonstrates the most profound connection with the earth and its creatures. Abducted as a child, Birdalone, like Christopher, is raised in the midst of a forest ‘held to be mighty great, or maybe measureless’ by those who do not know it, but Birdalone navigates it respectfully and intuitively, having from her earliest years ‘wandered well-nigh as she had will, and much in the wood; for she had no fear thereof ’. Entirely at home in the wilderness, Birdalone also understands that this is shared territory and that she must inhabit it with due consideration for others, hence: She learned of the ways and the wont of all the creatures round about her, and the very grass and flowers were friends to her, and she made tales of them in her mind; and the wild things feared her in no wise, and the fowl would come to her hand, and play with her and love her.57 In both her imaginative and practical engagement with the wild, Birdalone recognizes the value and importance of plant and animal life, feeling a connection with the very ground she walks on.The relationship is mutually beneficial: the plants and wild creatures flourish free from harm and exploitation, whilst Birdalone finds in return that ‘the earth was her friend, and solaced her when she suffered aught’. In addition, Birdalone grows ‘hardy as well as strong’ in the wilderness, partaking of its resilience which serves her well as she endures the tyranny of the witch-wife, and when she matures to womanhood she is graced with the companionship of the wood-spirit Habundia, a relationship which symbolizes Birdalone’s affinity with the natural order.58 ‘The wild requires that we learn the terrain’, Gary Snyder writes, and ‘nod to all the plants and animals and birds’, an attitude and practice exemplified in Birdalone but demonstrated by all Morris’s protagonists who recognize the wilderness as shared space.59 For Margaret Grennan, Morris’s last romances are ‘like a medieval Book of the Hours, coloured in green and gold and cinnabar, figured with flowers, birds and beasts – a hymn of praise to the things he loved in any time, past, present, or future’, a description that aptly conveys the variety of colour, texture and life in their landscapes and testifies to Morris’s celebratory and inclusive vision of the natural world.60 It is a vision that acquires new relevance in the context of our own twenty-first century debates about rewilding and the often highly emotive and partisan responses generated by the suggestion that we might share our space more generously. Whilst the recent re-introduction of the beaver in certain parts of the United Kingdom might have been broadly accepted as a good thing, for example, the suggestion that we might re-introduce the lynx, the bear and the wolf – all previous inhabitants of the British Isles – is far more divisive and liable to provoke hysteria on the part of those who farm animals for human consumption and profit, those who wish to reserve the land for killing other creatures supposedly in the name of sport, and those 351

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who feel they have the right to enjoy a family picnic anywhere in ‘the wild’ without fear of finding themselves on the menu. As Toby Ackroyd from the organization Wild Europe notes, ‘in western countries people are no longer used to wild predators and that leads to a negative attitude’; fears that the re-introduction of wolves would pose a significant threat to human life, for example, are clearly unfounded in view of the statistical evidence.61 Nonetheless, our interaction as humans with the wild is complex, as Morris was well aware, and he does not offer a sentimental or simplistic representation of it in his last romances. In The Sundering Flood, Osberne kills three large wolves ‘with gaping jaws and glistening white fangs’ that have been attacking his homestead’s sheep, and in The Well at the World’s End, Ralph kills ‘a huge bear as big as a bullock’ when he attacks Ursula in the wilderness.62 When survival and livelihood are at stake, our relations with wild creatures can be ethically messy. But these creatures are still an essential element of the wild territory of the last romances – they are in and of its wildness – and whilst Morris depicts occasional conflict as inevitable, his protagonists do not wilfully pursue their wild neighbours nor seek their eradication.Thoreau lamented the extermination of what he termed the ‘nobler’ animals in parts of America during the nineteenth century, including cougars, panthers, wolves and bears, concluding:‘I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country’; to witness the selective extinction of certain animals was, he wrote, as if ‘some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars’.63 Whilst England no longer had creatures of that order to protect, having driven them to extinction centuries before, Morris lamented in a similar vein the loss of natural habitat in his own country and was particularly vocal in his criticism of the clearings and other changes taking place in Epping Forest, which, as Mackail writes, ‘smoothed down the characteristic wildness of the forest’.64 Appalled that the authorities might want to ‘landscape garden it, or turn it into golf grounds’, Morris argued that ‘not a single tree should be felled, unless it were necessary for the growth of its fellows’, demanding:‘We want a thicket, not a park, from Epping Forest’.65 In his last romances, Morris rejects the anthropocentric approach to the environment that rampant nineteenth-century industrialism, capitalism and tourism promoted with their scrabble for resources and profit, and reclaims the diversity and dynamism of the wilderness as a good in its own right.These stories are his own way of saying, along with Thoreau,‘I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth’.66

Wild Selves To know an entire earth is to know and delight in its wild places, and in doing so to know our own wildness, what Thoreau calls ‘the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us’.67 In his last romances, Morris’s protagonists respect and learn the ways of the wilderness, but they also respond to it at an instinctive and primal level, recognizing the chance it offers them to enact and accomplish their own wild selves.We see this in Hallblithe’s response to the ocean in The Story of the Glittering Plain, when ‘his heart swelled with joy as he sniffed the brine and watched the gleaming hills and valleys of the restless deep’; we see it in Ralph’s response to the Wall of the World in The Well at the World’s End, a terrifying and seemingly impassable range of mountains which nonetheless makes Ralph’s heart ‘rather rise than fall at the sight of them’; and we see it in Osberne’s early attraction to the vast and rapid river in The Sundering Flood,‘for ever the wondrous stream seemed to draw the lad to it’.68 In each case, the wildness of the natural world speaks to the protagonists of a more vital and authentic life, and they are compelled to listen. To reconnect with our wildness as human animals, as Ralph’s rising heart and Hallblithe’s sniffing of the brine imply, means in the first instance relearning how to be attuned and 352

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responsive to our physical being. Morris’s protagonists find a home in the wilderness, but they also find themselves fundamentally at home in it, and simultaneously at home in their own bodies. In her memoir Wild (2012), Cheryl Strayed records how covering miles of wilderness each day at walking pace as she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail allowed her ‘to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets’. She recalls feeling ‘more alive to my senses than ever’, believing that ‘it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way’. Strayed describes a ‘powerful and fundamental’ connection with the environment through which she moves, but also with her own physical being, noting how ‘I walked with a kind of concentration I’d never had before, and because of it I could feel the trail and my body more acutely, as if I were walking barefoot and naked’, an unfettered state she enjoys literally at a small creek where she sheds her boots and clothes and sits ‘naked in the cool shallow water, splashing it over my face and head’.69 Alone in the wilderness, Strayed undergoes a personal rewilding, opening herself to what Thoreau calls ‘our life in nature’, a life in which each day we are brought into direct contact with ‘rocks, trees, wind’ and come to know in all its glorious details ‘the solid earth! the actual world!’70 The youthful and energetic characters of the last romances undergo a similar personal rewilding in the wilderness; their senses are heightened, their bodies are active and they relish moving naked in the world. In Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, on escaping her imprisonment in the Castle of Greenharbour, Goldilind takes a horse and ‘sped along, half mad with joy at the freedom of this happy morn’, heading deep into the woods until she finds ‘a clear pool amidst of a little clearing’. Both exhilarated and exhausted from her ride in the heat of the day, she rubbed her eyes and smiled, and turned to the pool, where now a little ripple was running over the face of it, and a thought came upon her, and she set her hand to the clasp of her gown and undid it, and drew the gown off her shoulders, and so did off all her raiment, and stood naked a little on the warm sunny grass, and then bestirred her and went lightly into the pool, and bathed and sported there, and then came onto the grass again, and went to and fro to dry her in the air and sun.71 Goldilind responds instinctively and spontaneously to her environment, unrestrained by conventional codes of modesty and decorum which are entirely redundant in the woods.The sensory and sensual delight of the experience is clear: Goldilind lingers unselfconsciously to enjoy the sunshine on her bare skin before taking pleasure in the water, then takes time to play as well as bathe in the pool, indicating that this is more than a merely functional exercise. Nor does she hasten to cover herself when she leaves the water, allowing herself instead to enjoy her nakedness a little longer and the pleasurable sensation of drying naturally in the warm air. Nakedness represents the ultimate wild state, a literal stripping away of the protective but encumbering layers of civilization to move into raw and unmediated contact with the land and the elements, and most of Morris’s protagonists willingly espouse it. In The Water of the Wondrous Isles, Birdalone, like Goldilind, chooses to ‘put off from her her simple raiment’ in the heat of the summer forest,‘that she might feel all the pleasure of the cool shadow and what air was stirring, and the kindness of the greensward upon her very body’, and in The Well at the World’s End, having drunk from the eponymous well, Ursula asks Ralph ‘“shall we go hence and turn from the ocean-sea without wetting our bodies in its waters?”’, in response to which ‘they were speedily naked and playing in the water’.72 In his romances, Morris thus found a means of enacting in compelling and evocative terms what he called in his 1885 lecture ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’ the ‘eager life’ – a state of being in which we are able: 353

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To feel mere life a pleasure; to enjoy the moving one’s limbs and exercising one’s bodily powers; to play, as it were, with sun and wind and rain; to rejoice in satisfying the due bodily appetites of a human animal without fear of degradation or sense of wrong-doing; yes, and therewithal to be well-formed, straight-limbed, strongly knit, expressive of countenance – to be, in a word, beautiful […].73 Morris’s eager life is the wild life – a life which he claims as the birthright of all men and women, and which he looked to see restored in a post-revolutionary Communist society.74 Ellen, his most enigmatic character in News from Nowhere, is attractively suggestive of such future wildness with her unconventional beauty and restless energy, rowing athletically and moving always with grace and strength,‘her face and hands and bare feet tanned quite brown with the sun’, and in the romances that followed, the healthy and good-looking protagonists rise admirably to the physical challenges of their individual quests, riding, swimming, rowing and running their way through the world. 75 They also satisfy ‘the due bodily appetites of a human animal’ free from any sense of transgression, even without the involvement of a church or what Morris’s early readers would have recognized as a formal wedding ceremony, and the romance form, as Amanda Hodgson suggests, clearly ‘provided for Morris a freedom of expression that no other fictional form could have allowed him’ in depicting scenes of ‘unabashed sexual activity’.76 In The Water of the Wondrous Isles, for example, a reunited Birdalone and Arthur are ‘breathless’ with ‘longing’ for each other after being so long apart, and after much kissing and holding consummate their relationship in the cottage in the wildwood, Birdalone asserting with no sense of shame ‘“here tonight we shall lie”’.77 A similar lack of sexual inhibition characterizes Ralph’s relationships in The Well at the World’s End; when the Lady of Abundance has helped Ralph to escape from her tyrannical husband, she leads him to a clearing in the wildwood and ‘fell to kissing him long and sweetly’, and in response: He drew her down to him as he knelt there, and took his arms about her, and though she yet shrank from him a little and the eager flame of his love, he might not be gainsayed, and she gave herself to him and let her body glide into his arms, and loved him no less than he loved her.And there between them in the wilderness was all the joy of love that might be.78 There is none of the moral angst or self-recrimination we might expect from the pages of a nineteenth-century realist novel in response to an illicit liaison and the betrayal of a marriage vow. For Ralph and the Lady, this is an inevitable and entirely natural expression of their mutual attraction, for as the Lady tells Ralph, ‘“What else did I desire but to be with thee?”’79 After the death of the Lady, and many subsequent trials, Ralph and his new beloved Ursula are similarly eager to consummate their relationship, although Ursula prefers some semblance of a ceremony. Having met the messengers of the Innocent Folk sent to help them in the wilderness, Ralph is keen to ask whether ‘knowing each other carnally’ would hinder Ursula and himself in their quest to find the Well, and is assured by the Elder of the Folk, ‘we hear not that it shall be the worse for you in any wise that ye shall become one flesh’. Indeed the messengers are ‘joyful’ to find such love between them, and after the construction of a special shelter in the meadow and a feast under the open skies, Ralph requests that the messengers ‘bear witness that they were wedded’ whilst he and Ursula depart readily ‘to their bridal bower hand in hand through the freshness of the night’.80 There is clearly no place in the last romances for the ‘respectable commercial marriage bed’ or ‘mingled prudery and 354

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prurience’ of the nineteenth century as described by Old Hammond in News from Nowhere; instead, Morris demonstrates in these relationships his belief that the sexual act was integral to a ‘decent animalism’ and even had ‘something sacred about it’ in its own right if it was ‘the outcome of natural desires and kindliness on both sides’.81 Responding to our wild nature invariably demands that we renew our relationship with our own bodies – that we delight in physical movement and expression and tap into that restless underlying energy that compels us to leave our desks and our sofas. But personal rewilding also requires a psychological renewal, a transformative shift in perspective that enables us to see the world in a new way. In Feral (2013), Monbiot talks of undergoing such an experience, describing his sudden realization one ‘grey day in Wales’ that: I could not continue to live as I had done. I could not continue just sitting and writing, looking after my daughter and my house, running merely to stay fit, pursuing only what could not be seen, watching the seasons cycling past without ever quite belonging to them. Monbiot expresses a sense of stagnation and of alienation which will be all too familiar to many readers, concluding ‘I was, I believe, ecologically bored’.82 Whilst ecological boredom might be an ailment privileged only to the twenty-first-century middle classes, several of Morris’s protagonists similarly chafe against their social and domestic responsibilities, feeling themselves restrained and prevented by them. Carole Silver rightly notes that these characters manifest something of ‘the simplicity, vitality, and sense of duty to home and kindred of the barbaric peoples’, but this sense of duty is by no means an unquestioning or unambivalent one, and their own desire for self-determination more often than not wins out.83 Hence in The Well at the World’s End, Ralph refuses to stay at home as requested by his father and mother when his elder brothers leave to travel, telling his friends, ‘that liketh me not; therefore am I come out to seek my luck in the world’; Ralph feels the impulse of his own wild nature in ‘the blood running hot in his veins’ which compels him to travel and see new lands and new societies.84 Likewise, in The Wood Beyond the World, when Walter’s ship is blown off course, preventing him from returning to avenge his murdered father,‘his heart was lighter than it had been since he heard of his father’s death, and the feud awaiting him at home, which forsooth would stay his wanderings a weary while, and therewithal his hopes’. Now Walter finds ‘he needs must wander’, and though he grieves for his father, he welcomes the reprieve from an unhappy duty and the chance to pursue a different destiny that moving in accordance with the wind and the waves offers.85 To respond to the call of our own wildness in this way is not to seek an escape from life and its responsibilities, but rather to renew our commitment to our own life and to transform the way we live it. Indeed in The Story of the Glittering Plain, Hallblithe chastises the Sea-Eagle for seeking to escape his own mortality on the Glittering Plain at the cost of his autonomy, for the King of the Plain expects subservience in return for the gift of endless life: ‘Whose thrall art thou now?’ Hallblithe challenges Sea-Eagle;‘the bidding of what lord or King wilt thou do, O Chieftain, that thou mayest eat thy meat in the morning and lie soft in thy bed in the evening?’86 Wildness requires us to take, rather than relinquish, responsibility for our own lives, to refuse to accept without question the dictates of authority and the claims of experience, to find out for ourselves what our place and purpose in the world is. Ralph in The Well at the World’s End understands this when he resists the pressure put on him by a monk of the Abbey at Higham on the Way to abandon his travels early and pursue a potentially lucrative career in the service of the Lord Abbot. Ralph scorns the monk’s warning that if he is ‘set on beholding the fashion of this 355

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world’ then ‘most like it will give thee the rue’, refusing comfort and cowardly self-preservation in favour of adventure and the right to choose his own way.87 To follow the promptings of our own wild nature might well mean foregoing stability and security – the very things we are so often encouraged to aspire to as we mature into adulthood – but the potential rewards outweigh the sacrifices. Hence in The Sundering Flood, when Elfhild warns Osberne that in leaving the safety of the Dale ‘thou art going into peril of death, and thou so young!’ he asks ‘how might it ever come about that we might meet bodily if I abode ever at Wethermel and the Dale in peace and quietness, while thou dwelt still with thy carlines on the other side of this fierce stream?’ To reach Elfhild on the other side of the river, Osberne is prepared to ‘learn the wideness of the world’ and risk ‘chancehap and war’, proving himself a worthy successor to the heroes and heroines of the Icelandic sagas – stories which Morris celebrated as ‘a glorious outcome of the worship of Courage’ and whose ‘active heroes’, as John Purkis notes, had a deep and lasting influence on him.88 To honour our wildness thus sometimes calls for the courage to travel alone. Such travel might well be literal if, like Strayed, we find ourselves drawn to a solitary journey through the wilderness in order to find our way to a more authentic and purposeful life. Indeed Strayed talks of the ‘radical aloneness’ she experienced whilst walking the Pacific Crest Trail, truly understanding for the first time ‘the world’s vastness’ and ‘occupying it in a way I never had before’.89 In Morris’s romances, each protagonist spends such time alone in the wilderness and, as with Strayed, the experience is invariably transformative, broadening their vision of the world and their understanding of how they too might occupy it by releasing them into their own wildness. But travelling alone can also be understood metaphorically in terms of having the courage to pursue a different course in life to the one we expected to take, and more often than not that others expected – and perhaps wanted – us to take. It might mean abandoning the conventional goals that our culture deems worthy to seek more valuable aims and enriching experiences. Morris knew well enough what the consequences of taking such a decision were, having abandoned a conventional middle-class political position to join the embryonic Socialist movement in the 1880s, an act which E. P.Thompson declares ‘may be counted among the great conversions of the world’.90 In his 1884 lecture ‘Art and Socialism’, Morris warned those who chose to follow him that they would ‘be mocked and laughed at’, that they would ‘be looked on coldly by many excellent people, not all of whom will be quite stupid’, and that they would ‘run the risk of losing position, reputation, money, friends even’. Such experiences, Morris admitted,‘try the stuff a man is made of ’, but they were more than outweighed by the integrity of purpose and sense of contribution that joining the cause ensured.91 In his last romances, Morris repeatedly enacts such processes of renunciation and sacrifice whilst affirming their importance in achieving a more fulfilling life. Each of his protagonists, either through choice or necessity, leaves family and homeland to travel alone, at least for a while, in pursuit of something lost or something better. In doing so they must often contend with the disapproval or scorn of those who would stop them, or those who lack the courage to challenge social convention or indeed themselves. In The Water of the Wondrous Isles, when Birdalone escapes in the Sending Boat across the vast waters of the lake without clothes or provision, the witch-wife who has raised her and tyrannized her cries:‘“Go then, naked and outcast! Go then, naked fool! and come back hither after thou has been under the hands of the pitiless!”’ But Birdalone sails on, ‘nor so much as turned her head toward the witch wife’, for wildness does not yield to threats nor is it restrained by fear.92 Instead, the last romances demonstrate Mark Bekoff ’s claim that ‘rewilding is a transformative and personal process. It is a call to action, but primarily to action within our own lives’.93 Like Hallblithe in The Story of the Glittering Plain, it asks us to find and accomplish our own errand in the world. 356

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Wild Societies Reclaiming our wild selves is thus essential to a process of rewilding that may begin with protecting designated landscapes and re-introducing their lost inhabitants but which then proceeds to re-establish our own fundamental connection with the wild on an individual basis. However, for a truly comprehensive, meaningful and constructive vision of rewilding, we must also reconsider and rework how we live together as human animals, for if we are wild creatures in body and spirit, we are also social and increasingly urbanized creatures, now living in a world in which it is near impossible to escape the influences of twenty-first century civilization. Nor would most of us wish to abandon the benefits of that civilization, for whether we live in a hamlet, village, town or city, we benefit, albeit in varying degrees, from the technological advancements, transport networks and multifarious conveniences that are the hallmark of ‘civilized’ societies, and even those who dwell in rural areas feel entitled nowadays to a reliable mobile phone signal and superfast broadband. How wildness and civilization might be brought into a harmonious and complementary relationship is perhaps the ultimate challenge for proponents of rewilding, for centuries of cultural conditioning have led to an assumption, in Western societies at least, that the two are irreconcilable and that the triumph of one means the inevitable demise of the other. It was in Morris’s own age, Carolyn Merchant proposes, that this division between the wild and the civilized became particularly entrenched in the Western imagination. Merchant explains how, in the nineteenth century, The emerging bourgeoisie adopted a new secular narrative that legitimated the changes wrought on the earth. Capitalism’s origin story moves from desert wilderness to cultivated garden. In the new story, undeveloped nature is transformed into a state of civility, producing a reclaimed Garden of Eden. The wild is tamed, the wilderness subdued. The conversion of the wilderness ‘through science, technology, and capitalism’ is the myth ‘into which most Westerners have been socialized’, Merchant argues, ‘and within which we live our lives today’.94 In consequence, our relationship with the natural world, as R. P. Harrison laments, is based on ‘mastery and possession’, and we value it largely for what we can take and use from it.95 Such an approach had its critics already in the nineteenth century, with Friedrich Engels exposing the fallacy of the idea that we ‘rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people’ rather than understanding that we ‘belong to nature, and exist in its midst’, and Morris himself publicly mourned the loss of ‘the brown moors and the meadows, the clear streams and the sunny skies’ which had been plundered, built over and polluted by capitalist endeavours and now partook of the ‘hideous squalor’ of industrialism.96 Both Engels and Morris early understood how prioritizing the interests of civilization above the interests of the wild leads only to an impoverishment of both – how, as Oelschlaeger argues, ‘humankind’s apparent success in dominating and transforming wilderness into civilization not only endangers the web of life itself but fundamentally diminishes our humanity, our potential for a fuller and richer human beingness’.97 One response by those appalled at this appropriation and despoliation of the wild has been the reciprocal denigration of modern civilization; for the proponents of this position, as William Cronon writes,‘wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives’. From this perspective it is in the wilderness, and not the city, that ‘we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are – or 357

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ought to be’.98 Whilst there is much to sympathise with in this position in view of the environmental devastations and mass extinctions perpetrated by the forces of technological, industrial and economic progress, ultimately it serves only to reaffirm the seemingly irreparable break between civilization and the wild, and leaves the prospect of their reconciliation bleak.The wilderness undoubtedly offers an invaluable opportunity for self-renewal and the opportunity to reconnect with our own wildness, as discussed earlier in this chapter, but most of us must sooner or later return to our towns and cities and resume our civilized lives (nor is it likely nowadays that we entered the wilderness without the essential trappings of modernity in the form of rucksacks, weatherproof clothing, navigational aids and camping equipment).To move beyond the unhelpful and indeed often destructive dichotomy of wild and civilized, we must think more creatively and have the imagination and the will to conceive how, in Monbiot’s words, we might ‘enjoy the benefits of advanced technology while also enjoying, if we choose, a life richer in adventure and surprise’; it is through developing a comprehensive vision of rewilding, Monbiot argues, that we can begin the process of reconciliation, because ‘rewilding is not about abandoning civilization but about enhancing it’.99 Morris himself freely admitted his own ‘hatred of modern civilization’ as it defined itself in the nineteenth century, but he would have readily agreed with Monbiot that the solution is not to abandon it.100 For Morris, however, what was needed was not merely an enhancing of modern civilization but a transformation of it, and in his Socialist lectures and articles, together with News from Nowhere, he discusses in informed and persuasive detail what such a transformation might mean in social, environmental and economic terms, and what methods are most likely to achieve it.The last romances do not serve the same purpose as these more overtly political writings, but they still contribute significantly to Morris’s vision of how we might live, rather than how we live now, in their compelling depictions of wilder, more dynamic societies which are transformed and reinvigorated by the presence of their wild protagonists. The societies which these protagonists come finally to inhabit maintain an active and meaningful relationship with the wild, in that the boundaries between the human built environment and the wilderness are invariably permeable. Thoreau celebrated such permeability in Walden, writing: Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness – to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. For Thoreau, the vitality of individuals and of human societies more generally is dependent on moving easily and regularly between the communities in which we live and work and the wild landscape beyond; to live truly and fully as members of society,‘we must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigour’ and ‘witness our own limits transgressed’, something only the wild can bestow.101 As Don Scheese notes, Thoreau was also quick to emphasise how ‘living in or near civilization, one can still without much effort cross a border into wildness’, and such crossings are a characteristic feature of Morris’s romances.102 In The Water of the Wondrous Isles, the town of Utterhay where Birdalone and her companions finally settle is ‘hard on the borders’ of the vast wood of Evilshaw, and at the start of the tale we hear how ‘few indeed had entered it, and they that had, brought back tales wild and confused thereof ’.103 But as Norman Talbot observes,‘an evil wood, for Morris, is a contradiction in terms’, and those who fear Evilshaw demonstrate the limitations and ignorance of the civilized world view in which the wild is a problem rather than 358

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a necessity.104 In contrast, at the end of the story, we are told that:‘As to the wood of Evilshaw, it was not once a year only that Birdalone and Arthur sought thither and met the Wood-mother, but a half-score of times or more, might be, in the year’s circle’, whilst their friend Atra would regularly ‘leave Utterhay and her friends and fare lonesome up into Evilshaw, and find Habundia and abide with her in all kindness holden for a month or more’. For Atra in particular, journeying into the wildwood is the ‘tonic’Thoreau identified, for we are told that in the days before she leaves Utterhay, she would ‘fall moody and few-spoken’, whereas ‘she came back ever from the wood calm and kind and well-liking’.105 The wildwood restores and revitalizes Atra, who recognizes when contact with the wild is essential to her physical and psychological wellbeing. Donna Seaman claims that ‘our longing for wilderness increases in direct proportion to our eradication of it’ and that ‘people who live wholly urbanized lives, spending little time outdoors and rarely stopping to notice life that is not human-made, suffer emotionally and spiritually’; in her ability to move between town and wilderness, Atra in contrast accommodates the needs of both the civilized and the wild self and in doing so avoids the sense of loss and alienation that lack of regular contact with the natural world can engender.106 It is also significant that in traversing the threshold between civilization and wilderness,Atra, Birdalone and Arthur achieve some modest success in changing social attitudes in Utterhay, for we are told that ‘amidst all these comings and goings somewhat wore off the terror of Evilshaw’; whilst many still feel the need for a companion or ‘something holy’ to accompany them in travelling there, some progress at least has been made in reclaiming the wildwood from fear and superstition.107 Regular contact with the wild is essential also to Osberne in The Sundering Flood who, on returning from his quest and assuming the governance of his community, is repeatedly drawn to the uncultivated territory beyond his homestead. In the closing stages of the story we are told that once in every quarter Osberne went into that same dale wherein he first met Steelhead, and there he came to him, and they had converse together; and though Osberne changed the aspect of him from year to year, as for Steelhead he changed not at all, but was ever the same as when Osberne first saw him, and good love there was between those twain.108 Steelhead is seemingly ageless, one of ‘the warriors of while agone’, and mentors Osberne as a child, imbuing him with bodily strength beyond his years through the ritualistic bathing and blessing of his naked body, and affirming his attraction to the eponymous river when he tells Osberne:‘when thou mayest, seek thou to the side of the Sundering Flood, for meseemeth that there lieth thy weird’.109 We might indeed understand Steelhead as a manifestation of the spirit and the values of the wild in Morris’s final story: he fosters Osberne’s affinity with the raging waters of the river (unlike his grandparents who warn him to avoid it); he enhances the animal strength of Osberne’s naked body; and he confers the sword Boardcleaver on him that he might cultivate a purposeful and adventurous life. In addition, he himself remains eternally young and vigorous, a symbol of the undiminished energy of the wild, of what Seaman describes as the ‘vitality that charges our minds and sustains our souls’.110 In his regular visits to the Dale to meet Steelhead, Osberne, like Atra in her meetings with Habundia, thus responds to a primal and instinctive need to sustain his own wild nature in the midst of his everyday social and domestic life – to celebrate wildness as fundamental to his humanity. Restoring the balance between our wild and civilized selves, acknowledging them as equally valid aspects of our human nature, and ensuring we meet the needs of both, is one way of transforming our over-civilized lives. Moving as freely and frequently as we can between urban and 359

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wild landscapes enables this, but we can also make contact with the wild in the very midst of our towns and cities.As Snyder explains,‘Wild is the process that surrounds us all, self-organizing nature’, and we can choose to see, feel and appreciate it day by day no matter where we live, something Thoreau understood when he declared: ‘I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord’.111 Wildness can be found in the swathe of wild flowers growing in the suburbs of a city, in the bird of prey hovering over a town, or in the fox moving stealthily across an urban garden.We can experience it even more readily and regularly, like Morris, in the intense ‘green green green!’ of the grass in springtime or in a simple profusion of dandelions, and we can nourish our own wild nature, as Morris tells us in his 1881 lecture ‘Art and the Beauty of the Earth’, by learning ‘to love the narrow spot that surrounds our daily life for what of beauty and sympathy there is in it’.112 In the last romances, Morris’s protagonists demonstrate just such receptivity to the wild in their midst. Ralph in The Well at the World’s End loves the house in which he lives ‘and all that dwelt there’, including ‘the martins that nested in the earthen bottles, which when he was little he had seen his mother put up in the eaves of the out-bowers’.113 Here the wild finds its place at the centre of human domesticity and is both welcomed and appreciated as part of the home, something we see also in Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair in which Joanna and David nurse the wounded Christopher in the house at Littledale ‘and decked it with boughs and blossoms’ from the wildwood for their shared delight.114 That we can invite the wild into our lives at any time is symbolized also in The Water of the Wondrous Isles when Birdalone throws open her window in joy and ‘looked out on the beauty of the spring’ as it manifests itself in the very heart of the City of the Five Crafts.The market-wains moving through the city on that spring morning as she looks out from above also ‘brought to her mind the thought of the meads, and the streams of the river, and the woodsides beyond the city’, the sights, smells and sounds of spring thus establishing a literal connection between the city and the countryside beyond its walls, but also one based on memory and imagination.115 This imaginative connection with the wild is also exemplified in the art and architecture in the last romances. In The Story of the Glittering Plain, Hallblithe notes appreciatively the carvings above the shut-beds in the house on the Isle of Ransom which have ‘flowery grass and fruited trees all about’, and the house of Ralph’s friends Clement and Katherine in The Well at the World’s End is described as ‘goodly’ with its windows glazed with ‘flowers and knots and posies in them’.116 Birdalone in The Water of the Wondrous Isles likewise takes inspiration from the wildwood in her embroidery; she decorates the shoes the witch-wife allows her to make with ‘oak-leaves […] and flowers, and coneys, and squirrels’ and embroiders her new dress with ‘roses and lilies’ with ‘a tall tree springing up from amidmost of the hem of the skirt, and a hart on either side thereof ’. Even her smock receives careful and loving attention, being ‘sewn daintily at the hems and the bosom with fair knots and buds’.117 Seaman observes that ‘the arts, humanity’s flowers, are inextricably rooted in the wild’, a claim supported by their various manifestations in the last romances which recall Morris’s own textile designs with their proliferation of natural motifs.118 Linda Parry notes that one of the primary reasons for Morris’s success as a designer was the fact that ‘he had knowledge, understanding and a deep love of all natural things – flowers, trees, insects, animals and birds – and used these motifs with authority gained from observing nature at first hand’.119 The profusion of leaves, stems, berries and flowers that characterise Morris’s designs, the ‘vivacity of all the elements’ as described by Caroline Arscott, pay homage to the energy, colour, resilience and ebullience of the wild and reveal our need and our desire as human beings to respond, like Birdalone, creatively as well as physically to its variety and its vitality.120 Such creative endeavours are a valuable means of expressing our fundamental connection to the wild as civilized creatures, but we can do this also in the way we choose to live our lives 360

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and interact with others on a daily basis. Allowing our wild selves to inform our sense of purpose in life and our understanding of the role we might play in our communities is perhaps the most challenging means by which we can rewild our societies, but also the most essential in terms of achieving social transformation. In The Wood Beyond the World, this is exemplified in one of the rituals involved in the choosing of a new king in Stark-wall, in which Walter must choose between a robe ‘glorious and be-gemmed, unmeet for any save a great king’, and a suit of armour,‘seemly, well-fashioned, but little adorned […] worn and bestained with weather, and the pelting of the spear-storm’; Walter’s ‘heart arose in him’ at the sight of the armour and he readily chooses this, to the delight of the Elders of the city, who immediately confer the kingship on him.121 His choice signifies his determination to act in accordance with his own wild nature – a nature which directs him to be an active, energetic and selfless ruler who serves his kingdom and his people, a leader who seeks to contribute to his community rather than one who seeks merely to enjoy the wealth and comfort that his position confers. Cronon asserts that central to our relationship with wilderness is the need to consider ‘what it can tell us about home, the place where we actually live’, and the need to ask ‘how can we take the positive values associated with wilderness and bring them closer to home?’ He suggests that ‘in reminding us of the world we did not make, wilderness can teach profound feelings of humility and respect as we confront our fellow beings and the earth itself ’.122 Such humility and respect is demonstrated by Walter when he chooses service rather than reward, and it is characteristic more generally of the protagonists of the last romances in the positions they ultimately assume within their respective communities.Arthur and Hugh in The Water of the Wondrous Isles, for example, similarly accept the offer of a leadership position in defending the town of Utterhay from its enemies, telling the town’s governors that ‘it was well their will to dwell there neighbourly, and do them all the help they might’, and whilst they are happy to accept the honour of their new position in the town, they also commit wholeheartedly to ‘the work that should go with it’.123 In The Well at the World’s End, Ralph does not forget those who fought with him to save his kingdom of Upmeads from its enemies, however humble they may be, for ‘ever was he a true captain and brother to the Shepherd-folk, […] and were there any scarcity or ill hap amongst them, he helped them to the uttermost of his power’, whilst in Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair,‘to no man did Christopher mete out worse than his deserts, nay, to most far better he meted’, and ‘the tormentors of poor folk’ have no place in his land.124 In each case, these new leaders gradually transform their societies, eradicating poverty, inequality and injustice and liberating their fellow citizens to live their lives free from fear and want, and in response the people of their homesteads, towns, cities and kingdoms, as Osberne and Elfhild find in The Sundering Flood,‘grew better and not the worser’.125 Morris’s heroes and heroines are young men and women whose experiences of the wilderness and whose own wild natures thus come to full fruition in the societies they inhabit.They inspire and change those societies with the energy, generosity, inclusivity and endurance of the wild, and in doing so they challenge our preconceptions and assumptions regarding the supposedly insurmountable boundaries between civilization and wilderness, between public duty and personal fulfilment. Northrop Frye identifies ‘the polarizing in romance between the world we want and the world we don’t want’, and if the world we want is a wilder world, as the current burgeoning interest in rewilding suggests, then we can readily find in Morris’s last romances a vision of what that world could be.126 In these narratives of rewilding, Morris shows us just what Cronon means when he pleads:‘if wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world’.127 361

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Notes 1 May Morris, ed., The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910–15), XVI, pp. 72, 74. Further references will be abbreviated to CW. 2 Paul Meier, William Morris:The Marxist Dreamer, trans. by Frank Grubb, 2 vols (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), II, p. 420. 3 The End and the Means’, in May Morris, ed., William Morris: Artist,Writer, Socialist, 2 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), II, p. 430. Further references will be abbreviated to AWS. 4 CW, XVI, p. xi. 5 George Monbiot, Feral (2013), (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 11. 6 Mark Bekoff, Rewilding our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence (Novata, Cal.: New World Library, 2014), p. 13. 7 The phrase ‘against the age’ is taken from a letter by Edward Burne-Jones written in 1853 in which he refers to proposals for establishing a ‘Brotherhood’, to which Morris had already been enlisted, which would engage in a ‘Crusade and Holy Warfare against the age’; see J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1899; repr. New York: Dover, 1995), I, p. 63. Peter Faulkner borrowed the phrase for his own book on Morris – see Against the Age: An Introduction to William Morris (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980). 8 Edward Said,‘Thoughts on Late Style’, London Review of Books, 5 August 2004, pp. 3–7 (p. 3). 9 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Revised Edition (London: Merlin Press, 1976), p. 680; Dorothy M. Hoare, The Works of Morris and Yeats in Relation to Early Saga Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), p. 36; Amanda Hodgson, The Romances of William Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 197. 10 George Bernard Shaw,‘Morris as I Knew Him’, AWS, II, pp. ix–xl (p. xxix). 11 A.T. Quiller-Couch, ‘A Literary Causerie. Mr.William Morris’, Speaker, 14 (1896), 391–92 (p. 392); Paul Thompson, The Work of William Morris (London: Heinemann, 1967; repub. London: Quartet Books, 1977), pp. 178–79; Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), pp. 365, 364. 12 W. B.Yeats Autobiographies (London: Macmillan and Co., 1926), p. 174; C. S. Lewis Rehabilitations and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 48. 13 Ballantine Books published editions of The Wood beyond the World (1969), The Well at the World’s End (1970), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1971) and The Sundering Flood (1973). 14 Norman Talbot, ‘Women and Goddesses in the Romances of William Morris’, Southern Review (Adelaide), vol. 3 (1968-69), 339–57 (p. 339). 15 For my own previous reflections on the form and language of the last romances see: Phillippa Bennett, Wonderlands,The Last Romances of William Morris (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 8–10 and pp. 194–197; Phillippa Bennett, ‘Radical Tales’, in To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams, edited by Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2014), pp. 85–105 (pp. 85–91). 16 Norman Kelvin, ed., The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984–96), I, p. 162. 17 CW, XIV, p. xxiv. 18 Eugene D. LeMire, ‘Introduction’, in William Morris, The Hollow Land and Other Contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1996), p. xxviii. 19 Eugene Vinaver, Form and Meaning in Medieval Romance (London: MHRA, 1966), pp. 12, 8. 20 Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of the Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 61. 21 W. R. J. Barron, English Medieval Romance (London: Longmans, 1987), p. 7. 22 Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis (New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 84; Barron, p. 7. 23 Unsigned review of The Sundering Flood, Academy, 53 (1898), 304–305 (p. 305); Amanda Hodgson, The Witch in the Wood:William Morris’s Romance Heroines and the Late-Victorian ‘New Woman’ (London: William Morris Society, 2000), p. 23. For other critical responses to the language of Morris’s last romances see: Paul Thompson, The Work of William Morris; Philip Henderson, William Morris: His Life, Work and Friends (London:Thames and Hudson, 1967); and Colin Franklin, Printing and the Mind of Morris:Three Paths to the Kelmscott Press (Cambridge: Rampant Lions Press, 1986). 24 H. G.Wells,‘The Well at the World’s End’, Review, Saturday Review, 82 (1896), 413–15 (p. 414); C. S. Lewis, Rehabilitations, p. 39.

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Rewilding Morris 25 Norman Talbot,‘“Whilom, as tells the tale”:The Language of the Prose Romances’, The Journal of the William Morris Society, vol.VIII, no. 2 (Spring 1989), 16–26 (p.16). 26 Talbot,‘“Whilom, as tells the tale”’, p. 17. 27 Dustin Geeraert, ‘“The land which ye seek is the land which I seek to flee from”. The Story of the Glittering Plain and Teutonic Democracy.’ The Journal of William Morris Studies, vol. XX, no. 1 (Winter 2012), 18–35 (p. 29). 28 Morris’s translation of Beowulf was published by the Kelmscott Press in 1895; Morris worked with the Icelandic scholar Eiríkr Magnússon on translating the Icelandic sagas, and these translations were published under the title of the Saga Library between 1891 and 1905. 29 CW, XVII, p. 33. 30 News from Nowhere, CW, XVI, p. 149;‘The Society of the Future’, AWS, II, p. 464. 31 Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1991), p. 281. 32 Monbiot, p. 69. 33 Gary Snyder,‘Is Nature Real?’ in The Gary Snyder Reader (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1999), pp. 387–89 (p. 389). 34 The designation of U.S. National Parks has continued into the twenty-first century, and there are now 59 in total. 35 [accessed 11 July 2017]. 36 Martin Haggerty claims that Morris attended at least three meetings of the Commons Preservation Society in 1881,1883 and 1884, the latter of which he mentions in his article ‘Why Not?’ in Justice, Vol. 1, no. 3 (12 April 1884), 2; see Martin Haggerty, ‘William Morris – Open Spaces Champion’, 28 November 2013, [accessed 11 July 2017]. For Morris’s addresses to the Kyrle Society and the Nottingham Kyrle Society see AWS, I, pp. 192–205. 37 Haggerty, [accessed 11 July 2017]; ‘Art, Wealth and Riches’, CW, XXIII, p. 162. For recognition of Morris’s environmental activism see: ‘Earthshakers: The Top 100 Green Campaigners of All Time’, Guardian, 28 November 2006, [Accessed 9 July 2017] 38 CW, XVI, p. 202. 39 ‘The Lesser Arts’, CW, XXII, p. 17. 40 CW, XVI, p. 74; CW, XXII, p. 17. 41 CW, VIII, pp. 75–76. 42 Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998), p. 6. 43 CW, XIV, pp. 279–80. 44 CL, I, pp. 178, 177. 45 CL, I, pp. 195, 177. 46 Mackail, I, p. 240. 47 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (1864), (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 71; Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, Second Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 66. 48 CW, XIV, pp. 283–84. 49 CW, XIV, p. 281. 50 CW, XX, pp. 69–70. 51 CW, XX, pp. 73–74. 52 CW, XX, pp. 74–75. 53 Garrard, p. 77. 54 Florence Boos, ‘An Aesthetic Eco-Communist: Morris the Red and Morris the Green’, in Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston, eds, William Morris: Centenary Essays (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999), pp. 21–46 (pp. 44–45). 55 CW, XVI, p. 72; CW, XVII, p. 133. See also James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which describes how ‘in the forest of Arden it was said that down to modern times a squirrel might leap from tree to tree for nearly the whole length of Warwickshire’: J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1890), I, p. 57. 56 CW, XVII, p. 167. 57 CW, XX, pp. 1, 8. 58 CW, XX, p. 9.

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Phillippa Bennett 59 Gary Snyder,‘The Etiquette of Freedom’, in The Gary Snyder Reader, pp. 167–82 (p. 182). 60 Margaret R. Grennan, William Morris: Medievalist and Revolutionary (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1945), p. 133. 61 Mark Hillsdon,‘Bear Country’, BBC Wildlife Magazine, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 2017), 74–80 (p. 79). In an article in The Spectator in 2016, Rod Liddle observes that ‘there have been only eight fatal attacks upon humans in all of Europe and Russia combined in the last 50 years’ from wolves, compared to ‘74 deaths in 15 years in the UK alone’ involving cows: see Rod Liddle,‘Let’s bring the wolves back into Britain’, The Spectator, 1 October 2016 [Accessed 18 July 2017]. 62 CW, XXI, p. 19; CW, XIX, p. 52. 63 Henry David Thoreau, The Journal 1837–1861 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), pp. 372–73. 64 Mackail, II, p. 315. 65 CL, IV, p. 269. 66 The Journal 1837–1861, p. 373. 67 The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, 14 vols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), vol. 9, p. 43. 68 CW, XIV, p. 297; CW, XVIII, p. 303; CW, XXI, p. 11. 69 Cheryl Strayed, Wild (London:Atlantic Books, 2012, repub. 2015), pp. 207, 143, 156, 85. 70 The Maine Woods, p. 71. 71 CW, XVII, pp. 173–74. 72 CW, XX, p. 15; CW, XIX, p. 84. 73 CW, XXIII, p. 17. 74 I do not shy away from using the word ‘Communist’ here. Morris himself saw Socialism as the means to achieving true Communism and called himself a Communist, and it is important to reclaim the integrity of the concept as Morris and his colleagues understood it, despite its subsequent misappropriation in the twentieth century. See Morris’s lecture ‘Communism’, CW, XXIII, pp. 264–76. 75 CW, XVI, p. 148. 76 The Witch in the Wood, p. 22. 77 CW, XX, pp. 351–52. 78 CW, XVIII, p. 145. 79 CW, XVIII, p. 144. 80 CW, XIX, pp. 58–59. 81 CW, XVI, pp. 62–63; CL, II (1885–88), p. 584. 82 Monbiot, p. 7. 83 Carole Silver, The Romance of William Morris (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1982), p. 161. 84 CW, XVIII, p. 13. 85 CW, XVII, p. 12. 86 CW, XIV, p. 256. 87 CW, XVIII, p. 36. 88 CW, XXI, p. 80; CL, I, p. 344; John Purkis, The Iceland Jaunt:A Study of the Expeditions made by William Morris to Iceland in 1871 and 1873 (London:William Morris Society, 1962), p. 5. 89 Strayed, p. 119. 90 E. P.Thompson, p. 243. 91 CW, XXIII, pp. 213–14. 92 CW, XX, pp. 51–52. 93 Bekoff, p. 8. 94 Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 68. 95 R. P. Harrison, Forests:The Shadow of Civilization (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 121. 96 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974–2005), vol. 25, p. 461;‘Art,Wealth and Riches’, CW, XXIII, p. 159. 97 Oelschlaeger, p. 2. 98 William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’, in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1996), pp. 69–90 (p. 80). 99 Monbiot, p. 10. 100 ‘How I Became a Socialist’, CW, XXIII, p. 279. 101 Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854), (New York: Dover, 1995), p. 205.

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Rewilding Morris 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

Don Scheese, Nature Writing (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 59. CW, XX, p. 1. Talbot,“‘Whilom, as tells the tale’”, p. 19. CW, XX, p. 387. Donna Seaman,‘On the Edge of Wilderness’, in In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness, selected and introduced by Donna Seaman (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2002), pp. 5–13 (pp. 7–8). CW, XX, p. 387. CW, XXI, p. 250. CW, XXI, pp. 53, 26. Seaman, p. 6. ‘Is Nature Real?’ p. 389; The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 9, p. 43. CL, IV, p. 154; CW, XXII, p. 170. CW, XVIII, p. 7. CW, XVII, p. 168. CW, XX, p. 276–77. CW, XIV, p. 234; CW, XVIII, p. 10. CW, XX, pp. 13–15. Seaman, p. 8. Linda Parry, William Morris Textiles (New Jersey: Crescent Books, 1994), p. 8. Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2008), p. 31. CW, XVII, p. 119. Cronon, p. 87. CW, XX, p. 386. CW, XIX, p. 243; CW, XVII, p. 261. CW, XXI, p. 246. Frye, p. 58. Cronon, p. 90.

References and Further Reading Arscott, Caroline, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings. New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press, 2008. Barron,W. R. J., English Medieval Romance. London: Longmans, 1987. Bekoff, Mark, Rewilding our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence. Novata, CA: New World Library, 2014. Bennett, Phillippa, ‘Radical Tales’, in To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams, edited by Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2014, 85–105. –––––, Wonderlands,The Last Romances of William Morris. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. Boos, Florence,‘An Aesthetic Eco-Communist: Morris the Red and Morris the Green’, in William Morris: Centenary Essays, edited by Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999, 21–46. Cronon, William, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon. New York, NY: Norton, 1996, 69–90. Faulkner, Peter, Against the Age:An Introduction to William Morris. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980. Franklin, Colin, Printing and the Mind of Morris:Three Paths to the Kelmscott Press. Cambridge: Rampant Lions Press, 1986. Fraser, Robert, Victorian Quest Romance. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998. Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890. Frye, Northrop, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of the Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Garrard, Greg, Ecocriticism, Second Edition.Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. Geeraert, Dustin,‘“The land which ye seek is the land which I seek to flee from”:The Story of the Glittering Plain and Teutonic Democracy’, The Journal of William Morris Studies, vol. XX, no. 1 (Winter 2012), 18–35.

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Phillippa Bennett Grennan, Margaret R., William Morris: Medievalist and Revolutionary. New York, NY: King’s Crown Press, 1945. Haggerty, Martin, William Morris – Open Spaces Champion, 28 November 2013. (accessed 11 July 2017). Harrison, R. P., Forests:The Shadow of Civilization. London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Henderson, Philip, William Morris: His Life,Work and Friends. London:Thames and Hudson, 1967. Hillsdon, Mark,‘Bear Country’, BBC Wildlife Magazine, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 2017), 74–80. Hoare, Dorothy M., The Works of Morris and Yeats in Relation to Early Saga Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937. Hodgson, Amanda, The Romances of William Morris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. –––––, The Witch in the Wood:William Morris’s Romance Heroines and the Late-Victorian ‘New Woman.’ London: William Morris Society, 2000. Hume, Kathryn, Fantasy and Mimesis. New York, NY: Methuen, 1984. Kelvin, Norman, ed., The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984–96. LeMire, Eugene D.,‘Introduction’, in William Morris,The Hollow Land and Other Contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1996. Lewis, C. S., Rehabilitations and Other Essays. London: Oxford University Press, 1939. Liddle, Rod,‘Let’s bring the wolves back into Britain’, The Spectator, 1 October 2016. (accessed 18 July 2017). MacCarthy, Fiona, William Morris:A Life for Our Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Mackail, J. W., The Life of William Morris, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1899; repr. New York, NY: Dover, 1995. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels, Collected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974–2005. Meier, Paul, William Morris: The Marxist Dreamer, trans. by Frank Grubb, 2 vols. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978. Merchant, Carolyn, Reinventing Eden. London: Routledge, 2003. Monbiot, George, Feral. London: Penguin, 2014. Morris, May, ed., The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910–15. –––––, William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist, 2 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936. Oelschlaeger, Max, The Idea of Wilderness. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1991. Parry, Linda, William Morris Textiles. New Jersey, NJ: Crescent Books, 1994. Purkis, John, The Iceland Jaunt:A Study of the Expeditions made by William Morris to Iceland in 1871 and 1873. London:William Morris Society, 1962. Quiller-Couch,A.T.,‘A Literary Causerie. Mr.William Morris’, Speaker, vol. 14 (1896), 391–92. Said, Edward,‘Thoughts on Late Style’, London Review of Books, 5 August 2004, 3–7. Scheese, Don, Nature Writing. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. Seaman, Donna,‘On the Edge of Wilderness’, in In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness, Selected and Introduced by Donna Seaman.Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Shaw, George Bernard,‘Morris as I Knew Him’, in AWS, edited by May Morris, II. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936, ix–xl. Silver, Carole, The Romance of William Morris.Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1982. Snyder, Gary,‘Is Nature Real?’ in The Gary Snyder Reader, 2000, 387–89. –––––,‘The Etiquette of Freedom’, in The Gary Snyder Reader. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1999, 167–82. Strayed, Cheryl, Wild. London:Atlantic Books, 2015. Talbot, Norman, ‘“Whilom, as Tells the Tale”: The Language of the Prose Romances’, The Journal of the William Morris Society, vol.VIII, no. 2 (Spring 1989), 16–26. –––––, ‘Women and Goddesses in the Romances of William Morris’, Southern Review (Adelaide), vol. 3 (1968–69), 339–57. Thompson, E. P., William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Revised Edition. London: Merlin Press, 1976. Thompson, Paul, The Work of William Morris. London: Heinemann, 1967; repub.. London: Quartet Books, 1977. Thoreau, Henry David, The Journal 1837–1861. New York, NY: New York Review of Books, 2009. –––––, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H.Allen, 14 vols. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. –––––, The Maine Woods. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. –––––, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. New York, NY: Dover, 1995.

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Rewilding Morris Vinaver, Eugene, Form and Meaning in Medieval Romance. London: MHRA, 1966. Wells, H. G.,‘Review of The Well at the World’s End’, Saturday Review, vol. 82 (1896), 413–15. Yeats, W. B., Autobiographies. London: Macmillan and Co., 1926.

Unsigned Articles and Reviews ‘Earthshakers:The Top 100 Green Campaigners of All Time’, Guardian, 28 November 2006. (accessed 9 July 2017). ‘Review of The Sundering Flood’, Academy, vol. 53 (1898), 304–05.

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15 WINDY, TANGIBLE, RESONANT WORLDS: THE NONHUMAN FANTASY OF WILLIAM MORRIS John Plotz

Matter-of-factness … lends to all of Morris’s stories their somber air of conviction. Other stories have only scenery; his have geography. He is not concerned with ‘painting’ landscapes; he tells you the lie of the land, and then you paint the landscapes for yourself … The world of his imagining is as windy, as tangible, as resonant and three dimensional, as that of Scott and Homer.1 C. S. Lewis It is a great pleasure to re-introduce this elder patriarch of the heroic fantasy to a new generation of readers who probably never realized how deeply they were in the debt of William Morris, the man who invented fantasy.2 Lin Carter If there is any purpose in [Morris’s] style, its effect is to put the reader into an unreflecting stupor, a reverie of misty words and phrases.What also takes away force from Morris’s late romances is their failure to admit real pain or loss into their scheme of things.3 C. N. Manlove

Hope, But Not For Us Four decades ago, Darko Suvin floated a scholarly approach to science fiction (SF) that largely still prevails, emphasizing the genre’s commitment to “cognitive estrangement” and the technological “novum.”4 Suvin emphasizes the capacity of SF to challenge readers’ conceptual norms by way of what Victor Shklovksy called “estrangement”—specifically, Suvin sees SF doing so by representing and conceptualizing some scientific innovation that galvanizes the fiction’s plot. This focus on the technological “novum” as the medium of “cognitive estrangement” has led scholars to pay less attention to an equally vigorous strand of speculative storytelling that asks readers to feel not estranged but right at home in an utterly alien world: fantasy. Space has recently opened up, however, for a reappraisal of the interdependence of science fiction and fantasy. Recent scholarly debates on the question of the nonhuman—including animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and various new materialisms—have proposed new ways to think about what it means for the dream-space of literature to depict a world that is nonhuman in the unsettling sense that it rejects Enlightenment conceptions of free-standing human subjectivity, 368

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and seems to erase traditional boundaries between self and outer world.The birth of both science fiction and prose fantasy as new (or newly refashioned) genres in Britain in the 1890s—along with the virtually simultaneous rise of a new sort of Lovecraftian horror writing—should prompt some reflection on what exactly the precipitating historical factors may be for such a turn towards speculation about a vastly expanded and vastly powerful nonhuman realm.5 This chapter explores some of the ways that the tangibility, resonance, and the nonhuman aspects of Morris’s invented worlds became part of the DNA of fantasy’s current worldwide ascendancy. Although rarely reprinted or mentioned in the same breath as descendants like Tolkien,6 Lewis, Le Guin and others, Morris’s late romances laid down many of fantasy’s formal assumptions and preconditions—the attributes both satirized and subtly examined in Dianne Wynne Jones’s wry 1996 Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Making sense of the legacy of Morris’s fantasy means restoring his work to an immediate post-Darwinian context, in a fin de siècle literary climate where theories of evolution and natural materialism undermined Victorian realist fiction and its Idealist presuppositions, and opened up space for influential experiments in decadence, in Naturalism—and in fantasy.7 Ideas about the nonhuman that persist in modern-day fantasy and speculative fiction are more shaped by William Morris’s response to the Darwinian climate than is immediately apparent—albeit in some indirect and often counterintuitive ways. In appraising the prose romances that Morris wrote after News from Nowhere—The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World’s End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), and The Sundering Flood (1897)—Morris’s contemporaries and later scholars have often excoriated the “epoch of rest” quality of such removed worlds, or dismissed them as pale copies of medieval romance. Even admirers of Morris’s fantasy like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (despite his insightful praise for Morris’s worlds as windy, tangible, and resonant), frequently praise it as a resurrection of older folkloric conventions, thus misunderstanding its novelty. Faced with the challenge of how to think about a nonhuman world that undermines, or at least surrounds, the realm of seemingly autonomous human purposiveness, Morris’s prose romances imagine a world in which the activity of characters accommodates and responds to its nonhuman surroundings. Rather than instrumentalizing and appropriating nature “for use,” Morris’s characters, in a sense both human and nonhuman, model a way of inhabiting that other world inconceivable in our own world.8 Colin Manlove’s memorable attack on Morris’s work as “anemic” (i.e. static and drained of moral purpose) is in an odd way both right and wrong. The vision Morris’s fantasies offers is not for humanity or the world as it now is; it is more like Kafka’s gnomic aphorism: “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—only not for us.”9 The infinitude of hope available in Morris’s romances stems from his depiction of a world that refuses the idea of gaps between one character’s conception of the world and another’s. Moments of ignorance may occur, as for example when given characters do not yet know of a place and its rules; what cannot occur is a true divergence founded on mutually incompatible worldviews.When Birdalone, the heroine of Morris’s 1897 Water of the Wondrous Isles, exclaims “Oh! but thou art beautiful, O earth, thou art beautiful!” neither her sincerity nor the validity of the claim is dubitable. Birdalone’s apprehension of her world—the novel shows her moving through it and learning about its further reaches while undertaking or undergoing various adventures—is an apt paradigm for what Morris wants his romances to accomplish: Then she sat gazing on it, while the greyhead turned and smiled on her, well pleased of her pleasure. After a while she said: And might we go nigher? Yea, certes, said he, yet I 369

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doubt if thou wilt like it the better, the nigher thou art.Ah! she said, but if I were only amidst it, and a part of it, as once I was of the woodland!10 To be “amidst it” is to seek and achieve complete consonance with her world.11 Given such a cosmogony, it should be no surprise that another Morris romance features a human character named “Hall-Sun,” who is the light of her father’s hall, and an elf named Wood-Sun, who is an outdoors genus locus.12 Looked at in one way, Morris’s romances are classic wish fulfillment: quests are completed, beautiful couples intended for one another marry, wars end with communities saved and led from within.Viewed from another angle, though, these are worlds in which the feel of organic cohesion is not so much nostalgic for a bygone order as a vision of how human beings might belong to their world, how they might fit and conform to its logic rather than trying to bend it to their own will—in short, a dream-logic that is not so much “having one’s way” as picturing a world where humans have their way with the world only by doing things its way, a harmony that Morris thinks of as impossible in his (and our) own world. Such a world is, by definition, a world without us.An apt motto for Morris’s romances might be: Only Disconnect.

Disconnections The idea that Morris’s vision of a world-away-from-our-world means that Morris has embraced “unreflecting stupor” (Manlove again) reveals how unusual and hard to swallow is the kind of respect that Morris accords to the nonhuman world (the world very much not our own) in his fantasy.When we attempt to unpack the implications of this disconnection, though, we return to earth very quickly.The very timelessness of Morris’s vision of that world away and apart from our own is timely.13 Morris’s taste for the nonhuman—understood as a total secondary world that is ordered so as to make those who live in it mindful of their place, and defined by their respect or adherence to that world—was born out of his post-Darwinian moment (the same kind of environmentalism that led the American George Perkins Marsh to write his magisterial 1864 jeremiad Man and Nature), and it in turn influenced (albeit subtly and at a distance) a range of fantasy writers who followed his lead in later generations. One aspect of post-Darwinian thought especially germane in grasping William Morris’s fantasy is the emergence of the category that Eugene Thacker in 2011 called the “planetary”, that is, the aspects of our own world that are, as Thacker puts it,“without us.”Thacker’s project aims to displace the Kantian dyad of noumenal (world-in-itself) and phenomenal (world-for-us) with a triadic model, which also offers the idea of a world that is conceptually beyond our own ken: The world-in-itself … is the world in some inaccessible, already given state, which we then turn into the world-for-us.The world-in-itself is a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us. … While we can never experience the world-in-itself, we seem to be almost fatalistically drawn to it, perhaps as a limit that defines who we are as human beings … Let us call this spectral and speculative world the world-without-us.14 For Thacker, the literary genre of horror is a privileged way of approaching this “world without us” for reasons that have to do with the Freudian notion of an uncanny, the strangeness that looms up inside of the most familiar settings, suddenly shown to be terrifyingly otherworldly.To Thacker, the planetary offers in horror a vision of the world without us—even of thought itself become alien. In other words, this is not merely a movement beyond the human into the depths 370

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of space, but within ourselves a recognition of alienness, of something inhuman and incomprehensible made manifest. Thacker’s insight that in the aesthetic realm lie a set of tools for thinking through problems of the nonhuman that cannot be rationally parsed and conceptually settled applies to more than just horror. Despite his fixation on horror generally (and H.P. Lovecraft specifically), that notion of a “world without us” opens the door as well for Morris’s only disconnect fantasy, which offers up an account of the nonhuman world that has the effect of displacing or undermining human agency.15 Thacker’s notion of the world-without-us proves useful in understanding Morris’s fantasy—albeit in ways different from Thacker’s account of the genre of horror and its relationship to that planetary, the cosmos defined as a “world without us.” “World without us” is also a suggestive way to grasp the nonhuman aspect of the world that Morris is building (not just in his forest and Garden tapestries, where the animals of woodland waste move without haste, but also) in his romances, in which genealogy and to some extent interiority is supplanted by geography, and intention by situation. Kate Marshall (in 2016) proposes writing what we might call a narrative theory of the nonhuman, on the grounds that “fiction operates as a medium for thought with the capacity to engage critical questions about the nonhuman agencies, sentience, and points of view being presented so urgently in contemporary critical discourse.”16 We might therefore think about recent “new materialisms” such as Thacker’s not simply as a way of looking back at earlier literature but also as an extrapolation from an impulse and a way of thinking that literature had already been developing in the past.17

Subcreation and Secondary Worlds [L]ife is not empty nor made for nothing … parts of it fit one into another in some way; and that the world goes on, beautiful and strange and dreadful and worshipful.18 William Morris To see the advantages of applying Thacker’s notion of a “world without us” to Morris’s fantasy and its aftermath, start by considering one of the most influential accounts of the genre, offered by its most famous 20th century practitioner. Children are capable of course of literary belief, when the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce it.That state of mind has been called [by Coleridge] ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens.What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘subcreator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’; it accords with the laws of that world.You therefore believe it while you are, as it were, inside.The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or the art, has failed.You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.19 Following in Tolkien’s footsteps, Margaret Atwood insists on a crucial difference between “fiction of the waking state” and Secondary Worlds. On the one side, she writes, lie realist novels in which variations on the desirable norms appear, of course, but they take the form, not of monsters or vampires or space aliens, but of people with character defects or strange noses. Ideas about new forms of social organization are introduced through conversations 371

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among the characters, or in the form of thought or reverie, rather than being dramatized, as in the Utopia and the dystopia.20 Atwood sees her speculative fiction as of a piece with the sheer bouleversement humans have managed to practice on the world as a whole (genetic modifications and fossil-fuel planetbaking) in the age of the Anthropocene.21 Atwood puts herself and fellow speculative fiction writers closer to James Watson and Francis Crick (or perhaps James Watt and Thomas Edison, Anthropocene-initiators from the era of fossil capitalism) than to Dostoyevsky, Eliot, and others who write “fiction of the waking state.” 22 Armed with Tolkien’s vision of these “life-world” fantasies—and perhaps heartened by Atwood’s proclamation that fantasy does for the dream life what realism does for fiction— scholars persuaded by this line of reasoning have looked back and identified Tolkien’s forebears. They point to George McDonald’s Lilith and Phantastes, but also such cosmogenic projects as E. R. Eddison’s 1922 The Worm Ouroboros and the entire fantastical world that H.P Lovecraft (in stories such as his 1928 “The Call of Chthulu”) overlaid on the real-life geography of his native Rhode Island.This “secondary world” hypothesis also seems potentially helpful in making sense of the kind of cognitive distance that fantasy of the Morris stripe requires. However, any account that supposes a world divided merely into a primary and a secondary world risks overlooking the immanent tension present in fantasy literature, as in realism, from its beginnings: Michael Sandner and Gary K.Wolfe have, for example, pointed to Addison’s 1712 description of a “fairy way of writing” that proclaims its own “secular magic”; that is, its half-in, half-out quality.23 Tolkien’s notion of immersion-or-nothing also stands in stark contrast to Catherine Gallagher’s account of fiction’s intent and capacity to engender aesthetic experience. Gallagher traces modern fiction’s roots to an eighteenth-century capitalist worldview shaped by a culture of “disbelief, speculation and credit” and describes novels as neither truth nor falsehood, but as a third mode: “believable stories that do not solicit belief.”24 Gallagher proposes that “readers attach themselves to characters because of, not despite their fictionality … consequently we cannot be dissuaded from identifying with them by reminders of their nonexistence.”25 Readers of realist novels principally respond to fictional characters in their innately doubled roles as simultaneously plausible inhabitants of a world just like ours, and as thoroughly airy products of mere textuality. Novels therefore simultaneously allow for a form of imaginative escape, a release into the pleasures of invented world—the travails of a fictional character require no direct action on the reader’s part. On the other, they trigger experiential attentiveness to the way the world is. Gallagher’s account, then, seems to offer a stinging rebuke to Tolkien’s notion—one that many latter-day scholars of fantasy and secondary world-making implicitly or explicitly endorse—of a choice between complete belief and crushing disillusionment. It is clear Morris shares with Atwood some deep-seated suspicion about the realist fiction of his day, and a dream-time vision of what literature can and ought to do. Recall the exchange in News from Nowhere that ends with wise old Hammond embracing Guest’s sneer: if happy adventure stories represent a “second childhood” for humanity, so much the better.26 After all, Carole Silver argues that Morris “believed the childlike part of man produced works of imagination” and emphasizes Morris’s ‘romantic and Pre-Raphaelite concern with art as the embodiment of a dream—an interpretation rather than an imitation of life.” For Morris, romance “humanized pure myth and set implicitly mythical patterns into a world of human experience, while it idealized the human content.”27 It may be worth distinguishing Morris’s aesthetic vision from both Tolkien and Atwood by exploring some attributes of Morris’s notions of the romance as secondary world, attributes that set his world-building apart from a merely subjective subcreation. Silver’s proposal that Morris 372

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finds solace because “the individual may pass, but the earth and man remain” rings true to the aesthetic and ethical vision of Morris’s late romances. But her insight that “Morris’s last romances … are journeys to worlds beyond the ordinary world in search of love and fellowship”28 needs extension; that extraordinary world offers the fellowship that it does precisely on account of the unbridgeable gap between it and our ordinary realm. The sense of beholdenness to her world that Birdalone articulates hints at the non-arbitrary character of Morris’s world-making: his romances are not set in a purely imagined fairy realm that he happened to devise—like George MacDonald’s truly capricious and somewhat delirious Phantastes. Rather Morris is doing his best to conjure up a realm antithetical to his own (capitalist, liberal-bourgeois) present-day, the yin to its yang. Only disconnect. The Prologue of Morris’s early epic poem The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) makes explicit Morris’s awareness of what it means to offer a disconnected vision of the “beyond” within a troubled present-day: Folk say, a wizard to a northern king At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show, That through one window men beheld the spring, And through another saw the summer glow, And through a third the fruited vines a-row, While still, unheard, but in its wonted way, Piped the drear wind of that December day. So with this Earthly Paradise it is, If ye will read aright, and pardon me, Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea.29 The wintry blast that shakes the outside of the king’s hall (and, implicitly, shakes the outside of Morris’s own poem as well) stands in a fascinating relationship to the visions of the other three seasons that the wizard has “show[n]” against the hall’s windows. Frederick Kirchhoff reads Morris as proposing that “an awareness of the limits of art is necessary if we are to understand its strength.”30 This imagined world, projected on three windows but incapable of silencing the ambient sounds of winter, allows the audience to glimpse another world without allowing them to tune out the sound or the chill of the actual world behind.31A quarter-century later, Morris envisioned the space apart of the romances as durable and distinct enough that its anti-typical quality shines through clearly: the sea is our present turbulence, the isle of bliss is the impossible alternative that we dream up while storm-tossed. That late vision of a universe where the phrase “earth and man” gave proper pride of place to earth is present everywhere in the romances.We might look for example at the opening and closing lines of the final Part of Water of the Wondrous Isles: On the next day, they arose and were glad, and it was to them as if the sun of the early summer had arisen for nought save to shine on their happy day. And from the very end of the book: Now when all this hath been said, we have no more to tell about this company of friends, the most of whom had once haunted the lands about the Water of the 373

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Wondrous Isles, save that their love never sundered, and that they lived without shame and died without fear. So here is an end.32 The rising of the sun “for nought save to shine on their happy day” is in a sense the reciprocal to Birdalone’s own wish to be “only amidst it, and a part of ” that earth of which she principally says “thou art beautiful.”This is not a vision of the earth that has rid itself of humans, but rather of a world in which to be human means to be mindful of the needs and wishes of the earth. 33 This is not precisely an environmental or an ecological sentiment, since the land in question is not and could never be our own Earth. However, if this land is the world without us, it is constituted as a negative space, the sketching of an impossibility as if it were possible. News from Nowhere has a more direct didactic purpose when it concludes by having Guest proclaim of his story “if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.”34 In fact, the essence of the vision in Morris is that there can be no portal through from that world to this, no nudge and wink to admit that this “subcreation” really comes out of our own world. But that very insistence on separation may be Morris’s crucial point: those who live in a place where love never sundered, without shame, dying without fear, are those who occupy their world as Morris readers can never (or can they?) live in their own.

Battle of the Books There is a surprisingly deep scholarly split about the meaning of Morris’s late turn to fantasy.There are certainly recent scholars who share Carter’s affirmative sense that Morris invented fantasy, and who would echo some version of Mathews’s claim that “English fantasy literature begins with William Morris.”35 For example, Jamie Williamson’s recent historical taxonomy of fantasy traces the roots of modern Anglophone fantasy not to the novel but to the scholarly work of “the eighteenth century, the period when the retrieval of, and construction of modern mediated texts derived from, traditional literatures was inaugurated under the aegis of antiquarianism.”36 In making the scholastic link, he points out that to acknowledge the debt that Morris’s prose owes to his own earlier poetry, and to other 18th and 19th-century poetry before him, is to trace the genealogy of the genre back, via poetry, to the self-conscious antiquarianism of the 18th century, which first established a scholarly trove of stories that were available to modern-day romancers with an attractive taint of strangeness, an alien distance that could then serve as the formal basis for the fantastical appeal.37 Williamson is also astute in tracing Lin Carter’s impulse (abetted by the other founders of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series in the late 1960s) to invent a tradition—retrospectively validating works of that era by linking them in hindsight to a tradition (including MacDonald, Morris,Tolkien, Lewis, and a good many “pulp” writers or outliers such as Evangeline Walton) who in earlier eras had been classed in very disparate ways.38 He makes the case that “an almost exclusive emphasis on prose narrative” means that “Morris, an unarguably important author … looms a little too largely” in histories of fantasy.39 However, his crucial argument is that Morris, breaking from a verse-focused more scholastic tradition of fantasy writing, was “the first author to produce a large body of the kind of narrative I am discussing here in prose.”40 It is only in the aftermath of Morris’s prose romances that significant amounts of modern prose fantasy began, first in the English-speaking world and then elsewhere.41 Williamson thus belongs to the same scholarly tradition as Dimitra Fini’s recent argument that Morris’s contributions to early fantasy included prose romances taking places in invented worlds with a vaguely medieval atmosphere…[that Morris] was a major influence on Tolkien’s fantasy….[and that] By attempting to revitalize the medieval 374

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romance genre, Morris gave fantasy some of its most enduring elements: preindustrial, “medieval” settings, complex narratives with multiple characters and subplots; and a focus on northern European mythologies (54).42 However, a surprising number of taxonomists of fantasy consider Morris a marginal figure. Given Todorov’s account of fantasy as permanently liminal between the fabulous and the psychologically explicable and his commitment to a notion of perpetual hovering or undecidability, it is unsurprising that Morris does not appear in his influential The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973). Somewhat more surprising, though, is his absence from recent taxonomies of the genre such as Farah Mendlesohn’s 2008 Rhetorics of Fantasy, which relegates Todorov’s entire account of “the fantastic” (and the hesitation that it produces) to a subset of a category she calls “the liminal.”43 She argues that the fantastic is an area of literature that is heavily dependent on the dialectic between author and reader for the construction of a sense of wonder, that it is a fiction of consensual construction of belief … Intrinsic to my argument is that a fantasy succeeds where the literary techniques employed are most appropriate to the reader expectations of that category of fantasy.44 Given that the first books in any genre necessarily defy rather than meet expectations, this bias against originating texts may partially explain why Mendlesohn ignores Morris—and Dunsany, whom she mentions only once, approvingly quoting Manlove criticizing him for what she calls “diegetic overkill” [9]—in favor of James Thurber and the film Time Bandits. Mendlesohn is tellingly indifferent to Morris’s nonhuman world-building, which is something other than the sort of fantasy that she approvingly labels “immersion.” Other scholars are more than merely indifferent. In his 1975 Modern Fantasy, Colin Manlove effectively labels William Morris fantasy’s public enemy number one. This because Morris writes—this proves to be a crucial category for Manlove’s argument about the genre as a whole—“anemic fantasy.” Manlove slots Morris among the writers of “late Romanticism … [who] saw the consequence of [decline of religious certainty] as a loss of individuality in men and their products … [and accordingly] looked to the past, and particularly to an imagined medieval past, for an alternative society.” And lest the reader be inclined to quibble about the sorts of other-worldliness that the genre of fantasy offers, Manlove quickly clarifies the rules for this kind of Romantic backlash against the Industrial Revolution: “fantasy is always distinguished by its extensive use of the supernatural (which adds strangeness to the object); by the fact that since some of its worlds are the creation of Christians they are the product not merely of wish fulfillment but of partial belief.”45 To Manlove, Morris is an interloper rather than a creator of modern fantasy, because he is one of a range of writers of fantasy who variously fail to make the wonder they celebrate vital: their work is often delightful, beautiful, or exciting but in the end it lacks the fibre of reality … What also takes away force from Morris’s late romances is their failure to admit real pain or loss into their scheme of things. Manlove tellingly compares such limpid but actionless prose to the fin-de-siècle preciosity of Oscar Wilde or J. K Huysmans … [in whose work described objects have neither] the symbolic import of those in The Book of Revelation 375

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nor the sacramental value they might find in the work of George Mac Donald.They are there to satisfy the greed of the imagination and for no other purpose.46 Manlove’s criticism here may appear simply instrumental: he is rebuking Morris and the other “anemic” writers for lacking Christian purpose—Morris, like Wilde and Huysmans, is guilty of being neither theologically symbolic like the Bible itself, nor pietistic like MacDonald’s allegory.47 However, Manlove’s criticism of Morris as anemic is actually in some ways conceptually aligned with the account offered above of the nonhuman world-building in Morris’s fantasies— albeit with the ethical valence reversed. Where Manlove sees shallow delusion (i.e. absence of Christianity), I would stress the deliberate flatness of a world where characters come to know themselves with reference to their world (Birdalone and Wood-Sun), and in which readers are pushed to envision a place apart, a world that demands and allows a kind of coeval solidarity foreclosed in our own:A world without us. Manlove’s attack on Wildean preciosity in Morris finds a very revealing echo in the praise lavished on Morris’s world-building by Wilde himself: Mr. Morris’s last book [The House of the Wolfings] is a piece of pure art workmanship from beginning to end, and the very remoteness of its style from the common language and ordinary interests of our day gives to the whole story a strange beauty and an unfamiliar charm … His fine harmonies and rich cadences create in the reader that spirit by which alone can its own spirit be interpreted, awake in him something of the temper of romance and, by taking him out of his own age, place him in a truer and more vital relation to the great masterpieces of all time … In days of uncouth realism and unimaginative imitation, it is a high pleasure to welcome work of this kind.48 What exactly is that “truer and more vital relation” that Wilde has in mind? Manlove’s presumption is that Morris’s anemia stems from his rejecting any (Christian) higher purpose. However, one way to understand the beauty that Morris aims both to represent and produce is how insistent he is upon the role played by a simple nonhuman haecceity in that universe. Even in the earliest of Morris’s fantasies, there is an insistence upon the simple facticity of a world that needs no rarefied act of cognition to understand it. In The House of the Wolfings, the beauty of the divine Wood-Sun is perceptible even through closed eyes: Then the carline hung over her and kissed her and embraced her; and then through her closed eyes and her slumber did the Hall-Sun see a marvel; for she who was kissing her was young in semblance and unwrinkled, and lovely to look on, with plenteous long hair of the hue of ripe barley, and clad in glistening raiment such as has been woven in no loom on earth.49 To “see a marvel” has nothing to do with being awake or having one’s eyes open: for the HallSun to be in the presence of this beauty is enough to allow the description (the surface rendering) to proceed.This is perception without perceivers; what matters is the ontological quality of the world. Fantasy for Morris then is not wish-fulfillment (like the dream sequence in Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which oranges poke through the windows of the dream house and, when milk is needed, a cow shows up to poke her udder through the open door). Fulfillment in Morris’s works comes from characters accepting the world as is, rather than as desired. Chaplin shows wish fulfillment within our own actual realm, a wish fulfillment that bends that world to the 376

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characters’ desires. Morris by contrast shows a world in which characters are capable of attaining perfect acceptance of, perfect inclusion into, their environment.50

After Morris Is modern prose fantasy truly the descendant of the nonhuman impulse that runs through the late prose romances of William Morris? How do we get from William Morris to Kazuo Ishiguro announcing in The Guardian that “I am on the side of ogres and pixies” and David Mitchell assuring readers that “Bending the laws of what we call reality in a novel doesn’t necessarily lead to elves saying ‘Make haste! These woods will be swarming with orcs by nightfall’”?51 How, that is, should we explain the shadowy journey that fantasy and speculative fiction in Britain has taken—sometimes coming out into the light (Huxley and Lessing) but generally staying in the shadows alongside John Wyndham and Michael Moorcock? Seeing fantasy as nothing but Tolkienian subcreation (plus its more purposive and allegorical twin, Lewis-style allegorizing of the kind that Manlove approves of) means ignoring English and Irish fantasy writers of the Modernist era (a “minor canon”) who practice baroque experimentation with fiction’s limits. Lord Dunsany’s strange World War I–era fantasy tales, for instance, include “A Tale of London” (in which a Baghdadi sheik hears fairy tales about London) and “How One Came, as Was Foretold, to the City of Never,” in which a visitor to Fairyland finds that its residents too are haunted; on the far side of Fairyland lies a land that is as mysterious and alluring to Fairyland as Fairyland is to mortals.52 There are also a number of less direct ways Morris’s influence can be traced, among them (Williamson explores this ground with subtlety) the deliberate indirection entailed in writing fantasy stories based not on Greek and Roman nor on Christian myths (the canonical culture, that is) but on more obscure traditions (be they Norse, German, Irish, Icelandic, or Welsh) that allow some leeway for the writer looking to chart a distinct relationship to the cultural mainstream.53 Telling the story of writers who turn folklore into fantasy not for nationalist purposes but to triangulate away from the world as it is might cause us to focus renewed attention for example on (obscure Hoosier) Evangeline Walton, whose 1936 The Virgin and the Swine is something between a retelling and a reinvention of the fourth part of the Mabinogion (Lin Carter’s triumphant rediscovery of Walton led to her publishing her versions of the first three books in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series in the early 1970s). In The Virgin and the Swine’s dour wry reworking of Welsh legend,Walton seems to take directly from Morris the notion that a fantasy novel can simply set out to chronicle a self-compete land of story without extravagance of transportation or any justification for that other world’s altered rules.54 There are certainly distinctly post-Hemingway touches to Walton’s writing; she adds pithy conversational prose, and makes Mabinogion characters into noir detective versions of themselves (imagine Gandalf,Aragorn and Elrond as Raymond Chandler might have described them). But the key Morris convention remains: characters are brought down to earth, but to an earth not our own. Walton resembles in this way another slightly later fantasist whose world-building is not usually traced back to the influence of Morris. Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959) directly inherit Morris’s “anemic” imagination: that is, he offers up a world unapologetically divorced from the “fibre of reality” and dedicated to the “greed of the imagination.” And in more pulpy realms, there is a huge range of mid-century fantasists like the (Danish) American Poul Anderson (e.g. in his strange 1954 Edda-inflected fantasy The Broken Sword) who are usually linked directly to Tolkien (as pale imitators or feeble parallels) but whose work carries clear echoes of a Morris-like world where magic and mortal unapologetically interlace with one another. 377

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However, the strongest aftereffects of Morris’s fantasy are perhaps traceable in Ursula Le Guin’s work both for adults and in the category she is credited with pioneering,“young adult” fantasy. Relevant here is not just the obvious line of descent that ties her anarchist “ambiguous utopia” The Dispossessed (1974) to News from Nowhere, but also her more general commitment to prioritizing world-building over plot, the assembling of a desirable other world rather than a set of defining events within that world.We can see that commitment, for example, in her notion that her own novels are less formal narratives than they are stories which delineate or expose a world: “actually I’m terrible at plotting, so all I do is sort of put people in motion and they go round in circles and they generally end up about where they started out. That’s a Le Guin plot.”55 To pick errancy over narrative by this account is more than favoring the picaresque over the realist; worlds ranging from Earthsea to the gender-redefining The Left Hand of Darkness bespeak Le Guin’s commitment to understand stories as devices to reveal a world and its rules.56 Characters operate less as experiential centers than they do as evidence of what it means to accept one’s world, to accept one’s placedness within it.57

Conclusion: The Case for Anemia Toril Moi has recently proposed that one way to think of the 1890s is a time when older forms of Idealism-infused Realism give way, or at least step sideways to open space for, a whole range of deliberately anti-Idealist experiments, in which Decadence and Naturalism are, despite their seeming differences, actually closely conceptually aligned.58 This chapter proposes that we also attend to a far less travelled literary byway, seeing not only in Morris’s fantasy and its descendants a distinctive response to the post-Darwinian challenge of the nonhuman world, but also that it does have a kind of shadow canonicity, a hidden ramifying influence on a wide range of speculative and semi-speculative fiction in later generations and movements. Turning to Thacker’s (ecological or environmental) account of a planetary “world without us” provides one way to see how the “anti-horror” of William Morris operates as repudiation of status quo ante. Manlove’s suggestion that the anemia of Morris’s writing links it to decadence is suggestive, but it does underestimate how thoroughly Morris seeks to conjure up a world that makes only negative claims upon our shared world, that seeks not so much to lie (in the aesthetic sense of lie that Oscar Wilde defended) as to reject everything foundational about ordinary understanding of human life in an everyday social realm. That act of repudiation helps explain why tracing Morris’s legacy entails going farther afield than the best-known writers who claimed his legacy, Lewis and Tolkien. Both took Morris’s idea of a Secondary World and restored it to what Moi would call an Idealist framework, that is, one that palpably presents a recognizable this-world moral schema (in Lewis’s case a blatantly Christian one) that is at the vital center of how the narrative unfolds. The act of subcreation in both authors, then, functions to make that Secondary world into a simple occasion for thisworldly action, channeled through recognizably human characters. However, Morris himself does not restore that sense of moral agency, and it is this refusal (related to his commitment to fantasy as a nonhuman space) that explains both his pervasive background influence and his absence from mainstream accounts of fantasy that (like Manlove and Mendelsohn) implicitly presume that moral teleology is the core of the genre. Morris offers instead what we might even want to call an anti-horror account of a world without us. His fantasy world actively refuses unintelligibility, not only the uncanny voids of H. P. Lovecraft–style horror but even the very ordinary gaps and interstices that arise within 19thcentury realist fiction. I have in previous work discussed the flatness of Morris’s romances by emphasizing the way that “love of this world” (amor mundi) functions to depersonalize individual 378

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characters, so that in Water of the Wondrous Isles, for example, the character Birdalone (as the “alone”-ness of her name suggests) comes to stand in for each individual human.59 Approaching these same passages by way of Thacker’s “world without us” brings the nonhuman aspect of this depersonalization to the fore. Rather than a “world for its people,” Morris offers a vision, a faroff vision, of “people for the world”—only those people are not to be mistaken for Morris, his readers, and their cohabitants of our own world.

Notes 1 C. S. Lewis,“William Morris,” 221. 2 Lin Carter “Introduction,” ix–xii. All emphases in original. Cf. also Lin Carter, Imaginary Worlds (Ballantine: New York, 1973), esp. pp. 20–26. Carter says that Morris wrote “a long, adventurous quest like the Grail romances, told in a limpid prose style of lyric simplicity, studded with quaint archaism—a narrative style borrowed from Malory. He would set the scene in a fresh, scrubbed, morning world, painted in the clear primary colors of a medieval tapestry” [23]. 3 Manlove, Fantasy Impulse, 132. 4 Suvin, 374; among the many who have explicated and amplified the estrangement hypothesis, one outstanding point of reference is Frederic Jameson’s work in the early volumes of Science Fiction Studies (collected and extended in Archaeologies of the Future). 5 The new science fiction of Wells and his followers certainly owes a debt both to Jules Verne’s scientific romances a generation earlier and to such fascinating if isolated earlier experiments as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Similarly, medieval romance is a backdrop (albeit a formally very distinct one) to modern fantasy, and fascinating experiments by Sara Coleridge (Phantasmion, A Fairy Tale, 1837), George MacDonald (Phantastes, 1858), Richard Jefferies (After London, 1885), and such satirists as Samuel Butler (Erewhon, 1872). Nonetheless, this chapter argues that much that happens in both genres between 1885 and 1895 is new, and that Morris’s contribution to that novelty is considerable. 6 The evidence for the Tolkien connection, traced in Carter and more extensively in Massey, is to be found in names (both draw the name Mirkwood from the Elder Eddas, and Tolkien has a drawing called “The Wood at the World’s End”) and more comprehensively in world-building; the style of his descriptions, certainly, but also the attention to geography and cartography is shaped by Morris’s sensibility (much more than simply in a resemblance between Tolkien’s Shire and Morris’s Upmeads). In one early letter, Tolkien reports that “Amongst other work I am trying to turn one of the short [Kalevala] stories … into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between” (Letters, 7). And a 1960 letter reports retrospectively that in The Lord of the Rings, “The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains” (Letters 303). 7 On the Idealist roots of realist fiction see Moi; on the influence of decadence on Modernism see Sherry; on the rise of new forms of Naturalism see Jameson, Antinomies, Fleissner, and Plotz, “Speculative Naturalism.” 8 Cf. John Frow’s argument about the overlap between the category of character and that of person—the two being homologous in some aspects, but unlike in others (Characters and Persons,12–15). 9 Walter Benjamin,“Franz Kafka,”“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace World, 1968). 10 William Morris, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, Collected Works, vol. 22, 148. 11 I am indebted, as many Morris scholars are, to Norman Talbot’s work on the distinctive aspects of Morris’s late prose style.Talbot emphasizes “the eloquence, richness of texture and efficient psychological and narrative development of The Water of the Wondrous Isles” (25).While my emphasis here is on the nonhuman totality of Morris romance world, I do think that what Talbot means by psychological is likely on some deeper level compatible with Morris’s world building impulse;Talbot and I both discern in those stories a sense of how personhood gets entangled with place, how an individual life is altered by its thrownness into a certain determinative place. 12 “This lamp which burned ever was called the Hall-Sun, and the woman who had charge of it and who was the fairest that might be found was called after it the Hall-Sun also.” (House of the Wolfings, 1889, Collected Works, vol. 14, 8).

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John Plotz 13 Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots and recent history of science work on the “epistemic virtue” of objectivity, especially Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity, have suggested useful new ways of tracing the pervasively unsettling legacy of Darwinian natural materialism in late-19th-century Britain. 14 “The world-without-us allows us to think the world-in-itself, without getting caught up in a vicious circle of logical paradox. … The world-without-us lies … in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific.The world-without-us is as much a cultural concept as a scientific one, and as this book attempts to show, it is in the genres of supernatural horror and science fiction that we most frequently find attempts to think about, and to confront, the difficulty of the world-without-us. … The worldfor-us is simply the World, the world-in-itself is simply the Earth, and the world-without-us is simply the Planet. … Anything that reveals itself does not reveal itself in total. The remainder perhaps is the “Planet.” (Thacker, 5–7). 15 Cf. Taylor, Universes Without Us. 16 Marshall, “The Old Weird,” 633. In a recent unpublished manuscript, Marshall also makes the case that “the resistance to anthropocentrism that animates contemporary critical debates surrounding the nonhuman—including speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, animal studies, and the new materialisms – has an important and overlooked expression in the history of the novel … in trying to imagine something like a ‘flat’ or an ‘object oriented’ ontology, or the structure of relations between human and nonhuman others, these thinkers have a more novelistic way of thinking than they tend to acknowledge.” 17 Bould and Mathews are among the scholars who have developed an account of the “horizontal” materialism of William Morris—that is, they stress Morris’s commitment to a this-worldly materialism refusing a transcendent escape to another:“Morris’s horizontal hero struggles to preserve community and communal values” (Bould, 52). 18 William Morris, 1876 letter, quoted in J.W. Mackail, Life of William Morris, 328. 19 Tolkien, 132. 20 Atwood, 517. 21 Against such realism,Atwood offers two sorts of closely aligned imaginative work: scientific invention, and the stories that mirror that inventiveness. “As William Blake noted long ago, the human imagination drives the world. At first it drove only the human world, which was once very small in comparison with the huge and powerful natural world around it. Now we have our hand upon the throttle and our eye upon the rail, and we think we’re in control of everything; but it’s still the human imagination, in all its diversity, that propels the train. Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination” (Atwood, 515, 517). 22 For example, Michael Saler’s As If makes the case (implicitly contra Gallagher) that we should understand realist fiction as an imperfect way-station on the path towards fully immersive art (cf. also Grusin and Bolter, Remediation). Saler argues that full-on dream worlds—modern-day virtual gaming worlds and series like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—achieve the fondest hopes of past fictional realism; Sherlock Holmes ushered his readers into an era of “disenchanted enchantment” or of “animistic reason,” paving the way for our own age to become a Golden Age for the plausible invented universes that Tolkien labeled “secondary worlds” (Saler, 12, 17). Saler’s emphasis falls less on the Holmes stories themselves than on the advent of a fan culture around the Holmes stories, which he sees as the first manifestation of a fanatically immersive modern-day “fan-boy” culture. 23 Cf Sandner:“Fantastic literature emerges as a site for critical debate in the eighteenth century, partly as a result of increasing disbelief in but continued fascination with the supernatural, partly as a negative byproduct of arguments for the realistic novel and, perhaps most importantly, as a vital component of the emergent discourse of the sublime” (Introduction, 6). 24 Gallagher, 340. 25 Gallagher, 351–2. 26 “It is the child-like part of us that produces works of imagination.When we are children time passes so slow with us that we seem to have time for everything.” … “Second childhood,” said I in a low voice, and then blushed at my double rudeness, and hoped that he hadn’t heard. But Hammond had, and turned to me smiling, and said: “Yes, why not? And for my part, I hope it may last long; and that the world’s next period of wise and unhappy manhood, if that should happen, will speedily lead us to a third childhood.” (News from Nowhere, 102) 27 Silver, xvi, xiii, xv. 28 But wrong to claim that they are “Designed as much for the socialist utopia of the future as they are for Morris’s own unregenerate age.” (Silver, 157)

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Windy, Tangible, Resonant Worlds 29 Morris, “Prologue,” The Earthly Paradise, 1870. 30 Kirchhoff, 96. 31 Cf. Emily Harrington’s interest in late- Victorian reflections on how the site of the lyric “I” can oscillate between the represented subject of a poem and the interpolated reader; and her argument that Michael Field’s poetry “asserts not only the instability—and the portability—of the lyric ‘I,’ but that the processes of detachment and attachment are fundamental to the lyric as a genre” (221). 32 Morris, Water of the Wondrous Isles, 374, 387. 33 Talbot describes this romance’s “eloquence and richness of texture,” but this passage sheds light as well on the kind of “development” that Talbot labels “psychological” but might better be described as comprehensive. 34 Morris, News, 211, emphasis added. 35 Mathews, 1977, 3. 36 Williamson, 34. 37 Williamson also discusses ways that earlier work raging from Amadis to The Faerie Queene to Sidney’s Arcadia (or even Pilgrim’s Progress and Gulliver’s Travels) might be classed not simply as antecedents but as initiators of the tradition, before finally concluding that “If we look strictly to prose for predecessors to Morris, we are restricted to scattered, single works: MacDonald’s visionary Phantastes (1858) Sara Coleridge’s fairy-tale romance Phantasmion (1837), Thomas Hogg’s eccentric cross-hatch of border legend and the legends of the medieval magician Michael Scott’s The Three Perils of Man (1832) and scattered shorter tales by Benjamin Disraeli, John Sterling and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. However the work of William Morris’s earlier literary career includes the work on which his considerable contemporary reputation rested: a larger body of extended narrative poetry, comprising versions of various classical, medical and German/Scandinavian myths and legends.Though verse this body of romance stands as a natural forerunner to the prose romances in terms of style and language: it is fantasy” (Williamson, 37). 38 “The coalescence of fantasy—that contemporary literary category whose name most readily evokes notions of “epic trilogies” with “mythic” settings and character—into a discrete genre occurred quire recently and abruptly, a direct result of the crossing of the resurgence of interest in American popular ‘sword and sorcery’ in the early 1960’s with the mass commercial success of J. R. R.Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the paperback edition of which had been motivated by the former in the mid-1960’s. Previously there had been no identifiable genre resembling contemporary fantasy, and the work that is now identified as laying the groundwork for it (‘pregenre’ fantasy) appeared largely undifferentiated in widely dispersed areas of the publishing market” (Williamson, 1). For a similar later example (1988) of that kind of tradition-invention, see Cawthorn and Moorcock, Fantasy:The 100 Best Books. 39 Williamson, 37.Williamson downplays the significance of other potential prose antecedents to modern fantasy, with the exception of two understudied works: Hogg’s Perils of Man and Peacock’s Misfortunes of Elphin (1829): “on the whole, the offspring of the eighteenth century [Gothic] form moved in the direction of horror and supernatural fiction. [similarly] … Like most of his longer narrative poems, Scott’s prose fiction in general eschews magical or supernatural elements and, on its own merits, stands outside the focus of this study” (Williamson, 83). 40 Williamson, 34. 41 Totally forgotten now are Henry Newbolt’s Aladore (1914),Wilfred Childe’s Dream English:A Fantastical Romance (1917), and E. R. Eddison’s Ourobouros series, which I gamely if painfully struggled through as a child. But Williamson shows that these are important links in the chain that ties Morris to Tolkien (Childe, for example, was a colleague of Tolkien’s at Leeds in the early 1920s). I am grateful to Anna Vaninskaya for exchanges on this topic and for pointing me to Williamson’s work. 42 Dimitra Fimi,“Tolkien and the Fantasy Tradition,” 54. 43 Even those agreeing that Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as only existing on the boundary between the marvelous and the real will not necessarily accept Mendelsohn’s division of fantasy into four “successful” forms:“the Portal-Quest”;“Immersive”;“The Liminal”; and “The Irregulars.” 44 Mendelsohn, xii. 45 Manlove, Impulse ix, x, xii. He also adds a patriotic note:“With this interest of fantasy in the uniqueness of things, it is perhaps understandable that the genre has flourished particularly in Britain and America, which are still generally distinguished among other countries for the scope they give to the individual, the personal and the local” (xii). 46 Manlove, 140, 143.

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John Plotz 47 Indeed, elsewhere in the book, Manlove tries to claim both Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin for a “conservative” and Christian worldview—it is a stretch. 48 Oscar Wilde,“Mr.William Morris’s Last Book.” Pall Mall Gazette. (2 March 1889). 49 Morris, House of the Wolfings, 40. 50 If space permitted, it might also be worth thinking about the Arts and Crafts artisanal production that is aligned with this same spirit of “anemic” fantasy. Looking even briefly at various Morris and Company Merton Abbey tapestries—for example, the collaboratively worked 1887 piece The Forest, where Morris first “published” the poem “The Lion,” and J. H. Dearle’s 1892 “Greenery,” which sets to tapestry the poem “Forest”—gives a sense of Morris’ other-world-constitutive sensibility at work. Both “The Forest” and “The Lion” appear in “Verses for Pictures” in Morris’s 1891 Kelmscott Press Poems by the Way. 51 Both quoted in Sian Cain,“Writers’ indignation: Kazuo Ishiguro rejects claims of genre snobbery,” The Guardian (March 8, 2015). 52 Little wonder that Dunsany and Peter Beagle join Morris as “anemic” fantasy in Manlove’s work. Looking farther forward, a Tolkien-centric account of fantasy would also mean undervaluing Kazuo Ishiguro’s own recent Buried Giant, intensely evocative of those late chilling Goya murals that depict hazy massive figures fighting across a ruined landscape. Ishiguro’s detour into a dragon-plagued Arthurian Britain allows him to explore the implications of forgetting and remembering past wrongs, mixing the ethical debates around the South African Truth and Reconciliation commission with concerns about the recovery of childhood memories. 53 I am grateful to Florence Boos for pointing out that Morris and Andrew Lang likely had a fin de siècle influence not only on W. B.Yeats and Emily Henrietta Hickey in Ireland, but also on Rosamund Marriott Watson in London. 54 The same matter-of-fact fantasizing defines Sylvia Townsend Warner’s undervalued final book, Kingdoms of Elfin. 55 Wickes, 16, in “Dialogue with Ursula Le Guin,” [1982], 12–25, in Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin. 56 Le Guin’s most influential booster, Fredric Jameson, praises in her work an impulse toward “world reduction.” Jameson, 271.To Jameson, both the gender-bending in The Left Hand of Darkness and the battle between anarchist Annares and capitalist Urras in The Dispossessed are simplifying allegories; they make our own world’s power elites visible, and hence resistible. Jameson is understandably responding to Le Guin’s desire to pare away the superfluous, honing each story to a knife-edge, so that nothing matters but a set of sharpened contact points. However, by enlisting Le Guin in his critique of an overly complex capitalist world packed with superfluous choices, Jameson misses another equally crucial aspect of her vision: her books remind us how little of our world belongs to those who think they rule it. 57 Roland Barthes. The Neutral has a compelling account of this kind of narrative worldliness, which Barthes identifies as writing that is not active, agential, and plotted, but instead diffident, observing, and inactive: neutral. For Le Guin, this kind of chosen inaction, or action within the confines of a larger nonhuman logic, became increasingly linked with her interest in Taoism, which finds explicit articulation both in The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and in the second Earthsea trilogy (Tehanu:The Last Book of Earthsea [1990], Tales from Earthsea [2001], and The Other Wind [2001]). 58 Moi, 67–91. This account seems to me a useful way to supplement Vincent Sherry’s recent work on how decadence forms a hidden unacknowledged substratum of later Modernist work—to see how much decadence and Naturalism actually had in common and how much that commonality, specifically its anti-Idealism, contributed to Modernism. 59 Florence Boos proposes that “‘bird’ may derive from the Middle-English ‘burde,’‘maiden’ or ‘embroidress’”(161).

References and Further Reading Arscott, Caroline,William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008. Arsić, Branka. Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Atwood, Margaret. “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake ‘In Context.’” PMLA 119, no. 3 (2004): 513–17.

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Windy, Tangible, Resonant Worlds Auden,W. H. “Letter to Lord Byron.” The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939. New York, NY: Random House, 1977, 169–99. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Benjamin,Walter.“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace World, 1968. Bennett, Phillippa. Wonderlands :The Last Romances of William Morris. London: Peter Lang, 2015. Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Boos, Florence. “The Socialist New Woman in William Morris’s The Water of the Wondrous Isles.” Victorian Literature and Culture 23 (1995): 159–75. Bould, Mark.“What Kind of Monster Are You? Situating the Boom.” Science Fiction Studies (SFS) 30, no. 3 (91) (20031101): 394–416. Cain, Sian. “Writers’ Indignation: Kazuo Ishiguro Rejects Claims of Genre Snobbery.” The Guardian, March 8, 2015. Carter, Lin. “Introduction.” William Morris:Wood Beyond the World. Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series #1. New York, NY: Ballantine, 1969, ix–xv. Cawthorn, James, and Michael Moorcock. Fantasy:The 100 Best Books. London: Xanadu, 1988. Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Davis,Theo. Ornamental Aesthetics:The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016. Fimi, Dimitra.“Tolkien and the Fantasy Tradition” Claire Whitehead:The Fantastic. Critical Insights. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013, 40–60. Freedman, Carl Howard, ed. Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Garnett, David. Lady into Fox. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922. Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Ideas in Context. Cambridge, England and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Harrington, Emily.“Michael Field and the Detachable Lyric.” Victorian Studies 50, no. 2 (2008): 221–32. Helsinger, Elizabeth K. Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2008. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future:The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London and New York, NY:Verso, 2005. ———. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. Jones, Diana Wynne. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. New York, NY: Firebird, 2006. Kirchhoff, Frederick.“William Morris’s Anti-Books:The Kelmscott Press and the Late Prose Romances.” Forms of the Fantastic, ed. Jan Hokenson and Howard Pearce. New York, NY: Greenwood Press, 1986, 93–100. Lewis, C. S. “William Morris.” Selected Literary Essays. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 119–34. Manlove, C. N. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1975. ———. The Fantasy Literature of England. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. ———. The Impulse of Fantasy Literature. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983. Marshall, Kate.“The Old Weird.” Modernism/Modernity 23, no. 3 (September 2016): 631–49. Massey, Kelvin Lee. The Roots of Middle-Earth: William Morris’s Influence upon J. R. R. Tolkien. PhD Diss., University of Tennessee, 2007.Accessed 02022017 at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631485. Mathews, Richard. Fantasy:The Liberation of Imagination. Studies in Literary Themes and Genres; # 16. New York, NY and London:Twayne Publishers and Prentice Hall International, 1997. ——— . Worlds beyond the World:The Fantastic Vision of William Morris, 1st ed. The Milford Series, vol. 13. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1978. May Morris, ed. The Collected Works of William Morris. London: Longmans, 1910–15. Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

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John Plotz Moi, Toril. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Morris,William. News from Nowhere, vol. 16 in The Collected Works of William Morris. London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1992. ———. The House of the Wolfings, vol. 14 in The Collected Works of William Morris. London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1992. ———. The Sundering Flood, vol. 21 in The Collected Works of William Morris. London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1992. ———. The Water of the Wondrous Isles, vol. 20 in The Collected Works of William Morris. London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1992. Plotz, John.“Le Guin’s Anarchist Aesthetics.” Public Books, October 15, 2015. http://www.publicbooks.org /fiction/le-guins-anarchist-aesthetics. ———.“Nowhere and Everywhere:The End of Portability in William Morris’s Romances.” ELH 74, no. 4 (2007): 931–56. ———.“Speculative Naturalism and the Problem of Scale: Richard Jefferies’s After London, after Darwin.” Modern Language Quarterly:A Journal of Literary History (MLQ) 76, no. 1 (2015): 31–56. Saler, Michael T. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sandner, David. “Introduction.” Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, ed. David Sandner. London: Praeger, 2004, 1–13. Sherry,Vincent B. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Suvin, Darko.“On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34, no. 3 (1972): 372–82. Talbot, Norman. “‘Whilom, as Tells the Tale’: The Language of the Prose Romances.” Journal of William Morris Studies 8, no. 2 (1989): 16–26. Taylor, Matthew A. Universes Without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet. Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. Ropley: Zero, 2011. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic; a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, vol. in the CWRU Press Translations. Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973. Tolkien, J. R. R.“On Fairy Stories.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: HarperCollins, 1997, 109–61. ———. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Selected and ed. Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Walton, Evangeline. The Virgin and the Swine:The Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi. Chicago, IL:Willett, Clark & Co., 1936. Wilde, Oscar.“Mr.William Morris’s Last Book.” Pall Mall Gazette, March 2, 1889. Williamson, Jamie. The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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PART IV

Literature and Socialism

16 WILLIAM MORRIS AND BRITISH POLITICS: FROM THE LIBERAL PARTY TO THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE Frank C. Sharp

Of William Morris’s eighteen years of political activism, seven were spent in promoting the activities of the Liberal Party, a longer period than his association with either the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League, or the Hammersmith Socialist Society. Morris came to active political engagement relatively late in his life, but once committed, he at first passionately supported the Liberal party and its goals. although he later became deeply disillusioned with parliamentary politics. Many works on Morris, particularly those with a socialist point of view, have tended to dismiss his engagement with the Liberals as merely a stage on the path to socialism. However, the Liberal Party provided Morris experience working on political campaigns, exposed him to the inner workings of parliamentary politics, and most importantly, gave Morris his earliest public speaking experiences. His work with the Liberals also distinctly colored his approach to public affairs and his political critiques as a socialist. In this essay, I will argue that many of his later concerns as a socialist were continuations of his earlier embrace of Liberal principles, extended and modified by a commitment to basic social reorganization. The Liberal Party was created in the late 1830s from a coalition of Whigs, MPs who broke with the Tories over the issue of free trade, and Radicals. The Whigs were the descendants of aristocratic and gentry groups that had supported the Glorious Revolution. Historically they had supported the supremacy of parliament and the limitation of the powers of the monarch. They were responsible for the first Reform Act in 1832, and after the creation of the Liberal Party, they were the largest group in the coalition.The Whigs operated under an assumption that aristocratic leadership of the party with a paternalistic view of aiding the underprivileged was desirable. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Whigs lost influence, and with the increase in the electorate with each Reform Act, the Radicals gained importance.The Radicals included businessmen interested in promoting free trade, non-conformists who chafed against the favoritism shown to the Church of England and its adherents, and middle-class activists interested in protecting basic liberties and improving the lives of the less privileged in Britain.When the Liberals were in power, the Radicals supported expanded access to education, basic protections for workers, and extension of male suffrage in Britain. The Radicals also believed that a goal

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of British foreign policy should be the promotion of the basic rights of oppressed peoples in Europe who were suffering under reactionary and brutal regimes.1 During the period Morris was involved in Liberal politics, only a fraction of the male population could vote. The qualifications for voting had not changed since the Representation of the People Act (Second Reform Act) in 1867. Out of a total population of approximately 30 million, only about 2.5 million men in Great Britain had the vote. These included all male householders in the boroughs as well as tenants who paid rent of £10 a year or more. In the countryside, the bill gave the vote to agricultural landowners and tenants with small amounts of land. In 1884, the electorate would be further expanded under the Third Reform Act, but by this time Morris had already left the Liberals to become a socialist. Morris’s participation in the Liberal Party came at a time when its radical members were gaining in numbers and influence. However, the Whigs had more organization and presented a more consistent program. Many of the Whig aristocrats disliked the new focus of the party and tried to restrain its radical shift. These Whigs broke from the Liberals after the party endorsed Irish home rule in 1885, including Morris’s close friend George Howard (1843–1911). During the late nineteenth century, Liberal leaders were continually walking a tightrope of trying to appeal to the Radicals and new working-class electorate while maintaining support from their traditional aristocratic and landed supporters. During his period of involvement with the Liberals, Morris always sympathized with the Radical wing of the party and was dismissive of the Whigs.

William Morris and the Liberal Party 1876–1883 From his origins in the professional classes and his family’s non-conformist origins, Morris naturally gravitated towards the Liberal Party, as did most of his circle of friends. However, there is little indication that he was anything more than a passive supporter of the Liberals as a young man; presumably he voted for Liberal candidates but beyond that gave no active support to the party. Morris would acknowledge this when he began active political participation for the Liberals, admitting that he had been one of those “heeding public matters less than they ought.”2 In 1876, Bulgarian Christians in the Ottoman Empire requested protections and a degree of autonomy from the government in Constantinople. After demonstrations in the Bulgarian provinces, the Ottoman government decided to make an example out of the Bulgarians in case other minorities in the empire might also demand concessions. Ottoman troops and irregular mounted bashi-bazouk units massacred thousands of Christian Bulgarians. Liberals in England and throughout Europe were shocked by the Turkish massacres.The leading Liberal newspaper, the Daily News, which Morris regularly read, carried stories of the atrocities that included rapes, murders, destruction of churches and monasteries, and stories of groups of women and children being herded into buildings which were then set on fire. Estimates of the numbers of dead reached over 30,000. However, the Conservative government led by Disraeli refused to criticize the Ottoman Empire. They worried that weakening the Turks would lead to an increase in Russian influence in the region and endanger British interests in the Mediterranean, particularly the Suez Canal. William Ewart Gladstone was the leading figure in the Liberal Party. As Prime Minister from 1868 to 1874, Gladstone’s major achievements included supporting the Education Acts that provided England for the first time with an adequate system of elementary schools. He also ended religious tests for admission to universities, disestablished the Church of Ireland, introduced the secret ballot in British elections, and legalized trade unions in Britain. In foreign policy, Gladstone sought to create a European order based on co-operation rather than conflict. 388

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He hoped that British influence would lead to the rule of law and free elections supplanting the power of oppressive regimes. In 1876, Gladstone was expected to retire from leadership of the party which was then in opposition. However, he was moved by the carnage in the Ottoman Empire to write a book, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, and called upon Britain to withdraw its support for the Turks I entreat my countrymen … upon whom far more than upon any other people in Europe it depends, to require and to insist that our government, which has been working in one direction, shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour to concur with the states of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria.3 Gladstone made it clear that he intended to continue to lead the Liberal Party and would push the party to move for protections for minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Morris was one of many in Britain who answered Gladstone’s call. In 1876, he wrote a long and impassioned letter to the Editor of the Daily News expressing his horror at the actions of the Turks “torturing and oppressing” their subject peoples. He asked for them to have “some chance for existence to force the Turkish Government to agree to give these peoples some security for life, limb, and property.” He appealed to the Liberal Party and to British workingmen to avoid the “shame” that would accrue to Britain if it failed to support the Bulgarians, and demanded that the British government make it clear that they would “wage no war on behalf of the Turks, no war on behalf of murders.”4 With this letter, Morris began several years of active service in the Liberal cause. A decade before Morris’s involvement in the cause of minorities in the Ottoman empire, the areas of Poland under Russian domination had risen up in 1863 in a brave but ultimately doomed revolt known as the January Uprising.The Poles demanded basic rights and freedoms in the Russian Empire.The uprising was brutally put down by Russian troops with massacres of the revolutionaries similar to those that would occur in Bulgaria in 1876 and mass deportations to Siberia for the survivors. Support for the Polish cause swept Liberal Europe and there were huge demonstrations in London and throughout Britain.There is no evidence that Morris was involved at all in this cause that was remarkably similar to the one that he passionately supported in 1876. Many Liberals refused to be part of the work of the Eastern Question Association in the 1870s because of Russia’s oppression of the Poles and lingering censure of Russia from the Crimean War (1853–1856). Morris was likely thinking of the Poles and the January Uprising when he wrote to Charles Faulkner at the beginning of his involvement with the Eastern Question Association that “I know that the Russians have committed many crimes.”5 Fiona MacCarthy in William Morris, A Life for Our Time very plausibly posits that Morris may have been more receptive to the cause of the Bulgarians and criticism in general of the Ottoman government in the 1870s through his friendship and business relationships with members of London’s Greek community, including members of the Cassavetes, Ionides, and Spartali families.6 In December 1876, Morris was elected treasurer of the Eastern Question Association. Perhaps because of his celebrity, Morris was recruited to give speeches in support of the Association’s aims. Initially a diffident speaker, Morris came to be an effective advocate for the cause, and he would later use the public speaking skills gained in this campaign in speeches throughout his life. Morris focused his work for the Association on increasing working-class participation. In the spring of 1877, after Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire, Morris delivered speeches at several venues defending five resolutions condemning the Ottoman Empire which Gladstone 389

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had espoused in parliament. He described one meeting at the Canon Street Hotel as “quite a success; they seemed to have advanced.”7 After Russia went to war with the Ottoman Empire, Morris issued his appeal To the Working Men of England, which condemned the rich who were promoting intervening on the side of the Turks. Through his work on the Bulgarian campaign, Morris came in contact with some of the most significant figures in radical Liberal politics beginning with his first involvement in the Eastern Question Association. He had a close association with A. J. Mundella (1825–1897), a radical Liberal MP from Sheffield; James Bryce (1838–1922), a professor of History at Oxford who would go on to be elected an MP in 1880 and eventually became a member of the cabinet; Henry Broadhurst (1840–1911), a prominent trade unionist who would also be elected to Parliament in 1880; Frederick Chesson (1833–1888), a radical journalist who had been active in the anti-slavery movement at the time of the American Civil War; and Auberon Herbert (1838–1906), younger son of the Earl of Carnarvon and a radical Member of Parliament for Nottingham. It would be wrong to think of Morris’s involvement with the Liberals solely in terms of his work for the Eastern Question Association. Morris accepted much of the agenda promoted by the Radical wing of the party.This included further expansion of male suffrage and legislation to ameliorate the conditions of the poor including expansion of educational opportunities. At this period he greatly admired Gladstone; in one of his earliest speeches delivered to the Chichester Liberal Association, he described Gladstone as “the most illustrious statesman of England, the most single-hearted statesman of the world.”8 Broadhurst brought Morris into an organization that he had helped found, the Workmen’s Neutrality Committee, and Morris wrote the lyrics for the song “Wake London Lads” for a large meeting organized by the committee in January 1878. In February 1878, he was a key organizer in a major demonstration for the working men of London on behalf of the Eastern Question Association. Morris was part of a deputation that persuaded Gladstone to agree to speak at the event,9 and he booked the Agricultural Hall in Islington, then the largest venue in London, for it. However, under pressure from the Liberal establishment, the assembly was abandoned and Morris described the change to Jane Morris as “the parliamentarians began to quake.”10 It is generally believed that although Gladstone had agreed to appear, he was relieved that the project was abandoned.11 Morris was deeply disappointed by the failure of his plans. He wrote to Jane, “I am that ashamed that I can scarcely look people in the face though I did my best to keep the thing up.”12 The failure to support this demonstration was the first of a string of events that would leave him disillusioned with the Liberals. Soon after the failure of the Agricultural Hall meeting, the Eastern Question cause was disbanded. Military successes by the Russian army threatened Constantinople itself, and the Conservatives were able to shape public opinion in support of the Turks against the Russians. Disraeli was able to use the threat of British intervention to push the warring parties and the other major powers to the Berlin Conference of 1878, which resulted in increased autonomy for the Bulgarian principalities and the Serbians, the addition of Thessaly to Greece’s territory, and Britain’s acquisition of Cyprus for its empire. After the Congress, support for the activities of the Eastern Question Association was dramatically reduced. In the historical literature relating to the Bulgarian Agitations, those authors focusing on the Liberal point of view generally include a discussion of Morris’s involvement, although his contributions are not a central part of the narrative.13 Typical of the Liberal-centered scholarship is Richard Shannon’s Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation. Shannon rather dismissively sees Morris as impractically idealistic and describes him as motivated by “a romantic misconception shared by Gladstone in a rather different way that the working class provided the dynamic of virtuous protest.”14 Shannon does acknowledge that the involvement of a figure of Morris’s stature raised 390

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awareness of the campaign but does not otherwise place great value on his participation. Ann Pottinger Saab’s Reluctant Icon, Gladstone, Bulgaria and the Working Classes 1856–1878 makes a more detailed study of Morris’s involvement in the Bulgarian agitation. She sees Morris’s contribution as crucial in expanding the Eastern Question Association’s appeal to the working men in London and making them aware of the issues in the cause. She believes that his turn to socialism resulted from his being “thoroughly disillusioned by what he considered as the cowardice of middle-class leaders.”15 A significant area of Morris’s political involvement which has not been sufficiently explored is Morris’s opposition to British imperialism. Certainly, his participation in the Eastern Question Association was based on the premise that Britain’s colonial interests could not justify an immoral foreign policy in relation to the Ottoman Empire. In 1878, during his involvement with the Eastern Question Association, Morris was also actively involved in opposition to Britain’s involvement in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. His distress over imposition of direct British rule in Egypt in 1882 was one of the factors leading to his ending his relationship with the Liberal Party. He was also adamantly opposed to coercion in Britain’s rule in Ireland. In her introduction to a critical edition of Morris’s lecture, Our Country Right or Wrong, Florence Boos places Morris’s activism and anti-imperialism in the context of nineteenth century European anti-militarism.16 Socialist writers have struggled with Morris’s engagement with the Liberals. It is impossible to ignore the passion with which Morris embraced the Liberal cause. E. P. Thompson’s 1955 William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary attributes Morris’s initial enthusiasm for the Liberals to “confusions and naiveties of thought” and is obviously troubled by Morris’s “faith in the complete integrity of Gladstone.”17 Thompson to a large extent uses a detailed analysis of Morris’s actions in these years to treat Morris’s engagement with the Liberals merely as a stage in his development as a socialist. He does argue that Morris’s engagement with working men in the Bulgarian campaign eventually led him to believe that workers must organize their own socialist struggles. Similarly in his 1938 “William Morris and the Modern World,” G.D. Cole generally chose to ignore Morris’s engagement with the Liberals when he wrote on Morris’s politics.18 In his 2011 The Making of British Socialism, Mark Bevir creates an elaborate analysis of Morris’s “Protestant” and “romantic” beliefs to explain Morris’s engagement with Liberalism.19 None of these treatments seem to adequately address Morris’s ardent support of the Liberal Party. It is more accurate to acknowledge his deep commitment to the Liberals on its own terms, and to try to see why Morris came to believe that parliamentary politics could not provide solutions to the problems in society that liberal ideals claimed to address.

The Shift to Socialism In the election held in April 1880, the Liberal Party won one of its largest majorities in any election campaign. Morris had supported a number of radical Liberal candidates, including Charles Dilke and his friends James Bryce and Henry Broadhurst. Morris was ecstatic over the Liberal victory and the large number of radical candidates returned, writing Broadhurst that the election was “a new start on the road of progress and freedom.”20 He sent a poem to William De Morgan which characterized the election as “Rending the clouds that darkened England’s heart.”21 Yet just three years later, Morris would turn his back on the Liberals and parliamentary politics completely and become a socialist.This dramatic transformation can only be explained by a confluence of factors that both made Morris convinced that liberal reform was ineffective and led him to the belief that only socialism could sufficiently change society. Mackail stated that “no two of his friends … agree in their view of the steps by which he became a convinced 391

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Socialist.” It is obvious that a combination of factors convinced Morris that parliamentary solutions would not resolve the problems he saw in society, but that only extreme socialist measures could cure its ills. The first and obvious factor was Morris’s disillusionment with the Liberal Party. In the 1880 election a large number of radical Members of Parliament were elected.The radicals had worked hard in the campaign and their supporters were crucial in the Liberal victory. However, the radicals were deeply disappointed that when Gladstone selected his cabinet, he included only one token radical, Joseph Chamberlain; his reasoning was likely that the radicals had no other party to go to, while he was worried about his Whig supporters who could (and would in 1885 after he embraced Home Rule) be lured to support the Conservatives. Morris believed that the Whigs were not true Liberals. In his letter of congratulation to his friend James Bryce who was successfully elected in 1880, Morris called it “a double triumph when a good liberal turns out a sham one,” meaning a Whig.22 Some of the policies pursued by the Liberal government between 1880 and 1883 also disturbed Morris. During this period, the government passed no substantial domestic legislation addressing issues important to the Radicals. The Radicals actively supported a comprehensive plan to provide elected local government bodies, but this was opposed by the Whigs and was not passed.While there was rather modest Irish land reform legislation, Parliament also passed a harsh government-sponsored Irish Coercion Bill to deal with the growth of the Irish National Land League. The statute enabled the British government in Ireland to arrest without trial persons “reasonably suspected” of crime and conspiracy. However, those arrested were often not involved in criminal activities, only supportive of the Irish National Land League’s political goals. Morris was horrified by this legislation.The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) took a strong stance against Irish coercion and this may have been a factor in Morris’s later membership in the organization. Morris was similarly appalled at British intervention in Egypt in 1882.The Gladstone government reluctantly moved militarily to take charge in Egypt in order to quell the perceived anarchy of the Urabi Revolt,23 as well as to protect British control over the Suez Canal in order to maintain its shipping route to India. The Egyptian forces were defeated and Britain would occupy Egypt into the twentieth century. Morris would refer to this conflict as “the Stockjobbers’ Egyptian War.”24 Initially Morris attempted to work for change and remain a Liberal. In the autumn of 1879, he became Treasurer of the National Liberal League, an organization made up of convinced Radicals including John Bright (1811-1889), Henry Broadhurst, and George Howell (18331910). Its goal was to unite working class support with sympathetic middle-class Liberals and to present a more coherent message expressing the Radicals’ goals. Morris wrote a supportive letter to the Editor of the Daily News to “lay the Claims of the National Liberal League before them,” describing their efforts as “missionary labour.”25 In January 1880, Morris gave a lecture for the League,“Violence Abroad Breeds Helplessness at Home,” that offered a criticism of the policies of the government. He attributed most contemporary military conflicts to greed and national glory and argued that to “make the pill of national glory [palatable it must be] gilded with … stuff about the advancement of civilization and the spread of the beneficent influence of the British race.”26 Although the League offered Morris a platform to promote his beliefs within the Liberal Party, eventually he became disillusioned even with this organization and turned to the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1883. In 1887, Morris asked, “as to the Radical Party where is it and what is it except the feeble tail of this same feeble Liberal Party?”27 By contrast, Jane Morris would retain an allegiance to the Liberal Party until her death in 1914, although late in life she joined the Fabians. 392

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By 1884, Morris, who until the previous year had been a passionate Liberal, was referring to the two parties as “damn tweedledum and blast tweedledee.”28 Certainly Morris believed that whichever party was in power, the British system would favor capitalists over the workers. In 1884, he also described Gladstone, whom he had once admired, as “a confirmed Tory, too old to change.”29 Morris did, however, see his former Radical colleagues as potential converts to the socialist cause. “[T]here is another Radical section who are on the lookout for progressive ideas, and are the representatives of advancing Democracy.These may, and often do, oppose us as inconvenient impracticable persons, who interfere with what they have learned to consider progress, but they are not really unfriendly and are willing to hear us, and when they have done so they will find many of them, that they are Socialists after all.”30 In 1885, he wrote in the SDF’s journal Justice of a future where “Society will presently wake up and find the Whigs extinct, the Liberals extinct, the true Radicals rapidly becoming Socialists and facing a party which will have been forced to drop its mask; which may be called Tory or what you will, but which proclaims at last without hypocrisy its real maxim,‘Keep them Down.’”31 Even as he grew disillusioned with Liberal politics, Morris continued his friendships with leading liberal politicians, most notably James Bryce. Immediately after the winding down of the Eastern Question Association, Morris would join Bryce’s Anglo-Armenian Committee, which would continue the work of protesting against the persecution of minorities in the Ottoman Empire.32 His Liberal friends would also support many of Morris’s endeavors. James Bryce and George Howard served on the Committee of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) for many years, and other prominent Liberal MPs including A.J. Mundella and Sir John Lubbock were among the original members of SPAB. In the SPAB’s 1879 campaign to save St. Mark’s Venice from a destructive restoration, over 50 Members of Parliament signed Morris’s memorial, most of them Liberals. Liberal MPs John Burns and Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham would actively support the activities of the Socialist League and both would be arrested at the Bloody Sunday demonstration. After Cunninghame Graham chaired his first League meeting, Morris reported it in Commonweal as “the first time in the history of Britain that a British MP presided over a socialist meeting.”33 Radical Liberals also supported the Socialist League campaign for free speech in 1885 when socialists were targeted by police for arrest and harassment.As late as 1892, when the Liberal government was attempting to choose a replacement for Tennyson as Poet Laureate, members of the cabinet seriously considered Morris for the position despite his ardent socialism. Bryce promoted Morris as a potential candidate, reminding Gladstone that Morris was “an upright man whom one cannot know without liking and a most earnest and hearty fellow worker with some of us in the anti-Turkish agitation of 1876-1878.”34 Intellectually, Morris’s conversion to socialism was inspired by several sources. The seminal inspiration for Morris’s political views were the works of John Ruskin.As Morris himself related in ‘How I Became a Socialist,’ Lastly, there were a few who were in open rebellion against the said Whiggery - a few, say two, Carlyle and Ruskin.The latter, before my days of practical Socialism, was my master towards the ideal aforesaid, and looking backward, I cannot help saying, by the way, how deadly dull the world would have been twenty years ago but for Ruskin! It was through him that I learned to give form to my discontent, which 1 must say was not by any means vague.35 In Ruskin’s 1853 chapter from The Stones of Venice, “On the Nature of Gothic—The Function of the Workman in Art,” he laments the degradation of the working man caused by industrialism 393

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and condemns capitalists who keep their workers poor and ignorant. In the preface to his Kelmscott Press edition of The Nature of Gothic, Morris interprets Ruskin politically,“If Politics are to be anything else than an empty game, more exciting but less innocent than those which are confessedly games of skill or chance, it is toward this goal of the happiness of labour that they must make.” He credits Ruskin as “the teacher of morals and politics … [who] has done serious and solid work towards the new-birth of Society, without which genuine art, the expression of man’s pleasure in his handiwork, must inevitably cease altogether, and with it the hopes of the happiness of mankind.” One of Ruskin’s works in particular, Unto This Last, resonates in Morris’s socialism, especially Ruskin’s cogent criticism of capitalism and its conclusion,“That country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings,” provides the template for Morris’s approach to social problems. Ruskin’s assertion,“Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor” likewise echoes in Morris’s later writing. Ruskin’s influence is also apparent in Morris’s insistence that in addition to providing for workers’ physical wellbeing, socialists also had a duty to provide them intellectual and aesthetic opportunities. Mackail asserted that in Morris’s conversion to socialism, the writings of the French philosopher and early socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) were also highly influential.36 In one of the articles co-authored by Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax,“Socialism from the Root Up,” published in the Socialist League’s journal, Commonweal, they find that Fourier’s “criticism of modern Society is most valuable as anticipating that of scientific Socialism; unlike his contemporaries he has an insight into the historical growth of Society.”37 Certainly the influence of Fourier’s theory of “attractive labour” is easily identifiable in the utopian strain in Morris’s thought. In a review in Commonweal in 1890, Morris, describes Fourier’s theory as “truly inspired,”38 and in his essay, “The Hopes of Civilization,” he states that “Fourier is the one that calls for most attention: since his doctrine of the necessity and possibility of making labour attractive is one which Socialism can by no means do without.”39 It is not too much of a stretch to see that this doctrine inspired Morris’s beliefs as to the benefits that creative and intelligent work can provide the working man. Some later scholars, particularly Paul Meier, have attempted to downplay Fourier’s influence,40 but its hold on Morris’s thought is readily apparent. One further work was influential in Morris’s early socialist beliefs, Sergius Stepniak’s 1883 Underground Russia, Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life. Stepniak (Sergey Mikhailovich Stepnyak-Kravchinsky) was a Russian emigré writer and revolutionary. After joining a socialist organization in Russia, he had been arrested by the Russian authorities but was able to escape police custody and go into exile; at the time, convinced that terrorism would persuade Tsar Alexander II to introduce democratic reforms, he returned to Russia in August 1878, and assassinated General Nikolai Mezentsov, head of Russia’s secret police. He then lived in exile in London and was a friend of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, to whom Morris was also close. Morris became a friend of Stepniak and supported him financially, and Stepniak lectured for the Socialist League and contributed to Commonweal. Morris wrote to a friend at the time of his joining the SDF “[R]ead Underground Russia if you want your blood to boil.”41 In this book, Stepniak details the sacrifices of the socialists, many of them quite young, in the face of persecution by the Tsarist regime. He emphasizes their bravery in attempting to free their nation from tyranny.When introducing a lecture Stepniak gave to the Socialist League in 1886, Morris told the audience that it was from reading Underground Russia that he came to believe he had to advocate for socialism.42 Surprisingly, Karl Marx’s writings had little influence on Morris’ s decision to become a socialist. Morris did not read Marx’s Capital until after he had joined the SDF and become 394

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committed to the cause. In Revolutionists in London James Hulse argues that “Marx was not the predominant influence” in Morris’s movement towards socialism.43 However, when Morris did finally read Marx after he was a member of the SDF in 1883, he was described as “bubbling over with Karl Marx whom he had just read in French.”44 There is some evidence that initially Morris, while being enthusiastic over Marx’s historical analysis, struggled with the details of Marxist economic theories. It also appears that there was some early resistance to Morris among committed Marxists. In 1884, Frederick Engel’s close associate, the CzechAustrian socialist, Karl Kautsky, wrote an article in the Frankfurter Zeitung that dismissed Morris as a “sentimental Socialist.”When Ernest Belfort Bax translated the article for Justice, Bax felt compelled to add a statement to the article defending Morris, stating that “Mr. Morris though a poet and an artist is no ‘sentimental Socialist’ but a robust disciple of Marx.”45 Engels wrote to Kautsky after the incident, “the Morris affair is of no significance, they are a muddle-headed lot.”46 After working with Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor in the SDF, Morris came to have a close relationship with her and they would both become founding members of the Socialist League. However, his interactions with Engels always seemed strained, and Engels’ correspondence contains frequent remarks disparaging Morris’s actions and beliefs. On one occasion, Engels described Morris to Kautsky as “a very rich but politically inept art lover,”47 and he also harshly criticized Morris’s accommodation of anarchists within the Socialist League.48 Despite these problems, after the founding of the Socialist League, Morris would, in collaboration with Belfort Bax, write a series of insightful pieces on Marxism for Commonweal and commit himself to a Marxist view of socialist issues. Aside from these theoretical influences, there were experiences in Morris’s own life which moved him towards socialism. One of the sources of Morris’s shift to socialism that has received insufficient attention is his involvement with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). From its founding in 1877, Morris led a series of campaigns to protect significant medieval buildings in Britain, the continent, and British colonies against both outright destruction and restorations which would falsify and destroy their historical fabric.Again and again, Morris faced heartbreaking results in cases where, no matter how artistically or historically important, buildings could be destroyed or altered at the whim of their owners because of the rights of property. In a letter to a supporter of the Society in 1880, Morris wrote, “[Y]ou know what a hard matter it is dealing with buildings that are called ‘private property.’”49 In his address to the first annual meeting of the SPAB in 1878, he lamented that “any considerations of Art must yield if they stand in the way of Money interests.” In his campaign to save Christopher Wren’s churches in the City of London, Morris asked if the “churches are to be sacrificed to the Mammon-worship and want of taste of this great city.”50 These experiences served to push Morris to ardently oppose the “sacredness” of property rights over the public good. At their core, Morris’s socialist beliefs were based on the premise that working people could be reformed or benefited through education, leisure, and exposure to beauty. In this context, it is likely that Jane Morris had a profound influence on her husband’s socialism. Jane had been raised in severe poverty with a rudimentary education; her father was a stable hand and her mother an illiterate domestic servant. However, once she had access to education through her marriage to Morris, her intelligence allowed her to transform herself. Jane became proficient in French and Italian and read widely; developed into an accomplished pianist; was knowledgeable about history, art, and literature; and had a keen understanding of politics. It is easy to infer that his experiences with his wife had a major impact on Morris’s opinions of the working class and their potential if given sufficient opportunities and encouragement. A persuasive argument has been made that Morris’s experiences as a director of the Devon Great Consols mining company also influenced his socialist beliefs. This company, which 395

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provided much of the Morris family’s wealth in the 1860s, had large numbers of employees who worked under harsh and dangerous conditions. Profits were placed above care for the workers’ wellbeing. In their 1991 William Morris, Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain, Jon Press and Charles Harvey convincingly make the case that Morris’s experience with business and capitalism influenced his later political beliefs. They argue that Morris’s “personal knowledge of Victorian capitalism was one factor which made his critique of modern industrial society so powerful and influential.”51 Florence Boos and Patrick O’Sullivan make a detailed study of worker’s conditions at the mine, Morris’s involvement in its operations, and its influence upon him in a 2012 article,“Morris and Devon Great Consols.”52 They conclude that Morris expressed his conviction that the pyramid scheme of capitalist waste will consume the wealth it pretends to create in a technologically accelerated Hobbesian war of ‘all against all,’ and he saw signs of this ‘commercial war’ in imperial Britain’s frenetic trade cycles, and its searches for cheaper labour and new markets.And in its abuse of its workers, the constant searches for new foreign markets, its dependence on fickle and costly cycles of trade, and its failure to offer steady employment, the history of Devon Great Consols provided miniatures of all these phenomena. They also suggest that Morris’s later concern for the environment may have been partially inspired by his experiences with the mine.

Morris’s Engagement with Politics as a Socialist In 1885, Morris broke with the SDF and, with other dissidents, founded the Socialist League. During Morris’s membership in the League, he was a staunch anti-parliamentarian, opposing all action towards socialists creating a parliamentary party. His experiences with the Liberals left him with the feeling that politics was a sordid business. The inevitable compromises and tradeoffs necessary to pass legislation in a parliament dismayed him. In 1885, he lamented “the continual life of compromise which ‘Parliamentary Socialists’ would be compelled to live.”53 Morris worried that the will of the majority would be used to oppress minorities and limit their freedom. He also believed that individual pieces of legislation such as were promoted by radical Liberals may have benefited selected groups of working men but were merely palliative measures which would not substantially change the power structure of Britain or the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Friedrich Engels described Morris’s opinions as “a mortal hatred of all things parliamentary.”54 Morris’s most famous statement on parliamentary government is of course found in News from Nowhere, in which the narrator finds that the Houses of Parliament have been transformed into storage facilities for manure. Morris’s opinions on parliament continued to be informed by his responses to the Liberal Party. Florence Boos characterizes it as “an intense love-hate relationship”55 in which his opinions are colored by his disillusionment with a party that he had formerly supported. In 1885 just prior to the general election, Morris published a piece in Commonweal, ‘On the Eve of the Elections.’ In it, Morris predicted that in the “case of an overwhelming Liberal majority, the Parliament will certainly be one of inaction.” He also stated that “it will be the aim of the Government not to stir anything which might divide the Party.” Clearly, he was remembering his experiences as a frustrated Radical after the election in 1880, in which little progressive legislation was enacted and Gladstone attempted to mollify the Whig wing of the party. Similarly, he singled out “the spectacle of the incompetence of Parliament for anything but repression,” harkening back to the Liberal coercive measures in Ireland in 1881.56 396

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In 1889, Morris published in Commonweal a two-part satirical fictional dialogue between three “advanced radicals”: an architect, a non-conformist clergyman, and a businessman called “Whigs Astray.” He uses their dialogue to poke fun at Liberal radicals. One of the topical subjects discussed was the institution of local government bodies, which had been one of the radical goals when Morris was a Liberal.When finally instituted by a Conservative government, however, these were limited in power and autonomy. One of Morris’s characters dismisses them: County Councils, eh? A Tory measure; and properly so. Bodies with feeble administrative powers in themselves; mere machinery in the hands of the central government; good to strengthen that by doing its dirty work and appearing responsible for it, while in reality they are responsible for nothing.That is what you mean by self-government. If you were to mean more your plank would be a plank to be walked by the present society; for when the State has delegated all its powers what is the good of it, and what shall we do with it?57 Morris also lampoons the Liberal government’s preoccupation with taxation. Morris’s clergyman argues that Liberals are virtuous because they believe in a “graduated income tax and graduated death duties.” His architect replies that these will be “paid by those who have no income but what they steal.” Morris also uses his characters to ridicule other Liberal causes, including reform of the House of Lords. He ends the second installment by dismissing “advanced Radials” as merely “Whigs Astray.”58 After he became a socialist, Morris continued to read the Liberal newspaper the Daily News, which remained Morris’s primary source for current events. In her introduction to the 2018 edition of William Morris’s Socialist Diary, Florence Boos very aptly described Morris’s attitude to the Daily News:“one might term his response as … a lover’s quarrel.”59 Again and again, the topics covered by Morris in his articles in Commonweal treated events that had been the subject of pieces in the Daily News. The events that the Daily News found to be significant inspired Morris’s coverage, even if the latter was often sarcastic or disparaging. Morris’s reservations concerning Socialist involvement in the parliamentary system were confirmed by the “Tory gold” scandal in 1885. In the 1885 General Election, the SDF put up candidates for constituencies in Hampstead and Kennington. Later it was exposed that they had been sponsored and financially supported by a Conservative party agent, Maltman Barry, in an attempt to divide the opposition vote. Both the Socialist League and the Fabians denounced the SDF. After the scandal, Morris wrote to the Glasgow socialist, John Bruce Glasier, ‘I feel really sickened at the idea of all the intrigue and degradation of concession which would be necessary for a revolutionary party doing any dirty work or soiling ourselves”.”60 Shortly before he died, Morris told Glasier that the Tory gold affair “scared him against parliamentarianism.”61 Morris’s antagonism toward parliamentary politics was so great that in 1887, when the Socialist League held a vote at its annual conference on whether to support parliamentary participation, Morris contemplated having to leave the organization he had founded. He told Glasier, “I should therefore be forced to my very great sorrow, to leave it … [a] mere abstract resolution that we might have to send members to parliament at some time or another would not drive me out.” But he believed that if the parliamentary party called for electioneering in the near future, he would need to leave; he believed that “[w]e should treat Parliament as representative of the enemy,” and that if the League voted to pursue parliamentary action, “it ceases to be what I thought it was, and I must try to do what I can outside it.”62 The resolution was defeated, and the immediate result of this dispute was that, although Morris was able to continue to be a member, several branches, including the influential Bloomsbury branch, finally broke 397

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away from the League. However, the ultimate outcome of this conflict was that Morris, deprived of many allies, was substantially weakened in attempting to balance the socialist wing of the League with that of its anarchist faction. As Fiona MacCarthy noted,“Morris was now isolated in the League.”63 The events of 1887 eventually led to Morris and the Hammersmith Branch’s departure from the League in 1890 to form the Hammersmith Socialist Society. A topic which must be seen through the prism of Morris’s opposition to parliamentarianism is his opinions about women’s suffrage. For his time, Morris had a liberated and progressive attitude towards women. In his writings and speeches for the Socialist League, Morris advocated for women’s personal autonomy in sexual and other matters. In 1880, Morris signed a petition to allow women to take degrees at Cambridge University,64 and he actively supported the efforts of the Working Women’s College located in Queen Square to educate working-class women. Many of the women in the Morrises’s circle, including Rosalind Howard, Sophia and Mary De Morgan, Catherine Holiday, Jane Cobden, and Anne Cobden Sanderson, were strong supporters of women’s suffrage. Jane Morris herself was involved in the National Women’s Suffrage Society; in 1884, Jane was one of the “Lady Patronesses” of a ball sponsored by the society to raise funds for the suffrage cause.65 She also strongly supported her close friend, Jane Cobden, in her campaign to be the first woman elected to the London County Council in 1889.66 In 1884, Jane Cobden asked Morris to speak at a meeting supporting suffrage, and his response gives the clearest summary of his views on women’s suffrage: To speak plainly my private view of the suffrage matter is that it is of no use until people are determined on Socialism; and (privately again) I would wish them to abstain from all voting, municipal, school board or parliamentary till we can have a national convention to settle things on a new basis. As to the House of Commons; ’tis no use; they don’t mean to do anything in the woman’s suffrage question or any other. ’tis nothing but a sham fight between the parties, and the radicals are as bad as any others. Even on an issue where Morris was in agreement with Liberal Party aims, he separated himself from association with them.After his friend William Stead’s exposé in the press of child prostitution and sex slavery,“The Maiden Tribute,” Morris gave a moving speech on the exploitation of poor women and children for sex: Two things are to be noticed. First, that the children of the poor are always the victims. Second, the terrible and miserable unhappiness of the whole affair.There is much talk of immorality.Whatever is unhappy is immoral. It is unhappiness that must be got rid of.We have nothing to do with the mere immorality.We have to do with the causes that have compelled this unhappy way of living; the causes that drive girls and women into the streets, to sell their love, not to give it.These causes are the same that make a man degrade himself by over-hours and competition.There is the closest of relations between the prostitution of the body in the streets and of the body in the workshops. Women’s wages are not even subsistence wages.They are intended to cheapen labour for the manufacturers. The first thing that is necessary, is that all women should be freed from the compulsion of living in this degraded way.We aim at the real liberty of every human creature, not the liberty to starve or to sell oneself or one’s child.67 However, when Stead wanted Morris to appear at protests for legislation to protect women and children from such exploitation (the 1885 Criminal Amendment Act) organized by Liberal organizations, Morris replied, “I am not quite on a horse with you in the matter, and yet as a 398

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Socialist I cannot let it alone, so I am bound to follow the lead of our League.”68 Morris and his fellow members of the Socialist League attended a major protest in Hyde Park, but under their own banner and separate from the Liberal protesters (although Jane Morris walked with a Liberal women’s group). Morris even notified the press,“The Socialist League is going to have a platform of its own.”69 Morris felt compelled not to be seen supporting a Liberal Party event no matter what the cause. Morris continued his passionate opposition to British imperialism through his activism on behalf of the Socialist League. The very first issue of Commonweal proclaimed that “the foreign policy of the great internationalist socialist party must be to break up these hideous race monopolies called empires.” On 23 April 1885, soon after its founding, the Socialist League held a public meeting chaired by Morris “[t]o protest against the aggressive imperial policy and against the Soudan War,” at which the League “denounce[d] the aggressions against the peoples of Egypt and the Soudan which have occasioned such wrong waste and slaughter, and sympathises heartily with the brave men women and children who have offered such dauntless resistance to Tyranny.”70 Morris was dismayed by the British public’s hero worship of Charles Gordon for his adventurism in the Sudan. Morris urged socialists to “attack the Gordon-worship” because Gordon “used his military and administrative capacity for the purpose of bringing the Soudanese under the subjection of a vile tyranny.”71 Morris and the Socialist League also organized opposition to Britain’s 1885 war with Burma, which led to Burma’s later annexation by Britain as a British colony. In October 1885, the League held a public meeting protesting the war. Morris laid out his views for the committee planning the meeting. He believed that “the Burmese case is a flagrant, an open example” of Britain instigating a war to expand the markets for British goods. He argued that in response to politicians’ claims that Britain was bringing “civilization” to “barbarous” cultures, we must never cease telling the people at home till they learn that these barbarous populations are people also, their friends, not their enemies, that we cannot rob them without robbing ourselves.”72 Part of Morris’s opposition to British imperialism was his sympathy with the plight of the Irish under British rule. Irish issues received more coverage in Commonweal than virtually any other topic, and many of the pieces on Ireland were written by Morris himself. From the early 1870s until 1920, the Irish Home Rule movement was one of the most controversial and dramatic aspects of British political life. In the early part of this period, both Liberal and Conservative British governments alternated conciliatory legislation with coercion. After Gladstone embraced Home Rule in 1885, large numbers of Liberal MPs left the party. By contrast, Morris had great sympathy for the Irish cause, and Liberal vacillation on this issue had been one of the reasons for his leaving the Liberals and embracing socialism. He distrusted even the Liberals’ motives in their proposed Home Rule legislation, remarking that “[t]o find the irreducible minimum has been Mr. Gladstone’s aim, and according to the verdict of both friends and foes he has succeeded.”73 Jane Morris was likewise an ardent supporter of Irish Home Rule. In a January 1888 letter to Jane Cobden, Jane recounted a quarrel that she had with her husband over Home Rule: “I taxed him this morning with not caring about Home Rule. He says he does as one of many things but that there are more evictions in London in a week than there are in all Ireland.”74 This description gives an interesting insight into Morris’s view of Irish affairs. Just two months before he had expressed his dismay in Commonweal about “[t]hose Liberal members who have been crying out so loud about the wrongs of the Irish peasants and who are so wholly blind to those of the London workmen.”75 While his sympathies were clearly engaged by the Irish cause, he also believed that it could become a distraction from the essential goals for which the Socialist 399

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League was fighting. As well, from his essays on Ireland in Commonweal, it is clear that he was not optimistic that political independence in Ireland would lead to any significant improvement in the lives of the Irish working classes. When the Liberals’ Home Rule Bill was debated in 1885, Morris welcomed it in principle but had heavy doubts about its future: Well, this is revolutionary, and we revolutionists rejoice in it on those grounds, and in the blow which it will deal at the great Bourgeois Power—the British Empire: also it may well be that Ireland must become national before she can be international.Yet we must ask ourselves what is to come next; will Ireland ruling herself be progressive, revolutionary that is, or reactionary? Will Socialists find their work easier in the Parnellite Ireland than now? … There is no doubt as to the answer to those questions if we are to go no further than Mr. Parnell would have us; the fullest realization of his programme would bring Ireland to pretty much the state of things which Liberal reformers want to realize in England as a bar to the march of Socialism which they have at last heard of, and are beginning to fear … would lead, it seems to me, to founding a nation fanatically attached to the rights of private property (so called), narrowminded, retrogressive, contentious, and—unhappy. He ended his article with a call: “To the Irish, therefore, as to all other nations, whatever their name and race, we Socialists say, your revolutionary struggles will be abortive or lead to mere disappointment unless you accept as your watchword, WAGE-WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE.”76 Morris’s most cogent message on Ireland was contained in a pamphlet distributed by the Socialist League, Shall Ireland Be Free. In it, Morris begins by congratulating the Irish people on their coming freedom, but he warns them to “Beware for you may find that you have but changed the tyrant and not the tyranny.” He makes the case that without changes to the economic structure, political rights will not change the lives of Irish workers, and cautions them, “Irishmen, if you do not get rid of the Landlords, Capitalists and Usurers and their hangerson, you will still be a nation of slaves and slaveholders even if you are called independent, even if you become the Irish Republic.” Interestingly. the pamphlet also includes a call to workers in England to support the aspirations of the Irish for freedom.77 Whatever Morris’s doubts were about the ultimate merits of Home Rule as then debated, he was passionate in his opposition to coercive measures against the Irish. In Commonweal, he worried that coercive measures in Ireland would result in Britain “[d]ragging a second Poland with her.”78 In 1887, as Chief Secretary for Ireland in the Conservative cabinet, Arthur Balfour engineered the Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act of 1887, also known as the Irish Coercion Act.This was far more draconian than any previous coercion bill; Morris noted,“[T]he government have brought a very ferocious Coercion bill against the Irish and I fear it will be ‘wigs on the green’ if it is carried.”79 In an article in Commonweal, Morris agreed with “what the Pall Mall called it the other evening, a declaration of war against Ireland.” He felt that “to say to a part of the Empire:‘We are going, not to suspend, but to abolish your civil rights by the strong hand, and let us see what you dare to do in resistance to this violence’, is to admit that such people are in rebellion against the central authority, and are perfectly conscious of their solidarity as against it.”80 Morris then urged the Socialist League to join a demonstration against the Coercion Bill,81 even though the meeting was called by Liberals and “is to be a regular respectable Liberal affair.”82 As in the case of the protests in support of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885, the League attended independently as a distinct group and under a separate banner, 400

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making a powerful statement for Ireland and against coercion.Afterwards Morris referred to the League’s participation in this event as “a great triumph.” In conclusion, Morris continued to be aware of Liberal politics and to interact with Liberal politicians even as he explicitly rejected parliamentary politics. His involvement with British politics had repercussions long after he had abandoned the Liberal Party for socialism.Through the Socialist League, he continued to advocate for the ideals that had originally brought him to support the Liberal Party: anti-imperialism, redress of poverty, and basic human equality. Although he rejected the institutionalized Liberal Party as an ineffective and insincere upholder of these stated ideals of individual liberty, expanded opportunity, and respect for the national sovereignty of other peoples, it seems clear that many of Morris’s endeavors as a socialist were diverted towards an expanded conception of the aims which had prompted his original Liberalism. His time as a Liberal thus gave him insights into and understanding of politics that colored his reaction to political events long after he had left the Liberal Party.

Notes 1 For background on the Liberal Party in this period see T.A. Jenkins, Gladstone,Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 1874–1886, OUP, 1988. 2 Morris to the Editor of the Daily News, 1876, Kelvin, vol. 1, p. 325. 3 William, Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, London, Murray, 1876, p. 13. 4 Morris to the Editor of the Daily News, 24 October 1876, Kelvin, vol. I, pp. 323–326. 5 Morris to Charles Faulkner, 15 November 1876, Kelvin, vol. 1, p. 331. 6 Fiona, MacCarthy, p. 379. 7 Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, 4 May 1877, Kelvin, vol. 1, p. 370. 8 “Address to English Liberals,” May, Morris, William Morris,Artist,Writer, Socialist, vol. 2, p. 379. 9 “Mr. Gladstone and the Eastern Question, Manchester Evening News, 16 February 1878, p. 2. 10 Morris to Jane Morris 20 February 1878, Kelvin, vol. 1, p. 450. 11 See Ann Pottinger, Saab, p. 180. 12 Morris to Jane Morris, 20 February 1878, Kelvin vol. 1, p. 450. 13 In contrast, in authors focusing on Disraeli and the Conservatives, Morris is barely given a mention. See e.g. Kovic, Milos, Disraeli and the Eastern Question, OUP, 2011, which has only a single reference to Morris in a list of prominent individuals supporting the Eastern Question Association. 14 Richard, Shannon, p. 220 15 Saab, Reluctant Icon, p. 190. 16 Florence, Boos, ed., William Morris: Our Country Right or Wrong. 17 E. P,Thompson, 1976, p. 207. 18 E.g. Coles’ essay,“William Morris and the Modern World” in Persons and Periods, London: Macmillan, 1938, although ostensibly a study of Morris’s political evolution, fails to mention Morris’s period of interaction with the Liberals. 19 Mark, Bevir, p. 91. 20 Morris to Henry Broadhurst, 4 April 1880, Kelvin, vol. 1 p. 565. 21 Kelvin, vol. 1, p. 564. 22 Morris to James Bryce, 4 April 1880, Bodleian Library, Ms. Bryce. 168. 23 The Urabi revolt was a nationalist uprising in Egypt from 1879 to 1882 led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi. It sought to depose Khedive Twefik and end French and British influence in Egypt. Initially the uprising had some success, and the Khedive created a new legislative chamber which included many Urabist members. Subsequent French and British intervention led to an Urabist coup.Worried about losing their influence in Egypt and the safety of the Suez Canal, the British army intervened in 1882. The uprising was eventually put down and Urabi was sent into exile in Ceylon.Wilfrid Scawen Blunt championed Urabi in the early 1880s. 24 Morris to Andreas Scheu, 15 September 1883, Kelvin, vol 2a, p. 230. 25 Morris to the Editor of the Daily News, Kelvin, vol.1, p. 527. 26 Daily News, 14 January 1880, p. 6. 27 “Political Notes,” Commonweal, 12 March 1887, p. 81.

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Frank C. Sharp 28 Morris to William Allingham, 18 April 1884, Kelvin, vol. 2a, p. 274. 29 Wilfrid Scawen Bunt’s diary in Peter Faulkner, Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, U Exeter P, 1986, p. 3. 30 “Home Rule or Humbug,” Commonweal, 26 June 1886. 31 “The Hackney Election,” Justice, 29 November 1884, p. 4. 32 Morris to Anthony Mundella, 3 July [1879], Kelvin, vol. 3, p. 81.This letter is incorrectly dated as 1889 in Kelvin. 33 Commonweal, 9 April, 1887, p. 120. 34 Frank C., See Sharp, William Morris and the Search for Poet Laureateship, 1892, “Journal of PreRaphaelite Studies, Spring 1996, pp. 71–80. 35 “How I Became A Socialist,” William Morris: Selected Writings, ed. G. D. H. Cole. London: Nonesuch Press, 1948, p. 655. 36 J.W., Mackail vol 2, p. 79. 37 Commonweal, 30 October 1886, p. 243. 38 Commonweal, 25 January 1890, p. 29. 39 William, Morris, Signs of Change, 1896. 40 Meier, Paul, vol. 1, p. 176–179. 41 WM to Frederick Ellis, 23 May 1883, Kelvin, vol. 2a, p. 195. 42 Salisbury Times, 1 April 1886, p. 7. 43 James, Hulse, p. 80. 44 Cormell Price’s diary quoted in Mackail, vol. 2, p. 97. 45 Justice, 1 March 1884. 46 Engels to Kautsky, 24 March 1884, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol 47, p. 121. 47 Engels to Kautsky, 22 June 1884, Id., p. 146. 48 On 20 March 1886, Engels wrote to Paul Lafargue, “Moreover they [the Socialist League] have far more truck with the anarchists than is desirable.Their celebrations on the 18th were held in concert with the latter and Kropotkin spoke there—twadde or so they tell me.” Marx/Engels, vol 47, p. 431. 49 Morris to Richard Phene Spiers, 26 August 1881, Kelvin, vol. 1, p. 588. 50 Morris to the Editor of the Times, 15 April 1878, Kelvin, vol. 1, p. 477. 51 Charles Harvey and Jon Press, William Morris, Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain, Manchester, 1991, p. 3. 52 Florence Boos and Patrick O’Sullivan, “Morris and Devon Great Consols,” Journal of William Morris Studies (Summer 2012), 11-39. 53 “Socialism and Politics (An Answer to ‘Another View’),” Commonweal, July 1885, p. 6. 54 Friedrich Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 4 June 1887, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol 48, p. 70. 55 Boos Florence,“Returning to Morris’s Socialist Diary,” William Morris’s Socialist Diary, p. 32. 56 “On the Eve of the Elections,” Commonweal, December 1885 p. 101. 57 “Whigs Astray,” Commonweal, 19 January 1889, p. 19. 58 Whigs Astray,” Commonweal, 26 January 1889, p. 27. 59 Boos, Socialist Diary, p. 32 60 Morris to John Bruce Glasier, 1 December 1886, Kelvin, vol. 2b, p. 598. 61 Glasier, John Bruce, p. 15. 62 Morris to Glasier, May 19, 1887, Kelvin, vol. 2b, pp. 655–666. 63 MacCarthy. p, 577. 64 Text of petition and list of signatories in ‘Women In University Degrees’, Cambridge Independent Press, 22 May 1880, p. 6. 65 The Englishwoman’s Review, 15 January, 1884; p. 22. 66 Jane Morris to Jane Cobden, 1 January 1889, Sharp and Marsh, p. 175. 67 Commonweal, September 1885, p. 78. 68 Morris to Stead, 12 August 1885, Churchill College, Cambridge. 69 Pall Mall Gazette, 19 August 1885, p. 12. 70 Flyer publicizing the meeting in the Socialist League Archive IISH. 71 Morris to James Mavor, 26 March 1885, Kelvin, vol 2a, p. 41.0. 72 Morris to Chairman of the Meeting on the Threatened Burmese War, 28 October 1885, Kelvin, vol. 2b, pp. 477–478. 73 Independent Ireland, Commonweal,April 1886, p. 36. 74 Jane Morris to Jane Cobden, 14 January 1888, Sharp and Marsh, p. 16.3.

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William Morris and British Politics 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

“The Liberal Party Digging Its Own Grave,” Commonweal, 26 November 1887, p. 380. “Ireland and Italy—A Warning,” Commonweal, October 1885, pp. 86–87. Manuscript in Morris’s handwriting of text of the pamphlet,The Rosenbach, Philadelphia. “Notes on the Elections,” Commonweal, 10 July 1886, p. 113. Morris to Jenny Morris, March 30, 1887, Kelvin, vol 2b, p. 633. “Law and Order in Ireland,” Commonweal, 9 April 1887, p. 113. Morris to Henry Barker, 2 April 1887, Kelvin, vol. 2b, p. 636; Commonweal, 9 April 1887, p. 120. Morris to Henry Barker, 2 Ibid.

Further Reading Bevir, Mark. The Making of British Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 2011. Boos, Florence, ed. William Morris, Our Country Right or Wrong. London:William Morris Society, 2008. Boos, Florence, ed. William Morris’s Socialist Diary. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2018. Glasier, John Bruce. William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement. London: Longmans, 1921. Hulse, James. Revolutionists in London. Oxford: OUP, 1970. Kelvin, Norman, ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris, 5 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 1986–1996. Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris, 2 vols. London: Longmans, 1899. MacCarthy, Fiona. William Morris, A Life for Our Time. London: Faber, 1996. Meier, Paul. William Morris,The Marxist Dreamer. Hassocks: Harvester, 1972. Saab, Ann Pottinger. Reluctant Icon, Gladstone, Bulgaria and the Working Classes 1856–1878. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Shannon, Richard. Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876. Hassocks: Harvester, 1975. Sharp, Frank C. and Jan Marsh, eds. The Collected Letters of Jane Morris. London: Boydell, 2012. Thompson, E. P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 1st ed., 1955; 2nd ed., New York, NY: Pantheon, 1976.

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17 NEWS FROM NOWHERE IN THE MUSEUM OF LITERARY INTERPRETATIONS Tony Pinkney

One of the best things that has been said about Morris’s utopia occurs in Michael Holzman’s 1984 essay on the text, where he argues that ‘The story of the making of News from Nowhere should also give us some material for reflection on the nature of the literary’.1 ‘Making’ here can in fact mean several different things. It may point to the biographical detail of Morris’s composition of the work across 1890, which also opens out into the question of the different forms in which it was published (as a serial in that year, then as a commercial press book in 1891, and finally as a private press book in 1892). Or the term ‘making’ may point inside rather than outside News from Nowhere and refer to its internal principles of literary organisation, its self-generated textual activity. The wager of Holzman’s remark is that a sufficiently thoughtful engagement with Morris’s utopia, which includes both internal and external features of its ‘making’, will lead not just to a better grasp of the work itself, or even to broader insights into that strange genre of utopia to which it belongs, but, at the highest level of generality, into new thoughts about literature itself, about what it is and how it functions. I want to take Holzman’s remark one stage further, however, and suggest that the two elements of which it is composed are also interchangeable, that they exist in a reciprocal or dialectical relationship to each other. So that if an analysis of the making of News from Nowhere can expand our thoughts about the literary, so too will new conceptions of literature lead to new analyses of the internal structure of Morris’s utopia.And we will not always be able to tell these two processes clearly apart from each other. Is a new analysis expanding our sense of the literary, or has an expanded concept of literature led to a new close reading? You would think those two things are distinct enough, but I doubt that they always are, and I shall return to this issue at the end of this chapter. News from Nowhere is in many ways a memorably open-air text, with its early morning plunge into the Thames, its leisurely journey by horse and cart through a leafy, transformed London, and its long, strenuous, 120-mile journey by rowing-boat up the river from Hammersmith to Kelmscott. The utopian bodies the book presents to us are accordingly well-honed, boundlessly energetic, and often sun-burnt with the vigorous outdoor existence they lead – rowing, mowing, camping and carving being its most emphasised manifestations. But there is another dimension to this book altogether, an intense ‘indoor-ness’ which is not simply that of the country cottages or colleges where you briefly recuperate before embarking on another day of 404

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fervent physical activity in Nowhere’s perpetual sunshine. For this is also a book of museums. The British Museum is the most dominant of these: it strikes William Guest as ‘An Old Friend’ as he and Dick Hammond drive up to it, and he has long, sometimes gruelling historical and political exchanges there with old Hammond. But Dick also refers, very early in the book, to the Hammersmith Museum, which apparently has strong collections of coins and therefore does not need Guest’s few oxidised Victorian examples; and later, on the river trip, he informs us that Windsor Castle has now become a museum. Further upriver still, Henry Morsom gives the travellers a detailed tour of the Wallingford Museum and its large collection of articles of manufacture and art. Even Kelmscott Manor, in the closing pages of the book, is a kind of museum, with its old tapestries and simple items of rural furniture. I therefore find myself wondering whether, somewhere in Morris’s Nowhere, there might be a Museum of Literary Interpretations; and if William Guest had been taken to this, he might have found himself pondering the conundrum as to what you do with contradictory interpretations of a single textual phenomenon offered by equally well-qualified interpreters. Let us run swiftly through a few of the ‘exhibits’ in the cabinets. First is the issue of the ‘external’ making of News from Nowhere, that is, its serial publication in Morris’s socialist newspaper Commonweal between 11 January and 4 October 1890. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Author as Producer’, Miguel Abensour takes a highly positive view of this: ‘this mode of publication – undertaken in a milieu highly concerned with descriptions of socialism – is designed to solicit responses. … In a certain sense, the reader [of Commonweal] is invited to participate in the act of writing utopia’.2 However, Frederick Kirchhoff takes a decidedly adverse view, concluding that ‘News from Nowhere suffers from the inconsistencies and structural flabbiness common in periodical fiction’.3 Second is the tone with which the Socialist League meeting at the very beginning of the book is presented to us. John Goode has taken a dark view of this political gathering, arguing that ‘What most characterizes the League is precisely the destructive individualism which the story escapes from’: ‘it is as a relief from the despair of working within the party that the narrator moves towards utopia’.4 Perry Anderson, however, in his chapter on Morris in Arguments within English Marxism, begs to differ. He argues that Goode ‘reads this passage too solemnly … The tone is rather humorously self-ironic’.5 On this showing, there is still hope for the Socialist League, even if it cannot yet reconcile its socialist and anarchist elements. Third is the nature of the characters that Guest meets in utopia. Patrick Parrinder remarks approvingly that Boffin the Golden Dustman ‘has a Dickensian eccentricity, quite frequent among the Nowherians, and a token of the individuality their society fosters’, while, on the other hand, Eileen Sypher claims that ‘the text almost pointedly avoids differentiating characters. The result is an embarrassingly paradoxical situation in which individuals are affirmed to be “free” yet are not really individuals’.6 Fourth, the issue of William Guest’s return to the late-Victorian period at the very end of the book. Norman Talbot offers a resounding endorsement of the visitor to utopia: ‘Guest is back among us, more resolute than ever’, while Barbara Gribble is at best sceptical and at worst decidedly contemptuous of him:‘one expects him to take up again his former and ineffectual habits’.7 Fifth, the question of the hermeneutic pluralism of the work as a whole. For while Miguel Abensour informs us that ‘It is the composite character of Morris’s utopia that makes it eminently modern as an “open work” in Umberto Eco’s sense’, John Goode announces firmly that ‘News from Nowhere is certainly not an open text. It lays down a very definite historical programme and addresses questions of social relations with specific principles’.8 This list could easily be extended from the 130-year-long interpretation history to which Morris’s utopia has now been subjected. How can one possibly hope to adjudicate between 405

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such diametrically opposite judgements? Disagreements within Nowhere itself sometimes lead to intense local democratic debates, with pamphlets for and against flying backwards and forwards. But the truth of the matter at dispute can usually be judged by immediate practical outcomes – whether the bridge built helps the community or not, whether the wheat needs to be got in this week or next. However, it is hard to see how such empirical checks can be applied to literary interpretation and disagreement. Can we then take any of the social principles of Morris’s utopian world and turn them into literary-critical maxims, so that they would guide us in our approach to the very text in which they appear? I want to take three such principles from the work, all of them delivered in the book’s museums, as it happens. First,‘we are no longer hurried’, as old Hammond puts it.9 We have already experienced this maxim on our readerly pulses, in the contrast between Guest’s cramped and rapid transit across London by underground train after the Socialist League meeting and the genial horse-drawn journey back towards Bloomsbury with Dick next morning. Not only is their elderly horse Greylocks slow in his own right, but Dick decelerates his pace still further as they pass through Kensington forest, to the point where one feels that they are hardly travelling at all. Here, as so often in his long disquisitions, Hammond raises a Nowherian custom or practice to the level of explicit theoretical consciousness: with the abolition of capitalism and its drive towards the maximisation of economic growth, the entire society can slow to a humane rhythm of life. News from Nowhere contains a lot of discussion of books and reading, but this is mostly about the social function of literature as a whole rather than detailed accounts of actual reading practices. Plenty of people are reading in the text, from Annie with her ‘pretty old book’ in the Guest-House onwards (ch. III, p. 19); and we are at liberty to imagine that they do so in the non-hurried mode that Hammond has recommended. My second principle occurs when Hammond describes east London: ‘you come on the Docks … still in use, although not so thronged as they once were, since we discourage centralisation all we can’ (ch. X, p. 68). If we apply this maxim to literary interpretation rather than social organisation, then we shall want to move decisively away from ‘organicist’ models of the text, which see the literary work, in Coleridge’s famous image, as a snake with its tail in its mouth. For such models of the text, all its elements, thematic and formal, relate harmoniously in a benign totality in which, even if certain details do initially look discrepant, we can be sure that they will ultimately fold back into the circular whole of which they are part. But old Hammond may be taken as enjoining upon us an exactly contrary practice of reading, one which sees the work as composed of different elements which may pull in discrepant directions. ‘Unity’ may be something the work consciously aims at (although, in many avant garde texts, it also may not be); but even if it does, it can never attain that goal, since it necessarily remains decentralised and self-divided. The third maxim occurs later at the Wallingford Museum, as Morsom describes the records of a village council in the post-revolutionary period. He emphasises ‘their intense earnestness in getting to the bottom of some matter which in time past would have been thought quite trivial, as, for example, the due proportions of alkali and oil for soap-making’ (ch. XXVII, p. 177).We should therefore, in carrying this Nowherian principle over into textual interpretation, press hard on features of the literary work which look marginal to a conventional hermeneutics. If we work ‘earnestly’ with these odd details, these tiny awkward moments or images, we may find that they eventually tell us more about the work than its official statements of intention. News from Nowhere enjoins us to a twofold mode of thinking from its very first sentence: there is, it implies, a set of political concerns appropriate to the immediate ‘Morrow of the Revolution’, and then a quite different set suitable to ‘the future of the fully-developed new society’ very much further down the line (ch. I, p. 3). And certainly a good number of readers 406

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of Morris’s utopia have gone wrong because they have not kept these two different time-frames rigorously apart. I want to adapt this schema in a very open and flexible way, suggesting that everything in this remarkable text requires a twofold reading. There is thus an initial moment in which News from Nowhere boldly extends the genre of utopia by adding new social content or new literary technique (or both) to it, with the aim of enhancing the green-socialist vision which Morris aims to put forward in the book. But this is then followed, more or less rapidly, by a second moment in which these striking new features, which seem more firmly to secure the book’s political vision, actually turn round on and problematise it, and this is a textually unconscious rather than conscious process. This utopia – and this is already one of its striking features – does actually contain critics of its central vision: explicit objectors like the old Grumbler, Ellen’s grandfather at Runnymede, with his hankering after the old days of competition; and implicit ones like the Obstinate Refusers on the upper Thames, who in anti-social fashion will not abandon their own pleasure in house-building for the sake of that wider social good which is the hay-harvest. Morris’s utopia hospitably includes such dissident voices, but the kind of dissidence I want to examine here is an untoward textual effect, whereby every move that News from Nowhere makes to ground its social vision more strongly than the classical utopia could also rebounds against it and causes an intriguing textual turbulence.This twofold reading practice is indeed a way of resolving some of those interpretative antinomies I set out above in the Museum of Literary Interpretations, for we will often find that the more positive of the remarks offered above correspond to the initial, self-positing textual moment, while the more sceptical of them can then be found to articulate the second, self-undermining effects that I shall be examining here. I shall look at five major aspects of Morris’s utopia where we can detect such a process at work.

Objects Almost all readers of News from Nowhere have agreed that we have an unusually vivid sense of its object-world, both human and natural.This is true whether we are dealing with the most local detailing of the imagined world – Dick Hammond’s beautifully wrought belt buckle of damascened steel, the various types of bread offered at the Hammersmith breakfast, the elaborately crafted Japanese-style pipe in the Piccadilly tobacco booth – or with its major structural features such as the exuberant architecture of the Hammersmith Mote-House and theatre. Morris’s Nowhere is sensuously present to us to a degree that no previous utopia had attempted. The same is true of the natural world as Guest, Dick and Clara head up the Thames later in the book, with its willows, reeds, chub and warblers. To particularise the object-world of utopia in this way is immensely beneficial in terms of its political reception.Whereas so many of the classical utopias are abstract and schematic in their portrayal of the ideal society, Morris’s utopia can be lived on the reader’s pulses; it has a compelling sensuous as well as intellectual dimension to it, which may make us all the more ready to see it as a politically desirable goal to strive for. However, this welcome particularising of utopia may also have more untoward effects built into it. Each of these memorably realised objects becomes, in its physical density, open to psychoanalytical or mythic investment in ways that may run athwart the text’s official political meanings; the pipe and pouch that Guest receives in the Piccadilly tobacco-booth are arguably of this kind, carrying Freudian significances that relate to anxieties about male identity rather than just reinforcing a point about the non-commercial economy of Nowhere. Moreover, in a more global sense, the very prevalence of Morrisian objects in this text may become troubling. John Helmer has written insightfully about this. Describing Morris himself as ‘a fetishist of the object’, he evokes his utopia thus:‘We are constantly aware of the press of objects in the world 407

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to which the narrator comes … we have the sense of passing through tableaux of innumerable objects set about several major figures … The crush and press of all these things – we are constantly reminded of things – produces something like the sense of claustrophobia’; and this is all the more the case in that these objects are all contained within that wider geographical ‘container’ which is the Thames valley itself.10 We may thus by now be verging upon that effect familiar from Charles Dickens’s novels where the physical objects in a room or building are actually more vibrant than the reified human characters those spaces contain. I suspect that News from Nowhere itself feels something like this about its own object-world. For having unleashed all these pipes and pouches, belts and buckles upon us, it then, in a second textual operation, seeks to recontain the sensory energies it has articulated. It does this by a strategy of ‘adjectival insistence’ (to borrow F. R. Leavis’s phrase for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) which aims to manage and diminish the very objects it has been so memorably evoking. For a recurrent series of adjectives is applied to the objects, buildings, people and even spaces of Morris’s utopia:‘dainty’,‘quaint’,‘pretty’,‘nice’,‘gay’, and above all ‘little’, which is used a quite extraordinary number of times in this text.All of these terms bleed the objects to which they are applied of substance and look at them through the wrong end of a telescope. Having sensualised utopia so successfully, then, News from Nowhere has let the genie – or rather object – out of the bottle, and has to use a strategy of brisk adjectival management to get it back in there again.

Role of William Guest In the classic utopia, the visitor to the new realm has to locate the figure that H. G.Wells neatly terms the ‘Old Man who Knows Everything’, wonderingly imbibe from him the history and principles of the good new society, and then, possibly after a brief tour of the new world which confirms everything he has just learnt from his utopian mentor, return to his own far from perfect society in order to spread the good news.This is what we might term the ‘neutral’ model of the visitor to utopia, a process of benign absorption followed by transmission to one’s benighted fellows back home, and clearly William Guest is playing this traditional role in Morris’s utopia. He names himself ‘Guest’ because he knows that he must one day return home from this idyllic realm to spread the political message. But several critics have pressed rather harder on this issue of Guest’s function within Nowhere and have seen it not just as receptive but active, so that he gives lessons to as well as takes them from the new world. Morris thus pushes the classical utopia beyond itself, suggesting that there is something lacking in the new society which its visitor can – even while he absorbs so much from it – also remedy. On this showing, the post-revolutionary society of Nowhere is settling rather too thoroughly into the social and environmental pleasures of its own present; it is in danger of under-estimating, perhaps even of losing altogether, book-learning, intellectual endeavour, scientific research and, above all, the sense of history. Both old Hammond and Ellen issue cautionary notes along these lines, with the latter even suggesting that, if sensuous immersion in immediate pleasures too thoroughly disperses the long perspectives of historical study, there may ultimately be a danger of social regression back to capitalism. Into this situation, where everyone is rowing, mowing and carving rather than studying, comes William Guest, the very incarnation of past history. No wonder, then, such critics argue, that Ellen follows him so enthusiastically up the Thames and attaches herself so intently to him. For if she can absorb the painful lessons of late-Victorian society from him and then convey them to the Nowherians with whom she is reintegrated at Kelmscott (after isolation in her grandfather’s cottage at Runnymede), then Nowhere may be ‘re-historicised’ and saved from the dire fate of political recidivism back to class society. Norman Talbot has propounded this case very eloquently and argues that, not only 408

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does Guest take necessary communist lessons back to Victorian London, but he also, in more active mode,‘leaves behind a better, tougher Nowhere’.11 This is indeed a remarkable reformulation of the classical utopia on Morris’s part, pushing the visitor beyond neutrality into interventionist mode in the new world. But a third reading of the visitor’s function in this work is also possible, in which that expanded function turns sour; for the infusion of history into utopia not only welcomely gingers it up, but may even threaten to unravel it altogether if Guest’s old commercial prejudices somehow manage to get a lodging in the mind of his Nowherian friends. James Buzard argues that ‘Should he be tempted to remain, Guest would pose an unwitting threat to his utopian hosts … he must go home again so as to limit the contamination he may spread’.12 Marcus Waithe, in a fine Bakhtinian reading of Morris’s utopia, concludes that ‘Guest seems at times in danger of contaminating Nowhere with his own acutely developed awareness of self ’.13 For Matthew Beaumont, Guest ‘unsettles the tranquillity of utopia. His very presence is a disruption of the epoch of rest’; and there are after all a good number of old Grumblers and Obstinate Refusers in this work who might indeed be counter-revolutionarily receptive to Guest’s capitalist consciousness and maxims.14 When old Hammond fulminates against the British Government having once sent blankets infected with small-pox as gifts to inconvenient tribes of Red-skins, he may, in his righteous indignation against the past, be missing that much more immediate threat to Nowhere represented by his visitor’s own potential for infection or contamination. So Morris has welcomely extended the role of the visitor from the relatively neutral pose of wonderment and passive learning to active intervention (the teaching of historical perspectives that are in danger of being lost), only to find that such interventionism cannot necessarily be contained within benign limits but may itself spread recidivist political modes of thought within Nowhere too.

Genre ‘It will first be necessary,’ James Buzard writes in his 1990 essay on Morris’s utopia, ‘to make some observations on the generic identity of News from Nowhere’.15 You can say that again! Let me just list some of the generic categories to which the book has been assigned or related across the near-130 years of its critical reception: ‘utopia’, ‘romance’, ‘arcadia’, ‘propaganda’, ‘pastoral’, ‘jeu d’esprit’, ‘idyll’, ‘dream-vision’, ‘allegorical vision’, ‘adventure’, ‘anti-novel’, ‘Earthly Paradise story’, ‘uncritical’ or ‘traditional history’, ‘dystopia’, ‘georgic’, ‘séance fiction’, ‘Noh play’, ‘ethnographic tract’, ‘philosophical game’, ‘Cokagyne vision’, ‘parody’, ‘detective novel’, ‘political Bildungsroman’, ‘soft science fiction’, ‘Gothic mystery’, ‘satire’, ‘cartoon-art’, even ‘commercial sampler’.That should be enough to be getting on with, one would think; it won’t be long before we have as many categories as William Guest has years (i.e., 56). But in fact even a single one of these terms may under closer inspection break open into half a dozen others, so that ‘utopia’, which looks simple and apt enough, can be further subdidvided (and all of these have indeed been proposed for News from Nowhere) into ‘kinetic utopia’, ‘ecotopia’, ‘heuristic utopia’, ‘critical utopia’, ‘forestopia’, ‘maximum utopia’. Some of the generic hypotheses I have listed seem so unlikely that you might indeed think that we were dealing with genres, rather than news, from nowhere; but I should not wish to rule any of them out of bounds in advance. Most critics have taken a single, preferred category and tried to assign Morris’s book definitively to it, but if we stand back and take the spread of generic terms as a whole, then we must surely ask ourselves how one work can be so diversely categorisable. Or could it indeed be, rather, that all these genres are at work in it at once? The book’s subtitle – ‘utopian romance’ – already gives us two genres and begs the question of both their natures and their mutual relationship. Utopia I take to be the systematic exposition 409

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of a social system, exemplified here most intensely by the day-long lecture which Guest receives from old Hammond in the British Museum. Tom Middlebro’ notes that ‘the utopia … with its urban setting, embodies stability, uniformity, efficiency and hierarchy’.16 Romance, on the other hand, in Morris’s use of the term, is invariably a tale of quest-adventure, in which the hero embarks upon an arduous journey packed with ordeals and tests in order to recover some numinous lost object.Thus it is that William Guest sets off up the river Thames from London to Kelmscott in chapter XXI, and Ellen herself evokes the romance ethos later on the trip (she herself being one of the ordeals that Guest faces on it): ‘a feeling of going somewhere, of coming to something strange, a feeling of adventure which I have not felt in bigger waters’ (ch. XXVIII, p. 189).And if you face such challenges on the quest, then you will need, like Guest, to employ a ‘series of Odyssean lies’ to get through them (ch. XXVII, p. 184). Can these two genres, then, benignly coexist and mutually complement each other, as subjective to objective, rural to urban, or whatever? News from Nowhere is certainly very keen to believe that opposites can be reconciled in some genial interbalance or higher synthesis.When, after the revolution, the city dwellers invade the country, the initially aggressive metaphors that evoke this phenomenon soon give way to a successful exchange of values across the dichotomy: the former city dwellers reinvigorate the ‘idiocy’ of rural life, while the latter conveys something of its steadiness and traditionalism to the former. Moreover, the notion of reconciling opposites comes through not just thematically, but in the book’s abiding symbolism and vocabulary. Bridges are a central feature in the text because they are the architectural ‘hyphens’ which hold the opposing banks of the river together in unity. ‘Mingling’ becomes a recurrent item in the work’s vocabulary because it too denotes the eirenic impulse towards identity-in-difference. However, we should also note that bridges in this new society can be intensely controversial, as in old Hammond’s example of local democratic debate, so there are presumably those in Nowhere who do not want to join opposites; and the ubiquitous term ‘mingling’ is counterbalanced in the book by a vocabulary of ‘entangling’, in which opposites interact with each other in ways which are not necessarily helpful. In fact, however, the book’s subtitle – ‘a utopian romance’ – does not exhaust the genres at play in this work, for there is also the frame narrative, in which William Guest comes home from a political meeting, goes to sleep and wakes up next morning in a strange, transfigured reality.Thus a third generic term kicks in: the medieval dream-vision, as in Chaucer or Langland, which Morris himself had already skilfully employed in his A Dream of John Ball in 1886–87.The dream-vision frame dovetails readily enough with the social content of News from Nowhere, so much of which has a medievalist dimension to it. It is true that we can still keep even a three-way play of generic terms – ‘dream-vision’,‘utopia’ and ‘romance’ – within an overall framework of reconciliation, as the sublation of initial opposites in some higher vision.Thus one might argue that the intense subjectivity of the frame narrative – Guest’s desperate yearning to see a day of the new world – passes through the Hegelian ‘antithesis’ of system and objectivity in old Hammond’s exposition of the new society, and is subsequently lifted to a higher and more inclusive mode of subjectivity in the longing for Ellen which characterises the upriver journey, where sexual desire does seem to be finding its Eliotic ‘objective correlative’ in the natural world around it. Three is, without a doubt, an important number in the Morrisian imaginary. Fiona MacCarthy notes his ‘quasi-mystical belief in the significance of trios: he was always attuned to doing things in threes’.17 But the dominant model of triadic relationships in Morris is not the neat Hegelian scheme of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, but rather the emotional pain and dysfunctionality of the sexual triangle, with Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot being the great archetype of this, as in his earliest and finest poems. And there is certainly plenty of such difficult triangularity in News from Nowhere.We first encounter it in Dick Hammond, Clara and the man for whom Clara abandoned 410

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Dick two years ago; it is perhaps again faintly adumbrated between Guest, Ellen and the stately lady on the upper reaches of the Thames. And it explodes into Nowherian tragedy in the tale that Dick tells early on in the book of a case of sexual jealousy that in the end cost the lives of two men and a woman, and in a similar instance narrated by Walter Allen later, in which again an overheated sexual triangle has led to homicide and may lead to suicide too. As soon as one painful sexual triad has sorted itself out in the book, as with Dick and Clara coming together again, others at once come to the fore, with much worse results. Ellen tells us at one point that she has ‘often troubled men’s minds disastrously’ (ch. XXVIII, p. 188), so it sounds as though she has been involved in a few of these fraught situations too, and Morris gives us an anguished depiction of a socialist sexual triangle between Richard, his wife and Arthur in The Pilgrims of Hope. If the adulterous or sexual triangle inhabits the Morrisian imagination so deeply, and we have three genres at play in News from Nowhere, then might it be possible to think of literary genres, as well as human individuals, as having jealous sexual intrigues among themselves – two of them pairing up against the other, and then, later, allegiances switching sharply and the triangle reforming itself in a new and still more difficult configuration? Well, perhaps; and I would certainly be inclined to see the thematic prevalence of such relationships in the book itself not just as affording necessary socialist lessons ‘Concerning Love’ (to borrow the heading of chapter IX), but also as the trace or scar within textual content of the grinding tensions of the three major genres of which this utopia is composed (or ‘entangled’). For again, as with the earlier two-term generic model, it does not prove difficult to unravel the Hegelian schema which simply sublates the initial opposites at a higher level. One might well argue that the compartments between the terms of the generic triad are less watertight than they ought to be, and that subjectivity from both the dream-vision and the upriver quest begins to ‘bleed back’ into the supposedly objective expositions of social system offered by old Hammond to his visitor. For it is certainly striking how much friction and even antagonism is generated between the two elderly interlocutors in the British Museum. A simple listing of relevant vocabulary items will make the point: ‘nettled’, ‘uneasy’, ‘dry gibe’, ‘crowed’, ‘mockingly’. The exchanges between the two men can at times be more like those between Hallblithe and the irascible old warrior Sea-Eagle in Morris’s romance The Glittering Plain than the equable, gentlemanly conversation of Dr Leete and Julian West in Edward Bellamy’s utopia Looking Backward.We should also note a distinct strain of melancholy which constantly assails old Hammond in the meditative silences or ‘musings’ that so often punctuate his long expositions to Guest, and which just occasionally comes overtly to the surface, as in his startling admission that ‘I am old and perhaps disappointed’ (ch. IX, p. 58). In fact, it is possible to see the romance paradigm as ‘bleeding backwards’ into the British Museum episodes in a more radical way. In a discussion of the different kinds of households, old Hammond says to Guest:‘I need not say much about all this, as you are going up the river with Dick, and will find out for yourself by experience how these matters are managed’ (ch. X, p. 65).This is not actually the very first mention of the upriver trip in the book; Dick had initially mooted it eight chapters earlier, but, curiously, he has not imparted that fact to his great-grandfather, so it remains a mystery how old Hammond can know of the scheme here. I suggest that this odd narrative discrepancy is the sign of a moment of generic interference. It is as if, just for an instant, the idea of the upriver journey is old Hammond’s own, something he enjoins upon Guest, and in the light of the friction between them that I have already evoked, we can perhaps see why. It is a familiar narrative paradigm elsewhere in Morris, above all in his Jason, that an older king threatened by a young hero sends the latter on a quest which he hopes will prove fatal in order to remove the danger from his realm and person. It may well be, then, that this romance archetype too is active within News from Nowhere. 411

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Characters How many characters does News from Nowhere contain in all? Possibly Bob the weaver with his passion for mathematics knows the answer to this question, but I imagine that the rest of us probably do not. If we cannot produce an exact figure, perhaps we could at least venture an impression: does Morris’s utopia contain just a few or a good number of characters? All such answers will no doubt be comparative; if we come to News from Nowhere fresh from a reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, then we will feel that Morris only musters a modest number of Nowherians, but if we have just watched Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, then we are more likely to feel that Morris has given us quite a lot. Darko Suvin has helpfully developed a comparative judgment in these matters which may well have mattered a good deal to Morris himself: that between News from Nowhere and Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Pointing out how Bellamy’s ‘fear of existential openness’ manifests itself both thematically and formally in his utopia, Suvin argues that, in contrast, ‘Morris’s novel not only more than doubles the number of characters (two main women and two main guides instead of one each in Bellamy – plus a great number of subsidiary characters instead of the lone Mrs. Leete and some disembodied voices and faces); it also enriches the times, spaces and overall complexity of their relationships’.18 That will certainly serve as a working reply to my initial question. How many characters does News from Nowhere contain? Answer: a good number more than Looking Backward. Why should this be, is the question which next pops up; what is gained or lost by Morris having many more characters than Bellamy? One familiar answer here concerns the issue of exposition in utopia, and this answer can be offered as a mere matter of literary tact and tactics, or as a deeper issue of the underlying political orientation of Morris’s utopia. If the first thing you do on arriving in utopia, after your feat of geographical or time travel, is to make a beeline to Wells’s Old Man who Knows Everything, it would, nonetheless, be as boring for the reader as it would be psychologically exhausting for the visitor to get every scrap of new knowledge from this single source. Dick Hammond is aware of this danger early on in Nowhere, warning Guest that ‘it won’t do to overdose you with information about this place … you had best suck it in little by little’ (ch. II, 11). So if a utopia can disperse its exposition across a variety of characters, then it exercises good manners to its visitor and is that much more likely to keep its audience reading. Even if all these new figures do say pretty much the same thing as the central expositor, then there are still advantages in terms of readerly interest. That is what I would regard as a minimal defence of multiple characters in utopia. One can press the case a stage further, however, by linking the multiplicity of utopian viewpoints to the underlying principles of the utopia itself, so that the surface ‘tactics’ of characterisation now come to embody deeper political values.Thus if old Hammond asserts to Guest that in Nowhere ‘we discourage centralisation all we can’, that key principle will have to apply to formal as well as thematic matters in Morris’s utopia, to the question of how the new society is expounded in the text as well as how it works economically.To have a single authoritative voice imparting full utopian wisdom to the visitor would clearly run athwart this principle, so that narrative form contradicted political content. By multiplying character, by expanding the opportunities for local, partial exposition, Morris thus produces a fictional universe in accord with the core values of Nowhere itself. It will then be important that such multiplicity is genuine rather than merely apparent, that these diverse figures do not all say precisely the same thing to the visitor, that they contribute at least different shades of emphasis and perhaps even significant differences too.Thus monologism gives way to dialogism, and the anti-Bellamyan requirement of a multiplication of character ultimately generates the assorted old Grumblers and Obstinate Refusers, as well as the Dicks, Claras and Ellens of Morris’s text. 412

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So far, so good; the multiplicity of characters, even when they disagree among themselves, is still serving the overall logic of the text, whether that is conceived as shrewd literary tactics or a deeper underlying commitment to heteroglossia. And no doubt many of the second-order figures in News from Nowhere do indeed work in this way. But may it not also be the case, as we saw earlier in the related case of the multiplicity of genre, that such diversity may not be merely instrumental, not just obediently in the service of wider textual aspirations? May it not be that such minor figures, or at least some of them, generate unexpected effects, raise issues the text is less happy to have floated, or begin to establish relations among themselves that rub the utopia in which they appear against the grain? Take one figure so minor that he is barely more than a name.When Dick offers his sculling work to Bob the weaver, he remarks:‘if you find it too much, there is George Brightling on the lookout for a stroke of work, and he lives close handy to you’ (ch. II, 13); that is all we ever hear of neighbour Brightling. But his is a memorable surname, surely, and in a book that contains so much interesting discussion of names, we should pay appropriate attention to it, particularly in the spirit of that slow reading of odd details which the book itself seems to enjoin upon us. Brightling’s vivid name in fact concentrates in itself the pervasive sun imagery in this text – ‘taking … at least part of the sun from our table as she went’, ‘the sun flashed back from him as if he had been clad in golden armour’ (ch. III, 19, 21) – to the point where he almost transports us to another Morris work entirely and potentially becomes the Sigurdian sun-god or cultural hero from Sigurd the Volsung. The tale that Morris’s great epic poem tells is, of course, that of the undoing of that great mythic figure and his love Brynhild by the lesser race of the cloudy Niblungs, so George Brightling may evoke a slight narrative unease if we do linger upon him. Or take another fleeting figure from the later chapters on the Thames: not Philippa the carver herself, whom everyone has acknowledged as a positive model for women in this utopia after their rather disappointing appearance as waitresses to the men in the Hammersmith Guest House, but rather her daughter, who is decidedly neglected in the critical commentary.As with Ellen, the daughter’s first appearance in the text is marked by a certain excess: ‘a taller woman, quite a girl she seemed … standing looking from Clara to Dick with delighted eyes’ (ch. XXVI, 174).Why should she be so fascinated by Dick and Clara, we wonder; one would surely expect her, as a Thames valley inhabitant, to be very accustomed to the sight of beautiful young couples. And when this woman is formally identified to us by the text, discrepant notes are again introduced:‘she turned out to be Philippa’s daughter, but was a tall strong girl, black-haired and gipsey-like of face and curiously solemn of manner’ (176).That ‘but’ is telling: the girl’s physical genetics do not seem to match at all with her mother’s, who is ‘a rather little woman’, and just why would you be ‘curiously solemn of manner’ in such a genial utopia? The mystery only deepens in the one interaction between mother and daughter that we witness in this episode. The other builders drink a toast to Guest and his party, but Obstinate Refuser Philippa will not; she ‘would have none of it all, but only shrugged her shoulders when her daughter came up to her and touched her’ (p. 176).That cold shrug seems to bear upon her relations with her daughter quite as much as upon the toast to Guest, as if it denotes some underlying emotional problem between the two of them that the text cannot really focus on, though it hints variously at it. We are used to the idea that adult heterosexual relations in Nowhere can be difficult and even violent at times, but what we seem implicitly to have here is evidence that parent–child relations in Morris’s utopia may be more problematic than we initially assumed. At any rate, Philippa’s daughter, as a representative minor character in this work, opens up this disquieting possibility without giving us the literary means by which we could pursue it any further. The final figure I wish to examine in this brief tour of minor Nowherians is the man whom Guest comes across in Kelmscott just before he returns from utopia to his own late-Victorian 413

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past: ‘a man who looked old, but whom I knew from habit, now half-forgotten, was really not much more than fifty. His face was rugged, and grimed rather than dirty; his eyes dull and bleared … His clothing was a mixture of dirt and rags long over-familiar to me … Inexpressibly shocked, I hurried past him’ (ch. XXXII, 209–10). Most readers, I suspect, do not give this shabby figure much thought; they simply see him as a self-evident detail, an index that Guest is losing his grip on the twenty-second-century future, that the capitalist past is beginning to reassert itself and reclaim him. Michael Holzman’s brisk commentary here is typical:‘This passer-by is the incarnation of the given, the victim of the real, the person for whom Morris has dreamed of a better society’.19 But a few critics have lingered more thoughtfully on this character in the spirit of News from Nowhere’s own interpretative maxims: fasten on some unregarded tiny detail, then be both leisurely and earnest about it. This grimy figure is, for instance, behind Barbara Gribble’s stern judgement that, despite everything he may have learned in Nowhere, Guest will remain an ‘ineffectual’ socialist when he returns to his own time:‘his capacity for effective action has not expanded, as his encounter with a farm labourer well demonstrates … he responds with obvious aversion to the grimed features and ragged clothes. The man greets him courteously, yet Guest cannot conceal his distaste’.20 Gribble reads this scene as if Guest were a horrified Pip encountering the uncouth Magwitch on the latter’s return to London towards the end of Great Expectations; only whereas that initial class-distaste is a reaction Pip must work his way through and beyond in the closing pages of Dickens’s novel, Guest, on Gribble’s reading, remains locked within it, which will compromise his political effectiveness when he finally returns to the Socialist League. But perhaps this dirty figure is not a farm worker, after all. Other critics, rather than concentrating on the interaction between Guest and the labourer, have suggestively folded the two back into a single composite entity.Thus Tom Middlebro’ argues that:‘he [Guest] turns back to the river, meets his ancient self, and is drowned in black oblivion’.21 So the grimy riverside figure may be Guest’s own double here, a startling local suggestion which none the less reaches far back into the substance of this book. Old Hammond, most famously, is a kind of double of Guest, for the visitor finds the elderly utopian’s face to be ‘strangely familiar to me; as if I had seen it before – in a looking-glass it might be’ (ch. IX, 53), and Henry Morsom is in turn later described as ‘another edition of old Hammond’ (ch. XXVII, 176). Guest is very probably old Hammond’s grandfather, in which case Dick, being the Sage of Bloomsbury’s great-grandson, turns out to be Guest’s great-great-great-grandson. So the minute you enter utopia, this supposedly so radically alien society, you actually find yourself surrounded by your direct family descendants. Moreover, we should also note the formulation that Guest uses in relation to the grimy man’s clothes – ‘mixture of dirt and rags long over-familiar to me’ – for this is very close to phrases he had used earlier in the book when he recognised visual motifs and literary quotations strewn around Nowhere: ‘very particularly familiar with them’ (ch. III, 14), ‘which I knew somewhat over well’ (ch. XXI, 141). Most critics have taken such phrases as indicating that the various motifs decorating the walls of Nowhere are actually from Guest’s or Morris’s own works. So the far future is not only populated in its most crucial generic roles (utopian guide and expositor) by your own family members but is also daubed all over with your own words and images.The whole thing, that is to say, is in some danger of turning into an immense ‘double’ of the visitor, of becoming narcissistic self-projection on the grand scale rather than an objectively plausible social future. The ‘soaking’ of the political future in your own subjectivity certainly makes it vivid and often humorous, but is also at risk of folding it entirely back within the originating self rather than allowing it to stand as a possible collective future for the movement to which you belong. It is the text’s own recognition of this danger, I suspect, which prompts it to invent Ellen, that energetic and enigmatic young woman who, being ‘the most unfamiliar to me, the most 414

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unlike what I could have thought of ’ (ch. XXVII, 182), is a bold attempt to reintroduce radical otherness into a utopia which is by now stifling for lack of it. So to linger on the minor, grimy figure Guest encounters by the Thames, to enterprisingly read him as Guest’s double rather than just any old late-Victorian farm labourer happening by, takes one very deeply into central and difficult issues for this text.

Gothic I emphasised above the salubrious outdoor nature of News from Nowhere and the impressive athleticism of so many of its inhabitants, while also noting that it contained various museums in which some of its most crucial exposition takes place. I must now again problematise the sunlit surfaces of this book, but from a different angle; once again, the ‘problem’ arises from one of the most progressive and welcome dimensions of Morris’s project. It is a commonplace of utopian studies that in the nineteenth century an important shift takes place within this genre. The spatial utopias of earlier centuries, where the ideal society exists in the same time as the visitor but far off in some distant undiscovered corner of the globe, give way to temporal utopias, where utopia exists in the same space as the visitor inhabits – Julian West’s Boston for Edward Bellamy, the Thames valley for Morris – but at some far-off point in a future that does not yet exist, but which could in principle be brought into being by organised activism in the visitor’s own present. Clearly, in a century of organised political movements, the feeling is that utopia can actually be made, not just intellectually fantasised about, so the genre mutates from spatial to time travel. Julian West wakes up from his hypnotic sleep 113 years in the future,William Guest some 200 years after the late-Victorian Socialist League meeting of the first page. This temporalisation of the genre is a crucial political breakthrough, but it also has other, unintended and almost certainly undesirable effects.When, with the help of whatever unlikely narrative device (time machine, hypnotic sleep and so on), the visitor to utopia wakes up in that far future, everyone he or she knows will necessarily be dead, and everything that he or she is socially and culturally accustomed to will be utterly gone. No one has registered better than Bellamy, in his account of Julian West’s early days in the new Boston, the shattering of identity that this situation will entail (William Guest, in contrast, by at once leaping into the Thames, symbolically lets the past wash off him). But besides this initial psychological shock, a more profound disorientation, generic rather than psychological, sets in too.The visitor travels forwards in time long beyond the date of his or her own biological death, so that he or she arrives in the future as a kind of ghost, with all the uncanny ambivalence that the term necessarily suggests. In the case of News from Nowhere in particular, several critics have suggested that Morris signals the spectral nature of his visitor to utopia by a kind of pun: Guest/ghost.22 Whether or not (as some commentators have argued) there is some etymological link between these two words, we should certainly be open to the word play here. Utopia itself is, after all, unique among literary genres in being founded on a pun – Thomas More’s Greek play on ‘good place’ versus ‘no place’ – so verbal mischief is formatively part of this genre from its very origins.And Guest himself, after all, knows that phantoms operate in Nowhere, for he senses ‘the ghost of London still asserting itself as a centre’ in Piccadilly (ch.VI, pp.33–4). Ghosts are always unsettling beings, even if, in some sense, they do you good in the end (as Marley’s ghost does Scrooge, for instance). Can we say more, then, about the kind of ghost that Guest will be in Nowhere, the kinds of unsettling he might cause it? I think we can, and that the answer comes, paradoxically, from another dimension of Morris’s utopia that is in the first instance one of the most attractive things about it. It has always been recognised that in its political vision News from Nowhere is an amalgam of Marxism and Ruskinianism, of Communism tout 415

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court and ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ as it comes through from Carlyle and Dickens to Ruskin himself. For the hardline Marxists, such an amalgamation of traditions dilutes and confuses Morris’s utopia, whereas for the rest of us, it surely immensely enriches it.The key social term for Ruskin, as for Morris himself in his explicitly architectural thinking, is the ‘Gothic’; for as one observes the medieval Gothic cathedral, so one can detect in and on it those traces of unalienated, freely creative and sensuous labour which serve as a utopian alternative to the dehumanised machine labour of the capitalist nineteenth century. And clearly a great deal in News from Nowhere is Gothic in precisely this Ruskinian sense: architecture and costume prominently hark back to medieval models, to the point that William Guest/Ghost can at times feel that he is living in the fourteenth century. But the term ‘Gothic’ has other powerful literary and cultural meanings too. In one direction, it points us to a memorable vein of female fiction, from the novels of Anne Radcliffe through those of the Brontë sisters to the memorable short stories of Angela Carter and beyond, in which the archetypal narrative situation is of an inexperienced, virginal, middle-class young woman threatened by an older, socially superior and sexually dangerous male in a bewildering and claustrophobic country house. In later, explicitly feminist Gothic writing, the narrative is usually of an energetic breakout from this initial situation of entrapment. But in another direction, the notion of Gothic gestures towards the genre of ‘horror’ more generally, towards that whole field of ghosts, monsters, vampires and zombies that so haunts the contemporary mass media; this is, in short, about as anti-utopian a literary and filmic tradition as you could find. Morris’s powerful invocation of the Ruskinian Gothic across his utopia, which is one of its most attractive features, also necessarily opens up – and in ways he does not fully master or control – these other, more troubling aspects of literary Gothic too. For Ellen herself is surely a Gothic heroine claustrophobically trapped in the cottage at Runnymede under the oppressive guardianship of the old Grumbler.There is certainly something excessive about her reaction to the arrival of Guest and company at the cottage – ‘jumped up as soon as we entered … clapped her hands and cried out with pleasure … fairly danced round us in delight of our company’ (ch. XXII, 148). For they represent her chance of break-out, and she will later seize it by following Guest up the river and attaching herself to him. But it is the other dimension of non-Ruskinian Gothic – ghostliness, vampirism and horror – that I want to emphasise here. For as the book so finely invokes its new architectural Gothic, so it seems to unleash other, darker veins of Gothic in its imagery too. Oddly enough, it is Dick Hammond, who one might have expected to be a less sensitive register of such nuances than, say, the moody Clara, who best discerns this aspect of Guest/Ghost. Dick already senses the genre to which Ellen belongs, as he sees her as a ‘good fairy’ trapped by ‘the gnome or woodspirit, our grumbling friend’, and he assigns Guest an even more unsettling role in the tale he is constructing here:‘You had better consider that you have got the cap of darkness, and are seeing everything, yourself invisible’ (ch. XXIII, 155). If old Hammond and Ellen clearly sense Guest’s historical and political origins in the late nineteenth century, Dick has intuitively grasped that to hail from that time period is to be, in this far future, an ontologically unstable spectre. He elaborates on this insight much later in the book, after he and Guest have swum in the Thames together.A discussion of the weather concludes with Dick reflecting:‘One thing seems strange to me … that I must needs trouble myself about the winter and its scantiness, in the midst of the summer abundance. If it hadn’t happened to me before, I should have thought it was your doing, Guest; that you had thrown a kind of evil charm over me. Now, you know … that’s only a joke, so you mustn’t take it to heart’ (ch. XXXII, 207).This is a very telling textual moment, in which the alternative Gothic meanings of Guest – that he is a dangerous spectre or monster capable of casting evil charms over the utopians to their hurt – comes perilously close 416

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to the surface of the book, which has indeed to work hard to suppress the recognition by surrounding it with remarks that undermine it (it has happened before, and anyway this observation is just a joke). But once we are alerted in this way to the Gothic aspects of William Ghost, we can sense the vampiric imagery that elsewhere, in tiny microtextual ways, infiltrates the sunny prose of this neighbourly utopia:‘got fairly bitten with love-madness’ (ch. XXIV, 165),‘we may be bitten with some impulse towards change’ (ch. XXIX, 194),‘you had best suck it in little by little’ (ch. II, 11). Once again, then, William Guest becomes a discrepant, possibly even destructive, presence in this utopia, and in both cases of this that I have examined, it is a welcome Morrisian extension of utopia which triggers these untoward effects. As we noted above, the attempt to give Guest a positively transformative (rather than just passively receptive) role in Nowhere seems to over-reach itself and lead to him becoming a politically contaminating presence within it. My examination of Gothic complexities in the book dovetails with that earlier account. The welcome enriching of a schematically Marxist utopia by a radical admixture of Ruskinianism unleashes other modes of literary Gothic, which in a different sense has Guest casting ‘evil charms’ over the new world. So ominous has he become that the book has to revert to conventional religious imagery by setting its final utopian scene in Kelmscott church to organise what in effect becomes a collective exorcism of the dangerous visitor. With Guest on the threshold of the church, Ellen ‘shook her head with a mournful look’ (ch. XXXII, 209), and that ‘No’ of hers, which we can also take to be the collective ‘No’ of all the younger utopians with whom she is now reintegrated, in effect propels the Guest/Ghost sickeningly back to Victorian London.

Conclusion I want, finally, to return to my opening remark from Michael Holzman, that any searching analysis of the making of Morris’s News from Nowhere involves us in new thought about the literary. I have suggested that the traffic here can be reversed, so that new conceptions of literature will in turn eventuate in novel News from Nowhere interpretations, and that we will not always know which way the traffic is running in individual cases. So I now need to move beyond the detailed interpretation of particular features of Morris’s utopia – objects, genre, the role of Guest, character, Gothic – to some more general reflection on what all this has told us about ‘the literary’. My specific readings above are both underpinned by, and open out into, a conception of literature that I would regard as Althusserian-Machereyan narrowly defined, but also as ‘postmodern’ in a more global sense. I don’t think it is any accident that Morris has that gaggle of troublesome Anarchists – four out of the six people present – at the political meeting which opens News from Nowhere.Whatever their relevance to his own struggles within the Socialist League at the time, they surely emit an oblique, lateral message about literature too, suggesting that however you attempt to pin things down ideologically in a text, the very act of writing will also free turbulent energies which may wrench the finished work from your original purpose.There is then, it would seem, something inherently anarchistic about the very act of literary composition.Anarchism is always present in a work, at the levels of form and style as well as explicit political content. We have had, as it happens, an important Marxist theory of the text which one might see as injecting a salutary ‘anarchism’ into literary form: it is that which is already at work in Louis Althusser’s dealings with Marx in his Reading Capital (1965) and which is then more explicitly theorised in the field of literature itself by his disciple Pierre Macherey in The Theory of Literary Production (1966). Literature, for these two French philosophers, internally distantiates the ideology which is its raw material. By giving ideology a specific literary form, the work of art forces 417

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it to speak of its own limits and silences, presses it to the point of contradiction and self-undoing, at which moment its guilty ‘not-said’ or non-dit is made manifest.We do have some readings of News from Nowhere from within a specifically Althusserian-Machereyan framework in excellent essays by Eileen Sypher and James Buzard published in the left-wing journal Minnesota Review in 1984 and 1991 respectively. My own readings above represent a looser, more heuristic adaptation of the Althusser-Macherey position, whereby Morris’s conscious endeavours to extend the utopian genre in politically welcome directions constantly runs into difficulty as he seeks to give them persuasive narrative figuration. The Althusser-Macherey model of literature’s ‘internal distantiation’ of ideology is only one specific textual operation – important for Marxist purposes, clearly – within a more general, epochally ‘postmodern’ sense of the literary text. We had one self-identifyingly postmodern reading of News from Nowhere offered to us from the period of high postmodernism itself, the 1980s.23 But we should now invoke ‘postmodern’ in a more general sense within literary studies, as an overall cultural ethos rather than a set of very specific intellectual positions (dissolution of the antagonism between high and low culture, evacuation of depth in favour of surfaces, and so on). If one does elasticate the notion in this capacious manner, then clearly within literary or cultural studies there is a recognisably postmodern sense of the text within whose force-field all recent readings of News from Nowhere have necessarily taken place (unless they have been very regressive indeed).This postmodern sense of the textual is well evoked in memorable formulations by Roland Barthes and Fredric Jameson. In the former’s essay on ‘The Death of the Author’, he declares: We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture … In multiple writing, in effect, everything is to be disentangled, but nothing deciphered.24 ‘Entangled’, we should recall, is a significant term within News from Nowhere itself. My second quote is from the American Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson in his magisterial 1991 book on Postmodernism: Our own recent criticism, from Macherey on, has been concerned to stress the heterogeneity and profound discontinuities of the work of art, no longer unified or organic, but now a virtual grab bag or lumber room of disjoined subsystems and random raw materials and impulses of all kinds.The former work of art, in other words, has now turned out to be a text, whose reading proceeds by differentiation rather than by unification.25 It has been, as I hope the reader senses, just such a model of the literary work as decentralised and self-conflictual, which has underpinned my own readings here. I started this essay with Michael Holzman’s suggestion that a sufficiently deep reflection on the making of News from Nowhere will always eventually debouch into meditation on the nature of the literary; but I argued also that the traffic between these two terms – the particular utopia and the notion of literature more generally – will be two-way, not one-way, and indeed often undecidably so. So it is that the most searching analyses of News from Nowhere in our time, from let us say the 1970s onwards, have both opened out into, but also implicitly operated from the 418

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start within the postmodern model of decentred textuality that Barthes and Jameson so memorably evoke. There are still, it is true, particular types of theoretically oriented reading which operate within that broad paradigm that have not yet been tried out on Morris’s utopia; I would think here of ‘queer’ and Deleuzian modes of interpretation, for starters.26 Whether we are now at the very edge of that paradigm, on the verge of some new model of textuality that would both emerge from and fund new approaches to News from Nowhere, remains an open and difficult question. There are certainly novel motifs in the world of literary and cultural studies which might open new avenues to Morris’s work; perhaps the most dynamic of these at the moment is the so-called ‘theological turn’ in literary studies, which might read News from Nowhere ‘backwards’ from its closing scene in Kelmscott church in order to make the text pliant to its concerns.27 But the moment when, in Hegelian fashion, quantity turns into quality, when a new cluster of motifs effectively coalesces into an entire paradigm change, is much harder to define – particularly for someone like me, intellectually formed in the earlier epoch itself.‘How the Change Came’ is the title of one of the most powerful chapters in Morris’s utopia. For some fifty years now, we have operated within the ambit of broadly postmodern readings of News from Nowhere (of which this essay has been another instance). As for when the great Change to a new epoch of interpretation might come, it will be the younger Ellens amongst us, rather than the grizzled William Guests of the old formation, who will first sense and articulate it, who will take us from that Museum of Literary Interpretations which now includes postmodernism itself into the open air and vibrant spaces of whatever comes next.

Notes 1 Michael Holzman, ‘Anarchism and Utopia: William Morris’s News from Nowhere’, English Literary History, vol. 51, 1984, p. 602. 2 Miguel Abensour, ‘William Morris: The Politics of Romance’, in Max Blechman, ed., Revolutionary Romanticism: A Drunken Boat Anthology (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1999), p. 128. 3 Frederick Kirchhoff, William Morris (Boston:Twayne Publications, 1979), p. 127. 4 John Goode, Collected Essays of John Goode (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995), p. 316. 5 Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980), p. 170. 6 Patrick Parrinder, ‘News from Nowhere, The Time Machine and the Break-Up of Classical Realism’, vol. 3, 1976, p. 268; Eileen Sypher, ‘The “Production” of William Morris’s News from Nowhere’, Minnesota Review, vol. 22, 1984, p. 91. 7 Norman Talbot, ‘A Guest in the Future: News from Nowhere’, in Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, eds. Florence S. Boos and Carole G. Silver (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), p. 39; Barbara Gribble, ‘William Morris’s News from Nowhere: A Vision Impaired’, Journal of the William Morris Society, 6.3, 1985, p. 21. 8 Miguel Abensour, p. 147; John Goode, p. 333. 9 William Morris, News from Nowhere, in The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1992), vol. 16, ch. X, p. 64.All subsequent references are incorporated in my text. 10 John Helmer,‘The Prettiness of Utopia’, Journal of the William Morris Society, 6.1, 1979, pp. 17, 4-5. 11 Talbot, p. 57. 12 James Buzard,‘Ethnography as Interruption: News from Nowhere, Narrative and the Modern Romance of Authority’, Victorian Studies, 40.3, 1997, p. 470. 13 Marcus Waithe, ‘News from Nowhere and Bakhtin’s Idyllic Chronotope’, Textual Practice, 16.3, 2002, p. 467. 14 Matthew Beaumont, News from Nowhere and the Here and Now’, Victorian Studies, 47.1, 2004, p. 48. 15 James M. Buzard, ‘The Fiction of a Finished World: Utopia and Ideology in Morris’s News from Nowhere’, Minnesota Review, 34/35, 1990, p. 85. 16 Tom Middlebro’,‘Brief Thoughts on “News from Nowhere”’, Journal of the William Morris Society, 2.4, 1970, p. 11. 17 Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris:A Life for our Time (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1994), p. 2.

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Tony Pinkney 18 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science-Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 190. 19 Michael Holzman, p. 601. 20 Barbara Gribble, p. 21. 21 Tom Middleboro’, pp. 8–9. 22 Both Matthew Beaumont and Marcus Waithe, among others, have made this point, but for the most enlightening discussion of ‘spectrality’ in and around Morris’s work, see Michelle Weinroth, ‘Introduction’, in Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne, eds., To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), pp. 3–34. 23 Tony Pinkney, ‘Postmodern Space and Morris’s Utopia’, News from Nowhere: Journal of Cultural Materialism, 9, 1991, 29–49. 24 Roland Barthes,‘The Death of the Author’, in The Rustle of Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 52–53. 25 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 31. 26 For a good conspectus of ‘queer theory’ approaches, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michèle Aine Barale, eds., Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); and Ronald Bogue’s Deleuze on Literature (London: Routledge, 2003) is a strong account of Gilles Deleuze’s implications for literary analysis. 27 For a brief overview of the political dimensions of this ‘turn’, see Alex Cistelecan’s ‘The Theological Turn of Contemporary Critical Theory’, Telos 167, Summer 2014, 8–26. Terry Eagleton is the most prominent literary critic and theorist to have made such a theological turn in recent years.

Further Reading The twentieth century’s greatest theorist of utopia, Ernst Bloch, was disappointingly dismissive about News from Nowhere in his magnum opus, The Principle of Hope (1938–47). Some of the best early criticism of Morris’s utopia comes from within the Communist tradition. A. L. Morton’s chapter on the book in his The English Utopia (1952) praises it as ‘the first Utopia which is not utopian’, an oxymoron which bears much pondering; and Paul Meier’s William Morris: the Marxist Dreamer (first published in French in 1972) is a massive two-volume account of News from Nowhere, meticulously tracking its relations to the political thought of Marx and Engels. E. P. Thompson’s hefty William Morris: from Romantic to Revolutionary (1955) was crucial in making Morris’s thought current again in the 1950s, but is rather thin in its discussion of News from Nowhere. Raymond Williams’s chapter on Morris in Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) is therefore perhaps the archetypal ‘New Left’ account of his work, but advances the provocative judgement that there is more life in Morris’s political lectures than in such romances as News from Nowhere. John Goode then challenged Williams’s assessment of News from Nowhere in his ‘William Morris and the Dream of Romance’ (1971, available in his 1995 Collected Essays). E. P.Thompson significantly changed position on Morris in the postscript to the reissue of his Morris book in 1976; he there attacked Paul Meier’s heavy-handed politicising of News from Nowhere and drew on Miguel Abensour’s model of the ‘heuristic’ (as opposed to ‘systematic’) utopia to extol Morris’s utopia as speculative and open-ended in its communist dreaming. For discussions of News from Nowhere in the literary-critical rather than directly political tradition, see, among a host of possibilities: Abensour, Miguel. ‘William Morris: The Politics of Romance’, in Revolutionary Romanticism: A Drunken Boat Anthology, ed. Max Blechman. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1999, 125–61. Arata, Stephen.‘Introduction to William Morris’, in News from Nowhere. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003. Beaumont, Matthew. ‘News from Nowhere and the Here and Now’, Victorian Studies, 47.1, 2004, 33–54. Belsey,Andrew.‘Getting Somewhere: Rhetoric and Politics in News from Nowhere’, Textual Practice, 5, 1991, 337–51. Boos, Florence S. and William Boos. ‘News from Nowhere and Victorian Socialist-Feminism’, NineteenthCentury Contexts, 14.1, 1990, 3–32. Buzard, James. ‘Ethnography as Interruption: News from Nowhere, Narrative and the Modern Romance of Authority’, Victorian Studies, 40.3, 1997, 445–74.

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News from Nowhere ———.‘The Fiction of a Finished World: Utopia and Ideology in Morris’s News from Nowhere’, Minnesota Review, 34/35, 1990, 81–98. Coleman, Stephen and Paddy O’Sullivan, eds. William Morris and ‘News from Nowhere’:A Vision for our Time. Bideford, Devon: Green Books, 1990. Gribble, Barbara. ‘William Morris’s News from Nowhere: A Vision Impaired’, Journal of the William Morris Society, 6.3, 1985, 16–22. Helmer, John.‘The Prettiness of Utopia’, Journal of the William Morris Society, 6.1, 1979, 17, 4–19. Holzman, Michael. ‘Anarchism and Utopia:William Morris’s News from Nowhere’, English Literary History, 51, 1984, 589–603. Kumar, Krishan. ‘A Pilgrimage of Hope: William Morris’s Journey to Utopia’, Utopian Studies, 5, 1994, 89–107. Laurent, Beatrice, ed. Essays on William Morris’s ‘News from Nowhere’. Nantes: Editions du Temps, 2004. Leopold, David.‘Introduction to William Morris’, in News from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, vii–xxxi. Parrinder, Patrick. ‘News from Nowhere, The Time Machine and the Break-Up of Classical Realism’, ScienceFiction Studies, 3, 1976, 265–74. ———.‘News from the Land of No News’, Foundation, 51, Spring, 1991, 29–37. Sypher, Eileen. ‘The “Production” of William Morris’s News from Nowhere’, Minnesota Review, 22, 1984, 84–104. Talbot, Norman.‘A Guest in the Future: News from Nowhere’, in Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, eds. Florence S. Boos and Carole G. Silver. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990, 38–60. Trilling, Lionel. ‘Aggression and Utopia: A Note on William Morris’s News from Nowhere’, in The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965–75. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1979, 148–115. Waithe, Marcus. ‘News from Nowhere and Bakhtin’s Idyllic Chronotope’, Textual Practice, 16.3, 2002, 459–72.

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18 WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE LITERATURE AND SOCIALISM OF THE COMMONWEAL Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

William Morris edited, supported, and wrote for the Socialist League’s newspaper Commonweal from 1885 to 1890, and during these years the publication carved out a distinct position within the broader world of late-nineteenth-century socialism. Characterized by its disavowal of party politics, its visionary utopianism, its emphasis on the literary and the aesthetic, and its refusal to view the natural world as detached from human social change, the Commonweal’s particular version of socialism owed much to Morris’s contributions in poetry and prose.This chapter offers an overview of Morris’s major literary writings for the Commonweal, including the serial poem The Pilgrims of Hope and the long prose romances A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere. While providing historical background on the Commonweal and synthesizing various critics’ accounts of Morris’s literary achievements within its pages, I will emphasize how Morris’s literary contributions to the journal established the peculiarly expansive, ecologically-minded version of nineteenth-century socialism that defined the Socialist League. The Socialist League’s place in late-nineteenth-century British socialism has often been misrepresented or underestimated in historical accounts of the movement precisely because it depended heavily on literature and aesthetics to formulate its politics. Writing about the latenineteenth-century left-wing press in 1988, Deian Hopkin, for example, argued that, “some socialist papers, notably, William Morris’s Commonweal, are best remembered for their literary content and style than for any enduring political impact.1 And yet surely we must conceptualize the Commonweal’s literature precisely in terms of political impact, especially given the political goal that the paper set out for itself, which was to teach a certain disposition and feeling toward the world.While the Manifesto of the Socialist League, which ran in the first issue of the paper and was also issued separately as a pamphlet, did begin with a clear diagnosis of capitalist society in the language of scientific socialism, it ended by articulating the goal of inculcating a “singlehearted devotion to the religion of Socialism, the only religion which the Socialist League professes.”2 In 1977, Stephen Yeo cast important scholarly light on the “religion of socialism” discourse in an analysis that he offered as an alternative to earlier, more “orthodox” approaches to the socialist revival.3 Since then, a good many authors have conceptualized how, exactly, the affective workings of the socialist movement functioned. Mark Allison has recently made the 422

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case for conceiving of the aesthetic domain as “at the very root of British socialism’s emancipatory promise.” Whereas an older, more strictly Marxist tradition of socialist historiography stressed the role of class-consciousness in making socialists,Allison pursues “an imagination- and aesthetic-centered account of socialism.”4 This kind of approach is representative of new directions in the field over the past few decades since Yeo’s essay. While providing an overview of Morris’s literature for the Commonweal and the critical response it has generated, my purpose here will be to describe Morris’s work for the Commonweal in terms of its distinct contribution to socialist discourse, and to situate within the broader socialist context of late-nineteenth-century England both the journal and the Socialist League that it represented in print form. First, some brief historical background on the journal and the League will be necessary.The Commonweal first appeared on 1 February 1885, having been conceived of and executed with remarkable speed by the group of socialists that split off from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) on 30 December 1884 to form the Socialist League.Along with Morris, this group included Edward Aveling, E. Belfort Bax, Robert Banner, W. J. Clark, J. Cooper, Joseph Lane, John L. Mahon, Stephen Mainwaring, and Eleanor Marx-Aveling. Of this group, as far as fame and influence within the socialist movement went, Morris and MarxAveling were the two biggest losses for the SDF and the biggest gains for the Socialist League. Disgusted by H. M. Hyndman’s autocratic and opportunistic tendencies as leader of the SDF, the Leaguers tendered their resignation from the Federation together at a Saturday meeting on 27 December 1884, after deciding to take the bold step of forming their own organization rather than attempting to wrest the SDF from Hyndman’s grip.5 Morris had previously been an important writer and contributor for Justice, the SDF paper that was under Hyndman’s control. On the occasion of Morris’s death, Justice reprinted his essay “How I Became a Socialist” with an introduction that gave Morris credit for his important role in the formation of Justice during the earliest days of the Socialist Revival:“Morris, with his great reputation and high character, doubled our strength at a stroke … When JUSTICE was started with Edward Carpenter’s money, in January, 1884, [Morris] threw himself into it with vigour, and wrote frequently.”6 Hyndman’s Justice was too much of a one-man show for many socialists’ taste, however, and after breaking with the SDF, Morris and the other Socialist Leaguers hoped to make the Commonweal more of an organizational paper. Under Morris, Edward Aveling was initially the paper’s sub-editor, to be followed by E. Belfort Bax, and while the paper began as a monthly, the League converted it to a weekly about a year into the project.7 In the second issue of the paper, published March 1885, Morris defined Commonweal against Justice by alluding to Hyndman’s tendency toward jingoism and unscrupulousness: The reception, favourable and unfavourable, that has been the lot of the Commonweal and the variegated criticisms that have been forthcoming on the Socialist League serve to show that League and Journal, in the familiar phrase,“meet a want.” The “want,” we may be pardoned for once again saying, is that of an English paper and of an English organisation which will preach in season and out of season Socialism, pure and simple, without any admixture either of political opportunism or bourgeois sentiment or national Chauvinism.The uncompromising nature of our antagonism to the capitalistic system of to-day is gatherable from the contents of our manifesto and of our journal.8 Despite Morris’s characterization of the Commonweal and the League as an “English paper” and an “English organization,” it was clear from the start that the League would not be willing to appeal to nationalism or race as a means to reach the British workers, in the way that Hyndman and some other socialist leaders were wont to do, and that the Commonweal would be 423

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international in scope. In the paper’s second issue, Morris denounced “our terrible system that manufactures criminals at one end of the social scale and patriots at the other.”9 And as the paper stated in “The Manifesto of the Socialist League,” which ran in the first issue: For us neither geographical boundaries, political history, race, nor creed makes rivals or enemies; for us there are no nations, but only varied masses of workers and friends, whose mutual sympathies are checked or perverted by groups of masters and fleecers whose interest it is to stir up rivalries and hatreds between the dwellers in different lands. In service of this cosmopolitan vision, Eleanor Marx-Aveling contributed an international notes column, full of information that she gleaned from her own research and contacts as well as from Friedrich Engels, who was in touch with a large number of socialists on the continent and who was close to Marx-Aveling.10 Beyond its journalism, the paper also printed translations of revolutionary poetry in German and French; indeed, approximately 17 percent of the poems printed in the journal were translations.11 The paper was anti-parliamentarian in its political orientation and preached social revolution rather than social reform; it dissuaded readers from participating in electoral politics or in political activities aimed at incremental change, including trade unionism. Such rigid anti-statism also meant that the Socialist League organization drew a number of anarchists into its fold, and ultimately the organization broke up after a series of fissures between the socialist and anarchist factions. Morris was eventually forced off the paper in 1890, and the Commonweal became an anarchist journal, limping along in an intermittent fashion until it finally collapsed for good in 1894. In December 1890, after Morris’s departure and a few months after the final installment of News from Nowhere, the paper transitioned back into monthly format, and its name was changed from The Commonweal:The Official Journal of the Socialist League to The Commonweal: A Journal of Revolutionary Socialism. Morris’s dream of an organizational paper was over. The new editors assured their readers that “no efforts will be spared to resume the Weekly Issue at the earliest opportunity,” and indeed the paper did resume a weekly format from May 1891 to September 1892.12 Its run was then suspended from 4 September 1892 to 1 May 1893, and it then briefly resurrected from May 1893 to May 1894. By this time, of course, Morris was long gone – on to other projects such as the Hammersmith Socialist Record and the Kelmscott Press. Morris’s friend Bruce Glasier, looking back at the Commonweal with the hindsight of many intervening years, thought that the paper’s peak was “during the three years 1887–1889, when Morris was rid of the disturbing meddlings of Dr. Aveling (his then sub-editor) and before the Anarchist influences began to force themselves upon him.” In this period, Glasier said, the paper “will bear comparison proudly with either its weekly rival Justice, or with Our Corner, To-Day, or the Practical Socialist, monthly magazines which enjoyed the advantages of the collaboration of such experienced journalists as Annie Besant, Hubert Bland, Bernard Shaw, and other Fabian Fleet Street intellectuals.”13 Bernard Shaw, for his part, would later give the Commonweal a great deal of credit, even though he disagreed with the Socialist League platform and advocated a very different version of socialism:“The Socialist League did its share in that making of Socialists which was, as Morris held, the real business of the movement.” Still, Shaw blamed the paper’s collapse on his friend Morris’s tolerance for anarchism: its attempt to extract from its proletarian members a Socialist Constitution was a grotesque failure. … they were romantic anarchists to a man … Morris, like all original artists and thinkers, had a good deal of this feeling too, and though he would 424

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not countenance Anarchism on any terms, was genuinely anxious to discover how its appetite for freedom could be reconciled with the positive side of Communism.14 In articulating this point, Shaw relies heavily on “feeling” and “appetite,” suggesting again the extent to which the Commonweal’s expressed version of socialism was grounded in affect and the body. Conceptualizing the journal’s socialism in aesthetic terms allows us to see how it sought to provide a distribution of the sensible, in Jacques Rancière’s phrasing, by which to reorient its readers’ affective and bodily dispositions toward the world.15 Morris’s pointed disdain for many established forms of political discourse meant that the literary served for him as a uniquely valuable medium for theorizing an anti-statist, ecologically-minded communism. Using narratives of time travel alongside older literary forms and archaic diction, Morris’s aesthetic aim in the Commonweal was to situate human society within a much wider historical and ecological frame than the individual human could easily conceptualize.Whether along internationalist, historicist, or environmentalist axes, Morris’s socialism was engaged in the aesthetic project of resituating and reimagining human life within wider spheres of existence. And this project was best communicated not through journalism but through the epic and speculative literary modes that he often reached for in the Commonweal.

The Pilgrims of Hope The Pilgrims of Hope, Morris’s serialized communist epic, ran in the Commonweal from March 1885 to June 1886, making it the earliest of his major literary writings published in the pages of the League’s paper.The epic, in thirteen poetic installments, was serialized at mostly regular intervals, with some gaps and variations along the way.16 A footnote to the poem’s second installment indicates that its sprawling, serialized form came about as something of an afterthought, but the poem soon grew into this expanded scope: “It is the intention of the author to follow the fortunes of the lovers who in the ‘Message of the March Wind’ were already touched by sympathy with the cause of the people.”17 The poem tells the story of a love triangle among three British socialists who travel to Paris to help defend the Paris Commune during its short duration in the spring of 1871. Hearing the news one February evening that “Paris has fallen at last,” the speaker, Richard, declares to his wife and his friend:“Let us go, we three together, and there to die like men.” Arthur, his friend and rival, responds, “Nay … to live and be happy like men,” but Richard concludes: “this was ever in my heart: / ‘They may die; they may live and be happy; but for me I know my part, / In Paris to do my utmost, and there in Paris to die!’”18 In the end, Richard survives while the others do not, but speaking in retrospect, he frames the poem as offering a wider, more epic, more communalized perspective on his individual experience as “an atom of the strife” in Paris: So we dwelt in the war-girdled city as a very part of its life. Looking back at it all from England, I an atom of the strife, I can see that I might have seen what the end would be from the first, The hope of man devoured in the day when the Gods are athirst.19 In some respects, the love triangle at the center of the poem resembles that which Morris was forced to endure in his own life during the period that the Paris Commune was happening. For in 1871, Morris temporarily removed himself from the presence of his wife Jane and his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti to allow them to pursue their relationship in Kelmscott Manor 425

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in relative privacy while Morris took a journey to Iceland.20 In the fourth installment of The Pilgrims of Hope, one notes that the description of the hair, eyes, and mouth of Richard’s wife bears some resemblance to Jane Morris. Despite this intriguing biographical parallel, however, it would be wrong to describe The Pilgrims of Hope as depicting a love drama against the backdrop of the 1871 Paris Commune. For the Commune is actually front and center to the story, and if anything, it is the love story, as Florence Boos notes, that is “subdominant” to the political plot.21 Reflecting on the poem’s interest in proletarian revolution, we might instead emphasize, following Michael Liberman, that the poem is the first of Morris’s three major narratives about proletarian revolution that would appear in the Commonweal: the first, The Pilgrims of Hope, was followed by “A Short Account of the Commune of Paris,” co-written with E. Belfort Bax and Victor Dave in 1886, and News from Nowhere in 1890.22 As with Morris’s other literary contributions to the paper, The Pilgrims of Hope appeared in close juxtaposition to the paper’s regular political content, including such essays as “Scientific Socialism” by Edward Aveling (April 1885);“Police Outrage on a London Club,” which describes a raid of the International Club (June 1885); a piece by Eleanor Marx-Aveling on the Maiden Tribute child sex scandal (August 1885); “How Not to Translate Marx” by Friedrich Engels, which took issue with an English translation of Capital (November 1885); and “Capitalism in India” by D. Gostling (January 1886). As this sampling suggests, the surrounding context of The Pilgrims of Hope was the journal’s usual medley of socialist theory, contemporary events, and international news, but as with Morris’s other literary works that appeared in the paper, The Pilgrims of Hope in some sense substituted for Morris’s own journalistic writing for the Commonweal. As Michael Holzman has noted, “The usual issue of the paper featured a long front-page article by Morris, typically called ‘Notes on Passing Events,’ and frequently also included a second article by him, either an account of an agitational journey to Scotland or Ireland, an editorial, or a short poem,” but “during the weeks that Commonweal was serializing Morris’s A Dream of John Ball, The Pilgrims of Hope, or News from Nowhere, their installments stood in place of most of his political commentary.”23 One reason for this, of course, was that Morris could only write so much at a time, and we know from a number of sources that Morris found the frenzied pace of journalistic writing for periodicals to be hard going.24 Still, I would agree with Holzman’s conclusion that Morris’s “imaginative works published in Commonweal were in no sense a diversion from his usual political writings; they were, perhaps not simply, but yet quite directly, political writings in another genre.”25 If The Pilgrims of Hope is thus an example of political writing in another genre, it is but one part of a large body of British socialist writing in this period that was reckoning with the Paris Commune—an event that Eleanor Marx-Aveling crucially framed as “the first attempt of the proletariat to govern itself ”—and with its brutal suppression after just over two months of existence.26 Anna Vaninskaya has called The Pilgrims of Hope Morris’s “best-known imaginative work dealing with the present,” and indeed, while the Paris Commune happened fourteen years before the serialization of Morris’s poem, its living memory was still, in a real way, very much present among the Socialist Leaguers.27 Eleanor Marx-Aveling published in 1886 her English translation of Hippolyte Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray’s important volume History of the Commune of 1871,“the primary first-hand historical account and source of Communard history.”28 More broadly, Kristin Ross has written of the centrality of the 1871 Paris Commune and its long historical shadow for socialism in the late nineteenth century. Because Britain offered exile to a large number of political refugees at this time, including Lissagaray, there were many exiled Communards participating in the London movement that surrounded the Commonweal. As Ross has pointed out, The Pilgrims of Hope exemplifies how Morris communicated a vision of socialism based not only on internationalist principles but also on eco-collectivist principles, 426

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following the internationalist and proto-ecological leanings of the Commune itself. Using a medley of traditional verse modes, some of which were nearly archaic by Morris’s time, Morris employs the form as well as the content of his poem to elaborate an eco-poetic, collectivist epic that draws on the example and memory of the 1871 Paris Commune. The epic’s first poem, “The Message of the March Wind,” which has often been printed separately as a freestanding lyric, begins with an ecological vision of the natural world understood through the terms of human sexuality: Fair now is the springtide, now earth lies beholding With the eyes of a lover the face of the sun; Long lasteth the daylight, and hope is enfolding The green-growing acres with increase begun.29 Although this image of springtime renewal is in many ways typical of the pastoral mode and its reliance on seasonal cyclicality, the lines’ overtly erotic vision – with the earth lying beneath the sun, looking up at its face “with the eyes of a lover” – also looks forward to the socialist ecology of News from Nowhere, where the utopian society of the future is defined by a quasi-sexual human entanglement with the natural world: The spirit of the new days, of our days, was to be delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair flesh of the woman he loves; this, I say, was to be the new spirit of the time.30 Here, as elsewhere in Morris’s work, the sexually charged relation between the human world and the natural world communicates the kind of multispecies entanglements currently of interest to such theorists of ecology and capital as Donna Haraway and Jason Moore. As Haraway has recently written,“living and dying on earth is a convoluted multispecies affair that goes by the name of symbiosis.”“Truly nothing is sterile,” since reproduction is happening all the time, even on the surface of our skin, and Haraway even connects this natural–cultural mutualism back to collectivist theories of society at the turn of the twentieth century:“Emma Goldman’s understanding of anarchist love and rage make[s] sense in the worlds of ants and acacias.”31 Jason Moore’s 2015 book Capitalism and the Web of Life similarly reframes “human relations as always already interpenetrated with the rest of nature, and therefore always already both producers and products of change in the web of life.”32 If, for these writers, all of the natural world is intertwined and capitalism works to deny these interconnections, we can look back to see that Morris recognized the capitalist distortion of human–natural entanglements and that he used this observation as a model for his socialist vision. Morris’s ecological interventions are particularly notable in the 11th and 12th installments of The Pilgrims of Hope, both of which include a great deal of apostrophe to the earth itself. Some of these lines echo the sexualized, almost seductive language of the poem’s opening stanza, as in this passage from the 11th installment: “O earth, thou kind bestower, thou ancient fruitful place, / How lovely and beloved now gleams thy happy face!”33 Other passages, however, address more directly the way in which the entanglements of the human and natural worlds have been obscured and misdirected by capitalism, and the way in which the Communards are seeking to heal that rift. One passage even looks ahead to a post-human world, positioning the reader within the long temporal scope of geological time, and imagining that the Communards’ love for the earth would somehow be remembered even then: 427

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O Earth, Earth, look on thy lovers, who knew all thy gifts and thy gain, But cast them aside for thy sake, and caught up barren pain! Indeed of some art thou mindful, and ne’er shalt forget their tale, Till shrunk are the floods of thine ocean and thy sun is waxen pale.34 Beyond its ecological vision, The Pilgrims of Hope is also an important marker of the continuity as well as the transition from Romantic to late-Victorian social protest poetry. Ruth Livesey has shown, importantly, how Dollie Radford’s poetry anticipated aspects of Morris’s Pilgrims only a year before its publication, but other critics have gone back to the Romantics to find a poetic trajectory for Morris’s epic.35 The Pilgrims of Hope receives sustained attention in Anne Janowitz’s Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, for example, where Janowitz reads it as “a revised kind of lyrical ballad, one which combined the narrative teleology of the ballad tradition and the depth psychology of the inward lyric.”36 She remarks on the drastic change in form that Morris made between the second and third installment of the poem, and chalks it up to his expanding ambitions for the scope and weight of the poem: The first two poems in The Pilgrims of Hope are written in song metre, after which Morris takes on a complex and interesting metrical intention. The verse of the rest … is written in a six-beat stress metre. … Morris draws on the four-beat metre, but needs a line suited to narrative that is somewhat more adaptable.And at the same time, the metre suggests a variation of an imitation of a classical hexameter.The alliteration

Figure 18.1 Opening Chapter, A Dream of John Ball, Commonweal, November 13, 1886. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive.

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suggests an Anglo-Saxon nativist poetic mode; the hexameters, an international classical epic mode. The Pilgrims of Hope reaffirms the communitarian poetic at the same time as it links together print and oral metres, and also links together song and epic.37 Morris combines the alliteration of Old English poetry with the more cosmopolitan form of epic hexameters, a medley that speaks to the internationalist scope of the Commonweal and the paper’s broader use of aesthetics to position its readers within wider historical, temporal, and geographical frames.The poetics of The Pilgrims of Hope enact the particular distribution of the sensible that the journal’s literature tried to effect.

A Dream of John Ball If The Pilgrims of Hope brings together the epic genre, the hexameter form, and the recentpast setting of the Paris Commune to expand the scope of the Commonweal’s socialist politics, Morris’s long dream-vision narrative A Dream of John Ball, serialized in the Commonweal from November 1886 to January 1887, employs different literary affordances to much the same ends. A Dream of John Ball uses a time-travel narrative to go back to a much more distant historical event than the Paris Commune – the fourteenth-century Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – to communicate a radical political and artistic continuity with a past that exists beyond living memory. The point was to position socialism within the longue durée and to make a connection between the nineteenth-century working-class movement and the long history of pre-modern peasant uprising, all in the service of energizing the socialist spirit of the day.While the Peasants’ Revolt was a reaction to serfdom and feudalism rather than industrial capitalism, in the 1870s and 1880s, as Nicholas Salmon describes,“the events of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 had undergone a significant historical reassessment,” and were beginning to be seen as a “watershed in the consciousness and organisation of ordinary people.”38 They were, in other words, starting to be understood in terms of the history of revolution and mass movements, and this shifting historical consciousness helps us see how the figure of John Ball was politically available to Morris for socialist agitation in the late-nineteenth century. Indeed, a few years before publishing John Ball, Morris anticipated just such a narrative purpose in a 4 October 1884 letter to the Manchester Guardian, where he insists that the spirit of John Ball is yet alive: Well, sir, John Ball was murdered by the fleecers of the people many hundred years ago, but indeed in a sense he lives still, though I am but a part, and not the whole of him as your worthy correspondent the profaner of the name of Piers Plowman professed to think. Nor will he quite die as long as he has work to do; and I am not yet convinced that even in Manchester he has no work to do.39 While critics of News from Nowhere sometimes complain that it idealizes the medieval past, A Dream of John Ball takes us back to a fourteenth century characterized by political intrigue and unjust persecution, although one that is not without its pleasures and its graces nor without its ironies. When the protagonist of the story, a stand-in for Morris himself, tries to explain to John Ball what life is like in the nineteenth century, his listener is confused by the horrific idea that “times of plenty shall in those days be the times of famine.”40 In another passage, the narrator attempts to describe the concept of wage labor, and John Ball replies,“I perceive we are not yet out of the land of riddles.The man may well do what thou sayest and live, but he may not do it and live a free man.”41 As these passages suggest, the narrative, though set in the past, has the present socialist movement firmly in its sights, as many readers then and 429

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now have recognized. In a review that ran in Justice on 14 April 1888, F. Keddell offered the opinion that while the “immediate work” for the day “is the propaganda of Socialism,” “in this we think this little work of Mr. Morris will have a good part to play.” He particularly recommends John Ball’s long, rousing speech at the heart of the narrative:“more pleasant and profitable reading can scarcely anywhere else be found in so small a compass as in these few pages where Mr. Morris so vividly depicts this scene of history.”The review’s only complaint concerns the expensive price of the book edition that appeared after John Ball’s serialization in the Commonweal. The reviewer suggests, “It would be well if Mr. Morris could see his way to publish a shilling edition,” and indeed a cheaper version was soon forthcoming from Reeves and Turner for one shilling, as well as a much more expensive Kelmscott Press edition in 1892.42 Eventually John Ball would circulate widely in book form, far beyond its periodical readership, as Anna Vaninskaya notes, though not to the same degree as News from Nowhere: “by 1920 A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere had print runs just surpassing 15,000 and 40,000 respectively.”43 Just as the epic genre of The Pilgrims of Hope enabled Morris to assume a wide temporal scope, the medieval dream vision of A Dream of John Ball affords the crossing of temporal boundaries between past and present as well as metaphysical boundaries between present-day material reality and that reality which is envisioned, dreamed, or imagined. It begins with the narrator falling into a dream that he describes as an “architectural peep show,” a vision of “the buildings of the past untouched by the degradation of the sordid utilitarianism that cares not and knows not of beauty and history.”44 The passage links the medieval genre of the dream vision to the modern experience of the peep show, a proto-cinematic visual entertainment, but also serves as a forceful reminder that Morris came to socialism, in part, through his work on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. His assurance that human social health is reflected by and affected by our architecture, arts, and design is, I would suggest, closely related to his proto-environmentalist awareness of the interpenetration of the human and natural world. In both cases, the outward and the inward are closely bound up together and mutually coproductive. The ecological and environmental strain of Morris’s and the Commonweal’s socialism is evident in John Ball in the attention given to common land and common space. The historical notion of the common and its importance as a legal category were of central concern to nineteenth-century socialists and are alluded to in the journal’s very name, Commonweal; they are also evident from a biographical perspective in Morris’s involvement with groups such as the Commons Preservation Society.45 In A Dream of John Ball, the narrator marvels at a landscape that “was quite unhedged,” and at the common spaces for meeting that provide for large-scale collective action:“three roads from other villages met and formed a wide open space on which a thousand people or more could stand together with no great crowding.”46 Writing in the 1880s, at a time when the socialists were involved in many disputes with the police over public meetings and public speech, Morris represents the common as a medieval English ideal with a long cultural history. In this way, Morris was also connecting back with early-nineteenth-century social movements against enclosure, reminding his readers that the great period of enclosure at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth was also historically contemporary with the rise of industrial capitalism.47 If A Dream of John Ball clearly represents the eco-collectivist elements of the Commonweal’s socialism, what of its internationalism? For while The Pilgrims of Hope is an overtly cosmopolitan narrative, since its three central figures travel to Paris together, critics such as Nicholas Salmon have considered John Ball more of a “celebration of national identity.”48 Certainly, the scope and

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sweep of its grand vision are more historical and metaphysical than geographical, but the narrative does present London as a microcosm of the wider world, as indeed it would have been for rural peasants of the fourteenth century. In giving his great speech to the people, John Ball asks them:“Which of you is hardy enough to wend the road to London tomorrow?”After they respond,“All! All!” he continues, Yet forsooth hearken! London is a great and grievous city; and may-happen when ye come thither it shall seem to you over-great to deal with, when ye remember the little townships and the cots ye came from. … But from London ye may have an inkling of all the world, and over-burdensome maybe shall that seem to you, a few and feeble people. Nevertheless I say to you, remember the Fellowship … for in these days are ye building a house which shall not be overthrown, and the world shall not be too great or too little to hold it: for indeed it shall be the world itself, set free from evil-doers for friends to dwell in.49 Just as the Commonweal sought, through its literature and aesthetics, to situate its readers’ politics in a wide historical and international frame, so John Ball attempts to reframe the stakes of the Peasants’ Revolt from medieval, rural England to “the world itself.” In the context of the narrative, this is the right kind of internationalism, and must be distinguished from the false internationalism – really a form of rapacious capitalism – which is bound up in the idea of the global market.As the narrator describes the nineteenth century to John Ball, he explains: the distance of one place from another shall be as nothing; so that the wares which lie ready for market in Durham in the evening may be in London on the morrow morning; and the men of Wales may eat corn of Essex and the men of Essex wear wool of Wales; so that, so far as the flitting of goods to market goes, all the land shall be as one parish. … Not as to this land only shall it be so, but even the Indies, and far countries of which thou knowest not, shall be, so to say, at every man’s door. … Say then, John, shall not those days be merry, and plentiful of ease and content for all men? John Ball, for his part, recognizes this description for what it is, a “doleful mockery.”50 In the long interview between John Ball and the nineteenth-century visitor, “the two men strive together,” as Florence Boos has described,“to understand how revolutionary goals can be proximately defeated and yet survive into the future.”51 What looks like a loss, from the perspective of a nineteenth-century socialist, may not be a loss in the long narrative of history. John Ball thus reflects on the vagaries and uncertainties of historical causation, even as it rests on a core vision of historical determinism: a movement of progress toward freedom. Here Morris introduces the idea – common in narratives of time travel – that tidings and prophecies from the future might affect the past in the same way that the past mysteriously affects the present. If the past, present, and future are bound up together in this way, Morris’s contemporary socialists can take comfort in their hopes for a future revolution, despite the unpropitious circumstances of the present, as well as in stories of past heroes of the people such as John Ball. (Indeed, in John Ball, the peasants of the fourteenth century are also cheered by stories from the past: ballads about Robin Hood.52) Change seems possible from a macro-historical perspective, if not from the perspective of the day-to-day journalism that surrounded A Dream of John Ball’s serialization in the Commonweal.53

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Figure 18.2 Opening Chapter, News from Nowhere, Commonweal, May 24, 1890. Image courtesy of the William Morris Archive.

News from Nowhere News from Nowhere, Morris’s famous work of socialist utopian fiction, is perhaps the most obvious example of how Morris employed his literary work for the Commonweal to speculate and imagine a free socialist society premised at the most fundamental level on a vision of humanity as a part of – not an actor upon – ecology and the natural world. News was serialized over 39 weekly installments from 11 January to 4 October 1890, and while it became the most widely read and significant of Morris’s major writings for the journal, its serialization ironically spanned the period of Morris’s separation from the Socialist League and the Commonweal as the organization was taken over by the League’s anarchist faction. Michael Holzman has thus made the claim that “News from Nowhere is unusual among utopian romances in that it was intended to have a direct bearing on the political tactics of a group attempting to bring about the changes in society proposed by the text.” “This aspect of News from Nowhere,” he adds,“can best be analyzed when it is considered not as a book, but in its original form, as a newspaper serial.”54 News depicts its troubled organizational context directly, opening with a fractious meeting of the Socialist League: “there were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but divergent Anarchist opinions.”The book’s protagonist, whom we later learn to call William Guest, ends the meeting by “roaring out very loud, and damning all the rest for fools,” which sounds very much like Morris, who was known for his quick and fiery temper.55 After leaving the meeting and making his way home, he says over and over again to himself,“If I could but see a day of it … if I could but see it,” referring to the socialist future that the Leaguers hope to bring about.56 He wakes up the next morning 432

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in that very socialist future, and finds himself having breakfast in a room with a commemorative carving in honor of the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League:“Guests and neighbours, on the site of this Guest-hall once stood the lecture-room of the Hammersmith Socialists. Drink a glass to their memory! May 1962.”57 News thus provides itself, from its opening chapters, with the goal of helping nineteenth-century socialists see beyond the pettiness of inter-movement strife and focus their attention on the big picture, the wide historical scope, and their hopes for a future society. News from Nowhere is thus the best example of how the Commonweal sought to mobilize the aesthetic affordances of its literary contributions in service of a socialism that disavowed party politics and was instead rooted in collective feeling and eco-socialist interconnectedness. That it had success in fostering such an expansive sense of mutuality is apparent from the influence of News from Nowhere’s vision of socialism on a very wide range of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century radicals.To take but one example, Ben Tillett, a dockworker who helped lead the celebrated London Dock Strike of 1889 and who ultimately became a Labour Member of Parliament for Salford, drew on Morris’s utopian vision to represent what a socialist society would be like in his 1897 pamphlet Trades Unionism and Socialism: “Blood-and-iron despotism or Cæsarism will have no place in a purely social democracy. … The free life of William Morris’s imagining … will be ours rather than the rule of the martinet. … We want the England of the curfew and factory bell to be the England of a glad people, joyous and free in their toil as Morris’s conception of a beautiful life.”58 What is perhaps most remarkable about Tillett’s evident debt to News from Nowhere is that he opens the pamphlet in terms that directly oppose, from a political standpoint, the kind of socialism represented by the Commonweal: Of all the blind, fatuous policies in the world, that of decrying Trades Unionism by professing Socialists is about the worst … In one’s Journeys throughout the country, the greatest stumbling-block to be met with is the rooted belief in the minds of some thorough-going reformers that Socialism is opposed to Trades Unionism. … That such short-sighted and stupid persons should be received at all as representing Socialism is incredible.59 There is no reason to think that Tillett is referring specifically to Morris here, for Morris died in 1896, a year before the publication of the pamphlet, and evidence suggests that he had softened his stance on trade unionism before his death. Still, there can be no doubt that the Commonweal’s particular flavor of socialism – purist, anti-palliative, anti-parliamentarian – was offensive to Tillett’s political sensibility.That Tillett is nonetheless able to draw so freely on the imaginative resources of News from Nowhere suggests the utopian novel’s success in communicating an expansive sense of interconnection and fellow-feeling among its readers. News from Nowhere influenced Tillett and so many others largely because of its wide circulation beyond the pages of the Commonweal. Indeed, after its appearance there, News appeared in a number of different book editions ranging from the cheap to the expensive, and Morris made a number of important textual changes between the serialized edition and the book edition. These changes are enumerated in Michael Liberman’s account of the textual history of the narrative, but the major effect of the changes, taken together, was to thicken even further the internationalist and visionary qualities that were already apparent in the first version. Further discussion of the “relationship of the new society to the societies of foreign nations,” Liberman notes, is one point of emphasis.The dates of the revolutionary change are also delayed in later editions: “From 1890 to 1891 … Morris seems to have delayed the onset of the revolution some forty years. His belief that a revolution would come quickly seems to have disappeared as 433

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a result of the increasing factionalism among socialist groups.”60 Setting the story even further in the future may have made it seem all the less engaged in present-day politics; on the other hand, Morris modeled the Great Change that brought Nowhere to its socialist state on the recent events of the Paris Commune of 1871, and thus the novel, like The Pilgrims of Hope, injects an element of present-day praxis into its time travel narrative of the socialist future. As with A Dream of John Ball, scholarly ideas of multi-temporality, prophecy, and clairvoyance have been crucial to the history of criticism on News. The long tradition of Marxist work on Utopia and the utopian impulse has been one touchstone. Matthew Beaumont, for example, reads News as a meditation on the problem of the present: Modernity might be said – in the absence of a reliable historical narrative – to mean immersion in the lived moment. Utopian fiction sought to escape this miasmic condition. It purported to be clairvoyant – that is to say, not so much prophetic as simply clear-sighted. … Utopia tried to grasp the fragmentary parts of the present as a singular totality by glimpsing it from an imaginary future.61 It may be helpful to link Beaumont’s claim back to News’s magazine serialization, for recent work on serialized narrative has described its aesthetic and formal qualities in terms of fragmentation and as averse to an aesthetic of wholeness, unity, or totality.62 Indeed, the week before its serialization began, News from Nowhere was announced in the Commonweal in terms that emphasize just such fragmentation:“Next week will begin a new serial story by William Morris entitled: NEWS FROM NOWHERE: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance.”63 This dispersed rather than unified form – “being some chapters” – encouraged a mode of thinking and feeling that was more sprawling and unending, less contained and parochial, than a very tight, compact narrative form might have suggested. The narrative aesthetic thus primed the readers’ feelings and senses for a transhistorical, internationalist vision of socialism grounded in human–natural interconnection. News from Nowhere’s ardent emphasis on ecological assemblage has been apparent ever since its serialization in the Commonweal, but we have not always given due attention to this aspect of the narrative. Clara, one of the denizens of Nowhere, gives a speech at one point that positively foretells the arguments of recent critics of capitalism and ecology such as John Foster Bellamy, who insists that “an ecological community and its environment must therefore be seen as a dialectical whole,” or Jason Moore, who bases his analysis on the fundamental observation that humanity and its environments “are not independent but interpenetrated at every level, from the body to the biosphere.”64 Morris’s Clara, anticipating such analyses, describes life under nineteenth-century capitalism as a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate – “nature,” as people used to call it – as one thing, and mankind as another. It was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make “nature” their slave, since they thought “nature” was something outside them.65 The very word “nature” is so unfamiliar to her way of thinking, as this passage demonstrates, that the narrator uses scare quotes to demonstrate the awkwardness with which she speaks the word. In another passage, William Guest comments to his guide, Dick, on how the people of Nowhere seem to have an exaggerated interest in the weather and the seasons and “look upon the course of the year as a beautiful and interesting drama.” Dick replies,“I can’t look upon it as if I were sitting in a theatre seeing the play going on before me, myself taking no part of it. … 434

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I am part of it all, and feel the pain as well as the pleasure in my own person.” Guest reflects on this “passionate love of the earth” that seems to be universal in Nowhere, a quasi-erotic sense of full immersion in the earth’s cycles of life, death, and reproduction.66 Recent critics have been more attentive to the strongly environmentalist qualities of Morris’s socialism.67 I have discussed elsewhere News’s representation of extraction capitalism and coalsmoke pollution and how this relates to its aesthetics of surface as well as to Morris’s divestment of his inherited mining shares in the years leading up to his conversion to socialism.68 Eddy Kent, focusing on another aspect of Morris’s ecology, has extended News from Nowhere’s cosmopolitanism from the international to the ecological, arguing that its “cosmopolitan view includes the possibility of the natural world being fully incorporated into the political arena.” Examining a number of texts, but drawing heavily on News, he suggests that in Morris’s socialism “the relationship negotiated cosmopolitically is hence not merely between individual humans, but also simultaneously, and more fundamentally, between humans and nature.”69 In her discussion of Morris’s debt to the Paris Commune, Kristin Ross likewise makes a fascinating case for the significance of the apricot orchard that replaces Trafalgar Square in the future society of News from Nowhere; the orchard, for Ross, symbolizes a thread of ecological communism that extends from the Commune to News and “a prefiguration of the ecological direction of Morris’s own thought.” (Of course many would argue that Morris’s thought had been running in ecological directions since his boyhood in Epping Forest.) Just as the Communards tore down the Vendôme Column in Paris, the residents of Morris’s Nowhere have torn down the statue of Admiral Nelson at the center of Trafalgar Square:“beyond merely reiterating the empty space of potentiality achieved by the Communards,” Ross says,“[Morris] goes one step further and creates a new space/time of seasonal rhythms and luxurious bounty.The orchard is the future, but it is one that hearkens back to the chronotope of a society … whose rhythms come from nature.”70

Conclusion In Morris’s important essay “How I Became a Socialist,” which describes his famous conversion to the doctrine of social and economic equality, he emphasizes the deep feelings rather than the ideas or theories that brought him to convert: “the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” How could it be otherwise, he asks, for “a man of my disposition, careless of metaphysics and religion, as well as of scientific analysis, but with a deep love of the earth and the life on it, and a passion for the history of the past of mankind.”71 Looking at his literary contributions to the Commonweal, it is especially evident how these qualities made their way into Morris’s socialism, and how they are expressed in the aesthetic forms through which he chose to communicate his vision of socialism. Using the expansive, sprawling, boundarycrossing narrative modes of the serialized epic, dream vision, and time-travel narrative, Morris’s major literary works for the Commonweal all prime their readers’ affective sensibilities to situate nineteenth-century politics and society in the widest of possible frames historically, internationally, and ecologically. The Pilgrims of Hope, A Dream of John Ball, and News from Nowhere expand their readers’ temporal sense to conceptualize revolt and revolution as part of a long arc of history, and they extend their readers’ sense of the borders of human society to new domains both internationally and ecologically. In all three works, Morris’s aesthetic purpose is to reimagine the human species in terms of a wider sphere of influence that extends backward into the past, forward into the future, sideways to other nations, and upward and downward into the very atmosphere and soil that constitute the earth. Such wide political ambitions could not be achieved through journalism but required the speculative and epic forms that Morris brought into the pages of the Commonweal through his literary contributions. 435

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Notes 1 Deian Hopkin, “The Left-Wing Press and the New Journalism,” Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914, ed. Joel H.Weiner (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988): 232. 2 “The Manifesto of the Socialist League,” Commonweal 1.1 (February 1885): 1. 3 Yeo, Stephen, “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896,” History Workshop, 4 (1977): 5–56. 4 Mark Allison, Imagining Socialism: Aesthetic, Anti-politics and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 5 There are numerous accounts of the formation of the League, but here I am relying mainly on E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1976), and Florence Boos,“The Socialist League, founded 30 December 1884,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, web, accessed 13 February 2017. 6 Justice (6 Oct 1896): 7. 7 Morris wrote to Mahon on 15 January 1886 about the move to the weekly format, describing the financial strain on the paper and wondering if a weekly would do better:“Weekly Commonweal. I am trying to collect some money for it have got some £70 … As to the reorganization the main idea is that we should look after our finances better … and try to get people not to depend on me.The only thing is that I don’t see how we can shorten expenses except by giving up our premises, which I cannot do for 2 years or more as you know. If we can make the Weekly Comm: pay its expenses it would be making some use of the place; … I think it a risk but that it ought to be tried: only I cannot and also should not pledge myself to find the money to pay its losses if they are heavy. A circulation of 3000 would cost us a loss of £3 a week 5000 would bring us home.” The Collected Letters of William Morris, volume 2, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987): 512. 8 Commonweal 1.2 (March 1885): 1. 9 Ibid. 10 In her recent biography of Eleanor Marx, Rachel Holmes notes that “Eleanor was the only woman amongst the ten founding signatories of the Socialist League.And of those ten, she was the most committed and forceful internationalist.” Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx:A Life (New York: Bloomsbury): 235. 11 See my book Slow Print for more on the poetry of the Commonweal and specifically its many translations. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013): 195. 12 Commonweal (December 1890): 388. 13 John Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement, 1921 (Bristol:Thommes, 1994): 179. 14 Bernard Shaw, William Morris as I Knew Him (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co: 1936), 12–13. 15 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics:The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004). 16 The first installment,“The Message of the March Wind,” ran in March 1885 and was followed by installments in April 1885, May 1885, June 1885,August 1885, September 1885, November 1885, January 1886, March 1886, and April 1886; at this point the paper transitioned to a weekly, but the final three installments continued to appear at monthly intervals on 8 May 1886, 5 June 1886, and 3 July 1886. 17 The Pilgrims of Hope Pt. 2,“The Bridge and the Street,” Commonweal 1.3 (April 1885): 20. 18 The Pilgrims of Hope Pt. 10,“Ready to Depart,” Commonweal 2.15 (April 1886): 29. 19 The Pilgrims of Hope Pt. 12,“Meeting the War-Machine,” Commonweal 2.21 (5 June 1886): 75. 20 For a biographical reading of the poem in light of Jane Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s affair, see Michael Holzman,“Propaganda, Passion, and Literary Art in William Morris’s The Pilgrims of Hope,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 24.4 (Winter 1982): 372–93. 21 Florence Boos,“Narrative Design in The Pilgrims of Hope,” in Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, ed. Florence Boos and Carole Silver (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990): 147. Boos’s view of the poem is in contrast to that of Jack Mitchell, who complains that the “conventional theme of the contemporary bourgeois novel, the love-triangle, comes to overlay and emasculate the main drive of the political action.” Jack Mitchell, “Tendencies in Narrative Fiction in the London-based Socialist Press of the 1880s and 1890s,” The Rise of Socialist Fiction, 1880–1914, ed. H. Gustav Klaus (Sussex: Harvester, 1987): 53.

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Literature and Socialism of the Commonweal 22 Michael Liberman, “Major Textual Changes in William Morris’s News from Nowhere,” NineteenthCentury Literature 41.3 (December 1986): 353. 23 Michael Holzman,“Anarchism and Utopia:William Morris’s News from Nowhere,” ELH 51:3 (Autumn 1984): 590-91. 24 Shaw, for example, recalls, “Another grievous task for [Morris] was to keep The Commonweal, the weekly paper of the League, going from number to number with topical paragraphs. Some of the stuff thus produced went to the rock bottom truth of the situation; but it did not come easily and happily.” Shaw, William Morris as I Knew Him, 51–2. John Bruce Glasier similarly recalls, “The task of editorship, as I have said, from the outset was distasteful to [Morris], not so much because, as is commonly supposed, he felt he had no aptitude for journalism, as because from the circumstances of the case it required him to give so much attention to the mere controversial side of party politics. I have not the least doubt that he would have made as good a shape at the craft of journalism as at the many other crafts which he so successfully took up, had the work enticed him. … But in writing for the Commonweal, the official journal of the League, he was expected to write, week after week, about the tiresome and now quite obsolete incidents and controversies of Gladstone-Salisbury politics – a task into which he could put no heart.” Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement, 178. 25 Michael Holzman,“Anarchism and Utopia,” 591. 26 Eleanor Marx Aveling, Introduction to History of the Commune of 1871 by Lissagaray, trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling, 1886 (New York: International, 1898): vii. 27 Anna Vaninskaya, William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010): 84. 28 Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx:A Life (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013): 111. 29 This first poem was also reprinted in Chants for Socialists by William Morris, which was published as a freestanding pamphlet by the London Socialist League Office in 1885, and again in Poems by the Way (London: Kelmscott Press, 1891). 30 William Morris, News from Nowhere, 1890 (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003): 174. 31 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016): 124, 64, 125. Elsewhere, Haraway also references Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist theorist of biological mutualism who was friends with Morris and a great influence on the anarchists of the Socialist League. 32 Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (London:Verso, 2015): 42. 33 The Pilgrims of Hope Pt. 11,“A Glimpse of the Coming Day,” Commonweal 2.17 (8 May 1886): 45. 34 The Pilgrims of Hope Pt. 12,“Meeting the War-Machine,” Commonweal 2.21 (5 June 1886): 75. 35 Ruth Livesey,“Dollie Radford and the Ethical Aesthetics of Fin-de-Siècle Poetry,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 514. 36 Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 197. 37 Ibid., 225. 38 Nicholas Salmon,“A Reassessment of A Dream of John Ball,” The Journal of William Morris Studies 14.2 (Spring 2001): 30. 39 The Collected Letters of William Morris, vol. 2, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984): 326. Manchester, as Morris ironically suggests here, was far from immune to workingclass agitation and certainly had a need of it. John Ball did end up having an influence there. Robert Blatchford, editor of the Manchester socialist newspaper Clarion, considered A Dream of John Ball one of his favorite books, though he complained about its two-dimensionality. In the 2 June 1894 issue of Clarion, he reprinted a section of it under the title “John Ball’s Sermon at the Village Cross.” Robert Blatchford, My Favourite Books (London: Clarion, 1900): 108–9.William Morris, “John Ball’s Sermon at the Village Cross,” Clarion (2 June 1894): 8. 40 William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, in Three Works By William Morris, ed. A. L. Morton (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 100. 41 Ibid., 97. 42 F. Keddell,“An Idyll of the Past,” Justice 222 (14 April 1888): 2. 43 Vaninskaya, William Morris, 43. 44 Morris, A Dream of John Ball, 35. 45 Even before converting to socialism, Morris was developing his ideas of the common good from out of his environmentalist leanings. As E. P.Thompson notes of Morris in 1881, “campaigns for the

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62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71

enforcement of the Smoke Act, societies like the Commons Preservation and the Kyrle Societies which were doing something to prevent the worst desecrations of town and countryside, to all these he was ready to give his public support.” Still, I think Thompson understates the role of this environmental activism in bringing Morris to socialism a few years hence.Thompson, William Morris, 257. Morris, A Dream of John Ball, 37, 39. As Helena Kelly describes,“Between 1795 and 1815 more than 3,000,000 acres of wastes, commons and heaths were enclosed.This figure equates to just under 5,000 square miles, an area about one-tenth the size of England, and it has been calculated that Parliament must have been passing enclosure acts at the rate of one a week. Enclosure led to a wholesale reshaping of a landscape, and by removing access to common land and waste might effectively halve the incomes of local labouring families who had relied on those spaces for fuel, food and small-scale enterprise.” Helena Kelly,“‘Wastes of corn’: Changes in Rural Land Use in Wordsworth’s Early Poetry,” Ecology and the Literature of the British Left:The Red and the Green, ed. John Rignall, H. Gustav Klaus, and Valentine Cunningham (Farnham, Surrey:Ashgate, 2012): 45. Salmon,“A Reassessment,” 30. Morris, A Dream of John Ball, 77. Ibid., 106. Boos,“The Socialist League.” Morris, A Dream of John Ball, 45. This connects to Michelle Weinroth’s reading of John Ball: that the narrator “exhibits the clairvoyance that both John Ball and the nineteenth-century socialist activists will require to glimpse the hazards and pitfalls of struggles lying ahead.With his dialectical vision, he offers heuristic possibilities, stretching the canvas to allow these medieval and Victorian audiences to see more than they can otherwise perceive within the narrow limits of their present.” Michelle Weinroth, “Redesigning the Language of Social Change: Rhetoric,Agency, and the Oneiric in William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball,” Victorian Studies 53.1 (Autumn 2010): 45. Michael Holzman,“Anarchism and Utopia,” 589. Morris, News from Nowhere, 53. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 65. Ben Tillett, Trades Unionism and Socialism, Clarion Pamphlet no. 18 (London: Clarion Newspaper Co., 1897): 15-16. Ibid., 1. Michael Liberman,“Major Textual Changes,” 350, 356. Matthew Beaumont, “News from Nowhere and the Here and Now: Reification and the Representation of the Present in Utopian Fiction,” Victorian Studies 47.1 (2004): 34. See also Rob Breton,“WorkPerfect: William Morris and the Gospel of Work,” Utopian Studies 13.1 (2002): 43–56. I also contend with its utopianism in my book Slow Print. See, for example, Sean O’Sullivan,“Serials and Satisfaction,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 63 (2013): 1–36. Commonweal 6.208 (4 January 1890): 1. John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000): 16. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 28. Morris, News from Nowhere, 219. Ibid., 245. See, for example: Florence S. Boos, “An Aesthetic Ecocommunist: Morris the Red and Morris the Green,” William Morris: Centenary Essays, ed. Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999): 21–46; Regenia Gagnier and Martin Delveaux,“Towards a Global Ecology of the Fin de Siècle,” Literature Compass 3.3 (2006): 572–87; and Patrick O’Sullivan,“‘Morris the Red, Morris the Green’ – A Partial Review,” The Journal of William Morris Studies 19.3 (2011): 22–38. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, “William Morris, Extraction Capitalism, and the Aesthetics of Surface,” Victorian Studies 57.3 (Spring 2015): 395–404. Eddy Kent, “William Morris’s Green Cosmopolitanism,” The Journal of William Morris Studies 19.3 (Winter 2011): 66. Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2015): 60–61. William Morris, “How I Became a Socialist,” 1894, rpt. in Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A. L. Morton (New York: International, 1973): 244.

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Works Cited: Allison, Mark.“Building a Bridge to Nowhere: Morris, the Education of Desire, and the Party of Utopia.” Utopian Studies 29.1 (2018): 44–66. ———. Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Beaumont, Matthew. “News from Nowhere and the Here and Now: Reification and the Representation of the Present in Utopian Fiction.” Victorian Studies 47.1 (2004): 33–54. Blatchford, Robert. My Favourite Books. London: Clarion, 1900. Boos, Florence S. “An Aesthetic Ecocommunist: Morris the Red and Morris the Green.” William Morris: Centenary Essays. Eds. Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999, 21–46. –––––. “Narrative Design in The Pilgrims of Hope.” Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris. Eds. Florence Boos and Carole Silver. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990, 147–66. –––––. “The Socialist League, Founded 30 December 1884.” Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History.Web. Accessed 13 February 2017. Breton, Rob.“WorkPerfect:William Morris and the Gospel of Work.” Utopian Studies 13.1 (2002): 43–56. Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York, NY: Monthly Review, 2000. Gagnier, Regenia and Martin Delveaux.“Towards a Global Ecology of the Fin de Siècle.” Literature Compass 3.3 (2006): 572–87. Glasier, John Bruce. William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement. 1921. Bristol:Thommes, 1994. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Holmes, Rachel. Eleanor Marx:A Life. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2014. Holzman, Michael. “Anarchism and Utopia: William Morris’s News from Nowhere.” ELH 51:3 (Autumn 1984): 589–603. ———. “Propaganda, Passion, and Literary Art in William Morris’s The Pilgrims of Hope.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 24.4 (Winter 1982): 372–93. Hopkin, Deian.“The Left-Wing Press and the New Journalism.” In Papers for the Millions:The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914. Ed. Joel H.Weiner.Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. Janowitz, Anne. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Keddell, F. “An Idyll of the Past.” Justice 222 (14 April 1888): 2. Kelly, Helena. “‘Wastes of corn’: Changes in Rural Land Use in Wordsworth’s Early Poetry.” Ecology and the Literature of the British Left:The Red and the Green. Ed. John Rignall, H. Gustav Klaus, and Valentine Cunningham. Farnham, Surrey:Ashgate, 2012, 45–60. Kent, Eddy.“William Morris’s Green Cosmopolitanism.” The Journal of William Morris Studies 19.3 (Winter 2011): 64–78. Liberman, Michael. “Major Textual Changes in William Morris’s News from Nowhere.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 41.3 (December 1986): 349–56. Livesey, Ruth. “Dollie Radford and the Ethical Aesthetics of Fin-de-Siècle Poetry.” Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 495–517. “The Manifesto of the Socialist League.” Commonweal 1.1 (February 1885): 1. Marx Aveling, Eleanor. Introduction to the History of the Commune of 1871. By Hippolyte-Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray.Trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling. 1886. New York, NY: International, 1898. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. –––––. “William Morris, Extraction Capitalism, and the Aesthetics of Surface.” Victorian Studies 57.3 (Spring 2015): 395–404. Mitchell, Jack. “Tendencies in Narrative Fiction in the London-based Socialist Press of the 1880s and 1890s.” The Rise of Socialist Fiction, 1880–1914. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Sussex: Harvester, 1987, 49–72. Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London:Verso, 2015. Morris,William. The Collected Letters of William Morris.Vol. 1. Ed. Norman Kelvin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. –––––. A Dream of John Ball. In Three Works By William Morris. Ed.A. L. Morton. NewYork, NY: International Publishers, 1986, 33–114. –––––. “How I Became a Socialist.” 1894. Political Writings of William Morris. Ed. A. L. Morton. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1973, 241–46. –––––.“John Ball’s Sermon at the Village Cross.” Clarion (2 June 1894): 8.

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Elizabeth Carolyn Miller –––––. News from Nowhere. 1890. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003. –––––. The Pilgrims of Hope. Serialized in the Commonweal (March–June 1885, August–September 1885, November 1885, January 1886, March–April 1886, 8 May 1886, 5 June 1886, and 3 July 1886). O’Sullivan, Patrick.“‘Morris the Red, Morris the Green’ – A Partial Review.” The Journal of William Morris Studies 19.3 (2011): 22–38. O’Sullivan, Sean.“Serials and Satisfaction.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 63 (2013): 1–36. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics:The Distribution of the Sensible.Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York, NY: Continuum, 2004. Ross, Kristin. Communal Luxury:The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso, 2015. Salmon, Nicholas. “A Reassessment of A Dream of John Ball.” The Journal of William Morris Studies 14.2 (Spring 2001): 29–38. Shaw, Bernard. William Morris as I Knew Him. New York, NY: Dodd, 1936. Thompson, E. P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Pantheon, 1976. Tillett, Ben. Trades Unionism and Socialism. Clarion Pamphlet No. 18. London: Clarion, 1897. Vaninskaya, Anna. William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Weinroth, Michelle. “Redesigning the Language of Social Change: Rhetoric, Agency, and the Oneiric in William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball.” Victorian Studies 53.1 (Autumn 2010): 37–63. Yeo, Stephen. “A New Life:The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896.” History Workshop Journal 4 (1977): 5–56.

Further Reading: Allison, Mark. Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Beaumont, Matthew. “News from Nowhere and the Here and Now: Reification and the Representation of the Present in Utopian Fiction.” Victorian Studies 47.1 (2004): 33–54. –––––. Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Bevir, Mark. The Making of British Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011. Boos, Florence S. “An Aesthetic Ecocommunist: Morris the Red and Morris the Green.” William Morris: Centenary Essays. Eds. Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999, 21–46. –––––.“‘The Banners of the Spring to Be’:The Dialectical Pattern of Morris’s Later Poetry.” English Studies 81 (2000): 14–40. –––––.“Narrative Design in The Pilgrims of Hope.” Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris. Eds. Florence Boos and Carole Silver. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990, 147–66. –––––.“The Socialist League, Founded 30 December 1884.” Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Web.Accessed 13 February 2017. Boos, Florence S. and Carole Silver, eds. Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Boos, Florence S. and William Boos. “News from Nowhere and Victorian Socialist-Feminism.” NineteenthCentury Contexts 14.1 (1990): 3–32. Brantlinger, Patrick. “‘News from Nowhere’: Morris’s Socialist Anti-Novel.” Victorian Studies 19.1 (September 1975): 35–49. Breton, Rob.“WorkPerfect:William Morris and the Gospel of Work.” Utopian Studies 13.1 (2002): 43–56. Buzard, James.“Ethnography as Interruption: News from Nowhere, Narrative, and the Modern Romance of Authority.” Victorian Studies 40.3 (Spring 1997): 445–74. Coolsen, James Gordon. The Evolution of Selected Major English Socialist Periodicals, 1883–1889. Unpublished Dissertation,The American University,Washington, DC, 1973. Faulkner, Peter and Peter Preston, eds. William Morris: Centenary Essays. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999. Frye, Northrop. “The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris.” Studies in Romanticism 21.3 (Fall 1982): 303–18. Glasier, John Bruce. William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement. 1921. Bristol: Thommes, 1994. Hanson, Ingrid. William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890. London:Anthem, 2014.

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Literature and Socialism of the Commonweal Holland, Owen.“William Morris’s Utopian Optics.” Victorian Network 5.1 (Summer 2013): 44–64. Holzman, Michael. “Anarchism and Utopia:William Morris’s News from Nowhere.” English Literray History 51:3 (Autumn 1984): 589–603. –––––l. “Propaganda, Passion, and Literary Art in William Morris’s The Pilgrims of Hope.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 24.4 (Winter 1982): 372–93. Janowitz, Anne. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kent, Eddy.“William Morris’s Green Cosmopolitanism.” The Journal of William Morris Studies 19.3 (Winter 2011): 64–78. Liberman, Michael. “Major Textual Changes in William Morris’s News from Nowhere.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 41.3 (December 1986): 349–56. Livesey, Ruth. “Socialism.” Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. MacCarthy, Fiona. William Morris:A Life for Our Time. London: Faber, 1994. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn.“Literature and the Late-Victorian Radical Press.” Literature Compass 7.8 (August 2010): 702–12. –––––. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. –––––.“Sustainable Socialism:William Morris on Waste.” Journal of Modern Craft 4.1 (March 2011): 7–25. –––––. “William Morris, Extraction Capitalism, and the Aesthetics of Surface.” Victorian Studies 57.3 (Spring 2015): 395–404. –––––. “William Morris, Print Culture, and the Politics of Aestheticism.” Modernism/Modernity 15.3 (September 2008): 477–502. Mitchell, Jack. “Tendencies in Narrative Fiction in the London-based Socialist Press of the 1880s and 1890s.” The Rise of Socialist Fiction, 1880–1914. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Sussex: Harvester, 1987, 49–72. Mutch, Deborah. English Socialist Periodicals, 1880–1900: A Reference Source. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005. O’Sullivan, Patrick.“‘Morris the Red, Morris the Green’ – A Partial Review.” The Journal of William Morris Studies 19.3 (2011): 22–38. Pierson, Stanley. British Socialism:The Journey from Fantasy to Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Ross, Kristin. Communal Luxury:The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso, 2015. Salmon, Nicholas. “A Reassessment of A Dream of John Ball.” The Journal of William Morris Studies 14.2 (Spring 2001): 29–38. –––––. “The Revision of A Dream of John Ball.” Journal of the William Morris Society 10.2 (Spring 1993): 15–17. Shaw, Bernard. William Morris as I Knew Him. New York, NY: Dodd: 1936. Thompson, E. P.William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Pantheon, 1976. Vaninskaya, Anna. William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Waithe, Marcus. William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2006. Waters, Chris. British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Weinroth, Michelle. “Redesigning the Language of Social Change: Rhetoric, Agency, and the Oneiric in William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball.” Victorian Studies 53.1 (Autumn 2010): 37–63. Yeo, Stephen. “A New Life:The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896.” History Workshop Journal 4 (1977): 5–56.

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19 DESIRE AND NECESSITY: WILLIAM MORRIS AND NATURE Patrick O’Sullivan

Introduction In a world where the words of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl can generate a global protest movement,1 as a result of which serious scientific reports of ‘climate breakdown’2 and mass extinction of species3 can bring millions of her fellows (and their parents and grandparents) out on the street, it may seem willfully idiosyncratic still to believe that the words of a middle-aged, middleclass,Victorian man who died some one hundred and twenty-five years ago could possibly retain any relevance to the problems of today. However, in several countries, the left-wing response to just these problems has involved development of some kind of Green New Deal:4 programmes which seek to reverse not only current runaway climate change, accelerating habitat destruction and overwhelming biological extinction, but also the increased poverty, inequality and insecurity caused by forty years of Neo-liberal economic policies associated with ThatcherismReaganomics, globalisation and post-2008 austerity. Such programmes are predicated on the principle that ‘the liberation of nature and the liberation of human beings are one and the same’, and that therefore all solutions to environmental problems must begin with social justice. And as William Morris himself came to same conclusion in or about 1883, it is precisely in this discussion that his ideas may be about to demonstrate their greatest relevance. Modern environmentalism (Table 19.1), of which William Morris is often cited as an ancestor, probably began with the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s seminal examination of the harmful ecological effects of chemically-persistent,‘broad-spectrum’ pesticides.5 However, as an ideology (if not always as a movement), modern environmentalism has from the outset been dogged by a major dichotomy between two ‘modes’ of operation: technocentrism – the realm of the environmental professional – and ecocentrism, the province of the environmental enthusiast. In technocentrism, nature is known as ‘the environment’, and human beings are considered separate from nature. Instead, nature is seen as ‘neutral stuff ’, to which professionals can apply scientific and managerial techniques in order to enhance human wellbeing. In contrast, in ecocentrism, ‘the environment’ is called ‘nature’, a ‘natural order’ of which we are inseparably a component. Ecocentrism therefore ‘preaches the virtues of reverence, humility, responsibility and care’ in pursuit of permanence, stability, diversity and homeostasis.Whereas technocentrism concentrates mostly on means, ecocentrism is much more concerned with ends, and is therefore 442

William Morris, Nature, and Desire Table 19.1 ‘Modes’ of modern environmentalism and their ideological underpinnings Mode

Technocentrism (‘resource optimists’)

Ecocentrism (‘resource pessimists’)

Submode

Ideology

Cornucopians (‘Pseudo-environmentalists’)

Pro-growth Resources not limited Free market solutions

Accommodaters (‘Pale Greens’)

Growth can and must continue, but only with careful, sciencebased resource management

Authoritarians Mainstream Greens (‘Dark Greens’) (‘Green greens’) Share many ideas with Dark Greens and Gaians, but much more liberal Gaians regarding political organisation and personal lifestyle

Limits to growth Population control Biorights Intrinsic value of Nature

Ecosocialists (‘Red Greens’) Eco-anarchists (‘Black? Greens’) Ecofeminists (all other forms of environmentalism patriarchal)

Liberation of nature and of human beings one and the same.‘Soft’ technology

Gaia, Deep Ecology

as much a moral position as an ideological one,6 of which Extinction Rebellion is only the most recent manifestation. This terminology has been expanded on by several authors, most notably David Pepper.7 Here, technocentrists are divided into Cornucopians, who adopt a growth-orientated position; and Accommodaters, who seek a managed balance between economic growth and environmental sustainability. Ecocentrics are likewise differentiated into Mainstream Greens, who share a wide range of principles and ideas with other green groups; Dark Greens, who adopt a more authoritarian, quasi-NeoDarwinian position regarding growth, especially that of the human population;8 and Gaians, who are similarly biocentric in focus, but who emphasise James Lovelock’s Gaia theory and the more mystical aspects of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess’s Deep Ecology.9 However, each of these ‘sub-modes’ share a fundamental, implicit view of what I will term ‘scarcity’: not that physical scarcity of resources which was the original preoccupation of the environmental movement, but ‘economic scarcity’, a phenomenon which depends not on supply,10 but on demand – the (oft-supposed innate) tendency of human beings to consume ever-increasing numbers of goods and services, and hence materials.Those greens who accept ‘scarcity’ (‘resource pessimists’; Mainstream Greens,Authoritarians, Gaians), especially those who consider it innate (Dark Greens), become preoccupied with ‘limits’, and therefore invariably end up advocating authoritarian solutions – extreme population control, and/or highly regulated ‘spaceship’ economies – to the ‘resource crisis’. In contrast, of those who reject ‘scarcity’ (‘resource optimists’), Cornucopians believe that, as resources are not limited, indefinite economic expansion can (and must!) continue, whereas Accommodaters, as their name implies, 443

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maintain that while continued economic growth is a necessary condition for survival of modern, progressive, democratic, liberal society, such growth must be closely monitored and carefully managed, so that key species, environments and ‘ecosystem services’11 are not jeopardised. Among ‘resource pessimists’, there is however a small minority of ‘red-greens’ or (broadly) ‘ecosocialists’,12 who, though pessimistic about the Earth’s capacity to support continued economic growth, regard this problem as one of demand for resources, rather than supply. For ‘red-greens’, resources are limited not because of any (mythical!) innate human capacity to over-consume, but owing to the in-built tendency of some economic systems, especially capitalism, to overproduce. Therefore, their solution to the ‘resource crisis’ is the overthrow of capitalism, and indeed, as we have seen, the liberation of nature and the liberation of human beings are one and the same.13 The origins of ‘red-green’ thought lie in the work and ideas of several prominent nineteenthcentury political radicals, most notably Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris. For Pepper, Morris is ‘the most obviously green of the Victorian utopian socialists’, in that: (he) elaborated virtually all of the themes ‘discovered’ by radical environmentalists over the past quarter-century about a century before they did … so that he is ultimately the prophet of an eco-socialist future rather than a romantic ecotopian past.14 And Peter Marshall considers that: What makes Morris an advanced ecological thinker … is his conscious wish ‘to keep life simple, to forgo some of the power over nature won by past ages in order to be more human and less mechanical, and willing to sacrifice something to this end’.15 It is in News from Nowhere (1890–91) that Morris’s red-green ideas are most fully realised, and it is that book which provides us with a ‘blueprint’ in which the likely nature of the economy, polity and social structure of an ecological society are most fully explored.16 By basing his model on one key, fundamental economic change – abolition of the profit motive – Morris was able to explain in practical terms17 precisely how and in what ways human impact upon the Earth could be reduced in a truly free and democratic society, without resort to the kind of authoritarianism so beloved of the ‘survivalist’ environmentalists of the late 1960s-early 1970s. In this, he follows a key red-green principle:‘local production for local need’.18 Therefore, despite Morris’s tremendous influence on design, literature, and politics, his most important contribution to human thought may be yet to come, in that, in the shape of News from Nowhere, he also knew ‘how to save the world’ from ecological ruin without resorting to totalitarianism. How Morris arrived at this position is the subject of the rest of this account.

Development of Morris’s ‘Green’ Thought Some years ago, I outlined a number of green ideas embedded in News from Nowhere (Table 19.2).19 Basically, as Peter Marshall recorded, some eighty years before such terms became common currency, Morris described the likely social and environmental impact of implementing such ideas as simplicity, smallness, decentralisation, production only for need, a change in the nature of work, the use of alternative technology and appreciation of the inherent value of nature, all of which became prominent within modern environmentalism. How Morris arrived at this position may be explored by investigating a selection of his lectures.20 These provide a narrative to the development of his political ideas over the last twenty years or so of his life, from the very first (‘The Lesser Arts’, 1877) to one of the last (‘Makeshift’, 444

William Morris, Nature, and Desire Table 19.2 ‘Green’ themes and ideas detectable in News from Nowhere Theme

Predicted Consequence

Smallness, simplicity of lifestyle

Reduction of human impact on adjacent ecological systems and on demand for resources Recovery by local communities of control over their own resources Reduction of demand for physical resources and/or pollution

Decentralisation, local autonomy Wastefulness of modern industrial production, pollution as ‘external cost’ Need to produce long-lasting goods of high quality Production for need, not wants

Reduction of human impact on nature in terms of resource demand and pollution Shift in the work paradigm, production for need From ‘Useless Toil’ to ‘Useful Work’; work as pleasure only Alternative technology Truly alternative technology leads to increase in personal and local autonomy Nature valuable in itself (inherent value) Respect for nature as entity Rewilding

Importance of wild nature

Agroecology, permaculture

Use of ecologically benign food and other production systems Local production part of an established regional tradition Redrawing of human institutional boundaries to respect natural divisions Opposition to globalisation of production leading to decline of local production and communities Of both human beings and of nature

Locality Bioregionalism Anti-globalisation Liberation

1894). I will discuss these under two headings: (1) those lectures given before January 1883, when Morris is believed to have joined the Democratic Federation;21 and (2) those he gave subsequently, having embraced Socialism.Thus I shall discuss the development of Morris’s ‘green’ ideas either side of his crossing ‘The River of Fire’, and becoming, according to E. P.Thompson, ‘the first creative artist of major stature anywhere in the world to take his stand, consciously and without shadow of compromise, with the revolutionary working class.’22

I. Before 1883: Desire In lectures given before 1883, Morris identified several key green ideas and concepts, but remained uncertain as to the solutions to the problems he described.Thus in modern terms, he was still, at this stage, an unreconstructed ‘Green-Green’.There is even reference to the importance of ‘limits’: the latest danger which civilisation is threatened with, a danger of her own breeding: [is] that (humans) in struggling towards the complete attainment of all the luxuries of life … should deprive their whole [species] of all the beauty of life: … that … in striving to attain to a complete mastery over nature, [we] should destroy her simplest and widest-spread gifts.23 445

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The source of this danger is ‘competitive commerce’, the economic system which places money above everything and ignores the ‘externalities’ produced by heedless exploitation of nature: Is money to be gathered? [C]ut down the pleasant trees among the houses, pull down ancient and venerable buildings for the money that a few square yards of London dirt will fetch; blacken rivers, hide the sun and poison the air with smoke and worse, and it’s nobody’s business to see to it or mend it: that is all that modern commerce, the counting-house forgetful of the workshop, will do for us herein.24 What is being destroyed is not without value of its own.What it possesses is ‘inherent value’: the ability of a natural item to contribute to human life because it possesses beauty, historical importance, or cultural significance.25 Therefore it is our duty as a species not to destroy that value: there is one duty obvious to us all; it is that we should … guard the natural beauty of the earth: we ought to look upon it as a crime, … to mar the natural beauty, which is the property of all … ; and scarce less than a crime to look on and do nothing while others are marring it.26 Morris’s initial solution to this problem is simplicity, another key green concept: Simplicity of life, begetting simplicity of taste, … simplicity everywhere, in the palace as well as in the cottage.27 But allied to this is a more powerful idea, prefiguring the ‘reddening’ of Morris’s early greengreen ideas: production ‘only for need’. if our wants are few, we shall have … little chance of being driven … into injustice; and if we are fixed in the principle of giving [all workers their] due, how can our selfrespect bear that we should give too much to ourselves?28 Such a change would then produce another fundamental cultural shift: a transformation in the nature of Work. This topic is explored throughout Morris’s essays, and he writes extensively of it in these early examples. Thus: the greatest of all evils, … [is] the greater part of the population being engaged for … the most part of their lives in work, which at the best cannot interest them, or develop their best faculties, and at the worst (and that is the commonest, too) is mere unmitigated slavish toil, only … wrung out of them by the sternest compulsion.29 This is because of the commercial system – a ‘race to the bottom’ to reduce costs and increase (or maintain) profits – and especially the division of labour so beloved of Adam Smith. He identifies three kinds of work: Mechanical Toil, whose purpose is not the making of wares … but the increase of the riches of the (employer) who sets (the worker) to work; Intelligent Work, which is more or less mechanical … but … over which … [workers have] at least some control; and Imaginative Work, which is altogether individual; … [and] is all pleasure. 446

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Unfortunately, under competitive commerce, ‘Mechanical Toil has swallowed Intelligent Work and all the lower part of Imaginative Work,’ and soon ‘Mechanical Toil will sweep over all the handiwork of [humanity], and art will be gone’.30 Instead, Morris insists that ‘the chief duty of the civilised world to-day is to set about making labour happy for all, to do its utmost to minimise the amount of unhappy labour’.31 However, he is not sure how this can be achieved:‘I have no infallible nostrum to cure an evil whose growth is centuries old.’ Does the answer lie in technology? He is sceptical. What? Machines then. … at last pretty nearly everything … will be made by machines. I don’t see why it should not be done. … I myself have boundless faith in their capacity. I believe machines can do everything – except make works of art.32 Thus at this time Morris had not yet developed his own idea of a truly alternative technology. Much of his early thought is summarised in ‘The Lesser Arts of Life’ (1882), which reads as a kind of ‘green-green’ (Tab1e 1) mission statement: There is a vast deal of labour spent in supplying civilized [people] with things … [we have] come to consider needful, and which, as a rule, [we] will not do without. Much of that labour is grievous and oppressive; but since there is much more of grievous labour in the world than there used to be, it is clear that there is more than there need be … … what therefore can we do towards … reducing the amount of grievous labour: first, by abstaining from multiplying our material wants unnecessarily, and [second], by doing our best to introduce the elements of hope and pleasure into all the labour with which we have anything to do … … to do with as few things as we can, and … see to it that these things are the work of free people and not of slaves; … if we are to fulfil these duties we must take active interest in the arts of life which supply (our) material needs, and know something about them, so that we may be able to distinguish slaves' work from free people’s, and to decide what we may accept and what we must renounce.33 But at this time, Morris was still politically a Liberal, and his essays are still full of references to ‘the progress of civilisation’.As such, they lack a socialist perspective: I do not blame either one class or another in this matter, I blame all.34 His solution at this stage is therefore reform of the existing commercial system, which he still believes cannot possibly produce such problems on purpose: civilisation cannot mean at heart to produce evils … such losses therefore must be accidents of civilisation, produced by its carelessness, not its malice; and we, if we be men and not machines, must try to amend them: or civilisation itself will be undone.35

II. From 1883: Necessity Morris joined the Democratic Federation, an openly socialist organisation, some time during mid-January 1883. Henceforth, his lectures sought to enlist people not just to the cause of 447

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Art, but of Socialism (and indeed later, what he termed ‘Communism’).As he later explained, by the summer of 1882 he was ready to join any political group which termed itself socialist, and his conversion led to an explosion of lectures and other speeches over the next five years, so that some of his most celebrated works date from the period 1883–87. In the first (‘Art, Wealth & Riches’, 6 March 1883), he could not quite bring himself to declare openly for socialism, describing himself as one of ‘a very small minority’ whose ‘business … is to spread discontent’. That he was correct to be wary is borne out by the reception to the next (‘Art under Plutocracy’, 7 November 1883) in which he stated:‘For I am “one of the people called Socialists” ’.36 The same themes occur as found in earlier lectures, but the context is no longer Progress, but: the antagonism of classes which began in all simplicity between the master and the chattel slave of ancient society, and was continued between the feudal lord and the serf of mediaeval society, has gradually become the contention between the capitalist developed from the workman of the last-named period, and the wage-earner.37 Again, Nature is seen not just as a set of resources for our particular use, but a source of inherent value which it is our duty to protect. how many acres of common land has riches robbed the country, even in this century? Were not the brown moors and the meadows, the clear streams and the sunny skies, wealth? … our civilization is passing like a blight, daily growing heavier and more poisonous, over the whole face of the country, … our green fields and clear waters, nay the very air we breathe are turned not to gold … but to dirt. To keep the air pure and the rivers clean, to take some pains to keep the meadows and tillage as pleasant as reasonable use will allow them to be … nay, even to leave here and there some piece of waste or mountain … free from fence or tillage … is it too much to ask?38 Even in one of his last lectures (‘Makeshift’, 18 November 1894), he argues: we must needs turn the fairness of the earth in the very countryside itself into a makeshift of what it should be. … I am not here thinking only of the unspeakable horrors of the manufacturing districts in which the face of the country has been destroyed, but rather of the vulgarization of the country … all the thousand and one ways in which we belie our foolish boast of our wealth and our common-sense.39 The cause of all this, however, is no longer more generally ‘Competitive Commerce’, but specifically, Profit: It is profit which draws (people) into enormous unmanageable aggregations called towns, … profit which crowds them up … into quarters without gardens or open spaces; profit which won’t take the most ordinary precautions against wrapping a whole district in a cloud of sulphurous smoke; which turns beautiful rivers into filthy sewers, which condemns all but the rich to live in houses idiotically cramped and confined … and at the worst in houses for whose wretchedness there is no name.40 448

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Morris continues to argue for ‘local production for local need’ and simplicity of lifestyle. His model for the first is the guild system of early fourteenth-century England, in which: there was little competition in the markets, wares being made in the first instance for domestic consumption, and only the overplus of what was wanted at home close to the place of production ever coming into the market or requiring any one to come and go between the producer and consumer.41 Thus,‘[i]n other times of the world’s history if a thing was not to be had, people did without it, and there was an end’.42 As for simplicity, he believed that adoption of a simpler lifestyle would not only provide a healthier human environment as well as reduce or eradicate many other ecological problems, but, along with other aspects of Socialism – cooperation, a sense of community – would also lead to moral change, an idea which E.P.Thompson considered a key component of Morris’s thought:43 simplicity of life … which some would call stagnation, would give real life to the great mass of [hu]mankind, and … be a well-spring of happiness. It would raise them … to a higher level of life, until the world began to be peopled, not with commonplace people, but with honest folk not sharply conscious of their superiority as ‘intellectual’ persons now are, but self-respecting and respecting the personality of others, because they would feel themselves useful and happy, that is alive.44 Meanwhile, under Profit, technology has become an instrument of oppression, a reversal of its original role of alleviating human effort: the great machines of our epoch … act on labour in a threefold way: first they get rid of many hands; next they lower the quality of the labour required, so that skilled work is wanted less … thirdly, the improvement in them forces the workers to work harder while they are at work.45 This is because: those who invented the machines, … did not aim at the saving of labour in the sense of reducing the labour which each (worker) had to do, but … aimed … at producing the utmost possible amount of goods which they could sell at a profit.46 “Labour-saving” machines therefore only reduce the skilled labourer to the ranks of the unskilled, … increase the … precariousness of life among the workers and … intensify the labour of those who serve the machines (as slaves their masters). All this they do by the way, while [they] pile up the profits of the employers. But under Socialism, a true ‘alternative technology’ – one which increases personal and local autonomy, and the pleasure of work – could develop: In a true society these miracles of ingenuity would be … used for minimizing the amount of time spent in unattractive labour, which by their means might be so reduced 449

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as to be but a very light burden on each individual. All the more as these machines would most certainly be very much improved when it was no longer a question as to whether their improvement would ‘pay’ the individual, but rather whether it would benefit the community.47 However, Morris’s main preoccupation is still the nature of human labour and its degradation under capitalism. Thus: the eighteenth century perfected the system of labour which took the place of the mediaeval system, under which [workers] individually carried [out] … work all through its various stages from … first to … last. This new system, the first change in industrial production since the Middle Ages, is known as the system of division of labour, wherein, … the unit of labour is a group, not a [person]; the individual … in this system is kept life-long at the performance of some task quite petty in itself, and which he [or she] soon masters, and having mastered it has nothing more to do but to go on increasing [their] speed of hand under the spur of competition with [their] fellows, until [they] become the perfect machine …48 And the immediate cause of this degrading labour which oppresses so large a part of our people is the system of the organization of labour, which is the chief instrument of the great power of modern Europe, competitive commerce. 49 Under this system, [workers] are collected in huge factories, in which labour is divided and sub-divided, till [workers are] perfectly helpless … without those above to feed [their] work, … Not only [are they] not asked to put [their] individuality into [their] share of the work, but (they are] not allowed to. [They are] but part of a machine, and [have] but one unvarying set of tasks to do; and when [they have] once learned these, the more regularly and with the less thought [they do] them, the more valuable [they are].The work turned out by this system is speedily done, and cheap to buy. … but it is of necessity utterly unintelligent, and has no sign of humanity.50 The problem is, however, that: the captain of industry … thinks not of the wares with which he has to provide the world-market, but of profit to be made from them, so the instrument which he employs as an adjunct to his machinery, the artisan, does not think of the wares which he (and the machine) produces as wares, but simply as livelihood for himself.51 As a result, whilst people work throughout the civilized world as laboriously as ever they did, they have lost … the natural solace of that labour; a solace … they once had, and always should have, the opportunity of expressing their own thoughts … by means of that very labour, by means of that daily work which nature or long custom, a second nature, does indeed require of them.52 450

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Human beings are, of course, obliged to work in order to obtain their livelihood, but ‘unless we find some means to make all work more or less pleasurable, we shall never escape from the great tyranny of the modern world’. Instead, ‘our aim should be to add to the incentive of necessity for working, the incentive of pleasure and interest in the work itself ’.53 Morris therefore reiterates that work, although a necessity, should not be turned into drudgery, but (following Ruskin) should instead be made (or rather re-made) pleasurable. He therefore puts forward three propositions, without which, he believes,‘[A]ll other work … is worthless; … slaves’ work – mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil’.These are: It is right and necessary that (everyone) should have work to do (which is) worth doing, (and) of itself pleasant to do; (and which should be) done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious. Nothing should be made by (human) labour which is not worth making; or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers. No one who is willing to work should ever fear want of such employment as would earn for (them) all due necessaries of mind and body.54 The first two, says Morris, are a direct challenge to the system of labour in capitalist countries, so that if Society could or would admit them, the face of the world would be changed.Together they imply that there are three ‘due necessaries’ for a good citizen: honourable and fitting work, decency of surroundings and adequate leisure. In particular, Morris makes the link between human liberation and the liberation of Nature: our houses must be well built, clean and healthy; … there must be abundant garden space in our towns, and our towns must not eat up the fields and natural features of the country; nay I demand even that there be left waste places and wilds in it, or romance and poetry – that is Art – will die out amongst us. … our houses must be stoutly and properly built, but also … ornamented duly: that the fields be not only left for cultivation, but also that they be not spoilt by it any more than a garden is spoilt: no one for instance to be allowed to cut down, for mere profit, trees whose loss would spoil a landscape: neither on any pretext should people be allowed to darken the daylight with smoke, to befoul rivers, or to degrade any spot of earth with squalid litter and brutal wasteful disorder.55 Finally, Morris highlights three kinds of waste inherent in capitalist production. First there is the overproduction which ensues from competition: a certain market is demanding goods; there are, say, a hundred manufacturers who make that kind of goods, and every one of them would if he could keep that market to himself, and struggles desperately to get as much of it as he can, with the obvious result that presently the thing is overdone, and the market is glutted, … Can’t you see the waste of it – waste of labour, skill, cunning, waste of life in short?56 Second, is the production of luxuries: The grossly unequal distribution of wealth forces the rich to get rid of their surplus money by means of various forms of folly and luxury, which means further waste of labour.57 451

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‘These things’, says Morris,‘I will [forever] refuse to call wealth: they are not wealth, but waste’. Third: there is even a sadder industry yet, which is forced on many, very many, of our workers – the making of wares which are necessary to them and their brethren, because they are an inferior class.58 In short, in one way or another, all the industry of the country is wasted. Beyond even that, there is of course the point that in none of the above occupations are workers paid the full value of their labour.This is because the labourers cannot work until they have obtained leave from their masters to do so, which the latter will only grant on the condition that the workers will yield up to them all they produce over and above their livelihood. … the whole of the working class is compelled to give an hour’s work for less than an hour’s just pay, that is, for less than the amount of wealth produced by that work. … of the difference between what (workers need) to live on and the value of the wealth (they produce), a very small portion goes to (them), the main part being claimed by (their) masters as profit, rent, and interest … … that surplus value has in our days grown so enormous that nobody ever dreamed of the workman receiving a proportionate share of it. 59 In these later lectures, Morris can therefore be seen developing the ideas which culminate in News from Nowhere.60 Several delivered between 1886 and 1887 (‘True and False Society’,‘What Socialists Want’,‘The Society of the Future’) contain passages which might actually have come from that book. Here he explores (1) the necessary conditions for Socialism, (2) their moral and ecological implications and (3) the true nature of the Socialist polity.Thus, everyone should have free access to the means of production of wealth – the raw material and the stored-up force produced by labour; in other words, the land, plant, and stock of the community, … The first step … is to get the means of making labour fruitful, the Capital, including the land, machinery, factories, &c., into the hands of the community to be used for the good of all alike, so that we might all work at ‘supplying’ the real ‘demands’ of each and all … instead of … working for profit. As a result,‘there would be plenty of wealth in such a community to satisfy all reasonable needs’.61 Then, (We) shall find that we have, as aforesaid, a mass of labour-power available, which will enable us to live as we please within reasonable limits. The first and most obvious

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necessities will be so easily provided for … that we shall have time to look round and consider what we really do want, … and … what (we) really do need.62 When that happens, people ‘will … refuse to … waste their lives in ceaseless and hopeless toil; and when it does come, their instincts for beauty and imagination (will be) set free along with them’.63 They will then set about organizing the real society which even now exists under the authority which usurps that title.That true society of loved and lover, parent and child, friend and friend, the society of well-wishers, of reasonable people conscious of the aspirations of humanity and of the duties we owe to it through one another – this society, I say, is held together and exists by its own inherent right and reason, … … a Community striving for the happiness of the human (species): each … striving for the happiness of the whole and therefore for (their) own through the whole. Surely such a community would develop the best (human) qualities … and make such a world of it as it is difficult to conceive of now:64 As for Nature: the land we love (will) no longer be treated as here a cinder-heap, and there a game preserve, but as the fair green garden of Northern Europe, which (no-one) on any pretence should be allowed to befoul or disfigure.65 Being no longer driven to death by anxiety and fear, we should have time to avoid disgracing the earth with filth and squalor, and accidental ugliness would disappear along with that which was the mere birth of fantastic perversity.66 And in our own environment: every … family should be generously lodged; … every child should be able to play in a garden close to the place (their) parents live in; that the houses should by their obvious decency and order be ornaments to Nature, not disfigurements of it.67 aggregation of the population … will also come to an end; and the huge manufacturing districts will be broken up, and nature heal the horrible scars that (our) heedless greed and stupid terror have made: mere cheating and flunky centres like the horrible muck-heap in which we dwell (London, to wit) could be got rid of easier still; and a few pleasant villages on the side of the Thames might mark the place of that preposterous piece of folly once called London.68 Consequently: what a changed world it would be … how full the streets would be of pleasant faces instead of those worn and dragged and anxious features which are our wear now-adays; how merry we should be over our work; how kind would be our intercourse with each other; how delightful, how rich with beauty and pleasure our contemplation of the past and the present, and our hopes for the future?69

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III. The Polity of Nowhere One aspect of Morris’s thought which some biographers have neglected is his idea of the appropriate polity of a Socialist society. This was not parliamentary democracy, or even ‘State Socialism’, but a ‘Federation of Independent Communities’ living in harmonious federation with each other, managing their own affairs by the free consent of their members, yet acknowledging some kind of centre whose function it would be to protect the principle whose practice the communities should carry out.70 Such communities would hold all wealth in common, and would use that wealth for satisfying the needs of each member, only exacting from each that (they) should do (their) best according to (their) capacity towards the production of the common wealth.71 And would operate for furthering the organization of labour, by ascertaining the real demand for commodities, and so avoiding waste: for organizing the distribution of goods, the migration of persons – in short, the friendly intercommunication of people whose interests are common.72 Last, in ‘The Society of the Future’ (1887) Morris returns to a more ecological perspective, and gives an account of Socialism which clearly served as the outline for News from Nowhere: It is a society conscious of a wish to keep life simple, to forgo some of the power over nature won by past ages in order to be more human and less mechanical, and willing to sacrifice something to this end. It would be divided into small communities varying much within the limits allowed by due social ethics, but without rivalry between each other, looking with abhorrence at the idea of a holy race. Being determined to be free, and therefore contented with a life not only simpler but even rougher than the life of slave-owners, division of labour would be habitually limited: men (and women too, of course) would do their work and take their pleasure in their own persons, and not vicariously: the social bond would be habitually and instinctively felt, so that there would be no need to be always asserting it by set forms: the family of blood-relationship would melt into that of the community and of humanity. The pleasures of such a society would be founded on the free exercise of the senses and passions of a healthy human animal, so far as this did not injure the other individuals of the community and so offend against social unity: no one would be ashamed of humanity or ask for anything better than its due development. But from this healthy freedom would spring up the pleasures of intellectual development, which the men (sic) of civilisation so foolishly try to separate from sensuous life, and to glorify at its expense. (People) would follow knowledge and the creation of beauty for their own sakes, and not for the enslavement of their fellows, and they would be rewarded by finding their most necessary work grow interesting and beautiful under their hands without their being conscious of it.73 454

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IV. ‘Red-green’ Socialism in Nowhere outlined In the economy of Nowhere, money is no longer needed and has been abolished. Goods are made locally, for local need only, and services (e.g. ferries, refuse collection) are provided free by people who take pleasure in that kind of work (which they do not perform full time). In local markets, goods are freely available on the basis of need.There is no point in taking more; tomorrow the market will be full again. Likewise, in the polity of Nowhere, centralised government has been abolished in favour of decentralisation of power to local community assemblies (folk motes). In such cities as remain, these assemblies represent local neighbourhoods, in the countryside, the village or ‘commune’. Decision-making is by the ‘consent of the minority’, with voting as a last resort: let us take one of our units of management, a commune, or a ward, or a parish … In such a district, as you would call it, some neighbours think that something ought to be done or undone: a new town-hall built; a clearance of inconvenient houses; or say a stone bridge substituted for some ugly old iron one, – there you have undoing and doing in one. Well, at the next ordinary meeting of the neighbours, or Mote, as we call it, according to the ancient tongue of the times before bureaucracy, a neighbour proposes the change and of course, if everybody agrees, there is an end of discussion except about details. … But supposing the affair proposed and seconded, if a few of the neighbours disagree to it, if they think that the beastly iron bridge will serve a little longer and they don’t want to be bothered with building a new one just then, they don’t count heads that time, but put off the formal discussion to the next Mote; and meantime arguments pro and con are flying about, and some get printed, so that everybody knows what is going on; and when the Mote comes together again there is a regular discussion and at last a vote by show of hands. If the division is a close one, the question is again put off for further discussion; if the division is a wide one, the minority are asked if they will yield to the more general opinion, which they often, nay, most commonly do. If they refuse, the question is debated a third time, when, if the minority has not perceptibly grown, they always give way. … [I]f the divisions are still narrow … [a]s a matter of principle and according to the rule of such cases, the question must then lapse, and the majority, if so narrow, has to submit to sitting down under the status quo. But I must tell you that in point of fact the minority very seldom enforces this rule, but generally yields in a friendly manner.74 Perhaps more controversially, I am prepared to argue that, in the society of Nowhere, there is what Morris intended to signify as the full economic, political, social and sexual emancipation of women, although others might not agree.75 What Morris has been charged with, is that in Nowhere, despite the social revolution which has taken place, women’s activities are still confined to the domestic sphere, and economically and politically, men are still ‘in control’. True, women are depicted – alongside men – carrying out the hay-harvest, and also working as stone masons (one ‘our best carver’, although she is not leader of her work team), but it does not help Morris’s case that at his first encounter with women in Nowhere (as the visitor,William Guest), they serve him breakfast in a large, communal guest house (‘cooking and clearing up’ as recently described), or that throughout the book, Guest refers to how shapely, handsome, well-knit and pretty the women look performing various tasks.76 455

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But Morris was attempting to contrast what he supposed inhabitants of Nowhere might look like – tall, healthy, handsome – with people of his own century, where many were ravaged by hard, physical labour or spoiled by privilege and over-indulgence.77 That he expressed this idea clumsily by modern standards is true, but does not mean that he intended to be sexist. (He also often comments favourably on men’s appearance as well).As for the women who wait upon him in the Hammersmith Guest House, why is it not possible that rather than just working there as cooks or waiters (i.e. in ‘subordinate’ positions; NB: there are no servants in Nowhere, domestic or otherwise), what they are actually doing is running the place, as a collective? In any case, as Carolyn Merchant points out, the problem is not that work historically has been gendered, but that some kinds of work have been downgraded vis à vis others on the basis of gender; generally those kinds of work associated with women.78 Guest later raises this point himself: about this woman question? I saw at the Guest House that the women were waiting on the men: that seems a little like reaction, doesn’t it? Given what we have learned from Merchant, the answer is fair enough: Come, now, my friend, don’t you know that it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skillfully, and to do it so that all the house-mates about her look pleased, and are grateful to her? However, the copybook is immediately blotted: everybody likes to be ordered about by a pretty woman: why, it is one of the pleasantest forms of flirtation.79

V. Work in Nowhere As we have seen, the fundamental characteristic of Nowhere is that it is a society in which the profit motive has been abolished; all else flows from that one basic change. And as a practical man, what Morris was therefore searching for in Nowhere is an idea of what the nature of work might be like in just such a society.Therefore he took as the paradigm for Nowhere the nature of work in the one non-profit society he knew the most about: the rural economy of the European High Middle Ages, during which, as he maintained throughout his lectures and writings, working people were in many ways less oppressed by their work than in the nineteenthcentury commercial economy. In this ‘Gothic’ economy, raw materials (wool, milk, meat, grain, wood, timber, etc.) were produced on the land (largely) by the men, and processed in the house (largely) by the women.80 More widely, the women of Nowhere are as free to choose their own sexual partners as are the men, and to separate from them if they wish, without sanction.They are no-one’s property, and control their own fertility.While other women in the book are praised for their ‘femininity’, there is one female character, Ellen, who could scarcely have existed in nineteenth-century England, and indeed would probably still in some ways stand out today.81 Thus although Morris can be said to have introduced his idea of ‘the woman question’ in Nowhere in what today we would consider a clumsy (and indeed crass) manner, and in the context of the late nineteenth century, to have earned no more than a ‘could do better’ for this section of the book,82 it is important to note that although he conceived of work in Nowhere as being gendered, he did not conceive of its being downgraded on the basis of gender. 456

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Thus we read that work in Nowhere – both men’s and women’s – has been made pleasurable by abolition of the profit motive, allowing a great revival of decorative skills. Unpleasant work is performed by elective volunteers, but has been ‘getting somewhat scarce for the last fifty years’.83 The Victorian incentive to work to avoid poverty is replaced by the ability of work to provide personal (and communal) fulfilment and self-expression. In London, food is grown locally throughout the city, as also per Kropotkin.84 Goods are made not in factories but in workshops – where, instead of on a production line, articles are made by the same person from the beginning to the end of the process. Machines are used, but only either to avoid drudgery (‘useless toil’) or to give enhanced pleasure. Energy-intensive processes (smelting, clay firing, glass making) are carried out in ‘banded workshops’ – where people ‘band’ together to save fuel and to generate less pollution. These do not emit smoke. Water power is widely used (perhaps also to generate electricity; in 1890, electric light had just been invented), and heavy goods move by water in ‘force barges’ – possibly also powered by electricity – rather than by road.There are few books, and no formal schooling. Instead, the emphasis is on practical learning – when people need to learn something, they learn it.There are a few colleges and universities scattered about the countryside, pursuing ‘the art of knowledge’, rather than ‘the art of commerce’. It is not thought to do anyone much harm. More relevant to our present theme, political and economic revolution have led, in turn, to major ecological and landscape change. A population of ca 40 million, the same as that of late nineteenth-century Britain, is supported by intensive garden agriculture in both town and country, but have largely dispersed into the countryside, where commercial monoculture has been replaced by multi-layering, with arable fields planted with fruit trees.There has also been a great revival of the techniques of sustainable woodland management (wood pasture, pollarding, coppicing, etc,): increased amounts of woodland and forest are used for timber and wood production, and for recreation. Finally, water quality in the River Thames is vastly improved. All of these changes are subordinate to one major change: the elimination of the profit motive. Or as ‘Old Hammond’, the historian of Nowhere, explains: This is how we stand. England was once a country of clearings amongst the woods and wastes, with a few towns interspersed, which were fortresses for the feudal army, markets for the folk, gathering places for craftsmen. It then became a country of huge and foul workshops and fouler gambling-dens, surrounded by an ill-kept, poverty-stricken farm, pillaged by the masters of the workshops. It is now a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt, with the necessary dwellings, sheds, and workshops scattered up and down the country, all trim and neat and pretty. For, indeed, we should be too much ashamed of ourselves if we allowed the making of goods, even on a large scale, to carry with it the appearance, even, of desolation and misery. As for ‘wilderness’, it is clearly important both for its inherent and its instrumental value: My friend, we like these pieces of wild nature, and can afford them, so we have them; let alone that as to forests, we need a great deal of timber, and suppose that our sons and our sons’ sons will do the like. As to the land being a garden, I have heard that they used to have shrubberies and rockeries in gardens once; and though I might not like the artificial ones, I assure you that some of the natural rockeries of our garden are worth seeing. Go north this summer and look at the Cumberland and Westmoreland ones, – where, by the way, you will see some sheep feeding, so that they are not so wasteful as you think; not so wasteful as forcing-grounds for fruit out of season, I think. 457

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Go and have a look at the sheep-walks high up in the slopes between Ingleborough and Pen-y-gwent, and tell me if you think we waste the land there by not covering it with factories for making things that nobody wants, which was the chief business of the nineteenth century.85 Looking back on what I originally wrote about News from Nowhere (see note 16), it is now possible to see that, as well as the ideas listed there, Morris also prefigured certain other key components of modern ecocentrism. These include his use of the techniques of what are now known as ‘permaculture’ and ‘agroecology’ (mixing ‘layers’ of fruit trees and crops) in order to explain how it would be possible to feed substantial urban populations without the use of intensive agro-industrial processes, and his keen sense of the Thames Valley of Nowhere as a ‘bioregion’.86 There is also his clear identification of ‘local production for local need’ as the only real definition of sustainability, and it should also be noted that he identified the dangers of economic globalisation long before the establishment of the World Trade Organisation: so far-reaching is this curse of commercial war that no country is safe from its ravages; the traditions of a thousand years fall before it in a month; it overruns a weak or semi-barbarous country, and whatever romance or pleasure or art existed there, is trodden down into a mire of sordidness and ugliness; the Indian or Javanese craftsman may no longer ply his craft leisurely, working a few hours a day, in producing a maze of strange beauty on a piece of cloth: a steam-engine is set a-going at Manchester, and that victory over nature and a thousand stubborn difficulties is used for the base work of producing a sort of plaster of china-clay and shoddy, and the Asiatic worker, if he is not starved to death outright, as plentifully happens, is driven himself into a factory to lower the wages of his Manchester brother worker, and nothing of character is left him except, most like, an accumulation of fear and hatred of that to him most unaccountable evil, his English master.The South Sea Islander must leave his canoe-carving, his sweet rest, and his graceful dances, and become the slave of a slave: trousers, shoddy, rum, missionary, and fatal disease – he must swallow all this civilization in the lump, and neither himself nor we can help him now till social order displaces the hideous tyranny of gambling that has ruined him.87

VI. Desire and Necessity compared in Nowhere and Republican Spain, 1936–37 Throughout this essay I have alluded to the great final chapter of Edward Thompson’s biography of William Morris, ‘Necessity and Desire’: ‘Necessity,’ the economic determinism of Marx’s ‘laws of history’; and ‘Desire,’‘morality, conscience, human will and “agency”’. In its concluding section (‘Desire and Necessity’),Thompson identifies the source of Morris’s greatness not as his poetry, or his work in the decorative arts, or his political campaigning (at which he was ‘a failure’), but his ‘moral realism’:‘the practical moral example of his life’, and ‘the quality which unites and informs every aspect of his life and work’, including his political and artistic writings.88 Thompson developed these themes in a subsequent lecture, where he stated that Morris’s unique contribution to socialist thought was ‘the great enrichment of the ethical content of Communism’,89 and that he used his moral criticism of society to develop a practical revolution. At the nub of this question lies the concept of community:‘That true society of loved and lover, parent and child, friend and friend, the society of well-wishers, of reasonable people conscious of

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the aspirations of humanity and of the duties we owe to it through one another … held together … by its own inherent right and reason’,90 which Morris brought to the point of expression. His critique of capitalism therefore complements that of Marx, in that ‘Economic relationships are at the same time moral relationships; relations of production are at the same time relationships between people, of oppression or of cooperation.’ Thus ‘construction of a Communist society would require a moral revolution as profound as the revolution in economic and social power’. Thompson concludes: It is because William Morris … sought to body forth a vision of the actual social and personal relations, the values and attitudes consonant with a Society of Equals that he remains the greatest moral initiator of Communism within our tradition.91 Like many anti-utilitarians, then, Morris was basically a moralist, and it is surely the case that as well as ‘social’ and ‘personal’, we can add the word ‘ecological’ to the above list: that what William Morris sought to ‘body forth’, throughout his entire life, was the economic, political, social, personal and ecological basis of a ‘red-green’ society. Naturally, then, Morris’s writings pre-figure many modern green concepts, but it is perhaps this last idea which is the most important: that establishment of an ecological society would both involve and generate moral change in human beings. Such suggestions might be less convincing were it not recorded that during the twentieth-century revolution which most closely resembles News from Nowhere, the Spanish Revolution of 1936–37, precisely that kind of change appears to have taken place.Thus the Secretary of the Doctors’ Section of the Barcelona Syndicate reported in 1937: What is so encouraging is the moral revolution (sic) [which] has taken place in the (medical) profession. Everybody is doing [their] work honestly. The eminent doctor who is … sent once a week to work without a fee in a district dispensary never fails to go.The important personage who in the old days would go through the wards … followed by a retinue of … less[-]qualified colleagues … has disappeared.Today there are only equals who esteem and respect each other.92 Adoption of direct, participatory democracy by the many Collectives established during that revolution stimulated exactly the kind of release in enthusiasm and creative energies predicted by Morris. In particular,‘the right to participate spontaneously with one’s thought, one’s heart, one’s will, one’s initiative to the full extent of one’s capacities’ gave rise to a new concept of liberty, and a new morality, both of which existed as a function of practical activity. Yesterday’s competitors became today’s workmates, the corporative spirit disappeared. Workers permitted changes in production which went against their own craft interest (e.g., grubbing up vines to grow food). The ‘creative drive’ dominated all, but as well, ‘There was no need to impose any kind of (work) discipline, for from the first hour there was a kind of self-discipline which comes from the conviction that one is working for the community’.93 Women were treated as economic equals in about half of the agrarian collectives, but not the rest, on the principle that they rarely lived alone.94 They still were not social equals;‘respectable’ women did not go to the communal café. Married women – ‘detained by household chores’95 – were not generally obliged to work in the fields, except at harvest, when everyone was needed. There were no more servants or housemaids, as such work had been abolished. Single women worked in collective workshops or in distribution cooperatives.

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However, Martha Ackelsberg reports that in some Aragón collectives, those who kept the villages going day-to-day and were the first village delegates, were women, because many men were away with the flocks.Although these were the exception, she concludes that, generally, although the ‘double duty’ of work and home continued, at the same time the lives of many women were changed markedly as a result of extraordinary new opportunities, and of course many women famously enlisted and fought in the militias. Degrees of freedom increased dramatically, and Spanish working-class women began to act autonomously for the first time, although this effect was more pronounced in the cities than in the countryside.96 Economic reorganisation was ‘completed’ by establishing free health care, free schools – Collectivists possessed an ‘almost mystical’ attitude to education – libraries, cinemas and cultural centres (Ateneos). In Hospitalet de Llobregat (Catalonia), in an echo of ‘A Factory as it Might Be’, the municipality set up a large crèche and children’s nurseries in places where women worked. At Muniesa (Aragón), Saturnino Carod, leader of a CNT militia column but by birth an Aragónese peasant, developed an ‘agro-town’ whose purpose was to reverse rural depopulation, providing schools, theatres, cinemas and libraries, all supported by local, agriculturally-based industries.And in Graus (also Aragón), according to participants Gaston Leval and Alardo Prats,‘40% of the workforce, formerly engaged in socially useless activity, is now directed to useful (sic) projects for the benefit of all’.The Collectivists were indeed building ‘a new world in our hearts’.97

*

*

*

William Morris developed the ideas which led to News from Nowhere as a result of ‘Desire’; to make the world a better place (or as he said on his deathbed, to ‘get mumbo-jumbo out of the world’).98 On taking up socialism, he espoused the economic ‘Necessity’ which Marx’s ‘laws of history’ and the ‘internal contradictions’ of capitalism appeared to mandate, and worked for its downfall with all his might. But in developing his own moral critique of capitalism, he never forgot one of his earliest ideas: our duty to protect nature and its inherent value from overexploitation. In this, he extended his analysis from the laws of history to the laws of physics, and in particular, to the one which states,‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’.99 This may yet serve as his greatest contribution. At the end of his great biography, Edward Thompson describes Morris as ‘one of those people whom history will never overtake’.100

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Florence Boos for her indulgence in the preparation of this article. I would also like to acknowledge, for the first time in print, my debt to Kevin McGrath, at one time ‘John Ball’ of Peace News, and the first person to draw my attention to Morris, and to News from Nowhere. Many thanks, comrade!

Notes 1 Greta Thunberg, speech to UN Climate Change COP24 Conference,Katowice,Poland,12 December 2018; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFkQSGyeCWg (as visited 2 June 2019). 2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Global Warming of 1.5° C. An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable

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3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23

development, and efforts to eradicate poverty, IPCC, Geneva, 7 October 2018; https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ (as seen 2 June 2019). United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Warning: a sixth mass extinction is on the cards, UNEP, Nairobi, 1 April 2019; https://www.unenvironment.org/pt-br/node/24717 (As seen 2 June 2019). Yanis Varoufakis and David Adler,‘It’s time for nations to unite around an International Green New Deal’, The Guardian, London, 23 April 2019; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/ apr/23/international-green-new-deal-climate-change-global-response (as seen 2 June 2019). Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Timothy O’Riordan, Environmentalism, London: Pion Press, 1981, p. 1.The similarity of this terminology to Arne Naess’s ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ environmentalism is striking (Arne Naess,‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-range Ecology Movement. A Summary,’ Inquiry, 16, 1972, pp. 95–100.). However, as O’Riordan indicates (p. 2), it is a mistake to apply it too rigidly. Rachel Carson is today an ecocentric icon, but she was also, of course, an environmental professional. Stephen Cotgrove,Catastrophe or Cornucopia,Chichester:Wiley,1982,154 pp.; David Pepper,Ecosocialism, London: Routledge, 1993, 266 pp. (afterwards Pepper, Ecosocialism); Modern Environmentalism. An Introduction, London: Routledge, 1996. Based on the authoritarian, hierarchical interpretation of Darwin, and the highly patriarchal version of ‘tribal’ anthropology found principally in the writings of Edward (‘Teddy’) Goldsmith (e.g. The Way. An Ecological World-view, Revised ed., Dartington, Devon, UK:Themis Books, 1996). For Naess, see note 6; James Lovelock, Gaia.A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. That would indeed be physical scarcity. Robert Costanza and twelve others, ‘The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital’, Nature, 387, 1997, pp. 253–260. Pepper, Ecosocialism, pp. 232–235, 34. In 1989, Red-Greens represented 5–10% of the population, but this figure must surely vary over the decades as political ideas in general change. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom. The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982. Pepper, Ecosocialism, pp. 205, 214–5. ‘The Society of the Future’, Commonweal,Vol. 5, nos. 168, 169, 170, March–April 1889, as quoted in Peter Marshall, Nature’s Web: Rethinking Our Place on Earth, p. 313. Patrick O’Sullivan,‘The Ending of the Journey:William Morris, News from Nowhere and Ecology’, in Stephen Coleman and Patrick O’Sullivan, eds., William Morris and News from Nowhere:A Vision for Our Time, Hartland: Green Books, 1990, pp. 169–181. (Afterwards, O’Sullivan,‘Ecology’) And I am quite sure that his being a practical man was an important factor in this context. And for red-greens, the only true definition of sustainability. O’Sullivan, ‘Ecology’. According to Nicholas Salmon (with Derek Baker, The William Morris Chronology, Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1996; afterwards Salmon, Chronology), between December 1877 and January 1896, Morris gave well over five hundred lectures and political addresses, the vast majority of them (more than four hundred) during the years 1883–1890, when he was active in the (Social) Democratic Federation and the Socialist League. Many of these were later published, and are available online (https://www .marxists.org/archive/morris/works/).A chronological list is available from http://morrisedition.lib. uiowa.edu/lemire-bibliographical-checklist-socialist-essays.pdf. Salmon, Chronology, pp. 119–120. E. P. Thompson, William Morris. Romantic to Revolutionary, London: Pantheon, 2nd ed., 1976, p. 727. (Afterwards Thompson, Morris) See also Florence S. Boos,‘An Aesthetic Ecocommunist. Morris the Red and Morris the Green’, in Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston, eds William Morris: Centenary Essays, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996, pp. 21–46 (afterwards Centenary Essays) and Bradley J. MacDonald, ‘William Morris and the vision of ecosocialism’, Contemporary Justice Review, 7, 2004, pp. 287–304. ‘The Beauty of Life’, vol. 22, 51–52. Except where indicated otherwise, all references to Morris’s lectures are from the Collected Works of William Morris, ed May Morris, London: Longmans, 1910–15. They may also be found at https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/, accessed January– April 2017. NB: In quoting Morris, I have tried to avoid the gendered language which, as someone from the nineteenth century, he habitually used. Such edits are printed in parentheses. Corrections to Morris’s original text, or to what may be transcription errors, are in square brackets.

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Patrick O’Sullivan 24 ‘The Lesser Arts’ (afterwards ‘Lesser Arts’), vol. 22, 24. 25 Patrick O’Sullivan, ‘On the Value of Lakes’, in Patrick O’Sullivan & Colin Reynolds, eds, The Lakes Handbook, Vol. 2, Lake Rehabilitation and Restoration, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 3–24. 26 ‘The Prospects for Architecture in Civilization’ (afterward ‘Prospects’), vol. 22, 135. 27 ‘Lesser Arts’, vol. 22, 24. 28 ‘The Art of the People’ (afterwards ‘Art of the People’), vol. 22, 48. 29 ‘The Beauty of Life’, vol. 22, 66. 30 ‘Prospects’, vol. 22, 147. 31 ‘Art of the People’, vol. 22, 43. 32 ‘Art and the Beauty of the Earth’, vol. 22, 166. 33 ‘The Lesser Arts of life’, vol. 22, 238. 34 ‘Lesser Arts’, vol. 22, 22. 35 ‘Prospects’, vol. 22, 128. 36 ‘Art under Plutocracy’ (afterwards ‘Plutocracy’), vol. 23, 172; Salmon, Chronology, p. 120; ‘How I became a socialist’, Justice, 16 June 1894; Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time, London: Faber & Faber, 1994, pp. 477–79. 37 ‘The Hopes of Civilization’ (afterwards ‘Hopes’), vol. 23, 75. 38 ‘Art,Wealth and Riches’ (Afterwards ‘Riches’), vol. 23, 158;‘Plutocracy’, vol. 23, 171, 170. 39 ‘Makeshift’, William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris, Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1936, vol. 2, pp. 475-476 (Afterwards AWS, afterwards ‘Makeshift’). 40 ‘How we live and how we might live’ (afterwards ‘How we live’), vol. 23, 22. 41 ‘Plutocracy’, vol. 23, 176. 42 ‘Makeshift’, 469. 43 E. P.Thompson,‘The Communism of William Morris’, London:William Morris Society, 1965, 19 pp. Afterwards Thompson,‘Communism’. 44 ‘The Society of the Future’ (Afterwards ‘Future’); from A. L. Morton, ed., The Political Writings of William Morris, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979, pp. 188–203. 45 ‘The Dawn of a New Epoch’ (afterwards ‘Dawn’), vol. 23, 127. 46 ‘Hopes’, vol. 23, 65–69. 47 ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’ (Afterwards ‘Useful Work’; Italics added), vol. 23, 117. Given the recent rise of the ‘gig’ economy, Morris’s use of the word ‘precariousness’ is chillingly prescient. 48 ‘Hopes’, vol. 23, 67–68. 49 ‘Riches’, vol. 23, 150. 50 Ibid., vol. 23, 151. 51 ‘The Arts and Crafts of Today’, vol. 22, 365–66. 52 ‘Art and Socialism’, vol. 23, 193. 53 ‘Dawn’, vol. 23, 138;‘Art and its Producers’ (Afterwards ‘Producers’), vol. 22, 352. 54 ‘Art and Socialism’, vol. 23, pp. 209, 205, 209. 55 ‘Art and Socialism’, vol. 23, 210. 56 ‘How we live’, vol. 23, 8. 57 ‘True and False Society’ (Afterwards ‘True and False’), vol. 23, 227. 58 ‘Useful Work’, vol. 23, 103. 59 ‘Socialism’; from Florence S. Boos, ‘“Socialism” and “What we have to look for”: Two unpublished lectures by William Morris’, Journal of William Morris Studies (afterwards JWMS), XIX, part 1, 2010, pp. 9–51. 60 Thompson, p. 692. 61 ‘True and False’, vol. 23, 231; ‘Useful Work’, vol. 23, 110; ‘True and False’ (emphasis added), vol. 23, 233. 62 ‘Useful Work’, vol. 23, 111. 63 ‘Aims’, vol. 23, 89. 64 ‘True and False’, vol. 23, 231; ‘Socialism:The Ends and the Means’ (Afterwards ‘Ends’), Artist, Writer, Socialist, vol. 2, 432. 65 ‘Riches’, vol. 23, 161. 66 ‘Future’, 202. 67 ‘How we live’, vol. 23, 22. 68 ‘Future’, 196. 69 ‘Ends’, Artist,Writer, Socialist, vol. 2, 432.

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78

79 80

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82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92

‘Dawn’, vol. 23, 139. ‘True and False’, vol. 23, 235. ‘Dawn’, vol. 23, 139. ‘Future’, p. 208. James Redmond, ed, William Morris, News from Nowhere. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970 (afterwards Redmond, NfN), pp. 74–75. The last paragraph surely would inform any debate about Brexit. Jan Marsh, ‘Concerning Love: News from Nowhere and Gender’, in Coleman & O’Sullivan, pp. 107–25. But see also Florence S. Boos,‘An (Almost-)Egalitarian Sage:William Morris’s Later Writings and “The Woman Question”, in Thäis Morgan, ed, Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse. Renegotiating Gender and Power, Piscataway, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 187-206, 296-301; Florence S. Boos and William Boos,‘News from Nowhere and Victorian Socialist Feminism’, NineteenthCentury Contexts, 14, 1990, pp. 3–32 (afterwards Boos and Boos); Ruth Kinna, ‘Socialist Fellowship and the Woman Question’, In David Latham, ed, Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris,Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 183–196;Ady Mineo,‘Eros Unbound: Sexual Identities in News from Nowhere’, JWMS, IX, 1992, pp. 8–14;‘Beyond the Law of the Father: the “New Woman” in News from Nowhere’, in Centenary Essays, pp. 200–206. Or that in several cases much more detail is gone into than that; or that in at least one instance, female solicitousness is rewarded by a pat on the head. Piers J. Hale, Political Descent. Malthus, Mutualism and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014. It is my own memory that, during the late 1940s/early 1950s, the working-class people among whom I grew up were generally thought to be ‘old’ at sixty – and looked it! A process Carolyn Merchant (The Death of Nature:Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, London: Harper & Row, 1983, pp. 149–155) attributes to the rise of scientism, and the professionalisation of occupations previously open to women, but no longer (e.g. medicine). I am grateful to Sionad Mackie O’Sullivan for discussion of this point. Redmond, ed, News from Nowhere, p. 51. ‘Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century’ (Vol. 22, 375) ‘Feudal England’ (Vol. 22, 39), Nowhere have I seen this better illustrated than in Tales from the Green Valley (Lion Television, 2005, 12 × 30 mins) in which precisely that division of labour exists. For me, this series clearly demonstrated that on seventeenth-century Welsh farms, it was the women, particularly the housewife, who instigated and controlled the work schedules. See also E. Estyn Evans,‘The Ecology of Peasant life in Medieval Europe’, in William L.Thomas, Jr, ed, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 217–239. Tony Pinkney,‘“News from Nowhere in Recent Criticism” Revisited’, JWMS, XX, 2, 2013, pp. 30-40. Although Ellen remarks (News from Nowhere, Chapter 29) that she will one day have a good many children (cf. Boos & Boos, p. 27), I do not think there is any doubt that she will be the one to decide where and when, and with whom. Such ideas were surely explosive in Victorian England. Boos and Boos, pp. 3–6, 18–28. Redmond, News from Nowhere, p. 23. Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories, and Workshops, or Industry Combined with Agriculture, and Brain Work with Manual Work, London:Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1912, pp. 79–240. Redmond, News from Nowhere, pp. 61–63. O’Sullivan,‘Ecology’; Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual, Sisters Creek, Tasmania: Tagari Publications, 1988; Stephen R. Gliessman, Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems, Boca Raton, Fla: CRC Press, 2015; Redmond, pp. 166–167; Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985. ‘How we live’, vol. 23, 9. Thompson, Morris, Part IV,‘Necessity and Desire’, pp. 641–730; David Goodway,‘E.P.Thompson and William Morris’, in Centenary Essays, pp. 229–36 (p. 233);Thompson, Morris, p. 717. Thompson,‘Communism’, p. 6. ‘True and False’, vol. 23, 237. Thompson,‘Communism’, pp. 7, 16, 17–19. José Ibuzquiza, Secretary of the Doctors’ Section of the Barcelona Syndicate, July 1937, as quoted by Gaston Leval (Transl.Vernon Richards), Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, London: The Freedom Press, 1975, p. 272. (Afterwards, Leval)

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Patrick O’Sullivan 93 Leval, pp. 183, 212, 247, 283, 298, 346. 94 Gaston Leval, ‘The Characteristics of the Libertarian Collectives’, in Sam Dolgoff, ed, The Anarchist Collectives. Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939, Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1990, p. 167. (Afterwards, Dolgoff) 95 José Peirats, Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution, London: Freedom Press, 1990, p. 141. 96 Martha Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain. Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 97–109; Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain. The Experience of Civil War, 1936–1939, London: Penguin, 1981, pp. 285–291. 97 A Factory as it Might Be’, Justice, 1884, vol. 1, No. 18 (17 May), 21 (31 May), 24 (28 June); Leval, pp. 41, 292–93; Fraser, pp. 363-366; Gaston Leval and Alardo Prats, ‘The Collectivization in Graus’, in Dolgoff, p. 140 (emphasis added); Anarchist militia commander Buenaventura Durruti, as quoted by Pierre Van Paasen, Toronto Daily Star, 18 August 1936; https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2012/03 /27/buenaventura-durruti-a-new-world-in-our-hearts-spain-1936/ (as seen 4 April 2017). For more parallels between News from Nowhere and the Collectives of Republican Spain, 1936–37, please see my ‘¡Homenaje a Aragón! News from Nowhere, Collectivisation and the Sustainable Future’. JWMS, 29.3, 2011, pp. 93–111. 98 Thompson, Morris, p. 635. 99 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, New York:Alfred.A Knopf, 1971, pp. 33–46, esp. pp. 45–46. 100 Thompson, Morris, p. 730.

Further Reading Ackelsberg, Martha. Free Women of Spain. Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. Coleman, Stephen and Patrick O’Sullivan, eds. William Morris and News from Nowhere:A Vision for Our Time, Hartland,WI: Green Books, 1990, pp. 169–181. Dolgoff, Sam, ed. The Anarchist Collectives.Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990. Evans, E. Estyn.‘The Ecology of Peasant life in Medieval Europe’, in William L.Thomas, Jr., ed., Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 217–239. Fraser, Ronald. Blood of Spain.The Experience of Civil War, 1936–1939, London: Penguin, 1981. Goodway, David. ‘E.P.Thompson and William Morris’, in Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston, eds., William Morris: Centenary Essays, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996, pp. 229–236. Kinna, Ruth. ‘Socialist Fellowship and the Woman Question’, in David Latham, ed., Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris,Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 183–196. Kropotkin, Peter. Fields, Factories, and Workshops, or Industry Combined with Agriculture, and Brain Work with Manual Work, London:Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1912. Leval, Gaston. Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, trans. Vernon Richards, London: The Freedom Press, 1975. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, London: Harper & Row, 1983. Morris, William. The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris, London: Longmans, 1910–15. _____. News from Nowhere, ed. James Redmond, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. _____. The Political Writings of William Morris, ed.A. L. Morton. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979. _____. William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris, Oxford: Blackwell’s (2 vols), 1936. Peirats, José. Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution, London: Freedom Press, 1990. Pepper, David. Ecosocialism. From Deep Ecology to Social Justice, London: Routledge, 1993. _____. Modern Environmentalism.An Introduction, London: Routledge, 1996. Tales from the Green Valley (Lion Television, 2005, 12 × 30 mins), Producer Peter Sommer. Thompson, E. P. William Morris. Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd ed., London: Pantheon, 1976.

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Morris’s relationship to the Marxist tradition has often proved to be a source of controversy for those who seek to construe him as an ultimately harmless bourgeois gentilhomme – an ‘antiquary, artist, poet, upholsterer, scolder of dons, and sympathetic retailer of old-time stories’ – who did not pose any real political danger to the ruling social order of his day.1 During the 1870s, Morris was frequently identified with ‘the idle singer of an empty day’ who features in the Prologue to his poem The Earthly Paradise (1868–70).That he also went on to become one of the most eminent Victorians to espouse the necessity of a revolutionary socialist transformation of bourgeois society can still today seem somewhat jarring, particularly if one only knows of Morris through his pattern designs or his youthful Pre-Raphaelitism. There is a wealth of scholarship seeking to explain and account for Morris’s remarkable trajectory, not all of which can be considered in this short overview. E. P.Thompson deployed a memorably alliterative formulation to describe Morris’s journey from ‘romantic to revolutionary’, and his biography of Morris, first published in 1955 and republished in revised form in 1977, remains an invaluable testament to the extent and seriousness of Morris’s political commitment.2 Paul Meier’s vast study William Morris:The Marxist Dreamer (1978), which runs to 862 pages in the original French edition of 1972, offers a wide-ranging exegetical account of the areas of overlap between Marx’s writings and Morris’s utopianism, particularly with regard to the labour theory of value, alienation and the withering of the bourgeois state and its institutions.3 A number of anarcho-communist thinkers shared the end-goal of a stateless, classless society, particularly Peter Kropotkin, who was in Morris’s circle of political contacts and who spoke at the Hammersmith Socialist League branch on numerous occasions. Morris also worked with a number of anarcho-communists in the Socialist League, although he never quite belonged to this faction, which eventually ousted him from the editorship of Commonweal and destroyed the League shortly thereafter. He explicitly repudiated anarchism, asserting, in the midst of a polemic against the League’s anarchist faction, that ‘I call myself a Communist, and have no wish to qualify that word by joining any other to it’.4 Notwithstanding such remarks, some commentators have persuasively pointed to patterns of anarchist influence in Morris’s political thought, suggesting that ‘Morris was more of an anarchist theorist than perhaps even he recognized’.5 More recently, Bradley J. MacDonald has discussed Morris’s eco-socialism as an urgently ecological mediation of the living tradition of Marxism.6 Necessarily, I have drawn on some of the same source material gathered in these works in putting together the consideration 465

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of Morris’s relationship to Marx – and that more chimerical beast, Marxism – which forms the focus of this chapter. I can hope to do little more than elaborate on a few of the areas of ‘elective affinity’ between Morris’s and Marx’s conceptual vocabularies, as well as those passages in Morris’s political writings where he explicitly refers to, and advocates, ideas that are clearly derived from his reading of Marx. Elsewhere, Morris considered Marx’s political role in the development of the European socialist movement, and his comments reveal partisan support for Marx’s positions. Morris also featured prominently in the debate about so-called ‘English Marxism’ that took place between Thompson and Perry Anderson during the 1980s. The debate touched on a host of issues, including the national question, socialist internationalism and the role of theory in socialist thought, with the younger Anderson interrogating Thompson’s concepts of agency, experience and class.7 The particular contours of the debate arose out of conditions specific to the 1970s and 1980s, but this does not mean that ‘English Marxism’, or Marxism more generally, is now an outmoded topic of purely historical interest. On the contrary, as Daniel Bensaïd put it in Marx for Our Times (first published in English translation in 2002), ‘[t]he “critique of political economy” conducted in Capital unquestionably remains the foundational reading of the hieroglyphs of modernity and the starting point for a research programme that has yet to be exhausted’.8 More recently, Terry Eagleton has aptly commented that ‘as long as capitalism is still in business, Marxism must be as well. Only by superannuating its opponent can it superannuate itself.’9 Whilst this chapter can hardly be claimed as a contribution to the twenty-first-century Marxist critique of political economy, it does offer an argument for the establishment of a Marxist political tradition in Britain during the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

I. Marx, Morris and the Socialist Movement in Fin-de-Siècle Britain As Morris gravitated towards the nascent socialist movement during the early 1880s, it is clear that he began to feel the incongruity of his position. On 1 July 1884, Morris delivered a lecture on ‘Architecture and History’ before the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), an organisation which he had helped to found during 1877, in which he reveals one of the major sources of his historicism: The exigencies of my own work have driven me to dig pretty deeply into the strata of the eighteenth-century workshop system, and I could clearly see how very different it is from the factory system of to-day, with which it is commonly confounded; therefore it was with a ready sympathy that I read the full explanation of the change and its tendencies in the writings of a man, I will say a great man, whom, I suppose, I ought not to name in this company, and who cleared my mind on several points (also unmentionable here) relating to this subject of labour and its products.10 Morris had in mind Marx’s account of the factory system in Capital and its impact on domestic industry, where Marx expounds the view that the ‘development of the factory system and the revolution in agriculture that accompanies it’ led to an expansion of production in other branches of industry, whilst also altering the character of production, particularly with regard to the introduction of unskilled workers and ‘cheap labour’.11 Morris had read Joseph Roy’s French translation of Marx’s Capital during 1883, and he clearly shared Marx’s critique of the deleterious effects of the division of labour in manufacture set forth in Chapter 14 of the first volume of Capital, where Marx describes how, under conditions of specialisation, ‘a worker who performs the same simple operation for the whole of his life converts his body into the 466

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automatic, one-sided implement of that operation’.12 Marx’s formulations of the dehumanising, degrading nature of Victorian working conditions sound at times distinctly like those of Ruskin, who wrote in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ – a well-known chapter in the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1851–53) – that ‘[y]ou must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him.You cannot make both.’13 Morris clearly draws upon his reading of this section of Capital, as well as Ruskin, in much of his political writing where his critique of the division of labour’s deleterious effects is a striking keynote. One can detect the dual influence of Marx and Ruskin in his lecture ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’ (1884), where Morris comments that ‘for a man to be the whole of his life hopelessly engaged in performing one repulsive and never-ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for the hell imagined by theologians, but scarcely fit for any other form of society’ (CW, 23:118). One might also look to Morris’s remark in his 1884 lecture ‘Art under Plutocracy’, where he wrote that pleasureless labour turns workers into ‘machines more or less conscious of their own unhappiness’ (CW, 23:175). Yet Morris’s reluctance to name Marx in front of a SPAB audience during the early 1880s suggests an acknowledgement, on his part, that public advocacy of Marx’s ideas would be likely to cause controversy. Marx was, after all, a key figure in anti-communist demonology at the fin de siècle – hardly a name to conjure with in polite company. Elsewhere, Morris was less reticent. In an interview with Cassell’s Saturday Journal, published on 18 October 1890, Morris proclaimed that ‘[i]t was Carl Marx, you know, who originated the present Socialist movement; at least, it is pretty certain that that movement would not have gathered the force it has done if there had been no Carl Marx to start it on a scientific basis’.14 Similarly, in an article on ‘The Revival of Handicraft’ (1888), published in the Fortnightly Review – a prominent Victorian periodical that had been founded by Anthony Trollope, Frederic Harrison and E. S. Beesly during 1865 – Morris wrote that: ‘I must assume that many or perhaps most of my readers are not acquainted with Socialist literature, and that few of them have read the admirable account of the different epochs of production given in Karl Marx’s great work entitled “Capital”’ (CW, 22:334). Morris’s assumption about his readership, probably accurate, is telling insofar as it reminds twenty-first-century readers of the relative obscurity of Marx’s writings during the 1880s as compared with our own cultural moment. Marx’s marginal position in Victorian Britain, however, renders Morris’s interest in him all the more noteworthy. Morris, along with his comrades such as Ernest Belfort Bax and Henry Mayers Hyndman, was one of the leading propagandists for Marx’s ideas in Britain during the fin de siècle.15 Bax included Marx in a series of articles on modern thinkers which he published in the journal Modern Thought during 1881.16 Hyndman, meanwhile, popularised many of Marx’s ideas in England for All (1881), but earned Marx’s lasting rebuke for his failure to give Marx due accreditation. Morris and Bax were more consistently internationalist and anti-imperialist than Hyndman, whom Morris characterised as ‘rather a jingo than anything else’, but they all moved within the same Marxian orbit.17 Morris’s journalism is peppered with criticisms of British imperial exploits, and Old Hammond reiterates the critique of imperialism as the ‘great vice of the nineteenth century’ (CW, 16:95) in Morris’s utopian romance News from Nowhere (1890). Following Marx, Morris also drew particular attention to the ‘international character of capital which will seek for employment wherever it can best be found’, as well as capital’s tendency forcibly to seek out and exploit new markets – both points which Marx and Engels had emphasised in The Communist Manifesto.18 Morris and Bax elsewhere undertook a collective exegesis of Marx’s theory of value in a series of articles titled ‘Socialism from the Root Up’, published in the Socialist League journal Commonweal between May 1886 and May 1888.19 These articles set out the basis of Marx’s economic thinking, with a view to propagating these ideas amongst the journal’s readership 467

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of Socialist League militants and the wider periphery of the labour movement. As Mark Bevir has noted, ‘these early British Marxists … generally thought of Marx primarily as a scientific economist and a historian who showed the importance of class struggle’.20 The League, which counted Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor amongst its members, was a vehicle for propaganda that aimed to popularise Marx’s ideas, even if it also contained a sizeable anarchist faction that eventually gained control of the organisation, and swiftly derailed it. Edward Aveling, who produced the first complete English translation of Capital along with Samuel Moore in 1887, also belonged to the League. In this sense, it is important to acknowledge that Morris, along with some of his League comrades, intervened into a wider radical culture associated with the socialist revival of the 1880s in which Marx’s ideas were by no means hegemonic, but were beginning to gain a hearing. The French historian Georges Haupt has pointed out that the emergence of the terms ‘Marxism’ and ‘Marxist’ within the European socialist movement had a mixed history, bound up with the factional polemics that took place within the International Workingmen’s Association (or First International) during the 1870s. The terms were used pejoratively by anarchists and other opponents of Jules Guesde’s Parti Ouvrier Français (POF) as part of a wider trend for sectarian ‘onomastic labelling’.21 The terms were used more consistently by the German socialist Karl Kautsky and the group oriented around the theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit, in which the first German translation of Morris’s News from Nowhere was serialised during 1892–93. Haupt commented that Kautsky was the father of the terms ‘Marxist’ and ‘Marxism’ in the meaning they have assumed in our vocabulary. … For Kautsky and the small group connected with the Neue Zeit, the terms ‘Marxism’ and ‘Marxist’ had the value of a programme and were used as weapons in the ideological and political struggle.22 Haupt thus offers a useful reminder that any discussion of Morris’s relationship to ‘Marxist theory’ must begin with the recognition that there was, in fact, no codified body of theory that could be designated as such at the time of Morris’s entry into the British socialist movement. On the contrary, ‘Marxism’ was still very much in the process of formation. Moreover, Marx himself preferred to characterise his theory as ‘critical materialist socialism’ as against the factional neologism ‘Marxist’, whilst Engels tended to prefer ‘critical and revolutionary socialism’ or ‘scientific socialism’.23 This did not stop their political supporters, such as August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht in Germany, setting out to win hegemony for the discourse of ‘Marxism’ in the German Social Democratic Party during the 1880s. Haupt’s essay makes no reference to the political context of the British socialist movement, but it is notable that the Socialist League formed its closest contacts with the Marxist groupings on the continent, particularly the POF in France and the Bebel-Liebknecht group in Germany. In this sense, Morris’s work in the Socialist League consolidated a process that was more advanced on the continent, whereby Marx’s ideas began to carry political resonance within socialist organisations and, to a lesser extent, within the institutions of the wider labour movement. On one of the very rare occasions in which the term ‘Marxist’ appeared in Commonweal during Morris’s tenure as editor, the anarchist Victor Dave used the epithet to characterise the position of a bankrupt French newspaper: The Marxist organ of our French Socialist comrades, Le Socialiste, has been obliged to stop its publication, owing to lack of financial support. Comrades Jules Guesde, Paul Lafargue [Marx’s son-in-law], and Gabrielle Deville, who have been very active in 468

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propagating the Communist doctrines of Marx and Engels, will no doubt find ere long the means of continuing their work in a new paper.24 The term appeared, with similar usage, in several of Dave’s regular ‘International Notes’ columns for 9 February, 4 May and 21 September 1889. Dave’s deployment of the term, which shows an awareness of the factional alignments at work in the French socialist movement, was not derisive, but it clearly belongs to the kind of onomastic labelling that had been a common feature of anarchist polemic in the First International. Such matters became especially pronounced in the British socialist movement during 1889 at the time of the Paris Congress of European socialist organisations.There were, in fact, two conferences that took place in Paris during 1889, both of which claimed the mantle of European socialism. Morris attended the conference hosted by the Marxist POF of Guesde and Lafargue as a delegate of the Socialist League, whereas delegates from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), including Hyndman, attended a rival conference around the corner from the Rue Petrelle on the Rue de Lancry.The so-called ‘Impossibilist’ conference attended by Morris would, in time, be recognised as the founding conference of the Second International.25 Unlike the opposing ‘Possibilist’ conference, the ‘Impossibilists’ warned against the gradualist pursuit of palliative reforms, in keeping with Morris’s strategic outlook. In his report on the conference, Morris was adamant that the two conferences should remain separate (showing a streak of characteristically hard-headed factional toughness) on the basis that ‘the Possibilist Congress … has no pretensions to being a Socialist Congress, and considering … that there is a distinct smack of jingoism about it, no valid pretensions to being international’ (PW, 432). Hyndman, meanwhile, denounced the ‘Impossibilist’ conference in an article titled ‘The International Workers’ Congress and the Marxist Clique’, written for the SDF organ Justice. Hyndman’s denunciation in turn provoked a response from the Russian Nihilist Sergius Stepniak, which Morris printed in Commonweal on 22 June 1889, in which Stepniak corrected Hyndman’s assertion that ‘both Stepniak and W. Parnell declare in writing that their names were appended to the Marxist circular without their consent’, informing readers that ‘no such declaration has been made by me and … my name has been appended to the said circular with my full consent’.26 Stepniak further commented that ‘we, the so-called Russian Nihilists, must take every opportunity of showing our solidarity with the great international Socialist movement’, adding that ‘Morris, Engels, Lafargue, and Bebel … represent a huge part of this movement’.27 At the European level, then, Stepniak chose to identify Morris with the group that Hyndman derisively described as ‘the Marxist clique’. By dint of these allegiances, Morris, in his capacity as editor of Commonweal, acted as a propagandist for what came to be seen as the Marxist wing of the European socialist movement. However, as E. P.Thompson has pointed out, Hyndman’s earlier claim, after the split in the SDF, ‘to be the only true disciple of Marx, and his doctrinaire use of Marx’s name, prompted Morris to be especially careful of this kind of dogmatism’ (755).

II. ‘Socialism from the Root Up’ As the above account suggests, factional disputes between Marx’s sympathisers could be particularly intense, but all sides at least tended to agree about the importance of Marx’s theoretical contributions to the movement. Elsewhere in the radical milieu of the 1880s, Marx’s economic thought came under sustained attack from the gradualist Fabian Society, whose adherents, including Philip H.Wicksteed, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, set out to refute Marx’s labour theory of value with reference to William Stanley Jevons’s theory of marginal utility (in the case of Wicksteed and Shaw), and the neoclassical economics of Alfred Marshall and David Ricardo’s 469

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theory of rent (in Webb’s case).28 By contrast, Morris and Bax offered popular and sympathetic exegeses of Marx’s value theory, implicitly responding to the Fabian critique, much as Morris engaged in more open and explicit criticism of the Fabians elsewhere (PW, 457–63). Morris and Bax’s exposition of the ‘contents of the principal chapters’ of Marx’s ‘great work “Das Kapital”’ comes at the end of ‘Socialism from the Root Up’ (1886–88), and deals with Marx’s discussion of value (broken down into use value, exchange value and surplus value), exchange, money and the circulation of commodities (PW, 575).The earliest chapter that dealt entirely with Marx was published in Commonweal on 26 February 1887, a month after the first complete English translation of Marx’s Capital had appeared in January, whereupon it attracted attention in the Athenaeum and the Westminster Review.29 Morris and Bax’s text was, in part, a well-timed attempt to gain a wider audience for Marx’s economic ideas at just the moment when these ideas had become available to an Anglophone readership. A revised and extended version of ‘Socialism from the Root Up’ was later published as a book, Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (1893), in which Chapter 19,‘Scientific Socialism: Karl Marx’, is dedicated in its entirety to the exposition of Marx’s theory of the commodity form, the labour theory of value and primitive accumulation. Elsewhere in his lectures, such as ‘Dawn of a New Epoch’ (1886), Morris was fluent in discussing Marx’s concepts including ‘surplus value’ and ‘the reserve army of labour’ (CW, 23:127), and he singled out Marx’s economic thought for praise in his 1885 lecture ‘The Hopes of Civilization’ (CW, 23:74). In addition to the economic aspects of ‘Socialism from the Root Up’, the articles offer an historical overview of the development of modern society, beginning with a chapter on ‘Ancient Society’ in which the discussion of social forms, including the gens and the tribe, is influenced by the anthropological writings of Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). In later chapters on the development of European revolutionary movements during the nineteenth century, Morris and Bax also lucidly elaborate on the perceived political influence of Marx’s writings. For example, they characterise the European revolutionary wave of 1848 in the following terms: This revolt … was in the main a mere counter-stroke to the reaction which was diligently striving to restore the aristocratic privilege which the French Revolution had abolished, and to sustain what of it had escaped its attack. In 1830 the revolt was purely bourgeois in character, and was in no sense social …. In 1848 it had in some places a strong infusion of the proletarian element, which however was dominated by middleclass patriotism and ideas which led to the assertion and consolidation of nationalities. But a new element was present in these latter revolutionary movements, though at first it did not seem to influence their action much.This was the first appearance in politics of modern or scientific Socialism, in the shape of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, first published in 1847. (PW, 554–55) Morris and Bax here identify Marx and Engels as pivotal figures in the ideological formation of the European socialist movement – a point that Morris makes elsewhere in the Fortnightly Review and Cassell’s Saturday Journal. In political terms, Morris and Bax identify Marx as a founding member of the First International in 1864, along with the Positivist E. S. Beesly and the British trade union leader George Odger. They go on to state that ‘[i]n 1869, at the Congress of Basle, Marx drew [the International] into the compass of Socialism; and though in England it still remained an indefinite labour-body, on the Continent it became at once decidedly Socialistic and revolutionary, and its influence was very considerable’ (PW, 558). In an addition to the chapter on ‘The Paris 470

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Commune of 1871, and the Continental Movement Following it’ in the book-form version of the text, Morris and Bax also noted Marx’s influence on the German Workers’ Party, founded by Ferdinand Lasalle in 1862, but which, after Lasalle’s death in 1864,‘came under the influence of the International and of Marx, owing to the zeal of [August] Bebel and [Wilhelm] Liebnecht [sic]’ – Morris’s foremost allies in the German socialist movement.30 In this more strictly political sense, Morris and Bax’s history of the development of the European socialist movement was written in such a way as to emphasise the role of Marx’s ideas at certain strategic moments, at the expense of other important (and opposed) figures, such as the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whom Morris and Bax do not mention. As such, the text clearly constitutes a partial, and partisan, intervention that can be taken as clear evidence of its authors’ own political and ideological identities. Given the tendentiousness of such historical narrativisation, Morris and Bax’s account actively contributed to the formation of ‘Marxism’ as an effective ideological and organisational current in the European socialist movement. Given such interventions, the question of the precise nature of Morris’s relationship to ‘Marxist theory’ can be productively reframed if it is considered not as a matter of Morris’s doctrinal affinity with this or that proposition traceable to Marx’s economic writings, but rather as a more variegated readiness to propagandise the importance of an emergent communist political movement, in which he unambiguously identified Marx – as opposed to his anarchist rivals – as the most significant theoretical proponent. For E. P.Thompson, ‘Socialism from the Root Up’ offers conclusive proof that ‘Morris and Bax succeeded in presenting Marx’s essential theory clearly, and with telling historical illustrations, some drawn from Capital, some from their own knowledge’ (753).31 Thompson’s remarks appeared in an Appendix to his Morris biography titled ‘William Morris, Bruce Glasier and Marxism’, included in both the 1955 and 1977 editions. Thompson challenges the then-prevalent view of Morris’s lack of interest in economic questions, accurately commenting that John Bruce Glasier’s posthumous (and tendentious) reconstruction of Morris’s position constituted an attempt to downplay and soften Morris’s revolutionary commitment in the light of Glasier’s own subsequent gravitation towards reformism.Thompson’s purpose was definitively to refute ‘a general impression among biographers of Morris and political journalists that Morris ‘“repudiated” Marxism’ (741).

III. Romanticism and Marxism: Morris’s and Marx’s Elective Affinities In the Postscript to the 1977 revised edition of his Morris biography, Thompson considerably extended and qualified his view of Morris’s relationship to Marxism, suggesting that the question ‘turns upon Morris’s independent derivation of Communism out of the logic of the Romantic tradition’ (802).As part of a wider polemical dispute with Thompson, Perry Anderson similarly suggested that the romantic derivation of Morris’s ‘utopian communism’ thus gave it ‘a generosity and confidence of vision missing from the mainstream of historical materialism’.32 Anderson deploys the phrase ‘utopian communism’ here as a substitute, or place-holder, for that apparently more contentious and difficult word,‘Marxism’, Morris’s relationship to which, as Anderson points out, Thompson had done much both to complicate and illuminate. Before returning to the specificities of this dispute, it is necessary to examine some areas of conceptual overlap between Morris’s and Marx’s thought, given that Marx’s communism was also, in part, independently derived from the Romantic tradition.33 Indeed, the nature of the relationship between Marxism and Romanticism has itself long been a source of contention. As Raymond Williams once observed, ‘[a]lmost all our revolutionary language in fact comes from the Romantics and this has been a real hindrance as well as an incidental embarrassment’.34 In a similar vein, Michael Fischer has commented that Marxist critics’‘ambivalence toward Romanticism reflects the often tacit Marxist contention that 471

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Marxism in some way has been able to absorb the positive contributions of the Romantic movement without at the same time succumbing to its negative limitations’.35 Thorough discussion of Marx’s intellectual formation would, of course, need to give due account to his youthful engagement with German idealist philosophy, the bourgeois political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, as well as his own experience of mid-nineteenth-century European politics.36 For the narrower purposes of this chapter, an accentuation of Marx’s romantic inheritance allows for a more tightly focused comparison with Morris. Noting the problematic nature of the relationship between Marxism and Romanticism, Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre remark that ‘[a] certain number of Marxist analyses [of Romanticism], or analyses influenced by Marxism … perceive in Romanticism’s anti-bourgeois critique only its reactionary, conservative, retrograde aspect’.37 Nevertheless, Löwy and Sayre acknowledge the possibility of mutually contradictory articulations of an oppositional stance with regard to industrial-capitalist modernity, which leads them to set out a typology of romanticisms that encompasses Marxism: ‘1. restitutionist 2. conservative 3. fascistic 4. resigned 5. reformist 6. revolutionary and/or utopian’.38 Allowing for oscillation between these poles, they then elaborate a series of distinct tendencies within revolutionary-utopian romanticism, as follows:‘1. Jacobin-democratic 2. populist 3. utopian-humanist socialist 4. libertarian 5. Marxist’, before carefully commenting that Morris himself gravitated from ‘nostalgia for the Middle Ages to a Marxist-leaning socialism’.39 At the risk of merely shifting the discursive ground onto more favourable terrain, this typology makes it possible to identify one common source for Marx’s and Morris’s shared critique of bourgeois civilisation in what Löwy and Sayre broadly define as revolutionary-utopian romanticism, characterised by its strong opposition to capitalist modernity and oriented towards a political project of social revolution, thus rendering that opposition forward-looking, rather than nostalgic.40 Both Marx and Morris identified this project with the name of communism. In view of this shared identification, it is legitimate to assume that some light might be cast on the relationship between Marx and Morris by way of an investigation of the precise nature of their shared intellectual debt to Romanticism.The aim of such an investigation is not to ‘prove’ or verify a genealogical pattern of influence from Marx to Morris, but rather to suggest the existence of certain elective affinities that obtain between these two differently situated, but solidaristically related, thinkers. For Löwy and Sayre,‘Romanticism is one of Marx’s and Engels’s neglected sources, a source perhaps as important for their work as German neo-Hegelianism or French materialism’.41 Michael Fischer similarly warns that we should ‘treat skeptically the claim of Marxism to overcome Romanticism’.42 These insights, if taken seriously, would place Marx and Morris in the position of fellow communists whose communism shared a common point of origination, despite their otherwise different trajectories and vocabularies. Thompson articulated a similar connection, or pattern of affiliation, in the Postscript to the revised edition of his biography of Morris, in which he suggested that it is ‘possible … to envisage the Romantic tradition, transformed as it was by Morris (in part through his encounter with Marx), entering into a common Communist tradition to which it could contribute its particular emphases, vocabulary and concerns’ (785).43 With this in mind, he couched Morris’s ‘importance within the Marxist tradition … less in the fact of his adhesion to it than in the Marxist “absences” or failures to meet that adhesion half-way’ (786).Thompson did not deny that Morris was, in some sense, a Marxist – situated ‘within the … tradition’ – but he complicated that identification by arguing that ‘Morris’s “conversion” to Marxism offered a juncture which Marxism failed to reciprocate’, pointing to perceived antinomies between knowledge and desire, between practical reason and the creative imagination and between science and morality (786). Although Thompson does not specify what such reciprocation might have involved, one might infer that he was 472

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warning against ‘bad’ versions of Marxism that tend towards economism, whilst celebrating Morris’s uniquely utopian communism as a way of broadening the imaginative horizons of Marxist theory and practice. As Ruth Levitas aptly comments in her illuminating discussion of Thompson’s engagement with Morris,‘the traditional Marxist rejection of utopia is weakened’ through Thompson’s work, at the same time as Thompson recognises that any ‘fragile synthesis’ of Marxism and utopia, knowledge and desire, or utilitarianism and Romanticism, remains ‘constantly in danger of disintegrating into its component parts’.44 The precise logic of Thompson’s position is hard to decipher, given that he clearly identifies Morris as a Marxist, both in the Postscript and in the reprinted Appendix,‘William Morris, Bruce Glasier and Marxism’, in order to suggest the possibility of a hybrid, plural Marxist tradition capable of embracing Morris’s heterodox communism.45 Yet Thompson sets this possibility against the existence of a more restrictive, monolithic Marxism that reappears in the moment of alleged failure of reciprocation.Thompson charges this ‘orthodox Marxism’ with having ‘turned its back upon a juncture which it neglected to its own peril and subsequent disgrace’ (779). So which ‘Marxism’ is it that unfairly overlooked Morris? Engels was certainly dismissive of Morris at times, and it was Engels who did the most to consolidate the canon of ‘orthodox’ Marxism after Marx’s death (780–81, 785–86). Another possibility, however, is that Thompson had in mind the Stalinised versions of Marxist practice that had come to dominate the communist political movement of Thompson’s own formative years and to which he had paid lip-service in the first edition of his Morris biography, where Thompson unabashedly applauds ‘Stalin’s blue-print of the advance to Communism’.46 By the time he came to write the Postscript for the second edition,Thompson had long abandoned such illusions, having resigned his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1956 during the USSR’s invasion of Hungary. In disentangling himself from this Stalinised version of orthodox Marxism, with which some of Morris’s other commentators, such as Robin Page Arnot and Arthur Leslie Morton, were closely involved,Thompson also reframed his own earlier attempt to fit Morris onto this Procrustean bed. Thus, Thompson’s examination of Morris’s relationship to Marxism in the Postscript is, in part, a self-critical gesture, given the extent to which Thompson’s understanding of Marxism was heavily coloured by his experience of the CPGB’s Stalinised version of it. In that sense,Thompson reveals as much (if not more) about his own preoccupations, as he does about Morris’s. Thompson’s Postscript, however, contains relatively little discussion of Marx’s actual writings.What might be gained, then, from reading Morris alongside Marx? If Marx can be described, without controversy, as a theorist of alienation, of political economy and of revolution, Morris might more accurately be described as a propagandist for revolutionary communism, whose partisanship was born out of a deep, thorough-going and hard-won understanding of the social reality of alienation.Yet, as Löwy and Sayre contend,‘the Marxist concept of alienation is strongly tinged with Romanticism’ insofar as the ‘dream of integral humanity, beyond fragmentation, division, and alienation’ constitutes an important point of intersection ‘between Marx and the Romantic legacy’.47 Morris’s political lexicon did not extend to the kind of philosophical vocabulary that would have enabled him to articulate his understanding in the theoretical terms deployed in Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (1844), where Marx elaborates his critique of alienation. Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that Morris’s manifold statements about the prospect of working-class self-emancipation, repeated in lectures such as ‘The Hopes of Civilization’ (1885) and ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’ (1885), arise from his conviction that the reproduction of capitalism is predicated upon the denial and frustration of the full potentiality of human self-realisation, and that the distribution of such frustration, as well as the suffering born of it, is organised unevenly along class lines. For this reason, Morris’s and Marx’s shared understanding of alienation deserves closer examination. 473

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IV. Alienation, Production and Sensuous Emancipation In ‘Monopoly: or, How Labour is Robbed’ (1887), Morris writes: I assume that most workmen are conscious of the inferior position of their class, although they are not and cannot be fully conscious of the extent of the loss which they and the whole world suffer as a consequence, since they cannot see and feel the better life they have not lived. (CW, 23:245) Morris’s focus on denied, or blocked, sensory capacity is reminiscent of a passage in Marx’s early writings, where he conjectures that the dis-alienation of the labour process would create the conditions of possibility for an expanded horizon of sensory perception. In his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, Marx argues that the ‘supersession of private property is … the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes’, allowing the senses to ‘relate to the thing for its own sake’.48 This projected liberation of the senses is closely tied, at this stage in Marx’s intellectual development, to a humanistic assertion of essential human qualities and capacities, articulated in his concept of ‘species-being’.49 In News from Nowhere, Morris similarly figures the protagonist William Guest’s induction into the projected communist society of the future through a metaphorical language of sensuous apprehension, marking another point of affinity between Morris and Marx. Old Hammond’s description of the transformed relationship between town and country in Nowhere alerts readers to the sensuous nature of Guest’s introduction to the ‘new life’: Guest is described as having ‘had a first taste’ of ‘that happy and leisurely but eager life’ (CW, 16:72) which prevails in Nowhere. Similarly, when dinner is served in the hall of Bloomsbury market, Guest notices the somatic hunger in his belly for the first time, but acknowledges that it had not previously come to his attention because ‘[he had] been feeding [him]self with wonder this long time’ (CW, 16:99). The utopian sensorium of News from Nowhere blends the figurative with the literal, encompassing the senses of sight (CW, 16:42), sound (CW, 16:176), touch (CW, 16:201–2), smell (CW, 16:17, 36) and the more literal kind of taste (CW, 16:15).At the same time as the known world is defamiliarised through devices of utopian estrangement, the potential opacity of the utopian world is counteracted by the familiarity of Guest’s sensuous, somatic experiences there. It is particularly significant that Morris conveys Guest’s initiation via an extended metaphor of sensuous gratification because, as Michelle Weinroth suggests,‘sensuousness is crucial for political persuasion, not only in contributing to the vivid evocation of an ideal vision but also in its aesthetic capacity to foster that desired contemplative unity between ideologue and public’.50 One contemporary reviewer of News from Nowhere likened Morris’s utopia to a place where ‘everything points to a deep joy in mere sensation, and to a deeper, vaster ignorance of what underlies it’ (a coded rebuke to Morris’s atheism).51 Yet this dismissal of the ‘mere’ sensuousness of Guest’s utopian experience overlooks the way in which the sensory aspects of his journey mark a point at which the aestheticism of Morris’s pre-socialist years takes on definite political value as a rhetorical means of persuasion. Morris returned to the idea of sensuous emancipation, which is a keynote of his distinctively aesthetic commitment to revolutionary socialism, at the conclusion of ‘How I Became a Socialist’ (1894): it must be remembered that civilization has reduced the workman to such a skinny and pitiful existence, that he scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life much better than 474

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that which he now endures perforce. It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life before him, a life to which the perception and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to be as necessary to man as his daily bread. (CW, 23:281) Like Morris, Marx also posits that new, higher needs might be created as a result of human activity. Philip J. Kain helpfully summarises Marx’s discussion of the transformation of needs in the Grundrisse (1857–58), commenting that:‘(f)or Marx, need calls forth development in production … and developments in production transform needs’, such that ‘[p]roduction can create even a need for art and beauty’.52 In the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, part of Marx’s argument about the specificity of human species-being similarly concerns the aesthetic sense: Animals produce only according to the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while [humanity] is capable of producing according to the standards of every species and of applying to each object its inherent standard; hence [humanity] also produces in accordance with the law of beauty.53 Such capability, however, is, as Morris claims, often smothered and suppressed by a civilisation that organises production according to the principles of ‘competitive Commerce’ (CW, 23:201). In Capital, meanwhile, Marx posits aesthetic production as a model (or pre-figuration) of nonalienated labour. For example, Marx’s likening of Milton to a silkworm – claiming that ‘Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his own nature’ – implies a humanistic ontology in which Milton’s poetic capability figures as an intrinsic part of ‘his own nature’.54 The implication seems to be that aesthetic creativity constitutes a static, or stable, feature of human nature. Such a view also underpinned Morris’s iteration of the Ruskinian maxim that ‘ART IS MAN’S EXPRESSION OF HIS JOY IN LABOUR’ (CW, 23:173). Elsewhere, Marx construes human nature (or essence) as changeable according to circumstance – as having been ‘historically modified in each epoch’, or as a product of the ‘ensemble of the social relations’.55 This descriptive, as opposed to normative, account of human nature stresses its plasticity, allowing for the possible transience of negative human characteristics that will disappear along with the supersession of adverse social conditions. Like Marx, Morris also clearly envisages such a scenario when he posits that ‘such a stupendous change in the machinery of life as the abolition of capital and wages must bring about a corresponding change in ethics and habits of life’, such that ‘it would be impossible to desire many things which are now the objects of desire’ (PW, 338). Here, then, is another aspect of the elective affinity between Marx and Morris: both relied on a distinction between the actuality of human suffering and degradation set against the emancipatory potential of human creativity. Contrary to popular misconceptions about communist authoritarianism, largely over-determined by twentieth-century representations of the so-called ‘Soviet bloc’, both Marx and Morris advocated communism as a means of expanding and developing the potential for human self-realisation, moving beyond the latter-day slavery of wage-labour to a form of collective, cooperative production organised around an expansive conception of human need, rather than the consolidation of a system of private property. With Morris, such argumentation is, more often than not, conducted by simple assertion. As he put in an 1885 Commonweal article titled ‘Attractive Labour’:‘[p]eople’s innate capacities are pretty much as varied as their faces are; but individual character and varied capacity are not cherished by the system which tends to get rid of skilled labour altogether’ (PW, 94). Morris claimed that ‘in a reasonable community’, by contrast,‘these varied capacities would be looked 475

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out for and cultivated’ (PW, 94). One would need to turn to Marx’s early writings to find a more explicit and theoretically grounded specification of the concept of alienation, which Marx adapted from Ludwig Feuerbach’s writings on Christianity in The Essence of Christianity (1841) and from G.W. F. Hegel’s discussion in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where the concept of ‘self-alienated spirit’ forms a crucial part of Hegel’s philosophical system.56 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a full account of these two complex and difficult thinkers, but it is important to note that whilst Feuerbach defined alienation in terms of humanity’s spiritual reliance on the idea of a deity, which Feuerbach construed as a projection of alienated human capacities, Marx adapted the concept with reference to social and economic reality, focusing particular attention on the process of production. For Hegel, alienation had a primarily metaphysical meaning, describing a dialectical process through which being is externalised (Entäusserung) from itself, and it understands this externalisation as alien and strange. Marx took from Hegel the important concept of ‘Aufhebung’ (which means simultaneously ‘transcendence’,‘supersession’ and ‘preserving’), but crucially extended Hegel’s thought with reference to concrete social practices, particularly labour’s self-alienation, and thereby claimed to have surpassed Hegel’s ‘merely formal’ and ‘abstract’ conception of alienation by focusing on the ‘inexhaustible, vital, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification’ in the labour process.57 Morris also appears to have possessed at least some minimal familiarity with Hegel’s thought given his reference in ‘The Gothic Revival’ (1884) to the ‘knowledge of necessity defined by a philosopher as being the only true liberty’.58 In his useful summary of Marx’s concept of alienation, István Mészáros identifies four key aspects of Marx’s usage:‘(a) man is alienated from nature; (b) he is alienated from himself (from his own activity); (c) from his “species-being” (from his being as a member of the human species); (d) man is alienated from man (from other men)’.59 Alienation, in this sense, is always self-alienation, and is bound up with stifled possibilities for human flourishing in the realms of practical and productive activity, sociality and self-realisation. For Marx, the establishment of communism would overcome the phenomenon of alienation because, as he put it: Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development [italics in original].60 Similarly, in Marx’s ‘Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy’ (1844), in which he identifies money, wage-labour, credit and banking as forms of alienation, Marx concludes with an account of non-alienated labour as an expression of ‘human, communal nature’, construing such labour as an essential feature of pleasurable existence.61 In conditions of mutual cooperation, rather than servitude or wage-labour,‘[m]y labour would be the free expression and hence the enjoyment of life’, whereas ‘[i]n the framework of private property it is the alienation of life since I work in order to live, in order to procure for myself the means of life’.62 This short text presages Marx’s discussion of an ‘advanced phase of communist society’ in his ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ (1875), where he envisages the disappearance of the ‘enslaving subjugation of individuals by the division of labour, and thereby the antithesis between intellectual and physical labour’, which would in turn bring about a situation in which ‘labour is no longer just a means of keeping alive but has itself become a vital need’.63 The humanistic ontology implied here is a shared aspect of both Marx’s and Morris’s understanding of the centrality of labour to human existence. As Paul Meier has put it, labour, for Marx as for Morris, is ‘the point of 476

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departure of a materialistic humanism [humanisme matérialiste], whose reality has all too often been wilfully concealed’.64 Marx’s implicit distinction between working to live (in a coercive ‘free’ market) and living to work (under conditions of unforced, free cooperation) similarly animated Morris’s critique of the division of labour (CW, 23:11, 63, 67–68) and his concomitant vision of emancipated labour as the true horizon of individual and collective freedom. Morris derided the very idea of ‘free contract’ as a ‘capitalist lie’ (CW, 23:223) and set his ideal of freedom against the hypocritical ‘freedom’ of bourgeois society which leaves ‘most … free to take at a wretched wage what slave’s work lay nearest to them or starve’ (CW, 23:204). In this respect, Morris was also influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s critique of the ‘cash-nexus’, as well as Carlyle’s assertion of the dignity of manual labour in works such as Sartor Resartus (1833–34) and Past and Present (1843), although Morris went much further than Carlyle in his willingness to countenance social revolution as a means of labour’s emancipation.65 Marx’s account of non-alienated labour as a form of pleasurable self-expression has clear parallels with Morris’s socialism, although Morris tended to stress his indebtedness to the utopian socialist Charles Fourier’s ‘doctrine of the necessity and possibility of making labour attractive’ (CW, 23:73), as well as John Ruskin’s ‘lesson’ that ‘art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labour’, which Ruskin had put forward in his chapter on ‘The Nature of Gothic’.66 Fourier’s ideal also underpins Old Hammond’s discussion of labour as ‘a pleasure which we are afraid of losing, not a pain’ in News from Nowhere, where Morris imagines a society in which ‘all work is now pleasurable’ (CW, 16:92). Marx was less willing to acknowledge a debt to Fourier in this regard, commenting in Notebook VI of the Grundrisse that even if labour were to become ‘attractive work, the individual’s self-realisation’ – as opposed to ‘its historic forms as slavelabour, serf-labour, and wage-labour’, where ‘labour always appears as repulsive’ – such attractive work ‘in no way means that it becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier … conceives it. Really free working, e. g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion.’67 Marx again draws on a form of aesthetic production (musical composition) as an example of non-alienated labour that allows for the possibility of individual self-realisation but refuses to countenance a collapse in the boundary between ‘work’ and ‘play’. For Marx, then, even attractive, non-alienated labour could still involve hard work in the proverbial sense of the phrase, because of the mental effort and physical exertion involved. However, in conditions of free, non-coerced and cooperative production, Morris and Marx both assumed that such exertion would be a source of pleasure and fulfilment. As Marx put it elsewhere in the Grundrisse: Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like, although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject.68 Given Morris’s wide array of interests and his practical skill as a craftsman in areas as diverse as fabric dyeing, wallpaper design and manuscript illumination, he could, in one sense, be regarded as a living embodiment of the ‘different subject’ of the production process here envisaged by Marx. Morris’s personal wealth, as Perry Anderson recognises, was ‘one material substratum of the sensuous ease and freedom of [his] capacity to visualize the lineaments of a society of abundance beyond capitalism’.69 In a very real sense, Morris could afford to treat ‘work’ as ‘play’, but he also strained every sinew to bring about a society in which this condition would be 477

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universalised. At the more abstract level, Morris and Marx shared the view that a suspension of the contradiction between free time and labour time in post-capitalist society would create the possibility of a different, non-alienated relationship to production. In Morris’s terms, the abolition of various forms of ‘Useless Toil’, as opposed to ‘Useful Work’, would allow for an expansion of ‘the leisure which Socialism above all things aims at obtaining for the worker’, which is ‘also the very thing that breeds desire – desire for beauty, for knowledge, for more abundant life’ (PW, 87). Morris’s defence of leisure does not imply a simple limitation of the working day, to allow for more ‘free’ hours during the evening for the pursuit of pastimes and hobbies, but, rather, a fundamental transformation of the production process itself that would render the distinction between ‘labour’ time and ‘free’ time obsolete.

V. Revolution, Dual Power and the Transition beyond Capitalism The claim discussed in the previous section that Morris relied upon an unstated theory of alienation is hardly original.As long ago as 1959,Thompson observed in passing that ‘Morris did not use the term “alienation” … but he was – and remains – our greatest diagnostician of alienation, in terms of the concrete perception of the moralist, and within the context of a particular English cultural tradition’.70 Thompson’s formulation, however, is notable for the way in which he immediately shifts the perspective away from an abstract language of systemic diagnosis to the specificity of ‘concrete perception’, signalling and invoking the ‘English cultural tradition’ of moralism, or sage writing, predominantly associated with the writings of Carlyle and Ruskin. Morris’s proclaimed greatness as a ‘diagnostician’ of alienation owes as much, for Thompson, to Carlyle’s critique of the cash-nexus as it does to ‘Marx’s moral indignation, and its foundation in the manuscripts of the early 1840s’.71 Thompson even construes Marx here primarily as a moralist rather than a theorist, reflecting Thompson’s own preoccupations as a historian who polemicised against the structuralist theoretical turn in Marxist criticism during the post-war period in favour of an empirical approach grounded in the recovery and elaboration of human ‘experience’, both lived and perceived.72 Thompson’s account of Morris’s intellectual formation is certainly accurate, but it threatens to understate what Raymond Williams characterised as Morris’s ‘transvaluation’ of the ‘Culture and Society’ tradition, which Morris was able to achieve because of his political commitment to social revolution.73 With characteristic tenacity, Morris set out this commitment in the opening paragraph of his lecture ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’ (1884), which merits quotation in full: The word Revolution, which we Socialists are so often forced to use, has a terrible sound in most people’s ears, even when we have explained to them that it does not necessarily mean a change accompanied by riot and all kinds of violence, and cannot mean a change made mechanically and in the teeth of opinion by a group of men who have somehow managed to seize on the executive power for the moment. Even when we explain that we use the word revolution in its etymological sense, and mean by it a change in the basis of society, people are scared at the idea of such a vast change, and beg that you will speak of reform and not revolution. As, however, we Socialists do not at all mean by our word revolution what these worthy people mean by their word reform, I can’t help thinking that it would be a mistake to use it, whatever projects we might conceal beneath its harmless envelope. So we will stick to our word, which means a change of the basis of society; it may frighten people, but it will at least warn them that there is something to be frightened about, which will be no less dangerous 478

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for being ignored; and also it may encourage some people, and will mean to them at least not a fear, but a hope. (CW, 23:3) Unlike, say, Carlyle or Ruskin, whose political views were often reactionary, Morris linked his critique of capitalist inequality to the practical and organised expression of class struggle through the institutions of the labour movement. Morris also accentuated the importance of workingclass self-emancipation, commenting that ‘it is … impossible that the change can be made from above to below … it is the workers themselves that must bring about the change’ (CW, 23:251). This view was encapsulated in the Socialist League’s statement of principles, much as it had been advocated by the First International. Like Marx, Morris’s ultimate aim was the abolition, or supersession, of class society.This led Morris to adopt a maximalist stance of implacable opposition to palliative strategies of piecemeal reform, calling on socialists to ‘choose between Parliamentarism and revolutionary agitation’ (PW, 98). Morris’s tactical opposition to running socialist candidates in parliamentary elections, which he outlined in ‘Socialism and Politics’ (1885) and ‘The Policy of Abstention’ (1887), set him at odds with some leading Marxist members of the Socialist League, including Bax and Bloomsbury branch members Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, who advocated parliamentary agitation without illusions.The Bloomsbury branch, which had the support of Engels, eventually split from the League on this question during 1888, though Thompson suggests approvingly that Morris revised his purist view of the matter during the early 1890s in response to Progressive gains on the London County Council (448–60, 503–11, 597–601). Perry Anderson, by contrast, esteems Morris’s earlier implacable hostility to the ‘bourgeoisdemocratic parliament’ as a sign of his intellectual toughness and clairvoyance, offering an anticipation of the strategic dilemmas and impasses of twentieth-century reformism that ‘went well beyond anything to be found in Marx or Engels’.74 Anderson’s disagreement with Thompson’s focus on Morris’s moral realism led him to highlight ‘another Morris to whom we owe no less homage, who was concerned not only with moralities but strategies’, and in whose political writings ‘we witness … the first frontal engagement with reformism in the history of Marxism’, especially in lectures such as ‘Whigs, Democrats and Socialists’ (1886) and ‘The Policy of Abstention’ (1887).75 This aspect of Morris’s political imagination, and his resolute ability to consider the strategic implications of his revolutionary commitment, marks, for Anderson, Morris’s decisive theoretical contribution to Marxist political thought, even as it signals a blind-spot in Marx’s own writings. Morris, according to Anderson, clearly posed ‘for the first time the structural unity of the capitalist order … as the insurmountable obstacle to any sequence of partial reforms being capable of peacefully changing it into socialism’.76 Anderson attributed Thompson’s failure seriously to consider this aspect of Morris’s achievement to the residual influence of the CPGB’s drift towards reformism on Thompson’s thought.77 In particular, Anderson commended ‘How the Change Came’, the long, central chapter of News from Nowhere, as ‘an extraordinary theoretical feat’ because of the ‘care and depth of thought that Morris devoted to the nature of a computable revolutionary process in Britain’.78 For readers unfamiliar with Morris’s text, no summary can adequately capture the drama and intensity of the projected revolutionary upheaval, with its numerous shifts of tempo, modulations in the balance of forces between ruling and popular classes, and the multiple forms of struggle that combine to overthrow the bourgeois state. Morris envisages a process in which the formation and development of new representative institutions, including workers’ councils and a Committee of Public Safety, undermines and eventually supersedes the authority of the bourgeois parliament at Westminster. Morris’s depiction of what John Crump characterises as ‘an alternative source of legitimacy’ offers a vivid dramatisation of Marx’s concept of dual power, and Crump adds that ‘[t]he only 479

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people for whom Morris’s handling of this issue is likely to pose problems are those who equate democracy with parliamentary institutions’.79 Dual power describes a situation of temporary coexistence between competing institutions of popular representation, taking the form of a conflict between the established state machinery and new representative organs that spring up in the course of mass struggle against the existing state. In Marx’s ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’ (March 1850), detailing his preferred strategic orientation towards ‘petty-bourgeois democrats’ during a revolutionary situation, he writes that: Alongside the new official governments [the workers] must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers.80 Marx here counsels that the workers’ movement should establish its own representative institutions as an alternative pole of attraction to the institutions of the bourgeoisie, in order to establish the terrain for independent proletarian political organisation and class struggle. Vladimir Lenin elaborated this strategic rationale in more detail, and acted upon it, during the revolutionary risings in Russia in 1917.81 More recently, Fredric Jameson has returned to the concept of dual power as both a ‘political programme’ and ‘utopian proposal’ with the potential to revivify anti-capitalist practice in the contemporary conjuncture.82 In News from Nowhere, Morris drew from the store of accumulated historical experience of past revolutions by imagining the formation of a Committee of Public Safety as the primary organ of revolutionary leadership.The Committee, Hammond explains,‘began to be a force in the country, and really represented the producing classes’ (CW, 16:119), in opposition to the Westminster parliament. In the marginal headers to the 1892 Kelmscott press edition of News from Nowhere, the passage describing the Committee’s formation is annotated:‘Two governments’ and ‘The old order passing’, indicating the resonance of Morris’s imagined revolutionary scenario with the concept of dual power.83 Somewhat later in the narrative, a ‘new network of workmen’s associations grew up … whose avowed single object was the tiding over of the ship of the community into a simple condition of Communism’ (CW, 16:120).This network of workers’ councils is more radical than the Committee and more capable of taking the ‘immediate action’ (ibid.) called for by the rapidly developing political crisis in the state. Crump notes that ‘[t]he crucial break-through … is not achieved by the undifferentiated “people” flocking to the barricades, but by the wage workers using the power which derives from their role as producers of wealth within capitalism’, highlighting the centrality of class struggle in Morris’s conception of social transformation.84 The existence of this counter-power in the workers’ councils, offering an alternative pole of attraction to the old order at the crucial moment in an unfolding revolutionary process, ensures the successful organisation of a general strike as a means of dismantling ruling-class power. Morris’s commitment to the ‘war of classes’ (CW, 23:265) was grounded in his conviction that collective and democratic control over the means of production would improve the lot of the majority – thereby creating the material conditions for the supersession of alienation – and that a social revolution would be necessary to achieve and secure such control for any sustained period. His revolutionary politics was buoyed up by a remarkably prescient ability to draw out the strategic consequences of this position, pointing to the final elective affinity between Morris and Marx that I wish briefly to note here in conclusion. For both Morris and Marx, the decisive horizon of their various political and theoretical interventions concerned not only the 480

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overthrow of the existing bourgeois state, but also the full withering of the state as an instrument of class domination.This horizon animates Morris’s vision of ‘the present rest and happiness of complete Communism’ (CW, 16:186) in News from Nowhere.85 * This chapter has focused on some perceived elective affinities between Morris and Marx, in their understanding of alienation and revolution, in order to suggest parallels and patterns of affiliation in their thought. It stops short of Paul Meier’s claim that Morris simply ‘reproduces the formulations of Marx and Engels’, which, as Thompson suggested, ‘is in effect an exercise of closure, confining [Morris’s] utopian imagination within textually-approved limits’ (789).86 Yet, as the chapter’s two closing sections might be taken to suggest, some recognition of the homologies between Morris’s and Marx’s writings – as distinct from Morris’s simple identification with ‘Marxism’ per se – can prove to be an illuminating way of discussing their respective political imaginations.

Notes 1 The description belongs to Maurice Hewlett, one of the reviewers of Morris’s utopian romance News from Nowhere (1890). See Maurice Hewlett, ‘A Materialist’s Paradise’, National Review 17:102 (August 1891), 818–27 (818). 2 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd rev. edn (London: Merlin Press, 1977). Subsequent references to this edition will appear, in parentheses, in the body of the text. 3 The titular evocation of Morris’s Marxism is an innovation of Meier’s translator, Frank Gubb, but it is perfectly in keeping with the main argument of Meier’s book. See Paul Meier, La pensée utopique de William Morris (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1972) and Paul Meier, William Morris:The Marxist Dreamer, trans. Frank Gubb, 2 vols (Hassocks:The Harvester Press, 1978). 4 William Morris, Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal 1883–1890, ed. Nicholas Salmon (Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1994), p. 414. Subsequent references to this edition will appear, in parentheses, in the body of the text, as follows: PW, 414. 5 See, for example, Lyman Tower Sargent,‘William Morris and the Anarchist Tradition’, in Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, eds, Florence S. Boos and Carole G. Silver (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), pp. 61–73 (61). Florence and William Boos, meanwhile, take a more heterogeneous approach in pointing to Morris’s affinities with both Marx and Kropotkin (as well as E. F. Schumacher, Raymond Williams and Rudolf Bahro). See Florence and William Boos, ‘The Utopian Communism of William Morris’, History of Political Thought, 7:3 (Winter 1986), 489–510. 6 Bradley J. MacDonald, Performing Marx: Contemporary Negotiations of a Living Tradition (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 47–66. 7 For a recent assessment of this debate, see Wade Matthews, The New Left: National Identity and the Break-up of Britain (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2014), pp. 226–31. 8 Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times:Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory Elliot, 2nd edn (London:Verso, 2009), p. xv. 9 Terry Eagleton, Why Marx was Right (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2011), p. 2. 10 The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris, 24 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910–15), vol. 22: 311. Subsequent references to Morris’s Collected Works will appear, in parentheses, in the body of the text, as follows: CW, 22:311. 11 Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 590. 12 Ibid., p. 458. On Morris’s reading of Capital, Meier comments that ‘he almost immediately embarked upon reading Capital in the Lachâtre French edition (1872–75)’ shortly after he joined the Democratic Federation on 13 January 1883, and that ‘[f]rom that moment, references to Capital and, even more, borrowings from it, become increasingly frequent in his work’. Meier, 1:212. 13 The Works of John Ruskin, eds, E.T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London, 1903–12), 10:192. Ruskin’s chapter is striking for its movement away from the predominant discussion of architecture to a

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consideration of the labouring conditions of fourteenth-century workmen. Ruskin presented them as multi-skilled artisans whose labour was undivided, and who worked with a holistic, all-encompassing view of the task in hand. Ruskin theorised a union between collaborative equality and individual creativity, asserting that ‘[i]t is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity’. Ibid., 10:201. We Met Morris: Interviews with William Morris, 1885–96, ed. Tony Pinkney (Reading: Spire Books in Association with the William Morris Society, 2005), p. 48. The best study of the early reception of Marx’s writings in Victorian Britain remains Kirk Willis,‘The Introduction and Critical Reception of Marxist Thought in Britain, 1850–1900’, The Historical Journal, 20:2 (June 1977), 417–59.Willis points out that ‘many of Marx’s most important writings became available in English only in the late 1880s and the 1890s’, whereas ‘in both Germany and France they were available much earlier’ (457). See also Stanley Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism:The Struggle for a New Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973). Ernest Belfort Bax,‘Leaders of Modern Thought – XXIII: Karl Marx’, Modern Thought, 3:12 (December 1881), 349–54. The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin, 4 vols in 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984–1996), 2:371. The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, ed. Eugene D. LeMire (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969), p. 127. For a fuller discussion of Morris’s anti-imperialist and internationalist politics, see my William Morris’s Utopianism: Politics, Propaganda and Prefiguration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), chapter 5. For a more recent traversal of this complex topic, see Diane Elson, ed., Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, 2nd edn (London:Verso, 2016). Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 157. Georges Haupt, ‘From Marx to Marxism’, in Aspects of International Socialism: Essays by Georges Haupt, trans. Peter Fawcett, with a preface by Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press & Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1986), pp. 1–22 (12). Ibid., pp. 13–14. Ibid., p. 12. Victor Dave,‘International Notes’, Commonweal, 4:113 (10 March 1888), 75. George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism, 4th edn (London: Flamingo, 1983), pp. 241–243. S. Stepniak,‘International Socialist Working-Men’s Congress: To the Editor of Justice’, Commonweal,5:180 (22 June 1889), 195. For Hyndman’s article, see H. M. Hyndman,‘The International Workers’ Congress and the Marxist Clique’, Justice, 6:283 (15 June 1889), 3. Stepniak’s correction also appeared in Justice on 22 June. Stepniak, p. 195. See Bevir, pp. 138–45, 152–64; Pierson, pp. 119–23. See Willis, p. 442. William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax, Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), p. 204. Nicholas Salmon agrees that ‘[f]or anyone attempting to prove that Morris was a Marxist this is the crucial text. This is because it is the only attempt by Morris to grapple with the economic basis of Marx’s work.’ Salmon, however, disputes Thompson’s view of Morris’s role in drafting the text, and comments that Morris and Bax offer little more than an ‘impersonal, pedantic and generally uninspiring account of Marxist economics’. Nicholas Salmon, ‘William Morris:The Final Socialist Years’, The Journal of William Morris Studies, 14:4 (Summer 2002), 12–24 (18–19). Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (London:Verso, 1980), p. 159. For a fuller discussion of the relationship between Marx and Romanticism, characterised by simultaneous attraction and repulsion, see Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 88–98. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), p. 71. Michael Fischer,‘Marxism and English Romanticism:The Persistence of the Romantic Movement’, Romanticism Past and Present:An Interdisciplinary Journal, 6:1 (1982), 27–46 (27). See, for example, Rolf Hosfeld, Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Bernard Heise (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013). Löwy and Sayre, p. 10. Ibid., p. 58.

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Morris and Marxist Theory 39 Ibid. 40 The French Marxist Henri Lefebvre has elaborated Marx’s identification with revolutionary romanticism. See Henri Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 3rd edn (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989), pp. 399–402; Stuart Eldon, Understanding Henri Lefebvre:Theory and the Possible (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 119; Löwy and Sayre, p. 223. 41 Löwy and Sayre, p. 90. 42 Fischer, p. 28. 43 For an illuminating discussion of Thompson’s Postscript and the issues it raises about Morris’s relationship to Marxism and Romanticism, see Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 2nd edn (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 132–50. 44 Levitas, pp. 146, 150. 45 In the revised, 1977 edition, Thompson defends the claims made in the Appendix against criticism from J.Y. Le Bourgeois. See Thompson, p. 752 n.3. 46 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955), p. 760. 47 Löwy and Sayre, p. 96. 48 Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 352. 49 Ibid., pp. 327–29. 50 Michelle Weinroth, Reclaiming William Morris: Englishness, Sublimity, and the Rhetoric of Dissent (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), p. 41. 51 Hewlett, p. 822. 52 Philip J. Kain, Marx and Ethics, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001) p. 194. 53 Marx, Early Writings, p. 329. 54 Marx, Capital, p. 1044. 55 Ibid., p. 759; Marx, Early Writings, p. 423. For an account which emphasises Marx’s static, as opposed to socially constructionist, view of human nature (without which, it is alleged, his theory of alienation would be untenable), see Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London:Verso, 1983). For discussion of an opposing, anti-humanist view, see Louis Althusser, For Marx [1965], trans. Ben Brewster (London:Verso, 1990), pp. 219–47. 56 See especially G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 294–96; Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans (London: John Chapman, 1854). 57 Marx, Early Writings, pp. 395–96. 58 Morris, Unpublished Lectures, p. 64. LeMire suggests that the ‘philosopher’ referred to by Morris was, in fact, Engels. It is certainly true that Engels’s Anti-Duhring (1878) contains discussion of the equation between freedom and necessity, but the text did not appear in English translation until 1907, over a decade after Morris’s death. Morris may have picked up Engels’s discussion in conversation with Bax. In any case, Engels himself makes clear that the ‘philosopher’ in question is Hegel, writing that ‘Hegel was the first to make a proper explanation of the relations of freedom and necessity. In his eyes freedom is the recognition of necessity.“Necessity is blind only in so far as it not understood”’. Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: Anti-Duehring, ed. and trans. Austin Lewis (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1907), p. 147. 59 István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation, 4th edn (London: Merlin, 1975), p. 14. See Marx, Early Writings, pp. 322–34. Needless to say, Mészáros’s use of the masculine pronoun constitutes a regrettably androcentric statement of the case. 60 Marx, Early Writings, p. 348. 61 Ibid., p. 278. 62 Ibid. 63 Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in The First International and After: Political Writings, Volume 3, ed. David Fernbach, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 339–59 (347). 64 Meier, 1:242. 65 Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill, 30 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1904), 6:154. Morris praised Carlyle’s critique of laissez-faire economics in ‘How I Became a Socialist’, where he named Ruskin and Carlyle as the two most important mid-Victorian thinkers who engaged in ‘open rebellion’ against the ‘measureless power of Whiggery’ (CW, 23:279). 66 William Morris:Artist,Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris, 2 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), 1:292.

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Owen Holland 67 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 611. Marx drafted this series of seven rough notebooks during 1857–58, and the text was first published in German in 1939. 68 Ibid., p. 712. 69 Anderson, p. 163. 70 E. P.Thompson,‘William Morris’, in Persons and Polemics: Historical Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1994), pp. 66–76 (72). 71 Ibid., p. 72. 72 See, for example, E. P. Thompson, ‘The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors’, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin, 1981), pp. 1–210 (7). 73 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, with an introduction by Geoff Dyer, 3rd edn (London: Verso, 2015), p. 128. 74 Anderson, p. 177. 75 Ibid., p. 176. 76 Ibid., p. 178. 77 Ibid., p. 186. 78 Ibid., p. 184. 79 John Crump,‘How the Change Came’, in William Morris and News from Nowhere:A Vision for Our Time, eds. Stephen Coleman and Paddy O’Sullivan (Hartland: Green Books, 1990), pp. 57–73 (59, 67). 80 Karl Marx,‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’, in The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings,Volume 1, ed. David Fernbach, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 326. 81 See Stathis Kouvelakis,‘Lenin as Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on Hegel’s The Science of Logic’, in Lenin Reloaded:Toward a Politics of Truth, eds Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 165–204 (195). See also August H. Nimtz, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917:The Ballot, the Streets – or Both (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 115–23. 82 Fredric Jameson et al., An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2016), p. 3. 83 William Morris, News from Nowhere: Or, An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892), pp. 171–72. 84 Crump, p. 63. 85 For a succinct account of Marx and Engels’s writings on the state, see Hal Draper, ‘The Death of the State in Marx and Engels’, Socialist Register, 7 (1970), 281–307; see also Meier, 2:306–27. 86 Meier, 1:239.

References and Further Reading Abensour, Miguel. ‘William Morris: The Politics of Romance’, in Revolutionary Romanticism, ed. Max Blechman. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1999, 125–61. Anderson, Perry. Arguments within English Marxism. London:Verso, 1980. Beaumont, Matthew. Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900. Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2009. Bensaïd, Daniel. Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory Elliot, 2nd edn. London:Verso, 2009. Bevir, Mark. The Making of British Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Boos, Florence and William Boos. ‘The Utopian Communism of William Morris’, History of Political Thought, 7:3 (Winter 1986), 489–510. Coleman, Stephen and Paddy O’Sullivan, eds. William Morris and News from Nowhere:A Vision for Our Time. Hartland: Green Books, 1990. Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx was Right. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2011. Elson, Diane, ed. Value:The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, 2nd edn. London: Verso, 2016. Faulkner, Peter. ‘Murry, Marx and Morris’, The Journal of the William Morris Society, 12:4 (Spring 1998), 7–14. Fischer, Michael. ‘Marxism and English Romanticism: The Persistence of the Romantic Movement’, Romanticism Past and Present:An Interdisciplinary Journal, 6:1 (1982), 27–46.

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Morris and Marxist Theory Haupt, Georges.‘From Marx to Marxism’, in Aspects of International Socialism: Essays by Georges Haupt, trans. Peter Fawcett, with a preface by Eric Hobsbawm. Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press & Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1986, 1–22. Holland, Owen. William Morris’s Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics and Prefiguration. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017. Hosfeld, Rolf. Karl Marx:An Intellectual Biography, trans. Bernard Heise. Oxford: Berghahn, 2013. Jameson, Fredric, et al. An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 2016. Kinna, Ruth. William Morris and the Art of Socialism. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia, 2nd edn. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Lichtheim, George. A Short History of Socialism, 4th edn. London: Flamingo, 1983. Liedman, Sven-Eric. A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx, trans. Jeffrey N. Skinner. London: Verso, 2018. Löwy, Michael and Robert Sayre. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. MacDonald, Bradley J. Performing Marx: Contemporary Negotiations of a Living Tradition. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. Meier, Paul. William Morris:The Marxist Dreamer, trans. Frank Gubb, 2 vols. Hassocks:The Harvester Press, 1978. Mészáros, István. Marx’s Theory of Alienation, 4th edn. London: Merlin, 1975. Morton, A. L. ‘Morris, Marx and Engels’, The Journal of the William Morris Society, 7:1 (Autumn 1986), 45–54. ____. The English Utopia, 2nd edn. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969. Pierson, Stanley. Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism:The Struggle for a New Consciousness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. Salmon, Nicholas. ‘William Morris: The Final Socialist Years’, The Journal of William Morris Studies, 14:4 (Summer 2002), 12–24. Sargent, Lyman Tower.‘William Morris and the Anarchist Tradition’, in Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, eds. Florence S. Boos and Carole G. Silver. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990, 61–73. Thompson, E. P. ‘William Morris’, in Persons and Polemics: Historical Essays. London: Merlin Press, 1994, 66–76. ____. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd rev. edn. London: Merlin Press, 1977. Vaninskaya, Anna. William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Weinroth, Michelle. Reclaiming William Morris: Englishness, Sublimity, and the Rhetoric of Dissent. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. Weinroth, Michelle and Paul Leduc Browne, eds. To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss:William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780–1950, 2nd edn reprinted with a postscript. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. ––––. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, with an introduction by Geoff Dyer, 3rd edn. London: Verso, 2015. Willis, Kirk. ‘The Introduction and Critical Reception of Marxist Thought in Britain, 1850–1900’, The Historical Journal, 20:2 (June 1977), 417–59.

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PART V

Books: Collecting and Design

21 WILLIAM MORRIS’S BOOK COLLECTING Yuri Cowan

This chapter will describe Morris’s practice in assembling his library, followed by the history of his collection during his life and afterward; will outline the major collections that now hold the particular early printed books and medieval manuscripts that belonged to him, as well as the major resources for identifying books from his collection; and will suggest ways in which knowledge of Morris’s library can inform future approaches to the study of his art and literature, especially with regard to the works he published at the Kelmscott Press in the 1890s.This chapter will thus provide an introduction to an aspect of Morris that is currently under-examined and that should lead to a great deal of important new work on Morris from the perspectives equally of intertextuality, historiography, the history of libraries, and his creative practice, especially with regard to the production of books. It is important here to pay equal attention to the content, form, and history of the books that belonged to Morris; they are worth examining for their subject matter, for their design, and for their status as artifacts of material culture and with the marks of their former use and reception upon them. It is easy to be fascinated by Morris’s rich collection of medieval manuscripts and incunabula, and they are key to our understanding of his taste and interests, but an important thesis of this chapter is that Morris’s ordinary reading copies and his nineteenth-century resources on the history of the Middle Ages and on the history of art deserve greater attention from book historians and literary scholars alike. Morris’s collecting has been described by Paul Needham, Joseph Dunlap, Richard Landon, William S. and Sylvia Peterson, and Mark Samuels Lasner. His collecting went through several phases, of which the most important was the great acquisitive phase around the time that he was cultivating an interest in the practical side of book design, that is to say, from around 1889 to his death in 1896. His earliest collecting is not as easy to trace, and further research might be done. We do know that a number of the books (some of them fairly rare, like the Ulm Boccaccio of 1473) that he collected in this earlier period had been sold by the time he had greater funds in the 1880s and 1890s, and although early biographers such as J. W. Mackail considered that Morris had “sacrificed” his book collection to fund his socialist activism in 1880, Richard Landon (2014, 329–331) points out that this was not really the case, and that Morris had not sold more than twenty per cent of his collection, which by the time of a rough catalogue in 1876 (Needham 1976, 97) had included some six early manuscripts as well as a number of incunables and many Icelandic works.We do know that he ended up rebuying some of those earlier books—in better copies, according to Landon. It was at the end of the 1880s that he began a 489

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more thoroughgoing phase of collecting, with an eye to assembling a library that was in some way illustrative of past practices of design and that could serve as inspiration for the Kelmscott Press, and also apparently with the idea that the collection would form a useful investment to provide for his family after his death. It is clear that Morris’s library was above all a social environment where he would discuss the books with friends and artistic collaborators and even visiting journalists. The books that made up Morris’s collection, especially the early printed books, have been shown to be influential in very specific ways on the typography and ornamentation of the books of the Kelmscott Press1, and not only was Morris a benefactor of their example but so were Emery Walker, Edward Burne-Jones, and many others involved with the illustration, typography, and design of Kelmscott books.The medieval texts themselves—romances, popular and ecclesiastical religious texts, and histories, among numerous other genres—show Morris’s interest in all facets of the social life of the past, including topics as diverse as hunting and gardening, chivalry and saints’ lives, history and legend, painting and dyeing, medicine and cookery. Morris’s artistic and design practices as they were inspired by these books have been the subject of work by John Dreyfus, Norman Kelvin, and others; I have also discussed this in connection with their subject matter’s influence on Morris’s social theories (Cowan 2008). Finally, one of the paradoxes of our study of Morris’s collecting is that, since we rely so heavily on our documents of the sales of his library to form our picture of the books he owned, there is so far no single systematic study of his acquisition of his books.That is to say, the order in which he built his collection needs further research and clarification, and it could give us new insights into the development of his buying habits; the shifting of his priorities, tastes, and interests; and the resultant changes in his theories about book production. Another possibility is suggested by Norman Kelvin’s description of Morris’s relationship with one particular bookseller, Bernard Quaritch (1997); a similar treatment of Morris’s interactions with booksellers like the Leightons would be welcome. Richard Landon has described the importance of Morris’s first meeting the publisher and bookseller F. S. Ellis in 1864, introduced to him by Swinburne (Landon 2014, 329).This was an important relationship for Morris; it was Ellis who first guided him in the antiquarian book world and became from 1868 on Morris’s publisher (see Letters 1.62-3). Their friendship, based on fishing and books, lasted to the end of Morris’s life.An important area for future work on Morris will be found in exploring the networks that informed his buying, sharing, and adaptation of books, since collaboration and discussion were essential to Morris’s creative practice (Cowan 2015). The best resource at this time for the books that formed part of William Morris’s library is a comprehensive ongoing blog-based list of his books by William and Sylvia Peterson; between it and the work of Paul Needham (in his 2001 article “William Morris’s ‘Ancient Books’ at Sale” and in his 1976 Morgan exhibition catalogue William Morris and the Art of the Book), Morris’s library has been pretty thoroughly accounted for.The largest contemporary source available is the 1898 Sotheby’s auction catalogue of Richard Bennett’s resale of a large number of Morris’s books, but this gives us, as will be seen, an incomplete picture, since Bennett and Morris’s family both retained a number of books at that point—of the most precious in the first case, and of the greatest sentimental interest in the second—in their respective possessions at the time of the sale.The best resource for the books that were kept by Bennett and that are now in the Morgan Library in New York is the four-volume folio Catalogue of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books printed at the Chiswick Press in 1907 and compiled by a team of specialist bibliographers of the highest reputation, with facsimiles and bibliographical information for the most prominent books (James, et al.). For the books that were retained by Morris’s family there is an auction catalogue, referred to by the Petersons as the “Lobb catalogue,” of the 1939 sale of May Morris’s books (Catalogue, 1939). Norman Kelvin’s Collected Letters of William Morris (4.401–433), 490

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in addition to Morris’s letters to booksellers and friends, includes a transcription of F. S. Ellis’s initial valuation of Morris’s collection in preparation for its eventual sale, in which Ellis lists as accurately as possible the prices that Morris paid for his manuscripts and early printed books (the original of this valuation is now in the Berger collection at the Huntington Library); unfortunately, Ellis did not record the dates of acquisition for these books, and of course it is only the medieval and early modern books that are included.At the Grolier Club of New York there are six London auction catalogues that were marked up by Morris from 1891 to 1895 (Needham 1976, 98), and those are the kinds of documents that we can use to build the picture and timeline of the kind that I have proposed above of Morris’s buying habits and acquisitions. There are also several unfinished attempts that Sydney Cockerell, as Morris’s secretary, made at compiling a bibliographical account of Morris’s library.There was even a plan to publish such a catalogue at the Kelmscott Press (a project with earlier parallels in, for instance, the Bannatyne Club’s catalogue of the library of Sir Walter Scott, or George Robins’s catalogue of Walpole’s collections at Strawberry Hill), but after Morris’s death this was reduced to the facsimiles reproduced in the Kelmscott “Some German Woodcuts of the Fifteenth Century,” all of which represented illustrations in books from Morris’s collection. Cockerell includes a brief description of the project in the Kelmscott book’s colophon, noting that some of the woodcuts were made for an earlier article by Morris—itself an important document of Morris’s understanding of medieval printing—on “The Woodcut Books of Ulm and Augsburg” in Bibliographica; for more, see Peterson’s Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press, 131–33. Some of the cataloguing notes by Cockerell and by Morris survive in various forms in the British Library and Morgan Library, although they do not add significantly to the material we have in more readily available form (for more on these notes, see Needham 1976, 98–99). The story of the dispersal of Morris’s library deserves to be known by all Morris scholars, and is worth telling again here.The medievalist Robert Steele concluded his “Obituary” of William Morris in The Academy, 10 October 1896, no. 1275 (261–62), with a plea to memorialize Morris by keeping his book collection together: If so be that a monument is desired, there is one that would have pleased him above all others. For many years he had been gathering together a unique collection of books and illuminated MSS. Could these but be kept together as a whole, and presented to one of our national libraries, or to some great provincial centre, it would not only be a worthy tribute to his memory, but an absolutely unparalleled education in taste. It is to be hoped that the collection formed with such loving care will not be dispersed, and this magnificent educational opportunity lost. Unfortunately, this was not to be. One would certainly think Morris’s library might have been worth more if sold as a whole collection with such a notable provenance than if sold in parts, and since Steele was personally connected to the matter (a friend to whom Morris bequeathed many of his literary papers, in fact) his urgings here seem to have had Morris’s family’s interest at heart as well as the public’s. But Paul Needham, in the most meticulous and detailed account of the circumstances we have of the sale of Morris’s collection, an article which I draw on heavily for this section, suggests that Morris’s library was not worth quite as much as it could have been because the books had for the most part been only been bought within the previous five or ten years (2001, 177). In the event, Morris’s friend Charles Fairfax Murray made an attempt to purchase the library entire, but since he could not come up with ready cash, no satisfactory arrangement could be made, and Morris’s executors F. S. Ellis and Sydney Cockerell had to find another 491

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buyer. Thomas Chatto, of the bookshop of Pickering and Chatto, found a “man obscure or entirely unknown to the book world of his day” (Needham 2001, 183), the industrialist Richard Bennett, who was willing to buy the collection at £18,000, plus a commission of £2000 for Chatto, which was £8000 more than the initial valuation that Ellis had established (Needham 2001, 184). In November of 1896, the book label “From the Library/of William Morris/Kelmscott House/Hammersmith,” familiar to anyone who has examined a book that belonged to Morris, had been printed by Morris’s executors at the Press and inserted into the books in the collection (Peterson 1984, 182).The sales process was completed and the books moved by 1 May 1897. Bennett took his pick of the early printed books and manuscripts and sold the rest at auction. It was certainly not the fate that Steele had expressed a hope for, and it was in some ways a fairly dismal end to the story of the collection of books out of which Morris and his friends had gained so much aesthetic enjoyment over the previous decade. However, it is also a useful illustration of the way in which one person’s library, the expression of a particular taste and set of principles, will not always be valued in the same way by other collectors with different desires and goals. Bennett’s collecting principles were certainly unlike Morris’s; Landon describes with some amusement how Bennett “disliked folios and refused to have any books over thirteen inches in height on his shelves” (2014, 337). This suggests a rage for order very unlike Morris’s Gothic pragmatism, and Bennett’s divergent tastes had serious consequences for the dispersal of the collection. At the Sotheby’s sale of December 1898, Bennett disposed of a large number of the books that he did not want. Essentially, he kept about half of the manuscripts and incunabula, and sold almost all of the later books (for the details, see Needham 2001, passim). Morris’s friends looked on disapprovingly: “What a dolt and idiot must that Bennett be to … turn out that Hegesippus,” wrote Ellis to Cockerell (Needham 2001, 185), referring to the twelfthcentury manuscript of De excidio judaeorum in a contemporary Winchester binding that formed lot 580. From this point on, many of these books have not been traced, and particularly the nineteenth-century books appear in the Petersons’ catalogue with regularity as “Unlocated.” It is satisfying to find that several members of Morris’s circle, including Walker, Douglas Cockerell, and T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, were on hand at the December sale to buy books that must have reminded them of their friend.2 Another collector, Thomas Ryburn Buchanan, was also there and bought three manuscripts that were eventually bequeathed to the Bodleian (see Kidd 2000). The usual dealers—Quaritch, Leighton—were of course present as well.The catalogue itself has been digitized by Google and could at the time of this writing be found on archive.org as well as the William Morris Archive. Perhaps one of the most intriguing outcomes of Bennett’s sale of his unwanted books from Morris’s library is that it now has a presence comprising some 198 volumes in the Wellcome Collection in London. This came about because the major buyer at the Sotheby’s sale was Henry Wellcome himself, in his first major book acquisition, buying over a third of the books on offer under the name of “Hal Wilton.”The story is told in a blog entry by Ross Macfarlane on the Wellcome Library website, including the melancholy fact that many of the books and manuscripts were resold in the 1930s and 1940s as being duplicates or else as not being entirely pertinent to the library’s emphasis on the history of medicine.Wellcome’s acquisition of Morris’s books is indeed a fascinating story but not, upon reflection, an entirely surprising one. Examples of what Morris called in his preface to Steele’s edition of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum “knowledge-books of the Middle Ages” were among the works that Morris went to in order to build up his picture of the popular knowledge, life, and work of men and women of the past, beyond the political history and obsequies of books that had been directed more towards elites. In the Wellcome Library’s collection, such works of popular and 492

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scientific knowledge include Pomponius Mela’s geographical works, published at Vienna by Johannes Singriener in 1518; Pliny’s Cosmographia, printed at Ulm by Johann Reger in 1486; and Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Cronicarum (the so-called Nuremberg Chronicle that was printed by Koberger at Nuremberg in 1493).The latter is one of the most famous incunables, although not exactly rare; it is a book which Morris must have bought copies of at various times, since he gave at least one away, to William Michael Rossetti and his wife Lucy at their marriage in 1874 (Needham 1976, 22). Also in tune with the Wellcome’s mandate, herbals and medical treatises had also long been sites where Morris could learn about the practical everyday uses of various plants in the Middle Ages.The most famous and common herbal of the Early Modern period, John Gerard’s Herball, or generall historie of plantes, is a book that was a touchstone for Morris on many levels: Norman Kelvin describes how Gerard was one of Morris’s sources when he was first beginning to practice the art of dyeing (1.259, n. 4), and how it was even later used as a reference work at the Merton Abbey works (3.352, n. 5). He owned multiple copies, of which the Petersons trace three (it is not clear which, if any, was the one in place at Merton Abbey).The first edition of 1597 (lot 544 in the Sotheby’s catalogue) owned by Morris has now found a home in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Another copy (1636) was bought at the 1898 sale by Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who with characteristic insouciance coloured some of the woodcuts and later gave the book as a gift to Sydney Cockerell; it is now at the William Morris Gallery.And a third copy, in the 1633 edition, was another of Morris’s gifts, to May Morris in 1882; as part of the May Morris Bequest, it is now in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries (see below). Morris owned quite a number of such medical, herbal, and scientific incunables and manuscripts, and they include many that Henry Wellcome doubtless would have coveted, such as the Morgan Library’s M 165 (a fifteenth-century French manuscript, Aldobrandino da Siena’s Régime du Corps); or, at the same library, the hand-coloured copy of Joannes de Cuba’s Ortus Sanitatis (The Garden of Health), printed at Mainz by Jacob Meydenbach in 1491; or, again at the Morgan, the Dutch translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum (All’t Werk van Bartholomeùs Engelsman) printed by Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem in 1485 and with its full-page woodcuts also hand-coloured. These works, along with many others of the most notable manuscripts and incunabula that had belonged to Morris’s collection, were not in the Sotheby’s sale because they were among the works which Bennett had kept for himself. Obviously Bennett had more taste than Ellis gave him credit for, since his larger collection was sold in 1902 to the wealthy American banker Pierpont Morgan, in which the remaining books from the 1898 auction were interspersed among many even more lavish medieval manuscripts and notable incunables by Caxton and others, to the tune of £130,000 (Needham, p. 197)—an amount that puts the sale of Morris’s collection into humbler perspective. The Morgan’s folio four-volume printed catalogue of the Bennett sale is a rich and well-illustrated work, and Morris’s books take up just one of the four volumes. Needham’s catalogue of the 1976 Morgan Library exhibition William Morris and the Art of the Book is an essential resource for anyone wishing to follow the choicest items of Morris’s library; all the major incunables and manuscripts that belonged to him can be found there.They include beautifully illustrated printed books such as the Franciscan Stephan Fridolin’s Schatzbehalter or spiritual “Treasure Chest” printed by Anton Koberger in 1491 or the beautiful copy of Augustine’s Cité de Dieu printed at Abbeville in 1486–87 by Pierre Gérard and Jean Du Pré (Needham 106–107). The medieval manuscripts in the Morgan include not only what one might call workaday psalters and books of hours (among them the thirteenthcentury Clare Psalter, from which Morris printed the Laudes Beatae Mariae Virginis in 1896, and the fifteenth-century book of hours, now M. 99, from which the English translation of Psalmi Penitentiales was printed in 1894, as discussed by Curt F. Bühler), but also the very finest ones that 493

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Morris owned, such as his last two major, expensive, and one might almost say reckless acquisitions, the Worksop Bestiary (M. 81) and the Windmill Psalter (M. 102), both of which he bought in the last six months of his life. Adding to this collection the Morgan’s separate acquisitions of some of Morris’s authorial manuscripts and Kelmscott material, the Morgan Library is a major centre for anyone wishing to work on Morris’s relationship to the book arts. Digital images of some of these manuscripts can be found through the Morgan Library’s online catalogue, Corsair, as well as on the William Morris Archive. Since Bennett’s two sales, then, Morris’s library has ultimately ended up in two sizeable collections and many smaller ones.3 Although the most prominent books, and the largest number of them, are in the Morgan Library, the collection from the Sotheby’s sale that is still extant in the Wellcome Library is most notable for its inclusion of many of Morris’s more ordinary working copies: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and English works on dyeing, for instance, such as James Haigh’s The dyer’s assistant in the art of dying wool and woollen goods (York, 1787), Claude-Louis Berthollet’s Éléments de l’art de la teinture, avec une description du blanchiment par l’acide muriatique oxigéné (Paris, 1804), or J. Ch. Leuchs’s Traité complet des propriétés, de la préparation et de l’emploi des matières tinctoriales et des couleurs (Paris: De Malher, 1829, 2 vols.), all of which will be of interest to scholars examining the technical works that Morris drew upon for his textiles. Finally, although quite a few nineteenth-century editions of Icelandic texts were among those deaccessioned and sold by the Wellcome in the 1930s, there is still a substantial collection of Iceland-related material at the Wellcome, including Landnámabók in Icelandic and Latin (Copenhagen:A. F. Stein, 1774) as well as geographical and ethnographical works on Greenland and on the Sami people. Even if the Wellcome has not kept its initial holdings of Morris’s books intact, the outlines of Morris’s collecting principles can be found in what remains, and there is room for a detailed study of the volumes that are still there. The Huntington Library also contains books that belonged to Morris, arrived via the sale of the Helen and Sanford Berger collection as well as through the library’s more general collecting over the years. In the Berger collection, in addition to its rich coverage of books and material directly from and about Morris, the Press, and the Firm, are several books from Morris’s library. Attesting again to the great joy Morris found in giving books away as gifts is a copy of one of Morris’s favourite medieval authors, John Froissart, presented to Georgiana Burne-Jones’s sister Louisa in 1857, in the modern Thomas Johnes translation. Also in the Huntington’s collection is the poet Mathilde Blind’s The Heather on Fire: A Tale of the Highland Clearances (London:Walter Scott, 1886), inscribed to Morris by the author “with sincere admiration.” Blind was well connected among the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement more generally, as described by James Diedrick in his recent study of her, and the presentation volume is an illustration of the literary networks of the period. It is not clear how well Morris and Blind knew each other, and no correspondence with her appears in the Collected Letters, but she was a friend of Eleanor Marx and moved in the same socialist circles. At any rate, The Heather on Fire is just the kind of political verse and appeal against injustice that might be assumed to speak to Morris, with its vivid descriptions of Orkney fishermen, hard-scrabble farmers, and the burning of their homes, and although we have no way of knowing how thoroughly he read the poem and its detailed historical notes, it and another book from Blind remained in his possession long enough to form part of lot 1022 (with other presentation copies) of the Sotheby’s sale in 1898. Beyond the Berger Collection, among the books from Morris’s library also now at the Huntington are two fifteenth-century medieval manuscripts of Italian manufacture that belonged to him, both of which sold at the Sotheby’s sale in 1898 and made their way to California at different times. One of these is a Humanist manuscript of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (MS 494

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HM 01031) and the other a Gothic MS of Vergil’s Georgics and Aeneid (MS HM 001036)—the latter an important narrative for Morris in both literary and book-historical terms, since he translated the epic into English and also created his famous Pre-Raphaelite manuscript of it with Edward Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray (Tittle 2015). Since Morris’s collecting took place after the making of his Aeneid manuscript, these medieval manuscripts cannot be said to be “influences” on that opus, but they certainly form a picture of the kinds of manuscript creation that inspired Morris’s work and that he was now in the 1890s finally able to afford for himself. High-quality images from both of these manuscripts can be seen on the Digital Scriptorium website, which also displays images from several other Morris-related medieval manuscripts that are now in American institutions. One of these is a fifteenth-century French psalter written for use by a member of the Celestine order and inscribed “To Jenny Morris” from “William Morris … January 17, 1892” that is now in Columbia University’s collection. As Jenny’s property, this book would not have been part of the larger sale. Many books that Morris similarly gave away doubtless wait hidden, to surface again in collections and bookshops the world over. A number of the books that belonged to Kelmscott Manor and to the family were sold at auction after the deaths of May Morris and her companion Mary Lobb in 1938, and these are fewer than in the Morgan and elsewhere, but perhaps of greater significance, since they are the books that were not sold as part of Morris’s collection but rather kept back as the personal property of Morris’s family.We have seen some such books already (May’s copy of Gerard’s Herball and Jenny’s psalter among them). The books in the Lobb sale are intriguing for the glimpses they show into the diverse nature of the Morris family’s ordinary reading:Victorian poetry, of course, but also ballad collections like William Motherwell’s Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern (1827) and other works on folklore, as well as works edited by Frederick James Furnivall for the Early English Text Society, and still more books on plants. It is fascinating to find in the Petersons’ catalogue that one incunable that seems either by accident or design to have eluded the sale and been kept in the family up until May’s death was Erhard Ratdolt’s 1482 Venetian edition of Euclid’s Elementa Geometria—not as famous perhaps as some more splendid fifteenth-century folios, but a superb choice to retain, with its intricate decorations designed in-house and its interesting woodcut geometrical diagrams. Indeed, Ratdolt’s printing is of more than just aesthetic interest: Stanley Morison recounts how Ratdolt was the first, and for some time the only, printer in Italy who (like Morris) designed his own printed ornaments for the pages he printed, rather than having them decorated by hand by professionals. The Society of Antiquaries of London has also ended up with a few books that came from the May Morris bequest of Kelmscott Manor and its contents in 1939, since the Society was the residuary legatee after Oxford University gave up the bequest in 1962. May Morris also gave items to the Victoria and Albert Museum and a collection of papers to the British Library (which is supplemented by the papers formerly in the possession of Robert Steele).The books belonging to the Society of Antiquaries include a single bound volume of four sixteenthcentury Italian writing books by three different hands, which was used by Morris and by his daughters to practice calligraphy from. This book’s interesting production history and subject matter have been described by A. S. Osley in his article “The Kelmscott Manor Volume of Italian Writing-Books.”The cutting of woodblocks to represent cursive writing was very difficult, and in the 1520s two Italian artists, Ugo da Carpi and Eustachio Celebrino, independently developed the process and skills necessary to reproduce cursive writing; they collaborated (not always peacefully, as Osley colourfully describes) with two writing masters, Giovannantonio Tagliente and Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi, to produce the four books that were bound together in this volume.As a material instance of the sometimes tempestuous process of collaborative book production and of the complicated relationship between handwriting and printing, it is easy to 495

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see how Morris was drawn to acquire this book for both calligraphic and printing-historical reasons, as well as why it was retained in the family’s possession. One cannot pass over the discussion of Morris’s library without speculating on the whereabouts of Morris’s own copies of books from the Kelmscott Press. It is in some ways hard to identify those copies of the Press books that “belonged” to Morris. Indeed, perhaps the most evocative lesson to be drawn from the great number of presentation copies in the “Related Materials” notes in each entry of Peterson’s Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press is that one of Morris’s great joys in making, as in acquiring, books was to give them away. But he certainly kept a set of Kelmscott books for himself: a photograph of Morris’s library at Kelmscott House reproduced in William Morris and the Art of the Book asserts that “The upper shelves of one case are mostly filled with vellum-bound Kelmscott Press editions” (99). And Peterson in The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure describes how in August of 1897 Cockerell “sold Morris’s vellum set [i.e., printed on vellum, rather than just vellum-bound as above] of the Kelmscott Press books (for £650) to Henry Gamman, an old friend from the Coal Exchange” (269), and surprisingly not all of these Kelmscott books have been located, although his copy of the Chaucer, now in private hands, is the vellum copy number 1.10 in the Petersons’ The Kelmscott Chaucer: A Census. The British Library has Emery Walker’s set of Kelmscott Press books, including an intriguing bound collection of “retree” pages from the vellum Chaucer (C.43.h.17) that was in Walker’s possession, which I have examined and plan to discuss more thoroughly in another study. With this retree Chaucer, as with the volume of writing books, the latter a sammelband, or collection of books printed separately but later placed together according to a recognizable logic on the part of the collector (similar to what Morris himself did when he put together the Kelmscott Order of Chivalry volume, for which see Cowan 2015, 163), we see Morris and his circle showing an interest in books beyond the moment of their design and impression, with an eye to those books’ later histories, including, significantly, their reassembly and rebinding. One particular bibliographical curiosity that Morris owned is a bound set of “what have been called, for want of a better term [presumably by Cockerell in his valuation of the library, see Kelvin, Letters 4.407], proof impressions of the illustrations for [Bernhard] Richel’s 1476 German edition of the Speculum humanae salvationis” printed in Basel (Needham 1976, 105).These woodcuts, four per page and 257 in all according to Cockerell, are bound with a manuscript of a different text, Johanne’s Utino’s Compilatio librorum historialum totus Bibliae. The bound volume is now Morgan Library PML 224, and one imagines that Morris found it intriguing as a work bringing together print and manuscript. It is characteristic of Morris’s interest in the details of artistic production that he obtained a book like this, one that revealed so much of the preparatory work for the printing of his favourite medieval books. Sydney Cockerell’s catalogue of incunabula and the lists of woodcuts that he was requested by Morris to make (see, for instance, Needham 1976, 38), diligent as they are in their counting of cuts, are incomplete and at any rate would not contain all the bibliographical information that we now think of as possible to include, and yet his catalogues and Morris’s intention to print them at the Kelmscott Press reveal that Morris and his circle had at least a tentative desire to participate in and contribute to bibliographical scholarship. Space constraints and the privileging of design characteristically tended to trump this concern, however, as when, for instance, Morris quietly demurred when E. Gordon Duff requested to print a bibliography of editions of the Golden Legend (Cowan 2015, 168). A similar respect for bibliographical interest and fidelity accounts for the fact that so many of Morris’s contemporary books are listed as “uncut” in the Sotheby’s catalogue.The catalogue’s use of the term is not evidence of Morris’s not having read those books (that is, the cataloguer likely does not mean they are “unopened” according to the definition given in John Carter and 496

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Nicolas Baker’s ABC for Book Collectors, 226), but rather of Morris’s disdain for the trimming of edges: the untrimmed edges of books are, as Carter and Baker say in their definition of “uncut” (223–24), of very valuable bibliographical interest. These edges, and the choice to cut them down to size or not, are also a very important aspect of the history of bookbinding, which, as the introduction to the Sotheby catalogue suggests, was something that Morris was drawn to, even if it was not among the many skills in which he had direct practical experience. Bookbinding, that recontextualizing art, will be a productive area of future study with regard to the history of the books that Morris owned, having for instance parallels with his thinking with regard to the protection of ancient buildings. Like re-roofing a medieval barn, Morris was willing to send his books to binders he trusted would not (among other sacrileges) alter his beloved expanse of margin at the tail of the page, nor damage the decorations by over-trimming. Prominent among the binders he used was the firm of J. and J. Leighton: in addition to the Leighton-bound Virgil manuscript in the Huntington Library, there are at least four early printed books in the Morgan’s collection that belonged to Morris and were bound by Leighton. Several of these adopted as endpapers the same “Flower”-watermarked paper by Joseph Batchelor that was used for the Press, and one of them (a slim Savonarola pamphlet printed by Thierry Martens at Antwerp in 1502) even bound in the limp vellum with ties that is such a familiar binding for Kelmscott books.The Doves Bindery was also contracted to bind books for Morris, a task which was particularly often carried out by Douglas Cockerell; the picture of the Kelmscott House library on page 99 of the Needham catalogue shows “a large folio French Bible, newly bound with pigskin spine by Douglas Cockerell; its two companion volumes, in older plain vellum, are next to it.” In the event, the manuscript Bible’s two companion bindings were not completed in Morris’s time but rather by Marguerite Duprez Lahey, who was bookbinder for the Morgan Library for many years in the first half of the twentieth century (the set is now M.109–111). Paralleling the completion of the Aeneid manuscript by Graily Hewitt, or the continuation of the Firm’s design work by John Henry Dearle, this miscellaneously bound, three-volume book attests to the collaborative and diachronic impulse that was at the heart of Morris’s creative practice, and to the many successor hands that set to work on items that Morris and his predecessors made or collected. It is clear from the examples recounted here that Morris scholarship today stands to gain a great deal from an awareness of the history of Morris’s book collecting. For scholars of the Firm and of the Press, we now know that books such as his eighteenth-century works on dyeing, his copies of old herbals, and even his medieval manuscripts served as technical and design inspirations and in some cases as copytexts; there is still plenty of room to explore just how these books were used and what kinds of knowledge he gained from them. Similarly, we find in his collection a number of catalogues drawn from the South Kensington Museum, where he must have found plenty of examples of handicraft and antique material culture to inform his art and his theories; indeed, his close relationship with the South Kensington Museum has rarely been explored since Barbara Morris’s discussion of the matter in 1975. Art historians can find a rich body of Morris’s source material in the coloured illustrated antiquarian works of Henry Shaw on medieval dress and art, published by William Pickering in the 1830s and after, which are fascinating examples of Victorian printing in their own right. For scholars of Morris’s social theories, we are beginning to understand the remarkably catholic reach of the mass of historical material that Morris compiled, and how it led him to histories of material culture, of food and drink, of dress and architecture, of popular religion and ethnography, that in turn informed his socialism and his theories of art and society.This kind of material can be found throughout his collection in rare books and reading copies alike, but the varied output of the Early English Text Society is one particularly useful place to start. For literary scholars, and as is only natural with 497

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such a richly allusive author, intertextuality and quellenforschungen have long been important scholarly avenues for understanding his work in the fields of narrative, verse, ornament, craftsmanship, and the book arts alike. From his use of Malory and Froissart in the Guenevere volume of 1858 (discussed by, among others, Margaret Lourie and David Staines), through the sagas and mythological tales of the Earthly Paradise period 1868–70 (charted by Florence Boos and Oscar Maurer), to his allusions to Dickens in News From Nowhere and his printing of selections from Shakespeare,Tennyson, and Shelley at the Kelmscott Press, Morris showed a willingness to engage with the canonical greats on their own terms, and the critics have followed him through the literary traces of that engagement. However, he also built up his own canon, a more widereaching and inclusive one, exemplified in the great diversity of his reading interests. Library and book historians too will find in Morris, in addition to the bibliographical interest of the complicated relationships between the books he knew and the books he made, a richly documented account of a collector’s taste and practices. Finally, the many examples of Morris’s own sharing and gifting of often very rare books give us a picture of a community where the rare book was a demystified object, and where a social space was created in which it could be experienced. Morris’s book collecting takes us far beyond his engagement with the best-known books, as we discover, first, the way in which his knowledge of so many diverse and non-canonical works and authors lends a richness and a sincerity to his passionate assertions about the quality of the social and artistic life of the men and women of the past and, second, his far more than text-deep engagement with the book as a material artifact of those past creative and social lives.

Notes 1 See, for instance, Needham 1976, Peterson 1992, Landon 1993, and Cowan 2008, as well as, with regard to Morris’s earlier experience of medieval books in relation to his calligraphic practice,Whitla 2001. 2 In a similar way, the American man of letters Charles Eliot Norton, who was a long-time friend and acquaintance of Morris’s, bought in 1908 in New York the Italian humanist manuscript of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in Latin, now MS Lat 266 in the Houghton Library, that had been sold at the Sotheby’s sale (lot 71). 3 To give just a few examples, Landon’s “Books” section of the catalogue of the 1993 Canadian exhibition The Earthly Paradise displays several incunables that belonged to Morris and have ended up in Canadian university collections: German and Italian imprints, four in all, at Dalhousie, as well as Jenson’s Latin Pliny of 1476 at McGill. And others are surely on the move, in North American collections and elsewhere. Since the time of that exhibition, for instance, Morris’s copy of Ægidius Romanus’s De Regimine Principum (Gunther Zainer, 1476) was donated in 2003 to the Graham Library at Trinity College, at the University of Toronto.

References and Further Reading Braesel, Michaela. “The Influence of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts on the Pre-Raphaelites and the Early Poetry of William Morris.” Journal of the William Morris Society 15:4 (Summer 2004): 41–54. Bühler, Curt F. “The Kelmscott Edition of the Psalmi Penitentiales and Morgan Manuscript 99.” Modern Language Notes 60:1 (January 1945): 16–22. Carter, John and Nicolas Barker. ABC for Book Collectors, 8th ed. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2006. A Catalogue of the Library of Finely Bound Books Removed from Warnford Park, Southampton, the Property of the Late H. Charles Woods, Esq. Sold by Order of the Executors …;Also Selected Books from Kelmscott Manor, Sold by Order of Messrs. Lloyds Bank, Ltd.,Acting as the Executors of the Late Miss V. Lobb, Including Books Formerly the Property of William Morris and the Late Miss May Morris … on Thursday, July 6th, 1939, and Following Day. London: Hodgson & Company, 1939. Catalogue of a Portion of the Valuable Collection of Manuscripts, Early Printed Books, &c. of the Late William Morris, of Kelmscott House, Hammersmith Which Will be Sold by Auction … On Monday, the 5th of December, 1898, and Five Following Days. London: Dryden Press, 1898.

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William Morris’s Book Collecting Cowan,Yuri.“Collaboration,Translation, and Reception: Editing Caxton for the Kelmscott Press.” To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams. Ed. Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015, 149–71. –––––. William Morris and Medieval Material Culture. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2008. De Ricci, Seymour. English Collectors of Books & Manuscripts (1530–1930) and Their Marks of Ownership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930, repr. 1969, 171–73. Diedrick, James. Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters. Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Dreyfus, John.“A Reconstruction of the Lecture Given by Emery Walker on 15 November 1888.” Matrix 11 (Winter 1991): 27–52. Forman, H. Buxton. The Books of William Morris. [1897]. New York, NY: Burt Franklin, 1969. James, Montague R.,A.W. Pollard, S. J.Aldrich, E. G. Duff, and R. G. C. Proctor. Catalogue of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books from the Libraries of William Morris, Richard Bennett, Bertram, Fourth Earl of Ashburnham, and Other Sources, Now Forming Portion of the Library of J. Pierpont Morgan, 4 vols. London: Chiswick Press, 1906–1907. Kelvin, Norman.“Bernard Quaritch and William Morris.” Book Collector 46 (1997): 118–33. Kidd, Peter. Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts c.1300–c.1500 from the Collection of T. R. Buchanan in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2000. http://www.bodley .ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/medieval/buchanan/buchanan.html.Accessed 5 December 2016. Landon, Richard. “Books.” The Earthly Paradise:Arts and Crafts by William Morris and his Circle from Canadian Collections. Ed. Katharine A. Lochnan, Douglas E. Schoenherr, and Carole Silver. Toronto: Key Porter Books for the Art Gallery of Ontario, 1993, 249–76. –––––.“Was William Morris Really a Pre-Raphaelite?” A Long Way from the Armstrong Beer Parlour: A Life in Rare Books. Ed. Marie Elena Korey. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2014, 323–38. LaPorte, Charles. “Morris’s Compromises: On Victorian Editorial Theory and the Kelmscott Chaucer.” Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris. Ed. David Latham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, 209–19. Lasner, Mark Samuels. William Morris:The Collector as Creator. New York, NY: Grolier Club, 1996. Linenthal, Richard A. “Sydney Cockerell: Bookseller in All But Name.” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 13:4 (2007): 363–86. Macfarlane, Ross. “William Morris at the Wellcome Library.” Wellcome Library, 27 April 2009. http://blog .wellcomelibrary.org/2009/04/william-morris-at-the-wellcome-library/.Accessed 5 December 2016. Maurer, Oscar. “The Sources of William Morris’ ‘The Wanderers.’” University of Texas Studies in English 29 (1950): 22–30. –––––. “William Morris and Gesta Romanorum.” Studies in Language, Literature and Culture of the Middle Ages and Later. Ed. E. Bagby Atwood and A.Archibald Hill.Austin,TX: University of Texas Press, 1969, 369–81. McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. –––––. “A Thing to Mind:The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris.” Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, 45–75. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn.“Collections and Collectivity:William Morris in the Rare Book Room.” Journal of William Morris Studies 17:2 (2007): 73–88. Morison, Stanley. Four Centuries of Fine Printing, 4th ed. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 1960. Morris, Barbara. “William Morris and the South Kensington Museum.” Victorian Poetry 13:3/4 (1975): 158–175. Morris,William. The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Art of the Book. Ed.William S. Peterson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. –––––.“On the Artistic Qualities of the Woodcut Books of Ulm and Augsburg in the Fifteenth Century.” Bibliographica 4 (1893): 437–55. Munby,A. N. L. Connoisseurs and Medieval Miniatures 1750–1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Needham, Paul, ed. William Morris and the Art of the Book. New York, NY: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1976. –––––.“William Morris, Book Collector.” William Morris and the Art of the Book. Ed. Paul Needham. New York, NY: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1976, 21–47. –––––. “William Morris’s ‘Ancient Books’ at Sale,” Under the Hammer: Book Auctions Since the Seventeenth Century. Ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote. London: Oak Knoll Press, 2001, 173–208. Osley,A. S.“The Kelmscott Manor Volume of Writing-Books.” Antiquarian Journal 64:2 (1984): 351–60.

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Yuri Cowan Peterson, William S. A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. –––––. The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. –––––.“The Library of Emery Walker.” Matrix 12 (Winter 1992): 3–14. Peterson, William S. and Sylvia Holton Peterson. The Kelmscott Chaucer: A Census. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2011. –––––.The Library of William Morris: A Catalogue. https://williammorrislibrary.wordpress.com/. Phiminster, Evelyn J.“John Ruskin,William Morris, and the Illuminated Manuscript.” Journal of the William Morris Society 14:1 (Autumn 2000): 30–36. Smith, Roger. “Bonnard’s Costume Historique:A Pre-Raphaelite Source-Book.” Costume 7 (1973): 28–37. Steele, Robert, ed. Medieval Lore from Bartolomaeus Anglicus. By Bartolomaeus Anglicus. Trans. John of Trevisa. [1893]. London: Chatto and Windus, 1924. –––––.“Obituary. William Morris.” The Academy 1275 (10 October 1896): 261–62. Stoneman, William P. “‘Variously Employed’: The Pre-Fitzwilliam Career of Sydney Carlyle Cockerel.” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 13:4 (2007): 345–62. Treuherz, Julian. “The Pre-Raphaelites and Mediæval Illuminated Manuscripts.” Pre-Raphaelite Papers. Ed. Leslie Parris. London:Tate Gallery, 1984, 153–69. Utz, Richard. “Enthusiast or Philologist? Professional Discourse and the Medievalism of Frederick James Furnivall.” Studies in Medievalism 11 (2001): 189–212. Whitla, William. “‘Sympathetic Translation’ and the ‘Scribe’s Capacity’: Morris’s Calligraphy and the Icelandic Sagas.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 10 (Fall 2001): 27–108. Yamaguchi, Eriko. “Rossetti’s Use of Bonnard’s Costumes Historiques: A Further Examination, with an Appendix on Other Pre-Raphaelite Artists.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 9 (Fall 2000): 5–36.

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22 WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE KELMSCOTT PRESS: TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF ENVIRONMENT Nicholas Frankel

In 1895, one year before his death,William Morris was typically self-effacing when explaining why he had started the Kelmscott Press four years earlier: I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters … It was the essence of the undertaking to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type.1 But many commentators regard Morris’s motivations as far more ambitious than this. Shortly before Morris spoke of his desire to promote a new aesthetics of reading—to produce “books which it would be a pleasure to look upon”—the English Illustrated Magazine characterized him as determined on printing and publishing nothing less than “the most magnificent book ever produced on an English press.”Arguably Morris fulfilled this determination with the 1896 publication of the Kelmscott Chaucer, described by the painter Edward Burne-Jones (who illustrated it) as a “pocket cathedral,” and today the press is widely recognized to have been a profoundly important cultural event.“Except for Blake … Morris was the first English artist of major stature who succeeded in controlling every aspect of the printing of a book,” writes William S. Peterson, who calls Morris “one of the most important printers of the modern era” and “the progenitor of nearly all twentieth-century private presses.”2 Inspired by incunabula in the British Museum and his own burgeoning private collection, Morris “sought to recreate the rich Gothic texture he admired in books printed in the third quarter of the fifteenth century.”3 But his eye was fixed firmly on his own historical moment too, and many of the fifty-three titles that Morris published were contemporary, no less than twenty-two of them authored or translated by Morris himself. So where Peterson tells us that the Kelmscott Press was “in effect the final phase of the Gothic Revival” as well as Morris’s “last great attempt to restore beauty and sanity to an ugly, mad world” (Kelmscott Press, 5, 42), Jerome McGann writes that it “put[s] us on the brink of a new world of poetry.”4 For McGann, the Press was the culminant expression of a “materialist aesthetic” that had conditioned Morris’s approach to the written word ever since the publica501

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tion of his first book, The Defence of Guenevere, in 1858, and that subsequently had a decisive effect on literary modernism. If the Press possessed far-reaching implications for the future of printing and literature, moreover, it was also a venture with revolutionary political ramifications, scholars now argue, continuous with strands in Morris’s political career that he had been pursuing long before he turned his hand to fine printing. In Kelmscott Press books, says Michelle Weinroth, conventional proselytizing migrates from the platforms of outdoor lectures and the columns of newsprint to the spaces of an ornamented page.Away from the hustings and off the soapbox, political praxis appears embedded and embossed in an object d’art where social commentary and aesthetics become indistinguishable.5 The continuities Weinroth points to between Morris’s political activism and the Kelmscott Press have not always been so clearly recognized. For much of the twentieth century, the press was seen as a venture designed to divert Morris personally in his retirement from public life, a source of psychic consolation after years of personal and political struggle. In his monumental study of Morris’s transformation from Romantic to revolutionary, for instance, E. P. Thompson calls the press “simply a source of delight and relaxation” and a reflection of the “new mood of resignation” with which Morris met his growing ill-health, the worsening condition of his daughter Jenny, and, perhaps most especially, his disappointment and failure on political fronts to which “he had given the best of his mind and energies.”6 Similarly Peter Stansky—who mentions the press only glancingly in Redesigning the World, his 1985 study of Morris as designer—writes that the press was the “solace along with his collection of books and manuscripts, of the last years of [Morris’s] life.”7 Even Peterson, whose work documenting the origins, methods, and principles driving the Kelmscott Press remains unsurpassed, writes that it was “in effect an amusing diversion for Morris.”8 Morris too downplayed the importance of the press, at least in public, remarking offhandedly to a journalist that “I wanted to print some nice books” and “I wanted to amuse myself.”9 But his essays and lectures on the book arts make it clear that Morris saw the Press as an intervention in the course of Western bookmaking. He viewed the history of printing from the early 1500s onwards as one of degeneration and increasing enslavement to the demands of capitalist publishing.“After the end of the fifteenth century,” he writes,“the degradation of printing, especially in Germany and Italy, went on apace; and by the end of the sixteenth century there was really no beautiful printing done.”10 Typefaces had become ugly, debased, and in some cases unreadable; papers and inks had become impoverished by mass-production and the never-ending pursuit of cheapness, leading to their rapid deterioration, while the principles of typography that make reading delightful (and that had been intuitively understood by the great German, Dutch, and Italian printers of the fifteenth century, Morris argues) had long been neglected.The Victorian explosion in demand for densely illustrated and ornamented books, moreover, fed first by the growth of wood-engraving and later by the new photo-mechanical processes of the late 1870s and 1880s, meant that illustrations and page-ornaments were thrown down randomly with reckless disregard for their relation to type or the harmony of the page. Few Victorian book artists understood the processes whereby their work was to be reproduced, resulting in designs that were displeasing because unsuited for reproduction in print.11 The demands of the marketplace, moreover, meant that reproductive engravers worked in near-industrial conditions, alienated from their labor and from one another, without giving thought or time to matters of artistry, whether the original designer’s or their own. Morris was especially scathing about England, where he felt that the decline was steeper and more rapid than elsewhere in Europe,12 and while he recognized that in the course of his own lifetime, isolated improvements had been made to English printing, notably through the revival of the Caslon old face typefont by the mid-nineteenth-century printer Charles Whittingham and his successor Charles Jacobi at the Chiswick Press, he viewed the modern-style typefaces 502

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beloved by Victorian printers, as well as the eighteenth-century typefaces on which they were based, as “positively ugly … dazzling and unpleasant to the eye owing to the clumsy thickening and vulgar thinning of the lines” (“Printing,” 62). By contrast, Kelmscott Press books represented nothing less than a total reconceptualization of the Western printed book, from the paper, ink, fonts, and woodblocks used in printing to the principles governing the arrangement of pages and the organization of workers responsible for bringing the author’s vision into material existence. Morris approached bookmaking—and indeed any form of creative practice—as a social and collaborative enterprise, feeling that beauty could only be “obtained … by the harmonious cooperation of the craftsmen and artists who produce the book.”13 When setting up the press, he employed an array of carefully chosen, brilliantly talented individuals, many of whose names have now long been forgotten, “all of them thoughtful, painstaking artists, and all working in harmonious cooperation,”14 to manufacture and design every element of the book’s production. His model was the medieval guild or artisans’ workshop, and while it might be objected that Morris’s personal authorship of a number of books issued by the Press contravened its collectivist ethos, the author, in Morris’s view, assumed no special primacy over illustrator, type-designer, wood-engraver, pressman, or any of the other numerous agents responsible for the book’s production and dissemination. The conventional bibliographic signs of authorship are in fact missing from a number of Kelmscott Press books, including the first of them, Morris’s own Story of the Glittering Plain, which possesses no titlepage and ends with a colophon stating only that “here endeth the Glittering Plain, printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press … finished on the 4th day of April of the year 1891. Sold by Reeves and Turner.”15 Of far more importance than the title-page, to Morris’s mind, was the book’s colophon, which emphasized the facts of printing and bookmaking, or the ornate

Figure 22.1 Colophon, The Story of the Glittering Plain, Kelmscott Press (1894). Univerity of Iowa Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive.

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pressmark Kelmscott with which a number of Kelmscott Press books conclude. For Morris, even the most “literary” book, far from being a work of individual genius, was a collective and corporate enterprise, in which a body of skilled artisans gave painstaking thought and attention to the visual arrangement of every graphical, textual, and material element.16 Within two years of founding the press, Morris began to codify the principles he was attempting to enshrine, and today it is difficult to consider the press separately from the lectures and short articles on the book arts that Morris delivered and published in the early 1890s whilst overseeing the press’s operations, usefully gathered together in 1982 by William S. Peterson under the collective title The Ideal Book. Perhaps the most important of these are Morris’s lecture “The Ideal Book” and his essay “Printing” (both 1893, the latter co-authored with Emery Walker), in which Morris lays down precepts for how printed books might combine functionality with artistry.17 First, letter forms should be “designed by an artist, and not an engineer,”18 should observe a “careful purity of line,” and should avoid “irrational swellings and spiky projections” (“Printing,” 63). In part this meant a thickening and enlargement of letter forms, above and beyond those commonly in use, since in an effort to save on paper and for purely commercial reasons, printers had for centuries used type too narrow and small for comfortable reading. Second, the modern practice of “leading” should be retrenched so that larger type might be used without necessarily increasing the amount of paper needed; and the spaces between words should be equalized as far as possible, to avoid unsightly and arbitrary rivers of white meandering through the text.Third, the printed page should be conceived as half of an opening, not as a unit in itself.This in turn necessitated that the text’s position on the page be reconsidered, with more space allowed to the bottom and outer margins than to the top and inner ones. Fourth, modern papers, whether cheap or “sham-fine,” should be rejected in favor of paper “as good as it can be” (“The Ideal Book,” 72). Ideally paper should be hand-made and not over-thick, especially in the case of smaller books, which do not “lie quiet while you are reading” whenever the paper is too heavy (“The Ideal Book,” 72). Finally, ornament, whether illustration or pure pattern-work,“must form as much a part of the page as the type itself … and become architectural” (“The Ideal Book,” 72–73). Since the sixteenth century, printers had conceived of book ornament as an arbitrary adjunct with no inherent relation to the text, while even illustrations, no matter how interesting in themselves, generally sat uncomfortably with the letterpress and so became “far from an ornament in the book” (“The Ideal Book,” 73). By contrast,“a book ornamented with pictures that are suitable for that, and that only, may become a work of art second to none, save a fine building duly decorated, or a fine piece of literature” (“The Ideal Book,” 73). Illustrated books, Morris admitted, were “not absolutely necessary to man’s life” (“The Ideal Book,” 73). But Morris laid it down as a precept that “the picture-book … gives us such endless pleasure, and is so intimately connected with the other absolutely necessary art of imaginative literature that it must remain one of the very worthiest things towards the production of which reasonable men should strive” (“The Ideal Book,” 73).19 As Peterson has observed, “one cannot understand the moral intensity of Morris’s typographical writings without realizing that he does not merely wish to improve the printing of books: in fact … he wants to alter the course of Western history.”20 The Kelmscott Press, as we shall see, was also an effort to change the course of history, at least insofar as it had resulted in the cheapened, market-driven books to which Morris took such strong exception. Nonetheless, many book historians have questioned that effort’s success and effects. Elizabeth Miller has recently observed that “Morris’s print interventions emerged at a moment of seemingly inevitable, invulnerable capitalist print progress—progress towards a bigger, faster, more commercial and more profitable print marketplace.”21 As Pat Francis notes, the press’s years of activity (1891–1898) coincided with the invention and perfection of Monotype, the mechanical 504

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typesetting machine that was to revolutionize print production on a massive, industrial scale in the early twentieth century.22 As importantly, virtually from the moment the first book left the press, questions were raised about the readability of Kelmscott Press books as well as the density of their pages and Morris’s love for Gothic type. In 1971, Roderick Cave reaffirmed Holbrook Jackson’s 1938 judgment that Kelmscott Press books “ask you to look at them rather than to read them,” implying that they are “museum pieces, typographical monuments—beautiful and ineffectual angels beating in the void their luminous wings in vain.”23 Cave concluded that while Kelmscott Press publications are magnificent works of art and even “revolutionary manifestos in the cause of better printing,” they are not books.24 Two years earlier, Colin Franklin had gone further, arguing that, while it was the most splendid of all private presses, the Kelmscott Press was “not a pioneer” and “had slender influence.”25 In an effort to counteract Cave’s and Franklin’s judgments, John Dreyfus later granted the Press a wider and more lasting influence. But at the same time, he noted that the work of direct imitators was often “sadly inept” and concluded that Morris’s influence was greatest on “those who never mimicked his mannerisms but applied his principles to books produced by twentieth-century production methods.”26 Even William S. Peterson concluded his magisterial 1991 history of the Kelmscott Press by remarking that, while Kelmscott Press books were intended to symbolize “a protest against the ethos of industrial capitalism,” they quickly became “in all their opulent splendor, an example of conspicuous consumption” (Kelmscott Press, 275). A turning-point in understanding of the Kelmscott Press came in 1992 with the publication of Jerome McGann’s seminal essay “`Thing to Mind’: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris,” subsequently republished as part of his Black Riders:The Visible Language of Modernism (1993).While not a study of the Kelmscott Press per se, McGann’s essay traced the genesis of Morris’s “materialist aesthetic” from his earliest student publications in the 1850s to the full, final flowering of his literary career in the works that he published at the Kelmscott Press in the last five years of his life.As we have seen, the Press had always interested historians of printing on account of the radical practices whereby the books it issued were designed and printed. But McGann, a literary scholar, was as concerned with reading and imaginative praxis as with the printed icon, and for him, as mentioned, “the texts issued at Kelmscott Press put us on the brink of a new world of poetry” (“Thing to Mind,” 69). For McGann, the books issued by the Kelmscott Press represent a decisive break not merely with the world of print and commercial publishing, as it had been conceived for the past two centuries and more; they also make a break with concepts of reading that treat print simply as a vehicle and that regard language as a system of referential signs pointing beyond themselves to some semantic content. Morris “wants us to read … as much with our eyes as with our minds,” writes McGann, and for this reason each text printed at the Kelmscott Press is “executed primarily as a design of words and lettering” (“Thing to Mind,” 69–71). McGann cites as an instance the opening to the first volume of The Earthly Paradise, published in 1896. “Borders between decorative materials and linguistic text are established to be overrun everywhere,” he writes, with leafwork that is “defined at the margins [moving] into bibliographical spaces normally occupied by typeface alone” (“Thing to Mind,” 74). Similarly, the lineation and choice of typeface generate a text that is “thick with its own materialities” (“Thing to Mind,” 74).The effect is “to foreground textuality as such,” to force readers to attend to the literary work’s immediate and iconic condition “as if words were images or objects in themselves” (“Thing to Mind,” 74). In this respect, says McGann, the Press was a “profound … deeply influential, precursive event” since it heralded not merely early modernist literary procedures such as imagism, vorticism, and objectivism, but also important later developments in visual and concrete poetry (“Thing to Mind,” 75). 505

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Figure 22.2 Opening, The Earthly Paradise, Kelmscott Press, 1896. University of Iowa Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive.

There are clear lines of descent from McGann’s work to Jeffrey Skoblow’s 2002 essay “Beyond Reading,” which also emphasizes the effects of Morris’s printing and publishing practices upon reading. Like an earlier generation of scholars, Skoblow argues that Kelmscott Press books are “not particularly well-designed for reading,” while also noting that they have proven doubly inaccessible to the vast majority of readers by virtue of the speed with which they became museum-pieces and objects for collectors.27 To engage the Kelmscott Press directly, Skoblow writes, “to take the books in hand, one must generally go to one of the great plutocrat libraries—the British, say, the Morgan, or the Huntington—to which access is controlled and in which contact with the objects is strictly monitored” (“Beyond Reading” 246). In this respect, of course, Kelmscott Press books are not unique.What is distinctive, says Skoblow, is the vigor with which Morris made inescapable the fact of his books’ inaccessibility. For Skoblow, Kelmscott Press books do not place us on the brink of a new world of poetry so much as they place us “beyond reading,” refusing the premises by which they might be read in a world that sees reading as a form of consumption, immediate in its satisfaction, and that regards books as information-delivery systems. Like McGann, Skoblow gives close attention to the “pervasive materiality” (“Beyond Reading” 252) of a Kelmscott Press book; he notes, for instance, how capital letters “seem to disappear in plain sight” (“Beyond Reading” 247) on the title-page to the 1894 edition of The Story of the Glittering Plain, and how readers quickly become “beguiled … by ever shifting forms,” as frames seem to collapse in front of our eyes, as text becomes more fully interpenetrated by ornament, and as margins appear more central than we took them to be initially (“Beyond Reading” 249) [see Plate 22.1]. For Skoblow, such textual procedures constitute a “derangement of the senses” (“Beyond Reading” 247), and they do not transform read506

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ing so much as they resist or refuse it. “If this is reading,” Skoblow writes, “then reading is not what we learn in school: we are called, at Kelmscott, to a different order of activity” (“Beyond Reading” 249).28 Skoblow is careful to situate this resistance to normative reading practices within larger historical contexts. He reminds us not merely of Morris’s lifelong objective to “redeem the arts … from the commercial ethos which … has dominated their development,” but also that Morris’s work is part of “a great Romantic-Marxist continuum” deeply alive to “the exploration of objectification, sensory alienation, commodification, and the negative dialectics of resistance” (“Beyond Reading” 241). For Morris, the desire to produce beautiful books went hand in hand with a hatred of modern civilization:“to make beautiful things, for Morris, is to make unalienated things, to reclaim the thing-ness of things from the dilutions, adulterations, and abstractions of commodification” (“Beyond Reading” 241–42).The Kelmscott Press was thus a sustained act of resistance to the capitalist order as such—to an “age of superabundance [in which] … the utilitarian production of makeshifts … has swept away the book-producer in its current, and … few books nowadays can at the best claim anything more than negative qualities as to their appearance.”29 It was a utopian vision that owed as much to Keats as to Karl Marx, for its object was nothing less than the complete redemption and reclamation of the senses. The work of McGann and Skoblow represented a decisive advance in Kelmscott Press scholarship, for it shifted the focus of inquiry “from the esoteric study of Morris’s print production to a radically new hermeneutic of the decorated literary page” (“Redesigning the Language” 37). In the wake of Skoblow and McGann, it was no longer possible to regard Morris’s latecareer turn to the production of gorgeously ornamented printed books as a break with his earlier career. Rather the Press appeared to be a new, more radical development in a career long dedicated to the “embodiment of dreams,” in which heightened perceptual consciousness and the realization of beauty went hand in hand with a refusal to accept the customary order of things. But as Michelle Weinroth has recently written, McGann’s and Skoblow’s treatments of the Kelmscott Press also left unexplored “a noteworthy dimension of Morris’s Kelmscott productions—the reconfiguration of the rhetoric of social change” (“Redesigning the Language,” 38–39). For Weinroth, Kelmscott Press productions are not merely embodied acts of resistance to the hegemony of capitalism insofar as it bears upon the printed word. Some of them are also efforts to re-enchant the rhetoric of social and political change—“to redesign and thereby revolutionize socialist propaganda” (“Redesigning the Language,” 39)—and for this reason they need to be understood continuously with those literary works of the late 1880s and early 1890s such as The Pilgrims of Hope, A Dream of John Ball, and News From Nowhere, in which Morris tried to formulate imaginative solutions to obstacles he had encountered in his career as a political thinker, agitator, and organizer. A Dream of John Ball is especially critical to understanding the Kelmscott Press as “the site of a refurbished … political discourse” (“Redesigning the Language” 39). First serialized in 1887–88 in the Socialist League newspaper Commonweal, A Dream of John Ball is at once an uplifting story of heroic revolt, an oblique and private expression of Morris’s disgruntlement with ideas about social change advocated by contending elements within the Socialist League, and “an index of his desire, against criticism, to inject aesthetic material into the pages of Commonweal” (“Redesigning the Language,” 40).The story, a dream-vision in which a late-Victorian socialist is magically transplanted back into the midst of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, is simultaneously “propaganda and commentary on propaganda,” says Weinroth, and it offers its readers “aesthetic instruction on the limits of agitation” by postulating three revolutionary kinds of political knowledge and action: expanded “epistemologies of time,” a new kind of “three-dimensional thought,” and a thoroughgoing redefinition of masculine agency (“Redesigning the Language,” 507

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40). But it is in the work’s (re)incarnation as a Kelmscott Press book, says Weinroth, that these forms of revolutionary knowledge and action are posed with the greatest urgency. In the serialized Commonweal version of 1887–88, these new orders “arise out of the narrative fabric, specifically in descriptions of landscape and in portrayals of characters” (“Redesigning the Language,” 54). In the Kelmscott Press edition of 1892, by contrast, “they are intensified as they surface in new incarnations” (“Redesigning the Language,” 53–54). The famous frontispiece to the Kelmscott edition, for instance, far from being a mere ornamental flourish, “gives substance to the spatio-temporal dynamics of the narrative” (“Redesigning the Language,” 56). Considered simply as a picture, it represents a sharply-realized Edenic world in which inequality and ownership do not exist. But once its distinctive overspilt leafy borders are taken into consideration, as well as its dialectical relation to the page facing it, this “picture” becomes a true “frontispiece,” a bibliographical incarnation of the “pleasant dream” or “architectural peep-show” whereby the sleeping “dreamer” becomes transported into a less sordid, historically actualized world where vision and thought become renewed and “all the detail [suddenly appears] clear and reasonable.”30 To be sure, it represents the ideals of fellowship and labor to which the narrative aspires, but it “simultaneously enacts by textual means the process of historical envisioning by which those ideals are to be attained.”31 For Weinroth, this doubling of John Ball’s political urgencies in the text’s bibliographic features is characteristic of Kelmscott Press books generally. Kelmscott Press books are “regenerative and illuminating sites for the eye and mind,” says Weinroth, for they “wrest the Victorian reader out of the spin of capitalist time,” nourishing the starved eye and allowing thought to ripen under conditions of repose and delight (“Redesigning the Language,” 55).Textual ornament and fine materials have “not eclipsed the idea of the practice of agitation, only redesigned

Figure 22.3 Opening, A Dream of John Ball, Kelmscott Press, 1892. University of Iowa Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive.

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it as a new source of enlightenment” (“Redesigning the Language,” 58).And just as the narrative of A Dream of John Ball obliges us to grasp time as “a spectral confluence of temporal zones,” so the reader of a Kelmscott Press book experiences a new “tempo for textual hermeneutics,” becoming obliged to “think doubly, to glimpse sight of a beautiful future, while recalling the lengthy voyage” necessary for reaching that future (“Redesigning the Language,” 58–59).32 Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is another recent critic who sees Kelmscott Press books as “utopian spaces, outside the ‘march of progress’ [that] … pointedly remove themselves from the general flow of mainstream print” (Slow Print 40). Like Skoblow, Miller accentuates Morris’s “resolutely materialist insistence on attention to production” (Slow Print 56). Like Weinroth, she views the press’s production values as “simultaneously archaic and futuristic” (Slow Print 57),33 and, again like Weinroth, she sees Morris’s explicitly political and utopian works A Dream of John Ball and News From Nowhere as intrinsic to understanding the Press’s broader objectives. For Miller, the 1892 Kelmscott Press edition of News From Nowhere is, no less than John Ball, an effort to incarnate and activate a political vision that had been thwarted by its earlier dependence on “the template of mass mediation” (Slow Print 62). (Like A Dream of John Ball, Nowhere had previously been serialized in the pages of Commonweal, where, despite Morris’s best efforts to “make the paper in some degree a good example of typographical art,” it had been compromised by “industrial forms of literary production” [Slow Print 62]).The narrative of News From Nowhere invites readers to imagine a postrevolutionary future in which citizens live harmoniously in fellowship, unalienated from the fruits of their own labor, in full accord with nature, the places they inhabit, and their own bodies. But where the Commonweal serialization had compromised this vision through its dependency on conventional newsprint, the Kelmscott Press edition incarnates it in its very fiber. Miller argues that the edition’s frontispiece, for instance, depicting the old house where the romance’s central characters make a blissful end to their journey, “reminds us of its alterity [in order] to highlight our own alienation from the present it depicts” (Slow Print 64). But everything about this frontispiece is deliberately iconic, and it can equally be argued that it makes concrete and real what might otherwise too easily be written off as visionary or utopian. The solidity of the picture’s wood-engraved lines and dense black ink is underscored by the peculiar wording of the frontispiece’s caption, printed in thick black roman capitals: THIS IS THE PICTURE OF THE OLD HOUSE BY THE THAMES TO WHICH THE PEOPLE OF THIS STORY WENT [.] HEREAFTER FOLLOWS THE BOOK ITSELF WHICH IS CALLED NEWS FROM NOWHERE OR AN EPOCH OF REST & IS WRITTEN BY WILLIAM MORRIS[.] The matter-of-fact syntax emphasizes immediate presence.The roman capitals have about them the air of a public proclamation or inscription, and they enforce a kind of reality-effect, underscored by the facticity of four floral printer’s devices that do not punctuate the caption so much as interrupt it.The allusions to the Thames and to Morris himself, moreover, like the quadruple repetition of the definite article “the” in the first sentence, make this vision of the house where Morris’s “utopian romance” ends seem as real as the book in hand—an effect only heightened when we reflect that the house is actually that (Kelmscott Manor) in which the novel was partly written. Similarly, the leafy floral forms that frame the text’s opening and that encroach so dramatically into the text come to seem not just representations of the abundant fruit trees and continuous gardens “running over with flowers” that are such a marked feature of Nowhere’s environment, but also living, actualized expressions of the work’s ecological ideal—of a world in which culture and nature, text and context, become merged in a space that eludes hierarchical definition and defies the normative economy of the page. 509

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Figure 22.4 Frontispiece, News from Nowhere, Kelmscott Press, 1892. Washington University Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive.

Like Weinroth, Miller sees Morris’s presswork as a liberation from the constraints imposed on his vision by his earlier dependence on the world of capitalist print. But uniquely among recent scholars, Miller also sees the Kelmscott Press as giving impetus to a far broader movement at the turn of the twentieth century—by no means confined simply to a “private press movement”— that she calls the slow print movement, in which political and literary radicalism went hand in hand with a Morrisian resistance to the hegemony of capitalist printing and publishing. The press exacerbated widespread discontent not merely with the world of mass print, Miller argues, but also with the realist novel and other literary forms that had long been dependent upon it. It thus indirectly influenced the “theatrical turn” (which Miller also terms an “antinovel turn”) palpable among early-twentieth-century writers, as well as other new and radical forms of literary and political enterprise.With a reach that extended far beyond those with direct access to its books, Miller writes, the Kelmscott Press was “part of a broader anticapitalist counterculture” and it did much to promote a wider “rejection of large-scale forms of reproduction, metonymically represented by print reproduction, on the grounds that they do violence to our humanity” (Slow Print 303). Like other recent scholars, then, Miller views the Kelmscott Press as a revolutionary moment of cultural rupture,“constitutive of the modernist moment” (Slow Print 300), which places us on the brink of a more just and beautiful future.34 Yet there is one feature of Kelmscott Press books that remains curiously downplayed in most of the recent treatments I have been discussing: Morris’s obvious love for rich floriated ornament based on the forms of plants, many of which he possessed, cultivated, and studied in his own gardens at Kelmscott Manor and Kelmscott 510

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House.To be sure, this is a matter of book design and not simply production, though it is germane that Morris evokes the forms of plants with calligraphic flourishes as if to underscore the importance of the human hand. Moreover, it is something of a misnomer to describe the floriated forms adorning Kelmscott pages as ornaments, as secondary adjuncts to the verbal text, since in many instances they thoroughly interpenetrate verbal text, as we have seen, and are more properly described as illuminations. But it is without question that Morris personally designed dozens of borders, half-borders, and illuminated capitals for Kelmscott Press books, each incorporating a rich abundance of floral and vegetal forms, and that the incorporation of such forms is as distinctive a feature of the Kelmscott Press book as the original typefaces, papers, and illustrations that populate them or the typographic principles governing their layout. These floriated elements may be more integral to the Kelmscott Press book than has been appreciated by scholars, and to some extent they resist the bibliographic language (“decorations,” “borders,” “half-borders,” etc.) that has traditionally been used to describe them. “Love of nature in all its forms must be the ruling spirit of such works of art as we are considering,” Morris had written in “The Lesser Arts of Life.”35 “I must have unmistakable suggestions of gardens and fields, and strange trees, boughs, and tendrils, or I can’t do with your pattern” he had written in “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing.”36 For Morris there was an “eventfulness of form in those things which we are always looking at,” and “one of the chief uses of decoration”—as well as “the chief part of its alliance with nature”—is “to sharpen our dulled senses” by reminding us of a world in which the objects we employ and the spaces we inhabit are fully integrated with the living environment.37 This is not to say that Morris required ornament to be strictly or straightforwardly representational; decoration is “futile” and decadent, he writes, “when it does not remind you of something beyond itself, of something of which it is but a visible symbol.”38 Above all, “ornamental pattern-work … must possess beauty, imagination, and order.”39 But even when made to be “suggestive rather than imitative,” ornament should remind us “of the outward face of the earth … or of man passing his days between work and rest,”40 Morris writes. Certainly it should instill love for a natural world fast disappearing under the encroachments of “snorting steam,” the “piston stroke,” and the “spreading of the hideous town.”41 But as importantly, it should instill hope and a desire to transform civilization “till the web, the cup, or the knife look as natural, nay as lovely, as the green field, the river bank, or the mountain flint.”42 Morris had been practicing these principles for many years when he founded the Kelmscott Press, notably in the wall-furnishings and fabrics he designed and produced for Morris and Co. His personal delight in plant forms is obvious at a glance when we view his wall-furnishings, for instance, and as Michelle Weinroth has recently written, the latter embody an “aesthetic of dialectical movement and growth” that is subversive and politically radical.43 In pattern-design, Morris writes,“every line should have its due growth, and be traceable to its beginning” while “no stem should be so far from its parent stock as to look weak or wavering. Mutual support and unceasing progress distinguish real and natural order from its mockery, pedantic tyranny.”44 Design conducted along these lines is the “graphic index of an egalitarian social philosophy,” Weinroth has written, an affirmation of non-hierarchical social arrangements “in which no central figure dominates the ground” and “no one shape or representation, prevails.”45 Equally, the relation of stem to parent stock in the formation of floriated patterns is a symbol of the “support” and “unceasing progress” without which life is impossible. Secondary forms, represented florally as new growths or offshoots (buds, blossoms, fully-formed flowers, fruits, and so forth), both depend upon and surpass the parent forms from which they derive.The resulting patterns are a form of “graphic choreography,” generating a “rhythm” that “brings the whirring perspectives of frenzied life to a halt, energizing the perceptual senses to crave more time, to linger with the unexpected, and to break down perceptions.”46 At the same time, they emphasize 511

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the dynamics of forward-moving growth and change, built not on rupture and division but on natural and modest increments whereby the new both replicates and revises the old. Far from evolving from “fixed postulates,” says the French theorist and aesthetician Henri Focillon, “ornament creates various new geometries even at the heart of geometry itself.”47 It renews life through the ceaseless dialectic of repetition and variation. There are clear lines of continuity between Morris’s pattern-designs for Morris and Co. and those that go to make up the so-called ornaments that adorn the pages of Kelmscott Press books. One sign of this continuity can be found in Morris’s frustration when experimenting with the marriage of printed text and decorative ornament just prior to the inception of the Kelmscott Press. In 1890 he bound the “Superior Edition” of his romance The Roots of the Mountains, the last of his works to be printed at the Chiswick Press, in chintz containing one of two stylized floral designs, either “Honeysuckle” chintz or “Little Chintz.”48 Both designs were based on flowers that Morris possessed in his own gardens and of which he had made a close study. But to Morris’s mind, the material, style, and profuse color of these chintzes sat awkwardly with the medium of the printed book—it was an experiment he never repeated—and only confirmed him in his lifelong discomfort with the ornamentation of a book’s binding.49 Subsequently, after he began issuing books printed at the Kelmscott Press, he bound them in either unornamented full vellum or quarter linen (also unornamented), the latter conceived merely as a temporary binding—though in fact the majority of Kelmscott Press books have never been rebound.50 And where he always emphasized the need for color in producing textiles and wallpapers, he was initially averse to the incorporation of anything but a solid black in Kelmscott Press books, and was only reluctantly persuaded by his colleague the master-printer Emery Walker that red might be used for shoulder notes and chapter-headings in some books.

Figure 22.5 Acanthus Wallpaper, Morris & Co., 1875. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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It took Morris some time to figure out a satisfying way to replicate the dynamic, life-affirming effects of his wallpapers and fabrics within the confines of a printed book. Upon founding the press, he concentrated his energy initially on typeface design and the illumination of individual letters, the latter all gorgeously interpenetrated with stylized floral and vine patterns in white line. As Peterson observes, the same simple border appeared in the first five Kelmscott Press publications, always where the text commences, and “only later did Morris introduce a profusion of full, three-quarter, half-quarter, and corner borders into his books” (The Kelmscott Press 141). But the resemblance of even the earliest Kelmscott Press border to some of Morris’s wallpaper designs is obvious. And if “a love of nature in all its forms” was the guiding spirit for the design of Morris’s wall furnishings, it is also the guiding spirit of his earliest printed border, which Morris conceptualizes as a textual habitat no less than his wallpapers, tapestries, and tiles had been meant to constitute a revolutionary new lived environment. Indeed the demarcation lines between text and border, or between the reader and the larger world he or she inhabits, are constantly shifting when we read a Kelmscott Press book, with the result that the page’s decorative border comes to seem an extension of the text itself. We can see this clearly in the way the full-page border both surrounds and extends the opening of “From the Upland to the Sea,” the poem which commences Poems By the Way, the second book to be issued by the Press.The poem had originally been written in the 1860s for inclusion in “The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice,” which Morris had at the last minute decided to exclude from The Earthly Paradise, a context in which it clearly forms a love lyric addressed by Orpheus to Eurydice. But for Poems by the Way, the lyric has been stripped from its original context, with no speaker or addressee clearly identified, and it has been radically transformed in

Figure 22.6 Opening, “From the Upland to the Sea,” in Poems By The Way, Kelmscott Press, 1892. University of Iowa Libraries. Courtesy of the William Morris Archive.

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the process.The questions with which the poem begins—“Shall we wake one morn of spring,/ Glad at heart of everything,” so enraptured that we immediately step outside and journey past “the wind-flowers and the bays” till “our very joyance needs rest at last”—had originally been spoken by Orpheus to Eurydice. But in Poems by the Way, with no clear markers identifying their speaker, these lines invoke their reader as a companion in imagined bliss, offering up a generalized invitation to journey collectively across a fecund springtime landscape terminating in “prayer and praise of bliss” at the arrival of approaching countryside. This expansion of the poem’s meaning is underscored and reinforced by the relationship between the page’s typography and the surrounding full-page floral border. Our gladness of heart at the arrival of spring is incarnate in the decorative design, and it is surely no accident that the last line of the poem’s opening,“Thither comes the country side,” is printed adjacent to the largest section of the floral border, at the bottom of the page, which in consequence seems not to frame the poem so much as extend or amplify it. Even Morris’s earliest decorative border, in other words, is nothing less than a living embodiment of the more acutely “felt” environment which he asks his reader to experience on an imaginative level. This doubling of the text’s urgencies in the decorative border is palpable in many Kelmscott Press publications, especially those authored by Morris himself. Take for example the famous “Prologue” that opens The Earthly Paradise: Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town; Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small and white and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green; Think, that below bridge the green lapping waves Smite some few keels that bear Levantine staves, Cut from the yew wood on the burnt-up hill, And pointed jars that Greek hands toiled to fill, And treasured scanty spice from some far sea, Florence gold cloth, and Ypres napery, And cloth of Bruges, and hogsheads of Guienne. We are being asked here to imagine an environment dramatically transformed—elaborately ordered, densely inhabited, and thick with earthly texture. Although Morris’s injunction to “Forget six counties overhung with smoke” is notable for what Norman Kelvin has called its “explicit rejection of Victorian society” and its “invitation to rise above the experience of modern London,”51 Morris’s lines are equally striking for the urgency with which they direct us to dream of a living habitat “small, and white, and clean/ … bordered by gardens green.”The mention of “bordered … gardens” is especially resonant, since in the Kelmscott Press edition the page is itself bordered with elaborate stylized representations of leafage, fruit, and flowers, and although these border designs do not correspond to the poem exactly in matters of color, they initiate that effort to imagine an “earthly” paradise whose very incompleteness is implicit in the urgency of Morris’s repeated injunctions to “dream” and “think.”The printed page, as Morris has conceived it here, does not so much contain the poem’s text as allow it to seep into the border designs, which themselves stand as living incarnations of Morris’s envisioned earthly paradise. As with the opening to Poems by the Way or the gorgeous illuminated “F” commencing the “Prologue” (which echoes and

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extends the border [see Figure 22.2]), language has been conceptualized here as a vegetal entity, at once a reflection and an extension of the world it helps to make up. In the case of Morris’s late romance Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, this unity of border and text is further underscored by the book’s 16mo format, which allows just sixteen lines of text on the opening page (apart from a three-line chapter heading) and which places a correspondingly greater emphasis on the border and the gorgeous illuminated “O” that commences the text [see Plate 22.2].Twelve of the opening sixteen lines describe the land of Oakenrealm: Of old there was a land which was so much a woodland, that a minstrel thereof said it that a squirrel might go from end to end, and all about, from tree to tree, and never touch the earth: therefore was that land called Oakenrealm. As with the openings to Poems by the Way and The Earthly Paradise, the page is printed in a way that ensures we experience the traversal of space for ourselves; the opening phrases, each no more than three or four words in length, seem deliberately enjambed, and as the eye moves rapidly within the narrow confines of the page’s leafy borders, like a squirrel which moves “from end to end, and all about, from tree to tree, and never touch[es] the earth,” the page itself becomes “so much a woodland,” its borders an incarnation of the “Oakenrealm” within which the tale’s protagonist is born. The unity of text and decoration which I am describing is not restricted merely to those Kelmscott Press books which Morris personally authored (some eighteen of the press’s fiftythree published titles)52 or translated (another five). Nor is it always so immediately apparent as in the cases of Poems by the Way, The Earthly Paradise, or the two political romances that are the focus of Weinroth’s and Miller’s studies. In the very earliest Kelmscott Press books, as I have already mentioned, Morris restricted himself to a single floriated border around the text’s opening while scattering illuminated capitals throughout the text.When we read the Kelmscott Press edition of John Ruskin’s Nature of Gothic (the fourth book to be issued by the press,53 and one described by Morris in his preface as “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century”), it is not till the seventy-sixth page that the rationale driving the opening decorated border becomes apparent. Here we encounter the following remarkable justification for the existence of floriated ornament, which Ruskin sees not merely as a distinctive feature of Gothic architecture but also as a phenomenon “indicative both of higher civilization and gentler temperament” than had been manifest in earlier ages: The rudeness of ignorance … is not so great as to prevent the successful rendering of the wayside herbage; and the love of change, which becomes morbid and feverish in following the haste of the hunter and the rage of the combatant, is at once soothed and satisfied as it watches the wandering of the tendril and the budding of the flower. Nor is this all: the new direction of mental interest marks an infinite change in the means and the habits of life.The nations whose chief support was in the chase, whose chief interest was in the battle, whose chief pleasure was in the banquet, would take small care respecting the shapes of leaves and flowers; and notice little in the forms of the forest trees which sheltered them, except the signs indicative of the wood which would make the toughest lance, the closest roof, or the clearest fire. The affectionate observation of the grace and outward character of vegetation is the sure sign of a more tranquil and gentle existence, sustained by the gifts, and gladdened by the splendour, of the earth. In that careful distinction of species, and richness of delicate and undisturbed

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organization, which characterize the Gothic design, there is the history of rural and thoughtful life influenced by habitual tenderness, and devoted to subtle inquiry; and every discriminating and delicate touch of the chisel, as it rounds the petal or guides the branch, is a prophecy of the development of the entire body of the natural sciences, beginning with that of medicine, of the recovery of literature, and the establishment of the most necessary principles of domestic wisdom and national peace. As opposed to visual forms that manifest a tendency to barbarism or elitism in their choice of subjects, floral ornament expresses and appeals to a latent human tendency to peace and equality. There is a “peculiar significance,” Ruskin writes, in the Gothic workman’s “intense affection” for “the living foliage.”Although not authored by Morris himself, a clearer rationale for Morris’s own love of floriated decorative ornament is not to be found elsewhere throughout the fiftythree Kelmscott Press volumes. While the design of The Nature of Gothic reflects an important element in Ruskin’s own views about the nature of Gothic, the design of other works not personally authored by Morris—particularly those which had long been seen as classics in Morris’s own day—demands to be seen as an interpretative framework rather than a straightforward extension of the text, and its effect is to make us read with fresh eyes and hope.The works of Geoffrey Chaucer are “now newly imprinted,” maintains the title-page to the Kelmscott Chaucer, the most famous book printed at the Kelmscott Press. For Morris, a “new printing” of a familiar work was effectively a new critical interpretation of it, unleashing possibilities that had previously remained latent or invisible. This becomes clear when we turn to the Kelmscott Press edition of Keats’s Poems. For here the book’s design and printing lend an unexpected historico-political urgency to the famous lines with which “Endymion,” the opening poem, begins: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darken’d ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make ’Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake, Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms. Keats’s lines clearly anticipate the startling “shapes of beauty” with which they are made one in the Kelmscott Press edition. Morris began the press with the express purpose of producing 516

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books with “a definite claim to beauty,” as we have seen, and in his search for inks and papers that would not deteriorate over time, he clearly hoped that each book would be a “joy for ever.”54 Viewed in the context supplied by the Kelmscott Press, the effort to “keep/ A bower quiet for us” so that sleep becomes “Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing,” is nothing less than Morris’s effort to give pleasure to readers made despondent and “gloomy” by “the inhuman dearth/ Of noble natures” and by “the unhealthy and o’er-darken’d ways.” In Morris’s hands, there is a political charge to Keats’s lines:“the unhealthy and o’er darkened ways” are another version of the “six counties overhung with smoke” that Morris rejects at the beginning of The Earthly Paradise, if not the streets surrounding Trafalgar Square where Morris and his Socialist colleagues had met political defeat at the hands of mounted police and guardsmen in November 1887.55 Perhaps most importantly, Keats’s lines make the book appear somehow conscious of its own decorative practices; we “wreath a flowery band to bind us to the earth,” in order to provide a “cooling covert” against the “hot season.” In Morris’s hands, the subject of these lines is no longer Keats but rather Morris and the cluster of his fellow-workers at the Press—particularly the wood-engraver William Hooper and the printer Emery Walker—and these lines announce the printers’ rationale for surrounding each text with a “flowery band” (“Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing” [my italics]).The production of a floral border is driven by the need to “keep/ A bower quiet for us, and a sleep/ Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”A self-conscious act performed to “spite … despondence,” the printing of a decorative border is an act of political faith (“in spite of all”), a repeatedly undertaken effort to renew time itself (“on every morrow”).

Figure 22.7 Opening, The Poems of John Keats, Kelmscott Press, 1894. University of Maryland Library.

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“Life is in its environment and not isolated from it,” the ecologist Murray Bookchin has said—and not merely in its environment, the philosopher John Dewey would add, “but because of it, through interaction with it.”56 Far from being independent of one another, living things exist interdependently with nonliving things and other species, just as the life of culture and the mind, despite appearances and traditions to the contrary, has its roots in the world of natural evolution. Only when April “with his shoures soote” has “bathed every veyne in swich licour/ Of which vertu engendered is the flour,” Chaucer tells us, in lines that traditionally mark the birth of English literature, do “folk longen to goon on pilgrimage.” Only when “Zephirus … with his swete breeth/ Inspired hath in every holt and heeth / The tendre croppes” do palmers long “to seken straunge strondes.” We see this symbiosis between life and environment at work repeatedly in books printed at the Kelmscott Press, which make their appeal to the eye and the skin as much as the mind, as McGann remarks, and typically begin by placing an often familiar literary text in a vegetal frame that in turn comes to saturate or seep into the text. But Morris’s environmentalism does not reside solely in his deconstruction of the literary text’s seeming isolation from the world. Morris also uses his distinctive visual designs and printing practices to enliven readers to what he called “the beauty of the earth”—to the tissue of a living world, rapidly disappearing under the heels of industrialism and urbanism, whose innate rhythms and processes are, to employ Ruskin’s words,“the sure sign of a more tranquil and gentle existence.” For this reason, the Kelmscott Press’s importance does not reside simply in Morris’s sharply iconic and material sense of language (McGann), its challenge to normative reading practices, its resistance to the hegemony of capitalist publishing and the world of mass print (Skoblow and Miller), or its concretizing of the revolutionary rhetoric at work in John Ball and News From Nowhere (Weinroth). It resides too in Morris’s extension into the form of the printed book of the decorative ideals that he had been pursuing for almost thirty years when he started the press and had previously mapped out in his lectures “The Lesser Arts,” “Making The Best of It,” and “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing.” In part, to be sure, those ideals are reflected in the distinctive mode of Kelmscott Press books’ production—in Morris’s reclamation of the book from the destructive hegemony of capitalist print culture, in his distinctively Pre-Raphaelite turn to late-Medieval models of production and design, and perhaps above all in his insistence on the innate artistry latent within even the humblest workman. But those ideals are reflected as well in the Kelmscott Press’s program of book design, whereby through the dialectic of language and vegetal ornament, Morris inculcates in his reader what we might term a distinctive environmental aestheticism, designed to dissolve the imagined borders of text and self, to admit the world, and thereby to remind us, as the philosopher Arnold Berleant puts it, that “environment is continuous with us, our very condition of being.”57 In “The Lesser Arts,” Morris nostalgically recalls a pre-Modern era when there was “a full sympathy between the works of man and the land they were made for,” before ending his lecture by envisioning a future era when, once again, “all the works of man … will be in harmony with nature, will be reasonable and beautiful.”58 The lecture, one of many that supports Paddy O’Sullivan’s contention that Morris is “one of our greatest ecological thinkers” and “an unparalleled source of inspiration for the Green or ecology movement,”59 has traditionally been understood as a rationale for the aesthetic program Morris had been pursuing at Morris & Co. But it is no less a rationale for the aesthetic program he pursued at the Kelmscott Press in the final years of his life, wherein he showed that a printed book, no less than a wall-furnishing, a rug, or a chair, might under the proper circumstances be made to “look as natural, nay as lovely, as the green field, the river bank, or the mountain flint.” 518

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Notes 1 “A Note by William Morris on his aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press,” in Morris, The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book by William Morris, ed.W. S. Peterson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 75. Morris’s note was written in late 1895 for a paper read by Carl Edelheim in January 1896 before the Philobiblion Society of Philadelphia. Edelheim published his paper, incorporating Morris’s reflections on the founding of the Press, in the Spring 1896 number of a Boston publication, Modern Art.Two years later, in March 1898, Morris’s reflections were published as the final book printed at the Kelmscott Press under the title “A Note By William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press.” 2 Peterson, The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure (University of California Press, 1991), 312, 3, and 311, hereafter cited as Kelmscott Press. 3 John Dreyfus,“The Kelmscott Press,” in William Morris, ed. Linda Parry (New York: Harry N.Abrams, 1996), 311. 4 Jerome McGann, “‘Thing to Mind’:The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris,” in his Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 69, hereafter cited as “Thing to Mind.” 5 Michelle Weinroth,“Redesigning the Language of Social Change: Rhetoric, Agency, and the Oneiric in William Morris’ A Dream of John Ball,” Victorian Studies, 53:1 (Autumn 2010), 38, hereafter cited as “Redesigning the Language.” 6 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: From Romantic to Revolutionary (2nd ed. rev. 1976; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 583, 582. 7 Peter Stansky, Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s and the Arts and Crafts (Princeton University Press, 1985), 222. 8 William S. Peterson, A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press (Oxford University Press, 1984), xl. Peterson qualifies this remark by adding “though some very serious ideas lay behind its founding.” 9 “‘Master Printer Morris’:A Visit to the Kelmscott Press,” Daily Chronicle, 1893, repr. in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 95. 10 William Morris and Emery Walker, “Printing,” in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 61, hereafter cited as “Printing.” 11 Nearly all Victorian book and periodical illustration was full of “scribbly work [that] enrages one beyond endurance,” complained Morris’s close friend, collaborator, and frequent illustrator of Kelmscott Press books, Edward Burne-Jones,“stupid senseless rot that takes an artist half a minute to sketch and an engraver half a week to engrave, for scribble is fearful labour to render” (quoted Peterson,The Kelmscott Press, 48). 12 “by the end of the sixteenth century … the worst [printing], which perhaps was the English, was a terrible falling-off ” (“Printing,” 61). 13 William Morris,“The Woodcuts of Gothic Books” (1892), in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 37. 14 Ibid., 40. 15 Morris is mentioned unassumingly as writer on the book’s fly-title, but only in such a way (“written by William Morris”) as to emphasize the fact of writing rather than any kind of imaginative proprietorship or genius. 16 See too Weinroth’s argument that “the Kelmscott Press was also a pioneering enterprise in collaborative relations of production, a community effort between editor, engraver, compositor, and binder. By resurrecting an (albeit idealised) 14th-century cooperative ethic and by facilitating a co-production of quality wrought books modelled on an artisanal tradition, Morris’s typographical project stood as a double condemnation of capitalist modernity. It was at once a protest against industrialization’s deleterious legacy of mass produced cheap print and an unmitigated critique of class division—the hydra of exploitative toil and privileged art” (“Reinventing Socialist Education:William Morris’s Kelmscott Press,” Socialist Studies / Études socialistes, 13 (1), Spring 2018, 47). 17 “Printing” was first published in a volume of essays for the Arts and Crafts Society, and as its concluding sentence shows, it underscores the connections between the Kelmscott Press and the broader objectives of the Arts and Crafts Movement:“all books might at least be comely and well-looking: and if to these good qualities were added really beautiful ornament and pictures, printed books might once again illustrate to the full the position of our Society that a work of utility might be also a work of art, if we cared to make it so” (66). 18 Morris,“The Ideal Book,” in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 69, hereafter cited as “The Ideal Book.”

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Nicholas Frankel 19 Ibid. Like many other book artists of the 1890s, Morris describes the key attribute of an illustrated book by using the term picture, with its emphasis on materiality and visual perception, rather than illustration, with its emphasis on conceptual “content” and the picture’s subservience to the verbal text. 20 Peterson, Introduction to The Ideal Book, xxiii. 21 Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford University Press, 2013), 37, hereafter cited as Slow Print. 22 See Slow Print, 53. 23 Holbrook Jackson, The Printing of Books (1938), quoted in Roderick Cave, The Private Press (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), 141. 24 Cave, The Private Press, 142. 25 Colin Franklin, The Private Presses (1969; 2nd ed.Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1991), 35. 26 Dreyfus,“The Kelmscott Press,” 316. 27 Jeffrey Skoblow, “Beyond Reading: Kelmscott and the Modern,” in The Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 239, hereafter cited as “Beyond Reading.” Skoblow’s argument about the inbuilt inaccessibility of Kelmscott Press publications is rendered problematic by recent developments in the digital reproduction—or more accurately, remediation—of printed books. Under the general editorship of Florence Boos, the online William Morris Archive has recently made Kelmscott Press books more accessible by remediating them for the digital age. See “Kelmscott Press Books on William Morris Archive,” http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/ BookArts/KelmscottPressBooks.html; also Florence Boos,“The Kelmscott Press,” http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/BookArts/KelmscottPressIntro.html 28 Citing the work of the contemporary American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Charles Bernstein, Skoblow describes Kelmscott Press books as “antiabsorptive” artifacts, surpassing even many of Bernstein’s own works, insofar as they “remain rather more fully in a state of ‘antiabsorptive autonomism’ than any dialectician or postmodernist might aspire to” (“Beyond Reading,” 245). 29 Morris,“Some Thoughts on the Ornamented Manuscripts of the Middle Ages,” in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 1. 30 Morris, A Dream of John Ball and A King’s Lesson (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892), 1. 31 Nicholas Frankel,“‘A Thing Most to be Longed For’:William Morris’s Textual Paradise,” in his Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s (High Wycombe: Rivendale, 2009), 269. 32 For an expansion of Weinroth’s argument that the Kelmscott Press reconfigures the rhetoric of agitation, see Weinroth,“Reinventing Socialist Education:William Morris’s Kelmscott Press.” 33 See too John Plotz’s recent assessment of the Press as “a new-old industry,” especially his judgment that “Morris’s finest work in a medieval vein is shaped by his experiments with state-of-the-art technology” (Semi-Detached:The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience Since Dickens, Princeton University Press, 154). 34 Echoing McGann, Miller argues that the Kelmscott Press was a formative influence on the little magazines and private presses that were indispensable vehicles for High Modernist writers 35 “The Lesser Arts of Life,” in Hopes and Fears for Art and Lectures on Art and Industry, intro. May Morris, vol. 22 of The Collected Works of William Morris (1914; New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 240. 36 “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” in Hopes and Fears for Art and Lectures on Art and Industry, 195–96. 37 “The Lesser Arts,” in Hopes and Fears for Art and Lectures on Art and Industry, 4–5. 38 “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” 179. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 177. 41 See Prologue to The Earthly Paradise, p. 514 below. 42 “The Lesser Arts,” 5. 43 Michelle Weinroth, “Redesigning the Beautiful: Morris, Mabb, and the Politics of Wallpaper,” in To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams, ed. Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 244. 44 “Making The Best of it,” in Hopes and Fears for Art and Lectures on Art and Industry, 109–10. 45 Weinroth,“Redesigning the Beautiful,” 250. 46 Ibid., 251. 47 Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (1934), tr. George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 94. For an explication of Morris’ argument that floral ornament embodies a forward-moving dynamic of growth and change, see Nicholas Frankel, “William Morris and the Moral Qualities of Ornament,” Socialist Studies / Études socialistes, 13 (1) Spring 2018, 23–35.

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William Morris and the Kelmscott Press 48 See Eugene D. LeMire, A Bibliography of William Morris (London: British Library/New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2006), 133–35. 49 Peterson observes that “it was an experiment that must ultimately have disappointed Morris, since he did not repeat it” (The Kelmscott Press, p. 71). 50 The Kelmscott Chaucer, some copies of which were bound in a pigskin binding specially designed by Morris and executed at the Doves Bindery, constitutes a unique and important exception to this generalisation. 51 Norman Kelvin, rev. of The Earthly Paradise by William Morris, ed. Florence Boos (2 vols. New York and London: Routledge, 2002), Victorian Poetry 41.3 (2003), 454. 52 These figures include two distinctly different editions—in 1891 and 1894 respectively—of Morris’s Story of the Glittering Plain. 53 The Nature of Gothic was the first Kelmscott Press book not to have been authored personally by Morris (though Morris authored an important preface to it), with the exception of Wilfrid Blunt’s Love-Lyrics & Songs of Proteus, issued one month earlier. Blunt personally financed the publication of Love-Lyrics & Songs of Proteus, and Morris may have agreed to publish it at least partly to placate his wife, who was Blunt’s lover at the time and helped oversee Blunt’s book through the press. See Peterson, The Kelmscott Press, 217–27. 54 Despite the death of the human body, the works of any man “yet liveth, therefore … end not,” a thinly veiled Morris remarks in A Dream of John Ball. 55 See Morris, “London in a State of Siege” (1887), rpt. in Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal 1883–1890, ed. and intr. Nicholas Salmon,William Morris Library (Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1994), 302–6. 56 Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995), 61; John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1980), 13. 57 Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 1992), 156. 58 “The Lesser Arts,” 17, 27. 59 Paddy O’Sullivan, “Struggle for the Vision Fair: Morris and Ecology,” Journal of the William Morris Society, 8 (Spring 1990), 5–9.

References and Further Reading: William Morris and the Kelmscott Press “‘Master Printer Morris’:A Visit to the Kelmscott Press,” press interview, Daily Chronicle, 1893, repr. in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 95–98. Berleant, Arnold. The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia, PA:Temple University Press, 1992. Bookchin, Murray. The Philosophy of Social Ecology. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995. Boos, Florence. The Kelmscott Press. http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/BookArts/KelmscottPressIntro.h tml. Cave, Roderick. The Private Press. London: Faber & Faber, 1971. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. 1934; rpt. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s, 1980. Dreyfus, John.“The Kelmscott Press,” in William Morris, ed. Linda Parry. New York, NY: Harry N.Abrams, 1996, 310–16. Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art (1934), trans. George Kubler. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1992. Frankel, Nicholas. “‘A Thing Most to be Longed For’: William Morris’s Textual Paradise,” in Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s. High Wycombe: Rivendale, 2009, 249–79. _____. “William Morris and the Moral Qualities of Ornament,” Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes 13.1 (Spring 2018), 23–35. Franklin, Colin. The Private Presses. 1969, 2nd ed.Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1991. Kelvin, Norman.“Untitled rev. of The Earthly Paradise by William Morris, ed. Florence Boos (2 vols. New York and London: Routledge, 2002),” Victorian Poetry 41.3 (2003), 454. LeMire, Eugene D. A Bibliography of William Morris. London: British Library/New Castle, Delaware, Oak Knoll Press, 2006. McGann, Jerome. “‘Thing to Mind’: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris,” in Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, 45–75. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.

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Nicholas Frankel Morris,William. “A Note by William Morris on his aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press,” in The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book by William Morris, ed.W. S. Peterson. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1982, 75–78. Morris, William and Emery Walker. A Dream of John Ball and A King’s Lesson. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892. _____.“London in a State of Siege (1887),” rpt. In Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal 1883–1890, ed. and intr. N. Salmon. William Morris Library. Bristol:Thoemmes Press, 1994, 302–6. _____.“Making The Best of it,” in Hopes and Fears for Art and Lectures on Art and Industry, 81–118. _____. “Printing,” in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 59–66. _____. “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” in Hopes and Fears for Art and Lectures on Art and Industry, 175–205. _____. “Some Thoughts on the Ornamented Manuscripts of the Middle Ages,” in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 1–6. _____.“The Ideal Book,” in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 67–73. _____.“The Lesser Arts,” in Hopes and Fears for Art and Lectures on Art and Industry, 3–27. _____.“The Lesser Arts of Life,” in Hopes and Fears for Art and Lectures on Art and Industry, intro. May Morris, Vol. 22 of The Collected Works of William Morris. 1914. New York, NY: Russell & Russell, 1966, 235–69. _____.“The Woodcuts of Gothic Books (1892),” in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 25–44. “Mr.William Morris at the Kelmscott Press,” English Illustrated Magazine, 1895, repr. in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 98–106. O’Sullivan, Paddy.“Struggle for the Vision Fair: Morris and Ecology,” Journal of the William Morris Society 8 (Spring 1990), 5–9. Peterson, William S. A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. _____. Introduction to The Ideal Book, xi–xxxv. _____. The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Plotz, John. Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience Since Dickens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Skoblow, Jeffrey.“Beyond Reading: Kelmscott and the Modern,” in The Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell. Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002, 239–58. Stansky, Peter. Redesigning the World:William Morris, the 1880s and the Arts and Crafts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Thompson, E. P. William Morris: From Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd ed. rev. 1976. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Weinroth, Michelle.“Redesigning the Beautiful: Morris, Mabb, and the Politics of Wallpaper,” in To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams, ed. Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015, 241–73. _____. “Redesigning the Language of Social Change: Rhetoric, Agency, and the Oneiric in William Morris’ A Dream of John Ball,” Victorian Studies 53.1 (Autumn 2010), 37–63. _____. “Reinventing Socialist Education: William Morris’s Kelmscott Press,” Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes 13.1 (Spring 2018), 36–56.

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INDEX OF PROPER NOUNS

Abensour, Miguel 405, 420 Abramovich, Roman 10, 249, 250 Adams, Oscar Fay 292 Aho, Gary 1, 160, 164 Amantea, Gisele 10, 244 Anderson, Karl 147, 164, 332 Anderson, Perry 18, 405, 466, 471, 477, 479 Anglican Church,Anglicanism 7, 8, 23, 42, 62, 173, 177, 183, 193, 197, 200–1, 215 Anglo-Afghan War 391 Anglo-Armenian Committee 393 Anglo-Saxon 11, 16, 23, 287, 293, 311, 346, 429 Anti-Scrape see Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Armitage, Simon 159 Armstrong, Isobel 10, 264–65, 269 Arnot, Robin Page 5, 31, 35, 232, 473; William Morris:A Vindication 31; William Morris:The Man and the Myth 5, 31 Arscott, Caroline 203, 254, 360 Art Workers Guild 50 Arthur,Arthurian 42, 77, 83, 212, 219, 229, 252, 279–85, 312–13, 316, 354, 359, 410, 411 Arts and Crafts Exhibition 116, 124 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society 50, 327 Arts and Crafts Movement 1, 9, 41, 50, 88, 92, 182–83, 185, 188, 227, 230–31, 236, 240, 244, 319 Attlee, Clement 231 Auden, G.A. 156 Auden,W.H. 7, 156–59, 163 Aveling, Edward 18, 73–74, 81, 85, 423–24, 426, 468, 479 Bagehot, Walter 48–49 Bain, Rowan 136 Baldwin, Louisa 116 Balfour, Eustace 182, 400

Ballantine, Archibald 296 Bancroft, Samuel 107 Banks, Sir Joseph 147 Banner, Robert 423 Baring, Edward Charles 48 Barraclough, Eleanor R. 159 Barribeau, James 336–37 Barucka, Edyta 92 Batchelor, Joseph 497 Bauhaus 9, 10, 221, 227, 239, 240 Bax, Ernest Belfort 18, 72, 74, 394–95, 423, 426, 467, 470–71, 479 Beaumont, Matthew 409, 434 Bebel,August 72–74, 76, 81, 468, 471 Bell, Sir Isaac Lowthian 48 Benjamin,Walter 9, 245, 253, 265, 405 Bennett, Richard 19, 490, 492–94 Benson,William A.S: 218, 220, 234 Benyon, Tony 189 Berleant, Arnold 518 Besant,Annie 71, 424 Betjeman, John 233 Bevir, Mark 391, 468 Birchall, Rev. Oswald 182 Blake, William 501 Blind, Mathilde 494 Blow, Detmar 93 Blunt,Wilfred Scawen 5, 64–65, 98, 109, 124, 127, 131, 133–34, 493 Boccaccio 305, 324, 489 Bodichon, Barbara 68, 71, 97 Bodley, George Frederick 44, 177–78, 183, 188, 191–93, 214–15 Bookchin, Murray 518 Bourdieu, Pierre 48–50 British Ministry of Defense 10, 242 Broadhurst, Henry 390–92

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Index of Proper Nouns Brontë, Charlotte 82, 416 Brown, Ford Madox 43–45, 97, 105, 124, 188, 193–97, 210, 213–15, 218, 220, 237, 240, 246 Bryce, James 390–93 Bryson, John 33 Buchanan,Thomas Ryburn 492 Bulwer Lytton, Edward 42 Bulwer Lytton, Robert 285 Burden, Elizabeth (Bessie, sister of Jane Morris) 8, 65, 108, 214 Burden, Jane 28, 33, 62, 176, 212, 214; see also Morris, Jane Burden, Robert 63 Burne-Jones, Edward 8, 12, 20, 27, 29, 40, 42–45, 47–48, 51, 68–69, 107–8, 131, 172, 175–77, 179, 188–90, 193–94, 197–204, 209–10, 212–19, 229–30, 233–34, 252, 296, 303, 322–24, 338, 490, 495, 501 Burne-Jones, Georgiana (Macdonald) 4, 20, 27–31, 40, 54, 60, 63, 68–71, 107–8, 131, 146, 149, 202, 212–14, 228, 287, 290, 334 Burne-Jones, Philip and Margaret 30, 68 Burton, Sir Richard 148 Butterfield,William 7, 43, 175–77 Buzard, James 409, 418 Calhoun, Blue 49, 292 Cambridge Camden Society (Ecclesiological Society) 44 Campfield, Eliza (Mrs. George) 214 Campfield, George 190, 214 Carlyle,Thomas 28, 393, 416, 477–79 Carnarvon, Earl of 49, 390 Carpenter, Edward 119, 423 Carr, Julie 265, 271 Carter, Lin 368, 374, 377 Cassavetes family 389 Catling, Christopher 90, 95 Catterson-Smith, Robert 109 Cave, Roderick 505 Century Guild 50 Chatto, Thomas 492 Chaucer, Geoffrey see under Chaucer, Geoffrey in the Index of Selected Titles of Creative Works Cherry, John 90 Chesson, Frederick 390 Chichester Liberal Association 390 Chiswick Press 117, 490, 502, 512 Chorley, H.F. 280–82, 287 Church of England 34, 44, 172, 181, 183, 201, 387; see also Anglican Church Clark, W.J. 423 Clayton & Bell: 43, 191, 192 Clutton-Brock, Arthur 266 Coal Exchange 496 Cobden, Jane 71, 398–99 Cobden Sanderson,Anne 398 Cobden-Sanderson, T.J. 492

Cockerell, Douglas 492, 497 Cockerell, Sydney 28, 30, 40, 63, 68, 90, 103, 106, 108–9, 112, 115, 121, 134–36, 233, 316, 324, 335, 491–93, 496 Cole, G.D. 391 Collingwood, W.G. 148 Commons Preservation Society 7, 179, 348, 430 Compton, Rev. John 198 Cooper, J. 423 Cooper, Nicholas 90, 93–94, 191 Cormack, Peter 191, 202 Coronio,Aglaia Ionides 64, 69–71, 98, 338, 349 Cottle, A.S. 332 Cowper,William 44, 215 Crane, Walter 216 Crawford,Alan 93, 185 Crick, Martin 233 Culmer, Ada 136 D’Arcy, William 219 Dante Alighieri 33, 162, 253, 287, 332 Darbyshire, Alfred 107 Dasent, George 148, 157, 332 Dave,Victor 426, 468–69 Davidson, Peter 156 Davies, Celia 134, 136 De Morgan, Mary 398 De Morgan, Sophia 108, 123 De Morgan,William 48, 108, 123, 214, 218–19, 391, 398 de Navarro, John 136 Dearle, John Henry 46, 54, 115, 219–20, 497 Deller, Jeremy 2, 10, 249–53 Demidova, Polina 2 Derain, Jeanne 71 Devon Great Consols 41–42, 44, 54, 60, 131, 252, 395, 396 Dewey, John 518 Dickens, Charles 30, 134, 405, 408, 414, 416, 498 Dilke, Charles 391 Dixon, Richard Watson 175, 212 Donovan,Andrea 182, 185 Doughty, Oswald 96, 100 Doves Bindery 497 Dreyfus, John 490, 505 Drinkwater, John 296 Drury, Michael 93, 185 Duchamp, Marcel 252 Duff, E. Gordon 496 Dufferin, Lord 148, 157 Dungavell, Ian 231 Dunlap, Joseph R. 67, 138, 345, 489 Dürer,Albrecht 210, 213 Early English Text Society 19, 316, 495, 497 Eastern Question Association 179, 305, 310, 319, 389–91, 393 Eliot, George 148, 288, 372, 410

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Index of Proper Nouns Eliot,T.S. 278, 288–89, 372, 410 Ellis, Frederick Startridge 19, 87, 97, 101, 108, 113, 122, 305, 312, 490–93 Ellison, Ruth 154 Engels, Friedrich 35, 72–74, 76, 357, 395–96, 424, 426, 467–70, 472–73, 479, 481 Essex & Co. 236 Evans, Frederick 94, 111, 121–22, 124–25, 127 Evans, W.H. 146 Fabian Society 65, 392, 397, 424, 469–70 Faulkner, Charles 34, 43–45, 59, 63, 68, 101, 108, 126, 130, 146, 174, 176–79, 207, 209, 212–14, 216–18, 389 Faulkner, Kate 8, 134, 218 Faulkner, Lucy see Orrinsmith, Lucy Faulkner Faulkner, Peter 1–3, 5, 7, 64, 92, 98–99 Felce, Ian 337 Fini, Dimitra 374 Firm, the see Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. FitzGerald, Edward 334 Fitzgerald, Penelope 99, 117 Fletcher, G. Rutter 108 Fletcher, Hanslip 119, 122, 124 Focillon, Henry 512 Fortunati,Vita 95 Foster, Myles Birket 48, 117 Fourier, Charles 394, 477 Fra Angelico 198 Francis, Pat 504 Franklin, Colin 505 Fredeman,William 97, 127 Freud, Freudianism 32, 370, 407 Froissart, Jean 211, 283–84, 494, 498 Fulford,William 172, 209–10 Gamman, Henry 496 Garden City Movement 2, 92 Garnett, Dr. Richard 281–83 Garrett, Rhoda and Agnes 49 Gaskin,Arthur J. 109 Gaskin, Georgie Cave 109 Geeraert, Dustin 346 Gere, Charles March 109, 117, 122, 127, 235 Gilmore, Isabella Morris (sister of William Morris) 60, 62 Girouard, Mark 48 Gladstone,William Ewart 179, 388–93, 396, 399 Glasier, John Bruce 4, 30–31, 35, 71, 84, 397, 424, 471, 473 Goode, John 405 Gordon, Charles 399 Gothic Revival 5, 7, 42–43, 171, 173–75, 177–78, 180, 183–84, 197, 209, 213–15, 266, 292, 320–21, 476, 501 Gothic, High Victorian 173 Green Party (ideals, etc.) 7, 15, 17, 162, 235, 348, 407, 442–47, 455, 459, 518

Greenlaw, Lavinia 7, 159–60, 163 Grennan, Margaret 351 Gribble, Barbara 405, 414 Grigson, Geoffrey 158 Gropius, Walter 239–40 Guild of Handicraft 50, 89 Guy, Rev. Frederick B. 171, 192 Haggerty, Martin 348 Hake, Dr.Thomas Gordon 107 Hake, George 113 Hamilton, Duchess of 228 Hammersmith Socialist Society 31, 65, 148, 232, 387, 398, 424, 465 Hanson, Ingrid 285 Hart, Imogen 119, 127, 208, 217–18 Hegel, G.W. F., Hegelian 410–11, 419, 472, 476 Henderson, Philip 5, 32–33 Henderson, Rev. Ebenezer 147 Herbert, Auberon 390 Heritage Lottery Fund 230, 232 Hermansson, Halldór 338 Hewitt, Graily 323, 497 HMS Courageous (nuclear submarine) 240–42 Hoare, Dorothy 344 Hodgson,Amanda 344, 354 Holiday, Catherine 398 Holman Hunt,William 210 Holst, Gustav 2 Holst, Imogen 2 Holtzman, Michael 404, 414, 417–18, 426, 432 Hooker,William 147, 157 Hopkin, Deian 422 Horsfall,Thomas Coglan 220 Howard, George, Earl of Carlisle 45, 48, 64, 107, 109, 116, 127, 177, 216, 388, 393 Howard, Jonathan 90 Howard, Newman 108 Howard, Rosalind 45, 48, 63–64, 71, 107, 134, 216, 398 Howell, Charles Augustus 96 Howell George 392 Hughes, Stuart Sam 294 Hulse, James 395 Hutton,William Holden 126 Huxtable, Sally-Anne 208, 216 Hyndman, Henry Mayers 423, 467, 469 Icelandic (language) 12, 22, 146–47, 154, 292, 294, 332–34, 336–37, 377, 494 Industrial Revolution 92, 375 Ionides family 45, 68–69 Ionides, Aleco 218 Ionides,Alexander 69, 218, 220, 389 Jackson, Holbrook 505 Jacobi, Charles 502 Jamaicans (portraits) 2, 10, 227, 253–54

525

Index of Proper Nouns James, Henry 33, 287 Janowitz, Anne 428 Jochumsson, Matthías 154 Jones, Owen 267 Kautsky, Karl 395, 468 Kavenna, Joanna 159 Kay, John 233 Keats, John see under Keats, John in the Index of Selected Titles of Creative Works Keddell, F. 430 Kelmscott Manor Visitors’ Book 90, 103, 108–9 Kelmscott Press 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 19–22, 33, 34, 40, 51–54, 65, 71, 100, 106, 108–9, 113–14, 117–19, 122, 125, 132, 172, 232, 244, 261–63, 266, 268, 305–6, 312, 314, 316, 322, 324, 394, 424, 430, 480, 489–91, 496, 498, 501–18 Kelvin, Norman 3, 32–33 Kennedy, John 338 Kent, Eddy 435 Kirchhoff, Frederick 373, 405 Kirk, Sheila 108, 174–75 Kropotkin, Peter 394, 444, 457, 465 Kyrle Society 348 Labour Party 30–31, 65, 231 Laing, Samuel 334, 337 Landon, Richard 489, 490, 492 Lane, Joseph 423 Lasner, Mark Samuels 489 Latham, David and Sheila 11 Latin (language) 12–13, 19, 22, 302–9, 312, 314–16, 322–24, 334, 494 Lazarus, Emma 94 Le Guin, Ursula 151, 369, 378 Lefèvre, Raoul 316 Leighton, J. and J. 19, 497 Lemere, Bedford 50 LeMire, Eugene 3, 345 Lemprière, John 315, 317 Leslie, George Dunlop 110 Lethaby,William Richard 50, 119, 175, 216 Levitas, Ruth 151, 473 Lewes, G.H. 288 Lewis, Clive Staples 14, 151, 345–46, 368–69, 374, 377–78 Leyland, Frederick 48 Liberal Party (Liberalism) 4, 14, 17, 71, 319, 387–401, 447 Liberman, Michael 426, 433 Lindsay, Jack 5, 32–33, 35 Lissitzky, El 246–47 Litzenberg, Karl 337 Lobb, Mary 66, 155, 490, 495 Louise, HRH Princess 48 Lourie, Margaret 285, 498 Lushington,Vernon 108

MacCarthy, Fiona 2–5, 27, 29, 35–36, 40–42, 59, 90–92, 95–96, 112, 134, 148–50, 152, 158–59, 169, 177–78, 185, 208, 210, 213, 215, 217, 220, 228, 233, 345, 389, 398, 410; William Morris: A Life for Our Time 3, 5, 35, 158, 389 MacDonald, Bradley J. 465 MacDonald, George 373, 376 Macfarlane, Ross 492 McGann, Jerome 10, 20, 262, 263, 501, 505–7, 518 Mackail, J.W. 4, 21, 23, 27–35, 40, 69, 91, 95–96, 99, 109–10, 132, 134, 137, 155, 171, 179, 190, 210–11, 213, 279, 302–3, 306, 308–9, 333, 349, 352, 391, 394, 489 Mackley,Alan 182, 185 MacNeice, Louis 7, 156–59 McQueen, Ian 2 Maddison, John 90, 119 Magnússon, Eiríkr 12, 13, 79, 146–49, 152, 154, 156, 159, 162–63, 292, 322, 332–34, 336–38 Magnússon, Magnus 148–49, 159, 163 Mahon, John L. 423 Mainwaring, Stephen 423 Maizy, Ann 63 Malory,Thomas 42, 212, 219, 283, 285, 332, 337, 498 Mander, Nicholas 92–93 Manlove, Colin 14, 368–70, 375 Marillier, Henry 51 Marsh, Jan 5, 33, 62–63, 65, 96, 98–99, 133–34 Marshall, Alfred 469 Marshall, Peter Paul 43–45, 188, 213, 218, 444 Marx, Karl 18–19, 31–32, 310, 319, 321, 394–95, 417, 444, 458–60, 465–81, 507; see also Capital, das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto in the Index of Selected Titles of Creative Works Marx-Aveling, Eleanor 71–74, 76, 81, 85, 423–24, 426, 479, 494 Mason, Anna 116 Maurer, Oscar 498 Maurice, Charles 54 Maxwell, Glyn 159 May Morris Bequest 88, 312, 493, 495 Mayakovsky,Vladimir 246 Meier, Paul 18, 343, 394, 465, 476, 481 Memling, Hans 210 Merchant, Carolyn 357, 456 Meyer, Hannes 239 Michel, Louise 71 Middle Ages 12, 44, 173, 184, 209–11, 264, 268, 303, 305, 311, 314, 316, 321, 345, 450, 456, 472, 489, 492–93 Middlebro’,Tom 410, 414 Moore,Albert 188, 214 Moore, Samuel 468 Morgan, J. Pierpont 19, 493 Morison, Stanley 233, 495 Morris, Barbara 497 Morris, Edgar 23, 108, 130

526

Index of Proper Nouns Morris, Emma (elder sister) see Oldham, Emma Morris Morris, Emma Shelton (mother) 23, 34, 41–42, 59–62, 105, 170, 172–73, 179, 185, 230 Morris, family 4, 19, 20, 23, 27–28, 30, 34–35, 41–42, 58–60, 66–68, 70, 72, 74, 87–88, 91, 96, 98–99, 102–3, 105, 107–9, 115, 118–19, 122–23, 127–28, 130–33, 137–38, 169–71, 175–76, 179, 215, 217–18, 227, 230, 234, 252, 306, 388, 396, 490, 491, 495–96 Morris, Francis (uncle) 41 Morris, Henrietta (sister) 41, 61–62, 71 Morris, Isabella 60, 62; see also Gilmore, Isabella Morris, James 158 Morris, Jane Alice (Jenny) 5, 6, 28, 30, 62–64, 67–68, 70, 100, 103, 107, 113, 115–16, 118, 123, 130, 132–36, 145, 176, 495, 502 Morris, Jane Burden 5, 8, 28, 33, 36, 60, 62, 64–65, 67–68, 70, 88, 90, 96–98, 101, 103, 107–9, 122, 126, 131–36, 145, 213–14, 217, 253, 390, 392, 395, 398–99, 426; see also Jane Burden Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. (also Morris and Co.) 2, 5–10, 19, 28, 34, 43–51, 53–54, 59, 63–65, 68, 71, 88, 98, 106, 108, 112–19, 126, 128, 133, 137, 174, 176–79, 181, 183, 191, 198, 207–8, 213, 216–20, 227–28, 230, 232, 235–37, 242, 251, 511–12, 518 Morris, Mary (May) 4, 6, 19, 27–28, 30–33, 40, 60–67, 71, 88–89, 96, 102–3, 107, 111, 113, 116, 119, 121, 124–25, 127, 131–32, 136, 138, 145, 151–56, 176, 213, 281, 306, 312–17, 323, 332, 343, 345, 490, 493, 495 Morris,Thomas (uncle) 41, 62 Morris,William Senior 34, 41, 59, 170–71 Morton,Arthur Leslie 473 Moss, Sarah 159 Mundella,Anthony J. 390, 393 Munro, John 316 Murray, Charles Fairfax 13, 101, 323–24, 334–35, 491, 495 National Liberal League 392 National Trust 9, 137, 227–30, 243, 348 Naydenko, Dmitry 2 Nazis 157, 158 Needham, Paul 19, 489–93, 497 Neiswander, Judith A. 208 Nettleship Henry 307–8, 310 New, Edmund Hort 109, 122 Norton, Charles Eliot 79 O’Donoghue, Heather 161 Old English 137, 294, 429 Old Norse (language) 12, 146, 155–57, 159, 160, 163, 335, 336, 346 Oldham, Emma Morris (sister of William Morris) 32, 41, 60–62, 170

Oldham, Reverend Joseph 61 Orrinsmith, Lucy Faulkner 49 Osley, A.S. 495 Oxford Archaeological Society 91 Oxford Architectural Society 171 Oxford Brotherhood 36, 69 Oxford Socialist Society 116 Paris Commune 16, 425–27, 429, 434–35, 470–71 Parkins,Wendy 5, 36, 133 Parks Smith, Rev.William 197–201 Parrinder, Patrick 405 Parry, Linda 70, 90, 98–100, 113, 115–16, 212, 217, 360 Parsons, Lucy 71 Pater,Walter 11, 265, 278–81, 287, 321 Peasants’ Revolt 16, 419, 431, 507 Pepper, David 443–44 Percy,Thomas 147, 332 Peterson,William S. 3, 501–2, 504–5, 513 Peterson,William S. and Sylvia Holton Peterson 3, 52, 306, 489–93, 495–96 Pevsner, Nikolaus 194, 220, 233, 239–40 Philpotts, Henry 197–98 Powell, Louise 323 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 101, 192, 209–10, 282, 321, 332 Pre-Raphaelite, Pre-Raphaelitism 2, 11, 13, 42–44, 62–63, 87, 91, 101, 146, 192, 208, 210, 213, 229, 234, 263–65, 278–98, 321, 332, 334–35, 372, 465, 494–95, 518 Prettejohn, Elizabeth 126, 265 Price, Cormell (also Crom) 65, 108, 122, 172, 177, 179, 185, 209, 212 Prinsep,Valentine 177, 212, 216 Pugin,Augustus Welby N. 7, 169, 174, 176, 209, 235 Puritanism 59 Quaritch, Bernard 490, 492 Quiller-Couch, A.T. 345 Quirk, Randolph 337 Ravilious, Eric 156 Reeves & Turner 430, 503 Renaissance 12, 94, 188, 202, 229, 254, 262, 279, 305, 319–21, 324 Rexroth, Kenneth 338 Ricardo, David 469, 472 Richardson, Linda 73 Richmond family 123 Robbins, Chris 232 Roberts, Mike 2 Rolfe,William J. 292 Romantic-Marxist continuum 507 Ross, Kristin 22, 426, 435 Rossetti, Christina 97

527

Index of Proper Nouns Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 5,–6, 28, 32–34, 36, 42–45, 47, 63–64, 67–68, 87–90, 96–98, 100–2, 105–7, 118–19, 122–27, 131, 133, 137, 145–46, 162, 174–76, 178, 188, 193, 208, 210, 212–15, 217–18, 230, 234, 253, 281–83, 310, 425 Rossetti, Lucy 493 Rossetti,William Michael 100, 493 Rowley, Charles 132 Ruskin, John 10, 21, 42, 169, 173, 179, 183, 189, 196–98, 209–10, 237, 264–67, 278, 321, 393, 416, 451, 467, 477–79, 515–16; see also specific titles in title index

Stillman, Marie Spartali 110 Street, George Edmund 7, 42–44, 170, 173–75, 177, 180–81, 183, 188, 190–91, 193, 197–200, 204, 210–12, 214 Sturluson, Snorri 154–56, 335 Suvin, Darko 368, 412 Swannell, J.N. 336–37 Swinburne,Algernon 279, 283, 287, 292, 305, 310, 490

Saab,Ann Pottinger 391 Salmon, Nicolas 35, 429–30 Sanderson & Co. 41, 42, 51 Scheu,Andreas 1, 30, 59, 65, 148 Scott, George Gilbert 7, 43, 170, 179, 180, 182–83, 188, 194, 215 Scott, George Gilbert junior 179, 194 Scott,Walter 305, 309, 368 Seddon, John P. 214 Semper, Gottfried 266–67 Sewter,Albert Charles 189, 190, 194, 196, 198, 200, 203, 215 Shankland, Graeme 233 Shannon, Richard 390 Shaw, George Bernard 4, 30, 33, 35, 66, 72, 149, 250, 269, 424–25, 469 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 52, 279, 282–84, 498 Siddal, Elisabeth (Lizzie) 63, 162, 213 Silver, Carole 345, 355, 372 Skelton, John 283 Skoblow, Jeffrey 20, 506–7, 509, 518 Sloane, Mary Annie 121 Smith, Lindsay 11, 264–65 Smith, Robert and Frank 47, 51, 54, 106, 108 Social Democratic Federation (earlier, Democratic Federation) 17, 31, 148, 253, 310, 319, 338, 387, 392–97, 423, 445, 447, 469 Socialist League 14, 15, 18, 31–32, 35, 65, 71–72, 74, 149, 232, 253, 310, 338, 387, 393–401, 405–6, 414–15, 417, 422–26, 432–33, 465, 467–69, 479, 507 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings 5–7, 9, 18, 33, 36, 91, 98, 169, 185, 191, 227, 230, 237–38, 310, 338, 393, 395, 430, 466 Solomon, Simeon 188, 194–97, 214–15 Spanish Revolution 459 Sparling, Henry Halliday 51–52, 65, 117 Spartali family 389; see also Marie Spartali Stillman Staines, David 498 Stansky, Peter 502 Stead, William 398 Steele, Robert 19, 491–92, 495 Stepniak, Sergius 394, 469 Stevenson, Lionel 315

Talbot, Norman 345–46, 358, 405, 408 Taylor, George Warington 177–78, 216, 333 Tegnér, Esaias 334 Tennyson,Alfred 42, 82, 281–83, 292, 313, 393, 498; see also “The Lady of Shalott” in the Index of Selected Titles of Creative Works Thacker, Eugene 14, 370–71, 378–79 Thackeray Turner, Hugh 7, 182 Thompson, Edward P. 4, 18, 27, 31–35, 146, 149, 179, 242, 344, 356, 391, 445, 449, 458–60, 465–66, 469, 471–73, 478–79, 481, 502; William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary 5, 31, 158, 391, 465, 502 Thompson, Paul 345 Thoreau, Henry David 349, 352–53, 358–60 Thorpe, Benjamin 164, 332 Tillett, Ben 433 Tolkien, John R. R. 7, 14, 145, 151, 158, 160–61, 369, 371–72, 377–78, 394 Tory (Party) 65, 175, 387, 393, 397 Trollope,Anthony 148, 467 Tucker, Herbert 266, 271, 293 Turner family 93, 119, 126 Updike, John 5, 35 Vallance,Aymer 95–96, 99, 102, 109 van der Rohe, Mies 239 Van Eyck, Jan 193, 210–11 Vaninskaya,Anna 73, 426, 430 Venning, Philip 9 Vinall, Charles 7, 181 Voysey, Charles 236 Wagner, Richard 161 Waithe, Marcus 409 Walker, Emery 20, 108, 126, 490, 492, 496, 504, 512, 517 Waller, Samuel 148 Waltham Forest Council 121, 123, 125, 128, 170, 230–31 Wardle, George 7, 13, 45–47, 54, 181–82, 335 Wardle,Thomas 7, 108, 115, 179, 181–82 Wardour Street English 296, 310, 337 Warhol,Andy 10, 227, 250–53 Warwick, Countess of 87 Waterson, Merlin 90, 119

528

Index of Proper Nouns Waugh, Evelyn 156 Wawn,Andrew 147, 148, 332 Webb, Philip 2, 7, 42–45, 48, 90, 93, 97, 101, 103, 107–8, 132, 138, 169–70, 174–78, 180–83, 185, 188, 190, 192–94, 197, 199, 202, 210, 212–16, 218, 220, 229, 234, 349 Webb, Sidney 469 Weinroth, Michelle 2, 20, 474, 502, 507–11, 515, 518 Wellcome, Henry 492–93; see also Wilton, Hall Wellington, Duke of 61 Wells, H.G. 151, 346, 408, 412 Whig (Party) 27, 322, 387–88, 392–93, 396–97, 479 Whittingham, Charles 502 Wicksteed, Philip H. 469 Wilberforce, Samuel 173, 175, 181 Wilde, Oscar 295, 311, 375–76, 378 Wiley, Kehinde 2, 10, 253–54 Wiliamson, Jamie 374, 377 William Morris Archive 2, 336, 492, 494, 506, 508, 510, 513

William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist 30, 66; see also May Morris Bequest William Morris Gallery, Friends of the 230 William Morris Society 2, 9, 51, 162–63, 232–33, 346 Williams, Raymond 420, 471, 478 Wilson, Charlotte 71 Wilton, Hall 492; see also Wellcome, Henry Women’s Guild of Arts 66 Womens’ Protective and Provident League 71 Wong, Alexander 264 Woodward, Benjamin 175, 212 Workmen’s Neutrality Committee 390 Wyndham, George 48 Wyndham, Madeline 48, 220 Wyndham, Percy 48, 109, 220 Yeats,William Butler 278–79, 281–83, 297, 345 Yeo, Stephen 41, 92, 422–23 Zambaco, Marie 68

529

INDEX OF PLACES

1, Holland Park, London 70, 177, 216, 218, 220 1, Palace Green, London 48, 177, 216 17, Red Lion Square 175–76, 208, 210–14, 250 26, Queen Square, Bloomsbury 70, 87, 137, 176, 215–16, 333, 398 All Angels, Brighton 177, 202; see also St. Michael and All Angels All Saints, Cambridge 200 All Saints, Middleton Cheney 8, 200, 215 All Saints Selsley, Gloucestershire 8, 177 Amington, Staffordshire 200 Art Gallery, Queen’s Park, Manchester 220 Ashmolean Museum 230 Australia 2, 208 Bad Ems, Germany 63, 101 Berger (Helen and Sanford) Collection 19, 491, 494; see also Huntington Library Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 116 Bloomsbury 175–76, 210, 236, 397, 406, 474, 479 Bodleian Library 209, 212, 322, 492 Brampton, Cumbria 192, 202 British Library 68, 212, 312, 323, 491, 495, 496 British Museum 15, 175, 405, 410–11, 501 Bulgaria 388–91 Burma 399 Burnaby Art Gallery, B. C. 10, 244 Cambridge, England 303, 333, 336, 398 Castle Howard 48 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea 126 Clay Cross, Derbyshire 61 Clouds,Wiltshire 48, 220 Coach House, Hammersmith 230, 232 Coddington (All Saints Church) 191 Cotswolds 88, 92–93, 102, 178, 183, 234–35, 243

Dartington Hall 2 Delaware Art Museum 2, 107, 335 Egypt 182, 391–92, 399 Elm House,Walthamstow 41, 170 Epping Forest 41, 170, 179, 232, 352, 435 Exeter College, Oxford 42, 171, 175, 209, 211, 304, 323 Fitzwilliam Museum 40, 133, 198, 323 Forest School,Walthamstow 171 France 30, 62, 172–73, 177, 182, 185, 210, 243, 313, 468 Germany 63, 173, 182, 468, 502 Getty Wormsley Library 335 Gloucestershire 91–93, 99 Grange, Fulham 68 Green Dining Room,Victoria and Albert Museum 9, 177, 215 The Hill,Witley, Surrey 48, 177 Horrington House, Chiswick 70, 87, 137 Huntington Library 19, 337, 491, 494, 497, 506 Inglesham church (St. John the Baptist) 91, 111, 169, 182 Ireland 23, 388, 391–92, 396, 399–401, 426 Italy 63–64, 69–70, 130, 179, 182, 198–99, 309–10, 334, 495, 502 Jesus College Chapel 176, 204 Kelmscott church (St. George’s) 91, 169, 184, 417, 419 Kelmscott House, Hammersmith (also Kelmscott House, Museum) 2, 9, 30, 87, 89, 94–95, 102–3,

530

Index of Places 105–6, 108–9, 117–18, 126, 131, 133, 137, 178, 208, 218, 227, 232–33, 306, 404–5, 492, 496–97 Kelmscott Manor 2, 6, 9, 19, 64–66, 68, 87–146, 178, 183, 208, 217–18, 227, 230, 234–35, 237, 405, 425, 495, 509–10, 523–30, 536 Kelmscott Manor, Green Room 119, 121, 127, 217, 530; Old Hall 119, 127; Panelled Room 105, 127–28, 135, 530;Tapestry Room 110–11, 119–24, 217

Rottingdean, East Sussex 69, 107–8, 122, 131 Rounton Grange,Yorkshire 48 Scalands, East Sussex 96, 97, 101 South Kensington Museum 10, 174, 178, 208, 215, 273, 497; see also Victoria and Albert Museum Spain 17, 458 Speke Hall, Liverpool 48 St.Augustine’s Cathedral, Canterbury 175 St. Cross,Winchester 177 St. James’s Palace (Ceiling,Armory) 9, 44, 114, 177, 215 St. John’s Torquay (St. John the Evangelist) 8, 191, 195, 197–201, 203 St. Michael and All Angels, Scarborough 8 St. Michael Penkevil 191 St. Paul, Morton, Lincolnshire 203 St. Peter and St. Paul, Over Stowey 201 St. Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham 203 Stanmore Hall, Middlesex 115, 219 Sudan 399

Ladock, Cornwall (church in) 191 Lechlade, Oxfordshire 87, 99, 101, 112, 114–15 Leigh’s Academy, Newman Street, London 210 Leyton, Borough of Waltham Forest 60 Liberty’s (department store) 236, 243 London, passim (esp. chapters 4–9) Lyndhurst, Hampshire 198–99, 429, 458 Manchester 27, 45, 183, 220 Marlborough College, Oxford 12, 42, 59, 102, 170–71, 252, 302–3, 315, 323–24 Membland Hall, Devon 48 Merton Abbey, Surrey 45–46, 94, 118, 127, 218, 232, 306, 493 Morgan Library 19, 335, 490–91, 493–94, 496–97 Morrisheiði 153

Tate Britain 174, 184, 230 Thames 91, 95, 101–2, 113, 115, 117–18, 127, 178, 217–18, 234, 404, 407–8, 410–11, 413, 415–16, 453, 457–58, 509, 514 Troutbeck, Cumbria 201–2

National Portrait Gallery 2, 160, 163 Naworth Castle, Cumbria 48, 107, 130 Nun Monkton,Yorkshire 201–2

United States 2–3, 23, 66–67, 154, 228, 347 Upper Gordon Street, no. 1, Bloomsbury 210–11

Oxbridge 172–73 Oxford 12, 27, 35, 42–45, 59–60, 63, 69, 92, 101, 108, 171–76, 181–83, 192, 201, 209–13, 215–17, 219, 229, 252, 302–5, 308, 324, 390, 495 Oxford Street 45, 47, 113, 217–18, 236, 252 Oxfordshire 87, 91–92, 95, 101, 178 Poland 400 Red House, Upton, Kent 2, 7–9, 42, 63, 69, 95–96, 125, 137, 169, 176, 183, 208, 212–15, 227–30, 305

Venice 182, 250, 393 Victoria and Albert Museum 9, 19, 31, 51, 68, 90, 174, 208, 214, 216, 218, 228, 230, 236, 244, 495, 512; see also South Kensington Museum Wallingford Museum 15, 405–6 Wandle, river 218 Water House,Walthamstow 42, 170; see also William Morris Gallery Wellcome Library 19, 492, 494 William Morris Gallery 2, 94, 116, 119, 122, 138, 170, 227, 230–32, 493 Woodford Hall,Woodford 41–42, 170, 179

531

INDEX OF SELECTED TITLES OF CREATIVE WORKS

Note: Morris’s literary and artistic works are alphabetized separately. Morris,William,Artwork and Designs: Carpets: “Clouds” 48, 220; “Hammersmith” 218;“Holland Park” 218, 220; “Kidderminster” 218;“Peacock and Bird” 114, 116;“Vanderbilt” 116 Painting:“La Belle Iseult” 212 Tapestries:“Bird” wall hanging 218, 242; “Greenery” 220;“Holy Grail” 219, 252; “Lanercost Priory Dossal” 114, 116 Textiles: “Batchelor’s Button” 114–15; “Brother Rabbit” 46, 128;“Evenlode” 113–14; “Fritillary” 114–15;“Kennet” 114, 127, 217, 227; “Rose and Thistle” 128; “Strawberry Thief ” 113–14, 127–28, 227, 242;“Tudor Rose” 242 Wallpapers:“Acanthus” 245, 252–53, 512; “Brer Rabbit” 113–14;“Daisy” 217, 243–45; “Golden Lily” 237;“Golden Lily Minor” 245;“Honeysuckle” 114–16, 227, 242, 512; “Medway” 128; “Pimpernel” 237; “Pomegranate” 217, 242;“Trellis” 125, 194, 217, 227–28;“Tulip and Willow” 113–14

“The Decorative Arts” 17, 49, 319, 321; see also “The Lesser Arts” “The Defence of Guenevere” 10–11, 32, 63, 76, 261, 264–65, 268–69, 271, 278–88, 291, 294, 312, 502 A Dream of John Ball 16, 20, 310, 345, 410, 422, 426, 428–31, 434–35, 507–9, 518 Chants for Socialists 266, 269, 294 Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair 21, 114, 117, 295, 297, 343, 350, 353, 360–61, 515 Collected Letters of William Morris 3, 32–33, 35, 89, 312, 490, 494 “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire” 77, 284, 286 diaries (Morris’ diaries) 10–3, 48, 90, 105–6, 111–12, 116–17, 124, 131, 134, 147, 155 “The Early Literature of the North” 149–50 The Earthly Paradise 2, 10–14, 21, 28, 49, 52, 78, 97, 147–48, 261–63, 265–66, 268–69, 271, 280–82, 286–88, 290–94, 303, 312–18, 322, 324, 334, 373, 409, 465, 498, 505–6, 513–15, 517 “The Eve of Crecy” 77 “Fame” 61 “From the Upland to the Sea” 21, 513 “Gertha’s Lovers” 62, 77 “Golden Wings” 77, 281 “A Good Knight in Prison” 77 “Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames” 89, 91, 95, 114, 119, 129 Gothic Architecture 7, 184 “Gunnar’s Howe above the house at Lithend” 146, 153–54 “Hand and Soul” 114, 118 “Hapless Love” 64 “The Haystack in the Floods” 77, 279, 286

Literary Works: Aeneid/The Aeneids of Virgil, trans. 12, 303–4, 307–11, 313–14, 322–24, 334, 495, 497 “Alone, Unhappy By the Fire I Sat” 63 “Architecture and History” 7, 183, 466 “Art,Wealth & Riches” 319, 448 “Art and the Beauty of the Earth” 183, 360 “Art under Plutocracy” 319, 321, 448, 467 “Bellerophon in Argos” 78, 318 Beowulf, trans. w.A.Wyatt 52, 346 “The Blue Closet” 77 A Book of Verse 68, 261–62, 290, 334–35

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Index of Selected Titles of Creative Works Heiðarvíga saga, trans. w. Eiríkr Magnússon, hereafter EM 333 Heimskringla, trans. w. EM 147, 332, 334–35, 337–38 “The Hill of Venus” 78 “Hope is Dead, Love Liveth” 68 “Hopes and Fears for Art” 49 “The Hopes of Civilization” 394, 470, 473 Horace, Odes, illum. 12, 303–5, 318, 322–24, 334 The House of the Wolfings 71, 73, 114, 117, 151, 161, 295, 338, 345, 376 “How I became a Socialist” 393, 423, 435, 474 “How We Live and How We Might Live” 17, 353, 473, 478 “100 Best Books” 302 “Iceland First Seen” 146, 149, 150, 154, 159 Icelandic Journals (Journals of Travel in Iceland) 6, 146–52, 155–60, 163, 349 “The Ideal Book” 20, 504 Iliad, trans. 12, 303, 306–7, 311–12, 314, 318 “In Praise of My Lady” 63 “In Prison” 77 “The Judgment of God” 77 “King Arthur’s Tomb” 77, 279–80, 284 “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon” 78 Laxdaela saga (unfinished trans. w. EM) 334 “The Lesser Arts of Life” 17, 447, 511; see also “The Decorative Arts” The Life and Death of Jason 11–12, 52, 76, 78, 265, 281, 287–91, 294, 303, 312–18, 324, 411 “Lindenborg Pool” 12 Love is Enough 10–11, 114, 116, 227, 250–52, 261, 263, 266, 268–69, 286, 294, 334 “The Lovers of Gudrun” 78, 147, 155, 334 “Making the Best of It” 49, 518 “Manifesto of the Socialist League” 422–24 “The Man Who Never Laughed Again” 78 “Monopoly: or; How Labour is Robbed” 474 “The Mosque Rising in the Place of the Temple of Solomon” 305 “The Nature of Gothic” (Morris’s intro.) 21 “Near Avalon” 77, 284 News from Nowhere 2, 6, 8, 15–20, 22, 32, 64–65, 74, 81, 83, 87, 89, 92, 95, 99, 114, 117, 119, 132, 138, 159, 162, 178, 184, 221, 235, 253, 283, 285, 294, 297, 319, 343, 345, 348, 350, 354–55, 358, 369, 372, 374, 378, 396, 404–19, 422, 424, 426–27, 429–30, 432–35, 444–45, 452, 454–60, 467–68, 474, 477, 479–81, 498, 507, 509–10, 518 Novel on Blue Paper 99, 114, 117, 170 Odyssey, trans. 12, 287, 303–4, 306–7, 310–13, 317, 322 “On the Eve of the Elections” 396 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (Morris et alia) 60, 63, 172, 210, 305, 332, 345

“The Pilgrims of Hope” 16, 71, 266, 310, 411, 422, 425–30, 434–35, 507 Poems By the Way 11, 12, 124, 153, 163, 262, 266, 290, 294, 297, 513–15 “The Policy of Abstention” 479 “The Present Outlook of Socialism in England” 321 “Printing” 503–4 “The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization” 183 “Rapunzel” 280, 281, 283 “The Revival of Architecture” 184 “The Revival of Handicraft” 467 “Riding Together” 7, 284 “The Ring Given to Venus” 78 The Roots of the Mountains 73, 114, 117, 151, 295, 296, 345, 512 Rubaiyat (Omar Khayyam) (illum.) 334 “Scenes from the Fall of Troy” 12, 286, 291, 303, 309–10, 312–13, 316, 324 “Shall Ireland Be Free” 400 “A Short Account of the Commune of Paris” 426 Signs of Change 30, 60 Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs 11, 78–80, 147, 149, 155, 161–62, 266, 269–72, 292–94, 310, 335, 338, 413 “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End” 77, 278, 291 Socialism and Politics 479 “Socialism from the Root Up” with E. B. Bax 394, 467, 469–71 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, w. E. Bax 470 Socialist Diary 149, 302, 397 “Some German Woodcuts of the Fifteenth Century” 491 “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing” 21, 268, 511, 518 “SPAB Manifesto” 180, 182, 189, 238 “Spell-Bound” 77 The Saga Library, trans. w. EM 13, 147, 162, 333–38 “The Shadows of Amiens” 172 “The Socialist Ideal:Art” 320 “The Society of the Future” 452, 454 “The Story of Aslaug” 147, 332 The Story of Frithiof the Bold (Frithiofs saga), trans. w. EM 334–35 The Story of Grettir the Strong (Grettis saga), trans. w. EM 147, 292, 334 The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue (Gunnlaugs saga), trans. w. EM 13, 323–35 “The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice” 289–91, 513 The Story of the Dwellers at Eyr (Eyrbyggia saga), trans. w. EM 13, 333 The Story of the Glittering Plain 13, 122, 151, 295, 297, 343, 348–49, 352, 355–56, 360, 369, 411, 503, 506

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Index of Selected Titles of Creative Works “The Story of the Unknown Church” 172 The Story of the Volsungs and the Niblungs (Volsunga saga), trans. w. EM 13, 78–79, 147, 261, 292, 332, 334–35 The Story of Viglund the Fair (Viglundar saga), trans. w. EM 334 The Sundering Flood 13, 114, 117, 151, 297, 343, 348, 352, 356, 359, 361, 369 “The Three Flowers” 61 Three Northern Love Stories, trans. w. EM 13, 147, 334 “Three Songs” 2 “The Tune of Seven Towers” 77 “To the Working Men of England” 390 “True and False Society” 452 “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil” 445, 467, 478 Viglundar saga (The Story of Viglund the Fair), trans. w. EM 334 “Violence Abroad Breeds Helplessness at Home” 392 “Wake London Lads” 390 “The Wanderers” 12, 290–92, 317, 322 “The Watching of the Falcon” 78 The Water of the Wondrous Isles 6, 13, 71, 81, 83–84, 151, 294, 297, 343, 351, 353–54, 356, 358, 360–61, 369, 373, 379 The Well at the World’s End 13, 100, 114, 117, 151, 297, 343, 348–49, 352–55, 360–61, 369 “What Socialists Want” 452 “The Wind’s on the Wold” 77, 114, 124–25 The Wood Beyond the World 151, 296–97, 343, 346, 355, 361, 369 “The Woodcut Books of Ulm and Augsburg” 324, 491, 493, 496 Ynglinga Saga, trans. w. EM 13, 335

Chaucer, Geoffrey, Works (including Kelmscott Chaucer) 3, 10, 51–52, 70, 109, 114, 118, 209, 246–47, 279, 287, 313, 315–16, 332, 337, 410, 496, 501, 516, 518 Commonweal (Socialist League Newspaper) 10, 16, 18, 20, 68, 72–73, 75, 92, 149, 253, 263, 302, 310, 320, 393–400, 405, 422–35, 465, 467–70, 475, 507–9 Eddas (Elder and Poetic) 13, 147–48, 292, 332, 334, 377 English Magic (Jeremy Deller) 249 For the Voice (Eli Lissitzky) 10, 246 “Homage to William Morris” (Imogen Holst) 2 Keats, John 21, 31–32, 279, 290, 507, 516–17; see also Poems of “The Lady of Shalott” (Tennyson) 42, 280 “Morris as I Knew Him” (G. B. Shaw) 30 Morte d’Arthur (Malory) 42, 212, 219, 283 “The Nature of Gothic” (Ruskin) 8, 21, 172, 196–97, 209, 267, 393–94, 467, 477, 515–16 Njáls saga 332 Northern Antiquities (P. H. Mallet, trans. Percy) 147, 332 “Notes of a biographical talk by William Morris” Sydney Cockerell 30 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 302, 306, 312–15, 318 Poems of John Keats 516–17 Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley 52 Seven Lamps of Architecture (Ruskin) 173, 237 Shakespeare,William 243, 295, 314, 498 The Stones of Venice (Ruskin) 172–73, 196, 209, 264, 367, 467 Syr Isambrace (anon.) 52 The Two Paths (Ruskin) 42 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 12, 302–4, 306–10, 313, 319–20, 322–24, 334, 497 “We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold” (Deller) 2, 10, 227, 249, 254

Other Creative Works: “Anarchy and Beauty” (exhibition) 2, 160, 228, 230, 239 “Big Red Propeller” (David Mabb) 245

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