The Routledge Companion to William Morris

Florence S. Boos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367560881
  9780415347433
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351859004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

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.

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

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,

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 father-in-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 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 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
• Index of Proper Nouns
• Index of Places
• Index of Selected Titles of Creative Works