Against The Age (Routledge Revivals)

An Introduction to William Morris

Peter Faulkner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136663802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Students new to the work of William Morris will find the full range of his achievements covered in this reissue of Peter Faulkner's excellent biography, first published in 1980. The author has carefully placed Morris in the context of the Victorian age, but has also suggested the relevance of his ideas today. The six chapters are organised biographically and cover all aspects of Morris's work in poetry, fiction, design and socialist politics.

The emphasis is on his continuous struggle against the age in which he lived, seen as an idealism which went through various stages from the wistfulness of The Earthly Paradise through the practical activities of the firm of Morris & Company to the socialism of Morris's later years. The book quotes freely from writings by Morris which are not easily accessible and gives an overall account from which the student can develop his specialist interests. This reissue will appeal to sixth-formers and undergraduates interested in the Victorian period, as seen through one of its most striking personalities.

When this book appeared in 1980, Morris's reputation had risen again after the low estimates of the interwar period. This was due both to the reappraisal of his politics and to the expanding popularity of his designs. Against the Age offers a clear account of Morris's career for those developing an interest in his numerous achievements. It covers the whole range of Morris's work, and argues for his significance as a writer of both poetry and prose. Since 1980 our knowledge of Morris has been enriched by the publication of Norman Kelvin's edition of his Collected Letters, by the late Nicholas Salmond's editions of his contributions to the socialist journals, by Fiona MacCarthy's biography of 1984, and by the increasing recognition of Morris as a pioneer of environmentalism. However, the book retains its value for its wide coverage and its balanced attitude to Morris's achievements, and for its encouragement to readers to consider the issues that make Morris of continuing importance today.

I

Early Life and Poetry, 1835–59

In 1883 Morris wrote a long letter to an Austrian refugee and socialist, Andreas Scheu, in which he gave a lively account of his life that cannot be improved upon as far as it goes. Quotations from the letter have been used to begin each chapter of this book.¹ The section covering his early years is characteristically clear and informal:

I was born at Walthamstow in Essex in March 1834, a suburban village on the edge of Epping Forest, and once a pleasant place enough, but now terribly cocknified and choked up by the jerry-builder.

My father was a business man in the city, and well-to-do; and we lived in the ordinary bourgeois style of comfort; and since we belonged to the evangelical section of the English Church I was brought up in what I should call rich establishmentarian puritanism; a religion which even as a boy I never took to.

I went to school at Marlborough College, which was then a new and very rough school. As far as my school instruction went, I think I may fairly say I learned next to nothing there, for indeed next to nothing was taught; but the place is in very beautiful country, thickly scattered over with prehistoric monuments, and I set myself eagerly to studying these and everything else that had any history in it, and so perhaps learned a good deal, especially as there was a good library at the school to which I sometimes had access. I should mention that ever since I could remember I was a great devourer of books. I don't remember being taught to read, and by the time I was seven years old I had read a very great many books, good, bad, and indifferent.

My father died in 1847 a few months before I went to Marlborough; but as he had engaged in a fortunate mining speculation before his death, we were left very well off, rich in fact.

I went to Oxford in 1853 as a member of Exeter College; I took very ill to the studies of the place, but fell-to very vigorously on history and especially mediaeval history, all the more perhaps because at this time I fell under the influence of the High Church or Puseyite school; that latter phase however did not last me long, as it was corrected by the books of John Ruskin which were at the time a sort of revelation to me; I was also a good deal influenced by the works of Charles Kingsley, and got into my head therefrom some socio-political ideas which would have developed probably but for the attractions of art and poetry. While I was still an undergraduate, I discovered that I could write poetry, much to my own amazement; and about that time being very intimate with other young men of enthusiastic ideas, we got up a monthly paper which lasted (to my cost) for a year; it was called the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, and was very young indeed. When I had gone through my schools at Oxford, I who had been originally intended for the Church made up my mind to take to art in some form, and so articled myself to G. E. Street (the architect of the new Law Courts afterwards) who was then practising in Oxford; I only stayed with him nine months however, when being in London and having been introduced by Burne-Jones, the painter, who was my great college friend, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite School, I made up my mind to turn painter, and studied the art but in a very desultory way for some time.

Meantime in 1858 I published a volume of poems The Defence of Guenevere; exceedingly young also and very mediaeval.

Although Morris writes with some amusement over the naïveté of his youth, this account is accurate. Above all, it gives an impression of his devotion to history, particularly the history of England. This became the central enthusiasm of his life, the source of his poetic inspiration and the basis for his Utopian vision.

The comfortable circumstances of his early life were due to his father's success in business, in particular to a fortunate investment in Great Devon Consuls, which rose at one time to a value of some £200,000. This enabled Mr Morris to acquire Woodford Hall, a substantial Georgian house, with spacious grounds, in 1840, and the family to move to Water House, Walthamstow (now the William Morris Gallery) in 1848, the year after Mr Morris's death. Living on the borders of Epping Forest, the young Morris was able to wander freely, at one time in a miniature suit of armour, often inventing stories of chivalry and adventure partly based on the reading of romantic novels – he had read most of those of Scott by the age of 7. The hornbeams of Epping were to feature in many of his descriptions of landscapes, while the vision of the past encouraged by Scott was to contribute substantially to his criticisms of Victorian England. Morris was a thick-set and energetic child and youth, excitable, restless, awkward and sensitive. Although he had four brothers and four sisters, he does not seem to have been very close to any of them except Emma, to whom some of his earliest letters were written. Her marriage in 1852 seems to have left him with a strong feeling of isolation. Although Morris throughout his life gave observers the impression of self-sufficiency because of his involvement in so many different types of work, this may have been misleading. His emotions were not the less deep because they were often concealed.

At Marlborough from 1845 to 1851 the poor organisation of the school, which actually led to a revolt of the pupils, allowed him to live in his own way, cultivating his enthusiasm for the English past and inventing imaginative stories. His physical energy led him into vigorous walking, and to such exercises as single-sticks, at which he was a dangerous antagonist. His creative energy had a clear physical basis; he could never bear to be idle. The school library contained works of archaeology and ecclesiastical history, including Contrasts by A. W. N. Pugin, a leading Roman Catholic mediaevalist and architect. Pugin's argument was that modern England was in every way inferior to mediaeval England, and he enforced this view by means of polemical pairs of illustrations such as ‘A Catholic town in 1440’ and ‘The same town in 1840’.²

The chapel at Marlborough also introduced Morris to the High Church forms of service which were replacing the staid Evangelicalism of his parents in many English churches at the time. This was the result of the movement which had begun at Oxford in the 1830s when John Henry Newman, John Keble and Edward Pusey led an attack on the lack of spiritual idealism in the Church of England. Newman regarded Keble's assize sermon of 14 July 1833 on ‘National Apostasy’ as the start of what was to be called the Oxford movement. In the same year Newman inaugurated the series of Tracts for the Times which gave the movement its alternative name of Tractarian and helped to stimulate discussion of many issues, such as the relation of church and state, which previous, more easy-going generations had ignored. The call for a new seriousness in the church, in consonance with its early traditions, called forth a wide and deeply felt response in the younger generation. The situation became more involved after Newman had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1843, for this seemed to prove the validity of the argument put forward by opponents of the movement that it would lead its members away from the Church of England altogether, However, Keble, Pusey, and many others remained faithful to that church, and their teachings and examples became widely influential. The theology of the High Church movement laid emphasis on the priesthood and the sacraments, and consequently led to more interest in the liturgy and the church services themselves. All this must have appealed to sensitive and idealistic young men like Morris, and he was further encouraged in the direction by the Reverend F. B. Guy, who coached him for Oxford after he had left Marlborough in 1852, and by his favourite sister Emma.

The England in which Morris grew up, and which was to impinge more and more directly on him throughout his life, was a country rapidly becoming industrialised. The enormous development of the railways in the 1840s was obvious evidence of this. In the process of becoming wealthy, England was also becoming dirty and polluted, and the benefits of industrialisation were very unevenly spread. Some made fortunes, many were near starvation. The indignant accounts of the conditions of the urban poor given by novelists like Dickens and Mrs Gaskell and by social commentators like Carlyle and Engels remind us of how severe a shock industrialism was rendering to English society – the first to be fully exposed to such large-scale developments. Rural poverty was an age-old phenomenon, but the hideous squalor of the new cities was an appalling novelty. Kingsley and Ruskin, to whom Morris refers in his letter to Scheu, were among the authors most concerned to bring home to their readers the stark facts about the social changes so rapidly taking place. Charles Kingsley was associated with F. D. Maurice and others in the movement known as Christian Socialism, which aimed to save England from exploitative commercialism by a recall to the ethics of Christianity. Kingsley wrote many articles and pamphlets for this cause, and several novels. Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850) is the fictional autobiography of a working man, a victim of the economic system, and is written with generous indignation, though little power of characterisation, and the same is true of Yeast, a Problem (1851). Kingsley's bluff, unsubtle personality had something in common with that of Morris, but the writings of John Ruskin were to exert a far more profound and lasting effect because they were concerned with art as well as society. Morris went up to Exeter College, Oxford, in January 1853 (though he was accepted for October 1852), where he evidently read the first two volumes of Ruskin's Modern Painters and discussed them with his friends, who included Edward Jones, later as Burne-Jones to become the well-known painter, and R. W. Dixon, poet and future cleric, who recalled Morris's ‘chanting’ of passages from Ruskin concerning the Slave Ship and Turner's skies. But Morris and Burne-Jones were even more impressed by The Stones of Venice (1851–3). The second volume contains a chapter entitled ‘Of the nature of Gothic’ which represents the vital centre of Ruskin's social thinking; Morris was later to reprint it at the Kelmscott Press. In it Ruskin argues that man is only free when he can exercise his creative gifts in his work, and that this freedom has been destroyed by industrialism:

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them … there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords' lightest words were worth men's lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped into the furrows of his fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is set like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.³

This is powerful writing directed towards a central social problem of the time and we cannot be surprised that Morris and Burne-Jones (who came from Birmingham and had a closer knowledge of the realities of industrialism than his wealthier friend) were impressed by it, though it was not until later that its influence became apparent in Morris's work.

Morris found no stimulus in his academic work at Oxford, but enjoyed the architecture of the city, still so markedly mediaeval in character, and the opportunity to read and to talk with his friends. Reminiscences of the period, such as those of Dixon recorded by Mackail in his Life of William Morris, emphasise the energy with which Morris threw himself into many activities. As to his reading, Morris's own account is preserved in some notes by Sydney Cockerell:

Our clique was much influenced by Keats, who was a poet who represented semblances, as opposed to Shelley who had no eyes, and whose admiration [i.e. admiration of whom] was not critical but conventional. I remember the issue of Tennyson's ‘Maud’ [July 1855], and its doubtful reception by the reviewers. I went up to College in 1852. Ruskin's ‘Stones of Venice’ (vols. 2 and 3) came out in the following year, and made a deep impression. I read Mrs Browning a great deal at Oxford. She was a great poetess – in some respects she had greater capacity than Browning, though she was a poor rhymer. I refer to the earlier works; ‘Aurora Leigh’ I consider dull. I pretended to like Wordsworth at that time, and was to some extent touched by the Kingsley movement which, like Puseyism, was a reaction against Puritanism. I never read Byron …⁴

The modern reader may find it difficult to see what Morris saw in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's often sentimental poetry, but she was popular at the time for h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Early Life and Poetry, 1835–59
• 2 The Firm and Poetry, 1860–70
• 3 Iceland and Kelmscott Manor, 1871–7
• 4 Into Politics, 1877–82
• 5 Socialism, 1883–90
• 6 The Last Stage, 1890–6
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Suggested Reading
• Index