Introduction by the Editor

INTRODUCTION BYTHE EDITOR HEN Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne- Jones, William Morris, and some fellow-artists painted on the damp walls of the Oxford Un- ion debating hall in 1857, their ignorance of fresco technique led them to produce haunt- ing images of the Middle Ages which, in ghostly fashion, began to fade almost immedi- ately; but the more permanent legacy of this episode was a body of richly revealing anecdotes about the Pre- Raphaelites themselves. Burne-Jones, for example, recalled that Mor- ris was so fanatically precise about the details of medieval costume Figure 1 that he arranged for "a stout little smith" in Oxford to produce a suit of armor which the painters could use as a model. When the basinet arrived, Morris at once tried it on, and Burne-Jones, working high above, looked down and was startled to see his friend "embedded in iron, dancing with rage and roaring inside" because the visor would not lift.1 This picture of Morris imprisoned and blinded by a piece of medieval armor is an intriguing one: certainly it hints at an interpretation of his career that is not very flattering. But we ought to set alongside it another anecdote, from the last decade of Morris's life, the symbol- ism of which seems equally potent. Early in November 1892, young Sydney Cockerell, recently hired by Morris to catalogue his incunab- ula and medieval manuscripts, spent the entire day immersed in that remote age while studying materials in Morris's library. As evening approached, he emerged again into the nineteenth century (or so he thought) and climbed the staircase of Kelmscott House: "When I went up into the drawing room to say goodnight Morris and his wife were playing at draughts, with large ivory pieces, red and white. Mrs. M. was dressed in a glorious blue gown and as she sat on the sofa, she looked like an animated Rossetti picture or page from some old MS of a king and queen."2 Even though his wife seemed to have stepped out of an illumination, Morris was not, in the end, crippled by a dreamy infatuation with the Middle Ages; the medievalism which suffuses his art and personal life was not merely a means of escaping ugly Victo- rian realities. The unifying theme of Morris's extraordinarily varied career was a desire to reunite art and craftsmanship, and this in turn led to that preoccupation with functional structure and honest use of XI Introduction materials which has prompted Pevsner to call him one of the pioneers of modern design.3 If Morris seems at times to be struggling in vain to lift the visor of his basinet, we must also remember that - by a sublime paradox which he himself would have relished - his aesthetic theories point unmistakably in the direction of Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the twentieth century. The central dilemma of Morris's artistic career is that though he warmly condemned the servile imitation of historical styles, he never- theless turned incessantly to medieval art for (in Burne-Jones's words) "inspiration and hope."4 Walking such an aesthetic tightrope inevita- bly required some very fancy footwork. Writing in 1893, Morris offered this piece of advice (which he admitted was "a little dangerous") to C. M. Gere, who was struggling, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to provide illustrations for the Kelmscott Press edition of The Well at the World's End: "... you should now try to steep yourself, so to say, in mediaeval design; look [at] illuminations in 13th & 14th century books [,] at wood cuts and so on, and make sketches from them But (there is always a but, you know) all this will be of no use to you unless you feel yourself drawn in that direction and are really enthusiastic about the old work. When I was a young-bear, I think I really suc- ceeded in ignoring modern life altogether. And it was of great service to me." Significantly, in his next letter to Gere, Morris described his own counsel as "doubtful."5 Victorian England, after all, was littered with cautionary examples of the danger of an indiscriminate revival of medieval styles. Ruskin himself had come to hate the mock-medievalism of suburban villas, railway stations, and banks which sprang up, to his horror, in apparent malignant response to his praise of Venetian Gothic. Morris (whom Ruskin, incidentally, described as "beaten gold" and "the ablest man of his time"6) always had to take special care not to be similarly misunderstood. The founding of the Kelmscott Press by Morris in 1891 can be use- fully seen, in fact, as the final phase of the Victorian Gothic revival. The ideas that lay behind the Press (such as distrust of the machine and the association of the Gothic style with a certain set of moral values) were drawn directly from Ruskin's chapter entitled "The Nature of Gothic" in The Stones of Venice: not surprisingly, that essay became the fourth book published by the Press, and Morris, in an Introduction, praised it as "one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century." But Morris, like Ruskin, was struggling against more than a poisonous industrialism. He had also to combat a spurious re- xii vival of medievalism in bookmaking which was only slightly less Introduction alarming than the Gothicky contagion that was rapidly disfiguring Victorian cities and suburbs. Of course the Chiswick Press had been intelligently reviving the use of Caslon's type since the middle of the century, but in the history of medievalizing typography the key event was the Caxton Exhibition - a celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of English printing - held in London during the summer of 1877. The Exhibition, with its extensive array of early printed books and an operating wooden press, aroused such enthusiasm that, according to one trade journal, "the columns even of the Times have been thrown open to correspondence on moot points of typographical history."7 Stanley Morison believed that the event "had a decisive effect upon bibliographical and typographical studies."8 At a more popular level, the rediscovery of Cax- ton as a patriotic hero encouraged the revival of earlier styles of typography, generally in debased form: hence by the 1880s "old-style" printing, as practiced by important firms like Unwin Brothers, the Leadenhall Press (which sometimes called itself Ye Leadenhalle Press), and Messrs. George Falkner & Sons, was rivaling "artistic" printing as one of the most fashionable typographical modes of the day.9 An advertisement in the Antiquary magazine in 1881 offered read- ers " Old English Type " letters and monograms (" in Turkey Red, and orders can also be executed in Black") "for sewing on household linen, socks, and underclothing." The term medieval was thrown about with wonderful abandon, as when a type specimen book by Unwin Brothers announced: "Type of the Old Style of face is now frequently used, more especially for the finer class of Book and Ornamental work. The series in use at the Gresham Steam Press are from the Original Matrices, which were cut at the beginning of the last century, and thus possess all the peculiarities of the Mediaeval Letters"10 Another word much bandied about by old- style printers was " quaint": it appeared obsessively in advertisements and printing trade journals, and there was even a magazine called Ye Quaynt. Falkner & Sons issued a "quaint and curious" series of Christ- mas cards. Andrew Tuer, of the Leadenhall Press, the most energetic of all the old-style printers, compiled a volume entitled 1,000 Quaint Cuts from Books of Other Days (1886). Old-style printing often consisted of a bewildering mixture of Old Style (i.e., a derivative of Caslon) text type, pseudo-Caxton display types, and borders and ornaments borrowed from four centuries, with xiii l William Morris, as photographed on January 19, 1889. Courtesy of the Na- tional Portrait Gallery (London). 2 Emery Walker. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery (London). Introduction the sort of archaic spelling that one would today associate with preten- tious Ye Olde Antique Shoppes. A representative colophon by Falk- ner & Sons reads: "Concernynge thys Boke, and ye Impryntynge thereof, it hath ben done wythe cunnynge Crafte by Maister George Falkner & hys Sons, of ye antiente Citie of Manchester, in ye Royal Duchie ot Lancaster, after ye style of daies longe gone bye insomuch as MAISTER WILLIAM CAXTON hymself maye have ben ye imprynt- er "11 This sort of bogus medievalism in typography is clearly equiv- alent to the sham Gothic of eighteenth-century dilettantes like Wil- liam Beckford and Horace Walpole - or, worse yet, the horrors perpetrated by Victorian jerry-builders in the name of Gothic - and it remained for Morris (just as Pugin and Ruskin had done in architec- ture) to step into this messy scene of Victorian commercial printing and to make clear, once and for all, the difference between seeking "quaint" typographical effects and rediscovering the fundamental structural principles of the medieval book. When Burne-Jones told Charles Eliot Norton in 1894 that he and Morris were attempting to make their edition of Chaucer "a pocket cathedral,"12 his analogy was exactly right: each Kelmscott Press book was intended to be not a Vic- torian railway hotel" done in the Gothic style," but a miniature cathedral, or at least a parish church, constructed of sound materials and in- spired by the Ruskinian vision of craftsmanship as an act of worship. & The craft of bookmaking, like many other crafts, had long fascinated Morris. As Oxford undergraduates, he and Burne-Jones spent long hours in the Bodleian Library studying illuminated manuscripts and medieval woodcuts.

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