This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. “Us Poor Singers”: Victorians and The Earthly Paradise Audience, Community, and Storytelling in William Morrisʼ First Success Emily Rose Doucet PhD English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2013 ii I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis; that the following thesis is entirely my own work; and that no part of this thesis has been submitted for another degree or qualification. ___________________________ Emily Rose Doucet 1 March 2014 ii iii Thesis Abstract The Earthly Paradise was William Morris’s first real success, and it remained his best-known work even after his death. It has not fared as well since the mid- twentieth century, when it became overlooked and problematic, as the Morris of The Earthly Paradise years became coextensive with a portrait of Victorian middle-class myopia. This verdict has been brought to the doors of the poem’s first readers, who are imagined to have liked it for uncomplicated reasons of fashion and entertainment. I reconsider these assumptions by returning to the contemporary reception of the poem to ask what audiences thought about Morris as a public figure, what it was that they so responded to in his work, and what the poem itself says about reception—the relationship between story, audience, and speaker. I argue both within the text and in the reception of it, such relationships are nearly always understood as communal, as storytellers—Morris and those in his text—address audiences as collective publics, and speak on behalf of them. Moreover, this speech is always marked by a mutually inclusive relationship with text, so that stories are properly understood as arising from the discursive field established through the participation, both textual and vocal, of anyone who understands himself or herself addressed by the discourse. iii iv Acknowledgments I am grateful for Fiona MacCarthy’s William Morris: A Life for our Time, which introduced me to Morris in all his richness, many years ago, and for Florence S. Boos’ edition of The Earthly Paradise without which tackling the poem would have been an even greater challenge, and much less of a pleasure. Thank you to the English Literature Dept at the University of Edinburgh, in particular my supervisor Anna Vaninskaya, as well as Tim Milnes and Jonathan Wilde for reading early sections of this project. Thank you to my viva committee for the insight of their suggestions: Penny Fielding, Simon Dentith and Dermot Cavanagh. Thank you as well to my early professors at Dalhousie University and University of King’s College, in particular Rohan Maitzen, Trevor Ross, and Christina Luckyj. Thank you both to Dr. Tyson Stolte and Dr. Linda Tym for their insight, patience, and generosity. Thank you as well to Sarah Carlton and Vanessa LeBlanc, for their handholding, and for their stubborn faith. And finally thank you to my grandparents: Agnes, Bill, Marie and Joe who all, in their different ways, taught me about the value of poetry; to my parents, Joan and Alfred, to whom I entirely owe this, and much more besides; to my siblings Mathieu and Susie, for their support, their wisdom, and their conversation; and to Nigel, my Industrial Revelation. iv v Table of Contents Introduction 1 The floundering fortunes of The Earthly Paradise 6 Critical Engagements 11 The Earthly Paradise’s Unity 16 Thesis Outline 20 Part One: Reading Morris: Private Affect, Public Bonds and the Morrisean Appeal Introduction 28 i. Reading Morris 35 ‘The Real Morris belongs to us” 35 The case of The Earthly Paradise 43 ii. Reading The Earthly Paradise 64 The Earthly Paradise and its contemporary popularity 64 Defining the readership of The Earthly Paradise 68 Voice, discourse, and text in The Earthly Paradise 74 Contemporary reading experiences 85 Part Two: Contemporary Contexts: The Earthly Paradise, the Epic, and the Stories we tell Introduction 94 The Sources 101 Telling stories about the past: Challenges to the Classical Tradition 109 A liberal Education 110 v vi Old Northernism 116 Chaucer in the mid-Nineteenth Century 121 Reading the Age: negotiating epic responses to The Earthly Paradise 126 Morris, Tennyson, and Browning 133 Epic Affect 146 Part Three: “Tales Feigned and True”: Negotiating Reception in the tales of The Earthly Paradise Introduction 153 The problem of the Wanderers’ Tale 156 Tales about tales: alternative accounts of the earthly paradise story 164 Reading each other 166 Uniting Subjectivities: Atalanta, Alcestis, Psyche 174 The Urban Gaze: Bharam, Pygmalion, Rhodope 186 Envoi 199 Bibliography 205 vi 1 Introduction “There are many writers greater than Morris,” admits his admirer C. S. Lewis. “You can go on from him to all sorts of subtleties, delicacies, and sublimities which he lacks. But you can hardly go behind him” (Rehabilitations 55). W. B. Yeats gives us a slightly different version: “I would choose to live his life, poetry and all, rather than my own or any other man’s” (Autobiographies 132 emphasis added). These observations, yoking emphatic praise with caveats, reveal a relationship to William Morris that is foundational, life-shaping, and yet aware of his—and its—limitations. In his 1936 article on the reception of William Morris, Karl Litzenberg identifies a trend in contemporary criticism that he paraphrases as “he was a great poet, but”(421). Later critic Florence S. Boos writes that as Morris’s writing developed he “never lacked for readers, but they seemed more and more to demand what he least wished to say” (“Victorian Response” 24). The aim of this study is to consider the complexities in Morris’s reception through an investigation of the contemporary reception of The Earthly Paradise, the poem for which he achieved his first fame, and which is now not often read, or liked. Indeed it has become one of the more problematic examples of his disconnect between readers and what Morris wished to say. The tensions between Morris’s critical reputation, his readership, and his own desires as a writer to write what he “wished to say” can be located from the period of the writing and the publication of The Earthly Paradise. It was from this time that it became feasible to think of him both as a public figure and a “great poet” and as 1 2 someone who might not lack for readers. This project considers the intersection of these phenomena: the creation and subsequent reception of William Morris the public figure; how that figure emerges in the particular instance of the reception of his first success The Earthly Paradise, what it was in the poem his contemporary audiences responded to; and how this poem itself frames the question of reception. This project seeks to recreate—as far as it is able—the cultural context of The Earthly Paradise’s contemporary reception, the affiliated rise of William Morris the writer, and the ways in which William Morris himself engages with questions of audience, community, identity and public performance in the poem itself. The Earthly Paradise is a multi-framed verse narrative of 42 000 lines that begins with an address by a contemporary narrator to the nineteenth-century inhabitants of London, it then backwards in time, first to medieval London, and then to a city of indeterminate location and provenance, but populated by people who live under the cultural inheritance of the Greco-Roman classical tradition. Here we meet a scraggly group of seafaring Norwegians—the Wanderers—who have alighted upon that city’s shores after having left their native Norway long ago in search of the fountain of youth, which is to say, the Earthly Paradise. After leaving Norway and before ending up in this city, they undergo trials and adventures, lose some of their group through misadventure, fail in their quest, grow older and faint of heart. We hear this tale, itself a very long narrative, and only then settle into the heart of the work as the Wanderers and the Elders of the city begin a year of exchanging the cultural heritage of their respective old tales. These tales are presented in a calendar structure upheld by both the Wanderers and the Elders, as well as the contemporary narrator, who interjects, after each pair of stories, with an intimate, opaque lyric poem on the subject of both his own emotional landscape and the newly starting month. 2 3 This adventure narrative, and its emphasis on the storytelling moment—an activity associated with leisure, relaxation and diversion—have all helped to give The Earthly Paradise a reputation for escapism. The Prologue’s first line, and certainly the most famous line of the whole work, urges us to “Forget” contemporary London and travel back in time with the narrator to a different London—“small and white and clean” (I: Prologue 5). Nevertheless, the poem itself is primarily about dashed hopes, lowered expectations, and coming to peace with a world depicted as sad and occasionally cruel.