William Morris and Medieval Material Culture

WILLIAM MORRIS AND MEDIEVAL MATERIAL CULTURE by Yuri Cowan • A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Yuri Cowan (2008) William morris and medieval material Culture DoCtor of PhilosoPhY, 2008 Yuri Cowan DePartment of english, universitY of toronto aBSTRACt in the miD-nineteenth CenturY, when organizations such as the Early English Text Society began making an increasing variety of medieval texts accessible to Victorian readers, the “everyday life” of the past became an important subject of historiography. For many of William Morris’s contem- poraries, this project of social history and textual recovery provided welcome evidence to support either narratives of nostalgia for an ordered past or a comforting liberal sense of progress; for Morris himself, however, the everyday life of the medieval past offered an array of radical possibilities for creative adaptation. Morris’s broad reading in newly recovered medieval texts, his library of manuscripts and woodcut books, and his personal experience of medieval domestic architecture were more instrumental in developing his sense of the past than were such artefacts of high culture as the great cathe- drals and lavishly illustrated manuscripts, since it was through the surviving items of everyday use that Morris could best approach the creative lives of ordinary medieval men and women. For William Morris, the everyday medieval “art of the people” was collaborative, de-centralizing, and devoted to process rather than to the attain- ment of perfection. Morris consistently works to strip ancient texts of their veneer of authority, resisting the notion of the “rare book” as an object of cultural mystery and as a commodity. His response to the art of the past is a radical process, in which reading is not mere “poaching” on the hegemonic territory of capital and cultural authority, but an immersive activity in which any reader can be intimately and actively engaged with the artefact from the earliest moment of its production. Such active reception, however, as diverse and fallible as the individuals who practice it, requires in turn an ongoing creativity in the form of adaptations of, and even collaboration with, the past. ii yuri cowan • William Morris And Medieval Material Culture Morris’s theory of creative adaptation was consequently itself not static, and this dissertation traces its evolution over Morris’s career. In his early poetry, Morris reveals his sense of the limitations of the historical record as his char- acters grasp simultaneously at fantasies and physical objects to make sense of the crises in which they find themselves, suggesting the incomplete and unstable circumstances of textual reception itself. In the socialist lectures and fiction of the 1880s, Morris makes use of surviving and imagined frag- ments of medieval material culture and domestic architecture to describe an aesthetic that can embrace creative diversity, co-operation, and even imper- fection across historical periods. In the works produced by his Kelmscott Press, the material book itself becomes a collaborative site for artists, illus- trators, and editors to work out the active reception and dissemination of the popular reading of the past. Finally, in the romances of the 1890s, Mor- ris describes a diversity of possible social geographies, ultimately articulat- ing a vision of the romance genre itself as a popular art, equally capable of transformation over time as are the artefacts of everyday life that Morris cre- atively employs in his fictions throughout his career. iii AcknoWledgements This dissertation, like its subject matter, was influenced by diverse academic, archival, and social communities. I hope always to be as open-handed and generous with knowledge as the people and institutions I mention here. I owe most of all a debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Melba Cuddy-Keane, whose compassion, dedication, and professionalism have impressed me pro- foundly. She has consistently offered the right advice at the right time, and I have found myself regularly influenced by her as an intellectual and ped- agogical model, always to my own benefit. On my supervisory committee, Christine Bolus-Reichert introduced me to the aesthetic movement and the history of everyday life in a graduate course, thereby shaping the direction of this thesis before it was even conceived; her ongoing contributions to this project are many. Andy Orchard has always been genial and ready to share his wide knowledge of the Victorian Anglo-Saxonists, translation, and the history of editions of medieval texts, and has kept me as honest in my por- trayal of Morris’s Middle Ages as a Victorian scholar can be. I would also like to thank my readers, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Rachel Buurma, for their helpful advice, evocative questions, and useful comments. I wish to acknowledge the kind assistance of funding from a variety of sources: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council fellowship, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the Christopher Wallis Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the University of Toronto Open Fellowship, the U of T English Department’s De Luca Fellowship, and a University of Toronto Foundation Graduate Award for Travel. The archival work that is the basis for this dissertation was carried out in a number of North American research libraries. The staff of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, where the bulk of Morris’s library is now held, were very accommodating. The New York Public Library offered a wealth of relevant material, and the staff of the Huntington Library in San Marino were unfailingly kind and helpful. The comprehensive resources of the Uni- versity of Toronto library system were well suited to this project; I wish par- ticularly to thank Richard Landon of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for his many suggestions and interesting conversation, and Marie Corey of iv yuri cowan • William Morris And Medieval Material Culture the Robertson Davies Library at Massey College for sharing her knowledge of the Victorian art books held there. Many friends and acquaintances within the academy and outside it have offered intellectual support and friendship. My parents, Bob and Joani Cowan, top this list for providing the foundations of my understanding of history, and the cornerstones of my own library; this dissertation is dedicated to them with gratitude and love. My grandmother, Peg Wells, looked after me and made me feel very much at home when I visited the Huntington Library. Les- lie Howsam, William Whitla, Linda Parry, Ian Young, William Blissett, Piers Brown, and Brian Morgan all generously shared with me their knowledge of literature, of art history, and of various aspects of the history of the book. Brian Morgan set this edition in Enschedé’s Lexicon and Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro. The William Morris Society of Canada, especially Richard Bishop, David Latham, and Jean Johnson, welcomed me kindly to Toronto, and sup- ported me in characteristic fellowship; so did Stephanie Massey, Joshua Lyons, and Greg Mackie. Finally, I wish to thank Ratsamy Pathammavong for her help, cheer, love, and hope: “Tomorrow, and the fair days afterwards!” v yuri cowan • William Morris And Medieval Material Culture taBle of Contents Abstract: William Morris and Medieval Material Culture ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vi introDuCtion “Thousands of Small Facts”: Morris and Victorian Historiographies of the Everyday 1 ChaPter one Material Culture and Textual Instability in the Early Poetry of William Morris 30 ChaPter two “A Union of the Arts”: Material Culture and Medieval Everyday Life in Morris’s Socialist Lectures and Fictions 67 ChaPter three The Mirror of Everyday Life: Representing the Middle Ages at the Kelmscott Press 97 ChaPter four Material Culture and the Social Geographies of Morris’s Late Romances 141 envoi The Sundering Flood 178 Works Consulted 193 Appendix: Selected Individual Books and Manuscripts Associated with Morris’s Collecting and Printing 221 introDuCtion “thousands of small faCts”: morris and viCtorian historiographies of the everyday n a letter to anDreas Scheu of September 15, 1883, William Morris recalled the course of his career up to that time, and the seemingly nat- ural progression from being a boy at Marlborough College seeking out “prehistoric monuments” in the countryside in order to eke out the lim- Iited education he was receiving, up to his present position as a designer and political activist. Among the central themes of Morris’s reflective letter are the evolution of his socialist conviction out of his belief in the importance of art and the reliance of that evolution upon his changing relationship to history, especially medieval history. One epiphany that occurred to Morris during the period of his writing The Earthly Paradise in the 1860s was simultaneously literary and historical: “I had about this time extended my historical reading by falling in with translations from the old Norse literature, and found in it a good corrective to the maundering side of medievalism” (Let- ters 2: 229). With that single scornful adjective “maundering” (“drivelling” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, though the word seems simultaneously to have here for Morris the other negative connotations of wayward meandering and languid effeminacy), Morris repudiated the largely aesthetic medievalism of his early enthusiasms, of knights and ladies, tournaments and love intrigues, in favour of the more direct, simple social life described in the sagas. Since the kinds of medieval culture and art valued at various times by Morris are an important barometer of the evolution of his political and aesthetic theories, the fact of his attention having turned from the High Middle Ages to the extreme northwest frontier of Europe, from the tomb of Arthur to the ashes of Njal’s homestead, from the eve of Crécy to Gudrun at her loom, is significant indeed.

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