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Morris and Victorian Historiographies of the Everyday 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 contemporaries, 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 cathedrals 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 attainment 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 ii 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. 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 characters 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 fragments of medieval material culture and domestic architecture to describe an aesthetic that can embrace creative diversity, co-operation, and even imperfection across historical periods. In the works produced by his Kelmscott Press, the material book itself becomes a collaborative site for artists, illustrators, and editors to work out the active reception and dissemination of the popular reading of the past. Finally, in the romances of the 1890s, Morris describes a diversity of possible social geographies, ultimately articulating 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 creatively 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 profoundly. She has consistently offered the right advice at the right time, and I have found myself regularly influenced by her as an intellectual and pedagogical 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 portrayal 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. iv 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 University of Toronto library system were well suited to this project; I wish particularly to thank Richard Landon of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for his many suggestions and interesting conversation, and Marie Corey of 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. Leslie 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. The William Morris Society of Canada, especially Richard Bishop, David Latham, and Jean Johnson, welcomed me kindly to Toronto, and supported 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 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............................................................................…..…...........................................41 Chapter Two: “A Union of the Arts”: Material Culture and Medieval Everyday Life in Morris’s Socialist Lectures and Fictions......................................................….............91 Chapter Three: The Mirror of Everyday Life: Representing the Middle Ages at the Kelmscott Press.....................................................................…...................…................131 Chapter Four: Material Culture and the Social Geographies of Morris’s Late Romances.................................................................................................................189 Envoi: The Sundering Flood…………………………………………………………...239 Works Consulted..................................................................................................…......259 Appendix: Selected Individual Books and Manuscripts Associated with Morris’s Collecting and Printing…………………………………………………………………299 vi “Thousands of Small Facts”: Morris and Victorian Historiographies of the Everyday In a letter to Andreas Scheu of September 15, 1883, William Morris recalled the course of his career up to that time, and the seemingly natural progression from being a boy at Marlborough College seeking out “prehistoric monuments” in the countryside in order to eke out the limited 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
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