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The Medievalism of William Morris The Medievalism of William Morris Suzanne 0 ‘Rourke Scanton [William Morris’sJ vision is true because it is poetical, because we are a little happier when we are looking at it, and he knew as Shelley knew. .. the economists should take their measurements not from life as it is, but from the vision of men like that, from the vision of the world made perfect that is buried under all minds.1 From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage.2 In the seventeenth century, the term “Middle Ages” first came into use to describe the roughly one thousand years between the fall of Rome and the end of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century. Almost as soon as they were over, the Middle Ages became a point of comparison with “Modem” times. People have used the Middle Ages to define themselves, to explain who they are and who they are not, to measure how much progress they have made over the past, or how much they have lost in relation to it. The medieval is part of our consciousness and imagination. The modem Western world owes much to the medieval for its cultural and religious traditions, political structures, and intellectual framework.3 Historian Leslie Workman put it simply, “medievalism . [isi the Middle Ages in the contemplation of contemporary society.”4 Some historians contend that it was the romantic artists and writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who first created medievalism. They rehabilitated the Middle Ages by replacing images of barbarism, decline, and backwardness that ‘Peter J. Faulkner, Against the Age: An Introduction to William Morris (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), ix-x, quoting W.B. Yeats on William Morris, “The Happiest of the Poets” (1903) in Essays (London, 1924), 77. 2EJ Hobsbawm, The Age ofRevolution: Europe 1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), 27, quoting Alex de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. J.P. Mayer (1958), 107-108. Veronica Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail: The Questfor the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), ix-xii. “Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin, eds., Medievalisnz in England II (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), 2. 154 Suzanne 0 ‘Rourke Scanlon are associated with those times with images of chivalry, idealism, simple beauty, and appreciation of women. But nineteenth century views of the Middle Ages were mainly based on “ideological projections” because medievalist scholarship was not yet very far advanced.5 In any event, nineteenth century medievalism provided a discourse to compare ideologies and qualities from an imagined past with the Victorian world that privileged rationalism, utilitarianism, centralized government, and industrial capitalism.6 By the turn of the nineteenth century, medievalism pervaded culture in Britain. It was in England that medievalism first developed, and Romanticism originated from it. England had a medieval character even in the seventeenth century. One reason for this is that there had been a great deal of continuity in its major political institutions: common law and Parliament. In England, medievalism had probably always been present as a discourse since the Renaissance, but from the eighteenth century on, it was fashionable and visible there.7 Of the many forms medievalism has taken in modern times, the 19th century English Romantic movement used it as a medium to stir reflection and comparison between contemporary and past. The Romantics looked back on the Middle Ages seeing times of richer values, social harmony, and greater spirituality. William Morris, born in England in 1834, during the later phase of this era, was associated with a branch of the movement in art that used medievalism more deliberately and fluently, and as an idiom of protest.5 William Morris was one of the most influential medievalists of this phase, as creator of paintings, decorative arts and crafts, graphics, jewelry, books, poems, fiction, songs, and as translator, art theorist, and political writer. Morris used medievalism in his art and social activism to express his dissatisfaction with the problems he perceived in Victorian society and his vision for social reform. During the Victorian medieval revival, medievalism could offer solace and escape from the harsh industrial capitalism of nineteenth century England. According to E.P. Thompson, “[tJhe values of industrial capitalism were vicious and beneath contempt, and made a mockery of the past history of mankind.”9 Through medievalism, Morris launched his own “holy crusade against the age,” and made a unique contribution in the arts and politics.’0 Not only was capitalism securely entrenched in Morris’s time, it was venerated by State and Church. As Charles Dickens described it in Hard Times, the Victorian era was an age of “facts and figures,” in which people should “never wonder” or “stoop to the cultivation of sentiments and affections.” Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 28-29 6 John Simons, “Medievalism as Cultural Process in Pre-industrial Popular Literature,” in Medievalis,n in England II, 5-6; Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, 29. Leslie J. Workman, “Medievalism and Romanticism,” Poetica 39/40(1994), 1; Simons, 6. Ortenberg, Holy Grail, 44-45. E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (Pontypool: The Merlin Press, 1955, 1976 Foreword by Peter Linebaugh, 2011), 770. ‘°Thompson, 248. Charles Dickens, Hard TOnes, ed. by Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51. EX POST FACTO The Medievalism of William Morris 155 Medievalism was a form of revolt against the prevailing utilitarianism of Victorian times, that were in Morris’s words, pervaded by “bourgeoisdom and philistinism.” Morris sought to diffuse philistinism with his art: to “inject into the very sources of production pleasurable and creative labour, to recreate conditions of artistic production found in medieval times.”2 The literary and visual artwork that Morris created gave him an outlet for social protest, but it never fully satisfied his desire to create social change. Thus, in his later life, Morris worried that his work was not making enough of an impact. Morris’s artistic vision could not stop the spread of slums or ugly suburban sprawl, and he found it distasteful that his work was in very high demand among so many fashionable and wealthy clients. In his discontent, Morris continued to search for new projects, and he ultimately became involved with England’s incipient socialist movement. He was one of its earliest and original thinkers, writing extensively on the subject in a way that complemented the teachings of Karl 3 Marx. Morris grew up and lived through times of dual revolution in Europe: the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. As the revolutions fanned out from England and France in the form of economic growth and world conquest, European economies grew, but it was Britain especially that enjoyed unparalleled expansion and world domination. According to E.J. Hobsbawm, it was an age when “money not only talked, but governed.”4 During the Industrial Revolution, class consciousness developed among three classes: land owners, bourgeois capitalists, and laborers, and a utilitarian outlook prevailed. In the early years of the nineteenth century, a “pietistic protestantism” grew, one that had no tolerance for anything not comporting with its “rigid, self-righteous, and unintellectual” values.’5 With the growth of factory production, inhospitable manufacturing cities cropped up, characterized by gloomy mills spewing air and water pollution and punctuated with endless rows of small, bleak homes. Socialist movements, including Marxism, developed in the nineteenth century as a reaction to the problems posed by the Industrial Revolution.’6 William Morris’ Early Life and Career Morris grew up in a suburban village near Epping Forest called Walthamstow in a well-to-do family. His childhood was a time steeped in the romanticism of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Morris was raised as a member of an evangelical branch of the English Church, but as he recalled, “never took to” 12 Thompson, 248. ‘‘ “ Thompson, 248-249, 770. E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age ofRevolution: Europe 1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), 3, 28-31; Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12; George lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), xiii. ‘5lbid., 185-188. 16 Ibid., 187-188; George lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), xiii. VOLUME XXII 2013 156 Suzanne 0 ‘Rourke Scanlon this religious practice. From an early age Morris was a voracious reader and had a fascination with medieval and prehistoric sites and “endless stories of knights and chivalry.” Morris’s father died in 1847, and his inheritance made him very wealthy. In 1853, Morris began studies at Oxford and immersed himself in medieval history and the religious poetics of the Oxford Movement. He abandoned the latter when he came into contact with the writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle: Ruskin on art, society, and the idea that art should express the moral being of the artist and Carlyle on medieval utopianism and condemnation of industrial capitalism. Morris was surrounded by romanticism, and it was one of the strongest of his early influences and passions.’7 In 1856, Morris crossed paths with a circle of artists and friends associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, a parallel movement in relation to Romanticism which included Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Bume-Jones. The circle dedicated itself to the “purity of art and religion and ... the service of things of the spirit in a world given over to Mammon.”8 Morris wrote poetry during this time, reflecting these values and his preoccupation with the medieval.
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