“THE BEAUTY OF THE BOUGH-HUNG BANKS”:

WILLIAM MORRIS IN THE THAMES LANDSCAPE

by

Sarah Marie Mead Leonard

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art History

Spring 2020

© 2020 Sarah Marie Mead Leonard All Rights Reserved

“THE BEAUTY OF THE BOUGH-HUNG BANKS”:

WILLIAM MORRIS IN THE THAMES LANDSCAPE

by

Sarah Marie Mead Leonard

Approved: ______Sandy Isenstadt, Ph.D. Chair of the Department of Art History

Approved: ______John Pelesko, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Approved: ______Douglas J. Doren, Ph.D. Interim Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education and Dean of the Graduate College

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Signed: ______Sandy Isenstadt, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Signed: ______Margaret Stetz, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Signed: ______Zara Anishanslin, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Signed: ______Tim Barringer, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation argues that people are shaped by places. It therefore seems right to thank, first and foremost, the places that shaped me: the red dirt of the North Carolina Piedmont and the clear cold streams of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the thousands of other places that have followed.

The process of this dissertation has taken me across continents and oceans. It has shown me the unfailing support of my academic community, friends, and family, and brought new, treasured people and places into my life. I could write another 400 pages of thanks for them and for the opportunities and experiences of this process, but these brief acknowledgements will have to suffice. I am grateful to my dissertation committee, Sandy Isenstadt, Margaret Stetz, Zara Anishanslin, and Tim Barringer. As my advisor, Sandy has provided invaluable support throughout my time at the University of Delaware. This project could never have existed without his encouragement, feedback, and enthusiasm for my interdisciplinary explorations. Margaret deserves mention not only for her ebullient support of my , but also for smiling at an undergraduate Victorianist across a conference dinner table in 2008 and saying “You should consider the University of Delaware for graduate school.” It was good advice. Talking with Zara assured me that my work was coherent and even exciting, and I am so thankful for her thoughtful input and ability to see strengths I did not know I had. Tim has supported this project since long before any words were put to paper, and his interest in my approach to Morris has meant a great deal to me as I worked.

iv The University of Delaware Department of Art History has been my home for the better part of a decade, and I am abundantly thankful to everyone I have worked with there. I was lucky to find a department which is so devoted to nurturing not only our scholarship but also our community. I particularly appreciate the professors who happily welcomed my interdisciplinary angles to their subjects – experiences writing for Professors Domínguez Torres, Nees, and Okoye stand out in my mind. Although I was never able to take any of her courses, Wendy Bellion has also bolstered my scholarship in myriad ways. The Curatorial Track PhD program drew me to Delaware, and the professional and academic support of its advisors has been invaluable as I pursued my career goals. One of the best aspects of my time at UD has been the opportunity for interdisciplinary study and collaboration. I am thankful to the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture for welcoming me with open arms and making me a permanent part of their community. Brock Jobe, Rosemary Krill, Greg Landrey, Emily Guthrie, and many other members of the Winterthur faculty and staff were all important figures in my time at UD. The UD Center for Material Culture Studies, meanwhile, provided me with abundant financial support – more on that later – but also made me part of a community of like-minded graduate students and faculty, headed by Martin Brückner and of course Sandy Isenstadt. I knew I would be happy at the University of Delaware the moment Mark Samuels Lasner put Edward Burne-Jones’s copy of in my hands during my campus visit in 2011. I’ve valued Mark’s support and our conversations over our shared interests ever since. The rest of the UD library staff have also of course been at the heart of my scholarship. I particularly appreciate the work of the

v ILL staff and Susan Davi, and the good cheer of the desk staff every time I arrived with a stack of books for them to process. The art history staff are so important that I find it difficult to articulate. Derek Churchill has always been a patient and endlessly helpful presence. Star Griffin was a cheering and steadying figure in my first years of the program, and Lauri Perkins gets double credit for helping me along my way (and being a friend) at both Winterthur and UD. And Linda Magner: invaluable does not even being to describe it. She’s there for every crisis and every joyous moment. But not only that – I have truly enjoyed getting to know her (and sharing tips!) over the last eight years. The ’s Pre-Raphaelite collection and resources have hugely significant to the growth of my scholarship. I cannot understate how much I valued my time working with the museum’s staff, particularly Margaretta Frederick, whose conversations helped me to formulate this project and whose support has sustained it. I’m also thankful to the other museums where I have had the opportunity to hone my art historical and object-centered skills as an intern, and particularly to Charles Brock and the National Gallery of Art, where I got to spend a summer with the Victorian Thames through Whistler’s Wapping. I have been lucky to have teachers who nurtured my curiosity and ambitions at many junctures in my life, and for that, too, I am grateful. My professors at Wesleyan University deserve my thanks for forming my art historical mind and giving me the skills I needed to carry on in the field. The program in Historic Landscape Studies in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, meanwhile, made much of my ensuing scholarship possible, and for that I must thank Jonathan Finch and Mark

vi Edmonds. The seeds of this dissertation were first planted there, in a seminar paper written for Mark’s course.

The research for this dissertation has been generously supported by a variety of sources both inside and outside the University of Delaware. The Department of Art History’s Mellon Curatorial Track Fellowship allowed me to pursue both curatorial work and research. My first UK research trip was supported by the Department of Art History’s Global Dissertation Development Grant and the Center for Material Culture’s Delaware Public Humanities Institute and Friends of Rockwood Fund Grants. The Huntington Library and Art Collections were particularly generous, funding my research in their collections in San Marino through their Robert R. Wark Fellowship as well as nominating me for their Huntington-New College Exchange Fellowship. That exchange formed part of my second UK research trip, along with the in the United States’s Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship and a Research Support Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. I also completed research at the Yale Center for British Art through their Visiting Scholar Award. Lastly, two generous year-long fellowships allowed me the space and time to write, revise, and complete this project: a Junior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Library and the University of Delaware Department of Art History Sewell C. Biggs Dissertation Writing Fellowship. I am grateful also to the institutions that hosted me throughout these years of work. The curatorial staffs of the , Manor, and the Victoria and Albert Museum Clothworkers' Centre were particularly helpful as I began

vii this project. My two months at the Huntington allowed me to work with many essential and rare materials, particularly the Abbey Dye Book which is so central to this project. In Oxford, I was thrilled to have access to the vast collections of the Bodleian Libraries. In , I particular homes at the National Art Library, the London Metropolitan Archives, and the British Library, as well as making use of the collections of the Tate Library and Art Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of London. The library and staff of the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale library system were welcoming and helpful, and the library of Dumbarton Oaks was essential to completing this project. All of these research trips were characterized by welcoming hosts and new friends. I am particularly thankful to Joel, Sara, and Ada in London and Jessica, Erik, and my fellow guests in Altadena. The security, food service, and facilities and other support staff at every institution where I researched made everything possible, and these few sentences are not enough thanks for all they do every day. The security staff at the Huntington, particularly Marco, made me feel like part of the family. The support staff of New College, Oxford, especially Hassan and his team, kept me well looked-after and helped me feel comfortable in a new place. William Morris might have called the New Buildings of New College “gaunt and ugly,”1 but I was very happy in my rooms there. The community of Dumbarton Oaks nurtured me for a year. The other fellows and staff in the Landscape and Garden Studies program pushed my scholarship to new levels. The library staff was endlessly helpful and also made lovely break room and

1 In a letter to the editor of The Speaker, May 24, 1890.

viii lunch table companions. And again, the support staff made everything possible. Thank you to Hector for keeping us fed, Maria for looking after us in the Fellowship House, the garden staff for making everything so beautiful, and the security staff for welcoming us and putting up with our antics – and Kenyatta, Kemp, and Austin for being our friends. I use the plural ‘us’ here because during my time there, I had my fellow fellows all around me. I won’t name them all, but they know they are loved. It was an intensive year of work, and the community we built together made it wonderful.

I have separated my thanks to my fellow students and academic peers not because they deserve any less appreciation, but because I am lucky to also call many of them my friends. I am so deeply thankful to have been surrounded by generous, kind, incisive, and supportive peers both in the art history department and in the larger UD community. I am thankful to all the students who welcomed me into the department, showed me potential paths to follow, and continue to expand my ways of thinking about our field and our careers, particularly La Tanya Autry, Sarah Beetham, Lisa Berry Drago, Emily Casey, Craig Lee, Isabel Oleas, Tiffany Racco, Ashley Rye- Kopec, Hannah Segrave, and Rachel Zimmerman. She would probably refuse the credit, but my success owes a great deal to Amy Torbert’s unerring and multifarious support across so many years. My cohort – Amy Martin, Vanessa Reubendale, Jeff Richmond-Moll, Elizabeth Simmons, Spencer Wigmore, and Karli Wurzelbacher – were great people to travel alongside through this experience. The cohorts below me, too, have been wonderful: Alba Campo Rosillo, Anne Cross, Caitlin Hutchinson,

ix Margarita Karasoulas, Galina Olmsted, Emily Shartrand, Victoria Sunnergren, and many others. I’m thankful for the friendships of Dorothy Fisher and Rachael Vause, and for Kiersten Mounce Thamm and our design history working group of two. The Winterthur classes of 2013, 2014, and 2015 welcomed me into their world and have remained my friends. Students in the History and English departments, too, have been my peers and friends. I’m particularly thankful to my Victorianists-in-arms Petra Clark and Samantha Nystrom. Jim and Pauline Eversmann have been friends to many Winterthur and UD graduate students over the years. I was lucky to find myself their neighbor, and our weekly trips to the farm stand and bakery, along with many wonderful dinners, sustained me through many years of scholarship. And through them, I got to know Nalleli Guillen, who is, simply put, one of my most valued friends. Beyond UD, I have a large community of fellow scholars whose support and friendship mean a great deal to me. Victorianist circles have proved to be exceptionally welcoming and supportive, and I have more friends in that world than I can practically list here, but I’ll mention Shannon Draucker, Jo Briggs, Anna Wager, and Annemarie Pearson. The friends made during my travels, especially Kim Walker, Felix Flicker, and the Huntington junior scholar circle, were wonderful benefits of my peripatetic lifestyle. Social media has strengthened my connections to scholars I already knew, even as we spread out across the world, and brought many new ones into my life. Someone is always there to cheer you on, give advice, or ask a question that leads both of you down interesting new paths of research, and I truly appreciate my community there. Melissa Gustin deserves special mention for growing from an Instagram friend, to a Victorianist friend, to one of my closest friends.

x A myriad of other friends also deserve my endless thanks for their support and love. Max Matthews. Chad Hooper. Kaleigh Fleming. Poppy Starkie. Cara Attwood. Allie Alvis. Mattie Horine. Nick Jones. Alison and Branwen Spyker. Nell de Jaeger. And on, and on, and on. If anyone in the last eight years said something nice to me, or made me laugh, or sent me a picture of a weird bird, I’m thankful to them. Sharing an apartment with another art historian over the last year was the best idea ever because that art historian was Danielle Abdon. And with her in mind I will also thank the cats of my dissertation: Lucy, Nate, and Vespa.

As everything above has surely made clear, I have been lucky in my academic life and in my friendships – but nowhere have I been luckier than in my family. Their influence and support are everywhere in this project and in my life, and I am aware of the privilege I have in growing up the way I did, and in sharing my interests and love of learning with so many people around me. At risk of being too effusive, I will make a list. My grandparents, Doreen, Marshall, Catherine, and Charles, who set us all on our paths. My aunts and uncles and cousins; the family members who have come to me by marriage; the extended family even beyond them; the friends who are also members of our families; all surround me with love. My stepbrothers Emmett and Austin and their partners Mel and Liz, who I’m lucky to have as friends. My sister Iris, who’s forging her own path now – I’m so excited to see where it leads. And most of all my parents: Maggie, Michael, Alan, Patrick, and Michelle. My family has always encouraged my curiosity and passion. This dissertation is the result, and it is dedicated to them.

xi TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... xvi ABSTRACT ...... xxiv

Chapter

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Terminology ...... 7

Landscape ...... 8 Nature and Natural ...... 9 Ecosystem, Ecology, and Environment ...... 11

The Thames: Form and Culture ...... 12 Historiography and Methodology ...... 17 Dissertation Structure ...... 25

2 GRUBBINESS, LOW SPIRITS AND BOUNDLESS RICHES: LONDON .. 29

The Lea and Walthamstow ...... 31 Morris in London ...... 51 “Sordidness, Filth, and Squalor”: London in Morris’s Writings ...... 66

News from Nowhere ...... 69

London and Morris’s Art ...... 73

3 A HEAVEN ON EARTH: KELMSCOTT ...... 77

Morris at Kelmscott ...... 79 Kelmscott: The Landscape and the House ...... 85 The Thames and Kelmscott ...... 93 Value in the Landscape ...... 97 The Literary Role of Kelmscott ...... 103 The Other Victorian Kelmscott ...... 111

4 UNMISTAKABLE SUGGESTIONS OF GARDENS AND FIELDS: THE PATTERNS ...... 119

xii Morris and Pattern-Designing ...... 120 The Patterns of the 1880s ...... 122 The Tributary Patterns ...... 124 “The Outward Face of the Earth”: Some Hints on Pattern-Designing ...... 127 Morris’s and the Landscape ...... 130 Legacies of Land Management ...... 136 Landscape Form and the Patterns ...... 139 Personal Geography: Morris and the Tributaries ...... 147

The : Evenlode and Windrush ...... 148 Oxford: Rose and the Cherwell ...... 154 The Southern Chalk Streams: Kennet, Lodden, and Wey ...... 157 : Cray and Medway ...... 163 London: Wandle and Lea ...... 166

Patterns in the Interior: Landscapes of Use ...... 168 Conclusion ...... 177

5 OUR HELPFUL STREAM: MERTON AND THE WANDLE ...... 179

The Site and Sources ...... 182

Sources: Site Descriptions and Oral Histories ...... 185 Sources: Factory Records and the Dye Book ...... 187 Secondary Sources ...... 190

Merton and the Wandle ...... 191 Industry and on the Wandle ...... 193 Morris at Merton ...... 200 “The inward amenity of the place”: The Aestheticized Factory ...... 203 The Merton Abbey Works ...... 207 Printing at Merton ...... 211 The Dyeing and Printing Process ...... 216 Water in the Dye Process ...... 220 Water Systems at the Merton Abbey Works ...... 227 Morris and the Contemporary Wandle ...... 233

Extraction: The London & South Western Water Company ...... 234 River Health and Pollution ...... 239

Contributing Factors: Urbanization ...... 240 Contributing Factors: Industrialization ...... 242

Pollution and the Merton Abbey Works ...... 244

xiii 6 CONCLUSION ...... 255

FIGURES ...... 262 REFERENCES ...... 335

Online resources ...... 335 Manuscript and Archival Sources ...... 336 Primary Sources ...... 336 Secondary Sources ...... 338

Appendix

A LIST ...... 348 B NOTES ON THE DIFFICULTIES OF MORRIS & CO. DOCUMENTATION AND ATTRIBUTION ...... 350

Dating ...... 351 Samples and Colorways ...... 353 Attribution ...... 357

C THE DYE PROCESS ...... 369

Terms ...... 370 Process ...... 372

Preparation ...... 372 Coloring ...... 374

Colorways ...... 375

Finishing ...... 376

Colors ...... 377

Black ...... 377 Blue ...... 378 Brown ...... 383 Buff ...... 384 Green ...... 385 Orange ...... 386 Purple ...... 386 Red ...... 387 Yellow ...... 389

xiv Weld ...... 391 “” (Quercitron) ...... 392

xv LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Map of the Thames system, showing tributaries, major Morris sites, and London administrative boundaries c. 1881...... 262

Figure 2 William Morris, Evenlode, 1883. Indigo discharge and block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 21 x 9 in (53.5 x 22.5 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London [Hereafter V&A], CIRC.93-1933...... 263

Figure 3 William Morris, Windrush, 1883. Indigo discharge and block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 20.5 x 17.5 in (52 x 44.5 cm). V&A, T.617-1919...... 264

Figure 4 William Morris, Kennet, 1883. Indigo discharge and block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 27.5 x 8.75 in (70 x 22 cm). V&A, T.604-1919...... 265

Figure 5 William Morris, Wey, c. 1883. Indigo discharge and block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 9 x 12 in (23.5 x 30.5 cm). V&A, T.49-1912...... 266

Figure 6 William Morris, Lodden, 1884. Indigo discharge and block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 24 x 17.5 in (61 x 44.5 cm). V&A, T.39-1919...... 267

Figure 7 William Morris, Wandle, 1884. Indigo discharge and block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 38.75 x 17.5 in (98.5 x 44.5 cm). V&A, T.45-1912...... 268

Figure 8 William Morris, Cray, 1884. Block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 36.25 x 17.75 in (92 x 45 cm). V&A, T.34- 1919...... 269

Figure 9 William Morris, Lea, 1885. Indigo discharge on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 16 x 9.5 in (40.5 x 24 cm). V&A, T.610-1919...... 270

xvi Figure 10 William Morris, Medway, 1885. Indigo discharge and block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 18.25 x 12 in (46.5 x 30.5 cm). V&A, T.600-1919...... 271

Figure 11 “Washing printed chintz in the river.” Linda Parry, William Morris Textiles, 60...... 272

Figure 12 Gallery design at the Museum of London uses the Thames’s outline to evoke the city as a whole. (Photos author’s own, May 22, 2018.) ...... 272

Figure 13 Map showing Morris sites and tributaries within modern London area. 1880 London municipal boundary overlain in grey...... 273

Figure 14 Detail of 1863 (OS) showing Walthamstow...... 274

Figure 15 The Lea today: Looking south on the near Walthamstow, with Victorian railroad bridge, wetlands natural area, and modern recreational trail. (Photo author’s own, August 31, 2016). 275

Figure 16 The Lea today: looking north on the Lee navigation near Walthamstow, with narrow boats (small canal houseboats) and bicyclist. (Photo author’s own, August 31, 2016)...... 276

Figure 17 After William James Smith. Walthamstow Ferry Fishery, 1928. Published by Pittman, London. British Museum, 1927,1126.1.26.9 ..... 277

Figure 18 Josiah Henshall, after Charles Marshall. Tottenham Mills, Middlesex, 1839. Published by Simpkin & Marshall, London. British Museum, 1927,1126.1.26.11...... 277

Figure 19 Detail of 1862 OS Map showing , with Red House marked...... 278

Figure 20 James McNeill Whistler, , 1859. Etching. The Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, F1888.33...... 278

Figure 21 The Thames Embankment under construction in , 1865. View looking west towards Somerset House. The Illustrated London News, February 6, 1865...... 279

Figure 22 (center, square façade with five windows) as seen from the south bank of the Thames. (Photo author’s own, September 3, 2016.) ...... 280

xvii Figure 23 Kelmscott House and front garden and wall as seen from Upper Mall. (Photo author’s own, September 3, 2016.) ...... 281

Figure 24 Detail of 1865 OS Map, showing the Thames area of , with Kelmscott House marked...... 282

Figure 25 Detail of 1895 OS Map, with Kelmscott House marked. Malthouses and wharf are visible along The Creek at center, and lead mill near the Thames at right...... 283

Figure 26 Pre-Raphaelite paintings of modern London and the Thames. , Found, 1859, unfinished. Oil on canvas. Delaware Art Museum, 1935-27. , on the Night of the Marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, 1863. Oil on canvas. , WA1894.4...... 284

Figure 27 James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea, 1871. Oil paint on . Tate, London, T01571...... 285

Figure 28 Gustave Doré, Asleep Under the Stars, 1872. From William Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, London: A Pilgrimage. British Library, London, Wf1/1856...... 286

Figure 29 Claude Monet, The Houses of Parliament, Sunset, 1903. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1963.10.48...... 286

Figure 30 James Tissot, Waiting for the Ferry at the Falcon Tavern, c.1874. Oil on canvas. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, 1963.41...... 287

Figure 31 Kelmscott today, marked with arrow. Google Earth, June 2009...... 288

Figure 32 Detail of 1876 OS Map showing Kelmscott Manor and surroundings. 289

Figure 33 Aerial view of Kelmscott looking southwest, c. 2017. Society of Antiquaries of London...... 290

Figure 34 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, , 1871. Oil on canvas. Delaware Art Museum, 1935-26...... 291

Figure 35 The riverbanks around Kelmscott, looking south. (Photo author’s own, September 11, 2016.) ...... 292

xviii Figure 36 Charles March Gere, frontispiece, News from Nowhere Kelmscott Press Edition, 1893. Image via the William Morris Archive, http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/news.html...... 293

Figure 37 View from attic window in northeast wing of Kelmscott Manor, showing view of river, indicated by line between two fields beyond the trees. (Photo author’s own, June 2, 2018 – apologies for the reflection.) ...... 294

Figure 38 Frederick H. Evans, Kelmscott Manor: From the Thames, 1896. Platinum print. Getty Museum, Los Angeles. View looking northwest towards the manor. Bridge shows where the backwater enters the Thames...... 295

Figure 39 Frederick H. Evans, Kelmscott. The Thames Near the Manor, 1896. Lantern slide. Getty Museum, Los Angeles...... 295

Figure 40 , , 1851-52. Oil on canvas. Tate, London, N01506...... 296

Figure 41 , The Hayfield, 1855-56. Oil on panel. Tate, London, T01920...... 296

Figure 42 Detail of 1876 OS map showing Buscot factory premises...... 297

Figure 43 Photograph purportedly showing Buscot sugar beet distillery, c. 1870- 79. https://buscot-park.com/history/an-industrialised-agricultural- estate-in- ...... 297

Figure 44 Marie Spartali Stillman, Kelmscott Manor: From the Field, not dated. Watercolor and gouache on panel. Delaware Art Museum, 2013-27. .. 298

Figure 45 Edmund Hort New, view of Kelmscott Manor. Illustration for J.W.Mackail, The Life of William Morris (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles...... 299

Figure 46 Chart showing Morris’s design production by year...... 300

Figure 47 William Morris, Trellis 1862; Daisy, 1864; (or Pomegranate), c. 1866. (distemper color block printed on paper). Printed Jeffrey & Co. V&A E.3703-1927, E.3718-1927, E.3712-1927...... 300

Figure 48 Floral , France, c. 1850-1860. Block print on paper. V&A, E.771-1955...... 301

xix Figure 49 Owen Jones, wallpaper, c. 1852-1874. Block print on paper. V&A, 8343:65...... 301

Figure 50 Eyebright plant, Wikimedia Commons, user Tigerente. William Morris, Eyebright, 1883. Indigo discharge and block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 5.25 x 3.5 in (13.5 x 9 cm).V&A, T.46-1919...... 302

Figure 51 William Morris, Rose, 1883. Indigo discharge and block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey. Repeat: 20 x 17 in (50.5 x 43.5 cm). V&A, T.53-1912...... 303

Figure 52 Hedgerow at Kelmscott with roses in bloom – early in season. (Photo author’s own, June 2, 2018.) ...... 304

Figure 53 Willows near Kelmscott (first row) and on Kelmscott property (second row). (Photo author’s own, September 11, 2016.) ...... 305

Figure 54 William Morris, Willow Bough, 1887. Wallpaper (distemper color block printed on paper). V&A, E.557-1919...... 306

Figure 55 Water forget-me-not. https://www.first-nature.com/flowers/myosotis- scorpioides.php ...... 307

Figure 56 Marsh marigold. https://shop.sussexconservation.org/products/calthra- palustris-marsh-marigold ...... 307

Figure 57 Corncockle. https://wildflowerfinder.org.uk/Flowers/C/Corncockle/Corncockle.ht m William Morris, Corncockle, 1883. Block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 22.25 x 9 in (56.5 x 23 cm). V&A CIRC.87-1953...... 308

Figure 58 Snakeshead fritillary. Michael Apel, Wikimedia Commons...... 309

Figure 59 William Morris, Fritillary, 1885. Wallpaper (distemper color block printed on paper). Printed Jeffrey & Co. V&A CIRC.283-1959.Detail of William Morris, Lodden, 1884 (fig. 6) showing fritillary motif...... 309

Figure 60 Newly lain hedgerow, midland bullock type. National Hedgelaying Society, https://www.hedgelaying.org.uk/pg/info/styles.aspx...... 310

xx Figure 61 Mature hedgerow at Driffield, , with may blossom (hawthorn). Brian Robert Marshall, Geograph, https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1885415. Driffield is about 11 miles (17.5 km) west of Kelmscott in the ...... 310

Figure 62 William Morris, Strawberry Thief, 1883. Indigo discharge and block print on cotton. Printed Merton Abbey Works. Repeat: 41 x 35.75 in (104 x 91 cm). V&A, T.11-1919 ...... 311

Figure 63 Comparison of meanders in Kennet, 1883 (fig. 4) and Thames at Kelmscott (fig. 31, rotated – west/upstream at top of image)...... 312

Figure 64 Water-crowfoot in the Kennet. Robert Harvey, Natural World Photography. https://www.naturalworldphotography.net/photo_15888301.html ...... 312

Figure 65 Water, willow, and riverside plants near Kelmscott. (Photo author’s own, September 11, 2016)...... 313

Figure 66 Map of Kelmscott area and Cotswold tributaries. Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty shown in green...... 314

Figure 67 The Windrush at Minster Lovell. (Photo author’s own, September 12, 2016.) ...... 315

Figure 68 Detail of 1885 OS Map showing Kennet and grounds of Marlborough College...... 316

Figure 69 The dining room, 7 Hammersmith Terrace, London (former home of Emery Walker). Photo c. 2017, Emery Walker’s House, https://www.emerywalker.org.uk/dining-room...... 317

Figure 70 The antiquities and drawing rooms, 1 Holland Park (home of the Ionides family). Photograph c. 1898, from an album by Bedford Lemere & Co. V&A, E.1-1995. Reproduced in Charles Harvey, and Jon Press, “The Ionides Family and 1 Holland Park.” The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 – the Present, no. 18 (1994): 2–14. . 318

Figure 71 Green Room, Kelmscott Manor, with faded original Kennet hangings. (Photo author’s own, September 13, 2016.) ...... 319

Figure 72 “View of the Morris Works at Merton Abbey.” Photograph printed in Morris & Co. Printed Linens and Cottons catalogue, c. 1900. The Huntington Library, NK8843.M6 1900z...... 320

xxi Figure 73 Detail of c. 1870 OS map, with approximate boundaries of the Merton Abbey Works property outlined...... 321

Figure 74 The Merton Abbey Works site and surroundings today. Google Earth, May 2018...... 321

Figure 75 The Wandle today. Looking west along Merton High Street from the point where the river passes under the road. The shopping center is behind the trees to the left...... 322

Figure 76 The Wandle today. Looking northeast across the river, south of the shopping center near the Merantun Way bridge...... 323

Figure 77 Merton Abbey Dye Book page, Wandle. The Huntington, museum collection. (Photo author’s own.) ...... 324

Figure 78 Edmund Hort New, illustrations of the Merton Abbey Works for J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907...... 325

Figure 79 Lexden Lewis Pocock, The Pond at William Morris’s Works at Merton, c. 1880s. Watercolor. V&A, P.34-1924...... 326

Figure 80 Detail of 1894 OS map showing Merton Abbey Works premises and surroundings...... 327

Figure 81 Detail of 1895 OS map showing details of Merton Abbey Works premises...... 328

Figure 82 The first printed patterns produced at the Merton Abbey Works...... 329

Figure 83 William Morris, Honeysuckle, 1876. Block printed on cotton. Printed: Wardle, Leek. Repeat: 30 x 36 in (76 x 91.5 cm). V&A, CIRC.196.1934...... 329

Figure 84 Merton Abbey Dye Book, red versions of Rose and Thistle, Bird and Anemone, and Brother Rabbit. The Huntington, museum collection. (Photo author’s own.) ...... 330

Figure 85 “The Indigo Vats.” Photograph printed in Morris & Co. Printed Linens and Cottons catalogue, c. 1900. The Huntington Library, NK8843.M6 1900z...... 331

xxii Figure 86 “Chintz Printing by Hand at the Morris Works, Merton Abbey.” Photograph printed in Morris & Co. Printed Linens and Cottons catalogue, c. 1900. The Huntington Library, NK8843.M6 1900z...... 332

Figure 87 William Morris, Wandle, 1884. This example was indigo discharged but never had its other dyes applied. V&A CIRC.427-1953...... 333

Figure 88 J.H. Dearle, Cherwell, 1887. Printed velvet. Printed Merton Abbey Works. V&A, T.62-1946...... 334

Figure 89 J.H. Dearle, Double Bough, 1890. Wallpaper (distemper color block printed on paper.) Printed Jeffrey & Co. V&A, E.683-1915...... 334

xxiii ABSTRACT

This dissertation reexamines the work of the Victorian polymath William Morris (1834-1896) through his relationship with the landscape of the . Morris passed his whole life within the Thames’s system of streams and gentle valleys, and the river flows through his intertwined roles of designer, author, political thinker, and factory owner. Employing strategies of historic landscape studies, material culture studies, and ecocriticism, this project uncovers the centrality of the Thames in Morris’s life and works and thereby reveals new information about his inspiration and impact. Morris was a Londonder, but he eschewed the Victorian metropolis’s modern landscape of change and pollution, focusing instead on a pastoral vision grounded in the rural landscapes of the Thames and its tributaries. This pastoral manifested across his writing – from poetry and romantic fantasies to speeches on aesthetics and politics – but, this project argues, it can also be clearly seen in his designs, particularly the printed repeating patterns of textiles and wallpapers for which he is so well known today. The close connection between Morris’s most beloved countryside landscape, Kelmscott, and his patterns shows how the ecosystems and traditional agriculture of the Thames valley manifested in his visual style. Meanwhile, an inspection of the production history of those patterns – and especially the nine printed textiles which Morris named after tributaries of the Thames – uncovers the material inseparability of Morris’s works and his native river system. While the visual content of the patterns calls upon the rural landscape Morris idealized, their production demanded extensive engagement with the Wandle, the Thames tributary which ran

xxiv through the middle of the Morris & Co. factory premises. The river’s water was used in every step of the textiles’ production process, and the associated waste products would have entered the stream. Thus, Morris’s relationship with the Thames and its tributaries reveals how he drew inspiration from the rural landscapes of the river and rejected London and modern systems of industry and pollution – but it also uncovers his inextricable place within those same systems.

xxv Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

In August 1880, the designer and poet William Morris, his family, and several of their friends set off on an expedition up the River Thames.2 In the course of a week, the voyagers travelled from the Morrises’ home on the river embankment in west London to Kelmscott Manor, the family’s country retreat in the far western corner of , a journey of just over 130 miles (212 km) (fig. 1). During the trip, which is recorded in letters and an amusing co-written travel narrative, the group ate, drank, and made abundant and apparently painful puns. They also observed the riversides as they left London for the countryside. There were many fine things to see – “beautiful big willows,” “pleasant banks,” scenery “full of character,” and riverside meadows where the travelers could watch haymaking while they ate their lunch – but the narrative also contains criticism of ugly towns and the stink of sewers.3 It was a pleasant journey overall, with an equally pleasant goal at its end: at the end of the trip,

2 The other travelers were Morris’s wife Jane, his daughters Jenny and May, their friends William De Morgan (the well-known potter), Cormell Price, Richard Cecil Grosvenor, Elizabeth Macleod, and a housemaid named only as Eliza. A second expedition was undertaken in August of 1881 with a slightly different group: the Morrises, Macleod, De Morgan and his sister Mary, Charles Faulkner, and Lisa Stillman.

3 British Library, Add MS 45407 A.

1 Morris wrote, “Presently the ancient house had me in its arms again: J. had lighted up all brilliantly, and sweet it looked you may be sure.”4 The accounts of this aquatic holiday are a window into a pleasant summer’s sojourn, but they also lay out a series of literal and metaphorical landmarks in William Morris’s lifelong relationship with the River Thames. There are the homes, Kelmscott Manor and its London namesake, Kelmscott House; the amusement of river recreation; the love for the beauty of the riparian countryside, and particularly in the willow tree and the hay meadow, in apparently timeless plants and agricultural practices.5 But there is also a despair in the pressures of the mid-Victorian world, in the unstoppable expansions of cities and towns and the effluent of their sewers, and most of all, perhaps, in the looming specter of the vast metropolis the travelers happily left behind. All of these themes recur throughout Morris’s life, intermingling in his poetry and prose, his art criticism and political polemics, and his designs. The Thames and its tributaries ran through Morris’s life from beginning to end. He was born in the valley of a Thames tributary, the Lea, and died in a room overlooking the London Thames’s broad tidal waters, and he passed his whole life within the Thames basin’s network of streams and gentle valleys. From a young age, he showed interest and pleasure in river landscapes. The Thames and its tributaries

4 ‘J.’ was William’s wife Jane, who had left the group early to travel ahead to the ‘ancient house,’ Kelmscott Manor. William Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, August 19, 1880. Norman Kelvin, ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris: Volume I, 1848-1880 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 583. [All volumes hereafter Collected Letters.]

5 In the interest of clarity and ease of reading, I have not included the scientific names of plants in the main text of this project. This information, where available, is provided in Appendix A.

2 were sites of everyday life and of recreation, as well as abundant inspiration.6 But in adulthood, the river’s pleasures proved inextricable from Morris’s ire over the ills of his modern world. Throughout his works, the Thames and its surroundings function as a pastoral ideal, a perfect rural world standing as a bastion against the evils of urbanization, industrialization, and capitalism. Like the sewer smells on the 1880 expedition, however, the modern would could never be entirely escaped or denied. A close study of Morris’s relationship with the rural spaces of the Thames and its tributaries reveals how he valorized and drew inspiration from them, but it also uncovers his place within Victorian systems of resource exploitation and environmental degradation. As the following chapters will show, Morris engaged with the Thames, its tributaries, and their surroundings across media and throughout his life. This dissertation considers the full scope of that relationship, with particular attention paid to Morris’s repeating-pattern printed textiles and to his life and work in the 1880s.7 I argue that Morris’s patterns, and especially his printed textiles, have particularly

6 In the early 1910s, , William’s daughter, reflected that her “family had always been ‘wet bobs,’ nearly as much at home on water as on dry land.” May Morris, “Introduction,” in William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, Volume XIII: The Odyssey of Homer Done into English Verse, May Morris, ed., (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), xxxiv. [All volumes hereafter Collected Works.] As well as the long expeditions up the Thames there were many short excursions, and innumerable mornings and afternoons spent rowing, fishing, or walking along the river’s banks.

7 Throughout this project I will use the term ‘repeating-pattern printed materials’ to distinguish Morris’s printed textiles and wallpapers, which share many design traits, from other types of non-printed patterned goods such as woven textiles, carpets, and . For Morris, the production process and materials of those latter goods demanded different approaches to design and manufacturing, and they are thus visually and materially separate sub-categories in his work.

3 strong visual and physical relationships with the landscape of the Thames – relationships that his other works, while still influenced by the Thames and its surroundings, do not share. This interrelation of pattern and landscape was particularly complex in the 1880s, a decade in which Morris’s life and work changed in significant ways.8 The Morris family had settled into both of their homes by the late 1870s, and for Morris the 1880s were a period of transit between three river sites: Kelmscott Manor, Kelmscott House, and his design firm’s factory at Merton, which opened in 1881.9 Morris became an active Socialist in 1883, and he wrote extensively about his interlinked political-aesthetic views on art, society, and landscape throughout the period, culminating in his 1890 Socialist utopian fantasy News from Nowhere, with its extended reflections upon the state of the Thames. The opening of the Merton Abbey Works, meanwhile, allowed Morris to pursue new designs and produce new types of printed fabrics. These works included a group of printed textiles which were named for tributaries of the Thames: Evenlode, Windrush, Kennet, Wey (1883), Lodden, Wandle, Cray (1884), Lea, and Medway (1885) (figs. 2-10). As I will show, these fabrics were connected to the Thames system in more than just name: their visual content evokes the ecology and landscape forms of the rural river and its tributaries, and their production demanded extensive engagement with the water of the Wandle, the Thames tributary which ran through the middle of the factory complex.

8 The division of biography or creative output by decade is often fairly arbitrary, but in the case of Morris’s life and this study, the events in question line up nicely.

9 Morris’s design firm began as Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co. in 1861 and was reorganized and renamed as Morris & Co. in 1875. It was frequently referred to as “the Firm,” a moniker I will also use in this project.

4 My approach to Morris and his Thames landscape reveals new aspects of his life and works, and particularly of his designs. While Morris’s works are so numerous and their media so diverse that it is difficult to form a synthetic view of his output, a close study of the tributary patterns and other Thamesian works draws out several interrelated themes. This perspective highlights Morris’s pastoralist insistence upon the primacy of the traditional English countryside as a site of meaning and inspiration. It also presents an opportunity to consider the opposing force of Morris’s pastoral, London, a constant but easily overlooked presence in his life. By centering Morris’s designs within the contexts of landscape history and ecology, this project investigates the depth and complexity of the inspiration Morris drew from his most beloved sites, the valleys of the Upper Thames and its chalk stream tributaries. Lastly, a new and detailed material history of Morris’s printed textiles uncovers the centrality of river water to his work and reveals his inextricable connection to Victorian systems of extraction, pollution, and environmental harm. As well as uncovering new information about Morris’s works and surroundings, this landscape- and material-centered approach brings attention to previously neglected contradictions in Morris’s life and legacy. It is not controversial to state that Morris is an inherently contradictory figure: much has been made in particular about the paradox of his outspoken Socialism and his business success as well as, relatedly, his art-for-all philosophy and the expense of his products. Although these conflicts are important aspects of Morris’s life and work, they are not new ground. New interdisciplinary and thematic study can, however, reveal further complications with far-reaching historic and modern consequences.

5 This project focuses on two such complications. One, the essential paradox of Morris’s pastoralism, threads itself through all of his riverside landscapes. Morris idealized traditional English rural spaces and drew upon specific sites for inspiration, but those sites were not simple countryside idylls. Even Morris’s interactions with the sites he loved were mediated by modern technology, because those sites were only accessible to him as a result of the rapid expansion of the British rail network from mid-century onward. Additionally, all of Morris’s landscapes showed the influence of industry and capitalist enterprise – influences which Morris steadfastly ignored in his writing and art, and which have been largely absent from related scholarship. With apologies to Ruskin, I will show how Morris went into nature rejecting some things, selecting some things, and scorning others. By reading the Morris’s landscapes as they were, rather than as Morris wanted them to be, the ideological work of Morris’s Thames valley pastoralism becomes visible. The second contradiction I explore in this project is centered on the Merton Abbey Works. There, Morris’s designs were turned into printed fabrics using a complex dyeing process which demanded a great deal from the . In his art criticism and political works, Morris spoke out against the environmental effects of Victorian Britain’s highly industrialized economy.10 But at Merton Abbey, his

10 So much so, in fact, that he is seen by some as a spiritual forebearer of British environmentalism. See for example Florence S. Boos, “An Aesthetic Ecocommunist: Morris the Red and Morris the Green,” in William Morris: Centenary Essays (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 21–46.; David Faldet, “The River at the Heart of Morris’s Ecological Thought.” In Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 73–84; Patrick O’Sullivan, “‘Morris the Red, Morris the Green’ – A Partial Review,” The Journal of William Morris Studies 19, no. 3 (Winter 2011), 22–38; and depictions of Morris in the popular press such as Andrea Watson, “The First Eco-Warrior of Design,” BBC Culture: Designed,

6 political-aesthetic viewpoints were undermined by the consequences of the production of his goods – including Wandle, 1883 (fig. 7) and the other textiles named for Thames tributaries. The dyes used to create these fabrics were derived from plant materials – what are often called “natural dyes,” as opposed to synthetic dyes.11 However, these materials were not harmless just because they were derived from plants rather than invented in a nineteenth-century scientific lab. As my research shows, the dye-mixing and textile printing processes at the Works required abundant supplies of potentially harmful acids and bases, as well as toxic materials such as bichrome (potassium bichromate), which was essential to Morris’s signature indigo discharge dye technique. I argue that while some of these materials would have been spent as part of the chemical processes of dyeing, large amounts would have entered the river though washing and waste disposal processes, contributing to the accumulation of pollutants in the Wandle, the Thames, and eventually the oceans. Morris does not seem to have been aware of these potential consequences of his patterns, but, I argue, they must nevertheless be acknowledged as part of the material and environmental legacy of his work.

Terminology This dissertation makes use of several terms with complex or contested meanings. One of these, landscape, is the term at the heart of the project. The others are interrelated terms: nature and natural, and ecosystem, ecology, and environment.

September 9, 2019. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190909-the-first-eco-warrior- of-design.

11 The first true synthetic dye, mauveine, was discovered in 1856 and its brilliant purple quickly became very popular. Many other synthetic dyes followed.

7 These three groups of concepts are of course interwoven, but they are not interchangeable, and their distinctions and limitations are important to acknowledge.

Landscape Landscape is a concept with multiple meanings both within and outside the academy. To historians of art and literature, it evokes a genre of painting or a particular type of scenery viewed by a spectator from a distance, or else designed spaces executed with particular aesthetic aims. To geographers and environmental scientists, on the other hand, it is a discrete and scientific portioning of the earth’s surface, which then can be examined empirically – i.e. a particular social or ecological landscape.12 In this study I use landscape in its geographical sense, defining the Thames river system and the physical surroundings of Morris sites as my spaces of inquiry. In so doing, however, I also engage with geographical and art historical theories which situate landscape as a subject generated by human perceptions of and interactions with land and environment. Denis Cosgrove defined landscape as “a way of seeing” – in other words, a conceptual framework through which humans view and interpret the space around them.13 W.J.T. Mitchell, meanwhile, argued for landscape “as a verb… a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.”14 In these theoretical approaches, landscape is not a raw, empirical material, but an effect of cultural concepts and human perceptions of a space. This constructed, conceptual

12 Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 9.

13 ibid., 1.

14 W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1.

8 quality of landscape can be seen very clearly in the case of the Thames, a physical geographic feature which is intimately tied to cultural conceptions of place, history, and nationhood. Although landscape is often associated with the rural and natural worlds, I will use the term more broadly to also encompass urban and industrial spaces. This is a standard practice in the field of landscape studies, especially in recent years.15 The lack of distinction reflects the fact that these built environments are not truly discrete from the worlds around them. Rural and urban spaces interact constantly, cities and factories have their own ecosystems and environmental impacts, and topography and culture shape and are shaped by cities and industry just as in the countryside.

Nature and Natural More than thirty years ago, Raymond Williams declared that nature is “perhaps the most complex word in the language,”16 and the term has only gained more definitions and weighted cultural implications since then. Given that complexity and the term’s cultural specificity, it bears stating how I will and will not be employing it in this project. In the culture of the United States of America, the concept of nature has long been associated with concepts of the wilderness, of plant and animal life and outdoor

15 See, for example, the Urban Landscape Studies initiative at Dumbarton , which seeks to “foster an understanding of cities as landscape systems.” Dumbarton Oaks, “Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies,” 2019. https://www.doaks.org/ research/mellon-initiatives/mellon-initiative-in-urban-landscape-studies.

16 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised and expanded ed. (London: Fontana Press, 1983), 219.

9 space untouched by humanity. This concept its itself false and grounded in settler colonialism as well as a general misapprehension of how “untouched” anything can be in the modern period which some scholars term the Anthropocene.17 However, in British contexts the implications of the term are subtly different. There are few, if any, places in the islands of Great Britain and Ireland which could have been considered “wild” at any point in the last several millennia. British outdoor space has been relatively densely populated and heavily managed since prehistory, and the marks of those populations can still be read in the countryside, from large monuments to details like the lines of field boundaries or the names of rivers.18 British nature exists within what is generally understood to be a historic and human landscape. When I use the term nature in this project, this is the particular nature to which I am referring. Natural, meanwhile, is a construct which relies upon a false human/non-human ecological distinction, but I will use it occasionally in this project to distinguish between cultivated plants and domesticated animals and their less closely managed counterparts. I also occasionally use the term “natural world” to distinguish plants,

17 The Anthropocene is a concept, grounded in study of geologic timescales, which says that we are now living in an age in which the environmental and particularly climate impacts of humankind are felt across environments and visible even at the vast scale of geological stratification. The term became popular in the ecocritical humanities and has now spread to a limited extent into popular parlance.

18 For example, of Morris’s tributaries, all but Evenlode and Wandle have names identified as “Celtic” or “Pre-English.” Evenlode and Wandle’s names are both early medieval. A.D. Mills, A Dictionary of British Place-Names (Oxford: , 2011). For more on the deep history of British land and the practice of landscape reading, see Peter J. Howard, An Introduction to Landscape (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011) and other works in historic landscape studies, particularly the foundational text W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955).

10 animals, and non-human landscape forms from the human built environment. I avoid usages of the term which are tied up in concepts of environmental virtue, for example , instead choosing to use more descriptive terms such as plant-based or non-synthetic.

Ecosystem, Ecology, and Environment Throughout this project I discuss landscapes using terms borrowed from fields such as biology, botany, and environmental studies. I employ ecosystem to describe the interrelated biological systems of a landscape: its plants, animals, and environmental factors. Ecology, meanwhile, describes the overarching relationships of those systems, which can be disrupted by outside factors. I use environmental primarily to discuss the effects of human impact on ecosystems, i.e. environmental change or environmental degradation. I use these terms to describe landscapes and their systems rather than Victorian scientific or cultural concepts. However, they are not entirely anachronistic in a nineteenth-century context: concepts such as ecology and the environment became widely known in the twentieth century, but interest in biological systems and relationships predated the exact terms, and as I discuss in Chapter 5, scientific study of those systems and human impacts on them was evolving during Morris’s lifetime.19

19 Ecology, coined in German in 1866, entered the English language in 1875. “ecology (n.),” The Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com /dictionary/ecology. It described the study of the interrelations between organisms and their environments – ecosystems – but ecosystem itself was a twentieth-century introduction. “ecosystem (n.),” The Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ecosystem.

11 The Thames: Form and Culture The Thames is not simply a significant site and source of inspiration in William Morris’s life. It is also a major geographic and cultural feature, one that epitomizes the melded physical-cultural nature of the concept of landscape. Whole books can be – and have been – written on the complexities of the river’s form, history, and cultural significance. Here, I will provide a general outline of those subjects across the Thames river system, while the following chapters will investigate these subjects in more detail within specific Thamesian landscapes. The dominant waterway of southern , the Thames rises in damp fields in Gloucestershire and meanders eastwards, passing the cities of Oxford and Reading before entering London on its way to Southend-on-Sea, the traditional demarcation between river and estuary (fig. 1). For most of its course through the Thames valley is a broad basin dominated by wide terraces of gravel and alluvial materials which were deposited by the river and occasionally the sea as water levels changed over millennia. The lower terraces are generally rich agricultural land, with the ones closest to the river standing as the modern flood plain. Although the air distance from the river’s source to its estuary is only 118 miles (190 km), its twists and turns are so numerous that they almost double the river’s length – following the riverbank, it is about 215 miles (346 km) from source to

Southend.20 The Thames is not a particularly large river by global standards, but given

20 This meandering path is due in large part to the river's extremely gradual fall. Its source is only 360 feet (110 m) above sea level. For comparison, the source of the 315-mile-long Hudson River is 4,322 feet (1,317 m) above sea level, and even the source of Delaware’s Brandywine Creek, which is only 20 miles long, is 850 ft (260 m) above sea level.

12 the small scale of the islands of Britain and Ireland, it is a significant geographic feature. It is by far the longest river in England, and within the isles it is bested only by the Scottish Severn and the Irish Shannon, which are respectively five and nine miles longer. The Thames collects a large volume of water from its broad valley catchment and the surrounding hills. At , less than twenty miles from its source, it is already 60 feet (18 m) wide and deep enough for river barges, with a flow fast enough to be dangerous. In the heart of London, it is 870 feet wide (265 m) – 290 yards, or the length of almost three American football fields. It is tidal up to , more than 70 miles from the estuary proper.21 In central London the tide rises and falls 23 feet twice a day. The river’s flow and tides are powerful physical forces which have shaped the landscape around it for many thousands of years. The Thames valley has hosted human populations since deep prehistory, and the river and its surroundings shaped settlement patterns. Settlements often grew at the confluence of the river and one or more of its tributaries or the intersection of water and land transport. Oxford, for example, was settled near a ford and the Cherwell, while London grew up around a Roman bridge and several tributaries.22 Population and prosperity also clustered in areas that were easy to farm or around places of employment, like the mills and later factories supported by the water power of the

21 For ease of reading in sections involving distances and other calculations, I have chosen to spell out only single-digit numbers (one to nine) throughout the text. For notes on my measurement and mapping strategies, see “Online Resources: Mapping,” p. 335.

22 For more on how the river shaped London’s settlement patterns, see Chapter 2, p. 56-57.

13 river and its tributaries. And even as the river shaped settlement patterns and human activity within its catchment, so too did people shape the river. Since prehistory bridges and piers have been built, fords improved, irrigation channels and drains built, and riverbanks altered.23 Improvements in technologies from the medieval period forward led to sections of the river being controlled by weirs and locks.24 There is no stretch of the Thames inland from the ever-shifting tidal marshes of its estuary that could be considered truly "wild" in shape, in the sense of being totally at the whim of natural forces, nor has there been for the last millennium at the very least.25 The same holds true of its tributaries, which were all the easier to alter because of their smaller sizes. The practical uses of rivers for agriculture, water-powered industry, and domestic supply mean that the river valleys of southern England have always been relatively densely populated compared to the uplands. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the acceleration of industrialization along rivers magnified this population disparity. Rivers were essential to industrialization because they could

23 Archaeologists have identified the remains of pier and bridge structures in the Vauxhall area of London dating back to the Mesolithic (c. 4500 BCE) and Bronze Age (c. 15000 BCE) respectively. See “Vauxhall Key Site Information.” Thames Discovery Programme, July 14, 2010. http://www.thamesdiscovery.org/ riverpedia/vauxhall-riverpedia. There are innumerable reasons to alter riverbanks, including improved access and water flow and control of or floods.

24 Some tributaries were fully channelized or even covered over (culverted).

25 Even much of the famously treacherous and shifting estuary is today managed to protect shipping corridors, military installations, and the occasional heritage site. The estuary is vast and largely detached – geographically, culturally, and aesthetically – from the Thames valley, placing it outside the scope of this project. For a general overview of the estuary, see Caroline Crampton, The Way to the Sea: The Forgotten Histories of the (London: Granta Publications, 2019).

14 generate power, aid the transport of goods, and supply water for production and later steam power and heat absorption. As large-scale industrialization spread – and with it, urban growth – the reshaping of rivers only accelerated. The Thames could not have been considered either natural or clean before the industrial revolution, but from the late eighteenth century onwards, the river and its tributaries began to show more detrimental effects from the pollution of both industrial and human waste. The poor condition of the Thames reached a famous peak with London's of 1858 but continued well beyond.26 Today, the river is still shaping and being shaped by the life along its banks. The force of the river still cuts through the land around it, molding riverbanks and islands. Floods still fertilize fields and dictate which areas are fit for building. New bridges are still constructed, and old bridges repaired or expanded. London still struggles to contain its sewage and runoff, and the face of the city's river currently includes the large construction barriers and equipment associated with the construction of the Thames Tunnel, a vast new sewer which will run below the Thames. The Thames is such a prominent landscape feature that it unsurprisingly looms large in how the people along its banks think of the spaces around them. The Thames is a cultural icon, and a multifarious one, standing at once for many different parts of English life.27 The river is present in almost every iconic view of London, since the

26 The nadir of the Thames's health came a century later, in the 1950s, when industrial runoff and water pH changes caused by extensive industrial and domestic coal-burning meant that the river was considered 'dead' – unable to support even rudimentary water plants and animals.

27 I consulted Peter Ackroyd’s Thames: The Biography (New York: Doubleday, 2007) for a grounding in the river’s deep history and cultural significance.

15 majority of the city’s internationally recognizable structures sit on its banks or span its waters.28 The London Thames is so central to the visual conception of the city, in fact, that the shape of its meandering path is often used as a visual shorthand, clearly assumed to be recognizable even when the aerial view is reduced to a few abstracted arcs (fig. 11).29 It is the wide, liquid heart of a busy, modern city: crisscrossed by bridges, underlain by tunnels, lined in cultural landmarks both old and very new. Upriver, however, the Thames is different: the Upper Thames is generally perceived as rural, quiet, natural, and historic, so much so that moving upstream is often framed as moving back in time.30 In this cultural formulation, London is always new, always different, and the countryside is untouched and traditional – beautiful, perhaps, but caught in the stasis of the timeless.31 The Thames, running through both

28 Examples include the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London, Tate Modern, Power Station, the London Eye, the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, and bridges like and Millennium Bridge. Even St. Paul’s Cathedral, which does not sit on the river, is often shown from the river. Buckingham Palace is one of the few internationally recognizable London landmarks not visible from the Thames.

29 One reason for the cultural legibility of this shape, particularly in the UK, is likely the aerial view of the city and its river that closes the opening credits of the popular long-running soap opera EastEnders.

30 , Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 5.

31 This dual nature of the Thames and its valley – rural and urban, historic and modern – could be seen very clearly in the introductory sequence of the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. The sequence, a mix of filmed footage and animation, begins at the source of the Thames then follows the river along its course to London. Upriver, there are children chasing frogs, verdant fields, riverside cafés, and characters from the Wind in the Willows, and the sound is water, birds, and the children’s laughter. Downstream, as the audience enters London, the already quick-fire images become frenetic, focusing on the city’s landmarks and innovations as the sound shifts to the music of The Clash and The Sex Pistols, among others. The final portion of the sequence brings the audience up the – the river of Morris’s childhood –

16 landscapes and connecting them, carries with it a deep sense of history as well as perpetual motion.32 Many of these themes can be seen in Morris’s work, and particularly in his pastoral construction of the countryside in opposition to Victorian London. Morris was not only responding to his personal experiences of the Thames, but also working within and contributing to broader cultural meanings of that landscape.

Historiography and Methodology This dissertation’s inspection of Morris and the Thames landscape shows how an interdisciplinary thematic approach, rather than one focused on a single work or body of work, can open new perspectives on a well-known and well-studied figure. My work draws not only upon the history of art and design, but also bodies of thought such as historic landscape studies, material culture, and ecocriticism. Using this varied approach, I assemble a holistic view of an important aspect of Morris’s life and work and generate new understandings of the inspiration and impact of his designs. Although Morris is well-represented in scholarship and popular publishing, there are a number of surprising gaps in the literature. Scholars of literature and

through a redeveloped industrial quarter to the Olympic Stadium. The message was quite clearly stated, and reiterated in the symbolism of the opening ceremony itself: the gentle countryside of the Upper Thames was the best of old England, the bustling metropolis the best of modern England, and all of that was meant to contextualize the history, culture, and values of the entire host country for the most international audience imaginable. That is a questionable presumption, of course, given the fact that England is not only London and the Thames valley, and the UK is not only England – but it is a neat summary of the ways the river and its landscape are sometimes used as a shorthand for a particular view of British history and identity.

32 Ackroyd Thames, 11-19; Schama, Landscape and Memory, 5.

17 politics have produced a myriad of monographs and essays on Morris’s writings, but critical and interpretive studies of his visual output are far less common. Not only that, but some aspects of his visual work still lack even basic study. In this project I rely heavily upon Linda Parry’s William Morris Textiles, a thorough study of the full range of Morris & Co. fabrics.33 This work established the standards for identifying and dating Morris’s textile designs and provides the necessary background information for my further analysis of Morris’s many designs. However, there is no equivalent work for the wallpapers – in fact, it is impossible to even find a definitive list of all the wallpapers produced by the Firm, let alone their dates and attributions.34 What information there is instead must be gleaned from exhibition catalogues and other partial sources. Additionally, although Morris appears often in works on design history, these are generally superficial overviews discussing his views and influence. There are very few scholars who have sought to interpret Morris’s designs as works of art in their own right. Rather, most have focused on recording the works’ history or reading them as illustrations of Morris’s artistic philosophies.35 While I am indebted to

33 Linda Parry, William Morris Textiles (London: V&A Publishing, 2013). [Hereafter Parry, Textiles.]

34 The dating and attribution of Morris & Co. products can be difficult. See Appendix B for more details.

35 One exception is Caroline Arscott, who addressed Morris’s designs in William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). That work includes a chapter on Morris and the Thames, but takes a different interpretive stance than this project, focusing on Morris’s love of fishing and on Arscott’s larger narratives of violence, masculinity, and the body.

18 these earlier studies of Morris, I to demonstrate the potential of alternative approaches to the material. The nature of this project requires close attention to Morris’s biography and writings in order to understand how he moved through and engaged with the Thames landscape and how he conceived it both personally and polemically. For biographical material I looked particularly to May Morris’s writings on her father and Fiona MacCarthy’s 1994 William Morris: A Life for Our Time, the most recent and most thorough work on the subject.36 After completing a general survey of the presence of rivers and river landscapes in Morris’s written oeuvre, I worked particularly from his letters, his aesthetic-political speeches and essays, and his Socialist utopian fantasy News from Nowhere.37 I consulted many of these texts via digitization projects including the William Morris Archive, the William Morris , and the Hathi Trust’s scans of the 24 volumes of the Collected Works of William Morris.38 Despite my extensive work with Morris’s texts, I have tried my best to avoid the common pitfall of taking him at his word. Morris said so much about so many things that it can be difficult to move beyond his statements and inspect his work or

36 May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and introductory texts to The Collected Works of William Morris; Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (New York: Knopf, 1994) [hereafter MacCarthy].

37 Morris’s letters are collected in Norman Kelvin and Holly Harrison, eds., The Collected Letters of William Morris, Volumes I-IV, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984-1996.

38 “The William Morris Archive”, http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/; “The William Morris Internet Archive,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/; The Collected Works of William Morris, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001024179.

19 actions independently. However, this difficulty must be overcome because it can otherwise lead to an uncritical and ahistorical approach which assumes that just because Morris wrote something in his often polemical writings, he must have followed that rule down to the letter in the much messier real world.39 In the case of discussions of Morris’s designs, this approach can obfuscate the material history of the works, creating confusion about the actual production processes. It also tends to privilege standardized narratives of European revivalism and the virtues of “natural materials” over the more complex – and more interesting – stories the objects can tell. I thus seek to contextualize Morris within his period and his landscape and to address his patterns on their own terms, focusing on their content, form, and material histories. In order to discuss Morris’s works and biography I use his texts not as a starting point from which everything else might be slotted into place, but rather as supportive evidence. This evidence must be weighted with the understanding that no matter the context – whether a letter to his daughters or a speech to a Socialist crowd – Morris would have been presenting particular viewpoints and narratives which did not always accord with the complications of his works and the world around him.

As a work of landscape-centered art history, this project’s methodological and theoretical background lies within several disciplines and bodies of thought. My investigation of Morris’s interactions with and understandings of the Thames is based upon the research tools and theories of historic landscape studies. My study of his patterns, meanwhile, is grounded in art history and material culture, but it also draws

39 This approach also contributes to the tendency to idolize Morris as an untouchable prophet of everything from anarcho-socialism to environmentalism to anti- imperialism.

20 upon the concerns of environmental studies and ecocriticism. These fields of course interrelate, with concerns, research, and conclusions overlapping and informing each other throughout the project. The landscape research of this project is based in the methods of historic landscape studies.40 A primarily British academic field originally born from cultural geography and archaeology, historic landscape studies traditionally emphasizes the importance of fieldwork alongside research using materials such as maps, aerial photos, archaeological surveys, and archival documents, as well as literature and art. The aim, simply put, is to understand how humans interacted with a landscape over time, both physically and culturally – how they shaped it and were shaped by it, but also how they experienced and understood it. For this project, I undertook site visits as well as extensive research into the history of those sites. I walked the riverbanks of the Thames in central London, Hammersmith, Oxford, and Kelmscott, the Lea in Walthamstow, the Wandle in Merton, the Cherwell in Oxford, and the Windrush and Evenlode in the Cotswolds. I also visited Morris sites which are open to the public, touring Red House, Kelmscott Manor, and Water House (the William Morris Gallery), as well as the former site of the Merton Abbey Works.41 On these trips I observed the present day rivers, noted historic features where possible, and compared current landscapes with historic images

40 The seeds for this project were planted in a seminar paper I wrote as part of my MA in Historic Landscape Studies in the Archaeology Department of the University of York, UK, in autumn 2010. Peter J. Howard’s An Introduction to Landscape provides a good overview of the methodological and conceptual frameworks of the field.

41 Kelmscott House is a private residence and although the William Morris Society operates out of the former carriage house there, they were closed for renovations during my research visit.

21 and descriptions. This ‘boots on the ground’ approach informed my general spatial and historic descriptions of sites throughout this project. It also allowed me to observe details of the rivers and their ecosystems, work which shaped my arguments about the visual relationship between Morris’s pattern designs and landscapes. Throughout this project I also use sources common to landscape history research in order to reconstruct Morris’s landscapes in his lifetime. The Victoria County Histories, an encyclopedic series chronicling the minutiae of English local history, were invaluable sources for information on everything from underlying geography to the exact number of mills on a given river in the 1880s.42 The extraordinarily detailed Ordnance Survey (OS) maps produced by the British government since the early nineteenth century were also essential sources.43 I also relied upon works of local and industrial history as well as archaeological studies. In the case of London, I was able to draw on a bounty of scholarship on subjects such as Victorian urban change, the sanitation problems of the rivers, and artistic interpretations of the metropolis.44 William Morris's Kelmscott: Landscape and

42 Many of the volumes have been digitized and are available via British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/.

43 I accessed historic OS maps primarily through the National Library of Scotland’s digital map viewer, https://maps.nls.uk/os/

44 For example Jim Clifford, West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshland, 1839-1914 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2018); Bill Luckin, Pollution and Control: A Social History of the Thames in the Nineteenth Century (Bristol; Boston: A. Hilger, 1986); Nancy Rose Marshall, City of Gold and Mud: Painting Victorian London (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2012); and Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000).

22 History was a particularly rich source for archaeological and historical information about the Kelmscott area,45 one which allowed me to pursue my own interpretation of Morris’s visual work within the context of that landscape. As noted above, my approach to landscape as both a physical space and an experiential and cultural phenomenon is grounded in the work of landscape historians and theorists. This includes not only geographers such as Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels and archaeologists such as the contributors to William Morris’s Kelmscott, but also art historians who have engaged with the cultural meanings of the landscape. British art history is particularly rich with examples of scholarship which investigates the economic and political realities behind landscape artists’ choice of subjects.46 This approach has informed my own investigation of the economic and technological forces at work in Morris’s landscapes, as well as the tenacious bond between his political views and his pastoral aesthetics.47 Through its visual and contextual analysis of Morris’s works and surroundings, this project integrates Morris’s landscape-inspired patterns with the history of nineteenth-century and particularly Pre-Raphaelite

45 Alan Crossley, Tom Grafton Hassall, and Peter Salway, eds. (Bollington, UK: Windgather Press in association with the Society of Antiquaries of London, 2007).

46 Examples include John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and, with a rarer focus on the middle of the nineteenth century, the chapter “The Harvest Field in the Railway Age” in Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2005), 83-131.

47 My exploration of Morris’s pastoral is also grounded in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

23 landscape art.48 I do not seek to claim that his patterns are depictions of physical space in the mode of landscape painting – they quite clearly are not. However, I argue that Morris was observing his surroundings just as closely as any landscape painter, selecting from his observations in ways that reflected his personal and political views, and communicating those observations and choices through a visual medium. His patterns may not be landscape paintings, but they are certainly a form of landscape- influenced art. Another primary concern of this project is the material history of Morris’s printed textiles. While questions of material and production are of course part of traditional art history, my research in this subject also draws upon the theory and practice of material culture studies. By foregrounding the fabric printing’s processes and materials I illuminate not only Morris’s individual creative endeavor but also the physical influences and effects of his works and the interconnectedness of inspiratory, productive, and environmental landscapes. This work was made possible by a singular survival from the Morris & Co. factory: a large volume of dye recipes known as the Merton Abbey Dye Book. Now held in the art collection of the Huntington Library, Museum, and Gardens, the Dye Book is an essential source for anyone attempting to unravel the materials and processes that went into the Firm’s printed fabrics. It is also, however, a technical and complex working record, and perhaps because of this, it has received little direct attention in Morris and decorative arts scholarship – an absence I have worked to rectify to some degree, but which merits further attention in the future.

48 Morris’s work is unsurprisingly absent from scholarship which addresses the Pre- Raphaelites and landscape painting such as Allen Staley’s The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

24 The concerns of landscape studies and material culture overlap with those of environmental history and the relatively new approach of ecocriticism. In order to describe Morris’s landscape and investigate his works’ interactions with the natural world around them, it was necessary to turn to sources ranging from natural history guidebooks to environmental reports. My work on the water usage and pollution at Merton Abbey, meanwhile, originates in my thematic exploration of the Thames system as a whole but connects to the ecocritical goal of reconsidering art and literature within the context of environmental history – work which, as Alan Braddock writes, “may cast canonical works and figures in a new light by revealing previously unnoticed complexity regarding environmental concerns.”49

Dissertation Structure The four chapters of this project follow an approximately chronological path through Morris’s relationships with the three most important Thames landscapes of his life: London (Chapter 2), Kelmscott (Chapters 3 and 4), and Merton Abbey (Chapter 5). Each chapter includes descriptions of the landscapes in question during Morris’s period, allowing the history of Morris’s engagement with those sites to grow from the evidence of the land and natural and built environments. This information is then used to open new modes of interpretation for Morris’s works.

Chapter 2 focuses on Morris’s relationship with the urban landscape of London, a space shaped by the Thames and a number of tributaries. London and its

49 Alan Braddock, “Ecocritical Art History,” American Art 23, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 24-28. In my conclusion, I also pursue another element of ecocriticism, considering how the environmental problems of Morris’s rivers connect to twenty-first century ecological concerns.

25 immediate surroundings were Morris’s native landscape and the place where he spent the majority of his life, first along the Lea and later along the Thames itself. In Morris’s lifetime the Lea valley was a site of rural beauty but also of urban change. The pleasure he took in his childhood landscape reflected pleasures he would find along the Thames and its tributaries for his whole life, and his negative reactions to its changes there reflect his negative reactions to London as a whole. Victorian London was not only the largest city in the world; it was also the largest city there had ever been. It was the shining, bustling heart of a powerful industrial and imperial nation, full of new wealth and new building projects, expanding ever outward into the countryside around it. But it was also plagued by problems, particularly overcrowding, poverty, and pollution. The impacts of London’s improvements and its problems were both felt particularly keenly by the Thames and its tributaries. New bridges, tunnels, and embankments proliferated, but so too did waterborne disease, with outbreaks of cholera and typhoid bringing down swathes of the city’s population throughout the century.50 The London landscape and the rivers at its heart are essential to understanding Morris’s relationship with the rest of the Thames system because they were what he knew best and what he reacted against. Chapter 3 explores the place which Morris loved best, the pastoral ideal he set against the modern ills of London: the Upper Thames landscape around his countryside retreat, Kelmscott Manor. The Manor stands in a small village, also called Kelmscott, at the point where western Oxfordshire meets Gloucestershire. The river dominates the area’s landscape forms and was at the center of the Morrises’ life there.

50 Of course, some of London’s improvements were also attempts to ameliorate its problems. The embankments of central London were built primarily to house sewers.

26 Kelmscott was the epitome of everything Morris valued in a landscape: a sparkling willow-lined river running through a gentle rural space defined by traditional features like hay meadows and hedgerows. It functioned as his ultimate pastoral, and a close study of the historic landscape features of the area expose the work of that idealization, showing how Morris disavowed the presence of local industry and the realities of the period’s agricultural depression from his experience and descriptions of the site. Chapter 4 expands upon Morris’s relationship with Kelmscott to explore how the site’s plant life, traditionally managed features, and landscape forms influenced his printed pattern designs. It begins with an in-depth inspection of the botany of the patterns, showing that Morris chose many plants which are characteristic of the rural ecosystems of the Thames and its tributaries. It also considers the visual correspondences between the forms of the patterns and Thamesian landscape features. Shifting focus to Morris’s tributary-named patterns in particular, it goes on to explore how those patterns reflect Morris’s relationship with the landscapes and ecologies of the broader Thames river network, including rivers like the Cray and Kennet with which he had personal connections. Throughout the chapter, I argue that these patterns reveal further aspects of Morris’s idealization of Thames landscapes. In the conclusion, I consider the implications of that connection between ideal and pattern, questioning the meaning of the presence of those landscape-inspired works in the Victorian domestic interior. Chapter 5 places the patterns within the context of another river setting, their landscape of production, the Merton Abbey Works along the River Wandle in southwest London. The chapter focuses on reconstructing the intimate relationship

27 between the Wandle and the factory’s fabric printing process. The Wandle was one of the primary features which attracted Morris and the Firm to the factory site in Merton, and the production of his late patterns – a group which notably includes Wandle and all the other tributary patterns – relied upon the production processes which the move made possible. My deep research into these processes and the materials involved reveals the presence of the river’s water at every step in the fabrics’ production, from the fabric’s first rinse in the river (fig. 11) to the mixing of every dye and chemical to the washing away of waste. This, in turn, shows Morris’s inextricable position within the systems of Victorian water use and pollution. The conclusion continues in this thread of ecological thought, contemplating how Morris’s place within his landscape and within the materially exploitative and environmentally damaging systems of his period speaks to our modern world of looming ecological collapse – and what the continued popularity of Morris’s riverine patterns mean in the twenty-first century when chalk streams are drying up and rising sea levels threaten to flood London permanently.

28 Chapter 2

GRUBBINESS, LOW SPIRITS AND BOUNDLESS RICHES: LONDON

William Morris was a Londoner. Biographically, this label is a simple fact. Morris was born in the London area in 1834, he died in Hammersmith in 1896, and his primary residence was always in the city or its suburbs. Yet, the city is all but absent from his visual and written works, which draw inspiration from and idealize the English countryside of the Thames and its tributaries. It may therefore seem counterintuitive to begin a study of Morris’s relationship with the Thames with a discussion of London. However, as this chapter will show, the context of Morris’s life along London’s urban and suburban rivers is essential to any nuanced understanding of his relationship with the rural environments which inspired his work. The city and its surroundings were Morris’s native and permanent home, and he did not simply inhabit some generic modern urban space. Rather, as this chapter will show, he moved within highly specific urban, suburban, and semi-rural sites (fig. 13). The conditions he encountered in those places informed his views on city and country and, by extension, contributed to the form of his written works and designs. Morris’s creative emphasis on the Thames valley countryside was a pastoralist and at times utopian pursuit, one which unfailingly emphasized concepts and aesthetics of the rural, the historic, and the ‘natural.’ By their very definitions, however, the pastoral and the utopian cannot exist independently: they must exist in

29 tension with dichotomous concepts, with the real or unideal, the counter-pastoral, even the dystopian. Within this context, Morris’s London served two apparently contradictory purposes: it was the foundation of his pastoralism, and the representation of his anti-pastoral. Morris’s pastoral vision can be traced to his childhood in the valley of the River Lea, which was relatively rural at the time of his birth but was rapidly altered by the spread of suburban development in the second half of the nineteenth century. The of Morris’s aesthetics and ideals can be found in that landscape, and so too can the contrasts of modern change and degradation which he set himself against. In Morris’s adulthood, meanwhile, the London landscapes which he occupied took the position of an opposing force: the city which always must exist in tension with the country, the dark reality to be solved or at least ameliorated with ruralist ideals and aesthetics. The city appears in his letters and biography as a necessary evil to be railed against, and in his poetry and political writings as a dark presence which must either be turned away from or overthrown.51 It is absent in the visual material of his design work, but that absence holds its own significance, further reinforcing Morris’s rural preferences. By drawing design inspiration from the countryside of the Thames and its tributaries, Morris immersed himself in tastes formed in his childhood, and both rejected and sought to improve his rapidly urbanizing and industrializing surroundings. Therefore, his relationship with London and London’s rivers is an essential aspect in his broader relationship with the landscapes of the Thames.

51 Nowhere is this clearer than in News from Nowhere, in which the narrator, an undisguised stand-in for Morris, contrasts the ruralized London of the future Socialist utopia with the Victorian city he knew.

30 This chapter begins by uncovering the origins of Morris’s rural ideals in his childhood surroundings in the Lea Valley. Following that, a consideration of Morris’s broader London landscape places him within the context of that Victorian landscape and culture of change. Lastly, a deeper consideration of Morris’s particular brand of pastoralism, born of London but focused on the rural Thames and its tributaries, will lay the groundwork for the following chapters, which take those rural landscapes and their role in Morris’s work as their subject.

The Lea and Walthamstow Morris's childhood river landscape, the Lea (or Lee)52 valley around Walthamstow, was and still is a microcosm of the contradictions of British river landscapes: urban and rural, suburban and industrial, ancient and modern, degraded and celebrated. It was the first landscape Morris knew intimately, and in its river, its soft hills, and its common lands one can find the first indications of his later affection for the semi-managed, semi-natural state of the upper Thames and other historic rural lands – as well as for gentle, clean waters that supported his favorite form of recreation, fishing. However, the Lea is also tied to many other aspects of Victorian London: to suburban growth on a huge scale, to pollution and disease, and to the expansion of the British empire. Its local, personal story in Morris's life reveals his childhood exposure to a particularly English, particularly historic natural aesthetic, as well as providing an entry point to his mature criticisms of the city and its surroundings. Its larger story places Morris within a network of landscape change and

52 Both spellings are used in both colloquial and official contexts. Generally, Lea is used for the "natural" river and Lee for the canalized navigation and other human- constructed elements of the riverscape.

31 environmental degradation which shared much in common with those he would encounter throughout his lifetime along the Thames and its tributaries. Today, Walthamstow is a densely developed suburban residential and commercial district located at the northeastern terminus of the Victoria Underground line, within the London borough of Waltham Forest (fig. 13). At the time of Morris’s birth in 1834, the area was already a London suburb, albeit one of a very different nature than today. Walthamstow proper was then a small village in the county of , perched on top of a hill overlooking the valley of the River Lea, about six miles (9.8 km) northeast of the center of the . The landscape around the village was a patchwork of farmland, common land used primarily for grazing, forest, and small villa estates of parkland and gardens (fig. 14).53 The area had been a popular location for wealthy Londoners’ countryside retreats in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was historically too far from the center of the city to support dense development.54 In 1831, two years before the Morris family arrived in the area, the population of Walthamstow civic parish was 4,258, in an area of 3,690 acres (5.75 square miles, 14.9 square kilometers).55 This is a density of about 741 people per

53 E.R. Powell, A History of the County of Essex, Vol. 6 (London: Victoria County History, 1973), 244.

54 Powell, A History of the County of Essex, 245.

55 The civil parish is a governmental administrative district. They grew out of ecclesiastical parishes but were administratively distinct by the mid-nineteenth century. The closest equivalent in the United States are the civic townships of some states, an administrative subdivision of a county. Population data source: “Visions of Britain: Walthamstow AP/CP through Time.” http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/ 10248322

32 square mile or 1.15 people per acre.56 By comparison, in 1831 the City of London had a population of 130,120 in just over one square mile (672 acres, 2.72 km square) – about 194 people per acre.57 In the early nineteenth century Walthamstow’s fashionability had waned somewhat, but its villas continued to attract well-off City professionals who were able to settle their families there and commute to the urban center where their businesses were based. The Morrises were one such family. William Morris's father, also named William, was a senior partner in a bill brokerage in the City. He and his wife Emma first lived above his company's premises in Lombard Street, around the corner from the Bank of England in the middle of the City.58 Their first three children were born there, two girls who survived and a boy who died in infancy. As both the elder William’s wealth and the family grew, they sought more salubrious surroundings, moving to Walthamstow in 1833. The younger William was the first of the family's children born outside the City. Others followed; by 1846, William was one of nine surviving children, five boys and four girls. The elder William likely travelled daily

56 The population density of the area is particularly low because it included sections of unsettled land in the Lea marshes and Epping Forest. Even if these were to be excluded from the overall calculations, however, the density would still be very low compared with districts closer to central London.

57 “City of London District through Time: Census Tables with Data for the District/Unitary Authority.” http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10076924. For further comparison, the modern borough of , which lies between Walthamstow and the City, has an area of 7.36 square miles (19.1 square km) and had a population of 35,482 in 1801. , which lies between Hackney and the City and was shifting from an inner suburb to an urban neighborhood in the period, covers only a square mile (2.66 km square) and had a population of 68,564 in 1831.

58 MacCarthy, 2. MacCarthy notes that it was standard practice for a member of the business to live on the premises in the period.

33 from Walthamstow to his firm's offices in the City of London. There was not yet rail service to Walthamstow, but there was an active stagecoach network providing service both to the City and to Lea Bridge, where rail service into the City was available after 1840.59 In undertaking this commute, the elder William was like thousands of other businessmen who were increasingly taking advantage of improvements in road and rail transportation to vacate the City and settle in the suburbs. The Morrises occupied several historic homes in the Walthamstow area during William's childhood.60 He was born at Elm House, an early nineteenth-century villa on Walthamstow's Clay Hill. Around 1840, the family moved to Woodford Hall, a larger eighteenth-century house with 50 acres of parkland and another 100 acres of farmland outside Walthamstow on the edge of Epping Forest.61 The elder William died in 1847, leaving his young family with a respectable fortune bolstered not only by bill broking but also by investments in Devon copper mining. In 1848 the family moved to Water House, a seventeenth-century home with a Georgian façade which is now the William Morris Gallery. It was smaller and did not have as grand an estate, but its large garden (now Lloyd Park) included a medieval moat, an enchanting feature for a child already interested in the past. During this time, Morris came and went from Walthamstow. He began school at Marlborough College in in 1848, returning home for holidays.62 After leaving Marlborough permanently in 1851, to Walthamstow, then left

59 Powell, A History of the County of Essex 250.

60 Like many – if not most – families in the period, they were renters.

61 MacCarthy, 6-8.

62 Morris’s time at Marlborough along the is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, p. 157-163.

34 again in 1853 to begin his university studies at Exeter College, Oxford. The family stayed at Water House until 1856, by which point Morris was living in central London and beginning his artistic career.63 As Morris’s later works show, he remained interested in the Walthamstow area long after moving away. He also carried the tastes and opinions he had formed there for the rest of his life. The landscapes of the Lea and of Morris’s native Walthamstow are therefore essential elements in understanding Morris’s larger personal geography within the Thames valley. It was along the Lea that he first encountered the characteristic forms and features of the valleys of the Thames and its tributaries: broad, flat valleys of gravel and clay; open riverside meadows used for grazing and hay; and mixed management serving agricultural, industrial, domestic, recreational, and aesthetic purposes. It was also, therefore, the first place where he encountered the plant and landscape forms that later shaped his pattern designs. The Lea landscape was also unique to its own place and time, however, reflecting the changes being brought about by Victorian industrialization, population expansion, and urbanization. The Lea’s source is at Leagrave outside Luton, in the Chiltern Hills north- northwest of London. In its 42 mile (68km) course it runs southeast to Hertford before turning to run almost due south into eastern London.64 It was traditionally the

63 It is not clear exactly when Morris’s mother and siblings left Walthamstow. Several of his brothers were in the military and all his sisters but Henrietta married and left the family home. According to Fiona MacCarthy, by the late 1860s Morris’s mother was living in Leyton, still in the greater Walthamstow area, but by the mid 1870s she was settled at Much Hadam, , much further up the Lea valley. MacCarthy, 215 and 341.

64 Though very short compared to continental rivers, the Lea is a relatively long, high- volume river by the standards of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, where many

35 boundary between the counties of Essex, to the east, and Hertfordshire and Middlesex to the west.65 Its final two miles form a meandering tidal estuary known as before it empties into the Thames at Leamouth, Blackwall, east of the Isle of Dogs.66 It remains a major landmark of East London, running through the reclaimed industrial landscape of the 2012 Olympic Park and appearing in cultural references to the area.67 Today it is primarily a recreational landscape, with nature reserves and walking and bike paths alongside (fig. 15). The water is used for transport, though this too is of a largely recreational and domestic nature: it hosts leisure cruisers, kayaks, and residential canal boats, not the laden industrial barges of the past (fig. 16). Unlike other London-area Thames tributaries, the Lea is a relatively major British river in its own right. It was already semi-navigable to Hertford in the early medieval period, and starting in the fifteenth century, a series of alterations and improvements were undertaken to enhance this natural quality.68 By the late eighteenth century, a system of cuts, locks, and canalized river lengths known as the

rivers are not navigable and the longest river, the Severn, is only 220 miles (354km)

65 After many years of urbanization and political reorganization, the Lea now forms the boundary of various : Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Haringey, and Enfield to the west; Newham and Waltham Forest to the east.

66 In British English, 'creek' is more often used in its coastal sense, meaning a tidal inlet, rather in the sense of an inland stream.

67 For example, the song “The River Lea” by Adele and the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony discussed p. 16, note 31.

68 Jim Lewis, From Ice Age to Wetlands: The Lea Valley’s Return to Nature, (Faringdon, UK: Libri Publishing, 2017), 16.

36 Lee Navigation ran between Hertford and the Thames.69 Before the introduction of railroads in the nineteenth century, the Lea and its Navigation provided a major transport link between the Home Counties and London. The tidal reaches of the Lea and its surrounding marshes meanwhile became an important center in British seafaring, supporting shipbuilding and other related industries from at least the late medieval period.70 It was also a common embarkation, disembarkation, and supply point. In 1614 the East India Company established a shipyard there which eventually evolved into the East India Docks, built in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was there that all commodities from India and China were unloaded for transport into London until the Company lost its monopolies on Indian and Chinese trade.71 This made the mouth of the Lea a particularly important site in London’s imperial and commercial history. The Lea’s importance did not lie only in transport, however. Its steady and relatively high-volume water flow powered mills and supplied water for the production of goods, making it a significant site in the industrial history of the capital. The Lea Valley had in fact been one of the first "industrial centers" in Britain, with mills and factories running on water power and supporting many trades – including,

69 The Lee Navigation connects to another eighteenth-century engineering project, , which created a much more direct route between the Lea, central London, and other parts of London’s shipping infrastructure like Limehouse Basin.

70 Elizabeth Williamson, , and Malcolm Tucker, (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 83-88.

71 Once the monopolies were lost in 1813 (India) and 1833 (China), products from those locations began to arrive at a variety of docks along the river. Peter Stone, The History of the Port of London: A Vast Emporium of All Nations (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword History), 126.

37 between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, calico-printing, one of the industries for which William Morris would later be known.72 As the nineteenth century advanced, the lower reaches of the river in particular were heavily industrialized.73 The river would have also supplied water for local agricultural use and for domestic consumption. At the time of Morris’s birth, the Lea Valley had a distinct dual character (fig. 17) The river was being used extensively for transport, industry, and water supply, but it was also well-known for its picturesque rural setting and relatively natural environment. The division of the Lee Navigation from the River Lea in many areas meant that throughout much of the Lea valley there were two streams. The Lee would have been bustling with trade, and it was channelized, with sheer manmade embankments. The Lea, however, was allowed to meander and pool through its floodplain meadows, crisscrossed by old bridges and weirs. This does not mean that one stream was managed and the other natural, however. Rather, they were managed for different purposes. The meadows of the Lea were agricultural spaces, supporting grazing and haymaking and, in some areas, watercress-growing.74 The river,

72 William Page and J. Horace Round, The History of the County of Essex, Volume 2 (Victoria County History, 1907), 404-5. Morris’s relationship to the British calico industry, including the industry of the Lea, are discussed in more depth in Chapter 5.

73 Jim Clifford explores this industrialization and its social, political, and environmental effects in West Ham and the River Lea.

74 Watercress beds were a common feature of many Thames tributary riversides in the nineteenth century. The rectangular tanks of shallow, slow-running water allowed for the cultivation of watercress, a native British plant eaten as a leafy green. Watercress was particularly prevalent in Victorian London, where it was sold on the street and available very cheaply. Watercress sellers, often young impoverished girls, were favorite sympathetic figures in paintings and literature.

38 meanwhile, was managed as a recreational space in the first half of the nineteenth century. Between the 1820s and 1840s, there was a craze for angling (fishing with a rod and line) among middle-class men, who had increased amounts of free time and money to spend on leisure pursuits. The Lea Valley was an ideal destination for these hobbyists: the river’s water supported a healthy population of fish, and it was within easy reach of an affordable day trip from London by stagecoach or even on foot. The popularity of this hobby and the Leaside sites that supported it (not only fishing spots but also riverside inns serving food and drink) are attested to by a proliferation of paintings and prints of the subjects in the decades around Morris’s birth (fig. 17).75 This recreational use of the river reflects the Lea’s rural-suburban nature just before the large-scale landscape changes that began with the arrival of railroads to the area in the 1840s. It is also significant within the immediate context of Morris’s life. It is unclear if Morris ever fished on the Lea, but he certainly picked up the hobby somewhere in the Lea valley while still young. In his second surviving letter, sent home to his sister Emma in March 1849 when he was a schoolboy at Marlborough

75 See Robert Fountain, Angling on the Lea (Clifton, Virginia: Friends of British Sporting Art), 2000. Part of the general boom in cheap prints for a popular audience in the period, the Lea angling prints present myriad variations on similar themes, showing the anglers in their finery of light breeches, dark frock coats, and high top hats among picturesque settings of rural riverbanks, rustic wooden bridges, and slightly tumble-down inns. The type also appears in portraiture of the period, showing middle-class men at their leisure rather than in formal settings (a type inherited from leisure portraiture of the aristocracy). Notably, one of the very earliest works by William Holman Hunt, later one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, is a c. 1844 portrait of a friend as a Lea Valley angler, with the river and a rustic bridge in the background, Henry Clark on the Banks of the River Lea, c. 1844-45 (private collection). Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 94-95.

39 College along the River Kennett, he mentioned that he wanted to buy a fishing pole.76 Stories of his short sojourn at Marlborough also say that he would bring fish and bird nets into the classroom, tying them to his desk so he could work at knotting them.77 In adulthood, Morris often reported about his fishing expeditions and his catches (or lack thereof) in letters from Kelmscott Manor, and at one point he even used fish from Kelmscott to stock the Wandle, the river that supplied water to his factory.78 Thus, even Morris’s chosen recreation stemmed from his childhood environment. As he fished beside the Kennet or in a rowboat on the Kelmscott Thames, he was connecting to a lifelong network of river landscapes, ones that shared functions and personal pleasures as well as ecologies and aesthetics. It is clear from Morris’s writings that he appreciated the environments and scenery that the Lea Valley had to offer. His fondness for Epping Forest, the historic woodland that sits in the uplands above the Lea Valley to the northeast of Walthamstow, is particularly well known.79 In that former royal forest, the young Morris gained an appreciation not only for historic architecture, as his biographers have often discussed, but also for how traditional land management shaped the landscape. In his adulthood, he wrote several passionate defenses of the historic

76 William Morris to Emma Morris, March 19, 1849. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 6.

77 MacCarthy, 29.

78 William Morris to Frederick Startridge Ellis, March 22, 1882. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 104.

79 See MacCarthy, 14-17. A former royal forest, Epping Forest was officially protected in 1878 in response to the pressures of development as London expanded. It still covers 5,900 acres and is the largest open space in modern London.

40 management of Epping Forest, particularly pollarding, which was curtailed when the land was officially protected and brought under the control of London’s city government as a public open space in 1878.80 In News from Nowhere, Morris’s narrator describes the Epping Forest of his youth: “made up of pollard hornbeams mixed with holly thickets,” and the changes that had come to it in the ensuing years: “I was very much shocked then to see how it was built-over and altered; and the other day we heard that the philistines were going to landscape-garden it.”81 Morris took up the cause again several years later, writing a series of critical letters to the Daily Chronicle in late April and early May 1895.82 These letters were partially in response to a perceived threat from commercial timber management in the forest, but their primary concern is truly with the aesthetic control of the forest. The banning of pollarding and thinning of the hornbeams contravened his particular rural aesthetic,

80 Pollarding is a trimming method in which a tree's upper branches, usually everything above about ten feet, are cut back regularly. This encourages new growth and produces twiggy wood for use as firewood and fodder, and in crafts such as basketry, wattle-and-daub wall construction, and woven fencing. It also creates a visually unique tree form in which a trunk rises to a ball shape above head level, from which the thin new growth emerges. This makes the forest relatively open, with a sparse canopy, and also marks a space as being managed for work and use value rather than aesthetics. Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: Phoenix Press, 2004), 65-67. Aesthetic choices would tend to privilege growth which is either truly natural (uncontrolled) or managed to look relatively natural. Of course, in Morris’s case the historic and use value of managed trees and forests held their own aesthetic value.

81 News from Nowhere, 14-15. The ‘the other day’ in this passage is a -up from the narrator, who struggles to figure out how to speak of his very recent past to the citizens of Nowhere, for whom those events took place over a hundred years ago. It reflects Morris’s view about plans by the Corporation of London to beautify the Forest in his own time.

82 William Morris to the Daily Chronicle, Collected Letters Vol. 4, 268-275.

41 which was founded not in a sense of the "natural" or wild – which would have favored free-growing trees – but in a sense of the traditional or historic. As will be discussed in the following chapters, Morris’s passion for traditionally managed rural landscapes continued throughout his life, and stretched beyond woodlands like Epping Forest to encompass fields, meadows, hedgerows, and riverbanks. His first experiences with rural fields and meadows would have also been in the patchwork landscape of Walthamstow and the Lea, where agricultural fields and market gardens were interspersed with suburban estates, and riverside meadows were still used as grazing commons.83 As a schoolboy, Morris already evinced a liking for old-fashioned rural landscapes, just as he did for fishing; one of his earliest surviving letters (written a month after the one requesting a fishing rod) includes an effusive description of the water meadows of the Kennet near Marlborough College.84 His enthusiasm for that landscape was in keeping with what we know about his personality and intensity of interests as an adult, but it also shows a very young man who already appreciated the uniqueness of traditional English rural environments. Morris’s later writings show that he applied this type of appreciation to the Lea valley as well. His short story “Frank’s Sealed Letter,” an early work unusually set in

83 Vestiges of the area’s riverside meadows survive today and have become areas of scientific importance – not only because they are open areas in a dense-populated city, but also because their traditional hay-and-grazing management protects plant and animal species endangered by more intensive modern land management practices. This story is echoed up and down the Thames and its tributaries, and it will be discussed in more depth in the following chapters, particularly Chapter 4.

84 William Morris to Emma Morris, April 13, 2849. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 7. This letter and is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, p. 160-61.

42 his own time period, includes a detailed description of the Lea Valley.85 The narrator, setting out from London on a whim to enjoy a spring day, comes to the Lea and reflects that although “people called it an ugly country…. it seemed very lovely to me…. I was always a lover of the sad lowland country.”86 Wandering the valley, he comes upon “another little river, a mere brook,” and describes birds signing in the hedges and in the willows, and the color of the sky and young grass and flowers. Pensive and melancholy, but trying to avoid his thoughts, he dwells on the appearance of the land around him:

I noticed every turn of the banks of the little brook, every ripple of its waters over the brown stones, every line of the broad-leaved waterflowers; I went down towards the brook, and, stooping down, gathered a knot of lush marsh-marigolds; then, kneeling on both knees, bent over the water with my arm stretched down to it, till both my hand and the yellow flowers were making the swift-running little stream bubble about them.87

This interaction with the waterside plants and the water itself sends the narrator tumbling back into memories of his childhood. At the time he wrote the passage, Morris may have been reflecting on his own childhood. When the story was published in April 1856 in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, the literary periodical he ran with his university set, Morris had begun work as an apprentice in G.E. Street’s architecture firm in Oxford. He would have still been visiting his family regularly in

85 The story was published in April 1856 in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, the socially and aesthetically concerned literary periodical Morris ran with his Oxford friends.

86 William Morris, “Frank's Sealed Letter," The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (4: April 1856), 231.

87 Morris, “Frank's Sealed Letter,” 231.

43 Walthamstow, and in August he moved to London when Street’s office relocated.88 He was setting off on his adult life, and his affection for the Lea was coming with him. The evocation of everyday English landscapes in “Frank’s Sealed Letter” – not sublime or rare, and considered by some to be unimpressive or ugly, but filled with simple beauties and simple pleasures – would recur throughout Morris's works over the next forty years. It is the world of News from Nowhere, of his art and social criticism, and, as this project will show, of his fabric patterns. Morris’s affection for that type of rural environment was rooted in the Lea valley of his childhood, or an idealized version thereof – one that featured only willows, hornbeams, marsh- marigolds, blue skies, and clean water. As a young adult in Walthamstow and London, Morris would have been abundantly aware that such landscape features were rapidly disappearing, if they still existed at all. The Lea passage “Frank’s Sealed Letter” is as much an elegy as a fond description, the narrator’s melancholy as appropriate for the landscape description as it is for the story’s central tale of lost love. Since Morris’s childhood, the Lea valley – like most of London’s surroundings – had been undergoing explosive and unprecedented population growth and development. In 1840, the railways expanding outwards from London reached Lea Bridge, a mile and a half (2.45 km) southwest of Walthamstow, bringing the Essex fields east of the river into closer reach of London. The area around Lea Bridge station was quickly subsumed into the growing metropolis, and suburban development began

88 August 1856 was also when Morris purchased Ford Madox Brown’s The Hayfield. Nicholas Salmon and Derek W Baker The William Morris Chronology (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), 17. The painting, which depicts hay being stacked in the traditional, non-mechanized way, is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, p. 102.

44 to spread northwards along the river valley, reaching towards Walthamstow.89 By the 1860s, the old village and villa district was becoming less and less popular with the gentry and upper-middle classes, and many of their country-suburban estates were being transformed into terraces of new houses for the booming middle classes.90 In 1870, the railway reached Walthamstow itself, and the village exploded into a new, densely-developed suburb.91 Between the censuses of 1851 and 1871, the population of the parish more than doubled, from 4,959 to 11,092, and it continued to double every decade following; in 1901, the population of Walthamstow was 95,131.92 These precipitous shifts would have been difficult for anyone to ignore, and they certainly did not escape Morris. Answering fellow Socialist Andreas Scheu's request for a biographical sketch in 1883, he wrote that “I was born at Walthamstow in Essex in March, 1834, a suburban village on the edge of Epping Forest, and once a pleasant place enough, but now terribly cocknified and choked up by the jerry- builder.”93 This statement reflected not only Morris’s unhappiness with the changes that had come to Walthamstow as the suburbs expanded, but also his distaste for middle-class Victorian architecture. He ascribed this ill to London in particular with

89 The area to the south was already relatively industrial and developed, but it also underwent vast changes in the second half of the nineteenth century, with Leaside areas like West Ham becoming extensions of the densely packed and unhealthy lower- class districts of inner East London. Jim Clifford, West Ham and the River Lea.

90 Powell, A History of the County of Essex, 244-46.

91 ibid., 244.

92 ibid., 241.

93 William Morris to Andreas Scheu, Sep. 15, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 227.

45 his use of the word cocknified, a modification of cockney, a descriptor for London natives and the London way of life.94 The Lea Valley and Walthamstow therefore stand within Morris’s brief autobiography as a microcosm of his larger ideals of the countryside and the nation – as well as his broader complaints about London. The ‘pleasant place’ he had described in “Frank’s Sealed Letter” was long gone, succumbed to the creeping influence of the city which he spent his adulthood living within and railing against. As the population and development of the Walthamstow area and the Lea Valley as a whole grew, it put ever-increasing pressure on the natural and historic systems of the local landscape. This pressure can be seen in the alterations and eventual protection of Epping Forest, but it was also particularly strong along the Lea. Like the Thames in central London, the Lea was reshaped by technological innovations, as when the picturesque wooden bridges of the Lea angling prints were replaced with modern bridges that could sustain heavier traffic.95 The river’s water, meanwhile, felt the effects of the dual liquid demands of residential populations – water supply and waste disposal – and began to suffer the serious problems shared by the Thames and so many of its tributaries in the period. This, in turn, led to further physical changes along the stream.

94 Though it is now used primarily in describe white working-class native Londoners, in Morris’s time “cockney” referred primarily to upwardly mobile but lower-middle- class Londoners who were seen as having vulgar and gaudy taste. See Gareth Stedman-Jones, “The "Cockney" and The Nation, 1780-1988,” in Metropolis, London: Histories and Representations Since 1800, ed. David Feldman and Gareth Stedman- Jones (New York: Routledge, 1989), 272-324.

95 Ferry Bridge, just down the road from the Morrises’ Water House, was rebuilt in iron in 1854. Powell, A History of the County of Essex, 243.

46 One of the Lea’s primary roles in the nineteenth century was as a water supply for London. In the period, piped water for London households was obtained through subscription to a private water company. These companies formed a patchwork over London, with different neighborhoods receiving water from different companies, all of which drew water from their own sources. The Lea was a source for at least two of these companies, the New River Company and the East London Water Company. The New River Company had been set up in the early seventeenth century to bring water about twenty miles from springs in the Lea Valley near Ware to the City of London and the neighborhoods to its north.96 By 1700 the Company was also drawing water from the Lea to augment the springs, and in 1856 – faced with ever-increasing demand from London’s growing population – they received permission from the government to draw off much larger amounts of water from the river.97 This system had to be carefully monitored and controlled to prevent ill-effects downstream: if too much water was taken from the upper Lea to supply inner London, the river, its navigation, and the industries and residential areas alongside would all suffer. The need for water downstream from the New River was particularly marked because the East London Waterworks Company was also using the river to supply water to its customers in the areas east of those supplied by the New River Company. Like the New, the East London company drew their water from the Lea itself – but unlike the New, they did so much closer to the area they supplied. In the 1850s, the

96 For the majority of its length, this water supply was in fact a ‘new river’ – an open, albeit manmade, water channel. Its ended at reservoirs in , from which it supplied water via gravity feed.

97 Lewis, From Ice Age to Wetlands, 28.

47 East London Waterworks Company dug reservoirs and filter beds among the riverside meadows of Walthamstow. This effort was an attempt to increase the reliability and cleanliness of their supply, which had previously been drawn directly from the Lea in more developed areas further downstream.98 The landscape of mid-century Walthamstow was thus incorporated into the expanding infrastructure of the city even before dense development reached the area. Unfortunately, household and industrial waste systems were much slower to arrive in the Lea Valley. By the 1860s the notoriously noxious London Thames was benefitting some from ’s new sewer system, but the Lea had no such sanitation innovation. As the nineteenth century progressed and the valley became increasingly densely populated, the health of the river – and of people living near it – plummeted. Even as cases of waterborne diseases decreased in much of central and west London, they rose in inner East London.99 The situation there was exacerbated by the deprivation of many of the area’s neighborhoods, but also by the East London Waterworks Company’s continued practice of supplying water drawn directly from the Lea.100 By the end of the nineteenth century, the Lea was known for typhoid, not trout.

98 ibid., 15.

99 Here I use “inner East London” to identify the deprived precincts closer to the City, the Thames docks, and the industrialized lower reaches of the Lea – areas like Whitechapel, Wapping, Shoreditch, Poplar, and West Ham. This is opposed to the relatively salubrious new middle-class suburbs on the outer edge of the area, of which Walthamstow was an example.

100 For further information about the pollution of the Lea and corresponding levels of disease, see Bill Luckin, Pollution and Control.

48 It is realistic to assume that Morris was somewhat aware of both the changes to his native river and their broader social implications. In fact, it would have been difficult for him not to be, because from 1861-1874 one of his business partners was Peter Paul Marshall, a surveyor and sanitary engineer for the Tottenham Local Board of Health.101 Tottenham lies directly across the Lea from Walthamstow, and experienced a similar pattern of development and population growth in the nineteenth century, going from a semi-rural villa district to a densely-settled suburb.102 In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Marshall was particularly involved in the overhaul of the borough’s sewage system.103 He encouraged experiment and innovation, but an outbreak of typhoid led to his resignation in 1873, after which he became increasingly involved with the Firm until its reorganization the next year.104 Even the workings of Morris’s business therefore felt the indirect effects of London’s sewer systems and the ill-health of the Lea, and Morris certainly would have been aware of Marshall’s work and struggles.

101 Marshall, a native of Edinburgh, had come to London after working for the Liverpool Water Works Committee, where he took part in the massive project of bringing clean drinking water to that city. He began working for the Tottenham Board of Health in 1857. From 1877, he was the City Engineer for the city of Norwich. For an overview of Marshall’s life, career, and involvement in the Firm, see Keith E. Gibeling, “Peter Paul Marshall: The Forgotten Member of the Morris Firm,” The Journal of William Morris Studies, 12 no.1 (Autumn 1996), 8-16.

102 See A.P. Baggs et. al., A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 5, Hendon, Kingsbury, Great Stanmore, Little Stanmore, Edmonton Enfield, Monken Hadley, South Mimms, Tottenham (London: Victoria County History, 1976).

103 Gibeling “Peter Paul Marshall,” 11-12. This effort came in response to the government’s Lea Conservancy Act, which sought to ameliorate some of the river’s problems.

104 ibid., 12.

49 More generally, the horrible living conditions of inner East London were well known: as well as being the subject of news items, they were fodder for authors like Charles Dickens, Morris’s favorite novelist. As Morris became increasingly politically active in the 1870s and 1880s, the poor conditions of the working classes were of increasing concern to him, and at the same time he began to venture to East London to lecture on both art and socialism (and often the two together). Some Socialists in the period were also concerned about the political implications of the fragmented and profit-driven nature of London’s water system. In the 1890s, the Fabian Society pressed for the equable distribution of natural resources, including the destruction of “water lords” and water rates.105 There is no record of Morris reflecting directly on the links between the Lea’s water and the causes for which he campaigned, but given his general awareness of and interest in the physical landscapes surrounding him, it seems unlikely that the riverine connection between his idyllic childhood home and the deprived and suffering East End would have escaped his notice. Like the suburban development of its valley, the dangerous state of the River Lea formed part of the physical and social landscape of change and degradation which Morris opposed both politically and aesthetically. In many ways, the River Lea and its landscape set the stage for all that Morris would encounter later up and down the River Thames. His childhood surroundings of meadow, field, forest, and stream helped to shape his tastes for rural landscapes, traditional land management, and angling. The changes he saw and criticized in those

105 John Broich, London: Water and the Making of the Modern City (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 72. Morris was not a Fabian himself, though he had many friends and comrades who were members. For further information on the Fabians’ engagement with London water rights, see Broich 70-82.

50 surroundings were many of the same that he saw in many other places along the Thames and its tributaries throughout his life. Even the industry that had dominated his native valley in the early industrial period, calico-printing, would become one of his most famous creative pursuits – and the one where he paid tribute to the Lea and the other tributary landscapes he loved. The Lea valley was a microcosm of what was to come for Morris, both in the countryside of Kelmscott and in the suburban and urban landscapes of London.

Morris in London Throughout his adult life, Morris lived within London, but he moved fairly often. Almost all of those moves were driven by necessities – by work or by the pressure of family needs. After leaving university Morris worked as an apprentice in G.E. Street’s Oxford-based architecture firm, but he had only been there for few months when the office moved to London in 1856, taking Morris with it. Soon, Morris had abandoned architecture and he and his best friend Edward Burne-Jones had moved into shared lodgings at Red Lion Square, Holborn, intending to pursue lives of art. This put them at the center of urban London, and about half a mile north of the Thames. Morris did not record his motivations for or feelings about his 1856 move, but it is likely that it was the only time he truly wanted to live in the city. Settling in central London – and living in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s former rooms – meant that he and Burne-Jones could take part in the Pre-Raphaelite literary and artistic circle they had admired from afar as students in Oxford. By 1859, it seems the shine of inner London had worn off. Like so many city- dwellers before and after, Morris was starting a family and looking away from his crowded, dirty, and unhealthy urban surroundings. He did not simply move to the

51 fashionable suburbs like his parents, however – already an aesthetic and social idealist, he set out to create a perfect home in a better place, and commissioned his friend to design it. The house, dubbed Red House, is now known as an important early work of Arts and Crafts architecture, and the effort to furnish it was famously a major impetus for Morris’s design work. The house and the community it was meant to host were directly related to Morris’s ideals for art and life: centered on handwork, communal spirit, and a rosy-hued view of the medieval period past. The site chosen for the home, meanwhile, appealed to Morris’s established taste for rural Thames tributary landscapes. At the time of its construction in 1860, Red House lay in the Kent village of Upton on the far eastern edge of London’s suburban reaches, about ten and a half miles (17 km) from the center of the City and twelve miles (19.5 km) from Red Lion Square (fig. 13).106 It was the furthest Morris ever lived from central London in his adulthood, and the furthest from the Thames, too. The house is three miles (4.8 km) from the Thames at Erith, but it was still close to other rivers: less than a mile and a half (just over 2km) from a major tributary, the Cray, and three quarters of a mile (1.2 km) from its smaller tributary, the Shuttle. Like the Walthamstow of Morris’s childhood, the area was largely rural: the Red House site was an old orchard, and surrounded by fields and market gardens (fig. 19).107 The Cray is a smaller river than the Lea, and the Shuttle barely more than a brook, but there are distinct similarities between the Cray and the Lea, too. Though the Cray is short – only about nine miles

106 The area is now part of the , and thoroughly suburbanized.

107 MacCarthy, 154-55.

52 (14km) long – and not navigable, its supply and force were enough to drive many mills.108 The area was also known for an association with textile history – the river’s broad gravel terrace flood plain supported the development of the English bleaching industry in the seventeenth century.109 Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Cray, like the Lea, was known for its textile printing works.110 This mix of agriculture and industry would therefore have been familiar to Morris, as would the broad green tributary valley of the river. Despite Morris’s apparent desire to move away from the city, part of the reason that the site in Upton was chosen was that the Cray valley was not entirely disconnected from London. The house stood about two and a half miles from Abbey Wood, then the nearest rail station in the area, and Morris and his friends and family happily moved between house and station by horse-wagon.111 Abbey Wood was on the North Kent Line, and a journey of about an hour would deliver passengers to London Bridge Station and, after 1864, to .112 This meant that Morris could regularly travel into London to attend to business – a trip that became increasingly necessary after the foundation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co. in 1861. Like

108 Eleven mills are recorded in the Domesday Book in 1068. Katherine Harding and Denise Baldwin, Along the River Cray: A Pictorial History of the Cray Valley, (London: London Borough of Bexley, 2012), 2.

109 Harding and Baldwin, Along the River Cray, 89.

110 ibid., 98.

111 MacCarthy, 157.

112 The two stations are, respectively, 1.5 miles (2.5 km) and 2/3 of a mile (1 km) from Red Lion Square.

53 Walthamstow in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mid-nineteenth-century Upton was already essentially a genteel suburb, semi-rural in appearance, but intimately connected to London’s business and transport. The Cray valley’s proximity to London meant that it would soon go the same way as Walthamstow, its meadows and market gardens largely disappearing under expanding suburban and industrial development. But the Morrises would not be there to see it.113 They left Red House in 1865, a year before the railway came to nearby Bexley and suburban development in the area exploded.114 The primary reason for leaving Red House seems to have been the same one that originally drew Morris to the area: its distance from London. The business and production work of the Firm required Morris to be in London regularly, and the more than hour-long commute was too difficult.115 It was more practical for him and his young family to live in London, close to the Firm – and they chose to live very close indeed, moving into the same Georgian townhouse in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, that housed the Firm’s offices and workshops. At Queen Square, Morris was back where he had begun in central London, only a few blocks north of Red Lion Square. The location was obviously convenient for his work, and and Bessie Burden’s work, too – the two sisters were

113 The family had expanded in their time at Red House: both of his daughters were born there, and Jane’s sister Elizabeth (Bessie) Burden also came to live with them not long before they left for London and lived with them for several years at Queen Square. MacCarthy, 198 and Collected Letters Vol. 1, 172.

114 Harding and Baldwin, Along the River Cray, 86.

115 MacCarthy, 193-94. Other factors likely played a part, including the collapse of the communal dream of living with the Burne-Joneses and the cost of sustaining a large independent household.

54 heavily involved in the Firm’s production. By the early 1870s, however, the family no longer found it comfortable to share premises with their workplace or to live in central London, and they began looking for alternate accommodation. This search took two forms. First, in 1871 Morris sought out a countryside retreat where he and his family and friends could escape from London; as will be discussed in the following chapter, he found Kelmscott Manor, which was to become his most-beloved place. By the end of 1872, Morris was also looking for a new London home.116 He turned his attention to London’s western riverside suburbs, and the family moved to a rented home in Turnham Green, Chiswick in 1873. Five years later, they moved again, settling at a home on the Hammersmith Embankment which they named Kelmscott House after their Oxfordshire retreat. As will be discussed in more detail below, Kelmscott House is an obviously Thamesian site, and was thought of in such terms by Morris and his family. It is important to note, however, that Morris was never separated from the broader landscape of the Thames and its tributaries, no matter where he was in London. Like any other Thames valley settlement, London lies atop terraces of clay and gravel lain down by millennia of floods and water level changes. The whole of the city is formed around the river and formed by the ways the river has shaped the land around it. London is where it is because of how its landscape interacts with the river: it is far enough from the sea to be relatively protected from weather and invasion, but with tidal water ideal for reaching the sea for trade, and the center of London’s most ancient settlement lay near the location of the first practical place to build a bridge as

116 William Morris to Aglaia Ionides Coronio, October 8, 1872. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 164.

55 one moved inland.117 Its urban development, too, was shaped by the curves of the river, which have high ground better for building on their outer edges, and lower ground prone to dampness and flood on their inner edges.118 Tributaries also shaped the city; for example, when living in Holborn Morris was not far from the valley of the culverted Fleet, which still shapes the contours of the area. The Thames drove the city’s economic development as well, providing a base for shipping from London’s earliest history and, in the nineteenth century, hosting the largest port in the world and the ships of a globe-spanning imperial enterprise. Moving through London, Morris would have seen all of these effects of the river and its landscape, and he also would have witnessed the ways the river was changing. Crossing the river on the train from Red House, he would have seen the city’s many new bridges, as well as the forest of masts of the seafaring ships moored in the river (fig. 20).119 He also would have seen the beginnings of the Thames Embankment project, which continued throughout his time living in Queen Square, transforming the Thames foreshore in central London and introducing the interceptor

117 The bridge location is where the various eponymous London Bridges have stood since.

118 This is why many of the most historic pockets of – such as The City, Westminster, , and Greenwich – lie where they do, and why some riverside areas, like the Isle of Dogs, went largely undeveloped until the nineteenth century.

119 Before 1750, central London had only one bridge, the ancient London Bridge. There were no further bridges downstream, and the next upstream was six miles (9.75 km) away at . By the time of Morris’s birth, London had nine bridges. In his lifetime, he would see twenty bridges built in London: thirteen new ones and seven replacements. (Some of these replacements were for older structures, but others were for decades-old bridges that had proven structurally unsound.)

56 sewer which attempted to solve the river’s desperate problems with sewage pollution (fig. 21). Morris could not have been unaware of these changes: they were highly visible, large-scale construction works and major civic matters, and general sanitation and water quality were major topic of news and discussion throughout the second half of the century. Morris also had surprisingly robust personal connections to the work of London sanitation. Peter Paul Marshall and Charles Faulkner, the other two named partners of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., were both civil engineers.120 Marshall, though also a painter, worked in sanitary engineering throughout his life, as discussed above. In 1859, meanwhile, Charles Faulkner left his position as a mathematics fellow at Oxford to train as a civil engineer in London. Faulkner gave up the work within several years – according to Fiona MacCarthy, it was because he got too many complaints about arriving at the Firm smelling like the sewers.121 Whether or not this is true (and it seems quite plausible), this anecdote drives home the centrality of the physical presence of London’s polluted rivers and major engineering efforts in the mid-nineteenth century. Morris lived amidst modern London, and he could not avoid the stink of the sewers entering his workplace, because his friends had found professional opportunity there – and they needed those types of opportunities, because aesthetic ideals were not paying the bills. No matter what sort of river Morris wished

120 In its early years the Firm did not make enough money to support its partners financially. Morris got by largely on income from inherited copper mine shares for at least several years, and the other partners found their primary income through professions or painting.

121 MacCarthy, 171. Faulkner took on a salaried position at the Firm as a general manager in 1862.

57 he lived along or chose to depict in his works, his everyday surroundings and everyday life were shaped by a river that was also a space of environmental degradation and rapid, large-scale technological and urban change.

At Kelmscott House, Morris had a more direct relationship with the London Thames than ever before. In fact, if it had been any more direct, he would have been living in a boat. The large Georgian house sits directly on the Hammersmith Embankment, overlooking the river, separated from the water only by the river wall, a narrow roadway, and a small front garden (figs. 22-24). This riverine presence was a large part of what drew Morris there, and it is a defining aspect of the landscape there and of his relationship with the site. Hammersmith is, like all of London, a Thames landscape. It is a historic settlement on the north shore of the river, on high ground where the river turns south towards .122 The Bath Road, one of the primary roads from London to the west of England, ran close to the river there. 123 The original village spread itself along both the riverbanks and the road, which is locally known as King Road (fig. 24). The riverside areas of the village were a mix of residential, commercial, and industrial premises, with a street or promenade running along the river. Kelmscott House is on

122 Historic development in the area followed the pattern of the rest of London: settlements on the outer edges of river curves, and undeveloped lands on the inside of the curves, where land was lower. Barnes, the area across the river from Hammersmith, was very sparsely developed until the second half of the nineteenth century.

123 The Bath Road eventually became the A4. In the twentieth century, a new A4 route was built in Hammersmith between Kings Road and the river, meaning that today a multi-lane highway runs across the northern end of Kelmscott House’s back garden.

58 Upper Mall, the upstream portion of that street. In Morris’s time, Upper Mall ended at the banks of a waterway, a tidal outflow stream of known generally as The Creek or Hammersmith Creek. Upper Mall was connected with the rest of Hammersmith by High Bridge, which crossed the creek a little way upstream from its confluence with the Thames. The Creek was navigable up to King Street, and historic OS maps show that its shores and mouth were host to wharfs and industrial premises, all within 300 feet (90 m) of Kelmscott House (fig. 25).124 Like the rest of the London area, Hammersmith underwent extensive changes in the nineteenth century. Originally located in the county of Middlesex, it became a London parish relatively early, in 1834. A few years earlier in 1827, the first suspension bridge on the Thames had opened there, linking Hammersmith to Barnes on the south shore and making the village all the more important to the circulation of London’s population and goods. At that time, the civil parish of Hammersmith had a population of just over 10,000, already almost double its population in 1801.125 Population growth and corresponding development continued at a fairly steady pace until the Metropolitan Railway – London and the world’s first underground rail line – expanded west to the first Hammersmith Station in 1864.126 After this, the local population almost tripled between 1861 and 1881, going from about 25,000 to 72,000;

124 The local industrial premises included malthouses – part of the brewing industry – on the west bank of the creek, and a lead mill on Middle Mall. Today the Creek is covered over, and the area of its mouth and the leadworks is Furnivall Gardens, a small public park.

125 The exact population was given as 10,222 on the 1831 census. “Hammersmith CP/Ch/Vest Through Time,” Vision of Britain. http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/ unit/10164618/cube/TOT_POP

126 Morris later used the line to commute to central London.

59 by 1901, the parish had over 100,000 residents.127 The population was mixed: wealthy and middle-class families lived along the river and in some neighborhoods, but other areas were very poor. May Morris remembered “ragged mites from the neighbouring riverside slum” (presumably the area around the Creek and leadworks) playing at Kelmscott House’s river stairs, and her father going down to beg them to be quiet while he worked.128 In other words, Hammersmith was much like any other part of London in the period: urbanizing and industrializing, its population growing, some groups poor and suffering and others comfortable, and all living in a landscape shaped by the Thames. Jane, Jenny, and May Morris were abroad in Italy when William found the house, and he wrote several extensive letters to Jane describing the building and its surroundings and asking if she thought it a good choice. He mentions the river several times in the letters, emphasizing how important it was to his choice of the house. In the first letter, he wrote that “the open river and the garden at the back are a great advantage.”129 Later, in the letter informing Jane he had leased the house, he assured her that despite the house’s distance from central London, their friends would visit “if only for the sake of the garden & river.”130 He also reported to May about the

127 Population calculated from census data via Vision of Britain, Hammersmith Civil Parish and St. Peter and St. Paul subdistrict data sets.

128 Collected Works Vol. 13, xvii.

129 William Morris to Jane Morris, March 12, 1878. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 456.

130 William Morris to Jane Morris, April 2, 1878. ibid., 469. Morris was right – people came to the house for many reasons, but the river was one. The family hosted an annual party to view the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.

60 attractiveness of the site,131 and in another letter to Jane, he wrote: “The situation is certainly the prettiest in London.”132 The prettiness of the house’s location continued to be mentioned in later letters to friends and family, though always with qualification, couched within tacit criticism of the city as a whole as when he wrote to May that “it looked all very cheerful – for London.”133 Nevertheless, the attractiveness of the site that was what made it tolerable to Morris – and the Thames was the primary factor in that beauty. The river was a constant part of life at Kelmscott House, always visible from the windows, and occasionally even making its way inside when floodwaters and high tides topped the embankment.134 The centrality of the river at Kelmscott House is reflected in the writings of Morris and his daughter May.135 Both William’s letters and May’s reminiscences make particular mention of the effect of the light on the water outside the house’s large Georgian windows. William wrote to Jenny in the late 1880s,

131 William Morris to May Morris, April 8 or 9, 1878. ibid., 575.

132 William Morris to Jane Morris, March 18. 1878. ibid., 459.

133 William Morris to May Morris, April 8 or 9, 1878. ibid., 575.

134 Morris mentioned the possibly of the water reaching the house’s basement kitchen in a letter to May. William Morris to May Morris, March 9, 1889. Collected Letters Vol. 3, 40. May’s introductions to her father’s works includes a story about friends and family rushing out to the outbuilding where the Morris & Co. Hammersmith carpets were woven to rescue the Firm’s most elaborate carpet from a particularly high tide. Collected Works Vol. 13, xxv.

135 It also appears in other small details of his life and work, such as the maker’s mark of the Firm’s Hammersmith rugs, which were first woven in a Kelmscott House outbuilding. The mark shows a hammer – a symbol of workmanship – above, as May wrote, “a blue zig-zag (for the river).” Collected Works Vol. 13, xxiii.

61 “I am sitting in my room with the dancing about in the sunshine on the table & the water sparkling outside so that it looks quite pretty.”136 May’s description of the house repeatedly calls up the same effect,137 and she also refers to the effect of the river’s reflected light on the rooms and objects of the house, intimately linking the river outside and the life inside: “The south side of the drawing-room with its five windows was all light and movement from the river…. The Red House settle caught the gleams of the river on its tawny gold panels in winter evenings, and in summer the dancing reflections of the river.”138 The views from the house, too, are as important to her description of the home as any detail of the interior, stretching over more than a page. She emphasizes how one could experience the natural world there by witnessing the sky, the weather, and the river, but also notes how much they enjoyed watching the river traffic, “the great barges coming up on the tide, the speeding sails.”139 “How we loved and watched it all,” she concludes, “The spaciousness, the interest of the riverside!”140 As well as making the Morris’s city home beautiful, the Hammersmith Thames provided a link to the rural river landscapes they loved. Sometimes those links were quite literal, as in the case of the summer river journeys of 1880 and 1881, when the Morris family and various friends embarked from the landing stairs outside Kelmscott

136 William Morris to Jenny Morris, October 10, 1889. Collected Letters Vol. 3, 109.

137 Collected Works Vol 13, xvii and xx.

138 ibid., xix-xx.

139 ibid., xvii-xviii.

140 ibid., xviii.

62 House and adventured upstream to Kelmscott Manor.141 The physical connection between the rural Thames Morris loved and the city Thames where he lived was obvious, and it brought him pleasure. For example, in 1892 Morris wrote to Jenny at Kelmscott Manor, telling her that he and May had sat outside at Kelmscott House watching the tide and boats, “So you see we have a river as well as you.”142 This connection is particularly important given the influence of Kelmscott and the rural river in Morris’s design work, especially in the 1880s – just after he took the lease on Kelmscott House. Those designs called up the countryside, but they were made in the city, where Morris spent his days overlooking a very different river. Despite the Morris’s aesthetic pleasure in the Hammersmith Thames, the river there was hardly a beautiful idyll. Because the water is still tidal at Hammersmith, the area would have been subject to the same pollution cycling as the rest of the London Thames, in which the tide churned the river’s noxious water upstream twice a day, making it more difficult for waste to flow away. And even though the sewage problems of the center city were somewhat ameliorated by Bazalgette’s sewer in the 1860s, the London Thames still received the runoff of much of southern England. As other Thameside cities like Reading and Oxford grew, their human and industrial waste became part of the cumulative pollution of the river.143 The clear water of Kelmscott Manor ran down to Kelmscott House, but so did a great deal else.

141 See Introduction, p. 1.

142 William Morris to Jenny Morris, August 29, 1892. Collected Letters Vol. 3, 437.

143 Luckin, Pollution and Control, 65.

63 More locally, there were smaller-scale nuisances to think of: in 1883, Morris wrote a letter to the Daily News confirming a report of a “malodorous and insanitary” ditch on the south side of the river, which he argued impeded the ability of locals to walk and enjoy their attractive surroundings.144 The surroundings were not all beauty, however. Morris described this ditch as running “along the towpath from the Soap Works by Hammersmith-bridge.”145 This brief phrase sums up much that is left out in William and May’s statements about sparkling water and leaves. Kelmscott House overlooked trees and sunlight, but also a working waterway, industrial sites, and a modern bridge. The adjoining riverside suburbs of Chiswick, Hammersmith, and Chelsea were all mixed industrial and residential spaces, with homes lying beside businesses like boatworks, building yards, and factories.146 Directly across the river, there were the reservoirs and buildings of a waterworks.147 Although river trade had slackened with the coming of the railways, boats still carried cargo and passengers along the water, some towing via the towpath Morris mentioned, others powered by wind or, increasingly, steam.148 And not far downstream, in full view of Kelmscott House, there was . In the mid-1880s, the original 1820s bridge

144 William Morris to the editor of the Daily News, August 14, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 216-17.

145 ibid., 216.

146 In 1884, Morris wrote to his mother about a fire in a timber yard in Chiswick “lighting up everything far and near.” William Morris to Emma Shelton Morris, December 31, 1884. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 365.

147 These fairly low-lying structures may have been blocked from view by trees, as they are today.

148 The Morris family’s own river trips were powered mainly by towpath towing.

64 and its stone piers were replaced with a stronger bridge with iron piers decorated in a particularly ornate pseudo-historical Victorian fashion which Morris did not care for in the least. By focusing on the water and the sparkling riverlight, William and May Morris closed off their home’s less than ideal surroundings, making the best of Kelmscott House and of London. It could never be an ideal place, however, because it still was London. As May wrote: “I do not think he ever felt in his heart that the house he named Kelmscott House was our real home; it was a convenient and seemly shelter from the weather, a place to keep books and pretty things in, but at best a temporary abode, as all building would be to him in modern London.”149 William Morris’s own statements about the necessity of being in London were much sharper. When he chose a site in Merton for the Firm’s factory in 1881, forgoing another possible site at Blockley in the rural Cotswolds, he wrote to his friend William de Morgan, “so adieu Blockley and joy for ever (sic), and welcome grubbiness, London, low sprits and boundless riches.”150 In 1882, he wrote to his friend and frequent correspondent Georgiana Burne-Jones after a visit to Kelmscott, "You may imagine that coming back to this beastly congregation of smoke-dried swindlers and their slaves (whom one homes one day to make their rebels)… does not make me much more in love with London… however let that pass, since in London I am and must be.”151 Pained resignation, not acceptance, was the rule.

149 Collected Works Vol. 13, xvi.

150 William Morris to William de Morgan, April 16, 1881. Collected Letters of William Morris, Vol. 2a, 42. For more on the search for a factory, see Chapter 5, p. 201-03.

151 William Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, August 24, 1880. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 584-585. Morris also contrasted the two Thameses in this passage: after recounting

65 “Sordidness, Filth, and Squalor”: London in Morris’s Writings Criticisms of London are scattered across Morris’s aesthetic and political essays and lectures. His longest passages on the subject come in his lectures framed around art and political systems, particularly “Art Under Plutocracy” and “Art Under Socialism,” and in two city-centered essays, “Ugly London” and “Town and Country.” The criticisms Morris leveled on the city could be oblique, carefully tempered, or bold – even venomous – but all are part of a shared concern with London as a den of social ills and comorbid poor aesthetic taste. Morris’s critical lecture-essays152 are full of strong words and polemical phrasing, but the language used for London is particularly colorful. Some words Morris used for London, its lifestyle, and its built environment in his public writings included vulgar, ugly, squalid, sordid, sickening, shabby, noisome, hideous, filthy, and beastly. Often these terms were combined into particularly ringing condemnations, for example, in “Art under Plutocracy”: “Sordidness, filth, and squalor, embroidered with patches of pompous and vulgar hideousness.”153 The situations which Morris sought to criticize with these sorts of words varied. Some references were vague, taking it as a given that the audience would understand implications that London and other cities are unattractive, dirty, and all-around bad. Others are specific: multiple essays mention the bad conditions of poor districts and the vulgarity of wealthier ones, and some criticize

two pleasant journeys on the Thames during his time away, he concluded “So here I am again on the lower Thames, finding it grimy.”

152 Many of his lectures were later published as essays, and the essays are the only texts of most the lectures that survive.

153 “Art under Plutocracy,” 1883. Collected Works Vol. 23, 164-191. First delivery: 7 November 1883, the Russell Club, University College Hall, Oxford.

66 London architecture. Suburban growth and the apparent presence of London taste and values in the countryside were also of particular concern to Morris and appeared repeatedly in his criticism. As we have seen, Morris was ill-at-ease the type of suburban development that had altered the landscape of the Lea valley and many other areas around London. In his lectures, he made critiques of such development both because it destroyed rural spaces and because common suburban architecture offended his taste. One of his most evocative criticisms of London regards of the city’s sprawling growth: “The spreading sore of London swallowing up with its loathsomeness field and wood and heath without mercy and without hope, mocking our feeble efforts to deal even with its minor evils of smoke laden sky and befouled river.”154 Morris’s criticisms were occasionally tempered with considerations of the benefits of the city, though these were always couched in broader criticisms and calls to action. In the 1892 lecture “Town and Country,” he spoke of one benefit to London, “its intellectual life.”155 The thrust of his argument, however, is not that London has its own benefits, but that the countryside needed its own intellectual life, and the city needed to be more like the countryside. In the earlier “Some Hints on Pattern Designing,” Morris did acknowledge that the situation was complicated when he called for people “Not to live in an ugly and squalid place (such as London) for the

154 “Art and Socialism,” 1884. ibid., 192-214. Delivered 23 January 1884, Leicester Secular Society, Leicester.

155 “Town and Country,” 1892. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1892/ town.htm. Delivered 29 May 1892, the Hammersmith Socialist Society, Kelmscott House.

67 sake of mere excitement or the like, but only because our duties bind us to it.”156 This phrase’s relatively gentle approach likely owes a great deal to when it was written. “Some Hints on Pattern Designing” was delivered in 1881, and not long after Morris took the leases at Kelmscott House and Merton Abbey. In acknowledging that some people might need to be in London, he was acknowledging his own situation. He had to be in London, but he certainly was not going to like it, and he did not think anyone else should, either. Like “Some Hints on Pattern Designing,” the 1888 essay “Ugly London” is a relatively personal and gentle take on the subject, especially when compared to some of Morris’s contemporaneous lectures. A response to an essay on London’s unattractiveness by the writer Ouida, the piece agrees with her criticisms and takes them further, but also tempers the critique with an unusual degree of emotional self- reflection. “It is difficult,” Morris wrote, “To express in words the feeling with which this ‘cockney nightmare’ burdens me; ‘discouraging’ is still the best word I can find.”157 He goes on to draw an analogy with smell: “There are certainly smells which are more depressing and deadly to pleasure than those which are frankly the nastiest:… these kinds of smells are more lowering than the kind of stench that drives one to write furiously to the district surveyor. And the quality of London ugliness is

156 “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” 1881. Collected Works Volume 22, 175-205. First delivery 10 December 1881, the Working Men's College, Queen's Square, London. Originally published The Architect: Part 1, 17 December 1881, 391-394; Part 2, 24 December 1881, 408-410.

157 “Ugly London,” Pall Mall Gazette. September 4, 1888. https://www.marxists.org/ archive/morris/works/1888/ugly.htm “Cockney nightmare” is a phrase borrowed from Thomas’s Carlyle’s 1850 essay “Hudson’s Statue,” in which Carlyle railed against modern tastelessness and tied it to political ills.

68 just of this heart-sickening kind.”158 This reflection is more sunk in depression than rage, but it nonetheless drew upon the same well of ill-feeling and aesthetic-political criticism, and came to the same sorts of conclusions: that minor aesthetic chances might be made to improve London a little, but its bad qualities could only be truly ameliorated if something revolutionary was to happen.

News from Nowhere Morris’s most extensive writing on London begins where his lectures and essays leave off. Rather than calling for real change brought about by revolution, News from Nowhere shows what that change could look like.159 The novel is narrated by a late Victorian man known as “Guest” who finds himself transported to twenty-first century England, renamed Nowhere after the coming of the socialist revolution in the early twentieth century.160 The narrator – a man active in the socialist cause, raised in Walthamstow, and living in Hammersmith – is a clear stand-in for Morris. The book outlines Morris’s particular vision of ideal socialism, in which all objects and buildings are beautiful and well-made by hand, everyone does work because they want to, and the only landscape is that of the traditional English countryside. This fantasy is Morris’s most well-known work of fiction, and it has been extensively discussed in

158 ibid.

159 News from Nowhere began life in 1890 as a serialized story in Commonweal, the newspaper of the Socialist League. Morris had helped to found and support both the League and the paper. The story was revised and published as a book in 1891. This section uses the 1891 text, as published in the 2009 Oxford World Classics edition edited by David Leopold.

160 The name of the place, Nowhere, is the literal English translation of ‘utopia.’

69 other venues, particularly by scholars or utopianism and Socialism. It merits some attention here because of the ways it reinforces the landscape tastes, criticisms, and ideals that Morris returned to throughout his life. The re-imagined London and countryside of his Nowhere are the peak of his idealized world, but they are not unfamiliar, and like his life, they center on the Thames. The novel begins when Guest goes to sleep after a late night of drinking and arguing about Socialism in 1880s London and wakes up the next morning hungover in Hammersmith. He descends to the river to clear his head with a swim. Though he has already noted the unusually clear water of the river, it is only when he emerges from a full submersion that he realizes that he has entered a new world. His description of the new Hammersmith neatly sums up everything Morris found wanting in his own Hammersmith: “The soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys were gone; the engineer’s works gone; the lead-works gone.”161 The bridge he had known is replaced by one “of stone arches, splendidly solid, and as graceful as they were strong,” topped with “fanciful little buildings” in the mode of a medieval bridge, and weathered but with “no marks of the grimy sootiness which I was used to on every London building more than a year old.”162 He finds the rest of London similarly transformed. The sprawl of the Victorian city has shrunken back and the land use and architecture of what urban space remains has changed. Streams have been unculverted, revealing a “pretty little brook” near

161 William Morris, News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, ed. David Leopold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7.

162 ibid., 7-8.

70 central Hammersmith163. Kensington, a wealthy neighborhood that had undergone a development boom in the second half of the nineteenth century, has almost entirely disappeared, replaced by a forest that spreads north and east to eventually meet Epping Forest.164 Even in the very center of the West End, the landscape is one of free- standing homes surrounded by gardens which overflow with flowers and productive fruit trees.165 Trafalgar Square has become an orchard, and the Houses of Parliament are now the Dung Market, used to store manure.166 Though he does not visit, Guest discusses east London several times. Dick, his guide through Nowhere, describes Walthamstow as “A pretty place… a very jolly place, now that the trees have had time to grow again since the great clearing of houses in 1955.”167 Guest learns that the slums of East London were cleared as well, and that an annual feast to commemorate the occasion takes place on the meadows that replaced them.168 And the Lea, too, has been restored, leading him to reflect: “How strange! that I who have seen the very last remnant of the pleasantness of the meadows by the Lea destroyed, should have heard them spoken of with pleasantness come back to them in full measure.”169 All over, the city has fallen away. The rule is not rewilding (to borrow a twenty-first-century term),

163 ibid., 23.

164 ibid.

165 ibid., 35.

166 ibid., 35-36 and 28.

167 ibid., 15

168 ibid., 57

169 ibid., 58.

71 however. It is, rather, what might be called reruralizing. The forest that has overtaken Kensington is managed, and the renewed Essex marshes are grazed.170 Morris’s ideal is not a wilderness, but a landscape in which the traditionally maintained forests and meadows he loved have overtaken the city he hated. In the second half of the novel, Guest and his new companions set out on an upstream journey much like those Morris took with his friends and family in 1880 and 1881. However, now they travel in a changed landscape and on a changed river, and though the trip is a sort of holidaymaking, they also intend to join in the season’s haymaking. As they move upriver, Guest is pleased to see that the spread of London’s suburbs along the Thames has also been reversed, so that they no longer have to see “the hideous vulgarity of the cockney villas of the well-to-do, stockbrokers and other such, which in older time marred the beauty of the bough-hung banks” – a degradation which he grows upset just remembering.171 Eventually, the party comes to rest at an old house which is clearly Kelmscott Manor. In this way, the story not only connects to another point in Morris’s personal geography; it also interlinks his imagined utopia and his true pastoral idyll, the “Old House by the Thames” and the rural riverside landscape around it. It is at Kelmscott that the story ends, and it was there that Morris found the epitome of everything he had loved in the landscapes of the Thames and its tributaries since his childhood along the Lea. Kelmscott was the place that let him turn away from London, and it shaped

170 ibid., 23 and 58-59. As will be discussed in the following chapter, reruralization is also seen in Nowhere’s countryside in the form of a return to traditional land management.

171 ibid., 124 and 135.

72 only for his writing, but also his designs which – as I will show – draw upon a lifetime’s experience of Thames tributaries and a deep knowledge of the particular landscape of Kelmscott and the Upper Thames.

London and Morris’s Art The previous section concerned itself with Morris’s writings because of London’s presence there, but London’s absence in Morris’s art holds its own significance. It may seem a given that someone so at odds with the city and so in love with the countryside depicted only the countryside in his works, but that apparently obvious outcome merits a moment of further inspection. The absence of London can be seen, in fact, as a presence – another piece of evidence of Morris’s rejection of the city and choice of the countryside. Lynda Nead has characterized the “metropolitan experience” of Victorian London as primarily visual, pointing out how the city was associated with “its address to the sense of sight” and its saturation with images.172 Morris lived his life in this London, regularly absorbing the visual world of its changing landscape, and exposed to the proliferation of images of the city. Yet he did not participate, even as the artists around him engaged with the modern city’s landscapes, lives, problems, and spectacles. Within his own Pre-Raphaelite circle, even artists known primarily for their images of history, literature, and fantasy also painted or illustrated scenes of modern London, particularly during the early years of the movement – these works largely predated Morris’s arrival in that artistic scene, but they were nonetheless part

172 Nead Victorian Babylon, 57.

73 of the visual language of his peers (fig. 26).173 Meanwhile, other painters interested in modern narrative, cultural commentary, and fashionable society also depicted the city at length, as did those interested in more abstract subjects like the effects of light and atmosphere. And the Thames was a particularly popular subject for them all.174 To list only a few examples of the outpouring of London, and particularly London Thames, art during Morris’s lifetime: James Abbott McNeil Whistler famously depicted the docks of east London (fig. 20) and the light and weather of Chelsea and Battersea outside his own riverside window only a few miles downstream from Kelmscott House (fig. 27). Gustave Doré made many images of the docks and of the destitute and desperate who sheltered on or around the river’s bridges in his engravings for London: A Pilgrimage in 1872 (fig. 28). Several Impressionist painters, including Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, first painted the city as refugees of the Franco-Prussian War around 1870. Monet returned repeatedly to explore the effects of light and fog upon the Thames and its landmarks, particularly its bridges and the Houses of Parliament (fig. 29). James Tissot – another Frenchman, but one who settled permanently in London – painted fashionable boating parties on the Upper

173 The popularity of the city as subject decreased after the 1850s, and it was uncommon among the ‘second generation’ of Pre-Raphaelites with whom Morris can be grouped. For other examples of Pre-Raphaelite London works, see: Ford Madox Brown, Work (1852–1865); John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past (1859); and John Everett Millais, The Bridge of Sighs (1858).

174 Of course, the Thames was also a popular subject for London art of other periods. See, for example, the works in Mireille Galinou and John Hayes, London in Paint: Oil Paintings in the Collection at the Museum of London (London: Museum of London, 1996).

74 Thames, but he also depicted scenes around the London river (fig. 30).175 British narrative painters and printmakers concerned with the problems of modern life also often turned to the Thames, which served both as an image of urban and imperial might and as a symbol of desperation and degradation. Paintings and illustrations of everything from riverside landmarks to construction sites to the working river celebrated the innovations and power of the city.176 But ragged children and homeless families sheltering on and under bridges were also frequent subjects, as were “fallen women” with their implied final fates in the water.177 In all these images and many more, the Victorian London Thames took in a broad variety of subjects and cultural roles: its feats of engineering like bridges and docks showed the advancements of modernity, its abundance of ships and goods showed the span of empire, its crushes of

175 For more see Nancy Rose Marshall and Malcolm Warner, James Tissot: Victorian Life, Modern Love (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

176 Examples include John O’Connor, The Embankment, 1874; John Anderson’s paintings of the Houses of Parliament; the Illustrated London News’s many depictions of the construction of the underground, sewers, and docks (fig. 21); and dock and Pool scenes like Charles Napier Hemy, Blackwall (1872) and works by Frederick A. Winkfield. See Nead, Victorian Babylon, and Mireille Galinou and John T. Hayes, London in Paint.

177 For examples of bridge shelterers, see Augustus E. Mulready, A Recess on a London Bridge (1879-1880), , I am Starving (1857), and Gustave Doré. For examples of the ‘fallen woman’ around the Thames, see Rossetti, Found (fig. 26), Whistler, Wapping, Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past, and despairing figures such as August Leopold Egg, Past and Present (1858), Abraham Solomon, Drowned! Drowned! (1860), and Thomas Graham, Alone in London (c. 1904). Nancy Rose Marshall discusses some of these works and the broader types associated with them in City of Gold and Mud: Painting Victorian London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Lynda Nead’s Myths of Sexuality (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1988) and Susan Casteras’s Images of Victorian Womanhood in (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987) also include discussions of the fallen woman type and the Thames.

75 enthusiastic crowds showed the excitement and intensity of new urban lives, but its desperate inhabitants exposed problems that were culturally associated with the ills of modernity and the city – all while the play of light on water let certain painters advance a new aesthetic appreciation of the fogs and “atmospheres” caused, at least in part, by the city’s infamous pollution. Morris would have been surrounded by all these images and many more. But he never depicted anything similar – nor did he even refer to any such art in his personal or public writings. Of course, Morris was not a painter or illustrator, but a designer, working with a different visual language and set of expectations. Yet, other designers did reach towards the modern and even the urban, manipulating new materials or depicting London scenes on paper or cloth, while artists like Whistler showed the ‘decorative’ potential of London’s particular visual character, potential that could have also been drawn upon in the literal decorative arts. But Morris’s rejection of the visual interest of London’s Thames was so complete that the subject did not even exist, not even to be referenced negatively – implying, in its absence, a total unavailability. Those were the sites he knew, the landscape he inhabited, and in his visual work, he placed them entirely outside of the realm of consideration. To Morris, the countryside was the only place where beauty and interest was available, and so the countryside was where he found his visual inspiration. As we have seen, however, Morris’s countryside tastes were themselves an effect of the city, molded by the changing space of suburban tributaries and solidified by his horror of the urban, industrial, modern world that had London at its heart. His patterns and other visual work were not a neutral choice, but an active rejection of London in favor of a pastoral vision of the Thames landscape.

76 Chapter 3

A HEAVEN ON EARTH: KELMSCOTT

When William Morris rejected London, and with it the London Thames, he did not simply turn towards the countryside in a general sense: rather, he focused on a single site, drawing abundant inspiration from its landscape over a period of twenty- five years. As we have already seen, Morris preferred specific kinds of countryside landscape above all other spaces – namely the rural riverside of the Thames and its tributaries, places that were green and flowering, gentle, and managed through traditional means like hedgelaying, pollarding, and cyclical common grazing and haymaking. From 1871 until his death in 1896, one place epitomized that ideal landscape for Morris: an Oxfordshire village named Kelmscott, where he leased Kelmscott Manor as a country retreat (figs. 31-33). Kelmscott is at the center of his work, and most particularly his designs for printed patterns. It was also a place with an inextricably close relationship with the River Thames. The river influenced the topography, environment, and human use of the site, forming and sustaining the landscape. Morris’s works display a deep understanding of and sympathy for that connection, but also a re-forming of that landscape to meet his own ideals, creating a pastoral idyll out of a real working landscape. The idea of Kelmscott as a central site in Morris's life is not a new one. He would have admitted as much himself. His public writings often mention the house, garden, and surroundings, and his correspondence reflects a love and longing for the place. In her introductory texts to her father's collected works, May Morris often

77 referred to Kelmscott, repeatedly acknowledging its significance. In one volume, she wrote "I feel that these notes, to give the true impression of things, must always have their 'undertone' of Kelmscott life."178 This chapter and the one that follows seek to go beyond May’s undertone, exploring Kelmscott not as an idealized and evocative backdrop for Morris’s life, but as a highly specific physical site which Morris encountered and reacted to as he created his works. These chapters argue that in order to give a “true impression” of very literal things – objects produced by Morris – it is necessary to understand Kelmscott’s real Thameside landscape in detail. This chapter will outline Morris’s relationship with Kelmscott, which spanned from his early adulthood to his death. In order to do so, it will focus not just on the role of Kelmscott in Morris’s works and ideals, but also on the physical form of the site, which existed independently of Morris and exerted influence over his experience of the place and its aesthetics. In doing so, I draw – as I do across this project – on landscape studies methodologies to incorporate historical and physical site evidence with considerations of Morris’s life and works. The chapter begins with a brief biographic account of Morris’s time at Kelmscott before moving on to a landscape history of the site. I then explore how Morris reacted to and idealized the Kelmscott landscape’s particular form and riverside environment. Morris’s aestheticized and sometimes entirely utopian approach to the site can obfuscate the agricultural and economic realities of the place and the period, but a landscape approach recovers those realities and places them within the context of Morris’s aesthetic-political aims. All of these strands of the site’s history further articulate the marked interrelation of Kelmscott's Upper Thames landscape and Morris’s works. This interrelation is

178 Collected Works v. 14, xx.

78 particularly significant in his patterns for printed designs, and the depths of that relationship will be explored in the subsequent chapter.

Morris at Kelmscott Morris's first visit to Kelmscott was on May 16, 1871, in the company of his friend .179 There, in the furthest southwest corner of Oxfordshire, they found a hamlet of grey stone houses and barns surrounded by agricultural fields and bordered by the Thames. At the southern edge of the village, a large seventeenth-century farmhouse rose above the flat countryside and the river. This was the building the men had come to see, Kelmscott Manor (fig. 33). Morris was seeking a country retreat for himself and his family, with the aim of being able to escape London occasionally without having to secure temporary lodgings each time. This practice of leasing lodging away from the city was common in the period.180 The Victorians had many reasons for these trips, including recreation and tourism, but health was also a factor. One of Morris's stated reasons in seeking a country home was that his young daughters were still nursing coughs from the previous winter – an ailment blamed on London's bad air.181 According to Morris’s early biographer J.W.

179 Murray, a painter and collector, noted the visit in his diary: “Breakfasted with Mr Morris. Went with him to Faringdon. Lunched at Lechlade and drove over to Kelmscott to look at a house and returned in the evening.” Qtd. Parry, Textiles, 95.

180 The upper classes, of course, already had their country estates. As income and transport links increased, upper-middle-class Londoners like the Morrises also spent more time away from the city. Even lower-middle and lower-class Londoners took advantage of new train and steamboat services to take day trips to the countryside or the seaside.

181 MacCarthy, 275.

79 Mackail, Morris was attracted to Kelmscott Manor by a letting-agent's listing in London.182 The very fact that Morris was interested in the listing speaks to his taste for historic rural landscapes. Previously, the Morris family had ventured to the seaside for their holidays, like so many other respectable and well-off Victorian families, and remote corners of rural Oxfordshire were not exactly popular vacation destinations.183 However, there was long precedent in London artists venturing out to rural spaces to paint and relax, and by looking to Kelmscott, Morris was taking part in that pastoralist aesthetic tradition, as well as seeking out a space in keeping with his own lifelong tastes.184 Whatever Morris was looking for or expecting at Kelmscott, what he found there seemed to suit him perfectly. Morris took out a lease on the Manor almost immediately, and throughout the rest of his life he would return to the house and its surroundings as often as possible. At the end of his life, it was where he was buried.185

182 J. W Mackail, The Life of William Morris (New York: Dover Publications, 2013), 225. Nicholas Salmon refers to the listing as “an Oxfordshire house-agent’s catalogue.” The William Morris Chronology (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), 53. The original source for this information is unclear.

183 This included stays in Littlehampton, Sussex in 1864, Southwold, Suffolk, in 1868, and Torquay, Devon, in 1870. Nicholas Salmon and Derek Baker, The William Morris Chronology.

184 For more on London artists’ rural retreats, see Tim Barringer, “The Harvest Field in the Railway Age,” in Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 83–131.

185 Even after his death, the village and manor retained their connection to Morris. His wife and daughters continued spending time there, and in 1913 Jane Morris finally purchased the manor. May Morris preserved the house as a memorial to her father, and it is now owned by the Society of Antiquaries of London and run as a museum centered on the Morrises’ period of tenancy.

80 The day after his first visit, he wrote to his old friend and business partner Charles Faulkner to express his enthusiasm:

I have been looking about for a house for the wife and kids, and whither do you guess my eye is turned now? Kelmscott, a little village about two miles above Radcott Bridge – a heaven on earth; an old stone Elizabethan house like Water Eaton, and such a garden! close down on the river, a boat house and all things handy.186

Faulkner would have recognized the reference to Water Eaton, a 1586 house above Oxford on the Cherwell, which the two men had likely encountered together during their university days. He also would have understood the thrill of the proximity of the river and the presence of a boat house, since their youthful friendship had included a shared enthusiasm for boating and the river.187 Morris had first encountered the Upper Thames while at Oxford, and his enthusiasm for it would deepen at Kelmscott. He was immediately attached to the place, even though his first years there would be fraught with personal and professional complications. Morris continued his letter to Faulkner, "I am going there again on Saturday with Rossetti and my wife: Rossetti because he thinks of sharing it with us if the thing looks likely."188 The thing, it seems, did look likely: Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti took up a shared lease on the house that June. Rossetti was perhaps even more in need of a rural retreat than the Morris family. His physical and mental health were precarious, owing not least to his intake of the sedative chloral hydrate. In 1872 he suffered a breakdown, leading him to spend even more time at Kelmscott than

186 William Morris to Charles Faulkner, May 17, 1871. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 133.

187 MacCarthy, 60.

188 William Morris to Charles Faulkner, May 17, 1871. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 133.

81 before.189 Another factor in the dual lease was that Rossetti and Jane Morris were in the midst of a love affair. William left them to it, departing for Iceland several weeks after taking the lease and not returning until September. During that time, Jane Morris and Rossetti were often together at the Manor, along with Jenny and May. These complicated interpersonal circumstances have been discussed in depth by other authors, and I will not explore them in detail here, except to note that they made Morris's early associations with Kelmscott less than ideal.190 The situation with Rossetti was uncomfortable and distressing. Even putting aside the matter of the love affair, Rossetti was famously difficult, with his addiction exacerbating what were likely underlying mental health difficulties.191 He was prone to paranoia and outbursts, and he bullied those around him, including Morris. On top of everything, Morris and Rossetti were also business partners in the Firm, which was struggling financially, adding to the stress of the period.192 Morris could not face being at the manor for any prolonged period with Rossetti there. In October 1872, he wrote to his friend Aglaia Ionides Coronio that, while he had been visiting Kelmscott frequently over the summer and early autumn, "(I) shall not go there so often now as Gabriel is come there, and talks of staying there permanently: of course he won't do

189 His health continued to decline, and he died only ten years later in 1882, aged 53.

190 Fiona MacCarthy’s Morris is a good place to start exploring Rossetti and the Morrises. See Chapters Seven to Ten (197-348), covering the decade between 1865 and 1875.

191 MacCarthy, 319-322.

192 ibid. 341-344. The Firm was reorganized from Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. to Morris & Co. in early 1874.

82 that, but I suppose he will stay some time."193 A month later, Morris again wrote to Coronio, with more distress:

Rossetti has set himself down at Kelmscott as if he never meant to go away; and not only does that keep me away from that harbour of refuge… but also he has all sorts of ways so unsympathetic with the sweet simple old place, that I feel his presence there as a kind of slur on it.... [I do not] think I should feel this about it if he had not been so unromantically discontented with it.194 Morris chafed at sharing a place which he already loved with someone who did not care for it in the same way. As early as September 1871, only months after taking the lease and after being absent in Iceland for many weeks, Morris called the Manor "my own little old house" and wrote of it with affection.195 Around the same time, Rossetti described the manor as "a beautiful old-fashioned house" in a letter, but went on the bemoan the landscape as boring and "deadly flat" and the village as "about the doziest clump of grey old beehives to look at that you could find anywhere.”196 Rossetti's distaste for the village and landscape also make themselves known in his first painting of Jane Morris, Water Willow (fig. 34). In the work, he reshaped the landscape to suit

193 William Morris to Aglaia Ionides Coronio, October 8, 1872. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 165. He was correct: for the next eighteen months, Rossetti was almost constantly in occupation at the Manor. Linda Parry, “The Morris Family and Kelmscott,” in William Morris’s Kelmscott: Landscape and History, ed. Alan Crossley, Tom Hassall, and Peter Salway (Bollington; London: Windgather Press in association with the Society of Antiquaries of London, 2007), 100.

194 William Morris to Aglaia Ionides Coronio, November 25, 1872. ibid., 172-73.

195 William Morris to Louisa MacDonald Baldwin, September 30, 1871. ibid., 150.

196 Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Alicia Losh, October 28, 1871. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 5: The Chelsea Years, 1863-1872, Prelude to Crisis III. 1871- 1872, ed. William Fredeman (Cambridge, UK: DS Brewer, 2002), 173.

83 his own aesthetic, rearranging buildings and placing them at a raking angle with hills beyond to counteract the "deadly flat" aspect. May Morris later wrote that the painting had bothered her as a child – she had apparently inherited her father's taste for the local landscape and belief in truth in art, and thought that moving the buildings around was immoral.197 In 1874, Morris finally asked Rossetti to release him from the Kelmscott lease, apparently having abandoned hope of ever reclaiming the place he loved.198 Rossetti, however, soon gave up his own half of the lease, and returned to London that July.199 By doing so, he freed Morris to reclaim the Manor for himself and his own happy associations. Morris went on to co-lease the house with a far more amenable friend, the publisher Frederick Startridge Ellis, who shared his affection for the place and particularly for the river’s fishing. Between 1874 and his death in 1896, Morris visited Kelmscott regularly, sometimes accompanied by family or friends and sometimes on his own, sometimes for long stays and sometimes for only a night or two. The historic house was itself a draw, but the landscape and the river were, if anything, more of an attraction. Morris wrote often and effusively of the house's gardens, describing their seasonal changes to family members and friends who were not there with him. He roamed the surrounding countryside, walking along the river or making excursions further afield in the Thames valley and the Cotswolds, and he often and happily set out on the river in a small boat

197 Collected Works Vol. 4, xx.

198 MacCarthy, 335.

199 The two men’s business association also ceased with the reorganization of the Firm in March 1874.

84 to fish. His works reflect the intimate knowledge that can only come from spending a great deal of time in a landscape, especially in the case of the botanical and landscape forms of his patterns, which will be discussed in Chapter 4. Every moment there contributed both to his affection for the place and to the inspiration he drew from it.

Kelmscott: The Landscape and the House Morris’s experience of the Kelmscott landscape is so central to his works that it is essential to understand the site – and not just as Morris recorded it, but also as a physical space with its own particular forms, ecologies, and history. Thus, this section will provide an overview of the landscape history of Kelmscott and Kelmscott Manor, drawing from site visits and from histories of the site and its area, particularly the 2007 William Morris’s Kelmscott: Landscape and History, a collection of archaeological and historical essays about the village, the manor, and the Morrises.200 As in London, the Thames is at the heart of this landscape history, because all of the things Morris loved about Kelmscott – its historical and natural aesthetics, its remoteness, its potential for recreation – were effects of its setting along the Upper Thames. Kelmscott Manor stands near the banks of the Thames among meadows and fields where the far western edge of Oxfordshire meets Gloucestershire, within the small village of Kelmscott201 in the Kelmscott civil parish (fig. 31). The village is about 65 miles (105 km) west of London, and approximately equidistant from Oxford

200 ed. Alan Crossley, Tom Hassall, and Peter Salway (Bollington; London: Windgather Press in association with the Society of Antiquaries of London, 2007).

201 Sometimes also spelled Kelmscot.

85 and the source of the Thames outside of , with each about 17 miles (27 km) away.202 The Cotswolds, a hilly region popular with tourists today for rural beauty and picturesque villages, lie about eight miles (13 km) to the north.203 Kelmscott village is a small loosely-nucleated community clustered among agricultural fields. It is relatively unchanged since Morris’s time. Its population has remained steady, varying between 100 and 150 for several centuries – neither gaining because of development nor losing because of the typical rural exodus to cities.204 This means there has been little new building, and the fields surrounding the village are still used for crops and grazing. The village is composed primarily of houses and farm buildings, all built in local grey limestone. There is a church, St. George’s, where the Morris family is buried, and a pub, but there are no shops, and the village school no longer operates. The nearest town with shops and other services is Lechlade, a little more than two miles (3.5 km) west across the fields. The village lies off the local thoroughfares and had no riverside road, no bridge, and no rail service.205 In Morris’s

202 The river takes a much more meandering path, so by water the village is about 25 miles from and 30 from Oxford.

203 Kelmscott and its neighboring riverside villages and towns are sometimes identified with the Cotswolds, but they are a separate region, both geographically and historically. The characteristic hills, steep valleys, and honey-yellow stone of the Cotswolds are absent near the river.

204 Mary Hodges, “Kelmscott: The People in Their Place,” in William Morris’s Kelmscott, 69.

205 In the first decades of the British rail network, the closest station was at Faringdon, south of the Thames, more than six miles (9.8 km) away by road. The station at Lechlade opened in early 1873. A small Kelmscott and Langford station also operated a mile and a half (2.4 km) north of the village, but it did not open until 1907. Although Swindon, , and Oxford are all relatively close by, Kelmscott remains fairly remote today. There is little public transportation, and the village is reached down

86 time it would have had little traffic and few if any outward signs of modernity. The small size and relative remoteness likely contributed to Morris’s affection for Kelmscott, because while there he could escape at least some aspects of his contemporary world, imagining himself to be in a place apart. The landscape around Kelmscott has few landmarks besides the village itself, and few topographical features besides the river. The land is open, with no woodland to speak of, and only hedges to break up the fields. It is also very flat, especially in comparison to the Cotswolds nearby. The elevation of the entire parish varies by only about ten feet: the riverside is about 220 feet (68m) above sea level, and the highest point, in the northern part of the village, about 230 feet (71m).206 This lack of elevation change is typical of the topography of the Upper Thames. The area of the river valley around Kelmscott is characterized by a series of broad, flat terraces composed of limestone gravel derived from the Cotswolds and the alluvial clay deposited by the river.207 The village and its parish occupy the first of the terraces, closest to the river. Because the plain is so flat, the river meanders a great deal, twisting and turning through the fields of Kelmscott and its surrounding villages.

single-lane country roads. It does host visitors and the traffic they bring, but that is only because of Kelmscott Manor (and perhaps the pub). Otherwise, it has remained largely residential and agricultural, although – like in the Cotswolds – many of the homes are now occupied by people like Morris, well-off city dwellers with a taste for the countryside.

206 Simon Townley, A History of the County of Oxford, Volume 17, 112-113.

207 Mark Robinson, “The Environmental Archaeology and Historical Ecology of Kelmscott,” in William Morris’s Kelmscott, 29. Gravel and clay terracing is fairly common along the Thames and its tributaries, including many like the Lea and Wandle with which Morris is associated.

87 There are no rapids, no precipitous fall, and very little in the way of riverbanks. The river does not cut through higher ground, but rather comes up almost to ground level, creating a near-seamless merging between land and water (fig. 35). The proximity between the Thames’s water and the flat land around it shaped the ecology, agriculture, and management of the Kelmscott area. The soil there is rich and well-watered – at times too well-watered. Small floods of the agricultural land around the village have always been commonplace.208 The Manor’s proximity to the river mean that its surroundings flood even more often than the village itself, and Morris’s correspondence often mentions floods, though the house itself does not seem to have affected often.209 Even when unflooded, Kelmscott Parish is still very wet as a result of the high water table and the lack of gravity-driven drainage. Many drains, ditches, and small streams cut across the area, helping to keep the fields from becoming entirely waterlogged.210 The incursion of water in the fields is not entirely negative, however. Soil nutrients in fields near the river are regularly replenished by flooding, and even fields located further from the river remain rich because of the deep alluvial soil of the

208 Floods that effect the Manor and the village center are less regular, but by no means uncommon: the Victoria County History of the area lists floods that seriously affected the village in 1893, 1903, 1915, and 1947, and more recently in 2000 and 2007. Simon Townley, A History of the County of Oxford, Volume 17, 113.

209 See, for example, letters of November 9, 1875, Collected Letters Vol. 1, 276; December 17, 1877, ibid., 466; and August 23, 1879, ibid., 572. The house’s garden wall may have helped ease the flooding risk.

210 Simon Baker, “A Place for Digging Ditches: Cropmarks Around Kelmscott” in William Morris’s Kelmscott, 15-28.

88 river terraces. Additionally, the dampness keeps crops and meadows well-watered, reducing the need for external irrigation. According to archaeologists, Kelmscott’s rich and well-watered soil was already supporting an open agricultural landscape by the Iron Age (in Britain, c. 800 BCE – 50 CE).211 Historically, the parish's fields were organized in a manner traditional to many riverside agricultural areas in Great Britain: cultivated fields lay further from the river where they could be better maintained, better drained, and better protected from flooding, while fields closer to the river were kept as rough, wet meadows for grazing and hay-growing. Around Kelmscott, the riverside meadows are still open and irregularly shaped, owing to the paths of the river and various drainage ditches, but the cultivated fields are large and regular as a result of enclosure around 1799.212 These newer fields were and are still divided with hedgerows, rather than fences or walls, meaning that even newer landscape features retained aspects of older methods of land management.213 The village of Kelmscott lies amidst the enclosed fields, its houses and other buildings clustering together with the agricultural land beyond. This type of organization, with homesteads and farmyards grouped rather than standing alone on individual farms, is typical of the area.214 However, the history of landownership at

211 Robinson, “The Environmental Archaeology and Historical Ecology of Kelmscott,” 35.

212 The act of enclosure for Kelmscott Parish was obtained in 1798, and physical enclosure would have occurred soon after. Townley, "Medieval and Modern Settlement,” 50.

213 Hedgerows are hand-formed living barriers between fields. Their construction and unique ecology and visual effect are discussed in detail in Chapter 4, 134 and 139-41.

214 Townley, “Medieval and Modern Settlement,” 39.

89 Kelmscott is slightly less typical. Despite its advantages of agricultural richness and easy access to the river, Kelmscott was never a self-contained manorial property. The moniker "Kelmscott Manor" is misleading: the Manor is not the former seat of an aristocratic landowner, and Kelmscott village was never the center of its own estate. Rather, it was an auxiliary portion of a larger estate, Broadwell, and its lands were not even connected to other Broadwell lands.215 Because of this, Kelmscott had no single large house, which may also be part of the reason that the buildings of the village do not center on any particular landmark.216 Village house lots are generally large, with barns and farmyards and even small fields interspersed with the residential area, reflecting the fact that the village’s work was always farming. This mix of small fields and farmyards with homesteads makes the village relatively diffuse even in its clustered organization. The residential area fades outwards into the fields, rather than running up against a distinct village/field boundary. This is especially true as one approaches Kelmscott Manor. Moving south out of the village, one passes homes, then barns and outbuildings, and then a swathe of field before the Manor’s garden wall and outbuildings appear.217

215 Townley, A History of the County of Oxford, 112.

216 The village church, another potential landmark, is tucked away to the north of the village, and it lies alongside a single road, rather than sitting at a crossroads or on a square. The pub is more central, and there is a stone pediment outside it which likely once held a cross, as is often seen at English village crossroads. However, if a cross ever stood there it is long since lost, and the reorganization of the village’s roads (probably executed during enclosure) ⁠ made that site less of a crossroads than previously. The village also did not have its own market, so there is no market space or square.

217 The house itself is largely hidden from view by the garden wall.

90 Kelmscott Manor itself is not so much a fine manor house as an overgrown farmhouse with delusions of grandeur. The village’s population consisted of peasants working the Broadwell estate land until the seventeenth century, when control over the land and wealth became increasingly consolidated among a small number of interrelated Kelmscott families.218 These families altered the built environment of Kelmscott extensively, expanding their farm buildings and constructing or altering homes to reflect their increased wealth. 219 One such building was the house that would become Kelmscott Manor. The original building was constructed sometime in the first decades of the seventeenth century by the Turner family, and known as Lower House.220 The building was extended several times by the family as its fortunes improved.221 In 1665, the obviously upwardly-mobile owner Thomas Turner (the third man of that name to own the house) was granted a coat of arms, securing his position in the gentry.222 In 1864, his descendent James Turner purchased the right to call his home a manor – meaning the home had only been known as Kelmscott Manor for seven years when Morris signed his lease in 1871.223 James Turner died in 1869, at which point the Manor passed to his nephew Charles Hobbs, who put the house up for

218 Townley, “Medieval and Modern Settlement,” 47.

219 ibid., 49.

220 Nicholas Cooper, “Kelmscott Manor,” in William Morris’s Kelmscott, 114.

221 ibid., passim.

222 ibid. 115.

223 Townley, “Medieval and Modern Settlement,” 53.

91 rent.224 The Hobbs family were the dominant landowners and farmers in the village in the later nineteenth century, and they influenced the village as much as the Morrises did, as will be discussed in more detail at the end of this chapter. Today, the built environment of the Manor is in approximately the same layout as it was when the Morrises were resident.225 The house has a three-story central block facing east, with wings at both north and south. The north wing, also three stories, extends two rooms deep to the east and one room deep to the west. The south wing extends only to the west. It is also three stories high and one room deep, creating a U- shape on the back of the house. A single-story service range extends further from this wing at a slight south-west angle.226 The house is surrounded on all sides but the south by a walled garden, which is further sub-divided by hedges. To the east, the garden wall divides the manor property from a lane which runs north to the village and east to the river. A gate opens to the lane and a path runs to one of the manor's doors, forming the view preserved in the frontispiece for News from Nowhere (fig. 36). To the north there is a grassy area flanked by a barn and a cottage, and to the west, a meadow

224 Cooper, “Kelmscott Manor,” 116.

225 The preservation of the house and its surroundings owes in no small part to May Morris's efforts to preserve the site as a memorial to her father in the first decades of the twentieth century. For more information on May's legacy, later changes to the site, and the extensive repairs to and restoration of the house undertaken in the 1960s, see Chapters 10 and 11 of William Morris’s Kelmscott: Landscape and History: Jonathan Howard, "Kelmscott Manor as William Morris Never Knew It," 131-145, and Hal Moggridge, "The Restoration of the Kelmscott Manor Gardens," 146-158. In 2019, the Manor and grounds closed for a large-scale conservation and improvement project, focused primarily on the visitor services facilities in the Manor outbuildings.

226 For information on the interior layout of the Manor, see Cooper, “Kelmscott Manor.”

92 which is part of the manor property. To the south, the wall divides the garden from the service range's courtyard. The garden holds two small outbuildings, a gazebo set against the east wall and a privy to the far south-west corner. The property also includes three barns and a dovecot to the south of the house. These buildings are arranged in three parallel north-south oriented ranges, creating two farmyard spaces between them. A small lane runs between them and the Manor and opens onto the village lane through a gate. Together, these buildings would have originally formed an active farming complex which displayed the success of the Turner family.227 By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the structures were already historic, and apparently of little functional interest to the local agricultural community, given that the manor lease was taken by Morris – a city businessman rather than a farmer, a man more interested in the Thames, angling, and wildflowers than the soil, animal husbandry, or agricultural improvements.

The Thames and Kelmscott Less than five hundred feet (150 m) to the south of Kelmscott Manor, the Thames runs through its riverside meadows. As discussed above, the river is a constant presence in the form of the surrounding landscape; however, the river can also seem surprisingly disjointed from the village and the Manor.228 There are several

227 Today they contain services for the Manor museum, including a café and a shop.

228 As well as being physically noticeable in the village, the disjunct between Kelmscott and the river is reflected in literature on the site. A glance at the index of William Morris's Kelmscott shows that the river features prominently in chapters which focus on the landscape of the site (Chapters 2, 3, 4). Otherwise, it is mentioned only five other times, three of which are in direct relation to the inspiration Morris drew from the river. Chapters concerning the built environment, the Morris family's life at Kelmscott, and Kelmscott's twentieth-century history make no mention of the

93 reasons for this disconnection. Some are reflections of the landscape form and history of the village, and others are effects of changes to the site since Morris’s time. The first reason that the Thames can seem disjointed from Kelmscott is that it is, quite simply, hard to see. Because of the flatness of the landscape and the clustering of the majority of the village buildings about a quarter mile (400m) from the riverbanks, the river is invisible from the village proper.229 The river also has no other appreciable phenomenological presence around Kelmscott. It flows steadily through its narrow channel without impediments like cataracts or weirs, meaning it makes no appreciable sound. If it has a scent or a feel, it is only a part of the area's general leafy green dampness. A visitor today can miss it entirely unless they follow the road east from the manor for a hundred yards, break through a line of trees, and find the water suddenly at their feet. The Manor complex is the closest part of the village to the river, but today it affords only one view of the water, from small windows upstairs in the north-east wing (fig. 37). This limited view is partially the effect of a robust line of trees between the manor and the riverside meadow to its south. The vegetation was much sparser in Morris’s time, as attested to by contemporary photographs (figs. 38 and 39), so there would have been more of a view then – but even then, not much of one. Even without

river at all. The situation is similar in other works centered on Kelmscott Manor, which may mention Morris's love of the river, but which often fail to describe where the river lies in relation to the house, or even to describe the basics of the landscape correctly.

229 This is unlike nearby Lechlade, for example, where the village lies closer to the river and on a slight rise. But even there, the river is only visible from the back sides of the buildings. The village is oriented for business around its market square, not for vistas.

94 the trees, one would only have been able to glimpse the river from a few upstairs windows. The rest of the view is occluded by the garden wall and the outbuildings to the south of the manor and undermined by the structure and orientation of the house. Rather than facing out towards the river, the manor was built approximately parallel to the river. The façade of the manor faces east and slightly north (and the rear, thus, west and slightly south). Both overlook fields, and the closest point in either direction where a direct view from the windows could intersect the river’s path is over a mile and a half away – totally invisible in the flat landscape even if there were not interceding trees. The house clearly was not built to take advantage of river views, but rather oriented to the surrounding fields and the village.230 Along with the growth of trees in the area, another modern change has also altered the manor’s relationship with the river. A shallow, reed-filled ditch now runs just south of the Manor's barns and double farmyard. This feature once held much more water, constituting a semi-navigable backwater which connected to the Thames at either end of the grazing field known as Reefham. Nicholas Cooper has posited that the manor’s farm buildings might have been placed along the backwater to give direct access to boats for trade.231 The water could still take small boats when Morris came to Kelmscott, and the manor complex included the small boathouse mentioned in Morris's first description of the Manor and depicted by Rossetti in Water Willow. In 1882, alternations made by the Thames Conservancy cut off much of the water flow to

230 Far more windows in the Manor face north towards the village than south towards the river.

231 Cooper, “Kelmscott Manor,” 115.

95 the backwater, much to Morris’s consternation.232 While the manor was not built for river views, it did have direct access to the water, a relationship that is largely lost today. Like the manor, Kelmscott village is not oriented visually towards the river. It also does not have a particularly close physical relationship with the river, as its distance from the riverbanks alone should make clear. A large part of the reason for this is likely that the village possesses none of the features that might lead to development around the water, such as bridges, locks, or mills. Radcot downriver and Lechlade upriver were sites of river trade, market towns with infrastructure for the loading and unloading of river barges.233 However, Kelmscott does not seem to have been as heavily involved in river trade, perhaps because the two river trade villages were so nearby. Kelmscott’s position as an outlying portion of Broadwell estate, meanwhile, likely explains the lack of a mill. Broadwell’s mills were located closer to the center of the estate on a Thames tributary, Broadwell Brook.234 The Broadwell estate may also have discouraged trade along the river or even with the neighboring market towns, instead emphasizing direct connection with the estate. Broadwell’s

232 Mackail, “The Life of William Morris,” 71.

233 “Lechlade,” in A History of the County of Gloucester: Volume 7, ed. N. M. Herbert (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press for Victoria County History, 1981), 106-121 and "Langford Parish: Radcot," in Simon Townley, A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 17, 250-269. Both towns were important shipping centers because they lie so close to the end of the navigable Thames, the last point at which cargo could travel easily by water rather than overland on bad roads. Lechlade remained important in the last decades of the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth because it was the point at which the Thames-and-Severn canal reached the Thames.

234 “Broadwell Parish: Broadwell,” in Simon Townley, A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 17, 20-59.

96 interest in Kelmscott was not river trade nor even water power, but the agricultural benefits of riverside land. The estate reaped income primarily from the plants and animals raised in Kelmscott's rich fields. Additionally, the estate's fishery is believed to have been at Kelmscott, but that activity does not seem to have affected the landscape or built environment of the parish.235 The built environment of Kelmscott and its relative detachment from the river tell us that a working relationship with the Thameside land and its products, not river- centered commercial undertakings or aesthetic considerations, were at the heart of the village’s life. However, for Morris, the landscape’s aesthetic appeal was its greatest attraction – and that appeal was tied up not in the grand vistas the village and manor could not provide, but rather in the agricultural land, in its traditional forms and particular ecosystem, and in the river encountered at close range on fishing trips and riverbank rambles.

Value in the Landscape Kelmscott had the potential to be a particularly powerful landscape for Morris because it shared traits with other river landscapes he admired while also standing at a remove from the changes he hated on the Lea and the Lower Thames. As has already been discussed, Morris's youthful interest in landscapes tended to focus on certain elements common to the Thames valley. An indexing of mentions of landscapes in his writing and of the real landscapes he particularly admired reveals many common features: small, gentle rivers filled with fish; the clear, grass-lined streams that fed them; flat river valleys either flanked at a distance or closed in by gentle hills; and the

235 ibid.

97 agricultural and managed features of those valleys – water meadows, ancient woodlands, grazing commons, hayfields and wheat fields, and the hedgerows that separated them all. He loved, also, the plants associated with those environments: the willows that grow so often beside such rivers; the hedgerow species like roses and thistles; and the diversity of wildflowers that spring up in hay meadows and on the verges of fields and roads.236 All of this affection aggregates into an affection for a particular type of English landscape – a gentle, southern, Thamesian one – and a particular type of land management – the traditional or “unimproved.” Morris’s selection of landscape features prevalent in the lowlands of the Thames valley was not simply a question of choosing a default option. There were other types of landscape available within easy reach of his homes in London, all with their own ecosystems and landscape forms – the open expanses and hills of the South Downs in Sussex, for example, or the seasides of Kent or Essex. Further afield in Britain there were the moody moorlands of the North, the rugged Highlands of Scotland, the dramatic peaks and waters of the Lake District, the blue seas and looming cliffs of Cornwall. All were relatively easy to access as the railways expanded, and all served as inspiration to groups of artists and writers. Morris even had the landscapes of Europe at his disposal: he travelled to France multiple times, spent months in Bed Ems in the German Rhineland, visited Italy, and made his two famous voyages to Iceland. Yet, he not only eschewed that wide range of inspiratory landscapes: he even limited himself within river landscapes. In the case of his tributaries in particular, he focused on their agricultural lower reaches to the exclusion

236 For a further discussion of Morris’s relationship with the plants of riverside landscapes, see the following chapter.

98 of their upland headwaters. The peaceful valleys of Cotswolds streams were as rugged and wild as his tastes seem to have extended. In this, he was not unlike many of his Victorian artistic peers, though he engaged with and depicted his chosen landscapes in his own ways. In 1853, famously took John Everett Millais to task for his choice of setting for Ophelia (fig. 40). Millais had painted the works’ background along the enchantingly-named Hogsmill River in , southwest of London. “When you do paint nature,” Ruskin wrote in a letter to the young artist, “Why the mischief should you not paint pure nature and not that rascally wire-fenced garden-rolled nursery- maid’s paradise?”237 Millais’s setting had much in common with Morris’s own landscape tastes: the Hogsmill is a tributary of the Thames which at the time ran through an agricultural area, though it is now within greater London. The painting is even filled with many of the plants Morris admired, from the large willow that dominates the upper left of the canvas to the tiny white flowers of water-crowfoot along the bottom edge.238 Ruskin could have leveled the same sort of criticisms about his friend Morris’s ideal landscapes, and in matter of fact, he likely did. In a letter to Charles Fairfax Murray in 1875, Morris wrote that he had been in Oxford with Charles Faulkner and that they had seen Ruskin: “He was amusing, but refused to enter into our enthusiasm for the country & green meadows: said that there were too many butter

237 Joan Evans, John Ruskin, 186.

238 See further discussion in Chapter 4, 135.

99 cups & it was like poached eggs.”239 The same sort of settings that were a delight to Morris and an inspiration for his visual works and writings were no delight to Ruskin. Morris and many artists in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, on the other hand, preferred the rural surroundings of the Home Counties and the Thames Valley. They took to heart Ruskin’s exhortation in Modern Painters to “go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing,”240 but in Ruskin’s view, they chose the wrong nature. However, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites were not unlike many other artists and art consumers in the period in their choice of gentle English rural landscapes. There was a noticeable increase in the production of and market for images of the Home Counties (the counties surrounding London) from the 1830s onwards, as well as more images of the Thames.241 Part of this preference was practical: the Thames valley and the rural counties surrounding London were easily accessible, especially with the expansion of the railways, while the Alps were not. But the preference was also aesthetic and ideological. Ruskin, a generation older than the Pre-Raphaelites and Morris, had tastes that tended towards the sublime landscapes of the Romantic period: grand, overwhelming, detached from man and instead

239 William Morris to Charles Fairfax Murray, May, 26 1875. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 254.

240 Ruskin, Modern Painters, Modern Painters, Volume I (National Library Association, undated) 423.; accessed via Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29907/29907-h/29907-h.htm.

241 Peter Howard, “Change in the Landscape Perceptions of Artists,” Landscape Research 9, no. 3 (1984): 41–44 and “Painters’ Preferred Places,” Journal of Historical Geography 11, no. 2 (1985): 138–54.

100 communicating the mightiness of God. Morris and many other Victorians preferred something gentler: the picturesque and pastoral over the sublime, a landscape that evoked history on a human scale rather than a geologic one. Tim Barringer has argued that the images of heartland England painted in the mid-nineteenth century were both an extension of the urban world of London and a reaction to it, dependent on urban art markets and modern transport but responding to a desire for “a reassuring image of home in contrast to the alarming incomprehensibility both of the modern metropolis and of colonial landscapes.”242 The new cities were their own sort of sublime, hostile and strange and dangerous. Those living within them, Morris included, did not necessarily want to seek out further sublimes. When Morris did encounter wilder landscapes, like those he saw in Iceland, he found interest but not beauty. To Morris, beauty lay largely in familiarity, history, and comfort, and that was what he found along the Thames and at Kelmscott, and what he thought should be communicated in his designs and promoted by social change.243 Morris’s preference for the countryside of the English heartland can be seen across his work, but also in details of his life such as his taste for art. Morris, unlike some other members of his circle, was no art collector.244 But in 1856, the year he

242 Tim Barringer, “The Harvest Field in the Railway Age,” 103.

243 Morris discussed these concepts in a number of lectures, notably those collected in Hopes and Fears for Art (1882), “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing” (1884), and the Socialist-artistic lectures of 1883-84. The relationship between these lectures, Kelmscott, and Morris’s design work is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.

244 The notable works of art at Kelmscott Manor, such as Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Spring, were owned by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and left behind when he returned to London. Morris’s primary collecting impulse was for historic books,

101 returned to London from Oxford aged only twenty-two, he purchased the small painting The Hayfield from Ford Madox Brown (fig. 41).245 The work depicts hay being harvested in the traditional, non-mechanized way in a field in Hendon, Middlesex.246 As Allen Staley writes, Brown chose to show “a rural England still untouched by the modern city and the industrial revolution,” giving the work a “nostalgic escapism.”247 Morris’s interest in the painting can thus be seen as another expression of his affection for the Home Counties and Thamesian English countryside, but it also reflects his preference for historic farming and land-management methods. This preference, like the preference for Home County and Thames landscapes, was also shared with other Victorian artists. As Tim Barringer has discussed, the mid- Victorian period was a time of large-scale change in agriculture, as technological advances and the systems of wage labour and industrial efficiency reached the countryside.248 Yet landscape artists in the period rejected modern farming and any other hint of modernity in their works, preferring to depict outmoded methods and landscapes unaffected by agricultural improvement.249 The countryside of these

though he sometimes also purchased items of historic decorative arts like Persian carpets.

245 Salmon and Baker, The William Morris Chronology, 17. Morris did not retain it very long, selling it in 1864.

246 Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 45-46. Like Millais’s Ewell, Hendon is now part of greater London.

247 ibid., 45.

248 Barringer “The Harvest Field in the Railway Age,” 86-88.

249 ibid., 88-89.

102 painters was a pastoral Arcadia at heart, hearkening not only to an anti-urban landscape, but also an imaginary golden age untouched by modernization.250 Morris’s design work and writing is in the same mode, rejecting both city and the modern countryside in favor of a pastoral vision.

The Literary Role of Kelmscott The landscape forms which Morris most valued were so prevalent at Kelmscott that the Manor and its surroundings seem presaged in works that predate Morris's arrival there. Idyllic rural or semi-wooded riversides feature prominently in many of his works, both early and late, and native flora and fauna of the Thames are particularly prevalent. For example, willows and riversides recur even in his very earliest works. His very first poem, "The Willow and the Red Cliff" of 1854, begins "About the river goes the wind / And moans through the sad grey willow.”251 The poem swings back and forth between an ideal upriver setting where the unnamed female protagonist once was happy and a blighted seascape where she in sunk in despair. His early story "Frank's Sealed Letter" of 1856, which deals so closely with his favorite aspects of the Lea landscape,252 also calls up a larger river and its willow- studded banks. A little over ten years after these works, in the late 1860s, Morris set out to write an epic poem. Published as in sections between 1868 and 1870, the poem is framed as a monthly exchange of stories between a group of

250 ibid., 115.

251 Collected Works vol. 21, xxx.

252 See Chapter 2, p. 42 – 44.

103 “gentlemen and mariners of Norway" and the locals of "some Western land” at some point in the distant past.253 It begins, however, with a call to its Victorian readers, asking them to “Forget six counties overhung with smoke, / Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, / Forget the spreading of the hideous town” and instead to think of the past, “And dream of London, small, and white, and clean, / The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.”254 As well as calling to mind the future ideal London of News from Nowhere, this passage immediately places the poem in a pastoral – an earthly paradise – in which the “hideous town” is rejected in favor of another landscape – a landscape very clearly based on the English countryside and especially the Thames valley. The Earthly Paradise was truly epic – it fills two volumes of Morris’s Collected Works. Each section of the poem, divided by month, features an introduction that sets the scene where the groups meet, followed by the two stories, all in verse. As in so much of Morris's writing, certain settings recur, particularly gentle river valleys populated with distinctly English flora and fauna.255 When considering Morris’s relationship with the Thamesian countryside, however, the most noteworthy thing about The Earthly Paradise is the setting of the narrative conceit, the places where the groups gather together to share their tales, several of which evoke Morris's beloved

253 “Prologue – The Wanderers,” The Earthly Paradise, Collected Works Vol. 3, 3. The "Norwegian" stories are essentially medieval romances, some Norse in setting and others English, while the stories of the "Western land" are retellings of Classical myths.

254 “Prologue,” The Earthly Paradise, Collected Works Vol. 3, 3, lines 1-6.

255 These settings occur in both the medieval and Classical tales.

104 river valley landscapes. In May, we are told, "They gathered at the feast: the fair abode / Wherein they sat, o'erlooked, across the road / Unhedged green meads, which willowy streams passed through."256 July's feast takes place "Within a lovely valley, watered well / With flowery streams."257 Most significant of all, however, is the introduction to June, which includes the stanza

See, we have left our hopes and fears behind To give our very hearts up unto thee; What better place than this then could we find By this sweet stream that knows not of the sea, That guesses not the city's misery, This little stream whose hamlets scarce have names, This far-off, lonely mother of the Thames?258

This passage is as neat a description of Morris’s relationship with Kelmscott as any other. And the introduction goes on to describe the group’s choice to voyage upstream “on their chief river"259 to "a house most fair… set upon the river side”260 – a description which could match to the Morris family's happy journeys upriver to Kelmscott with their friends, as well as the journey undertaken in News from Nowhere. Yet, when Morris wrote those lines, the setting and the river trips were only dreams. The Earthly Paradise was first published in 1870, a year before Morris found Kelmscott. The river trips came even later, in 1880 and 1881, and News from Nowhere in 1890. Thus, the introduction to “June” shows that by the end of the 1860s, Morris

256 “May,” The Earthly Paradise, Collected Works Vol. 4, 1, lines 26-28.

257 “July,” The Earthly Paradise, 143, lines 1-2.

258 “June,” The Earthly Paradise, 87, lines 8-14.

259 ibid., line 24.

260 ibid., lines 31-32.

105 was already focused on the countryside aesthetic that would dominate so much of his later work. He already had his imagined pastoral, built up from youthful affection for local landscapes and rivers and from his historicist ideals. It only remained for him to find it in reality, and he found it at Kelmscott.

After Morris came to Kelmscott, the pastoralist contrast between the rural riverside and the city outlined in The Earthly Paradise – the one sweet, the other miserable – would only become more pronounced. Once he had found a place to be away from the city, he begrudged the city even more. This mix of ill-feeling towards London and deep affection towards Kelmscott can be seen in letters sent throughout his many years visiting Kelmscott, but it becomes very clearly pronounced in the early 1880s. In the letters that survive from that period, an earlier urge to travel further afield fades, and Kelmscott becomes the singular goal. In 1877, he wrote to Jane from Queen Square: "I confess I sigh for Kelmscott."261 In later summer and early autumn 1880 he wrote repeatedly to Georgiana Burne-Jones expressing deep-felt emotion about Kelmscott: "I can’t pretend not to feel being out of this house and its surroundings as a great loss."262 In other letters he describes feeling "very ill content" or "sulky" about departing Kelmscott.263 There is a sense throughout Morris's

261 William Morris to Jane Morris, August 2, 1877. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 392.

262 William Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, September 27, 1880. ibid., 591.

263 William Morris to George James Howard, November 3, 1881. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 73; William Morris to Jenny Morris, September 7, 1886. Collected Letters Vol. 2b, 572.

106 correspondence of a deep personal attachment to Kelmscott, and predictably strong feelings about leaving it behind for other places where he did not want to be. Looking across Morris's creative output and the strands of his life in this period, it becomes clear that it was not just that he was expressing a desire to visit Kelmscott more often in these letters. Rather, his relationship with the house and its surroundings was deepening and expressing itself more clearly in his many works. One reason for this shift might have been the shifting external pressures of Morris's life. He no longer had to vie with the interpersonal complications of sharing the Manor with Rossetti, and the stresses of the Firm's shifting fortunes had largely been ameliorated after its reorganization in 1875 and the move to the Oxford Street shop in 1877. However, the burgeoning reputation of the Firm meant that Morris needed to be in London almost constantly, and that situation seemed destined to be permanent after the Firm's production facilities were settled at Merton in 1881. Given Morris's deep dislike for London and ambivalent feelings about settling there, the reinforcement of the permanence of his situation in this period must have also reinforced the importance of Kelmscott in his life. The 1880s were also a time of intense and overlapping activity for Morris. As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, the move to Merton allowed him to expand his design enterprise. With more manufacturing space at their disposal, the Firm could work at larger scales of production, both in volume of objects created and in the size of those objects. A much larger and specialized dyeing space, meanwhile, meant that Morris could put his previous experiments with indigo-discharge dyeing into practice, resulting in a boom in printed fabric design and production. At the same time, Morris was becoming even more politically and socially aware, starting on the

107 journey that would lead him to Socialism by mid-decade. This political shift resulted in an outpouring of lectures and essays. His literary focus also began to shift from poetry to prose, resulting in the publication of two long prose stories in the second half of the decade: A Dream of John Ball in 1886, and News from Nowhere, written in 1889 and published in 1890, with more following in the 1890s. And in 1891 Morris founded the Kelmscott Press, naming his newest venture after his most beloved place.264 Given the importance of Upper Thames landscapes in Morris's writing before he ever ventured to Kelmscott, it should not be surprising that the manor, its surroundings, and the river also featured prominently in the writing Morris produced after 1871. The English countryside continued to recur as a setting in Morris’s poetry, and he evoked the river and rural aesthetics continually in his artistic and social criticism. Additionally, as his political thought evolved, Kelmscott and traditional Thames river landscapes became especially significant as emblems of the particular, pastoral form of Socialism Morris explored in his late prose. Morris's shift to literary prose came late, but he was then highly prolific, producing ten fiction texts – generally referred to as “prose romances” – between 1886 and his death a decade later.265 Eight of these texts can be summarized as medievalist quest stories, proto-fantasy tales inspired by the medieval chivalric prose romance

264 The Kelmscott Press, based in Hammersmith, was a private press producing fine editions of books, including many of Morris’s writings. It is seen as one of the birthplaces of the art press movement of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

265 “Prose Romances and Dramatic Works,” The William Morris Archive. http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/prose.html

108 form and rife with mythological allusions drawn from Norse and Germanic sources. These novels, like some of Morris's earlier epic poetry, take place in landscapes that combine the gentleness of English countrysides with stranger, more rugged lands, the descriptions of which seem derived from Morris's time in Iceland.266 In one story, The Well at World's End (1896), the hero sets out on his quest from his home which is clearly Kelmscott. His adventures take him across the Thames valley, up into the hills on the southern side of the river, and through other settings well-known to Morris and his family, before the setting becomes more fantastical and Icelandic. May Morris identified this novel, particularly, with the mix of familiar and strange which characterized the landscapes of Morris's late fantasies, "the passion for the soil and loving observation of familiar country mingled with marvels beyond sea."267 The same could be said of Morris’s first two prose romances, A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere, but in those stories, the wonders are not formed by the importation of foreign landscapes into English climes. Rather, the marvels are the ways the Thamesian landscape itself might be transformed by social change. Both A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere are time-traveling Socialist dream-fantasies that take place in Thamesian rural settings – A Dream of John Ball in the medieval past, and News from Nowhere in the future. A Dream of John Ball begins with the Victorian Socialist narrator, as in News from Nowhere a clear stand-in for Morris, slipping into a dream state. He ‘wakes’ in an imagined, ideal

266 Like Morris’s mixing of Norse legends and later medieval chivalric literature, this contrasting of an English pastoral and more rugged landscapes is also common in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and later high fantasy authors.

267 Collected Works Vol. 18, xix.

109 medieval past, one in which communalism, valued work, and fine taste rule. He finds himself in a bit of “ordinary English low-country” which he describes in detail: the land is unenclosed except for garden and orchard plots, and scattered with copses (small ) and hamlets. The fields are farmed in strips, and there are trees full of red apples, and white poppies and red roses blooming. The open fields and “a certain unwonted trimness and handiness about the enclosures of the garden and orchards” puzzle him because “I was of course used to the… tumbledown bankrupt–looking surroundings of our modern agriculture.”268 This brief description of how Morris imagined a better time carries with it all his usual criticisms of the modern world – though in this case they are unusually applied to the rural landscape.269 As mentioned in Chapter 2, in the latter half of News from Nowhere the Morris stand-in narrator, Guest, travels upriver from London with his new friends. In the final chapters, he finds they have brought him to Kelmscott, a place he describes as little changed, unlike London. What has changed instead are the people. For one thing, the citizens of Nowhere appreciate the house and what it stands for. Ellen, one of Guest’s companions, enthuses about “This many-gabled old house built by the simple country- folk of the long-past times…. (which) is lovely still amidst all the beauty which these latter days have created…. It seems to me as if it had waited for these happy days, and held in it the gathered crumbs of happiness of the confused and turbulent past.’”270

268 A Dream of John Ball, Collected Works Vol. 16, 215-219.

269 The final passage of the novel also includes a typically Morrisian complaint about the modern world. The narrator awakes in his own time and bemoans the ugliness of London and the London Thames outside his window, echoing the beginning of News from Nowhere.

270 News from Nowhere, 173.

110 This statement sums up Morris’s own feelings on the matter: Kelmscott Manor was perfect, but the world needed to catch up with it. Like Nowhere’s Londoners, the people of the countryside have also been raised up by the Socialist revolution. Morris’s description of them contrasts them with the rural people of his own day:

[I] half expected to see the gay-clad company of men and women change to two or three spindle-legged back-bowed men and haggard, hollow-eyed, ill-favoured women, who once wore down the soil of this land with their heavy hopeless feet, from day to day, and season to season, and year to year. But no change came as yet, and my heart swelled with joy as I thought of all the beautiful grey villages, from the river to the plain and the plain to the uplands, which I could picture myself so well, all people now with this happy and lovely folk, who had cast away riches and attained to wealth.271

Morris’s two Socialist dream novels both contain ideal rural landscapes steeped in the same qualities he always admired. Unlike much of his other writing, they also apply criticism to the real rural worlds of Morris’s own time. In his much briefer essays and speeches, and several poems as well, the ideal rural is wielded as a contrast to the terrible city, but these novels introduce a further nuance of criticism and reveal Morris’s ambiguous feelings towards the realities of the rural world he idealized.

The Other Victorian Kelmscott

The criticisms of contemporary agricultural landscapes in Morris’s Socialist dream stories reveal fissures between the ideal and real landscape in his work. Morris loved the visual world of Kelmscott and what the place stood for in his personal value system, but he does not seem to have appreciated it as a contemporary working

271 ibid., 172.

111 landscape. Yet a working landscape it certainly was: so much so, in fact, that in the early twentieth century it was more well known for its dairy herds than for any former resident. As the landscape and village descriptions earlier in this chapter show, for most of its history Kelmscott was above all an agricultural community. Morris’s neighbors were not like-minded artists or middle-class businessmen, nor even London urchins or countryside landed gentry, but farmers. However, this did not mean the other nineteenth-century residents of Kelmscott fit into a pastoral vision of simplicity, tradition, and abundance set against the modern ills of the city. Nor, in fact, did Kelmscott itself perfectly fit that vision. The landscape history of the site reveals that a great deal more was happening there, reflecting greater trends towards agricultural change in the period. When engaging with Kelmscott, Morris made conscious decisions about which landscape elements to discuss, idealize, and depict, and which to minimize or ignore outright. When Morris came to the countryside from London, he would have witnessed the effects of two forces shaping rural life and the landscape in the period: a long agricultural depression and the increasing industrialization of farming. Both forces undermined the pastoral vision of the countryside, the first by revealing the hardships of rural life, and the second by introducing objects and concepts associated with modernity and urban life – steam power, efficiency, capitalism – into agricultural landscapes. And while Morris seems to have been at least somewhat sympathetic about the poverty and struggles of the countryside, the rise of modern farming was one of his many anathemas – even though (or perhaps because) it was particularly prevalent at Kelmscott.

112 Morris’s time at Kelmscott overlaps almost exactly with the period of the late Victorian agricultural depression, which is generally dated c.1873-1896.272 This depression was fueled by the general economic downturn at the time, a series of bad harvests, and most of all by the British government’s free market approach, which led to cheap American grain imports out-competing British farmers.273 Morris’s comments about the poor state of the countryside and particularly the countryside’s people in the late 1880s and early 1890s likely reflect this economic reality. The specter of haggard nineteenth-century agricultural laborers he conjures up at the end of News from Nowhere would have lived hard lives, doing strenuous work for increasingly tenuous pay. The implication of the aesthetically superior agriculture and farmers of both Socialist dream tales is that those problems – like all things – would be improved under a different economic system. And Morris was not entirely incorrect, because the advancement of capitalist systems like free trade and wage labor played large parts in the economic suffering of the rural poor in the nineteenth century.274 At the same time, however, Morris’s vision of an agricultural golden age, aesthetically pleasing and populated by happy laborers, did not present a viable solution. Morris and many other nineteenth-century artists preferred traditional farmlands, but ‘unimproved’ rural areas experienced more economic hardship than

272 This depression is also termed the Great Depression of British Agriculture.

273 Jane Bingham, The Cotswolds: A Cultural History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 38.

274 Barringer, “The Harvest Field in the Railway Age,” 89.

113 modernizing regions in the nineteenth century.275 The trend in nineteenth-century agriculture was towards mechanization and large-scale farms, and farm owners and managers did not typically set out with aesthetic concerns in mind. Rather, their priorities were increased efficiency, reduced costs, and increased yields – measures that would allow them to compete with international trade and produce larger amounts of food for an ever-growing population. At Kelmscott, the farmers and landowners did not just follow this trend: they were on the vanguard. The Kelmscott area had already been trending towards large consolidated commercial farms when the parish was enclosed in 1799, and that trend continued throughout the nineteenth century.276 In the mid-nineteenth century, Kelmscott had only four farms, all of which were between 200 acres and 400 acres in size – well above average for the period.277 These farms were owned by several interconnected families, the most prominent of which were the owners of Kelmscott Manor, the Hobbs family. The Hobbses were deeply invested in agricultural improvement and innovation. They had a successful dairy and sheep farm, and are now known as pioneers of industrialized milk production and large-scale modern agriculture.278 Their

275 ibid.

276 Townley, “Medieval and Modern Settlement,” 53.

277 ibid. In 1851, two-thirds of British farms were under 100 acres, and in England and Wales – where farms were larger – about half were over 200 acres. J. V. Beckett, "The Debate over Farm Sizes in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England", Agricultural History 57, No. 3 (July 1983), 308.

278 The Hobbses’ innovations included the early adoption of refrigeration, which allowed them to distribute milk to the London market via rail by the turn of the century. By the early twentieth century their farm was over 2000 acres. Hodges,

114 success seems to have been beneficial to the village, which showed a population increase in the second half of the nineteenth century when most agricultural areas across Britain were losing residents to the cities.279 Morris was aware of the Hobbses’ work. A few of his letters mention Robert W. Hobbs, the head of the farm, and the two seem to have had a fairly cordial relationship. In 1889, Morris wrote to Jenny about a conversation with Hobbs on the Oxford-Lechlade train: “He told me that his new machine did not answer for cutting corn that was much laid. He was boastful over the ram lambs which he had sold in May… and showed me a paper with an account of them as the Kelmscott Flock; which sounds grand, doesn’t it.”280 In 1896, he noted approvingly that Hobbs had chosen to re-thatch some farm buildings rather than use modern roofing, “a great gain to me, who am always shaking in my shoes before the advent of zinced iron sheets.”281 A few other brief mentions in letters and diaries indicate when certain farming activities were taking place, with a particularly fond note about haymaking: “Mr. Hobbs has carried the big field of hay first-rate. The country is one great nosegay, the scent of it intoxicating.”282 Otherwise, however, the reality of Kelmscott as a working landscape is absent from Morris’s own considerations of the site, including any published

“Kelmscott: The People in Their Place,” 78 and Townley, A History of the County of Oxford,132.

279 Townley, A History of the County of Oxford, 9.

280 William Morris to Jenny Morris, August 30, 1889. Collected Letters Vol. 3, 93.

281 William Morris to Phillip Webb, April 27, 1896. Collected Letters Vol. 4, 368.

282 William Morris to Jane Morris, June 21, 1889. Collected Letters Vol. 3, 77.

115 descriptions of the house.283 This absence made it easier for Morris to cast Kelmscott as a place out of time and an ideal rural landscape. The Hobbses’ working landscape was not even the only local sign of industrialized agriculture around Morris at Kelmscott. In the first decade of Morris’s tenure at Kelmscott there was an even more invasively modern enterprise only a mile and a quarter (two km) upstream: not another mechanized farm, but an entire factory. In 1869, the owner of the nearby , Robert Campbell, built a sugar beet distillery on an island in the Thames beside Buscot Lock.284 It was a large-scale operation, reflecting the agricultural and industrial optimism of the time just before the agricultural depression set in. Within a few years the factory grounds also included a gas works and premises for manufacturing animal feed, sulphuric acid, and artificial fertilizer.285 The extent of the premises can be seen in OS maps from the period (fig. 42). The huge amounts of sugar beets needed were brought to the site by a private

283 May Morris, who it might be argued had more sympathy than her father for the real labor of farming and the life of agricultural landscapes, wrote about Hobbs in her introductions to her father’s collected works, noting that “impressions of Kelmscott would be incomplete without the inclusion of the leading personality which gives life to the place.” Collected Works Vol. 18, xxxiv. May, who lived at Kelmscott full-time in later life, was friendly with the Hobbses and other local families. She was involved in local efforts such as the encouragement of women’s farm work during the First World War. Hodges, “Kelmscott: The People in Their Place.”

284 Hassall “The Kelmscott Landscape Project,” in William Morris's Kelmscott, 6-7 and John R. Gray, “An Industrialised Farm Estate in Berkshire,” Industrial Archaeology 8, no. 2 (1971): 171–83. Buscot Park is now well-known for housing Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose cycle and several other important Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic works. These were acquired by the house’s next owner, Alexander Henderson, later Lord Faringdon.

285 Gray, “An Industrialised Farm Estate in Berkshire.” The additional products were largely byproducts of the distillery and gasworks.

116 narrow-gauge rail network running three stream engines.286 Campbell was an inveterate improver, but he was over-extended.287 The Distillery closed in 1879 and was torn down by the early 1880s, its contents sold. But for eight to ten years, this industrial installation would have been a major part of Morris’s Kelmscott experience. The factory is not well-recorded in published literature, but there is one image available on the Buscot Park website (fig. 43). The building appears to be about four stories tall, and built of brick, with a large smokestack. It is doubtful the factory’s main bulk would have been visible from Kelmscott Manor, but its smokestack may well have been, especially because Buscot Lock lies in the direct sightline of the Manor’s rear windows. Even if the factory was not visible from Kelmscott Manor, it would have had a presence in the area: there would have been smoke, and likely sounds, and the scents of the factory’s products. Additionally, Morris enjoyed walking and boating along the Thames, and there in the middle of the river, an easy walk or row from Kelmscott, sat a modern factory. Its decade-long presence does not so much undermine as deconstruct Morris’s pastoral, founded as it necessarily was on a stark division between city and country, industrial and rural. Perhaps this is why Morris never mentioned the factory, even on the occasion of its being torn down. Acknowledging its presence would have meant acknowledging the complications of the industrializing agricultural landscape beyond his personal idyll.

286 ibid.

287 Other projects included the instillation of telegraphs to communicate around the estate, the use of large amounts of mechanized agricultural equipment, and the building of an innovative concrete barn around 1870. Campbell died bankrupt in 1887. Hassall, “The Kelmscott Landscape Project,” 6-7 and Gray, “An Industrialised Farm Estate in Berkshire.”

117 If one relies on Morris’s impressions of Kelmscott, one can receive only a partial impression of the place. The same is true even when one looks beyond Morris’s works to the visual records of Kelmscott such as Marie Spartali Stillman’s watercolors (fig. 44), Frederick Evans’s photographs (figs. 38 and 39), or Edmund New’s illustrations for the Mackail’s The Life of William Morris (fig. 45). These works focus on the house and its immediate surroundings, perpetuating Morris’s own pastoral – almost inevitably so, since these artists were personally connected to Morris and often directly involved in efforts to memorialize him. Similarly, Kelmscott’s current position as a site for the preservation of Morris’s legacy can occlude the rest of its history by privileging his story and perspective over all others. The history of industrial-agricultural development in the Kelmscott area is significant, however, because it reminds us that the stories and imagery Morris created are not simple. The Kelmscott of Morris’s works is not a reality but a pastoral, an idealized vision that cannot by its nature accept incursions of industrial agriculture or agricultural industry. Thus, Morris’s works can be understood not just as expressions of his rejection of the city, but also his selective love of particular aspects of a very particular Thamesian landscape.

118 Chapter 4

UNMISTAKABLE SUGGESTIONS OF GARDENS AND FIELDS: THE PATTERNS

William Morris expressed his Thamesian pastoral across media. It was not only a written ideal but also an artistic one, informing the visual style and content of his design work. This influence can be seen most clearly in his printed wallpaper and textile patterns. A close inspection of the visual evidence of these patterns, the landscape of Kelmscott and the Thames valley system, and Morris’s writing on pattern-designing shows that he drew very direct, specific inspiration from the places and ecologies around him. These patterns are not direct or even stylized representations of particular places in the mode of landscape art but, as I will show, they should be understood as interpretations of the landscape forms and ecosystems of the rural Thames and its tributaries. The vast majority of Morris’s pattern design career took place after the lease was taken at Kelmscott Manor in 1871 (fig. 46), and the influence of that site can be seen across the spectrum of his printed patterned works. This chapter will inspect that broad influence before giving particular attention to the group of later fabric patterns which Morris named after tributaries of the Thames: Evenlode, Windrush, Kennet, Wey (1883), Lodden, Wandle, Cray (1884), Lea, and Medway (1885) (figures 2-10). These patterns form a distinct group in which the visual and conceptual influences of the Thamesian countryside are particularly pronounced. They also trace a personal geography, emphasizing Morris’s associations with the tributaries for which they are

119 named. Thus, they are a particularly significant body of evidence in the inspection of Morris’s overall relationship with the landscape of the Thames. As is true across Morris’s works, these visual relationships carried the weight of personal, aesthetic, and political meanings. This chapter concludes by considering the implications of those meanings in another register, the patterns’ use in interiors, inspecting how the patterns brought Morris’s landscape style and ideals into direct contact with the wider Victorian society which he sought to influence.

Morris and Pattern-Designing Morris pursued a myriad of professional and artistic roles over his relatively short life: poet, designer, novelist, political writer, lecturer, preservationist, business owner, periodical editor, and art book printer, among others. Of these, the first two – poet and designer – were the most long-lasting. Morris’s career as a decorative art designer stretched from the late 1850s to the late 1880s.288 In that time, he produced around seventy-one original designs for printed repeating-pattern wallpapers and fabrics.289 These designs form a large body of work which can be evaluated as a whole or subdivided by media, date, and style into smaller, interrelated groupings with their own visual and interpretive traits.

288 This statement excludes his work as a book designer, which was a separate undertaking primarily confined to the 1890s. For a discussion of the vagaries of dating and attributing Morris’s works, see Appendix B.

289 Morris also produced repeating-pattern designs for woven textiles, carpets, , linoleum, and embroidery. These materials required different types of designs and thus constitute separate bodies of work. Their stylizations, formal structures, and production histories demand different types of visual reading which place them outside the interpretive structure of this project.

120 Morris began his pattern design work with several embroideries in the late 1850s and early 1860s.290 However, these works were experiments with which he furnished his own homes, not designs for the mass market. His first pattern designs for manufacture and sale through the Firm were wallpapers.291 His earliest papers – Trellis, 1862, Daisy, 1864, and Fruit (or Pomegranate), c. 1866 (fig. 47) – show him experimenting with form and inspiration. They also touch upon certain elements that would recur throughout this pattern work, including the use of historical precedents, forms that emphasize diagonal movement and obfuscation of repeats, and close observation of real landscapes: Trellis was famously inspired by observations made in the garden at Red House.292 Morris started designing fabrics several years later, beginning with Jasmine Trellis, c. 1868-70. He pursued both wallpaper and printed fabric design until the second half of the 1880s, though his enthusiasm came in waves, with two particular peaks of production, the first in the mid-1870s and the second in the first half of the 1880s (fig. 46).293 These two periods of activity correspond to different periods of interest for Morris, and have different, though closely related, visual styles. This project focuses on the patterns of the 1880s because of the patterns’ strong visual relationship to the forms and ecosystems of the rural Thames landscape, the tributary naming shift in 1883-85, and the physical relationship between the

290 See Linda Parry, “Embroidery,” in William Morris Textiles, 14-41.

291 The Firm was then Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., later Morris & Co.

292 Lesley Hoskins, “Wallpaper,” in William Morris (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996), 206.

293 These peaks and valleys are related to shifts in the Firm’s production process, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, as well as to Morris’s typical bursts of enthusiasm and shifting interests.

121 Thames landscape and object production at Merton Abbey after 1881, which is the subject of Chapter 5.294

The Patterns of the 1880s The 1881-1885 printed fabric patterns recombine earlier Morris design features but also constitute a visually distinct body of work with its own variations of formal organization, motif, and color. They are:

Name Date Rose and Thistle Designed c. 1881, not registered with the patent office.295 Brother Rabbit Also known as Brer Rabbit. Designed c. 1881, registered with the patent office May 20, 1882. Bird and Anemone Designed c. 1881. Registered June 17, 1882. Wreathnet 1882, unregistered. Borage 1883, unregistered. Corncockle Registered February 27, 1883. Strawberry Thief Registered May 11, 1883. Evenlode Designed March 1883.296 Registered September 2, 1883.

294 The choice to largely exclude wallpapers is based on a variety of factors. Morris’s wallpapers and printed fabrics had a great deal in common: both were made with block-printed pigments and could achieve a similar (though not identical) set of effects and level of detail. Both required a great deal of concentration on the repeat: how it would be achieved by interlinking printing blocks and how it would be emphasized or disguised by the visual contents of the pattern. But the materials were not the same and the effects achieved were also not identical. The wallpapers do not share all the visual traits which link the printed textiles to the river, such as meander patterning and light-on-dark background fills. They also were not included in the riverine naming scheme and were manufactured in a different context. All of these factors mean that the wallpapers, though significant in their own right, are outside of the scope of this project.

295 For more information on registration and other dating methods, see Appendix B.

296 William Morris to May Morris, March 3, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 165.

122 Wey c.1883, unregistered. Kennet Registered October 18, 1883. Windrush Registered October 18, 1883. Flowerpot Registered October 18, 1883. Eyebright Registered November 23, 1883. Rose Registered December 8, 1883. Lodden Sometimes spelled Loddon. 1884, unregistered. Wandle Designed September 1883.297 Registered July 28, 1884. Cray 1884, unregistered. Lea Registered February 2, 1885. Medway Registered September 21, 1885.

These patterns are generally more simplified and more boldly geometric than the patterns of the mid-1870s. They include a number of elements which are either unique to the period or used much more frequently then. For example, there are more stylized motifs borrowed from Middle Eastern and South Asian decorative art, such as the teardrop blooms in Evenlode (fig. 2). Some patterns, especially among the tributary group, include thick plant stems which become decorative features in their own right, as in Windrush and Wandle (figs. 5 and 7).298 The patterns’ colors are also bolder, with greater contrast, reflecting the new dye techniques the Firm used at Merton Abbey – among which the blue of indigo discharge is particularly prominent.299 The designs of the 1880s use both of the basic pattern structures used by Morris, the symmetrical net and the curving vertical meander, but they also feature a

297 William Morris to Jenny Morris, September 4, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 223.

298 Before 1883, Morris tended to minimize his stems or conceal them behind close- branching foliage. Thick decorative stems are present in early modern European textiles and in Indian textiles. See Parry, Textiles, 64 and Hoskins “Wallpaper,” 207.

299 See Chapter 5.

123 new meander variation, the diagonal repeat.300 Morris’s methods of articulating and adding detail to the patterns also changed in the period. Dotted infill, previously largely restricted to wallpapers, is seen much more frequently in the textiles of the 1880s, reaching its intricate heights in Windrush and Lea (figs. 5 and 9).301 Another new feature, seen only in the tributary patterns Kennet, Wandle, Cray, and Medway (figs. 4, 7, 8, and 10) is the use of white-on-dark scrolling floral and foliate background patterns, which break up blocks of color behind the primary pattern and add depth to the design. Overall, the patterns of 1881-84 show the successful culmination of some of Morris’s formal experiments and the results of several aspects of his stylistic evolution. The tributary patterns stand out particularly because of their unique forms, which reflect both continuing study of historic patterns and intensive, even increasing engagement with the landscape of the Thames.

The Tributary Patterns Of the nineteen printed fabric patterns designed by Morris after 1880, nine are named for tributaries of the Thames.302 This group represented a major deviation from

300 Net patterns such as Lodden (fig. 6) have mirrored symmetry, with their structural elements (usually stems and leaves) forming a ’net’ across the pattern. In meander patterns such as Wey (fig. 3), the structural elements of the design move vertically along the fabric or paper in a series of S-curves. In the diagonal variation such as Wandle, the pattern’s structure moves upwards diagonally to meet itself in the repeat to its side rather than directly above.

301 Dotted infill was created by inserting metal pins in the wooden printing blocks, an exacting and labor-intensive process.

302 One other pattern, Rose, 1883 (fig. 51), seems to have also been considered as a candidate for a tributary name: the original design for the pattern, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, includes a note that reads “Cherwell/Rose.” Parry Textiles, 291, n. 64.

124 earlier naming practices at the Firm. Before the mid-1880s, the majority of the Firm’s patterns in all media were named for specific botanical and zoological motifs included in the designs. A list of Morris & Co. designs can therefore read a little like a seed catalogue: Daisy, Willow, Acanthus, Tulip, Jasmine, Larkspur, and so on. Those patterns not named for featured botanical motifs were named for where they were intended to hang (i.e. the St James patterns of 1881) or for the origins of the historical patterns that had inspired them (i.e. Utrecht Velvet c. 1871, or Madras Muslin, 1880). Linda Parry writes of the shift to tributary names that it was “as if [Morris was] attempting to find a suitably descriptive nomenclature."303 Yet, the titles are the least directly descriptive in Morris’s oeuvre. What they reflect, instead, is the prominence of the Thames and its tributaries in Morris’s life and creative process, and the inspiration he drew from river landscapes. Morris never articulated his exact reasons for turning to river names, but he did comment on the practice several times. In early spring 1883, he wrote to May: “I have been at work pretty hard & have made a new pattern which in honour of the occasion I ought to call ‘Colchium’: only as Colchicum is nothing less than a crocus & I have stupidly omitted to put a crocus in, to avoid questions being asked I must fall back on a river and call it Evenlode.”304 In the style of so many of his letters to his daughters, this comment should be read with a degree of self-effacing humor and not understood as a direct narrative – especially since the ‘occasion’ mentioned was apparently an attack of gout, which was treated with Colchium. However, his comment on “falling back” is interesting, as this naming practice was by no means a default at the moment:

303 Parry, Textiles, 64.

304 William Morris to May Morris, March 3, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 165.

125 in matter of fact, Evenlode was the first tributary registered with the patent office.305 Morris’s description of the name as a fallback points to his focus on rivers. Its implication that the choice of a tributary name was an obvious way to correct his mistake reveals at the very least that the Thames and its tributaries were often on his mind and were deemed appropriate subjects for his naming practice. Morris’s one other comment on the tributary names points to a potential for deeper significance. On the fourth of September 1883, five days before Evenlode was registered, he wrote to Jenny about another design:

I seem to have a panic on our not having chintz blocks enough, for I have two more on the stocks: one of them, (I am working on it this afternoon) is such a big one that if it succeeds I shall call it Wandle: the connection may not seem obvious to you as the wet Wandle is not big but small, but you see it will have to be very elaborate & splendid and so I want to honour our helpful stream.306 The Wandle was the river that supplied water to the Morris & Co. factory at Merton Abbey, and it was at the center of every step of the Firm’s fabric printing process, as I will discuss in the following chapter. Morris thus connected the complexity and grandness of Wandle to the importance of that stream in his life and work, undermining the throwaway nature of the Evenlode naming story. Within six months, what may or may not have started as a fallback practice had become a matter of

305 It was registered September 9, 1883. Two more patterns, Windrush and Kennet, were registered a month later, on October 18. Any of the three may have been designed first, but Morris’s decision to comment on the naming shift points to Evenlode as the first to be named.

306 William Morris to Jenny Morris, September 4, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 223.

126 personal significance to Morris, linked in a conscious way to the physical landscape from which he also drew visual inspiration for the corresponding designs.

“The Outward Face of the Earth”: Some Hints on Pattern-Designing There is abundant evidence for the claim that the form and visual motifs of Morris’s patterns were directly influenced by the landscape around him. This evidence can be found through close visual inspection of the patterns and the land, as the following sections of this chapter will show, but it can also be found in Morris’s own writings on the subject, which outline his processes and beliefs and thereby provide a framework with which to approach the finished designs. In December 1881, when he was settling in at Merton Abbey and just before he started designing the tributary patterns, Morris delivered the lecture “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing.”307 In the lecture, which was also quickly published in the periodical the Architect, Morris laid out his general principles of designing different types of patterned media and put forward arguments about the purpose and meaning of patterned materials. The natural world and the rural landscape were at the center of much of what he had to say. Early in the lecture, Morris argued that while the “best” art stirs emotions, in so doing it “wearies us body and soul” and therefore cannot be “for ever under our eyes” – but, by the same token, life should not be “wholly stripped of life or

307 Delivered to the Working Men’s College at the Morris & Co. premises in Queen’s Square and published in The Architect in two parts: 17 December, 391-94 and 24 December, 408-10. Collected Works Vol. 22, 175-205.

127 beauty.”308 This was therefore the purpose the value of “lesser art,” or design, which surrounds people in their everyday lives. For that purpose, he wrote,

It will be enough for us to clothe our daily and domestic walls with ornament that reminds us of the outward face of the earth, of the innocent love of animals, or of man passing his days between work and rest as he does. I say, with ornament that reminds us of these things, and sets our minds and memories at work easily creating them; because scientific representation of them would again involve us in the problems of hard fact and the troubles of life, and so once more destroy our rest for us.309 Thus, according to Morris, decorative arts should use their ornamentation to evoke but not directly copy the natural world – and first and foremost ‘the outward face of the earth’ or, in other words, the physical landscape. He repeated that argument in several forms throughout the lecture, as when he stated that “any decoration is futile… when it does not remind you or something beyond itself, of something of which it is but a visible symbol.”310 And he consistently made clear that the thing to be symbolized was the natural world: “I must still insist on plenty of meaning in your patterns; I must have unmistakable suggestions of gardens and fields.”311 In fact, with the exception of the longer justification quoted above, Morris clearly took it for granted that the natural world was the thing decorations should be depicting. Throughout the lecture, he

308 “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” 176-77.

309 ibid., 177.

310 ibid., 179.

311 ibid., 195. This argument is couched in his understanding of Central Asian and Middle Eastern geometric forms as being expressions of “tradition and memory,” without meaning as he viewed it – though he does acknowledge that there is value in the history of the forms.

128 consistently lists plants and landscape features as the only examples of where designers might find their inspiration and what their decorations should represent. Morris’s views on natural inspiration and evocation were not revolutionary. Rather, they placed him in direct conversation with the views of mid-nineteenth- century advocates of design reform and with the truth-to-nature philosophies of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. Design reformers had set themselves against the period’s fashion for effusive naturalistic ornament, such as detailed and illusionistic three-dimensional images of flowers printed on wallpapers and fabrics (fig. 48). Designers like Owen Jones and his disciple Christopher Dresser instead favored the use of highly simplified, conventionalized natural forms, derived from close study of plants but without detailed realism or dimension (fig. 49).312 They also advocated for truth to materials – decrying, for example, the casting of iron to resemble branches of wood – a view they shared with Ruskin, Morris, and Morris’s Arts and Crafts followers. Ruskin’s “truth to nature” views may seem initially less compatible with the strictures of design. Morris’s aim to evoke rather than copy meant that he could not, as Ruskin advised in Modern Painters, “go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly… rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.”313 Unlike the design reformers, however, Morris also did not focus on simplified, standardized forms drawn from botanical study. Rather, he drew

312 Sara J. Oshinsky, “Design Reform,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2006), http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd /dsrf/hd_dsrf.htm.

313 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume 1, 423. (Project Gutenberg, September 2009), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29907/29907-h/29907-h.htm.

129 inspiration from the closely-observed and complex rural world around him, giving his patterns an element of Ruskinian natural study despite their necessary conventionalization. As in Morris’s poetry and other writing, a close reading of the natural features mentioned in “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing” show that he had a specific type of landscape in mind when considering where pattern-designers should find their inspiration. As well as fields and gardens he mentioned hedgerows, and in a section regarding conventionalized design, he stated that it was necessary to simplify forms because “You can't bring a whole country-side, or a whole field, into your room, nor even a whole bush.”314 These were not simply references to any part of the natural world. He did not, for example, mention mountains, or coastlines, or swamps, or any infinite number of other landscape features. The landscapes which he had in mind when writing the lecture, to which he was drawn throughout his life, upon which he focused in the 1880s, and which he depicted in his patterns were all the same: the English countryside, and particularly the rural riverside spaces of the Upper Thames and the river’s tributaries.

Morris’s Plants and the Landscape Many previous scholars and biographers, based on the clear evidence of the patterns and May’s comments on the subject, have noted that Morris drew upon the plants around him for his pattern designs.315 However, the ecological particularities of

314 “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” 194.

315 See for example Parry Textiles, 42; May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 37; and books such as Derek Baker, The Flowers of William Morris (London: , 1996) and

130 that influence have not been explored in depth, and works on the subject have focused primarily on flowering garden plants, even though there is a far broader range of species represented in Morris’s works. As I will show, the wilder plants of the patterns are particular to the riverside ecosystems of the Thames and its tributaries, and they represent an active choice on Morris’s part to focus upon the landscapes he most admired.316 Morris's plants are not just things that happened to be near him. He was a resident of London, with easy access to parks, gardens, and flower markets. He could have sought his plants in the city, or looked to the exotic and unusual plants so beloved by Victorian gardeners for his designs. He made another choice, and he had strong opinions on the matter. In “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing” he wrote,

I have said that it was good and reasonable to ask for obviously natural flowers in embroidery; one might have said the same about all ornamental work, and further, that those natural forms which are at once most familiar and most delightful to us, as well from association as from beauty, are the best for our purpose. The rose, the lily, the tulip, the oak, the vine, and all the herbs and trees that even we cockneys know about, they will serve our turn better than queer, outlandish, upsidedown-looking growths. If we cannot be original with these simple things, we shan't help ourselves out by the uncouth ones.317

The plants Morris used in his designs follow this instruction, to a point. He did use roses, tulips, oaks, and vines in abundance. However, he also used many other plants,

Rowan Bain, William Morris Flowers (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2019).

316 For the scientific names of plants discussed in this and other sections, see Appendix A.

317 “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” 200.

131 and went far beyond a Londoner’s presumably cursory knowledge of the countryside, depicting not only the wildflowers and trees that characterize the Thames valley in general, but also ones that are specific to the wet, traditionally-managed agricultural lands and clear water of the Upper Thames and the tributaries. In his designs, as in so many other parts of his life, his focus was on Kelmscott. Certain types of plant recur throughout Morris designs, and many of the same also appear in his critical and literary writings and in the personal descriptions of gardens and landscapes which he sent to friends and family in letters. A cursory glance at the descriptive titles of his patterns for printed and woven fabrics yields a list of twenty-five plants:

Acanthus Corncockle Lily Strawberry Anemone Daisy Marigold Thistle Bluebell Eyebright Oak Tulip Borage Honeysuckle Pomegranate Violet Campion Iris Rose Willow Carnation Jasmine Snakeshead (fritillary)

Others, such as columbine, cornflower (bachelor's button), forget-me-not, hawthorn, larkspur (delphinium), peony, pimpernel, pink, poppy, and sunflower, can be added from the wallpapers and from the visual evidence of the patterns. As a result of the stylization of Morris’s botanical motifs, it is not always easy to tell exactly which type of flower he was looking to for inspiration. Additionally, he might have been looking to domesticated or wild varieties, or to any of several different types of plants which share a name ('daisy,' 'violet,' and 'rose' for example describe many different species and varietals). However, certain conclusions still can be made from the plants Morris chose.

132 These plants show a mix of influences. Some are "exotics" such as acanthus, peonies, jasmine, tulips, and pomegranates which call to mind Asian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean climates and decorative arts.318 However, many were also common garden plants – peonies, for example, grew at Kelmscott Manor and at Kelmscott House in London.319 Other common garden plants imported from abroad like carnation, columbine, larkspur (delphinium), and sunflower also feature prominently in the patterns. Far more of Morris’s plants, however, are plants which grow wild in the British countryside – some so distinctively British that they are used as symbols of the nations of the (oak and rose for England, thistle for Scotland).320 And they are not simply random countryside species: they are plants which Morris would have known from his lifelong countryside wanderings, wildflowers and trees associated particularly with the environments he loved the best: the meadows, agricultural fields, hedgerows, and riverbanks of the Thames valley landscape.321

318 His treatment of certain plants in certain patterns also reflects the influence of Middle Eastern objects, as in the petalled motifs with simplified botanical patterns at their center seen in Evenlode and Windrush. These motifs bear little to no resemblance to actual plants but are evocative of the Iznik tiles and other Middle Eastern ceramics admired, collected, and imitated in Morris's circle. See particularly the works of Morris’s friend William de Morgan, including tiles used at Kelmscott Manor. Other examples include the extensive collections of Frederick Leighton.

319 May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, 36; William Morris to Jenny Morris, June 3, 1891, Collected Letters Vol. 3, 309.

320 The daffodil of Wales is absent, though J.H. Dearle made up for that in 1891. Northern Ireland did not exist until 1921. There is no evidence that Morris was generally attempting to depict the national symbols across his patterns. However Oak, a woven silk damask, was an alternate design for the fabrics created for St James's Palace and the damask used in the project, St. James, prominently features roses.

321 Despite Morris’s early love for the forests around Walthamstow, the only

133 Some of Morris’s plants thrive in many British grassland environments, from meadows and fields to domestic lawns: daisy (fig. 47), eyebright (fig. 50), violet, and pink are examples. Others are characteristic of cultivated land or "disturbed ground,” land that has been plowed or otherwise moved around, primarily by human forces. These plants are the wildflowers of agricultural land: corncockle, violets, borage, thistle, poppy, campion, and scarlet pimpernel. Morris also chose plants which thrive in the hedgerows which are distinctive features of many British agricultural landscapes, including roses (fig. 47, 51, 52), honeysuckle, thistles, red campion, and yellow pimpernel, as well as oaks. And Morris did not just use rural plants, or agricultural plants: he also used a group of very specific species associated with rivers and watersides. One of the most common waterside plants in Morris's patterns – as in his writings – is the willow, which recurs as both a primary feature and a background fill (figs. 53 and 54).322 But he also used many other plants which grow either in wet grassy zones, such as riverside greenswards and water meadows, or in the water itself. Wood forget-me-not, for example, is a wet meadow and waterside plant (fig. 55), and wild iris grows on wet ground, particularly riverbanks.323 Marsh marigolds, as the

characteristic British woodland flowers present in his designs are bluebell and anemone. This is likely partially a result of proportion: more wildflowers grow in sunlit open fields than in shady woodlands. However, other distinctive British wildflowers like primula are notably absent. Additionally, visually distinctive flowers associated with the seashore (such as thrift) and with moorlands and other high hillside and mountain environments (such as heather or gorse) are absent from the designs.

322 i.e. Tulip and Willow, 1873; Willow, 1874; Willow Bough, 1887.

323 Paul Sterry and J. R Press, A Photographic Guide to Wildflowers of Britain and Europe. (London: New Holland, 2001), 83 and 132.

134 name implies, grow in marshes and other wet areas like ditches (fig. 56).324 These are the plants of watery English landscapes, of riverbanks and wet meadows and stretches of standing water. As such, many also appear in John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, which depicts a Surrey Thames tributary (fig. 40).325 Some, such as snakeshead fritillary and water-crowfoot, are even particularly associated with the Thames and its tributaries, as will be discussed in further detail later in this chapter. The presence of all of these plants reflects Morris’s close relationship with the landscapes of the Thames valley and particularly with the space around Kelmscott. In his own version of a Ruskinian mode, he ventured out into that landscape and observed it closely. He may not have “rejected nothing,” but he certainly found interest and inspiration in a range of forms, depicting not only grand and well-known garden blooms or wildflowers but also the humble and often small-scale species of ditch, verge, and plowed field. The variety of the species he chose implies a longstanding observation of an environment over different seasons, and the specificity of some of those species tells us exactly which environment, or environment type, he was observing and interpreting through his patterns. His plants are characteristic not just of any British outdoor space, but of wet and riverside spaces, and spaces managed for agriculture, particularly by traditional means: they are characteristic of the landscape he found and loved around Kelmscott.

324 Marsh marigold is one of the plants specifically mentioned in Frank’s Sealed Letter. See Chapter 2, p. 43.

325 See Chapter 2, p. 99. Thamesian plants depicted by Millais include the water willow and dog-rose bush on the riverbanks above Ophelia’s form, water forget-me- not on the upper bank and the second implied bank at the lower edge of the painting, and water-crowfoot in the water beside her.

135 Legacies of Land Management Morris’s preference for traditional land management and farming techniques, borne out across his personal and public writings, is also a central element in his approach to pattern design and landscape-centered inspiration. The botanical motifs and forms of his patterns are not only elements of the general countryside, or the specific Kelmscott area: they are also reflections of the physical features and botany particular to certain types of historic English landscape management. In fact, they might be read as records of landscapes and ecosystems which were already under threat in Morris’s lifetime and which have become increasingly rare in the ensuing century and a half. Changes in farming practice that began in the nineteenth century not only altered the physical and productive scale of British agriculture: they also altered the ecosystems of the British countryside. These changes included the introductions of steam-powered mechanization, wire fencing, and artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides. Mechanized planting and harvesting allowed – even required – fields to be larger, which led to the destruction of hedgerows and other botanically diverse inter-field habitats. Mechanization also led to the decline of water meadows and any other type of field that required hand-sowing or hand-harvesting, or otherwise could not support machines.326 The haymakers of News from Nowhere – and of paintings such as Ford Madox Brown’s The Hayfield, owned by Morris (fig. 41) – who worked in fields without machines were already outmoded by mid-century.327 Wire fencing,

326 The channel systems of water meadows, for example, are incompatible with large- scale machinery that needs even ground on which to move. See Stedman, 5.

327 See Barringer, “The Harvest Field in the Railway Age.”

136 meanwhile, was a quicker and more efficient way to divide space, leading to the further decline of the hedgerows Morris admired. And while artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and other chemicals led to increased yields, they also affected the plants and animals in and around the harvest fields. Many of the plants Morris used in his patterns are still common wildflowers and garden flowers in Britain. However, some like have become increasingly rare, largely because one person's wildflower can be another person's weed. Corncockle, the namesake of an 1883 Morris fabric (fig. 57), was once a common wildflower on cultivated land, but it declined in the twentieth century as a result of the use of artificial herbicides.328 Other agricultural advances have had similar effects; for example, improvements in land drainage have led to the decline of plants such as water violet which are endemic to wet areas or ditches.329 Snakeshead fritillary is one particularly well-known example of a plant well-loved by Morris that has suffered as a result of shifts away from traditional land management.330 The delicate wildflower with its distinctive checkerboard petals is a quintessential Thames valley plant (fig. 58 and 59). A common meadow wildflower in the nineteenth century, it now survives

328 Sterry and Press, Wildflowers of Britain and Europe, 19.

329 ibid., 71.

330 Fritillaries appear repeatedly in Morris’s printed fabric patterns: they are the namesake of Snakeshead, 1876, and variegated bell-shaped flowers in a similar style also appear in Evenlode, Cray, and Lodden. Morris also mentions them repeatedly in his personal writing, reporting their bloom to Jane in a letter in April 1890 and noting searching for, finding, and picking them in local fields with Jenny in diary entries from late April 1895. They now grow in the Kelmscott Manor garden, and likely did in Morris's period as well (the April 1890 letter to Jane refers primarily to the garden). Collected Letters Vol. 3, 151-52; diary, British Library, Add MS 45407 B-45411.

137 primarily in traditional hay meadows along the Upper Thames and its tributaries.331 These meadows historically supported a diverse range of flora and fauna because of the way they were managed, with periods of grazing and growing that corresponded to the lifecycles of many wildflowers.332 As hay and grazing lands were drained and turned into arable land or sown with single-plant hay crops in the late nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century, populations of fritillary and other wildflowers were lost.333 Morris lived through one of the most intense phases of change in British agriculture. He would have witnessed the loss of hand-mown hay meadows and hedgerows, the increased drainage and regularization of land, and the introduction of various new technologies that further altered rural ecosystems. These changes, along with increases in pollution and population, altered the longstanding ecology of the agricultural landscape. The plants of Morris’s patterns therefore not only reveal his preference for the rural environment: they also reveal the delicate ecological balances

331 Andy Byfield, “A Chequered History: The Snakeshead Fritillary,” , April 26, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gardening-blog/2013/apr /26/snakeshead-fritillary. The two most notable populations are by the Thames at about 10 miles (16 km) upstream from Kelmscott and in the meadows of Magdalen College near where the Cherwell meets the Thames in Oxford.

332 The fields were grazed in the autumn and winter, then left ungrazed through the spring and summer to allow a grassy meadow to grow; in mid-summer (usually early July), the grass would be cut by hand and dried to use as hay. This corresponded to the growing season of many wildflowers, and allowed them – and the animals that lived off them, like native bees – to thrive among the grass.

333 Byfield, “A Chequered History.” There is some shift in the other direction occurring now, with land conservation organizations and some individuals looking to return to traditional management techniques in order to promote biodiversity and support threatened species, among other benefits.

138 and traditional management practices that formed the landscape he observed, loved, and interpreted.

Landscape Form and the Patterns While the majority of Morris's patterns show the influence of the botanical environments of the Upper Thames and its tributaries, some also reveal a particular formal relationship with the broader physical features of that landscape. The net and meander structures of Morris’s patterns had historical precedents, in Morris’s designs they also take on elements of the landscapes around him. By inserting Thames countryside plants into the dynamic but highly structured forms of the patterns, Morris not only melded his historic and landscape influences: he also created visual evocations of the landscape forms around him, particularly the hedgerow and the riverbank. Many of Morris’s patterns have something of the traditional hedgerow about them. Hedgerows – field divisions made from living plants – are not mentioned so often as gardens in Morris's writings, nor are they mentioned often in scholars’ discussions of his design work. But Morris would have known them from the Kelmscott countryside, where they are the favored method of field division, and he certainly seems to have had them in mind from time to time. In “Some Hints on

Pattern-Designing,” he wrote:

In all good pattern-designs the idea comes first, as in all other designs, e.g., a man says, I will make a pattern which I will mean to give people an idea of a rose-hedge with the sun through it; and he sees it in such and such a way; then, and not till then, he sets to work to draw his

139 flowers, his leaves and thorns, and so forth, and so carries out his idea.334

Morris was, of course, describing his own working process. The pattern he described may be hypothetical, but the statement nevertheless shows that he considered the visual effect of hedgerows to be an interesting and potentially inspirational subject, worthy of evoking in the interior. In hedgerows, as in Morris’s patterns, the botanical growth and the underlying structure are one and the same. Hedgelaying, the craft of making hedges, involves the careful cultivation, trimming, and interweaving of living shrubs or trees to create impenetrable field divisions (fig. 60). The hedging branches braid, loop, and double back on each other, all while sprouting new growth. Sometimes single trees, known as standards, or rows of trees are incorporated; the standards are often oaks or willows.335 Wildflowers and vines, meanwhile, grow up among the hedge branches. Mature hedges are dense walls of plant material that provide habitat for wildflowers and wildlife as well as marking boundaries and keeping livestock where they need to be (fig. 52, 61). The interwoven layers of flowers and foliage of Morris’s patterns – including common hedgerow plants like roses, hawthorn, honeysuckle, thistle, pimpernel, oak, and willow – evoke the profuse diversity and dense structure of Kelmscott's hedges.

The net patterns, in particular, share the structural rigidity of newly-lain hedges with their tight repeating patterns of interwoven branches (figs. 6, 51). Several net patterns are populated, too, by hedge animals: rabbits and birds (fig. 62). And in their

334 “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” 200.

335 Rackham The History of the Countryside, 184-96.

140 backgrounds, below the rambling plants, they often give way to dark shades of color, like the depths of dense vegetation where sunlight does not reach. They may not be explicitly hedgerow-inspired patterns, but they nevertheless show a close attention to how plants grow in the Kelmscott countryside: to the layering of specific types of foliage, fauna, and flowers, to the play of light and shadow, and to the order below the apparently informal complexity of biologically diverse, traditionally managed landscape features. The late meander patterns, too, combine structure with effusive, twining plant growth and call upon the traditionally-managed lands of the Upper Thames, but they show another influence: the river itself. The twisting paths of the motifs, their complex overlays, and the flowered backgrounds can all be read as responses to the immediate landscape of the river around Kelmscott. This Thamesian influence is especially significant given that all but two of the late meander patterns are named for tributaries.336 The inspiration cited in the patterns' names is shown in the fabrics themselves. As in the net-structured, hedgerow-type patterns, the landscape is present in both the formal structure and the botanical motifs of the late meander patterns. Both pattern and river have a primary line – stem or channel – which cuts across space in a curving path, but with clear directionality: meander patterns up across the fabric and rivers downstream (fig. 63). Both double back on themselves, creating lobes of land or of background space. The primary lines also branch, sometimes meeting each other again and sometimes separating permanently. In rivers, these branches are channels

336 The two exceptions are Rose and Thistle and Corncockle, which predate the switch to tributary patterns.

141 around islands, backwaters, and tributaries. In the patterns, the branches are botanical ones: separations from stems, sometimes rejoining the main stem via overlap and in other cases moving away from the primary stem to end in a flower or . Rivers flow like the meander patterns and landscape meanders are a particularly marked characteristic of the Upper Thames as it makes its slow way through its flat floodplain – as can be seen in aerial photographs and maps of the Kelmscott area. Thus, the formal structure of the meander patterns forms another visual echo of the Thames landscape. The visual relationship between landscape form and pattern does not end there, however. In her analysis of the connection between Morris’s angling hobby and his meander designs, Caroline Arscott draws attention to what she calls “the issue of surface and depth.”337 The river has both these features: it is an essentially two- dimensional surface upon which boats and leaves float, but it also has depth in which currents flow and fish live. The formal structures and color choices of Morris’s patterns allow for a limited play between two-dimensional surface and visual depth much like that seen on the water of the Thames. The twisting and overlapping of stems and motifs across Morris’s patterns create tension between flatness and implied dimensionality, echoing the layering and depth of nature while still conforming to restrictions of media and form.338 Dark grounds and intricate but simplified backdrop

337 Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 189.

338 As opposed to popular nineteenth-century patterns which used perspective and shading to create illusionistic images (fig. 48).

142 infills also further the visual effect of depth, allowing the background to recede and implying multiple layers of growth and pattern. In four of the tributary patterns – Kennet, Wandle, Cray, and Medway (figs. 4, 7, 8, and 10)– the background fill is formed by a branching, twining pattern of small white stems and flowers atop a dark ground. In these patterns, the interplay of surface and depth is particularly complex, as is the relationship to the landscape of the Thames and its tributaries. The botanical infill design was most often created by discharging the deep blue indigo fabric and not over-dying with other colors.339 This process revealed the white cotton beneath, so that the true background – the plain fabric – paradoxically served as middle ground, just as it served as foreground detail and highlight in many of the patterns' motifs. In these patterns, depth and surface are physically as well as visually reflexive.340 The white stem-and-flowered backgrounds of these four patterns do not only represent a new way in which Morris explored surface and depth in his designs, however: they can also be read as further botanical and visual references to the Thames landscape. Rather counterintuitively, these four patterns and the other tributary patterns include less recognizable riverside plants than some of Morris’s other patterns.341 The infill patterning in particular is so simplified that it can seem

339 The exception to this rule was Cray, which does not seem to have been produced with a blue background until after Morris's death. See Chapter 5 and Appendix B.

340 The physical relationship between surface and depth becomes even more complex when one considers the manufacture of the indigo-discharge patterns, which was reliant on the water of the River Wandle. See Chapter 4.

341 Fritillaries do make an appearance in Evenlode and Cray, but the primary motifs of the tributary patterns are by and large not riverside plants, or even wildflowers. The dominant forms are garden flowers: large, multi-layered round blooms with serrated

143 botanically unreadable, but in the context of the ecosystems of the Thames and its tributaries, a visual parallel appears. The small scale, density, and five-lobed blooms of the patterns evoke plants which grow not just alongside the Thames and other rivers, but in them. These include water violets and water forget-me-nots, and most particularly water-crowfoot, a group of common British aquatic plants related to buttercups.342 Water-crowfoot grows in mats on the surface of slow-moving or still fresh water, including ditches and streams (fig. 64). The green body of the plant remains mostly submerged, but the small, five-lobed white flowers raise above the water on delicate stems which twist and turn in the water. Water-crowfoot is particularly closely associated with the environments of chalk streams, a particularly English type of watercourse that includes many of Morris’s tributaries.343 It is also one of the characteristic tributary plants featured in Millais’s Ophelia (fig. 40): its mat of greenery and bobbing flowers filling much of the bottom of the frame. With these plants in mind, the forms of the background decoration in Kennet, Wandle, Cray, and Medway take on another aspect. It is possible to interpret them not as the twining

edges – probably carnations or peonies – as well as tulips, sunflowers, and iznik-style flower motifs.

342 Water forget-me-not grows “beside fresh water, with the plant often partially submerged” and water violet is an aquatic plant “with both submerged and floating stems” Sterry and Press Wildflowers of Britain and Europe, 83 and 71. Water- crowfoot is so common in British streams that it is rather emblematic: two works I consulted for this section, C.D. Preston and J.M. Croft’s Aquatic Plants in Britain and Ireland (Boston: Brill, 2014) and The World Wildlife Fund UK’s “The State of England’s Chalk Streams” report have photographs of water-crowfoot on their covers.

343 “The State of England’s Chalk Streams.” The World Wildlife Fund UK, 2014. http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/wwf_chalkstreamreport_final_lr.pdf, 26. For more on chalk streams, see below.

144 forms of land plants, but as the floating stems and flowers of plants on the surface of water, with the dark blue of the river beyond. The white-on-dark effect of the tributary pattern background fills can in fact be seen as a double image of the river landscape. As well as calling up water-crowfoot and other aquatic plants, it evokes another aspect of the river's appearance: the refraction of light on the water's surface. If one is lucky enough to visit the Upper Thames on a day with bright sun and blue sky, and preferably a light wind, one can see a tributary pattern in the landscape (fig. 65). When blue sky and bright sunlight reflect off the water, it creates an intricate play of white highlights on the blue surface. This abstracted sort of small-scale white-and-blue pattern appears beyond waterside plants, forming the background for riverbanks full of wildflowers and for the strong lines of willow trunks and their densely overlapping, delicate foliage. Morris may or may not have been trying to replicate this exact riparian visual effect in his patterns; however, given the way he spoke of finding inspiration in a sunlit rose-hedge and bringing reminders of the landscape into patterns, it is not beyond imagining. Additionally, whether or not this effect was his intention, he certainly would have seen it during all his time along the water and out on it while boating and fishing. The blue of water and the intricate, repeated pattern of light reflecting from it is as much a part of the space around Kelmscott as the forms of meandering streams, wildflowers, meadows, and hedgerows. They are all aspects of the landscape that is distilled and interpreted through Morris's pattern designs, and through the tributary patterns in particular. Of course, not all of the tributary patterns share all these visual traits outlined above. Not all are meander patterns, and not all have botanical infills. There is no

145 exact Morris formula for creating reminders of the Thames and tributary landscape, but rather an interrelated set of techniques and effects, some shared across many works, some unique to the tributary pattern group, and some seen only in single designs. For example, Evenlode (fig 2), the earliest of the tributary patterns, has the deep blue indigo background which dominates the late printed fabrics, but no infill atop it. Windrush (fig 5) lies somewhere in between; its small foliage infill is less divided from its foreground, and less simplified than the characteristic white-and-dark fills. Lodden (fig 6) is, as usual, one of the biggest outliers: it is a net pattern rather than a meander, though it was indigo-discharged, it has a light ground and no background infill. Lea (fig. 9) is also a curious case that diverges substantially from the other tributary patterns. It is technically a meander pattern, but it does not have the bold, directional stems that dominate Morris's designs in the period, making it hard to distinguish its repeat or directionality.344 A large part of the legibility problem lies in the way the pattern uses dotting for both shading and infill. Though Morris used dotting in many patterns, Lea takes it to an extreme. Foliage and background are both filled by the tiny specks of white from the dotted discharge. This, along with the single-color dyeing, creates a visual continuity between foreground and background. Depth is subordinated to movement and the small-scale patterning of the dots. As an experiment in form, it might be considered a failure. However, as a river-centered

344 Much of Lea is difficult to distinguish. It is a visually confusing pattern, and it does not seem to have been very successful. It turns up less often in museum collections than some of its brethren, which might indicate that less of it was printed or sold in the first place. It is also not uncommon to come across images of it, on museum collection websites and elsewhere, that are not the right way up. Only very close looking, in fact, can determine which way up might be. This problem is particularly pronounced in the single-color versions of the pattern, which seem to be the originals, based on evidence in the Merton Abbey Dye book and Morris & Co. sample books.

146 pattern, it might be considered more successful. The foliage of the pattern seems to float in the mid-ground, like riverbank plants suspended in the river's flow. And even more so than the white-and-blue background fills, Lea's directionless yet rhythmic repeat of fractured white and light blue captures the scintillating effect of light refracting on water.

Personal Geography: Morris and the Tributaries As the evidence of the patterns and the landscape shows, Morris had a close relationship with the environment around him, especially at Kelmscott Manor. However, as the titles of the tributary patterns alone should make clear, Morris’s patterns do not only reflect his relationship with one place. Rather, they are part of the larger riverine network of his life. In naming his tributary patterns, Morris pointed towards his lifelong involvement with the broader Thames landscape, not only along the main channel and valley, but also along a variety of its feeder streams. Morris encountered these tributaries at different points in his life and valued them for different, though interrelated, reasons. The tributary patterns therefore outline a personal geography, embracing the full span of the Thames valley from the river’s source to its estuary, north into the Cotswolds and Chilterns, and south into the Downs and Kent. This section will explore that geography, moving in a general downstream trajectory through the patterns and sites. This trajectory helps to classify the types of landscapes Morris was interested in, and it is also approximately chronological: Morris’s earliest tributary patterns were named for Upper Thames tributaries, and the last for the furthest downstream. The downstream progression of Morris’s tributary pattern names is logical within the context of Morris’s landscape interests and ideals, as well as his biography. He started with Upper Thames tributaries near Kelmscott and

147 Marlborough – his ideal landscape and a beloved landscape of his childhood – before moving on to spaces which were, to him, less ideal and more fraught – the rivers of London and Kent. Together, these tributary spaces and their patterns further illuminate the lifelong nature of many of the themes in Morris’s relationship with the broader Thames valley: the valuing of traditional rural landscapes, the denigration of modern changes, and the often complex relationship between the two.

The Cotswolds: Evenlode and Windrush The valleys of the Evenlode and the Windrush lie within 15 miles (24km) of Kelmscott, forming part of the larger context of Morris’s life at Kelmscott and along the Upper Thames (fig. 66). Morris’s letters and May’s reminiscences show that the family was particularly fond of the Windrush valley and visited it repeatedly.345 In August 1883, Morris wrote to Jenny that he and a friend would be taking several days to journey up the Windrush valley from Whitney to Minster Lovell and Burford.346 Evenlode (fig. 2), the first pattern Morris named for a tributary, had been designed about six months before, and was registered in September. Windrush (fig. 2) followed, along with Kennet, in October. Given Morris’s focus on the Kelmscott landscape during the 1880s, it is unsurprising that when he turned to rivers for naming inspiration, the Cotswolds rivers were among the first he chose. And as at Kelmscott, a close inspection of the history of these tributaries shows how Morris overlooked

345 He also travelled across much of the northern Cotswolds when visiting Kelmscott, so even though the nearby Evenlode is never specifically mentioned in his letters or diaries, it seems unlikely that he would not have visited it.

346 William Morris to Jenny Morris, August 14, 1882. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 215.

148 certain aspects of the river landscapes and elevated others in order to form an idealized vision of what the countryside was or could be. The Cotswold settings of the Windrush and Evenlode make them unusual within Morris’s larger Thamesian landscape. The Cotswolds are a hilly region that runs in a shallow arc northeast approximately 80 miles (130 km) from Bath to Chipping Campden.347 Much of the Cotswold area is characterized by high, exposed ground – the wolds of the region’s name – but it is also interspersed by the valleys of streams and rivers, several of which lie within easy reach of Kelmscott.348 Unlike the Thames nearby, the Cotswolds streams cut through hills, forming more noticeable and sometimes relatively dramatic valleys. Riverside villages generally climbing up hillsides rather than sitting entirely within the flat floodplain.349 Despite the steepness of the surrounding hills, however, the bottomland around the Windrush and Evenlode is very flat (fig. 66), and the streams tend to meander through grassy floodplain fields as they do at Kelmscott and along Morris’s other tributaries – a fact which

347 Kelmscott lies just south-east of this arc, on the broad alluvial plain between the Thames and the hills. Oxford lies to the east of the area, and Stratford-upon-Avon to the north. To the west is the valley and estuary of the Severn and the cities of Gloucester and Cheltenham. To the southwest are Bath and Bristol. The streams and small rivers that run through the valleys of the area drain into three rivers: the Severn, the Avon, and the Thames. The Thames’s source is also among the hills, near Cirencester. Much of the Cotswolds region is now designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), which gives it some legislative protection as a natural area and historic landscape. Jane Bingham, The Cotswolds: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xxiii.

348 As well as the Windrush and Evenlode to the north, there are also the Coln and Leach to the west.

349 For example, the medieval village of Burford, eight miles (13 km) due north of Kelmscott, descends more than 200 feet from its highest point (at more than 500ft above sea level), to its lowest at the Windrush.

149 distinguishes them from other Cotswolds streams with narrower valleys.350 These landscapes therefore combine the somewhat more picturesque or even dramatic Cotswolds landscapes with the gentler meandering floodplain spaces Morris admired up and down the Thames river system. Morris’s relationship with the Cotswolds landscape reflects the complicated relationship between his ideals and the economic realities of the British agricultural landscape. According to May, her father’s two favorite Cotswolds villages were Bibury along the Coln and Minster Lovell on the Windrush.351 May’s praise of those villages, which likely reflects her father’s views, focuses on the grey buildings and small scale of the villages, the mix of grasslands and woodland in the valleys, and the “sparkling water” meandering through it all. Her father meanwhile described Bibury to his friend and fellow designer Kate Faulkner as “surely the most beautiful village in England: lying down in the winding valley beside the clear Coln,” going on to praise its small scale as well.352 This compactness of both building and landscape, what May

350 The landscape character assessment of the Cotswolds AONB defines nineteen landscape character types within the area, and the valleys of the Windrush and Evenlode are the only examples of “broad floodplain valley.” Cotswolds AONB Partnership. “Landscape Character Assessment: The Cotswolds Landscape, Part 1” (2002) https://www.cotswoldsaonb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/3_The CotswoldsLandscape_1.pdf, 39.

351 Collected Works, Vol. 18, xxiv-xxv.

352 William Morris to Kate Faulkner, August 8, 1890. Collected Letters Vol. 3, 188. In the same letter, he notes that he is finishing News from Nowhere. There is no clear reason why Morris did not name a pattern after the Coln. There is a later Morris & Co. pattern called Colne, but it dates from after Morris’s lifetime. Parry Textiles, 261. There is a temptation to blame the choice on poetics: Coln/Colne does not have the evocative multisyllables of Windrush or Evenlode, or even the brief vowel ring of Wey or Lea.

150 calls “dainty and sweet,” seems to have pleased both Morrises, and both also praised the vernacular irregularity of Cotswold villages. While these traits held – and still hold – distinctive attraction for people like Morris in search of a vision of traditional rural England, they were less indicative of pleasant country life than of economic ills: rural poverty, agricultural depression, and industrial decline. The reason so many Cotswolds villages retain their small medieval and early modern homes is not necessarily that people in the past preferred them that way: rather, people often could not afford anything else.353 While the area is good for sheep farming and was therefore relatively wealthy in the late medieval period, shifting markets and increased competition from imported wool in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a steep decline in local prosperity.354 Some parts of the Cotswolds underwent agricultural improvement in the early nineteenth century, but others did not, and when Britain plunged into agricultural depression in the 1870s, the fortunes of the Cotswolds fell even further.355 At the same time, the area was suffering from industrial decline. As at Kelmscott, the dual industrial-agricultural legacy of these rural spaces is often overlooked, despite how it contributed to the fortunes of those sites and their physical environments. Bibury’s picturesque clusters of vernacular buildings and expanses of greensward, for example, are remnants of the

353 When such buildings gained cultural value from the late nineteenth-century love of the vernacular and hand-hewn in which Morris played a part, many locals were more than happy to sell their uncomfortable cottages to urban transplants in search of rural “authenticity.” Peter J. Howard, An Introduction to Landscape (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 252. Today many Cotswold village buildings are kept in their state of sparkling quaintness by wealthy urban transplants or second-home owners.

354 Bingham The Cotswolds, 34-35.

355 ibid., 36 and 38.

151 large-scale textile cottage industry that preceded the mechanization of the later industrial revolution.356 As industry advanced, however, the Cotswold textile industry collapsed, leaving former sites of manufacture to decay into picturesque scenes, their context largely lost as their value shifted. The Windrush and Evenlode valleys were also industrial landscapes. The Windrush, the longest of the Cotswold rivers, had enough volume and fall to power to a substantial wool blanket industry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.357 This industry was centered at Witney, only two and a half miles (4 km) downstream from Minster Lovell (fig. 66). By Morris’s time, when other power sources were available and tastes had shifted, the Witney woolen blanket industry had shrunk but not disappeared entirely.358 Several large firms were still in operation into the 1890s, and the river valley would have borne substantial evidence of its mixed rural-industrial heritage. 359 The Evenlode, meanwhile, was an early site of rail expansion: the line that runs up the valley from Oxford to Hereford was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the 1840s and opened in 1851.360 These valleys therefore bore abundant evidence of the mixed agricultural-industrial histories that complicate the pastoral contrast between rural and urban.

356 ibid., 81.

357 Mark Child, The Windrush Valley: A Guide to the River, Towns and Villages (Stroud, UK: Amberley, 2010), 160.

358 ibid.

359 Bingham The Cotswolds, 88.

360 The line, known as the Cotswold Line and still in operation, was an early site of railway land and labour conflicts. See Bingham The Cotswolds, 93-94.

152 Morris made few acknowledgements of incursions of modernity in the landscape of the Cotswolds. He does seem to have been aware of the poverty and struggles of the area, to at least some degree: in his letter to Kate Faulkner praising Bibury, he noted that “the other villages (along the Colne) are beautiful too, though terribly marred by the signs of neglect and poverty, and shabby griping the causes of which we know so well.”361 He made no mention of the industrial heritage of the area, but he would have been aware of it. When he was looking for a location for the Firm’s factory around 1880, he turned first to a disused silk ribbon mill at Blockley, in the northern Cotswolds.362 Moving there would have allowed Morris to be within a rural landscape he loved, but the possibility only existed because of the area’s industrial history and shifting fortunes – matters upon which Morris did not reflect in his known writings. The Cotswolds, in his writings and May’s, and the writings and ideals of many that followed him, stood as a pastoral ideal, a place to leave behind the ills of the modern, the industrial, and the urban. In the end Morris did not achieve his dream of retreating to the Cotswolds: the plan to move to Blockley was dismissed as impractical by the Firm’s business manager, and the Firm’s factory was soon established at Merton in the London suburbs.363 Several years later, he used that factory to create

361 William Morris to Kate Faulkner, August 8, 1890. Collected Letters Vol. 3, 188.

362 MacCarthy, 430 and Bingham The Cotswolds, 88.

363 See Chapter 4. Others did pursue the Cotswolds dream: in 1902 Morris’s friend and follower C.R. Ashbee moved his Guild of Handicrafts from the to another disused Cotswolds silk ribbon mill, close to Blockley in Chipping Camden. This project and other smaller-scale Utopian craft undertakings secured the Cotswolds’ reputation as a central site in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century craft history. See Bingham The Cotswolds, 88 and 129-142.

153 Windrush and Evenlode, calling up the spirit of the river valleys he admired despite his necessary remove from them.

Oxford: Rose and the Cherwell After the Cotswold patterns, Morris’s tributary pattern names jump over 30 miles (50 km) downstream to the Reading area. In so doing, they skip large swathes of the upper river with which he had no relationship except as a passerby. They also, however, skip one other Thames tributary landscape that was an important site in Morris’s life: Oxford and its tributary, the Cherwell. Oxford is the only place Morris lived that does not feature in the tributary pattern names. It was also a major site in his riverside personal geography. Morris first engaged with Upper Thames landscapes in Oxford, and the city and its surroundings remained a point of reference, as when he mentioned the Cherwell valley to Charles Faulkner in his first description of Kelmscott.364 The Cherwell does not apparently appear among his works, but it almost did: the 1884 design for Rose (completed fabric fig. 51) bears an annotation in pencil: “Cherwell/Rose.”365 There is no indication why Morris abandoned the tributary name in favor of a more descriptive one. However, there is a possibility that his choice was colored by his personal relationship with Oxford and particularly the Cherwell, which had been put under considerable strain in the early 1880s.

364 William Morris to Charles Faulkner, May 17, 1871. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 133.

365 Parry, Textiles, 291, n. 64. There is an 1887 Morris & Co. fabric pattern named Cherwell, but that pattern’s occasional attribution to Morris instead of J.H. Dearle is extremely doubtful. See Appendix B.

154 Morris’s feelings on Oxford seem to have been mixed. He spent 1853-56 there as an undergraduate at Exeter College. In those years he made lifelong friendships, including Edward Burne-Jones and Charles Faulkner, and got his start in art and poetry. He also met his wife, an Oxford native, there during the Oxford Union mural project in 1857. However, he was not particularly enthusiastic about the university or his education, and he seems to have been largely indifferent to the city as well throughout the 1860s and 1870s.366 In the 1880s that changed: Morris became aware that Oxford’s historic architecture was under threat, and he became active in preservation campaigns, beginning with a battle over a tributary site, Magdalen Bridge. In the 1880s the eighteenth-century Magdalen Bridge was one of the primary entry points to the center of Oxford and the only major bridge across the Cherwell from its junction with the Thames until Gosford Bridge near Islip, five miles (8 km) north. It was judged too narrow for Victorian traffic and plans were proposed to widen it, to the distress of Morris and many others. For several months Morris contributed to the cause, writing letters to the press and helping other campaigners with their work.367 In one letter to the Pall Mall Gazette – which was not published – he wrote, It may well be thought that the mere words, ‘the destruction of Magdalen Bridge' would go at once to the heart of any one who knows Oxford well; that any one who has lived there either as gownsman or townsman, & who does not want to be set

366 Oxford rarely appears in his correspondence from the period, and in an 1880 letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones he notes he had only visited three times since completing his studies. August 19, 1880, Collected Letters Vol. 1, 581-84.

367 See William Morris to Henry George Woods, Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 77-78.

155 down as dull to any impression of art or history, would be eager to protest against such a strange piece of barbarism.368

He went on in much the same vein for many lines more. It was clearly a subject of heightened feeling, even relative to Morris’s many heightened feelings. His disappointment over the campaign’s failure in December 1881 seems to have compounded itself with his general distress over changes happening all over the university and the town in the period, resulting in a distaste for the place in general.369 He wrote two letters to periodicals over the next decade to voice his opinions on “The vulgarisation of Oxford” in 1885 and “the great public scandal” of changes to Oxford and Cambridge in 1890.370 In both letters he looked back to the Oxford “of thirty years ago,” declaring in the later letter that the Oxford he had known as a student was “one of the most beautiful cities in the world” but “two-thirds of this beauty has now been destroyed.”371 He laid the blame entirely at the feet of the educated members of the colleges, whom he thought should know better. This spate of criticism, combined with the “spoilt” nature of the Oxford Thames riverside which is mentioned in News from

368 “Magdalen Bridge,” July 16, 1881. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 55-57.

369 See letter to Henry George Woods, ibid., 85-86.

370 William Morris to the editors of The Daily News, November 20, 1885. Collected Letters Vol. 3, 493-94; William Morris to the editors of The Speaker, May 24, 1890. ibid., 156-59.

371 William Morris to the editors of The Speaker, May 24, 1890. Collected Letters Vol. 3, 157.

156 Nowhere,372 show that in the 1880s Morris felt a growing distaste for Oxford and the changes that had come to it. When the time came to choose between “Rose” and “Cherwell” in 1884, the Oxford associations of the latter might have carried with them enough mixed feelings to tip the scale, leading to the abandonment of that particular tributary and its absence from the broader geography of the patterns.

The Southern Chalk Streams: Kennet, Lodden, and Wey After the Cotswolds rivers, Morris’s next grouping of tributary names came from a series of rivers that run from the downs of southern England north to the Thames: the Kennet, Lodden, and Wey (fig. 1). Of the three streams, Morris had a close relationship only with the Kennet (fig. 64), one of the rivers of his boyhood.373 However, the three rivers share so many physical traits that they can be seen as parts of the same extended rural chalk stream landscape. Chalk streams are a particularly English type of waterway. They are endemic to areas where chalk is a major geological element, as it is in much of southern and eastern England.374 Within this geological region, the layers of chalk below ground act

372 News from Nowhere, 160.

373 The name Kennet pays tribute to a stream Morris knew well in his childhood, but which he does not seem to have revisited as an adult. It can therefore be seen as a nostalgic pattern, hearkening to a landscape Morris had loved but did not retain a relationship with into the 1880s – a trait it shares with the later Cray and, to an extent, Lea. This also sets it apart from Windrush and Evenlode, which name landscapes Morris was actively visiting during the 1880s.

374 England’s chalk runs in a broad swathe from Dorset on the south coast northeast into East Anglia and then, turning west slightly, to the eastern reaches of Lincolnshire and . A spur also reaches east across southern England from Dorset to Kent. The chalk formations of the country include the aforementioned Downs, the high Chiltern hills that form the western and northern boundaries of the Thames basin in

157 as filters and reservoirs for rainwater, creating large chalk aquifers which in turn feed streams and rivers. Those waterways generally share a series of interrelated traits. Because they are spring-fed, their water is cool and has constant, consistent flow, rather than varying in temperature or water level depending on season or weather. For the same reason, the water carries little to no silt, meaning that chalk streams are extremely clear (sometimes evocatively called “gin-clear”) and have clean gravel streambeds rather than muddy or sandy ones.375 Because the water moves through chalk, it is slightly alkaline and carries dissolved calcium carbonate.376 The World Wildlife Fund UK (WWF-UK) identifies approximately 224 such streams in England, varying from small watercourses to large rivers.377 The largest proportion of those, 41 of the 224, are Thames tributaries. This concentration of chalk-fed waterways is an important feature of southern English landscape and ecology, and it also has global significance as a unique geologic formation and ecosystem.378

which London sits, the Wolds (another name for downs) of eastern Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and the chalk cliffs of the southern and far south-eastern coasts, including the famous White Cliffs of Dover.

375 “The State of England’s Chalk Streams,” 30 and 13.

376 ibid., 26.

377 ibid., 41. These watercourses include ones which would generally be called creeks in the United States but exclude what the WWF-UK calls rivulets and what in the US might be called streams or brooks. The WWF-UK takes a fairly broad view of chalk streams, classifying them within a spectrum of traits rather than concentrating only on ‘classic’ chalk streams which include all traits. This spectrum approach takes more account of the variance in the natural world and the shared biological traits across the streams, and I will be using it in this project.

378 “Chalk Rivers,” The Wildlife Trusts. https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/habitats/ freshwater/chalk-rivers.

158 Unlike many other unique ecological systems, chalk streams do not have any endemic species.379 However, their water quality allows them, when healthy, to support a great deal of biodiversity. The WWF-UK identifies them as “optimal habitat for a number of England’s iconic and indicator species” and for some very rare species.380 They are known as excellent fishing streams, particularly for trout and salmon, and at their best they also host important populations of invertebrates, waterside mammals like water voles and otters, and aquatic and waterside plants.381 The report identifies one aquatic plant in particular with the chalk streams: water- crowfoot. As discussed above, this aquatic wildflower closely resembles the white-on- dark background fill used in some of the tributary patterns – and that fill first appeared in Kennet in 1883. It subsequently appeared in three other patterns, Wandle, Cray, and Medway; of these rivers, only the Medway is not technically a chalk stream, though it is fed by Kentish chalk streams. Thus, in their background fills, as in so many of their other botanical and formal features, the tributary patterns reflect the ecology and landscape forms of their riverine namesakes. When Morris started school at Marlborough College in 1848, aged thirteen, he would have already been familiar with one chalk stream, the Lea. At Marlborough, however, he had a much closer relationship with the Kennet: the river borders the school grounds, and so Morris found himself living along a riverbank for the first time

379 Species that can live only in that particular habitat.

380 “The State of England’s Chalk Streams,” 26 and 28.

381 The WWF-UK report states rather poetically that “the aquatic plants are the ‘hedgerows’ of the river, providing the in-stream habitat on which everything else depends.” ibid., 26

159 (fig. 68). What we know about Morris’s school days reveals an interest in the river as both a fishing stream and as a larger landscape. His second surviving letter tells his sister Emma that he was hoping to buy “a nice fishing rod,” and he was later remembered for sitting in the schoolroom hand-knotting fishing nets.382 As noted before, his third surviving letter, also written to Emma, is a long, excited description of an excursion to see Silbury Hill and Avebury, important Stone Age sites further up the Kennet valley. The fifteen-year-old Morris related that on the return journey, the group went through a water meadow – a space he described with rapturous enthusiasm and slight illegibility (emphasis his own):

We went through a mud lane down one or two water fields and last but not least through what they call here a water meadow up to our knees in water, now perhaps you do not known what a water meadow is as there are none of them in your part of the world So for your edification, i will tell you what a delectable affair a water meadow is to go through; in the first place you must fancy a field cut through with an infinity of small streams say about four feet wide each the people to whom the meadow belongs can turn these streams on and off when they like and at this time of year they are on just before they put the fields up for mowing the grass being very long you cannot see the water till you are in the water and floundering in it except you are in[?] above the field. Luckily the water had not been bog[?] when we went through it else we would have been up to our middles in mud, however perhaps now you can imagine a water meadow.383

382 William Morris to Emma Morris, March 19, 1849. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 6; MacCarthy, 29.

383 William Morris to Emma Morris, April 13, 1849. ibid., 7. It is clear that Morris’s interest in water meadows began at Marlborough, given his statement that “there are none of them in your part of the world.” Walthamstow’s riverside meadows might not have been as intensively managed as those along the Kennet, without the same flooding-and-draining technologies in place, but they certainly fit the broader definition of the term water meadows, being intermittently flooded and used for

160 Although he does not mention it in his letters, Morris likely also encountered many plant species along the Kennet which would later be at the heart of his experience of Kelmscott. The Kennet landscape is now recognized for its biodiversity, and in Morris’s time that would have been even greater, especially in the water meadows.384 Many of those meadows were lost with the introduction of agricultural mechanization and the waning of the traditional rotation of sheep grazing, flooding, hay growing, grazing, and flooding again.385 In Morris’s time, however, the Kennet would have been lined in the botanically diverse grassy fields which some groups are now trying to reintroduce on the Kennet and along many other British watercourses. Morris’s time on the Kennet represented an early, formative encounter with so much of what he would later value, particularly clean chalk stream water, traditional land management, and corresponding biodiversity. But there, as everywhere in Morris’s personal geography, the rural traits Morris valued cannot be entirely divided from his contemporary world. The Kennet which Morris knew around Marlborough was so rural because it was upstream from the river’s navigable stretches, but the lower river was industrialized and, like the Lea, heavily altered to improve navigation.386 And much like the Upper Thames and the Cray valley, the upper Kennet

grazing. So either Morris was excluding the Lea meadows for not being managed in the same way, or he was not yet highly aware of the landscape of his own hometown.

384 The Kennet is now protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), a designation related to its biodiversity.

385 Jonathan Gaunt and Michael Pooley. Marlborough and The Kennet (Marlborough, UK: White Horse Bookshop, 1994), 23.

386 Somewhat unusually for a Thames tributary, the Kennet’s course is generally west-

161 was accessible to Morris because of the railroad. Marlborough College is not an ancient public school like Eton or Rugby. It was only founded in 1843, as Fiona MacCarthy writes, “following the move westwards of the railway,” with a prospectus that “stressed its proximity to Swindon,” where the junction of several major railway lines was planned.387 The expansion of modern transportation infrastructure made it easier and less expensive for children to be sent away to school, and thus a comfortable upper-middle-class family like the Morrises could afford a position at a new school for their eldest son. Without the railroad, the young Morris would have had to be content with the charming but rapidly urbanizing valley of the lower Lea, and most of the landscapes for which he held such affection throughout his life would have required journeys of days rather than hours. The river namesakes of Lodden and Wey are not so central in Morris’s biography, but they have a great deal in common with the Kennet geographically, ecologically, and culturally. The two rivers both spring from the chalk aquifers of Hampshire with sources only about 15 miles (24 km) apart. The , to the west, runs north and west to join the Thames just east of Reading at Wargrave, not far

east, rather than on a north-south axis. It springs in the hills of Wiltshire and runs east to Reading, where it turns north to meet the Thames. It is 45 miles (72 km) long – neither particularly long nor short. Extensive engineering in the eighteenth century made the river fully navigable to Newbury, 17 miles (27 km) upstream from Reading, where the river is joined by the Kennet and Avon Canal. The canal parallels the river another 8.5 miles (13.7 km) to Hungerford, but then splits, running southwest while the Kennet continues west. The canal eventually meets the Avon at Bath, and from there boats and goods could reach the major port of Bristol.

387 MacCarthy, 29.

162 from the mouth of the Kennet (fig. 1).388 The , to the east, flows north and east to join the Thames at Weybridge, which is now within the London urban area.389 They are both classic chalk streams, with the same clear, steady, alkaline water and historic biodiversity. By using their names, Morris was reinforcing his patterns’ relationship to the traditional and quintessentially English chalk stream landscape as well as the broader Thames landscape. He also chose rivers which were, at the time, somewhat less fraught with modern complications than many others. Unlike the Cherwell and the London and Kent rivers, most of the length of the Loddon and Wey lay outside the reach of encroaching urbanization in the Victorian period. They therefore might have seemed like ideal naming choices for patterns that evoked rural landscapes. Beyond that, it is difficult to say why Morris might have chosen them, and afterwards, he switched back to primarily using names with more personal associations.

Kent: Cray and Medway Morris’s final four printed fabric pattern designs and final four tributary patterns took their names from tributaries of the lower, tidal Thames and its estuary. The namesakes of the Cray (fig. 8) and Medway (fig. 10) flowed southeast of London

388 The pattern uses an alternate spelling.

389 Because the Thames follows a long meander north between Reading and far western London, the two river mouths are twice as far apart in river distance as in land distance – almost 40 miles (64 km) apart in river distance versus 20 miles (32 km) over land.

163 through the county of Kent, while Wandle and Lea were named for London tributaries (figs. 1 and 13).390 Cray’s position in Morris’s personal geography is an essentially nostalgic one. Morris’s first home with Jane and their daughters, Red House, sits in the Cray Valley, and by naming a pattern for that river, Morris would have evoked that place which he loved so intensely, but had to abandon so soon. The valley of the Cray was the location of Morris’s first personal home, and the first place he held up as a potential paradise. If Kelmscott was an ideal found, Red House was an ideal formed and then lost, a pastoral which Morris was forced to refashion after that particular dream collapsed. Additionally, Morris’s career as a designer began with the decoration of Red House in the Cray valley, and he may have sought to acknowledge that significance with Cray, one of his largest and most complex patterns.391 The Cray has much in common with the other tributary pattern rivers: it is a chalk stream with a mixed rural-industrial heritage.392 Despite being only nine miles (14 km) long, it carries a substantial flow of water – enough so that it was already

390 The Medway is still a Kent river, but the Cray is now within the London borough of Bexley.

391 The pattern’s repeats were some of the largest of any of Morris’s printed fabric patterns, and it required the most printing blocks – 34. (Wandle, the second most complex, took 32.) The materials and labor required for the printing meant that Cray was also the Firm’s most expensive printed fabric. Parry Textiles, 243.

392 Unlike Morris’s other tributary pattern namesakes, The Cray is technically a tributary of another tributary, the Darent, rather than of the Thames itself. However, by the time it reaches the Darent, it is already flowing through the and Crayford tidal marshes, and it joins the Darent’s larger tidal creek less than a mile before the combined flow of both rivers reaches the Thames.

164 supporting eleven mills by the eleventh century CE.393 Part of the reason for this proliferation of early industry was likely the proximity of London: the entirety of the river valley lies within about 12 miles (19.5 km) of the center of the City of London (fig. 13).394 The Cray’s broad, flat valley and abundance of clean, alkaline water made it an ideal site for the early modern textile-bleaching industry. 395 Two other rivers around London shared these traits and connections to textile manufacturing and processing: the Wandle and the Lea. When he came to the Cray valley in 1860, Morris was moving within a network of controlled rural space and abundant early modern industry which related closely to his own later work. Medway (fig. 10), as noted, is an outlier among the tributary patterns. As with the Hampshire chalk streams, Morris did not have a close relationship with the Medway valley, but he might have encountered it when living at Red House, which is only about 15 miles away. Additionally, the Medway’s status as a Thames tributary is questionable because it does not drain into the river proper, but rather into its estuary (fig. 1). It generally is not classed as a tributary, but it is sometimes grouped within the larger Thames basin, since it is part of the same geological and hydrological system.396

393 Harding and Baldwin. Along the River Cray, 1-2.

394 The river runs approximately along the edge of a 12-mile arc southeast of the center of the City – Orpington is 12.5 miles (20km) away, Bexley about 11.5 miles (18.4 km), and Crayford just over 12 miles (19.5 km). That proximity meant the area was an important center for market gardens and orchards where food crops were grown for London tables. Harding and Brown Along the River Cray, 4.

395 The river also supported at least one textile printing works, the David Evans Silk Mills, into twentieth century. Harding and Brown Along the River Cray, 89 and 98. For more on the early modern bleaching industry, see Chapter 5.

396 For example, the UK Environmental Agency includes the Medway with the

165 Like the Thames, the Medway drains the hills of southern England, including some downland chalk streams.397 Morris’s choice to include the Medway among his tributary patterns may reflect a recognition of this larger system, as well as the Medway’s similarity and proximity to other rivers which he admired. The Medway is the next river east from the combined Cray and Darent valley. Even if it is not technically a Thames tributary, it shares physical traits and a larger catchment with Morris’s other Kent river, and thus can be seen as an extension of Morris’s personal landscape in Kent and the context of the larger Thames basin.

London: Wandle and Lea Of all of Morris’s tributary pattern namesake streams, he had the closest and most permanent relationships with the two London-area rivers, the Lea and the Wandle (figs. 7 and 9).398 By grouping his much-changed native landscape with rural rivers like the Windrush and the Kennet, Morris classed the Lea among the sort of streams he idealized, rather than those he denigrated. In so doing, he acknowledged the importance of the Lea in his life and his aesthetic views – a logical thing to do,

Thames in its collections of catchment data. http://environment.data.gov.uk/ catchment-planning/RiverBasinDistrict/6

397 “The State of England’s Chalk Streams,” 58. A relatively long English river at 70 miles (113 km), the Medway rises within the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Sussex then crosses into Kent, running north-east and then north through the western side of that easternmost English county. In the distant past, when sea levels were lower, it would have drained into the Thames, which itself was once a tributary of the same river system as the Rhine. Now, its lower reaches drain into an area of estuary and marshes which then open into the greater Thames estuary.

398 These two rivers are discussed in detail in other sections of this project, Chapters 2 and 5 respectively.

166 given that the Lea valley was where he first explored and came to love the streams that feed into the Thames, their good angling, shallow valleys, and surrounding traditionally-managed agricultural land. This can be seen in Morris’s early story “Frank’s Sealed Letter” (1856), as discussed in Chapter 2.399 The parallels between that story’s evocation of the Lea valley and the patterns Morris designed over two decades later are striking, particularly in the moment when the narrator collects “a knot of lush marsh-marigolds” (fig. 56) and submerges them in a rivulet “till both my hand and the yellow flowers were making the swift-running little stream bubble about them”400 Morris came to the valley of the Wandle much later than the Lea, in 1881 – making it the last of the tributary landscapes that he would have encountered before beginning the pattern-designing process. However, this late introduction was just what made the Wandle significant. The clean, clear, mildly alkaline chalk stream water of the Wandle allowed Morris to pursue the indigo-discharge dye technique that colored all but one of the tributary patterns. The river was an essential material presence in the production of the fabrics’ rich dark blues and bright, detailed botanical forms. This aspect of the patterns and the river landscape and the broader history of the Wandle will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, which concerns itself with Morris’s work and legacy along the stream. What bears stating here is that, as mentioned before, Wandle (fig. 7) is one of only two tributary patterns with a naming story. Morris’s oft-quoted statement that Wandle was being created “to honour our helpful stream” shows that the tributary pattern names did in fact have personal significance

399 p. 42- 44.

400 Morris, “Frank's Sealed Letter,” 231.

167 for him and, at least sometimes, reflected his feelings about the sites of his personal, river-centered geography.401

Patterns in the Interior: Landscapes of Use Beyond the tributary patterns, there is another Morris pattern which has well- known direct connections to the Thames landscape: the 1887 wallpaper Willow Bough (fig. 54). This pattern does not bear the same marks of the Upper Thames as the tributary patterns, but it is very clearly centered on the willow, the waterside tree that recurs through so many of Morris's patterns and so much of his writing. May Morris's story about the creation of the pattern is often repeated:

We were walking one day by our little stream that runs into the Thames, and my Father pointed out the detail and variety in the leaf- forms, and soon afterwards this paper was done, a keenly-observed rendering of our willows that has embowered many a London living- room.402 This story reinforces the assertion that Morris was working from the landscape around him as he created his pattern-designs, making close observations of real plants that were translated into the conventionalized repeating forms of the patterns. It is also interesting, however, because of the way May shifts her attention, transitioning from “our little stream that runs into the Thames” and “our willows” to the interior of a London home. This shift is an important reminder that her father’s patterns do not exist in the two-dimensional abstract of design drawings and fabric and wallpaper samples. Rather, they were created to be displayed in three dimensions in interiors,

401 William Morris to Jenny Morris, September 4, 1883. Collected Letters Volume 2a, 223.

402 “Morris as Designer,” 36.

168 where they would become part of their owners’ everyday lives and exist in visual and iconographic dialogue with myriad other objects. The following section is a foray into what Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart term the “potentially interpretable and evocative detail” of Victorian interiors, reading the landscape evocations of Morris’s pattern works within their intended context, the domestic interior, and their largest market, London.403 In its neat turn from outside to inside and Kelmscott to London, May Morris’s story about Willow Bough illuminates the contradiction inherent in the patterns’ landscape of use. The presence of Morris’s patterns in Victorian interiors complicated the relationship between inside and outside, city and country, modern life and pastoral ideal. And this in fact can be seen as part of the point, the meaning, of the works. By offering his Thamesian pastoral patterns to the consumer, Morris was inserting his ideal into the everyday life of others, which could be seen as one step in the right direction towards his aesthetic and political aims. Morris’s printed patterns are by nature large-scale works, designed not as motifs or single iterations but as repeats in many multiples over large swathes of space. The wallpapers were of course designed to cover a least a portion of a room’s wall, meaning the repeats would have stretched around a room, surrounding the

403 Jason Edwards, and Imogen Hart, “Introduction,” in Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart, eds., Rethinking the Interior, c.1867-1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2017), 13. Given its immense size, constant building boom, and large population of affluent consumers, London was at the heart of The Firm’s market and the market for building and design goods in general in the Victorian period. MacCarthy, 111. Therefore, we can assume that a large portion of the Firm’s goods were destined for London homes, with the exception of the primarily ecclesiastical .

169 viewer.404 The printed fabrics, too, were designed first and foremost as wallcoverings, though they were also sold as curtains, curtain-liners, and upholstery.405 Thus, Victorian interiors decorated with Morris patterns would have been immersive, surrounding their occupants with the visual effects of the works (figs 69 and 70). When hung the patterns also gained an aspect of dimension and movement: though sometimes used flat, they were intended to be draped, and the resultant folds of fabric added further visual complexity – an effect that can be seen in the Green Room at Kelmscott Manor, with its faded Kennet hangings (fig. 71). The printed patterns also rarely, if ever, existed in isolation. Victorian interior photographs show rooms with walls decorated with one or more pattern, hand- or machine-woven carpets in another pattern, curtains in another (which we know from records might have been lined with yet another), furniture upholstered in one or more additional patterns, and sometimes embroidered soft furnishings like pillow covers and tablecloths which also featured repeating motifs (figs 69 and 70).406 This multi- layering of Morris’s patterns on walls, curtains, and furniture added extra layers of complexity both visually and conceptually. When, as I have argued, any one of these patterns might be viewed as an expression of the landscape features of the Upper Thames and the river’s tributaries,

404 Victorian interiors often combined papers with paneling or dados, so designs did not always stretch floor-to-ceiling, though Morris preferred them to do so.

405 Morris’s preferred wallcovering method was fabric, or other if possible, otherwise printed.⁠ Wallpaper was a third-best option, a makeshift that could provide a similar experience but could never be the same. Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing” and Parry, Textiles, 64-66 and 181.

406 Parry, Textiles, 198.

170 the multi-patterned complexity of Victorian Morris interiors can be read as another expression of those landscapes’ visuality. Riverine meanders and hedgerow net- patterns appeared together, as did the flora and occasionally fauna of garden, verge, hayfield, and waterway. Thus, the motifs and forms drawn from the Thames landscape were compounded into spaces which were by no means avatars of the landscape, but which nevertheless shared some of its traits. Just as the traditional landscapes of the English riverside are a patchwork of fields, meadows, and waterways, Victorian rooms decorated with Morris patterns formed a system of motifs and pattern types existing alongside each other and intermingling, thereby echoing the complexity of the landscapes which inspired them.407 There is clear potential for significance in the way Morris’s patterns brought the Upper Thames and tributary landscape inside to places aesthetically and physically separate from their inspiratory sites. In interiors decorated with Morris patterns, people would go about their daily lives surrounded by the features of an idealized rural

407 Edwards and Hart’s introduction furthers the potential to read interiors as landscapes by illuminating the transient and phenomenological nature of interior spaces, the possibility of environmental factors like light and atmosphere to alter experiences, and the idiosyncratic culturally- and personally-inflected reactions of any individual encountering them. They also note that they are

Inclined to the discourse of the sublime here because of the almost impossible number of different surfaces, textures, angles, lines, colours, objects, images, pieces of furniture, and other components… within a never static set of determining environmental conditions; and also because of the complex way in which those objects and spaces interact dialectically with any given subjectivity.

This statement echoes the discourse of landscape aesthetics and the difficulties and theoretical approaches of landscape history. Edwards and Hart “Introduction”, 16-17.

171 landscape, albeit in a semi-abstracted form. Plants which city dwellers might not have ever seen or noticed would have become motifs they viewed every day and knew intimately, just as they were in reality for Morris. The effusive intricacy of the patterns, meanwhile, had the potential to communicate aspects of Morris’s visual pleasure in the rural landscape. The distant and threatened countryside thereby became a familiar and recognizable part of the interior landscapes of Victorian Britain and beyond, and Morris’s tastes, with all their attendant meanings, became an important part of popular taste. The communication of aesthetic preferences and pastoral ideologies through the patterns was indirect, but it was also intentional. William and May Morris’s statements on patterns and design show that there was an urge towards meaning in the works. As previously noted, for Morris a central aspect of design – and particularly pattern-design – was the creation of ‘visual symbols’ of a world beyond the pattern in order to give that pattern beauty and meaning.408 The meaning of the landscape-pattern connection had the potential to vary depending on the contexts of the objects, the landscapes of their use – and no overarching statement can be made about all those contexts, because they varied so widely.409 However, some ideas might be drawn out

408 Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing.”

409 Morris & Co. patterns were used in domestic settings ranging from royal homes and aristocratic castles to middle-class villas and terraces, and they circulated across the globe. The Firm was commissioned to redecorate several rooms in St. James’s Palace, London, in 1880 and to design a wallpaper for Balmoral Castle in 1887. Morris also often worked with his friends the Earl and Countess of Carlisle to decorate their various homes, including Naworth Castle and Castle Howard. For information on the Castle Howard decorations, see Eeyan Hartley, “Morris & Co. in a Setting,” The Journal of William Morris Studies 11, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 5–9. The Arts and Crafts engraver and printer Emery Walker, one of the Morrises’ neighbors in

172 from considering the general presence of these patterns within late Victorian homes, and particularly in London settings. By selling patterns which evoked the riparian landscape of Kelmscott and the tributaries, Morris was bringing his particularly English pastoral inside the modern built and domestic landscapes of the city. Sally-Anne Huxtable has argued that one of the Firm’s earliest decorating projects, the Green Dining Room at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), was also an essentially Arcadian or pastoral project, “a conscious, visual evocation of this landscape of the imagination, this lost world of perfection; a representation of Arcadia manifest in the urban tumult of London.”410 The type of ideal landscape evoked was different – Huxtable is quick to point out that the Green Dining Room’s plants are largely not those of the English hedgerow, but rather of a Mediterranean Arcadia – but the aim can be seen as being much the same.411 As we have seen, in their botanical motifs, their hedgerow and meander forms, and their titles, the tributary patterns and other designs conjured up a very specific type of English landscape.

Hammersmith, decorated extensively with Morris wallpapers and fabrics (fig. 69), and Linda Parry includes several Australian examples in William Morris Textiles, 198-99. Some of these settings were decorated specifically by Morris & Co., sometimes but not always with William Morris’s direct involvement. However, many more homes were furnished by other decorators or by clients who bought directly from the Firm’s shop, all of whom potentially used the materials in ways of which Morris would never have approved. The designs were also used in Morris’s own homes, but the complexity of the inflection of Morris designs within his own space is outside the scope of this project; see Imogen Hart, “An ‘Enchanted Interior’: William Morris at Kelmscott House” in Rethinking the Interior, 67–84, for one approach to the subject.

410 Sally-Anne Huxtable, “Re-Reading the Green Dining Room,” in Rethinking the Interior (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2017), 33.

411 ibid., 32.

173 It is difficult to say how many Victorian consumers would have understood the exact nature of this evocation, but Edwards and Hart argue that we cannot undervalue the “polymathic expertise” which some Victorians could have brought to bear “to master… [their] interiors’ complex aesthetics.”412 If nothing else, we might posit that some Victorian consumers – particularly those with interest in botany, a common scientific hobby at the time – would have understood the landscape contexts of some of the plants depicted, given their strong association with waterways, hedgerows, and haymeadows. To Morris, meanwhile, the meaning of the introduction of this landscape to the urban domestic interior would have likely been just that: he was bringing the thought of the countryside to the city. But it was also something more. As his career progressed, Morris’s ideas about landscape became increasingly tied up in thoughts and ideals that went beyond aesthetics into labor, politics, and revolution. The presence of these landscape-inspired patterns in middle-class and upper-class London sitting rooms was not simply an aesthetically pleasant way to evoke the countryside, because the countryside was not simple. A reminder of the Upper Thames in London could be – and often was, for Morris – a revolutionary act. The potential of the patterns to carry political implications is clear in Morris’s writings. His aesthetic choices and ideals were always deeply tied to ideas of hand- work and cries against mechanization even before he became a Socialist in the 1880s. In Morris’s long-held view, both society and art were suffering, and the improvement of either would bring about the improvement of the other. This belief was not initially

412 Edwards and Hart “Introduction,” 13.

174 tied directly to ideas of political revolution, but by the time the tributary patterns were created, design and revolution were creeping ever closer in Morris’s conception. As early as 1880, Morris was writing to Georgiana Burne-Jones about London’s population, calling them “smoke-dried swindlers and their slaves (whom one hopes one day to make their rebels).”413 He first read Marx in 1882, less than a year after the move to Merton Abbey. He joined the Democratic Federation, later the Social Democratic Federation, in January 1883, and the first tributary pattern, Evenlode, was designed two months later. For the three years in which he produced his most overtly Thames-influenced patterns, Morris was an active Socialist, and increasingly articulating his aesthetic views in political terms and vice-versa.414 Given this, the two efforts – Socialism and pattern-making – cannot be viewed separately. Morris was trying to improve taste through society and society through taste, and his designs were an essential aspect of that work. His Socialism and other activism were essentially pastoral and English in nature, focused on improving the places and people immediately around him and preventing further degradation of places that he loved. His designs drew on the same well of enthusiasm and affection for a particular type of English landscape and English tradition, creating a visual expression of the same things he had praised in his literary work and advocated for in his criticism and political writings: a land in which history and tradition were not disregarded, labour and craft were valued, water and air were clear, and roses, willows, and oaks grew in

413 August 24, 1880. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 584.

414 His pattern output did decrease after 1885, as his Socialist lecture schedule increased and he became the editor of the Socialist periodical Commonweal, but Willow Bough, that Kelmscott pattern that made its way into so many sitting rooms past and present, was designed in 1887.

175 abundance in a gentle countryside. Thus, if his customers placed his patterns in their homes, giving themselves abstracted imagery of hedgerows and riversides to admire in contrast to the evils of the city outside their windows or the “makeshift” illusion of other popular wallpapers and fabrics, they might be moved one step closer to Morris’s ideal world, both aesthetically and politically. Whether or not this project was successful is another question entirely. A Socialist revolution has yet to arrive and reshape London and Britain despite the fashionability of Morris & Co. patterns in the late Victorian period and on-and-off ever since. However, the patterns’ longstanding popularity might be understood as a half victory for Morris. He wanted people to appreciate the beauties of the English countryside and be changed in particular ways by that appreciation; the former seems to have been achieved, even if the latter was not. Morris’s design efforts were one of a number of interrelated late nineteenth-century developments that changed how the British understood their rural landscape. At the same time Morris was bringing the Upper Thames into London drawing rooms, other Victorians were working to preserve historic natural areas or record waning rural traditions, to take only two examples among many.415 At the same time the Cotswolds and other ‘unimproved’ rural landscapes were becoming increasingly popular, as were buildings that imitated vernacular styles and gardens that celebrated ‘natural’ planting and the effusive growth associated with rural cottage surroundings.416 The presence of Morris’s

415 One well-known result of this work was the foundation of the National Trust in 1895.

416 See, for example, the architecture of Morris’s friend and designer of Red House Philip Webb and the garden designs and writings of William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll.

176 patterns in late Victorian drawing rooms and their popularity ever since may not be an expression of a change in political feeling, but it is an expression of a change in taste and of cultural priorities in the period; perhaps not a success by Morris’s own rubrics, but a significant matter nonetheless.417

Conclusion William Morris’s printed patterns are multivalent expressions of his personal geography and his aesthetic-political pastoralism. The worlds of the patterns are landscapes upon landscapes. Across their lifespan – from initial inspiration, to final design, to public consumption – they built up interconnected references to and engagements with the places Morris loved the best. The intertwining histories of Morris, his patterns, and the spaces of the Thames and its tributaries reveal not only new aspects of Morris’s design work, but also the complexities of the landscapes of Victorian Britain and of Morris’s engagement with them. The complex engagements between Morris and the Thames landscape do not end with the visual or even the ideological aspects of his patterns, however. There is another register of these patterns’ relationship with the landscape, because between the patterns’ design and use, there was another step: production. And it was in production,

417 The value of the continued popularity of the cultural concept of the ideal English countryside is itself open to criticism. Intertwined concepts of landscape and cultural tradition have a particular and sometimes dangerous overlap with forces of conservatism, nationalism, and xenophobia, and the conceptual English countryside is no exception to this rule. The gentle, rural Home counties, Thames valley, and Cotswolds are epitomes of a “Little England” aesthetic which has a tendency to overlap with isolationist ideals. Morris’s essential radicalism makes him somewhat less susceptible to direct conservative cooption, but his patterns and the landscapes he championed are nevertheless part of a shared aesthetic and cultural heritage which has very real consequences in our contemporary world.

177 as we shall see, that the patterns had their closest physical engagement with the Thames and its tributaries.

178 Chapter 5

OUR HELPFUL STREAM: MERTON AND THE WANDLE

Wandle (fig. 7), designed in 1883 and registered with the patent office on July 28, 1884, is one of William Morris’s most elaborate and complex printed fabrics. It has the longest vertical repeat of any of his printed works – 38 3/4 inches (98.5 cm) – and the second-largest area covered by a repeat, more than 4.5 square feet (0.4 square meters).418 Of the Morris patterns with known numbers of printing blocks, it is in the top three – it required 32 blocks, while Cray required 34 and Evenlode 33.419 These blocks were used to apply the three major dye colors used at the Firm’s Merton Abbey Works, creating a design that was available in only one seven-shaded colorway.420 Wandle’s size and vivid coloring meant it would have been an eye-catching feature wherever it was used. The number of blocks involved reflect both how complex it

418 Only Cray, designed around the same time, is comparable, with a repeat height of 36.25 in (92 cm). The other meander-form tributary pattern repeats range from Wey’s 9 inches (23.5 cm) to Kennet’s 27.5 inches (70 cm). Honeysuckle (1876), originally printed by Wardle, has a repeat of 30 x 36 inches (76 x 91.5 cm), 7.5 square feet (0.697 square meters). Of the tributary patterns, Cray has the next largest repeat area, at just under 4.5 square feet (0.3 square meters). Dimensions from Parry, Textiles.

419 For comparison Strawberry Thief (fig. 62), another fairly complex pattern, required only 24 blocks. Block numbers from Parry, Textiles.

420 A colorway is a color or combination of colors in which a design is available. some Morris & Co. designs were available in only one colorway, while others had many options. Wandle’s single colorway is made up of two shades of blue, three of red, and one each of yellow and green. See dyeing sections below and Appendix C for further details.

179 would have been to print, and how much work it would have taken, as each block was used to apply dye materials by hand, one at a time, over the full length of the fabric. This labor and the time and materials it would have demanded meant that Wandle was also particularly expensive.421 By any quantitative rubric, then, Wandle was as big, elaborate, and splendid as William Morris told his daughter Jenny it might be in a letter from September 1883:

I seem to have a panic on our not having chintz blocks enough, for I have two more on the stocks: one of them, (I am working on it this afternoon) is such a big one that if it succeeds I shall call it Wandle: the connection may not seem obvious to you as the wet Wandle is not big but small, but you see it will have to be very elaborate & splendid and so I want to honour our helpful stream.422 By naming one of his lavish printed textiles after the Wandle, Morris was not aggrandizing that fairly minor London-area river. The “helpful stream” was so central to his work in the 1880s that it deserved nothing less. As I have shown in the previous chapters, Morris’s patterns, and particularly his printed fabric patterns, had a close and complex aesthetic and ideological

421 A c.1900 Morris & Co. printed textile catalogue lists Wandle and Cray at 5 shillings 3 pence a yard. They are the most expensive cottons listed (linens were more expensive). One-color printed cottons like Bird and Anemone, Brother Rabbit, and Lea were a quarter of the price, at 1 shilling 4 pence a yard. This cost is even higher when one considers a purchaser would need over a yard of fabric to even see the full repeat of Wandle – whereas Lea and Brother Rabbit would fit over two repeats in a yard. Printed Linens and Cottons (London: Morris & Co., c.1900). It is very difficult to convert historic prices to modern money, especially given changes in wages and cost of living over time, but 5 shillings 3 pence was a fairly significant sum – at least £25/$30 today. (Calculated using the MeasuringWorth “Purchasing Power of the Pound” tool, https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/Ukcompare.)

422 William Morris to Jenny Morris, September 4, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 223.

180 relationship with the landscapes of the Thames and its tributaries. However, the interrelation of the rivers and the patterns went beyond questions of inspiration and meaning. At the Merton Abbey Works, the Firm’s factory on the Wandle (fig 72), another type of relationship between Thames landscapes and Morris patterns developed. The act of producing the fabrics required elaborate and ongoing physical engagement with the landscape and water of the river. The Wandle quite literally touched every step of the dyeing and printing process. Its presence and its particular physical features were essential to the processes that led to the creation of the tributary patterns and Morris’s other fabric designs of the 1880s. Without it, those patterns may never have existed. Therefore, the relationship between pattern and landscape is deeply intertwined, with the former relying on the latter for both visual and physical form. This chapter will explore the material relationship between fabric and water at Merton Abbey. First and foremost, it will delve deeply into the presence of the Wandle’s water and the riverside landscape in the production process of the tributary patterns and other fabrics. It will also consider the ways in which Morris and his circle discussed and interpreted the Merton landscape, showing how there – as everywhere – the physical and practical could not be divided from the aesthetic and ideological. Lastly, the manufacturing history of the patterns will be used to place Morris and his works within the contexts of Victorian water management and environmental harm. This research not only provides new context in the material and riverine history of the textiles: it also sheds light on an under-appreciated paradox at the heart of Morris’s design work. In his writings and ideals, Morris set himself in opposition to Victorian systems of industry, extraction, and pollution, but in the production of his

181 designs he inevitably took part in those same systems. The landscape and environmental history of the Merton Abbey Works therefore reveals Morris’s situation within well-established networks and spaces of production, and – perhaps most significantly – uncovers the negative ecological impact of his work.

The Site and Sources The Merton Abbey Works was a seven-acre factory site in Merton, then a Surrey suburb on the south-western edge of London. The Wandle ran through the property, dividing it into northwestern and southeastern portions (fig 73). Morris & Co. began leasing the site in June 1881. They moved their stained glass and operations there from Queen Square and Kelmscott House, and also began to print textiles there in late 1882 or early 1883.423 Only the Firm’s embroidery and wallpaper operations remained off-site: May Morris supervised embroidery production in her Hammersmith home and as a domestic piecework operation, while wallpaper continued to be printed by Jeffrey & Co. in Islington.424 Morris & Co. operated on the Merton site until their closure in 1940.

423 This had always been the intention, but it took the operation some time to get started – see discussion below.

424 For more on May Morris and Morris & Co. embroidery, see Anna Mason, Jan Marsh, and Jenny Lister, May Morris: Arts & Crafts Designer (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2017) and the “Embroidery” chapter in Parry, Textiles, 14-41. Though outside the scope of this project, there is ample potential for water use studies of other Merton Abbey products and Morris objects created offsite at the Wardle works, Jeffrey & Co., and the Kelmscott Press. The Jeffrey & Co. Islington factory likely obtained its water from the New River, the seventeenth-century water supply connected to the upper reaches of the Lea which provided water to the City of London and areas to its north like Clerkenwell and Islington, (see Chapter 2, p. 47). The wallpaper firm’s water use per yard would not have been anywhere near what Morris & Co. used for their printed textiles, but there still would have been issues of supply,

182 Unfortunately, the Merton Abbey Works has not survived into the modern day.425 After Morris & Co. shuttered in 1940, the property was purchased by its neighbor, the paper and cardboard manufacturer New Merton Board Mills Ltd. By the late 1940s the Board Mills had expanded their complex onto the Morris property, obliterating all portions of the Merton Abbey Works.426 The Board Mills closed by the middle of the 1980s and the site was redeveloped. A large supermarket opened on the southeastern portion of the property in 1989, and offices were built on the northwestern portion in 1992.427 There are no remnants of the Works; however, the Wandle still runs by (fig. 74).

waste, and pollution – made all the more complex by the factory’s location in the center of urban London. The Wardle works in Leek, meanwhile, would likely have drawn their water from and contributed to the pollution of the River Churnet, and the Kelmscott Press, located in Hammersmith, likely obtained their water from the Thames.

425 A surviving Merton factory site, , is often confused for the Morris & Co. factory site. However, this site sits just upriver from the former Morris & Co. site, and was in fact the dyeworks for another famous late Victorian design retailer, Liberty & Co. For more on the Liberty works, see below, p. 199.

426 This change can be seen in Ordnance Survey maps from the period: the Morris & Co. factory buildings are present on maps surveyed in the late 1930s but are no longer there on maps updated in 1950. The Board Mills factory is not well-recorded, but it was a large-scale industrial complex, including a central factory of at least five stories with multiple smokestacks. It can be seen in photographs on the Merton Library and Heritage Service’s “Merton Memories” website, for example https://photoarchive. merton.gov.uk/collections/work-and-industry/97810-merton-board-mills.

427 David Saxby, William Morris at Merton (London: Museum of London Archaeology Service and , 1995), 5.

183 Today in Merton, the Wandle is channelized (fig. 75).428 North of the supermarket it runs between vertical concrete and metal banks, with footbridges crossing it to give shoppers access. Upstream, to the west of the supermarket property, there is a relatively natural section, with wooded earthen banks and a paved path frequented by walkers and fishermen (fig. 76). The Wandle’s water is clear and fast- flowing, perhaps two feet deep, and clean enough to support aquatic plant and animal species.429 It sits fairly low in its channel, at least several feet below the surrounding ground level, unlike in more rural Thames landscapes where the water level tends to run close to the surrounding ground (compare figs. 75 and 76 to figs. 35 and 67). This difference reflects typically intensive control of a largely suburban and urban river, as well as the amount of building and rebuilding in the area between the medieval and modern periods, which would have raised the ground level around the river. Comparison to images of the area in Morris’s time or just after (fig. 11 and 72) shows the distance between river level and ground level has changed. The loss of the Merton Abbey Works complicates study of the site. Without extant built environment to form a basis for interpretation, the site description and analysis in this chapter relies on written and visual sources. William Morris’s letters are particularly helpful, as are May Morris’s essays. Historic Ordnance Survey (OS) maps have been important for understanding the physical layout of the Works property

428 Other sections of the Wandle have had their more natural wet verges restored in twenty-first century “re-wilding” efforts.

429 An achievement, given that the Wandle was badly polluted in the twentieth century. See Hadrian Cook, “A Tale of Two Catchments: Water Management and Quality in the Wandle and Tillingbourne, 1600 to 1990,” Southern History 30 (2008): 78–103.

184 and its changes over time, although they cannot communicate much information about the ways the factory functioned. For that information, the best sources have been site descriptions from the period and surviving factory records like the Merton Abbey Dye Book. Additional information was gleaned from oral histories of the factory, secondary sources on the industrial history of the Wandle and Merton, and a series of archaeological studies undertaken by Museum of London Archaeology during the redevelopment of the Board Works site in the 1980s and 1990s. All of these sources are fragmentary in their own ways, and they must be approached critically in order to patch information together and form a clearer understanding of the layout, workings, and impact of the factory.

Sources: Site Descriptions and Oral Histories As well as being written about by William and May Morris, Merton Abbey was described by several visitors. Most notably, the American activist and poet Emma Lazarus was shown around the Works by William Morris in July 1883 and published an essay about her visit three years later in The Century Magazine.430 Though they offer important and sometimes poetic details, these sources must be viewed critically. As is the case in all of May Morris’s writings, her comments on Merton Abbey were written between the 1910s and 1930s, and the intervening time as well as her own agenda of furthering her father’s works and views must be kept in mind. Other descriptions like Lazarus’s must also be viewed within the context of the pastoral

430 Emma Lazarus, “A Day in Surrey with William Morris,” The Century Magazine 32, July 1886. See also Morris’s letter to Lazarus, July 5, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 205. Lazarus is most well-known today for “The New Colossus” (1883), the sonnet inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

185 aestheticization of the site, which will be discussed in detail later in this chapter. They tend to emphasize the appearance of the site and Morris’s ideals, and do not give exact information about the manufacturing processes. Another significant source for the history of Merton Abbey are a small but rich collection of oral histories by former employees of the Works.431 This chapter draws particularly upon the oral history of Douglas Griffiths, who was an apprentice in the Works’ tapestry studio in the 1930s.432 Though they are significant works of documentation, these reminiscences also have disadvantages as historical records. Written down in the 1970s and 1980s, they record the memories of men and women who worked at the site in the decades between the World Wars, during the waning years of the Firm, rather than during Morris’s time. And as with any personal reminiscences documented decades after the fact, they have the potential for inaccuracy, as well as being subject to the same shared sentiments and pastoralism as other records of the site. However, in the absence of other information, they can be helpful to understand details of how the factory operated and how the Firm’s employees experienced the site and their work.

431 Douglas Griffiths, "Morris and Company: Merton Abbey Works," interview, December 17, 1975 (Sanford L. Berger Papers, Box 48, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA); May Lea, "Memories of Working for Morris and Company,” March 1978 (Sanford L. Berger Papers, Box 48, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA); Edward Payne, “Memories of Morris & Co,” The Journal of William Morris Studies 4, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 3–6.

432 Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works.”

186 Sources: Factory Records and the Dye Book The factory records of Merton Abbey are another important but partial source. The most significant of these records for the purposes of this project is the Merton Abbey Dye Book, held in the art collection of the Huntington Museum, Library, and Gardens. The notebook where Morris recorded his notes as he learned about printing and dyeing, now held at the National Art Library, London, is also important for understanding the sources and development of Morris’s dye knowledge.433 The Merton Abbey Dye Book appears to have been used as a record of the factory’s dye recipes and processes. As such, it is an essential document to any study of the technical aspects of dyeing and printing at Morris & Co. However, it is a complex and fragmentary record, and must be understood as such. The book is a large ledger into which a series of notes for particular textiles were written by hand (fig 77). Like cooking recipes, the dye recipes detail the dye materials used, the ways those materials should be prepared, and the steps to be followed to create the final product.434 Many of the recipes also include small samples of the finished fabrics. The notation is largely technical, and many materials are called by now-archaic names, meaning it takes some deciphering to draw out information about the dye processes at the Works.435 Additionally, the book was clearly a working document, amended and

433 William Morris, “Printer’s Notes,” c 1880-85 (86.ZZ.180, National Art Library, London).

434 Throughout this chapter I will use the phrase “dye materials” to indicate all the various types of solutions and pastes used in the printing and dyeing process. This includes materials which are dyes, mordants, thickeners, and soaps, among other technical designations.

435 My primary sources for understanding the Book’s notations were Agutí Nieto- Galan, Colouring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe

187 added onto over time, which makes some aspects of periodization difficult, further complicating its use as a source. The Dye Book appears to have been written up in two major stages. The second stage, after page 89, is clearly later than the first and seems to date after Morris’s lifetime, placing it outside the scope of this project.436 However, the first section of the book likely dates from the period of Morris’s involvement or just after, and it will be used extensively in the following discussions of the factory’s processes and materials. This first section includes two subsections. The first two pages list standard preparations for some common dye materials used at the Works. This is then followed by fifty-seven recipes for specific fabrics distributed between pages 3 and 72. They are organized into seven colorway categories and indexed under those categories on pages inserted into the back of the ledger.437 Based on variation in the handwriting and ink color and thickness, these recipes seem to have been written in several rounds of recording, rather than all at once. There are also at least three major campaigns of annotations and emendations in

(Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic, 2001) and William Crookes, A Practical Handbook of Dyeing and Calico-Printing (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1874).

436 There are a number of reasons to segregate the second section. Although both sections include recipes for patterns by Morris’s successor J.H. Dearle and some that use materials discovered after Morris’s period of involvement at the Works, the second section has more of both. Additionally, it is written in a single hand which is different from those of the first section, and it does not show the same process of annotations and alterations that occurred in the first section, nor does it include fabric samples. It therefore seems to have been written in a separate round of recording than the earlier group.

437 The categories are: Reds (14 recipes); Buffs (6); Yellow (3); Blue & White (7); Blue White & Yellow (6); Many Coloured Dyed grounds (11); and Many Colours, White gros. (10).

188 pencil and two different types of red ink. Four of these red ink annotations are dated, and the dates range from September 1890 and February 1892. From this evidence, it seems that the Dye Book was created no later than the 1889. I think it most likely that the first recipes were written down in the book sometime between 1885 and 1887 in order to record practices and recipes that had become standardized in the first few years of dyeing and printing at Merton Abbey.438 Other recipes would then have been added as new patterns and colorways were introduced in the late 1880s under J.H. Dearle, before being amended as processes were further refined in the early 1890s. The second section of new recipes would have been added even later – most likely in the late 1890s or early 1900s. A comparison of the index of the Dye Book and the fabrics known to be printed at Merton Abbey shows that it is an incomplete record. The absence of the small-scale net patterns of 1882-83 (Wreathnet, Borage, Flowerpot, and Eyebright) is particularly glaring.439 Some colorways, such as the blue and pink version of Corncockle, are also absent, while some included in the book do not seem to survive as samples or full lengths of fabric.440 Despite its complexity and incompleteness,

438 It may even be that the book exists because of the transfer of control in the mid- 1880s, when Morris might have wished to see his favored processes recorded before leaving Dearle in charge; however, this is only speculation.

439 There seems to have been a section in the Book for them – pages 16-20 are labelled for ‘linnings’ (linings, which the small-scale patterns were generally marketed as), but left blank.

440 This may indicate that, respectively, some colorways are later and others were recorded in the Book but not sold. However, the evidence of both the Book and museum collections of Morris patterns is spotty, so no absolute conclusions can be drawn about what was and was not manufactured and sold at what times.

189 however, the Book is still an important technical source which I have used extensively throughout this chapter as well as in Appendix C, which explores the technical details of the Merton Abbey Works dye process in more depth.

Secondary Sources The Merton Abbey Works are often mentioned in Morris scholarship, but with little precise detail about the site. As usual, however, Linda Parry’s Morris Textiles has also been indispensable in providing basic technical information and pointing to additional sources. One of the best sources for a basic understanding of the history and layout of the site is David Saxby’s 1995 pamphlet William Morris at Merton, published by the Museum of London Archaeology Service and the London Borough of Merton. That pamphlet draws upon an archaeological excavation undertaken in the northwest portion of the Merton Abbey Works site in 1992. There was also extensive archaeological study near the southern boundary of the site between 1976 and 1990, in response to the redevelopment of the area. Unfortunately, those excavations focused on the medieval remains of and did not include the area that composed the heart of the Merton Abbey Works. I have, however, drawn extensively from David Saxby and Pat Miller’s monograph on the excavations for historic and geographic context.441 Local histories of Merton and the Wandle have also been helpful in forming the broader landscape and historical contexts of the Merton Abbey Works site, as well as placing Morris within the history of Victorian water pollution.

441 The Augustinian Priory of St Mary Merton, Surrey: Excavations 1976-90. Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2007.

190 Merton and the Wandle In Morris’s time, the Merton Abbey Works was located in the Surrey parish of Merton on what was then the south-western edge of London’s suburban expansion, just over 7.5 miles (12.75 km) from the center of the City. The area is now known as , while Merton has loaned its name to a larger London borough that encompasses areas such as Wimbledon, , and Merdon. The village area around the Merton Abbey Works site seems to have been referred to as both Merton and Merton Abbey. For the sake of clarity, I will be referring to the factory as Merton Abbey or the Merton Abbey Works and the area as Merton. Like so many places in the greater Thames valley, Merton sits on a geological base of gravel and alluvium, laid down in this case by a chalk stream Thames tributary, the Wandle.442 Around Merton, the Wandle crosses a flat area of what would once have been wet meadows, as along the Upper Thames and many of its tributaries as previously discussed. The river arrives on a south-north trajectory, then turns to run east alongside Merton High Street for approximately 150 yards (140 m) before crossing under the street and continuing north again (fig. 74). About 1/3 of a mile (1/2 km) south of the center of Merton, a small channel called The Pickle diverges and runs east before meandering north to rejoin the Wandle at its crossing point with the street. The majority of the Merton Abbey Works sat within the approximate rectangle formed by the two streams. In the nineteenth century there was also an island where the river turned east and ran along the road (fig. 73), but this has now disappeared.443

442 Miller and Saxby, The Augustinian Priory of St Mary Merton, 9; H.E. Malden, “Merton,” in A History of the County of Surrey, Vol. 4. (London: Victoria County History, 1912), 64.

443 According to Miller and Saxby, the course of the Wandle in the immediate area of

191 Merton centers on the immediate environs of the Wandle, stringing itself out along a major thoroughfare, Merton High Street, on both sides of the road’s river crossing. In the first centuries of the common era, Merton marked the point where the Roman road between London and modern Chichester crossed the Wandle, and there is evidence of a Romano-British settlement there.444 In the medieval period, Merton was the location of an Augustinian priory, St. Mary Merton, often referred to as Merton Priory or Merton Abbey. The Priory, founded in 1117, was a relatively major monastic site with multiple royal associations.445 Its walled precinct sat south of Merton High Street, beginning just to the east of the point where the Wandle now meets the road, and stretched south and west-southwest, covering an area of approximately 50 acres (0.2 km sq.). The modern Wandle bisects the precinct, but in the time of the priory it ran to the east, and a smaller channel supplied water to the Priory.446 During the

the Works was likely altered in the early modern period to create a channelized stream for milling purposes. Based on the layout of the medieval Merton Abbey Priory, they hypothesize that the river previously followed the approximate path of the Pickle today and that the modern Wandle is a manmade channel. The Augustinian Priory of St Mary Merton, 9.

444 That crossing was probably close to the current one, although the path of the river was different. The road would have run NE – SW across the Merton Abbey Works property. Miller and Saxby, The Augustinian Priory of St Mary Merton, 10-11 and Penny Bruce and Simon Mason, Merton Priory (London: Museum of London Archaeology Service and London Borough of Merton, 1993), 3.

445 Henry I’s body lay in state there before burial in 1135, Henry III had private quarters there and his wife Elanor was crowned queen there, and Henry VI was crowned there in 1437. It was also the site of peace treaties and Privy Councils. The archbishop and martyr and , founder of Merton College Oxford, were both educated there. See Bruce and Mason, Merton Priory, 6.

446 At the Priory, as elsewhere, the water supply was an essential element in the architecture. Streams were diverted into channels to supply water to the monks and

192 Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, the Priory was largely deconstructed.447 Afterwards, portions of the Priory precinct gave way to clusters of homes or commercial buildings, but the majority of the land grew into a mill/factory precinct, including the parcel that would become the Merton Abbey Works. This transition to industry was in keeping with development all along the Wandle, where much of the landscape moved into industrial use between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Industry and Textiles on the Wandle The landscape and location of the Wandle made it an ideal location for industrial development in the era before steam power. The river is fed by the chalk aquifer of the , with its headwaters around the southern London suburb of . From there, it flows nine miles (14 km) north to meet the Thames at Wandsworth. It is a powerful stream for its size, with a steady flow of water and a relatively precipitous fall of over 100 feet from its sources to Wandsworth.448 These were good conditions for water-powered mills, and there were already at least thirteen mills along the Wandle by the eleventh century.449 In the first half of the nineteenth

their fishponds and to wash away waste from kitchen, infirmary, and reredorter (latrines). Miller and Saxby The Augustinian Priory of St Mary Merton, 115 and “Water Management” sections of each chapter.

447 By the nineteenth century, little visual evidence of the abbey survived, though there were scraps here and there, bits of stone or wall integrated into the village’s built environment. The primary survivals were a chapel and a heavily altered secular building, Abbey House, demolished 1914. Bruce and Mason, 6. In Morris’s period, the foundations of the central Priory buildings lay directly under Merton Abbey Station. Miller and Saxby, 123.

448 By comparison, the Thames falls only 360 feet over its 215-mile length.

449 Cook “A Tale of Two Catchments,” 88.

193 century the river hosted about thirty-eight mills or factories, an average of more than four industrial sites per mile.450 All of this industrial development meant that the river was highly controlled: extensively channelized, sometimes culverted, and drawn from to supply millponds and races as well as various production processes. The river also fed watercress agriculture: Ordnance Survey maps from the mid-1890s show seven watercress bed complexes along the Wandle, including one just to the east of the Merton Abbey Works on the other side of the Pickle (fig.80).451 The area’s most famed and significant industry, however, was textiles. All three of Morris’s London-area rivers, the Wandle, Lea, and Cray, supported a trio of interrelated textile industries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: bleaching, calico printing, and dye milling. Dyers and technologies moved between all three river valleys for centuries before Morris arrived on the scene, and Morris was not the only Lea valley man operating dye premises along the Wandle in the nineteenth century.452 This means that Morris lived or worked in three significant textile centers in his life (four, if one counts the wool industry of the Cotswolds). While that might seem to be simply a pleasing coincidence, it is also an illustration of

450 Published records from 1805 and 1853 both list 38 sites. By 1853, some were steam powered. The mills ground goods as diverse as grain, gunpowder, pigments, and snuff, and the factories’ products included copper, paper, beer, and food products. Cook “A Tale of Two Catchments, 88-90.

451 Watercress was an important crop along many Thames valley rivers, especially the relatively clean chalk streams. (See Chapter 2, p. 38 note 72.)

452 H.E. Malden, A History of the County of Surrey Vol. 2 (London: Victoria County History, 1912), 368 and E.N. Montague, A Study of the Textile Bleaching and Printing Industry in Mitcham and Merton from 1590 until 1870 (Merton, UK: Merton Historical Society, 1992), 96. Dye industry histories also mention numerous examples of dyers from one area working in another.

194 the centrality of physical landscapes to Morris’s work and of his situation within well- established systems and landscapes of production. The things Morris valued about the Lea, the Cray, and later the Wandle were also things that made those rivers useful to the textile industry: their steady flows of clean chalk stream water supported industry as well as wildflowers and trout. Their proximity to London, meanwhile, let him live and work along them. Morris’s father could commute to the City via stagecoach from the Lea valley, and Morris himself commuted by underground and suburban train to Merton. The physical facts of the river landscapes and their well-established networks of materials, production, and transport made the sites right for Morris’s life and work even as they linked him inextricably to the same systems he raged against: industrialization, urbanization, and pollution. The story of the Merton Abbey Works is closely linked to the centuries-old textile industry of the Wandle and to the network of dyers and factory owners that existed between the Wandle, Lea, and Cray. The landscape history of that industry and network helps to elucidate the Firm’s choice of site and the reasons the river was so central to their work. The Wandle, Lea, and Cray valleys were cradles of the British textile industry for two reasons. One was the water supply: as chalk streams, the rivers provided reliable flows of very clean water until well into the nineteenth century.453 Additionally, the water of chalk streams is slightly alkaline (base pH) and has small amounts of chalk in solution, and both of these traits were beneficial to the chemistry of bleaching and dyeing.454 The other factor was the valleys’ proximity to London. As

453 The Wandle’s problems with both water supply and cleanliness in the later part of the century will be discussed later in the chapter.

454 Many dye material recipes called for chalk or alkaline materials to be added. For

195 Britain’s largest city, largest port, and largest center of trade and banking, London offered access to a large consumer market, a regular supply of raw materials, and a burgeoning capitalist system that could support the outlays and transactions of factory owners and merchants.455 It wasn’t until the advent of steam power, train transport, and more highly mechanized factories in the first half of the nineteenth century that the textile industry shifted north and the London rivers began to lose their significance as British textile centers. However, the industry did not die: a number of dyeworks along the Wandle shifted focus to the London luxury market, focusing particularly on dyed silks, and some were still in operation when Morris & Co. arrived in the area.456 The first of the interrelated textile industries to flourish along the Wandle, Cray, and Lea was bleaching. Before the introduction of chemical bleaches in the nineteenth century, bleaching was a highly intensive manual process which required large supplies of clean and preferably alkaline water and large expanses of flat land on which cloth could be spread to dry and lighten in the sun. In the late medieval and early modern period, the Dutch – with their wealth of water and flat land – dominated the bleaching industry, and wealthy people in England sent their white goods (primarily linen) to Holland annually to be whitened.457 In the seventeenth century,

example, see Morris’s notes on madder in his “Printer’s Notes,” which record that the water used either needed to have chalk in it naturally or have it added. Bleaching also required an alkaline solution; bleached fabrics were sometimes coated in milk, or lye was used. Chlorine, the most common modern bleach material, is also a strong base. See Montague, Textile Bleaching and Printing Industry, 21.

455 Montague, Textile Bleaching and Printing Industry, 7.

456 ibid., 36.

457 Malden, A History of the County of Surrey Vol. 2, 368.

196 however, the industry reached England, supported primarily by Dutch people who immigrated and set up bleaching fields along the chalk streams around London. These fields, like watercress beds and water meadows, required hydrological expertise because water would be diverted from the river to run into channels between higher strips of ground. Cloth to be bleached was lain out on the ground and wetted frequently with the water from the channels. This time-intensive and therefore expensive method died out in the nineteenth century as chemical bleaching became possible in factories and homes.458 However, it did survive long enough that some bleaching fields are still visible on early OS maps of the Wandle from the mid- nineteenth century. Calico printing followed bleaching into the valleys of the London chalk streams. In the seventeenth century, increased trade with the Indian subcontinent led to a craze for Indian printed cottons, known as calico or chintz.459 By the end of the century, British manufacturers had set about imitating the fine Indian wares. The earliest known calico print works in Britain was established in 1676 at West Ham along the Lea.460 By 1690, a number of other printworks had appeared: Joyce Storey’s Thames and Hudson Manual of Textile Printing lists the principal centers as Richmond-on-Thames, Bromley and Crayford on the Cray, Waltham Abbey on the Lea, and Merton Abbey.461 Later, in the mid-eighteenth century, the Wandle valley

458 Montague, Textile Bleaching and Printing Industry, 21.

459 Joyce Storey, The Thames and Hudson Manual of Textile Printing (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 20.

460 ibid., 29

461 ibid.

197 was the first site of copper plate calico printing in England.462 The calico printworks gravitated to these sites for the same reasons as the bleachers did: access to a clean alkaline water supply and proximity to London. The established bleaching industry would have been an additional attraction, because calicoes were printed on the long lengths of white cotton which would have required bleaching as part of their production process. And like bleachers, early calico printers needed long strips of land where they could lay out their products in the sun after dyeing, drying them and bringing out the whites, a process known as crofting. Accordingly, Britain’s earliest calico printworks patchworked together with bleachworks along chalk stream riverbanks near London. The Wandle, Lea, and Cray also supported a third textile-related industry, dye- milling. This industry seems to have predated the others – the Victoria County History of Surrey states that there were water-powered dye-wood mills on the Wandle as early as the sixteenth century, which worked grinding dye-wood into pigment.463 However, the flourishing of bleaching and particularly calico-printing would have boosted local dye-mills, giving them a local market hungry for their products. The Merton Abbey Works site was a part of this long legacy of textile work. Historian E.N. Montague writes that by the end of the seventeenth century there were

462 This faster, more mechanized technique, an alternative to woodblock printing, was imported from Ireland c. 1756. Stuart Robinson, A History of Printed Textiles: Block, Roller, Screen, Design, Dyes, Fibres, Discharge, Resist, Further Sources for Research (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 18; Montague, Textile Bleaching and Printing Industry, 53.

463 Malden, A History of the County of Surrey Vol. 2, 366-67. “Dye-wood” can refer to any number of wood-based dye materials, in this case probably or one of the Asian red woods. Nieto-Galan, Colouring Textiles, 26 and 28.

198 “whisters” – bleachers – operating at the site that would become the Merton Abbey Works factory.464 By the end of the eighteenth century, the site had shifted to calico- printing. It cycled through at least nine proprietors between 1792 and 1880, and followed trends in the market, shifting from calicoes to silk and homewares as the century progressed.465 For a time the works were run by Edward Reynolds, who hailed from Waltham Forest along the Lea.466 The next factory upriver from Morris’s future site was also run by a Lea valley native, Edmund Litter, during the mid-nineteenth century, and followed a very similar trajectory to the Morris site, from calico to luxury goods to Arts and Crafts prestige. The luxury goods produced by Littler’s sons came to the attention of Arthur Liberty in the 1870s, and by 1890 all the Littler Brothers’ printed silks were destined for Liberty’s famous department store.467 In 1904 the Liberty company took over the works, operating there until the 1970s.468 This, then, was the world Morris entered into: a local landscape with a deep history of industry and close connections to the places from which he had come and the market to which he catered. When he set out to find a factory for the Firm, he was not acting totally independently, but within a pre-existing network of technical

464 Montague, Textile Bleaching and Printing Industry, 74.

465 Saxby, William Morris at Merton, 4.

466 Montague, Textile Bleaching and Printing Industry, 96.

467 Montague, The Historic River Wandle, 16-18.

468 ibid., 18. The Liberty works are now a center for arts and crafts, with workshops, shops, cafés, and events. Because of the closeness of the two sites’ names – Merton Abbey Mills for the Littlers and Liberty, Merton Abbey Works for Morris & Co. – and their shared textile and Arts and Crafts heritage, many people mistake the preserved Liberty site for the lost Morris one.

199 knowledge, material exchange, and the production of goods. The local industry was then changing in the face of outside forces, but those changes gave Morris an opportunity by leaving dyeworks vacant along good dyeing streams.

Morris at Merton When he set out to find a factory site for the Firm in 1881, Morris’s two greatest concerns were space and water. The Firm was finally finding more solid and lasting success, but the resultant increase in production meant that it was outgrowing the awkward, cramped premises at 26 Queen Square.469 The Firm’s pre-existing modes of manufacture needed room to expand, and Morris also hoped to pursue a new type of production: after many years of frustration, he wanted to split with Thomas Wardle and move the Firm’s fabric-dyeing in house.470 This move to dyeing meant that the Firm’s new factory would need water, and lots of it. As will be discussed in detail below, dyeing required water for almost every step of the process, from the first dye-mixing to the final rinse. And more than that, in order for the dyes to work their best, they needed clean water. Visibly impure water – muddy, or murky – would be an obvious bad base for color, and on top of that dyes

469 The Firm’s shop and the Morris family had moved out of Queen Square in 1877- 78, but that did not mean the building, originally a home, was any more suited to be a factory than it had been before. It was especially difficult because so many of the goods Morris & Co. offered, such as stained glass and tapestry, required large spaces and specialized equipment for their production. Carpet manufacturing was, at the time, happening not at Queen Square but in a shed at Kelmscott House.

470 These frustrations are documented extensively in Morris’s letters of the late 1870s. Morris found it difficult to get consistent printing from Wardle without being there to supervise, and he was often dissatisfied with the quality of the colors and their tendency to fade. See also Parry, Textiles, 48-51.

200 are chemical compounds, often very sensitive to changes in pH or exposure to other compounds. Water that carried too many impurities could therefore undermine the process of mixing or setting dyes and mordants. Given the vast expansion of both industry and urban areas in Britain in the nineteenth century and the resultant impacts on water quality, finding water that was suited for dyeing was not easy, except along chalk streams like the Wandle, with their well-filtered aquifers, steady flows, and clear alkaline water. Morris also had other concerns beyond the practicalities of space and water, however. True to his usual fashion, he was looking for a site that appealed to his aesthetics and ideals. He had originally wanted to shift the Firm’s manufacturing not only away from central London, but away from London completely. He looked first at a disused factory in the north Cotswolds town of Blockley, but the scheme was dismissed as impractical by the Firm’s business manager George Wardle.471 It was too far from London, the Firm’s shop, and the city’s ready supplies of raw materials and labor. Something else had to be found. After reluctantly abandoning the Cotswold plan, Morris set out to search for a more practical site. His friend William De Morgan was also looking for a site for a planned pottery, and the two explored the surroundings of London for several months in search of suitable premises for their undertakings.472 The next site Morris considered was in Crayford, Kent – a center of fabric-dyeing only two and a half miles

471 Parry, Textiles, 55. For more on Blockley, see Chapter 4, p. 153.

472 De Morgan was considering sharing space with the Firm. In the end he settled in Merton a little northeast of the Merton Abbey Works, where his pottery operated for several years before moving again.

201 (4 km) from Red House.473 However, those works were deemed unsuitable, partially because of the problem Red House had also had: the journey there from central London was still more than an hour, and Morris did not want to face it.474 He also was not able to find a suitable site along the Colne in West London.475 On March 17, Morris and De Morgan went to Merton. That day, Morris wrote to Jane that the premises “seem as if they would do, and if so, and if we can get them, then am I evermore a bird of this world-without-end-for-everlasting hole of a London.”476 He was never going to express pleasure at having to be in London, but the premises did suit, as he detailed in another letter to Jane two days later. The advantages he listed included a manageable rent, its previous active use as a printworks, the ease of getting there from Hammersmith, and its “good and abundant water.”477 “The suburb as such is woeful beyond conception,” he continued, “yet the place itself it even very pretty” – and, he concluded, if the lease couldn’t be obtained he was not sure “what we shall do: I expect such places are rare near London.”478 Despite his strong feelings about London and his desire to be away from the place, in the end the choices he made were practical. The Merton Abbey Works provided what

473 This irony was not lost on Morris, who wrote to Jane, “How queer it would be if we were to set up our work there again.” William Morris to Jane Morris, February 23, 1881. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 23.

474 William Morris to Jane Morris, March 10, 1881. ibid., 31.

475 Not to be confused with the Cotswolds Coln discussed in Chapter 3.

476 William Morris to Jane Morris, March 17, 1881. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 32.

477 William Morris to Jane Morris, March 19, 1881. ibid., 33.

478 ibid.

202 the Firm needed: water, space, transport, and even a degree of historic character and rural attractiveness to appeal to Morris’s tastes.

“The inward amenity of the place”: The Aestheticized Factory Merton Abbey was at heart a working site, but its riverside setting complete with willows, gardens, and hay meadows also held potential for the same sort of aesthetic value as the riversides of Kelmscott and the rural tributaries. In the relative attractiveness of the Merton Abbey site, Morris was able to build up an illusion of a semi-rural place apart, transposing some of what he loved about the countryside onto the practical suburban factory where his workers produced his countryside-inspired works. As with so much around Morris, the relationship between apparently opposed things – countryside and factory, inspiration and production – was both practically and ideologically intertwined. This intertwining began with Morris himself and his first admission to Jane that the Works could be considered pretty. In 1886, Emma Lazarus’s essay on Morris and the Works cast the whole site as a sort of garden or even a presaging of Morris’s Nowhere, “a scene of cheerful, uncramped industry, where toil looks like pleasure, where flowers are blooming in the windows, and sunshine and fresh air brighten the faces of artist and mechanic.”479 Both Morris and Lazarus contrasted the surrounding suburban development of Merton and the apparently idyllic factory grounds, and the same theme played out at much greater length in May Morris’s introduction to the thirteenth volume of her father’s collected works.

479 Lazarus, “A Day in Surrey with William Morris.”

203 May’s description of the factory site began by contrasting the “desolation” of Merton to the “melancholy charm” of the Works precinct, before going on to emphasize the “rambling garden” and “waving willows” and the sense of history in the site, looking back to the Priory and the pre-industrial Wandle.480 She also reported that her father nurtured the site, making it more attractive by taming its overgrown greenery and planting gardens.481 She described flowers and sunlight, and glimpses of water and abundances of green, and even labor was made beautiful:

The dye-shop, with its bright copper becks, gay wools and silks, the men in aprons and clogs, the white steam curling about the roof, the sunlight outside and the willow boughs close pressed against the windows: that was a picture ready-made. But the place was full of pictures – the bleaching ground, a meadow Father had set with poplars, how charming it looked when yards and yards of coloured chintz lay stretched on the grass!482

She concluded: “The whole impression of the place was sparkling water with sweet flowered margin, poplars and willows, narrow walks between the water, and the black, red-tiled worksheds.”483 These descriptions certainly bear more than a little nostalgia – May wrote them in the 1910s, more than a decade after her father’s death – but they also echo many other statements about the Works from Morris’s time and after. And while May apologized for remembering “pictorially which he viewed so practically,”

480 Collected Works Vol. 13, xxx-xxxi.

481 Although May’s phrasing implies her father was the one doing the taming and planting, he more likely ordered the work – especially since we know from letters that he did not undertake the gardening at his homes, either.

482 ibid., xxxi-xxxii.

483 ibid., xxxii.

204 the fact is that the site was always both for Morris.484 If her father had not viewed the site from an aesthetic standpoint as well as a practical one, there would have been no point in undertaking work like planting gardens. Descriptions of the Works as a place apart continued up until its closure in 1939. H.C. Marillier’s 1927 History of the Merton Abbey Tapestry Works mourned the loss of the majority of the Works’ “lovely setting of meadows and willow” but also stated that “enough remains still to preserve the inward amenity of the place, which, in contrast to its sordid surroundings, is an oasis of quiet industry.”485 Douglas Griffiths, speaking of the 1930s, said “when you walked in from Merton High Street with the trams rattling up and down – twenty paces and you were in a different world.”486 Images of the site produced in the years after Morris’s death also emphasized certain picturesque aspects of the site: the dark buildings veiled by willows, and the sparkling water of the river and millpond (figs. 11, 72, 78, and 79). This proliferation of descriptions and images seems to show that the Works did have some lasting appearance as a small bit of countryside wedged into the light-industrial suburbs, complete with wildflowers and willow trees and a sparkling stream. The site was even mown for hay at least once.487 And the shared vision of the Wandle as a pretty countryside stream was not unique to Morris and his circle.

484 ibid., xxxi.

485 H.C. Marillier, History of the Merton Abbey Tapestry Works Founded by William Morris (London: Constable and Co., 1927), 13.

486 Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works.”

487 William Morris to May Morris, July 12, 1882. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 114.

205 Despite its heavy industrialization, portions of the river were still relatively rural in Morris’s period. Not far upstream from Merton, the river ran through the grounds of an eighteenth-century country house, Hall, where it acted as a feature of a landscape park.488 The source of the river was also known to be particularly pretty and interesting. Much of the river’s water emerges from springs into a series of ponds in the village of , which was still relatively undeveloped in the period. Morris’s friend and mentor John Ruskin, whose mother was from Croydon, was familiar with the area around the source of the Wandle and praised it enthusiastically. The introduction to his The Crown of Wild Olive begins “Twenty years ago, there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in South England, nor any more pathetic, in the world, by its expression of sweet human character and life, than that immediately bordering on the sources of the Wandel”(sic) before going on to bemoan “the insolent defiling of those springs by the human herds that drink of them.”489 Morris was obviously aware of this connection, writing to Ruskin in 1883:

I need not say that I should be very glad to see you at our place at Merton Abbey: though I fear it would be a grief to you to see the banks of the pretty Wandle so beset with the horrors of the Jerry-builders: there is still some beauty left about the place however, & the stream itself is not much befouled: I am doing my best to keep the place decent, & can do so in the seven acres our works command; but as to the rest can do but little.490

488 Now a National Trust property.

489 John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin Vol. XVIII (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1905), 385-86.

490 William Morris to John Ruskin, April 15, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 186-87. There is no indication Ruskin ever visited.

206 This statement closely echoes Morris’s complaints about the “Jerry-builders” and the state of the Lea valley and the lower Thames. It also underscores the fact that the factory’s countryside aesthetic was as constructed as it was natural. Morris and the Firm chose to nurture the Works as a place of meadows and gardens as well as a place of work. In so doing, they kept the site “decent” and visually and ideologically separate from the surrounding suburb, even as they exploited the Wandle and its surroundings for their undertakings and became deeply involved in the modern state of the river and its landscape.

The Merton Abbey Works Despite the loss of the Merton Abbey Works site and its often aesthetically- focused contemporary descriptions, it is possible to form a fairly detailed reconstruction of the space and use of the site. This description is essential to understand how objects were produced there and how the Works engaged with the Wandle and larger material systems – and, in turn, the role the tributaries played in Morris’s life and work. The Merton Abbey Works sat directly atop the inner precinct of the former priory, very near where the Wandle meets Merton High Street (fig. 80). The property lay primarily on the east side of the river, between the Wandle and the Pickle. A copper mill (later a paper mill) lay to its north, on the island between the Works property and the street. Just to the west of that island, the Works property extended north to meet the street. Upstream, to the south of the property, there was the Littler

207 dyeworks. Between the two factories was Merton Abbey Station and the Merton branch of the , Merton and Wimbledon Railway, opened in 1868.491 Morris and the Firm were able to move into a functional factory space, with a number of buildings and pieces of equipment in situ. They thus did not undertake extensive building, though they did reshape buildings for their needs.492 The majority of the Works’ buildings were located in the property’s northern arm near Merton High Street (fig. 80 and 81). The property was entered by a gate at the east corner of its street frontage, which opened into a yard that ran south to the river. To the west of the gate, there were three buildings with street frontage: the office and caretaker’s house; a second house which held rooms for drawing and possibly Morris’s own lodgings; and a dormitory for boys apprenticed at the factory.493 The factory’s work took place primarily in three wooden “sheds,” two of which were long two-story buildings (fig. 72, 78, and 79), and the other a more compact one-story structure. One of the long sheds ran beside the yard, south of the office. It held the stained glass workshops upstairs and the dye house beneath. Behind this building was the smaller weaving shed, where loom-woven patterned (jacquard)

491 The station and line connected the area to central London via Ludgate Hill and London Bridge stations and provided both passenger and freight service. “Merton Abbey Station,” Disused Stations, http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/m/ merton_abbey/. Morris used it to commute: from Kelmscott House in Hammersmith he would take the Underground into the City, then change to the train for Merton.

492 Later, when the Firm became heavily involved in the repair and restoration of historic tapestries, the garden on the north side of the river was sacrificed to build a special tapestry repair hut. See Payne, “Memories of Morris & Co.”

493 Saxby, William Morris at Merton, 5. Linda Parry notes that Morris had a bed on site. Parry, Textiles, 64.

208 fabrics were produced. A small boiler house sat between the stained glass/dye shed and the river. A garden stretched behind these buildings, from the back of the street frontage buildings to the Wandle. Where the yard met the Wandle, a low timber bridge provided access to the rest of the property (fig. 72). At the southwest corner of the bridge, there was an open-sided shed built over the river, containing a wheel on which the fabrics were washed (fig. 11). Beyond it, another long two-story shed extended south. This shed held the carpet and tapestry weaving space on the ground floor and the fabric-printing room above. On the east side of this building, between it and the Wandle, there was a mill pond (maps and fig. 79). Historic OS maps show open areas bounded with trees to the south of the Works’ millpond and east of the weaving/printing shed (figs. 73, 80, and 81). In David Saxby’s pamphlet about the site, he indicates that these areas were part of the property of the Works. While the exact source for the boundary lines he shows is not clear, several nineteenth-century sources support the general claim. Morris stated that the property covered seven acres, which corresponds to the boundaries drawn by Saxby.494 Emma Lazarus’s thorough description of the site lists an “orchard and kitchen garden” among the landscape features, and it seems most likely that the orchard was the small area of trees south of the mill pond.495 And lastly, the field to the east must be included within the grounds of the Works because of its known use in the factory’s fabric production process.

494 William Morris to John Ruskin, April 15, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 187.

495 Lazarus, “A Day in Surrey with William Morris.”

209 The property’s eastern area appears to have been crossed by two or three channels with a single intake/outlet along the Pickle. These channels were not laid out as closely together as those in some bleaching fields, but given the site’s history as both a bleaching site and a printworks, it seems likely that the open ground and water supply was intended for bleaching or crofting. As discussed above, crofting was the final step in traditional calico printing, in which the fabrics were lain out in the sun so their whites could be whitened as they dried – the “grounds cleared,” as the Dye Book puts it.496 The process’s name is likely derived from its interaction with the landscape: croft is a traditional term for a field, so crofting would be the act of laying fabric out on a field.497 By the nineteenth century, the drying and clearing process had been mechanized using steam and hot rollers, but was still called crofting. Morris & Co. is known to have used both methods at Merton Abbey, where the premises included a mechanized indoor croft room as well as the crofting field.498 Morris of course preferred the more traditional and picturesque field method.499 Additionally, in July 1882 Morris wrote to May that “hay-making at Merton” had just begun.500 This

496 See above, p. 198.

497 "croft, n.1." OED Online, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com/view/ Entry/44687.

498 Parry, Textiles, 56 and 60. Crofting is listed among the instructions for eight of the patterns in the Merton Abbey Dye book. The instruction is often “croft to clear grounds,” and it seems to have been associated particularly with madder and weld dyeing, not indigo discharge.

499 Parry, Textiles, 56.

500 William Morris to May Morris, July 12, 1882. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 114. The letter shows Morris was aware of the growing and harvesting conditions necessary for good hay: “a sorry haymaking ’tis like to be admist all this wet.”

210 indicates that to some extent the damp crofting meadow was managed in the same way as riverside meadows up and down the Thames and its tributaries, from the grazing commons of the Lea to the wildflower-filled meadows of Kelmscott.501

Printing at Merton The question of how the Firm used the factory and its land is important not only from a general landscape history perspective, but also because it directly affected the output of the Works. The physical space in which the Firm’s products were made shaped the making of those things. The move to Merton Abbey and the presence of the Wandle allowed the Firm to undertake processes that had been unattainable before, and Morris’s design work shifted to match the new production methods, resulting in the late body of work (1881-85) dominated by the nine tributary patterns. The fabrics designed to be printed and dyed at the Merton Abbey Works engaged directly with the Wandle and its landscape at every step of their production.502 As Morris drew inspiration from the system of Thames tributaries, his designs also relied upon the

501 By the 1930s this portion of open land was apparently no longer in possession of the Firm. OS maps from the period show that the Board Mills had expanded massively, with several buildings located on the former crofting meadows. The sale may in fact have happened several decades earlier, as an OS map from 1911 shows that a railroad siding arcing across the east end of the space to connect the Board Mills to Merton Abbey Station. Presumably as mechanized drying and modern dye methods advanced the Firm stopped field crofting the fabrics and no longer needed the land. Field crofting might also have become less practical (or even totally impossible) in the face of the area’s increased density of population and industry, which in turn would have led to a noticeable decline in air quality, especially given the heavy use of coal in English domestic and industrial contexts in the first half of the twentieth century.

502 The Firm also seems to have begun dyeing earlier designs at the Merton Abbey Works. However, because these designs were not created in response to the particular conditions of the Works and the Wandle, they are not the focus of this chapter.

211 water of one of those tributaries for their existence, and in turn affected the health of the river. Through the manufacturing process of the Merton Abbey Works, Morris and his patterns became part of the landscape and environmental history of the Wandle. In order to explore the depths of the reflexive design-production relationship between the printed textiles and the Wandle, it is necessary to understand the technical details of the Merton Abbey Works’ dyeing and printing processes. As such, in the following sections I will outline the Firm’s history of fabric printing and dyeing at the Works, the dye materials and methods employed, and the ways the Wandle’s water was put to use. This information shows that the patterns are not only a result of Morris’s idealization and interpretation of the landscape: rather, their existence and appearance also relied on the exigencies of their production process, which in turn relied upon the physical state of the Wandle and its surroundings. Although the Firm arrived at Merton Abbey in summer 1881, they did not begin printing fabrics there in earnest until late 1882 or early 1883. The primary reason for this delay was likely a need to prepare the Works’ spaces. Although the site had been previously used for dyeing and printing fabrics, it was altered and repaired to suit the Firm’s purposes. On January 1, 1883, Morris wrote to Jenny reporting that he was planning to visit Merton Abbey that day and “expect(ed) to find all going”, unlike the previous Thursday, December 28, when he had “found the wheel no means finished as they had promised: indeed it looked like a boy who has pulled his watch to pieces & can’t put it together again.”503 Apparently the waterwheel where the fabrics were to be washed had required some sort of large-scale repairs. Five days later, he wrote to May: “Well to wind up we have seen the ‘wheels go round’ at Merton, & the

503 William Morris to Jenny Morris, January 1, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 146.

212 printing seems like to go on swimmingly now.”504 At the end of February, however, he reported to Jenny that things were still settling in in the print shop: “We are not getting on quite as fast as we should with the printing; is very tough work getting every thing in due order, the cloths seem to want so much doing to them before they can be printed & then so much doing to them after they are printed.”505 Judging by this comment, repairs or renovations were not the only matter delaying the production of textiles at the Works. Dyeing and printing on textiles was a complex art, and it seems that it took some time for the Firm and its employees to get everything working correctly. There is also evidence that the gap in printing in 1881-83 also encompassed a period of design and technique experimentation, with Morris’s patterns evolving to meet the new production methods the Works made possible. When the Firm arrived at Merton, Morris had already been studying and experimenting with historic and modern dye techniques for almost a decade.506 Additionally, he would have been familiar with many processes and materials from his visits to Thomas Wardle’s works in Leek. At Merton Abbey, he was able to apply and expand upon his knowledge; however, he had never before been in charge of large-scale dyeing or printing operations. All dyeing and fabric printing is an exact science, requiring precise chemical and environmental controls, and some of the processes Morris chose to use

504 William Morris to May Morris, January 6, 1883. ibid., 148.

505 William Morris to Jenny Morris, February 28, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 160.

506 Parry, Textiles, 48

213 were particularly finicky.507 He would have had help from his employees, particularly the experienced dyers and printers he hired to run the shops, but the adjustment nevertheless would have taken time and a certain amount of trial-and-error.508 There is evidence in the patterns themselves for this period of experimentation. As has been noted, Morris’s periods of printed fabric design came in peaks and valleys (fig. 46). One such valley occurred in the late 1870s. After designing seven printed fabrics in 1877 – the second-most productive year in his career – he stopped almost completely, designing one in 1877 and none between 1878 and 1880. This lull corresponded to the period of conflict with Thomas Wardle over printing quality. Work on printed fabrics resumed c. 1881 with three patterns: Brother (or Brer) Rabbit, registered May 20, 1882; Bird and Anemone, registered June 17, 1882; and Rose and Thistle, unregistered (fig. 82).509 When Morris began these patterns, his work had changed noticeably. Unlike the intricately colored and highly detailed patterns being designed for production at the Wardle factory – for example Honeysuckle, 1876 (fig. 83) – the patterns designed c. 1881 by Morris were much simpler. All three were designed to be dyed with single dyes resulting in patterns picked out either in a lighter and a darker shade of the same color or in a combination of white and a single color.510 They were also less detailed. Although still printed at a large repeat scale,

507 See the descriptions of the Merton Abbey dye processes below and in Appendix C.

508 Parry, Textiles, 56.

509 The c. 1881 date is drawn from Linda Parry’s conclusions. The design for Rose and Thistle has a Queen Square mark, dating it from before the Merton Abbey move. Between this evidence and Morris’s experimentations in the period, she dates all three of the designs to before June 1881. Parry, Textiles, 56 and 226-29.

510 I will describe white-and-color patterns as either color-on-white or white-on-color.

214 they have far less dotted and lined shading and infill, making them appear blockier than the highly articulated 1877 patterns. All three c. 1881 patterns were produced in four colorways: red-on-white and two-tone red (both dyed with madder); buff-on- white (dyed with an iron solution); and white-on-blue (dyed with indigo). Birds and Anemone was also available in two-tone blue (indigo) and Rose and Thistle in white- on-yellow (dyed with weld). With the exception of the yellow Rose and Thistle, which might date from slightly later, the three designs and their colorways are consistently listed together in the Dye Book at the start of their corresponding color sections (fig. 84). The simplicity of the designs, their registration dates situated between the move to Merton Abbey and Morris’s reports of success, and their places in the Dye Book all point to their position as transitional-foundational designs. They likely functioned as proof of concept: if the correct effects could be achieved on these relatively simple designs, the methods could be applied to other pieces. More complex designs could and did follow. In 1883, Morris designed around ten patterns for printed fabrics – his most prolific year of printed .511 Another three followed in 1884, and two in 1885.512 Many of these designs expanded upon the type framed by

Color-on-white indicates that the background fill of the fabric is white (fig. 82c), while white-on-color is the opposite (fig. 82a).

511 Corncockle, registered 2/27/1883; Strawberry Thief reg. 5/11/1883; Evenlode reg. 9/2/1883; Flowerpot, Kennet, and Windrush reg. 10/18/1883; Eyebright reg. 11/23/1883; Rose reg. 12/8/1883; Borage and Wey unregistered. Numbers and dating beyond registrations are approximate. Corncockle may have been designed in late 1882. Borage and Wey may be 1884.

512 Wandle, reg. 7/28/1884; Cray and Lodden, unregistered 1884; Lea, reg. 2/2/1885; Medway reg. 9/21/1885.

215 the c. 1881 patterns: bold and blocky with large-stemmed meanders and large blooms (figs. 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8). These designs used the techniques developed during the 1881- 83 experimental period and expanded upon them, layering different dyes to create complex multi-colored patterns. These post-move designs included all nine of the tributary patterns. Wandle and its fellow river-named patterns were not only inspired by the river landscape, but designed with the Merton Abbey Works’ river-dependent production processes in mind.

The Dyeing and Printing Process The techniques used to dye and print fabric at Merton Abbey Works are complex, but essential to an understanding the material history of the patterns.513 This information is usually summarized in writing on Morris’s textiles or the Merton Abbey Works; however, when overly simplified it does not provide the kind of technical information needed to understand the materiality of the production process or its effects. Thus, for the purposes of this chapter, I will outline the general production process by following the manufacture of a complex printed design – Wandle – from start to finish.514 Using this outline as my base, I will then go on to

513 Despite the relatively extensive research on Morris’s textiles, the technical details of the Firm’s dye work have received relatively little attention. Linda Parry does summarize some aspects of the process in William Morris Textiles. Virginia Davis’s article “William Morris and Indigo Discharge Printing”, The Journal of William Morris Studies 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 8–17, delves into technical details of the indigo discharge process, but the other processes have not been investigated in published materials. For this reason, I am providing some detail here, with further in- depth information about techniques and materials available in Appendix C.

514 Further detailed information on the Firm’s dye materials and processes is available in Appendix C.

216 investigate the presence and necessity of water in every step of the process, an interpretive turn which reveals the material centrality of the Wandle in Morris’s work. I will conclude the section with a consideration of the types of water infrastructure that may have been in place at the Merton Abbey Works. Taken together, these investigations reveal the intricate intertwining of Morris’s river-inspired patterns and the extractive, productive tributary landscape that supported their creation. The printing process for a Morris & Co. fabric like Wandle began with a collection of dye materials and the length of woven white cotton fabric to be dyed.515 Before printing started, the undyed fabric would be hung on the waterwheel and run through the water of the Wandle, washing away any impurities and wetting the cloth (fig. 11).516 After this, it would be carried to the dye room on the ground floor of the northern shed, where it would be immersed in one of the large indigo vats set in the floor (fig. 85) for a set period of time to achieve the desired color.517 Afterwards it would be “soured,” washed with a mild acid solution, a step which helped to remove mineral deposits on the fabric.518 It was then washed, rinsed in a weak lye solution,

515 Wandle and most of the other tributary patterns were dyed on cotton only, though other designs were printed on other fabrics, particularly linen.

516 The wheel is referred to interchangeably as a jenny, ginny, or ginney in Morris’s notes and the Dye Book. This is not a standard technical term in textile manufacturing, but in the nineteenth century it was a common general word for a machine, related to gin (itself possibly a shortening of engine) – i.e. the spinning jenny and the cotton gin.

517 The longer the cloth was left in the indigo solution, the darker the final color. The Firm had several standardized shades of blue; Wandle, like most of the tributary patterns, was dyed “No. 6 Blue”, one of the darkest shades.

518 The Dye Book recipes start with the fabrics already dyed and so do not include this step, but it appears in Morris’s “Printer’s Notes” in a section titled “The Merton Abbey practice. Aug: 1883.”

217 and washed again.519 Both washings took place on the waterwheel. Between each step, the large swathes of fabric would be carried back and forth across the Wandle, from dye shed on the northwest bank to the wheel shed on the southeast. After washing, the fabric was dried before the indigo discharge process could begin. The first step in the discharge process was bichroming. Bichrome (potassium dichromate, a metallic salt solution) was applied using the padding machine, a type of mangle which applied dye material solutions to the whole fabric with rollers. The bichromed cloth was left to cure overnight before being taken from the dye shed – again crossing the timber bridge that spanned the Wandle – and up to the print room on the upper story of the southern work shed. In the print room, the fabric would be spread on the long table that stretched down of the length of the room (fig. 86).520 The printers would work their way down the fabric with carved printing blocks and a cart – on tracks for easy movement – that carried the dye material to be applied to the block. At this point in the process, the dye material being used was a discharge paste: a combination of oxalic and sulphuric acids and a gum-and-clay thickener.521 This solution, aided by the chemical layer lain down by the bichrome, reacted with and removed the indigo. For Wandle the printers used both “white” and “half-white” discharges. The white discharge was full strength, and

519 The base lye solution was presumably intended to neutralize any remaining acid from the souring process.

520 If the fabric was longer than the table, it would be hung in swags at the end, which would be rolled out onto the table once the first portion was complete, as can be seen in fig. 85).

521 The thickener gave the acid solution substance, making it easier to print, and also helped it adhere to the fabric.

218 it completely removed the indigo, reverting any area it touched to the white of the original fabric. Half-white discharge, a weaker solution, left behind a lightened blue (fig. 87). After the discharge was applied, the length of Wandle would go through another round of cleaning in order to remove the discharge paste and the indigo with it.522 Once the fabric was cleaned and dried, it would return for another round of dyeing, this time with red. According to the Dye Book, Wandle was dyed with three shades of red: deep red, mid-red, and mid-pink.523 All three were printed directly on the fabric using solutions that combined thickening, alizarine (a dye derived from the colorant chemical of madder), and a mordant.524 After being printed, the fabric would go through two cycles of steaming and soaping to set the color and wash away excess dye materials. After this cleaning was complete, the fabric was ready for its final color, yellow. Wandle’s yellow portions were printed with a material the Dye Book calls bark; also known as quercitron, the dye is derived from the bark of the North American Eastern bark oak.525 Green was also created at this stage by printing the

522 Morris’s Printer’s Notes also list an overnight aging period, but the Dye Book does not, with some patterns instead demanding immediate clearing after discharge printing. The recipe for Wandle does not indicate either.

523 There is no reason to believe this is untrue, but the two reds are difficult to distinguish by eye. It seems likely that one was used for the dotted detailing and another for the larger areas of color.

524 The other red dyeing technique used at the Works required textiles to be printed with a mordant and then dipped in a madder bath, a more involved and time- consuming process. See Appendix C.

525 The Works used two different yellow dyes, quercitron and weld. See Appendix C.

219 yellow over areas that had previously be half-discharged – yellow over light blue created green. Like the red portions, the yellow was printed with a mixture of dye, mordant, and thickener. After printing, the fabric was hung in a cool room and left to age, allowing the dye reaction to complete. Depending on the method and mixture used (the Dye Book lists two), it would be aged one day and then steamed, or else aged two days without steam.526 After the yellow was applied, the printing was complete, and all that was left was for the fabric to be finished. The Dye Book does not give any particular finishing instructions for Wandle, but its recipes indicate that generally fabrics were washed on the wheel in the river and then crofted. After crofting, the printing process was complete. The finished length of Wandle was ready to be transported to Oxford Street for sale.

Water in the Dye Process At every step in the Merton Abbey Works fabric printing process, one thing was always present and necessary: the water of the Wandle. The river appears repeatedly on every page of the Dye Book, not by name, but in every material and process the book details. Reading recipes, site descriptions, and images with an attention to the presence and use of liquid reveals the centrality of the Wandle to the entire printed fabric manufacturing process, as well as the large scales of its use. This,

For more information on quercitron, see Heather Hansen, “The Quest for Quercitron: Revealing the Story of a Forgotten Dye” (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 2011).

526 The steam process was used early in the Merton Abbey period and abandoned by around 1890. See Appendix C.

220 in turn, allows us to see Morris’s relationship with the Wandle for what it was – not just aesthetic or inspiratory, but physical, industrial, and even exploitative. Water was needed for every dye material used at the Works: dyes, mordants, discharges, and the various baths used to set the colors and wash the fabrics. Many of these mixes also called for additives that were created separately – acids or bases for the correct chemistry, thickeners for consistency, and so on. Throughout the Dye Book’s recipes, these materials and additives are called for in liquid measures, indicating they would have been solutions, many or most of which would have been mixed on site from dry materials. In some cases, the amounts prepared might have been small – a small bottle of acid or tub of thickener gum – but the dye and wash baths in particular would have been mixed in very large quantities, filling vats which had to be large enough to receive large amounts of fabric. Water was thus needed in abundance even before the actual printing process began, and at the Works, that water was drawn from the Wandle.527 As well as being a central ingredient in the Firm’s dye materials, the Wandle was crucial throughout the fabric printing process. Its water was present in every step by which the fabric was prepared, printed, and finished. Even before any dye materials

527 Douglas Griffiths stated that when he was employed at the Works in the 1930s, the dye vats “would be filled with water from the Wandle,” and there is no reason to disbelieve his statement. Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works.” It is unclear exactly when piped water came to the Merton area, but by 1884 it was supplied by the Lambeth Waterworks Company, which pumped from the Thames. Francis Bolton, London Water Supply, (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1884), 36 and Arthur Silverthorne, London And Provincial Water Supplies: With The Latest Statistics of Metropolitan and Provincial Water Works (London: Crosby Lockwood, 1884), 52. However, this supply was expensive and intended primarily for domestic use. It is doubtful the Firm would have chosen to use commercial piped water when they had an abundant and free water source with ideal dye chemistry on their doorstep.

221 were applied, the fabric was washed directly in the river, a process which it would undergo repeatedly during its manufacture. After being attached to the waterwheel in the shed built out into the river channel, the fabric would be rotated through the water, which would wash away impurities and unwanted materials and soak into the cloth, readying it for further processes.528 In the print room, water was present in the thickened solutions of dyes and mordants that the printers applied to their carved blocks. It also suffused the room. Under the category of “Shops” (printing workshops) in his “Printer’s Notes,” Morris wrote that “They should be warm & moist and of equable temperature: some boil a kettle in the shop to keep the air moist; some hang up damp cloths. This last is best.”529 If the room was too dry, it could disrupt the careful balance of moist printing cloth and measured dye solution. Even in the air of the workshop, the water of the Wandle was essential to the success of the dye process. While being dyed and finished, the printed fabrics would go through any number of combinations of processes like rinsing, soaping, steaming, aging, dunging, coppering, and crofting.530 And all of these processes also used water, to a greater or lesser extent. Soaping, coppering, and dunging all involved soaking the fabrics in baths of various solutions. Steaming was just that – setting colors with the application of steam – and aging took place in a warm, damp room which was also likely fed with

528 It is likely that the cloth was damp for at least some of the processes at the Works, as it is a standard practice to apply dye materials to wet or damp fabric. However, there is no direct reference to the cloth’s dampness or lack thereof in the Merton Abbey records.

529 “Printer’s Notes,” 143.

530 See Appendix C for more details.

222 steam. Crofting, as discussed, could involve the laying out of washed damp cloth on the fields beyond the factory buildings or could be a steam process. All of these steam- centered processes required not just water, but heated water, which was produced in the boiler between the river and the dye shed.531 Water was also abundantly present in the dye shed. This was where the dye materials were mixed, which would have required a steady supply of water. It was also where the large dip-vats of dyes were housed, filled with liquids mixed using the Wandle’s water. The indigo vats in particular dominate descriptions and imagery of the dye shed, reinforcing both the centrality of that dye to Morris’s work and the physical presence of its watery form. The only photographs of the dye house interior show the four indigo vats, which were set into the floor of the space (fig. 86). The vats are also the focus on many descriptions of the space, and they seem to have been an attraction for visitors: Emma Lazarus wrote of wool being “dipped for our amusement” to show off the dramatic green-to-blue oxidization of dyed indigo.532 The indigo vats were an attraction at least partially because they were so large – in period texts they are variously described as “great,” “deep,” “huge,” and “gigantic.”533 Douglas Griffiths spoke of how easy it was to fall into the vats and dye yourself blue up to the waist. Griffiths’s reminiscences also give an idea of the scale of the dyeing process: “There

531 For more details on the boiler, see below, p. 227.

532 Lazarus, “A Day in Surrey with William Morris.”

533 Lazarus, “A Day in Surrey with William Morris,” Marillier, History of the Merton Abbey Tapestry Works, Payne, “Memories of Morris & Co.,” Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works.”

223 was large frames which with nails, little bent hooks, we used to hook on the calico – quite stiff, and you’d get about thirty, or… sixty feet according to what you were going to dye. Then the whole dye was lifted up, quite an effort, it used to take two of you all your time to lift it up – lower gently into the vat of indigo, or whatever colour you were using.”534 (These frames can be seen in fig. 86.) A 30 foot (9.14m) length of 36 inch (3 foot, 91.44 cm) wide fabric would be 90 square feet (8.36 square meters). When draped for dipping, it would have needed to hang in swags that did not touch so the dye solution would reach all the fabric evenly. In the photograph of the vats, they appear to be about 3.5 feet (107 cm) wide, which would make sense if they were receiving three-foot-wide cottons. If they were 3.5 feet deep as well as wide, but not full to the top (as seen in fig. 85), they would hold about 36.75 cubic feet (1.04 cubic meter) of liquid, which is 229 imperial gallons or 275 US gallons (1041 liters). This number is supported by Morris’s records: when Morris and Thomas Wardle were experimenting with indigo in 1877, Morris wrote to him that he thought 200 gallons (presumably imperial gallons) to be the right size for a vat.535 From these numbers, we can begin to understand the volumes of water that would have been involved in the Merton Abbey Works dyeing process. The dye shed had the four indigo vats and other receptacles for dyeing other colors and applying any solution in which the fabric needed to be dipped or washed.536 Many finishing

534 Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works.”

535 William Morris to Thomas Wardle, August 27, 1877. Collected Letters Vol. 1, 395.

536 Although the red and yellow for Wandle were applied through direct printing, several of the Firm’s methods for dyeing those colors did require the immersion of full lengths of cloth in dye baths after the application of mordants. See Appendix C.

224 processes also required submersion in baths of materials such as soaps, dung, and acidic and basic solutions.537 Based on the indigo vats, we can assume that other dye baths would have needed to hold at least 200 imperial gallons of liquid in order to accommodate the large amounts of cloth. The Dye Book recipe for Blue Windrush, meanwhile, notes that the post-discharge clearing bath should contain at least three pints of caustic soda (lye) in a 120 gallon (144 US gallon, 545.5 liter) beck.538 At any time, therefore, the dye house may have contained over 1,200 gallons (1441 US gallons, 5455 liters) of water-based dye baths – 800 gallons of indigo alone, alongside other dyes and processing liquids.539 Additionally, other portions of the fabric printing process required smaller amounts of liquid for dye material mixing or application. For example, some materials which needed all-over application were applied with the padding machine, which used rollers to spread a liquid dye material evenly over a length of cloth. Both the bichrome required for indigo discharge and the mordants required for tonal red fabrics (“padded reds”) were applied this way. The Dye Book shows that for bichrome, one gallon of

537 ‘Dung’ was a solution of warm water and cow dung, believed to help in clearing certain thickeners. Crookes, A Practical Handbook of Dyeing and Calico-Printing, 294-95.

538 “A large shallow vessel or tub, used in brewing, dyeing, etc.” “beck, n.4,” OED Online, Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/16759.

539 The dye shed was also responsible for dyeing the wool for the Works’ weaving operations, and Douglas Griffiths reported that there was a separate system for that process: “There the vats were above ground, made of wood about three inches thick, and they’d be about waist-height. And these were used in the same manner as those in the ground, but of course you had… more variety of colours.” Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works.” It is likely that this separate system was in place from the outset at the Works. The wool used for tapestry would have required different dye processes and would have been easier to control in smaller vats.

225 liquid was required. Water was also needed for the mixing of the various dye solutions. Wandle, a particularly complex pattern that required the maximum number of dyes used for any one printed fabric at the Works, calls for water eight times in its Dye Book recipe, with a total of just over three imperial gallons (3.6 US gallons, 13.6 liters). It also calls for a variety of dye materials in liquid measurement, most if not all of which would have been mixed using water as well. These numbers are fairly negligible compared to the large volumes of the dye baths, but they nevertheless reflect an extensive use of water and liquid materials throughout the Merton Abbey textile printing system.540 The admittedly approximate calculations above show that a length of Wandle would likely have come into contact with over 400 US gallons (1514 liters) of liquid in its dyeing and discharging alone, not to mention the volumes needed for mixing materials or the amount that would have flowed past its fibers during its many rinses on the waterwheel. This information lends perspective to the scale of undertakings at the Merton Abbey Works. When considered within Morris’s larger riverine landscape history, it also opens new paths of interpretation and investigation. At Merton Abbey, Morris’s relationship with the landscape of the Thames and its tributaries became one of exploitation and extraction as well as inspiration. Morris and the Firm put the Wandle’s water was put to work in dye house and wash shed, and in so doing, they reshaped and potentially even poisoned the river system around them.

540 A detail in Douglas Griffith’s oral history also points out the omnipresence of liquids in the process: he speaks of acid carboys ‘littering’ the dye room, which is indicative of the large amounts of auxiliary materials being used as well as the dyes. Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works.”

226 Water Systems at the Merton Abbey Works Given the large volumes of water needed in the fabric printing process at Merton Abbey, it is likely that there was some sort of system in place there to draw water from the Wandle and channel it to some of the work spaces, particularly the dye house and the boiler room. The liquid infrastructure of the Works has not been examined in previous scholarship on Morris and his designs, but this technical information is significant because it can tell us more about how Morris and the Firm exploited and impacted the river’s water. A few pieces of the Works’ system for engaging with the river are known from visual and written evidence: namely the millpond, the waterwheel, the boiler, and the various liquid receptacles inside the factory buildings. However, a great deal more is unknown, and difficult if not impossible to reconstruct given the limited technical records of the site and its destruction in the mid-twentieth century.541 There is no information about how the water supply was obtained or moved through the property, nor is there any clear information about provisions for wastewater. Thus, what follows is an overview of what we can glean about the water system from letters, descriptions, and images, along with some hypotheses about the system as a whole. This overview contributes to our understanding of Firm’s water use, but perhaps more importantly, it forms a background for further considerations of the factory and Morris’s works within the larger hydrological and environmental systems of the Wandle.

541 The archaeological investigation of portions of the site in 1992 records several drains, some quite elaborate, but no pipes or other water-delivery systems. There are also no records of any nineteenth-century materials being found during the dig. This may be because the archaeologists privileged deeper layers of history, or it may be that nineteenth-century materials were destroyed by twentieth-century disturbances, including Second World War bombing and multiple waves of building at the Board Mills. See Saxby, William Morris at Merton, 6-8.

227 The largest piece of the water system at the Merton Abbey Works was the millpond that lay between the south shed and the river (fig. 79). OS Maps show that the pond, which would have drawn its water from the Wandle, predated the Firm’s lease on the Works (fig. 73). It is not mentioned in descriptions of the site from the Firm’s time, but it clearly remained, appearing on maps and in images of the Works. The pond’s original purpose and use in the Firm’s time are both unclear. It may have once been used to feed a waterwheel for power, or it might have been a supply reservoir for the factory and/or its adjacent crofting fields. In Morris’s period it may have been used as a supply reservoir, or it may have simply been an aesthetic feature; it is unlikely that it powered or was even connected to the nineteenth-century waterwheel. The waterwheel, called a “ginny” throughout the Dye Book and other period records, has been discussed in some detail above.542 However, it merits further attention here as well because of how it interrelates – or fails to interrelate – to other portions of the Works’ water systems. The wheel stood within a small shed which was built out into the river just south of the Works bridge. Unlike many other waterwheels, it does not seem to have been attached to any sort of channel or drain. Rather, the river water would have flowed directly into and out of the shed, past the wheel and whatever it held. Douglas Griffiths’s oral history mentions that if the fabric on the wheel was not attached properly, “We all had to dive in and pull our trousers up and get it out of the river itself, where it had floated, before it got through to the Board Mills, otherwise we would have lost quite a bit of chintz.”543 Hence, we can conclude

542 See p. 217.

543 Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works.

228 that there was no sort of drain channel. Additionally, Griffiths mentioned that dye run- off from the Liberty works could cause immediate problems if fabrics were being washed at the Morris works, indicating that the waterwheel was engaging directly with the Wandle rather than receiving stored water from the millpond.544 One of Morris’s early letters about the site mentions the “water power” of the Wandle, but there is no indication that the river actually provided direct power to any machinery at the Works.545 The waterwheel was constructed to hold fabric, not to catch the water’s force, and it thus it appears to have had crossbars rather than paddles (fig. 11). Additionally, the surviving image of the shed gives no indication of affiliated waterwheel machinery, nor does the shed appear to have been big enough to house such machinery. OS maps also show that it was detached from the other buildings, which would have made it difficult (though not impossible) to conduct water-driven power between them.546 The Works also required very little external power. In keeping with Morris’s ideals of handcrafting, the factory was not highly mechanized compared to others in the period, and work was performed by hand at relatively small scale. Douglas Griffiths does cite several pieces of steam-powered machinery, and Morris’s “Printer’s Notes” mention “whizzing” – spin-drying – a fabric, but it is unclear which pieces of machinery, if any, were in place at the factory during Morris’s time.

544 ibid.

545 William Morris to George Howard, March 16, 1882. Collected Works Vol. 2a, 101.

546 Douglas Griffiths stated that rather than providing power the wheel was powered by the boiler, but it is not known if this was true in Morris’s period. Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works.”

229 We do know, however, that there was a boiler in place at the Works in Morris’s period, located in a small building near to the north workshed. This boiler would have burned coal to heat water drawn from the Wandle.547 As well as supplying steam to power any machines that needed it, the boiler would have generated the hot water called for in some dye material recipes and the steam used in several dyeing and cleaning processes. There would have been some sort of piping in place to bring hot water and steam to the places where it was used, but it would not have had to go far. The steam-aided techniques were associated with the processes of the dye house, and therefore likely took place there or within the boiler building next door. There is no indication of how water was transported from the river to the boiler or the dye room. However, given the volumes needed, it seems likely that there was some sort of pump system to extract the water from the river channel and deliver it where it was needed. The boiler and the dye room they likely shared a supply line from the river. This supply would have need to be fairly robust in order to keep a steady flow to the boiler and fill the dye shop’s vats. Once the water did arrive at the dye shop, it was put to use mixing the many dye material solutions. Some of these, particularly those used in washing, were likely spent after one use and thus required constant replenishment. The indigo vats lasted much longer if their chemical balance was maintained, but eventually the colorant would be spent and the indigo solution would have to be replaced. Douglas Griffiths

547 Douglas Griffiths stated specifically that the boiler used river water. In his time, the boiler was also large enough that it required the work of two men, both former sailors. Edward Payne meanwhile reported that there were multiple boilers, one for the heating and one for indigo fabric processing. Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works” and Payne, “Memories of Morris & Co.”

230 recalled: “You used to get a sludge of indigo dye about a foot deep at the bottom. So eventually, after say towards six months, you’d take one of these vats out of action and it would have to be cleared right out – horrible job!”548 This means firstly that new supplies had to be made – requiring more water – and secondly that hundreds of gallons of spent dye solution and solid waste needed to go somewhere. There are no clear records of how the Firm disposed of waste at the Works. It seems most likely, however, that the destination of its wastewater was the river, via a drainage system. Archaeological records show a number of drains around the workyard, dating mostly from the eighteenth century.549 These may or may not have still been in use in Morris’s period, but some sort of drainage must have been used – a fact hinted at briefly in Morris’s correspondence. In the February 1883 letter to Jenny discussing the preparations for dyeing at the Works, Morris wrote that “we are getting tidy now, but havn’t (sic) quite cleared up about the big filtering bed, which still wants something doing to it, as the tail was red with madder the other day.”550 ‘Tail’ has multiple meanings in regards to drainage and streams: it could refer to a drain or to the area just downstream of a waterwheel.551 This means that the location of the filtering bed is somewhat unclear. Linda Parry

548 Griffiths, “Merton Abbey Works.” This cleaning schedule might have been more frequent in the nineteenth century, given that Griffiths was employed in the 1930s, when the Firm’s fortunes were waning and the Works were using more synthetic dyes.

549 Saxby, William Morris at Merton, 8. As noted above, excavations on the former Works property did not record any nineteenth-century material.

550 William Morris to Jenny Morris, February 28, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 160.

551 "tail, n.1". OED Online. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/197067.

231 mentions the matter, but her phrasing, “on at least one occasion Morris clogged the wheel with madder dye,”552 implies that the tail was associated with the washing wheel. Given what we know of the rinsing system and the physical position of the wheel, however, this seems unlikely. The flow of river water would have carried the madder away immediately, even if there was enough on the fabric in the first place to clog such a robust system. Additionally, there does not seem to have been a place around the water wheel for the filtering bed Morris mentioned. A filter bed is a system in which a liquid is run through layers of permeable materials, usually sand and gravel, in order to strain away contaminants. Given that such a system requires water to soak slowly through it, it would not make much sense to have one in the flowing river around the waterwheel. Rather, it is far more likely that the filtering bed was connected to the drainage system for the dye shop’s waste, dug into the ground somewhere between the shop and the riverbank in order to filter away at least some of the dye materials in the factory’s wastewater. The filtered water would have then entered the river through a drain tail. This system is unfortunately not mentioned again, so we have no further indications of where it was, the exact materials it was intended to filter, or whether it was ever as efficacious as Morris desired. There are also no further indications of the Works’ systems for waste management or drainage. With the current information available about the Merton Abbey Works site, evidence of water and waste systems is fragmentary at best. However, what little is known does reinforce the centrality of the Wandle to the Firm’s work and the constant

552 Parry, Textiles, 60. Though these descriptions do not seem to match, I have not found any other mention of another incident involving madder and the river, so I believe this is another interpretation of the same Morris letter.

232 engagement with the river as a source of industrial material. The Firm’s production process required water usage and waste disposal, and in so doing, it required the company and Morris himself to become direct actors in the systems and pressures of the Victorian Wandle.

Morris and the Contemporary Wandle The Firm’s engagement with the Wandle as an industrial water source meant that the Merton Abbey Works and the textiles produced there were intrinsically linked to the contemporary state of the Wandle. Although the success of the Firm’s production at the Works shows that their needs were met, the conditions required to print textiles there were by no means guaranteed. Like any river around London, the Wandle was under pressure from urban and industrial expansion – in fact, as the environmental historian Hadrian Cook has shown, the problems of and changes to the Wandle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be read as a microcosm of the many issues at play in the management and health of English rivers over the last two centuries.553 Water rights, public health, industrialization, pollution, environmental study, and waterway restoration all play their parts in the history of the river since the early nineteenth century. Whether he liked it or not, by setting up a factory along the Wandle, Morris was engaging not only with a long history of British textile manufacturing, but also with an immediate, contemporary complex of competing interests and pressures – particularly water extraction and pollution. Along the Wandle, he could no longer be an opinionated outside observer. The state of the river affected his works, and his works affected the state of the river.

553 Cook, “A Tale of Two Catchments.”

233 Extraction: The London & South Western Water Company Almost as soon as the Firm settled at the Merton Abbey Works, the reality of Morris’s new involvement with his contemporary landscape and contemporary industry became clear. On March 16, 1882, Morris wrote an urgent letter to his good friend George Howard. Addressed from Merton Abbey, the letter read in full:

My dear George

I am in a fix – for look here; I took this place muchly for the sake of its water-power, & for the water of the Wandle; and now the Wandle is going to be dried up – no less – there is a bill before a committee on Monday as I hear suddenly to enable the London & S Western Water Company to tap the head springs of the river at Carshalton: the river is almost wholly fed from these springs, & tapping them thus would reduce it to a muddy ditch. As to myself I don’t much care, as I always said we ought to have gone into the country, but on public Grounds (sic) I could burst when I think of it: the Wandle from here upwards is a most beautiful stream as perhaps you know. I shall try to see you on Saturday morning; but meantime can you do anything in the House to help to stop such a damned iniquity?

Yours affectionately

William Morris554

Howard was a painter, aristocrat, arts patron, and Liberal member of Parliament.555 By writing to him, Morris was calling on Howard’s friendship and public spirit in an attempt to fend off a very real threat to the Wandle and, by extension, the Merton Abbey Works.

554 William Morris to George James Howard, March 16, 1882. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 101-02.

555 Later, in 1889, he became the ninth Earl of Carlisle.

234 As London and its suburbs expanded throughout the nineteenth century, the need for healthy, reliable water supplies grew ever greater. In the early 1880s, the London and South Western Water Company hoped to tap the clean, steady flow of the Wandle’s Carshalton springs to supply water to the village of Croydon, which was then an outlying but rapidly-expanding suburb.556 Similar schemes were being undertaken across the chalk aquifer of southern England, and especially in the Downs to the south and Chilterns to the north and west of London.557 These schemes had a major public benefit, supplying urban neighborhoods with much-needed clean water. However, they also had the potential to wreak havoc on the rivers that sprang from the same aquifer, especially if the water was drawn from springs that directly fed rivers. If too much water was piped away the flow of the river would reduce or stop entirely, a situation known as over-abstraction.558 Reduced flow had many secondary effects: it

556Between 1801 and 1881, Croydon’s population expanded from just under 6,000 to 80,000. Hadrian Cook, “‘An Unimportant River in the Neighbourhood of London’: The Use and Abuse of the River Wandle,” The London Journal 40, no. 3 (November 1, 2015), 231.

557 Like all water suppliers in the period, the London and South Western Water Company was a private firm rather than a public utility. Private water companies had existed in Britain since at least the late sixteenth century, providing water on a subscription basis – early examples included a pumped system that drew from the Thames at London Bridge (c. 1582) and the New River Company, est. 1609, which is discussed with the Lea in Chapter 2. These supplies were largely a luxury of the wealthy until the nineteenth century, and the reach and impact of the water companies was relatively limited. As more and more homes were provided with piped water supplies, however, a patchwork of private firms expanded to offer water almost anywhere in London. This water was drawn from rivers, springs, or wells and brought to homes through pump or gravity-feed systems.

558 Over-abstraction is still a concern in England today, especially in the face of global climate change, a matter I explore further in my conclusion.

235 exacerbated public health problems, because if there was less water, the proportion of sewage material and other pollution in rivers increased; it harmed wildlife and plants that depended on reliable water levels; and it could cause serious problems for industrial establishments, slowing or stopping their water-powered machinery as well as reducing the availability of a major raw material. This was what Morris feared for the Wandle. In early 1882, the Merton Abbey Works had not yet begun producing dyed and printed fabrics for sale. If the Carshalton scheme went ahead, the Firm’s textile plans may have been scuppered before they even began. Although Morris hinted in his letter to Howard that he might have taken the degradation of the Wandle as an excuse to return to his plan of a factory in the countryside, he was also very clearly agitated at the possibility that the most important resource at his newfound factory was about to be drained away. It would have been costly for the Firm to move again, so despite his aside on the matter to a trusted friend, it seems unlikely that Morris would have seriously considered leaving the factory behind and undermining his plans without a fight. And fight he did, reaching out not only to Howard, but also to other friends and to fellow mill-owners and lawyers. On the same day he wrote to George Howard, Morris also wrote to James Bryce, another kindred spirit in Parliament who had been an early supporter of Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.559 The letter is similar to that

559 William Morris to James Bryce, March 16, 1882. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 102- 03. Bryce was a professor of law at Oxford, a writer and historian, and a prominent Liberal politician. He joined the SPAB in 1877 and was active in the organization. In the early 1880s he was MP for Tower Hamlets, London. He later would be a member of Prime Minster Gladstone’s cabinet and from 1907-13, British Ambassador to the United States of America.

236 addressed to Howard, making the same practical-aesthetic argument that the river needed to be saved both for the sake of industry and for the sake of beauty, although with slightly more emphasis on Morris’s practical concerns as a business owner. Other letters followed in the next few days. First on March 18 came a reply to a letter from Bryce, in which Morris explained that he had learned other Wandle mill owners were petitioning against the bill. He had not been invited, probably because he was such a newcomer to the river, but he was in touch with “the lawyers who have the case in hand.”560 On March 22, Morris sent a letter to Frederick Ellis, his friend and co-leasee at Kelmscott Manor.561 The discussion in the letter was doubly fraught, because it concerned not one but two water management problems. Morris began by thanking Ellis for explaining the channel work undertaken by the Thames Conservancy which had altered the Kelmscott backwater.562 He then went on, “news for news, nay, water news for water news,” to discuss the potential changes to the Wandle. Between the two pieces of news, we learn that Ellis, Morris’s fellow lover of angling, had brought live perch down from Kelmscott to stock the Wandle – so among his practical and aesthetic concerns, Morris also had to worry that his fish might not “die a natural death (by hook to wit)”. He also reported that he had been up to the springs at Carshalton for the first time that day, his concern over the river driving him to see more of its upper reaches.

560 William Morris to James Bryce, March 18, 1882. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 103.

561 William Morris to Frederick Startridge Ellis, March 22, 1882. ibid., 104.

562 See Chapter 3, p. 95-96.

237 Within a fortnight of his initial agitation, Morris’s anxieties were allayed. The bill failed, the Water Company cancelled their plans, and on March 29 Morris wrote letters to George Howard and Georgiana Burne-Jones celebrating the victory and turning to another river-based concern: namely, inquiring if the Howards wanted to come to Kelmscott House to watch the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race that Saturday. The letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones also fills in more details about Morris’s experience of the upper Wandle, which he visited twice that week: once on March 22 with his business manager George Wardle, the trip reported to Ellis, and again that Friday with George Howard and their friend Richard Grosvenor.563 He wrote that they “(saw) a great deal of the water, much of it quite quiet and unspoiled; it is really very beautiful, crystal clear in spite of all the mills” and “The whole river swarms with trout.”564 This experience with the water company and its surrounding correspondence reinforce several aspects of Morris’s broader relationship with Thames and its tributaries. His distrust of modern improvements is there, as is his joy in angling and his love of “quiet and unspoiled” riversides. The trips up the Wandle echo many other trips Morris made along other rivers, including the Thames itself. However, their difference in purpose – seeking not entertainment, but information – underscores the fact that for all his aesthetic arguments and public-minded ideology, Morris also had a

563 The same Grosvenor who accompanied the Morrises and friends on one of their boat trips up the Thames.

564 William Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, March 29, 1882. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 106. In this letter Morris also notes that on March 22 he called on Arthur Hughes, the Pre-Raphaelite affiliated painter, who lived in Wallington “in a beautiful place, and the Croydon branch of the Wandle sweeps round his bit of close.”

238 deep professional interest in practical and technical matters around the river. His relationship with the Wandle was necessarily different to that with other rivers, because along the Wandle he had to engage with the practical concerns of the river’s usage and problems.

River Health and Pollution Over-abstraction was not the only problem facing the Wandle’s water in Morris’s time nor, for that matter, in the decades and centuries before his arrival there. The early industrialization of the Wandle had long altered the river in myriad ways, sometimes to the detriment of the natural environment. The intensification of both urban and industrial expansion in the nineteenth century, meanwhile, led to rapid change in the river’s ecosystem. The river’s industrial importance and proximity to London mean that its changes and challenges were particularly well-documented. By looking to this aspect of the Wandle’s history, it is possible to place Morris’s work within a larger context of landscape change, environmental concern, and ecological change. As with any British stream, and particularly the broad-valleyed rivers of the Thames system, the Wandle has a deep history of human intervention. Rural land management, agriculture, and pre-modern industry would have affected the shape of the river for a millennium or more before the establishment of the Merton Abbey Works. Agriculture brought about alterations like channelization, the digging of ditches and drains, and the reshaping of riverside meadows and fields, as well as the building of grain mills.565 The large-scale channelization of the river was itself a cause

565 Thirteen mills already existed along the river in 1086, when they were recorded in the Domesday Book. Cook, “A Tale of Two Catchments,” 88.

239 of environmental degradation, in that it destroys the natural relationship between a river, its banks, and surrounding groundwater systems.566 Mills, meanwhile, meant the construction of ponds, races, and tails, and extensive building both near to and directly engaged with the water (i.e. waterwheels). Even the medieval priory at Merton would have reshaped the river, both by building around it and by making use of its water. As industry expanded along the Wandle in the later medieval and early modern periods, such physical interventions in and impacts to the river would have increased. The Wandle was lined in mills and factories by the nineteenth century, and the reason they were there was to use the water as a production material, a source of power, or both. Industries that generated liquid waste would often have drained it directly into the river or the streams that fed it, further impacting water quality as well as effecting hydrology and sediment levels. The settlements along the river also would have affected it, particularly with the run-off of human and animal waste. All of these systems were already centuries-old by the time Morris arrived at the Wandle. However, in the nineteenth century human impact on the river expanded exponentially, leading to conflicts like the 1882 water company struggle and growing proto-ecological concern.

Contributing Factors: Urbanization

One of the major factors in the declining health of the Wandle in the nineteenth century was the rapid expansion of urban populations in and around London. Because the Wandle is so short – nine miles (14 km) from source to Thames – its entire length was within relatively easy reach of London, especially as the rail system grew. As

566 Cook, “An Unimportant River,” 227-28.

240 London exploded outwards, former villages in the Wandle valley became major population centers in their own right. This shift was particularly pronounced along the upper reaches of the river. The Wandle’s major sources are at Croydon and Carshalton; while Carshalton remained a fairly small village in the nineteenth century, Croydon’s increased contact with London turned it from a county market town to a major suburb. This expansion inevitably put increased pressure on the area’s infrastructure and natural resources. All these new people needed water to live on and somewhere for their waste to go, and the Wandle answered for both purposes. By the late 1840s Croydon’s population was suffering from devastating outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, both diseases caused by human waste coming into contact with water supplies.567 The river in the area was known to be noxious. Croydon was an early adopter of the national Public Health Act of 1848, which allowed local authorities to form their own boards of health “with extensive powers over town infrastructure, including the management of water supply and sewage disposal,” as Nicholas Goddard writes in his close study of the history of Croydon’s nineteenth-century water and sewage management.568 The Croydon Board of Health was the first nationally to implement piped water and sewage removal for its town.569 However, as the later 1882 London and South Western Water Company case shows, the act of supplying piped water has its own consequences. Additionally, as early

567 See Nicholas Goddard, "Sanitate Crescamus: Water Supply, Sewage Disposal and Environmental Values in a Victorian Suburb," in Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 132-148.

568 Goddard, “Sanitate Crescamus,” 132.

569 ibid.

241 adopters of sewage management the Croydon Board did not know what would or would not work, and even local sanitation successes could have unintended consequences, creating pollution downstream or otherwise harming the wider ecosystem.570 The demands of the Croydon population, the Croydon Board of Health, and the water companies were often in direct conflict with the other vested interests along the Wandle. As Goddard outlines, the Board was never sympathetic to the industrial or recreational uses of the river, even while extraction threatened to reduce flow and sewage discharge polluted the river, killed the popular trout, and silted millponds, further impeding water-powered industry.571 The problems were never solved to everyone’s satisfaction in the nineteenth century, and sewage treatment and attendant pollution, like water extraction, remained a problem into the 1880s and 1890s.572

Contributing Factors: Industrialization The issues at Croydon illustrate only some of the environmental pressures the Wandle faced around the middle of the nineteenth century. Croydon was, after all, only one point high along the river’s nine mile path. The population of other areas along the rest of the Wandle also increased in the period, with similar impacts on

570 ibid., passim.

571 ibid., 135. As a consequence, the Croydon Board of Health was also an early presence in the world of British water rights litigation, with legal action repeatedly being taken against the Board both for pollution and for over-abstraction

572 Cook, “An Unimportant River,” 231. The Croydon Board of Health dissolved in 1883 when the town became a County Borough, but sewage treatment and water management carried on under other governmental auspices. Goddard, "Sanitate Crescamus,” 148.

242 water quality, but for much of the length of the river, there was also another cause for concern: industrial pollution. During the angling boom of the 1840s, the Wandle had been a popular trout stream.573 By the late 1850s, though, the fish population was believed to be decreasing rapidly and Frederick Braithwaite, an engineer and keen angler, set out to evaluate why. The report he generated, “On the Rise and Fall of the River Wandle; its Springs, Tributaries, and Pollution,” was delivered at a meeting of the Institution of Civil Engineers in January 1861, discussed over a period of four nights, and published in their journal.574 Braithwaite recorded water levels at various points along the Wandle, the runoffs of industrial and municipal drains, and the volumes of materials being used and discharged at riverside factories.575 It is a remarkable document, an ancestor of what we might today call an environmental survey, showing a keen and exacting awareness of the conditions that affect the health of rivers including both municipal and industrial pollution. It is full of information about the Wandle’s conditions and

573 A trait it shared with the Lea; see Chapter 2, p. 39.

574 Frederick Braithwaite, “On the Rise and Fall of the River Wandle,” Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 20 (1861), 191-208.

575 For example, of Littler’s Works he wrote: “At Messrs. Littler's, in dry seasons, there is not sufficient water in the whole river, for washing purposes; twenty men are constantly employed in rinsing dyed goods. Six and a half carboys, or 13 cwt (a hundredweight, 112 lbs.), of sulphuric acid, and 3 cwt. of alum are used weekly, as mordants, and though all, or nearly all, the alumina is struck into the material, yet the equivalents of sulphuric acid and potash of the alum are washed out, and are, at present, discharged into the stream. Prussiate of potash, muriate of tin, chloride of lime, and nitrate of iron, are also used, but not in large quantities, and a great proportion of these also pass into the stream by the washing process. The works require a constant flow, through a pipe 5 inches in diameter, for the use of the vats, baths, &c., and this water runs off extremely foul.” Braithwaite, “On the Rise and Fall of the River Wandle,” 202.

243 industries, revealing just how much effluent the river was carrying even as its principal industry declined and its population was only just entering its greatest period of growth. Yet, when Morris arrived at Merton Abbey twenty years later, he reported that the river was clean and that it still supported trout. It is unlikely that the river’s actual condition had been much improved, given both the ongoing struggles of the Croydon Board of Health to solve its sewage and supply problems and the Wandle’s continued industrial use. In fact, the Wandle continued to decline until well into the twentieth century.576 Pollution and cleanliness, it seems, were not mutually exclusive. The Wandle was still fueled by the chalk aquifer, and without over-abstraction it provided enough flow to run factories and, apparently, to clear away the worst of the effluent. The river was not untouched, but it was clean enough for Morris’s purposes.

Pollution and the Merton Abbey Works The Wandle’s history of pollution, and particularly industrial pollution, leads to an obvious but surprisingly overlooked question: What impact might the Merton Abbey Works have had on the surrounding environment, and particularly on its helpful stream, the Wandle? There has never been even a cursory study of the Merton Abbey Works as a source of pollution. The issue is not addressed in David Saxby’s writings on the site, nor in Linda Parry’s work on Morris’s textile manufacturing. Part of the reason for this oversight might be the scope of those texts. Saxby’s works are brief, primarily acting as summaries of known evidence and archaeological survey. Parry’s work, meanwhile,

576 Cook, "An Unimportant River".

244 is so encyclopedic that an in-depth inspection of the technicalities of the printing and waste process would have been out of place. However, the absence of any other consideration of the matter is nevertheless a major gap in Morris scholarship. As I have discussed, there is abundant evidence that waste materials would have been entering the Wandle at the Merton Abbey Works. With this in mind, an inspection of the recipes of the Dye Book and other records reveals a potentially noxious mix of harmful materials such as acids, bases, and heavy metals. However, this information alone is not enough to allow us to form clear conclusions about the potential impact on the Wandle’s stream ecology. In fact that question is difficult, if not impossible, to resolve in a precise way. A scientific measurement of the environmental impact of the Works would require, at the very least, data about the volume of water in the Wandle in the period and the volume of waste products being generated by the factory, neither of which is easily obtained.577 In the absence of concrete data, however, it is still possible to draw some general conclusions about the potential effects of the Works on the health of the Wandle and its surroundings. Morris’s letter mentioning madder runoff has already been cited as proof that there was a system at Merton Abbey channeling waste water into the Wandle.578 If working properly, the filter bed Morris discussed might have removed particulate matter like dye pigments, but it is unlikely that it would have been able to filter away all the types of waste at the Works. Potentially toxic chemicals used at the Works

577 Some of this information could conceivably be gleaned from sources such as Braithwaite’s study, governmental records, and the records of the Firm, but the gathering and analysis of this data would require expert ecological and hydrological knowledge and thus must remain outside the scope of the current study.

578 William Morris to Jenny Morris, February 28, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 160.

245 included strong acids and bases, metal-based mordant solutions, and bichrome, the solution applied to indigo discharge fabrics between dyeing and discharging.579 Any of these materials may have entered the Wandle through the wastewater drainage system. The process of washing on the waterwheel, meanwhile, had the potential to introduce a matter including pigments, soaps, and bleaches directly into the stream without any of the benefit the filter bed might have provided. Compared to the huge mechanized textile factories operating in other parts of Britain in the period, the Merton Abbey Works was a small-scale and slow-moving operation. As such, they would not have been operating with the same volume of potential pollutants as many other factories, nor generating those pollutants as quickly. There were also a great many other factory sites along the Wandle, and many likely released far more pollution than the Merton Abbey Works. With or without adequate filtration, it is unlikely that any of the Works’ potential pollutants were ever introduced to the Wandle’s abundant flow at such a volume as to cause harm on their own. However, the Works’ waste products cannot be considered in isolation. Pollution is only rarely the effect of a single acute event like an oil spill. Rather, in the vast majority of cases it is a cumulative effect over space and time. Any material entering the river at the Works would have increased the overall concentration of that type of pollutant in the river, further tipping the balances toward major environmental harm. For example, the addition of acids to the Wandle had the potential to be particularly harmful by disrupting the natural pH balance of the alkaline chalk stream water – a

579 Acids and bases listed in the Dye Book include hydrochloric, sulfuric, acetic, citric, and oxalic acids and caustic soda, another name for lye (sodium hydroxide). The metals listed in mordant solutions included lead, cyanide, and arsenic. Bichrome is also known as potassium dichromate.

246 condition upon which some chalk stream species rely.580 Heavy metals, meanwhile, have the potential to harm animal life over long spans of time, as can be seen in the problems with metal concentrations in fish today. The Works would not have been the primary polluters of the Wandle at any one moment, but their materials became part of a system of water and pollutants stretching up to Croydon, down to the Thames, and beyond. At Wandsworth, the Works’ waste would have become part of the vast environmental disaster of the Victorian Lower Thames, flowing downstream past Morris’s house at Hammersmith to the swirling stinking tidal system of central London, into the estuary and the English Channel – or else leaching out of the water to enter the biological systems of local animals, plants, and people, and even the soil of the riverbanks and the mud of the river bottom. Within that huge system any particular particle of pollutant would be so dilute as to be inconsequential, but it is the concentration of those pollutants, not their singular existence, that causes environmental harm. Morris’s Works might not have been a major contributor to the large-scale pollution of the period, but it must nevertheless be understood as part of that network of water and waste. Despite Morris’s ideals, he cannot and should not be separated from the physical systems in which he took part. Whether or not Morris can be considered culpable for his participation in this system, however, is a potentially complex question. Now, almost 140 years after the founding of the Merton Abbey Works, we have an exponentially greater understanding of the science and consequences of pollution. Morris was not, however, living in a world ignorant of pollution and water systems. In fact, quite the opposite

580 “The State of England’s Chalk Streams.”

247 was true. It was impossible to ignore the consequences of industrialization and urbanization on British rivers in the Victorian period, and Morris was as aware of this as anyone – in fact, given his interests, he was likely more aware than many. He does not, however, seem to have had a scientific knowledge of the subject. Based on a reading of his public statements and of the production processes at Merton Abbey, it seems most likely that while Morris was aware of the problem of pollution, he did not see himself as part of that problem. This view seems to have arisen from a mix of both true and willful ignorance on Morris’s part, and like so much, it was tied up in his ideologies of nature, craft, and history. He meant well, and thought he was doing good. His culpability, such that it is, lies more in a failure to understand the consequences of his actions. It is not clear exactly what Morris knew or thought about the specific pollutants in use at Merton Abbey. We do, however, know that he seems to have harbored some suspicion of modern science and medicine. What this meant, when it came to his few discussions of pollutants, was that while he had a well-founded mistrust of the effects of modern innovations on the environment, he also could mistrust the authorities who said certain materials were unhealthy. In his early speech “The Lesser Arts,” delivered in 1877 and published in Hopes and Fears for Art in 1882, Morris criticized science for being too caught up in capitalist enterprise to do anything about human suffering, even in the case of “matters which I should have thought easy for her” like ameliorating pollution.581 On the other hand, in a letter to

581 William Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” Collected Works Vol. 22, 25. In 1889’s “The Art of Dyeing” he also criticized science for harming art: “Of these dyes (aniline dyes) it must be enough to say that their discovery, while conferring the greatest honour on the abstract science of chemistry, and while doing great service to capitalists in their

248 Thomas Wardle in 1885 Morris dismissed public concerns about heavy metals in wallpaper, concerns which were driven by medical research. He thought it impossible that wallpapers could cause lead poisoning and called the arsenic scare of previous decades a great folly.582 He went on to blame the scare on doctors who saw “their patients ailing (but) don’t know what’s the matter with them, and in despair put it down to wall papers when they probably ought to put it down to the water closet, which I believe to be the source of all illness.”583 Pollution therefore rears its head again in the passage, but only in the form of sewage, with other environmental pollutants written off as inconsequential. In the case of Morris’s own wallpapers this was not an unreasonable stance to take: later testing showed that the papers that had been brought to his attention did not contain lead.584 And while Morris’s early patterns did contain some arsenic, as was typical for the period, he never favored the particularly vivid greens associated with poisonings, and his wallpaper manufacturer Jeffrey & Co. was advertising their papers as arsenic-free by the mid-1870s.585 However, the wider arsenic scare of the period was not unfounded. Some papers were

hunt after profits, has terribly injured the art of dyeing.” William Morris, “The Art of Dyeing,” The Decorator and Furnisher, March 1892.

582 William Morris to Thomas Wardle, October 3, 1885. Collected Letters Vol. 2b, 463.

583 ibid.

584 William Morris to Thomas Wardle, October 20, 1885. Collected Letters Vol. 2b, 473.

585 This claim has been borne out by scientific analysis. Terry Kirby, “How William Morris Betrayed His Socialist Ideals with His Wallpaper,” The Independent, June 12, 2003.

249 in fact dangerously laden with the metal, and the use of arsenic for coloring was banned in some countries by the 1880s – a matter the well-known chemist and writer on dyes Thomas Crookes discussed in a book Morris is known to have owned.586 In that particular matter, therefore, Morris fell somewhere between mildly uncharitable and willfully unenlightened. Morris never addressed the various other pollutant and poisonous materials at his Works, so it is difficult to know how much he knew about them or what he thought of their potential harmfulness; nor can we know how much he knew about pollution in general or the nascent field of environmental science. However, we do know that the information was freely available if he had chosen to seek it out. Braithwaite’s 1861 study of the Wandle is a fine example of the fact that there was already a deep scientific interest in the matter of pollution during Morris’s lifetime and that information about the subject was freely available. Additionally, the hazards of many materials Morris used were already well-known. Acids and lye carried obvious possible risks – both are skin irritants even when dilute and can be very dangerous at high strength. The bichrome used in the indigo discharge process, meanwhile, was singled out by William Crookes in one of his books on dyeing: “From the immense use of bichrome in dyeing it is very possible that certain quantities of this powerful poison may find their way into rivers. In all sanitary legislation its exclusion, even in minute traces, should be rigorously insisted on.”587 While we do not know if Morris

586 Crookes, Dyeing and Tissue Printing, 43. The book was listed among those sold after Morris’s death: https://williammorrislibrary.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/%C2% B6-crookes-dyeing-and-tissue-printing/.

587 Crookes, A Practical Handbook of Dyeing and Calico-Printing, 544.

250 read this particular work, he was familiar with Crookes, and the material’s poisonous qualities would have been common knowledge. If the bichrome was ‘excluded’ at the Merton Abbey Works as Crookes recommended, it is not clear where or how. Morris’s public statements on the matter of pollution, meanwhile, were largely restricted to general criticisms of industry on aesthetic and social grounds. His artistic- socialist speeches of the early 1880s often featured imagery of polluted rivers along with other ills like bad housing, smoky skies, and poisoned ground.588 These were all problems of the modern world, and in Morris’s line of thinking, socialism and a return to art and craft would cure them – as seen in News from Nowhere, with its clean rivers and thriving natural environments. For example, in “Art and Socialism” (1884), Morris listed controls that would ideally maintain “order and beauty” and “decency of surroundings” in the landscape.589 They include what would now be considered rural preservation, tree conservation, and pollution control:

That the fields be not only left for cultivation, but also that they be not spoilt by it any more than a garden is spoilt: no one for instance to be allowed to cut down, for mere profit, trees whose loss would spoil a landscape; neither on any pretext should people be allowed to darken the daylight with smoke, to befoul rivers, or to degrade any spot of earth with squalid litter and brutal wasteful disorder.590

588 For example, the lectures collected in Hopes and Fears for Art (1882) and the 1884 speeches “Art and Labour,” “Art and Socialism,” and “How We Live and How We Might Live.”

589 “Art and Socialism,” Collected Works Vol. 23, 209. Delivered as a lecture to the Leicester Secular Society, January 23, 1884 and published as a pamphlet later that year.

590 ibid. 210.

251 In Morris’s writings, pollution is a thing separate from his work and ideals, a thing thrust upon the world by the ignorance and ill-will of an industrialized capitalist society. He certainly seems to have been aware of the potential harms of pollution – for example, in 1885’s “The Depression of Trade” he referenced the “seeds of pestilence and death” in sewage-laced water.591 By and large, however, his arguments were not focused on public or environmental health, but on broader, more philosophic questions of societal function, labor, and art. In his artistic-socialist lectures, Morris made a single reference to dye as a potential pollutant. In the same portion of “The Lesser Arts” in which he criticized science for doing nothing to alleviate modern ills, Morris referenced Leeds “get(ting) rid of its superfluous black dye… (by) turning it into the river.”592 Originally written during Morris’s period of dye study with Thomas Wardle in Leek and at home in Queens Square, this phrase shows that he had an awareness of how the textile industry in particular could affect water quality. However, by referencing Leeds, he put literal and ideological distance between his own pursuits and those that were “making the world hideous.”593 Leeds was one of the vast new industrial centers of the English North, with a textile economy that would have made significant use of mechanized production and synthetic dyes – including aniline black, presumably the dye Morris is referencing. The imagery he calls up, a river turned black with dye, is potent, and there

591 “The Depression of Trade,” 1885. First delivered July 12, 1885 to the Oldham Branch of the Socialist League, Manchester. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris /works/1885/trade.htm

592 “The Lesser Arts,” Collected Works Vol. 22, 25. The river in question would be the River Aire.

593 ibid.

252 is a criticism of modern taste couched within it: he goes on to reference “the heaviest of heavy black silks,” the sort of material favored for Victorian mourning fashion in particular. 594 These are not the sort of products, materials, or manufacturing spaces Morris favored. Leeds (and Manchester, mentioned for its heavy smoke) were also so distant as to be almost entirely Other, held up as epitomes of the worst of modern Britain without the complexity of personal attachments and investment that came when Morris wrote about the Thames and the South of England.595 There is a clear sense that Leeds’s black dye is one matter, and the work of those who would pursue art and betterment is another. Yet, Morris also argues that the two are intertwined – that unless people turn their attention away from pure profit and to the improvement of the environment, then “we can scarcely even begin with any hope our endeavours for the bettering of the arts."596 As always, the heart of Morris’s belief is that the improvement of society (including the reduction of pollution) must move forward along with, and possibly ahead of, the improvement of art. This dual step forward may be part of what Morris thought he was achieving at Merton Abbey. There is no indication that he believed his own work had the potential to harm the environment around it, especially once controls were put in place, as the matter of the filter bed shows. Morris seems to have believed that modern industry, modern materials, modern urbanization, and modern ignorance and greed were the

594 ibid.

595 Morris often employed the North in this way, rarely grappling with the region’s problems with any sort of specificity. This tendency is perhaps most pronounced in News from Nowhere, which gives lavish attention to changes in the Thames valley but mentions the North in only the vaguest terms.

596 “The Lesser Arts,” 25.

253 culprits of pollution, and thus if one stood apart from those things and instead pursued better methods and better ideals, one was not a polluter. Of course, he was not entirely incorrect about the sources of the problem. However, by failing to see himself as part of the modern world, Morris failed to see himself as part of the modern systems that were harming the environment around him. Morris may not have been aware of the potential harms he was causing, but that potential nevertheless existed, and must be considered as part of the full material and environmental history of Morris’s designs. The Wandle was present in every moment of the printing of Morris’s textiles patterns, and the patterns were present in the Wandle.

254 Chapter 6

CONCLUSION

William Morris is well-known and well-studied, but his designs contain myriad paths for possible reevaluations of his life and work. As I have argued, even a seemingly subtle decision like the depiction of a certain plant or the inflection of a stem can carry meaning far beyond visual effect. The choices Morris made in his designs are deeply intertwined with what he observed in the landscapes around him and how he thought about those spaces, their history, and their changes. Morris’s selection of certain English countryside plants and landscape forms reveals his concentration on a very particular type of landscape, the traditionally-managed agricultural riversides of the Upper Thames and its tributaries. These choices were aesthetic, but they were also cultural and political, carrying with them value judgements. Morris’s focus on the countryside was also a rejection of the urban modern world that surrounded him and an extension of his pastoral Socialist vision of an ideal England. The abundant and complex material history of Morris’s design work, meanwhile, can be a particularly rich path of investigation when it is examined in detail and approached theoretically as well as empirically. As I have demonstrated, the industrial nature of Morris’s artistic production makes it an especially apt subject for

255 ecocritical inquiry – work which places Morris within the systems and consequences of Victorian environmental change for the first time.597

As I finished writing about Morris’s place within the ecological and extractive systems of the Wandle during the waning weeks of another year marked by the effects of global climate change, it was difficult to look away from the interconnections of Morris’s environment and our own. In matter of fact, it felt crass, even irresponsible, to leave such a looming subject unacknowledged. What, then, can Morris’s relationship with the environment tell us about our own situation? While this question is presentist in nature, ecocritical thought allows for – even encourages – investigation of the intersection of current concerns and past cultural output via a “strategic presentism.”598 And as the literary scholar Jesse Oak Taylor has pointed out, presentism is particularly pertinent for Victorian subjects, not only because the length of ecological timeframes compress the distance between ourselves and the nineteenth century, but also because the Victorians were “the first inhabitants” of the Anthropocene.599 Systems which began to form in the late eighteenth century,

597 The research necessary for this project also began to reveal the imperial systems which produced Morris’s materials, a subject which was outside of the scope of this dissertation but which will hopefully be developed further in the future. I have begun one strand of work in this direction, researching the imperial trade networks of Morris’s indigo and presenting my initial findings in the paper “Looking Beyond the Fabric: William Morris and the Indian Indigo Industry” at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference in November 2018.

598 Dan Brayton, qtd. in Jesse Oak Taylor, “Where Is Victorian Ecocriticism?” Victorian Literature and Culture 43, no. 4 (2015): 877

599 Jesse Oak Taylor, “Where Is Victorian Ecocriticism?,” 878.

256 such as industrial expansion, urbanization, the burgeoning of capitalism, and the further expansion of global imperialism, set in motion an avalanche of environmental consequences. The Victorians witnessed and began to record and respond to these consequences while also of course contributing to them on a vast scale. Victorian environmental concerns echo our own because they are our own. Victorians interventions in landscapes and environments still shape the world around us. Sometimes the consequences are physical: for example, in British cities, the nineteenth-century water supply and sewer systems discussed in previous chapters are often still in use. As urban populations keep expanding and water usage and waste keep increasing, these aging systems are failing to keep up, resulting in problems like extensive water loss through pipe leakage, wastewater overflow in rivers and streams, and the accumulation of sewer ‘fatbergs.’600 At other times, the effect is more systematic. The nineteenth century was the first time humans exploited fossil fuels on a large scale, and many of the technological innovations that led to that change originated in Britain – leading, in turn, to the profusion of greenhouse gases that have driven global climate change. The webs of Victorian cause and modern effect are complex, and we can by no means blame our current situation on them directly, not least because in many cases

600 George Greenwood, and Daniel Wainwright, “London’s Water Pipes Leak 36,000 Times in Six Years,” BBC News, June 8, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk- england-london-44227168; “Replacing London’s Victorian Water Mains,” , July 29, 2016,https://corporate.thameswater.co.uk/about-us/investing-in-our- network/Victorian-mains-replacement; Sanjana Varghese, “London’s Super Sewer Won’t Solve the City’s Epic Poop Problem,” Wired UK, December 2, 2018. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sewage-environment-climate-change-london; “‘Monster’ Fatberg Found Blocking Sewer.” BBC News, September 12, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-41238272.

257 the consequences of what began in the nineteenth century were not widely understood until well into the twentieth. In fact, much of our modern understanding of those consequences is also grounded in the Victorian period. Nineteenth-century scientists in Britain and elsewhere laid the foundations for modern environmental sciences and began documenting the data which twenty-first-century scientists use to understand the changes our world is going through. For example, as I was writing this conclusion, NASA announced that 2019 was the second-warmest year on record; those records begin in 1880.601 And both scientists and ordinary people in the Victorian period were concerned with the effects of what was going on around them – effects that were hard to ignore. Some, like Frederick Braithwaite on the Wandle, turned to scientific study to understand what was happening and to try to find solutions. Others reacted in other ways – as Morris did with his turn to the countryside, his aesthetic-political pastoral set against a polluted and changing world. As I have argued, the landscapes of the patterns – inspiratory, interior, productive – show that the designs were deeply intertwined with the systems around them – ecological, economic, extractive. And those systems were no more isolated within their period than any other element of the Victorian environment. Rather, elements of the designs which I have discussed in this project can also speak to modern ecological pressures along the Thames and its tributaries. One example is Morris’s anxiety over the London and South Western Water Company’s 1882 plans to

601 Only 2016 was warmer, and the last six years, 2014-2019, make up the top six warmest years. Jeff Masters, “Earth Had Its Second Warmest Year in Recorded History in 2019,” Scientific American Blog Network: Eye of the Storm, January 15, 2020. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/eye-of-the-storm/earth-had-its-second- warmest-year-in-recorded-history-in-2019/.

258 tap the springs that fed the Wandle. Morris and factory owners up and down the river feared these plans would dry up the water they relied upon for their manufacturing processes – a fear compounded, in Morris’s case, by concerns about the appearance of the river and its health as an angling stream. While it is easy to consign the London and South Western Water Company’s plans to a category of nineteenth-century ignorance or greed, to do so would ignore the very real connections between Victorian and current environmental pressures. Just as nineteenth-century London struggled to cope with the resource demands of a growing population and put unsustainable pressure on hydrological systems as a result, twenty-first-century England is facing a water crisis. The over-abstraction Morris dreaded in 1882 is an acute matter of concern along southern England’s chalk streams now, almost 140 years later. Municipal water systems across the south of England, including London’s, still draw from the chalk aquifer. As urban populations continue to grow, the demands on the water extraction and supply systems born in Morris’s lifetime have only increased.602 When combined with the effects of climate change, particularly the spate of heatwaves and droughts that have affected Britain and the rest of Europe in recent summers, these systems have been tested to their breaking point. There have been repeated incidents of British chalk streams drying out in the summer. This drying is catastrophic for any stream ecosystem that is not adapted to seasonal intermittent flow, but it is particularly

602 After a period of decrease in the mid-twentieth-century, London’s population has been growing steadily since the 1980s. In 2016, the city’s population was 8.770,000, and it was estimated it would gain at least another quarter of a million people by 2026. Office for National Statistics, “Subnational Population Projections for England,” May 24, 2018.

259 dangerous for the delicate chalk stream systems which evolved around the constant flow of cold and alkaline water.603 Additionally, if the aquifer continues to be over- taxed, it will lead to serious problems in London and other towns and cities across southern England.604 Morris’s struggle with the London and South Western Water Company Water Company and any number of parallel Victorian stories can help to contextualize the origins of this modern crisis, as well as showing how even an object seemingly detached from broader concerns, like a fine textile decorating a wall or a chair, is intimately tied to centuries-long systems of environmental change. Morris’s designs can show us patterns which have shaped the world we now occupy. Just as Morris’s political and aesthetic ideologies were inexorably interrelated and tied to the Thames and the countryside, so too are the problems he reacted against and sometimes exacerbated deeply interlinked with crises we face today. We cannot ascribe ill will to Morris’s actions in his time – in fact, it is abundantly clear that he meant well, and tried to do well – but neither can we elevate him to vaunted status because of his relatively progressive views, nor hold him apart from the world around him. By viewing Morris’s life and works within their Thames landscapes, we can better understand his place in the ecological systems and changes of Victorian Britain. This type of understanding is of particular relevance today as we contemplate the consequences of ongoing mass industry, global capitalism, and unsustainable

603 Martin Salter and Stuart Singleton-White, “Chalk Streams in Crisis: A Call for Drought Action Now.” Chilterns Chalk Stream Project, June 2019; Fred Pearce, “The Threat to Chalk Streams, Our Unique Contribution to Global Ecology,” The Guardian. July 24, 2014; Phoebe Southworth, “Britain’s Chalk Streams Face Fight for Survival, Conservationists Warn,” The Telegraph, September 13, 2019.

604 Roger Harrabin, “England Water Shortage ‘Within 25 Years,’” BBC News, March 19, 2019; “London Facing Water Crisis, Report Claims,” BBC News, June 6, 2019.

260 exploitation of resources. Morris cannot offer us a practical model to overcome these challenges – the impossibility of his Socialist pastoral lies in its very name, Nowhere. Nevertheless, a view of Morris’s river landscapes can offer a model for studying the relationships which every artist, and every person, has with the environments around them – the ecosystems with which we are all inextricably intertwined.

261 FIGURES

ALL IMAGES REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT

262 REFERENCES

Online resources

NB: All links accurate and active as of February, 2020.

Mapping

I created the maps for this project using the online platform Carto, https://carto.com/, and open source data from the following sources:

- OS Open Rivers. OS OpenData, Ordnance Survey, October 2019. https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendatadownload/products.html

- Counties of England and Wales, 1881. England and Wales: Registration Counties, Data Access, A Vision of Britain. https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data/#

Historic OS maps accessed via the National Library of Scotland’s digital map viewer, https://maps.nls.uk/os/, except figures 25, 32, and 42, accessed via EDINA Historic Digimap Service, http://digimap.edina.ac.uk, courtesy Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Direct distance measurements were obtained using the DistanceFromTo online tool, https://www.distancefromto.net/, Google Maps, and Google Earth. River distances calculated using data in Leigh Hatts, Walking: The (Milnthorpe, UK: Cicerone, 2016).

Terms

The Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/

OED Online, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com/

Texts The Collected Works of William Morris, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001024179

“The William Morris Archive”, http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/

“The William Morris Internet Archive,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/

335

Many of the Victoria County History volumes have been digitized and are available via British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/.

Other

Currency converstion: MeasuringWorth “Purchasing Power of the Pound” tool, https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/Ukcompare.

Historic population data: A Vision of Britain Through Time. https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/

Information on books owned by Morris: The Morris Library Project. https://williammorrislibrary.wordpress.com

Manuscript and Archival Sources

Griffiths, Douglas. Morris and Company: Merton Abbey Works. Oral history, December 17, 1975. Sanford L. Berger Papers, Box 48. The Huntington Library.

Merton Abbey Dye Book. Museum Collection, Huntington Library, Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA.

Morris, William et. al. “Descriptive Account by William Morris of an Expedition by Boat from Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith, to Kelmscott Manor, Lechlade, Co. Oxon.; 10-16 Aug. 1880.” WILLIAM MORRIS PAPERS. Vol. XVII A (Ff. 12), 1880. Add MS 45407 A, British Library.

Morris, William. “Journals of William Morris; 1881-1896. Printed Annual Desk Diaries with His Daily, or Less Frequent, MS. Entries.” WILLIAM MORRIS PAPERS. Vols. XVII B-XXI, 1881-96. Add MS 45407 B-45411, British Library.

Morris, William. “Printer’s Notes.” 86.ZZ.180. National Art Library Special Collections, London.

Primary Sources

336 Morris, William. The Collected Letters of William Morris. Edited by Norman Kelvin and Holly Harrison, eds. 4 volumes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984-96.

Morris, William. The Collected Works of William Morris. Edited by May Morris. 24 volumes. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910-15.

Morris, William. News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance. Edited by David Leopold. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Morris works not included in the Collected Works or Collected Letters:

Morris, William. “The Art of Dyeing.” The Decorator and Furnisher, March 1892. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1889/dyeing.htm.

Morris, William. “The Depression of Trade,” 1885. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1885/trade.htm.

Morris, William. “Town and Country.” The Journal of Decorative Arts, April 1893. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1892/town.htm.

Morris, William. “Ugly London.” Pall Mall Gazette. September 4, 1888. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1888/ugly.htm “

Other Primary Sources

Bolton, Francis. London Water Supply. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1884.

Braithwaite, Frederick. “On the Rise and Fall of the River Wandle; Its Springs, Tributaries, and Pollution.” Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 20, no. 1861 (January 1, 1861): 191–208.

Lazarus, Emma. “A Day in Surrey with William Morris.” The Century Magazine, July 1886.

Morris, May. William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Payne, Edward. “Memories of Morris & Co.” The Journal of William Morris Studies 4, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 3–6. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 5: The Chelsea Years, 1863-1872, Prelude to Crisis III. 1871-1872. Edited by

337 William E. Fredeman. Vol. 5. 10 vols. Cambridge, UK ; Rochester, NY: DSBrewer, 2002.

Ruskin, John. “The Crown of Wild Olive.” In The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Vol. XVIII. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1905.

Silverthorne, Arthur. London And Provincial Water Supplies: With The Latest Statistics of Metropolitan and Provincial Water Works. London: Crosby Lockwood, 1884.

Secondary Sources

“‘Monster’ Fatberg Found Blocking Sewer.” BBC News, September 12, 2017, sec. London. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-41238272.

“The State of England’s Chalk Streams.” The World Wildlife Fund UK, 2014. http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/wwf_chalkstreamreport_final_lr.pdf.

“Vauxhall Key Site Information.” Thames Discovery Programme, July 14, 2010. http://www.thamesdiscovery.org/riverpedia/vauxhall-riverpedia.

Ackroyd, Peter. Thames: The Biography. New York: Doubleday, 2007.

Arscott, Caroline. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Arscott, Caroline. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

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347 Appendix A

PLANT LIST

This list is intended primarily to provide the scientific names of plants which are mentioned in this dissertation. In some cases, specific species can be pinpointed, but in other cases the plants can be identified only within a genus or family range. It is difficult to form a definitive list of all the plants used in Morris’s designs, but this list does encompass most of the more readily identifiable varieties, including those named in pattern titles.

Acanthus Acanthus mollis is the variety used in design motifs. Anemone Anemone nemorosa, wood anemone. Bluebell Hyacinthoides non-scripta Borage Borago officinalis Campion, bladder Silene vulgaris Campion, red Silene dioca Carnation Dianthus caryophyllus. Also known as dianthus. Columbine Genus Aquilegia Corncockle Agrostemma githago Cornflower Centaurea cyanus. Also known as bachelor’s button. Daisy Family Asteraceae Asteraceae Bellis perennis (common daisy, lawn daisy, or English daisy) is a common wildflower. Eyebright Euphrasia nemorosa Forget-me-not, water Myosotis scorpides Forget-me-not, wood Myosotis sylvatica Hawthorn Crataegus monogyna Honeysuckle Lonicera periclymenum Hornbeam Carpinus betulus Iris Genus Iris. Iris pseudacorus is a common waterside wildflower. Jasmine Jasminum officinale

348 Larkspur Genus Delphinium. Also known as delphinium. Lily Genus Lilium Marigold Calendula officinalis Marigold, marsh Caltha palustris Oak Genus Quercus Peony Genus Paeonia Pimpernel, bog Anagallis tenella Pimpernel, scarlet Anagallis arvensis Pimpernel, yellow Lysimachia nemorum Pink Dianthus plumarius Pomegranate Fruit of Punica granatum Poppy Papaver rhoeas, common or corn poppy. Rose Genus Rosa. Rosa canina, dog-rose, is a common wild shrub. Snakeshead fritillary Fritillaria meleagris Strawberry Genus Fragaria. Fragaria vesca is the wild strawberry. Sunflower Species in the genus Helianthus. Thistle Species of the tribe Cardueae, especially in genera Cirsium and Carduus. Cirsium vulgare, spear thistle, is a common wildflower and design motif. Tulip, garden Genus Tulipa. Tulip, wild Tulipa sylvestris Violet, common dog- Viola riviniana Violet, water Hottonia palustris Water-crowfoot Ranunculus aquatilis, common water-crowfoot, and many other closely related species. Willow Many species of the genus Salix. Salix alba, white willow, is particularly common near waterways.

349 Appendix B

NOTES ON THE DIFFICULTIES OF MORRIS & CO. DOCUMENTATION AND ATTRIBUTION

There are abundant complications inherent in the study of the designs of William Morris and the products of Morris & Co. The Firm produced a large body of work with inconsistent documentation, and there is no single source like a catalogue raisonné to be relied upon for questions of dating, attribution, or even original appearance (colorways, media, etc.). Many questions therefore arise from the existing evidence, and some are all but impossible to resolve. This appendix is intended to outline some of the problems and lancunae surrounding the subject and to clarify the choices I have made around them, particularly in regard to dating the end of Morris’s pattern design career and the shift of attributions to in the late 1880s. Many of these complications around Morris and the Firm arise from the fact that the objects in question are consumer goods, produced in numbers and then distributed. There is no single, discrete object to document and study. Because of the ways the Firm documented and marketed its products, even dates and designers’ identities can be unclear. Visual evidence must be drawn from surviving examples of the fabrics and wallpapers, as well as the original designs (when extant) and contemporary documentation such as photographs and illustrations. For some patterns these forms of evidence are abundant, however others are known only from small samples that do not even show a full repeat. Contextual evidence, meanwhile, can

350 come from company notes and ledgers, printing blocks, correspondence, and marketing materials, among other sources. In the following sections, I will outline how the available sources affect dating, descriptions of original appearances, and attribution, as well as the choices I have made in regard to each subject. I will primarily be referring to these problems in relation to the Firm’s printed fabrics, but it should be noted that many of the concerns with the fabrics are only amplified in regards to the wallpapers, which have received far less scholarly attention to date – so little, in fact, that there seems to be no official count of the number of wallpapers produced by the firm, let alone documentation with clear attributions and dating. It can be hoped that the Open University PhD project centered on the wallpapers, announced October 2018, will ameliorate some of those problems in the future.

Dating There are several reasons that the dates of Morris & Co. products are sometimes unclear. First and foremost, there are no official release dates for the products – no Firm announcements, nor any known ledger recording when patterns were first printed or first sold. The only official recorded dates for the fabrics or wallpapers are the days the patterns were registered at the Patent Office. However, less than half the patterns were registered.607 Registrations were also often done in batches. The dates do not conform to when the patterns were actually completed, nor to when production started, let alone when they were designed. We know, for example, that

607 I have not been able to ascertain why this might have been and I have not seen any hypotheses on the matter by other scholars.

351 Morris was designing Evenlode in March 1883608 and Wandle in September 1883,609 but those patterns were registered on September 2 1883 and June 28 1884, six and nine months apart respectively. Registration dates clearly do not correspond to design dates. Design dates and registration dates also do not indicate when production began. The process of turning a design into an object took time. In the case of printed fabrics, first the wood blocks had to be cut – a process that took place out-of-house at the London firm of Alfred Barrett610. Then, dye schemes had to be prepared and experimented with, a process recorded in Morris’s “Printer’s Notes” notebook611 and the Merton Abbey Dye Book.612 Finally, the fabrics had to be printed – itself a complicated and time-consuming process as discussed in Chapter 5 and Appendix C. Registration dates likely indicate when the Firm was at least relatively satisfied with the design and dye schemes, and ready to begin production in earnest. So, patterns have the potential to be dated in multiple ways. As seen with Evenlode and Wandle, some patterns' design dates can be approximated because Morris mentions working on them in his letters. Registration dates can also be used, but do not tell us when the designs were made. Many designs lack both these indicators, however, and must be dated through context. Many are given a general date

608 William Morris to May Morris, March 3, 1883. Collected Letters Vol. 2a, 165.

609 William Morris to Jenny Morris, September 4, 1883. ibid., 221.

610 Parry, Textiles, 59.

611 c. 1880. 86.ZZ.180, National Art Library, London.

612 Huntington Museum and Library, museum collection, San Marino, CA.

352 based on when they first appear in Morris & Co. catalogues or at exhibitions. Linda Parry has done a great deal of research to arrive at these dates, whether exact or contextual, and I have chosen to trust her work in the absence of any materials to disprove her. Thus, any dates given in this work are those used by Parry in her newest edition of William Morris Textiles. Throughout the text I have endeavored to indicate what kinds of dating I am using (registration or design); general dates given with just a year are the estimates given by Parry. For further details on design periods and dating in general, Parry’s work should be the first port of call.

Samples and Colorways In order to examine Morris’s work with a particular design, it is necessary to establish which colors and media he intended to be used, and which he did not. This is of course a concern for any designer’s work, but given Morris’s strongly-held opinions on matters of design, materials, and color, it must be considered of particular importance for him. Certain colorways or dyes would not only have been outside his aesthetic intentions: they would have been anathema. Thus, it is doubly important to attempt to document which Morris & Co. colorways were produced under Morris, and which were introduced later – but that effort is not simple. The question of Morris’s planned colors and media is complicated by the presence of multiple colorways (dye schemes) and variations in base material for some patterns. Sometimes these color and material variations are “original” (planned and present from the start or within the first few years of a pattern’s production) and some were created decades after the first production. Colorway variations are very common, as when discharged fabrics were available in blue and multi-colored overdyed versions, or wallpapers on light and dark backgrounds. Variations in material could

353 exist within specific categories – as when a wallpaper was available in both distemper colors and metallic stamped papers, or a fabric printed on both cotton and silk – or could cross categories, as in the patterns printed as both wallpapers and fabrics. For some patterns, there are few variations known, but for others (for example Honeysuckle, designed 1876), there are many. Among the fabric patterns, there seems to be more variation in the 1870s, when Morris and Wardle were experimenting more widely with materials and dyes. After the break with Wardle and the move to Merton Abbey, patterns generally seem to have come in less colorways and less materials, reflecting Morris’s focus on indigo discharge on cotton. The wallpapers, meanwhile, seem to have consistently been available in more color variations. In the cases of both materials, there is also the problem of commissions, when customers ordered patterns in particularly materials or colorways not available for general sale in the shop.613 These commissions existed in smaller amounts and might not survive at all. And as noted, no such comprehensive work has been done for the wallpapers, meaning there may be further variations of which we are not currently aware. Additionally, Morris & Co. continued producing Morris patterns after his death, sometimes adapting his designs for other media (i.e. printed patterns into woven ones), sometimes changing dye materials (i.e. introducing synthetic dyes), and sometimes producing alternate colorways to keep up with changing tastes. Because the Firm’s objects were not dated, it can be difficult to establish which schemes and materials were original and which were later introductions. This problem is exacerbated by a tendency for cataloguers to give extant examples the date of the

613 For example, Rosalind Howard and Morris corresponded about a gold and red version of Sunflower destined for Castle Howard. Hartley, “Morris & Co. in a Baroque Setting,” 7.

354 original design, rather than of production – an understandable impulse, given the lack of production dates.614 However, the impulse can be a dangerous one for scholars seeking to interpret the designs, because it fails to account for later variations and adaptations of the patterns. Linda Parry’s work has been invaluable in documenting original materials and colorways and identifying and dating later adaptations for the fabrics, but her work does not (and perhaps cannot) account for every variation, nor does it illustrate many of them. Therefore, it is still difficult to determine the dates of many colorway and material variations, especially rare ones. The dating of color and material variations is, like all other types of Morris & Co. dating, based on a range of research. Some schemes can be dated within a range based on Firm sample books which survive in various museum collections. Surviving Morris & Co. printed fabric pieces can also often be dated to within certain ranges if their selvedge edges survive. As is true with printed fabrics today, the Firm’s printed fabrics included an identifying mark along the selvedge edge (the unprinted strip at each edge of the cloth). Many samples have the selvedges cut off or obscured by frames, and even if the selvedge remains, the address stamp is not necessarily present, as it was only printed occasionally down the length of the fabric, but if it does exist, it can date the fabrics within a few fairly broad ranges. There are four possible selvedge marks for Morris & Co., as identified by Linda Parry.615 Two are from the 26 Queen Square period (1868-1877). If a selvedge stamp was used between 1877 and 1882,

614 Further complications have been caused in recent years by Sanderson’s reissuing of Morris & Co. designs, which are generally advertised as “original” or “archive” but which are very often issued in new colorways or materials suited to 21st century taste. Scholars tend not to mistake them for historic designs, but enthusiasts often do.

615 Parry, Textiles, 284-85.

355 when the shop was located at 264 Oxford Street, no patterns have been found with it.616 Oxford Street was renumbered in 1882 and the shop became 449 Oxford Street – an address at which it remained until 1917, meaning the third selvedge stamp of "Morris & Company 449 Oxford Street London.W" could identify any pattern printed 1882-1917. The company moved to George Street, Hanover Square in 1917. From then until the company closed its doors in 1940, they used a stamp that read "RECd Morris & Company." This is helpful in some ways; since production started at Merton Abbey in 1881 and continued there until 1940, the two later selvedge stamps can at least distinguish Merton fabrics from those printed at Wardle's dye works in Leek. Paper labels attached to some samples can also be helpful, as they give the full company name, which changed several times. Before 1905 it was Morris & Company; after that, Morris & Company Decorators Ltd. (1905-1925) and Morris & Company Art Workers Ltd. (1925-1940). However, none of these factors are particularly helpful for distinguishing any fabrics printed within the 1882-1905 date range, or 1882-1917 without paper labels. This is a matter of some concern because it covers a period when Morris was heavily involved with production (1882 – c.1885, see below), a period when he had ceded managerial and design control to J.H. Dearle (c.1885 – 1896), and a more than twenty- year period after his death (1896-1917). Tastes and production procedures both changed a great deal in that thirty-five year timespan, leading to the use of new colorways and new materials, as discussed. For all these reasons, I have chosen to be extremely conservative in my dating and attribution of alternate colorways and

616 This gap corresponds with a gap in Morris's pattern design (fig. 46) and the move to Merton Abbey, but it is unlike that the Firm ceased producing and selling pattered fabrics in that period.

356 materials for the patterns. I have relied extensively upon Linda Parry’s research as well as on my own conclusions drawn from the Merton Abbey Dye Book held at the Huntington Museum and Library, which I will discuss in some detail in Ch. 5. For the purposes of this project, I will be attributing only certain colorways found in the Merton Abbey Dye Book to Morris directly, and considering any others as possible later additions to the Morris & Co. repertoire. I will discuss those decisions as relevant throughout the project.

Attribution Though the questions of dating and of alternate colors and materials in Morris & Co. Fabrics are clearly complicated and important ones, but the problem of attribution is perhaps the most fraught. Morris was never the sole pattern designer for Morris & Co., and the Firm did not distinguish between designers, issuing all patterns under the Morris & Co. label. As I will show, some patterns can be firmly attributed to Morris, and some to other designers working for the Firm, but many others can only be attributed through context and/or close inspection of their formal qualities. I have chosen by and large to use Parry’s attributions, with several minor exceptions. However, some of Parry’s attributions differ from some popular and traditional attributions, including a number put forward by May Morris in biographical materials about her father. Additionally, the period of concentration of this project – the 1880s – overlaps with the period with the most complicated attributions. It is unclear from known records when Morris ceded the role of head designer to J.H. Dearle, so many designs made between c.1886, when Dearle seems to have become active, and Morris’ death in 1896 have been attributed to both creators at various points. I argue, with the

357 support of evidence given by Parry, that Morris ceased to design patterns for printed fabrics in 1885. The Firm employed pattern-designers besides Morris from the beginning. Morris’s earliest repeating-pattern design, Trellis, was designed in collaboration with Philip Webb, who drew the birds,617 and there is every chance that other designs were also designed collaboratively, though there is no clear evidence on the matter. The Firm’s fourth-ever pattern, Indian, c. 1868-70, is believed to have been adapted from a historic pattern by the architect George Gilbert Scott Jr.618 Kate Faulkner619 designed at least six patterns for the firm between 1875 and 1880, two printed fabrics and four wallpapers.620 May Morris, as well as heading the Firm’s embroidery department and designing many of their embroidery patterns, also created three wallpapers in the mid- 1880s.621

617 Lesley Hoskins, “Wallpaper,” in Linda Parry, ed. William Morris (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996), 206.

618 Hoskins “Wallpaper”, 207.

619 Sister of Morris’s friend and early associate in the first iteration of the Firm, Charles Faulkner. She also designed in many other media, both for Morris & Co. and on a freelance basis.

620 I am taking my information about wallpapers primarily from the 1982 catalogue of wallpapers in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the most through, but by no means exact or exhaustive, study on the subject to date. E. A Entwisle, Jean Hamilton, and Charles Chichele Oman, Wallpapers: A History and Illustrated Catalogue of the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Sothebys in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1982).

621 Honeysuckle, 1883, often attributed to her father or confused with his 1876 printed fabric of the same name; Horn Poppy, c. 1885, and Arcadia, c. 1886. Entwhisle, Hamilton, and Oman, Wallpapers, 376-77.

358 In the mid to late 1880s, J.H. Dearle began producing pattern designs as well. Originally a shop assistant at the Firm’s Oxford Street store, he had been the Morris’s first tapestry weaving apprentice at Queen Street, eventually taking over the training of new weavers and running of the Firm’s tapestry-weaving department.622 By the 1890s, Morris was reducing his involvement in pattern design and in the day-to-day running of Merton Abbey and the Firm. At some point in the late 1880s, Dearle took over as chief designer and as manager of the factory. The exact date of that transition is unclear and there is some indication that for a time Morris still had some oversight of the Firm's work and commented on Dearle’s work occasionally.623 By the 1890s, Dearle had taken full control, and he continued in his roles as designer and manager after Morris’s death in 1896 and until his own death in 1932.624 In his more than forty years of design activity, Dearle created approximately sixty repeating-pattern printed designs for Morris & Co. – many of which were designed for both fabric and wallpaper – and more than twenty others for woven fabrics.625 These designs include many that are famous and well-loved today, such as Seaweed (1901) and Blackthorn (1892). He was also the designer in charge when many of Morris’s designs were adapted for other media after 1896. After J.H. Dearle’s death, his son Duncan Dearle took over the roles of factory manager and chief designer (though he seems to have designed only a few patterns) and continued as such for eight years until the Firm went

622 Parry Textiles, 66.

623 ibid.

624 ibid., 66-67.

625 See Entwhisle, Hamilton, and Oman, Wallpapers and Parry, Textiles.

359 into receivership in 1940.626 Several other designers, such as Kathleen Kersey627 and William Arthur Smith Benson (the chairman of the Firm),628 also contributed designs in the early twentieth century. Clearly, then, Morris & Co. patterns are not synonymous with Morris himself. The names are, however, often used interchangeably, leading to many general misattributions in popular media and the commercial sphere629. Even in Morris scholarship, many attributions are questionable or entirely incorrect. This owes itself, in part, to the way the Firm treated its works and to a great deal of vagueness and misattribution in early secondary sources. The Firm did not differentiate between creators in its public documents. Everything fell under the name of the Firm rather than the original creator. Precise attributions are therefore made from a mix of other sources, including but not limited to original designs and letters. They cannot, however, be firmly established from early secondary sources. Just as is true today, people outside the immediate circle of the Firm during Morris’s years of activity seem to have been happy to call anything produced by Morris & Co. “Morris”, and thus journalism, reviews, and other contemporary sources cannot be trusted when naming particular patterns as Morris designs. Additionally, even people close to Morris and the production process do not seem to have been not entirely clear on who designed what. Mackail was not very concerned with Morris’s specific pattern designs and does

626 Parry Textiles, 67.

627 Entwhisle, Hamilton, and Oman, Wallpapers, 383.

628 ibid..

629 For example, most “William Morris Notecards” or “William Morris Calendars” in fact feature designs by multiple designers.

360 not list them. May Morris did, in 1936’s William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, but her lists are inaccurate, leaving out some earlier patterns, naming several Faulkner patterns as Morris ones,630 and over-attributing the late-period patterns to Morris rather than J.H. Dearle.631 As I will discuss, there is abundant evidence that this practice is incorrect. However, many scholars have repeated May’s lists without stopping to examine the evidence of the objects themselves, leading to inaccurate lists of Morris’s works and misattributions of Dearle works to Morris. Technically, the only designs which can be attributed to Morris with absolute certainty are those which he names as his work in letters or elsewhere. Other attributions must be made from formal or contextual evidence – a process which is less difficult with the works of Kate Faulkner and May Morris, which have their own styles, but more difficult with Dearle’s works. Especially in the early years of Dearle’s design career, he worked in a firmly Morrisian mode, using many motifs already present in Morris designs but recombining them in new ways. He also continued the practice of naming patterns after rivers. Therefore, lines blur between the two. My own study supports Linda Parry’s attribution of all printed patterned fabrics produced after 1887 to Dearle. This claim is supported by the formal differences between the

630 Such as Carnation and Peony. Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, 45- 46.

631 There could be several reasons for May’s misattributions. First, and most simply, she was writing forty years after Morris’s death, on a project she was not closely involved with even when it was occurring. Even she calls her list “approximate” and acknowledges how long it has been since her father’s years of activity with the Firm. Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, 39. She might have been relying on the production lists of the Firm as well as on any specific recollections of her father’s activities, and notably she was writing after even J.H. Dearle’s death, meaning he was also not around to ask.

361 1880-1885 patterns attributed to Morris and the patterns designed from c. 1887 onwards, as well as by some external evidence. If true, this split between 1885 and 1887 also reinforces the major significance of the tributary patterns in Morris's pattern-design oeuvre, as they were the final major body of work before he shifted to other projects. Part of the reason for placing the divide between 1885 and 1887 is that there is a clear two-year gap in the production of new designs by the Firm between Medway (fig. 10) in 1885 and Cherwell in 1887 (fig. 88). Not only were no new printed fabric patterns produced in that period: there were also no new woven fabrics and only two wallpapers, Arcadia, designed by May Morris, and Lily and Pomegranate by her father. In 1887, only two new patterns appeared: Cherwell in fabric and the famous Willow Bough (fig. 54) in wallpaper. While this period of inactivity is not unheard of in the Firm’s and Morris’s production histories, the previous dip in pattern production between 1878 and 1880 had corresponded to the period of transition when Morris became dissatisfied with Thomas Wardle’s work and sought out his own premises for dyeing. Production then spiked, peaking in 1883 with ten fabric patterns produced, before again easing off and then ceasing entirely – possibly an indication that Morris’s interest was waning and/or he was preparing to hand off his position as designer to Dearle. In the catalogue of Morris & Co. textiles which makes up a large portion of William Morris Textiles, Parry is cautious about attributions of printed textiles between 1887 and 1890, citing Cherwell (1887), Severn (c. 1887-90), Avon (c. 1888), and Trent (1888) as “Morris and/or Dearle.”632 Medway is therefore the last given an

632 Parry, Textiles, 244-247.

362 individual Morris attribution, in 1885, and the first given an individual Dearle attribution is Florence, c. 1890.633 In the text of her chapter on the printed fabrics, however, Parry is much bolder in her attribution, stating that all four of these patterns are most likely by Dearle. Parry supports this claim by pointing to the design's fairly unsophisticated design: Cherwell, Avon, and Trent "lack definition, both in the direction of the pattern and the drawing of the details. They are quite unlike Morris's work, especially his most recent tributary series. Severn is equally strange… subsidiary floral details are, once again, awkward."634 Parry therefore makes a claim for Morris ceasing to design printed fabrics for the firm by 1887. With the gap before that, that would make Medway the final fabric pattern definitely designed by Morris. I believe that Parry’s claims are correct, and would like to draw out her formal analysis further to support the divide between Medway and Cherwell. One of the other aspects Parry uses to support the attribution of the 1887-1890 patterns to Dearle is their hodgepodge of Morrisian elements: “carnations, fritillaries, thistles, chrysanthemums and roses.” This is especially clear in Cherwell: the large- headed peony or chrysanthemum blooms resemble one in Cray (fig. 8), the pinks are close to those in Evenlode (fig. 2), the dark-tipped daisies look like those in Corncockle (fig. 57), and the sharp-tipped serrated leaves are a common motif across many Morris works. However, the relative size and detail of the motifs sit together uneasily. The large blooms in particular are highly detailed with linework for shading, a technique seen in many of the tributary patterns, but most of the other motifs are simplified and flattened to such an extent that the large blooms look like they were

633 ibid., 249.

634 Parry, Textiles, 65.

363 pasted in from another design entirely. The large, round, empty centers of those daisies are also jarring when compared to earlier Morris & Co. designs, which always fill daisy centers. The stems, meanwhile, are very thin – possibly too thin for the large leaves, giving a sense of instability. It is also unclear which of the three stems springing from the stop of the large bloom corresponds to which of the two which lead into it from below and which is a new stem – a confusion Morris tended to avoid by giving the new, secondary stem a different color or type of detailing (see, for example, the pink stems in Wey, fig. 5, or the brown ones in Cray, fig. 8). As discussed in Chapter 4 and 5, Morris’s patterns show continuing evolution and experiments, and sometimes (as in the case of Lea) those experiments were not entirely successful. However, if Cherwell was designed by Morris it could not be considered experimental. We can expect Morris to have known how to deftly wield a pattern with a gentle diagonal stem meander, blooms, and leaves, but a new designer might have struggled more. Interestingly, Cherwell’s meander also diverges from Morris in several ways. Its stems are much thinner than most of Morris’s diagonal meanders (besides Wey). Its meander runs left-to-right, unlike any of Morris’s diagonal meanders, though of course that sample size is so small that it is difficult to claim that Morris would have never designed a left-to-right meander. Over all, the jarring problems of scale and detail in Cherwell are out of character for Morris, and point to the work of an inexperienced designer still exploring the medium. Notably, the problems in Cherwell were corrected when the pattern was reworked and issued as the wallpaper Double Bough in 1891 (fig. 89). In that pattern, the difference between details levels is evened out, stems are strengthened and more clearly articulated, and both the daisies and the background receive dotted fills to

364 remove the blank spaces of the original. By 1891, Dearle was certainly the head designer, and it appears that he took an opportunity to improve a less successful piece of early work. No other pattern seems to have been so extensively reworked when the Firm began to transfer fabric patterns to wallpaper and vice-versa in the 1890s. All of this evidence indicates that Cherwell was most likely being Dearle’s first produced repeating-pattern design for the Firm. As noted, Parry marks this as the break between Morris and Dearle patterns in the fabrics, though Morris designed one wallpaper in both 1886 and 1887. Part of the reason for this is that the patterns that followed, Severn, Avon, and Trent, still have a certain awkwardness and even strangeness to them. Parry also points to the presence of elements that recur in Dearle works – “pointed-headed tulips and dark veining picked out on flowers and leaves” – as evidence that the 1887-90 patterns are not by Morris.635 Close inspection of these elements helps elucidate the formal distinction of the Morris and Dearle patterns. In Cherwell, the tulips are not present but the dark veining is present in the secondary meander of small leaves and in the center of highly stylized petals/leaves to the right of the large blooms. That dark-veined detailing is present but uncommon in earlier Morris & Co. patterns: it appears only in the Dove and Rose woven fabric of 1879 and in a more overtly Persian form in Evenlode (fig. 2). However, it recurs in leaves and petals in several of Dearle's later designs (for example, Daffodil, 1891), particularly on the pointed tulips that are an exclusively Dearlen detail636 – as it does in Severn, Avon,

635 Parry, Textiles, 65.

636 Morris’s Rose 1883 (fig. 51) does have a pointed tulip, but it is not styled in the same way as the Dearle pointed tulips and is not dark-veined.

365 and Trent. These motif details further support the 1885/87 attribution split between Medway and Cherwell, Morris and Dearle. There is further external evidence for the split in attribution between 1885 and 1888 in the Merton Abbey Dye Book now in the art collection of the Huntington. The dye book, which is undated, includes dye recipes and printing instructions for patterns attributed to both Morris and Dearle. The problems of dating the book are discussed in some detail in Chapter 5; for the purposes of this appendix, it should suffice to say that while the dye book is a complex working document annotated and revised over several decades, it could not have been started any later than 1890, during the period of transition from Morris to Dearle. It stands to reason that it might have been begun as many ad ten years earlier, when the fabric production process at Merton Abbey was being perfected. The recipes were entered into the book in two general groups. The first are the recipes that date from c. 1890; the second group is much later, outside the period of concern for this study. The first group includes eight early Dearle designs, none dated later than c. 1892, including the patterns about which there are attribution questions. The most notable difference between the designs attributed to each designer is that while some the patterns attributed Dearle use blue, none of them call for indigo discharge printing, instead using ‘pencil blue’, block-printed indigo. This is a major break with the patterns designed by Morris between 1881 and 1885, all but two of which (Corncockle, 1883 and Cray, 1884) were indigo-discharged. Morris had experimented with other methods to print blues in the 1870s, but he was never satisfied with the results.637 This meant that even designs that required very little blue, such as Rose and Loddon, went through the intensive discharge process rather than

637 Parry Textiles.

366 having their blue block-printed. If he had begun using non-discharge blue-printing methods in the late 1880s, it would have meant a major shift in both practice and philosophy. It is far more likely that this material shift is a reflection of the change in designers and in Dearle's increased influence as the day-to-day manager of the factory.638 Therefore, the evidence of the dye book further supports the claim that Morris stopped designing fabrics after Medway in 1885. It may be clear from the above discussion that Dearle also carried on another Morrisian trait in his designs, namely the practice of naming some patterns after rivers. In all Dearle seems to have named around fourteen of his designs after rivers: the four mentioned above as well as Shannon, Yare, Mole, Derwent, Graveney (all c. 1893), Colne (c. 1899), Ribble (1904),639 Eden, Bourne (both c. 1905), and Brentwood or Brent (c. 1912).640 Of those, only five – Cherwell, Mole, Graveney, Colne, and Brent – are Thames tributaries. Many of the others are major rivers of the British Isles: the Shannon in Ireland is the longest river in the isles, the Severn the longest in the UK, the Trent the third-longest after the Thames; the Avon and Yare, while shorter, are very important rivers in their regions. This is another clear division between Morris’s

638 As time went on and Morris became less involved, techniques and dyes which he did not care for became more and more common. The second, later group of recipes in the dye book feature synthetic dyes, which were anathema to Morris.

639 Ribble, 1904, is only known from one small sample and Parry does not firmly attribute it to Dearle. Textiles, 262.

640 The Brent is a river; Brentwood is not. He also designed a pattern named Brook – a common name for small Thames tributaries in the London area (see for example or Brook, both in the Merton area. Norbury Brook is a tributary of the Wandle also called the River Graveney, and Brook dates from around the same time as Graveney, see Parry Textiles, 254.

367 works, which focus so closely on the Thames and on Thamesian aesthetics, and Dearle’s, which are broader in both name and influence.641 It is also, however, an indication that the naming practices begun by Morris cannot be used as a sign of continued work in pattern design after 1885. Formal and material evidence is much stronger and seems to support the 1885/87 split in the absence of any further information.

641 Dearle’s Seaweed wallpaper, for instance, is a beautiful design centered on a wildly un-Morrisian material; Morris never showed any particular interest in the sea, its aesthetics, or its materials.

368 Appendix C

THE DYE PROCESS

The purpose of this appendix is to give an overview of the processes and materials involved in dyeing and printing fabrics at the Merton Abbey Works. As a result of the amount of specialized knowledge and terminology involved in discussing dyeing, it can be difficult to find the happy medium between cursory, uninformative summaries and detailed accounts so technical that they are incomprehensible to non- experts. As such, I formed these summaries to clarify the processes and materials for myself, and hope they can be helpful to others attempting to understand the technical aspects of Morris’s printed textiles. This overview is by no means intended to be exhaustive. An in-depth study of each material and technique employed at the Works could easily fill a book on its own and would go beyond my own high school level knowledge of chemistry and amateur enthusiast’s experience in dyeing. However, I do aim to bring together the information I have gathered by transcribing the Merton Abbey Dye Book and Morris’s “Printer’s Notes” notebook,642 by studying the textiles themselves and the history of Merton Abbey, and by consulting primary and secondary sources related to nineteenth-century dye techniques.643

642 Huntington museum collection and National Art Library, London, 86.ZZ.180.

643 Several sources which were particularly helpful: William Crookes, Technological Handbooks: Dyeing and Tissue Printing (London: George Bell and Sons, 1882); Agustí Nieto-Galan, Colouring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial

369 Because the Merton Abbey Dye Book is the only historic source which clearly lays out the dye methods and materials used at the Works, it is the primary source for the information I provide here. However, as noted in Chapter 5, the Dye Book is an incomplete record. It does not include many fabrics known to be printed at the Works – which means that, for example, we cannot know which yellow dye was used for many textiles.644 It also leaves out information such as the preparation methods for some dye materials. Rediscovering such information can require further extensive search, as Virginia Davis demonstrated in her work on Morris’s indigo vats.645 This appendix seeks to present what information is relatively easily available in a more easily-digested form, rather than to undertake new technical research. The appendix is divided into three sections: terms, which defines some of the terminology used; process, which outlines the basic printing process; and colors, which gives more in-depth information about the materials and processes used to produce each dye color used at the Merton Abbey Works.

Terms Additive and subtractive processes: Indigo discharge, one of the primary techniques used at Merton Abbey, is a subtractive process: the whole cloth is dyed

Europe (Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic, 2001); Joyce Storey, The Thames and Hudson Manual of Textile Printing (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) and The Thames and Hudson Manual of Dyes and Fabrics (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978).

644 Scientific analysis such as spectrography might be able to determine this, but no such research seems to have been carried out with Morris textiles to date.

645 Davis, Virginia. "William Morris and Indigo Discharge Printing." Journal of the William Morris Society 11.3 (Autumn 1995): 8-18.

370 with indigo, and then any areas where the indigo is not needed are printed with a bleach solution. The indigo washes away, re-exposing the white of the original fabric. All other processes used at the Works were additive, with color being applied only to the areas where it was needed. This could be achieved by printing the coloring material directly onto the fabric or by printing a mordant which would produce color when exposed to a dye bath. Dye materials: A general phrase for the various solutions and pastes used to prepare, color, and finish the fabrics. These include materials defined as dyes, mordants, thickeners, and soaps, among others. There is no evidence that the Works generated its own raw dye materials; rather, they seem to have purchased processed and refined materials which would have been produced at industrial scales at other sites. The Firm is known to have purchased at least some of their dye materials from Skilbecks, a major drysalters (dye supply) firm in the City of London. Dye: A compound which imparts color to a textile, either through application on its own or through combination with mordants. Dyes can be derived from plant or mineral materials or created chemically, either in imitation of naturally-occurring dye compounds or as fully independent colorants.646 In keeping with Morris’s strong views on the subject, the dyes used at the Works during his period of direct involvement (1881 – c. 1885) were all derived from naturally-occurring materials, albeit with a variety of levels of processing.

646 One of the first fully synthetic dyes, mauveine, was discovered by William Henry Perkin in 1856.

371 Mordant: A chemical, usually a metallic solution, which when combined with a particular dye generates a chemical reaction which colors fabric. The majority of the dyes used at Merton Abbey required a mordant. Thickener: A neutral substance that thickened a liquid dye or mordant solution, allowing it to be applied with a printing block. Thickeners used at the Merton Abbey Works included gum Senegal (gum arabic, derived from acacia saps), British gum (dextrin, derived from vegetable starch), clay, and the evocatively-named “dragon” (tragacanth, derived from Astragalus saps).

Padded/padding: Some dye materials were applied using a padding machine, a type of mangle which applied the solution evenly to the fabric using rollers.

Process At its most basic, the fabric printing process at Merton Abbey had three steps: preparation, coloring, and finishing.

Preparation

Preparation encompassed the preliminary steps before the printing could begin: cutting the blocks, readying the cloth, and mixing any of the dye materials that could be made ahead of time. Blocks: All of the patterns made at the Merton Abbey Works were designed to be printed using wood blocks. The blocks were cut by the firm of Alfred Barrett, a specialist in the craft.647 These blocks were primarily wood, but they also used metal

647 And later James Barrett, presumably his son. See Parry, Textiles, 59, for a detailed account of the process of approving and cutting the blocks.

372 pins for small dotted details and felt infill for large areas, which would both make the overall block lighter and ensure more even distribution of the dye material being printed. Depending on the complexity and size of the design, a printed fabric could require anywhere from one block to more than thirty. In multi-colored patterns, each color would require at least one block. The designs were often broken up into smaller, more manageable blocks, increasing the total number used. Some designs also had different sets of blocks for different colorways, depending on if the coloring process was additive or subtractive.648 Once cut and approved, the blocks would be brought to the Works, where they would be stored Fabrics: The vast majority of the printed textiles produced at the Merton Abbey Works were printed on plain-weave cotton. A small number were produced on linen or on cotton velveteen. The base fabrics were not made at Merton Abbey, but purchased as plain cloth from suppliers.649 This cloth came in standard widths (36 inches for cottons, 27 for linen) which in turn dictated the size of the Firm’s final products and the pattern repeats within them.650

648 For example, the white-on-red version of Bird and Thistle required blocks cut to apply color only to the background, leaving the white pattern undyed, and while the blue-on-white required blocks cut the opposite way in order to discharge the pattern from the dyed indigo background.

649 I have not been able to determine who supplied the Firm’s fabrics or where they were woven, but it is likely that they originated in the industrial North, then the center of the British textile industry where they would have been created from raw materials imported from further reaches of the Empire.

650 They could only be 36 inches at their widest, and to use the cloth efficiently any smaller repeat needed to fit evenly into 36 inches – hence the many approximately 18, 12, and 9 inch horizontal repeats among the patterns.

373 The primary preparation for the fabric was washing. Before use, the fabric was washed on the water wheel in the Wandle (fig. 11). This would have readied the cloth in two ways. Firstly, it would wash away any remaining byproducts of the cloth’s production process (such as bleaches) and any dirt it might have picked up in transit. Secondly, it would wet the cloth – an important step, as many dyes are best when applied to damp rather than dry materials. Dye materials: Dye materials were prepared at set times depending on the dyeing plan and the recipe. The Dye Book indicates which materials were best used cool and which were used warm, and in many cases advises that they should be prepared overnight before the day they were needed. This means that some were likely prepared and waiting before the dye process began, while others would be mixed while the process was ongoing.

Coloring Coloring took up the majority of time and labor in the creation of the printed textiles. Depending on the complexity of the pattern being printed, the coloring step could involve just one process, or many. The two basic processes were dyeing and printing. In dyeing, the entire length of fabric would be submerged in a large vat (also known as a dye bath) of a dye solution such as indigo or madder. In printing, a dye material would be applied to the fabric via a wood block cut with some or all of the pattern.651 Some coloring processes only required the printing step, but many required a combination of both printing and dyeing. The chemical processes of the various dye

651 If the pattern was multi-colored, different blocks had to be cut for each color. Additionally, some larger patterns were broken up into several blocks for ease of application.

374 techniques required these steps to be performed in different orders, sometimes with intervening phases such as aging that helped to set the dyes. Printing was carried out in the print shop on the upper floor of the south shed. The textile would be “brought to table” – laid out on the long table that dominated the room – and the printers would move down its length, applying the dye materials with their blocks. Dyeing was performed in the dye shop on the ground floor of the north shed, where there were large vats and other receptacles able to receive long swathes of cloth. It is likely that this is also where intervening processes like ageing, bichroming, and steaming were carried out.

Colorways Morris’s patterns from the Merton Abbey period (1881-85) used a restricted selection of colors and color combinations. The Firm printed primarily in blue, red, yellow, brown, and buff (a warm yellow-brown). Secondary colors were produced by layering combinations of blue, red, and yellow, resulting in shades of green and orange. The majority of the 1881-85 pattern recipes in the dye book are for single- color designs. These could be simple, requiring only one dye and one trip to table, or complex, with shades of the same color requiring different mixes of dye materials and multiple cycles through the dyeing and finishing processes.

Multi-colored patterns were even more complex to produce because they involved multiple types of dye material, all of which required different processes. The multi-colored combinations shown in the Dye Book were: brown and buff,652 blue and

652 One design, Brown and Buff Corncockle.

375 buff,653 blue and yellow (with green),654 and “many coloured” patterns that used blue, yellow, and red (with green and occasionally orange). The chemical and visual nature of these dyes meant that they had to be applied to the fabrics in a specific order: blue (indigo), then red (madder), and finally yellow with orange and green (weld or quercitron). For details on the processes required by each color, see below.

Finishing Different dye processes required different finishing techniques. Some processes helped to clear the fabric, washing away excess dye materials to reveal the pattern. Depending on the materials used – not only the dyes, mordants, and discharges, but also the gums and minerals used to thicken solutions – different types of clearing baths were needed, at different temperatures and durations, all of which is laid out in the Dye Book. Some colors were also fixed by additional finishing processes, as when weld dyes were “coppered”, washed in a copper solution. For many if not all of the printed textiles, however, the final steps were a trip to the water wheel for a final wash in the Wandle, followed by crofting, the process by which any remaining dye traces were cleared. Crofting traditionally happened out of doors on bleaching fields. There, as in traditional bleaching, the whites of the pattern would be brightened by the sun, aided by the slightly alkaline water of the Wandle that had soaked into the fabric. As with bleaching, more mechanized crofting options were available in the nineteenth century, and it appears the Firm used both methods.655

653 Blue Windrush.

654 Tulip and Willow, Blue and Yellow Kennet, and Green Lea.

655 Parry, Textiles, 56 and 60.

376 After crofting, the fabrics would be complete; unlike some popular textiles in the period, they were not glazed656 or given any other sort of finish. Once clean, cleared, and dry, the fabrics would be prepared for shipping, destined for the Morris & Co. shop on Oxford Street or the homes of clients.

Colors

Black

Iron (iron acetate and aluminum acetate) Only two patterns in the first half of the Merton Abbey Dye book use black: the yellow versions of Cray and Cherwell.657 Both use black for the dark outlines of blooms, leaves, and stems, whereas more several definite Morris-period patterns use a dark brown for their outlines (see Brown, below). The black of the two yellow patterns was dyed with a mixture of red and iron “liquors” (aluminum acetate and iron acetate), and thickeners – in the case of Cray, gum and oil. Both of the liquors are mordants primarily used in madder printing, but when mixed on their own, they created black. It does not appear that they needed extra steps to set the color, and it may not have even required a washing before further dyes were added.

656 Also known as calendaring. A process by which heat, pressure, and often waxes or resins are applied to fabric to give it a sheen and a more delicate structure and drape.

657 Cherwell, a Dearle design, dates from after Morris’s direct involvement in the Works.

377 Blue Indigo (Indigo tinctifora) Blue is the dominant color in the story of Morris’s dyeing and in the visual character of most of the Merton Abbey printed textiles. Morris’s quest for the correct blue drove much of his dye experimentation in the Queen Square period, and was a contributing factor in his break with Thomas Wardle and move to Merton Abbey.658 Blue and blue dye was part of Morris’s identity. He became well-known for appearing in blue worker’s smocks or dyed blue up to his elbows, and he signed some letters to his daughters “Your old Proosian blue”, a pet name referring to a blue dye and his dyed skin and clothes. The dye technique Morris settled on to achieve his ideal blue was indigo discharge.659 He was first able to pursue that technique at an industrial scale at Merton

658 See Parry, Textiles, 48-51.

659 Morris is often given credit for ‘reviving’ indigo discharge, which is not entirely incorrect. The technique had all but disappeared from manufacturing since the advent of mechanized pattern-printing processes in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, the term ‘revival’ can carry with it a false sense of historicity. Indigo discharge had in fact only been introduced in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Storey, Dyes and Fabrics, 137. Indigo itself was an early modern introduction to Europe supplanting woad, a native material which produces the same dye chemical as Indigofera tinctiora but in less quantity. Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo (London: British Museum, 2011). When Morris began printing fabrics, indigo discharge had only existed for around seventy-five years and had only gone a few decades. Many of the dyers with whom Morris collaborated would have been familiar with it – in fact, he may have hired older dyers to work at Merton Abbey specifically because they knew how to discharge indigo. Morris’s own ideals of historicism and revival tend to color the story of his indigo and overlook how very modern a material and technique it really was. And Morris certainly was not the only producer using indigo in the period: in fact, British imports of the material only increased throughout the nineteenth century, petering out only when synthetic indigo was introduced in 1901.

378 Abbey.660 Accordingly, the vast majority of the printed fabric patterns created in the Merton Abbey period, 1881-85, included blue in at least one colorway. (The only exception to this rule seems to be Cray661.) Some of these patterns were only available in single colorways in which blue played a prominent role, usually as the background color. Others required only small amounts of dye for light blue and green details,662 No matter the amount of the color required, they were all dyed with the discharge process, a subtractive method that required the fabric to first be dyed an all-over shade of blue, then printed with a discharge (bleaching) solution to create the pattern. Because the technique was subtractive, it was performed first, with any other colors added after on top of the lighter areas revealed by the discharge.

660 In fact, he may have hired older dyers to work at Merton Abbey specifically because they knew how to discharge indigo. His dyeing foreman is mentioned in a letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones as “Gooadacre” – my own investigation in census records shows that this was likely Samuel Goodacre, who was born in 1831 and moved from Bethnal Green to the Wimbledon/Merton area between 1881 and 1891.

661 The evidence of the Dye Book makes it difficult to determine what colorways Cray was originally printed in. The first group of recipes in the book includes a yellow tonal version and multi-colored versions with both red and blue grounds. The gray, pink, and blue colorway which is illustrated in Parry, Textiles, 242 does not appear in the Dye Book and is likely later. The Dye Book’s yellow version, meanwhile, does not appear to exist in larger samples, meaning it may not have been produced or sold. Both the red and blue ground versions in the Dye Book use dyes of which Morris did not approve, which dates them later. The red ground version’s blue details are in pencil blue, and the blue ground version calls for alizarine green, a synthetic dye that was not even discovered until 1895. There may have been earlier versions of either colorway that were not recorded in the Dye Book, which is not a complete record of all the fabrics dyed at the Works.

662 Green was dyed by overdyeing a light indigo blue with yellow; see “Green”.

379 Indigo, derived from the tropical plant Indigo tinctifora663, is a finicky dye material, requiring skill from its mixers and dyers. Both the production of the dye material and the dye process itself require fermentation and oxidization. Indigo dye is maintained in indigo vats,664 large containers of the fermented solution carefully controlled to maintain the correct pH and oxygen levels. When they arrived at Merton Abbey, the Firm dug three large indigo vats into the floor of the Dye House. Fabrics or could be dipped into these vats. When removed from the solution, they would have been green, but as soon as they touched the air, they would have begun to oxidize, rapidly turning to rich shades of blue – a rather magical process that Morris liked to demonstrate for visitors. In indigo dyeing, different shades of blue are achieved by leaving the fabric immersed for different periods of time and/or by repeated cycles of submersion and oxidization. At Merton Abbey, those cycles and the blues they produced were standardized. The Dye Book identifies various shades of blue and cross-references them across patterns. Each indigo-dyed pattern’s page begins with a note about its particular blue just under its title, before the recipe itself begins. While some of the shades were designated for only one pattern, most of the patterns were dyed using standard shades designated by numbers. For example, the recipe for the blue version of Brother Rabbit on page 29 notes, “This is blue a shade lighter than 31 + is called

663 Technically, indigo is a chemical, indoxyl, which can be derived from several different plants, not all of which are even from the Indigoferae family. However, the dye most commonly called indigo is that derived from Indigo tinctifora. In the period, the majority of indigo reaching Britain was grown in modern India and Bangladesh.

664 A term still used by dyers today, whether the ‘vat’ is an actual vat, a stock pot, or a 10-gallon bucket from a hardware store.

380 “Nº 6 blue””. (Nº 31, meanwhile, was the blue associated with one version of Birds and Anemone, and the notes on that pattern’s page665 indicate that it was the darkest of the shades the Firm produced.) The page also includes a sample of plain blue cloth, with a later annotation in red ink: “Nº 6 blue as it comes from the vats & before printing.” Nº 6 seems to have been the most common blue used at the Works. It was used for eight different fabrics: Brother Rabbit, Tulip and Willow,666 Strawberry Thief, and five of the nine tributary patterns: Wey, Kennett, Wandle, Medway, and Evenlode. All the other numbered shades, though standardized and identified in comparison with each other in the Book, are only identified with single patterns.667 Among the other tributary patterns, Lodden had its own blue, recorded in the Dye Book as “Lodden Blue”; Lea was dyed Nº 3015 for its blue version and Nº 3232 for the green; and Windrush was dyed Nº 1020. After the fabrics had fully oxidized and reached the desired shade of blue, the next step was bichroming – washing in a solution of water, bichrome, and caustic soda. This happened the night before they were to first come to table. and then hung to dry. The chemical layer lain down by bichroming would react with the discharge material when it was printed, aiding the reaction.668 It was a delicate process,

665 Page 27. There was also a lighter version of Birds and Anemone, shown on p. 28 and printed on Nº 17 blue, and a “two blues” version – as well as versions in madder red.

666 A design from 1873, originally printed by Wardle and adapted for indigo discharge after the move to Merton.

667 They may, however, have been used for other patterns not listed in the Book.

668 Davis, “William Morris and Indigo Discharge Printing,” 3

381 especially because the bichromed fabrics needed to be kept out of the light until printing time.669 In the morning, the bichromed fabric was brought to table and printed with a discharge paste, a combination of a gum-and-clay thickener (also made the night before) and oxalic and sulphuric acid solutions. This material was printed onto the fabric anywhere that the design called for any color besides blue or green. As soon as possible after the discharge was printed, the fabric was cleared: washed in hot water and caustic soda (lye) to clear away the discharge paste. Any area that had been printed with the paste would have its indigo discharged – bleached away, essentially – revealing the white of the cloth beneath. Some patterns also called for “half discharge,” a weaker solution that would lighten the blue without removing it entirely. This was used to create “two blues” patterns and multi-colored patterns with dark backdrops and lighter green areas, as seen in Wandle and several other tributary patterns. (See “Green,” below) After being cleared, the fabric would be rinsed and soured – washed in a mild acid solution to remove alkaline (base) dye material deposits. The final step was always to “wash well on ginny,” the wheel in the Wandle, usually for half an hour. If the pattern required other colors, it would be dried and prepared for other dye processes. Otherwise, it was finished and ready to be prepared for sale.

669 ibid. and Dye Book..

382 Brown Catechu ( catechu) Brown is a relatively uncommon color in the recipes of the Dye Book. It appears in three patterns that can be securely dated from the period of Morris’s greatest involvement at the Works: Brown and Buff Corncockle, Blue Windrush, and Lodden. In all cases, it is so dark as to appear almost black. Its colorant was catechu, an extract of several species of tropical plants in the legume family (), particularly Senegalia catechu (aka Acacia catechu and Mimosa catechu) Of the fabrics using catechu, Brown and Buff Corncockle has the most thorough notes, particularly because it appears in both the Dye Book and Morris’s Printer’s Notes. For this pattern, a solution of catechu and pyroligneous acid (“wood vinegar”) was mixed with a gum thickener and acetate and nitrates of copper to make the dye, which was applied directly to the fabric. According to the Printer’s Notes, the printed fabric was hung in a cool space overnight, then aged in a hot room for eighteen hours, then let sit cool for at least three more days. After this it was washed in a base solution, then in the water of the Wandle on the wheel, before being returned for the buff print. In his Printer’s Notes Morris also notes that if a fabric was bichromed, catechu did not require an additional oxidizer. This is borne out in the way the catechu is employed in the indigo discharged patterns where it is used, blue Windrush and Lodden. Lodden does not include its own catechu recipe notes, instead referring back to the version in Windrush. In the Windrush recipe, the printing mix does not include the copper solutions used for Corncockle; rather, it calls only for catechu mixed with water, wood vinegar, and gum senegal. The indigo dyeing and bichroming is implied to have already been performed before the catechu printing. Interestingly, the catechu

383 printing is listed as the first step listed in both Windrush and Lodden, before the discharge material was applied, and without any washing or setting in between (which would have ruined the bichroming). Presumably the chemistry of the catechu coloring reaction was not undermined by the discharge solution, even as it washed the indigo away. Close inspection of the fabric sample on the Windrush page shows that the discharge overlapped the catechu, leaving white on both sides of the dark line, and the same clearly had to happen in Lodden, where so much of the indigo was discharged.670 After discharging was complete, the fabrics underwent the normal discharge clearing and finishing process described in the blue section above.

Buff Iron (iron acetate) The Firm’s buff color was used in several single-color prints671, the brown and buff version of Corncockle, and the blue Windrush. It was not, however, used in any of the many-coloured designs that included madder.672 Buff was made with acetate of iron – also called iron liquor – mixed with a thickener and applied directly to the cloth as a surface print. Acetate of iron could also be a madder mordant, generating a purple

670 This may also explain the difference in tone between the warm, rich catechu brown of the Corncockle sample and the cooler, darker catechu printing in Windrush and Lodden – if the catechu was printed on top of the indigo and protected it from the discharge solution, it would have created an overlay, with the indigo darkening and cooling the overall color.

671 Rose and Thistle, Brother Rabbit, Birds and Anemone, Lea, and Kennet (two shades of buff).

672 Red and pink were used only with yellows, not with buff.

384 tone,673 but when used alone without dipping in the madder bath, it generated the yellow-brown buff color. After printing, it was aged one to two days in the “warm drying room” – according to the Buff Print Lea recipe (p. 13), “to drive off the acid & commence oxydation (sic).” It was then padded, but with caustic soda (lye) rather than the mordant used in the red padding process, allowed to air, and finally “raised” in hot water to bring out the pattern and wash away the gum of the thickener.

Green Overdye of blue and yellow During the period of Morris’s direct involvement with the Merton Abbey Works (1881 – c. 1885), the Firm did not use green dyes.674 Rather, green was made by layering a yellow dye on top of light blue indigo. The light blue would either be dyed that shade (as in Lodden) or half-discharged from a darker blue (as in Wandle, Kennet, Strawberry Thief, and many others). The Firm used two yellow dyes, weld and quercitron (see “Yellow”). Quercitron was more common overall, but both were used to generate greens.675

673 Crookes, Dyeing and Tissue Printing, 291-292.

674 Stand-alone greens do appear in some Morris patterns in the first half of the Dye Book, but their placement among later Dearle patterns like Cherwell and Florence seems to imply that they were post-Morris additions. Most use ceruleine, a synthetic dye discovered in 1871. These include two versions of Green Windrush (46 and 63), Green Bird and Anemone (47), Yellow Medway (57), and Blue Ground Cray (69-70), which also features a blue dyed with alizarine green, a dye not discovered until 1895.

675 For example, weld was used in Tulip and Willow and Lodden.

385 Orange Overdye of red and yellow Orange is not a common color in Morris’s patterns from the Merton Abbey period. It is used extensively in only one pattern, Rose, and in some details of Strawberry Thief and Flowerpot.676 The Dye Book recipe and blocks677 for Strawberry Thief show that its orange was created by printing weld yellow on top of madder pink. This is presumably also true of Rose, which does not appear in the Dye Book. Close inspection of a sample in the V&A collection (T.53-1912, FIG ###) shows several places where the blocks were not perfectly registered. In those places, edges of pink or yellow appear around orange areas, which is indicative of an overlay process. However, without a Dye Book listing we cannot know for sure if Rose’s overlay yellow was weld or quercitron.

Purple

Unused The printed fabrics produced at the Abbey under Morris never included purple. There may be several reasons for this. Morris’s palette was drawn from his particular interpretation of medieval textiles and manuscripts, which generally contained very little purple. This was largely because natural purple dyes were rare and expensive and layering blue and red dyes did not produce good purples. This changed in the mid- nineteenth century with the introduction of the first true artificial dye, mauvine, and

676 Flowerpot’s small scale makes its orange details indistinct, but the notes to the block-printer on the design held by the Birmingham Art Gallery show that it was designed and cut for both red and orange.

677 Victoria and Albert Museum, T.125 B to W 1980.

386 subsequent anniline dyes. These dyes made extremely vivid purples available in large quantities, and the color was very popular. Morris’s apparent reluctance to use purple likely arose from a mix of all these factors. Purple was difficult to manufacture within his self-imposed material limitations (using old-fashioned natural dyes), it was not common in the historical objects he idolized, and it had associations of “vulgar” modern tastes driven by industrial innovation.

Red Madder (Rubia tinctorum) At Merton Abbey, red and pinks were dyed with madder678, a dye derived from the plant Rubia tinctorum, which grows in temperate climates such as the Mediterranean and the Netherlands.679 Madder is a mordant dye, which means that in order to obtain color, the dye material must be combined with a metallic solution that creates the necessary chemical reaction. Different combinations of mordants can create colors besides red, but the Firm used madder only for red. In order to print with the material, they used two different processes which I define as mordant-and-bath printing and alizarin printing. The first method was used for single-color and tonal red fabrics and for the red-ground version of Cray (41), and the second for multi-color fabrics in which red (and orange) was present in details.

In mordant-and-bath printing, the textiles are first printed with the mordant and then soaked in the dye bath to attain color. The mordant was most often red liquor, an

678 Morris used other red dyes in other contexts, such as the dyeing of wool for weaving and embroidery. Parry, Textiles, 56.

679 Nieto-Galen, Colouring Textiles, 24.

387 alumina solution, mixed with a gum thickener and, depending on the recipe, other materials like acetic acid and oil. It would be applied to the plain cloth using carved blocks, printing on every portion of the fabric where red was desired. Different strengths of mordant solution were used for different shades of red, and many patterns include both a darker red and a pink. After being printed with the mordant, the fabric was typically left to age for two days. It was then dunged – literally soaked in water mixed with cow dung. It was believed that the mineral salts and other chemical and organic matter in the dung helped to break down the thickeners and remove them from the fabric more thoroughly than water alone.680 On the same day as the dunging, the fabric was cleaned and then finally dyed, soaking in a series of two madder solutions for several hours. The madder would react with any portion of the fabric that had been printed with the mordant, but not anywhere else, creating the desired shades of red. If the pattern included areas of white ground, it was ready for finishing after the second dyeing. Patterns that involved tones of red with no white ground showing,681 on the other hand, were soaped after the dyeing and then padded with mordant. They were then aged, dunged, and dyed again. For finishing, both the white and red ground madder prints were soaped, crofted, and soaped again. Fabrics that required less red did not undergo the intensive mordanting-and- bath process with its ageings and dungings. Rather, they were printed with alizarin (generally abbreviated “aliz.” in the Dye Book). Alizarin is the name of the compound that produces color in all madder pigments and dyes. It was first manufactured

680 Crookes Dyeing and Tissue Printing, 294-95.

681 i.e. the padded versions of Rose and Thistle, Brother Rabbit, and Birds and Anemone, padded Red Windrush, and the red velvet Wey and Mole,.

388 synthetically in 1868, but given Morris’s distaste for synthetic dyes, it seems most likely that the Firm would have been using a naturally-derived madder version rather than synthetic version. In alizarin printing, the pigment was mixed with mordants (usually both acetate and nitrate of alumina) before application, turning the multi-step madder process into a one-step direct application. After the alizarin was printed, the fabric went through a cycle or two of steamings and soapings to set the color and prepare it for further dyeing.682

Yellow Weld (Reseda luteola) and quercitron (Quercus velutina) In Morris & Co. patterns from the period of the Dye Book, yellow was used primarily as a detail color in multi-color printings. The Dye Book records only one single-color yellow pattern, Yellow Rose & Thistle, and two with yellow grounds – Yellow Cray and Yellow Cherwell, the latter a J.H. Dearle pattern.683 In multi-color patterns, the color appears both on its own, mostly as coloring for flowers, and as an overlay with light blue indigo or pink alizarin-printed madder to make green and orange. The Dye Book shows two different types of yellow dyes were used at Merton Abbey in the late nineteenth century: weld and quercitron, which is called bark throughout the book. The weld plant, Reseda luteola, produced the primary European

682 Every pattern in the Dye Book that includes alizarin printing also includes yellow printing, which came after, so alizarin-printed textiles were never complete after the process.

683 Buff was used more extensively in single-color prints. See “Buff.”

389 yellow dye until the introduction of quercitron.684 Quercitron is derived from the bark of the eastern black oak, Quercus velutina, which grows in North America and entered Europe as a dyestuff in the eighteenth century.685 The Firm used at least two processes for bark dyeing, called dyeing or steaming. The single-color patterns were all printed with weld. Of the tributary patterns printed with yellow, Blue and Yellow Kennet, Green Lea, Wey. Wandle, Red Cray, Evenlode were printed with quercitron. Lodden, however, was printed with weld, as was Strawberry Thief. It is not clear why one was particularly favored over the other in any of these cases, but the primary factor was likely the color quality, especially when used in combination with other dyes and processes. Unlike the Firm’s indigo and madder processes, which seem to have been fairly well-established and stable by the time they were written down in the Dye Book, the yellow processes seem to have undergone a great deal of reevaluation throughout the Firm’s first few decades at the Merton Abbey Works. The yellow sections of recipes are altered far more often than any other sections. In some cases, these alterations come in the form of small annotations, but in many more cases, entire yellow recipes are crossed out and replaced with new ones, reflecting full shifts in methods or dye materials. A few patterns were switched from one dye to the other, while many quercitron patterns had their dye methods changed. The problems in dating both the Dye Book and its annotations make it difficult to say exactly when each dye method and material was used at Merton Abbey, but the mix of yellow

684 Nieto-Galen, Colouring Textiles, 28.

685 ibid. For more information on quercitron see Heather Hansen, “The Quest for Quercitron.”

390 recipes throughout the Book seems to indicate that both bark and weld were in use contemporaneously. There was, however, a clear shift away from steam to dyeing in the patterns using bark, and the dates written in some annotations show that this shift had occurred by the early 1890s at the latest.

Weld Weld, Reseda luteola, is a European plant that creates a yellow dye. Before the introduction of North American quercitron dye, it was the primary yellow dye used in Western Europe.686 There is evidence that weld was grown at Merton Abbey – Emma Lazarus wrote in 1886 that “One of the clear, brilliant yellows frequently employed in his fabrics is procured from the bushes of his garden.”687 However, it is unclear if the plant was simply being grown for interest or actually being harvested and processed.688 As with red madder and bark dyeing, weld was dyed at Merton Abbey with a red liquor mordant-and-dye process. The design was printed on the cloth with thickened red liquor, aged two days, then dunged twice. It was dyed on the same day as the dungings, making two visits to the weld vat. After, the cloth was soaked in hot water, crofted “to clear grounds,” and soaked in hot water again. Some patterns were

686 Nieto-Galen, Colouring Textiles, 28.

687 Lazarus, “A Day in Surrey with William Morris.” For more on Lazarus’s visit to Merton Abbey, see Chapter 5.

688 I personally doubt the work of the Merton Abbey Works included cultivating and processing weld, because it would have likely required specialized knowledge and a great deal of effort to produce the quantity and quality of dyestuff required for large- scale production.

391 complete at this stage, but others689 were coppered (soaked in a copper solution) to improve colorfastness, rinsed in cold water, and soaped. Unfortunately, the Dye Book goes not have any notes indicating why some patterns use weld instead of bark dye, but it was presumably also an aesthetic choice based on the overall effect of the dyed fabric. All three of the single-color yellow patterns were printed with weld, indicating it might have given a better large-scale yellow, with bark favored for detail printing. Only two patterns are listed as using weld for details: Lodden and Strawberry Thief. Although this may not explain the choice, it is worth nothing that Lodden and Strawberry Thief had slightly different color requirements than the other patterns. Lodden has a light ground, and Strawberry Thief is the only pattern in the dye book to require yellow overdyeing on pink to create orange. It is possible that quercitron dyeing was not ideal for either of those circumstances. It is unfortunate that Rose does not appear in the dye book, because it combines the conditions of both: a light ground and the use of orance. If Rose was known to have been dyed with weld, it would support this theory.690

“Bark” (Quercitron) Throughout the Dye Book the dye now known as quercitron is generally called “bark”, a name that refers to its source, the bark of an American oak. The Dye Book names bark, bark chips, bark liquor, and flavine in its recipes. Flavine or flavin is generally the name given to industrially-produced derivatives of quercitron. It is not

689 Yellow Rose and Thistle and possibly others.

690 Without records on the dyeing process, the only way to determine this might be by chemical analysis. however, I have never seen such a study for any Morris & Co. fabric.

392 clear, however, how the authors of the Dye Book meant the terms. They may be interchangeable, or they may indicate the dyers were using a variety of products derived from the same material. It is clear, however, that the dyers used those dye materials in two different processes. One is referred to in the Book as simply “dyeing”, the other as “steam yellow.” Like madder dyeing, bark dyeing was a mordant process. The cloth was printed with red liquor, the same mordant as was used to produce red madder, although in this case the concoction was different, using oil as well as thickeners and no acetic acid. The fabric was then aged two days691 before being submerged in the hot bark dye vat for several hours. Few of the recipes have notes on finishing, but presumably it would have been the same as in other patterns – washing and crofting. Steaming condensed this process. It was still a mordant process, but instead of printing with mordant, aging, and then dyeing, the mordant and dye were mixed together and then printed onto the fabric, which was then aged, steamed, cooled, and washed. The mordant was also different. Rather than the red liquor mordant of the dyeing process, steaming used a mix of a metal mordant – both tin crystals692 and nitrate of alumina693 are listed in different recipes – and a thickener. The Dye Book shows a distinct shift from the more efficient steam process to bark dyeing. Green Lea and Wandle have steam yellow in their original recipes which was later crossed out and replaced with bark dye. Tulip and Willow and Medway were

691 Green Lea and Many Coloured Wey also call for dunging, which was presumably done for all patterns.

692 Stannous chloride dihydrate.

693Aluminum nitrate.

393 also originally steam yellow, but it was replaced with weld. Evenlode appears to have gone from steam yellow to weld to bark dye. The recipes for Blue and Yellow Kennett and Many Coloured Wey give bark dye and steam options, but both also include notes about why the steam is not preferred. The Wey page states that “We do not steam the yellow – dyeing gives a more pleasant general tone to this pattern. Tho' the yell is not so good as that got by steaming.” By ‘good’ they presumably meant strong or color- fast; Linda Parry notes that impermanence is a particular concern for yellow dyes.694 The page for Blue and Yellow Kennet expands upon the aesthetic judgement, noting that in steam yellows “the blue remains bright + clear but gives a cold effect to the whole pattern. When the yellow is got by dyeing the blues + whites take on a slight tint which softens the whole + gives a warm effect – this latter way is thought better.” Presumably this was the overall reason for the shift away from steam yellows.695

694 Parry, Textiles, 57.

695 This shift from steam to dye holds true only for patterns designed by Morris in the first five years of operations at Merton. Slightly later Dearle patterns such as Cherwell, Florence, and Avon all use steam yellows. Some other apparently later alternate colorways and recipes use galloflavine yellows. Both of these differences reflect a larger shift in the recipes towards efficiency and, occasionally, new industrial dyes.

394