Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2018 The User, the Reader, and the Pocket Cathedral: William Morris's Arts and Crafts Aesthetic and the Decorated Book Brandiann Molby Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Molby, Brandiann, "The User, the Reader, and the Pocket Cathedral: William Morris's Arts and Crafts Aesthetic and the Decorated Book" (2018). Dissertations. 2830. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2830 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2018 Brandiann Molby LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO THE USER, THE READER, AND THE POCKET CATHEDRAL: WILLIAM MORRIS’S ARTS AND CRAFTS AESTHETIC AND THE DECORATED BOOK A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY BRANDIANN A. MOLBY CHICAGO, IL MAY 2018 Copyright by Brandiann A. Molby, 2018 All rights reserved. x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation is a continuation of my M.A. work at Royal Holloway, University of London, and I am grateful to the English faculty at RHUL, in particular to Ruth Livesay and Adam Roberts for their introduction to Victorian London, and to Mary Cowling for her too-short lectures on Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. This project took shape under the direction of the English faculty at Loyola University Chicago, and I am deeply indebted to Francis Fennell, Jr. for his kind guidance, to James A. Knapp for a grounding in textual studies and word/image theory, to Micael Clarke for her matchless writing center pedagogy, and to Paul Eggert for helping me identify the final theoretical aims of this project. I am also grateful for the tireless efforts of the librarians at the Bodleian Library and Loyola’s Cudahy Library. I thank Amy Kessel, Melissa Bradshaw, and Sherrie Weller for their kind mentorship, and the staff of the Loyola University Chicago Writing Center, whom I have been privileged to work alongside. I am also indebted to each member of the Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society, which has continued, as it began, in the spirit of friendship, camaraderie, and humor. I wish to offer my particular thanks to Lydia Craig for her peerless revision advice, to Pamela Caughie for her encouragement early in my time at Loyola, and to Josh and Cindy Wallace for their unflagging friendship. I am deeply grateful to Al and Diana Molby, Nate and Katie Molby, and Dan and Lena Troike for their unfailing support. My deepest thanks to Matt Molby, to whom this dissertation is dedicated. !iii For Matt My acquaintance with Morris led me to look at the page of a book as a picture, and a book as an ornament. George Bernard Shaw TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: RIGHT SEEING: THEORIZING THE VICTORIAN VISUAL ETHICS OF INTERPRETATION 20 CHAPTER TWO: MORRIS & CO.: ARCHITECTURE, THE NEO-GOTHIC, AND THE REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS 101 CHAPTER THREE: THE USER AND THE READER: MORRIS’S ARTS AND CRAFTS AESTHETIC AND THE DECORATED BOOK 142 CHAPTER FOUR: THE POCKET CATHEDRAL: THE KELMSCOTT CHAUCER AND MORRIS’S ARTS AND CRAFTS AESTHETIC 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY 246 VITA 259 !vi x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The Derby Day, William Powell Frith 26 Figure 2. The Railway Station, William Powell Frith 27 Figure 3. A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881, William Powell Frith 28 Figure 4. The Last Day in the Old Home, Robert Braithwaite Martineau 29 Figure 5. Past and Present, No. 3. Despair, Augustus Egg 31 Figure 6. Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, J.M.W. Turner 34 Figure 7. Christ in the House of His Parents, John Everett Millais 45 Figure 8. Contrasted Residences for the Rich and Poor, A.W.N. Pugin 50 Figure 9. Frontispiece (Chesney Wold) and title-page by ‘Phiz' of the Bradbury and Evans edition of Dickens's Bleak House, H.K. Browne 55 Figure 10. Wren’s City Churches, Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo 59 Figure 11. The Blind Girl, John Everett Millais 61 Figure 12. Work, Ford Madox Brown 63 Figure 13. The Blessed Damozel, Dante Gabriel Rossetti 76 Figure 14. “The Climax, or the Kiss; Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (illustration for the play Salome by Oscar Wilde), Aubrey Beardsley 91 Figure 15. Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, J.M. Whistler 94 Figure 16. The Golden Stairs, Edward Burne-Jones 97 Figure 17. The Mill: Girls Dancing to Music by a River, Edward Burne-Jones 98 !vii Figure 18. Frontispiece to 'News from Nowhere' (London: 1890, Kelmscott Press) 143 Figure 19. “Mr. Morris Reading Poems to Mr. Burne Jones,” Edward Burne-Jones 166 Figure 20. “The M’s at Ems,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti 167 Figure 21. Print from bound volume of forty-six proofs of woodcuts, printed from blocks designed by William Morris for the Kelmscott Press 186 Figure 22. Golden type/Troy type/Chaucer type: Specimens of Fonts Developed for the Kelmscott Press 210 Figure 23. Proof of a design after William Morris, title-page to The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Kelmscott Press 212 Figure 23. Proof of a design after William Morris, illustration to The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London: 1896, Kelmscott Press, page 1) 214 Figure 25. Proof of an illustration designed by Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott Chaucer: p. 1, Prologue, Edward Burne-Jones 217 Figure 26. Proof of an illustration designed by Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott Chaucer: p. 397, A Treatise on the Astrolabe 238 !viii x INTRODUCTION Addressing the crowd at the National Association for the Advancement of Art in 1889, William Morris lamented how hard it was to find a well-designed ewer and basin for the bedroom. If you went shopping, he complained, all you would find would be pieces of “crockery with a scrawl of fern leaves and convolvulus over it which […] gives you no pleasure, still less any idea; it only gives you an impression (a mighty dull one) of bedroom.”1 Although essentially functional, the set, in Morris’s view, fails in all the important ways: namely to give pleasure to the consumer and the maker and to convey an idea through its form and decoration, even a rather basic idea of the natural world. The only real success of the ewer and basin lies in the fact that its “ornament, that special form which the ineptitude of the fern scrawl and the idiocy of the handle had taken, has sold so many dozen or gross more of that toilet set than of others” and thus is a commercial success even if an artistic and social failure.2 For Morris, the impractical designs, too-perfect finishes, and cursory ornamentation found on most household items are not only symptomatic of the wider social decay brought about by industrialism’s progress, but they are actually fueling it. While it may seem surprising to argue that the ewer and basin have the capacity to influence society, I contend that Morris’s argument is a central, largely unaddressed component 1 Morris, William. “The Arts and Crafts of Today.” Art and Its Producers and The Arts and Crafts of Today: Two Lectures Delivered for the Association for the National Advancement of Arts. Paternoster Row, London: Longmans & Co., 1901. 36-7. Print. 2 Ibid. !1 !2 of his artistic principles. Despite the resurgent interest in Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites over the past twenty-five years, Morris scholarship has not fully addressed the extent to which his career is unified around his exploration and development of his beliefs about the nature and function of the work of art. Precisely because Morris’s career was so varied and comprehensive, Morris scholarship has remained largely compartmentalized into separate critical discussions of his prose, poetry, applied arts and crafts, and book designs. With the exception of E.P. Thompson’s landmark biography, most early twentieth-century scholarship also largely excised Morris’s political activism as either unrelated to his artistic practice or as an aberration on his artistic legacy, and this disunity has prevented critics from tracing the complexity and extent of Morris’s contributions to Victorian art, literature, and aesthetics. To date, the most influential examination of the theoretical implications of Morris’s work was Jerome McGann’s landmark study of Kelmscott Press books, in which he recognizes the presence of a hermeneutic relationship between Morris’s texts and the book’s material decoration.3 For McGann, Morris “worked to integrate the poem and its performative medium not by seeking a return to oral traditions of production, but by acknowledging the compositional environment as a necessary condition for the creation of modern poetry […and in the process undertook] a broad-scale effort to exploit as completely as possible all the resources of the physical media that were the vehicular forms of his writing.”4 Apart from more recent studies in book history, such as Nicholas Frankel’s acknowledgment of the reader’s role in the 3 McGann, Jerome. “‘A Thing to Mind’: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris.” Huntington Library Quarterly 55.1 (Winter 1992): 55-74. JSTOR. Web. 25 November 2017. 4 Ibid., 56 !3 interpretation of Kelmscott books,5 subsequent examinations of Morris’s texts have largely confined themselves to applying McGann’s analysis to newer areas of interest in Morris studies such as ecocriticism, book history, and textual studies.