The pre-Raphaelites.
Boos, Florence S.
Christina and Dante Rossetti, William Morris, and his friend Edward
Burne-Jones were well represented in this year's offerings.
The Rossettis
In Christina Rossetti: A Descriptive Bibliography (Oak Knoll
Press), Martha Ives has prepared a remarkably broad palette of
information about Rossetti's revisions, adaptations, and
publication history. In accordance with bibliographic principles set
forth by Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle in Principles of
Bibliographical Description, Ives offers a list of musical settings of
Rossetti's works; a catalogue of her poems and articles; a partial
bibliography of later editions and reproductions; an overview of her
efforts to cooperate with publishers; a bibliography of her translations
and printed ephemera; and a study of her many afterthoughts and
revisions in the margins of her published works. The result of this work
is a trove which students of Rossetti will explore for years to come.
In "Laura's Laurels: Christina Rossetti's
'Monna Innominata' 1 and 8 and Petrarch's Rime sparse 85
and 1" (VP 49, no. 4), Mary Moore sets aside Rossetti's
indebtedness to Dante to consider the ways in which she reversed
Petrarchan tropes and prototypes. In careful analyses of the opening
sonnet and sonnet eight, in which Esther's seduction of King
Ahasuerus inspires the poet's desire "to take my life so into
my hand," Moore suggests that the prevalence of aural imagery in
Rossetti's sequence reflected a view of the "field of
vision" as an "arena of female objectification" (p. 505),
and that her use of elision, replacement, and appropriation confronted
"the ideology of gender implicit in Petrarch's poems."
In "Home one and all": Redeeming the Whore of Babylon in
Christina Rossetti's Religious Poetry" (VP 49, no. 1),
Stephanie Johnson argues persuasively that Rossetti's assertion in
"The Holy City, New Jerusalem" that God will bring both
"strangers.... [h]ome ... one and all," as well as her use of
imagery applied to the "Whore of Babylon" in Revelations to
describe the consort of Christ in "She Shall Be Brought Unto the
King" (1898), were expressions of her evolving conviction that all
may be redeemed.
In "Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'Inner
Standing-Point' and 'Jenny' Reconstrued" (Univ. of
Toronto Quarterly 80, no. 3), D. M. R. Bentley argues that
Rossetti's use of the "inner standing point" of a
"young and thoughtful man of the world" who visits the room of
a prostitute "invites the reader of the poem ... to enter into
rather than merely observe the situation ... and ... participate in
[its] perspectives and emotions"; and that the responses in the
poem's conclusion--in which the speaker leaves coins in
Jenny's hair and departs on a "dark path I can strive to
clear"--are "far more complex, intricate, nuanced, and engaged
than they were when he began the poem, and surely this was also
Rossetti's hope for the poem's readers" (p. 713).
Bentley's analysis of Rossetti's intentions is persuasive, but
it does not respond to the familiar feminist criticism that Jenny
herself--unlike the speaker in Augusta Webster's contemporary
"A Castaway"--remains mute throughout the poem.
In "'A Very Clear and Finished Piece of Writing':
William Michael Rossetti's 'Mrs. Hohnes Grey'"
(Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 20, N.S., Spring), Bentley reexamines
William Rossetti's 840-line dramatic monologue, originally drafted
for the short-lived Germ in 1850 and finally published in The Broadway
in 1868. Bentley makes a persuasive case that this neglected work of
Rossetti's youth was a pioneering effort to bring a realistic tale
of middle-class grief and jealousy into the range of poetic expression,
and that the poem has an impartially "reportorial and forensic
quality which ... connects it to Pre-Raphaelitism and [gives it] an
almost modernist coolness and impersonality" (p. 20).
In "Visible Sound and Auditory Scenes: Word, Image, and Music
in Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, and Morris" (Media, Technology, and
Literature in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Colette Colligan and Margaret
Linley [Ashgate]), Linda K. Hughes canvasses mid-Victorian views of
music, which ranged from Ruskin's insistence that music be
subordinate to language, to Pater's concern that its complementary
"resonances" be valued and retained. She also adduces two
telling contrasts. In the first, in Tennyson's "The Palace of
Art," St. Cecilia is represented as dormant and her instrument
silent, and "the only rhythms and musicality given play in
[Tennyson's] poem are those of the poet himself." In D. G.
Rossetti's illustration of the scene, by contrast, an angel who
resembles St. George kisses Cecilia as she plays the organ, in a visual
(and in that sense independent) suggestion that "music trumps
poetry." In the second pairing, Hughes observes that
Rossetti's watercolor of "The Blue Closet" "seems
posed as an intensely self-conscious work about art," even as its
visual and tonal harmonies "suggest the complementarity of artistic
media." By contrast, in his poem with the same title Morris strove
to make sound and rhythm central features of his work and "to draw
together painting, music, and poetry despite their competing claims of
iconicity, sound, and language." In her conclusion, Hughes argues
that Tennyson, Rossetti, and Morris all seek to preserve the boundaries
between the arts, although Morris' and Rossetti's paired works
pay more direct tribute to music's role in aestheticism.
Morris and His Circle
The Kelmscott Chaucer: A Census by William S. Peterson and Sylvia
Holton Peterson (280 pp.; Oak Knoll Press) is a major study of the
history and provenance of the 1896 Kelmscott Press Chaucer, the most
ambitious and original bookmaking effort of the nineteenth century. The
Chaucer's font, initials, and borders were personally designed by
Morris, its eighty-seven wood-engravings created by Edward Burne-Jones,
and its ink, paper, and vellum were crafted by the Press's artisans
to the highest specifications. In separate chapters devoted to vellum
copies, paper copies, and unlocated copies, the Petersons have located
and described as many of the work's thirteen vellum and four
hundred twenty-five paper copies as they could physically find, and they
have chronicled the extensive history of their wanderings and ultimate
fates.
They have also conveyed aptly the unfinished and open-ended nature
of their project and graced the volume with illustrated lives of many of
the volume's purchasers, among them oft-mentioned but elusive
figures such as Bernard Quaritch and Frederick Ellis. For them,
"provenance has proven to be not a dull, technical term but a
window into the fascinating human stories that lie behind nearly every
copy of the Chaucer." This beautifully designed and produced volume
is a pioneering effort and labor of love, and admirers of the
Press's work will not find a better resource for their further
studies.
Fiona MacCarthy's 629-page The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward
Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (Harvard, 2012) subsumes a
myriad of dramatic details into a sweeping narrative of
Burne-Jones's artistic, marital, and emotional life, and the social
and artistic networks in which he lived. MacCarthy has made a sustained
attempt to research Burne-Jones's early life and education; his
expeditions to Italy in search of new models for his art; the extent to
which the patronage of D. G. Rossetti, John Ruskin, and Ford Madox Brown
aided him in his early work; and his growing appetite in later life for
the cultivation and society of wealthy patrons and well-placed friends.
The volume's extensive index helps readers access the work's
many references to other artists, events, and personages of the time.
MacCarthy also acquaints her readers with the quirky extravagance
and intermittent eloquence of Burne-Jones's letters, scattered in a
bewildering maze of public and private collections. These reveal that he
"love[d] mosaics better than anything else in the world," for
example; sincerely mourned the loss of the family cat ("the
beautiful hair oriental beauty [sic] that moaned, gasped and gave
birth," p. 381), execrated the neo-classical monumentality of St.
Paul's ("let it chill the soul of man and gently prepare him
for the next glacial cataclysm," p. 359); and thought that
"the best in me has been love and it brought me the most
sorrow" (p. xxiv).
It also brought sorrow to others. Burne-Jones was a serial pursuer
of women as well as a gifted and charming conversationalist. MacCarthy
documents his extended and extensively documented affair with Maria
Zambaco, whom he pursued to Paris and perhaps Italy, as well as a series
of ambiguously platonic liaisons with young, handsome, intelligent, and
initially unmarried women, among them May Gaskell, Violet Maxse, and
Frances Graham Horner. In MacCarthy's gentle formulation, Georgiana
Burne Jones was constrained to "put up for years with her husband
scribbling those discursive, entreating, intimate illustrated letters to
his adored women in another room" (p. xxii).
One of the biography's major merits, in fact, is
MacCarthy's attention to Georgiana Burne-Jones, a thoughtful and
accomplished woman who dutifully focused her Memorials almost entirely
on her husband. MacCarthy offers the most extensive account we are
likely to have of Georgiana's upbringing, her early artistic and
musical endeavors, her reactions to her husband's deceits and
infidelities, her central role in the management of his affairs, and her
socialist convictions and active engagement in feminist endeavors until
her death in 1920.
MacCarthy also explores in considerable depth Burne-Jones's
friendship with Morris, as one would expect of the author of William
Morris: A Life for Our Time, and she throws the contrasts between the
two friends' choices and convictions into critical relief. She
accepts Burne-Jones's claims to be a "radical" and
"bitter Republican" but makes clear that these views failed to
temper his dislike of feminism and contempt for socialism, moderate his
gratitude for the company of aristocratic friends, or even prevent his
acceptance of a baronetcy at the ascendance of his career. He did share
Georgiana's contempt for "liberal" imperialism, however,
not to be taken for granted in an extended family which included Rudyard
Kipling and Alfred and Louisa Baldwin.
MacCarthy's summary evaluation of the two friends is that
Burne Jones "was the greater artist, though Morris was unarguably
the greater man" (p. xxii), a comparison which elides (or at least
diminishes) Morris' personal ideal of the "lesser" arts;
widely held views that poetry is a "high" art; Morris'
role in the foundation of the nascent Arts and Crafts movement; and his
creation of the most influential fine-arts press of his time.
Biography too may be an example of Morris' "lesser"
arts. MacCarthy's elegiacally entitled The Last Pre-Raphaelite is
more than a study of a craftsman of uncommon painterly grace. It is a
memorial of the sensibilities and contradictions of an entire generation
of ardent young men (and women) who sought to formulate new ideals and
challenged the verities of their often philistine "betters."
In "Trebled Beauty: William Morris's Terza Rima"
(Victorian Studies 53, no. 3), Naomi Levine argues that the formal
qualities of Morris' most famous poem subtly heightened the
intensity of its content. Mindful of historical associations of terza
rima with erotic subjects, Levine argues effectively that Morris'
triplets reflected The Defence's asymmetries as well as its ethical
ambiguities; that his periodic enjambments of rhymes across stanzas
maintained and enhanced its balance and fluidity; and that the cadences
and syncopations of his poem heightened readers' responses to
Guenevere's powerful but ambivalent "defence."
In "William Morris' 'Golden Wings' as a Poetic
Response to the 'Delicate Sentiment' of Tennyson's
'Mariana'" (VP 49, no. 3), Benjamin Saltzman interprets
Morris' 1859 poem as a contrastive foil to Tennyson's
"Mariana." Unlike Tennyson's passive heroine, he argues,
Morris' Jehane kills her lover as well as herself, and therefore
does not "remain ... patiently submissive to her male counterpart,
but ... proactively and dangerously seeks him out--even at the expense
of the ... happiness of the community at large." As I read
"Golden Wings," Jehane interprets her lover's absence in
wartime as evidence that he has been killed; she commits suicide in the
hope that she will join him in the afterlife; and the poem's final
image of a stiffening corpse in a "rotting leaky boat" is not
evidence that she has committed a murder, but confirmation of her
assessment of her lover's likely death and the wider horrors of
war. Nonetheless Saltzman's interpretation offers new evidence of
the wide range of readings which the lyrics of Morris' Defence of
Guenevere may bear.
In "Redesigning the Language of Social Change: Rhetoric,
Agency, and the Oneiric in William Morris's A Dream of John
Ball" (Victorian Studies 53, no. 1 [20101), Michelle Weinroth
construes Morris' political parable as a subtle corrective to
"masculinist" illusions of victorious revolution embedded in
the doctrines of contemporary socialism. She also observes that
Morris' revenant and his "hedge-priest" hero John Ball
share a common commitment to "the democratic tactics and ethics of
a future commonweal" which would transcend the internal conflicts
and tensions of the present (p. 53), and sees his Kelmscott Press
edition of John Ball of 1892 as an attempt to save "the seeming
monetary and temporal luxuries of art ... from the narrow epistemologies
and 'administered' time of capitalist modernity" (p. 60).
In "The Living Past of William Morris's Late
Romances" (Journal of William Morris Studies 19, no. 2), Gabriel
Schenk interprets Morris' last five romances as expressions of his
conviction that "the past is not dead, but is living in us, and
will be alive in the future." Rejecting a false and static past of
"frozen time" in these works, Morris' characters inhabit
a past which is young, alive, and subject to error, and his tales
(re)enact forms of "creative repetition" which embody a
"romantic" "capacity for a true conception of history, a
power for making the past part of the present" (p. 29).
In "Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste"
(Journal of Modern Craft 4, no. 1), Elizabeth Miller argues that Morris
considered avoidance of "waste" in all its senses a
significant aspect of utopian life, and she interprets his essays, News
from Nowhere, and his work for the Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings as sustained attempts to reject "the neophilia,
disposability, and planned obsolescence of capitalist production."
Miller's article is a response to critics of the rarity and cost of
Kelmscott Press books, but her arguments apply with equal force to other
artifacts of Morris' literary and decorative artwork.
In "William Morris' 'Equality': A Critical
Edition," (Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 20, N.S., Spring), I
provide an annotated edition of a political essay left unpublished at
Morris' death. In it Morris interprets oppressive employers as
avatars of autocratic deities, warns that limited education might make
revolutions "confused and full of suffering," and expresses
his bitter but considered view that "the ordinary labourer [in
capitalist Britain] is in a worse position than a savage living in a
good climate." Finally, Morris observes that among the crowd who
attended the funeral of Alfred Linnell (a victim of the police riot on
"Bloody Sunday" in November of 1887) "were ... many and
many who might not perhaps have been made into great men, but who
certainly might have been made into happy and useful ones; and I tell
you plainly that we are criminals because they have not been so made,
and if the consequences of our crime overtakes us, who shall pity
us[?]" In "Green Cosmopolitanism in Morris's News from
Nowhere" (Journal of William Morris Studies 19, no. 3), Eddy Kent
considers ways in which Morris' vision of the future imagined a
secular-millenarian society in which nations would form "one great
community," and humans would embrace "the only ethical
response: a subsumption of politics into the natural world; a green
cosmopolitanism" (p. 66). Contrasting Morris' utopia with the
dystopian collective of Walter Besant's The Inner House (1888), in
which coopted workers devote themselves to mindless consumption, Kent
argues that the revolutionaries in Morris' utopia would be active
caretakers of Ellen's "earth and everything in it" and
practice a "green cosmopolitanism ... predicated on each part
feeling conscious of its relations to the whole." "Reach
this," Kent suggests in emulation of Morris, "and politics as
we know it ... will vanish" (p. 76).
In "A Darker Shade of Green: William Morris, Richard Jeffries,
and Posthumanist Ecologies" (Journal of William Morris Studies 19,
no. 3), Jed Mayer envisions a "posthumanist" rejection of
human exceptionalism and its infatuation with technological
"progress." He recalls Morris' critical interest in
Richard Jeffries's After London (1885) and its
"ecogothic" account of a world in which humans defer to the
"wild[ness]" of nature, and argues that whereas Jeffries
viewed the vast ecological shifts he presented with "grim
detachment," Morris imagined a future in which humans live "in
accordance with the nonhuman" (p. 83) and understand that
"brightness and beauty are inextricably tied to corruption and
decay" (p. 89).
In "!Homenaje a Aragon! News from Nowhere, Collectivism and
the Sustainable Future" (Journal of William Morris Studies 19, no.
3), Patrick O'Sullivan offers a heartfelt homage to peasant-led
"Nowherean" communities in Aragon during the Spanish civil
war, whose inhabitants strove to end rural illiteracy, introduce adult
education, distribute food and shelter equably, create profit-free
banking exchanges, and support popular resistance to Franco's
fascist state. Comparing and contrasting practices Morris envisioned in
Nowhere with the efforts of these local councils, whose members were
eager to learn more about scientific ways to alleviate backbreaking
farm-labor, O'Sullivan argues that "though William Morris did
not 'predict' collectivisation, his pre-figuring of the likely
ecological future was extremely accurate.... [W]hat he found was that
the salvation of the world does not lie solely, as Henry David Thoreau
thought, in 'Wildness,' but in 'local production for
local need'" (p. 107).
In "La Belle Iseult" (Journal of William Morris Studies
19, no. 2), Jan Marsh traces the history of Morris' sole surviving
work in oil, left unfinished (and perhaps undervalued) by its creator.
After Morris undertook the work in 1856-57, he brought it first to
Rossetti and then to Ford Madox Brown for retouching before giving it to
Madox Brown's son Oliver ("Nolly"). Oliver in turn later
gave it to Rossetti, unaware perhaps of the latter's obsessive
desire to acquire every image of Morris' wife, and Marsh dryly
suggests that the painting could not be hung at Kelmscott Manor lest it
offend Morris, or at Rossetti's home in Cheyne Walk lest it offend
Fanny Cornforth. When William Michael Rossetti found it among his
brother's possessions fifteen years after Dante died in 1882, he
scrupulously returned it to Morris' widow, who exhibited it in the
New Gallery under the inaccurate title "Queen Guinevere."
In "Between Ouvrierisme and Elitism: the Dualism of William
Morris" (Journal of William Morris Studies 19, no. 2), Antoine
Capet critiques Paul Meier's assertion in William Morris: The
Marxist Dreamer (1872), that Morris' bourgeois origins made it
impossible for him to understand "real" workers'
movements. Examining Morris' conception of "labor" as
useful endeavor, his rejection of "culture" as a "concept
of an elite," and his responses to music, bookbinding, and other
arts, Capet notes that Morris' objective was "precisely to
refuse to make working people partake of the sham 'culture' of
the elites, encouraging them instead to accede to 'genuine'
culture: 'popular high culture'" (p. 42).
In William Morris: The Blog, Digital Reflections 2007-2011
(Kelmsgarth Press), Tony Pinkney attempts to engage a general audience
in an electronic genre he describes as an "amalgam of the
journalistic, the scholarly and the creative" (p. 51). His short
essays resurrect the spirit of Morris' "Notes on News"
for Commonweal, and their more engaging passages range from reflections
on hitherto unnoticed characters and incidents in News, to a carefully
crafted redaction of its first chapter in the epic style and octameter
anapests of Sigurd the Volsung.
In "The Dialectic of Nature in Nowhere" (Journal of
William Morris Studies 19, no. 3), Pinkney attempts to identify four
stages of Nowherean responses to "nature." In the first,
natural resources are gradually restored (salmon return to the Thames,
for example). In the second, nature becomes "romantically"
wild and intractable (large forests reappear). In the third, people
"go ... to work in a systematic way to contain or
'manage' ... natural energies" (p. 55). And in the
fourth, more chiliastic state evoked by Ellen in Nowhere's final
pages, a "political sublime" "may precipitate [the]
world, plunging it into a truly utopian 'change beyond the
change'" (p. 62).
In their "William Morris: An Annotated Bibliography
2008-2009" (Journal of William Morris Studies 19, no. 3), David and
Sheila Latham list, review, and arrange books and articles devoted to
aspects of Morris' work under the rubrics "General,"
"Literature," "Politics," "Book Design,"
and the "Decorative Arts." Their work is helpful as always,
and the distribution of their rubrics is informative in its own right:
ten of their one hundred forty entries consider Morris' book
designs, twenty-one his socialist endeavors, thirty his literary
writings, and fifty-three the rest of his decorative artwork.
This has been an unusually good year for biographical and
bibliographical studies of the Pre-Raphaelites. Next year's woods
and pastures new will be graced (I hope) by assorted sprigs and shoots
inspired by the Rossetti Archive and Rossetti's Correspondence, and
the first coraprehensive edition of Jane Morris' Letters.