Algernon Swinburne, Sent to the Guillotine

"A.C.S. addressing the people"
Copyright: Syracuse University Library Special Collections

Many of William Morris's friends were famous in their own right. Algernon Charles Swinburne was one of these men, becoming well-known for his poetry in the late 1860s and the '70s. Swinburne is also well-known for his eccentricities. A tiny man with an enormous head crowned by fluffy red hair, he was a sight to see. He was also restless and enthusiastic. In short, he was easy to caricature. His friend Lady Trevelyan did just that in 1861, painting a silly watercolor of him on a Republican tirade.

This sketch, “A.C.S. addressing the people”, is now in the Special Collections of Syracuse University Library, where I stumbled upon it during a mission to read some of Morris's letters. The Library has kindly agreed to let me share the watercolor, which is directly referenced in Chapter IV of William Bell Scott's Autobiographical Notes. The quote explains why the figure of Swinburne is standing in front of a guillotine:

“Louis Napoleon, or, as Swinburne called him, "the Beauharnais," was now in his glory; Victor Hugo, and others dear to all of us, were refugees. Swinburne, always possessed by some pet subject of hatred or admiration, was carried away by un-governable fury at the success of the wretched adventurer ... now settled in the Tuileries, and practised his ingenuity in inventing tirades against him, sometimes full of humour and splendour, at other times grossly absurd. Lady Trevelyan, always ready to enter into his mood, used to assist him; but learning he was going to accompany his family to France, she predicted that he would be caught by the police, and sketched the fate that awaited him. The figure of A.C.S. addressing the people was wonderfully good.”

You can contact me at clarafinley1@gmail.com if you want to see a higher resolution image. Click to see more views and thumbnails! 

The Two Beatrices: A Companion to the New-Found Rossetti

"The Salutation of Beatrice" and "Jane Morris as Beatrice"
 Left, the newly discovered oil ( © Christie’s Images Limited 2012.)
Right, the watercolor via Rossettiarchive.org. [copyright DGR 1828-1882: An Exhibition (Tokyo 1990)]

After lying hidden in a private collection in Scotland for the past century, a forgotten oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Salutation of Beatrice,” will go on sale at Christie's at the end of May. It features Jane Morris in all of her glory as Dante's love, and it's been hailed as “the finest oil portrait by the artist to come to auction in over 25 years.”

Its appearance resolves some mysteries about Rossetti's work. The first mystery comes from one of Rossetti's letters to Jane, written late July of 1869: “I want much to get the little Beatrice I was doing from you finished,” he wrote, “but the hands are in the way as I think I must alter them and all the models have such vile hands.” When this letter was published in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence in the late seventies, the reference to the painting was a bit confusing, because the only likely candidate for a Beatrice from 1869 didn't have hands anywhere in the picture.

A footnote tried to get around the problem : “It is difficult to identify this picture. It may be the Beatrice … which is a replica of the head of the 1870 Mariana ... Having such difficulty with the hands he may have cut down the canvas and kept the head and shoulders” But the dating of the newly emerged painting - 1869 - means that we have a much simpler, and more likely, explanation for this reference.

Another mystery was the purpose of a Rossetti watercolor, "Jane Morris as Beatrice"(Alternately titled “The Salutation of Beatrice”). Some scholars thought that it was a study for an oil painting of a completely different design. We see now that it is obviously the same design as the discovered painting. If the dating of both works is correct, the watercolor was probably a copy of the oil painting.

May Morris's 150th Year

May Morris in a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1872

2012 is May Morris's 150th anniversary year, an occasion that the Royal Mail (UK) marked with bringing out a stamp featuring one of her lush embroideries.

May, Morris's second daughter, was an impressive textile designer and artist in her own right; she was also a close partner to her father during his years of Socialist activity. After her parents passed away, she lived out her days at Kelmscott Manor, with her devoted companion (and possible lover) Miss Lobb.

Marjorie Breakspear, the niece of one of May's friends, wrote a beautiful account of her days living in a cottage on Kelmscott Manor's grounds, and of her memories of May. May, though quieter than the brash Miss Lobb, was evidently up for a laugh:

“...May Morris came and dug up our potatoes, and it was a good joke for her when we offered to pay her at the current rate! She accepted the money, with much laughter, and spat on it in her hands, as she had seen the farm labourers do. She also kept goats, and loved the kids, gambolling over her head and shoulders. She liked knitting, but not crochet, and her favourite colour was a soft blue.”

Happy 150th birth-year, May Morris!

A Cheeky Letter from Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson, penning some grammar corrections.
(Top, a sentence to set Stevenson's teeth grinding.)

Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and a fan of Morris's poems, drafted this letter to Morris from his estate on a Samoan island in February of 1892. The “touches of affectation and constraint” weren't normal for Stevenson, so it seems he felt uncomfortable or even nervous about writing it. In the end he couldn't bring himself to send it. This was probably for the best. Morris wasn't overly sensitive to criticism, but he didn't exactly relish it.

“Master,—A plea from a place so distant should have some weight, and from a heart so grateful should have some address. I have been long in your debt, Master, and I did not think it could be so much increased as you have now increased it. I was long in your debt and deep in your debt for many poems that I shall never forget, and for Sigurd before all, and now you have plunged me beyond payment by the Saga Library. And so now, true to human nature, being plunged beyond payment, I come and bark at your heels.

“For surely, Master, that tongue that we write, and that you have illustrated so nobly, is yet alive. She has her rights and laws, and is our mother, our queen, and our instrument. Now in that living tongue where has one sense, whereas another. In the Heathslayings Story, p. 241, line 13, it bears one of its ordinary senses. Elsewhere and usually through the two volumes, which is all that has yet reached me of this entrancing publication, whereas is made to figure for where.

“For the love of God, my dear and honoured Morris, use where, and let us know whereas we are, wherefore our gratitude shall grow, whereby you shall be the more honoured wherever men love clear language, whereas now, although we honour, we are troubled.

“Whereunder, please find inscribed to this very impudent but very anxious document, the name of one of the most distant but not the youngest or the coldest of those who honour you, 

              Robert Louis Stevenson.”

Photo via Project Gutenberg: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls 

Happy 178th Birthday, William Morris!

Our lemon drizzle birthday cake for Morris.

Today I thought I'd write about what Morris did on his 44th birthday, 134 years ago. That year, he spent his birthday at “The Grange”, home to his friends Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones. Although it was March, it still felt like winter and snow came “with a sudden & mighty squall” at about 3PM.

His wife and teenage daughters were away in Italy, so they sent him notes and gifts through the mail. His daughter May, barely sixteen, sent him a stylish tobacco pouch. He wrote thanking her: “the shape ... is very pretty & the colour: only I ask you to put silk strings to it as cotton on cotton sets my teeth on edge: of course 'tis indigo.” It could be tough having a designer for a father.

The next night, he had a belated birthday dinner at his mother's house with his mother and his unmarried sister, Henrietta. He stayed overnight, and in the morning a servant gave him a haircut in front of his mother, sister, and a resident parrot.  Apparently, the parrot “was delighted” by these proceedings, drowning out their conversation as he “mewed & barked & swore & sang at the top of his vulgar voice.”

It was a very good birthday indeed.

All quotes from Norman Kelvin's The Collected Letters of William Morris, Volume I.

A Victorian Morris Joke

From the November edition of Punch in 1883:

Dueling Socialists

Swinish Luxury: Edward Burne-Jones's Heart of the Rose, based on a wall hanging he'd designed for Sir Lowthian Bell.

Warington Taylor, the business manager of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Co. from 1865 until his death by consumption in 1870, was a proto-Socialist. This fact came out fairly obviously in 1866, during the firm's decoration of St. James's Palace. At this time, he wrote* to Philip Webb: “Just remember we are embezzling the public money now - what business has any palace to be decorated at all?” Morris's daughter May later claimed** that Taylor had been instrumental in Morris's conversion to Socialism. This seems to be borne out by the timing of Morris's first overtly political work- a poem called 'God of the Poor', published in 1868 at the height of his friendship with Taylor.

So, why would Morris tell John Bruce Glasier, years later, that he “never knew whether the manager [Taylor] was at all inclined favourably towards Socialism”? Morris went on to say that he'd only discovered Taylor's leanings after he died, when “suddenly a curious thing came to light.” This was a document in Taylor's private desk, an estimate for the decoration of a church. Under the item "silk and gold altar cloth", Taylor had noted “...the above item is a wholly unnecessary and inexcusable extravagance at a time when thousands of poor people in this so-called Christian country are in want of food—additional charge to that set forth above, ten pounds.” “'That,' said Morris, 'at once explained our not getting the order; but I was more than delighted that the chap had done it. You see,' he added with a chuckle, 'I had succeeded in making the dear old chap something of a Socialist after all!'”

This is a jarring departure from May's claim. It might sound like Morris was grand-standing to Glasier, and willfully mis-representing Taylor, but this version of the story fits with how Morris viewed himself. Morris believed that he had been a Socialist, in some sense, for his entire life. In his 1894 lecture “How I became a Socialist”, he wrote “Now this view of Socialism which I hold to-day, and hope to die holding, is what I began with; I had no transitional period...” Apparently, the only change had come when he joined the Democratic Foundation in 1883, and converted to "practical Socialism".

He'd always had the ideal of Socialism in his mind, he explained, even before “modern Socialism” rose up. His study of history and art, and his reading of Ruskin, had pushed him “into a hatred of the civilization which, if things were to stop as they are, would turn history into inconsequent nonsense”. Thus he claimed that “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”

Morris may not have liked to admit it, but he had gone through a transitional period. To be sure, there's evidence that he had loved the medieval period, and hated modern civilization, from adolescence. But whether this caused him to think about the poor of Victorian England, or be inclined to Socialism from an early age is more doubtful. When he first arrived in Oxford, his friend Dixon remembered,“His manners and tastes and sympathies were all aristocratic.” Hardly promising traits for a Socialist. Even when he started the “Oxford and Cambridge Magazine” with his Oxford friends in 1855, it was a couple of his friends - not Morris himself - who seemed most interested in social issues.

In the article “Unhealthy employments”, for example, Cormell Price and Charles Faulkner wrote about the dangerous conditions suffered by match and cutlery manufacturers; and in an article attributed to Price, “The work of young men in the present age”, he asserted that “If we work with patient zeal we need not fear but that the poor will be oppressed no longer ... no longer will countless human beings herd together, day and night, in one small room”. By contrast, Morris's many of contributions of stories and poetry focused on a love and longing for the past, and betrayed no explicit interest in current social issues.

Jump forward to 1868, and Morris's strident poem “God of the Poor” presents a very different picture. The poem is about an evil, wealthy lord who treats poor people like dirt. The poem contains such cutting lines as “Twenty poor men's lives were nought/ To him, beside a ring well wrought./ The pommel of his hunting-knife/ Was worth ten times a poor man's life.” Or jump farther forward to the mid 1870's, when Morris's hatred of modern civilization had brimmed almost to the point of over-flowing. At this time, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, one of the wealthy clients of Morris's decorating firm, found him agitatedly talking to himself, and so asked him if anything was wrong. Morris wheeled around “like a wild animal” and said “It is only that I spend my life in ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.”

Had Taylor's personal influence, heightened by his tragic death in 1870, contributed to Morris's change; or had Morris's aesthetic hatred of his own era grown, un-helped, into a hatred of the era's inequalities? Morris claimed the latter; his daughter asserted the former. Who should we believe?

*See entry for 27 December 1866 for the reference to this letter.

** See entry for 3 March 1865 for the reference to this claim.

For the photo, thanks to: www.leicestergalleries.com