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William Morris: A Life for Our Time

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
800 Seiten
Englisch
Faber & Fabererschienen am22.01.2015Main
Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, and described by A.S.Byatt as 'one of the finest biographies ever published', this is Fiona MacCarthy's magisterial biography of William Morris, legendary designer and father of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement. 'Thrilling, absorbing and majestic.' Independent 'Wonderfully ambitious ... The definitive Morris biography.' Sunday Times 'Delicious and intelligent, full of shining detail and mysteries respected.' Daily Telegraph 'Oh, the careful detail of this marvellous book! . . . A model of scholarly biography'. New Statesman Since his death in 1896, William Morris has been celebrated as a giant of the Victorian era. But his genius was so multifaceted and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time - possibly of all time - could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and ranked as a poet with Tennyson and Browning. In her definitive biography - insightful, comprehensive, addictively readable - the award-winning Fiona MacCarthy gives us a richly detailed portrait of Morris's complex character for the first time, shedding light on his immense creative powers as artist and designer of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry, and books; his role as a poet, novelist and translator; on his psychology and his emotional life; his frenetic activities as polemicist and reformer; and his remarkable circle of friends, literary, artistic and political, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. It is a masterpiece of biographical art.

A former Guardian critic, Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of the leading writers of biography in Britain with her widely acclaimed Eric Gill (1989). Her next book, William Morris (1994), won the Wolfson History Prize. Her Byron:Life and Legend (2002) has been described as 'one of the great literary biographies of our time'. She also received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Last Pre-Raphaelite (2011), and was awarded the OBE in 2009. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. She was married to David Mellor, one of Britain's leading industrial designers. She died in 2020 at the age of 80.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextWinner of the Wolfson History Prize, and described by A.S.Byatt as 'one of the finest biographies ever published', this is Fiona MacCarthy's magisterial biography of William Morris, legendary designer and father of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement. 'Thrilling, absorbing and majestic.' Independent 'Wonderfully ambitious ... The definitive Morris biography.' Sunday Times 'Delicious and intelligent, full of shining detail and mysteries respected.' Daily Telegraph 'Oh, the careful detail of this marvellous book! . . . A model of scholarly biography'. New Statesman Since his death in 1896, William Morris has been celebrated as a giant of the Victorian era. But his genius was so multifaceted and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time - possibly of all time - could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and ranked as a poet with Tennyson and Browning. In her definitive biography - insightful, comprehensive, addictively readable - the award-winning Fiona MacCarthy gives us a richly detailed portrait of Morris's complex character for the first time, shedding light on his immense creative powers as artist and designer of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry, and books; his role as a poet, novelist and translator; on his psychology and his emotional life; his frenetic activities as polemicist and reformer; and his remarkable circle of friends, literary, artistic and political, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. It is a masterpiece of biographical art.

A former Guardian critic, Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of the leading writers of biography in Britain with her widely acclaimed Eric Gill (1989). Her next book, William Morris (1994), won the Wolfson History Prize. Her Byron:Life and Legend (2002) has been described as 'one of the great literary biographies of our time'. She also received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Last Pre-Raphaelite (2011), and was awarded the OBE in 2009. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. She was married to David Mellor, one of Britain's leading industrial designers. She died in 2020 at the age of 80.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9780571265831
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2015
Erscheinungsdatum22.01.2015
AuflageMain
Seiten800 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse38310 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.1580987
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe





CHAPTER ONE
Walthamstow 1834-48


To this day´, said William Morris, getting aged, when I smell a may tree I think of going to bed by daylight.´ Scents could always trigger off a surge of recollections, stretching right back to his childhood. The sweet pungent smell of balm brought back with sharp immediacy very early days in the kitchen garden of the Morris home at Woodford, and the large blue plums which grew on the wall beyond the sweet-herb patch´. Scents for Morris had a potency that verged on the erotic. Look at Clara, charming suntanned unselfconscious heroine of his abandoned novel, posthumously published as The Novel on Blue Paper, making for the river on a blazing summer day, her feet bruising scent from the great horse-mint as she picked her way between the willow stems´, with wafting aromas of the marshland hay and clover, humming of the bees and the tinkle of sheep bells.

William Morris was born on 24 March 1834 into what he later described as the ordinary bourgeois style of comfort´. It was not a visually sensitive household. Discussing whether the love of beauty was natural or acquired Morris said his own love of beauty must have been inborn since neither his father or his mother nor any of his relations had the least idea of it. His father, also William, who was thirty-six at the time of his son´s birth, was by then a financier, making a small fortune as senior partner in a bill-broking business with an office in Lombard Street, in the commercial centre of the City. His mother Emma, whose maiden name was Shelton, had been a neighbour of the Morrises in earlier years, when their two families had lived in Worcester. There had already been some connection by marriage. The families were also intertwined in their tastes and expectations. The degree to which the marriage of his parents was an arranged marriage may have weighed with William, whose own marriage was to be so relatively reckless. The family kept up its connections with Worcester and Morris referred to being taken there on visits in the days when he sucked at a bottle´ and cried for his bamper´. He remembered Prince Arthur´s Chantry and the mediaeval tombs in the cathedral from a single later visit in the 1850s, when he went to see his aunts.

William was the third of his parents´ surviving children, and the first to be born at Elm House in Walthamstow. After they were married his parents set up house in Lombard Street, in rooms above the office. It was a convention in City firms in those days that a member of the firm should reside on the premises. They also had a cottage in Sydenham, for holidays and weekends. Their first child, born in Lombard Street in August 1827, was Charles Stanley who only lived four days. Then there were two sisters, Emma and Henrietta, born in 1829 and 1833 respectively. They were the close companions of William Morris´s childhood, and maybe this encouraged his later quasi-mystical belief in the significance of trios: he was always attuned to doing things in threes. After William came Stanley, born in 1837; Rendall in 1839; Arthur in 1840; Isabella in 1842; Edgar in 1844; and Alice who was born in 1846 and died in Tunbridge Wells as late as 1942. William´s brothers pursued the conventional professions, Rendall and Arthur becoming army officers and Stanley a prosperous gentleman farmer, breeding Jersey and Guernsey cows. Of all the Morris children it was only Isabella, leading light in the Anglican deaconess movement of the 1880s, who had any of her brother´s contrariness and zeal.

The Morrises developed substantial figures. Though the early engagement pictures of his parents show a relatively slight and even wistful couple, his mother with small corkscrew curls curtaining her forehead, the children acquired a certain weightiness, seemingly in keeping with their rising status in the world. In their photographs they stand well-upholstered and commanding with the square jowl that was even more pronounced in Morris´s sisters than his brothers. William escaped it: in the early portraits his face looks almost heart-shaped. But people used to comment on the heavy jowl-line of his daughters Jenny and May.

Morris believed in fate and, as he grew older and immersed himself in sagas, he came to espouse a particularly Nordic version of fate that he referred to as the Weird´. The idea of grand inevitability enthralled him: I am in the hands of Weird, to wend as she will have me,´ cries Osberne setting out on his heroic travels in The Sundering Flood, Morris´s last Nordic story. The Weird is inescapable, the thing ordained for you, a theme also explored in The Earthly Paradise with its six fairy ladies delivering their rulings over the cradle of Ogier the Dane. It was Morris´s own Weird to be born into a family so redolent of early Victorian bourgeois values: industrious; acquisitive; uncritical; incurious. Morris was himself industrious: his energy was legendary. In some precise respects he too remained the bourgeois. But it is also true that his upbringing within that narrow setting of commercial endeavour fed his later actions when he came to embrace the Socialist cause with the passion of the lover, in his own description. He attacked the middle classes, conscious he belonged to them, instinctively aware of what they were about.


*


I am a boor, and a son of a boor,´ William Morris stormed across the table at a London dinner party in the 1860s, his eyes set and his fist clenched. And indeed the Morris dynasty did have a certain ruggedness. His paternal ancestors on both sides were Welsh. His father´s father was apparently the first of this family of Morrises to drop the Welsh Ap´ ( son of´) from the surname. Morris´s grandfather had come to Worcester from a remote valley of the upper Severn in the late eighteenth century, setting up his business and transforming himself into a city burgess praised in contemporary records as the epitome of probity and very religious´. His wife Elizabeth, the daughter of a retired naval surgeon from Nottingham, was a tall and stately woman who in her senility became part of the extended Morris family at Woodford Hall in Essex, offering William a trip to her home town if he was a very good boy´.

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, William Morris was intrigued by his roots in wild Wales and its lovely ancient literature´, though he never acquired more than a few words of the Welsh language, which he described as difficult but beautiful´. He attributed his natural empathy with the Tristram sagas to Wales: All my literary life´, he wrote, I have been deeply moved by that Cycle of Romance, as indeed I ought to be, being myself Welsh of kin´. He blamed the Cymry for his dark hair and for his melancholy streak. When the chance came in the middle 1870s Morris was off eagerly to look at his lost Fatherland´. He loved its dreariness and mystery. He went as far as Towyn, a little queer grey Welsh town by the sea-shore on the flats under the mountains in the most Welsh part of Wales´.

William´s birthplace was an early nineteenth-century house with a large garden in what was then the Essex countryside. Commuterland loomed already. William Morris Senior travelled every day by stage coach to his office. Elm House was not a grand house: the Morrises got grander. But it was emphatically a gentleman´s residence, standing prominently on Clay Hill, rising ground which allowed vistas north-east across the valley of the River Lea towards Epping Forest, two miles or so away. J. W. Mackail, William Morris´s first biographer, was just in time to see Elm House before its demolition in 1898 and described a plain roomy building´ with the garden front facing south on to a large lawn surrounded by shrubberies and kitchen gardens, and a great mulberry tree leaning across the grass. Morris´s old Oxford friend Cormell Price, who accompanied Mackail on a sentimental journey around William Morris´s haunts, made the comment that the windows were set wide apart, so much so that the rooms tended to look dark. However, he added, by making a clean sweep of all the houses around under 40 years of age you can conceive it was a very pleasant spot´.



1 Elm House, Walthamstow, William Morris´s birthplace. Drawing, 1898, by E. H. New for J. W. Mackail´s The Life of William Morris.



Morris himself, with his intense consciousness of the political overtones of buildings, would later have dismissed Elm House as dull and bourgeois: he would have preferred to have been born in the little whitewashed cottage or the mediaeval hall. But the use he made years later of Elm House as the basis of Parson Risley´s rectory, in The Novel on Blue Paper, shows in how much detail it had lingered in his mind, and with what sense of ambiguity. The white panelled hall, with its stuffed tiger and its trophies of the hunting field; the wide carved staircase; the open glass door leading from the drawing-room out into the old-fashioned flower garden with its mulberry tree and straight-cut flower borders, and the great row of full-foliaged elms: the rectory is partly a place of loneliness, oppressiveness, and partly a place of decorous delight. It is wonderfully typical of Morris that he should use his birthplace as the background of a fable on the moral power of beauty to transform - and disconcert. Risley is a Morris villain, sexually crass and lamentably indolent, but as he wanders around his lovely garden in the evening, while the yellow sun...


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Autor

Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of theleading writers of biography in Britain with her widely acclaimed bookEric Gill, published in 1989.Byron: Life and Legend was described by A. N. Wilson as 'a flawless triumph' andWilliam Morris, described by A. S. Byatt as 'large, delicious and intelligent, full of shining detail', won the Wolfson History Prize and the Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Award. MacCarthy received the 2011 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography forThe Last Pre-Raphaelite. She was awarded theOBE for services to literature in 2009.Her most recent book isWalter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus, which was Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2019.