6	VISUAL INTERLUDE II

“This New-Old Industry”:
William Morris’s Kelmscott Press

Isabel Hofmeyr has described Gandhi’s work on a collectively owned printing press during his South African years as the indispensable ground for his later political work. In navigating some of the pitfalls around print production at the Phoenix commune from 1907 onward, she argues, Gandhi put himself on the path toward his most radical political forays. William Morris may look like almost the opposite case. After a decade with a wide range of artistic activities explicitly tied to his socialist ideals, in the late 1880s he began designing medievally inflected books at Kelmscott Press: seemingly a retreat from politics altogether. To some contemporaries, Morris in those final years was reverting to a childhood spent charging around the New Forest in a suit of armor, a Scott novel tucked under his arm. Reports find him playing checkers with his wife Jane on a medieval board, cloaked in a medieval robe, or boasting to friends not that he bought but rather that he “cheapened an old chest.”¹

Does that make Gandhi a progressive success story and Morris a self-made refugee from the world of politics, who forsook dry, unpromising political landscape for what Hannah Arendt disparagingly called the “oasis of art”? No; the bases for Morris’s medieval passions were more artisanal than antiquarian, and they signal a different sort of radicalism. The detached Morris, the “idle singer” born “out of his due time” was still crisscrossing the country on lecture tours, lugging his own architectural magic-lantern slides with him and consulting a matchbox filled with tiny photographs of the latest typeface for the Kelmscott Press.²

Moving temporarily away from the experiments with fictionality that accompany the semi-detachment of writers like George Eliot and Henry James, this chapter makes the case that for William Morris a form of aesthetic semi-detachment was a necessary step away from his present world that allowed him to return to that world from a different direction: a shift in vantage rather than an exit strategy. We know that in part because of the virtues that he praised in his artistic and political forebears, seeing the same kind of half-removal from their present-day experiences in them that he himself sought. We can also gain a sense of what might be called Morris’s strategic anachronism by exploring the uses that he and his collaborators made of magic lanterns and other modern technology in the founding of Kelmscott Press. It may seem an irony, but it is ultimately no paradox that Morris’s finest work in a medieval vein is shaped by his experiments with state-of-the-art technology. To boot, Morris’s prose romances of the 1880s and 1890s (intended as departures from the realist novel of his own day, even though they are never explicitly marked as time travels in the way that News from Nowhere is) were shaped by an aesthetic he understood as both “epical” and “ornamental”—that is, by its warring impulses within the book toward narrative sequence and toward decorative stasis. Those late experiments are crucial in understanding Morris’s idea of making art that could draw its audience into a mimetic reverie yet simultaneously make that audience aware of the artwork as a material object, in all its thingliness.

Morris’s artistic and political evolution in the last decade of his life (he died in 1896) depends on his looking backward to medieval and early modern workers for inspiration—but looking backward in a new way.3 His admiration for those medieval precursors to Kelmscott arises because he discerns, and seeks to make sense of, an immediate affinity between their and his own struggles with their respective media: his daughter May was right to call Morris’s venture a “new-old industry.” By Morris’s account, those medieval bookmakers had been haunted but also nourished by their own past; like him they had sought to make something new out of their encounter with that past’s demands. Accordingly, the complicated, politically germinative doubleness of Morris’s final few years comes into sharpest focus if we understand the crucial role newfangled photographic technology and the magic lantern—now shorn of the adjective magic and put to work as a key late-Victorian tool for technologies of enlargement and projection—played in the inception of Kelmscott.

PLATE 1. Caravaggio, The Musicians. The viewer is invited to meet the sightless gaze of a musician listening to his own inaudible playing (c. 1595, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 2. Hans Memling, Christ Blessing. At a double distance: Christ’s fingers, resting on the picture’s frame, both acknowledge and push up against the divide between viewer and painting (1481, oil on panel, 35.1 × 25.1 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; bequest of William A. Coolidge. Photograph © 2017, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

PLATE 3. John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents. Alone together: the awkward proximity of Mary and Jesus hints at a deeper incongruity in the painting, which shocked contemporary audiences with its scrupulous corporeal accuracy about a scene rife with supersensible feeling. Anatomy met theology, and Dickens was only the most vociferous of those left aghast (1849–50, Tate Britain). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 4. John Everett Millais, Ophelia. “Too equally distributed elaboration”: the vivacity of the natural details is both a triumph and an irritant, distracting viewers who seek instead an absorbing encounter with the central figure (1851–52, Tate Britain).

PLATE 5. John Everett Millais, Mariana. The captive’s isometrics: capturing the tedium of eventless life, with all its inaction condensed into a depictable instant (1851, Tate Britain). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 6. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Reading from Homer. Almost audible: the interlocked hands of the listeners register their reverent intensity as part of the ongoing event (1885, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 7. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sappho and Alcaeus. Unacknowledged touch: Sappho is both an absorbed auditor and the tangible surface on which her beloved’s hand rests. (1881, Walters Museum, Baltimore). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 8. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Unconscious Rivals. “Peculiar doubleness”: women united by a handclasp—and by their unwitting rivalry for whomever it is they are craning to see or to hear (1893, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

MATERIALITY IN THEORY: ART’S OBJECTHOOD RECONSIDERED

The uses to which Morris put the magic lantern for his Kelmscott venture—antiquarian and hypermodern both—give a hint of the direction his experiments in the 1890s took. The aesthetic innovations developed by gazing into a mirror of past practice led him to refract contemporary politics through the lens of art. This is a complex historical puzzle: are the key pressures that motivate Morris contemporary, and the turn to the past merely an outlet for his topical cogitation? Or is Morris primarily engaged in recovery work, cloaked at least intermittently in modern shape simply so as to be acceptable to contemporary audiences? In disciplines such as book history and media studies, questions of materiality have always been foregrounded in ways both empirical and theoretical. The past decade has seen the development of some valuable new approaches to the materiality in the aesthetic realm, as well, moving toward a new field that might be paradoxically labeled “materiality theory.”4 Recent work (by Isobel Armstrong, Jennifer Roberts, Leah Price and others) can help make sense of Morris neither as entirely dreamy nor entirely engaged: an artist whose artisanal retreat into a new kind of book production explores and reflects on a new way of living at once in and out of his everyday world. William Morris conceives of his Kelmscott Press books as both the medium upon which representation occurs (the text’s material substrate, the signifying object) and also as the set of signs that reflect upon their own status as works of art (the signifying object).⁵

Accordingly, this chapter’s approach to Kelmscott Press and the role new technologies played in its inception begins by considering what can be gained from Isobel Armstrong’s 2008 Victorian Glassworlds, a compelling example of a new kind of materiality studies, one that investigates boundaries or crux points where new ideas about the limits of materiality are coming into being. Armstrong reveals the oft-overlooked developments that made that triumph of sheet glass profoundly transformative, demonstrating how lenses, mirrors, and omnipresent windows could reshape both lived environment and scientific practice. Victorians, by Armstrong’s account, saw glass as simultaneously medium and barrier, an industrial product that “makes evident its materiality as a brittle film” between viewer and world, which also allowed that world to come through or bounce off it in a dizzying range of magnifications, refractions, and reflections that forced viewers to contemplate objects both in their original and in their glassed manifestations.⁶ At the core of Armstrong’s approach is the idea that we ought to look carefully at what particular material, artisanal, and technological practices imply about how representation operates, and what the relationship is between objects and the people who make or use them.

This crucial idea—that we find ideas not so much in things as in a thick description of the practices and cogitation that brought those things into being, and placed them where they are—also shapes Jennifer Roberts’s Transporting Visions. Roberts explores the way nineteenth-century American visual artists grappled with the tactile resistance that arises when mobility increases, crediting artists with having developed an account of what it means for their paintings simultaneously to represent and materially inhabit the actual world:

Pictures in early America (a social and spatial world notable above all for its great distances) were marked by their passage through space—not only by the crushed corners, craquelure, and other indexical injuries that they may have sustained along the way, but also by their formal preprocessing of the distances they were designed to span. The friction of distance, in other words, made itself felt not only on the outsides but also on the insides of pictures: in their emblematic and allegorical configurations, their calibrations of scale and dimension, their management of the sensory matrix of delayed beholding.7

The recent resurgence in media studies has also increased the overlap between straightforward book history and more hermeneutic sorts of textual analysis: for example, important recent work (by Blair, Kafka, and Soll) studies the ways in which practices like note taking, recordkeeping, and book publishing have shaped and been shaped by evolving intellectual norms for defining textuality, fictionality, and aesthetic value. Similarly, Leah Price’s work on the shifting ways in which the mixed material and ideational nature of books was understood in the Victorian era attempts not only to document and explain the historical shifts that occur during the nineteenth century but also to bring its analysis forward to explain why what we see of the past in the early twenty-first century may differ so greatly from what scholars perceived only a decade or so prior.⁸ Price’s point is that we still need to find a “history of books and reading” that acknowledges the difficulties involved in coming up with any one intellectual approach that could rest comfortably and continuously at the juncture point where books and reading converge.

All three approaches (Armstrong, Roberts, Price) are attuned to objects in their material form and in their status as representational, and all suggest that only such a bimodal approach will discern what is perhaps the most crucial element of all: the ways in which the object itself bears marks of the thought that its creator put into that very doubleness. Armstrong suggests the advantages scholars can gain from attending carefully to the ambient intellectual work that surrounds, for example, lens making, or the advent of new massive panes of glass. Roberts, operating with the same close attention to how material practices encode subtle semiotic assumptions of their makers and users, also directs our attention to direct representational claims made by the very art objects she is parsing. And Price’s account of the particular sorts of duality encoded into books as art objects turns our attention outward again to the divergent scholarly approaches that can produce different accounts of what looks to be the “core” meaning of an object. Kelmscott Press as an artistic venture owes something to medieval bookmaking and something to late Victorian technologies that might reanimate those past practices. They owed more, though, to the practical-minded idealism of William Morris, conjuring up a “new-old industry” as semi-detached from its time and milieu as the man himself. Consider what he made of Emery Walker’s lantern slides.

LANTERNS, MAGIC AND OTHERWISE

It is no secret that Morris’s decision to found the Kelmscott Press owes something to the role magic lanterns and “lantern lectures” played in the public intellectual life of the 1880s. Until recently, though, not much scholarly attention has been focused on magic lanterns themselves. Even today, to the extent literary scholars consider magic lanterns in the nineteenth century at all, their image is as quaint precinematic “attractions.” It’s hard to blame us: if you go by what the fiction of the day has to say, lantern shows were spectacles defined chiefly by the experience of succession without sequence. That is, these were idle entertainment that followed one image after another, but were disorienting (sublimely or ridiculously) because they lacked any underlying logical order. A remark by Rochester to Jane in Jane Eyre provides a telling template for the Victorian novel’s take on lanterns:

I wonder what thoughts are busy in your heart during all the hours you sit in yonder room with the fine people flitting before you like shapes in a magic-lantern: just as little sympathetic communion passing between you and them as if they were really mere shadows of human forms, and not the actual substance.9

Brontë turns to the magic lantern to evoke Jane’s social detachment from the scene before her: pictures in a magic lantern are shadows and hence demand no “sympathetic communion.” That detachment depends upon the untethered “flitting” that goes along with images that whip successively by without ever resolving into a single comprehensible whole. In short, the sensation of visual disconnection—the images are here in the room and yet they can’t see me, we are in truth nothing to each other—ultimately justifies Jane’s social and moral neglect of the “fine people.”

It is in the same spirit that Eliot deploys the magic lantern in Middlemarch when describing Dorothea’s state of sublime overthrow in the face of the wonderful but horrible art of Rome.

Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.10

These “magic-lantern pictures of a doze” are consecutive but without coherence. Moreover—like Marcel’s childhood show of Genevieve de Brabant a half century later in Remembrance of Things Past—they overlay Dorothea’s reality without actually impinging on it. For Jane Eyre, a magic lantern’s passing show figures forth a social burden—her duty is to interact instead of treat those passing people as an evanescent show. Here the effect at issue is aesthetic, with a magic lantern standing in for sleep’s illogical sequelae.

Such novelistic accounts, though, leave out a key aspect of Victorian lantern culture. Public lantern shows in the late nineteenth century were frequently (perhaps even usually) not phantasmagoric and spectacular but factual, expositional, and didactic. Lightman, Fyfe, and other historians of science have pointed to the importance of lantern-wielding scientists, as well as spectacular visual displays of information ranging from the celebrated Reverend John Wood to the little-known lecturers who might be found displaying Krakatau to Fairfield one night, New Haven the next. “Lantern lectures” (the word “magic” starts to drop out of newspaper accounts of the events in the 1880s) mustered facts and presented evidence about places unknown more often than they dazzled and deluded.

It is entirely in the spirit of the age that when Jacob Riis first proposed the book that eventually became How the Other Half Lives (1889), he announced his intention to shoot “a series of view[s] for magic lantern slides, showing, as no mere description could, the misery and vice that he had noticed in his ten years of experience.”11 In that claim, the word “showing” could not be replaced there by the word “recording”; the testimonial power inherent in the display of photographs as lantern slides is crucial. We might say that such lantern lecturers are early adapters of the latest technologically advanced wave of what Robert Nelson (writing about the birth of the art history slide lecture in the 1890s) calls forensic and epideictic expostulation.¹² That is, such prosaic lanterneers are developing new presentation styles that depend both on viewers’ appreciation of the slide’s present immediate and immanent qualities (the epideictic accordingly registers the slide’s aesthetic force ) and on their mining it for the information encoded in it, while the forensic approach aims above all for fidelity to the original meaning of the image that is represented in the room, aspiring to “truth to life.”¹³

Three aspects of the booming didactic and scientific lantern lectures of the 1880s and 1890s—call it the era of the “Prosaic Lantern Show”—are worth noting. Firstly, rhetoric that pointedly distanced the lantern from its magic antecedents was on the rise. Starting in the late nineteenth century, earlier incarnations of the magic lantern (invented in Northern Europe at the height of the Renaissance) were often depicted as Oriental, so as to underscore the lantern’s movement away from illusion toward rational and “Western” displays of visual information. Secondly, in the late nineteenth century, photographic lantern slides arrived. As Trevor Fawcett has shown, the technology to make photo projection reliable did not get solidly underway until the late 1860s, and the projective technology to make photographic projections really brilliantly legible on a large scale not until the late 1880s, but the impact was tremendous when that illuminated magnification did arrive.

Finally, magic lanterns operated as scientific experiments in action: if it is no surprise to learn that Marie Curie lectured with the lantern, it is striking that we can go back to the so-called “Grand Oxyhydrogen Microscope” in which “in lantern” experiments—including the disintegration of water into the very oxygen and hydrogen used to light the lamp—were shown in places like the Adelaide Gallery and the Royal Polytechnic Institution as early as 1842. Mannoni also reports that a popular showman in the 1870s experimented with projecting “slides” that were essentially two laboratory slides pressed together, between which he would insert various liquids that would, before the light of the lantern, dry and form various striking crystals.

These are effectively experiments not only conducted under the lights of the magic lantern but actually upon that light. In fact, such experiments in scalability and projection are worth comparing to T. S. Eliot’s eerie fantasy that what is inexpressible in ordinary speech might be expressed if we could lay our interiors on view by way of a magic lantern: “It is impossible to say just what I mean! / But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.” Eliot, writing in 1915, imagines the lantern providing an index (an x-ray) of the true contents of the nervous system. It is a vision that resonates with these lantern-aided experiments—and is profoundly distinct from the idea in Jane Eyre and Middlemarch that magic lantern slides are dizzying ephemera, generating succession without sequence.

EMERY WALKER’S SLIDES

Morris’s book production at Kelmscott Press takes advantage of emergent technology to gaze backward through time. This sort of doubleness makes more sense if we understand Morris’s turns toward lantern technology in the late 1880s and early 1890s as deriving in part from his appreciation of the lantern’s capacity for photographic magnification and illumination.14 The effect of new visual technologies on the Arts and Crafts circle generally, and Morris especially, was immense.¹⁵ Crucial to the story of Morris’s relationship to late Victorian visual technology is the 1888 lantern lecture by Emery Walker (self-taught printer and bookmaker) that inspired Morris to found the Kelmscott Press (though publication only began in 1891).¹⁶ The particulars of this lantern lecture reveal a Morris far less skeptical of the latest technology than has often been inferred from his Ruskin-inflected medievalism.¹⁷

Emery Walker was a printer whose coachbuilder father had gone blind when Emery was only thirteen. Intensely shy, he did master one public lecture. He delivered it perhaps twenty times in his life: its first airing, after considerable urging and handholding by Morris, came on November 15, 1888, in the New Gallery, Regent Street. Walker hung a sheet from the ceiling at the front of the large hall and positioned a magic lantern at the back. With the lantern illuminated, Walker shed his shyness. According to the adulatory account of a reporter on the scene (Oscar Wilde), a series of “books were also exhibited on the screen, the size of course being very much enlarged.”¹⁸ Reconstructing the conversations she had with her father after the event, May Morris captures their shared excitement:

[The audience was] much struck by the beauty of the “incunables” [examples of early printing] shown, and by the way they bore the searching test of enlargement on the screen. One after another the old printers passed before us, one after another their splendid pages shone out in the dark room.19

The next day, Morris visited Walker to propose the founding of the Kelmscott Press. Though it would take three years before the first books were made, this lecture seems to have been Kelmscott’s conceptual birthday.

Why? The actual images were ones Morris had seen before, repeatedly; indeed, many of the slides came from Morris’s own books, loaned to Walker so he could prepare the slides.²⁰ The difference lay in the image and not the object—or perhaps better to say in Morris’s experience of the image. We can assume that Walker was using one of the new, much brighter professional lanterns that Trevor Fawcett describes as having revolutionized the projection culture of the late 1880s: for medieval printed letters to stand the “searching test of enlargement on the screen” depended on the capacity of the projector to offer a new sort of steady magnification and illumination. Additionally, Walker’s stress on how crucial heavy solid black letters are for forming beautiful patterns on a page seems to have altered Morris’s sense of what role text should play on a page; Morris’s later drawings and plans for his own fount of type (Fig. 6.1) give a sense of the intense attention he and Walker brought to bear, as May Morris puts it, “on the proportions and angles of say a lower case i.”²¹

Walker began his lecture with an assertion that must have perfectly resonated with Morris’s own sense of the intimate relationship between art and artisanal craft: printing could only be defined “by the mechanical conditions under which it was exercised. Only when strictly with reference to these limitations was it entitled to be considered as an art at all.”²² Handwriting and beautiful typefaces consorted: an age with beautiful types, he asserted, must have had beautiful handwriting, and when handwriting declined, the types did, too. Walker also stressed repeatedly the importance of the “mechanical” relationship between graphic and type elements on the page, from which all further aesthetic success had to flow: “artistic relation was the outcome of mechanical relation; without the latter, the former was impossible.”²³

Finally, Walker showed at least one comparative slide (Fig. 6.2), apparently crafted so that two images (one from a Bamberg printed missal in 1481, the other from a manuscript missal from Wurzberg of the same era) could be viewed together.²⁴

FIGURE 6.1. William Morris, notes on the letter “h”: May Morris describes his meticulous attention, during the design process, to “the proportions and angles of say a lower case i” (The Morgan Library and Museum. PML 76897; gift of John M. Crawford Jr., 1975).

This splitting of the slide for heuristic purposes appears to be a significant milestone, preceding by at least a decade and perhaps more Heinrich Wolflin’s introduction of the two-lantern lecture—which in its latter-day incarnation via the slide projector (and later digital descendants, Powerpoint and Keynote among them) undergirds virtually all twentieth- and twenty-first-century art history instruction.25 This slide-splitting is a form of what Nelson calls “visual argumentation” that builds upon but also qualitatively transforms earlier experiments, among them Ruskin’s watercolor marks over paintings, Cockerell’s “comparative juxtapositions” by way of painted sheets, and Wood’s luminous pastel sketches.²⁶

If Walker’s is indeed a significant new use of the medium of the lantern lecture, that originality would be consistent with what Walker did for Morris in the months immediately following, as the Kelmscott font design got under way. As May Morris describes it,

Mr. Walker got his people to photograph upon an enlarged scale some pages from Aretino’s “Histroia Fiorietnina” printed in Venice by Jacques le Rouge in 1476 and pages of all the more important fifteenth century Roman types. These enlargements enabled Father to study the proportions and peculiarities of the letters. Having thoroughly absorbed these, so to speak, he started designing his own type on this big scale. When done, each letter was photographed down to the size the type was to be. Then he and Walker criticized them and brooded over them; then he worked on them again on the large scale until he got everything right. The point about all this—though it may be scarcely necessary to dwell on a rather obvious thing—that while he worked on the letters on this large scale, he did not then, as is often done with drawings for mechanical reproduction, have the design reduced and think no more about it; it was considered on its own scale as well, and indeed, when the design had passed into the expert and sympathetic hands of Mr. Prince and was cut the impression—a smoked proof—was again considered and the letter sometimes recut. My father used to go about with matchboxes containing these “smokes” of the type in his pockets, and sometimes as he sat and talked with us, he would draw one out, and thoughtfully eye the small scraps of paper inside.27

FIGURE 6.2. An illustrative split-slide: prepared by the typographer and publisher Emery Walker for an 1888 magic-lantern lecture on bookmaking and typography. One image is from a Bamberg printed missal in 1481, the other from a manuscript missal from Wurzberg of the same era. Split-slide reconstructed by John Dreyfus in Matrix 11, 1991; reprinted here with the kind permission of Matrix and the estate of John Dreyfus. HRef-104no. 11, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

In creating magnified images of fonts and then reducing their corrected descendants (Fig. 6.3), then repeating the cycle as needed, Walker did with photographic miniatures and enlargements what seems very natural to May but had apparently never been done before.²⁸

Two striking innovations underlie the font design at the core of Morris’s Kelmscott. His medievalist press stems from a burst of modernist ingenuity.²⁹ Walker’s split slide and magnified/minimized photos for font design fit the spirit of the 1880s. The larger cultural context for Walker’s glowing slides and photographic enlargements is (as Chris Otter argues in The Victorian Eye) a burgeoning late Victorian interest in “technologies of visual detail.” The advent of new ways of thinking about microscopic detail, he argues, depends on tools—x-rays and astronomical photographs, for example, but also detailed blueprints of intricate machinery—being made available to study microscopic features of a particular object with greater assurance.³⁰ Thinking about Morris’s lantern slides and his use of “smokes” in the context of Otter’s emphasis on these technologies of visual detail (and in relationship to Rebecca Lemov’s recent work on earlier nineteenth-century development of ideas about the storage and retrieval of visually encoded information³¹) offers a useful way to revisit Lindsay Smith’s argument that Morris has an “unsettled account of vision, with [an] odd blend of empiricism and transcendentalism.”³²

FIGURE 6.3. Handwritten notes on a photographic enlargement of Kelmscott letters in the design process. “When done, each letter was photographed down to the size the type was to be. Then he and Walker criticized them and brooded over them; then he worked on them again on the large scale until he got everything right” (The Morgan Library and Museum. PML 76897; gift of John M. Crawford Jr., 1975).

While I agree with Smith that Morris’s notion of vision is “unsettled” by the sorts of records that photography can make, Smith’s argument underestimates the dailiness of photography for Morris and the part that it plays in making “visual detail” more readily accessible to the artist’s analytical eye. Indeed, the case for Morris and the forensic utility of the magic lantern may also apply to a wider range of nineteenth-century thinkers whose experience with the pervasive facticity of technologies of visual detail in the late nineteenth century can be easily overlooked: Oscar Wilde’s admiration for the accuracy as well as the beauty of Walker’s slides is, in the context of Picture of Dorian Gray, a revealing detail. Even the very wonder that Morris evidences in response to lantern slides and photographs (May’s account of Morris’s scrupulous attention to his matchbox full of “smokes” [Fig. 6.4] during boring table conversation is a revealing tidbit) derives not from uncertainty about what is seen, but from delight with what is to be found in the suddenly palpable image.

FIGURE 6.4. One of the original “smokes”: photographic reductions of Kelmscott letters Morris had originally designed in a larger size (The Morgan Library and Museum. PML 76897; gift of John M. Crawford Jr., 1975).

The excited markings that Morris made on the enlarged photos of fonts as he worked toward the “golden” font, and the notes Walker and Morris exchanged as they squabbled over the virtues of woodcuts and electrostatic processes for reproduction, testify to Morris’s notion of letter-shapes as actively inviting photographic representation. This excitement sheds some light on what aspects of medieval book production (and reading practice) Morris valued—and also which aspects he ignored. Morris showed no interest in the medieval tradition of later interlineation of a book (that is, he failed to conceive of a book as something that might be modified by later generations of readers adding in their own commentaries). He did, however, have a very strong sense of successive waves of modification and experimentation, whereby an artist produced for publication what might be called, so many iterations had it gone through, a laminated artwork.

Problems of malleability, scaleability, and projectability of images play a key role in Morris’s thinking about Kelmscott books. Generally speaking, he comes across as skeptical about many aspects of shifts in scale as they apply to the making of books; for instance, he opposed making a small-format book out of a large one without considerable thought to the formal challenges posed by transposing text onto new pages. Yet there seems to be a conundrum here. How can Morris be attached principally to the art object as material item, yet simultaneously be a practitioner of the whole rhythm of magnification, illumination, and contraction which is indispensable for the key technological innovations that underlay Kelmscott Press?

The tension (or paradox) is a revealing one. Morris’s aesthetic is predicated on fixed sizes achieved out of fluidity, and stillness wrought out of infinite motion. This doubleness manifests itself in the interplay between the solid medieval (or Kelmscott) book and the infinitely changeable projection of letters through a magic lantern. Moreover, that doubleness finds an intriguing echo in the way that Morris sees the relationship between the art of the past and its present descendants. In both cases, Morris wants to make use of a fixed and available past in order to create, and play around with, a flexible and protean present, but his conception of the present design work always strives to retain within it a sense both of the real nature of the dimly discernible past and of the innovations and originality that are required to make a new manifestation that effectively recreates some aspect of the older work.

EMERGENT RESIDUALISM; EPICAL AND ORNAMENTAL

Morris’s overall account of what he valued in the woodcut books on which the Kelmscott aesthetic was based (an account most fully aired in his lantern lecture on the topic, composed in 1890 as he drew up the founding principles of Kelmscott itself) stresses two principles that underwrite his admiration. The first is temporal—not only is Morris himself undertaking a “new-old” art, but so too were the late medieval bookmakers he studies:

Though [this book-art] was produced by the dying Middle Ages, they [i.e., the Middle Ages] were not yet dead when it was current, so that it yet retains much of the qualities of the more hopeful period; and in addition, the necessity of adapting the current design to a new material and method gave it a special life, which is full of interest and instruction for artists of all times who are able to keep their eyes open.33

This temporal integration of two separate moments—the new printing press era and the old pictorial imagination of the Middle Ages that those books draw upon for their innovations—links these books to Kelmscott itself, which aims to keep something old alive and yet to do so by actively embracing the coming age and all its technological advances. Morris turns to the magic lantern because he wants to be shaped by the new and old at once—and he imagines that the fifteenth-century bookmakers he admires were similarly shaped by their present and their own backward glances. We might call this (modifying Raymond William’s distinction between “emergent” and “residual” world views) an ideology of emergent residualism. Morris makes use of the latest technologies (lantern-slide illumination and photographic enlargement) in order to recapture medieval aesthetic triumphs, so as to create them anew in the present.

Even in Morris’s own lantern lecture of 1890, we can discern the aesthetic drive toward totality that he explicitly adopts as the credo for his own Kelmscott books. It is however, a totality that runs along two parallel tracks. The two-track approach requires that Morris coerce graphic material into narrative service, as well as requires of typefaces that they serve graphic needs.34 The internal dynamic that Morris sees between “epical” and “ornamental” is revealed, for example, in his “Note by William Morris on his Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press.” That piece emphasizes “the force of the mere typography” in fifteenth-century books and insists that in designing the Kelmscott books he has to “consider chiefly the following things: the paper, the form of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words and the lines, and the position of the printed matter on the page.”³⁵ All of this, along with Morris’s belief in the importance of the horizontal rectangle—“The unit of a book is not one page but a pair of pages”—suggests a tension between the storytelling and the visual components of a book.

Morris never saw Kelmscott books simply as pairs of pages, horizontal rectangle after horizontal rectangle bound together. Alongside a conception of artwork as material object is Morris’s evident allegiance to a compelling “tale”—his devotion to Scott and Dickens was lifelong and passionate. That is, Morris sees the crucial binary between taking pleasure in the look—of text and image alike—and taking pleasure in what the words have to say. Morris praised medieval books as organic precisely because they at once adorned and narrated:

All organic art, all art that is genuinely growing, opposed to rhetorical, retrospective, or academical art, art which has no real growth in it, has two qualities in common: the epical and the ornamental; its two functions are the telling of a story and the adornment of a space or tangible object.³⁶

Telling and adornment are locked in an inescapably slippery double relationship: the one seeks to delay the viewer, to encoil her in arabesques, while the other rushes her on through permutations and personalities to arrive at the completed action. Morris approaches the problem of the reader’s movement through a book (from one spread of pages to the next) by conceptualizing the artwork as itself in motion. By his account, the “artistic” quality of his books depends upon a planned blending of the still decorative quality of the printed page and the movement of the narrative arc of the “tale,” the sequential imperative that keeps the reader turning pages.37 Morris does not give up on the inertia and the impetus implied by the word epical (Fig. 6.5). The words, or the story they unfold, have a temporal dimension—alongside the book’s existence as a durable thing of paper and ink and spacing. Not so much vibrating between the two as caught in an apprehension of both, Morris’s ideal book audience is aware of a life lived doubly, in and out of time.

The emergent residualism of those backward–looking medieval bookmakers aligns, then, with Morris’s almost paradoxical vision of the books themselves as at once epical and ornamental, defined by their rapidity of motion and their stasis both. Morris’s new understanding of the press’s capacities derives from Emery Walker’s “smokes” and his magic lanterns, fueled by photographs and testifying to the malleability of relics from the immutable past.

CONCLUSION: SLOW BOOKMAKING

This chapter has to this point emphasized Morris playing the role that Nelson calls the “epideictic lecturer”; that is, making the audience aware of being in the room with beauty. Indeed, those readers who find Kelmscott Press books difficult to read report feeling overwhelmed by them, brought to a standstill that makes absorption in the text qua text impossible. Yet Nelson’s notion of the “forensic gaze” also seems apt for the man who crisscrossed the country lugging his own architectural lantern slides with him. Walker’s split slides and disquisitions on type and handwriting are a crucial part of the Kelmscott collaboration, as well. Alongside that dreamer “out of his due time” is always Morris, the consummate craftsman, whose seeming detachment from the present is better understood as a tinkerer’s attachment to the past as mundane country. He remains the man who snapped at his daughter “in a moment of exasperation, a poor drawing of some medieval armor being in question: ‘No one can draw armour properly unless he can draw a knight with his feet on the hob, toasting a herring on the point of a sword.’”

Where does this discussion of the interwoven epical and ornamental, the emergent residualism of Kelmscott, leave our understanding of the magic lantern and of Kelmscott—both with regard to Morris as artist and, given the crux nature of late 1888, as committed socialist? In her late writings on Kant’s aesthetics, Hannah Arendt proclaims that a work of art cannot be a character—by which she means that an artist is guilty of “reifying” actions that belong to the realm where person meets person and turning those actions into mere pieces of work, inanimate and potentially deadly to genuine human interaction. For Arendt, the virtues of “mental visiting” hinge on the absence of any materialization of the forms by which such visiting takes place: in specifying the mental encounters that make up “representative thinking,” Arendt never mentions a page from which the departure occurs, never names an article that initiates the encounter.

Figure 6.5. “The telling of a story and the adornment of a space or tangible object”: William Morris’s book design for Kelmscott Press explores the persistent tension between the “epical” and the “ornamental.” The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (Kelmscott Press, 1892; courtesy of the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department, Brandeis University).

Morris discerns the same tension, but with the valence inverted. Morris says decisively in an 1893 interview that “a building and a book” are the “best work[s] of all” and that (contrary to J. S. Mill’s notion) “a character cannot be a work of art.”38 The two statements appear antithetical: Arendt faults artworks for trying to pass themselves off as human; Morris faults merely social aspects of a life for fraudulently impersonating actual artworks. Both positions draw a bright line between what occurs in the realm of art and in the realm of human interaction, and both discern dangers in crossing the line. What does that bright line mean for Morris’s socialism, whether sublimated into or annihilated by his turn toward the Kelmscott project in the early 1890s? The line from Shelley that Morris used to explain the Kelmscott project—“we must look before and after”—suggests he understands artworks to be durable in ways that an unmediated human character is not. If something of a person lives after them—if something of them contains within it a sense of what the unfolding future might be—that something is housed within the artworks they produce, which live on beyond them as (pace Mill) a character or a reputation do not.

It has proven difficult for later scholars to decide what this tangled relationship—the superiority of artwork to character, coupled with the necessity for human equality—implies for Morris’s politics and aesthetics. One possible solution would be to discern in Morris a belief in a utopic, art-mediated solution to present-day political travails. Jeffrey Skoblow’s Paradise Dislocated stresses Morris’s tendency to seek “the current,” arguing that Morris’s “aesthetic of habitation is a gesture towards the immediate, a politics of the antitranscendental.”³⁹ The ways in which Morris uses magic lanterns to make medieval books, though—and the ways in which his works of the 1890s cobble together an inherently uneasy mixture of the conception of the epical and the ornamental—suggest that Skoblow may be underestimating the bifurcated nature of Morris’s project. In order best to embody that “current,” Morris sees no choice but to make artworks that stand partially outside of it.

One theoretical frame for this chapter’s account of Morris’s experiments at Kelmscott has been the “materiality theory” implicitly offered by Armstrong, Roberts, and Price. It would be a mistake, though, to neglect Morris’s relationship to the wider world of Victorian print publication in all of its rapidity and profusion. Elizabeth Miller’s Slow Print (2013) explores various ways the late Victorian radical left sought political and aesthetic alternatives to the free flow of (commercialized) information and entertainment that by the end of the century defined the print-mediated liberal public sphere. Miller is interested in the bitter knowledge, beginning among mid-nineteenth-century radicals and socialists, that the “free press and free print” maxims of the earlier radical age had little relevance in a society where not the state but the commercial organs of publication exercised dominance over the circulation of ideas and of art.40 Socialists, anarchists, communists, and other opponents of class-divided liberal polity faced a promiscuous market-driven publication model that did not silence political dissent, but simply drowned it out in a raucous commercially motivated chorus.⁴¹

Faced with that exclusion by profusion, what were radicals to do? Morris’s poignant description of the “desolate freedom” that Commonweal had found outside the realm of widely circulating periodicals suggests the set of left-wing innovations that Miller sets out to explore: forms that avoided “selling out” partly by avoiding successful selling altogether. Miller’s account of Morris as aspiring to slowness may not be a complete explanation for the movement between new and old that I have been trying to map, nor the inward tension Morris discerns between the “epical” and “ornamental” aspects of a book. Like the notion of emergent residualism and May Morris’s notion of the “new-old industry,” however, Miller’s account of the appeal of “slow print” for Morris and his cadre sheds light on Morris’s use of a medieval craft legacy to fabricate books for a new century. Noticing the appeal of slow print in a rapid age also allows us to consider, as Roberts puts it, how the “friction” of the conditions of production can be registered “not only on the outsides but also on the insides” of artworks: not only in what they materially are but also how they depict the conditions of their work of representation. Parsing that inside aspect of Morris’s work requires noticing his sense that every artwork has to be understood as partially escaping from its own day—and also partially lodged within the material world from which it arose.

In fact, long before Morris himself had made use of magic lanterns for design purposes, he had already explored their use as a metaphor for grasping the artwork’s semi-detached relationship to its own day and place. The Prologue of his early epic poem The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) makes the metaphor explicit:

Folk say, a wizard to a northern king

At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,

That through one window men beheld the spring,

And through another saw the summer glow,

And through a third the fruited vines a-row,

While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,

Piped the drear wind of that December day.

So with this Earthly Paradise it is,

If ye will read aright, and pardon me,

Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss

Midmost the beating of the steely sea.42

The wintry blast that shakes the outside of the king’s hall (and, implicitly, shakes the outside of Morris’s own poem) stands in a fascinating relationship to the visions of the other three seasons that the wizard has “show[n]” against the hall’s windows. Kirchoff reads Morris as proposing that “an awareness of the limits of art is necessary if we are to understand its strength.”⁴³ We might also note that this shadowy isle of bliss, projected on three windows but incapable of silencing the ambient sounds of winter, is very like a description of a magic-lantern show, which allows audiences the glories offered through the eye, a glimpse into another world, without allowing them to tune out the sound or the chill of the actual world behind.⁴⁴

Two decades later, conjuring up visions of medieval books out of the slides that Emery Walker projected, Morris was again thinking about the relationship between a shadowy isle of bliss and the steely sea of a world filled with injustice and oppression. The world as it actually was to Morris in 1888 seemed a far cry from the idylls up on the screen. Turning those glowing images to ink-and-paper actuality, then, restores the sensation of partial remove that first arose when the wintry blast of everyday, rundown Victorian England roared behind the screens on which those images sunnily glowed.

Morris is a linchpin for a project that aims to grasp what impact ostensibly external factors like changing conceptions of visual technology and changing modes of publication had upon prose fiction’s crooked path through the nineteenth century. His musings on the lantern-slide quality of all fabulation are as crucial as his theory of the relationship between “epical” and “ornamental” in the book arts. Together, they suggest how consistently Morris strove to reconcile his image of aesthetics as a realm apart with his concrete practical knowledge of how any product of his hands was destined for a present-day audience in search of the partial retreat that the “epical” and the “ornamental” might supply.

To think of Morris as a writer of romances or of fantasy is not only to mark the ways in which his late works deviated from the fictional norms of the day, it is also to hint at a link between his socialist vision for artistic emancipation and the aspirations of a young writer whose rise to fame came just as Morris died. The “scientific romances” of H. G. Wells belong in the same kind of netherworld that Morris’s Kelmscott Press had triumphantly constructed. Raymond Williams influentially concluded that the main accomplishment of Wells is to loose on British letters a “confusion of forms.” If so, it is a confusion that may owe a great deal to the conglomerated work of the various “lesser arts” that William Morris drew together to build a “shadowy isle of bliss” in his Kelmscott books.