Lecture 19

History of English LiteratureCOMSATS Virtual Campus Islamabad

In the later Victorian period a movement took place in English poetry, which resembled something like a new Romantic Revival. It was called the Pre-Raphaelite Movement and was dominated by a new set of poets-Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris, who were interested simply in beauty. They were quite satisfied with the beauty of diction, beauty of rhythm, and the beauty of imagery in poetry.

They were not interested in the contemporary movements of thought which formed the substance of Arnold’s poetry, and had influenced Tennyson a good deal. They made use of the legends of the Middle Ages not as a vehicle for moral teaching or as allegories of modern life, as Tennyson had done, but simply as stories, the intrinsic beauty of which was their sufficient justification. There was no conscious theory underlying their work as there was in the case of Arnold’s poetry.

It was in 1847 that a young artist named Holman Hunt came under the influence of Ruskin’s first volume of Modern Painters. He along with his friends, Millais and D.G. Rossetti, who were also painters, determined to find a club or brotherhood which should be styled Pre-Raphaelite, and whose members should bind themselves to study

Nature attentively with the object of expressing genuine ideas in an unconventional manner, in sympathy with what was ‘direct and serious and heart-felt’ in early Italian painting before the artificial style of Raphael. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lasted for a very short time, but its effect upon the plastic arts was far-reaching and revolutionary. D.G. Rossetti who was a painter as well as poet, introduced these principles in the field of poetry also.

The Pre-Raphaelite school of poetry did not regard poetry as being prophetic, or as being mainly philosophical. Their poetry did not concern itself with intellectual complications after the manner of Browning, nor with social conditions.

Thus it divided itself sharply from the great writers of the time—Tennyson, Browning and Arnold. It was not an intellectual movement at all, but it brought back the idea that poetry deals with modes of thought and feeling that cannot be expressed in prose. Moreover, it gave greater importance to personal feeling over thought.

It also introduced symbolism which was so far rare in English poetry, and insisted on simplicity of expression and directness of sensation. The fleshly images used by the Pre-Raphaelite poets were full of mysticism, but the Victorians who considered them as merely sensuous were shocked by them.

Born 1828 in London Father was an Italian patriot exiled from Naples for his

political activity and a professor of Italian at King’s College Mother was half Italian Children Dante, William and Christina grew up fluent in

Italian and English Dante attended Kings College In 1846 he was accepted into the Royal Academy to study

art He left to study under Ford Maddox Brown In 1848 he, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais

began to call themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group attracted other young painters, poets and critics

In 1849 Dante exhibited his first paintings He met Elizabeth Siddal, who became a model for many of

his paintings and sketches. They married in 1851 Dante later met and fell in love with Jane Burden who later

married Morris. Janey Morris became one of Rossetti’s idealized women

After the death of his wife, Rossetti lived with Swinburne, his brother Michael, and George Meredith. He continued painting and writing poetry

One of his models Fanny Cornforth became his mistress In 1872 Rossetti suffered a mental breakdown He died in 1882.

Developed out of Romantic Movement A call for a fresh vision, a challenge to orthodoxies Truth was not a given fact but something relative

to the individual mind Aim to go back to a more genuine art, rooted in

realism and truth to nature Bright paintings on a white background Attention to detail and color Subjects from medieval tales, poetry, and religion Drew upon the works of Shakespeare, Keats, and

Tennyson

Longing to return to world of medieval Christendom

Combination of Anglican piety and Italian impetuosity

Attention to detail Sister arts of painting and poetry

Born Dec. 5, 1830 In 1848 became engaged to James Collinson, but broke off

engagement after he reverted to Roman Catholicism Christina and her mother attempted to support the family by

starting a day school, but the attempt failed She was in love with Charles Cayaley, but refused to marry

him because he was not a Christian At first drawn to the evangelical branch of the Church of

England, but later drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840’s

After rejecting Cayley, she lived vicariously in the lives of other people

After 1875 involved with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

Last twelve years of her life were quiet ones Died of cancer Dec. 29, 1894.

Never completely a part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866) Themes of frustrated love and tension between desire and

renunciation characterize her poetry Gothic strain in her poetry Poetry is characterized by hiddenness and reserve Art is a refuge Art mediates between this world and the transcendent world Poetry mediates between religious values and aesthetic

values of Pre-Raphaelite movement An aesthetics of renunciation

An allegory of temptation and redemption The little men represent worldly affections The two sisters could be the two sides of

Christina’s own character Redemption of a guilty person by an

innocent one Analysis of gender roles

William Morris was born on March 24, 1834, at Elm House, Walthamstow.

He was the third of nine children and the oldest child of William and Emma Shelton Morris. His famile was very well off and during Morris's youth became increasingly wealthy: at twenty-one, Morris had an income of £900, quite a sum in those days.

Morris's childhood was a happy one. He was spoiled by everyone, and was rather tempermental, as in fact he would be for the rest of his life: he would throw his dinner out of the window if he did not approve of the manner in which it had been prepared. He was smitten at a very early age, as many young gentlemen of his day were, with a great passion for all things mediaeval.

At age four he began to read Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels, and he had finished them all by the time he was nine.

In 1859 Morris married Jane at Oxford. Morris's marriage was a very difficult one: Jane was moody and frequently ill, and within a few years of their marriage, playing Guenevere this time, had embarked upon a long affair with Rossetti, which permanently strained Morris's relationship not only with Jane herself but also with the man who had been first one of his heroes and then one of his closest friends.

In 1862 Morris designed the first of many enormously influential wallpapers for the Company.

1870 saw the publication of Morris's prose translation of the Volsunga Saga, The Story of the Volsungs.

Morris saw the Socialist movement as a way to resolve the problems his problems of poverty, unemployment. He also thought that the movement could help fix the death of art and the growing gap between the upper and lower Classes which he saw as being the pervasive legacy, in Victorian society, of the ongoing Industrial Revolution.

Over the next few years Morris wrote socialist pamphlets, sold socialist literature on street corners, went on speaking tours, encouraged and participated in strikes and took part in several political demonstrations. In July, 1887 Morris was arrested after a demonstration in London.

In 1891 William Morris became seriously ill with kidney disease. He continued to write on socialism and occasionally was fit enough to give speeches at public meetings. Morris political views had been influenced by the anarchist theories of Peter Kropotkin.

The William Morris Gallery, opened by Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1950, is the only public museum devoted to England's best known and most versatile designer. The Gallery is located at Walthamstow in Morris's family home from 1848 to 1856, the former Water House, a substantial Georgian dwelling of about 1750 which is set in its own extensive grounds (now Lloyd Park).

The Gallery's internationally important collections illustrate William Morris's life, work and influence. There are permanent displays of printed, woven and embroidered fabrics, rugs, carpets, wallpapers, furniture, stained glass and painted tiles designed by Morris himself.

The intricate layering and intertwining of organic forms in Morris's patterns for wallpapers, such as Jasmine, and textiles, such as his design for the printed textile Iris, are still instantly recognizable today.

Morris designed two wallpapers, Daisy and Trellis, in the early 1860s when he was living at Red House. Both designs were registered in February 1864 and the wallpapers were hand-printed for Morris by Jeffrey & Company of Islington. The Daisy pattern was directly inspired by a wall-hanging depicted in a 15th-century manuscript of Froissart’s Chronicles. Morris used similar ‘clumps’ of flowers for embroidery and tile designs of the 1860s.

http://www1.walthamforest.gov.uk/wmg/images/daisy1.gif

Like a number of Morris’s chintz patterns of the 1880s, Wandle is named after a tributary of the river Thames, the Wandle being the stream which flowed past the Morris & Company workshops at Merton Abbey, Surrey. Morris began the design in September 1883, writing to his daughter Jenny that, although ‘the wet Wandle is not big but small’, he wanted to make the pattern ‘very elaborate and splendid … to honour our helpful stream’.

The Brother Rabbit pattern was inspired, according to May Morris, by the ‘Uncle Remus’ stories which her father was reading to the family at their Hammersmith home, Kelmscott House. It was one of the first textiles to be printed at Merton Abbey, where Morris & Co. moved its workshop premises at the end of 1881.

Four months later he participated in what became known as Bloody Sunday, when three people were killed and 200 injured during a public meeting in Trafalgar Square. The following week, a friend, Alfred Linnell, was fatally injured during another protest demonstration and this event resulted in Morris writing, Death Song.

He became a committed socialist, joining the Democratic Federation and later founding the Socialist League and working tirelessly as a political activist. His embrace of socialism was a response to the new conditions of labor resulting from the industrialization of Britain.

He founded the Kelmscott Press, named after his beloved home, to print books "with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty." For Morris, the book was an art object to be appreciated in the same way as a beautiful home or a painting.

The Golden Legend finally appeared as the seventh book from the Kelmscott press, rather than the first, as was originally intended. The text, a thirteenth-century collection of lives of the saints, was chosen because of its centrality to medieval culture as well as its association with some of the most important early printers.

Morris & Company made an important contribution to the development of church decoration in the nineteenth century. The Firm joined a number of companies competing to meet the demand for stained glass created by the mid-nineteenth-century boom in church-building inspired by the Gothic Revival and the Anglican High Church movement.

In his last few years of his life Morris wrote Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome (1893), Manifesto of English Socialists (1893) The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and Well at the World's End (1896).

William Morris died on 3rd October, 1896.

Morris's ideas lived on even after his death, not only in the work of his protégé John Henry Dearle (1860-1932), who took over as artistic director of the Firm and guided it almost until its end, but in that of countless other artists and designers who, for a century and a half, have looked to Morris for inspiration. His influence extended from the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century to the organic modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright in America and the stark functionalism of the Bauhaus in Europe.

Besides Rossetti and Morris, Swinburne was another Victorian poet who is reckoned with the pre-Raphaelites, though his association with them was personal rather than literary, and he belonged to the later styles of the movement. Unlike the other members of the group, Swinburne was a musician rather than a painter.

The poetry of Rossetti and Morris, however musical it may be, is primarily pictorial. Swinburne’s poetry lacks the firms contours and sure outlines of the poetry of Rossetti and Morris, but it has the sonority of the rhymes which links the verses together.

From his youth Swinburne displayed an extraordinary skill in versification and a gift of imitating widely different rhythms, not only those of English poets, but also those of the Latin, the Greeks, and the French.

It is in fact in the music of verse that Swinburne is pre-eminent. When once asked at an Oxford gathering, which English poet had the best ear, he answered, “Shakespeare, without doubt; then Milton;’ then Shelley; then, I do not know what other people would do, but ‘I should put myself.”

This claim, though made in all simplicity, is quite justified, and there is no doubt that Swinburne is one of the great masters in metrical technique. He handled the familiar forms, of verse with such freedom that he revealed their latent melody for the first time.

Swinburne’s poetry deals with great romantic themes—like Shelley’s revolt against society, the hatred of kings and priests and the struggle against conventional morality. He was also inspired by the French romantics, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire.

The appearance of his Poems and Ballads in 1866 created great excitement. The Victorians who had accepted Tennyson as the great poet of the age, resented the audacity of this upstart who, though possessing high technical skill, cared nothing for restraint and dignity. Arnold found many of his lines meaningless, and called him “a young pseudo-Shelly”.

Serious persons were perturbed by his downright heterodoxy. His violent paganism was the first far-heard signal of revolt that was to become general till a generation later. The young, however, were carried away by the passion of his verse, his intoxicating rhythms, and the new prospects of beauty which seemed to be opening in English poetry.

Swinburne first became known by his Atalanta in Calydon (1865), a poetic drama, distinguished by some great choruses, especially the one that opens, ‘Before the beginning of the years’.

Swinburne was essentially lyrical even when he attempted drama, and the success of Atalanta in Calydon was due to the choral passages possessing great lyrical quality. Dramatic movement and the creation of characters were outside Swinburne’s range. He wrote other dramas—Bothwell(1874), and Mary Stuart (1881) both on a period of history in which he was passionately interested. But, above all, Swinburne is a lyrical poet and he never surpassed or equalled the Poems and Ballads, (1886).

In his later poems—LausVeneris, The Garden of Proserpine, The Tymn to Proserpine, The Triumph of Time, Ltylus and Dolores, there is a repetition of images and ideas already familiar. These songs of love were succeeded by poems dedicated to national liberty, especially that of Italy, for Swinburne was an ardent admirer of Mazzini.

In A Song of Italy (1867) and Songs before Sunrise (1871) he gave lyrical expression to his passion for freedom. Two other volumes of Poems and Ballads appeared in 1878 and 1889. His later poems—Studies in Song (1880). A Century of Roundels (1883) and Tristram of Lyonesse(1882) show more of metrical skill than lyrical power.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jmorris.htmhttp://www.victorianweb.org/authors/morris/wmbio.html

History of English Literature by Dr. Mullik