JAN MARSH is a writer specializing in biography and history.  She has written widely on the circle around William Morris, whose family home in Forest Road Walthamstow is now the William Morris Gallery, a community museum.  Jan Marsh is a member of the WMG advisory trustees. This is the first chapter of her new book, William Morris and Red House, published by the Chrysalis Group.  Red House in Bexleyheath was Morris’s first home after his marriage, designed to his specifications and decorated by himself and his friends. 

Later, Morris became a famous designer whose textiles and wallpapers are still in production, and the most visionary thinker of the emergent socialist movement. His concept of a better life for all is described in the utopian story News from Nowhere, which continues to inspire people all around the globe. William Morris lived from 1834 to 1896, and his slogan was ‘Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death’.

1859–60 

IN THE BEGINNING

In 1859, William Morris was 25 years old, and newly married.  Born in Essex, he was the son of a City broker who struck lucky with lucrative mining shares not long before his death in 1847.  On reaching 21, William inherited an annual income of around £700. 

He had also been brought up with a strong work ethic; it would not do to be ‘lazy, aimless, useless, all my life long.’   His first ambitions were idealistic: to work for social reform through church ministry, which chimed with his boyhood passion for things romantic and medieval.  But at Oxford, religion gave way to music, art and literature.   He became friends with fellow student Edward Burne–Jones, from Birmingham, and began to write poems and stories.  Then, after a summer vacation touring northern France  – nine cathedrals and 24 splendid churches – he told his mother he was going to train as an architect.   ‘It will be rather grievous to my pride and selfwill to have to do just as I am told for three long years, but good for it too, I think.’ 

In January 1856, he went to work for George Edmund Street, architect for the diocese of Oxford, where his supervisor was Street’s chief assistant Philip Webb.  A lifelong friendship began.  But this same year, through Burne–Jones, Morris also met painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and other members of the Pre–Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was persuaded that he too should become an artist.  ‘Rossetti says I ought to paint, he says I shall be able,’ he wrote. ‘So I am going to try, not giving up the architecture, but trying if it possible to get six hours a day for drawing besides office work.’  

Unsurprisingly, it was not possible.  In the autumn, Morris gave up architecture for painting.  He spent his time on drawing and illumination, on poems prompted by Rossetti’s intense watercolour depictions of chivalric scenes, and on decorating archaic–style furniture for the rooms he shared with Burne–Jones in Red Lion Square, Holborn.  Huge, unwieldy chairs, one semi-circular stool built like a pail, a massive great settle with cupboards above.

It was a time of vigorous and varied but rather unfocused activity.  In Oxford at midsummer 1857, Morris and Rossetti met the architect of the  University Museum and the Union Society debating hall.  Rossetti at once offered to lead a team of artists to decorate the hall with murals depicting the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.  On this vacation project, undertaken with great high spirits and small skill, Morris was first to start and first to finish. Then he began a decorative pattern for the entire roof.  

In October, Rossetti and Burne–Jones went to a touring theatre company performance, and in the audience spotted a local girl named Jane Burden, whom they persuaded to sit as an artist’s model.  Rossetti cast her as Arthur’s adulterous Queen Guinevere.  When he left Oxford to join his fiancée Elizabeth Siddal, Jane continued to pose, this time for Morris, as La Belle Iseult.   By March 1858, when Morris’s first book, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, was published, he was engaged to Miss Burden. The wedding was fixed for April the following year.   Some of his friends were appalled.  ‘To think of his marrying her is insane,’ joked young Algernon Swinburne; ‘to kiss her feet is the utmost men should dream of doing.’

Though discouraged by his inability to draw human figures, Morris worked intermittently on two paintings, one of Iseult in her bedchamber with Tristram’s dog curled up on the bed, and the other of the dog recognising a disguised Tristram.  In August, he took another trip to France, this time in the company of Charles Faulkner, an Oxford friend, and Philip Webb, with whom Morris shared a lifelong pleasure in exploring old buildings.  En route, they conceived the house Morris and Jane would inhabit after their marriage.

Morris was short, robust and bushy–haired.  He had a good appetite for wine and food, and a consequent tendency to stoutness that led to his nickname ‘Topsy’ after the fictional character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who thought she ‘just growed’  Temperamentally, he was self–reliant and good–natured, with a tendency to violent rages that his friends provoked, knowing how easy it was to wind him up, and that the explosions would be over as swiftly as they began.   ‘He is plain spoken and emphatic, often boisterously,’ observed a later acquaintance, but ‘without an atom of irritating matter.’  

Tall, slender, dark–haired and reserved, Jane Burden was 18 at the time of their engagement.  By her own admission, she was not in love with Morris.  But she was young, ignorant and very poor.  Her father was a stableman and her mother a laundress; Jane, older brother and younger sister lived in a backyard hovel.  Overawed by the artists’ admiration, she was dazzled by the proposal, which meant a life of comfort for herself and her family.  Inspired by the chivalrous tales he was reading and writing, Morris enjoyed sharing his knowledge of history and literature, and saw no class obstacle to marriage, despite his mother’s evident dismay.  

During 1858, Jane was educated to become a rich gentleman’s wife.  Hitherto, she had belonged to the ‘servant class’; henceforth she would employ and instruct household servants.    She became an avid reader and lover of music, learning to play the piano, and also a skilled needlewoman, who would be renowned for her embroidery.    Her first trip abroad, indeed her first journey beyond Oxford, was on honeymoon to Belgium and Paris in May 1859.  On return, the young couple took lodgings near Holborn, and Jane was introduced to society.   Quiet and shy in company, she was called ‘Janey’ by her husband and the close circle of his friends, who quickly became hers too: Gabriel and Lizzie Rossetti, Edward and his wife Georgiana Burne–Jones, Ford and Emma Madox Brown, Swinburne, soon a loyal admirer, and particularly Webb, who had also grown up in Oxford.  By midsummer the plans for the new house were complete.

Philip Webb was three years older than Morris, the son of a physician and second of eleven children.  Trained by architect John Billing in Reading, he joined G.E. Street’s Oxford office in 1854 and moved with it to London in autumn 1856.  Through Morris he soon met Rossetti and the rest of the Pre–Raphaelite circle, in which he became a valued and always self–effacing figure, well liked by male and female friends.   Tall and sober, his serious demeanour was leavened by a ready wit that made him a popular guest.  Aiming ‘to consume the least possible, yet without impoverishment’, his taste was for simplicity and quality.  He refused to create a large architectural practice, preferring to design everything himself, despite knowing this meant a modest income, insufficient in Victorian eyes to keep a wife and family.  Disliking attention, he also declined to publish or publicise his work.  Perhaps the key figure in the creation of Red House, Webb is the most elusive, but his architectural commissions and correspondence testify to personal integrity and long, faithful friendships.

He refused to take a fee for designing Morris’s house; this was a commission between friends, and an opportunity to display his skill.  As the plans proceeded, Webb remained in Street’s office until May 1859, when building began, and then set up his own practice in Great Ormond Street, close to the Morrises.  It is thought he had already received a second commission for an artist’s house, from painter J.R. Spencer Stanhope.

Towards the end of his life, Webb declared that no architect should design a house before he [sic] was forty.  But had he followed this precept, not only would Red House have taken a wholly different form, but Webb’s career would have followed another trajectory.   As it was, his ideas and Morris’s money combined at a unique moment to create a building that commands historical attention. 

As construction proceeded, Morris and Jane moved into the neighbouring house, so that Morris could oversee the builders and effectively act as site manager.  Incapable of idleness, he was doubtless also planning the interior decoration and preparing the garden.   Around the beginning of April 1860, Janey became pregnant: Red House would be a family home