"The beauty of the bough-hung banks": William Morris in the Thames landscape
Date
2020
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University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation reexamines the work of the Victorian polymath William Morris (1834-1896) through his relationship with the landscape of the River Thames. Morris passed his whole life within the Thames’s system of streams and gentle valleys, and the river flows through his intertwined roles of designer, author, political thinker, and factory owner. Employing strategies of historic landscape studies, material culture studies, and ecocriticism, this project uncovers the centrality of the Thames in Morris’s life and works and thereby reveals new information about his inspiration and impact. Morris was a Londonder, but he eschewed the Victorian metropolis’s modern landscape of change and pollution, focusing instead on a pastoral vision grounded in the rural landscapes of the Thames and its tributaries. This pastoral manifested across his writing – from poetry and romantic fantasies to speeches on aesthetics and politics – but, this project argues, it can also be clearly seen in his designs, particularly the printed repeating patterns of textiles and wallpapers for which he is so well known today. The close connection between Morris’s most beloved countryside landscape, Kelmscott, and his patterns shows how the ecosystems and traditional agriculture of the Thames valley manifested in his visual style. Meanwhile, an inspection of the production history of those patterns – and especially the nine printed textiles which Morris named after tributaries of the Thames – uncovers the material inseparability of Morris’s works and his native river system. While the visual content of the patterns calls upon the rural landscape Morris idealized, their production demanded extensive engagement with the Wandle, the Thames tributary which ran through the middle of the Morris & Co. factory premises. The river’s water was used in every step of the textiles’ production process, and the associated waste products would have entered the stream. Thus, Morris’s relationship with the Thames and its tributaries reveals how he drew inspiration from the rural landscapes of the river and rejected London and modern systems of industry and pollution – but it also uncovers his inextricable place within those same systems.
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Keywords
British art, Design history, Ecocriticism, Landscape history, Victorian art, Morris, William