Edward Burne-Jones's Chaucer Portraits in the Kelmscott Chaucer

The Kelmscott Chaucer, the final cooperative venture of William Morris (1834–96) and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98), has always and rightly been praised as a major achievement in printing. Finished May 8, 1896, and issued June 26, 1896, the book was the culmination of Morris's work as a master craftsman and of his collaboration and friendship with Burne-Jones. Much has been made of Morris's skill in printing and decorative ornament. While Burne-Jones's achievements as a painter and his special devotion to Arthurian subjects have been the subject of recent major reconsiderations, his drawings in the Kelmscott Chaucer have received comparatively less attention, and his portraits of Chaucer have been little noted. These thirty-one portraits support the now generally held view of Burne-Jones as the "Victorian Artist-Dreamer."¹

Throughout their lives the two men shared an enthusiasm for manuscripts and books. Morris learned calligraphy and wood engraving early. He was busy with manuscripts from 1856 through the mid-1870s, when his illuminated manuscripts—most notably Virgil's Aeneid, for which Burne-Jones contributed illustrations—rivaled those of earlier centuries. Morris's skilled calligraphy gave him knowledge of the shapes of letters and of spaces. While at Oxford he bought old books, though he became a serious collector of medieval manuscripts and books only in the late 1880s. As always, he excelled, amassing "a library of higher quality than any other major English literary figure."² Its strength was approximately one hundred medieval manuscripts and fifteenth-century German and French illustrated printed books; these became models for printing at the Kelmscott Press, which was sometimes identified as "the final phase of the Victorian Gothic Revival."³ Morris judged "A beautiful Book . . . the most important production of Art and the thing most to be longed for," second only to "A beautiful House." Books, "medieval craftsmanship at its best," escaped the ravages of "restoration" that Morris deplored in nineteenth-century Gothic.⁴

At the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in London on November 15, 1888, Morris heard Emery Walker, a brilliant typographer, lecture about the connection between medieval illuminated manuscripts and the incunabula that were modeled on them. He also looked at projected photographs of type and saw that he could thus avoid working with small types. The well-known result was a long conversation that night, and many subsequent ones, for Morris was inspired to master a last craft. He founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891. It published fifty-three titles, another twenty were unfinished, and Sydney C. Cockerell cited an additional seven in his "Annotated List of All the Books Printed" that accompanied A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press, issued March 24, 1898, as the final item.⁵ Although Morris spoke of publishing a Chaucer as early as June 11, 1891, it was the last work completed in his lifetime.⁶ Morris's theory and practice help to explain its distinctive richness among Kelmscott's list of splendid books, notably the significance of Burne-Jones's unusually rich illustration. For Morris, bookmaking was "a typographical adventure."⁷ Thus illustration and ornament were an enrichment but not so essential as a book's "architecture"—its type design, its leading (or lack of leading), its word spacing, and its margins—and the quality of paper/vellum and ink.

Nevertheless, illustration was needed for the preeminent combination of beauty and meaning, as is evident in medieval art—and in the Kelmscott Chaucer:

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. . . . Not only is all its special art obviously and simply beautiful as ornament, but...