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  • A Genius for Money: Business, Art, and the Morrisons by Caroline Dakers
  • John Smail (bio)
A Genius for Money: Business, Art, and the Morrisons, by Caroline Dakers; pp. xiii + 326. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011, $40.00, £25.00.

James Morrison was born into obscurity as the son of an innkeeper in Middle Wallop, Hampshire. Unlike his brothers, who became farmers, he was apprenticed in his teens to a haberdasher in London and never looked back. When he died Morrison was worth two million pounds, reputedly the largest fortune of any commoner in Britain. Moreover, while keeping his feet firmly planted in the world of commerce, Morrison was able to establish himself as a member of Britain’s social elite, becoming a landowner, a prominent collector, a patron of design, and a political and intellectual figure of note. Caroline Dakers’s biography tells the story of this fascinating but little-known figure, exploring the means by which his extraordinary business acumen enabled him to transform his own and his family’s social station. The result is an engaging portrait of a man whose life suggests that we may need to rethink some of our assumptions about this era.

While the book does, broadly speaking, tell the story of Morrison’s life from beginning to end, the individual chapters are loosely organized around three main [End Page 120] themes. One set of chapters explores Morrison’s commercial and financial activities. Although he lived during the first industrial revolution of textiles, steam, and iron, the basis of Morrison’s fortune was neither industrial nor particularly revolutionary. Rather, he sold haberdashery, lots of it. Joining Joseph Todd’s firm in 1809 as a shopman, he expanded the range of goods the firm offered for sale and cultivated a network of suppliers who could deliver quality product at a reasonable price. These goods—everything from ribbon and thread to lace, gloves, and cloth—were then sold, both wholesale and retail, at very modest profits for ready money. The strategy was spectacularly successful. Within three years Morrison became a partner, within five he had married his master’s daughter, and within fifteen he owned outright a firm with an annual turnover of almost half a million pounds. In time, Morrison became a sleeping partner in the haberdashery firm, but this was no retirement from business, for he was increasingly drawn to the role of financier, investing heavily in railways in the United States, Europe, and South America. These foreign investments caused Morrison a good deal of trouble, but ultimately they became an important element in his portfolio, providing just over half of the income of £150,000 he earned in the early 1850s.

Although clearly possessed of an extraordinary commercial and financial talent, Morrison was never just a man of business, and Dakers also documents his ambitions to ascend the social ladder. In his pursuit of social standing, Morrison did not leave much to chance, and once the haberdashery firm was on a sound footing he invested time and money on self-improvement. He bought himself a suburban villa, undertook an edifying tour of England and Scotland, became a member of the Royal Academy, got elected to the Political Economy Club, began to collect both old and new works of art, and patronized important designers. He was also active in good works, helping to establish London University and serving on the committee that founded a school for improving British design. However, the crowning achievements of Morrison’s self-improvement efforts (and also evidence that he did, in the end, arrive) are the Grand Tour he took with his family in 1826 and his election to Parliament in 1830.

The third aspect of Morrison’s life that receives extensive coverage in this biography concerns his houses and estates: his villa at Balham, his first country house at Fonthill in Wiltshire, his townhouse in Harley Street, and then the much grander and more extensive transformation of his estate at Basildon in Berkshire. Though completed at different times, all reflect his willingness to invest in both fine art and design and his desire to rebuild in a fashion appropriate for a man of...

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