Wonderlands: The Last Romances of William Morris by Phillippa Bennett (review)

Phillippa Bennett’s study of William Morris’s late romances argues for their significance in Morris’s larger social project. As she observes, nineteenth-century scholars have frequently dismissed the value of the romances, seeing them as dreamy, reactionary, and unacceptably archaic in style. Bennett, however, locates Morris’s romances firmly within his wider social and artistic project. Her study draws extensively not only on Morris’s own essays and lectures but also on the ideas and debates of the period, producing a rich account of Morris’s social theory and its location in his time. In chapters addressing the embodiment, topography, architecture, and politics of wonder, Bennett draws clear connections between ideas and images in the romances and Morris’s broader social theory.

The Introduction sets out Bennett’s claim that wonder, as both a response to the world and an expression of human relationship to that world, is a powerful political concept that is central to Morris’s platform of social reform. Observing the general critical neglect of Morris’s romances by scholars of nineteenth-century literature, Bennett nevertheless points to individual scholars who have discussed these works. Missing here is an introduction to the romances themselves; despite her perception that they are little known except to Morris scholars specifically, Bennett takes for granted that her readership knows what the romances are and when they were written. She thus implicitly restricts her readership to Morris scholars, but her account of wonder and its place in the vision of a significant social thinker has much to offer wider scholarship.

Chapter 1, “The Embodiment of Wonder,” considers Morris’s representation of human bodies as wonderful. Bennett demonstrates the power of particular moments in the romances when Morris’s protagonists view each other or are perceived by a wider group; the harmonious perfection of their bodies and faces is depicted as evoking a wonder central to the operation of the narratives. She locates this attention to the radiant human body as a key feature of Morris’s social vision; his critique of contemporary capitalist English society focused on its effect on human bodies, which he and other reformers of the period saw as shrunken and distorted by their subordination to the industrial machine. Bennett’s analysis here goes beyond other Morris scholars in its account of how the goodness of Morris’s heroes is manifested through physical beauty.

Bennett next examines “The Topography of Wonder” (Chapter 2), perhaps better described as “the landscape of wonder,” because her quotations include descriptions of grass and birds. This chapter begins with an acknowledgment of the traditional place of landscape, especially the forest, in the marvelous but points out how all of Morris’s romances feature a return to the familiar following exploration of a more remote and apparently fantastic landscape. Bennett examines especially Morris’s responses to his journeys to Iceland as informing his pictures of such exotic landscape, locating this in the context of the Victorian quest for sublime scenes. Morris’s enthusiasm for Iceland embraced its significant cultural history. However, Bennett argues that his idea of England was equally important. Like the Romantics, Morris sought to reawaken pleasure in the familiar, despising the tourist approach to landscape. Bennett’s location of England in the romances is, however, less persuasive than most of her analysis.

Chapter 3, “The Architecture of Wonder,” offers a fascinating account of attitudes toward conservation and restoration in the late nineteenth century and the often fierce debates between advocates of each. Morris, like John Ruskin, was strongly against stripping the patina of history as part of “restoration”; he proposed a society to protect rather than restore. This was the period when admiration for the Gothic flourished; for Morris, however, the marks left on Gothic structures by time were a vital reflection of their connection with human history and human society. He envisaged halls that would serve as houses for communities; Bennett suggests that the houses in the romances are important sites for...