History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870 by Florence S. Boos (review)

There are few people on the planet who know as much about William Morris as Florence S. Boos, and few who have contributed as much to developing scholarship on and about this most protean Victorian writer, creator, and thinker. Boos's publications on Morris include edited collections on Victorian medievalism and Morris's socialism, editorial and critical work on The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), numerous publications offering scholarly editions of Morris's lesser-known works, articles on just about every facet of Morris's literary career, and (most recently) General Editor of the William Morris Archive.

As such, it is perhaps surprising she has not published previously a substantive monograph on Morris until History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870. In her acknowledgments, Boos mentions a 1980 stay at Morris's Kelmscott House and the ways in which she "became intrigued by the many Morris autograph drafts that rested unheeded in the British Library and elsewhere" (xi). Primary editorial reclamation of forgotten or overlooked work has been a hallmark of Boos's scholarship and that is much in evidence here.

Given Boos's lifelong engagement with Morris, History and Poetics sometimes reads as though it is a text in which Boos has put everything she has not said elsewhere about Morris. There is a strong pull in many books on Morris to want to present him as a totalizing whole: separating Morris's poetry from his biography, his socialism from his trips to Iceland, et cetera, just does not seem right. The socialist Morris is implicit in the earlier Morris presented here, and his later lectures on art, work, and politics are cited frequently, despite their being outside the stated scope of the book's titular timeframe. There are gains and losses with this approach, and, despite the assertion that "Morris was the most consistently 'historicist' of the major Victorian poets," this book does not read overall as a very historicist text (7).

Boos's aim in History and Poetics is to offer as much background and context against which to set Morris's earlier writings as possible. She opens with a chapter titled "'If I Can': Morris's Early Writings," which mostly focuses on his uses of the past and his medievalism. There is a section on Wilhelm Dilthey, the "principal nineteenth-century [German] theorist of empathetic historicism" (8). The name is new to me, and thus of interest, but after three pages he is never mentioned again. If Dilthey is included to help us better understand Morris's use of history, this is not worked through any subsequent interpretive chapter. Chapter 2, "From Antecedents to 'Oxford Brotherhood,'" is more overtly biographical with a fine command of the many varied biographical sources that surround Morris, his family, and his friends. A substantial section introduces the key collaborative relationship of Morris's life (with Edward Burne-Jones), and interesting sections follow on lesser-known Charles Faulkner and Cormell Price. The second chapter also introduces black and white images, ostensibly to complement biographical details, but I sometimes puzzled over choices. There are no actual links in the text to the images, which rarely seem illustrative of a point.

Discussion of Morris's literary work starts in earnest in chapter 3, "Morris's Earliest Poems: Preparation for The Defence of Guenevere," which considers the "more than fifty . . . early poems and unused fragments for The Defence" that Boos previously collected in The Juvenilia of William Morris: With a Checklist and Unpublished Writings (1983), and which are now in the Morris Archive (72). They have received little critical attention. Apparently "friends warned May Morris against attempts to recuperate Morris's early drafts and juvenile poems," but when constructing editions of her father's work, she partly ignored this (72). The chapter ends by considering the poems published in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856), suggesting that these...