Dedication

To Valpy, Tina and Maria

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Penelope Fitzgerald: Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

Introduction

Picture Acknowledgements

Foreword and Acknowledgements

1. 1833–53: A childhood without beauty

2. 1853–5: Oxford: loss and gain

3. 1855–6: Morris and Jones; the quest for a vocation

4. 1856: An apprenticeship to Rossetti

5. 1856–60: The long engagement

6. 1860–2: Expansion: the firm, Ruskin and Italy

7. 1863–5: Green Summer: a season of happiness

8. 1865–6: Friends and enemies

9. 1866–7: A threat to the Earthly Paradise

10. 1867–70: Phyllis and Demophoön: the dangers of enchantment

11. 1870–6: The desolate years

12. 1876–8: A return to the world: the Grosvenor Gallery

13. 1878–84: King Cophetua: the studio in the eighties

14. 1884–90: The Royal Academy: ‘to think, Jones, of your coming to this!’

15. 1890–2: Briar Rose: Burne-Jones in the nineties

16. 1892–4: ‘The best in me has been love’

17. 1894–6: The Kelmscott Chaucer and the parting of friends

18. 1896–8: Rottingdean and Avalon

Picture Section

Appendix 1: Sources

1. Unpublished Material

2. Select Bibliography

Appendix 2: Paintings by Burne-Jones mentioned in the text and now in public collections

Notes to the Text

Index

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Penelope Fitzgerald Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.

She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been shortlisted for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.

After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have done introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.

Hermione Lee

2013

INTRODUCTION

If you stand in front of a large Burne-Jones painting, such as King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid in Tate Britain, or any other of his major works in oil, stained glass or tapestry, the modern world immediately recedes. The spell cast is hard to resist. No other English artist in the late nineteenth century so completely transports us into another realm where literary or mythological allusions meld with gently refulgent colour, in compositions that have been cunningly designed and elaborately finessed. The subtle strength of Burne-Jones’s imagery owes much to his study of the Italian Renaissance, and in his work we find the last great flowering of the Renaissance tradition before modernism ran like a virus through all the arts, here and there turning its back on the past while determinedly heralding the importance of modernity. Burne-Jones, whose preference in art was for stillness, remained a stalwart opponent: having been brought up in Birmingham, in close proximity to some of the most damaging aspects of the Industrial Revolution, he famously announced that ‘the more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint’.

Burne-Jones’s response to the age in which he lived resonates with present-day anxieties about the social, cultural, financial and political implications of globalisation. Yet there are many reasons why he is so deeply sympathetic. The high-minded and deeply earnest John Ruskin cannot have been easy to tease, but when pseudo-Gothic and medieval public houses began to appear on street corners, Burne-Jones gently provoked him with the remark, ‘Your doing, my dear.’ Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography gives us Burne-Jones’s humour as well as his idealism, the man and his art, while tracing the trajectory of a career that transformed Ned Jones into Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the internationally renowned artist who was socially much in demand. Penelope Fitzgerald’s narrative teems with famous figures from the Victorian era, and inevitably it is bound up with the history of Pre-Raphaelitism, for although Burne-Jones and his friend William Morris were not part of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they were drawn in during the late 1850s by D. G. Rossetti. Burne-Jones’s early, painstakingly detailed pen-and-ink drawings on Arthurian subjects equal in intensity the finest productions in this vein. He went on to make more robust the Pre-Raphaelite achievement, while Morris busily created outlets for its decorative style, through his determination to revive craft and to reform domestic design.

Penelope Fitzgerald seems at home amid this crowded setting. Admittedly, the six years she spent researching and writing this book gave her an impressive intimacy with her subject. But also relevant here is the fact that she herself was descended from a formidable tribe. There were three bishops in her family background, and immediately after she completed this biography, she wrote The Knox Brothers about her father (the writer and editor who brought Punch into the twentieth century) and her uncles, among whom was the Anglo-Catholic priest Ronald Knox who, after agonies of indecision, ‘poped’, then wrote about his spiritual journey and became a famous apologist for Roman Catholicism. From The Knox Brothers alone, quite apart from her later novels and her biography of the poet Charlotte Mew, it is evident that Fitzgerald understood the complex tensions harboured by individuals and within families. She was well prepared for the entangled loyalties within the Pre-Raphaelite circle, its creative brilliance as well as its dysfunctional ingredients. As a biographer, her observations are wry and sane.

Burne-Jones’s mother died six days after his birth. He claimed that it left him with persistent guilt and made him ever after kind to women. The lack of a mother very probably triggered his desperate need for female affection. When he first met Georgiana Macdonald, who was to become his wife, she was only ten years old. They became engaged when Georgie was fifteen. Over the years, this small woman had to put up with a great deal, not least the emotional crisis caused by Burne-Jones’s great passion for the Greek beauty Maria Zambaco and which was made worse by her public suicide attempt when he tried to extract himself from their relationship. Fitzgerald admires Georgie’s firmness, her dignity and steadfastness. Others have remarked that she gazed at the world through pale grey eyes: Fitzgerald adds that these eyes ‘did not so much seem to reprove small mindedness as refuse to admit its existence at all’.

The Birmingham of Burne-Jones’s childhood had showed him that advancing industrialisation brought in its wake moral squalor. In response to this he looked back to medieval times, to what he felt to be a more pristine world, and fed his mind on chivalric ideals. Fitzgerald understands this well: ‘What he knew from his own experience was that beauty was an essential element without which human nature is diminished. If art gives us beauty it will make us more like human beings.’ Amid the casual flow of imagery that surrounds us today, this argument may seem bluntly utilitarian and overly simplistic. But there is no doubt that Fitzgerald here identifies one of Burne-Jones’s core beliefs. In old age his need for beauty sharpened his obsession with young women. He became completely besotted with one after another, including May Gaskell, to whom he wrote often five or six times a day, Fitzgerald reminding us that in this period there were in all seven posts in the course of a single day. It did not seem to matter to him that she was married. ‘Mrs Gaskell, if not firm, must have been a tactful woman,’ Fitzgerald remarks. ‘She managed a difficult situation extremely well.’

This dry authorial voice is one of the pleasures of this book. Another is the use of idiosyncratic detail. Whistler, who favoured full-length portraits, is glimpsed weeping over his inability to capture on canvas the tightly trousered legs of his patron Frederick Leyland. After an outing which Burne-Jones made with three others, there is a trip back into London by means of a hired fly because one of the party, Ellen Terry, has suddenly taken against the train and refuses ‘to get into the nasty thing’. And when Burne-Jones becomes a regular guest at country house parties, Fitzgerald reminds us how icily cold such houses could be, ‘so that the ascent to the bedroom, candle in hand, was like an Arctic expedition’. We learn that once back in London, the artist took to meeting his young women in the heated Palm House at Kew Gardens. No wonder Georgie at one point goes in search of a country retreat where her husband can be removed from the fray of life. She travels to Brighton, turns her back on it, and walks over the Downs to Rottingdean. Here she finds an empty house on the village green which is promptly bought. One of its attractions was that the view from the back looked on to the Downs. From the front, the biographer notes, ‘you could see the solid little grey church, which had survived gales and fires and even the restorations of Gilbert Scott’.

Fitzgerald’s narrative repeatedly excites with the interest that surrounds Burne-Jones’s artistic development. She takes us inside the studio, identifies recurrent themes, tracks commissions and recognises the importance of exhibitions, particularly those held at the Grosvenor Gallery where the rich brocades and theatrical décor set off his art to perfection. ‘From that day’, his wife writes, with reference to its opening exhibition in 1877, ‘he belonged to the world in such a sense that he never had done before, for his existence became widely known and his name famous.’ Less happy was his relationship with the Royal Academy of Arts, from which he eventually resigned; and at the famous Whistler vs Ruskin trial he loyally, if reluctantly, gave evidence on Ruskin’s behalf, which Whistler never forgave or forgot. Fitzgerald is an able guide to many things, but brings expert knowledge of flowers to Burne-Jones’s use of them in his paintings. She evidently travelled far in search of his pictures, his decorative schemes and stained glass, and, although her critical analysis remains pleasingly light, she can be very discerning. His art, she concludes, is ‘based on ideas and treatments that had lingered for years in his mind, a mind that was obliged to repeat certain obsessional patterns corresponding to the inner life’.

Alongside the procession of paintings that runs through this book are the many friendships which Burne-Jones enjoyed with writers and artists: with Swinburne and George Eliot; with ‘Tad’ – Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the jocular painter of domestic scenes in ancient Greek and Roman times – with the painter of moral allegories G. F. Watts, with Ford Madox Brown, Val Prinsep and others. To some extent Fitzgerald’s rich knowledge of Victorian art may have been stimulated by her friendship with the White Russian émigré and former Tate curator, Mary Chamot, who knew a great deal about Burne-Jones and kick-started the research for this book by lending its author the notebook Burne-Jones filled during a trip to Italy in 1871, a fact mentioned in Hermione Lee’s indispensable biography of Penelope Fitzgerald.

The overall tone of Fitzgerald’s biography of Burne-Jones is affectionate and admiring. But it does not ignore the tragic notes, which increase as time goes on. Burne-Jones is particularly saddened by the mental confusion that engulfed Ruskin and by Morris’s decline. He is deeply moved by the sight of Morris’s coffin on a haywain decorated with moss and entwined with striplings of willow. It was the exact opposite, Fitzgerald notes, of Lord Leighton’s funeral, for the former President of the Royal Academy had lain in state in Burlington House before a public procession took him to his funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral. But it was Morris, not Leighton, that Burne-Jones had in mind when he wrote to May Gaskell,‘… the King was being buried, and there was none other left’. Throughout this book, the reader’s sympathy with Burne-Jones steadily deepens. Fitzgerald describes him at the beginning of 1898, aged sixty-five, his clothes now frequently crumpled, unlike the ‘ridged’ trousers worn by his fashionable son Phil, after much careful ironing. Burne-Jones was, we are told, ‘more puzzled than ever by a world which was too arrogant to recognise that its restlessness was the result of a neglect of beauty’. Under the influence of this book’s persuasive portrait, it is hard not to agree.

Frances Spalding

2014

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Permission to reproduce illustrations has been kindly given by the following: Victoria & Albert Museum for photographs of Mrs Pat Campbell, May Morris, William Morris, Margaret Burne-Jones and Kate Vaughan; Sotheby’s on behalf of a private owner for Georgiana Burne-Jones by Burne-Jones; British Museum for cartoons of Burne-Jones in middle age (from Letters to Katie, by permission of Macmillan London and Basingstoke); London Borough of Hammersmith Public Libraries for photographs of the Burne-Jones and Morris families, Georgiana Burne-Jones by Edward Poynter, Edward Burne-Jones and his son Phil, and Edward Burne-Jones and Angela Mackail; St Cecilia’s Window, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Christ Church Cathedral.

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in future editions.

FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Burne-Jones regarded with gloomy distaste the prospect of becoming the subject of a biography. Yet he was a late Romantic, whose pictures, on his own admission, are a series of images scarcely to be understood without a knowledge of the life which projected them. In this book I have tried to trace faithfully the daily life with its successes and disasters which he accepted with a modest irony peculiarly his own, and the inner life of a painter who might have said, with Jung: ‘If I had left these images hidden in my emotions, they might have torn me in pieces.’

Any biographer of Burne-Jones must start from the Memorials collected during the six years after his death by his wife Georgiana, and from the materials for it which she deposited in a tin box in the Fitzwilliam Museum. There are, however, many other sources, particularly for the second part of his career, from 1870 to 1898. Most of the bibliography given at the end of this book consists of contemporary accounts and reminiscences. But beyond these there are diaries, notebooks and work-lists and more than three thousand letters written by Burne-Jones to his friends, who kept them out of affection, even when they were asked to throw them away

My gratitude is due to the following people for their kindness and hospitality, and for generously allowing me to make use of papers in their possession: Miss Mary Chamot, who encouraged me to begin to research, and Professor W.E. Fredeman, who explained to me how to set about it; Mr Oliver Bagot, Mr Francis Cassavetti, Mrs Imogen Dennis, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, the Dowager Lady Hardinge of Penshurst, Mr George Howard, Mrs Celia Rooke, Mr Lance Thirkell, Lady Tweedsmuir and the Society of Antiquaries of London.

I should also like to thank the following people who have answered enquiries and helped me in many different ways: Mrs Raymond Asquith, Lord Baldwin of Bewdley, Mme Marielle de Baissac, Mr Wilfrid Blunt, Mr Toby Buchan, Dr Raymond Chapman, Mr Charles Carrington, Mr Leslie Cavan, Lord and Lady Clwyd, Mr Norman Colbeck, Dr Malcolm Easton, Professor Leon Edel, Dr Irmgard Feldhaus (Clemens-Sels Museum), Lady Gibson, Miss Phyllis Giles (Fitzwilliam Museum Library), Sir William Gladstone, Professor Gordon Haight, Miss L.F. Hasker (Hammersmith Borough Libraries), Mr Philip Henderson, Miss Helen Henschel, Mr Charles Jerdein, Mr Jeremy Maas, Lady Mander, Professor Roderick Marshall, Mrs June Moll (University of Texas at Austin), Mr David Masson (Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds), Mr Tom Nelson, Mr Peter Norton, Mr Richard Ormond, Mrs Dorothy Parish, Mr Terry Pepper, Mrs Louis Reynolds, Mrs Mary Ryde, Mr A.C. Sewter, Mr E.E.F. Smith (Clapham Antiquarian Society), Mr D.E. Clayton-Stamm, Miss Susie Svoboda, Mr E.F. Thomas (churchwarden of St Margaret’s, Rottingdean), Mr W.S. Taylor, Mr F.H. Thompson (Society of the Antiquaries of London), Mr Raleigh Trevelyan, Mrs Elizabeth Wansbrough, Miss M. Walls (The Grange Museum, Rottingdean). In particular I should like to thank Mr John Christian for his patience and expert knowledge in correcting the typescript; the staff of the Print Rooms of the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Watts Galleries, Compton, the William Morris Galleries, Walthamstow; and my own family.

The following publishers have kindly given permission for extracts quoted in the text: George Allen & Unwin (The Winnington Letters edited by Van Akin Burd); Peter Davies Ltd (The Macdonald Sisters by Lord Baldwin, and The Young du Maurier edited by Daphne du Maurier); the Yale University Press (The Letters of George Eliot edited by Gordon S. Haight).

P.M.F.

1 1833–53
A CHILDHOOD WITHOUT BEAUTY

Edward Burne-Jones was born on 28 August 1833, as Edward Coley Burne Jones, the only surviving child of Edward Richard Jones. He never knew his sister, who died in infancy, nor his mother, who died a few days after his birth, but he felt all through his life that he had lost them and sorely missed them.

Mr Jones was a not even moderately successful Birmingham gilder and frame-maker. He was probably of Welsh descent, but his ancestry is lost among many Joneses; as Burne-Jones pointed out when he at last took the step of hyphenating his name; to be called Jones is to ‘face annihilation’. He did not know the Christian names of his grandparents on either side: his mother might have been more likely to keep the family annals, but she was dead.

The widower and his pale, delicate, unassertive little son continued to live over the shop, sharing a small bedroom overlooking the timber-yard behind it, where the raw wood for the frames was kept. Every Sunday, after listening to an Evangelical sermon with other small tradesmen at St Mary’s, Whitall Street, they went to visit Mrs Jones’s grave, and Ned was frightened to see his father cry. ‘There’s one thing I owe to my father, that is his sense of pathos. Oh, what a sad little home ours was and how I used to be glad to get away from it.’¹ Half-holidays also meant a visit to the churchyard where Mr Jones sometimes gripped his head so hard that he cried out with pain. This kind of commemoration did not strike him, then or afterwards, as strange. He only pointed out that, had he guessed then what adult life was like, he wouldn’t have passed his childhood in such a ‘needlessly saddish manner’.² His clothes were made out of what was left over from his father’s suits, every penny was saved, and Mr Jones, putting in long hours in the workshop, tiptoed up to bed so as not to wake the child. In an age of self-help, this father could show thrift and sobriety, but not confidence. His failure in business was the result of unworldliness and inefficiency in the craft itself; as a hard worker, he set an excellent example.

Housekeeping for the disconsolate family was undertaken by a Miss Sampson, described by Lady Burne-Jones as ‘uneducated, with strong feelings and instincts’. Ned recalled being sometimes given a penny and spending it on a ‘mutton-pie, sodden with rancid fat’³ as a relief from her cooking. It was Miss Sampson who told him, when he was building a child’s city of small stones, that ‘you must not call it Jerusalem, Edward’; she acted as a represser of fantasy, useful to a child whose imagination is strong enough to thrive on opposition and to become – as Burne-Jones pointed out – ‘his private torment’. Ways had to be devised early on to avoid telling Miss Sampson what he was thinking about, so that it could remain to trouble him. He suffered for as long as he could remember from bad dreams, and from waking to find ‘large anxious faces of grown-ups’ bending over him. It was his habit as an artist to speak of his dream world, where real and unreal mixed without priority, as if it were his own retreat, but in fact he never seriously entered it without apprehension.

Mr Jones’s shop was at 11 Bennett’s Hill, itself quite a new and very respectable street in a district which had recently covered green fields with raw pavements. ‘The town itself has walked uphill’, in the words of the local comic singer Dobbs, the population having nearly doubled between 1821 and 1831. At the corner of the hill and Waterloo Street was a News and Commercial room; near to it, with a bold classical portico, was the Society of Artists’ building, which was probably the reason why Mr Jones opened as a frame-maker close by. All this was decorous and decent, but inescapably near was a frightening Birmingham which lay in wait, after a not long process of ‘coming down’, for the failed small clerk and tradesman. This was the swarming city of ‘Brummagem roughs’ and Irish immigrants, which was neither policed nor lighted (except in winter) until 1839; Newman, in his first days at the Oratory, said that the Irish congregation ‘made the air like drinking hydrogen or carbonic gas’. Although the town escaped the worst of the cholera epidemics, these were the hungry thirties, and the masses of operatives (including working children of seven and upwards) were unskilled and unsettled, going home to crowded ‘courts’ and rookeries where dozens of families clung together, sharing one tap and one privy. Birmingham was said to have over a thousand of these red-brick warrens, more than any other city, and among them were ‘scores of houses of ill-fame’. In 1848, when after a long agitation the Government introduced the Health of Towns Bill, the official Inspector to the Board of Health respectfully laid before them for consideration that ‘the borough of Birmingham is not so easily healthy as it may be, on account of unpaved streets, confined courts, open middens and cesspools and stagnant ditches’. The Birmingham ‘wares’ themselves, on the other hand, exhibited an alarming vitality. Thomason’s in Church Street claimed that he could do all that Cellini did, and cast anything in bronze, including life-size statues; Pemberton’s would imitate any pattern in ‘metallic bedsteads’, Jennens and Betteridge would manufacture any object in papier-mâché inlaid with pearl shell. It would be quite wrong, of course, to think of all these products as shoddy: Gillott’s took pride in the fact that Charles Reade had written the whole of It’s Never Too Late to Mend with only one of their steel pen-nibs. The ‘thousands trades’ had their thousand separate voices, and though the city was never quite without music – rarely, indeed, without Handel’s Messiah, which was given at festivals from 1823 onwards – it was hideous with the volleys fired off in iron-lined proofing-houses where the gunsmiths tested their weapons all day. ‘At night,’ Carlyle wrote in Past and Present, ‘the whole region burns like a volcano, spilling fire from a thousand tubes of bricks’. The streets at large reeked of drunkenness, the universal resource. The Town Council, when Edward Burne Jones was six, received a report from the Borough Magistrates to the effect that ‘the present police force was totally inadequate to maintain the peace’. In fact, in the Chartist Riots that year Mr Jones was sworn in, surely one of the most unlikely of special constables, and for a few weeks of terror of the streets seemed ready to crawl uphill and overwhelm them.

A queer, close life took its quiet course in the back shop in Bennett’s Hill, bolted against Saturday night drunks. Mr Jones and his friend, Mr Caswell, turned over pictures left for framing, and the old dark canvases which Mr Caswell, who was retired, liked to buy cheap and touch up; at one time they got what must surely be a Turner, but ‘the sea was too quiet’ and Mr Caswell added a number of large waves; or they would talk about ‘the first historical painter that Birmingham had produced, and how Mr Gillott the pen-maker had paid £1,000 for a historical picture and felt disgusted, and then they would shake their dear old heads’.⁴ To the little boy the stock-in-trade was repulsive, dark and oily-smelling, in faded frames. Like most lonely children, he drew pictures – mostly of demons – to give substance to the stories he told himself, but the feeling at 11 Bennett’s Hill was that nothing should be wasted, and Mr Caswell immediately ‘made me draw a coffee-pot with all the reflections (and no doubt it wasn’t a bad thing to do) but when you looked closer demons were coming out of the pot’.⁵ Music he loved, but he scarcely realised this yet, since there was no good choral singing at St Mary’s and Mr Jones could not afford, or did not choose, to go to concerts. Sixty years later, Burne-Jones said that he had passed a childhood without beauty. There was none, certainly, in the little house itself or the ‘chairs, carpets, tables and table furniture each duller and more commonplace than the other’, or the picture of a cemetery over the ‘hard square-featured clock’, showing the tombs of Miss Sampson’s Yorkshire relatives.

Beauty, therefore, was something the child could only recall in fragments, which could not really be distinguished from happiness; he meant such things as the smell of currant-loaves and wallflowers in Mr Caswell’s kitchen-garden, and rare outings with Mr Jones, who, wretched though his taste in art might be, ‘would walk tired miles to see a cornfield’. There were also the pretty faces of the Miss Choyces, farming cousins in Warwickshire, where he was sent occasionally – it was a milk and cheese farm – in the dubious hope of his growing stouter. The Choyces took him on one occasion to see the Cistercian monastery at Charnwood, and he dreamed for years of being shut away in peace behind its great doors. But, for Burne-Jones as for Ruskin, beauty was not inherited but earned. Ruskin, so he tells us in Praeterita, learned to love the movement of water through watching the gutter at the back of a baker’s shop; Burne-Jones began to love plant form by being allowed to pick one wall-flower. Beauty they both felt as a craving which could be satisfied and perhaps only valued – for as artists neither of them ceased to be Evangelical at heart – only after a hard struggle. Ruskin, however, also warns us that those who are starved of beauty in childhood will find the love of it in later life ‘rampant and unmanageable’.

Many of these details were recalled by Burne-Jones in the last few years of his life and taken down by his faithful studio assistant, Thomas Rooke. These notes were of course used by Lady Burne-Jones in her Memorials, and yet without falsification (that was impossible to her) she seems to have made her husband’s childhood gentler and more pathetic than it really was. She left out the child’s horrors, which are not less real when they are overheard and half understood. The bird-scarer passed the gate on the way to the open fields, and would stop suddenly and pull horrible grimaces.⁶ In a house a few doors down, a father had cut off a boy’s fingers when he wouldn’t take his hands off the cloth. Another had mistreated his son so horribly that one of them had taken poison, and though he was brought round the poison ‘worked itself out’ years later, making him mad.⁷ Three miles along the road out of Birmingham a lonely shack had to be passed where a man had lived who had gone crazy through disappointment in love; the pond where he had drowned himself was still in front of the shack.⁸ Terror attached to certain names and words – ‘progeny’ was one – and to the sight of the swollen full moon. All these were lonely fears, but less so than his first experience of education, when he was seven years old. His aunt, Mrs Choyce, took him to a small school at Henley-in-Arden during one of his country visits and stayed to talk to the master while Ned went on alone into the classroom, where he met ‘a shout of derision’⁹ from the boys he when they saw how small he was. Writing fifty years later to Olive Maxse, he described himself as ‘the kind of little boy you kick if you are a bigger boy’.¹⁰

This may have been a good preparation for King Edward’s Free School ‘where I proceeded at the age of 12’. By this time Burne-Jones had developed, in spite of his delicacy, a surprising power of survival. At King Edward’s, magnificent grammar school though it was, ‘the masters sometimes fought the boys’. Ned himself was stabbed in the groin during prayers ‘and I found something warm on my leg and putting my hand there found it was blood’. He had the uneasy distinction of being taken home in a cab, to avoid explanations with the headmaster; it was the first time he had been in a cab and he was sick on the floor.¹¹ Later came the traditional challenge ‘from a very large boy’ to fight him after school. Ned, who was terrified, ‘flew at him like a dog and then it was all over and I was sick as a dog’.¹², Instruction was in two large rooms for all classes, and order was kept by beating and by end of term prizes. But in his seven years he received an excellent education and never quite got over his surprise at knowing more Latin, history and geography than William Morris, who went to Marlborough.

Like many imaginative children, Burne-Jones could only learn from one master, though his temperament, needing an absolute hero, rejected Mr Thompson’s name and the coarse black hair on his hands. ‘I worshipped him when I was little, and we used to look at each other in class. I wonder what he thought when he looked.’ The boy survived furious beatings to absorb what the teacher had to give; his habit was to improvise on a few words read out at random – ‘with the flattest sentence in the world he would take us to ocean waters and the marshes of Babylon … and the constellations and abysses of space’. To this Burne-Jones must have responded completely, since to the end of his career he drew inspiration from the word itself – the image that springs from the name. He noticed, however, as he listened to Mr Thompson’s fantasies in word-derivation, that the master was sometimes drunk.¹³

Ned entered King Edward’s in 1844, ten years after the school had been rebuilt to Barry’s hard Gothic designs, which left the outside impressive and the inside dark and draughty. The headmaster was Dr Prince Lee, a magnificent autocrat who taught the boys that every minute of life was accountable, his motto being Salpisei – ‘the trumpet of judgement shall sound’. Ned was put into the ‘commercial’ department, where Greek was not studied, and the boys left at fifteen or sixteen with a sound preparation for business. It was Mr Thompson who advised Mr Jones, when his son was fifteen years old, to let him stay on at school. Instead of going straight to a counting house at eight shillings a week, which meant a positive contribution to the economy of Bennett’s Hill, Ned passed straight into the Classical school, where boys were prepared for university. His friends received the impression, when they called for tea at Bennett’s Hill, that ‘he always used to have nice things about him, to a schoolboy extent’. In point of fact, as Ned told Rooke, his pocket money, until he was eighteen years old, was a penny a week, and his father allowed him to sell his school prizes to buy his class books.¹⁴ Even homework was an extravagance because it meant burning a candle till two o’clock in the morning.¹⁵ Mr Jones agreed to this, because he supposed it was the right thing.

In the upper forms of the school Burne-Jones had his first real experience of friendship, that is, of openly giving and receiving affection; he formed his own circle, who were staggered by his practical jokes (these sometimes attracted the attention of the police) and fascinated by his queer mixture of gentleness and underlying fierceness, not so well hidden then as it was later. This was the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the golden age of intense male friendships, whose delicate emotional balance is hard to assess today. Chivalry and uncertain hope entered into them when the boys, in the haven of the school library, made themselves ‘exquisitely miserable’ over Keats on ‘long hot afternoons’ or read Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur and In Memoriam. Outside, they were adolescents, and Ned was growing too tall for his strength. They were ‘quizzed’ by the girls, and at a loss for a smart reply.

It was Richard Dixon who first introduced Burne-Jones to Keats; coming from a large poor Methodist household, he later became a canon of Worcester, a poet and the correspondent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Another intimate was Cormell Price; ‘Crom’ was two years younger than Ned and had known him in the Commercial school. He was to try many things – medicine, Russia, teaching – before becoming headmaster of the United Services school (and consequently of Stalky & Co), without ever adapting significantly to this world. He began and ended as hopelessly enthusiastic and unpractical Crom; others looked after him. Harry Macdonald was the son of another Methodist minister on the Birmingham circuit, whose large family were to be of the greatest importance to Burne-Jones.

Both Dixon and Cormell Price support Burne-Jones’s recollections of the crude misery of Birmingham. Crom Price remembered seeing men killed at prize fights. ‘At Birmingham school a considerable section of the upper boys were quite awake to the crying evils of the period,’ he told Mackail, William Morris’s biographer. ‘… I remember one Saturday night walking five miles into the Black Country, and in the last three miles I counted more than thirty lying dead drunk on the ground, more than half of them women.’ As small boys it had shocked them and made them run faster for the safety of the lighted shop fronts. Now it was a matter of humanitarian conscience. How could the world be served?

From concern with human suffering and the uneasy craving for beauty there was only a short step, for an adolescent thinking young Evangelical, to the edge of the Apostolic movement. (The precise shade of Mr Jones’s Evangelicalism can be judged by the fact that Ned was not allowed to read novels until he was in the First Class, but did occasionally go to the theatre.) In 1849, the same year that Ned entered the Classical school, Newman was sent to Birmingham and arrived in a fly full of luggage and plaster Madonnas to open the Oratory in an old gin distillery in Alcester Street. His first sermon, preached to hundreds of operatives and dirt-poor Irish, with a sublime inappropriateness that could only come from great spiritual depths, was on ‘how to escape the false worship of the world’. There was of course no question of Mr Jones and his son attending mass. But ‘the effect of Newman, even on those who never saw him’, Burne-Jones told Frances Graham, was a ‘leading – walking with me a step in front’. The adventure of the Oratory impressed him as a glorious gamble ‘putting all this world’s life in one splendid venture … in an age of sofas and cushions he taught me to be indifferent to comfort, and in an age of materialism he taught me to venture all on the unseen.’ In this way Newman at long distance touched the unborn firm of Morris & Co., and through wallpaper and rushback chairs would continue to preach that there are greater things in this world than comfort.

Newman was in no way a mediaevalist and did not recognise the ‘note’ of sanctity in the mediaeval church, but those who saw and heard him from a distance did not always make this distinction. The Oratory entered into the classroom mythology of the King Edward’s boys, and Ned became ‘Edouard, Cardinal de Birmingham’, sending missives illuminated in red and blue, while Crom Price was a less distinguished member of the ‘Order of St Philip Neri’ (Newman’s own order). When the ‘cardinal’ was invited during his holidays to Hereford by a brother of Mr Caswell’s, a further transformation took place: at the cathedral he heard church music well sung for the first time, and saw in the building itself something he had never guessed from the brand new Gothic of King Edward’s. He was in direct contact with beauty, the acute physical and emotional effect of ‘old music’ combining with the remoteness of the lamp-lit chancel. It was his own ‘note’. At the same time he passed easily under the influence of a young, serious, singing and choir-mastering Puseyite clergyman, John Goss, who had been at Oxford in the heroic days of Newman’s secession, attending his last university sermon on ‘the parting of friends’. This had now been printed, and Goss lent the volume to Ned. It became clear to Burne-Jones that he must be a priest like Goss; if he was to serve the drunks and vagrant workers that littered the pavements on the way to school, it must be in a community like the Oratory, or perhaps like the semi-monastic group suggested in Hurrell Froude’s Project for the Revival of Religion in Great Towns. There must be a meeting point between the need to serve and the need for beauty. Mr Jones, when his son returned to Birmingham, was quietly ready to exchange his pew in St Mary’s for one in Puseyite St Paul’s, where there was ceremonial and music. He had made up his mind that Ned was to become, if not a successful manufacturer of steel pens, then a bishop.

This, of course, meant Oxford, although most of the Upper School boys went on to Cambridge. Dixon was ready to matriculate and Crom Price, two years younger, hoped to follow them. Both of these were down for Pembroke, where the master, Dr Jeune, was a former headmaster of King Edward’s, but Goss had been at Exeter, and for Exeter, therefore, Mr Jones put down his son. When he found that Ned, unlike Dixon, had not been awarded an exhibition, he faced a total payment, over the three years before an honours degree, of about £600. There would be tuition fees of about £20 per annum, coals, room-rent, hire of furniture, charges for servants (about £30 a term), kitchen bill, buttery bill (for bread, butter and beer), washing bill, college subscriptions; even the travelling expenses to Oxford were a consideration. With heaven knows what further economies and calculations, Mr Jones ‘determined to send him at his own expense’. The Bennett’s Hill house was let, except for the workshop, and a smaller house taken, where Miss Sampson and the furniture accompanied them, father and son shared a bedroom as usual, and a lodger was squeezed in as well. This was in the Bristol Road, which the Memorials tell us ‘provided better air and exercise’, though in fact the drains at this time ran into open ditches on the west side.

Ned matriculated on 2 June 1852. He had his first sight of the city of Oxford, the river, and the meadows. Excitement, and possibly some guilt at the sacrifices made for him, brought on a severe illness, the first since he had nearly died at birth, but one which was to set a pattern for the rest of his life – heart weakness, spectacular fainting, a black depression on recovery. Harder to bear, at the age of nineteen, was delay; he would have to wait till the following spring before there was room for him in the overcrowded college.

Kicking his heels in Birmingham, he went to call for the first time on his school friend Harry Macdonald, and so met the family where, a few years later, he would find his wife. They were then living in a house in Nursery Terrace, Handsworth, the Rev. George Macdonald having been recently appointed for the second time to the Birmingham circuit.

In 1852 the minister’s house was crowded from attic to cellar. The children at home were Harry, Alice, Carrie, Georgie, Fred, Agnes (the prettiest) and Louisa. They had already lost two little brothers, and had gone upstairs to see one of them ‘stamped with the marble hue of death’; Carrie had only two more years to live.

Their story (as it is told by their descendant Lord Baldwin in The Macdonald Sisters) is of an unworldly preacher bringing up, or rather letting his wife bring up, a large family on a tiny income, sometimes less than £200 a year, so that to buy a book or to have the piano tuned was a heroic event. This, however, was never felt as poverty, and the affection between the sisters was very close. They all had in common integrity and decisiveness – William de Morgan said that they never began a sentence without knowing how it would end. Visitors who were in the least pretentious were cut short. Lord Baldwin records that a preacher who spoke of his heart as ‘black, and full of stones’ was told by little Louie that he must mean his gizzard. This firmness went with a tendency to melancholy and poor health. What redeemed it, besides its own moral purity, was a dry sense of humour and an acceptance of the ‘stages of life’, which implied a reverence for life itself.

Such unworldliness, combined with sharpness, could alarm casual visitors. Ned shrank. But the praying, singing, cooking, sewing, turning, boot-patching, ‘putting-up’ of preserves, making do, giving charity, racing up and down stairs, self-criticising and self-improving could make way at once for a lonely visitor. Ned, although he called with Crom Price, could be seen at once as lonely. To Georgie, a child in a pinafore, his pallor and delicacy suggested that he needed looking after. Georgie, at the age of ten, was quite used to this. She noticed also an unexpected source of power in him, like an illumination, when the conversation moved him.

How Burne-Jones – the Memorials are ‘confident that the mystery which shrouds men and women from each other in youth was sacred to him’ – dealt with his own growing sexuality can hardly be judged. He referred to it only ironically, for example, in reference to a visit to the theatre when he was staying at the Camberwell home of his father’s sister, Aunt Catherwood. Mr Catherwood took him to the Lyceum pantomime, where they stood in the pit and Ned fell hopelessly in love with the probably forty-year-old Fairy of the Golden Branch. ‘She held out something, and I thought it was too beautiful ever to be.’ But this was not surprising, since the Fairy – supported by Blueruino, an Illicit Spirit – was none other than Madame Vestris herself. Complementary to these fantasies was the very strong reaction of a sisterless young man, in the presence of young girls en fleur, on the verge, some sooner, some later, of a natural but despoiling experience. This, which was to be one of the recurrent themes of his painting, took its origin from the daughter-crowded minister’s house in Nursery Terrace.

In the Hilary Term of 1853, Burne-Jones finally went up, and passed from the small shop and the grimy streets of Birmingham to Newman’s own university.

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