Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  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 pic
tures 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 wer
e ‘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?