This spring, with the help of the Morris Society’s Dunlap
Award, I conducted research in the UK. The work I undertook there will
support my PhD dissertation, “’The beauty of the bough-hung banks’: William
Morris in the Thames Landscape, ” which combines art historical and landscape
studies methodologies to explore Morris’s personal and creative relationship with the river and its
tributaries. It also contributed to a new, related research project on Morris
and the Indian indigo industry, the results of which I will present at the
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) annual conference this
October.
 | |
| William Morris, Wey, 1883. Victoria & Albert Museum. A pattern named after a Thames tributary. |
My research led me to many collections – from Morris
manuscripts at the British Library and the National Art Library, to business
ledgers and maps in the London Metropolitan Archives, to indigo samples in the
economic botany collection at Kew
Gardens – but it also
gave me access to Morris’s sites themselves. Those site visits are an important
part of my work, and I thought that for this blog post I would explore some of
my experiences of and reflections on those site visits, in an attempt to show
the type of work I have been doing with the Morris Society’s support.
As a landscape historian, I seek to understand the spaces of
Morris’s life, their interrelations, and how they affected his designs and
writing. I concern myself with the physical forms of sites and with the natural
systems and human lives they contain and shape. In order to do this, I study
historic records and visual evidence, building an interpretation of what sites
were like in the past and how individuals and groups interacted with them and
interpreted them as part of their culture. When possible, I also pursue “boots
on the ground” research, a traditional method in British landscape studies that
favors visiting a site and comparing modern and historic records to the
physical landscape in order to better understand its forms, aesthetics, and
usages, and its change over time. (One of the primary proponents of this method
was W.G. Hoskins, whose 1955 classic The
Making of the English Landscape has recently been re-issued by Little
Toller Books. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the British
countryside or the discipline of landscape studies.)
Visiting sites and occupying physical landscapes, as I was
able to do this spring, can lead to revelations both large and small, adding
insight and color to the research I do in historic and art and design
collections.
Sometimes these revelations happen by chance – as when I set
off to drive from Lechlade to Kelmscott Manor one morning this June and was met
just before the turn-off to Kelmscott by a steam tractor, merrily chugging its
way up the road through the fields: beautifully polished, captained by amateur
enthusiasts, and looking like a visitation from another time – Morris’s time,
to be precise.
 |
| Steam tractor parked near Kelmscott Manor |
Kelmscott, despite its current chocolate-box appearance and
its pastoral idealization in Morris’s writings, was a very early and important
site in the industrialization of agricultural processes. Steam tractors would
have been quite at home in the fields of Morris’s innovative neighbors, the
Hobbses, and the unexpected appearance of not one, but two of them in Kelmscott
that day – on their way to a steam rally in Lechlade – opened a multi-sensory
window into the diverse and changing agricultural practices of Morris’s time.
Their presence in the present showed not just their historic existence, but
also a hint of how they might have been experienced: tall above the flat fields
and the hedges, with billowing steam adding to their visibility; shining,
noisy, and smelly; and fast (for their time), though they hold up traffic in
the present.
These personal experiences help to contextualize the
research that landscape scholars like me undertake in other, more methodical
ways. Thorough study of the physical and agricultural history of the Kelmscott
landscape, for example, will form much of the backbone for my chapter on the
site. My primary sources are the evidence of maps, field systems, and the built
environment, as well as – of course – Morris’s own writings and designs, May
Morris’s reflections on the place and her father’s life, and the imagery produced
by Morris’s circle, such as Marie Spartali Stillman’s watercolors and Frederick
H. Evans’s photographs.
The phenomenology of Victorian technology at the site is not
conventional research, but it helps to add context and color, as does the
experience of seeing pollarded willows along the Thames, or inspecting how
flowers beloved by Morris still grow wild in the summer hedges and ditches. Such
things may seem incidental, but when one is writing thousands of words about
how Morris reacted to and drew inspiration from the landscape, they are
important. The Dunlap award gave me access to these moments of insight, and I
thank the Morris Society for the opportunity.
 |
| Enjoying the riverside willows at Kelmscott |
Sarah Leonard, a Ph.D.
candidate in Art History at the University of Delaware, is winner of the Morris Society's 2017 Dunlap
Fellowship.
