W ENDY P ARKINS Social Mobility and Female Agency: The Case of Jane Morris In this essay, I want to explore the relationship between literature and mobility in the nineteenth century through the example of Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris and the model and muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There are two main reasons why Jane Morris is an appropriate figure to examine in this context. Firstly, as an icon of Pre-Raphaelite art, the figure of Jane Morris circulated in Victorian culture through representation in diverse forms. In George du Maurier’s cartoons for Punch magazine from the late 1870s to the early 1880s, for example, Jane Morris’s distinctive features were depicted to epitomize the Aesthetic woman as a tall, long-necked, undulating figure with drooping head, black frizzy hair low on the forehead, strong facial features and a melancholy expression. Through such caricatures, du Maurier publicized Aestheticism beyond the metropolitan coteries where it first began and, in the process, gave a form of public visibility to the distinctive features of Jane Morris, previously familiar only to those few who had seen a Rossetti canvas. In one well-known cartoon from 1880, the ‘Six-Mark Teapot’, du Maurier portrayed a figure resembling Jane Morris opposite an unmistakable version of Oscar Wilde, the two identified as the ‘Intense Bride’ and ‘Aesthetic Bridegroom.’ The fact that Jane Morris could serve as the feminine embodiment of Aestheticism alongside Wilde, representing the male Aesthete, shows how such figures could bridge the gap between high and popular culture, moving between domains that others sought to keep firmly apart (such as art and everyday domesticity, for instance). 1 1 See Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). With the death of Rossetti in 1882, when the artist’s work began to be more widely known - through gallery exhibitions, photographic reproductions and press descriptions - Jane Morris became the face of Aestheticism on a much wider scale, her fame no longer restricted to personal acquaintance or word-of-mouth communication among artistic and literary networks. Jane Morris provides, then, an example of the mobility of the image associated with the expansion of print culture, the development of new forms of visual technology and the rise of modern celebrity in the Victorian period. W ENDY P ARKINS 314 As a living embodiment of Aestheticism, Jane Morris was also a vehicle for the expression of conflicting ideas concerning women and the commodification of art, and here, too, the influence of du Maurier’s cartoons on perceptions of Aestheticism was evident. Vernon Lee’s novel critiquing Aestheticism, Miss Brown, for instance, featured a Jane Morris-like heroine whose surname was the same as du Maurier’s female character, Mrs Cimabue Brown, who featured in many of his anti-Aestheticism cartoons. 2 In Miss Brown, the eponymous character is central to Lee’s critical exploration of the popularization of Aestheticism and the marginalization of women as creative subjects within Aestheticism and Decadence. The first part of this essay will consider how Lee’s novel depicts the mobility and agency of the artist’s model in a way that suggests Lee was drawing on her personal acquaintance with Jane Morris. In the latter part of this essay, however, I will turn from representation to the historical subject herself in order to consider the role of literature in a life of Victorian social mobility. As a working-class woman who married up, Jane Morris is usually seen as a kind of Cinderella figure whose life and status was magically transformed when she consented to marry a middle-class man of independent wealth in 1858. I want to show, however, how her life may also be understood as consistent with Victorian accounts of working-class advancement through self-improvement in which reading played a crucial role. As scholars such as Jonathan Rose and Kelly J. Mays have argued, reading was central to the processes of self-formation by working-class subjects in the nineteenth century. 3 In Miss Brown, the working-class heroine who is offered an unexpected opportunity for a rapid social rise is also a devoted reader of everything from Dante to the daily newspaper. For Anne Brown, reading is not simply an escape from a life of drudgery as a nursery maid but a valued source of knowledge of a wider social reality. Over the course of the novel, and across widely-divergent social domains, Anne is buffeted by encounters with con- The success of Jane Morris’s social mobility depended on her ability to acquire the kind of cultural capital that was expected of a middle-class woman. Like the musical and language skills she attained, reading and a knowledge of literature were key ways in which she could both foster and display cultural capital and achieve a level of social acceptance within the new contexts of her life. All these new skills required the upwardly-mobile subject not simply to cultivate the appearance of gentility but to undertake a continuing commitment of time and attention that suggests a strong personal inclination towards the challenges and pleasures of such accomplishments. 2 Vernon Lee, Miss Brown [1884] (Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2004). 3 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001); Kelly J. Mays, ‘Domestic Spaces, Readerly Acts: Reading(,) Gender, and Class in Working-Class Autobiography,’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 30.4 (2008): 343-368. Social Mobility and Female Agency 315 flicting bodies of knowledge and world-views - such as Aestheticism, socialism and positivism - which she attempts to negotiate and master through self-education based on wide reading. Anne’s desire for independence leads to a decision to enter a women’s college but by the end of the novel she has succumbed to nervous prostration due to excessive study and renounces her plans to teach or write, returning instead to her unfaithful suitor and patron in order to rescue him from his vices through her wifely devotion. Miss Brown was widely regarded as a roman à clef in which Lee’s friends and acquaintances connected with Aestheticism (such as Oscar Wilde and William Michael Rossetti) detected unflattering references to themselves and Lee suffered a degree of social ostracism in England following the novel’s publication in 1884. 4 The forehead was high and narrow, the nose massive, heavy, with a slight droop …; the lips thick, and of curiously bold projection and curl; the faintly hollow cheek subsided gradually into a neck round and erect like a tower, but set into the massive chest as some strong supple branch into a tree-trunk. Particularly striking was the degree of physical resemblance between the heroine, Anne Brown, and Jane Morris. Anne is described, for instance, as possessing “heavy masses of dark, lustreless hair, crimped naturally like so much delicate black iron wire” and a distinctive physique: 5 Vernon Lee had met Jane Morris on a number of occasions, firstly in Italy, where Lee lived and Jane often travelled in the winters from the late 1870s onwards, and then subsequently in London when Lee became a regular visitor to the metropolis in the early 1880s in order to develop her literary reputation and social networks. In letters to her mother back in Italy, Lee described Jane Morris in admiring terms (Jane Morris in London was “more beautiful and grand perhaps than in Florence,” Lee wrote 6 ) and was scathing about Rossetti’s canvases, believing they had failed to capture Jane Morris’s beauty. 7 4 For the fullest account of the allusions to historical personages in Lee’s novel, see Leonee Ormond, ‘Vernon Lee as a Critic of Aestheticism in Miss Brown,’ Colby Library Quarterly 9 (September 1970): 131-54. After the publication of Miss Brown, however, the artist Marie Spartali Stillman (a friend of both Vernon and Jane) wrote to Lee to protest against her depiction of Anne Brown which Stillman read as an undisguised representation of Jane Morris: 5 Lee 14, 18. 6 Irene Cooper Willis, Vernon Lee’s Letters (privately published, 1937), 70, July 5, 1881. 7 Rossetti’s paintings of Jane Morris, Lee wrote to her mother, “mak[e] her look as if her face were covered with ill-shaven stubble, and [are] altogether repulsive. The pictures seem to me not merely ill painted and worse modelled, but coarse and repulsive.” Cooper Willis 126, July 11, 1883. W ENDY P ARKINS 316 I was so very sorry you had so accurately described Mrs Morris because I am sure she will feel much pain in being in evidence for every one must recognize her and she has suffered so much from being stared at and remarked and now she is so sensitive and suffering that she will feel it all the more. 8 We don’t know how Lee responded to Stillman’s letter 9 but elsewhere in her correspondence Lee referred to Anne Brown in connection with Jane Morris in a way that makes clear that the link between the two was intentional, not accidental. 10 Not only did Anne Brown seem to be closely modelled on Jane Morris’s appearance, but her story seemed a variation of Jane’s biography: both women were plucked from working-class drudgery to become the muse of an artistic movement and entered a social environment in which their ensuing fame and affluence ensured a degree of independence. 11 8 Qtd. in David B. Elliott, A Pre-Raphaelite Marriage: The Lives and Works of Marie Spartali Stillman and William James Stillman (Easthampton: Antique Collectors Club, 2006), 133. Beginning the novel as a nursery maid of Scottish-Italian parentage, Anne is ‘discovered’ by the English painter-poet Walter Hamlin who sees Anne not only as a stunning model but the personification of his aesthetic ideals, just as Jane Morris was spotted by Rossetti in a theatre audience in Oxford and recruited as a model. Hamlin then arranges for Anne to be educated in Germany before she joins him in London (in anticipation of their marriage), where he introduces her as his muse to the artistic circles under his influence. While Anne is initially exhilarated by her escape from domestic service and entry into a vibrant cultural domain, she becomes increasingly disenchanted both with Aestheticism and her ambiguous relationship with Hamlin. In Miss Brown the question of women’s modern mobility is juxtaposed with women’s location in art, where the static quality of the artist’s model seems to symbolize the male artist’s desire to contain and control the woman who inspires him. While it is Hamlin’s patronage that allows Anne to leave servitude, travel Europe, and live a diverting life in metropolitan London, he is ultimately preparing her for a purely ornamental role in his life. Similarly, the social mobility - through travel, education and a private income from Hamlin - that Anne experiences is not a precursor to her autonomy: whether as muse, model or wife, she is expected to be a fixed embodiment of Hamlin’s aesthetic ideals in his home and he rebukes any sign of intellectual independence on her part. 9 Stillman and Lee subsequently reconciled their friendship in 1885. See Cooper Willis, 196. 10 In a letter to her mother in June 1886, Lee described gossip she had heard about Jane Morris’s unhappy marriage as “the sort of sequel to Miss Brown.” See Cooper Willis 219, July 29, 1886. 11 See Ormond 1970 and Jan Marsh, Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story 1839-1938 (Horsham: Printed Word, 2000). Social Mobility and Female Agency 317 So, on the one hand, Anne Brown seems to exemplify women’s modernity signalled by her transformation from nursery maid into the icon of a modern artistic movement, even a celebrity in the modern sense. On the other, she is trapped by her obligation to Hamlin, whose conservative politics and bohemian lifestyle work together to preclude Anne from moving beyond his expectations of a feminine object of desire. Foreshadowing the kind of narrative trajectory that was common to New Woman fiction of the 1890s, Lee can only offer her heroine a tragic fate, doomed to marry a man she does not love and unable to achieve the independence she had worked towards through her continuing education, both literary and political, beyond the narrow confines of Hamlin’s aesthetic coterie. At the same time, however, the narrator’s insistence on Anne’s unique character, derived from her working-class background and Scottish-Italian heritage, sets her apart from the values of aesthetic London and suggests that some unassimilable element of identity or self remains untouched by the trappings of social mobility. The story of Anne Brown, then, comes to a narrative impasse. Anne’s desire for autonomy and a career falters and she accepts her fate to return to Hamlin and nurse him back to health in Italy, a place where she hopes he may be safe from the temptations of London or Paris. Turning from Lee’s tragic narrative of social mobility to the real-life example of Jane Morris reveals both parallels and disjunctures between these fictional and historical life stories. We might assume that Anne Brown and Jane Morris’s experience of social mobility was an increasingly common one in the nineteenth century but a study of women’s marital mobility between 1839 and 1914 - dates which coincidentally match Jane Morris’s lifespan exactly - suggests that this was not necessarily the case. Although, in this period, “almost 50 per cent of women married a man whose class position was different to that of their father’s,” lower-middle class women were more likely to marry down than working-class women to marry up. 12 Further, working-class women “were 50 per cent more likely to move into the middle class than their brothers, but still only one in ten did so.” 13 Although rates of upward mobility for working-class women rose over the course of this period and marriage “provided the principal vehicle for their mobility,” then, Jane Morris was still an exception in her lifetime. 14 Like Anne Brown, Jane Morris also accepted a life of domesticity as the price of social mobility but as the wife of William Morris she was not bound by the same expectations of feminine confinement as Walter Hamlin imposed on Anne Brown. William Morris’s relatively progressive views on the status 12 Andrew Miles, Social Mobility in Nineteenthand Early Twentieth-Century England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 153. 13 Miles 175. 14 Miles 164, 174. W ENDY P ARKINS 318 of women meant that the Morris household was a space where Jane and her daughters, Jenny and May Morris, were given a greater freedom than in other Victorian middle-class families, even if they still also carried out domestic tasks traditionally associated with femininity. It has been assumed that Jane Burden underwent some kind of training or education during the period of her engagement to William Morris, in order to prepare for her social transition and the new duties and status that would follow her marriage. Although no archival record of this transformational process has survived, Jane Morris possessed a proficiency in music and French that cannot have been part of her rudimentary schooling in Oxford. Her letters also attest to her abilities in Italian, a learning process that may have begun during her engagement but which she certainly continued during her first visits to Italy. Later still, a number of contemporary sources mention Jane learning to play the mandolin. 15 Within an artistic household, moreover, Jane Morris was frequently in the company of artists and writers, both men and women, and accounts of these social occasions do not convey the same sense of elitism and snobbery that Vernon Lee attributes to the Hamlin circle in Miss Brown. 16 The writer and friend of Rossetti, Theodore Watts-Dunton, went so far as to claim that Jane was “superior to Morris intellectually, she reached a greater mental height than he was capable of, yet few knew it,” pointing to the “ease and facility” with which she had acquired French and Italian, and the speed with which she had compensated for her lack of education during her engagement to Morris. 17 The artist William Rothenstein, who only became acquainted with Jane Morris in her later life, also recalled that Jane was “an admirable talker, wholly without self-consciousness, always gracious, and in her person beautifully dignified…. Women married to famous men are over-shadowed by their husbands; but when they survive their husbands, there comes sometimes a late flowering, previously, perhaps, held in check.” 18 In other words, Jane Morris’s upward mobility was not an overnight ‘make-over’ but an ongoing intellectual and aesthetic development that placed value on interior as much as exterior transformation. Reading, as a These two vignettes of an accomplished, poised woman counter the view of Jane Morris that some contemporaries perpetuated, in which she was a living tableau, as passive and unchanging as the Rossetti portraits she resembled. Instead, they provide an insight into a historicised subject who evolved over time in response to the changing circumstances and contexts of her life. 15 See, for example, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, 1879-1922, Vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 233. 16 See, for example, Georgiana Burne-Jones’s account of the Red House years (1861-5) in her Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1904). 17 Theodore Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces (New York: Dutton & Co, 1916), 10. 18 William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein 1872-1900 (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), 288. Social Mobility and Female Agency 319 form of self-education and a means of cultivating a feeling, contemplative self, was particularly noteworthy in this regard. In autobiographical narratives of self-improvement told by working-class subjects in the nineteenth century, reading was often prioritized as an invaluable means of transcending the limitations and deprivations of their position. Reading formed an indispensable component of working-class auto-didacticism, ensuring that learning was not understood as limited to a particular phase of life (associated with formal education) but continued over the recorded course of a lifetime. 19 We can only speculate that Jane Morris’s early life was characterized by textual impoverishment in a relatively illiterate household. Her formal education in the local parish school would have been primarily devoted to the kind of feminine skills designed to equip working-class girls for domestic service and their own family duties. With her engagement to William Morris, then, a new world of reading opportunities and other cultural practices was opened up to Jane Burden. In a letter to Rossetti in 1878, Jane wrote that “I still keep up my old habit of reading every scrap that comes in my way,” a remark that evokes both a powerful desire for reading and implies a scarcity of available reading material in early life that continued to influence Jane Morris’s voracious reading habits twenty years after her marriage. 20 Her constant reading echoes the experience of many of the readers and autodidacts described by Rose (2001), Mays (2008) and Gagnier (1991) in their respective studies of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography and selfformation where the desire for texts - whether entertaining or instructive - was a powerful drive for subjects who felt they could never make up for the literary deprivations of early life and for whom books were associated with autonomy, escape or betterment in various forms. Working-class life narratives of “liberation via literacy” also associated reading with the attainment of an internal and emotional emancipation that was sharply distinguished from the economic dependence and self-abnegation the writers associated with wage-slavery. 21 19 Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920 (New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), 43. For working-class readers in this period, Mays contends, reading could be an important collective or public experience but it 20 John Bryson & Janet Camp Troxell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 80, September 1878. In the letter from which this quotation is taken, Jane asked for information about “a story of an intensely sensational character” that she had found on the reverse of a newspaper cutting sent her by Rossetti. Her interest was piqued by the fact that the hero’s name was “Boddlebak,” which she takes to be a name of Icelandic origin. This letter suggests that Jane had acquired some knowledge of the Icelandic literature that William Morris dearly loved. 21 Mays 344, 345. W ENDY P ARKINS 320 was also an activity crucial to the development of an autonomous and internalized sense of self and agency. 22 The desired form of selfhood, however, was inevitably inflected by gender as well as class, not least because the solitude and space necessary for the cultivation of an interiority derived from reading was differently understood by men in waged labour and women primarily responsible for domestic labour. 23 As Mays notes, many working-class women’s narratives ambivalently represented “reading as always demanding forms of privacy and secrecy that exclude the family and induce feelings of worry and guilt rather than pride” and thus as differentially available to men and women. 24 A love of reading, linked to a “desire for private space and time, solitude, and silence,” could be a source of familial conflict, especially for women who noted a discrepancy between their own opportunities and those presented to their brothers, or whose mothers valued domestic skills over scholarship. 25 Until the late nineteenth century, moreover, “autodidact culture was an overwhelmingly male territory.” 26 The diversity of reading represented in Jane Morris’s letters provides a picture of the extent of her reading, including poetry, biography, journals, fiction (of diverse genres) and essays, as well as newspapers and periodical literature. Discussion of books was, in fact, often the chief topic of her extant correspondence with Rossetti and others, just as reading was a favoured shared pastime. In November 1875, Rossetti wrote to his mother from Bognor requesting her to send books - “Reading is very scarce here” - to be shared with Jane Morris, who would be lodging nearby while she modelled for his painting, Astarte Syriaca: A woman from the working class who acquired through marriage the desired “space and time, solitude and silence” for private reading may, then, have experienced a form of liberation or autonomy that was fraught with ambivalence: both a precious opportunity and a confirmation of the gulf that now separated her from her family of origin, especially perhaps from an illiterate mother. Mrs Morris has I believe returned you the D’Arblay with which she was more delighted than I think I ever knew her to be with any book. She has now got Evelina. I told her you had many amusing ones & would probably lend some to an honest borrower, but I fancy she is shy of asking. 27 22 Mays 347-8. 23 Mays 345, 347. 24 Mays 355. 25 Mays 347, 353-5. 26 Rose 18. 27 William E. Fredeman (ed.), The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vol. 7 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 125, November 1875. Social Mobility and Female Agency 321 Writing to his mother again at the end of the month, however, Rossetti is critical of the books sent: The books you sent Mrs Morris are in perfect safety at her house but with the exception of Louis XIV (and that she already knew much by other books), the selection was not a lucky one for her, as she takes no interest whatever in the Royal Family & Vicar of Wakefield & Macaulay’s Lays had long been known to her. The D’Arblay book was new to her & a great boon & she has since read Evelina (of which in these glutted days a new railway edition has nevertheless just appeared) with great pleasure. 28 Rossetti’s repeated assurances of Jane’s enthusiasm for Burney’s novel and diaries (published as The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay and reprinted many times by 1875) were no doubt in part intended to mollify his mother for his sharp criticism of her other choices. What is also clear in this letter is Rossetti’s insistence on Jane Morris’s accomplishments, her possession of cultural capital (she has already read much of what has been sent), that his mother (he implies) has under-estimated. Rossetti’s repetition of Jane’s fondness for Burney’s work in these letters, however, also presents another clue to the importance of reading for Jane Morris. In Evelina, Burney’s ambivalent depictions of the possibilities and pitfalls of social mobility emerging in the late eighteenth century represents “a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World” (in the words of the novel’s subtitle) as an active process, requiring and inscribing bodily transformations - of dress, voice, demeanour, gesture. 29 Rossetti’s defence of Jane Morris’s breadth of literary knowledge was no exaggeration. Remarks taken out of context from the Rossetti correspondence have been interpreted to mean that Jane Morris was unsympathetic to poetry but her correspondence reveals a sustained interest in the work of Coleridge and Dante, among others. While Fanny Burney’s books often describe an aristocratic milieu, her observations of the difficulties of women negotiating space and agency within the confines of class and gender hierarchies, and of the emotional and affective consequences of social mobility, may have provided an imaginative resource for Jane Morris that offered echoes of her own life situation. 30 28 Fredeman 150. She also often discusses a wide range of bio- 29 Frances Burney, Evelina or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance in the World, 1778 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002). 30 When Rossetti sent Jane Italian translations of Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song poems for children, Jane replied “I return the verses of Christina’s, they seem very funny as far as I can understand them, I still find difficulties with poetry, as you can imagine” (Bryson & Troxell 80), September 1878. Jane’s comment, that is, refers to her facility with Italian idiom, not with poetry per se. The other comment that has been taken to mean Jane Morris was not fond of poetry is again from one of Rossetti’s letters when he writes: “Do not say that poetry is far from you. It should be nearest to us when we need it most, though indeed I know how difficult it sometimes is to feel this” (Bryson & Troxell 16), March W ENDY P ARKINS 322 graphical literature, including memoirs, correspondence and journals (such as by Boswell, Vasari, Walpole, Scott, Balzac), and a diverse mix of fiction. She liked Samuel Richardson as well as Burney and, among contemporary novelists, liked George Meredith but disliked Mary Ward’s The History of David Grieve (1892) which “seemed to me a laboured and unnatural description of a number of excessively disagreeable people, about whom I did not feel interested.” 31 In her lengthy correspondence with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, with whom she had an affair from the late 1880s to the early 1890s (and a friendship of even longer duration), Jane Morris again frequently discussed her reading. While her letters to Blunt may at times have an aspirational quality - discussing people, events and books in which she assumes he will take an interest and showing herself informed on such matters - she does not scruple to disclose to him that she also reads popular contemporary literature (although it often disappoints her or is only taken up as a last resort). In fact, throughout her correspondence there is an almost insatiable need for books; whether at home or away, there are repeated requests for books to be sent, returned, or recommended, as well as accounts of re-reading loved texts, and there is no surer sign of serious ill-health than when she reports she has been unable to read. Writing to Blunt from Italy in 1885, for instance, Jane noted, with dissatisfaction, her enforced indolence: “My time here is passed in walking and idling, for I must not read much, it is a great privation, I am used to reading in bed … but this is strictly forbidden to me now by all: powerful doctors.” 32 The value of reading in the everyday life of Jane Morris is also demonstrated in the keepsake books she made. 33 10, 1880. Here, Rossetti seems to be referring to an occasion when failing health prevented Jane from reading (as his previous letter of three days earlier had also implied). These books incorporated a wide range of quotations - from late medieval, Romantic and Victorian verse, in French and Italian as well as English, as well as aphorisms and nursery rhymes. Also prominent in these handmade books are extracts from contemporary writers such as John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne and (interestingly) Vernon Lee. In a book bound in red 31 Peter Faulkner (ed.), Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: The Letters of Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt together with Extracts from Blunt’s Diaries (Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1986), 64, February 27, 1892. 32 Faulkner 6. Jane Morris mostly used “: ” in place of a hyphen in her letters. Without necessarily going to the extreme of the rest cure made famous by the American doctor Silas Weir Mitchell, Victorian doctors could often advocate the therapeutic benefits of forms of rest and sensory deprivation that recommended against reading or other intellectual activities for (female) patients. See, for example, Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980 (New York: Penguin, 1985), 138- 40. 33 Three are now held in the British Library and a fourth, a gift to Rosalind Howard, is in the Castle Howard Archives. Social Mobility and Female Agency 323 leather, for instance, Jane Morris has copied the following quotation from Ruskin: There is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation: talk to us in the best words they can choose, and with thanks if we listen to them. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, -- & can be kept waiting round us all day long, not to grant audience, but to gain it, -kings and statesmen lingering patiently in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our book-case shelves, -we make no account of that company, -perhaps never listen to a word they would say all day long. 34 Taken from the first essay in Sesame: Of Kings’ Treasuries and originally presented as a lecture in aid of a library fund for the Rusholme Institute in Manchester in 1864, Ruskin’s plea for the value of books and literature as a democratizing form of sociality may have spoken powerfully to a working-class reader whose aspirations had been a source of isolation in early life. In effect, Jane Morris’s keepsake books chart a writing of the (reading) self. As Stephen Colclough reminds us, the transcription of a text within a commonplace book is an intensive reading experience: the choice and isolation of short passages from longer texts require close and careful attention, as the reader re-makes the text for her own purposes. 35 The red keepsake book, in particular, features a number of extracts relating to the value and pleasures of reading, a sentiment shared both by middle-class Victorians as well as working-class autodidacts, and demonstrates that the maker of the keepsake book has acquired not only the design and decorative skills to produce such an artefact but the knowledge and love of a diverse sweep of literary texts from which to choose the entries. A life rich in cultural, as well as financial, capital is given material form in these handmade objects, painstakingly produced with care and attention to detail. If Jane Morris was not a ‘self-made’ woman in the common-sense (and commonly gendered) understanding of the term, she was nonetheless a “self-made reader,” to use Richard Altick’s term, making a self through reading and writing practices. 36 In 1895, Jane Morris wrote to Blunt that “I am always inventing plots for novels, and if I ever find myself anywhere in peace I believe I should develop them, but I daresay they would be bad and would not sell.” 37 34 British Library Add 45351A. Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies: Three Lectures was first published in 1865. The “peace” Jane Morris sought for writing may have eluded her - if, indeed, this statement was meant to be taken seriously - but reading seems to have been a constant solace in her life as well as a powerful means of connection with 35 Stephen Colclough, “Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience,” Publishing History 44 (1998): 18-19. 36 Richard Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957), 240-259. 37 Faulkner 93, October 26, 1895. W ENDY P ARKINS 324 others. The significance she placed on reading as a practice that could enhance a community is also suggested in a letter she wrote to Sydney Cockerell in 1897, about the “possibilities of founding a sort of club-village reading room” in Kelmscott. 38 While she would go on, with the collaboration of the architect Philip Webb, to have two workers’ cottages built in Kelmscott in memory of her husband, it is interesting that the reading-room plan seems to have been her first idea. 39 Curiously, Jane Morris also described to Blunt a paucity of books at Kelmscott Manor: “we have been rather excited by putting up a new book: case to hold what I call reading-books. Several ‘friends’ have complained of the dearth of books to read in this literary man’s house.” 40 For her, it is clear, books were not merely aesthetic objects, as important as the craft of printing and book design may have been to her (also demonstrated by her interest in the Kelmscott Press 41 In Upward Mobility and the Common Good (2007), Bruce Robbins argued that narratives of upward mobility perform significant cultural work but he focuses his attention on masculine protagonists in nineteenth-century novels and twentieth-century cinematic heroines. Earlier narratives of a female protagonist’s social advancement (more typically, a woman of middle rank rising to gentry or aristocratic status) depicted “her erotic bonding with a social superior and the promise of a new, socially elevated family to come” ), they were “what I call reading-books” that should not be confined to the “literary man’s” library but form a vital part of the everyday spaces shared by family and friends. There could, it seems, never be enough books in her life. 42 38 Hammersmith & Fulham Archives, September 24, 1892. , but in Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown such a narrative ended in failure and self-sacrifice, with the heroine in virtual exile in Italy tied to a broken man she does not love. Vernon Lee’s re-telling of Jane Morris’s story as one of thwarted desire and ambition offered a powerful critique of the gendered privileges of Aestheticism but failed to capture the complexities of class and gender in this context. In denying her literary heroine the agency to act differently, Lee presented a bleak story of social mobility that contrasts with Jane Morris’s 39 The first mention of her plan for workers’ cottages appears in a letter to Webb in August 1898 (BL Add 45342), but a year earlier Jane Morris had reported to Cockerell that she had “had a talk with Mr Hobbs [the owner of Kelmscott Manor at that time] … but there appears to be little chance of any success [for the village reading room]. He has no barn he can spare and any new building in the place would be an eye-sore unless we can spend a large sum of money and much thought on it” (13 Aug 1897, Hammersmith & Fulham Archives). 40 Faulkner 93. 41 Jane Morris’s interest in her husband’s Kelmscott Press is often overlooked but I address this and other affinities shared with William Morris further in my forthcoming Jane Morris: The Burden of History (Edinburgh UP). 42 Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007), 2. Social Mobility and Female Agency 325 story of successful, if still painful, acquisition of cultural capital through upward mobility. Jane Morris did not simply have a higher social status bestowed on her, once for all, through her marriage. Instead, her adult life exemplified a remaking of what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus. 43 Habitus is a concept developed by Bourdieu to describe how social class is acquired and perpetuated, not simply as an individual or group identity but as a set of embodied dispositions through which a subject engages with the social world and understands her place within it. Through this concept, Bourdieu sought to overcome the limitations of accounts of class formation that privileged either social determination or individual agency. As “a product of history, that is of social experience and education,” habitus “may be changed by history, that is by new experiences, education or training,” although such transformations are not easily accomplished. 44 43 See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Habitus,’ Habitus: A Sense of Place, ed. Jean Hillier & Emma Rooksby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 27-34. Jane Morris’s social mobility required the acquisition of new skills and knowledge to befit her new role and class position but it also brought about an altered sense of self through her location and participation in new affective networks of family, friendship and intimacy. Much of these sustained processes of upward mobility remain invisible (and probably unrecoverable) to scholars but one aspect of ‘self-improvement’ that connects Jane Morris’s narrative with that of other stories of Victorian working-class advancement was the value placed on reading. A re-making of self premised on a desired cultivation of an autonomous interiority and intellectual independence was closely linked with the freedom to read widely. Through extensive reading, Jane Morris gained a hugely expanded range of cultural references, allusions and affinities through which to communicate a newly-made self with others who spoke the same literary language. 44 Bourdieu 29, original emphasis. 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