HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JANE MORRIS!

 

To celebrate the birthday of Jane Morris

To celebrate the birthday of Jane Morris (née Burden) on 19^th October 1839, I am sharing an extract from my book, ‘How We Might Live: At Home with Jane and William Morris’. 

D G Rossetti, 'The Blue Silk Dress', 1868

We know very little about her early years, but I wanted to piece together the fragments we can glean about her life before 1857 – the unexpected memories she offers to friends; Victorian census entries; church records and maps; and my own experience of living in Holywell Street for several years.   

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It is fitting that we first see Jane clearly at the theatre. In the summer of 1857 she emerged from the shadows of her background, and became visible as a potential artist’s model. At the playhouse, Jane could immerse herself in alternative worlds, experience transformations and sudden revelations. The actresses of the Drury Lane Theatre Company on stage that night could choose how to present themselves to the audience. They could dress up, rearrange their hair, alter their posture, modulate their voice, step into the light. They could be a peasant or a princess. For a working-class girl like Jane, the theatre was full of possibilities. The story of Jane’s ‘discovery’ has been retold and romanticised many times. She is treated like a blank space, a nobody, as if she only became a fully formed person after she moved into the orbit of the artists. Very few people have tried to see the meeting from her perspective. Jane was already working, probably in domestic service, possibly for a college. She was already resourceful and imaginative. She was skilled in needlework and hungry for books.

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Bath Place now

What do we know about her background for sure? Jane was born on 19 October 1839 in St Helen’s Passage, a tiny cut-through between Holywell Street and New College Lane. She was baptised in the little church of St Peter-in-the-East in the blank days between Christmas and New Year 1840, more than a year after her birth. Maybe she was a sickly child (although parents often hastened christenings, in case the baby died). Maybe her family were not bothered about church attendance. Certainly, as an adult, Jane was not conventionally religious. Unlike Georgie Burne-Jones, for example, faith was never the bedrock of her character. Her education was rather scrappy, too. Schooling for all young children was not compulsory until the 1870, so Jane probably learnt to read and count in a school set up by a local charity or church. 

Marriage certificate of Jane's parents

Her own mother, born Ann Maizey, was illiterate. She could not write her own name when she married Robert Burden in 1833. It seems that there was no one to teach her in Alvescot, the little Oxfordshire village where she grew up. Like many young agricultural workers, she had left the land and come into town looking for work. She wanted a life that was less exposed, less hand-to-mouth. Ann’s son-in-law William Morris came to idealise the seasonal, rooted way of living that was destroyed by industry and urbanisation. But he overlooked the ignorance, the cold, the damp, the harsh grind that Ann Maizey and her generation had wanted to escape. How keenly did Jane feel this dissonance between her family’s familiarity with rural poverty, and her husband’s nostalgia for a pre-industrial idyll? 

The gap between Jane’s experience, and that of her mother, later became almost insurmountable. Jane, through her marriage, was surrounded by writers. She became steeped in the literary worlds of romance and legend. And then she was exposed to the fiery political tracts of radical thinkers. This was a way of living, creating, interacting that was unthinkable for her parents. It is perhaps Jane’s greatest achievement that she was born into a home where her mother could barely read or write, and yet she transcended these limitations magnificently. Jane grew into a woman who could converse with poets, who learnt to read Dante in Italian, and taught her own bright daughters. Georgie Burne-Jones, in her retelling of Jane’s story, wondered why she had not met William or his friends ‘during the time he was at College’. Jane was, after all, a beauty ‘of so rare and distinguished a type’ that it seemed strange that their paths had not crossed sooner. 

D G Rossetti, 'Jane Burden', 1858

Georgie of course knew the answer. But she glossed over the great social gulf between the Burdens and William’s undergraduate set. Exeter College was a five-minute walk away from Jane’s home. They could have passed each other on Broad Street or outside the Bodleian Library many times. However, their everyday lives were very different. For one thing, Jane was five years younger than William; she was only sixteen when William finished his studies. It is also worth remembering that during his time at Exeter College, he was writing, not drawing. He did not need flesh-and-blood models for his imagined heroines. William’s circle then gravitated towards a different part of the city. They spent much of their time with friends in Pembroke College, to the south of Carfax, the crossroads at the very centre of town, or they walked west across Port Meadow to the river. Jane moved through other quarters of the city, seeing it from her own angle. 

She and her family had changed lodgings several times in her short life, but always within the same limited area. Her home now was wedged in Brooks’ Yard behind 65 Holywell Street. For a few years, they had lived on the other side of the road in King’s Head Passage, down a tight entry beside a pub. When she was little, their home had been in Brazier’s Yard, in a row of buildings backing onto 23 Holywell Street. Her childhood was unsettled, punctuated by these moves. They never shifted more than a hundred yards or so. And they always lived in the crowded courtyards hidden behind the elegant Georgian façades of Holywell Street. A short walk to the north brought Jane to open ground. Beyond Wadham College were meadows and grazing land for sheep and cattle, but these were gradually enclosed and landscaped, to become the University Parks in the early 1850s. From the other end of the street, she could reach Holywell church and the watermill, and then open fields. She sometimes walked across Magdalen Bridge to the woods beyond the Iffley Road, and came home with handfuls of violets. As a girl, these were her breathing spaces, away from the cottage, where she was hemmed in on all sides. 

Oxford, 'Holywell Street & New College', 1850

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Why did they live in such tucked-away places? The Burdens were poor, and it is likely that their lodgings were connected to her father’s job. Many of their neighbours in St Helen’s Passage were college servants, or their dependants  – a porter from Brasenose College lived there, next to a laundress and a gardener’s widow. In the houses around them were carpenters, seamstresses and college cooks. When they moved up the road, they lived among charwomen, manglewomen and labourers. Jane’s father was listed on his marriage certificate and in the 1861 census as an ostler or groom. He may have worked in the livery stables at Number 7 or Number 14 Holywell Street. We can still see the great wooden gates that once opened onto the busy yards, where Burden and the other men prepared the horses for their exercise. Or he could have been employed in the stables attached to New College. Perhaps if William Morris and his friends had been keen on hunting, and kept horses in town, they might have seen Jane sooner. As it was, she went unremarked, as she stopped by the stables to bring her father his dinner. 

The barns and coach houses at New College were cleared in the 1870s to make way for the expansion of the college accommodation. The whole area around Jane’s home was transformed then, with much of the medieval layout swept away. The stables had been built in the ancient moat, known locally as The Slype, beneath the city wall. An Ordnance Survey map of 1876 shows how the old buildings curved round the bastion, and clung to the medieval stonework. Between the stables and Holywell Street was a stonemason’s yard and large domestic gardens, filled with fruit trees. All these were lost too, as New College extended beyond the wall, creating a new range of Gothic Revival buildings and an imposing gateway and lodge. 

Holywell Street, The Slype & old city walls

But in Jane’s childhood, her family lived and worked in a jumble of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses and cottages, interspersed with pubs like the King’s Head and the Golden Ball (also demolished in the 1870s). Only the King’s Arms and the Turf Tavern survived.

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Sitting in the tiny beer garden of the Turf today, it is still possible to get a sense of the cheek-by-jowl environment in which Jane grew up. Like the college stables, the pub was built in the old moat, close against the city wall. The houses lean in, limiting the light. St Helen’s Passage twists and kinks. There is little privacy. In the 1840 and ’50s, the pale roughcast on the walls was blackened by smoke from the cooking ranges. Jane’s mother is said to have worked as a laundress, but it is hard to imagine that she could have washed and dried linen at home – the soot and smells were inescapable. The family shared a water supply and a privy. (Some houses in this lane did not have indoor bathrooms fitted until the early 1970s.) 

William Morris, embroidery design, c.1862

Wet washing, noise from the pubs and workshops, dogs, children, hens, and not a breath of air: this was the scene outside Jane’s front door. It was the same from St Helen’s Passage to Brazier’s Yard. Brooks’ Yard was owned by a dairyman. So, in 1857 Jane could have woken to the clatter of metal churns and milk carts, and the smell of cows and curdling cream. Inside the cottage was no better. She would have shared a room, and probably a bed, with her sister. Space was tight. The rooms were dark. It was a struggle to keep clean, to tame her wild hair, to find money for a shawl or dress fabric. Home was stifling, especially in high summer. 

There were outbreaks of cholera in the Long Vacations in the early 1830s and again in 1849 and 1854. Dr Acland’s map of Oxford, showing the locations of the cholera outbreaks, indicated that most cases were on the other side of the city, in the parishes of St Ebbe’s and St Thomas. These were labelled as ‘districts still undrained’ with ‘parts of the river still contaminated by sewers’. However, there were several reported deaths in Holywell Street and New College Lane. Anxieties about disease and the safety of drinking water were heightened again in 1857, when the Illustrated London News printed illustrations of magnified drops of water. These pictures made visible dozens of microscopic creatures, with tentacles and whiskers, that lived in streams and ponds. This was more evidence of the ‘very offensive and unwholesome state’ of urban waterways. 

For Jane and her family, these worries were hard to ignore. Ill-health and early death had come close to home. Jane had watched her big sister Mary Anne die of tuberculosis in 1849. Mary Anne was only fourteen when she succumbed to ‘consumption’. There was nothing that Ann Burden could do, as her young daughter began to lose weight, to cough blood. They tried to ease her night fevers. But the disease was deadly, untreatable and easily spread. We can imagine Jane, at nine years old, scared for her older sister, and trying to keep little Bessie out from under her mother’s feet. Jane was all too aware of the fears about paying the doctor’s bills, the waiting, the struggles to make sure there was a meal on the table when the men came home from work. William, her brother, was only twelve but would also have been out working also as a messenger boy. It was Jane’s job to run errands, or fetch groceries from the covered market. 

Her father had an unpredictable temper. We know that in 1837, before Jane was born, he had been fined for assaulting a neighbour. It must have been more than just an exchange of sharp words, because the woman had reported him to the police. This was part of the background noise of her early life: Jane and her mother had to keep her father in good humour as they faced the difficulties of looking after a sick child, and trying to manage a household on a very small income. From a young age, Jane was learning how to cook, clean, sew, budget, shop, care for her sister, dodge her father, and make herself useful. It would have been hard to fit in schoolwork and friendships too. But she said later that she always loved to read. She craved stories and news from the wider world. As Jane wrote in the 1870s, ‘I still keep up my old habit of reading every scrap that comes my way.’ 

D G Rossetti, 'Jane Reading', c.1870

In the very few memories she shared of her childhood, there are these hints, these quick glances beyond her immediate poverty. She remembered standing on Hythe Bridge, overlooking the canal, and watching the boats casting off and leaving the city behind. She told Crom Price how ‘I always thought when I was a little girl in Oxford how much I should enjoy a voyage on one of those barges . . . but it seemed like a dream I should never be able to realise.’ In 1879, when she wrote this letter, they were planning an excursion along the river, and at last, ‘the thing is within one’s grasp.’ She added, ‘Crom, it must be a barge but not a very coaly one.’ This comment seems to sum Jane up – her hope and imagination tempered by practicalities. Like William, she knew that the ‘embodiment of dreams’ required a balance between the visionary and the realistic.

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Jane and May's recipe folder

To commemorate Jane and her fabled hospitality at Red House and Kelmscott Manor, we are encouraging people to bake a #cakeforJaneMorris over the next few days. I was extremely fortunate to be able to transcribe the recipes from her folder, now kept at Kelmscott. 

These include notes made by May and friends of the family. Jan Marsh, for example, has identified 'Ada' who contributed a lemony fruit cake as Ada Culmer - she was Jenny's carer and companion. Other recipes reflect their travels - in Iceland and in Italy, for example. They are all published, for the first time, in 'How We Might Live'.  (To buy 'How We Might Live' )