"The Regenerating Satire of the Last Pre-Raphaelite: Ford Madox Ford’s Rejection and Revisitation of William Morris’s Chivalric Ideal"

This paper takes as its starting point Arnold Hauser’s notion of sociology of art to advance a new reading of Ford Madox Ford’s rejection and revisitation of William Morris’s aesthetic credo. As a twentieth-century writer, Ford Madox Ford was deeply affected by the modernism of William Morris. Raised in the literary-artistic milieu of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the “last Pre-Raphaelite”, as Douglas Goldring defines Ford, came into contact with the socio-cultural activities sponsored by The Socialist League and by Morris & Co. But Ford Madox Brown’s grandson, who was amused and fascinated by the revolutionary figure of Morris, casts the Pre-Raphaelite man of genius into doubt and derision, emphasising his deficiencies and idealistic propensities. According to Ford, the era of Pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, marketable poetry and the Social Revolution is now over. We can see traces of Ford’s parodic allusion to Morris’s art and writings in The Simple Life Limited (1911), “his sunniest and most successful comic novel”, an anti-utopian novel that desacralises Morris’s chivalric ideal as expressed in News from Nowhere (1890). The Morrisian world of simplicity is repeated in A Simple Life Limited but the forms are varied: always new versions, new connotations, new characterisations, but always the same satirical meaning. The “simplest English writer of [the nineteenth century]”, as Swinburne calls Morris, represents the stereotype that must be demolished. It is my objective here to concentrate on a comparative analysis of Morris’s News from Nowhere and Ford’s A Simple Life Limited from a new-historicist perspective because it allows me to demonstrate Ford’s processes of change and regeneration with respect to Morris’s mediaeval tradition. In A Simple Life Limited, Ford employs a dynamic mode of myth reading – he makes the reader aware of Morrisian myths and, most importantly, points out that they are not natural but constructed; they are, in Hauser’s words, “concrete modifications of a basic form which does not exist”. The Morrisian myth of simplicity is stolen and restored through a demystifying approach. Ford demonstrates the inapplicability of Morris’s principles to a modern socialist colony which is composed of intellectuals, poets, novelists, literary critics, theatre directors, craftsmen, architects, miniaturists, garment manufacturers and printing press operators and is dedicated to “Beauty, Art, Poetry itself and all the Finer Things” as envisioned by William Morris. Like Nowherians, Simple Lifers devote themselves to the simplicity of the lesser arts in order to better themselves and to live a simple, dignified almost perfect life. Reminiscent of Morrisian sages, Simple Lifers are experts and producers of great benefit who practice applied arts correctly. But the Morrisian idea that simple living habits predispose us towards securing happiness proves ineffective for Simple Lifers and their devotion to the lesser arts aimed at producing something useful for life appears to be completely useless in the modern era. Through Simon Branson, Horatio Gubb, Mr Major, and Ohpelia Branson, I suggest, Ford deconstructs and regenerates Morris’s mediaeval tradition revealing his filiation to and distancing from the cultural and social formations pertaining to the Victorian era of mediaeval revival.