HILARY FRASER(1868-70), a poem consisting of twenty-four tales on classical and
medieval - especially Norse - subjects:
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green. (WM III, 3)Yet, in a style notable at once for its directness and indirection, Morris's
historicist poetry performs a complex balancing-act between aesthetic
displacement and transformational socialist engagement. Where his epic
poems such as The Earthly Paradise retreat into the past, his later prose
romances The Dream of John Ball (1888) and News from Nowhere (1890)
project into a Utopian future - as part of a larger political vision.
It was not, then, generally mere nostalgia for a pre-industrial golden age
that impelled the Victorians' historicist turn. The strategic uses of history in
the nineteenth century were manifold. For a newly empowered yet still
insecure middle class seeking cultural and ideological as well as economic
and political definition, history could serve as a means of legitimacy,
conferring respectability by offering a lineage that connected the modern
bourgeoisie to such persons as Italian Renaissance merchant princes and
patrons. For a nation conscious of its role on the world stage, history
provided moral lessons and political guidance in the form of parallels and
precedents. And for an age that was self-consciously modern, it offered
insights into the very meaning of modernity. Articulated in the full range of
artistic forms, the past was always and inevitably imbricated in the very
textures of Victorian ideology. Further, Victorian representations of the past,
as of everything else, are notable for their ideological instability. On the one
hand, John Ruskin's Gothic cathedral epitomized the pre-capitalist order at
the same time as it promoted the decidedly bourgeois ideals of personal
freedom and individuality. On the other hand, Morris's neo-medieval
furnishings were conceived in homage to the creativity of the pre-industrial
craft worker yet their production paradoxically involved laborious, repeti-
tive, and highly regulated techniques, and they were soon to become
synonymous with the very elitist aesthetic that Morris ostensibly despised.
Victorian critics and readers themselves were hardly naive interpreters of
historical poetry, novels and paintings, any more than they were of
historical treatises. Victorian commentators were acutely aware of the
varieties of classicism and medievalism displayed among contemporary
poets, just as they were alert to the mediating role of the poet, together
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