Friends of Red House
Friends of Red House |
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Visiting Red House in the 1860'sWhen Red House was built, it was near a small hamlet called Upton that was fairly isolated in the middle of farmland and orchards with the large estates of Danson and Blendon surrounding it. Nearby Bexleyheath was growing slowly with shops, schools and churches only just beginning to appear. To get there from London required a train to Abbey Wood (or possibly Plumstead). The Morrises had built for them a wagonette, based on an old-fashioned cart, but, predictably, painted brightly.
It was therefore four hours return journey, and so the weekend party or the longer stay were common.
Ned and Georgie Burne-Jones stayed there for several months after the house was opened in 1860. The painter Ford Madox Brown and the poet Algernon Swinburne were also visitors. The stories told are of an extremely happy time with work and play being pursued with great enthusiasm. In the earliest days it must have been much like a working holiday with everyone helping out in the decoration of the house. The Morrises appear to have been genial hosts and, for Morris himself, it was part of his dream of an artistic working community. He himself, as for much of his earlier life, bore the brunt of many jokes and hoaxes: his waistcoat sewn up, his hand of cards doctored, his friends refusing to talk to him except through Janey. His friends, who called him Topsy (after the character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), could be quite cruel as cartoons drawn by both Rossetti and Burne-Jones show:
But Morris clearly loved the camaraderie, particularly of his male friends, and was willing to be the buffoon or victim. So the diaries and letters of the time are full of jollity, song, creative work, good food and wine.
The local population looked on with some horror as the wagonette came by with strangely dressed and somewhat exotic looking people arriving at the weekend. They pondered on whether they were vagabonds, members of a traveling show or even a circus. They were particularly shocked at the flouting of convention by holding tea parties on a Sunday afternoon. Many of the accounts of these happy times we have were from earlier months. As time went by circumstances changed, as did individuals. Jane, Georgie, and Lizzie all got pregnant. Rossetti appears to have drifted off from Morris, particularly after Lizzie first had a stillborn child and then tragically died, probably from a deliberate overdose of laudanum, to which she was addicted. The men became increasingly focussed on the company they set up in 1861 - Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company – which was based in London. Morris became a commuter, travelling up to four hours a day.
He now increasingly needed to work for a living as his expenses went up, and his shares went down. Both Burne-Jones and Morris were affected by ill-health. Not surprisingly, it became more and more difficult to maintain those early heady days and less surprising than is usually thought that they would leave Red House after only five years. |
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