New Contexts and Publishing Paradoxes: William Morris as a New Romancer

When William Morris's late-Victorian contemporaries referred to romance in general (as opposed to the New Romance in particular) they could have in mind any number of things, from Chaucer and the Icelandic sagas, to the historical novels of Scott and Dumas, to E. A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). But despite this generic diversity, most uses of the term activated one of two sets of antithetical associations. Either romance was a universal and popular creation like the old literary monuments of pre-modern communities, or it was a mass genre that was recognisably the product of a commercial society. Morris willingly participated in market processes; at the same time, he was one of the most vocal exponents of the romance-ascommunity idea. Was he, in this respect, typical of his contemporaries? There were many who recognised that romance could be a commodity; there were also many who thought of it as a primal mode of human expression with its roots in the national epics of primitive peoples. Both perceptions depended to some extent on new developments, whether the growth of the publishing industry towards the end of the century, or the anthropological and philological discoveries that shaped the Victorian understanding of pre-modern cultures. And it was by no means exceptional to hold both at the same time. By a curious form of doublethink romance revival giants managed to act according to the exigencies of the market, but to talk (at least in public) as if the market were non-existent.