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Essays in Medieval Studies 6
[Page numbers of the printed text appear at the right in bold.]

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Medieval England on the Nineteenth-Century Table

Eunice Dauterman Maguire

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In the nineteenth century, the English domesticated the Middle Ages for the middle classes through nostalgia. This paper explores three aspects of that process in medieval forms and images on transfer-printed pottery. The industrial art of transfer printing on ceramic tableware made such images a staple for daily consumption on both sides of the Atlantic,1 where printed views and published works by artists and writers at different levels of culture appealed to the same market as the pottery. The arts through the century also share motifs, as well as the recurring and easily recombined associations they evoke for a widely literate public.

Examples in transfer ware bring the past into the present, or project the present into the past. They do so by the topographical presentation of medieval buildings in English landscapes; by the playful addition to outdoor scenes of figures dressed in a more or less English medievalizing fashion; and by the novel visualization or creation of a particular kind of medievalizing contemporary monument. Some nonsensical-looking fantasies are among the results; yet they were formed with the same disrespect for historical accuracy and with the same willingness to borrow eclectically, as the fantastic medievalizing trappings of Romantic poets like Keats. Certain pieces of pottery can elucidate a progression, as if on a stage, from the use of a medieval building as a backdrop in a country landscape, to the populating of less rural landscapes with imaginary characters, and the eventual choice of a London park for one of England's most conspicuous medievalizing monuments, not leading but following popular taste. Looking at the printed images of transfer wares seriously enough to compare them with works of "high art," both literary and visual, reveals a remarkable alignment between the two.

The novel medievalizing compositions are in part due to the procedure of transfer printing in the nineteenth century. The pottery was printed by a paper transfer taken from a copper engraving made especially for the purpose. More than one paper transfer could be snipped up and applied to a single piece. This cheap means of mass-produced and easily varied decoration developed in Staffordshire into a major industry for the distribution and export of vast quantities of image-bearing wares

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to a receptive middle-class public.2

A medieval building in a rural landscape appears on a blue-printed platter of about 1827, represented in the Moore collection of the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. It is marked with the title Whitney, Oxfordshire, without the maker's name.3

[Fig. 1. Whitney, Oxfordshire, printed in blue. Unknown maker, ca. 1827.
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Reproduced by permission of Krannert Art Museum.] The scene is surrounded by a scalloped and fringed lambrequin, or curtain-like border, as if to create a domestic window through which to contemplate the view. The backdrop is a Gothic church, its spire the focal point. The building's mass serves as measure and arbiter of a row of small cottages signaled by their fragile arcs of smoke rising like windblown buttresses from chimneys along the church's side. The architecture screens and completes the view, as a barrier behind a deep introductory landscape where trees, water, and grasses ease the eye: far from a wilderness, a tamed, calm scene closed off to further distance by the authority of the church's structure.

The church building is a historical reminder that landscape is defined for human viewing by constructed presences, like the church and cottages at the horizon in the mezzotint by David Lucas after John Constable's composition "Stoke by Neyland, Suffolk," for the 1830 book English Landscape Scenery.4

[Fig. 2. "Stoke by Neyland, Suffolk," mezzotint by David Lucas after John Constable.
Andrew Wilton, Constable's "English Landscape Scenery" (London: British Museum, 1979). Reproduced by permission of the British Library.] In this print, as on the platter, the title is the name of the whole rural place, the entire village and its fields, not just the church; the commentary accompanying the print begins by noting, instead of the building's form, its standing as a solid structure at the service of nature's most evanescent phenomena. "The solemn stillness of Nature in a Summer's Noon, when attended by thunder-clouds, is the sentiment attempted in this print ... The effect of light and shadow on the sky and landscape are such as would be observed when looking northward at noon; that time of day being decidedly marked by the direction of the shadows and the sun shining full on the south side of the Church."

The artists' depiction of the fleeting effects of weather and time of day in this image are the equivalent of the smoke trails on the Whitney platter, the insubstantial means of depicting a particular moment. On the platter, smoke from cooking fires suggests the approaching time of the evening meal, for which all the inhabitants have gone indoors. The passing moment in both compositions stands in contrast to the accumulated centuries suggested by the Gothic church. If the images alone are insufficient to spell out this message, Constable makes it clear in his text. Arching over the church's tower as if taking precedence, a noonday rainbow curves. He spends many words on that most fleeting of natural features before continuing:

[the countryside] abounds in noble Gothic churches: the size of

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many of them, and seen as they now are standing the imposing grandeur in neglected and almost deserted spots, imparts a peculiar sentiment, and gives a solemn air to even the country itself, and they cannot fail to impress the stranger with the mingled emotions of melancholy and admiration. These magnificent structures are found in scattered villages and sequestered places, out of the high roads, surrounded by a few poor dwellings, the remains only of former opulence and comfort, but ill according with such large and beautiful specimens of architecture ... [at Stoke by Neyland] the Tower, from its commanding height, seems to impress on the surrounding country its own sacred dignity of character.

The same principles apply when Constable observes a more famous medieval building. His 1841 mezzotint by Lucas, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (fig. 3) retains Stoke by Neyland's embracing natural arch, a double rainbow soaring now over the Gothic structure, at the horizon, while in the foreground the landscape is filled with rural incident.5

[Fig. 3. Salisbury Cathedral mezzotint by David Lucas after John Constable.
Andrew Wilton, Constable's "English Landscape Scenery" (London: British Museum, 1979). Reproduced by permission of the British Library.]
As in the Whitney scene, a placid spread of water sets the mood.6

At the turn of the century, Uvedale Price, in his "Essay on Architecture and Buildings," considers the relationship between buildings and scenery; in volume 3 of his Essays on the Picturesque he is still concerned with the integrity of a castle in its natural setting.7 Price wrestles with ideas taken for granted in popular images as well as in academic compositions for most of the nineteenth century. A pleasing picture combines art with nature. In a scene depicting a building, the landscape may be the primary feature. But the medieval building has a legitimate function as a limiting feature in a wild or rural landscape. On both of the Constable/Lucas views, as in the view of Whitney on the platter, the monument and its medieval identity screens out distant industrial enterprise or immediate mundane distractions.

People wanting to escape from the press of industrial urban life with its uncomfortable quality of fast-paced time were drawn to the ambience of long-lastingness in medieval settings. Scenes like that of the Whitney platter reassuringly offer peace, and a long-term view, where an actual medieval building is an essential element in the English countryside. The landscape puts the building at a comfortable distance for contemplation. Illustrated travel literature, popular for the same reasons, served as models for some of the Staffordshire potters' engravers.8 With respect to the medieval past, both text and image in this genre develop historical notions of the picturesque, juxtaposing art with nature.9

Even the major poets translate topographical tradition from visual into verbal images. Perhaps the most famous of all English landscape poems features a medieval ruin, presented in the title only, as

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part of the distant setting--Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour." In a sense the poet is using the monument as a focal backdrop, just as Constable and the anonymous designer of the Whitney print have done a generation later, when Wordsworth's popularity was on the rise. Victorians made, wrote about, and illustrated tours to see the Wordsworth landscapes, just as Constable, in his own lifetime, was informed by a stranger, a fellow-traveller in a coach, that they were passing through Constable country.10

When leading artists' and writers' work encouraged existing habits of looking at landscapes with medieval buildings, they also nourished the commercial ceramicist's process of constructing an imaginary or fantastic medieval scene.11 In transfer ware, the carefully composed topographical presentation of a medieval subject shifts into fantasy toward the middle of the century, pushed by a change in the copyright law which prevented the use of actual scenes as printed in recent publications. Although it is true that the time-honored practice of snipping up existing prints and putting their pieces together in new combinations gave the decorators of transfer wares an immediate way of creating fantastic scenes,12 the piecemeal method of composing and the formulaic introduction of a building in its natural landscape belong as well to poets inventing a "medieval" atmosphere.

Keats, in "The Eve of St. Agnes," translates a topographical mode of illustration into verse at the opening of the poem. Like Constable or the designer of the Whitney scene, he follows the lead of the illustrated travel book, or the earlier topographical print, by the way he presents the foreground to the medieval hall and chapel, distancing the reader from an everyday urban or domestic environment by means of a natural and rural interval of detail.

The poem's medievalism, like many transfer-printed scenes, has a dual aim in the reaching for a kind of timelessness, along with the dream of escape. A narrative element, in prints, is the introduction of figures into landscape. The Constable/Lucas detail of a figure sitting contemplatively at the water's edge, not using his fishing pole, brings human life into the natural landscape of Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows and assures the viewer of an escape from time's more active tedium.

A theatrical variation of Tudor dress in transfer patterns was designed to offer British as well as export purchasers an alternative escape from the present. Proud of an overseas market and an expanding empire, the potters put Britons from the past into improbable exotic scenes, as if they had strayed from a Shakespeare set. Such figures disport themselves on the Bosphorus (a stop for Victorians traveling to India) on a vegetable dish marked for a Louisville importer.13

[Fig. 4. Bosphorus, printed in brown. R. Hall and Co., 1841-49.
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from private collection.] In Figure 5, on

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a cup from a series called Olympic Games, although designed long before the games' revival, a vaguely Himalayan valley has become a playing field where a javelin-thrower takes aim, wearing something like a late medieval English doublet over a belted tunic (fig. 5).14

[Fig. 5. Olympic Games, printed in black. Thomas Mayer, 1825-35.
Krannert Art Museum photo, reproduced by permission of Krannert Art Museum, from private collection.] Where are we here, in time or in place? The costume's style, familiar from nineteenth-century illustrations of historical novels, is a cue that we have escaped to an imaginary realm. Such costumes have a practical timelessness also; unlike contemporary dress, they can go out to the public on tableware to be used for some years without looking dated.

Conversely, the intrinsic inaccuracies of medievalizing fantasy are often more blatant in the popular images of transfer ware, especially after the first quarter of the century, than in either verbal or visual works by great masters. A design called Priory (fig. 6) gives us a Gothic monument crossed with a Chinese garden pagoda;

[Fig. 6. Priory, printed in brown. Hicks, Meigh & Johnson, ca. 1825-35.
Krannert Art Museum photo, reproduced by permission of Krannert Art Museum, from private collection.] a small jug borrows gilded and enameled scrolls from the borders of illuminated manuscripts (fig. 7).15

[Fig. 7. Scrollwork, printed in green, enamelled in red and gilt. Unknown maker, ca. 1840.
Krannert Art Museum photo, reproduced by permission of Krannert Art Museum, from private collection.] The taste and the creative process both are carefree and allusive, undismayed as the medievalizing Keats or Coleridge by any need to identify or to conform to an actual source or to specific models for details.16 Ironically, feeling no need for familiarity with particular medieval types was one reason nineteenth-century people liked medieval subjects. On transfer wares the imagination drifts into a fancy-dress world of shapes and images borrowed from times and places so long ago and far away as to blend into a new dreamlike whole, making the escape from actuality all the more complete.

As we have seen, the prejudice against a too-specific reminder of history is part of the legacy of the picturesque. In some cases, it extends as far as the representation of human figures. Throughout the century, there is a recurring preference for groups of images which are not documents of history but creations as seamless as a dream. In a journal published in Edinburgh in 1815, a French traveller in England prefers worn sculpture and a distant view. His frontispiece is an aquatint of Goodrich Castle, its walls crumbling and overgrown. He admires Litchfield Cathedral, with the proviso that the ruined statues look better than when they were new: "so worn and defaced by time ... Those venerable stumps suit their situation ... The fine view ... from the bridge leading to it, would be much improved if the few houses between it and the water were removed, and a lawn substituted."17

In his imagination he anticipates the composition of the Whitney platter, except that he prefers not even to see a house as a reminder of present human activity. He visits Fountains Abbey in the grounds of Studly Park, approves and sketches the chapel, and praises the ruins' "extent, and particularly their situation," although he finds their style "upon the whole, heavy," and a standing tower too "entire ... for

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beauty."18 Making no mention of the abbey's Cistercian history, he finds its natural history of great interest: "there are six or seven immense yew-trees behind the abbey,--one is 28 feet in circumference; they were there, and recorded as large trees before it was built (1150)!"19

This interest in joining medieval architecture with natural wonders to the exclusion of people or of human figures continues into the mid-Victorian period. Writers such as Harriet Martineau and her lake-country guest, Ralph Waldo Emerson, voice it on either side of the Atlantic.20 An unpeopled view in a transfer print on a platter at the Krannert marked Coburg21 (fig. 8) displays a castle as if from a distance, blurred by firing in the so-called flow-blue technique.

[Fig. 8. Coburg, printed in blue. John Edwards, ca. 1880-90.
Krannert Art Museum. Reproduced by permission of Krannert Art Museum.] This style with its indefinite edges and vaporous lines recalls Emerson's observation of history, that "time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts."22 By the name Coburg, however, the purchaser would understand the drowsy outlines of these fantasized towers to represent Coburg castle, a connubial retreat dear to Queen Victoria after she married Albert of Saxe-Coburg. The royal pair, who loved to escape into the country, were themselves the social models of domesticity.23 Around the image of the castle, a border of vine leaves brings nature to the table with suggestions of fruit and wine.

Turning toward America, a last example from the Krannert's collection returns to a peopled landscape, tying it to the associations of Gothic monuments and of outdoor delight. It also illustrates the transatlantic extent of fantasies in the popular imagination, spelling out the possibility that unknown designers may express them in anticipation of the work of famous artists and architects.24 Apparently designed some time before Albert's death, on a printed plate mysteriously named Columbia, a Gothic garden monument prefigures in miniature Gilbert Scott's giant Albert Memorial in London's Hyde Park (fig. 9).25

[Fig. 9. Columbia, printed in red. William Adams and Sons, ca. 1840-50.
Krannert Art Museum. Reproduced by permission of Krannert Art Museum.] Contrary to our usual academic assumptions, the "high art" of this well-known monument follows a way already indicated in both two and three dimensions.

On the Columbia plate, an arched Gothic pinnacle has come down from the sky, where its prototype crowned a cathedral; now it sits incongruously on the ground, as garden sculpture, replacing the urn which had been almost ubiquitous in such transfer prints, either in a classicizing or an orientalizing form (fig. 4).26

[Fig. 4. Bosphorus, printed in brown. R. Hall and Co., 1841-49.
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from private collection.] If the classical urn Keats describes belonged in a garden as a "foster child of silence and slow time," this transplanted pinnacle accelerates the medieval past into the Victorian present. The sentiment developed in the Romantic poem made its way into industrial art: the maker's printed mark on the bottom of the Columbia plate includes the urn as an emblem of art itself, and of the lasting dignity of artifice.27 Being indigenously northern, and not classi-

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cal, the Gothic motif manages to escape these connotations. The name "Columbia" suggests the maker's hope that America would welcome the pattern. It assumes that the medieval past belongs to the domestic imagination on both sides of the ocean.

In mid-century America, when such an image might be found in two dimensions on the dinner table, it was appearing outdoors in three dimensions. Parklike cemeteries adorned with monuments of classicizing or medievalising style came into being, and funerary imagery ranked high in aesthetic consciousness. The Gothic tabernacle becomes a fashionable alternative to a memorial urn as a historic marker in New York City, illustrated in a travel book of 1866. Although serving as a collective cenotaph and lacking the central sculptured figure, the monument parallels the one on the Columbia plate as a precedent for the Albert Memorial (fig. 10).

[Fig. 10. Soldier's Monument in Trinity Churchyard. From Benson J. Lossing, The Hudson; from the Wilderness to the Sea (Troy, N. Y., 1866).] It was a soldiers' monument in Trinity churchyard, dedicated in 1852 to patriots imprisoned during the War of Independence.28 There is a double irony in the choice of a Gothic style for this monument and the rebuilt Trinity Church: at the time of the Revolution, the rector there was a loyal Englishman, opposed to the cause for which the memorial was built. The Gothic reference to ancient piety honors patriotism while glossing over this historical embarrassment, and mends the transatlantic bridge of sentiment.

In Gilbert Scott's hands the Albert Memorial has a different significance (fig. 11).

[Fig. 11. The Albert Memorial, drawing by Gavin Pownall Maguire after an anonymous print.] He did not base his design on actual medieval architecture, but on "ancient shrines" he saw as the "models of imaginary buildings"--in his words.29 While the domed structure of the Albert Hall might glorify, the Gothic style of the Memorial virtually sanctifies the prince, whose figure inside appears relaxed, modern, and highly specific, in contrast to the generalized, robed statue of the Columbia monument or the empty shrine in Trinity churchyard. This visual canonization plants him in a public garden, where fantasy may bloom more freely than in genuinely medieval confines such as Westminster Abbey, the traditional home of memorial sculptures for England's great figures. Placing the monument outdoors acknowledges the established emotional tie between nature and the Gothic style. What is more, instead of offering a spiritual or aesthetic retreat to a remote or rural landscape, the architect follows the unknown designer of the Columbia transfer print, putting an image borrowed from the Middle Ages within reach of the populace for their pleasure as pedestrians, giving them in an urban refuge from the city streets a Gothic point of reference in an outdoor space. Yet the Memorial does not serve, like the Whitney church, as a historical screen across the landscape. Its populous sculptured base invades the lawn with an imperial polemic. The trefoil arches open on all four sides almost defiantly recall the picturesque taste for airy Gothicisms intrinsic to the

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Columbia and the Trinity churchyard monuments. The huge scale of Gilbert Scott's structure, at the same time, is as transcendingly public as Albert's Crystal Palace, which had drawn enormous crowds to the same park to see displays of transfer-printed pottery and other industrial arts.30

In the park, Victoria's consort instantly becomes part of the legendary and romantic medieval past, brought out in dazzling materials and vast dimensions into as bright a light as ever shines on English soil. Anachronism and stylistic anomaly are a price willingly paid, as we saw with the Tudor Olympiast, for the medieval supply of adaptable domestic fantasies. In the same spirit Tennyson reshapes the past to fit the present, dedicating his Arthurian Idylls of the King to Albert's memory as "some image of himself ... ideal knight"31 and addressing him as "dear to Art, / Dear to thy land and ours, a Prince indeed, / Beyond all titles, and a household name."

This poem, an elegant escapist confection, joined the illustrated travel books in the parlor, a generation or two after curtains printed with castles32 had been hung in homes where images of Gothic monuments or medievalizing fantasy might have come to the table with the food. John Ruskin, in 1864, remarked that English housewives were would-be noble ladies of a feudal era.33 Hungry for culture, but never uniform in sophistication, the nineteenth-century public was happy to be fed with transfer-printed household images of the Middle Ages. On the dinner plate, the domesticated medieval motif served up dreams to share.