The William Morris Society and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) wish to co-sponsor a session on “The Pre-Raphaelites and Print Culture.” The Pre-Raphaelites were important pioneers in the visual presentation of texts, as Dante Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and most famously, William Morris experimented with book design, book illustration, and fine press printing. Their aesthetic preferences influenced not only late nineteenth-century British print culture but twentieth-century and contemporary American and European printing and book design as well.

In recent years Pre-Raphaelite book illustration and Morris’s Kelmscott Press have continued to inspire critical, scholarly, and popular interest, as in Elizabeth C. Miller’s Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture, 2013; William Peterson’s The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographic Adventure, 1991 and The Kelmscott Chaucer: A Census (with Sylvia Peterson), 2011; and and Nicholas Frankel’s “William Morris and the Kelmscott Press: Towards an Aesthetics of Environment” (Routledge Companion to William Morris, 2020). In addition, several recent exhibitions are planned to celebrate the 130th anniversary of the founding of the Kelmscott Press, including a June 29th, 2021 International Kelmscott Press Day in commemoration of the publication of the Kelmscott Chaucer. Our co-sponsored session is therefore particularly timely, and is designed to feature a wide variety of Pre-Raphaelite innovations in book design from its origins onwards. Our panel includes distinguished and emerging scholars, with each speaker offering new scholarly insights.

In the first presentation, “Illustrating History in The Germ,” Courtney Krolczyk of Rutgers University argues for the innovative nature of the etched designs in the first Pre-Raphaelite magazine. She notes that the illustrations found in The Germ are indicative of a major shift in British book illustration from an earlier, more satiric style to one more closely aligned with the conventions of contemporary painting, and that The Germ’s contributors and their associates thus helped shape the history of British book illustration in the 1860s and beyond.

The second presentation will be by Mark Samuels Lasner, the founder and curator of the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection of Pre-Raphaelite materials at the University of Delaware, and the editor or co-editor of more than 16 books and exhibition catalogues. In “Enigma Variations: Looking at Burne-Jones and Morris’s ‘Cupid and Psyche’ Prints,” he notes that although the joint project to create an illustrated version of The Earthly Paradise has been often documented in general terms, little has been said about the “Cupid and Psyche” woodcuts themselves. Sets of the “Cupid and Psyche” prints survive in several libraries and museums—yet who made them, when, and why, remains uncharted. Samuels Lasner’s presentation will report on his research in progress, occasioned by the acquisition of the only set of the woodcuts known to be signed by William Morris.

Next Rebecca Mitchell, a Reader at the University of Birmingham and author/editor of six monographs and editions on Victorian poetics, will present an intriguing example of Pre-Raphaelite influence on American periodical culture in the San Francisco-based comic journal The Lark (1895-1897). The Lark’s parodic approach distilled several aspects of PRB print culture: it drew from the textual and visual vocabulary of The Germ, The Century Guild Hobby Horse, The Dial, and the Kelmscott Press; its advertisements mimicked those of the Yellow Book and Vale presses; and its bamboo paper represented a Pacific-coast response to the hand-laid stock of the British art magazines, to name just three qualities. This talk considers what its satiric approach can tell us about the transmission of Pre-Raphaelite print design, both across the ocean and over time.

And finally, Jennifer Rabedeau, a PhD student at Cornell University, offers a critique of Morrisian design, as embodied in the “Strawberry Thief” wallpaper motif, Morris’s presentation manuscripts of the 1870s, and his use of paratextual borders in the Kelmscott Chaucer. Rabedeau examines the politics of Morris’s illuminated and printed borders to argue that these simultaneously consolidated British national identity around a purportedly local medieval past while offering strategies for managing foreignness within and beyond the boundaries of the empire. Belied by their marginal status, paratextual borders extend beyond the page, bolstering state borders while incorporating the visual logics of empire alongside the text. Rabedeau suggests that once we understand the mechanisms whereby Morris’s borders both resisted and participated in the project of empire, we are able to reevaluate the imperial legacies of Pre-Raphaelite print culture as a whole.

Each presenter will be asked to speak for ten minutes, after which the moderator will invite debate and discussion.