Edward Burne-Jones

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From concern with human suffering and the uneasy craving for beauty there was only a short step, for an adolescent thinking young Evangelical, to the edge of the Apostolic movement. (The precise shade of Mr Jones’s Evangelicalism can be judged by the fact that Ned was not allowed to read novels until he was in the First Class, but did occasionally go to the theatre.) In 1849, the same year that Ned entered the Classical school, Newman was sent to Birmingham and arrived in a fly full of luggage and plaster Madonnas to open the Oratory in an old gin distillery in Alcester Street. His first sermon, preached to hundreds of operatives and dirt-poor Irish, with a sublime inappropriateness that could only come from great spiritual depths, was on ‘how to escape the false worship of the world’. There was of course no question of Mr Jones and his son attending mass. But ‘the effect of Newman, even on those who never saw him’, Burne-Jones told Frances Graham, was a ‘leading – walking with me a step in front’. The adventure of the Oratory impressed him as a glorious gamble ‘putting all this world’s life in one splendid venture … in an age of sofas and cushions he taught me to be indifferent to comfort, and in an age of materialism he taught me to venture all on the unseen.’ In this way Newman at long distance touched the unborn firm of Morris & Co., and through wallpaper and rushback chairs would continue to preach that there are greater things in this world than comfort.

Newman was in no way a mediaevalist and did not recognise the ‘note’ of sanctity in the mediaeval church, but those who saw and heard him from a distance did not always make this distinction. The Oratory entered into the classroom mythology of the King Edward’s boys, and Ned became ‘Edouard, Cardinal de Birmingham’, sending missives illuminated in red and blue, while Crom Price was a less distinguished member of the ‘Order of St Philip Neri’ (Newman’s own order). When the ‘cardinal’ was invited during his holidays to Hereford by a brother of Mr Caswell’s, a further transformation took place: at the cathedral he heard church music well sung for the first time, and saw in the building itself something he had never guessed from the brand new Gothic of King Edward’s. He was in direct contact with beauty, the acute physical and emotional effect of ‘old music’ combining with the remoteness of the lamp-lit chancel. It was his own ‘note’. At the same time he passed easily under the influence of a young, serious, singing and choir-mastering Puseyite clergyman, John Goss, who had been at Oxford in the heroic days of Newman’s secession, attending his last university sermon on ‘the parting of friends’. This had now been printed, and Goss lent the volume to Ned. It became clear to Burne-Jones that he must be a priest like Goss; if he was to serve the drunks and vagrant workers that littered the pavements on the way to school, it must be in a community like the Oratory, or perhaps like the semi-monastic group suggested in Hurrell Froude’s Project for the Revival of Religion in Great Towns. There must be a meeting point between the need to serve and the need for beauty. Mr Jones, when his son returned to Birmingham, was quietly ready to exchange his pew in St Mary’s for one in Puseyite St Paul’s, where there was ceremonial and music. He had made up his mind that Ned was to become, if not a successful manufacturer of steel pens, then a bishop.

This, of course, meant Oxford, although most of the Upper School boys went on to Cambridge. Dixon was ready to matriculate and Crom Price, two years younger, hoped to follow them. Both of these were down for Pembroke, where the master, Dr Jeune, was a former headmaster of King Edward’s, but Goss had been at Exeter, and for Exeter, therefore, Mr Jones put down his son. When he found that Ned, unlike Dixon, had not been awarded an exhibition, he faced a total payment, over the three years before an honours degree, of about £600. There would be tuition fees of about £20 per annum, coals, room-rent, hire of furniture, charges for servants (about £30 a term), kitchen bill, buttery bill (for bread, butter and beer), washing bill, college subscriptions; even the travelling expenses to Oxford were a consideration. With heaven knows what further economies and calculations, Mr Jones ‘determined to send him at his own expense’. The Bennett’s Hill house was let, except for the workshop, and a smaller house taken, where Miss Sampson and the furniture accompanied them, father and son shared a bedroom as usual, and a lodger was squeezed in as well. This was in the Bristol Road, which the Memorials tell us ‘provided better air and exercise’, though in fact the drains at this time ran into open ditches on the west side.

Ned matriculated on 2 June 1852. He had his first sight of the city of Oxford, the river, and the meadows. Excitement, and possibly some guilt at the sacrifices made for him, brought on a severe illness, the first since he had nearly died at birth, but one which was to set a pattern for the rest of his life – heart weakness, spectacular fainting, a black depression on recovery. Harder to bear, at the age of nineteen, was delay; he would have to wait till the following spring before there was room for him in the overcrowded college.

Kicking his heels in Birmingham, he went to call for the first time on his school friend Harry Macdonald, and so met the family where, a few years later, he would find his wife. They were then living in a house in Nursery Terrace, Handsworth, the Rev. George Macdonald having been recently appointed for the second time to the Birmingham circuit.

In 1852 the minister’s house was crowded from attic to cellar. The children at home were Harry, Alice, Carrie, Georgie, Fred, Agnes (the prettiest) and Louisa. They had already lost two little brothers, and had gone upstairs to see one of them ‘stamped with the marble hue of death’; Carrie had only two more years to live.

Their story (as it is told by their descendant Lord Baldwin in The Macdonald Sisters) is of an unworldly preacher bringing up, or rather letting his wife bring up, a large family on a tiny income, sometimes less than £200 a year, so that to buy a book or to have the piano tuned was a heroic event. This, however, was never felt as poverty, and the affection between the sisters was very close. They all had in common integrity and decisiveness – William de Morgan said that they never began a sentence without knowing how it would end. Visitors who were in the least pretentious were cut short. Lord Baldwin records that a preacher who spoke of his heart as ‘black, and full of stones’ was told by little Louie that he must mean his gizzard. This firmness went with a tendency to melancholy and poor health. What redeemed it, besides its own moral purity, was a dry sense of humour and an acceptance of the ‘stages of life’, which implied a reverence for life itself.

Such unworldliness, combined with sharpness, could alarm casual visitors. Ned shrank. But the praying, singing, cooking, sewing, turning, boot-patching, ‘putting-up’ of preserves, making do, giving charity, racing up and down stairs, self-criticising and self-improving could make way at once for a lonely visitor. Ned, although he called with Crom Price, could be seen at once as lonely. To Georgie, a child in a pinafore, his pallor and delicacy suggested that he needed looking after. Georgie, at the age of ten, was quite used to this. She noticed also an unexpected source of power in him, like an illumination, when the conversation moved him.

How Burne-Jones – the Memorials are ‘confident that the mystery which shrouds men and women from each other in youth was sacred to him’ – dealt with his own growing sexuality can hardly be judged. He referred to it only ironically, for example, in reference to a visit to the theatre when he was staying at the Camberwell home of his father’s sister, Aunt Catherwood. Mr Catherwood took him to the Lyceum pantomime, where they stood in the pit and Ned fell hopelessly in love with the probably forty-year-old Fairy of the Golden Branch. ‘She held out something, and I thought it was too beautiful ever to be.’ But this was not surprising, since the Fairy – supported by Blueruino, an Illicit Spirit – was none other than Madame Vestris herself. Complementary to these fantasies was the very strong reaction of a sisterless young man, in the presence of young girls en fleur, on the verge, some sooner, some later, of a natural but despoiling experience. This, which was to be one of the recurrent themes of his painting, took its origin from the daughter-crowded minister’s house in Nursery Terrace.

In the Hilary Term of 1853, Burne-Jones finally went up, and passed from the small shop and the grimy streets of Birmingham to Newman’s own university.