de Morgan, William

(1839 -1917)

Information

A colleague of William Morris in the Arts and Crafts Movement, and a later acquaintance of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, de Morgan was initially known for his stained glass and decorative tiles. It was not until just before his retirement that he began to write novels. The first of these, 'Joseph Vance'(1906), is also his best known, and to its author’s surprise proved to be a great success. It was followed by eight more novels which brought him far more financial reward than his earlier artistic career. One of his American reviewers explained the appeal of de Morgan’s books thus: ‘It is the Victorian age itself that speaks in these rich, interesting, overcrowded books … They will be remembered as Dickens’s novels are remembered.’ 'Joseph Vance' is a sprawling, entertaining tale of a drunken builder’s son who becomes the protégé of a middle-class family. In the early chapters, describing a holiday taken by the family in Herne Bay, de Morgan highlights the problems of making an excursion from London to the north Kent coast in the 1850s, and its lack of appeal of to the young ladies of the family – unless another interest were to be found. The family’s elder daughter, Violet, reacts thus to the prospect of a holiday in Herne Bay:

Quotations

‘And as for Herne Bay, detestable place, I hope we shall go somewhere else. … ‘And you know perfectly well the weather will be quite fine and smooth till we pass the Nore – it always is! And then we shall all have to go and be sick in the cabin’... And I declare I won’t! If I get drenched through to the skin, I’ll stop on deck – I declare I will.’
Her younger sister, Lossie, describes the eventful journey:
We had to get up six to be in time for the Packet … But I really was frightened we shouldn’t get the Boat. For when we got to London Bridge Wharf there was a stoppage and all our luggage had to be carried by separate men, and of course any one of them might have got away in the crowd, and we should never have seen our Box again … However, in the end the party got off safely in a boat called the Red Rover … the machinery of which gave great satisfaction … Aunty was very uncomfortable at such a lot of heavy iron, and asked a Mariner whether the boat didn’t sometimes go down, and he said not on this line. But he gave the boats on the other line a very bad character and hinted that they very seldom arrived at their journey’s end … But we weren’t very bad, any of us, and it’s always great fun going along the Pier, which is two miles long, in a truck with a sail, only of course Aunty, who has never been, thought it wasn’t safe and asked a very stout man in blue with an oilskin hat whether it would blow over the pier. And he though she wanted to know how soon it started and said presently Marm. And Pa said it usually blew over about halfway. Wasn’t it a shame to make game of poor Aunty?