Edward Burne-Jones was the archetypal literary-minded Victorian. Born in 1833, the son of a Birmingham picture-framer and gilder, he developed a taste for the Romantic poets while at school. Then, whilst an undergraduate at Oxford, he found a lifelong friend in William Morris. The university was supposed to be their route towards holy orders, but together they converted to the religion of art for art’s sake. Another student friend, Archibald MacLaren, gave Burne-Jones his first artistic break by asking him to provide illustrations for a collection of stories called The Fairy Family.
Why did the Victorians spend so much time away with the fairies? Though Fiona MacCarthy’s subtitle is ‘Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination,’ she sticks closely to the traditional cradle-to-grave narrative and subject-centred focus of orthodox biography, offering little in the way of wider context. The encounter with MacLaren’s fairy stories is one of many missed opportunities for excursions into the idiosyncrasies of the Victorian imagination.
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