Normally in an essay in this series I would feature The Rubaiyat at the beginning. In the case of the Ashbee edition, though, as will become clear in due course, The Rubaiyat is best dealt with at the end. So, let us begin with Ashbee himself.
The life and career of Charles Robert Ashbee (1863–1942) are so well documented (1) that it is necessary to give only a brief outline of them here. Born in London, he was the son of wealthy businessman Henry Spencer Ashbee and his part–Jewish part–German wife, Elizabeth Josephine Jenny (née Lavy). His father wanted him to help run the family business, but Ashbee himself rejected that idea in no uncertain terms, a course of action in which he was supported by his mother (who doted on him as he did on her), much to the annoyance of his father. Eventually his father reluctantly gave way, and he went to Cambridge. After reading history at King’s College, he started work as an architect at Bodley & Garner in London in 1886. By this time he was greatly influenced by John Ruskin and William Morris, but his progressive socialist leanings, on top of his refusal to enter the family firm, and possibly combined with his emerging homosexuality, led to estrangement from his father. The antipathy was mutual – Ashbee rejected his father’s conservative leanings and disapproved of his near–obsession with collecting erotica (2), a passion he shared with his friends Richard Burton and Richard Monckton Milnes. The situation wasn’t helped any by his father dismissing the Pre–Raphaelites as the purveyors of rubbish, and William Morris as “a hopeless philistine” – he himself talked of the glory of the Pre–Raphaelites and greatly admired Morris. His parents’ marriage floundered, perhaps partly on account of the friction between father and son (she always sided with the latter), perhaps also because she had become aware of his collection of erotica, and probably also because she was a firm believer in women’s rights, which her conservative husband certainly was not. They formally separated in 1893. The estrangement with his father was never resolved, and Ashbee was cut out of his father’s will (he died in 1900), as indeed was his mother.
Taking his lead from Ruskin and Morris, in 1888 Ashbee set up the Guild and School of Handicraft, initially at Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution set up some years earlier by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett to alleviate the poverty in the East End of London. Later, in 1891, the Guild, having separated from the School, moved into its own workshops at Essex House in the Mile End Road. The School closed in 1895, though the Guild continued to produce metalwork, jewellery, furniture and, of course, books.
William Morris’s Kelmscott Press closed in 1898, and Ashbee bought up much of its printing machinery, transporting it to Essex House, and re–employing some of its redundant staff. Thus was born, in 1898, the Essex House Press, which, by 1910, had issued over 90 titles. Financial pressures, though, plus the expiration of the lease on Essex House, necessitated the move of the Guild and Press to Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, in 1902, where it formed a sort of arcadian socialist utopian community in which the Guild School was reinstated. (Ashbee actually wrote two utopian novels, From Whitechapel to Camelot, published by the Guild of Handicraft, Essex House, Mile End Road, in 1892, and The Building of Thelema, published by J. M. Dent in 1910. These, of course, followed in the wake of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, published by Reeves & Turner in 1891, and subsequently by the Kelmscott Press in 1892.)
On a personal front, in 1898 Ashbee married Janet Elizabeth Forbes (1877–1961), the daughter of a wealthy London stockbroker and early supporter of Ashbee’s Guild and School. For some years the marriage remained unconsummated by the homosexual Ashbee (he was greatly influenced by what we would now call the gay rights campaigner, Edward Carpenter, who was also a socialist utopian), but he must have been bisexual, for in 1911 the first of their four daughters was born. The marriage was also cemented by Janet’s keen participation in the Guild. She was very popular with the Guild members and she was active in her husband’s publishing activities – she edited John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1899, for example, and she edited and contributed to The Essex House Song Book, published in ten parts between 1903 and 1905. (It ultimately appeared in book form in 1905.) Indeed, she got on very well with Ashbee’s homosexual friends like Edward Carpenter, Laurence Housman, and the enigmatic George Ives. They remained together until Ashbee’s death in 1942.
The Guild was in financial trouble as early as 1904, for which the Press was largely responsible. Basically its books were pricey, and they didn’t sell as well as the cheaper products of the mainstream publishers using modern printing methods and state of the art machinery. (Likewise, other Guild workshops could not compete with the commercially produced products manufactured by the likes of Liberty & Co.) One solution would have been to go commercial, but this went against the basic foundation on which Ashbee had founded the Guild, and that was a step too far for him. So, to ease the financial pressure on the broader Guild, the Press under Ashbee folded in 1906, though some of its machinery was taken over by Ananda Coomaraswamy, so The Essex House Press continued in a different form until 1910. It is an interesting thought that had Ashbee not been cut out of his father’s will, his inherited wealth might have greatly altered the fate of the Essex House Press and the Guild generally. The Guild itself appears to have survived in one form or another until 1921, though Ashbee himself had left Chipping Campden in 1916. As for the original Essex House in London, it was demolished in 1937 to make way for a cinema.
We need not follow Ashbee’s life and career in any detail further than this in the present essay, for the Ashbee Rubaiyat had appeared in 1905. Suffice it to say, that among lecture tours in the USA, he worked as an architect (he knew Frank Lloyd Wright) and town planner; campaigned on environmental issues and for the preservation of old buildings; taught English in Cairo (1916); and served as Civic Adviser to the British Administration in Jerusalem (1919–1922.) His final years were spent with his wife at Godden Green, Sevenoaks, Kent (which had in fact been Janet’s family home and the place where they were married.)
Fig.1a is a portrait of Ashbee and Fig.1b a portrait of his wife Janet (3a), both by William Strang, and both dated 1903. Fig.1c is a charming photograph of Janet with their four daughters, lined up in order of height, taken in Jerusalem. As regards the first, I was amused by the comment of one guild member, made about the time this drawing was done, that Ashbee looked like he had just walked out of a painting by Velazquez.
Like Morris’s Kelmscott Press before it, Ashbee’s Essex House Press seems rather at odds with its socialist background, in that its publications were generally beyond the reach of all but the better off, something which applied to the sale of their craft works, of course. Plus the books could be bought by the culturally unscrupulous for investment purposes and sold later at a healthy profit – capitalism, in other words (see below.) Not only that, but many of its titles were obscure and elitist to say the least, and hardly the sort of thing to promote the spread of culture and education to the poorer classes, many of whom struggled to put food on the table let alone buy the books. A good example is the edition of The Hymn of Bardaisan, rendered into English verse from the Syriac text by F. Crawford Burkitt, published in 1899 in an edition of 300 copies at 7s 6d. Another example is A Mornynge Remembraunce by Bishop (later Saint) John Fisher (1469–1535), which contained a frontispiece by Ashbee, published in 1906. The frontispiece and title–page are shown in Figs.2a & 2b. It was an edition of 125 copies on paper at 1 guinea with 7 on vellum at 3 guineas.
Of more popular appeal were two other titles, each of which contained a frontispiece by Ashbee: Shelley’s Adonais (1900) and his Prometheus Unbound (1904).
Adonais was issued in an edition of 50 copies on vellum priced at £1 10s, and within four years of publication, copies were being sold at auction for £25, thus confirming Ashbee’s worst fears, voiced above. Its frontispiece is shown in Fig.3 and is intended to depict the grave of Keats in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. One is tempted to dismiss it as a crude and unrealistic picture, for, with the three red crosses, it is totally unlike the scene of the actual grave, and the location is only recognisable by the Pyramid of Cestius in the background. But as we shall see, there is often more than meets the eye to Ashbee’s illustrations, and the resemblance of the three crosses to a Calvary might be no accident.
Prometheus Unbound was issued in an edition of 200 copies on paper priced at 2 guineas, and 20 on vellum at 7 guineas. Its frontispiece is shown in Fig.4 and relates to Act I of the poem, with Prometheus chained to the precipice in the background, the Phantasm of Jupiter on the right, the sea nymphs Panthea & Ione, the sisters of the wife of Prometheus, to the lower left, and with Earth, the mother of Prometheus, to the lower right.
Ashbee also did the frontispiece for Walt Whitman’s Hymn on the Death of President Lincoln, published in 1901 in an edition of 125 copies on vellum at 2 guineas each (Fig.5). This depicts the blooming lilacs, the evening star and solitary thrush of the opening verses, a funeral cortege in the background. Again, Ashbee did the frontispiece for Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, published in 1904 in an edition of 150 copies on vellum at £2 12s 6d each (Fig.6). This presumably depicts the fictional village of Auburn, named in the opening line. And, of course, he did the frontispiece for the Essex House Press edition of The Rubaiyat, published in 1905 in an edition of 88 copies on paper at 2 guineas and 17 on vellum at 4 guineas, to which we will turn in a separate section below (Fig.15a). Not that Ashbee did every frontispiece. On the contrary he enlisted the aid of other artists, notably Reginald Savage, William Strang, and, on one occasion, Walter Crane (see below.) Strang, of course, did the portraits in Figs.1a & 1b, and in 1902 the Essex House Press published The Doings of Death, a portfolio of 12 woodcuts by him which, as the title suggests, are very much after the pattern set by Holbein. It was issued in a limited edition of 140 copies, priced at 6 guineas.
These others were professional artists, of course, which Ashbee was not, though he was certainly skilled. He seems to have developed a talent for drawing at an early age – at school (Wellington College) he won prizes for his free–hand drawing, for example – and his German grandfather arranged for him to have drawing lessons in Hamburg on a visit there. He certainly attended art classes at the Westminster School of Art and the Slade School of Art in 1892–3. But he was never really a professional artist, and never became involved in what we would now call the art scene. Though the frontispieces in Figs.3, 5 & 6 might appear amateurish, the reason for this is perhaps not so much down to lack of skill as that they were woodcuts intended to be hand–painted for their respective limited editions, and a simple design made for easier colouring. It also, of course, reduced the costs. George Thomson’s hand–coloured frontispiece for Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1901) was similarly simple, depicting Gray’s Tomb at Stoke Poges (Fig.7), though Walter Crane’s above–mentioned frontispiece for Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality (1903) was more complex, yet was still hand coloured. It is shown here as Fig.8 and clearly has the line “see the children sport upon the shore” very much in mind. At any rate, the simplicity of these frontispieces of Ashbee’s is certainly not down to lack of artistic skill, as the frontispieces in Figs.2a & 4 demonstrate, and as will be demonstrated again in what follows.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
The Psalter or Psalms of David from the Bible of Archbishop Cranmer, edited with the old orthography by Janet Ashbee, with ornamental initial letters to each psalm and other in–text woodcuts by Ashbee himself, was published by the Essex House Press in 1901. A quarto sized volume, it was published in an edition of 250 copies on paper priced at 4 guineas and 10 on vellum at 16 guineas – huge price tags back in those days, and well beyond the reach of all but the better off. A typical two–page spread is shown in Fig.9a; the colophon and curious angelic tail–piece (also featured on the title–page in red) in Fig.9b; and the details of the publishers beneath an elaborate Essex House logo in Fig.9c. We shall return to that logo below.
Even more ambitious was The Prayer Book of King Edward VII, published in a small folio format in 1903 to commemorate the coronation of the king back in August 1902. It was published in an edition of 400 copies on paper at 12 guineas each and 10 on vellum at £40 each. (The king got a special free copy, of course, which hardly smacks of socialism, but there it is.) It contained over 150 woodcuts by Ashbee, and was a monumental piece of work. Fig.10a shows the frontispiece and title–page; Fig.10b shows the headpiece of the last of eight Contents pages, each bearing a procession of the great men and women who have influenced the Church of England in the course of its history; Fig.10c is effectively the title–page to the section on the Church Calendar (p.19); Fig.10d the headpiece to the section “At Morning Prayer” (p.66); and Fig.10e the headpiece of the section “A Commination, or Denouncing of God’s Anger and Judgements against Sinners” (p.257.) The colophon is shown in Fig.10f – note again that floral logo.
Some of the details of Ashbee’s illustrations left enough readers sufficiently puzzled for the Essex House Press to issue a 14 page booklet, A Key to the Principal Decorations in the Prayer Book of King Edward VII, as Designed and Carried Out by C.R. Ashbee, in 1904. Thus, in Fig.10a, the frontispiece depicts the seven Kings of England named Edward, and the title–page various London buildings with the Coats of Arms of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, the Abbey of Westminster and the City of London. For those puzzled by the presence of George Washington in Fig.10b, he represents “the cleavage of the Anglo–Saxon people and the founding of the American Episcopalian Church.” Fig.10c illustrates a bishop instructing a layman in matters of the Church Calendar, a symbolic orrery above, with, “in the background the Churches of Stepney & Bow, with Essex House, where the King’s Prayer Book was begun.” According to Crawford (p.393), the layman is Ashbee himself and the bishop is Winnington Ingram, the Bishop of London, whom Ashbee knew personally. In Fig.10d, “Quicunque Vult” represents the Athenasian Creed, a statement of belief in the Holy Trinity (on the left), the rejection of which leads to the Jaws of Hell (on the right.) Interestingly, Ashbee adds, “A reminder this that in some respects we are still in the Middle Ages.” Fig.10e represents an early Old Testament Commination service, showing Shimei cursing King David by throwing stones at him (2 Samuel 16.5–6), to which Ashbee adds, “the Commination services of our own time are best gathered from the lips of socialistic workmen.” It is noteworthy that in Fig.10e Shimei is dressed as an Edwardian carpenter, identifiable by his bag of tools, wearing an apron, braces and bowler hat!
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
Ashbee had an even more ambitious plan to publish an edition of the Bible, to be illustrated by Strang, but not enough subscribers could be found, and the project had to be shelved.
All of this, of course, begs the question of Ashbee’s own religious beliefs. In his privately published book Grannie: a Victorian Cameo (1939), he left a curious account of his religious education as a child in the bosom of his family:
Our conventions were pagan and never sabbatical. The Church was always kept at arm’s length, still more so any form of dissent. My parents had no use for the old religious wrangle. But it was well, thought they, to observe how, in such matters, the human mind moved, and what were the conventions of others. So for many years it was our custom to visit the London churches and conventicles, High, Broad, Low, Roman, Positivist, Dissent in any form, no matter how the word of God was spluttered or intoned. Observe it all but be yourself unbound. The parcel of good tidings, however done up, might contain some grain of Truth, that was the idea. And over the Sunday dinner – roast beef and Yorkshire – the mission and the minister were mercilessly torn. (p.31–2)
Later in the book (p.77–81) he gives us some more information on his religious views. Thus, “there is so much ‘poison’ in all this religion of the churches and the sects, it is so much in the nature of a scourge or epidemic that strikes not our bodies but our minds, brings so much suffering into life, that it is well to inoculate early.” And yet, “there is so much that is good and noble in it – some deep seated instinct in man that needs and finds expression in religious forms.” Again, “there is the beauty of it; the language, and the glory of the English. Unless you know your Prayer Book and your Bible, you will never know English, never be an Englishman or an English–woman” – a little extreme, but there it is. Elsewhere, in less extreme mode, Ashbee is quoted as saying that The Bible and The Book of Common Prayer were “perhaps the two greatest standard works in the English tongue.” This, of course, is an aesthetic stance, not a doctrinal one.
In Chipping Campden, Ashbee and his wife were not very popular with the local vicar and his wife. The Ashbees regarded them as intrusive when, in 1902, the vicar’s wife began making inquiries about the theological beliefs of the Guild members, presumably in the hope of swelling her husband’s congregation. Ashbee wrote to her that his members weren’t used to such probing, and didn’t like it, adding, “I hope therefore you will pardon the suggestion, which as a member of the Church of England, perhaps I may be permitted to make, that anything like an inquisitional search for souls is more calculated to drive them away from church than attract them thither.” For their part, the vicar and his wife regarded the Ashbees as little better than Godless Bohemians. Amusingly by today’s standards, again in 1902, they strongly disapproved of the Guild enjoying a bike ride on the Sabbath! Yet the Ashbees still felt the need to attend church on Sunday, which they did in neighbouring Saintbury, where the rather unconventional vicar held services with a degree of ritual which had great appeal for them. In other words, their church attendance, though not without its spiritual side, was as much an aesthetic business as a devotional one, and this, as noted above, perhaps holds the key to Ashbee’s drive to publish editions of the Psalms, the Prayer Book and the Bible – aesthetics. He is reported as once saying that, “There is nothing quite so beautiful as a Church of England service in all its Elizabethan glory.” That “Elizabethan” tag again shows that his admiration was founded on aesthetics rather than doctrine.
Again, in 1905, the Essex House Press published a book of Ashbee’s poems and songs, entitled Echoes from the City of the Sun, in a limited edition of 250 copies (the City of the Sun, of course, was Chipping Campden.) The opening poem, with headpiece, is shown in Fig.11 and makes it clear that Ashbee leant towards Natural Theology or Deism rather than doctrinal Christianity. He was nominal Church of England at best. Also of interest in respect of Ashbee’s inner spiritual landscape are his poems “Old Belief” and “The Spiritual Progress.” Finally, again in Grannie, he wrote:
I once heard a group of Muslim boys discussing God. One of them summed up the discussion with the words – ‘What more is there to say – God is a spirit.’ And that being so, cast from you all the easy human attributes, the coming of God or the gods on Earth, God’s Sacrifice, God the Father, God the Son, the Mother of God. Cast away all creeds. covenants, dogmas, believe only in God the Spirit. (p.79)
It is also interesting that when one of Ashbee’s school friends died aged 14, his mother said in a letter, “Why does God do these things ?”, a question which Ashbee thought fit to put on record in Grannie (p.46).
Ashbee had a fascination with symbolism, both its mystical varieties, from Swedenborg to Blake, and its use in the paintings by the likes of G.F. Watts and Puvis de Chavannes.
Fig.12, is a symbolic drawing done by Ashbee after a visit to see William Morris in December 1887. He titled it “Soul of William Morris” (3b) and by his own account it depicted Morris as “a great soul rushing through space with a halo of glory round him, but this consuming, tormenting and goading him on.” It bears a curious resemblance to the images drawn by some psychics, allegedly depicting the spirit world (a nod towards the likes of Swedenborg, perhaps ?)
Again, Ashbee saw Blake’s mythical city of Golgonooza, described in his poem Milton (“Golgonooza is named Art and Manufacture by mortal men”), as symbolic of his Guild at Chipping Campden. A design by Ashbee, apparently done as a possible letter–head for the Guild in 1888 (3c), refers to Golgonooza by name, and clearly follows the style of Blake’s drawings (Fig.13). This gives us an indication of Ashbee’s mind–set, though nothing so arcane seems to have seeped into the publications of the Essex House Press.
One symbol / emblem which we do repeatedly encounter, though, is the flower logo already seen in Figs.9c & 10f (also Fig.15b below.) This represents the white Pink, the white variety of Dianthus Plumarius, which also occurs with pink and rose colouring. As Crawford points out (p.224–5), Ashbee would have seen the flower used in 15th century Flemish manuscripts and late 16th century English embroideries, and when he saw that the flowers grew in the garden at Essex House, it presented itself as a natural emblem for the Press, which continued to use it even after the Press had moved to Chipping Campden. This is all eminently plausible, but it is curious that the logo always has two long filaments reaching out from the flower head, whereas the actual flower does not. (It does have ten stamens which are perhaps represented by the ten dots, two to each petal, close to the centre of the flower, best seen in Figs.10f & 15b.) Is this significant, or are the filaments merely a decorative addition ?
As for the bee in Fig.9c, this too may well be just a decorative addition. Or perhaps not: the design in Fig.14a was Ashbee’s design for a letter–head, and it is clearly a rebus showing a Bee superimposed on an Ash Tree – hence Ashbee. Actually, this wasn’t original to Ashbee, as his father had used a similar device on his bookplates (Fig.14b). But did Ashbee Jr intend his design simply as a rebus ? As Crawford points out (p.371), its style is reminiscent of early printers’ marks and the tree itself reminiscent of images of the ash tree Igdrasil (or Yggdrasil), the Old Norse World Tree, so there may be more to it than just that. The thing is one never really knows with Ashbee, and the problem is that it is all too easy to see symbolism where none was ever intended. Bearing this in mind, one interpretation – perhaps the most likely – would be that SX House + Bee = Essex House (Worker ?) Bee = Ashbee, a simple play on words. Or perhaps the bee is here as the traditional symbol of communal industry, which would be appropriate for the Essex House Guild. But either way, why does the elaborate logo of Fig.9c appear only in The Psalter or Psalms of David – the usual bee–less form of the logo is as in Figs.10f & 15b ? Does the bee have something to do with the text, perhaps ? Hardly. The psalmist says of his enemies that they surround him like a swarm of bees (Ps.118.12 – the only direct reference to the bee in Psalms); of the judgements of the Lord, that they are finer than gold and sweeter than honey (Ps.19.10); and of the words of the Lord, that they too are sweeter than honey (Ps.119.103). All in all, then, that bee, like the elaborate nature of the logo, remains something of a mystery.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur was, as stated earlier, published by the Essex House Press in 1905. It is Potter #29 and Paas #1755, and uses FitzGerald’s first version. Its frontispiece, by Ashbee, and the facing opening quatrains are shown in Fig.15a. Its colophon and details of its limited edition are shown in Fig.15b. As the colophon tells us, it was printed for the Omar Khayyam Club – hence the list of Club members at the front of the book, preceded by a short Introduction on the history of the Club by its well–known member and Omarian, Clement Shorter. The genesis of this edition was explained in The Pall Mall Gazette on 12 May 1905 (p.8), at the end of a report on the Club dinner at Frascati’s Restaurant the evening before:
It has been suggested that a literary memorial of the Omar Khayyam Club shall be reproduced in the form of a choice edition of the “Rubaiyat.” The proposition, further, is that this issue, which shall be called the Omar Khayyam Club edition, and perhaps contain some of the memorial muses from time to time written by members of the club, shall be hand–printed at The Essex House Press, and limited to 100 copies, on hand–made paper, sold to the public at two guineas, with five on vellum at four guineas. The enterprise will be in the charge of Mr. Clement Shorter.
Clearly the idea of including memorial muses by members was dropped, and the numbers of copies of paper and vellum changed. As quoted earlier, and as Potter affirms, in the end 88 were on paper and 17 on vellum, the total of 105 copies remaining fixed. Incidentally, Fig.15a is from a coloured vellum copy; the paper copy used the same illustration but in simple black and white.
Note also the floral logo in Fig.15b, and the Brook Street address, just off the prestigious Bond Street, which was the London outlet for the Guild’s productions in Chipping Campden. Clearly such an address in the West End of London would have clientèle well able to afford the surplus copies of the book.
So far so good, but what of that frontispiece ? Clearly it doesn’t refer to any quatrain in particular, but more likely refers to elements taken from various quatrains. The grapes on the vine above the entrance to the corridor, are a clear enough nod towards Omar, but is the robed figure about to enter that corridor Omar (his dress is hardly oriental, but then there is “my Robe of Honour” in quatrain 71, plus the laurel wreath around his head is fitting for the poet) or is he, like the layman in Fig.10c, a symbolic reference to Ashbee himself struggling to find his socialist ideal? It is tempting to see the corridor as the path leading to the grave, the dark doorway at its end being the “Door to which I found no Key” in quatrain 32, but again, it could be symbolic of the approaching financial failure of Ashbee’s Arts and Crafts Utopia (as we have seen by 1905, the year of publication, the Guild was in financial difficulties.) The lit candle in a lamp suspended from the archway at the entrance and the robed figure’s raised hands could both refer to quatrain 33: “Then to the rolling Heav’n itself I cried, / Asking, ‘What Lamp had Destiny to guide / Her little Children stumbling in the Dark’.” (It is puzzling that the lamp seems to be surrounded by a swarm of moths (?), thus presumably dulling its light.) Or the hands, raised towards “that inverted Bowl we call the Sky, ” might be a nod towards quatrain 52: “Lift not thy hands to It, for help &c.” But again, the raised hands could be a symbolic reference to Ashbee’s own financial problems. As for the little bird to the lower left, it may be just decorative (like the bee in Fig.9c ?), or it may be the Bird of Time in quatrain 7, or perhaps the Nightingale representative of fleeting youth in quatrain 72. And what is that object at the lower right ? Is it a Guild–manufactured writing desk for Omar, as anachronistic here as the stone throwing modern carpenter in Fig.10e ? (Another suggestion is that it is a pew–like bench or seat.) The trouble is that if the Calvary interpretation of Fig.3 holds water, anything goes, for Ashbee’s partiality for symbolism muddies the interpretive waters. So far as I know, Ashbee left no explanation of his Omar frontispiece comparable to that he left for his illustrations for The Prayer Book of Edward VII, and so we are left to guess.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
As to what publishing this edition of The Rubaiyat meant to Ashbee, again we must guess. He could certainly have seen his religious views reflected in Omar (“Myself when young did eagerly frequent / Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument &c” in quatrain 27, for example.) And he certainly knew his Omar, for in Grannie, talking of the bottles of wine at his parents’ great Tuesday dinner parties, he wrote, “All the different ceremonial vessels nudged each other then, as when the ‘little moon peeps in’ at Ramadan in FitzGerald’s quatrain – ‘now for the porter’s shoulder knot a creaking’.” (p.35) On the other hand, as MacCarthy notes (p.95), when Ashbee took a small party to go sketching in France, the reading matter he chose to take with them consisted of “Sterne, William Morris, Meredith, a Wilkie Collins, a Dickens and the Golden Treasury” – no mention of Omar. Again, Crawford (p.384) hints that when The Rubaiyat, like some of the other Essex House poetical works, was published, it seems that “Ashbee had an eye on a particular market,” which rather hints at financial motives. He seems never to have attended an Omar Khayyam Club dinner, still less to have been a member of the Club. His only link to the Club seems to have been via Shorter, and there isn’t a single mention of him in Crawford’s monumental book, so how the two came to know each other remains unknown at present.
Note 1: The best source on Ashbee’s life and work is Alan Crawford’s C.R. Ashbee – Architect, Designer & Romantic Socialist (Yale University Press, 2005), which gives not only a detailed account of Ashbee’s life, but has sections devoted to Design, Architecture, Furniture, Metalwork, Jewellery, and the Essex House Press. Of particular interest is his Appendix 3: A List of Books, Pamphlets etc printed at the Essex House Press. Also of great interest are Fiona MacCarthy’s The Simple Life: C.R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds (Lund Humphries, 1988) and Ashbee’s own autobiographical book, Grannie: a Victorian Cameo, privately published in a limited edition of 100 copies printed by Oxford University Press in 1939. It is dedicated to his four daughters, and is largely a family history addressed to them – thus “Grannie” is their grandmother, not his, which can be a bit confusing when talk turns to grandfathers and great grandfathers! Still of interest is A Bibliography of the Essex House Press, with Notes on the Designs, Blocks, Cuts, Bindings etc., from the Year 1898 to 1904 (Essex House Press, 1904.)
Note 2: See Ian Gibson, The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (Faber & Faber, 2002.) Much of his vast collection of erotica, in many languages, was acquired in the course of his extensive business travels, and eventually went to the so–called Private Case in the British Museum (now Library), well away from ready access by the public. The Museum didn’t really want such pornographic material, but they did want his equally vast collection of books relating to Cervantes and Don Quixote, and Ashbee had stipulated that they couldn’t have one without the other. Though principally about H.S. Ashbee, Gibson’s book gives some useful information about C.R. Ashbee along the way.
Note 3: These original art–works are housed in the C.R. Ashbee Archive at King’s College, Cambridge: a) Janet Ashbee at CRA/84; b) William Morris at CRA/1/3,f.170; c) Blakean letter–head at CRA/1/3,f.224.
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My thanks are due to the Library of King’s College, Cambridge, for the use of the images cited in Note 3, and to the John Rylands Library in Manchester for the use of their extensive collection of Essex House Press publications. (It may interest readers to know that they also have a bulky album titled “Original Drawings and Designs for the Prayer Book of King Edward VII by C.R. Ashbee” at Shelfmark R35293.) I must also thank Joe Howard and Sandra Mason for proof reading this article and making some useful comments on it. Last but not least, I must thank Fred Diba for the images used here as Figs.15a & 15b.
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