'Those who did not throw decanters were in a minority'

Lately, of necessity, I've been in transit rather a lot, mostly by train. Fortunately I have a nice fat book to keep me entertrained (a happy typo!): Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of Edward Burne-Jones (1975 – her first published title) – yes, I'm back among the ladies, and also, I suppose, back to my desultory project of reading all of Penelope Fitzgerald backwards. Edward Burne-Jones is an elegant, fluent and hugely skilful biography, handling masses of material with ease and keeping the reader (this one, anyway) turning the pages happily. As with her novels, she immerses us in a rounded, wholly convincing past world. Here is a vivid passage from early on, after Edward Jones (not yet Burne-Jones), a solitary young man with an impoverished Birmingham background, has met William Morris at Exeter College, Oxford, where the two very different men took to each other instantly and embarked on their lifelong collaborative mission...

 According to Mackail, 'the coarseness of manners and morals' at Exeter ' was 'distressing in the highest degree' to Morris. Burne-Jones, curiously enough, perhaps because he was used to Saturday nights in Birmingham, seems to have minded it less. 'One night a man threw a heavy cut-glass decanter of port at someone sitting next to me,' he told Rooke, 'and it went between us both and smashed to pieces on the wall behind, so that we were both drenched in port ,shirts and faces and all over our clothes, as though we were covered with blood.' What impressed Burne-Jones was that the man responsible, who had to be dragged forcibly out of Hall, later became 'a high dignitary of the church'. Those who did not throw decanters were in a minority. William Richmond, the painter, visited his elder brother at Exeter in 1854: 'My brother did not belong to the aesthetic set ... and among them two of them were pointed out to me as special oddities ... These were William Morris and Edward Jones.'