694. Stories After Nature

From 1892, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon were thinking about books they wanted to illustrate and publish. Many of those original plans never materialised, such as an edition of Song of Songs announced in 1892 in a prospectus for the second issue of The Dial, or an edition of The Voiage and Travaille of Sir John Maundeville mentioned in a prospectus for Daphnis and Chloe. Other projects were mentioned in letters to publisher John Lane, who distributed their work, or were suggested by Oscar Wilde, even when he was already imprisoned. The longest list comes from an October 1894 letter to American publisher F. Holland Day: it included editions of, among others, Charles Lamb, John Webster, Catullus, Richard Crashaw, Plato, Thomas Gray, Walter Pater and Richard Lovelace.

More than twenty years later, Ricketts sometimes thought back to such plans, referring to ideas he did not mention before. On 30 March 1915, he wrote to Gordon Bottomley:

I remember Wells’ play very dimly, I thought it wordy at the time. His Stories after Nature pleased me. I even contemplated publishing it with woodcuts in the old days of the Vale.

Charles Wells, Stories after Nature (1891), cover

Charles Wells's play - published under the name H.L. Howard - was called Joseph and his Brethren. A Scriptural Drama in Two Acts, issued by G. and W.B. Whittaker in 1824. Two years earlier Wells had published (anonymously) his Stories after Nature (London, T. and J. Allman, and C. And J. Ollier, 1822). The play was reprinted in 1876 with an introduction by Algernon Charles Swinburne. The stories were reprinted in 1891 by Lawrence and Bullen with a preface by W.J. Linton. 

What was so appealing about these stories that Ricketts wanted to make wood-engravings to accompany them?

Charles Wells, Stories after Nature (1891), title page

Some of the stories are set in ancient times, for example in Sparta. The main characters are often dukes, princes, kings or members of their court in France or Italy during the Renaissance. Other stories are set in late-medieval Britain. There are disguises, kidnappings, violence, tyranny, love stories, betrayals, chivalry, grief and desolation:

He was become the silent image of despair, and sat for hours  on the ground without motion, brooding over his misery. But this melancholy pleasure could not last; his mind fell short of the intensity of his passion, and when he had once lost the clue of his thoughts, his affections became a chaos, and he was no longer able to subdue them to the consideration of the beloved object. At last he came to himself, and was quietly resigned to his hard fate; the violence of his grief subsided into a calm, and he bore his affliction patiently. ('Dion, a King of the Olden Time').

Some stories are about love discovered too late or about unconditional friendship between men, such as 'Edmund and Edward', while others describe the lives of brothers 'who lived as happily as two bachelors could do' ('the Plague').

Charles Wells, Stories after Nature (1891), pp. 124-125

Most of the stories are dramatic, with fortunes abruptly lost, love treacherously met with exile - and it seems that those scenes of a sudden reversal of fortune visually appealed to Ricketts. Both the loss of trust and the regaining of a lover or status might have given him an idea for an image, perhaps not unlike those seen in his edition of The Parables.