Lodden by William Morris: History of the Printed Textile

Lodden at a glance

The table below collects the core facts about Lodden as the Victoria and Albert Museum records them. Everything in it comes from the museum's own object documentation, so the attribution and the dates carry the weight of a single institutional source rather than a range of published scholarship.

Lodden belongs to the group of printed cottons that Morris designed in the 1880s, and it sits within a wider family of river named chintzes. The journal's overview of the river patterns places it among designs that take their titles from Thames tributaries.

What the fabric shows

The V&A describes Lodden as a block printed cotton with a polychrome scrolling foliage print. In plain terms, the surface carries leafy stems that scroll across the cloth in several colours, printed from blocks rather than woven or painted.

That description is deliberately general, and it is as far as the museum record supplied here goes. The individual plants in the pattern are not identified in the evidence available for this page, so no botanical reading of the design can be offered. What can be said is structural: the design is built from scrolling foliage, printed in more than one colour, on a furnishing scale.

Morris himself had views on how far printed patterns should imitate nature. In his essay The Lesser Arts of 1877, as quoted by the V&A, he advised wallpaper designers against trying to make their paper look as if it were painted by hand. The remark concerns wallpaper rather than Lodden specifically, but it shows the principle of stylisation that governed his printed designs.

Design date, attribution and the open questions

The V&A gives Lodden a primary date of 1884 and a production date of 1884, and records the design as by William Morris for Morris & Co. Because these figures come from the museum's documentation, they are the firmest dates available for the design.

The two V&A examples carry different production date ranges, which is worth reading carefully. The record for O270929 gives a production range of 1884 to 1912, while the record for O224709 gives 1884 to 1919. The ranges describe when each surviving piece may have been printed, not when the design was drawn.

Several questions about the design's history remain open, and it is better to name them than to paper over them.

Points that the evidence supplied for this page does not establish:

• Whether Lodden was first issued or registered in a year other than the 1884 design date, and which date is which.
• Which firm block printed Lodden, and when printing of this design moved to Merton Abbey, if it did.
• Whether there are documented later reissues of the design.

The attribution to Morris rests on the V&A's record. No second published source for the attribution was available for this page, so readers should treat the museum's wording as the current authority rather than a settled consensus across the literature.

How Lodden was made

Lodden is a block printed cotton. Block printing meant carving the pattern into wooden blocks, one for each colour, and pressing each block onto the cloth in turn. It was slow, skilled work, and it produced the crisp edges and layered colour that distinguish Morris's printed cottons from machine printed goods of the period.

The place of production is recorded differently across the two V&A examples. The record for O270929 states that the fabric was made in Great Britain, a broad designation, while the record for O224709 states that it was made at Merton Abbey. The two statements do not contradict each other, since Merton Abbey is in Great Britain, but the narrower record is the more informative of the two.

Merton Abbey fits the chronology. According to the V&A, from the early 1880s onwards Morris's energies were focused on the production of textiles at Merton Abbey Mills, and the museum also records that tapestry weaving was established at Merton Abbey when company production was consolidated there in 1881, when Morris appointed John Henry Dearle to manage production. A design dated 1884, with one example recorded as made at Merton Abbey, sits squarely within that period of concentrated textile work.

What the records do not settle is which works printed Lodden. The evidence available here does not name a printer for the design, whether an outside firm or the Merton Abbey works themselves, so no printer can be stated with confidence.

Two museum examples and a sample book

Two examples of Lodden are documented in the V&A's collection, and their records differ in instructive ways. The table below sets the two side by side.

The differing end dates in the V&A's records, 1912 for one example and 1919 for the other, suggest that the firm continued printing the design over a long span, though the ranges describe the museum's dating of the surviving pieces rather than a documented printing history. No third museum example with an object number is established by the evidence for this page.

One further V&A object offers a research avenue. The museum holds a swatch sample book of 58 pieces of block printed cottons and linens, museum number O293127, dated 1900 to 1910, containing designs by William Morris, J. Henry Dearle and Kate Faulkner for Morris & Co. According to the V&A, the book includes some reprints of 1830s designs and some samples with labels giving pattern number, name, fabric width and price per yard.

Whether that sample book includes a Lodden swatch is not established by the evidence available here. If it does, a label could supply the pattern number, width and price that the object records lack, which would make the book a natural first stop for anyone extending this research.

Lodden among Morris's printed chintzes

Lodden belongs to a type that Morris developed across the 1880s: block printed cotton furnishing fabrics with dense, scrolling plant patterns in several colours. The V&A's records for other designs in this family show the same medium and the same attribution to Morris for Morris & Co.

The evidence supplied for this page does not include object records for other individual printed cottons, so no named comparisons can be listed here with dates or attributions. Readers who want the fuller context of the river named group can find it in the journal's overview of Morris's river patterns, and comparisons with individual contemporaries are covered in the pages on the story of Kennet and our guide to Wandle.

What we still do not know about Lodden

A short catalogue of gaps is the honest way to close the research picture. Each point below could change the account of the design if new evidence emerged.

Open questions about Lodden:

• Which plants or motifs are securely identified in the pattern. The V&A describes scrolling foliage but the evidence here names no species.
• Whether Morris made any documented statement about Lodden. No such statement appears in the evidence supplied.
• Which firm block printed the fabric, and the exact relationship of the design to printing at Merton Abbey.
• Whether the design was first issued or registered in a year other than the 1884 date given by the V&A.
• Whether later reissues of Lodden exist and are documented.
• Whether the V&A sample book O293127 contains a Lodden swatch, and if so what its label records.

None of these gaps undermines the core identification of the design. What is secure is the medium, the 1884 date as recorded by the V&A, the attribution recorded by the museum, and the two museum examples with their numbers.