ABSTRACT
According to Mackail’s biography, Morris as a small child already showed, in his tastes and activities, strong signs of characteristics which remained constant throughout his life; but in his anxiety to establish the status of his subject as child prodigy (precocity being the natural harbinger of genius), he tells us that Morris had read widely in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels by the time he was four years old. No doubt older readers of Scott, whether or not they have four-year-old children, will find little difficulty in dismissing this alarming story as implausible, to say the least. But Mackail, though not always a totally scrupulous biographer, would hardly have gratuitously invented anything so fantastic. It seems most likely that he was happy to relate a largely apocryphal tale originating with Morris’s close friends and relatives. Morris himself is on record as claiming merely to have read a great many books – ‘good, bad, and indifferent’, in his own words – by the time he was seven. It is quite conceivable that by the age of 11 or 12 he had actually read some of the easier works of Scott, such as Ivanhoe, or The Talisman, or even Quentin Durward; but what appears not in doubt is that in his later, mature years it seemed to Morris that Scott had been a life-time literary companion. In other words, he could hardly remember what it was like not to have read the works of Scott. They had become second nature to him; it must have seemed as if he had known them all his life.
