The silk route

 A Genius for Money: Business, Art and the Morrisons by Caroline Dakers, Yale University Press, RRP£25, 352 pages

When James Morrison died in 1857, he was the richest commoner in England. A self-made haberdasher who became a radical member of parliament and a great art collector, his is not a famous name. His life story, though, told in Caroline Dakers’ sprightly biography A Genius for Money, is not only fascinating in itself; it is an emblem of the 19th-century story.

Born the son of a publican in Middle Wallop, Hampshire, in 1789 – the year the Bastille was stormed – he went up to London and worked in a haberdasher’s shop at just the right moment. By the time he was a young man, and ready to be taken into partnership and to marry his boss’s daughter, the Napoleonic wars were over, trade was opening up once again with America, and City of London merchants and their womenfolk could be encouraged to buy silk handkerchiefs, crêpe, gloves, neckerchiefs, bandanas and ribbons: all things that are easily lost or stolen and that therefore have to be bought and rebought over and over again.

Key to Morrison’s early success was that he never employed salesmen. Instead he chose good buyers who went round the manufactories in Lancashire and Derbyshire; they bought stuff cheap wholesale and, as he expanded his business with shops on Oxford Street, they sold cheap too – a principle followed by such later success stories as Marks and Spencer and Primark.

Morrison was an intelligent man. He would spend his early wages at Lackington’s, London’s biggest and cheapest bookshop, in Finsbury Square – known as the Temple of the Muses. In the evenings, he studied languages. He was the classic self-made man. He moved to a villa in the south-west London suburb of Balham – Dakers cunningly reminds us that the house purchased by Ruskin’s sherry merchant father in Herne Hill had formerly been owned by a draper, in roughly the same line of business as Morrison.

In 1821 Morrison invested in the Gas Light and Coke Company and started buying land. For as well as being a successful businessman, he also – like nearly all the rich in the history of 19th-century England – wanted to be landed.

He bought the estates that had formerly belonged to the Beckfords at Fonthill, just near the Wallops, Upper and Lower, of his own birth. He would eventually buy Basildon Park near Reading, a glorious Palladian mansion. And he owned a substantial house in London’s Harley Street.

Into these residences, Morrison stuffed increasingly stupendous art treasures: Aelbert Cuyps, Turners, Poussin’s “Landscape with a Calm” – one of the most eerily beautiful landscapes ever painted – Claude Lorraine’s “Rape of Europa”, Rembrandts – interestingly, very few Italian pictures, even though he had visited Rome.

As a radical MP, he not only espoused all the good causes – from the abolition of capital punishment for trivial offences to the extension of the franchise – he was a passionate free-trader and opponent of the Corn Laws; he campaigned for a National Gallery, and was a founder-member of the Reform Club, the London gentlemen’s club originally opened as a forum for radical MPs.

Dakers points out that as a landowner, Morrison was careful not to upset his old-fashioned neighbours by increasing the wages of his agricultural labourers. Their lot did not much improve under Morrison’s lordship, but he had one card up his sleeve denied the old blimps. He could offer poor labourers a chance to do what he did – have a leg-up in commerce by giving them jobs in shops. Another emblem there, of the 19th-century drift away from the country towards the towns.

This is an absolutely model biography, with a subject largely unexplored before. It tells us not only about Morrison but also about his two remarkable sons: Alfred, who was an even more manic collector than his father, and Charles, who vastly expanded his father’s textile business and became an even richer millionaire financier, moving from “family capitalism” to “a more modern corporate form of enterprise”. Another emblem there. Stylishly, they were all Mr Morrison: James turned down the chance to acquire a baronetcy in 1837 for the price of £5,000.

While plundering, with fascinating effect, the letters and diaries of the family, Dakers also has a very happy way of comparing Morrison’s life with Victorian fiction. We are reminded, at the beginning of his career, of the importance attached to silk handkerchiefs by Fagin in Oliver Twist; and when he buys a house in Harley Street, we are reminded that it was the address of Dickens’ ill-fated millionaire Mr Merdle inLittle Dorrit.

James Morrison, however, unlike Merdle, was an absolutely decent, sensible individual. His instincts are all sound. A small example, which made me cheer – when he visited Waterloo, he noted “several monuments about the place & all of them say something about enemies of their country – or the human race & about honour, glory, gallantry, youth, virtue etc. Etc., all of which are lies or nonsense”.

AN Wilson is author of ‘The Victorians’ (Arrow Books)