Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

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8 (p. 409) Mrs. Higgins was brought up on Morris and Burne Jones; and her room ... is not crowded with furniture and little tables and nicknacks.... the Morris wall-papers, and the Morris chintz window curtains and brocade covers.... A few good oil-paintings ... (the Burne Jones, not the Whistler): English poet and artist William Morris (1834-1896), a friend of Shaw, introduced the idea of designing homes and furnishings according to aesthetic principles; he designed wallpaper, chintzes, and the like. Mrs. Higgins rejects Victorian horror vacui (“fear of empty spaces”) by not crowding her drawing room with “furniture and little tables and nicknacks”; in doing so, she proclaims her modernity. Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was a pre-Raphaelite painter and an associate of Morris; Mrs. Higgins’s embrace of Burne-Jones shows that her modernity stops short of Shaw’s contemporaries, for she has no paintings in the more modern manner of Whistler.