William Morris

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  William Morris arrived in the world on the 24th of March 1834, and by the time he died on the 3rd of October 1896, he had left his mark on textiles, poetry, fantasy fiction, architectural preservation, and revolutionary socialism. Few figures of the Victorian era spread themselves across so many different fields and made a genuine contribution to each. Yet there is a paradox at the heart of his life: a man who despised industrial capitalism built one of the most fashionable decorative arts firms in Britain, furnishing the homes of the very aristocrats and wealthy industrialists he believed should be overthrown. How did a child who loved riding his pony through the Essex countryside become a street-corner agitator, arrested for fighting back against a police officer? And how did a manufacturer of wallpaper and tapestries come to shape the imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis? Those questions run through everything Morris did.

• 2. Roots and Oxford

  ›

  Elm House in Walthamstow, Essex, was where Morris's story began, in a wealthy middle-class household whose income rested on copper mines and bill-broking. His father died unexpectedly in 1847, when Morris was still a teenager, and the family sold the large mansion at Woodford Hall to move into the smaller Water House. Before that loss, Morris had spent years roaming Epping Forest, fascinated by the Iron Age earthworks at Loughton Camp and by the hunting lodge at Chingford. Those early wanderings left a permanent imprint: throughout his life he would return to old buildings, old landscapes, and old stories as touchstones of something that industrial England had discarded.

  At Marlborough College he was bullied and homesick, earning the nickname "Crab", but he seized the chance to visit the prehistoric sites of Wiltshire, walking among the stones at Avebury and Silbury Hill. At Exeter College, Oxford, starting in January 1853, he was again bored by his formal studies but energised by everything outside the curriculum. Medieval architecture, the writings of John Ruskin, and the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood fired him in ways that classical scholarship never did. Ruskin's chapter "On the Nature of Gothic Architecture" in the second volume of The Stones of Venice struck Morris as, in his own words, "one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century."

  At Oxford he joined a group of undergraduates from Birmingham studying at Pembroke College: William Fulford, Richard Watson Dixon, Charles Faulkner, and Cormell Price, together with his lifelong friend and collaborator Edward Burne-Jones. They called themselves the Birmingham Set and spent their time reciting Shakespeare, discussing Tennyson, and dreaming of a shared life devoted to art. It was on a trip across northern France with Burne-Jones and Fulford in July 1855, visiting medieval churches and cathedrals, that the two men committed themselves to "a life of art" rather than commerce or the clergy.

• 3. Red House and the Firm

  ›

  Philip Webb, who had supervised Morris during his architectural apprenticeship, designed the exterior of Red House in the Kentish hamlet of Upton near Bexleyheath; Morris handled the interiors. The building cost Morris £4000 at a moment when his fortune had already been reduced by a sharp fall in the value of his shares. It rejected architectural convention by being L-shaped, built from red brick and red tile, and situated within an orchard so that house and garden formed a single designed environment. Burne-Jones called it "the beautifullest place on Earth."

  Red House became a gathering point for friends, who helped paint walls, ceilings, and furniture with scenes from Arthurian legend, the Trojan War, and the tales of Geoffrey Chaucer. Lizzie Siddal stayed during the summer and autumn of 1861 as she recovered from a traumatic miscarriage; she would die of an overdose in February 1862. The House was also the seedbed for the decorative arts company that Morris launched in April 1861: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., founded with Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Webb, Ford Madox Brown, Charles Faulkner, and Peter Paul Marshall. They called themselves "the Firm" and operated from No. 6 Red Lion Square.

  The Firm's stained glass windows found immediate demand, commissioned for the wave of Neo-Gothic church construction and refurbishment sweeping Victorian Britain, often through the architect George Frederick Bodley. Their exhibit at the 1862 International Exhibition in South Kensington brought press attention and medals of commendation, despite fierce opposition from Neo-Classical design establishments. By 1864, Morris had grown tired of the long daily commute from Upton to London, spending three to four hours in transit each day. He sold Red House and in autumn 1865 moved his family to No. 26 Queen Square in Bloomsbury, the same building where the Firm had already relocated its base of operations.

• 4. Poetry and Iceland

  ›

  Bell and Dandy published Morris's epic poem The Life and Death of Jason in 1867, at his own expense. It retold the ancient Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece and, unlike his first poetry collection, it sold well enough that the publisher paid Morris a fee for the second edition. From 1865 to 1870, Morris laboured on The Earthly Paradise, a cycle of 24 stories drawn from an array of different cultures, each told by a different narrator. Set in the late fourteenth century, it followed a group of Norsemen who flee the Black Death by sailing from Europe and discover an island where the inhabitants still worship the ancient Greek gods. Published in four parts by F. S. Ellis, it gained a cult following and established Morris as a major poet.

  Morris had befriended the Icelandic theologian Eiríkur Magnússon, and together they produced prose translations of the Eddas and Sagas for English-speaking readers. Morris also produced 18 handwritten illuminated manuscripts between 1870 and 1875, teaching himself Roman and italic script and the technique of gilded letters; the first of these was A Book of Verse, completed as a birthday gift for Georgiana Burne-Jones. In July 1871, leaving Jane and his children with Rossetti at Kelmscott Manor, he sailed from the Scottish port of Granton on a Danish mail boat, travelling via Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands to Reykjavík. He met the President of the Althing, Jón Sigurðsson, before travelling by Icelandic horse along the south coast. He returned in July 1873, pushing further north to Vatna glacier and Fljótsdalur.

  Those two trips changed his politics. He later reflected that they made him realise "the most grinding poverty is a trifling evil compared with the inequality of classes." The landscape of Iceland, stripped of ornament and hierarchy, confirmed instincts that he had been developing since Oxford. His joint tenancy on Kelmscott Manor, the manor house in the Oxfordshire village of Kelmscott constructed around 1570, became the other great anchor of his inner life, a place he adored and to which he returned for the rest of his years.

• 5. Craft, Dye, and Design

  ›

  Thomas Wardle ran the Hencroft Works in Leek, Staffordshire, and Morris entered into a co-operative agreement with him that brought the designer into direct contact with industrial labour for the first time. Between the summer of 1875 and the spring of 1878, Morris worked at the dye vat alongside Wardle's workers. He rejected the chemical aniline dyes that dominated commercial production and instead revived organic alternatives: indigo for blue, walnut shells and roots for brown, cochineal, kermes, and madder for red. Living and working in that industrial environment gave him a personal understanding of factory life and deepened his revulsion at the conditions workers endured.

  In the Spring of 1877, Morris & Co. opened a new store at No. 449 Oxford Street, and by 1880 the firm had become a household name among Britain's upper and middle classes. It furnished sections of St James's Palace and the chapel at Eaton Hall, taking commissions from aristocrats, wealthy industrialists, and provincial entrepreneurs. Morris privately described this work as "ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich", a tension he never fully resolved. Throughout this period he also had woven fabric, carpet-making, and tapestry production on his mind. He described tapestry as "the noblest of the weaving arts" and in September 1879 finished his first solo piece. Over the course of his career he produced more than 600 designs for wallpaper, textiles, and embroideries, more than 150 for stained glass windows, and around 650 borders and ornamentations for the Kelmscott Press.

  His guiding principle was simple: the design and production of an item should never be separated. He insisted that craftsmen understand the full process, from raw material to finished object, and his biographer Mackail noted that Morris became "a manufacturer not because he wished to make money, but because he wished to make the things he manufactured."

• 6. The Socialist Turn

  ›

  Britain's first socialist party, the Democratic Federation, had been founded in 1881 by Henry Hyndman, and Morris joined in January 1883. He read voraciously: Henry George's Progress and Poverty, Alfred Russel Wallace's Land Nationalisation, and Karl Marx's Das Kapital, though he admitted Marx's economic analysis gave him "agonies of confusion on the brain." He preferred the writings of William Cobbett and Sergius Stepniak. He was appointed to the Federation's executive committee in May 1883 and soon elected treasurer, while regularly lecturing at meetings across Britain. In November 1883 he spoke at University College, Oxford on "Democracy and Art," openly espousing socialism to an audience that included many who found it shocking.

  In February 1884, he travelled to Blackburn, Lancashire amid the great cotton strike, lecturing on socialism to the strikers. The following month he marched in London to commemorate the first anniversary of Marx's death and the thirteenth anniversary of the Paris Commune. He designed the Federation's membership card and helped write their manifesto, Socialism Made Plain, which demanded free compulsory education, free school meals, an eight-hour working day, and nationalisation of land, banks, and railways. He also covered the financial losses of the Federation's newspaper, Justice, and befriended another contributor: George Bernard Shaw.

  When the Federation renamed itself the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, a schism opened between those who favoured parliamentary action, led by Hyndman, and those who regarded Parliament as irredeemably corrupt. In December 1884, Morris and his supporters, most notably Ernest Belfort Bax and Edward Aveling, left the SDF. It was the first major schism in the British socialist movement. Morris immediately founded the Socialist League and composed its manifesto with Bax, describing their position as "Revolutionary International Socialism." He ran the League's newspaper Commonweal as editor for six years, keeping it afloat financially, publishing contributions from Friedrich Engels, Shaw, Paul Lafargue, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and Karl Kautsky. By autumn 1890, anarchists had seized control of the League's executive committee; Morris had been subsidising its activities with £500 a year, and he finally walked away.

• 7. Fantasy and the Kelmscott Press

  ›

  The Chiswick Press published Morris's The House of the Wolfings in December 1888, a fantasy set in Iron Age Europe that reconstructed the lives of Germanic-speaking Gothic tribes through a mixture of prose and verse. A sequel, The Roots of the Mountains, followed in 1889. Over subsequent years he produced a series of prose romances, including The Story of the Glittering Plain in 1890, The Wood Beyond the World in 1894, The Well at the World's End in 1896, and two further titles published posthumously. Tolkien considered much of his literary work to have been inspired by an early reading of Morris and even suggested he was unable to better Morris's work; the names "Gandolf" and the horse Silverfax both appear in The Well at the World's End. The young Tolkien attempted a retelling of the story of Kullervo from the Kalevala in the style of The House of the Wolfings. C. S. Lewis's Narnia series is considered to have been heavily influenced by The Wood Beyond the World. Early fantasy writers Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, and James Branch Cabell were all familiar with Morris's romances.

  In January 1891, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press, a private press dedicated to producing limited-edition books in an illuminated-manuscript style. It would go on to publish the celebrated Kelmscott Chaucer. Morris developed three typefaces for the press and contributed around 650 borders and ornamental designs. He was by this point increasingly ill. Aside from gout, he was also showing signs of epilepsy. In July 1896, he went on a cruise to Norway with construction engineer John Carruthers, visiting Vadsø and Trondheim, but his physical condition deteriorated during the trip and he began experiencing hallucinations. He returned to Kelmscott House, where he died of tuberculosis on the morning of the 3rd of October 1896. His funeral was held on the 6th of October; his body was carried from Hammersmith to Paddington station, transported to Oxford, and then taken to Kelmscott, where he was buried in the churchyard of St George's Church. His daughter May's edition of his Collected Works, published between 1910 and 1915, runs to 24 volumes, with two more added in 1936.