William Morris

English writer and designer

• Born: March 24, 1834
• Birthplace: Walthamstow, near London, England
• Died: October 3, 1896
• Place of death: Hammersmith, near London, England

Morris’s influence on book design has been almost as profound as his impact on the decorative arts and the course of modern design; his key contribution to the growth of modern British socialism was practical, financial, and philosophical; he was also a powerful force in the revival of narrative poetry and the rediscovery of Norse literature, and an influential romantic and utopian writer.

Early Life

The future socialist William Morris was born into upper-middle-class comfort. The son of a nondescript Evangelical mother and a businessperson father, he was brought up in a series of semirural residences near Epping Forest, where he acquired a love of natural form that would later manifest itself in his designs. At Marlborough public school, from January, 1848, until December, 1851, he benefited not from studying (because the school, then newly founded, was rather lax and rough) but from having free access to beautiful countryside and the wealth of historic buildings in the area. This resulted in his coming to know, as he later said, “most of what was to be known about English Gothic.”

In 1853, Morris entered Exeter College, Oxford. In 1854, he made the first of several summer trips abroad that expanded his conception of art and architecture. During this period, the writings of essayist and reformer John Ruskin proved to be a revelation to Morris, clarifying his unconventional beliefs. Also critical to his development was Thomas Carlyle’s upholding of the virtues of the medieval past over the vices of the present.

At Exeter, Morris made two friendships that would last his lifetime and inform his work. Most important, the idealistic enthusiasm for things medieval of future painter Edward Burne-Jones confirmed Morris’s own. The two gathered about them a group of friends, the “Brotherhood,” dedicated to a “Crusade and Holy Warfare against the age”; for the twelve months of 1856, they published the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (largely funded by Morris, who in 1855 came into an income of nine hundred pounds a year). At the same time, after taking his degree, in January, 1856, Morris articled himself to George Edmund Street, one of the most prominent architects of the revived English Gothic. In his Oxford office, he met and became friends with young architect Philip Webb.

Another major influence of the Oxford years was the Pre-Raphelite painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who swayed Morris toward painting and away from architecture: Crucially, Rossetti’s painting was medieval in inspiration and tended to emphasize the decorative. The influence is apparent in one of Morris’s few extant paintings, a mural executed at the new Oxford Union Debating Hall in 1857. His model was seventeen-year-old Jane Burden, daughter of an Oxford groom: In 1859, in the teeth of Victorian convention, Morris married her. In a poem in his first volume, The Defence of Guenevere (1858), he pays tribute to the beautiful and enigmatic Jane; it points, too, at the loneliness he would later suffer in this marriage. Her great “mournful” eyes “[are] most times looking out afar,/ Waiting for something, not for me/ Beata mea Domina!”

Life’s Work

Anticipating the birth of two daughters in 1861 and 1862, in 1860 Morris joined with Webb to build himself a house. At this moment, Morris’s path started to unroll before him. “Red House,” so called for the color of its brick, left uncovered in defiance of architectural convention, has been said to have initiated plain, unostentatious modern domestic design. The problem of what to do about aesthetically satisfying interior decoration and furniture led directly to the formation of Morris and Company.

The aim of “the Firm,” which involved painters Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown as well as Webb and Burne-Jones, was to reinstate decoration as one of the fine arts. As its prospectus stated, it was concerned with everything from paintings “down to… the smallest work susceptible of… beauty.” It was so successful that by 1866, only four years after the first Morris wallpaper, “Daisy,” the Firm was decorating rooms at St. James’s Palace. Gradually, as he mastered each craft, Morris expanded its scope to include, besides painted windows and mural decoration, furniture, metal and glassware, cloth and paper wall-hangings, embroideries, jewelry, dyed and printed silks and cottons, and carpets and tapestries. He created more than six hundred designs for the Firm, basing his designs on natural forms, primarily flowers, but always retaining a structural pattern. His designs are characterized by his firm calligraphic line (anticipating the style of art nouveau) and suggestions of movement, growth, and fullness.

At the height of these activities, in 1869, Morris was visited by Henry James, who remembered the bearded and still somewhat bohemian designer as “short, burly and corpulent, very careless and unfinished in his dress.… He has a very loud voice and a nervous restless manner and a perfectly unaffected and business-like address.” As a younger man, Morris had been rather poetically beautiful, though not when in the throes of his occasional childish rages, during which he would bang his head on the walls.

There had been a lull in poetic production between The Defence of Guenevere and publication of Morris’s next major works, The Life and Death of Jason in 1867 and The Earthly Paradise , a series of intricately interweaved narrative poems, in 1868-1870. These brought Morris instant success and popularity. Meanwhile his first translations of Icelandic sagas were published in 1869; their influence is apparent in much of his writing after the lonely and escapist The Earthly Paradise, most powerfully in his acclaimed epic Sigurd the Volsung (1876), the immediate cause of his being considered for the prestigious post of professor of poetry at Oxford: He declined to be considered (as later he would decline to be nominated for the post of poet laureate upon the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in 1892).

By 1881, when the Firm moved to larger premises, there was essentially little difference between Morris the businessperson and any other Victorian capitalist. Contrary to eulogizing tradition, he did not entirely spurn machines (spurning instead “the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny”). Although he provided rather better pay and conditions, work in the Firm was boring: Certainly, it did not reach Morris’s Ruskinian, medieval-Gothic ideal of delight and self-expression in work. After he had become a committed socialist, Morris was even more aware of the ironies of his position, as well as its benefits, such as his ability to fund socialist activities and the socialist press. However, he operated the way his society dictated he must in order to operate at all.

What Morris called his “conversion” to radical political activism came about gradually from 1876, in protest against the “dull squalor” of his civilization. By the early 1880’s, he had openly committed himself to socialism, and despite some problems within the Socialist League, which he helped to found in 1884, he remained faithful to this cause until he died, not only writing political poetry (Chants for Socialists , 1883-1886; The Pilgrims of Hope , 1885), pamphlets, and tales, but also editing the League’s journal Commonweal, from 1885 to 1890, selling it on the streets, speaking at workingmen’s clubs and on street corners throughout the country, and braving arrest during the “free-speech” disturbances of 1886.

Philosophically, socialism gave Morris an analysis that provided firmer foundations for his belief that art has its roots in the social and political body, and will wither if that body is not in good health. High Victorian capitalist society, as his reading of the works of Karl Marx impressed upon him, was sick; nothing less than revolution was needed, and accordingly he would work for it. From the late 1870’s, Morris went on to express these beliefs in the many lectures and publications, often spin-offs from his design work, on which rests his reputation as a pivotal figure in the development of the modern conception of culture. His analysis was deepest and most eloquently expressed in A Dream of John Ball in 1886 (a mix of romance and the philosophy of history) and in the utopian socialist vision News from Nowhere in 1890. Between 1889 and his death in 1896, Morris also published eight prose romances, set in a semimythological past, which prefigure the fantasies of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.

The third of these tales, The Story of the Glittering Plain , was the first book to be published, in 1890, by the Kelmscott Press. It was Morris’s great “typographical adventure” that revitalized English printing, then at a low ebb, stimulating experimentation and a proliferation of private presses. His insistence that the best books are “always beautiful by force of the mere typography” led to his designing two alphabets and producing more than six hundred designs for initials, borders, and ornaments. Between 1891 and 1898, when his executors wound up the Press, fifty-two books were produced; his 1896 Kelmscott edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer has been pronounced the finest book ever produced. Morris lived long enough to see it finished, but the punishing round of his many activities took its toll at last, and he died at the age of sixty-two.

Significance

The greatest pattern designer of the nineteenth century, William Morris has had a lasting effect upon the look and thought of the modern world because of his attempt to uphold in practice his Ruskinian belief in truth to nature, his respect for his materials, his fight for quality workmanship in a world already engulfed by shoddy mass production, and the protofunctionalism he came to advocate, expressed in his famous dictum: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Beyond even this, Morris was one of the most searching, and certainly the best-rounded, critics of English society and culture in the nineteenth century. He made in action, in his own life, the kind of links between poetry, politics, art, and society that are usually left to academics. His work was unified and therefore made more influential by a core of essentially simple ideas: to make life more worth living, less complicated, and more beautiful for more people. As he wrote in an 1894 article, “How I Became a Socialist”: “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” He refused to believe, he added, that all the beauty of the world was destined to end “in a counting-house on the top of a cinder heap.”

Bibliography

McCarthy, Fiona. William Morris: A Life of Our Time. New York: Knopf, 1995. Scholarly, comprehensive biography that describes the full range of Morris’s endeavors and interests. Places Morris’s life and career within the context of Victorian architecture, politics, and literature.

Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris. London: Longmans, 1899. Reprint. Benjamin Blom, 1968. The standard, authorized biography, written at the request of Burne-Jones, with unhampered access to papers of the family and the Firm. A skillful patchwork of extracts from Morris’s own writings, diaries, and letters, as well as Mackail’s quietly elegant and highly readable narrative.

Morris, May, ed. William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist. London: B. Blackwell, 1936. Reprint. 2 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966. The invaluable insights of Morris’s beloved and politically sympathetic daughter, also the editor of the twenty-four volumes of The Collected Works of William Morris (1910-1915).

Morris, William. The Collected Letters of William Morris. Edited by Norman Kelvin. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. Excellent edition, with a solid introduction, chronology, more than thirty illustrations per volume (including reproductions of letters, plus designs, places, and people), indexes of subjects and correspondents, and unobtrusive footnoting.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Selected Writings and Designs. Edited by Asa Briggs. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1962. Includes two short autobiographical pieces. Helpfully organized under the headings of “Romance” (including his best poetry), “Commitment,” “Socialism,” and “Utopia” (the first half of News from Nowhere is printed in full). Excellent but short introduction by Briggs and good interleaved central section on Morris as designer by Graeme Shankland.

Naylor, Gillian. The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of Its Sources, Ideals, and Influence on Design Theory. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1972. More than one hundred illustrations, nine in color, of designs, fabrics, furniture, and household objects. Morris takes his place in a well-organized survey leading from Augustus Pugin through to Frank Lloyd Wright and the modern “efficiency” style.

Pevsner, Nikolaus. Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. 3d ed. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970. First published in 1936. A compelling case for the crucial influence of Morris, despite his medievalism, for the modern movement. Makes clear the connections between interior and pattern design, architecture (including the work of Webb), and painting. Heavily illustrated.

Stansky, Peter. William Morris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. This excellent brief study in the Past Masters series is less a collection of the essential facts than a reflective essay upon the essential Morris. Thoroughly readable and frequently witty.

Thompson, E. P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. Rev. ed. London: Merlin Press, 1977. A monumental, primarily political study by the author of the classic work The Making of the English Working Classes (1963). Traces how Morris’s intense romanticism came to unite with his political idealism.

Vallance, Aymer. William Morris: His Art, His Writing, and His Public Life, a Record. Kennebunkport, Maine: Milford House, 1971. Reprint of second edition of 1898. Draws extensively on contemporary reviews, criticism, and opinions. Heavily and attractively illustrated.

Waggoner, Diane, ed.“The Beauty of Life”: William Morris and the Art of Design. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003. Published to accompany an exhibition presented at the Huntington Library and the Yale Center for British Art. Contains essays about Morris’s stained glass, interior decoration, and bookmaking, the activities of Morris & Company, and Morris’s influence on British design and the American Arts and Crafts movement.