Morris, William

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MORRIS, WILLIAM

MORRIS, WILLIAM (1834–1896), English poet, political thinker, and decorative artist.

William Morris was born in Walthamstow, now part of London, on 24 March 1834 and died at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, London, on 3 October 1896. Perhaps his greatest fame in his own lifetime was as a poet. But his work as a designer with his own firm and as a politically active socialist has been more enduring. His father made a fortune as a stockbroker, allowing Morris to experiment with various careers before choosing to pursue three: poet, designer, and political thinker and activist. His early love of the Middle Ages, which helped shape all his activities, was fostered by his reading and his explorations of Epping Forest near his home and in the Savernake Forest near his boarding school, Marlborough. He went to Exeter College, Oxford, where he joined a like-minded circle of friends, most notably the future painter Edward Burne-Jones.

Morris had already come to despise what he saw as the cheap and shoddy ideas and goods of the age. At first he thought that the way of reform was to become an Anglican minister, but his interest in religion declined. Influenced by John Ruskin's Stones of Venice (1851–1853), particularly its fifth chapter, "On the Nature of Gothic," he determined to use art as the means of reform. He was persuaded by Ruskin's argument that workers need to have a sense of pleasure in their work and in their surroundings. Morris considered being an architect, then a painter but abandoned these careers. Moving to London he found no furniture to his liking so he designed his own. Finding no house he wished to live in, he turned to his friend Philip Webb, who designed for him, in a simplified redbrick Gothic, the influential Red House in Bexleyheath outside of London. In 1861 he formed a design firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company, to provide for the inside of the house, and it became a commercial operation. (With some acrimony, Morris eliminated his partners in 1875 and re-formed the firm as Morris & Company.)

Morris felt that much of the design of the time was ugly and false to nature. Its purpose was not beauty but to demonstrate the wealth of its purchaser. Morris believed in talent, not genius, and felt he demonstrated this himself by working in all areas of his firm's production. Although to modern eyes many of Morris's designs appear elaborate, in their own time they represented a move toward simplicity. He designed furniture, wallpaper, stained glass, textiles, tapestries, tiles, carpets, and, toward the end of his life, books for his last enterprise, the Kelmscott Press. As the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement he had a profound effect

on design and architecture not only in his own country but also in continental Europe and indeed the rest of the world. He wrote that his aim was "to combine clearness of form and firmness of structure with the mystery that comes of abundance and richness of detail" (Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, p. 27). He wished, in his own words, "to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is the one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it" (Morris 1882, p. 4). In his wake, various Arts and Crafts firms were formed. The movement emphasized handmade products, simplicity of form, and fitness to purpose. As such it was a reaction against Victorian objects and an extremely important influence on the look of the world in the twentieth century.

His best-known series of poems was The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), and one cartoon depicted him as "The Earthly Paradox." He was aware of being caught in a technological conundrum. He hated what he saw as the low quality of machine products, and is frequently seen as being antimachine. He certainly did not admire the machine, but he was perfectly willing to use it as a way of producing his wallpapers and chintzes at lower cost, although his firm's finer work was done by hand. He increasingly came to feel that corporate interests, to use the modern term, would demand cheaper and shoddier production. For instance, he hated the new chemical dyes and insisted on using natural ones.

Morris became more and more active in politics, as he felt that the only way that the ordinary person could make and have truly beautiful and useful objects was if socialism were introduced and the economic arrangements of society transformed. He became a convinced Marxist, but this did not lead him to change his business methods. Though his workers were well paid, he did not share the profits of his firm. To charges of hypocrisy, Morris pointed out that his one individual case would not change society and he needed his income to achieve political reform, indeed revolution, for all.

He devoted a great deal of his considerable energy to political agitation. The various political groups with which he was associated were the precursors of the British Labour Party, much as he would have disliked it given that in his view society needed to be totally transformed politically. He outlined his utopia in his most famous prose work, News from Nowhere (1891). Through the founding of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877), Morris launched the modern preservation movement. He helped create a far greater sensitivity to the need to preserve and protect the environment. Morris's legacy encompasses a belief in simplicity of form, many magnificent designs and objects, persuasive political analysis of the economic world, and a vision of socialism on a human scale.

See alsoFurniture; Ruskin, John; Socialism.