Education and early career.
Morris was born in an Essex village on the southern edge of Epping
Forest, a member of a large and well-to-do family. From his
preparatory school, he went at the age of 13 to Marlborough College.
A schoolfellow describes him at this time as “a thick-set,
strong-looking boy, with a high colour and black curly hair,
good-natured and kind, but with a fearfultemper.” At Marlborough,
Morris said that he learned “next to nothing . . . for indeed next
to nothing was taught.” As in later life, he learned only what he
wanted to learn.
In 1853 Morris went to Exeter College at Oxford, where he met Edward
Jones (later the painter and designer Burne-Jones), who was to
become his lifelong friend. Both Morris and Jones became deeply
affected by the High Church (Anglo-Catholic) movement of the Church
of England, and it was assumed that they would become clergymen.
Nevertheless, it was the writings of John Ruskin on the social and
moral basis of architecture (particularly the chapter “On the Nature
of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice) that came to Morris “with the
force of a revelation.” After taking his degree in 1856, he entered
the Oxford office of the Gothic Revivalist architect G.E. Street. In
the same year he financed the first 12 monthly issues of The Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine, where many of those poems appeared that, two
years later, were reprinted in his remarkable first published work,
The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems.
Visits with Street and Burne-Jones to Belgium and northern France,
where he first saw the 15th-century paintings of Hans Memling and
the Van Eyck brothers and the cathedrals of Amiens, Chartres, and
Rouen, confirmed Morris in his love of medieval art. It was at this
time that he came under the powerful influence of the Pre-Raphaelite
painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who persuaded him to give
up architecture for painting and enrolled him among the band of
friends who were decorating the walls of the Oxford Union with
scenes from Arthurian legend based on Le Morte Darthur by the
15th-century English writer Sir Thomas Malory. Only one easel
painting by Morris survives: “La Belle Iseult,” or “Queen Guenevere”
(Tate Gallery, London). His model was Jane Burden, the beautiful,
enigmatic daughter of an Oxford groom. He married her in 1859, but
the marriage was to prove a source of unhappiness to both. Morris
appears at this time, in the memoirs of the painter Val Prinsep, as
“a short square man with spectacles and a vast mop of dark hair.” It
was observed “how decisive he was: how accurate, without any effort
or formality: what an extraordinary power of observation lay at the
base of many of his casual or incidental remarks.” From 1856 to 1859
Morris shared a studio with Burne-Jones in Red Lion Square, London,
for which he designed, according to Rossetti, “some intensely
medieval furniture.”
After his marriage, Morris commissioned his friend the architect
Philip Webb, whom he had originally met in Street's office, to build
the Red House at Bexleyheath (so called because it was built of red
brick when the fashion was for stucco villas). It was during the
furnishing and decorating of this house by Morris and his friends
that the idea came to them of founding an association of “fine art
workmen,” whichin April 1861 became the firm of Morris, Marshall,
Faulkner & Company with premises in Red Lion Square. The other
members of the firm were Ford Madox Brown, D.G. Rossetti, Webb, and
Burne-Jones. At the International Exhibition of 1862 at South
Kensington they exhibited stained glass, furniture, and
embroideries. This led to commissions to decorate the new churches
then being built by G.F. Bodley, notably St. Martin's-on-the-Hill at
Scarborough. The apogee of the firm's decorative work is the
magnificent series of stained-glass windows designed during the next
decade by Burne-Jones for Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge, the roof
being painted by Morris and Webb. The designs for these windows came
to Morris uncoloured, and it was he who chose the colours and put in
the lead lines. He also designed many other windows himself, for
both domestic and ecclesiastical use.
Two daughters, Jenny and May, were born in 1861 and 1862, and
altogether the five years spent at Red House were the happiest of
Morris' life. After a serious attack of rheumatic fever, brought on
by overwork, he moved in 1865 to Bloomsbury in London. The greater
part of his new house wasgiven over to the firm's workshops—an
arrangement that, combined with her husband's boisterous manners and
Rossetti's infatuation with her, reduced Jane to a state of neurotic
invalidism. Morris' first wallpaper designs, “Trellis,” “Daisy,” and
“Fruit,” or “Pomegranate,” belong to 1862–64; he did not arrive at
his mature style until 10 years later, with the “Jasmine” and
“Marigold” papers.
Iceland and Socialism.
As a poet, he first achieved fame and success with the romantic
narrative The Life and Death of Jason (1867). In the 20th century,
however, Jason, with its lax, easily flowing couplets, appears
diffuse to the point of tenuity. All painful emotion is carefully
avoided or smothered in prettiness, as italso is in his next work,
in the seemingly endless stories of The Earthly Paradise (1868–70),
a series of narrative poems based on classical and medieval sources.
The best parts of The Earthly Paradise are the introductory poems on
the months, in which Morris reveals his personal unhappiness. A
sterner spirit informs his principal poetic achievement, the epic
Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876),
written after a prolonged study of the sagas (medieval prose
narratives) read by Morris in the original Old Norse. The
exquisitely illuminated Book of Verse, telling once more of hopeless
love and dedicated to Georgiana Burne-Jones, belongs to 1870.
In 1871 Morris and Rossetti took the Elizabethan manor house of
Kelmscott in Oxfordshire. In the same year Morris paid his first
visit to Iceland, and the journal he kept of his travels contains
some of his most vigorous descriptive writing. He returned to
Iceland in 1873. The joint tenancy of Kelmscott, however, was never
a success, and, after the finalbreakdown of his health in 1874,
Rossetti left the house for good, to Morris' great relief. At the
same time, the firm was reorganized under his sole proprietorship as
Morris & Company. In 1875 Morris began his revolutionary experiments
with vegetable dyes, which, after the removal in 1881 of the firm to
larger premises at Merton Abbey in Surrey, resulted in their finest
printed and woven fabrics, carpets, and tapestries. In 1877 Morris
gave his first public lecture, “The Decorative Arts” (later called
“The Lesser Arts”), and his first collection of lectures, Hopes and
Fears for Art, appeared in 1882. In 1877 he also founded the Society
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in an attempt to combat the
drastic methods of restoration then being carried out on the
cathedrals and parish churches of Great Britain.
The Morris family moved into Kelmscott House (named after their
country house in Oxfordshire), at Hammersmith, in 1878. Five years
later Morris joined Henry Mayers Hyndman's Democratic (later Social
Democratic) Federation and began his tireless tours of industrial
areas to spread the gospel of Socialism. But he was considerately
treated by the authorities, even when leading a banned demonstration
to London's Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday” (Nov. 13, 1887),
when the police, supported by troops, cleared the square of
demonstrators. On this occasion he marched with the playwright
George Bernard Shaw at his side. But by this time Morris had
quarrelled with the autocratic Hyndman Federation and formed the
Socialist League, with its own publication, The Commonweal, in which
his two finest romances, A Dream of John Ball (1886–87) and News
from Nowhere (1890), an idyllic vision of a Socialist rural utopia,
appeared. Subsequently, he founded the Hammersmith Socialist
Society, which held weekly lectures in the coach house next door to
Kelmscott House as well as open-air meetings in different parts of
London.
The Kelmscott Press.
The Kelmscott Press was started in 1891, with the printer andtype
designer Emery Walker as typographical adviser, and between that
year and 1898 produced 53 titles in 66 volumes. Morris designed
three type styles for his press: Golden type, modelled on that of
Nicolas Jenson, the 15th-century French printer; Troy type, a gothic
font on the model of the early German printers of the 15th century;
and Chaucer type, a smaller variant of Troy, in which The Works of
Geoffrey Chaucer was printed during the last years of his life. One
of the greatest examples of the art of the printed book, Chaucer is
the most highly decorated of the Kelmscott publications. Most of the
Kelmscott books were plain and simple, for Morris observed that
15th-century books were “always beautiful by force of the mere
typography.”
Death and assessment.
A sea voyage to Norway in the summer of 1896 failed to revive
Morris' flagging energies, and he died that autumn after returning
home, worn out by the multiplicity of his activities. He was buried
at Kelmscott beneath a simple gravestone designed by Philip Webb.
Morris is now regarded as one of the great men of the 19th century,
though he turned away from what he called “the dullsqualor of
civilization” to romance, myth, and epic. Followinghis contemporary
the art critic John Ruskin, Morris defined beauty in art as the
result of man's pleasure in his work and asked, “Unless people care
about carrying on their business without making the world hideous,
how can they care about Art?” To Morris, art included the whole
man-made environment.
In his own time William Morris was most widely known as the author
of The Earthly Paradise and for his designs for wallpapers,
textiles, and carpets. Since the mid-20th century it is as a
designer and craftsman, rather than as poet or politician, that
Morris is valued most, though future generations may esteem him more
as a social and moral critic, a pioneer of the society of equality.
Philip Prichard Henderson
