William morris biography fiona gubelmann
William Morris: A Life for Our Time
It’s lawless and violent there - the schoolboys, feral progeny of upper-middle class Anglican clergymen, pelt stones at passing farmers and skin wild animals in Savernake Forest, a more cultivated Epping. Morris hides out in it, exploring churches and ancient burial-mounds, weaving nets. At Oxford, Morris is intended for the Church, but rails against Anglicanism.
He and Burne-Jones edge closer to Catholic doctrine, drawing on the recent Tractarian disputes, and gain an interest in the Gothic revival as a rejuvenation of medieval Christianity. With Burne-Jones Morris has ‘his first real friendship’ (p), and a real group of friends also - they read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats and Wordsworth to each other, and write poetry themselves.
Both Morris and Burne-Jones imagine becoming part of a celibate, sacred brotherhood devoted to art and worship - they discover Ruskin and the Pre-Raphelites, and Morris starts sketching architectural forms. Oxford’s stifling academic atmosphere bores him - he is impatient for something else.
He visits Northern France, entranced by the same cathedrals that fascinated Ruskin: Amiens, Chartres, Beauvais, Rouen - colossal masterpieces of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century architecture.
It’s here that he finally decides to give up the road towards the cloth - his mother is furious. He finishes at Oxford and is taken on as a pupil by the imposing Gothic architect G.E. Street, which initially allowed him to stay in Oxford. The day-to-day confines of architectural surveying and draughtsmanship, as well as Street’s relatively conservative style, meant immediate disillusionment, although a fortunate new friendship with Street’s clerk, Philip Webb.
Next to London with Street’s office, living with Burne-Jones, and the fateful meeting with Rossetti, the kindly tormentor.
An exposure to Rossetti’s worldliness and cruelty, but also to his great artistic influence. Morris quickly becomes portly. His forays into tapestry, poetry and painting start here in earnest, as he abandons the persona of the architect and decides to become an artist - whatever that means. He meets Janey - both unhappy, it seems, from the start, with Morris’s awkwardness and Janey’s lack of agency.
A second trip to France shows Morris at his most unstable and irascible - at the news that his ‘traditional boat had been sent over from the Oxford boatyard Bossom’s’, intended for a trip down the Seine, had been damaged in transit, Morris punches the stone quay itself, grazing his hand (p).
Then to the Red House, that idyll of an artistic community never fully realised in practice but - thanks to Webb’s genius - a glorious embodiment of Morris’s aesthetic ideals.
Great vaulted rooms, rose trellises and ripe apples falling in through the windows. The beginning of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. in Red Lion Square, the beginning of the ultimate unresolved paradox of Morris’s life: his uncanny success at commerce and his social principles which abhorred it. Children - Jenny and May - who spend just long enough in the Red House to remember it as a paradise before the pressures of work force the family back to London.
The expansion of Morris and Co.
at Queen Square, just down the road from Red Lion Square, seems to me to herald the start of Morris’s artistic maturity as he enters his thirties. Just as commissions to St. James’s Palace and the South Kensington Museum start arriving, Morris begins work on the 40,line poem The Earthly Paradise, which McCarthy sees as ‘the grand unloading of the stories which has jostled in his mind since he was as boy.’ (p).
An interesting aside: the nave roof of Jesus College chapel was done by Morris (c.f. p), and along with Burne-Jones and Madox Brown he designed the stained glass windows of the outer chapel (p)! Morris never really shrugs off his establishment links - even two years before his final conversion to revolutionary socialism, he was still working the Throne Room of St.
James’s Palace (p). The start of Janey’s affair with Rossetti - the whole thing so clearly painful for all involved, although I have to say I’m really starting to hate the latter.
The long, drawn-out process of quasi-separation between Morris and Janey, and the former’s involvement with Georgiana Burne-Jones and Aglaia Corino, is present in the rather tortured years that follow.
Morris finally finishes The Earthly Paradise, filled with tales of romantic betrayal and loss, while Rossetti is writing (and even publishing) sonnets to Janey.
William morris biography fiona gubelmann We try and recreate the feel of the shop wherever we are online, to reflect our niche categories and personality. Marlborough Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. Guaranteed safe and secure checkout.Husband and wife effectively live apart, with Janey suffering from periodic waves of an undislosed illness. The supposed political neutrality and escapism of Morris’s poems is denied by C.S. Lewis, who claims that ‘Morris may build a world in some ways happier than the real one; but happiness puts as stern a question as misery.
It is this dialectic of desire, presented with no solution, no lies, no panacea, which gives him his peculiar bittersweet quality, and also his solidity. He has faced the fact.’ (p).
Due to both marital woes and (I suspect) incipient creative exhaustion, Morris’s first trip to Iceland in comes at a moment of quiet crisis.
The restorative, cathartic power of hardship and toil on the lava-fields and high passes, mixed with the political and literary resonances of the sagas in the landscape, combine to rejuvenate Morris, who returns to England a little more settled. It helped that the house he returned to was Kelmscott Manor, which he and Rossetti had jointly leased in McCarthy speculates that ‘[p]erhaps no other Englishman, apart from the owners of truly ancestral homes, has ever felt such passionate attachment to a building’, despite the fact that Morris only ever stayed there ‘for more than a few days at a time’ (p).
From the village of Kelmscott emerged Morris’s great ideal of ‘a network of small ruralist communities’, which later developed into the twentieth-century garden city movement. Morris wrote to Georgiana’s sister, Louisa Baldwin, in
“… look, suppose people lived in little communities among gardens and green fields, so that you could be in the country in 5 minutes walk, and had few wants; almost no furniture for instance, and no servants, and studied the (difficult) arts of enjoying life, and finding out what they really wanted: then I think one might hope civilisation had really begun.” (p).
Before long, however, Rossetti was a dog in the manger, occupying the house full-time between and , often with Janey, essentially driving Morris out.
William Morris: A Life for Our Time - Faber: Byron: Life and Legend was described by A. Close Back In Stock Notification. Her understanding of his work as an artist-craftsman is profound, yet she is equally illuminating about the strange mixture of nostalgia and yearning for change that shaped his politics. Create account.
What infuriated the latter the most was Rossetti’s disdain for the Kelmscott and ambivalence towards what Morris viewed as a paradise. ln a letter to Aglaia in , Morris deemed Rossetti a ‘slur’ upon the house (pp). After a second salutary if melancholy trip to Iceland in , Morris starts to harden himself against his old attachments.
Rossetti is evicted in , and - along with Morris’s other partners, including a livid Ford Maddox Brown - ejected from the great brotherhood of the company. ‘Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co.’ kept only the name of its first, and most important, partner.
It’s from around this point (ish) that Morris’s artistic and political endeavours start to coincide.
Whilst ‘the sixteen chintzes printed at Leek by Wardle are what most people consider the quintessential Morris’ (p), and his interest in subjects from mastering dyes and composing poetry remain, that visit to Leek also makes him intimately aware of industrial Britain up-close. He gets into politics sideways, through his membership of committees such as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Eastern Question Association, writing impassioned letters to the newspapers.
Previously bashful in the presence of an audience, Morris begins to lecture and quickly warms to his task, including delivering the now classic speech on ‘The Lesser Arts’ in There seems to be an outlet here for the well-suppressed bitterness, as well as a growing affinity for loud words and bloody noses.
From dyes to tapestries and carpets in the late s - and, more clearly than ever, the disjunct between Morris’s ideals and his artistic/professional practice. Contradictions abound - despite his Ruskinian principles, with weaving as with all crafts, ‘[w]hen it came to a battle of fanaticisms, excellence of product usually won’ over the conditions of production (p).
Mechanisation, for instance in automating weaving, was not as alien to the Morris workshop as might be supposed. A similar issue was his clientele, people whom he often seemed to despise, and yet who flocked to the new Morris and Co. shop on Oxford street:
‘A whole cultural history could be written in terms of Morris furnishings.They have always been the safe choice of the intellectual classes, an exercise in political correctitude. North Oxford of the s was all Morris. Morris's Daily Telegraph obituary recorded: “when married tutors dawned upon the academic world, all their wives religiously clothed their walls in Norham-Gardens and Bradmore Road with Morrisian designs of clustering pomegranates.”’ (p).
By the time of the iconic Thames river trip from Kelmscott House to Kelmscott Manor in August , Morris’s friends are constantly ribbing him about his strengthening socialist principles - by this time, any allegiance to Gladstone and the Liberals in the wake of the EQA has vanished.
In , Morris moves operations from Queen Square to Merton Abbey in the South London suburbs.
Between and the factory produced the most iconic printed patterns of Morris’s career: Strawberry Thief, Windrush, Brother Rabbit, Wandle. Part of the breakthrough was colour - these designs used in-house indigo dying rather than relying on Wardle’s operation in Leek. As always, the gulf between Morris’s theory and practice is noticeable. Merton was a ‘humane factory for the time, affected for the god by its proprietor’s charisma’ (p), but it was still a factory.
The guiding principle better resembled ‘benign patriarchy, not social experiment’, with limited worker autonomy and democracy, although conditions and pay were much better than anywhere else. Rossetti dies in , and Janey starts another affair, this time physical, with William Scawen Blunt, who (poetry and politics aside) became known as one of the most notorious philanderers of the Victorian era.
How much Morris knew is uncertain - he is increasingly drawn towards the ‘river of fire’ and socialism.
This decision, as McCarthy points out, had been a long time coming. The tipping point was probably Morris started reading theory (including Mill, Marx’s Capital and Owen) from early , and internalised it fully to the alarm of old friends and acquaintances.
An incendiary speech at University College Oxford in November made it clear to the public that his revolutionary beliefs were totally in earnest. Well aware of the cries of hypocrisy, he responded to a letter in the Evening Standard:
‘Your Correspondent implies that to be consistent we should at once cast aside our position of capitalists, and take rank with the proletariat; but he must excuse my saying that he knows very well we are not able to do so; that the most we can do is to palliate as far as we can the evils of the unjust system which we are forced to sustain; that we are but minute links in the immense chain of the terrible organisation of competitive commerce, and that only the complete unrivetting of that chain will really free us.’ (p)
Within a year, socialism had swallowed Morris up almost entirely, particularly after he joined the Democratic Federation in January - the first serious socialist organisation in England - two years after its foundation and just under two months before the death of Karl Marx in London.
McCarthy cites E. P. Thompson’s suggestion that William Morris was one of only about people who joined the Federation in , putting him at ground zero of the movement (p). He becomes the treasurer of the fledgling organisation, providing it with significant funds, distributing pamphlets and agitating in Hyde Park. However, by , Hyndman’s influence over the now rebranded SDF (now maybe strong [c.f.
p])was too much, and Morris enacted a painful split by forming the Socialist League.
The intellectual influence of this breakaway group was enourmous. Morris was drawn into the Marx-Engels family circle by Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling. Engels (slightly lukewarmly, it has to be said) called the trio of Morris, Aveling and Bax the only honest intellectuals in English socialism, and wrote an important article on the subject for the second issue of Morris’s Commonweal, which also featured George Bernard Shaw.
Prominent European socialists including Karl Kautsky, Pyotr Lavroff and William Liebnecht sent their well-wishes to the launch of the publication. A young Holst would conduct League’s Hammersmith Choir.
Artist william morris biography Shop the look. Refund Policy. Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. This email has been registered!Graham Wallas, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Ramsay McDonald, Kier Hardie and later H. G. Wells would speak in the Coach House at Kelmscott House. Morris began an affectionate and close friendship with Pyotr Kropotkin, who also lectured for him many times; Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and George Gissing remembered vividly their own experiences of the meetings there.
All this at a time when the League’s active membership was probably less than , but whose impact on the turbulent years of the mid-to-late s was clear. Morris attended demonstrations that teetered on riot, was arrested twice, feverishly travelled Britain giving endless speeches, wrote A Dream of John Ball.
He was everywhere.
But from around , at the height of Morris’s activity (at least lectures in that year), the wheels started coming off. That year, the League was routed on Bloody Sunday, the parliamentary-minded Bloomsbury branch, which included Aveling and Marx, broke off in Anarchists took over the executive committee, advocating for the kind of violence that threatened to get Morris arrested again.
Three important contributors to Commonweal, two of whom were on the executive committee of the League, were later confirmed to be agents provocateurs and spies for the police - I am reminded of Conrad here. Morris was still the most internationally prominent British socialist, and was nominated as the spokesman for English socialist delegation to the Second International at Paris in , but even whilst there he knew the game was up.
Shortly after News from Nowhere finished its serial publication in Commonweal, Morris’s Hammersmith branch declared itself independent from the League in
McCarthy does her best to argue that Morris’s last six or so years were as energetic as ever, but instead the attempt brings out even more clearly the sense bitter disappointment that followed the split, and the creeping exhaustion that inexorably ran him down.
Morris did start writing again, embarking on new fantasy novels including The Well at World’s End, so influential for Tolkien and Lewis; Joyce, who loved Morris, used these stories as a thesaurus for his own writing (p.x). his involvement in the rapidly expanding Arts and Crafts scene strengthened despite his initial suspicion; and the Kelmscott Press started up, with Morris once again learning the tricks of the trade from scratch.
He was still writing occasional poetry, and refused to be nominated for the poet laureateship after Tennyson’s death in At the same time, however, his health began catching up with him properly for the first time. Appearances at meetings either for socialist or artistic causes became rarer, and Merton Abbey had by this time effectively passed from Morris’s personal management.
The Kelmscott Chaucer, completed in collaboration with Burne-Jones in , gave him a profound sense of fulfilment - he remarked that it was just the thing that would have sent his student self into ecstasies of happiness could he have got hold of it. That, to me, seems the last victory - McCarthy’s biography closes with an account of the violence done to him physically by tuberculosis and reputationally by the disdainful columns in the London newspapers that followed his death.
This summer, I’ve been volunteering as a room steward at Kelmscott Manor.
Although it was gutted by Oxford University, the whole thing has now been miraculously restored by the Society of Antiquaries. The visitors are a curious bunch - some are art critics, professional historians, pilgrims from all across the world. A Spaniard told me of his late father, an anarchist poet who was battling Franco with News from Nowhere as a companion at the same time Oxford was auctioning off Morris’s last possessions.
The son, travelling from America, had come to Kelmscott to celebrate his father’s birthday. An Australian handed me his card with his son’s name on the back - the latter had written his doctorate on Morris, was forced to abandon a professional academic career, but still writes articles for a few online-only journals.
A visiting Londoner, there with her parents, studied a Cranach woodblock print on the mantelpiece, and then asked me to hold a torch up to Morris’s bed so she could take a photo and explain to her mother how the embroidery on the hangings was done. She was some kind of expert - exactly what kind I never found out, as they drifted onto the landing and out of earshot.
In Jane’s room, in front of the bed where William was born, an elderly woman visiting with her friend told me about a paper she’d read on sleep cycles in England. Apparently, they used to wake at three in the morning, stoke the fire, and then go out to chat with the neighbours. Most visitors know virtually nothing about Morris - even the genteel-looking ones who peer through their frameless glasses at the finery, making appreciative musing noises to each other, tend not to comment on anything apart from the wallpapers.
Charming, of course. Laura Ashley and all that stuff. Very pretty, isn’t it? Not much of it around nowadays.
They’re right. The big houses in Norham Gardens have been remodelled for student accommodation and niche sub-faculty offices - some of them have been knocked together to make palatial mansions for absentee oligarchs. Then again, Morris always hated the suburbs.
What angers me more than the filtering of what remains of his legacy into tote-bag kitsch is the fact that most of it had already been buried, quite deliberately, by the political and cultural establishment in the years after his death. McCarthy aptly terms it a ‘conspiracy of memory’, in which even his friends were complicit (p.x). When Morris as Morris is disinterred it is usually as a figure of fun, perhaps paired with inane speculation on Jane’s affairs.
If he had been less honest, less compassionate, less principled, less unselfish, he would still be a household name, although his work would have been immeasurably cheapened. In the stead of fame, then, we have this - an excellent, detailed, clear-eyed view of a quite extraordinary man. It’s a shame barely anyone will ever read it.
(24/08/24)