Morris, William 1834-96
English craftsman, poet and socialist

William Morris was born in Walthamstow, near London, into a middle-class family. He was educated at Marlborough School and Exeter College, Oxford. He studied for holy orders, but renounced the Church and studied architecture, with his friends and fellow-members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly the painter Edward Burne-Jones. He studied architecture under George Edmund Street, but on the advice of Dante Gabriel Rossetti became a professional painter (1857-62).

In 1859 he married a model, Jane Burden, and moved into the Red House at Bexley Heath, which he designed and furnished with the architect Philip Webb. From the ideas expressed there, and with the help of his pre-Raphaelite associates, in 1861 he founded the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, which soon revolutionized the art of house decoration and furniture in England.

His literary career began with a volume of poetry and longer narrative poems including The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), a collection of 24 classical and medieval tales in a Chaucerian mould. He developed a passionate interest in the heroic literature of Iceland, and worked with Eir�kur Magn�sson on a series of saga translations. He visited Iceland twice, in 1871 and 1873, and was inspired to write Three Northern Love Songs (1875) and a four-volume epic, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Nibelungs (1876), regarded as his greatest literary work.

He founded a Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877. His experience as a master-craftsman, and his devotion to the Gothic, persuaded him that the excellence of medieval arts and crafts sprang from the joy of free craftsmen, which was destroyed by Victorian mass-production and capitalism. He joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1883; his Utopian ideals did much to develop the philosophy of socialism, and when the Social Democratic Federation suffered disruption in 1884 he formed a breakaway Socialist League.

In 1890, in a further rejection of Victorian values, he founded a publishing house, the Kelmscott Press at Hammersmith, for which he designed clear typefaces and wide ornamental borders; it produced a stream of his own works as well as reprints of English classics.

Bibliography: Morris's other publications include a verse morality, Love is Enough, or The Freeing of Pharamond (1872), and translations of Virgil's Aeneid (1875) and Homer's Odyssey (1887). His socialist zeal inspired two prose romances, The Dream of John Ball (1888) and News from Nowhere (1891). Further prose romances concentrated more on story-telling: The House of the Wolfings (1889), The Roots of the Mountains (1889) and The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), all set in the far north. His last works were a book of verse (Poems by the Way, 1891), and further prose romances: The Wood beyond the World (1895), The Well at the World's End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles and The Story of the Sundering Flood (published posthumously in 1897).