Morris rented the rural retreat of Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire from 1871 while also retaining a main home in London. He was greatly influenced by visits to Iceland with Eiríkr Magnússon, and he produced a series of English-language translations of Icelandic Sagas.
He also achieved success with the publication of his epic poems and novels, namely The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), A Dream of John Ball (1888), the Utopian News from Nowhere (1890), and the fantasy romance The Well at the World's End (1896). In 1877, he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings to campaign against the damage caused by architectural restoration. He embraced Marxism and was influenced by anarchism in the 1880s and became a committed revolutionary socialist activist. He founded the Socialist League in 1884 after an involvement in the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), but he broke with that organization in 1890. In 1891, he founded the Kelmscott Press to publish limited-edition, illuminated-style print books, a cause to which he devoted his final years.
Morris is recognised as one of the most significant cultural figures of Victorian Britain. He was best known in his lifetime as a poet, although he posthumously became better known for his designs.
The William Morris Society founded in 1955 is devoted to his legacy, while multiple biographies and studies of his work have been published. Many of the buildings associated with his life are open to visitors, much of his work can be found in art galleries and museums, and his designs are still in production.
E. P. Thompson on William Morris
I have in no way altered my opinion that if we are to acknowledge William Morris as one of the greatest of Englishmen it is not because he was, by fits and starts, a good poet; nor because of his influence upon typography; nor because of his high craftsmanship in the decorative arts; nor because he was a practical socialist pioneer; nor, indeed, because he was all these; but because of a quality which permeates all these activities and which gives to them a certain unity.
I have tried to describe this quality by saying that Morris was a great moralist, a great moral teacher. It is in his moral criticism of society (and which of his actions in the decorative arts, or in Anti-Scrape, or the renewal of interest in Icelandic Saga, was not informed by a fundamental criticism of the way of life of his own time?) – and in the crucial position which this criticism occupies in our cultural history at the point of transition from an old tradition to a new – that his greatness is to be found.
And this greatness comes to its full maturity in the political writing and example of his later years. I have gained the feeling that perhaps through fear of controversy and out of respect for admirers of William Morris who do not share his political convictions–this Society has tended to be reticent on this matter.
But Morris was one of our greatest men, because he was a great revolutionary, a profoundly cultured and humane revolutionary, but not the less a revolutionary for this reason. Moreover, he was a man working for practical revolution. It is this which brings the whole man together. It is this which will make his reputation grow as the years advance.
E. P. Thompson on William Morris
I have in no way altered my opinion that if we are to acknowledge William Morris as one of the greatest of Englishmen it is not because he was, by fits and starts, a good poet; nor because of his influence upon typography; nor because of his high craftsmanship in the decorative arts; nor because he was a practical socialist pioneer; nor, indeed, because he was all these; but because of a quality which permeates all these activities and which gives to them a certain unity.
I have tried to describe this quality by saying that Morris was a great moralist, a great moral teacher. It is in his moral criticism of society (and which of his actions in the decorative arts, or in Anti-Scrape, or the renewal of interest in Icelandic Saga, was not informed by a fundamental criticism of the way of life of his own time?) – and in the crucial position which this criticism occupies in our cultural history at the point of transition from an old tradition to a new – that his greatness is to be found.
And this greatness comes to its full maturity in the political writing and example of his later years. I have gained the feeling that perhaps through fear of controversy and out of respect for admirers of William Morris who do not share his political convictions–this Society has tended to be reticent on this matter.
But Morris was one of our greatest men, because he was a great revolutionary, a profoundly cultured and humane revolutionary, but not the less a revolutionary for this reason. Moreover, he was a man working for practical revolution. It is this which brings the whole man together. It is this which will make his reputation grow as the years advance.
English revolutionaries in the past hundred years have been men without a Revolution. At times they have convinced themselves of the Revolution’s imminence. H.M. Hyndman when he founded the Social Democratic Federation in 1882 looked forward to 1889 as the probable date of its commencement.
For a time Morris (whose thinking was greatly influenced by the Paris Commune) shared this cataclysmic outlook. But when he founded the Socialist League in 1884 he had already grown more reticent ‘our immediate aim should be chiefly educational...with a view to dealing with the crisis if it should come in our day, or of handing on the tradition of our hope to others if we should die before it comes’.
Five years later again, when writing News from Nowhere, Morris postponed the commencement of the Revolution to 1952. In the sixty years that would intervene he foresaw much ‘troublesome wearisome action’ leading to the triumph of ‘demi-semi-Socialism’, which would improve the condition of the working-class while leaving its position unchanged. At the end of this vista of reform he still saw an ultimate revolutionary confrontation: and in one of his last lectures – delivered in 1895, the year before his death – he avowed:
I have thought the matter up and down, and in and out, and I cannot for the life of me see how the great change which we long for can come otherwise than by disturbance and suffering of some kind We are living in an epoch where there is combat between commercialism, or the system of reckless waste, and communism, or the system of neighbourly common sense. Can that combat be fought out ... without loss and suffering? Plainly speaking I know that it cannot.
He was a revolutionary without a Revolution, more than that, he knew that he did not live within a revolutionary context.
He did not, like Cromwell, have Revolution thrust upon him: nor did he, like Lenin, build a dedicated party within a society whose revolutionary potential was apparent.
He did not, like Cromwell, have Revolution thrust upon him: nor did he, like Lenin, build a dedicated party within a society whose revolutionary potential was apparent.
In the eyes of his opponents was the very type of the socialist ‘trouble-maker’ or (as they would phrase it today) the maladjusted intellectual.
He wanted to stir up revolt where no revolt was. He wanted to make contented men discontented, and discontented men into agitators of discontent. It ‘it is to stir you up not to be content with a little that I am here tonight’. And he spent his energy recklessly during the last fifteen years of his life, with the aim of creating a revolutionary tradition – both intellectual and practical–within a society unripe for Revolution.
He wanted to stir up revolt where no revolt was. He wanted to make contented men discontented, and discontented men into agitators of discontent. It ‘it is to stir you up not to be content with a little that I am here tonight’. And he spent his energy recklessly during the last fifteen years of his life, with the aim of creating a revolutionary tradition – both intellectual and practical–within a society unripe for Revolution.
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