William Morris(1834–1896)

William Morris was born at Elm House, Walthamstow, in Essex on the twenty-fourth of March 1834, eldest son of William Morris the senior, a partner in the City bill-discounting firm of Sanderson and Co, and Emma Shelton of Worcester. The family was substantially wealthy on the strength of the father's bill-discounting partnership and from 1842 of a major shareholding in the Devon Great Consols copper mine, the largest copper mine in the British Empire of the period; the boy was raised in the spacious Woodford Hall in Essex with the income that gave Morris the financial independence on which his later artistic and political career was built. He was schooled at Marlborough College 1848 to 1851, at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1853 (the BA in 1856), and in the Oxford undergraduate years met the painter Edward Burne-Jones, the lifelong friend and collaborator whose Pre-Raphaelite-tradition Christian-classical figure-drawing became the central decorative-arts collaboration of Morris's later firm.

He took up architecture under the Oxford diocesan architect George Edmund Street from January 1856 (Philip Webb, the architect who designed Morris's Red House at Bexleyheath, was a fellow-pupil at the Street office), abandoned the architecture for painting under Dante Gabriel Rossetti from December 1856, married Jane Burden of Oxford in April 1859 (the Pre-Raphaelite muse who sat for Rossetti's Proserpine), and commissioned Philip Webb to build the Red House at Bexleyheath in Kent (completed 1860) as the matrimonial home, the foundational English-Arts-and-Crafts house. He founded with Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Webb, Ford Madox Brown, Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co at Red Lion Square, Holborn, on the eleventh of April 1861 in his twenty-seventh year, the foundational firm of the English Arts and Crafts movement.

The firm produced from 1861 to 1875 the full range of medieval-influenced decorative arts (stained glass for William Butterfield's Anglican churches, embroideries, ecclesiastical and domestic furniture, hand-painted tiles, wall-papers, woven and printed textiles), worked through the 1860s and 1870s on the major decorative commissions for the Green Dining Room at the South Kensington Museum (1866 to 1868, the second public-museum commission in Britain to a private firm), and across the late 1870s and 1880s expanded into the wall-paper, printed-textile, woven-textile and carpet ranges (Trellis, Daisy and Pomegranate wall-papers, Strawberry Thief, Birds and Tulip printed textiles, the Hammersmith hand-knotted carpets) that constitute the central body of Morris design and that have been continuously in production by Morris and Company successor firms (today Morris & Co, owned by Sanderson Design Group) for the past hundred and sixty-four years.

The literary work runs in parallel. He published the verse-volume The Defence of Guenevere in 1858 in his twenty-fourth year, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), the long blank-verse Earthly Paradise in three volumes 1868 to 1870 (twenty-four classical and Norse story-narratives in over forty-two thousand lines, the most-read English-language poetry of the late 1860s), the prose translations of the Icelandic sagas in the joint authorship with Eiríkr Magnússon (Grettir's Saga, 1869; Volsunga Saga, 1870), the long heroic-Norse epic Sigurd the Volsung (1876), and the socialist-utopian prose novels A Dream of John Ball (1888) and News from Nowhere (1890), the foundational text of English-language socialist-utopian fiction.

He joined the Democratic Federation in 1883 in his fiftieth year, broke with H. M. Hyndman in 1884 and founded the Socialist League with Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, edited the League's weekly paper Commonweal 1885 to 1890, lectured weekly through five hard winters at the Hammersmith Socialist League's Sunday meetings on Hammersmith Bridge, was a founding committee member of the Hammersmith Socialist Society of 1890, and through the late 1880s and early 1890s was the central single English literary-and-design figure of the early British Labour movement. He set up the Kelmscott Press at Upper Mall in Hammersmith in 1891 to publish the great fifty-three Kelmscott Press books across the next five years (including the great Kelmscott Chaucer of 1896 with the eighty-seven Burne-Jones wood-engravings), the foundational books of the late-nineteenth-century English private-press revival. He died at Kelmscott House on the third of October 1896 in his sixty-third year and was buried at the small parish churchyard of Kelmscott in west Oxfordshire under a slab designed by Philip Webb. The Morris name in modern English-language design and political culture carries the weight of the firm of 1861, the Earthly Paradise, the Kelmscott Press and the Socialist League.