William Morris
(Photograph by Frederick Hollyer - 1884 - Platinum print. Museum no. 7717-1938
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

William Morris (24 March 1834 - 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement.

Morris (1834-96) had trained as an architect and had early unfulfilled ambitions to be a painter. As a student at Oxford he met the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and through this friendship he came into contact with the Pre-Raphaelite painters, such as Rossetti, and others in their circle. In 1859 Morris married Jane Burden, an unconventional beauty and a favourite model for the Pre-Raphaelites. He immediately commissioned his friend, the architect Philip Webb, to build them a new home on land he had bought in Bexleyheath, Kent. Now a suburb of London, Bexleyheath was then a rural area. Morris wanted a modern home which would nevertheless be 'very medieval in spirit'. This is exactly what Webb gave him.

Morris and his wife moved into Red House in 1860 and spent the next two years furnishing and decorating the interior. Morris did much of the work himself, with help from his artist friends.

Prompted by the success of their efforts, they decided to start their own company. In April 1861 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was established at 8 Red Lion Square in London. It produced a range of original domestic furnishings including embroidery, tableware and furniture, stained glass and tiles.

Wallpapers were soon added to the list because Morris was unable to find any he liked well enough to use in his own home. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. profoundly influenced the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century. He was also a major contributor to reviving traditional textile arts and methods of production, and one of the founders of the SPAB, now a statutory element in the preservation of historic buildings in the UK.
Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life. His best-known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870), A Dream of John Ball (1888) and the utopian News from Nowhere (1890).

William Morris was in fact one of the pioneers of revolutionary socialism. He was one of the first to join the Social Democratic Federation in 1883. It had been launched two years earlier by HM Hyndman, an ex-Tory journalist, around a socialist programme broadly drawn from Marx. The discovery of a coherent theory that could tie his own critique of society with an effective way of changing it filled him with joy. A friend noted in his diary that 'he was bubbling over with Karl Marx'. When he was invited to speak at Oxford, his old university, he shocked his distinguished audience with a rallying call to class war: 'Here are two classes, face to face with each other...no man can exist in society and be neutral, no-body can be a mere looker on...you must either be a reactionary... or you must join in the march of progress, trample down all opposition.'

The SDF produced pamphlets and a weekly newspaper--Justice--that outlined a coherent Marxist politics for the first time in Britain. Its members set up branches wherever they could, built around weekly meetings and using public sales and outdoor meetings to attract an audience. Morris soon became a sought after speaker and a regular at various sales pitches around London. Morris's tremendous political speeches and writings were central to the revival of the British socialist movement at the end of the 19th century. They show that Marxism has been influential in Britain for over 100 years, and their relevance today is striking. Writing in the 1890s he warned against faith in partial reforms that depended on 'parliamentary agitation'. Such reforms would, he believed, 'be sucked into the tremendous stream of commercial production, and vanish into it, after having played its part as a red herring to spoil the scent of revolution.' If they wanted real change, Morris argued, people must 'take over for the good of the community all the means of production: ie credit, railways, mines, factories, shipping, land, machinery.'

Morris was a man of awe inspiring energy and huge talents. A contemporary remarked that he achieved what five normal men might do in one life. He was one of the leading poets of the age, a celebrated lecturer and pamphleteer, he wrote novels and edited two socialist newspapers, he led campaigns for the preservation of ancient buildings and he achieved international fame as a designer of textiles, wallpapers and even stained glass windows. But all his work was shaped by his developing rebellion against the values of Victorian capitalist society.

He devoted much of the rest of his life to the Kelmscott Press, which he founded in 1891. The 1896 Kelmscott edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is considered a masterpiece of book design.

William Morris is particularly important to Walthamstow as he was a resident who acquired world wide fame. The Borough motto 'Fellowship is life' is taken from from his writings "Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do them."

(Text & picture kindly provided by Bill Bayliss)