Life and work

William Morris was born in Walthamstow, at that time just outside London, on 24 March 1834. He came of a conventional middleclass background – his father was a City broker – and had a conventional middle-class upbringing and education. When he was six the family moved to Woodford Hall, quite a grand estate in the Essex countryside.

In this pleasant rustic environment, near the River Thames and Epping Forest, William passed a happy childhood. On his father's death in 1848 the family moved back to Walthamstow – still at the time semi-rural – but by then William had already been sent away to board at the newly founded public school of Marlborough College. Much of his time there was spent exploring the Wiltshire countryside. But he managed to do enough work to pass the entrance examination for Oxford, and entered Exeter College in 1853. His intention at the time was to prepare for the Church.

Oxford in the 1850s was still feeling the effects of the Oxford Movement, that surge of Anglo-Catholic feeling whose guiding spirits were Keble, Newman, Pusey and Froude. Morris was drawn to its seriousness, its sense of history and its appreciation of the life of the Middle Ages. But he was even more affected by the medievalism of Ruskin and Carlyle. These writers – some of whose key works appeared in the 1850s – also channelled his interests into more directly aesthetic and social concerns.