A period of significant demographic, social, and political transformation produced essays marked by a deep seriousness of tone and a sense of weighty purpose that departed sharply from the playful quality of the periodical tradition and the lighter touch of the Romantic familiar essay. Essayists in criticism of this period (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde) were deeply engaged in defining ideas of culture that could encompass an increasingly diverse and fragmented society. This chapter reflects on the publication contexts that shaped some of the best-known examples of the Victorian critical essay; examines Victorian critics’ emphasis on specific capacities in perception as a ground for pedagogical exposition with the aim of achieving social coherency; and highlights the deep historicism and awareness of mediation that informs the Victorian essayist’s approach to cultural criticism.

The chapter investigates the cultural place-making of Morris’s country house, Kelmscott Manor, and the reformer’s foundational role in in bringing Kelmscott into mainstream public consciousness. He did so by means of his publications News from Nowhere (1890; 1891) and ‘Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames’ (1895). The chapter accords special focus to the power of the accompanying illustrations, examining the circumstances behind their creation. Morris’s hitherto unacknowledged role as the art director of the News from Nowhere frontispiece is analysed at length, arguing that he practised image-building as a counterpart to his literary method. It also argues that Morris thus endowed Kelmscott with particular connotations and symbolic values, laying the foundations for the deeply-rooted Kelmscott myth as a domestic and rural idyll. In so doing he also cemented Kelmscott’s cultural association with himself and its ongoing role as a fitting Morris memorial and as an embodiment of his ideology in relation to buildings’ and nature conservation, Arts and Crafts design ethos, and socialism.

Morris the designer and maker is Morris the poet and Morris the socialist, for reasons that take us to the heart of his ambitions for the decorative arts and the nature of his practice. His work in the visual and tactile arts of decoration and design takes as its larger subject the workings of a desire for beauty in an often unlovely world shaped by the industrial revolution and driven by an optimistic capitalism. The designs he contributed to the furnishings business he created with his artist friends, Morris & Company, balanced harmonious colour and ordered structure against a complexity that invited the imagination to wander. His designs were intended to function therapeutically, addressing distortions of perception and sensibility produced by the conditions of modern labour and the effects of modern mass-produced objects on workers and consumers. Morris was frequently disappointed in his efforts to create an art for all, both by the economic exigencies of running a commercial business and by the decorative preferences of his clients. Yet in his designs for walls – wallpapers and textiles – he created an art of the domestic and the everyday, an art to live with that refused to abandon hope for a different future.

This article unpicks William Morris’s relationship to Marxism and the influence of Marxism on Morris’s social and political thought. It looks at Morris’s political activities in the 1880s and 1890s, including his membership of the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League and the Hammersmith Socialist Society, as well as his political speeches and journalism. Morris was clearly a socialist and described himself as a communist, had read and was influenced by Marx, and was also an active participant in socialist and Marxist debates both in Britain and Europe. But Marxism did not harden into an orthodoxy until the 1890s and has been contested ever since. It is thus very difficult to distinguish Marxist from other socialists in the period of Morris’s political engagement, as many themes were either shared or cut across this distinction. A key issue has been Morris’s utopianism, in particular News from Nowhere, written for the socialist paper Commonweal in 1890. Morris’s utopian method permeates his political essays: this is how it is, this is how it could/should be. This, perhaps, renders Morris more than Marxist, rather than less, in his insistence on keeping the vision of a better world active as an inspiration to political change.

Red House in Kent, was the only house William Morris ever commissioned and owned. Designed by his lifelong friend and collaborator, the architect Philip Webb in 1859–60; the house stands as the physical embodiment of Morris’s exuberant spirit, youthful ambition, romantic medievalism, and great sense of possibility. For five highly industrious and creatively charged years from 1860–5, it resounded with the ‘jovial campaign’ of decorating and furnishing and creating a garden to meet his emergent taste for rich colour, figurative compositions and complex pattern making. It was also a family home and a place of collaborative endeavour with artistic contributions from his wife, Janey and close friends, Edward Burne-Jones, Webb, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal and Georgiana Burne-Jones. Recent research has revealed lost wall paintings, tantalising fragments of polychromatic patterns and a wealth of evidence about the furnishings, contents, the overarching theme of the interior schemes and a much richer knowledge of the interrelationship of house and garden. This chapter explores the creation of Red House, its complex decoration and its role as a point of inspiration and testing ground for the founding and first commissions of ‘the Firm’, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company (later Morris & Company).

After his conversion to socialism in 1883, William Morris expressed again and again his hope of replacing the ‘cannibalism’ and ‘stupendous organization – for the misery of life’ that characterized modern civilization with the community of liberated equals pursuing satisfying and meaningful work that he saw in socialism (CL, ii.480; CW, xxiii.279). In his own account of his political awakening to the causes and cures of poverty and inequality he described himself as a ‘practical Socialist’ with little interest in politics for politics’ sake. Indeed, he embarked on a relentless programme of propaganda and agitation for the cause: he gave speeches, founded and edited a newspaper, Commonweal, and wrote protest chants, political poems, articles and sketches as well as contributing to pamphlets and leaflets on aspects of socialism in the present and future. This chapter examines the range of Morris’s journalistic and propaganda writings and the ways they formulate and express his practical but never narrowly pragmatic socialism. His recurring emphasis on the interconnections of art, beauty, environment and communities of many kinds shapes an internationalist, revolutionary ideal of socialism founded on and arrived at through fellowship, imagination and action.

With striking consistency Morris’s 1877 epic Sigurd meets the principal criteria of its genre. The poem makes its story the vehicle for conveying culturally definitive lore and values, and imbues its heroic actors with the aim of earning a place in that story. The first paginal opening of the 1898 Kelmscott edition embodies this consistency, in imagery and typography that constitute a bibliographical and prosodic rite of passage inducting the reader into a balance of fullness with order that typifies the whole. This aesthetic-ethical balance is then repeatedly thematized along the poem’s synchronic and diachronic axes: e.g., on one hand panoramic vistas, on the other hand sweeping narrative renditions of cosmology and prophecy; or the pivotal “house” figure, which doubles as doomed architectural structure and as tragically concatenated lineage. Morris’s epic moreover incorporates, among other constituent modes like pastoral and romance, the newly ascendant Victorian genre of domestic fiction, which, after dominating the story with the novel-like marital intrigue and foregrounded subjectivity of book 3, yields across the final book to the epic obsequies of Sigurd and Brynhild and the final conflagration of the royal palace at Gudrun’s implacably vindictive hand.

William Morris’s ‘greatest single inspiration’ was said to be the language and literature of medieval Iceland. After a brief survey of the origins and scope of Old Norse literary texts, this piece works through the considerable volume of translations of Old Norse saga literature which Morris made along with his Icelandic collaborator Eiríkur Magnússon, and considers why, after a ten-year period of astonishing productivity, his interest seems to have cooled. Morris’s knowledge of Old Norse literature and traditions is detailed, his translation methods are analysed, and the style and lexis of his controversially archaizing translations described, with special reference to Eiríkur’s experiences of working with him. Morris also translated Old Norse eddic verse, and many of the prose sagas he translated contain skaldic stanzas in the elaborate and unique dróttkvætt, or court, metre. The piece concludes with an assessment of these poetic translations, which are often overlooked, and the particular metrical and lexical challenges the originals present.

William Morris has had many legacies: two of the most significant are in the fields of modern design and modern fantasy literature. In each, he had influential champions. The scholar Nikolaus Pevsner acclaimed Morris as a “pioneer of modern design” in 1936, and the fantasy author and critic Lin Carter lauded Morris as the progenitor of the “imaginary world” tradition of modern fantasy beginning in the 1960s. This chapter assesses their arguments through examinations of how modern design in interwar England came to be defined as an outgrowth of the Arts and Crafts movement, and how modern fantasy became associated in postwar North America with the creation of realistic yet autonomous “imaginary worlds” such as those found in Morris’s late prose romances. Morris’s fusion of medievalism and modernism assumed novel afterlives in each of these domains, as did his passion for world-building in actuality and in fiction.

This chapter examines Morris’s role and impact in the emergence of the movement from the 1880s onwards. Many of his ideas were developed by the next generation, ironically at a time when Morris was losing faith in his early passions. Young architects including Ashbee, Gimson and Lorimer met Morris, became involved in organisations such as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and played a role in setting up the Art Workers’ Guild and other new groups. There was a real enthusiasm for communal art. Craft workshops were set up, initially in cities, with the Cotswolds emerging as the movement’s first and major rural centre. The main driver was the idea of hands-on learning by doing, both in a workshop setting and in art schools. Morris’s success as a pattern designer ensured that this aspect of his work continued to inspire others, as did his passion for a beautiful house and a beautiful book. His emphasis on art for all also saw the emergence of opportunities for amateur arts. Morris’s legacy was widely acknowledged in Britain and beyond after his death, helped by the efforts of his daughter May in editing her father’s writings.

This chapter describes both the centrality of Morris’s work as a public lecturer and his feelings of ambivalence about speaking out in this way. It moves from Raymond Williams’s characterisation of the lectures as where Morris spoke as a ‘whole man’ to Thomas Carlyle’s mixed feelings about the form, poised as it was between conflicting ideas about preaching, about political life and about celebrity. It examines how Morris’s career as a lecturer was an aspect of his deepening engagement with public controversy from 1877, and was imagined as a duty that Morris was obliged to take up. It considers Morris’s resistance to rhetoric, which he connected to the deceiving modes of contemporary conventional politics. It argues that Morris’s own rhetoric was more compelling when he spoke at dramatic occasions, such as his Oxford lecture on ‘Art and Democracy’, rather than when he considered the lecture to be part of the grind of socialist agitation, where Morris sometimes worried about the capacities of his working-class audiences to understand his central message. The chapter ends by considering Morris’s speaking in Northumberland in 1887, as a temporary utopian moment when public speaking and the condition of the people were integrated and not separated.

This chapter opens by pointing to the popularity of utopian fantasies, or ‘prophetic romances’, at the fin-de-siècle, before exploring some of the possible socio-economic and political reasons for this situation, not the least of which was the impact of the Paris Commune on the late nineteenth-century anti-socialist imaginary. The chapter proceeds to an outline of the US journalist Edward Bellamy’s best-selling utopian fiction, Looking Backward (1888), undoubtedly the most influential of these publications on both sides of the Atlantic. In his review of this book, Morris offers a critique of Bellamy’s ‘temperament’ – which he suggests is typical of late nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology in so far as it is decidedly ‘modern’ – as ‘unhistoric and unartistic’. The chapter concludes, then, by claiming that the distinctiveness of Morris’s contribution both to the tradition of utopian fiction and to contemporaneous debates about socialism lies in his characteristic insistence on a future society that is historic, artistic and, finally, erotic.

William Morris anticipated a number of our present concerns about the economy, the environment, and labour; defended the value of handmade, quality products against the growing proliferation of cheap, factory-made products; envisioned a peaceful, communal society that would value beauty, practise useful and stimulating work, and achieve equality of condition; and believed in the possibility of creating a better world by rejecting corrupt institutions and ideologies. Many of the most critical challenges we now face – accelerating climate change, social and economic inequity, political division, the ever-widening reach of the market into our lives – are outgrowths of nineteenth-century issues. This essay explores the way in which both Morris’s aesthetic principles and his progressive social initiatives continue to resonate. Today, as civility, social justice, and ecological integrity erode under the pressure of divisive politics, short-sighted policy, war, nationalism, pandemic, and social unrest, Morris’s ideas and practice are especially suggestive, both about where we might go and where we have gone wrong.

This chapter considers William Morris’s first collection of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858). It starts by observing that the features of the collection given a difficult early reception by critics also ensured its popularity in the twentieth century. The chapter goes on to discuss Robert Browning’s influence on Morris and sets his manner of experimentation in the context of Pre-Raphaelite and medievalist aesthetics. Close attention is given to key poems from the collection, including ‘The Defence oThis chapter considers William Morris’s first collection of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858). It starts by observing that the features of the collection given a difficult early reception by critics also ensured its popularity in the twentieth century. The chapter goes on to discuss Robert Browning’s influence on Morris and sets his manner of experimentation in the context of Pre-Raphaelite and medievalist aesthetics. Close attention is given to key poems from the collection, including ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ and ‘The Haystack in the Floods’. f Guenevere’ and ‘The Haystack in the Floods’.

The archaic appearance of the Kelmscott Press publications can lend the impression of revivalism in its fundamentalist form. This chapter considers the modern (and partially modern) technologies employed by Morris’s bookmaking venture, ranging from Emery Walker’s method of photographic enlargement in the development of typefaces, to the employment of early nineteenth-century metal presses. The discussion focuses initially on Morris’s broader relationship with technology, including the influence of John Ruskin. As with Ruskin, an initial impression of hostility to all mechanised solutions gives way to qualifications based in the form of energy harnessed, the context of the work, and the relationship with human agency or intelligence. Morris’s account of weaving provides a particularly suggestive basis for rethinking his relationship with technology, and this opens the way for a discussion of two lens-based solutions which he applied to work at the printing press. The first relates to the mediation of the hand by photographic means, most notably Burne-Jones’s hand as designer of the Press’s woodcuts. The second concerns technologies of projection and enlargement, initially employed by Walker at the ‘magic lantern’ lecture that inspired the foundation of the Press, and then in the design of typefaces based on early Venetian models.

This chapter tracks Morris’s biographical involvements with Oxford across his lifetime, and examines the role of Oxford, as both city and university, in prompting the radical political commitments of his later years. On his arrival there as an undergraduate in 1853, he was deeply disillusioned with the official teaching of the university, but made a number of formative friendships which opened to him new cultural and social horizons. The intellectual influence of John Ruskin interacted with Morris’s own intense response to Oxford’s ancient architecture to propel him further in the direction of social critique. In later years, as activist for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Morris threw himself into campaigns to protect key Oxford sites. As a socialist activist from 1883, he regarded Oxford as an important city to capture for the cause, lecturing there on socialism no less than six times (ably assisted by his old friend Charles Faulkner, who founded the Oxford branch of the Socialist League). We can also trace links between the Bodleian Library’s holdings and Morris’s own publishing venture, the Kelmscott Press; and Oxford plays a significant role in both the local imagery and overall geography of his utopia News from Nowhere.

This chapter examines the series of prose romances that William Morris wrote in the 1850s, 1880s and 1890s and that were rediscovered in the twentieth century by writers, editors and critics of fantasy. The first section, ‘Romance and Fantasy’, recovers the moment of Morris’s canonisation as the ‘inventor’ of imaginary-world fantasy and briefly considers his influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, before tracing fantasy’s roots back to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century definitions of the romance genre. The second and third sections, ‘The Romances of the 1890s and the Germanic Romances’ and ‘The Political Romances and the Romances of the 1850s’, provide an overview of the key formal and thematic characteristics of Morris’s texts, proceeding in reverse order from his final medievalist fantasies, via his socialist timeslip dream visions to the short-form romances of his student days. These sections highlight the variable significance of communalism at different stages of Morris’s writing career and introduce comparisons with contemporary works by Mark Twain and Edward Bellamy. The final section of the chapter offers a case study of The Story of the Glittering Plain (1890), focusing on the themes of mortality and kinship.

The chapter discusses William Morris’s understanding of pattern and his designs for wallpaper and woven and printed textiles. It acknowledges his call for pattern that would be soothing and restful for the viewer. The chapter explains that, for Morris, pattern was nonetheless expected to function on an intellectual level. Good pattern could engage with personal, political and ethical issues at a level of high seriousness, he thought. Reference is made to Morris’s reading of Gottfried Semper and to Morris’s partial translation (from a French edition) of Ferdowski’s Shahnameh (c. 1010 CE) recounting pre-Islamic Persian myths. Looking at Morris’s theoretical and instructional writing and considering designs of the early 1880s such as Windrush and Strawberry Thief, the chapter explores themes of fabrication, stylisation of plant forms, cultural exchange, the ongoing redeployment of ornamental motifs and aesthetic engagement with Persian culture as well as allusions to familial and romantic love. Traits of Morris designs such as symmetrical paired figures, crossing plant stems, vertical ‘tree of life’ axes, emphatic meanders in certain designs, variations in scale and composite plant forms are investigated and interpreted. The chapter demonstrates that Morris’s designs offer evidence of his commitment to the intellectual dimensions of pattern.

William Morris was among the most prescient of ecological thinkers in Victorian arts and literature and his work offers a searing appraisal of industrialism from within the context of its epochal rise. During this time Britain and its Empire saw major transformations in the natural world and in human relations to it, and living in the context of the first fully fossil-fuel-powered society, Victorian writers and artists were the first to observe the impacts of coal-fired industry and render them into art. Only a few authors, however, including Morris, channelled such observations into a full-throated critique of what was lost and diminished in the process of industrialization. This chapter draws on Mikhail Bakhtin, Amitav Ghosh, and other theorists of narrative to explore how News from Nowhere, The Wood Beyond the World, and other works by Morris draw on older literary depictions of the human place in the natural world. In the longer history of art and literature, landscape and nature were not always conceived as a mere backdrop to human drama, though this was increasingly the tendency in modern literature. Morris’s work challenged this tendency by drawing on older forms to produce an ecological vision that, paradoxically, feels remarkably timely today.

Serving as the editorial introduction to the Cambridge Companion to William Morris, this chapter offers a broad outline of Morris’s life, emphasizing the historical and cultural factors that informed his artistic philosophy and wide-ranging output. The contours of Morris’s critical reception, past and present, are also sketched, and brought into dialogue with the chapters collected here. The first part of the discussion considers ‘The Making of Morris’: that is, the complex nexus of influences and events that enabled him to make a distinctive and enduring contribution in so many fields. Much of this discussion is biographical, but it also considers spatial and geographical ways of understanding the shape of his life. The second part is entitled ‘Morris Making Us’,. It proposes ways in which Morris’s influence continues to condition and enable our ways of thinking as inheritors of his legacy.