Who was William Morris?
Why did he write such works? Are there themes in his work? Did his work alter as he grew older? One central truth is already obvious to you. William Morris was an artist. This essay will show some aspects of the man and his work, his beliefs, and what may have shaped them; but everything will be pervaded by that single fact: William Morris was an artist. Who Was William Morris? Morris was born one hundred and fifty years ago on the 24th of March 1834, and he died just before the twentieth century began. In his prime, he was a stocky and robust man with a neat black beard and a loud voice. The eldest son of a wealthy London stockbroker, he lived until the age of thirteen with his parents and his brothers and sisters in a large country house set in its own grounds close to Epping Forest. When his father died in 1847, the family moved house. Morris then attended a school in Marlborough, among the Wiltshire Downs. When he was eighteen he went to Oxford University. Early in 1856, he became
William Morris was an eminent Victorian, born in 1834. He had a many-sided career as poet, artist, manufacturer and socialist. At Oxford he began a life-long friendship with Edward Burne-Jones, the painter and designer, who subsequently introduced him to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet and painter, and a leader of the Pre-Raphaelites. At one time Morris intended to enter the church, then began to write poems and prose romances, decided (under Rossetti’s influence) to become an artist – and eventually became an architect. Jane Burden, whom he married in 1859, was painted many times by Rossetti. In furnishing his red brick house at Upton, Kent, Morris found his true vocation as artist and designer. He founded a firm in Bloomsbury where, with the help of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and others, he produced furniture of simple shapes and solid workmanship, and fabrics, hangings and carpets which did much to change the heavy Victorian outlook on interior decoration. Throughout his life William Mo
Though best known today as a designer of fabrics and wallpapers, in his own time Morris was equally famous for his writing and his pioneering socialism. He was a man of fierce energies and strong opinions. When he was taken to court for knocking a policeman’s helmet off during a political demonstration, Morris was stubbornly unrepentant. In his socialist vision of a future Britain, ‘News from Nowhere’, the Houses of Parliament are used for the storage of dung – all they are good for, says the book’s narrator. William Morris was born into a prosperous middle-class family in Walthamstow, then a village just outside London, in 1834. He went up to Oxford University to study theology, but lost his faith and left before taking his degree. At Oxford, however, he met Edward Burne-Jones, and both joined a group of young men who circled around the charismatic figure of Gabriel Dante Rossetti, poet and artist. Morris determined to become a painter himself. His pictures were disappointing, and his
