William Morris

William Morris was a designer, poet and revolutionary socialist who argued that the way things are made determines the kind of life people have. He was born rich, went to Oxford intending the church, and came out committed to art with a circle that became the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelites. The firm he founded in 1861 produced wallpaper, textiles, furniture, stained glass and tapestry whose patterns are still in print, and it was built on the conviction that the division of labour in a factory degrades the worker as much as the product. He said he would have nothing in his house that he did not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful, which is quoted endlessly and usually stripped of the politics attached to it. From 1883 he was an active socialist, lecturing on street corners, arrested at a demonstration, funding and editing Commonweal, and quarrelling with almost every faction in turn. A Dream of John Ball, written in 1888, sends a modern narrator back to the eve of the Peasants' Revolt to talk with the priest who led it, and contains his most-quoted argument: that men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and then turns out not to be what they meant. He founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which still exists, and the Kelmscott Press. News from Nowhere, his utopia of 1890, imagines an England after the revolution with no money, no prisons and no division between art and work, and it was written partly as an argument against the mechanised state socialism of Edward Bellamy. He refused the Poet Laureateship. He died at sixty-two, and his doctor gave the cause as simply being William Morris and having done more work than most ten men.

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