LWIA 4.3: William Morris

In which a digression is taken so that about fifty others don't have to be.

Consider William Morris, for instance. One of the great British polymaths, Morris was a major nexus point of Victorian culture, working simultaneously as a writer, translator, designer, textile artist, printer, and socialist. Born to a well-off family, he developed an early love of architecture, which developed at Oxford into a specific love of the medieval. He was drawn from there into the cooling embers of romanticism, especially after befriending the painter Edward Burne-Jones and becoming the cornerstone of the so-called Birmingham Set along with Charles Faulkner, and then befriending Burne-Jones’s mentor Dante Gabriel Rossetti and becoming an enthusiastic backer of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

This list of influences gestures at the core of Morris’s aesthetic principles, which were rooted in a nostalgic rejection of industrialism in favor of reviving older styles. He was the sort of man who described London as a “spreading sore,” yearning to establish a rural community of crafters. In 1860 he commissioned Red House in rural Kent and moved there, establishing, alongside Faulkner, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and others, an interior design company initially called Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co, but later simply Morris & Company, selling murals, hand-embroidered fabrics, and stained glass designs. His first iconic success came in the form of a wallpaper design titled Trellis, depicting roses twining around the wooden beams of the eponymous structure. Morris’s principles eventually led to him becoming the father of the Arts and Crafts movement (although the actual Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from which it drew its name was founded by Walter Crane). This movement rejected industrialism and excessive ornamentation, favoring instead a focus on utility and quality of design, insisting that a designer should also be a craftsman heavily involved in the actual execution of his ideas.

Separate from his career as a designer, meanwhile, Morris was an accomplished writer and poet. His earliest works to get attention were epic poems—a retelling of the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, a cycle of retellings called The Earthly Paradise, and a reworking of the Volsunga Saga. But in his later career this approach began to evolve. In 1889 he published A Tale of the House of the Wolflings and The Roots of the Mountains, a pair of novels about medieval Germanic tribes living in and around the forest of Mirkwood. These had their obvious roots in the Norse sagas he’d previously been rewriting, complete with the slight tinge of the fantastic—details like a cursed armor and discussion of monsters and wights living in the woods. And he would develop further in that direction with his late career works The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World’s End, both published through his own Kelmscott Press, an effort to bring the values of the Arts and Crafts movement to printing by reviving the style and detail of the first printed books. These were outright fantasy novels—among the first of the genre, with The Well at World’s End being the first example of a full-on secondary world story.

That Morris does not get the recognition for his role in creating the genre that his contemporary H.G. Wells does for creating science fiction is largely down to the fact that fantasy, unlike its sister genre, has ample roots in mythology and in ancient genres like fairy tales, making the question of its creation even harder than usual. But Morris was not without his contributions to the other half of the era’s development of the fantastic. In 1890 he penned News from Nowhere (or An Epoch of Rest), an account of a futuristic utopia. In this, Morris was drawing from the third major strand of his life and career—his ardent socialism. The novel was at its core a response to another piece of utopian literature, Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. Bellamy’s vision of the year 2000 was based primarily on a vision of nationalized and heavily automated industries, which was of course anathema to Morris, who offered a competing vision of a pastoral socialism in which harmony with nature renders work no longer a miserable drudgery and enabling a truly equal society.

Morris’s involvement in the socialist movement dated to the beginning of the 1880s, when he became disillusioned with the Liberal Party following the rise to power of William Gladstone, concluding that even their radical wing could never hope to escape its middle class nature. Following Henry Hydman’s foundation of the Democratic Federation—Britain’s first outright socialist party—Morris joined the movement and, due to his profile, swiftly rose through the ranks, joining the party’s executive committee just five months after joining and quickly becoming its treasurer (as well as designing its membership card, of course). He quickly made use of his fame to become one of the most visible and outspoken proponents of socialism, touring the country to lecture about it, at times to his hosts’ considerable chagrin.

There was always a strangeness to Morris’s socialism, as News from Nowhere ultimately suggests. He did not, for instance, step down as the head of his company, although any controversy this might have caused within the Democratic Federation was undoubtedly blunted by his willingness to bankroll it. And besides, his involvement with the movement was sufficiently ardent that it quickly ate the bulk of its time. In 1884 he was one of the major figures in a schism within the party, rejecting its electoral focus and splitting off to form the openly revolutionary Socialist League, designing and editing their newspaper, Commonweal, in which he initially serialized News From Nowhere, although he was eventually booted from the organization after it took an anarchist turn.

But for all his plain import, in From Hell all that Moore proves good for is a two page sequence in which Moore takes advantage of the fact that Liz Stride was murdered in Dutfield’s Yard on Berner Street, beneath the International Working Men’s Educational Club (whose steward discovered her body) to have the murder take place while William Morris is reading his poem “Have No Thought for Tomorrow.” Moore is being slightly apocryphal here—although Morris frequented the club, there is no evidence he was there on the night of Stride’s murder, and his selection of poem, from Morris’s 1872 collection Love is Enough, is purely for the contrast it provides as Campbell alternates between panels of Morris reading and panels of Stride’s brutal murder. It’s a comparative throwaway, the rich tapestry of connection and significance that Morris represents reduced to a small tile in Moore’s sprawling mosaic of the times.