William Morris (1834–96) was a British designer, craftsman, poet, and early socialist. His designs for furniture, fabrics, stained glass, carpets, tapestries, wallpapers, and other decorative arts generated the Arts and Crafts Movement in England and revolutionized Victorian taste.
Born in Walthamstow, near London, England, Morris was a member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who sought to counteract the effects of industrialization by a return to the artistic aesthetic of the medieval era. In 1861, he established Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, an association of craftsmen that Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which soon revolutionized the art of house decoration and furniture in England. His founding of Kelmscott Press in 1890 influenced typographical and book design.
Morris’s literary career began with a volume of poetry and longer narrative poems, including The Earthly Paradise (1868–70,) a collection of 24 classical and medieval tales in a Chaucerian mold. He developed a passionate interest in the heroic literature of Iceland, and worked on a series of saga translations, and wrote Three Northern love Songs (1875) and a four-volume epic, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Nibelungs (1877,) regarded as his most significant literary work.
Morris joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1883; his Utopian ideals did much to develop the philosophy of socialism, and, when the Social Democratic Federation suffered disruption in 1884, he formed a breakaway Socialist League. His socialist zeal inspired two prose romances, The Dream of John Ball (1888) and News from Nowhere (1891.)
Morris’s other publications include a verse morality, Love is Enough, or The Freeing of Pharamond (1872,) and translations of Virgil’s Aeneid (1875) and Homer’s Odyssey (1887.)
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Not on one strand are all life’s jewels strung.
—William Morris
Topics: Life, Wisdom
So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.
—William Morris
Of rich men it telleth, and strange is the story how they have, and they hanker, and grip far and wide; And they live and they die, and the earth and its glory has been but a burden they scarce might abide.
—William Morris
Topics: Wealth, Riches
A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as part of the human race, he creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful.
—William Morris
Topics: Work
Unless people care about carrying on their business without making the world hideous, how can they care about Art?
—William Morris
Give me love and work — these two only.
—William Morris
Topics: Work
Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement; a sanded floor and whitewashed walls and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the same with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?
—William Morris
Topics: Simplicity
Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.
—William Morris
Topics: Art, Artists
I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love. It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigor of the earlier world?
—William Morris
When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it. He must always be a stranger to the place he loves, and its people.
—William Morris
Topics: Writers, Home
It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last
—William Morris
Topics: Experience
I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
—William Morris
Topics: Protest
If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
—William Morris
Topics: Simplicity, Home
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