Making earthly paradise

In the mid-1980s, seized by a rare homemaking impulse, we decided to cover the uneven plaster of our spare room with William Morris’s “Willow Boughs” wallpaper. This was hardly a cutting-edge aesthetic gesture. “Willow Boughs”, like “Strawberry Thief”, “Acanthus” and “Trellis”, is among the compositions that have made Morris a familiar reference point in domestic design. Pleasing to most people, and at worst inoffensive, it represents a modest nod towards the Arts and Crafts movement – appropriate, I felt at the time, for a scholar interested in the nineteenth century. The paper was pricey, but of sufficiently high quality to hide the flaws in the plaster beneath. I was gratified by the effect, feeling that it added a touch of character to our unremarkable interior.

My mild satisfaction in contemplating the newly decorated room epitomizes Morris’s place in modern culture. He is remembered chiefly as a designer of historical importance whose patterns, drawn from nature, imply a distance from modernist abstraction and industrial automation. They are used as a small but comforting homage to traditions of craftsmanship, causing no real inconvenience to the purchaser. The popularity of Morris’s designs means that he has not been forgotten, though his lingering presence is a faded reflection of his strenuously productive life.

Morris was never simply a designer. He was a poet, translator, author of prose romances and fiction, and successful businessman. He was also a pioneering craftsman, making jewellery, textiles, metalwork, embroidered tapestries, books, tiles, stained glass, wallpaper and furniture. In his later years he turned to political activism and became a foundational figure in the early years of British socialism. When he died at the age of sixty-two, in 1896, his doctor commented on the cause of his death: “I consider the case is this: the disease is simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men”. His tirelessly resourceful series of experiments was driven by his rejection of modern civilization. He wanted to renew the creative practices of the past to create a different future, and what is now remembered from his diverse pursuits largely depends on who is doing the remembering.

Ingrid Hanson’s wide-ranging selection from Morris’s prolific writings identifies new points of interest in his oeuvre without neglecting those parts of it that mattered most to earlier generations. She is keen to highlight what she calls his “ecological thinking” in the interwoven plant, human and animal life that formed his work as a designer. Morris was steeped in the late Romanticism that he encountered in Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson and the first generation of pre-Raphaelite artists and writers. As a young man he locates romance in the fertile and wooded countryside of southern England, rather than among Wordsworth’s lakes and mountains or in the warm Italian South of Keats and Shelley. Although he travelled to Iceland in his middle age, this had more to do with his study of heroic sagas than with any wish to incorporate Iceland’s bleak and treeless scenery into his own pastoral ideal. Morris’s images of the quintessential historical landscape are rooted in Epping Forest.

His glowing vision, deliberately distanced from the grime of Victorian capitalism, arose early in his work. “The Story of the Unknown Church”, published in the short-lived Oxford and Cambridge Magazine that Morris and his friends began in 1856, set the tone: “among the corn grew burning scarlet poppies, and blue corn-flowers; and the corn-flowers were so blue, that they gleamed, and seemed to burn with a steady light, as they grew beside the poppies among the gold of the wheat”. This is beautiful, though it would be an unworkable model for modern agriculture. We will not feed a growing population if our fields are full of poppies and cornflowers, lovely though they are. Morris opposed the mechanization of labour on the land and in factories and mills, but he was never able to reconcile his desire for more humane patterns of employment with the aim of providing affordable goods of high quality for the working poor. His concepts of design were hugely influential, but the products of his workshops were only ever available to the affluent, whose money came from the economic structures he wanted to overturn. This was the contradiction that finally drove him to become a socialist.

It was a tension that shaped his life from the beginning. He was born into a prosperous family, its wealth derived from his father’s holding of valuable mining shares. There are stories of an indulged William, as a small boy, riding to school on a pony and exploring the local woodland in a miniature suit of armour. His passion for medieval architecture had its origins in his childhood. He recalled feeling that “the gates of heaven have been opened to me” when he was taken to see Canterbury Cathedral as an eight-year-old, and this quasi-religious enthusiasm infused his years as an undergraduate at Oxford. The rigidly classical academic syllabus meant little to him, but the medieval charm of the city fired his imagination, as – briefly – did the fervent piety that then pervaded its Anglican colleges. Still more important was the circle of friendship that student life made possible. It was in Oxford that Morris, forceful and confident, became the leading member of “the Set”, a group of high-minded young men who aspired to a life of art infused by idealism. Persuaded by Ruskin’s view that paintings and buildings were the necessary expression of the conditions of labour of those who made them, they resolved that they would not be bound by the worldly values of their parents. There was even a notion that they might establish some sort of monastic order.

That didn’t last, not least because Morris fell helplessly in love with Jane Burden, the teenage daughter of an Oxford ostler, whom he met at a theatre. This was more than a matter of picking up a pretty girl and enjoying a brief fling, common enough among young men of Morris’s class and generation. Jane was a young woman of haunting beauty and considerable intelligence. Morris’s commitment turned out to be lifelong; Jane’s less so. They married in 1859 (no member of his disapproving family attended the wedding) and set about making a life together. The choices available to the young couple were not altogether straightforward. Although Jane was resolute in leaving her working-class roots behind, she embarked on her marriage with little serious education or social experience, and was clearly not equipped to become a conventional middle-class wife. A novel way of living must be constructed, which could only be managed in a radically new house. Morris had apprenticed himself to G. E. Street, a gothic revivalist architect then based in Oxford, where he met Philip Webb, who shared his medievalist ambitions. Morris, who quickly abandoned the idea of becoming an architect, commissioned a house from Webb with a view to designing the decoration himself. It was a turning point. “Red House”, near Bexleyheath in Kent, was to become a “Palace of Art” (the phrase came from Tennyson) – a unified design where furniture and decoration would combine with architectural details to forge a new paradigm for daily life.

Morris was not greatly interested in decorating grand public buildings, though he would make an exception for churches. Throughout his career he focused on household settings. Textiles, furniture and paintings would surround a family with beauty. His innovative “Red House” was a collective enterprise, like so many of his projects. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Charles Faulkner and Edward Burne-Jones all contributed to the ornamentation. Burne-Jones and his wife, Georgiana, intended to move in, but the plan fell through. After five years Morris moved back to London, defeated by a wearying commute into the city. But the “Red House” project became the basis for the manufacturing processes of “the Firm” – Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., instituted in 1861 as a decorative arts company with retail lines in wallpapers, chairs and fabrics. After a shaky start that called for a certain amount of subsidy from Morris, the Firm flourished, patronized by well-to-do customers hoping to display their advanced taste. The value of Morris’s mining shares declined and he ran the business on commercial principles. But he was never anything other than a wealthy man, and his resources underpinned the freedom that allowed him to acquire impressively varied skills as a craft-based manufacturer. He learnt how to use vegetables dyes effectively (he had no time for the new chemical dyes that had taken over the market) and how to embroider, engrave, print, weave and paint on tiles and stained glass, while managing the recruitment and training of his workers. Had he been poor, he would have been compelled to focus his activities more narrowly. Money allowed Morris to expand his business on the basis of hands-on knowledge.

His prodigious schedule of work was driven in part by his restlessly energetic nature. Yet, despite his boisterous good humour, Morris’s life was darkened by an underlying melancholy and the need to escape from trying home circumstances. His marriage was not happy, and Jane had an affair with Rossetti that wounded him deeply. After Rossetti’s death in 1882, there was another affair with the poet William Scawen Blunt. It is not an accident that Morris’s poetry and fiction often turns on varieties of love triangles, including the relations between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot in medieval legend. Morris believed that women had a right to sexual independence, and it is a tribute to his humanity that he was prepared to tolerate his wife’s infidelities. But the disappointment shadowed his attempts to build a private idyll. A beautiful house could not guarantee a contented life.

Marcus Waithe has edited a comprehensive collection of essays that explores the full extent of Morris’s multiplicity. The section on his writing is particularly revealing, balancing analysis of the startling violence of The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), published when Morris was twenty-three, with consideration of his long narrative poems, with their yearning for a lost world. “Forget six counties overhung with smoke”, Morris urges readers of The Earthly Paradise (1868–70). The early poems are inclined to represent women as tragic victims, while later work finds a more layered complexity in their relations with conflict and power. Morris had become fascinated by Norse mythology as a student at Oxford, and Heather O’Donoghue examines his collaboration with the Icelandic scholar Eiríkur Magnússon in producing a series of translations of medieval sagas. Trips to Iceland distracted from personal difficulties, and perhaps poring over his translations served a similar purpose. Whatever his motives, Morris made a notable impact on the development of Icelandic studies – quite an achievement given the exacting demands of the Firm.

Although it might seem that the various strands of Morris’s work have only their historicism in common, Hanson’s substantial selections from the narrative poetry and translations demonstrate other connections. Morris’s writings are, like his designs, founded on rhythmic patterns, vivid colour and repeated reference to the natural world. It is not an insult (though perhaps not entirely a compliment) to suggest that they are recognizably the product of the imagination that generated so much wallpaper. The opening lines of Sigurd the Volsung (1876), based on Völsunga saga – accomplished, agreeable and consciously archaic – exemplify a method that served Morris well:

There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old;
Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold:
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors;
Earls’ wives were the weaving-women, queens’ daughters strewed its floors,
And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.

This is the kind of thing that goes on for thousands of lines.

Surprisingly, as Anna Vaninskaya points out in The Cambridge Companion to William Morris, Morris’s distinctive approach to the history of northern Europe has turned out to be a persistent influence. His copious narratives in prose and poetry helped to define the fantasy genre for succeeding generations. J. R. R. Tolkien, another student of the sagas, folk stories and romances of medieval literature, learnt a great deal from Morris; so did Andrew Lang and C. S. Lewis. Any other man would have been satisfied with a life of unremitting effort that had shifted the taste of a generation and provided a new cultural context for its literature. But Morris could not reconcile himself to the radical social injustice that he saw as an inescapable consequence of late Victorian industrial capitalism, and he was not satisfied.

In 1883 he left his earlier political liberalism behind and converted to an uncompromising version of socialism. He wrote to Georgiana Burne-Jones: “The ideas which have taken hold of me will not let me rest … To me society, which to many seems an orderly arrangement for allowing decent people to get through their lives creditably and with some pleasure, seems mere cannibalism”. Morris was among the earliest English readers of Das Kapital (he read it in a French translation in 1883), and throughout the rest of his life he supported socialist causes as he tried to change the prevalent understanding of how labour and production should function in a healthy society. He had, however, no intention of immersing himself in arcane theories of political economy, and in A Dream of John Ball (1888) and the utopian News from Nowhere (1891), he turned to fiction as the means of transforming readers into activists. It was, he believed, “essential that the ideal of the new society should always be kept before the eyes of the working classes”.

Some aspects of Morris’s social values have worn badly. His view of gendered identities never moved beyond the perception of women as primarily fitted to serve and support their menfolk (“you must not forget that child-bearing makes women inferior to men”). This makes the contemporary reader wince. His typically impatient reaction to the increasing awareness of the dangers of arsenic in wallpaper is also disconcerting. “As to the arsenic scare, a greater folly is hardly possible to imagine: the doctors were bitten as people were bitten by the witch fever”, was his brusque response. “My belief about it all is that doctors find their patients ailing, don’t know what’s the matter with them, and in despair put it down to the wallpapers when they probably ought to put it down to the water closet, which I believe to be the source of all illness.” Given that good sanitation did so much more for public welfare than hand-woven tapestries, this does not argue for a strong understanding of the real needs of the poor. It was only pressure from his customers that convinced Morris to produce arsenic-free wallpaper.

All heroes are imperfect, as Morris knew well. But his refusal to accept the tawdriness and cruelty of modern economic practice remains appealing, though the paradoxes that always qualified the practical utility of his resistance are now more marked than ever. Sara Atwood’s essay on Morris’s twenty-first-century legacies in The Cambridge Companion describes the continuing proliferation of goods carrying his designs – not just wallpaper, but oven gloves, tea towels, coasters, cushions, jewellery, mugs, scarves and more besides. “Strawberry Thief” is especially popular: you can buy mass-produced leggings printed with the design in several versions. Widely available online, they are generally not expensive.

Dinah Birch is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Liverpool

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