William Morris: A Life for Our Time

by Fiona MacCarthy

Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, and described by A.S.Byatt as 'one of the finest biographies ever published', this is Fiona MacCarthy's magisterial biography of William Morris, legendary designer and father of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement. 'Thrilling, absorbing and majestic.' Independent'Wonderfully ambitious ... The definitive Morris biography.' Sunday Times 'Delicious and intelligent, full of shining detail and mysteries respected.' Daily Telegraph'Oh, the careful detail of this marvellous book! . . . A model of scholarly biography'. New StatesmanSince his death in 1896, William Morris has been celebrated as a giant of the Victorian era. But his genius was so multifaceted and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time - possibly of all time - could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and ranked as a poet with Tennyson and Browning.In her definitive biography - insightful, comprehensive, addictively readable - the award-winning Fiona MacCarthy gives us a richly detailed portrait of Morris's complex character for the first time, shedding light on his immense creative powers as artist and designer of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry, and books; his role as a poet, novelist and translator; on his psychology and his emotional life; his frenetic activities as polemicist and reformer; and his remarkable circle of friends, literary, artistic and political, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. It is a masterpiece of biographical art.

Genres: Biography, Art, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Politics, Design

1377 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 26, 1995

About the author

Fiona MacCarthy was an English biographer and cultural historian best known for her studies of 19th- and 20th-Century art and design.

MacCarthy began her career on The Guardian in 1963 initially as an assistant to the women's editor Mary Stott. She was appointed as the newspaper's design correspondent, working as a features writer and columnist, sometimes using a pseudonymous byline to avoid two articles appearing in the same issue. She left The Guardian in 1969, briefly becoming women's editor of the London Evening Standard before settling in Sheffield.

She later became a biographer and critic. She came to wider attention as a biographer with a once-controversial study of the Roman Catholic craftsman and sculptor Eric Gill, first published in 1989. MacCarthy is known for her arts essays and reviews, which appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books. She contributed to TV and radio arts programmes.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first review, and I dedicate it to my friend, Margaret Unger, who suggested that I join Goodreads. If you love the Arts and Crafts movement as I do, and yearn to understand William Morris, then this is the book for you. I selected this book as my first to review because Morris was fascinated with Iceland and Margaret lives there. Morris learned Icelandic and translated some of the old epics into English. He visited Iceland twice when such a visit was a major undertaking. I reread MacCarthy's descriptions of Morris's visits recently, and was moved by her description of his love for the sometimes bleak beauty of that island. At 780 pages, I can't say it is a quick or easy read, but it is worth the effort.

[Timbow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long, but worth it.

Google Morris and you will get Wallpaper, Wallpaper, Wallpaper, Wallpaper, Wallpaper, Wallpaper,... But there is sooo much more to him which seems almost forgotten now, his writing, his poetry, his idealism, his socialism, his phenomenal influence on the age, on the social experiments, the communes, the back to the land movements, the craft revivals, the hippies...

It's a fat book. Skim through the early life is my advice.

[Sam Maxfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Morris's wallpaper patterns are ubiquitous yet there is so much more to remember him by. McCarthy's biography pays homage to his genius(not a term I use lightly)and his warm, eccentric, erratic nature. His creative life is explored in detail - and what creativity he had! His output was outstanding, from epic poems, short stories and novels to tapestry, painting, furniture design, book-printing, calligraphy, philosophy, socialist treatises, running a company and, of course, a few wallpaper patterns.

McCarthy probes into the heartbreak he endured as his wife, Janey (the muse/model for many a pre-raphaelite painting) carried on an affair with his friend, Rossetti over a period of years. Rossetti comes across as a bit of a rotter in this book. Particularly nice is Morris's warm relationship with his two daughters.

One of the best things about the book was the inclusion of cartoons of Morris by his friend, Edward Burne Jones; these ridicule Morris in an affectionate, funny way and are a delight.

I agree with another reviewer that McCarthy's focus on his early years is a bit dry and cumbersome. Once that is done, and Morris grows into his creative powers, the book is wonderful.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second biography I've read by McCarthy (the first was on Byron), and unfortunately I find her frustrating as a biographer. These books are weighty, physically unwieldly tomes, yet she manages to leave out or gloss over key information, while at the same time filling up page after page of tangential or downright irrelevant information, for just one example, a paragraph devoted to Freud's office. She was also quite ableist about Jenny Morris, and indeed towards others she deemed had conditions that were not "organic", including Jane Morris/Butden, a common risk in biography writing. There was some interesting information, but this became a matter of random chance.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘History (so called) has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed. Art has remembered the people, because they created.’
William Morris

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Morris is first sent to school at nine years old, riding the two-mile journey on the same pony he would later take on excursions around Epping Forest. Marlborough next, Morris now aged fourteen. It’s lawless and violent there - the schoolboys, feral brats of upper-middle class Anglican clergymen, pelt stones at passing farmers and skin wild animals in Savernake Forest, a more cultivated Epping. Morris hides out in it, exploring churches and ancient burial-mounds, weaving nets. At Oxford, Morris is intended for the Church, but rails against Anglicanism. He and Burne-Jones edge closer to Catholic doctrine, drawing on the recent Tractarian disputes, and gain an interest in the Gothic revival as a rejuvenation of medieval Christianity. With Burne-Jones Morris has ‘his first real friendship’ (p.59), and a real group of friends also - they read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats and Wordsworth to each other, and write poetry themselves. Both Morris and Burne-Jones imagine becoming part of a celibate, sacred brotherhood devoted to art and worship - they discover Ruskin and the Pre-Raphelites, and Morris starts sketching architectural forms. Oxford’s stifling academic atmosphere bores him - he is impatient for something else.

He visits Northern France, entranced by the same cathedrals that fascinated Ruskin: Amiens, Chartres, Beauvais, Rouen - colossal masterpieces of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century architecture. It’s here that he finally decides to give up the road towards the cloth - his mother is furious. He finishes at Oxford and is taken on as a pupil by the imposing Gothic architect G.E. Street, which initially allowed him to stay in Oxford. The day-to-day confines of architectural surveying and draughtsmanship, as well as Street’s relatively conservative style, meant immediate disillusionment, although a fortunate new friendship with Street’s clerk, Philip Webb.

Next to London with Street’s office, living with Burne-Jones, and the fateful meeting with Rossetti, the kindly tormentor. An exposure to Rossetti’s worldliness and cruelty, but also to his great artistic influence. Morris quickly becomes portly. His forays into tapestry, poetry and painting start here in earnest, as he abandons the persona of the architect and decides to become an artist - whatever that means. He meets Janey - both unhappy, it seems, from the start, with Morris’s awkwardness and Janey’s lack of agency. A second trip to France shows Morris at his most unstable and irascible - at the news that his ‘traditional boat had been sent over from the Oxford boatyard Bossom’s’, intended for a trip down the Seine, had been damaged in transit, Morris punches the stone quay itself, grazing his hand (p.149).

Then to the Red House, that idyll of an artistic community never fully realised in practice but - thanks to Webb’s genius - a glorious embodiment of Morris’s aesthetic ideals. Great vaulted rooms, rose trellises and ripe apples falling in through the windows. The beginning of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. in Red Lion Square, the beginning of the ultimate unresolved paradox of Morris’s life: his uncanny success at commerce and his social principles which abhorred it. Children - Jenny and May - who spend just long enough in the Red House to remember it as a paradise before the pressures of work force the family back to London.

The expansion of Morris and Co. at Queen Square, just down the road from Red Lion Square, seems to me to herald the start of Morris’s artistic maturity as he enters his thirties. Just as commissions to St. James’s Palace and the South Kensington Museum start arriving, Morris begins work on the 40,000-line poem The Earthly Paradise, which McCarthy sees as ‘the grand unloading of the stories which has jostled in his mind since he was as boy.’ (p.200). An interesting aside: the nave roof of Jesus College chapel was done by Morris (c.f. p.210), and along with Burne-Jones and Madox Brown he designed the stained glass windows of the outer chapel (p.628)! Morris never really shrugs off his establishment links - even two years before his final conversion to revolutionary socialism, he was still working the Throne Room of St. James’s Palace (p.211). The start of Janey’s affair with Rossetti - the whole thing so clearly painful for all involved, although I have to say I’m really starting to hate the latter.

The long, drawn-out process of quasi-separation between Morris and Janey, and the former’s involvement with Georgiana Burne-Jones and Aglaia Corino, is present in the rather tortured years that follow. Morris finally finishes The Earthly Paradise, filled with tales of romantic betrayal and loss, while Rossetti is writing (and even publishing) sonnets to Janey. Husband and wife effectively live apart, with Janey suffering from periodic waves of an undislosed illness. The supposed political neutrality and escapism of Morris’s poems is denied by C.S. Lewis, who claims that ‘Morris may build a world in some ways happier than the real one; but happiness puts as stern a question as misery. It is this dialectic of desire, presented with no solution, no lies, no panacea, which gives him his peculiar bittersweet quality, and also his solidity. He has faced the fact.’ (p.260).

Due to both marital woes and (I suspect) incipient creative exhaustion, Morris’s first trip to Iceland in 1871 comes at a moment of quiet crisis. The restorative, cathartic power of hardship and toil on the lava-fields and high passes, mixed with the political and literary resonances of the sagas in the landscape, combine to rejuvenate Morris, who returns to England a little more settled. It helped that the house he returned to was Kelmscott Manor, which he and Rossetti had jointly leased in 1871. McCarthy speculates that ‘[p]erhaps no other Englishman, apart from the owners of truly ancestral homes, has ever felt such passionate attachment to a building’, despite the fact that Morris only ever stayed there ‘for more than a few days at a time’ (p.311). From the village of Kelmscott emerged Morris’s great ideal of ‘a network of small ruralist communities’, which later developed into the twentieth-century garden city movement. Morris wrote to Georgiana’s sister, Louisa Baldwin, in 1874:

“… look, suppose people lived in little communities among gardens and green fields, so that you could be in the country in 5 minutes walk, and had few wants; almost no furniture for instance, and no servants, and studied the (difficult) arts of enjoying life, and finding out what they really wanted: then I think one might hope civilisation had really begun.” (p.315)

.

Before long, however, Rossetti was a dog in the manger, occupying the house full-time between 1872 and 1873, often with Janey, essentially driving Morris out. What infuriated the latter the most was Rossetti’s disdain for the Kelmscott and ambivalence towards what Morris viewed as a paradise. ln a letter to Aglaia in 1872, Morris deemed Rossetti a ‘slur’ upon the house (pp.322-3). After a second salutary if melancholy trip to Iceland in 1872, Morris starts to harden himself against his old attachments. Rossetti is evicted in 1874, and - along with Morris’s other partners, including a livid Ford Maddox Brown - ejected from the great brotherhood of the company. ‘Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co.’ kept only the name of its first, and most important, partner.

It’s from around this point (1875ish) that Morris’s artistic and political endeavours start to coincide. Whilst ‘the sixteen chintzes printed at Leek by Wardle are what most people consider the quintessential Morris’ (p.357), and his interest in subjects from mastering dyes and composing poetry remain, that visit to Leek also makes him intimately aware of industrial Britain up-close. He gets into politics sideways, through his membership of committees such as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Eastern Question Association, writing impassioned letters to the newspapers. Previously bashful in the presence of an audience, Morris begins to lecture and quickly warms to his task, including delivering the now classic speech on ‘The Lesser Arts’ in 1877. There seems to be an outlet here for the well-suppressed bitterness, as well as a growing affinity for loud words and bloody noses.

From dyes to tapestries and carpets in the late 1870s - and, more clearly than ever, the disjunct between Morris’s ideals and his artistic/professional practice. Contradictions abound - despite his Ruskinian principles, with weaving as with all crafts, ‘[w]hen it came to a battle of fanaticisms, excellence of product usually won’ over the conditions of production (p.401). Mechanisation, for instance in automating weaving, was not as alien to the Morris workshop as might be supposed. A similar issue was his clientele, people whom he often seemed to despise, and yet who flocked to the new Morris and Co. shop on Oxford street:

‘A whole cultural history could be written in terms of Morris furnishings. They have always been the safe choice of the intellectual classes, an exercise in political correctitude. North Oxford of the 1880s was all Morris. Morris's Daily Telegraph obituary recorded: “when married tutors dawned upon the academic world, all their wives religiously clothed their walls in Norham-Gardens and Bradmore Road with Morrisian designs of clustering pomegranates.”’ (p.413).

By the time of the iconic Thames river trip from Kelmscott House to Kelmscott Manor in August 1880, Morris’s friends are constantly ribbing him about his strengthening socialist principles - by this time, any allegiance to Gladstone and the Liberals in the wake of the EQA has vanished.

In 1881, Morris moves operations from Queen Square to Merton Abbey in the South London suburbs. Between 1881 and 1883 the factory produced the most iconic printed patterns of Morris’s career: Strawberry Thief, Windrush, Brother Rabbit, Wandle. Part of the breakthrough was colour - these designs used in-house indigo dying rather than relying on Wardle’s operation in Leek. As always, the gulf between Morris’s theory and practice is noticeable. Merton was a ‘humane factory for the time, affected for the god by its proprietor’s charisma’ (p.454), but it was still a factory. The guiding principle better resembled ‘benign patriarchy, not social experiment’, with limited worker autonomy and democracy, although conditions and pay were much better than anywhere else. Rossetti dies in 1882, and Janey starts another affair, this time physical, with William Scawen Blunt, who (poetry and politics aside) became known as one of the most notorious philanderers of the Victorian era. How much Morris knew is uncertain - he is increasingly drawn towards the ‘river of fire’ and socialism.

This decision, as McCarthy points out, had been a long time coming. The tipping point was probably Morris started reading theory (including Mill, Marx’s Capital and Owen) from early 1882, and internalised it fully to the alarm of old friends and acquaintances. An incendiary speech at University College Oxford in November 1883 made it clear to the public that his revolutionary beliefs were totally in earnest. Well aware of the cries of hypocrisy, he responded to a letter in the Evening Standard:

‘Your Correspondent implies that to be consistent we should at once cast aside our position of capitalists, and take rank with the proletariat; but he must excuse my saying that he knows very well we are not able to do so; that the most we can do is to palliate as far as we can the evils of the unjust system which we are forced to sustain; that we are but minute links in the immense chain of the terrible organisation of competitive commerce, and that only the complete unrivetting of that chain will really free us.’ (p.479)

Within a year, socialism had swallowed Morris up almost entirely, particularly after he joined the Democratic Federation in January 1883 - the first serious socialist organisation in England - two years after its foundation and just under two months before the death of Karl Marx in London. McCarthy cites E. P. Thompson’s suggestion that William Morris was one of only about 200 people who joined the Federation in 1883, putting him at ground zero of the movement (p.466). He becomes the treasurer of the fledgling organisation, providing it with significant funds, distributing pamphlets and agitating in Hyde Park. However, by 1884, Hyndman’s influence over the now rebranded SDF (now maybe 500 strong [c.f. p.502])was too much, and Morris enacted a painful split by forming the Socialist League.

The intellectual influence of this breakaway group was enourmous. Morris was drawn into the Marx-Engels family circle by Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling. Engels (slightly lukewarmly, it has to be said) called the trio of Morris, Aveling and Bax the only honest intellectuals in English socialism, and wrote an important article on the subject for the second issue of Morris’s Commonweal, which also featured George Bernard Shaw. Prominent European socialists including Karl Kautsky, Pyotr Lavroff and William Liebnecht sent their well-wishes to the launch of the publication. A young Holst would conduct League’s Hammersmith Choir. Graham Wallas, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Ramsay McDonald, Kier Hardie and later H. G. Wells would speak in the Coach House at Kelmscott House. Morris began an affectionate and close friendship with Pyotr Kropotkin, who also lectured for him many times; Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and George Gissing remembered vividly their own experiences of the meetings there. All this at a time when the League’s active membership was probably less than 300, but whose impact on the turbulent years of the mid-to-late 1880s was clear. Morris attended demonstrations that teetered on riot, was arrested twice, feverishly travelled Britain giving endless speeches, wrote A Dream of John Ball. He was everywhere.

But from around 1887, at the height of Morris’s activity (at least 105 lectures in that year), the wheels started coming off. That year, the League was routed on Bloody Sunday, the parliamentary-minded Bloomsbury branch, which included Aveling and Marx, broke off in 1888. Anarchists took over the executive committee, advocating for the kind of violence that threatened to get Morris arrested again. Three important contributors to Commonweal, two of whom were on the executive committee of the League, were later confirmed to be agents provocateurs and spies for the police - I am reminded of Conrad here. Morris was still the most internationally prominent British socialist, and was nominated as the spokesman for English socialist delegation to the Second International at Paris in 1889, but even whilst there he knew the game was up. Shortly after News from Nowhere finished its serial publication in Commonweal, Morris’s Hammersmith branch declared itself independent from the League in 1890.

McCarthy does her best to argue that Morris’s last six or so years were as energetic as ever, but instead the attempt brings out even more clearly the sense bitter disappointment that followed the split, and the creeping exhaustion that inexorably ran him down. Morris did start writing again, embarking on new fantasy novels including The Well at World’s End, so influential for Tolkien and Lewis; Joyce, who loved Morris, used these stories as a thesaurus for his own writing (p.x). his involvement in the rapidly expanding Arts and Crafts scene strengthened despite his initial suspicion; and the Kelmscott Press started up, with Morris once again learning the tricks of the trade from scratch. He was still writing occasional poetry, and refused to be nominated for the poet laureateship after Tennyson’s death in 1892. At the same time, however, his health began catching up with him properly for the first time. Appearances at meetings either for socialist or artistic causes became rarer, and Merton Abbey had by this time effectively passed from Morris’s personal management. The Kelmscott Chaucer, completed in collaboration with Burne-Jones in 1896, gave him a profound sense of fulfilment - he remarked that it was just the thing that would have sent his student self into ecstasies of happiness could he have got hold of it. That, to me, seems the last victory - McCarthy’s biography closes with an account of the violence done to him physically by tuberculosis and reputationally by the disdainful columns in the London newspapers that followed his death.

This summer, I’ve been volunteering as a room steward at Kelmscott Manor. Although it was gutted by Oxford University, the whole thing has now been miraculously restored by the Society of Antiquaries. The visitors are a curious bunch - some are art critics, professional historians, pilgrims from all across the world. A Spaniard told me of his late father, an anarchist poet who was battling Franco with News from Nowhere as a companion at the same time Oxford was auctioning off Morris’s last possessions. The son, travelling from America, had come to Kelmscott to celebrate his father’s birthday. An Australian handed me his card with his son’s name on the back - the latter had written his doctorate on Morris, was forced to abandon a professional academic career, but still writes articles for a few online-only journals. A visiting Londoner, there with her parents, studied a Cranach woodblock print on the mantelpiece, and then asked me to hold a torch up to Morris’s bed so she could take a photo and explain to her mother how the embroidery on the hangings was done. She was some kind of expert - exactly what kind I never found out, as they drifted onto the landing and out of earshot. In Jane’s room, in front of the bed where William was born, an elderly woman visiting with her friend told me about a paper she’d read on sleep cycles in England. Apparently, they used to wake at three in the morning, stoke the fire, and then go out to chat with the neighbours. Most visitors know virtually nothing about Morris - even the genteel-looking ones who peer through their frameless glasses at the finery, making appreciative musing noises to each other, tend not to comment on anything apart from the wallpapers. Charming, of course. Laura Ashley and all that stuff. Very pretty, isn’t it? Not much of it around nowadays.

They’re right. The big houses in Norham Gardens have been remodelled for student accommodation and niche sub-faculty offices - some of them have been knocked together to make palatial mansions for absentee oligarchs. Then again, Morris always hated the suburbs. What angers me more than the filtering of what remains of his legacy into tote-bag kitsch is the fact that most of it had already been buried, quite deliberately, by the political and cultural establishment in the years after his death. McCarthy aptly terms it a ‘conspiracy of memory’, in which even his friends were complicit (p.x). When Morris as Morris is disinterred it is usually as a figure of fun, perhaps paired with inane speculation on Jane’s affairs. If he had been less honest, less compassionate, less principled, less unselfish, he would still be a household name, although his work would have been immeasurably cheapened. In the stead of fame, then, we have this - an excellent, detailed, clear-eyed view of a quite extraordinary man. It’s a shame barely anyone will ever read it.

(24/08/24)

[Michael Baranowski · Rating 2 out of 5]

This would have been a fantastic 300 - 400 page biography. Unfortunately, it's 780 pages many of which are filled with mind-numbing minutiae.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

#dnf I managed 120 pages. I'll need to try again when I'm retired.

[Mariana Lis · Rating 3 out of 5]

An avid reader of Mr. William Morris’ fiction and socio-political writing, an admirer of his craft and loving follower of his faith, I have contemplated this nonetheless fascinating account of Morris’ life with revolving feelings over the time it took me to complete my reading of it. The first part of the book is truly an elucidating and endearing journey through the poet’s early life and artistic rendezvous. Author Fiona MacCarthy knows her subject well, no doubt, and the book transpires both entertainment and well-supported information.

My only - I won’t say problem, surely; more like an hesitation with it, comes from the second part of the book, so to speak. Here, I find that the author is quick to accept a certain vision of Morris that is not clearly grounded, unless by specific assertions of her own making. MacCarthy’s account of Morris’ political leanings seems to border too much on a personal quest, and this becomes apparent with sure mentions of prior thought and early scrutinising of his political mindset. It’s possible that MacCarthy is trying to disturb early consensus among scholars regarding Morris’ statement for Marxism, but it is also possible that, in doing so, she drifts off into speculation that don’t quite fit with what Morris himself had to say – and did say – on certain subjects (for instance, anarchism).

In comparison to countless other biographies on William Morris, Fiona MacCarthy’s book represents a fresh and, in many respects, deserving new take on this person of note. It rivals E. P. Thompson’s biography in its love and respect for Morris, his work and thought, even though, like Thompson’s work, it is not without its faults. I recommend that this book be read in light draughts, coupled with readings of Morris’s own writings.

[Dwreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first discovered William Morris by reading his wonderful fantasy novels (The Sundering Flood, The Well at the Worlds End, The Water of the Wondrous Isles and The Wood Beyond the World) published by Ballantine books in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Later I acquired a Morris Chair (designed by William Morris, one of the first reclining chairs) and became interested in the Arts and Crafts moment (of which Morris is considered a progenitor). Over the years I have seen Morris wallpapers, furniture, and artwork at museums, especially in the UK. I found this 1995 biography of Morris at a local book sale and decided it was time I learned more of this mans life. If you ever read a biography of someone you admire, be prepared to find out they may be both more and less than you imagined as a person. Morris was brilliant, often difficult, wildly passionate about art and politics, oddly charismatic, a bit of a bully, he had either some type of mental illness or very bad impulse control, and with all of this, the man was far ahead of his time, was able to laugh at himself, pretty much invented the modern fantasy novel (along with Lord Dunsany and George MacDonald) and his vision for a fairer, more humane world is still unfinished business. While I support his humanitarian ideas, I did find the chapters on his Socialist/Communist/Anarchist involvement rather tedious and sadly know the dismal outcome of these ideas. If you are interested in William Morris, the Arts and Crafts movement or the history of English Socialism, there is much here for you, I found not rather rewarding and learned a great deal.

[William Collen · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Morris is a fascinating person, and this book does a great job explaining why. MacCarthy admirably does not divorce Morris' public doings from his private life: all in all, this vision of Morris is a deeply human one, full of the kinds of little troubles, petty discomforts, and small victories that an average life is always full of. There is too much hagiography in accounts of public figures' lives, and this book is a needed corrective to that—would that more biographies were like it! I especially enjoyed the intertwining of Morris' life with that of his close friends Burne-Jones and Rossetti—the latter would, of course, betray him most execrably, and MacCarthy portrays their fraught relationship with great skill

What kind of person was Morris, really? In these pages he comes across as a person who feels a deep nostalgia for the good things that have left us, and who is interested in the entire world and just wants to make that world a little better—and the forces around him sometimes help him in that pursuit, and sometimes they hinder him: isn't that the way it is with all of us? (I didn't read the last part of the book—the part describing his life past 1884 or so—because I got distracted with other reading.)

[Brian Gowthorpe · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional biography. Morris is a particularly interesting subject but Fiona MacCarthy gets under his skin with sympathy and keen interest. He was an influential man, much loved and admired, turning his hand with dense absorption to so many interests throughout his life. It seems that although he had numerous friendships with women and fell hard for Jane Burden, he did not have the dubious art of making women feel sexually appreciated. We will never know whether this was from shyness or because he was too interested in other things. I can’t share FM‘s enthusiasm for his poetry but his many surviving letters and prolific writing provide an unusually rich source of material for a biography. His passion for socialism was trying for his friends; eventual course of socialism in Britain took a much more modified form than his ideal but he came to see some benefits at least in gas and water socialism. Morris was born a rich man, which gave him the enviable opportunity to pursue things that interested him but his was not an idle, wasted life: rather, it was intensely creative.

[Marshall Colman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a love/hate relationship with William Morris and I had a love/hate relationship with Fiona MacCarthy's biography.

William Morris was one of those volcanic Victorian personalities - stupendously energetic, deeply moral, highly persuasive, dazzlingly brilliant, massively influential, greatly change-making - like W. E. Gladstone, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Darwin, Henry Cole, Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale. The Victorian era threw up people like that. Morris's energy was legendary. He did six things at once and he wanted to do everything for himself: designing, writing poetry, embroidery, wood-engraving, dyeing, printing, lecturing, preserving old buildings and revolutionary politics. Physically he was remarkable: short and stout, scruffy, loud, rapid in his movements and subject to rages, which Fiona MacCarthy thinks were a form of epilepsy because they were followed by trances and forgetfulness. When he died aged 62, his doctor said he died of being William Morris.

It's not without significance that his first intention was to go into holy orders, and his life was a moral crusade against ugliness and injustice. He said that he was motivated by a hatred of modern civilisation. In 1861, at the age of 26, he started his company, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with great self-confidence and rapidly won decorating and furnishing contracts for ecclesiastical and institutional buildings - one of his earliest jobs was St James's Palace. By the time of his death in 1896, every house of taste had some Morris wallpaper or Morris furniture in it. He was the dominant influence in the Arts and Crafts Movement, which was at its height from about 1880 to 1914. He was probably a greater inspiration to the early members of the Labour Party than Karl Marx. His approach to design and manufacturing revolutionised the teaching of art in Britain and his influence was felt in the art schools right up until the end of the Second World War.

So Morris was a man of enormous significance in Britain - and, indeed overseas: he was looked up to by design reformers in Europe, America and Japan - and he's a man whom it's hard not to love. But he was backward-looking and he encouraged Britain to be backward-looking too. He hated modern society, hated the railways, hated the factory system, hated the city, hated the division of labour and wanted everyone to be a craftsman. His inspiration was a fantasy of the Middle Ages drawn from Chaucer and the Morte d'Arthur. His first reading was The Waverley Novels, which he had completed by the age of seven. He and his Arts and Crafts Followers were, to a large extent, gentlemen with a contempt for trade and commerce. His ideal society, as described in "News from Nowhere" was a ridiculous fantasy of tiny craft workshops, no government, no police, no prisons, no religion, no marriage. It was written not in his adolescence but towards the end of his life as a mature statement of his creed. You cannot take it seriously.

His influence as a designer is impossible to ignore. His wallpaper designs have never been out of print. He is hugely popular, though he was not unique. The revolt against the design excesses of the Great Exhibition of 1851, ornate, overblown and ugly, was actually begun by Henry Cole, the very man who organised the Exhibition. His contemporary, Owen Jones, produced a large illustrated "Grammar of Ornament" that advocated the flat, simple designs that Morris produced. Every designer in the 19th century read it and they continue to read it in modern editions. Jones's protege, Christopher Dresser, went further than him and some of his designs from the 1880s are so modern-looking that they appear to have been made in the 1930s. Morris's superficially attractive craft ideas were not accepted by all designers. Even though he was a Master of the Art Workers Guild, Lewis Foreman Day argued against the Arts and Crafts idea that every artisan should be a designer and every designer an artisan, because designing and making were specialised skills and you could not do either well if you did not concentrate on one or the other.

Graham Wallas, an admirer of Morris and later a founder of the London School of Economics, shot Morris's economics to pieces: "Once, while I listened to him lecturing, I made a rough calculation that the citizens of his commonwealth, in order to produce by the methods he advocated the quantity of beautiful and delicious tilings which they were to enjoy, would have to work about two hundred hours a week. It was only the same fact looked at from another point of view which made it impossible for any of Morris's workmen, or indeed for anyone at all whose income was near the present English average, to buy the products either of Morris's workshop at Merton or of his Kelmscott Press."

Fiona MacCarthy has written probably the best biography of Morris. It covers Morris as designer, poet, political activist and man. It's subtitled "A Life for our Time". But Morris, in my humble opinion, has nothing to offer our time. After he died, his influence on design in Britain was wholly negative and held up progress for fifty years. The initiative passed rapidly to Germany and Britain became an Arts and Crafts backwater. The design lessons had been learned and were being applied to industry. His socialism was woolly and romantic and had no practical application. His idea of a craft-based economy, which pervaded the crafts in Britain until the 1970s, was reactionary and irrelevant. MacCarthy does well with Morris's poetry and novels, which are of variably quality, and admits that he wrote verse too easily - 1,000 lines a day was normal for him.

This is an immensely warm and readable biography of a great but flawed individual. MacCarthy's passion for Morris and her belief in his ideals makes it a good read, though, for myself, I would have preferred a more critical account.

[Ingrid Weir · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book more. Such a fascinating man. The quote from his doctor on the cause of death - 'simply being William Morris and having done more work than ten men'. William Morris' own dictum that ' Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful ', is something I live by as an interior designer. However I felt that in this book, the broad themes of Morris' life were crushed by too much detail.

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant account of Morris in all his complexity. MacCarthy is such a sympathetic biographer and really brings out the humanity in her subjects. It's taken me ages to read this and as soon as I finished I wanted to start again at the beginning. Highly recommended.

[April · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! Utterly wonderful and abounding with earthly reverence.

[Mark Krebs · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too long...

[Christy Lenzi]

DNF

[Denise]

Re WSJ 9/15/95 book review.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificently detailed account of the richly productive and intensely creative life of a unique Victorian.

[Elizabeth McCollum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm still reading it, having gotten bogged down in the chapters about his politics, but as a good comprehensive biography of Morris, it is perfect. Although I could have used less inclusion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's opinions and cartoons about Morris; seeing as he was cuckolding Morris, I don't see how his views about him can be taken with anything but a large dose of rock salt. It almost seems as though, big Morris fan that she is, MacCarthy is afraid of seeming too partisan, and throws in all the Rossetti insults to keep things balanced. But honestly, I really wish she had felt satisfied with including just a representative few, rather than inundating the chapters with them. Since I have very little time for Rossetti the man, I had even less interest in his nonsense than others might who like him better. The political chapters are good. But with all the political nonsense going on in our own time, I just haven't got the stomach for 19th century stuff. I'll get back to it after the election, hopefully.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This became my Bible whilst writing my dissertation. McCarthy goes into such depth and detail about the life and work of Morris that it almost feels like she knew him personally.
Most people think that William Morris was an artist and designer but during his lifetime, he was better known as a poet, author and political activist. These areas, as well as many aspects of his troubled personal life are well covered in this book.
Morris is a fascinating man and McCarthy brings him to life in this work. Although his early years are a little heavy going, I found this book entertaining and informative.
Before I read this, I liked William Morris. By the time I finished, I was in love with him!

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very comprehensive book, so comprehensive that I felt that couldn't see the forest for the trees.
There is a lot of information, particularly about his devotion to the socialist cause and to his poetry and translations but relatively speaking nothing about his novels.
The book has illustrations, but for someone whose life was design many more illustrations would have definitely been warranted.

[Charles Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was drawn to this heavy tome for the soap opera intrigues of Morris's marriage to Jane Burden, the "stunner" who set styles and was depicted so often by Rossetti and others in the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Yet I gained respect for Morris in his journey from thoroughgoing medievalist to committed socialist. The man had energy and creativity and curiosity throughout his life, and his legacy of poems, novels, designs, and speeches is inspiring.

[Linnea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable read. Quite a thorough and even account of Morris' life. There were certain areas I would have liked more information, but overall, I thought McCarthy did a masterful job. You get a very clear picture of what a visionary William Morris was. He anticipated so many of the cultural and economic changes that followed him.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quality biog of a major figure in 19th century culture, whose contribution to design extends to this day, maybe not for everyone but I loved it.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read parts of this for a research paper on William Morris.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evernote

Reread 2019 same rating

[Julia Hendon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very in depth look at all phases of William Morris's life and work. Long, but Morris deserves the detailed treatment.

[Michael McCormack · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very detailed. A bit heavy going for me.