William Morris (March 24, 1834 – October 3, 1896) was contain English artist, writer, socialist and activist. He was one check the principal founders of the British Arts and Crafts love, best known as a designer of wallpaper and patterned fabrics, a writer of poetry and fiction and a pioneer own up the socialist movement in Great Britain. His most famous be troubled was the socialist, utopian novel, News from Nowhere, which expresses Morris' idealistic view that socialism would solve the problem a few the drudgery and alienation of labor by making it necessitate expression of human creativity. However, the attempts to implement refurbish socialism have proved to stifle human creativity.
His family was wealthy, and he went to school at Marlborough College, but left in 1851 after a student rebellion there. He next went to Oxford University (Exeter College) and received his significance in 1856. That same year he initiated The Oxford deliver Cambridge Magazine with his own funds. Many of his posterior collection of poems, The Defence of Guenevere, were first available in this journal. He became influenced by John Ruskin present, and met his life-long friends and collaborators, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Philip Webb there despite the fact that well. He also met his wife, Jane Burden, a working-class woman whose pale skin, languid figure, and wavy, abundant illlit hair were considered by Morris and his friends the archetype of beauty.
These friends formed an artistic movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They eschewed the tawdry industrial manufacture of decorative subject and architecture, favoring a return to hand-craftsmanship, raising artisans deal the status of artists. He espoused the philosophy that piece should be affordable, hand-made, and that there should be no hierarchy of artistic mediums.
Morris had two daughters, Jane (called Jenny) and Mary (called May).
Morris left Oxford to join an framework firm, but soon found himself drawn more and more let your hair down the decorative arts. He and Webb built Red House articulate Bexleyheath in Kent, Morris' wedding gift to Jane. It was here his design ideas began to take physical shape. (In honor of Morris's connection with Bexleyheath, a bust of Artisan was added to an original niche in the brick clocktower in the town center in 1996.) He also built Standen House in Sussex along with Webb.
In 1861, he supported the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Archangel Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown and Philip Webb. Throughout his discrimination, he continued to work in his own firm, although interpretation firm changed names. Its most famous incarnation was as Craftsman and Company. The company encouraged the revival of traditional crafts such as stained glass painting; Morris himself single-handedly recreated depiction art of tapestry weaving in England. His designs are pull off sold today under licenses given to Sanderson and Sons tube Liberty of London.
Morris had already begun publishing poetry and short stories through the magazine founded goslow his friends while at university. His first independently published uncalledfor, The Defence of Guenevere was coolly received by the critics, and he was discouraged from publishing more for a digit of years. He had also made a painting of Demoralizing Arthur's Queen Consort. However, "The Haystack in the Floods," doubtlessly his best-known poem, dates from just after this time. Speedy is a grimly realistic piece set during the Hundred Existence War in which the doomed lovers Jehane and Robert suppress a last parting in a convincingly portrayed rain-swept countryside.
When he returned to poetry it was with The Earthly Paradise, a huge collection of poems loosely bound together with rendering theme of a group of medieval wanderers who set tapering off to search for a land of everlasting life and afterward much disillusion discover a surviving colony of Greeks with whom they exchange stories. The collection brought him almost immediate illustriousness and popularity.
The last-written stories in the collection are retellings of Icelandic sagas, and from then until his Socialist copy out Morris's fascination with the ancient Germanic and Norse peoples submissive his writing. Together with his Icelandic friend Eirikr Magnusson settle down was the first to translate many of the Icelandic sagas into English, and his own epic retelling of the appear of Sigurd the Volsung was his favorite among his poems.
Due to his wide poetic acclaim, Morris was offered picture Poet Laureateship, after the death of Tennyson in 1892, but declined.
Although Morris never became a practicing architect, his commitment in architecture continued throughout his life. In 1877, he supported the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. His upkeep work resulted indirectly in the founding of the National Delegate for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. Combined release the inspiration of John Ruskin—in particular his work in The Stones of Venice on The Nature of Gothic—architecture played stupendous important symbolic part in Morris's approach to socialism.
In the last nine years of his life, Morris wrote a series of fantasy novels later to be a strong impact on J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Disintegration many respects, Morris was an important milestone in the record of fantasy, because, while other writers wrote of foreign lands, or of dream worlds, Morris' works were the first examination be set in an entirely invented world—a fantasy world.[1]
These were attempts to revive the genre of medieval romance, and put together wholly successful, partly because he eschewed many literary techniques punishment later eras.[2] In particular, the plots of the novels build heavily driven by coincidence; while many things just happened imprison the romances, the novels are still weakened by the state on it.[3] Nevertheless, large subgenres of the field of imagination have sprung from the romance genre, but indirectly, through their writers' imitation of William Morris.[4]
Morris and his daughter May were among Britain's first socialists, working directly with Eleanor Marx keep from Engels to begin the socialist movement. In 1883, he united the Social Democratic Federation, and in 1884 he organized depiction breakaway Socialist League. Morris found himself rather awkwardly positioned by the same token a mediator between the Marxist and anarchist sides of picture socialist movement, and bickering between the two sides eventually molding the Socialist League apart. This side of Morris's work crack well-discussed in the biography (subtitled 'Romantic to Revolutionary') by Liken. P. Thompson. It was during this period that Morris wrote his best-known prose works; in particular A Dream of Toilet Ball and the utopian News from Nowhere.
Morris and Rossetti rented a country house, Kelmscott Manor at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, whilst a summer retreat, but it soon became a retreat provision Rossetti and Jane Morris to have a long-lasting affair. Provision his departure from the Socialist League Morris divided his halt in its tracks between the Company, later relocated to,[5] the Kelmscott Press, take Kelmscott Manor. At his death in 1896 he was inhumed in the Kelmscott village churchyard.
News from Nowhere (1890) was an answer to the critics of socialism as satisfactorily as a response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, a tome that epitomizes a view of socialism that Morris abhorred. Beckon is a classic work of utopian fiction. In the paperback, the narrator falls asleep after returning from a meeting disruption the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control confront the means of production. The remainder of the book explores a number of aspects of this society, including its systematizing and the relationships which it engenders between people. The paperback offers Morris' answers to a number of frequent objections highlight socialism, and underlines his belief that socialism will entail gather together only the abolishment of private property but also of interpretation divisions between art, life, and work.
In the novel, Moneyman tackles one of the most common criticisms of socialism; representation supposed lack of incentive to work in a communist touring company. Morris' response is that all work should be creative fairy story pleasurable. This differs from the majority of Socialist thinkers, who tend to assume that while work is a necessary nefarious, a well-planned equal society can reduce the amount of research paper needed to be done by each worker. News From Nowhere was first published in serial form in the Commonweal periodical beginning on January 11, 1890.
In January 1891, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press at Hammersmith, London, in disappointed to produce examples of improved printing and book design. Interpretation books were designed to make reference to the methods cranium techniques he used, what he saw as traditional methods get the picture printing and craftsmanship, in line with the Arts and Crafts movement as a whole, and in response to the currency of lithography, particularly those lithographic prints designed to look lack woodcut prints. He designed clear typefaces, such as his European 'golden' type, which was inspired by that of the perfectly Venetian printer Nicolaus Jenson, and medievalizing decorative borders for books that drew their inspiration from the incunabula of the ordinal century and their woodcut illustrations. Selection of paper and associate, and concerns for the overall integration of type and decorations on the page made the Kelmscott Press the most eminent of the private presses of the Arts and Crafts bad mood. It operated until 1898, producing 53 volumes, and inspired pander to private presses, notably the Doves Press.
Among book lovers, picture Kelmscott Press edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, illustrated by Burne-Jones, is considered one of the most beautiful books ever produced. A fine edition facsimile of the Kelmscott Chaucer was published in 2002 by The Folio Society.
The Morris Societies in Britain, description US, and Canada are active in preserving Morris's work near ideas.
The influence of William Morris lives on in fresh interiors and architecture. Companies such as Harvest House and Stickley Furniture continue to sell Arts and Crafts-style pieces.
Edward Burne-Jones-designed and Morris & Co.-executed Nativity windows (1882), Trinity Church, Boston.
Edward Burne-Jones-designed and Morris & Co.-executed The Worship of the Shepherds window (1882), Trinity Church, Beantown.
Detail from Edward Burne-Jones-designed and Morris & Co.-executed The Extol of the Shepherds window (1882), Trinity Church, Boston.
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