William Morris was born in 1834, and died aged 62, having influenced the world of British design, heritage, social change, and literature. His admirers included Queen Victoria & Prince Albert, George Bernard Shaw, and then later on, Tolkien and C S Lewis.
An interesting fact about William Morris is that he started out as a poet and was even asked by the Queen to be her Poet Laureate, after the death of Lord Tennyson. As poet and author, Morris began to explore the things that were of interest to him and how he wished to live his life. He didn’t make a living from his writing and needed to look after his wife and family, so he began to explore his other passions - business, the decorative arts and design. He soon realised he could make a pretty good living by creating stained glass windows for churches, and then went on to establish his homewares shop.
His first retail shop and showroom was originally called Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. which then became his decorative arts company, Morris & Co. The business was founded with his Pre-Raphaelite collaborators Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Philip Webb, affectionately called "the Firm". The Oxford Street storefront offered an innovative "all under one roof" retail experience, where customers could browse and purchase off-the-shelf homewares and interior decoration items - including handcrafted furniture (such as the famous Sussex chair), fabrics, printed cottons, wallpapers, carpets, decorative ceramics, and stained glass windows for the home.
Although William Morris is famous today for his designs for fabrics and wallpapers, in his own day he was known as the author of, The Earthly Paradise, an epic poem written as a collection of retellings of myths and legends from Greece and Scandinavia. Morris introduced these major Norse sagas and epics thanks to his friend, the Icelandic scholar Eiríkur Magnússon. Their pioneering translations included, The Story of Grettir the Strong, and The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs. This was the first time Victorian Britons were presented with the foundational Norse myths, and it has been documented by scholars that without these translations, there may never have been Lord of the Rings, and we may never have heard of Narnia.
So Morris was obsessed with the old tales and was interested in taking us back to simpler times. A time before the industrial revolution, when everyone's lives could have been much happier and much more wholesome. He was saddened by the slums and poverty he saw around him, which made him quite political. He actively campaigned for the rights of the labouring classes - for their working conditions and their rights to a living wage. He became a member of the Socialist League, helping to write and print cheap, accessible printed materials - including penny pamphlets, manifestos, and the weekly journal Commonweal, featuring iconic graphic designs and woodcut headers created by the artist, Walter Crane.
At the beginning of his novel, News from Nowhere, when the time traveller wakes up in the future, one of the extraordinary things he finds is that people can swim in the River Thames, that London has been rewilded, the people are healthy and happy and there are woodlands throughout the city. Children are playing and camping out during the summer and there are communal gardens all along the river banks. He is saying to us - this is what we can aim for. He believed, if we can imagine it, we can make it happen - he was saying all of this, back in 1890. This is a vision that is relevant to us all today. A greener and more caring society. And a more hopeful vision for all of our futures.