His theoretical writings on the arts and crafts have exerted a profound influence on architecture and interior design in forms very different from Morris's own; and his writings on socialism, with their faith in a Communist society determined by human desire rather than political theory, remain a significant critique of twentiethcentury Marxism.
Morris is a genuinely transitional figure. His life and work are grounded in a historical past they in many respects carry to its efflorescence, yet, at the same time, he reformulates the values of that past in ways that address themselves to the modern world. For this reason, as his biographer E. P. Thompson suggests, Morris should be seen neither as a man of the past nor as a man of the present, but as "a new kind of sensibility" unique in its "reassertion at a new level and in new forms of pre-capitalist values of community" and what Morris ironically termed "barbarism."
The juxtaposition of past and present can be traced to Morris's boyhood. His father was a bill broker who commuted daily to his London office from suburban Walthamstow, where William Morris, his eldest son, was born 24 March 1834.
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