Utopia and Dystopia

William Morris (1834–1896) was born in Walthamstow, now part of London, on March 24 and died at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, London on October 3. During his own lifetime he was best known as a poet, but while his reputation as a poet has continued, his work as a designer with his own firm and as a politically active socialist has been even more enduring. An early love of the Middle Ages helped shape all his activities. He rejected what he saw as the cheap and shoddy ideas and goods of the modern age.

At first Morris thought that social reform was possible through the Anglican ministry. But influenced by the work of social commentator and art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), especially the fifth chapter of Stones of Venice (1851–1853), "On the Nature of Gothic," he turned to art instead. Ruskin convinced him of the need for workers to have a sense of pleasure in their work and surroundings. Morris considered being an architect, then a painter. Moving to London he found no furniture to his liking so he designed his own. He found no house he wished to live in. Turning to his friend Philip Webb, Morris had him design the influential Red House in Bexleyheath outside of London in a simplified red brick Gothic. He formed a design firm to work on the inside of the house and it became a commercial operation.

It was through his work as a designer and a businessman that Morris confronted issues of technology and ethics. He felt that much of the design of the time was ugly and false to nature. Its purpose was not beauty but to advertise the wealth of its purchaser; it was not true to its form; it was not true to Ruskin. Morris believed in talent, not genius, and felt he demonstrated this himself by working in all areas of his firm's production. To modern eyes, many of Morris's designs appear elaborate; in their own time they represented a move toward simplicity. He designed furniture, wallpaper, stained glass, textiles, tapestries, tiles, carpets, and toward the end of hislife, books for his last enterprise, the Kelmscott Press. His aim, as he wrote in Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society Catalogue of the First Exhibition, was "to combine clearness of form and firmness of structure with the mystery that comes of abundance and richness of detail" (p. 27). He wished, in his own words, "to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is the one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it" (Morris 1882, p. 4).

Morris was aware of being caught in a technological conundrum. He hated what he saw as the low quality of machine products. He is frequently seen as being anti-machine. He certainly did not admire the machine but he was perfectly willing to use it as a way of producing his wallpapers and chintzes at lower cost, although his firm's finer work was done by hand. He increasingly came to feel that the reliance on technology was becoming an ethical and political matter and that, to use the modern term, corporate interests would demand cheaper and shoddier production. For instance, he hated the new chemical dyes and insisted on using natural ones. He became more and more active in politics because he felt that the only way the ordinary person could make and have truly beautiful and useful objects was if socialism were introduced and the economic arrangements of society transformed. He became a convinced Marxist. This did not result in his changing his business methods. Though his workers were well paid, it was not a firm in which he shared the profits. To charges of hypocrisy, he pointed out that his one individual case would not change society and he needed his income to achieve political reform, indeed revolution, for all.

Morris devoted a great deal of his considerable energy to political agitation. The various political groups with which he was associated were the precursors of the British Labour Party, much as he would have disliked it. In his view, society needed to be totally transformed politically if it were to serve the best scientific, technical, and ethical needs of its members. He outlined his utopia in his most famous prose work, News from Nowhere (1890). Though he fought for total change, at the same time he had an important influence on contemporary capitalist society. He launched the modern preservation movement through the founding of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877), and he helped create a sensitivity in favor of preserving and protecting the environment. Although in practice he made compromises, he left a legacy of belief in simplicity of form and truth to materials that has had a profound effect on the look, usefulness, and technology of the modern world.

Science, Technology, and Literature;; Socialism;; Utopia and Dystopia.

Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society Catalogue of the First Exhibition. (1888). London: London New Gallery.

Briggs, Asa, ed. (1984). William Morris: News from Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Kelvin, Norman, ed. (1984–1996). The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

MacCarthy, Fiona. (1995). William Morris: A Life for Our Time. New York: Knopf.

Morris, May, ed. (1910–1915). The Collected Works, 24 vols. London: Longman, Green & Co.; (1973) New York: Oriole Editions.

Morris, William. (1882). Hopes and Fears for Art. London: Ellis & White.

Stansky, Peter. (1985). Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1889s, and the Arts and Crafts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Thompson, Edward Palmer. (1976). William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. New York: Pantheon.

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