The archaic appearance of the Kelmscott Press publications can lend the impression of revivalism in its fundamentalist form. This chapter considers the modern (and partially modern) technologies employed by Morris’s bookmaking venture, ranging from Emery Walker’s method of photographic enlargement in the development of typefaces, to the employment of early nineteenth-century metal presses. The discussion focuses initially on Morris’s broader relationship with technology, including the influence of John Ruskin. As with Ruskin, an initial impression of hostility to all mechanised solutions gives way to qualifications based in the form of energy harnessed, the context of the work, and the relationship with human agency or intelligence. Morris’s account of weaving provides a particularly suggestive basis for rethinking his relationship with technology, and this opens the way for a discussion of two lens-based solutions which he applied to work at the printing press. The first relates to the mediation of the hand by photographic means, most notably Burne-Jones’s hand as designer of the Press’s woodcuts. The second concerns technologies of projection and enlargement, initially employed by Walker at the ‘magic lantern’ lecture that inspired the foundation of the Press, and then in the design of typefaces based on early Venetian models.

This chapter tracks Morris’s biographical involvements with Oxford across his lifetime, and examines the role of Oxford, as both city and university, in prompting the radical political commitments of his later years. On his arrival there as an undergraduate in 1853, he was deeply disillusioned with the official teaching of the university, but made a number of formative friendships which opened to him new cultural and social horizons. The intellectual influence of John Ruskin interacted with Morris’s own intense response to Oxford’s ancient architecture to propel him further in the direction of social critique. In later years, as activist for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Morris threw himself into campaigns to protect key Oxford sites. As a socialist activist from 1883, he regarded Oxford as an important city to capture for the cause, lecturing there on socialism no less than six times (ably assisted by his old friend Charles Faulkner, who founded the Oxford branch of the Socialist League). We can also trace links between the Bodleian Library’s holdings and Morris’s own publishing venture, the Kelmscott Press; and Oxford plays a significant role in both the local imagery and overall geography of his utopia News from Nowhere.

This chapter examines the series of prose romances that William Morris wrote in the 1850s, 1880s and 1890s and that were rediscovered in the twentieth century by writers, editors and critics of fantasy. The first section, ‘Romance and Fantasy’, recovers the moment of Morris’s canonisation as the ‘inventor’ of imaginary-world fantasy and briefly considers his influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, before tracing fantasy’s roots back to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century definitions of the romance genre. The second and third sections, ‘The Romances of the 1890s and the Germanic Romances’ and ‘The Political Romances and the Romances of the 1850s’, provide an overview of the key formal and thematic characteristics of Morris’s texts, proceeding in reverse order from his final medievalist fantasies, via his socialist timeslip dream visions to the short-form romances of his student days. These sections highlight the variable significance of communalism at different stages of Morris’s writing career and introduce comparisons with contemporary works by Mark Twain and Edward Bellamy. The final section of the chapter offers a case study of The Story of the Glittering Plain (1890), focusing on the themes of mortality and kinship.

The chapter discusses William Morris’s understanding of pattern and his designs for wallpaper and woven and printed textiles. It acknowledges his call for pattern that would be soothing and restful for the viewer. The chapter explains that, for Morris, pattern was nonetheless expected to function on an intellectual level. Good pattern could engage with personal, political and ethical issues at a level of high seriousness, he thought. Reference is made to Morris’s reading of Gottfried Semper and to Morris’s partial translation (from a French edition) of Ferdowski’s Shahnameh (c. 1010 CE) recounting pre-Islamic Persian myths. Looking at Morris’s theoretical and instructional writing and considering designs of the early 1880s such as Windrush and Strawberry Thief, the chapter explores themes of fabrication, stylisation of plant forms, cultural exchange, the ongoing redeployment of ornamental motifs and aesthetic engagement with Persian culture as well as allusions to familial and romantic love. Traits of Morris designs such as symmetrical paired figures, crossing plant stems, vertical ‘tree of life’ axes, emphatic meanders in certain designs, variations in scale and composite plant forms are investigated and interpreted. The chapter demonstrates that Morris’s designs offer evidence of his commitment to the intellectual dimensions of pattern.

Between 1867 and 1873, William Morris composed an astounding quantity of his best poetry – The Life and Death of Jason, The Earthly Paradise, and Love Is Enough, as well as several narratives and personal lyrics largely unpublished in his lifetime. In these, Morris repurposed the poetic forms and legends of prior European traditions to confront an urgent question: in the absence of the orthodox religious and political ideals that suffused past literature, how can a modern poet represent the struggles of his contemporaries toward meaningful lives? Is heroism still possible and, if so, what should be its qualities? Paradoxically, even as Morris’s answers celebrate myth and romance as models for present-day living, they assert the need for individuals to accept incompletion and partial defeat in the service of ultimate aims, recognizing that their lives form part of a communal, transhistorical pattern. Morris’s major poems offer his contemporaries not closure, but understanding, providing a form of psychological realism through myth and fantasy. Their preoccupations – the nature of love and the need for deferral – would accompany him through later embodiments of his convictions, including his final tragic epic Sigurd the Volsung and the visionary and utopian News from Nowhere.

William Morris was among the most prescient of ecological thinkers in Victorian arts and literature and his work offers a searing appraisal of industrialism from within the context of its epochal rise. During this time Britain and its Empire saw major transformations in the natural world and in human relations to it, and living in the context of the first fully fossil-fuel-powered society, Victorian writers and artists were the first to observe the impacts of coal-fired industry and render them into art. Only a few authors, however, including Morris, channelled such observations into a full-throated critique of what was lost and diminished in the process of industrialization. This chapter draws on Mikhail Bakhtin, Amitav Ghosh, and other theorists of narrative to explore how News from Nowhere, The Wood Beyond the World, and other works by Morris draw on older literary depictions of the human place in the natural world. In the longer history of art and literature, landscape and nature were not always conceived as a mere backdrop to human drama, though this was increasingly the tendency in modern literature. Morris’s work challenged this tendency by drawing on older forms to produce an ecological vision that, paradoxically, feels remarkably timely today.

Serving as the editorial introduction to the Cambridge Companion to William Morris, this chapter offers a broad outline of Morris’s life, emphasizing the historical and cultural factors that informed his artistic philosophy and wide-ranging output. The contours of Morris’s critical reception, past and present, are also sketched, and brought into dialogue with the chapters collected here. The first part of the discussion considers ‘The Making of Morris’: that is, the complex nexus of influences and events that enabled him to make a distinctive and enduring contribution in so many fields. Much of this discussion is biographical, but it also considers spatial and geographical ways of understanding the shape of his life. The second part is entitled ‘Morris Making Us’,. It proposes ways in which Morris’s influence continues to condition and enable our ways of thinking as inheritors of his legacy.

For the whole of his life, William Morris lived within reach of the River Thames or one of its tributaries. In the last twenty-five years, he was within a stone’s throw of it at Kelmscott Manor on the Upper Thames, at Kelmscott House beside it in urban Hammersmith, and at his Merton Abbey factory on the River Wandle. The landscape of ‘the infant Thames’ being his ‘Heaven on earth’, he sought to ‘forget’ – a key word in The Earthly Paradise – the mighty lower river with its filth and degradation, though he betrays a feeling for the whole river as national artery. In his utopian romance, News from Nowhere, his protagonist laments the fact that the Thames is not celebrated in literature. The romance in question seeks to rectify that by imagining a boat trip between Morris’s houses – something he himself twice undertook – and this becomes, as it shapes the narrative, a journey back into the heart of England and forward through a country transformed into something like paradise. The sense of happiness is partly achieved through the exclusion from the story of anything dark or painful and, in this, it may remind us of Morris the pattern designer, whose fabrics – a group of them named after Thames tributaries – evoke an inviolate nature and, through it, contentment and rest.

As an undergraduate Morris was enthralled to read the work of John Ruskin, especially The Stones of Venice (1851–53). This book would profoundly influence Morris’s thinking for the rest of his life. The Kelmscott Press would publish a chapter from it – ‘The Nature of Gothic’ – in 1892. Morris developed Ruskin’s argument that the Gothic craftsman of the Middle Ages achieved pleasure in his work as a result of creative freedom and collaborative effort denied him by the factory system of industrial capitalism. Although Ruskin’s values were deeply rooted in Toryism and Christian morality, Morris accommodated Ruskin’s ideas and simultaneously embraced socialism. In 1883, Morris told an audience in the hall of University College, Oxford that he was ‘a member of a socialist propaganda’. Ruskin, seated on the platform throughout the lecture, reportedly rose at the end to praise Morris as ‘the great conceiver and doer, the man at once a poet, an artist, and a workman, and his old and dear friend’. This chapter describes the nature of the relationship between Morris and Ruskin and considers the significance, extent and limitations of his influence.

This chapter explores William Morris’s developing views about the ‘woman question’ across his life, focusing in particular on his comments within press interviews, his literary works, and his interpersonal relationships, be this with employees, friends, or family. It considers the past scholarship on this topic, which has tended to focus on debating whether Morris can be considered a ‘feminist’ or not. It emphasises that although Morris agreed in the need for adult suffrage for all and at times actively promoted progressive causes such as equal pay and the need for sexual freedom (even within marriage), he did still believe women had different roles to play to men in society, although these views could be inchoate and ill defined. The chapter showcases how Morris’s views were shaped by the male-orientated networks he inhabited in his political and professional life and by contemporary anxieties about the supposed effeminacy of artistic men. Moreover, it examines his views in relation to others within the networks of fellowship which made up the socialist and women’s movements, to situate and compare his views, and to best explore how Morris’s writings and ideas contributed to public discourse about women and gender at the brink of the twentieth century.

New Negro writers and artists often spotlighted the contrast between the liberatory potential of dynamic bodily movement and the restricted social spaces of Harlem, which were shaped by segregation. This chapter examines a variety of cultural texts – social and cultural history by Wallace Thurman and James Weldon Johnson, visual art by Winold Reiss, and short fiction by Rudolph Fisher and Langston Hughes – to argue that representations of dance and bodily movement opened the way for creative engagement with the spatial dynamics of segregation and overcrowding in Harlem, which was fascinated by the look, the sound, and the feel of dance. Fisher’s short story “High Yaller,” for instance, probes the affective or subjective dimensions of segregation, passing, and colorism through a sustained focus on dancing bodies in “jim-crowed” scenes of Harlem cabaret and the traversing of “color lines” in the cityscape of New York.

This chapter traces the complex legacies of multiple religious traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and syncretistic spirituality, as they inform utopian strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction, including the miraculous realism of Toni Morrison, the lyrical historicism of Marilynne Robinson, and the religiously themed science fiction of James Blish and G. Willow Wilson. Apocalyptic concepts, with a strong emphasis on transformative and liberatory possibility, are a recurrent element of these narratives.  The term “spirituality” itself is ambiguous, particularly in a national context in which religion has been a source of both oppression and hope. The chapter draws on postsecular critiques of literature and culture that, in John McClure’s terms, indicate “a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religion.” It argues that skeptical perspectives do not necessarily militate against the aesthetic and ethical potential of theologically oriented utopian fiction.