Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Anarchism and libertarian socialism in Britain 17
movements with all my heart: got a friend [Webb] to build me a house [Red House]
very mediaeval in spirit in which I lived for 5 years, and set myself to decorating it;
we found, I and my friend the architect especially, that all the minor arts were in a
state of complete degradation especially in England, and accordingly in 1861 with
the conceited courage of a young man I set myself to reforming all that: and started
a sort of firm for producing decorative articles. 4
The ‘sort of firm’ was Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., in which the principal
participants were Morris himself, Burne-Jones, Webb, Rossetti and Ford Madox
Brown. In 1875 it was reconstituted, amid considerable acrimony, as simply Morris
& Co., with Morris as ‘the only partner’. 5 By this time the business, subsidized in
the early years by Morris’s personal wealth and producing stained glass, furniture,
wallpapers, printed chintzes, woven fabrics and tapestries, was a great success, both
financial and artistic. Morris was revealed as a designer and craftsman of genius:
Almost all the designs we use for surface decoration, wallpapers, textiles, and the
like, I design myself. I have had to learn the theory and to some extent the practice
of weaving, dyeing, & textile printing: all of which I must admit has given me and
still gives me a great deal of pleasure. 6
Concurrently Morris was an acclaimed poet. His first, exceptional collection, The
Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, had been published at his own expense in 1858,
and was followed by The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and the poetic work for which
he was best known and admired in his lifetime, the massive The Earthly Paradise
(1868–70), sprawling over four of the twenty-four volumes of the Collected Works.
On Tennyson’s death in 1892 the two most serious contenders for his successor as
Poet Laureate were Swinburne, who was immediately eliminated for his republicanism
and atheism, and Morris, who even though by then a revolutionary socialist
was sounded out by a member of Gladstone’s Cabinet, James Bryce. 7 Morris was to
become a major socialist thinker. Perry Anderson has shrewdly related the quality
of his utopian vision to the fact that he was
a practising artist of the highest gifts, for whom ordinary work was daily creation….
Moreover, the major fields of Morris’s practice were plastic arts, which are themselves
distinctive within the forms of aesthetic composition for eluding the division
between mental and manual labour. Yet at the same time, he was also a poet and a
writer. Thus one might say that in his figurations of the future, Morris was able to
draw on unique resources in his present, which brought him tangibly nearer to the
conditions he imagined than any of his communist contemporaries: secure wealth,
creative work, polymathic skills.
4 Ibid., II: 1881–1884, p. 228.
5 Ibid., p. 229.
6 Ibid., pp. 229–30. Charles Harvey and Jon Press, William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian
Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), is an exceptional study of Morris as a
businessman.
7 MacCarthy, William Morris, pp. 631–3.