William Morris Biography Quotes 14 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
William Morris was born in 1834 at Walthamstow, then on the edge of London, into a prosperous middle-class family. From an early age he absorbed the landscapes, churches, and vernacular buildings of southern England, experiences that later shaped his taste for medieval art and craft. After a period at Marlborough College he went up to Exeter College, Oxford, where he forged a lifelong friendship with Edward Burne-Jones. The two were enthralled by the writings of John Ruskin, whose defense of Gothic architecture and handcraft gave intellectual ground to their aesthetic ideals. Morris considered a career in the Church, but his fascination with buildings and decoration took him to apprentice in the architectural office of George Edmund Street. There he worked closely with the young architect Philip Webb and met artists connected with the Pre-Raphaelite circle, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown.

Marriage, Red House, and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle
In 1859 Morris married Jane Burden, later widely known as Jane Morris, who became both muse and collaborator. That same year he commissioned Philip Webb to design Red House at Bexleyheath, a domestic retreat built in a plain, honest manner using local materials. Friends from the Pre-Raphaelite community, among them Rossetti and Burne-Jones, helped decorate its interiors with murals, furniture, and textiles. Working together to furnish Red House convinced Morris that there was a broader public need for well-designed, hand-made objects. The social and creative bonds formed in this period anchored much of his subsequent work.

Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. and the Craft Revival
In 1861 Morris helped to found the decorative arts firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Peter Paul Marshall, and Charles Faulkner. The firm produced stained glass, furniture, textiles, metalwork, and wallpapers, often for churches and domestic interiors. Burne-Jones supplied celebrated designs for stained glass; Webb refined the architectural sense of the work; and the firm benefited from the tiles and ceramics of William De Morgan. In 1875 Morris assumed full control and reorganized the workshop as Morris & Co., expanding production while trying to maintain high craft standards. In pursuit of better materials and color, he partnered with the dye expert Thomas Wardle to revive natural dyes. In 1881 he moved manufacture to the Merton Abbey Works, where water from the River Wandle and careful workshop planning supported the labor-intensive processes he prized. Patterns such as Strawberry Thief and Willow Bough exemplified his devotion to nature, structure, and repeat design.

Writings, Poetry, and Medievalism
Morris wrote throughout his life. Early volumes like The Defence of Guenevere signaled his attraction to medieval legend, while the long poem The Earthly Paradise brought him wide readership. He explored northern sagas with the Icelandic scholar Eirikr Magnusson, collaborating on translations that deepened his knowledge of narrative and myth; he also journeyed to Iceland, further confirming his admiration for premodern societies. His epic poem Sigurd the Volsung and later prose romances drew from these sources, weaving tales of fellowship, honor, and craft. The narratives were more than literary exercises; they proposed a vision of a life in which useful labor and beauty were inseparable.

Art, Society, and Socialism
Under the moral influence of Ruskin and sharpened by urban industrial realities, Morris concluded that the degradation of work under capitalism was the enemy of art. In the early 1880s he joined the Social Democratic Federation led by H. M. Hyndman, then helped found the Socialist League with allies such as Eleanor Marx and Ernest Belfort Bax. Based at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, he organized lectures, wrote pamphlets, and addressed street meetings, insisting that art was a human birthright rather than a luxury. He later formed the Hammersmith Socialist Society to keep the emphasis on education and democratic organization. Visual allies like Walter Crane developed socialist imagery congruent with Morris's ideals, while inside his own firm he attempted to balance fair employment with the realities of a market economy. In 1877 he had already founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings with Philip Webb and other colleagues, opposing destructive restoration and arguing for responsible conservation, thereby marrying politics to heritage.

Kelmscott Manor, Personal Network, and Domestic Arts
Morris's domestic life intertwined with his work. Jane Morris contributed greatly to the firm's textiles and embroidery, and her presence inspired paintings by Rossetti and designs across the circle. The couple's daughters, Jenny and May, grew up within this creative environment; May Morris became an accomplished designer and a leader in embroidery, later stewarding her father's archive and ideals. The family divided time between Kelmscott House in Hammersmith and Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, a seventeenth-century house that embodied the rural life and craftsmanship Morris loved. He cultivated a close network that included Burne-Jones, Webb, De Morgan, Wardle, and the practical manager George Wardle, whose organization helped sustain Morris & Co. through decades of commissions for churches and homes.

Printing, Typography, and the Kelmscott Press
A lecture by the typographer Emery Walker in the late 1880s prompted Morris to study early printing. Dissatisfied with modern book design, he founded the Kelmscott Press in Hammersmith in 1891 to print volumes with rich, legible type, handmade paper, and carefully cut wood-engravings. He designed new typefaces, including the Golden, Troy, and Chaucer types, drawing on fifteenth-century models. The press issued works by himself and by authors he revered, culminating in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer in 1896. That book combined Edward Burne-Jones's illustrations with Morris's pages, borders, and initials, the images cut in wood by skilled engravers after Burne-Jones's drawings. The Kelmscott books were intended not as antiquarian curiosities but as living examples of how beauty, clarity, and craft could coexist in a modern context.

Theory, Practice, and Influence
Across media, Morris argued for the unity of the arts: architecture, furniture, textiles, and books should form a coherent whole serving everyday life. He insisted that design grew from materials and process, not from superficial ornament. His workshops trained artisans, revived techniques, and modeled collaborative making among designers, dyers, weavers, and printers. Though his goods were expensive, he saw the workshops as experiments pointing toward a future in which dignified labor would produce beautiful, affordable things. Through lectures, essays, and example, he became a central figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, shaping the thought of designers and reformers in Britain and abroad. His ideas influenced contemporaries such as Walter Crane and later figures who advanced design education, historic preservation, and the integration of art with industry.

Later Years and Legacy
In the 1890s Morris divided his energies among the firm, the press, writing, and public advocacy. He continued to travel, lecture, and oversee production at Merton Abbey while guiding the Kelmscott Press's ambitious list. Strain and ill health increased, but he worked to the end, dying in 1896. Friends and collaborators such as Burne-Jones, Webb, De Morgan, and Walker carried forward aspects of his program; Jane and May Morris preserved and interpreted his work. Through Morris & Co. interiors, SPAB's conservation principles, socialist lectures and romances like News from Nowhere, and the example of the Kelmscott Chaucer, he left a durable template for aligning art with life. His career showed how a designer, poet, and organizer, in partnership with a remarkable circle of friends and colleagues, could challenge an age of mass production and inspire a more humane idea of making.

Our collection contains 14 quotes who is written by William, under the main topics: Wisdom - Meaning of Life - Writing - Freedom - Free Will & Fate.

Other people realated to William: Algernon Charles Swinburne (Poet), John Burns (Activist), Alec Issigonis (Designer), David Geffen (Businessman), E. P. Thompson (Historian), Dante G. Rossetti (Poet), Wally Amos (Businessman), Gustav Stickley (Architect), Gertrude Jekyll (Celebrity), Walter Crane (Artist)