Volume 32, Number 7 · April 25, 1985
Unhappy Utopian
By Tim Hilton
Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts
by Peter Stansky
Princeton University Press, 293 pp., $27.50
The Collected Letters of William Morris Volume I, 1848–1880
edited by Norman Kelvin
Princeton University Press, 626 pp., $55.00
William Morris and the Middle Ages
edited by Joanna Banham, edited by Jennifer Harris
Manchester University Press, 225 pp., $10.50 (paper)
In his rough serge suit and open-necked shirt, William Morris was often taken for an artisan. This pleased him, but in truth his appearance was at odds with his position, and his tastes. Morris had inherited a considerable private income from shares in a copper mine, for he came from the capitalist class he loathed; while his view of the world was not that of a working man but was formed by his enthusiasms when an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-1850s. His years in the university gave him his poetic inspiration, his artistic friends, his beautiful, silent wife, and a potent dream of comradeship in a medieval town set amid meadows. Even Morris's socialism was filled with nostalgia for Oxford: the utopian romance News from Nowhere harks back to his youthful discoveries as though to efface the troubled years of his adult life.
Review, 2824 words
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