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William Morris: A Life for Our Time

February 13,

Morris is first sent to school at nine years old, riding the two-mile journey on the same pony he would later take on excursions around Epping Forest. Marlborough next, Morris now aged fourteen. It’s lawless and violent there - the schoolboys, feral brats of upper-middle class Anglican clergymen, pelt stones at passing farmers and skin wild animals in Savernake Forest, a more cultivated Epping. Morris hides out in it, exploring churches and ancient burial-mounds, weaving nets. At Oxford, Morris is intended for the Church, but rails against Anglicanism. He and Burne-Jones edge closer to Catholic doctrine, drawing on the recent Tractarian disputes, and gain an interest in the Gothic revival as a rejuvenation of medieval Christianity. With Burne-Jones Morris has ‘his first real friendship’ (p), and a real group of friends also - they read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats and Wordsworth to each other, and write poetry themselves. Both Morris and Burne-Jones imagine becoming part of a celibate, sacred brotherhood devoted to art and worship - they discover Ruskin and the Pre-Raphelites, and Morris starts sketching architectural forms. Oxford’s stifling academic atmosphere bores him - he is impatient for something else.

He visits North

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Throughout his life William Morris was a well-respected writer, producing widely read translations, novels, essays and poetry. Eager to design as well as to write texts, he experimented with calligraphy and page decoration, and later set up his own publishing company, the Kelmscott Press.

It was the illuminated manuscripts he had seen in Canterbury Cathedral as a boy that ignited Morris's enthusiasm for historical texts. It was fuelled further by regular visits to the Bodleian Library when he was a student at Oxford, and after graduating he made his own attempts at decorating manuscripts. Morris was looking for an antidote to, as he saw it, the ugliness of the newly industrial world. He was also influenced by the Gothic Revival, a 19th-century fashion that looked back to medieval forms and patterns, and which had brought the details of Gothic ornament into the public realm with books such as Owen Jones and Noel Humphreys' Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages (). In addition, Morris's friendship with F.S. Ellis, a publisher and rare-book dealer, gave Morris direct access to historical works, including a set of 16th-century Italian writing-books (books showing examples of calligraphy).

Between and Morris began to experiment with calligraphy, writing out and (in whole o