William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (Literary Criticism and Cultu

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Taylor pulled the Firm's finances into order and spent much time controlling Morris and ensuring that he worked to schedule. Janey's relationship with Rossetti had continued, and by the late s gossip regarding their affair had spread about London, where they were regularly seen spending time together. In August Morris joined the Burne-Jones family on their holiday in Lymington , while in August both families holidayed together in Oxford.

While there, he enjoyed walks in the countryside and focused on writing poetry. Morris had continued to devote much time to writing poetry. The book was a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of the hero Jason and his quest to find the Golden Fleece. In contrast to Morris's former publication, The Life and Death of Jason was well received, resulting in the publishers paying Morris a fee for the second edition.

Designed as a homage to Chaucer, it consisted of 24 stories, adopted from an array of different cultures, and each by a different narrator; set in the late 14th century, the synopsis revolved around a group of Norsemen who flee the Black Death by sailing away from Europe, on the way discovering an island where the inhabitants continue to venerate the ancient Greek gods. Published in four parts by F. Ellis , it soon gained a cult following and established Morris' reputation as a major poet.

By , Morris had become a public figure in Britain, resulting in repeated press requests for photographs, which he despised. Together they produced prose translations of the Eddas and Sagas for publication in English. Morris deemed calligraphy to be an art form, and taught himself both Roman and italic script, as well as learning how to produce gilded letters. Illustrated with Burne-Jones woodcuts, it was not a popular success. By early summer , Morris began to search for a house outside London where his children could spend time away from the city's pollution.

He settled on Kelmscott Manor in the village of Kelmscott , Oxfordshire , obtaining a joint tenancy on the building with Rossetti in June. Although generally disliking the country, Morris was interested in the Florentine Gothic architecture. Ellis taking his place. Now in complete control of the Firm, Morris took an increased interest in the process of textile dyeing and entered into a co-operative agreement with Thomas Wardle , a silk dyer who operated the Hencroft Works in Leek, Staffordshire.

As a result, Morris would spend time with Wardle at his home on various occasions between summer and spring In the Spring of , the Firm opened a store at No. Continuing with his literary output, Morris translated his own version of Virgil 's Aeneid , titling it The Aeneids of Vergil Although many translations were already available, often produced by trained Classicists, Morris claimed that his unique perspective was as "a poet not a pedant".

He declined, asserting that he felt unqualified, knowing little about scholarship on the theory of poetry. In summer Jenny Morris was diagnosed with epilepsy. Refusing to allow her to be societally marginalised or institutionalised, as was common in the period, Morris insisted that she be cared for by the family.

They then proceeded to visit a number of other cities, including Venice , Padua , and Verona , with Morris attaining a greater appreciation of the country than he had on his previous trip.

Owned by the novelist George MacDonald , Morris would name it Kelmscott House and re-decorate it according to his own taste. Morris became politically active in this period, coming to be associated with the radicalist current within British liberalism. EQA had been founded by campaigners associated with the centre-left Liberal Party who opposed Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli 's alliance with the Ottoman Empire ; the Association highlighted the Ottoman massacre of Bulgarians and feared that the alliance would lead Disraeli to join the Ottomans in going to war with the Russian Empire. However, his discontent with the British liberal movement grew following the election of the Liberal Party's William Ewart Gladstone to the Premiership in Morris was particularly angered that Gladstone's government did not reverse the Disraeli regime's occupation of the Transvaal , introduced the Coercion Bill , and oversaw the Bombardment of Alexandria.

In , Morris visited Burford Church in Oxfordshire , where he was appalled at the restoration conducted by his old mentor, G. He recognised that these programs of architectural restoration led to the destruction or major alteration of genuinely old features in order to replace them with "sham old" features, something which appalled him. Adopting the role of honorary secretary and treasurer, most of the other early members of SPAB were his friends, while the group's program was rooted in Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture He was particularly strong in denouncing the ongoing restoration of Tewkesbury Abbey and was vociferous in denouncing the architects responsible, something that deeply upset Street.

Moving his workshops to the site, the premises were used for weaving, dyeing, and creating stained glass; within three years, craftsmen would be employed there. However, despite Morris's ideals, there was little opportunity for the workers to display their own individual creativity.

1st Edition

Morris was aware that, in retaining the division between employer and employed, the company failed to live up to his own egalitarian ideals, but defended this, asserting that it was impossible to run a socialist company within a competitive capitalist economy. Janey's relationship with Rossetti had continued through a correspondence and occasional visits, although she found him extremely paranoid and was upset by his addiction to chloral. She last saw him in , and he died in April the following year. In January Morris was involved in the establishment of the Radical Union , an amalgam of radical working-class groups which hoped to rival the Liberals, and became a member of its executive committee.

Britain's first socialist party, the Democratic Federation DF , had been founded in by Henry Hyndman , an adherent of the socio-political ideology of Marxism , with Morris joining the DF in January Instead he preferred the writings of William Cobbett and Sergius Stepniak , although he also read the critique of socialism produced by John Stuart Mill.

In May , Morris was appointed to the DF's executive, and was soon elected to the position of treasurer. Morris aided the DF using his artistic and literary talents; he designed the group's membership card, [] and helped author their manifesto, Socialism Made Plain , in which they demanded improved housing for workers, free compulsory education for all children, free school meals, an eight-hour working day , the abolition of national debt, nationalisation of land, banks, and railways, and the organisation of agriculture and industry under state control and co-operative principles.

Morris also regularly contributed articles to the newspaper, in doing so befriending another contributor, George Bernard Shaw. His socialist activism monopolised his time, forcing him to abandon a translation of the Persian Shahnameh. However, the group was facing an internal schism between those such as Hyndman , who argued for a parliamentary path toward socialism, and those like Morris who deemed the Houses of Parliament intrinsically corrupt and capitalist.

Personal issues between Morris and Hyndman were exacerbated by their attitude to British foreign policy; Morris was staunchly anti-imperialist while Hyndman expressed patriotic sentiment encouraging some foreign intervention. As the leading figure in the League Morris embarked on a series of speeches and talks on street corners, in working men's clubs, and in lecture theatres across England and Scotland. To combat this, the League joined a Defence Club with other socialist groups, including the SDF, for which Morris was appointed treasurer.

Morris oversaw production of the League's monthly—soon to become weekly—newspaper, Commonweal , serving as its editor for six years, during which time he kept it financially afloat. First published in February , it would contain contributions from such prominent socialists as Engels, Shaw, Paul Lafargue , Wilhelm Liebknecht , and Karl Kautsky , with Morris also regularly writing articles and poems for it. Set in Kent during the Peasants' Revolt of , it contained strong socialist themes although proved popular among those of different ideological viewpoints, resulting in its publication in book form by Reeves and Turner in From January to October , Morris serialised his novel, News from Nowhere , in Commonweal , resulting in improved circulation for the paper.

In March it was published in book form, before being translated into French, Italian, and German by and becoming a classic among Europe's socialist community. Combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction , the book tells the tale of a contemporary socialist, William Guest, who falls asleep and awakes in the midth century, discovering a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production.

In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems; it was a depiction of Morris' ideal socialist society. Morris had also continued with his translation work; in April , Reeves and Turner published the first volume of Morris' translation of Homer 's Odyssey , with the second following in November. It told the story of socialists who are put on trial in front of a corrupt judge; the tale ends with the prisoners behind freed by a proletariat revolution.

The Second International emerged from the Congress, although Morris was distraught at its chaotic and disorganised proceedings. At the League's Fourth Conference in May , factional divisions became increasingly apparent between Morris' anti-parliamentary socialists, the parliamentary socialists, and the anarchists; the Bloomsbury Branch were expelled for supporting parliamentary action.

Although the proposal faced some opposition, Morris would be elected to the Guild in , and was elected to the position of master in Giving lectures on tapestries for the group, in he would be elected president.

Although his socialist activism had decreased, he remained involved with the Hammersmith Socialist Society, and in October oversaw the creation of a short-lived newsletter, the Hammersmith Socialist Record. It contained both prose and aspects of poetic verse. On publication, Morris' Beowulf would be critically panned. When the press closed in it had produced over 50 works. The Kelmscott Press would go on to publish 23 of Morris' books, more than those of any other author. By the early s, Morris was increasingly ill and living largely as an invalid; aside from his gout , he also exhibited signs of epilepsy.

Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings

Mainstream press obituaries trivialised or dismissed his involvement in socialism, although the socialist press focused largely on this aspect of his career. Thompson described him as having a "robust bearing, and a slight roll in his walk", alongside a "rough beard" and "disordered hair". He has a loud voice and a nervous restless manner and a perfectly unaffected and businesslike address. His talk indeed is wonderfully to the point and remarkable for clear good sense.

Politically, Morris was a staunch revolutionary socialist and anti-imperialist, [] and although raised a Christian he came to identify as a non-religious atheist. However, he believed that it led to little more than a "yearning nostalgia or a sweet complaint" and that Morris only became "a realist and a revolutionary" when he adopted socialism in Morris's behaviour was often erratic. William Morris was a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, essays, and translations of ancient and medieval texts.

His first poems were published when he was 24 years old, and he was polishing his final novel, The Sundering Flood , at the time of his death. His daughter May's edition of Morris's Collected Works — runs to 24 volumes, and two more were published in Morris began publishing poetry and short stories in through the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which he founded with his friends and financed while at university.

It is a grimly realistic piece set during the Hundred Years War in which the doomed lovers Jehane and Robert have a last parting in a convincingly portrayed rain-swept countryside. An additional volume was published under the title of Three Northern Love Stories in In the last nine years of his life, Morris wrote a series of imaginative fictions usually referred to as the "prose romances".

Morris's prose style in these novels has been praised by Edward James , who described them as "among the most lyrical and enchanting fantasies in the English language. On the other hand, L. Sprague de Camp considered Morris's fantasies to be not wholly successful, partly because Morris eschewed many literary techniques from later eras. Early fantasy writers like Lord Dunsany , E. Eddison [] and James Branch Cabell [] were familiar with Morris's romances. The Wood Beyond the World is considered to have heavily influenced C.

Lewis ' Narnia series, while J. The young Tolkien attempted a retelling of the story of Kullervo from the Kalevala in the style of The House of the Wolfings ; [] Tolkien considered much of his literary work to have been inspired by an early reading of Morris, even suggesting that he was unable to better Morris's work; the names of characters such as " Gandolf " and the horse Silverfax appear in The Well at the World's End.

Sir Henry Newbolt 's medieval allegorical novel, Aladore , was influenced by Morris's fantasies. During his lifetime, Morris produced items in a range of crafts, mainly those to do with furnishing, [] including over designs for wall-paper, textiles, and embroideries, over for stained glass windows, three typefaces, and around borders and ornamentations for the Kelmscott Press. Mackail asserted that Morris became "a manufacturer not because he wished to make money, but because he wished to make the things he manufactured.

Street had co-written a book on Ecclesiastical Embroidery in , and was a staunch advocate of abandoning faddish woolen work on canvas in favour of more expressive embroidery techniques based on Opus Anglicanum , a surface embroidery technique popular in medieval England. He was also fond of hand knotted Persian carpets [] and advised the South Kensington Museum in the acquisition of fine Kerman carpets. Morris taught himself embroidery, working with wool on a frame custom-built from an old example.

Once he had mastered the technique he trained his wife Jane, her sister Bessie Burden and others to execute designs to his specifications. Following in Street's footsteps, Morris became active in the growing movement to return originality and mastery of technique to embroidery, and was one of the first designers associated with the Royal School of Art Needlework with its aim to "restore Ornamental Needlework for secular purposes to the high place it once held among decorative arts.

Morris took up the practical art of dyeing as a necessary adjunct of his manufacturing business. He spent much of his time at Staffordshire dye works mastering the processes of that art and making experiments in the revival of old or discovery of new methods.

William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings

One result of these experiments was to reinstate indigo dyeing as a practical industry and generally to renew the use of those vegetable dyes, such as the red derived from madder , which had been driven almost out of use by the anilines. Dyeing of wools, silks, and cottons was the necessary preliminary to what he had much at heart, the production of woven and printed fabrics of the highest excellence; and the period of incessant work at the dye-vat — was followed by a period during which he was absorbed in the production of textiles — , and more especially in the revival of carpet-weaving as a fine art.

Morris's patterns for woven textiles, some of which were also machine made under ordinary commercial conditions, included intricate double-woven furnishing fabrics in which two sets of warps and wefts are interlinked to create complex gradations of colour and texture. Nineteenth and twentieth century avant-garde artistic movements took an interest in the typographical arts, greatly enriching book design and illustration.

In the late nineteenth century, William Morris founded the Arts and Crafts movement, which emphasized the value of traditional craft skills that seemed to be disappearing in the mass industrial age. His designs, like the work of the Pre-Raphaelite painters with whom he was associated, referred frequently to medieval motifs. In he founded the Kelmscott Press, which by the time it closed in had produced over fifty works using traditional printing methods, a hand-driven press and hand-made paper. His work inspired many small private presses in the following century.

The Kelmscott Press influenced much of the fine press movement in England and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It brought the need for books that were aesthetic objects as well as words to the attention of the reading and publishing worlds. At Kelmscott Press the perfection of book-making was under his constant supervision and practical assistance. It was his ambition to produce a perfect work to restore all the beauty of illuminated lettering, richness of gilding and grace of binding that used to make a volume the treasure of a king. His efforts were constantly directed towards giving the world at least one book that exceeded anything that had ever appeared.

With this in mind, Morris took equal care on the choice of his paper which he adapted to his subject with the same care that governed his selection of material for binding.

As a result, few but only the wealthy could purchase his lavish works, mainly due to how intrinsic his work was. However, he realized that creating works in the manner of the middle ages was difficult in a profit-grinding society. President of the William Morris Society Hans Brill referred to Morris as "one of the outstanding figures of the nineteenth century", [] while Linda Parry termed him the "single most important figure in British textile production".

He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. Aymer Vallance was commissioned to produce the first biography of Morris, published in , after Morris' death, as per the latter's wishes.

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MacCarthy's biography, William Morris: Morris has exerted a powerful influence on thinking about art and design over the past century. He has been the constant niggle in the conscience. How can we combat all this luxury and waste? What drove him into revolutionary activism was his anger and shame at the injustices within society.

He burned with guilt at the fact that his "good fortune only" allowed him to live in beautiful surroundings and to pursue the work he adored. One of the meeting rooms in the Oxford Union, decorated with the wallpaper in his style, is named the Morris Room. Standen in West Sussex , England, was designed by Webb between and and decorated with Morris carpets, fabrics and wallpapers. Morris's homes Red House and Kelmscott Manor have been preserved.

Red House was acquired by the National Trust in and is open to the public. Kelmscott Manor is owned by the Society of Antiquaries of London and is open to the public. William Morris and the Art of Design and accompanying publication. Morris's literary works, translations, life and images, the Book Arts. All Saints, Middleton Cheney, Northamptonshire. All Saints, Middleton Cheney — Solomon.

Strawberry Thief , furnishing fabric, designed Morris, Detail of a watercolour design for the Little Flower carpet showing a portion of the central medallion, by William Morris. Panel of ceramic tiles designed by Morris and produced by William De Morgan , Kelmscott Press typefaces and colophon, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Textile designer, novelist, and socialist activist — For other people named William Morris, see William Morris disambiguation. William Morris by Frederick Hollyer , Morris' Acanthus wallpaper design, , left and a page from Morris' illuminated manuscript of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones.

Two of Morris' designs: Snakeshead printed textile and "Peacock and Dragon" woven wool furnishing fabric When we have enough people of that way of thinking, they will find out what action is necessary for putting their principles in practice. Therefore, I say, make Socialists.

We Socialists can do nothing else that is useful. First page of text, with typical ornamented border. Troilus and Criseyde , from the Kelmscott Chaucer. Illustration by Burne-Jones and decorations and typefaces by Morris.

The SPAB Manifesto

Cabbage and vine tapestry, Design for "Tulip and Willow" indigo -discharge wood-block printed fabric, William Morris Queen Guenevere and Isoude, Detail, William Morris window, Cattistock Church, Detail from The Worship of the Shepherds window But those who make the changes wrought in our day under the name of Restoration, while professing to bring back a building to the best time of its history, have no guide but each his own individual whim to point out to them what is admirable and what contemptible; while the very nature of their task compels them to destroy something and to supply the gap by imagining what the earlier builders should or might have done.

Moreover, in the course of this double process of destruction and addition, the whole surface of the building is necessarily tampered with; so that the appearance of antiquity is taken away from such old parts of the fabric as are left, and there is no laying to rest in the spectator the suspicion of what may have been lost; and in short, a feeble and lifeless forgery is the final result of all the wasted labour.

It is sad to say, that in this manner most of the bigger Minsters, and a vast number of more humble buildings, both in England and on the Continent, have been dealt with by men of talent often, and worthy of better employment, but deaf to the claims of poetry and history in the highest sense of the words. For what is left we plead before our architects themselves, before the official guardians of buildings, and before the public generally, and we pray them to remember how much is gone of the religion, thought and manners of time past, never by almost universal consent, to be Restored; and to consider whether it be possible to Restore those buildings, the living spirit of which, it cannot be too often repeated, was an inseparable part of that religion and thought, and those past manners.

For our part we assure them fearlessly, that of all the Restorations yet undertaken, the worst have meant the reckless stripping a building of some of its most interesting material features; whilst the best have their exact analogy in the Restoration of an old picture, where the partly-perished work of the ancient craftsmaster has been made neat and smooth by the tricky hand of some unoriginal and thoughtless hack of today.

If, for the rest, it be asked us to specify what kind of amount of art, style, or other interest in a building makes it worth protecting, we answer, anything which can be looked on as artistic, picturesque, historical, antique, or substantial: It is for all these buildings, therefore, of all times and styles, that we plead, and call upon those who have to deal with them, to put Protection in the place of Restoration, to stave off decay by daily care, to prop a perilous wall or mend a leaky roof by such means as are obviously meant for support or covering, and show no pretence of other art, and otherwise to resist all tampering with either the fabric or ornament of the building as it stands; if it has become inconvenient for its present use, to raise another building rather than alter or enlarge the old one; in fine to treat our ancient buildings as monuments of a bygone art, created by bygone manners, that modern art cannot meddle with without destroying.

Thus, and thus only, shall we escape the reproach of our learning being turned into a snare to us; thus, and thus only can we protect our ancient buildings, and hand them down instructive and venerable to those that come after us. Skip to main content. The Manifesto A society coming before the public with such a name as that above written must needs explain how, and why, it proposes to protect those ancient buildings which, to most people doubtless, seem to have so many and such excellent protectors.

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