Morris Co

William Morris is one of the greatest and best-known British designers. This new introduction to his work puts his ideas into a modern context, showing how his designs can be used not only in traditional interiors but also in contemporary settings. Morris created highly distinctive designs for wallpapers and textiles, many of which are still enjoying enormous popularity today. Through his company, Morris & Co, he contributed to the transformation of interior design at the end of the 19th century and gave expression to the ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The highly accessible text looks at pattern and colour, as well as sources of inspiration such as nature, literature and legend. It also offers a fascinating insight into his working practices which were so different from those of many of his Victorian contemporaries. His desire to make beautiful things was at the core of his enterprise and his subtle colour schemes and evocative designs, many of which are still in production, have a timeless appeal. Through specially commissioned photographs showing rooms using his designs in a wide variety of settings, and details of individual textile and wallpaper designs, the book provides a wealth of ideas and inspiration for contemporary home owners.

William Morris (1834–96) was an English poet, decorative artist, translator, romance writer, book designer, preservationist, socialist theorist, and political activist, whose admirers have been drawn to the sheer intensity of his artistic endeavors and efforts to live up to radical ideals of social justice. This Companion draws together historical and critical responses to the impressive range of Morris’s multi-faceted life and activities: his homes, travels, family, business practices, decorative artwork, poetry, fantasy romances, translations, political activism, eco-socialism, and book collecting and design. Each chapter provides valuable historical and literary background information, reviews relevant opinions on its subject from the late-nineteenth century to the present, and offers new approaches to important aspects of its topic. Morris’s eclectic methodology and the perennial relevance of his insights and practice make this an essential handbook for those interested in art history, poetry, translation, literature, book design, environmentalism, political activism, and Victorian and utopian studies.

"Essays on fine printing in the UK and USA during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, first published in various journals, edited and with added illustrations"--

This book offers a new interpretation of William Morris’s utopianism as a strategic extension of his political writing. Morris’s utopian writing, alongside his journalism and public lectures, constituted part of a sustained counter-hegemonic project that intervened both into the life-world of the fin de siècle socialist movement, as well as the dominant literary cultures of his day. Owen Holland demonstrates this by placing Morris in conversation with writers of first-wave feminism, nineteenth-century pastoralists, as well as the romance revivalists and imperialists of the 1880s. In doing so, he revises E.P. Thompson’s and Miguel Abensour’s argument that Morris’s utopian writing should be conceived as anti-political and heuristic, concerned with the pedagogic education of desire, rather than with the more mundane work of propaganda. He shows how Morris’s utopianism emerged against the grain of the now-here, embroiled in instrumental, propagandistic polemic, complicating Thompson’s and Abensour’s view of its anti-political character.

This book is a companion to The Unwinding. It contains within images that tell stories, but it reads like a silent film. Each of the images is an invitation to dream.The tales of this silent edition are not pinned to the page by words. Each dreamer will find their own path, perhaps a new one each time they return.The illustrations are intended to inspire: there is space to draw and write, to paint dreams and stories, thoughts and verse, in new worlds, wherever your pen may guide you.