Marxist, maker and maverick: The curious contradictions of Britain's best textile designer

In November 1884, a young John Bruce Glasier heard William Morris speak to the Glasgow branch of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and was enraptured. A burly figure with an unkempt beard, Topsy, as Morris was known to his close friends, left a strong impression on the future politician, who described him ‘in his ever-afterwards familiar dark-blue serge jacket and lighter-blue cotton shirt and collar, (without scarf or tie) and with the grandest head I had ever seen on the shoulders of a man… A kind of glow seemed to be about him, such as we see lighting up the faces in a room when a beautiful child comes in’.

Morris (1834–96) had joined the SDF the previous year and now, aged 50, was immersed in a punishing round of public talks to promote the emergent socialist movement. It was a year of personal transformation, having started with his co-founding of the Art Workers Guild and ending with the Socialist League, which he established on December 30 with Karl Marx’s daughter. Morris was convinced that there could be no radical development in design without an equivalent revolution in society.

As a young man, he had channelled his prodigious energies into the gentler revolution of Red House at Bexleyheath, south-east London, a restrained, vernacular-Gothic essay in warm red brick and tile designed by his friend Philip Webb.

Red House encapsulated Morris’s vision for a unified work of art, integrated with orchards and a rose-trellised garden and designed and made collectively. Its interior decoration challenged the discordant clutter of mass-produced furnishings that typified High Victorian taste. ‘If we want art to begin at home, as it must, we must clear our houses of troublesome superfluities… have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,’ he would famously exhort in The Beauty of Life, 1880.

After moving into Red House in 1860, Morris and his wife, Jane Burden, the daughter of an Oxford stablehand whom he’d married in 1859, threw themselves into creating what his university friend, the painter Edward Burne-Jones, called ‘the beautifullest place on earth’.

He and other friends, including Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, would gather for convivial working weekends, delighting in the freedom to experiment with their ideas and skills. They painted murals and friezes, decorated furniture and plasterwork, embroidered curtains and wall-hangings and played bowls in the garden.

The style of many of these works evoked the chivalric romances and poems that Morris had read as a boy, but his interest in the Middle Ages was more than a nostalgic yearning for Olde England; he had a passionate feeling for medieval buildings.

As an Oxford undergraduate, he had been deeply influenced by Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and the idea, championed by Augustus Pugin, that Gothic design was aesthetically and morally superior. ‘Honesty’ — of construction, purpose and materials — invested a building with integrity. Hand-craftsmanship and a delight in the making imbued it with vitality and moral dignity.

John Ruskin’s belief in the ennobling power of labour and his tenet that nature is the source of all beauty flowed into Morris’s philosophy of design and manufacture. Both men were conservationists, eco-warriors and social reformers, preaching that art could transform lives and that industrialisation caused ugliness, pollution and inhumanity. Morris’s famous News from Nowhere, published in 1890, was a socialist-environmentalist manifesto dressed up as a utopian romance.

The Pre-Raphaelites were another influence, with their ideals of truth to Nature, social engagement and rejection of formulaic convention. Morris had developed his interest in medieval art when articled to the Gothic-Revival architect G. E. Street, where he made illuminated manuscripts and learnt to woodcarve and stitch.

Unsuited to an architect’s office, he turned to poetry, painting and embroidery. His wife remembered how she’d found a piece of indigo-dyed serge in a London shop and designed flowers for it, which they then ‘worked in bright colours and a simple rough way… the work went quickly and when finished we covered the walls of the bedroom at Red House to our great joy’.

In 1865, Morris moved to London, ironically having to leave the house where he’d been happiest because of the success of the decorating business it had borne. Established in 1861, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co specialised in artist-designed products for domestic and ecclesiastical interiors, with stained glass, filtering light through naturalistic tertiary colours, central to the firm’s early work.

By the time Morris opened his showroom in Oxford Street as sole proprietor in 1877, Morris & Co, as he’d renamed the business, offered a wide range of products unrivalled for their quality. They included mural decoration, carving, embroidery and metalwork, as well as the hallmark wallpapers and fabrics.

Accomplished at weaving, modelling and embroidery, Morris also learnt dyeing techniques and began to produce block-printed textiles in about 1870. The first design was Jasmine Trellis, its trailing stems printed onto glazed cotton for summer curtains and cushions. He became particularly interested in carpets and introduced hand-knotting to the Morris & Co range.

In 1881, the firm moved to an old silk-weaving factory at Merton Abbey, south London, which became the main production centre for hand-blocked textiles and hand-woven silk, woollen cloth and tapestries.

Composed around native plants and birds, Morris’s rhythmic patterns reflect ‘those natural forms which are at once most familiar and delightful… The rose, the lily, the tulip, the oak, the vine’. His first wallpaper pattern, Trellis (1862), featuring climbing roses and birds co-designed with Webb, was inspired by the Red House garden; Strawberry Thief (1883) depicts thrushes observed in the orchard at Kelmscott, the Oxfordshire manor house he rented from 1871.

The image of a pre-industrialised England that lay at the heart of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement gained popularity as the rural economy declined. Through articles by writers such as Lawrence Weaver, Country Life played a significant role in promoting Morris’s ideals — or at least those that appealed to its readers: beautiful homes by architects such as Webb, Lethaby and Lutyens; medieval manor houses gently resuscitated in line with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which Morris co-founded in 1877; good craftsmanship; a dream of rural England.

Paradoxically, given Morris, Webb and Lethaby’s socialism, these beautiful things were affordable only for the wealthy. Morris — Marlborough and Oxford educated with a private income — complained to a friend: ‘I spend my life in ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.’ It wasn’t his only contradiction.

Although he advocated ‘simplicity of life, begetting simplicity of taste’ (a line from his lecture The Lesser Arts, 1877), Morris’s own interiors were richly layered, albeit aesthetically harmonious and uncluttered. The drawing room of his Hammersmith house was furnished with a wardrobe designed by Webb and painted with a scene from Chaucer by Burne-Jones, iznik ceramics from Damascus and de Morgan lustreware plates above the chimneypiece. Wall hangings were printed with Morris’s favourite Bird design, Persian rugs were laid over his Tulip and Lily carpet, with bobbin-turned ‘Morris’ reclining chairs, Asian metalwork and a grate and settle by Webb further adornments.

Morris studied the designs and craftsmanship of his antiques and took inspiration from their motifs and patterns. The floral forms of Evenlode, for example, echo those of Turkish and Syrian ceramics. Meanwhile, he lamented the destruction to ‘the beautiful works of the East’ by ‘western conquest and commerce’, and described the British Empire as ‘not a thing to love or to be proud of, but a disgrace and a nuisance, as a domination compounded of fraud, injustice and violence to be scorned by all honest men’.

Yet, not for the first time did he turn a blind eye to his anti-imperialism, when he undertook commissions for state rooms at St James’s Palace (1866) and a Golden Jubilee wallpaper for Balmoral (1887).

This year, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge marks Morris’s 130th anniversary with an exhibition centred around its rich collection of artefacts that highlight the city’s little-known connections with Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. A strong theme is the pioneering role of women in the Morris enterprise, artists such as Kate Faulkner, whose skills, from embroidery and tile painting to pattern design and gesso, were indispensable. The firm enabled women to undertake professional work and develop their own careers.

In 1885, May Morris took charge of the embroidery department and would play a key role in raising the status of the craft from that of a domestic hobby. She and her sister Jenny had been taught from an early age by their mother, who ‘laid with her needle the foundations of the firm’, and May went on to become a leading designer and embroiderer.

For all the paradoxes and failings of Morris’s ideologies, his work stands out among the Victorian decorative arts as being untainted by later derision. The lighter style of the firm’s stock Sussex chairs, and of its later wares, coupled with the emphasis on sound, unfussy workmanship, has appealed to successive waves of design reformers, with wallpaper and textile designs, some refreshed in updated palettes, still in production.

Simultaneously, the artistic style of decorating with an informal mix of antiques, textiles and well-designed contemporary pieces, as revived by the like of Robert Kime and Ben Pentreath, owes much to Morris, as does the ethos of design companies such as ANTA, with its textile and ceramics workshops run by a conservation architect and fabric-designer.

As the exhibition sets out to demonstrate, Morris was an innovator who ‘looked backward in time to reimagine a new future’. The challenges and contradictions he encountered as he grappled with issues relating to commercial production, the environment, education, social inequality and colonial legacy feel just as relevant today.

This feature originally appeared in the October 21, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.