William Morris

The William Morris who matriculated at Exeter College in 1852 came up to read Classics. He left, four years later, as a self-described medievalist headed for architecture, painting, and (in time) the design of more or less everything else. The poet, designer, printer, and revolutionary socialist who is the other William Morris from this century of Oxford's history was an undergraduate here.

Exeter College, 1853–1856

Morris was born at Walthamstow in March 1834 into wealth — his father was a City bill-broker — and at fourteen was sent to Marlborough, an experience he hated. He came up to Exeter in June 1852 but, finding the college full, only went into residence in January 1853.

He was bored by his Classics teaching almost immediately. What did engage him were the city's medieval buildings, the Anglo-Catholic movement to which he was briefly attached, and the work of Carlyle, Ruskin and Tennyson. In his first year he met another freshman, a Birmingham theologian called Edward Burne-Jones — and through Burne-Jones, a circle of Burne-Jones's old Birmingham schoolfriends at Pembroke, including the future architect Charles Faulkner. They called themselves "the Brotherhood"; historians have called them the Birmingham Set.

In January 1856 the Set began publishing the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, funded largely by Morris and modelled on the earlier Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ. It was through that magazine that they recruited a contributor in London called Dante Gabriel Rossetti; by the end of that year, both Morris and Burne-Jones had decided they would become painters.

The Oxford Union Murals, and Jane Burden

In the summer of 1857, Morris and Rossetti came back to Oxford, found the new Union debating-hall under construction, and pursued a commission to paint the upper walls with scenes from Le Morte d'Arthur. Morris contributed Sir Palomides' Jealousy of Sir Tristram and Iseult — Wikipedia notes his painting was "widely deemed inferior and unskilled compared to those of the others," though even there his characteristic strength in floral background was already obvious. The full story of the murals — and of their immediate technical collapse — is told at the Oxford Union Murals.

It was during the murals work, in October 1857, that Morris and Rossetti spotted Jane Burden and her sister Bessie at an Oxford theatre. Jane sat for several of the paintings. She and Morris were engaged the following spring and married, in a low-key ceremony at St Michael at the North Gate on 26 April 1859. The marriage produced two daughters — and, eventually, the long, public-private scandal of Jane's relationship with Rossetti.

The Firm, and after

Before leaving Oxford for good, Morris briefly apprenticed in the city office of the Neo-Gothic architect George Edmund Street, working under a young assistant called Philip Webb who became a lifelong collaborator. The apprenticeship moved with Street to London later in 1856; Morris soon gave it up for painting, and then for the project that would define him.

In April 1861 Morris and six partners — Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Webb, Ford Madox Brown, Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall — founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. "The Firm" set out to reform Victorian decoration by reviving medieval methods of hand-craftsmanship and ended up shaping every drawing room in the country. It was reorganised as Morris & Co. in 1875, with Morris in sole control. The wallpapers, textiles and stained-glass cartoons that came out of it — many of the figure designs by Burne-Jones — are still in production.

From 1871 Morris rented Kelmscott Manor in the upper Thames valley as a rural retreat. In 1877 he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which still campaigns against the over-restoration of historic fabric. In the 1880s, after reading Marx, he became a revolutionary socialist, founded the Socialist League, and wrote the Utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890). In 1891 he founded the Kelmscott Press, and to it he devoted what remained of his life. He died at his London home in October 1896, aged 62.

Sources: Wikipedia: William Morris · Wikipedia: Oxford Union murals

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