MORRIS, William
(b. 1834, Walthamstow, d. 1896, Hammersmith)

News from Nowhere: frontispiece

1893
Woodcut
British Library, London

In 1861, Morris founded his own firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (from 1875 Morris & Co.), which produced stained glass, furniture, wallpaper and fabrics. Despite the original name of the firm (in which Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Webb and Ford Madox Brown were also active), Morris was the dominant figure, as was acknowledged when it was reorganized in 1875, with a fair amount of recrimination and bitterness, as Morris & Co. In the early years of the firm, he continued to work happily with a group, which in theory at least was his ideal. But from now on, there was a recurring cycle in his working life: he would start out with a group and a hope of cooperation; when the group failed, he would start out again, eventually operating on his own. The persistence of this ideal of working in a group is stated eloquently in News from Nowhere (1890), a picture of Utopia, which became his most famous prose work.

The picture shows the frontispiece to the 1893 Kelmscott Press edition of William Morris's News from Nowhere. It depicts Kelmscott Manor.