Sometime in 1882, William Morris decided he was no longer a radical and began to associate himself explicitly with socialism. He stated in How I Became A Socialist (16 June 1894) that by the summer of 1882 he was ready “to join any body who distinctly called themselves Socialists.” (Edward Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 1976 p.268)
In January 1883 Morris joined the Democratic Federation and began his agitation for socialism – a commitment that he would maintain to his death. He continued to be a dedicated conservationist. In his celebrated lecture Art under Plutocracy, delivered at the Russell Club at Oxford University in November 1883, at which he unashamedly urged the audience to join the socialist cause, Morris repeated some of his earlier themes.
He said: “I can myself sympathise with a feeling which I suppose is still not rare, a craving to escape sometimes to mere Nature… I can deeply sympathise with a weary man finding his account in interest in mere life and communion with external nature, the face of the country, the wind and weather, and the course of the day, and the lives of animals, wild and domestic; and man's daily dealings with all this for his daily bread, and rest, and innocent beast-like pleasure.” (Morton 1973 p.63)
In Under an Elm-Tree; or, Thoughts in the Country-Side, published in Commonweal (6 July 1889), he described his joy at the countryside:
“Midsummer in the country — here you may walk between the fields and hedges that are as it were one huge nosegay for you, redolent of bean-flowers and clover and sweet hay and elder-blossom. The cottage gardens are bright with flowers, the cottages themselves mostly models of architecture in their way. Above them towers here and there the architecture proper of days bygone, when every craftsman was an artist and brought definite intelligence to bear upon his work. Man in the past, nature in the present, seem to be bent on pleasing you and making all things delightful to your senses; even the burning dusty road has a look of luxury as you lie on the strip of roadside green, and listen to the blackbirds singing, surely for your benefit, and, I was going to say as if they were paid to do it, but I was wrong, for as it is they seem to be doing their best.
And all, or let us say most things, are brilliantly alive. The shadowy bleak in the river down yonder, which is — ignorant of the fate that Barking Reach is preparing for its waters — sapphire blue under this ruffling wind and cloudless sky, and barred across here and there with the pearly white-flowered water-weeds, every yard of its banks a treasure of delicate design, meadowsweet and dewberry and comfrey and bed-straw — from the bleak in the river, amongst the labyrinth of grasses, to the starlings busy in the new shorn fields, or about the grey ridges of the hay, all is eager, and I think all is happy that is not anxious.” (Salmon 1994 p.426)
In News from Nowhere, he has Ellen express his what he would later call his “deep love of the earth and the life on it”: “O me! O me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it, - as this has done!” (Morton 1973 p.244 and 1968 p.391)
However I would argue that his conversion to socialism developed his ecological politics in a number of significant respects. In particular Morris developed a more sophisticated conception of the relationship between nature and human society, a more adequate explanation for the causes of ecological degradation, a notion that the working class could become the vital social agency in ecological as well as wider politics and a positive conception of socialism as a more ecologically sensitive as well as a freer, more equal and non-exploitative mode of production. He also gave more concrete responses on the nature of work under socialism (including on factories and machinery), on forms of energy, on transport, on housing and urban life, and on lifestyle politics, that repay reading today.
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