Morris was born on 24 March 1834 in Walthamstow, then a village on the edge of Epping Forest to the north west of London. He was born into a wealthy middle class family who wanted him to join the church. Ever the dissident, he gave up Oxford University to take up art and poetry.
In 1861 he founded the Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, which did paintings, decoration, metalwork, stained glass, jewellery, sculpture and furniture for wealthy Victorians.
His political activity dated from the struggle to stop the Tory government going to war with Russia between 1876 and 1878. His “Appeal to the Working Men of England” (1877) blamed capitalists for the war and set him on the road via liberalism and radicalism to the socialist movement.
In January 1883 Morris joined the Democratic Federation, a small Radical group led by Henry Hyndman, which would soon become explicitly socialist (it became the Social Democratic Federation, SDF in August 1884). In November 1883 Morris spoke at Oxford University, scandalising the audience by calling on them to join the struggle against capitalism.
From then onwards Morris became a leading spokesperson for socialism as well as political journalist, publishing articles in the SDF paper Justice. However in December 1884 Morris, Eleanor Marx, Ernest Belfort Bax, Edward Aveling and others – fed up with Hyndman’s dictatorial behaviour and jingoistic politics - resigned from the SDF. They set up the Socialist League and published the paper, Commonweal.
The Socialist League was divided, between with Eleanor Marx, Aveling and Bax who favoured standing candidates for parliament and local councils to advance socialist propaganda; and others, including Morris, who opposed such parliamentary tactics. Morris and his close comrades in the Hammersmith branch eventually broke with the Socialist League at the end of 1890, but continued to work in the Hammersmith Socialist Society until ill health took its toll. He remained committed to socialism until the end, telling an American correspondent, “I have NOT changed my mind on Socialism” in one of his last interviews, given in January 1896. (Paul Meier, William Morris: The Marxist Dreamer, 1978 p.201)
When William Morris died on 3 October 1896, apparently his doctor pronounced that the cause of death was “simply being William Morris and having done more work than most ten men”.
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