William Morris (1834-1896), has often been attributed as being the inventor of the Morris reclining chair. In fact, the Victorian Morris did produce one version but, although we adopted his name to the chair, he was not the inventor. Morris is also associated with being the father of the English Arts and Crafts movement, which was later to influence the likes of Gustav Stickley who brought back its philosophies to North American in the form of Mission and Craftsman ideals.

William Morris was a writer, orator, artist, textile designer, wallpaper artisan and poet. Morris held strong beliefs that in an age of modern machines and gilded homes that men truly should have equal access to a quality of life and articles around them should be of artisan, rather than mass, production. In turn-of-the-century Great Britain Morris was not just involved with designing furniture, wallpapers and textiles. William Morris carried his political beliefs into his work life, believing that these beliefs and ideals would eventually produce equal opportunities for everyone to own his works.

Politically William Morris was an involved in early English Social Democracy. He joined the Social Democratic Federation 1883. After a fight with Henry Hyndman, the founder of the SDF group, Morris founded his own group, called the Socialist League. When asked to explain how he fell into Socialism, Morris delivered an explanation in “How I Became a Socialist” that read in part -

“Well, what I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain­slack brain workers, nor heart­sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all-the realisation at last of the meaning of the word COMMONWEALTH .”

Morris, a student of medieval times, was himself a natural educator, writing and lecturing on street-corners in England and Scotland. Supposedly after delving into Marx’s Das Kapital in a French translation, he declared himself a Marxist. Morris was a man of awe inspiring energy, who possessed huge talents and ideals. Morris dreamt enormous dreams of a Socialist Revolution in England. He saw his world, his Victorian Britain, as physically ravaged and spiritually drained by the Industrial Revolution. He longed for a more artist-centric, communal, mediaeval agrarian society that was filled with happy, healthy people, all enjoying the work they did by hand.

Although Morris himself did not quite succeed in his selfless attempts to encourage a relationship between industry and craft, his ideas were not a failure. American Gustav Stickley brought the ideas of Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement to the new country and was able to merge mass production with handmade craftsmanship. Stickley’s German-American Yankee ingenuity coupled with the Morris’s politics, ideals and gifts created some of the most sought after designs in history.

While, William Morris was indeed a man who was not in love with the world he had been born into, he seemed to see socialism as a means to an end. That end was supposed to transform the ugliness he saw in late century Britain into the beauty that he hoped it once was and could be. In his “News From Nowhere” he would write:

The earth and the growth of it and the life of it! If I could but say or show how I love it!

In a very real sense his entire life, especially his organic designs in home décor, was a successful attempt to share the meaning of those lines with others. While some believe he was an eccentric utopian, his life’s work lives on in print, in the organization called the William Morris Society and in home decors worldwide.

Tags: Amish Furniture Styles, Arts and Crafts, arts and crafts movement, Craftsman, furniture design, Gustav Stickley, Henry Hyndman, Mission, morris chair, reclining chair, socialism, William Morris

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Arts and Crafts, Craftsman, History of Furniture Making, Mission, News, Organic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.