William Morris

5 Jul, 2018 700 Arts

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of William Morris, known in his lifetime for his poetry and then his contribution to the Arts and Crafts movement, and increasingly for his political activism. He felt the world had given in to drudgery and ugliness and he found inspiration in the time before industrialisation, in the medieval life which was about fellowship and association and ways of working which resisted the division of labour and allowed the worker to exercise his or her imagination. Seeing a disconnection between art and society, his solution was revolution which in his view was the only way to reset their relationship.

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Guests

  • Ingrid Hanson No other episodes
    Lecturer in 18th and 19th Century Literature at the University of Manchester
  • Marcus Waithe No other episodes
    University Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene College
  • Jane Thomas 4 episodes
    Professor of Victorian and Early 20th Century Literature at the University of Hull

Reading list

  • William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings
    Caroline Arscott (Yale University Press, 2008) Google Books →
  • William Morris in the Twenty-First Century
    Phillippa Bennett and Rosie Miles (eds.) (Peter Lang, 2010) Google Books →
  • The Making of British Socialism
    Mark Bevir (Princeton University Press, 2011) Google Books →
  • William Morris and News from Nowhere: A Vision for Our Time
    Stephen Coleman and Paddy O'Sullivan (eds.) (Green Books, 1990) Google Books →
  • William Morris: His Life and Work
    Stephen Coote (Third Millennium Press Ltd, 2018) Google Books →
  • Against the Age: An Introduction to William Morris
    Peter Faulkner (Routledge, 2012) Google Books →
  • William Morris: Centenary Essays
    Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston (eds.) (University of Exeter Press, 1999) Google Books →
  • William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas
    Ian Felce (D. S. Brewer, 2018) Google Books →
  • William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856-1890
    Ingrid Hanson (Anthem, 2013) Google Books →
  • William Morris's Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics and Prefiguration
    Owen Holland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Google Books →
  • The Concept of Utopia
    Ruth Levitas (Peter Lang, 2011) Google Books →
  • William Morris: A Life for Our Time
    Fiona MacCarthy (Faber and Faber, 1994) Google Books →
  • The Collected Works of William Morris
    William Morris (ed. May Morris) (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books →
  • Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal, 1883-1890
    William Morris (ed. Nicholas Salmon) (Thoemmes, 1994) Google Books →
  • William Morris
    Linda Parry (ed.) (Philip Wilson and the V & A, 1996) Google Books →
  • William Morris: Textiles
    Linda Parry (V&A Publishing, 2013) Google Books →
  • We Met Morris: Interviews with William Morris, 1885-96
    Tony Pinkney (ed.) (Spire, 2005) Google Books →
  • Oscar Wilde in Context
    Peter Raby and Kerry Powell (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Google Books →
  • Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts
    Peter Stansky (Premier Book Marketing Ltd, 1996) Google Books →
  • From William Morris to Sergeant Pepper: Studies in the Radical Domestic
    Peter Stansky (Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1999) Google Books →
  • William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary
    E. P. Thompson (Merlin Press, 1977) Google Books →
  • William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Home
    Pamela Todd (Thames & Hudson, 2012) Google Books →
  • William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914
    Anna Vaninskaya (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) Google Books →
  • William Morris's Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality
    Marcus Waithe (D. S. Brewer, 2006) Google Books →

Related episodes

Programme ID: b0b9w0vq

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b9w0vq

Auto-category: 700 (Arts and Recreation)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello, William Morris 1834 to 1896 is best known now as a designer of wallpaper and for his advice to have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.