MACHTELD VAN GELDER

Idealism in Times of Great Luxury
The Radical Patterns of William Morris, Wallpaper Man of My Dreams

For years I have been drawn to the gentle patterns of the nineteenth-century designer William Morris — and perhaps even more to the audacious step he took, a social suicide, turning from an aristocratic wealthy entrepreneur into a radical socialist. 

Born under every conceivable advantage, Morris knew from childhood that he would never have to work. At least: not for money. At nineteen he inherited copper mines and an annual income sufficient for life. A prodigiously successful businessman, he was first of all a designer, craftsman and poet. The tenderness of his wallpapers and verses conceals how radical he truly was. His interiors — those vines and birds and curling tendrils — have entered cultural heritage, while the political fire that fed them has faded from view.

Few poets become wealthy entrepreneurs; fewer wealthy men become radical socialists — least of all in the stratified Britain of his day. What drove Morris? And does he still matter?

On the banks of the Thames in Hammersmith stands Kelmscott House — a broad Georgian building with a cobalt-blue front door framed by lilac bridal-veil and a pale-pink rose bush. Fourteen tall windows and three roof lights gaze onto the quick, grey river. Barges slide downstream; mahogany-coloured rowing boats pull against the current toward the little club beach opposite. For more than twenty years Morris looked out upon this water, living here with Jane, celebrated as “the most beautiful woman in England,” and their two daughters. A lovely setting for a very unhappy marriage. Here he drew his final breath.

To the left of the main house, in what was once the coach house, the William Morris Society now resides. Inside, the exhibition is a tender jumble of personal relics — a few chairs (on which, of course and regrettably, one may not sit), sketches for early Morris & Co. designs, and a press from his Kelmscott Press. Three volunteers guard and narrate the collection; the visitors today are mostly Asian, dressed in a charming composite of Burberry, Barbour and Liberty. One, an elderly gentleman in perfect tweed, monopolises the prettiest volunteer with a monologue about his doctoral dissertation on Morris at his Chinese university.

In the tiny shop I finally buy an apron printed with The Strawberry Thief in fox, cobalt and moss green, emblazoned in Morris’s own Golden Type font: “When class robbery is abolished, every man will reap the fruits of his labour.” I have no idea whether such aprons were ever popular in Communist China. On the spot I join the William Morris Society and am told, delightedly, “We already have members from the Netherlands!”

Of course, Morris himself lived the life of the exempt — financed, in the end, by the miners whose labour sustained his family fortune. He might have spent his days preserving that wealth, attending races and premières, or travelling for pleasure. I often wonder what it takes, as Morris did, to turn one’s privilege against itself — to campaign with all one’s might against the systematic theft of wealth from the working class, against what he called “the robbery of ordinary men.”

Where are the radical left-wing entrepreneurs now — erudite, creative, possessed of good taste? These days, especially since Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy, we read about the “class migrant” who climbs from poverty to privilege. But the reverse journey? Morris estranged himself from his own class — not to live like the poor, but to lift the poor up.

Now that we have drifted from the relative stability of the managed economy into one that sweeps away not only the treasures of the earth but the values we once held dear, I find myself more and more grateful for a man like William Morris.

Until a few years ago, I lived with an awkward admiration for philanthropists — those deep-pocketed patrons whose “refined taste” was so artfully coached by their advisers. But I can no longer feel gratitude for the elegant prestigious architecture of privately owned museums financed by a single wealthy family. How I wish that something less shiny and reflective — say, taking responsibility for the common good — might confer status instead. Simply proudly paying taxes, for example, rather than earning public gratitude with cigars filched from the community’s box. A stable society, I now think, is the greatest inheritance one can leave a grandchild.

Morris, too, loved art — though he championed what he himself called “the lesser arts.” He was the father of the Arts and Crafts movement. After studying the Classics at Oxford, he returned home and began to teach himself a dozen crafts — weaving, glass-staining, embroidery. He discovered, to his surprise, that artistic skill can be learned in adulthood. “I am ashamed,” he wrote, “when I think of my blessed hours of work and the monotony to which most men are condemned.”

In his workshop he trained his own team, some of them boys from a local orphanage. There he found proof that good work, joy in labour and creativity are attainable by anyone — if only given the chance. You do not find self-respect by tightening the left leg of a chair on a factory line, but by crafting the whole chair yourself.

His political awakening deepened when he saw that the soul-destroying labour of the factories was not accidental but inherent in the new industrial order. The common man toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week, without rights, like a slave. More than the inequality of wealth, it was the inequality of work-quality that made Morris a socialist. He came to see commercialism and mass production as dehumanising forces. In 1877 he delivered his first lecture, “The Lesser Arts.”

At Walthamstow — one of the estates of his youth — a Georgian house with rounded wings now houses the William Morris Gallery, home to the largest Morris collection in the world. There are drawings for his Red House, a loom still threaded with half-woven tapestry, the inventory of his interior shop The Firm (later Morris & Co.), and a luminous visual map of his life. On display too is the letter that shocked his mother — his declaration to devote himself to art: “Dear Mama, I know this comes as a surprise, and perhaps a disappointment. I wish to do work that adds some good to the world. I hope for your understanding and support. I believe on this path I may find both happiness and meaning. Love, William.”

Also here are the textiles he designed for the homes of prosperous industrialists — at first, his most dependable patrons.

One wonders whether Morris’s work and ideas still matter. Are the deep hues of his interiors — oxblood, ochre, moss and fox — truly timeless? It’s hard to imagine in this era of greys, blacks and beiges. Are his figurative patterns of fruit, foliage and twining vines timeless, then? Equally hard to say, flipping through the minimalist pages of current design magazines. Do his designs even sell, in England? Are they loved?

At Liberty in Soho, the wallpaper and fabric department still carries a generous stock of his designs. Beside the archive of historical prints, Liberty has even reissued some of the best-loved — Willow, Strawberry Thief — recoloured for modern palettes. And yet, Morris’s art endures. Unlike in Morris’s own house, here you are invited to touch everything. Liberty is hardly the only place to buy Morris. His showrooms and stockists now span the world, catering to consumers who prize exclusivity, limited editions, the aura of handcraft. The apron with his class-robbery quote, however, was nowhere to be found here.

Like us, Morris lived in a time of dizzying change — the flight from countryside to city, Darwinism eroding faith, the rise of the machine. When he was born in 1834, the fastest thing on earth was a horse’s gallop; by the time he died, trains and motorcars crisscrossed the land. He was fourteen when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, thirty-three when Das Kapital appeared.

Moving in the highest circles, he nonetheless became a socialist around 1884, at nearly fifty. Soon he was lecturing across Britain — sometimes three times a day — publicly embracing a political creed that appalled his family and clients alike. On streets and squares he urged men and women to rise against their employers. He was arrested more than once, but his fame as designer and businessman shielded him from the worst the establishment could inflict.

After the brutal suppression of a workers’ protest in 1887, Morris began serialising his science-fiction tale News from Nowhere — the story of a Victorian man who wakes one morning in the year 2102 to find himself in a paradise of shared ownership. With it, the entrepreneur meant to refute the idea that socialism saps the will to work: his imagined society thrives because people take pleasure in their labour. The beloved book, a utopian classic, has never been out of print since 1890 (Penguin Classics) and appears in dozens of editions worldwide.

Back home in Amsterdam, I tied the apron — “When the exploitation of the working class has ended, every man shall live by his own labour” — around my partner’s waist. He laughed and folded it away. So it goes with lofty ideals, I fear. Later we cycled to De Ru, the elegant wallpaper shop in Amsterdam’s Van Woustraat. We had to wait; all the pattern books were occupied by a man in his sixties and his very elderly mother, peering forlornly at the open pages of Morris designs. At last they made their choice. The salesman asked about the room sizes, and I heard the mother reply, “Our ceilings are three metres thirty.” And so it goes: in the Netherlands of 2025, the curtains and wallpapers of a radical socialist still grace the high-walled homes of the rich — homes whose owners proudly adorn themselves with what some of their peers would call an extremely left-wing aesthetic. 

The timeless “Lesser Art” of William Morris: the wallpaper man of my dreams.

Machteld van Gelder is a Dutch essayist, columnist and television maker based in Amsterdam. Her work explores beauty, labour and the quiet politics of everyday life.