This newly selected edition of William Morris's works brings together poetry and prose, lectures, articles, and letters from his life, ordered chronologically, with an introduction highlighting his pressing and prescient writing on matters of the natural and built environment, human and non-human relations, internationalism, migration, and social justice, as well as the wide range of his literary and artistic concerns. Expert textual notes draw attention to the interconnectedness of Morris's writing and its rich literary, historical, and political contexts and sources: this is work that reaches back to tales of personal, dynastic, and political passion in medieval Europe or the craftsmanship of ancient Persia as deftly as it lambasts Victorian work practices and living conditions in Britain or sets out to correct misconceptions about the nature of social revolution; it creates visions of a just, equal, and beautiful future from re-told or imagined pasts. This selection includes lyric, epic, and narrative poetry and a range of prose writings that tell stories, conjure worlds, rouse their readers to action, and urge them to care for the earth, its inhabitants, its beauty, and its histories. It demonstrates the continuing power of Morris's writings to speak to the present with as lively, particular, and provocative a voice as it spoke to its own time.

Through his own work and in his own words, the book traces the fascinating progress of William Morris, pre-Raphaelite poet and architectural student into designer, writer and pioneer socialist. His youthful enthusiasm for the Middle Ages and Gothic architecture fired him with the conviction that he must dedicate his life to 'Art'. Later letters written to friends explain how in the industrialised nineteenth century Morris become preoccupied with the loss of traditional skills and pride in work and during the last ten years of his life he became increasingly involved in political agitation, and his stories, poems and lectures all reflect his commitment to the socialist cause and his ideals for art and society. Other extracts from his letters and poems reveal more intimate aspects of Morris's life and personality, reflecting the despair and isolation he felt over the breakdown of his marriage and his reliance on the friends who helped him through his personal crisis. WILLIAM MORRIS BY HIMSELF is a tribute to an exceptional man, whose work and reputation have survived for more than a century.

Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, the essential biography of the father of the Arts and Crafts movement. The author, Fiona MacCarthy, is the curator of the National Portrait Gallery's 2014-15 exhibition Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy.'One of the finest biographies ever published in this country' A. S. Byatt Since his death in 1896, William Morris has come to be regarded as one of the giants of the Victorian era. But his genius was so many-sided and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time, possibly of all time, could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and could have been ranked as a poet together with Tennyson and Browning.With penetrating insight, Fiona MacCarthy has managed to encompass all the different facets of Morris's complex character, shedding light on his immense creative powers as artist and designer of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry and books, and as a poet, novelist and translator; his psychology and his emotional life; his frenetic activities as polemicist and reformer; and his remarkable circle of friends, literary, artistic and political, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. Fiona MacCarthy's skilful drawing together of these disparate elements makes for a comprehensive and compelling biography.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.