On a blustery Clerkenwell evening as part of the Reds on the Green series, political theorist Ruth Kinna explored William Morris’s activism and his belief in art’s social purpose; an argument that, in her telling, runs like a continuous thread from Morris’s earliest poetry to his last campaigns.
Ruth Kinna took the lectern and organised the room’s attention around two plain questions: How is William Morris remembered? And how should he be remembered? The distinction matters, she argued, because the first answer we usually get — Morris the pattern-maker, Morris the wallpaper — tells only half the story.
She began with the basics. Morris (1834–1896) first broke through as a poet; The Earthly Paradise, made his name. Then came the designs: textiles, prints, furniture. Work born from friendships with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, the bohemian cohort who dropped out of university and set up a craft enterprise that still defines Morris’s visual legacy. But in the late 1870s, to general surprise, he turned his fire on Victorian “commerce”; his umbrella term for an economic order that polluted cities, degraded labour and corroded social ties. He joined the Social Democratic Federation (they used to meet in this building,” Kinna noted), fell out with its leader H. M. Hyndman, and helped found the Socialist League in 1884, an openly agitational, anti-parliamentary outfit. When anarchists later steered the League in directions he rejected, he launched the Hammersmith Socialist Society and stayed a socialist to the end. Unusually for the period, he called himself a communist.
If that potted biography suggests two lives – artist, then agitator – Kinna asked the room to look again. The early poetry already mourns a world being lost to industrialisation: handcraft pushed aside, ugliness ascendant, people herded into narrower, lonelier lives. The later essays sharpen the vocabulary, against “commerce” and atomising “individualism”, but they don’t change the target. For Morris, the problem and the remedy are holistic: how we produce, how we live, how we relate. His ideal is not that everyone becomes a designer like him; it’s that everyone works “as an artist”; taking pleasure in useful, well-made work because it is done with and for others. In that sense, his art and his socialism are not rival callings but one continuous practice.
London moors the story. Born in Walthamstow (the family home is now the William Morris Gallery), Morris shared digs with Rossetti and Burne-Jones in Red Lion Square, where his first furniture was so solid the joke was you couldn’t move the chairs. Later he made Hammersmith his base, organising meetings at Kelmscott House. He loved the city and hated what industry was doing to it.
Kinna read a few lines that imagine an alternative—“dream of London small, white and clean, / the clear Thames bordered by its garden green”—and then jumped forward to News from Nowhere (1891), the utopian romance in which a time-traveller wakes in a post-revolutionary Hammersmith. The smoke and soapworks have vanished; the bridge arches like something from an illuminated manuscript; life hums through workshops and markets remade by everyday artistry. It isn’t escapism, Kinna said; it’s a method. Utopia is the sketchbook in which Morris works out what production and social life could look like if beauty were ordinary and shared.
That vision never floated free of the street. In the 1880s Morris marched with the unemployed from Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square, writing up the confrontations for Commonweal, the socialist paper he edited and bankrolled. His report on 13 November 1887, Bloody Sunday, reads like a dispatch from a front line: columns blocked and then ambushed by police near Seven Dials, batons swinging “like soldiers attacking an enemy,” banners ripped from poles, a man beaten down while wrapping the torn cloth round his arm. The mainstream press sided with authority; Commonweal recorded the violence and insisted on the link between a politics that treats the poor as a nuisance and a culture that flattens art into commodity. Even the paper’s look, careful typography and handsome layout, was part of the argument: beauty belongs to common life, not elite consumption.
So, back to Kinna’s first question: how is Morris remembered? Too often as a tasteful decorator. That memory is tidy, marketable and misleading. You can see the irony, Kinna suggested, in the way Morris’s motifs are endlessly repackaged for the very commerce he loathed, while his insistence that art withers under exploitation is pushed to the footnotes.
How should he be remembered? As the artist-socialist whose through-line never wavered. The wallpapers and the pamphlets speak the same language; the hand-cut block and the picket line point in the same direction. Morris wanted “fewer, better things,” made to last, because such making dignifies the maker and the user alike. He believed that innovation is worthwhile only if it expands freedom, fellowship and delight in useful work. And when he couldn’t find that world, he didn’t retreat into the studio; he went out the door, sometimes from the Marx Memorial Library, and joined the march!
It didn’t end the way he hoped. The revolution in Nowhere never arrived. But that, Kinna said, is the context for his utopianism: not a fantasy to hide in, but a refusal to give up hope. Remember him whole and you don’t just inherit a pattern book; you inherit a standard. Judge our own making – of objects, of cities, of politics – by whether it helps ordinary people live well together. By that measure, Morris is not a heritage brand. He’s still a live question.
Article by Emanuela Aru
The event was part of the Islington Heritage: Reds on the Green program.
Next event will be Nov 20 from 6pm to 7:30pm GMT – book your space below
Ruth Ellen Kinna is a historian and theorist of anarchism. She is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Politics, History and International Relations of Loughborough University. She is also the author of William Morris: the art of socialism.
