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.
Introduction TEXTS Letter to Cormell Price, 3 April 1855 Letter to Cormell Price, 10 August 1855 From the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856: 'The Hollow Land' 'The Story of the Unknown Church' From The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems', 1858: 'The Defence of Guenevere' 'Golden Wings' 'The Haystack in the Floods' 'Sir Peter Harpdon's End' 'Concerning Geffray Teste Noire' 'The Eve of Crecy' 'Near Avalon' 'In Prison' From The Earthly Paradise, 1868–70: 'Apology' From the 'Prologue' 'March' 'November' 'February' From 'The Watching of the Falcon' Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 19 October 1871 From Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, Books 1 and 2, 1876 From 'The Lesser Arts', 1877 'The Beauty of Life', 1880 From 'Some Hints on Pattern-Designing', 1881 Letter to Robert Thompson, 24 July 1884 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil', 1884 'How We Live and How We Might Live', 1885 'Unattractive Labour', 4 May 1885 'Attractive Labour', 5 June 1885 From two letters to Georgiana Burne-Jones, 28 April 1885 and 13 May 1885 'The Vulgarization of Oxford': Letter to the Editor of the Daily News, 20 November 1885 'The Day is Coming' 'All for the Cause' 'The March of the Workers' A Dream of John Ball, 1888 From The House of the Wolfings, 1888 'Mr Shaw Lefevre's Monumental Chapel': Letter to the Editor of the Daily News, 30 January 1889 'Looking Backward', Commonweal, 22 June, 1889 News from Nowhere, 1891 'How I became a Socialist', 1894 'On Epping Forest': Letter to the Editor of the Daily Chronicle, 23 April 1895 From The Sundering Flood, 1896 Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press, 1895
Ingrid Hanson took her first degree at Cambridge and returned to academia after fifteen years working in journalism, freelance writing, and community teaching, gaining her PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2011. She has taught at the universities of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam, and Hull and is currently Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. She has published work on William Morris, Victorian medievalism, masculinities, Victorian socialist poetry and periodicals, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-war literature. She has spoken about William Morris as an expert guest on Radio 4's In Our Time and on Radio 3's The Essay.
Reviews for William Morris: Selected Writings
Ingrid Hanson's wide-ranging selection from Morris's prolific writings identifies new points of interest in his oeuvre without neglecting those parts of it that mattered most to earlier generations * Dinah Birch, TLS *
