The Tables Turned: 'A most dangerous disturbance!''

By William Morris

William Morris was born in Walthamstow, London on 24th March 1834 he is regarded today as a foremost poet, writer, textile designer, artist and libertarian. Morris began to publish poetry and short stories in 1856 through the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which he founded with his friends and financed while at university. His first volume, in 1858, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, was the first published book of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Due to its luke warm reception he was discouraged from poetry writing for a number of years. His return to poetry was with the great success of The Life and Death of Jason in 1867, which was followed by The Earthly Paradise, themed around a group of medieval wanderers searching for a land of everlasting life; after much disillusion, they discover a surviving colony of Greeks with whom they exchange stories. In the collection are retellings of Icelandic sagas. From then until his Socialist period Morris's fascination with the ancient Germanic and Norse peoples dominated his writing being the first to translate many of the Icelandic sagas into English; the epic retelling of the story of Sigurd the Volsung being his favourite. In 1884 he founded the Socialist League but with the rise of the Anarachists in the party he left it in 1890. In 1891 he founded the Kelmscott Press publishing limited edition illuminated style books. His design for The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is a masterpiece. Morris was quietly approached with an offer of the Poet Laureateship after the death of Tennyson in 1892, but declined. William Morris died at age 62 on 3rd October 1896 in London. Here we present The Well at the World's End.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stage Door
• Release date: Feb 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781787807136

William Morris

William Morris has worked on international tax policy matters in the public and private sectors for over twenty years. He is also a member of the clergy team at St Martin-in-the-Fields, having been ordained a priest in the Church of England in 2010. He has degrees in history, law and theology, and is the author of 'Where is God at Work?'

Book preview

The Tables Turned by William Morris

or, Nupkins Awakened

As for the first time played at the Hall of the Socialist League on Saturday October 15, 1887

British poet, author, thinker and publisher William Morris was born in 1834 in Walthamstow, Essex. The eldest son of wealthy Londoners Emma Shelton Morris and William Morris, the younger Morris would become one of the most influential people in the cultural landscape of Victorian England.

Educated at home and at a nearby preparatory school, Morris’s childhood was one of privilege, with books, leisurely excursions and ponies for personal use. The idyll ended (to an extent) with the sudden death of Morris Senior in 1847 when the younger Morris was just 14 years old.  The next year, Morris began his formal studies at Marlborough College in Wiltshire. After three years of bullying and homesickness, Morris returned to his family home and was thereafter privately tutored.

In 1852, Morris entered Oxford University to study the Classics. While there he also became interested in medieval-era history and architecture. Morris would come to identify with medievalist ideals, as did a growing socio-political movement in England that rejected the values of the prevailing Victorian capitalist system. Morris would become even more politically active later in life, embracing the socialist values that he had recognized in medievalism as an undergraduate.

Morris made several important and life-long friends while at Exeter College at Oxford, most notably the artist and designer Edward Burne-Jones. Morris and Burne-Jones became part of a group of Oxford thinkers (most of them from the industrial city of Birmingham) who would be known historically as The Birmingham Set.  The group included divinity student William Fulford, poet and theologian Richard Watson Dixon, mathematician Charles Faulkner and scholar Cormell Price – internally they called themselves The Brotherhood. The members of the group shared literary interests as well as values and were huge fans of Alfred Lord Tennyson, art critic John Ruskin, the Arthurian legends and William Shakespeare.

In 1856, Morris helped fund and start up the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, the first of many cooperative projects in which he took an active role. Twelve issues were published.  Also in 1856 – upon completion of his Bachelor of Arts degree - Morris was apprenticed briefly to the Oxford based Gothic revival architect George Edmund Street. Morris would use lessons learned from Street, and supervising architect Philip Webb, during the design process for his own Red House in Kent. Morris lived there with his new family – wife Jane Burdon, who he married in 1859, and daughters Jenny and Mary – until 1865.

In 1858 Morris published The Defence of Guenvere, an innovative volume of lyric and dramatic verse, which nonetheless was not well received critically. Morris would not publish again until 1867 when Bell and Dandy published the epic romantic poem The Life and Death of Jason. The printing was financed by Morris himself; happily, the book was well received and Morris received a fee for the second edition.

From 1861 Morris commuted from The Red House to London where he had opened a decorative arts firm with Burne-Jones, Webb, Faulkner and other friends: the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Peter Paul Marshall. The company – known publicly as Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. and privately as The Firm – specialized in locally produced fabrics, furniture, tapestries, wallpaper, architectural carving and stained glass windows. In 1875, Morris assumed total control of the company, now named Morris & Co. Though known in his lifetime chiefly for being a poet, Morris would also achieve posthumous acclaim as a chief architect of the Arts and Crafts British design movement.

In 1865, Morris sold The Red House and moved to Bloomsbury in London with his family. By 1870, he was a cultural fixture in that city and a celebrity of some stature.

From 1865 to 1870, Morris worked on another epic poem, The Earthly Paradise. Designed as homage to Chaucer, it consists of 24 stories, each with a different narrator from a different cultural background. Set in the late 14th century, it is about a group of Norsemen who flee the Black Death by sailing away from Europe, on the way discovering an island where the inhabitants continue to venerate an ancient Greek god. Published in four parts by F. S. Ellis, the epic gained a cult following and established Morris' reputation as a major poet.

Greatly influenced by his friendship with Icelandic theologian Eiríkr Magnússon and several visits to Iceland, Morris produced a series of English-language translations of the Icelandic Eddas and Sagas (old Norse poems and stories). Morris