MORRIS, WILLIAM (1834-1896), English poet and artist, third child and eldest son of William Morris and Emma Shelton, was born at Elm house, Walthamstow, on March 24, 1834. His father came up to London in 1820, and entered the office of a firm of discount brokers in which he afterwards assumed a partner ship. William was a delicate and studious child. When he was six the family moved to Woodford hall, where the boy's health improved. He was then sent to a school at Walthamstow, and, after his father's death, when the home at Woodford was broken up, to Marlborough. There he acquired a taste for architecture, fostered by the school library, and an attraction towards the Anglo-Catholic movement. In June 1852 he matriculated at Exeter college, Oxford, but he did not go into residence till Jan. 1853. Among his Oxford friends were Edward Burne Jones and a little Birmingham group at Pembroke. They were known among themselves as the "brotherhood"; they read together theology, ecclesiastical history, mediaeval poetry, and, among moderns, Tennyson and Ruskin. They studied art, and fostered the study in the long vacations by tours among the Eng lish churches and the Continental cathedrals. Morris began at this time to write poetry.
Morris was entered (1856) as a pupil at the office of George Edmund Street, the architect ; and on New Year's Day the first number of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine appeared. The magazine existed for only a year. The chief immediate result was the friendship between Morris and Dante Gabriel Ros setti (q.v.), who became a contributor. In the summer of 1856 Street removed to London, and Morris accompanied him, working hard at architecture and painting. Rossetti persuaded him to de vote himself exclusively to painting. Early in 1858 Morris pub lished The Defence of Guenevere, which was almost unnoticed by contemporary criticism, but is now recognized as one of the pearls of Victorian poetry.
On April 26, 1859, Morris married Jane Burden, a beautiful Oxford girl, who had sat to him as a model, and settled tem porarily at 41 Great Ormond Street, London. Meanwhile he set about building for himself at Upton a house which was to be the embodiment of all his principles of decorative art. Its furnishing had suggested a fresh activity; Morris now decided to begin decoration as a career. A small company was formed, consisting of
D. G. Rossetti, Philip Webb, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Faulk ner and Marshall, and in Jan. 1862 started business under the title of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., with offices at 8 Red Lion square. The firm undertook church decoration, carving, stained glass, metalwork, paper-hangings, chintzes and carpets. The busi ness, after inevitable vicissitudes, flourished, but the "house beau tiful" at Upton proved to be unhealthily situated. Serious illness obliged the family to remove to town, and in Nov. 1865 they re settled at 26 Queen square, Bloomsbury. Morris was now un ceasingly busy, but he found time to write. In June 1867 he pub lished The Life and Death of Jason, which was at once successful ; and in April 1868 the first two parts of The Earthly Paradise. The rest of this wonderful storehouse of poetic romance appeared in two volumes in 1869 and 187o. In 1871, he took Kelmscott manor house, in the Upper Thames valley, in joint-tenancy with Rossetti, for use principally as a holiday home. In 1872 appeared Love is Enough, structurally the most elaborate of his poems ; and in the autumn he began to translate the shorter Icelandic sagas, to which his enthusiasm had been directed by two inspiring journeys to Ice land. Business worries, however, interrupted him ; the company had grown out of proportion with the existing division of profit and labour, and reconstruction was necessary. Long negotiations ensued, and in March 1875 the old firm was dissolved. Morris now became sole manager and proprietor.
Meanwhile in addition to his work upon the sagas, Morris had actually finished and (in 1875) published a version of the Aeneid. In 1876 appeared Sigurd the Volsung, a version full of heroic vigour, movement and vitality, but somewhat too lengthy and incoherent in design to preserve the epic interest intact to the British taste. This splendid burst of poetic activity had raised him to a place among the first poets of his time ; and in 1877 he was offered the professorship of poetry at Oxford, which he declined. A fresh outlet for his energy was furnished by his foundation in 1877 of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which . sprang into being as a practical protest against a scheme for restoring and reviving Tewkesbury abbey.