ABSTRACT
By the end of the 1870s, the reputation of Morris & Co. was beginning to spread beyond the British Isles. Its products were received with enthusiasm by overseas clients who were willing to pay premium prices for goods of the highest quality and originality. Like many British firms, it lacked the manpower and local expertise to setup retail outlets of its own, and the appointment of reliable agents was seen as the best way of making sales in the rich markets of Europe and the United States. 1 In Germany, Morris & Co. products were available in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, and towards the end of the century Siegfried Bing sold Morris’s fabrics from his influential Maison de l’Art Nouveau in Paris. Morris frequently remarked on the difficulties of the American market; a particular problem was the tariffs on imported goods, which he described as ‘enormous’ and ‘almost prohibitive’. 2 Yet as the vogue for English designs and English products gathered pace during the late 1870s and early 1880s his designs were achieving such popularity amongst the well-to-do that United States manufacturers had begun to copy them, obliging him to publish the names of authorised agents, and warning that ‘no others can supply the goods we make’. 3 In Boston, for instance, Morris & Co. supplied A.H. Davenport & Co. with wallpapers, cretonnes, damasks, dress-silks, embroidery silks and crewels, Joel Goldthwait & Co. with carpets, and J.F. Bumstead & Co. with wallpapers. 4 In New York, Cowtan & Tout of Madison Avenue was Morris & Co.’s general agent in the United States, though by 1883 this function passed to Elliot & Bulkley of 42 East 14th Street. 5
