ABSTRACT
William Morris was passionate about architecture, its past, present and future. His youthful engagement with it was intensely romantic, sensual even. Later he came to understand it as a particular expression of the time and place of its making, though without losing that earlier strength of feeling for it. In both respects, he was walking a well-worn path. The Romantic poets and painters of two generations earlier had described architecture in emphatic, emotive terms. Morris had left Marlborough by Christmas 1851 and spent the first half of 1852 studying for his Oxford entrance exam under the guidance of the Rev. F. B. Guy of the Forest School in Walthamstow. Morris stayed on with him for another six months. There is no evidence that Morris joined the Oxford Architectural Society or even that he ever attempted any serious, scholarly study of medieval buildings in his free time.
