ABSTRACT
While undertaking research in the archives of the William Morris Society [WMS] on the background to a story that forms the core of my chapter here, I came across a lecture delivered to the Society in 1959 by the great socialist historian E. P. Thompson. In it he praised the late nineteenth century craftsman, design reformer, and poet as a ‘great moral teacher’, whose ‘greatness [came] to its full maturity in the political writing and example of his later years’. In relation to my research the most significant and thought provoking observation was Thompson’s:
feeling that perhaps through fear of controversy and out of respect for admirers of William Morris who do not share his political convictions – this Society has tended to be reticent on this matter. But Morris was one of our greatest men, because he was a great revolutionary, a profoundly cultured and humane revolutionary, but not the less a revolutionary for this reason. Moreover, he was a man working for practical revolution. It is this which brings the whole man together.
