ABSTRACT
William Morris was a polymath who turned his hand to designing and making in a variety of processes, as well as poetry and novel writing, socialist activism, and publishing, among other achievements. Posthumously printed, Architecture, Industry and Wealth is a selection of lectures and articles that reveal the variety of Morris’s artistic interests which range from architecture, design and textiles, to connections between arts and socialism. In the article, Morris points to the crafts, whereby unselfconscious craftsperson is at one with the product, while he sees the industrial labourer as alienated from the object that he produces. Despite this pessimistic outlook, Morris ends on a cheerful note saying ‘It is my firm belief that we shall in the end realize this society of equals, and that when it is realized it will not endure a vicarious life by means of machinery; that it will in short be the master of its machinery and not the servant, as our age is’.
