ABSTRACT
William Morris was born in 1834 into a prosperous landowning Essex family of Evangelical persuasion. As a precocious child he developed a taste for Walter Scott, Gothic architecture, and 'sad lowland country'. In 1848 he went to Marlborough College, then dominated by a High Anglican spirit, and from there, after private tuition, to Exeter College, Oxford in Jan. 1853. He and his exact contemporary Edward Burne-Jones became the centre of a group of undergraduates who cultivated Pre-Raphaelitism, medievalism, and a wide range of cultural and even social interests. Overlaying the artistic enthusiasm was a religious enthusiasm which led to a plan for a sort of artproducing monastery. Ruskin was a dominant influence. In 1856 M. articled himself to George Edmund Street, one of the foremost neo-gothic architects. A colleague was Philip Webb, the principal figure in English domestic architecture from the 1870s onwards. In 1857 M. and Burne-Jones took up painting as disciples of Rossetti.
