Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/211

 MORRIS, WILLIAM (1834–1896), poet, artist, manufacturer, and socialist, was the eldest son and third child of William Morris, a partner in the firm of Sanderson & Co., bill brokers in the City of London, and of Emma Shelton, daughter of Joseph Shelton, a teacher of music in Worcester, and son of John Shelton, proctor in the consistory court of that city. He was born on 24 March 1834, at Elm House, Clay Hill, Walthamstow, his father's suburban residence. In 1840 the family removed to Woodford Hall (now known as Mrs. Gladstone's Convalescent Home), the park of which was conterminous with Epping Forest. As a boy, therefore, Morris had the free daily range of that unique tract of country, then little changed since mediaeval or even since prehistoric times; and these surroundings fostered his natural keenness of eye and romantic bent of temper. He learned to read very young, and never remembered a time when he could not read, but was not notably precocious otherwise. His earlier education was at a small private school in the neighbourhood; from January 1848 until December 1851 he was at Marlborough College, and then lived for nearly a year as a private pupil with the Rev. F. B. Guy, afterwards canon of St. Albans, and then assistant master at the Forest School, Walthamstow. He matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, in June 1852, and went into residence in January 1853.

Morris went up to Oxford with an unusual amount of varied knowledge and a character already strongly marked and well developed. Love of the middle ages was born in him, and was reinforced by the wave of Anglo-catholicism which had just spread over England, and which had come as a highly stimulating influence on families brought up, like his, in a somewhat stagnant evangelicalism. Already as a boy he had acquired a singularly minute knowledge of trees, flowers, and birds. At Marlborough he had, with the aid of the school library and all the specimens of ancient building within reach, made himself a good antiquary, 'knowing,' as he afterwards said, 'most of what was to be known about English Gothic;' and Savernake Forest and the Wiltshire downs made a background in complete harmony with his growing sense of romance and love of beauty. At Oxford he at once formed a close friendship with [q. v. Suppl.], who had entered at Exeter together with him, and had brought, from the very different surroundings of middle-class life in Birmingham, an enthusiasm, a knowledge, and a high idealism, which at all points confirmed and supplemented his own. Until Morris's death the two men lived in the closest intimacy, not only of daily intercourse but of thought and work. They were the two foremost figures in a group of undergraduates, chiefly Birmingham schoolfellows of Burne-Jones, which was perhaps more remarkable than any which Oxford has produced since.

At Exeter Morris read only for a pass degree, and mixed little in the general life of the college. But he was an incessant, swift, and omnivorous reader, and his prodigious memory enabled him in those few years to lay up an enormous store of knowledge. Religious perplexities, under which, in 1854, he was on the point of joining the Roman communion, passed over soon afterwards; ecclesiastical history and Anglican theology were in turn mastered and put aside, and their influence was gradually replaced by an artistic and social enthusiasm in which Carlyle, Ruskin, and Kingsley were the chief modern leaders whom he followed. When he came of age in 1855 he still cherished a fancy of devoting his considerable fortune to the foundation of a monastery in which he and his friends might combine an ascetic life with the organised production of religious art. This ideal became gradually enlarged and secularised, but remained, in one form or another, his ideal throughout life.

In the autumn of 1854 Morris had made his first visit to northern France, and in the long vacation of 1855 he repeated the tour in company with Burne-Jones and William Fulford, another member of the undergraduate circle, who were now known among themselves as 'the Brotherhood.' During this tour, under the added impulse of his boundless enthusiasm for French Gothic, he definitely renounced the purpose of taking orders with which he had gone to Oxford, and made up his mind to be an architect. As soon as he had passed his final schools that winter, he articled himself as a pupil to [q. v.], already one of the most prominent architects of the revived English Gothic, who then had his headquarters in Oxford as architect to the diocese. The articles were signed on 25 Jan. 1856. In Street's office Morris formed an intimate and lifelong friendship with the senior clerk, [q. v.], which had an important influence over the development taken by English domestic architecture during the next generation. He worked in Street's office for the rest of that year, first at Oxford, and afterwards in London when Street removed thither in the autumn. Meanwhile Burne-Jones had left Oxford without