Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/502

ÆT. 49] fession, and implies a tribute to very special distinction in one who is not a Bishop or a Privy Councillor. This honour was conferred on him on the 13th of January, 1883. He had gone down to Bournemouth that day to see his daughter. "Such a pile of letters I found waiting me," he wrote to her on the 17th, after coming back to London, "some of them like those of David Copperfield after he had become an author." That same day he enrolled himself as a member of the Democratic Federation.

On his card of membership, which is signed by H.H. Champion, he is described as "William Morris, designer." It was on his status as a workman that he based his claim to admission into the fighting rank of a working-class movement. The step, which in a sense cut him definitely away from respectability, was in no way a merely formal one. He took it with a full sense of its import. "I am truly glad," were his words, with something of the grave joy of a convert, "that I have joined the only society I could find which is definitely Socialistic." His support of the new movement, even before he formally joined it, had not been confined to theoretical sympathy. In the previous October he had sold the greater part of his valuable library, in order to devote the proceeds to the furtherance of Socialism. Though he was not exactly a bibliophile, many of these treasures cost him a pang to part with, from the "De Claris Mulieribus," which had been his first purchase among the masterpieces of the early printers, down to oddly printed collections of Sagas from the Skalaholt Press, which he had acquired in Iceland. "If the modern books are unsaleable," he wrote to Ellis, "perhaps you would let me take them out after your valuation, as I have no idea what they are worth to sell (though beastly Rh