Books: Victorian Renaissance Man

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WILLIAM MORRIS by E.P. THOMPSON 829 pages. Pantheon. $17.95.

Of all the Victorians, William Morris perhaps came closest to filling the outline of that egregious myth, the Renaissance Man. Only his socialist convictions made him turn down the post of Poet Laureate after Tennyson died. He translated the Icelandic sagas into English, wrote News from Nowhere, one of the best Utopian novels in the history of that genre, and was a charter member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. With John Ruskin, he was an influential agitator for maintaining the integrity of the architectural past; dozens of developers and architectural opportunists had cause to fear the voice of the Anti-Scrape, as Morris called his Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

Connective Tissue. He was the greatest designer of his age. Morris' workshops at Red House and Kelmscott offered as radical a challenge to English mass fabrication with its textiles, furniture and printed papers as, 70 years later, the Bauhaus would present to industrial manufacture in the 20th century. As book printer, weaver of tapestries, furniture designer and stained-glass worker, Morris consistently turned out the best work of anyone in Victorian England. Moreover, he was one of the century's major social thinkers.

Yet within 50 years of his death in 1896, the man's reputation had shrunk to a few yards of chintz and flowered wallpaper. This forceful and articulate genius had receded into a green limbo where Pre-Raphaelite ghosts lisped harmlessly to one another. He was posthumously seen as a backward-looking fabulist, a quaint Victorian period piece. The visions of a great radical socialist were diminished and finally lost. Yet in life they absorbed his greatest energies. "There is no salvation for the unemployed," he wrote in 1887, "but in the general combination of the workers for the freedom of labor—for the REVOLUTION." This belief permeates the 24 volumes of Morris' collected works. Rebellion was the connective tissue of his life. For reclamation, Morris needed the attentions of a Marxist historian: that event did not come until 1955, with the publication of Edward Thompson's William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary.