QI The Book of the Dead

– inventing ridiculous gadgets like underwater spectacles so he could read in the bath – he was alsoone of the most respected and influential members of the Victorian scientific establishment and feted as one of the great men of his day. The final irony is that, for all his eugenicist talk of creating a ‘better’ world by sterilising ‘those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism’, it was Galton himself who died childless.

     
    William Morris (1834–96) was a decade younger than Galton. Given their respective political views it’s unlikely they ever met, although perfectly possible that Galton’s elegant South Kensington home was furnished using Morris’s designs. Morris is still best known as a designer, the Terence Conran of the nineteenth century: his work has spawned a thousand tea cosies, spectacle cases and napkins. This has tended to obscure his other achievements as a poet, painter, engraver, weaver, dyer, printer, retailer and revolutionary. Morris elevated ‘busyness’ to a kind of art form, so much so that, when he died in 1896, his doctor attributed his demise to ‘his simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men’.
    For Morris ‘useful’ work (which he distinguished from ‘useless’ toil) was no different from play: an enjoyable occupation that engaged both the mind and the senses. Confucius had said much the same thing 2,500 years earlier: ‘Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work again.’ In a century when industrialisation was rapidly reducing human beings to automata, Morris’s ideas were a powerful call for change. Few people have lived their work as thoroughly.
    Morris’s father was a city broker who died young, but whose shares in a Devon copper mine ensured the family enjoyed acomfortable life. As a result, Morris could afford to be generous to his friends, entertaining them royally and bankrolling their artistic joint ventures. It also left him with a devil-may-care disrespect for class distinctions that gives his prose a blunt honesty we don’t usually associate with the High Victorians. In a letter to a friend he writes: ‘I am a boor and the son of a boor … How often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world and real feelings and passions, however, rudimentary, taking the place of our hypocrisies.’
    His early childhood was idyllic. He grew up near Epping Forest; his father had bought him a pony and toy suit of armour, and he would ride into the forest as a miniature knight, carrying out quests and making up tales of chivalry while sketching the birds and wild flowers that would become central to his designs. He loathed formal education. At Marlborough, he recalled, ‘I had a hardish time of it, as chaps who have brains and feelings generally do at school.’ His nickname was Crab, and he was famous for his stormy temperament, rushing after those who teased him ‘with his head down and his arms whirling wildly’.
    This restless, impulsive quality persisted throughout his life and made him both lovable and exasperating. Before going up to Oxford, he toyed with the idea of becoming a High Church Anglican clergyman, but the work of John Ruskin converted him to architecture instead. Next, he became a passionate advocate of medieval art and communal living. After he graduated, he was apprenticed to G. E. Street, the Gothic revival architect, whom he later came to despise as a ‘vandal’. Inspired by his best friend, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, Morris decided that his real calling was painting. Then poetry took him over and he wrote The Earthly Paradise (1869), a kind of re-invention of the Canterbury Tales , in which a group of medieval Norwegian wanderers set out in search of a land of eternal life. This mythic verse epic became an immediate best-seller, establishing him as one of the most popular poets in the country. From then on, most people knew him as the ‘author of The Earthly Paradise ’, and the poem was still popular enough, more than twenty years later, for Morris to be offered the Poet Laureateship when Tennyson died in 1892. As well as poetry, novels, fantasies and essays flowed out of him – his Collected Works come to twenty-four large volumes. After poetry, his next preoccupation was dyeing, a complex technical process that he taught himself. Having mastered that he learnt weaving, then tapestry, then