QI The Book of the Dead

printing. On top of all this, he found time to become a political activist: first a liberal, then a socialist and the spiritual godfather of the British Labour Party. His friend Burne-Jones encapsulated the roller-coaster ride of Morris’s life: ‘All things he does splendidly … every minute will be alive.’
    Morris never felt more alive than when he was making something. He summed up his philosophy in saying: ‘If a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he is weaving a tapestry, he had better shut up.’ His infectious enthusiasm rubbed off on all those around him. Whether at home, or in the factories and shops he built, Morris had a genius for getting everyone to join in. Much of this was due to his bonhomie and unconventional sense of fun. At Oxford, he was noted for his purple trousers and once ate dinner in a suit of chain mail he’d had made by a local blacksmith. His unruly mop of hair led his friends to nickname him ‘Topsy’ (as in the phrase ‘growed like Topsy’) after the ragamuffin slave girl in the popular contemporary novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).
    William Morris was a short, portly, barrel-chested, bright-eyed, tousled ball of energy: absent-minded, charming, continuallybreaking chairs by means of what Ned Burne-Jones called ‘a muscular movement peculiar to himself’ and capable of terrifying fits of foul-mouthed temper. When in a rage, he could crush forks with his teeth and smash holes in plaster walls with his head: one Christmas Day he threw an under-cooked plum pudding through a window. In return, his friends would wind him up terribly, resewing the buttons on his waistcoat to make him seem even fatter, or refusing to answer his questions at dinner. Mostly it was with Morris’s cheery compliance. He liked being the centre of attention, even when it cast him in an absurd light.
    He was a man of large appetites: he ‘lusted for pig’s flesh’ and always kept the dinner table groaning with good wine. ‘Why do people say it is so prosaic to be inspired by wine,’ he protested. ‘Has it not been made by the sunlight and the sap?’ He liked the grand gesture: on becoming a socialist he sat on his top hat to mark his resignation from the board of the family’s copper mine. With his shaggy beard, blue work-shirt and rolling gait, he was often mistaken for a seaman, though he sometimes seems more like a Viking that has stepped out of one of his beloved Norse sagas.
    Perhaps because of his lovable, faintly batty streak, Morris’s contributions to public life are often overlooked. He has been called the father of Modernism in architecture, the most important English socialist thinker and the first environmentalist. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Art Workers Guild, both of which he helped found, continue to thrive. Even in literature, where his reputation has suffered its steepest decline, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien both cited his prose romances like The Wood beyond the World as inspirational for their own work.
    Considering why Morris’s poems were no longer read, G. K.Chesterton once remarked: ‘If his poems were too like wallpapers, it was because he really could make wallpapers.’ Morris’s design has become a by-word for English bourgeois good taste. It appears everywhere – often in contexts that Morris could not possibly have foreseen, still less approved of. Morris’s ideal house was a big barn, ‘where one ate in one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in a third corner and in the fourth, received one’s friends.’ His own actual houses were, quite literally, hand-made works of art. The core idea of his thought is that art begins at home, in the making and furnishing of a house. True art, for Morris, is indistinguishable from craftsmanship: it isn’t about abstract ‘self-expression’ but practical collective labour that gives pleasure in the doing and creates beauty that everyone can share. He was extraordinarily influential in his lifetime: the social progressives who applauded Galton’s eugenics – George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, the Pankhursts, J. M. Keynes – had homes that were veritable shrines to Morris & Co.
    Morris was well aware of the contradiction of being a socialist visionary, on the one hand, and a businessman who supplied decor to the rich and famous on the other. But he was far too busy to wallow in guilt. He pointed out that he paid his staff over the odds and taught them to make beautiful things