QI The Book of the Dead

that would last a lifetime. What would be the point, he asked, of him giving his money away? The poor would be just as poor. ‘The world would be pleased to talk to me for three days until something new caught its fancy. Even if Rothschild gave away his millions tomorrow, the same problems would confront us the day after.’
    In some ways, the brand of socialism that Morris championed has fared no better than Galton’s eugenics, but he was never a hard-line party man – Engels and the other London-basedcommunists were deeply suspicious of him. Neither he nor they could have foreseen the Gulags, any more than Galton could have predicted the Nazis. What Morris did see coming, though, with great clarity and dismay, was the consumer society. Even as a teenager he refused to go into the Great Exhibition of 1851 with the rest of his family, suspecting it would be brimful of industrial ugliness and wasteful luxury goods. ‘I have never been in any rich man’s house which would not have looked the better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-tenths of all that it held,’ he wrote. Far ahead of his time, Morris saw that consumerism would come to oppress those who did the consuming: he foresaw a nation drowning in cheap tat and clutter, its people ruled by their own possessions. ‘Luxury,’ he said, ‘cannot exist without slavery of some kind or other.’
    He also saw how capitalism would get round the growing clamour for freedom and equality. In 1869, long before the Labour Party was founded, he predicted that the establishment would survive by adopting ‘quasi-socialist machinery’ with ‘the workers better treated, better organised, helping to govern themselves, but with no more pretence to equality with the rich, nor any more hope for it than they have now’. They were prophetic words. Though the overall standard of living has improved in the 140 years since Morris was writing, inequality in British society has actually widened. The top 20 per cent in Britain today now earn seven times as much as the bottom 20 per cent.
    As the novelist Henry James said of Morris, he is ‘wonderfully to the point and remarkable for clear, good sense’. He wasn’t a sophisticated political theorist; he was a problem-solver, a doer, and he was the first major figure to utter the heresy that unless art is accessible to everyone it is worthless.

    His personal life, friendships and merriment aside, was painful. His wife, Jane, had two long affairs, one with his friend, the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who rather cruelly called his pet wombat Topsy), and the other with the louche poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Her infidelities wounded Morris deeply, although his own emotional inadequacies were partly to blame. His view of romantic love never developed beyond adolescent idealisation and fell far short of the emotional intimacy that Jane needed. She was a depressive and Morris escaped her moods by burying himself in his work. Nevertheless, they remained together and he managed the situation over forty years with tact and kindness. By way of compensation for his failings as a husband, he was endlessly attentive to his children – particularly his daughter Jenny who lived life as a semi-invalid because of her epilepsy. They, in turn, adored him.
    In the last two years of his life his great passion was the production of a hand-printed edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , in type he designed himself, with eighty-seven illustrations by Burne-Jones. A masterpiece of book design, it is the embodiment of his theory that work should be collaborative and the results both beautiful and useful. Burne-Jones called it ‘a pocket cathedral’.
    In 1895 trouble with Morris’s lungs proved to be tubercular and he started to weaken. But, visiting a badly restored Norman church in Sussex, he still had the energy to unleash paroxysms of fury at the absent architects: ‘Beasts! Pigs! Damn their souls!’ On hearing that John Ruskin had described him as ‘the ablest man of his time’, he summoned his old jollity to order up a bottle of Imperial Tokay (one of his favourite wines) from the cellar. But he knew the end was near. ‘I cannot believe I will be annihilated!’ hefumed. His final words were defiant: ‘I want to get mumbo jumbo out of the world,’ but his death was peaceful. Several of his friends noted how beautiful he looked lying there in repose – and, being motionless, how unlike himself.

     
    Morris’s