Morris attended Exeter College, Oxford and was one of the founders of Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, to which he contributed essays, poems and short stories. His first book of poetry, Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, was published in 1858. Morris, together with other artist friends founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, in 1861 which produced printed textiles, wallpaper, stained glass and furniture. The firms designs were enormously successful and had a great influence of English design and taste. In 1883, Morris joined the Social Democratic Federation and was instrumental in the development of its doctrine into socialism. Along socialist lines he published The Dream of John Ball (1888) and News From Nowhere (1891). Besides a large amount of poetry, among which one of the best is Sigurd the Volsung (1876), Morris produced a number of romantic novels. Among the better known of these were The House of the Wolfings (1889), The Roots of the Mountain (1890), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1890), The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897 posthumous) and Child Christopher (1895). |
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