This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series brings together a selection of William Morris's poetry and prose, lectures, articles, and letters, with an introduction and notes that emphasize his rich literary and historical connections and the relevance of his prescient writing to pressing issues of the modern world.

Ingrid Hanson took her first degree at Cambridge and returned to academia after fifteen years working in journalism, freelance writing, and community teaching, gaining her PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2011. She has taught at the universities of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam, and Hull and is currently Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. She has published work on William Morris, Victorian medievalism, masculinities, Victorian socialist poetry and periodicals, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-war literature. She has spoken about William Morris as an expert guest on Radio 4's In Our Time and on Radio 3's The Essay.

• Introduction


• TEXTS


• Letter to Cormell Price, 3 April 1855


• Letter to Cormell Price, 10 August 1855


• From the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856:


• 'The Hollow Land'


• 'The Story of the Unknown Church'


• From The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems', 1858:


• 'The Defence of Guenevere'


• 'Golden Wings'


• 'The Haystack in the Floods'


• 'Sir Peter Harpdon's End'


• 'Concerning Geffray Teste Noire'


• 'The Eve of Crecy'


• 'Near Avalon'


• 'In Prison'


• From The Earthly Paradise, 1868-70:


• 'Apology'


• From the 'Prologue'


• 'March'


• 'November'


• 'February'


• From 'The Watching of the Falcon'


• Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 19 October 1871


• From Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, Books 1 and 2, 1876


• From 'The Lesser Arts', 1877


• 'The Beauty of Life', 1880


• From 'Some Hints on Pattern-Designing', 1881


• Letter to Robert Thompson, 24 July 1884


• 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil', 1884


• 'How We Live and How We Might Live', 1885


• 'Unattractive Labour', 4 May 1885


• 'Attractive Labour', 5 June 1885


• From two letters to Georgiana Burne-Jones, 28 April 1885 and 13 May 1885


• 'The Vulgarization of Oxford': Letter to the Editor of the Daily News, 20 November 1885


• 'The Day is Coming'


• 'All for the Cause'


• 'The March of the Workers'


• A Dream of John Ball, 1888


• From The House of the Wolfings, 1888


• 'Mr Shaw Lefevre's Monumental Chapel': Letter to the Editor of the Daily News, 30 January 1889


• 'Looking Backward', Commonweal, 22 June, 1889


• News from Nowhere, 1891


• 'How I became a Socialist', 1894


• 'On Epping Forest': Letter to the Editor of the Daily Chronicle, 23 April 1895


• From The Sundering Flood, 1896


• Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press, 1895