Galton was knighted in 1909 and died two years later, just a few months before he turned ninety, like Humboldt. Eccentric to the last, he experimented with controlling his bronchial problems by smoking hashish. To the very end, he was sure he knew best. Odd as he undoubtedly was—inventing ridiculous gadgets like underwater spectacles so he could read in the bath—he was also one 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 sterilizing “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 it’s 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 industrialization was rapidly reducing human beings to automatons, 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 a comfortable 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 armor, 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 wildflowers 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 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
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
William Morris was a short, portly, barrel-chested, bright-eyed, tousled ball of energy: absentminded, charming, continually breaking 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 undercooked 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 center 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 who 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, such as
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 byword 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, handmade 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 labor 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 more than most and taught them to make beautiful things that would last a lifetime. What would be the point, he asked, of his 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-based communists 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
