Few individuals have exerted more influence on their

contemporaries, and on posterity, than William Morris.

Dr Stephen Coote brings together the diverse elements

of this extraordinary man s life into a single biography.

The narrative is illustrated both with colour pictures of

his work and extracts from his poetry and prose,

throwing light on the career of this multi-faceted

Victorian who:

~ as a designer of fabrics and wallpapers changed

thousands of homes and remains an important

influence today

~ as a craftsman and proprietor of his own company

spread the ideals of individual workmanship, the

organic wholeness of all the arts and resistance to

mass-production

~ as a writer and poet, was offered the poet

laureateship, wrote constantly on the social

conditions of his day and translated Icelandic

~ as a socialist, espoused revolutionary ideas and was

one of the founding fathers of the British socialist

movement.

Besides Morris s considerable achievements, Stephen

Coote looks at the man himself: his stormy friendships,

his tortured menage with Jane Morris and Dante

Gabriel Rossetti and his single-minded devotion to his

work.

When Morris died in 1896 at the age of 62, his doctor

ascribed the cause of death to "simply being william

Morris and having done more work than most ten men

Almost a 100 years later, Stephen Coote has provided a

fitting tribute to one of the great figures of modem