Nowadays there's so much respect for William Morris as a designer that it's somehow difficult to see him as anything else, but when Professor Morton founded the William Morris Society in 1955, he was probably thinking more of Morris's role as a pioneer of English socialism than of up-market wallpaper patterns.

Morris was an energetic propagandist for socialism from the mid-1870s until the end of his life, constantly on the road addressing indoor and outdoor political meetings. Included here are two letters from Morris to his daughter Jane in April 1887, where he describes the schedule of a particularly gruelling trip to Scotland, with one or two speeches every day in a string of different towns and cities, and then he was persuaded to tack on an extra few days addressing miners on Tyneside just when he thought he had finished...

Most of the pieces in this fairly short book were written as lectures, with just a couple of short pieces of straight journalism at the end of the book. Public speaking in late-Victorian times was rather different from what it is now — no microphones, of course, and rowdy audiences who could easily shut a speaker down if they chose to — so Morris's style, with its carefully crafted rhetorical periods and breathing pauses, is sometimes a bit hard to take in cold print (it's easier if you put on a long false beard and declaim through it to yourself). All the same, it's obvious that he was very good at presenting Marxist ideas in terms that his British audiences could make sense of: he paints a very clear picture of what's wrong with capitalism (exploitation, waste, and ugliness, in particular) and why only a revolution can put things right.

Although he has a lot to say about how important it is for work to be useful and meaningful, and to result in the production of useful and beautiful things, he doesn't go in for any kind of romantic return to medievalism. He accepts that there are jobs that are best done by machines, but he urges that the effect of introducing a machine should not be to replace a skilled worker with an unskilled one, but rather to eliminate the need for someone to do a mindless and unpleasant job. He isn't a naive idealist: he realises that under socialism there will still be a need for managers and for people who clean toilets, and accepts that this could be a problem, but he doesn't see it as insoluble.

If Morris had any clear ideas about what socialism would mean for existing gender roles, he doesn't talk about it here. He uses the word "men" frequently, and by it he seems to mean male workers. There are some passing hints that he sees a socialist world as one in which people would be free to follow their "animal urges" as long as these didn't harm anyone else, but he doesn't expand on this. He does talk about slavery and the exploitation of workers in the colonies, but he treats these things as simple consequences of the capitalist system, not as a separate problem.

What is astonishing if you're used to reading nineteenth-century English intellectuals is the complete lack of any reference to religion. He neither attacks the churches nor defends them, he simply seems to find them irrelevant to the situation of late-Victorian workers. He also clearly doesn't have any interest in democratic reform or electoral politics: government for him means the official defence of capitalism, and meaningful change can only come from its replacement by a mass movement of workers. Piecemeal reform is a danger, as he argues in one of the last pieces in the collection, as it will tend to mitigate the pain of living under capitalism without taking away the ultimate cause of the pain. If we could bring him back and show him the 21st century, he would probably be entirely justified in saying "I told you so" (but he might be pleased to see that beards are back in fashion). ( )

This work begins with William Morris's first-ever public lecture in 1877. It includes lectures, articles and letters, and ends with a survey of his life. This edition includes two reviews of books which were crucial to the development of his thought: More's "Utopia" and Bellamy's "Looking Backward".