William Morris (1834-1896) was an English designer, poet, novelist, and socialist. Born in Walthamstow, Essex, he was raised in a wealthy family alongside nine siblings. Morris studied Classics at Oxford, where he was a member of the influential Birmingham Set. Upon graduating, he married embroiderer Jane Burden and befriended prominent Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With Neo-Gothic architect Philip Webb, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, he designed the Red House in Bexleyheath, where he would live with his family from 1859 until moving to London in 1865. As a cofounder of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co., he was one of the Victorian era's preeminent interior decorators and designers specializing in tapestries, wallpaper, fabrics, stained glass, and furniture. Morris also found success as a writer with such works as The Earthly Paradise (1870), News from Nowhere (1890), and The Well at the World's End (1896). A cofounder of the Socialist League, he was a committed revolutionary socialist who played a major part in the growing acceptance of Marxism and anarchism in English society.
