William Morris, a Transcultural Artist and Man of Letters

Abstract

William Morris is extremely famous for his career as a designer and one of the founders of the whole movement of the Arts and Crafts in Late Victorian England. But the other side of his career, as a man of letters, is far less abundantly documented. While his Socialist utopia News from Nowhere (1890) is still read and commented upon today, far less attention has been given to his early poems, as well as his late romances written in a mock- mediaeval style which was to inspire the whole twentieth-century movement of “Fantasy” literature.The article focuses on Morris’s partly neglected love of letters, both in the sense of literature as a whole, and of individual letters. Morris loved the letter as a writer, but also as a visual artist: from an early stage of his career, he practiced calligraphy as leisure, before turning to book-printing as a professional activity in the last years of his life. This love of letters is studied on the basis of a particular case-study: his production of a calligraphic and illustrated version of the mediaeval Persian poems of Omar Khayyam, the Rubbayiat, in their English translation by Edward FitzGerald (1859). Aside from his passion for letters, in both their graphic and poetic dimension, Morris’s work on the Rubbayiat shows how deeply intercultural and intermedial his inspiration was. He recreated for the English readers of the Persian poet a visual world which borrowed from his other creations in the field of textiles, carpets, wall-papers, etc., and brought together East and West in a completely hybrid visual creation. It is those eminently cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary sources of inspiration that the article unravels.