William Morris (1834-96) was not only a Victorian poet, translator, fantasy writer, major socialist, and anti-imperialist, but also a decorative artist, pioneering architectural preservationist, influential book designer, and early environmentalist. These wide-ranging interests have made him a focus of continued interest into the present, as his contributions have been featured in recent exhibitions, essay collections, books, and journal articles. In line with Morris’s own egalitarian views, these recent tributes have also included a reexamination of the contributions of those in his circle of friends and co-workers. Even more than those of many nineteenth-century contemporaries, Morris’s achievements were interactive and collaborative, from his early participation in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, through his decorative work for Morris and Co., his co-translations of Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon poetry, his Icelandic and European literary and artistic pilgrimages with friends, his co-creation of the Kelmscott Press, and his campaigns alongside both working- and middle-class colleagues in the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Eastern Question Association, the Socialist League, and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society.

The U. S. William Morris Society is therefore pleased to propose an Allied Organization session on “Morris and Collaboration.” Each prospective paper presents a new aspect of Morris’s shared work within a broader nineteenth- and twentieth-century context.

In “Printing Beauty, Crafting Democracy: Morris’s Legacy in J. M. Dent and Letchworth’s Publishing Industries,” Catherina Domeneghini, Wolfson Postgraduate Scholar in the Humanities at Oxford University, traces the influence of the cooperative business practices as well as designs of Morris and Emery Walker’s Kelmscott Press on J. M. Dent, the chief the mass-market publisher of aesthetically tasteful early twentieth-century books (the Everyman Library), whose premises were appropriately sited in the arts-and-crafts influenced garden city of Letchworth. Informed by the J. M. Dent archives, Domeneghini pushes back against the assumption of a divide between publishers of inexpensive classics and their less affluent readers. She argues that the artistry of book production was for Dent, as for Morris, “as politically significant as the product,” and that the firm’s collaborative business practices sought to create the press as “a community with a life and a creative volition of its own.”

In “Artistic Collaboration in the Kelmscott Chaucer and Future Possibilities for Books and Reading,” Xinguan Qiu, a Ph. D. student at Binghampton University, examines the rationale behind modern artistic book designs based on medieval sources. She notes that Morris as designer and Edward Burne-Jones as illustrator held differing conceptions of the political and artistic significance of the use of medieval antecedents. Emphasizing Burne-Jones's less well-discussed contributions, Ms. Qiu argues that the latter compromised between his own preferences and those of Morris, and that the issues raised by the resulting hybridity of the Kelmscott Chaucer anticipate those central to our present era of new, technologically-enhanced forms of book creation and reader response.

In “Stained Glass in the Sacred Heart Chapel at Roehampton: Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Angela Burdette Coutts,” Professor Jude V. Nixon of Salem State University explores the meanings behind a little-studied collaboration between Morris, proprietor of the decorative firm of Morris and Co., his friend, partner, and preferred designer Edward Burne-Jones, and Angela Burdette Coutts, a major Victorian philanthropist, whose sponsorship of stained glass windows for the Sacred Heart Chapel at Roehampton University, near Morris’s home in Hammersmith, enabled a major work of Victorian art. Using hitherto unexamined documents in the Roehampton archives, Professor Nixon is the first to explain the twelve panels’ distinctive themes, figure presentation, and sacramental use of light in the context of other stained-glass windows of the period and Morris and Co.’s desire to replicate some of the effects of Gothic cathedrals.

And finally, in “William Morris, T. S. Eliot, and the Proposed Demolition of Nineteenth-Century Churches,” Professor Emeritus Robert Fishman of the University of Michigan links the work of two literary figures who were also ardent architectural preservationists. Morris was the guiding spirit behind the formation of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings in 1877, and Eliot participated in the successful campaign to preserve nineteen Christopher Wren masterpieces, which in the 1920s had been scheduled for demolition by the Church of England. Fishman suggests that both poets “saw a uniquely modern form of spirituality in this unmediated juxtaposition of the sacred and profane in the London cityscape.”

The panelists represent a balance in age, nationality, and academic positions, with two postgraduate students and two senior scholars. Presentations will be limited to 12 minutes each to allow time for discussion.