William Morris

At four, sickly William Morris was already deep in the Waverley novels; before seven, he had read through them and many more. A move to a country house near Epping brought ancient churches and forest paths into his life—and seemed to open a door to the Middle Ages.

In Elisabeth Luther Cary’s biography, nineteenth-century Essex is the landscape of Morris’s boyhood: a little suit of armor, old church monuments, and long rambles through woods and countryside. The boy who collected rubbings from ancient inscriptions would grow into a poet, craftsman, and socialist, driven by a vision of remaking work and daily life according to the beauty he found in medieval England. His longing was not simply for the past; it pressed him to make the present “something different from what it was.” How would that dream shape the life he chose to lead?

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