1 THE ELUSIVE OTHERNESS OF WILLIAM MORRIS’S PAINTED SPACE Daniela Brown I do not believe in the world being saved by any system – I only assert the necessity of attacking systems grown corrupt, and no longer leading anywhither: that to my mind is the case with the present system of capital and labour: as all my lectures assert, I have personally been gradually driven to the conclusion that art has been handcuffed by it, and will die out of civilization if the system lasts. (Morris in Briggs 136) But for the words “art” that “has been handcuffed” by corruption, a contemporary reader may momentarily think this is an extract from the president’s speech at a referendum meeting or in the parliament or somewhere before the press. In a different time, space, culture and political colour these words defined the personality of another rebel, I would say, a romantic, William Morris who put them on paper in 1883. They reflected the grievances of William Morris’s fiery spirit assumed to be socialist and his discontentment with Victorian society and authorities. They were in a letter sent to C. E. Maurice, another socialist. Morris’s rebellious attitude urged him to carry on in the same letter with the opinion that the differences between the rich and the poor are “unendurable” and the solution for him is to act for “the destruction of the system which seems… mere oppression and obstruction”. To his judgment, the opposition can win by “the united discontent of numbers” (Morris in Briggs 137). Therefore, the belligerent solution advanced by William Morris was to deface capitalism and capitalistic injustice in England by the great numbers of discontented people who were to loudly voice their opposition. Morris’s unworldly idealism is transparent. According to Andrew Graham-Dixon, William Morris “was not a revolutionary, but a nostalgic utopian “(193).Having come from a well-to-do family, spending his Oxford years in the study of the medieval past and idealistically aiming at joining the Church together with his life- time friend Edward Burne-Jones, Morris’s sheltered life must have kept him away from a deeper understanding of Victorian social intricacies. F. Engles ones said about him: “Morris is all very well as far as he goes, but it is not very far.” (Graham-Dixon 193) This present paper intends to show the difference between William Morris’s wonderful but impractical ideas about world peace and social equality in a space he meant to be populated by unique hand-made artefacts, accessible to anyone, and the alterity of his initial ideal, that is, extraordinary textiles, wallpaper, stained glass, furniture, all quite exquisite and expensive, but all accessible only to the very few. William Morris eluded the destination of his designed objects: his carpets and wallpapers, his embroideries and tiles with medieval scenes decorated the houses of prosperous capitalists building up an English interior decoration geography that bore the style of Morris, that initiated the Arts and Crafts Movement, that announced and influenced the designs of the internationally Art Nouveau style of the last two decades of the 1800s and the first decade of the 1900s. It is not at random I have chosen to quote from a letter from 1883 because, for William Morris, the year was socially and politically prolific: he then joined the Democratic Federation, later called the Social Democratic Federation, he read Karl Marx’s Capital in French and declared himself an ardent Socialist, began lecturing on Socialism, although he himself had admitted that “ suffered agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the pure economics of that great work, [the Capital] (Morris in Briggs 34) 1 , and combined this ideology with theories on the mission of art. That same year, he lectured in Manchester on “Art, Wealth and Riches” and in Oxford on “Art and Democracy” (Briggs 24-25). In 1883, he was at the peak of his career, at the climax of his artistic success, at the maturity of his ideological beliefs. His intentions and ambitions were noble: to do away with “300 years of profit-mongering for the overthrow of 1 Morris in the Social Democratic Federation journal called Justice, 16 June 1894