“The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (via philosophybits)
On this day, 24 March 1834, designer, artist and libertarian socialist William Morris was born. In Britain his iconic prints are well-known, although his lifetime of revolutionary activism is almost completely unknown.
In an article explaining how he came become a socialist, he wrote: “the consciousness of revolution stirring amidst our hateful modern society prevented me, luckier than many others of artistic perceptions, from crystallising into a mere railer against ‘progress’ on the one hand, and on the other from wasting time and energy in any of the numerous schemes by which the quasi-artistic of the middle classes hope to make art grow when it has no longer any root, and thus I became a practical Socialist.”
Morris also took a view on the role of art in the movement: “civilisation has reduced the workman (sic) to such a skinny and pitiful existence, that he scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life much better than that which he now endures perforce. It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life before him, a life to which the perception and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to be as necessary to man as his daily bread, and that no man, and no set of men, can be deprived of this except by mere opposition, which should be resisted to the utmost.”
Learn more about his life and ideas in this great biography by EP Thompson, and check out some of his prints here in our online store: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/william-morrishttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1678994362285707/?type=3
