Switch to English Switch to French

The Open University  |   Study at the OU  |   About the OU  |   Research at the OU  |   Search the OU

Listen to this page  |   Accessibility

the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Reading Experience Database UK Historical image of readers
  RED International Logo

RED Australia logo


RED Canada logo
RED Netherlands logo
RED New Zealand logo

Listings for Author:  

Morris

 

Click here to select all entries:

 


  

William Morris : 

[Alice Foley] read some Morris and less Marx, but for her a liberal education for the proletariat was not merely a means of achieving socialism: it was socialism in fact. At night school she staged a personal revolution by writing a paper on Romeo and Juliet and thriling to the "new romantic world" of Jane Eyre. She joined a Socialist Sunday School where 'Hiawatha' was recited for its "prophetic idealism", and a foundry hammerman intoned Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Foley      Print: Book

  

William Morris : 

'[J.M. Dent's] cultural contacts broadened when he became an apprentice bookbinder in London, discovering the work of William Morris, Cobden-Sanderson and the Arts and Crafts Movement'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Malaby Dent      Print: Book

  

William Morris : [unknown]

[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Cutlery worker, age seventy-two...Fond of Longfellow, Stevenson, Ruskin, William Morris and Charles Dickens'

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent      Print: Book

  

William Morris : The Haystack in the Floods (and other poems)

'When Wilfrid Blunt joined [William] Morris and his daughter at Kelmscott in 1891, Morris "read us out several of his poems ... including The Haystack in the Floods, but his reading is without the graces of elocution."'

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: William Morris      

  

William Morris : The Defence of Guenevere

Letter H.96 (Beginning of June 1861) ?The Defence of Guenevere by Morris is published by Bell & Daldy.?

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin      Print: Book

  

William Morris : poetry

"Before she came into contact with Suffragism ... [Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence] felt her political outlook ... had been conditioned by reading Morris, Carpenter, and Whitman's poetry."

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence      Print: Unknown

  

William Morris : [unknown]

'After a miserable Catholic school education...periodic unemployment allowed [Joseph Toole] to study in the Manchester Reference Library. There he discovered, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Mill, Emerson, Dickens, Morris, Blatchford, Shaw and Wells, and of course John Ruskin..."Study always left me with a deep feeling that there was so much amiss with the world. It seemed that it had been started at the wrong end, and that it was everybody's business to put the matter right".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Toole      Print: Book

  

William Morris : The Earthly Paradise

'A.E. Coppard, a laundrywoman's son who grew up in dire poverty, left school at nine, ascended the ranks of clerkdom and became (at age forty) a professional author. At fourteen he was still enjoying "Deadeye Dick", by twenty he was reading Henry James...He secured a literary education at the Brighton Public Library, and as a professional runner he used prize money to buy Hardy's poems, Shakespeare, Mackail's translation of "The Odyssey", and William Morris's "The Earthly Paradise". In an undemanding job... he read on company time, though there was a row when his supervisor found "Jude the Obscure" on his desk'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Edgar Coppard      Print: Book

  

William Morris : 

'Before his departure for his native land he had read some of Dickens and Stevenson... and William Morris. John Masefield's debt to William Morris as a constructive thinker is considerable. It may be that Morris has been the formative influence, in his limitations as well as his liberations, on Masefield's view of life'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: John Masefield      Print: Book

  

William Morris : 

'Uncle Richard had adored Ruskin, and worshipped Morris, and had slept for years with a copy of "In Memoriam" under his pillow. He told me once how he and his friends used to wait outside the bookshops in the early morning, when they heard that a new volume of Tennyson was to come out. He had read all Browning too, and all Wordsworth, and Carlyle, in fact nearly everything contemporary; and he constantly re-read the Classics in their own classic tongues... a triumph of timing occurred once when he was listening to the Thunderstorm in the Pastoral Symphony, and reading the thunderstorm in "Oedipus at Colonus", and a real thunderstorm took place!'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Litchfield      Print: Book

  

William Morris : The Earthly Paradise

Henry James to Alice James, in letter begun 10 March 1869 (continued on 12 March), on evening spent at home of William Morris: "After dinner (we stayed to dinner, Miss Grace, Miss S. S. and I,) Morris read us one of his unpublished poems, from the second series of his 'un-Earthly Paradise,' and his wife having a bad toothache, lay on the sofa, with her handkerchief to her face."

Unknown
Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: William Morris      

  

William Morris : The Earthly Paradise

'one day in Kirkwall my brother Johnnie, who had gone to work in a shop there, gave me three pennies to spend, and I went at once to the bookseller's which sold "The Penny Poets" and bought "As You Like It", "The Earthly Paradise", and a selection of Matthew Arnold's poems. ...I did not get much out of the selection of Arnold's poems... "As You Like It" delighted me, but it was "The Earthly Paradise" that I read over and over again.'

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir      Print: Book

  

William Morris : [prose works]

'These artless idealists had their favourite authors, which I now proceeded to read...Their piece de resistance was Sir Thomas More's "Utopia", closely followed by the prose works of William Morris, "The Story of the Unknown Church", and the like. There was quite a spate of novels with this ideology, but the only one that has come down to the present day is Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Stamper      Print: Book

  

William Morris : The Story of the Unknown Church

'These artless idealists had their favourite authors, which I now proceeded to read...Their piece de resistance was Sir Thomas More's "Utopia", closely followed by the prose works of William Morris, "The Story of the Unknown Church", and the like. There was quite a spate of novels with this ideology, but the only one that has come down to the present day is Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Stamper      Print: Book

  

Frank Morrison : Who Moved the Stone

'Headmistress takes Evensong in school because the church could not be blacked out. Instead of a sermon she read from books with a religious theme, e.g. "The Other Wise Man", "Who Moved the Stone?" and "In the Steps of the Master", which we all enjoyed.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group:      Print: Book

  

William Morris : [unknown]

[Helen Roothman] 'brought Edith new poetry too - the French symbolists, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire - to enlarge her own rapt readings of Swinburne, William Morris, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Yeats'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

John Morrison : Hoggiad, The

'A gentleman who deems himself libelled at in the Wake has sent a long poem to Edin. to be printed [italics] in quarto [end italics] which he denominates [italics] The Hoggiad [end italics] or [italics] A Supplement to the Queen's Wake [end italics] It is the most abusive thing I ever saw but has otherwise some merit'..

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: James Hogg      Manuscript: Unknown

  

William Morris : Earthly Paradise, The

'He [George Gissing] recommended [in letters to his siblings] books like Morris's "Earthly Paradise", a poem "abounding in the quaintest archaisms"; Ruskin's "Unto this last", which Gissing liked as a "contribution to - or rather onslaught upon - Political Economy"; Landor's "Imaginary Conversations", for its "perfect prose"; and Scott's "Redgauntlet", for the romantic situations of which he must "try to find parallel kinds in modern life". Gissing kept up the habit throughout his life: he was always reading and always recommending books to his friends and family. In the early 1880s he read a lot of German, and to his brother, Algernon, particularly recommended Eckerman's "Conversations with Goethe", "a most delightful book". Meanwhile his sister, Margaret, was reading Schiller under his direction'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: George Gissing      Print: Book

  

Lewis Morris : 

'[quotation from Maurice Bowra's Memoirs] The first time I met him [John Betjeman] he talked fluently about half forgotten authors of the nineteenth century - Sir Henry Taylor, Ebeneezer Elliott, Philip James Bailey, and Sir Lewis Morris'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: John Betjeman      Print: Book

  

Morris : ?work on ornithology

From Emily Tennyson's Journal, 1870: 'Nov. 8th. [...] A. read me Pepys' Diary [...] We read about starlings in Morris; I did not know (what A. had put into his Idyll ["The Last Tournament"] by his own observation) that the starlings in June, after they have brought up their young ones, congregate in flocks in a reedy place for the sake of sociability.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred and Emily Tennyson     Print: Book

  

William Morris : 

'Mr Morland then read a paper on Wm Morris & his writings & gave illustrative readings assisted by Mrs Morland'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Harold J. Morland      Print: Book

  

William Morris : 

'Mr Morland then read a paper on Wm Morris & his writings & gave illustrative readings assisted by Mrs Morland'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Adelaide Morland      Print: Book

  

William Morris : Earthly Paradise

'The consideration of the Life & work of Wm Morris was opened by the reading of a short account of the Life by Mrs Goadby in which his many activities were passed in review. After some comments Mrs Edminson read the opening verses to the Earthly Paradise the idle singer of an empty day. Miss Goadby followed with an excellent paper entitled "Some Illustrations of Wm Morris's love of nature" which showed a wide knowledge and keen appreciation of the author's works both in prose & verse. After some appreciative remarks Mrs Ridges read a paper on Wm Morris & Socialism in which it was pointed out that the socialism was the direct & logical outcome of his artistic attitude. [this argument is summarised] Some discussion folowed & was hardly concluded at ten o clock when the Chairman called upon A. Rawlings for some remarks on the art of Wm Morris. In two or three minutes a very incomplete statement of Morris's methods & aims was made & a very pleasant evening was brought to a close'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Edminson      Print: Book

  

William Morris : [political works]

'The consideration of the Life & work of Wm Morris was opened by the reading of a short account of the Life by Mrs Goadby in which his many activities were passed in review. After some comments Mrs Edminson read the opening verses to the Earthly Paradise the idle singer of an empty day. Miss Goadby followed with an excellent paper entitled "Some Illustrations of Wm Morris's love of nature" which showed a wide knowledge and keen appreciation of the author's works both in prose & verse. After some appreciative remarks Mrs Ridges read a paper on Wm Morris & Socialism in which it was pointed out that the socialism was the direct & logical outcome of his artistic attitude. [this argument is summarised] Some discussion folowed & was hardly concluded at ten o clock when the Chairman called upon A. Rawlings for some remarks on the art of Wm Morris. In two or three minutes a very incomplete statement of Morris's methods & aims was made & a very pleasant evening was brought to a close'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Blanche Ridges      Print: Book

  

William Morris : [poetry and prose]

'The consideration of the Life & work of Wm Morris was opened by the reading of a short account of the Life by Mrs Goadby in which his many activities were passed in review. After some comments Mrs Edminson read the opening verses to the Earthly Paradise the idle singer of an empty day. Miss Goadby followed with an excellent paper entitled "Some Illustrations of Wm Morris's love of nature" which showed a wide knowledge and keen appreciation of the author's works both in prose & verse. After some appreciative remarks Mrs Ridges read a paper on Wm Morris & Socialism in which it was pointed out that the socialism was the direct & logical outcome of his artistic attitude. [this argument is summarised] Some discussion folowed & was hardly concluded at ten o clock when the Chairman called upon A. Rawlings for some remarks on the art of Wm Morris. In two or three minutes a very incomplete statement of Morris's methods & aims was made & a very pleasant evening was brought to a close'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Miss Goadby      Print: Book

  

William Morris : translation of The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs

'Morris's Sigurd is a grrrrreat poem; that is so.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson      Print: Book

  

William Morris : Earthly Paradise, The

'C.I. Evans described the Earthly Paradise & Mrs Evans & R.H. Robson gave readings therefrom. H.M. Wallis read [superscript 'recited'] some parts of Sigurd the Volsung & described the extraordinary conditions under which many of the poems were written. Some little discussion upon his poetical works followed but lack of time prevented the reading of further poems'. [the 'crowded' tendency of the meetings is then commented on]

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Evans      Print: Book

  

William Morris : 

'C.I. Evans described the Earthly Paradise & Mrs Evans & R.H. Robson gave readings therefrom. H.M. Wallis read [superscript 'recited'] some parts of Sigurd the Volsung & described the extraordinary conditions under which many of the poems were written. Some little discussion upon his poetical works followed but lack of time prevented the reading of further poems'. [the 'crowded' tendency of the meetings is then commented on]

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Marriage Wallis      Print: Book

  

William Morris : Earthly Paradise, The

'C.I. Evans described the Earthly Paradise & Mrs Evans & R.H. Robson gave readings therefrom. H.M. Wallis read [superscript 'recited'] some parts of Sigurd the Volsung & described the extraordinary conditions under which many of the poems were written. Some little discussion upon his poetical works followed but lack of time prevented the reading of further poems'. [the 'crowded' tendency of the meetings is then commented on]

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Evans      Print: Book

  

William Morris : Earthly Paradise, The

'C.I. Evans described the Earthly Paradise & Mrs Evans & R.H. Robson gave readings therefrom. H.M. Wallis read [superscript 'recited'] some parts of Sigurd the Volsung & described the extraordinary conditions under which many of the poems were written. Some little discussion upon his poetical works followed but lack of time prevented the reading of further poems'. [the 'crowded' tendency of the meetings is then commented on]

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Reginald Robson      Print: Book

  

William Morris : Sigurd the Volsung

'C.I. Evans described the Earthly Paradise & Mrs Evans & R.H. Robson gave readings therefrom. H.M. Wallis read [superscript 'recited'] some parts of Sigurd the Volsung & described the extraordinary conditions under which many of the poems were written. Some little discussion upon his poetical works followed but lack of time prevented the reading of further poems'. [the 'crowded' tendency of the meetings is then commented on]

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Marriage Wallis      Print: Book

  

William Morris : 

'Meeting held at 70 Northcourt Avenue: 18. 6. 35.

Charles E. Stansfield in the Chair

1. Minutes of last read and approved.

2. The Secretary then read a letter from Marjorie C. Cole, expressing her interest in the Book Club and offering us a book “Gone Rambling” by Cecil Roberts which she had recently read with enjoyment. [...]


[...]

6. The large subject of London was then opened by Howard Smith. He spoke of the extraordinary insistence of the divergent views as its origin, leaning to the opinion that it owed its beginnings to to a variety of causes.


[...]

7. Extracts from Defoe’s Journal of the Great Plague were then read by Victor Alexander.


[...]

8. From Defoe we turned to Pepys, and Reginald Robson described the Great Fire.


[...]

9. We next enjoyed a delightful picture of old London which Edith Goadby gave us, making the acquaintance of Gabriel Bardon the locksmith, his pretty daughter Dolly and Simon the apprentice. It was all too short, but at least we left them happily seated before their jolly round of beef, their Yorkshire cake and quaintly shaped jug of ale.


10. A further scene was depicted for us by Ethel Stevens, old Crosby Hall, Chelsea Hospital, Cheyne walk as it used to be, and Carlyle’s house, where he entertained Tennyson in the kitchen. We were introduced to John Stuart Mill and his great concern over the loss of his fiend’s manuscript of the French Revolution, and we took glimpses at William de Morgan + Sir Thomas More.


11. Finally Charles Stansfield read us Wordsworth’s Sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge, and Henry Marriage Wallis quoted happily ten lines from William Morris.'

Unknown
Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Marriage Wallis      

 

Click here to select all entries:

 

   
   
Green Turtle Web Design