Check out another great EF! Newswire review, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, by EP Thompson, PM Press, re-released 2011.
Morris was a Romantic poet and famous designer of chintzes, wallpapers, and furniture. But was he an anti-civ primitivist? Herein lies the importance of this book today.
“’Civilization’ (he wrote to Georgie Burne-Jones in May 1885) ‘I know now is doomed to destruction… What a joy it is to think of it! And how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies. With this thought in my mind all the history of the past is lighted up and lives again to me. I used really to despair once because I thought what the idiots of our day call progress would go on perfecting itself.’”
Check out the book on PM Press’s website here
