A Materialist’s Paradise: William Morris and the Kelmscott Press

Online talk sponsored by the William Morris Society (UK).

“In the 1891 review of News From Nowhere ‘A Materialist’s Paradise’, Martin Hewlett charged William Morris with ‘exaggerat[ing] the dependence of human nature upon its environment’, and complained that Morris presents ‘the conditions of human welfare [as] physical’. In this lecure Dr Elizabeth Miller will consider the Kelmscott Press as Morris’s true ‘materialist paradise’, the creative project that most fully expresses his refusal to relegate the natural world to the debased category of the profane. Focusing especially on the materials from which the Kelmscott books are made, Dr Miller will interpret the project of the press in reaction to the industrial ecologies and in light of the burgeoning environmental movement of the 19th century.

Dr Elizabeth Miller is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of William Morris Studies.“

6:00 pm London (BST), 1:00 pm Eastern, 10:00 am Pacific

£5.00