Chapter 4 - The Thames Basin

Summary

For the whole of his life, William Morris lived within reach of the River Thames or one of its tributaries. In the last twenty-five years, he was within a stone’s throw of it at Kelmscott Manor on the Upper Thames, at Kelmscott House beside it in urban Hammersmith, and at his Merton Abbey factory on the River Wandle. The landscape of ‘the infant Thames’ being his ‘Heaven on earth’, he sought to ‘forget’ – a key word in The Earthly Paradise – the mighty lower river with its filth and degradation, though he betrays a feeling for the whole river as national artery. In his utopian romance, News from Nowhere, his protagonist laments the fact that the Thames is not celebrated in literature. The romance in question seeks to rectify that by imagining a boat trip between Morris’s houses – something he himself twice undertook – and this becomes, as it shapes the narrative, a journey back into the heart of England and forward through a country transformed into something like paradise. The sense of happiness is partly achieved through the exclusion from the story of anything dark or painful and, in this, it may remind us of Morris the pattern designer, whose fabrics – a group of them named after Thames tributaries – evoke an inviolate nature and, through it, contentment and rest.