The archaic appearance of the Kelmscott Press publications can lend the impression of revivalism in its fundamentalist form. This chapter considers the modern (and partially modern) technologies employed by Morris’s bookmaking venture, ranging from Emery Walker’s method of photographic enlargement in the development of typefaces, to the employment of early nineteenth-century metal presses. The discussion focuses initially on Morris’s broader relationship with technology, including the influence of John Ruskin. As with Ruskin, an initial impression of hostility to all mechanised solutions gives way to qualifications based in the form of energy harnessed, the context of the work, and the relationship with human agency or intelligence. Morris’s account of weaving provides a particularly suggestive basis for rethinking his relationship with technology, and this opens the way for a discussion of two lens-based solutions which he applied to work at the printing press. The first relates to the mediation of the hand by photographic means, most notably Burne-Jones’s hand as designer of the Press’s woodcuts. The second concerns technologies of projection and enlargement, initially employed by Walker at the ‘magic lantern’ lecture that inspired the foundation of the Press, and then in the design of typefaces based on early Venetian models.

Serving as the editorial introduction to the Cambridge Companion to William Morris, this chapter offers a broad outline of Morris’s life, emphasizing the historical and cultural factors that informed his artistic philosophy and wide-ranging output. The contours of Morris’s critical reception, past and present, are also sketched, and brought into dialogue with the chapters collected here. The first part of the discussion considers ‘The Making of Morris’: that is, the complex nexus of influences and events that enabled him to make a distinctive and enduring contribution in so many fields. Much of this discussion is biographical, but it also considers spatial and geographical ways of understanding the shape of his life. The second part is entitled ‘Morris Making Us’,. It proposes ways in which Morris’s influence continues to condition and enable our ways of thinking as inheritors of his legacy.

The closing phase of Pater’s 1868 review, ‘Poems by William Morris’, reappeared in 1873 as his Conclusion to The Renaissance. This chapter takes Pater’s engagement with Morris – both initially, and in these altered contexts – as a basis for thinking about his contribution to the development of English Studies. His evaluative criteria and methodology are also germane: what Pater values in Morris also envisions what he values in literature more generally. His account of ‘flux’ and perceptualism are familiar; but in the Morris review Pater is drawn more insistently to analogies with water – a fluidity expressing his aversion to walls, whether cultural or material, and a toleration of literature in dilution. Dilution is not commonly associated with literary virtues, not least because the twentieth-century re-founders of English tended to value concentration and concretion over any impression of looseness or dispersal. It is argued, however, that Pater recovers value from dilution – indeed, a dynamisation – though engagement with the language of cures associated with the then-fashionable alternative medicine of homeopathy.