At the age of thirty-seven William Morris went off to Iceland to reassess his life (or lives) to date. From a sunny, well-heeled childhood – his father was a bill broker who died shortly and luckily before his business collapsed – Morris went to rough-tough Marlborough, where he learnt next to nothing because, he said, ‘next to nothing was taught’, and on to Exeter College, Oxford, where he took a pass degree and made friends with Ned Jones (later Sir Edward Burne-Jones, such are the transformations of time and social rising).

Originally destined for the cloth, Morris decided to switch to architecture, spent a year in the office of G E (Law Courts) Street and then, under the charismatic influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, switched again, this time to art. Having already published a monthly magazine that lasted longer than most such ventures, he issued a volume of verse so innovative that the printer thought the first page must be missing.

As Fiona MacCarthy is at pains to show, Morris was full of energy so penetrating and practical that each field was thoroughly ‘done’ in turn. Studying medieval armour, he had a local blacksmith make replicas in which he cheerily sat down to dinner. Having money helped: Morris could always realise his dreams, though later the steep decline in his inherited income made the success of Morris & Co, his smart furnishing shop, a necessity as well as a pleasure.

Thus, every five years or so, Morris reinvented himself with a new creation. Red House, his new-built ‘utopian’ home in Kent, gave way to Queen Square and the interminable narratives of The Earthly Paradise, a filmic fantasy series in verse. Then came the recovery of old techniques in stained glass, illuminated manuscripts and natural dyes redolent of a medieval golden age. In all these fields, however, the wishful impulse was creative rather than escapist: things were made, books were writ-ten, textiles were sold, for present and future use.

A short, stocky, pugnacious man, who dressed like an artisan and never looked in a mirror, Morris was the good-humoured butt of many jokes and caricatures by Burne-Jones and Rossetti that combine to give the impression of him sitting at a loom composing (or weaving?) poetry, or designing wallpaper while riding an Icelandic pony. A kinder image is of him emerging from the cellar with bottles in each hand and under each arm; he liked wine and food and conviviality. MacCarthy suggests yet another vignette when she describes his campfire success with a scratch stew of tinned carrots, a hunk of bacon and four curlews as a feat worthy of a well-known television cook.

Marriage was Morris’s major failure, whether because his wife, Janey, a stable hand’s daughter aged eighteen, was in no position to refuse his offer, or because Morris lacked sexual sensitivity is now hard to say; despite the birth of two daughters, their relationship had little emotional intimacy. MacCarthy hints at female distaste and frigidity, even ‘the ultimate vagina dentata syndrome’, but she also more plausibly contrasts Morris as the ‘classic stumbling English husband’ and Rossetti as the smooth-tongued seducer. Morris was neither possessive nor patriarchal (it was Janey who would have liked a son, according to Georgiana Burne-Jones) and though he was unprepared for cuckoldry, his response was curiously complaisant. How, precisely, was it arranged that Morris and Rossetti should share the tenancy of Kelmscott Manor so that Janey and Gabriel could be there together while Morris went to Iceland? Who, one wonders, said what to whom?

It’s clear, though, that in order to look at things largely and not pettily, Morris set himself a test of physical endurance and privation in the rocky wastelands of central Iceland. It worked. He returned with a new decisiveness. Henceforth he would not agonise, but, when necessary, act.

Rossetti was less resilient. Faced with open dishonour as the lover of his friend’s wife, his mental equilibrium cracked. That Gabriel was mad was all too true, commented Janey later. Morris, seeing the implications, withdrew from the Kelmscott tenancy in such a way as to prevent Rossetti remaining, and with brutal resolve threw him and the other partners out of the firm, restructuring it under his sole control. Commercial success assured, he then turned his attention to the public realm, campaigning against imperialist warmongering, against the destructive restoration of ancient buildings, and, eventually, in favour of full-blooded revolutionary socialism in the steps of Marx and Engels.

Henry James, writing to impress the folks back home, once described Janey Morris as a ‘grand synthesis’ of all Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Such has been the Morris industry in the years since Edward Thompson first began his rehabilitation that few stones remain to be turned, but this fat book offers a thorough and indeed grand synthesis of Morris’s multifarious activities that helps us to see him whole.

No man is a hero to his biographer, but though MacCarthy is clear-headed about Morris’s faults, she is passionate as to his importance, linking each of his concerns to a present-day topic and casting Morris as the ‘inner conscience’ of Britain in the century since his death. Where others have seen the socialist years when he wrestled with the innate self-destructiveness of ultraleftism either as an aberration in a life devoted to art and literature, or as the only element of significance, she treats them as an integral and even culminating phase. The centenary of his death will be marked in 1996 by a major retrospective at the V&A; with this biography ‘for our time’ in hand, the significance of his life and work can be revalued.

Was Morris ‘a conservative radical’, as MacCarthy claims? Radical certainly, but apart from good wine and old buildings, there was little of the past or present that he wished to retain. His frustration — and Morris’s rages were legendary — was surely that he could not at a stroke design and make a new society in the same way he could a three-tiered stained-glass window, say, or a wall-sized tapestry. Politics, alas, is less easy than patterns.