WILLIAM MORRIS (1834–1896)

Summary

How I became a Socialist is an account of Morris's personal political odyssey, written two years before his death for the Socialist Democratic Federation newspaper Justice (16 June 1894), which he had helped to subsidise. As a document it also serves to convey the fissiparous nature of late nineteenth-century socialism. By the 1870s the British socialist tradition embodied in Owenism was a largely spent force and the new socialism owed much of its impetus to competing European ideologies.

Morris had briefly tried working within the constraints of the existing political system. In the mid–1870s, at the time of the Bulgarian atrocities and their aftermath, which had seemed to threaten European war, Morris had embraced the Liberal side and campaigned enthusiastically against Disraeli's bellicose policies. He was swiftly disillusioned, however, by what he saw as the ineffectual nature of the Liberal leadership, and further disenchanted with Liberal policy toward Ireland, which he diagnosed as essentially imperialistic. Besides, he felt that liberalism was still dominated by Whiggish rather than radical thought, still inclined to base its piecemeal remedies upon an acceptance of the existing political and economic framework. This last factor was to form his major difference of opinion with the Fabians, who voiced the fear that Morris's insistence on class warfare and the need for revolution made his writings profitable for confirmed socialists but unnecessarily alarmist for potential converts.