Redesigning the Language of Social Change: Rhetoric, Agency, and the Oneiric in William Morris's A Dream of John Ball

Forced in 1890 to surrender his editorship of Commonweal, the radical paper of the Socialist League, William Morris turned to designing beautiful books at his Kelmscott Press. Traditionally interpreted as an aestheticist break from activism, Morris's Kelmscott moment, I argue, constitutes an extension of his socialist praxis and an attempt to redesign the idiom of agitational discourse typical of his era. Focusing on Commonweal and Kelmscott editions of A Dream of John Ball, I claim that Morris's private press served as a matrix for reconceiving the delivery and reception of socialist news. Giving material form to the epistemological, ethical, and sensuous dimensions of his novel language of social change, Morris's decorative activity proved more groundbreaking than the radicalism of his anarchist peers.