Morris & Co. From 1861 to 1940: The Full History of the Firm

What the surviving record shows about the firm

The most reliable way to define Morris & Co. is through its objects. The V&A's wallpaper holdings include two bound pattern books that preserve the firm's output in original form. The first, 'Volume 1', contains 25 Morris & Co. patterns from 1862 to 1881 under the reference E.441-529-1919, and it holds the 'Wreath' specimen described above. The second, 'Volume 2', contains 27 Morris & Co. patterns under the reference E.530-608-1919, including 'Willow Bough', a foliate pattern of intertwined willow leaves designed by William Morris, printed by Jeffrey & Co. for Morris & Co. and first issued in 1887, museum number O248728. The dating of 'Volume 2' is inconsistent within the V&A record itself, a conflict noted later in this article.

These pattern books matter because they tie designs, dates and makers together in one place. A specimen is not a reproduction or a later copy; it is the paper as sold. For a business history, that is the strongest ground available.

One honest limit should be stated at the start. The record used for this article does not state the firm's founding date or its original name, and it does not cover the firm's closure. So this is not a founding-to-closure narrative in the usual sense. It is a history built from what the objects and their records actually document, with gaps flagged rather than filled. For the wider life of the man behind the firm, see the main Morris guide, which covers his biography and career as a whole.

Wallpapers: the first documented product line

Wallpapers are where the firm's history is best documented, and 'Trellis' is where that story begins. According to the V&A, 'Trellis' shows a flowering thorned rose bush growing on a wooden trellis with birds and flying insects, and it was the first paper designed by William Morris but the third to be issued. The birds were designed by Philip Webb, which makes the paper a documented collaboration from the firm's earliest days.

The dates around 'Trellis' are slightly uneven in the record itself. The V&A gives the design date as 1862 and registration and production as 1864, with production dates listed variously as 11/1862, 01/02/1864 and 1864, under museum number O248458. The safest reading is that the design came first, in 1862, and the paper was registered and produced in 1864.

The 1870s brought steady expansion. The V&A dates a period of great expansion in the firm's range between 1875 and 1885, though its published statement on the number of designs created in that window is incomplete in the record used here. What is clear from the specimens is the continued flow of new papers: 'Sunflower', designed by William Morris, manufactured and printed by Jeffrey & Co. in 1879 in England, survives under museum number E.513-1919.

The 'Wreath' and 'Willow Bough' specimens, from 1876 and 1887 respectively, bracket that expansion nicely. Together with 'Sunflower' and the earlier 'Trellis', they show a wallpaper line that ran from the firm's first years through to the end of Morris's life.

How the papers were made is also documented. According to the V&A, the 'Wreath' wallpaper was printed using wood-blocks cut by the family firm Barrett's in Bethnal Green, and printed by Jeffrey & Co. in distemper, water-based colours. Morris's own position on wallpaper design is preserved in his essay The Lesser Arts, published in 1877, and is quoted in full below.

The scale of the output is easy to state. The table below gathers the dated specimens that anchor this section.

Where the wallpapers went: documented interiors and clients

A wallpaper business is visible through its walls. That is a client at the centre of the circle, not a stranger.

The firm also reached beyond its immediate circle. In 1875 Morris's wallpapers were used in decorative schemes throughout 18 Stafford Terrace, a house bought by Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne. That house, with its papers in place, became a documented interior of the kind business historians rely on.

A further commission shows the firm selling to the aristocracy. In the first half of the 1880s the Earl and Countess of Carlisle, friends with Morris and his wife, used Morris's Bird and Anemone and two versions of a design centred on a motif the surviving record truncates. The partial naming is frustrating, but the essentials hold: named clients, named designs, a documented timeframe.

Success also bred imitation. Towards the end of the 19th century, other designers and manufacturers began to produce cheaper papers in what the V&A calls 'the Morris style'. Among them, the V&A notes that Charles Voysey (1857 to 1941) produced designs showing clear evidence of Morris's influence in flat but complex patterns and stylised organic forms. Imitation, in this reading, arrived within Morris's lifetime.

If you want to see how the papers themselves look as objects, the original designs collection gathers specimens by product, which makes it a useful companion to the pattern books described above.

The price side of this story, who could actually afford the papers and why that sat awkwardly with Morris's politics, is covered separately in more on the price of Morris & Co., which works through the costs and customers in detail.

Embroidery and the Oxford Street shop

The firm's retail history has a clear milestone. According to the V&A, embroidery became a more significant part of the business following the opening of Morris & Company's new 'all under one roof' shop in Oxford Street in 1877. Before that point, and increasingly after it, the firm was building a product range that went well beyond paper.

The embroidery side was organised around two kinds of product. According to the V&A, Morris, later his daughter May and assistant John Henry Dearle, produced designs for completed panels or 'embroider yourself' kits, used for cushion covers, fire screens, portières and bedcovers. The kit model let customers do part of the work themselves, which suited both the firm's economics and its principles.

Management of the embroidery side shifted within the family. In 1885 Morris stepped away from direct involvement with embroidery, putting May, then aged just 23, in charge, according to the V&A. The record used here does not state her exact role title, so the plain wording is the safest one: she took charge.

It is worth being careful about what the shop and the embroidery record tell us. On the V&A's account, they document a business diversifying its products after 1877 and delegating its embroidery management in 1885. They do not, on the record used here, document the finances behind the move, which is a separate question. The broader context of the materials the firm used, including the hazards of some Victorian wallpaper pigments, is covered in the story of Morris and arsenic.

Woven textiles and the Leek dyeing partnership

Textiles brought the firm into partnership with an outside dyeing works. In 1875 Morris began working with Thomas Wardle, owner of a dyeing works in Leek, Staffordshire, a collaboration the V&A describes as driven by a wish to re-establish the use of natural dyes. The partnership mattered technically as much as commercially: dyeing was the step that made printed cloth possible at quality.

The first fruit of that work is datable. 'Marigold' (1875) is, according to the V&A, the first textile likely to have been printed by Wardle, a dense pattern Morris also used for wallpaper. Using one design across paper and cloth was efficient, and it shows how the firm's product lines fed each other.

Woven furnishing textiles followed. 'Tulip and Rose', the first dateable design by Morris for a woven furnishing textile, was registered in 1876, according to the V&A. Two years later came 'Peacock and Dragon' (1878), which the museum describes as an imposing yet popular design inspired by 16th- and 17th-century Italian silks.

The inspiration behind these weaves was studied rather than imagined. Morris examined early woven textiles in the collections of the South Kensington Museum, the institution that later became the V&A, according to the museum's own account. That detail ties the firm's design practice directly to the public collections of the period.

The printing methods behind the cloth, particularly the slow indigo discharge process used for some of the firm's best-known prints, are covered in more on woodblock wallpaper printing alongside the paper side of the workshop's output.

Tapestry at Merton Abbey

Tapestry was the craft Morris valued most. He first set up a tapestry loom in 1877, calling weaving 'the noblest of all the weaving arts', according to the V&A. His first completed tapestry was 'Acanthus and Vine' (1879), which apparently took 516 and a half hours to complete, a figure the museum's record preserves.

The design has documented ancestors. According to the V&A, the design of 'Acanthus and Vine' was influenced by 'large-leaf' verdure tapestries woven in France and Flanders in the 16th century. That is an interpretation held by the museum, and it fits the pattern already seen with 'Peacock and Dragon': Morris studying historic textiles and working from them.

Production then moved to a single site. Tapestry weaving was established at Merton Abbey when company production was consolidated there in 1881, and Morris appointed John Henry Dearle to manage production, according to the V&A. The move gathered the firm's making under one roof in the same period as its retail was gathered under one roof in Oxford Street.

Large tapestry commissions were often a shared effort. According to the V&A, they were often designed by Morris, Dearle and other artists in collaboration, and executed by the company's weavers on Flemish-style looms that Morris had built. That division of labour is the clearest evidence in the record that Morris & Co. was a workshop, not a one-man studio.

Dearle's role grew from this appointment, and his later management of the firm's design output is a story of its own. The commissions side of the business, from churches to country houses, is likewise treated at length in a dedicated article on Morris & Co. commissions.

What the sources do not settle

A business history is only as good as its gaps. Several questions that readers of a Morris & Co. history usually ask cannot be answered from the record used here, and it is better to say so than to guess.

The following points remain open on the evidence used for this article:

• The founding date and original name of the firm are not stated in the record, so the founding date in this page's title reflects the firm's traditional dating rather than a documented founding record here.
• The firm's closure is likewise not covered by the sources used, so nothing is claimed here about when or why the firm ended.
• The statement that the firm greatly expanded its range between 1875 and 1885 is truncated in the source, so the number of designs created in that window is not given here.
• The name of the Carlisle commission design is incomplete in the record: the Earl and Countess of Carlisle used Bird and Anemone and two versions of a design whose centred motif is cut off in the source text.
• There is a dating conflict over the 'Volume 2' pattern book in the V&A record: its catalogue entry dates the 27 patterns to 1882-96, while another part of the same record gives a different range. The catalogue dating is used here, with the conflict noted.
• The record covers wallpapers, embroidery, woven textiles and tapestry, but not furniture, stained glass or the firm's other products, so those areas are omitted rather than sketched from memory.

One further caution concerns quotations. The only Morris quotation in the record is from The Lesser Arts (1877) and concerns wallpaper design, not the firm's history. So Morris himself, on this evidence, does not narrate his own business. His design principles are quotable; his business opinions here are not.

Key facts at a glance

The dates and records below are the load-bearing facts of this article, each traceable to a museum record. They are collected here for scanning and checking.

• 'Wreath' wallpaper, designed by William Morris, produced in England in 1876, museum number O248613, part of the 'Volume 1' pattern book of 25 Morris & Co. patterns from 1862-81 (E.441-529-1919), according to the V&A.
• 'Trellis' was, according to the V&A, the first paper designed by William Morris but the third to be issued, with birds designed by Philip Webb; designed 1862, registered and produced 1864, museum number O248458.
• 'Sunflower' wallpaper, designed by William Morris, manufactured and printed by Jeffrey & Co., 1879, museum number E.513-1919, according to the V&A.
• 'Willow Bough' wallpaper, designed by William Morris, printed by Jeffrey & Co. for Morris & Co., first issued 1887, museum number O248728, part of the 'Volume 2' pattern book of 27 patterns (E.530-608-1919), according to the V&A.
• According to the V&A, the 'all under one roof' shop in Oxford Street opened in 1877, after which embroidery became a more significant part of the business.
• According to the V&A, Morris began working with Thomas Wardle of Leek, Staffordshire in 1875, aiming to re-establish natural dyes.
• According to the V&A, 'Tulip and Rose', the first dateable Morris design for a woven furnishing textile, was registered in 1876.
• 'Acanthus and Vine', Morris's first completed tapestry, dates to 1879 and apparently took 516 and a half hours to complete, a figure preserved in the V&A record.

Where to go next

The story told here stops at the documented edges of the record, but the firm's history continued under John Henry Dearle, whom Morris appointed to manage production at Merton Abbey, and its product lines each have longer stories of their own. The stained glass side of the business, and the question of who makes Morris & Co. designs today, are both covered in dedicated articles in this cluster.

For readers who want to compare designs side by side, the original designs collection brings together wallpapers, textiles and tapestry designs, which is the quickest way to see the range documented above in one place.