William Morris's Illuminated Manuscripts and Calligraphy

The short answer: a calligrapher in the 1870s

The core of Morris's calligraphic work sits in a five-year window. The V&A dates his experiments with calligraphy to between 1870 and 1875, a period in which he wrote out and decorated 21 manuscript books, some entirely and some in part. This was not casual practice. He built a working repertoire of five scripts and taught himself the technical skills the work demanded, including the production of gilded letters.

The scale matters. Twenty-one manuscript books in five years represents sustained, disciplined work with pen, ink and gold, carried out alongside everything else Morris was doing in design and business.

Where the enthusiasm came from

The origins are documented and early. The V&A states that illuminated manuscripts Morris saw in Canterbury Cathedral as a boy ignited his enthusiasm for historical texts. That enthusiasm was fuelled further, again according to the V&A, by regular visits to the Bodleian Library when he was a student at Oxford.

The wider context was the Gothic Revival. The V&A describes it as a 19th-century fashion that looked back to medieval forms and patterns, and Morris's interest in manuscript decoration sits squarely within that outlook. The Revival also carried Gothic ornament into public view through books, including Owen Jones and Noel Humphreys' Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages, published in 1844.

So by the time Morris picked up a pen to write out a manuscript book himself, he had seen original illuminated manuscripts in a cathedral, studied historical texts in one of the great research libraries, and lived through decades of published Gothic revivalism. The V&A's account presents the 1870s manuscripts as the point where those influences became practice.

First attempts and the industrial backdrop

After graduating, Morris made his own attempts at decorating manuscripts. The V&A records this as the starting point of his hands-on engagement with the form, preceding the concentrated output of 1870 to 1875.

Why turn to a medieval craft in an industrial age? The V&A's own reading is that Morris was looking for an antidote to, as he saw it, the ugliness of the newly industrial world. That interpretation belongs to the museum, and it frames the manuscript work as part of the same impulse that drove the rest of his design career.

Iceland and the texts he chose

The subject matter of the manuscript books is distinctive. According to the V&A, many of the texts were Morris's translations of 'The Sagas of Icelanders', prose narratives based on events in Iceland between the 9th and 11th centuries.

The V&A dates Morris's visits to Iceland to 1871 and 1873, within the same period as the manuscript books. The museum's interpretation is that Morris saw in Iceland's people and homes a simple and dignified alternative to the society of industrial Britain.

The combination is worth stating plainly: a designer teaching himself historical scripts, using them to write out his own translations of medieval Icelandic prose, in the years immediately after travelling to Iceland twice.

A Book of Verse: the key surviving example

One completed manuscript can be named with confidence. The V&A identifies A Book of Verse, made in 1870 for Morris's close friend Georgiana Burne-Jones. It shows the manuscript work at its most personal, produced for a friend rather than a client.

The book was also collaborative. The V&A records that it contained poems and calligraphy by Morris, with figurative decoration by Edward Burne-Jones and two other artists. Even in a hand-lettered book made for a friend, Morris worked with other hands, a pattern that recurs throughout his career.

A note on limits: the evidence behind this page names no other surviving manuscripts and gives no locations for them. A Book of Verse is the one example the record supports, and this page does not guess at the rest.

What the evidence shows, and what it does not

The V&A makes a qualitative claim about the manuscripts: that they show an understanding of original scribal methods rather than a superficial 'copying' of particular historical styles. In the museum's reading, Morris learned how medieval scribes actually worked, rather than imitating the look of their pages.

Several reasonable questions remain unanswered by the available record:

• No verbatim quotations from Morris himself about his calligraphy appear in the evidence, so his own account of the practice cannot be given here.
• Beyond A Book of Verse, no specific manuscripts are identified, and no holdings or locations are given.
• The evidence records no disputed points or scholarly disagreements about Morris's calligraphy.

These gaps are stated rather than filled.

From pen to press: why the calligraphy mattered

The V&A draws a direct line from the manuscript experiments to Morris's later practice. In the museum's account, the calligraphic work of the 1870s taught him about letter shapes, decoration and illustration of text pages, use of space, and control of margin size. Those are exactly the problems a printer and book designer must solve, and Morris solved them first with a pen.

The route to printing ran through earlier contacts. The V&A notes that Morris edited the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in 1856, which brought him into contact with the printer Charles Whittingham of the Chiswick Press.

The full story of the press belongs elsewhere on this site. the Kelmscott Press traces how the hand-lettered books of the 1870s became a working press in Hammersmith, and Kelmscott typefaces covers the typefaces Morris designed there. The manuscript work is best understood as the training ground for both.