New Year's Greeting

Warm greetings to all readers of this Morris blog from its author on New Year’s Day 2009! It seems a long time indeed since I put up the first of its 41 entries on 2nd October 2007, and occasionally it has felt hard to sustain under the pressures of a busy academic teaching career. What has kept me going – appropriately enough for a Morrisian blog site – is fellowship, your genial fellowship as readers from across the globe, and particularly the active fellowship of those who have commented on the blog entries (AliasGuenevere has distinguished herself here, with owlfarmer offering some very helpful thoughts too).

I have tried to keep a rough balance in my entries between the historical and the utopian, between a scholarly interest in William Morris in his own historical moment and a more urgent sense that he must be rewritten, reworked and remade in our own time. And I have been constantly inspired by Fiona MacCarthy’s stress on ‘the detail of his idiosyncracy and strangeness … his oddities and quirkiness of language’. So, if you don’t feel I’ve got the balance right, please tell me; better still, why not start a Morris blog of your own? It is, I think, a quite new form of writing, an interesting, perhaps even therapeutic amalgam of the journalistic, the scholarly and the creative; so the more of them we have around Morris’s giant figure and copious oeuvre, the better.

Sincere thanks to you all, at any rate, for visiting this site to date, and I hope it may continue to be of interest in the months and years to come. Best wishes too for all your own Morris- and utopia-related projects in 2009.