“I will begin by saying that I call myself a Communist,” wrote William Morris in 1889, “and have no wish to qualify that word by joining any other to it.” This isn’t an announcement that seems consistent with Morris’s unappealingly chintzy reputation today.

In the early twenty-first century, he is still probably best known for his densely decorative, highly textured wallpaper designs, helping pioneer the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century. Online, it appears, Morris is often referred to as “the wallpaper guy.”

But Morris’s avowal of communist beliefs was a characteristically plain-speaking one. As an artist, he was sharply attuned to the politics — and the risks — of speaking plainly, not least because he was conscious of his reputation as a fashionable and highly sophisticated designer of fabrics and textiles for the more affluent members of the middle class.