Life of William Morris Author:J. W. MacKail Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XIII MERTON ABBEY Ever since the days when Red House was to have been made the centre of a little manufacturing community, the idea of transferring... more » the works of the firm to some place out of London had been in Morris's mind; and now not only was his dislike of London greater than ever, but the increasing scale and complexity of the business made migration more practically urgent. Weaving, dyeing and cotton printing, the three new staples of the firm's work, are all industries that require spacious workshops; for dyeing and its subsidiary processes of bleaching, the necessary air and water could only be had out of London for anything beyond mere experimental work. But in nearly every branch of the business there were difficulties involved by want of proper premises. At every hand something essential to the production of the finished goods had to be procured or executed elsewhere: in some cases the raw material could only be laboriously obtained from Yorkshire manufacturers; in others the designs made at Queen Square had to be sent out to manufacturers for execution. In neither case was it possible to secure the same results as when the whole work was carried out by men trained in Morris's own methods, and working under his own eye. The least that was wanted was a single place in which the business could be so far concentrated that he could dye his own silks and cottons and wools,weave his own carpets and tapestries and brocades, print his own chintzes, and put together his own painted windows. When the separate counting house and showrooms in Oxford Street were set up, there was no insuperable difficulty in the way of transferring the manufacturing part of the business from Queen Square and Hammersmith to any centre that might be fixed upon. To transfer the works t...« less
ISBN-13: 9780405087677 ISBN-10: 0405087675 Pages:750 Edition:Facsimile of 1899 ed Rating: