Publisher's Synopsis
The Relations of Art to Labour deals with matters central to William Morris's concerns as a designer and socialist. It is therefore one of his most important lectures, which he adapted for publication in The Cooperative Wholesale Societies Annual in 1890.
Morris originally lectured on the subject to the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society on 1st April 1884, and repeated the lecture on some nine other occasions. The version of it that he gave to the Glasgow Sunday Society on 14th December 1884 was included by Eugene LeMire in 1969 in The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris under the title 'Art and Labour'. Morris simplified the style of that version of the lecture for its working-class audience, as Alan Bacon shows in his Introduction to this edition.
This edition presents - for the first time since 1890 - the arguments in the more powerful rhetorical tone that Morris felt appropriate for his original middle-class audience. It also contextualises the lecture by providing an appendix by Lionel Young on 'The Nineteenth-Century Growth of Co-operatives'.
