Health

I have often felt myself to be living in two different times. As a scholar of William Morris and of nineteenth-century literature, I spend my working life struggling to piece together a sense of the past, immersing myself in history's works and doings , hoping to interpret it in service of our present-day life. The past has given birth to the present, but in ways that are not always easy to grasp. As a scholar based in North America, I am distanced spatially as well as temporally from the world Morris inhabited: in the post-1950s landscape of Davis, California, there is almost nothing in my daily life to connect me, materially, to the nineteenth-century past of Morris and his circle. This past in which I spend so much time, then, exists mainly in the form of words on a page. I see Morris’s voice in black letters and the white spaces between them… always remembering that Morris himself had very firm opinions as to what the dimensions of those white spaces should be. Kelmscott Hou