Quintessentially English? Rethinking William Morris’ Textile History

By Gursimran Oberoi

Recognised internationally as a quintessential British textile from the Arts and Crafts Movement, William Morris’ ‘Strawberry Thief’ has become synonymous with ‘Englishness’. Morris conceived the idea in the 1870s, experimenting with hand block-printing techniques long abandoned in England. He refined his technique over the course of thirteen years working in collaboration with Thomas Wardle, a noted silk dyer. Since its copyright in 1888, Morris’ ‘Strawberry Thief’ has been a steadfast popular favourite, combining quality industry using colourfast cotton with a simple but beautiful narrative of thrushes stealing strawberries from an English country garden. Yet how has ‘Strawberry Thief’ come to be considered as quintessentially ‘English’ or ‘British’ when its creation is implicated in the physical, creative and economic displacement of world cultures under British and European imperialism and colonialism?

By looking into the production process, we can appreciate the material influences of Indian agriculture, labour, textiles, designs, dyeing techniques, and Persian artistry. We can start to unravel the complexities between Morris’ socialist and anti-colonial writings against exploitative labour, and his engagement with these very processes in textile making. These accounts evoke the palpable tension between Morris’ appropriation of Indian crafts and his awareness of wider power disparities which become all the more significant when we consider the afterlife of ‘Strawberry Thief’ internationally.

Indigo block printing lies at the heart of ‘Strawberry Thief’s production. Dissatisfied with the Prussian blue printing in ‘Tulip and Willow’ of 1873, Morris sought to create colour palettes that had individuality, purity, and luminescence. Indigo became central to this process. Both Morris and Wardle studied and adapted indigo vat dyeing processes developed in India, and documented their experimentation in the Merton Abbey Dyebook among other publications. As letters to family and friends evince, Morris’ experiments left his hands and forearms ‘permanently blue’. His toil mirrored the work of thousands of unnamed Indian labourers who for centuries had produced and dyed cottons and silks using the plant, Indigofera tinctoria. This plant is believed to have originated in the Indian subcontinent and has been used in dyeing processes for over 5000 years across Asia and Africa long before the arrival of Western powers.

The colour palette in ‘Strawberry Thief’ tries to replicate the depths of colour Wardle had encountered during his Indian travels and what Morris had seen in Indian textiles. The production process they developed immersed cotton repeatedly in a vat of indigo dye. A bleaching agent was then applied to a pearwood block to remove or soften the dye in key areas transforming the indigo colour into a white or pale blue. Observing red hues in Indian and Persian fabrics, Morris used alizarin from the madder root grown in South India on a separate woodblock to dye the strawberries. This labour intensive process was repeated for the other colours. The vegetal dye weld was used to create the yellow that we observe on the birds’ beaks and on the central flowers. This colour heralds from Eurasia and was also applied as a yellow overdye onto the shades of indigo to create green leaves and shading. The gentle browns speckled over the thrushes’ breasts were most likely made using the roots of British walnut trees or, as the historian Virginia Davis perceptively notes, the plant juice catechu which also stems from India. These materials, techniques and colourings which inform the production of ‘Strawberry Thief’ were underpinned by nineteenth-century processes of Empire, in addition to the multidirectional movements of peoples, ideas and trade between Britain, India and Iran.

Given these fusional crafted histories, one would expect Morris to have expressed clear opinions on the subjects of Indian labour, textile production and economy. Edward Said has suggested that Morris was ‘totally opposed to imperialism’. Morris rarely made any specific references to India in his writings despite relying on the resources, designs and production techniques of the indigenous population. Nevertheless, in 1879 he signed a letter published in The Times drawing attention to the potential negative effects British tastes might have on Indian crafts. This dichotomous nature of Morris’ appropriation of Indian crafts and his knowledge of wider power disparities is particularly interesting when we consider the global afterlife of ‘Strawberry Thief’.

Since its creation, this print has become recognised worldwide as a symbol of English craftsmanship. Its mass production in wallpaper, bedding, curtains, lampshades, furniture, and clothing amongst a plethora of other objects has seen a revival of appreciation for William Morris in recent years. Nevertheless, this revival is not uncontested: the poem ‘Strawberry Thief Singing’ (2017), by the American Pakistani poet Shadab Zeest Hashmi, eloquently reminds us that:

The thrush, caught jubilant, after stealing
ripe fruit from the artist’s garden, goes to
a prison of textile, serves a sentence
of centuries in cotton, needles passing
through her feathers, stitches on the sigh
(or the ghost of song) in her bill, on wings.
She will be stretched on Raj furniture
across the commonwealth, a souvenir
in chintz, her crime displayed on bedspreads.
She will hang from windows, a doll of the wind.

Hashmi’s poem invites us to consider if the narrative depicted in ‘Strawberry Thief’ echoes its creation. There is no doubt that William Morris created a beautiful timeless print which has captured our attention for more than a century. While he might turn in his grave at the relatively low-quality merchandise now available, the plethora of these objects reminds us of the fusional aesthetic histories to which Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement are deeply indebted.

Dr Gursimran Oberoi is a published art historian who specialises in the international reception of Victorian art. Her upcoming monograph, Global Watts: Symbolism, Fame and Activism(1880-Present Day), examines the display and appropriation of symbolist artworks by George Frederic Watts in the International Women’s Rights, Indian Independence and African American Civil Rights Movements. Gursimran is an Associate Teaching Fellow (University of Surrey), KCATO Manager (King’s College London) and Trustee (Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village).