William Morris was the most influential designer in Victorian England — and a committed Marxist revolutionary. He created over 600 patterns for wallpaper and textiles, founded a firm that transformed British taste, and built a printing press that produced what many consider the most beautiful book in the English language. He also stood on street corners in the rain selling socialist newspapers, was arrested during a demonstration, and poured his fortune into a political movement that eventually pushed him out.

Beneath all of it was a marriage shaped by silence. His wife Jane's long affair with his friend and business partner Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an open secret. Morris never confronted either of them. Instead, he left — riding across Iceland on horseback, translating sagas, channelling everything he could not say into an astonishing output of work. The Strawberry Thief, the Kelmscott Chaucer, the utopian novel News from Nowhere — each one an argument that beauty was not decoration but a moral obligation.

This is the story of a man who refused to choose between beauty and justice, who designed exquisite wallpaper for the wealthy while preaching revolution to the poor, and whose contradictions were not a flaw but the engine of everything he made.

• (00:00) - The Penny Papers