Elm House, an early 19th-century property in what was then the Essex countryside, was William Morris’s birthplace and his family home until 1840. This large house and spacious garden once stood on what is now Forest Road, the busy thoroughfare that runs from the William Morris Gallery to Blackhorse Road tube station. This drawing was an original illustration to J.W. Mackail’s The Life of William Morris, published in 1899. Mackail, who was Burne-Jones’s son-in-law, was the first of many biographers who have contributed to Morris’s legacy, yet he found his status as a family friend frustrating as he sought to balance honesty with diplomacy, particularly with regard to the complicated romantic relationships in Morris’s circle: “How extraordinarily interesting one could make the story, if one were going to die the day before it was published.”
