Walthamstow FC and the contradiction of William Morris

In 1884, William Morris gave a lecture to the Hampstead Liberal Club with the title of ‘Useful Work Versus Useless Toil’. His remarks were typically damning of what he saw as the crude philistinism of Victorian capitalism with its mass production of fripperies and of what Marxists call the alienation of labour – the psychological and material disconnection between the worker and the product of his work. Morris offered an alternative, utopian vision, in which everyone would have access to fulfilling, productive work suited to their skills and nature and where there would be no idle rich and no boss class stealing the value of the labour of the working classes. In other lectures and in his writings he lamented the decline of the individual craftsman caused by the industrial revolution.  

One can only imagine, then, what this embodiment of high-minded Victorian socialism would make of a mass-produced football shirt bearing a floral pattern produced by one of his partners, J.H.