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When William Morris was 49 he crossed "the river of fire" and became a revolutionary socialist. He had always felt uneasy about the disparity between his comfortable lifestyle and the conditions endured by most of the British working classes. In the 1880s he began working towards overthrowing the system that enabled the rich to profit from their labour, going on marches, writing articles and lecturing all over the country.

When Morris and his comrades attended rallies, they carried banners to identity their political allegiance. The image of Adam and Eve on this banner has been borrowed from Burne-Jones’s illustration to Morris’s socialist novel ‘A Dream of John Ball’, about a priest who was one of the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. Ball believed all people were created equal, asking "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"

Morris’s political activities began when he joined the Social Democratic Federation at its inaugural meeting in June 1881. However, the organisation soon became factionalised and Morris, who objected to the leader’s obsession with parliamentary politics to the detriment of trade union organisation, broke from the SDF in 1884. Morris then went on to establish the Socialist League, a more radical group that sought a revolutionary overturn by the mobilised working classes.

Throughout the decade of his most strenuous political engagement, Morris’s continued to run his business. He did not see campaigning as incompatible with his design work and deeply regretted that his products were so expensive. Morris’s aim in his socialist campaigns, and his designs, was to create a society where everyone lived comfortably in beautiful surroundings.