Peter Faulkner was one the world’s leading William Morris scholars. And he had all the virtues that we expect of a Morris scholar: a gift for comradeship and cooperation, empathy, kindness, fairness, judgment. He was one of the first colleagues I met at Exeter when I arrived in 1996, indeed he was one of the reasons I had been attracted to the Department from California. When other senior members of the Dept were rather distanced from the new Professor of English—bizarrely, an American and a woman—Peter was kind and welcoming. And he remained a close friend and interlocutor well after he retired.

Peter was a longtime member of the rather wonderful William Morris Society, gave the Inaugural Kelmscott Lecture, and was longtime editor of the Journal of  William Morris Studies. He was also the author or editor of The Collected Works of William Morris, William Morris: Centenary Essays, William Morris: The Critical Heritage, Against the Age: An Introduction to William Morris, William Morris: Selected Poems, Fifty Years of Morris Studies, The White Man’s Burdens: An Anthology of British Poetry of the Empire (with Exeter Professor Chris Brooks), Modernism, and Humanism in the English Novel. He also edited The Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde.

The Department of English and Creative Writing remember our colleague and comrade Peter Faulkner as entirely worthy of his objects of study: sociable, creative, kind, and just. A great scholar, and a very good man.

• By Regenia Gagnier, Professor of English, Exeter