Roads to Utopia
Barnita Bagchi
William Morris
News from Nowhere
Wlilliam Morris
1834-1896
Morris: Brilliant Designer, Leader of
Arts and Craft Movement
Biography
• http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/morris/wmbio.html
for more detail
• Son of a prosperous family, Morris, who was happy in his
natal milieu, became radicalized, joined the preRaphaelites, and combined art, architecture, design, and
craft in an innovative and ambitious way.
• Stained-glass, tapestry, wallpaper, chairs and other
furniture: Morris designed a huge array of artistic and
lifestyle artefacts.
• Putting the best art and craft into the everyday.
• Translated Icelandic sagas.
• Wrote neo-medieval romances, also poetry.
Biography
• Declared himself a socialist in the 1880s.
• Offered Poet Laureateship after
Tennyson’s death, but declined it.
• News from Nowhere serialized in
Commonweal in 1889.
• Wrote other prose fantasies, such as The
Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the
World's End.
News from Nowhere
• A dream or a vision, seen by a politically
committed man, who is in some disgust at
factionalisms and quarrels.
• Humour in the opening.
• ‘News’: actuality. ‘Nowhere’: utopia.
Fantasy.
Critique of Machine-Led Civilization
• Morris had reviewed another famous and
influential utopian novel Looking
Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) by Edward
Bellamy in Commonweal.
• He found Bellamy’s vision too work and
machine-oriented.
News from Nowhere: A Utopian
Romance
• Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites re-valued
the Middle Ages and medieval romance.
• Guilds, crafts, Gothic art and architecture,
the romance mode, which is poetic and
imaginative: all these associations of the
medieval age are reworked and taken into
a new, higher key in News from Nowhere.
‘If I could but see a day of it! If I
could but see it!’
• And he does: he goes into a new world as
the Guest, a man of fifty-six entering the
future, visiting the same land as his own:
• That land is now renovated.
• No government.
• No military conflict.
A new landscape
• The soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys were gone; the
engineer’s works gone; the lead-works gone; and no sound of
rivetting and hammering came down the west wind from
Thorneycroft’s. Then the bridge! I had perhaps dreamed of such a
bridge, but never seen such an one out of an illuminated manuscript;
for not even the Ponte Vecchio at Florence came anywhere near
it. It was of stone arches, splendidly solid, and as graceful as they
were strong; high enough also to let ordinary river traffic through
easily. Over the parapet showed quaint and fanciful little buildings,
which I supposed to be booths or shops, beset with painted and
gilded vanes and spirelets. The stone was a little weathered, but
showed no marks of the grimy sootiness which I was used to on
every London building more than a year old. In short, to me a
wonder of a bridge.
Ch. II
Gardens
• The word occurs repeatedly in News from
Nowhere: like Sultana’s Dream, this utopia
loves gardens.
• Fresh, cultivated nature. Herbs, flowers,
plants.
• Against the smoke-belching world of
industrial capitalism.
Love
• No romance, even a utopian romance is
complete without love.
• Ellen and the Guest’s unconsummated love
• Dick and Clara’s fulfilled love.
• Honesty, lack of coyness.
No Money
• Think back to Utopia.
• Common property. No profit.
• Centralisation discouraged.
No punishment, no prisons
• “Yet you must understand,” said the old man, “that when
any violence is committed, we expect the transgressor to
make any atonement possible to him, and he himself
expects it. But again, think if the destruction or serious
injury of a man momentarily overcome by wrath or folly
can be any atonement to the commonwealth? Surely it
can only be an additional injury to it.”
Said I: “But suppose the man has a habit of violence,—kills
a man a year, for instance?”
“Such a thing is unknown,” said he. “In a society where
there is no punishment to evade, no law to triumph over,
remorse will certainly follow transgression.”
Ch. XII
Work as Pleasurable
•
Now, this is what I want to ask you about—to wit, how you get people to work when there is no reward of labour,
and especially how you get them to work strenuously?”
“No reward of labour?” said Hammond, gravely. “The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?”
“But no reward for especially good work,” quoth I.
“Plenty of reward,” said he—“the reward of creation. The wages which God gets, as people might have said time
agone. If you are going to ask to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the
next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the begetting of children.”
“Well, but,” said I, “the man of the nineteenth century would say there is a natural desire towards the procreation of
children, and a natural desire not to work.”
“Yes, yes,” said he, “I know the ancient platitude,—wholly untrue; indeed, to us quite meaningless. Fourier, whom all
men laughed at, understood the matter better.”
“Why is it meaningless to you?” said I.
He said: “Because it implies that all work is suffering, and we are so far from thinking that, that, as you may have
noticed, whereas we are not short of wealth, there is a kind of fear growing up amongst us that we shall one day
be short of work. It is a pleasure which we are afraid of losing, not a pain.”
“Yes,” said I, “I have noticed that, and I was going to ask you about that also. But in the meantime, what do you
positively mean to assert about the pleasurableness of work amongst you?”
“This, that all work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is
done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant; or else because it has
grown into a pleasurable habit, as in the case with what you may call mechanical work; and lastly (and most of our
work is of this kind) because there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work itself; it is done, that is, by artists.”
Ch. XV
Tuning In to the Natural Rhythms of
the Year
•
Attunement to the seasonal and agricultural rhythms, to nature and its rhythms.
•
“You are thinking that we don’t make a great show as to numbers,” said Dick; “but you must remember that we
shall have more to-morrow; because in this haymaking work there is room for a great many people who are not
over-skilled in country matters: and there are many who lead sedentary lives, whom it would be unkind to deprive
of their pleasure in the hay-field—scientific men and close students generally: so that the skilled workmen, outside
those who are wanted as mowers, and foremen of the haymaking, stand aside, and take a little downright rest,
which you know is good for them, whether they like it or not: or else they go to other countrysides, as I am doing
here. You see, the scientific men and historians, and students generally, will not be wanted till we are fairly in the
midst of the tedding, which of course will not be till the day after to-morrow.” With that he brought me out of the
little field on to a kind of causeway above the river-side meadow, and thence turning to the left on to a path
through the mowing grass, which was thick and very tall, led on till we came to the river above the weir and its
mill. There we had a delightful swim in the broad piece of water above the lock, where the river looked much
bigger than its natural size from its being dammed up by the weir.
“Now we are in a fit mood for dinner,” said Dick, when we had dressed and were going through the grass again;
“and certainly of all the cheerful meals in the year, this one of haysel is the cheerfullest; not even excepting the
corn-harvest feast; for then the year is beginning to fail, and one cannot help having a feeling behind all the gaiety,
of the coming of the dark days, and the shorn fields and empty gardens; and the spring is almost too far off to look
forward to. It is, then, in the autumn, when one almost believes in death.”
“How strangely you talk,” said I, “of such a constantly recurring and consequently commonplace matter as the
sequence of the seasons.” And indeed these people were like children about such things, and had what seemed to
me a quite exaggerated interest in the weather, a fine day, a dark night, or a brilliant one, and the like.
“Strangely?” said he. “Is it strange to sympathise with the year and its gains and losses?”
“…you look upon the course of the year as a beautiful and interesting drama.”
•
•
•
•
Abrupt Waking from His Dream
• Ellen’s last mournful look seemed to say, “No, it will not do; you
cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the
past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again, now
you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite
of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in
store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship
—but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see
all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are
not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real
lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be
the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your
struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain
and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of
fellowship, and rest, and happiness.”
Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be
called a vision rather than a dream.