Yesterday
was the birthday of William Morris (1834-1896). To mark the occasion, I take a break
from the early modern and venture forth to more modern utopian thinking. Morris
is best known as a textile designer and a member of the Arts and Crafts
movement, which was formed as a reaction against the industrial production and
impoverishing design.
But Morris
was a socialist and an author too. One of his best known books is a utopia
called News from Nowhere (1891). It didn’t make a great impression at its time,
mostly because it was overshadowed by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887),
a veritable bestseller. Morris’s book was written as an answer to Bellamy’s and
the books are fairly similar.
News from
Nowhere (or an Epoch of Rest) is a socialist utopia set in 21st century London.
The protagonist, William Guest, wakes up one morning to find himself in the
future. He sets out to study his new surroundings and is very impressed by what
he sees. There is a common ownership of everything. There are no classes or
cities. Labour has ceased to be painful and people work joyously. Work is
recycled too, so that people do both manual labour and creative tasks like
writing poetry. Everyone is expected to do all kinds of work.
As well as
a socialist utopia that seeks to answer why people would work in communism,
Morris’s book is an ecological utopia. Fed up with the level of pollution in
the industrialised England, he imagined an idyllic society where the
industrialisation has been stopped and reversed. The world has returned to a
kind of pseudo medieval, agrarian society where people find pleasure in nature.
The industry has ceased from polluting and the nature has been able to recover.
Swimming in the Thames is possible, unheard of in Morris’s time. Along with
nature, beauty is valued above everything else. Morris’s romanticised medieval
ideal comes up in the clothing people wear, for example.
The story
itself takes a form of a medieval romance, a quest for love and (communist) fellowship.
The goal is Ellen, a working class woman emancipated under socialism, but also a
benign nature spirit. However, the goal turns out to be unattainable for the
visitor from the past.
While
Morris’s utopia is set in a future world, it looks backwards to a world already
lost – or a world that never really existed, an imagined pseudo medieval
creation of Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. But while his book didn’t cause a
stir, he had a right notion about the attractiveness of the romanticised past.
His designs have had a lasting life, the romantic medieval spirit winning over
new people generation after generation.
