49 pages • 1 hour read
William MorrisNews from Nowhere
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1890A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Utopian Literature
Utopia, the Greek word for “no place,” has come to refer to portrayals of desirable and nearly perfect worlds in literature and politics. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was the first work to use the word in its modern sense, but idealized communities have been the subject of literature since the Bible and the ancient Greeks. A number of 19th-century British authors, including Samuel Johnson and Edward Bulwer-Lytton in addition to Morris, used the utopian genre to comment upon contemporary social and economic issues by juxtaposing the existing world with ones that appeared to have solved the issues that plagued Victorian industrialized society.
Utopian socialism emerged in the first half of the 19th century as a way to describe visionary notions of future societies. The term was sometimes used as a criticism of those who dreamed of hypothetical socialist communities without considering the struggles necessary to bring them about or the infrastructure necessary to sustain them. The “historical” chapters in News From Nowhere represent Morris’s attempt to imagine the process by which an industrialized capitalist society might transform itself, with popular assent, into a socialist utopia.
Historical Context: Socialism and Romanticism as a Response to the Industrial Revolution
News From Nowhere reflects the conversation in late-19th-century England about the economic and spiritual ravages of industrialized capitalism. Following thinkers such as John Ruskin, who deplored the dullness of factory work and advocated a return to natural forms and artisanal production, Morris and others embraced socialism in both politics and aesthetics. These concerns defined the second socialist movement in England. The discussion of the immorality present in the economic system divided between the working class and the ruling class was not new, but the 1848 publication of Karl Marx and Frederic Engels’s Communist Manifesto brought these ideas to a wide audience.
In addition to political theory, Morris looks to the artistic resources of Romanticism in News From Nowhere. The Romantic movement in England and continental Europe arose in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, largely in response to the Industrial Revolution. Romantic literature in England, associated with writers such as William Wordsworth (1770-1850), advocated for a renewal of humanity’s relationship with nature as a rebuke to mechanization and exploitation. A Romantic view of nature pervades the socialist utopia of News From Nowhere; the two are perpetually linked by the representatives of Morris’s idealized 21st century.
