Synopses & Reviews
This volume illustrates the variety of William Morris's prose, while focusing on one theme: the earthly paradise. The "Nowhere" of News from Nowhere (1890) is England in 2102, an ideal pastoral society born out of revolution. It is as compelling a dream of the future as the nightmares of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Exhilaratingly, it reminds us that nothing is inevitable about the way we livenow or in 1890.
Synopsis
Poet, pattern-designer, environmentalist and maker of fine books, William Morris (1834-96) was also a committed socialist and visionary writer, obsessively concerned with the struggle to achieve a perfect society on earth. News From Nowhere, one of the most significant English works on the theme of utopia, is the tale of William Guest, a Victorian who wakes one morning to find himself in the year 2102 and discovers a society that has changed beyond recognition into a pastoral paradise, in which all people live in blissful equality and contentment. A socialist masterpiece, News From Nowhere is a vision of a future free from capitalism, isolation and industrialisation. This volume also contains a wide selection of Morris's writings, lectures, journalism and letters, which expand upon the key themes of News From Nowhere.
About the Author
William Morris was a dreamer with a genius for turning dreams into reality. Self-taught in thirteen different crafts, some of them ancient ones that had died out, he became the greatest European pattern-designer since the Middle Ages. He was, besides, a campaigning socialist and a pioneering environmentalist, a lyric poet and a forceful journalist, a storyteller and a maker of fine books.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chronology
Bibliographical Note
Romance
The Story of the Unknown Church
A King's Lesson
Two Extracts from A Dream of John Ball
News from Nowhere
Lectures
The Lesser Arts
Some Hints on Pattern-designing
Useful Work versus Useless Toil
The Hopes of Civilization
Gothic Architecture
Occasional Prose
"Looking Backward": a review of Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy
Under an Elm-tree; or, Thoughts in the Countryside
Preface to The Nature of Gothic by John Ruskin
Foreword to Utopia by Sir Thomas More
How I Became a Socialist
A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press
Letters
[The Eastern Question]: letter to the Daily News
[Anti-Scrape]: letter to the Athenaeum
[St. Mark's, Venice]: letter to the Daily News
Notes