News from Nowhere

William Guest comes home cross and weary from a quarrelsome meeting of the Socialist League, goes to bed doubting that the better world his comrades argue over will ever come — and wakes to find it already made. The river outside his window runs clean and full of salmon, the smoke and squalor of Victorian London have vanished, and a young boatman named Dick rows him out into an England transformed beyond a century of change.

It is a world without the things Guest had taken for permanent: no money, no private property, no buying or selling; no great cities, no factories, no slums; no government, no law courts, no prisons, no police. People live in small, friendly communities, dress and build beautifully, and do their work — whatever it may be — for the pleasure of doing it well. Guided by Dick and his betrothed Clara, Guest is taken to old Hammond, a man past a hundred, who explains in the book's long central conversation how the change came about: through class struggle, revolution, and civil war, and then the slow remaking of the world on common ownership and free, joyful labour. Then Guest journeys up a shining Thames toward the haymaking, and meets Ellen, whose radiant love of the living earth becomes the purest image of the new world.

Written in 1890 as William Morris's answer to Edward Bellamy's mechanised, centralised utopia Looking Backward, News from Nowhere sets beauty against efficiency and fellowship against profit. Out of a lifetime spent making beautiful things by hand, and a furious quarrel with the ugliness of industrial capitalism, Morris built the most enduring and best-loved utopia in the English language — a dream-vision so vivid you can walk through it, and so humane it has never stopped being longed for.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text with an editor's foreword on Morris, the utopian romance, and the answer to Bellamy, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.