A Socialist League meeting, a fall asleep, and a wake-up in a moneyless, art-filled England.

News from Nowhere

William Morris · 1890

Morris wrote this in 1890 as a direct, deliberate answer to Bellamy's Looking Backward — where Bellamy imagined utopia as industrial efficiency, Morris imagined it as the abolition of money, the state, and wage labor, remade instead around craft, beauty, and pleasure in work itself. It has almost no plot: a man falls asleep after a revolutionary meeting and wakes into a future England where the Thames is clean, nobody owns anything, and an old historian explains, chapter by chapter, exactly how it happened. It remains one of the clearest statements of what a communist society might feel like to actually live in, from a writer who designed wallpaper and translated sagas as seriously as he organized for revolution.

32 chapters · 77,457 words · ~5.9 hr read