News from Nowhere
Glossary
A
- An Old House Amongst New Folk
- The penultimate chapter in which Ellen leads Guest to an ancient manor house — recognizable to Morris's original readers as Kelmscott Manor, Morris's own home — now inhabited by people of the new age who live easily among its old beauty rather than preserving it as a museum piece.
- Related: Ellen, The Feast's Beginning
- Annie
- A resident of the Hammersmith Guest House who welcomes William Guest back warmly and frankly after his day in London with Old Hammond, contrasting with the more guarded Clara. Guest notes he likes her openness and feels a small pang as they part.
- Related: Clara, Dick Hammond
B
- Boffin (the Golden Dustman)
- A flamboyant figure Guest encounters at the guest house, dressed in a splendid, richly embroidered surcoat that flashes in the sunlight — his nickname nods to the Dickens character and to the new society's playful attitude toward the once-despised trade of dustman, now performed for its own dignity rather than desperate necessity.
- Related: Dick Hammond, The Change
C
- Clara
- Dick's wife, from whom he is briefly estranged when Guest first meets him, and who rejoins the party partway through the river journey. She is somewhat guarded and 'always a little on the defensive' compared to the frank, open Annie, and her reunion with Dick threads quietly through the upriver chapters.
- Related: Dick Hammond, Annie
- Concerning Government
- The chapter in which Old Hammond explains that this future England has no government, parliament, laws, or coercive state apparatus in the 19th-century sense, having replaced representative democracy and majority rule with informal local consensus and the simple absence of anything worth legislating over once property and money are gone.
- Related: The Parliament House (as Dung-Market), Old Hammond
- Concerning Love
- The chapter in which Old Hammond describes how marriage, divorce, and sexual relationships have become entirely voluntary and free of legal or economic coercion in the new society, since the abolition of private property removed the main motive for treating relationships as binding contracts.
- Related: Old Hammond, Clara, Dick Hammond
D
- Dick Hammond
- The cheerful, handsome young waterman and craftsman who first welcomes Guest at the Hammersmith guest-house, becomes his guide through London, and turns out to be Old Hammond's great-grandson. Dick drives, rows, and escorts Guest through most of the book, embodying the new society's easy manual competence and good humor.
- Related: Old Hammond, Clara, Greylocks
E
- Ellen
- The sharp, independent young woman Guest meets on the river journey upstream, who most directly voices Morris's own restlessness with — and probing curiosity about — the world Guest has left behind. Ellen leads Guest to the old house among new folk near the book's end, and her closeness to him foreshadows his final, sorrowful expulsion from the dream.
- Related: William Guest (Narrator), An Old House Amongst New Folk
G
- Greylocks
- The name of the horse that pulls Dick's cart on the road out of Hammersmith at the start of Guest's journey, one of many small domestic details Morris uses to make the future world feel lived-in and ordinary rather than merely theoretical.
- Related: Dick Hammond
- Guest House
- The communal lodging where travelers are put up for free, without payment or reservation, encountered first in Hammersmith and again elsewhere along Guest's journey — one of the book's clearest small illustrations of a world organized without money or private property, where hospitality is simply how things are done.
- Related: The Change, Dick Hammond
O
- Old Hammond
- The 105-year-old historian, living plainly at the British Museum, who gives Guest — and the reader — the book's central lecture on how the revolution happened and how this new communist society actually functions, covering government, politics, incentive, love, and the arrangement of daily life across several chapters of dialogue.
- Related: William Guest (Narrator), The Change, Dick Hammond
- On the Lack of Incentive to Labour
- The chapter in which Old Hammond addresses Guest's 19th-century assumption that people will not work without the threat of poverty or the lure of profit, arguing instead that labor performed under pleasant conditions, for visible community benefit, and free of exploitation becomes its own reward — the book's fullest statement of Morris's theory of joyful, non-alienated work.
- Related: Old Hammond, The Change
R
- Runnymede
- The meadow beside the Thames, historically the site of the sealing of Magna Carta, where Guest and his companions wake to a beautiful early morning on their river journey — Morris quietly layering the new society's freedom over a landscape already associated with historic struggles against arbitrary power.
- Related: The Thames Journey
T
- The Change
- This future society's name for the revolution that abolished money, private property, and the state, recounted at length by Old Hammond in the book's central chapter, 'How the Change Came.' It moves from parliamentary crisis through a general strike, martial law, a brief violent civil war, and finally a long, gradual transformation of daily life and consciousness.
- Related: Old Hammond, Committee of Public Safety, How the Change Came
- The Committee of Public Safety
- The revolutionary body formed by a convention of workers' leaders from the Federation of Combined Workmen during the crisis of the Change, deliberately taking its name from the French Revolutionary precedent. Lacking any drilled or armed force to direct, it could do little more than post placards and call the fateful mass meeting in Trafalgar Square.
- Related: The Change, Trafalgar Square
- The Feast's Beginning — The End
- The book's final chapter and title, describing the haymaking feast Guest attends before he fades from the dream and wakes back in his own grim 19th-century London — the double meaning of 'beginning' and 'end' capturing both the festival he is about to miss and the vision's own dissolution.
- Related: An Old House Amongst New Folk, William Guest (Narrator), Ellen
- The Federation of Combined Workmen
- The workers' organization named in Old Hammond's history of the Change as the body that convened the Committee of Public Safety during the revolutionary crisis, representing the organized labor movement of Guest's own era carried forward into the narrative of transformation.
- Related: Committee of Public Safety, The Change
- The Obstinate Refusers
- A small community encountered on the river journey who prefer building a stone hall to joining the seasonal haymaking, illustrating that individual choice and even mild eccentricity persist within the new society's cooperative economy — nobody compels them to conform, and their neighbors regard the choice with amused tolerance rather than censure.
- Related: The Thames Journey, On the Lack of Incentive to Labour
- The Parliament House (as Dung-Market)
- The former Houses of Parliament, which Guest is startled to learn has been repurposed as a market for storing manure — Old Hammond's wry, deliberately provocative answer to Guest's anxious question about what kind of government now rules England, dramatizing the abolition of the centralized state.
- Related: Concerning Government, Old Hammond
- The Praiser of Past Times
- The elderly, disgruntled figure Guest and his companions encounter at Hampton Court who nostalgically prefers the old competitive, hierarchical world — a rare dissenting voice within the new society, offered by Morris as a foil to sharpen the book's argument by showing that not everyone is uncritically content.
- Related: The Thames Journey, Ellen
- The Socialist League
- The real-world socialist organization, co-founded by Morris himself, whose meeting Guest attends on the night he falls asleep — the frame that opens the novel, grounding its utopian vision in the concrete political debates of 1890s British socialism about what should happen 'on the morrow of the revolution.'
- Related: William Guest (Narrator), The Change
- The Thames Journey
- The extended upriver boat trip that occupies roughly the second half of the book, carrying Guest, Dick, Clara, and eventually Ellen from Hammersmith through Hampton Court, Runnymede, and the upper waters to a haymaking festival near the river's source — Morris's device for touring the transformed English countryside and rural community life.
- Related: Dick Hammond, Ellen, Hampton Court
- Trafalgar Square
- The London landmark, transformed in the new society into an orchard-filled public space, which Guest visits with Dick and which was also, in Old Hammond's history, the site of the decisive and bloody confrontation between the state's hired police and the massed workers during the Change.
- Related: The Change, Committee of Public Safety, London
W
- William Guest (Narrator)
- The 19th-century Londoner, transparently William Morris himself, who falls asleep after a heated debate at the Socialist League and wakes into a transformed, moneyless, stateless future England. He spends the book touring this new world by foot, cart, and boat, alternately delighted and quietly grieved to know he can never truly belong to it.
- Related: The Change, Old Hammond