Dave's Book Blog: "News from Nowhere" by William Morris

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The narrator of this story, who calls himself William Guest, goes to sleep and wakes up in the future. If that reminds you of Rip van Winkle by Washington Irving, it's not the only model. There is the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus which was included in the mediaeval Golden Legend and - as the Companions of the Cave - the Quran; their legend is mentioned in The Grey King by Susan Cooper. There's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, which was published the year before News from Nowhere was first serialised, although in this book the time travel is backwards and caused by a blow to the head. And, perhaps most obviously, there is Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, a novel which Morris reviewed, in which the protagonist falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in a socialist world in 2000; it was a best-seller in its day. Morris had a lot of possible models for his fiction.

But News from Nowhere is only tangentially a novel. For a start, the plot is really just a chronicle of things happening, with very little novelistic shape to it: it's no more than a frame on which to hang philosophical speculations. Fundamentally, there is a lack of conflict, and conflict is what drives most novel narratives. The characters surrounding the protagonist, are fundamentally nice, including the grumpy granddad. The only real tension is that the narrator is worried that he will let slip that he is from the past; he pretends to be from another country.

It's poorly written. None of the characters have any depth, in fact they are so flat they are scarcely even two-dimensional. Of the principals:

Dick is Mr Marvellous. Not only is he incredibly nice - he happily forgives his girlfriend after she has had an affair with another man - and eternally cheerful and immensely generous with his time but also he is a wonderful rower and, as he himself modestly says, “a pretty good mower”. I disliked him from the start.
His grandfather, Hammond, is nice and kind and very wise.
There is a grumpy old man who is grumpy about everything.
The women are delightfully kind and delightfully pretty.

The first chapter is a third person narrative describing things happening to “a friend”; this then morphs in the second chapter and subsequently into a first person narrative. This narrative shift could be seen as the creation of a frame narrative in order to distance the ‘I’ of the narrator from the author, despite the many hints in the text that these are, in fact, one and the same (for example, they end up at Kelmscott Manor, the house where Morris lived, and this is described by the narrator as being familiar). In fact it just feels clumsily inconsistent.

There are poorly written sentences. For example:

“As he sat in that vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity, a carriage of the underground railway, he, like others, stewed discontentedly.” (Ch 1) The repetition of discontented/ discontentedly does not seem deliberate (as it would be if this was an example of anaphora) and therefore, although the image is compelling, this is a poorly constructed sentence.
“To her quoth Dick, ‘ Maiden, would you kindly hold our horse while we go in for a little while?’” (Ch 6) The use of ‘quoth’, archaic even then and used mainly in fiction set in the mediaeval period, and the strange word order, and the use of ‘Maiden’ as a title to address a young girl by, all suggest that Morris is trying to evoke Merrie England in the way that typically hack Victorian writers such as Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake and Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter did.
“All work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant, or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit.” (Ch 15) Lots of pleasure! Is this anaphora? Or carelessness?

But it isn't really intended to be a novel. Like the central part of 1984, it is basically a platform for Morris's utopian socialist political ideas. The basis of it is that the Industrial Revolution was a Bad Thing and that the perfect future is a return to the rural paradise that Morris thinks was England in the Middle Ages. It was fashionable at the time (for example, Oscar Wilde with his aestheticism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with which Morris was associated, being a lifelong friend of Edward Burne-Jones and sharing his wife with Dante Gabriel Rossetti) to romanticise the mediaeval period. Morris is aware is wasn't all great back then: “Have you not read of the Mediaeval period, and the ferocity of its criminal laws; and how in those days men fairly seemed to have enjoyed tormenting their fellow-men? - nay, for the matter of that, they made their God a tormentor and a jailer rather than anything else.” (Ch 7)

He seems to believe that all was parasidical back then as a matter of taste. He loves the Gothic aesthetic, being an enormous fan of that architecture and adoring Mallory's Morte D'Arthur. Mediaeval good, Victorian bad is a dogma with him and anything made of metal, such as “the beastly iron bridge” (C 14), is horrid and bad. 'Chacun a son gout', or 'one man's meat is another man's poison', or 'de gustibus non est disputandum' are not precepts which sway Morris.

Fundamentally, his socialist utopia is achieved by clearing the slums of London and sending the population back into the countryside (sounds a bit like what Mao did in the Cultural Revolution, or what Pol Pot did in Cambodia) where they will be housed in the stately homes on the grand estates (plenty of room?) and will produce the necessities of life by farming. He suggests that much of what is produced in the Victorian factories is unnecessary, cheap and shoddy wares which are only wanted because people have been brainwashed into thinking they are necessary. True necessities (presumably including the pipe and tobacco that the narrator buys) can be hand produced. And Morris believes that hand-production is inherently pleasurable for the labourer. Therefore people will not need to be incentivised or forced to work, they will do it because they enjoy it, whether it is the outside work of ferrying or haymaking or digging up the road which they do because it makes them feel fit, or the more artisan work such as making beautiful pipes.

This obviously reflects Morris’s own life. He set up a craft co-operative producing furniture and interior decoration such as wallpaper. The irony was that despite it being backed by Morris’s personal fortune (inherited shareholdings in, among other things, copper mines) the company made things that only well-off people could afford. Even nowadays, Morris designs and artisan products are more expensive that mass-produced goods and there are many people who have no chance of affording them. Perhaps this dream of a utopia was Morris trying the reconcile the realities of his life (inherited money, crafts produced for the wealthy) with his socialist ideals.

Dick's forgiving nature when his girlfriend asks to return to him following her affair is an opportunity for Morris to set out his views of marriage. He doesn't believe in it, or at least not in the way that, in the Victorian era, women were often treated as property, belonging to father or brother before being sold to a husband. In this respect, the novel matches reality. Morris married Jane Burden, who had been one of the models (and possibly one of the lovers) of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Jane was available because Rossetti married another model, Lizzie Siddal. But when Siddal died, Rossetti returned to 'claim' Jane, and for a while Morris, Rossetti and Jane lived in a threesome where it seems likely that Jane, still married to Morris and mother to his two daughters, slept exclusively with Rossetti. The utopian ideal of free love in the pages of News from Nowehere, matches this situation (although there are suggestions that Morris wasn't particularly happy with the arrangements). But in other respects, Morris isn't quite as enlightened: “Don't you know that it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skilfully, and to do it so that all the house-mates about her look pleased and are grateful to her?” (Ch 9) Not a lot of liberation! And, since he has abolished parliamentary democracy, he fudges the issue of women’s suffrage.

On the other hand, as an ex-teacher who was once a pupil at Eton College, I thought he made some valid points about education:

“You expected to see children thrust into schools when they had reached an age conventionally supposed to be the due age, whatever their varying faculties and dispositions might be” (Ch 10)
“In the nineteenth century, society was so miserably poor, owing to the systematised robbery on which it was founded, that real education was impossible for anybody.” (Ch 10)
“In the nineteenth century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cambridge ... were the breeding places a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people.” (Ch 10)
Eton College is “a place for the ‘aristocracy’ ... to get rid of the company of their male children for a great part of the year.” (Ch 24)

Other selected quotes:

“They were clothed like women, not upholstered like arm-chairs.” (Ch 3)
“A big mastiff, who was as happily lazy as if the summer-day had been made for him alone.” (Ch 7)
“His face, dried-apple-like as it was seemed strangely familiar to me; as if I had seen it before - in a looking glass it might be, said I to myself.” (Ch 9)
“Was not the Parliament on the one side a kind of watch-committee sitting to see that the interests of the Upper Classes took no hurt; and on the other side a sort of blind to delude the people into supposing that they had some share in the management of their own affairs?” (Ch 11)
“It was a current jest of the time that the wares were made to sell and not to use.” (Ch 15)
“Their raiment, apart from its colour, was both beautiful and reasonable - veiling the form, without either muffling or caricaturing it.” (Ch 19)
“As for your books, they were well enough for times when intelligent people had but little else in which they could take pleasure, and when they must needs supplement the sordid miseries of their own lives with imaginations of the lives of other people.” (Ch 22)

An interesting, rather than a fun read. It's a dream of an ideal society. It didn't convince me, although there is very little argument expended in order to try and convince me.

May 2024; 182 pages