News from Nowhere

Utopia, the Greek word for “no place,” has come to refer to portrayals of desirable and nearly perfect worlds in literature and politics. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was the first work to use the word in its modern sense, but idealized communities have been the subject of literature since the Bible and the ancient Greeks. A number of 19th-century British authors, including Samuel Johnson and Edward Bulwer-Lytton in addition to Morris, used the utopian genre to comment upon contemporary social and economic issues by juxtaposing the existing world with ones that appeared to have solved the issues that plagued Victorian industrialized society.

Utopian socialism emerged in the first half of the 19th century as a way to describe visionary notions of future societies. The term was sometimes used as a criticism of those who dreamed of hypothetical socialist communities without considering the struggles necessary to bring them about or the infrastructure necessary to sustain them. The “historical” chapters in News From Nowhere represent Morris’s attempt to imagine the process by which an industrialized capitalist society might transform itself, with popular assent, into a socialist utopia.