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The Politics of William Morris's News from Nowhere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Trevor Lloyd
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Extract

When one of the characters in William Morris's Utopian romance News from Nowhere says “We are very well off as to politics—because we have none” he was talking about the manipulation and intrigue that everyone hopes will be banished from Utopia. Morris had to carry on his own political work amidst the manoeuvring he hoped would be unnecessary in the future. News from Nowhere is about politics in the sense in which the word is used in the title of Aristotle's Politics; and it teaches the rather Aristotelian message “Men come together in communities to live, they remain in communities to live in fellowship.” But the book had its local and immediate political context: most directly, in 1890 Morris gave up the editorship of the Socialist League magazine Commonweal, which was publishing the story in installments, when twenty out of the thirty-nine installments had appeared. While his retirement was not entirely voluntary there is no reason to think that the remaining installments were altered by the new editors. When Morris published the story as a book the following year he added a certain amount of new material which indicates a somewhat different point of view.

What he published in 1890 (the Commonweal version) was considerably closer to the anarchist view of revolution than what is now accepted as News from Nowhere, and what he added for the 1891 version (the book) shows a distinct shift towards an attitude more favourable to the State Socialists, or Fabians, that anything he wrote in Commonweal.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , Fall 1977 , pp. 273 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1977

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References

1 Morris, William, News from Nowhere (London, 1970), p. 72Google Scholar. This is probably the most easily accessible edition. It is based on the book published in 1891, and does not show the changes from the original story.

2 Morris retired on 25 May 1890. Thompson, E.P., William Morris (London, 1977), p. 566Google Scholar. This book is the eagerly awaited new edition of Thompson's monumental 1955 life of Morris, and is free from some of the signs of the pressures of the Cold War visible in the first version.

3 Thompson, p. 502, about Morris's views on the date of the revolution, is a clear sign that Thompson had not noticed that Morris changed his mind on various points between 1890 and 1891. Meier, Paul, La penséé utopique de William Morris (Paris, 1972), p. 433Google Scholar. Liberman's, M.R. doctoral thesis, William Morris's “News from Nowhere”: A Critical and Annotated Edition, Nebraska, 1971Google Scholar, gives the Commonweal text (from which the Boston 1890 edition was pirated), the 1891 text with its substantial additions, and the Kelmscott 1892 edition in which very few additional changes were made. Liberman notes the changes but writes (p.67) as though they were hostile to the State Socialists.

4 Thompson, pp. 211, 261, 296-7, 344-5.

5 Thompson, p. 357-61.

6 Thompson, especially p. 415; Meier p. 331-4 extends our knowledge of Engels's involvement; Kapp, Yvonne, Eleanor Mane The Crowded Years (London, 1976), pp. 56–68 and 91–2.Google Scholar

7 The articles appeared under the heading “Socialism from the Root up” between 15 May 1886 and 6 August 1887; Morris and Bax never quite lost touch with each other and later they published the articles with a few changes as Socialism. Its Growth and Outcome (London, 1893).Google Scholar

8 Thompson, pp. 504-5 and 507-9.

9 Commonweal 18 May and 17 August 1889 give Morris's point of view; 22 June and 6 July provide examples of the anarchist point of view.

10 News from Nowhere, p. 26.

11 The opening chapters of Kropotkin, , La Conquête du Pain (Paris, 1892; English translation, London, 1906)Google Scholar take for granted this type of spontaneous property-eliminating revolution.

12 News from Nowhere, p. 74-6.

13 The only deletion of interest is that Commonweal, 25 January 1890, refers to the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League which in News from Nowhere, p. 12, is simply the Hammersmith Socialists—that is, the small group Morris set up after leaving the League. Apart from this, he allowed what he had written to stand.

14 Thompson, p. 566.

15 Henderson, Phillip ed., Letters of William Morris (London, 1950), p. 324–5.Google Scholar

16 Morris, William, “Where are we now?” Commonweal, 15 November 1890.Google Scholar

17 Kropotkin, P., “William Morris,” Freedom, November 1896.Google Scholar

18 The three sections cover pp. 1-45, 45-115 and 115-82 of News from Nowhere.

19 E.g. Hulse, J., Revolutionists in London (Oxford, 1970), p. 89.Google Scholar

20 News from Nowhere, p. 63-4.

21 Commonweal 28 July and 11 August 1888; News from Nowhere, p. 80-1.

22 News from Nowhere, p. 103.

23 Commonweal, 25 January 1890; News from Nowhere, p. 89. “State Socialist” had from Morris something of the derogatory undertones that sometimes are attached to the word “reformist” at the present day.

24 Bowman, S., Edward Bellamy Abroad (New York, 1962), p. 86–8Google Scholar; Meier, pp. 124 and 128; on p. 683 Meier refers to “Le gradualisme fabien de l'utopiste yankee,” but leaves Fabian Essays in Socialism virtually unnoticed; Thompson, p. 542.

25 News from Nowhere, p. 84; Commonweal, 18 May 1889.

26 Commonweal 25 June 1889 and 25 February 1890; News from Nowhere, p. 89.

27 From p. 91, line 19 and p. 94, line 40, is inserted; and on p. 95 the words “from the Confederation of the Combined Workmen” is inserted.

28 Hulse, p. 102.

29 There is one more reference to the Combined Workmen, News from Nowhere, p. 104, but Morris seems to have thought that once the unions had set up a Committee of Public Safety, it would conduct the revolution.

30 Pataud, E. and Pouget, E., How we shall bring about the Revolution (London, 1913).Google Scholar

31 Pease, Edward R., The History of the Fabian Society (London, 1963), p. 88–90Google Scholar, gives details of the publishing success of Fabian Essays in Socialism, and attributes its success to the fact that it offered a coherent policy.

32 The nearest to a date for the revolution in the Commonweal version is in the 24 May installment, where the counter-revolutionaries complain that socialist tendencies had been tolerated for twenty years. Liberman, p. 383, infers from this that it was set in 1910, but perhaps Morris was just saying “another dozen years of work for the revolution.”

33 Morris specified 1952, News from Nowhere, pp. 35 and 93; the phrase about “tolerated for twenty years” was changed to “sixty” (p. 97).

34 Commonweal, 18 January 1890; News from Nowhere, pp. 6, 67 and 155; Meier, p. 432.

35 Commonweal, 25 January 1890; News from Nowhere, p. 13.

36 News from Nowhere, p. 91.

37 Meier, p. 426; News from Nowhere, p. 93-4.

38 Morris may conceivably not always have been so sure of the inevitability of a violent break in development. Meier writes as though Morris, when he used the term “State Socialism,” had difficulty deciding whether this was a matter of a welfare state system or the first stage of socialism, p. 438-9. Meier is of course sure that these two stages of development would not blend peacefully into one another; was Morris so sure?

39 News from Nowhere, p. 101-3.

40 News from Nowhere, p. 112.

41 News from Nowhere, p. 102.

42 Naturally Morris was pro-Home Rule, Commonweal, October 1885, but he was almost as interested in the way “moderates” were coming together in the Unionist party to impose law and order, Commonweal, 22 May, 26 June and 3 July 1886.

43 News from Nowhere, pp. 94.

44 Cline, C.A., Recruits to Labour (New York, 1964)Google Scholar gives biographical details of over sixty people of some importance in the Labour party who had previously been Liberals, but this is primarily concerned with the 1914 period.

45 Pease, p. 153.

46 Commonweal, 20 April 1889.