William Morris. News from Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance. Hammersmith, 1892.

WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896)

A classic novel of a scion of the Arts and Crafts movement, News from Nowhere celebrates collectivism and the non-competitive life of farm workers in the future. The worry-free atmosphere contrasts with the physical horrors of late Nineteenth-century industrialism:

No one unburdened with very heavy anxieties could have felt otherwise than happy that morning; and it must be said that whatever anxieties might lie beneath the surface of things, we didn’t seem to come across any of them.

Craft communes such as the Roycrofters embraced Morris’s vision as their ideal.