Here is the contrarian take. News from Nowhere is a better book than Utopia, Walden Two, Looking Backward, or any of the other politically-serious utopias that a reader is supposed to take seriously. It is better precisely because it is less serious. Morris is writing in 1890, in the full weight of Victorian industrial London, and he is the only Victorian utopian who had the courage to imagine a future in which people were less busy.
This is the innovation. Every other utopia before and since imagines a future in which people are more productive, more organized, more efficient, more educated, more advanced. Bellamy’s Looking Backward, published two years earlier, imagines a 2000 AD United States that is essentially a giant industrial corporation with federal management and everyone working the same efficient shift. Skinner’s Walden Two imagines a behaviorist collective in which the scheduling is optimized for maximum human flourishing. The pattern is consistent. Utopia, in Western literature, is usually a version of our present life with the machinery running better.
Morris refused. His 2100 London is a city in which the industrial revolution has been reversed. The factories are gone. The Thames runs clean. The Houses of Parliament are a storage barn for manure. The fields are farmed by hand. Beautiful buildings have been built on the ground where the ugly buildings were. People work because they enjoy the work, or do not work, and nobody in the book is visibly stressed, visibly anxious, visibly scheduled, or visibly monetized. The entire apparatus of industrial modernity has been disassembled, not because the people of 2100 are primitive, but because they have decided, collectively, that industrial modernity was not worth what it cost.
Critics have dismissed this for a hundred and thirty-five years. The critics have called it naive, pastoral, sentimental, pre-modern, a Victorian’s cosplay of the Middle Ages he could not have actually lived in. All of these critiques are correct in their narrow details and wrong in their cumulative weight, because the critics are measuring Morris’s utopia against the metric the utopia explicitly rejects. If the metric is productivity, Morris loses. If the metric is human hours available for non-transactional life, Morris wins, and every subsequent utopia loses to him, because every subsequent utopia has accepted the terms of industrial time and Morris did not.
Morris was the only one who understood that utopia, if it is to be a utopia, must differ from the present in its pace rather than in its apparatus. He was a craftsman. He ran a design firm that made wallpaper and fabric and stained glass and chairs, and he ran it because he believed that the twentieth century would be a century in which human beings would need to be re-taught how to spend a Saturday. He wrote the book as an argument that the spending of a Saturday was the political problem of the coming century. He was right. Nobody else saw it.
The book has a plot, barely. A Victorian socialist named William Guest falls asleep in his Hammersmith house and wakes up in the year 2100. He meets a series of young people who explain the world to him. He travels by boat up the Thames with them. He falls slightly in love with a woman named Ellen. At the end, he travels too far, and begins to fade, and wakes up back in 1890. The plot is not the point. The plot is the device.
The point is the texture. Morris spends the book’s middle hundred pages on conversations with various 2100 Londoners about what it is like to live the way they live. How the work is organized — or rather, not organized. How education happens without schools. How criminal justice has dissolved because the conditions that produced criminality have dissolved. How sexual jealousy has mostly ended because the property relations that made it load-bearing are gone. How the day is structured around meals taken with friends and work done because the work is satisfying. How art is made by everyone, not as a profession. How, crucially, there is no visible commerce — no shops, no advertisements, no prices, no money — and the economy has been replaced by something that is not quite barter and not quite gift economy and not quite socialism, but rather a kind of social practice that the book does not explain because the book believes, correctly, that a practice can only be lived and cannot be explained.
Here is what the critics miss. Morris is not predicting the future. He is refusing the future his contemporaries were predicting. He is writing against Bellamy, against the Fabian socialists, against the industrial socialists, against the trade union leaders, against every other thinker on the English left of his decade who had accepted that the future would be industrial, whatever else it was. Morris was saying no. He was saying, not as a prediction but as a moral argument, that the price of industrialism was too high, and that the left was being tricked into accepting the price because the right had made industrialism look inevitable.
A hundred and thirty-five years later, the question Morris was asking is the question everybody is asking again. What is the pace of life the industrial economy has been extracting from us, and what would it mean to take it back. Morris did not have an answer. He had a vision. The vision was deliberately undetailed, because detail would have been a lie — Morris was not the architect of 2100, he was only arguing that 2100 should be built on a different premise than his century had accepted.
Read the book the way he wrote it. Slowly. In a chair. With a cup of tea. Not on a screen. The medium is the thesis. The thesis is that the book could only be read, and only be written, at a particular pace. The pace is the point. The point is the book.
A related vagobond.com piece: Around the World Through a Photographer’s Lens — China.
The philosophy I have been drawing out from this kind of reading I call Baoism. Bao Ji — Bring Your Own. Pace is one of the things you bring.
Readers and fans of News from Nowhere will really enjoy Notes from Nowhere — my own dispatches from the slow places, the off-grid corners, the Saturdays Morris was writing for. A hundred and thirty-five years later, in the century Morris was trying to warn against. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
