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William Morris
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News from Nowhere and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) Paperback – January 4, 1994

by William Morris (Author), Clive Wilmer (Editor, Introduction)
4.5 out of 5 stars 130 ratings
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This volume illustrates the variety of William Morris's prose, while focusing on one theme: the earthly paradise. The "Nowhere" of News from Nowhere (1890) is England in 2102, an ideal pastoral society born out of revolution. It is as compelling a dream of the future as the nightmares of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Exhilaratingly, it reminds us that nothing is inevitable about the way we live—now or in 1890.
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  1. Print length
    480 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Classics
  4. Publication date
    January 4, 1994
  5. Grade level
    12 and up
  6. Reading age
    18 years and up
  7. Dimensions
    7.8 x 5.08 x 0.86 inches
  8. ISBN-10
    9780140433302
  9. ISBN-13
    978-0140433302
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About the Author

William Morris was a dreamer with a genius for turning dreams into reality. Self-taught in thirteen different crafts, some of them ancient ones that had died out, he became the greatest European pattern-designer since the Middle Ages. He was, besides, a campaigning socialist and a pioneering environmentalist, a lyric poet and a forceful journalist, a storyteller and a maker of fine books.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0140433309
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (January 4, 1994)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780140433302
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140433302
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.8 x 5.08 x 0.86 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 out of 5 stars 130 ratings

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4.5 out of 5 stars
130 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • fengxiali
    5.0 out of 5 stars Nice purchased.
    Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2014
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    This is the required book for the class, buy here can save more money, and get it so fast .
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  • BOK H
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2016
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    had to get for a class
    good read!
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  • Rexis
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2014
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    Great. used for school.
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  • wiredweird
    4.0 out of 5 stars Artist and Socialist
    Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2005
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    Yes, I mean that with a capital S. The title story, "News from Nowhere", is a Socialist Utopia like Bellamy's "Looking Backward." In fact, Morris wrote an intro to Bellamy's brief book, and criticized it (gently) for not going far enough.

    Morris' view of that happy future occupies about half of this thick compilation. It is an incredible Eden, where hale, hearty, and lovely people swing into everything with the greatest gusto. Morris' character, the Guest, arrives just when everyone is falling over themselves to row upstream for the privelege of baling hay. Through some Socialist magic, everyone has become beautiful, intelligent, and youthful. In fact Ellen, who takes a shine to the Guest, has such "beauty and cleverness and brightness" (her own words, p.223) that she lives out of town to avoid causing a ruckus among the young bucks there.

    Outside of everyone's passion for good, hard labor (with the fear of some future shortage of sweaty work to go around), 'Nowhere' is most notable for the changes it has wrought on the English countryside. Since government no longer serves a Socialist need, the old trappings of power have been torn down. The one exception is the old Parliament building, which now serves as the transfer station between the producers of manure and its consumers - with a clear implication that little has changed.

    Exchange of manure is about the most sophisticated social interaction, since Morris declares that "this is not an age of inventions. The last epoch did all that for us," (p.192) and they let more of the old knowledge slip away every year. Instead, his healthy and pastoral people work for love of work, and infuse some vague sense of art into whatever it was they were going on about. Issues of medical care are waved away under their general shiny health, despite the fact that pastoral, non-technological people filled their graveyards with women dying in childbirth.

    The other half of this book is divided between a number of essays and lectures, most of which extol the Socialist ethos. About 120 pages of "Lectures" discuss design, and some few - with gritted teeth - acknowledge that science may deserve to exist. Yes, he tolerates those people in whom the desire to know burns most brightly. Mostly, however, "science" is something good for cleaning flue gas so the rural colors may shine more brightly.

    Morris was a visionary. He was also a brilliant and driven man, a skilled artisan, and eloquent writer. Unfortunately, he was born into a good-sized estate, so never had to pay all that much attention to the fussy bits of how people put the bread on their tables. The disconnect between his plenty and the majority's need is painfully apparent, but not to himself.

    The best-reasoned essay of the lot was the last, on the founding philosophy of his Kelmscott Press. He explained, in concrete terms, how he decided on the principles of artisanship of printing, and goes into some detail about how well-made text should appear. Much of what he said made sense, and much of the rest could be confirmed or denied by printing up a few pages and seeing what worked - the essence of his reviled "science."

    Morris had a fine and wide-ranging mind. This book shows many of its aspects, but also shows many of its failings. I was happier thinking of him only as the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement.

    //wiredweird
    68 people found this helpful
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  • robert sommer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2014
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    great
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  • reading man
    3.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic Foolishness
    Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2014
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    I'm afraid that with the best will in the world I can't help finding William Morris a bit of a dope.

    NEWS FROM NOWHERE is a "utopian" novel, but that Morris could conceive it reflects on his intelligence, because the colossal ignorance of human nature it exhibits is both risible and repugnant.

    To keep this unmemorable fantasy in print likely means that you can't underestimate the bad taste of mindless idealists of any age and their willingness to buy books that second their silly views.

    William Morris wallpaper designs are worth looking for, but avoid this foolish book.
    12 people found this helpful
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  • P. Schumacher
    5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful
    Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2006
    "News from Nowhere" is a Utopian fantasy in strong reaction against the Industrial (factory) Capitalism of the time (1890s England).

    It's like a cross between "Rip Van Winkle" and "Gulliver's Travels." William, the hero, goes to sleep in 1890s England (the powerhouse of rapacious Industrialism and Imperialism) and wakes up in a post-2000 England, where Industrialism is gone, and life is like heaven.

    How has all this happened? Simple. People have given up the Ethic of Scarcity mentality, which says "Let him who does not work not eat"--which turns life into never-ending toil. And they have turned to an Ethic of "Follow Your Bliss."

    This, naturally, has destroyed Industrial (factory) capitalism.

    Morris believed that Industrial (factory) Capitalism, with its fierce division of labor and assembly-line techniques--although very efficient--was grotesque and dehumanizing. Like Marx, he believed that such a system turned workers into mere components of the machine--mechanical and highly expendable.

    For workers, it made life repetitive and soul-killing (and body-killing) drudgery. And for consumers, it turned out floods of shoddy assembly-line trash--"goods" that were hardly good at all but unesthetic, cheap, throwaways.

    Morris realized that Industrialism had traded quality for quantity, and it had given the wrong answer to Jesus' question, "What profiteth it a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?"

    (Sound familiar? It is precisely what we have now.)

    He wanted to change all that. And unlike the Marxian socialists, Morris did not see the factory system as inevitable.

    He favored a more anarchist type of socialism.

    In "News from Nowhere"--in the TRULY brave new world he envisions--there is no government (because people are quite capable of governing themselves and reaching mature agreements), there are no schools (because people instinctively learn what is useful and what interests them), and most of all there is no work, in the sense of toil and drudgery (because people do what they like, out of their own artistic gifts and interests).

    As a result, people like their lives and they like other people. They are happy, and as a consequence healthy. They make things and do things not for profit but because they like doing them--and in the grand scheme of things, all necessary and beautiful things get done.

    This is a marvelously charming book, and presents the (quite achievable) Anarchist Paradise in simple and concrete terms.
    38 people found this helpful
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  • K. Duchmann Jr.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Timeless
    Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2010
    Morris' dream was that the divisions between work, life and art would blur. He believed that industrial consumerism led to toil, inequality, environmental destruction and inferior products. He also insisted--in contradistinction to Edward Bellamy--that "the true incentive to useful and happy labour is and must be pleasure in the work itself" and that a free society is one where "the unit of administration [is] small enough for every citizen to feel himself responsible for its details, and be interested in them; that individual men cannot shuffle off the business of life on to the shoulders of an abstraction called the State, but must deal with it in conscious association with each other". I think his ideas are as important today as they were at the end of the 19th century.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Brian Wood
    5.0 out of 5 stars "News From Nowhere" revisited
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 24, 2014
    Verified Purchase
    I read it first as a lonely 14 year old. For some reason I totally forgot its content, unlike the H.G. Wells "scientific romances" (his term) novels that I also read at that time. Revisiting it now as an 80 year old I see what fascinated me about "News From Nowhere" and still sense its magic. However I can now understand why Morris's idealised communism can never work; the world really is so much more complex than he appreciated, human nature so much more complex also, and medicine (for example) demands a structured training that he found abhorrent, understandably so when we consider what most schooling (especially for those denied his privileged upbringing) was like in his time. Given his idealism I can only be thankful that he was not to know what Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Min and others made of the system that he thought would set people free. The other material was new to me, enjoyable, but leaving me wondering if he really knew as much about medaeval life as he thought that he did.
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  • Client d'Amazon
    5.0 out of 5 stars Format parfait pour se plonger dans ces récits
    Reviewed in France on July 18, 2017
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    Livre pas très lourd et souple qui m'accompagne partout, avec plusieurs courts récits avant News from nowhere. Bonne édition avec la préface.
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  • Ramachandra. R
    4.0 out of 5 stars Socialist Utopia book by designer Morris.
    Reviewed in India on September 2, 2022
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    Though more famous as a designer, William Morris was also a writer & wrote this Utopian novel, which was highly praised by fellow Fabian Society member, George Bernard Shaw.
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  • Paolo
    5.0 out of 5 stars amazing reading
    Reviewed in Germany on July 1, 2024
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    one day unnecessary hard work might be abolished, chillax reading
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  • thomas poulsen
    5.0 out of 5 stars Super
    Reviewed in Germany on December 5, 2018
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    Super
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