Introduction to Morris' News from Nowhere

Attached is a wonderful conversation between Tony Pinkney of Lancaster University and the Reader as to why anyone should bother with a Utopian book from the 1890s. The book is free to read on the site, the William Morris Archive.

News From Nowhere Introduction

It begins thus:
Reader: Why should I be expected to read a description of an ideal society dating from the 1890s?  What can that possibly have to do with us today in the early twenty-first century?

TP: Well, do you think you already live in an ideal society, then, so that you don’t need any help or ideas from the past?  With a global economic crisis battering us all from 2008 onwards, with proliferating nuclear weaponry and dangerous international tensions, with the democratic hopefulness of the Arab Spring running into the sands, with international terrorism and the ‘war on terror’ mutually reinforcing each other, and with the environmental problems of climate change, energy depletion, habitat destruction and species extinction accelerating rather than slowing down, I’m inclined to think we need all the help we can get from the models of an ideal society that we inherit from the past!  We don’t have to swallow them hook, line and sinker, but there might be helpful suggestions and inspiration towards improvement there.

R: Well alright, things aren’t so good at the moment, I’ll concede that.  But if, like Morris in News from Nowhere, you have got a scheme for a good or even perfect society, why not set it out as a series of clear-cut propositions that we can debate straightforwardly?  Why present it in literary form instead?  Why turn it into a story?

TP: As it happens, Morris did set out clear-cut propositions for change in his political lectures of the 1880s.  When you’ve got time, take a look at ‘The Society of the Future’, which he first delivered in November 1887.  If you put your scheme into a story, though, you give greater concreteness to your abstract system; you can give a firsthand feel for how it works, you put flesh on its bare bones.  Instead of saying, as a sociology textbook might, the economy is organised in such and such a fashion, you can actually show people working together under the new social relations, show them in the very process of learning how to become new kinds of people (cooperative rather than competitive, say).  We as readers experientially participate in such new relationships, we feel them on our pulses, rather than just learning about them intellectually, as theoretical possibilities.