News from Nowhere and Other Writings

by William Morris, Clive Wilmer (Editor), Clive Wilmer (Introduction), Clive Wilmer (Noted by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140433302
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/04/1994
Series:	Penguin Classics Series
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	542,662
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.84(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chronology
Bibliographical Note
Romance
The Story of the Unknown Church
A King's Lesson
Two Extracts from A Dream of John Ball
News from Nowhere
Lectures
The Lesser Arts
Some Hints on Pattern-designing
Useful Work versus Useless Toil
The Hopes of Civilization
Gothic Architecture
Occasional Prose
"Looking Backward": a review of Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy
Under an Elm-tree; or, Thoughts in the Countryside
Preface to The Nature of Gothic by John Ruskin
Foreword to Utopia by Sir Thomas More
How I Became a Socialist
A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press
Letters
[The Eastern Question]: letter to the Daily News
[Anti-Scrape]: letter to the Athenaeum
[St. Mark's, Venice]: letter to the Daily News
Notes

What People are Saying About This

Clive Wilmer

We are not expected to swallow Morris' dreams. On the contrary, we are encouraged to dream for ourselves.