A Comparison of Morris' News from Nowhere and Life in the Twin Oaks Community Page: 1
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Experiencing the reality of egalitarianism is qualitatively different from
merely reading economic theory or a utopian novel.
Ingrid Komar
When William Morris wrote his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890), one of
his main intentions was to satirize Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), a book
presenting a world Morris dismissed as "a Cockney paradise,"* though it was among the
most popular books of its day. Morris' intention was never, as Fiona MacCarthy points
out, to produce "a blueprint from which people could plan a working social system"
(587). Nevertheless, it is evident that life as portrayed in Morris's novel represents many
of his most passionate ideas about how life in the real world should be. "Nowhere' is a
truly egalitarian society: it is anti-authoritarian, it is beautiful. News from Nowhere is also
a book that has provided a good deal of influence and inspiration in the twentieth-
century. Of this MacCarthy has to say:
Its effect is as a catalyst. Morris releases the imagination by suggesting that
another form of society is possible. For people suffering political stagnation
then and now-it points a way out. By 1898 News from Nowhere had been
In his introduction to Three Works by William Morris, A. L. Norton explains in a footnote: "Morris
always used the work Cockney in the sense of pretentiously vulgar." He furthermore quotes a review
Morris wrote for Commonweal on Looking Backward in which he says that Bellamy:
conceives of the change to socialism as taking place without any breakdown of (modern) life, or
indeed disturbance of it, by means of the final development of the great private monopolies which
are such a feature of the present day. He supposes that these must necessarily be transformed into
one great monopoly which will include the whole people and be worked for the benefit of the
people...
The great change having thus peaceably and fatalistically taken place, the author has put
forward his scheme of the organization of life; which is organized with a vengeance....
In short, a machine life is the best which Bellamy can imagine for us on all sides; it is not
to be wondered at then that his only idea of making labour tolerable is to decrease the amount of it
by means of fresh and ever fresh developments of machinery. (24-5)
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Garner, Royce Clifton. A Comparison of Morris' News from Nowhere and Life in the Twin Oaks Community, thesis, December 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5179/m1/4/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .