He was concerned with beauty and utility, and horrified by the shoddy, mass-produced goods cranked out by industrial capitalism.Ī design for the decorative art company of William Morris, undated
Morris’s quaint dictate, quoted ad nauseam, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” is not inconsistent with his worldview. Morris’s firm produced high-end textiles, stained glass, and furniture, and his wallpaper designs, in particular, are familiar to many who might not even know their author. He was a founding member of the Arts and Crafts Movement. His influence on the decorative arts cannot be overstated. Morris was born in Walthamstow, Essex, northeast of London, in 1834. He urges us to wish harder, not plan better. At a moment in history when social reform and conservationist policy have appeared on the political horizon, William Morris offers a reminder of the constitutive limits of our imaginations. If no other argument for revolutionary change made within the novel seems persuasive, this line, appearing late in the narrative, should give us reason to consider the insufficiency, even the costs, of a pragmatic reformist mindset. Many aspects of News from Nowhere set it apart from other utopian fiction of the time-it is decidedly socialist, conscious of the environmental costs of industrialization, backward-looking rather than futuristic, and free of prescriptiveness about any particular social arrangements-but Ellen’s melancholy observation on the psychic life of the capitalist subject is singularly important. Or rather, it is a constellation of miseries, unevenly distributed, like everything else, that results from the gross exploitation of nature and people necessary for supplying profitably our pleasures and comforts. It is a misery particular to global capitalism.
But our own unhappiness remains strikingly similar to what Morris had in mind. The environmental destruction produced by diesel-fueled trucks, rare earth mining, and rocket fuel were also in the future. In 1890, the year News from Nowhere was published, twenty-four-hour deliveries, video calls, and space travel were fictional. “You belong,” explains Ellen, “so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you.” Not because of any fictional science of time travel, nor because he poses a threat to this particular future’s social harmony, but because his very being has been so thoroughly deformed by the social conditions of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism that he is incapable of experiencing the pleasures and desires of a world freed of competition, exploitation, and suffering. At the end of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest (Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance), a woman named Ellen explains to the visitor, William Guest, that he cannot stay in this perfect place of clean air, meaningful work, and satisfying leisure.
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