Matt Biscay

Utopia is based on the concept of rest, linked up with dreams. In Rip Van Winkle (1819) by Washington Irving, the character falls asleep for 20 years and wakes up in the middle of nowhere, in the theme of “suspended animation”. When Rip wakes up, he has missed the American Revolution: he is a stranger in his own land because of the lapse of time due to an irrational event.

To rip is to tear. He rips the curtains of time. RIP also means “rest in peace”. It symbolises death and resurrection. Rest is therefore the framework of the novel, along with the importance of Marxism. The author cannot help infusing his own beliefs into his programmatic vision. William Morris is “moved by compassion for the working class”.

William Morris’s socialism, inspired by scientific Marxism, emphasises fellowship, happiness, personal fulfilment through work and art, and the role of education in the socialist process. The future of revolution depends on the success of education. His socialism respects individuality and no repression of the varieties of human nature.

It clouds the issues: it is more a matter of time than a place. Nowhere is England and the reporter is addressing an imaginary audience. “Rest” has several meanings. An epoch is a period, a parenthesis in history, just a time-lapse in the future.”Some chapters’ are a few fragments from future history, limited.

Rest and Unrest

Unrest represents social unrest, in the capitalist society. Contrariwise, rest breaks from capitalism, it is a necessary death resulting in resurrection and regeneration, a vital revival after a long period of social turmoil. Rest suggests a historical ordeal, relief and respite after a long struggle. It qualifies Marxist influences.

The first leitmotiv is pleasure. Then it gives way to rest and peace. Words are related to each other. Page 44 shows rest on happiness, peace and dreams. The notion of dream permeates the narrative. The guest is transported to the world of 2103.

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Utopia did not inspire William Morris as no references exist. he might have read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1871), whose title is an inversion or reversal of “nowhere”. In this book, the world is enslaved by machines that become so powerful and intelligent.

Morris’s utopia is suspicious about machines. It is hard to make a clear distinction between political manifestos and utopias. Socialist books can sound like utopias. Owen, Fourié anticipated Karl Marx. Is News From Nowhere a manifesto or a deliberate romance? If you read the subtitle you get the answer though it is not clear-cut.

William Morris: Life and Works

In the article “How I Became a Socialist”, published in 1819, Morris said, “Apart from a desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life is hatred of modern civilisation”.  The central concept of beauty is opposed to the notion of hatred: this is Morris’s struggle for socialism. Gradually, we discover some anticipations of our world.

In 1834, Morris was born in the countryside. His dad was a businessman in the city (“well-to-do”). There were lots of personal contradictions. He was from a family of nine children, number three and the eldest son. His father died in 1847. They had moved to a place called Woodford Hall, in a beautiful villa.

In his case, the autobiography is essential. News From Nowhere is packed with different elements of his biography: personal background and architecture. It is always a beautiful house with green and beautiful natural surroundings. His childhood was connected with beauty and nature. He had a passion with his dad for the Middle Ages; they visited churches and mediaeval architecture. A critic called this “childhood medievalism”.

Walter Scott was instrumental in shaping memories of the past. After the death of his dad, he went to Marlborough College. he did not like it and called it “a really rough school”. Fascinated by the past, he visited many monuments (“monumenta” in Latin). He had a fascination for history. “I don’t remember having been taught to read”;  in News From Nowhere, children learn by themselves.

In 1853, Morris went to Oxford, the ideal place for its gothic architecture and literary productions. There, he met John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle and he met his best friend Edward Burne-Jones (later to become a famous painter). They became close friends till the end.

Morris went to the continent, to Belgium and Northern France where he visited cathedrals (Amiens, Beauvais and Chartres). At Oxford, he started mediaeval history. He was an intellectual and active at the same time – this is the greatest originality about Morris. They visited Le Louvre. He and his friends were mystical and had a taste for religious commitment.

This was the time when Morris and Jones decided to become artists: an architect and a painter. Maurice didn’t have to work as he was getting an income from his father. There was a gothic revival at the time, with a new taste for mediaeval architecture. It was trendy to be into mediaeval ideals and chivalry. There was a general aspiration to the simple life of the mediaeval monasteries.

Carlyle and Ruskin were very influential at the time. Nostalgia was very trendy. These people were progressive (involved in social movements) and at the same time regressive (with mediaeval ideals): it was a strange conciliation between progress and regress. What was meant by art was a resolve to defend a new sort of art coming from the past and to be defended in the future. You must go backwards to progress. Novelty lies only in the past.

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To define utopia, we must look for the etymology given by Thomas More. “U-topos” means “no place, nowhere”. “Eu-topos” means “the good place”, it is therefore ambiguous.

Utopia has no real location, it is a vision, impossible to find. It is good, the world is perfect, and it represents a quest for perfection. Thus, how can we reach such perfection? More’s Utopia tries to answer this: in Book I, he describes the English system and institutions he wants to eliminate. Book II describes Utopia, the materialisation of the perfect world in the future. 

Utopias are always prospective. It suggests that present-day institutions are dangerous and that we need to create a new system in the future. The characteristics of utopia are:

• Isolated
• Self-centred
• An island

It is a world that cannot be contaminated by the outside world, far away from corruption. The Protestant Reformation was fighting against the corruption of the Catholic Church. Andreae, a Protestant leader wrote Christianopolis. The second reason for the emergence of Utopia is America, for it was a world of perfection, uncontaminated by civilisation.

Utopia’s subgenre is dystopia. “Dys” means “bad place”. It is a counter model, the place we must avoid at all costs. Counter-utopia and anti-utopia are confusing. A counter-utopia is a model that tries to abandon an austere model.

Perfection is dangerous. Most 19th and 20th ideologies were inspired by utopias: communism, and fascism. They aimed at creating a perfect world. In the 1960s there was a strong response to the tyranny of utopians, with the libertarians and the hippies: they refused bureaucracy and forged an individualistic response to a utopian future – the community. Utopia is interested in a group, a mass of people but not individuals. 

In the 16th century, there was a lot of interest in Thomas More’s Utopia because people were fed up with the regime, yet they did not see the problems.

The first utopia, Plato’s Republic, is a search for justice with a strong emphasis on community and property, and the abolition of money, gold and silver. Gold is used for chamber pots. The emphasis is on education and equality between men and women. We find the same features in Thomas More’s Utopia. Some ideas are acceptable, and some are not (like eugenics). Utopia endowed an implicit tyranny: while it means to make people happy, it contributes to their fall.

The concept of utopia

There have been many utopias, especially now that the definition is more precise. The definition depends on the ideological context. We can try to point out several concepts through centuries.

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