News from Nowhere and Other Writings [Paperback]

This volume illustrates the variety of William Morris's prose, while focusing on one theme: the earthly paradise. The Nowhere ofNews 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 ofBrave New WorldandNineteen Eighty-Four. Exhilaratingly, it reminds us that nothing is inevitable about the way we live—now or in 1890.Introduction
Chronology
Bibliographical Note
Romance
The Story of the Unknown Church
A King's Lesson
Two Extracts fromA 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 ofLooking Backwardby Edward Bellamy
Under an Elm-tree; or, Thoughts in the Countryside
Preface toThe Nature of Gothicby John Ruskin
Foreword toUtopiaby 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 theDaily News
[Anti-Scrape]: letter to theAthenaeum
[St. Mark's, Venice]: letter to theDaily News
NotesWilliam 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.GB