News from Nowhere

Morris wrote this after a Socialist League meeting sent him home dreaming, and the book keeps that dream’s logic. His narrator falls asleep and wakes in a future England where money, private property, prisons, and central government have all vanished. People live in a green, decentralized commonwealth, doing work they enjoy because it is craft rather than drudgery, and beauty has returned to ordinary life. Much of the story is a slow journey up the Thames, with long talks about how the great change came about. Written partly as a reply to the mechanized socialism of Edward Bellamy, it argues that a good society should feel like art, not a factory. Free to read here as a PDF and EPUB edition.