Though best-known today as a designer of fabrics and wallpapers, in his own time Morris was equally famous for his writing and his pioneering socialism. He was a man of fierce energies and strong opinions. When he was taken to court for knocking a policeman’s helmet off during a political demonstration, Morris was stubbornly unrepentant. In his socialist vision of a future Britain, News from Nowhere, the Houses of Parliament are used for the storage of dung – all they are good for, says the book’s narrator.
News from Nowhere remains the best-known of Morris’ writings. Originally serialized in Morris’ socialist newspaper, The Commonweal, in 1890 as a rebuttal to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888), which predicted a world benefitting from advanced technology, it envisions a future, pastoral, post-socialist revolution England in which capitalism, class, industrialization, and (to some extent) sexism have disappeared. The iconic frontispiece to the Kelmscott Press edition, by Charles M. Gere, shows Morris’ country house in Oxfordshire, Kelmscott Manor, the model for the “house by the river” lovingly described in the book.