![]() ![]() What he published in 1890 (the Commonweal version) was considerably closer to the anarchist view of revolution than what is now accepted as News from Nowhere, and what he added for the 1891 version (the book) shows a distinct shift towards an attitude more favourable to the State Socialists, or Fabians, that anything he wrote in Commonweal. When Morris published the story as a book the following year he added a certain amount of new material which indicates a somewhat different point of view. While his retirement was not entirely voluntary there is no reason to think that the remaining installments were altered by the new editors. News from Nowhere is about politics in the sense in which the word is used in the title of Aristotle's Politics and it teaches the rather Aristotelian message “Men come together in communities to live, they remain in communities to live in fellowship.” But the book had its local and immediate political context: most directly, in 1890 Morris gave up the editorship of the Socialist League magazine Commonweal, which was publishing the story in installments, when twenty out of the thirty-nine installments had appeared. ![]() Publication date 1893 Topics Utopias Publisher Hammersmith, Kelmscott Press, sold by Reeves and Turner, London. Morris had to carry on his own political work amidst the manoeuvring he hoped would be unnecessary in the future. News from nowhere: by Morris, William, 1834-1896. ![]() When one of the characters in William Morris's Utopian romance News from Nowhere says “We are very well off as to politics-because we have none” he was talking about the manipulation and intrigue that everyone hopes will be banished from Utopia. ![]()
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