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REAPPRAISING NEWS FROM NOWHERE: WILLIAM MORRIS, J. S. MILL AND FABIAN ESSAYS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2018

SEAMUS FLAHERTY
SEAMUS FLAHERTY*
Affiliation:
School of History, Queen Mary University of London E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines News from Nowhere, William Morris's late nineteenth-century utopian romance. It seeks, first, to establish John Stuart Mill as a crucial influence on the text. It argues that, in News from Nowhere, Morris engaged extensively with Mill's mid-century essay On Liberty. It shows how Morris dramatized Mill's “harm principle”; how he challenged the notion that custom must necessarily be antithetical to the “spirit of liberty”; and how he enacted Mill's stricture that “if opponents of all important truths do not exist,” then they must be invented. The article seeks, second, to contest the view that Morris was writing in indignant response to Edward Bellamy's portrait of utopia, Looking Backward. The article argues, instead, that it was rather the Fabians who incurred Morris's indignation. It attempts to demonstrate that if News from Nowhere was indeed an answer to another book, it was an answer to Fabian Essays.

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 951 - 980
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank the three anonymous referees for their enormously helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as the editors of Modern Intellectual History. The article has benefited immensely from their collective efforts.

References

1 For a classic statement of the notion that News from Nowhere is an “authentically libertarian utopia” see Abensour, Miguel, “William Morris: The Politics of Romance,” in Blechman, Max, ed., Revolutionary Romanticism (San Francisco, 1999), 125–61Google Scholar, at 125. Clear-cut endorsements of the idea that Morris was writing in response to Bellamy are offered, meanwhile, in Kumar, Krishan, “News from Nowhere: The Renewal of Utopia,” History of Political Thought 14/1 (1993), 133–43Google Scholar; Beaumont, Matthew, Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 (Chicago, 2009), 40–41Google Scholar; and Levitas, Ruth, The Concept of Utopia (Oxford, 2010), 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 William Morris, “Looking Backward” (1889), in Morris, Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal, 1883–1890, ed. Nicholas Salmon (Bristol, 1994), 419–25, at 420.

3 Waithe, Marcus, “The Laws of Hospitality: Liberty, Generosity, and the Limits of Dissent in William Morris's ‘The Tables Turned’ and ‘News from Nowhere’,” Yearbook of English Studies 36/2 (2006), 212–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 213.

4 Morris, William, News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, in News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ed. Wilmer, Clive (London, 2004), 41–228, at 112Google Scholar.

5 Morris, William, “How I Became a Socialist: Written for ‘Justice,’ 1894,” in The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols. (London, 1915), 23: 277–81Google Scholar, at 278. Morris retrospectively described Mill's arguments in Chapters on Socialism as having been put “clearly and honestly.” But, at the same time, Morris misrepresented Mill's posthumous papers by describing them, on the one hand, as an attack on “Socialism in its Fourierist guise,” and reporting, on the other, how he “learned from Mill against his intention that Socialism was necessary.” Ibid., original emphasis.

6 J. S. Mill, Chapters on Socialism (1879), in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson, 33 vols. (London, 1963–91), 5: 703–56, at 744.

7 Mill, J. S., On Liberty (1859), in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 18: 213–310Google Scholar, at 301.

8 Waithe, “The Laws of Hospitality,” 220.

9 Lloyd, Trevor, “The Politics of William Morris's ‘News from Nowhere’,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 9/3 (1977), 273–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 273. For this distinction see Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), 90–102Google Scholar. “To speak of a writer's motives,” Skinner rightly argued, “seems invariably to speak of a condition antecedent to, and contingently connected with, the appearance of their works. But to speak of a writer's intentions may either be to refer to a plan or design to create a certain type of work (an intention to do x) or else to refer to an actual work in a certain way (as embodying particular intention in x-ing). In the former case we seem (as in talking about motives) to be alluding to a contingent antecedent condition of the appearance of the work. But in the latter we seem to be alluding to a feature of the work itself. Specifically, we seem to be characterising it in terms of its embodiment of a particular aim or intention, and thus in terms of its having a particular purpose or point.” Ibid., 98.

10 Holzman, Michael, “Anarchism and Utopia: William Morris's News from Nowhere,” ELH 51/3 (1984), 589–603CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 590. Lloyd also illuminated Morris's assault on the anarchists.

11 Ibid. Lloyd, “The Politics of William Morris's ‘News from Nowhere’,” 279–80, for instance, successfully drew attention to Morris's assault on the Fabians. But he did not shed light on just how exactly Morris did so.

12 Morris elected to describe his doctrine as communism in an effort “to step between social democracy and anarchism.” Kinna, Ruth, William Morris: The Art of Socialism (Cardiff, 2000), 115Google Scholar. Kinna provides the best account of Morris's political self-understanding in chapter 4 of the same book. Kinna also recognized there that “Morris never claimed to have written News from Nowhere as an answer to Looking Backward.” Ibid., 19.

13 See Lawrence Davis's not always accurate criticisms of Morris in “Morris, Wilde, and Marx on the Social Preconditions of Individual Development,” Political Studies 44/4 (1996), 719–32.

14 Kumar, “News from Nowhere,” 133.

15 Morris, “Looking Backward,” 425; William Morris, “Where Are We Now?” (1890), in Morris, Political Writings, 488–94, at 493.

16 William Morris, “Fabian Essays in Socialism” (1889), in Morris, Political Writings, 457–62, at 457.

17 Mill, On Liberty, 223.

18 Ibid., 272.

19 Ibid., 245.

20 Morris, William, “Notes on News” (1887), in Morris, Journalism: Contributions to Commonweal, 1885–1890, ed. Salmon, Nicholas (Bristol, 1996), 266–8Google Scholar, at 266.

21 Waithe, “The Laws of Hospitality,” 217.

22 Camarda, Julie, “Liberal Possibilities in a Communist Utopia: Minority Voices and Historical Consciousness in Morris's News from Nowhere,” Nineteenth Century Contexts 37/4 (2015), 301–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article was discovered after the author had written the article presented here. It makes a number of similar points. It too suggests that Morris “shared fundamental methodological and political principles” with Mill. It isolates the role ascribed to dialogue and Nowhere's model of individuality as owing something to Mill's On Liberty. On other matters, though, and in the detail, the respective arguments diverge. The “harm principle” is not discussed in Camarda's article, and she unconvincingly presents Nowhere as an intentionally flawed utopia rather than Morris's personal ideal of the good society.

23 Jayne Hildebrand, R., “News from Nowhere and William Morris's Aesthetics of Unreflectiveness: Pleasurable Habits,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 54/1 (2011), 3–27Google Scholar. Hildebrand seeks to prove how Morris responded in News From Nowhere to “Victorian debates about the relationship among consciousness, individuality, and historical change.” She invokes Mill's On Liberty as one of the sources that Morris railed against, but she does not seek to prove that Morris had actually read it, relying, instead, on the prevalence of ideas “about the personal and social dangers of unreflectiveness.” Ibid., 6, 4.

24 “But as to this allotment scheme, J. S. Mill said all that was necessary,” Morris wrote, revealing his knowledge of Mill's Principles, “when he said it was simply allowing the labourers to work to pay their own poor rates. The bill is really in the interests of the employing farmers and the rack-renting landlords.” Morris, “Notes on News,” 266. Morris was referring to the Labourers’ Allotment Bill of 1887. Mill's critical remarks on “the much-boasted Allotment System” are set out in Book 2 chapter 12. Mill, J. S., Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848), in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 2: 362–6Google Scholar.

25 Morris, William, The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Kelvin, Norman, 4 vols. (Princeton, 1987)Google Scholar, 2: 293. MacCarthy, Fiona, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London, 1994), 474Google Scholar.

26 Persky, Joseph, The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism (Oxford, 2016), 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Ibid.

28 Morris, William, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. Morris, May, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1936)Google Scholar, 2: 109.

29 Ibid., 173–4. The closeness of their relationship is documented in Morris's correspondence. See, for instance, the letters dated 2 Sept. 1888 and 30 Dec. 1888 in Morris, Collected Letters, vol. 2.

30 Belfort Bax, Ernest, The Legal Subjection of Men (London, 1908)Google Scholar. Bax, The Problem of Reality: Being Outline Suggestions for a Philosophical Reconstruction (London, 1892), 92.

31 Belfort Bax, Ernest, The Ethics of Socialism: Being Further Essays in Modern Socialist Criticism, &c. (London, 1893), 124Google Scholar.

32 For an account of how Morris dramatized Bax's ideas in his late Germanic romances see Vaninskaya, Anna, William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (Edinburgh, 2010), 77–87Google Scholar.

33 Morris, News from Nowhere, 112–15, 125, 137, 159. For Bax's views on these matters see Ernest Belfort Bax, The Religion of Socialism: Being Essays in Modern Socialist Criticism (London, 1886); and Bax, Ethics of Socialism.

34 See Ernest Belfort Bax, “Democracy and the Word of Command,” in Bax, Essays in Socialism: New and Old (London, 1907), 75–8.

35 Bax, Ethics of Socialism, 127.

36 Ibid., 123, 121.

37 Ibid., 124.

38 Ibid.

39 Morris, News from Nowhere, 118–19.

40 Mill, On Liberty, 225, 226.

41 Morris, News from Nowhere, 118, 119.

42 Ibid., 196.

43 Ibid., 93.

44 Ibid.

45 Mill, On Liberty, 223.

46 Ibid., 223–4.

47 Ibid., 224.

48 For the logic of question and answer see the brief summary in Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1: 115–16. Skinner usefully argued that “we need to understand why a certain proposition has been put forward if we wish to understand the proposition itself. We need to see it not simply as a proposition but as a move in an argument.” “Here,” he went on, “I am generalising R. G. Collingwood's dictum to the effect that the understanding of any proposition requires us to identify the question to which the proposition may be viewed as an answer. I am claiming, that is, that any act of communication will always constitute the taking up of some determinate position in relation to some pre-existing conversation or argument.” Ibid., 115.

49 Ibid.

50 Mill, On Liberty, 276.

51 Ibid., 277.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., 278.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Morris, News from Nowhere, 89–90, 114.

57 Mill, On Liberty, 276.

58 Ibid., 263.

59 Ibid.

60 Morris, News from Nowhere, 97, original emphasis.

61 Mill, On Liberty, 265, 271.

62 Ibid., 263.

63 Ibid., 261.

64 Morris, News from Nowhere, 93. Here, my argument departs slightly from that laid out by Hildebrand. Morris by all means repudiates the “standards of honour and public estimation” built on “success in besting our neighbours” associated with the humanist tradition. But he does not embrace as wholeheartedly as Hildebrand suggests “unreflective behaviour.” Morris, News from Nowhere, 113. Hildebrand, “Aesthetics of Unreflectiveness,” 3.

65 Mill, On Liberty, 262.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid., original emphasis.

69 Morris, News from Nowhere, 112.

70 Ibid., 112.

71 Ibid., 113.

72 Ibid., 63.

73 Ibid., 117.

74 Mill, Chapters on Socialism, 746. See, for example, William Morris, “The Dull Level of Life” (1884), in Morris, Political Writings, 28–31.

75 William Morris, “A Factory as It Might Be” (1884), in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, 2: 130–40, at 131.

76 Mill, On Liberty, 272. Mill applauded “energy” as evidence of “character.” “Energy,” he conceded, “may be turned to bad uses.” But “more good may always be made of an energetic character,” he argued, if only energy “is guided by vigorous reason, and strong feelings controlled by a conscientious will.” Ibid., 263, 272. As we shall see, both conditions have been fulfilled in Nowhere.

77 Morris, News from Nowhere, 222.

78 Mill, On Liberty, 272. Morris insisted that “it would be a contradiction in terms” to describe the condition of “rest and happiness” depicted in Nowhere as “stagnation.” William Morris, “The Society of the Future” (1888), in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, 2: 453–68, at 467–8. Mill, of course, did not use the term “stagnation,” using “stationary” instead. Mill, On Liberty, 273.

79 Ibid., 268.

80 Morris, News from Nowhere, 120.

81 Mill, On Liberty, 269. It is worth remarking that, in his review of Looking Backward, Morris described Bellamy's “government by alumni”—inaccurately—as “a kind of aristocracy.” Yet his description of choosing out, or breeding, “a class of superior persons,” combined with his use of Mill's text up to that point and after, suggests that Morris's utterance was probably provoked by Mill. Morris, “Looking Backward,” 423.

82 Mill, On Liberty, 267.

83 Morris, News from Nowhere, 120.

84 Ibid., 102, 121. These arguments were aimed at the anarchists in the SL. But Morris was no doubt helped in bringing them into focus by engaging with Mill's warnings about “the tyranny of the majority,” one of “the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.” Mill, On Liberty, 219.

85 Ibid., 250.

86 Ibid., 252.

87 Morris, News from Nowhere, 117.

88 Mill, On Liberty, 254.

89 Ibid., 272, original emphasis.

90 Morris, News from Nowhere, 117.

91 Mill, On Liberty, 253. Morris, News from Nowhere, 118.

92 Mill, On Liberty, 258.

93 Ibid., 230.

94 Ibid., 229.

95 Ibid., 251.

96 Beaumont, Matthew, “News from Nowhere and the Here and Now: Reification and the Representation of the Present in Utopian Fiction,” Victorian Studies 47/1 (2004), 33–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 40.

97 David Leopold, “Introduction,” in Morris, William, News from Nowhere, ed. Leopold, David (Oxford, 2003), vii–xxxiGoogle Scholar, at xxix. See also Leopold, David, “William Morris, News from Nowhere, and the Function of Utopia,” Journal of William Morris Studies 22/1 (2016), 18–41Google Scholar.

98 Beaumont, “News from Nowhere,” 39. Abensour, “William Morris,” 145.

99 Waithe, “The Laws of Hospitality,” 225.

100 Mill, On Liberty, 245.

101 Camarda argues, for example, that Guest, indeed, “acts as an ideal Millian ‘eccentric’, whose questions and dialogue are never completely suppressed or dismissed, allowing him to illuminate Nowhere's historicity and inherent flaws.” This interpretation, however, while correct insofar as it identifies the “socratic dialectics” at the core of Morris's book, is not convincing. Camarda overstates the extent to which Morris identifies with Guest and “Nowhere's exceptional and dissenting individuals.” As she herself concedes, “Morris did not view Nowhere as a dystopia.” Camarda, “Liberal Possibilities,” 303, 310, 307.

102 Morris, News from Nowhere, 176, 174.

103 Ibid., 176.

104 Ibid., 119, 101, 65. For the corresponding passages in Mill see On Liberty, 307, 308–9, 305. One of the chief objections that Morris raised in his review of Looking Backward, published six months before he started writing News from Nowhere, was the sense created by Bellamy that “the problem of the organisation of life and necessary labour can be dealt with by a huge national centralization, working by a kind of magic for which no one feels himself responsible.” Morris argued that “it will be necessary for the unit of administration to be small enough for every citizen to feel himself responsible for its details, and be interested in them”; “individual men,” he continued, echoing Mill's views on political education, “cannot shuffle off the business of life on to the shoulders of an abstraction called the State.” Morris, “Looking Backward,” 424–25.

105 For a summary of the debate over Morris's relation to “Marxism” and anarchism see Kinna, Ruth, “William Morris and Anti-parliamentarism,” History of Political Thought 15/4 (1994), 593–613Google Scholar, at 593–4.

106 This notion of “the priority of paradigms” is brought out exceptionally well in Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1: 58–9.

107 Kumar, “News from Nowhere,” 133.

108 For the publication history and the reception of Looking Backward in Britain see Marshall, Peter, “A British Sensation,” in Bowman, Sylvia E., ed., Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophets’ Influence (New York, 1962), 86–118Google Scholar. For Fabian Essays see Briggs, Asa, “Introduction,” in Shaw, Bernard, ed., Fabian Essays (London, 1962), 11–29Google Scholar.

109 Morris, “Looking Backward,” 425.

110 Ibid.

111 Morris, “Fabian Essays,” 457, original emphasis.

112 Ibid., 458.

113 Ibid.

114 The best account of permeation and its varieties is given in Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton, 2011), 195–214. Morris, however, willfully ignored the different political strategies at play, choosing instead to conflate Webb's position with those adopted by the other Fabian lecturers.

115 See, above all, Morris, William, “How Should We Live Then?”, a lecture delivered to a meeting sponsored by the Fabian Society. Paul Meier, “An Unpublished Lecture of William Morris,” International Review of Social History 16/2 (1971), 217–40Google Scholar. As Morris put it to Sydney Olivier, “It would be pretty much my Society of the Future with differences suited to the probable audience.” Morris, Collected Letters, 2: 9.

116 George Bernard Shaw, Fabian Tract, No. 41. The Fabian Society: What It Has Done; and How It Has Done It (London, 1892), 3.

117 In addition to Bevir see McBriar, A. M., Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884–1918 (Cambridge, 1966), 1–28Google Scholar; MacKenzie, Norman Ian and Mackenzie, Jean, The First Fabians (London, 1977), 73–116Google Scholar; and Pierson, Stanley, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism: The Struggle for a New Consciousness (Ithaca, 1973), 106–39Google Scholar.

118 As Shaw wrote, Morris disliked the Fabians “as a species.” “However, there was no love lost on the other side.” Bernard Shaw, “Morris as I Knew Him,” in Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, 2: ix–xl, at xi.

119 Quoted in Thompson, E. P., William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London, 1977), 539Google Scholar.

120 Ibid., 539–40.

121 Morris, “Where Are We Now?”, 493.

122 Shaw, Fabian Tract, No. 41, 19. Thompson, William Morris, 459, noted how already “in September, 1887,” Morris “was identifying his real theoretical opponents as being among the Fabians, and this despite the fact that Shaw was a close personal friend.”.

123 William Morris, “On Some ‘Practical’ Socialists” (1888), in Morris, Political Writings, 336–42, at 337.

124 Morris, “Fabian Essays,” 462.

125 Meier, “An Unpublished Lecture,” 222.

126 Morris, “‘Practical’ Socialists,” 338.

127 Ibid.

128 Annie Besant, “Industry under Socialism,” in Shaw, Fabian Essays, 184–204, at 184.

129 Ibid.

130 Ibid.

131 Ibid.

132 Morris, “‘Practical’ Socialists,” 341.

133 Besant, “Industry under Socialism,” 185.

134 Wells, H. G., A Modern Utopia, ed. Claeys, Gregory and Parrinder, Patrick (London, 2005), 72Google Scholar.

135 Besant, “Industry under Socialism,” 195.

136 Ibid., 196.

137 Ibid., 194, 190, 193. Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward 2000–1887, ed. Beaumont, Matthew (Oxford, 2007), 108Google Scholar.

138 Morris, News from Nowhere, 159.

139 William Morris, “Correspondence” (1889), in Morris, Political Writings, 414–18, at 416.

140 Besant described the “great farms” that she envisaged for the rural unemployed as “improvements of the Bonanza farms in America.” Besant, “Industry under Socialism,” 191.

141 Ibid., 189.

142 Ibid. Morris, News from Nowhere, 98.

143 Morris, News from Nowhere, 98.

144 Ibid. The same, of course, is true of Bellamy's Boston. In Bellamy's utopia evening meals are, however, taken at a “general-dining house,” but each family is assigned a separate room for its exclusive use. Bellamy, Looking Backward, 87, 90.

145 Besant, “Industry under Socialism,” 195.

146 Ibid. Morris, News from Nowhere, 199.

147 Ibid., 124, 192.

148 Ibid., 122.

149 Ibid., 123.

150 Morris, William, “Art under Plutocracy” (1883), in The Collected Works of William Morris, 23: 164–91Google Scholar, at 168.

151 Morris, News from Nowhere, 160.

152 Ibid., 159.

153 Ibid., 201.

154 Ibid., 123.

155 George Bernard Shaw, “The Transition to Social Democracy,” in Shaw, Fabian Essays, 207–36, at 235.

156 Morris, News from Nowhere, 123.

157 Morris, “Fabian Essays,” 463.

158 Shaw, “Morris as I Knew Him,” xxiii, xx.

159 Morris, “Fabian Essays,” 463.

160 Ibid., 462.

161 Shaw, “Morris as I Knew Him,” xi.

162 Shaw, “Transition,” 235.

163 Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (Harmondsworth, 1945), xi.

164 Ibid., xii.

165 Shaw, “Transition,” 235.

166 Ibid., 214.

167 Ibid., 218.

168 Ibid., 214.

169 See, for instance, Fawcett, Henry, “The Recent Development of Socialism in Germany and the United States,” Fortnightly Review 24/143 (1878), 605–15Google Scholar; Herbert Spencer's classic diatribe The Man versus the State, in Spencer, Political Writings, ed. John Offer (Cambridge, 1994), 59–175; as well as Mason, John W., “Political Economy and the Response to Socialism in Britain, 1870–1914,” Historical Journal 23/3 (1980), 565–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Shaw, “Transition,” 218.

170 Ibid., 222.

171 Besant, “Industry under Socialism,” 186. Shaw, “Transition,” 222.

172 Ibid., 224, 225.

173 Ibid., 225.

174 Ibid., 226.

175 Ibid., 227.

176 Ibid., 230.

177 Ibid.

178 Ibid.

179 Ibid., 231.

180 Morris, “Looking Backward,” 422. Morris, “Fabian Essays,” 458.

181 For contemporary objections to the expansive use of the word “socialism” by extreme individualists like Spencer see Rae, John, Contemporary Socialism (London, 1908), 12Google Scholar; and, more particularly, Brodrick, George C., “Democracy and Socialism,” Nineteenth Century 15/86 (1884), 626–44Google Scholar, at 628–9. For an historical appraisal see Collini, Stefan, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1979), 13–50Google Scholar.

182 Morris, “Fabian Essays,” 459, original emphasis.

183 Kumar, “News from Nowhere,” 138.

184 Morris, News from Nowhere, 134. John Crump, “How the Change Came: News from Nowhere and Revolution,” in Stephen Coleman and Paddy O'Sullivan, eds., William Morris and News from Nowhere: A Vision for Our Time (Bideford, 1990), 57–73, for instance, fails to even mention the Fabian Society in his analysis of Morris's view of the transition to socialism.

185 Bellamy was strident in his advocacy of cross-class party-political action. In Looking Backward the “followers of the red flag” are depicted not only as having hindered “the establishment of the new order,” they are also supposed to have been subsidized to persist in their strategy by the opponents of change. Bellamy, Looking Backward, 148–9.

186 Morris, News from Nowhere, 134. The right-wing group among the Fabians put out a journal called Practical Socialist. See McBriar's remarks in Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 19–20.

187 Shaw, “Transition,” 235–6.

188 Ibid., 236. Morris, News from Nowhere, 135.

189 Ibid., 133–4.

190 Ibid., 134.

191 Shaw, “Transition,” 235.

192 Morris, News from Nowhere, 135.

193 Ibid.

194 Ibid.

195 Sidney Webb, “Historic,” in Shaw, Fabian Essays, 62–93, at 92.

196 Engels, Frederick, “Introduction,” in Marx, Karl, The Civil War in France (Peking, 1966), 1–18Google Scholar, at 17. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels famously posited that the “executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto (London, 2002), 221Google Scholar; and Engels elaborated on this foundation in the chapters of Anti-Dühring later republished as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, where he formulates the proposition that the “state is not ‘abolished’” but “withers away.” Engels, Frederick, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (London, 1993), 107Google Scholar, original emphasis.

197 Morris, News from Nowhere, 108.

198 Ibid., 111.

199 Belfort Bax, Ernest, Reminiscences and Reflexions of a Mid and Late Victorian (London, 1918), 81.Google Scholar

200 Morris, News from Nowhere, 156.

201 Ibid., 155.

202 Morris, Collected Letters, 2: 218.

203 Morris, “Where Are We Now?”, 493.

204 David Leopold brings these points out well—that is, the political intent pervading the novel and the solace Morris derived from writing the book—in his introduction to the edition he edited. Leopold, “Introduction,” xi, xxix.

205 See Bevir, Making of British Socialism, 196–205.

206 Morris, “Fabian Essays,” 460.

207 Shaw, Fabian Tract, No. 41, 12.

208 For an effort to rectify the “Stalinist air-brushing” of Bax from Morris's life see Aldous, Roger, “‘Compulsory Baxination’: Morris and the Misogynist,” Journal of the William Morris Society 12/1 (1996), 35–40Google Scholar. For a measured response see Kinna, Ruth, “Time and Utopia: the gap between Morris and Bax,” Journal of William Morris Studies 18/4 (2010), 36–47Google Scholar.

209 Hobsbawm, Eric, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964), 234Google Scholar, for instance, imperiously dismissed Bax as a “cranky” author of “pioneer Marxist histories”; and Thompson similarly dealt summarily with Bax, spurning his “sudden fits of utter abstraction,” his “completely unpractical cast of mind,” and his “essential lack of proportion.” Reversing the true nature of the relationship, “His best work was done,” Thompson concluded, “when Morris was at his elbow to bring him down with a bang out of his naïve ruminations.” Thompson, William Morris, 373.

210 See Hulse, James, Revolutionists in London: A Study of Five Unorthodox Socialists (Oxford, 1970), 77–110Google Scholar. It was by no means resolved, however, by Hulse's at times not altogether convincing analysis.

211 Ibid., 82.