ABSTRACT

In William Morris’s News from Nowhere, Old Hammond describes England as ‘a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt’. His companion Guest, a time traveller from the nineteenth century who has already been entertained with a brief tour of twenty-second-century London, questions this description. Wildness is not, admittedly, a quality we might readily expect from a writer or his works in his final years. But there is also a danger in interpreting the last romances exclusively in these terms; to do so is to suggest that they offer closure rather than inspiration, that they espouse rest rather than action and that they have more to say about the end rather than the totality of life. The romance is by very nature a wild mode which refuses to be reined in.