ABSTRACT
One of the best things that has been said about William Morris’s utopia occurs in Michael Holzman’s 1984 essay on the text, where he argues that ‘The story of the making of News from Nowhere should also give us some material for reflection on the nature of the literary’. News from Nowhere is in many ways a memorably open-air text, with its early morning plunge into the Thames, its leisurely journey by horse and cart through a leafy, transformed London, and its long, strenuous, 120-mile journey by rowing-boat up the river from Hammersmith to Kelmscott. Almost all readers of News from Nowhere have agreed that we have an unusually vivid sense of its object-world, both human and natural. In fact, it is possible to see the romance paradigm as ‘bleeding backwards’ into the British Museum episodes in a more radical way.
