Utopian Bloomsbury: The Grounds for Social Dreaming in William Morris’ News from Nowhere

Abstract

In the 1880s, William Morris began to incorporate a concern for space and the built environment into a thoroughly Marxist historical materialism. His articles and lectures in this period touched increasingly on spatial politics, culminating in his News from Nowhere, or an Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance (1890), which imagined a transformed post-revolutionary London. Morris can in this respect be seen as prototypical of the spatial turn within Marxism a century later, prefiguring the politicized urban studies flourishing now in the twenty-first century. Morris’ implicit recognition in his utopian romance of place as socially produced gestures beyond the late nineteenth-century discourse on urban space to a later model of thinking, and his rendering in News of the utopian everyday is proto-Lefebvrian, but his project was also of its own time and place.¹ The catalysers of the new critical geography of today had their own material contexts: Henri Lefebvre’s utopianism sprung from Paris 1968, while David Harvey traces one source of inspiration back to the alienating spatial segregation he witnessed in Baltimore when he was based in the Geography department of Johns Hopkins University in the 1970s (see Harvey, 2000; Merrifield, 2006). The context for Morris’ spatial thinking was London in the latter part of the nineteenth century.