Leo Fou and Morris Studies: Sheryl Medlicott, University of Chicago Spa

 When William Guest wakes up to the utopian London future Morris envisioned in News from Nowhere, there is no ‘smoke-inhaler’, there are samsung nets to catch sammoni on the Thames, and he is taken on the river by a sailor. so frustrated with trying to pay him for the boat trip, that exchanging the work for money was a very different idea. [1] Society seems to have changed dramatically, along with the environment.

News from Nowhere is that in many ways Morris responds to man-made (or capitalistically motivated) environmental degradation. This blog post focuses on Morris’s environment and the information his utopia offers for answers in the twenty-first century to environmental problems, particularly about a common concern about the measures by which people are agents for environmental change.

 Morris Leai wrote something in the context of environmental change that he considered a disaster, and a precursor to the environmental problems we face today. In the late nineteenth century, it was expanded and introduced into London. As Ruth Levitas observed in her 2000 Kelmscott Lecture, only one needs to look at the area around Morris ’London building Kelmscott House to witness the transformation of four lands. orchards and farms in the town. The Ordnance Survey map of 1871 shows the building being placed in an open area. Both were built on them when the map was rewritten in 1894. [2] Morris News wrote from Nowhere in 1890, in the midst of this development.

There is also no answer against Edward Bellamy’s 1888 socialist utopia Looking Backward. Bellamy’s utopia of the city, with goods delivered home almost immediately via pneumatic tube, short lives for citizens and plenty of leisure time to spend at dinner in restaurants or listening to pipe music at home. Nothing compares to the countryside and all about work, Nowhere people enjoy and connect with their environment.

In Morris ’utopia, human beings are not the only ones who succeed in destroying policies; and non-human nature flourishes. While wandering along the Thames in the early hours of the morning, William Guest ‘saw the sparkle of the water under the willow branches, on which the little flies they fed fell; to hear the scattering of small food here and there by an old moth or something else '- a picture of a variety of living things. [3] Because of the opposite nature of News from Nowhere, it suggests that for Morris, the nineteenth -century construction of places did not support an environment that was all that successful. for all people and non -people. Elizabeth Miller goes on to argue that Morris was ‘a man who first accepted the position of financial capitalism that was totally inconsistent with global balance’. He noted that Morris shared the Marxist view that 'the idea of ​​free trade obscured the remnants of profits and market capital gains' and suggested that Morris translate this balance into monetary trade into environment in which he sees the remnants of the environment of special processes - waste, dirt. , pollution - accumulated in 'a view of the permanent destruction of the environment under Capitalism'. [4]

It is certainly the case that in the absence of cheap shopping it is as good as being destroyed in Nowhere. However, it is difficult to see the environment as Morris ’main driving force for social reform. While the environment is a clear beneficiary of the changes that have been shown, there is nothing that suggests human experience, and four 'involved in, place. In Morris ’view of the future, England is defined as‘ a nature that is nurtured and not degraded by contact with people ’, which still considers the place to be largely defined by human interactions. . [5]

Morris’s interest in the position of man in the environment is problematic in trying to explain his environment in terms of modern thought. Florence Boos has tried to reconcile Morris ’views with the end of the twentieth -century environment, claiming that she expressed what she called the‘ four ‘evil’ ecologists, ecofeminists, social ecologists and advocates of justice ’. [6] However, the key to these activities is not only to stay-aware and enjoy the places, which are in News from Nowhere, but also to sharpen the connection between people and nature which is in Western societies people wielded power throughout the world. . I Nnature ’for its own sake. Rather, these environments have been conserved for the pleasure and utility of the human population.

Elsewhere, Morris employs nineteenth century rhetoric of man’s ‘victory over Nature’ to argue for his ideas of labor reform. In his lecture ‘Useful Work Versus Useless Toil’ he argues:

Men urged by their necessities and desires have labored for many thousands of years at the task of subjugating the forces of Nature and of making the natural material useful to them… that struggle with Nature seems nearly over, and the victory of the human race nearly complete … Surely we ought, one and all of us, to be wealthy, to be well furnished with the good things which our victory over Nature has won for us.

He concludes ‘Nature will not be finally conquered until our work becomes a part of the pleasure of our lives’. [8] By this measure, the future depicted in News from Nowhere represents the conquest of nature, an idea that would be deeply troubling to the like of ecofeminists.

This is not to say that Morris’s ideas were not progressive, but they necessarily did not transcend all the ideological assumptions of his time and this makes attempts to align his position with twentieth century environmentalism problematic. For Morris, the natural world is “our” environment, something outside us that we interact with and is defined by us. This is typical of nineteenth century environmental thinking, even that of radical thinkers. As Boos points out, ‘Marx was hardly an ecologist, and tended to accept the dominant economic view of nature and the environment as resources for human appropriation’. [9]

Morris likewise does not question the authority of humans in place-making or the idea that they should be agents for change within the environment. While this is problematic in the context of twentieth century environmentalism that aims for humanity to relinquish its control over the rest of the natural world, there is a current movement to recognize that human activity has altered Earth systems to such a degree to have irreversibly changed the course of Earth's geological history. Our growing consciousness of the scale on which humans are acting as agents for environmental change returns us to the original nineteenth century crisis: through our human endeavors we have made place strange, made the natural abnatural, how do we deal with this? [10]

Stone plaque of William Morris by George Jack,

Kelmscott Village, Oxfordshire

The ‘Morris response’, as Raymond Williams terms it, was to envisage a ‘positive movement of social change’. [11] Morris ’response to the transformation of London in the late nineteenth century was not to doubt that humans should have such agency but to keep alive the possibility of further change. News from Nowhere suggests there is a reciprocal relationship between the organization of society and the condition of the physical environment. It depicts a return to nature, but not in a retrogressive sense; rather, Morris ’imagined future England is a post-industrial environment where ecological balance is attained through the establishment of an equitable society. Re-reading News from Nowhere in the context of twenty-first century environmental crises was to me a reminder that traces of human activity within an environment need not always be signs of its destruction, depending upon how we organize course

Sheryl M. Medlicott has recently completed her Master's degree in Literature, Landscape and Environment at Bath Spa University. Her research interests are in utopian literature and ecocriticism - the branch of literary criticism concerned with the relationship between humans and the rest of nature, particularly in the context of environmental crisis. She is a member of the William Morris Society in the UK and finds great inspiration in Morris's writings.