Page 27 - History 2020

shop still sells his favourite brand of tobacco, though the pipes on sale are not mass-

produced clay but finely hand-carved and studded with jewels. The child who politely
serves him refuses to take any payment, indeed she doesn’t what his Victorian coins
are for.

Other passages are intentionally comic. Through Guest, he notes how naïve some of
his characters sound. He also satirises aspects of Victorian society, such as Guest’s
unflattering recollections of its idle, unattractive upper-class women, in contrast to
the women of the future who were unfailingly attractive in their simple dresses (wool

and silk), while all have toned and fit bodies from doing their fair share of manual
work.

Morris represents an important and distinctly British strand in socialist thought; one
that seeks not to share for fairly the wealth of the industrial revolution, but to
question the its basic assumptions about work, wealth and human nature. News from
Nowhere deserves its place as one of the most important pieces of modern utopian

literature. And if the significant thing is what it tells us about Morris’ temperament,
then both deserve our respect.

Other gardens
In News from Nowhere, Hammond tells Guest that the Revolution ended the era of
“pillage” by “huge and foul workshops” so that “It is now a garden, where nothing is
wasted and nothing is spoiled, all neat and trim and pretty.” However, the cultural
strand of Victorian rural escapism did not begin with Morris. After the Great

Exhibition, more and more writers – poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson, novelists like
Thomas Hardy, and non-fiction writers like Richard Jeffries presented the countryside
as offering what Wiener calls a “psychic balance-wheel” to the change and instability
of industrial and urban life. The rural vision was very English and very southern.
Relatively few were able to actually escape there, One was Kipling, who set himself
up in rural Sussex as a country gentleman and refused to ever have the phone

installed. Obviously, a literal mass exodus from the cities was not practicable; it was,
as Wiener eloquently puts it, “an exodus of sentiment”, not to the actual countryside,
but to “the countryside of the mind.”

Perhaps the most famous rural idyll of Victorian times was Hardy’s Wessex. Fictional
of course, but fans of his early novels so loved his descriptions of rural life that Hardy
was induced by his publishers to include geographical notes to guide readers to the
real places on which he had based his stories. Hardy himself was aware of the
harsher realities of rural poverty and how progress and the industrial revolution

brought benefits as well as threats to rural life. But public demand for the rural idyll