William Morris: the romance of home

The central concern of this paper is to defend the romanticism of William Morris’s socialism. It focuses on a particular debate about the relationship between his masterpiece, News From Nowhere, and one of his late prose romances, The Story of the Glittering Plain. I consider the argument, forcefully developed by Roderick Marshall, that Morris’s decision to publish the latter book signalled his rejection of the political ideal captured in News From Nowhere. This argument rests on the contention that Morris’s books treat the same, highly romantic image of socialism in radically different ways. News From Nowhere celebrates it as utopia.