REAPPRAISINGNEWS FROM NOWHERE: WILLIAM MORRIS, J. S. MILL ANDFABIAN ESSAYS

This article examinesNews from Nowhere, William Morris's late nineteenth-century utopian romance. It seeks, first, to establish John Stuart Mill as a crucial influence on the text. It argues that, inNews from Nowhere, Morris engaged extensively with Mill's mid-century essayOn Liberty. It shows how Morris dramatized Mill's “harm principle”; how he challenged the notion that custom must necessarily be antithetical to the “spirit of liberty”; and how he enacted Mill's stricture that “if opponents of all important truths do not exist,” then they must be invented. The article seeks, second, to contest the view that Morris was writing in indignant response to Edward Bellamy's portrait of utopia,Looking Backward. The article argues, instead, that it was rather the Fabians who incurred Morris's indignation. It attempts to demonstrate that ifNews from Nowherewas indeed an answer to another book, it was an answer toFabian Essays.