I should say in my defence that there are several features of News from Nowhere which combine to make it seem uninspiring reading. He is astonished to find that all signs of Victorian industrialism have been swept off the face of the earth, that he is among a people who wear fourteenth-century clothes, look uncannily young for their age, and see work as a delight rather than a compulsion. Socialism has advanced beyond anything Karl Marx ever described. English citizens no longer, for instance, understand what money is, have almost no sense of history, observe nothing that could be called a legal system, and continuously celebrate an essentially practical, non-intellectual life. The hero is then delivered back to 1890s London, ready to prophesy to others the possible future he has glimpsed.
Problems inevitably arise in reading a novel about a world in which there is virtually no conflict.
It is frustrating to witness Morris s prose slowly running aground on long stretches of eventlessness, buoyed up by a thesaurus-load of positive adjectives applied to almost everything his hero sees. It is embarrassing to have to pull him up for his incompleteness. He tells us, for instance, that all work which would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery . I feel frustration and embarrassment, of course, because I have a gut reaction of sympathy for Morris s political intentions and views. A literature exam is not held to allow us to express our gut reactions.