News from Nowhere by William Morris
When Sir Thomas More coined the word “utopia” for his 1516 book of the same name to represent a perfect idea of Plato’s Republic, where there are few laws, no wars and people live in perfect harmony and peace, what kind of place was this really? It is, supposedly, a place where evil no longer dwells, a place where misery and poverty are a thing of the past. Some 19th century Victorians caught hold of this idea and ascribed it to Karl Marx’s blueprint of a working socialist nation. Indeed, William Morris, a socialist, writer and Pre-Raphaelite, created his own utopia in the novel New from Nowhere (1890); except there is a noticeable lack of diversity. To paraphrase the thoughts of Buggin’ Out from Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing:
“How come ain’t no black people in Morris’s utopia?”
Morris suggests the one time existence of such people in the novel which laments the 19th century as one of the last eras run amuck with capitalism and rich people infected with the disease of “Idleness” as a result of forcing others to work for them. And, while he often hints at the binaries of “slaves” and “slave owners”, other than speaking of them in the socialist terms of “workers” and the “ruling class,” he never addresses who these workers are, what they look or sound like, or what their plight is. He never discusses them on any personal level. And, even when the old man Hammond begins to discuss imperialism and the antics of Henry Morton Stanley, he is interrupted by the narrator, much to his chagrin, and to mine.
It’s like when the 1992 movie Boomerang, starring Eddie Murphy, came out. Sure we loved seeing beautiful black folks on the big screen; Eddie, Halle Berry, Lela Rochon, Grace Jones, Geoffrey Holder, etc. But, there was also a noticeable lack of white people—in New York! Come on, now. Even black folks knew that wasn’t right.
So, was the utopia that Victorians wrote about a world where everybody was British—and white? Is it as H.G. Wells suggests in A Modern Utopia (1905) that “The depopulation of the Congo Free State by the Belgians, the horrible massacres of Chinese by European soldiery during the Pekin expedition” …simply…”a painful but necessary part of the civilising process of the world”? I certainly hope not. If so, not only would Morris be disappointed in the fact that London is yet a thriving capitalist society, but he’d likely be disoriented by the level of its diversity as well.
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I’m thinking of Andre Gide’s Travels in the Congo after this interesting reading.
Hmm, please don’t tell me there are no black people in his Congo? It be interesting to read Gide to compare it to King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild.