Between Utopia and Tradition: William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball

ABSTRACT

William Morris, author of the famous nineteenth-century utopian novel News from Nowhere, thought it both possible and desirable to develop a utopian vision that could be affirmed by many individuals. However, Morris also recognised that achieving such utopian unity was not easy. There is, at least potentially, something personal about utopian visions; they are shaped by idiosyncratic desires that cannot be shared. Through a reading of Morris’s A Dream of John Ball, I argue that Morris offers a temporal solution to the problem of utopian unity. The central characters in the text, medieval priest John Ball and a nineteenth-century socialist agitator, come to recognise their shared adherence to the same image of a new society. This is achieved through the mediation of tradition: Ball and the agitator overcome their differences by committing themselves to disappointed hopes elaborated in past struggles that have been handed down to the present. Morris’s articulation of utopia and tradition—the sense that visions of the future can be made shareable through reference to the past—offers the possibility of a transtemporal solidarity of utopians and the bringing together of the dreams of a plurality of individuals.

KEYWORDS:

• Solidarity
• tradition
• untimeliness
• utopia
• William Morris

Notes

1. Morris, News from Nowhere, 186.

2. Ibid., 3.

3. Ibid.

4. Allison, “Building a Bridge,” 53. Allison borrows the term Party of Utopia from Beaumont’s “Party of Utopia,” 163–66, and from Jameson’s Postmodernism, 180.

5. Morris, News from Nowhere, 211.

6. Not all Morris scholars would agree that his utopia has a prescriptive quality. Most famously, Miguel Abensour, partly via a reading of the opening of News from Nowhere, claims that Morris does not want his readers to adopt his utopia as their own. For Abensour, the task is to follow Morris in the activity of utopianising rather than adhering to the contents of his utopia. As such, the “story of utopia contains an invitation for readers to respectively formulate and communicate their own vision of communism.” Abensour, “William Morris,” 130. Abensour’s libertarian reading has been very influential, shaping the work of prominent scholars of Morris and utopia including E. P. Thompson and Ruth Levitas. See Thompson, William Morris, 785–94; and Levitas, Concept of Utopia, 140–41. However, this reading has recently been criticised. As indicated, Allison has taken Abensour to task for his inattention to those moments of News from Nowhere that imply that Morris was aiming to develop a vision that could be widely adopted. Allison, “Building a Bridge,” 47–51. More generally, Ruth Kinna argues against the idea that Morris’s utopian vision should not be taken literally and Owen Holland emphasises the propagandistic function of Morris’s utopianism, which is focused on convincing others of the correctness of his position. Kinna, “Relevance of Morris’s Utopia,” 742–44; and Holland, William Morris’s Utopianism, 29–44. Although I cannot undertake a full critique of Abensour here, my sympathies lie with scholars who emphasise the prescriptiveness of the Morrisian utopia. For an extended discussion of this issue, see Davidson, “My Utopia is Your Utopia.”

7. Morris, “Looking Backward,” 502.

8. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 515.

9. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia.

10. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 3–18.

11. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 182–89; Levitas, Utopia as Method, 123–26.

12. Abensour, “William Morris,” 144.

13. See Boos, “Alternative Victorian Futures”; Eisenman, “Communism in Furs”; Goode, “William Morris”; Holzman, “The Encouragement.” Exceptions to this historical reading include Yuri Cowan’s focus in “‘Paradyse Erthly’” on the text’s dream-vision form; Michelle Weinroth’s “Redesigning the Language,” a study of the relationship between A Dream of John Ball and socialist propaganda; and Ingrid Hanson’s account in “The Living Past” of sacrificial violence in A Dream of John Ball. These studies betoken a discontent with the narrowness of the historical reading but do not extensively address Morris’s utopianism.

14. Morris, A Dream of John Ball, 215. I refer to the narrator as the socialist agitator in this article for two reasons. First, near the beginning of the text, the narrator briefly recounts a dream in which he preaches socialism before a crowd. Second, the commonality between the narrator and Ball is partly dependent on their shared political activism. Referring to the narrator as the agitator highlights this. Hereafter page references to A Dream are cited in the text.

15. Benjamin, “The Concept of History,” 395.

16. Although my focus here is not directly on the contents of Morris’s utopia, the interdependence of equality and freedom in his thought is evident in Ball’s vision. See Levitas, “Beyond Bourgeois Right,” 609–14.

17. Levinas, Time and the Other, 76.

18. Hyndman and Morris, A Summary, 51.

19. Morris, Signs of Change, 53.

20. Levinas, Time and the Other, 77.

21. Elliott, Shape of Utopia, 22.

22. Morris, Lectures on Socialism, 258.

23. Landauer, Revolution, 112–13. Landauer’s work on utopianism has received renewed interest in recent years, particularly from realist political theorists. See Geuss, “The Metaphysical Need,” 155–58; and Thaler, “Hope Abjuring Hope,” 680–81.

24. I take my understanding of untimeliness here from Ernst Bloch’s work on non-contemporaneity. In simple terms, this concept names the sense that “multiple historical temporalities can co-exist within a common present” and, perhaps more importantly, contradict this present moment (Osborne, “Out of Sync,” 41). For Bloch, “[n]ot all people exist in the same Now” insofar that people carry with them hopes that were formed in past historical ages (Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 97). As Bloch suggests, “precisely because so much of the past has yet to come to an end, the latter also clatters through the early dawnings of newness” (ibid., 144).

25. See Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 93–96.

26. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 308.

27. Shils, “Tradition,” 127.

28. Morris, Collected Letters, 364.

29. Benjamin, “The Concept of History,” 395.

30. Freeman, Time Binds, 70.

31. Weeks, “The Vanishing Dialectic,” 750.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J500033/1].

Notes on contributors

Joe P. L. Davidson

Joe P. L. Davidson is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His thesis is focused on the relationship between temporality and utopia. It uses a range of utopian texts—including William Morris’s News from Nowhere, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber—to develop a critical social theoretical account of progress and historical time.