Identifying medieval custom as a historical and literary source for Nowhere’s social behaviour, Waithe contends that “informal laws and customs” such as medieval hospitality and gift giving provide “the key to understanding … Nowhere’s openness.” 5 Yet he also cautions that the unreflective character of such customariness may lead to politically exclusionary practices “to take News from Nowhere seriously as a blueprint” is therefore “to consider its social arrangements in a way Morris never intended.” 6 3 Matthew Beaumont sees the all-too-perfect changelessness of Nowherian life as an intentional flaw, a conscious sign from Morris that the unreflective “forgetfulness” of Nowhere may “clear the way for a return to some more alienated, fetishized condition of life.” 4 Of the handful of recent critics who read unreflective practices as positive features of Nowhere, Marcus Waithe’s work on the role of custom in Morris’s work is most suggestive. By transforming art into “unreflectingly lived … sensuous experience … without significant obstacle or friction,” Morris unwittingly neutralizes the “critical, conceptual, and oppositional powers” essential to art’s moral function.
2 Although she does not adopt the liberal humanist terms of Trilling’s argument, Linda Dowling similarly identifies unreflective life as a problem, particularly in its consequences for the social role of art. Arguing that the book’s “conception of man’s nature” is “informed by a calculated modesty,” Trilling criticizes Morris for rejecting the ideals of personal autonomy, desire, and innovation central to the humanist tradition. Years ago Lionel Trilling faulted Morris’s utopia for its endorsement of a life lived unreflectingly, and many contemporary critics have followed his lead in identifying this as Nowhere’s most dystopian feature.
The utopian inhabitants’ absorption in an apparently changeless present in which they spend day after golden day engaged in the repetition of pleasurable but commonplace tasks has led numerous readers to question the desirability of a happiness that rests on so mundane a foundation. He receives a striking reply: “We have been living for a hundred and fifty years … more or less in our present manner, and a tradition or habit of life has been growing on us and that habit has become a habit of acting on the whole for the best.… That is in short the foundation of our life and our happiness.” 1 By identifying habit rather than a set of laws or a system of government as the binding force of socialist community, Morris places at the centre of his political theory a form of repetitive, unreflective behaviour that was deeply unpopular in much nineteenth-century thought and continues to pose a problem for many present-day critics of News from Nowhere. In a pivotal moment in William Morris’s utopian romance News from Nowhere, William Guest asks Old Hammond to explain how the socialist society of the future is governed.
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