Art | October 07, 2026

How to Live: William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement 

I have always felt that your work comes from the sheer delight of making beautiful things—that no alien motive ever interests you. 

–Oscar Wilde in a letter to William Morris 

In William Morris’s speculative-futurist novel News from Nowhere, fifty-six-year-old William Guest, a thinly veiled version of Morris himself, falls asleep in a carriage back to the city after attending a testy Socialist League meeting. The year is 1890, but when he wakes up, it’s 2102, and he’s in a country that only vaguely resembles England. He learns that a revolution has transformed society into an egalitarian world—a pastoral paradise where men, women, and children live communally without need for marriage, money, or private property. Factory labor has been replaced by artisanal work such as printing and weaving. It is the kind of labor that’s filled with creative camaraderie and plenty of leisure. 

In Morris’s utopian world, institutions such as businesses, government, churches, and prisons no longer exist. But education thrives. Boys and girls, even adults, learn together in tent classrooms pitched in forests. Their education is immersive. School days are like summer camps, filled with swimming, hiking, rowing, fishing, and making crafts from natural materials. And, of course, everyone is beautiful and healthy, and the countryside is free of pollution and industrial squalor.  

News from Nowhere is an expression of Morris’s hope for improvements in the physical conditions of human life as he witnessed it in England in the mid-nineteenth century. When writing the novel, the question he kept asking was “How might we live?” The novel envisions an equable, fluid existence that Morris wished for everyone. In fact, his lifelong work as a visionary thinker, a craftsman, and the head of a famous decorating firm was always in service of creating a better, more sensible, and beautiful world for the ordinary person.