Rating: 3 out of 5

Interesting tale. A bit preachy in places and the long conversation in the British Museum was long. Read because Robert Llewelyn mentioned it as an influence to his enjoyable “News from Gardenia”

Highlighted passages:

News from Nowhere, or, an Epoch of Rest : being some chapters from a utopian romance (William Morris)

As he sat in that vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity, a carriage of the underground railway,

“when a person can read, of course he reads what he likes to; and he can easily get someone to tell him what are the best books to read on such or such a subject, or to explain what he doesn’t understand in the books when he is reading them.”

it is mostly in periods of turmoil and strife and confusion that people care much about history;

love is not a very reasonable thing, and perversity and self-will are commoner than some of our moralist’s think.”

It is said that in the early days of our epoch there were a good many people who were hereditarily afflicted with a disease called Idleness, because they were the direct descendants of those who in the bad times used to force other people to work for them-the people, you know, who are called slave-holders or employers of labour in the history books.

it is a pretty thing, and since nobody need make such things unless they like, I don’t see why they shouldn’t make them, if they like. Of course, if carvers were scarce they would all be busy on the architecture, as you call it, and then these ‘toys’ (a good word) would not be made; but since there are plenty of people who can carve-in fact, almost everybody, and as work is somewhat scarce, or we are afraid it may be, folk do not discourage this kind of petty work.”

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.

there are so many, indeed by far the greater number amongst us, who would be unhappy if they were not engaged in actually making things, and things which turn out beautiful under their hands,-there

we are all bent on the same enterprise, making the most of our lives.

all work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant; or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit, as in the case with what you may call mechanical work; and lastly (and most of our work is of this kind) because there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work itself; it is done, that is, by artists.”

To this ‘cheapening of production’, as it was called, everything was sacrificed: the happiness of the workman at his work, nay, his most elementary comfort and bare health, his food, his clothes, his dwelling, his leisure, his amusement, his education-his life, in short-did not weigh a grain of sand in the balance against this dire necessity of ‘cheap production’ of things, a great part of which were not worth producing at all.

all their devices for cheapening labour simply resulted in increasing the burden of labour.

“how could they possibly attend to such trifles as the quality of the wares they sold? The best of them were of a lowish average, the worst were transparent make-shifts for the things asked for, which nobody would have put up with if they could have got anything else. It was a current jest of the time that the wares were made to sell and not to use;

“there was one class of goods which they did make thoroughly well, and that was the class of machines which were used for making things. These were usually quite perfect pieces of workmanship, admirably adapted to the end in view. So that it may be fairly said that the great achievement of the nineteenth century was the making of machines which were wonders of invention, skill, and patience, and which were used for the production of measureless quantities of worthless make-shifts.

At the end of the nineteenth century the cry arose for compelling the masters to employ their men a less number of hours in the day: this cry gathered volume quickly, and the masters had to yield to it. But it was, of course, clear that unless this meant a higher price for work per hour, it would be a mere nullity, and that the masters, unless forced, would reduce it to that. Therefore after a long struggle another law was passed fixing a minimum price for labour in the most important industries; which again had to be supplemented by a law fixing the maximum price on the chief wares then considered necessary for a workman’s life.” “You were getting perilously near to the late Roman poor-rates,” said I, smiling, “and the doling out of bread to the proletariat.”

many people at that time, and before it, used to think that machinery would entirely supersede handicraft; which certainly, on the face of it, seemed more than likely.

if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account