Excerpts from William Morris’s News from Nowhere, or an Epoch of Rest:  Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance.  1891.  Ed. Krishan Kumar.  Cambridge, Eng.:  Cambridge UP, 1995.

The following footnote of Krishan Kumar is a good summary of the Pre-Revolution and the Revolution of 1952, which resulted in the socialist's two year Civil War.

The ending of the novel is Guest's heartbreak of waking from his utopian dream.  As Kumar notes, the character of Julian West in Looking Backward thinks he awakens in the nightmare of the nineteenth century at the end of the novel, but awakens again in the year 2000, his utopia secure.  On the other hand, Guest does wake up, and therefore must continue his struggle in the present to achieve the utopia of his dream (209).

From the hyperessay “Castles in the Air: Utopian Fiction and Twain, 1871-1891” by Adam Watson. First published online in 2001. Author website: www.adamwatson.org.