News from Nowhere

In News from Nowhere, a utopian vision set in the 21st century, William Morris paints a picture of the socialist society of which he dreamed but was never able to realize. The house illustrated is Kelmscott Manor, a 17th century farmhouse by the River Thames which Morris rented in a joint lease with the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1871.  It was a locus for artistic collaboration and intellectual discussion, and appears in News from Nowhere as a sort of earthly paradise inhabited by “happy and lovely folk who had cast away riches and attained to wealth”.