Twentieth-Century Critical Readings of Morris’s Utopianism

Abstract

This chapter examines dominant trends in the existing critical studies of Morris’s utopianism, in order to establish the distinctive basis of this book’s approach. E.P. Thompson memorably identified Morris’s utopianism with a heuristic ‘education of desire’, drawing on the work of the French political theorist Miguel Abensour. Thompson thereby characterised the utopian function of Morris’s text as a form of estrangement which might, in turn, lead readers to interrogate the habitual values, or ‘commonsense’, of Victorian society. This chapter brings two questions to Thompson’s perspective. First, is the utopian function of estrangement historically invariable? Second, does Thompson overlook the fact that certain communities of fin-de-siècle readers were already estranged from the ‘commonsense’ of Victorian society. If one acknowledges that Morris’s utopianism addressed these readers, then it becomes necessary to qualify critical accounts of the function of Morris’s utopianism, which expounded political arguments against Morris’s ideological rivals, amongst whom we might number Fabian gradualists, back-to-the-land anarchists, free trade internationalists of the Manchester School, as well as middle-class feminists of the first wave.