‘All Good Earthly Things are in Utopia Also’: Familiarity and Irony in the Better Worlds of Morris and Wells

Abstract

Nicholas Ruddick notices the ‘strict unity of place’ that characterises The Time Machine.¹ It seems an innocuous remark made in passing, but serves to draw our attention to the relatively static character of the time traveller’s journey: changes of scene are effected by the turn of a dial and notwithstanding a dive into the river and a museum visit, the most important exploration made in the year 802,701 is underground and back again rather than lateral. To describe this time-travelling tale as ‘static’ is a little mischievous, for it was the term Wells used to disparage William Morris’s society of Nowhere, of whose inhabitants the Eloi appear to be a parody.² The word is not chosen to antagonise Wells’s enthusiasts, but to introduce a discussion of the qualities in common of the two writers’ possible worlds, which tend to be downplayed within a literary-critical tradition that has presented them as ideological adversaries or on either side of a cultural transition which could be glossed as the passage from utopian to science fiction. Darko Suvin devotes a chapter of his hugely influential Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) to ‘Wells as the Turning Point of the SF Tradition’; Carl Freedman, despite his appreciation for Morris’s ‘political intellect’, describes News from Nowhere as ‘predominantly precritical and pre-science-fictional in monologic form’.³ My claim is that the familiar topography in News from Nowhere (1890) and A Modern Utopia (1905) provides the basis for ironic reflection by both authors on the qualities of the utopian imagination itself.