Bodily Beauty, Socialist Evolution, and William Morris’s News from Nowhere

Abstract

William Morris’s News from Nowhere describes a utopian future containing an improved and beautified British race, a detail in the text which is best explained by placing the novel within the context of the evolutionary scientific theory produced within Morris’ late-nineteenth-century socialist circle. Examination of scientific discussions in the socialist periodicals Commonweal and Justice shows evolution and “the survival of the fittest” to be importantly integrated into the group’s socialist theories and reveals their project of articulating a socialist evolutionary theory whose roots can be traced to Engels. These writers argued for a reinterpretation of Darwin’s findings and proposed a new theory of evolution that cohered with socialist political doctrine. Like many other socialist writers in Morris’ circles, his views on evolution seek to denaturalize capitalist competition and class struggle and replace these with socialist cooperation as the next natural stage of human evolution. While evolution is perhaps a minor aspect of Morris’ novel, examination of socialist evolutionary science offers key insight to an understanding of late-nineteenth-century British socialism. The project of socialist evolution in fact contains the fundamental contradiction in their overall socialist project: examination of the socialist evolutionary theory developed by writers in Morris’ circle reveals their evolutionary – not revolutionary – socialism.