In 1890, William Morris, the English artist, designer and social activist published News from Nowhere (or an Epoch of Rest), a utopian work of fiction imagining a world with no money, no class system, no marriage, no big cities and a society in which the beauty of nature is not only prized but also embodied in its architecture.
Whilst the book is set in London, glancing down that list of attributes one can’t help but wonder if Morris secretly intended it to be set in Iceland. Blazing a trail for the legions of tourists who have since fled to the same wilderness by hopping on a low-budget flight, Morris visited twice in 1871 and 1873, taking a train from St Pancras to Newcastle, then a ship from Berwick in Scotland, sailing past the Faroes and arriving into Reykjavík some eight days later. Once on the island, he travelled, largely on horseback, throughout Vesturland (the Western Region, as depicted in this map), describing the mountains he saw as “looking as though they had been built and half-ruined”.
He kept a journal of his first trip, which, perhaps because it coincided with an unhappy period in his home life (his wife Jane’s increasingly close relationship with the pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti), does not contain any visionary theory, but is rather a straight travel diary. In it he details many experiences familiar to the contemporary tourist including his frustrations with his companions, Icelandic interpreter Eirikr Magnusson (“He was so late that I began to get fidgety”) and his good friend, Charles Faulkner (“To say the truth, Faulkner has no genius for cookery”). A must-read for who might also venture to the place he described as the “most romantic of all deserts”. I (fs)
In 1890, William Morris, the English artist, designer and social activist published News from Nowhere (or an Epoch of Rest), a utopian work of fiction imagining a world with no money, no class system, no marriage, no big cities and a society in which the beauty of nature is not only prized but also embodied in its architecture. Whilst the book is set in London, glancing down that list of attributes one can’t help but wonder if Morris secretly intended it to be set in Iceland...
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