Tag: Socialism

The Socialist Utopia as Child’s Play: The Games of H. G. Wells and E. Nesbit

Other, Teaching the Victorians

The first edition of H. G. Wells’s 1911 publication Floor Games, a manual for a worldbuilding game for children, opens with a declaration: [On a floor] may be made an infinitude of imaginative games, not only keeping boys and girls happy for days together, but building up a framework of spacious and inspiring ideas in them for after life. The British Empire will gain new strength from nursery floors.[1] The concept that child’s play could alter the child’s future —

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The Past is Red: Some New Departures in the Historiography of Victorian Socialism

Book Reviews

The Making of British Socialism, by Mark Bevir, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011, xiii + 350 pages, £24.95 (hardback), ISBN 0-691-15083-3 Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green, edited by John Rignall and H. Gustav Klaus in association with Valentine Cunningham, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, xi + 267, £60 (hardback), ISBN 1-4094-1822-1 William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914, by Anna Vaninskaya, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, viii

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Will Abberley, ‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris

Other

In 1885 William Morris wrote that poetry had become near-impossible in the modern age, since ‘language is utterly degraded in our daily lives, and poets have to make a new tongue each for himself: before he can even begin his story he must elevate his means of expression from the daily jabber to which centuries of degradation have reduced it’ (IIB 483). Abberley explores the intellectual influences that shaped Morris’s belief in such linguistic degradation, and how his late fiction

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