49 pages • 1 hour read
William MorrisNews from Nowhere
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1890A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 25-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary: “The Third Day on the Thames”
Walter, joining the boating party, continues to discuss the situation he described the evening prior. Rather than going into exile overseas, he believes it makes more sense for the man who committed the crime to live in a house isolated from their community. Waiting for the water to rise at a lock, Guest asks why they have not invented something faster or better with all the time on their hands. Dick replies that they are not in an age of invention.
They come across a group of girls who are bathing and urging them to come with them, but Dick declines. Guest notices that they make a lot of small talk about the present situation with genuine interest rather than discussing anything serious. In the old times, outside of one’s job, one knew nothing about the country, but these people know because they wanted to learn more. He notices more birds of all kinds and assumes that hunting must no longer be a pastime.
Chapter 26 Summary: “The Obstinate Refusers”
The girls laughingly banter with Dick, joking about a group of men engaged in a nearby building project rather than in the harvest. Dick tries to explain to a confused Guest that they’re laughing because some people have work that interests them instead of easy-hard work like haymaking. Easy-hard work is work that is hard on the muscles but does not challenge you otherwise.
At the worksite, they observe men and a few women reconstructing a building. A woman introduces them as the Obstinate Refusers. She interrupts one woman to talk to them, but she excuses herself to return to her work carving figures because she loves every minute of it. One man asks the workers and their visitors to toast to their project.
Chapter 27 Summary: “The Upper Waters”
They meet a man named Henry Morsom, who Guest describes as a country version of Hammond. Morsom explains that work used to be defined by whether one was choosing to do it, whereas now, all work is chosen and therefore enjoyable. There was a shift after the civil war from machinery to handiwork as people learned to enjoy working. Clara notes that people used to think of nature as something separate from themselves rather than part of them.
As they leave Morsom, Ellen arrives, and Guest joins her boat to help row. He is enamored with Ellen and muses that he has never met a woman like her with such a love of life. He still suspects that Ellen has taken a liking to Dick but tries to convince himself otherwise. As they chat, he accidentally reveals that he has been there many times, and since she thinks that he is a traveler from somewhere far away, she looks at him curiously. As they float down the Thames, Guest is shocked at how little has changed. They observe the scenery and sleep in a sparsely inhabited house.
Chapter 28 Summary: “The Little River”
Ellen insists that Guest join her in her boat again. After Ellen remarks how shocked she is that people of the past did not value the land or each other, Dick decides to be honest with her and tell her that the reason he understands that time so well is because he was a part of it. She admits that she followed him down the river because she knew that the truth was something interesting like that, even though it was a risk because she tends to have a serious effect on men. She says that later, she will have a proposal for him, and he says he will do anything for her.
They chat openly about their surroundings and his past, but she asks no other questions about where or when he comes from. She divulges that she will soon leave her current home to go with her father upriver.
Chapter 29 Summary: “A Resting-Place on the Upper Thames”
Ellen asks if rich men had houses similar to those of field laborers in his time, and Guest explains that the rich people’s houses reflected their morals and the fact that they exploited working men to build them, and therefore they were vulgar looking.
She wants to ask him more questions and explains that she believes it is important for people to know history to pass onto their children in case their society bends toward change.
Chapter 30 Summary: “The Journey’s End”
Ellen is amused by Guest’s pleasure in all the views. She asks how they took care of the river in the days “of which you have record,” being careful not to say “lived” (230). He says they took no care of it. Once the river had no commercial value, they sold it to a company that occasionally took its trees and resources just to have something to do. He exclaims at how lucky she is to have avoided this age, and she says it should last for both of them. She proposes that he should live with her and her father.
They continue to paddle and then reach their destination, where they are greeted by a stately woman. Guest looks around at the trees, hills, and sun, fearing that he will one day return to the time when haggard men and women lived there. He reflects on his happiness that people have finally “cast away riches and attained to wealth” (235).
Chapter 31 Summary: “An Old House Amongst New Folk”
Ellen implores Guest to come with her up to the house, and he, without thinking, leads the way. Ellen is excited about the beauty of nature and the cottage built by people in the country long ago. They sit in a room with faded tapestries, and Guest feels nearly unconscious. Ellen asks if he is comparing past and present yet again, and he laments that even now when all is well, he cannot lose sight of all that was wasted in the past. She says that before he goes back, he must see as much as possible. Dick retrieves him to go for a swim before dinner, and he fears that he will not see Ellen again.
Chapter 32 Summary: “The Feast’s Beginning—The End”
Dick talks about the changing seasons with such passion that Guest takes note of his deep pleasure in nature. Dick teases him that he put a curse on him to think about winter. Dick brings them to a church to eat dinner, where Guest finds the weather oppressive.
The church is filled with flowers, scythes, and beautiful people. However, when they enter, Guest’s companions no longer seem to see or recognize him. They look right through him. After a few minutes, he goes outside and back down the path and half-recognizes a haggard man limping down the path dressed in rags. He tips his hat to the visitor, and as Guest continues down the path, he sees a black cloud like one out of a nightmare; it causes him to lose consciousness.
He wakes up in his house in Hammersmith and considers whether he has been dreaming. He feels like it had been real, but all the while, he felt that he did not belong. He muses that if others could see what he saw, maybe then people could view it as a “vision rather than a dream” (248).
Chapters 25-32 Analysis
The closing chapters reinforce the themes of Pleasure Without Property and The Return to Nature After Industrialization. Morris is at pains to demonstrate, once again, that people living under socialism will still be willing to engage in meaningful physical labor, such as harvesting and construction. The reward of the village feast replaces any financial incentive. Once again, however, these pleasures come at a cost. The slow movement of water at the lock on the Thames is a sign that technological innovation has fallen by the wayside as part of the return to nature after industrialization. Dick’s instinctive resonance with the seasons still has the power to surprise Guest, who calls it strange. Dick responds, “Is it strange to sympathise with the year and its gains and losses?” (244). He personifies the year to emphasize his emotional connection to the seasons. During this conversation, Guest reflects that “these people [are] like children about such things” (244). Soon after this, despite his criticism of Dick’s connection to the seasons, Guest’s anxieties are reflected in the weather of the day, which he calls more “sultry and oppressive” than any other day (246).
When Ellen asks about the houses that used to be on the river, Guest says that “the ugliness and vulgarity of the rich men’s dwellings was a necessary reflection from the sordidness and bareness of life which they forced upon the poor people” (226). Engaging the theme of The Familiar Made Strange allows Morris to critique the human cost of luxury in his own time while disguising the critique as, essentially, a history lesson. Later, as Ellen describes a quaint house built by people of Morris’s time, she says that it seems “as if it had waited for these happy days, and held in it the gathered crumbs of happiness of the confused and turbulent past” (238). The comment casts the 19th century not as a time of progress but as a “confused” period where people were too invested in struggles to appreciate pleasure without property. The humble house represents Morris’s hope for humanity—that people can find enough hope and beauty in their time to hold out for a future wherein people live happy lives such as the ones he portrays in this novel.
Morsom further develops questions of labor and its continuation under socialism, reflecting just how deeply this problem concerned Morris. Morsom explains to Guest that in the time before freedom, rich people believed that the sharper minds should be free to study art, science, and history, while others should undertake the labor necessary for the functioning of life. Morsom uses a rhetorical question to emphasize how ridiculous it is that this idea was abandoned when all people had freedom, asking, “[I]t was strange, was it not…?” (210). Morsom goes on to explain the shift in their view of work. Work was something to avoid at all costs, until “under the guise of pleasure that was not supposed to be work, work that was pleasure began to push out the mechanical toil” (211). Morris uses repetition and anadiplosis to emphasize the changing definition of the word “work.” Without masters and machinery alienating the worker from their product and forcing workers to find pleasure elsewhere, work itself became pleasurable. The transition from industrial capitalism to sustainable labor underlines the best dimensions of pleasure without property and the return to nature after industrialization.
Morris ends the novel with a stark contrast and a depressing awakening for Guest in returning to his own time. Instead of attending a feast, he becomes an invisible man. Everything that was good turns bad: The weather becomes oppressive and dark, the people become ugly, and Guest becomes disoriented and blind. As he wanders out of the feast, he sees a hobbling, haggard man who starkly contrasts all of the beautiful, happy people in the church. The man represents his brutal fate in the world of capitalism to which he will return.
Nevertheless, when he wakes up, he admits that he knew all along he did not belong there. He imagines that Ellen’s final look communicates all that he already knew: that he must return to his time, but with the knowledge that after all the turmoil of his age, there is a time when the world will rest. The fact that he finds this truth in Ellen’s face represents her symbolic importance in his growth: Her love for life and her optimistic view of the world inspire him. She reflects what he feels and knows deep down, the fact that he must go, in a way he can understand. Her childlike perspective lets him enjoy and understand the world in a new way.
When he wakes up in his bed in Hammersmith and realizes that it was but a dream, he still feels gratitude that he witnessed it. Having experienced the familiar made strange, Guest is better poised to imagine a possible socialist future.
