A Socialist History Society on-line meeting
17 June 2025 at 7pm
All welcome, but you will need to register in advance:
https://ucl.zoom.us/meeting/register/A_O6dDWaTbWttfpqmAM87A

Speaker Dr Phillippa Bennett

In William Morris’s News from Nowhere, Old Hammond describes England as ‘a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt’. His companion Guest, a time traveller from the nineteenth century who has already been entertained with a brief tour of twenty-second-century London, questions this description. Wildness is not, admittedly, a quality we might readily expect from a writer or his works in his final years. But there is also a danger in interpreting the last romances exclusively in these terms; to do so is to suggest that they offer closure rather than inspiration, that they espouse rest rather than action and that they have more to say about the end rather than the totality of life. The romance is by very nature a wild mode which refuses to be reined in.

Phillippa Bennett’s Research interests
The life and work of William Morris. Nineteenth-century literature, particularly medievalism, the development of the romance form, gothic writing and utopian writing; nineteenth-century Socialism and Communism and the development of revolutionary ideals; nineteenth-century aesthetics, including Pre-Raphaelitism, architecture and the Arts and Crafts movement; nineteenth-century explorations of Iceland and the revival of the literature of the Great Old North.

Phillippa has recently published a co-edited collection of essays on William Morris’s literary, aesthetic and political legacy in the twenty-first century and is also working on a book on William Morris’s Last Romances.