1. Communism and the money economy - Did political economists read this book? WHAT DID J.S. MILL SAY ABOUT THIS BOOK? How about Keynes? Look up contemporary reviews -- what was the standard position on the "abolition of money" question?
2. Morris on the River Thames - old-school environmentalism, with a couple of key jibes at the Thames Conservatory Association. Might be interesting to look at re: Woolf, Conrad, and others (specifically - portraiture of the river -- the lifeblood of England, the spigot of industry, etc) --> also re: Morris' pastoralism, especially in the second half of the book -- what happens, for instance, when you go upriver.
3. (Morris on sustainability) -- "There are matters which I should have thought easy for her [Science]; say for example teaching Manchester how to consume its own smoke, or Leeds how to get rid of its superfluous black dye without turning it into the river, which would be as much worth [science's] attention as the production of the heaviest of black silks, or the biggest of useless guns" (252)
4. Dress and architecture? What are the ladies wearing?
Morris and Walter Gropius --> "As to their dress, which of course I took note of, I should say they were decently veiled with drapery, not upholstered like arm-chairs, as most women of our time are. In short, their dress was somewhat between that of the ancient classical costume and the simpler forms of the fourteenth century garments, though it was clearly not an imitation of either: the materials were light and gay to suit the season (53)
Mostly, though, I just want to look at these weird literary references -- "I'm curious about where you come from for good reasons, literary reasons." (Dick, who also can't identify a book to save his life) --> why these attacks on novelists, specifically? Is there something I'm missing here? --> specifically, thinking about why Morris would write a utopian novella, rather than a bit of muckraking journalism (more in the realist vein)
Much learning is spoiling you. You remind me of the radical cobblers in the silly old novels, who, according to the authors, were prepared to trample down all good manners in the pursuit of utilitarian knowledge" --> why novels over tracts? (Morris on Dickens? On Disraeli? Who's he talking about here?) --> linking realism explicitly to reform fiction?
Why is it that we find the dreadful times of the past so interesting in pictures and poetry? --> It is true that in the 19th c., when there was so little art and so much talka bout it, there was a theory that art and imaginative literature ought to deal with contemporary life; but they never did so; for, if there was any pretence of it, the author always took care (as Clara hinted now) to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealize, and in some way or another make it strange, so that, for all the verisimilitude there was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the Pharaohs.
(Dick) Well surely it is but natural to like these things strange; just as when we were children, as I said just now, we used to pretend to be so-and-so in such-and-such a place. That's what these pictures and poems do; and why shouldn't they?
(Hammond) Thou hast hit it, Dick. It is the childlike part of us that produces work of the imagination. When we are children time passes so slow with us that we seem to have time for everything.(131).
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