Octavo. 305pp. Frontispiece illustration by C. M. Gere of Morris's Kelmscott Manor. The actual world of Morris's London is thus grafted into his fantastical tale of a Socialist future. In a departure from his characteristically medievalist stories, Morris here imagines a protagonist who, after attending a meeting of the Socialist League, falls asleep and wakes to find himself in a future England based not upon capitalist labor but common ownership and completely democratic systems of production. Morris's rejection of the techno-economics of an industrialized modernity is on full display: the imaginary society has no sprawling cities, no courts or prisons, no debt because there is no currency, and no immense factories. Instead, the human is reunited with nature and finds joy in work, a Morrisian ideal if ever there were one. The story first appeared in 1890 in the Socialist periodical, The Commonweal, as a rebuttal of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Although Bellamy's utopian novel likewise imagined a society free of private property and its associated social afflictions, it based that society upon a sympathy between man and machine, where the machine would supplant much of human labor, leaving more time for leisure. This copy with the bookplate of Byrdcliffe, the Morris-inspired artist's colony in upstate New York, with the initials of the colony's founder Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead. In the spirit of the colony, Whitehead and his wife, Jane, leant their books to anyone who wished. Their library contained several Kelmscott titles, many of which were dispersed after the death of the Whitehead's son; the present copy remained with the family because it was held in a private part of their house, "White Pines," and not in the main library. Bound in full limp vellum with green ties all intact. Mild soiling to covers, shallow crease along spine. Papers from page 64 to 93 show toning - this phenomenon is found in a range of other Kelmscott books and is likely a fault inherent to the paper. Near fine. (Peterson A12)