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PARTISAN REVIEW
But there are other occasions of dubiety and interruption in
Nowhere.
One of these focuses upon the problems that attach to sexual love. Not
only does sexuality continue to be an untamed, irrational source of con–
flict, but "perversity and self-will" in connection with sexual relations
remain, remarks Old Hammond, "commoner than some of our moralists
think." Unhappy unions occur not uncommonly, and the only homicide in
the book takes place as the result of a sexual dispute. But Morris is too
intelligent a person and too much of a wri ter to claim that the irrational
and the problematic in Utopia would be reduced or remain confined to
the sphere of private life. Throughout
News from Nowhere,
there recurs a
kind of paradigmatic scene. It first appears very early on, when the narra–
tor and his young guide, Dick, are having breakfast on the first morning in
the new world. There enters a splendid-looking man, handsomely dressed
in golden cloth, whose name is Henry Johnson, but who calls himself, and
is called by everyone else, Boffin, after the immortal Golden Dustman,
Noddy Boffin, in Dickens's
Our Mutual Friend.
Boffin is one of Dickens's
late mythological characters, who has been a dustman, or garbage collec–
tor, all his life, has inheri ted a great fortune in a mountainous garbage
dump, and is the beneficiary of the modern economy of turning waste
(including excrement) into money, fortune, and gold. Johnson is himself a
garbage collector, who literalizes the gold in his dress, but who also, as his
name suggests, has a weakness; as Dick explains to the narrator,
Johnson/Boffin spends "his time in writing reactionary novels, and is very
proud of getting the local colour right ... and as he thinks you come from
some forgotten corner of the earth, where people are unhappy, and con–
sequently interesting to a story-teller, he thinks he might get some
information out of you."
The interesting, the unhappy, and the individualized all tend to go
together, as Tolstoy had already observed. The end of history does not pro–
duce, even in imagination and theory, an interesting world. As Clara, Dick's
formerly estranged wife, although no malcontent like Boffin, asks:
How is it that though we are so interested with our life for the most
part, yet when people take to writing poems or painting pictures, they
seldom deal with our modern life, or if they do, take good care to
make their poems or pictures unlike that life? Are we not good
enough to paint ourselves? How is it that we find the dreadful times
of the past so interesting to us-in pictures and poetry?
This note of querulous or plaintive doubt is raised at intervals through–
out the narrative. On the way up the Thames, the principal characters meet
