Health

Having grown up in rural Vermont, I have been enthralled with William Morris’s News from Nowhere since first reading it. Yet “rural” Vermont isn’t quite right. Like Morris’s Nowhere in the years immediately after the revolution, my hometown was marked by both recently collapsed industry and continued agriculture. Unlike, say, Middlemarch – the novel that first drew me to Victorian studies – with its picture of provincial life as a   mingling of manufacturing and farming, News from Nowhere spoke to my own past, one where agrarian and craft labor had begun to supersede industrial production. Above all, however, Nowhere’s folk mote – a utopian form of community self-government -- resonated with my experience of progressive politics within a small community where town halls still determine public policy.             More than an accessory of some pastoral idyll of New England, the town halls of Vermont share ideological roots with Morris’s folk motes. Both stem from a desire for what t