Backward and Forward on Socialism

News from Nowhere, by William Morris, was published in 1880 and first translated into Chinese in 1981. By then, six translations of Edward Bellamy's novel on an ideal socialist society, Looking Backward, had exerted its influence on Chinese social thought. Yet that gap stands as a peculiar fact of history, given that Morris' socialist imagining was the only utopian fiction of the Victorian era so rooted in Marxist ideals.