Summary
Chapter 7: Trafalgar Square
Dick, William, and the man from Piccadilly continue on their way and come to a more residential area of houses with beautiful gardens full of flowers and fruit trees. As William takes in this view, he has the strange sensation of seeing this same place but with only tall, ugly houses and buildings. He then recognizes the place as Trafalgar Square. The men discuss the history of the place, with William becoming quite impassioned and nearly revealing his time travel once again. William defends the 19th century by comparing it the medieval period, but Dick counters that people at least acted openly according to their conscience back then. This takes the men into a deep discussion of prisons, which Dick informs William no longer exist in England.
Since William is clearly uncomfortable during Dick’s diatribe, they turn the conversation to architecture once again. They also turn their conversation back to William’s pipe, with more misunderstandings due to William seeming to not like the pipe for being so pretty and calling it “too valuable” (44), a word which Dick does not understand. Driving past a small factory, Dick explains the general means of production to William, saying that very little is done with machinery and factory buildings are thus used as “banded workshops to do hand-work in which working together is necessary or convenient” (45).
The carriage comes to a part of the road being repaired by a group of men. Though William seems to think he will finally see people unhappy with the job they have to do, they instead find the men to be laughing and enjoying their labor.
Chapter 8: An Old Friend
The carriage arrives in Long Acre and the man from Piccadilly chooses to get out here, wishing the other men well. Dick tells William that they will soon be at the home of his kinsman. After a little more travel, the men reach the home of Dick’s great-great-grandfather, the old British Museum. Dick hints that there is someone he will want to visit with while William speaks with his kinsman.
Dick drives the carriage into a stable and then the men walk up to the building. Dick remarks on the ugliness of the old architecture once again, but says that there is worth in seeing what one’s ancestors found beautiful. With Dick seeming hesitant for some reason, the men head inside.
Chapter 9: Concerning Love
Dick and William go upstairs in the museum. An old man welcomes them and tells Dick that Clara is here, which makes Dick flustered. The old man welcomes William and asks where he is from, accepting William’s answer that he used to live in England but has spent a while abroad. Clara enters and the old man invites them to go spend time in another part of the house together, rather than listen to William and himself talk about history.
Dick and Clara leave and the old man and William start their conversation. William asks the old man to talk to him as if he is “a being from another planet” (53). However, before they launch into history, William asks the old man to fill him in about the relationship between Dick and Clara. The old man tells him that Dick and Clara were happily in a relationship for two years; Dick left Clara for another woman who he stayed with for only a year, and now Dick seems sad to have let Clara go. He tells William that they have two children together, who have been staying with one of his daughters. William remarks that he must have wanted to keep them out of divorce court, but the old man scoffs at this, reminding William that divorce court is another institution that has been abolished now that all goods are collective. The old man is clear, however, that this does not mean that all relationships are now free of troubles and foolishness.
William inquires about the position of women in 21st-century English society. The old man tells him that specific focus on the emancipation of women is unnecessary since everyone can now do what they like for work and pleasure. William notes that he has seen women waiting on men, such as at the Guest House, but Old Hammond counters that William may simply not respect housekeeping as much as people do now. They also discuss the burden of motherhood, which some women in the 19th century were trying to emancipate themselves from, but again the old man argues back that “all the ARTIFICIAL burdens of motherhood are now done away with” (59), and even that women are more suited to be good mothers in this environment. The chapter ends with the men briefly discussing beauty, specifically how beautiful people have become in this socialist society, since everyone has freedom and children are born only from happy, healthy relationships.
Chapter 10: Questions and Answers
The old man invites William to ask another question, and William brings up education. The old man expands upon what Dick began in Chapter 5, telling William about children choosing what they learn about and when, in contrast to students being forced to study subjects by rote at certain times. He uses William as an example that this system did not work anyway, asking William how much mathematics he remembers now that he is an adult, after being forced through years of mathematics classes.
Next, William asks about households; that is, whether people live in family units or communally. The old man responds that people are able to move around as they please, including asking to live with anyone who agrees to live with them, but that many people like to live in the same place and with the same people for a while at a time.
William asks what has become of cities, and Old Hammond replies that they are “more like ancient Babylon now than the ‘modern Babylon’ of the nineteenth century” (63). The old man tells William that they have a holiday called "The Clearing of Misery," during which there is a feast, dancing, and singing on the site of some of the old city slums. William asks specifically what lies east of Bloomsbury, and the old man tells him in detail about the way there is still a more dense living population in London due to tradition and that down by the Thames there are houses that people often live in for short stretches of time. The old man tells William about the other once-large cities, and then about the smaller cities nearby, which have mostly turned into small towns with lots of open country between them. After a brief tangent in which the old man scoffs at Oxford, Cambridge, and the pretensions of educated people of the past, William gets him on the subject of villages. The old man explains how people quickly desired to return to the land with the transition to socialism and, after some initial struggle, people relearned how to live off of the land and divisions between town and village people lessened. The old man describes the view of England now as a garden that everyone is helping to cultivate. William inquires as to the population of England now, and the old man says that he believes it has not changed but has simply spread out. He encourages William to explore the more rural parts of England this summer.
Chapter 11: Concerning Government
William now asks about government. The old man replies, “our present parliament would be hard to house in one place, because the whole people is our parliament” (72). In response to William’s questions as to how things are run if there is no centralized government, Old Hammond fires back a series of questions about how the Parliament actually used to function, suggesting that it was only ever constructed to help the upper classes. Lawsuits were generally costly and unfair, especially for the poor. The conclusion of the dialogue is “the government really existed for the destruction of wealth” (75).
Chapter 12: Concerning the Arrangement of Life
William continues to press Old Hammond about the viability of this system. Old Hammond intuits that William is skeptical of how this system of government prevents crime. However, the old man persuades him that people genuinely commit less crime, though he does admit that there are certainly still instances of violence, especially caused by romantic issues. He posits that not having a system of laws and jails means that people are more likely to feel bad and change their ways when they commit what would once have been considered a crime. William suggests that they see a criminal act as a “spasmodic disease” (80) and the old man agrees with this assessment.
Analysis
Trafalgar Square is first referenced in this section of the story, and comes back later when Old Hammond tells William more about the socialist revolution that resulted in the society William witnesses in 21st-century England. Trafalgar Square is a public area in Central London. Its name comes from the Battle of Trafalgar, a British victory that occurred in 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars. The square has been used for political demonstrations multiple times in England's history, especially Bloody Sunday in 1887. Morris gives his opinion on Bloody Sunday through Dick's perceptions of the event, writing, "a fight which took place here in or about the year 1887 (I am bad at dates). Some people, says this story, were going to hold a ward-mote here, or some such thing, and the Government of London, or the Council, or the Commission, or what not other barbarous halfhatched body of fools, fell upon these citizens (as they were then called) with the armed hand. That seems too ridiculous to be true" (41).
In Morris's socialist utopia, children are left much more to their own devices than in 19th-century England. This is explicitly told to William, and shown to him when he sees children camping together in the woods and working in shops without adult supervision. However, this is also shown through children who are notably not seen in the novel, the two children of Dick and Clara. Old Hammond refers to them briefly, but Dick and Clara never mention them to William themselves, and are never shown caring for the children. This fact underscores how childhood is both longer and shorter in a socialist society; children are not babied for such a long time, but people are also allowed more of the freedom and pleasure of childhood in their adult lives.
Morris would likely believed his novel to be feminist. After all, the author has Old Hammond explicitly state that gender inequality is a thing of the past in 21st-century England since free choice for all means that women can have any job they want to and design their family structures to be less prohibitive of their interests. However, Morris still depicts women mostly in subservient roles like serving food and cleaning, and spends considerable time talking about women's beauty, health, and youthfulness. Furthermore, he uses the conversation between Old Hammond and William to critique the ideology of feminists in the 19th century who proposed gender equality through sterilization, calling it a "strange piece of baseless folly" (59). Therefore, modern feminists would likely see Morris's feminism as overly simplistic, if not anti-feminist.
A notable stylistic shift occurs in Chapter 11 when the narrator begins to transcribe the dialogue like that in a play, using "(I)" (73) for William Guest and "(H)" (73) for Old Hammond. This lasts only until the end of Chapter 11, with the text returning to the regular style of the novel from the beginning of Chapter 12. Using this style briefly calls attention to the importance of the content of William and Hammond's dialogue, rather than the other elements present such as imagery and narrative tone.
The rise of psychology in the late 19th century is clear from the socialist ideology on criminal justice introduced in Chapter 12. As Morris describes through Old Hammond, in a socialist society, there would be no court, jail, or capital punishment; people who committed crimes (the number of which would be relatively fewer thanks to people not having material possessions to fight over) would feel more regret and experience change because of not being punished by a formal criminal justice system. This was clearly an element of socialism that Morris believed in deeply and knew that people would be skeptical of, because he returns to this theme at least twice more in later chapters.
