In the late nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy and William Morris presented millions of readers with a choice between their visions of socialist utopia. Bellamy, an obscure Massachusetts novelist, launched the first salvo in 1888. His sci-fi parable Looking Backward: 2000–1887 centers on a man who falls asleep for 113 years, awakening in 2000 to an America where private capital has been gradually and peacefully overthrown. All industry has been nationalized, and everyone gets an equal share of the profits; education is free, and the state guarantees jobs to workers, who can retire at forty-five. Looking Backward was a hit in an era of huge trusts and militant strikes. It sold half a million copies by 1891, more than any other nineteenth-century American book except Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and fans formed over 162 Bellamyite clubs to promote its ideas.

Bellamy fever soon reached the UK. There Looking Backward received a scathing review from the British socialist William Morris, who wrote that Bellamy’s state-led vision amounted to a “machine life” under “one great monopoly.” In News from Nowhere, Morris’s 1890 book-length rejoinder, the narrator also wakes up in a socialist utopia after a long nap. This time, however, a violent revolution has toppled capitalism, taking with it the government, prisons, the monetary system, and the institution of marriage. Morris was both a Marxist and a Romantic, and in his imagined future aesthetics are paramount; people work out of a sense of creative fulfillment in a picturesque landscape untroubled by Victorian England’s “dark satanic mills.” This decentralized pastoral socialism could hardly have been further from Bellamy’s ideal.

Bellamy was kinder to News from Nowhere than Morris had been to Looking Backward. His review called the book “well worth reading” but argued that “anarchistic” socialists are mistaken to equate the state with repression — only an ultraefficient government-controlled economy, he suggested, could create the common plenty required to make harsh policing obsolete. Judging by the books’ sales, Bellamy won the argument, but Morris continues to inspire today.