William Morris fished many rivers during his long, impassioned career as an angler, but none of them meant as much to him as the Thames – ‘our only English river’, as his utopia News from Nowhere describes it. This hybrid talk will evoke the variety and excitement of Morris’s angling ventures on the lower and upper Thames – his best catches, his best fishing spots, the friends he fished with, his piscatorial mishaps too – and will set his exploits in a wider context of Victorian angling. Fishing plays an important role in utopia too. ‘I dreamed last night that we were off up the river fishing’, says Bob the weaver in News from Nowhere. Hence the title of this talk; for Morris fishes both the actual and the utopian Thames.
This event is part of the Totally Thames Festival, an annual celebration of what is arguably London’s biggest natural asset; the River Thames.
Tony Pinkney was until recently Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Lancaster University. He spent his teenage years fishing at Southend-on-sea and his adult years researching, writing and publishing on William Morris.
