This is an article accepted for the inaugural edition of The Victorian, an online peer-reviewed scholarly journal examining all aspects of the Victorian period, social, cultural, political and aesthetic. The article considers Morris’s preference for the romance form rather than the novel – the main fictional form of the period - in the context of Morris’s socialism and socialist ideals more generally. It aims to show how his interest in the literary romance can be regarded as an extension of his political praxis and how the romance and Morris’s socialist ideals are both interested in the possibility of transformation and the significance of hope as a radical experience
