The narrative begins in late nineteenth-century London, where a group of socialists debate the aftermath of a revolution. One of them, exhausted by the squalor and intellectual weariness of industrial capitalism, falls asleep and wakes up in a radically transformed England of the twenty-first century. The grimy, smoke-choked metropolis has vanished, replaced by a lush garden city where the Thames runs clear and ancient monuments stand amidst smiling fields and timber houses. The protagonist encounters a people who live without laws, money, private property, or centralized government, having discarded the state machinery once used by the rich to oppress the poor.
Instead of competing for survival, individuals engage in pleasurable, creative labor, making things for use rather than for a blind world-market. Through dialogues with an elderly archivist, the traveller learns how the old commercial system collapsed after bitter class struggles, strikes, and a bloody state massacre that finally galvanized the working masses to overthrow their masters. Marriage and gender relations have been utterly revolutionized: love is free from economic calculation, women are fully emancipated and honoured as mothers and companions, and the coercive family unit has dissolved into voluntary association.
The educational system is similarly transformed, as children learn naturally from their surroundings rather than enduring forced schooling. As the protagonist travels up the river towards Oxfordshire, participating in the hay-harvest, he experiences a society of unanxious happiness and aesthetic beauty. Yet, a persistent undercurrent reminds him that he belongs to another world, creating a poignant tension between the idyllic present and his uncertain reality.
