A Dream of John Ball and A King’s Lesson was serialized in Commonweal in 1886-87 and published as a book by Reeves & Turner in 1888. The narrator — a Victorian man — falls asleep and wakes in Kent in June 1381, on the eve of the Peasants’ Revolt. He finds himself among the rebels and meets their spiritual leader, John Ball — the radical priest who preached that “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”
The dream framework allows Morris to stage a dialogue between medieval radicalism and Victorian socialism. Ball’s vision of freedom is immediate and concrete: the abolition of serfdom, the common ownership of land, the end of the lord’s power over the peasant’s body. The narrator knows — but cannot tell Ball — that the revolt will fail, that the freedoms Ball seeks will not be won for centuries, and that when they are won, they will be corrupted by capitalism into new forms of servitude.
The conversation between Ball and the narrator is Morris’s finest political writing: passionate, lucid, and genuinely moving in its portrayal of revolutionary hope against the knowledge of historical defeat. The Kelmscott Press edition (1892), with Edward Burne-Jones’s frontispiece, is among the most beautiful books the Press produced.
Collecting A Dream of John Ball
First book edition (Reeves & Turner, London, 1888): Blue cloth.
Kelmscott Press edition (1892): With Burne-Jones frontispiece.
Market values:
- Kelmscott Press edition, fine: $3,000–$8,000
- Reeves & Turner first, fine: $200–$500
- Reeves & Turner first, very good: $80–$200