News from Nowhere

Guest repeatedly notices the childlike qualities of the people he meets, even as he also experiences a sense of well-being that he associates with his own youth. He comes to believe that society has returned to a state of childhood, but for Dick, Clara, and Ellen, for example, their childhood never really ended because they do not strictly differentiate between childhood and adulthood. Children do not attend school; they simply learn skills and knowledge from books and elders in their own time as adults continue to do throughout life. Hammond acknowledges this by celebrating that “we have got back our childhood again,” and they refer to this idea that they have enough time to be imaginative as a “second childhood” (121).

Minor characters also exemplify childlike qualities. When Guest meets Boffin, he describes him as “happy as a child who just got a new toy” (26), and when he meets Clara, she grabs his hand “as an affectionate child would” (118). Later, in discussing their relationship with nature, he thinks to himself that “indeed these people [are] like children about such things” (244). For Guest, the only way to understand their enthusiasm for these topics is to see it as the emotion of a child.