Middle and late nineteenth-century utopianism LIBERALISM, CONSERVATISM AND UTOPIANISM

Middle and late nineteenth-century utopianism LIBERALISM, CONSERVATISM AND UTOPIANISM

Though Adam Smith had acknowledged the unlikelihood of a universal system of ‘natural liberty’ or freedom of trade ever being achieved, which cast his own project in a utopian light, most nineteenth-century liberals saw themselves as explicitly antiutopian, in the sense of relying on a system of private property to promote wealth, and upon gradual social and political reforms to create a liberal and more democratic society. One exception, however, was JOHN STUART MILL, who in his Principles of Political Economy (1848) suggested that a ‘stationary state’ might one day be reached in which the growth of population and accumulation of capital and expansion of production and consumption might be relinquished in favour of an emphasis on the qualitative, cultural, moral and intellectual improvement of social life. Some forms of late nineteenth-century liberalism, notably New Liberalism in Britain, assumed a much more collectivist approach to social issues, and writers like JOHN HOBSON accordingly moved much closer to contemporary socialism. Liberal and radical reformers also occasionally adopted the utopian genre to popularize their schemes: Henry Forest’s A Dream of Reform (1848), for instance, imagines a reduction of the working day and reform of the factory system, the election of the monarch and construction of healthy, well-organized cities, without being socialist. Conservatives occasionally also adopt the genre, though mostly satirically, as does BENJAMIN DISRAELI in The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1827), an attack on Whiggism and utilitarianism. Some conservative (but also some radical) thought also assumes a utopian direction in its portrayal of an idealized past, notably in the medievalism, in Britain, of ROBERT SOUTHEY, THOMAS CARLYLE and JOHN RUSKIN, and the ideal of an essentially rural, pre-commercial ‘Merrie England’. Pastoral themes also predominate in the thought of RALPH WALDO EMERSON, in HENRY DAVID THOREAU’s Walden (1845), and in the Fourierist enthusiasms of the New England Transcendentalists in the USA, while, at the popular level, and especially for would-be emigrants, the USA itself figures as a crucial symbol of utopia throughout the period, continuing an ideal evident from the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest.

Entries A-Z 689 UTOPIAN FICTION

Between 1870 and 1900 there was a sudden and widespread surge of interest in the utopian genre, the result both of substantial economic and social upheaval, and of the intellectual impact of Darwinism and socialism. Literary utopianism in the mid- and late nineteenth century assumed a wide variety of forms. Besides the leading works inspired by the socialist movements in the USA, Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere, the advent of Darwinism was a crucial source of utopian inspiration from the 1870s onwards. Amongst the chief fictional utopias published in English in this period is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872), which uses the device of a discovery of an unknown society to explore a mélange of ideas, including hostility to technology, Darwinian approaches to the regulation of population and advancement of science, to which Butler was largely hostile, cast principally in dystopian form, and as a satire of Victorian manners. This was followed by a sequel, Erewhon Revisited (1901), which focuses on the degeneration of religious belief into superstition. In France, works like Samuel Berthoud’s L’Homme depuis Cinq Mille Ans (1865) popularized scientific optimism, while socialist utopias included Alain Le Drimeur’s La Cité future (1890) and Emile Zola’s Travail (1901).

One of the most popular works published in the period was Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), which explores a society of highly evolved subterranean beings who possess a great natural power called ‘vril’. Their society is largely decentralized and family-centred. More a satire on evolutionary thinking, the novel is not meant to function as a positive utopian ideal suitable for imitation, but like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is chiefly satirical. Many lesser-known late nineteenth-century texts do provide such an image, however. Amongst these can be mentioned W.H.Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887), which applauds the virtues of simplicity; Etymonia (1875), which describes a communal society in which labour and exchange are strictly regulated; In the Future: A Sketch in Ten Chapters (1875), which accounts for the abolition of poverty; E.J.Davis’s Pyrna: A Commune; or, Under the Ice (1875), which discusses a community founded on the principle of brotherly love and sexual equality where ‘unhealthy’ procreation has been eliminated; and Joseph Carne-Ross’s Quintura. Its Singular People and Remarkable Customs (1886), another egalitarian utopia. From the 1880s onwards anti-utopian satires also become increasingly common; those of note include James Ingleton. The History of

a Social State A.D. 2000 (1893), in which individualism has first been abolished by a collectivist revolution, then restored under a monarchy. Two themes thus become more prominent in literary utopias from 1880–1900: the growing role of science and technology, and its uses both in prolonging life, eliminating waste and disease, and, by eugenic techniques, improving the human race; and the emergence of revolutionary socialism as a significant challenge to the established order, which popularized utopian ideas on a much wider scale than previously.

The most prolific and influential author of utopian works of the period was H.G.WELLS (1866–1946), who produced in quick succession The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), When the Sleeper Awakes (1899) and The First Men in the Moon (1901). Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life (1902) was a non-fictional excursus into future forecasting in which Wells predicted the further growth of the middle classes, a decline in family size, the extension of ‘machine’ politics in democratic

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 690

regimes, the gradual emergence of a world state and the use of eugenic ideals to discriminate against the ‘people of the abyss’. The theme that the purpose of life was the deliberate evolutionary creation of higher types, possessed of a passion for order and efficiency, is continued in Wells’s most famous, and also last, fictionalized model society, A Modern Utopia (1905). This describes a collectivist society that provides universal welfare, though population expansion is strictly regulated. Political dominance, and the task of social improvement, are entrusted to the samurai class, loosely modelled on Plato’s Guardians, though they are not an entirely hereditary caste.