LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOCIALISM

The most important later British socialist writer explicitly to adopt the utopian form was WILLIAM MORRIS (1834–96), whose News from Nowhere (1890) describes a post- revolutionary, twentieth-century London reduced in size and population, cleansed of pollution and heavy industry, and united by a system of voluntary exchange and rotation of work. There is no coercive or centralized state apparatus, but a consummate dedication to artistic creativity, individual variation in taste and social equality. Medieval styles prevail, crime is greatly reduced and politics, conducted almost entirely at the local level, includes a substantial toleration of minority opinion. This is, to an important degree, an aesthetically based utopia, much influenced by the writings of John Ruskin (and notably the famous discussion of the role of the worker in the process of production in the chapter entitled ‘The Nature of Gothic’ in The Stones of Venice). This linkage of art to socialism was supported by writers like Oscar Wilde in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891). Morris’s chief target is the American EDWARD BELLAMY (1850–98), whose Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1889) instigated widespread interest in socialism in North America, Europe and elsewhere, and spawned a movement known as ‘Nationalism’. Bellamy envisaged a highly structured, centralized, industrialized society in which a comprehensive welfare system, universally-mandated labour and relatively equal distribution ensure a high standard of living. Crime has virtually disappeared, lawyers and juries are no longer necessary, and education is universal. Women play a substantial (though not equal) role in industrial and social organization, and promote the improvement of the species by mating with the most superior men. A sequel was published entitled Equality (1897), which attempts to respond to issues raised by the public reception of Looking Backward. Here there is greater equality between the sexes, but not much between different races. Looking Backward spawned an astonishing interest in the utopian genre in the USA in particular. Dozens of US imitations appeared, (and over sixty world-wide) like Bradford Peck’s The World a Department Store (1900) and W.D.Howells’s A Traveller from Altruria (1894), as well as anti-Bellamy dystopias, while writers such as A.R.WALLACE, the British evolutionist and land nationalisation advocate, and Ebenezer Howard, founder of the British Garden City movement, acknowledged a debt to Bellamy. In Russia alone there were seven translations before 1917, and Maxim Gorky declared the book was widely read by Russian youth; in 1889 it was banned from public libraries as a result. Less influential but also notable in this period are Theodor Hertzka’s Freeland (1890) and Laurence Gronlund’s The Co- operative Commonwealth (1886).

Entries A-Z 691 Following Marx and Engels’s dictum that the communist future could not be described

in detail, but must unfold historically, the large late nineteenth-century Social Democratic movement in Germany inspired few literary utopias. An exception was the immensely popular Woman under Socialism (1883) by the Social Democratic leader Auguste Bebel, which gave a detailed image of future social organization, including the minutiae of everyday life, and doubtless inspired John Petzler’s Life in Utopia (1890). Eugene Richter’s Picture of a Socialistic Future (1893) was a bestselling liberal satire on the notion of a ubiquitous, all-controlling state that would eventually eliminate all forms of liberal freedom. But a reluctance to embrace the utopian genre was also shared by moderate socialist reformers, such as the Fabian SIDNEY WEBB, who emphasized that socialism was not a utopia, but a concrete principle of social organization.

LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOCIALISM