The English Utopia. A L Morton 1952
Fades the Republic; faint as Roland’s horn,
Her Trumpets taunt us with a sacred scorn...
Then silence fell: and Mr Long was born. – Chesterton.
When Churchill’s troopers triumphed at Sedgemoor they rode down the last defenders of Cokaygne, the Utopia of all jolly fellows, of the proud, independent man, neither exploiting nor exploited, eating and drinking of his own abundance. For this was one half of the Levellers’ dream, and, I think, more than half of the Levellers’ strength. On the one side they were modern, rational, civilised in a measure above that of their time. On the other, they were medieval, traditional, appealing to the deep-lying desires and perpetually thwarted hopes of the people. Their power lay in the synthesis of the past and the future: their weakness and the inevitability of their defeat lay in its incompleteness and in the gap which existed between it and the objective reality of historical development – a gap far deeper and wider than that Bussex Rhine on Sedgemoor in which Monmouth’s army met its defeat.
But if it was a peasant army and a peasant Utopia which went down, the ultimate victory did not rest with the Catholic-feudal counter-revolution. This was not merely another of the long series of peasant insurrections crushed by feudal power; it was the final defeat of the plebeian element in the Bourgeois Revolution, and, with that defeat, the necessity for the upper bourgeoisie to compromise with the remnants of feudal society also came to an end. Churchill might indeed ride to Sedgemoor as James Stuart’s man: he rode home already beginning to think that William Nassau might pay a better price for his services. The ultimate victors at Sedgemoor were the Whigs, the men who three years later organised the so-called ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688.
The events of 1688, while not a revolution in the true sense, consolidated the victory won by the bourgeoisie forty years earlier. Advances far beyond what the bourgeoisie either needed or desired, alternating with partial and temporary successes of reaction, had filled the intervening period. Now a compromise, corresponding roughly with the objective balance of class forces, had been reached – the time had come for the victors to gather the fruits. So 1688 established the power of the great merchants and financiers, allied with the Whig nobility who had transformed themselves into capitalist landowners. This combination, irresistibly strong, made politics a closed shop and created the apparatus needed for the rapid accumulation of capital leading to the agricultural and industrial revolution of the latter part of the eighteenth century.
The great epoch of the seventeenth-century Revolution had been an age of enthusiasm and wild hopes, of bold speculations and the clash of ideas. All this now ended: heroism, self-sacrifice, disinterestedness, passed so clean out of fashion that the very words acquired a slight flavour of impropriety. Every thing and every man now had its known price and honour became a commodity like all the others. Instead of Laud we find Sacheverell, instead of Cromwell, Walpole, while the nearest the eighteenth century could come to Lilburne was John Wilkes. ‘Silence fell, and Mr Long was born.’ Men felt that wars had brought nothing about, but this was far from the truth: what had been created was the condition for a rapid expansion of trade and industry, the establishment with the Bank of England and the National Debt of a ‘modern’ financial system, a long series of colonial wars in which English capitalism established its right to exploit vast new territories. In the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie, which had emerged out of and in contradiction to feudal society, and had fought for and won political power, transformed itself into modern capitalism and, breaking the last links which had bound it to the old feudal order, established itself and its specific mode of production as a part of the recognised order of things.
And of all this a young man who had fought at Sedgemoor on the losing side, and, three years later, had been on the winning side with William of Orange, was the first prophet. Daniel Defoe, in his pamphlet An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), defined both his own standpoint and that of the new order with singular exactness:
I was for my first entering into the knowledge of Public Matters, and have ever been to this day, a sincere lover of the Constitution of my country, zealous for Liberty and the Protestant Interest; but a constant follower of Moderate Principles, a vigorous opposer of Hot Measures of all Parties. I never once changed my opinions, my principles, or my Party: and let what will be said of changing sides, this I maintain, that I have never once deviated from the Revolution Principles, nor from the doctrine of Liberty and Property on which they were founded.
For Defoe, as for Churchill, ‘Liberty and Property’, or, more accurately, ‘Liberty for Property’, came to be identified with the House of Orange and the Protestant Succession, and, indeed, as things were, no real alternative existed after 1685. For Churchill, to whom changes of allegiance came as easily as they have to other members of his family, no difficulty was presented – but Defoe? Defoe who has at least the honour of having fought in the last battle of English liberty? Did he never feel that his new principles were a betrayal of what his comrades had fought and died for under the sea-green banner that Monmouth had inherited from the Levellers?
If he did, he certainly never said so except perhaps indirectly. When Robinson Crusoe escaped from Sallee he took with him a Negro slave boy, Xury, whom he promised ‘to make a great man’, and for whom he professed a lively affection. When at the end of their voyage they were picked up by a Portuguese ship, the captain:
... offered me also sixty pieces of eight more for my boy Xury, which I was loth to take, not but what I was not willing to let the captain have him, but I was very loth to sell the poor boy’s liberty, who had assisted me so faithfully in procuring my own. However, when I let him know my reason, he owned it to be just, and offered me this medium, that he would give the boy an obligation to set him free in ten years, if he turned Christian, and Xury saying he was willing to go with him, I let the captain have him.
The only real regret Crusoe ever expressed over this transaction was when he found that he could profitably have made use of Xury’s labour himself. Is it fanciful to see in this Negro slave boy Defoe’s old comrades of the Left, and in the captain, perhaps, William of Orange? Possibly, though Defoe expressly invites us to interpret Robinson Crusoe in just this kind of way:
The adventures of Robinson Crusoe are one whole scene of real life of eight-and-twenty years, spent in the most wandering desolate and afflicting circumstances that ever a man went through, and in which I lived a life of wonder, in continual storms... in worse slavery than Turkish, escaped by as exquisite management as in the story of Xury and the boat of Sallee, been taken up at sea in distress... in a word there is not a circumstance in the imaginary story but has its just allusion to a real story.
Whether Defoe had any intention of drawing it, the parallel is certainly there, and the whole episode is entirely in keeping with the times: that is why Defoe is the characteristic writer and Robinson Crusoe the characteristic Utopia of the early eighteenth century, just as Churchill is its characteristic public figure. It was this horrifying combination of the objectively progressive with the morally squalid in the Revolution of 1688 which bewildered so many of the best men of the day: it was this perhaps which turned the incorruptible Ferguson into a Jacobite, it was this which created an agonising and insoluble problem for those who had more old-fashioned ideas of loyalty than Churchill and greater intellectual subtlety than Defoe.
Among the former was an Irish soldier, as great perhaps if less fortunate than Churchill, who was also with the victorious army at Sedgemoor. Among the latter a young man who in 1685 was an unsatisfactory student at what he regarded as a most unsatisfactory university – Trinity College, Dublin. If Churchill and Defoe are typical figures on the one side, Sarsfield and Swift can stand for the best on the other, and it is perhaps significant that we have to go to Ireland to find them. In England the ‘Revolution’ stood, in however debased a way, for the Good Old Cause: Ireland could offer no Good Old Cause, since, whoever won, the Irish people were certain to be enslaved and exploited. Sarsfield was no politician but a simple and honourable soldier. He took what seemed to him the inevitable course under the circumstances, and, after his famous defence of Limerick, migrated to Europe with many of his men and was killed at Landen in 1693. Swift’s fate was more complex and will detain us longer, since he was to write the second and the greatest utopian work of the age – Gulliver’s Travels.
Swift came from a family traditionally Royalist: his grandfather had been ruined for the support he gave to Charles I in the Civil War. His father and uncles came to Ireland to try to restore the family fortune. So Swift was veritably born into contradiction: neither English nor Irish, he seemed at times to hate equally the lands of his origin and his adoption: often he insists that he is an English gentleman who happened to be born in Ireland, but it was in Ireland that he became a national figure, respected and loved as few have been before or after him.
Yet his career as an Irish patriot was the result of little more than an accident. When he left the University it was to England that he turned as a matter of course to make his name in politics and letters. While acting as personal secretary to Sir William Temple, that admirable nonentity, he published his first brilliant satires, The Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. Later he took orders, rather unwillingly, and divided his time between his Irish parish of Laracor and the polite literary world of London. Presently he made himself the indispensable pamphleteer of the Tories. His savage wit, his brilliance in polemic, his arrogance and the overwhelming force of his personality made him, for some years, an outstanding figure in English politics.
Yet, it may be said, what was he after all but a Tory hack writer? I think that Swift’s Toryism needs a few words of explanation. Swift accepted, albeit regretfully, the ‘Revolution’ of 1688. Yet he could not but observe that it had strengthened a new sort of oppression and a new breed of exploiter.
With these measures [he wrote] fell in all that Sett of People, who are called the Monied Men: such as had raised vast Sums by Trading with Stocks and Funds, and Lending upon great Interest and Praemiums; whose perpetual Harvest is War, and whose beneficial way of Traffic must very much decline by a Peace.
Swift had, as we shall see, a deep hatred of war, of colonial exploitation, of the depression of agriculture by the money-lender and stock-jobber. He saw (rightly) in the Whigs the Party which stood for all these things: he saw (wrongly) in the Tories the Party which opposed them and stood for what he felt to be the older and saner way of life.
In a sense, Swift’s hatred of the new forces was reactionary, but it was neither dishonest nor ignoble. The form which his hatred took was the only one which seemed open to him. A generation, two generations earlier he might have become a Leveller, and the duality of the Leveller outlook, based on a confused antagonism to both feudal and bourgeois exploitation, had much in common with his own. It is interesting, if no more, to find that in one of his letters he refers to Stephen College, ‘the Protestant Joiner’ and a martyr of the Left as ‘a noble person’. And a century later William Godwin, the oracle of the English Jacobins, declared that Swift showed ‘a more profound insight into the true principles of political justice than any preceding or contemporary author’. Swift was born in an evil time when there were neither Levellers, nor Jacobins, and in practice if one was not a Whig the only alternative was to be a Tory.
Swift may be reckoned the first in that curious succession of Tory radicals who expressed in a more or less distorted form an opposition to those features of capitalist development which bore most oppressively upon the masses. In the direct succession, Cobbett was perhaps the last and greatest figure; but the line reappears in the nineteenth century, touching the fringes of Chartism in the persons of Oastler, JR Stephens and Charles Kingsley. Finally, through Ruskin, this Tory radicalism was not without influence on William Morris and the modern working-class movement in Britain.
How far he was from the common Tory beliefs in Divine Right and Non-resistance both his life and his works bear full witness. There is hardly a reference anywhere to any monarch which is not one of derision and contempt and he was never so happily employed as when thwarting the ministers who governed in their name. Nor should we forget how Gulliver, visiting the island of Glubbdubdrib, whose inhabitants had the power to recall the dead, used his opportunities:
I had the honour to have much conversation with Brutus; and was told that his Ancestor Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the Younger, Sir Thomas More and himself were perpetually together: A Sextumvirate to which all the Ages of the World cannot add a Seventh... I chiefly fed my eyes with beholding the Destroyers of Tyrants and Usurpers, and the Restorers of Liberty to oppressed and injured Nations. But it is impossible to express the Satisfaction which I received in my own Mind, after such a Manner as to make it a suitable Entertainment to the Reader.
So if, as we shall see presently, Swift’s Brobdingnag was a Tory utopia, his Toryism would no more have qualified him for membership of the Carlton Club today than it did in his lifetime for the bishopric to which his talents and services certainly entitled him. We have seen how he attacked the Whigs as the war party. In Gulliver’s Travels the theme of war is approached again and again. Gulliver offers to the King of Brobdingnag the secret of gunpowder, and when this offer is rejected with horror, comments ironically:
A strange effect of narrow Principles and short Views! that a Prince, possessed of every Quality which procures Veneration, Love and Esteem; of strong Parts, great Wisdom and profound Learning; endued with admirable Talents for Government, and almost adored by his subjects; should from a nice unnecessary Scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no Conception, let slip an Opportunity put into his hands, that would have made him absolute Master of the Lives, the Liberties, and the Fortunes of his People.
Few Tories indeed have been burdened with such nice unnecessary Scruples, nor with these to which Gulliver confesses at the end of his voyages, when he considers whether he should not have annexed his discoveries to the English crown:
To say the Truth, I had conceived a few Scruples with relation to the distributive Justice of Princes upon these Occasions. For Instance, a Crew of Pirates are driven by a Storm they know not whither; at length a Boy discovers Land from the Top-mast; they go on Shore to rob and plunder; they see an harmless People, are entertained with Kindness, they give the Country a new Name, they take formal Possession of it for the King, they set up a rotten Plank or a Stone for a Memorial, they murder two or three Dozen of the Natives, bring away a Couple more by Force for a Sample, return home, and get their Pardon. Here commences a new Dominion, acquired with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the first Opportunity; the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free Licence given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust; the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants: And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a Modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People.
Swift had every reason to know what he was talking about, since, before this passage was written, a sudden turn of political events had led to his finding himself, from 1714, settled permanently in Ireland, England’s oldest and most exploited colony. For a time he was stunned, and the ‘English’ side of him held him aloof. But Swift, with his passionate hatred of oppression and injustice and his equally passionate desire to dominate his environment, could not long be still. Step by step he was drawn into a struggle in which all the odds were against him, a struggle which in one sense was doomed to failure because he was fighting the battles of the future with the weapons of the past. The struggle ended, for him, in madness and despair, yet he did succeed in blowing up the almost dying fires of Irish nationality into a fresh blaze, and out of that struggle we have today, among other things, those three masterworks, The Drapier’s Letters, A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels.
Gulliver’s Travels is not merely Swift’s masterpiece. It is the heart and centre of all his work, lying clear across the most fruitful years of his life. Begun in 1714 and not finished till shortly before its publication in 1726, there is good evidence to show that it was seldom far from his thoughts in these years. It was constantly being rewritten and added to, so that it reflects the growth and development of his ideas, his first, second and final thoughts about man and society.
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, then, are the utopias of the two greatest writers of the last phase of the English Revolution, twin and complementary utopias whose authors, like their heroes, are the twin and complementary representatives of their age. Their similarities and their differences are alike significant and the next section of this chapter must begin by examining both the similarities and the differences.
At first it is the similarities which strike us. Both Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe belong to a new world which is entirely different from that reflected in any previous utopia. In the first place, the element of pure fiction is enormously increased. For More, Bacon, Harrington, in varying degrees, the fiction was a mere framework, a convenient device for getting their utopia introduced, never intended to carry any real conviction: one can think away the fiction and what is left would stand up well enough. It is impossible to think of Gulliver’s Travels or Robinson Crusoe in this sort of way. Swift, and Defoe still more, produce novels, ‘present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them’. There is a fundamental difference in approach, in temper and in style. And it is perhaps in their style that the difference is most fully disclosed.
For the first time we have a style which is fully bourgeois, which avoids excess and pays dividends, and this is just as true of the frustrated aristocrat, Swift, as of the optimistic bourgeois, Defoe. Even More, the most vivid and human of the earlier utopians, only descends from the general to the particular for special reasons and with an almost apologetic air of deliberately unbending, as in the little episode of the outburst of coughing in which the exact situation of Utopia was for ever lost. But for Swift and Defoe the general is only built up of an infinitude of minute particulars and the particular has now become the normal. By the accumulation of exact detail Defoe convinced us that the probable really happened, Swift forces us to suspend for a time our disbelief in the impossible.
And their imaginary gardens do not contain only real toads, they also contain real people around whom the whole action turns. The individual hero, the full-scale bourgeois man, having transformed England, has now reached the shores of Utopia. The difference is clear from the very title of these books: instead of Utopia and Oceana we are offered The Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, and Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon and then a Captain of Several Ships. It is not only what Crusoe and Gulliver see which is important, but what they do, and their Utopias are presented not in the abstract but very much through the eyes of the visitors: further, they are not mere observers but actors and their actions change and modify the Utopias which they describe. It is significant that this development is far more marked in the case of Crusoe than of Gulliver.
At the outset the social background of each is firmly sketched in. Each came from the ‘middle state’ of life, which Crusoe’s father ‘had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanical part of mankind, and not embarass'd with the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper part of mankind’. Each was a younger son. Here we have the classic bourgeois hero who has held the stage of fiction ever since, the young man of respectable family and good parts, who has been given a fair (or, as some would say, an unfair) start and has his way to make in the world. His adventures are the counterpart of those of the knight errant of medieval romances, except that they are undertaken not for their own sake but for some solidly material benefit. Instead of riding through the Enchanted Forest to the Well at the World’s End the bourgeois hero sails prosaically by compass and star around a well-charted world. However fantastic Gulliver’s adventures may turn out to be, he sets out soberly from the Pool of London and it is possible to determine the latitude and longitude of his wildest fantasies with fair accuracy: Gulliver’s Travels is the first utopia to be equipped with maps, and if Robinson Crusoe is not similarly provided it is only because all the places he visited are sufficiently well known to make them unnecessary.
For by 1700 the world was already fairly mapped, was ceasing to be a place of wonder and was becoming a place ‘where there is a great deal of money made’ by capable and self-reliant young men in the middle state of life. And Britain and Holland, the countries of the first victories of the bourgeoisie, led the field in the hunt to ransack the world. It was natural, therefore, that the travel tale should enjoy an immense vogue in both countries, but it was a travel tale that had changed much since the days of Hakluyt. There, the emphasis had been on the conflict with Spain, the sacking of rich cities, and the capture, against fantastic odds, of galleons loaded with gold and silver plate: it was after all but one generation removed from the old romances. But this early exuberance had passed with the other exuberances of the bourgeoisie in its ‘knight errant stage'; the concern for trade and for trading opportunities, which had always been latent, now came uppermost. Apart from some odd corners the world seemed sufficiently known and Crusoe’s object was to use his knowledge to profitable effect.
And here we strike the first, and probably the most important, difference between Defoe and Swift. Both take as ‘hero’ the new bourgeois man seeking his profits at the ends of the earth; but where Defoe completely identifies himself with Crusoe, Swift deliberately creates Gulliver as a mask behind which his criticism may be delivered with more telling effect, just as earlier he had done with MB the Dublin Drapier. Behind all the similarities there is the most profound difference: Swift and Defoe did, indeed, look at the same world, and each in his own fashion saw it with exceptional clarity, but they looked with different eyes and drew different conclusions. Defoe accepted and rejoiced in his age, its achievements and its order: Swift rejected them with bitterness, with contempt and with horror. So, while Robinson Crusoe is a book single-minded almost to the point of naivety, Gulliver’s Travels contains a vast and fascinating contradiction between its form and its content, a contradiction without which it could never have become a nursery classic. As Professor H Davis says:
We may regard Gulliver’s Travels as, both in form and shape, wholly the product of the eighteenth century, while being at the same time the most violent satire of its hopes and dreams and a repudiation of much that it most valued.
Where Crusoe, like Defoe, is the man of his age, the age of the all-conquering bourgeoisie, Gulliver is the lost and defeated man. The irony of his fate is only underlined by the commonplace clothes in which Swift has chosen to dress him. Crusoe travels because there are never enough worlds for him to conquer, Gulliver in search of a substitute for the lost (and of course largely fictitious) world that the bourgeois revolution has destroyed. Crusoe finds what he is looking for, because it is only the replica of the world from which he sails. Gulliver can never find his vanished world because he must take with him wherever he goes the essence of the real world of which he is the unwilling representative.
There is nothing in Robinson Crusoe but its genius to warn the reader that it is not what it claims to be, an authentic work of travel and adventure. Not even the most stupid reader (for I cannot believe the unnamed Irish bishop who according to Swift declared that ‘the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it’ to be anything but an invention) could make such a mistake about Gulliver’s Travels. While both derive by way of the travel tale from the romances of chivalry, Gulliver’s Travels has a second ancestor – the wonder tale, and in it satire and realism, horror, wit and fantasy are combined in a wholly new way. This element of fantasy is in Swift, and in many though not all of his predecessors, further evidence of a profound sense of social defeat and of a retreat from the reality of the world in which that defeat had been suffered.
Here, however, a distinction must be drawn, since there have been times when fantasy has had quite another character. The fantasy of Rabelais or of Cyrano de Bergerac, both of whose work had elements of a utopian character, both of whom Swift had read and from whom he probably took hints that were developed in Gulliver’s Travels (the Academy of Lagado from the Court of Queen Whim, the significance of physical size and the fantasy of inverted logic from de Bergerac’s Voyage to the Moon) is that of a rising class, exuberant and conscious of its increasing power and using this weapon to ridicule the shams and absurdities of a decaying society. It is there a weapon of the new Humanism against the theory and practice of the Middle Ages. At the same time, the decaying feudal order remained politically powerful, and a strict censorship forced its critics to adopt an Aesopian language without which their criticism would never have been heard. For the same reason, France in the eighteenth century, when the bourgeois revolution was maturing, produced a whole crop of utopias at a time when in England this form had temporarily almost disappeared. Here the bourgeois revolution had been accomplished, and the question of its successor had not been raised. In France, Foigny and Diderot, Mably, Morelly and even Voltaire found the utopian form admirable as a means of attacking established institutions, religious beliefs or even social and sexual customs in a way which would be generally understood without laying themselves open to official reprisals. The same is true of Swift, who could never have ventured to say many of the things he did in a more direct form, and, even as it was, had considerable apprehensions for his own liberty and the safety of his printer’s ears.
Cervantes, too, had used fantasy to ridicule the old order, but here a marked difference can be seen. Spain in the early seventeenth century was a country in which the bourgeoisie had failed to take the necessary first steps towards the conquest of power, a country already entering the long decline which has lasted down to our own time. Spain had become the centre of religious and political reaction in Europe, and the old and new orders were involved in an interrelationship in which both were poisoned and degraded. So that Cervantes, while criticising the old order through the person of Don Quixote, is forced to criticise without a solid basis on which to rest. He criticises, not from the standpoint of a rising, progressive class, but from a subjective idealism, that is sometimes strikingly akin to that of Swift. And, criticising the past, he too finds present and future equally distasteful while driven to despair, he too takes refuge in illusion, magic and fantasy. Don Quixote is a true hero, but a defeated hero the worst tragedy of whose defeat lies in its absurdity. Both in their greatness and in the tragedy of their failure, Cervantes and Swift, Quixote and Gulliver, seem to me to have more in common than is generally realised.
To turn from Cervantes and Rabelais to the immediate English predecessors of Gulliver’s Travels is to turn from the great to the trivial. Yet some of them have interest as indications of the background from which Swift’s work emerged. Most naive of all, perhaps, is The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wife of the Royalist General defeated at Marston Moor. Published in 1668 it was probably written earlier when she and her husband shared the exile of Charles II. It is a wholly reactionary utopia, monarchical and anti-scientific, but, like its author, so childlike and having the occasional shrewdness of a child, that it is impossible to judge it over-harshly.
The Blazing World is said to be joined to this world by the North Pole. It is visited by the Duchess and so at least can claim the honour of being the first utopia written by a woman and having a heroine as its central figure. For reasons that are never at all clear she quickly becomes Empress. Of its Government, she asks the inhabitants:
... why they have so few laws? To which they answered, That many Laws make many Divisions, which most commonly breed Factions and at last break out into open wars. Next she asked, Why they preferred the Monarchical form of Government before any other? They answered, That as it was natural for a body to have one Head, so it was natural for a Body Politick to have but one Governor, and that a Commonwealth, which had many Governors was like a Monster with many Heads. Besides, said they, a Monarchy is a divine form of Government and agrees most with our religion.
This Utopia is inhabited by many kinds of men in animal shape who follow trades and professions adapted to their nature, and the Empress, not one feels without a certain malice, forms them into appropriate Societies:
The Bear-men were to be her Experimental Philosophers, the Bird-men her Astronomers, the Fly-, Worm- and Fish-men her Natural Philosophers, the Ape-men her Chymists, the Satyrs her Galenical Physicians, the Frog-men her Politicians, the Spider- and Lice-men her Mathematicians, the Jackdaw-, Magpie- and Parrot-men her Orators and Logicians, the Gyants her Architects, etc.
Here, just because of its complete simplicity, the role of fantasy as compensation for defeat is seen at its clearest. Margaret Cavendish, in exile, consumed with pride in her and her husband’s family, her wealth vanished, contemptuous of the victorious Commonwealth, ridiculed by the raffish, bankrupt Court that surrounded Charles abroad as an eccentric, frumpish bluestocking, crowned herself Empress of a Never-never World, covered herself with a blaze of diamonds and mocked or exiled all those whom she hated or could not understand. Here, but for the Grace of Genius, goes Jonathan Swift!
Two other utopias need only a few words. Of one, The History of the Sevarites, something was said in the last chapter. It need only be added that the fusion of realism and fantasy, of the travel tale and the wonder tale which is so outstanding in Gulliver’s Travels is very clearly marked.
The same is true of an earlier work, The Man in the Moon; Or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, written by Bishop Francis Godwin and first published in 1638. [1] Reprinted in Swift’s lifetime, it is now most easily to be found, quaintly disguised as the body of a pamphlet called A View of St Helena, in the Harleian Miscellany. [2] Not only is there the same fusion noted above, but a number of specific similarities which suggest that Swift was probably familiar with Godwin’s work. There is the same insistence on size: Gonsales is a dwarf and most of the inhabitants of the moon giants who despise the stunted, short-lived minority:
Them they account base unworthy creatures, but one degree above brute beasts, and employ in mean and servile offices, calling them bastards, counterfeits or changelings.
In general there is a strong likeness to the classical-heroic outlook of Swift. There are no laws, no theft because no poverty, little disease, no fear of death. It will be seen how much this atmosphere resembles that of the Houyhnhnms. One feature, the ingenious mechanical contrivance by which Gonsales is carried to the moon by wild geese, anticipates somewhat a still later utopia, Paltock’s Peter Wilkins.
If Gulliver’s Travels has a long and complex pedigree, Robinson Crusoe, considered as a utopia, has but little. [3] Earlier utopias had been, in one way or another, pictures of a community; something of the social unity and stability which feudal society had inherited from tribal is taken for granted, and the individual, however tenderly his needs may be considered, is still part of a greater whole. Robinson Crusoe is the pure bourgeois man, the man completely alone, and his utopia is a one-man colony where the individual owes everything to his own efforts and is neither helped nor hindered by anyone. It is typical of the bourgeois that he always attributes his wealth to his own work, genuinely ignoring what he does not wish to see, the working class to whose exploitation that wealth is due. The illusion of independence has always been his favourite illusion. In a society whose first law is competition, independence carried to the logical absurdity of absolute solitude cannot be without a certain theoretical appeal, since solitude means first of all freedom from competitors and only secondarily the absence of assistants. This is the basis of the widespread desert island dream, in which the hero is always either alone or king of the island.
Crusoe indeed complains of the lack of company on his island, but in reality he is sufficiently reconciled to his state and presently discovers ample compensations. When other inhabitants do arrive he is careful to make sure that they come as servants or tenants. When enough have been collected the final happy state is reached in which the proprietor Crusoe can leave his property to itself, and, withdrawn from the actual labour of production, can collect rent and profit from a distance. The bourgeois utopia, in short, is the foundation of a colony by the free bourgeois man.
Not that this man is without quite admirable qualities. Crusoe, like Defoe, is by eighteenth-century standards humane and even generous. He is singularly devoid of narrow racial or religious prejudices and at all times finds it necessary to satisfy himself that his actions are in accord with the strictest moral principles. Thus he has a long debate with himself as to the lawfulness of massacring the cannibals, and in fact does not do so till good moral grounds offer themselves. In Further Adventures he is genuinely distressed at the destruction by his shipmates of a native village in Madagascar, though even here he almost manages to satisfy himself in the end that some justification existed. But in the long run, and this again is where Crusoe stands for the true bourgeois man, he does almost always convince himself that what is profitable is right, just as Defoe was always certain that however dubious some of his actions might appear, they were always reconcilable to ‘true Revolution principles’.
It is I think the unity and simplicity of Robinson Crusoe, the unity and simplicity of life as it appeared to a class before whom the future seemed to offer an eternity of success and to whom Heaven’s Gate seemed hardly further off than Cathay, which makes it most of all so complete a contrast to Gulliver’s Travels. And it seems natural enough, therefore, that the former was written in a single burst, almost as an afterthought to a life packed with the most various activities, whereas, as I have already said, Gulliver’s Travels was the product of Swift’s twelve most creative years, constantly revised and expanded and reflecting both the development and the contradictions of his thought during that time. It is now necessary to turn and trace in some detail the chronology of its composition and the changes which it went through.
Written as it was, it is neither a single book nor a single Utopia. It is a series of short books strung on the thread of a common central character, and a series of Utopias, some positive and some negative. That is to say the social criticism is conveyed in some places by descriptions of a Commonwealth whose merits Swift holds up as an example to his countrymen but in others by those whose vices and follies constitute a satirical attack upon familiar institutions. More than this, there are parts where both elements are found in conjunction, and in this respect as perhaps in others, Swift seems to have served as a model for Samuel Butler when he came to write his Erewhon.
Early in 1714 Swift joined with his friends Arbuthnot, Pope, Gay and Parnell to compile a joint satire, The Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus. Swift’s contribution seems to have been an account of a voyage to the land of pygmies which grew into the first part of Book I of Gulliver’s Travels, and the satire on projectors which was later expanded to make a large section of Book III. Then came the death of Queen Anne and Swift’s retirement to Dublin: for some years he was stunned into silence by this blow and in these years of silence his genius matured and took a new direction. His hatred of injustice and oppression was intensified by the conspicuous example which he discovered in Ireland.
In 1719 Defoe scored an immense popular success with Robinson Crusoe. Swift had no high opinion of Defoe. The fellow was a Whig, a sneaking tradesman and a vulgar ignoramus whose writings were below the notice of the polite wits who filled the literary coffee houses. Defoe might well have answered in the words which Swift wrote about himself:
As for his works in Verse and Prose,
I own myself no Judge of those:
Nor, can I tell what Criticks thought ‘em;
But, this I know, all People bought ‘em.
And we need not enter into the perhaps inevitable hostility between these two great men. What seems clear, however, is that the success of Defoe’s imaginary travel tale turned Swift’s mind back to the long-neglected manuscript in which he had once begun to exploit this genre to so different an end. At any rate, about 1720 he is again at work upon what had now become Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput.
But, whereas the earlier chapters had been a light-hearted satire on the littleness of man and the folly of his delusions of grandeur, a new and bitter note can now be detected. Gulliver himself, who at the beginning of the book had appeared to stand for Swift, has now become Bolingbroke and his disgrace and exile is an account in cipher of Bolingbroke’s fall from power. Much later other additions were made: Walpole is introduced in the character of Flimnap and there are allusions to events as late as the revival of the Order of the Bath (1725) and the award to Walpole of the Order of the Garter (May 1726). It is clear in general that right up to its publication in 1726 Swift was constantly taking out his manuscript and adding some fresh touch as it came into his mind.
There are, consequently, all sorts of contradictions and incongruities. One such is Chapter VI of the Lilliputian book. The general character of the book is clear: it is a negative utopia, Swift’s ironic comment on human littleness, on the absurdity of political pretensions, feuds and honours. Swift stands above the English scene and Lilliput is what he sees there. But in Chapter VI, obviously written much later than most of the rest of the book, this giant’s eye view is abandoned in favour of a few pages of direct utopian writing very much nearer to the classic manner of More.
In it Swift describes certain laws and customs which ‘if they were not so directly contrary to those of my own dear country, I should be tempted to say a little in their justification’. In Lilliput informers are discouraged, fraud more severely regarded than theft, and virtue rewarded at the same time that anti-social behaviour is punished. No one thinks the management of public affairs a mystery and therefore they regard the honest man of average abilities as the fittest to be entrusted with it. All this is very much in line with Swift’s peculiar brand of Toryism, and his account of Lilliputian education is still more characteristic.
Parents, they say, ‘are the least of all others to be entrusted with the education of their own children’ and this is entirely taken over by the state from an early age. The education given is entirely determined, not by the abilities shown by the children, but by the social status of their parents. There is one system for the children of the nobility, another for those of the gentry, and so forth:
Only those destined for trade are put out apprentice at eleven years old, whereas those of persons of quality continue in their exercises till fifteen, which answers to one and twenty with us... The cottagers and labourers keep their children at home, their business being merely to till and cultivate the earth, and therefore their education is of little consequence to the public.
Here the reactionary side of Swift’s philosophy shows itself. He accepts the feudal conception of degree and adopts it as the basis for a static Utopia in which an everlasting Golden Age can be preserved by the rigid division of society in classes which are almost castes, each with its own duties and rights and across whose boundaries it is impossible to pass. This rigid structure, indeed, is inherent in all the early Utopias whose authors conceived them as completed works of art, finished, perfect and unchanging. Human society, like the universe, was something deliberately created, not something which had evolved dialectically from the development of its own contradictions, and all that was needed for Swift, as for More, was an ideal pattern. It was the contrast between this ideal perfection and the obviously imperfect world, and the impossibility of finding any way of bridging the gap between the two, which drove them to despair of humanity.
Meanwhile, at this early stage, Swift is concerned with the problem of size, and to it he returns in the Second Book, written apparently soon after work on Gulliver’s Travels was resumed, and, to judge from the internal evidence, written very much more in a single burst. Here Gulliver visits Brobdingnag, to whose people he is exactly in the same proportion as the Lilliputians were to him. Brobdingnag is a simple Utopia of abundance, not an ideal commonwealth, as the horrifying account of the beggars shows, not without grossness and imperfections, yet having many of the qualities that Swift most desired. Degree is observed, and we have a land of simple, prosperous, hardworking and hard-fisted yeomen, whose wants are amply supplied by native merchants and craftsmen. The nation in arms makes a standing army or any peculiar state machinery superfluous, and government is reduced to a minimum. No law is allowed to exceed in number of words the number of letters contained in their alphabet. A minor feature especially pleasing to Swift was the complete absence of seaports and hence of foreign trade.
The physical size of the Brobdingnagians has as its counterpart the possession of the heroic virtues, so that when their king passes his and Swift’s judgement upon Europe it is expressed in terms of size:
I cannot but consider the Bulk of your Nation to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
Swift’s philosophy, as expressed in these first two Books, is that man would pass muster if he were bigger, physically, mentally and morally, and that a return to a life of few wants and simple virtue would provide a sufficiency of happiness.
But one great change can already be seen. A large part of Book I was written in England, and the scene is that of English politics. By 1720 Swift had been for six years in Ireland and in the rest of Gulliver’s Travels it is Ireland which provides the background, an Ireland devastated by two centuries of war and misgovernment. Her people were sharply divided into two nations: the Anglo-Irish upper and middle classes to which Swift belonged and the ‘old Irish’, the peasants, degraded almost beyond humanity by their sufferings. Ireland at this time was a conquered province, nearer than ever before or since to a complete loss of its sense of nationhood. So when Swift draws a picture of the agricultural prosperity of Brobdingnag it is the contrast with the starving Irish peasantry around him that is in his mind.
And it was in 1720 that Swift published the first of his series of Irish pamphlets, urging the people to develop their native resources and, like the Brobdingnagians, to import nothing from abroad, especially from England. This was followed in 1724 by the more famous Drapier’s Letters which made Swift a national figure and defeated the project of Wood’s Halfpence. But even in his victory Swift passed to a more utter despair. He could win a limited success of this sort, but it could not touch the heart of the problem, the problem of Irish poverty and the misery of the peasant masses. So, in 1729, he wrote in A Modest Proposal:
Therefore let no Man talk to me of other Expedients: Of taxing our Absentees at five shillings a pound: of using neither Cloath nor household Furniture, except what is of our own Growth and Manufacture... Of learning to Love our Country, wherein we differ even from the Laplanders and the Inhabitants of Topinamboo... Of being a little Cautious not to Sell our Country and Consciences for nothing: Of teaching Landlords to have at least one degree of Mercy towards their Tenants. Lastly of putting a Spirit of Honesty, Industry and Skill into our Shopkeepers...
But as to myself, having been wearied out for many Years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of Success, I fortunately fell upon this Proposal [that the children of the poor should be fattened and sold for the tables of the rich], which as it is wholly new, so it hath something Solid and Real, of no Expence and little Trouble, full in our own Power, and whereby we can incur no Danger in disobliging England.
The expedients were vain, idle and visionary because there was no class in Ireland at that time which had the will and the power to act effectively. Swift, too, was growing old and suffering from increasing infirmity. As he looked around him despair deepened into approaching madness, and it was in this mood that the later parts of Gulliver’s Travels were written.
Book III is the most confused and contradictory part of the whole work because the greatest gap existed between its different elements. It embodies some of the earliest and some of the latest sections. The section dealing with the scientific projectors was mostly written about 1714, though even here a letter from Arbuthnot shows that as late as 1725 he was still making additions. The satire on projectors is in part an attack on Newton and contemporary science, an attack that was not particularly successful because Swift never fully understood what he was attempting to satirise. His attitude is clear from a remark about the Brobdingnagians:
The Learning of this People is very defective; consisting only in Morality, History, Poetry and Mathematicks; wherein they must be allowed to excell. But, the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in Life; to the Improvement of Agriculture and all mechanical Arts; so that among us it would be little esteemed.
Swift did not grasp the effect the scientific advances of his day were to exercise on production methods, though perhaps if he had he would have liked them none the better for that.
Besides the satire on scientific projectors, however, there is the satire on political projectors, who make statecraft a sacred mystery to befuddle and rob the common people, and I think that if it were possible to disentangle all the details it would be found that most of this was a later addition resulting from his Irish experiences. The account of the way in which the agriculture of Balnibarbi had been deliberately ruined by the greed and folly of its landlords is closely parallel to what Swift was writing about Irish landlords in the pamphlets of the same period.
And the whole fabric of the flying island, Laputa, and its relation to the mainland below it, is a direct satire on England and Ireland with many references to the battle over Wood’s Halfpence, some of which must have been added as late as 1725. Laputa, whose name, derived from the Spanish, means the whore, is inhabited by a completely idle and parasitic ruling class, divorced from all the realities of life and concerned only to suck tribute from their literally subject territory. Essentially, Book III is a negative utopia aimed at the system of colonial exploitation operating from behind a mask of false reason, false science and false enlightenment.
Finally we have the horrifying account of the Struldbrugs, the people doomed to live for ever after the loss of all the capabilities that make life endurable. Swift had always had a horror of such a fate and in this chapter, which Professor Davis suggests may have been the last written of the whole work, he seems to realise that it was indeed closing in upon him. Yet the really remarkable fact about Swift is the way in which his increasing horror and despair deepened his understanding and sharpened his criticism. This is most of all apparent in Book IV, where Gulliver visits the country of the Houyhnhnms, the rational horses. Swift had previously satirised particular abuses and injustices. Now he drives at the very structure of European society and he depicts it with a clarity that only More and Winstanley among his predecessors had attained:
I was at much Pains to describe to him the Use of Money, the Materials it was made of, and the Value of the Metals: that when a Yahoo had got a great Store of this precious Substance, he was able to purchase whatever he had a mind to; the finest Cloathing, the noblest Houses, great Tracts of Land, the most costly Meats and Drinks; and have his Choice of the most beautiful Females. Therefore since Money alone, was able to perform all these Feats, our Yahoos thought, they could never have enough of it to spend or to save, as they found themselves inclined from their natural Bent either to Profusion or Avarice. That, the rich Man enjoyed the Fruit of the poor Man’s Labour, and the latter were a Thousand to One in Proportion to the former. That the bulk of our People was forced to live miserably by labouring every Day for small wages to make a few live plentifully. I enlarged myself much on these and many other Particulars to the same Purpose: but his Honour was still to seek: For he went upon a supposition that all Animals had a Title to their Share in the Productions of the Earth: and especially those who presided over the rest.
This title is simply the Birthright for which the Levellers had contended two generations before, and it was no doubt passages like this, and others in which Law, government, commerce and war are discussed in a similar vein which won the approval of Godwin two generations later.
There is, however, much more here than negative satire. Book IV, like Book II, is a positive utopia, perhaps the strangest ever conceived and one which marks a new turn in Swift’s thought. Earlier he had stressed the littleness of man, implying that all might be well if he could attain the stature of which he was capable, for was not man a soul made in the image of God? In Book IV all this is thrown open to doubt. Man, he suggests, is corrupt beyond redemption and nothing can serve but a new species, born without original sin and therefore without need of that salvation which seemed so unaccountably withheld. So he constructs a moral utopia of rational horses, living in a society of Arcadian simplicity which looks back on the one hand to the Golden Age of primitive tribal communism and to the asceticism of More’s Utopia where happiness is reached by the elimination of all superfluous wants, and forward on the other to the closely related ‘noble savage’ myth of Diderot and Rousseau and the philosophic forerunners of the French Revolution.
Swift goes indeed far beyond them by returning not only to the noble savage but to a more biologically specialised world. The horse is nobler than man because he is less complex. He has few wants and has attained an extremely advanced moral and philosophical superstructure on an economic basis that is roughly that of the Neolithic Age. The state barely exists, clothes and metals are unknown, the unit of society is the patriarchal family. The Houyhnhnms show neither the refinements nor the vices of the civilisation which Swift had come to detest.
In other respects they compare badly with the happy, uninhibited and affectionate savages of, for example, Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage. In shedding human vices and follies they have lost also human warmth and passion: good becomes empty of meaning to beings incapable of evil. They marry, beget children, are educated and regulate all their social relations by the coldest reason. It is a world which we can admire from a distance but in which only Swift would care to live.
To point the contrast to this coldly perfect polity of horses, men are represented by the Yahoos, more odious and disgusting than any other animals because they excel them in cunning and, without human reason, possess all the vices of humanity. To a limited extent the Yahoos stand for men as Swift saw them in his moments of utter despair. Yet, as Sir Charles Firth has shown in his brilliant essay The Political Significance of Gulliver’s Travels, this is only one side of the medal. We must never forget that Swift wrote in devastated Ireland, and we have seen how the specific character of his despair arose from the total contradiction between his vision of social justice and the existing relation of social forces. Above all, he despaired of any possibility of improving the lot of the peasantry, of remedying:
The millions of oppressions they lie under, the tyranny of their landlords, the ridiculous zeal of their priests and the general misery of the whole nation.
Swift feared that these ‘millions of oppressions’ were transforming the Irish into a nation of Yahoos. As Firth puts it:
‘The savage old Irish’ who made up ‘the poorer sort of our natives’, were not only in a position similar to that of the Yahoos, but there was also a certain similarity in their natures. If nothing was done to stop the process of degeneration they would become complete brutes, as the Yahoos were already. They were, so to speak, Yahoos in the making.
The Yahoos, then, were less a picture of man than a warning of what Swift feared. He is continuing the attack on colonialism begun in Book III by pointing out what he regards as its inevitable consequence. What he did not see, and was indeed prevented by his whole class background and standpoint from seeing, was that these same peasants were already beginning their long and bitter agrarian struggle, which allied to the struggle for national independence which Swift had helped to forward, was to enable them to rescue themselves from their degradation. The Modest Proposal was not in the end to prove history’s last word on the Irish question.
Swift’s misanthropy has become almost proverbial, and is deduced mainly from the Yahoos and A Modest Proposal. Yet this view can only be maintained by a superficial reading: the bitterness is not that of a man with a low estimate of human dignity and the value of human happiness but of one who found his high estimate of man’s place in the universe perpetually contradicted by everything around him. The victory of the bourgeois over the feudal order was it is true socially progressive, but bourgeois progress has always been achieved at a staggering cost in human suffering and degradation. Swift, looking back to an idealised past and forward to a just society which few beside him cared even to guess at, saw only the cost. Defoe saw only the social advance, barely noticing the suffering which accompanied it. Together, in their two complementary utopias, they depicted the glory and misery of their age. Defoe’s benevolence is that of the victor who can afford to be magnanimous. Swift’s misanthropy is that of the representative of a defeated class, yet, though he fought against bourgeois values in the name of the past, the very fact that he fought against them honestly and courageously held within it the ground for a new standpoint in which the future could be comprehended. That, I believe, is why we honour Swift while we can only respect Defoe.
For reasons already indicated utopian literature reached its lowest level in England during the eighteenth century, and the successors to Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels do not call for any detailed treatment. Two works, however, should be mentioned: The Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca by Simon Berington and The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock.
The first, a rather academic production, once attributed for no very good reason to Bishop Berkeley, was published in 1738. It purports to be:
Taken from his Confession and Examination before the Fathers of the Inquisition at Bologna in Italy. Making a discovery of an unknown Country in the midst of the vast Deserts of Africa, as Ancient, Populous, and Civilised as the Chinese.
It may well reflect early reports of the advanced native civilisations existing in the Upper Niger region, and, in so far as the travel tale element is fairly prominent, it may be regarded as being in the tradition of Robinson Crusoe. So far as matter is concerned, however, the author has clearly studied earlier utopian writers, especially More and Campanella, and has little of his own to add of any value.
The Mezzorarrians, as these people call themselves, were driven from Egypt by a barbarian invasion, and, having crossed the Sahara, settled in an unknown region of great natural fertility. This point is especially insisted on as affording the basis of a social order in which elements of primitive and modern communism are oddly blended: on the one hand their society is simple and tribal, on the other it is made clear that owing to their great natural resources, their communism is based on abundance rather than scarcity. This is the most original feature of the utopia, though it leads inevitably to certain contradictions. Berington defends his system very much in the style of More:
Since every one of them is employed for the common good more than for themselves, perhaps Persons may apprehend that this gives a Check to Industry, not having that spur to private Interest, hoarding up riches or aggrandising their Families, as is to be found in other Nations. I was apprehensive of this myself, when I came to understand their Government; but so far from it, that probably there is not such an Industrious Race of People in the Universe.
Almost the only feature which seems specially characteristic of the eighteenth century is their religion. They are apparently Deists, tolerant, benevolent and eminently rational:
Everything they do is a sort of Paradox to us, for they are the freest and yet the strictest People in the World: the whole Nation... being more like an Universal Regular College or Community [it must be remembered that the narrator is described as an Italian Catholic] than anything else.
This toleration produces a moment of rather grim humour when Signor Gaudentio is being examined by the Inquisition. He says that the Mezzorarrians:
Told me when I came to be better acquainted with them, I should find they were not so inhuman as to put People to Death because they were of a different Opinion from their own.
The Inquisitor asks sourly:
I hope you don’t think it unlawful to persecute, or even put to Death obstinate Hereticks who would destroy the Religion of our Forefathers and lead others into the same Damnation with themselves?
And Gaudentio very hastily disclaims the holding of any such dangerous opinion.
The Adventures of Peter Wilkins, who discovers a nation of flying Indians in the South Seas, has a little of the fantastic quality of Gulliver’s Travels on a very much lower level, but its underlying character is far more close to that of Robinson Crusoe. Its hybrid character and stiffly mechanical development prevent it from coming anywhere near either of its predecessors in quality. Peter Wilkins is, however, like Robinson Crusoe, very much the typical bourgeois hero at a rather later stage. Written in 1751, at the time when the Industrial Revolution was just taking shape, the book shows a far greater preoccupation with the details of production technique than any previous utopian romance.
After a series of adventures very much in the Crusoe style, including an escape from Africa and a period alone on a desert island, Peter Wilkins falls in with the Flying Indians. They have a stone age culture, with no knowledge of letters, metal or the measurement of time, yet most inconsistently, a fully developed feudal social organisation and a grandiose architecture. Wilkins instantly impresses them with his ‘superior knowledge’ and cleverness. This does not consist in any personal quality that he possesses: he is in fact an exceptionally stupid young man whose principal talent seems to be the capacity to father an immense family in record time. His superiority is entirely that of the bourgeois man in a feudal society, which more than compensates for his inability to fly.
At his first meeting he displays his knowledge of gunpowder and firearms: it will be seen that he has none of Swift’s scruples and is, indeed, as morally obtuse as an American politician brandishing an atom bomb. By this and similar demonstrations he quickly gains a complete ascendancy which he uses to inaugurate a full-blown bourgeois revolution from within. He introduces writing, the metallurgical arts, all sorts of mechanical techniques. Slavery and serfdom are abolished and replaced by a system of ‘free’ wage labour in which the former feudal grandees find themselves employing their former slaves as producers of commodities. An era of universal plenty and prosperity for all is promised:
‘Sir’, says I, ‘the man who has nothing to hope loses the use of one of his faculties; and if I guess right, and you live ten years longer, you shall see this State as much altered as the difference between a lask (slave) and the tree he feeds on. You shall all be possessed of that which will bring you fruits from the woods without a lask to fetch it. Those who were before your slaves shall take it as an honour to be employed by you, and at the same time shall employ others dependent on them, so as the great and small shall be under mutual obligations to each other, and both to the truly industrious artificer: and yet every one content only with what he merits.’
‘Dear son’, says my father [father-in-law], ‘those will be glorious days indeed!’
Glorious days indeed! By its very simplicity this book marks a turning point. It is both the first utopia in which we can see the forces of change at work and the last which discovers in the bourgeois order the road to Utopia. At the time of its composition the Bourgeois Revolution had prepared the way for large-scale capitalist production, which in turn created a new class and contradictions which could only be resolved by the supersession of bourgeois society. All future utopias reflect, in one way or another, the contradiction and conflict within the new society.
1. Of this book Anthony Wood writes: ‘This book... was censured to be as vain as the opinion of Copernicus, or the strange discourses of the Antipodes when first heard of. Yet since by a more inquisitive search in unravelling those intricacies, men of solid judgements have since found out a way to pick up that which may add a very considerable knowledge and advantage to posterity. Among which Dr Wilkins, sometimes Bishop of Chester, composed by hints thence given (as ‘tis thought) a learned piece called A Discovery of a New World in the Moon (Athenæ Oxonienses, 1691).
2. The Harleian Miscellany is a collection of material from the library of the Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer that was collated and edited by Samuel Johnson and William Oldys during 1744-53 on behalf of the publisher Thomas Osborne. Its subtitle was A Collection of Scarce, Curious, And Entertaining Pamphlets And Tracts, as well In Manuscript As In Print, Found In The Late Earl Of Oxford’s Library, Interspersed With Historical, Political, And Critical Notes. It was originally published in eight volumes; a second edition of 12 volumes was published in 1808 – MIA.
3. But see Part III, Chapter III for Nevile’s The Isle of Pines.