The English Utopia. A L Morton 1952
I have lived to see thirty millions of people indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice, their king, led in triumph and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects. And now methinks I see the ardour of liberty catching and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and science. – Dr Price, A Sermon Preached Before the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain, 1789
In England the machines are like men and the men like machines. – Heine
Between Dr Price’s sermon and Heine’s observation lies a decisive phase in the development of capitalism and a whole world of extravagant hopes and correspondingly extravagant unbounded despairs. The French Revolution was to free men from political tyranny and usher in an age when the exercise of reason would open the road to Utopia. The machine was to increase national prosperity boundlessly and free men from the curse laid upon Adam at the Fall, from the iron law that decreed that however long and hard they worked they could produce little more than was needed to keep them alive. In 1789 the burden seemed about to be lifted from the shoulder and it was felt that nothing was required of man but to straighten his back and march straight into an earthly paradise.
Such expectations were not new, least of all in England. We have already seen something like them in the seventeenth century, when the English Revolution seemed to be a preliminary to the Millennium, [1] but there were important new features in 1789 which have to be taken into account. The English Revolution in the seventeenth century was an isolated event: nothing at all comparable had happened elsewhere except in the Netherlands, nor was there any apparent likelihood of its repetition elsewhere. In Europe it was nowhere understood nor regarded as an example to be followed. But the French Revolution did rouse Europe: France was the acknowledged cultural leader, French literature an unrivalled model, and the philosophers of the enlightenment, who prepared the ground for the Revolution, had been read and admired all over the Continent. Feudal reaction was felt to be outmoded and a growing bourgeoisie was eager to follow the French example. It was only in England, where the dominant section of the bourgeoisie, having accomplished their revolution, had come to terms with a now largely bourgeois aristocracy, that the Revolution was unwelcome. In England a further revolution could only be of a dangerously popular character which would threaten the existing compromise. Here, too, the lesson of the Commonwealth was not quite forgotten, and Leveller was in current use as a synonym for Radical as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, while Democrat was a title only adopted by the lower orders. On the Continent, then, the Revolution was welcomed by all sections of the middle and lower classes, in England only by those who thought the work of the seventeenth century was still incomplete. But everywhere it was recognised as an event of not merely French but of international significance.
It came, too, and indeed would not have been possible otherwise, after a long period of expansion. The main outlines of the world were now securely mapped and a series of colonial wars had established French, British, Spanish and Dutch colonial empires on a world scale. In America the revolt of the colonists had just ended by the establishment in the United States of the first bourgeois republic. Alongside the growth of world trade and exploration was a corresponding growth of the productive forces, most marked in England, where, by 1789, what we now call the Industrial Revolution was already making rapid headway, but marked enough elsewhere for the bourgeoisie to be acquiring a sense of strength frustrated by the bonds of a degenerate feudalism. Economic grievances of a kind which, though present, remained in the background of the English Revolution, or only came to the front at a later stage, were stressed from the beginning in the Cahiers de Doléances, the statements of demands which preceded the meeting of the States General.
For these and other reasons the French Revolution was more avowedly political, more unmistakably a class struggle, than any that had gone before. The Revolution in England had worn a mask of religion: in Holland and America there was the element of national liberation to confuse both contemporaries and the historian. So persistent and so convenient has been this fog that it is only now beginning to clear and the Marxist view that all these were bourgeois revolutions to win acceptance. In the case of France such confusion is less possible. The French Revolution appeared from the start as a struggle of the bourgeoisie, with the peasants and the unpropertied masses of the towns as their allies, against a feudal regime. It was the spectre of the class struggle that terrified all sections of the propertied in England. The words ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ meant quite different things to those who used and to those who heard them. For the first, Equality meant the abolition of those feudal restrictions which gave special privileges to a few, and Liberty the abolition of everything which hindered the free accumulation of capital; for the latter, they meant security and equality of condition. The time quickly came when they demanded that their interpretation should prevail.
If the hopes and speculations of the time can be summed up in a single word that word is Reason. To the bar of Reason everything was brought: kingship, religion, laws, customs and beliefs – whatever could not account rationally for itself was unhesitatingly condemned. In Reason was the key to Utopia, for if only the ideal society could be discovered and clearly demonstrated to be reasonable no one could seriously oppose it. ‘Truth’, wrote Blake, ‘can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.’ A standpoint that 150 years earlier had been peculiar to a few individuals like Hartlib now became the universal dogma. That Reason itself had to be examined, that while, for example, it has seemed reasonable to the capitalist that all men should be free to exploit or be exploited, this was by no means so clear to the worker, was something still to be understood.
At this point all that seemed necessary was to sweep away certain negative restraints – monarchy, priestcraft, ignorance – by which men were coerced or deluded into denying Reason. Once this was done the rest followed easily. The doctrine of human perfectibility might be absurd enough in some of the forms it took, yet it contained the fundamental truth that human nature is not something absolute and unchanging but is itself the product of human life and the actual conditions under which that life is carried on. An unending prospect opened out, and here, I think, is the new feature that marks the utopian speculation of this age. Earlier utopias conceived a perfect commonwealth finished in all its parts and therefore eternally fixed. Now, progress was not merely the road to Utopia, it existed within Utopia, which, instead of having a geography, now has a history and a climate. It is not surprising that the two great utopian writers of the age are two of its greatest poets, Blake and Shelley.
First, however, something must be said about an extremely prosaic figure, William Godwin, whose principal work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, though not strictly a utopia in the sense in which I have defined it for the purpose of this book, cannot be passed over. Not only was its influence immense, but it does concentrate all the typical ideas of the time into a single work permeated with utopian feeling. So representative was it that for years after its publication the phrase the Modern Philosophy was always taken as referring to Godwin and his followers.
Undoubtedly the French Revolution supplied the impetus for Godwin’s thought, yet he disliked and distrusted all revolutions, preferring to rely on a vaguely formulated desire for change, which, he supposed, would be produced by the propagation of his ideas. Here we encounter the basic contradiction: man is moulded by his environment, that is, mainly, by the society in which he lives. But society can only be changed by man, and how is this unchanged man to change society or even to imagine or desire such a change? It is one of those familiar chicken and egg paradoxes which are in fact insoluble in terms of mechanical materialism. Only when seen dialectically is the contradiction resolved, when we look not at man as an individual in isolation but at man as a member of a class, and see that it is in the conflict of classes that both man and society are transformed. This Godwin never understood, and his thought is in consequence academic and harmless. This no doubt is why he was never interfered with during whole period of the anti-Jacobin terror. There is much in his work that is courageous and clear-headed, but the total effect is negative.
Just as he did not believe in revolution as a means of reaching Utopia, he saw Utopia itself mainly as an absence of the things he disliked. Government was to be reduced to a minimum, society to consist of a loose federation of semi-autonomous communes. This was indeed a feature of many of the utopian writers of this and the succeeding period. Owen’s parallelograms, Fourier’s phalanxes and Spence’s parishes all illustrate the tendency, which can even be traced back to Winstanley the Digger. All these utopias spring in some part from the disillusion of the masses at the progress and outcome of the bourgeois revolution, and one of the features of that revolution is the expropriation of the peasantry and the destruction of the feudal village commune. The parish or commune ceases to be the frame inside which the producer functions: he is herded into towns and factories, away from his ‘knowen and accustomed houses’. The first effects of the division of labour are hideously apparent. So the utopian writers voice the dream of a village commune restored on a higher plane, without the presence of a frequently tyrannical feudal master, and making use of the new technical and scientific knowledge to secure a standard of living impossible in the Middle Ages. Closely connected with this is the tendency, new at this time, with the significant exception of the Diggers, to transfer utopian fantasy into brick and mortar utopian colonies.
Within the parish, Godwin argued, little more would be needed than the force of public opinion which would condemn all anti-social acts as offences against reason. If wars were unavoidable the armed nation would make a professional army unnecessary: here he is in line with all the radical opinion of the time. Freedom meant only the absence of any restraint upon the individual, the assumption being that the individual would always wish to do what was reasonable and therefore in the public interest. This general principle lies behind Godwin’s very sketchy economic proposals. All men ought to be equal, none ought to enjoy a superfluity while others were in want. Yet equally it is an offence against the idea of liberty to enforce equality or to deprive anyone of his property. Property must remain sacred in order that men may exercise reason in disposing of it. That there is a difference in kind between the wealth a man himself creates and that which he acquires by exploiting the labour of others is outside Godwin’s conception: it is reason and virtue which interest him, not the mode of production.
Here his philosophic anarchism is seen at its wildest: ‘Everything understood by the term cooperation is in some sense an evil’, because all cooperation means a certain surrender of individual freedom. Godwin suggested that it might become unnecessary by the increased use of machinery, but how the production and employment of vast quantities of complicated machinery was possible without cooperation is never explained.
For Godwin and for those who based their ideas upon his philosophy, there had to be something of the miracle about change, however fervently they might deny the possibility of the miraculous. This is true above all of Godwin’s son-in-law, Shelley, whose whole writings with their ‘Kingless continents sinless as Eden’ are utopian from beginning to end. He, too, was confronted by this contradiction between man and environment and he solved it by transferring it to a superhuman plane. Man’s struggles and conflicts were the reflection on earth of a cosmic struggle between the principles of Good and Evil, in which Evil had so far had the better of things but in which Good would ultimately triumph. This Manichean philosophy can become an expression of negation and despair but it is not necessarily so. For it does at least recognise the conflict, and it may, as it did with Shelley, admit the possibility of human cooperation with one side or the other. For him the great question, unresolved at the time of his death, was of the form of this cooperation. Generally, as in Prometheus Unbound or The Masque of Anarchy, man’s part seems to be an heroic endurance of evil in the course of which both man and the universe are transformed:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory!
By this endurance man can free himself from the –
Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes
Of reasoned wrong.
– to reach Utopia in which –
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise.
Elsewhere there are signs that Shelley was moving towards a more positive attitude: if he had lived longer we cannot doubt that he would have identified himself more closely with the actual struggles then developing. There is one other aspect of Prometheus Unbound which demands comment here. The ‘crime’ of Prometheus was that of breaking the age-long impasse of primitive communism by introducing changes into the mode of production. Primitive communism might be, as the ancient myths presented it, a Golden Age, but it had to be left behind before any progress was possible. What Prometheus did was to place in man’s hands a choice, the possibility of advance from the realm of necessity to that of freedom. Here is at least the germ of a dialectic approach to history. Like most of his generation Shelley had no doubts as to the value of science or machinery: such doubts were still confined to those who suffered from their effects.
Another method of escape from the Godwinian dilemma was that considered by Coleridge and Southey. Suppose that a new environment could be created artificially on a small scale, in which a few individuals might be transformed, could not these in turn react upon the world at large and so effect, in time, a universal change? Thus was born the scheme for a Pantisocracy, the first, perhaps, of all the attempts to realise Utopia as a model commonwealth. America, where a revolution had just been successful, was then a magnet for all radicals, a land of freedom and justice whose defects (which Cobbett and Paine were to discover) were hardly visible to the eye of faith on the other side of the Atlantic. Here was land for the taking, and no kings, priests or feudal lords to prevent the attainment of perfection. So the Pantisocrats planned their settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna and Southey wrote to his brother in 1794:
We preached Pantisocracy and Aspheterism everywhere. These, Tom, are two new words, the first signifying the equal government of all, and the other the generalisation of individual property.
The scheme foundered, partly because of Southey’s already ingrained tendency to rat, but mainly for the reason which has made all such ‘pocket editions of the New Jerusalem’ at the worst fiascos and at the best curiosities. Before such a community could be established a considerable amount of capital had to be collected – and the owners of capital have seldom been interested in Utopia. Utopian colonies have usually been abortive because the necessary capital could not be found, or have failed to prosper because they have had to start with a capital hopelessly inadequate. In this case, the modest proposed capital of £125 a head turned out to be quite unprocurable.
In reality, the scheme was an attempt to avoid rather than to solve the dilemma. Pantisocracy, like all attempts to found a model commonwealth, was largely the result of an impulse of flight, not only from immediate repression, but from the need to fight in the world as it is and to transform it. There is always an element of sell-deceit in the belief that eventually the utopians will return to transform the world from the outside. The decision to retreat to the Susquehanna was the first step on the road that ended for Coleridge in a morass of admittedly excellent table talk and for Southey with the Poet Laureateship and a place on the staff of the Quarterly Review.
Like so many radical writers of this time Coleridge shared with Blake the heritage of dissenting Humanism. The great difference between them was that Blake, unlike Coleridge, was apprenticed to a manual trade and followed it all his life. It is this that gives his thought an actuality unusual in English poetry. In the so-called Prophetic Books, which, as will be seen, are utopian from end to end, symbol is piled upon symbol, mythical figures divide and unite till the mind refuses to follow their mutations, but at their wildest these Books have an earthiness which derives from the actual conditions of life in Blake’s time. And the man who, having spent a lifetime compiling a vast series of such Prophetic Books could write –
Prophets in the modern sense of the word have never existed... Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing will happen, let you do what you will
– was clearly no crazy visionary.
Blake’s father, a Swedenborgian hosier of London, apprenticed his son to a leading engraver, and Blake is one of the great English masters of the craft of engraving on metal. When the French Revolution broke out he was just thirty but had not yet written any of his important poems. The Revolution influenced him profoundly. In 1789 appeared the first of a series of rhapsodic poems with such titles as The French Revolution, A Song of Liberty, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America and Europe. In all these, though they are written in Blake’s peculiar symbolic manner, the basic ideas are those of the radical circle in which he moved, a circle in which Paine rather than Godwin was the dominating influence. There is a simple delight in the overthrow of tyranny and a belief in the opening of a new age for France and the world, there is also, especially in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a dialectic unique at this date.
Soon, however, three things happened. First, there was the bitter repression that broke up the London Corresponding Society, drove Paine into exile and made the open expression of radical views near to impossible for twenty years. On the title page of a book attacking Paine, Blake wrote:
To defend the Bible in this year of 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without control.
In this atmosphere of repression and censorship Blake went underground, his writing becoming progressively vaguer, his myths continually more involved.
But it was not only the censorship which oppressed him. The French Revolution followed its course, with the big bourgeoisie more and more firmly in control behind a military dictatorship. After Thermidor the Republic degenerated into the Directory, the Directory into the Empire. It was no longer possible to see the clear issue between freedom and tyranny, the bright hopes of 1789 were evidently not being fulfilled. Blake, like many more, turned away from politics in the narrow sense, not losing faith but seeing that the struggle was of a different and far more complicated character than he had once supposed. So, in 1809, he writes:
I am really sorry to see my Countrymen trouble themselves about politics... Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something Else besides Human Life.
The third thing was happening in England. Here, under the stimulus of war, capitalism was advancing at an unprecedented pace. The last peasantry were being expropriated by the Enclosures, the long death of the hand-workers was beginning, everywhere sprang up the Satanic Mills. Oppression was changing its face, and Blake was one of the first to recognise a new enemy. Paraphrasing Milton he might have said that new capitalist was but old baron writ large. And the priest of the old school, preaching hell fire was but a child to Parson Malthus, the bastard science of whose ‘principle of population’ seemed to doom the vast majority of the human race to perpetual and perpetually increasing misery. It is the sense of these new events that makes Blake’s later poetry unique.
First, he turned his dialectic upon the mechanical materialism which he recognised as the doctrine of capitalism in this phase. Godwin, like most other people, still saw and thought in terms of the sovereign individual, without ties and without environment, a view which is the social counterpart of eighteenth-century mechanical atomism. Blake hated and attacked this atomism for exactly the same reason as he attacked the fashionable engravers who reduced everything to ‘Unorganised Blots and Blurs’, to ‘dots and lozenges’, and himself insisted on the primacy of line. In defending line Blake was implicitly defending the belief that the part cannot exist except in relation to the whole, the individual except in relation to the class of which he is a member. [2]
It is in this context that Blake’s attitude to Locke, Newton and Voltaire, to all the thinkers of the enlightenment, must be understood. He condemned them not because they were rational but because they were mechanical, yet he saw in their mechanical materialism something which, while it was being used to enslave humanity, had within itself also a potentially liberating force:
Mock on, Mock on Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, Mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a Gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.
The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of light
Are sands upon the Red sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
Satanic wheels, man destroying Jerusalem and building Babylon – this for Blake is the fruit of reason uncontrolled, the reason which placed laissez faire upon its altar and proclaimed the right of every (rich) man to do what he would with his own. Jerusalem, the dominating symbol of all the later Prophetic Books, is Blake’s Utopia. Albion – England or the world or man himself – is in a state of perpetual transformation: corresponding to every part of it there is a utopian reality:
The fields from Islington to Marylebone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood,
Were builded over with pillars of gold,
And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.
Albion could become Jerusalem, but it could also become Babylon, the wilderness of squalor and exploitation which he saw the rulers of England creating around him. Man had to choose what he would create, and so the world of these Prophetic Books is not only a world of continual building but a world of continual war.
Thus it is obviously impossible to give the kind of picture of Blake’s Utopia that can be given of More’s or Harrington’s. It is not an island to be discovered or a kingdom to be given laws, but a city – Jerusalem or Golgonooza – to be built. And, unlike previous Utopias, this is not established for ever after a divine or human pattern of perfection. Each building becomes the starting point for a new fall and division and the foundation of a new city. Because Blake is incapable of thinking otherwise than dialectically, history, and therefore Utopia, can never come to a conclusion.
So, for the first time, we have a Utopia reached not by abstract speculation but by the transformation through struggle of what actually exists. This is shown most clearly in the complex interaction of Blake’s symbolic figures. The building of Jerusalem, the confounding of Babylon, is the outcome of the eternal yet ever shifting conflict between Urizen – Jehovah, the creator and oppressor, the god of things as they are, and Orc, a Promethean figure, redeemer and regenerator, who elsewhere stands for fire and for revolutionary terror. Blake sees the conflict as fought simultaneously on a number of planes, as a conflict of cosmic forces, but no less as a conflict in society and in the minds of men. Yet this is not a mechanical clash of right and wrong. It is a dialectical interpenetration, a conflict of iron (Urizen represents the ‘iron law of wages’, Malthus’ ‘principle of population’, the new iron machinery of factory production) and fire. Orc is consumer as well as liberator, and Los, another Promethean fire symbol, stands elsewhere for metallurgy, the new transforming technique of the age, in which fire and iron are creatively brought together. Jerusalem is to be the outcome of Orc’s struggle, but precisely of Orc’s struggle to transform Urizen, who represents the material world as well as its creator: iron is none the less iron because it becomes molten.
And yet, for all the hundreds of pages in which this theme is elaborated, Jerusalem remains an abstraction, veiled in a fog of words. Blake was faced with a problem he could never solve. The new world of smoke and wheels and misery, which it is his peculiar importance to have been the first to grasp imaginatively as a whole, left him bewildered and hopeless. In this, as in other respects, his special position as a free craftsman was both his strength and his weakness. He saw that there must be a solution but too few terms of the equation were given for him to be able to find it, so all the Prophetic Books are full of confused battles that never come to a climax and of the building of fabulous cities only that they may be destroyed. In one sense this is because Blake knew that history never ends: but in another because he could not clearly see the next step. Like Shelley, he was a great utopian whose utopia never quite managed to get itself written.
This section must conclude with some account of another dissenting radical, contemporary with Blake and the creator of a Utopia of a much more familiar pattern. Thomas Spence was born in Newcastle in 1750 of poor Scottish parents who were Glassites, members of a sect which advocated a community of goods. At the age of twenty-five Spence became notorious through a paper read before the Newcastle Philosophical Society on the parochial ownership of land, henceforth to be the main point in his political programme. He was expelled from the Society, was victimised and left for London, where he lived as a teacher, lecturer and radical bookseller. Like many tradesmen of the time he coined tokens for small change: unlike most of them his tokens often had a sharp political point. One, depicting a man hanging from a gallows, has the inscription ‘The End of Pitt’.
Holding views of a definitely socialist kind, which, unlike many early socialists, he did all he could to present to the working class, it is not surprising that he was persecuted by the authorities, being imprisoned in 1793 and again in 1794, 1798 and 1801. For a long time his views made little headway, but shortly before his death (1814) the Society of Spencean Philanthropists was formed, which had a short period of political importance in connection with the Spa Field Riots (1816) and the Cato Street Conspiracy (1820).
Spence’s utopia is an exposition in fictional form of his land ownership scheme, not unlike that afterwards put forward by Henry George in Progress and Poverty. It was published in two parts. Description of Spensonia by Thomas Spence Bookseller at the Hive of Liberty, 8 Little Turnstile, High Holborn, London, appeared in 1795. It was followed in 1801 by The Constitution of Spensonia, A Country in Fairyland situated between Utopia and Oceana. This part adds little of importance to the account in the earlier volume.
Here we are told of a man who, dying, left a ship to his sons to be held in common. Each was to be paid a wage according to his status in the crew, but after this all the profits were to be divided equally. The plan worked excellently, and, when in due time the ship was wrecked on an uninhabited island, the same principle was adopted. The new country was known as the Republic of Spensonia. All land was declared public property and all citizens received shares for which they paid a rent to the community, no other taxation being levied. Houses and workshops were built at public expense. The parish was the unit of social and economic life, but a national assembly, whose meetings needed to be but short and informal, ‘takes care of their national concerns and defrays the expenses of the state, and matters of common utility, by a pound rate from each parish, without any other tax’.
Further details are given in the form of a dialogue with a visitor to Spensonia. The liberties of the citizens are guaranteed by two very characteristic ‘guardian angels’. A secret ballot (the idea of which Spence seems to have taken from Harrington) makes bribery or corruption impossible. The other ‘guardian angel’ is ‘the universal Use of Arms, guarantee of a free people’. This had long been a standing radical demand: we have seen that it was a feature of More’s Utopia and that Swift condemned the use of a standing army as a means of enslaving a people. More recently the demand had reappeared in Godwin’s Political Justice, and it was part of the programme of the London Corresponding Society of which Spence was a member.
In general, the state was of little importance compared with the parish:
The parishes build and repair houses, make roads, plant hedges and trees, and in a word do all the business of a landlord. And you have seen what sort of landlords they are. I suppose you do not meet with much to repair or improve. And it is no wonder, for a parish has many heads to contrive what ought to be done. Instead of debating about mending the state, as with you (for ours needs no mending) we employ our ingenuity nearer home, and the result of our debates are in each parish, how we shall work such a mine, drain such a fen or improve such a waste. These things we are all immediately interested in, and have each a vote in executing; and thus we all are not mere spectators in the world, but as all men ought to be, actors, and that only for our own benefit.
A passage like this looks backward to the medieval commune and forward to the withering away of the state. Spence was not an inspired writer, and Spensonia cannot be placed very high in the utopian hierarchy, but at its best it has an honesty and freshness, an atmosphere of neighbourliness, which gives the reader a feeling of real people at work in real clay which is by no means common, and which we shall not encounter again before we reach Morris’ News From Nowhere.
The French Revolution considered as a bourgeois revolution was an outstanding success, but to those who hailed it as the beginning of an epoch of universal brotherhood it was for that very reason disappointing, and some of them began to grasp this connection, as we have seen Blake doing. Long before, isolated philosophers of the enlightenment had attacked private property as the root of social evils, but such attacks had been regarded as an academic quirk. It was the positive work of the group of men whom we now call the utopian socialists to analyse the failure of the French Revolution, to inaugurate the millennium, and to propose solutions based on a new and more deep-reaching criticism of society, Engels admirably describes their starting point in his Anti-Dühring:
We saw in the introduction how the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, who paved the way for the revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that existed. A rational state, a rational society were to be established; everything that ran counter to eternal reason was to be relentlessly set aside. We saw also that in reality this eternal reason was no more than the idealised intellect of the middle class, just at that period developing into the bourgeoisie. When, therefore, the French Revolution had realised this rational society and this rational state, it became apparent that the new institutions, however rational in comparison with earlier conditions, were by no means absolutely rational. The rational state had suffered shipwreck...
The promised eternal peace had changed into an endless war of conquest. The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of being resolved in general wellbeing, had been sharpened by the abolition of guild and other privileges, which had bridged it over, and of the benevolent institutions of the church, which had mitigated its effects; the impetuous growth of industry on a capitalist basis raised the poverty and suffering of the working masses into a vital condition of society’s existence...
Trade developed more and more into swindling. The ‘fraternity’ of the revolutionary motto was realised in the envy and chicanery of the competitive struggle. Corruption took the place of violent oppression, and money replaced the sword as the chief lever of social power...
In a word, compared with the glowing promises of the Enlightenment, the social and political institutions established by the ‘victory of reason’ proved to be bitterly disillusioning caricatures. The only thing lacking was people to voice this disillusionment, and these came with the turn of the century. [3]
These people were nearly all men who had reached maturity only during the period of the Revolution. Saint-Simon, indeed, was born in 1760, but Owen and Fourier were only eighteen and seventeen when the Bastille fell, while Cabet was born in the year before that event.
The strength of all these lay in their criticism of society, their dawning sense of the fact that the masses were exploited. Their weakness came from the fact that these masses, even in England, did not yet constitute a working class in the modern sense of the term. So the regeneration of humanity could only be the work of the genius, the exceptional man imposing his will upon the herd.
The problem of social organisation [wrote Saint-Simon] must be solved for the people. The people themselves are passive and listless and must be discounted in any consideration of the question.
His Utopia was one in which the industrial bourgeoisie and the technicians, between whom he never clearly distinguished, should become the ruling class: the bourgeois revolution was to be carried to its conclusion by the enthronement of a capitalism which had somehow ceased to exploit and a capitalist class that had somehow become altruistic. The general picture is very similar to some of HG Wells’ forecasts, or to what it was fashionable a few years ago to call the Managerial Revolution.
If Fourier, with his grandiose schemes for a world covered with a network of loosely-related phalanxes, is more in line with the kind of utopian speculation to which we have grown accustomed, he presents his schemes with a background of riotous imagination compared to which the Arabian Nights is sober realism. Nevertheless, there are many important positive aspects, especially in his conception of man as a many-sided being who had to be developed in all directions. He wished to end both the excessive division of labour which was making the worker, in Marx’s phrase, ‘part of a detail machine’, and the division created by capitalism between town and country which was equally disastrous for both. And while, like all the utopians, he believed that man could be moulded by his environment, he also understood that society cannot be arbitrarily shaped without taking into account the character of man at any given time. It is in his broad fundamental ideas that Fourier is greatest: in applying them he involves himself in a tangle of metaphysical absurdities which often blind us to the importance of what he is saying.
It was in England that the development of capitalism and of the working class was most rapid, and in England, and with Owen, utopian socialism reached its highest point. Owen was first of all a successful capitalist, at a period when the capitalist was still the actual organiser of production: he knew from the inside the new machines and factories, he had a close daily contact with the industrial workers. It was this practical knowledge, allied to and transforming the theoretical outlook which he shared with the other utopian socialists, which gave him his peculiar importance. Above all, he thought of men as living in society and not as isolated individuals.
When he spoke of men’s character being formed for them by environment, he had a social process in mind.
Any character [he wrote] from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened may be given to any community [my italics – AM], even to the world at large, by applying certain measures, which are to a great extent at the command, and under the control, or easily made so, of those who possess the government of nations.
This was not a mere theoretical idea, for it goes in no way beyond what Owen had himself proved by his work at New Lanark, or what was afterwards proved at the Owenite community at Ralahine in Ireland, the only one which met with reasonable success.
Yet the second half of the quotation is as important as the first: Owen’s appeal for a long time was to those possessing the government of nations. Like other utopian socialists he saw neither the fact nor the role of the class struggle and believed that the ruling class were as open to conviction and as ready to act on the dictates of reason as he was himself. ‘No obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance’, he wrote in 1816.
Owen’s experiences at New Lanark, where he reduced hours, increased wages, provided lavish social services and still found it possible to produce substantial profits, convinced him that the productive forces had developed to such a degree that the possibility of universal plenty should be obvious to all. In a generation a vast accumulation of wealth had taken place and ‘this new power was the creation of the working class’. Yet the working class alone enjoyed none of the benefits, and Owen, hitherto an exceptionally enlightened and philanthropic manufacturer, now grasped the point that this was the result of exploitation, that the workers could only become prosperous if this exploitation were brought to an end. At this stage the readiness of the ruling class to listen to reason quickly ended, and Owen found that it was to the workers he must turn if he wanted to be heard.
The outcome of Owen’s New Lanark experiences was his plan for the establishment of ‘Villages of Cooperation’. At the beginning these were to be set up by the government as a method of providing work for the unemployed. Gradually, as he realised that the authorities would never adopt his plan, and with his increasing contact with the workers, among whom it was greeted with enthusiasm, the plan transformed itself in his mind into something far more ambitious. The Villages, in which industry and agriculture were to be combined, must be ‘founded on the principle of united labour, expenditure and property, and equal privileges’. Presently he conceived the idea that a network of such Villages, expanding and prospering as he was convinced they must, and giving each other mutual support, would cover the whole country and replace the existing competitive system with one based on the principle of cooperation. Much of the rest of his life was spent in unsuccessful attempts to establish such communities: the result was something of which neither he, nor anyone else at this time, dreamed, the vast Cooperative movement and the idea of the Cooperative Commonwealth with which it is associated.
Up till 1820 he had been an exceptionally successful man of business, but, had his career ended then, he would hardly be remembered today. In the later part of his life few of his practical ventures ended without disaster, but he played a decisive part in the beginnings of almost every valuable development of the age. His share in the growth of the trade-union and Cooperative movements was only more important than his work for factory legislation and for educational progress.
Above all, though he was not the first socialist, he was the man through whom socialism first left the study and gripped the masses. It is true of course that Owen’s socialism was of a limited character. He did not see the workers as a creative force, but only as a means through which his own regenerating ideas could operate: to the end he retained a good deal of the character of the enlightened master who wished to guide and control the working-class movement as he had guided and controlled his employees at New Lanark. Nor did he ever lose the belief that socialism could be brought about by the formation of model cooperative communities which would eliminate competition by the example of their success. The story of the Owenite communities and of the reasons for their failure can have no place in this book, nor are they what made Owen a great historical landmark. His real work was to give a new object and direction to the British working-class movement, which carried it beyond the limited radicalism of Cobbett and his associates, and, very quickly, beyond Owen himself. Owen attracted a host of disciples, many of whom played important parts in the Chartist and other movements.
One of these disciples was a young man called John Goodwin (or, as he later preferred to call himself, Goodwyn) Barmby. Barmby was born in 1820 at the Suffolk village of Yoxford, where his father was an attorney. He was intended for the church, but when he was 14 his father died and he appears to have taken his education in hand himself. At any rate he did not attend any school and speaks of a boyhood spent in roaming the fields and reading poetry. His reading, if a little unusual, was certainly wide. In 1837 he went to London, where he must have moved in Owenite and radical circles, since we find him, on his return to Suffolk, entering wholeheartedly into the Chartist movement. During 1839 the local press contains a number of reports of meetings addressed by him, both in Ipswich, which was the main centre of Chartist activity, and in villages in various parts of East Suffolk. There are also numerous letters from him, on all sorts of subjects from the Repeal of the Union to Church Bells, into all of which the topic of Chartism is somehow introduced.
Early in 1840 he visited Paris, where he claims that ‘at a certain interview at this time with a celebrated Frenchman, he was the first to pronounce the now famous name of Communism’. Whether or not this claim to absolute priority can be substantiated, there is no doubt, I think, that Barmby was the first to adopt the name Communist for any organisation in England. On his return to London in 1841 he founded the Communist Propaganda Society, later called the Universal Communitarian Association. He was not free from the weakness common to the utopian socialists of picturing themselves as saviours of mankind, and this is shown by his adoption of 1841 as Year One of the new Communist Calendar, or by the tone of a letter, written inside the cover of a copy of the Association’s journal, The Educational Circular and Communist Apostle, now in Ipswich Public Library, which is subscribed:
Barmby, President in Chief
To Commoner T Glide
Barmby at this date was still less than twenty-one!
We are not told the name of the ‘famous Frenchman’, but the evidence available suggests that it may have been Cabet, whom Barmby probably met in London in 1838, was certainly on good terms with in Paris in 1841, and with whom he afterwards corresponded. Cabet in 1840 had just made a sensation with his utopian romance Un voyage en Icarie, which was to give him for a few years a position in the French working-class movement comparable to that held by Owen somewhat earlier in England. Cabet had taken part in the Revolution of 1830 but was presently banished to England as an uncomfortably radical politician. Here he became acquainted with Owen and with the writings of More and Harrington. Under this stimulus he began a study of utopian literature which led him to the writing of Un voyage en Icarie, a work rather eclectic than original. Its enthusiasm and apparent practicability, which made it boundlessly popular in France a century ago, cannot now hide the pomposity and the poverty of invention which make Icaria surely the drabbest Utopia between Nova Solyma and Bellamy’s Boston.
What is important in it is not the utopian details but the fact that Cabet tried to complete the work of the French Revolution by giving a new content to the old slogans. In Icaria equality means not merely equality before the law but economic equality worked out to a mechanical nicety which would be terrifying if it could be taken seriously. Everyone is to live in the same kind of house, to eat the same food in communal restaurants, to work the same number of hours, and the same hours, every day, and to wear the uniform proper to his or her age, calling and circumstance. On this basis, Icaria is a completely democratic republic:
It is the Republic or Community which alone is the owner of everything, which organises the workers, and causes the factories and storehouses to be built, which sees that the land is tilled, that houses are built and that all the objects necessary for feeding, clothing and housing each family and each citizen are provided.
Cabet intended his book only as a theoretical essay in the manner of More, but he was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm with which it was received and forced reluctantly into the leadership of a mass movement which hoped to regenerate France and the world by setting up Icarian communities in America. Nobody on a similar mission ever set out with such hopes and such support as the first body of colonists who left for Texas in 1847. The hopes were disappointed, the support dwindled rapidly after 1848, every kind of hardship and misfortune was encountered, but up to a point the attempt succeeded. Despite all external difficulties and a series of internal feuds and secessions, for which Cabet himself was certainly partly to blame, the Icarian communities survived for 50 years, a length of life without parallel in the history of utopian colonies.
Barmby was certainly strongly influenced by Cabet at this stage, and when he spoke of Communism he meant something like Icarian communities with the addition of a rather Shelleyan pantheism. He now began to turn his mind increasingly towards the possibility of founding such a community. He did not abandon Chartism – in 1841 he was elected as the Suffolk delegate to the Convention and later in the same year was adopted by the Ipswich Chartists as their prospective Parliamentary candidate – but Chartism, however excellent in itself as an immediate step, began to seem a small matter to one who dreamed of the transformation of the entire human race.
Neither democracy or aristocracy [he wrote a little later] have anything to do with Communism. They are party terms for the present. In future Governmental politics will be succeeded by industrial administration.
Meanwhile he seems to have joined for a short time the Alcott House Concordium, founded on Ham Common by James Pierrepont Greaves. When this broke up (largely because the members objected to a diet of raw vegetables during the winter months) he was attracted by the efforts of the Tropical Emigration Society to establish a settlement in Venezuela [4] and there was a project for a Communitorium at Hanwell and another on the island of Sark. Another venture was the publication, in January 1842, of a magazine, The Promethean. The name is significant both of Barmby’s debt to Shelley and more particularly because of the place occupied by Prometheus in the radical thought of the time. Prometheus was the redeemer of man through knowledge, the hero who braved the wrath of obscurantists and gods to bring man his heritage that was deliberately withheld. Like Owen, Barmby believed that there was no obstacle but ignorance.
The four issues of The Promethean contain articles by Barmby on a quite extraordinary variety of subjects. Besides one series on Communism and another on Industrial Organisation, there is An Essay Towards Philanthropic Philology, advocating a universal language, The Amelioration of Climature in Communalisation, on the effect of human activity on climate and the prospect of climate control in the future, and Past, Present and Future Chronology: An Historic Introduction to the Communist Calendar.
The Promethean was not a success, but the Communitarian Association seems to have continued to exist on a small scale and at some point was reconstituted as the Communist Church. About this time, and possibly at Ham Common, Barmby met a young man of his own age, Thomas Frost, whose Forty Years’ Recollections (1880) is the main authority for the next phase of his career. Frost describes Barmby as ‘a young man of gentlemanly manners and a soft, persuasive voice, wearing his light brown hair parted in the middle after the fashion of the Concordist brethren, and a collar and tie à la Byron’. He found Barmby ‘conversant with the whole range of Utopian literature’, and he ‘blended with the Communistic theory of society the pantheistic views of Spinoza, of which Shelley is in this country the best known exponent’.
The two agreed to revive The Communist Chronicle as a penny weekly, and it was published by Hetherington. It was in The Communist Chronicle that Barmby’s utopian romance The Book of Platonopolis appeared as a serial. Unless a file of the Chronicle remains hidden in some library, this utopia appears to be completely lost, but it is probable that a very fair idea of its character and contents is given in Frost’s summary:
This was a vision of the future, a dream of the rehabilitation of the earth and of humanity; of Communisteries built of marble and porphyry, in which the commoners dine off gold and silver plate, in banqueting-halls furnished with the most exquisite productions of the painter and sculptor, and enlivened with music; where the steam cars carry them from one place to another as often as they desire a change of residence, or, if they wish to vary the mode of travelling, balloons and aerial ships are ready to transport them through the air; where, in short, all that has been imagined by Plato, More, Bacon and Campanella is reproduced, and combined with all that modern science has effected or essayed for lessening human toil or promoting human enjoyment.
If we add to this account the list of forty-four ‘Societarian Wants’ published in the first issue of The Promethean, of which the first ten are –
1. Community of sentiment, labour and property.
2. Abbreviation of manual labour by machinery.
3. Organisation of industry in general and particular functions.
4. Unitary architecture of habitation.
5. The marriage of the city and the country.
6. Economy through combination in domestics.
7. Love through universality in ecclesiastics.
8. Order through justice or abstract mathematics in politics.
9. Medicinally prepared diet.
10. Common or contemporaneous consumption of food.
– and compare all this with the arrangements of Cabet’s Icaria, we need not perhaps too much regret the disappearance of The Book of Platonopolis.
Proposals for a Communitorium on the island of Sark and on the outskirts of London came to nothing and there was a growing friction. Of this we have only Frost’s account, but it would appear that while he wished to develop The Communist Chronicle as a common organ for all existing socialist and communist groups, Barmby wanted it to serve the ends of his Communist Church. By about 1845 a break took place which quickly killed both Chronicle and a Communist Journal which Frost attempted to run in competition with it.
The remainder of Barmby’s story can be told more briefly. The year 1848 found him once more in Paris, but soon after this he took a new turn, shedding his utopian communism to become a Unitarian minister. He remained politically active, however, became a member of the Council of Mazzini’s International League and took part in the movements in defence of Polish, Italian and Hungarian liberation. In 1867, while Unitarian minister at Wakefield, he organised a big meeting to demand parliamentary reform. In 1879 his health broke down and he returned to Yoxford where he died in 1881.
But in fact the significant part of his career ended in the Chartist 1840s, for those years marked also the ending of utopian socialism in England. In one sense the very development of the working-class movement which culminated in Chartism made it superfluous: utopianism is a characteristic of an immature working class. But it is also true that for these few years the general growth of the movement also stimulated utopianism, so that it went out like a rocket, in a blaze of splendour. It was in these years, the years from Owen’s Queenwood (1839) to O'Connor’s Land Scheme (c1846), that the imagination of the masses was most easily stirred. Chartism did not prevent thousands from seeking parallel ways of release from their sufferings, indeed, it was from this desire for release, this stirring of the imagination that Chartism in turn drew much of its vitality. [5]
After 1848 circumstances changed abruptly. The political defeat of Chartism disappointed many. The ending of the years of slump and crisis and the opening of the great capitalist boom of the mid-century set the working-class movement on a new and more prosaic course. The discovery of the American and Australian gold fields and rapid advance in land and sea transport led to an epoch of large-scale emigration in which the kind of energy that had gone into the establishment of Owenite or Icarian communities now spent itself on more individual pioneering in the newly-opened territories. In the light of this, Barmby’s whole career, and not least his abandonment of utopianism after 1848, seems to have a significance out of all proportion to his intrinsic importance.
It is difficult not to see him as a slightly comic figure, this earnest young man so determinedly setting out to be the saviour of mankind. Frost says of him:
It was the misfortune of those who accepted him for their leader that they never knew the goal to which he was leading them. Viewing his erratic flights in the past by the light of his career in later years it would seem that, while endeavouring to form a church which should be ‘the Sacred Future of Society’, he was really still groping towards the light and seeking for something which eluded him.
Erratic and pretentious though he was, Barmby had energy and imagination and a contact with the mainstream of the mass movement which he never entirely lost. Like all the utopians he knew both what was wrong and what was needed. The something that eluded him was the knowledge of how to bridge the gap between what existed and the world he desired. Yet at this very time Chartism was helping Marx to perfect his science of the movement of society: 1848 was not only the year of the defeat of Chartism, it was also the Year of Revolutions and of The Communist Manifesto.
After Chartism, the Year of Revolutions and The Communist Manifesto the old style utopias should have come to an abrupt end. It should have been clear that the practical questions now were, how would the new socialist society emerge from existing society, and, in accordance with its origin and the history of its growth, what were its characteristics likely to be? But in fact it was more than a quarter of a century before scientific socialism began to acquire a mass basis and the gap between Barmby and Bellamy, which corresponds also to the classic period of expanding British capitalism, is conveniently occupied with two utopias which are concerned not with these fundamental questions but with incidental aspects of nineteenth-century bourgeois society considered as a going concern.
The Coming Race by Lord Lytton (1870) and Erewhon by Samuel Butler (1872) are books so different in spirit and temper that it is hard to realise that their publication was almost simultaneous, but they have this much in common: both are concerned with the superstructure of society, the basis is never questioned or even explained. Both books deal, in their different ways, with such questions as religion, marriage and sex relations, education, crime and punishment, and, especially, with the effects of machinery and the development of science on human happiness. It is characteristic of both that questions are put rather than answered: Butler’s satire is so involved that in the end his meaning is often left obscure, while Lytton’s hero, though admiring the underground Utopia which he discovers, suffers so severely from a ‘discouragement’, rather like that which strikes down the ‘short lived’ in Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, that he is delighted in the end to return to the world from which he came.
Lytton, dandy, politician and best-selling Victorian novelist, young radical and old Tory, was the last of that series of brilliant young men whom Godwin drew around him. Written at the very end of his life, and thirty-five years after the death of Godwin, The Coming Race has hardly a page in which Godwin’s influence cannot be traced, though there is evidence also of a study both of the utopian socialists and the classical utopian writers like More and Bacon. All this is blended with Lytton’s aristocratic and Tory outlook, though it is also true that there was much in Godwin’s abstract intellectualism that was not incompatible with Toryism by 1870. Lytton’s ambiguous standpoint can be illustrated by a passage in which the hero (an American) is made to extol his native land after the style of Swift among the Houyhnhnms:
I touched but slightly, though indulgently, on the antiquated and decaying institutions of Europe, in order to expatiate on the present grandeur and prospective pre-eminence of that glorious American Republic, in which Europe enviously seeks its model and tremblingly foresees its doom... dwelling on the excellence of democratic institutions, their promotion of tranquil happiness by the government of party, and the mode in which they diffused such happiness throughout the community by preferring, for the exercise of power and the acquisition of honours, the lowliest citizens in point of property, education and character. Fortunately recollecting the peroration of a speech, on the purifying influences of American democracy, made by a certain eloquent senator (for whose vote in the Senate a Railway Company, to which my two brothers belonged, had just paid 20,000 dollars), I wound up by repeating its glowing predictions of the magnificent future that smiled upon mankind – when the flag of freedom should float over an entire continent, and two hundred millions of intelligent citizens, accustomed from infancy to the daily use of revolvers, should apply to a cowering universe the doctrine of the Patriot Monroe.
In part such a passage reflects the hatred of the average English Tory for American or any other democracy, a hatred particularly acute in the years just after the Civil War, and Lytton in The Coming Race certainly takes every opportunity to attack and disparage democracy as the worst possible form of government. But it reflects also the great change that had taken place since Blake, Paine and Coleridge had hailed the revolutionary democracy of America as a new dispensation, when, for a few years, America and Utopia had seemed to be almost identical. The visit of Dickens to America and the publication of his Martin Chuzzlewit (1843) marks an awareness of the corruption of that democracy accompanying the growth of capitalism, and by 1870 the beginnings of monopoly and a whole series of resounding scandals were exposing features of the American way of life which have since become more unpleasantly obvious. It did not need a Tory to see that the ‘pure’ bourgeois democracy of the United States could become every bit as corrupt and predatory as the varied combinations of feudal and capitalist society that existed in Europe. It was already clear that free enterprise, the enlightened exercise of reason and self-interest without the interference of kings, priests or nobility, could never produce the Utopia which had been so confidently expected from it.
Lytton, of course, could not look forward to socialism for a solution. He seems to have envisaged some form of society in which Toryism met Godwinian anarchism on the ground that in a completely patriarchal society everyone would know and accept their place as in a happy family, and that every form of government and compulsion would then become superfluous. He certainly accepted Godwin’s view that a community so organised must of necessity be small: the tribes of the Vril-ya did not often contain many more than 50,000 souls.
The story of The Coming Race is simple enough. Its rich American hero discovers a vast underground country while exploring a mine. This country is inhabited partly by the very highly civilised Vril-ya and partly by much more numerous nations in various stages of more or less democratic barbarism. The distinguishing feature of the Vril-ya, from which their name derives, is the possession of Vril, a force comparable in many ways with atomic energy, but so completely controlled that it is contained in a light staff carried by all individuals and can be used at will for any purpose of construction or destruction. It is Vril which has transformed the lives of these people, abolishing war, making government unnecessary, and, indeed, impossible, since every individual has the power, if he chooses to exercise it, to destroy the whole community in a moment. Vril also provides such a supply of energy for productive purposes that an age of plenty exists. Most work is done by elaborate machines or by Vril-operated robots, but what dirty or unpleasant work does remain is left, as in Fourier’s phalanxes, to children. Since literature and the arts have also ceased to exist to any extent, it is a little difficult to discover how the adult Vril-ya actually pass their time.
Most of the book is occupied with an account of their customs, history and beliefs: in general the result is, as I have suggested, a compost of Godwin, Owen, Fourier and Cabet: when Lytton departs from the traditional utopian features his poverty and confusion of ideas become apparent. In spite of some superficially ‘Socialist’ details his Utopia has as its basis a naively Tory capitalism, in which private ownership continues but exploitation and poverty have been ironed out, and the rich are far too gentlemanly to regard their wealth as anything but a source of rather irksome obligations. The hero’s host explains gravely:
Ana [men] like myself, who are very rich, are obliged to buy a great many things they do not require, and live on a very large scale when they might prefer to live on a small one... But we must all bear the lot assigned to us in this short passage through time that we call life. After all, what are a hundred years, more or less, to the age through which we must pass hereafter? Luckily I have one son who likes great wealth. He is a rare exception to the rule, and I own I cannot understand it.
Similarly, though an air of novelty is given to sex relations by the reversal of the roles conventionally assigned to men and women, in essentials the picture presented is no different from what might be seen in any fashionable Victorian drawing-room. The hero at a party observes:
Wherever I turned my eyes, or lent my ears, it seemed to me that the Gy (woman) was the wooing party and the An (man) the coy and reluctant one. The pretty innocent airs which the An gave himself on being thus courted, the dexterity with which he evaded direct answers to professions of attachment, or turned into jest the feathery compliments addressed to him, would have done honour to the most accomplished coquette.
The right of women in this underworld Utopia to make sexual advances brings the plot to such conclusion as it has. Two Gy-ei (seven feet high) make the most determined attempts to secure the hero, who might well have found such a situation alarming even if he had not been warned that if he gave way he would certainly be reduced to a cinder by the power of Vril in order to avoid the contamination of this super-race by inferior stock. Eventually he escapes to the surface world, thoroughly scared and full of forebodings of the time when the Vril-ya will re-emerge into the air and colonise the earth after exterminating its inhabitants.
In many ways The Coming Race is a trivial book, and its main interest is as an illustration of the way the rational radicalism of the enlightenment had become vulgarised and drained of its revolutionary content after a century of capitalist advance. Erewhon, published only two years later, though it seems at first sight a far more modern work, and though it is written on an altogether different level of sophistication, is nevertheless equally mid-Victorian in a somewhat different manner. It is a prospect of Utopia from the study window of a country rectory through the eyes of the rector’s brilliant, eccentric son. And it is one of the characteristics of the rector’s clever son that he is able to feel supremely detached while in fact remaining very much a part of his environment. Such was peculiarly the case with Samuel Butler, and it is this which gives to Erewhon its unique flavour.
The world of the more prosperous clergy into which he was born, people with good livings and ample private incomes, was in itself as isolated as it could well be. Its money did not stink: it had no visible connection with the productive process at any point: it never encountered the working class except as servants or as respectful, hat-touching rustics. And even from this world Butler set deliberately to work to detach himself.
Melchisidek [he wrote in one of his jottings] was a really happy man. He was without father, without mother and without descent. He was an incarnate bachelor. He was a born orphan. In the course of his life he quarrelled not only with his family but with every religious, scientific or literary group that came across his path.
Yet he always returned, just as the section in his Notebooks headed Rebelliousness is followed by another headed Reconciliation. He quarrelled with his family yet he never broke with them, just as his criticism of society never came to the point of questioning the basis on which the comfortable, academic middle class existed and his criticism of religion never came to the point of an atheism which would have made nonsense of their comfortable, academic ideas. He loved to shock and alarm, but never to a degree that would have made him finally unacceptable. It is perhaps characteristic that, when he had shocked his father by refusing to take Holy Orders, it was to New Zealand, then the most anglican and gentlemanly of colonies, that he agreed to go and try his hand at sheep farming. All the same it was New Zealand that gave him the distance and the sharpness that were necessary to enable him to see England in a new light. New Zealand as well as the rectory had its part in Erewhon. Butler proved a very good farmer and reacted to this pioneering life with delight. The settlement at this time was on the East coast, dominated by the Western Ranges, against which it pushed continually, trying to find ways through or more sheep pasture. Butler took an active part in this exploration, fascinated by the unknown.
Few people [he wrote in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement] believe in the existence of a moa. If one or two be yet living, they will probably be found on the West Coast, that yet unexplored region of forest which may contain sleeping princesses and gold in blocks and all sorts of good things.
This was the spirit in which Higgs, the hero of Erewhon, set out on his journey over the range.
The Utopia he discovers, Erewhon (Nowhere) is of all its kind the most difficult to classify. It is neither positive – an example to be followed, nor negative – an awful warning. It is indeed a veritable Mundus Alter et Idem, an antipodean country like and unlike our own, with its own wisdom and its own folly, different from ours but subtly complementary, so that it satirises and criticises on two or three different planes simultaneously. Its hero is at one and the same time Butler who satirises and a priggish young anglican who is the object of the satire. Erewhon and England are, as it were, the left and right foot of the same pair of boots.
Higgs, then, pushes into the mountains as Butler had done, and emerges into a country with a social structure and a cultural level very similar to our own. One immediately striking difference is the complete absence of machinery. How a society with a medieval productive technique could in other ways resemble industrial England is one of the class of questions Butler is never sufficiently interested to ask. Higgs discovers presently that the absence of machinery is not due to lack of invention but to deliberate policy. Some five hundred years before, a civil war had ended with the victory of the machine-wrecking party and the total destruction of all machinery, and since that time its manufacture or use has been prohibited under the severest penalties, penalties from which Higgs barely escaped from being in possession of a watch. All this is explained in a long section of Erewhon entitled The Book of the Machines.
Here, as usual, Butler seems to be saying a number of things at once. In part this is an attack on mechanical materialism, in which he uses his favourite method of carrying an argument to the logical point at which its absurdity becomes self-evident. In this case, starting from the argument that man is really nothing but a machine, he suggests that, if so, the machine is a potential man and may in the course of evolution become human and even superhuman:
After all then it comes to this, that the difference between the life of a man and that of a machine is one rather of degree than of kind, though differences in kind are not wanting. An animal has more provision for emergency than a machine. The machine is less versatile; its range of action is narrow; its strength and accuracy in its own sphere are superhuman, but it shows badly in a dilemma; sometimes when its normal action is disturbed, it will lose its head, and go from bad to worse like a lunatic in a raging frenzy; but here, again, we are met by the same consideration as before, namely, that the machines are still in their infancy; they are mere skeletons without muscles and flesh.
In this sense The Book of the Machines was Butler’s first shot in the war against the Darwinians, waged under the slogan of ‘creative evolution’.
This, however, is only part of the story. He argues, or the Erewhonian book he pretends to quote argues, that machines are a menace to man, that, beginning in a humble way as his servants, they are rapidly becoming his masters and may in the end be able to dispense with him:
It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well and speak never so wisely, they will always do the one or the other for our advantage, not their own, that man will always be the ruling spirit and the machine the servant... That is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master; and we have come to such a pass that, even now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines...
How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom...?
In the meantime the stoker is almost as much a cook for his engine as our own cooks are for ourselves. Consider also the pitmen and coal merchants and coal trains, and the men who drive them, and the ships that carry coals – what an army of servants do the machines thus employ! Are there not probably more men engaged in tending machinery than in tending men? Do not machines eat as it were by mannery? Are we not ourselves creating our own successors in the supremacy of the earth, daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their organisation, daily giving them greater skill and supplying more and more of that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be better than any intellect?
In all this it is not hard to see an expression of the widespread horror at the results of capitalist machine production, a horror especially widespread among intellectuals of the nineteenth century, and which Butler shared with people as different from himself and each other as Blake, Cobbett and Ruskin. But having said so much Butler remembered that first tools and then machines may also be regarded as an extension of the human body, adapting it to new purposes and enabling it to increase its control over its environment. Even under capitalism machinery has a liberating as well as an enslaving character. This argument he puts into the mouth of another Erewhonian author:
Civilisation and mechanical progress advanced hand in hand, each developing and being developed by the other, the earliest accidental use of the stick having set the ball rolling, and the prospect of advantage keeping it in motion. In fact, machines are to be regarded as the mode of development by which human organism is now especially advancing, every past invention being an addition to the resources of the human body. Even community of limbs is thus rendered possible to those who have so much community of soul as to own money enough to pay a railway fare; for a train is only a seven-leagued foot that five hundred may own at once.
Butler does not attempt to reconcile the two viewpoints, merely observing that the first writer ‘was considered to have the best of it’, and I think that the whole section reflects very exactly not only his own ambivalent attitude to industrialism but that of the Victorian bourgeoisie as a whole, the mixture of pleasure, amazement and horror at this thing they had created, with its possibilities of leisure and wealth, its actual accompaniment of squalor and misery, and the undertones of menace, relatively subdued in 1870 but never quite absent, which threatened them with destruction. [6]
All this is implied rather than stated, and, immediately, Butler seems to have felt that the Erewhonians did better without machinery. One of the things that had delighted him about New Zealand was the good health and good looks of the people there, the ‘shaggy clear-complexioned men with the rowdy hats’, and he must have compared them with the town-dwelling, machine-operating inhabitants of England. Butler saw men free and happy without machinery. What he didn’t see was that the life of the New Zealand settlers would not have been possible at all without English capital, the English market and the English machine-made goods they were able to buy with their wool. Middle class, shy and rather ungainly himself, he idealised the peasant and the aristocrat much as Yeats did a generation later. Therefore in Erewhon he created the Utopia of physical perfection:
Lastly, I should say that the people were of a physical beauty which was simply amazing. I never saw anything in the least comparable to them. The women were vigorous, and had a most majestic gait, their heads being set upon their shoulders with a grace beyond all power of expression...
The men were as handsome as the women beautiful. I have always delighted in and reverenced beauty; but I felt simply abashed in the presence of such a splendid type – a compound of all that is best in Egyptian, Greek and Italian. The children were infinite in number, and exceedingly merry; I need hardly say that they came in for their full share of the prevailing beauty.
On this basis Butler built an entertaining fantasy of topsy-turveydom in which ill health is regarded as a crime and savagely punished, while moral shortcomings are a matter for pity and careful treatment. Once again there is an ambivalence: negatively there is extremely telling satire on English criminal justice and our whole unscientific approach to crime, but behind that is a profound feeling that beauty and good health and good luck (in Erewhon misfortune is also punishable) are the supreme blessings and that men both are and ought to be rewarded for possessing them and punished for not possessing them. He certainly had a full measure of the belief of his class that if a man was poor or unfortunate it was probably his own fault.
Butler’s attitude to the conventional code prevailing in Victorian society was similar. The great, though never openly acknowledged god of Erewhon is Ydgrun (Grundy), whose worship consists in doing what the world does. Butler pokes fun at Ydgrun, who, he knows perfectly well, is as often cruel and absurd in Erewhon as in England, yet he concludes that on the whole she is the best practical guide for life and that the ‘high Ydgrundites’, that is, the cultured upper classes, ‘have got about as far as it is in the right nature of man to go’.
Take her all in all [he concludes], she was a beneficent and useful deity, who did not care how much she was denied so long as she was obeyed and feared, and who kept hundreds of thousands in those paths which make life tolerably happy, who would never have kept there otherwise, and over whom a higher and more spiritual ideal would have had no power.
Whether he is discussing religion (the Musical Banks), education (the Colleges of Unreason) or any other institution, Butler’s attitude is similar. There is direct satire, there is an indirect satire by granting to the most absurd Erewhonian institutions their special and unexpected measure of good sense, like the existence of a Chair of Worldly Wisdom in the Colleges of Unreason, and finally, when he feels that his class has been sufficiently teased and irritated, he will make amends in some way or another so that in the end they can feel that they are really good fellows and that the world would be a poorer place without them. At once bold and timid he is like a weak swimmer, forever striking out from the shore and as often heading back in panic the moment he finds he is out of his depth. His criticism is family criticism, never going far beyond what the rest of the family will regard as permissible. It is none the less well directed and entertaining and, up to a point, valuable criticism for all that.
A word should be said in conclusion about the machinery of these two books. Erewhon is almost the last of the old-style place Utopias, situated in some as yet undiscovered corner of the earth. We have seen that this was the result of the special circumstances of Butler’s life in New Zealand. As a rule, even before this, the device was wearing thin as the blank spaces on the map filled up. Henceforth new machinery was called for and Utopia was transferred either into the more or less distant future, or, as in Lytton’s book to an underground world, or even to another planet. The Coming Race is, I think, the first of the new class of utopias in this sense, just as Erewhon is among the last of the old.
1. See Part III, Chapter II.
2. Compare Morris: ‘Remember always, form before colour and outline, silhouette before modelling, not because these are of less importance, but because they can’t be right if the first are wrong.’ [William Morris, ‘Art and the Beauty of the Earth’, The Architect, 29 October 1881 and 5 November 1881, available at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1881/earth.htm > – MIA.]
3. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Part III, Section I, available at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch23.htm > – MIA.
4. Readers of Alton Locke will remember the passionate longing of its Chartist hero to settle in some tropical country, and how he did so after the collapse of Chartism.
5. This stirring of the imagination in Chartism, and its turn into Utopian forms is well illustrated by a poem written by Ernest Jones, while in prison between July 1848 and July 1850. The New World: A Democratic Poem, gives, in language not unlike that of Barmby, but with greater precision and maturity of thought, a picture of a classless world in which nature is transformed by science and man in turn transforms himself: ‘Mechanic power then ministers to health, / And lengthening leisure gladdens greatening wealth... / No fevered lands with burning plagues expire, / But draw the rain as Franklin drew the fire; / Or far to mountains guide the floating hail, / And whirl on barren rocks its harmless flail.’ Like all the Utopians of the age, Jones saw in science a liberating force, but he was already learning from the experience of Chartism and the teaching of Marx and Engels that this force could only be set in motion through the conquest of power by the working class.
6. Erewhon, though published in 1872, was probably written before the Paris Commune.