The English Utopia

A. L. MORTON

The English Utopia





To Vivien





The land where the sun shines on both sides of the hedge.– West Country Proverb

Introduction

This book is a story of two islands – the Island of Utopia and the Island of Britain. These islands have parallel histories which help to explain each other, and that is what I have tried to make them do. For Utopia is really the island which people thought or hoped or sometimes feared that the Britain of their day might presently become, and their thoughts are affected not only by the books they had read and the ideas with which they were familiar, but by what was going on in the real world about them, by the class they belonged to and by the part that class was playing and wanted to play in relation to other classes.

I have called it the English, and not the British, Utopia merely because the Utopias that have come my way have in fact been English and not Scottish, Irish or Welsh. Swift is only a partial exception to this generalisation. And I have been happy to confine myself to the Utopia of this one country because our literature is peculiarly rich in such books. This, I think, is mainly because of the very early development of bourgeois society here, and the classic form which that development took, so that English political thinkers had a peculiar pride in our history and felt a special duty to the world. This English pride sometimes takes the form of an odious smugness, and we shall discover that smugness is one of the vices which Utopia was least successful in eliminating, but sometimes it is large and generous, the desire of a man who is on to a good thing to share it with his neighbours. So here, one of the main motives of the makers of utopias is the desire to present their conceptions of democracy, of social living, of a true commonwealth, in the most popular, most acceptable way. I have “delivered my conception in a fiction, as a more mannerly way”, wrote Samuel Hartlib of his Macaria.

A second reason for the richness of the English Utopia is the simple one that England is an island. For it is always easier to imagine anything in proportion as it resembles what we are or know, and it is as an island that we always think of Utopia. The fact that an island is self-contained, finite, and may be remote, gives it just the qualities we require to set our imagination to work. True we shall find utopias underground, under the sea, surrounded by mountains in the heart of Africa or Asia, even on another planet or perhaps remote in time rather than space, nevertheless the vast majority of utopias are still to be found on islands.

The English Utopia is so vast a field that I have not often been tempted to stray beyond it. But here and there I have done so, when this seemed necessary in the interests of perspective. I could not, for example, discuss Morris properly without saying something of Bellamy, nor could the French Utopian Socialists be altogether ignored.

Similarly, I have not felt myself too strictly bound by my definition of Utopia as an imaginary country described in a work of fiction with the object of criticising existing society. Some such definition was necessary to keep my book within reasonable bounds, and it excludes from consideration both attempts to found Utopian communities and works in which the element of fiction is absent. Yet something had to be said of Godwin, Owen and Winstanley, and in some of the books I discuss the element of social criticism has been reduced to very small proportions. Samuel Butler once defined definition as “the enclosing of a wilderness of ideas within a wall of words”, and it would be a poor thing if I could not now and again turn my back on my wilderness to take a look over the wall at other men’s gardens. All the same, a discussion of such figures as Winstanley and Owen at a length at all proportionate to their importance would have turned this book into something quite different from either the thing I planned or the thing it has grown into. So I have contented myself with, in the one case, a bare reference, and, in the other, an outline cut down to the minimum, though I am fully aware that this course will satisfy nobody.

Perhaps a note on the word Utopia might be helpful. It comes from two Greek words meaning “No place” and was adopted by Sir Thomas More as the name of his ideal commonwealth. From this it has been extended to cover all imaginary countries as well as books written about them. Here I use Utopia when I refer to the book by More, Utopia when I am referring to an imaginary country, and utopia when I am referring to a book about such a country. The distinction between the second and third uses is convenient, but not always easy to draw in practice, and anyone who took the trouble to look for them would probably find inconsistencies on this matter in the following pages.

CLARE.          A. L. Morton.

March 1952.

CHAPTER 1

Poor Man’s Heaven

O see ye not yon narrow road,

So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers?

That is the Path of Righteousness,

Though after it but few inquires.

And see ye not yon braid, braid road,

That lies across the lily leven?

That is the Path of Wickedness.

Though some call it the Road to Heaven.

And see ye not yon bonny road

That winds about the fernie brae?

That is the Road to fair Elfland

Where thou and I this night maun gae.

—Old Ballad: Thomas the Rhymer