The end of this book does not mark the end of utopia, only the concentrated decline of its founding conceit. Of course, there are exceptions to my time line. In his prefatory “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” added in 1624 to the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton anticipates the transformations I have focused on, declaring, “I will yet, to satisfy and please myself, make an Utopia of mine own, a New Atlantis, a poetical commonwealth of mine own, in which I will freely domineer, build cities, make laws, statutes, as I list myself” (97). Long after the purview of this book, many others would find remaining room to emplace utopian geographies, for instance Samuel Butler in his South American utopia, Erewhon (1872). Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) spawned countless imitations, even whole genres, in which the eradication or transformation of utopia is not a prominent feature. If characters enjoyed lengthy afterlives (Brewer), it seems that settings did, too. Nevertheless, as they were continually reappropriated, such settings became suffused with self-conscious fictionality, eventually downgraded to the status of children’s fiction: disenchantment, therefore, became a starting point rather than a conclusion. The early novel helped change the way readers thought about the world, helped change their understanding of the location of utopia. It shifted the burden of plausibility and made disbelief—or its deliberate suspension—the appropriate response to representations of radical geographic difference.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, utopia was discarded, domesticated, and then once again displaced, now into the future. Midcentury novelists eschewed utopian difference, idealizing instead the home and nation. Women writers imagined a host of domestic utopias, cut off from the mainline features of the novel but only partly cut off from English society. It was the French who popularized the idea of an enclave in the future, an alternative separated not by oceans but by centuries.
Samuel Richardson has been given a founding role—indeed, the founding role—in the rise of the novel (Watt, Rise of the Novel) and, more specifically, the rise of domestic fiction (Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction), but what is important for my purposes is the way he tied the genre to the representation and valuation of domestic space. Robert Folkenflik has noted “the extraordinary number of spatial locutions” in Pamela (1740), and true enough its heroine continually “invests locations with feelings” (586, 588). More recently, Cynthia Wall has argued that Richardson’s three novels exemplify the century’s longer trajectory of novelistic description, from minimally rendered narrative spaces to richly detailed interiors, filled with consumer goods (137–48). Additional commentators have focused on the description of particular areas of the household and their contested genderings (Varey, Space and the Eighteenth-Century Novel 181–99; Chico 159–91; Lipsedge). When Pamela and Clarissa venture outward, they do so to escape, because home life—or rather the men there—have failed them, and a dangerous world awaits outside. Preferable, for Richardson, was well-ordered domestic space, which he cleared, or repurposed, as the site of conjugal marriage, prescribed earlier in conduct books and then in the marital rules enumerated at the end of Pamela. These rules, delineating a male-female relationship worthy of emulation, are utopian in their own way, but there is little resemblance here to the elective affiliations described in the preceding chapters.
Richardson’s first novel gazes obsessively on its eponymous character’s thoughts and feelings, excavating an inner world opposed to the world around her. Certainly, Pamela’s insistence on the importance of her virtue is a defiant assertion of agency, yet this attitude wound up being so influential as to become conventional (Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction 108–34). Her morality reaches far beyond Mr. B’s estates at Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire. Everyone in the novel reads her journal approvingly, so that, as John Richetti puts it, “the social and the individual spheres interact and interpenetrate … [and] the social and the personal animate one another” (English Novel in History 87). In contrast, the utopian interiorities examined here preserve ideals that remain incongruous with social life, ideals too exotic and oppositional to be the basis for large-scale reform.
Henry Fielding exerted a very different kind of influence on the tradition of the novel (McKeon, Origins 382–409), but he too helped draw in the range of novelistic action. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once remarked that moving from Richardson to Fielding was “like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in May” (Coleridge 2: 339). Indeed, Fielding took his characters out on the open road, offering readers a panoramic view of English society (J. Hunter, Occasional Form 161–65). His novels give us “a solitary hero … juxtaposed to a socioscape described in careful, general detail,” thereby initializing the genre’s nationalistic function (B. Anderson 32). Very deliberately, Fielding laid claim to the tradition of the epic, which of course performed a similar role in earlier times (Parrinder 97–101). Retrospectively, he was judged by Walter Scott to be a specifically English novelist and a great chronicler of the English character (H. Brown 12–14). The self-exiled Man of the Hill in Tom Jones (1749) might have been a protagonist in an earlier novel; here, he is a minor character, his story merely interpolated and then left behind. The same could be said about the gypsies. Fielding’s ending, the renewing of family and the restoration of Paradise Hall, draws on and reconfigures ideals that are historically, not geographically, distant.
In eighteenth-century England, the genre of the literary utopia was advanced primarily by women writers, including Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, and Mary Hamilton. In A Description of Millenium Hall (1762), Scott imagined a sanctuary for women alienated by seduction, courtship, marriage, and family. These women, cohabiting a country estate, are extricated from the constraints of marriage and maternity. They apply themselves to various recreational, educational, and vocational endeavors and help less advantaged women to sustain themselves by their collective industry. Conceptually, the novel synthesizes bluestocking feminism with gentry capitalism. Felicity Nussbaum calls Millenium Hall “a harmonious community of reason, reflection, and freedom to speak that is unattainable outside its confines” (Torrid Zone 151). Alessa Johns agrees that the characters of the novel create “new communities based on emotional, educational, and moral ties rather than legal or biological ones,” but Johns rightly downplays the boundary between utopia and the world at large, stressing Millenium Hall’s “replicating, outward-moving capacity” (93, 104). The model was replicated by the eponymous hero of Scott’s own History of Sir George Ellison (1766), about a male visitor in the earlier novel who goes on in the subsequent one to follow the women’s example. Both novels employ the familiar pattern of disenchantment and reenchantment, yet what they recover is not imaginary geography but more modest and immediate possibilities. Millenium Hall is secluded, located in “a scene truly pastoral,” an “earthly paradise,” but ultimately it is accessible enough—arguably as geographically proximate as it is incremental in its program for reform (S. Scott, Millenium Hall 56, 58). The novel has been said to underwrite hierarchies “based on agrarian capitalism and a nascent manufactory system,” and the estate relies as well on New World slavery (Jordan, “Gentlemen and Gentle Women” 32; “Creole Contagion”). Such utopias are more feasible but less radical. What is gained in social breadth seems partly traded away in complicity with existing class and colonial structures.
Across the Channel, new philosophical ideas and, soon, a new governing body itself fostered a commensurably new type of utopia, one that depended on temporal rather than spatial disconnections. Future fictions had appeared earlier (Alkon), for instance Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733), but the model was durably conventionalized by Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771). This novel enjoyed immediate acclaim and enduring popularity; it was continually reprinted, expanded, and translated (Wilkie; Darnton 115–36). Utopian thought had been pervasive in eighteenth-century France, a recurring theme in writings on politics, metaphysics, and history (Baczko). Out of this context sprang new beliefs about the future, beliefs that were, for some, validated by the French Revolution. Unshackled from history’s endless repetitions, as well as notions of the apocalypse, the future was suddenly unknown and undetermined, subject to human reason and action (Koselleck, Futures Past). Mercier’s novel expressed these possibilities. For Reinhart Koselleck, its innovation to the genre was twofold: First, authors became explicit producers, rather than finders, of utopia, so that it now existed “in the mind of the author alone” (“Temporalization of Utopia” 87). Second, euchronias required “temporal continuity,” a pathway into the future that could plausibly connect it to the present (88). Mercier replaces the voyage with a dream, but of course dreams presuppose sleep. Next to 2440, the novels I have examined posit something like a waking dream. It is true that these utopias chart no paths to better futures, certainly not futures imagined at the level of whole societies. Still, the discontinuities they produce are not just imaginable but also immediately livable. The gap is between an apparently enlightened consciousness and a largely intractable society.
Utopian geographies were fortified against the vicissitudes of history, though their relationship to history more broadly exceeds mere negation. These utopias idealized the past and implied at least some sense of futurity, insofar as their ideals became practicable in an ongoing way. Utopian geography, we might say, is chronotopic, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense, compounded of temporal and spatial elements.1 Euchronias, too, required spatial grounding: Paris, in Mercier’s case. Later, science fiction would become synonymous with strange new planets and galaxies, just as older literature had relied on islands and continents. What is different is the relative stretching of geography and history and the underlying assumptions about their different capacities to accommodate better ways of life. Whatever we gain, we also lose something when utopian ideals are cast into the future. Perhaps they are now understood correctly: as destinies toward which we might work. Still, utopia evaporates as a concurrent reality, as a possibility separated from us only laterally.
In the foregoing chapters, I have followed the transformation of utopia by modernity’s signature genre, demonstrating the persistence of utopian fictions and describing the shifting position of utopia within fiction. The utopian enclave—whether it be geographic, subjective, or temporal—constructs and defines the relationship between utopia and reality. It establishes a shifting point of accessibility and an opening or closing window of opportunity. Studying this connecting disconnection helps us understand the history of utopian possibility. It also helps us understand the capacity of these utopias—and later ones—to give us ourselves routes and timetables leading to better lives, better societies.