National internationalism in late 19th-century utopias by Mór Jókai, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris

The paper looks at two major representatives of fin-de-siècle utopian fiction, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward 2000–1887, William Morris’s 1890 News from Nowhere, and an earlier work by the Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai, The Novel of the Century to Come (A jövő század regénye, 1872–1874). I examine their various strategies regarding the spatial and historical aspects of utopian transformation as well as their respective positions toward the relation of commerce and community. On the whole, I suggest that the pattern of nationally informed or biased internationalism that seems to underlie all three novels might be traced back to the enlightened concept of patriotic cosmopolitanism.

Architecture Under Nationalism

The international smash Looking Backward 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy, represents the peak of nineteenth-century utopian literature. As the troubles of American industrial cities reached a boiling point, this novel offered a seductive vision of universal prosperity under industrial socialism. Its urban design content was somewhat vague, but Bellamy quickly published an essay clarifying his commitment to the principles of urban decentralization, and a number of his fans wrote sequels driving this point home. As a major political movement called “Nationalism” rose to carry out Bellamy’s vision, William Morris roused his pen in London to rebut Looking Backward with an anti-industrial counter-utopia of pastoral peace: News from Nowhere. The suburban Morris had more in common with Bellamy, however, than he realized. At the same time, the architect John Pickering Putnam called for garden apartments to define the coming Nationalist utopia, testing his ideas with several prominent projects in Boston’s Back Bay.

Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia

The rise of suburbs and disinvestment from cities have been defining features of life in many countries over the course of the twentieth century, especially English-speaking ones. The separation of different aspects of life, such as living and working, and the diffusion of the population in far-flung garden homes have necessitated an enormous consumption of natural lands and the constant use of mechanized transportation. Why did we abandon our dense, complex urban places and seek to find “the best of the city and the country” in the flowery suburbs? A large missing piece in this story is found in Victorian utopian literature. The replacement of cities with high-tech suburbs was repeatedly imagined and breathlessly described in the socialist dreams and science-fiction fantasies of dozens of British and American authors in the nineteenth century. Some of these visionaries—such as Robert Owen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Ebenezer Howard, and H. G. Wells—are enduringly famous, while others were street vendors or amateur chemists who have been all but forgotten. Together, they fashioned strange and beautiful imaginary worlds built of synthetic gemstones, lacy metal colonnades, and unbreakable glass, staffed by robotic servants and teeming with flying carriages. As different as their futuristic visions could be in their politics or narrative qualities, most were unified by a single, desperate plea: for humanity to have a future worth living, we must abandon our smoky, poor, chaotic Babylonian cities for a life in shimmering gardens.

Inventions of Nemesis

Examining literary and philosophical writing about ideal societies from Greek antiquity to the present, this book offers a striking new take on utopia's fundamental project. Noting that utopian imagining has often been propelled by an angry conviction that society is badly arranged, the book argues that utopia's essential aim has not been to secure happiness, order, or material goods, but rather to establish a condition of justice in which all have what they ought to have. The book also makes the case that hostility to utopias has frequently been associated with a fear that they will transform humanity beyond recognition, doing away with the very subjects who should receive justice in a transformed world. Further, the book shows how utopian writing speaks to contemporary debates about immigration, labor, and other global justice issues. Along the way, the book connects utopia to the Greek concept of nemesis, or indignation at a wrong ordering of things, and advances fresh readings of dozens of writers and thinkers — from Plato, Thomas More, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and H. G. Wells to John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Fredric Jameson, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Chang-Rae Lee. The book offers a vital reconsideration of what it really means to imagine an ideal society.

Locating Nowhere

This chapter examines the proliferation of utopian literature in the United States and Great Britain during the late nineteenth century, mainly due to the economic and social upheavals resulting from industrial capitalism. In particular, it shows how writers such as Edward Bellamy and Thomas More came up with their visions of peaceful and egalitarian future worlds in response to the turbulence of their era. The chapter first provides an overview of the Great Depression experienced by both the United States and Great Britain between 1873 and 1896, a period characterized by extreme poverty and unemployment, before discussing the history of More's Utopia (1516). It then considers how utopian socialists in Europe and the United States, including Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier, devised schemes for the total reconstruction of society. It also analyzes Henry George's utopian vision, which he articulated in his 1879 book Progress and Poverty.

After the Last Utopians

This chapter explores contemporary everyday utopias that embrace the central values associated with Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—institutions, sites, and practices that are committed to political, sexual, and spiritual egalitarianism; that promote simplicity and sustainability; and that explore new forms of family and community. Here the author describes his visits to the isle of Erraid in the Scottish Hebrides, Findhorn in northern Scotland, Twin Oaks in rural Virginia, and Occupy Wall Street. He also discusses the turn against utopia and the triumph of the literary dystopia in the twentieth century; how literature, social theory, and communities—the three distinct faces of utopianism—thrived from the late 1950s through the 1970s; utopian literature in the twenty-first century; Carpenter's influence on gay men's retreats and on the Radical Faeries; and the role of education in utopian vision.

The Last Utopians

For readers reared on the dystopian visions of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale, the idea of a perfect society may sound more sinister than enticing. This literary history of a time before “Orwellian” entered the cultural lexicon reintroduces us to a vital strain of utopianism that seized the imaginations of late-nineteenth-century American and British writers. The book delves into the biographies of four key figures—Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—who lived during an extraordinary period of literary and social experimentation. The publication of Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 opened the floodgates of an unprecedented wave of utopian literature. Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer, was a committed socialist whose News from Nowhere envisions a workers' Arcadia. Carpenter boldly argued that homosexuals constitute a utopian vanguard. Gilman, a women's rights activist and the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” wrote numerous utopian fictions. These writers, this book shows, shared a belief in radical equality, imagining an end to class and gender hierarchies and envisioning new forms of familial and romantic relationships. They held liberal religious beliefs about a universal spirit uniting humanity. They believed in social transformation through nonviolent means and were committed to living a simple life rooted in a restored natural world. And their legacy remains with us today, as the book describes in entertaining first-hand accounts of contemporary utopianism, ranging from Occupy Wall Street to a Radical Faerie retreat.

Introduction

This book examines the distinctive strain of transatlantic utopianism found within the work of four writers—a group that it calls the “last utopians”—of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Focusing on the legacy of Bellamy, Morris, Carpenter, Gilman, and their contemporary heirs, the book shows how utopian literature and social thought flourished in the United States and Great Britain from the mid-1880s until 1915. It also considers the distinctive elements that unite the utopianism of Bellamy, Morris, Carpenter, and Gilman, suggesting that their utopian visions are currently manifested in lived utopianism. Finally, the book explores contemporary everyday utopias that embrace the last utopians' central values—institutions, sites, and practices that are committed to political, sexual, and spiritual egalitarianism; that promote simplicity and sustainability; and that explore new forms of family and community.