The birth of the modem utopia coincided with the break-up of the unified Christian world. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) (Route 2), Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) (Route 2, Direction 4) emerged out of the religious turmoil which led eventually to a secularised world, opening up new forms and objects for utopia. In much the same way the European voyages of exploration and discovery were literally discovering a New World, which was bound to stir the utopian imagination.

More’s Utopia (Route 2, Directions 2-3) was a fiction showing the best society not as a normative model or a satirical paper to that existing, but as a society actually achieved in which the reader was invited to participate. This work was based on the concept of communism where the community property served a more general scheme of communal living involving the prohibition of money, common military training, common education, common habitation and dining.

In the 18th century the form of satire (Route 5) held together both negative or anti-utopian, and positive or utopian elements. It criticised, through ridicule and invective, its own times, while pointing to alternative and better ways of living. The greatest work of this kind was Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) (3.10 in your textbook) where there seemed to be distinct utopian features in Lilliput and Brobdingnag; while the society of the impeccably rational horses, the Houyhnhnms, appeared almost a formal utopia.

For most of 19th-century writers and thinkers utopia was the thing of the future, the culmination of the forces of historical evolution, prepared by the most powerful and progressive tendencies of modem times: democracy, science and socialism. The renewal of utopia stimulated also its counter-force, anti-utopia or dystopia. As utopia concentrated on the positive, so anti-utopia painted the most negative, the blackest picture possible of the present and the future to come. Just as utopia lent the persuasive techniques of the literary imagination to the cause of modern ideas of science and socialism, so anti-utopia lent the same techniques to the revolt against modernity. Like utopia, anti-utopia invented whole social orders, in all their particularity. But while the utopian order was perfect in the moral sense, the anti-utopian order was merely perfected, in the social sense. It was the dreadful perfection of some modern system or idea. And while utopian societies were ideal, in the sense of the best possible, anti-utopian society represented merely the victory or tyranny of the idea. In both cases the reader was invited to live the life of a society realised according to some principles. But in the one case the expected response to the experience was delight, in the other, horror.

In the eyes of 20th-century intellectuals industrial society seemed to have over-reached itself and was preparing its own destruction, as it is reflected in Yeats’s poems (6.12 in your textbook). America and the Soviet Union inspired the hopes and designs of utopian experiments, but they could inspire anti-utopia as well. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) (TB 61-62) drew largely upon American practices for its picture of a benighted future world, sunk in consumerism.

Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) (6.19 in your textbook) were the precise and passionate expression of the writer’s bitter feelings about the failure of a socialist utopia in the Soviet Union. However in these novels utopia and anti-utopia flow into and out of each other in intricate patterns of affirmation mixed with bleak pessimism.

The 1950s proclaimed “the end of ideology”; in the new utopian conception science and technology played a major role to which fears about nuclear war were the persistent anti-utopian undercurrent. Horror of the present and fear of the future came to writers such as William Golding (Direction 2 - Direction 3) who, in Lord of the Flies, expressed his view of the thinness of the protective civilised layer keeping man from barbarism and the brutal annihilation of his kind.

The utopian current in the 1960s flowed largely within a tide of technological optimism. The complaint was not against technology itself, but against its abuse: its restricted and perverted uses, its employment in the service of war and repression. Especially the technology of television and hi-fi was an essential part of the counter-culture. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (Direction 4 - Direction 5) is a dystopia where books are burnt by the state and literacy is going to disappear.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (Direction 6 - Direction 7) is set in an alternate Britain in the late 1990s. The book is a restless creation of a dystopian world where the characters are clones created to donate organs. The novel deals with the progressive loss of hope in a world where the characters are pushed against the limits of their environment but eventually rationalise and adapt to them.