The Nationality of Utopia

H. G. Wells, England, and the World State

Maxim Shadurski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000682878
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since its generic inception in 1516, utopia has produced visions of alterity which renegotiate, subvert, and transcend existing places. Early in the twentieth century, H. G. Wells linked utopia to the World State, whose post-national, post-Westphalian emergence he predicated on English national discourse. This critical study examines how the discursive representations of England's geography, continuity, and character become foundational to the Wellsian utopia and elicit competing response from Wells's contemporaries, particularly Robert Hugh Benson and Aldous Huxley, with further ramifications throughout the twentieth century. Contextualized alongside modern theories of nationalism and utopia, as well as read jointly with contemporary projections of England as place, reactions to Wells demonstrate a shift from disavowal to retrieval of England, on the one hand, and from endorsement to rejection of the World State, on the other. Attempts to salvage the residual traces of English culture from their degradation in the World State have taken increasing precedence over the imagination of a post-national order. This trend continues in the work of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, J. G. Ballard, and Julian Barnes, whose future scenarios warn against a world without England. The Nationality of Utopia investigates utopia's capacity to deconstruct and redeploy national discourse in ways that surpass fear and nostalgia.

1 English Utopia and Utopian England

England and Utopia

England and utopia have exchanged energies for more than 500 years. Ever since its generic inception in Thomas More’s eponymous book, utopia has shaped and been shaped by the representations of England and English culture. Following More’s example, writers as varied as Francis Bacon, Henry Neville, James Harrington, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Samuel Butler, William Morris, H. G. Wells, Robert Hugh Benson, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Read, George Orwell, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, J. G. Ballard, and Julian Barnes, among the more famous few, have performed the dual task of defining England and conveying utopia. However, only a few commentators have addressed these exchanges centrally and directly, and the work of Arthur Leslie Morton and Richard Gerber deserves special attention. Both have discussed the tropes of isolation and expansion, which utopia shares with the discourse of England. In The English Utopia (1952), Morton maintains that utopia owes its isolation to English insularity, which it nevertheless seeks to surpass:

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.¹

For Morton, England’s containment and remoteness necessarily precede utopia. He lays these parameters at the historical foundation of the discourse of England, whereas utopia offers ‘a mirror image, more or less distorted, of the historical England’.² Morton connects this image to the expansion of bourgeois society, which finds expression in utopian writers’ socioeconomic aspirations and fears, as well as desire to share with the rest of the world ‘their conceptions of democracy, of social living, of a true commonwealth, in the most popular, most acceptable way’.³ Thus, England as an insular enclosure grows into England as an ever-expanding entity, first on the island of Britain and then on a global scale. Symptomatically, Morton sets out to tell ‘a story of two islands – the Island of Utopia and the Island of Britain’.⁴ However, once he declares a preponderance of English utopias over those written by Welsh, Scottish, and Irish authors, Britain silently resigns from the pages of his book. England replaces Britain as both an island and utopia’s linchpin for global expansion.

Unlike Morton, Gerber, the author of Utopian Fantasy: A Study of Utopian Fiction since the Nineteenth Century (1973), argues that utopia reproduces the discourse of England and gravitates towards the island. In his essay ‘The English Island Myth: Remarks on the Englishness of Utopian Fiction’ (1959), he considers utopian island enclosures as a way of immortalizing England’s isolation and self-protection from the wider continental processes of flux and reflux. Set on islands, utopian realms resemble England in that they guarantee the individual ‘preservation in spite of infinity and immense natural forces, perhaps even in spite of death’.⁵ According to Gerber, utopia speaks directly to the idea of English liberty: just as the island grants physical immunity to external invasion, the boundaries of the individual must also be kept sacrosanct. A breakdown of insularity equals trespassing on liberty, which Gerber illustrates with the examples of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Orwell’s Winston Smith. Crusoe finds the safety of his situation compromised when he discovers unfamiliar footprints on his island. Winston, in turn, experiences an unrelenting intrusion into his innermost self, which parallels England’s dissolution in a larger collective totality.⁶ In Gerber, isolation reigns supreme in English utopian writing, which limits utopia’s capacity to transcend England and pursue universal goals. Unlike Morton, Gerber ties both utopia and the discourse of England to the national context.

Although produced in the 1950s, such competing critiques pose questions that remain relevant nowadays. Which of the discursive aspects does English utopia endorse: isolation or expansion? Or do both aspects overlap in creating utopian visions? H. G. Wells anticipated some of the answers to these questions. His Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution (1941) links utopia to the discourse of England, referring to the notions of geography, continuity, and character. In Wells, an alternate spatio-temporality emerges from England, much as it bears a modern imprint:

under an entirely new state of affairs, Britain, in a federal world, completely socialist and sharing a common freedom with all mankind, may still preserve the outward pattern of ‘old England’ so far as the countryside is concerned. Church, inn, country house, park, will be there. […] But […] the transient element and transport are likely to be much more dominant.⁷

In the same Guide, Wells highlights the specificity of British institutions, which, having a foothold in England, facilitate English continuity and are therefore designated as human inheritance: ‘This tradition of not going too far has been Britain’s greatest gift to mankind. She worked out Parliamentary government. She invented the constitutional king who functions only by the advice of his ministers. Her national church is a compromise’.⁸ Wells further asserts the moderate and liberty-loving features of the English character, providing a model for humanity in times of confusion and crisis: ‘Britain abounds in reasonable men. They hate and despise panic. They resent the suppression of books, papers and discussion’.⁹ Wells recommends that his compatriots retain their essential qualities as a token of continuity and a compass for the rest of the world. His plea takes the form of rhetorical figures: ‘Will Britain in the midst of this deafening and blinding war still hold by her native traditions? Will she once again save herself by her own tough common sense and all the world by her example? In time?’¹⁰ The urgency with which Wells expresses the need of Britain’s and, subsequently, England’s endurance may be understood as his response to the destruction caused by the recent Blitzkrieg. Michael Sherborne also records, in his biography H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (2010), that Wells was ‘flagging physically’ at the time,¹¹ and his recourse to the idiom of character and nativism not only reverts to his propagandist engagements during the Great War, but also reveals his current anxiety about what could be irretrievably lost. Indeed, the outbreak of WWII led Wells to a full-hearted investment in human rights, and the Guide came out as his second collection on the subject, the first one being The Rights of Man; or, What are We Fighting for? (1940). Yet, overall, his outline of utopia proceeds discursively from the spatial markers of ‘old England’, the status quo of British institutional arrangements, and the ‘tough common sense’, which has legitimized them.

Wells’s account of utopia’s discursive origins demonstrates an overlapping of isolation and expansion. Alongside foregrounding England’s pastoral uniqueness, Wells upholds the universal resonance of English continuity and character. However, he does so apologetically, rather than normatively, showing awareness that the world may choose otherwise and England will not make it to the future. Wells’s apology bespeaks a major shift that affected national discourse in the first half of the twentieth century. In The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (2006), Peter Mandler has noted that, following the traumatic attainment of Irish Home Rule, ‘“English values” could not simply be imposed, even on a near neighbour’.¹² Consequently, faith in Britain’s imperial mission eroded, yielding to the complementary sentiments of self-containment and self-reassurance. This historic mutation of national discourse refocused attention from expansion to isolation, and English utopia has responded to that shift ever since.

In what follows, I investigate theories of utopia, nationalism, and place, whose intersections allow me to conceptualize utopia as a content-based, spatially and temporally locatable, and iconoclastic phenomenon. I contend that utopia renegotiates, subverts, and transcends national discourse as a means to achieving post-national ends. In my discussion, I examine various strands of English national discourse, which have constituted England in terms of pastoral containment and imperial expansion, growth of liberty and stability of everyday life, individualism and love of ritual. Related to the notions of geography, continuity, and character, said strands displace England into an improved version of a globalized British state. Such a renewed discursive existence effectively universalizes English culture. At the same time, though, this universalization frequently comes at a cost. It reproduces national discourse, while the emancipatory work of utopia remains either unimaginable at best or largely compromised by dystopian fear and nostalgia at worst.

Utopia, the Nation, and Place

Theories of utopia have frequently elided the exchange of energies between utopia and the nation. Instead, much landmark work has sought to substantiate a claim about humanity’s search for a (completely) different condition of the world, which will be eagerly called home. Lyman Tower Sargent takes exception to this tendency, when, in his essay ‘Utopianism and National Identity’ (2000), he points up the commonality of these two phenomena. Following the methodological precepts of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), he refers to utopia and the nation as ‘imagined communities’, both produced in the space of modernity and each affecting the other. While the nation addresses the needs of the present with an emphasis on the past, utopia is oriented towards the future.¹³ Sargent’s observation has received little elaboration, resurfacing only in the notion of utopia as a prefigurative instrument of both national and global communities, as well as discussions of utopia’s embodiments in social history. Most recently, studies of utopia have taken a ‘spatial turn’ of their own, and utopia’s original meaning as both no and good place has reasserted itself in present-day conceptualizations. This turn has additionally conduced to understanding utopia and the nation as spatial phenomena whose convergences define the specificity of place.

Up until now, Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1953) has remained a touchstone of research on utopia. Famously, Bloch posits a paradoxical claim about utopia as homeland: it is a place where humanity has never been. Being the ‘intended promised land, promised by process’,¹⁴ utopia necessitates gradual and ultimate emancipation, in the course of which people will have shaken off the burden of history and subsequently opened up new possibilities. Bloch analyses a very extensive body of texts, from folklore to modern fiction, which permits him to discern homeland in the glimpses he catches across the centuries. The concluding lines of his book delineate utopia in vividly emancipatory terms. Humanity will have become itself when it walks and stands upright:

Once he [man] has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 English Utopia and Utopian England
• 2 The Wellsian Utopia and the Discourse of England
• 3 England in Transition: Memory, Politics, and Technology
• 4 England Redeemed: The Road, the Rose, and the Dream
• 5 The End of England: Eugenics, Landscape, and Recollection
• Coda: England for England’s Sake?
• Bibliography
• Index