Introduction

Summary

Literally and figuratively, the domain of eighteenth-century British utopianism is largely terra incognita. The subject itself, indeed, was once thought hardly to exist. For the age called Augustan is often supposed to have been singularly hard-headed and worldly, its speculative energies prematurely squandered by the constitutional experiments of the mid-seventeenth century, its intellectual fancies modest beside the spuriously ‘enlightened’ musings beloved of the French philosophes. Britain's only contemporary literary masterpieces which adopted the utopian genre, this view presumes, were typically sceptical satires like Gulliver's Travels. None the less, this is in itself a fanciful portrait. There were, indeed, many satires upon the notions of primitive innocence and of terrestrial moral perfectibility in this era, as well as the widespread use of the utopian format primarily to lampoon existing social imperfections, rather than to recommend a superior regime. But these are not solely characteristic of an age which, after all, swarmed with projectors, adventurers, moralists and improvers of all sorts. Much enamoured of the idea of progressing somewhere, if only back to a more virtuous epoch, eighteenth-century Britain could not but imagine a variety of fictional ideal societies and (the genres are closely related) model commonwealths. These often distinctively portray well-ordered and virtuous if normally still imperfect regimes, where property is held in common or limited by agrarian laws.