Abstract
Not all utopias are meant for us. In the decades before Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopia Looking Backward, three remarkable works appeared that may be variously described as satirical utopias, anti-utopias or utopian fantasies. Edward Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and W.H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887) share the same element of sexual romance that we have already found in Looking Backward and News from Nowhere: a developing relationship between a female utopian and the male visitor to the new world, which on eugenic grounds we should not expect to end happily. However, in The Coming Race, Erewhon and A Crystal Age, the disjunction between the two worlds is much greater than that between nineteenth-century capitalism and the near-future socialist societies of Bellamy and Morris. Bulwer Lytton’s invention of the magical energy source ‘vril’, Butler’s ‘Book of the Machines’ and Hudson’s matrifocal Arcadia belong, instead, to science fiction or (to use Hudson’s term) ‘fantastic romance’.2 These texts confront us with the paradoxes of the human and the non-human.
And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers — shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle — to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)1
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Notes
H.G. Wells (1895) The Time Machine, ed. P. Parrinder (London: Penguin), p. 91.
W.H. Hudson (1950) A Crystal Age (New York: Doric Books), p. 29. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton (2002) The Coming Race (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview), p. 91. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
Cf. A. Van Gennep (1977) The Rites of Passage, trans. M.B. Vizedom and G.L. Caffee (London: Routledge), pp. 15–17.
V. Turner (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press), p. 238.
S. Butler (1985) Erewhon, ed. P. Mudford (London: Penguin), p. 139. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
J. Clute and P. Nicholls, eds (1995) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: St Martin’s), p. 181;
V. Fortunati and R. Trousson, eds (2000) Dictionary of Literary Utopias (Paris: Champion), p. 205;
D. Suvin (1983) Victorian Science Fiction in the UK (Boston, MA: Hall), p. 352.
P. Raby (1991) Samuel Butler: A Biography ( London: Hogarth ), p. 127.
Raby (1991), p. 126; A.D. Culler (1968) ‘The Darwinian Revolution and Literary Form’, in G. Levine and W. Madden (eds), The Art of Victorian Prose (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 234.
J.C. Garrett (1984) Hope or Disillusion: Three Versions of Utopia: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Butler, George Orwell (Christchurch, NZ: University of Canterbury), p. 26.
W. Reade (1924) The Martyrdom of Man [1872] (London: Watts).
H.L. Sussman (1968) Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 158.
S. Butler (1923) A First Year in Canterbury Settlement and Other Early Essays (London: Cape, and New York: Dutton), p. 217.
W. H. Hudson (1904) The Purple Land: being the Narrative of one Richard Lamb’s Adventures in the Banda Orientál, in South America, as told by Himself, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth), p. 338.
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© 2015 Patrick Parrinder
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Parrinder, P. (2015). Strains of the Non-Human: The Coming Race, Erewhon, A Crystal Age. In: Utopian Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137456786_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137456786_6
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