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The Word “Utopia” Has Become One of the Best-Known Puns in Literary History Ever Since Thomas More Designated His Vision Of

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The Word “Utopia” Has Become One of the Best-Known Puns in Literary History Ever Since Thomas More Designated His Vision Of FOREWORD PETER LIEBREGTS The word “utopia” has become one of the best-known puns in literary history ever since Thomas More designated his vision of an ideal non- existent place in his Utopia (1516) as such by playing on the Greek for ou, “non-” and eu, “good”. In turn, topia, “place”, is the plural diminutive of topos, which is also used to denote a stock theme in literature.1 It must be said that the notion of an ideal place or society was already a topos long before More, as may be seen in, for example, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Biblical book of Isaiah, and Plato’s Politeia with its political blueprint for an ideal community. But it was More’s term that helped to define the genre, and especially in nineteenth- century Anglo-American literature “utopia” would become a hot topos, as it were, when it was presented in many different shapes and looked at from many different angles. The collection of essays in the present book all deal with this particular period, and approach the topic through its link to the various cultural communities that expressed their utopian ideals in an attempt to bring about change and reform, and the realization of a better world. Of course, as some of these articles make clear, every group had its opponents and critics, sometimes coming from within its own circle: even utopians are only human. In this respect one can point to perhaps the first known cultural community in Western history with a common, even slightly utopian agenda, namely the one gathered round the wealthy Roman patron of poets Gaius Maecenas at the time of emperor Augustus. Maecenas managed to induce Virgil and Horace, and to a lesser extent Propertius, to express support for the regime of Augustus and the values it fostered. Yet even in some of the Latin works celebrating the greatness of Rome and the pax Augustana, 1 For Thomas More the word “utopia” was a pun as it exploited the different meanings of the abbreviated U in Greek. 2 Peter Liebregts we may hear dissenting voices, which goes to show that only in an ideal world are the expression of the individual and the social and political agenda of the community always on the same page. In his contribution, which opens this collection, C.C. Barfoot focuses on a modern Maecenas, Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) the bookseller, who published educational and scientific works such as Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1784). More important, however, in the context of the present book, was his role as a patron in bringing together a number of mutually sympathetic people to discuss issues of church and state, individual belief and personal liberty and self-expression – utopian, social and political agendas. People like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, and, to some extent, William Blake, while enjoying Johnson’s hospitality, were in various ways involved in the creation and moulding of a better society. Through his publications Johnson could rally public support for particular ideas, and assume the role of a distributor of what might be said to amount to utopian programmes. Joseph Johnson signalled the arrival of a world in which booksellers and publishers were not just conduits for the printed word but patrons, inspirers, commissioners of words in print who might seek to change the world, and would often partly succeed in doing so. The impact of one particular member of Johnson’s circle, Mary Wollstonecraft, is discussed in Bryan Waterman’s article on “The Friendly Club”, a group of young American intellectuals who in the New York of the 1790s came together in weekly conversations in an attempt to search for first principles on which a new moral order might be established. Though the club only included young men, its members idealized the feminist writing of Wollstonecraft and others who have come to be known as the “British Jacobins”. They also sought to carry on conversations on philosophical principles with women of their broader social circles. Waterman explores the challenges faced by the Friendly Club and its larger, mixed-sex networks of association as they sought to put into practice principles derived from their reading of British radicals in the wake of the French Revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, who was also closely associated with Joseph Johnson, figures prominently in the contribution by Evert Jan van Leeuwen, “Godwin, Bulwer and Poe: .
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