The Nationality of Utopia: H.G. Wells, England, and the World State 9780367330491, 0367330490, 9781000682878

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The Nationality of Utopia

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 postnational, 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. Following Huxley’s attempts to salvage the residual traces of English culture from their abuses in the World State, the prospect of England’s dissolution takes increasing precedence over the visions of post-national order and dissents from the Wellsian utopia. 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. Maxim Shadurski holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Literary Utopias from More to Huxley: The Issues of Genre Poetics and Semiosphere. Finding an Island (2007) and Utopia as a World Model: The Boundaries and Borderlands of a Literary Phenomenon (2016), as well as essays on utopia, nationalism, and

landscape. He edits The Wellsian: The Journal of the H. G. Wells Society and serves as an academic advisor for the Gale/Cengage publishing group. He is an Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Studies at Siedlce University (Poland).

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

57 Hermeneutic Ontology in Gadamer and Woolf The Being of Art and the Art of Being Adam Noland 58 Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions First Postindependence Wave Maryna Romanets 59 Black USA and Spain Shared Memories in 20th Century Spain Edited by Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego 60 Ezra Pound and 20th-Century Theories of Language Faith with the Word James Dowthwaite 61 Gombrowicz in Transnational Context Translation, Affect, and Politics Silvia G. Dapía 62 The British Stake in Japanese Modernity Readings in Liberal Tradition and Native Modernism Michael Gardiner 63 Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing Writing in the Wings Graham Wolfe

64 The Nationality of Utopia H. G. Wells, England, and the World State Maxim Shadurski

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The Nationality of Utopia H. G. Wells, England, and the World State Maxim Shadurski

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Maxim Shadurski to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-33049-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-31774-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

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

Acknowledgements

Completed between December 2017 and April 2019, this volume has a somewhat longer preceding trajectory. Earlier drafts of the material featured herein have appeared as follows: ‘A Newly Redeemed England in H. G. Wells’s Utopias’, Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 43.1 (2013): 55–75; ‘H. G. Wells’s Interwar Utopias: Eugenics, Individuality and the Crowd’, Sydney Studies in English 40 (2014): 21–42; ‘“Flowers and a Landscape were the Only Attractions Here”: The England of Wells and Morris in Aldous Huxley’s Interpretation’, in Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris: Landscape and Space, edited by Emelyne Godfrey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); ‘Nation and Utopia: Images of England in Brave New World’, in Imagology Profiles: The Dynamics of National Imagery in Literature, edited by Laura Laurušaitė (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2018); ‘Yevgeny Zamyatin and the Wellsian Utopia’, in H. G. Wells and All Things Russian, edited by Galya Diment (London: Anthem, 2019). I am grateful to the respective publishers for permission to reprint. The foundations of my research for this monograph were laid during my doctoral programme at the University of Edinburgh, and I thank my supervisor Randall Stevenson for the reassurance and inspiration he gave me from the very first moments of my project’s gestation. I am also thankful to my second supervisor Anna Vaninskaya for her rigorous attitude to my work and unfailing encouragement. In addition, I worked closely with Laura Marcus (now of the University of Oxford), Alex Thomson, Jonathan Wild, Sarah Carpenter, Nina Engelhardt (now of the University of Cologne), and Marc Di Sotto, and am obliged to them for the generous advice and help they offered. Outside Edinburgh, my research has drawn on the support of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of

Limerick, with whom I have maintained links for more than a decade. My gratitude is due to Tom Moylan: his publications, correspondence, and fellowship have bolstered my sense of direction. I also thank Michael G. Kelly and Joachim Fischer for making me feel part of the Centre. As editor of The Wellsian and member of the H. G. Wells Society’s executive committee, I have greatly benefited from regular contact with Patrick Parrinder and Michael Sherborne. Particularly, I thank Simon J. James of the University of Durham: his mentorship and kind understanding have been invaluable throughout these years. Work towards completion of this volume was assisted by several travel grants and research subsidies from Siedlce University, and I am grateful to Roman Mnich for supporting my initiatives. I thank Adam Parkes of the University of Georgia for the encouragement and appreciable feedback he provided, and my manuscript’s reviewers for their highly constructive reports. My further acknowledgement goes to Michelle Salyga and Bryony Reece at Routledge in London for seeing this volume through to publication. Completion of my book has also been a matter of the stimulating friendships I am privileged to have with Simon Grimble, Kenneth Hanshew, Nataliya Sokolova, Alexander Garbalev, Maria Gul, and Natallia Dunko. My close friends – Oksana Blashkiv, Margarita Malykhina, Natallia Lameka, and Aleksei Stakhavets – deserve special thanks. I owe the greatest debt to my family and parents for their love and patience.

Introduction

‘Our true nationality is mankind’ remains probably one of the most memorable injunctions made by H. G. Wells.1 Appearing at the close of The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (1920), this phrase expresses an unfulfilled wish for a post-WWI peace, on the one hand, and a call for a post-national, post-Westphalian beginning, on the other. Indeed, after the Treaty of Versailles carved up Europe into national jurisdictions, Wells’s hopes could not have been dashed further. Following the culmination of nationalisms across the continent, he reasserted his proposal for a World State, whose initial stirrings can be found as early as The War of the Worlds (1898). Repeatedly, Wells petitioned for a world organized on scientific principles, where education and open discussion would have eradicated extant armies, navies, and social hierarchies; where technology would have transformed the experience of space, time, work, and travel; and where the rule of democracy would have rendered dishonest statesmen out of service.2 Together, these developments would have engendered a new faith in global well-being. For Wells, the World State was to become a place where humanity would have come into its own, a prefiguration of utopia. Writing two decades later, George Orwell took issue with Wells’s renewed proposal. In ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ (1941), he criticizes the optimism with which Wells perceived the human ability to outgrow itself. Orwell urges that atavisms, such as ‘nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty’, installed Hitler in his office and WWII broke out.3 Perhaps, Wells overestimated the remit of human reasonableness in the face of manipulative rhetoric. Yet he did not need a reminder that atavistic tendencies could easily return, unless morality and knowledge guided social progress.4 In his 1934 BBC radio broadcast ‘Whither

Britain?’, Wells took up his earlier argument, only to denounce nationalism and refuse to be labelled a conventional patriot. Instead, he confided in the English capacity to surpass nationalism and set a worthy example for the world to follow: It is just because I have this intense pride in being English that I will not consent to see the English mind and English life cooped up within the narrow bounds of nationalism. The whole of this little planet is not too big for Englishmen. We are a world people and we belong to the world.5 Insisting on England’s commensurability with the world, Wells enlisted English political, sociocultural, and economic legacies as the more progressive premises for the World State. Among others, such legacies included the English Constitution as an organic and provisional pathway to progress, English liberty as the embodiment of local customs and institutions, the English language as a unifying tool of far-flung Englishspeaking communities, and the British Empire as an open-handed infrastructure of global communications and influence. Wells’s selection of English – and British – achievements discloses an attitude that would not have looked strange to Victorian public moralists. One pictures Matthew Arnold applying his method of touchstones to the wider fabric of English culture, in an attempt to procure a broadly human, rather than parochial, outlook. However, the fact that Wells valorised certain strands of national discourse poses a question about the national foundations of his utopia and the nationality of utopia in general. If English legacies are hailed universal, is, then, our true nationality English (or British, in legal terms)? If the World State drives modernity forward into a post-national condition, does this process purport to anglicize the world before utopia takes effect? Which features of national discourse constitute utopian visions? And does utopia supersede national discourse in the course of redeployment?

Argument Trajectory and Premises In probing the questions stated above, this monograph pursues the following trajectory. In Chapter 1, it contends that as long as nation-states hold ideological purchase over bordered territories, the task of utopia

remains to renegotiate, subvert, and transcend national discourse with a view to bringing forth alternate places. This contention subscribes to the ‘modernist’ theories of nationalism and treats the nation-state as a spatial phenomenon enabled primarily by the spread of printed media, industrial production, faster communications, and circulation of commodities. Being the product of capitalist modernity, the nation-state absorbs pre-existing forms of human association and socioeconomic interaction into its demarcated jurisdiction. The latter process at once unifies and fragments the world; it also enshrines social, gender, and racial inequities both within and between nation-states. Despite (and perhaps because of) the more recent indications of the nation-state’s alleged withering-away into the rule of corporate enterprise, the aftermath of the 2008 economic meltdown has spelled a resurgence of nationalisms not only across Europe and North America, but also further afield. In their own peculiar ways, ‘We want our country back’ campaigns, ‘America first’ postures, independence and ‘White Europe’ marches, as well as high-flying Euroscepticism, testify to a potent preserve of exploitable loyalties to the nation-state. The nature of said loyalties may be better comprehended in the light of Slavoj Žižek’s departure from the classical Marxist notion of ideology as a false consciousness. In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), he maintains that ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ – ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence – that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’.6 Žižek compares the functioning of ideology on a social level to a psychological condition that both delineates an individual sense of reality and grants enjoyment to its subject, ‘only in so far as its logic escapes him’.7 Accordingly, enjoyment sustains loyalties to the nation-state. The fundamental spontaneity of enjoyment overtakes ideology and becomes discourse, broadly understood as beliefs and practices. Imparting reality to the nation-state, national discourse bears a loose or highly problematical relation to the interdependencies that constitute the world and its underlying complexity.

English national discourse embraces multi-generic intermedial expressions of the beliefs and practices that came into circulation after the 1707 Act of Union and retain discernible resonance up until now. Indeed, England’s involvement in the British state has played a major role in how the English nation has been constructed, enacted, and perceived in frequently contrary ways. On the one hand, the discourse of England has set a benchmark for things British, from the Westminster government through the British Empire to the BBC, ‘the voice of the nation’; on the other, it has marked a retreat into the ‘Little England’ of market towns and pastoral reflection. At first glance, such discursive polarities highlight the distinction between loyalty to the British state and that to the English nation, with social affiliations complicating either allegiance. However, closer analysis reveals an interpenetration and entanglement of both loyalties, which Chapter 1 treats as ramifications of the same, albeit historically mutable discourse, exploring them in terms of geography, continuity, and character. In brief, the discourse of England invokes an England that expands its influence into the rest of the island of Britain and the neighbouring island of Ireland, as well as building a far-flung empire. As the work of expansion increasingly faces untoward circumstances, attempts to rediscover a lost pastoral containment gather momentum. Having no ascertainable foothold in the lived experience, England’s prelapsarian existence holds little value for the idea of continuity, which equals the unhampered growth of liberty. Gradual reforms limit monarchical power and bring out liberty, posing no immediate threat to either an existing socio-political order or the stability of everyday life. In consequence, the idiom of English character mirrors the wisdom of England’s own historical development. The English love liberty, value compromise, shun extreme attitude, and improvise ad-hoc solutions by ‘muddling through’. Examined in Chapter 1, this version of discourse summons up the reality of England. As long as the trappings and contradictions of that reality remain hidden from view, discourse gives cause to enjoyment. Tasked with renegotiation, subversion, and transcendence, utopia offers a critical tool that could pierce through national discourse. Such an operation may initially upset enjoyment, yet it will open up profiles of alterity. Much of Wells’s writing, from scientific romances through social realist novels and utopian fictions to pamphlets and human rights campaigns, performs a distinctive set of operations. Further to reformulating the

concept of utopia, his work revisits the discourse of England and reinvests some of its select features in the proposal for the World State. In doing so, Wells subscribes to the reasoning of the lecture he gave in the German Reichstag in 1929. There, four years before Hitler rose to power, Wells had pleaded, with sadly ironic prescience, for ‘an organization, or a system of organizations, which may divert loyalty and devotion from patriotism to world order, and lead the way to and control a world Pax’.8 Chapter 2 investigates how Wells envisages the World State at once to outgrow national discourse and retain the traces of England therein. Prefiguring utopia, the World State self-consciously supersedes island enclosures, proclaims dynamism as its functional mode, and forswears uniformity of character. Inflected by evolutionary theory, political thought, and modern foresight, all these principles permit Wells to press the discourse of England into the service of utopia. As a result, the channels of communication and trade set up by the British Empire enable unbordered interactions and a much faster traversing of space and time. In this new spatio-temporality, pastoral no longer holds unimpeachable value, becoming, like modernity, a condition that may or may not deliver fulfilment, depending on the uses to which it is put. Vouching to control modernity, the World State espouses continuity, which involves a gradual transcendence of existing institutions to a point of revolutionary change. In ways redolent of Whig historiography, Wells shies away from revolution as a vehicle of transformation and privileges the acquisition of liberty through long-term reforms. One such reform includes the provision of comprehensive education, whereby the World State abolishes social divisions along the lines of gender and class. Instead of a standardized character, it sets out to cultivate individuality, whose practice of fair play, empirical outlook, and rebellious inclinations save the new order from stagnation. When redeploying national discourse, Wells inscribes a cosmopolitan intent on his selections. He expects the best of England to supersede what he deplores in every nation-state: frontiers, propaganda, militarism, and political motley.9 As Wells defies the reality of the nation-state, his utopia reveals alterity neither elsewhere nor elsewhen. Any intersection of space and time may now potentially lead to the alterity of a post-national world order. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 situate the lineages of the Wellsian utopia in the wider sociohistorical and cultural contexts of the first decades of the twentieth century. I explore varied versions of the World State, as well as

tracing how individual writers’ response to modernity marks a shift from disavowal to retrieval of England. Chapter 3 intervenes into the terms of England’s transition to an alterity that demands writing off national discourse. In The Dawn of All (1911), Robert Hugh Benson depicts the nascence of an English Catholic polity and its alignment with the Holy See. At face value, the novel conveys the allegory of a regained faith: a priest falls into a coma of disbelief, dreams of the triumph of the Catholic Church in 1970s England, and, on reawakening, makes a final confession. The dying priest’s dream concentrates on his alter ego, Monsignor Masterman, who equally disowns his scruples and eventually becomes Cardinal of England. However, before Masterman takes up the high office, the narrative of the priest’s dream unveils an ongoing revision and denunciation of the discourse of England. The chapter examines said processes in the light of personal memory, contemporary politics, and modern technology. The fact that the dream’s main character sustains memory loss results from his loyalties to England and English liberty, which, in turn, inflect his theological modernism and socialist sympathies. Through these lenses, Masterman perceives the changes leading to England’s conversion: the English nation-state extracts itself from wider British and imperial involvements, institutionalizes dynastic and hierarchical continuity above emancipation, mutes the exigency of procreation, and administers corporate punishment. Even though these measures seek England’s unity with the Catholic fold, they exhibit a vividly dystopian aspect, defined, primarily, by a reaction against Edwardian politics. Benson’s World State limits parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage; grants Ireland imperial, rather than national, status; and exiles socialist dissidents. Further, the use of technology reinforces social inequities: while the privileged groups utilize the flying machines to transcend frontiers, the lower quarters of English society exist under surveillance and regimentation. In co-opting modernity to the service of a globe-trotting male-only Church elite, Benson disrupts the expansion of liberty. This abrogation of the main tenet of national discourse diminishes substantially the utopian premise of his project. Whereas Benson writes off the discourse of England for the sake of the World State, Wells reaffirms their continuity. Chapter 4 analyses Wells’s uses of locomotion, science, and psychoanalysis as means whereby he annihilates the spatio-temporal distance between England and utopia. The

chapter focuses on Men Like Gods (1923) and The Dream (1924), which constitute a diptych written against the background of Liberalism’s recession from the UK politics. Both novels address this major historic change in an attempt to renew the nationally unifying Liberal cause and redefine its continuing validity. Wells sets his utopia in a place dubbed Utopia, which exists some 2,000 years or so into the future. Mr Barnstaple, the protagonist of Men Like Gods, personifies a stock lower middle-class character with Liberal leanings. This circumstance permits him the highest degree of appreciation of the Utopian order, including both its biologically engineered landscape and scientific preoccupations. By contrast, Barnstaple’s Earthling companions revolt against Utopia, which results from their national and social status, political and sociocultural views. The novel caricatures the discursive loyalties to the nation, religion, monarchy, empire, war, and compensatory pastoral as atavistic and therefore antiutopian attitudes. While Barnstaple moves forward to see England redeemed in Utopia, Sarnac, the protagonist of The Dream, dreams backward of England’s redemption. He avails himself of the sublime Utopian landscape, which presents more than a palimpsest. Sarnac’s vantage point allows him to unravel the spatio-temporal trajectories that revert to England’s wronged past. In his dream, Sarnac pursues one such trajectory and identifies with a lower middle-class Englishman. Utopian society endorses this identification, as long as the act of dreaming revisits the unredeemed English lives. Sarnac narrates his dream in a historiographic style that heightens a gradual realization of the missed opportunities. At the same time, the narrative remains wary about an absolute freedom that might be. In privileging England’s redemption, the Wellsian utopia tethers itself to the national context and constrains its earlier emancipatory commitments. By contrast, Aldous Huxley strips away nearly all of the redemptive potential from the World State. Contrary to Benson’s and Wells’s, his enterprise typifies the worst of modernity, which submerges England under foreign influence, from Ford and Freud through test tubes to drugs and hypnopaedia. Chapter 5 discusses Huxley’s retrieval of national discourse as a way of salvaging England from the abuses in the World State. In Brave New World (1932), Huxley purports to rectify the perceived degenerative drift, land misuse, and cultural stagnation with the help of eugenics, English pastoral, and poetic recollection. Reacting against egalitarianism, the novel

morphs extant social prejudices and sociocultural stereotypes into insurmountable caste barriers. In order to facilitate the proliferation of upper-casters, the World State sanctions social segregation, dysgenic types, and experimental island enclosures. Yet such policies fail to prevent some of the Alphas’ dissent, which leads to their search for sublime experience. Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, and John the Savage (who is also a eugenic Alpha, despite his birth and socialization outside the World State) gain an unpremeditated rapport with the residual energies of the defiled English landscape. John attempts to redeem a Surrey wasteland; Bernard flies above the English Channel, utilizing technology in order to expose himself to a stormy sea; and Helmholtz faces expulsion to the Falkland Islands, which may supply him with the best conditions for writing. Whereas the novel forecloses both John’s and Bernard’s transcendences, it associates Helmholtz’s with the Wordsworthian poet. Resorting to tranquillity and latent imaginative powers, Helmholtz evokes the contents of Mustapha Mond’s safe. His verses, the ‘Rhymes on Solitude’, perform a dual intertextual operation: they parody Eliotic idiom, on the one hand, and recollect an absent tradition of mystical reflection, on the other. Helmholtz proceeds to poetry from neither excavation nor mediation, but recollection. His pending exile to a colonial outpost promises to improve on English pastoral, which, jointly with perennial poetic activity, is devised to survive the World State. The Coda examines later post-national scenarios, whose dystopian tenor bewails a world without England. Drawing on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), and Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998), I maintain that these novels demonstrate incremental failures of national discourse. English pastoral dissipates into an irredeemable solipsism, English continuity translates into path dependency, and the idiom of English character abdicates with the arrival of a female protagonist. However, the dissolution of national discourse unveils its unrealized potential. English emancipatory legacies have yet to produce a saturating effect, which will have propelled England from its displaced discursive existence into its place-specific self. This study discards the generic distinctions between utopia, dystopia, and anti-utopia. Such taxonomies lead back to a widespread view that the crisis of modernity has sent utopia into decline, which engenders an

ascertainable proliferation of dystopian and anti-utopian scripts.10 Instead, I conceptualize utopia as a form of imagination which produces visions of alterity. Utopia envisages place in response to its concretizations within the complex network of global socioeconomic relations, as well as resulting histories and discourse. Committed to the production of place as alterity, utopia performs a triple operation on existing (in my analysis, national) discourse. By way of renegotiation, subversion, and transcendence, it maps out varied, sometimes entangled, possibilities. Their tenor depends on how each particular text treats the systematic closure to which society and individual remain confined. Reacting to Wells’s World State, most of the utopian fictions under my scrutiny tend towards dystopia. With the exception of Benson, writers from Huxley to Barnes disavow the postnational condition of the world as an always already bad place. At the same time, though, their scenarios, albeit dystopian in character, glimpse into moments of alterity, which may be discursively unbound and therefore emancipatory. Both the lineages of the Wellsian utopia and its later interpretations envision the emergence of a post-national world order in southern England. In doing so, they revisit a discursive trope that has garnered attention in social, geological, and art historical categories. In Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell recounts his return to ‘southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world’.11 Sensitized to the shifting social allegiances during the Spanish Civil War, he isolates two Englands, hidden from each other ‘by the curve of the earth’s surface’.12 The England of cottage gardens, familiar streets, cricket matches, and bowler hats exists separately from the misery of industrial England. Orwell’s distinction runs along the south-north divide, making southern England contingent on social privilege. Unlike Orwell, W. H. Auden explains such distinctions as a matter of geology. His poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’ (1948) distinguishes between a mild southern landscape, on the one hand, and forbidding northern wastes, on the other. Even though the speaker reposes his aesthetic preferences in ‘a limestone landscape’, he endorses ‘clays and gravels’ as much more malleable material.13 Accordingly, southern England lends itself to domestication and representation more generously than its northern counterpart does. Patrick Keiller adds a further social gloss, when linking representation to the class status of southern England. In The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (2014), he explains that the earliest

portrayals of Sussex sought to countervail modernity for the benefit of the landed aristocracy; later, though, these attempts have expanded into national discourse, which holds the Home Counties to embody the rest of England. The resulting perception privileges an area ‘west of a line between London and […] Lancaster’, while at the same time excluding ‘the eastern counties and the hilly districts’.14 This fragmentation persists in twentieth-century English utopia, which uses southern England to defamiliarize power, wealth, and commanding myths, whose high concentration is associated with the region. London and adjacent counties serve as either a portal into the World State or a site that endures the most under it. In Wells, Berkshire and Sussex lead to Utopia; in Huxley, Surrey witnesses the worst of land misuse; in Orwell and Ballard, London vicinities offer a treacherous possibility of escape; in Barnes, Wiltshire survives England’s territorial decline, while the Isle of Wight replicates England. With the exception of Burgess, whose city has no name, Wells, Benson, Huxley, and Orwell enlist London to epitomize the least propitious features of urban modernity, which conspires with the World State against English residues. In furnishing defamiliarized representations of southern England, English utopia mounts a vigorous reminder of what may be lost to the change. However, this reinstatement of national discourse occurs simultaneously with a growing attention to England as place. Despite being frequently muted in post-national scenarios, questions of English land use, liberty, and human association gradually assume centrality. Chapter 1 addresses the reciprocity between English utopia and utopian England.

Notes 1 H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (London: Cassell, 1934), 1146. 2 Ibid., 1151–2. 3 George Orwell, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, in George Orwell: Essays, introduction by Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 2000), 193. 4 H. G. Wells, ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’, Fortnightly Review 60, no. 358 (1896): 594. 5 H. G. Wells, ‘Whither Britain?’ H. G. Wells on the Future: BBC Broadcasts from the Father of Science Fiction, broadcast on 9 January 1934, www.bbc.co.uk/archive/hg_wells/12404.shtml, accessed on 31 March 2019. 6 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 15–16. Unless stated otherwise, emphasis is in the original.

7 Ibid., 16. 8 H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future with ‘The Common-Sense of World Peace’ and ‘The Human Adventure’, edited and introduction by Patrick Parrinder (London: PNL Press, 1989), 52. 9 Ibid., 49. 10 Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 423. 11 George Orwell, The Homage to Catalonia, introduction by Julian Symons, note on the text by Peter Davison (St Ives: Penguin, 2000), 196. 12 Ibid. 13 W. H. Auden, ‘In Praise of Limestone’, in W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 186–7. 14 Patrick Keiller, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (London: Verso, 2014), 25.

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 overview 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. My further discussion investigates the ramifications of national discourse, which has 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, these dualities commit England to a discursive existence that frequently has no foothold in either space or time. England’s discursive content becomes the stuff of utopia in visions that range between England’s placeless condition and its placed spatio-temporal phenomenon, between reproduction of national discourse and production of a post-national alterity. The latter enterprise surpasses national discourse in a final act of redeployment.

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 democracy, there arises in the

world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland.15 Bloch expends much of his verbal energy, frequently heavy-footed and opaque, on the common ground, which he attempts to carve out for human destiny. His emphases on the straight gait and impulse to change the world do have a universal resonance. However, what Bloch offers as a universal and putatively concrete claim lacks, ironically, much concretization. The exact parameters of Blochian homeland evade representation, just as the roadmap leading humanity to utopia remains largely emotive. Bloch introduces the idea of ultimum to denote the unrepresentable work of utopia. This idea receives further development in studies of utopia by Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), Suvin places utopia in the category of socio-political science fiction, based on the imaginative operations it performs. Utopia produces newness, or novum, by means of ‘cognitive innovation […] deviating from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality’.16 While the images of novum furnish an alternate version of history and, in doing so, estrange us from reality as we know it, ultimum marks the limits of the imaginable. Unlike Suvin, Jameson takes a further step to enlist the unimaginable as a guide to the good society and entrust utopia with the fulfilment of that desire. Indeed, Jameson is best remembered for the oft-(mis)quoted remark: ‘Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’.17 Acting contrary to this reservation, he points to Blochian ultimum and envisages ways in which the making and transformation of society takes place due to the empowerment of all social groups, regardless of their hierarchical positions. He stipulates in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) that an achieved collectivity or organic group of any kind – oppressors fully as much as oppressed – is Utopian not in itself, but only insofar as all such collectivities are themselves figures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless society.18 If a classless society demarcates ultimum, all other variants of change become secondary in importance, deprived of a revolutionary and

systematic potential. In his collection Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), Jameson instructs that utopia may not deliver itself through ‘liberal reforms and commercial pipedreams, the deceptive yet tempting swindles of the here and now’.19 Rather, ultimum bodies itself forth as a counterpoint to the pessimism of the lived moment and in opposition to the imaginable.20 Here, as in Bloch, utopia necessarily lacks representation, which keeps the horizon of change open. Bloch’s designation of utopia as ‘principle of hope’ has been instrumental in the writing of Tom Moylan and Ruth Levitas, who, in their own peculiar ways, interpret utopia as process, desire, and method. In Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986), Moylan rejects the notion of utopia as blueprint and defends it as a process that seeks to move humanity ‘in history toward greater emancipation’.21 Even though the latter process only symbolically resolves contradictions, it challenges the fixed nature of the world, offering up opportunities for further transformation. Moylan installs utopia firmly in the realm of the human imagination, opened ‘beyond the present limits’.22 However, he is careful to specify his claim about utopia’s use value for humanity, as he brings it to bear on a sociohistorical context informed by the aftermath of the Paris civil unrest of 1968, on the one hand, as well as the 1970s emancipatory movements and the radical left’s intellectual activity in the USA, on the other. Moylan also explicates his claim by devising a separate literary-historical and interpretative category of ‘critical utopias’, into which he groups a corpus of 1970s fictional writing by US authors. Such explications do justice to a process whereby utopia unveils multiple alternatives to the deadlock of a particular historical moment. Yet much as Moylan’s whole-hearted pairing of utopia with revolution inspires in the context of his US-based analyses,23 it detracts somewhat from the universal claim he promotes. If sociohistorical circumstance determines utopia, it should equally define the means by which change is effected. Metaphorically, in Blochian vein, Moylan construes utopia as an arrival at an ever open and therefore receding horizon.24 This metaphor needs to be considered jointly with the ground on which the utopian dreamer moves or stands.

While Moylan looks towards the capacity of the human imagination to conceive emancipation, Levitas turns to ‘a utopian propensity in human beings’.25 In The Concept of Utopia (1990), she defines that feature as desire ‘for a different, better way of being’,26 which enables her to elaborate on utopia’s claim about humanity: Most utopias are portrayed as universal utopias. This portrayal entails that they necessarily make claims about human nature as a means of legitimising the particular social arrangements prescribed. Indeed, without the criterion of human needs and human nature we have no objective measure for distinguishing the good society from the bad […]. The appeal to needs is made, in fact, to provide such a (pseudo-) objective criterion, rather than make explicit the values involved in particular constructions of individuals and societies, and present this as what it is – a matter of moral choice.27 Levitas’s critique of a relativist logic surrounding how (much) human needs differ across the world, as well as the extent to which the meaning of human nature depends on supremacist valuations, is generally sound. The idea of a different, more fulfilling life may never become clear, unless the commonest, most fundamental human needs are agreed on, with regard to their sociohistorical determinations. Levitas revisits this problem in Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (2013), where she examines human needs from an ontological perspective: ‘any discussion of the good society […] entails both imagining ourselves otherwise and a judgement about what constitutes human flourishing’.28 Levitas advances her claim about the premises of human flourishing, which should necessarily include dignity, becoming, self-transcendence, and wonder. Unlike present-day societies, an alternate society will satisfy these needs in the process of excavating the hereto unrealized socioeconomic possibilities, on the one hand, and conjuring up new proposals, on the other.29 The latter process is dubbed ‘imaginary reconstitution’, which suggests that utopia already has all the requisite materials at its disposal, and it is the task of social thinkers to reconstitute these materials in an act of imagination. Levitas contributes her fair share to the task by recruiting insight from a wide range of like-minded thinkers. In conclusion, she writes: ‘Utopia as method is not and cannot be blueprint. Utopian envisioning is necessarily

provisional, reflexive and dialogic’.30 However, this Bloch-inspired rhetoric receives a concretization wherein Levitas privileges Anglo-American and Western European ideas of social improvement to the exclusion of much else besides. The resulting constitution of utopia as method does not warrant its universal claim. Even though Levitas follows Jameson in ascribing the limitations of utopia partly to ‘the limits of our imagination’ and partly to ‘the limits of our power’,31 it is Patrick Parrinder who sees the cause of these limitations in overlooking the content of utopian projects. Indeed, Moylan and Levitas explicitly avoid reducing utopia to the images, activities, and ideas that it puts forward, maintaining thus the argument about utopia’s openness and universality.32 By contrast, Parrinder inspects the content of utopian fictions from Francis Bacon through William Morris to Margaret Atwood in order to problematize utopia’s universal claim. In Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond (2015), he demonstrates that utopian texts fail to envisage societies that satisfy every human need; instead, they present alternate places that suit narrowly specialized interests, be it science, technology, eugenic hygiene, or antiquarianism.33 Without denying the use value of the socioeconomic alternatives envisaged by utopia, Parrinder insists on its iconoclasm of the conventional meaning of humanity, and H. G. Wells’s portrayals of Eloi, Morlocks, and Utopians are particularly helpful on this count. According to Parrinder, utopia reaches out universally when redefining humanity in a way that makes us inadequate and ‘wholly or partially excludes us’.34 Utopia is more than an open horizon with which humans come to terms as they move forward. In utopia, the concretized images of human fulfilment may surpass our comprehension, so much that we abandon the readiness with which we call them homeland. Whereas Parrinder situates the images of uncanny alterity at the heart of utopia’s anticipations, Phillip E. Wegner concerns himself with how utopia forestalls human association in the context of modernity. In Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (2002), he contends that Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) institutionalizes the genre at a time when land enclosure in England heralded the arrival of capitalist relations, guided further by the availability of the printing press and Protestant doctrine. Wegner sees these historic factors conspiring, as

they allow utopia to realize its prefigurative potential with regard to the emergence of the nation-state. The state as a regulative mechanism gives rise to the nation as a modern form of human association.35 Utopia lays out a model of an imaginary community whose premises are foundational to the nation-state: artificial borders, micro-level politics, popular authority, standardized language, and secularized religion. Thus, More’s text helps to ‘usher in the conceptual framework or representation of space of “nationness” within which the particularity of each individual nation can then be represented’.36 Wegner warrants this claim by analysing a collection of utopian fictions, which he dubs ‘narrative utopias’ to underscore their exploratory tendencies. Written by English, Russian, and US authors, these fictions are made to register the standardizing march of Western modernity, embodied in the nation-state and therefore significant for humanity at large. Unsurprisingly, Wegner’s analyses loop back to an English context, when, in breach of his own chronology, he tackles George Orwell’s dystopia. While Utopia prefigures the rise of the nation-state, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) should necessarily spell its demise. As the autonomy of the nationstate declines and its apparatuses become increasingly oppressive and dysfunctional, Wegner calls forth utopia to insert another element of newness, understood as ‘the cognitive space around which new kinds of lived experiences and theoretical perceptions form’.37 The newness towards which the critic gestures is a global community. It will supersede the residual nation-state and somehow rectify the empty spaces of bureaucracy, consumerism, and production, which Western modernity has left behind. However, the content of such newness remains the prerogative of the didactic operations that utopia is supposed to perform on the reader’s mind. The work of Gregory Claeys marks a watershed in conceptualizing utopia. In Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (2011), he pursues a clearly counter-Blochian line of argument, maintaining that utopia has revealed itself in concrete form throughout history, and the meaning of utopia mutates across historical epochs, once human aspirations for a certain change have been granted. He admits that ‘utopia has often been attained or discovered (and as often lost again); many past ages were indeed the realization of earlier utopian visions; and, for some, every present is a past utopia’.38 Unlike Moylan and Levitas, Claeys discards the notion of utopia as ‘principle of hope’, dream, and desire. He also opposes Jameson and Wegner in how he treats utopia as a version of ‘a vastly improved

society’.39 This society does not need to surpass the limits of the imaginable. Rather, it realizes itself through a notable, frequently major transformation that involves anything from people’s habitats to the sociopolitical order they live by. According to Claeys, the parameters of a particular historical moment specify utopia as a plausibility in ‘an eternal quest for the improvement of the human condition’.40 In locating utopia in time, he accounts for the mutable character of the socioeconomic and political circumstances that define aspirations for change. However, Claeys overlooks the fact that initial aspirations rarely match the outcome of change, and the unrealized surplus of what change might have delivered will always exceed its actual realization. When decoupled from its original capacity to transcend the historical moment, utopia fears to be buried under the weight of incremental improvement, whose purpose can be difficult to ascertain. Claeys’s notion goes beyond the dominant conceptualizations of utopia as process. Yet, like most of its predecessors, it remains spatially unbound. A ‘spatial turn’ in studies of utopia has largely been expedited by David M. Bell in Rethinking Utopia: Place, Power, Affect (2017). Bell’s distinctive approach consists in redefining utopia in view of More’s original etymology of ‘no-good-place’. Bell dismisses the idea of utopia as a mental operation, whose scope may be summarized as follows: the outreach of global capitalism has become so totalizing that it leaves no place for utopia on the map of the world. Previously, utopia offered alternatives to the constraints of the nation-state; now, when the nation-state gradually withers away, utopia may act as a practical guide to operating under this new condition.41 Bell discerns topophobia in such considerations and, instead, draws inspiration from Doreen Massey’s theory. In For Space (2005), Massey refuses to see space as a surface where all connecting lines meander, in their own self-consciously autonomous ways, towards the present condition of the world. Rather, she understands space as a multiplicity of ‘stories-so-far’.42 Each story has a trajectory of its own in the context of global socioeconomic relations. Any cross-section through space reveals not only a setting-up of new relations, but also a becoming of previously established ones. Yet the process of becoming may remain or have remained largely unrealized due to the prevailing narratives of race, gender, and class, which preclude a less superficial treatment of difference and diversity. For Massey, to demand revision of such practices amounts to

a political project that will fulfil a continuous development of stories, rather than their reduction to a palimpsest. Place emerges at the intersections of trajectories that constitute space and make it geographically meaningful and practically valuable. Place marks a pause in the constant dynamism of space.43 Bell derives a utopian potential from Massey’s theory of space: if place concretizes multiple socioeconomic relations, some of them must have transformative power. Utopia means both a production and a reproduction of place ‘within, against and beyond this (and any) present’.44 As the use of prepositions signals, this act involves conflict (against), circumscribed by a simultaneous reconstitution of what exists (within) alongside an imagination of newness (beyond). Bell conceives of conflict as a necessary mode whereby the superficiality of consensus building is averted, which presents possibilities for struggle, action, and improvisation.45 Additionally, utopia involves a production or reproduction of place, resulting potentially, but not necessarily, in newness, which may or may not be better than an existing state of affairs. Thus, utopia is more than a tantalizing horizon beyond which lies unknown territory; it is equally more than a moment of fulfilment in some phantasmal alterity, be it past or future. Bell’s notion of utopia vests power in the mutual transformation of place and people. Unlike some of its earlier expressions, this claim does not make human flourishing march to the tune of Western thought, or human history sail in the wake of Western modernity. Bell privileges place-specific and largely demotic transformative practices, rather than panoptic views favoured by Moylan and Levitas. Bell also deems past visions of social transformation reusable in the context of his understanding of place as a meeting-up of multiple trajectories. However, Bell’s inscription of utopia on the place-people nexus plays down the fact that place and people, as well as their interactions, are frequently the outcome of discourse. He strays dangerously close to the atomization of space to the level of situational emergences of place, as in living place, work place, study place, recreation place, and meeting place. Whereas Wegner’s logic overpowers in how it treats space as sufficiently globalized and conducive to a post-national, global community, Bell’s notion underwhelms by disregarding the bigger picture of place-bound allegiances. Importantly, such allegiances emerge from capital’s preponderance over global socioeconomic relations that at once

homogenize and differentiate space. In Spaces of Hope (2000), David Harvey has contended that the global circulation of capital benefits from varied market structures and means of accumulation, a circumstance that reasserts ‘ancient cultural distinctions’, co-opts communitarian interests, and builds ‘place-bound loyalties en route’.46 Accordingly, the nation-state carves out place in the global capitalist competition by means of the bureaucratic and law-enforcing mechanisms that regulate wage labour and market exchange. This process sanctions and mobilizes national discourse, which, in turn, draws on place-specific memories and mythologies in order to readapt them to the service of market forces. My further discussion explores how utopia seeks out alternate ‘stories-so-far’ within, against, and beyond national discourse, in an attempt to transcend capitalist totality. The origins and workings of national discourse have received diverse interpretation. ‘Modernist’ theories of nationalism, such as endorsed by Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and John Breuilly, assert that the political elites invent and transmit national ideologies in order to manipulate the sensibilities and actions of the masses, and thus keep them in check. Accordingly, the state precedes the nation and any nationalism that might be. Anthony D. Smith challenges this view with a ‘primordialist’ contention. In National Identity (1993), he concedes that nations are indeed fabrications and not natural features of the world. However, in the light of Ernest Renan’s earlier supposition, all national ideologies exploit a reserve of pre-existing features pertaining to place, such as dynastic rule, race, language, religion, and geography.47 When defining the nation as ‘a named human population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members’,48 Smith resolutely plants the nation in place, which determines the specificity of its relation to space. He illustrates the robust import that the nation as place has over people’s attachments through reference to the EU, whose citizens nearly always identify themselves as national first and European second.49 In Nations and Nationalism (1995), Smith remarks that ‘the nation remains embedded in the past that shapes its future as much as any present global trends’ (158). Smith’s somewhat tendentious formulation, though, casts little light on the underlying causes of said trends. Žižek rectifies this elision by referring to enjoyment. In Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993), he observes that national ideology becomes discourse not

when it is imposed on people by the political elites, but when people actively re-enact and enjoy that ideology. Such acts further translate discourse into what Žižek calls the ‘real, non-discursive kernel of enjoyment’, which, in turn, makes the nation more real than imagined. In his own words, ‘A nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths that structure these practices’.50 Along these lines, the continuity of the nation pivots on enjoyment, which takes precedence over ideology, struggle, and conflict. In order for utopia to create place, in Bell’s terms, within, against, and beyond what exists, it needs to confront enjoyment arising from national discourse. If national discourse delivers enjoyment through differentiation of space, its allegedly alternate, anti-capitalist undertow is problematical. In this case, place remains largely co-opted to the service of the nation-state and, by extension, global capital. The extant capitalist narratives of the free selfregulating market, unhampered economic growth, and competition submerge other possibilities. Preoccupied with the imagination of alterity, utopia must envisage a rectification of the nation-state’s collusion with capitalism; its redeployment of national discourse should pursue not only post-national, but also post-capitalist goals. Firstly, utopia’s production of alterity begins with an attention to the content of national discourse, which highlights the nation-state’s vision of itself, its needs and roles in a broader framework of global relations. Such content becomes the stuff of utopia only when conducing to ‘a fair and just society, with equal opportunity and transparent governance’.51 Secondly, utopia produces alterity from the alternate possibilities underpinning the historical fabric of place. Alternatives of this kind are born of the long-standing questions of territorial belonging, social, racial, and gender relationships, as well as binaries of nature and culture. Retaining its spatial and temporal embeddedness, utopia establishes new connections between the relations that underlie the surface of space, which results in a different concretization of place. And thirdly, in producing alterity as an ultimum, utopia performs an iconoclastic function. It returns images of a world where the enjoyment of national discourse will have ceased. What remains to be asked is whether this cessation means the acquisition of homeland, where the contradictions of increasingly homogenized and yet divided space will have been resolved.

The Discourse of England: Geography Whereas the subsequent chapters examine utopia’s production of alterity, the remainder of the present chapter focuses on the discursive content of England, related to geography, continuity, and character. This content sets up a reference framework for the task of redeployment, to which English utopia commits itself. The geography of England as place is complicated by the idea of Britain, its histories and legacies. As a land inhabited by the Celts and ruled by the legendary King Arthur, Britain predates England’s emergence after the fall of the Roman Empire. Britain (or, to be more precise, the Kingdom of Great Britain) also postdates England as a political entity arising in the wake of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, from the 1707 Act of Union. In uniting the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England, the latter of which had exercised jurisdiction over Wales since the 1530s, the Act of Union established a state that found its institutional base in Westminster and officially declared itself British. Indeed, shortly after its foundation, the British polity made provisions for the existence of one British nation in the British Nationality Act of 1730. British nationality was thus extended to the subjects of the Crown, natural-born or professing the Protestant religion within George IV’s dominions, including Ireland and France.52 At the very beginning, birthplace and faith defined the legal right to British nationality, glossing over the extant sociocultural and linguistic diversity of which Britain was comprised. Britain’s regional discrepancies, broadly grouped into ‘South Britain’ (that is, England and Wales) and ‘North Britain’ (that is, Scotland), came to the fore in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). In this novel, Tobias Smollett endows his narrator protagonist with an ‘English’ perspective, which will guide him on a tour of Britain. Clinker furnishes for his predominantly London-based readership an estranged and yet appreciative image of ‘North Britain’ in lieu of existing stereotypes. Even though he confirms the putatively unfavourable features of Scottish land cultivation, ‘the appearance of the bulk of the people, and the language of conversation in general’, he nevertheless expends much praise on Edinburgh’s vibrant intellectual life and Scotland’s inherent potential to catch up with England.53 Clinker’s account of his travels suggests that the enterprise of a unified British nation depends on Scotland’s capacity to imitate England in speech, manners, and the more

general look of the land. Within the parameters of British union, England becomes the measure of things British. In Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (1997), Tom Nairn has linked English domination of Britain after the Act of Union to ‘a mixture of commanding geography, overwhelming demography and economic power’, as well as an element of political mastery.54 Indeed, England had attained an economically, linguistically, and politically normative role in the British nation long before nationalism became a vehicle for sociocultural discontent and emancipation. Although England had never received national status in legal terms, it gained supremacy over its insular neighbours, with ensuing references to England as being larger than it actually was. I have already pointed up an offshoot of this tendency in A. L. Morton’s substitution of England for Britain. However, England is an island to the same extent as Scotland and Wales, and England’s identification with the island of Britain is a matter involving both self-aggrandisement and self-isolation. Since Britain, not England, lent its name to the British Empire, the question of England’s imperial growth and entanglement begs further attention. Historians of empire, such as Linda Colley, Duncan Bell, and Andre Liebich, register a preference in much imperial writing, which, from the 1760s onwards, used England for the entire island and Englishman for Briton.55 Moreover, this discursive feature posited no contradiction in terms for empire’s connection with British union, nor did it jar with the later idea of Greater Britain. In Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992), Colley has construed the British nation as a modern phenomenon inextricable from Great Britain’s imperial expansion. ‘[S]uperimposed over an array of internal differences in response to contact with the Other, and above all in response to conflict with the Other’,56 British nationality pivoted primarily on the Protestant faith, by which Great Britain distinguished itself from Catholic nations, such as France. Protestantism thus instilled in Britons, across a wide social spectrum, a confidence in their own liberty and prosperity, as well as their God-given mission, which measured up to the building of empire.57 This mission was driven by Great Britain’s superior navy, which granted the island protection, while at the same time ensuring a worldwide spread of liberal values, allegedly enjoyed by the Britons themselves. By this logic, Colley sets up the Protestant faith and the imperial project as factors that held the British nation firmly

together; their cessation would mean a destabilization of British union.58 What Colley does not problematize, though, is the imbalance between the premises of British nationality, such as birthplace and faith, in facilitating both British union and empire. After Great Britain and Ireland merged to form the UK in 1801, the right to British nationality was extended to Irish population by virtue of birthplace; however, the Irish Catholic faith disallowed exercising that right through involvement in empire. Regardless of its internal denominations, the common faith granted the Scottish and – to a much lesser degree – Welsh Protestants some parity with their English counterparts in the imperial mission, but it excluded the Irish Catholics. In ‘Globalising the “Principle of Nationality”’ (2011), Liebich reminds us that Scottish participation in the British Empire might have been disproportionately large,59 which enabled a transmission of certain Scottish influences across a wider imperial project, be they medical, educational, religious, or legal, in addition to golf and whiskey. However, this participation, as well as that of Wales and Ireland, would always bear an imprint of England’s overweening domination, foundational to British union. Liebich cites the title of John Robert Seeley’s seminal book The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883) to encapsulate the direction taken by the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.60 England’s primacy in imperial expansion asserted itself further in what became known as Greater Britain. In The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (2007), Duncan Bell derives its meaning from wide-ranging interpretations of the lineages and prospects of the British Empire. He notes that, although Greater Britain came to denote not only the territorial totality of the British Empire, but also the Englishspeaking countries including the USA, ‘the most frequent usage was in reference to the settler colonies’, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, and the Cape Territories.61 Indeed, Seeley played a crucial role in making England coextensive with Greater Britain or ‘a vast English nation’.62 At the opening of The Expansion of England, he famously critiqued the way in which empire came into being, as the English had ‘conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’.63 For England to expand less precariously in future, Seeley points to the common ground on which empire apparently stood. Opposed to the prospect of a

British federation, he hails the unique nature of Greater Britain, whose interests coalesced, being ‘rooted in the shared culture of the English “race”’.64 Seeley is careful, though, to exclude India from involvement in Greater Britain. Since India failed to grant a required level of homogeneity with England and its settler colonies, he sees it as a possession and separate branch of empire: ‘When we inquire then into the Greater Britain of the future we ought to think much more of our Colonial than of our Indian Empire’.65 Seeley also greets the expansion of England as an organic process, distinct from the artificial imposition of nationality on alien peoples, which was taking place in Europe. For him, England was sufficiently aligned with its settler colonies in terms of Anglo-Saxon origin, religion, and interest, which permitted it to become a worldwide nation and a ‘world-state’.66 Whereas Seeley envisaged England’s expansion by means of empire, James Anthony Froude, another significant proponent of Greater Britain, insisted on integration of what England already possessed. In Oceana, Or, England and Her Colonies (1886), he introduces an imaginary worldwide state that owes its name and foundations to James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), a blueprint for a post-revolutionary Cromwellian republic. Harrington placed the utmost premium on trade as a pledge of the citizens’ freedom, which, in turn, would allow Oceana to give ‘law to the sea’.67 This seventeenth-century desideratum certainly anticipated Britannia’s rule over the waves and could not but strike Froude’s chord. However, as Duncan Bell has observed, for Froude, ‘there was no need for further expansion as the contours of Oceana were discernible in the present structure of the empire – its material outline was “an achieved fact”’.68 Froude therefore sees Oceana as a redemptive counterpoint to late Victorian England, disfigured by the forces of industrial modernity and, as a result, beginning to lose out to its competitors. Assuming the tone of a public moralist, he spares no words to bewail ‘the condition of England’: What England would become was to be seen already in the enormously extended suburbs of London and our great manufacturing cities: miles upon miles of squalid lanes, each house the duplicate of its neighbour; the dirty street in front, the dirty yard behind, the fetid smell from the ill-made sewers, the public house at the street corners. Here, with no sight of a green field, with no knowledge of flowers or forest, the blue

heavens themselves dirtied with soot, […] with no entertainment but the music hall, no pleasure but in the drink shop, hundreds of thousands of English children are growing up into men and women. […] Was this to be the real condition of an ever-increasing portion of the English nation?69 By contrast, Froude appoints Oceana to grant its citizens much wider pastoral experience. Unlike England, divided up between towns and aristocratic game preserves, Oceana will contain extensive stretches of the countryside that will educate both body and soul in ‘the exercise of plough and spade, in the free air and sunshine, with country enjoyments and amusements’.70 Froude depicts Oceana as the result of England’s organic growth, rather than premeditated expansion. Oceana is to become a future condition of ‘new Englands’, which will overlay empire with a commonwealth ‘held together by common blood, common interest, and a common pride in the great position which unity can secure’.71 Both Seeley and Froude promote an ever closer union between England and (some of) its colonies. In doing so, they speak the language of origin and interest; they also identify England with the British Isles and parts of the British Empire. Such rhetorical glosses signal the contemporary tendency to homogenize British nationality, initially premised on birthplace and faith, as AngloSaxon in origin (adverted to as ‘race’). Whereas the idea of Britain purported to supersede regional and cultural diversity at the time of British union, the discourse of England subsumed the diversity of a far-flung empire. This form of homogenization carried the process of nation building forward, with England surpassing its own geography. As England began to represent both Britain and empire, it could not avoid becoming susceptible to the growth of other rival empires and economies, primarily those of Germany and the USA. Commentators link this susceptibility to the invasion trope,72 which regained momentum in 1870s fiction, following the publication of George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871). The novella shows Germany’s victory over Britain and the break-up of the British Empire resulting from the battle fought on English soil, in Surrey. In The War of the Worlds, Wells puts both the invasion trope and Surrey’s topography to further imaginative uses. Instead of the German military forces, he pictures Martians landing in their cylinders on Horsell Common. This parkland area,

located outside Woking, a small merchant town lying to the south-west of London, plays host to the ‘beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind’.73 Remarkably, Wells’s novel contains no direct reference to the British Empire, recruiting the word ‘empire’ only in its secondary meaning to denote a sphere of activity or control. In the opening chapter, one reads about the continuing ‘assurance of their [human] empire over matter’, and one of the final chapters, ‘The Work of Fifteen Days’, reports that ‘the fear and empire of man had passed away’ in the havoc caused by the Martian invasion.74 The absence of the British Empire in the novel occurs simultaneously with a spectacular loss of human empire, as though the two empires coalesce in their inadequacy to avert disaster. In using Surrey to enact global catastrophe, The War of the Worlds demonstrates a vivid departure from Chesney’s idea of invasion, where Surrey stood for Britain and empire. In Wells, Surrey serves as a synecdoche for humanity, in line with his concluding plea for a ‘commonweal of mankind’. At the same time, the choice of Dorking and Woking over the more obvious centres of imperial and global importance equally suggests the staying power of English suburbia to epitomize the universal norms of life. England’s dissociation from Britain and empire surfaced largely in response to the plans of further imperial expansion, especially during the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’, which began in 1881 and went astray for Britain in the Boer War. This circumstance brought about a new political and wider sociocultural sentiment, which, having become known as Little Englandism, opposed the ‘larger patriotism’ of the British Empire.75 Yet the idea of Little England was never a singular form of reaction. Mandler records that it embraced frequently conflicted references to the self-reliant and enterprising English character and the cult of the peasant, as well as versions of a ‘softer, more domestic, homely, almost feminized, insularized’ nation.76 Ramifications of Little Englandism took root in a contemporary corpus of writing, which relied on John Ruskin’s uses of landscape in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), setting it up as an index to the condition of England. In Landscape, Writing and ‘The Condition of England’ – 1878–1917, Ruskin to Modernism (2004), Simon Grimble has remarked that, in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, the (predominantly pastoral) landscape attained cultural and symbolic value for the sense of national belonging it mustered. He has also admitted that,

although Thomas Carlyle’s Chartism (1839) coined ‘the condition of England’ to describe the discrepancies between the industrialists’ welfare and the workers’ poor lives, this term later became a trope directing the reader to a geographical entity that is thought of primarily as a single landscape which has been humanised and improved by a single body of people and which is imagined as being comprehended by an observer, rather than to a political entity – Britain – which is only pictured comprehensively on a map.77 Imperial thinkers readily used England for Britain. By contrast, landscape writers were extremely sensitive not only to the political and sociocultural distinctions existing between Scotland and Wales, on the one hand, and England, on the other, but also to the ways in which landscape emblematized such distinctions. Ford Madox Ford and Edward Thomas, among others, advocated an England whose landscape, albeit marred by modernity, had a shaping and life-sustaining power for its people. Ford’s project consisted in separating out England from empire and British union. For him, the stretching of England beyond its original borders disclosed an artificial process whereby all remaining links with the land would have been forfeited. Interactions with the land of England and its composite geography informed, in Ford’s view, people’s frame of mind and character. In The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind (1907), he intimates: It is obviously England that has made the English; it is the climate, the shapes of the land, the moisture that covers walls with lichens, the rain upon the fertile soils, the great valley in a river basin set towards the East. It is these things that have engendered the tranquil state of mind, the optimism, the contentment, the belief – illusion if you will – that life is worth living.78 Indeed, this passage evokes an illusion of the psychological wonders of which the land of England was deemed capable. It also leaves hardly any doubt as to Ford’s renunciation of the British imperial notions of expansion, founded on Anglo-Saxon origin and Protestantism. In privileging geography and engagement with the land over race and faith, he opens up

England as a physically bounded, yet vividly more democratic phenomenon than empire. England’s prominence in discussions of landscape during the late Victorian and Edwardian period can be further explained by a wider sociohistorical movement known as Back to the Land. By the 1870s, the legacies of laissez-faire political economy, manifest in the unregulated importation of foreign grain, had disadvantaged farmers around Britain, ushering in the Great Depression of British Agriculture, which, in turn, heightened interest in self-reliant land use. In Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, 1880–1914 (1982), Jan Marsh has maintained that the return to the land involved predominantly the middle classes residing in suburbia and the upper classes moving seasonally between their town and country houses. Marsh has construed this trend as a way of restoring health and happiness, accompanied by the revival of handicrafts and simplification of daily life.79 However, Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, in Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (1984), have observed that the working classes were also returning to the land not only to sustain themselves, but also in defiance of private land ownership. Their plotlands, inspired by the ideals of anarchism, mutual aid, and the utopian visions of Robert Blatchford and William Morris, made a visible presence in the English landscape of the early twentieth century.80 Thus, the Back-tothe-Land movement acquired an almost national dimension whereby different orders of English society could establish a pastoral rapport with the land of England, also invoked in Froude’s defence of Oceana. After the land of England had taken on so much significance in both sociocultural valuations and people’s livelihoods, Edward Thomas’s reputed response in 1915 should come as no surprise. When asked why he had joined the Artists’ Rifles during the Great War, he picked up a pinch of earth, crumbled it between his fingers and replied: ‘Literally for this’.81 The fact that Thomas was ready to fight for the smallest particles of the land ties in with his broader version of England, necessarily made up of minute individual sensations and lasting presences. In the essay ‘England’ (1914), Thomas describes his country as a place of innumerable holes and corners, and most men loved – or, at any rate, could not do without – some one or two of these, and loved all

England, but probably seldom said so, because without it the part could not exist.82 Here, Thomas explicitly prefers an England of pastoral experiences to the grandeur of expansion, typified by empire and British union. This preference illuminates his collection This England: An Anthology of Her Writers (1915), where he draws on the writing of Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, and some lesser-known poets in order to ‘make a book full of English character as an egg is of meat’.83 Indeed, most of his selections distinguish England from empire, communicate a sense of dissent from the constraints officially imposed by the state, and reaffirm England’s pastoral history. That latter reaffirmation comes to the fore in Thomas’s own poem ‘Lob’ (1915), whose eponymous protagonist represents an elusive yet perennial figure of the Englishman: He is English as this gate, these flowers, this mire. […] He has been in England as long as dove and daw, Calling the wild cherry tree the merry tree, The rose campion Bridget-in-her-bravery; And in a tender mood he, as I guess, Christened one flower Love-in-idleness […]84 The poem portrays Lob as an indelible part of the English landscape, a naturalized component of the land, which he humanizes through naming. Yet Lob’s permanence evades the speaker like a mysterious spirit. His interlocutors recognize Lob’s features, but remember him in another shire and by a different name: Jack Cade, Jack Smith, Jack of every trade, Robin Hood, Ragged Robin, lazy Bob. Because of Lob’s elusiveness, the poem gives no reassurance as to whether the land of England will always body forth a likeness of Lob in its various ‘holes and corners’. Instead, it predicates Lob’s reappearance on the continuity of England’s pastoral qualities. Just as Ford wishes climate and soil were solid enough to replicate England in its people, Thomas enlists the fine grains of the land and elements of the landscape in order to reassert their centrality to the meaning of England and its people’s life. These projections essentialize England as a pastoral geography and nation, inward-looking, self-sustaining, and isolated from the big business of empire. Such a shift of attitude and rhetoric

remained palpable both during and after the Great War. England’s containment and greenery continued to provide a compensatory alternative to what Stephen Daniels has delineated as ‘the absurd theatre of Flanders, that boundless, discomposed land, a no man’s land, an anti-landscape’.85 During the interwar years, England as a geography at once involved in and separate from Britain developed new definitions, both pastoral and otherwise. In the 1920s, practices as varied as conservationism and motorcar tourism went ahead, attaining, in David Matless’s words, the status of ‘a national movement’ and ‘an intellectual, spiritual and physical citizenship’.86 However, the national dimension of such practices frequently had a rather nostalgic undertow, based on an imaginary version of England that had to be preserved or rediscovered. In an article on rural England, Stephan Kohl has admitted that Patrick Abercrombie’s The Preservation of Rural England (1926), for one, relied heavily on the image of an aesthetically arranged combination of byroads, brooks, hedges, fields, small forests, thatched cottages and a few other ingredients. It is not the countryside, or nature, but a representation of the country, constructed from traditional material along conventional lines of combination.87 Similarly, books, such as Clough Williams-Ellis’s England and the Octopus (1928) and Britain and the Beast (1937, co-authored with John Maynard Keynes), propelled the pre-existing aesthetics of the land in contrast to the suburban sprawl disfiguring it like a monster. An aestheticized England played an equally central role in motorcar tourism. Helped by guidebooks, such as H. V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927), motorists would go on journeys across the countryside in order to be sensitized to its ‘natural’ and therefore appreciably pastoral aspects. Churches, winding roads, country lanes, village pubs, and stately homes garnered unreserved praise, which was meant to enhance the motorists’ love of England. By contrast, the new roads that brought motorcars to the countryside were seen as an artificial and therefore deplorable intrusion.88 Both preservationists and authors of guidebooks endorsed the distinction between the degrading effects of city life and the redemptive potential of pastoral England. They largely shared this attitude with the late romantic mind-set characterizing the five anthologies of Georgian poetry, edited by Edward Marsh from 1911 to

1922. As late as its last collection, the work of the Georgian poets, such as Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Robert Nichols, and J. C. Squire, abounded in nature images, which gave voice to seagulls, foxes, trees, cliffs, and hills to offer a solution to the dilemmas of a modern city dweller. The modernist idea of waste land countervailed pastoral tropes. Summoned up by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), this idea militates against the compensatory imaginings of nature’s restorative and humanized powers. Instead, Eliot conveys an uncompromising sense of how the very awakening of nature forecloses pastoral experience, as in ‘April is the cruellest month’.89 Unlike Georgian poetry, The Waste Land stays firmly within the city (predominantly London, with a cursory reference to Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, and Vienna), venturing out only to the desert, which heightens the barrenness of the land and cancels out the prospect of salvation. The poem’s concluding setting in a jungle witnesses the arrival of a purifying rain, as hard won as the ‘fragments’ that the speaker has ‘shored against [his] ruins’.90 Opposed to contemporary popular assurances, Eliot strips the land of the promises of pastoral redemption and ushers in the need to earn it by a thorough remodelling of culture from ‘a heap of broken images’. His move to an international urban modernity discards English pastoral. In Grimble’s words, London thus becomes a universal city closer to ‘Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah than to […] Birmingham’.91 Eliot’s counter-pastoralism may have dispersed some of England’s essential qualities, yet its London base imparts England a new archetypal value and permanence. Apart from Eliot’s, counter-pastoral articulations gained little canonical prominence during the interwar period. The pastoral meaning of England continued to colour national discourse, and Stanley Baldwin, the UK threetime Conservative Prime Minister (1923–1924, 1924–1929, 1935–1937), played an active role in propping it up. As part of the celebrations of St George’s Day, he authored an address ‘England’ (1924). There, he concerns himself with the uses of England where Britain is meant, the English people’s qualities and their lineages around the world, and – most important – the English landscape. He begins by thanking his audience for bearing with his deliberate deployment of ‘the word “England” without some fellow at the back of the room shouting out “Britain”’.92 Although calculated for effect, Baldwin’s apology indicates that by the mid-1920s the previously common substitution of England for Britain had become problematical.

Further, Baldwin offers a celebratory account of ‘the great English race’, created by God and endowed by St George with the exemplary gifts that range from indifference and serenity to persistence and ruthlessness. Those gifts ‘have made the Englishman what he is, and […] have enabled [him] to make England and the Empire what it is’.93 In the second part of his address, once the imperial bombast has been exhausted, Baldwin adopts a register markedly redolent of Little Englandism. He equates England with both its landscape and the sensory experiences obtainable from its observation: To me, England is the country, and the country is England. […] The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function.94 Like Thomas’s Lob, Baldwin’s England is an eternal presence, as old as humanity. This essential, almost prelapsarian characteristic underlies temporary inscriptions, such as empire and industries. Yet, existing at the level of impressions, England lacks solidity, and the speaker is quick to reinvest it, in Ford’s fashion, in the English people. Their ‘power of making homes’, coupled with the love of justice and humanity, results from the interactions with England and yields a major English legacy.95 Baldwin’s address demonstrates a curious overlapping of imperial self-congratulation, where England stands for Britain and empire, on the one hand, and Little Englandism, where England morphs into the permanence of country life, on the other. His acts of universalizing England both as a fertile ground for the worthiest human endeavours and as a pastoral site render the specificity of his subject quite elusive and indeterminate. England thus becomes spatially and temporally unlocatable: it assumes existence in a timeless pastoral nowhere whence history and geography have been emptied out. Albeit an empty container, English pastoral has had robust nationwide currency, re-emerging most recently in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games. Children’s choirs from around the UK sang the selections from William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ (1804), intermittent with the

lines from Scottish (‘Flower of Scotland’) and Welsh (‘Land of My Fathers’) national songs, and an Irish ballad (‘Danny Boy’). The singing occurred alongside the stadium performance of a pastoral scene being dismantled in order to give way to the growth of industry. The performance glimpsed into communal life, socialization, and a game of cricket, before these activities were diminished by a mass exodus to the city and hard sweaty labour therein. Pleading allegiance to the stereotypical English landscape of live hedges and rolling hills, Danny Boyle, the director of the ceremony, edited out the most defining period in the history of that landscape, a phase heralding the rise of the ‘dark Satanic Mills’. This elision rehearsed what Raymond Williams has described in The Country and the City (1973) as a ‘very powerful myth’, according to which England lost innocence in the course of a transition from agrarian to industrial society.96 However, land enclosure had preceded and conduced to industrialization, unsettling thereby the life of peasants and their rustic preoccupations. In exploiting said myth, the Olympic ceremony reasserted England as a site of prelapsarian pastoralism and superimposed this historically unverifiable experience on the constituent parts of the UK. Krishan Kumar, the author of a series of interventions into English identity, has attributed England’s at once contained and widely spread-out existence to the nature of British union. Being ‘inextricably interwoven’ with other parts of the UK, England can never retreat into its smaller geography.97 Indeed, England’s geography has reigned symbolically supreme over the UK since at least 1917, when, at the height of the Great War, King George V renounced his explicitly German titles and adopted the name of Windsor instead.98 Windsor, a place in reputedly pastoral Berkshire (prior to the construction of Heathrow airport, for that matter), has exercised a unifying significance for the UK, so much that post-independence Scotland was determined to keep the monarchy. Having initially evolved as a response to imperial expansion, the pastoral mode still informs the discourse of England and – through it – the unity of the British nation. For utopia to produce alterity, it will need to rethink English pastoral.

The Discourse of England: Continuity Continuity relates to the English Constitution and an institutional framework associated with it. Its idea has received perhaps the most durable

consolidation in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event (1790) and acquired an almost mythical permanence in national discourse. Responding to revolutionary change whereby ‘the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken’,99 Burke advocated precedent, inheritance, and gradualism as premises of England’s existence. His Reflections stipulates that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. […] This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. […] [T]he idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding the principle of improvement. […] Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.100 Burke brackets together the founding moment of the English Constitution, when the English aristocrats limited King John’s power in 1215, with the much later establishment of a constitutional monarchy in England, following the post-1688 settlement with William of Orange. He perceives those events to reprise the alleged wisdom of a natural process whereby, once attained, the precedent of power sharing will continue to grow and body forth an ever greater degree of liberty across society. Undoubtedly, in the idiom of his time, Burke connects the expansion of liberty with England’s ‘institutions and its governing classes’,101 particularly those represented in Parliament. His naturalization of liberty purports to protect existing power structures from an overhaul, just as it cautions against written constitutions. For Burke, the latter arrangements may potentially infringe on liberty as a natural inheritance and impose constraints on its gradual growth. Accordingly, liberty ought not to be enforced in the form of

abstract constitutional precepts, but rather embody itself in the generational links, specific interactions, and local engagements maintained by freeborn individuals. Written after the consummation of British union, Burke’s Reflections strengthened the ideological foundations of the British polity, whose constitution remains largely identical with that of England. If the English Constitution marked the foundation of English statehood and its later expansion into a British polity, Westminster Parliament has had a central role to play in leading this process since the Glorious Revolution. Gerard Delanty points out Parliament’s investment in continuity, when, in Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe (2013), he infers that Britain’s ancien régime, unlike its continental counterparts, resides in neither the monarch nor the public, but with Parliament.102 This inference takes its tack from Whig historiography, whose narrative upholds Parliament as the tool of a gradual progression towards constitutional monarchy and liberal democracy. Parliament thus becomes a site for delivering liberty to ever wider quarters of the population, and this process warrants the continuity of the English Constitution. However, the fact that Parliament operates in the institutional framework of a highly hierarchical society complicates the freeing aspect of its activity. In her study of English political thought, Julia Stapleton draws attention to the ways in which such complexities were smoothed out when nineteenth-century Whiggism told a story of national unification which successfully transcended class, racial, and linguistic barriers; of the uniqueness of the English political system with its fine balance of local and central forces; of the successful brokerage of ‘progress’ and ‘tradition’; and of the successful securing of English constitutional liberty and representative institutions.103 In such a scheme, Westminster Parliament faces the simultaneous task of protecting the system from incremental demands for reform and enfranchisement, on the one hand, and granting liberty, on the other. The paradoxical nature of this task mediates progress with continuity by ensuring that the delivery of liberty does not impinge on the institutional status quo. Formed predominantly from the supporters of Whig ideology, the UK Liberal Party took up the banner of continuity, which they carried almost single-handedly in the period between 1868 and 1918. In his essay

‘Englishness and the Political Culture’ (1986), Robert Colls recommends that the Liberals engendered a ‘capacious Liberalism’, which meant specific freedoms: ‘free subjects, free speech, free ideas, free religion, free contracts, free enterprise, free markets, free trade’.104 Granted by Westminster Parliament, such freedoms traced their origins to the English Constitution, with an immediate impact on the British state and its colonies. Additionally, Parliament secured its own continuity by the liberating process. Associated primarily with Irish Home Rule and universal suffrage, a confluence of rebellious political platforms challenged the politics of continuity during the first decades of the twentieth century. In The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), George Dangerfield testifies to the Liberals’ internal divisions over these issues, which allegedly led the Party to a dead end: ‘before them stood a barrier of Capital which they dared not attack. Behind them stood the House of Lords’.105 Having rejected the first two Irish Home Rule bills and reluctant to give women the right to vote until 1918, the Liberals failed to effect wider political and social liberty. Failure to act convincingly on the creation of a welfare state and limitation of upper-class privilege caused a reshaping of England’s (and Britain’s) socio-political climate and scene. The Great War quickened the latter process, as it offered wider occasions for social mobility, when soldiers of lower birth had been promoted to ‘parity of rank with the sons of the aristocracy’.106 As the Liberal Party steadily lost ground, Labour made seismic electoral advances, until it gained office in 1924. At face value, such developments put enormous pressures on the continuity of the British state and the constitutional mechanisms by which it delivered liberty. However, by the time the Labour Party came to power, its socialist agenda had undergone substantial adaptations to the idiom of continuity. In Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958), Williams places Labour’s advocacy of gradualism ‘under Fabian direction’.107 Founded in 1884, the Fabian Society promulgated an evolutionary outgrowing of laissez-faire capitalism on the way to socialist society. In Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), the early Fabians, including Sidney Webb and G. B. Shaw, subscribed to gradual reforms that would eradicate certain ‘historic fossils’ by constitutional, rather than revolutionary means and lead out ‘the irresistible progress of Democracy’.108 When in power, Labour adopted the language

of English liberty. In a study of left-wing patriotism, Paul Ward has observed that the Party’s adherents saw liberty as an innate quality that had to be defended from the Lords’ privilege, urban capitalism, and external invasion.109 Moreover, Labour made no pretences about its espousal of an existing institutional set-up as ‘the sole legitimate vehicle for the advance of socialism’.110 When the British state had to deal with Labour unrest, the Labour Party demonstrated allegiance to continuity by opposing the insurrectionary spirit of the General Strike of 1926. The demands for the miners’ better working conditions should have been channelled within, not outside, parliamentary party politics. Throughout the interwar years, continuity remained at the heart of an extant constitutional order and its time-honoured narrative. In The Politics of Englishness (2007), Arthur Aughey opines: ‘That there was no serious fascist or communist threat to constitutional politics in England in the 1920s and 1930s was not a matter of “mere” luck but also a matter of political culture’.111 Indeed, contemporary political studies, including John Oakesmith’s Race and Nationality: An Inquiry into the Origin and Growth of Patriotism (1919) and Ernest Barker’s National Character and the Factors in Its Formation (1927), endorse the Whig version of history: they accentuate the unity of the British nation, which results from the exercise of political will and systematic education. Importantly, both Oakesmith and Barker assert that unity at the level of ‘common interest’112 and ‘common mental content’,113 rather than blood and race. For Oakesmith, the ‘common interests of a group of people are their common material, intellectual, moral and artistic possessions, their social institutions and their economic relations and their common sympathy in the use of these in the world of experience’.114 For Barker, the state always necessarily occasions said commonalities: ‘It is not nations which make States; it is States which make nations’.115 By extension, the British state not only preceded the British nation, but also legitimized itself through the practice of continuity. In her essay on English identity, Stapleton contends that, up until the outbreak of WWII, proponents of continuity mobilized it to rule ‘against the “foreign” extremist creeds of both left and right which appeared to be making dangerous inroads into intellectual opinion at home’.116 Put otherwise, gradual reform, organic evolutionary growth, and halting delivery of liberty took precedence over the ‘un-English’ models of social

progress which threatened to thwart continuity. The English Constitution continued to supply a discursive counterbalance to a potential onslaught on the system it had produced. Further to the overriding assurances, which the practice of continuity offered in a political sense, the interwar period played witness to the less affirmative sensibilities. They ranged from nostalgia and elegy to the revisions of continuity, which frequently, if obliquely, challenged the relevance of the English Constitution in the context of modernity. Authors, such as Charles F. G. Masterman, D. H. Lawrence, and George Orwell, unveiled the nuances of continuity pertaining to the condition of England. In The Condition of England (1909), Masterman recruits the southern English landscape to give a broader perspective on modernity, which swept England in the early twentieth century: A few generations ago that difficulty did not exist. England was the population of the English countryside: ‘the rich man in his castle’, ‘the poor man at his gate’; the feudal society of country house, country village, and little country town, in a land whose immense wealth still slept undisturbed. But no one today would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside the spirit of an ‘England’ four-fifths of whose people have now crowded into the cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer in the fields at noontide or evening, the old English service in the old English village church, now stand but as the historical survival of a once great and splendid past.117 This elegiac invocation of England deplores the dissolution of age-old certainties, such as existed between aristocrat and peasant. Bewailing the loss of that ‘splendid past’, Masterman muffles the history of land enclosure, which had established the patterns of country life he sees disappearing. Given that, continuity takes on a seemingly contradictory valence: the ways in which it is debated in the political and public sphere do not match the change affecting England’s wider socioeconomic fabric, testified by the landscape. Masterman returns to this contradiction in England after War: A Study (1922). Even though he tunes into a much less minatory score on the decomposition of social hierarchies, he hazards to essentialize the depopulation of the land:

If the English had cared enough for their land they would have fought for it as the French peasants did, and as the Irish peasants did, and obtained it at last, however hopeless the fight once appeared. We have little devotion to the soil of England as England, although we have much devotion to the race of Englishmen as Englishmen.118 For Masterman, the English have no attachment to the land, which results in their being a ‘race’ of wanderers – ‘seafarers’ and ‘wayfarers’.119 Therefore, demands for the land, should they ever be presented, will undermine the English liberty to wander from country to town (and further around the globe) in search of a better life. The cessation of wandering may also involve opposition to the established order that grants them that peripatetic liberty. As long as such a scenario remains unrealized, the precepts of the English Constitution prove highly adaptable to the socioeconomic pressures of modernity. Unlike Masterman, Lawrence capitalized on the English people’s right to live communally off the land, which changes the meaning of continuity. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), he furnishes a description of a mining country in the East Midlands, which is witnessed by Connie Chatterley, the novel’s protagonist: This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not Organic, but mechanical.120 Composed in the mechanical recitative of a typewriter, this passage reinforces the effects of modernity on the landscape, which suffers from overtyping more than overwriting. Unlike Masterman, Lawrence affords a critically engaged stance on the extant political meaning of continuity. If industrialization transforms the land and bears out ‘an appalling difference in manhood’, continuity presents little more than a constitutional necessity to keep the multitudes of miners under the land, not on the land, and allow them the liberty to become what Connie perceives as the ‘anima of mineral disintegration’.121 The fact that Connie cannot reconcile the sights she

observes with a more savoury version of England additionally prefigures the novel’s programmatic and yet open-ended conclusion. Her love affair with Oliver Mellors, Sir Clifford Chatterley’s gamekeeper, spells the promise of a holistic relationship that defies the social boundaries and bridges the divide between mental and bodily experience. Similarly, a newly devised practice of continuity may provide the liberty to regenerate oneself in an egalitarian community that maintains an organic link with the land. Whereas Masterman’s Englishmen are, in essence, wanderers who choose liberty over the land, Lawrence exhibits a longing for a foothold, be it Mellors’s farm or a whole community. Williams has commented on Lawrence’s principles in Culture and Society: He was not a vagrant, to live by dodging; but an exile, committed to a different social principle. The vagrant wants the system to stay as it is, so long as he can go on dodging it while still being maintained by it. The exile, on the contrary, wants to see the system changed, so that he can come home. This latter is, in the end, Lawrence’s position.122 Yet Lawrence had never come home. He went on wandering, if only to escape from the hierarchical relations ordained by the English Constitution. Lawrence’s forward-looking, albeit indeterminate, rectification of the condition of England stands in sharp contrast to Orwell’s largely nostalgic denunciation of that condition. Unlike Lawrence, Orwell gestures towards the frequently neglected roles that the lower middle class could have played in buttressing and improving on England’s constitutional continuity. Orwell’s loyalties to that class have been known since the publication of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), demonstrating his re-enactment of social normativity. Orwell preferred to be lower middle class, obfuscating both the gentility of his birth and his education at Eton. This normative position allowed Orwell a vantage point from which to survey the impenetrability of the social barriers, so much that in order to get outside the class-racket I have got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well. I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognisable as the same person.123

In acknowledging his inability to re-adapt himself, Orwell pointed up not only the difficulty of the task, in which he engaged as a worker, but also a reluctance to undermine the securities of a class system. Orwell’s social allegiances additionally correlate with his defence of Little England,124 whose partly historical and partly mystical existence depended on the life and activity of the English lower middle class. In Coming Up for Air (1939), Orwell symptomatically associates continuity with an imaginary southern English market town, Lower Binfield, which serves as a synecdoche for pre-war England. Looking back on the late Victorian and, particularly, Edwardian decade, the novel thus develops the most prominent myth of a long summer afternoon, an undisturbed life replete with certainties. The narrator, George Bowling, offers several reflections to that end: ‘Before the war it was always summer – a delusion, as I’ve remarked before, but that’s how I remember it’.125 Bowling’s awareness of the delusory nature of his memories sets him up as at once a wistful and sober-minded commentator on what is past. Patrick White, the author of On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (1985), has speculated that the sense of nostalgia for an ‘idealised air of the golden age’ stems, on both an individual and a national levels, from the ‘destabilisation of everyday life’.126 By the latter he means the effects of modernity on the family, community, division of labour, tradition, and perceptions. Orwell’s novel discerns change in the people of his class, who ‘hadn’t heard of machine-guns, they didn’t live in terror of the sack or spend their time eating aspirins, going to the pictures, and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp’. All this prelapsarian existence, not yet choking on tinned food, asphalt, and rubbish, ‘belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler’.127 Although the novel’s narrator reminisces nostalgically of the much simpler, innocent life, he also pinpoints the unsavoury, unjust, and poor quality of that life, manifest in a rampant lack of basic amenities and social welfare, widespread alcoholic relapses, and illegitimate births. Nevertheless, he wonders: what was it that people had in those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure. More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know was that the

order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things would go on as they’d known them.128 Bowling’s emphasis on continuity as an underlying principle of the lower middle-class life acquires an air of desirability in Orwell’s patriotic essays. In ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940), Orwell admits that war may divest the wider world of further certainties, yet England yields ‘something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same’.129 Instilled in him by the system of education, such a robust sense of continuity has gone along with the sound of ‘God Save the King’ and the sight of a Union Jack, both of which allegedly transcend politics. On this note, Orwell charges against the lacking patriotism of the ‘Europeanized’ left-wing intellectuals, whom he deems unable to carry the banner of change in the name of their country. In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), he lays a comparable charge on the working man, whose patriotism is ‘unconscious’, and therefore his ‘heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack’.130 Moreover, in Orwell’s view, the worker exhibits a strong sense of insularity and xenophobia because of his limited contact with the rest of the world. Having little to say on the loyalties of the upper orders of society, only that the number of ‘treacherous’ men among them ‘is probably very small’,131 Orwell designates his own class as a preserve of a truly English patriotism and, by extension, socially transformative potential. When he famously declares that England resembles to him a ‘family with the wrong members in control’,132 he anticipates his later remark about the need of ‘a complete shift of power’, which might bring with it ‘New blood, new men, new ideas – in the true sense of the word – a revolution’.133 Clearly, Orwell’s prognosis is more than a nostalgic testimony to the opportunities missed by the representatives of his class; it is also a way of reassigning that class with an unfulfilled historic role, which goes against the grain of nostalgia. If the moment in which Orwell’s symbolically timeless England finds itself is void of continuity, the lower middle class can give continuity a new lease of life. Recent commentators have expanded on Orwell’s sentiment, aligning English patriotism with the continuity of British union as an end in itself. Tristram Hunt has thus discerned the means to said ends in the growing need of new institutions: an English parliament and a bank holiday for St

George’s Day, which would grant legitimacy to popular identifications with England. In Hunt’s own words, We need to be much clearer about our love and affection for the signs and symbols of modern England. This was the genius of Orwell’s English socialism – to combine mission and motivation; the poetry of radicalism with the purpose of patriotism.134 The latter purpose looks promising in the situation of extant social, economic, and ethnic disparities. Yet, concerned primarily with the salvaging of British union, its radical scope remains guesswork. Lately, critical discussions of continuity have adopted a pronouncedly oppositional attitude towards the English Constitution and the Burkean conservatism that carried it forward. Taking exception to Burke’s foreclosure of revolution and republicanism, the authors of Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness, and English Literature (2013) underscore the elitist predispositions of the British state to serve, in historical perspective, the interests of capital, be it British union, empire, or the City of London.135 Deemed to conspire presently with neoliberalism, the British state has acted on the deregulation of employment and social welfare, as well as contributing to the expansion of the financial sector, which overpowers the City and – through it – marginalizes the rest of the country. The volume’s contributors also campaign for an English parliament, intending it, however, as an undoing of the erstwhile imperial and current neoliberal tendencies. They share a staunch belief that this institution will restore continuity to the service of liberty, which will eventually deliver the next stage of England’s constitutional growth, an English republic.136 However, what these sanguine propositions underestimate is the extent to which the legacies of land enclosure, a specifically English development with comparable applications around the British Isles, coexist comfortably with the neoliberal direction taken by the British polity. Indeed, enforcement of leasehold on land, which is overwhelmingly private in England, occurs simultaneously with the commodification of the monarchy. If such renewed coalescences of medieval land tenure and royal spectacle go largely unchallenged, perhaps continuity means more than the acquisition of wider liberty; it may equally signify the stabilized, almost ritualistic order of everyday life that holds

England and British union together. Utopia’s work on national discourse may proceed from challenging the symbolic certainties for the sake of emancipation.

The Discourse of England: Character Further to continuity, the idiom of character inflects the discourse of England. In the aforementioned study of the English character, Mandler has established that this idiom emerged in the work of nineteenth-century public moralists, such as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold, who had come to think of their audiences in terms of a ‘psychologically homogeneous unit’, the ‘nation’.137 Character thus served as a tool of both the ‘political mobilization of the “people”’ and imposing middle-class values that would ‘tame’ the lower and the upper classes.138 Both functions sought to ensure social cohesiveness and remained paramount throughout much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, while at the same time, the understanding of the national character mutated under the influence of significant events. Mandler supplies a detailed intervention into how, following the 1867 Reform Act and the 1884 Representation of the People Act, the gradual enfranchisement of the reading public set up the channels for transmitting the English character. Initially inseparable from Teutomania, a fascination for the Germanic roots of the Anglo-Saxons, the idiom of character construed the English people with balanced features in contradistinction from the ‘animal passion that had so frustratingly set back Irish and French progress’.139 Such constructions made up the character of the ‘great Briton’. Moderate, imaginative, and yet reasonable, as well as confident in Britain’s economic and imperial superiority, he found reassurance in his universally civilizing mission. However, just as England’s expansion into Britain and empire caused anxiety about potential external invasion and subsequent disappearance, the great Briton had diminished to the stature of the Little Englander by the end of the nineteenth century. He transformed into a character withdrawn from the vagaries of the wide world and grew deeply attached to the landscape and domesticities of his daily life. In Mandler’s estimation, the Great War ‘restored the mid-Victorian consensus: confidence in the character of the people was rebuilt by the experience of war and even more by the experience of peace, as Britain’s distinctiveness

vis-à-vis the rest of Europe returned’.140 Indeed, as indicated earlier, the idiom of character took on a self-celebratory tonality during the interwar years. To be English meant standing for liberty and parliamentary democracy in the face of the usurpations of power on the continent. According to Mandler, since the ‘world crisis was a crisis of English values’, an unprecedented renewal of the national character occurred during WWII.141 Dubbed the ‘people’s war’, it heightened the idiom of character as both the vehicle and purpose of fighting: it was ‘the first war in which all of the people – on home front and war front alike – were constantly bombarded with intimate descriptions of what they themselves were like’,142 and what character their struggle was worth. The latter broadening of the national character to the people marked a high point in the history of this idiom, a summit that had been reached by the undoing of the racial premises of character, on the one hand, and its partial unmooring from the imperial aspirations to produce the universal Englishman, on the other. Despite the fact that women had remained largely excluded from the formulations of the national character, it fulfilled an instrumental role in national unification. In the second half of the twentieth century, Mandler contends, the idiom of character disintegrated, which was caused by a series of factors. One such factor relates to a shift in social science from considerations of character to those of identity, when emphasis begins to fall on ‘the consciousness of belonging to a group, though not necessarily sharing with it all one’s innermost qualities’.143 This shift accounts for a much wider spectrum of possible allegiances and associations. Undoubtedly, if identities can be worn like hats or revealed like the nests of a Russian doll, they hardly constitute a homogenized form of character. Among the historic factors enabling that shift, Mandler expands on the following: the changing ethnic composition of the British population, the anti-establishment trend in the British popular culture of the 1960s, the flowering of Scottish and Welsh nationalisms in the 1970s, the growing impact of US-style globalization, and Euroscepticism. In their peculiar contexts, these factors have rendered the unifying appeal of the idiom of character completely inadequate, so much that Mandler concludes: ‘Beyond football, most people find it difficult to pin down anything particularly emblematic of England today’.144 Given current debates about the future of British union and England’s relation to Europe, the discursive legacies of character gain

renewed urgency, and the subsequent chapters of my study elaborate on the English character in the context of a post-national world. Prior to losing its purchase, character had received contesting treatment from both domestic and foreign commentators. If read together, their accounts expose the duality of the English character in how it at once guarantees and eradicates individuality, unites and entrenches difference, brings out the best of humanity, and dehumanizes. One of the more assertive endorsements of the primacy and uniqueness of this subject among other nations can be found in The English National Character (1896), authored by Mandell Creighton, a Cambridge historian and bishop of the Church of England. He propounds: ‘Now the most important point about English history is that the English were the first who formed for themselves a national character at all’.145 Despite acknowledging the dynamic reciprocity between history and the making of character, Creighton underscores the latter’s supremacy as both the ‘animating spirit’ and ‘civilizing agent’ of England’s institutions, literature, and imperial interactions. Along these lines, the advantages of the English character are held unquestionable, as they work themselves out in both the ‘individual Englishman’ and the ‘notion of liberty’, which he ‘takes with him, wherever he goes’.146 Creighton extols these qualities to explain England’s separateness from Europe, which ostensibly lacked character at the time. Writing four decades later, Ernest Barker continued to use the idiom of character, but did so, unlike his late Victorian predecessor, with fewer certainties and more circumspection. Barker’s National Character and the Factors in Its Formation underscores the roles of education, law and government, religion, as well as acquisition of language and literature in the shaping of the national character. For him, character formation is necessarily the outcome of a consciously willed process, rather than an unconscious working-out of the always already innate individualism and liberty: ‘a nation makes its character by the minds and the wills of its members, as an individual makes his character by the operation of his mind and his will’.147 Deeming the English character similar to other national characters in how it is malleable by circumstance, Barker voices concern about unchecked immigration, which may dilute the nation’s specificity in the maelstrom of contact.148 In an essay on Barker’s political thought, Stapleton has credibly suggested that Barker exercised open-mindedness in ‘making contact with other nations and national traditions’, and therefore

‘defied the English national stereotype of insularity in matters of the mind and much else besides’.149 However, Barker’s anxieties surrounding England’s own integrity and tradition signal a markedly waning confidence in whether the Englishman’s individuality would suffice to sustain them. They additionally suggest a diminished assurance about the English civilizing mission not only abroad, but also at home. Contrary to this wary drift in domestic discussion of character, contemporary foreign appraisals reinstated its value in times of a world crisis. Flanking chronologically the interwar period, the work of George Santayana and Michael John Demiashkevich, both US social thinkers, held the English character in very high esteem, sometimes to the detriment of critical reflection. In his collection Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922), Santayana plants the Englishman firmly in the immediate physical environment he inhabits, as if this circumstance has an ultimate effect on his innermost constitution. For Santayana, since the Englishman ‘prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts’,150 he lacks the missionary and conquering instinct. In writing off English involvement in empire, Santayana domesticates the Englishman and extrapolates his pastoral reflexes from a construction of the English landscape wherein ‘Everything lingers on and is modified’.151 The latter construction reanimates the contemporary trope that brought the English landscape and character in close association with the sense of mild changeableness and moderation,152 as well as peace and stability, which carried forward the continuity of national life.153 Subsequently, in Santayana’s view, the Englishman’s ‘character is like his climate, gentle and passing readily from dull to glorious, and back again; variable on the surface, yet perpetually self-restored and invincibly the same’.154 If the Englishman can only experience temperate mood modulations, which are nevertheless contingent on his permanent outlook, the English character becomes a bulwark against the extremities afflicting the continent at the time. Santayana intimates that agitation and revolution are as alien to the English character as intense weather effects to the English landscape. Unlike Santayana, Demiashkevich takes a less mystifying view of the Englishman’s naturalized predispositions and registers the specific mode whereby the English subject of The National Mind: English, French, German (1938) engages with reality. Instead of being preoccupied with

‘political, aesthetic, or metaphysical doctrine’, the Englishman pays his utmost attention to character in public and private life.155 Demiashkevich observes that such an empirical attitude operates on fair play. This principle emerged in the late nineteenth-century context of organized games and was making a comeback during the interwar period as a validated norm in both domestic and international affairs: This very English way of ‘playing by the game’, a remarkably sound and fertile custom productive of political stability and social peace, is a constant lesson, not only to dictators but also to democratic and parliamentary governments in foreign countries.156 In Demiashkevich’s estimation, the practice of fair play additionally involves the art of compromise, which defines many socio-political arrangements in England, on the one hand, yet never infringes on the Englishman’s liberty, on the other.157 Notably, Santayana and Demiashkevich strike the same chord when evoking peace and stability in their exposition of the English character. Such evocations point up a desideratum that can only be granted through the cultivation of a moderate mind-set, fairness, love of liberty, and compromise. Albeit laudatory and wishful, this revision of the English character welcomes a return of the exemplary Englishman for the world to look up to. In contrast to the affirmative accounts of the English character, one finds its vivid criticism as a class-bound phenomenon. From a foreign perspective, writers in this category highlight how the English character bears out the worst of modernity on the economically dominant English middle classes. In a collection of short stories The Islanders (Ostrovitiane, 1918), Yevgeny Zamyatin satirizes the regimentation of middle-class life through the portrayal of the Reverend Dewley and the Jesmond community, for which he preaches. As befits his name, the vicar lives and acts duly, which refers directly to the strict order of his daily routines, regulated by timetables for food, fresh air, penance, charity, and intercourse with his wife. Dewley practises his own ‘precepts of compulsory salvation’, according to which ‘life must be like a well-run machine and lead us to our goal with mechanical inevitability, mechanical, you understand’.158 Communally, Dewley’s precepts attract a uniform following, to an extent that English individualities become identical cogs in the social machinery

they operate. This tendency comes to the fore particularly on a Sunday, after Dewley’s sermon, when middle-class conformity takes centre stage: The Sunday gentlemen were of course manufactured at a factory in Jesmond, and on a Sunday morning thousands of copies appeared on the streets, along with the Sunday edition of the St Enoch Parish Gazette. Carrying identical canes and wearing identical top hats, the respectable Sunday gentlemen in their false teeth strolled down the street and greeted their doubles.159 Zamyatin uses the Sunday sermon as an occasion that discursively consolidates the gentlemen into an ‘imagined community’. On no other day perhaps do they get as fully involved in a ritual of common beliefs and manufactured likenesses, whose performance relies on modern industries, from replicated news items to artificial markers of gentlemanly status. Yet Zamyatin’s satire remains kindly and allows the islanders, including Dewley, leeway to readjust their regimented lives to accident and interaction with those who resist to be disciplined. The vicar’s Irish doctor reverses the established meaning of ‘fixed and unshakable truths’ by admitting that ‘I’m always punctual in my lateness: that’s a sort of punctuality’, and the vicar exhibits nothing but annoyance in response.160 Unlike Santayana and Demiashkevich, who discern in the English character the unique qualities that can be made universal, Zamyatin detects a symptomatic trend in how that character heralds standardization, rather than flourishment of individuality. In collating this trend with the effects of modernity, The Islanders stages a dry run of Zamyatin’s dystopia We (My, 1920), whose characters are numbers, uniformly dressed, and set to follow timetables with mechanical precision. Zamyatin’s insight into the artificiality of the English character finds ascertainable homologies in G. J. Renier’s journalistic enquiry with a telltale title The English: Are They Human? (1931). On a note similar to Zamyatin’s, Renier discloses in the English gentleman the standardizing workings of modernity that apparently distance him from the rest of the human race. Somewhat glibly, he notes that ‘I came to the conclusion that the world is inhabited by two species of human beings: mankind and the English’, whereas the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish still partake of ‘universal humanity’.161 In denying the English human status, Renier lays

the problem at the doorstep of Victorian public moralists, primarily Matthew Arnold, whose idea of the cultured individual did allegedly more justice to ‘outward form’ than immediate value-laden interaction.162 He observes the culmination of this idea in the English gentleman’s ‘ritualistic conception of life’, noting that Throughout the day, the Englishman performs acts and pronounces words, not because they have a significance in themselves, but because they happen to be the acts and the words which, for one reason or another, it is deemed right to perform and to pronounce.163 Indeed, adherence to ritual involves a thorough attention to externalities. Implanted into the English gentleman’s mind by his Eton-Oxbridgian education, they include his proverbial understatement in conversation, hyperbolic appreciation of his country, distrust of theoretical knowledge, and – most important – refusal to drop his h’s in speech. Since, in Renier’s perceptions, the English character is a modern matter of mechanical repetition, practised by the representatives of a particular class, it puts them at a disadvantage to those whose humanity is neither modern nor mechanical. Here, Renier means ‘normal and old-English humanity: the urban and especially the rural proletariat’.164 On being exposed to English villagers, he records their flair of shrewd and unrestrained conversation, downright expression of opinion, lack of arrogance, and consistent disregard of the h’s. These qualities are thought to align the English country folk with their continental and American counterparts. Adopting a proto-Marxist approach to the proletarians’ historic agency, Renier expects them to rebel against the standardizing constraints imposed by the English character. His expectations prefigure those of Winston Smith, who equally reposes hope in the proletariat. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston tells his diary: If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within.165

Winston’s hope takes a sharp downturn when he discovers that the proles lack the ascertainable notions of history and politics. However, in a recent study of dystopia, Claeys argues that, regardless of Winston’s disillusionment, Orwell ‘has left a space for hope’ in his novel.166 Claeys explains that the proles retain the capacity to revolt, precisely because they have been allowed to exist outside the system that engenders the likes of Winston. On this reading, Orwell releases the proletariat from the dictates of character but fails to concretize hope. By contrast, Renier connects the English proletarians’ transformative potential to the political achievements of the middle classes. To be sure, he accords little value to compromising constitutional arrangements, such as ‘a republic with a king’, and practical applications of continuity whereby ‘a spell of governmental experience […] put an end to [the Labour Party’s] revolutionary tendencies’.167 Instead, Renier holds admiration for the transcendence of nationality, whose realization within British union derives itself from the alleged empiricism of the English character. In the interwar context of the newly fledged nation-states and persecution of ethnic minorities there, the British polity offered a template for both a supranational coexistence of nations and constitutional secession from it, as in the case of the hard-won Irish Free State.168 Renier recommends that the English proletarians take over this supranational order from the middle classes and develop themselves into the ‘British Citizens of the World’.169 Vested with residual English humanity, the new Englishman may hope to redress the dehumanizing proliferation of modernity and enable better forms of human association. Whereas Zamyatin and Renier dissect the English character for the standardizing sway it held over its adherents, A. G. Macdonell takes their caveats in a less minatory and more comedic direction. In a novel England, Their England (1933), Macdonell, himself a Scottish journalist, adopts a quasi-foreign perspective on the subject, which permits him to exploit some of the extant stereotypes surrounding the English character and its connections with organized games and landscape. The novel enacts a series of expository operations whose varied degree of thoroughness dethrones the English character as such. Commissioned to write a book about England ‘as seen through the eyes of a Scotsman’, Donald Cameron, the novel’s protagonist, fails to comprehend any common qualities among the Englishmen he encounters. He quickly realizes that the English character is a sham, because people are ‘all different’.170 Most such realizations take

place during the cricket matches, in which representatives of an upper class participate. Unlike the commentators analysed above, Cameron shies away from seeing in the game anything but a social occasion and therefore avoids spelling out a link between the players’ conduct and the principle of fair play. Cameron’s second field trip takes him on a sojourn across Hampshire, where the sight of an English boarding school brings out the sense of England as a perennial being. He muses: ‘The English school, whose motto puts kindliness above flourishment or learning, lay among its water-meads, and all around was the creator, the inheritor, the ancestor, and the descendant of it all, the green and kindly land of England’.171 Couched in a highly sentimental vocabulary typical of H. V. Morton’s guidebooks, this passage essentializes a particular image of the English landscape and salutes its truth value above the features of industry, waste, suburbia, and impoverishment, which also constitute ‘real’ England. The novel’s critical distance from such a selective act of valorisation assumes itself in its very title, England, Their England. Like Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley, it alludes to the imperialistic verse, ‘Pro Rege Nostro’ (1900), written by the late Victorian poet William Ernest Henley on the Boer War. While the poet expresses readiness to follow the bugle call of ‘England, my England’,172 Connie Chatterley stops to wonder about her rapport with England, whose body has been disfigured by coalmines; she remarks to herself: ‘England, my England! But which is my England?’173 England, Their England, in turn, assumes a tongue-in-cheek air when leaving England dutifully to the English. Yet Macdonell’s irony unravels a socially entrenched version of England, perhaps more solid than the middle-class articulations of the English character. Despite the fact that, in the second half of the twentieth century, the idiom of character forfeited scholarly and public currency, its legacies have resurfaced in the Brexit polemics concerning Europhobia, dominant among a marginal majority of the English voters. David Marquand, a political scientist and former Labour MP, has addressed the issue in an essay ‘Britain’s Problem is Not with Europe, but with England’ (2017). He imputes the outcome of the Brexit referendum to an ‘outdated version of English nationhood’, regardless of its class underpinnings. Across British union, the myths of England as a ‘special, exemplary, and even providential nation’ materialize in the iconography of the ‘mock-Gothic Houses of Parliament’ and the ‘trooping of the colour on the monarch’s official

birthday’.174 In Marquand’s view, the love of ritual obscures the more rebellious, fair, and liberty-loving version of England, whose origins reach back to the fourteenth-century peasants’ revolts, John Milton’s pronouncements against tyranny, and the Chartists’ demands of universal suffrage. Republican in orientation, the latter version pleads for an England that will be more receptive to the wills of its partners in British union, as well as ‘foster[ing] a humane, imaginative and generous-hearted relationship with the rest of our continent’.175 In distinguishing the love of liberty from the love of ritual as polarized identifications with England, the above polemic revisits the earlier interpretations of the English character, analysed in this chapter. Love of liberty has been regarded as a quality nurtured by English institutions and sanctioning England’s civilizing mission within British union and around the world. Love of ritual, in turn, has been likened to the regimentation of daily life and frequently caricatured as a warning about the standardizing impact of modernity. In historical perspective, the Englishman’s love of liberty served as the universal quality towards which humanity ought to have aspired, whereas his love of ritual heightened a sense of self-inflicted, artificial separateness from human association. Foregrounding the continuing relationship with Europe as a pledge of liberty, present-day discussion revises the idiom of character. In order to partake of wider humanity, identifications with England need to capitalize on the love of liberty, whose growth has been forestalled by what Žižek defines as the ‘non-discursive kernel of enjoyment’, which is love of ritual. The worldwide emancipatory mission of the English character has yet to come full circle and a utopian England to emerge. The discursive content of England summons up a largely contradictory idea of place. At the level of pastoral geography, this idea strives to expand place beyond England’s borders into the island of Britain, British union, and empire, but at the same time, it reduces England to an insular enclosure and particles of the land. In terms of continuity, it heralds the organic growth of liberty, while at once demanding a stabilized order of life, which calls liberty into question. Through the idiom of character, the discourse of England endorses individuality, moderation, compromise, and fair play; yet, on the flipside, it brings out regimentation and love of ritual. Surfacing in literary, sociocultural, and political practices, these contradictions supply utopia with materials for redeployment and potential resolution. If utopia is

to renegotiate, subvert, and transcend the discourse of England, it may seek to deliver an alterity whose geography will have witnessed a revision of land ownership, continuity reinforced the pursuit of liberty, and idiom of character espoused closer associations with humanity. Wells’s prefiguration of utopia’s pertinent operations on the discourse of England makes his proposal for the World State central to the next chapter.

Notes 1 A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1952), 9. 2 Ibid., 11. 3 Ibid., 9. 4 Ibid. 5 Richard Gerber, ‘The English Island Myth: Remarks on the Englishness of Utopian Fiction’, Critical Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1959): 38. 6 Ibid., 40. 7 H. G. Wells, Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution (London: Gollancz, 1941), 94. 8 Ibid., 55. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 56. 11 Michael Sherborne, H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, foreword by Christopher Priest (London: Peter Owen, 2012), 334. 12 Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 147. 13 Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘Utopianism and National Identity’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3 (2000): 88. 14 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 205. 15 Ibid., 1376. 16 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 64. 17 Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review 21 (2003): 76. 18 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 2002), 281. 19 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 3. 20 Ibid., 84. 21 Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, edited by Raffaella Baccolini (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), 23. 22 Ibid., 40. 23 Ibid., 35, 43, 49, 195, 223. 24 Tom Moylan, ‘To Stand with Dreamers: On the Use Value of Utopia’, The Irish Review 34 (2006): 5. 25 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), 209. 26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 214. 28 Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 177. 29 Ibid., 153, 197. 30 Ibid., 218. 31 Ibid., 220. 32 Moylan, Demand, 38–39; Levitas, Concept, 214. 33 Patrick Parrinder, Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 184. 34 Ibid., 188. 35 Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 2. 36 Ibid., 55. 37 Ibid., xx. 38 Gregory Claeys, Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011), 12. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 15. 41 Robert T. Tally, Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), ix. 42 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2014), 12. 43 Ibid., 66, 106. 44 David M. Bell, Rethinking Utopia: Place, Power, Affect (London: Routledge, 2017), 63. 45 Ibid., 156. 46 David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 39–40. 47 Ernest Renan, ‘What Is a Nation?’, translated and annotated by Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 12–18. 48 Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1993), 14. 49 Ibid., 152. 50 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 202. 51 Maxim Shadurski, Utopia as a World Model: The Boundaries and Borderlands of a Literary Phenomenon [Utopiia kak model mira: granitsy i pogranichiia literaturnogo iavleniia] (Siedlce: Wydawnictwo IKR[i]BL, 2016), xiii. 52 British Nationality Act, 1730 [4 Geo 2 c. 21], Nationality Laws of European States and Territories, last modified on 6 February 2019, www.uniset.ca/naty/BNA1730.htm, accessed on 31 March 2019. 53 Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Munich: Jürgensmeier, 2005), 231–33. 54 Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997), 198. 55 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996), 121; Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 111; Andre Liebich, ‘Globalising the “Principle of Nationality”’, in Nationalism and Globalisation, edited by Daphne Halikiopoulou and Sofia Vasilopoulou (London: Routledge, 2011), 31. 56 Colley, 6. 57 Ibid., 34. 58 Ibid., 395. 59 Liebich, 32.

60 Ibid., 33. 61 Bell, Idea, 7. 62 John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 75. 63 Ibid., 8. 64 Bell, Idea, 110. 65 Seeley, 11. 66 Ibid., 293. 67 James Harrington, Oceana (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace, 2016), 132. 68 Bell, Idea, 148. 69 James Anthony Froude, Oceana, Or, England and Her Colonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 8–9. 70 Ibid., 8. 71 Ibid., 12. 72 I. F. Clarke, ‘Before and After The Battle of Dorking’, Science Fiction Studies 24, no. 1 (1997): 40; Claeys, Searching, 172; Neil Evans, ‘“A World Empire, Sea-Girt”: The British Empire, State and Nations, 1780–1914’, in Nationalizing Empires, edited by Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015), 61. 73 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, in H. G. Wells: Classic Collection I (London: Gollancz, 2010), 292. 74 Ibid., 207, 333. 75 J. H. Grainger, Patriotisms: Britain 1900–1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 140. 76 Mandler, English, 139–40. 77 Simon Grimble, Landscape, Writing and ‘The Condition of England’ – 1878–1917, Ruskin to Modernism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 13. 78 Ford Madox Ford, England and the English: The Soul of London, The Heart of the Country, The Spirit of the People, edited by Sara Halsam (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 326. 79 Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, 1880–1914 (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 4, 7. 80 Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2004), 8, 29. 81 Quoted in Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 2013), 114. 82 Edward Thomas, ‘England’, in Edward Thomas, The Last Sheaf: Essays, foreword by Thomas Seccombe (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 102. 83 This England: An Anthology from Her Writers, compiled by Edward Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915), iii. 84 Edward Thomas, The Collected Poems, edited by George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 54. 85 Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 213. 86 David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1998), 67, 73. 87 Stephan Kohl, ‘Rural England: An Invention of the Motor Industries’, in Landscape and Englishness, edited by Robert Burden and Stephan Kohl (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 186–87. 88 H. V. Morton, In Search of England (London: Methuen, 1927), viii. 89 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 63. 90 Ibid., 79.

91 Simon Grimble, ‘Englishness’, in T. S. Eliot in Context, edited by Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 50. 92 Stanley Baldwin, On England and Other Addresses (London: Philip Allan, 1926), 1. 93 Ibid., 4. 94 Ibid., 6, 7. 95 Ibid., 8–9. 96 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985), 96. 97 Krishan Kumar, ‘Negotiating English Identity: Englishness, Britishness and the Future of the United Kingdom’, Nations and Nationalism 16, no. 3 (2010): 478. 98 Chris Baldick, The Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 303. 99 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event, edited by Conor Cruise Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 193. 100 Ibid., 119–20. 101 Mandler, English, 26. 102 Gerard Delanty, Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 172. 103 Julia Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 34. 104 Robert Colls, ‘Englishness and the Political Culture’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, edited by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 29, 31. 105 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, introduction by Peter Stransky (London: Serif, 1997), 21. 106 Jonathan Wild, ‘“A Merciful Heaven-Sent Release”? The Clerk and the First World War in British Literary Culture’, Cultural and Social History 4, no. 1 (2007): 82. 107 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 187. 108 Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by G. Bernard Shaw (London: The Fabian Society, 1889), 33. 109 Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1998), 101, 118. 110 Ibid., 5. 111 Arthur Aughey, The Politics of Englishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 45. 112 John Oakesmith, Race and Nationality: An Inquiry into the Origin and Growth of Patriotism (London: William Heinemann, 1919), viii. 113 Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in Its Formation: revised edition (London: Methuen, 1948), 12. 114 Oakesmith, ix. 115 Barker, 15. 116 Julia Stapleton, ‘Political Thought and National Identity, 1850–1950’, in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, edited by Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 263. 117 Charles F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909), 11–12. 118 Charles F. G. Masterman, England after War: A Study (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), 151–52. 119 Ibid., 150. 120 D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Collins Classics, 2013), 188. 121 Ibid., 192. 122 Williams, Culture, 205.

123 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 150. 124 Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness, and English Literature, edited by Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 128; Anna Vaninskaya, ‘The Political Middlebrow from Chesterton to Orwell’, in The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr. Miniver Read, edited by Kate Macdonald (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 169. 125 George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 103. 126 Patrick White, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21–22. 127 Orwell, Coming, 74. 128 Ibid., 107. 129 George Orwell, ‘My Country Right or Left’, in George Orwell: Essays, introduction by Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 2000), 137. 130 George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’, in George Orwell: Essays, introduction by Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 2000), 147. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid., 150. 133 Ibid., 164. 134 Tristram Hunt, ‘Labour Must Embrace Englishness – and Be Proud of It’, The Guardian, 5 February 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/05/labour-embraceenglishness-proud-patriotism, accessed on 31 March 2019. 135 Literature of an Independent England, 7, 39. 136 Ibid., 15, 238. 137 Mandler, English, 26. 138 Ibid., 41, 168. 139 Ibid., 81. 140 Ibid., 141. 141 Ibid., 181. 142 Ibid., 193. 143 Ibid., 196. 144 Ibid., 239. 145 Mandell Creighton, The English National Character (London: Henry Frowde, 1896), 8. 146 Ibid., 32. 147 Barker, 6. 148 Ibid., 47. 149 Julia Stapleton, ‘Ernest Barker: Classics, England-Britain, and Europe, 1906–1960’, Polis 23, no. 2 (2006): 216–17. 150 George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (London: Constable, 1922), 32. 151 Ibid., 14. 152 Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 80, 209. 153 G. R. Searle, A New England?: Peace and War, 1896–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 602. 154 Santayana, 38. 155 Michael Demiashkevich, The National Mind: English, French, German (New York: American Book, 1938), 29. 156 Ibid., 64. 157 Ibid., 90.

158 Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders and The Fisher of Men, introduction and translated by Sophie Fuller and Julian Sacchi (London: Flamingo, 1985), 15. 159 Ibid., 23. 160 Ibid., 26. 161 G. J. Renier, The English: Are They Human? (London: Williams and Norgate, 1931), 27. 162 Ibid., 287. 163 Ibid., 171. 164 Ibid., 199. 165 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (St Ives: Penguin, 1990), 72. 166 Gregory Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History. A Study of Modern Despotism, Its Antecedents, and Its Literary Diffractions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 436. 167 Renier, 36, 150. 168 Ibid., 156. 169 Ibid., 288. 170 A. G. Macdonell, England, Their England (Stroud: Founthill Media, 2012), 40, 97. 171 Ibid., 188. 172 William Ernest Henley, ‘Pro Rege Nostro’, in The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions by Various Writers and a General Introduction by Matthew Arnold, edited by Thomas Humphry Ward (London: Macmillan, 1918), vol. 5, 508. 173 Lawrence, Lady, 187. 174 David Marquand, ‘Britain’s Problem is Not with Europe, but with England’, The Guardian, 19 December 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/19/britain-problem-noteurope-england-brexit-englishness, accessed on 31 March 2019. 175 Ibid.

2 The Wellsian Utopia and the Discourse of England

The World State at the Interface of Modernity and Cosmopolitanism H. G. Wells’s conception of utopia, or the Wellsian utopia, fulfils the task of emancipation and iconoclasm by defying generic and national boundaries. It finds expression in both the writer’s fiction and journalism, wherein Wells delineates the possibilities for a more accomplished post-national world. According to Simon J. James’s Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture (2012), Wells’s oeuvre reconstitutes utopia from the usable elements of culture, which allows humanity to win the race against catastrophe.1 In H. G. Wells and the World State (1961), W. Warren Wagar insists that the Wellsian utopia evolves in several stages, which are not always chronological.2 With its outline of the history of the Modern State (also dubbed the New Republic in Anticipations (1901) and the World State in A Modern Utopia (1905)), The Shape of Things to Come (1933) and The Holy Terror (1939) postdate Men Like Gods (1923). The latter of these novels offers the most advanced vision of social transformation. Wells envisages the rise of the Modern State as a historically unprecedented event, heralded by the fall of the fickle dictatorships that emerged temporarily on the ruins of the old democracies. Indeed, the Wellsian utopia refers to a progression whereby the Modern State grows into the World State, before it acquires the universal dimensions of Cosmopolis and Utopia, where the state will have withered

away into the process of education. ‘Our education is our government’,3 is the motto proclaimed in Men Like Gods and a horizon towards which the Wellsian utopia is tending. Critics have expressed complementary views regarding Wells’s engagements with national discourse. On the one hand, James infers that the Wellsian utopia facilitates ‘the falling-away of loyalties to national identity’ and the outgrowing of patriotism and the nation-state.4 Indeed, in evolutionary terms, Wells foresees the emergence of united humanity as a desired post-national possibility. On the other, Stapleton discloses a national impulse in Wells’s evolutionism, contending that his ‘use of Whiggism – albeit selective – as a model of progress towards a world state suggests an identity with English culture which belies his more culturally detached scientific cosmopolitanism’.5 Put differently, Wells predicates the attainment of a nationless world on the discourse of England. This contention adheres to the logic of Wells’s own identification, which, in the preface to The Shape of Things to Come, declares his instincts ‘as insular as my principles are cosmopolitan’.6 In what follows, I take a stand against the dichotomous understanding of the Wellsian utopia, arguing that its national means form a complex entanglement with its cosmopolitan ends. Alongside evolutionary theory and political thought, Wells recruits a wide array of discursive features, which pertain to English geography, continuity, and character. My discussion assembles the Wellsian utopia from its manifestations in the texts that address the respective questions of pastoral alterity and imperial infrastructure, evolution and revolution, individuality and the idiom of character. This material constitutes an idiosyncratic version of utopia, which at once purports to denationalize the world and anchor England’s discursive continuity there. In acknowledging the complexity with which Wells renegotiates, subverts, and transcends national discourse, I maintain that the Wellsian utopia inscribes a cosmopolitan intent on national predispositions, which makes it neither cosmopolitan nor national, but both at the same time. Wells’s professional background as a biologist had perhaps a decisive bearing on his conception of utopia as a matter of a continuous evolutionary process, rather than revolutionary rupture. As early as ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’ (1896), Wells contended that the differences between the natural and the evolved man were minimal in terms of evolutionary changes. Accordingly, the more significant distinctions consist in the

accumulation of ‘moral suggestions and knowledge’, which characterize the evolved man.7 In Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells (2003), John S. Partington has uncovered the origins of this idea in T. H. Huxley’s theory of ethical evolution. Huxley, under whom Wells studied biology, distinguished between evolution as a ‘cosmic process’, which permits the fittest to survive, and evolution as ‘social progress’, which favours ‘those who are ethically the best’.8 Partington suggests that Huxley upheld the importance of social progress as a mechanism of ‘tam[ing] the “cosmic process”’.9 Here, the ‘cosmic process’ and social progress constitute a symbiosis wherein human biology not only defines, but is also defined by culture. Wells puts this idea to imaginative lengths in his scientific romances. Most vividly, The Time Machine: An Invention (1895) propels the Time Traveller into the year 802,701, where he becomes privy to the post-human condition of the Morlocks and Eloi. In their own peculiar ways, these two species foreclose human evolution: while the former have degraded to the nadir of subterranean bug-eyed monsters, the latter have climbed the treacherous heights of nearly ethereal beings. With the acquisition of new bodily forms, both Morlocks and Eloi represent a shift of balance between cultural transmission and biological adaptability, which disrupts their human evolution. A comparable concern arises from the depiction of vivisectionist experiments in Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). On a biological level, the Beast Folk can be made to resemble humans, yet their ability to maintain the acquired humanity rests ultimately on the mantra of the ‘Law’: ‘Not to go on all Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’10 Without the daily recitation of this cultural code, relapses to a pre-existing animal state occur in sinister ways. As indicated in the Introduction, the epilogue of The War of the Worlds contains one of the incipient formulations of the Wellsian utopia. The narrator posits the need of ‘the commonweal of mankind’, not a paradise on Earth.11 If the Martian invasion has taught people anything, they should be ready to take concerted action in order to secure their survival in future. This action involves a further convergence of the biological and cultural forces that have facilitated human evolution. The Martians’ absolute defeat by the bacteria gives humanity an obvious biological advantage. However, on a cultural level, humans have yet to accept the precariousness of their position in the face of another possible invasion. Before that happens, they must achieve, on their own planet, what the Martians have failed to. Aaron

Worth observes that, in addition to spatial conquest, Wells promotes technologies that have a longer lifespan and educational outreach, such as language, cinematic and archival records, and cultural artefacts.12 As a caveat to the disturbed relationship between biology and culture, Wells allows a glimpse into a highly specialized and therefore unhuman society depicted in The First Men in the Moon (1901). Inhabiting the Moon, the Selenites have resolved all internal contradictions caused by inequality, war, and waste. Their standards of well-being pivot on the system of stringent eugenic controls, which put every citizen into their place, be it intellectual activity or physical work. The novel remarks: ‘He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it’.13 Such a biologically engineered division of labour and ensuing hierarchies contradicts Wells’s notions of ‘controlled breeding’ and ‘intense education’.14 These notions pertain to the biological and cultural factors of human evolution, and their permeation sustains the Wellsian utopia. Wells’s anticipations of the future also carry the hallmarks of his utopia. ‘A Story of the Days to Come’ (1899) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), among other scientific romances, offer the sights of unseen transport, as well as foregrounding both instructive and cautionary moments in the condition of modernity. Put otherwise, Wells not only soars upward into the sky to command a view of an indiscriminate ‘shape of things to come’, but also detects in that shape new opportunities and potential threats. Parrinder has assigned Wells with the dual symbolism of Moses and Cassandra, whose forecasts are equally comforting as they are ominous.15 Indeed, Wells’s ascertainable anticipations comprise time travel, nuclear energy, the aeroplane, the tank (‘land ironclad’), the laser beam (‘heat ray’), embryonic chimeras, the atomic bomb, the outbreak of WWII, the launch of spacecraft, and – less certainly – Wikipedia.16 Such prophecies bring forth a future whose disastrous course may be averted if utopia takes over modernity. In Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought, Wells comprehends modernity as a series of developments inflected by locomotion, urban conglomerations, and communications that unite the world.17 Of its own accord, modernity

produces no better condition of society; rather, this new condition presupposes much effort on people’s part: They will not conceive of it as a millennial paradise, a blissful inconsequent stagnation, but as a world-state of active ampler beings, full of knowledge and energy, free from much of the baseness and limitations, the needless pains and dishonours of the world disorder of today, but still struggling, struggling against ampler but still too narrow restrictions and for all more spacious objects than our vistas have revealed.18 Wells’s emphases on endless struggle speak directly to his conception of utopia, which is never ideal, fixed, or delivered by a simple fluke of modernity. To Wells, modernity supplies utopia with the circumstances and tools for purposeful action. In A Modern Utopia, Wells delineates the major principles whereby he distinguishes his utopia from that of his predecessors: Plato, More, Bacon, Bellamy, and Morris. First, he declares his utopia kinetic, rather than static, with reference to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory.19 The dynamism of the Wellsian utopia also has a narrative embodiment, particularly evident in A Modern Utopia. To that end, critics have pointed to ‘an irruption of the narratable’20 and a formal flux epitomizing the novel’s speculative and exploratory nature.21 Second, the Wellsian utopia purports to transcend islands and similar insular enclosures in order to become coextensive with the whole world: ‘World-state, therefore, it must be. […] We need a planet’.22 Third, Wells thinks of his utopia in terms of time, rather than space, finding space synonymous with permanence and closure.23 Fourth, set in the not-yet, the Wellsian utopia commits itself to utilitarian tasks, such as increasing ‘the beauty, the pleasure, the abundance and promise of life’.24 Fifth, the Wellsian utopia maintains continuity with the world as we know it, so much that every human has a more evolved, ‘parallel’ version of him or herself.25 And sixth, the samurai, a non-hereditary caste of administrators, govern the World State. They are highly intelligent, healthy, and morally sound volunteers,26 forerunners of Wells’s later idea of the ‘open conspiracy’.

These principles receive concretization in Wells’s further writing, which maps out his utopia’s gradual expansion through the World State. In The World of William Clissold: A Novel at a New Angle (1926), Wells presents the World State as ‘one interlocking system’ and ‘a world business organization’.27 Granted such a unifying prospect, he recommends that large companies first act to ‘make for a single economic world organization, for Cosmopolis that is and not for Empire’.28 In The Shape of Things to Come, Wells envisages the growth of the World State in the form of an interconnected system of economic and cultural units. He admits: ‘There was to begin with a faculty of scientific research, a faculty of interpretation and education, a health faculty, a faculty of social order, a supply and trading faculty, a number of productive faculties, agricultural, mineral and so on’.29 Each named unit will be specialized yet flexible in its activities, and very closely linked to all other regions by means of highly developed networks of transport and communication. Thus, Wells readjusts the progress of modernity to the service of a globally united order that will function like a living organism. Just as biology and culture intermix on a human level, the World State equips the geophysical features of the world with renewed economic and cultural faculties, and this new order takes on a planetary scale. The Wellsian utopia derives its cosmopolitan impulses from Immanuel Kant’s foundational essays: ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent’ (‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’, 1784) and ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (‘Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf’, 1795). Wells embraced the prospect of a world federation, which, in Kant’s own words, ‘should eventually include all nations’.30 Despite its cosmopolitan perspective, the latter vision carried imperial connotations, which James Tully records as Kant’s investment in the ‘presumed direction of European civilization toward the universal culture’.31 The Europe of nation-states would thus aid the growth of republican values and morality, which all other non-European communities would mature to accept of their own accord. Kant’s injunction – nation-state first, federation next – received a new lease of life in Giuseppe Mazzini’s influential essay ‘Nationalism and Nationality’ (1871). One of the architects of a unified Italy, Mazzini anchored the ‘construction of humanity’ in nationalism, contending

famously that ‘Humanity constitutes the end and the nation the means’.32 In consequence, the nation-state began to denote not only a freeing stage from imperial oppression, as primarily in the case of Italy, but also a mechanism of acquiring liberal values. The nation-state took on the role of a landmark achievement on the way to a wider freedom, synonymous with humanity. Initially, Wells endorsed Mazzini’s instruction, to which he admits in his 1921 pamphlet The New Teaching of History with a Reply to Some Recent Criticisms of The Outline of History.33 However, the practical implementation of the League of Nations modified Wells’s understanding of the nation and nationalism in the newly established framework of a world peace. Following the Treaty of Versailles, Wells withdrew his backing of the league, because, in Partington’s observation, Germany had been ‘treated to a vindictive peace […] by the “war-guilt” clause. […] The League of Nations […] was for all practical purposes a league of victors […]. It excluded Germany, Russia and Turkey and was deserted by the USA’.34 Wells responded to such a misconceived post-war settlement by repudiating the nation-state as no more than an affliction that incites a named population to act as if it were ‘more important than the general welfare of humanity’.35 Subsequently, the League of Nations garnered much criticism from Wells for causing disorder and chronic misunderstanding around the world. In Men Like Gods, the omniscient narrator reports the protagonist’s betrayed hopes at the failure of the League of Nations to contain conflict, unreason, and ‘social dissolution’.36 Along similar lines, The Shape of Things to Come construes the League with the power to ignite unhealthy superstitions. As one such example, the novel cites the government of the newly restored Poland, which ‘developed into an aggressive, vindictive and pitiless dictatorship’, belligerent against other nationalities.37 Dismissing the League as ‘a hindrance rather than a help to the achievement of world peace’,38 Wells equally rejected the nation-state as both a precursor of the World State and a guarantor of cosmopolitanism. Present-day commentators share Wells’s stance on cosmopolitanism, when setting it up against the nation-state and nationalism. Yet, unlike Wells, they promote place-bound and interpersonal manifestations of cosmopolitan contact, rather than its globally unifying clout. Barney Warf and Chris Rumford concur in their assertion that cosmopolitanism predates nationalism, and the advent of national jurisdictions has marginalized the

world’s cosmopolitan mode of existence.39 Warf discerns in nationalism a contrary tendency to what Mazzini propagated as the nation-state’s allegedly cosmopolitan purpose: ‘All nationalist ideologies, to one degree or another, view community as synonymous with the nation-state, not with all of humanity’.40 For Warf, nationalism always necessarily divides humanity, be it through education, news media, military service, or – most important – borders. Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, ‘foregrounds human commonalities and worldwide concerns’, which ought to inform placespecific politics.41 Whereas Warf views cosmopolitanism as a desired condition of the world, Rumford takes a critical line on the prospect of a cosmopolitan reality under the circumstances of globalization. Indeed, if big businesses and movement of commodities are to implement such a reality, the outcome will hardly be cosmopolitan and may only continue stirring up nationalistic or even tribalist fervour. Instead, Rumford suggests that the existence of borders empowers cosmopolitanism, as long as ‘societies are characterized by fragmentation, transformation and multiplicity’.42 He perceives the instance of border crossing to be an ‘escape from permanence and solidity’, which blurs the distinctions between ‘inside/outside, self/other, individual/group’, resulting thus in a ‘cosmopolitan encounter’.43 Like Warf, Rumford affirms that the nation-state, with its express fixation on border control and surveillance, may only hamper the practice of cosmopolitanism, which primarily occurs on a demotic level. Failure to ascertain a cosmopolitan encounter in the Wellsian utopia has led critics to charge against Wells’s privileging of a world unified to a point of homogeneity. In ‘Miniaturization and Cosmopolitan Future History in the Fiction of H. G. Wells’ (2010), Morgan Fritz holds that Wells’s overriding concern with the emergence of a particular utopian vision trumps diversity, whose conditions ‘resist coordination and planning’.44 Fritz ascribes this feature of the Wellsian utopia to its author’s penchant for envisaging the world in miniature, as though the complexities of race, language, class, and religion could be systematized, similarly to a war game board. Much as this act of resolution minimizes the demotic enactment of cosmopolitan encounters in the World State, it grants the reader, through the images of concerted action, ‘the benefit of critical distance from the problems faced by an imperfect humanity struggling toward cosmopolitanism’.45 Such images play a crucial role in challenging the

fixities to which the nation-state and nationalism consign individuals and societies under their control. Further, this chapter investigates the ways in which Wells fuses a cosmopolitan intent with the discursive notions of English geography, continuity, and character.

Pastoral Containment, Imperial and Linguistic Expansion Wells’s engagement with England’s pastoral geography emanates from his rethinking of how space and time relate in utopia. Until the late eighteenth century, utopian writing represented alternate places that could be discovered elsewhere: on our planet, underneath its surface, or on the Moon. In The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice (1982), Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor have conceded that Thomas More, for one, only entertained ‘the possibility of an English utopia in a different temporal location, i.e. in the future. Such an emphasis was not made explicit, however’.46 Beginning with Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s The Year 2440: A Dream if Ever There Was One (L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais, 1771), authors of utopian fiction increasingly brought into focus alternate times, also known as uchronias. In the wake of the French Revolution, this shift of focus from elsewhere to elsewhen strengthened, reflecting utopia’s growing attention to the urgency of social improvement and political reform. As the exploration of the world had left hardly any remaining foothold for alternate places, alternate times ought to be searched for in already familiar locations. Wells’s immediate precursors in the genre – Edward Bellamy and William Morris – belong in the category of writers preoccupied with the portrayal of alternate times. In their own largely competing ways, they depict what the USA and England would, respectively, have become in the twenty-first century if change had been implemented. Both Bellamy and Morris use the dream state to teleport their protagonist narrators into the future; the outline of that temporality in spatial terms reveals the two writers’ difference in the treatment of pastoral. Set in Boston, Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) permits Julian West a dual perspective on the city he once knew. Initially, he commands a housetop view, which heightens the control that has been exercised over the Boston landscape:

At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings, for the most part not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures, stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, along which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their piles on every side.47 When inspecting the uncanny novelty of a once familiar landscape, West relies on the ‘green islets’ of Boston harbour as his moment of recognition. However, West’s exploration of the city at street level drowns his astonishment in the ‘horror of strangeness’. This second perspective compels him to realize ‘how complete the change had been’.48 Set in the Thames Valley in Hammersmith, Morris’s News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest (1890), in turn, affords William Guest an outlook on England, which, albeit singular, has a manifestly sensory appeal. Unlike West, Guest begins a record of his astonishment from the freshness of the air he breathes, the gentleness of the breeze that touches his body, and the sunlit colours of the morning. Guest conceives of the extent of change not through the formidable layout of a city, which he does not intend to survey from above, but through the strangely clear water in the river and the qualities of the landscape around: Both shores had a line of very pretty houses, low and not large, standing back a little way from the river […]. There was a continuous garden in front of them, going down to the water’s edge, in which the flowers were now blooming luxuriantly, and sending delicious waves of summer scent over the eddying stream.49 The Thames supplies Guest with a moment of recognition in a landscape whose strangeness never terrifies him. Morris makes pastoral central to Guest’s experience in 2003 England. By contrast, Bellamy either sets pastoral at an observable remove from West or encloses it within Boston’s trimmed orderliness. Regardless of both authors’ differences, their notion of pastoral catalyses the effects of change that time inscribes on a certain place. According to Wells’s principles of the World State, this fragmentation of space reverts utopia to its foundations. In A Modern

Utopia, Wells remarks that his predecessors, including Bellamy and Morris, imagine secluded places in order ‘to promise sufficient isolation for a polity to maintain itself intact from outward force’, while he rules ‘against the permanence of any such enclosures’.50 Wells devises the World State as not only a spatiality of planetary dimensions, but also a temporality that can be attained at any intersection of space and time, and pastoral expedites such attainment. A Modern Utopia highlights three uses of pastoral: the first one relates to the protagonist travellers; the second to the samurai, the World State’s elite; and the third to the social disjecta. Unlike West and Guest, Wells’s characters – the Owner of the Voice and the botanist – no longer fall into a dream that lasts a century or so. Instead, they reach the World State ‘in the twinkling of an eye’, switching early twentieth-century England for another setting in space and time: We should scarcely note the change. Not a cloud would have gone from the sky. It might be the remote town below would take a different air, and my companion the botanist, with his educated observation, might almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone out of the picture, and the embanked straightness of the Ticino in the AmbriPiotta meadows – that might be altered, but that would be all the visible change. Yet I have an idea that in some obscure manner we should come to feel at once a difference in things.51 Albeit immediate and effective, this relocation carries a markedly ironic connotation. In her introduction to the volume on landscape and space, Emelyne Godfrey notes that Wells’s protagonists find themselves ‘walking in Switzerland, that desirable destination for Edwardian holidaymakers, which was also a place of recuperation for Wells’.52 The Owner of the Voice thus gives an imaginative spin to the clichéd knowledge of the Swiss landscape, widely available through guidebook merchandise at the time. Yet his privileging of Switzerland, a land where technological innovation coalesces with sublime scenery, asserts a new version of pastoral, which coexists with England in the form of an alternate spatio-temporality. Inside the World State, on the other hand, pastoral takes on both a protoromantic and an exilic aspects. As members of the ruling caste, the samurai set out to experience pastoral ‘beyond the securities of the State’, in a

‘sandy desert in Africa and Asia […]; much of the Arctic and Antarctic circles; vast areas of mountain land and frozen marsh; secluded reserves of forest, and innumerable unfrequented lines upon the sea’.53 The samurai opt for places whose characteristics transcend their understanding. Wells challenges such proto-romantic sensibilities, when later, in The Shape of Things to Come, he dubs the natural environment ‘gaunt, unsatisfactory and utterly unsympathetic’. He therefore prescribes procuring efficiency from ‘areas of marsh and scrub, bare wildernesses of rock, rainless regions, screes and avalanche slopes’.54 However, the samurai’s recurrent selfexclusion from any such activity suggests that designated pastoral enclosures permit them solitude, insecurity, and meditation, and these conditions enable entry into alternate spaces and times. Further to elitist experience, pastoral also provides exile for socially maladjusted individuals, including criminals, drug addicts, and alcoholics. A Modern Utopia speculates that ‘Perhaps islands will be chosen, islands lying apart from the highways of the sea, and to these the State will send its exiles, most of them thanking Heaven, no doubt, to be quit of a world of prigs’.55 Expulsion of the ‘incurable cheats’, who allegedly threaten the order, prevents the World State from consigning them to the lethal chamber. Instead, the social disjecta receive an opportunity for an alternate mode of living and being. Like the samurai, they avail themselves of pastoral, which may reveal a spatio-temporality distinct from that of the World State. Wells’s validation of pastoral follows his logic concerning evolution and modernity. Just as evolution requires more than ‘lucky accidents of history’, as Miles Link has maintained in his investigation of Wells’s outlines of the future,56 modernity and pastoral deliver alternate possibilities through collective and individual effort. In this light, Wells’s reaction against suburbanization, which had devoured much of the English countryside, alongside small merchant towns, including Bromley (Wells’s birthplace in Kent) and Woking (the embodiment of the suburban hubris and subsequent target of the Martian invasion), must be read in contradistinction from John Batchelor’s assumption aired in H. G. Wells (1985). Wells does not celebrate the countryside as ‘a corrective to the misery of lower middleclass urban life, and as the repository of national virtues’.57 Nor does he limit his response to ‘antipathy towards the affluent class-ridden suburbs and particularly the threat they posed to the country’s much loved countryside’, as Peter J. Beck has intimated in a study of the re-adaptations

of The War of the Worlds.58 Rather, Wells problematizes a pervasive sense of human apathy and conformity, which dissipates pastoral. Furnishing an analytical explanation of Wells’s pastoral, Thomas Connolly has recently contended that the countryside occupies in Wells a liminal position between ‘nature’ as a blind bestial force, on the one hand, and ‘civilization’ as a vehicle of amoral and dehumanizing progress, on the other.59 Flanked by these two opposites, Wells’s pastoral shows no way to ‘either a more innocent and benign mode of life or […] automatic salvation from the nightmare of “progress”’.60 Connolly justifies that, unlike Morris, Wells resorts to pastoral in order to create sites of both desire and warning. Moreover, I must add, action done on such sites defines pastoral as fulfilling or otherwise. Along these lines, Wells’s The History of Mr. Polly (1910) offers a vivid illustration of how its eponymous character finds restorative powers in peripatetic existence, away from the town life. This condition allows Polly to undo the failures of his formal schooling and later socialization by genuine encounters with people and places. A spark of the Wellsian utopia flares up, when Polly concludes: ‘If the world does not please you, you can change it’.61 Surely, Polly’s enthusiastic pledge refers to his immediate surroundings, whose pastoral provides only one corollary for his accomplishments, the other one being his effort. A major shift in conceptualizing pastoral occurred for Wells during the Great War and continued thereafter. Increasingly, Wells’s writing put the English landscape and its select features to wider affirmative uses, in a perceived attempt to assemble an alternate spatio-temporality. In his wartime novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), this affirmation assumes centrality in the scene when the protagonist starts for a night drive. As his car runs ‘on moonlight’,62 Essex and Suffolk present themselves in pastoral terms: dreaming villages, gleaming houses, a winding downhill road, dogrose hedges, pine trees, shapes of the hawthorn, oak and apple, as well as a bolting of rabbits. Almost mystically, in the dimness of the moonlight, Britling falls back on the underlying solidity of the English landscape for his waymarks. The thought that the world has already lost direction in ‘pure destruction and catastrophe’ urges him to infer guidance from ‘Certain things – The meaning of England…. The deep and long-unspoken desire for kindliness and fairness….’63 Such certainties resemble pastoral in that they make a shimmering presence on a moonlit night, while the turmoil of the

Great War threatens to extinguish them. Britling sees pastoral as a reliable system of coordinates not only for England, but also for humanity. On this reading, the protagonist’s fear to lose English pastoral amounts to the foreclosure of a world peace. Pastoral and utopia converge in Wells’s dystopian novel The Autocracy of Mr. Parham: His Remarkable Adventures in This Changing World (1930). Wells shows how fascist sympathies, held by the titular character, morph into a dream of England coming under his dictatorial rule. As Lord Paramount, Parham professes unscrupulous militarization, so much that his efforts affect the sea levels around England’s coastal areas. When arriving to oversee the outcome of his actions in Cornwall, he fails to recognize what he used to remember as a landscape of both a mythical and a personal significance. Parham’s sense of an irremediable loss fuses his memory of the Arthurian cycle with a vivid recollection of the sunset he once observed above the sea. A disconcerting remark from the interlocutor dashes this memorial epiphany: ‘Only it isn’t Land’s End any more. This runs right out’.64 Symptomatically, the sight of a deformed Cornish landscape prompts Parham’s reawakening, and he refutes his fascist allegiances. Wells enlists Cornwall’s coastal vistas to embody a mythologized British and English history, whose endurance may be secured only by conventional English politics. Through pastoral, he reinstates the discourse of England as an avowed means to an alternate spatio-temporality. In contrast to such reinstatements, Wells dissociates the notion of pastoral from imperial expansion. Earlier on, as has been noted in Chapter 1, Froude advocated England’s colonies as a necessity that would safeguard pastoral. Since Wells connects pastoral primarily, and almost exclusively, with England, he endorses empire’s mercantile and infrastructural facets above pastoral experience. In his biography, Sherborne has assured that the ‘existence of the British Empire would shape Wells’s vision of a unified world’.65 True, empire presented to Wells an indelible part of England’s identity and history, and an agent of its global expansion. Anticipations emphasizes the modernizing effects of empire, which, linked by communications, creates an unbordered and interconnected space.66 The British Empire procures Wells’s praise because of its trade and geographical configuration. In a collection of essays An Englishman Looks at the World, Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters (1914), he compares it ‘to open hands, while the German Empire except for

a few ill-advised and imitative colonies is clenched into a central European unity’.67 Even after the German Empire dissolved in 1918, Wells’s later pamphlet Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy (1929) brought up the same images of the open hand and the tight fist of the German Zollverein,68 which testifies to its author’s enduring admiration for the British Empire. At the same time, Wells’s collection of journalism A Year of Prophesying (1924) features a determined opposition to empire as a form of exploitation, commercial discrimination, and testing of armaments.69 Moreover, Wells deplores the British Empire’s inability to adapt quicker to the development of modern technologies and therefore prophesies its loss in a similar fit of absent-mindedness in which it was once acquired, to use Seeley’s famous dictum. Renouncing allegiance to ‘a King-Emperor’, Wells budgets on ‘the share that our English language and civilisation and peoples may play in the future of mankind’.70 This form of liberal imperialism matches the spirit of the Wellsian utopia, which also pledges to spread England’s legacies. Outside pastoral and further to the infrastructure of the British Empire, Wells makes the growth of the World State contingent on the English language, rather than the Anglo-Saxon race. Beginning with Anticipations, he accentuates the significance of English as the best-suited lingua franca of ‘a world state […] already established’ in the ‘economic sense’.71 In An Englishman Looks at the World, Wells conjures up a far-flung Englishspeaking community which, sharing ideas of freedom, expands into ‘a limitless fellowship of thought and beauty’.72 Wells’s collection World Brain (1938) contains an even more assertive promotion of English to the status of a universal network of knowledge: English because it has a wider range than German, a greater abundance and greater subtlety of expression than French and more precision than Russian, is the language in which the original text of a World Encyclopaedia ought to stand. And moreover it is in the Englishspeaking communities that such an enterprise as this is likely to find the broadest basis for operations, the frankest criticism and the greatest freedom from official interference and government propaganda. But that must not hinder us from drawing help and contributions from, and contemplating a use in every community in the world.73

This rationale enlists English as the most adequate tool for the guarantee and facilitation of intellectual freedom within and beyond the political context of the late 1930s. For Wells, English typifies Cosmopolis. It adapts itself to the needs of wider humanity, embraces much variety, and, unlike pastoral and empire, does not break up.

Whig Historiography and Revolution In contradistinction from pastoral, which Wells treats inseparably from England, his stand on continuity looks paradoxical. Contradictions transpire on two counts: in the light of Wells’s evolutionary views (which I have explored in this chapter) and because of his frequent relish for fresh starts in scientific romances. Indeed, the sights of a spectacularly thorough, not merely gradual, erasure of time-tested assurances countervail continuity, which forms the bedrock of the Wellsian utopia. The narrator of Wells’s In the Days of the Comet (1906) wonders in awe: Where is that old world now? Where is London, that sombre city of smoke and drifting darkness, full of the deep roar and haunting music of disorder, with its oily, shining, mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river, its black pinnacles and blackened dome, its sad wildernesses of smutgreyed houses, its myriads of draggled prostitutes, its millions of hurrying clerks?74 Similarly, in The World Set Free (1914), which contains a prophecy of the atomic bomb, the poor and unhealthy old world turns into a clean slate awaiting to be filled in by Wells’s imagination. However, Tono-Bungay (1909), Wells’s social novel, cancels out such a willed transformation. Instead of a fantastic change, unregulated capitalism causes a wasting-away and subsequent eradication of England. In Maps of Utopia, James has proposed that this novel’s ‘formal wastefulness, its rhetorical overproduction, mimetically reproduces the wasteful over-production and inflation of the consumer economy that is its subject’.75 Indeed, TonoBungay concludes on a series of conceptually reiterative and verbally superfluous remarks that everything is a waste, as it physically passes and dissolves:

Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass – pass. The river passes, London passes, England passes….76 If England is to pass in the death throes of capitalism at worst or on arrival of a new order at best, what will remain of its legacies? Following the breakdown inflicted by the Great War, this question weighs heavily on the Wellsian utopia, which begins to avoid destructive tendencies and takes up the idiom of continuity instead. Wells’s preference for a continuous progression to the World State sharpened in the context of his trips to Russia in 1920 and 1934. These experiences became the subject of his own accounts: Russia in the Shadows (1920) and Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866) (1934), as well as biographical and interpretative research.77 However, Wells’s reservations about the imminent rupture of a Bolshevik future and its impact on his notion of continuity remain largely underexplored. In Russia in the Shadows, Wells extends praise to the Bolsheviks only when he sees them as social reformers, with concrete projects, including those of electrification and education. Thus, he sympathizes with Lenin’s dreams in the Kremlin, which were to herald a phase of limitless experiments, and with the Bolshevik spirit, which made ‘the only possible backbone now to a renascent Russia’.78 Throughout much else, Wells rails against Marxism, on whose tenets Bolshevik Russia styled itself, for being destitute of ‘creative and constructive ideas’.79 On a similar score, Men Like Gods intimates that ‘the narrowness of Marxist formulae’ sacrificed the country’s ‘constructive power for militant intensity. In Russia he had marked its ability to overthrow and its inability to plan or build’.80 Wells’s rhetoric offers direct response to the penultimate paragraph of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), where one gets a full sense of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s revolutionary pitch: They [the Communists] openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.81

In the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Wells played witness to the outcome of the proletariat’s victory, which looked to him as ‘a vast irreparable breakdown’.82 This ensuing experience could not be more distant from his espousal of continuity. Wells’s later writing called attention to Russia’s irrelevance to the utopian cause. In The Shape of Things to Come, that country emerges as lying to the world, not leading it: Russia went clumsily, heavily and pretentiously – a politician’s dictatorship, propaganding rather than performing, disappointing her well-wishers abroad and thwarting the best intelligences she produced. When her plans went wrong through her lack of precise material foresight, she accused, and imprisoned or shot, engineers and suchlike technical workers.83 Wells’s autobiography records his growing awareness of Russia’s notorious crackdown on intellectual freedom. While visiting Soviet Russia in 1934, Wells met Ivan Pavlov, a world-renowned physiologist, whose scientific prominence had secured him a relatively free, if marginally dissident, position in Soviet society. Wells reports Pavlov’s anxiety about ‘the need for absolute intellectual freedom if scientific progress, if any sort of human progress, was to continue’.84 Yet, in Wells’s estimation, Pavlov towered as a solitary figure above the wilderness of Soviet despotism and error of selfsufficiency. Disillusioned by Russia’s failure as an intellectually illiberal environment, Wells gives the following rendering to its evolutionary development: Russia ‘is like a reptile trying to fly before wings were evolved’.85 If Russia fails to match the standard of the Wellsian utopia, what does? Wells’s uses of the word revolution and fictional rendering of continuity bespeak his allegiance to the English Constitution. Wells conceived of revolution in at least three senses. The first one bears a metaphysical connotation and denotes a thorough socio-political, economic, and cultural change of the world at large. Mr Barnstaple, the frustrated and neurasthenic protagonist of Men Like Gods, ponders on the powers that fleshed out Utopia over a course of time: ‘Revolutions arise and die; the Great Revolution comes – incessantly and inevitably’.86 In the same vein, Wells concludes The Shape of Things to Come, observing that ‘this is neither a

dream book nor a Sibylline history, then it is a theory of world revolution’.87 The second meaning of revolution implies a much-needed pragmatic readjustment in a certain area or practice. Wells demonstrates the application of this approach in After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation (1932), where he reflects on a 1930s ‘triple malaise’: ‘The first and most urgent is the financial breakdown. The second and most fundamental is the revolution in economic method. The third and most perplexing is the political fragmentation of the world’.88 Addressing these three issues, Wells proposes specific measures, which will create ‘enduring structural arrangements’ in a ‘world-wide manner’.89 Essentially, the above meanings of revolution sanction a notable step-change that will entail adjusted development. Yet by no means do they legitimize revolution as their vehicle, especially in a period marked by an underlying concern about social upheaval. This third meaning of revolution transpires in the verbatim record of the Stalin-Wells talk, which took place in 1934. In reference to the repercussions of the 1926 General Strike in Britain, Stalin responded: The first thing any other bourgeoisie would have done in the face of such an event, when the General Council of Trade Unions called for a strike, would have been to arrest the Trade Union leaders. The British bourgeoisie did not do that, and it acted cleverly from the point of view of its own interests. I cannot conceive of such a flexible strategy being employed by the bourgeoisie of the United States, Germany or France. In order to maintain their rule, the ruling classes of Great Britain have never forsworn small concessions, reforms. But it would be a mistake to think that these reforms were revolutionary.90 Stalin’s response is couched in a rigidly Marxist vocabulary of class struggle. As long as the British elites do their best to prevent a forceful grab of power from happening, their actions afford only concessionary adjustments. Contrariwise, Wells argues that ‘the forms of the struggle should fit as closely as possible to the opportunities presented by the existing laws, which must be defended against reactionary attacks’.91 Wells’s argument echoes a desideratum that received nationwide currency after the General Strike, especially because of the legendary football match between protesters and police. In Mandler’s view, this event, alongside the

election of a ‘National’ government in 1930, fed off the idiom of English character as one based on compromise and continuity.92 Unlike Stalin, Wells predicates social change on the unification of a class of ‘open conspirators’, separate from, but constituted of both proletariat and bourgeoisie. In due course, this class will have ushered in change by working on extant institutional mechanisms and necessitating thus their gradual transformation. Wells distances himself from the idea of revolution as an active overthrow of an existing system for two interconnected reasons. Wagar pinpoints one of them in an introduction to Wells’s The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928): a missing ‘faith in any sort of revolution from below, captained by the working class’.93 True, Wells writes off Marx and Engels’s assertion that the proletariat may only overcome its subjected position by ‘constitut[ing] itself the nation’.94 Wells satirizes the proletarians’ incapacity to comprehend constructive political action and imagine a community of their own. In Men Like Gods, the two Earthling drivers, who stand for the working class and are marginal characters, express nothing but loathing towards Utopia: to Penk, the Utopians look like ‘a lot of arf-crazy, arf-savage people’, and to Ridley, they are ‘§§*!*!*+*+! degenerates’.95 The other reason why Wells dismisses revolution relates to his ulterior fear of the wreckage, inadequacy, and disruption that may succeed a historic shift. The images of such a breakdown of culture already haunt the last pages of The Time Machine. Reacting to revolution as the mechanism of a violent transferral of power, the Wellsian utopia subscribes to the contemporary politics of continuity. In Men Like Gods, Wells uses the image of ‘a normal English high road’ to show how hazardous an abrupt propulsion into Utopia, the World State’s next stage, might be. Barnstaple tries to make an escape from England, whose pastoral landscape of inns, fields, castles, and hills has been scarred by the signs of commerce. Inadvertently, he hits the Utopian road made of glass, ‘clear in places as still water and in places milky and opalescent, shot with streaks of soft colour or glittering richly with clouds of embedded golden flakes’.96 Barnstaple’s jalopy accelerates out of control on such a road, and this inadequacy forestalls further setbacks in his and other Earthling travellers’ interactions with Utopia. Just as his old car is not fit for driving in completely new conditions, his brain lacks the tools to

understand the extent of change that has come about. Barnstaple explains the failure to follow the Utopians’ telepathic exchanges in his own terms: ‘And that is why occasionally […] when you soar into ideas of which we haven’t even a shadow in our minds, we just hear nothing at all’.97 For Barnstaple to comprehend and appreciate Utopia as best he can, the ‘normal English high road’ should have been continuous with the Utopian crystal road not only spatially, but also temporally. Centuries of long-lasting progress separate England from Utopia, and the novel posits that it would be rash to hasten their passage, given the presently available technology and intelligence. Earlier, in The War in the Air (1908), Wells resorts to the metaphor of the road to signify Britain’s continuity: ‘Unlike any other roads in Europe, the British high roads have never been subjected to any organized attempts to grade or straighten them out, and to that no doubt their peculiar picturesqueness is to be ascribed’.98 Wells treats the road in close association with the English Constitution and British Empire, the two phenomena that grew organically, rather than breaking with the past. If, in a Burkean sense, the post-1688 political settlement implies the enactment of a time-venerated and therefore truly picturesque contract, historical rupture cannot be granted. Instead, revolution must be worked out gradually, with little or no immediate effect on extant power structures and socioeconomic arrangements. Indeed, this model of continuity echoes the grand narrative of Whig historiography, which makes the idea of social progress more national than cosmopolitan. At the same time, one may not ignore Wells’s reaction against the co-optation of continuity, which presages stagnation. In The Autocracy of Mr. Parham, Wells caricatures the denial of every possibility of step-change beyond the practice of short-term fixes: ‘There never has been a revolution in all history. There have been so-called revolutions; […] mere froth upon the great steam of events. Broaden down from precedent to precedent – Yes. Begin anew – No’.99 During the interwar period, as Wells demonstrates, the worship of continuity tended to harden into an unhealthy conservatism, finding itself at odds with the dynamism of his utopia.

Individuality, Fairness, and Empirical Outlook Whereas continuity merges Wells’s evolutionary views with national discourse, his recourse to the idiom of character foregrounds, primarily, the

roles of biology and culture in founding and sustaining a utopian community. A confluence of these factors presents itself in A Modern Utopia, when the Owner of the Voice informs us that ‘every man, woman, and child alive has a Utopian parallel’.100 Such a parallel heralds an improvement on all human beings, regardless of their nationality and national character. The Owner of the Voice admits of his Utopian double: He is a little taller than I, younger looking and sounder looking; he has missed an illness or so, and there is no scar over his eye. His training has been subtly finer than mine; he has made a better face than mine….101 Emerging at the intersection of eugenics and education, the Utopian parallel has harnessed frequent critical attention. Commentators have been careful to emphasize a changing, yet largely humanistic aspect of Wells’s eugenic affiliations. Partington has thoroughly vindicated Wells the eugenicist, whose awareness of the death camps operating in Central Europe during WWII forced him ‘to reject [eugenics] out of hand’.102 Richard Nate and Piers S. Hale, in turn, have attempted more multifaceted readings of how eugenic imperatives underlie the social implications of the Wellsian utopia. Confirming that the practice of eugenics undergoes a gradual transformation in the World State, Nate gleans its development from negative applications, such as preclude ‘all deformed and monstrous and evilly diseased births’,103 to the proliferation of physically and intellectually accomplished stocks. However, Men Like Gods is deemed to mark a watershed in Wells’s flagging certainties about eugenics, which become replaced by his growing belief in education as a means of overcoming the blind forces of nature.104 Hale concurs with Nate in discerning a preponderance of eugenics in Wells’s initial projections of the new humanity. Particularly, he notices that, since Wells regards matters of eugenic control as state business, his political elites are no longer composed of capitalist plutocrats, but include ‘a biological meritocracy’, with women taking an active part in the selection process.105 Indeed, the fact of belonging to the samurai caste grants equal emancipation to both sexes, which counters potentially degenerative choices in reproduction. Throughout, Hale promulgates the idea of educated choices, which, in Wells’s design of ‘men like gods’, set out to guide human betterment. Until

the exact knowledge of the inheritable germ plasm becomes available, ‘the individual’s biological worth’ must remain the prerogative of education in heredity, which hones the human ability to evaluate achievements and character.106 Hale’s analysis finds corroboration in the sociological study The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931), where Wells urges: The deliberate improvement of man’s inherent quality is at present unattainable. It is to a better education and to a better education alone, therefore, that we must look for any hope of ameliorating substantially the confusions and distresses of our present life.107 These lines offset T. H. Huxley’s influence on the Wellsian utopia, which demands that social progress take charge of the survival and procreation of the ethically best human stocks. Wells’s overarching emphasis on education amplifies the heterogeneity of individual human beings who will inhabit the World State. Adhering to its own precept of dynamism, the Wellsian utopia problematizes the idiom of character, which brings with it the need to unify groups of people into fixed homogeneous entities. Instead, Wells premises the ‘fundamental ideas’ of his utopia on ‘margins and elasticities, a certain universal compensatory looseness of play’.108 In line with these ideas, the World State’s population lends itself only to a tentative possibility of generalization, to which effect A Modern Utopia advises: Four main classes of mind were distinguished, called, respectively, the Poietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base. The former two are supposed to constitute the living tissue of the State; the latter are the fulcra and resistances, the bone and cover of its body. They are not hereditary classes, nor is there any attempt to develop any class by special breeding, simply because the intricate interplay of heredity is untraceable and incalculable. They are classes to which people drift of their own accord. Education is uniform until differentiation becomes unmistakable, and each man (and woman) must establish his position with regard to the lines of this abstract classification by his own quality, choice, and development….109

Undoubtedly, the World State is a stringently hierarchical society. Yet its hierarchies forswear both ancient and contemporary principles of classification, while educational possibilities grant people leeway in what they wish to become. Indebted to Plato’s Republic (ca. 380 BC), the World State also groups the citizens in an attempt to mirror their qualities. However, unlike the Platonic guardians, warriors, and producers, who are, respectively, wise, brave, and temperate (427e),110 Wells’s citizens do not operate solely within the designated occupations; as a result, they exhibit a much wider range of individual characteristics. Whereas Plato’s classification had a largely socioeconomic dimension, Wells’s contemporaries concerned themselves with Anglo-Saxonism and PanGermanism as ways of generalizing the racial divisions of humanity. In ‘Pragmatic Utopianism and Race: H. G. Wells as Social Scientist’ (2017), Duncan Bell has recorded Wells’s aversion to the misuses of Darwinism and linguistic affinities, which, shaped by the notions of ‘nationality, religion, and imperialism’, underwrote ‘racial bigotry’.111 This record has permitted Bell to attribute pragmatism to the Wellsian utopia, a philosophical strand that esteems individuality and ‘immunise[s] people against the dangers of racial othering’.112 Indeed, in A Modern Utopia, the Owner of the Voice shuns the constituent parameters of the national character: ‘a uniformity of physical and mental type, a common idiom, a common religion, a distinctive style of costume, decoration, and thought, and a compact organisation acting with complete external unity’.113 Such parameters provide classificatory instruments that not only impede social fluidity, but also depersonalize individuals. The World State defies the average, subscribing to the postulate: ‘It is not averages that exist, but individuals. The average Chinaman will never meet the average Englishman anywhere; only individual Chinamen will meet individual Englishmen’.114 In valuing individuality above any generalizable type of the human being, the Wellsian utopia develops to allow occasions for dissidence. Initially, the World State would cleanse itself of maladjusted individuals, yet its later progress testifies to the more propitious practices. One such example involves Lychnis, Barnstaple’s guide in Men Like Gods. As befits her name, she offers the closest match for the sensibilities she shares with the Earthlings. Having lost her husband and sons in an accident at sea,

Lychnis presents a throwback from the Utopians’ steely rationality. Unlike them, she maintains human passions and poetic impulses: She had rediscovered the lost passion of pity, first pity for herself and then a desire to pity others. She took no interest any more in vigorous and complete people, but her mind concentrated upon the consolation to be found in consoling pain and distress in others. She sought her healing in healing them.115 Barnstaple’s account of the misery of the ‘Age of Confusion’ kindles Lychnis’s imagination, just as the eradication of sympathy in Utopia fails to excite her. Embodying the residual attachments to soul-doctoring, secluded life, and sublime nature, Lychnis exposes the halting process of evolution, which has otherwise moved her society forward. Additionally, her individuality imparts a requisite instance of dynamism to the Wellsian utopia. The other example of a dissenting character includes Theotocopulos, who features most vividly as a poet of nature and public agitator in Wells’s film script for Alexander Korda’s Things to Come (1935). Unlike Lychnis, Theotocopulos takes a line of rebellion against the World State’s incessant progress. He believes that progress encroaches on personal freedom and usurps the joys of living in the here and now: Is man never to rest, never to be free? A time will come when they will want more cannon fodder for their Space Guns […]. Make an end to Progress now. […] Between the dark past of history and the incalculable future let us snatch today – and live.116 Orchestrated by Theotocopulos and charged with Luddite overtones, this rebellious campaign finds its backing in the crowd, a phenomenon of modern life whose powers worried Wells. The Shape of Things to Come bears Wells’s dedication to José Ortega y Gasset. In The Revolt of the Masses (1930), the latter predicted that the crowd had the capacity to rule through dictators, who, in turn, would erase ‘everything eminent’ on their way.117 When leading the crowd, Theotocopulos both elicits and expresses its wild and irrational urges, which summon up an assault on the technical elite’s aspirations for ‘conquest after conquest, to the stars’.118 Theotocopulos’s rebellion may indeed foreground his own individuality, but

it incapacitates the crowd’s individualized existence. As with Lychnis, Wells treats Theotocopulos as an agent of dissidence whose provenance is largely an atavism to be outgrown in the process of evolution. Men Like Gods instructs us that ‘There are no more Crowds in Utopia. Crowds and the crowd-mind have gone for ever’.119 At the same time, the Wellsian utopia accommodates the likes of Lychnis and Theotocopulos, regardless of their regressive dispositions. In this sense, Wells takes exception to the banishment of the poets, stipulated by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue about the Republic (Plato 398a). According to Socrates, because the poets rely on the knowledge derived not from ideas, but from experience, their subsequent manipulations of truth affect ‘the whole state’ and its ‘most important political institutions’ (Plato 424c). Unable to pay authority due service, the poets are feared to trigger social unrest. By keeping the poets, Wells remains loyal to the precept of his utopia, which bases dynamism on the need of uncertainty.120 Rebellion can thus supply a degree of disturbance, reminding the society of its hereto unresolved problems and contradictions. This scheme points up Wells’s departure from the idiom of character oriented towards conformity and regimented consensus. Instead, Wells draws on the English character to justify rebellion alongside fair play. In Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education (1918), his mouthpiece outlines this conjunction: I tell you there is no race and no tradition in the whole world that I would change for my English race and tradition. I do not mean the brief tradition of this little Buckingham Palace and Westminster system here that began yesterday and will end tomorrow, I mean the great tradition of the English that is spread all over the earth, the tradition of Shakespeare and Milton, of Newton and Bacon, of Runnymede and Agincourt, the tradition of the men who speak fairly and act fairly, without harshness and without fear, who face whatever odds there are against them and take no account of Kings.121 The speaker’s stress on fair deeds falls simultaneously on the ability to go against the grain, be it politics, faith, or imagination. In Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (1991), Stefan Collini has construed fairness as ‘an expression of a deeply ingrained perception of the qualities needed to cope with life, an ethic with strong

roots in areas of experience ostensibly remote from politics’.122 Notably, Wells re-politicizes fair play, which is evidenced by his protagonist’s rebellious pronouncement against kings and parliamentary government. He makes English fairness look like a form of perennial rebellion, a tradition that combines poetry with religious dissidence, and scientific innovation with military prowess. Such conflations neutralize rebellion and render it indelible from progress with continuity. In The Outline of History, Wells underscores ‘the greatness of English fairness and freedom’,123 which affirms the relevance of these features of character to a new post-national order. Further to individuality, fairness, and rebellion, the World State links its progress to the cultivation of an empirical outlook. This outlook acquires particular visibility in Wells’s 1930s writing on the world brain. Envisaging the world brain as a global knowledge infrastructure at the World State’s service, Wells anatomizes it into encyclopaedic sections that deal with philosophies, languages and cultures, mathematics, chemistry, biography, health, biology, political systems, education, religion, economic life, and aesthetics.124 Given the fluid nature of all knowledge, Wells refuses to produce a definitive version of the world brain because that version will hamper growth. In World Brain, he contends: Such premature crystallization of a thing needed by the world can produce, we now realize, a rigid obstructive reality, just like enough to our actual requirements to cripple every effort to replace it later by a more efficient organization. Explicit constitutions for social and political institutions are always dangerous things if these institutions are to live for any length of time.125 In designating the world brain as an always necessarily provisional phenomenon, Wells eschews rigid theoretical formulations. He also highlights the self-identification of the world brain in his novella The Camford Visitation (1937), when its uncanny voice declares itself as ‘the enemy of all final doctrines and convictions’ and ‘the spirit of the provisional’.126 At face value, such pronouncements reflect Wells’s evolutionary views, which premise the organic growth of species on process and circumstance, rather than singular manipulative acts. On closer inspection, though, disavowal of theory and doctrine equally re-invokes

Burkean conservatism, which Wells’s contemporaries utilized to rule against the 1930s flowering of adverse political platforms. Burke’s famed dislike of abstractions, such as manifest in written constitutions, found resonance with W. R. Inge, a Cambridge professor of divinity and Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. His contribution to The English Genius (1939) concludes that ‘the most irreparable mistakes are made by consistent doctrinaires, and we prefer to improvise a solution for each problem as it arises’.127 Here, Inge alludes to Burke in order to reinforce the proverbial English stereotype of ‘muddling through’, or acting amateurishly as in the absent-minded acquisition of empire. By contrast, Wells avoids such clichés and draws on the empirical vocabulary used by Burke to describe the growth of liberty in the English Constitution. In relation to his utopia, Wells admits: ‘If a thing is really to live it should grow rather than be made. It should never be something cut and dried’.128 Along these lines, the World State’s empirical outlook conduces to a provisional and therefore incremental liberty. Its expansion supersedes the boundaries instituted by Burkean conservatism. The Wellsian utopia presents at once a regulative mechanism of human evolution and a clearing-house for the cultural ingredients deemed profitable for humanity. In place of these ingredients, Wells proposes to redeploy – and sometimes reinstate – the discourse of England, making use of English pastoral, Britain’s mercantile and linguistic channels of global outreach, Whig historiography, as well as principles of fair play and empiricism. With a renewed sense of individuality and rebellion, Wells’s propositions safeguard continuity and, if espoused, deliver revolution as their long-term outcome. In adducing emancipatory tasks from national discourse, the Wellsian utopia sets it up as a normative model for the world to emulate and for English lineages to endure. This peculiarity confirms Wells in the role of a post-national thinker, contrary to the cosmopolitan designations he reserved for himself.

The Wellsian Utopia, Its Adherents and Malcontents Devised to attain a post-national, post-Westphalian world order, the Wellsian utopia lent itself to criticism, appropriation, and reformulation during the twentieth century. Responses to Wells occurred either in synchrony with the development of his utopia or diachronically, in the form

of direct or oblique attention to its provisions. My study pursues this chronology, but privileges, overwhelmingly, the first category of responses. Such an arrangement permits me to register the mutable contemporary bifurcations of the Wellsian utopia in the context of national discourse, especially when these bifurcations receive contrary treatment and take on a life of their own. Within said category, the work of Robert Hugh Benson merits attention. Born into the family of Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, he converted to Roman Catholicism with a view to partaking of the universal Holy Communion. In Confessions of a Convert (1913), Benson admits that, prior to conversion, he had felt increasingly disconnected from the ‘vast continent’ of believers, since the Church of England was ‘a very small and unimportant affair’.129 Following conversion, Benson elaborated on how England could be reinstalled in the Catholic fold as a pledge of salvation. Axel Stähler has interpreted this enterprise as an attempt to enable an alternate community that surpasses the nation-state and, in doing so, ‘becomes the necessary condition for the utopia of the next world’.130 In the light of Christian teleology, Stähler’s interpretation raises no doubts: indeed, the pinnacle of salvation resides in the New Jerusalem, the city of God. However, in terms of the Wellsian utopia, any promise of otherworldly grace ought to be ruled out because it detracts from the opportunities available in the here and now. According to Benson’s biographer, Cyril C. Martindale, Benson found no discord with Wells’s immanent utilitarianism, which he deemed ‘far better than agnosticism or aimlessness’.131 Other biographers testify to Benson’s fascination with Wells’s visions of technological progress.132 Belonging in the same category of contemporary responses, the work of Aldous Huxley highlights the repercussions of England’s absorption into the World State. In Huxley’s own words, he began writing Brave New World ‘on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it’.133 However, the resulting work proved more complex than a mere denigration of Wells; as Huxley acknowledged in an interview, the novel ‘started out as a parody of H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods, but gradually it turned into something quite different from what I’d originally intended’.134 In Wandering into Brave New World (2013), David Leon Higdon has clarified that, as Huxley progressed with the writing, ‘Henry Ford began to eclipse H. G. Wells as a target’,135 marginalizing him to references as a pregnancy

specialist. Within the larger design of Huxley’s onomastic satire, both Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud reign supreme, followed by a wide array of other foreign masterminds, from Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to Benito Mussolini and Mustapha Kemal Atatürk. Immortalized in the proper names of the World State’s citizens (such as Bernard Marx, Lenina Crowne, Benito Hoover, Mustapha Mond, to name a few), their impact constitutes a postnational order that overpowers England. The World Controllership for Western Europe embraces modernity alongside artificial procreation, eugenic controls, hypnopaedia, caste divisions, and pill-assisted acquiescence. In conflating some of the problematical modern trends with the prospect of a post-English world, Huxley renders the Wellsian and any other utopia alien to England. A counter-Wellsian streak features strongly in the second category of responses to the Wellsian utopia, especially in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Unlike Huxley, Orwell deems the world organized on Wells’s principles an impracticable fantasy. At a time when the thrill of dictators, ‘the appeal of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin’, was taking over sanity, the World State could not present a more inadequate proposal.136 In his novel, Orwell furnishes a grim commentary on how a future post-national order might institutionalize what Wells ostensibly overlooked: the exercise of unsophisticated physical and psychological intrusion, ‘a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’.137 As observed in Chapter 1, Nineteen Eighty-Four merges the symbolic capitulation of personal liberty with the disappearance of England’s borders in the wider realm of Oceania. Similarly to Orwell, Burgess preoccupies himself with the subject of individual autonomy and free will, and, like Huxley, places it in the context of England’s exposure to foreign influence. Just as the proliferation of a violent nadsat subculture is seen to result largely from an ongoing arms race and Soviet sympathies, the protagonist’s apparently depersonalizing treatment takes its tack from American behavioural psychology. As in Huxley and Orwell, England’s post-national prospects set off the fear of external invasion, no matter whether it comes from the East or from the West. Further to counter-Wellsian anxieties, the second category of responses offers renegotiations of modernity in ways relatable to Wells’s. Instead of presenting their country as a passive victim of modern (and frequently foreign) influence, J. G. Ballard and Julian Barnes expose the ways in

which the scramble for profit and efficiency presides over modernity in England. In Ballard’s Concrete Island, the protagonist finds himself entrapped in a traffic enclosure. He has to come to terms with England’s collapse into a dysfunctional space, concreted over to conceal the unresolved individual and national crises. Barnes’s England, England heightens an equally self-administered transformation, which reduces the meaning of England to a set of simulacra, from the Houses of Parliament and cricket to Shakespeare and warm beer. Copied from their English originals and situated within easy reach on the Isle of Wight, replicas and re-enactments serve mass tourism in the interests of corporate moguls. At the same time, ‘real’ England goes economically bust, retreats into selfisolation, and degenerates into tribalism. With a whiff of nostalgia for what may be lost, Barnes posits an uneasy question: what remains of England, whose content has been emptied out by global processes? Markedly, Wells’s comparable concern unveiled itself against the background of a different kind of modernity. Presaged by the two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, and the advent of technologies, that modernity also threatened to submerge England. In the face of it, Wells, like Barnes, deconstructed national discourse. Yet Wells’s act sought to salvage what he believed was worth preserving for the emergence of a new postnational order. Predicated on effort and action, the Wellsian utopia left little room for fear and nostalgia. In the subsequent chapters, I investigate how the authors in question relate to the cause of the Wellsian utopia, contextualizing that relationship alongside the changing circumstances of modernity and ensuing inflections of the discourse of England. My investigation begins with England’s imaginary transition to a supranational state.

Notes 1 Simon J. James, Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 192. 2 W. Warren Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 210. 3 H. G. Wells, Men Like Gods, in H. G. Wells: Classic Collection II (London: Gollancz, 2011), 254. 4 James, Maps, 134, 165. 5 Julia Stapleton, ‘Political Thought and National Identity, 1850–1950’, in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, edited by Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 260.

6 H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (London: Gollancz, 2011), 4. 7 H. G. Wells, ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’, Fortnightly Review 60, no. 358 (1896): 594. 8 T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, in T. H. Huxley and Julian Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943 (London: The Pilot Press, 1947), 81. 9 John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 28. 10 H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, in H. G. Wells: Classic Collection I (London: Gollancz, 2010), 136. 11 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, in H. G. Wells: Classic Collection I, 362. 12 Aaron Worth, ‘Imperial Transmissions: H. G. Wells, 1897–1901’, Victorian Studies 53, no. 1 (2010): 76. 13 H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon, in H. G. Wells: Classic Collection I, 522–3. 14 Gareth Davies-Morris, ‘The Alien Eye: Imperialism and Otherness in H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon’, in Children’s Literature Review: Reviews, Criticism, and Commentary on Books for Children and Young People, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau (Farmington Hills: Gale, 2015), vol. 200, 186. 15 Patrick Parrinder, ‘Introduction’, in H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future with ‘The Common-Sense of World Peace’ and ‘The Human Adventure’, edited and introduction by Patrick Parrinder (London: PNL Press, 1989), 8; Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 9–10. 16 Parrinder, ‘Introduction’; Simon J. James, ‘The Worlds of H. G. Wells’, in H. G. Wells and Nature, edited by Barbara Kiser and introduction by Simon J. James (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2016), 6–8; W. Boyd Rayward, ‘H. G. Wells’s Idea of a World Brain: A Critical ReAssessment’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50, no. 7 (1999): 557–73; Google and the World Brain, directed by Ben Lewis (Polar Star Films, 2013); Future Tense – The Story of H. G. Wells, directed by Samuel Supple and presented by Dominic Sandbrook (BBC, 2016), 16 September 2016. 17 H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought, introduction by Martin Gardner (Mineola: Dover, 1999), 2, 35, 122, 128. 18 Ibid., 167. 19 H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, introduction by Mark R. Hillegas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 5. 20 James, Maps, 137. 21 Nathan Waddell, Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900– 1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 40. 22 Wells, Modern, 12. 23 Ibid., 11. 24 Ibid., 96. 25 Ibid., 24. 26 Ibid., 278. 27 H. G. Wells, The World of William Clissold: A Novel at a New Angle (London: Ernest Benn, 1926), 635. 28 H. G. Wells, Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), 6. 29 Wells, Shape, 350. 30 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, edited by Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 117.

31 James Tully, ‘The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives’, in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, edited by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 344. 32 Giuseppe Mazzini, ‘Nationalism and Nationality’, in A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations, edited by Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 63. 33 H. G. Wells, The New Teaching of History with a Reply to Some Recent Criticisms of The Outline of History (London: Cassell, 1921), 11. 34 Partington, Building, 82. 35 H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (London: Cassell, 1934), 982. 36 Wells, Men, 208. 37 Wells, Shape, 90. 38 Ibid., 98. 39 Barney Warf, ‘Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Geographical Imaginations’, The Geographical Review 102, no. 3 (2012): 276; Chris Rumford, Cosmopolitan Borders (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 5. 40 Warf, 274. 41 Ibid., 289. 42 Rumford, 10. 43 Ibid., 10, 91. 44 Morgan Fritz, ‘Miniaturization and Cosmopolitan Future History in the Fiction of H. G. Wells’, Science Fiction Studies 37, no. 2 (2010): 218. 45 Ibid., 226. 46 Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor, The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 143. 47 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, introduction by Walter James Miller (New York: Signet Classic, 2000), 25. 48 Ibid., 51–2. 49 William Morris, News from Nowhere, in Selections from William Morris, introduction by Yuri Shvedov (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1959), 183. 50 Wells, Modern, 11. 51 Ibid., 14. 52 Emelyne Godfrey, ‘Introduction: Tomatoes and Cucumbers’, in Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris: Landscape and Space, edited by Emelyne Godfrey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 24. 53 Wells, Modern, 304. 54 Wells, Shape, 382. 55 Wells, Modern, 144. 56 Miles Link, ‘“The Honest Application of the Obvious”: The Scientific Futurity of H. G. Wells’, in Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes, edited by Trish Ferguson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 142. 57 John Batchelor, H. G. Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 87. 58 Peter J. Beck, The War of the Worlds: From H. G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Beyond (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 31. 59 Thomas Connolly, ‘Utopia and the Countryside in Wells’ Scientific Romances’, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 46, no. 2 (2017): 21. 60 Ibid., 22.

61 H. G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly (London: Thomas Nelson, 1910), 283. 62 H. G. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (London: Waterlow, 1933), 114. 63 Ibid., 116. 64 H. G. Wells, The Autocracy of Mr. Parham, His Remarkable Adventures in This Changing World (London: William Heinemann, 1930), 337. 65 Michael Sherborne, H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, foreword by Christopher Priest (London: Peter Owen, 2012), 22. 66 Wells, Anticipations, 125–6. 67 H. G. Wells, An Englishman Looks at the World, Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters (London: Cassell, 1914), 37. 68 H. G. Wells, Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), 10. 69 H. G. Wells, A Year of Prophesying (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 59. 70 Ibid., 61–2. 71 Wells, Anticipations, 138. 72 Wells, Englishman, 38. 73 H. G. Wells, World Brain (London: Methuen, 1938), 22. 74 H. G. Wells, In the Days of the Comet, in H. G. Wells: Classic Collection II, 156. 75 James, Maps, 107. 76 H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, introduction by Gilbert Phelps (Bungay: Pan, 1972), 328. 77 Maria Kozyreva and Vera Shamina, ‘Russia Revisited’, in The Reception of H. G. Wells in Europe, edited by Patrick Parrinder and John S. Partington (London: Continuum, 2005), 48–62; Sherborne, 221–2, 256–60, 305–7; Galya Diment, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 105–10; Matthew Taunton, ‘Russia and the British Intellectuals: The Significance of The Stalin-Wells Talk’, in Russia in Britain: From Melodrama to Modernism, edited by Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 209–24; Olga Soboleva and Angus Wrenn, From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017), 101–41. 78 H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 133, 88. 79 Ibid., 48. 80 Wells, Men, 402. 81 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore (St Ives: Penguin, 2015), 52. 82 Wells, Russia, 10. 83 Wells, Shape, 129. 84 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), in 2 vols. (London: Victor Gollancz and The Cresset Press, 1934), vol. 2, 816. 85 H. G. Wells, After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation (London: Watts, 1932), 187. 86 Wells, Men, 402. 87 Wells, Shape, 424. 88 Wells, After Democracy, 234. 89 Ibid., 243. 90 Stalin-Wells Talk. The Verbatim Record and a Discussion by G. Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, J. M. Keynes, Ernst Toller and Others (London: The New Statesman and Nation, 1934), 17. 91 Ibid., 15.

92 Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 151. 93 W. Warren Wagar, ‘Introduction’, in H. G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy: H. G. Wells on World Revolution, edited and introduction by W. Warren Wagar (Westport: Praeger, 2002), 15. 94 Marx and Engels, 30. 95 Wells, Men, 298. 96 Ibid., 216. 97 Ibid., 242. 98 H. G. Wells, The War in the Air, in H. G. Wells: Classic Collection II, 629–30. 99 Wells, Autocracy, 213. 100 Wells, Modern, 24. 101 Ibid., 247. 102 John S. Partington, ‘H. G. Wells’s Eugenic Thinking of the 1930s and 1940s’, Utopian Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 79. 103 Wells, Modern, 143. 104 Richard Nate, ‘Discoveries of the Future: Herbert G. Wells and the Eugenic Utopia’, in Children’s Literature Review: Reviews, Criticism, and Commentary on Books for Children and Young People, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau (Farmington Hills: Gale, 2015), vol. 200, 97. 105 Piers J. Hale, ‘Of Mice and Men: Evolution and the Socialist Utopia. William Morris, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw’, Journal of the History of Biology 43, no. 1 (2010): 46. 106 Ibid., 47–8. 107 H. G. Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (London: William Heinemann, 1932), 679–80. 108 Wells, Modern, 270. 109 Ibid., 265–6. 110 Plato, Republic, translated by John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan and introduction by Stephen Watt (Ware: Wordsworth, 1997). The numbers in brackets refer to the sections of the Republic. 111 Duncan Bell, ‘Pragmatic Utopianism and Race: H. G. Wells as Social Scientist’, Modern Intellectual History, 2017, www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/274822, accessed on 31 March 2019. 112 Ibid., 28. 113 Wells, Modern, 324. 114 Ibid., 332. 115 Wells, Men, 386. 116 H. G. Wells, Things to Come: A Film Story Based on the Material Contained in His History of the Future The Shape of Things to Come, introduction by Allan Asherman and George Zebrowski (Boston: Gregg Press, 1975), 122. 117 José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, translated by Anthony Kerrigan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 173. 118 Wells, Things, 141. 119 Wells, Men, 385. 120 Wells, Modern, 7–8. 121 H. G. Wells, Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education (London: Cassell, 1918), 725. 122 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 116. 123 H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (London: Cassell, 1934), 1060.

124 Wells, Work, Wealth, 776. 125 Wells, World Brain, 52. 126 H. G. Wells, The Camford Visitation (London: Methuen, 1937), 60. 127 The English Genius, edited by Hugh Kingsmill (London: The Right Book Club, 1939), 5. 128 Wells, World Brain, 52. 129 Robert Hugh Benson, Confessions of a Convert (Sevenoaks: Fisher Press, 1991), 34. 130 Axel Stähler, ‘The Re-Conceptualization of Space in Edwardian Prophecy Fiction: Heterotopia, Utopia and the Apocalypse’, in Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945, edited by Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 165. 131 C. C. Martindale, The Life of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, in 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1916), vol. 2, 223. 132 Reginald J. J. Watt, Robert Hugh Benson: Captain in God’s Army (London: Burns and Oates, 1918), 88; Janet Grayson, Robert Hugh Benson: Life and Works (Lanham: University Press of America, 1998), 149. 133 Letters of Aldous Huxley, edited by Grover Smith (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), 348. 134 George Wickes and Ray Frazer, ‘Aldous Huxley’, in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Second Series, introduction by Van Wyck Brooks (London: Secker and Warburg, 1963), 165. 135 David Leon Higdon, Wandering into Brave New World (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 23. 136 George Orwell, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, George Orwell: Essays, introduction by Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 2000), 193. 137 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (St Ives: Penguin, 1990), 280.

3 England in Transition Memory, Politics, and Technology

The Condition of England and Unity with the Catholic Fold As early as Anticipations, Wells conceded that major organized religions, particularly Roman Catholicism, could serve as staging posts on the road to the World State and, in the end, Cosmopolis.1 However, by the late 1920s, he had grown disillusioned with the prospect. In the lecture ‘The CommonSense of World Peace’ (1929), delivered in the German Reichstag, Wells ruled: In its most generalized professions Christianity claims to be a uniting religion for all mankind, over-riding all races and kingdoms, but in practice it is closely associated with an antiquated cosmogony, a limited and partial teaching of history, and also with a supple acquiescence in existing institutions and in existing governments and dictatorships, which is no doubt ascribable to its preoccupation with spiritual things.2 Wells’s frustrations originated from the perceived failure of Christian organizations to ‘re-make the mental background and the political methods of mankind’, which he also extrapolated on other world religions.3 Like Christian churches, they remained largely impotent in subordinating national loyalties to the cause of a more unifying faith. In an attempt to redress such shortcomings, Wells devised his own creed, dubbing it an ‘open conspiracy’. Its adherents would come primarily from among scientists, engineers, and aviators, ready to dedicate themselves to the service of Cosmopolis.4 Even though this service never acquired the scale of a world religion, it attracted a sizable following, as evidenced by both individual interest and a flowering of related societies in the 1930s.5

Writing nearly two decades before Wells’s disillusionment, Robert Hugh Benson vested hope in the powers of Roman Catholicism to end national factions and unite the world through the Holy Communion. Unlike Wells’s, Benson’s World State presents a supranational, rather than post-national entity, allowing the existence of nation-states within its remit. Such an enterprise presupposes founding a new English polity whose exclusive loyalties to Roman Catholicism will prepare England for the Second Coming of Christ, to be followed by the revelation of the next world. This chapter intervenes into England’s alignment with the Catholic fold, contextualizing it in his other writing, theories of memory, Edwardian politics, and contemporary technological developments. I argue that, in disavowing national discourse, Benson infringes on English liberty, which transfigures his project of universal redemption into a pre-Orwellian dystopia. Benson set up the World State against modern tendencies, particularly Liberalism, whose effects on England he deplored in John Henry Newman’s vein. Laying the foundations of what became known as the Catholic Revival, Newman feared the menacing inroads of the multitude on authority, and in Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), he professed the ‘means of maintaining religious truth in this anarchical world’.6 In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold furnished an analysis of Newman’s reaction against Liberalism, summarizing its major targets as follows: It was the great middle-class liberalism, which had for the cardinal points of its belief the Reform Bill of 1832, and local government, in politics; in the social sphere, free-trade, unrestricted competition, and the making of large industrial fortunes; in the religious sphere, the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.7 Arnold concurred with Newman in deploring the fact that Liberalism had diminished the spiritual component in the lives of the English and substituted it by the materialism of railroads and other machinery. However, unlike Newman, he valorised ‘the moral fibre of the English race’, which, nurtured by Puritanism and Nonconformity, had broken away from dogma and could still chart further progress.8 In Arnold’s foresight, what threatened the future was not so much ‘our old middle-class liberalism’ as ‘a power which it is impossible yet to judge fully’, ‘the new and more

democratic force’.9 Benson developed this foresight into a dystopian and theological vision, which responded to an abundance of socialist platforms in the early twentieth century, coupled with the electoral gains of the newly formed Labour Party in 1906. In Lord of the World, Benson portrays the dawn of the twenty-first century in Europe and America as a battleground between the adversary forces of Catholicism and communism, while a third force, comprised of ‘Eastern religions’, operates beyond the Urals. Poised as good and evil, respectively, each force implements a code of its own. Catholicism endorses an absolute divine authority, which allegedly secures individualism. Communism, on the contrary, celebrates the human, which turns it into ‘Humanitarianism’, an ‘anti-supernatural’ and therefore collectivist creed.10 Subsequently, in line with St Augustine’s The City of God against the Pagans (De civitate Dei contra paganos, 426), Catholicism and communism divide the western part of the world into two distinct cities: the city of the Creator, on the one hand, and the city of Karl Marx and Gustave Hervé, on the other. The latter city exercises its influence from Germany, the historic hotbed of anti-Catholic sentiment and socialist ideas. It transforms London into a locus of hedonism, with electric placards written in Esperanto, artificially lit streets, rubber pavements, and legalized euthanasia.11 The mass gains full rein in such a city, ruling through a benevolent dictator, rather than priests or even politicians. Lord of the World imputes the original cause of England’s modernity to its rupture with Rome in the sixteenth century, which had ostensibly precipitated the inevitable enforcement of the English Poor Laws and, in the words of the novel’s character, ‘established the Communists for ever’.12 In an interview of 1914, Benson was recorded to express disapproval of the effects of the Reformation on England’s economic life: Then he pointed out to me, emphasizing his remarks with jabs now with a cigarette, now with a forefinger, that until the Reformation there were no poor laws in England. The first one came in under Elizabeth. The monasteries took care of the few poor there were in the medieval era. The destruction of the monasteries meant the real beginning of the unhappiness of the poor. Protestantism and poverty were linked rather closely together.13

In conflating Protestantism with poverty, Benson foregrounds the alleged direction which modernity had taken in England. For him, England’s deepening split from the Catholic fold eventually led to the proliferation of Liberalism, socialism, and communism. With a view to reversing that direction, Benson addressed the condition of England in both theological and socioeconomic terms, and entertained a possible revision of English loyalties. These issues form a subtext of his apologetic and fictional writing, wherein he proceeds from asserting the organic unity and authority of Catholic doctrine in the face of an everdivided English Protestantism. In the pamphlet A City Set on a Hill (1904), Benson maintains that Roman Catholicism exhibits ‘the two principles of organic growth, namely: identity and change’.14 From his perspective, Catholic doctrine, unlike its Protestant counterpart, has the capacity to grow in ways that do not render it apart. This idea stems from Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), which stipulates that ‘the highest and most wonderful truths’ remain unchanged and therefore require a ‘longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation’.15 In NonCatholic Denominations (1910), Benson assigns the flowering of Liberalism in England to the absence of a unified Protestant doctrine, which manifests itself in ‘the rent and divided National Church, held together as it is at present by little more than its establishment in the State’.16 For Benson, said condition results mainly from a lacking singular and universal authority, which, according to his Paradoxes of Catholicism (1913), is the bulwark against denominational sectarianism and anarchy.17 In tackling England’s socioeconomic challenges, Benson turned to G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. The latter two had brought Catholic doctrine to bear on the precepts of Distributism, which promotes diffusion of wealth and ownership through small-scale enterprise.18 With these ideas in mind, Benson promulgates, in his essay ‘A Catholic Colony (A Suggestion)’ (1910), a self-sustaining community which will be managed by committees and run on ‘sternly business lines’.19 Even though the exact functioning of such an enterprise lacks elaboration, Benson explicates it as a means of averting suburbia’s growth into the southern English landscape: ‘It is rolling country, wooded in parts, but arable and pasture through most of its extent. In the centre of it, within a mile of a railway station, stands a newly built village grouped about a green’.20 On this score, Benson offers a variation

on Ebenezer Howard’s project of the Garden City, such as realized originally in Letchworth in 1909. Yet Benson’s ultimate resolution of the condition of England deviates from his contemporaries’ aesthetic and socioeconomic concerns. In Howards End (1910), E. M. Forster makes one of his characters, Mrs Munt, ask of the journey on which she is about to embark: ‘Into which country will it lead, England or Suburbia?’21 Rather, Benson points towards Catholic colonies as a promising destination. In them, ‘nothing but the old Faith of England had ever been preached or practised’, and they are ‘places that reproduced […] such sound civilization as [England] possesses today’.22 In the pamphlet with a self-proclaiming title, The Conversion of England (1906), Benson envisages that prospect inextricably from a thorough overhaul of the English people’s sentiment. His historical novels profess the Catholic faith as both a beneficial and exemplary feature of the realm, typified by the royalty and espoused by the gentry. Set amid the postReformation ancestral tensions, The Queen’s Tragedy (1906) counterpoises Elizabeth to Mary Tudor and shows the latter to have ‘a plan of rule that would make England one with the nations instead of setting her aloof in a fierce and capable insularity’.23 In Come Rack! Come Rope! (1912), Benson depicts how Mary Tudor’s devout stance on faith and country inspires Robin Audrey, the novel’s protagonist, to accept death in defiance of Elizabeth’s supporters; he dies for ‘the Catholic faith, […] which was once the faith of all England – and which […] may be one day its faith again’.24 Outside historical fiction, Benson takes a less sanguine line on the prospect of the Catholic faith in England. Resorting to the categories used by Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, he remarks that ‘Catholicism stands to [the English] for the principles of darkness, slavery and retrogression: Protestantism for light, liberty and learning’.25 Benson’s social novels comment on how these skewed notions put Catholicism at a disadvantage and incite popular opposition to it. In None Other Gods (1910), the central character’s choice of the Catholic faith goes against the grain of his familial values, which are made to appear as little more than an unquestioning conformity to social convention. His father is described as ‘a Tory, not exactly by choice, but simply – for the same reason as he was Church of England – because he was unable, in the fibre of him, to imagine anything else’.26 Benson depicts the English as being unable not only to drop off

their nationally determined attitudes, but also to rationalize their views. Thus, a character of Initiation (1914) has several reasons why ‘she couldn’t be a Catholic […]; but had omitted to state what these were….’27 Apprehending anti-Catholic sentiment as a major impediment to England’s conversion, Benson prescribes expiation for the English people. In The Dawn of All, the novel on which the remainder of this chapter centres, Benson’s mouthpiece, Cardinal Bellairs, urges that ‘a corporate crime must be expiated by corporate reparation, and it is that reparation which has already waited too long’.28 Even though the speaker avoids specifying the form of reparative acts, the novel’s plot discloses their impact on England through the protagonist’s perceptions.

The Dawn of All: Modernist Apostasy and ‘The Man Who had Lost His Memory’ Whereas Lord of the World concludes on a distant promise of the world’s unity under Roman Catholicism and England’s return to it, The Dawn of All fulfils that promise, yet does so by means of a dream. In Benson’s latter novel, a priest dreams of his alter ego, Monsignor Masterman, who finds himself in 1970s England to witness the establishment of the Catholic Church in the English state and his own appointment as Cardinal of the realm. Being himself a dissenting priest, the dreamer reawakens with an express wish to confess, especially now that he lies on his deathbed. Comprised of three parts – the prologue; the main body, which contains the dream; and the epilogue – the novel’s formal structure has allowed both secular and religious commentators to construe The Dawn of All as an apology for the thoroughgoing triumph of Roman Catholicism, ushered in by the victory of the Catholic faith over the human heart. Along these lines, Sargent catalogues the novel as a ‘Eutopia of the Roman Catholic Church completely dominant in sixty years’.29 Nicholas Heap further asserts that Benson envisages the re-establishment of the Medieval Catholic Church, reborn and triumphant with the Pope recognized by all nations as Arbiter of the World. The second part of The Dawn of All concludes with the jubilation surrounding the passage of the bill in the British Parliament

making the Catholic Church once more the Established Church of the Realm.30 Similarly, Janet Grayson maintains that England’s officially endorsed and popularly accepted conversion to Roman Catholicism marks a resolution in which Benson invests his theology and imagination. Thus, John Masterman ‘is made Cardinal Archbishop of England and with the king at his side goes into the skies on an aerial barge to welcome an airship carrying the Pope and world leaders making a world tour’.31 In The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (2003), Ian Ker discerns in such images the novel’s ‘unabashedly triumphalistic’ thrust.32 Notably, the aforementioned readings tend to ignore what the contemporary audiences of The Dawn of All might have recognized more immediately. In his biography, Martindale points out that the portrayal of England’s transition to Roman Catholicism discloses the inquisitorial nature of that enterprise, so much that ‘it seemed almost cynical that a man should so light-heartedly preach a sermon first on one text and then on its exact opposite’.33 True, in one episode, when Masterman ventures out to explore London, he experiences what he has never seen before: flying machines, curfew laws, checkpoints, and sentinels. The omniscient narrator reveals the protagonist’s impressions: Yet by some abominable trick, it seemed, these individuals were not merely in external matters forced to conform to the Society which they helped to compose, but interiorly too; they actually had been tyrannized over in their consciences and judgments, and loved their chains. If he had known that the fires of revolt lay there sleeping beneath this smooth exterior he would have hated it far less; but he had seen with his own eyes that it was not so. (Dawn 133) Masterman’s susceptibility to the limitations of liberty and the English people’s resulting acquiescence challenges the ‘triumphalistic’ interpretations of Benson’s novel. In the dying priest’s dream, Masterman faces more than a theological dilemma. He actually comes to terms with England’s ongoing transition, which looks dystopian to him: ‘Somewhere,

down in the very fibre of him, was an assumption that England and Catholicism were irreconcilable things – that the domination of the one meant the suppression of the other’ (Dawn 177). Stähler has argued that Benson’s fiction rehearses the ‘ultimate communion’, which must necessarily trump all other allegiances, including those to the nation-state.34 Accordingly, Masterman’s internal conflict pivots on the need to disown whatever discursive sense of England he possesses, before fully embracing the Catholic faith. Likewise, England’s conversion to Roman Catholicism means the undoing of its own discourse, a process that causes disturbance and opposition in Benson’s novel. Flying above London, Masterman surveys his future assignment: Here beneath him lay London, the finest city in the world, where, if ever anywhere, had been tried the experiment of a religion resting on the strength of a national isolation instead of an universal supernationalism; – it had been tried, and found wanting. (Dawn 250) The Dawn of All enacts its central conflict by playing on the interface between faith and memory, whose operations it first treats as a dichotomy and eventually mediates. Questions of faith come to the fore primarily, but not exclusively, in the novel’s prologue and epilogue, which narrate of the dying priest. He has fallen into a coma of disbelief, which overlaps with his physically comatose state, in consequence of research on the history of ‘the thirteenth-century Popes’ and ‘Piccolomini affair’ (Dawn ii–iii). The two topics pertain to a period noted for the growth and ensuing suppression of heresy. Indeed, throughout much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Rome-Avignon schism kindled Europe-wide divisions, leaving behind a legacy of mutual distrust and newly sworn doctrines.35 Most notoriously, however, this schism led to an escalation of the crusading spirit of the Catholic Church. Subsequently, in the mid-fifteenth century, Pope Pius II (Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini) put his ‘energies and money […] to recruiting troops and ships for a new crusade and to trying to persuade the leading powers of Europe to take part’.36 Even though this venture never succeeded, the awareness of it made the priest, in Benson’s novel, doubt both religion and his own faith: ‘All religions were the same. There wasn’t

any truth in any of them. Physical science had settled one half of the matter, and psychology the other half’ (Dawn iii). The priest’s doubts, alongside his reference to science and psychology, associate him with modernism, a fin-de-siècle breakaway movement in the Catholic Church. Initially defined by Pope Pius X in his encyclical ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis: On the Doctrine of the Modernists’ (1907), modernism denoted a synthesis of all heresies, brought out by a rationalist approach to the Bible, secularism, and agnosticism.37 Reaction against the Catholic modernists’ practices culminated in ‘The Oath against Modernism’ (1910), which condemned ‘historico-theological research’ uninspired by ‘sacred authority’.38 George Tyrrell, an English Catholic priest, played a key role in engendering this papal attack on ostensible modernist heresy. He had opposed the infallibility of the Popes and stability of dogma, as well as insisting that the Catholic Church should abandon involvement in politics.39 Tyrrell’s confrontation with the Catholic establishment triggered his excommunication and most probably gave Benson a model character to embody the modernist tendencies.40 In The Dawn of All, both the dying priest and the subject of his dream, Monsignor Masterman, drift towards modernism. Just as the former fails to reconcile Christ’s resurrection with the sectarianism and militancy that riddled the medieval history of the Catholic Church, the latter struggles to foresee a future in which that Church would follow ‘the religion of its Founder’. On observing the ongoing establishment of a Catholic state in England, his scruples take on the following dimension: Then, almost without perceiving the connection, he turned in his mind to Christianity as he conceived it to be – to his ideal figure of Christ; and in an instant he saw the contrast, and why it was that the moral instinct within him loathed and resented this modern Christian State. (Dawn 134) In his indignation, Masterman strikes the same chord as the dying priest does: they both hold suspect the political licence towards which the Catholic Church aspires. This sentiment aligns them with the idea of a ‘Christ-centred Catholicism’,41 propagated by the modernist movement in general and Tyrrell in particular. In the epilogue, Benson resolves the priest’s doubts and flirtations with modernism, which allegorically follows

his reawakening from the coma he was in. Having dreamt up the triumph of Roman Catholicism in England, the priest makes a requisite leap of faith, reveals the epiphanous content of his dream, and requests to have a priest summoned. The novel’s frame composition resembles the ones utilized in Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Morris’s News from Nowhere, reinforcing the idea that dreams may outgrow themselves and become either a reality, as with Julian West, or a vision, as with William Guest. Questions of memory assume centrality in the main body of The Dawn of All and stand in close relation to the political and sociocultural climate of the Edwardian period in England. Despite frequent designations as ‘an especially splendid age’ marked by coherence, security, and optimism,42 that decade spelt a dissolution of many certitudes. As pointed out in Chapter 1, universal suffrage and Irish Home Rule put enormous pressures on Liberalism, which had ‘remained the dominant force in the political culture’ since the 1880s.43 Voiced across English society and British union, rebellious demands divided the Liberals, heightening the fear of mass democracy. Being the central precept of Liberalism, delivery of wider liberty purported to threaten the very foundations on which the Liberal establishment stood. This dilemma preoccupied C. F. G. Masterman, a junior minister in the Asquith government (1908–1916). In The Condition of England, Masterman pursues Arnold’s apprehensions and detects dangers in the continuing rise of the uncontrollable masses. He dubs them the ‘Deluge’, the ‘influx, as the rush of a bank-holiday crowd upon some tranquil garden: tearing up the flowers by the roots, reeling in drunken merriment on the grass plots, strewing the pleasant landscape with torn paper and broken bottles’.44 Yet Masterman’s wary diagnosis envisages no treatment. In its absence, The Dawn of All vouches for ‘a reversion to medieval times’ as a way of maintaining the order, defined by authority, monarchy, and hierarchies (Dawn 23). Albeit anti-modern in orientation, the emerging system resorts to the most recent aviation technology in order to achieve a victory. Such a seemingly incompatible arrangement bespeaks the contradictions of modernity, which Benson’s protagonist has to confront. Eponymous with C. F. G. Masterman, he surveys England’s modern condition under Roman Catholicism, which affects his workings of memory. Throughout the narrative of the priest’s dream, Masterman is cited as ‘the man who had lost his memory’, and this formula recurs twenty times

(Dawn 11, 15, 33, 37, 97, 100, 108, 128, 131, 136, 145, 154, 159, 176, 186, 204, 218, 229, 251, 254). Reminders of memory loss alternate with statements about Masterman’s state of mind, amounting to his temporary acceptance of that condition: ‘I am crippled mentally; my memory left me a few months ago; it may leave me again, and this time helpless and useless’ (Dawn 216). A major accident occurs when the protagonist learns that Westminster Abbey has been newly bequeathed to the Benedictine Order and made over: The old monuments were gone, of course – removed to St. Paul’s – and for the first time for nearly three hundred years it was possible to see the monastic character of the church as the builders had designed it. Over the screen hung now again the Great Rood with Mary and John; and the altars of the Holy Cross and St. Benedict stood on either side of the choir-gates. (Dawn 128) Much as Masterman rejoices at the return of the Abbey to its original, sanctified purpose, he misses the features that the building had accumulated over the centuries, becoming a monument of state and national importance. He regrets the absence of ‘statesmen in perukes who silently declaimed secular rhetoric in the house of God, swooning women, impossible pagan personifications of grief, medallions, heathen wreaths, and broken columns’ (Dawn 129). Playing witness to a redefined public space, Masterman has to bridge the gap between his recollections of Westminster Abbey, on the one hand, and its currently cleansed condition, on the other. The removal of monuments and memorials from inside the Abbey exemplifies a repressive act of cleansing which Masterman must also perform on his own memory. He fulfils the task by making a momentary compromise with himself: ‘It seemed to him as if in some other life he had once stood here – surely there in that transept – a stranger and an outcast […]’ (Dawn 129). However, Masterman exhausts his ability to constrain memory, shortly after he realizes that the new English state treats any type of reasonable doubt about the righteousness of the Catholic Church as treason. A campaign to discredit socialism takes place when England’s Catholic elites deploy a fleet of flying machines, volors, to defeat their socialist opponents in Berlin. Awed by this victory, as well as by the sights the volors offer of themselves

and of the passing scenery, Masterman fails to ascertain the antecedents to said moments in his memory and feels subsequently ‘quieted; not convinced’ (Dawn 248). Memory stands for the familiar order of things to Masterman, experienced primarily in the national context. Conversely, Benson designates faith as a pledge of alterity. Resisting a leap of faith to the last, the protagonist holds on to memory, whose contemporary theories sought to buttress continuous psychological experience against uncertainty and flux. In Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire, 1896), Henri Bergson conceptualizes memory as precisely the reserve of recollections that may never be forfeited. In order to reactivate them, one needs to attend and reflect. According to Bergson, ‘By this memory is made possible the intelligent, or rather intellectual, recognition of a perception already experienced; in it we take refuge every time that, in the search for a particular image, we remount the slope of our past’.45 Frederick Myers, the founder of the Society for Psychical Research, takes a similar line of argument, when, in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), he proposes ‘the existence of some subliminal continuity of memory, lying deeper down than the evocable memory of common life – the stock of conscious reminiscences on which we can draw at will’.46 By this logic, Masterman’s endeavours to connect with England under Catholicism must grant him solace, rather than calling his memory into question as an always already failing phenomenon. Benson’s own understanding of memory can be helpful here. In ‘A Modern Theory of Human Personality’ (1907), he defines memory as a ‘trapdoor’ that ‘often opens up the way of communication […], so as to allow of an uprush of strange but natural powers’.47 Along these lines, Materman’s persisting scruples skew his attention and reflections towards England’s condition under Liberalism, which forecloses an ‘uprush’ of a deeper kind. This unreleased energy relates at once to his personal faith and the faith of preReformation England. Avoided by the protagonist for a long time, his leap of faith requires maturation, which will eventually result in the regaining of the memory he has putatively lost. At the start of the dying priest’s dream, after Masterman has been brought to his new lodgings, he faces a moment of self-identification: A tall mirror, he remembered, hung between the windows. He ran straight up to this and stood staring at his own reflection. It was himself

that he saw there – there was no doubt of that – every line and feature of that keen, pale, professional-looking face was familiar, though it seemed to him that his hair was a little greyer than it ought to be. (Dawn 14) Fully recognizing his appearance in the reflection, Masterman also detects quite a significant alteration: his greying hair. This detail marks the onset of the protagonist’s maturation, which prefigures an ultimate re-surfacing of historical memory as personal faith and its overlapping with the faith of the realm. The main section of The Dawn of All attempts to resolve the opposition of memory and faith by invoking the Gospel of James, wherein faith presupposes looking at oneself in the mirror and remembering what one looks like. Subsequently, the memory of one’s reflection equals ‘the perfect law that gives freedom’, whereas lack of faith distorts that memory and makes one hostage to disobedience (James 1: 23–5). Initially struck by the appearance of greyer hair in what he sees in the mirror, Masterman matures to accept the change and espouse it as an indication of his new liberty. Having shed his doubts, the protagonist appears, at the end of the dying priest’s dream, as Cardinal, with the ‘Royal Standard of England’ flapping nearby (Dawn 246). However, regardless of his maturation, Masterman continues to dichotomize memory and faith; as the narrative informs us, ‘there the vision lay before him – this man who had lost his memory and had found a greater gift instead’ (Dawn 250). The novel’s epilogue supplies a more sustainable resolution of this dichotomy. When the dying priest comes to, he achieves the integrity of memory and faith. The priest’s final confession, which happens symbolically on an Easter morning near Westminster Cathedral, relies on the fully wakeful memory of his own lapse and dream, both of which allegorize the English Reformation and its envisaged undoing. In mediating the distinctions between memory and faith, The Dawn of All may indeed fathom the problem of England’s transition to Roman Catholicism. However, the means by which the novel purports to outstrip loyalties to the nation-state remain contentious and merit further consideration.

Discursive Politics of the Edwardian Period and the Future of England Further to being a modernist apostate and ‘the man who had lost his memory’, Masterman bears a close relation to the discourse of England. Largely, this discourse offsets his theological apostasy and memory loss. Masterman’s political leanings and wider views of English society represent both the creed espoused by the Liberals and the fault-lines affecting them during the first decade of the twentieth century. For the Catholic officials he meets, Liberalism means little more than liberalism, anarchy, and godlessness, which England’s conversion to Roman Catholicism purports to redress. The resulting revisions of English geography, continuity, and character cause Masterman’s sustained disorientation. The Dawn of All heightens a sense of geography that at once acknowledges outlying Catholic realms and writes off British union. Masterman flies to France, the Vatican, and North America, as well as the religiously hostile Germany, but finds no mention of any British place outside England. In addition to London, where most events occur, only the ‘University churches of Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham’ come to the reader’s attention, as High Mass is sung there (Dawn 127). Whereas Scotland and Wales never appear in Benson’s novel, Ireland, which was also a constituent part of the UK at the time, features as an autonomous entity and imperial power in its own right. Masterman’s subsequent trip to Ireland makes him consider Dublin, Belfast, and Thurles as points of interest (Dawn 156). The novel thus fragments the map of the then UK in an attempt to transcend the religious discordances underlying the union and holding England within its gravitational pull. Just as Ireland enjoys sovereignty under Catholic rule, England has yet to come into its own outside British union and empire, both founded on the Protestant faith. In historical perspective, The Dawn of All registers – and wishfully hastens – the erosion of Protestant certainties, which, as discussed in Chapter 1, had lost much of their purchase in the course of the Boer War. To use Linda Colley’s ironic phrase, ‘God has ceased to be British, and Providence no longer smiles’.48 As a compensation for the flagging God-given mission, previously associated with the spread of Protestantism and expansion of the British Empire, Benson’s novel rethinks England’s world-leading role. A government official assures Masterman that ‘The establishment of the

Church in England was being regarded on the Continent as a kind of test case; and even more by the Anglo-Saxon countries throughout the world’ (Dawn 195). This assurance places England at the forefront of ensuing Catholic conversions, likely to redraw hereto extant unions and empires into different configurations. Alongside repudiating the Protestant terms of England’s insular containment and imperial expansion, The Dawn of All revises the notion of continuity. Conventionally inseparable from the growth of liberty, this notion is shifted towards the permanence of dynastic monarchical rule and related power structures. From an imaginary standpoint in 1973, Masterman gains insight into earlier socio-political upheavals, when socialism ‘came most near to dominating the civilized world’ (Dawn 16). However, after the Catholic officials attained power in England, they averted the danger of a socialist state which, unlike the Church, is deemed to have supported the population ‘for economic reasons, however conscientious and individually charitable statesmen may be’ (Dawn 22). As the protagonist observes preparations being made for the establishment of the Catholic Church in the English state, he ascertains the onomastic continuity with which that endeavour aligns itself. Masterman hears that ‘Edward IX – a young man – is on the throne’ (Dawn 27). The Edwardian age, at whose close Benson completed The Dawn of All and whose securities Orwell later missed, receives renewal. At least in retrospect, this redefined form of continuity recalls a comparable analogy with the eighteenth century, when the successive ascensions of Hanoverian kings, all named George (1714–1830), to the throne might have equally enhanced the sense of socio-political and religious coherence across British union. In a final act of overcoming his scruples, Masterman accepts the continuity of monarchical government as ‘that faulty mirror of the Divine government of the world’ (Dawn 248). Equally, he credits a different type of liberty, which the Gospels endorse as the ‘Law of Love’ (Dawn 253) and the Catholic Church implements by means of an Edwardian dynasty. Under the circumstances, the idiom of character sets up a distinct profile for the English people, which plays down their patriotism. England’s Catholic authorities ensure religious cohesiveness by pronouncing everybody ‘a Catholic – from the King downwards’ (Dawn 28). In doing so, they place the Church above the nation, in both sentiment and service.

Fr Bellairs, Masterman’s predecessor in the post of Cardinal of England, explains: I am an Englishman as well as a Catholic, and I love England only less than I love the Church. I say frankly that I do love her less. No man who has any principles that can be called religious can say otherwise. I tell you plainly that should it come to be a choice between Caesar and God – between the King and the Pope – I should throw myself at once on the side of Christ and his Vicar. (Dawn 182) Bellairs practises what he preaches: towards the end of the novel’s main section, he dies in defence of the Catholic faith against the German socialists. Prior to taking over the Cardinal’s business, Masterman manifests loyalties typifying his English character. The protagonist fears that Catholic rule will infringe on parliamentary democracy, revoke the right to vote, overpower women, eliminate Ireland’s prospect of Home Rule, and displace freedom of expression. All such fears pertain to the discourse of England, which Benson highlights in The Dawn of All. The novel depicts how the Houses of Parliament undergo reconfiguration on both a symbolic and a functional levels. Parliament Square acquires ‘the image of the Immaculate Conception’ (Dawn 7), while the House of Lords and the House of Commons become designated as the Upper and the Lower House, respectively (Dawn 185). Further to anticipating the inauguration of ‘the first professedly Catholic Parliament for more than four hundred years’ (Dawn 178), these changes foreclose the practice of parliamentary democracy. Whereas the Upper House endorses England’s conversion in line with the monarch’s and the Vatican officials’ will, the Lower House remains more receptive to public opinion and therefore less eager to accept the establishment of the Catholic Church in the English state. The novel notes: ‘The Upper House […] was practically unanimous in favour of the Bill; and there had been one or two unpleasant demonstrations outside the entrance to the Second Chamber’ (Dawn 185). In highlighting the recurrent tensions between the two Houses of Parliament, The Dawn of All re-enacts contemporary concerns surrounding the development of the welfare state in Britain in the years between 1906 and 1914. According to Derek Fraser, the latter project meant ‘a major non-socialist injection of social welfare into

the British system’.49 Indeed, for the first time, the British state took on the provision of minimum wages, old-age pensions, medical services, unemployment and health insurance, and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Albeit socially oriented, such measures garner disapproval in The Dawn of All. A Catholic ideologue condemns them as the state’s unjustifiable expansion for its own economic interest. To him, the novelties of the welfare state look like ‘a mark of disgrace – for the simple cause that it is not the receiving of money that is resented, but the motive for which the money is given and the position of the giver’ (Dawn 22). The rationale for this denigration takes its root from the historical stalemate of the 1909 People’s Budget Bill. Proposed by the Commons as a way of funding social welfare through taxation of the rich, the Bill met opposition in the House of Lords. In an attempt to circumvent an inevitable parliamentary crisis, H. H. Asquith, the then Prime Minister, lodged a request for the dissolution of Parliament and a general election in January 1910. Later in the same year, he called another snap election, after the Liberal and Conservative Members of Parliament ‘had failed to agree on proposals to limit the power of the House of Lords’.50 In The Dawn of All, Benson counters any such limitation, which allows him to ensure the Lords’ continuing centrality to politics and economic matters. Eventually, the Lower House votes in favour of the Establishment of the Church Bill, yielding thus to the pressures from the Upper House, the monarchy, and the Pope. This act ushers in a newly emerging Catholic Parliament, detached from both the electorate and the exercise of liberty. In Benson’s novel, English liberty forfeits most of its discursive associations with the enfranchisement of wider quarters of society. Masterman learns that, in 1970s England, women have gained the right to vote ‘under the same conditions as men’; however, ‘There’s a severe educational test now, of course. Not more than about one in seventy adults ever get the vote at all. But the result is that we’re governed by educated persons’ (Dawn 27). At slightly above one percent, such electoral provisions look exclusive, if compared with the enfranchisement of around sixty percent of the UK’s male population before 1914.51 Purporting to eliminate the possibility of rule by ‘sheer weight of numbers’, ‘the inexpert’, and ‘the mediocrity of the average’ (Dawn 17, 53), Benson’s idea of the franchise prescribes a stringent system of educational controls. In their absence, as Benson admonishes in ‘Points of View’ (1911), ‘not only

would I not extend [the vote] to women, but I would take it away from men’.52 This admonition echoes the nineteenth-century public moralists’ reservations concerning universal suffrage. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold warned that ‘the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity were touched with sweetness and light’. In his vision, the whole of society had to be ‘in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive’,53 before it could govern itself through the vote. Much as Benson adheres to the need of an educational threshold in social governance, he takes exception to Arnold’s recommendations about enfranchisement as the potential outcome of a long-lasting nation-wide education. For Benson, education and the vote remain hierarchical rights, even though they surpass gender entrenchment by a margin. The fact that England’s Catholic authorities enfranchise a select group of women does not entail emancipation. On the contrary, women are ordered to decorate themselves in ways that underscore their gender, familial ties, and social status: ‘Each woman has a predominating colour, the colour of the head of her family, and all, of course, wear badges’ (Dawn 53). Such formal segregation reinstates women’s essentially subordinate position in a society ruled by male-only ecclesiastics. It also offers a reaction against the New Woman, a figure ‘tied to the social and material changes taking place in late nineteenth-century modernity’,54 as well as inflecting emancipatory trends in later decades. Among Benson’s contemporary fictional embodiments of the New Woman, the eponymous protagonist of Wells’s social novel Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story (1909) deserves to be mentioned. Obsessed with the acquisition of the vote, ‘the symbol of everything’,55 Ann Veronica initially views it inseparably from her personal liberty. However, her civic aspirations take a downturn after a failed ‘raid upon the House of Commons’, following which she gets arrested. The protagonist’s subsequent retreat from political activity launches a phase of self-emancipation, which she achieves through the exercise of free love. In Wells, the liberty to choose a suitable male for procreation not only dissents from erstwhile social convention, but also ends the frequently violent demands for justice and equality. Indeed, Wells’s novel condemns women’s militancy as ‘wild burlesque’.56 Benson’s treatment of women, in turn, veers towards liberty only in a metaphysical sense. Entirely absent from Masterman’s experience of 1970s England, women receive a singular

representation in the female nurse who looks after the dying priest in the novel’s prologue and epilogue. This nurse comes across as a quietly devoted carer and ‘convinced Catholic’ (Dawn ii, 257). She dreamily floats in anticipation ‘of a king […] in a far-off city’ (Dawn 258). Unlike Ann Veronica, the nurse romances with Christ and feels contented with her positive faith, which supersedes most of her worldly preoccupations. The novel’s two temporal planes render women nameless, passive, and publicly invisible, which poses questions about the reproductive mechanisms of this largely ecclesiastical society. Further to detractions from parliamentary democracy and liberty, Masterman observes a geopolitical and socioeconomic reinvention of Ireland. This process offers a sharp contrast to the negotiations surrounding Irish Home Rule, initiated in the late nineteenth century. Using emancipatory arguments, W. E. Gladstone, the UK’s Liberal Prime Minister, promoted respective Bills in 1886 and 1893. His support of the Irish cause resonated with the liberal-nationalist struggle happening particularly in Greece and Italy, and giving rise to self-governing nationstates there.57 Even though the granting of legal autonomy to Ireland had never seen the light of day within British union, Gladstone’s efforts precipitated a new world order whereby imperial rule would cease shortly and Europe be carved into national jurisdictions. In an attempt to override this course of modernity, The Dawn of All envisages Ireland’s existence in both a colonial and postcolonial, premodern, and supranational condition. Before the novel’s protagonist takes his volor to Thurles, he finds out that Ireland developed enormously as soon as she had gained independence, but emigration continued […]. […] Of course, she is a part of the British Empire; but her real social life lies in her colonies. Australia succeeded in getting Home Rule from Ireland about twenty-five years ago. (Dawn 31) Thus, Masterman’s interlocutor presents Ireland as a sovereign, yet constituent part of the British Empire, with an empire of its own and legal control over the colonies. Such an intricate overlapping of functional designations furnishes the profile of empire with new features. It supplies a malleable, multi-layered, and polycentric network of interdependencies,

which not only allows the acquisition of autonomy, but also dissolves the boundaries between colony and metropole. Additionally, the British and the Irish Empires converge in the novel with an ever-growing Catholic realm. In this design, Ireland may be deemed to profit from economic and political involvement in empire, on the one hand, and religious links with the Holy See, on the other. Masterman’s subsequent stay in Ireland reveals the country’s socioeconomic condition and restorative potential, realized without the foundation of the nation-state: The whole island, he learned, was the absolute and inalienable possession, held under European guarantees, of the enclosed Religious Orders, with whose dominion no interference was allowed. All the business offices of the country and the ports of the enormous agricultural industries were concentrated in Dublin and Belfast; the rest of the island was cultivated, ruled, and cared for by the monks themselves. (He read drearily through the pages of statistics showing how once again, as in medieval days, under the labour of monks the land had blossomed out into material prosperity; and how this prosperity still increased, year by year, beyond reckoning.) (Dawn 159) In Benson’s novel, Ireland figures as a self-sustaining monastic enclosure, which provides a site for religious retreats and psychical recuperation. It counters aspects of modernity that both dilute religious sensibilities and cause mental disorders. Masterman notices the availability of ‘Hospitals-ofGod’ on the island. These institutions serve as mental clinics, which derive their treatment methods from the allegedly auspicious convergence of Ireland’s undisrupted Catholic tradition and untarnished pastoralism. Predictably, The Dawn of All exploits the country’s trite portrayal, immortalized, among others, in the 1885 poem ‘The Island of Saints and Scholars’. There, the poet depicts Ireland as an essentially ‘emerald green’ island whose priests have nurtured, guarded, and spread Christianity far beyond Europe.58 Regardless of being a self-styled stronghold of the apostolic faith, Ireland chances on Masterman’s notably different appreciation. Contrary to extant images, the protagonist glimpses into Ireland’s state of oppressive emptiness, silence, and inscrutability:

So far as solitude was concerned, he might be imprisoned in a dead city. And all this deepened his impressions of peace and recuperation. The silence, through his knowledge, was alive to him. There must be, almost within sound of a shout, hundreds of living persons like himself, yet all intent, in some form or another, upon that same overwhelming silence in which facts could be received and relations readjusted. (Dawn 164) Dismayed by the demands of ‘Contemplative Life’ in an all-Ireland monastic sanatorium (Dawn 169), Masterman fails to rectify them with his attachment to the nation-state, whose gradual reconfiguration he registers in England. Unlike England, Ireland has already become a specialized faculty in a wider Catholic and imperial infrastructure, re-enacting thus the Wellsian idea of the World State, comprised of functional units. This idea bewilders Masterman so much that, at the end of his Irish sojourn, he laments: ‘I am unhappy altogether’ (Dawn 166). Clearly, the protagonist’s discontent does not pre-empt W. B. Yeats’s renowned ambivalence about the Irish nation, born in the context of modernity as a ‘terrible beauty’.59 Rather, Masterman shrinks from the possibility of a supranational world order, despite its premodern underpinnings. He struggles to accept any shape of the world unlike the one sanctioned by Gladstone and the likeminded Liberals. Nevertheless, Masterman’s espousal of English liberty surpasses his Liberal leanings and takes on a socialist valence, especially when he becomes aware of how England’s Catholic state treats dissidence. This treatment involves practices of judicial persecution, on the one hand, and exile, on the other. Masterman witnesses the first practice when attending the trial of a Catholic clerk, Dom Adrian, who has been accused of disputing the ‘miraculous element in religion’. In a conversation with the protagonist, Adrian reveals the nature of his dissidence: ‘I refuse to submit, maintaining that I am differing, not from the Catholic Church as she really is (which would be heretical), but from the Catholic Church as interpreted by these theologians’ (Dawn 143). Adopting a scientific understanding of supernatural cures, he questions dogma, an act that the Catholic officials deem to endanger not only the Church, but also society. Consequently, Adrian’s trial acquires an Erastian significance, whereby secular authorities execute the dissident, while society accepts this as deliverance. To that end,

The Dawn of All records: ‘he was put to death and not a soul, it seemed (not even the victim himself) resented it’ (Dawn 154). For Masterman, such putatively legal action presents an unscrupulous attempt to sustain security and cohesiveness at the cost of the ‘right to think for oneself’ (Dawn 145). Whereas Catholic dissidents fall victim to judicial persecution, which seeks to root out heresy from within, their socialist counterparts receive a much more complex and less inquisitorial treatment. The Catholic ideologues, Mr Manners and Fr Jervis, inform Masterman of their worries surrounding the proliferation of socialism and prepare him for a trip to Boston, where the socialists find exile. Early in The Dawn of All, Manners, a political economist, admits that Christianity anticipates ‘all the ideals of Socialism […] by about two thousand years’: like socialism, the Catholic Church ‘sanctifies and safeguards the individual’, in addition to demanding obedience as ‘a much-neglected virtue’ (Dawn 22). Manners’s explanation recalls an early twentieth-century debate about the capacity of socialism and Christianity to conjure up an alternate society, both separately and in unison with each other. In a study of Edwardian intellectual culture, Vincent Geoghegan has observed that much of that debate owed itself to the release of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical ‘Rerum Novarum: On Labour and Capital’ (1891), which castigated ‘any form of socialism’, yet sympathized with the workers’ condition in a modern economy.60 Indeed, the encyclical denounced the socialists’ insurrectionary politics alongside their attempts to overwrite the ‘law of nature’ by eradicating private property and taking control of the family and household. At the same time, Leo XIII relied on resolving social hostility through religion, which should be common to the rich and the poor alike. Unintentionally, such a premeditated resolution gave rise to various alignments between religious consciousness in general and the Catholic faith in particular, on the one hand, and socialism, on the other. The resulting plethora of proto-socialist groupings included ‘New Theology’ Socialism, Church Socialism, Working-Class Biblical Socialism, Socialism from Above, Anglican Christian Socialism, and Catholicism and Socialism.61 Instead of disavowing socialism as such in a vein similar to ‘Rerum Novarum’, The Dawn of All follows the contemporary situation when the possibility of a productive interpenetration of Catholic doctrine and socialism presented itself. Through the character of James Hardy, an appealing leader of the socialist movement in the novel, Benson utilizes an onomastic homology with James Keir Hardie, a British politician who

chaired the Independent Labour Party between 1894 and 1900 and led the Labour Party between 1906 and 1908. In his pamphlet From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), the latter holds that the ‘principles set forth in the Sermon on the Mount’ foreshadow the social economy espoused by the socialists, and that communism, being the ‘invariable outcome’ of socialism, has its roots in the Christian notion of heaven.62 However, since the socialists rely on methods crucially distinct from those of the Catholic Church, their activities contradict Benson’s vision of England’s conversion. Thus, James Hardy voices his programme in the spirit of his historical namesake, demanding the ‘formal disestablishment of the Church throughout Europe and the complete liberty of the Press, with guarantees that these should continue’ (Dawn 226). Such demands resonate across The Dawn of All with anxieties about oppression, republicanism, and insurgence. Manners instructs Masterman that socialism licenses the ‘Survival of the Majority’ and ‘tyrannize[s] first over the minority and then over the individual’ (Dawn 22). Couched in Social Darwinist terms, this criticism discards the socialist principle of state ownership, which ostensibly favours the fitter masses to the disadvantage of the less fit few. Rather, Manners gestures towards Belloc’s Distributist proposition, made in An Examination of Socialism (1908). Belloc ruled that, in order to avoid a socialist ‘Servile State’, ‘a state of highly divided property’ ought to be nourished.63 Jervis further advises Masterman that the Catholic officials endorse property divisions in a way that reinforces existing socioeconomic and political hierarchies: We treat our kings like kings […]. And, at the same time, we encourage our butchers to be really butchers and glory in it. Law and liberty, you see. […] No republican stew-pot, you see, in which everything tastes alike. (Dawn 55) Notably, the novel locates law and liberty outside the justice of human equality and designates them as contingencies that depend on hierarchical status. England’s Catholic ministers validate this order as the only means to a supranational state, holding the socialists suspect of disobedience. Jervis remarks:

Socialist and infidel speeches can be delivered freely in what are called private houses, which are really clubs. Well, that sort of thing cannot possibly go on. The infidels have complained of tyranny, of course – that’s part of the game. As a matter of fact they’ve been perfectly free unless they gave actually public offence. (Dawn 122) Jervis’s rhetoric offers a mediated response to the political agitation associated with the 1910 electoral manifestoes of Labour. In the context of the ongoing parliamentary crisis, the Party pleaded for a different sociopolitical system, where ‘the feudal age is past and […] the people are no longer willing to live on the sufferance of the Lords’.64 Similarly to their early twentieth-century precursors, the socialists in Benson’s novel test the limits of liberty and its social entrenchment. Not only do they threaten to subvert England’s irenic transition to Roman Catholicism, but they also challenge the discourse of England, which their Catholic counterparts work to displace. If England’s conversion means the supersession of the nationstate and return to medieval power structures, any further growth of liberty, which ensures continuity, becomes superfluous, and England diminishes to a discursive uncertainty. However, The Dawn of All shies away from this radical closure by outsourcing the exercise of liberty into an elsewhere. Before Masterman parts with all his doubts surrounding Catholic rule in England, he flies to Boston in North America with the intention to inspect the socialist colonies there. The Catholic officials have been exiling the dissidents from England for two reasons: in order to secure the country’s undisturbed conversion and grant the regime’s adversaries ‘complete civil and religious liberty elsewhere’ (Dawn 199). Masterman’s upcoming visit brings out his strong visceral feeling that ‘he was coming into a civilization which, although utterly unknown to him by experience, yet had in his anticipation a curious sense of familiarity’ (Dawn 203–4). However, the protagonist’s favourable stance loses out to the preconceptions he has acquired from the Catholic ideologues, as he rehearses the irreconcilable antagonisms between Catholicism and socialism. Similarly to his guides and ‘Rerum Novarum’, the protagonist falls back on a somewhat stereotypical, simplified, and therefore narrow version of socialism, which he construes as being necessarily infidel, materialistic, democratic, and godless. Catholicism, too, acquires a similarly limited frame that brackets in

creationism, monarchy, and even empire as convenient contrasts to socialism (Dawn 203). Masterman finds confirmation for these binary certainties during his sojourn in Boston. Yet, contrary to expectation, he lends praise to ‘good government, stability, good bodily health, the propagation and education of children, equality in possessions and opportunities’ (Dawn 206), As the protagonist spends time enjoying ‘real liberty as he had conceived it’, his socialist sympathies additionally come to the fore (Dawn 208). Predominantly, he appreciates the material features of the ‘socialistic Canaan’ (Dawn 206), which evokes Bellamy’s Looking Backward, also set in Boston and containing a compatible response. Like Masterman, the wakeful West ascertains the formidable human achievement in the construction of the welfare state, evidenced at the close of the twentieth century. Dr Leete guides West’s admiration: The nation is rich, and does not wish the people to deprive themselves of any good thing. […] No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.65 Unlike Masterman, though, West accepts what he witnesses as an ultimate reality, different from the late nineteenth-century USA. Benson’s protagonist, in turn, grows distraught and increasingly confused about the balance of spiritual and material components in both social organization and individual life. He feels alienated in the face of modernity, which leaves him with a final dilemma: He felt terribly alone in a terrible world. Was the whole human race, then, utterly without heart? Had civilization reached such a pitch of perfection – one part through supernatural forces, and the other through human evolution – that there was no longer any room for a man with feelings and emotions and an individuality of his own? Yet he could no longer conceal from himself […] that it was better to be heartless through too vivid a grasp of eternal realities, than through an equally vivid grasp of earthly facts. (Dawn 209)

For Masterman, modernity dehumanizes as much as it presents new possibilities. Nevertheless, he prefers to sacrifice a part of his own humanity to the prospect of the Second Coming. The protagonist’s encounter with the socialist colonies expedites his epiphany, which supplants his modernist apostasy, memory loss, and Liberal leanings. Alongside uncertainties, Masterman overcomes his discursive attachment to England elsewhere. This experience stimulates his involvement in the business of England’s conversion. Benson’s World State authorizes the existence of outposts in ways that disclose both a Platonic allusion and a Wellsian trope. The socialists resemble the banished poets whose exile creates exclaves of alterity within a wider global infrastructure. As long as their colonies exercise liberty, this practice salvages the supranational Catholic enterprise from entropy and preserves whatever remains of England in the form of a discursive trace. Outside the imagined transition to Roman Catholicism, The Dawn of All makes a political forecast. It entrusts the socialists with the task of England’s continuity, a transfer that followed Labour’s rise to power in 1924.

Aviation Technology, Regimentation, and the Defiance of Liberty In restricting the practice of liberty to the socialist outposts, The Dawn of All opposes a proliferation of modernity wherein the ecclesiastical and political elites could forfeit full control over technological advances. Instead, Benson rehearses the condition experienced by Graham, the protagonist of Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes, in future London, where the armies of workers commute on moving platforms to their subterranean sweatshops, while the members of the ruling caste take to flying stages. Ultimately, Graham’s advantage over his opponents, including primarily the dictator Ostrog, hinges on his ability to operate a flight. Likewise, Benson’s Catholic authorities rely on aviation technology, which reinforces their power. With the help of volors, they attain an unparalleled vision, produce a formidable sight, and marshal the supranational cause both in England and around the world. Treated as no ordinary visitor, Masterman also gains access to the volors on several occasions, and this experience trumps his hereto robust notion of liberty.

The volors strike Masterman as extraordinary apparatuses. Made of aerolite, a special metal ‘as thin as paper’ and ‘far stronger than any steel’, they operate on the recently discovered ‘most volatile gas’ (Dawn 42). In their construction, the volors resemble birds and imitate bird flight: The tail of a boat is a recent development. […] It’s exactly like the tail of a bird, and contracts and expands in every direction. Then besides that there are two wings, one on each side, and these can be used, if necessary, in case the screws go wrong, as propellers. But usually they are simply for balancing and gliding. (Dawn 43) While a Catholic official apprises Masterman that the volors replicate ‘Almighty God’s design’ (Dawn 43), Lena Wånggren explains, in Gender, Technology and the New Woman (2017), that such resemblances owe themselves, primarily, to Otto Lilienthal. This German aviation pioneer developed a theory of ‘bird flight, especially that of storks, by describing the aerodynamics of their wings’,66 which he consolidated in his study Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation (Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst, 1889). Unlike Lilienthal, the Catholic authorities profess the divine, rather than scientifically grounded, provenance of the volors, which allows them to bestow miraculous powers on machinery. The volors fulfil several functions in the infrastructure of Benson’s World State. First, they fly to enhance the perceived unity of the world among the Catholic elites. Flight overcomes the isolation of nation-states and reduces the distances between them, creating thus the impression of an ongoing integration into one Catholic state. During his European voyage, Masterman ‘had learned in Versailles that the Church could reorganize society, in Rome that she could reconcile nations; he had seen finally in Lourdes that she could resolve philosophies’ (Dawn 109). Second, the volors serve to teleport the privileged group to witness instantaneous healing, which news they are committed to spread. Masterman lands at Lourdes in order to observe miracles being performed on the sick and authorized by the Catholic officials, as ‘all those [cures] which could not be so paralleled were recorded, with the most minute detail, under the sworn testimonies of doctors […]’ (Dawn 101). Initially, the protagonist feels elevated by the ‘sense of a great circumambient Power […],

sacramentalized, it seemed, by the solemn evening light, and evoked by this tense ardour of half a million souls, and focused behind him in one burning point….’ (Dawn 104). However, Masterman’s piety gradually gives way to doubt, when the novel adverts to a naturalistic account of the miracles at Lourdes, written earlier by Émile Zola. Featured in the French writer’s trilogy The Three Cities (Les Trois Villes, 1894–1898), Lourdes (1894) relegates miracles to the human thirst ‘after illusions’, with the result of being ‘deceived and consoled’.67 Benson enlists this reference to comment on Masterman’s scruples, which arise from the interpretation of miracles as groundwork of faith. Benson spells out his stance in the pamphlet Lourdes (1914), recommending that ‘if I should not be healed by Mary, I could at least learn how to suffer as a Christian ought’.68 In shifting the accent from miracle to suffering, Benson rationalizes faith and adapts it to match the idiom of English character. Masterman winces away from the sights of a miraculous cure because their overpowering effects disagree with the moderate and sober-minded attitude he is supposed to exhibit as an Englishman. Symptomatically, the volors allow the protagonist quick access to miracles, yet the latter experience proves less uplifting than the scenes he observes in flight. Indeed, Masterman’s excitement reaches its peak when he flies above London and the volor facilitates his comprehensive perception of the city: he listened with considerable curiosity to the strange humming sound that filled the air, rising and falling as of a beehive. […] [H]e presently perceived it to be the noise of the streets rising from below; and it was then that he saw for the first time that foot-passengers were almost entirely absent, and that practically the whole roadway, so far as he could make out from the high elevation at which he stood, was occupied by cars of all descriptions going this way and that. They sounded soft horns as they went, but they bore no lights, for the streets were as light as day with a radiance that seemed to fall from beneath the eaves of all the buildings that lined them. The effect of lighting had a curious result of making the city look as if it were seen through glass or water – a beautifully finished, clean picture, moving within itself like some precise and elaborate mechanism. (Dawn 41)

Seen from the deck of a volor, London comes across as a mechanical being whose sounds and lights constitute an indivisible whole. Such perceptions reveal a modernist tendency towards amalgamating the disparity and fragmentation of city life into a holistic, unified phenomenon. As early as The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (1905), Ford Madox Ford described London as being ‘essentially a background, a matter so much more of masses than of individuals’, on the one hand, and ‘a very immense symphony-orchestra than a quartet party’, on the other.69 Ford’s dual insight and Benson’s likening of the city to a mechanism anticipate some of the interwar film aesthetic, particularly evident in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927). In The Dawn of All, London’s mechanical orderliness also persists at street level. When Masterman hears the city clocks ‘all striking the single stroke of midnight’ (Dawn 40), this sound prefigures both modernist and dystopian concerns about mechanization. Most famously, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921) exposes the ‘twitching of the hands of the clock’ as a mechanical bondage,70 while Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) punctuates the main character’s workings of memory with the chimes of Big Ben, setting up the distinction between free-flowing private time and mechanized public time. Huxley’s Brave New World locates modernist responses to the clock against the background of Taylorism, a method that sought to increase labour efficiency through time management. The novel presents the ‘four thousand electric clocks’ simultaneously striking the same minute and hour, and this synchrony regiments the Brave-NewWorlders’ lives, regardless of their caste belonging.71 In Nineteen EightyFour, Orwell imparts the practice of regimentation, especially among the representatives of the Outer Party, a totalitarian dimension. Opening with the motion of clocks ‘striking thirteen’,72 the novel gives prominence to both the efficiency of electronic clockwork and the surrealist order in which Winston Smith finds himself. The protagonist’s defection from the official clock happens when, relying on the ‘friendly ticking’ of the ancient twelvehour clock in the proles’ area, he confuses the time of his arrest at nine in the morning for nine in the evening.73 Much as this error relativizes regimentation in a temporal sense, it does not liberate Winston from the consequences of his attempted transgression.

Further to the aerial views and chiming clocks, The Dawn of All reveals London’s mechanical profile in the very fact of it becoming a Catholic city, ‘drilled and disciplined by its religion’. In London, Masterman apprehends no noise, no glare, no apparent evil. And the marvel was that the people seemed to love to have it so! […] One priest had told him that civilization in the modern sense would be inconceivable without [curfew laws and vigilance over morals]. How else could the few rule the many?… (Dawn 132) Perceived by Masterman, England’s transition to Roman Catholicism brings with it modern systems of oppressive social control and undemocratic government. This occurrence not only lays bare the protagonist’s manifest allegiance to the discourse of England, which has been explored above, but also foretells a comparable posture in Orwell. In ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940), he points out the global influence of the Catholic Church, its structural likeness with the Communist Party, and the dangerous inroads it was making into England’s intellectual life.74 Orwell carries his denunciation further in ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (1946), where he places the two organizations on the same footing and credits them as enemies of English liberty. He observes: Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent – for they were not of great importance in England – against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists and ‘fellowtravellers’.75 This exhortation receives a renewed urgency in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The novel situates its protagonist in a society that merges the worst practices Orwell associates with the Catholic Church and the Communist Party. As a result, Winston becomes subject to tyranny in the form of not only totalizing surveillance, but also thought censorship. Similarly to Benson’s London, Orwell’s Oceania lacks the visible signs of crime or evil, and, in order to ensure that Winston unpretentiously likes it so, the Inner Party breaches into his inner self. O’Brien plays the central role in Winston’s

rectification; his Irish-looking name suggests a Catholic connection, which, by implication, precludes respect for liberty. Nineteen Eighty-Four programmatically closes at Winston’s capitulation to his own love of Big Brother. Yet the novel’s ‘Appendix’, written in the past tense, invests in the justice of history to deliver Oceania’s demise. By contrast, Benson’s novel depicts the emergence of a supranational Catholic order and Masterman’s final acknowledgement of its expediency prior to the Second Coming. Even though The Dawn of All and Nineteen Eighty-Four convey the contrary views of England’s well-being in the World State, both novels embody national discourse in the protagonists whose experience summons up – inadvertently in Benson’s case and deliberately in Orwell’s – the dystopia of a post-English world. This coalescence bespeaks the recurrent anxiety about England’s usurpation by external and therefore necessarily illiberal powers. Unlike Winston in Orwell’s novel, Masterman escapes persecution, because the social status in which he visits England determines his extent of liberty. This circumstance broadens the protagonist’s possibilities significantly: alongside the Catholic elites, he gains technologically complemented perspectives on England and the world. Eventually, Masterman fixes his lapses of faith without coercion and assumes the highest office in the realm, acting of his own free will. At the novel’s end, the hierarchical exercise of liberty evidences itself in a scene involving the Pope. He flies to Berlin in order to admonish the socialist congregation that their adherence to the emancipatory cause will lead to a war they are unlikely to win. In the Pope’s own words, You say that Christ is hard – that His Church is cruel, and that man must have liberty? I too say that man must have liberty – he was made for it; but what liberty would that be which he has not learned to use? (Dawn 245) Despite alluding to the Christian principle of free will, the Pope recommends that any wider and more specific uses of liberty remain beyond uneducated comprehension. This advice implies that liberty is largely a matter of learning and initiation, rather than a socially instituted condition. Along such lines, the Pope relies on his key position among the initiated group, who practise liberty. In an earlier episode, Masterman first watches him partaking of mundane trappings with worldly princes, and then

spots him kneeling ‘to confess his sins’ in a private chapel (Dawn 87). These actions foreground a pattern whereby the Pope may do whatever he deems fit, and confession grants him an additional mandate to start over again and do more, as long as he pleads service to his Church. The range of liberty narrows down considerably at the bottom-line of society, whose members, as I have noted above, exist under surveillance and in fear of punishment. Unlike their authorities, the lower orders have no access to aviation technology. Instead, they can only enjoy a pageant of volors marking the occasion of the socialists’ final defeat. Described as ‘incalculable multitudes beneath’ (Dawn 247), the common citizens of England observe the ‘navy of a dream’ (Dawn 246), whose miraculous powers, remaining untapped, must boost faith. For G. K. Chesterton, faith in miracles marked the limits of liberty; in Orthodoxy (1908), an apology for the apostolic faith, he observes: If a man cannot believe in miracles there is an end of the matter; he is not particularly liberal, but he is perfectly honourable and logical, which are much better things. But if he can believe in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so; because they mean first the freedom of the soul, and secondly, its control over the tyranny of circumstance.76 In Benson’s novel, the Catholic officials implement Chesterton’s notion of liberty treacherously, yet effectively. Under Catholic rule, England grants the exercise of liberty an elitist inflection, which circumstance accounts for a varied degree of free will and faith, depending on one’s position in a technologically enhanced hierarchy. The higher one finds oneself, the more opportunities one gets, including access to power and modern technology. One’s lower position leaves fewer options to choose from, but promises emancipation through faith and miracles. In founding his Catholic state on ecclesiastical and socio-political inequities, Benson defies liberty. However, his defiance derives its energies from intransigent governance and technological innovation, each reinforcing the other in the context of modernity. Geared towards the Second Coming of Christ, Benson’s utopia propels England into a supranational condition where national boundaries will have been suspended, religious sectarianism outgrown, the autonomous status of

Ireland secured, and socialist dissidents salvaged. However, all these possibilities acquire a largely dystopian tenor, when The Dawn of All pits them against the discourse of England, whose pertinent beliefs and practices have to be discontinued. Parliamentary democracy becomes redundant, the exercise of liberty exclusive, and women’s emancipation proscribed. Aided by modern technology, the return to the Catholic fold not only divests England of its discourse, but also exacerbates pre-existing social divisions and gender segregation. Such inauspicious outcomes foreclose the capacity of the Catholic communion to redeem England, inviting us to inspect the possibilities for redemption in Wells’s writing.

Notes 1 H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought, introduction by Martin Gardner (Mineola: Dover, 1999), 165. 2 H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future with ‘The Common-Sense of World Peace’ and ‘The Human Adventure’, edited and introduction by Patrick Parrinder (London: PNL Press, 1989), 51. 3 Ibid., 52. 4 H. G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (London: Victor Gollancz, 1928), 32. 5 Lesley A. Hall, ‘Open Conspirators Seek Similar: The Inspiration of H. G. Wells’s Utopian Dreams’, The Wellsian: The Journal of the H. G. Wells Society 40 (2017): 32–8. 6 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons, edited, annotations, and introduction by Frank M. Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 325. 7 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, edited by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 73. 8 Ibid., 72. 9 Ibid., 73. 10 Robert Hugh Benson, Lord of the World (Cirencester: The Echo Library, 2005), 8. 11 Ibid., 41–2, 64, 76. 12 Ibid., 6. 13 Louis H. Wetmore, ‘An Unpublished Interview with Benson’, America, 17 February 1917: 444. 14 Robert Hugh Benson, A City Set on a Hill (London: Catholic Trust Society, 1904), 52. 15 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, preface by Ian Ker (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 206. 16 Robert Hugh Benson, Non-Catholic Denominations (London: Longmans, 1910), x. 17 Robert Hugh Benson, Paradoxes of Catholicism (London: Longmans, Green, 1913), 102. 18 Jay P. Corrin, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle against Modernity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 29. 19 Robert Hugh Benson, ‘A Catholic Colony (A Suggestion)’, The Dublin Review 293 (1910): 393. 20 Ibid., 385. 21 E. M. Forster, Howards End, edited by Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 13. 22 Benson, ‘A Catholic Colony’, 395. 23 Robert Hugh Benson, The Queen’s Tragedy (London: Pitman and Sons, 1906), 321. 24 Robert Hugh Benson, Come Rack! Come Rope! (London: Hutchinson, 1912), 402.

25 Benson, ‘A Catholic Colony’, 384. 26 Robert Hugh Benson, None Other Gods (London: Hutchinson, 1910), 46. 27 Robert Hugh Benson, Initiation (London: Hutchinson, 1914), 21. 28 Robert Hugh Benson, The Dawn of All (Milton Keynes: Dodo Press, 2007), 183. Henceforth referenced as Dawn. 29 Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516–1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1988), 149. 30 Nicholas G. Heap, ‘Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914), Catholic, Novelist, and Apologist: Towards the Restoration of a Portrait’, unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1996: 214. 31 Janet Grayson, Robert Hugh Benson: Life and Works (Lanham: University Press of America, 1998), 221. 32 Ian Ker, The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 10. 33 C. C. Martindale, The Life of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, in 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1916), vol. 2, 87. 34 Axel Stähler, ‘Apocalyptic Visions and Utopian Spaces in Late Victorian and Edwardian Prophecy Fiction’, Utopian Studies 23, no. 1 (2012): 167. 35 Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (Basingstoke: Papermac, 1995), 338, 590. 36 Roger Collins, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of Papacy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009), 327. 37 Pope Pius X, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis: On the Doctrine of the Modernists’, Papal Encyclicals Online, 2000–2017, www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10pasce.htm, accessed on 31 March 2019. 38 Pope Pius X, ‘The Oath against Modernism’, Papal Encyclicals Online, 2000–2017, www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10moath.htm, accessed on 31 March 2019. 39 Nicholas Sagovsky, ‘On God’s Side’: A Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 3, 9. 40 Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 19. 41 Sagovsky, 23. 42 Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: revised edition (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 1998), 143. 43 Robert Colls, ‘Englishness and the Political Culture’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, edited by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 29. 44 C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909), 15. 45 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Mineola: Dover, 2004), 92. 46 Frederick W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (Tasburgh: Pelegrin Trust, 1992), 69. 47 Robert Hugh Benson, ‘A Modern Theory of Human Personality’, The Dublin Review 282 (1907): 87. 48 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996), 395. 49 Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1973), 156. 50 F. W. S. Craig, British Electoral Facts: 1832–1987 (Dartmouth: Parliamentary Research Services, 1989), 177. 51 Keith Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness (London: Longman, 1998), 175.

52 Robert Hugh Benson, ‘Points of View’, The Dublin Review 298 (1911): 72. 53 Arnold, 79. 54 Lena Wånggren, Gender, Technology and the New Woman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 3. 55 H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story (London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1909), 229. 56 Ibid., 299. 57 Keith A. P. Sandiford, ‘W. E. Gladstone and Liberal-Nationalist Movements’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 13, no. 1 (1981): 28. 58 S. M. S., ‘The Island of Saints and Scholars’, The Irish Monthly 13, no. 144 (1885): 297–9. 59 William Butler Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’ and Other Poems, edited by James Reilly (Mineola: Dover, 1997), 53–5. 60 Vincent Geoghegan, ‘Socialism and Christianity in Edwardian Britain: A Utopian Perspective’, Utopian Studies 10, no. 2 (1999): 61. 61 Ibid., 53–61. 62 James Keir Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism; James Ramsay MacDonald, Labour and the Empire; Philip Snowden, The Socialist’s Budget, edited by Robert E. Dowse (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974), 36, 42. 63 Hilaire Belloc, An Examination of Socialism (London: Catholic Trust Society, 1908), 16. 64 Labour Party General Election Manifestos: 1900–1997, edited by Iain Dale (London: Routledge, 2000), 12. 65 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, introduction by Walter James Miller (New York: Signet Classic, 2000), 58. 66 Wånggren, 191. 67 Émile Zola, Lourdes, translated by Ernest A. Vicetelly (London: Chatto and Windus, 1894), x, 373. 68 Robert Hugh Benson, Lourdes (London: Manresa Press, 1914), 82. 69 Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (London: Everyman, 1995), 11. 70 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Penguin, 1996), 524. 71 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. Brave New World Revisited, introduction by Malcolm Elwin (London: Heron Books, 1968), 40, 134. 72 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (St Ives: Penguin, 1990), 3. 73 Ibid., 100, 233. 74 George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in George Orwell: Essays, introduction by Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 2000), 121. 75 George Orwell, ‘The Prevention of Literature’, in George Orwell: Essays, introduction by Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 2000), 331. 76 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1909), 235.

4 England Redeemed The Road, the Rose, and the Dream

Modernity, Romance, and the Work of Redemption The task of England’s redemption gained particular urgency in H. G. Wells’s writing at the time of the Liberals’ electoral losses in 1924. This circumstance not only triggered a reshaping of the contemporary political scene, but also inspired uncertainties about England’s future. Wells’s Men Like Gods and The Dream register the latter symptom. Both novels form a diptych, with a narrative structure that enables moving forward and backward, between England and Utopia, history and alterity. Alongside narrative, Wells enlists the modern means of locomotion, science, and psychoanalysis with a view to diminishing England’s distance from Utopia. In Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014), Laura Marcus has observed that, during the period between 1880 and 1930, ‘dreaming, early cinema, transport, telepathy, telegraphy [acquired] their significance as an annihilation of space and time’.1 Wells’s distortions of spatio-temporal relations supply national discourse with a new sense of continuity. Just as Utopia leads back to England, England extends into Utopia. Wells’s uses of locomotion, science, and psychoanalysis are evenly spread out between the two novels. While experiments with the fourth dimension and biological engineering manifest themselves in each, transport occurs in Men Like Gods, and dreaming underpins The Dream. As indicated in Chapter 2, Alfred Barnstaple, the protagonist of Men Like Gods, accesses Utopia by driving and craving for an escape. The fact that he drives his car, instead of walking, cycling, or taking the train, reflects the contemporary vogue for motorized personal transport, to which Wells was not immune. In The War of the Wheels: H. G. Wells and the Bicycle (2017),

Jeremy Withers points out that Wells privileged the automobile after he bought his own in 1914, and it became for him both a ‘convenient, even restorative, form of transportation’ and an aid to extramarital romance.2 Barnstaple resembles the eponymous character of Mr. Britling Sees It Through in that he drives to alleviate his anxieties and ponder on solutions. However, unlike Britling, Barnstaple quickly gives up on his ‘secret plannings’, permitting his car to take him from ‘a fixed and definite place into what mathematicians call […] a locus’.3 Sensing that every road leads ‘to Elsewhere’ (Men 213), he unintentionally reaches Utopia, which has romance in store for him. Locomotion partly accounts for Barnstaple’s arrival, whereas experiments with the fourth dimension explain the rest. The protagonist finds out that he and his undesired co-travellers have fallen into a time portal opened by the ‘thrust of the atom to rotate a portion of the Utopian material universe in […] the F dimension, into which it had long been known to extend for perhaps the length of a man’s arm’ (Men 236). This portal reveals to Barnstaple a parallel spatio-temporality in ways that remind us of Wells’s short story ‘The Door in the Wall’ (1906) and its moorings in the discourse of England. After the story’s protagonist, Lionel Wallace, loses the capacity to navigate between the more fulfilling realities and the one he inhabits, he begins to long ‘for a door, for a garden!’4 In ‘The Englishness of English Literature’ (1983), Peter Conrad ascribes this longing to a nostalgia that runs through much English writing and bewails either a land whence the gods have abdicated or a life behind the closed gate of Eden. Conrad holds that, from Chaucer onwards, English writers have sought to redeem England’s desecrated condition by furnishing a compensatory pastoral, ‘the walled garden or the moated house, corresponding to the islanded self, private or privated, sundered from the unifying continent […]’.5 Wells’s Utopia embodies a comparable imaginative attempt to regain a defunct garden, and experiments with the fourth dimension herald England’s redemption, at least in Barnstaple’s perceptions. When Barnstaple perceives Utopia ‘as if the whole place were a garden’ (Men 230), he has yet to understand the role of biological engineering there. Similarly to A Modern Utopia, both Men Like Gods and The Dream favour pastoral settings in alpine regions, reinforced by sublime elements. A Modern Utopia features the Swiss Alps, most probably for their

commanding views over the valleys, ‘where men and women are happy and laws are wise, and where all that is tangled and confused in human affairs has been unravelled and made right’.6 The Dream focuses on the Italian section of the Alps, the Utopian ‘land of heart’s desire’, with Domodossola being the only place recorded by name.7 In Men Like Gods, Barnstaple finds his initial location ‘against a background of snow-clad mountains. A few tall, white clouds were sailing across a sky of dazzling blue’ (Men 217). Then, the protagonist encounters a tame leopard, which he compares to ‘a great cat’ (Men 220); later, he learns that insects and midges have disappeared, the brown bear has ‘greatly improved in intelligence’, and the dog has ‘given up barking’ (Men 261–2). Barnstaple makes his most remarkable discovery on a ‘rough-heaped ridge of rock’, planted with roses: He did not know that double roses could be got in mountains; bright red single sorts he had seen high up in Switzerland, but not such huge loose-flowered monsters as these. They dwarfed their leaves. Their wood was in long, thorny, snaky-red streaked stems that writhed wide and climbed to the rocky lumps over which they grew. Their great petals fell like red snow and like drifting moths and like blood upon the soft soil that sheltered amidst the brown rocks. (Men 295) This extraordinary sight encapsulates Utopia’s ‘perfected landscape’ (Men 401). The double rose represents the human effort that has gone into its cultivation in the harshest environment possible. The flower heightens the sense of the sublime, which owes itself largely to Utopian science and gardening, rather than natural forces. Helped by Lychnis, Barnstaple conceives of Utopia as the product of a willed transformation: ‘They have changed a wild planet of disease and disorder into a sphere of beauty and safety. They have made the wilderness of human motives bear union and knowledge and power’ (Men 368). The protagonist further realizes that the work of Utopia never stops, with research and experiment maintaining it as an ever-improving garden. Before leaving Utopia, Barnstaple wishes England would become one: ‘“Given the will,” said Mr Barnstaple. “Given only the will.”…’ (Men 403). In this biologically transformed environment, the Utopians possess mentally and physically enhanced characteristics. In doing so, they espouse

the admonition contained in one of Wells’s last books, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945): That new animal may be an entirely alien strain, or it may arise as a new modification of the Hominidae, and even as a direct continuation of the human phylum, but it will certainly not be human. There is no way out for Man but steeply up or steeply down. Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.8 In their struggle for survival, the Utopians have indeed surpassed humanity. They conduct telepathic communications and exhibit accomplished bodies. Additionally, Lychnis informs Barnstaple that self-pity and sympathy have gone out of Utopia: on tearing his ankle, her nephew Crystal ‘limped but he […] laughed’ (Men 387). However, despite all such changes, the Utopians deliver no termination of humanity, unlike the Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine. Rather, as Parrinder intimates, they present the process of continuing human development, ‘rendering the concept of post-humanity redundant’.9 The Utopians’ new humanity confines Barnstaple mostly to the company of the atavistic Lychnis. Even though their romance melts the distance between England and Utopia, it ends with the protagonist’s forced expulsion. He looks as inadequate there as other Earthlings. Whereas locomotion and science permit Wells to think forward from England to Utopia, psychoanalysis reverses that order, setting out to detect frustrated desires and choked development. Wells turns to the psychoanalytic method in The Dream. The novel’s narrative reasons backward to uncover not the English anticipations of a utopian future, but the Utopians’ memory and identity with an English past. This form of detection entails narrative reordering, so that the narrative set in England follows, rather than preceding, the narrative set in Utopia. Unlike his predecessors in Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Morris’s News from Nowhere, Sarnac, the protagonist of The Dream, dreams not of Utopia, but of early twentieth-century England. On reawakening, he narrates his dream in the form of a social realist novel, wherein he increasingly identifies himself with an Englishman Henry/Harry Mortimer Smith: If the memory of Harry Mortimer Smith is in my brain, then I am Smith. I feel as sure that I was Smith two thousand years ago as that I

was Sarnac this morning. Sometimes before this in my dreams I have had a feeling that I lived again forgotten lives. (Dream 314) Just as Sarnac dreams of England, Smith dreams of Utopia. Regardless of the contrary directions of their dreaming, they both dream of England’s redemption. Sarnac gathers up Smith’s sense of lack and longing in the same way as Smith prefigures Sarnac’s fulfilment. The novel’s epilogue transcribes this connection as a matter of perennial dreaming, indistinguishable from life itself. Sarnac remarks: It was a life, […] and it was a dream, a dream within this life; and this life too is a dream. Dreams within dreams, dreams containing dreams, until we come at last, maybe, to the Dreamer of all dreams, the Being who is all being. (Dream 319) Couched in proto-romantic idiom, Sarnac’s reflection gestures beyond the missed opportunities of the English past. If dreams are the stuff that life is made on, the grand social purpose of dreaming requires more than redemption. In what follows, I enquire into how Wells’s annihilation of spatiotemporal relations expedites England’s redemption, and how his renegotiation, subversion, and transcendence of national discourse contribute to the wider emancipatory thrust of his utopia. I begin by analysing the transformation of the English landscape into a Utopian one, whereby Men Like Gods purports to rectify the condition of England. The latter landscape elicits negative response from other Englishmen, whose political affiliations and sociocultural views denounce both Utopia and utopia. By contrast, The Dream highlights Sarnac’s identification with England, which my discussion traces through the environment and social occasions he revisits, and the quasi-historical narrative he constructs. Traversing space and time, Barnstaple and Sarnac acquire a vantage point that grants redemption. But does it bring forth alterity?

The Road from Maidenhead to Utopia and Back

In Men Like Gods, Barnstaple hits the road, overwhelmed by the ‘urgent need of a holiday’ (Men 207). He has no destination in view, but embarks on a self-conscious escape from the frustrations of his job, the political situation in the UK, and developments on the continent of Europe. Barnstaple works as a ‘sub-editor and general factotum of the Liberal’, which he dubs the ‘well-known organ of the more depressing aspects of advanced thought’ (Men 208). The protagonist’s awareness of coal lockouts in England, ‘unforgettable and unforgivable outrages’ in Ireland, and the failures of the League of Nations forestall his reservations about Liberalism: His hope had always been in liberalism and generous liberal effort, but he was beginning to think that liberalism would never do anything more for ever than sit hunched up with its hands in its pockets grumbling and peeving at the activities of baser but more energetic men. Whose scrambling activities would inevitably wreck the world. (Men 208–9) To be sure, Barnstaple does not premeditate his own shift of allegiance; rather, he laments the lack of initiative by which representatives of his class have become afflicted, and that affliction spills over beyond England. Barnstaple’s search for direction takes him west of London, and, before reaching the Maidenhead Road, he passes through Sydenham and Slough. For the protagonist, Sydenham typifies the condition of England, with its suburban middle-class life. The ‘domesticities of Sydenham’ weigh heavily on Barnstaple (Men 347), who resides there with his family. In despair, he drives over the place and gives no second thought to its potential relevance to utopia. Ensuring that ‘his back was generally towards Sydenham and the Liberal office’ (Men 213), Barnstaple ignores the Crystal Palace as a marker of modernity. Contemporary commentators furnished competing appraisals of the Crystal Palace, which, prior to being destroyed by fire in 1936, had been Britain’s notable landmark. Le Corbusier hailed this edifice as ‘one of the great monuments of nineteenth-century architecture’, because it exhibited ambition and ‘triumphant harmony’.10 Unlike Le Corbusier, who admired the futuristic faith and daring of the Crystal Palace, Fyodor Dostoyevsky apprehended it in apocalyptic terms. Having visited the site in 1862, Dostoyevsky recorded his sentiment in Winter Notes on Summer

Impressions (Zimniie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiach, 1863): ‘something final has been accomplished here – accomplished and completed. It is a biblical sight, […] some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled before your own eyes’.11 Dostoyevsky returned to the subject in Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpoliia, 1864), viewing the Crystal Palace in contradistinction from humanity’s innermost needs and inclinations: ‘suffering is doubt, it is negation, and what good is a crystal palace in which one can have doubts? […] man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos’.12 For Dostoyevsky, the Crystal Palace equalled the end of history, a finality that could only be consummated by transcendent forces. Contrary to Dostoyevsky’s theological disavowal, the wider intertext of Wells’s writing casts light on the absence of the Crystal Palace on Barnstaple’s radar. In Experiment in Autobiography, Wells recalls ‘the gardens of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, through which he took strolls as a teenager.13 In The New Machiavelli (1911), he refers back to the Crystal Palace as both a playground spectacle of ‘gratuitous fireworks’ and an ‘immense facade’ blocking the protagonist’s way to the school.14 Wells attaches neither historic nor symbolic significance to the building: he writes it out of England and never reclaims for utopia. By contrast, Slough regains both a literary and sociocultural importance in Men Like Gods. In Slough’s vicinity, Barnstaple hears ‘the voice of a prehistoric saurian’ (Men 214), which heralds the appearance of two sets of the more privileged travellers, one in a limousine and the other in a touring car. This detail adds to the despondency he drives to overcome. Allegorically, Barnstaple’s self-appointed mission leads him forward, reminding the reader of Christian’s quest in John Bunyan’s From This World, to That Which Is to Come (1678). Like Christian, who walks from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, Barnstaple drives from London to Utopia. Just as Barnstaple’s road passes through Slough, the Slough of Despond lies on Christian’s way to the Celestial City. Christian regards the Slough of Despond as a ‘particularly filthy ground’, which arouses ‘many fears and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions’.15 This literary allusion acquires an additional poignancy in the context of the second wave of industrialization, which affected Slough in the 1920s, turning it into ‘the archetype of anti-settlement’.16 A little more than a decade later, John Betjeman immortalized Slough as the incarnation of modern English life,

when he famously meant to bomb it out of existence: ‘Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough// To get it ready for the plough’.17 Unlike Betjeman, Barnstaple summons no air raids. Instead, he follows the trajectory that Bunyan mapped out for Christian: he passes over Slough and progresses to a more fulfilling place. He attends to his personal salvation before effecting any transformative action. Initially, the Maidenhead Road discloses to Barnstaple the disparities of the English landscape, where Windsor Castle stands alongside ‘the board advertisement of a riverside hotel’ (Men 214). Yet unexpectedly, that same road turns crystal, and the landscape around changes beyond recognition: This was an entirely different road from the one he had been upon half a minute before. The hedges had changed, the trees had altered, Windsor Castle had vanished, and – a small compensation – the big Limousine was in sight again. (Men 215) Barnstaple’s irony suggests that his unsolicited companions are likely to spoil his stay in Utopia, and their impressions are not going to match. Barnstaple quickly notices a different quality of the road on which his car has happened to stop: ‘instead of being the packed together pebbles and dirt smeared with tar with a surface of grit, dust, and animal excrement, of a normal English high road, [the Utopian road] was apparently made of glass’ (Men 216). The protagonist’s acknowledgement of the comprehensible distinction between the Maidenhead Road and its counterpart in Utopia causes Mr Burleigh’s denial. This Earthling traveller declares with aplomb: But are we to judge by appearances or are we to judge by the direct continuity of our experience? The Maidenhead Road led to this, was in continuity with this, and therefore I hold that this is the Maidenhead Road. (Men 218) Unlike Barnstaple, Burleigh denies the probability of parallel temporalities and therefore ties continuity to the empirical impressions he derives from his immediate experience. He refuses to imagine space as a texture of unrealized possibilities and longer-term evolvements. If pursued, such

imagination may upset the ritualized stability of his everyday life, a discursive concern whose manifestations I have tackled in Chapter 1. Conversely, Barnstaple opens himself to the idea of Utopia as England’s temporal extension. There, he sees how progress and design have inscribed and continue inscribing themselves on a landscape: The landscape had absorbed the patient design of five-and-twenty centuries. In one place Mr Barnstaple found great works in progress; a bridge was being replaced, not because it was outworn, but because someone had produced a bolder, more delightful design. For a time he did not observe the absence of telephonic or telegraphic communications; the posts and wires that mark a modern countryside had disappeared. […] but his ideas of the mechanical organization of this new world were too vague and tentative as yet for him to attempt to fix any significance of this sort of place or that. He walked agape like a savage in a garden. (Men 371) Although Barnstaple relates strongly to the observable transformations, he struggles to verbalize their precise remit. This narrative challenge amounts to the incapability of imagining a spatio-temporality where the familiar order of life will have become something else. The uncanny nature of change cancels out Barnstaple’s sensibilities, yet it strengthens his faith in England as place, redeemed and reconstituted over time. Before being expelled from Utopia, Barnstaple obtains an important fragment of its landscape, a petal of a double rose. However, this keepsake fails to survive his return journey: He drew out the petal he had torn from the red flower. It had lost its glowing red, and as he held it out in the stuffy air of the room it seemed to writhe as it shrivelled and blackened; its delicate scent gave place to a mawkish odour. (Men 407) The fading of the Utopian rose in England reaffirms that the spatial potentialities of the English landscape remain untapped, and only their realization will reduce the temporal chasm between England and Utopia. A

highly demanding cultivatable flower, the double rose serves as a synecdoche for the Utopian landscape, just as its single counterpart has symbolized the English royalty and, subsequently, nation. The evolved Utopian rose leads back to England in the same way as the Maidenhead Road elevates into Utopia. Yet each excludes the other, despite communicating an underlying sense of continuity.

Discursive Loyalties in the Utopian Context Men Like Gods translates the contemporary spectrum of discursive English loyalties into political and sociocultural reactions against Utopia. As stated above, two sets of Earthlings accompany Barnstaple during his Utopian sojourn, including Father Amerton, Mr Burleigh, Mr Catskill, Mr Mush, Lady Stella; Lord Barralonga, M. Émile Dupont, Mr Hunker, Greeta Grey, and the chauffeurs Penk and Ridley. Professional occupations aside, these visitors’ nationality constitutes the most noteworthy distinction. Nearly all of them are English, with the exception of a Frenchman (Dupont) and an American (Hunker). On landing in Utopia, the Englishmen claim the right to speak on behalf of humanity. When Catskill calls for a military coup, he reposes his cause in the interests of the ‘Human Empire’, a thin disguise for the Anglo-Saxon race at worst and Britain’s war allies at best. Eventually, he condescends: ‘I meant a common brotherhood of understanding. […] I meant our tried and imperishable Entente’ (Men 327). This pledge inspires the Earthlings to unite under Catskill’s leadership and produce ‘a blue flag with a white star, a design sufficiently unlike any existing national flag to avoid wounding the patriotic susceptibilities of any of the party. It was to represent the Earthling League of Nations’ (Men 337). Critics have already read Men Like Gods as a roman à clef.18 However, they have not accounted for the discursive loyalties that Utopia propels into acute visibility. The Utopian environment renders Father Amerton into a headstrong guardian of Christian morality and national interests. Most severely, he berates population control and vaccination, as they infringe on the course of life ordained by God (Men 256, 319). Amerton’s emphasis on the divine provenance of social principles takes its cue from G. K. Chesterton’s opposition to all brands of socialism and state control. Like other representatives of the Catholic Revival in England, Chesterton pleaded for England’s return to Roman Catholicism. In Christianity, Patriotism, and

Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (2009), Stapleton has observed that, for Chesterton, unity with Rome promised to restore England to its true national self by retrieving it from the ‘layers of concealment, denial, and mistaken identity’.19 On such grounds, he urged that ‘we must see the intrinsic value of the nation before we see its international value to other nations’.20 Chesterton’s apology for the nation tallied with his support of ‘a league of nations’, which made him Wells’s staunch opponent. As part of that debate, Men Like Gods sends up Chesterton as a retrograde who thinks of Utopia exclusively in terms of ‘a moral nightmare’ (Men 394). Cecil Burleigh takes a somewhat more reserved, yet equally reactionary stance on Utopia. His attitude originates from his social background and political status as an upper middle-class gentleman and conservative leader. In front of the Utopians, Burleigh positions himself as a mouthpiece for the normalities of English life, particularly evident in his daily gastronomic arrangements: We begin, as a rule, with a simple cup of tea and the thinnest slice of bread-and-butter brought to the bedside. Then comes breakfast. […] He proceeded to […] the particulars of an English breakfast, eggs to be boiled four and a half minutes, neither more nor less, lunch with any light wine, tea rather a social rally than a serious meal, dinner in some detail, the occasional resort to supper. It was one of those clear statements which would have rejoiced the House of Commons […]. (Men 228) Burleigh’s description lifts the contingencies of status, means, and taste to the level of essentialities. Endorsed and rehearsed with enjoyment, resulting characteristics constitute England’s discursive specificity, whose reproduction sustains the idiom of English character. Barnstaple takes no exception, when he admits: ‘Yes, I eat in much the same fashion’ (Men 228). Given his irregular meals and uneasy financial circumstances, Barnstaple tells a lie. Yet by lying, he imparts reality to Burleigh’s England. Burleigh wears his English manners seriously, when complimenting Utopia tongue in cheek: ‘It is certainly a very lovely world. The loveliness is even greater than the wonder. And there are human beings here – with minds’ (Men 223). Yet eventually, his scepticism overtakes the sense of irony he initially displayed and he renounces, on the Earthlings’ part, any

‘favourable preconceptions of Utopia’ (Men 328). Additionally, Burleigh exercises dilettantism in political labelling: for him, Utopia is at once republican, socialist, and anarchist, because it is not a constitutional monarchy (Men 244–5). The fact that Burleigh comes across as a dilettante of a thinker and politician matches the contemporary portrayals of Arthur Balfour, who served as the UK Prime Minister (1902–1905) and a Conservative MP (1906–1922). Harold Begbie, a political journalist and author of The Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Reflections (1920), described Balfour as egotistic and incompetent, as well as hostile to novelty and ‘enthusiasms of the human race’.21 The Utopians elaborate on this caricature by adding that Burleigh’s ‘powers of belief are very small. He believes in very little but the life of a cultivated wealthy gentleman who holds a position of modest distinction in the councils of a largely fictitious empire’ (Men 393). True, empire continued to inform Balfour’s worldview, even after his political career ended. In his introduction to the new edition of Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1927), Balfour ruled that the past and future successes of the British Empire owed themselves to ‘the transformation of the British Monarchy’.22 In the Utopian context, this reinstatement of monarchical rule and imperialism looks more than anachronistic. Rupert Catskill re-enacts his England by exhibiting an anti-utopian mind-set and military inclinations. He opposes Utopia because it lacks room for his fighting spirit: Life on earth was […] insecure, full of pains and anxieties, full indeed of miseries and distresses and anguish, but also, and indeed by reason of these very things, it had moments of intensity, hopes, joyful surprises, escapes, attainments, such as the ordered life of Utopia could not possibly afford. (Men 265–6) In conflating Utopia with finality, Catskill preaches a broad conservative doctrine of anti-utopianism. His rhetoric strikes a resonant chord with Dostoyevsky’s denigration of the Crystal Palace and antedates John Gray’s recent attempts to end utopia, before it ostensibly ends history.23 Catskill starts a crusade against Utopia as Secretary of State for War, with the intention to dominate and ‘spread our prestige and our influence and our

spirit into the inert body of this decadent Utopian world’ (Men 325–6). However, his military campaign goes astray, largely because he misunderstands the enemy’s assets. In a futuristic short story ‘The Army of a Dream’ (1904), Rudyard Kipling accurately diagnoses the British army’s failures during the Boer War. The story shows an Imperial Guard of young men, drilled and stationed around the globe to defend empire and freedom: ‘We’re a free people. We get up and slay the man who says we aren’t’.24 However, despite effort and determination, this army suffers a nearly total defeat and extinction at the hands of an opponent who has neither skill nor morale. If Catskill knew his Kipling better, he would have probably refrained from fighting the Utopians, whose military innocence does not prevent them from being victorious in combat. In presenting Catskill as a warmonger, Wells sublimates his own similar impulses. As established in Chapter 2, war and destruction feature strongly in Wells’s early fiction, just as they transpire in Kipling’s prescient outputs: The Five Nations (1903) and Traffics and Discoveries (1904). At the outbreak of war in 1914, Wells led an offensive against pacifists, his pamphlet The War That Will End War (1914) being one such example. As Peter Buitenhuis deduces, ‘Wells the propagandist had in those early months of war entirely taken over from Wells the scientist and critic’.25 Yet, after the Great War had begun in earnest, both Kipling and Wells changed their tack. On losing his son in military action, Kipling went into grieving;26 shaken by the harrowing news from the Battle of the Somme, Wells surrendered his militaristic fervour.27 He disavowed his faith in ‘the war that will end war’, equating it with the ‘spectacular catastrophe’ of ‘our outwardly prosperous society’.28 In Men Like Gods, Catskill evokes Winston Churchill in a dual sense. On the one hand, Catskill expresses staple public-school loyalties to England, which Barnstaple confirms as ‘Empire and Anglo-Saxon and boy-scout and sleuth’ stuff (Men 344). On the other, he embodies the agonies of Britain’s economic and imperial decline. This symptom brackets him together with not only Churchill, but also Kipling and Wells, when they turn away from utopia to resolve historical anxieties by war. Richard Toye has investigated the relationship between Churchill and Wells, describing it as a cordial friendship and pointing out Churchill’s borrowings from Wells’s vocabulary.29 Perhaps Catskill bears the imprint of Wells’s own mediated influence on Churchill.

Freddy Mush conveys his English loyalties in opposition to the treatment of nature in Utopia. For the Utopians, nature holds no key to divine meanings and lacks pathetic fallacy. One Utopian describes nature as an uncaring blind force that ‘made us by accident; all her children are bastards – undesired; she will cherish or expose them, pet or starve or torment without rhyme or reason’ (Men 270). The mastering of nature features as a Utopian life principle, which ensures the survival of the best, rather than the fittest stocks. As a result, competition does not affect Utopian society, where struggle and war become irrelevant. Such an approach frees off the energy that feeds into the discovery of new dimensions of life. Another Utopian affirms: ‘Life of which you and I are but anticipatory atoms and eddies, life will awaken indeed, one and whole and marvellous, like a child awaking to conscious life’ (Men 396). From Mush’s perspective, the Utopians’ actions distort the ‘Balance of Nature’, divesting poetry of its subject matter. What shall one write about in a society that controls its environment and whence conflicts and clashes have disappeared? When Mush offers the Utopians a reading of poetry that deals with ‘the effect of the war upon literature’ (Men 303), they silently decline. They probably feel bemused by the fact that poetry may seek to redeem the damage and devastation, which should not happen in the first place. Mush’s interest in post-war landscapes echoes that of Edward Marsh, editor of the collections of Georgian Poetry and Churchill’s personal secretary. Commentators hold that Marsh’s poetic taste welcomed compensatory portrayals of England.30 In Wells’s novel, Mush takes the same stand, refusing to value an improved landscape above its romanticized representation. Unlike the characters I have just inspected, Barnstaple bears no resemblance to a known person of whom he could be a lampoon. As a stock character, he represents the lower middle class and its mainstream Liberal politics. Barnstaple’s status and views supply a vantage point for him to survey the impediments to England’s progress. During the Earthlings’ insurrection against Utopia, the omniscient narrator records: They [the Utopians] had tried to bring back Utopia to the state of earth, and indeed but for the folly, malice and weakness of men earth was now Utopia. Old Earth was Utopia now, a garden and a glory, the Earthly Paradise, except that it was trampled to dust and ruin by its Catskills, Hunkers, Barralongas, Ridleys, Duponts and their kind.

Against their hasty trampling folly nothing was pitted, it seemed, in the whole wide world at present but the whinings of the Peeves, the acquiescent disapproval of the Burleighs and such immeasurable ineffectiveness as his own protest. (Men 350) Barnstaple believes his counterparts to be a brake on progress. In her essay ‘Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H. G. Wells’ (2014), Christina Alt adds that the protagonist associates the other Earthlings with ‘stupidity, violence, and filth’, which reduces them to the animal, parasitic level of existence and intellect.31 Further, Barnstaple foregrounds national, predominantly English, associations that equally hamper the Earthlings, including himself. Even though the protagonist’s reflections invoke a more neutral ‘Old Earth’, rather than the ‘Human Empire’, his outlook on the world remains largely Anglo- centric. In pointing up his own ineffective protest, Barnstaple anchors himself, too, in national discourse. In Mr. Britling Sees It Through, Wells provides an earlier and more sustained context for Barnstaple’s self-conscious failings. Britling contemplates: The English because of their insularity had been political amateurs for endless generations. It was their supreme vice, it was their supreme virtue, to be easy-going. […] Until the Great War the Channel was as broad as the Atlantic for holding off every vital challenge. Even Ireland was away – a four-hour crossing. And so the English had developed to the fullest extent their virtues and vices of safety and comfort; they had a hatred of science and dramatic behaviour; they could see no reason for exactness or intensity; they disliked proceeding ‘to extremes.’ Ultimately everything would turn out all right. […] All their habits inclined them to fight good-temperedly and comfortably, to quarrel with a government and not with a people.32 The speaker rehearses the idiom of English character, predicated on a ‘muddling-through’ principle. Britling’s sympathies tend towards moderation and compromise, which proscribe extreme sentiment and action. Rooted in Liberal ideology, these qualities offer a counterpoint to

outlandish attitudes and behaviours.33 During the Great War and, particularly, the interwar period, to be English meant being a good-natured amateur, and Barnstaple personifies one such character. Barnstaple’s Liberal leanings set him apart from his co-travellers, as he is the only one who accepts Utopia as England’s alternate spatiotemporality and tries to relate to it. By contrast, Amerton’s moral rigidity and nationalism, Burleigh’s monarchism and imperialism, Catskill’s warmongering, and Mush’s compensatory pastoralism rule out Utopia and any connection it exhibits with England. Barnstaple’s relationship to Utopia at once vindicates Liberalism and spells its pending demise. On the eve of the Liberals’ exit from power and the ensuing reshaping of the UK political scene, the protagonist despairs over the failures of the Liberal government, just as he disparages his own ineffectiveness. However, unlike Masterman in Benson’s The Dawn of All, Barnstaple does not have to forswear his Liberal leanings in order to embrace a supranational order. Rather, Barnstaple’s Liberal vantage point affords him the most serious appreciation of Utopia, which bespeaks the urge to secure England’s continuity in a different social faith.

A Utopian Vantage Point on the Condition of England Whereas Men Like Gods deploys a contemporary vantage point to look forward towards Utopia, The Dream adjusts its perspective to that of nineteenth-century predecessors, William Wordsworth and John Ruskin. The heading of the novel’s first chapter, ‘The Excursion’, signals homologies with Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814). The poem figures landscape into a matter of both personal and communal significance, and the speaker addresses that duality: … while the mists Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes, And phantoms from the crags and solid earth, As fast as a musician scatters sounds Out of an instrument […]34 The lines describe a gentleness of cloud phenomena, accompanied by the sound of pleasing music; the harmony of landscape converges with personal

and social harmony. This pastoral scene inspired Ruskin to feature Wordsworth’s verse in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, an essay that regrets the displacement of harmony under the condition of England.35 Ruskin puts Wordsworth’s description of landscape in stark contrast to his own inability to make sense of nasty, tremulous winds and unaccountable cloud forms, for which he blames industrialization and conflict-riven Europe. According to Ruskin, social, economic, and political forces have stripped landscape of most of its divine meanings, only ‘fragments […] of what existed still exist’.36 In The Dream, Wells obeys Ruskin’s instruction by supplying Sarnac with a critical vantage point. Set at a spatio-temporal distance from England, this perspective serves two purposes: it estranges the protagonist from the problems manifest in the English landscape and reveals the uses which Utopia has found for the fragments of the past. Wells entrusts Sarnac with the responsibilities of an explorer, dreamer, social critic, anthropologist, and historian. Initially, he comes across as a romantic tourist who is taking a holiday break in the company of his lover Sunray. Their relationship being ‘at a very delightful stage’, they readily go off ‘to wander among the lakes and mountains’ (Dream 11). Sarnac’s research on the nervous system and Sunray’s work on the representations of ‘happiness and sorrow in the past ages of the world’ inform their choice of the holiday destination and the ways in which they perceive it (Dream 12). They first find themselves in an antiquarian theme park where they meet an elderly man who at ninety-eight ‘was amusing his declining years by making statuettes of the greatest beauty and humour’, and ‘had a way of cooking the lake fish that was very appetising’ (Dream 12). The travellers’ surprise to see an artisan at work suggests the quaintness of such forms of production and taste, which would not be uncommon in Morris’s News from Nowhere. However, music moves Sarnac and Sunray most profoundly. A local musician’s performance of Frederic Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude (Étude Op. 10, No. 12, 1831), followed by battle and marching tunes, opens in the listeners ‘shutters upon deep and dark and violent things that had long been closed to mankind’ (Dream 13). The music stirs in Sarnac a historical sense of oppression and revolutionary fervour, which mingles with a turbulent sky above: ‘The sky had been starry, but a monstrous crescent of clouds like a hand that closes was now gathering all the stars into its fist of darkness. Perhaps there would be rain to-morrow’ (Dream 13). The novel

places the closure of clouds on a starry night alongside the closure of violence and darkness, conveyed by the music. Sarnac appraises such instances as dynamic, yet temporary phenomena. Their dynamism is but a disturbance of the landscape whose clear skies promise redemption. In line with the protagonist’s expectations, the storm-clouds bring down rain, ushering in a ‘golden and serene’ day with a multitude of flowers and ever clearer views of the valleys, lakes, and crags (Dream 18, 19, 21). Sarnac’s further task consists in reaffirming the spatio-temporal trajectories that link this redeemed landscape with England. The Dream elaborates on Wordsworthian pastoral when we find Sarnac enveloped in ‘a faint mistiness’ of the crags (Dream 21), in the company of other travellers and the guest-master. The nexus between nature and Utopian society undergirds the travellers’ names and occupations: The brother and sister were named Radiant and Starlight, and their work in life, they explained, was to educate animals; it was a business for which they had an almost instinctive skill. The two fair girls, Willow and Firefly, were electricians. (Dream 14) Clearly, the Utopians prefer names that capture bright light and liveliness, just as the females’ electrical jobs suggest emancipation. The education of animals, in turn, may be taken as a sign of the full social control exercised over the environment, which correlates with the biological engineering the reader has witnessed in Men Like Gods. If such is the underlying model of Sarnac’s society, his vantage point looks over a contained landscape. Yet this perspective does not preclude him and his companions from the primeval sensations that natural elements elicit in them: ‘They were all exhilarated by the elemental clatter and uproar; the rain was like a whip on their bare, strong bodies and the wind came in gusts that held them staggering and laughing, breathlessly unable to move forward’ (Dream 17). Having lost the sense of weakness in the face of uncontrollable natural forces, the Utopians live in the certainty of sunshine after the rain. When Sarnac points towards the origin of his dream as ‘the Dreamer of all dreams’ (Dream 319), such a seemingly Ruskinian gesture refills landscape with divine truths. Yet these truths stem in Utopia from social progress, which involves both nature and the individual.

Sarnac’s excursion to Domodossola, a small old town excavated in a valley, marks a turning point in his understanding of landscape and the tasks it may assign. The town’s ruins date back to ‘the last war period in man’s history’ (Dream 15), and the disinterment of mummified bodies from the landslide overpowers Sarnac. Apart from these sights, he becomes privy to the museification of the accident: On Sarnac’s tired mind it made a particularly deep impression. The material collected from the town had been arranged in a long museum gallery of steel and glass. There were many almost complete bodies; one invalid old woman, embalmed by the gas, had been replaced in the bed from which the waters had floated her, and there was a shrivelled little baby put back again in its cradle. The sheets and quilts were bleached and browned, but it was quite easy to see what they had once been like. The people had been taken by surprise, it seemed, while the midday meal was in preparation […]. (Dream 15–16) This newly excavated site exposes numerous undeveloped trajectories. Frozen in time, they constitute a layer in the landscape that serves as a foil to the one occupied by Sarnac. Since Utopia exempts itself from poison gas, mass destruction, and ‘pitiful discoloured litter from the vanished life of the past’ (Dream 16), its irenic existence creates a new layer that comprises differently emerging trajectories. If one follows Massey’s For Space, the layering of landscape occurs through the figure of palimpsest, which locks us ‘in the imagination of surfaces – it fails to bring alive the trajectories which co-form this space’. For Massey, landscape comes into its own only as ‘the product of […] full contemporaneous coexistence and becoming’.37 In the novel, Sarnac grows increasingly aware of landscape as a site of freefloating memories. Once activated, they affirm the possibility of another life running a parallel course to his in Utopia. One of the layers of the Utopian landscape opens up alterity in oneiric form. The dream state gives Sarnac access to a spatio-temporality that precedes his own, and his English alter ego Smith coexists and becomes there. Sarnac relies on Smith’s trajectories in the landscape when he surveys the condition of England and diagnoses it as a maladjusted and unhealthy society. Smith comes from Cherry Gardens, a place whose poetic name

found its limits in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. The town had risen from unplanned cheap building, which sought to accommodate ‘the swarming increase of population that had otherwise nowhere to go’ (Dream 27). This project was aggravated by the contraction of private space and lack of basic educational facilities: Cherry Gardens failed to provide people with gardens better than ‘either a muddle or a waste’ (Dream 27), and children’s gardens were simply non-existent there (Dream 32). In emphasizing the conceptual discrepancies between vernacular topography and its social meaning, Sarnac’s dream alerts us to the adverse effects that economic mismanagement produces on landscape. On leaving Cherry Gardens, Smith settles in London, which the novel portrays as the epitome of darkness, crowds, noise, as well as dysgenic bodies: At times there was a daylight that stripped London bare, showed its grime, showed its real ineffectiveness, showed the pitiful poverty of intention in its buildings, showed the many coloured billstickers’ hoardings for the crude and leprous things they were, brought out the shabbiness of unhealthy bodies and misfitting garments, … (Dream 122–3) London’s green spaces provide hardly any alternative to this description, carrying the signs of infestation with fungus and decay (Dream 227). Westminster Palace finds no praise in Sarnac’s narrative either. Unlike Morris’s Guest, Sarnac does not consign it to a dung market, but voices a critique of its form and function. The building appears to him as nothing more than ‘a pile of imitation Gothic […], a forest of spears […]’, which serves the interests of ‘a formal King, an ignoble nobility and a fraudulently elected gathering of lawyers, financiers and adventurers […]’ (Dream 118– 19). The only building whose nobility receives Sarnac’s approval is St Paul’s Cathedral: ‘it was exceedingly serene and beautiful on a clear, blue, windy day’ (Dream 119). Sarnac’s observations parallel the reconfiguration of London’s public space in Brave New World, on which Chapter 5 comments. In Sarnac’s estimation, the condition of England results in a landscape whose redemptive energies can be quite precarious, yet never completely missing. Smith derives such energies from the Downs, a Sussex landscape:

The Downs made a graceful skyline that bounded my world to the north as the sapphire line of the sea bounded it to the south, and they were almost the only purely beautiful things in that world. All the rest was touched by human confusion. (Dream 25) Contained, undisturbed, and clear of objects and people, this pastoral scene forms a classical case study for Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1899). If landscapes represent a female body,38 Sarnac’s dream bodies forth the avowed purity of Smith’s romance, which he later develops with Hetty Marcus, his wife-to-be. Smith’s acknowledgement of the exceptional beauty of the South Downs occurs immediately after his declaration of love for Hetty. The romantic symbolism of the landscape becomes even more significant after the Great War breaks out and Smith is dispatched to the battlefields. In Literature and the Great War, 1914–1918 (2013), Randall Stevenson has demonstrated that ‘one of the first uses of pastoral was in consolidating – almost literally, in grounding – patriotism and a hesitant sense of purpose during the uncertain late summer of 1914’.39 Sarnac registers a comparable effect of landscape on Smith, whose personal memory of the Downs and romance with Hetty inflect his patriotic determination. Symptomatically, Smith returns from war to witness the betrayal of his romance on both a personal and a patriotic levels. He finds Hetty expecting another man’s child and divorces her. He also rejects England, which has deteriorated during his absence: it ‘was a good deal rattled and much shabbier than before, but it was still the same old mean and haphazard world, acquisitive, divided, cantingly patriotic, idiotically prolific, dirty, diseased, spiteful and conceited’ (Dream 234). However, one last opportunity for redemption presents itself accidentally, when Smith helps Hetty to flee from her second unhappy marriage and emigrate. In retaliation, he receives a mortal injury from Hetty’s husband. The final act of Hetty and Smith’s reconciliation takes place, symbolically, in the Downs landscape. Even though the Downs, like most of the English landscape, have remained undefiled by trenches and barbed wire, Smith and Hetty must rely only on their imagination to summon up a life of unfulfilled possibilities:

‘Perhaps,’ said Hetty, ‘heaven is a place like this. A great hillside to which you come at last, after all the tugging and pushing and the hoping and the disappointments and the spurring and the hungers and the cruel jealousies are done with and finished for ever. Then here you sit down and rest. And you aren’t alone. Your lover is here and sits beside you and you just touch shoulder to shoulder, very close and very still, and your sins are forgiven you; your blunders and misunderstandings they matter no longer; and the beauty takes you and you dissolve into it, […] until nothing remains of all the distresses and anger and sorrow, nothing remains of you at all but the breeze upon the great hillside and sunshine and everlasting peace….’ (Dream 295) Hetty outlines the possibility of an alternate life, which means liberation from the constraints of her lived moment, and an existence in the full freedom of a summer breeze. Her expression of desire calls forth a compensatory pastoral condition, without concretizing the wider scope of social reconstitution. However, this lacking concretization finds fulfilment in Sarnac’s waking perceptions of the Utopian landscape, when Hetty’s image melts into that of Sunray: ‘I […] saw Hetty bending over me – in that lovely place upon this mountain-side. Only Hetty had become my dear Sunray who is mistress of my life. And the sunshine was on us and on her face […]’ (Dream 313). In the light of Freudian psychoanalysis, Sarnac’s dream discloses the desire he has harboured for Sunray. Focused on the thwarted romance between Smith and Hetty, the manifest content of that dream leads back to a latent lack and longing. Freud states at the close of The Interpretation of Dreams: ‘By representing a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, which the dreamer accepts as his present, has been shaped in the likeness of the past by the indestructible dream’.40 Yet notably, The Dream accords little attention to the nature of Sarnac and Sunray’s relationship; instead, it accentuates Utopia’s role in fulfilling the desires of romance and companionship, frustrated by history and circumstance. In Wells, the interpretation of dreams attains a grand social purpose, one of redemption. At the novel’s end, Sarnac surveys the Utopian landscape, which Hetty has prefigured in her compensatory pastoral:

He went out upon the portico of the guest-house and stood still, surveying the great mountains that rose out of cloud and haze, dark blue and mysterious in their recesses and soaring up at last into the flush of dawn. He stood quite still and all the world seemed still, except that, far away and below, a mist of sounds beneath the mountain mists, a confusion of birds was singing. (Dream 320–1) Sarnac’s vantage point reveals a landscape whose serene cloud phenomena and dawning sunshine might have satisfied both Wordsworth and Ruskin. The timespan of 2,000 years has solved the problems of place, improving on the condition of England. Equally, this perspective might have appealed to Burke. The layering of the Utopian landscape brings out redemption, which warrants continuity through an eternal contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn.41 Just as Hetty promises Smith to be present in the landscape after they both die (Dream 293), Sarnac makes a pledge to live ‘forgotten lives’ (Dream 314). Such aspirations find embodiment in the sublime stillness of the Utopian landscape, disturbed only by the birds’ unregimented voices. Solidity thus overshadows dynamism, and an eternal contract remains enthroned. Paradoxically, Wells predicates his utopia on the idea whose historical applications in the British polity have been effective, yet left the condition of England largely unresolved.

Identity with an Englishman Reaffirming the links between England and Utopia, Sarnac’s identification with Smith occurs both self-consciously and by means of a socially imposed mandate. Throughout the novel, Sarnac testifies to his incremental awareness of not only being like Smith emotionally, but also sharing with him his physical agonies. He begins by indicating his fragmentary associations with Smith in distresses unthinkable in Utopia: ‘He was torn – I was torn – by a sense of irrational separation and by the haunting persuasion of lost opportunities’ (Dream 223). Afterwards, Sarnac admits that the social circumstances of early twentieth-century England define much of Smith’s conduct, whereas Smith’s identity remains essentially indistinguishable from his:

And yet in my dream I was very much the same sort of man as I am today. I was a man of the same type. But I was driven by a storm of amazed and outraged pride and sexual jealousy of the most frantic sort towards acts of spite that are almost inconceivable here and now. (Dream 261–2) When visiting the excavations of Domodossola, Sarnac cuts ‘his hand upon the jagged edge of a broken carriage-window’ (Dream 16). In the dream, this injury becomes a gun wound: ‘“I was wounded in the arm –” Sarnac stopped and felt his arm’ (Dream 247). Sarnac’s identification with Smith, a lower middle-class Englishman, partakes of a wider context of Wells’s fiction and Wellsian criticism. Chapter 2 has established that Wells vested his hope of social transformation in the middle classes, which, given an appropriate education in the sciences, would develop into an open conspiracy. Such protoCarlylean tendencies disgruntled A. L. Morton, whose English Utopia construes the vector of the Wellsian utopia as ‘a mere continuation of bourgeois society’.42 In The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (2012), Matthew Beaumont pursues this earlier criticism by emphasizing the ambiguities around the presentation of the Morlocks and Eloi in The Time Machine. He observes that the proletariat ‘is at once oppressed and oppressor, the passive object and active subject of the collapse of human society. It is difficult to imagine a more charged and dynamic drama of the lower middle-class intellectual’s ambivalence towards the working class’.43 Patrick Parrinder has also noticed that, when the narrator of A Modern Utopia meets his Utopian alter ego, the latter turns out to be ‘one of the Samurai, a member of management rather than a factory worker’.44 The Owner of the Voice admits that his identity with a samurai results from the commensurable experience they both have, because ‘Our past, even its accidents, its accidents above all, and ourselves, are one’.45 Sarnac identifies with Smith to the same extent as the narrator of A Modern Utopia does with his double. They both share, within reason, similar professional occupations. The Dream complicates these interpretations by aligning the structural aspects of Sarnac’s identification with the perceived significance of his identity for Utopian society. Even though Sarnac displays a growing

tendency to see himself as Smith, the very act of dreaming indicates his ability to abandon the network of intersubjective relations in which he operates. This external, albeit temporary, position permits him to know more than his companions do. When Sarnac reaches in his narrative the episode of Hetty’s betrayal, he spares no words to describe Smith’s cruel thoughts about disfiguring Hetty in revenge. Sunray finds Sarnac’s dream inconceivable, about which he exclaims: ‘Dream! It is as men were. It is as they are, except for the education and the free happiness that release us’ (Dream 262). Here, Sarnac mounts a critique of the ideological selfassurance that underlies his society and obfuscates a fundamental fact: human goodness is not a given, but the product of social transformation. Sarnac uses his dream to reaffirm this premise by tapping into the ‘real’ of human nature: ‘Man is a creature which under nearly every sort of stress releases hate and malign action, and we were then still subjected to the extremest stresses’ (Dream 263). Sarnac’s awareness of the ‘real’ challenges his society, which hubristically thinks of itself as a pinnacle of social progress. Utopia’s ideological underpinnings infringe on the unconditional freedom Sarnac derives from dreaming. As mentioned above, his dream brings to the surface another dream, that of Hetty being a breeze on the hillside. Ultimately, the latter dream blends into the Utopian landscape, with Sarnac listening to birds singing. This convergence of a ‘dream within a dream’ and reality evokes the ancient Chinese text Zhuangzi (476–221 BCE), whose protagonist dreamed of being a butterfly and, on awakening, wondered whether he could still be that butterfly dreaming of Zhuangzi. Sarnac dreams of a similarly emancipatory condition, but he does so both through the object of his dream (Smith) and through the object of Smith’s desire (Hetty). The splitting of Sarnac’s dream diminishes his capacity to ask whether he could be either Smith or, indeed, a breeze or even a bird dreaming that it was Sarnac. In his analysis of the story of Zhuangzi, Žižek instructs us that such dreaming cannot be symmetrical.46 In other words, when asleep, Sarnac lacks the knowledge of being Sarnac, from whose consciousness the dream arose. Only when awake does he apprehend that he was Smith and the originator of Hetty’s dream. Sarnac reveals the impossible ‘real’ of his desire, which surpasses his social mandate. He wishes to see himself in the absolute freedom of a breeze, to which the confusion of birds bears an allowable likeness. However, Sarnac’s current

position as narrator and his major occupation as researcher of the nervous system foreclose his desire. The guest-master articulates Utopia’s ideology, whose function is to ensure ‘immortality now and henceforth – not for greed of the future but in the name of the wasted dead’ (Dream 319). Accordingly, Sarnac is obliged to identify with Smith and thereby carry the task of redemption forward. This socially imposed mandate bolsters Utopia’s continuity with England, yet it clearly compromises the emancipatory work of utopia.

Dreaming and/as Historiography When narrating the content of his dream, Sarnac exercises considerable control over its form. He shows awareness that his narrative has fragmented beginnings and circumstantial depth, both of which need to be sacrificed for brevity’s sake, before the dawn breaks (Dream 123). Such manipulations of the dream material correspond to what Freud calls the ‘secondary elaboration’ and whose mechanism he explains as a psychic function similar to our waking thought; they seem to have a meaning, but this meaning is very far removed from the real meaning of the dream. If we analyse them, we are convinced that the secondary elaboration has handled the material with the greatest freedom, and has retained as little as possible of its proper relations.47 On the surface, the narrative of Sarnac’s dream approximates the perspective adopted by Wells in The Outline of History. Sarnac presents the life of an Englishman in the context of England’s social history of the late 1890s – early 1920s, and he elaborates on the events of that life and history from the height of a more advanced social order. At a deeper level, though, Sarnac’s secondary elaboration glosses over the underlying thrust of the Wellsian utopia, which treats historiography as a matter of dreaming and reasoning backward. If dreams enable redemptive wish-fulfilment, Utopia not only leads back to England, but also reproduces England’s discursive preoccupations with continuity. Sarnac’s narrative foregrounds its investment in national discourse by conforming additionally to a rooted form of representation.

Sarnac lays no claim to producing a history. However, his narrative resembles a prose that bears the hallmarks of a historian’s work. In Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), Hayden White has proposed four explanatory strategies that can be applied to historical writing: the use of poetic language, emplotment, formal argument, and ideological implication.48 These strategies guide White’s discussion of histories and philosophies of history, alerting the reader of histories to the fact that the narrative of historical events is always a verbal construction, which reflects the writer’s assumptions about history and has an ideological inflection. Undoubtedly, Sarnac’s social history of England hardly matches the grand narratives produced by Tocqueville, Marx, Hegel, and Croce. Yet it exhibits a historiographical style that combines the features of realism and melodrama with self-reflective irony, and this combination brings out a Liberal message. Sarnac’s narrative resorts to a poetic language that creates an illusion of realism. The reader first encounters this tendency at the level of metonymic character portrayal. Sarnac describes the Smith family as a representation of England’s lower middle-class life. Smith’s father is at once a shopkeeper and ‘a poor man at the landlord’s gate’, always ready to engage ‘in plain English stealing and receiving stolen produce from Lord Bramble’s gardens’ (Dream 55). Such interactions typify the system of residual feudal relations, which have degenerated into conventional farce and hypocrisy. Sarnac also retraces the common trope of Victorian fiction, according to which male characters, with the exception of those in Thomas Hardy’s novels, go to London in search of work. Smith is no exception; his experience of London begins with Pimlico, whose ‘great wilderness of streets of dingy grey houses’ (Dream 115) brings back the images of waste, depicted earlier in Wells’s Tono-Bungay. The realist parameters of Sarnac’s narrative receive further realization when the omniscient narrator intervenes. This act brings into focus the significance of the fire around which the travellers are gathered. Sarnac’s storytelling posture permits him the most intimate relationship with the fire, which has a number of functions. Initially, it ignites his dream: before going to bed, he watches pinecones ‘flare and crackle’ (Dream 18). Later, the fire threatens to set Sarnac’s memory ablaze, as he finds ‘it hard to be reasonably brief when one’s mind is fuller of curious details than this fire is of sparks’ (Dream 125). As his narrative progresses, Sarnac takes care of the fire, stirring up ‘a

sierra of flames’ (Dream 163), which signals his growing emotional involvement. On two other occasions, the fire lights up his face to disclose bewilderment and deep emotion (Dream 154, 259). In The Dream, fire symbolism re-invokes its uses in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). Characters as different as Louisa Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby intently look into the fire, as though trying to comprehend whether its narrative of ashes and flames correlates with their expectations. Dickens’s novel also invites the reader to ‘sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn grey and cold’.49 This invitation instils hope: the future may be uncertain, yet it will be better than the past. Remarkably, Sarnac interacts with the fire in a way that largely lacks an anticipatory perspective. The fire facilitates his storytelling, but its flames do not necessarily convey either uncertainty or reassurance. Perhaps the realism of Sarnac’s narrative exhausts its imaginative energies under such circumstances. Utopian society may possess a detailed knowledge of England’s social history, which returns in dreams; however, it shies away from envisaging the not-yet, a moment beyond its own existence. Sarnac’s narrative enhances its realist fidelity by adopting an ironic distance from the English past. In that sense, The Dream resembles Grant Allen’s The British Barbarians: A Hill-Top Novel (1895). The latter novel inspects social convention through anthropological lenses, modulating its rule over British society into a question of ghost-worship. Being a guest from the future, Allen’s protagonist ascertains that social stability holds out in Britain, as long as ‘dead kings or dead relatives’ come back in the form of phantoms, taboos, and fetishes.50 Likewise, Sarnac ironizes English social convention concerning a man’s code of honour, with which Smith over-identifies. He fails to forgive Hetty’s betrayal because he feels ‘a tragically ill-used but honourably self-vindicated man’ (Dream 260). Before Sarnac reaches the end of his narrative, he informs his listeners three times that Smith is going to be killed (Dream 79, 100, 124). The use of the progressive tense stresses the predetermined trajectory of Smith’s life under the code of honour he embraces: ‘I am really beginning to be shot in this story though Radiant does not perceive it’ (Dream 124). This prolepsis allows Sarnac to emplot his narrative as a melodrama, which amplifies the ironic attitude taken by the Utopians towards the symbolic order of English life.

At the level of formal argument, Sarnac’s narrative contextualizes literature as a socially significant factor, one that operates in England and Utopia to sustain their distinct social order. Sarnac portrays Smith as the product of the 1870 Education Act, which created the opportunities for both mass education and proliferation of cheaply fabricated books. Consequently, novels shape Smith’s notions of life and romance. On one occasion, he meets his sister after her long absence and begins to fantasize about her degradation and his own role as saviour: My imagination began to leap and bound and soar with me. I pictured the Bad Man, dressed in that ‘immaculate evening dress’ which my novels told me marked the deeper and colder depths of male depravity, cowering under my stream of simple eloquence. (Dream 192) Believing that badness hides under good appearances, Smith reprises the clichés of second-rate Victorian fiction. His later employment on the editorial board of a publishing house makes him complicit in the production of ‘mental drugs’, administered in the form of ‘novelette magazines and popular novels’ (Dream 202). Smith is at once a victim and perpetrator of a system that utilizes literature to engender an imagined community where reading and book production entrench social disparities. In Utopia, literature probably takes a different form, yet its function remains identical with that in England. Literature moulds the Utopians’ knowledge and sensibilities, as well as upholding their professional divisions. The content of Sarnac’s dream indicates that neurological studies dominate his reading; without them, he would not have provided so sustained an exposition as his. Romance with Sunray also sharpens his insight into neurology, anthropology, and psychology, as she is ‘full of speculations about the ways in which the ancestral mind has thought and felt’ (Dream 12). When Sarnac concludes his narrative, his companions eagerly start a discussion of its psychological connotations. Radiant and Starlight give technical response, interspersed with references to Plato and Aristotle, as well as pointing up the relationship between memory and matter (Dream 315). Firefly and Willow, in turn, respond more emotionally, as they doubt the very plausibility of twentieth-century England, with its cruelty and heartache (Dream 317). The listeners’ varied response bespeaks

their individuality, yet it also testifies to the professional entrenchment of knowledge and ensuing inequities in Utopian society. As the functions of literature overlap in both societies, Sarnac’s narrative conveys a message that would not be out of place in England. His historiography stays within the gravitational pull of English continuity, reproducing the Liberal notion of utopia as a distant prospect. Hayden White explains that ‘Liberals […] project [a] utopian condition into the remote future, in such a way as to discourage any effort in the present to realize it precipitately, by “radical” means’.51 In dreaming only backward, Utopia remains bound to the unfulfilled wishes of Liberal England. This commitment sets back Utopia’s espousal of a new, perhaps uncanny, existence. Faced up with the crisis of Liberalism in England, the Wellsian utopia loses much of its emancipatory potential to the cause of redemption. Wells entrusts dreams with the latter task, which renders England and Utopia mutually compatible, rather than exclusive. In this scheme, lower middleclass Liberal loyalties foreshadow Utopia, which, in turn, envisages itself as the realization of England’s unfulfilled longings. In looping back and forth to the discourse of England, Wells’s diptych leaves Utopia under-imagined. Neither Men Like Gods nor The Dream expands sufficiently on the Utopians’ socioeconomic and political relations, their class structure, procreation, and belief systems. Obviating defamiliarization, such narrative elisions give more space to Liberalism’s residual importance as a nationally unifying force. Wells delays the end of England, which Huxley spells out in Brave New World.

Notes 1 Laura Marcus, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 3. 2 Jeremy Withers, The War of the Wheels: H. G. Wells and the Bicycle (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 167. 3 H. G. Wells, Men Like Gods, in H. G. Wells: Classic Collection II (London: Gollancz, 2011), 210. Henceforth referenced as Men. 4 H. G. Wells, ‘The Door in the Wall’, in H. G. Wells: Complete Short Story Omnibus (London: Gollancz, 2011), 634. 5 Peter Conrad, ‘The Englishness of English Literature’, Daedalus 112, no. 1 (1983): 172. 6 H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, introduction by Mark R. Hillegas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 30. 7 H. G. Wells, The Dream (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 318, 25. Henceforth referenced as Dream.

8 H. G. Wells, The Last Books of H. G. Wells: The Happy Turning and Mind at the End of Its Tether, edited, introduction, and appendix by G. P. Wells (London: H. G. Wells Society, 1982), 55. 9 Patrick Parrinder, Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 153. 10 Le Corbusier, ‘The Crystal Palace: A Tribute’, in Le Corbusier and Britain: An Anthology, edited by Irena Murray and Julian Osley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 106. 11 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, translated by Kyril FitzLyon (Richmond: Oneworld, 2008), 50. 12 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage, 2006), 34. 13 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), in 2 vols. (London: Victor Gollancz and The Cresset Press, 1934), vol. 2, 97. 14 H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli, edited by Simon J. James (St Ives: Penguin, 2005), 44–5. 15 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, From This World, to That Which Is to Come, edited by Roger Pooley (St Ives: Penguin, 2008), 18. 16 David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1998), 35. 17 John Betjeman, ‘Slough’, in John Betjeman, Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse (London: John Murray, 1937), 5. 18 J. B. S. Haldane, ‘Biology in Utopia’, in H. G. Wells in Nature, 1893–1946: A Reception Reader, edited by John S. Partington (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), 257; J. R. Hammond, H. G. Wells and the Modern Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988), 135. 19 Julia Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 8. 20 G. K. Chesterton, Review of The Salvaging of Civilization, by H. G. Wells, The Illustrated London News, 4 June 1921: 738. 21 Harold Begbie, The Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Reflections (London: Mills and Boon, 1920), 76. 22 Arthur Balfour, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), xxvi. 23 Maxim Shadurski, Utopia as a World Model: The Boundaries and Borderlands of a Literary Phenomenon [Utopiia kak model mira: granitsy i pogranichiia literaturnogo iavleniia] (Siedlce: Wydawnictwo IKR[i]BL, 2016), x–xi. 24 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Army of a Dream’, in Rudyard Kipling, Traffics and Discoveries (London: Macmillan, 1918), 257. 25 Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda, 1914–18 and After (London: B. T. Batsford, 1989), 120. 26 David Bradshaw, ‘Kipling and War’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling, edited by Howard J. Booth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 92. 27 Buitenhuis, 120. 28 H. G. Wells, The Salvaging of Civilization (London: Cassell, 1921), 1. 29 Richard Toye, ‘H. G. Wells and Winston Churchill: A Reassessment’, in H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Steven McLean (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 50; Sarah Cassidy, ‘Churchill “Borrowed” Famous Lines from Books by H. G. Wells’, The Independent, 27 November 2006, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/churchill-borrowedfamous-lines-from-books-by-hg-wells-6229767.html, accessed on 31 March 2019. 30 Georgian Poetry, selected and introduction by James Reeves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), xv; Robert L. Caserio, ‘Edwardians to Georgians’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-

Century English Literature, edited by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 98. 31 Christina Alt, ‘Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H. G. Wells’, in Children’s Literature Review: Reviews, Criticism, and Commentary on Books for Children and Young People, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau (Farmington Hills: Gale, 2015), vol. 200, 141. 32 H. G. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (London: Waterlow, 1933), 170. 33 Peter Mandler, ‘The Consciousness of Modernity? Liberalism and the English “National Character”, 1870–1940’, in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, edited by Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 134. 34 William Wordsworth, The Excursion: new edition (London: Moxon, 1853), 133–4. 35 John Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, in The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 34: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 69. 36 Ibid., 78. 37 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2014), 110. 38 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Brill, introduction by Stephen Wilson (Ware: Wordsworth, 1997), 244. 39 Randall Stevenson, Literature and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 135. 40 Freud, 452. 41 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event, edited by Conor Cruise Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 194–5. 42 A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1952), 197. 43 Matthew Beaumont, The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 251. 44 Parrinder, Utopian, 138. 45 Wells, Modern, 257. 46 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 47. 47 Freud, 338. 48 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth- Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), x. 49 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (London: Arcturus, 2013), 253. 50 Grant Allen, The British Barbarians: A Hill-Top Novel (London: John Lane, 1895), 86. 51 White, 25.

5 The End of England Eugenics, Landscape, and Recollection

Degenerative Drift, Land Misuse, and Cultural Stagnation For Aldous Huxley, the demise of Liberalism heralded the end of England, with a subsequent emergence of the World State. In Brave New World, Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe, states: ‘Liberalism, of course, was dead of anthrax, but all the same you couldn’t do things by force’.1 Mond’s historical excursus alludes to the Great War, whose modern weapons of mass destruction have inaugurated a postnational world order over which he presides. This technocratic, casteridden, hedonistic, and narco-hypnotic system has overlaid England as place and dissolved its cultural uniqueness. Contrary to Benson and Wells, no English character visits or dreams of Huxley’s alterity, and the task of looping back and forth between England and the World State resides with the reader. The novel helps to make such connections when it unveils the World State’s eugenic foundations, which define individual sensibilities and potential cultural renewal. Opening with the description of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, Brave New World sets it up as an emblem for the World State. After embryos are cloned into castes and produced in test tubes, hypnopaedia is used to condition the sentient beings into a respective caste consciousness and indoctrinate them for a life of consumption and immediate gratification. Alongside hordes of identical factory workers and an array of service people, the Centre generates highly accomplished individuals. Their mental powers grant them both a higher degree of nonconformity and the ability to pursue sublime experiences. In ways unbeknownst to them, the Alphas retrieve England from the dissolution it suffers in the World State.

A wider intertext of Huxley’s writing sheds light on the contemporary tendencies towards degeneration, land misuse, and cultural stagnation, which Brave New World amplifies into the end of England. The fear of degeneration regained currency in Britain during the late 1920s – early 1930s, after the economic slump had exposed weak and inefficient minds and bodies, in the first instance among the poor and the immigrants. The socioeconomic conditions of these ‘social problem groups’ and their limited access to education mattered far less than heredity, compounded by class, nationality, and social status.2 J. B. S. Haldane, the author of Daedalus, or, Science and the Future (1924), challenged this widespread belief system, which he thought to be ‘unscientific and rooted in a material desire to entrench inequality’.3 Instead, Haldane demanded social equality as a prerequisite for eugenics, in order to allow the best genetic material to move up unimpeded to the top. By the mid-1930s, eugenics had been largely discredited as ‘a system of social and political prejudices’,4 and Britain’s Eugenics Society invested effort in raising popular awareness about fertility and health, thereby distancing itself from the sterilization practices in Nazi Germany. Joanne Woiak has observed that, even though Huxley had never officially joined the Eugenics Society, his opinions about the abyss between intellectual and manual workers ‘illustrated his affinity with hereditarian Anglo-American eugenicists’.5 True, Huxley took a particularly strong stand against the proliferation of defectives among the ‘social problem group’ of English society, as opposed to the ‘bourgeoisie’. In ‘What is Happening to Our Population?’ (1934), he maintains that unless sterilization as ‘a mild measure’ is fully legalized, England’s prospects will look rather grim: ‘in a century or two, […] a quarter of the population of these islands will consist of half-wits. What a curiously squalid and humiliating conclusion to English history!’6 This exclamatory remark confirms Huxley’s faith in heredity; it is also deeply enmeshed in social prejudices. In ‘A Horrible Dilemma’ (1936), Huxley further speculates about the ostensible utility of eugenics, exploiting the stereotypical image of England as a good-natured society that may afford to have ‘unarmed policemen, freedom of speech and habeas corpus’.7 The writer fears the disintegration of this image and proposes to implement undemocratic planning in order to salvage his country’s rule of law. Before stating his

eugenic agenda for England, Huxley had been on a motor tour of the country’s industrial north in 1931. Repelled by the encounters with unemployed and destitute people, and failing to connect intellectually with the workers he met on the way, he recorded: ‘Class barriers are everywhere high; but in no country of the West are they so high as in England’.8 Perhaps the latter observation indicates a glimmer of compassion for the masses on Huxley’s part. However, the dysgenic and uncultured sights of what he describes as ‘alien Englands’ mismatch the image of England he feels at home with. Disavowing popular democracy as a voluntarism of ‘half-wits’ and ‘imbeciles’ at the ballot-box, and of scolding old men in Parliament, Huxley recommends a form of technocracy in which the many will be ruled by the right few, and sharper social boundaries will become not only inevitable, but also convenient. This recommendation conveys a reaction against both Liberalism and the egalitarian faith it inspired. Recently, critics have commented on the elitist underpinnings of Huxley’s World State. Jonathan Greenberg has opined that Brave New World articulates a ‘true utopia’ through the ‘homosocial bonding’ between John the Savage, Bernard Marx, and Helmholtz Watson, ‘a small group of the elect’.9 On a related note, Adam Parkes has intimated that Huxley’s idea of social order functions on caste, rather than class, principles, which facilitate the existence of ‘a small caste of experts’.10 Huxley’s anti-egalitarianism inflected his views of land misuse. In ‘Notes on Liberty and the Boundaries of the Promised Land’ (1931), he voices concern about mass access to the English landscape, exhorting that ‘nations that love the country destroy what they adore. Witness the two thousand square miles of London’s suburbs. Beauty spots accessible to whole populations cease to be beauty spots and become Blackpools’.11 This complaint regrets popular exploration, a trend that took on an unprecedented scale in the 1920s with the advent of motor tourism and guidebook industry. Huxley proposes to rectify the situation by a breeding programme that will reduce the population, in addition to limiting certain experiences, like flowers and landscape, to a tiny minority. In Brave New World, such radical measures receive a dystopian spin. Thomas, the Director of the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, emphasizes the economic utility of landscape: ‘Primroses and landscapes […] have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy’ (Brave 31). For this reason, the lower castes are programmed to use

landscape only as part of their commute to work or golf courses, whereas the elite retains the rudimentary capacity to seek gratuitous pleasures there, no matter how insecure their search may be. In valuing undefiled nature, Huxley held little respect for urban modernity: he deemed its architectural tendencies anti-social and foreign. Particularly, he levelled his critique at Le Corbusier, whose seminal books Towards an Architecture (Vers une architecture, 1923) and The Cities of Tomorrow (Urbanisme, 1925) profess mechanization. In ‘The New Romanticism’ (1931), Huxley pairs up Le Corbusier with Henry Ford and Vladimir Lenin, because each one of them, regardless of their political colouring, worshipped machinery and organization over ‘the soul and the individual’.12 Instead, Christopher Wren exacts Huxley’s praise in an earlier essay. Unlike Le Corbusier, Wren had taken a middle course between baroque theatricality and mechanistic imitations of art, classical principles and a native tradition. Huxley cites Wren as the most essentially English artist due to ‘the golden mean of reasonableness and decency’ he preached in stone.13 For Huxley, St Paul’s Cathedral stands unrivalled as a ‘monument of temperance and chastity’.14 In line with this appraisal, Gumbril Senior, a major character in Huxley’s Antic Hay (1923), looks to rebuild London. Drawing inspiration from Wren’s original design, he proceeds from St Paul’s, keeps all churches on their initial spots, and lays out recesses for socialization.15 Gumbril discerns in Wren’s London the epitome of a socially adjusted city that shuns the regimentation of Paris. However, Gumbril’s project resembles Wren’s in that it never comes to full realization, as other powers, including foreign influence, intervene. Brave New World parodies them in the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, which comes across as a ‘squat grey building of only thirty-four stories’ (Brave 15). The World State’s abundant use of concrete and its multi- storeyed skyline lead back to Le Corbusier. Perhaps for this reason, Brave New World renders St Paul’s into an absence, sparing it thus from the degradation that other public buildings suffer. Much as the World State satisfies the needs of top-notch eugenic stocks, it does not provide them with either pastoral or urban landscapes as sites of fulfilment. Huxley has the World State redress the condition of England, only to blight it further. This inconsistency ties in with what contributors to Brave New World: Contexts and Legacies (2016) have transcribed as ambiguities,

contradictions, and paradoxes, which constitute the novel’s strongest asset.16 Further to eugenics and landscape, Huxley attends to the problem of cultural stagnation, whose symptoms he associates with modernity. In his diagnosis, Huxley adheres to both Matthew Arnold’s earlier notion of culture and his contemporaries’ speculations about tradition. Famously, Arnold linked culture to perfection, when, in Culture and Anarchy, he meant by perfection ‘an inward condition of the mind and spirit [which] is at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us, and nowhere […] so much in esteem as with us’.17 Huxley finds this notion useful when defining literature and literary method as a means to culture. In the ‘Subject-Matter of Poetry’ (1923), he questions the novelty of contemporary writing, which preoccupies itself with ‘machinery and industrialism, of labour unrest and modern psychology’, while paying little regard to the human mind.18 Rather, literature, like music and art, ought to take a more holistic view of the reality it strives to represent. To that end, Huxley contends in ‘What, Exactly, is Modern?’ (1925) that the ‘most modern work of literature is the most intelligent, the most sensitive and spiritual, the freest and most tolerant, the most completely and widely comprehending’.19 For Huxley, literature relates most closely to Arnold’s notion of culture as ‘a study of perfection’,20 only when it remains committed to sincerity, truthfulness, and artistic integrity. Huxley elaborates on these principles in ‘Tragedy and the Whole Truth’ (1931). He posits the idea of ‘Wholly-Truthful Art’, which does not entail a photographic naturalism, but tries to record ‘bits of the truth’. Unlike tragedy, with its intense representation of reality, the latter technique approximates ‘the totality of human experience’.21 In Huxley’s estimation, some of his contemporary writers, as different as Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway, practised the ‘Wholly-Truthful Art’ and, by extension, sustained culture. In connecting culture to select examples, Huxley not only applies Arnold’s method of touchstones, but also relates to the ongoing attempts to elucidate tradition. Questions of language, accessibility, and authority loom large over that enterprise. They come to the fore in both the state-sponsored document The Teaching of English in England (1921), also known as The Newbolt Report, and the critical essays of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. The

Newbolt Report installs language as a vehicle by which tradition abides. Language makes ‘the element in which we live and work’,22 and the works of English literature constitute a generally accessible tradition, because a government authority validates them to be studied as such. If Eliot had found these assurances satisfying, he would probably have spared himself the effort of extracting and reconstituting tradition from the ruins of modern civilization. The Waste Land provides an eloquent illustration of Eliot’s excavations, as well as realizing the precepts of his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). For Eliot, tradition may only become available to the poet who works to procure ‘the consciousness of the past’. This task reveals tradition as a permanence, a main current that ‘abandons nothing en route’; at the same time, it involves the poet’s ‘continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’.23 Even though Eliot puts the poet in the position of a depersonalized medium, the process of mediation remains inextricable from the exercise of authority. Assembled in The Waste Land, the fragments of tradition are not free-floating value-free recollections. Leavis shared with Arnold and Eliot the intention to salvage culture from the devastating effects of modernity. In ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’ (1930), he deplores modern phenomena, such as the printed media, film, advertising, and radio broadcasts, for the abuses of language they commit, so much that tradition dissipates. Leavis entrusts the responsibility for cultivating a special use of language to a small group of critics and readers, because on them ‘depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition’.24 Leavis dissents from the ideological enthusiasm of The Newbolt Report, as well as avoiding Eliot’s cultural elitism. However, similarly to both the authors of The Newbolt Report and Eliot, Leavis understands tradition as a pre-existing fact, rather than a contingency over whose construction he exercises authority. Brave New World revisits the aforementioned concerns, imparting them a largely hyperbolic and therefore dystopian dimension. The World State’s cultural vacuity owes itself to Mond’s control over both the general unavailability of literature there and the language that the Brave-NewWorlders speak. The Controller plays the role of a gatekeeper who selects, isolates, and retrieves the items to be kept under lock and key. He denigrates his literary stock as a ‘whole collection of pornographic old books. God in the safe and Ford on the shelves’ (Brave 203). To that end,

Mond countermands the comparable practices upheld by Wells’s samurai. In A Modern Utopia, the latter have understood the fundamental incongruity between imaginative writing, on the one hand, and ‘an efficient and settled social and political organisation’, on the other.25 This understanding prevents the samurai from ridding the World State of ‘poietic activities’, in which they see the source of innovation. Additionally, they maintain tradition through ‘the Book of the Samurai, a compilation of articles and extracts, poems and prose pieces, which were supposed to embody the idea of the order’.26 Whereas the samurai aspire to transpose ‘All good earthly things’ to the World State, and their selections undergo constant revision,27 Mond ensures that culture, like God, manifests itself in his realm as an absence. With particular care, he guards The Holy Bible, The Imitation of Christ, Varieties of Religious Experience, Cardinal Newman’s sermons, and Maine de Biran’s journal (Brave 203–5). Such religious and philosophical texts present the utmost discordance with the World State’s absolute injunction of hedonism. Operating on these orders, the World State reduces poetic activity to hypnopaedic proverbs and readings from Henry Ford. Further to such cultural traces, William Shakespeare’s works accidentally find their way into the World State, as John the Savage, a visitor from the Indian Reservation, reproduces them. At first glance, John’s Shakespeare offers a culturally saturated alternative to the Brave-New-Worlders’ parlance, whose platitudes allow only singular interpretation: ‘Every one belongs to every one else’, ‘A gramme is better than a damn’, ‘Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today’ (Brave 45, 48, 51, 60, 88, 91, 109, 114, 182). Shakespeare, on the contrary, elicits varied response, as becomes clear in the episode involving Helmholtz Watson, an upper-caste propaganda technician and dissenting poet. Helmholtz reacts to John’s reading from ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ with ‘growing excitement’: At ‘sole Arabian tree’ he started; at ‘thou shrieking harbinger’ he smiled with sudden pleasure; at ‘every fowl of tyrant wing’ the blood rushed up into his cheeks; but at ‘defunctive music’ he turned pale and trembled with an unprecedented emotion. (Brave 164)

The novel emphasizes Helmholtz’s keen susceptibility to Shakespeare, whose language conveys a sense of solitary existence, strength, and silence. These experiences have inflected Helmholtz’s life lately and therefore guide his genuine interest in the poem. However, Helmholtz also plays a decisive role in dethroning Shakespeare as a counterpoint to hypnopaedia and Ford. When John proceeds to Romeo and Juliet, Helmholtz’s ‘puzzled interest’ in Shakespeare’s love-tragedy morphs into ‘an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing’ (Brave 165). This change of mood occurs because Helmholtz notices John’s passionate identification with Romeo, and begins to think of the play as ‘a superb piece of emotional engineering’. In Helmholtz’s view, Shakespeare presents ‘a marvellous propaganda technician’ (Brave 165), based on how completely absorbing his writing can be. By contrast, John’s role-play bars the possibility of multiple interpretation, which confines him to a narrowness of perception, comparable to that of the Brave-NewWorlders. Just as they speak hypnopaedia and Ford, John speaks Shakespeare to a point of self-delusion. The World State’s cultural stagnation bears out Huxley’s critique of how his contemporaries endeavoured to rectify the condition of culture in England. Huxley suspects the state-administered sanctioning of culture, because such an authority may be as corruptible as Mond’s. He equally distrusts the mediated recovery of tradition, as this process, typified by John, tends to flatten out the complexities of cultural reception. Additionally, Huxley doubts the capacity of a cultured minority to agree on the value of a literary text or a whole tradition of writing, just as Helmholtz and John can never read Shakespeare through compatible lenses. In what follows, I contend that Huxley devises the World State in order to assemble and catalyse his discursive sense of England. Huxley’s project draws on the best eugenic material and upholds social inequities. In doing so, it re-appropriates the residual features of English culture, curtailing them by the novel’s dystopian parameters. First, I analyse how the World State endorses Huxley’s prejudices about social mobility and sociocultural specificity, which allows him to foreground the exigency of a eugenic intellectual elite with which he identified. Then, my discussion turns to the three characters belonging, eugenically at least, to the upper caste: John, Bernard, and Helmholtz. Each one of them unknowingly gazes over English topographies in the hope to secure a more than aesthetic rapport with the land of England. As members of the elite, they seek an experience that

transcends the spoils of mechanization, commodity value, and ideological control. Finally, the chapter examines Helmholtz’s poetic transcendence, treating it as an attempt at recollecting an absent tradition. His technique reprises Wordsworth’s idea of poetry, understood in the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads (1800) as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity […]’.28 This reprisal promotes Helmholtz to the status of a perennial poet. Albeit precarious, his footings in English pastoral purport to outlast the World State.

The Eugenic Elite, Social Mobility, and Sociocultural Stereotyping The World State’s eugenic elite includes individuals from the Alpha caste, most of whom comprise the managerial echelons: Mond, Thomas ‘Tomakin’, Henry Foster, Benito Hoover, Bernard, and Helmholtz. John arrives from outside the borders of civilization. Unlike everyone he meets, he was born, rather than hatched, of biological parents, after his mother Linda had become pregnant regardless of the contraceptive measures she took. Fathered by Thomas, John has the makings of an Alpha, much as he lacks requisite conditioning. With the exception of John, Mond, and Helmholtz, the aforementioned Alphas work for the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. Mond is one of the World State’s highest authorities, and Helmholtz serves at the Bureaux of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering. Because of their Alpha intellectual range, these characters risk deviating from their conditioned mind-set, which otherwise demands serving the state and enjoyment. Mond went through deconditioning when he had developed, in his own words, an interest in truth. He faced the choice: either to go into exile and dedicate himself to pure science or relinquish truth and become the guardian of ‘other people’s happiness’ (Brave 200). Having chosen the latter option, Mond has succeeded to a World Controllership. Bernard and Helmholtz also experience deconditioning. While Bernard’s results from his physical defects: a short height, a slender proportion, and a melancholy face, Helmholtz’s is the outcome of excess, both mental and physical: as an Alpha-Double-Plus, he excels in emotional engineering, sport, and lovemaking. Caused by defect and excess, respectively, each of these characters’ deconditioning takes a different direction. Bernard revolts

because he is unable to conform, while Helmholtz is unwilling to do so. John joins his counterparts because, like them, he struggles to fit in. Back in the Reservation, his origin made him an outcast, ‘on the fringes of the group’ (Brave 126); in the World State, his lack of appropriate conditioning excludes him from the promiscuity and hedonism enjoyed by everyone else. The three characters – John, Bernard, and Helmholtz – form a white male Alpha set whose resistance eventually displaces them from the World State’s happy existence. However, before displacement occurs on Mond’s command, they benefit from the securities whereby the World State guarantees their elitist status. For the Alphas to remain socially unchallenged, the World State prohibits social mobility and reinvents sociocultural stereotypes as caste distinctions. In doing so, it addresses the shifts that affected Britain’s class system and colonial relations during the interwar period. David Cannadine has established that, after the Great War, the British political scene was becoming increasingly open to the members of the middle and even working classes.29 This growing social representativeness of the existing power structures inspired public pronouncements about Britain as a meritocratic, rather than class-based, society. In Our Inheritance: Speeches and Addresses (1927), Stanley Baldwin divested British society of such ‘old invidious expressions’ as ‘the gentry, or the middle classes, or […] the lowest classes’.30 Pleading for merit, Baldwin professed social mobility. However, his proposal remained silent about one crucial condition: what precisely warrants merit – position and wealth, or equal opportunity? Nevertheless, Baldwin attempted to legitimize the changing structure of British society, while Huxley’s World State endorses rigid divisions. In an episode set above London, the sight of a lower-caste monorail station reminds Lenina of her caste ‘wisdom’; she recites: ‘Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons’ (Brave 75). Lenina endorses the Epsilons with merit because they constitute a stratum of their own in a social hierarchy. Without them, Lenina would not have been able to identify herself as a Beta, let alone assert her distinct social status, as in: ‘“I’m glad I’m not an Epsilon,” said Lenina, with conviction’ (Brave 76). This episode deconstructs the myth of a meritocratic class-free society by dressing inequality in merit’s disguise. Additionally, Lenina’s reflections emphasize

the necessity of dysgenic types for the benefit of the World State’s eugenic elite. Further to merit, Brave New World treats negatively the tendency in British society to allow membership of elites through education. In a study of this interwar phenomenon, William D. Rubinstein has observed that incremental access to prestigious schools and Oxbridge enabled the more affluent middle classes to move up the social ladder.31 Such instances of social mobility provided a safety valve for the changing hierarchical order. Likewise, Huxley’s World State declares Eton ‘reserved exclusively for upper-caste boys and girls’ (Brave 145), yet broadens its caste recruitment range from Alpha-Double-Plus to Beta-Minus. Despite these concessions, students at Eton receive segregated teaching: the Alphas learn physics, while the Betas are drilled to fulfil the normalities of social life. Eton teaches not how to be unique, but how to conform; its library ‘contains only books of reference’ (Brave 147). Having first-hand knowledge of Eton as both a student and a teacher, Huxley uses it to subvert the contemporary belief in prestigious education as an avowed path for social mobility. Eton contributes to the reproduction of the World State’s caste system. The World State maintains social segregation through sport, dethroning thus the widespread myth that games unite. Markedly, all Brave-NewWorlders practise sport, and new technologies enable such ludicrous extensions as Riemann-surface tennis and centrifugal bumble-puppy cricket, escalator squash, and gymnastics. Most commonly, though, everyone plays obstacle and electro-magnetic golf. Before the Solidarity Service, Bernard is accosted with a question about the variety of golf he played last. As he has to admit that ‘he had been playing neither’, his reply triggers astonishment and ‘an awkward silence’ (Brave 80). Later in the novel, Lenina suggests playing ‘a round of Electro- magnetic Golf at St. Andrews’, which Bernard declines as ‘a waste of time’ (Brave 87). Bernard’s dismissal deviates from the universal norm. Jerome Meckier reads this exchange as Huxley’s criticism of an American lifestyle that encroached on Britain and hailed golf as ‘a new religion’.32 However, he overlooks the Scottish origins of golf and its specificity in England. As a game appealing to every social class, golf enjoyed its peak moment in Britain in the 1930s, and St Andrews granted access to its golf links to everyone without payment.33 Thus, Lenina’s mention of St Andrews of all geographic locations outside England is quite revealing, because golf in

England remained frequently ‘an occupation of affluent men’.34 English golf courses, like those elsewhere in Britain, had club associations, which meant strict requirements for the players’ social status. Municipal golf courses, in turn, offered an alternative to elite membership.35 Brave New World revisits these divisions. As a Beta upper-caster, Lenina belongs to the ‘Stoke Poges Club House’, whereas lower-caste golfers return ‘from their separate course to the metropolis’ (Brave 74). Hierarchies persist both on separate golf courses and in the segregated use of transport. Moreover, golf is a more isolating sport than football or even tennis, as it barely permits its players an effective release of hostilities. In privileging golf, the World State prevents its citizens from wider social interactions and, by extension, ensures the elite’s containment. The World State derives its eugenic controls from sociocultural stereotyping, which, over time, has transformed into convenient divisions. When Mond summons John, Bernard, and Helmholtz to his study, he expounds on two flawed island experiments, Cyprus and Ireland. Whereas Mond’s listeners perceive his reasoning as an endorsement of the social equilibrium against which they have rebelled, the reader may uncover the colonial and racial moorings of the Controller’s apology. Mond describes the Cypriot experiment: ‘The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas’ (Brave 196–7). The experiment misfired because it had repudiated the principles of caste segregation. To that end, Huxley’s own essay ‘A Note on Eugenics’ (1927) supplies an explanation: A state with a population consisting of nothing but these superior people could not hope to last for a year. […] If the eugenists are in too much of an enthusiastic hurry to improve the race, they will only succeed in destroying it.36 Mond indicates that the Cypriot eugenic state degenerated, and the ensuing political turmoil reminds the reader of the island’s situation under British rule in the early 1930s. Indeed, a nationalist push for union with Greece levered Cyprus into the headlines of the British press, giving it additional prominence in Arnold J. Toynbee’s Survey of International Affairs for 1930–1931. The Cypriots’ competing allegiances to Britain, Greece, and

Turkey disallowed any prospect of self-organization and sparked off mass protests that lasted throughout 1931, until the British military intervened.37 Mond recalls the outcome of the Cypriot experiment as one of social disorder and mutual defamation, which had built up to ‘a first-class war’, and the surviving Alphas ‘unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did’ (Brave 197). Historically, British rule over Cyprus continued until 1960, and the island, whose economy was immune to inflation and high taxes, offered British expats comfortable retirement from other imperial posts. Huxley’s World State renews the stereotypical image of Cyprus as a capable society that may exterminate itself, unless regulated from outside. Ireland, in turn, receives a thoroughly negative treatment. In Mond’s words, the Irish experiment aimed to ascertain the extent to which the island’s population of peasants and workmen could cope with extra leisure and achieve more happiness. As a result, the reduction of ‘all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day’ caused ‘Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma’ (Brave 197–8). The fact that the ‘whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day’ (Brave 197) not only resuscitates certain unflattering stereotypes, but also evokes the concept of Home Rule, as comprehended by Tom Broadbent, the protagonist of G. B. Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (1904). The latter has urged that ‘We English must place our capacity for government without stint at the service of nations who are less fortunately endowed in that respect; so as to allow them to develop to the English level of self-government’.38 Broadbent’s pledge for Ireland’s prospects ‘under English guidance’ exploits the cliché of the impractical Irish, who ought to be led by the efficient English administrator. Huxley’s World State inherits its global administrative role from the London-based British Empire, without which the colonial outposts cannot properly govern themselves. The World Controllers have fixed the Irish experiment by introducing ‘Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies’ (Brave 197). In historical perspective, such measures stand in sharp contrast to the social policy of the Irish Free State, which, until the 1930s, focused on the young nation’s moral profile by banning divorce, restricting liquor consumption, and suspending contraceptive advertisements.39 Thus, the World State derides Ireland’s self-government, counterpoising it to social equilibrium; it also empties Ireland of any Alpha presence, which measure

implies their mutual incompatibility. Matched by prejudices about social mobility and inter-class interaction, Huxley’s sociocultural stereotypes harden into insurmountable caste distinctions. The World State makes an appropriate place for the proliferation of the likes of John, Bernard, and Helmholtz, who replicate the discursive investments of an upper-middleclass Oxford-educated Englishman. However, they revolt, because the securities of their elitist position do not suffice to contain their unrealized impulses.

Three Characters in Search of a Landscape In their own peculiar ways, John, Bernard, and Helmholtz seek transcendence by turning instinctively to landscape, which permits them to inspect the condition of the World State. The reader, in turn, gains further insight into Huxley’s idea of England, whose land has lost all redemptive energies in the course of modernity. Gesturing towards a pristine landscape as a conduit for transcendence, Brave New World disparages the city and aligns itself with the discourse of England, which valorises pastoral. When the novel’s three characters search for sublime experience, they engage, unintentionally, with the residues of the English landscape. In Critical Landscapes (2015), Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten J. Swenson link landscape to ‘the economic, social, and political status of land rather than allowing this to be disguised by formal concerns’.40 Following this postRuskinian approach towards landscape examination, I explore how John, Bernard, and Helmholtz foreground the use value of the English landscape under the circumstances of its perceived defilement in the World State. Notably, with the exception of Amsterdam and New Mexico, where Bernard and Lenina travel, as well as cursory mentions of Iceland, Cyprus, Ireland, and the Falkland Islands, Brave New World stays predominantly in the southern English landscape. This circumstance forges the trio’s relationships with the landscape and highlights the boundaries that Huxley carves out for the land of England. Outside the radius of Central London, the novel mentions Chelsea, Notting Hill, and Shepherd’s Bush. Further afield lie Eton, Stoke Poges, Slough, Canterbury, Portsmouth, Exmoor, and Torquay. The novel’s final episodes take place in Surrey, Huxley’s own home county, whose topographies retain poetic vernacular qualities: Godalming, Guildford, Milford, Witley, Worplesden, Puttenham, Elstead,

the Hog’s Back, Hindhead (Brave 213). The only other British location lying beyond the English borders is St Andrews, whose golf courses lure the London upper-casters. Huxley’s focus on the south of England betrays a similarity to Wells’s earlier depiction of the same geography, defamiliarized by the sights of ruin and devastation. In The Sleeper Awakes (1910), Wells conveys the protagonist’s experience: Soon, however, they were driving over a sharp chalk hill that he recognised as the Guildford Hog’s Back, because of the familiar outline of the gorge at its eastward end, and because of the ruins of the town that rose steeply on either lip of this gorge. And from that he [Graham] made out other points, Leith Hill, the sandy wastes of Aldershot, and so forth.41 Like Huxley’s, Wells’s England endures only at the level of its southern topographies. The World State has absorbed and overwritten all else, which becomes particularly evident in Huxley’s portrayal of London. As in Wells, the London of Brave New World features titanic buildings, but retains a few English survivors, which bear the worst of Huxley’s satire. The strokes of Big Henry measure time, Westminster Abbey hosts a cabaret that celebrates artificial procreation, Whitehall houses the technocrat Mond, and Ludgate Hill accommodates the Fordson Community Singery. Huxley’s degrading commentary spares the nexus of the British (and English) constitutional monarchy: Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. Alongside St Paul’s Cathedral, they are absent from the World State. John surveys the English landscape both in contradistinction from the Reservation and in unison with his dream of a ‘brave new world’ (Brave 129). Familiar only with the valley of Malpais, he knows nothing of the world but the shabby and unhygienic standards of life, aggravated by the meagre quality of the land. Malpais stands on the outcrop of a ‘naked rock’, with ‘a streak of green’ lying at its feet (Brave 102). When John goes into forced exile, he takes the greenery of the Surrey heath as his dream incarnate. The novel registers the character’s initial impressions of the English landscape as being more pleasant and therefore mystifying than the land of Malpais:

Dim in the hazy English air, Hindhead and Selborne invited the eye into a blue romantic distance. But it was not alone the distance that had attracted the Savage to his lighthouse; the near was as seductive as the far. The woods, the open stretches of heather and yellow gorse, the clumps of Scotch firs, the shining ponds with their overhanging birch trees, their water lilies, their beds of rushes – these were beautiful and, to an eye accustomed to the aridities of the American desert, astonishing. And then the solitude! Whole days passed during which he never saw a human being. (Brave 215) The landscape astonishes John with the mysteries of the English air and dynamism of its features, so much that he feels assured of the possibility of redemption. The omniscient narrator informs us of John’s self-avowed vantage point: ‘Flowers and a landscape were the only attractions here’ (Brave 216). Crucially, John overlooks the fact that his expulsion takes place within the World State’s economic remit, where no experience may be gratuitous. John embraces a self-sustaining and redemptive mission in ways redolent of his historical and literary predecessors. He faithfully, albeit unreflectively, adheres to the principles of natural economy, which Gilbert White, a pioneer of natural observation, originally adumbrated. White declared in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789): ‘Thus Nature, who is a great economist, converts the recreation of one animal to the support of another!’42 In rehearsing the aforesaid precept of Enlightenment thought, John not only inhabits the same topographies of Hampshire and Surrey, as described by Gilbert White, but also enlists nature as the vital foundation for his independence of the outside world. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, though, John never laments his solitary state. Instead, he makes a conscious attempt to expiate ‘the filth of civilized life’ (Brave 217), an intention that reveals a Ruskinian streak. In his work on landscape writing, Grimble has contended that Ruskin invoked the pastoral idyll ‘as a way out of this intensely problematic world of progress, but the way to that idyll is difficult and solitary for it is to be reached by “individual, not public effort”’.43 Huxley’s novel locates John’s pastoral at the heart of an unpeopled landscape. However, this placement is nothing but

ironic: the landscape in which John finds himself may be sublime in a postindustrial sense, but forbidding in every other respect. Mistakenly, John takes in the English landscape as despoiled and therefore unappropriated. He looks at the outcome of a series of flying accidents, which have changed the Wey Valley into a no-flight zone: ‘Between Grayshott and Tongham four abandoned air-lighthouses marked the course of the old Portsmouth-to-London road. The skies above them were silent and deserted. It was over Selborne, Borden and Farnham that the helicopters now ceaselessly hummed and roared’ (Brave 214). Alert to ‘a blue romantic distance’ afforded by Surrey, John chooses one of the ferro-concrete lighthouses as his dwelling. The sight of distant skyscrapers, which point ‘solemnly towards the plumbless mysteries of heaven’, contributes to his emotional uplift (Brave 215). This whole scene lacks conventional markers of rural England, such as the rustic hermitage and the stately home, because abandoned lighthouses supersede them. Huxley’s reinvention of the English landscape prefigures a 1930s idiom of finding some consolation in a damaged, fractured landscape and the litter of failing machineries. An example of this idiom includes W. H. Auden’s celebration of dereliction, with which he famously identifies in the ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1936): ‘Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,// That was, and still is, my ideal scenery’.44 These lines reflect on how new unsightly scenes may trigger excitement. Yet, unlike Auden, John feels overwhelmed by the novelty of Surrey, so much that he ends his observation and sets about digging. When the novel tells us that ‘the Savage dug at what was to be his garden’ (Brave 220), it recalls the seventeenth-century Diggers in Surrey. Inspired and led by Gerrard Winstanley, the community sought ‘to dig up George Hill and the waste ground thereabout and sow corn, and eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows’.45 Winstanley’s idea of ‘waste lands’ referred to unused barren lands, usually former crown possessions. Repeatedly raided by outsiders, the Diggers’ community faced eventual displacement, because it had allegedly breached the laws of land ownership. John’s digging re-enacts the futility of any self-sustaining and redemptive mission under the system of land enclosure, which the World State has inherited from England. John realizes that the land of England cannot be redeemed, when his continual digging yields no result: ‘After a time the vermin evidently became bored and flew away; for hours at a stretch the sky above his head

was empty and, but for the larks, silent’ (Brave 220). This realization overlaps with John’s memories of Lenina, whose forthcoming attitude towards sex has upset his romantic expectations. The novel posits a comparison between Lenina’s licentiousness and England’s appropriation. When observation and digging fail, John takes to self-flagellation: ‘Forgive me, God. I’m bad. I’m wicked. I’m … No, no, you strumpet, you strumpet!’ (Brave 221). John’s acts of expiation end his reclusive life. Spotted by accident, his knotted whip quickly becomes newsworthy material in the media and results in the release of a first-class ‘feely’ production The Savage of Surrey across Western Europe. The mediatization of John’s profile brings a swarm of helicopters to the Surrey heath, establishing a new entertainment industry: ‘Like locusts they came, hung poised, descended all around him on the heather. […] As in a nightmare, the dozens became scores, the scores hundreds’ (Brave 223). A formerly unused and useless piece of land undergoes transformation into commodified territory, and John serves as its vehicle, contrary to his hopes of solitude and redemption. After stooping to a communal orgy, John thinks of no form of liberation other than suicide. However, in taking his life, he obviously does not factor in the World State’s need of cadavers for the extraction of phosphorus. John’s suicide leads to another instance of appropriation. Unlike John, who wishes to dig up the value of the land, Bernard adopts an exploratory approach to landscape. He responds primarily to the spoils of mechanization observed in London. Bernard’s response takes the form of an unfulfilled and ultimately unfulfillable quest for sublime experience outside the city. The novel records the Lake District as his plausible retreat from the constraints of communal life and social convention: he looks to nature for a liberating personal release. In a study of Brave New World, Robert S. Baker has argued that ‘Bernard’s choice of the Lake District, of privacy and conversation, is a political choice to the extent that it endorses what Huxley viewed as the liberal values of romantics like Shelley and Godwin’.46 Even though Baker elucidates popular associations with the Lake District, he erroneously collapses this region into a largely distinct tradition of English Romanticism. Additionally, the critic never explains that not all connections with nature necessarily imply radical politics. Nor does he acknowledge the roots of Huxley’s engagement with the previous tradition. Indeed, following Wordsworth’s admiration for landscapes of exceptional beauty, the Lakes came to emblematize a particular strand of

English culture, associated with liberty and romantic sensibilities, as well as an intimate relationship with nature. However, alongside admiration, Wordsworth had created opportunities for the commercial exploitation of the Lake District, which he himself later deplored, seeing pristine landscapes turn into a tame and visitor-friendly facility. Thus, Huxley’s allusion to the Lake District carries in itself reaction to a reaction, which takes on an expressly parodic valence in Brave New World. Even though Bernard originally proposes that he and Lenina spend a few hours walking in the heather and talking in solitude, he primarily thinks of landing ‘on the top of Skiddaw’ (Brave 87). Bernard’s unquestioning expectation of an established helipad suggests that the landscape has become mechanized, which circumstance disallows going completely off-piste. From Bernard’s proposal, the Lake District emerges as a commodified region: any interaction with it must yield an economic return, and its landscape is subsequently despoiled. This character’s unfulfilled quest for a lonely afternoon owes itself to a lack of gratuitous and potentially liberating contact with what the Romantics could only idealize as a sublime landscape. Instead, Bernard nearly completes his quest for the sublime above the English Channel. Flying in Lenina’s company, he brings his helicopter to a halt ‘within a hundred feet of the waves’ (Brave 88). While Bernard willingly exposes his senses to the flux of the sea, Lenina is ‘appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black foam-flecked water heaving beneath them, by the pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracted […]’ (Brave 88). Against the backdrop of a strengthening wind and clouded sky, Bernard declares his determination to be more ‘on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body’. His newly sworn idea of freedom dissents from the state ideology, which Lenina verbalizes: ‘I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays’ (Brave 89). Through this exchange, the novel accentuates the contrast between Lenina’s espousal of stability and the unsettling motion of the sea, which may never be fully contained or – for that matter – appropriated. In the World State, air travel has transformed the notions of insularity and international communications, leaving the sea outside the realm of economic interest and jurisdiction (clearly, Huxley did not anticipate the oil exploitation and exclusive fishery zones that presently commodify the North Sea). An odd minute above an open sea compensates

Bernard more than the promise of a whole afternoon in the Lake District. Yet without the modern technology of flight, this compensation would not have been possible, and Bernard’s membership of the eugenic elite gives him the advantage to fly. Bernard shuns the mechanization of the Lake District but has no reservations about operating a helicopter, as long as the resulting experience suspends him in awe. Like any other romantic experience, his search for a sublime landscape demands validation, which he expects from Lenina. Preferring to be happy ‘in everybody else’s way’ (Brave 89), Lenina betrays Bernard, and he lets his impulse degrade to selfpity and conformity. Helmholtz differs from both John and Bernard in that he has no direct recourse to the English landscape. However, the novel associates him with Fleet Street, which acquired the notorious profile of a propaganda machine in the early twentieth century. Helmholtz works as a propaganda technician. His position implicates him in the workings of the World State’s ideology, which constitutes the reality inhabited and enjoyed by the Brave-NewWorlders. This reality has its origins in wartime Britain, where the need to engender a nation-wide frenzy and secure the USA’s involvement in WWI allied government-sponsored propaganda with the printed media.47 The most eminent British writers of the time were recruited to produce propagandist outputs, which coincided with the promotion of media barons, such as Northcliffe and Beaverbrook, to various offices in the government. Brave New World reprises this modern fusion of political tasks with the literary imagination by commenting on how ideology can become the substance of life. Thus, an aerial view of London’s suburbs opens up ‘the majestic buildings of the Slough Crematorium’, followed by an explanation: ‘Now they recover over ninety-eight per cent of it. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which makes the best part of four hundred tons of phosphorus every year from England alone’ (Brave 75). The utilization of dead bodies epitomizes the World State’s mechanisms of appropriation, which reduce human life to commodity value. Meanwhile, both the fact and purpose of cremation bear a striking resemblance to the atrocity stories about ‘corpse exploitation establishments’ in Germany. Indeed, on 17 April 1917, The Times reported on ‘Science and the Barbarian Spirit’, allocating a separate column to a description of how fat was extracted from the dead bodies and then turned into lubricating oils; the bones were said to be ground into a powder and used in pigs’ food and as

manure.48 This report, which the Daily Mail also circulated, was later discredited as an anti-German hoax fabricated in England.49 In adapting the homespun propaganda, Brave New World demonstrates how ideologically constructed spoofs become the reality of ruthlessly efficient societies, be it wartime Germany or the World State. Unlike John and Bernard, Helmholtz tries to overcome the ideological constraints of his own making. His search for a landscape must necessarily surpass the efficiencies in which he has previously excelled. Indeed, Helmholtz understands that ‘sport, women, communal activities’ are only ‘second bests’, and ‘at the bottom’, he has grown ‘interested in something else’ (Brave 70). Even though the novel elaborates little on the landscape whence Helmholtz anticipates sublime experience, he accepts the Falkland Islands as his place of exile: ‘I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot wind and storms, for example . . .’ (Brave 201– 2). In making this choice, Helmholtz veers towards Wordsworthian pastoral, which distinguishes him from both John and Bernard. Neither John’s redemptive efforts nor Bernard’s reliance on technology and romance equals Helmholtz’s climatic preferences. Perhaps he hopes to retreat into a landscape where the dominant uncertainties of weather would give him sufficient isolation, just as the recesses of Cumbria once sheltered the revolutionary Wordsworth. Probably, Helmholtz links creativity to an unstable climate, another contrast to the World State’s avowed stability. Being a matter of conjecture, these possibilities acquire an additional nuance in the context of Mond’s designation of islands as alternate places. The Controller explains: he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who’s any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson. (Brave 200) When conjuring up alterity, Mond draws on the islands that remained Britain’s colonial possessions in the 1930s (with the exception of Iceland, the Marquesas, and Samoa). This detail suggests that Helmholtz’s exile

follows the route mapped out by James Froude. As discussed in Chapter 1, Froude associated England’s redemption with colonial pastoral. In Huxley’s novel, the Falklands lie beyond metropolitan modernity. Helmholtz moves where neither John nor Bernard has been – a pastoral alterity that lacks a foothold in England, yet leads back to its discourse.

Tradition Recollected in Solitude Like the poets in Plato’s Republic, Helmholtz faces expulsion for causing social unrest. He is guilty of reciting his ‘Rhymes on Solitude’ in front of the students, who immediately reported him to the authorities. On hearing Helmholtz’s verses, Bernard explains away his friend’s untoward act: ‘It’s flatly against all their sleep-teaching. Remember, they’ve had at least a quarter of a million warnings against solitude’ (Brave 163). Indeed, Helmholtz has deviated from the role of a propaganda technician, and instead of bolstering the certainties that make the World State’s reality, he has indicated their absence and abandonment (Brave 162). If seen from outside the World State’s ideological valuations, Helmholtz’s ‘Rhymes’ present a curious example of writing. Composed in the form of a doggerel, they provide a general commentary on the quality of literature in a society where civilization equals sterilization (Brave 104). More specifically, though, the verses bind together the instances of parody and recollection, which revert to the discourse of England. The parodic tendency of the verses manifests itself in both their setting and vocabulary. Walking in a city, the speaker navigates the counterpastoral mode of The Waste Land. However, unlike his counterpart in Eliot’s poem, he treads on the litter of ‘broken images’ more light- footedly. He avoids perceiving omens in the luminous silence, ‘frosty silence in the gardens’, the absence of ‘silence in the mountains’, or the jungle ‘humped in silence’.50 For him, ‘All silences rejoice’. In Huxley, the speaker progresses towards a hereto unknown experience by having the drum silenced. Thus, he denounces poetry whose beginnings Eliot saw in ‘a savage beating a drum in a jungle’.51 Additionally, Helmholtz’s verses register the departure of posteriors, another ill-famed constituent of Eliot’s lexicon, featured among the ‘improper rhymes’.52 Taken together, Huxley’s parody hastens the cessation of a style he associates with urban modernity.

He appoints Helmholtz to overcome modernist expression, which, in the World State, has become the only possible form. In ‘Poetry in the Future, the Future of Poetry: Huxley and Orwell on Zamyatin’ (1984), Meckier has construed Helmholtz’s verses with a utopian potential. In refocusing critical discussion from the Savage and his atavistic preserve of cultural reflexes, Meckier pleads that Helmholtz’s ‘creative drive is the only true utopian impulse, the only reliable urge towards a perfection that lies beyond soma, beyond the World State, beyond Shakespeare; it is otherwise known as man’s Final End’.53 Much as this interpretation of Helmholtz’s role as a poet casts light on the teleology of Huxley’s utopia, it falls short of investigating the discursive premises on which that utopia resides. I maintain that, through Helmholtz, Huxley redeploys Wordsworthian pastoral as a vehicle by which cultural stagnation and failing expression can be rectified. Eliotic idiom becomes the target of Huxley’s satire, because Helmholtz recollects and reinvents tradition, rather than mediating it. Huxley puts Helmholtz in a situation that largely forbids the excavation and recovery of tradition. The World State derides Eliot’s recommendation for the ancestral voices to ‘assert their immortality most vigorously’.54 Prior to Helmholtz’s poetic emergence, tradition has broken up, and its remnants survive only in the vilified language of hypnopaedia and his own verses. Thus, Helmholtz faces the problem that Huxley addressed in his 1923 essay ‘Ben Jonson’. According to Huxley, the absence of tradition leaves nothing for the poet to accept ‘unconsciously and as though it were the law of Nature itself’.55 In such circumstances, Huxley advises ‘theorizing’ tradition, by which he prefigures Helmholtz’s recollections. In contrast to Eliot’s instigation, Helmholtz bears no direct ‘relation to the dead poets and artists’,56 but maintains that connection unknowingly. He recollects tradition as a literary and sociocultural riposte to the World State. Like Wordsworth’s, Helmholtz’s recollections depend considerably on tranquillity and imagination. Helmholtz begins by acquiring ‘the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism’ (Brave 71). Solitude grants him a requisite opportunity for the cultivation of his mind in isolation from society. In ‘The Essence of Religion’ (1927), Huxley rules that ‘the more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude, the less it will be

drawn towards social religion or be moved by its practices’.57 Accordingly, solitude conduces to the inception of Helmholtz’s latent power, so much that he compares it to ‘all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines’ (Brave 71). This comparison alludes to what Frederick Myers categorized as a ‘realm of genius’ in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. For Myers, genius consists of the ‘subliminal uprushes’ that arise from the ‘profounder regions of being’, which, in turn, carry ‘a direct knowledge of facts of the universe outside the range of any specialized organ or of any planetary view’.58 Indeed, Helmholtz’s emergence as a poet correlates with his growing attention to a newly available insight and understanding. Unlike the speaker of The Waste Land, who ‘can connect// Nothing with nothing’,59 he tries to overcome the uncertainties of expression. Helmholtz’s hesitant ‘I try and I try . . .’ develops into the attempt to ‘say something about nothing’ (Brave 72). Before exile, Helmholtz complains to Mond about the debilitating need to write ‘when there’s nothing to say’ (Brave 195). This complaint confirms his craving for a something, which puts him in agreement with Wordsworth’s assembly of poets who are able ‘to perceive Something unseen before; […] Proceeding from the depth of untaught things’.60 Significantly, Wordsworthian pastoral became a conceptual trope shortly after the publication of Brave New World. Huxley’s contemporary, Charles Williams developed the concept of the ‘English poetic mind’, bracketing together the writing of England’s major poets – Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. Williams’s study of The English Poetic Mind (1932) sets up Wordsworth as a prototype of the English poet, who progresses from the ‘unknown modes of being’ to ‘the hiding-places of man’s power’, and thereby creates ‘the glory and the good of art’.61 Such allusions to Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850) adduce solitude as a locus in which the English imagination flourishes: ‘by its increasing capacity to express solitude, change, and action, the increasing strength of the poetry is known’.62 Along these lines, Helmholtz’s unpremeditated adherence to Wordsworthian pastoral reveals his ‘English poetic mind’. Just as The Prelude’s Poet embraces ‘The self-sufficing power of solitude’,63 Helmholtz aspires to translate that power into a transcendent vision of ‘That something, which is not’ (Brave 162).

Helmholtz’s recollections presage an improvement on Wordsworth as an archetypal poet. For Huxley, Wordsworth offered a model of the poet’s progress, and The Prelude laid out a course of creative evolution. However, Wordsworth’s nature-worship and ensuing change of political loyalties raised Huxley’s suspicions. In ‘Wordsworth in the Tropics’ (1929), Huxley criticizes the Romantic poet’s divination and humanization of relatively tame landscapes, as well as his inability to look beyond Europe’s temperate climes and reinvent the notion of nature. Huxley pictures Wordsworth in the role of a stubborn preacher, who became later, ‘personally as well as politically, the anglican tory’.64 Wordsworth’s poetic, social, and political conservatism presents to Huxley the signs of the poet’s death, which trajectory he sets out to reverse. Unlike Wordsworth, Helmholtz proceeds from his once secure status of an emotional engineer to a position in ‘conflict with Authority’ (Brave 161). In doing so, he not only dissents from the official ideology, but also moves away from indoctrination to a new liberty. Undoubtedly, Helmholtz’s progress is fraught with indeterminacies, which he signals both at the end of the ‘Rhymes’ and in a conversation with John. Just as his verses end with a question mark, the subject matter of his future compositions remains unclear either: Helmholtz ‘was silent; then, shaking his head, “I don’t know,” he said at last, “I don’t know”’ (Brave 166). On a formal level, though, he vouches for ‘really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases’ (Brave 165–6), whose novelty he has yet to master as a poet. Mond admits that Helmholtz happens ‘to be too much interested in beauty’ (Brave 201), which suggests the poet’s potentialities to improve on the doggerel-like quality of the ‘Rhymes’ in exile. Contrary to Wordsworth, Helmholtz matures to swear no allegiance other than to the imagination, which charts a further progression of the ‘English poetic mind’. Wordsworthian pastoral permits Helmholtz to recollect what the World State withholds from public circulation. On close reading, Helmholtz’s ‘Rhymes’ bear an ascertainable verbal and conceptual likeness to the contents of Mond’s safe. Seemingly disparate, the Controller’s holdings speak to the transcendence of stability, and this theme infringes on the World State’s social order. Helmholtz’s verses convey an impulse for change, alongside the incremental awareness of a crisis that follows, and the need of a spiritual, transcendent experience. In order to understand the concern that Helmholtz shares with The Holy Bible, one requires a prompt

from Huxley’s later novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936). There, Anthony Beavis voices a theory of personality according to which coherence and integrity belong only to the Jesus of the Gospel. Because the biblical Jesus has the unique capacity to be ‘unbowdlerized, unselected, uncanalized’,65 no other human personality may match his character without incurring gross simplifications. Helmholtz has grown aware of his own innermost transition and therefore outgrown the fixity to which the World State confines him. Helmholtz’s personality lacks coherence, as he tries to make sense of his relation to a society that demands absolute enjoyment. Through his questioning of the haptic pleasures derived from ‘Arms and respective bosoms, Lips and, ah, posteriors’ (Brave 162), Helmholtz gravitates towards the admonition made in The Imitation of Christ (1427), a ‘small book’ that ‘had lost its cover’ (Brave 203). Its author, Thomas à Kempis, wrote for a specific audience of men who had surrendered earthly delights for the cloister. He prescribed that they toil daily in the name of change and improvement, recommending that ‘Man’s true progress is self-renunciation; the man who achieves it has great freedom and security’.66 The World State’s ideology overturns Kempis’s recommendation and posits instead ‘Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. […] You can’t have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices’ (Brave 208). Helmholtz disowns the hedonistic trappings of civilization, and the third book that Mond extracts from his safe enlightens us about Helmholtz’s personal crisis. The ‘Something, which is not’, to which Helmholtz adverts in his verses, suggests his visceral grasp of what William James called ‘a more’. In Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), James links this extra power of the self to a transcendent godhead, tantamount to ‘the subconscious continuation of our conscious life’.67 Accordingly, Helmholtz’s discovery of ‘a more’ can help him to save himself, when all else has become ‘second bests’ (Brave 70), or, to use James’s dictum, ‘when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck’.68 Helmholtz recollects two other excerpts that communicate a shift of personality. One of them comes from John Henry Newman’s sermon ‘Remembrance of Past Mercies’ (1878), which Mond reads to John, in Helmholtz’s absence. The sermon problematizes the idea of personal autonomy during various periods of human life:

We are God’s property by creation, by redemption, by regeneration. […] [A]s time goes on, they [the young and prosperous], as all men, will find that independence was not made for man – that is an unnatural state – may do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end.69 In the World State, human life remains a sole property of social forces, from the moment of decanting to the extraction of phosphorous. Under such circumstances, Helmholtz’s verses disavow the past certainties of faces, places, and machines, foreshadowing thus a new form of proprietorship over his life. For Helmholtz, the social sublime gives way to ‘a presence’ that transcends the totality of his experience (Brave 162). Mond follows his reading from Newman by an extract from Pierre Maine de Biran, a French mystical theosophist. He derives the latter selection from the second volume of the Intimate Journal (Journal intime, 1824), which connects religious sensibilities with age: ‘we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false – a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God’ (Brave 205). In the respective journal entry for 6–7 June 1818, Maine de Biran remarks that faith in God precludes the fear of dying.70 On this score, Helmholtz’s ‘Rhymes’ express his search for a more abiding reality that contrasts with squalid copulations. His lived experience becomes less preferable and more ephemeral than the missing essence whose solidity he struggles to comprehend. Whereas the World State has no need of ‘something immovable, when there is the social order’ (Brave 206), Helmholtz takes exception and willingly accepts expulsion. The fact that Helmholtz recollects an absence bespeaks his capacity to access knowledge that lies outside the range of his lived experience, which opens him to inflows of new sensations and prepares to take fresh directions. His recollections bring back a tradition whose mysticism has a universal purview and its origins are international. At the same time, Helmholtz recollects that tradition by English, Wordsworthian means, which prove viable in times of cultural stagnation and crisis. Brave New World derives most of its utopian energies from the discourse of England. In terms of geography, the novel bewails a metropolitan modernity that has voided the land of England of redemptive powers. Instead of England, Huxley proposes colonial outposts whose insular, and therefore experimental, enclosures allow the elect few the experience of

pastoral alterity. The World State may have usurped Huxley’s England, but it has also renewed the discursive longings for an undefiled island to be found elsewhere. Huxley keeps pastoral at the foundation of continuity, whose renewal, in the absence of tradition, depends on the poet’s natural gift of recollection. Defined by solitude, imaginative uprushes, and mystical insight, Wordsworthian pastoral permits the World State’s poet to ascend the heights of perennial poetic activity, working in defiance of the corruptible powers that besiege him. Like Wells, Huxley invests in rebellion as a feature of character that guides progress. Eugenically enhanced and elitist, the ‘English poetic mind’ survives the end of England.

Notes 1 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. Brave New World Revisited, introduction by Malcolm Elwin (London: Heron Books, 1968), 54. Henceforth referenced as Brave. 2 Gavin Schaffer, Racial Science and British Society, 1930–62 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 39. 3 Ibid., 26. 4 Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 198. 5 Joanne Woiak, ‘Designing a Brave New World: Eugenics, Politics, and Fiction’, in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Aldous Huxley – New Edition, edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2010), 169. 6 Aldous Huxley, ‘What is Happening to Our Population?’ in The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses 1920–1936, edited by David Bradshaw (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 150. 7 Aldous Huxley, ‘A Horrible Dilemma’, in The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses 1920–1936, edited by David Bradshaw (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 213. 8 Aldous Huxley, ‘Abroad in England’, in The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses 1920–1936, edited by David Bradshaw (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 51. 9 Jonathan Greenberg, ‘What Huxley Got Wrong’, in Brave New World: Contexts and Legacies, edited by Jonathan Greenberg and Nathan Waddell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 118. 10 Adam Parkes, ‘“A Small Caste of Experts”: Aristocracy, Intelligence, and Stupidity in Huxley’s Interwar Fiction’, Aldous Huxley Annual: A Journal of Twentieth-Century Thought and Beyond 16 (2016): 173. 11 Aldous Huxley, ‘Notes on Liberty and the Boundaries of the Promised Land’, in Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays including ‘Vulgarity in Literature’ (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949), 129. 12 Aldous Huxley, ‘The New Romanticism’, in Aldous Huxley, Music at Night, 215. 13 Aldous Huxley, ‘Sir Christopher Wren’, in Aldous Huxley, On the Margin: Notes and Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 183. 14 Ibid., 180. 15 Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay, introduction by David Bradshaw (London: Vintage, 2004), 156. 16 Brave New World: Contexts and Legacies, ix, 3, 28.

17 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, edited by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 63. 18 Aldous Huxley, ‘Subject-Matter of Poetry’, in Aldous Huxley, On the Margin, 32. 19 Aldous Huxley, ‘What, Exactly, is Modern? A Critic Takes Sharp Issue with Some of the Current Uses of the Word’, Vanity Fair 24 (1925): 94. 20 Arnold, 62. 21 Aldous Huxley, ‘Tragedy and the Whole Truth’, in Aldous Huxley, Music at Night, 13. 22 The Teaching of English in England: Being the Report of the Departmental Committee Appointed by the President of the Board of Education to Enquire into the Position of English in the Education System of England (London: HM Stationery Office, 1926), 20. 23 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Perspecta 19 (1982): 38, 39. 24 F. R. Leavis, ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’, in F. R. Leavis, For Continuity (Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1933), 15. 25 H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, introduction by Mark R. Hillegas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 272. 26 Ibid., 282–3. 27 Ibid., 283–4. 28 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads: The Text of the 1798 Edition with the Additional 1800 Poems and the Prefaces, edited by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1965), 266. 29 David Cannadine, Class in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 129. 30 Stanley Baldwin, Our Inheritance: Speeches and Addresses (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1927), 17. 31 William D. Rubinstein, ‘Britain’s Elites in the Inter-War Period, 1918–1939: Decline or Continued Ascendancy?’ British Scholar 3, no. 1 (2010): 7. 32 Jerome Meckier, ‘Golf in Brave New World’, in The Perennial Satirist: Essays in Honour of Bernfried Nugel, edited by Herman J. Real and Peter E. Firchow (Münster: LIT, 2005), 242. 33 Geoffrey Cousins, Golf in Britain: A Social History from the Beginnings to the Present Day (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 95. 34 Martin Pugh, ‘We Danced All Night’: A Social History of Britain between the Wars (London: The Bodley Head, 2008), 288. 35 David Hamilton, Golf: Scotland’s Game (Kilmacolm: The Partick Press, 1998), 226. 36 Aldous Huxley, ‘A Note on Eugenics’, in Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 282. 37 Nancy Crashaw, The Cyprus Revolt: An Account of the Struggle for Union with Greece (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978), 26–7. 38 Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, in 7 vols. (London: The Bodley Head, 1971), vol. 2, 911. 39 Eunan O’Halpin, ‘Politics and the State, 1922–32’, in A New History of Ireland, in 9 vols. Vol. 7: ‘Ireland, 1921–84’, edited by J. R. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 117–18; David Johnson, The Interwar Economy in Ireland (Dublin: Dungaldan Press, 1985), 36. 40 Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten Swenson, ‘Introduction: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Land Use’, in Critical Landscapes, edited by Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten J. Swenson (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 3. 41 H. G. Wells, The Sleeper Awakes, in H. G. Wells: Classic Collection II (London: Gollancz, 2011), 531. 42 Gilbert White, The Natural History [and Antiquities] of Selborne, edited and introduction by W. S. Scott (London: The Folio Society, 1962), 17.

43 Simon Grimble, Landscape, Writing and ‘The Condition of England’ – 1878–1917, Ruskin to Modernism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 48. 44 W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, edited by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 175. 45 Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, introduction by Christopher Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 84. 46 Robert S. Baker, Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 103. 47 Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda, 1914–18 and After (London: B. T. Batsford, 1989), xvii. 48 ‘Germans and Their Dead. Revolting Treatment. Science and the Barbarian Spirit’, The Times, 17 April 1917: 5. 49 Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 65. 50 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 64, 76, 78. 51 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism and to Poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), 155. 52 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Blameless Sister of Publicola’, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot. Volume II: Practical Cats and Further Verses, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), 290. 53 Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic (Münster: LIT, 2011), 260. 54 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 37. 55 Aldous Huxley, ‘Ben Jonson’, in Aldous Huxley, On the Margin, 189. 56 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 37. 57 Aldous Huxley, ‘The Essence of Religion’, in Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies, 178. 58 Frederick W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (Tasburgh: Pelegrin Trust, 1992), 42, 60. 59 Eliot, Waste, 74. 60 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (Text of 1805), edited and introduction by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 226. 61 Charles Williams, The English Poetic Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 199–200. 62 Ibid., 201. 63 Wordsworth, Prelude, 22. 64 Aldous Huxley, ‘Wordsworth in the Tropics’, in Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will: Twelve Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), 126–7. 65 Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 98. 66 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated by Robert Dudley (Wheathampstead: Anthony Clarke, 1980), 97. 67 William James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, introduction by Eugene Taylor and Jeremy Carrette (London: Routledge, 2002), 395. 68 Ibid., 392. 69 John Henry Newman, Selection Adapted to the Seasons of the Ecclesiastical Year from the Parochial and Plain Sermons (London: Longmans, 1891), 59. 70 Pierre Maine de Biran, Journal intime, 1817–1824, introduction de A. de la Valette-Monbrun (Paris: Plon, 1931), 102.

Coda England for England’s Sake?

England after Pastoral In the second half of the twentieth century, the post-national scenarios for England followed a largely alarmist, minatory, and nostalgic direction. The resurgent fears of the World State not only eclipsed Benson’s disavowal of England, but also foreclosed Wells’s redeployment of national discourse towards wider emancipatory goals. Instead, later writers went in the wake of Huxley’s retrieval of England from the apprehensible injustices and perversions it sustained under the conditions of global modernity. This Coda inspects the legacies of the Wellsian utopia in the work of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, J. G. Ballard, and Julian Barnes. Their writing takes the generic form of dystopia and reprises a familiar trope. While English autonomy, individuality, memory, and history abdicate, foreign authority and interest prevail, sometimes on schadenfreude. I argue that such an alleged English apocalypse, when England’s solidity is made to melt into air, means a crisis of discourse, which has a bearing on the utopian imagination. As the old national certainties cease, they return in gloomy, but widely influential scripts of what the world might be like without England. At the same time, England’s own problems of land tenure, mediatized institutional spectacle, and ritualized supremacies remain symptomatically unexplored. Using the notions of geography, continuity, and character as a structuring principle, I investigate how the select writers substitute the production of alterity for the reproduction of national discourse. Whereas the Wellsian utopia and its contemporary lineages give England’s post-national condition the shape of the World State, later twentieth-century writers envisage varied configurations of that condition.

Yet unchangeably, they verify their visions against English pastoral. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell dissolves England into Oceania, one of the three superpowers. Winston tries to remember it otherwise: ‘Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London’.1 Oceania spares London as its functional node, while, in Phillip E. Wegner’s words, the rest of England (and Britain) turns into ‘an abstract landscape you “fly” over rather than a concrete one within which you become immersed’.2 Wegner places the loss of English autonomy in the post-WWII context, when the dismantling of the British Empire and emergence of a US super-state ‘demoted [England] to the status of a minor regional outpost’.3 England’s absorption into Oceania results in the radical curtailment of pastoral. Dominated by the ‘glittering white concrete’ of the four ministries and ‘a million dustbins’,4 London presents a cold and grimy bombed-out city. The pervasive instances of surveillance and bright-lit propaganda prompt Winston’s search for pastoral alterity. When starting a diary, he requires solitude, whose modicum he briefly attains in the alcove of his living room, with the sound of the telescreen slightly down. Even though Winston intends to write for the future, his premeditated act addresses, in essence, the uncertainties of memory under Oceanic rule: ‘he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two’.5 Winston’s recollections take over his dreams of the ‘Golden Country’, where the securities of childhood overlap with his unfulfilled longings. In this sunlit landscape, ‘a single splendid movement of the arm’ brings back the memory of his mother, who shielded him from disaster.6 Winston dreams of a similar gesture by a dark-haired girl who would sweep away ‘Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police’.7 The protagonist’s dreams take on an ascertainable concreteness in his romance with Julia, which he develops almost simultaneously with the diary. Their lovemaking occurs in both the countryside and the proles’ area, equalling, for Winston at least, defiance and a return to pastoral. Albeit highly precarious, pastoral allows him to regain personal autonomy in ways that countervail Eliotic idiom. Set amid the cruelty of Oceanic April and mixing memory and desire, Orwell’s novel points beyond urban modernity, which has grown both alien and totalitarian.

In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess expands on Orwell’s reaction against the World State and collapses England into a nameless region of a global superpower. One of the victims of street violence, ‘a burbling old pyahnitsa or drunkie’, retorts to the attackers: ‘What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there’s no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more’.8 In connecting the condition of the world to space exploration and social progress, the speaker thinks of a global entity that has superseded the British state. The novel takes place in an unnamed city whose topographies immortalize the tendencies that have conspired to create it. Scientific management and space conquest inform, respectively, Taylor Place and Gagarin Street.9 An overlapping of communist leanings, Jewish origin, and homosexual sympathies finds embodiment in Priestly Place (J. B. Priestley), Kingsley Avenue (Kingsley Amis), Wilsonsway (Angus Wilson), Marghanita Boulevard (Marghanita Laski), and Boothby Avenue (Robert Boothby).10 Such features benefit, primarily, the middle classes, who inhabit ‘real people’s houses’ and watch ‘worldcasts’, a form of global entertainment.11 At their service, they also have journalists with foreign names: Z. Dolin, ‘Something Something’ Rubinstein, and D. B. da Silva, who eagerly write about the abuses of liberty.12 Like Huxley, Burgess enlists onomastic satire to name England’s enemies; the protagonist Alex, in turn, leads a violent offensive against them. Contrary to the middle classes, he speaks a nadsat argot and resides with his working-class parents in a municipal ‘flatblock’. An early critic interpreted such dispensations as a warning of what English society ‘may become if it communizes itself along Soviet lines’.13 However, the pastoral securities of the bourgeois life prove treacherous and revengeful for Alex. At the novel’s opening, he ravages a middle-class home where he later comes looking for shelter: Here were houses and there was a like drinking mesto, and right at the end of the village there was a malenky cottage on its oddy knocky, and I could viddy its name shining on the gate. HOME, it said.14 Instead of granting redemption, F. Alexander, the owner of the house and author of A Clockwork Orange, implicates the protagonist in the campaign to overthrow the government, which misfires. Through this self-reflexive gesture, Burgess vindicates Alex as a constant victim of middle-class

manipulations, to which he should remain immune, like Orwell’s proles. Unlike Winston, who belongs to the Outer Party, Alex profits from exclusion, and this circumstance allows him to mature towards pastoral. Alex’s passion for the sublime Beethoven subsides to ‘malenky romantic songs’, his gang outings give way to the solitary thoughts of fatherhood, and his nadsat talk may begin to drop away.15 Burgess pits essentialized normativity against its global bourgeois defilements. His novel harbours a profoundly conservative longing for faux proletarian, people’s pastoral. In Concrete Island, Ballard reverses Orwell’s and Burgess’s perspectives. Rather than blaming modernity for England’s dissipation, he enquires into where England remains trapped, when the world has moved on with modernity. The novel figures England into a waste ground of discursive attachments whose palimpsest ‘maroons’ the protagonist Robert Maitland.16 W. Warren Wagar has remarked that Ballard’s England fuses internal and external landscapes, and his characters have to pass through them in order ‘to earn salvation’.17 Maitland undertakes his passage when, following a car accident, he finds himself in his Jaguar on a traffic island, ‘sealed off from the world around it’.18 Failing to escape, he construes his liminal position in contrast to London, which ‘was now asleep, part of an immense unconscious Europe, while he himself crawled about on a forgotten traffic island like the nightmare of this slumbering continent’.19 This contrast dissents from Orwell’s denigration of London’s complicity with global forces. In Ballard, London belongs elsewhere and partakes of wider continental activity, whereas Maitland’s insular enclosure heralds a return of the repressed. Like Winston, Maitland falls back on his childhood memories, which allows him to conjure up the safety and solitude of an ‘imaginary empty garden’,20 and he expects the island to reproduce that oneiric pastoral experience. As he revisits several spatial and literary tropes, his expectations translate into a discursive identification. Maitland gradually realizes that the island is ‘an exact model of his head’,21 and the layers of dilapidated Victorian and Edwardian buildings map out a cognitive space that contains his England. The protagonist’s exploration proceeds from England’s colonial to post-colonial state. He first sees himself as Robinson Crusoe,22 whose professed dominion he re-enacts in relation to the two social outcasts he encounters, Proctor and Jane Sheppard. Even though the latter never regards the traffic enclosure as an

island,23 the protagonist apprehends it as ‘a labyrinth of dips and hollows’,24 which evokes the privacy of Edward Thomas’s England of ‘holes and corners’. Moving away from a colonial enterprise to Little Englandism, Maitland notices the island’s relapse to a natural state. He feels ‘no real need to leave the island, and this alone confirmed that he had established his dominion over it’.25 Albeit solipsistic, Maitland’s realm consists of physical desolation and natural ruination, both of which deconstruct English pastoral. Setting his novel in April, Ballard links alterity to a potential transcendence of discursive waste. By contrast, Barnes problematizes the cessation of national discourse, precisely because of the irreparable degradation it leaves in its wake. In England, England, he depicts the dystopia of a post-national world where a global conspiracy reduces England to a displaced performance, on the one hand, and ‘an economic and moral waste-pit’, on the other.26 Two entities represent these developments: England, England, a corporate enterprise, and Anglia, England’s direct spatial successor. England, England evolves in conflict with its founder’s quasi-patriotic plan. Sir Jack Pitman, a tycoon and media baron, purported to astonish the world with the best of England.27 Instead, the project managers have capitalized on marketing, simulation, and customer satisfaction, veering towards the French theories of representation. Concentrated on the Isle of Wight, simulacra as varied as the White Cliffs of Dover, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, beefeaters, Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen’s house, Morris dancers, and stiff upper lips cater exclusively to the comfort and needs of paying tourists. While visitors partake of the re-enactments of England, the re-enactors derive their new form of citizenship from the endorsements they receive for the acts they perform. Subsequently, England, England nurtures sovereign aspirations from Westminster and vies for international recognition. The EU, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund grant requisite approval.28 In the novel, such organizations constitute a version of the World State that not only facilitates the withering-away of the nation-state and government deregulation, but also conspires with rapacious consumerism and profiteering. Unlike Huxley, Orwell, and Burgess, Barnes does not fear the end of England in the World State. On the contrary, aware of the phenomenon of mass tourism and England’s popularity as a travel destination, he entertains the sarcastic possibility of ‘a proud new

insularity’.29 Barnes’s major concern resides, though, in the World State’s incentive to replicate England to a point of discursive vacuity. At the other end of Barnes’s dystopian spectrum, England descends into an antiquated isolationism, both within and outside its British involvements. This process vacates England of the discursive leftovers that have escaped commodification in England, England. The disintegration of British union causes a resurgence of independent Scotland and Wales, both of which buy up tracts of English land.30 Paris Mean Time replaces the Greenwich Meridian, and the English Channel becomes the ‘French Sleeve’.31 Continental rivals rejoice at such physical and symbolic diminishments, and England changes its name to Anglia in an act of professed defiance and self-regeneration. Anglia’s revivalism takes the form of a counterrevolution that exploits the dormant back-to-the-land sentiment and wreaks havoc on urban modernity. The bulldozing of suburbs and destruction of four-lane highways happen intermittently with the re- establishment of common land.32 Nature reclaims its own, after machineries stop and villagers espouse a simpler, albeit austere life: Hens and geese wandered proprietorially across cracked tarmac on to which children had chalked skipping games […]. […] Without traffic, the village felt safer and closer; without television, the villagers talked more, even if there seemed less to talk about than before.33 The condition of Anglia finds embodiment in its formerly defiled, but now convalescing landscape, which features ‘buff and bistre, ash and nettle, dun and roan, slate and bottle’.34 On the flipside, though, all such reversals to a natural state and organic community barely promise redemption, because isolation threatens to engender ‘a new and incomparably brain-free species of village idiot’.35 In casting a bleak light on the prospect of English pastoral, Barnes takes exception to its valorisation in Orwell and Burgess. More resolutely, he follows Ballard in stripping away England’s pastoral solipsism. If neither a displaced performance nor a return to pastoral safeguards England against the World State, what does? The novel’s final scene provides the answer. It involves the protagonist Martha Cochrane, who used to work as England, England’s CEO. She now takes exile in Anglia, apprehending, though, its incremental resemblance to England, England. As

Christine Berberich has noted, Martha’s fellow citizens reinvent ‘traditions for their own use and, like Sir Jack Pitman in the main part of the novel, they discard what they do not like’.36 Indeed, the villagers assemble their disparate memories of costume, food, and music. Despite being England, England’s disjecta, they stoop to the same folly of re-enactment and manipulation. Even though the global community is not watching them yet, it may soon show interest. Martha observes the newly established ‘Fête’ from a distance, which allows her to take in ‘a rabbit, fearless and quietly confident of its territory’.37 In juxtaposing a rabbit’s territorial situation with the performative aspect of the villagers’ existence, this observation naturalizes discourse as an always already perennial mode of any ‘imagined community’. However, Martha distrusts memory and performance, because, early in life, she learnt to associate them with a ‘Counties of England jigsaw puzzle’.38 England’s symbolic body, with its underlying past, makes a whole only when all the pieces fall into place; whenever a piece goes missing, personal and sociocultural fabulations readily fill in the gap. Unlike Orwell’s Winston, she cannot escape into an imaginary pastoral state, or, like Burgess’s Alex, mature towards it. Instead, her Anglian exile takes its tack from Ballard’s Maitland. England may have wasted away under global influence, but Martha’s loyalty to place brings her back to that lived experience.

The Curtailment of Continuity Regardless of the reformulations to which Wells, Benson, and Huxley subject national discourse, their post-national visions uphold English continuity. The Wellsian utopia emerges from Whig historiography and relies on narrative reversals, which smooth over historical rupture. Benson’s Catholic polity predicates social cohesiveness on existing hierarchies and monarchy, and Huxley’s World State utilizes Wordsworthian pastoral as a privileged site of poetic recollection. Such varied discursive features countermand the uncanny possibilities that might be in a world without England. The post-national scenarios of the second half of the twentieth century attend increasingly to the curtailment of continuity, whose aftermath disrupts the links with the past, threatens the symbolic order of life, determines path dependency, and poses the need of a fresh direction. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, English continuity ends with the

Revolution, and the English past dissolves into the totalitarianism of Big Brother. Winston places the Revolution in 1925, one year after the Liberal Party had finished its rule in England. Whereas Wells’s Barnstaple perceives this historic moment as a difficult, yet hopeful stage towards Utopia, Winston turns to an old prole for historical perspective. However, the latter supplies no explanation as to whether life was ‘better before the Revolution than it is now’;39 having lived in a social exclave, he carries in his memory ‘small objects but not large ones’.40 By contrast, the protagonist looks to recover what he has never experienced, a symbolic past where personal memory and historical record would reinforce each other. That past always necessarily pre-exists Oceania, leading back to a prerevolutionary England. Under the circumstances, Winston acts defiantly of Oceania’s ‘reality control’, in the naïve belief that objects and literature may exist outside O’Brien’s intervention. However, the glass paperweight, with which Winston associates the Golden Country, takes on only a fraction of his childhood memories;41 it does not suffice to reconstruct a wider historical context of his family’s wartime tragedy. Similarly, his readings from the essay attributed to the defector Goldstein reassure Winston of his own sanity, but fail to contextualize Oceania beyond its current geopolitics, ideological imperatives, and social structure.42 The past has become irrecoverable, because the Revolution has ushered in its modern treatment. Ultimately, Orwell squares his accounts with Oceania by historicizing its language in the ‘Appendix’. Even though the past tense of his narrative does not reanimate England, it delays further rupture, at least until 2050.43 In Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, English continuity abandons its historical foundations and authorizes the symbolic order of life. As Alex proceeds from violence to retribution and back to violence, he narrativizes the uncertainty of his direction. Each of the novel’s three parts and concluding chapter open with a refrain: ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’ Occurring fourteen times,44 this rhetorical figure offsets the protagonist’s endeavour to break free from the global conspiracy of middle-class rule. On the one hand, Alex responds viscerally to the government, which winds him up like a clockwork and then treats his condition, so that he may never ‘commit acts of violence or to offend in any way whatsoever against the State’s Peace’.45 On the other, the protagonist falls prey to the malcontents of the state, who purport to use him as ‘a martyr to the cause of Liberty’.46

Indeed, F. Alexander and his associates defend liberty against usurpations, but they also endorse coercive action: ‘The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded –’.47 Alex’s failed suicide discredits this notion of liberty as part of a power game, alien to his life trajectory. After being dispatched from hospital, the protagonist has visions of ‘some devotchka or other who would be a mother to this son’.48 With ‘a new like chapter beginning’, Alex wishes to be left outside the tribulations that make and change history. Although he still feels ‘oddy knocky’ in a ‘terrible grahzny vonny world’, his interrogatives modulate into the affirmative ‘That’s what it’s going to be then, brothers’.49 Just as Orwell keeps the proles ‘clean out of the stream of history’,50 Burgess unwinds Alex from the pursuit of liberty that ostensibly disrupts the symbolic order of life. Jointly with both writers’ reaction against the World State, these arrangements shield English continuity from social upheaval. Ballard adopts a less protective stance on English continuity. Unlike Orwell and Burgess, he narrows it down to discursive path dependency. In Ballard’s Concrete Island, Maitland despairs over his car crash and subsequent entrapment only briefly. Towards the end of the first day, he chooses the line of postponement: ‘From now on, he must relax a little, husband his self-confidence. It might take several hours to devise a means of escape, perhaps another day’.51 On falling into a fever, the protagonist gives up on his desperate attempts to leave and, after the fever subsides, he even questions whether he has, ‘in fact, deliberately marooned himself on the island’.52 Following the growth of his entanglements with Proctor and Jane, Maitland not only accepts his confinement, but also prefers it to continue discretely. He intimates that ‘I don’t want anyone to know I’m on the island’.53 At the novel’s end, the protagonist remembers his wife and son, but his thoughts of food and rest set back ‘his escape from the island’.54 His dominion may be absolute now, but it results from discursive path dependency. This existential crisis bears the imprint of English continuity, whose erstwhile emancipatory scope has degraded to the incapacity to think and act differently. The need of a fresh direction underlies Barnes’s England, England. The novel treats English continuity in the light of performance and simulation, both of which converge to produce a post-national totalitarianism. On the

one hand, Sir Jack’s project gathers the meaning of England from a globally conducted survey, which has returned a list of ‘Fifty Quintessences of Englishness’, ranging between the Union Jack and bad underwear, hypocrisy and Magna Carta, whingeing and emotional frigidity.55 On the other, the Anglian villagers draw on a pool of their residual recollections of England, which produces a patchwork of games and songs, all played out of tune.56 Regardless of its global or local provenance, the re-enactment of English continuity privileges free-floating associations, which may be highly personal. In the novel, this reliance on mnemonic and even heuristic material overlaps with the levelling-out of historical context. Unlike Huxley’s Mond, who can dismiss history as bunk,57 the residents of England, England have ‘learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the downland with the breeze in your face. Travel light: it was true for nations as well as for hikers’.58 However, despite allowing national discourse to itemize and the grandness of history to diminish, such an approach does not herald a new freedom. Rather, the resulting palimpsest repositions ‘reality control’, whose methods may differ from those deployed by O’Brien, but whose aftermath produces a similar totalitarian closure. If customer satisfaction and performative enjoyment take precedence over decontextualized ‘quintessences’, England’s historical development and human association have reached a terminus. The novel’s open ending posits at least two possibilities. During a village festivity, Martha takes leave and ascends a hill, which grants her a commanding view and opportunity to reflect. She notices a villager ‘waving a plastic bag bearing the cross of St George. Patron saint of England, Aragon and Portugal, she remembered; also protector of Genoa and Venice. The conga, national dance of Cuba and Anglia’.59 Martha’s recollections retrace the free-floating material on which both England, England and Anglia have been founded. Having matured, she may want to travel light with history and descend the hill, as she has done before, to perform her own role of being ‘no more than what others saw you as’.60 At the same time, though, she may be an ironic onlooker who keeps aloof in order to avoid conflict with communal authority. Martha reproduces England’s insular posture, whose continuity closes off a fresh direction.

Identity with Place after Character

During the twentieth century, English utopia attests the dethronement of middle-class male supremacies, accompanied by the appearance of relational identities, including those with place. As the idiom of character disintegrates, it gives way to working-class and female actors. This process has its roots in the Wellsian utopia, which allows both women and men, regardless of their social background, to join the ruling elite. However, Wells’s professed egalitarianism finds its limits in the choice of characters who are lower middle-class Englishmen with Liberal leanings. Benson uses the same characterization, combining Liberalism with a theological inflection. Huxley enhances his character eugenically, while at the same time keeping him ensconced in the Liberal legacy of poetic recollection. In Wells, Benson, and Huxley, such discursive bearings acquire a universal significance. Their characters experience a post-national alterity where the end of England exemplifies human experience. Orwell’s Winston marks a turning point in the development of the utopian character. His resolution to stand in for humanity follows a downturn that the idiom of character took after WWII. Situated socially between the Inner Party and the proles, Winston couples his middle ground with the ‘spirit of Man’.61 He has to comprehend, though, that his universalizing pretensions have decayed alongside his own body, which O’Brien examines with a conclusive statement: ‘What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn round and look into the mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity’.62 Aired from the position of power in a post-national world, this condemnation dislodges the likes of Winston from their self-avowed representation of humanity. In the wake of such demission, Ballard’s Maitland acquires a relational identity. He no longer needs to espouse a global mission, but must rely on a symbolic order where class-based structures continue to operate. In Philip Tew’s observation, Maitland’s ‘English bourgeois self’ may regain itself through ‘the English class system’,63 which he reconstitutes in the power relations he builds with the mentally handicapped Proctor and the socially maladjusted Jane. Maitland buys Proctor’s devotion with wine and clothes, and uses money for the intercourse with Jane; he also lies to them.64 Such operations bolster Maitland’s self, fully contingent on the pre-existing inferiority and exclusion of others. After Proctor’s accidental death and Jane’s departure, the protagonist has no mechanism to validate his symbolic connection with

the island and – more broadly – national discourse. Whereas Orwell appoints O’Brien to shatter Winston’s discursive faith, Ballard leaves Maitland alone to apprehend its illusory nature. Burgess’s Alex and Barnes’s Martha find themselves outside the system of middle-class male postures, and the post-national alterity within which they function absolves them from certain discursive constraints. Whereas Alex gauges response violently, Martha settles for resignation, which may additionally reflect the differences in their gender and social status. Alex’s violence deserves no vindication, even though it has both a pattern and an addressee. In ‘Humanist Drama in A Clockwork Orange’ (2012), Charles Sumner has recorded that Burgess’s protagonist ‘arrogates to himself the authority to punish those who spoil the aesthetics of his environment’, because he has no power to ‘remake his world in any significant way’.65 Indeed, Alex directs his intolerance against the effects of the post-national state, whose oblique personifications he discerns in the sight of a drunkard, Billyboy’s odour, Dim’s disrespect for music, and the old ptitsa’s fancy for cats. When taken to the police station, the protagonist remarks that ‘I was going to get nothing like fair play from these stinky grahzny bratchnies, Bog blast them’.66 In recalling the principle of fair play, Alex shows awareness of a middle-class code of honour, which his formal education inculcates. Yet the perversions committed by the state instil in him an equally perverted sense of justice. Alex would have probably liked to espouse fairness, which has otherwise degraded into a corruptible travesty. Unlike Wells, who invests leadership in the middle classes, Burgess supplies no middle-class role model for his protagonist to emulate. Alex has to embrace his own noble savagery, diverting it away, though, from extant hierarchies, no matter how despicable he finds them to be. Burgess holds up national discourse against the receding supremacies of character. Barnes’s Martha signals a shift in the gender homogeneity of the utopian character. From Wells to Ballard, Martha’s progeny includes an array of secondary female characters. Socially and/or mentally inferior, they cater to their male counterparts’ contentment. In Wells, Lychnis serves as Barnstaple’s Utopian guide, precisely because her atavisms put her on a par with him; the Utopian Sunray marks the end of Sarnac’s dream quest, exercising little control over it. In Benson, the nameless nurse takes care of the dying protagonist. In Huxley, no woman is an Alpha, and Lenina recites to her lovers the World State’s caste wisdom and promiscuous licence. In

Orwell, Julia leads Winston to think that the orgasm can be ‘a political act’, most probably because she looks to him ‘a rebel from the waist downwards’.67 In Burgess, Marty and Sonietta submit to ‘the strange and weird desires of Alexander the Large’, only to recoil later in terror.68 In Ballard, Jane helps Maitland to recover; yet, despite being a streetwalker on the run from ‘moral attitudes’,69 she does not fall into the trap of his money-based power relations. Barnes, in turn, emancipates Martha from direct male authority, at least in romance. She does not need to validate or fulfil anybody’s quest in a post-national environment. Like Julia, she may give her partner the sensation of a mutual climax, but the novel tips off the reader about the ‘sweet fucking power of deception’.70 Martha enjoys a higher degree of autonomy, even though the omniscient narrator mediates her narrative agency. In England, England, the protagonist takes a self-conscious distance from the idiom of character. Instead, she defines it as follows: ‘It was surely something you had, or something that changed because of what happened to you, like your mother being brisker and more short-tempered nowadays’.71 This definition places character in the realm of personal qualities, formed by experience, and situational moods, which Martha deems impossible to build in compliance with an externally imposed dictum. Along these lines, character may never be fully known, and the protagonist uses her childhood photographs to show that neither her pushed-out lower lip nor clenched eyebrows reveal her character. Rather, the mediating frames of social convention and circumstance make character either conform or seem contrary in the eyes of others. Whereas her male predecessors derive their normative postures from conformity, Martha grows to embrace her cynicism, ‘a very lonely virtue’.72 Like most of her male predecessors, Martha is middle class, yet her femininity enables an identification with England that no other character has probed before. Particularly, she stands in sharp contrast to Orwell’s Winston, who has perpetuated England’s dystopian closure. On seeing himself in the mirror, ‘his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones […]’, Winston weeps inconsolably and wishes to be shot soon.73 Symbolically, the unsightly scene he faces reflects the condition of what remains of England in Oceania: a weak and emaciated body. In accepting this symbolism as an end in itself, Winston lets his displaced expectations

overtake him. If he discerns nothing beyond what is shown, his imagination capitulates and ‘reality control’ wins. Martha, in turn, finds herself in a less sinister, but more nuanced situation that resembles Winston’s plight, yet her response strikes a contrapuntal chord. The narrative recruits a Freudian trope to forge a comparison between Martha’s body and the Anglian landscape she surveys: ‘Martha recognized that she was fading too’.74 Rendered in indirect speech, this narrative instance conspires with ‘reality control’. Immediately thereafter, Martha hears a remark from a village boy: ‘My Dad says you’re an old maid’.75 Jointly with the narrator’s reporting, the boy’s restatement of his father’s words equals for Martha the maledominated conspiracy of social convention. Its powers parallel O’Brien’s control over Winston. Like Winston, Martha proceeds to inspect herself in the mirror. Undoubtedly, she does not discover the horror in her reflection: hair blown loose from her clips, plaid shirt beneath a grey windcheater, complexion whose ruddiness had finally asserted itself against decades of skin-care, and what seemed to her – though who was she to tell? – a mildness, almost a milkiness to her eyes.76 Unlike Winston, however, Martha not only accepts what she sees, but also avows the powers that might be: ‘Well then, old maid, if that’s what they saw’.77 The protagonist’s seeming complicity gives her an advantage: she plays up to the symbolism accorded her without allowing that symbolism to overtake her place-specific existence. Unlike Winston, Martha knows that ‘reality control’ attenuates in the mirror, which at once reflects and opens up an imaginary order. Just as her own reflection does not necessarily match that of an old maid, England’s condition in a post-national world should be imagined otherwise, beyond dolled-up performance and decrepitude. Among utopian characters, Martha belongs in the league of her own. She neither espouses nor directly confronts the discursive loyalties upheld by her male predecessors. She identifies with place, and endorses that identification with compromise and sagacity. Company she has none, but for that, she would need to change genre.

England after Discourse

Twentieth-century English utopia catalyses a refocusing of national discourse from spatial expansion to containment. Whereas Wells connects alterity to utopia’s planetary dimensions, later writers reinstate what Fredric Jameson dubs ‘the fear of contamination from the outside and from the past history’.78 Island enclosures regain their full significance as guarantors of alterity, renewing additionally the discursive trope of England’s isolation. Simultaneously, English utopia follows a major geopolitical shift, related particularly to empire and England’s post-colonial condition. Founded on the expansionist tendencies of the British Empire, the Wellsian utopia endorses the World State’s outlying territories with alterity. In Wells, Benson, and Huxley, the socially maladjusted individuals and groups find refuge in colonial compounds, where pastoral opportunities purport to abound. Symptomatically, the historical disbandment of the British Empire leaves Orwell’s Oceania without an outpost of alterity. Instead, the ensuing rise of superpowers relegates pastoral from external to inlying sites, formed of social exclusion. In Orwell, proletarian exclaves exist outside global conspiracies, whereas in Burgess, they revolt violently in pursuit of pastoral normality. With Britain’s decolonization, pastoral outposts recede into mental states and performance, and alterity becomes much harder to obtain. In Ballard, the litter of previously held beliefs demarcates an isolated enclosure, and the social misfit has yet to overcome its decomposition. In Barnes, pastoral translates into a matter of self-deluding re-enactment, and insular confinement bears the worst of degradation. However, the social outcast seeks alterity in the same place from which she departed, no matter how much it has changed in the interim. In a similar way, English utopia has coursed through England’s displaced and dismembered discursive existences, and gradually returns to England. However, this return occurs simultaneously with a mutable treatment of continuity and its central tenet of liberty. Liberalism haunts the Wellsian utopia, particularly on the eve of its historic demise, and Wells appoints liberty as a stepping-stone between England and the World State. In their own peculiar ways, Benson and Huxley delink the World State from liberty, and Orwell immortalizes their radical incompatibility. With the exception of Wells, no other writer under discussion envisages how existing power structures and institutional arrangements may grow into their evolved counterparts or fall away; instead, the post-national condition of the world is feared to disrupt continuity, cancelling out the alleged organicism of the

English Constitution. In the second half of the twentieth century, such anxieties engender varied response. Burgess essentializes continuity in the natural right to procreation, Ballard renders it into an obstacle to a new freedom, and Barnes upholds the liberty to be different without challenging an extant order. With these notions of liberty, English utopia closes the circle of its professed attempts to transcend discourse. Renegotiated and sometimes subverted, continuity begets inertias in even defamiliarized environments, foreclosing the possibility of a fresh direction. On return to England, English utopia embraces a new type of character. This achievement follows a century-long renegotiation of discursive loyalties, predicated on middle-class male dominance and ensuing gender bias. While the Wellsian utopia initiates the subversion of the patriarchal order, Barnes takes that process to the next stage. His female protagonist plays a discursively insurgent role, yet chances on the limitations of narrative agency and subjective autonomy. So far, English utopia has stopped at a halfway house between Wells’s emancipatory foresight, on the one hand, and reluctance to shed middle-class supremacies, on the other. Perhaps, my own choice of writers – all white, middle class, and male, with some variation on the social range – conspires with said conclusion, but the symptomatic representability of their work in a wider twentieth-century context can be hard to dispute. From Orwell to Barnes, post-national scenarios purport to re-invoke an English past where England would be sheltered from emancipatory upheavals. More than fifty years ago, A. L. Morton imputed the emaciated energies of English utopia to the exhaustion of the bourgeois revolution.79 Today, I may rightfully confirm that certain possibilities have remained unexplored, in fiction at least. As long as English utopia returns to England and reproduces national discourse, its nationality remains, in legal terms, British. It serves the integrity, continuity, and power structures of the British polity, bracketing out England’s place-specific existence. Indeed, to rephrase Jameson, imagining the end of England in the World State seems easier than imagining the end of the discursive certainties that pertain to pastoral, privilege, and supremacy. Perhaps, a weakness affects English utopia, which shies away from the uncanny, be it an open faith with the world or a hereto disenfranchised socio-political order. While fear and nostalgia weigh too heavily on English writers, the Wellsian utopia may provide a robust clearing mechanism that at once separates out atavisms from the more

productive features of English culture and endorses the latter with a global perspective. Contrary to Wells, though, discursive waste must be left unrepressed, allowing possible relapses to flag up. Usable material, in turn, should hold primary value for England, where the saturated redeployment of fair play and liberty will have effected a new freedom and enjoyment. In this alterity, English utopia will have stopped replicating England either elsewhere or elsewhen, and grounded it instead where it belongs – in a place coterminous with humanity.

Notes 1 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (St Ives: Penguin, 1990), 34. 2 Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 209. 3 Ibid., 212. 4 Orwell, Nineteen, 5, 77. 5 Ibid., 9. 6 Ibid., 33, 167. 7 Ibid., 33. 8 Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 12, 13. 9 Ibid., 33, 103, 136. 10 Ibid., 16, 25, 106. 11 Ibid., 47. 12 Ibid., 120. 13 Robert O. Evans, ‘Nadsat: The Argot and Its Implications in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange’, Journal of Modern Literature 1, no. 3 (1971): 409. 14 Burgess, 112. 15 Ibid., 137, 140–1. 16 J. G. Ballard, Concrete Island (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 27. 17 W. Warren Wagar, ‘J. G. Ballard and Transvaluation of Utopia’, Science Fiction Studies 18, no. 1 (1991): 53, 54. 18 Ballard, 13. 19 Ibid., 25. 20 Ibid., 27. 21 Ibid., 69. 22 Ibid., 32. 23 Ibid., 84. 24 Ibid., 102. 25 Ibid., 176. 26 Julian Barnes, England, England (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), 202. 27 Ibid., 34. 28 Ibid., 172, 202. 29 Ibid., 202–3. 30 Ibid., 251. 31 Ibid., 252.

32 Ibid., 255. 33 Ibid., 256. 34 Ibid., 258. 35 Ibid., 254. 36 Christine Berberich, ‘England? Whose England? (Re)Constructing English Identities in Julian Barnes and W. G. Sebald’, National Identities 10, no. 2 (2008): 176. 37 Barnes, 266. 38 Ibid., 4. 39 Orwell, Nineteen, 96. 40 Ibid., 96–7. 41 Ibid., 167. 42 Ibid., 193, 201, 209. 43 Ibid., 326. 44 Burgess, 3, 4, 5, 57, 58, 59, 63, 97, 99, 132, 133. 45 Ibid., 71. 46 Ibid., 121. 47 Ibid., 119. 48 Ibid., 141. 49 Ibid. 50 Orwell, Nineteen, 172. 51 Ballard, 58. 52 Ibid., 117. 53 Ibid., 167. 54 Ibid., 176. 55 Barnes, 83–5. 56 Ibid., 265. 57 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. Brave New World Revisited, introduction by Malcolm Elwin (London: Heron Books, 1968), 40. 58 Barnes, 203. 59 Ibid., 265. 60 Ibid., 259. 61 Orwell, Nineteen, 282. 62 Ibid., 285. 63 Philip Tew, ‘J. G. Ballard’s Traumatised and Traumatising Englishness’, in Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness, and English Literature, edited by Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 147. 64 Ballard, 135, 142, 149, 152. 65 Charles Sumner, ‘Humanist Drama of A Clockwork Orange’, The Yearbook of English Studies 42 (2012): 51. 66 Burgess, 51. 67 Orwell, Nineteen, 133, 163. 68 Burgess, 36. 69 Ballard, 115. 70 Barnes, 52. 71 Ibid., 13–14. 72 Ibid., 14. 73 Orwell, Nineteen, 285–6.

74 Barnes, 258. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 258–9. 77 Ibid., 259. 78 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 204. 79 A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1952), 202.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to endnotes. Abercrombie, Patrick (The Preservation of Rural England) 29 Act of Union (1707) 3, 21, 22 After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation (Wells) 69 Allen, Grant (The British Barbarians: A Hill-Top Novel) 138 Alt, Christina 127 ancien régime 33 Anderson, Benedict (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism) 13 Anglo-Saxonism 74 Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story (Wells) 99–100 Antic Hay (Huxley) 145 Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (Wells) 58, 66–7, 85 Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Newman) 86 Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (Hardy and Ward) 27 Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Jameson) 15 ‘The Army of a Dream’ (Kipling) 125 Arnold, Matthew 2, 41, 46, 92, 147 Culture and Anarchy 86, 88, 99, 146 Asquith, H. H. 92, 98 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 78 Atwood, Margaret 16

Auden, W. H.: ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ 156 ‘In Praise of Limestone’ 8 Aughey, Arthur (The Politics of Englishness) 35 The Autocracy of Mr. Parham: His Remarkable Adventures in This Changing World (Wells) 65–6, 72 aviation technology 93, 106, 110 Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, 1880–1914 (Marsh) 27, 28 Bacon, Francis 10, 16, 58, 76 Bagehot, Walter (The English Constitution) 124 Baldwin, Stanley (Our Inheritance: Speeches and Addresses) 30, 31, 150–1 Balfour, Arthur 124 Ballard, J. G. 8, 10, 169, 172–4, 176–9, 181 Concrete Island 7, 79, 171, 176 Barker, Ernest (National Character and the Factors in Its Formation) 35, 43 Barnes, Julian 8, 10, 80, 169, 173, 178, 181 England, England 7, 79, 172, 176, 179 Batchelor, John (H. G. Wells) 64 The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (Chesney) 25 Beaumont, Matthew (The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle) 134 Beck, Peter J. 64 Begbie, Harold (The Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Reflections) 124 Bellamy, Edward (Looking Backward: 2000–1887) 58, 62, 63, 92, 105, 118 Bell, David M. (Rethinking Utopia: Place, Power, Affect) 18–19 Bell, Duncan (The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900) 22–4, 74 Belloc, Hilaire (An Examination of Socialism) 88, 103 Benson, Robert Hugh 5–8, 10, 78, 85–94, 96–9, 101, 103–11, 127–8, 143, 169, 174, 177, 178, 180, 181 ‘A Catholic Colony (A Suggestion)’ 88 A City Set on a Hill 87 Come Rack! Come Rope! 88 Confessions of a Convert 78

The Conversion of England 88 The Dawn of All 5, 89–93, 95–8, 100–4, 106, 108–11, 127–8 Lord of the World 86, 87, 89 ‘A Modern Theory of Human Personality’ 94 Non-Catholic Denominations 87–8 None Other Gods 89 Paradoxes of Catholicism 88 ‘Points of View’ 99 The Queen’s Tragedy 88 Berberich, Christine 174 Bergson, Henri (Matter and Memory) 94 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Ruttmann) 108 Betjeman, John 120 Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation (Lilienthal) 106–7 Blake, William (‘Jerusalem’) 31 Blatchford, Robert 28 Bloch, Ernst (The Principle of Hope) 13–16, 18 Boer War 26, 48, 96, 125 Boyle, Danny 32 Brave New World (Huxley) 6, 78, 108, 131, 139, 143, 145–9, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157–9, 162, 165 Breuilly, John 20 Britain 3, 11, 12, 21–3, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30–1, 41, 49, 70, 98, 138, 143, 150– 2, 159, 169 Britain and the Beast (Williams-Ellis and Keynes) 29 The British Barbarians: A Hill-Top Novel (Allen) 138 British Empire 2–4, 22, 23, 25, 26, 66, 71, 96, 100, 124, 170, 180 British Nationality Act of 1730 22, 23, 25 British union 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 32, 33, 40–2, 47–9, 92, 96, 97, 100, 173 Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (Colley) 23 Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells (Partington) 56 Buitenhuis, Peter 125 Bunyan, John (The Pilgrim’s Progress, From This World, to That Which Is to Come) 120 Burgess, Anthony 8, 10, 169–71, 173–6, 179, 181, 182 A Clockwork Orange 7, 79, 170, 171, 175, 178

Burke, Edmund (Reflections on the French Revolution and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event) 32, 33, 77, 133 The Camford Visitation (Wells) 77 capitalism 18, 21, 35, 68 Carlyle, Thomas (Chartism) 26 Catholic Church 5, 89–92, 94, 96–8, 102, 103, 109 ‘A Catholic Colony (A Suggestion)’ (Benson) 88 Catholic fold 78, 85–9 Catholicism see Roman Catholicism Catholic Revival 86 The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (Ker) 90 Catholic rule 96, 97, 104, 111 Chartism (Carlyle) 26 Chesney, George Tomkyns (The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer) 25, 26 Chesterton, G. K. (Orthodoxy) 88, 110–11, 123 Chopin, Frederic (Revolutionary Etude) 129 Christianity 85, 92, 101, 102 Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton (Stapleton) 123 Churchill, Winston 125 The Cities of Tomorrow (Le Corbusier) 145 The City of God against the Pagans (Augustine) 87 A City Set on a Hill (Benson) 87 Claeys, Gregory (Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea) 18, 46 A Clockwork Orange (Burgess) 7, 79, 170, 171, 175, 178 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (Lyrical Ballads) 149 Colley, Linda (Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837) 23 Collini, Stefan (Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930) 76 Colls, Robert 34 Come Rack! Come Rope! (Benson) 88 Coming Up for Air (Orwell) 38 ‘The Common-Sense of World Peace’ (Wells) 85

The Commonwealth of Oceana (Harrington) 24 communism 86, 87, 103 The Concept of Utopia (Levitas) 15 Concrete Island (Ballard) 7, 79, 171, 176 The Condition of England (Masterman) 36, 38, 92 Confessions of a Convert (Benson) 78 Connolly, Thomas 64–5 Conrad, Peter 116 The Conversion of England (Benson) 88 Cosmopolis 55, 59, 67, 85 cosmopolitanism 55–61 The Country and the City (Williams) 32 Creighton, Mandell (The English National Character) 42, 43 Critical Landscapes (Scott and Swenson) 154 critical utopias 15 Crystal Palace 119–20 cultural stagnation 6, 143–9, 161, 165 Culture and Anarchy (Arnold) 86, 88, 99, 146 Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Williams) 34–5, 37–8 Daedalus, or, Science and the Future (Haldane) 144 Daily Mail 159 Dangerfield, George (The Strange Death of Liberal England) 34 Daniels, Stephen 29 Darwin, Charles 58 The Dawn of All (Benson) 5, 89–93, 95–8, 100–4, 106, 108–11, 127–8 In the Days of the Comet (Wells) 67 degenerative drift 143–9 Delanty, Gerard (Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe) 33 Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (Moylan) 15 Demiashkevich, Michael J. (The National Mind: English, French, German) 43–5 Dickens, Charles (Hard Times) 137 discourse of England 3–6, 10, 11, 21–32, 56, 66, 77, 80, 95, 97, 104, 109, 111, 116, 139, 154, 160, 165

character 41–9 continuity 32–41 geography 21–32 ‘The Door in the Wall’ (Wells) 116 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 119–20, 125 Notes from Underground 120 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 120 The Dream (Wells) 6, 115–19, 128, 129, 133, 135–9 Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (Marcus) 115 education 1, 4, 23, 35, 38, 39, 43, 46, 55, 57, 59, 60, 68, 72–4, 76, 98, 99, 105, 129, 131, 134, 135, 138, 144, 151, 178 Education Act (1870) 138 Edwardian period 5, 26, 27, 92, 95–106, 131 Eliot, T. S.: ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 147 The Waste Land 30, 147, 161 empirical outlook 44, 76–7 Engels, Frederick (Manifesto of the Communist Party) 68, 70; see also Marx, Karl England: after discourse 180–2 condition of 24–6, 85–9, 118, 119, 128–34, 146 future of 95–106 Little 3, 26, 31, 38, 41, 172 and utopia 10–13 Utopian 9, 49 vantage point 6, 38, 119, 126, 128–34, 155; see also discourse of England ‘England’ (Thomas) 28 England after War: A Study (Masterman) 36 England and the Octopus (Williams-Ellis) 29 England, England (Barnes) 7, 79, 172, 176, 179 England, Their England (Macdonell) 47, 48 English: character 41–9 Constitution 2, 33, 36, 37, 69, 71, 77 language 2, 66 legacies 2, 7, 21, 40, 42, 48, 66, 68 Liberalism 6, 86, 87, 92, 94, 95, 119, 127, 139, 143, 144, 177, 181

liberty 2, 37 loyalties 3, 5, 6, 85, 87, 97, 122–8, 181 politics 33, 34, 35, 66, 71 socialism 40 utopia 8–9, 11, 12, 21, 134, 177, 180–2 The English: Are They Human? (Renier) 45 The English Constitution (Bagehot) 124 The English Genius (Kingsmill) 77 ‘The English Island Myth: Remarks on the Englishness of Utopian Fiction’ (Gerber) 11 Englishman 6, 22, 28, 31, 42–4, 46–8, 66, 67, 74, 97, 107, 118, 134–6, 153 An Englishman Looks at the World, Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters (Wells) 66, 67 The English National Character (Creighton) 42 The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (Mandler) 12, 41–2 The English Poetic Mind (Williams) 162 The English Utopia (Morton) 10 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Newman) 87 ‘The Essence of Religion’ (Huxley) 162 eugenic elite 149–53, 158 eugenics 6, 7, 17, 57, 72, 73, 79, 143, 144, 146, 149–52, 158, 165, 177 Europe 1, 2–3, 24, 41, 42, 43, 48, 59, 71, 72, 79, 86, 91, 100, 101, 103, 119, 128, 143, 157, 171 European Union (EU) 20, 173 Euroscepticism 3, 42 An Examination of Socialism (Belloc) 103 The Excursion (Wordsworth) 128 The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (Seeley) 23, 24 The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Smollett) 22 Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866) (Wells) 68, 120 Eyeless in Gaza (Huxley) 163 Fabian Essays in Socialism (Shaw) 35 Fabian Society 35 Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (Nairn) 22

fairness 44, 76 The First Men in the Moon (Wells) 57 Ford, Ford Madox: The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City 108 The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind 27 Ford, Henry 78, 145 Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe (Delanty) 33 For Space (Massey) 18, 130 Forster, E. M. (Howards End) 88 Fraser, Derek 98 French Revolution 61 Freud, Sigmund 78 The Interpretation of Dreams 132, 133 Fritz, Morgan 61 From Serfdom to Socialism (Hardie) 103 Froude, James Anthony (Oceana, Or, England and Her Colonies) 24, 25 Gardiner, Michael (Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness, and English Literature) 40, 53n124; see also Westall, Claire Gellner, Ernest 20 Gender, Technology and the New Woman (Wånggren) 106 Geoghegan, Vincent 102 George V, King 32 Georgian Poetry (Marsh) 126, 141n30 Gerber, Richard: ‘The English Island Myth: Remarks on the Englishness of Utopian Fiction’ 11 Utopian Fantasy: A Study of Utopian Fiction since the Nineteenth Century 10, 11 Gladstone, William Ewart 100 globalization 42, 60 Godfrey, Emelyne 63 Goodwin, Barbara (The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice) 61; see also Taylor, Keith Grayson, Janet 90 Great War 12, 28, 29, 32, 34, 41, 65, 68, 125, 127, 132, 143, 150 Greenberg, Jonathan 145

Grimble, Simon (Landscape, Writing and ‘The Condition of England’ -1878–1917, Ruskin to Modernism) 26 Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution (Wells) 11, 12 Haldane, J. B. S. (Daedalus, or, Science and the Future) 144 Hale, Piers S. 72, 73 Hardie, James Keir (From Serfdom to Socialism) 103 Hard Times (Dickens) 137 Hardy, Dennis (Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape) 27; see also Ward, Colin Harrington, James (The Commonwealth of Oceana) 24 Harvey, David (Spaces of Hope) 19–20 Heap, Nicholas G. 89 Henley, William Ernest (‘Pro Rege Nostro’) 48 Hervé, Gustave 87 H. G. Wells (Batchelor) 64 H. G. Wells and the World State (Wagar) 55 H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (Sherborne) 12 Higdon, David Leon (Wandering into Brave New World) 78 historiography 136–9 The History of Mr. Polly (Wells) 65 Hobsbawm, Eric J. 20 The Holy Bible 148, 163 The Holy Terror (Wells) 55 Homage to Catalonia (Orwell) 8 ‘A Horrible Dilemma’ (Huxley) 144 Howard, Ebenezer 88 Howards End (Forster) 88 ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’ (Wells) 56 humanity 1, 12–15, 17, 26, 31, 42, 46–9, 55, 57, 59–61, 65, 67, 72, 74, 77, 99, 105, 117, 120, 122, 177, 182 Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (Myers) 94, 162 Hunt, Tristram 40 Huxley, Aldous: Antic Hay 145 Brave New World 6, 78, 108, 131, 139, 143, 145–9, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157–9, 162, 165

‘The Essence of Religion’ 162 Eyeless in Gaza 163 ‘A Horrible Dilemma’ 144 ‘A Note on Eugenics’ 152 ‘Notes on Liberty and the Boundaries of the Promised Land’ 145 ‘Subject-Matter of Poetry’ 146 ‘Tragedy and the Whole Truth’ 146 ‘Wholly-Truthful Art’ 146 Huxley, T. H. 56, 73 ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent’ (Kant) 59 The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860– 1900 (Bell) 23–4 identification 134–6 Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Wegner) 17 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Anderson) 13 The Imitation of Christ (Kempis) 148, 163–4 imperial expansion 66–7 Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy (Wells) 66 individuality 72–7 Inge, W. R. 77 ‘Inside the Whale’ (Orwell) 109 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 132, 133 Ireland 3, 23, 96, 100–1, 153 Irish Free State 47, 153 Irish Home Rule 12, 34, 92, 97, 100 The Islanders (Zamyatin) 44–5 The Island of Doctor Moreau (Wells) 57 ‘The Island of Saints and Scholars’ (S. M. S.) 101 Jameson, Fredric 16, 18, 180, 182 Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions 15 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act 14

James, Simon J. (Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture) 55, 68 James, William (Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature) 164 ‘Jerusalem’ (Blake) 31 Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education (Wells) 76 John Bull’s Other Island (Shaw) 153 John, King 33 Kant, Immanuel: ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent’ 59 ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ 59 Keiller, Patrick (The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes) 8 Kempis, Thomas à (The Imitation of Christ) 163–4 Ker, Ian (The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh) 90 Keynes, John Maynard (Britain and the Beast) 29; see also Williams-Ellis, Clough Kingsmill, Hugh (The English Genius) 77 Kipling, Rudyard (‘The Army of a Dream’) 125 Kohl, Stephan 29 Korda, Alexander (Things to Come) 75 Kumar, Krishan 32 Labour Party 35 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) 37, 48 land misuse 6, 8, 143–4 landscape 6–8, 26–32, 36, 37, 41, 43, 44, 47, 62, 63, 65, 66, 71, 88, 93, 117, 118, 121, 122, 126, 128–33, 135, 145, 146, 154–60, 163, 170, 171, 173, 179 Landscape, Writing and ‘The Condition of England’ –1878–1917, Ruskin to Modernism (Grimble) 26 Lang, Fritz (Metropolis) 108 Lawrence, D. H. 36–8, 146 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 37, 48 Women in Love 108 Leavis, F. R. (‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’) 147

Le Corbusier 119, 145–6 The Cities of Tomorrow 145 Towards an Architecture 145 Lenin, Vladimir 78, 145 Leo XIII, Pope (‘Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labour’) 102–4 ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (Auden) 156 Levitas, Ruth 15–16, 18, 19 The Concept of Utopia 15 Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society 16 Liberalism 6, 86, 87, 92, 94, 95, 119, 127, 139, 143, 144, 177, 181 Liberal Party 34 liberty 5, 33, 48, 49, 106–11 Liebich, Andre 22, 23 Lilienthal, Otto (Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation) 106–7 linguistic expansion 67 ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (Orwell) 39 Literature and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Stevenson) 132 Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness, and English Literature (Westall and Gardiner) 40, 53n124 ‘Lob’ (Thomas) 28–9 locomotion 6, 58, 115–18 London 8, 22, 24, 25, 30, 31, 40, 67–8, 87, 90, 91, 96, 106, 107–9, 119, 120, 131, 137, 145, 151, 153–5, 157, 159, 169–72 Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (Bellamy) 62, 92, 105, 118 Lord of the World (Benson) 86, 87, 89 Lourdes (Zola) 107 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge) 149 Macdonell, A. G. (England, Their England) 47, 48 Maidenhead Road 119–22 Maine de Biran, Pierre 148, 164 Mandler, Peter 26, 70, 141n33 The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair 12, 41–2 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels) 68, 70 Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture (James) 55, 68

Marcus, Laura (Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema) 115 Marquand, David 48 Marsh, Edward (Georgian Poetry) 30, 126, 141n30 Marsh, Jan (Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, 1880– 1914) 27, 28 Martindale, Cyril C. 78 Marx, Karl (Manifesto of the Communist Party) 68, 70; see also Engels, Frederick ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’ (Leavis) 147 Massey, Doreen (For Space) 18, 19, 130 Masterman, Charles F. G.: The Condition of England 36, 38, 92 England after War: A Study 36 Matless, David 29 Matter and Memory (Bergson) 94 Mazzini, Giuzeppe (‘Nationalism and Nationality’) 59–60 Meckier, Jerome 151, 161 memory: Bergson 94 faith and 91, 95 and identity 118 loss 93, 95 questions of 92–3, 139 uncertainties of 170, 174 Men Like Gods (Wells) 6, 55, 60, 68, 69, 71–5, 78, 115, 116, 118–20, 122, 123, 125, 128, 129, 139 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien (The Year 2440: A Dream if Ever There Was One) 61 Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (White) 136–7 Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Suvin) 14 Metropolis (Lang) 108 Milton, John 48 Mind at the End of Its Tether (Wells) 117 The Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Reflections (Begbie) 124 modernity 2, 4–8, 13, 17–19, 24, 27, 30, 36–9, 44, 45, 47, 48, 55–61, 64, 79, 80, 87, 93, 99–101, 105, 106, 111, 119, 145–7, 154, 160, 161, 165,

169–71, 173 ‘A Modern Theory of Human Personality’ (Benson) 94 A Modern Utopia (Wells) 55, 58, 63, 64, 72–4, 116, 135, 147–8 More, Thomas 10, 18, 61 Utopia 17 Morris, William (News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest) 10, 16, 28, 58, 62–3, 65, 92, 118, 129, 131, 172 Morton, Arthur Leslie (The English Utopia) 10, 11, 22, 134, 182 Morton, H. V. (In Search of England) 29, 47 Moylan, Tom (Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination) 15–16, 18, 19 Mr. Britling Sees It Through (Wells) 65, 115, 127 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) 108 Mussolini, Benito 78 ‘My Country Right or Left’ (Orwell) 39 Myers, Frederick W. (Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death) 94, 162 Nairn, Tom (Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited) 22 Nate, Richard 72 National Character and the Factors in Its Formation (Barker) 35, 43 national discourse 2–9, 12, 13, 20, 21, 30, 32, 41, 55, 56, 72, 77, 78, 80, 86, 110, 115, 118, 127, 136, 169, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182 National Identity (Smith) 20 national ideology 20 ‘Nationalism and Nationality’ (Mazzini) 59 nationalism 1–2, 13, 20, 22, 42, 59–61, 127 The National Mind: English, French, German (Demiashkevich) 44 national unification 34, 42 Nations and Nationalism (Smith) 20 The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (White) 155–6 neoliberalism 40 The Newbolt Report (on The Teaching of English in England, 1921) 147 The New Machiavelli (Wells) 120 Newman, John Henry: Apologia Pro Vita Sua 86 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine 86, 87, 148 News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest (Morris) 62, 92, 118, 129

The New Teaching of History with a Reply to Some Recent Criticisms of The Outline of History (Wells) 59–60 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 7, 17, 46, 79, 108–10, 169, 174 Non-Catholic Denominations (Benson) 87–8 Nonconformity 86 None Other Gods (Benson) 89 nostalgia 36, 38, 40, 79, 182 ‘A Note on Eugenics’ (Huxley) 152 Notes from Underground (Dostoyevsky) 120 ‘Notes on Liberty and the Boundaries of the Promised Land’ (Huxley) 145 novum 14 Oakesmith, John (Race and Nationality: An Inquiry into the Origin and Growth of Patriotism) 35 ‘The Oath against Modernism’ (Pius X) 91 Oceana, Or, England and Her Colonies (Froude) 24, 25 On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (White) 38–9 The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (Wells) 70 Ortega y Gasset, José (The Revolt of the Masses) 75 Orthodoxy (Chesterton) 111 Orwell, George: Coming Up for Air 38 Homage to Catalonia 8 ‘Inside the Whale’ 109 ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ 39 ‘My Country Right or Left’ 39 Nineteen Eighty-Four 7, 17, 46, 79, 108–10, 169, 174 ‘The Prevention of Literature’ 109 The Road to Wigan Pier 38 ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ 1 Our Inheritance: Speeches and Addresses (Baldwin) 150 The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (Wells) 1, 60, 76, 136 Pan-Germanism 74 Paradoxes of Catholicism (Benson) 88 Parrinder, Patrick 58, 117, 134–5

Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond 16–17 Partington, John S. (Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells) 56, 60 ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis: On the Doctrine of the Modernists’ (Pius X) 91 pastoral 3, 4, 6, 7, 28–32, 77, 101, 116, 127, 129, 132, 133, 149, 154, 156, 159–63, 165, 169–74, 180–2 containment 13, 61–7 Pavlov, Ivan 69 People’s Budget Bill (1909) 98 ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (Kant) 59 Pius II, Pope 91 Pius X, Pope: ‘The Oath against Modernism’ 91 ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis: On the Doctrine of the Modernists’ 91 The Pilgrim’s Progress, From This World, to That Which Is to Come (Bunyan) 120 place-bound allegiances 19, 177–80 Plato 58, 74, 75, 84n110, 105, 139, 160 ‘Points of View’ (Benson) 99 political elites 20, 73, 106 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Jameson) 14 politics: Catholic Church 91 constitutional 35 contemporary 71 Edwardian 5, 95–106 history and 46 Liberal 126 place-specific 60 radical 157 The Politics of Englishness (Aughey) 35 The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice (Goodwin and Taylor) 61 ‘In Praise of Limestone’ (Auden) 8 The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (Wordsworth) 162–3 The Preservation of Rural England (Abercrombie) 29 ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (Orwell) 109

The Principle of Hope (Bloch) 13, 15, 18 ‘Pro Rege Nostro’ (Henley) 48 Protestantism 23, 27, 86, 87, 89, 96 Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850– 1930 (Collini) 76 Puritanism 86 The Queen’s Tragedy (Benson) 88 Race and Nationality: An Inquiry into the Origin and Growth of Patriotism (Oakesmith) 35 recollection 6, 7, 65, 93, 94, 147, 160–2, 165, 170, 174, 176, 177 redemption 6, 30, 86, 111, 115, 116, 118, 119, 129, 132, 133, 136, 139, 155, 157, 160, 164, 171, 173 Reflections on the French Revolution and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event (Burke) 32, 33 Reform Act (1867) 41 regimentation 5, 44–5, 48, 49, 75, 108–9, 145 Renan, Ernest 20 Renier, G. J. (The English: Are They Human?) 45–7 Representation of the People Act (1884) 41 Republic (Plato) 74, 75, 84n110, 160 ‘Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labour’ (Leo XIII) 102–4 Rethinking Utopia: Place, Power, Affect (Bell) 18 The Revolt of the Masses (Ortega y Gasset) 75 revolution 4, 15, 32–3, 39, 40, 44, 56, 67–72, 77, 173, 174–5, 182 Revolutionary Etude (Chopin) 129 The Rights of Man; or, What are We Fighting for? (Wells) 12 The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell) 38 Roman Catholicism 78, 85–96, 103, 104, 106, 109 Rubinstein, William D. 151 Rumford, Chris 60–1 Ruskin, John (The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century) 26, 128 Russia in the Shadows (Wells) 68 Russian Revolution 80 Ruttmann, Walter (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City) 108

St Augustine (The City of God against the Pagans) 87 St Paul’s Cathedral 93, 131, 145–6, 155 samurai (Wells) 58–9, 63, 64, 73, 135, 147, 148 Santayana, George (Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies) 43–5 Sargent, Lyman Tower (‘Utopianism and National Identity’) 13, 89 Scotland 21–2, 27, 31–2, 42, 96, 173 Scott, Emily Eliza (Critical Landscapes) 154; see also Swenson, Kirsten J. ‘Scramble for Africa’ 26 Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (Claeys) 18 In Search of England (Morton) 29 Seeley, John Robert (The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures) 23, 24 self-identification 77, 94–5 Shakespeare, William 148–9 The Shape of Things to Come (Wells) 55–7, 59, 60, 64, 69, 75 Shaw, George Bernard: Fabian Essays in Socialism 35 John Bull’s Other Island 153 Sherborne, Michael (H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life) 12, 66 The Sleeper Awakes (Wells) 154 Smith, Anthony D.: National Identity 20 Nations and Nationalism 20 Smollett, Tobias (The Expedition of Humphry Clinker) 22 social: exclusion 180 mobility 34, 149–53 progress 56 reconstitution 133 socialism 40, 87, 94, 96, 102–4, 123 sociocultural stereotypes 6, 149–53 socioeconomic relations 2, 7, 16–19, 36, 37, 71, 87, 88, 100, 103, 139, 144 Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (Santayana) 43 The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (Ford) 108 Spaces of Hope (Harvey) 19–20 The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (Beaumont) 134 The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind (Ford) 27 Stähler, Axel 78, 90 Stapleton, Julia 33, 53n116, 55–6, 80n5

Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood: The England of G. K. Chesterton 123 Stevenson, Randall (Literature and the Great War, 1914–1918) 132 The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (Ruskin) 26, 128 ‘A Story of the Days to Come’ (Wells) 57 The Strange Death of Liberal England (Dangerfield) 34 ‘Subject-Matter of Poetry’ (Huxley) 146 The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek) 3 Surrey 7, 8, 25, 26, 154–7 Survey of International Affairs (Toynbee) 152 Suvin, Darko (Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre) 14 Swenson, Kirsten J. (Critical Landscapes) 154; see also Scott, Emily Eliza Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Žižek) 20 Taylorism 108 Taylor, Keith (The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice) 61; see also Goodwin, Barbara technology 5, 7, 57, 63, 66, 71, 78, 80, 86, 93, 106, 110, 111, 151, 158, 160 Things to Come (Korda) 75 This England: An Anthology of Her Writers (Thomas) 28 Thomas, Edward 27, 172 ‘England’ 28 ‘Lob’ 28–9 This England: An Anthology of Her Writers 28 The Three Cities (Zola) 107 The Time Machine: An Invention (Wells) 56, 71, 117, 134 The Times 159 Tono-Bungay (Wells) 67, 68, 137 Towards an Architecture (Le Corbusier) 145 Toye, Richard 141n29 Toynbee, Arnold J. (Survey of International Affairs) 152 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (Eliot) 147 ‘Tragedy and the Whole Truth’ (Huxley) 146 Tully, James 59 Tyrrell, George 91–2

ultimum 14–15, 21 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) 6, 23, 30, 31– 2, 34, 96, 98, 100, 119, 124, 127 United States of America (USA) 15, 24, 25, 42, 60, 62, 105, 159, 170 universal suffrage 5, 34, 48, 92, 99 Utopia (More) 17 Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (Levitas) 16 Utopian Fantasy: A Study of Utopian Fiction since the Nineteenth Century (Gerber) 11 ‘Utopianism and National Identity’ (Sargent) 13 Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond (Parrinder) 16–17 Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (James) 148, 164 The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (Keiller) 8 Wagar, W. Warren (H. G. Wells and the World State) 55, 70, 171 Wales 22, 23, 27, 42, 96, 173 Wandering into Brave New World (Higdon) 78 Wånggren, Lena (Gender, Technology and the New Woman) 106 Ward, Colin (Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape) 27; see also Hardy, Colin Ward, Paul 35 Warf, Barney 60 The War in the Air (Wells) 71 The War of the Wheels: H. G. Wells and the Bicycle (Withers) 115 The War of the Worlds (Wells) 1, 25–6, 57, 64 The War That Will End War (Wells) 125 The Waste Land (Eliot) 30, 147, 161 Webb, Sidney 35 Wegner, Phillip E. (Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity) 17–19, 169–70 Wells, H. G. 1–2, 4–8, 10–12, 17, 25, 26, 49, 55–80, 85, 99, 101, 105, 106, 111, 115–18, 120, 123, 125–8, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 169, 174, 177, 178, 180–2

After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation 69 Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story 99–100 Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought 58, 66–7, 85 The Autocracy of Mr. Parham: His Remarkable Adventures in This Changing World 65–6, 72 The Camford Visitation 77 ‘The Common-Sense of World Peace’ 85 In the Days of the Comet 67 The Door in the Wall 116 The Dream 6, 115–19, 128, 129, 133, 135–9 An Englishman Looks at the World, Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters 66, 67 Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866) 68, 120 The First Men in the Moon 57 Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution 11, 12 The History of Mr. Polly 65 The Holy Terror 55 ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’ 56 Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy 66 The Island of Doctor Moreau 57 Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education 76 Manifesto of the Communist Party 68 Men Like Gods 6, 55, 60, 68, 69, 71–5, 78, 115, 116, 118–20, 122, 123, 125, 128, 129, 139 Mind at the End of Its Tether 117 A Modern Utopia 55, 58, 63, 64, 72–4, 116, 135, 147–8 Mr. Britling Sees It Through 65, 115, 127 The New Machiavelli 120 The New Teaching of History with a Reply to Some Recent Criticisms of The Outline of History 59–60 The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution 70 The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind 1, 60, 76, 136

The Rights of Man; or, What are We Fighting for? 12 Russia in the Shadows 68 samurai 58–9, 63, 64, 73, 135, 147, 148 The Shape of Things to Come 55–7, 59, 60, 64, 69, 75 The Sleeper Awakes 154 ‘A Story of the Days to Come’ 57 The Time Machine: An Invention 56, 71, 117, 134 Tono-Bungay 67, 68, 137 The War in the Air 71 The War of the Worlds 1, 25–6, 57, 64 The War That Will End War 125 When the Sleeper Wakes 57, 106 The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind 73 World Brain 67, 76 The World of William Clissold: A Novel at a New Angle 59 The World Set Free 67 A Year of Prophesying 66 ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ (Orwell) 1 Wellsian utopia 5, 6, 8, 55–61, 65–9, 71–5, 77–80, 101, 105, 134, 136, 139, 169, 174, 177, 180–2 Westall, Claire (Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness, and English Literature) 40, 53n124; see also Gardiner, Michael Westminster Abbey 93, 155, 172 Westminster Parliament 33, 34, 131, 155 When the Sleeper Wakes (Wells) 57, 106 Whig historiography 4, 33, 67–72, 77, 174 White, Gilbert (The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne) 155–6 White, Hayden (Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe) 136–7 White, Patrick (On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain) 38–9 ‘Wholly-Truthful Art’ (Huxley) 146 Williams, Charles (The English Poetic Mind) 162 Williams-Ellis, Clough: Britain and the Beast 29 England and the Octopus 29; see also Keynes, John Maynard Williams, Raymond: The Country and the City 32

Culture and Society, 1780–1950 34–5, 37–8 Windsor Castle 32, 121 Winstanley, Gerrard 156 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Dostoyevsky) 120 Withers, Jeremy (The War of the Wheels: H. G. Wells and the Bicycle) 115 Woiak, Joanne 144 Women in Love (Lawrence) 108 Woolf, Virginia (Mrs. Dalloway) 108 Wordsworth, William 128, 129, 157–63 The Excursion 128 Lyrical Ballads 149 The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind 162–3 The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (Wells) 73 World Brain (Wells) 67, 76 The World of William Clissold: A Novel at a New Angle (Wells) 59 The World Set Free (Wells) 67 World State 1, 2, 4–8, 24, 49, 55–61, 63, 64, 66, 68, 71–9, 85, 86, 101, 105– 7, 110, 143, 145–155, 153, 157–65, 169, 170, 173–5, 178, 180–2 Worth, Aaron 57 The Year 2440: A Dream if Ever There Was One (Mercier) 61 A Year of Prophesying (Wells) 66 Zamyatin, Yevgeny (The Islanders) 44–5 Zhuangzi 135 Žižek, Slavoj 49, 135 The Sublime Object of Ideology 3 Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology 20 Zola, Émile: Lourdes 107 The Three Cities 107