‘Modern’ utopias
In 1905, H G Wells published an experimental fiction with the provocative title, A Modern Utopia. The book proposed that tomorrow’s ideal societies would not be like those of the past that saw happiness as a matter of arresting change, of keeping things still. Plato described a changeless society overseen by philosopher ‘Guardians’ in The Republic (c. 380 BC); and in Utopia (1516), Thomas More based his new world on the model of a lonely island state. Isolating the good society was one way of keeping it safe from the world’s corruption. This made islands and mountain valleys an obvious location.


Dream visions

William Morris’s utopian romance, News from Nowhere (1890) also links a personal journey into the future to a process of history. His hero, William Guest, falls out of bed into a London transformed by a socialist revolution. It’s a magical change, but in the end no substitute for the hard struggle of history, as a long section on ‘How the Change Came’ makes fully apparent. In his review of Looking Backward (1887), Morris was critical of what he saw as Bellamy’s ‘tightly drilled’ vision.^[3] Instead of a collective end-point, he casts Nowhere as a personal dream, inspired by the dream-visions of medieval literature, but written to prompt diverse striving for better futures. Guest is accordingly ejected from this ideal society at the end of the book, the implication being that happiness is something we will need to work at together.