‘An Idea for a Principality’? Encountering the East in Bacon's New Atlantis

Abstract

In 1605 there appeared in London a small volume entitled Mundus Alter Et Idem Siue Terra Australis ante hac semper incognita longus itineribus pergorini Academici imperrime lustrata. The book claimed to be authored by one 'Mercurius Britannicus' and printed in Frankfurt; it has since been claimed as the work of Joseph Hall, later Bishop of Exeter, then Norwich.1 The title of this satirical utopia, which charts Mercurius's travels through unknown southern lands, makes explicit an understanding present to some degree in all utopian writing: the imagined location is at once different from and the same as the writer's own world. The utopia is indicative of the author's own society, as well as describing a place that is deliberately at variance with it. This simultaneous similarity and difference is described in further detail in Mundus Alter et Idem by its editor, William Knight, in his introduction to the reader:Contrary to expectation, dear Reader, driven neither by storms nor by the neverending tossing of waves, without winds, without sails, you have been driven to a new world. [. . .] [Y]ou will recognize the shape of this old world to be such that although you see it to be another world, you will believe it to be the same. [. . .] [I]f you will accurately observe this world's members and features, and carefully ponder them, you will say that you have gazed at the true and living ideal of the world in which we dwell and its epitome. (3-4)The new location is familiar, in that it is like the old one, and different too; in this case, it is superficially presented as a perfection of the world to which the reader is accustomed. With reference to Hall's text, such a suggestion is obviously ironic; the countries that Mercurius encounters are far from ideal, so that J. Max Patrick has suggested that 'dystopia' would be a more accurate description of the text's genre.2 But in emphasising the simultaneous strangeness and familiarity of societies described in a fiction that purports to be about a better place, Hall recognises that this feature is one of the most important elements of ideal-state fiction. It is this coincident similarity and discrepancy between the utopian world and the writer's own environment that allow us to read the utopia as a reflection upon that environment. We are able to speculate as to the writer's ideals by looking for clues in the space between what we presume his own world to have been like, and his representation of a new and different land. It is in this gap between perceived reality and fiction that the utopia operates; this is the utopian space. By establishing similarities and differences between the way things are in 'real life', and the way they are in the utopian fantasy world, the writer is able to use this space both to criticise his own society, by showing how a place that is like it but different in strategic ways can be better, and to praise aspects of another society, whether imagined or real, by showing how particular practices result in perceived improvements.As it has this special function of seeming to reveal what a writer really believes to be best, the utopia is often read as a fantasy or wish-fulfilment. It is presumed that the space between fiction and reality is used by the utopian writer to demonstrate clearly how life could be better. Francis Bacon's utopia, New Atlantis, published posthumously with Sylva Sylvarum in 1627, is often seen as just this kind of dream. Bacon's society is read as a perfected one, with Salomon's House interpreted as his ideal institution of natural philosophy and Bensalem as its ideal setting.3 Certainly the idea of Salomon's House as the manifestation of Bacon's dream institution is supported by evidence elsewhere in his writings that he sought to institutionalise natural knowledge in just such a fashion. As has been well documented, much of Bacon's writing was geared towards establishing a new organisational structure of natural philosophy. …