Reviewed by: The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy by Michael Robertson, and: William Morris’s Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics, and Prefiguration by Owen Holland Alessa Johns (bio) The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy, by Michael Robertson; pp. viii + 318. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, $29.95, £25.00. William Morris’s Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics, and Prefiguration, by Owen Holland; pp. xi + 337. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, $99.99, £67.99. The two books under review both argue for the ongoing relevance of Victorian utopianism. In The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy, Michael Robertson sets out to explain why Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman remain worth reading. He points to attractive aspects of their work: their democratic socialist politics, their challenges to the patriarchal family, their creation of space for spiritual and religious feeling, and their attempts to foster reverence for the natural world. Robertson’s book, based on extensive research and engagingly written, is intended for the interested lay reader who is unfamiliar with these authors. He accordingly begins with an introductory first chapter covering crucial background: Thomas More’s Utopia (1551), the early-nineteenth-century utopian socialists Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, and the transmission of Owen’s and Fourier’s ideas to America, especially via the intentional communities of New Harmony and Brook Farm. The next four chapters discuss each of his writers, dwelling on how their ideas developed in tandem with their experiences and the substantial influence they enjoyed. He then ends with a look at utopianism today. Beginning with Bellamy, Robertson focuses on his novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) and explains the ways in which the story was “built upon central agents and values of modernity: science and technology, mechanization, urbanization, and centralized bureaucratic administration” (114). Bellamy then founded the so-called Nationalist political program (the “national control of industry with the resulting changes,” along [End Page 158] with the periodicals necessary to promote it) (65). In the next chapter, we learn how Morris reacted against Bellamy. Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) appeared two years after Looking Backward; he disdained Bellamy’s idea of an industrial army and instead, influenced by John Ruskin, favored medieval-style social and artistic practices, envisioning small-scale communities supported by individuals who took pleasure in handcrafts and artistic creation. The vision is in line with Morris’s own projects in design, poetry, translation, architecture, and restoration. Robertson then looks beyond Morris to consider the queering of utopian ideas to be found in Carpenter and Gilman. While Carpenter’s utopian vision echoes Morris’s in its objection to industrialism, modernity, and its embrace of small communities and pleasure in work, it differs in that social change in Carpenter comes not through workers’ revolt, but through the combination of feminine and masculine virtues in what Carpenter terms “homogenic” (160) community members or “Urnings” (162). Carpenter sought out the teachings of two foreign gurus: Walt Whitman, whom he visited in the United States, and Ramaswamy, whom he visited in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) for a month of daily study. Ramaswamy’s concept of “cosmic consciousness” led Carpenter to his insights about the role of homogenic “intermediate types,” whose “special access to the new consciousness,” overcoming dualisms, made them “uniquely qualified to lead humanity in the next phase of human evolution” (166–67). Gilman’s Herland (1915) depicts a very different style of community for women: one that accommodates women’s leadership and female friendship. Gilman’s peripatetic childhood was succeeded by a young adult life that included futile attempts to cure depression, an issue that spawned her best-known work, the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). Gilman critiqued current medical approaches to mental health issues, particularly the rest cure. She essentially healed herself through work, in particular through writing and giving lectures. Following Bellamy’s nationalist ideas, she composed Women and Economics (1898) and then, in her utopian texts, imagined a new, profitable existence for women, including expanded educational opportunities, kitchenless homes, and childrearing delegated to professionals. Robertson does not avoid Gilman’s offensive eugenic and antisemitic notions; he gives a...
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Aug 24, 2020
Maryam Ramezanian + 5
Open Access