In our third part of the life and times of William Godwin Tarquin O’Flaherty writes of Utopia, and the Age of Reason
It was Godwin’s belief that people cannot reason, cannot even begin to think about justice until they are released from the exploitative servitude imposed upon them by governments, the law and the Industrial Revolution. When people are eventually released from this parasitic grip, and a more equable arrangement arrived at, then (he thought) an infinitely better, perhaps Utopian society, a society of equals, might be arrived at.
Tolstoy read Godwin’s work, as did Pyotr Kropotkin, the Russian geographer, anarchist and philosopher. Marx and Engels used his work to illustrate how, in England, a country which referred to itself as ‘the Workshop of the World’, exploitation of the workers was still a commonplace and that there was an urgent and immediate need for change.
As I have observed elsewhere, Utopian ideals have appeared again and again in our literature over the centuries. The christian Heaven, Valhalla, the Greek Elysium, the Celtic Tir na nOg, (the Land of Youth) are all variants on the same theme. In the more recent past, imagined Utopian tales have been written, not to glorify yet another imaginary Heaven, but as a way to subtly criticize either an established order or a fading one. Thomas More’s Utopia, or Jonathon Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ set out to do precisely that. More was wise enough to have his Utopia printed in French and published in the Low Countries. Swift existed in a period of the 18th century when the Whigs and the Tories were the only parties. The Tories were on the side of God, the Whigs on that of profit. Swift hated war, colonial exploitation, and the depressing effect of money lending jiggery-pokery on the state of agriculture. He saw the ascendant Whigs as representing all of these things and he set about lampooning them.
Swift was one of the first of the great Tory radicals who opposed those capitalist developments which intruded on the rights and freedoms of the masses. He earned himself not a few enemies because of his stance and was denied preferment because of it. I wonder if becoming an immortal of English Literature is any consolation to him now?