Sir Thomas More and Utopia (1516 in Latin/ Ralph Robinson's 1st English translation, 1551)

Genre: Philosophical travel fiction married to autobiography and satire.  More's playful fusing of genres is characteristic of European humanism, as is his self-deflating wit.  This also is a clue to how the "novel"  emerged in the next two centuries as a genre of prose fiction pretending to historical truth, even though its readers and author know it is in some sense a "lie."  The text contains many layers of protective narrative insulation, especially More's decision to deliver the most radical comments from the persona of the character, Raphael Hythloday.   The "conversation overheard" does not entirely exculpate the hearer who reports it, though, as readers of Chaucer realize after serious consideration of the General Prologue (ll. 727-48) and the prologue to the Miller's Tale (ll. 59-78).

Characters: "More" (in quotes to distinguish him from More, the author); Raphael Hythloday the traveler from Utopia; Peter Giles, More's and "More"'s friend and a native of Antwerp (Belgium); King Utopus, founder of Utopia; the Anemolian ambassadors, and other minor members of Utopian society.  Of all the characters, several are named allegorically.  In the Norton excerpts, these include the "Anemolian" (Greek--"windy") ambassadors, and our main informant, Raphael Hythloday (Greek--"skilled purveyor of nonsense").  Click on the hyperlink if the story of Tobit and the Angel Raphael is not familiar to you.

Plot Summary: On a diplomatic trip to Brussels, "More" takes a side trip to the seaport of Antwerp where he falls into conversation with Peter Giles and Giles' acquaintance, Raphael Hythloday, who sailed with Amerigo Vespucci.  The men go to "More"'s house where, in the garden, Raphael tells them of the history, customs and culture of the Utopians.

Issues and general research sources:

  1. More sets out certain geographical and social starting points for the founding of Utopia which might be viewed as essential for the success of the strange experiment he contemplates there.
    • What are they and why do they enable this culture to so radically break away from most of the European tradition?
    • What European states have the most potential to be "utopias" by those physical and cultural definitions?
    • What attributes stand in their way?
  2. The humanist love of paradox and ironic contradiction shows itself first in the name, which may mean the "good place" or "no place."

    More's work probably influenced the American Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, especially in the conception and description of Walden.

    • Might you find the same tendency toward deliberate self-contradiction in Thoreau's work, as well?
  1. In the same year that Utopia was published, More's friend, the humanist priest, Desidarius Erasmus, wrote a Latin essay whose title can be translated The Education of a Christian Prince.  In it, he set out a bold strategy for reforming the hereditary monarchic states of Europe, one by one, by means of Humanist scholars' tutoring the heirs to the throne in classical and Christian values.  Instead of learning to rule only as a means to pursue their families' and their own personal egotistical appetites, such a Humanist "Christian prince" was to rule "as a good man for the common gain of all," a radical departure from ordinary royal policy in the previous thousand years.  To that end, Erasmus managed to get himself appointed royal tutor to the son of Henry VII, the future Henry VIII.  From what you know of Henry VIII's reign, how successful do you think this Humanist plan for political reform turned out to be, and do you see any alternatives to it or the Medieval status quo?  We could think of Erasmus' effect on English government as gradual and multi-generational, since Elizabeth I, tutored by Roger Ascham, was a literate and historical self-conscious ruler who might be said to embody some goals set out in Education.  But the circumstance which actually ended English sovereigns' beliefs that they were the government and that the government served them would have to be the trial and execution of Charles I in 1647-9 on orders of a revolutionary Parliamentary jury.
  2. Erasmus also wrote an essay on scholars' proverbial reference to the classical "Seleni of Alcibiades" which contained a notion relevant to More's strategy in Utopia.  In classical Greek households, a "Silenus" was a grotesque statue of an old man playing the flute which was popular as a curio.  They were carved such that, if you knew how to open them, you would discover within the figure of a god, resplendent in its beauty.  At one point in Plato's Athenaeus (v), Alcibiades, Socrates' bad-boy student, described Socrates, himself, as a sort of Silenus, ugly on the outside but when properly opened, revealing a god.  Knowledge, Erasmus' suggests, might just be like a Silenus, ugly on the outside, but containing something beautiful within it, and learning might be discovering how to open the ugly things we encounter in reality to discover the beautiful things they might contain.  He mocks most people's love of surface beauty by suggesting that most people are Sileni "in reverse," with their beauty on the outside and ugliness and immorality on the inside.  He even goes so far as to say that "nobody is further from true wisdom than those people with their grand titles, learned bonnets, splendid sashes and bejeweled rings, who profess to be wisdom's peak."  (Wonder who he's talking about?)
    • In More's critique of social order, economy, and government, do you see any aspects which seem grotesquely distorted, and might they contain a tiny kernel of something beautiful if interpreted correctly?
    • Might Utopia, itself, be a kind of Silenus? For instance, notice that in the last sentence I did not italicize or underscore the name, Utopia.
    • Where is Utopia?
    • Can you tell where Raphael Hythloday is trying to take you when he says "if you had been in Utopia with me"?

To go to the St. Thomas More Web Page, click here. 

To go to the Society for Utopian Studies web site maintained by Naomi Jacobs of U. Maine, Orono, click here.

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