The
Two Worlds:
‘Thomas More’s Utopia set the mould for all future utopian writing.’ To what extent and in what ways is
either New Atlantis indebted to More’s Utopia?
I would like to start this essay with a
quote from Paul Salzman in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis since it nicely encapsulates what I want to say in the
introduction. He writes:
In this essay I will be looking disputing
the above quote and seeing exactly how much Thomas More’s Utopia had influenced Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, arguing that it was mostly the invented concept, and the name, of
the Utopia genre that Bacon was indebted to over everything else. One could argue that Thomas More got
the idea of a Utopia narrative from Plato’s Atlantis story in his Timaeus and Critias,
though Plato was using the genre of allegory in his narrative and which New Atlantis borrows it’s
title from. More may have formed a
model and form for the genre but it was arguably around before him. The two
present their own versions of a perfect society.
Salzman later says that the New Atlantis is
deliberately counter to Utopia where science
structures society instead of humanist ethics. This seems to be the books’ main difference with each
other. But before we
go into the books’ differences we’ll have to look at what they have similar to
each other, and to do this we will have to look at the surrounding historical
and biographical details of them.
So let us first look at the context of the two books.
Between the years the two books were written there was a massive sea
change in English culture. In
Thomas More’s time England was a Catholic nation. By the time we get to Bacon it had become a Protestant
country. Usefully for this study
the two men occupied the same position of Lord Chancellor and were both
interested in how society was fit together and how it worked. Both of these men’s careers ended
ignobly with More being beheaded for disagreeing with King Henry VIII and Bacon
being charged for a number of accounts of corruption and for it held in the
Tower of London. For their
differences there was a great amount that was similar between the two men since
they both wrote about how a perfect society should work. We should try and see first what New
Atlantis owes to Utopia before decided what it attributed to the genre itself.
New Atlantis is really indebted to Thomas
More for inventing, and giving a name, the Utopia genre. As Paul Salzman writes:
‘More’s
Utopia itself seems to have been interpreted in
the early seventeenth century not so much as a particular kind of prose fiction
as a particular kind of concept’[2]
Although it should not be thought that
Bacon would not have written a type of New Atlantis without the reference to More but we could say that it did focus his
imagination into a particular model of writing, which he could not have done
without More. There are other
similarities in these books as well as what type of books they are.
What are similar in the two books are their founding fathers. More’s King Utopus gives his name to
his nation Utopia and Bacon’s Solamona prescribes his name to an institute in
Bensalem. The writers felt that it
was necessary to give their imaginary countries origin stories and it is
through these founding fathers that they get a conception narrative. There is also a brief homage from Bacon
to More that might expound on their similarities.
Bacon mentions in passing More’s Utopia,
the part about prospective partners seeing each other naked, during a
discussion on marriage. The
character Tirsan says to this about his people’s reaction to the passage: “This
they dislike; for they think it a scorn to give a refusal after so familiar
knowledge” but, Tirsan goes on, they do allow to see each other naked in nearby
pools known as the Adam and Eve’s pools.
This shows that New Atlantis is in
communication with Utopia responding to the
other’s ideas. This is one of the
few times that this is made clear.
Elsewhere in New Atlantis there is a lack
of reference to Utopia. That is not the only difference the two
books have. We should also look at
their styles that communicate their ideas.
The two books’ form is based on dialogue and description. There is only the faintest of plots in
both books as the authors are more concerned about representing their fictional
Utopias in as clearly a manner as they can make out. In the second part of Utopia there
is an extended monologue from the Utopian Hythloday. He describes in little essays various parts of his
society. New Atlantis contains a bit more narrative in that there are characters out on a
journey and it uses the discovery aspect of utopias to a more fuller. While they are both similar in form
there are key differences between the two books as R. W. Chamber shows:
‘While
More does not make his Utopians Christian, and does not give them a sacred
book, Bacon invents an outrageous piece of ‘miraculous evangelism’[3]
Chambers points out the different uses of religion. It is in Bacon’s New Atlantis that miracles occur, which is surprising for this most scientific of
writers. Bacon uses religion
prominently with the prayers and psalms used at various functions in his world
such as at the Feast of the Family.
More does not have religion used in an overt way but is subtly included,
such as the plain garbs and the productive work ethic, which is interestingly
more of a Protestant trait. They
also have the question of games.
The Utopians play games of numbers and vice verses virtue, while the
people of New Atlantis do not participate in
playing anything that resembles a game.
The Utopians are not against progress of knowledge because they attend
lectures on a number of subjects.
Both of the texts are about discovery of new kinds of knowledge. Arguably Bacon makes more use of the
journey as discovery because of the new technologies and techniques he has
included in his narrative.
They both use religion in different ways. Bacon has the allusions to biblical life (Bensalem/Jerusalem,
Salomon/Solomon) while More has the monkish lifestyle. It is interesting that it is a
Catholic, in a religion known for its pomp and grandeur, to write about a life
that is simple, modest and unadorned with glitter and for the Protestant to have
the Father of Salomon’s House expensively attired in a rich cloth.
The Utopians are not people who go entirely without science as
‘Husbandry is a science common to them all’[4],
but on the whole Utopia deals more in rural and
rational solutions to their problems, such as farming and labor. New Atlantis takes a much more technological answer to people’s problems such as
artificial wells, Chambers of Health, high towers and large deep caves, which
could be seen as revolutionary at it’s time.
The people in New Atlantis have a purpose of being, which is:
‘“The
End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things;
and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things
possible”’[5]
The Utopians in Utopia do not have such a mission statement but they have always seemed to
do not need such a statement because they do know how to live well by working,
learning crafts and attending lectures.
In New Atlantis the art of living rarely
came into his the society, it was more concerned with producing new machines to
make life easier. Utopia has a definite philosophy of living that the Utopians are centered
on. The people in New Atlantis do not have this type of sense of living other than progress at all
costs.
Judah Bierman in the journal New Atlantis and Other Renaissance
Utopias writes that the world of More’s Utopia seems very distant from Bacon’s scientific progression, but it
doesn’t mean the Utopians were not capable of complex processes and
observations. He continues by
saying that we could call More’s science a ‘“natural social science” a more
desirable science than mere industrial technology’[6]
Another writer, Robert P. Adams, picks up this point of progress as a source of
difference by saying:
‘Nowhere
in the picture of Utopia, however, do we find the powerful and characteristic
Baconian lust to make all knowledge man’s province an the restless Baconian
desire for perpetual new inventions and material improvements which go beyond
what the Utopians regard as naturally “necessary”[7]
For a man of New Atlantis he must progress at all costs for the gain of power over the world,
and over other people. The
Utopians do not have this need to progress because possibly they realise that
to have power over the world amounts to very little in their world if you
cannot be content with what you already possess.
Utopia can be interpreted as a satire on
fantasy thinking but in New Atlantis it is much
harder to get a satire interpretation because so much of seems to be written in
earnest. Bacon, it appears, wants
to see all these changes in his own lifetime with society progressing nicely
along his lines. More takes a
lighter touch about “no-places” with some cynicism about the possibility of
being able to create a perfect society.
Considering he wrote about a place of peace its hard to take this
serious when you know that Thomas More had people burned alive in his
life. He had to be aware of the
disparities between his life and his idea of a better world, hence the darkly
jokey edge he brings to Utopia. He places his faith and humanist
understanding with people, who he understands are not perfect and never can
be. Maybe this is why Bacon is
keener to see society change with better technology because at least with
technology there is a possible chance of being better perfected upon than human
beings.
So in conclusion Thomas More may have been the inventor of the Utopian
genre of fiction and given it a name, but beyond the concept, the frame, the
model, there is little else to suggest that its influence was anything but
that. Francis Bacon’s New
Atlantis is very different from Utopia in its basic construct of what society is. In Utopia there is labor,
learning and no private property, in New Atlantis there is advancement, technology and prayer. Bacon wrote his version of a perfect
society that has very little in common with More’s vision other than it is a
fictional society that operates outside usual geographic locations. The question should be if Thomas More
did not write Utopia would we have New
Atlantis in its present state? To my mind I would say that I imagine
we would get New Atlantis but a different
version of it, perhaps one not set in an imaginary place or with quite so many
outlandish ideas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, Robert P, ‘The Social
Responsibilities of Science in Utopia, New Atlantis and after’ from the Journal
of the History of Ideas, vol 10., No. 3 (Jun.,
1949), pp. 374-398
Bacon, Francis, ‘New Atlantis from Three
Early Modern Utopias, (New York: Oxford World
Classics)
Bierman Judah, ‘Science and Society’
in the New Atlantis and Other Renaissance Utopias, PMLA, vol. 78, No. 5 (Dec., 1963),
pp-492-500
Chambers , R. W., Thomas More (London: Johathan Cape ltd, 1935)
More, Thomas,‘Utopia’ from Three Early
Modern Utopias, (New York: Oxford World Classics,
1999)
Salzman, Paul, ‘Narrative contexts
for Bacon’s New Atlantis’ from Francis
Bacon’s New Atlantis ed. by Bronwen Price
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002)
[1] Paul Salzman ‘Narrative contexts for Bacon’s New Atlantis’ from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis ed. by Bronwen Price (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002)
[2] ibid
[4] Thomas More, ‘Utopia’ from Three Early Modern Utopias, (New York: Oxford World Classics, 1999) p56
[6] Judah Bierman, ‘Science and Society’ in the New Atlantis and Other
Renaissance Utopias, PMLA, vol. 78, No. 5 (Dec., 1963), pp-492-500
[7] Robert P. Adams, ‘The Social Responsibilities of Science in Utopia,
New Atlantis and after’ from the Journal of the History of Ideas, vol 10., No. 3 (Jun., 1949), pp. 374-398
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