New World Eden

In it a wanderer, Raphael Hythloday, relates to More and his friend Peter Giles of Antwerp the topography, daily life, mores, religion and government of a far off island, a place in which society exists in harmony, gold is so abundant it is used for making chamber pots and no one starves or begs.

Whether this New World Eden reflected More’s political or religious convictions has for centuries been fodder for scholarly disputation. What cannot be disputed, however, is that Utopia is a beguiling Shaggy Dog Joke whose details ignore human instincts, behavior, history and reality. To live in the society More imagined would be an agony of sterile uniformity similar to the dystopia imagined by George Orwell in his novel 1984.


Several years after the first print of Utopia, Desiderius Erasmus wrote to Ulrich van Hutten that More “. . . was always so pleased with a joke, that it might seem that jesting was the main object of his life.” In fact, a sixteenth century biographer of More, Nicholas Harpsfield, considered Utopia a “iollye inuention,” while Erasmus spoke “of it as if it were primarily a comic book.” More himself tipped his humorous hand by naming his Eden-like isle Utopia. In Greek, ou and topos mean literally “no place,” inferring that this island society cannot be credible. Throughout the book similar puns occur.

Of course, puns alone do not insinuate glib motives on More’s part, just as contemporary reviewers’ dismissals of Utopia as an invention or comic book do not vitiate its significance. What exposes More’s joke clearly is his description of the society, one in which exist “no pretext for evading work; no taverns, or alehouses, or brothels; no chances for corruption; no hiding places . . . Because they live in full view of all . . .” This is high humor, indeed, but humor of the sort that pales upon reflection, and produces a response of bland bewilderment that a learned and well-traveled man could be so ignorant of reality and the human condition as to consider this imagined society beguiling to anyone.