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+GREGORY CLAEYS The origins of dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell Introduction: Malice in Wonderland — concepts and theory Where did it all go wrong? When did the vision of heaven on earth become an anticipation of hell? In many accounts we emerge from the hopeful, dream-like state of Victorian optimism to pass through what H. G. Wells called the age of confusion into a nightmarish twentieth century, soon powerfully symbolized by the grotesque slaughter of the First World War. Enlightenment optimism respecting the progress of reason and science was now displaced by a sense of the incapacity of humanity to restrain its newly created destructive powers. From that time ideal societies have accordingly been more commonly portrayed negatively in dystopian rather than utopian form. Like most other parts of terra utopus, however, the concept of dystopia has been much contested, many eutopias or ideal societies having dystopic elements and vice versa. Dystopias are often described as ‘conservative’, though they may in fact be sharply critical of the societies they reflect, as we will see. ‘Dystopia’ is often used interchangeably with ‘anti-utopia’ or ‘negative utopia’, by contrast to utopia or ‘eutopia’ (good place), to describe a fictional portrayal of a society in which evil, or negative social and political developments, have the upper hand, or as a satire of utopian aspirations which attempts to show up their fallacies, or which demonstrate, in B. F. Skinner’s words, ‘ways of life we must be sure to avoid’ — in the unlikely event that we can agree on particulars.t Yet as we will see, the most famous exemplar of the genre, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, was not intended to be anti-utopian as such. 
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+The term ‘dystopia’ enters common currency only in the twentieth century, though it appears intermittently beforehand (dys-topia or ‘cacotopia’, bad place, having been used by John Stuart Mill in an 1868 parliamentary debate). The flowering of the dystopian genre was preceded by a variety of satirical tropes. Francis Bacon’s scientific ambitions were brought down several notches in Swift’s famous parody in book three of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The dystopian ideal has also been linked both historically and 107 
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+- GREGORY CLAEYS 
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+- logically | r| : The origins of dystopia 
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+- Five to proclamations of the ‘end of utopia’ (for instance in Marcuse, ef a similar type. It concentrates on British utopian literature, the richest such Lectures, 1970)*, and has sometimes also been wedded to the nowz tradition, and that which has produced its two best-known examples. It is 
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+- debunked hypothesis of the ‘end of history’. In the wake of totalitarianism ; suggested that this ‘turn’ was inherently ambiguous from the start; that is to 
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+- It was also suggested, in the works of Karl Popper (see The Open Society | } say, that its two major features, the socialist engineering of human behav- 
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+- and its Enemies, 1950),3 Jacob Talmon, and others, that the utopian impulse i i 3 iour via the reconstitution of society; and the eugenic engineering of human was itself inherently dystopian. That is to say, the desire to create a much ‘ 9 behaviour via biological manipulation, were viewed widely as both positive improved society in which human behaviour was dramatically superior to $ = and negative developments. This is illustrated by offering a brief introduc- 
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+- the norm implies an intrinsic drift towards punitive methods of controlling F ES tion to the key texts which define the genre, initially by H. G. Wells, but behaviour which inexorably results in some form of police state. 4° more especially Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s This contention, effectively a reductio ad absurdam, was anticipated dec; “ Nineteen Eighty-Four, as well as some lesser texts which define its range 
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+- ades earlier in the suggestion by the Italian psychologist Cesare Lombroso j | and breadth. Their common theme is the quasi-omnipotence of a mono- 
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+- that all socialists were ‘lunatics’, or deviant personalities, as well as in the ; lithic, totalitarian state demanding and normally exacting complete obedi- 
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+- sociologist Herbert Spencer’s allegation that all forms of socialism implied : ence from its citizens, challenged occasionally but usually ineffectually by ‘slavery’ or some variation on the ‘servile state’. It is flawed for two main vestigial individualism or systemic flaws, and relying upon scientific and 
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+- reasons. On the one hand, logically, it assumes that utopianism seeks pertechnological advances to ensure social control. fectibility, and thus, incapable of accepting less, must punish whatever Before commencing, two notes, one theoretical, one historical. Firstly, we 
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+- falls below this standard. Most utopias however do not demand or antici| should briefly consider demarcating the boundaries of the ‘dystopian’ con- 
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+- pate perfection as such, but accept considerably improved behaviour as cept. The term is used here in the broad sense of portraying feasible negaan attainable norm. On the other, historically, it fails to acknowledge that ! tive visions of social and political development, cast principally in fictional 
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+- many forms of utopian practice, such as monasticism, intentional communj| form. By ‘feasible’ we imply that no extraordinary or utterly unrealistic featies of various kinds, and many other variants on ‘ideal? societies, have not tures dominate the narrative. Much of the domain of science fiction is thus 
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+- Proven ‘totalitarian’. Thus while we may continue to debate the ambigu: | excluded from this definition: Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), for ity of, for instance, the fourth voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms in | instance, is not based on the extrapolation of some existing trend as such, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the broad implication that all forms of theoriz: and is thus not a dystopia; ‘Martians’ belong not to the realm of dystopia 
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+- ing which aim at a vast improvement in human society are ‘totalitarian’ | but to that of science fiction, or fantasy pur et simple. (Jules Verne thought or ‘dystopian’ has itself been disproven by history. Many of us indeed live | Wells too unrealistic, as a consequence.) If of course there had been evi- 
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+- today in the utopias of the past, in circumstances vastly better than those ) dence of extra-terrestrial life either in 1898 or now, these boundaries would 
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+- most of our ancestors even dreamt of. Thus the liberal paradigm of univer| necessarily shift; they are fluid by definition, or to use Wells’s own formula, sal opulence and stable democracy is itself also a utopian ideal, and itself | kinetic. By this definition, totalitarian dystopias are clearly dystopias, that susceptible to dystopian failure, both economically and environmentally. : is, mirrored if refracted realities, A voyage in a balloon in 1863 thus is not 
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+- There is of course something in the argument that, just as one person’s ter| science fiction; a journey to the moon is. A voyage to another planet was rorist is another’s freedom-fighter, so is one person's utopia another’s dys! science fiction in 1850, but will probably not be in 2020. Fugenic dystopias 
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+- topia. Indisputably, thus, whether a given text can be described as a dystopia | remain within the bounds of possibility. Conquest by alien beings, or robots, or utopia will depend on one’s perspective of the narrative Outcome. Such ! or the final calling of time by God at Judgment Day, may portray dystopic 
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+- than a rationale for dismissing the genre as such. ambiguity should, however, be a provocative source of discussion, rather | elements (as well as utopic, or both simultaneously). But texts portraying Nonetheless | such events are not ‘dystopias’ as such. 
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+- becomes it is generally conceded that in the twentieth century dystopia | 
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+- ossal[failures] the predominant[ of][totalitarian collectivism.] expression ofthe[ This chapter] utopian ideal,[ will][ focus] mirroring[ on][ the] the[ ‘turn?] colThe first dystopian turn , 
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+- towards dystopia from the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, secondly, we should note that just as the seminal political moment defintwhich is here portrayed as foreshadowed by two preceding movements of : tive of modernity was the French Revolution, so we witness in this period Ios | 109 
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+- : GREGORY CLAEYS | : The origins of dystopia . the hrst evidenee ofa theoretical and fictional ‘dystopian turn’ of the type ' The second dystopian turn | only associated with the later nineteenth and early twentieth i 
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+- | centuries. Satires upon Enlightenment conceptions of a life lived accord| Owenism produced little in the way of literary utopianism, and corresponding to the principles of reason appear in the preceding period, notably in | ingly little by way of anti- or dystopian satire. Two developments shape the 
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+- , Swift and in Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society (1756); indeed much clearer and more traditionally identified ‘turn’ towards dystopia in the closing | utopian writing in this period can be read as a discourse upon corrupdecades of the nineteenth century: eugenics and socialism. Utopian thought tion and degeneration. Fantasies of the ‘Last Man’ and of the Apocalypse in both Europe and North America had been strongly affected by Owenism, 
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+- | occur intermittently in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it is ourierism and Saint-Simonism from the 1820s through mid-century. From the only with the French Revolution that we witness a dialectical relationearly 1880s, however, the fictional genre becomes dominated by the promises 
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+- | ship emerging between three elements: utopian thought, here some of the of these two, often interwoven, ideals of social and individual improvement, i underlying principles of the Revolution; the creation of fictional utopias; both positively and negatively. Many writers were keen to urge the compati| and a fictional anti- or dystopian response. In this case, on the one hand | bility of socialism and Darwinism, notably Karl Pearson, who saw socialism I we witness fictional works inspired by leading trends in utopian thought, as the ‘logical outcome of the law of Malthus’.’ In Britain, Samuel Butler’s 
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+- | notably by Thomas Spence (The Constitution of Spensonia, 1801), and by : Erewhon (1872) discussed the new Darwinian creed, while Edward Bulwer| acolytes of William Godwin, particularly Thomas Northmore’s Memoirs Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) described a society in which Darwinian 
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+- | of Planetes (1795).4 On the other, these texts were met with a barrage of competition had been eliminated. On the socialist side, William Morris’s {| fictional satires of the ‘new philosophy’, loosely defined as ‘perfectibility’, News from Nowhere (1890) espoused a proto-environmentalist socialist 
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+- | which portrayed Godwinian invocations of a society governed by reason ‘deal wedded to Ruskinian aestheticism. Many works united these themes 1 as inducing disaster, such as Hannah More’s The History of Mr Fantom seamlessly, such as Walter Besant’s The Inner House (1888), in which phys|: (1797). This is also the point at which both major strands of the later dysical decay is arrested by scientific advance, and socialism is the only accepted ' topian turn, population control and socialism, are addressed by the most | form of organization. Eugenics might well be described as the ‘Darwinian 4 famous anti-utopian text of the nineteenth century, and a key source for utopia’, and the theme of racial war recurs frequently in later nineteenthq Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), T. R. Malthus’s Essay on Population century utopias, sometimes with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ winning (e.g., Robert f (1798).5 This in its first edition targeted Condorcet and William Godwin, William Cole, The Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 223 6, 1900), and I and in its second, substituted the founder of British socialism, Robert sometimes other races, such as the Japanese (e.g., [Ernest George Henham], | Owen, for Godwin. | John Trevena, The Reign of the Saints, 1911). In some ‘utopias’ black peo\ At the very end of this cycle of texts appeared Mary Shelley’s gothic | ples have been entirely eliminated (e.g., William Hay, Three Hundred Years i! masterpiece, Frankenstein (1818), often held to be the founding text of the Hence, 1881, p. 256) — but for non-whites this would be a dystopia. From 1 genre of science fiction, but also partly a satire on the failed aspirations ! the 1890s onwards the appearance of an increasing number of dystopian of the Revolution, heralding one of the key themes of late dystopian writ; texts thus seemingly indicates a negative trend in the wider utopian genre 
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+- 4 ings.® Subtitled ‘or the Modern Prometheus’, the work explores the perils : as a whole. I have argued elsewhere, however, that this is not the case.” A 1 of usurping the divine monopoly on creation, the creature standing in part large number of texts do portray the socialist revolution gone awry, and the | | for the ‘new man’ of the revolutionary ideal, and also centrally focuses on destruction of individualism at the hands of socialist revolutionaries, such i the Godwinian (or Rousseauesque) theme of naturally virtuous individuals as Charles Fairchild’s The Socialist Revolution of 1888 (1884). Commonly { being corrupted by society. For many, the theme of science- (or scientist) national collapse has been instigated by such revolutions, with widespread if gone-wild, then, first heralds dystopia, from Swift onwards. Thereafter sci| poverty resulting, as in A Radical Nightmare: Or, England Forty Years Hence i ence, technology, utopia and dystopia move forward increasingly in tandem, (1885). One of the earliest is Percy Clarke’s The Valley Council; or, Leaves : and after 1900 the characteristic form of the imaginary society would be | from the Journal of Thomas Bateman of Canbelego Station, N.S.W. (1891), ; both dystopian and often formally cast in the genre of science fiction, set | where a dictatorship results from a socialist revolution. Not uncommonly : normally in the future rather than the past or elsewhere in the here-and) socialist and eugenicist themes are combined in dystopian form, as in Red 
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+- : OW. | England: A Tale of the Socialist Horror (1909), where after the revolution ITO | inal 
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+- SEO IBN The origins of dystopia 
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+- neee ae anda by “he stare.” and children are removed from aumber of dystopian works, and then embracing utopia and exchanging Eugenic themes, however, were also ca able £ he; Z | degeneration for regeneration." Wells thus initially epitomizes what we 
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+- many works, to such a degree deed i -o cing portrayed positively In have here termed the ‘second dystopian turn’, but also the outpouring of tive ‘turn’ in the genre as such venerated fohs ce us Iras positing a nega_ late nineteenth-century utopian sentiment, often in taking up the very same simple asa reduction in family size and reorient is source sometimes this is as themes, notably authority, leadership and the advancement (or threat) of productivity and efficiency, as in Frank Per Coen itil towards greater science and technology. Many of his early works go beyond dystopia, as Speculations in Social Evolut;on) (1894) Ba oste's wares Utopia (Being defined here, into science fiction, often, instigated by his scientific trainendorsements appear in many works,1 p ne A Caan y positive eugenics | ing under I. H. Huxley, by moving beyond short-term to long-term evoluIce (x875), a society beneath a Swiss slacier we ome OF, Under the tion. That is tO say, they breach our expectations of the genuinely possible fect equality, fraternal love and communit ne Wied there is perwithin the social and especially the scientific constraints of the day, while unhealthy child | uty of property and children. But no offering a moral tale or prescient warning which clearly has contemporary ren are permitted to survive. Similarly, in Posterity: Its Verdicts | application. 
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+- 41 ; 
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+- sreani: ne Fane om of checks7), mecca examinations for Whether evolution was controllable by a species manifestly often not and the mentally diseased’ are prohibited i 'P;an . «moray unsound up to the task of the utopian ‘taking hold’ of evolution, as Men Like Gods[A:][ Read][Murphy][ S] | insisted, was indeed to become perhaps the quintessentially Wellsian theme. 
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+- Beyond the Ice (t894) a marriage bureau re vn[ming.] Acworth’s A New Eden (1896) family size Bulates ne while in Andrew ! As defined here, The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and euthanasia is the norm. In Ouintura: “a to two children, and The First Men in the Moon (1901), are works of science fiction, while The db en cor le and Remarkable Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) Is a dystopia. Yet all are extrapolations 
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+- Customs (1886) all children are naise. y State, and priority is given to | of present trends of one form or another, varying in their degree of plausihygienic improvement. bility. In The Time Machine, perhaps his most pessimistic work, Wells 
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+- Other themes helped to nourish the dystopian fl 
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+- including the threat of a Prussian invasion iv Beinay oT of the epoch, recounts the discovery of a world of AD 802,701 which is divided into Battle of Dorking (1871), for instance, write dur mn " . Chesney’s The two great groups, a master-race, the Eloi, ‘a real aristocracy, armed with a War, poorly trained English -lunteers are ite uring Srna perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system ally superior force. In Cromwell the Third: Or he Se ya technologicof to-day’, and an underground slave race, the Morlocks. The satire here Britain is annexed by Germany. ‘Alien’ -vwasic e Ju a. ofLiberty (1886), is upon both communism and schemes of selective breeding. The Island of fears into an ever more fantastic domain. F hoe cal merely extend such Doctor Moreau — in which Wells acknowledged that Swift (notably book i. oe[catastropie][ was][ firstly] four of Gulliver’s Travels) loomed large — focuses more narrowly on sci- 
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+- portrayed strikingly in Richard Jef[Carieg’] (1885), one of the sources of Morris’s Now, ba Ny, h, or, Wild England entific control of genetic development. With the creation of ‘beast-men’ or ing for primitivism, the simpler life, was n. om oe ere Yet the yearn‘quasi-human monsters — a prospect Wells thought plausible enough — man either; Morris himself famously -onfaced of ting y a dystopian theme, becomes ‘at last as remorseless as Nature’, and Promethean themes again ee ing consoled that barbarabound: we are near enough to Frankenstein to appreciate the parallels. In 
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+- ‘sm might again flood the world. And there other socialist utopias of the perio 4 incluline arcaean le rece in many When the Sleeper Awakes (1899), set 200 years in the future, a slave-state pias, such as Robert Blatchford’s The Sorce Shop (4 usually termed dystois ruled by a quasi-Nietzschean usurper named Ostrog (a Russian word ry 920P (1909), as well as in utofor prison); this is ‘no Utopia, no Socialistic state’ of a Bellamy, Morris 
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+- pian thought (Edward Carpenter, for i as a model for future socialist emulat stance, mentioned Melville’s Typee or Hudson type (all are mentioned). Why What went wrong? Corrosive ion). urbanization, the creation of ‘this great machine of the city’, concentration of wealth, and an incessant economic struggle, compared to the ‘idyllic 
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+- H. G. Wells’s dystopian entrée easy-going life’ of the nineteenth century. Satirized here are Carlyle’s heroworship ideal and Plato, and there are echoes yet again of Swift. Disease has 
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+- , | 
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+- neneing veorge We'’s is wan Famous Fon amongst other things, combeen virtually abolished, but the common man, gulled by ‘the world-wide aura of fin de siécle pessimism, by writing a £4|sehoods of the news-tellers,’ remains ‘helpless in the hands of demagogue L113 
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+- ri 
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+- GREGORY CLAEYS The origins of dystopia 
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+- hands property in the of the rich. 
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+- While In its outlines Huxley’s text is familiar to most readers.'® The world 
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+- Men not properly a dystopia, though it satirizes human folly, The First described, some 600 years ‘After Ford’, is one in which institutionalized in the Moon (1901) is a much less theoretically significant work. eugenic engineering underpins a rigidly stratified class society, the World 
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+- Written during the Boer War, it portrays the export of imperial] violence, State, based upon breeding both intelligent rulership and complacent sub- 
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+- with humans killing the Selenite lunarians as they had slain Savages on servience, and governed bya privileged group of controllers. Huxley later earth. Wells here took up the analogy of Columbus and the Americas.23 termed this ‘the completely controlled, collectivised society’.'” ‘Fordism’ rep- 
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+- From 1901, however, he began to devote himself to the life-long pursuit of resents the subordination of humanity to the machine and to the scientific 
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+- creating the world-state, sometimes called socialism, sometimes republicideal as such. Children are raised in common, behavioural manipulation is anism or ‘cosmopolis’. His last moment of hesitation was expressed in the elevated to a highly refined science, and, all books and monuments relating ‘social imaginings’ of Anticipations (1901), in which eugenic themes conto the former society having been destroyed, the past has been erased. There 
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+- tinue, and the dying out of the less efficient races js regarded as seemingly 1s no need for mass brutality. With the exception of a few ‘savages’ left to 
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+- inevitable. But Wells had now firmly turned to both prophecy and advocacy. their own devices, science has tamed society, and produced what Huxley 
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+- Thereafter he would regard a world-state as mankind’s only solution to its termed ‘a really efficient totalitarian state’ in which the population of slaves 
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+- Stavest social and scientific problems, though his idea of what this would ‘love their servitude’.™ They do so because sexual promiscuity is the norm, entail would in turn feed other dystopian visions. He remained certain that 4 and anxiety-alleviating drugs, notably the ‘perfect drug’, the euphoric soma, 
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+- superior caste or class had to guide this movement, exploring their role in so guarantee a ‘holiday from reality’. Hedonism, in short, is the predominant 
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+- doing in elaborate detail in A Modern Utopia (1905), and practically in the ethos. Everyone is happy, and endlessly reminds themselves of the fact: psy- 
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+- Fabian Society. Like many of his generation, he had faith in the Capacity of | chobabble rules, in consequence. scientists and engineers to bring happiness to the Masses, even if the creation There are many targets here: utilitarianism, ‘the horrors’ of Wells’s 
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+- of the world-state had to be instigated by planetary Catastrophe, as in In the World State (Men Like Gods is often seen as the satirical object; Huxley 
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+- Days ofthe Comet (1906) or nuclear war (in The World Set Free, 1914). But once described its author as ‘a rather horrid, vulgar little man’), totalitar- 
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+- as the new century advanced Wells also became ever less certain as to how to lanism, utopia itself, historical fatalism and, above all thought- and mind- 
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+- create, maintain and motivate this elite. By his death in 1946 he was deeply control. There is, however, an alternative worldview presented. From the 
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+- by a Gibbonian sense of recurrence. Pessimistic about historical] developments, his growing sense of dismay fed Savage Reservation comes an uncorrupted specimen of the former state A further writer worthy of note from this period is Yevgeny Zamyatin Heof representshumanity, art,John, science,to challenge humanity,the individuality, religionassumptions of the established and the follyorder. of 
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+- (1884-1927), who was influenced by Wells, and was in turn a key source humankind. What, then, was Huxley’s point? Did he really think such a 
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+- later for Orwell. Zamyatin’s We (written 1921, published in English in 1924) society might emerge from the present? Is this a celebration of some vari- 
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+- was anticipated by Jerome K. Jerome’s story, “The New Utopia’ ( 189r), in ation on the Noble Savage, a romantic rebellion against conformity and 
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+- which Post-revolutionary individuals are assigned numbers rather than materialistic hedonism? Was this a realistic dystopia, or does the point lie 
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+- names, are forced to dress similarly, and lead highly regimented lives superelsewhere? The ‘whole idea’ of Braye New World, Huxley once said, was | 
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+- vised by ‘guardians’. Zamyatin describes the One State, in which people live that if you could iron people ‘into a kind of uniformity, if you were able to 
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+- In glass houses, and where the ‘Benefactor’, constantly elected unanimously, manipulate their genetic background ... if you hada government sufficiently 
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+- Is the ruling figure, and sex js freely available if strictly controlled. Seemingly unscrupulous you could do these things without any doubt’.*? Where then 
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+- futile human resistance to this (by the ‘enemies of happiness’),*4 their disdoes Huxley wish our sympathies to lie? Not, certainly, with the hapless 
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+- Overy, torture and ‘cure’ unite Zamyatin’s and Orwell’s portrayals. Orwell] rulers of the future world, who reach for soma at the slightest anxiety. Even 
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+- wrote in 1946 that We satirized ‘not any particular country but the implied | the Controller admits that the state of happiness achieved in the new soci- 
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+- aims in Nineteen Eighty-Four, aims of industria] civilisation’.'5 This remains an Important clue to his own | ety appears ‘pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for 
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+- II4 | misery’. Yet in 1932, after the millions of deaths of the First World War, the | | II 
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+- . 
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+GREGORY CLAEYS The origins of dystopia stability achieved here was no mean outcome. Even at the cost of unbelief? much more explicit now that the greatest danger promoting such trends ‘If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn’t allow yourselves was world overpopulation, the probability of which ‘leading through unrest to be degraded by pleasant vices’, says the savage, God being ‘the reason to dictatorship becomesa virtual certainty’.** Degeneration into uniformity for everything noble and fine and heroic’, to be met by the riposte that through loss of the sense of freedom is thus still a key theme. But is religion ‘civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism’, that there is no still an antidote? To an impressive degree, Huxley now opted for freedom ‘right to be unhappy’. Are we then to identify with the old-fashioned savof information as the key to withstanding mass manipulation and an expliage, still wedded to ideas of love, monogamy, marriage, ‘freedom’, in short, citly capitalist ethos of conditioned consumption. ‘Democracy’, in the sense first expressed by throwing away the soma boxes? And does Huxley wish of collective, conscious self-government, was now more specifically pitted us to see the assertion of such ideals as contingent upon religious belief, against capitalist hedonism. Huxley still worried about drugs, and about with no discernible secular alternative to mindless hedonism? The answer is communism. He was not an egalitarian, and doubted whether the modern apparently yes. The satire, in other words, is as much upon contemporary world exhibited any ‘improvements in individual virtue and intelligence’. materialism and consumerism as upon the eugenic super-state; it is upon the But the most insidious enemy lay in the application of the techniques of threads which connect America with the Germany of Hitler and the Russia mind control to advertising, to politics, to undermining the sense of reality of Stalin, the human willingness to renounce a more diverse life in favour and reinforcing egotism and hedonism. Democracy was to drown in popof certainty and stability, the ‘primal and the ultimate need’.*° Critics have corn and toothpaste, with citizenship debased to a mere commodity, not to accused Huxley of anti-American snobbism. Yet this is somewhat beside be stomped under the Hitlerian jackboot. Huxley proposed limiting polthe point: Huxley is a critic of modernity as such, and America is only a | itical campaign spending, and even banning ‘anti-rational propaganda’ in leading instance of its definitive characteristics. His characters are named } election campaigns.*+ The answer, then, was not religion: it was birth conafter Russians, French, British, Jtalians and Americans. The problem is not trol — requiring an attack on some religions — and rationalism in politics. nationality, and it is not ideology. Huxley’s later novel, Island (1962), is usually described as a BuddhistHuxley’s chief concern, then, is much more with how servitude becomes and drug-inspired utopia whose engagement with spirituality was an effort attractive than it is with science or technology as such. In response to his to compensate for the apparent moral impasse of Brave New World. Huxley critics he proposed in a 1946 preface to Brave New World that a better himself termed it ‘a kind of reverse Brave New World ... a Topian rather world might be imagined in which science and technology were ‘made for than a Utopian phantasy, a phantasy dealing with a place, a real place and man, not ... as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them’. time, rather than a phantasy dealing with mo place and time’.*> In both The economics were to be decentralized and Henry-Georgian, the politics instances society has conquered violence, crime, hunger and inhumanity. Kropotkinesque and cooperative, and a quasi-religious knowledge of the However, if it reveals Huxley’s search for more humane religious principles, Godhead or ‘Final End’ was posited to which utilitarianism was subordinIsland lacks the degree of confrontation with the problems of hedonism and ated, bringing a ‘philosophical completeness’ to the original novel. But mass manipulation which mark his chief work. Pavlov makes an appearHuxley was in fact growing more, not less, pessimistic, particularly about ance; the problem is still collective somnambulism.”* But the response 1s overpopulation; he worried in 1950 that the world might reach three bilnot on a scale sufficient to answer the questions left begging in Brave New lion before commencing to diminish.?" Ape and Essence (1949) again raised World. The religious answer, too, is private and individual, the product fears of both science and leaders, particularly in combination, gone awry, of inner self-mastery, at best bounded by a small community like John with ‘progress’ portrayed like an uncontrollable genie released from the botHumphrey Noyes’s Oneida, which Huxley admired, not a mass collective tle. In Brave New World Revisited (1958) he returned to consider the issue bond of public worship. Yet this at least lay within the bounds of possibility. of ‘freedom and its enemies’. Critics had accused Brave New World of moral For Huxley had no faith in utopias where people were portrayed ‘radically failure in a time of crisis. But nearly thirty years of reflection had proven to unlike human beings ... quite different from what they are and from what, Huxley how successful the techniques of mind-control could be. He admitthroughout recorded history, they have always been’.?? (He condemned ted that the very desire for freedom seemed to be ‘on the wane’. While paySwift’s obsessive reluctance to acknowledge the realistic humanity of the ing homage to Orwell, Huxley insisted that behavioural engineering in both Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels.) The answer, then, lay in a more ‘rational Soviet-style and western regimes was enormously threatening. Yet he was mode’ of democracy, one in which ‘a ruling aristocracy of mind’ — but not TL6 I1L7 
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+- The origins of dystopia 
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+- GREGORY CLAEYS 
+
+- one based upon eugenics _ was given a much more prominent role, in order the totalitarian world Orwell satirized. Secondly, it argues that Nineteen to balance self-interest, demagoguery and corruption. Here a crucial role Eighty-Four represented for Orwell not merely a satire of totalitarianism, was to be played by those capable of practising the ‘disinterested virtues’, but the rejection of many other aspects of modernity. Thirdly, it contends and it was this that religion, itself aiming at ‘non-attachment’, sought as its that an illumination of a number of preceding texts assists in our interpret secular end. Here too Huxley worried that the worship of man, with ‘all ation of the main text here. And finally, it suggests that one of the major the virtues and perfections of God have been lodged in humanity, posed a themes which emerges in our interpretation of Nineteen Eighty-Four 1s significant danger, as did equivalent devotion to party, state, nation or race. | Orwell’s fear, evident from the mid-1930S onwards, that ‘ntellectuals in the It permitted immersion in “che sub-human world of crowd emotion’, which socialist movement bad been corrupted by power-worship, and hence would was the most effective totalitarian tool. Yet Huxley was not opposed to not function as capable or morally honest leaders in any new socialist SOCIintelligent planning for the future. He may have lacked Orwell’s commitety. Like Wells, Huxley (who also detested the trahison des clercs) and other ment to a socialist variation on collectivism, but he praised Roosevelt’s and writers of the period, Orwell thus recognized the problem of leadership to other attempts to anticipate the results of technological developments and be central to the design of any viable future society. similar reforms so long as they were ‘carried out by the right sort of means The term ‘totalitarianism’, rst introduced in 1928, but central to thinkand in the right sort of governmental, administrative and educational coning during the Cold War period (1947-91), purports to define the common texts’, that is to say, in an ethically sound manner, and through ‘decencore of both dictatorships 1n terms ofa militantly anti-liberal, anti-bourgeols tralization and responsible self-government’. And he retained an enduring philosophy hostile to most ideas of individualism and individual rights in interest “na whether small-scale communities of intelligent, like-minded indiparticular. Unlike previous ideas of tyranny, including monarchical absolutviduals could further such ends.** ‘om and military dictatorship, the key aspect of the new ideal was held to be the desire for complete control over the hearts and bodies, minds and souls, of the citizens of the nation. Totalitarian regimes assumed seven main 
+
+- Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) features: 
+
+- , 
+
+- Unlike Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was written after much of the scale and enormity of totalitarian brutality had (x) a one-party state with hegemony Overt the secret police, and a monopoly been revealed.2? Orwell’s dystopian world-state 1s blunt, stark and pitiless. over economic, cultural and informational sources; fascists see this state Consent rests upon punishment and fear rather than the manipulation of as the focus of the spiritual unity of the nation, possessing a will of its pleasure. Conformity 1s instilled by routine practice rather than eugenic own, and having nothing existing outside it, while communists view the conditioning; the abuse of science is Huxley’s great theme, that of power, state as an extension of proletarian power! during an interim ‘dictatorOrwell’s.2° Here too individuality has been eradicated, but much less comship of the proletariat’; fortably, at a much higher price. Less secure, the regime has to work harder (2) a technological basis to centralized power, ©-8.> especially through the +o maintain order. History to Ford is merely ‘bunk’; here it must be continuuse of the media and surveillance techniques; ously rewritten. Many readers see both novels as pitting the hapless individ(3) the willingness to destroy large numbers of domestic ‘enemies’ n the ual against society in an unwinnable contest. Yet if Huxley’s target was the name of the goals of the regime; such as the Jews under the Nazis, the agreeable self-deceptive conformity of capitalist society, and the obsessive kulaks (rich peasants) by Stalin; or the intellectuals by Pol Pot; infantile grasping for happiness of the moderns, Orwell’s was less distant (4) the use of ‘total terror’ (an emphasis particularly associated with the f-om this than is often recognized. Huxley’s work is often described as antiwork of Hannah Arendt) to intimidate the population and ensure Com materialistic,religious crisis,Orwell’s Orwell not.rarely Andso, while Huxley Orwell’sas a man great work wasengaged in atpermanent one level (5) pletethe willingnessloyalty; of the regime to annihilate all boundaries between the tions and politicizing any which r main, such as youth organizations; 
+
+- intensely political, Huxley’s as often been described as having few political individual and the party/state, by d **e** stroying most intermediary organizaovertones at all. This section examines George Orwell’s novel in the light of four issues. (6) a ‘totalist’ philosophy or ideology which demands absolute loyalty and 
+
+- Firstly, it asks the ‘realist’ question as to how the work mirrored or distorted sacrifice, and the absolute submission of the citizen to the party/state, 119 
+
+118 
+
+- 7 | The origins of dystopia 
+
+- GR EGORY CLAEYS , , 
+
+- : 3 i 
+
+- leaving no oe °; ‘ed° Peeis unpoliticizeds for fascists this was based which dwelt on the motif of individual failure in the face of a system of vested upon a true ac e myths for the masses, for Stalinists, it degrading work. We here also encounter Orwell’s first view of socialism, on Marx’s materiali a OF necessany historical development based which he parodied as ‘some kind of Aldous Huxley Brave New World: only number 6003. Rations: served outout ini grease-proof paper at theh communa 
+
+- ues 
+
+- becomes extremely t heeingdion of history; in both instances society not so amusing. Four hours a day in a model factory, tightening up bolt | Oo 
+
+- (5) a cult of leadership: in fascism . ae 
+
+- virtues of the . Vig; the leader embodies the spirit, will and kitchen. Community-hikes from Marx Hostel to Lenin Hostel and back. | 
+
+- | 
+
+- | - 
+
+- . 
+
+- despiteite thethe ffact"eth:thatMaivlarx: ae with the nation; in communism, Free abortion-clinics on all corners. . a | | 
+
+- equally strong cult emer “4 ered ne theory of leadership as such, an This view was to change dramatically swiftly. At the end of 1936 Orwell Catalonia (1938) he condemned not only fascism but also Moscow’s sub- 
+
+- -Sung. 
+
+- Nino Zedong and Kim me round Lenin, Stalin and later leaders like went to Spain to join Republican resistance to Franco’s coup. In Homage fo version of the Re ublican cause. As 1m. ortantly, he wrote that in Spain he 
+
+- | 
+
+- | 
+
+- oe 
+
+- : had ‘seen wondertul things, a0 at last really believe 10 Socialism, which | 
+
+- In orderr tto see how this analysis of totalitarianism meshed with other critid: 4 ‘ | th; dat | P r ek | al; P hich 
+
+- | : never did before’.?° On his return to Britain this commitment was exempli- 
+
+- cisms of those aspects of modernity which Orwell found most disturbing| we is athe . 
+
+- must first consid , poor in the ‘ndustrial north of Britain also included the observation that 
+
+- Eighty-F O ane development of Orwell s thought prior to Nineteen fed in The Road to Wisan Pier (1937). But this account of the life of the ghty-Four. Orwe was born as Eric Blair in Bengal in 1903, to a ‘lower. | 
+
+- upper-middle class’ family with a history of colonial service. He eYPiyOSESand : echnique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything’, add ng long possessed a strong sense of his own inferiority as well as the ht ois **t** he physique of the people was declining because of ‘the modern industr **i** al “ . 
+
+- . 
+
+- drudgery and soullessness of his class. His earliest oc of ul ~ 
+
+- ? 
+
+- school (described in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’) coreseen Laan | that it might be found “in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun’. Orwell now argued that socialism, “wholeheartedly 
+
+- umph of the strong over the weak?.>' After a period at Britain’s leadi[ous][ ih] lic school, Eton, in which he underwent a ‘Tory anarchist’ or indi i im : : applied, is a way out’, because It would at least give the world enough to eat. oy. 
+
+- phase3* and demonstrated a strong love of nature and a ouneed ualist But he also condemned socialist intellectuals, who ‘ncluded too many fruit atre common people. Many socialists he feared also bad an overly enlarged sense 
+
+- , 
+
+- of the Graeco-Roman ideal of citizenship Orwell showed hig ‘natural hatred juice drinkers, nudists and sandal-wearets, 0° being out of touch with the , | . 
+
+- olonial policeman between . .- 
+
+- . 
+
+- of authority’? by going to Burma as a c urmese 
+
+- ” as a kind of religion’, or cult of order and efficiency. But, protested Orwell 
+
+- 1927. Here he became overtly anti-imper! alist te first, major- novel% 2.2 and of order, and tended to see mechanical progress as an end-in-itself, ‘almost “we can actually feel the tendency of the machine to make a fullv human life 2 
+
+- pire as ‘simply a device for giving trade mon- 
+
+- Days, describes the British Emp’ os , ) — 
+
+- opolies t ish’ | ) : _ ; oe | 
+
+- . 
+
+- ofee eeegress’ ouas such.a nersAt o also encounter Orwell’s earliest criticisms impossible’. formachinery vended “+o frustrate the human need for effort and gone — being t something resembling a brain in - bottle . even if ‘the machine has 
+
+- out upon the jungle, and a a ae ee are me elL BAZes creation’. The logical end ot mechanical progress was ‘to reduce the human : got to be accepted ... srudgingly and suspiciously’.>” In the last and best of 
+
+- forests, monasteries, pagodas all vanished. And instead, pink villas fifty yards apart ... with all the gramophones playing the same tune. And all the f | 
+
+- | 
+
+- shaved flat, chewed into wood pulp for che News of theWorldors orests his pre-war novels, Coming Up For Air (1939), this hostility to modernity as into a one of the great novelties of the period. Fie exclaims: 
+
+- ; 
+
+- into gramophone cases.’ And here, too Orwell offers his first ‘ccights int i such is again a key theme. At one point the narrator ents! * milk-bar, then | slick and shiny and streamlined; mirrors, enamel, and chromium plate which- 
+
+- worl’ dominated by officialdom and the administrative mentality, describing the colonial atmosphere as ‘a stifling, stultifying world in which to live ... a There’s a kind of atmosphere about these places that gets me down. Everything ever direction you look in. Everything spent on the decorations and nothing 
+
+- world in which every word and every thought 1s censored’ .34 on the food. No real food at all. Just lists of stuff with American names, sort 
+
+- Dur Ing, the middle 1930s Orwell rapidly established his reputation as a of phantom stuff that you can't taste and can hardly believe in the existence of 
+
+- novelist, writing Down and Out in Paris @ London (1933), which dealt ° 
+
+- with poverty and unemployment; A Clergyman’s Daugbter (1 ). which Insts to the effect that food doesn’t matter, comfort doesn’t matter, nothing matters 
+
+- linked the themes of poverty and the question o£ how to live oe ol __ A sort of propaganda floating around, mixed up with the noise ofthe radio, a 
+
+- _ “Lh. 
+
+- life after the loss of religious faith; and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), except slickness and shininess and streamlining." E21 
+
+- T20 
+
+- The origins of dystopia 
+
+- GREGORY CLAEYs | | 
+
+- . | 
+
+- . , 
+
+- 4. 
+
+- . | 
+
+- This resistance to wh ; ; ver, | 
+
+- : a 
+
+- | 
+
+- | 
+
+- of mass-prat Bermare Crick has referred to as ‘Fordification’,» the novel as ‘an anthology of all the things he hated most; this explains why 
+
+- a combination of , . 
+
+- nass-Pro hoe techniques with a technocentric aesmany of its horrors are capitalist rather than Stalinist horrors’.** Despite the 
+
+- remain an 
+
+- “hetic. was to ” 
+
+- I e totall 
+
+- narticalatl ob the t me wing theme. Orwell’s growing concern was prominence of the anti-communist interpretauon of the work, Orwell himmass 
+
+- the sossibilit that See isregar’ for historical truth, as well as self wrote that it was which I am a supporter) but as 4 > ow-up of the perversions to Whit a cen- 
+
+- longer loved mn propaga a could produce a population who no NOT intended as an att ck on Socialism or on the British Labour Part (of ger loved liberty. Increasingly he feared the destruction of thear | ideal| of the bi - . ° b by € th | hich 
+
+- ‘autonomous individual’, a ship at the altar of idval'yane me belief that soca might so blindly wor tralised economy is liable and which have already partly been realised in necessarily will arrive, but | believe (allowing of course for the fact that the | 
+
+- any other but mass-produceH °ds s that they would forgo democracy and Communism and Fascism. | do not believe that the| kind of society I describe | 
+
+- , 
+
+- , 
+
+- In the early 1940s Orw ‘Pe i bh . e 
+
+- to pay greater hoa b 4 s critique shifted in several ways. He began book is a satire) that something resembling it -ould arrive. I believe also that oral aa vo th ‘c to the dangers of technocrats and bureaucrats in gentotalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and Tots “C9 
+
+- ftermed| t **a** teone me pointrecone° World War he warned of the dangers of what he | have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.*? | or 
+
+- - 
+
+- | 
+
+- | 
+
+- claimed Herloe brad a vied ofms hedonistic attitude 0 life’, which he, Nineteen| Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, Airstrip One, which has become wards a 
+
+- both fascism and communism weremn increasinY peheveds 100. that an American province.*® As explained in Emmanuel Goldstein’s Theory and collectivism’.4" Orwell however clearl a 4 hi ormeor® igarchical; Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the book within the book, which turns , e Lion 
+
+- during the wartime period as winin.i In-»rocralistUjtment out to be written by Inner Party leaders, the existing world system is one of (1941) he attempted to define a unique brand of Briti he be Unicorn three great states engaged in permanent warfare both for labour-powet and[socralism][ which] as a means of ruling their own populations.*’ These wars expend the results 
+
+- could reconcile the need to centralize he conn /[1.] . 
+
+- of freedom, privacy, the dislike of regi jm a SETISE © t © value of machine. production without actually raising the standard of living,| which. : which ne | | 
+
+- in law He hoped chat working thee caltare. aneae belie Orwell implies would threaten their power and legitimacy because greater a vital m | ; 
+
+- encourage power-worship, and retained - vetea da vital castireces ©nemoralnot equalityvalues, variously would threat defin d **e** n hierarchy. as Ingsoc, The Neo-Bolshevism and three states share the the Obliteration same set **of** integrity, might help sustain chese values. But he still sprea ; 
+
+- sistent effort to chip away English orale aq est wane of ‘th€ per the Self. The object of war is thus to maintain the ruling structures of the do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life’. Thus. as h pes _ edonisiic, what three regimes, hence the truthfulness of the apparent paradox, ‘War 1s Peace. provide ‘the much needed altern ti | R, a “ England might In Oceania the Party 1s an oligarchy, though ‘not a class in the old sense of one hand andAmerican rials we on ee authoritarianism on the the word’. In keeping with a Nietzschean gloss on Social Darwinism, Inner Party members seek power for its own sake: ‘power ‘s not a means, it is an 
+
+- however, was evident in his imeone .[me][ “][i][ Little][ of][ this][ opumism,] — work, in which the pigs who lead the rev ion a vast 1945) though this end’, a leading Inner Party member insists. Ultimately the Party’s power rests rs, fores . 
+
+- ; ac s perhaps the future; who contr ls the pres n controls the past. The Party even insists that 
+
+- eventually come to resemble their forvora ereOe .“t **ow** s <*Pne upon its ability t **o** manipulat **e t** he past:) ‘Who controls the past controls the chief theme of Orwell’s greatestgreatest workskth betrayal of the revolution by ‘Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.4* If imperfect, the system nonetheless functions adequately. Amidst an 
+
+- int **e** llectualnectuals. atmosphere of drabness, shortages and monotony, the novel recounts they clumsy rebellion of Winston Smith, an anti-heroic lower-level Outer Part y 
+
+- 949 
+
+- Nineteen Eighty-Four (1 member, whose crimes are writing a diary and having an affair with Julia, | 
+
+- | “4° | 
+
+- While Nineteen Eighty-F , ae rweil com 
+
+- Sealinist tract, ? it a See ae ene that 0 terete te antiOrwell’s crudely drawn female character, who is ‘corrupt fo the bones’. anti-modernist and anti-capitalist themes with a hostil ined certain Winston is of course caught, tortured and then rehabilitated. At the end Los 
+
+- ; 
+
+- ; 
+
+- ; 
+
+- Fascism. Others have taken a similar vi 2 ‘ ostility tO Stalinism and ‘He loved Big Brother’ As a satire or caricature of totalitarianism the novel at our ilisa- 
+
+- seen the main thrust ofthe work heine ‘simpl area er ee has focuses on two dominant themes. The first 1s the totalitarian demand for ebilitate us’, while John Mander describes the debasement of logic and language (‘doublethink’ and ‘newspeak’), the 
+
+- tion is tending to deracinate and debilt P yt in) ustria civilisa complete loyalty, which requires slavish submission by the intellectuals, 123 
+
+- I22 
+
+- GREGORY CLAEYSs 
+
+- evocation The origins of dystopia of the worst popular passions (“Hate Week’), and hostility to produced only ‘dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war’, while 
+
+- individualism (ownlife’), with even eroticism suppressed in the name of collectivism led ‘to concentration camps, leader worship, and war’. There 
+
+- war-fever and leader-worship. Secondly, there is the omnipresence of state seemed to be no alternative to this dismal choice between possible human 
+
+- power: the telescreen, the posters of Big Brother (who may or may not actufates, ‘unless a planned economy can be somehow combined with freedom ally exist), the ubiquitous Thought Police, the continuous rewriting of the of the individual, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong 
+
+- past. The grotesquely simple and blatantly unapologetic dishonesty of the is restored to politics’.s* Orwell did not know how this plea for decency, regime stands out for Many Commentators as the grand theme of the work; which some have seen as his central and abiding concern, might be realized. one of Orwell’s Sreatest concerns about totalitarianism was that it attacked But he still believed in (what many Cold War readers failed to acknow- 
+
+- the concept of objective truth. We are not led by Orwell to believe that this ledge) democratic socialism of a non-Marxian and peculiarly English type 
+
+- regime is likely to collapse from internal Pressures, for the Party stifles its to be a step in the right direction, if somehow ‘the religious attitude of life’ own dissent easily. Winston reflects, thus, that ‘if there was hope, it must could be wedded to it. 
+
+- lie in the proles’.49 But they are kept from rebelling by a diet of mass litThere are thus major differences as well as similarities between Huxley’s 
+
+- erature, heavy physical work, films, football, beer and gambling. No one and Orwell’s visions of the future nightmare. Huxley’s is clean, efficient, 
+
+- cares what they say, and Winston is informed, in a crude paraphrasing of complacent, defined by pleasure, Orwell’s clumsy, crude, brutal and focused 
+
+- Marxist theory, that they could not rebel until they were conscious, and on pain. Huxley penetrated much further into the behavioural psychology vice versa. Nonetheless the proles retain a moral honesty and authenticity : of consumer society. Yet Orwell captured the true horrors of the twenti- 
+
+- which Orwell clearly believed they possessed in real life. They, crucially, eth century far more accurately, and the manipulative nature of popular, 
+
+- have not been corrupted by Power-worship. Neither, at least not completely, mass culture is an essential ingredient in his description of it: what stood 
+
+- has Winston, left pondering his fate at the Chestnut Tree café. But then his between Huxley and the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four was Hitler. Huxley 
+
+- rebellion never stood much chance of success anyway. | had foreseen what Wells seemingly had not, the dark side of machine civThe corruption of the intelligentsia by the lust for power, then, remains | ilization, that progress was ‘a swindle’ (and Wells, Orwell too would allege, 
+
+- the central and most compelling theme of Orwell’s chief work, and one | was incapable of appreciating the real threat of totalitarianism). Rees has 
+
+- which we have seen was clearly foreshadowed in his major writings from argued that ‘Aldous Huxley’s theory is equally plausible: that people can be 
+
+- the mid-1930s onwards. The nineteenth-century faith in the guiding role to reduced to a servile condition by means of mass-suggestion, hypnopaedia be played in a post-aristocratic society by a Coleridgian clerisy or Carlylean and drugs, without any overt brutality or cruelty and without any conscious 
+
+- man of letters had thus been utterly misplaced. As Richard Rees has writsuffering.’53 Orwell did not agree with Huxley and other ‘neO-pessimists’, or ten, Orwell’s main conclusion respecting contemporary politics was that with a religious reckoning which was not essentially geared to the improve- 
+
+- the working class lacked ‘any Power to counteract the decadence of the ment of public morals. (It has been contended that Orwell was moving back 
+
+- intellectuals and the bestiality of the hate-mongering political fanatics’.s° towards Christianity. But evidence for this is slight; Orwell would reiterate Orwell himself, in his final years, and despite chronic poor health, clearly the need to ‘reinstate the belief in human brotherhood without the need of a 
+
+- attempted some reckoning with this increasingly pessimistic assessment. In “next world” to give it meaning’.54) WithHuxley he agreed that truth-telling, 
+
+- a book review published in 1945 he proclaimed the necessity of restoring history-writing, was essential to keeping society in balance. And he shared 
+
+- what he termed ‘the religious attitude of life? In order to counteract ‘the with Huxley, but in a much deeper and intense way, a sense of the betrayal 
+
+- disastrous consequences of worshipping man instead of God’. He became of the intellectuals as a class, of their descent into the mental! preoccupation 
+
+- convinced (perhaps quite erroneously) that ‘the modern cult of power worwitha ‘struggle for power’. It was this voluntary betrayal, not instigated by ship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is breeding, which produced Orwell’s dictatorship, though it did not touch the 
+
+- the only life there is’.5: Yet at the same time he had himself lost his reljessential humanity of the working classes, whose decency was epitomized 
+
+- gious faith, and could Propose no secular alternative to either religion or by their behaviour in Barcelona in 1937. Huxley continued to maintain that 
+
+- Power-worship. Re-establishing a sense of moral certainty eluded him to control based upon reward was likely to be more effective, in the long run, the end, though it remained crucial to his hope for the future. For capitalthan that based upon violence. But Orwell came to see Huxley’s ‘completely 
+
+- ism, he Proclaimed, in reviewing Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, 
+
+- 124 125 
+
+GREGORY CLAEYS e The origins of dystopia : materialistic vulgar civilizati gg vastly less rear, ning ization pasearianism, on hed c **o** ntendingnism as that‘a danger instead:past’, and | centras R **a** ly andBradbury's possiblyfamousfatal morF **a** hrenheitl weakness451 of western(1953). Othlib **er** al societies,notable contri- such | eemcaneeroairs a different kind ofworld, the centralised slave state, butions after the Second World War ‘nclude William Golding’s The Lord might be sdoptive a ‘gue who are in effect a new ruling class, though they of the Flies (19 54), Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), Anthony Burgess’s tic, on the contrary its fha heredt tary. Such a state would not be hedonisA Clockwork Orange (1962), Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes (1963), sliem and hedenonshin ; mic would come from some kind of rabid nationRobert Rimmer’s The Harrad Experiment (1966), Ira Levin’s This Perfect Pp. Day (1970) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975). Notable later feminist ofHence he condemned Brave New World for not providing an account dystopias include Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale (1986), whichis the motive of this ruling class, for not providing a reason ‘why societ set in the United States in the near future. A number of these are discussed should be stratified in the elaborate way that is described’, narticular im in later essays in this volume. terms of power-hunger’.°* And Huxley was satirizing the desire for equal: amyatin’swhich Orwel essentially admired3 and supported.| Critics thus agree that NOTES Four: indeed Orwell much coset 1 intent and design to Nineteen Eighty| r See Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian B Ux cy owed an unacknowledged debt to it. Studies 5:1 (1994), 1-37- On dystopia, see Mark Hillegas, The Future as For Zamvat; | yatin, with Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon and Jack Lond , Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (Carbondale: Southern Illinois , in The Iron Heel, possessed ‘an intuitive grasp of the irrational side of on University Press, 1967); W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of . stale O totali: Last Things . (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); M. Keith Booker, tarianism — human sacrifice l Lo. , cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of 7eader who is credited. with divine attributes’.57 > p ora The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, es’,5? and it was this which mi : 1994);ErikaErika Gottlieb,Wore Utopp **ia** n Fiction Eastast @and West (Montreal:7 MNICGillOrwell’s5 view made Zamyatin’s| book : ; y ook superior to Huxley’s. Queen’s University Press, 2001). : >» Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopta : (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 3 Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, rev. edn (Princeton University Conclusion: Some other dystopian trends after 1900 Press, 1950). . (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Besides the major texts assessed so far here, a number of other twentieth4 Reprinted in Gregory Claeys (ed.), Utopias of the British Enlightenment century dystopias merit mention. In some cases apparent d vehicles for socialist propaganda and aimed at cal ystopbas Were 5 T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a View of its Past The Iron Heel (1907), where an ‘Oligarchy’ eee. pens as 10 London’s and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into our Prospects ye trusts or capitalist dictaRespecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Effects which it Occasions. torship is orchestrated from Wall St[g] tionarjes.58 Femin; } reet, an opposed by socialist revoluA New Edition, very much Enlarged (1798) (London: Printed for J. Johnson by 01 : eminist writers also contributed a variety of other dystopian T. Bensley, 1803). visions in this period, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s With 1. . 6 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (London: n.p., 1818). er it + Karl Pearson, The Ethic of Freethought and Other Addresses and Essays Ourland (1916), a response in part to her own utopianpian HerlHerl **a** ndnd (1915). (London: I. Fisher Unwin, 1888), p. 3198 On these texts see Gregory Ulacys (ed.), Late Victorian Utoptas (6 vols., Extremely long-term evolutionary themes prevail“y in Olaf Stapledon’s Last h Claeys (ed.), Late Victorian Utopt | | , 7 crlean : PICKELINE, altos ), int : and First Men (1930), , in whi **c** hh many existingoy dystopian“_s“—“ideas - Am ! | ondon: Pickering and Chatto, 2008 introduction. predominance,. an emergent Amer . maanipulati > g erican World State which collapses, eugenic 9 Richard Jefferies, After London: or, Wild England (London: Cassell & Co, 1885). Tup a ion — are explored. In Stapledon it is the most vulgar Americ to Edward Carpenter, Joldus: An Anthology of Friendship (1908) (New traits which triumph.” The rise of fascism provoked a number of ficti ‘al York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1917). satires. In the best-known of these, Katharine Burdekin’ conal +1 On Wells’s dystopian writings, see 1n particular Bernard Bergonzi, The Early (1937), a pioneering g feminfem nist **i** critique,. it—_is the ETOCRIN'Striumph ofSwastikathe ‘sold er! N **i** ght H. G. Wells:John AHunti Study of theThe ScientificLogic of Romances F -H. (ManchesterG. Wells and UniversityFicti Press, , virtues’ of bloodshed, brutality and ruthle 7 “Ssoldierly 1961); John Huntington, fhe Logie of Fantasy: H. G. Wells ana science iction tues of gentleness , ney;y and4]love which| markssness agai moder **n** st thedegeneracy.*t Christian Many virFiction(New York:of H. ColumbiaG. Wells University(Oxford Press,University 1962);Press, Frank McConnell,1981); Patrick TheParrinder, Science Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy (Syracuse ahubsequent works would portray a damning indictment of hedonism as a University Press, 1995).A ood overview of Wells's writings is J.R. Hammond,An 127 126 
+
+- GREGORY CLAEYS a The origins of dystopia 
+
+- H. G. Wells Companion (London: Macmillan, 1979). Wells’s attitudes towards 38 Orwell, Complete Novels, pp. 442-3. science are particularly explored in Roslynn D. Haynes, H. G. Wells: Discoverer 39 Crick, George Orwell, p. 239. 
+
+- 12 of the Future (London: Macmillan, 1 980). 4o Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 2, p. 29. H.G. Wells, The Sleeper Awakes and Men Like Gods (London: Odham’s Press, 41 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 40-2. n.d.), p. 249; The Time Machine (London: Heinemann, 1937), p. 84; The Island 42 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 103. of Doctor Moreau (London: William Heinemann, 1896), p. 116; When the 43 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 47. 
+
+- 3 Sleeper Awakes (London: Harper, 1899), pp. 69, 169, 236. 44 Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (London: 14 H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (London: G. Newnes, 1901), p. 129. : Secker & Warburg, 1961), p. 116; John Mander, ‘George Orwell’s Politics’, 15 Yevgeny Zamyatin, We ( 1921) (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 186. : Contemporary Review (1960), 118. George Orwell, The Complete Works, ed. Peter Davison (20 vols., London: Secker , 45 Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 4, p. 564. & Warburg, 1998), vol. 18, 
+
+- 16 p. 15. 46 Studies of the text include: William Steinhoff, The Road to 1984 (London: A good introduction is Katie de Koster (ed.), Readings on Brave New World ! Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975); Irving Howe (ed.), 1984 Revisited: Totalitar- 
+
+- t7 (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999). ianism in Our Century (London: Harper & Row, 1983); Peter Stansky (ed.), George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell | On Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1983); Ejner J. 
+
+- 18 (4 vols., London: Secker & Warburg, 1968). Pp. 295. Jensen (ed.), On the Future of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Ann Arbor: University 19 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 12. | of Michigan Press, 1984); Paul Chilton and Crispin Aubrey (eds.), Nineteen Sy bille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (2 vols., London: Chatto & , Eighty-Four in 1984 (London: Comedia Publishing Group, 1983). 
+
+- 20 Windus, 1973), vol. 1, p. 244. 47 James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (London: Putnam, 1942), p. 69. 21 Huxley, Brave New World, pp. 174, 184-5, 167, 44. | Orwell wrote no less than five times between 1944 and 1947 on this book. Aldous Huxley, Themes and Variations (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950), Burnham in turn summarized the views of various writers, notably Mosca, 
+
+- 22 Pp. 247. Michels, Ostrogorski, Pareto and Sorel. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (London: Harper and Row, 1965), 48 Orwell, Complete Novels, pp. 863, 886. PP. 4, 13. 
+
+- 23 49 Ibid.,p. 783. 24 Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), p. 13. 50 Rees, George Orwell, p. 84. 25 Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p. t10. 5x Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 3, p. 126. 26 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, vol. 2, Pp. 241. 52 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 144. 27 Aldous Huxley, Island (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), p. 210. 53 Rees. George Orwell, p. 116. 28 Huxley, Proper Studies, p. ix. 54 Orwell, Complete Works, vol. 12, p. 126. Huxley, Proper Studies, pp. 157, 215; Ends and Means. An Enquiry into the 55 Ibid., vol. 15, p. 310. Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: 56 Ibid., vol. 18, p. 15. Chatto & Windus, 1937), PP. 3, 59, 625; Collected Essays (London: Harper & 57 Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 4, p. 75. 
+
+- 29 Row, 1958), p. 257; Ends and Means, pp. 59, 62. 58 Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: Macmillan, 1907). 30 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949). s9 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland (1916) (Westport, CT: For a contrast of the texts, see Peter Firchow, The End of Utopia: A Study of Greenwood Press, 1997); Herland (1915) (New York: Panther, 1979). Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, , 60 Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (London: i 984) and Jenni Calder, Huxley and Orwell, ‘Brave New World’ and ‘Nineteen Methuen & Co., 1930), p. 30. 
+
+- Eighty-Four’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1976). The literature on Orwell is now 61 Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night (1937) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, large. A good introduction is John Rodden (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to 1985). George Orwell (Cambridge University Press, 2007). The standard biography is 
+
+- 31 Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). BIBLIOGRAPHY Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 4, p. 359. 
+
+- 32 Crick, George Orwell, p. 16. Bedford, Sybille, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (2 vols., London: Chatto & Windus, 33. Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 1, p. 26. 1973). 34 George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Bergonzi, Bernard, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances 35 Penguin, 1983), pp. 96, 113. (Manchester University Press, 1961). 36 Ibid., p. 632. Blatchford, Robert, The Sorcery Shop (London: Clarion Press, 1907). 37 Orwell, Complete Works, vol. Ir, p. 28. Booker, M. Keith, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature (Westport, George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) (London: Secker & Warburg, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). 1959), Ppp. 99, 202. Burdekin, Katharine, Swastika Night (1937) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985). 
+
+- 128 129 
+
+GREGORY CLAEYS a The origins of dystopia Burnham, James, The Managerial Revolution (London: Putnam, 1942). Z A New Edition, very much Enlarged (1798) (London: Printed for J. Johnson by Calder, Jenni, Huxley and Orwell: ‘Brave New World’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ ‘ T. Bensley, 1803). | (London: Edward Arnold, 1976). 7 Mander, John, ‘George Orwell’s Politics’, Contemporary Review (1 960). 1 Carpenter, Edward, Ioldus: An Anthology of Friendship (1908) (New York: Mitchell | Marcuse, Herbert, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (HarmonasKennerley, 1917). | worth, Penguin, 1970). ev P Chilton, Paul and Crispin Aubrey ({eds.), Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 McConnell, Frank, The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells (Oxford University Press, (London: Comedia Publishing Group, 1983). 1981). | Kelvin ( Claeys, Gregory, The French Revolution Debate in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ) Morris, William, The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin (4 2.007). vols., Princeton University Press, 1987). , Claeys, Gregory (ed.), Late Victorian Utopias (6 vols., London: Pickering and Chatto, Orwell, George, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (4 2008). vols., London: Secker & Warburg, 1968). | (ed.) Modern British Utopias 1700-1850 (8 vols., London: Pickering and Chatto, The Complete Novels of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). , 1997). The Complete Works, ed. Peter Davison (20 vols., London: Secker & Warburg, (ed.} Utopias of the British Enlightenment {Cambridge University Press, 1994). 1998). Crick, Bernard, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949). de Koster, Katie (ed.), Readings on Brave New World (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, : The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) (London: Secker & Warburg, 1959). , 1999). Parrinder, Patrick, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy Firchow, Peter, The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995). jon: (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1984). Pearson, Karl, The Ethic of Freethought and Other Addresses and Essays (London: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Herland (1915) (New York: Panther, 1979). T. Fisher Unwin, 1888). } | versity P With Her in Ourland (1916) (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997). Popper, Karl, The Open Society and its Enemies, rev. edn (Princeton University rress, Gottlieb, Erika, Utopian Fiction East and West (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University | 1950). | Press, 2001). , Rees, Richard, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory| (Lon **don:** Secksecker Hammond, J. R., An H. G. Wells Companion (London: Macmillan, 1979). & Warburg, 1961). | 1 (Cambrid Hay, William, Three Hundred Years Hence (London: Newman & Co., 1881). Rodden, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (Cambridge Haynes, Roslynn D., H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (London: Macmillan, University Press, 2007). a oon an Studi 1980). Sargent, Lyman Tower, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Siuates Hillegas, Mark, The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians 5:1 (1994), I-37. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967). Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (London: n.p., 1818). “ Howe, Irving (ed.), 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century (London: Harper Stansky, Peter (ed.), On Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., & Row, 1983). 1983). Huntington, John, The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction (New Stapledon, Olaf, Last and First Men (London: Methuen & Co., 19 30). York: Columbia University Press, 1962). Steinhoff, William, The Road to 1984 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 197 5). | Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (1932) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). Wagar, W. Warren, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Brave New World Revisited (1958) (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Indiana University Press, 1982). Collected Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1958). Wells, H. G., The First Men in the Moon (London: G. Newnes, 1901). Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods The Island of Doctor Moreau (London: William Heinemann, 1896). Employed for their Realization (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937). The Sleeper Awakes and Men Like Gods (London: Odham’s Press, n.d.). Island (London, Chatto & Windus, 1962). When the Sleeper Awakes (London: Harper, 1899). Proper Studies (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929). The Time Machine (London: Heinemann, 1937). Themes and Variations (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950). Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We (1921) (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970). Jefferies, Richard, After London; or, Wild England (London: Cassell & Co, 1885). Jensen, Ejner J. (ed.), On the Future of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984). London, Jack, The Iron Heel (New York: Macmillan, 1907). Malthus, T. R., An Essay on the Princtple of Population; or, a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Effects which it Occasions. 
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