Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines

by Thomas More

  Insofar as Pine’s own narrative is concerned, then, the text might be read (and indeed has been read) as a fantasy of absolute sexual liberty, a wish-fulfilment of individual phallic and paternal transcendence. Pine is a man with four women at his sole disposal: no threat here from any other man, no competition for this embarrassment of sexual riches. Male potency in this narrative collapses class boundaries as effectively as it does shame: Pine sleeps with the two maidservants first, in private and then openly; his master’s daughter ‘Sarah English’, observing their intercourse ‘was content also to do as we did’ (p. 198). Fulfilment of such fantasies of sexual transgression—polygamy, voyeurism, cross-class intercourse—does not end here. Pine’s black slave Philippa, ‘seeing what we did, longed also for her share’, and with the consent of the other women she seduces Pine, who ‘satisfied [himself] with her, as well as with one of the rest’ (p. 198). Miscegenation and orgiastic sexual indulgence are thus added to the list of the taboos broken by the text; in the remainder of Pine’s narrative incest quietly joins this catalogue of transgressions, since Pine’s children must sleep with their half-siblings to produce their own issue. Male sexual fantasy in the text, moreover, extends beyond ‘simple’ gratification of unlimited male desire, since in addition it acts to assuage one of the fears which underlies the construction of patriarchy: the uncertainty, that is, of paternity. Neville organizes his narrative so as to suggest the eradication of doubt about Pine’s paternal status: Pine begins to sleep with ‘his’ women after he has been on the island for four months, and thus, unlike other men, can be possessed of certain knowledge that the children which issue from his women are his own.

  If a fantasy of absolute sexual liberation coupled with absolute certainty about paternity is one generative impulse of Pine’s narrative, a fantasy of absolute colonial freedom to control the island settled is another. Absence of sexual competition from other men is mirrored in the text by the absence of colonial competition from other European powers and of resistance from native populations: this is a vision of a place which one can overrun without the unpleasant necessity of at best exploiting native peoples or killing them, and at worst being killed by them instead, or driven out or massacred by one’s fellow Europeans. In this sense, Pine’s tale reads like a travel narrative from which all labour has been expunged. The natural fertility of the island precludes the labour of husbandry; its lack of native peoples precludes the labour of defence; the absence of other men precludes the labour—if such it can be called—of courtship. Even childbirth (the one kind of labour indispensable to the production of the particular kind of commodity—people—around which this narrative is so centred) is downplayed in the text, the women being all ‘soon well again’ after their deliveries, and only one experiencing any difficulty (apparently because she was overweight) (p. 198). In this respect, the text bears more similarity to a Land of Cockaygne or an Arcadia than it does to a utopia proper (for this distinction, see the first section of this introduction). This is a place where natural abundance, not systems or institutions, generates the happiness of the community; a place where food (in the realistic shape of something like a dodo) is there for the taking, and where mossy banks and trees provide all the shelter that one needs.

  This is perhaps the commonest reading of The Isle of Pines, which has usually, when it has been discussed at all, been interpreted as a narrative of phallic wish-fulfilment: a kind of ‘pornotopia’. Some of those who read the text this way, however, have read only Pine’s narrative; others have assumed that the main function of Van Sloetten’s tale is to provide a plausible explanation for the return of Pine’s narrative to England. It is, however, a great mistake to divorce Pine’s narrative from the frame in which it eventually appeared, or to underestimate the significance of Van Sloetten’s tale, which offers us the consequences, as it were, of Pine’s ‘history’; the present context through the lens of which we must read the narrative of Pine’s past. In his narrative, Van Sloetten tells us of his arrival on the island and his entertainment there by Pine’s grandson William, who in turn relates the tale of the community’s collapse after his grandfather’s death. The population ‘fell to whoredoms, incests and adultery; so that what my grandfather was forced to do for necessity, they did for wantonness’ (p. 201), says William; in consequence, William explains, the then ruler of the island (Pine’s son Henry), institutes extreme punishments for transgressions, and appoints one official from each tribe of Pine’s descendents to ensure the observation of his decrees. William’s story told, the Dutch visitors tour the island and map it. As they are about to leave, William Pine requests the assistance of the Dutch in fighting off a rebellion (p. 207); with William’s help the Dutch capture the rebel leader (who is subsequently killed), and resume their journey to the East Indies. The remainder of Van Sloetten’s narrative relates his travels to Calicut and Camboia and his journey home.

  What, then, are we to make of the text as a complete work? What we might initially have understood as a fantasy of sexual and colonial wish-fulfilment—a utopia of peaceful plenty—emerges as its opposite: a story of degeneration, a dystopia of absolute disorder and rebellion. Even the text’s title embodies this dichotomy: ‘Pines’ may be an anagram of ‘penis’, but ‘pine’ also signified ‘punishment’, ‘suffering’ (especially the suffering of hell), and (as a verb) ‘to lose one’s vitality or vigour’, as well as ‘to languish with desire’ (as it still does). William Pine’s appeal to ‘necessity’ as a justification of his grandfather’s conduct begins to seem like a hollow explanation of the difference between Pine’s conflict and that of his offspring, especially when we recognize the degree to which those things that are valorized in Pine’s narrative are shown to be defective in Van Sloetten’s. In Pine’s account his offspring by his black slave is ‘a fine white girl’; in Van Sloetten’s, it is a series of rapacious and rebellious black men (both episodes of degeneration are instigated by the offspring of Pine and his slave). From Pine’s point of view, his community is a kind of extended patriarchal family; in Van Sloetten’s, it is an emergent monarchy, Pine’s grandson being ‘Prince’ William Pine (Neville himself was a staunch republican). By the time that Cornelius Van Sloetten arrives in the Isle of Pines, he meets not a ‘nation’ of ‘English Pines’ (the grand finale of Pine’s narrative) but a fragmented tribal society, fraught with internecine divisions, a society which would be coded quite clearly for a seventeenth century reader as barbarous: ‘No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; | No occupation; all men idle, all.’19

  No one can say with any certainty why Neville wrote a sequel to his initial narrative, or why he then published them both together. But it is possible that he did so in order to preclude interpreting The Isle of Pines merely as pornotopia, as simple wish-fulfilment. For, episodic and fragmented as the narrative sometimes seems, there exist in it indications of deeper conceptual links between the two halves of the text, from minor details (such as the axe Pine originally takes from the ship, replaced by Cornelius Van Sloetten) to much more significant indicators of narrative congruence. At the end of the pamphlet, for instance, an apparently inconsequential description of the ‘Brachmans’ (Brahmins) of Calicut emerges as crucially linked to the narrative of Pine himself, as Van Sloetten details what anthropologists now recognize as a particular cultural mechanism for bypassing uncertainty about paternity whilst preserving patrilineal inheritance systems, property being passed from the father to his sister’s sons (with whom the father knows he shares blood, or genes), rather than to his own children (whose relation to him he must take on faith and not knowledge).

  But perhaps the most significant factor of all for our understanding of the relation of the two narratives is the nationalities of the narrators in it. It is not coincidental that Pine is English and Van Sloetten Dutch. The Dutch and the English had for more than half a century been involved in competition for dominance of the spice trade of the East Indies. The English East India company was established in 1600 (tw
o years after George Pine embarks on his voyage), the Dutch East India Company in 1602. In the succeeding decades competition between the two nations had become ever more intense, escalating by the mid-seventeenth century into the Anglo-Dutch Wars which re-erupted periodically over succeeding decades.

  One way to understand The Isle of Pines might be to view it as a moral tale, an exemplary narrative which tries to illustrate how the Dutch and the English might make common cause in joint colonial endeavour. Another, quite opposite, reading might attempt to insert the narrative into the history which provides its most immediate backdrop in a very different way, extracting from it a rather different moral tale. When George Pine arrives on the island, he essentially goes to sleep, devoting his life to pleasure and to idleness. When the Dutch arrive on the island, they engage in the labour which Pine evades, mapping the island, charting it, and working out exactly where it lies. One only has to compare Pine’s behaviour with that of the Dutch to realize how far short he might be thought to fall of the ideal colonist.

  The real significance of those alternative responses to the discovery of an unknown island may be clearer when we look at its location. Those familiar with More’s Utopia might be forgiven for fighting shy of taking too seriously another utopia’s references to the details of the voyages of its protagonists, and to the location of the island it describes. But in the case of The Isle of Pines we should suspend our scepticism concerning the information the text offers us on the location of its island. The Isle of Pines, we are told in Van Sloetten’s narrative, is situated at 76 degrees longitude, 20 degrees latitude. This places it some distance north-east of Madagascar, in the centre of the Indian Ocean (almost directly due south of the tip of India and almost directly due west of Java), and thus an ideal spot from which to dominate the age’s most lucrative and desirable of prizes: the spice trade of the East Indies. The Isle of Pines, in short, may have been written not to indulge fantasies about sexual excess, but to provide an explanation for Dutch ascendancy in the area—or perhaps to suggest another utopia altogether. What might have been had George Pine’s hedonism been replaced by Utopian industry or by the Bensalemite desire for knowledge? What would it have meant to British interests in the area had a different kind of English colonist—say, Robinson Crusoe—been shipwrecked on this particular island around 1600, when the English East India Company was first established? Neville could not have formulated precisely this last question, for The Isle of Pines was a precursor of Robinson Crusoe—as many, indeed, have noted—and not the other way round. But I strongly suspect that English labour, not English sexuality, is the utopian ideal to which this text is ultimately pointing. It is just that English labour is notable in this text only by its absence: like utopia itself, it just isn’t there.

  NOTE ON THE TEXTS

  Utopia

  The Latin text of More’s Utopia was first published in Louvain in 1516. Three further editions followed within the next two years: one in 1517 (published in Paris) and two in 1518 (published in Basel). The text was first translated into English by Ralph Robinson in 1551. A second, revised edition of Robinson’s translation followed in 1556. It is this 1556 edition I have used for the text in this volume. I have modernized spelling and put in inverted commas and paragraphs (the 1556 edition has neither), but have kept as much as possible of Robinson’s punctuation. Robinson’s translation is generally accurate, if more verbose than More’s original; in the notes I have drawn the reader’s attention to occasional inaccuracies.

  In its early editions the text of Utopia itself appeared with a variety of supporting materials: maps, the Utopian alphabet, poems and letters written by and to different members of the humanist circle of which More was a part. These ancillary materials all participated, in various ways, in the hoax that was Utopia, mentioning conversations with Hythloday, for example, or speculating on the location of the island. Different editions of the text published different selections of this material, so I have chosen here to reproduce the entirety of Robinson’s 1556 edition in order to show readers what an early edition would have looked like, and to illustrate the way in which early editions of Utopia were, to some degree at least, a collaborative enterprise. An appendix reproduces most of the ancillary materials which appeared in other early editions of the text but not in the 1556 edition: notes to all of these indicate the edition in which they first appeared.

  This ‘collaborative authorship’ also applies to the marginalia in Robinson’s edition. The majority of these are ascribed (in various places) to Peter Giles and to Erasmus; Robinson appears to be responsible for some of them.

  New Atlantis

  The New Atlantis was first published by William Rawley, Bacon’s secretary, in 1627, the year following Bacon’s death, and appeared at the end of the volume containing Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum: Or, A Natural History. The text in this volume is taken from Brian Vickers’s, edition for The Oxford Authors series. I have modernized spelling in a couple of instances.

  The Isle of Pines

  The publishing history of The Isle of Pines is very complex. George Pine’s narrative was published first, in June 1668. Cornelius Van Sloetten’s narrative was published shortly after, in July, without Pine’s narrative included in it—a frame, so to speak, lacking the picture it should enclose. Later in July, or early in August, a new version of the text appeared, again in pamphlet form, conflating the two earlier pamphlets into one and in so doing properly inserting Pine’s narrative into the frame provided by Van Sloetten. As my copy-text I have used Worthington Chauncey Ford’s edition of The Isle of Pines (Boston: The Club of Odd Volumes, 1920). Neville’s punctuation, which Worthington Chauncey Ford preserves, is haphazard in the extreme. I have throughout silently regularized, preserving the slack punctuation only when to regularize would involve choosing one potential meaning over another. I have silently amended the occasional typographical error, but have retained inconsistencies in names (Pines/Pine, Sparkes/Sparks).

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Thomas More, Utopia

  There is a huge amount of material on More: the following list mentions only a few of the most influential writings on the man and on Utopia.

  Other Editions

  The standard edition of the text is that edited by J. H. Hexter and Edward J. Surtz in volume IV of The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). Hexter’s introduction to the text in this edition is itself an important interpretation of the text. There are two other widely available translations of Utopia on the market. One is Paul Turner’s Penguin Classics edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). This is colloquial and readable, but its Anglicization of the names in the text (Hythloday, for example, becomes ‘Nonsenso’) undermines the serious aspect of Utopia. The other translation is Robert M. Adams’s for the Norton Critical Edition of Utopia (New York: Norton, 1975), which is indebted to Robinson’s. Adams’s translation is also reproduced in slightly different form in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition, edited by George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), which has comprehensive notes, especially with regard to the philosophical and classical aspects of Utopia. Two early editions of the text remain very useful: J. H. Lupton’s 1895 scholarly edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press), and J. Churton Collins’s Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which is aimed more at a student audience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904). Both of these reprint Robinson’s translation in its first (1551) edition; Lupton’s has the Latin on facing pages. Both have extremely comprehensive notes and introductions, which remain informative and readable.

  Biographies

  More’s son-in-law William Roper wrote the first Life of Sir Thomas More, reprinted in Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). Anthony Kenny’s Thomas More (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), in the Past Masters series, provides a readable and short introduction to More’s life and major works. R. W. Chamber
s’s Thomas More (London: Bedford Historical Series, 1935) has been very influential this century; it sees More in the light of his medievalism, his Christianity, and his Englishness. Alastair Fox’s Thomas More: History and Providence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982) is not exactly a biography, although its organization follows the trajectory of More’s life: Fox is interested in the tensions between reaction and radicalism in More’s personality, which he sees expressed in More’s writings from the beginning of his career. For information on More as a public figure, see J. A. Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

  Utopia: Sources and Contexts

  As the notes will indicate, More alluded to, and argued with, a number of classical sources in the Utopia. The most important of these are Plato’s Republic and his Laws, both of which are readily available in a number of different English translations. (See also below, under ‘Other Utopian Literature’.) George M. Logan’s The Meaning of More’s Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) discusses many of the relations between Utopia and its classical sources in a consideration of the nature of its political thought; Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: CUP, 1978) is a detailed introduction to the political philosophy of More’s age. See also his ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 1987). For background regarding the familial history of More’s time, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977; abridged edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).