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

by Thomas More

However we view his scientific legacy, two things are undeniable: that Bacon himself conceived of the reform of the natural sciences as the great project of his life; and that the New Atlantis is intended to further this aim. Throughout the text, Bacon’s conviction of the benefits which, if properly managed, science can confer on humanity, is pervasive. From the opening of the narrative, when the Bensalemites refuse—on the orders of the city’s ‘Conservator of Health’—to board the European ship for fear of infection, to the sailors’ quarantine in the ‘Strangers House’, where their sick are treated with citrus fruit and pills, Bacon’s narrative offers a vignette of a society in which scientific knowledge (in this case, of medicine) is not only profound but methodical, organized into institutions. It is not, in other words, merely in the description of Salomon’s House that science pervades the New Atlantis. Let us take, as an example, Bacon’s single direct allusion to Utopia, which occurs in the conversation with Joabin. ‘I have read in a book of one of your men,’ says Joabin,

  of a Feigned Commonwealth, where the married couple are permitted, before they contract, to see one another naked. This they dislike; for they think it a scorn to give a refusal after so familiar knowledge. But because of many hidden defects in men and women’s bodies, they have a more civil way; for they have near every town a couple of pools . . . where it is permitted to one of the friends of the man, and another of the friends of the woman, to see them severally bathe naked. (pp. 174–5)

  Why do the Bensalemites revise the practice they lift from Utopia? Perhaps because in doing so they shift the purpose of the custom. In More, the practice ensures that future lack of desire will not impair the emotional bond necessary to a lasting marriage, for in Utopia marriage is the bedrock of civil stability. In Bensalem the role of marriage lies not so much in the disciplinary function that the family can play, as in the production of the main commodity upon which the power of the nation depends: children. The ‘propagation’ (Bacon’s term) of healthy children might well be inhibited by ‘defects’ of either (potential) parent’s body were these not exposed prior to their union. So to guard against this eventuality, the subjective gaze of the intended spouse (who may deliberately or unconsciously ignore the presence of such ‘defects’ in the body of his or her beloved) is replaced in Bensalem by the objective examination of an impartial observer (who, it is assumed, will not).

  We see here a shift from the subjective to the objective, from desire to observation, and in acknowledging this shift we can recognize how fundamental to the New Atlantis the discourse of science actually is: in moving to the detailed description of Salomon’s House, Bacon is making explicit what has hitherto been implicit throughout the text. It is, then, unsurprising that the text has frequently been understood to be one whose purpose is singular and self-evident: to represent a society in which scientific knowledge is properly nurtured and in so doing to illustrate the benefits of such investment. This was certainly the way in which many early readers understood the New Atlantis. One of these was William Rawley, Bacon’s secretary, who prefaced its first publication with these words:

  This fable my Lord devised, to the end that he might exhibit therein a model or description of a college instituted for the interpreting of nature and the producing of great and marvellous works for the benefit of men, under the name of Salomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days’ Works. (p. 151)

  Later, the text was credited with precisely this influence. Widely reprinted in the years following its first publication, it was cited more than once in the mid-seventeenth century as a model for the Royal Society. It was not, of course, the only such model. Some academies of science, such as the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, pre-dated Bacon’s narrative, and other individuals shared Bacon’s vision of the benefits of investment in the natural sciences: Tommaso Campanella, for instance, wrote a utopia very similar to the New Atlantis, which was published some three years before it.

  Contemporary readers of the New Atlantis, then, saw its purpose and influence as being that of providing a blueprint for a new scientific institution, and to this aspect of the text we will return shortly. In describing the narrative as a fable, however, Rawley implicitly raises another aspect of Bacon’s work: its literary nature. A fable is a literary vehicle for communicating a distinct message through illustration of the consequences of a given action or actions; like a parable, it is intended to teach its audience some kind of lesson. To assume that this ‘lesson’ is that a scientific academy is beneficial to the society that is foresighted enough to support it, however, is problematic: such an account does not explain adequately some of the problems of the New Atlantis.

  In fact, it is possible to claim that illustrating the benefits of science is precisely what the New Atlantis does not do. With the exception of the discourse about disease which we have discussed above, there is almost nothing in the text which illustrates how the great works produced by the Fathers of Salomon’s House ameliorate the lives of ‘men’, of ordinary people. A juxtaposition of the New Atlantis with Utopia, in which we hear so much about the lives of Utopian citizens, makes this transparent, and also serves to foreground the extent to which Bacon neglects to describe the very institutions which he elsewhere claims it to be the first duty of the traveller to ascertain. We learn virtually nothing, for instance, of Bensalemite courts, nothing of their warehouses, markets, or executions. Elsewhere in his writings Bacon states emphatically that what is most important to report are the government, councils, magistrates, laws and practices of warfare of the countries that one visits.16 This, essentially, is the kind of information which Utopia takes pains to elaborate, yet in the New Atlantis we learn almost nothing of any of this (aside from the fact that Bensalem, unlike Utopia, is a monarchy). Why is Bacon reluctant to provide this information, and in what ways, if at all, does this contribute to his ‘end’ in creating this utopia, and to the ‘lesson’ that this ‘fable’ is intended to teach us?

  For those who believe that the New Atlantis is, as Rawley maintains, primarily a model for a scientific institution, the answer to these questions lies in the text’s self-advertised incompleteness. Rawley himself suggests that Bacon intended to offer his readers a fuller picture of the ‘best state or mould of a commonwealth’ (p. 151); his failure to do so, Rawley maintains, was a result of his being distracted by other, more pressing scholarly concerns. Yet this answer seems less convincing when we consider that the New Atlantis’s concluding claim to incompletion (‘The rest was not perfected’) is mirrored within the narrative by other, more worrying, lacunae. Conversations repeatedly end abruptly when the narrator’s interlocutors are ‘commanded away in haste’ (p. 175) by Bensalemite officials for purposes never revealed; these conversations are not resumed, no matter how ostentatiously incomplete they appear. Bensalem is, furthermore, an extremely secretive society. Its officials repeatedly impress on the narrator (and hence also the reader) that they are only permitted to divulge to foreigners some aspects of Bensalemite society, and that others must remain undisclosed. Most secret of all are the Fathers of Salomon’s House, about whom we learn almost nothing, and who remain segregated even from the rest of the Bensalemite population (p. 175).

  Different kinds of incompletion in the text appear, in short, to be not accidental but designed. And these explicit refusals to gratify narratorial (or readerly) curiosity exist alongside other, equally enigmatic difficulties. The text’s very names provoke questions. Why is the country called Bensalem and the text New Atlantis, for example? What is the relation between the original lawgiver of the island, ‘Solamona’, the biblical King ‘Solomon’, and the name of the island’s most significant institution, ‘Salomon’s House’? Why is the narrator finally given leave to publish the account of Salomon’s House when throughout the text we—as he—have been led to believe that it is the most secret of all of Bensalem’s secretive institutions? Why is one of the narrator’s main informants not a native Bensalemite but a Jew—hardly a trustworthy figure in the ic
onography of early modern English texts, as a glance at Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta or Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice would indicate? To these and other such questions the New Atlantis offers no certain answers—and, importantly, neither does an interpretation of the text which sees its purpose merely to be the illustration of an ideal scientific institution. How, then, might we account for these difficulties, and square them with Bacon’s evident conviction that the nurture of scientific inquiry is not merely desirable, but necessary? In order to do this we need to look again not only at the New Atlantis, but also at the nature of the discourse of science itself.

  As we have seen, of the two main accounts of Bacon’s relation to science, one saw him as one of the ‘fathers’ of modern science, while the other argued that he was not a scientist in any recognizably modern sense of the term. In the past two decades, however, a third claim has been made: one which sees Bacon’s works as fundamental to the construction of modern scientific thought, but which is both more critical of Bacon and more sceptical of science than are either of the two earlier positions. Broadly speaking, while the first two positions see modern science as primarily a discourse of knowledge, the latter is more interested in the power that a discourse of ‘pure’ knowledge may act to occlude or obscure. Feminist writers such as Evelyn Fox Keller and Sandra Harding, and Foucauldian critics such as Denise Albanese have claimed that knowledge cannot be divorced from power, and that an understanding of the fundamental connections between power and knowledge is indispensable to an understanding of Bacon’s writings. In making these claims, such critics have been able to point not only to the underlying presence of power within science’s supposedly objective discourse of knowledge, but also to the frequency with which Bacon himself links the two factors in his writings. ‘Those twin objects, human Knowledge and human Power, really do meet one,’ Bacon insists elsewhere;17 the connection between the two is more implicit, but undoubtedly present, in the Father’s description of the purpose of Salomon’s House: ‘the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’ (p. 177). With this connection in mind, we can return to the question of the purpose and function of the secrecy which Bensalem and the New Atlantis so studiously preserve. For this secrecy is indubitably inscribed in the text in a discourse of power. It is encoded in laws; it appears to operate at least once in the service of repression; it always operates in service of the power of the Bensalemite nation. Consider the nature of some of the things that we, like the narrator, are kept from knowing. We are not allowed to know how the ‘vulgar sort of mariners are contained from being discovered at land’ in Bensalem’s secret expeditions to other countries (p. 168). We are denied information about how Bensalem organizes the mechanics of its cultural espionage, nor are we told what has happened to the other ‘strangers’ who have lighted upon Bensalemite shores: to the Europeans who have found their way to Bensalem in the past, for instance (p. 159), or to the other Jews of Bensalem, apparently more numerous in times gone by (p. 172).

  There is too much we do not know about Bensalem and too many occasions when the limit of our knowledge is impressed on us by the text. This being the case, we might return to the notion of the ideal traveller with which we began. How ideal can the narrator of the New Atlantis really be, given his repeated failure to ask the questions of his Bensalemite interlocutors that readers have (recently at least) felt so pressing and insistent? Why is the narrator blind to the potentially sinister nature of Bensalem’s repeated refusal to reveal itself fully to him? Why does he never wonder why one of his most loquacious informers is a Jew, and not find it odd that someone supposedly marginal to Bensalemite society is also, apparently, a privileged participant in Bensalemite policy, being, like the governor, ‘commanded away in haste’ for unspecified official purposes at key moments in his conversation (p. 175)?

  More and more systematically, the text establishes a split between its narrator and its reader, whose respective experiences of Bensalem appear to be so radically different. Indeed, the narrator’s refusal to question Bensalemite secrecy itself provokes in the reader the curiosity which the narrator never betrays: we, in short, are continually encouraged to suspect unspecified dangers of which the narrator appears to be almost entirely unaware. So perhaps the ‘message’ of the New Atlantis is more complex than it might at first seem. We have had no time here to consider the possible influence on the text of another, growing, political concern for early modern nations: empire. But the ‘enlarging’ of empire is one of the principal motivations for the work of Salomon’s House, and although in that instance ‘empire’ is invoked as a common cause of all humanity, the same was not true of the race for actual empires beginning at the time of Bacon’s writing, which involved intense competition both between European powers, and between them and the peoples that they conquered, and frequently killed, in the seventeenth century and after.

  Does the New Atlantis suggest that its English readers should nurture investigation in the natural sciences? Yes, it does. But it may also illustrate the conviction that such investigation should be nurtured because scientific knowledge is indivisible from political power, and political power is a competitive reality. Bacon sees scientific empiricism as being fundamental to the goal of political empire, and it is the relation between empire and empiricism, power and knowledge, which he wants his reader not merely intellectually to consider, but emotionally to feel. Perhaps it is for this reason that Bacon chose a literary vehicle for the communication of what he had to say. The New Atlantis is indeed a kind of fable: a parable whose implications only emerge to the sceptical reader, who is unable to inhabit the position embodied in the unquestioning trust of the narrator himself. In encouraging us to ask the questions for which the text explicitly refuses to provide answers, the New Atlantis may alert its readers to the political necessity of attaining the knowledge that bestows on its owners such power. The narrator fails—in stark contrast to the Bensalemites—to understand the manner and degree in which knowledge and power are intertwined. We should not, the text may be telling us, make the same mistake.

  The Isle of Pines

  Henry Neville (sometimes spelt ‘Nevile’) was, like his father and grandfather before him, and indeed like Thomas More and Francis Bacon, influential in the highly complex politics of his age. He entered parliament after the regicide of Charles I, and remained an MP throughout the period of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and into the Restoration of the monarchy, writing, over these years, a number of tracts and pamphlets. All these were, in various ways and with various degrees of directness, interventions in the political debates of his time. These debates were highly complex, the basic opposition between monarchism and republicanism being complicated by the fact that there were in the period many different brands of republicanism, as well as by the fact that alliances frequently formed between factions which might appear at first sight to be antithetical: religious groups such as Puritans and nonconformists, for example, frequently made common cause with republicans. Neville himself, for instance, was friendly with at least one prominent Puritan, even though he was at one point charged with atheism (for, allegedly, preferring Cicero to the Bible).

  This complex political and intellectual background often makes the tracts and pamphlets produced during the period very difficult to interpret. This is not, perhaps, the case with some of Neville’s writings—of his translation of Machiavelli’s works, self-evidently, or of his best-known work, Plato Redivivus, a defence of some of the principles of James Harrington’s Oceana (itself one of the most important works of republican political theory produced in the period, on which Neville may well have had an influence). Other pamphlets Neville wrote, however, are more difficult to interpret. Some (including, I think, The Isle of Pines) are satires, whose targets are no longer as transparent as they may once have been. Such satires, moreover, frequently operate by fusing political critique wit
h sexual salaciousness and sexual anxieties, in ways which only recently have been acknowledged and taken seriously.

  For these reasons, and also because of the complicated publishing history of The Isle of Pines, the meaning of this text has, until very recently, eluded many of its readers. The Isle of Pines consists of two narratives. One is of the story of an Englishman, George Pine, who discovered the island; the other frames Pine’s tale, and purports to be written by Cornelius Van Sloetten, a Dutch sailor who happened on Pine’s descendants many years later. These two narratives were published separately at first, in pamphlet form; shortly after their publication a third pamphlet was issued, which inserted Pine’s tale within Van Sloetten’s. Few copies remain of these early texts, the pamphlet being an ephemeral form; most which survive offer only one part of the complete whole. Another reason for the text’s comparative oblivion over the past 300 years is also, no doubt, its salacious nature. Even the person who edited the only complete reprint this century, Worthington Chauncey Ford, felt it necessary to apologize for this aspect of The Isle of Pines. Pointing out that early readers of the text had noticed that ‘pines’ is an anagram of ‘penis’, and proposing in addition that ‘Sloetten’ may suggest the word ‘slut’, Ford concluded that ‘such an interpretation reduces our tract to a screaming farce’.18

  The assumption that the text’s interest in matters sexual renders it insignificant is not one which would be shared by literary critics today. Indeed, it is for its complex rehearsal of questions concerning the matters which most deeply preoccupy many of today’s critics—gender and sexuality, but also race, class, nation, and colonialism—that the text holds considerable interest. Some of these concerns are transparent enough in Pine’s narrative alone, in which the Englishman tells of his shipwreck on an uninhabited island somewhere near Madagascar with four women: his master’s daughter, two maidservants, and a black slave. Pine’s tale explains how he proceeded to people the island, producing by the time of his death at eighty 1,789 children, and how he organized his descendants into tribes named after their respective mothers. Finally, Pine tells us, he gives the narrative to his eldest son to be transmitted for posterity.