Forlorn Hopes and The English Review

Abstract

So far I have been exploring the links between early modernist writers, late nineteenth-century ideas about meliorism, and languages of perfectibility in order to provide a contextual and discursive basis for a terminologically-specific understanding of the early modernist utopianisms to be explored in the rest of this book. This preparatory work, though seemingly taking us somewhat away from the utopian experiments signalled in my ‘Introduction’, provides us with a more nuanced grasp of how early modernist writers differentiated their activities from schemes they saw as ‘utopian’ in the sense of practices conceived in the forgiving light of the quixotically ideal. Lewis would later describe himself as born ‘for utopias, built upon a dazzlingly white and abstract ground’ (1938, p. 229), and Wells, of course, was unafraid to associate his social and political thinking with the ‘dazzling’ qualities of utopian thought in A Modern Utopia (even if, as we have seen, that book’s contentions cannot easily be mapped onto Wells’s own). But early modernist writers tended to go in fear of the word ‘utopia’ and its cognates as descriptors of their activities for the simple reason that such terms conveyed, as they still have a tendency to do, a sense of ‘what-ifness’ disconnected from what Vernon Lee called the ‘living knowledge[s]’ (1906, p. 1134) of ordinary realities.