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Mary Griffith's 300 Years Hence (1836)
Jul. 13th, 2013 02:07 pmMary Griffith's 300 Years Hence (1836)
The basic premise of utopian fiction is that you have to get the traveller from our own world there – to a hidden valley in the Himalayas, to Mars, to the future – and then get them to walk around exclaiming over the different – and better! – way things are organised in utopia. Griffith’s novel uses the tired old ‘it was only a dream’ cliché, though, in justice to her, it may well not have been a cliché in 1836. The most notable example came decades later with Edward Bellamy’s *Looking Backwards* (1888).
Griffith’s traveller is injured in a crash and wakes up three hundred years later, to find a pacificist utopia loosely based on Quakerism. Women have increased rights and with this has come a distaste for violence and the concept of honour Eventually this meant wars ceased to be fought. Also, they wear plain, modest clothing. And they don’t have dogs (which carry rabies) or steam engines (which explode). All this is noted by the Recorder of Public Disasters.
Frankly, it’s a bit ho-hum as far as utopias go. No exotic garb, no unusual sex, no details of the food or the sewers. Just a lot of descriptions of the railway lines (no danger of crashes) running between well ordered fields. The future is agrarian, not industrial.
The basic premise of utopian fiction is that you have to get the traveller from our own world there – to a hidden valley in the Himalayas, to Mars, to the future – and then get them to walk around exclaiming over the different – and better! – way things are organised in utopia. Griffith’s novel uses the tired old ‘it was only a dream’ cliché, though, in justice to her, it may well not have been a cliché in 1836. The most notable example came decades later with Edward Bellamy’s *Looking Backwards* (1888).
Griffith’s traveller is injured in a crash and wakes up three hundred years later, to find a pacificist utopia loosely based on Quakerism. Women have increased rights and with this has come a distaste for violence and the concept of honour Eventually this meant wars ceased to be fought. Also, they wear plain, modest clothing. And they don’t have dogs (which carry rabies) or steam engines (which explode). All this is noted by the Recorder of Public Disasters.
Frankly, it’s a bit ho-hum as far as utopias go. No exotic garb, no unusual sex, no details of the food or the sewers. Just a lot of descriptions of the railway lines (no danger of crashes) running between well ordered fields. The future is agrarian, not industrial.
