From Nowhere: Utopian and Dystopian Visions of our - Chris J. Young

Maclean-Hunter Reading Room Cases
A Dark Place
We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy.
Something’s missing.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw drastic changes in the economic, cultural, social, and political
landscapes in Europe and North America that resonated around the globe. in the wake of the French
Revolution came the industrial Revolution, an event that exponentially increased the manufacturing and
transportation capabilities of machinery. Political instability swept across much of the European continent
as monarchies crumbled in the wake of both democratic and authoritarian rule. At the same time,
scientific discoveries, such as evolutionary theory and resultant social Darwinism, challenged the widely
held beliefs of Creationism, with effects lasting to the present day. Meanwhile the expansion of colonialism
continued, with millions of people subjected to foreign rulers. While technological innovations advanced
sections of society, other developments brought with them the tools to subjugate large masses of people
on an unprecedented scale. As the world became smaller, fascist and communist dictatorships assumed
the right to incarcerate millions of people in concentration camps and gulags. From the mid-nineteenth
century onwards, therefore, there was a considerable literary shift towards the concept of dystopia, a dark
place distinct from the idealistic visions of earlier centuries. Authors continued to write on contemporary
events, but their focus shifted to the evils of capitalism, fascism, communism, social Darwinism, and
dictatorship. in this next case, these dark places revealing the other side of the double-edged sword to
Western progress will be explored.
55. Samuel Butler (1835–1902). Erewhon, or, Over the Range. London:
Jonathan Cape, 1923.
Like Thomas More before him, Samuel Butler based his city of ‘Erewhon’ on an anagram of Nowhere.
Set in a pastoral location, Butler’s Erewhon satirizes both technology-based ideals of progress and social
Darwinism. The story begins with Higgs, the narrator, exploring a sparsely populated coastline in New
Zealand, where Butler had spent several years raising sheep. Higgs meets a chieftain and herder named
Chowbok who leads him into town where he is placed under house arrest for wearing a watch, or a
‘machine.’ imprisoned for a while, Higgs learns to speak the local language, and is eventually released
From Nowhere: Utopian and Dystopian Visions of our Past, Present, and Future 69