Sir Thomas Mores Utopia

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1908) by Ralph Robinson and Robert Steele – Chatto & Windus

ISBN: None
Condition: Good
Published: 1908
Offered by: Crappy Old Books

There was a time when imagining a perfect society was considered a respectable intellectual pursuit, rather than evidence that somebody was about to establish a political party, launch a revolution or apply for an enormous government grant.

Welcome to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, presented in Ralph Robinson’s celebrated English translation and edited by Robert Steele, in this handsome 1908 Chatto & Windus edition. Here is one of the most influential works of political and philosophical imagination ever written, produced by a man whose own experiences of government eventually concluded with the distinctly inconvenient removal of his head.

First published in Latin in 1516, Thomas More’s Utopia describes an imaginary island society whose inhabitants have developed some remarkably unconventional ideas about property, employment, religion, justice and the organisation of everyday life.

Private ownership is largely abolished, wealth is distributed according to communal arrangements, and citizens devote considerably less time to working than their European contemporaries. It all sounds rather promising, although the arrangements governing personal freedom, social discipline and domestic life might cause the modern reader to reconsider the advantages of an imperfect democracy.

More’s fictional traveller, Raphael Hythloday, describes this extraordinary civilisation while exposing the greed, inequality, corruption and occasional breathtaking stupidity of contemporary European society.

The result is a work of enduring ambiguity. Is Utopia a serious proposal for a better world, an elaborate satire of existing institutions, or a particularly sophisticated warning about the dangers of believing that humanity can be organised into perfection?

Possibly all three, which is rather inconvenient for anyone hoping to extract a straightforward political manifesto.

Ralph Robinson’s sixteenth-century English translation lends the work an additional historical flavour, while Robert Steele’s editorial involvement makes this Edwardian edition an appealing literary artefact in its own right.

This 1908 Chatto & Windus volume is particularly attractive for its unusual period binding, featuring patterned decorative boards with a contrasting dark cloth spine. Its distinctive appearance captures something of the Arts and Crafts sensibility of early twentieth-century book production, when publishers occasionally considered the physical appearance of a book nearly as important as the words inside it.

Condition: Good. A respectable antiquarian hardback showing the expected signs of age, handling and previous ownership. Its decorative binding retains considerable character, having survived more than a century of political upheaval without requiring constitutional reform.

Naturally, there is no ISBN. Such administrative conveniences lay decades in the future, although one suspects the inhabitants of Utopia would have developed an exceptionally efficient centralised system for assigning them.

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where imperfect books are celebrated, impossible societies are contemplated, and nobody is required to surrender their private property to complete a purchase.

An intriguing addition to any collection of political philosophy, Renaissance literature or decorative Edwardian editions.

Five centuries after its original appearance, Utopia remains a reminder that designing the perfect society is relatively straightforward. Persuading actual human beings to live in it is quite another matter.

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