Sir Thomas More's Utopia

 

Sir Thomas More's Utopia

 

Sir Thomas More's utopia is a major work in the history of English literature. It represents the flowering of the spirit of Renaissance in England. It was written by the great Christian humanists Sir Thomas More. Utopia was originally written in Latin and published in 1516. Erasmus supervised its printing of “utopia”. And later on it was translated into English by Ralph Robinson in 1551. The form of Thomas More's “Utopia” was influenced by the narrative of voyages as the record of the Explorer Amerigo Vespucci. It was printed in 1507. utopia is a Greek word meaning nowhere land. In this book Sir Thomas More gave the description of an imaginary kingdom of his ideals. In Utopia, Thomas More's purposes to paint a republic after his own ideals. By doing so, he wanted to expose the evils of the actual set up of his own country.

Utopia comprises two Books :-

In the first book we are told how the writer and his friend Peter Giles happened to meet a Portuguese traveller named Raphael Hythloday. Thomas More and Peter Giles accompanied him to the garden. Hythloday tells them about a country called utopia which he had happened to visit, while he was on his way back home from travel.

The description of the land covers the second part of the work. In Utopia, there is no private wealth or money. Thomas More describes the society which is very much like Marxist. In Utopia, there is no unemployment, neither poverty nor excess of wealth.

There are no wars of aggression and the utopians have no lawyers as they have no laws. The only law is conformity to love. There is great religious tolerance and only those are held guilty who deny the existence of God. the utopians glorify physical culture. According to utopians. Perfect health is the greatest of all bodily pleasure. There is no drinking, gambling, hunting and thieving. Thus, the utopians are highly moral people.

Sir Thomas More has narrated the ideal state existing in his imagination. Utopia is not merely a piece of More's idealizing imagination but a criticism of life. It represents the socialistic pattern of society and has aptly been called the first monument of modern socialism. More derives many of his ideas from Plato's Republic. Compton and Rickett commented, “Whereas Plato's Republic is an aristocratic communism Sir Thomas More's is on a democratic basis”. Utopia is a People's State with an effective government even though state controls.

The book embodies the spirit of Renaissance. Sir Thomas More criticizes fanaticism, scholasticism, the other worldliness, and the ideal of chivalry.

The word utopia was coined by Sir Thomas More it was adopted by many writers like Francis Bacon in his “New Atlantis”, William Morris “News from Nowhere” and Edward Bellamy's “Looking Backward” Jonathan Swift's “Gulliver's travel” and Samuel Butler's “Erawhon” can be called as satirical utopias.