The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin De Siècle by Matthew Beaumont, and: Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945 ed. by Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann (review)

Although not as heavily trafficked as some subfields, utopian studies is a lively area of contemporary Victorian scholarship. The two volumes I review here certainly illustrate its vitality and dynamism.

Limpid writing, sharp argumentation, and careful historicism characterize the essays collected in Matthew Beaumont’s The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin De Siècle. While sufficient to stand alone, The Spectre of Utopia might be considered a companion to the author’s fine Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870-1900 (2005), which offers a synoptic account of late Victorian utopian textual production from a Marxian perspective. This new volume expands the purview of the latter by taking in additional authors (such as H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats), materials (the utopian-feminist journal Shafts [1892-99] and the radical publisher William Reeves), and topics (occultism and science fiction). But this is no mindless annexation of adjacent territory: Beaumont takes the opportunity to fill some lacunae in his earlier book and to refine his theoretical optic.

Though all the essays in The Spectre of Utopia reward study, this volume has two high points. The first is its four-chapter examination of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888). While acknowledging its aesthetic and ideological shortcomings, Beaumont nonetheless maintains that “the literary and political importance” of Bellamy’s utopian romance “simply cannot be overestimated” (17). Looking Backward sold prodigiously in the U.S. and Great Britain, converted hundreds (thousands?) to its author’s “distinctively ambivalent vision of socialism,” and catalyzed an international utopian literary revival (30).

Beaumont claims he is reading Bellamy’s utopian romance “against the grain” in order to access its unactivated latencies (17). In fact, I think he is being too modest. What Beaumont has done, rather, is demonstrate the richness and even protomodernism of Looking Backward. His first and third chapters reveal the psychological complexity of the text’s time-traveling hero, Julian West. “In retrospect,” Beaumont suggests, “Bellamy’s finest achievement is perhaps his portrait of the protagonist’s psychology—that is, the aspect of the book that has been most consistently overlooked in scholarly accounts of it” (76). Chapter 1 shows that West’s invigorating experience of the totalizing social vision that characterizes utopia as a literary form is shadowed by crippling agoraphobia. Bellamy thus conjoins the “panoramic and paranoiac” (46). Chapter 3 offers a fascinating reading of Looking Backward against the backdrop of a contemporaneous disorder, “psychogenic fugue” (82). Individuals afflicted with this syndrome simply dropped out of their own life and reappeared in another, with no memory of the identity they had shed. Beaumont ruminates productively on the “chronological coincidence of the emergence of fugue and the resurgence of the utopian imagination—of compulsive wandering and compulsive wondering” (89).

The second chapter is the least persuasive of Beaumont’s Bellamy tetralogy—or, perhaps, merely the one that truly does read against the grain. It situates the text’s notorious shopping episode against the concurrent rise of the department store and notes that commodity fetishism in Looking Backward is so absolute that “the object of worship, the commodity itself, is mysteriously absent” (67). This is astute, but Beaumont’s conclusion that “freedom of consumption is Bellamy’s basic component of social liberation, and so its politics are ultimately those of a capitalist utopia rather than of the post-capitalist utopia that it purports to be” strikes me as rather too neat (69). Bellamy is far more affectively invested in the universal dissemination of music, for example, than in the availability of material...