John Lithgows Real Utopia and the Anticapitalist Romance of the Early Republic

This article analyzes an obscure early American author and activist, John Lithgow, and argues that his 1802 work Equality—a Political Romance deserves our special attention as a groundbreaking piece of writing about economic inequality and the democratic limits of republicanism at the core of the US national project. Specifically, Equality represents a singular development of utopian fiction responding to the political and economic exigencies of its historical moment, and in the process Lith gow inaugurates a variant of the genre—the American anticapitalist romance—that challenges our literary taxonomies, both in terms of utopianism and the literature of the early Republic. It is, finally, the rise of finance capitalism and the protracted de pression of the early national era that conditions John Lithgows serious exploration of anticapitalist ideas and experiment in utopian literature.