Utopia Limited

David Cannadine

• Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, 1884-1918 by Ian Britain
  Cambridge, 344 pp, £19.50, June 1982, ISBN 0 521 23563 4
• The Elmhirsts of Dartington: The Creation of an Utopian Community by Michael Young
  Routledge, 381 pp, £15.00, June 1982, ISBN 0 7100 9051 X

The Road to Utopia was trodden by many star-struck pilgrims before Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour made their celluloid expedition there in the 1940s. Sir Thomas More, who first wrote of the place, lost his head completely, for non-Utopian reasons, and since then a succession of charismatic cranks, frenzied philosophers and visionary vegetarians have aspired to realise heaven upon earth while more usually anticipating hell. Mighty prophets like Gerrard Winstanley (a bankrupt cloth merchant turned cattle herdsman), Sir Richard Bulkeley (an early 18th-century hunchback virtuoso), William Blake (‘I see so little of Mr Blake now,’ his wife once complained: ‘He is always in Paradise’), and James Pierrepont Greaves (damned by Carlyle as a ‘blockhead’ and an ‘imbecile’), preferred to leave the world rather than to understand or change it, renouncing (inter alia) religion, property, profit or prostitutes, tobacco, alcohol or flesh (sometimes animal, sometimes human).