Utopia means nowhere, and Thomas More chained its criminals in gold
Thomas More's 1516 island has no private property, no locks, a six-hour working day and religious tolerance. It also keeps two slaves in every household and uses gold for fetters and chamber pots, so nobody covets it. The name itself, built from Greek, literally means no place.
More wrote the book in Latin, published it in 1516 and revised it two years later. Its full original title runs to a whole sentence, calling itself a truly golden little book about the best state of a commonwealth. Before settling on the Greek-flavoured Utopia, formed from ou, not, and topos, place, More had called the island Nusquama, Latin for no-place. In English the word sounds just like Eutopia, good place, a pun More acknowledged in an addendum.
The frame is built to feel real. It opens with letters between More and actual acquaintances such as Peter Gilles, town clerk of Antwerp, and includes a sample Utopian alphabet. A joke explains why nobody visits: someone coughed just as the island's exact coordinates were announced. The traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus is presented as one of 24 men Amerigo Vespucci claimed to have left at Cabo Frio in Brazil, who then sailed on and lived among the Utopians for five years.
In the first book Raphael attacks European habits. Kings waste money on pointless wars, and hanging thieves makes murder no riskier than theft, so robbers may as well kill their witnesses. He blames much theft on enclosure, which fenced off common land for sheep and left families starving. More urges him to become a royal adviser; Raphael answers that courts only reward flattery.
The island itself is crescent-shaped, cut off from the mainland by a channel its founder King Utopos had dug, and holds 54 cities, with Amaurot at the centre. Groups of thirty households elect officials, who in turn choose a prince for life by secret ballot. Everyone farms in two-year stints, women alongside men, and learns a trade. Houses rotate every ten years. Moon worshippers, sun worshippers and monotheists live side by side; atheists are tolerated but distrusted, since without fear of an afterlife they supposedly lack any reason to obey. Critics have noticed how much of this resembles life in a monastery.
Source: Utopia (book)
