Aristopia

Aristopia
AuthorCastello Holford
LanguageEnglish
GenreAlternate history
Speculative fiction
Utopian fiction
PublisherArena Publishing Co.
Publication date
1895
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardcover)
Pages234 pp.
TextAristopia at Wikisource

Aristopia: A Romance-History of the New World is an 1895 utopian novel by Castello Holford, considered the first novel-length alternate history in English (and among the earliest alternate histories in general).[1]

Though part of the major wave utopian and dystopian literature that distinguished the final decades of the nineteenth century,[2][3] Holford's book reverses the normal stance of utopian projection: instead of imagining a better society at a future time or in a far-off place, he supposes that the founding of the United States occurred under different conditions and follows its development forward to a superior society in his own day.

The English playwright Henry Arthur Jones was taken with the idea of Aristopia, and used it in his own polemical writings, as in his "The Tax-Wise Men of Aristopia"[4] and his My Dear Wells.[5]

Holford was not the first writer in English to employ the term "Aristopia." The eighteenth-century freethinker John Fransham (1730–1810) left a posthumous manuscript titled Memorablilia Classica, which contains a piece called "The Code of Aristopia, or Scheme for a Perfect Government."[6]

  1. ^ Brian Stableford cites two short fictions, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "P's Correspondence" (1845) and Edward Everett Hale's "Hands Off" (1881), as precedents in American literature. Brian Stableford, Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia, New York, CRC Press/Routledge, 2006; pp. 18-19.
  2. ^ Kenneth M. Roemer, The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888–1900, Kent, OH, Kent State University Press, 1976.
  3. ^ Jean Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America, 1886–1896: The Politics of Form, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984.
  4. ^ Henry Arthur Jones, "The Tax-Wise Men of Aristopia," The World's Work: A History of Our Time, Vol. 41 (November 1920–April 1921), p. 240.
  5. ^ Henry Arthur Jones, My Dear Wells: Being a Series of Letters Addressed by Arthur Henry Jones to Mr. H. G. Wells, Upon Bolshevism, Collectivism, Internationalism, and the Distribution of Wealth, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1921; p. 242.
  6. ^ "Fransham, John" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.