The Storm Before the Storm: The Origins of Dystopia in Late Victorian Fiction

Author: Joshua Erenberg

Field of Study: Political Science

Program Affiliation: Source Project Research Program

Faculty Mentors: Will Glovinsky

Easel: 108

Timeslot: Midday

Abstract: Beginning after World War One, the centuries-long utopian literary tradition of imagining ideal societies increasingly gave way to dystopian narratives that portray large-scale planning, future technologies, and political authority as sources of danger rather than progress. Scholars such as Tom Moylan have credited this trend to a response to the catastrophic political events of the twentieth century, particularly totalitarianism and global warfare. Yet major elements of dystopian anxiety began to appear in literature decades before these disasters, raising questions about when and why confidence in utopian thinking began to fracture. This research turns to a pre-WWI archive including works by Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Samuel Butler, Max Nordau, E. M. Forster, and others to identify major harbingers of early dystopian discourse, including evolutionary theory, industrial mechanization, and degeneration discourse. Close analysis of these works shows how dystopian thought emerged within the tensions of late-Victorian utopian literature, rather than appearing suddenly in the twentieth century.