''Aristopia: A Romance-History of the New World'' is an

1895 Events January–March * January 5 – Dreyfus affair: French officer Alfred Dreyfus is stripped of his army rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. * January 12 – The National Trust for Places of Histor ...

utopian novel Utopian and dystopian fiction are genres of speculative fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal t ...

by Castello Holford, considered the first novel-length

alternate history Alternate history (also alternative history, althist, AH) is a genre of speculative fiction of stories in which one or more historical events occur and are resolved differently than in real life. As conjecture based upon historical fact, altern ...

in English (and among the earliest alternate histories in general). Though part of the major wave utopian and dystopian literature that distinguished the final decades of the nineteenth century, 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" and his ''My Dear Wells''. Holford was not the first writer in English to employ the term "Aristopia." The eighteenth-century freethinker

John Fransham John Fransham (1730–1810) was an English freethinker, eccentric, tutor and author. Early life Fransham was the son of Thomas and Isidora Fransham, born early in 1730 (baptised 19 March) in the parish of St. George of Colegate, Norwich, where hi ...

(1730–1810) left a posthumous manuscript titled ''Memorablilia Classica'', which contains a piece called "The Code of Aristopia, or Scheme for a Perfect Government."

Plot summary

Ralph Morton, an early settler in Virginia, discovers a reef made of solid gold. He cannily uses his wealth to build a planned society called Aristopia ( Greek for "the best place"), based on the '' Utopia'' of Sir Thomas More, with innovations and adaptations of his own. In Aristopia, all the land is owned by the government, and only leased to businesses and private citizens. Large-scale trade is also

monopolized A monopoly (from Greek el, μόνος, mónos, single, alone, label=none and el, πωλεῖν, pōleîn, to sell, label=none), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a spec ...

by the state, and inherited wealth is limited. Morton welcomes productive refugees from European conflicts — Huguenots, Irish fugitives from Cromwell's wars, and northern Italian and Swiss artisans. The colony prospers, buys more land from the

Indians Indian or Indians may refer to: Peoples South Asia * Indian people, people of Indian nationality, or people who have an Indian ancestor ** Non-resident Indian, a citizen of India who has temporarily emigrated to another country * South Asia ...

, and spreads westward. Morton dies at the age of 100; his descendants and successors carry his policies forward. The Aristopians support the American Revolution, and on their own initiative conquer Canada. Aristopia comes to dominate the new nation, eventually ruling all of

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

north of Mexico.

Everett F. Bleiler Everett Franklin Bleiler (April 30, 1920 – June 13, 2010) was an American editor, bibliographer, and scholar of science fiction, detective fiction, and fantasy literature. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he co-edited the first "year's best" ...

with Richard Bleiler, ''Science-Fiction: The Early Years'', Kent, OH, Kent State University Press, 1990; p. 369.

References

External links

* *{{Isfdb title, id=1055123 American alternate history novels Utopian novels 1895 American novels 1895 science fiction novels