Aristopia

rdf:langString Aristopia

rdf:langString Aristopia

rdf:langString Aristopia

rdf:langString Castello Newton HOLFORD

rdf:langString United States

rdf:langString English

rdf:langString Print

rdf:langString Aristopia: A Romance-History of the New World

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