Social Utopia in Victorian Literature (based on the novel by W.G. Hudson "The Crystal Age")

The subject of the study is to determine the main features and vectors of development of the Victorian utopia based on the analysis of W.G. Hudson's novel "The Crystal Age". For a long time in the era of antiquity and the Renaissance, one of the main aspects of the development of utopia was the correlation of an ideal society with socio-political, economic transformations and technological discoveries. The New European utopia was in many ways a continuation of this trend, increasingly bringing together the social and technological vectors of utopianism, when social well-being was directly correlated by thinkers with scientific and technological progress, urbanization and mechanization of labor. The Victorian utopia belongs to the period of the second half of the 19th century and combines the features of New European progressivism with the cult of nature, characteristic of sentimentalism and romanticism, and also anticipates some utopian ideas of the coming post-industrial era. W.G. Hudson's novel "The Crystal Age" is a combination of various genres of utopian literature (pastoral utopia, apocalliptic utopia, escapist utopia), and therefore is of particular interest for analysis. The article uses a comprehensive methodological approach combining a descriptive method with a semiotic analysis of the text of the novel, and analyzes the research literature on Victorian utopian literature. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the little-studied nature of W.G. Hudson's novel "The Crystal Age" in modern cultural and philosophical discourse, despite the fact that the novel contains certain ideas unique to that era, for example, the ideas of conscious consumption, excluding satiation and waste of resources. This thesis fully corresponds to the ecosophical strategy of the post-industrial era, but it is completely out of character for 19th-century industrialism. At the same time, the novel lacks a technotopian view of scientific discoveries and technical inventions as a guarantee of social well-being. In the "Crystal Age", technologies that are ahead of the time of writing are not depicted at all. The basis of the utopia of the "Crystal Age" is the anthroposocial transformation of society, the change of human nature along with the social structure. The socio-philosophical and socio-cultural significance of Hudson's novel is very high, since this work reflects the transformation of social relations, the way of life and the value system of the Victorian era: the changing role of women in society and the family, the desire to harmonize man with the natural environment in conditions of rapid industrialization.

The Victorian novel, William Henry Hudson, utopia, dystopia, The Crystal Age, pastoral, sentimentalism, social utopianism, Lewis Mumford, Victorian culture