Were the 1640s and 1650s a dystopia?
When Mike Freedman emailed me in December asking me if I would be interested in recording a podcast for his 1984 Today! podcast on all things dystopian, I was intrigued by the concept of thinking about my historical period, the 1640s and 1650s, in this way.
How did the strictures of the real puritan regime of mid-17th century Britain compare with the fictional worlds of the books I read in my youth: 1984, Brave New World of course, but also John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and the particularly depressing outlook of John Christopher (born of his experience of WWII brutality) in The Death of Grass, The Tripods series, and The Prince in Waiting series.
There were certainly incidents I have come across that strike us today as dystopian: the execution of women (but not men) for adultery; the rise in witch hunting; clergy being stoned, beaten or killed during church services; a church full of listeners threatening to drown a baptist preacher; a raped woman being sent to prison for fornication, actors whipped for performing a play at Christmas. But it seems to me that we would understand the concept of dystopia in a different way to people of the 17th century. Everyday early modern life, by its prevalence of death and violence, and the use of capital and corporal punishment, its restricted hierarchies of status and gender, would seem highly dystopian to us in many of its aspects. For people living in the 17th century though this was considered normal, and individual misfortunes often rationalised as God's will. We only have to read early modern diaries like those of Nehemiah Wallington or Anne Fanshawe to reveal life events that many of us today would recognise as tragic: few expected to have all their children survive or to live to seventy. What many contemporaries would have found more dystopian was the sense that the world during and after the civil wars was 'upside down' or, as Andrew Marvell put it, its 'disjointed Axel' was cracking, undergoing an unprecedented degree and pace of change in religious practice, government and law, the sense that the tree of government and order had been cut down at the roots from everything they had previously known.
We ended up in the curious position of recording the podcast in a break from wrapping Christmas presents two days before Christmas from my rented Christmas accommodation in Bath with unreliable broadband signal. During our conversation, Mike asked some great questions, which I sometimes found difficult to come up with a ready answer to, the actualities of historical experience generally being more complex than the simpler monomaniac ideologies of dystopian fiction. One question I found most intriguing, derived no doubt from Mike's experience of interviewing many others on this topic, was the extent to which the creation of dystopias often originates in the desire for its opposite, an idealistic belief amongst those in power that they have a system for making the world better. The puritans of the 1640s thought that if they could just properly reform the Church of England, and have it have it singing on the same hymn-sheet as Presbyterian Scotland or Calvinist Geneva, everything would become more perfect and God would smile on them. What they didn't expect was to unleash all sorts of new ideas to challenge the Godly programme and prevent the implementation of orderly reform. They should have paid more attention to what was already going on in New England. They also consistently denigrated as irreligious and ungodly those with more traditional views on religion, and as a result undervalued the latent power of conservative resistance to change. Consequently they found themselves attacked and resisted on both sides, and ultimately defeated.
If you'd like to hear our conversation, it can be found here.