utopographer

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English

WOTD – 21 September 2018

Etymology

A 1741 engraving of the English lawyer, statesman, and author Sir Thomas More (1478–1535).[n 1] Having written the book Utopia (1516) about the political system of an imaginary, ideal island nation, Moore can be regarded as a utopographer.

Blend of utopia +‎ topographer, probably coined by English writer Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) in his 1927 novel Meanwhile: The Picture of a Lady: see the quotation.[1]

Pronunciation

Noun

utopographer (plural utopographers)

  1. One who describes a utopia.
    • 1927, H G Wells, “Book the First. The Utopographer in the Garden.”, in Meanwhile: The Picture of a Lady, London: Ernest Benn, →OCLC; republished as Meanwhile: (The Picture of a Lady), New York, N.Y.: George H. Doran Company, August 1927, →OCLC, § 1, page 19:
      Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan knitted his brows. "Utopographer? Or was it a Utopologist? Or Utopolitan? Not a bad word, Utopolitan. No—it was Utopographer. I read it in one of the weeklies downstairs, the Spectator or the Nation or the Saturday. We might lead the talk rather carelessly towards Utopias and see what happened."
    • 1927 July 30, The Spectator, volume 139, London: F. C. Westley, →OCLC, page 193:
      Whether or not this guidance was useful we cannot judge, but in any event no short cuts for skippers are possible in Mr. Wells's latest book, which is supposed to be the picture of a lady, but is in reality the portrait of a gentleman bent on reforming the world—a Utopographer, the author calls him—by name Mr. Sempack.
    • 1998, W Warren Wagar, “Dreams of Reason: Bellamy, Wells, and the Positive Utopia”, in Daphne Patai, editor, Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy, Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, →ISBN, page 108:
      What holds all these disparate forces together, along with such latter-day utopographers as [Burrhus Frederic] Skinner and Aldous Huxley (in Island, not in his earlier satire of the positive utopia, Brave New World), is faith.
    • 1989, Richard Stites, “Revolution: Utopias in the Air and on the Ground”, in Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, New York, N.Y., Oxford: Oxford University Press, →ISBN:
      Unlike utopographers who describe the future world as static and readymade, Lenin shows the process and the mechanism through which "imperfect" socialists may move towards "perfect" communism: not by rocket, space ship, or time machine, but by long economic development under the auspices of socialist organizations.

Translations

Notes

  1. ^ From the collection of the Wellcome Library in London, England, UK.

References

  1. ^ “utopographer”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

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