1684

1684 is the publication date of Gilbert Burnet’s English translation of Thomas More’s Utopia, presented in this volume. Its appearance joined a long and uneven publication history to a translator drawn to the book’s critique of injustice in high places: Burnet had recently defended his friend Lord William Russell, attended Russell’s execution, and vindicated his memory before James II deprived him of his lectureship at St. Clement’s.

Place in the publication history

Utopia took shape in two parts: the account of the imagined place was probably written toward the end of 1515, and the introductory part early in 1516. The first edition was printed at Louvain late in 1516 under the editorship of Erasmus, Peter Giles, and other of Thomas More’s friends in Flanders. More revised the work before it was printed by Frobenius at Basle in November 1518; it was later reprinted at Paris and Vienna, but not in England during More’s lifetime.

The first English publication came in 1551, in a translation by Ralph Robinson. Burnet’s version followed in 1684 and is distinguished in the account as more accomplished in literary terms. The date therefore identifies not the work’s first circulation in English, but a later translation that this volume selected as its text.

Burnet and political injustice

Burnet’s connection to Utopia is presented as more than a translator’s literary interest. Soon before undertaking the translation, he had conducted the defence of Lord William Russell, attended his execution, and worked to vindicate his memory; James II then spitefully deprived him of his lectureship at St. Clement’s. The account says that Burnet was drawn to Utopia by the same sense of unreason in high places that had prompted Thomas More to write it. The parallel makes 1684 a moment of renewed political relevance: the book’s imagined commonwealth and its criticism of contemporary abuses spoke to a translator who had himself encountered power and injustice.

The book Burnet translated

Utopia is described as playful in its fictional details but intensely earnest beneath them, offering practical suggestions while attacking the chief political and social evils of its time. Its narrative begins with Thomas More’s embassy to the Low Countries and his meeting with Peter Giles at Antwerp, then passes from that factual setting into the account of Raphael Hythloday, a traveller whose reports introduce the imagined commonwealth. That movement from recognizable political circumstance to an invented society gives the critique room to test alternatives without presenting the book as a straightforward policy tract.

The work also draws on classical learning: Thomas More had read Plato’s Republic, and the account relates its invention to Plutarch’s description of Spartan life under Lycurgus. Its fantastic details and ideal communism do not remove it from contemporary politics. Rather, fiction, classical reference, and irony allow the book to examine social arrangements while sometimes disguising its immediate target—for instance, by making France stand for England or praising Christian kings ironically.

An argument left open

The frame of Raphael’s account preserves a difference between describing Utopia and endorsing every part of it. After Raphael finishes, Thomas More recalls objections to the Utopians’ warfare, religious views, and common ownership without money, yet avoids pressing them while Raphael is tired and may resent contradiction. He commends the constitution in general, postpones a fuller discussion, and ends by saying that he wishes some of its institutions could be adopted, though he does not expect to see them followed. This qualified close matters to the significance of Burnet’s 1684 translation: the book offers a forceful political comparison, but its framing leaves judgment and the possibility of imitation unsettled.