The Utopia of Sir Thomas More

The most important philosophical text of the English Renaissance which coined the term 'utopia'.

The text of this Clarendon Press edition follows the first English translation made by Ralph Robinson (1520-1577) for the private use of his friend, George Tadlow, who was a City haberdasher. A loose rendering, Robinson initially resisted calls for publication before the work was printed in 1551. Nevertheless, his translation is now regarded 'among the treasures of our literature' (Arber) as an imaginative piece of sixteenth-century prose.

The tale begins when More encounters the fictional character Raphael Hythloday, a traveller who has just returned from voyages with Amerigo Vespucci. Hythloday tells More of a distant island called Utopia, where all property is held in common and gold and silver are used not as currency but as the material for making shackles and chamber pots. However, all is not as it seems, and the paradoxes in the names of Hythloday ('the nonsense speaker') and Utopia ('nowhere') reveal a more complex story.

8vo (21.5 x 14.5 cm); photographic plates, prize plate to front pastedown, newspapers clippings tipped-in to front free endpapers, slight spotting; half blue calf prize-binding, brown cloth boards, marbled edges, slightly rubbed with some loss to lettering-piece to spine; c, 347, [1]pp.