More’s Utopia (1516) set an example for later writers who criticized the social conventions of their times by designing an ideal society. For the remarkable thing of More’s fiction is that it combined an abstract discussion of a utopian society with hardly veiled political criticism of autocratic rulers, such as the English and French kings in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The independent opinions expressed by More in his various functions – as a member of parliament, a privy councillor to Henry VIII, and lord chancellor of England – were bound to bring him into conflict with the king. When he refused to acknowledge Henry VIII as the supreme head of the Church, he was charged with treason and beheaded in 1535. More’s intellectual independence and courage already appeared from his social criticism in Utopia. Its combination of a sketch of the ideal society and a critique of contemporary government has remained a characteristic of the genre of utopian fiction and has set it apart from the idyll as well as the satire by combining elements of both.

In Utopia the narrator, who bears the name of the author, records a story that is told to him by Raphael Hythlodaeus – or, in Turner’s translation, Raphael, the dispenser of nonsense – about his journey to an island off the Brazilian coast, where he found a sort of welfare state providing every member of the community with the necessary food, clothing, housing, education, and medical treatment. It is a society characterized by a communal way of life without money, or, in Turner’s highly naturalizing translation, “communism minus money” (More 2003: 113). A more literal translation as well as the original Latin text can be found in an edition by Logan et al. (More 1995: 246-247).

Utopia is divided into two books: the first one, which is structured as a dialogue between Raphael and More and refers to the mismanagement and abuses of power in Tudor England, was written after the second; the second book, written during a long sojourn in the Southern Netherlands in 1515, is an uninterrupted description of the Utopian Republic and reads like an essay rather than a story.