“In Utopia There Will Be Wide Stretches Of Cheerless Or Unhealthy Or Toilsome Or Dangerous Land”

To H.G. Wells, Utopia wasn’t a perfectly pastoral or wholesome place, but one that was wise enough to separate the industrial and the green and adult entertainment from family fare. An excerpt from “A Modern Utopia,” 1905:

“But in Utopia there will be wide stretches of cheerless or unhealthy or toilsome or dangerous land with never a household; there will be regions of mining and smelting, black with the smoke of furnaces and gashed and desolated by mines, with a sort of weird inhospitable grandeur of industrial desolation, and the men will come thither and work for a spell and return to civilisation again, washing and changing their attire in the swift gliding train. And by way of compensation there will be beautiful regions of the earth specially set apart and favoured for children; in them the presence of children will remit taxation, while in other less wholesome places the presence of children will be taxed.”

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