After London

Lore & Background

The novel has two parts. The first five chapters, 'The Relapse into Barbarism', describe the fall of civilization after 'the passage of an enormous dark body through space' tilts the Earth's axis. Set a century later, it portrays nature reclaiming England: fields become forest, animals run wild, roads decay, and London reverts to lake and poisonous swampland. Society is dystopian and medieval, with illiterate peasants and slaves under corrupt nobility. The second, longer part, 'Wild England', is an adventure featuring aristocratic protagonist Felix Aquila, who falls in love, sets out to find his fortune, and becomes leader of a band of tribal shepherds.

Reader's Guide

After London was a popular novel in its time, though contemporary critics were generally confused and disappointed by its conclusion, preferring the first part. Critics dissatisfied with the second part often made an exception of chapters 22–24, which give a disturbing, surreal description of the fallen city. The work was criticized by early biographer Walter Besant but praised by Q. D. Leavis. Modern reviews have noted that the human elements have not aged well, but the wildlife descriptions are carefully observed. Michael Dirda considered the Dantesque chapters exploring London's remains 'brilliantly imagined' and compared them to works by Poe and H.G. Wells. The novel has been described as difficult to categorize, overspilling generic boundaries, and has been called a defining work for the apocalyptic Ruined Earth genre, disaster novel genre, climate fiction, and anthropocene fiction. It questions the notion of progress and represents a bleak prediction about humanity's future, shattering Victorian beliefs in progress and technology. The novel has influenced utopian romances such as William Henry Hudson's A Crystal Age, William Morris's News from Nowhere, and M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud, though the work itself is not a utopia.

Did You Know?

• The original draft was likely much longer, cut from three volumes to one due to publisher's demand.
• The novel's first part describes London as having reverted to lake and poisonous swampland.
• The protagonist, Felix Aquila, is the second son of a nobleman who becomes leader of a band of tribal shepherds.
• The book has been analyzed through lenses including feminist theory, ecocriticism, and Machiavellian thought.

Genre Identity and Core Function

Utopian and dystopian fiction occupy a shared space within speculative fiction, distinguished by their focus on extreme social and political configurations. A utopia presents a world aligned with the author's values, constructing an alternate reality designed to resonate with and appeal to readers. A dystopia inverts this relationship entirely, depicting a society that stands in direct opposition to the author's ethical framework. Some works choose to present both visions side by side, sharpening the contrast between them. These narratives most commonly appear within science fiction and broader speculative traditions, though they are not exclusive to those categories. At their core, both modes ask readers to confront the structures of their own world by projecting them into exaggerated or inverted forms. The reader is invited not merely to imagine a different society but to interrogate the assumptions that make their current one feel natural and inevitable.

Literary Ancestry and the Utopian Tradition

The tradition that utopian and dystopian narratives inherit stretches back to classical antiquity. Plato's Republic laid out a blueprint for an ideal political order, and centuries later Tommaso Campanella drew on that foundation to craft The City of the Sun in 1623, a vision of a society organized around equality. Thomas More's 1516 Latin work Utopia gave the genre its name, a term that plays on two Greek roots meaning both 'no place' and 'good place.' More's narrator, Raphael Hythloday, carries a name whose Greek etymology suggests 'expert in nonsense,' underscoring the text's satirical and ironic edge. Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) pushed the tradition further by inverting social norms—punishing the sick while treating thieves—making the work simultaneously utopian and dystopian. Margaret Cavendish's 1666 Blazing World added an early science-fiction dimension, and its feminist reading remains debated among scholars.

The Dystopian Mirror and Political Caution

Dystopian fiction functions as a political warning by extrapolating elements of the present into a distorted future. The societies it depicts are marked by features that run counter to the author's moral compass: widespread poverty, institutionalized suspicion, surveillance, or outright oppression. Crucially, most dystopian authors do not simply present these conditions; they trace at least one causal thread explaining how such a world came to be, often as an analogy for real-world problems. The genre's purpose is to offer readers a fresh vantage point on social and political practices that might otherwise be accepted as natural or unavoidable. Some dystopias are particularly insidious because their inhabitants genuinely believe they live in a utopia, a dynamic visible in works where the population regards its own oppressive structures as perfectly rational. Eschatological narratives, focused on apocalyptic collapse or the end of an era, frequently overlap with dystopian storytelling, adding a layer of temporal urgency to the political critique.

Proliferation and Modern Subgenres

The sheer volume of utopian and dystopian writing has grown dramatically over the centuries. More than four hundred English-language utopian works appeared before 1900, and that number multiplied into the thousands during the twentieth century. This surge is linked to several converging forces: the broadening readership for science fiction and young adult fiction, and a general intensification of public awareness around large-scale issues such as technology, climate change, and population growth. These pressures have given rise to recognizable subgenres, including climate fiction, young adult dystopian novels, and feminist dystopian narratives. Fredric Jameson, in his 2005 study Archeologies of the Future, argued that the fundamental engine of utopian thought is the tension between identity and difference—an imagined system that is thoroughly unlike the real one it responds to. The genre thus continues to evolve, absorbing new anxieties while retaining its core impulse to make readers see their own world with fresh, critical eyes.