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Mr. Howells's 'A Traveler from Altruria' recounts only his social apostle's acts and experiences at a summer hotel in a mountain village of New England, and includes none of the epistles upon the World's Fair and the life of New York that his chronicler has recently sent to him through a magazine. The author calls the book a romance, but its form is a thinly disguised and somewhat acrid tract for the times, marked in the narrative passages by the colloquialisms that now please Mr. Howells. Designedly unindividual, the village, the hotel and some of their characters are broadly typical of their kind. Other characters are only voices. From a remarkably observant banker, a retired manufacturer, a lawyer, a clergyman, a dry-as-dust professor of economics, an "average" woman, the wife of a prosperous broker, and from the romancer himself — all guests at the hotel— the Altrurian, a skillful questioner, hears much of the darker side of our industrial and social order. Through a mother and son of the soil at a neighboring farm, he acquaints himself with our agrarian discontent. Then, by general desire, he, in turn, becomes pedagogue, and, in a sort of a lecture in a grove, explains rather than pictures his own Altruria — an island common wealth that enjoys every virtue and delight of every Utopia from Plato down to Bellamy, where all men — he tells not how — have become good and pure, unselfish, unambitious, passionless.
This utopian novel critiques the unfettered capitalism and moral decay of the Gilded Age in America. The book follows a group of Americans at a summer resort as they interact with Mr. Homos, a visitor from the utopian island state of Altruria. Through their conversations, it becomes clear that Altruria is vastly superior in every aspect of life, exposing the shortcomings of American society. Howells weaves together the history of utopian literature, drawing upon renowned authors like Plato, Bacon, and Morris, to construct a captivating and insightful critique of America's capitalist society.
Reproduction of the original: A Traveller From Altruria by William Dean Howells
The Altrurian Romances (1968) of William Dean Howells consists of three utopias. A traveller from Altruria (1894), "The Letters of an Altrurian Traveller (1893-94), and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907). The Altrurian traveller, Aristed Homos, visits the United States in 1892 and stays there for about a year and a half, visiting a New Hampshire mountain resort hotel, New York City and Chicago. These romances record Homos's criticism of the social, political, and economic conditions of the industrial, capitalistic and 'plutocratic' America. The Commonwealth of Altruria has attained the Utopian dream of brotherly equality through literael application of the principles of 'liberty, equality, and fraternity.' Howells uses Homos as his spokeman in such a way that Homos's account of his country implies every insulting criticism of America. By letting the Altrurian Homos and his American wife describe the conditions of Altruria where complete social, political, and economic equality has been attained, Homos effectively draws the people's attention to his call for social justice through return to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Especially through the strict observance of the principes of 'liberty, equality, and fraternity.' -- University of Ryukyus Repository.
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A Traveler from Altruria: Romance by William Dean Howells, 1894.A Traveler from Altruria is a Utopian novel, a critique of unfettered capitalism andits consequences, and of the Gilded Age.Set during the early 1890s in a fashionable summer resort somewhere onthe East Coast of the United States, the book is narrated by a MrTwelvemough, a popular author of light fiction who has been selected tofunction as host to a visitor from the faraway island of Altruriacalled Mr Homos. Homos has come all the way to the United States toexperience first-hand everyday life in the country which prides itselfto represent democracy and equality, to see for himself how theprinciple that "all men are created equal" is being practiced.However, due to Altruria's secluded existence very little is knownabout that state, so Twelvemough and his circle of acquaintances are more eager to learnsomething about Altruria than to explain American life andinstitutions.William Dean Howells (1837 - 1920) was an American realist novelist,literary critic, and playwright, nicknamed "The Dean of AmericanLetters". He was particularly known for his tenure as editor of TheAtlantic Monthly, as well as for his own prolific writings, includingthe Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novels The Rise ofSilas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria.
I confess that with all my curiosity to meet an Altrurian, I was in no hospitable mood toward the traveler when he finally presented himself, pursuant to the letter of advice sent me by the friend who introduced him. It would be easy enough to take care of him in the hotel; I had merely to engage a room for him, and have the clerk tell him his money was not good if he tried to pay for anything. But I had swung fairly into my story; its people were about me all the time; I dwelt amid its events and places, and I did not see how I could welcome my guest among them, or abandon them for him. Still, when he actually arrived, and I took his hand as he stepped from the train, I found it less difficult to say that I was glad to see him than I expected. In fact, I was glad, for I could not look upon his face without feeling a glow of kindness for him. I had not the least trouble in identifying him, for he was so unlike all the Americans who dismounted from the train with him, and who all looked hot, worried, and anxious. He was a man no longer young, but in what we call the heyday of life, when our own people are so absorbed in making provision for the future that they may be said not to live in the present at all. This Altrurian's whole countenance, and especially his quiet, gentle eyes, expressed a vast contemporaneity, with bounds of leisure removed to the end of time; or, at least, this was the effect of something in them which I am obliged to report in rather fantastic terms. He was above the middle height, and he carried himself vigorously. His face was sunburned, or sea-burned, where it was not bearded; and, although I knew from my friend's letter that he was a man of learning and distinction in his own country, I should never have supposed him a person of scholarly life, he was so far from sicklied over with anything like the pale cast of thought. When he took the hand I offered him in my half-hearted welcome he gave it a grasp that decided me to confine our daily greetings to something much less muscular.