Goodbye to Utopia: Thomas More’s Utopian Conclusion

Chapter 9 offers a reading of the concluding paragraphs of More’s Utopia to illustrate how the work depicts his ideal world and Tudor society as two distinct theatres shaping and conditioning their members’ attitudes and expectations. The illusory values of contemporary society are contrasted with those of the imagined alternative. The fictional More (Morus) and the traveller relating his observations of Utopia (Hythlodaeus) belong to different, socially constructed value systems and the reader is accordingly required to chose between them.