Spensonia is a fictional Utopia

Utopia

Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...

n country created by the English author and political reformer Thomas Spence

Thomas Spence

Thomas Spence was an English Radical and advocate of the common ownership of land.-Life:Spence was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England and was the son of a Scottish net and shoe maker....

. Spence laid out his ideas about Spensonia in a series of literary works published in the late 18th century:

• A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe (1782)
• A Marine Republic, or A Description of Spensonia (1794)
• The Constitution of a Perfect Commonwealth (1798)
• The Constitution of Spensonia: A Country in Fairyland Situated Between Utopia and Oceana (1801)
• The Receipt to Make a Millenium or Happy World (1805).

Spence issued these works in several editions, creating a complex bibliography. Since he also developed and advocated his own scheme of language reform, he released his Spensonian works in both standard spelling texts and in his own Spensonian alphabet.

Spence's utopian writings are significant in that he was the first to apply Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

 ideas about democracy and majority rule to the genre, and also the first to attempt a utopian response to the Industrial Revolution

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...

. Spence's utopian works "were directed explicitly at the major institutions, economic and political, of the time. In so doing he provided the model of most future utopias."

Plot

Spence united these utopian writings with a frame story about shipwrecked English mariners. When a ship carrying English merchant brothers is stranded on a remote island, the brothers decide to take the arrangement they had aboard ship, the "Marine Constitution" given to them by their father, and apply it to their life on land; and so they create a commonwealth of collective ownership. The land of the island is the property of the collective, and individuals rent it for their own uses. They organize their own democratic government to manage their new social system.

Their society thrives and flourishes. Men and women are equal. Spensonia maintains cordial relations with other republics, and extends political asylum to refugees from tyranny. There is an official religion, a sort of vague deism

Deism

Deism in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the...

, though all other religions are tolerated.

News of the island of Spensonia is brought back to England by a figure named Captain Swallow.