A Crystal Age was published anonymously by T. Fisher Unwin in 1887. It is Hudson’s venture into utopian fiction: a young man (Smith) suffers an accident and wakes in a far-future England where human civilization has been replaced by small communities living in aesthetic harmony with the natural world. The houses are beautiful, the people are healthy and long-lived, and nature flourishes around them.
The catch — which Smith gradually discovers — is that these people have transcended sexual desire. Each community is organized like a beehive: one “mother” bears children, while the rest live in celibate contentment. Smith, who has fallen in love with a young woman of the community, finds that his passion is incomprehensible to her — she regards it as a kind of illness. The novel ends with Smith’s suicide when he realizes that the price of paradise is the extinction of individual love.
The book is remarkable as an early ecological utopia — decades before the modern environmental movement, Hudson imagined a human civilization genuinely integrated with nature. But it is equally remarkable as a critique of utopia: Hudson understood that any society which eliminates human passion eliminates what makes human life worth living. The book anticipates Huxley’s Brave New World in its recognition that the perfected society may be uninhabitable by actual humans.
Collecting A Crystal Age
First edition (T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1887): Cloth, published anonymously.
Market values:
- First edition: $200–$600 (scarce)
- Later identified editions (Duckworth): $40–$100