Summary
In Bacon's incomplete utopian novel, an unnamed traveler shares a story about when he and a group of fellow sailors became stranded in the South Sea.
They happened upon a seemingly remote island, but were soon greeted by inhabitants who allowed them to land. The inhabitants provided food, lodging, and other provisions to the sailors.
The narrator explains, through a series of conversations with various interlocutors, that the island is a place dedicated to the rigorous pursuit of knowledge.
The island, called Bensalem, was consecrated by Saint Bartholomew and was divinely inspired. As such, the people of the island are mostly Christians, although the narrator notes that one of his interlocutors is Jewish.
Resources on the island are shared and stored in large houses. There is no poverty, scarcity, or competition for resources. Families are celebrated with elaborate ceremonies, and the island encourages familial prosperity by honoring those families composed of more than 30 people.
The island is governed by an entity called Salomon's House, which is a large think tank that conducts vast scientific experiments for the advancement of society. Despite the island's remote existence, every twelve years Salomon's House sends explorers out into the world to retrieve information about other civilizations. They report back to the island with their findings, and the other servants of Salomon's House conduct experiments and draw conclusions about technologies, the natural world, and the future of mankind.
In a conversation with one of the Fathers of Salomon's House, the narrator learns about the myriad of roles and responsibilities needed to sustain this process of learning. The Father of Salomon's House grants the narrator permission to share all he has heard with people back in Europe (where the narrator is from), and the narrator announces his intention to publish this narrative when he returns home.
Analysis
The New Atlantis is Francis Bacon's incomplete utopian novel. In it, Bacon paints a portrait of an ideal and perfect society that is dedicated to the pursuit of learning and acquisition of knowledge. This society is also, crucially, a Christian society, emphasizing Bacon's ongoing argument that religion and science are not antithetical and are indeed inextricable in human philosophy.
Bensalem – the island on which the narrator finds himself – is often set in stark contrast to European societies (specifically, of course, England) to emphasize how different Bacon thinks the world could be if people prioritized learning and advancement over self-interest, competition, and pride.
As the narrator holds conversations with a number of interlocutors, he learns that the central tenets of this utopian society all revolve around not just acquiring knowledge but also synthesizing it and using it for the advancement of technologies. As such, The New Atlantis can be interpreted as a fictionalized manifestation of most of Bacon's recurring philosophical principles originally laid out in The Advancement of Learning and carried through in his Essays.
The New Atlantis imagines a world in which community prosperity is prioritized over individual success, making Bensalem quite similar to Thomas More's Utopia (1516), the text credited with bringing the term "utopia" into modern English vernacular. Both Bacon and More perceive individual pride as a major source of corruption and stagnation (though More is much more vocal about this), and portray ideal societies that are what contemporary readers might recognize as early incarnations of socialism.
Where Bacon differs most notably from More, however, is in his focus on scientific inquiry at the heart of his utopian society. When the narrator converses with the Father of Salomon's House, he is provided with a detailed explanation of every necessary role in the process of knowledge acquisition – including those who seek information, those who collate it, and those who interpret it in order to draw larger conclusions about the world. Bacon's utopia is one that revolves around the Baconian method of questioning and hypothesizing, making The New Atlantis a proto-novel that argues for scientific inquiry as the driving force behind man's prosperity.
