Henry Hurry Goodeve and Dominion over the Wants of the Universe

Two futurist fantasies serve as segues from utilitarian and Romantic accounts of steam in the long eighteenth century to a reading of Henry Hurry Goodeve’s “1980.” First, Félix Bodin’s Le roman de l’avenir [The Novel of the Future] (1834) presents a global allegory set in the late twentieth century, pitting the Benthamite “Universal Congress” against the “Poetic or Anti-Prosaic Association,” which is allied to the “despots” of Asia. Next, “A Family Conversation,” published in Calcutta in the same year, records a conversation among an Indian family in 1935, “a liberal age” of “enlightened utility.” The chapter then turns to Goodeve’s career as a Company medical doctor. His energetic support for the education of elite Indians and supreme confidence in the civilizing mission of their advancement were not just compatible but, indeed, flip sides of the cosmopolitanism of reason. This is the frame in which I read “1980,” in which technology is a utilitarian tool that has transformed the “Indian Republic” into an anglicized techno-wonderland and liberal imperial power. The optimistic future imagined by Goodeve accords with visions of Indian nationalism in which independence will be the natural result of diffusion, the circulation of commodities, modernization, and assimilation, not, as in Kylas Chunder Dutt’s “A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945” (1835), the inevitable aftermath of revolt.