New World Vs. 1984

New World Vs. 1984

According to John Wooden, “You can't let praise or criticism get to you. It's a weakness to get caught up in either one.” John Huxley’s novel Brave New World has received a lot of mixed criticism that dismissed this book as one that would stand the test of time. When the novel was first released in 1932, critics like John Chamberlain dismissed the novel as being farfetched. He said, “The bogy of mass production seems a little overwrought…” (233). Critics in recent times seem to enjoy this novel because Huxley shows us a utopia in the future that might be similar to ours. On July 1973, critic Bernard Bergonzi stated, “There is a gloomy fascination in seeing the ingenious horrors of Brave New World realized, not hundred of years into the future, as Huxley conservatively supposed, but here and now before our very eyes” (244). Even though some critics may not agree in the worth of this novel, I believe the public has proven its worth. Even after 73 years since the book was first published, people have heard about the book one way or another and educational institutions continue to teach it to students.

One of the first critics to write about Brave New World was John Chamberlain. On February 7, 1932, in The New York Times Book Review John says, “Yet it is a little difficult to take alarm, for, as the hell-diver sees not the mud, and the angle worm knows not the intricacies of the Einstein theory…”(233). He says the novel has good points about the future, but the public will not grasp it because they will not understand it. Chamberlain says, “If Mr. Huxley is unduly bothered about the impending static world,

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let him go back to his biology and meditate on the possibility that even in laboratory-created children mutations might be inevitable” (233). He is just a part of a few of the early critics who did not appreciate Huxley’s vision of the future as later critics would.

A more modern critic who did appreciate Huxley’s novel was Bernard Bergonzi. Bergonzi knew the public would appreciate Huxley’s ideas because they are not too far into the future. In July 1973 he wrote the quote mentioned above in which he says, Huxley’s future is not a hundred years away but here in the present today. This is one example why Brave New World was so popular with the public; they didn’t see Huxley’s ideas as being farfetched but as something that could be realized in the near future. Bergonzi also believes this novel will be enjoyable for readers, “contemporary readers may preserve a taste for simple narratives, wittily told, with a little action, a moderate amount of sex and good deal of talk that is clever without being difficult” (245). Aldous Huxley did not make Brave New World difficult to understand at all; therefore, if a reader paid close attention to it, they would appreciate the message Huxley is trying to tell about utopias. Finally Bergonzi states, “If I am right, Huxley’s novels, at the least the early ones, will go on being read for a long time, whatever the critics say” (245).

Another critic who saw Huxley’s vision as being present and not too far into the future is Nicholas von Hoffman. In July 1982, he