Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens - Jerome Meckier (essay date 1981)
Jerome Meckier (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: “Boffin and Podsnap in Utopia,” in The Dickensian, Vol. 77, No. 3, Autumn, 1981, pp. 154-61.
[In the following essay, Meckier discusses the use of the characters Podsnap and Boffin in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and William Morris's News from Nowhere, respectively.]
During the lecture-tour at the commencement of Brave New World, the Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre boasts about Bokanovsky's Process: from a ‘bokanovskified egg’, he gloats, as many as ninety-six embryos will grow, each eventually yielding a mentally retarded but ‘full-sized adult.’1 One can staff an entire plant with a work force of ‘identical twins’, docile products of a single, super-energized egg (BNW, 5). The sole drawback to applying Henry Ford's best-known idea, the principle of mass production, to biology is that, under normal conditions,...
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