The Man in the Moone
Author | Francis Godwin |
---|---|
Original title | The Man in the Moone or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales |
Language | English |
Genre | Science fiction |
Published | 1638 (John Norton, London) |
The Man in the Moone is a book by the English
The story is written as a first-person narrative from the perspective of Domingo Gonsales, the book's fictional author. In his opening address to the reader the equally fictional translator "E. M." promises "an essay of Fancy, where Invention is shewed with Judgment".[2]
Some critics consider The Man in the Moone, along with Kepler's Somnium, to be one of the first works of science fiction.[3] The book was well known in the 17th century, and even inspired parodies by Cyrano de Bergerac and Aphra Behn, but has been neglected in critical history. Recent studies have focused on Godwin's theories of language, the mechanics of lunar travel, and his religious position and sympathies as evidenced in the book.
Plot summary
Domingo Gonsales is a citizen of Spain, forced to flee to the East Indies after killing a man in a duel. There he prospers by trading in jewels, and having made his fortune decides to return to Spain. On his voyage home he becomes seriously ill, and he and a negro servant Diego are put ashore on St Helena, a remote island with a reputation for "temperate and healthful" air.[4] A scarcity of food forces Gonsales and Diego to live some miles apart, but Gonsales devises a variety of systems to allow them to communicate.[a] Eventually he comes to rely on a species of bird he describes as some kind of wild swan, a gansa, to carry messages and provisions between himself and Diego. Gonsales gradually comes to realise that these birds are able to carry substantial burdens, and resolves to construct a device by which a number of them harnessed together might be able to support the weight of a man, allowing him to move around the island more conveniently. Following a successful test flight he determines to resume his voyage home, hoping that he might "fill the world with the Fame of [his] Glory and Renown".[6] But on his way back to Spain, accompanied by his birds and the device he calls his Engine, his ship is attacked by an English fleet off the coast of Tenerife and he is forced to escape by taking to the air.[b]
After setting down briefly on Tenerife, Gonsales is forced to take off again by the imminent approach of hostile natives. But rather than flying to a place of safety among the Spanish inhabitants of the island the gansas fly higher and higher. On the first day of his flight Gonsales encounters "illusions of 'Devils and Wicked Spirits'" in the shape of men and women, some of whom he is able to converse with.[7] They provide him with food and drink for his journey and promise to set him down safely in Spain if only he will join their "Fraternity", and "enter into such Covenants as they had made to their Captain and Master, whom they would not name".[8] Gonsales declines their offer, and after a journey of 12 days reaches the Moon. Suddenly feeling very hungry he opens the provisions he was given en route, only to find nothing but dry leaves, goat's hair and animal dung, and that his wine "stunk like Horse-piss".[9] He is soon discovered by the inhabitants of the Moon, the Lunars, whom he finds to be tall Christian people enjoying a happy and carefree life in a kind of pastoral paradise.[10][c] Gonsales discovers that order is maintained in this apparently utopian state by swapping delinquent children with terrestrial children.[d]
The Lunars speak a language consisting "not so much of words and letters as tunes and strange sounds", which Gonsales succeeds in gaining some fluency in after a couple of months.[13] Six months or so after his arrival Gonsales becomes concerned about the condition of his gansas, three of whom have died. Fearing that he may never be able to return to Earth and see his children again if he delays further, he decides to take leave of his hosts, carrying with him a gift of precious stones from the supreme monarch of the Moon, Irdonozur. The stones are of three different sorts: Poleastis, which can store and generate great quantities of heat; Macbrus, which generates great quantities of light; and Ebelus, which when one side of the stone is clasped to the skin renders a man weightless, or half as heavy again if the other side is touched.
Gonsales harnesses his gansas to his Engine and leaves the Moon on 29 March 1601. He lands in China about nine days later, without re-encountering the illusions of men and women he had seen on his outward journey and with the help of his Ebelus, which helps the birds to avoid plummeting to Earth as the weight of Gonsales and his Engine threatens to become too much for them.
Background and contexts
Godwin, the son of Thomas Godwin, Bishop of Bath and Wells, was elected a student of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1578, from where he received his Bachelor of Arts (1581) and Master of Arts degrees (1584); after entering the church he gained his Bachelor (1594) and Doctor of Divinity (1596) degrees. He gained prominence (even internationally) in 1601 by publishing his Catalogue of the Bishops of England since the first planting of the Christian Religion in this Island, which enabled his rapid rise in the church hierarchy.[18] During his life, he was known as a historian.[19]
Scientific advances and lunar speculation
Godwin's book appeared in a time of great interest in the Moon and astronomical phenomena, and of important developments in celestial observation, mathematics and
Speculation on lunar habitation was nothing new in Western thought, but it intensified in England during the early 17th century:
Dating evidence
Until Grant McColley, a historian of early Modern English literature, published his "The Date of Godwin's Domingo Gonsales" in 1937, it was thought that Godwin wrote The Man in the Moone relatively early in his life – perhaps during his time at Christ Church from 1578 to 1584, or maybe even as late as 1603. But McColley proposed a much later date of 1627 or 1628, based on internal and biographical evidence.[21] A number of ideas about the physical properties of the Earth and the Moon, including claims about "a secret property that operates in a manner similar to that of a loadstone attracting iron", did not appear until after 1620. And Godwin seems to borrow the concept of using a flock of strong, trained birds to fly Gonsales to the Moon from Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum ("Natural History"), published in July 1626. All this evidence supports McColley's dating of "1626–29, with the probable years of composition 1627–28", which is now generally accepted.[22][21]
William Poole, in his 2009 edition of The Man in the Moone, provides additional evidence for a later dating. Godwin, he argues, most likely got his knowledge of the Jesuit mission in China (founded in 1601) from a 1625 edition of
One of Godwin's "major intellectual debts" is to Gilbert's De Magnete, in which Gilbert argued that the Earth was magnetic,
English editions and translations
McColley knew of only one surviving copy of the first edition, held at the British Museum[21] (now British Library C.56.c.2), which was the basis for his 1937 edition of The Man in the Moone and Nuncius Inanimatus, an edition criticised by literary critic Kathleen Tillotson as lacking in textual care and consistency.[30] H. W. Lawton's review published six years earlier mentions a second copy in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, V.20973 (now RES P- V- 752 (6)), an omission also noted by Tillotson.[16]
For the text of his 2009 edition, William Poole collated a copy in the
A French translation by Jean Baudoin, L'Homme dans la Lune, was published in 1648, and republished four more times.[g] This French version excised the narrative's sections on Lunar Christianity, [37] as so do the many translations based on it,[38] including the German translation incorrectly ascribed[39] to Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Der fliegende Wandersmann nach dem Mond, 1659.[h] Johan van Brosterhuysen (c. 1594–1650) translated the book into Dutch,[41] and a Dutch translation – possibly Brosterhuysen's, although the attribution is uncertain[42] – went through seven printings in the Netherlands between 1645 and 1718. The second edition of 1651 and subsequent editions include a continuation of unknown authorship relating Gonsales' further adventures.[43][44][i]
Themes
Religion
The story is set during the reign of Queen
By the time The Man in the Moone was published, discussion on the
Lunar language
Godwin had a lifelong interest in language and communication (as is evident in Gonsales's various means of communicating with his servant Diego on St Helena), and this was the topic of his Nuncius inanimatus (1629).
One of Godwin's sources for his Lunar language was Trigault's De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas.[48] Gonsales provides two examples of spoken phrases, written down in a cipher later explained by John Wilkins in Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger (1641).[50] Trigault's account of the Chinese language gave Godwin the idea of assigning tonality to the Lunar language, and of appreciating it in the language spoken by the Chinese mandarins Gonsales encounters after his return to Earth. Gonsales claims that in contrast to the multitude of languages in China (making their speakers mutually unintelligible), the mandarins' language is universal by virtue of tonality (he suppresses it in the other varieties of Chinese). Thus the mandarins are able to maintain a cultural and spiritual superiority resembling that of the Lunar upper class, which is to be placed in contrast with the variety of languages spoken in a fractured and morally degenerate Europe and elsewhere.[48] Knowlson argues that using the term "language" is overstating the case, and that cipher is the proper term: "In spite of Godwin's claims, this musical 'language' is not in fact a language at all, but simply a cipher in which the letters of an existing language may be transcribed".[22] He suggests Godwin's source may have been a book by Joan Baptista Porta, whose De occultis literarum notis (1606)[j] contains "an exact description of the method he was to adopt".[22]
Genre
The book's genre has been variously categorised. When it was first published the literary genre of utopian fantasy was in its infancy, and critics have recognised how Godwin used a utopian setting to criticise the institutions of his time: the Moon was "the ideal perspective from which to view the earth" and its "moral attitudes and social institutions," according to Maurice Bennett.[51] Other critics have referred to the book as "utopia",[52] "Renaissance utopia" or "picaresque adventure".[53] While some critics claim it as one of the first works of science fiction,[3][54] there is no general agreement that it is even "proto-science-fiction".[53]
Early commentators recognised that the book is a kind of picaresque novel, and comparisons with Don Quixote were being made as early as 1638. In structure as well as content The Man in the Moone somewhat resembles the anonymous Spanish novella Lazarillo de Tormes (1554); both books begin with a genealogy and start out in Salamanca, featuring a man who travels from master to master seeking his fortune. But most critics agree that the picaresque mode is not sustained throughout, and that Godwin intentionally achieves a "generic transformation".[55]
Godwin's book follows a venerable tradition of travel literature that blends the excitement of journeys to foreign places with utopian reflection; More's Utopia is cited as a forerunner, as is the account of Amerigo Vespucci. Godwin could fall back on an extensive body of work describing the voyages undertaken by his protagonist, including books by Hakluyt and Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, and the narratives deriving from the Jesuit mission in Beijing.[56]
Reception and influence
The Man in the Moone was published five months after The Discovery of a World in the Moone by John Wilkins,[57] later bishop of Chester. Wilkins refers to Godwin once, in a discussion of spots in the Moon, but not to Godwin's book.[16] In the third edition of The Discovery (1640), however, Wilkins provides a summary of Godwin's book, and later in Mercury (1641) he comments on The Man in the Moone and Nuncius Inanimatus, saying that "the former text could be used to unlock the secrets of the latter".[58] The Man in the Moone quickly became an international "source of humour and parody": Cyrano de Bergerac, using Baudoin's 1648 translation, parodied it in L'Autre Monde: où les États et Empires de la Lune (1657);[53][59] Cyrano's traveller actually meets Gonsales, who is still on the Moon, "degraded to the status of pet monkey".[60] It was one of the inspirations for what has been called the first science fiction text in the Americas, Syzygies and Lunar Quadratures Aligned to the Meridian of Mérida of the Yucatán by an Anctitone or Inhabitant of the Moon ... by Manuel Antonio de Rivas (1775).[61] The Laputan language of Jonathan Swift, who was a distant relation of Godwin's, may have been influenced by The Man in the Moone, either directly or through Cyrano de Bergerac.[48]
The Man in the Moone became a popular source for "often extravagantly staged comic drama and opera",
The book's influence continued into the 19th century. Edgar Allan Poe in an appendix to "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" called it "a singular and somewhat ingenious little book".[51] Poe assumed the author to be French, an assumption also made by Jules Verne in his From the Earth to the Moon (1865), suggesting that they may have been using Baudoin's translation.[65] H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901) has several parallels with Godwin's fantasy, including the use of a stone to induce weightlessness.[66] But The Man in the Moone has nevertheless been given only "lukewarm consideration in different histories of English literature",[53] and its importance is downplayed in studies of Utopian literature. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel's Utopian Thought in the Western World (winner of the 1979 National Book Award for Nonfiction) mentions it only in passing, saying that Godwin "treats primarily of the mechanics of flight with the aid of a crew of birds", and that The Man in the Moone, like Bergerac's and Wilkins's books, lacks "high seriousness and unified moral purpose".[67]
Gonsales's load-carrying birds have also left their mark. The Oxford English Dictionary's entry for gansa reads "One of the birds (called elsewhere 'wild swans') which drew Domingo Gonsales to the Moon in the romance by Bp. F. Godwin". For the etymology it suggests ganzæ, found in Philemon Holland's 1601 translation of Pliny the Elder's Natural History.[68] Michael van Langren, the 17th-century Dutch astronomer and cartographer, named one of the lunar craters for them, Gansii, later renamed Halley.[43]
Modern editions
- The Man in the Moone: or a Discourse of a Voyage thither by Domingo Gonsales, 1638. Facsimile reprint, Scolar Press, 1971.
- The Man in the Moone and Nuncius Inanimatus, ed. Grant McColley. Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 19. 1937.[30] Repr. Logaston Press, 1996.
- The Man in the Moone. A Story of Space Travel in the Early 17th Century, 1959.
- The Man in the Moone, in Charles C. Mish, Short Fiction of the Seventeenth Century, 1963. Based on the second edition, with modernised text (an "eccentric choice").[48]
- The Man in the Moone, in Faith K. Pizor and T. Allan Comp, eds., The Man in the Moone and Other Lunar Fantasies. Praeger, 1971.[69]
- The Man in the Moone, ed. William Poole. Broadview, 2009. ISBN 978-1-55111-896-3.
Monographs on The Man in the Moone
- Anke Janssen, Francis Godwins "The Man in the Moone": Die Entdeckung des Romans als Medium der Auseinandersetzung mit Zeitproblemen. Peter Lang, 1981.[70]
References
Notes
- ^ Remote signalling was one of Godwin's "personal obsessions".[5]
- ^ At the time the book was written England was at war with Spain.
- ^ Godwin proposes that as the Earth is magnetic,[1] only an initial push is necessary to escape its magnetic attraction, a push provided by the gansas.[11]
- ^ Godwin cites the green children of Woolpit as an example of Lunar children sent to Earth. The Lunars call their god Martinus, which might reflect the name of the green children's home, St Martin's Land.[12]
- ^ Gonsales speculates that his return journey was two days shorter than his outward journey because of the eagerness of his gansas to return to their home, or the Earth's greater magnetic attraction.[14] A modern mathematician, Andrew Simoson, has pointed out that the discrepancy can also be explained by the gansas flying directly towards where they could see the Moon to be on their outward journey. Therefore rather than travelling in a straight line they flew in a pursuit curve, attempting to catch up with the Moon as it orbited the Earth. But as the Earth orbits the Sun more slowly than the Moon orbits the Earth, the pursuit curve for the return journey was correspondingly shorter, and hence the journey home quicker.[15]
- ^ A Jesuit mission was set up in Beijing in 1601 by Matteo Ricci and Diego de Pantoja.[16]
- ^ Bürger lists publications from 1651, 1654, 1666, and 1671.[36]
- ^ W. H. van Seters notes that in 1651 two Dutch publishers, Jacob Benjamin in Amsterdam and I. G. van Houten in The Hague, published different continuations of the narrative, both bound with the second edition of Godwin's book; Benjamin's continuation is signed E. M., the initials of Godwin's fictional narrator. The continuation by van Houten exists in only one printing, but he had apparently planned for a third volume, a sequel to the sequel.[42]
- ^ This is a revised edition of his De furtivis literarum notis, vulgo de Ziferis libri iiii, first published in Naples in 1563.
Citations
- ^ a b c d Hutton, Sarah (2005), "The Man in the Moone and the New Astronomy: Godwin, Gilbert, Kepler" (PDF), Études Épistémè, 7: 3–13, archived from the original (PDF) on 26 August 2011
- ^ Godwin (2009), p. 67
- ^ a b Poole (2010), p. 57
- ^ Godwin (1768), p. 4
- ^ Poole (2010), p. 65
- ^ Godwin (1768), p. 15
- ^ Godwin (1768), p. 21
- ^ Godwin (1768), p. 22
- ^ Godwin (1768), p. 28
- ^ Capoferro (2010), p. 154
- ^ Capoferro (2010), pp. 153–4
- ^
Clark, John (2006), "'Small, Vulnerable ETs': The Green Children of Woolpit", JSTOR 4241432
- ^ Godwin (1768), p. 36
- ^ Godwin (1768), p. 43
- ^
Simoson, Andrew J. (2007), "Pursuit Curves for the Man in the Moone", The College Mathematics Journal, 38 (5): 330–8, S2CID 122450423
- ^ a b c d
Lawton, H. W. (1931), "Bishop Godwin's Man in the Moone", JSTOR 508383
- ^ Godwin (1768), p. 47
- ^ Poole (2009), pp. 13–14
- ^ Poole (2009), pp. 14–15
- ^ a b c d
Cressy, David (2006), "Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon", JSTOR 10.1086/ahr.111.4.961
- ^ a b c d
McColley, Grant (1937), "The Date of Godwin's Domingo Gonsales", S2CID 161384129
- ^ a b c d e f
Knowlson, James R. (1968), "A Note on Bishop Godwin's "Man in the Moone:" The East Indies Trade Route and a 'Language' of Musical Notes", S2CID 161387367
- ^ Poole (2009), pp. 18–19
- ^ Poole (2009), pp. 19–20
- ^ Poole (2009), pp. 20–22
- ^ Poole (2005), pp. 200–202
- ^ Poole (2010), p. 62
- ^ Poole (2009), pp. 23–24
- ^ Poole (2009), p. 27
- ^ a b
Tillotson, Kathleen (1939), "Rev. of McColley, The Man in the Moone and Nuncius Inanimatus", JSTOR 3717147
- ^ Poole (2009), p. 63
- ^ Poole (2010), p. 66
- ^ Poole (2009), p. 58
- ^ Poole (2009), pp. 58–60
- ^ McColley, Grant (1937), "The Third Edition of Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone", The Library, 4, 17 (4): 472–5,
- ^ Bürger & Schmidt-Glintzer (1993), p. 146
- ^ a b c Poole (2009), p. 41
- ^ Poole (2009), pp. 49–50
- ^ a b Bürger & Schmidt-Glintzer (1993), pp. 138–40
- ^
Hennig, John (1945), "Simplicius Simplicissimus's British Relations", JSTOR 3717748
- ^ Frederiks & Branden (1888–1891), p. 121
- ^ a b Seters, W. H. van (1952–1954), "De nederlandse uitgaven van The Man in the Moone", Het Boek, 31: 157–72
- ^ a b Poole (2009), p. 49
- ^ Buisman, M. (1960), Populaire Prozaschrijvers van 1600 tot 1815, B. M. Israel, pp. 127–8
- ^ Godwin (1768), p. 29
- ^ a b c
Clark, John (2007), "Bishop Godwin's 'The Man in the Moone': The other Martin", JSTOR 4241513
- ^ Godwin (1768), p. 10
- ^ a b c d e f
Neville Davies, H. (1967), "Bishop Godwin's 'Lunatique Language'", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 30: 296–316, S2CID 195050037
- ^
Arveiller, R. (1967), "Rev. of Cornelius, Languages in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages", JSTOR 40523004
- ^
Neville Davies, H. (1967), "The History of a Cipher, 1602–1772", JSTOR 733227
- ^ a b
Bennett, Maurice J. (1983), "Edgar Allan Poe and the Literary Tradition of Lunar Speculation", JSTOR 4239545
- ^
Sargent, Lyman Tower (1976), "Themes in Utopian Fiction in English before Wells", JSTOR 4239043
- ^ a b c d e Monterrey, Tomás (2005), "The Man in the Moone: Godwin's Narrative Experiment and the Scientific Revolution", Revista canaria de estudios ingleses, 50: 71–86
- ^ Sharp, Patrick B. (2011), "Colonialism and Early English SF; Review of Poole (ed.), The Man in the Moone",
- ^ Poole (2009), pp. 26–28
- ^ Poole (2009), pp. 28–31
- ^
Iliffe, Rob (2000), "The Masculine Birth of Time: Temporal Frameworks of Early Modern Natural Philosophy", JSTOR 4028029
- ^ Poole (2009), p. 48
- ^
Ridgely, Beverly S. (1957), "A Sixteenth-Century French Cosmic Voyage: Nouvelles des régions de la lune", JSTOR 2857145
- ^ Poole (2009), p. 51
- ^
Dziubinskyj, Aaron (2003), "The Birth of Science Fiction in Spanish America", JSTOR 4241138
- ^ a b Poole (2009), p. 52
- ^ Janssen, Anke (1985), "A Hitherto Unnoticed Allusion to Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone in Swift's The Battel Between the Antient and the Modern Books",
- ^ de Jeu (2000), pp. 223–4
- ^ Poole (2009), p. 53
- ^ Poole (2009), p. 54
- ^ Manuel & Manuel (1979), p. 219
- ^ "ganza, n.", Oxford English Dictionary (online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 23 April 2013
- ^
Marsaklsis, Ann (1972), "Rev. of Pizor and Comp, The Man in the Moone and Other Lunar Fantasies", JSTOR 229203
- ^
Hutton, Sarah (1983), "Rev. of Janssen, Francis Godwins "The Man in the Moone"", JSTOR 233122
Bibliography
- Bürger, Thomas; Schmidt-Glintzer, Helwig (1993), Der Fliegende Wandersmann nach dem Mond: Faksimiledruck der deutschen Übersetzung (in German), Herzog August Bibliothek, ISBN 978-3-88373-074-5
- Capoferro, Riccardo (2010), Empirical Wonder: Historicizing the Fantastic, 1660–1760, Peter Lang, ISBN 978-3-0343-0326-2
- Frederiks, J. G.; Branden, Jos. van den (1888–1891), "Brosterhuysen, Johan van", Biographisch woordenboek der Noord– en Zuidnederlandsche letterkunde (in Dutch), Veen
- Godwin, Francis (1768), The Strange Voyage and Adventures of Domingo Gonsales, to the World in the Moon ... With a Description of the Pike of Teneriff, as Travelled up by Some English Merchants (2nd ed.), John Lever
- Godwin, Francis (2009), "The Man in the Moone: Or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither", in Poole, William (ed.), The Man in the Moone, Broadview, pp. 65–134, ISBN 978-1-55111-896-3
- de Jeu, A. (2000), 't Spoor der dichteressen: netwerken en publicatiemogelijkheden van schrijvende vrouwen in de Republiek (1600–1750) (in Dutch), Verloren, ISBN 978-90-6550-612-2
- Manuel, Frank E.; Manuel, Fritzie P. (1979), Utopian Thought in the Western World, Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-93185-5
- Poole, William (2005). "The Origins of Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638)". Philological Quarterly. 84 (2): 189–210.
- Poole, William (2009), "Introduction", in Poole, William (ed.), The Man in the Moone, Broadview, pp. 13–62, ISBN 978-1-55111-896-3
- Poole, William (2010), "Kepler's Somnium and Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone: Births of Science-Fiction 1593–1638", in Houston, Chloë (ed.), New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period, Ashgate, pp. 57–70, ISBN 978-0-7546-6647-9
Further reading
- Godwin, Francis (1718), De man in de maan, of, Een verhaal van een reyse derwaarts (in Dutch) (5th ed.), Filip Verbeek
- The Man in the Moone public domain audiobook at LibriVox
External links
- Media related to The Man in the Moone at Wikimedia Commons
- The full text of The Strange Voyage and Adventures of Domingo Gonsales, to the World in the Moon at Wikisource
- Francis Godwin at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- The Man in the Moone title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- A 1740 plate based on the book's illustration, held by the Fitzwilliam Museum