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, it still takes thirty years for prospective workers from each hyperactivated egg to reach physical maturity. To prevent such...