More was a great public man, but he was first a father and head of his own house.  He says:  “While I spend almost all the day abroad amongst others, and the residue at home among mine own, I leave to myself, I mean to my book, no time.  For when I come home, I must commen with my wife, chatter with my children, and talk with my servants.  All the which things I reckon and account among business, forasmuch as they must of necessity be done, and done must they needs be unless a man will be stranger in his own home.  And in any wise a man must so fashion and order his conditions and so appoint and dispose himself, that he be merry, jocund and pleasant among them, whom either Nature hath provided or chance hath made, or he himself hath chosen to be the fellows and companions of his life, so that with too much gentle behaviour and familiarity he do not mar them, and by too much sufferance of his servants make them his masters.”

At a time, too, when education was thought little necessary for girls, More taught his daughters as carefully as his sons.  His eldest daughter Margaret (Mog, as he loved to call her) was so clever that learned men praised and rewarded her.  When his children married they did not leave home, but came with their husbands and wives to live at Chelsea in the beautiful home More had built there.  So the family was never divided, and More gathered a “school” of children and grandchildren round him.

More soon became a great man.  Henry VII, indeed, did not love him, so More did not rise to power while he lived.  But Henry VII died and his son Henry VIII ruled.  The great Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, became More’s friend, and presently he was sent on business for the King to Bruges.

It was while More was about the King’s business in Belgium that he wrote the greater part of the book by which he is best remembered.  This book is called Utopia.  The name means “nowhere,” from two Greek words, “ou,” no, and “topos,” a place.

The Utopia, like so many other books of which we have read, was the outcome of the times in which the writer lived.  When More looked round upon the England that he knew he saw many things that were wrong.  He was a man loyal to his King, yet he could not pretend to think that the King ruled only for the good of his people and not for his own pleasure.  There was evil, misery, and suffering in all the land.  More longed to make people see that things were wrong; he longed to set the wrong right.  So to teach men how to do this he invented a land of Nowhere in which there was no evil or injustice, in which every one was happy and good.  He wrote so well about that make-believe land that from then till now every one who read Utopia sees the beauty of More’s idea.  But every one, too, thinks that this land where everything is right is an impossible land.  Thus More gave a new word to our language, and when we think some idea beautiful but impossible we call it “Utopian.”