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Small octavo, pp. [1-2] 3 iv-vii [viii] 9 x-xvii [xviii] 19-119 [120: blank], original green boards rebacked with facsimile brown cloth shelf back closely resembling the original, facsimile paper spine label. First edition. An early American utopian novel, first printed as a serial in the Deist weekly newspaper, THE TEMPLE OF REASON, May through July 1802. First published as a book in 1837 and today one of the rarest early American novels in original format. This short work, told within the classic format of a sailor's report of a previously unknown island, is openly allegorical, the island being located in "regions lately discovered by political philosophers." It is "the first fully developed fictional portrayal of utopia in America," according to Joel Nydahl (Roemer [ed.], America as Utopia, p. 256), and presents "numerous reforms, practices, and attitudes that will become common fare in later American utopian fiction." It denounces private property and requires no assistance from the divine, placing its faith in bureaucracy to impose order, technology to reduce drudgery, and omnipresent gardens to instill virtue. The book contains a tension between a nostalgic desire to flee the urban and return to some putative Eden-like nature (the author shares with Rousseau the non-Christian faith in the innate goodness of Man) and the progressive urge to spawn technological marvels that will do all the dirty, dangerous and monotonous work for him. "EQUALITY is especially noteworthy for being the first American utopia to portray in some detail the garden-city." (ibid., p. 257). Lewis, Utopian Literature, pp. 160-1. Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 320. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 34. Bleiler (1978), p. 6. Reginald 04910. Wright (I) 920a. Binding rubbed at edges, endpapers foxed, some scattered foxing to text pages, mostly preliminary and terminal leaves, a very good copy. A nice copy of a major American utopian rarity. Housed in a custom cloth folding case. (#140667).
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