Fictional work: The New Atlantis

Overview
Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627) is an unfinished utopian narrative that imagines a learned, devout, and technologically advanced island society whose public life revolves around organized scientific inquiry. Framed as a traveler’s tale, it fuses adventure with a constitutional sketch of an ideal commonwealth. The island, Bensalem, is orderly, prosperous, and Christian, and its chief institution, Salomon's House, conducts experiments, gathers knowledge from around the world, and carefully translates discovery into public benefit. The fragment ends abruptly after the institution’s purposes and wonders are unveiled, leaving a suggestive blueprint rather than a completed story.

Plot
A European ship sailing from Peru toward China and Japan is blown off course and reaches an unknown land in the Pacific. The men are received cautiously yet generously by officials of Bensalem and housed in the Strangers’ House under sanitary and moral regulations. As their host explains the island’s customs, the crew learn that Bensalem is long converted to Christianity through a miracle: a pillar of light led islanders to a chest containing the canonical Scriptures and a letter attributed to the Apostle Bartholomew, after which the faith quietly flourished.

Guided through Bensalem’s disciplined civic life, the visitors witness the Feast of the Family, a ceremony honoring a patriarch, the Tirsan, who has sired thirty living descendants. The festival embodies the society’s esteem for chastity, marriage, and generational continuity, and shows how the state glorifies private virtue without vainglory or excess. The narrator also converses with Joabin, a learned Jew whose courteous frankness reveals the islanders’ moral rigor, modest prosperity, and the prudent limits they place on foreign contact.

The narrative’s focus culminates in the arrival of a Father of Salomon’s House, who, given special license, discloses the institution’s scope, methods, and selected results. After describing many experiments and devices, he blesses the strangers. The account breaks off without recording the ship’s departure, underscoring the text’s status as a visionary fragment.

Salomon’s House and the Reign of Experiment
Salomon’s House is the heart of Bensalem. Its stated end is “the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire.” Bacon depicts a research establishment with divisions of labor, long-term projects, and ethical oversight. Its members cultivate gardens and parks for controlled growth, distill medicines, preserve food by refrigeration, purify water, and engineer new alloys. They build “perspective houses” for optics, “sound houses” for acoustics, “engine houses” for mechanics, and “chambers of health” for longevity. They claim some degrees of flight in the air, craft undersea vessels, make precise clocks and instruments, and stage illusions in a “house of deceits” to probe the limits of sense. Knowledge also comes from abroad: trusted “merchants of light” travel incognito, collecting books, instruments, and reports, then return to sift truth from rumor. Discoveries are released gradually, with secrecy and selection guarding the common good.

Society, Faith, and Law
Bensalem allies scientific ambition with moral restraint. Christianity shapes public ritual without sectarian zeal; charity is practical and decorous. Sexual conduct is tightly governed, courtship chaperoned, and marriage esteemed as a public trust. Wealth is moderate, luxury subdued, and offices are held by those proven in virtue and ability. Foreign trade is restricted to control vices and preserve institutions, yet curiosity about nature and arts beyond the island is officially cultivated through Salomon’s House. The portrait suggests a state that marries piety to pragmatism, and authority to accountable expertise.

Style and Legacy
The New Atlantis melds serene, ceremonial description with flashes of technological prophecy. By dramatizing an academy devoted to experiment, collaboration, and instrumentation, Bacon anticipates the modern research university and the scientific society; the Royal Society later recognized this lineage. The fragment’s silences, about politics, dissent, and the distribution of power, invite debate, but its central image endures: a commonwealth that treats systematic inquiry as a public office and directs invention toward human flourishing.