Episode 301: Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” Intro and Ch. 1-3
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Welcome back to The Literary Life podcast with Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks! They are joined by Ella Hornstra for the beginning of a new series on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Thomas and Ella kick off the book discussion with a little biographical background on Huxley and dispel the myth that he belonged to the Bloomsbury Group. Angelina gives some literary history of the period in which Huxley wrote, as well as some thoughts on satire as a response to an age of overwhelming optimism. She also highlights the literary and cultural influences that Huxley satirizes in this novel, including Wells, Ford, and Freud.
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Don’t forget to check out this coming year’s annual Literary Life Online Conference, happening January 23-30, 2026, “The Letter Killeth, but the Spirit Quickeneth: Reading Like a Human”. Our speakers will be Dr. Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, Dr. Anne Phillips, and, of course, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks.
Commonplace Quotes:
The truth is, men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible; or, to speak it in other words: This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us. The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable. Worship, indeed, in any sense, is not recognised among us, or is mechanically explained into Fear of pain, or Hope of pleasure. Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also.
Thomas Carlyle, from “Signs of the Times“
Utopias appear more realizable than was ever believed possible before. And we find ourselves face to face with an agonizing question: how to avoid their definite realization? Utopias can be realized. Life marches towards them. And possibly a new age is beginning, an age in which intellectuals and the educated classes will look to the means of avoiding utopias and returning to a non-utopian society, less “perfect” and more free.
Nikolai Berdiaev, from The Philosophy of Freedom
I am like Adam, the first convict sentenced to transportation, but I have no Eve, and have eaten no apple but what was sour as a crab.
Lord Byron, from “Letters”
I undertook (not very successfully) to present a contrast of two “cardboard” world, equally fictitious–the world of advertising and the world of the post-war “Bright Young People.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, from Mind of the Maker referring to Murder Must Advertise
Books and Links:
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton
What Not by Rose Macaulay
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
1984 by George Orwell
Men Like Gods by H. G. Wells
My Life and Work by Henry Ford
On the Margin by Aldous Huxley
Music at Night by Aldous Huxley
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Books and Thoughts
by Aldous Huxley
Old ghosts that death forgot to ferry
Across the Lethe of the years -
These are my friends, and at their tears
I weep and with their mirth am merry.
On a high tower, whose battlements
Give me all heaven at a glance,
I lie long summer nights in trance,
Drowsed by the murmurs and the scents
That rise from earth, while the sky above me
Merges its peace with my soul's peace,
Deep meeting deep. No stir can move me,
Nought break the quiet of my release:
In vain the windy sunlight raves
At the hush and gloom of polar caves.
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