The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island is a satirical dystopian novel written by William Hurrell Mallock, and first published in 1878. It belongs to the wave of utopian and dystopian literature that characterized the later nineteenth century in both Great Britain and the United States. Satire Mallock derives the title of his book from Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's 1787 novel Paul et Virginie. As in that book, Mallock includes a shipwreck and a tropical island, though his satirical outlook is far from Saint-Pierre's earnest idealism. As his subtitle indicates, Mallock targets the Positivist and Utilitarian thinking of his era for satirical attack. He mentions John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, Frederic Harrison, John Tyndall, and Thomas Henry Huxley by name in his text. Consistent with his other works, like his satirical novel The New Republic (1878), Mallock's stance is that of a conservative and a religious believer. One critic summarized his position: "Comically, but ruthlessly, Mallock exposes the moral vacuity he believes to lie behind the positivist creed," reducing it to "utter absurdity...." To support his satire, Mallock closes the novel with a ten-page collection of 29 quotations from positivist and liberal thinkers and writers of Mallock's era, including eleven quotes from Tyndall and nine from Harrison, plus five from Huxley and two each from Harriet Martineau and William Kingdom Clifford. Synopsis The novel opens with the introduction of its title characters. The heroine is "the superb Virginia St. John," a celebrated beauty, famous for being famous. At the age of thirty she is the newlywed wife of an English bishop. The hero (the term has to be applied satirically) is Prof. Paul Darnley, a prominent intellectual: "He had written three volumes on the origin of life, which he had spent seven years in looking for in hay and cheese; he had written five volumes on the entozoa of the pig, and two volumes of lectures, as a corollary to these, on the sublimity of human heroism and the whole duty of man. He was renowned all over Europe and America as a complete embodiment of enlightened modern thinking. He criticised everything; he took nothing on trust, except the unspeakable sublimity of the human race and its august terrestrial destinies." Both characters are traveling abroad the steamship Australasian, sailing from Melbourne to London; Virginia is on her way to Chausible Island to meet her new husband, while