The nightmare vision of the fast-paced but meaningless routine of Brave New World reflects this widespread concern about the world of the 1920s and 1930s. While people in industrialized societies welcomed these advances, they also worried about losing a familiar way of life, and perhaps even themselves, in the process. With the new technology, distances grew suddenly shorter and true privacy rarer. At home, the expansion of transportation and communication - the cars, telephones, and radios made affordable through mass production - also brought revolutionary changes to daily life. The Russian Revolution and challenges to the British Empire abroad raised the possibility of change on a world scale. Huxley and his contemporaries wrote about changes in national feeling, questioning of long-held social and moral assumptions, and the move toward more equality among the classes and between the sexes. British society was officially at peace, but the social effects of the Great War, as it was then called, were becoming apparent.

It also shows how the novel overcomes its intense grounding in 1920s political turmoil to escape into the timelessness of dystopian fiction.Huxley wrote Brave New World 'between the wars' - after the upheaval of the First World War and before World War II. Lawrence’s writings? Did Huxley’s visit to Borneo contribute anything to the novel? New research allows substantive answers and even explains why Huxley linked such figures as Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud. Did his round-the-world trip in 1925-1926 provide material for the novel? Did India’s caste system contribute to the novel’s human levels? Is there an overarching pattern to the names of the novel/s characters? Has the role of Hollywood in the novel been underestimated? Is Lenina Crown a representative 1920s “flapper”? Did Huxley have knowledge of and sources for his Indian reservation characters and scenes quite independent of and more accurate than those of D. This new study addresses a number of questions which still remain open. Wandering into Brave New World explores the historical contexts and contemporary sources of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel which, seventy years after its initial publication remains the best known and most discussed dystopian work of the twentieth century.

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