It may be helpful to think of the book in terms of three concentric circles: at the centre of the fiction is Raphael’s description of Utopia and its customs and institutions, but that is set within the frame of the conversation in the garden of More’s lodgings in Antwerp, and then that in its turn is enclosed within the prefatory materials – the Utopian alphabet and verses and the various letters. These mark three distinct phases in the composition of the work, and equally three stages in its imaginative conception.
