Cæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century: Novel

by Ignatius L. Donnelly

Book Overview

The plotAs some other speculative writers did (Anna Bowman Dodd's 1887 book The Republic of the Future is a contemporaneous example), Donnelly cast his fiction in the form of an epistolary novel. His first-person narrator Gabriel Weltstein writes a series of letters to his brother, recounting his experiences during a 1988 visit to New York. Weltstein is a wool merchant from Uganda (early Zionist thinkers considered the possibility of founding a Jewish...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1696567521
• ISBN13: 9781696567527
• Release Date: September 2019
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 158 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 8.0" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful Edition

"Cæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century" by Ignatius Donnelly is the 10th book in the Early Classics of Science Fiction series. "Cæsar's Column" was first published in 1890 and though it is far from a great work, it holds a special place in the history of speculative fiction. The novel deals with a dystopian/utopian future (1988) and draws heavily on the author's own political views. Ignatius Donnelly was a populist politician moving from party to party and switching positions on issues frequently, eventually joining the Republican party and being elected as Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota and then to Congress. Donnelly also became known for his writing, as he wrote about such diverse topics as Atlantis, Ragnarok, and the true authorship of Shakespeare's works. Those were all considered non-fiction works though, and after being discredited he wrote "Cæsar's Column", a fictional work, under the pseudonym of Edmund Boisgilbert, M.D., though this was more of a publicity stunt than a real attempt to conceal his identity. "Cæsar's Column" is an important work in the history of speculative fiction because it is one of the earliest works which brings the ideas of Jules Verne to an American audience, though certainly not with the same level of quality. This work also looks at social Darwinism, and Donnelly's impression of where it will lead the society in the next 100 years. As is a general rule with this series, the quality comes not just with the works being presented, as many of them are far from ideal; but rather it is the supporting documentation which makes them well worth reading. In this case, it is the superb introduction and notes provided by Nicholas Ruddick which make this the ideal edition of this work to read. "Cæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century" takes place in the year 1988, mostly in New York City in a society which has decayed and lost its ideals. The narrator for much of the story is Gabriel Welstein, a visitor from the Swiss colony of Uganda, an agricultural utopian society. He has come to the U.S. to bypass the global Wool Ring which has monopolized the commodity, and most of the book is in the form of letters which Gabriel is writing to his brother Heinrich. In the city, Gabriel intervenes to save a beggar, who turns out to be Maximilian Petion, an attorney who is part of a brotherhood (the Brotherhood of Destruction) that is working to overthrow the corrupt ruling class. Much of the story deals with Donnelly's views on society and politics and in particular on the concept of social Darwinism. He provides a view of future technology which isn't too far off the mark with airships, city streets alight, though with power obtained from the Aurora Borealis instead of electrical power plants. One could say that the televised newspapers are a foreshadowing of the internet as well. There is some examples of anti-Semitism in the work as well, though as Ruddock discusses in his introduction it is pro