The Mummy!: A Victorian Tale of the 22nd Century

By Jane C. Webb Loudon

Book Overview

Within a decade of the 1818 publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, another Englishwoman invented a foundational work of science fiction. Seventeen-year-old Jane Webb Loudon took up the theme of reanimation, moved it three hundred years into the future, and applied it to Cheops, an ancient Egyptian mummy. Unlike Shelley's horrifying, death-dealing monster, this revivified creature bears the wisdom of the ages and is eager to share his insights with humanity. Cheops boards a hot-air balloon and travels to 22nd-century England, where he sets about remedying the ills of a corrupt government. In recounting Cheops' attempts to put the futuristic society to rights, the young author offers a fascinating portrait of the preoccupations of her own era as well as some remarkably prescient predictions of technological advances. The Mummy envisions a world in which automatons perform surgery, undersea tunnels connect England and Ireland, weather-control devices provide crop irrigation, and messages are transmitted with the speed of cannonball fire. The first novel to feature the concept of a living mummy, this pioneering tale offers an engaging mix of comedy, politics, and science fiction.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 048681579X
• ISBN13: 9780486815794
• Release Date: April 2017
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Duck Soup + Braveheart + Frankenstein= The Mummy!

Brandon Fraser, eat your heart out!What an odd, entertaining book this is. Written probably the cash in the success of Frankenstein, Jane Webb Loudon wrote it as a political satire and a tale of the supernatural. Distinguished because it is the first novel to feature the creature of the Living Mummy, the story centers around a corrupt English government in the year 2126, and Cheops, the resurrected-by-a-mad-scientist, 3000 year-old Mummy's attempts to fix it to earn a redemption from his accursed past.In the meantime, there are battles that spark thoughts of Braveheart, and the whole thing is a fascinating mix of comedy, Gothic horror, politics, and science fiction. I am surprised this didn't become a great literary classic, ranked up there with Dracula and Frankenstein. Indeed, this story is equal to them in just about every way. Way ahead of its time both socially and in intelligence, thanks to this recent re-print, however, Jane Loudon's The Mummy has a chance to emerge in the full glory that it deserves!