CAESAR'S COLUMN. A STORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. By Edmund Boisgilbert, M.D. [pseudonym] .. by Donnelly, Ignatius - [1890].

Chicago: F. J. Schulte & Company, Publishers, [1890].. Octavo, pp. [1-2] 3-367 [368: blank], flyleaves at front and rear, original decorated blue cloth, front and spine panels stamped in gold, white floral endpapers printed in brown. First edition. Vivid anti-utopian history by "The Prince of Cranks" that opens with the expected depiction of a technological wonderland, then penetrates to the "rotten" core of the "gorgeous shell." "One of the more influential political novels of the day, written from the point of view of splinter populism, it sees our civilization as ready to collapse from internal misdevelopment ... As fiction a mixed bag, sometimes imaginative, sometimes sentimental. As political literature, unusual in saying to capital and anarchists, a plague on both your houses." - Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 230. "Only Bellamy's LOOKING BACKWARD (1888) had greater popularity or influence than CAESAR'S COLUMN." - Anatomy of Wonder (1995) 1-29. Anatomy of Wonder (1976) 2-61; (1981) 1-58; (1987) 1-29; (1995) 1-29; and (2004) II-348. Bailey, Pilgrims Through Space and Time, pp. 73-4. Clareson, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s 253. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 16. Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 54. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, pp. 70-1. Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 294. Roemer, The Obsolete Necessity, p. 188. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 84. Survey of Science Fiction Literature I, pp. 272-76. Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK, p. 43. Bleiler (1978), p. 26. Reginald 04457. BAL 4816. Wright (III) 1579. Cloth rubbed at spine ends and corner tips, several faint stains on cloth at the upper edge of the front cover, corner tips soft, a very good copy. An above average copy of this book. (#156100)