ffred's
nearly-forgotten treasuresIn the days of Pym and Hampden, of Mirabeau and Danton, Pitt and Fox, argument and rhetoric may still have been powerful in persuading, but in the middle of the nineteenth century the veriest parliamentary tyro was aware that to have hoped ever to see an M.P. turned aside from his intended vote even by the eloquence of a Demosthenes, would have been as vain as to have expected the conversion of the Pope to the Wesleyan form of worship by a twopenny tract, or of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Romish faith by the recitation of a litany.
I first encountered a reference to this eerily prescient 1847 novel by Charles Frederick Henningsen in William North's essay "National Humor." It didn't take me long to realize why William North admired this work. The style is quite similar to his own: satirical, melodramatic, yet infused with idealism and romantic notions of noble genius. A political and economic fable in the guise of a science fiction novel, the story takes place sixty years in the future (1906) where the Western world has been split between Capitalist Oligarchic and Communist Democratic governments. Thrown into the mix of ambition, intrigue, and chicanery is a mad scientist who unleashes a plague of crop-devouring nanotech "atomic insects" which boosts the profits of the one who holds the monopoly of the antidote.
A fair portion of the story makes fun of historians and pokes jabs at various past English ministers and members of Parliament. At one point the author even makes fun of himself in this reference to his work Revelations of Russia:
"Here are two hundred volumes of Revelations. First, the Apocrypha, explained by Peter Borthwick, M.P. Next we have 'Revelations of Paris,' 'Revelations of London,' 'Revelations of Austria,' 'Revelations of the Turf,' by Lord George Bentinck, 'Revelations of Spain,' 'Revelations of the Eel-pie-house,' 'Back-stair revelations,' 'Revelations of St. Mary-le-bone,' 'Revelations of St. Pancras,' and 'Revelations of all the most public events which have occurred during the last half century.' Who would believe that a writer would be found after all these to style his book 'Revelations of Russia?' "
For the text I used these scans of volumes I and III of the 1848 edition and this scan of volume II of the 1847 second edition. While the OCR was highly accurate regarding most alphabetic characters, it suffered most in capturing various types of dashes and hyphens. Aside from that, I corrected numerous typographical errors in the books themselves. Bad chapter numbers were also corrected. Some obsolete spellings were updated, and some inconsistent spellings were standardized to the most frequent or modern (British) version.
So here it is: the master HTML version, the home-brew Kindle version, and the actual Amazon publication.
November 10, 2024