A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
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A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is the most popular book by James De Mille. It was serialized posthumously in Harper's Weekly, and published in book form by Harper and Brothers of New York City in 1888. It was subsequently serialized in the United Kingdom and Australia, and published in book form in the United Kingdom and Canada. Later editions were published from the plates of the Harper and Brothers first edition, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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[edit] Plot summary
The satiric and fantastic romance is set in an imaginary semi-tropical land in Antarctica inhabited by prehistoric monsters and a cult of death-worshipers. Begun many years before it was published, it recalls Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Gordon Pym and anticipates the exotic locale and fantasy-adventure elements of works by H. Rider Haggard such as She and King Solomon's Mines, and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, as well as innumerable prehistoric world movies based loosely on these and other works. The title and locale were inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's Ms. Found in a Bottle.
The main story of the novel is the narrative of the adventures of Adam More, a British sailor shipwrecked on the homeward voyage from Tasmania. After passing through a subterranean tunnel of volcanic origin, he finds himself in a "lost world" of prehistoric animals, plants and people sustained by volcanic heat despite the long Antarctic night.
A secondary plot about the four yachtsmen who find the manuscript written by Adam More and sealed in a copper cylinder forms a frame for the central narrative.
In his strange volcanic world, More also finds a highly developed human society which in the tradition of topsy-turvy worlds of folklore and satire (compare Sir Thomas More's Utopia, Erewhon by Samuel Butler, or Herland) has reversed the values of Victorian society: wealth is scorned and poverty is revered, death and darkness are preferred to life and light. Rather than accumulating wealth, the natives seek to divest themselves of it as quickly as possible. Whatever they fail to give away to the abject rich is confiscated by the government, which imposes the burden of wealth upon its unfortunate subjects at the beginning of the next year of reverse taxation as a form of punishment.
It was unfortunate for De Mille's reputation as a writer that this work, his best, was published after She and King Solomon's Mines, for although Haggard's works were well-known by then, the actual composition of De Mille's romance pre-dated the publication of the popular romances and his ideas were not in the least derivative from Haggard's better known works.
[edit] Reference
A scholarly edition of the work was published by the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (CEECT) (see below). This edition is the source of the information provided by this article.
[edit] Bibliography
- A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder was first published in nineteen installments in Harper's Weekly, Vol. 32, from January 7, 1888 (No. 1620) to May 12, 1888 (No. 1638). Each installment was accompanied by an illustration by Gilbert Gaul.
- De Mille, James. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. First American Edition. Harper and Brothers, New York, 1888.
- De Mille, James. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. First British Edition. Chatto and Windus, London, 1888.
- De Mille, James. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. First Canadian Edition. Robinson, Montreal, 1888.
- De Mille, James. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. New Canadian Library Edition. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1969.
- De Mille, James. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. Edited by Malcolm Parks. Carleton University Press, Ottawa, 1986. ISBN 0-88629-041-4 (hardcover), ISBN 0-88629-041-4 (paperback)
