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Anonymous [Loudon, Jane Webb].
THE MUMMY! A TALE OF THE TWENTY-SECOND CENTURY.
Publisher: Henry Colburn, London;
Date of Publication: 1827
Stock Code: 14241
First Edition. Octavo, 3 vols. Pp., [i-iii], iv-viii, [1], 300; [i-iii], 348; [i-iii], 303, [i] publisher’s ad. Bound without the half-titles. Bound in slightly later mid-nineteenth century tan half calf over marbled boards. Triple gilt fillets to spine compartments, olive green title labels. Engraved heraldic bookplate to each volume of Charles William Orde (1810–1875) of Nunnykirk Hall in Northumberland.
The first edition of Jane Loudon’s pioneering and politically charged science fiction novel. One of the most influential works of early 19th century science fiction alongside Mary Shelly’s ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘The Last Man’. Loudon responded keenly to the social and political instability surrounding her, writing in the wake of the French and American revolutions and the emerging workers rights movements. The Mummy is a highly critical response and worthy foil to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein published nine years earlier. Despite Loudon’s scepticism of Shelley’s politics, The Mummy is radically proto-feminist. It imagines an egalitarian utopia with a rule of female only succession, overseen by the trouser wearing, motherhood eschewing, Queen Claudia. Published at the peak of British Egyptomania following Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign, this is also the first literary depiction of a reanimated mummy, and so engendered a new subgenre in supernatural literature. “One of the children of FRANKENSTEIN, interesting in its curious medley of themes from current events, literature, and social theory. It contains snippets of almost every popular fictional form of its period and the immediate past, and also anticipates future developments. It offers utopian thought, Gothicism, anti-intellectualism, Egyptological discoveries, fantastic inventions, memories of Napoleon, Byronism, a dynastic theory of history, and much else. The SF element is strong, with many inventions and many projections of history; the supernatural element enters in the background, in the ultimate anti-intellectual theme, when the mummy reveals that it was not really revived by electricity, but by God as a warning against scientific prying." Bleiler. Some minor age browning and smudging (confined to margins) throughout and small loss to pp., 121-22 of vol. 2 at gutter with slight loss of text. Ink spots (not too obtrusive) to pp., 239- 65 of vol. 3. Rubbing to head and tail of spine and corner tips and minor scuffing to spine. In summary a very clean set in a near contemporary binding. £18500.00