Revelations of the Dead-Alive
Some fun bits from an 1824 novel set in 2023.
On a whim the other day, I went into Google Books and searched for the phrase “two hundred years hence” in books from two hundred years ago, and found this forgotten sci-fi novel by Irish author John Banim, where someone from his present day travels to 2022’s London and sticks around for a year or so before heading home. He spends most of it asking questions like “What do people think of Jonathan Swift today? How about Shelley?” and so on, which is not the most gripping plot. But when he occasionally tries to actually describe his future and our present, it gets fun. Here are some highlights.
By act of parliament, there are now only three periodicals. Things were getting out of hand. Every periodical, no matter how small or how weird its politics were, had its dedicated and partisan supporters. Therefore, “a most dangerous jumble of tastes frittered away the public mind, until puzzle begat languor, and languor indifference, and both an utter neglect of every new book and author.” I guess we live in the cautionary tale timeline.
The most fashionable men had “ample beards” and disheveled hair. Their “superabundant cloaks trailed on the ground, and they wore yellow, violet, or tawny-colored boots and stockings.” Our traveler does not approve. (Also, he sees a man-bun in a history museum and cracks up.)
Women wear clothes that enable ease of movement, and are quite immodest. Sometimes you can see their knees! And despite this, they’re now able to go to the theater unescorted and usually nothing bad happens! Our traveler approves of this one.
We see a group of people whom the traveler assumes must be soldiers. They’re dressed in armor covered in “a profusion of tawdry,” and with “helmets as ponderous as any old model of Greek or Rome.” He’s confused to learn that they don’t actually fight any battles, but just go around harassing civilians.
Via Wikimedia Commons. Double-decker busses have just been invented, sparking concern about technological unemployment. “In one of the main streets, a monstrous vehicle, undrawn by horses, and otherwise seemingly unimpelled, and yet loaded with inside and outside passengers, whisked past me at a fearful rate, while two more came trundling down the street in an opposite direction. “Aha!” exclaimed Mr. Drudge, “I see old Angle has been successful. This was to be the first day for adopting, in the post-office department, his new self-impelling coaches, and there they go in fine style. No doubt they must be universally imitated, and so an end to the vassalage, indeed to the race of horses.” It’s part of an ongoing trend, Drudge reports, of human labor being replaced by “competent machinery.” What about the laborers? asks our traveler. They must be cursing these inventors’ names. Drudge waves this away, saying that “a majority of them will, sooner than remain in a state of idleness, learn to attend and keep in order the machinery of our self-driving coaches; and you know any of them can still sit behind and blow the horn.”
Buskers and street sweepers have also been put out of business by robots, so now beggars have no excuse for their idleness, per a particularly callous scene. The next step, Angle says, is military robots (“automeda”), which has to be a priority because surely it will save countless lives by obsoleting soldiers.
Phrenology is out. Now, instead of the primitive pseudoscience of studying the bumps on someone’s head to determine their personality, we study the bumps on their feet.
There’s a bit of a brain drain problem in Britain, though—all the best talent is emigrating to the recently colonized moon. And I do mean “colonized”—the primitive inhabitants have been defeated and forced onto the less fertile bits of the moon, so that various European powers can fight over the good farmland. Naturally, everybody goes there for their honeymoon. It only takes a little over a year to get there.
Modern theater critics prefer understated acting, and art museums universally prefer art that makes you feel something over art that merely demonstrates the mechanical skill of the artist.
The cancel culture that plagued 1823 has long since been eradicated from polite society in 2023. “We have exploded all that unnecessary and self-degrading stuff. We do not indeed join in the ‘common cry of curs’ against every person who unhappily, yet conscientiously, differs from our established notions of morals and religion. We think it reasonable that, in a free country, any man may be allowed to try whatever theoretic voyage he pleases, decently; gravely, or wittily, but still decently. We are ready to take up a book that shall seek, as some have sought, to dethrone and darken heaven itself, and for its bright existence to substitute a horrible non-entity. Let even this be assayed…we have at last come to the resolution to read a metrical love-tale, or a sonnet to the Spring, without troubling our heads whether or not the author speechifies in or out of place; whether he attends the anniversary dinner of Charley or Billy; whether he reads Tom Paine or his Bible…”
Processed food! Our traveler is “amazed to observe, spread out, a profusion of little things resembling no human dinner-fare that in any country, and particularly in England, I had ever shared or contemplated. Mixtures they must indeed have been, of roots, fruits, and animal food, as by eating of them I inferred; but of what roots, fruits, or especial kind of meat, it went beyond my palate to determine.” That would be bewildering.
I don’t want to pass too much judgment on the author, if only because I can’t always tell which bits are meant to be utopian, dystopian, or satirical. Other writers from this time worried that we’d have this problem, incidentally.1 What I think this book gets right is that the future tends to be really weird. We don’t, specifically, have the little black boxes on our dining-room tables the book describes, the ones that extrude forks and knives so they can cut and serve food directly into your mouth. But we have plenty of commonplace devices that would seem just as strange, such as little black boxes that paint portraits in the blink of an eye and display the latest periodicals.
Also, that we would read about all the Italian operas being performed in England and think the English must’ve been bilingual, when they were actually just pretentious. And that, once the life expectancy of the working class had risen to fifty years, we’d look back on their statistics and go “that can’t be right.”
Still holding out for the superabundant trailing coats. Possibly still a trend forecast?