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Trollope's only dystopia — a novel of state euthanasia set in 1980, written by a man of the very age it condemns to death

On the imaginary island-republic of Britannula, near New Zealand, in the year 1980, the law of "the Fixed Period" decrees that every citizen, on reaching sixty-seven, shall be "deposited" in a college called Necropolis, there to pass a valedictory year before a merciful, compulsory death. Its author and president, Neverbend, is a rationalist convinced the euthanasia of the old is progress; the novel records his scheme colliding with human feeling, and Britain arriving — gunboat and "town-cannon" in hand — to put the barbarism down.

Written in the last months of his life — Trollope died in December 1882 — the book is a savage, ambivalent satire on the Victorian cult of efficiency and on the logic that prices a human life by its productivity. Its horror is autobiographical: Trollope was himself sixty-seven, the "fixed period" of his own fable, as he wrote it. Composed against the backdrop of the First Boer War, it carries Trollope's scepticism about colonial self-government into fable: Britain's gunboat re-imposes imperial rule on the wayward little republic and its capital, Gladstonopolis.

This is the first edition in book form of Trollope's only work of science fiction — his "sole venture into sf," in the words of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and his sixty-first book; John Clute calls it a work that "demonstrates the vigour of its author's rather gloomy Indian summer." Long dismissed as a curiosity — Michael Sadleir called it "an unfortunate excursion into Wellsian fantasia" — it is now read as a founding text of the euthanasia debate in fiction and a genuine ancestor of literary dystopia [J. H. Davidson, "Anthony Trollope and the Colonies," Victorian Studies 12, no. 3 (1969): 305–30].

[4], 200; [6], 203 pp. Octavo, publisher's crimson cloth, front boards blocked with a small gilt daisy device within a gilt circle, spines lettered in gilt. First-edition points: title-pages dated MDCCCLXXXII and reading "In Two Volumes," the imprint of William Blackwood and Sons.

Good to very good, honestly described: volumes leaning, spines faded, some soil and staining, cloth rubbed with light loss, bookplate to the front cover of vol. II; hinges tender, occasional foxing. A sound copy of a scarce first edition.

PROVENANCE

Bookplate to the front cover of vol. II.

REFERENCES

Sadleir, Trollope: A Bibliography, 62 (scarcity schedule C4); Wolff 6776; Trollope Society Catalogue 69

First edition. 2 volumes

EDINBURGH & LONDON: WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS · 1882

Trollope's only dystopia — a novel of state euthanasia set in 1980, written by a man of the very age it condemns to death

Name: Trollope's only dystopia — a novel of state euthanasia set in 1980, written by a man of the very age it condemns to death
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TROLLOPE, Anthony (1815–1882)

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On the imaginary island-republic of Britannula, near New Zealand, in the year 1980, the law of "the Fixed Period" decrees that every citizen, on reaching sixty-seven, shall be "deposited" in a college called Necropolis, there to pass a valedictory year before a merciful, compulsory death. Its author and president, Neverbend, is a rationalist convinced the euthanasia of the old is progress; the novel records his scheme colliding with human feeling, and Britain arriving — gunboat and "town-cannon" in hand — to put the barbarism down.

Written in the last months of his life — Trollope died in December 1882 — the book is a savage, ambivalent satire on the Victorian cult of efficiency and on the logic that prices a human life by its productivity. Its horror is autobiographical: Trollope was himself sixty-seven, the "fixed period" of his own fable, as he wrote it. Composed against the backdrop of the First Boer War, it carries Trollope's scepticism about colonial self-government into fable: Britain's gunboat re-imposes imperial rule on the wayward little republic and its capital, Gladstonopolis.

This is the first edition in book form of Trollope's only work of science fiction — his "sole venture into sf," in the words of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and his sixty-first book; John Clute calls it a work that "demonstrates the vigour of its author's rather gloomy Indian summer." Long dismissed as a curiosity — Michael Sadleir called it "an unfortunate excursion into Wellsian fantasia" — it is now read as a founding text of the euthanasia debate in fiction and a genuine ancestor of literary dystopia [J. H. Davidson, "Anthony Trollope and the Colonies," Victorian Studies 12, no. 3 (1969): 305–30].