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].

The Fixed Period. A Novel. In two volumes. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1882. [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.

A very good copy. Spines darkened, light rubbing to extremities and spine ends, a few small marks to the cloth, Coomes's Regent Library label (141 Regent Street, London) to the front cover of vol. II. Contents clean, with occasional faint spotting.

PROVENANCE

Coomes's Regent Library, 141 Regent Street, London, with its subscription label to the front cover of vol. II.

REFERENCES

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