{"product_id":"trollope-fixed-period-1882","title":"Trollope's only dystopia — a novel of state euthanasia set in 1980, written by a man of the very age it condemns to death","description":"\u003cp\u003eOn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWritten 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis 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].\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGood 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003ePROVENANCE\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBookplate to the front cover of vol. II.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eREFERENCES\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSadleir, Trollope: A Bibliography, 62 (scarcity schedule C4); Wolff 6776; Trollope Society Catalogue 69\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atelier Zweig Rare Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47051250368700,"sku":null,"price":1000.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0736\/1285\/3436\/files\/611146_l.jpg?v=1783095812","url":"https:\/\/atelierzweig.com\/products\/trollope-fixed-period-1882","provider":"Atelier Zweig Rare Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}