Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  As I approached Windmill Hill, a terrible sinking seized me. I seemed to totter on the brink of a precipice. Could Ethel be safe? Should I ever again see little Bertie and the baby? I pedalled on as if automatically; for all life had gone out of me. I felt my hip-joint moving dry in its socket. I held my breath; my heart stood still. It was a ghastly moment.

  At my father’s door I drew up, and opened the garden gate. I hardly dared to go in. Though each second was precious, I paused and hesitated.

  At last I turned the handle. I heard somebody within. My heart came up in my mouth. It was little Bertie’s voice: “Do it again, Granpa; do it again; it amooses Bertie!”

  I rushed into the room. “Bertie, Bertie!” I cried. “Is Mammy here?”

  He flung himself upon me. “Mammy, Mammy, Daddy has comed home.” I burst into tears. “And Baby?” I asked, trembling.

  “Baby and Ethel are here, George,” my father answered, staring at me. “Why, my boy, what’s the matter?”

  I flung myself into a chair and broke down. In that moment of relief, I felt that London was lost, but I had saved my wife and children.

  I did not wait for explanations. A crawling four-wheeler was loitering by. I hailed it, and hurried them in. My father wished to discuss the matter, but I cut him short. I gave the driver three pounds—all the gold I had with me. “Drive on!” I shouted, “drive on! Towards Hatfield— anywhere!”

  He drove as he was bid. We spent that night, while Hampstead flared like a beacon, at an isolated farm-house on the high ground in Hertfordshire. For, of course, though the flood did not reach so high, it set fire to everything inflammable in its neighbourhood.

  Next day, all the world knew the magnitude of the disaster. It can only be summed up in five emphatic words: There was no more London.

  I have one other observation alone to make. I noticed at the time how, in my personal relief, I forgot for the moment that London was perishing. I even forgot that my house and property had perished. Exactly the opposite, it seemed to me, happened with most of those survivors who lost wives and children in the eruption. They moved about as in a dream, without a tear, without a complaint, helping others to provide for the needs of the homeless and houseless. The universality of the catastrophe made each man feel as though it were selfishness to attach too great an importance at such a crisis to his own personal losses. Nay, more; the burst of feverish activity and nervous excitement, I might even say enjoyment, which followed the horror, was traceable, I think, to this selfsame cause. Even grave citizens felt they must do their best to dispel the universal gloom; and they plunged accordingly into a round of dissipations which other nations thought both unseemly and un-English. It was one way of expressing the common emotion. We had all lost heart—and we flocked to the theatres to pluck up our courage. That, I believe, must be our national answer to M. Zola’s strictures on our untimely levity. “This people,” says the great French author, “which took its pleasures sadly while it was rich and prosperous, begins to dance and sing above the ashes of its capital—it makes merry by the open graves of its wives and children. What an enigma! What a puzzle! What chance of an Œdipus!”

  The Idler

  November, 1892

  THE DOOM OF LONDON

  by Robert Barr

  ROBERT Barr lived the drama-packed adventures that are frequently credited to newspapermen in fiction. Though Glasgow-born and a grade school instructor in the Windsor, Ontario, public schools, he eventually obtained a post on the Detroit Free Press. There he became a legend, rumored to have dodged bullets and bounded across rivers of breaking ice in pursuit of news beats. He was eventually transferred to the paper’s London office. In England’s primary city he roomed with Rudyard Kipling and became a close friend of A. Conan Doyle.

  He decided to start his own business and through Doyle was introduced to Jerome K. Jerome, famed playwright of Three Men in a Boat (1889). Pooling resources they launched The Idler, its first issue dated February 1892. It was a success from the start, featuring smart fiction of the highest quality by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Rudyard Kipling, A. Conan Doyle, Israel Zangwill, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells, among others.

  It was in The Idler (November 1892) that The Doom of London was first published. Quite obviously it was intended as a fictional warning to the city of London to do something about the paralyzing fog, actually caused by the fumes from the thousands of soft-coal fires, which read so romantically in Sherlock Holmes stories, but which accounted for numerous deaths annually. In doing so, Barr popularized a new fictional gambit of civic criticism disguised as science fiction, later to be taken up by other writers, among them Cutcliffe Hyne, Grant Allen and, most elaborately, Fred M. White with a series of six disasters for London in Pearson’s Magazine during 1903 and 1904. The Doom of London was reprinted in America in McClure’s Magazine (November 1894), again in The Idler (February 1905), and in Barr’s hardcover collection, The Face in the Mask (1895).

  Barr frequently returned to tales that could be classed as science fiction or fantasy, among them The Fear of It (The Idler, May 1893), a Utopia of an island whose people have never heard of England or the United States; The Revolt of the— (The Idler, May 1894), telling of the rise of women to a place of dominance in business; and his very clever novel, From Whose Bourne (1896), where a murdered man recruits a great detective from the spirit world to help him clear his widow of suspicion in his death.

  Almost forgotten today, Barr was an inventive and satirical writer, well regarded in his time and distinctly worth the trouble of reviving.

  1.

  The Self-Conceit of the Twentieth Century.

  I TRUST I am thankful my life has been spared until I have seen that most brilliant epoch of the world’s history—the middle of the twentieth century. It would be useless for any man to disparage the vast achievements of the past fifty years; and if I venture to call attention to the fact, now apparently forgotten, that the people of the nineteenth century succeeded in accomplishing many notable things, it must not be imagined that I intend thereby to discount in any measure the marvellous inventions of the present age. Men have always been somewhat prone to look with a certain condescension upon those who lived fifty or a hundred years before them. This seems to me the especial weakness of the present age; a feeling of national self-conceit, which, when it exists, should at least be kept as much in the background as possible. It will astonish many to know that such also was a failing of the people of the nineteenth century. They imagined themselves living in an age of progress; and while I am not foolish enough to attempt to prove that they did anything really worth recording, yet it must be admitted by any unprejudiced man of research that their inventions were at least stepping-stones to those of today. Although the telephone and telegraph, and all other electrical appliances, are now to be found only in our national museums, or in the private collections of those few men who take any interest in the doings of the last century, nevertheless, the study of the now obsolete science of electricity led up to the recent discovery of vibratory ether which does the work of the world so satisfactorily. The people of the nineteenth century were not fools; and although I am well aware that this statement will be received with scorn where it attracts any attention whatever, yet who can say that the progress of the next half-century may not be as great as that of the one now ended, and that the people of the next century may not look upon us with the same contempt which we feel toward those who lived fifty years ago?

  Being an old man, I am, perhaps, a laggard who dwells in the past rather than the present; still it seems to me that such an article as that which appeared recently in Blackwood from the talented pen of Professor Mowberry, of Oxford University, is utterly unjustifiable. Under the title of “Did the People of London deserve their Fate?” he endeavors to show that the simultaneous blotting out of millions of human beings was a beneficial event, the good results of which we still enjoy. According to him, Londoners were so dull-witted and stupid, so incapab
le of improvement, so sodden in the vice of mere money-gathering, that nothing but their total extinction would have sufficed, and that, instead of being an appalling catastrophe, the doom of London was an unmixed blessing. In spite of the unanimous approval with which this article has been received by the press, I still maintain that such writing is uncalled for, and that there is something to be said for the London of the nineteenth century.

  2.

  Why London, Warned, Was Unprepared.

  The indignation I felt in first reading the article alluded to still remains with me, and it has caused me to write these words, giving some account of what I must still regard, in spite of the sneers of the present age, as the most terrible disaster that ever overtook a portion of the human race. I shall not endeavor to place before those who read, any record of the achievements pertaining to the time in question. But I would like to say a few words about the alleged stupidity of the people of London in making no preparations for a disaster regarding which they had continual and ever-recurring warning. They have been compared with the inhabitants of Pompeii making merry at the foot of a volcano. In the first place, fogs were so common in London, especially in winter, that no particular attention was paid to them. They were merely looked upon as inconvenient annoyances, interrupting traffic and prejudicial to health; but I doubt if any one thought it possible for a fog to become one vast smothering mattress pressed down upon a whole metropolis, extinguishing life as if the city suffered from hopeless hydrophobia. I have read that victims bitten by mad dogs were formerly put out of their sufferings in that way, although I doubt much if such things were ever actually done, notwithstanding the charges of savage barbarity now made against the people of the nineteenth century.

  Probably the inhabitants of Pompeii were so accustomed to the eruptions of Vesuvius that they gave no thought to the possibility of their city being destroyed by a storm of ashes and an overflow of lava. Rain frequently descended upon London, and if a rainfall continued long enough it would certainly have flooded the metropolis, but no precautions were taken against a flood from the clouds. Why, then, should the people have been expected to prepare for a catastrophe from fog, such as there had never been any experience of in the world’s history? The people of London were far from being the sluggish dolts present-day writers would have us believe.

  3.

  The Coincidence That Came at Last.

  As fog has now been abolished both on sea and land, and as few of the present generation have even seen one, it may not be out of place to give a few lines on the subject of fogs in general, and the London fogs in particular, which through local peculiarities differed from all others. A fog was simply watery vapor rising from the marshy surface of the land or from the sea, or condensed into a cloud from the saturated atmosphere. In my day, fogs were a great danger at sea, for people then travelled by means of steamships that sailed upon the surface of the ocean.

  London at the end of the nineteenth century consumed vast quantities of a soft bituminous coal for the purpose of heating rooms and of preparing food. In the morning and during the day, clouds of black smoke were poured forth from thousands of chimneys. When a mass of white vapor arose in the night, these clouds of smoke fell upon the fog, pressing it down, filtering slowly through it, and adding to its density. The sun would have absorbed the fog but for the layer of smoke that lay thick above the vapor and prevented its rays reaching it. Once this condition of things prevailed, nothing could clear London but a breeze of wind from any direction. London frequently had a seven-days’ fog, and sometimes a seven-days’ calm, but these two conditions never coincided until the last year of the last century. The coincidence, as every one knows, meant death—death so wholesale that no war the earth has ever seen left such slaughter behind it. To understand the situation, one has only to imagine the fog as taking the place of the ashes at Pompeii, and the coal-smoke as being the lava that covered it. The result to the inhabitants in both cases was exactly the same.

  4.

  The American Who Wanted To Sell.

  I was at the time confidential clerk to the house of Fulton, Brixton & Co., a firm in Cannon Street, dealing largely in chemicals and chemical apparatus. Fulton I never knew; he died long before my time. Sir John Brixton was my chief—knighted, I believe, for services to his party, or because he was an official in the city during some royal progress through it; I have forgotten which. My small room was next to his large one, and my chief duty was to see that no one had an interview with Sir John unless he was an important man or had important business. Sir John was a difficult man to see, and a difficult man to deal with when he was seen. He had little respect for most men’s feelings, and none at all for mine. If I allowed a man to enter his room who should have been dealt with by one of the minor members of the company, Sir John made no effort to conceal his opinion of me. One day, in the autumn of the last year of the century, an American was shown into my room. Nothing would do but he must have an interview with Sir John Brixton. I told him that it was impossible, as Sir John was extremely busy, but that if he explained his business to me I would lay it before Sir John at the first favorable opportunity. The American demurred at this, but finally accepted the inevitable. He was the inventor, he said, of a machine that would revolutionize life in London, and he wanted Fulton, Brixton & Co. to become agents for it. The machine, which he had in a small handbag with him, was of white metal, and it was so constructed that by turning an index it gave out greater or less volumes of oxygen gas. The gas, I understood, was stored in the interior in liquid form, under great pressure, and would last, if I remember rightly, for six months without recharging. There was also a rubber tube with a mouthpiece attached to it, and the American said that if a man took a few whiffs a day he would experience beneficial results. Now, I knew there was not the slightest use in showing the machine to Sir John, because we dealt in old-established British apparatus, and never in any of the new-fangled Yankee inventions. Besides, Sir John had a prejudice against Americans, and I felt sure this man would exasperate him, as he was a most cadaverous specimen of the race, with high nasal tones, and a most deplorable pronunciation, much given to phrases savoring of slang; and he exhibited also a certain nervous familiarity of demeanor toward people to whom he was all but a complete stranger. It was impossible for me to allow such a man to enter the presence of Sir John Brixton; and when he returned some days later I explained to him, I hope with courtesy, that the head of the house regretted very much his inability to consider his proposal regarding the machine. The ardor of the American seemed in no way dampened by this rebuff. He said I could not have explained the possibilities of the apparatus properly to Sir John; he characterized it as a great invention, and said it meant a fortune to whoever obtained the agency for it. He hinted that other noted London houses were anxious to secure it, but for some reason not stated he preferred to deal with us. He left some printed pamphlets referring to the invention, and said he would call again.

  5.

  The American Sees Sir John.

  Many a time I have since thought of that persistent American, and wondered whether he left London before the disaster, or was one of the unidentified thousands who were buried in unmarked graves. Little did Sir John think, when he expelled him with some asperity from his presence, that he was turning away an offer of life, and that the heated words he used were, in reality, a sentence of death upon himself. For my own part, I regret that I lost my temper, and told the American his business methods did not commend themselves to me. Perhaps he did not feel the sting of this; indeed, I feel certain he did not, for, unknowingly, he saved my life. Be that as it may, he showed no resentment, but immediately asked me out to drink with him, an offer I was compelled to refuse. But I am getting ahead of my story. Indeed, being unaccustomed to writing, it is difficult for me to set down events in their proper sequence. The American called upon me several times after I told him our house could not deal with him. He got into the habit of dropping in upon me unannounce
d, which I did not at all like; but I gave no instructions regarding his intrusions, because I had no idea of the extremes to which he was evidently prepared to go. One day, as he sat near my desk reading a paper, I was temporarily called from the room. When I returned I thought he had gone, taking his machine with him; but a moment later I was shocked to hear his high nasal tones in Sir John’s room, alternating with the deep notes of my chief’s voice, which apparently exercised no such dread upon the American as upon those who were more accustomed to them. I at once entered the room, and was about to explain to Sir John that the American was there through no connivance of mine, when my chief asked me to be silent, and, turning to his visitor, requested him gruffly to proceed with his interesting narration. The inventor needed no second invitation, but went on with his glib talk, while Sir John’s frown grew deeper, and his face became redder under his fringe of white hair. When the American had finished, Sir John roughly bade him begone, and take his accursed machine with him. He said it was an insult for a person with one foot in the grave to bring a so-called health invention to a robust man who never had a day’s illness. I do not know why he listened so long to the American, when he had made up his mind from the first not to deal with him, unless it was to punish me for inadvertently allowing the stranger to enter. The interview distressed me exceedingly, as I stood there helpless, knowing Sir John was becoming more and more angry with every word the foreigner uttered; but, at last, I succeeded in drawing the inventor and his work into my own room and closing the door. I sincerely hoped I would never see the American again, and my wish was gratified. He insisted on setting his machine going and placing it on a shelf in my room. He asked me to slip it into Sir John’s room some foggy day and note the effect. The man said he would call again, but he never did.