Immanuel Kant likened human history to ‘God’s novel.’Footnote 1
In 1838, the popular writer Martin Farquhar Tupper (1810–89) announced a miracle: he had ‘resuscitated’ wheat seeds recovered from the wrappings of a mummified Egyptian dissected in London.Footnote 2 Michael Faraday exhibited Tupper’s extraordinary plants in the library of the Royal Institution.Footnote 3 In a letter thanking Faraday for publicizing his ‘resuscitated mummy-wheat’, Tupper emphasized that, ‘To unbelievers, as you know, miracles are nothing, and perhaps are impossible; but it is gratifying to find, that our now perfectly restored triticum of the third year bears evidence of its exotic nature.’Footnote 4 Resuscitation of ancient Egyptian wheat, miracles, science – it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that Tupper was one of the great charlatans of his era, but Tupper’s success depended upon his ability to gauge the limits of the public’s imagination. In a metropolitan society like nineteenth-century London, those limits were increasingly established by print culture: and not just by scientific treatises and journals, but also by poems, satire and romance novels.Footnote 5 This was the tail end of the Romantic era; poets in Germany and in Britain were exploring new ideas around subjective interiorities, contrasted with the objectifying possibilities of scientific enquiry.Footnote 6 And in Britain, novelists took advantage of the democratic possibilities in reading novels to explore different social and political interpretations of the science and technology of the time.Footnote 7
Indeed, Tupper had borrowed the idea of ‘resuscitating’ Egyptian life from a popular novel about the scientific exploration of Egypt – set in the twenty-second century – published in London a decade earlier, written by the ambitious (and unknown) author Jane Webb (Jane Webb Loudon, 1800–58). In the novel, Webb Loudon’s heroes used galvanic batteries ‘to resuscitate the mummy of Cheops’.Footnote 8 The idea that science in the future could resuscitate the science of the past enthralled Webb Loudon (as it did a few, but by no means all, of her readers). ‘It was Cheops raised the pyramids from the dust by science’, Webb Loudon wrote, ‘and Cheops, by the force of science, shall be compelled to disclose their origin’.Footnote 9 In 1827, the sciences had not yet compelled the ancient Egyptians to disclose their secrets, but they would one day, and it was the strength of this tacit prognosis that made the novel compelling to readers of the time. Tupper helped himself to the idea of resuscitating Egypt, but he also hoped the resuscitated wheat would prove to be good, even superior to contemporary varieties. So did Faraday. For a season, many luminaries of the metropolis and its wider scientific network hoped that some of Egypt’s lost scientific expertise had been resuscitated.
Webb Loudon’s novel was (in some ways) a predictable consequence of the various sensations of the moment: she synthesized elements of Frankenstein with Egyptian archaeology. Webb Loudon and Tupper were both writing for profit and seeking to capitalize on the popularity of all things Egyptian. The practice of science in Egypt had been a source of public excitement and fascination for Webb Loudon’s entire life. In 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt; months later, the Institut d’Egypte was established in Cairo. Archaeological investigations were led by the French, but Britain was an important audience for their discoveries and advances: the naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire led the scientific project of Napoleon in Egypt, during which time he feared that hostilities with Britain would impede his ability to send specimens to Joseph Banks and Britain’s Royal Society.Footnote 10 Britain would have to wait until 1815 for an opportunity to conduct its own archaeological excavations in Egypt – but through the help of the traveller and antiquary Henry Salt, Banks facilitated the collections of the antiquities that swiftly filled the British Museum.Footnote 11 A metropolitan obsession with Egypt ensued.
The imagery and ideas of Webb Loudon’s book left new ideas and images in the imaginations of its readers, and novel associations like ‘resuscitated mummy’ became ordinary ways of perceiving. In a courtroom in Worcestershire in 1838, a journalist observing criminal court proceedings described accused murderer James Jones as ‘a most ill-looking fellow, with cavernous eyes, overhung with thick and bushy eyebrows, and with such a peculiar sallowness of complexion that he forcibly resembled a resuscitated mummy’.Footnote 12 The concept of, specifically, resuscitating Egypt’s past was what had made Webb Loudon’s book unique. Reviewers in the Literary Gazette acknowledged that despite the novel’s similarities to Frankenstein, ‘the idea of the resuscitation of a mummy is curious’.Footnote 13 (They were correct in a technical sense: the word ‘resuscitate’ doesn’t occur in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein).Footnote 14 In the 1820s, the word ‘resuscitate’ was familiar: it was used in cases of drownings, and also in rehydrating dried botanical specimens. When a sample of the wheat found its way to the Suffolk Agricultural Association, its annual dinner guests celebrated the remarkable ‘ear of resuscitated “mummy” wheat, raised this season from seed’.Footnote 15 Sheffield newspapers celebrated when a local resident planted ‘resuscitated mummy wheat’ in their garden.Footnote 16 But when the botanist John Henslow wrote to William Whewell about ‘mummy wheat’, he didn’t refer to it as ‘resuscitated’ – and neither did Darwin in a letter to Faraday where he asked for more substantial evidence of the feat.Footnote 17 The botanist John Lindley featured several articles on the controversy in his journal the Gardener’s Chronicle, all avoiding the term ‘resuscitated’.Footnote 18 It was playful and provoking, but not entirely serious, to imply that Webb Loudon’s visions of resuscitating ancient Egypt had found some truth.
Fictional speculation and prognostications on everything from resuscitation of the dead to the agricultural technology of the future earned Webb Loudon the contempt of reviewers and the press, as I show below. And while Webb Loudon did not write another novel like The Mummy!, she sustained her interest in the future – both its technological and its divine limits – for her entire career, though financial constraints and marriage dictated the genres and subject matter of her work. She was also interested in the ancient past, and the powers of prediction that knowledge of the past gave to those interested in the future. As I show in this article, when her published works are considered together, a coherent picture of human history, scientific progress and the possibility of predicting the shape and content of the future emerges. Webb Loudon viewed the future as constrained by the cycles of the past. ‘Progress’ – particularly technological progress – would always be bookended by periods of decline (until the end times), and the possibility of progress in science was always contingent upon periods of constructive political and social organization. In this article, I show that by taking Webb Loudon’s prognostic (and sometimes prophetic) writings seriously, we can better understand not just the promises, but the theological and sociological limits of the emerging technologies that so captivated Webb Loudon. Steam and fantastic new sources of energy could not – and would never – power humanity out of its circular and historical grooves, though they would bring humanity, for a time, closer to the divine.
Webb Loudon did not write any further novels set in the future, but after her marriage to the Scottish gardener and botanist John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) in 1831, the two of them shared the editorial responsibilities for the Gardener’s Magazine and routinely included prognoses and speculations on future technology and social organization within its pages.Footnote 19 John Loudon shared her interest in the future. A reformist, Loudon promoted a national secular system of education – but before such a system arrived, he clearly viewed affordable publications and encyclopedias as a means of furthering the education of the poorer classes, actively ushering in an improved, enlightened society.Footnote 20 Below, I discuss Webb Loudon’s educational and religious background, and draw upon her published works to show that, despite working in different genres (romantic fiction, theology, history, botany and gardening), Webb Loudon routinely invoked and elaborated upon her understanding of historical time. From there, I consider the role of prognosis (briefly) within the pages of The Mummy! and then survey its reception and discussion within the press. The article concludes with a consideration of how the Loudons incorporated prognosis into the Gardener’s Magazine. Particularly in the 1830s, the Loudons urged their readers to promote new technologies and social reforms because such technologies and reforms were near-certain aspects of the future. Prognosis became a moral imperative for reform.
Influences, religion and historical time
Until recently, historians of science have (as Koen Vermeir notes) regarded science fiction as better approached through the methodologies employed in literary studies.Footnote 21 Robert Richards has (perhaps) paid the most substantial attention to the blurred genres of scientific pursuits and imagination of the Romantic era – but even Richards found it necessary to push back against the perception that the poetic writings of Goethe ‘have been judged sometimes as failed science – but more often as not even science’.Footnote 22 It is now well established that historians of science ought to turn attention to science fiction (broadly conceived) to better understand how literature both mediates science and provides a space in which imagination and prognosis can explore the technological and scientific limits of the era.Footnote 23 Crucial to this growing historiographical vein is the question of how the production of science fiction informs the uses and applications of scientific concepts both in the public sphere and (potentially) in scientific practice. Developing a compelling case study towards this end, Jim Endersby has argued that the botanical science of orchids produced by Darwin and his contemporaries inspired new themes and ideas within science fiction, and that this imaginative and speculative orchid literature provided the subsequent generation of botanists with new ways of thinking that led to the discovery of how some species of orchid attract pollinating insects without producing nectar (pseudo-copulation).Footnote 24 Discovering direct links between speculative fiction and scientific practice will always be elusive, but one recurring argument in the historiography on science fiction is that science fiction refashions the lives and uses of scientific concepts within and outside the laboratory. Some of the concepts that historians of science will be interested in will be technical and specific (like pseudo-copulation). Concepts like ‘future’ lack such specificity yet are not therefore less integral to understanding scientific change.
Reinhart Koselleck, more than any other historian, has worked on the history of the concept ‘future’, particularly the practices of anticipating the future that we label ‘prognosis’. Koselleck was interested in how new ways of thinking about the future – and predicting the content of the future – became pervasive in Europe’s print culture from roughly 1750 to 1850, the Sattelzeit between premodernity and modernity.Footnote 25 Crucially, he viewed prognosis as necessitating some concept of cyclical time, and also what he termed ‘strata’: for example, the political history of a state might be composed of strata of periods of authoritarian rule contrasted with periods of liberal freedom. Once a community becomes fluent in thinking of time as composed of such layers (argues Koselleck), further observations about the future become expressible. Koselleck was particularly interested in the predictions of Diderot, observing that ‘the wish for freedom, like a catchword, could entirely change into a yearning for voluntary subjugation’.Footnote 26 Diderot had, famously, predicted future revolution in France, but he also predicted that, in the wake of revolution, a leaderless population would seek tyranny and subjugation, ideas that, Koselleck emphasizes, were not popular in Diderot’s enlightened milieu (but which were available for him in considering the ‘strata’ of Roman histories of civil war and imperial rule).Footnote 27
Koselleck argued that prognosis provided a means through which the future shaped the present, motivating one of his most controversial (and compelling) positions that prognostication became remarkably good during the Sattelzeit. This wasn’t through any arcane or mystical power, it was merely a consequence of the fact that people who attended to the strata and revolutions of historical time could not only anticipate what was coming (within, say, ten to fifty years), but also respond to it before it arrived.Footnote 28 Readers might be sceptical of the powers Koselleck appeared to attribute to prognosis (or disagree on his meaning), but there is a descriptive element to his work on prognosis which captures the background assumptions and intellectual furniture of how Europeans amongst the literate classes were thinking about the relationship of past, present and future.
Koselleck focused on German and French literature of prognosis, but these wider cultural fascinations with prognosis and the promise of scientific developments in the future also gained popularity in Britain’s print culture in the 1820s and 1830s, bringing with them fresh anxieties for established religious and scientific authorities. These specific concerns were that, as science gained in popularity, readers would increasingly search for continuities between scientific and religious views, potentially resolving them for themselves.Footnote 29 For Charlotte Sleigh, the politics of epistemology in these decades ‘included a critical questioning of imagination and its value’.Footnote 30 This was the decade that inspired the commission and composition of the Bridgewater Treatises. The reverend William Whewell (1794–1866), a treatise author, regarded science as ‘a leap into the very mind of God’ – when practised and communicated correctly.Footnote 31 Speculative and fantastical writing like that of Webb Loudon, through situating new technological and social developments in the ‘moral universe’ of a novel, represented the very kind of unanticipated and suspect literature that had inspired the commission of the treatises.Footnote 32 Such scrutiny wasn’t restricted to fantastical and romantic novels: Loudon’s instructive religious text Comparative Chronology was published during a period in which scientific (and historical) books aimed at children were drawing increasing scrutiny and concern from evangelical parents.Footnote 33
There are no direct references to Diderot in Webb Loudon’s work despite the startling similarities that emerge in their views on the cyclical nature of human history. Whatever influence she may have had, her interest in cycles and revolutions was markedly different from Diderot’s in that she sought to find confluence with her evangelical faith, as expressed in Conversations on Comparative Chronology from the Creation of the World to the Birth of Jesus Christ (1830) and in the subsequent The History of Africa (1831). Historians of science and literature who have written on Webb Loudon are, inevitably, drawn to either her science fiction or her botany. Her religious writing fits neither discipline and thus her Chronology is always passed over in silence, as is History of Africa, a hastily composed volume written drawing on the research notes of Chronology.Footnote 34 But these works provide some of the most substantial discussions of the science of the ancient world. In the latter, Webb Loudon affirms that ‘Egypt was the chosen seat of the arts and sciences’ and also that ‘age after age appears thus to rise in all its glory before us, and then in turn to fade from our sight’.Footnote 35 Greek and Roman history were, of course, crucial sources for these kinds of longue durée histories as they provide records of nations and empire passing through periods of growth, decline and subsequent demise.Footnote 36 Discussing the collapse of empires in her Chronology, she observed that it is: ‘verified by the experience of ages, that as a long series of misfortunes is generally followed by some great and unexpected success; so the most brilliant victories often contain within themselves the seeds of destruction for the victors’.Footnote 37
For all the declarations that such accounts of history were verified by experience, Webb Loudon’s views were not ubiquitous in her time. She was more assured of the repetition of the past than some of the sources she would have read. Webb Loudon certainly would have drawn on Edwin Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but she did not take the same conclusions as did Gibbon. For J.G.A. Pocock, Gibbon’s History can be characterized as what he termed an ‘enlightened narrative’ – the decline of Rome must be understood as belonging to a previous age, many of whose problems had been solved by the present one, ensuring that there was little risk of a return to what Gibbon termed ‘original barbarism’.Footnote 38 Further, Gibbon didn’t view Rome’s decline and fall as cyclical, or as bearing any kind of cyclical relation to, say, the British or French empires.Footnote 39
What role did science and knowledge play in shaping historical time? Webb Loudon viewed human history as being directed by knowledge systems, and credited early despots with ‘knowing that no engine is so powerful to rule the minds of the ignorant as superstition’.Footnote 40 Printing played a role in sustaining this unequal knowledge economy. Webb Loudon speculated that ‘before the invention of printing, whatever progress a nation collectively might make in science, the common people remained unenlightened, and they generally regarded those possessed of more knowledge than themselves as having commerce with supernatural beings’.Footnote 41
Webb Loudon had, by 1830, met John Loudon, and she might have been influenced by his own faith in the progressive potentiality of cheap print culture in formulating this explanation of the ‘superstructures of fiction’ that she observed in the historical writings of the ancient world.Footnote 42 We can perhaps gain some perspective on the views of Webb Loudon’s wider set by attending to the examples put forward by the London gardener Robert Fish, a frequent contributor to the Gardener’s Magazine. In 1836, at a meeting of the London Gardener’s Association, Fish declared,
the sentiments we entertain respecting knowledge or ignorance will bear an exact analogy to the progress which we have made in the acquisition of knowledge. The sages of India or of Egypt would entertain ideas concerning knowledge as different from those conceived of it by the modern philosophers of Europe, as would be found exemplified in the case of the untutored peasant boy, when contrasted with the genius and the intellect of a Newton.Footnote 43
Like Webb Loudon, Fish relied upon an idea that ancient Egypt (and India) boasted science, but that the sages of those eras guarded knowledge from the wider public, limiting the progress and life expectancy of these scientific traditions. Widening the culture of knowledge and education would improve upon the achievements of these anterior scientific civilizations.
These ways of thinking about the past had deep roots in Britain. In seventeenth-century England, millenarians turned to the work of Francis Bacon and Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius) for a positive philosophy of the relationship of technological improvements and religion.Footnote 44 This programme – popularized by Samuel Hartlib’s correspondence networks – viewed the ancient world as having possessed near-total knowledge of the cosmos, only to decline and decay in the millennia that followed the Fall of Adam. The technological and industrial advances of the seventeenth century, as well as new paradigms and approaches in natural philosophy, could be viewed both as recovering lost knowledge of an enlightened past, and as God slowly revealing knowledge through grace.Footnote 45 In the latter half of the seventeenth century (and well into the eighteenth), these ideas influenced numerous and often conflicting theological traditions concerned with making sense of progress in science and knowledge and the approaching end of the world. Bacon was certainly an inspiration to John Claudius Loudon (the phrase ‘knowledge is power’ appears on the title page of one of his first publications in 1803).Footnote 46 There aren’t any direct references to Bacon, Hartlib or Komenský in Webb Loudon’s work, but given her pride in her education in German, her interest in popular science and her involvement in contemporary evangelical thought, it is unsurprising that these older ideas of how religion and science fit together held appeal for Webb Loudon.
In The Mummy!, Webb Loudon explained that prognosis of the future relied upon these cycles: ‘Atheism, rational liberty, and fanaticism, had followed each other in regular succession’.Footnote 47 ‘The multitude’, she explained, ‘ever in extremes, rushed from excess of liberty to intolerance’.Footnote 48 This latter pronouncement is close to paraphrasing Diderot. But given that Webb Loudon borrowed so many details from Mary Shelley, could these larger ideas of circular revolution and cycles in time be lifted from Shelley’s own novels? Some critics, retracing the geography of Shelley’s novel, have argued that Frankenstein’s monster traces the development and disaster of (French) revolutionary thought.Footnote 49 And there is a brief reference to Constantin-Francois Volney’s Ruins of Empires (1791) in Shelley’s novel.Footnote 50 The Romantic Gothic origins of Loudon’s novel reinforce an argument that modern science fiction developed out of this older genre.Footnote 51 But to answer this question, we need to first compare the surviving sources of Shelley and Webb Loudon.
Webb Loudon read, admired and imitated Mary Shelley. In contrast, Webb Loudon is obscure in almost every sense of the word.Footnote 52 We know much about Shelley’s education and childhood, and, crucially, what she read.Footnote 53 Over 1,200 letters of Shelley survive – her father, William Godwin, copied out family letters and played a crucial role in preserving the family correspondence.Footnote 54 Shelley’s notebooks also survived: we have a record of how she edited and developed the novel.Footnote 55 We know from her diary that she was reading Humphry Davy’s Elements of Chemistry while working on her novel Frankenstein.Footnote 56 Numerous edited volumes have studied the novel’s context within early nineteenth-century scientific experimentation and popular culture.Footnote 57 However, there is no sustained or significant discussion of historical time composed of cycles and revolutions in Frankenstein, and the vision of the future in The Last Man is (famously) apocalyptic. Webb Loudon’s beliefs about historical time have other origins.
Mary Shelley wasn’t the only influential figure whom Webb Loudon strove to imitate: she admired (and corresponded with) the writers Anna Maria and Jane Porter.Footnote 58 Anna Maria Porter even dedicated a poem to Webb Loudon on the occasion of her marriage to John Loudon – an important recognition for Webb’s own aspirations.Footnote 59 In attempting to understand the reading that informed her views on the intersection of science and human history (and religion), we need at least a cursory review of her reading and tastes. She admired the poetry of Byron and the ambitions of Napoleon.Footnote 60 She translated French, Italian and German literature.Footnote 61 For all her admiration of the romantic and militaristic spirit of her era, she also regarded scientific enquiry as a human virtue. In a poem dedicated to the ‘misses Perry’ (family friends), Webb Loudon complimented the five sisters:
And each in turn delights to trace
The wonders of the insect race;
Or, over Nature’s varied book
With scientific skill to look.Footnote 62
In her novel Stories of a Bride, published quickly after The Mummy!, a female character speaking ‘a lingua franca, formed from the English, French, Italian, and German’, asks her male dinner guest, ‘Do you believe in Newton’s doctrine of gravitation? Do you think they will ever be able to discover the longitude? What is your theory respecting the formation of the earth; and do you really believe in the possibility of a future state?’Footnote 63 Webb Loudon, very likely, owed her own scientific and philosophical knowledge to self-instruction, and popular treatises, encyclopedias and dictionaries all informed her writing. We know that she read – and admired – Conversations on Natural Philosophy by Jane Marcet.Footnote 64 She studied Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary.Footnote 65 She was familiar with Descartes’s Physics.Footnote 66 In a letter to Pamela Trevelyan, we gain a brief insight to her identity as a natural historian – discussing Robert Pattison’s new geology, she endorsed his opinions on the comparative anatomy of the dodo to other bird species (‘I never thought they were right in classing it with the vultures.’)Footnote 67 She traded poems with the naturalist James Rennie (1787–1867).Footnote 68 She sustained a lifelong interest in attending ‘scientific meetings’ in literary institutions.Footnote 69 And Webb Loudon herself, in later years, was a trusted authority on botanical and historical questions. In his archaeological and Egyptological work, Joseph Bonomi relied on Webb Loudon’s expertise to identify plant species in Egypt, as well as their medicinal and religious significance.Footnote 70 And a surviving letter draft from Joseph Bonomi shows that he read Conversations on Comparative Chronology and wanted more information on the orations she discussed against Demosthenes.Footnote 71
Webb Loudon’s education and intellectual life invite speculation on what her influences might have been – but we can find more immediate and likely sources of influence in her religious beliefs. These were not atypical for her time. She belonged to what Boyd Hilton termed the ‘age of atonement’ – and the sincerity of her conviction to these popular ideas in moderate and radical evangelical thought are illustrated in her early poems.Footnote 72 In fact, we can look to an early poem of hers, ‘The redemption of man’, to understand the significance of this cultural emphasis on atonement:
Man to redeem, there must be pain and woe
Shame for his honour; for his pride disgrace;
Death for his life: and thus the human race
Alone are saved.Footnote 73
For all her belief in technological improvement, the glories of past scientific eras or the promises of the future, Webb Loudon was first and foremost committed to a theological compact that not only necessitated suffering, but also refuted the possibility that humans could divine the logic or reasoning of God by examining patterns or guessing at causes to provoke such consequences. Like many of her peers, Webb Loudon viewed history as determined by cycles of revolution, by scientific development, and by decline, despotism and liberal democracy, and most importantly as – on the cosmological scale – a process of atonement. So did other women she admired. Her friend Jane Porter corresponded with the evangelical leader William Wilberforce.Footnote 74 In her letters to Porter, Webb Loudon affirmed her belief that God’s distribution of good and evil, fortune and misfortune, was inscrutable and could not be predicted from earthly conduct or events: ‘my own merits have nothing to do with the business, and … the almighty … takes away as suits his infinite wisdom without reference to what we fancy or desireth’.Footnote 75 She affirmed the same beliefs in letters to other influential women, like the painter Pauline Trevelyan (1816–66).Footnote 76
But like many other people in Britain in the early nineteenth century, Webb Loudon’s religious faith accommodated fascination with mediums, clairvoyancy, phrenology and, of course, the mysteries of ancient Egypt. She attended seances, believing some to be genuine, and others fraudulent.Footnote 77 Her faith didn’t prevent her from keeping a cat named Demon.Footnote 78 She submitted herself to phrenological examination, writing to her editor, ‘The phrenologists say that conscientiousness and love of approbation are my two strongest qualities, and that I have no self-esteem. I believe they are right.’Footnote 79 An interest in communication with spirits was already strongly present in The Mummy!. A character in the book named ‘Father Morris’ felt ‘a strange, wild, undefinable craving to hold converse with a disembodied spirit’.Footnote 80 And the reanimation of the mummy itself hinged on ‘a question whether the spirits of the dead are left ‘floating, free as air, in the bright regions of ethereal space’'.Footnote 81 This interest in spirits, the organs of the mind and communion with the dead was a wider preoccupation amongst Romantic writers to dispel Newtonian and Cartesian conceptions of matter in order to pursue grander ideals of ‘the unified dynamism of force’.Footnote 82 Whether inspired by Diderot, or Francis Bacon, or other religious thinkers who had kept these millenarian intellectual traditions alive in Britain, the idea that scientific progress might be one and the same as an inscrutable, divine force held tremendous appeal for Webb Loudon, and formed the underpinning ideas of her fantastical novel.
Prognosis in The Mummy!
Published in the autumn of 1827, The Mummy! is woven from many ideas and themes that Webb Loudon borrowed from the popular press of her time, and literary critics have completed much of the work of identifying these inspirations. There is widespread agreement in literature studies and criticism that Webb Loudon read Jane Marcet’s popular-scientific works, that she read and/or attended lectures by Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution, and that she also read the work of natural historians like Erasmus Darwin.Footnote 83 The influence of Mary Shelley goes without saying: Lisa Hopkins has also identified several thematic overlaps and devices borrowed by Webb Loudon from The Last Man (besides setting the story in the future, both involved long-distance travel by balloon).Footnote 84 Rather than focus on individual prognoses (these are discussed in the reviews below), my aim here is to centre upon Webb Loudon’s wider understanding of science and its power to shape future society. Webb Loudon was proud of the travel she had undertaken with her father in Europe in 1819. She stated at the close of Prose and Verse (1824) that her next work would ‘consist principally of observations made by me, during a residence of more than twelve months on the Continent’.Footnote 85 Where are these Continental observations? It is possible that Webb Loudon published an anonymous pamphlet or short treatise on European politics and culture in the 1820s that has not yet been identified – but it is also true that The Mummy! begins with a protracted essay-like discussion of revolution, despotism and recurrence in history.
The beginning of the novel discusses cycles of popular revolt, despotism, religion, and scientific activity. In the twenty-second century, Webb Loudon speculates, Britain will be ruled by an absolute (and Catholic) female monarch. But this state of affairs had only formed in the wake of revolution. Echoing Rousseau, an enlightened mob had brought down Britain’s monarchy and declared, ‘we are free … we acknowledge no laws but those of nature’.Footnote 86 In the consequent state of political anarchy, there had been material decline: ‘The blessings of civilization were indeed fast slipping away from them.’Footnote 87 The restoration of monarchy – and the reintroduction of Catholicism – made sense to Webb Loudon as ‘despotism in the state … produces despotism in religion’, and so England had reconverted to Catholicism.Footnote 88 There was only one relationship between state power and the advance of the sciences – when despotism established peace and prosperity, the public invested its energy and leisure in ‘the improvement of the arts and sciences’.Footnote 89 Webb Loudon (unlike her peers in Germany or in France) did not imagine any role for the state in furthering technological progress – she imagined the decay and degeneration of political order and ensuing poverty while, at the same time, mining and agriculture encompassed the full extent of the globe. But this relationship between despotism and leisure for the sciences was potent: ‘new countries were discovered and civilized; the whole earth was brought to the highest pitch of cultivation … mountains were levelled, mines were excavated, and the globe racked to its centre … all nature was compelled to submit to the overwhelming supremacy of Man’.Footnote 90
Egyptians had greater science, and
in every point, excepting in their religion, they surpassed us … every scheme of religion falls infinitely below the divine perfection of Christianity; yet as Christianity was not revealed in the times we are speaking of, it cannot be denied that the Egyptians made some approach to wisdom even in their devotions…Footnote 91
On its own, this prose might be nothing beyond cynical details, woven to enchant and enthral her readers – but she returned to these themes in her anonymous History of Africa, written three years later. ‘Egypt was the chosen seat of the arts and sciences’, she explained in her History – but the cyclical nature of history predetermined its demise:
age after age appears thus to rise in all its glory before us, and then in turn to fade from our sight, like the ghosts of the race of Banquo, till at last all have perished, and a race of uncivilized Arabs, whose very dwellings are tents, have sprung up in their place.Footnote 92
Webb Loudon was interested in the idea that the ancient Egyptians – indeed, that the ancient world – were both scientifically and spiritually superior to her contemporary era. At one point in the novel, a character questions, ‘Can any modern institutions excel the wisdom of the laws enacted by the Pharaohs?’Footnote 93 As discussed above, such ideas had faded in popularity since having been espoused by natural philosophers like Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib and Isaac Newton – but Webb Loudon returned to them in several of her books. In Chronology, she included the comment: ‘A fanciful yet highly intelligent German historian (Müller) supposes that the soul, when fresh from the hands of its creator, retained enough of its divine nature to render it capable of acquiring the higher sciences’Footnote 94 – thus explaining to readers how the Babylonian and Egyptian sciences first developed. And her mummy ‘Cheops’ reflects at one point, ‘how feeble is this race of men … degenerate in form as well as spirit, their souls no longer seem emanations from the Divinity, though perhaps the immortal spark becomes degraded and abased from its long continuance in clay’.Footnote 95 Indeed, the final scene of the novel leaves it ambiguous as to whether the resuscitation of Cheops and the political reform he brings to Britain were brought about by science or divine powers. This theological question over the forces at work – divine and scientific – pervaded the Romantic era.
The Mummy! was discussed widely in the press, evoking scorn, bemusement and (in corners) praise. The editor William Jerdan credited himself with the discovery and rescue of Webb Loudon. In his memoirs, he wrote, ‘“The Mummy” is a production of great talent and imaginative power’ – it retained a readership and admiration for decades.Footnote 96 It was (unsurprisingly) identified by nearly every reviewer to have been inspired by Frankenstein, though most people writing on the book found more to say about its setting in the future than they did in the resuscitation of the dead. But was the depiction of the future merely a comic device? Some readers clearly thought so. If “The Mummy” has less originality, in its 'scenes of terror’, wrote one reviewer, ‘it may be safely affirmed that, in its comic or burlesque passages, it possesses indications of humour, of which Frankenstein is entirely destitute’.Footnote 97 Another commented that it contained ‘caustic and satirical pictures of society’.Footnote 98 A positive review emphasized that the editors had been ‘much amused’ with the book and that it contained ‘true humour.’Footnote 99 Neither review emphasized any particular interest in taking its contents as prognostication. Consider the wording of this review: ‘there is a singular mixture of the ludicrous and romantic; the ludicrous lies in the sketches of a futurity, where the butlers are philosophers, the footmen linguists, and the cooks accomplished as our present boarding school damsels’.Footnote 100 One reviewer commented on the impossibility that the book could have been written by Mary Shelley. ‘She never blends satire with her fancy’, they explained, ‘and “The Mummy” is full of clever and piquant sketches of society’.Footnote 101 At least one reviewer thought that the novel intended a derisive attitude towards scientific progress, and commented that ‘the attempted ridicule of science in the “mummy” is extravagant and stupid’.Footnote 102 The most damning review (published in the Sunday Times) declared the book ‘farago of nonsense’.Footnote 103
At least two reviews – one positive – did interpret the novel as making an effort at prognostication. And an article presumably paid for by the publishers also advertised the book on the intrigue of its pronouncements on the future. The advertisement text – repeated for weeks in newspapers throughout Britain – proclaimed that The Mummy ‘is an imaginary story for the year 2126; when the Government of England has passed through divers [sic] changes of form – when the mechanic arts have reached a perfection that lay nature wholly under human control’. It continued to enumerate other marvels of the future, but did not advertise the book as satirical or critical of the arts.Footnote 104 One review understood the book to have more in common with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, as it focused its attention upon ‘what the world would then be’.Footnote 105 The same reviewer, however, read the novel as providing a criticism of mechanics’ institutes and scientific lectures aimed at the public – a cultural milieu within which Webb Loudon herself was situated as a reader and attendee of scientific lectures. The second review to take Webb Loudon’s prognostications seriously was also her most damning review, questioning ‘that it should ever have found a publisher’. It is important to stress that the reviewers found the imaginative technologies and customs of the future insipid and banal on their own merit, and did not reject them as political satires. Amongst the details they found incredulous were
the powers of steam and the application of machinery to the ordinary business of life … buoyant air-horses … steam engines that perform the parts not only of valets, but of surgeons … corn and grass are mowed by steam, having been first grown by means of electrical machines … ripened by lenses that attract the heat … that coal and wood fire are superseded by hot air … that houses are moved to and fro upon rail roads … soldiers wear flexible steel-plate armour … a complete philosophical apparatus is enclosed in a walking stick …Footnote 106
The only other review of the book that took its prognostications as substantial was that written by John Loudon. How can we trust that John Loudon’s review was closer to Webb Loudon’s own intentions? If Webb Loudon’s personal correspondence can attest to anything, it is the intellectual intimacy of their marriage. We know from a letter in 1830 that Webb Loudon emphasized to her friend Jane Porter that John Loudon ‘is disposed to view with a partial eye all my endeavours’.Footnote 107 Loudon seems to have genuinely loved the book for its attempt ‘to predestinate [sic] the application of steam’, and he too singled out the discussion of steam-powered mowers, lenses for strengthening the rays of the sun and – particularly important for Loudon – the discovery of new sources of heat and energy. ‘Coal and other fuel having been long in disuse’, he noted in the novel, ‘smoke is unknown in London’. Explaining the value of the book to his enlightened readers, Loudon concluded, ‘The most extravagant and impracticable ideas will sometimes aid in forming new and useful combinations; and it is good to see the subject of scientific invention, and intellectual improvement, pushed to the extreme point.’Footnote 108
John Loudon had lost his right arm some years before, and once married, Webb Loudon became someone to help him write, to draw and to work. Sara Dewis and Bea Howe have both described the copious outputs of the Loudons in the print world: they produced encyclopedias, the Gardener’s Magazine and introductions to botany, and also undertook large projects like designing the botanical gardens of Birmingham.Footnote 109 It was very likely that Webb Loudon wrote out – by hand – the thousands of pages that compose the eight volumes of Arboretum et Fruticetum Brittanicum (1838). She herself attested that John Loudon would continue dictating the work until two or three in the morning at times.Footnote 110 During this time, Webb Loudon also silently assisted in the editing of the Gardener’s Magazine, writing additional articles and material when required. In 1836, the Loudons were writing and preparing the content for no fewer than five individual monthly publications.Footnote 111 Webb Loudon wasn’t a passive assistant; after her marriage, she used her own connections in the print world to intercede on her husband’s behalf, hoping that William Jerdan would take some interest in Claudius Loudon’s Illustrations of Landscape Gardens.Footnote 112
For these reasons, articles signed ‘the conductor’ in the Gardener’s Magazine ought be read as joint efforts by the Loudons. These articles and notices demonstrate that the future remained a concern for the Loudons – and, as I argue, provided the substance for using prognosis as a moral imperative for reform. In this way, because the future could likely achieve such technological or social improvement, present-day society should work to hasten their arrival. Consider this passage on energy written in 1831. On a discussion of the potential energy to be gained by installing waterwheels in hilly districts, they suggested constructing tiered zones of waterways with fifty-foot waterwheels constructed at hundred-foot intervals. Having speculated on this prodigious increase in (free) energy, the article continued, ‘It may possibly happen that in some future age, when the coal mines are exhausted, the manufactures of Britain will be transferred from the plains.’ But even this shift from coal to water power might prove outmoded once a global shortage of coal was reached, demanding even greater innovation. Continuing the thought experiment further:
If all the coal, not only in Britain, but in the whole world, were exhausted, it would be easy for every family to grow its own fuel: even without any farther improvements in the mode of application, than those which have been already suggested … An easy method of expressing, from common air, sufficient heat for all domestic purposes, may probably be discovered long before coal is exhausted.Footnote 113
In the same article, they expanded on other prognoses: ‘It is clear that the governments of all countries must sooner or later adopt the railroad system of communication from their seats of government to their extreme points’, they wrote.Footnote 114 Eventually, they predicted, a railway will be laid down ‘from Calais to Pekin: all that is wanting is a generation of civilisation in the more barbarous of the intervening nations, so as to admit of the cooperation of the different governments’.Footnote 115 Canals, likewise, they predicted would ‘be seldom resorted to’.Footnote 116
They also received prognostications on the future from readers. A long letter from George Henry Walker, described as ‘a patriot’ by the Loudons, speculated that ‘the day is not far off (and close at hand, if free trade were established …) when hot climates will as far exceed cold ones … in productiveness and variety of food, comforts, luxuries, etc., and arts, sciences, and refinements, personal size, strength, and beauty of man and beast’.Footnote 117 As Dewis has observed, these expansive discussions of the future fit John Loudon’s (albeit idiosyncratic) belief that training and education in the aesthetics of gardening would lead to improvements in industry, energy, architecture and social organization.Footnote 118 The insistence that the hot climates could out-produce the colder climates fit their desire to invert established hierarchies.
The Loudons viewed gardening as a crucial (and scientific) discipline from which technological and social innovations would be discovered and nurtured. Sometimes the Loudons anticipated the shape of the future in the development of garden spaces themselves. Remarking on the development of gardens in Frankfurt and Munich, and gardens in Spain that were ‘taking the place of the ramparts and fortifications of towns’, the Loudons remarked that ‘we may regard as a sort of pledge for the general peace of Europe; or, at all events, as a proof that nations contemplate, in case of any future quarrel, a more speedy mode of bringing it to a conclusion than the ancient tedious ones of besieging and defending fortified towns’.Footnote 119 Expanding on the difference of public spaces being designed by ‘kings and emperors’ rather than by the will of the people, we find the Loudons speculating on political themes familiar to the discussion of despotism in The Mummy: ‘The unity of power and of system … has greatly the advantage over our system of private companies’, they wrote, ‘when the monarch or the government happens to be liberal and enlightened’. Thus, on the Continent, as opposed to Britain, ‘there is a unity and consistency of plan and execution’.Footnote 120
Urban pollution was a recurrent concern in the magazine. The Loudons were interested in rumours that M d’Arcet ‘of the French mint’ had visited London and attached paper cones to his hat during his walks in the city to measure the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere.Footnote 121 Seeking solutions to the smoke in the city, they had visited a nursery in Hammersmith where they were invited by the proprietor to admire a smokeless furnace (manufactured by Witty).Footnote 122 Taking them to the roof, the nurseryman explained that the furnace burns the smoke, and invited them to sniff the ‘warm moist vapour’ that both Loudons professed was emitted by this miraculous stove.Footnote 123 The Loudons saw an immediate moral imperative to implement the stove everywhere. ‘Every country gentleman that has hothouses will be henceforth inexcusable … if a particle of smoke be seen issuing either from his gardens or his house’.Footnote 124 They predicted that Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool would, in the future, get rid of smoke entirely.Footnote 125
The Loudons also found it intuitive and logical to invoke the pressure of an enlightened and progressive future on the shortcomings of the present. Claudius Loudon’s interest in education for the labouring classes stretched back at least to 1809, when he had attempted to create an agricultural college in Great Tew – and also from his brief (but influential) acquaintance with Jeremy Bentham.Footnote 126 When the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge introduced the Penny Magazine in 1832, the Loudons felt that the future was hastening. ‘It is delightful to foresee that, when the whole of society shall be so far educated as to derive pleasure from reading’, they pronounced, books would be as common as ‘bread and potatoes’, and even prisoners would read books.Footnote 127 Condemning the poor construction of cottages for peasants in Scotland, they wrote, ‘it will hardly be credited in a future age’.Footnote 128 They could see such censure becoming possible in the near future. ‘With the progress of things’, they continued, ‘we have no doubt that this practice will be done away with’. Why? Because, as they explained, ‘with a superior degree of human cultivation among all classes, a more refined description of self-interest will require to be gratified’. Further, the moving force ‘on which we chiefly depend’, as they explained, was ‘the growing intelligence and taste of the cottagers themselves’. Expanding on the theme, they explained that ‘with a proper system of national education, and the free circulation of political and moral knowledge, both of which we hope soon to see established, the operative agriculturalists, like the operative manufacturers, will be enabled to command such dwellings’.Footnote 129 Here, the Loudons argued plainly that (1) the near future had progressed in civilization and respect of individuals, and (2) this evocation of the near future could exert pressure on the present times to reform, to hasten their transformation.
The power of the future to alter the present was also invoked by the Loudons in a complaint about the treatment of servants in Kensington Gardens. In 1837, livery servants were not permitted in the gardens, and the Loudons admitted that they were ‘lower in the moral scale than most others’. However, the Loudons pronounced that ‘the time, we think, is now arrived in this country, when humane and kind treatment should be substituted for lordly tyranny’. Why? The reason was, once more, because they are treated so in the future. ‘This treatment will soon become a matter of policy, as well as of justice and humanity’, the explained.Footnote 130 At any rate, the treatment of livery servants in Kensington Gardens would become more just in the future for the simple reason that ‘once the art of cooperating and petitioning is as well understood by this class as it is by some others, liveries will soon disappear altogether’.Footnote 131
All readers were encouraged to follow the improvement of science – on all topics. Encouraging its audience, the Loudons directed them to read the work of Herschel, and learn more of his ideas that ‘the nebulae in the milky way are supposed to be a sort of spawn (as a gardener would say) of future planets’.Footnote 132 In the same breath, they speculated that ‘the cow-fish (Manita fluviátilis) which lives partly in water and partly on land, “might become the universal food of mankind.”’Footnote 133 Noticing a trend in horticulture moving away from ‘mere empirical experience’ and towards a theory of caring for plants that was based on knowledge of their indigenous and natural conditions, the Loudons determined that the horticultural and botanical sciences were already ‘in a great degree defective’. The students of the future would need to trace a plant’s ‘geographical range, and its physical history in a state of nature’.Footnote 134
In reviewing some Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge publications on electricity, and its potential future uses in agriculture, the Loudons were excited. Reminiscent of some of the energy sources proposed in The Mummy!, they wrote, ‘Electricity appears to be an agent, which, like a heat, is everywhere in operation, both in the earth and air.’ Expanding on the pervasiveness of electricity, they wrote, ‘Though the subject is still in its infancy, it may be considered of the greatest importance to scientific cultivators, as explaining many phenomena, not otherwise to be accounted for.’ Here, they seemed to feel that there wasn’t enough information (as yet) to predict how electrical sciences might transform agriculture – but that didn’t mean that the future was not yet shaping the present. ‘At all events’, they wrote, ‘when gardeners are watering, abstracting water by draining, mixing soils … they may consider themselves as preparing the way for electrical changes, which, at some future day, will be accounted for in a more intelligent and specific manner than they can be at present’.Footnote 135 Where, in all this prognostication, was the cyclical nature of time? To recall Koselleck, these very manners of invoking the future, of seeking to hasten it, and permitting the future to determine the value of one’s present actions, all presumed a faith that the strata of the past provided an indication of what lay ahead.
Conclusion
Endersby is rightly sceptical that historians can find explicit evidence to trace the ebb and flow of ideas and influences between scientific practice and popular culture. But the Loudons did work to cultivate friendships and to circulate the writings and ideas of friends, and here there is ample material to discover that Webb Loudon’s ideas on the future were far from obscure or solitary literary reflections. Above, I quoted Robert Fish’s pronouncements on the recovery of the scientific knowledge of a lost and glorious human past – a friend of Webb Loudon who clearly shared the outlines of her concept of cyclical time. Still others appear in the magazine, and further research into Webb Loudon’s correspondence and friendships would uncover others. As John Claudius’s health declined the magazine featured fewer articles driven by the imagination and thought of the Loudons, but they still sought to commission material that strove to articulate the future. Peter Mackenzie’s writing was reprinted across their different publications, and lauded as a means of educating cottagers. One particular passage, where Mackenzie reflected on the means by which the future is ushered into being, is worth noting: ‘In general’, Mackenzie wrote,
the majority of mankind require to be helped, or, not only do they require the course to be pointed out for them, but also a pilot to guide them; and it is well for those of the present and future generations that these helps are not wanting … we expect a race of rational and intelligent beings [the future rural population], instead of many who reckon themselves men, yet are little better than creatures of instinct.Footnote 136
This method of reasoning had, by 1842, become second nature to the gardeners and naturalists who contributed to the Gardener’s Magazine. Because the population of the future was expected to be rational and intelligent, it was morally good to hasten and quicken the arrival of that future through the diffusion of scientific learning. Such ideas of hastening the future and its arrival had clear antecedents in millenarian Christianity – Bacon, Hartlib, Komenský and others invoked a spiritual anticipation and readiness for quickening the final reckoning and the restoration of an earthly paradise. But Webb Loudon did not, like Shelley’s father, William Godwin, believe that humanity could implement social reforms or develop technological powers that would liberate it from cycles of decline. Viewing scientific and social progress as determined by cycles also resolved any anxieties that humanity might transcend the conditions of the Fall – scientifically advanced societies had succumbed to vice and decay in the past, as they would in the future, until the intervention of a Christian god at the end of time. This was not pessimism, but an important theological position for Webb Loudon. Here, Webb Loudon’s work provides insight into efforts to resolve the contradictions within a culture that sought both to promote faith in the improving powers of scientific progress and also to sustain the necessity of Christian atonement. No future technology, no innovation, no discovery would alter the basic moral conditions of humanity.
Koselleck viewed what he termed ‘rational prognosis’ as supplanting an older, eighteenth-century tradition of what he termed a ‘mixture of rational prediction and salvational expectation’.Footnote 137 He worked to distinguish the prophetic and millenarian sense of time from this later, rational practice of speculating on what would happen next (given the patterns of the recent and distant past). Webb Loudon’s evangelical commitments make it difficult to distinguish the prophetic from the prognostic in her work, despite the technological specificity of many of her predictions of the content and material conditions of the future. The Mummy! is, itself, as much a story of Christian salvation as it is a series of anecdotal speculations on the agriculture, transport and energy sources of the future Britain. For these reasons, while it is tempting to regard Webb Loudon’s writings as ‘ahead of her time’ given the scarcity of other such novels set in the future, her ways of thinking about that future and the relationship of science and religion belonged to an earlier era.
Webb Loudon regarded scientific flourishing as dependent not only on a receptiveness to divine forces, but also on amenable forms of social organization. Like many of her peers, she did not associate scientific progress with liberal democracy. ‘Catholic despotism’, a key feature in her novel (and of keen political interest in the wake of Catholic emancipation), was portrayed ambiguously: the Catholic female queen of Britain is by no means a villain, and despotism itself is associated with greater social organization and the flourishing of science. John Loudon, while a champion for reform, also sought to reconcile these contradictions in his comparisons of German and British public spaces. Whatever its final political shape, for both Jane and John Claudius Loudon, prognosis became a moral imperative to reform, providing a power to call upon the judgement of the future to hasten the development of the technologies of the present.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Amanda Rees and the editorial leadership at BJHS for their assistance and critical insights in revising this article. Many thanks are due to two anonymous reviewers who greatly assisted in helping to refine and focus the article. I was greatly helped by colleagues at Sheffield Hallam University who helped to provide access to Webb Loudon’s wedding scrapbook and shared insights and other materials: thank you to Douglas Hamilton and especially to Lisa Hopkins for being so generous and sacrificing time to assist me. Thank you to Charlotte New at the Royal Institution for helping to search for any traces of Webb Loudon. Finally, thank you to Joseph Foster for your friendship and talking through the history of science fiction with me.
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