Caesar's Column
A dystopian novel of oligarchy, rebellion, and apocalyptic destruction.
Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century is a novel by Ignatius Donnelly, published pseudonymously in 1890. Donnelly is famous as the author of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882). The book has been variously categorized as science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopian fiction, and/or apocalyptic fiction; one critic has termed it an 'Apocalyptic Utopia.' It is also a political novel and a romance. The novel was a popular success, selling 60,000 copies upon initial publication and eventually 250,000 copies. It was one element of the great wave of utopian and dystopian literature during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Quick Facts
- Author
- Ignatius L. Donnelly / (as "Edmund Boisgilbert, M.D.")
- Country
- United States
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Apocalyptic fiction Science fiction Speculative fiction Utopian and dystopian fiction
- Publisher
- F. J. Shulte & Co.
- Pub Date
- 1890
- Media Type
- Print (Hardcover)
- Pages
- 367
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
Caesar's Column is partly based on Donnelly's commitment to agrarian Populism. In 1892, two years after the novel's publication, Donnelly drafted the platform of the Populist Party, which warned of a 'vast conspiracy against mankind' and 'terrible social convulsions.' The novel's worldview follows a man from a rural environment who travels to the heart of a brutal capitalist oligarchy, sees its corruptions, and witnesses its destruction. The novel partly concerns the debated question of the alleged anti-Semitism of the Populist movement: Donnelly's villain is an Italian Jew, while his protagonist has a name, Weltstein, that must have suggested a Jewish identity to many readers.
Reader's Guide
Donnelly cast his fiction as an epistolary novel. The first-person narrator, Gabriel Weltstein, writes letters to his brother recounting his 1988 visit to New York. Weltstein is a wool merchant from Uganda, a location that references early Zionist thought about a possible Jewish state there. He travels by airship, is dazzled by city illumination powered by the Aurora Borealis, and encounters subways, glass-roofed streets, televised menus, and televised newspapers. After intervening in a beating, Weltstein is drawn into the secret resistance organization the Brotherhood of Destruction, led by the fanatical Caesar Lomellini. The rebellion succeeds but causes massive casualties using advanced weapons like 'dynamite bullets.' Lomellini orders corpses piled in Union Square and entombed in concrete, forming 'Caesar's column.' The novel ends with Weltstein and others escaping to Uganda as New York burns. The book's significance lies in its reflection of Populist anxieties and its place in the wave of utopian/dystopian literature alongside works by Edward Bellamy and Jack London.
Did You Know?
- The novel was published pseudonymously in 1890.
- Donnelly drafted the Populist Party platform in 1892, two years after the novel's publication.
- The protagonist Gabriel Weltstein is a wool merchant from a Swiss colony in Africa, though the novel does not specify Uganda as a real country in that way.
- The rebellion uses advanced weapons called 'dynamite bullets' that increase carnage.
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