A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

Roderick McGillis was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary, Alberta.

This is the third volume published in the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts Series, and the editor is Malcolm Parks. The choice of James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, first published as a serial in Harper’s Weekly from January 7 to May 12, 1888, is apt for several reasons. The book has not appeared in many editions and it is currently only available in the New Canadian Library Series published by McClelland and Stewart (1969). This new scholarly edition provides an authoritative text, sets out the circumstances of the book’s first and subsequent publications, and offers exhaustive information and documentation of De Mille’s sources for his scientific speculations. The current popular and academic interest in science fiction makes welcome this edition of a book that clearly anticipates the scientific romances of H.G. Wells and the fantastic adventures of A.A. Merrett and others. What pleases me even more is the book’s price, for at $ 9.95 it is not beyond the reach of bookbuyers both casual and professional. Readers can now have a thoroughly edited version of De Mille’s posthumously published novel.

Parks has done an exemplary job. His critical apparatus includes an introduction in which he sets out his editorial practice, reasons for supposing that De Mille wrote the book in the mid-to late 1860s, the reception of the book upon its first book publication, and circumstances of De Mille’s life and education which are pertinent to an understanding of the novel. Parks also provides 32 pages of “Explanatory Notes” which offer the reader information of varying usefulness on such subjects as literature, nineteenth-century geology, paleontology, anthropology, and philology. We also have careful descriptions of each of the appearances of the novel in print, both serial and book publications. The final pages document emendations made and the principle employed in hyphenating words. All of this makes for an informative and authoritative text.

What really matters, however, is the novel itself. De Mille’s work is strange, weird, compelling, repetitive, silly, and fascinating by turns. He uses scientific knowledge available in the mid-nineteenth century to fashion a popular romance much the way Edwin A. Abbott used a different kind of science in writing his strange romance Flatland (1884). A Strange Manuscript, as characters in the novel point out, contains elements of the sensation novel and of the satiric romance. Part of the interest in reading the book is the discussion of the manuscript by the men who find it. De Mille’s real tour de force is, however, the consistency with which he reverses the values and beliefs of the Kosekin, his lost people of the Antarctic. Their love of death, poverty, and misery is a Freudian nightmare which De Mule works out with care, wit, and sophistication. The monsters, the cannibalism, the volcanic action of the landscape, and even the sometimes sultry, sometimes sprightly advances of the dark lady Layelah pale beside the frustratingly insistent arguments of the Kosekin that call for self-denial and a wish for death. At one point the hero, Adam More, cries out, “If I could only find someone who was a coward, and selfish and avaricious…. How much brighter my life would be” (p. 167). Neither Gulliver nor Crusoe was driven to this extreme.