Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio

by David Standish

  Now, up until this point, women had been kept out of government. But in this anarchic time, “they organized for mutual protection from the lawlessness that prevailed. The organizations grew, united and developed into military power. They used their power wisely, discreetly, and effectively. With consummate skill and energy they gathered the reins of Government in their own hands.” And threw all the men out. The new Constitution, the Preceptress tells Vera, “provided for the exclusion of the male sex from all affairs and privileges for a period of one hundred years. At the end of that time not a representative of the sex was in existence.” Italics courtesy of the Preceptress. The men aren’t killed off. Instead, when they can no longer run things, spend their time and energy wheeling and dealing and being important, they simply wither away!

  With them out of the picture, Mizoran society soars toward perfection.

  And the key to it all, indeed, the key to the novel’s purpose, is female education.

  Prior to their takeover of Mizora’s government, “colleges and all avenues to higher intellectual development had been rigorously closed against them. The professional pursuits of life were denied them”—just as they were in the United States at the time.

  Women in 1880 were largely still supposed to be only mothers and homemakers. But things were changing in small ways. One effect all those new factories popping up had, for better or worse, was to give women jobs working in them, taking them out of the home in previously unthought-of numbers. Emancipation of former slaves by constitutional amendment added impetus for women’s suffrage as well, and such leaders as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who had organized the first women’s rights convention in 1848), and Susan B. Anthony had started the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869 and repeatedly petitioned Congress to give women the vote. Higher education was still primarily male. Oberlin College had been one of the first to admit women in the 1830s. The first all-women’s college opened in 1836 as Georgia Female College (now Wesleyan College), and Mount Holyoke had begun as a female seminary in 1837. Vassar didn’t come along until 1861, Hunter College in 1870, and Smith and Wellesley in 1875, making them brand-new institutions when Lane was writing. But most women were stuck at home, doing housework and raising kids, stuck, too, up on that pedestal, where sentimental worship, far from elevating them, kept them from acting on any professional aspirations they might entertain. Educated, accomplished women were in the main regarded as “unnatural.” Anything beyond a little schoolmarming was suspect, and that was regarded as the province of unfortunate spinsters unable to perform women’s “true calling”—childbearing and housekeeping. The pressures to restrict women to their “special province”—the home—were still tremendous in 1880.

  Lane envisioned a life for women with none of these restrictions.

  Vera is ensconced in the National College to learn their musical language and soon finds that universal education is of the highest importance to the Mizorans—and that teachers are not only the highest-paid profession of all, they represent the pinnacle of Mizora’s intellectual aristocracy. Dream on, Mary Bradley. “The idea of a Government assuming the responsibility of education, like a parent securing the interest of its children, was all so new to me,” Vera thinks, “and yet, I confessed to myself, the system might prove beneficial to other countries than Mizora.” She reflects that in her world, “education was the privilege only of the rich. And in no country, however enlightened, was there a system of education that would reach all.”

  The rest of the novel details the fabulous rewards of Mizora’s education policy.

  One has been to provide a terrific standard of living for all. The Preceptress admonishes Vera regarding the potential benefits of universal education for her world: “The bright and eager intellects of poverty will turn to Chemistry to solve the problems of cheap Light, cheap Fuel and cheap Food. When you can clothe yourselves from the fibre of the trees, and warm and light your dwellings from the water of your rivers.” They’ve figured out how to create cheap energy by reducing water to its two separate elements by zapping it with electricity, then burning the result. “Eat of the stones of the earth, Poverty and Disease will be as unknown to your people as it is to mine.”

  Better living through chemistry.

  Lane does come up with a number of nifty sci-fi devices. The preferred conveyance is a low carriage “propelled by compressed air or electricity.” They also have airplanes—this nearly twenty-five years before successful heavier-than-air flight, though many at the time were working on it. More predictive is the Mizorans’ “elastic glass” (plastic by any other name) “as pliable as rubber.” Almost indestructible, among its many uses, “all cooking utensils were made of it” and “all underground pipes were made of it.” It’s also spun into “the frailest lace,” which “had the advantage of never soiling, never tearing, and never wearing out,” sort of a precursor of that old Alec Guinness movie, The Man in the White Suit. Other gizmos anticipate television, e-mail, and holography. The key to most of these advances is electricity, and naturally all of the living spaces and city streets in Mizora are bathed in bright artificial lighting. This was more a sign of the times than some visionary stroke, since even as Lane was writing, tireless Thomas Alva Edison was slaving away in his lab looking for the perfect filament for his revolutionary incandescent lightbulb, and in 1879 the first electric streetlights in the United States were turned on around Public Square in Cleveland, Ohio.

  Such gadgets are a commonplace in the futuristic hollow earth novels from this time. What sets Mizora apart is its vision of an ultimate matriarchy, where women have done away with men entirely. Here mothers produce only daughters and live with them in harmony until the daughters in turn become mothers. Lane is vague about how this asexual procreation is achieved. She says they have discovered “the secret of life” and suggests something like in vitro conception.

  Like the narrator of The Coming Race, Vera at last decides to go back home with her friend Wauna, the Preceptress’s daughter, to show her world a shining example of Mizoran society and to proselytize for universal free education. But it doesn’t work. Vera finds that her husband and son, who had migrated to the United States, are both dead. The brutality of the surface world overwhelms Wauna, and she dies attempting to return to Mizora. Nearly her last words are: “The Great Mother of us all will soon receive me in her bosom. And oh! my friend, promise me that her dust shall cover me from the sight of men.” True to her school to the very end.

  In 1882, just a year after Lane’s story was serialized, a novel titled Pantaletta appeared. It described a comic dystopia written with broad-stroke vaudeville flourishes that reads like a send-up of the serious feminism in Mizora. The author was Mrs. J. Wood, likely the pseudonym of a man unappreciative of efforts toward women’s rights.58

  The narrator is an American named Icarus Byron Gullible. After demolishing the family fortune starting a newspaper but fortuitously marrying a wealthy young woman, he devotes his time after serving in the Civil War to invention, and the result is an aircraft he calls the American Eagle.

  Gullible’s goal? The North Pole. He wants to get there “to stop the further sacrifice of heroic lives by polar expeditions.” With success he plans to “patent my invention and organize a company” to manufacture his Eagle airships, these to “carry all kinds of passengers to the new American possessions, at remunerative rates.” His Eagle flies, but not very fast, so the trip to the pole takes days. He passes “leagues of glistening ice” and then “below me, apparently boundless in diameter, rolled the gulf of gulfs,” a combination of the open polar sea and the great polar abyss. He flies on, the temperature rises, he sights land unknown on maps, and comes to earth at last, of course, in some Edenic country—“a spot which rivalled the garden of our first parents in beauty.” He is immediately nabbed by a group of martial women wearing strange garb and taken prisoner. His chief captor is the Pantaletta of the title, a half-mad virago given to loony, disjointed Lady Macbeth soli
loquies who’s also captain of the army. Gullible is drugged and dragged off to meet the president of the Republic of Petticotia, a topsy-turvy land where women have assumed power as well as men’s clothing, while the remaining men (millions have fled) are forced to wear what were formerly women’s clothes and perform all the duties formerly relegated to women. Petticotia is a cross-dresser’s paradise, where transvestitism has the rule of law. The word “man” has been banned as well. Former “men” are now called “heshes,” while women are “shehes.” The absurdity of this is a clear indication of the writer’s attitude toward women’s equality.

  The novel ends with Gullible popping up out of the interior world at the North Pole and winging his way south toward Greenland, eager to report that “the North Pole is discovered and is ours.” Filled with emotion, he rhapsodizes, “Oh, my native land, my soul goes out to thee … Long seems the time since I stretched me under thy umbrageous trees and felt the gentle influence of thy emerald face.”

  After The Coming Race, Mizora, and Pantaletta, novels of the 1880s and 1890s set in the hollow earth both multiplied and took on a certain sameness. It would be tedious to consider every one in detail. Indeed, it would be impossible, since several of them, while continuing to exist on various bibliographical lists, have proved impossible to turn up despite considerable searching. But the number of hollow earth novels produced between 1880 and 1915 is remarkable. The list includes:

  Mizora by Mary Bradley Lane (1880).

  Pantaletta: A Romance of Sheheland by Mrs. J. Wood (1882).

  Interior World, A Romance Illustrating a New Hypothesis of Terrestrial Organization &c by Washington L. Tower (1885).

  A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by Anonymous [James DeMille] (1888).

  Under the Auroras, A Marvelous Tale of the Interior World by Anonymous [William Jenkins Shaw] (1888).

  Al-Modad; or Life Scenes Beyond the Polar Circumlfex. A Religio-Scientific Solution of the Problems of Present and Future Life by Anonymous [M. Louise Moore and M. Beauchamp] (1892).

  The Goddess of Atvatabar by William R. Bradshaw (1892).

  Baron Trump’s Marvellous Underground Journey by Ingersoll Lockwood (1893).

  Swallowed by an Earthquake by Edward Douglas Fawcett (1894).

  The Land of the Changing Sun by Will N. Harben (1894).

  From Earth’s Center, A Polar Gateway Message by S. Byron Welcome (1894).

  Forty Years with the Damned; or, Life Inside the Earth by Charlies Aikin (1895).

  The Third World, A Tale of Love & Strange Adventure by Henry Clay Fairman (1895).

  Etidorhpa by John Uri Lloyd (1895).

  Through the Earth by Clement Fezandie (1898).

  Under Pike’s Peak; or Mahalma, Child of the Fire Father by Charles McKesson (1898).

  The Sovereign Guide: A Tale of Eden by William Amos Miller (1898).

  The Last Lemurian: A Westralian Romance by G. Firth Scott (1898).

  Through the Earth; or, Jack Nelson’s Invention by Fred Thorpe (1898).

  The Secret of the Earth by Charles W. Beale (1899).

  Nequa; or, The Problem of the Ages by Jack Adams [pseud. of Alcanoan O. Grigsby and Mary P. Lowe] (1900).

  Thyra, A Romance of the Polar Pit by Robert Ames Bennet (1901). Intermere by William Alexander Taylor (1901-1902)

  The Land of the Central Sun by Park Winthrop (1902).

  The Daughter of the Dawn by William Reginald Hodder (1903).

  My Bride from Another World: A Weird Romance Recounting Many

  Strange Adventures in an Unknown World by Rev. E. C. Atkins (1904).

  Mr. Oseba’s Last Discovery by George W. Bell (1904).

  Under the World by John DeMorgan (1906).

  The Land of Nison by C. Regnus [pseud. of Charles Sanger] (1906).

  Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum (1908).

  The Smoky God by Willis George Emerson (1908).

  Five Thousand Miles Underground, or The Mystery of the Centre of the Earth by Roy Rockwood [pseud. of Howard Garis] (1908).

  Upsidonia by Archibald Marshall (1915).

  Published anonymously in 1888, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is an example of a creeping sameness in hollow earth novels of the time. Various amounts of Symmes, Poe, and Verne are stirred together to concoct warmed-over hollow earth stew, including the requisite sea monster shown here on the cover of a pirated British edition.

  Let’s look at a small sample of the titles.

  The opening sections of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, published anonymously in 1888, exemplify the creeping sameness. Various amounts of Symmes, Poe, and Verne are stirred together to concoct a warmed-over hollow earth stew. Adam More (Adam Seaborn was Symmes’ hero, you will remember; and More wrote the first Utopia), shipwrecked with a companion in the Southern Ocean, lands on an island peopled by ferocious black cannibals who promptly eat his pal. More escapes on a small boat, drawn ever southward by a strong current until his craft is sucked downward into a black tunnel and pops up in a calm, warm sea lapping against a paradisiacal countryside. Here the author reaches even farther back in his ransacking, giving us a turned-on-its-head society that seems inspired by those in Niels Klim. As Steve Trussel summarizes the action,

  Upon landing, he finds a strange race very much resembling Arabs. They take him to their underground city, where he is taught a language similar to Arabic by the beautiful Almah, and discovers that the cultural and moral values of this peculiar race are weirdly inverted. These pseudo-Arabs see better in the dark than in daylight. They seek poverty, giving their possessions to whomever will take them; they long for death as the highest blessing of their lives; and, although peaceful, they practice human sacrifice on hundreds of willing victims. Adam and Almah fall in love, and find that they are destined to be given the honor of dying for her people. At the last moment, More kills several of the populace with his rifle, and the multitudes, awe-stricken, fall down and worship him as a god who can bring the greatest good—death—instantly.59

  This novel is at best an orientally embroidered celebration of life over death, an exotic romance without much redeeming value. Perhaps most interesting is that this story appeared serially in nineteen installments in one of the most popular American magazines of the time—Harper’s Weekly (which billed itself as “A Journal of Civilization”)—an indicator of how mainstream the idea of the hollow earth had become. The anonymous author turned out to be a Canadian college professor named James de Mille (1833–1880), a prolific and popular novelist in his day. He’s pretty much forgotten now, though he lives on in Ph.D. dissertations and academic criticism, and a surprising number of his novels are available online as e-texts. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, published posthumously, is considered the first Canadian science fiction novel and was reprinted by Insomniac Press in 2001.

  William R. Bradshaw (1851–1927) wrote The Goddess of Atvatabar, first published in 1892. This hollow earth novel has an almost overwhelming sumptuousness and richness of detail. An Irish immigrant who settled in Flushing, New York, Bradshaw was a regular contributor to magazines, edited Literary Life and Decorator and Furnisher, and was associated with Field and Stream as well. At his death in 1927 he was a Republican district captain in Flushing and president of the New York Anti-Vivisection Society.

  A number of new elements show themselves here. One is revealed in the full title:

  THE

  GODDESS OF ATVATABAR

  BEING THE

  HISTORY OF THE DISCOVERY

  OF THE

  INTERIOR WORLD

  AND

  CONQUEST OF ATVATABAR

  Earlier hollow earth novels such as Symzonia had land-grabbing imperialism as a subtext, but here it is announced blazing right in the title. This novel came at a time when America was running out of open land and the easy promise (seldom realized) of riches on the frontier. What had been called Seward’s Folly—the vast tract of Alaska purchased from Russ
ia in 1867—was looking visionary by the end of the century. And 1892 was just a few years before American policy changed to engage in a little empire building in the form of the Spanish-American War, which on slim excuse not only kicked Spain out of the New World but occupied the Philippines as well. So the conquest of Atvatabar is imaginatively predictive of geopolitical forces starting to simmer in the real world.

  And wouldn’t you know it? The name of the narrator/hero/chief conqueror is Commander Lexington White. The story opens aboard the Polar King, with White and his crew on a mission to discover the North Pole—something very much in the news at the time. Even as Bradshaw was writing, Admiral Robert Peary was making his second expedition to Greenland, a prelude to the one that would take him successfully to the pole on April 6, 1909—or so he believed and claimed. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, the idea of reaching the pole became a sort of frenzy, with explorer after explorer obsessed with gaining the dubious “glory” of being the first to do so. Just as Poe had tried to cash in on a polar mania fifty years earlier, Bradshaw’s polar framing for his hollow earth novel was quite timely.