Content area
Full Text
Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2023
Born the son of a country vicar in 1858, pioneering scientific romance writer George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones was an immensely prolific author.1 He wrote around 44 novels across multiple genres between 1893 and his early death in 1906, as well as a stream of short stories, poems and articles (see Locke 1974: 51-8). This essay explores just one, 'Hellville, U.S.A.', first published in Pearson's Weekly in 1898, later anthologized with four other tales, not all scientific romances, in Gambles with Destiny (1899). 'Hellville, U.S.A.'s interest lies in Griffith's ability, found across his writing generally, to draw on often disparate current world events as reported in the press to create a speculative story, which suggests the potential consequences of those events, leading to often extraordinary conclusions. In the case of 'Hellville, U.S.A.', Griffith suggests that a democratically elected government would take up arms against those citizens who opposed its policies, and upon their defeat, transport them to an abandoned town and then imprison them there without trial. The town quickly descends into chaos. As such, Griffith creates an early example of a dystopia, prefiguring the genre's development during the course of the twentieth century (see Kumar 1987). Since there was no established tradition of dystopian texts to reference, Griffith draws instead on the Biblical story and language of Sodom and Gomorrah, along with aspects of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), giving the story an epic feel, despite its mere 18,000 words.
George Griffith is a fairly obscure figure today, relegated mostly to footnotes, often dismissive in nature. Most of Griffith's novels have not been republished since his death, with several decades separating the posthumous publication of his last novel, Lord of Labour (1911), and the 1974 Hyperion reprint of his first novel, The Angel of the Revolution (1893). In addition to the latter, only Olga Romanoff (1894), A Honeymoon in Space (1900) and The World Peril of 1910 (1906) have been republished in curated editions in recent years. There are versions of his novels to be found in print-on-demand format, through platforms such as Amazon, but these are mostly uncurated and frequently unsatisfactory, containing errors from scans, and in extreme cases missing entire chapters. Partly because of this lack of reliable...