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175:, and a romance. It was a popular success as well, selling 60,000 copies upon its initial publication. Its sales eventually comprised 250,000 copies. Donnelly's novel was one element of the great wave of utopian and dystopian literature during the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth, exemplified by works like
292:. In the city, subways operate along 'subterranean streets' and, at ground level, streets are covered by 'roofs of glass'. At the Hotel Darwin, Weltstein finds a televised menu to guide him among exotic choices, from edible spiders to bird's nests from China. Televised newspapers are readily available.
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Weltstein soon gets into trouble, when he stops a coachman from beating a beggar. The coach belongs to Prince Cabano, formerly Jacob Isaacs, a prime figure of the ruling oligarchy; the beggar is Max Petion, actually a leader of a secret resistance organization called the
Brotherhood of Destruction.
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Gabriel meets the president of the brotherhood, Caesar
Lomellini, a dangerous and ruthless fanatic and an imposing physical presence, half Italian and half Negro. The middle section of the novel devotes attention to the romantic involvements of Gabriel and Max Petion, who rescue young women from
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exploitation. The two couples marry in a bucolic episode that counterpoints the scenes of urban oppression and violence that bracket it. (The four characters escape New York for Uganda at the end of the book, providing a sort of happy ending, which likely enhanced the novel's popularity.)
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The
Brotherhood of Destruction finally organizes a rebellion, which succeeds in deposing the oligarchs, though at the cost of massive casualties. (Technology has produced advanced weapons like "dynamite bullets" that increase the carnage.) Lomellini orders the corpses piled high in
221:"A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism."
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and entombed in layers of concrete—though
Lomellini himself is murdered as the mass grave is started. Gabriel Weltstein, fleeing New York by airship, looks back to see the vast cityscape in flames, while the mass grave—Caesar's column—rises through the smoke.
269:. His first-person narrator Gabriel Weltstein writes a series of letters to his brother, recounting his experiences during a 1988 visit to New York. Weltstein is a wool merchant from
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of the
Populist movement. Donnelly's villain is an Italian Jew — but his protagonist has a name, Weltstein, that must have suggested a Jewish identity to many readers.
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Weltstein has to accept Petion's guidance into proletarian society in New York City, where he learns the truth of the rapacious and oppressive social and economic order.
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Like many utopian/dystopian writers, Donnelly dwells on the technological changes of the future. Weltstein travels to New York City by
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Sexton reads the name as "Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon" rather than Jewish; Sexton, pp. 233-4.
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is a contemporaneous example), Donnelly cast his fiction in the form of an
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Doubters and
Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885–1918
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Donnelly's novel partly concerns the debated question of the alleged
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Allyn B. Forbes, "The
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The
Utopian Novel in America 1886–1896: The Politics of Form
233:: a man comes from his rural environment to the heart of a brutal
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Norman
Pollack, "Handlin on Anti-Semitism: A Critique of
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Norman
Pollack, "The Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism,"
168:; one critic has termed it an "Apocalyptic Utopia."
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Source etext of Caesar's Column at sacred-texts.com
355:, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984.
277:thinkers considered the possibility of founding a
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127:Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century
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398:, Kent, OH, Kent State University Press, 1976.
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206:is partly based on Donnelly's commitment to
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368:: The Dialogue of Utopia and Catastrophe,"
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437:, Vol. 68 No. 1 (October 1962), pp. 76-80.
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342:, New York, Free Press of Glencoe, 1964.
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255:As some other speculative writers did (
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137:Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
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