The Scarlet Plague
First edition, 1915
The Scarlet Plague (1912, book edition 1915) by Jack London is a post-apocalyptic novella set sixty years after a catastrophic pandemic that swept the world in 2013, killing nearly all of humanity within days. The frame narrative follows Professor James Howard Smith, an eighty-seven-year-old former English literature professor at the University of California at Berkeley, as he walks along what was once the embankment of a railroad near San Francisco with his three feral grandsons. To the boys, who know no world but the primitive one they inhabit, he tells the story of the Scarlet Death and what he witnessed of its coming. Originally serialized in London Magazine in 1912, the novella was issued as a book by Macmillan in 1915 with illustrations by Gordon Grant.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo pictorial red-brown cloth binding, front panel stamped in orange and yellow, spine stamped in orange, yellow, and gold. New York: MacMillan, 1915. #10287.
Good copy.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo pictorial red-brown cloth binding, front panel stamped in orange and yellow, spine stamped in orange, yellow, and gold. New York: MacMillan, 1915. #10287.
Good copy.
Additional Details
The Scarlet Plague opens in 2073 on the overgrown embankment of a long-dead railroad near the ruins of San Francisco. An ancient, palsied man in a goatskin cloak walks with three boys who are his grandsons. The boys are barefoot hunters with bows and slings, indifferent to the old man's memories and largely unable to follow his vocabulary. The old man is Professor James Howard Smith, once a professor of English literature at Berkeley, now one of the last survivors of the world that was. He has been telling his story for years. The boys have heard it before and are already bored.
The plague arrived in 2013, moving with a speed that defeated every attempt at containment. The first sign was a scarlet rash spreading across the face and body and death followed within the hour, often within minutes. No one recovered. No serum worked. Within days, cities across the world were in chaos Communications failed, fires burned without control, the roads filled with fleeing millions who carried the disease with them. Smith witnessed it from Berkeley, watched his university empty in an afternoon, saw his brother die in his doorway, and eventually joined a group of four hundred who barricaded themselves in the Chemistry Building. The plague found them anyway. Of the four hundred, he alone survived.
London renders the collapse with considerable detail. The city the survivors walk through is not a generic wasteland but a recognizable San Francisco of burning buildings, stalled automobiles, looting, and the class violence that emerges when civilization's structure is removed. Smith, a man of refined sensibilities, finds himself unable to help people being beaten and robbed on the street, himself incapable of the cruel brutality that survival demands. The plague does not discriminate by virtue, and the novel is explicit about this. The man who founds the Chauffeur Tribe, one of the small surviving groups Smith eventually encounters near Lake Temescal, is a coarse, violent former servant who beat the wife of a billionaire industrialist and made her his slave. Smith, the educated man, was afraid of him and could do nothing.
The social inversion London builds into the post-plague world is pointed. The survivors do not organize along the lines of the old civilization's hierarchies. The tribes that form take their names from occupations and places like the Chauffeurs, the Santa Rosans, the Sacramentos, the Palo-Altos. Smith, who married into the Santa Rosans, is the tribe's institutional memory, a man whose grandsons cannot grasp the word "scarlet" and who treats a silver dollar as a mysterious talisman. He tries to pass on what he knows, like the principles of steam, electricity, the alphabet, but the boys are completely engrossed in their own small world and only half-listening.
The novella ends not on hope but on a long view that is almost geological in its bleakness. Smith reflects that gunpowder will eventually be rediscovered, that men will again fight and kill in large numbers, that civilization will be rebuilt over generations only to collapse again, and that the priest, the soldier, and the king will always re-emerge. It is, he says, the eternal cycle, and there is no profit in it. Then the boys get up and herd the goats home.
London wrote the novella in 1912, the same year the Titanic sank, when confidence in technological progress was being quietly questioned by a few, while being hailed by most. His vision of a pandemic that outruns science, and of how quickly a modern city comes apart, was well ahead of its time.
The plague arrived in 2013, moving with a speed that defeated every attempt at containment. The first sign was a scarlet rash spreading across the face and body and death followed within the hour, often within minutes. No one recovered. No serum worked. Within days, cities across the world were in chaos Communications failed, fires burned without control, the roads filled with fleeing millions who carried the disease with them. Smith witnessed it from Berkeley, watched his university empty in an afternoon, saw his brother die in his doorway, and eventually joined a group of four hundred who barricaded themselves in the Chemistry Building. The plague found them anyway. Of the four hundred, he alone survived.
London renders the collapse with considerable detail. The city the survivors walk through is not a generic wasteland but a recognizable San Francisco of burning buildings, stalled automobiles, looting, and the class violence that emerges when civilization's structure is removed. Smith, a man of refined sensibilities, finds himself unable to help people being beaten and robbed on the street, himself incapable of the cruel brutality that survival demands. The plague does not discriminate by virtue, and the novel is explicit about this. The man who founds the Chauffeur Tribe, one of the small surviving groups Smith eventually encounters near Lake Temescal, is a coarse, violent former servant who beat the wife of a billionaire industrialist and made her his slave. Smith, the educated man, was afraid of him and could do nothing.
The social inversion London builds into the post-plague world is pointed. The survivors do not organize along the lines of the old civilization's hierarchies. The tribes that form take their names from occupations and places like the Chauffeurs, the Santa Rosans, the Sacramentos, the Palo-Altos. Smith, who married into the Santa Rosans, is the tribe's institutional memory, a man whose grandsons cannot grasp the word "scarlet" and who treats a silver dollar as a mysterious talisman. He tries to pass on what he knows, like the principles of steam, electricity, the alphabet, but the boys are completely engrossed in their own small world and only half-listening.
The novella ends not on hope but on a long view that is almost geological in its bleakness. Smith reflects that gunpowder will eventually be rediscovered, that men will again fight and kill in large numbers, that civilization will be rebuilt over generations only to collapse again, and that the priest, the soldier, and the king will always re-emerge. It is, he says, the eternal cycle, and there is no profit in it. Then the boys get up and herd the goats home.
London wrote the novella in 1912, the same year the Titanic sank, when confidence in technological progress was being quietly questioned by a few, while being hailed by most. His vision of a pandemic that outruns science, and of how quickly a modern city comes apart, was well ahead of its time.
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