Love Among the Ruins - A Romance of the Near Future
First edition, 1953
Love Among the Ruins (1953) is a short satirical novella by Evelyn Waugh, set in a near-future welfare state Britain where rehabilitation has replaced punishment, euthanasia is a popular state service with long waiting lists, and the government's great public buildings are already crumbling before they are finished. The central character is Miles Plastic, an orphan and arsonist whose upbringing has been entirely managed by the state and who emerges from the luxurious Mountjoy Castle rehabilitation center, a converted ancestral country house where murderers get the best rooms, into a bureaucratic world of grey uniformity. Miles is assigned to a euthanasia department in Satellite City, falls in love with a bearded ballerina whose botched sterilization operation has produced unforeseen consequences, and ends as he began.
Waugh's target is the postwar welfare consensus and what he saw as the sentimental progressivism underlying it. The novella is closer to Swift than to Orwell in its method, and its comedy is consistently dark. The first edition was published by Chapman and Hall in 1953 in an illustrated format with drawings by Marten Flavin, deliberately designed to resemble an expensive gift book. The illustration of the bearded Clara is among the more memorable images in mid-century British book design.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. London: Chapman & Hall, 1953. #10443.
Small bookstore sticker on rear endpaper. Nearly fine copy in dust jacket with just a few minor nicks.
Waugh's target is the postwar welfare consensus and what he saw as the sentimental progressivism underlying it. The novella is closer to Swift than to Orwell in its method, and its comedy is consistently dark. The first edition was published by Chapman and Hall in 1953 in an illustrated format with drawings by Marten Flavin, deliberately designed to resemble an expensive gift book. The illustration of the bearded Clara is among the more memorable images in mid-century British book design.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. London: Chapman & Hall, 1953. #10443.
Small bookstore sticker on rear endpaper. Nearly fine copy in dust jacket with just a few minor nicks.
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