Signed
Sixty Years Hence
Rare early dystopia, 1847
Sixty Years Hence (1847) by Charles Frederick Henningsen is one of the most significant rediscoveries in the history of speculative fiction. Published over a century before Nineteen Eighty-Four and decades before H.G. Wells's scientific romances, the novel represents what may be the earliest fully realized technocratic dystopia in English literature. While contemporary reviewers read it as political satire of the Peel administration, the novel's actual vision is considerably darker. Set in 1906, it imagines a world governed by a globalist oligarchy called "The Federation of Monarchies," whose power relies on financial control and the manipulation of the atmosphere itself. The catastrophe that unravels this world order is a bio-engineered pathogen created in a laboratory, a weapon that escapes its maker and begins attacking the global food supply. The novel anticipates the corporate sovereignty of The Iron Heel and the ecological catastrophes of later biopunk fiction by more than half a century.
Presentation Copy. This set contains signed inscriptions by the author on the front free endpapers of Volumes II and III (the inscription in Volume I has been excised). Dated "Jany. 1847," gifting the set to "Justina L. Hasenclever from the author."
Provenance. Volume I features a cut to the front endpaper; beneath this is affixed an 1877 newspaper obituary from Stockholm commemorating Henningsen’s adventurous life as a soldier of fortune. Each volume bears a small label on the rear paste-down with penciled reference notes. This copy originates from the renowned George Locke Spectrum Collection.
Rarity. Extremely scarce. Beyond the few institutional copies located by Negley and a single holding at Harvard, virtually no copies are known in circulation. Information regarding this specific copy are supported by a Certificate of Authenticity courteously provided by Lloyd W. Currey, who attests to the rarity and significance of this foundational work.
Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, three volumes: pp. [1-2] [i] ii-iv [1] 2-339 [340: blank]; [1-2] [1] 2-350; [1-2] [1] 2-381 [382: blank] [1-6: ads], original decorated brown cloth, spine panels stamped in gold and blind, front and rear panels stamped in blind, all edges untrimmed, yellow coated endpapers. London: Thomas Cautley Newby Publisher, 72, Mortimer St., Cavendish Sq. 1847. Lloyd W. Currey. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 4. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, Vol II, p. 60 (long, enthusiastic write-up). Negley, Utopian Literature 552 (locating only the Bodleian and Library of Congress copies). Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 49. #11147.
Set shows general shelf wear, including spinal lean and minor scuffing to cloth. Text blocks are slightly toned and dusty, with occasional marking and dog-eared corners. Signatures are loosening at several points, with inner hinges starting (particularly in Vol. 3). A solid Good set of a scarce title, now housed in a custom clamshell case.
Presentation Copy. This set contains signed inscriptions by the author on the front free endpapers of Volumes II and III (the inscription in Volume I has been excised). Dated "Jany. 1847," gifting the set to "Justina L. Hasenclever from the author."
Provenance. Volume I features a cut to the front endpaper; beneath this is affixed an 1877 newspaper obituary from Stockholm commemorating Henningsen’s adventurous life as a soldier of fortune. Each volume bears a small label on the rear paste-down with penciled reference notes. This copy originates from the renowned George Locke Spectrum Collection.
Rarity. Extremely scarce. Beyond the few institutional copies located by Negley and a single holding at Harvard, virtually no copies are known in circulation. Information regarding this specific copy are supported by a Certificate of Authenticity courteously provided by Lloyd W. Currey, who attests to the rarity and significance of this foundational work.
Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, three volumes: pp. [1-2] [i] ii-iv [1] 2-339 [340: blank]; [1-2] [1] 2-350; [1-2] [1] 2-381 [382: blank] [1-6: ads], original decorated brown cloth, spine panels stamped in gold and blind, front and rear panels stamped in blind, all edges untrimmed, yellow coated endpapers. London: Thomas Cautley Newby Publisher, 72, Mortimer St., Cavendish Sq. 1847. Lloyd W. Currey. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 4. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, Vol II, p. 60 (long, enthusiastic write-up). Negley, Utopian Literature 552 (locating only the Bodleian and Library of Congress copies). Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 49. #11147.
Set shows general shelf wear, including spinal lean and minor scuffing to cloth. Text blocks are slightly toned and dusty, with occasional marking and dog-eared corners. Signatures are loosening at several points, with inner hinges starting (particularly in Vol. 3). A solid Good set of a scarce title, now housed in a custom clamshell case.
Additional Details
Charles Frederick Henningsen's three-volume Sixty Years Hence, published in 1847 and set in 1906, is one of the most extraordinary works of speculative fiction to have fallen entirely out of circulation. Ostensibly a satire of the Whig government, the novel in practice constructs a technocratic dystopia of considerable coherence and ambition.
Henningsen imagines a world where national identities have dissolved into a globalist super-state, the "Federation of Monarchies," governed not by kings or parliaments but by a "Senatorial Order of Millionaires." Political power is calculated strictly by personal net worth, and the atmosphere itself is artificially engineered to extend the lives of the elite while the population starves.
The novel's central antagonist, John Cash, is a capitalist who achieves absolute power by holding the mortgages of the entire aristocracy. In Cash, Henningsen creates an early prototype of the supra-national corporate tyrant, anticipating the brutal oligarchy of Jack London's The Iron Heel by more than sixty years.
More remarkable still is the novel's catastrophe. The "vegetable contagion" destroying the world's food supply turns out to be not a natural disaster but a bio-engineered weapon. A scientist known as "The Galvanist" creates a microscopic, mutable organism in his laboratory to destroy the property of the rich. The artificial plague escapes containment, jumping from grain to grass and finally to animal life, systematically dismantling the global biomass.
The protagonist, Tempest, is the Galvanist's disciple, imprisoned in an asylum not because he is mad but because he holds the secret of the plague's origin. In the third volume he reveals to Cash that there is no cure. The scientist's "Legacy" was the assurance of inevitable extinction.
The novel ends with a sequence of betrayal, revolution, and biological horror. Cash is not destroyed by the famine but strangled by his own son and political allies in a coup to seize his wealth. This murder triggers a civil war between the starving populace and the aristocratic armies, a conflict Tempest ends by unleashing an electrical weapon against the oligarchy. The victory is hollow. The contagion evolves a final mutation and attacks the human brain itself. Eustatius Cash, the usurper, is found by a pool in a state of mindless idiocy, the first victim of a plague now threatening human reason.
Where Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) depicted a romantic, existential apocalypse, Henningsen introduced the specific mechanics of scientific and capitalist catastrophe. That this novel has been almost entirely unknown for nearly two centuries makes it one of the more remarkable gaps in the history of the genre.
Henningsen imagines a world where national identities have dissolved into a globalist super-state, the "Federation of Monarchies," governed not by kings or parliaments but by a "Senatorial Order of Millionaires." Political power is calculated strictly by personal net worth, and the atmosphere itself is artificially engineered to extend the lives of the elite while the population starves.
The novel's central antagonist, John Cash, is a capitalist who achieves absolute power by holding the mortgages of the entire aristocracy. In Cash, Henningsen creates an early prototype of the supra-national corporate tyrant, anticipating the brutal oligarchy of Jack London's The Iron Heel by more than sixty years.
More remarkable still is the novel's catastrophe. The "vegetable contagion" destroying the world's food supply turns out to be not a natural disaster but a bio-engineered weapon. A scientist known as "The Galvanist" creates a microscopic, mutable organism in his laboratory to destroy the property of the rich. The artificial plague escapes containment, jumping from grain to grass and finally to animal life, systematically dismantling the global biomass.
The protagonist, Tempest, is the Galvanist's disciple, imprisoned in an asylum not because he is mad but because he holds the secret of the plague's origin. In the third volume he reveals to Cash that there is no cure. The scientist's "Legacy" was the assurance of inevitable extinction.
The novel ends with a sequence of betrayal, revolution, and biological horror. Cash is not destroyed by the famine but strangled by his own son and political allies in a coup to seize his wealth. This murder triggers a civil war between the starving populace and the aristocratic armies, a conflict Tempest ends by unleashing an electrical weapon against the oligarchy. The victory is hollow. The contagion evolves a final mutation and attacks the human brain itself. Eustatius Cash, the usurper, is found by a pool in a state of mindless idiocy, the first victim of a plague now threatening human reason.
Where Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) depicted a romantic, existential apocalypse, Henningsen introduced the specific mechanics of scientific and capitalist catastrophe. That this novel has been almost entirely unknown for nearly two centuries makes it one of the more remarkable gaps in the history of the genre.