The Witch's Cavern - A Realistic and Thrilling Picture of London Society

Published anonymously in 1890 by the Australian author and clergyman Henry Crocker Marriott Watson, The Witch's Cavern is the American edition of The Decline and Fall of the British Empire; or, The Witch's Cavern, published the same year in Britain by Trischler and Company. The novel opens in the far future with its protagonist arriving in London in the year 2990, where England has been reduced to barbarism through socialist governance, climate change caused by the diversion of the Gulf Stream, the erosion of religious faith, and the growing equality of women. Through a sibylline trance in the Witch's Cavern, he is transported back to witness nineteenth-century London and the forces Watson believed were already setting England on this course. Watson had explored related themes in Erchomenon (1879).

The American Minerva edition, issued under the subtitle A Realistic and Thrilling Picture of London Society and credited to "One Who Knows," is considerably rarer than its British counterpart.

Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, bound in pictorial light gray-green cloth, front panel stamped in black, spine panel stamped in black and silver [LWC]. New York: The Minerva Publishing Company, 1890. #11150.
Early owner's name and address in pencil on the front free endpaper. Cloth is worn at spine ends and corner tips, toning to pages, partial hairline crack along inner front hinge but still quite sound. A bright, very good copy overall. Very nice for what appears to be a cheaply made book.