The Mummy! A Tale of The Twenty-Second Century.

London: Henry Colburn. 1827.

First edition. Three volumes. 12mo. (185x113mm). pp. viii, 300; [ii], 348; [ii], 303 [1, publisher's adverts]. Bound without half-titles in volumes II and III (volume I was issued without a half-title). Tan half calf, marbled paper covered boards. Spine with green morocco label, lettered in gilt. Some repairs and strengthening to joints, head and foot of spines and corners. Slight scuffing to spines and rubbing to boards. Internally there is some cracking to the hinges of volume one with gathering H torn at the foot and a little loose. Some foxing and marking and a small black ink stain between pp 239-244 and 251-261 of volume III. Otherwise in very good condition throughout. Front pastedowns have the bookplate of Charles William Orde of Nunnykirk. He was a breeder of racehorses who ran his stud operation from the family house, Nunnykirk Hall. A nice copy of a rare book which has appeared in the auction records only five times in the last 100 years.
The Mummy! represents the mingling of two cultural currents. The first is the early nineteenth obsession with ancient Egypt inspired by the work of French archaeologists and scholars following Napoleon's invasion in 1798. Of the many manifestations of contemporary Egyptomania, perhaps the most bizarre were the public "mummy unwrappings" which took place in 1821 in a Piccadilly theatre. The second is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the begetter of reanimation novels. Jane Webb's (she became Louden on her marriage in 1831 to John, the botanist and early fellow of the Linnean Society) The Mummy! tells of the Pharoah Cheops brought back life in 2126. Unlike Frankenstein's monster, Cheops is essentially benign dispensing wise advice and benefactions along with observations along the lines of "Human nature is still the same even in this remote corner of the globe", the banality of which evaporates into despair when one remembers that the person uttering these words is nearly 4700 years old so has, presumably, seen a thing or two. The Mummy! is, however, more than just a work of Gothic early science fiction. By setting the novel in a far distant future ruled by the absolutist Queen Claudia, Webb can hold up a satirical mirror to contemporary society. Her critical standpoint is broadly conservative by the standards of the time (she was no Mary Shelley) save for her belief that the world (or at least England) was better and more peaceably governed by a woman than by a man, thus making The Mummy! something of an early feminist novel. As remarkable are Webb's uncannily accurate predictions of life in the future: coffee machines, smokeless cities a form of internet and AI doctors and lawyers. And although the mummy is now a staple of horror films and novels, one must not forget that Webb's novel marks the emergence of the "mummy genre". It is an extraordinary work.