Hartmann, the Anarchist; or, The Doom of the Great City

Fawcett, E. Douglas (Edward Douglas), 1866-1960Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2

Word count: 210K words
Chapters: 22

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Hartmann, the Anarchist; Or, The Doom of the Great City by E. Douglas FawcettAuthor: Fawcett, E. Douglas (Edward Douglas), 1866-1960,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jun 14, 2018

Editor's review

This work is a rare “urban catastrophe” narrative in early science fiction. Its author, Fawcett, makes the anarchist Hartmann the protagonist and combines political radicalism with an imagination of the destruction of the modern metropolis. Its value lies not in fine characterization but in the anxieties of the late nineteenth century about technology, urban expansion, and social order: how a great city is brought to doom by human conspiracy, a setup that later became a common motif in catastrophe literature. The Project Gutenberg edition preserves the original English text and is suitable for reading as material on early science fiction, urban history, or political imagination. It is worth placing in the context of late Victorian popular fiction, noting how the narrator’s portrayal of “the anarchist” reflects the social panic of the time and how the disaster scenes serve moral and political warnings. It is more a cultural document than a tightly plotted modern novel, and readers should enter with an interest in literary history.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers interested in early science fiction and the origins of catastrophe literature
Scholars studying late nineteenth-century political panic and urban imagination
Readers who enjoy Victorian popular fiction and can read English originals
Teachers needing public-domain English texts for literary history teaching

Not a good fit for

General fiction readers expecting modern pacing and complex characterization
Readers who struggle with English and want only a Chinese translation for entertainment
Readers uninterested in political radicalism as a subject

Reading tips

Read the preface or contents first to learn the date of composition and the background of catastrophe fiction.
Compare Hartmann’s image with contemporary newspaper reports on anarchism.
Note details of the city’s destruction and record how the author uses spatial description to create panic.
After finishing, compare it with other early urban-catastrophe novels to trace the motif’s development.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book in Chinese or English?

This is an English-language e-book released by Project Gutenberg, with the text in English and no Chinese translation. Chinese readers need some English reading ability or should read with a dictionary and background materials.

Is it suitable as entertaining science fiction?

Not really. It is closer to late nineteenth-century popular political imagination and catastrophe narrative, with simple plot and characterization and limited entertainment value. It is more rewarding when read as literary history or genre genealogy.

What background should I know before reading?

It helps to know about the late nineteenth-century anarchist panic in Europe and the process of urbanization, which illuminates why the author links “the anarchist” with “the doom of the great city.”

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Fawcett, E. Douglas (Edward Douglas), 1866-1960 Author

E. Douglas Fawcett (Edward Douglas Fawcett, 1866–1960) is an English-language author about whom little biographical information is publicly available. The library currently holds only one work by him, Hartmann, the Anarchist Or, The Doom of the Great City. Judging from the available information, this is a narrative work of fiction; the words "Anarchist" and "the Doom of the Great City" in the title suggest a theme of social upheaval and imagined disaster, with the flavor of crisis narrative common in Western popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because public sources are limited, his nationality, education, career, and full body of work cannot be reliably established, and should not be over-inferred. For researchers, he is best treated as one example among authors of English popular fiction in that period, whose value lies in reflecting how the social anxieties about anarchism and urban crisis were imagined at the time.