Caesar's Column

Ignatius Donnelly · 1890

A 19th-century populist's nightmare of 1988 New York — and the revolution that brings it down in ruins.

The novel's later chapters contain antisemitic caricature in its depiction of the ruling oligarchy, reflecting the prejudices common in 1890s American populist writing — reproduced unaltered from the original text.

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40 chapters · 96,396 words · ~7.3 hr read

Ignatius Donnelly was a Minnesota populist, congressman, and pseudo-scientist who in 1890 imagined a future America ruled by a handful of trust-fattened oligarchs, its middle class extinguished and its underclass armed underground for the reckoning. Caesar's Column predates Wells and Orwell as an anglophone dystopia, and its warnings about monopoly capital, surveillance, and engineered inequality still land with real force. It is also a document of its moment's worst instincts, and reading it honestly means reckoning with both.

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Letters

Gabriel Weltstein's forty letters home from 1988 New York — from wide-eyed visitor, through the Beggar's Home and the Brotherhood's underworld, to the night Caesar's column rises over the ruins.

Caesar's Column

Contents

Letters