SOURCE: La Bossiere, Camille R. “The Mysterious End of James De Mille's Unfinished Strange Manuscript.” Essays on Canadian Writing 27 (winter 1983-84): 41-54.

[In the following essay, La Bossiere contends that De Mille did not leave A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder unfinished, but that the text simply “played itself … out,” a direct result of De Mille's comedic use of repetition in the novel.]

                    As when we dwell upon a word we know
                    Repeating, till the word we know so well
                    Becomes a wonder, and we know not why.

—Tennyson, “Launcelot and Elaine”

                    I sholde er this han fallen down for sleep,
Althogh the slough had never been so deep. …

—Chaucer, Prologue to “The Nun's Priest's Tale”

An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms and ripens from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never halts, never repeats itself.

—Bergson, Laughter

I nearly called out in my joy and amazement. He was speaking in his natural voice—a little weak, perhaps, but the very voice I knew.

—Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” His Last Bow

Repetition, at times the mother of ennui, can be both funny and killing. Writers and comedians have long known this and have shown it to be so. Some have gone so far as to raise seemingly endless reiteration to a pleasure principle. Tom Stoppard's comic reanimation of Hamlet is a case in point. “‘Getting a bit of a bore, isn't it?’” Rosencrantz says to Guildenstern in the midst of a game of flipping coins that will show more than ninety “heads” in a row.¹ Copies of Henri Bergson's “Dancing-jack” as described in his essay on laughter,² these fated players fail to see the humour their game provokes among the living. But there are, of course, limits to how much repetition the quick can stand. Even that post-modernist farceur Alain Robbe-Grillet can eventually become so fatigued with duplication that he resorts to the shorthand of “etc. …, etc., etc. …”³ No merciful or prudent author wants to kill off his or her readers too: the ending of a work is preferable to this kind of fatality. In fact, a number of writers virtuous in this regard have deliberately stopped before conclusive articulation lest their readers (or they themselves) should come to experience the surcease that is boredom. Chaucer, the self-effacing parodist of the entrancing “Tale of Sir Thopas” and the erudite entertainer of the emphatically sententious “Monk's Tale” (to choose perhaps the most obvious exempla of this variety of cessation in English literature), knew that there can be great efficacy in unfinished work.⁴ The craft is long, life is short—and dozing off on horseback can be deadly. Graced is the writer of narrative who has the cunning to know when to stop. In Canadian literature, a salient representative of this broad category of virtue is provided in James De Mille's unfinished A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888). Though De Mille's Adam More on one occasion sleeps safely on the back of a beast from prehistory, his author seems, certainly in the end, to have sided with the common-sensical host Herry Bailly, who almost always kept the temper and good cheer of his fellow travellers in mind.

“‘That's enough for to-day. … I'm tired and can't read any more. It's time for supper’”—spoken by Lord Featherstone, owner of the yacht Falcon on a winter's cruise in the southern latitudes, these are the last words of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.⁵ Enthusiastic for eating, drinking, and sport, the effete Featherstone is one who quickly becomes restive in the absence of some form of pleasurable stimulation. It is ennui, in fact, that had sent him to these latitudes. “Being weary of life in England,” we read in the novel's first paragraph, Featherstone had invited three guests to join him on the cruise: Dr. Congreve, Oxenden, and Melick, for the purpose of mutual entertainment. It would seem, however, that there is more than just the host's temperament at play here, since something of the last recorded feeling of this fourth and final reader of Adam More's papyrus record has been shared by at least one assiduous reader of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. George Woodcock publishes this reaction in 1973: “One senses a tired hand abandoning an unfinished task.” That the novel, published in 1888, remained “incomplete” at the time of De Mille's death in 1880 accounts, at least in part, for “so lame an end.”⁶ But why the sense of fatigue? And why was this novel, written, it has been argued, more than a decade before the author's death,⁷ left to rest unfinished for so long? Though these yet unanswered questions may be seen merely to tantalize, there is perhaps an answer to them which is not beyond our reach. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, the whole of which has recently been described as “an inviting enigma,”⁸ itself eventually provides the clues in the following investigation of its seemingly mysterious end.

A Strange Manuscript is said to be a difficult book to interpret comprehensively. The difficulty, to paraphrase existing commentary on this “minor classic of Canadian fiction,”⁹ arises from a number of interrelated causes. The first is its uncertain class, considering the multiple categories of novel it brings to mind. As De Mille knew and as the disagreement among the readers of Adam More cannot help but bring to our attention, it is no one thing. The party aboard the Falcon inconclusively debates as to how to classify the manuscript fetched up from the sea: “a sensational novel,” “a satirical romance,” “a scientific romance,” “a satire … of humanity,” and “a plain narrative of facts” are the alternatives proposed (pp.215-16). In his introduction to the 1969 New Canadian Library edition of A Strange Manuscript, R. E. Watters envelops More's readers by suggesting that the novel is “deliberately all these at once.”¹⁰

Secondly, there is the novel's far-reaching allusiveness and the harmonious or discordant echoing that it thereby stimulates. Plato's Republic, Haggard's She, Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, W.H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico, W.H. Mallock's The New Republic, Melville's Typee and Mardi, Butler's Erewhon, More's Utopia, and works by Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Eugene Sue, and Jules Verne are but some of the writings that have been variously recalled by De Mille's novel or which have invited comparison with it. In 1975, Wayne R. Kime decides for the “unconcealed eclecticism” of A Strange Manuscript.¹¹

The third problem associated with the novel arises from the uncertainty perceived in the novelist's intention. Whom is De Mille addressing and what does he mean to say to them? J.O. Bailey concludes in 1947 that “no satiric purpose is clear in the book.”¹² Less uncertain of that purpose a quarter of a century later—he writes of the novel's “exposure of the anti-vitalist attitudes that shadowed De Mille's own world”—George Woodcock finds A Strange Manuscript “ambivalent”: it is at once the work of a serious satirist and a “middlebrow” entertainer.¹³ John Moss, in 1981, summarizes the ambivalence in this way: “… an academic at Acadia and Dalhousie universities but also an author of numerous potboilers,” De Mille “seems to fuse his two sides” in A Strange Manuscript, “for it is both a fantastical adventure yarn and a seriously conceived satire, each aspect admirably serving the other's purpose”; though what the work's purpose is not easy to say: “The novel can be taken as a satire on Christianity, British society, the aristocracy, the new age of science, Darwinism, or all of these—or something entirely else.” The fiction, like its author's intention, has the grace of being “marvellously ambiguous.”¹⁴

But ambiguity or ambivalence is not the only thing one can be reasonably assured of in reading A Strange Manuscript. It is certain, among other things, that the book is not a positive utopia. De Mille, surely, did not imagine the Kosekin way of darkness and death so that others might be tempted to take it up. The ideal of unremitting darkness, we all know, would be as frustrating in its implementation as it would be disastrous in its effects. Nor is A Strange Manuscript an anti-utopia, for its author surely did not worry that the materialistic Western world was in any great or immediate danger of practising asceticism after the manner of the society he set in deepest tropical Antarctica. Too, critical study of A Strange Manuscript can be certain of itself—that is, of its own values and purpose. As the existing body of De Mille scholarship clearly implies and as one commentator states plainly, “the novel of ideas remains and is our reason for continuing to read A Strange Manuscript.”¹⁵ It is with such an assurance that the following words seek out a way to translate the sign that is De Mille's unfinished ending. As M.G. Parks suggests in a 1976 article, “Strange to Strangers Only,” this novel may not prove to be all that exotic or mysterious in its ideas.¹⁶

What must strike the reader at once is that A Strange Manuscript is extraordinarily repetitive, much more so than the discreet working of symbol or motif makes necessary. In the span of some twenty-five pages early in More's account, we are informed six times that, at the South Pole, six months of light precede six months of darkness (pp.88, 91, 93, 107, 109, 113), as though to warn the reader of things to come. From chapter xi, less than midway through A Strange Manuscript, there is hardly a page of More's record that does not advise the reader that “life and light seemed” to the Kosekin “as actual evils, and death and darkness the only things worthy of regard” (p.106). The Kosekin “hate life and love death” (p.115), for example; “their chief characteristic … is their love of darkness” (p.136). More's zeal for his reader's right understanding, it would seem, makes him tireless. As we approach the end of his account as preserved in A Strange Manuscript, we are still being informed that the “self-denying” (e.g., pp.93, 99, 116, 119, 126, 127, 128, 132, 163, 186) Kosekin “hated life, loved death” (p.232). “‘Never forget … that here death is considered the chief blessing,’” More's tutor and companion Almah stresses to her quizzical student (p.106). Certainly, we are not permitted to forget this cardinal point for an instant. “For it must never be forgotten that the Kosekin love death as we love life,” More reminds us in his own voice (p.137). Of “the blessings, the awful blessings of the Kosekin,” “the blessed mystery of death” is “the greatest blessing” (pp.231-32). And so it is. Amen.

The responsibility for such reiteration obviously lies with that simple seaman, Adam More. His lights are not great, perhaps smaller even than those of Swift's more illustrious narrator. Understandably, like any curious stranger in a curious land, More must ask questions if he is to come to enlightenment. This he does on many occasions. But the plain answers do not seem to advance him very much. The often repetitious questions—to Almah, the Kohen, Layelah, the Kohen Gadol, and the Chief Pauper—are run off in series on more than a dozen occasions (e.g., pp.84, 92, 104, 107, 110, 119, 121, 125, 126, 130, 158, 176, 180-85, 227-30, 239-40). More gets logically unequivocal answers, but he is not quick to catch on to transparent perversities. “All this was incomprehensible,” he reacts to the Kosekin view of death (p.98). “Could I ever hope to understand them?” he puzzles (p.119). “‘I don't understand,’” he answers to a logically lucid explanation (p.116); “‘I do not understand you,’” he complains to Almah (p.116). “All this was so utterly incomprehensible,” he exclaims in frustration (p.117). Just moments before Featherstone finally sets the manuscript down for rest and refreshment, we read that More has progressed to this grasp of Kosekin mores: “This was unintelligible, nor did I try to understand it” (p.252). He has come to some understanding of his own wit, it appears. He gives up.

To More's credit, though, the Kosekin authorities are no more quick to see. “‘Will our ceremony of separation make any difference as to our sacrifice?’” (p.239) he desperately inquires of the Chief Pauper, the lowliest and therefore the highest of the Kosekin. Will the ritual separation of Almah and More spare them from the sacrificial knife? This most orthodox of “the orthodox cannibals” (p.179) responds with incredulity: “‘What?’ he asked, with a puzzled expression.” More repeats the question. “‘I don't understand,’” replies the Chief Pauper, “still looking puzzled.” More is patient: “Upon this I once more repeated it,” he recalls. “‘How can that be?’” persists the mystified head of the Kosekin (p.239). While not quite so materially destitute and consequently below the Chief Pauper in the Kosekin hierarchy, the Kohen is an equal to his leader in wit. “‘I cannot understand,’” he responds to More's explanation that, contrary to Kosekin practice, “long life and … riches and … requited love” are the highest blessings of man in Europe (p.133). “‘I do not understand you’” (p.129), “‘It is impossible to understand this’” (p.131)—the Kohen gives the standard replies. Unlike the women, Almah and Layelah—both are quick to use logic, instinct, and common sense along with their knowledge of the Kosekin way to their advantage—these men keep puzzling away. Though repetition is the mother of learning, they learn little but repetition from their questioning. “‘Oh! … you will not understand,’” Almah warns More not long after their first meeting (p.126). She was right.

That mankind is generally slow to understanding would seem evident from A Strange Manuscript, if this Adam is to be taken as Everyman. Convention and a clouded with can be blinding. The readers of More's papyrus confirm this generalization on more than one occasion, but particularly when they attempt to translate the “intention” (p.216) of More's document in chapter xxvi. The littérateur Melick generously comes to this conclusion: More has written “a satirical romance,” the “general aim” of which is “to show that the mere search for happiness per se is a vulgar thing, and must always result in utter nothingness” (p.215). “‘Satire on what? … I'll be hanged if I can see it,’” Featherstone ingenuously responds. The Cambridge scholar Oxenden is of a mind with his host on this score—and with good reason. As Oxenden replies to the otherwise skeptical Melick's proposal, “‘No, my boy, More was a simple sailor, and had no idea of satirizing anything’” (p.216). The unwitting More could only unwittingly compose a satire: like Tacitus' Germania, then, More's is “a plain narrative of facts” (p.216). As readers of De Mille, however, we are in a position to see a bit more. For example, a fact that has been manifest for some time is that the New Testament, particularly The Beatitudes proclaimed in The Sermon on the Mount, provides the principal subtext or conceptual referent of A Strange Manuscript. This is what seems to elude Oxenden as he goes on, in chapter xxvii, to give his interpretation of the fundamentals of Kosekin thought. He does refer here to “all philosophy and all religions,” but he omits to mention the one most obviously being evoked by De Mille. Oxenden limits himself or is limited to a mention of “the great Indian religions” and “the joyous Greeks” (p.224). The more percipient reader has already learned that Christianity has been at play long before chapter xxvii of A Strange Manuscript, which presence is driven home in the next instalment of More's account, the next chapter of De Mille's novel. Here, “blessings” is repeated five times, and the Chief Pauper is likened, ironically in part, to “some gentle-hearted governor in Christendom” (pp.231, 232, 235).

Echoes of Christianity are even more pronounced in the subsequent two chapters, which take us to a marriage/separation and a bloody climax atop a sacrificial pyramid. Having been married to Almah by having formally given her up, More shoots the priestly executioners dead, thereby saving himself and his bride from a ritual death and the Kosekin supper table. But, to his amazement, More and his beloved are not overwhelmed by the multitude gathered below:

It was not, as with us, who should go up first, but who would go up last. … All were eager to go, but the Kosekin self-denial, self-sacrificing, and love for the good of others made each one intensely desirous to make others go up.

(p.246)

Taking his cue from Almah—given this opportunity, she immediately announces that, henceforth, she and Adam will deny themselves by becoming the rulers (and therefore the servants) of Kosekin and by taking from their people's shoulders the awful burden of wealth—More, “the heaven-born Atam-or” (p.167), “a Heaven-sent teacher” (p.169), now accepts the role as master and judge of these descendants of “the Ten Tribes” (p.150): “‘I am Atam-or, the Man of Light. I come from the land of light. I am the Father of Thunder, of Cloud and Darkness—the Judge of Death!’” (p.247). This obtuse Gentile Jehovah/Christ had been ironically prefigured in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, for example, where, having just taught his disciples the great danger of riches, Christ pronounces:

Amen I say to you that you who have followed me … shall also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left house, or brothers, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting. But many who are first now will be last, and many who are last now will be first.

(xix:28-30)

If Oxenden has anticipated any of these blasphemous parallels, he gives no sign of having done so; he keeps the proleptic knowledge to himself. Perhaps he is following the prudential way favoured by the subversive Kohen Gadol, the secretive author of the ten commandments of “selfishness”: “With the multitude he had to deal differently, and had to work his way by concealing his opinions” (pp.165-66). But this is unlikely. Unlike De Mille, Oxenden is addressing no more than a handful of personal acquaintances.

What, then, is the object of De Mille's satirical novel of ideas? George Woodcock writes that A Strange Manuscript is “a satire on our own world,” that De Mille is saying this to his Victorian reader: “Look at the Kosekin … for here are your own beliefs put into literal action.”¹⁷ “If anyone comes to me and does not hate … even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke xiv. 26), “Blessed are you poor” (Luke xvi:20), “Love your enemies” (Matthew v:44), “Greater love than this no one has, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John xv:13)—these, presumably, are some of those professed beliefs that the Kosekin put into literal action. But there is a difficulty with Woodcock's reading. If De Mille's is an attack, as he proposes, on “Old Testament-oriented religion,”¹⁸ it is an attack on New Testament-oriented religion as well. But information gathered by M.G. Parks from outside the novel shows that De Mille was active in his Christian faith at the time of A Strange Manuscript's composition.¹⁹ From this it would appear that religion itself, Old Testament and/or New, is not the certain target of the satire.

The Woodcock commentary, though, does provide an incidental detail, a coincidence, of more positive use to the investigator who would find a trail leading further along towards a more likely solution to A Strange Manuscript's end and ending. There are, notes Woodcock, “significant echoes” of Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) in De Mille's book.²⁰ The echoes are all the more striking for being, according to recent evidence, merely circumstantial in origin.²¹ Both of these writers given to ironic smiling²² shared existence in the world of Victorian convention and responded to that world in similar ways. In Butler's down-under country, Erewhonian un-European principle conforms to Erewhonian practice, revealing a world much like actual Europe; in De Mille's antarctic world, Kosekin practice conforms to Kosekin and European principle, showing a world much unlike actual Europe. Coming from opposite directions, both authors hold up for the Victorian reader's enjoyment and examination of conscience the relation of actual practice to professed principle. Each of these satires is “a looking-glass in which we can read from right to left the curious, reversed forms of … manners and beliefs,” in the words of Lewis Mumford on Erewhon.²³ Also finding himself among the representatives of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel, Butler's narrator, by inversion, recalls Adam More in other respects as well. He is startled, for example, on being told by the Erewhonians that “Money … is the symbol of duty.” “This,” he comments, “used to shock me at first, when I remembered that … they who have riches shall enter hardly into the kingdom of heaven.”²⁴ But this was not difficult to forget in practice: “‘I cannot understand you’” is a sentence Butler's narrator is compelled to use but once.²⁵ In circumstances so opposite to this as not at all to encourage a rapid acculturation, More is appalled to see the duty of poverty put into practice in the land of the Kosekin. Mirror-images of each other in essential design, then, both fictions are built in accordance with the logic of an “obvious mirror-reversal of values,” in the words of R.E. Watters on A Strange Manuscript.²⁶ That logic, instrumental to satirists throughout the ages, works as a key to Butler's intellectual method and to the mystery of De Mille's satire.

If the Erewhonians have a cardinal vice, it is that they are “quick to offer up common sense at the shrine of logic”—so judges the would-be-apostle to Erewhon.²⁷ Given such a vice, they are ideal matter for this traveller's author, who also thrives on logic. But his end differs from theirs: by logic, he strives to make reasonable men of logicians. The Erewhonians, we learn in chapter xxvi, had for their first great teacher a prophet who had deduced that it was wrong to kill animals.

We must not kill men because they are our brothers.
Animals are our “relations” too.
Therefore, we must not kill animals

Some six or seven hundred years later, a mischievous philosopher had extended the proscription to include vegetable life, since “animals and plants were cousins.”²⁸ This teacher had driven “his fellow-countrymen into a corner at the point of a logical bayonet.”²⁹ The scrupulous Erewhonian was now called to the duty of starvation. The people responded by doing what the philosopher hoped they would do: they set aside the commandment forbidding the killing of animals. He had realized his purpose. Not actually believing his own words in their literal sense or intention, the philosopher “had no other end in view than reducing the prohibition against eating animal food to an absurdity,” Butler's narrator disingenuously speculates.³⁰ Using the very instrument prized by Erewhonians, this second great teacher got the people to deviate into sense on the subject of food. The moral philosopher Butler himself could not have hoped for a more gratifying end result, to have men act in accordance with the final words in this chapter on the history of Erewhonian morality: “reason uncorrected by instinct is as bad as instinct uncorrected by reason.”³¹ This is the very sort of counsel set aside by the Kosekin in their quest for an absurd logical consistency.

Like the cunning ancient philosopher and the author of Erewhon, De Mille drives his reader into a corner at the point of inference. Either act on the strict logic of your principles and become kin to the Kosekin, goes his implied argument, or give up your principles and be unlike them. But if you do not abandon your principles, at least know yourselves for what you are in fact, hypocrites; on the other hand, if you do abandon your principles, then know yourselves for what you are, self-serving materialists. The reader who would avoid the charge of hypocrisy set out by the fiction's alternatives is reduced to these narrow choices: be either an insane honest Christian or a sane un-Christian materialist. The conclusive inference left to De Mille's reasonable Victorian reader follows: since neither of these alternatives is acceptable at bottom, either to Christian faith or common sense, one should strive to avoid them. “Extremes are alone logical,” a faculty member of Butler's College of Unreason generalizes.³² By logic—“Here extremes meet,” we read in A Strange Manuscript (p.139)—satirist De Mille brings the Erewhonian professor's proposition to life. Examining the alternatives of materialism and “abstract” spirituality in the light of De Mille's own religious history, M.G. Parks concludes that A Strange Manuscript, as a novel of ideas, is “an assault upon extremes of opposite kinds.”³³ A logical analysis of the logical design of the fiction itself would have forced that very conclusion.

Finally, for the novel's ending. Adam More, as we have seen, is a repetitive creature. Hard of hearing and short-sighted, as it were, and with a one-track mind, the simple sailor is slow to progress in understanding. And so with the Kosekin, who are uncompromising in following their convictions to the extreme, thereby reducing them to absurdity. The satirist who would also reduce to its absurd conclusion the mentality of such as More and the Kosekin is inevitably drawn into their ways, into the dangerous and awkward position of having to imitate his creations. It is not that simply the commentary on More's manuscript within the novel is “boring” or that De Mille here “sacrifices an idea that might have produced another Gulliver's Travels for the sake of an adventure story,” according to the suggestion made in the Literary History of Canada.³⁴ Rather, it would appear that the novel's governing idea, the “obvious mirror-reversal of values,”³⁵ of light and darkness, life and death, as unambiguous as the division of the polar year into two seasons, is not permitted to be enriched significantly beyond the logic of simple antithesis. The absence of a wide play of mind in De Mille's More and the Kosekin prevents a larger life; their satirizing author could not logically avoid sharing in that absence. Once the master concept is put in motion, its author is unable to do much more than repeat it time and again, in character, place, thought, and event. He anticipates the lot of the robot/teacher Plappa in Yevgeny Zamyatin's anti-utopian novel We.

But, as the Zamyatin reference suggests, there is matter for ironic and humourous reflection in such logical entrapment, for Plappa's stutterings and repetitions are a source of merriment to his living students. Similarly, the lively De Mille could hardly have failed to notice that his creations repeated themselves more often than intelligence made necessary. Ne quid nimis. Showing himself a lover of “extended professorial play” in his selfconscious and learned parodying of conventions and sources in A Strange Manuscript,³⁶ De Mille is more likely to have had the earnest More and the always deadly serious Kosekin repeat themselves as often as they do (and cannot help but do) so as to delight the reader with the recognition of yet another risible expression of the effect of darkness on sight. It would not be surprising, however, to learn that De Mille, at first amused with the absurdities of his fiction and its ruling characters—Bergson's “automatism … belongs to the comic,” from the essay “Laughter,” and George Meredith's “the malady of sameness,” from the Prelude to The Egoist, come to mind here—³⁷ grew to become tired of their endlessly predictable iteration, and playfully passed on the awkward task of making his excuses and so ending the book to his pleasure-loving host. There really was not much more of intellectual interest to hear or see or say—except, perhaps, “etc. …, etc. …” It is even possible that, moments after Featherstone's last words were set down, the discreet Dalhousie professor of literature recalled for his own amusement the first words of Herry Bailly as he stinted Chaucer of his “Tale of Sir Thopas”: “‘Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee. …’” The novel of ideas had played itself and its author out. Its happy ending, then, is salutary for all parties concerned. Almah and More are elevated to regal and divine station, the Kosekin have the blessing of increased poverty and suffering to look forward to, Featherstone turns from tiring words and approaching sleep to join his guests in the promise of supper, De Mille can call his creation quits, and the reader of A Strange Manuscript arrives at the last word. The unfinished book is all said and done.

Notes

1. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 8.

2. Henri Bergson, “Laughter” (1900), in Comedy, ed. and introd. Wylie Sypher (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 111-12.

3. Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Maison de Rendez-vous (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 201.

4. The matter of “closure” in the Hous of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde is not meant to be engaged here, only the limits which boredom imposes.

5. James De Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, ed. and introd. R. E. Watters, New Canadian Library, No. 68 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969). All further references to this work appear in the text.

6. George Woodcock, “De Mille and the Utopian Vision,” Journal of Canadian Fiction, 2, No. 3 (Summer 1973), 174.

7. M. G. Parks, “Strange to Strangers Only,” Canadian Literature, No. 70 (Autumn 1976), pp. 61-65.

8. John Moss, A Reader's Guide to the Canadian Novel (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981), p. 61.

9. Parks, p. 61.

10. Watters, Introduction, p. xvii

11. Wayne R. Kime, “The American Antecedents of James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder,” Dalhousie Review, 55 (Summer 1975), 301.

12. J. O. Bailey, Pilgrims through Space and Time (New York: Argus, 1947), p. 42.

13. Woodcock, p. 175.

14. Moss, pp. 59-60.

15. Woodcock, p. 175.

16. Parks, pp. 67-68.

17. Woodcock, p. 178.

18. Woodcock, pp. 179, 178.

19. Parks, pp. 67-70.

20. Woodcock, p. 174.

21. Parks, pp. 61-62. Parks proposes that A Strange Manuscript was written some five years before Erewhon (1872) was published. As Butler notes in his “Preface to the Revised Edition” (1901), however, some parts of Erewhon were published in 1863 and 1865, which fact may serve to stimulate further possible “source” or “influence” study.

22. A former student of De Mille's writes of “that peculiar sarcastic smile of his” (cited by A. R. Bevan, in “James De Mille and Archibald MacMechan,” Dalhousie Review, 35 [Autumn 1955], 205). Lewis Mumford refers to Butler's “quiet, wicked, gentlemanly smile” (Samuel Butler, Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited, introd. Lewis Mumford [New York: Modern Library Edition, 1925], p. xxii).

23. Mumford, Introduction, p. xxiv.

24. Butler, p. 197.

25. Butler, p. 75.

26. Watters, Introduction, p. xiv.

27. Butler, p. 261.

28. Butler, p. 274.

29. Butler, p. 281.

30. Butler, p. 272.

31. Butler, p. 283.

32. Butler, p. 208.

33. Parks, p. 76.

34. Fred Cogswell, “Literary Activity in the Maritime Provinces, 1815-1880,” in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, gen. ed. and introd. Carl F. Klinck, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), i, 127.

35. Watters, Introduction, p. xiv.

36. Kime, p. 302.

37. Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Sypher, p.81; and Meredith, “Prelude” to The Egoist, cited by Sypher, p.ix. The Prelude “rephrases” the theory of comedy set out two years before in Meredith's The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1877).