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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 4, December 1944
Page 52
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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 52 But Nininger refused to grow, and Donnelly went into politics, being elected, at the age of 28, Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota. Then he went to Congress, and after his defeat in 1870 retired to his rambling mansion (still to be seen not far from Hastings) in his ghost city and there, with the aid of a sizable library of his own, plus the copious notes he had made in Washington, he went to work on a book that was to live. He also tried to carry on his farm, but by 1880 he was almost ready for the poorhouse. "In the winter of 1880-1881," he recalled in later years, "there was nothing left of me but the backbone. I was pounding my heel on the rocks. The very gulls had abandoned me." But at last he had completed his manuscript. In 1882 Harpers brought it out. It was Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, no novel, but a serious study to demonstrate the truth of Plato's story of a sunken Atlantic island. Donnelly held, and aruged most effectively for his theory, that the world's original civilization had developed on Atlantis, the veritable Garden of Eden of the Bible, and thence had spread to the continents. The book caught on immediately, and within a few months was the talk of the country, and also of England. The great Gladstone himself commended it highly in a letter to the author in which he said he was disposed to believe in an Atlantis, then went on to cite phenomena of marine flora and fauna in support of the Atlantis theory. Poems about Atlantis appeared in periodicals. Newspaper advertisers played upon the word. Gagsters picked it up. With the stigmata of a rousing best seller so apparent, Harpers put on a night shift in the press room. No critic could confound Atlantis; too much erudition had gone into it. It was charmingly written, and the whole theory made so plausible that the public devoured it and believed they were getting great doses of sound archaeology---as indeed maybe they were. In any case, there can be no doubt that Donnelly's book gave generations of men and women their first insight into the wonders of archaeological theory and research. How many copies of Atlantis have been sold is not known, not even by Harpers, but it is thought to have gone through at least fifty editions or printings. It put Donnelly on his feet---there wasn't much wrong with his head---and presently, in 1883, he came out with another book, Ragnarok, the Age of Fire and Gravel, in which he attributed the world's deposits of clay, gravel, silt and sand to contact with a mighty comet in some prehistoric time. This volume had a large sale, but did not reach that of Atlantis. Donnelly took to the lecture platform, where he was very popular. Smooth-shaven, like Ingersoll, in a day of beard; good-looking, portly, and with good nature apparent in his speech and every gesture, he could doubtless have lectured indefinitely had he so desired. But a magnum opus was tormenting his restless mind. This appeared in 1888. It was The Great Cryptogram, of a size and weight to call for both hands to hold. IT was financially a failure, in spite of pretty fair sales, but truly wonderful in the rumpus it caused. In this book the author set out to prove, by the use of an ingenious cipher, that Francis Bacon wrote all of the works commonly attributed to Shakespeare. Never a man to do anything by halves, Donnelly also indicated that Bacon probably also wrote Marlowe's plays, Montaigne's Essays, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. This would seem quite an order, but it was nothing much for a man of Donnelly's erudition and horsepower. The better known critics of the time either ignored The Great Cryptogram or jumped on it with heavy feet. A considerable literary war was fought. The book is yet remembered and read by specialists, and as recently as 1923 Henry Wellington Wach, then president of the National Shakespeare Federation, in an address before the Baconian Society, remarked of it that "thinking men and women the world over sat up and rubbed their eyes at its appearance. Scholars everywhere, regardless of their belief or otherwise of the Baconian authorship of
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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 52 But Nininger refused to grow, and Donnelly went into politics, being elected, at the age of 28, Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota. Then he went to Congress, and after his defeat in 1870 retired to his rambling mansion (still to be seen not far from Hastings) in his ghost city and there, with the aid of a sizable library of his own, plus the copious notes he had made in Washington, he went to work on a book that was to live. He also tried to carry on his farm, but by 1880 he was almost ready for the poorhouse. "In the winter of 1880-1881," he recalled in later years, "there was nothing left of me but the backbone. I was pounding my heel on the rocks. The very gulls had abandoned me." But at last he had completed his manuscript. In 1882 Harpers brought it out. It was Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, no novel, but a serious study to demonstrate the truth of Plato's story of a sunken Atlantic island. Donnelly held, and aruged most effectively for his theory, that the world's original civilization had developed on Atlantis, the veritable Garden of Eden of the Bible, and thence had spread to the continents. The book caught on immediately, and within a few months was the talk of the country, and also of England. The great Gladstone himself commended it highly in a letter to the author in which he said he was disposed to believe in an Atlantis, then went on to cite phenomena of marine flora and fauna in support of the Atlantis theory. Poems about Atlantis appeared in periodicals. Newspaper advertisers played upon the word. Gagsters picked it up. With the stigmata of a rousing best seller so apparent, Harpers put on a night shift in the press room. No critic could confound Atlantis; too much erudition had gone into it. It was charmingly written, and the whole theory made so plausible that the public devoured it and believed they were getting great doses of sound archaeology---as indeed maybe they were. In any case, there can be no doubt that Donnelly's book gave generations of men and women their first insight into the wonders of archaeological theory and research. How many copies of Atlantis have been sold is not known, not even by Harpers, but it is thought to have gone through at least fifty editions or printings. It put Donnelly on his feet---there wasn't much wrong with his head---and presently, in 1883, he came out with another book, Ragnarok, the Age of Fire and Gravel, in which he attributed the world's deposits of clay, gravel, silt and sand to contact with a mighty comet in some prehistoric time. This volume had a large sale, but did not reach that of Atlantis. Donnelly took to the lecture platform, where he was very popular. Smooth-shaven, like Ingersoll, in a day of beard; good-looking, portly, and with good nature apparent in his speech and every gesture, he could doubtless have lectured indefinitely had he so desired. But a magnum opus was tormenting his restless mind. This appeared in 1888. It was The Great Cryptogram, of a size and weight to call for both hands to hold. IT was financially a failure, in spite of pretty fair sales, but truly wonderful in the rumpus it caused. In this book the author set out to prove, by the use of an ingenious cipher, that Francis Bacon wrote all of the works commonly attributed to Shakespeare. Never a man to do anything by halves, Donnelly also indicated that Bacon probably also wrote Marlowe's plays, Montaigne's Essays, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. This would seem quite an order, but it was nothing much for a man of Donnelly's erudition and horsepower. The better known critics of the time either ignored The Great Cryptogram or jumped on it with heavy feet. A considerable literary war was fought. The book is yet remembered and read by specialists, and as recently as 1923 Henry Wellington Wach, then president of the National Shakespeare Federation, in an address before the Baconian Society, remarked of it that "thinking men and women the world over sat up and rubbed their eyes at its appearance. Scholars everywhere, regardless of their belief or otherwise of the Baconian authorship of
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