The Nihilist Napoleon

Stone, J. Harris and Percy Carter

Verlag: London Marcus Ward & Co, Ltd 1885, 1885

Beschreibung

First edition. 172 pages. A Victorian paperback in grubby, foxed and slightly torn, but substantially present grey/blue wraps, lettered and illustrated in black and orange, the spine has loss to the bottom quarter and the rest is slightly fragile. The text block is somewhat foxed, toned and marked, it is still reasonably well stitched together. Set in the near future in an unspecified year of the late 1890s, this is a stirring, action packed account of a full-blown, full-blooded, bizarrely well-coordinated nihilist uprising, which begins in Russia and sweeps through Europe. We follow events through the eyes of our intrepid upper class hero, the nephew of a merchant who has offices in St Petersburg, as he is thrown within two pages into the midst of the horror, witnessing the hanging of an unspecified traitor by an unnamed organisation from beneath a wicker basket. Before many more pages have passed, he has accidentally joined a nihilist mob and sacked some palace or other, escaping by pretending to pursue a Russian aristocrat who in reality he is shielding from pursuit by the genuine nihilists. After a narrow escape of being shot by the aristocrat they rapidly become friends, kill and roast a swan, escape from a forest fire by swimming to an island, kill and roast a sheep(taking a couple of legs of roasted mutton for the road) and then rescue a countess. All of the preceding events occur within the first fifteen pages, but the intensity of the action at no point diminishes, as we range through Prussia and then to England. London is sacked and looted, several naval battles occur, the prisons are emptied, everybody gets drunk, women have their dresses ripped from them and flail around in their underclothes. Then somehow within about 8 pages everything calms down, the uprising is over, our hero has become "a confirmed bachelor", who owns two houses(presumably his Uncle died in the uprising, it's really not clear!) and all is once again well with the world. The authors seem to have written little else, although J. Harris Stone apparently wrote a book on caravanning and became the Honorary Secretary of the U.K. Caravan Club when it was formed in 1907, holding this distinguished role until 1933. A rare find. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 6771

Bibliografische Details

Titel: The Nihilist Napoleon

Verlag: London Marcus Ward & Co, Ltd 1885

Erscheinungsdatum: 1885

Auflage: 1. Auflage