The Mummy! : Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century is an 1827 novel written by Jane C. Loudon. It concerns an Egyptian mummy named Cheops who is brought back to life in the year 2126. The novel borrows many themes and ideas from another popular science fiction novel written by a female author of the period, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, as well as ideas about a future filled with advanced technology. In addition, it also features one of the earliest known examples of a "Mummy's curse".
Jane Loudon may have drawn inspiration from the general fashion for anything Pharaonic, inspired by the French researches during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt; the 1821 public unwrappings of Egyptian mummies in a theatre near Piccadilly, which she may have attended as a girl; and, very likely, the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. As Shelley had written of Frankenstein's creation, "A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch," which may have triggered young Miss Webb's later concept. In any case, at many points she deals in greater clarity with elements from the earlier book: the loathing for the much-desired object, the immediate arrest for crime and attempt to lie one's way out of it, etc.
However, unlike the Frankenstein monster, the hideous revived Cheops is not shuffling around dealing out horror and death, but giving canny advice on politics and life to those who befriend him. In some ways The Mummy! may be seen as her reaction to themes in Frankenstein: her mummy specifically says he is allowed life only by divine favour, rather than being indisputably vivified only by mortal science, and so on, as Hopkins' 2003 essay covers in detail.
Unlike many early science fiction works (Shelley's The Last Man, and The Reign of King George VI, 1900-1925, written anonymously in 1763), Loudon did not portray the future as her own day with only political changes. She filled her world with foreseeable changes in technology, society, and even fashion. Her court ladies wear trousers and hair ornaments of controlled flame. Surgeons and lawyers may be steam-powered automatons. A kind of Internet is predicted in it. Besides trying to account for the revivification of the mummy in scientific terms — galvanic shock rather than incantations — she embodied ideas of scientific progress and discovery, that now read like prophecies to those later down the 1800s. Her social attitudes have resulted in this book being ranked among feminist novels.
The Mummy! : Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century was published anonymously in 1827 by Henry Colburn in three volumes, as was usual in that day so that each small volume could be easily carried around. It drew many favourable reviews, including one in 1829 in The Gardener's Magazine on the inventions proposed in it.
Jane Wells Webb Loudon (19 August 1807 – 13 July 1858) was an English author and early pioneer of science fiction. She wrote before the term was invented, and was discussed for a century as if she wrote Gothic fiction, or fantasy or horror. She also created the first popular gardening manuals, as opposed to specialist horticultural works, and contributed to the work of her husband, John Claudius Loudon.
