Griffith, Mary
Entry updated 24 August 2020. Tagged: Author.
(?1800-1877) US horticultural author and author whose early Utopia, Three Hundred Years Hence (1950), originally appeared as one of the stories in Camperdown, or News from Our Neighbourhood: Being Sketches (coll 1836) as by An Author of our Neighbourhood. In an extremely early use of the Sleeper-Awakes convention – though (typical of early nineteenth-century conventions regarding the fantastic) the experiences depicted are described as a dream – the tale takes its protagonist 200 years forward into an automated, urban world where women are emancipated, Slavery is abolished (though at the cost of the repatriation of Blacks to an Africa they have never known), drunkards are pilloried, good hygiene is enforced, dogs are extinct and Shakespeare is expurgated. It is a bluestocking world, but one whose Feminism and good sense are conveyed with a substantial force of imagination. [JC/PN]
see also: Suspended Animation.
Mary Griffith
born ?Charles Hope, New Jersey: ?1800
died Pennsylvania?: 1877
works
- Camperdown, or News from Our Neighbourhood: Being Sketches (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1836) as by An Author of our Neighbourhood [coll: "Three Hundred Years Hence" occupies pages 9-92: hb/]
- Three Hundred Years Hence (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Prime Press, 1950) [reprints the story of the same name from the above: hb/]
links
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