The Idler November, 1892 THE DOOM OF LONDON by Robert Barr ROBERT Barr lived the drama-packed adventures that are frequently credited to newspapermen in fiction. Though Glasgow-born and a grade school instructor in the Windsor, Ontario, public schools, he eventually obtained a post on the Detroit Free Press. There he became a legend, rumored to have dodged bullets and bounded across rivers of breaking ice in pursuit of news beats. He was eventually transferred to the paper’s London office. In England’s primary city he roomed with Rudyard Kipling and became a close friend of A. Conan Doyle.
He decided to start his own business and through Doyle was introduced to Jerome K. Jerome, famed playwright of
Three Men in a Boat (1889). Pooling resources they launched The Idler, its first issue dated February 1892. It was a success from the start, featuring smart fiction of the highest quality by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Rudyard Kipling, A. Conan Doyle, Israel Zangwill, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells, among others.
It was in The Idler (November 1892) that
The Doom of London was first published. Quite obviously it was intended as a fictional warning to the city of London to do something about the paralyzing fog, actually caused by the fumes from the thousands of soft-coal fires, which read so romantically in Sherlock Holmes stories, but which accounted for numerous deaths annually. In doing so, Barr popularized a new fictional gambit of civic criticism disguised as science fiction, later to be taken up by other writers, among them Cutcliffe Hyne, Grant Allen and, most elaborately, Fred M. White with a series of six disasters for London in Pearson’s Magazine during 1903 and 1904.
The Doom of London was reprinted in America in McClure’s Magazine (November 1894), again in The Idler (February 1905), and in Barr’s hardcover collection,
The Face in the Mask (1895).
Barr frequently returned to tales that could be classed as science fiction or fantasy, among them
The Fear of It (The Idler, May 1893), a Utopia of an island whose people have never heard of England or the United States;
The Revolt of the— (The Idler, May 1894), telling of the rise of women to a place of dominance in business; and his very clever novel,
From Whose Bourne (1896), where a murdered man recruits a great detective from the spirit world to help him clear his widow of suspicion in his death.
Almost forgotten today, Barr was an inventive and satirical writer, well regarded in his time and distinctly worth the trouble of reviving.
1. The Self-Conceit of the Twentieth Century. I TRUST I am thankful my life has been spared until I have seen that most brilliant epoch of the world’s history—the middle of the twentieth century. It would be useless for any man to disparage the vast achievements of the past fifty years; and if I venture to call attention to the fact, now apparently forgotten, that the people of the nineteenth century succeeded in accomplishing many notable things, it must not be imagined that I intend thereby to discount in any measure the marvellous inventions of the present age. Men have always been somewhat prone to look with a certain condescension upon those who lived fifty or a hundred years before them. This seems to me the especial weakness of the present age; a feeling of national self-conceit, which, when it exists, should at least be kept as much in the background as possible. It will astonish many to know that such also was a failing of the people of the nineteenth century. They imagined themselves living in an age of progress; and while I am not foolish enough to attempt to prove that they did anything really worth recording, yet it must be admitted by any unprejudiced man of research that their inventions were at least stepping-stones to those of today. Although the telephone and telegraph, and all other electrical appliances, are now to be found only in our national museums, or in the private collections of those few men who take any interest in the doings of the last century, nevertheless, the study of the now obsolete science of electricity led up to the recent discovery of vibratory ether which does the work of the world so satisfactorily. The people of the nineteenth century were not fools; and although I am well aware that this statement will be received with scorn where it attracts any attention whatever, yet who can say that the progress of the next half-century may not be as great as that of the one now ended, and that the people of the next century may not look upon us with the same contempt which we feel toward those who lived fifty years ago?
