The Anarchist was written by Col. Richard Henry Savage. Savage (1846-1903) was the author of various historical romances and was a soldier, lawyer, world traveler, and engineer. He had a considerable following in the U.K. and the U.S. during his lifetime, He was also reportedly a loose model for Lester Dent’s pulp hero Doc Savage.¹

The Anarchist is set in a near future in which anarchism is triumphing over civilization and sweeping the world; one character speaks of “flaming Cincinnati, sacked Pittsburgh, and great New York under mob rule! The poison of anarchy is daily infiltrated through every industrial stratum!”² The plot of The Anarchist involves the wealthy American heiress Evelyn Hartley and the efforts of her tutor, Professor Carl Stein, to gain control over her and her riches. Stein does not want to marry Evelyn because “she would never waken to life under my wooing,”³ so he tries to arrange her marriage to men under his control. He wants her money to fund The Revolution. He tries to get it. He fails.

The Anarchist is one of a number of Victorian novels about anarchy and anarchists. The Anarchist is a particularly bad and boring example of the genre. The Anarchist is nakedly didactic, and Savage lacks the skill to create an entertaining narrative to mask his message. In his preface Savage approvingly says that “organized cosmopolitan repression will be the stern answer of the civilized world to the dark creed of Destruction.”⁴ The rest of The Anarchist is written to support this message. But the novel is not well-written or particularly interesting. The characterization is over-obvious, the dialogue is rife with exclamation points, Savage has far too many infodumps in the guise of dialogue, and there are pages-long monologues of philosophy and shrill, screeching lecturing. The interesting evil of Stein is nowhere near enough to offset the novel’s many flaws.

Really, the only reason to read The Anarchist is for Stein. Savage clearly viewed him as the villain of the novel, but modern readers are likely to view him with some sympathy, if not outright approval. Stein, after all, is opposed to the Czarist regime–which in real life was an evil regime that used torture and terror to oppress its serfs and ethnic minorities–and believes in an anti-capitalist revolution. A violent revolution, it must be admitted–Stein is no Communist, he’s an anarchist and a nihilist:

Bakunin was right! The ultra-nihilists are logical! Thrones must be emptied by assassination! Palaces wrecked! Wealth must shudder in its bed of doom! First, individuals, then the sordid oppressors of the poor, last the whole social system!⁵

Despite his violent tendencies, Stein’s heart is in the right place, and Savage strangely spends an excess of time in describing him and his thoughts, portraying him as a kind of superman, a “dreaming, human tiger,”⁶ so that the reader is led to view him as a man of heroic capabilities. Savage’s assumption that Stein’s political views were so abhorrent that all readers would turn against him has not proven to be the case historically.

In sum, if you must read The Anarchist, read only the parts with Stein and skip the rest.

Print: Richard Henry Savage, The Anarchist; a story of to-day. London: British Library, 2011.

Haia Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880-1914,” Victorian Studies 31, No. 4 (Summer 1988): 487-516.

Haia Shpayer-Makov, “A traitor to his class: the anarchist in British fiction,” Journal of European Studies 26.3 (Sept. 1996): 299-325.

¹ Marilyn Cannaday, Bigger Than Life: The Creator of Doc Savage (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990), 15-16.

² Richard Henry Savage, The Anarchist: a story of today (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauschnitz, 1894), 38.

³ Savage, The Anarchist, 68.

⁴ Savage, The Anarchist, 6.

⁵ Savage, The Anarchist, 86.

⁶ Savage, The Anarchist, 48.