The Vril Staff was written by “X.Y.Z.” “X.Y.Z.” is the pseudonym of an unknown author. The Vril Staff is an unauthorized sequel to Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race.

A San Franciscan rancher is forced to live with the prospect of Indian attacks. Among his guests are a French abbé and his two sisters. But one day one of the rancher’s workers, an Irishman named Zeno Norman, creates a staff, “an engine of destruction of such terrific force that no human power could withstand it.” Norman uses his new weapon against the Indians who threaten the ranch and kills thousands of them. This infuriates the Indians into an organized siege against the ranch, but the siege fails and Norman kills many thousands of the Indians. Some time later the nameless narrator of The Vril Staff meets the abbé and Norman, who tell the narrator that they are members of the Columbia Club, whose goal is

nothing less than the liberation of the whole of Europe from the tyranny of its twenty Caesars, and of reducing the taxation by which they misrule and oppress the 350 million people subject to the monstrous extortion of 2000 millions for uselessly enormous armaments.

The Club plans to run Europe “as cheaply as in America” through a “League of Peace.” The abbé says that faith in God will iron out any difficulties, pointing to the success of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army.

During the winter of 1892 war breaks out in Europe, provoked by the “twenty Caesars” and victimizing “three hundred and fifty million of these wretched peasants.” Russia threatens Europe, but Zeno Norman joins the Austrian War Office and heads to the front. When a wave of Russian cavalry charges Norman’s position, they die in great numbers thanks to his staff. Norman becomes a minor celebrity because of his slaughter of the Russian troops. Russia allies with Turkey, but the abbé, thanks to his association with Norman and his connections with the Columbia Club, gains influence among the rulers of the Europe and helps bring about the Vienna-Berlin-Rome alliance, which stalemates the Russian-Turkey alliance. Norman demonstrates his staff several times more and is outspoken in favor of world peace. He becomes an international celebrity, adored by the masses and constantly surrounded by fanatical bodyguards. Many of the European countries form the League of Peace, which creates its own army, whose purpose will be international peace-keeping. The French public is entranced with the League, but “patriots, communards, and the red socialists” are opposed to the idea of France joining the League, and Boulanger leads a rebellion against the League. Gladstone takes power from the Marquess of Salisbury and gives Ireland home rule. The Irish Protestants protest but are eventually forced to accept the English decision. The League of Peace defeats the French rebels, and New Europe is formed, with its capital at Strasbourg. Alsace-Lorraine is returned to France, which further pleases the French public.

England is the only European country which is not a member of the League of Peace; the English people are all in favor of joining the League, but the English government refuses to yield sovereignty. When Zeno Norman visits his sisters in Ireland he is threatened with arrest by the government, but popular sentiment is so in favor of Norman that the government decides against an arrest attempt. Norman suggests a demonstration of his staff’s power, which the English government is happy to accept. At Aldershot army artillery shells Norman, but his staff protects him and with it he kills the artillery units. The High Church, the upper classes, and the military are furious with Norman and denounce the experiment as “the jugglery of a Yankee mountebank,” but the nonconformist clergy and the rest of the English population are overjoyed.

Norman’s lover Agnes is kidnapped by the Russians, who intend to use her against Norman, but Norman travels to Russia, kills many Cossacks, and rescues Agnes. A great deal of Society material and romantic subplots follow. England eventually joins the League of Peace. A German general leads an Irish revolt against the League, which is defeated. Agnes forms schools to help women. The weather around Europe changes. Ireland becomes idyllic, England gains the environment of Newfoundland, and English and European immigrants create new cities around the Mediterranean.

The Vril Staff is a curiosity. The author acknowledges their debt to Bulwer Lytton on the first page and proceeds to tell the type of story which George Griffith (see: The Angel of the Revolution) would later popularize: advanced technology leading to a Future War whose end result is world peace and a utopia. The author addresses the major political issues of the day, from home rule in Ireland to the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine, while also lobbying for an end to vivisection and improved treatment of women. The author further includes an intercalated story about a human visiting other planets and meeting aliens who are similar to Aleriel (see: A Voice From Another World) in appearance and temperament.

In other words, The Vril Staff does not know what type of novel it wants to be. It lurches from Future War novel to Society novel to Utopia, including twenty-seven page lectures on the evils of the Catholic Church but omitting scene transitions, character development, and general coherence. The actual Vril Staff is not mentioned until late in the novel, the author does not describe it in any detail, and for most of the novel the reader is kept ignorant of how Norman kills. This does not seem to have been deliberate on the writer’s part, but rather something they meant to establish early in the novel and forgot about.

Interestingly, there is nothing of Theosophy in The Vril Staff, despite the Theosophical Society having immediately adopted The Coming Race and made the idea of the vril a part of their doctrine. And The Vril Staff’s portrayal of European politics, especially English opposition to the European Union-like League of Peace, strikes an occasional prescient note.

Lastly, The Vril Staff is a good example of the Victorian production and use of unauthorized sequel–that is, a sequel written without the knowledge or permission of the original text’s author(s). Perhaps the foremost Victorian example of this phenomenon is William Makepeace Thackeray’s Rebecca and Rowena: A Romance Upon Romance (1850), an unauthorized sequel to Scott’s Ivanhoe that Thackeray wrote to right Scott’s wrong in having Ivanhoe and Rowena marry rather than Ivanhoe and Rebecca marry. Admittedly, Rebecca and Rowena was written somewhat satirically, and Thackeray wrote, of Ivanhoe and Rebecca’s marriage, that “I don't think they had any...children, or were subsequently very boisterously happy. Of some sort of happiness melancholy is a characteristic, and I think these were a solemn pair, and died rather early.”¹ But an unauthorized sequel it was nonetheless, like The Vril Staff. Unauthorized sequels were hardly a Victorian invention:

...from the very beginning of the Western literary tradition, narratives have been parasitical on previous narratives; Greek drama is based on well-known myths, as are the Iliad and the Odyssey. Though the romantic linking of the value of art to originality initiated a shift in the way readers judge works of art, and the perception of the novel–as indicated in the very word “novel”–was that it was new in form and told the “news” in content, novels in fact have always responded to and often revised earlier texts. The arguably first modern novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, is a response to hundreds of previous chivalric romances.²

But the nineteenth century, with its proliferation of novel-writing, provided an unusually large number of unauthorized sequels, from Anna Richard’s A New Alice in Old Wonderland (1895), a sequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, to Honoré de Balzac’s Melmoth Reconciled (original: Melmoth Réconcilié, 1835), an unauthorized sequel to Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, to the large number of offended responses to George Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking,” to the numerous sequels to Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland (1884), to George W.M. Reynolds’ Pickwick Abroad, or the Tour in France (1837-1838), a sequel to Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, to Serviss’ Edison’s Conquest of Mars as a sequel to Wells’ War of the Worlds. That the Victorian era was a wonderland of unauthorized sequels was in part due to lax enforcement of copyright laws–or, in the case of the United States, no enforcement of them whatsoever–and in part due to either the desire to capitalize off of another work’s popularity or from a kind of hero-worship.³

¹ William Makepeace Thackeray, Rebecca and Rowena: A Romance Upon Romance (Paris: E. Thunot & Co., 1850), 99.

² Anne Humphreys, “The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels about Novels,” in Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing, eds., A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 443.

³ For much more on this, see Clare Pettitt, Patent Inventions–Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).