A Crystal Age

A man falls, and wakes in a world thousands of years hence where the family is the state, the house is the world, war is forgotten and the passion that drove his own century has been bred out. Hudson was a naturalist born on the Argentine pampas who came to England at thirty-three and lived in poverty; this 1887 romance sold badly and was rediscovered by writers — the paradise in it is genuinely alien, and the narrator cannot live in it. Fifty-nine plates of moonlit houses and sleeping figures, from Walter Crane to Edward Mitchell Bannister, hold the dreamlike stillness of the far-future world Hudson's narrator can never quite inhabit.