THE FIGHT AT DAME EUROPA'S SCHOOL: SHOWING HOW THE GERMAN BOY THRASHED THE FRENCH BOY; AND HOW THE ENGLISH BOY LOOKED ON. With 33 Illustrations by Thomas Nast

Book Description

New York: Francis B. Felt & Co., n.d.. [1871]. original purple cloth, front panel stamped in gold, yellow endpapers.. Cloth rubbed at edges and faded, else a very good copy. (#110084). First U.S. edition. The first edition illustrated by Nast. Henry William Pullen's THE FIGHT AT DAME EUROPA'S SCHOOL was an anonymously published allegory about the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871) published in 1870. About 200 pamphlet responses taking various sides of the question, appeared over the next couple of years. Scholars disagree on whether this strange publishing phenomenon, cloaking an ongoing war in the fantastic robes of allegory, should be connected with the other strange war-related publishing phenomenon of the period: THE BATTLE OF DORKING, a short futuristic war fantasy published in 1871, which likewise set off a (smaller) blizzard of sequels, responses, refutations, etc. and established a model for what became a distinctive genre of fantastic literature. The treatment by Pullen and his followers of modern mechanized war as a row among school boys is likely to strike a modern reader as either quaint or horribly naïve. The other irony triggered by a modern reading is that Dame Europa's School, an allegorical figment in 1870, was, 100 years later, well on its way to becoming an actual political and economic institution, the European Union. Locke, A Spectrum of Fanatsy, pp. 16-17.

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