Edmund Boisgilbert, M. D.

[Ignatius Donnelly]

Born in Philadelphia, Pa., U.S. on November 3rd 1831, Donnelly became a recognized novelist, orator, and social reformer, one of the leading advocates of the theory that Francis Bacon was the author of William Shakespeare’s plays.

Donnelly grew up in Philadelphia, where he became a lawyer. In 1856 he moved to Minnesota, where, with another ex-Philadelphian, John Nininger, he founded the boomtown Nininger City, intended as a cultural as well as an industrial centre. There he edited the erudite Emigrant Aid Journal, published in both English and German, to attract settlers. The scheme was successful at first, but a financial panic in 1857 caused abandonment of the town, leaving Donnelly as its only resident.

He entered politics, became an early supporter of the Republican Party, and served as lieutenant governor of Minnesota and as a U.S. Congressman from 1863 to 1869. He left the Republicans in the 1870’s and was active in several minority-party movements representing the interests of small farmers and workmen. Returning to Nininger City, he edited a liberal weekly, the Anti-Monopolist, in which he attacked bankers and financiers, whom he regarded as public enemies.

Donnelly’s first and most popular book was Atlantis published in 1882), which traced the origin of civilization to the legendary submerged continent of Atlantis. It was followed in 1883 by another work of speculation, Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, which attempted to relate certain gravel and till deposits to an ancient near-collision of the Earth and a huge comet. In The Great Cryptogram published in 1888 and The Cipher in the Plays and on the Tombstone in 1899, he attempted to prove that Bacon was the author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare by deciphering a code he discovered in Shakespeare’s works. His deciphering also led him to ascribe the plays of Christopher Marlowe and the essays of Michel de Montaigne to Bacon.
Donnelly’s utopian novel Caesar's Column in 1891, which predicted such developments as radio, television, and poison gas, portrays the United States in 1988 ruled by a ruthless financial oligarchy and peopled by an abject working class. It enhanced Donnelly’s reputation with the Populist Party, which represented the discontented farmers of the West and which he helped found in 1892. At the time of his death, which occurred in January 1901 (Minneapolis, Minn) he was vice presidential candidate of a splinter party, the Middle Road Populists. 1

An extract from Wigston’s The Columbus of Literature, 1892 is worth adding here on Donnelly’s “wonderful book, Caesar’s Column, was first issued in June, 1890. The name on the title page was Edmund Boisgilbert, M. D., and it was given out that this was a pseudonym.

The leading magazines and reviews, with one exception, and many of the great newspapers entirely ignored the book, and everything at first was against its success. It created the most profound interest, however, among those who read it, and soon became talked about by Julian Hawthorne, Bishop Potter, Frances E. Willard and others spoke highly of it, and Cardinal Gibbons praised it as an example of the highest literary form.

Read summed up its charm in these words: “It will thrill a careless reader of novels, or profoundly impress a statesman. It is gentle as a child and yet it is rugged as a giant.” In six months "Caesar's Column" passed through twelve editions, and considerable guessing was done as to the real name of the author, among those prominently named being Judge Tourgee, Mark Twain, T. V. Powderly, Robert G. Ingersoll, Chauncey M. Depew, Benj. F. Butler and others. In December it was finally announced that Ignatius Donnelly, author of Atlantis, and The Great Cryptogram, was also the author of Caesar’s Column. Mr. Donnelly had escaped general suspicion because his previous writings were more distinguished by laborious industry and wide information than by the qualities that go to make the creator of romances.

In Caesar’s Column Donnelly takes as his text the dangerous tendencies of that age he lived in, and gave a picture of what the world will be a hundred years from then, if the spirit of invention and material progress remains the same and the moral spirit of society moves along in its present channels. The San Francisco Chronicle aptly said of it: “In a startlingly original and fascinating novel he presents a profound study of sociological conditions.”