Baron Trump’s Marvellous Underground Journey

Ingersoll Lockwood, an American political writer, lawyer and novelist, combined a unique mixture of science fiction and fantasy into his novels from the late 1800s. Two of his most popular works of literature were illustrated children’s stories, focusing on a peculiar fictional character whose name rings a bell in 2017: Baron Trump.

Trump, an aristocratically wealthy young man living in Castle Trump, is the protagonist of Lockwood’s first two fictional novels, The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulgar and Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey. The little boy, who has an unending imagination and “a very active brain,” is bored of the luxurious lifestyle he has grown so accustomed to. In a twist of fate, Trump visits Russia to embark on an extraordinary adventure that will shape the rest of his life.

Lockwood’s final novel arrived in 1896, titled The Last President.

Illustrations from the novels depict Trump dressed in lavish, old-fashioned clothing and jewelry as he departs from Castle Trump and begins his voyage, heading to Russia to locate an entrance into alternate dimensions.

But by Lockwood’s third novel, The Last President, things become even more eerily linked to the present day.

The story begins with a scene from a panicked New York City in early November, describing a “state of uproar” after the election of an enormously opposed outsider candidate.

“The entire East Side is in a state of uproar,” police officers shouted through the streets, warning city folk to stay indoors for the night. “Mobs of vast size are organizing under the lead of anarchists and socialists, and threaten to plunder and despoil the houses of the rich who have wronged and oppressed them for so many years.”

“The Fifth Avenue Hotel will be the first to feel the fury of the mob,” the novel continues, citing an address in New York City where Trump Tower now stands. “Would the troops be in time to save it?”

The Last President doesn’t follow the same fictional narrative of Lockwood’s previous novels, though the links to Trump are once again abundantly clear. The president’s hometown of New York City is fearing the collapse of the republic in this book, also titled 1900, immediately following the transition of presidential power. Some Americans begin forming a resistance, protesting what was seen as a corrupt and unethical election process.

Source:
Newsweek