The Land of Darkness

The Land of Darkness', which is nominally a part of Oliphant's series of stories featuring a character known as the Little Pilgrim, but is in many ways distinct from other tales in the series, purports to be 'drawn from the Archives' which the female Pilgrim has learned about. The nameless male narrator finds himself in the afterlife, a hellish world in which, he soon discovers, self-interest and self-preservation are the primary goals of every inhabitant. This Darwinian world is also highly urban, with traffic and brightly lit shops among the first things the narrator encounters. The narrator learns that all the institutions he held dear in the Victorian world he has left behind, such as hospitals, the police, and the legal system, are unheard of in this infernal world. In the course of the story, and as he wanders through this world, the narrator encounters a man being tortured - in what looks like a live vivisection - on an operating table, descends into the underground mines where he finds scores of men slaving away for gold, finds a place of excessive pleasure which proves just as unbearable as the mines, and finally encounters robotic creatures which are being made to do the work of men, in a vision of work which is poised between a depiction of real-life Victorian manual labour and a hellish Dantean future.The story is evidently meant to reflect Oliphant's contemporary Victorian world as she saw it: for the deeply religious novelist, Christian values were being eroded and scientific experimentation and technological progress were now man's chief passion. The Dantean and Christian elements to the story were what initial reviewers chose to focus on, but it is the story's depiction of a dystopian world of machinery and slave labour - and, above all, a sort of proto-robotics - that makes it most relevant to a modern readership. 'The Land of Darkness' is preoccupied with the increasing industrialisation and urbanisation of the Victorian period, and the implications this has for morality and human relations. Hell is the dystopia of dystopias, for 'dystopia' is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as 'an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible' and hell is man's supreme imaginative vision of such a place.......................Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (born Margaret Oliphant Wilson) (4 April 1828 - 20 June 1897), was a Scottish novelist and historical writer, who usually wrote as Mrs. Oliphant. Her fictional works encompass "domestic realism, the historical novel and tales of the supernatural". LifeThe daughter of Francis W. Wilson (c. 1788 - 1858), a clerk, and his wife, Margaret Oliphant (c. 1789 - 17 September 1854), she was born at Wallyford, near Musselburgh, East Lothian, and spent her childhood at Lasswade (near Dalkeith), Glasgow and Liverpool. As a girl, she constantly experimented with writing. In 1849 she had her first novel published: Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland. This dealt with the Scottish Free Church movement, with which her parents had sympathised, and which had met with some success. It was followed by Caleb Field in 1851, the year in which she met the publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh and was invited to contribute to Blackwood's Magazine. The connection would last for her lifetime, during which she contributed well over 100 articles, including a critique of the character of Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.In May 1852, she married her cousin, Frank Wilson Oliphant, at Birkenhead, and settled at Harrington Square, now in Camden, London. Her husband was an artist working mainly in stained glass. Three of their six children died in infancy. The father himself developed alarming symptoms of consumption (tuberculosis). ...