A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), by James De Mille, is a classic lost-world adventure and satirical utopia. The frame narrative opens with yachters who discover a manuscript sealed in a copper cylinder drifting at sea. The manuscript recounts the tale of Adam More, a British sailor shipwrecked near Antarctica, who stumbles upon a tropical volcanic realm at the South Pole. There he encounters the Kosekin, a strange civilization that worships death, darkness, and poverty while despising wealth and life—an inversion of Victorian values. More and his beloved Almah endure captivity, sacrifice rituals, and desperate escapes in this imaginative critique of greed.
