FOREWORD

In March 1925, the audience at a teatime lecture at the Royal United Service Institution in Whitehall were invited to become gods. The principal speaker, Arthur Lovell, author of Ars Vivendi (1895) expounded upon the theory of Higher Vitality -- a fizzingly powerful mental state enjoyed, he claimed, by an elite of highly evolved humans who could be recognised by the shape of their noses. The coming race.

'Human growth is possible in one way only,' he declared. 'Full breathing upwards to the sinuses as well as downwards to the chest.' With this method, Lovell asserted, those who desired to achieve supernormal status -- the status of Shakespeare, Nelson and Napoleon -- might draw more deeply from 'the infinite ocean of energy' through which all human beings swam. He gave this energy a name: vril. 'Vril naturally signifies the height of dominion attained by cultivation of man's latent power ... it expresses, with precision, nerve-energy and will-force combined in the developed individual.' Lovell had stolen the name from a book: the one you now have in your hands.

In The Coming Race, vril is a force that can heal a wound, animate a household robot and illuminate or annihilate a city. It was conceived by Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, novelist, Baronet and Tory cabinet minister --  a man noted in his lifetime for founding the 'silver fork' school of society fiction, for his interest in the occult, and for his part in one of the most acrimonious marital bust-ups in British literary history. (Lytton had his wife, Rosina Doyle Wheeler, committed to a private lunatic asylum for a fortnight in 1858 -- she took her revenge by depicting the incident in a stinging autobiographical novel.)

The Coming Race was published anonymously in 1871, though the identity of its author was a very open secret. Lytton told his friend John Forster, Dickens' biographer, that the book was an attempt to fictionalise 'the Darwinian proposition that a coming race is destined to supplant our races'. Humanity's executioners are the Vril-ya, a race of winged demigods encountered by the unnamed hero, an American adventurer who stumbles across one of their subterranean cities at the bottom of a freshly sunk mineshaft.

From the evidence of their language, the visitor concludes that the Vril-ya are of Aryan descent. Physically, they resemble Native Americans. Their society offers a life of serene indolence for adults and frantic industry for children. Junior Vril-ya serve in the army, staff the shops and fend off the underworld's native population of carnivorous giant lizards. Vril-ya parents, however, loll about in well-appointed villas eating fruit and listening to the twittering of caged birds. Crime, adultery and literature have all died away in this civilisation. Feminism, vegetarianism and choral music flourish. Artificial sunlight beams down, fearsome weapons keep the barbarians of the lower regions at bay, machines perform menial tasks. And the power that motivates this society -- the mastery of vril -- is a genetic inheritance: thick bunches of nerves in their hands allow the Vril-ya to control its flow, to channel its power in acts of creation and destruction, and to fly through the vast recesses of their world on mechanical wings. 'In the course of one or two thousand years,' the visitor from the surface is told, 'such a nerve may possibly be engendered in those higher beings of your race, who devote themselves to that paramount science through which is attained command over all the subtler forces of nature permeated by vril.'

Arthur Lovell thought he might be one of those higher beings. During the first decade of the twentieth century he was a founder member of an organisation named the Vril-ya Club. Frustratingly, the material relating to its proceedings has disappeared from the stacks of the British Library, but his large body of pseudoscientific writings indicate how much energy he devoted to his attempts to realise the concepts of Lytton's science fiction -- and to convince others that this was a worthwhile way of spending their time. 'Human transmutation' was the object of his work. Sunbathing, walking in the moonlight, deep breathing and keeping an even temper were the keys to 'developing vril'. The Vril-ya, he noted, in Ars Vivendi, 'maintain a perpetual calmness of outward demeanour, with the inborn consciousness of superior power'. Therefore, he argued, 'for the preservation of health at its very best, a quiet manner is indispensable'.

Who were Lovell's acolytes? Sitting in the audience at the Royal United Service Institution that night in 1925 was F. G. Crookshank, author of The Mongol in our Midst (1924), a book that suggested that what is now called Down's Syndrome was evidence of an atavistic return to the state of the orang-utan. Crookshank liked what he heard so much that he wrote Lovell an approving letter about the evolutionary significance of the human nose. Also present was Jane Lorimer Hawthorne, a doctor who took the platform to report how she had been putting Lovell's ideas into practice at the Stepney Infant Welfare Centre. Hawthorne was a close colleague of the birth control campaigner and eugenicist Marie Stopes -- whose own writings display a fondness for quoting the title of Lytton's work. But Hawthorne's most significant contribution to British medical culture was as an advocate of cooler relationships between parents and children. 'A woman who is praised as a loving and affectionate mother; she told a meeting of the New Health Society in 1934, 'is sometimes merely being self- indulgent.' These were the tenets of the coming race.

Those who regarded Lytton's book as prophetic and believed they had a part in its future -- and those who attempted to materialise its images -- generally ended up looking foolish. In 1891, Dr Herbert Tibbits, founder of the London Massage and Galvanic Hospital and promoter of an 'electric corset' that claimed to cure menstrual pain, persuaded the Marchioness Dowager of Londonderry, the Countess of Cromarty, Lady Georgiana Elizabeth Spencer Churchill and a gaggle of like-minded aristocrats to staff the stalls at a six-day 'Coming Race Bazaar' at the Albert Hall. The city of the Vril-ya was recreated in the auditorium, but nobody came. Herbert Tibbits got drunk and started insulting his nurses, and everybody ended up in court. In 1905, the magician Nevil Maskelyne spent thousands putting the novel on the stage -- but yielded reviews that complained that the vril weapons were merely 'bicycle pumps of nickel loaded with squibs'. ('Many persons thought the play was "over the heads" of the public; reflected Maskelyne's business partner, David Devant, some quarter of a century later.

There was one group, however, that had more success in turning Lytton's fantasies into prophecies. The Vril-ya, we're told, have discovered how to send energy in projectile form across distances of hundreds of miles, 'so as to reduce to ashes within a space of time too short for me to venture to specify it, a capital twice as vast as London'. When Professor Henry Robinson, President of the Society of Engineers, addressed his members at their annual dinner in 1878, he described the trial of a prototype machine gun in Antwerp that was capable of firing 7,200 shots in one minute. It reminded, him, he said, of the guns in Lytton's book, and recalled how 'one army of subterranean inhabitants bad destroyed an opposing army by a single discharge of their electrical weapons, leaving as a residuum a small amount of carbonaceous matter'. His audience laughed heartily -- but they stopped, presumably, when he reflected, 'from the inventions that are daily taking place it seems we are not far from the realisation of such fancies.' In the next few decades, such observations would become commonplace. When a Times reporter described how a group of horsemen at the 1903 Royal Military Tournament had arranged themselves into the form of the letters 'V.R.I.L.', he remarked, 'this is not the mysterious quasi-electrical force prophesied in The Coming Race --  a prophecy now, perhaps, within measurable distance of fulfilment -- but it stands for the Fifth Royal Irish Lancers'. How many of those men, I wonder, survived the battles of the following decade? And how many lived to open a newspaper and read an account of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Today, vril-force is circulating in more marginal and outre writings. A tradition exists among excitable scholars of Nazi occultism that the technicians of the Third Reich were hoping to win the Battle of Britain with a fleet of vril-powered flying saucers. Despite what the web pages argue, the only source for this story is a speculative article in a 1940s edition of the American science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories. And there are people out there who, for 78 dollars a time, will send you a 'vril generator' in the post. It looks like a copper-effect turd, but testimonials from satisfied customers claim that they have used this object to navigate their way to Lytton's subterranean kingdoms. 'I have visited a place deep within the earth,' enthuses one devotee. 'I entered through a series of highly polished and round tubes which exited high on top of a mountain with a narrow path leading down into a lush and wondrous valley.' Another professes hearing a voice that promised, 'You are going to be shown the many valleys of the subterranean realms, the many gardens.

Despite the fervour of those who watched and waited, the coming race never came. No winged army rose from the depths to blast the human race to ashes or recognise the Marchioness Dowager of Londonderry as kin. No heavy-breathing superchildren with perfectly proportioned noses marched from the Stepney Infant Welfare Centre. No Nazi flying saucer ever engaged a Spitfire -- just as no hand-crafted "vril-wand bought on the Internet will ever transform its user from a scammer's dupe to a super-evolved being.

But read the story of The Coming Race, follow Bulwer-Lytton's hero into the depths of the earth, and absorb his descriptions of Vril-ya culture, and it's easy to understand why so many wanted to transmute these fantasies into facts: Victorian readers who knew their Darwin and suspected that industrialisation might have thrown the processes of evolution into reverse; Edwardian readers who knew how many Boer War recruits had been rejected on grounds of sickliness and wondered whether the nation didn't need a restorative shot of vril; occultists of the teens and twenties, with sons dead in the mud of France, praying for some sort of clean new dawn; the survivors of another war, hoping that Nazism might be explained by some supernatural force, rather than the self-pitying anti-Semitism that had been an everyday twentieth-century ideology well beyond the borders of Hitler's Germany; boys at their bedroom computers, hoping to buy psychic energy through PayPal.

The most tangible legacy of The Coming Race is, however, in your local supermarket. It's usually to be found with the sauces and gravies and stock cubes -- a little pot in black glass, containing a gooey substance that sits thickly on the flat of your knife and dissolves easily in hot water. In 1889, the makers of Johnston's Fluid Beef decided to make their product more marketable. Part of the Latin word bovus was coupled with the name of Lytton's mysterious force. 'Bovril is liquid life', blared the ads. 'The dietetic triumph of the age.' Bovril would not have sold well in the shops of the Vril-ya, where only fruit and vegetables were stocked, but it rapidly became a fixture of British larders -- helped, in no small measure, by its use as a restorative on the battlefields of the Boer War. Not quite the food of the gods -- but good enough for consumers living on the surface of the Earth. And good enough, perhaps, as a post-lecture drink at the Royal United Service Institution, for any audience-member preparing to join the coming race, and longing for the tang of something nourishing in their super-evolved noses.

Matthew Sweet, 2007

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