She saw the need for these manuals while assisting her husband, John Claudius Loudon, a botanist, garden designer, and author in his work. She later wrote, “It may easily be supposed that he was surprised to find the author of the book a woman but I believe that from that evening he formed an attachment to me, and, in fact, we were married on the 14th of the following September.” Loudon’s fictitious imagining of a steam plough attracted the attention of John Loudon who asked to meet the author of The Mummy!. The Mummy! more closely resembles Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World of 1666, another satirical utopian world of scientific advances. But whereas Shelley’s monster deals in horror and death, Loudon’s mummy is clearly affectionately satirical and does not reach the emotional depth of Frankenstein. It is also likely she was inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818. Loudon may have been inspired by the general fashion for anything Pharaonic inspired by the acquisition of Egyptian mummies during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt. Loudon’s twenty-second century world is a happy, egalitarian society filled with advances in technology, society and fashion: a peaceful world ruled by a female sovereign, court ladies in trousers, automatonic surgeons and lawyers, and the rebirth of the mummy induced by scientific galvanic shock rather than ancient incantation. It is a pioneering work of science fiction and the first identifiable ancestor of the mummy genre. Her first major work, The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century which was published anonymously in 1827 when she was twenty years old. She had been writing poems since aged twelve, and in 1826 published her first book, Prose and Verse. At the death of her father, when she was only seventeen, Loudon began writing as a career to support herself.

Soon after arriving home to England, her father’s business suffered heavy losses and his fortune evaporated. Following her mother’s death in 1819, she and her father, Thomas Webb, a Birmingham manufacturer, traveled the continent where she learned several languages. Loudon 1807-58 was a British writer best known for creating the first popular gardening manuals, providing an alternative to the specialist horticultural books of the day. The Ladies’ Flower Garden of Ornamental Perennials, 1849

The Mummy! by Jane C. Webb Loudon