“This New and Unexampled Way of Writing the History of Future Times”. The Rise and Fall of Empires and the Acceleration of History in Samuel Madden’s Eighteenth-Century Memoirs from the Future

This research explores the future as a secularized imaginary space in eighteenth-century European culture through the case study of the Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Published anonymously in 1733, the Memoirs is a work of speculative fiction in the form of an epistolary novel by the Irish writer Samuel Madden, an Anglican clergyman and philanthropist with Hanoverian and Whig sympathies. The novel consists of a collection of diplomatic letters written in the 1990s, sent to the Lord High Treasurer in London from British ambassadors from a number of countries, which the narrator claims to have received from the future. The aim of the present work is to re-assess the role of the Memoirs in the cultural history of time, as a fine example of the emergence of a new secularized future, pliable through human action, constructed through logical extrapolations informed by a variety of underlying rationales, ranging from utopian achievements to ominous warnings, to the satiric mocking of the writer’s present. In so doing, this research locates Madden’s political reflections in its original context – British political debate in the late 1720s – and, using the Memoirs as a case study, places new emphasis on the role played by a new form of global interconnectedness in shaping and accelerating complex processes of time secularization.