1413. THE PANCHRONICON. Scribner; New York, 1904. Time travel and humor in the mode of Frank Stockton.
* In a small New Hampshire village live Copernicus Droop, a drunken, would-be profiteer, and the Wise sisters, Rebecca and Phoebe. Rebecca accepts her status as an old maid, but her much younger sister Phoebe still suffers from a blighted romance in her youth.
* Phoebe, who is greatly interested in the Elizabethan age and Shakespeare, even has ancestral relics dating from the reign of Queen Elizabeth. These include love letters and a miniature of Mary Burton, a woman who looked exactly like Phoebe.
* One day Droop makes an offer to the two sisters: They should go back about twenty years into the past, where Rebecca could marry a suitor who never had the courage to propose to her, and with his money develop the profitable inventions that are now extant.
* His mechanism? A time-traveller from the twenty-seventh century had stopped by, became acquainted with Droop, died of pneumonia, and left his time-ship in Droop's possession. The solar-powered mechanism operates by flying to the north pole as an airship; then travelling around the meridians widdershins it picks up a day on each circumnavigation.
* After some hesitation the women agree to go back in time a few years. They fly to the north pole, which is a steel shaft that was imbedded in the ice by the future man, then circle around the pole as planned. But Rebecca rather foolishly manipulates the controls while Droop lies drunk, and the machine leaps back into time.
* When it eventually runs out of power, the three travellers find themselves in the year 1598, in the southern suburbs of London.
* At this point Phoebe merges with the personality, both physical and mental, of her ancestress Mary Burton, though she retains her own memories. Rebecca is accepted in the Burton household as Phoebe/ Mary's eccentric, half-mad nurse— although she does not undergo a merging comparable to Phoebe's.
* From here the characters follow separate plot strands. Phoebe is erotically involved with Guy Fenton, Mary Burton's sweetheart, and much of her efforts are directed to getting him out of the area alive, for she knows that he is about to be accused (falsely) of treason. But history shows that he did escape.
* Droop, who is a con man at heart, makes the acquaintance of Francis Bacon and other semishady court figures in an attempt to get royal monopolies for the phonograph and the bicycle. Bacon is revealed to be a shabby crook.
* Rebecca, the most rigid, cannot realize her changed circumstances but acts and judges as if she were still in her small New Hampshire village.
* Her rudeness attracts the attention of Queen Elizabeth, and by chance and misinterpretation Rebecca is accepted as American royalty and is installed near the queen.
* All threads come to a common end: Droop, while demonstrating the phonograph to the queen accidentally plays a cylinder proposing the Bacon-Shakespeare theory, with Francis Bacon as Elizabeth's illegitimate son.
* The queen flies into a rage. Droop escapes on his bicycle. Rebecca, on the pretense of seizing other cylinders that Droop holds, leaves by royal barge for the place where the time machine is hidden. Phoebe helps Guy to escape arrest. As they converge on the time machine, Bacon dashes up, demanding back clothing that he had exchanged with Droop to evade creditors.
* All travel to the nineteenth century. Bacon is dropped off in the 1850s, where he assumes the identity of Delia Bacon (a historical person) and sets up the Bacon-Shakespeare theory. The other four go on to 1898.
* A strong element in the story is the Bacon Shakespeare theory, which the author refutes by making Bacon unaware of Shakespeare's existence. Phoebe meets Shakespeare, who is a friend of Guy's, and recites to him verses that Shakespeare had not yet written.
* Much Yankee dialect and pseudo-Elizabethan speech, not badly done, in the later part.
* The author recognizes the possibility of time paradoxes, but evades them.
* Light and amusing, but the Stockton convention of provincial narrowness becomes a bore.
* The author has taken some pains with historical language, institutions, and personalities.
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