Life and publications
Little has been securely established about Bridgman-Metchim’s personal life. His birth and death dates, education and family background remain uncertain. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction identifies an earlier collection, Wild West Poems (1892), published as B. Metchim. By 1900 he had produced Atlantis: The Book of the Angels, issued in London by Swan Sonnenschein with illustrations of his own.
Our Own History of the War: From a South London View appeared in 1918. Virginia Woolf discussed it the following year in The War from the Street, considering the difference between public histories of war and the experience of people living through it. His surviving publications range from poetry and illustrated fantasy to the recent war, but they leave much of his personal history unknown.
An angel’s account of Atlantis
Atlantis takes its opening from Genesis and the story of the sons of God and the daughters of men. Its narrator, the angel Asia, is sent to turn humanity away from idolatry, but becomes entangled in the earthly world he is meant to reform. The tale joins desire and ambition to the approaching destruction of a powerful civilisation. Biblical language gives the catastrophe a moral significance, while the lavish settings and strange creatures belong to an elaborate imaginative world.
Bridgman-Metchim presented himself on the title page as the book’s interpreter. In his signed preface he claimed to have rendered the narrative from the root language of Shinar into modern English. No ancient manuscript is established by that claim. The opening poem, meanwhile, asks readers to imagine the vanished land through fancy and dreams. The book combines this claim to an ancient source with the freedom of an illustrated fantasy.
