[4] Donnelly's novel was one element of the great wave of utopian and dystopian literature during the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth, exemplified by works like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Jack London's The Iron Heel.

In 1892, two years after the publication of his novel, Donnelly drafted the platform of the Populist Party, in which he wrote, This is the world view of Caesar's Column: a man comes from his rural environment to the heart of a brutal capitalist oligarchy; he sees its corruptions firsthand, and witnesses its destruction.

[10] As some other speculative writers did (Anna Bowman Dodd's 1887 book The Republic of the Future is a contemporaneous example), Donnelly cast his fiction in the form of an epistolary novel.

At the Hotel Darwin, Weltstein finds a televised menu to guide him among exotic choices, from edible spiders to bird's nests from China.

The coach belongs to Prince Cabano, formerly Jacob Isaacs, a prime figure of the ruling oligarchy; the beggar is Max Petion, actually a leader of a secret resistance organization called the Brotherhood of Destruction.

Weltstein has to accept Petion's guidance into proletarian society in New York City, where he learns the truth of the rapacious and oppressive social and economic order.