Four sailors discover a copper cylinder containing a manuscript written by the adventurer Adam More, who was shipwrecked in the southern hemisphere. They read its contents out to one another, and the incredible story unfolds of his journey through a subterranean tunnel to a lost world which survives at the foot of a volcano. This strange utopian society, in which humans coexist with prehistoric animals, is the antithesis of Victorian England, as poverty is preferred to wealth and darkness to light. At once a timeless satire and a pioneering work of the science-fiction genre, "A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder" is bound to enthral readers today and revive James De Mille's reputation as a writer ahead of his time.