It’s rare for a book to start with calling a baby ugly. Yet on the first page of J.D. Beresford’s 1911 novel The Hampdenshire Wonder, our narrator is joined in his railway compartment:

I looked up when the woman entered my compartment, though I did not notice the name of the station. I caught sight of the baby she was carrying, and turned back to my book. I thought the child was a freak, an abnormality; and such things disgust me.

This baby is the titular Hampdenshire Wonder. His “abnormality” takes the form of an enlarged head and an uncanny stare, and we soon learn that he is possessed of an unearthly intelligence.

Reissued by the MIT Press as part of its Radium Age series of early twentieth-century science fiction reprints, The Hampdenshire Wonder is billed as “one of the genre’s first treatments of superhuman intelligence.” This being a novel about superintelligence from 1911, there is no shortage of crankery; eugenics, craniology, and a cheerfully vicious snobbery are all present and accounted for. Yet for all its nastiness, there is a sublimated emotional throughline that makes the book a compelling addition to the steadily expanding list of Radium Age titles.

In his introduction to this new edition, Ted Chiang states that “it remains a mystery as to why quite so many pages are spent on cricket.” This is a polite way of saying that to a modern, non-sporting reader, the opening stretches of the book can feel a bit dull. But the Hampdenshire Wonder, also known as Victor Stott, is the son of Ginger Stott, a superlative cricketer, and fully thirty-one of the first forty-three pages are spent on the narrator’s “Notes for a Biography of Ginger Stott.” I confess to finding the long descriptions of bowling techniques and run counts hard going, but things are enlivened when Ginger sustains a career-ending injury. He then resolves to sire a son so that he can “[l]earn ’im to bowl from his cradle; before ’e’s got ’abits,” and who can pick up where his father left off.

This desire to conceive a son without habits, however, ends up going rather too well. Young Victor, as previously described, is born with an enlarged head and a disregard for social niceties. This drives Ginger to abandon the family, leaving Victor to be raised by his mother, Ellen Mary, and to educate himself in the library of Challis, the local landlord. Ted Chiang points out that Ellen Mary is a surprisingly marginal figure in the story, writing that “she is praised for her intelligence, but given very few lines of dialogue. The unintellectual Ginger, by contrast, gets plenty.” He goes on to say that The Hampdenshire Wonder “is actually a work of horror SF, a cautionary tale about the dangers of knowing too much.”

He’s right that the plot eventually turns on whether the Wonder is too intelligent for this ignorant world. (Unsurprisingly to readers of the tradition the novel helped spawn, poor Victor doesn’t make it out of the book alive). He’s also right that Ellen Mary has little to do beyond tending to the boy’s needs and instigating the search for his body towards the end. But what seems to me to be missing from Chiang’s analysis is the real horror at the heart of the book: The Hampdenshire Wonder is a story driven by parental neglect.

The narrator is blasé about Ginger’s desertion, writing that “[i]t is not for us to judge whether his attainments were more or less noble than the attainments of his son.” But the plot’s essentials are damning. Ginger Stott is a frustrated athlete and ex-celebrity who fathers a child to continue his legacy, only to walk away when the child doesn’t turn out the way he wants. Ginger’s childishness comically emerges when Victor begins sitting in his favourite chair:

“Look ’ere! Get out!” he said. “That’s my chair!” The child very deliberately withdrew his attention from infinity and regarded the dogged face and set jaw of his father. Stott returned the stare for the fraction of a second, and then his eyes wavered and dropped, but he maintained his resolution.

[…]

There was a tense, strained silence. Then Stott began to breathe heavily. He lifted his long arms for a moment and raised his eyes, he even made a tentative step towards the usurped chair.

The child sat calm, motionless; his eyes were fixed upon his father's face with a sublime, unalterable confidence.

Stott’s arms fell to his sides again, he shuffled his feet. One more effort he made, a sudden, vicious jerk, as though he would do the thing quickly and be finished with it; then he shivered, his resolution broke, and he shambled evasively to the door.

Ginger is absent for most of the back half of the book, and it’s hard to imagine the story playing out as it does without his desertion. While delightful and eye-catching as ever, the artist Seth’s cover for this Radium Age edition is deceptive, featuring as it does a well-dressed and conforming mother, father, and child. Far from the story of a pair of proud middle-class parents to an inhuman prodigy, The Hampdenshire Wonder is about a family torn apart by a juvenile man’s disappointment and neglect. We learn at the book’s end that Ellen Mary has died “in the County Asylum.” We get Ginger Stott’s final appearance a sentence later, as the narrator tells us, “I hear that her husband attended the funeral.”

This is another worthy reprint from the Radium Age team. Reading The Hampdenshire Wonder in a United States co-ruled by a neglectful father with his own fantasies about superhuman intelligence, I was struck by its quiet yet vivid strain of horror.