An unsigned essay in the March 26, 1911 edition of the New York Times bemoans the fact that “mystery and romance have suffered greatly at the hands of modern science and invention,” and that the world therefore no longer has a place for such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Hans Christian Andersen, who supposedly found it much easier to blow our minds in the good old pre-1911 days.

The writer is afraid that without, to use one example, the shadows cast by “heavy, sticky, leaky oil lamps,” and with instead “a savage, tactless, pitilessly even cataract of light”:

“Who will read those tales now to the family seated around the matter-of-fact radiator with its angular gills and its regular, commonplace, good-natured wheeze?”

Luckily, we have somehow gotten by, and still find things that frighten us, even though we’ve advanced quite a bit beyond the science and invention of 100 years ago.

What I found the most interesting in the piece, though, was that the writer complained about the lack of anonymity and the loss of the ability for people to reinvent themselves back then—and he or she wasn’t talking about it being caused by the Internet, but instead by a couple of far simpler technologies.

“What chance has the scion of a royal house to pose as clerk and be loved for himself alone, when commercial agencies supply you very promptly with complete details on the past, present, and ‘prospects’ of any of your acquaintances for a fee ranging from 25 cents to $1? … Telegraph and long-distance phone have blasted forever the hopes of would-be impostors.”

Which tells me that come 2111, when we’ve slid even further along that slippery technology slope, our descendants will look back on quaint 2011 and wonder how you and I didn’t realize how how good we really had it.