Eldridge Compost, 1840—1911(?)

Eldridge Compost was a brilliant, well-educated madman, and the de facto leader of the League of Miscreants, a loose confederation of the most unbalanced crime magnates of the late Nineteenth Century.  An inscrutable radical, Compost was regarded by many intellectuals of his time as one of the century's most influential Utopians.  He was an outspoken social critic who longed to raze modern society, reversing what he called "Euro-American Technomorphic Hegemony," replacing it with a complex social system he dubbed "Frolicking Neo-primitivism."

Compost's hatred of Western civilization sprang from his singular childhood and adolescence.  The child of anthropologists, Compost was a mere infant when he was lost in an African jungle on one of his parents' many excursions to the largely unexplored continent.  Found by tribesman, he was raised in their culture, and enjoyed an earthy but idyllic youth.

At the age of twelve, he was engaged in a "manhood quest," a sacred rite of passage to adulthood in his tribe, when he was spotted and captured by a party of German hunters.  Since he could not speak German, they assumed he was English and returned him to London.  Scientists there poked and prodded this "Jungle Boy" (who could not speak English, either) in a fruitless attempt at understanding the nature of his anomalous development.  Compost escaped within weeks, reappearing months later in a traveling carnival, on display as "The Wild Boy of Tanganyika."  Shortly thereafter, he was purchased for £250 by the whaling tycoon Sylvester Compost, who gave the boy his name.

To his credit, Compost investigated thoroughly and found that the boy's true parents had been killed and eaten, not by Africans, but by a particularly disagreeable group of Greek fishermen.  Compost took the boy as his own, as his marriage of ten years had failed to produce any progeny.  The elder Compost then set about "civilizing" the grunting adolescent, dressing him in the finest clothes and sending him to the finest institutions of learning.

Eldridge absorbed the community into which he was so thrust, adopting the language and customs far more readily than anyone had predicted.  Unbeknownst to his doting adoptive parents, Eldridge was quietly plotting revenge, biding his time until he had learned enough to adapt to—and overcome—the society that had plucked from his happy home in Africa.  Although the Composts themselves never came to any harm, the young Compost embarked on a career of horrendous misdeeds against others.

He was an inveterate prankster in his early teens, but his offenses spiraled upward in severity and cruelty.  He narrowly escaped capture for hurling obscenities and rotten produce at the Queen, and was finally captured and jailed for burning down a sewing machine factory.  His sentence was commuted due to the tireless efforts and social standing of his father, but he was summarily disowned at age twenty when he arrived at an elegant birthday party—arranged by his tormented parents—wearing nothing but a large ceremonial mask.

Shortly thereafter, Compost founded The League of Miscreants, taking his first members from the crime-ridden streets of London.  Over time, the common ruffians were replaced by criminals of a higher order, and Compost struggled to manage the tenuous association, which was continually fraught with interpersonal and organizational struggles.  Compost strived to achieve a tightly planned system of interdependent objectives, but was largely ineffective at instilling even the pretense of discipline in his ranks.

The one objective upon which all members were in agreement was the destruction of modern civilization.  Each of them driven by demons of their own, the Miscreants attacked social, industrial, and governmental institutions with abandon.  They diverged zealously with respect to their final objective, however.  Each wanted to rule the world, and much of their efforts on their own behalf were calculated to do injury to their rivals within the League.

Compost's dashing appearance and Utopian schemes, coupled with his talent for persuasion, permitted him to charm the rich and powerful against their better nature.  The League of Miscreants was funded in no small part by donations from wealthy daughters of the British nobility.

Compost was badly burned and disfigured in a skirmish with the Hogalum Society in late 1877.  Robbed of his good looks, his finances failed as well, dragging him down into a maelstrom of madness.  In his later years, he renounced his criminal ties and set about convincing the public at large of the evils of modern society and the advantages of Frolicking Neo-primitivism.

In 1908, Compost published his magnum opus, a nine-volume monograph entitled "The Mud Hut."  Billed as "a master plan for an enlightened society," the massive tome languished in bookstores and was universally panned by critics.  The first volume was autobiographical in nature, detailing his youth in Africa.  The second volume began with his adoption and spun out of control as he described the "totalitarian regime" of the Compost household.  The third, fourth, and fifth volumes consisted primarily of baseless criticism and elaborate conspiracy theories surrounding the "landed gentry with aesthetically pleasing teeth" he insisted were guilty of "bleaching" Africa and bleeding everyone else.  The seventh through ninth volumes purported to lay out in detail the blueprints for constructing a model village.  However, Compost evidently was becoming confused in these later years and the volumes were riddled with contradictions and errors which he corrected in print rather than editing them from the text.

For instance, in Volume Seven (Making a Mud Hut) he recommended mixing mud from earth and "the blood of white oppressors."  This recommendation evidently required considerable qualification, however, as the bulk of Volume Eight (Making a Mud Hut Part Two) was devoted to explaining that not every white man was an oppressor.  For instance, he took great pains to exclude himself from consideration as a building material, and listed others such as Mark Twain who also fell into this category.  Volume Nine (Making an Even Better Mud Hut) began with instructions for destroying mud huts that were "defiled by the blood of white oppressors," and ended with a recommendation that villagers commune with nature by sleeping in trees.

As he neared completion of this final volume, Compost became agitated that publication of his book would require the use of printing presses and other machinery for binding, distribution, etc., and he abruptly stopped writing.  He outraged a series of publishers by demanding that his book be inscribed by hand on paper made from the skin of white oppressors.  In the end, he destroyed his own home with an axe and had the timber converted to paper for his first, and final, printing.

Compost was not seen nor heard from again.  In 1910, local police reported a naked elderly man "gamboling about in nothing but an African mask" and ejected him from Mark Twain's funeral, but it is unclear if this was actually Compost.  It is rumored that he returned to Africa, but there is no proof of this, and no official record of his death or place of burial.

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