H G Wells Omnibus, page 122
W. Warren Wagar is Distinguished Teaching Professor of History Emeritus at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He previously taught at Wellesley College and the University of New Mexico. A Vice President of the H. G. Wells Society, Wagar has published three books on Wells, including H. G. Wells and the World State; an edited anthology, H. G. Wells: Journalism and Prophecy; and a critical edition of Wells’s The Open Conspiracy. Other books by Wagar include The City of Man: Prophecies of a World Civilization in 20th-Century Thought, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things, and A Short History of the Future.
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Introduction
When The Invisible Man was first published in 1897, Victoria was still Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India. From her reign came the adjective “Victorian,” suggesting propriety, prudery, stuffiness. Victorians of all ranks minded their manners. Law and order prevailed, at least on the home islands, enforced by elaborately helmeted police. Tennyson and Trollope typified the decorous man of letters. Beneath the surface, passions seethed and resentments festered. Nevertheless, as such things go, the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain was a time of relative tranquility.
Into this peaceable kingdom burst the fantastic tales of a young science teacher and journalist by the good English name of Herbert George Wells—who also had a fair amount of Irish blood on his mother’s side. In four brutal novels issued between 1895 and 1898, he stunned the reading public and laid the foundations of a major literary career that spanned the next half century. Ironically, he is remembered today almost entirely for these four early novels: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). The hundred-odd other books he wrote, including dozens of novels and masses of nonfiction, attract few readers. Many were immensely popular in their own day, but at this writing, nearly all are out of print.
One secret of the perennial appeal of the four early novels is their violence, and the rude contrast between their violence and the innocence of their settings. These are extraordinarily dark fictions, which have lost none of their power to terrify, despite all the evil our species has inflicted on itself in intervening generations. In the case of The Invisible Man, what immediately reaches out and grabs us by the throat is the rage of the Invisible Man himself—a rage that may call to mind the misanthropic fantasies of Winston Smith and the grisly proceedings in the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Or-well had a political message to deliver, but what most inspires dread and horror in his readers today, I suspect, is the sadistic rage deeply embedded in some of his chief characters. We fear such anger in others. We also know that it may lurk within ourselves, ready to spring forth whenever we are thwarted by an unhappy turn of events.
The threats posed in the other early novels are somewhat different, but violence is never absent. In The Time Machine, the anonymous inventor journeys to the far future and finds that humankind has degenerated into two subhuman species—the ultimate progeny in one case of the capitalists (the “Eloi”) and in the other case of the working class (the “Morlocks”). In a reversal of fortunes, the descendants of the working class are now the masters, literally feeding on the flesh of the fragile, half-witted progeny of the former ruling class. When a great pack of these hideously devolved workers assaults the Time Traveller, he batters them with an iron bar in a murderous frenzy and just misses losing his own life. The account of his battle with the Morlocks is one of the more memorable moments in world literature.
The Island of Dr. Moreau offers violence of another order. A researcher on a Pacific island attempts to transform animals into men by excruciatingly painful surgery. He succeeds, up to a point, but is eventually killed by one of his tortured patients. The fauna of the island slowly revert to their bestial natures. The shipwrecked narrator of the story lives in mounting terror of these creatures, but survives and manages to escape from the island. And in what is surely the most violent of the four novels, The War of the Worlds, England is invaded by coldly intelligent octopuslike beings from Mars. Their technology is far superior to humankind’s. They conquer the earth, slaughtering vast numbers of its inhabitants in the process. But because they possess no immunity against terrestrial microbes, the Martians are soon annihilated by these unseen enemies. No thanks to human effort, the war of the worlds is won by earth.
The storytelling in all these early novels is peerless. Wells’s narrative instincts never failed him. The characters he portrayed, where characterization was needed, are true to life. Yet above all else, it is the raw violence, the pain, the rage, the fear, the visceral horror of his fictions that have drawn one generation of readers after another to their pages and explain their enduring fascination. The tale of The Invisible Man, as we shall see, is no exception.
Who was H. G. Wells? His beginnings are improbable. Unlike almost any other prominent English writer of his time, he hailed from the lowest stratum of the middle class. He was born on September 21, 1866, in the market town of Bromley, in southeastern England. His father was a Bromley shopkeeper who supplemented the family income for many years by playing professional cricket. When young Wells—known then as “Bertie”—was only thirteen, his mother was forced by declining financial fortunes to accept a position as housekeeper at a moderately large rural estate in the neighboring county of Sussex. She had once been a lady’s maid in the same house, but now she presided over a staff of servants. Wells’s father continued to keep his shop in Bromley for a while longer, earning little money.
Bertie Wells, as befitted a youth of his “station” in Victorian life, was meanwhile apprenticed to a draper (in American parlance, a dry goods merchant), for whom he worked for two miserable years. Just before he turned seventeen, Bertie persuaded his parents to set him free from his contract so that he could continue his education. After only one year as a pupil-teacher at a high school in Sussex, he won a scholarship to study in London at the Normal School of Science, a college recently founded to train science teachers.
His time at the Normal School of Science transformed Wells. In his first year, he studied biology under the redoubtable T. H. Huxley, one of Britain’s foremost scientists and a mighty advocate of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He passed most of his examinations with first-class honors. Although the next two years of study were less inspiring and his academic performance slipped, Wells emerged in 1887 as a qualified science teacher, a profession he plied off and on until 1893. During the same period, he also earned (by examination) the degree of Bachelor of Science at London University and published two science textbooks, one coauthored by R. A. Gregory, a colleague and lifelong friend.
A second turning point came in May of 1893 when tuberculosis sent Wells to bed for weeks. He had suffered from the disease for several years, but the fresh attack led him to resolve that a career of classroom teaching was no longer feasible. He would have to resort to his pen to make a living.
This was not a frivolous or absurd decision. Since his teens, Wells had written a number of stories and essays, some of them published in school journals. In 1891 his imposing article “The Rediscovery of the Unique” was even accepted by the prestigious Fortnightly Review. He had by no means mastered his craft, but he was also not a complete neophyte. Within a few months of vowing to become a professional writer, Wells began to sell articles, light essays, reviews, and stories to leading London editors.
Soon thereafter he converted “The Chronic Argonauts,” an awkward story about time travel dating from his college days, into a short novel titled The Time Machine. Bearing only the slightest resemblance to its prototype, The Time Machine made its debut both in the United States and Britain in the spring of 1895. Three other books by Wells were also published in 1895: a collection of light essays, a volume of short stories, and a fantasy novel about the adventures of an angel brought down to earth, The Wonderful Visit.
From that time forward, there was no stopping H. G. Wells. He overpowered his tuberculosis and not a year passed, all the way down to 1945, without at least one more new book appearing under his name. Often it was two or three.
Most literary critics concur, however, that Wells changed course between 1899 and 1901. After publishing The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, he continued to write what he chose to call “scientific romances.” At least one, The First Men in the Moon (1901), may even invite comparison with the first four. But increasingly he shifted his attention from the rich ambiguities of literature as a form of artistic expression to the urgent social, political, and economic issues of his day, both in Britain and in the world at large. Many of his subsequent novels, even the later scientific romances, became media for the articulation of a program of national and world reconstruction.
In 1902 and thereafter he also began churning out volume after volume of lively nonfiction, brimming with forecasts, commentary on current events, and projects to replace modern capitalism and the nation-state system with a socialist world government. The world state of his imagining would be created not by a proletarian revolution, as in Marx and Engels, and not by popular vote, but by an “Open Conspiracy” of “functional” men and women—elites possessing the most advanced technical, scientific, and managerial know-how who would bypass and ultimately supplant national governments. Wells often wobbled on the question of just how this revolution from the top would occur. Still, his vision of the coming world order remained substantially the same throughout his later years.
Although it may be tempting to search for inklings of this vision in the early scientific romances, and inklings there surely are, let us resist the temptation, at least for now. With that older Wells—the controversial public intellectual of the twentieth century: Wells the educator, Wells the propagandist, Wells the historian, Wells the founder of future studies—we are not centrally concerned as readers of The Invisible Man. But we do need to appreciate that when The Invisible Man was first published, he was a young man of thirty—the same age as the Invisible Man himself—with a long and in many ways distinguished career still ahead of him.
That career ended in 1946. Wells survived the horrors of the Second World War, living most of the time in London as German bombs and rockets fell all around him. He never doubted that Britain and its allies would prevail. He also lived to read about the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Japan. In fact he himself had coined the phrase “atomic bomb” in The World Set Free, a scientific romance published in 1914 that eerily predicted both the harnessing of atomic energy and the use of nuclear weapons in a world war. With his health failing, he published in 1945 his last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether. In this stark little volume, he appeared to surrender all hope for the human race, although some informed readers interpret it differently. On Tuesday, August 13, 1946, he died in his London home overlooking Regents Park. Three days later, two of his sons scattered his ashes from an airplane as it flew over the English Channel.
In the preface to a new edition published in 1933 of his best scientific romances, H. G. Wells explained that the chief originality of his tales in this vein was their strict adherence to reality as it presents itself to the ordinary reader, except for a single incredible marvel. The marvel as such, he noted, was “nothing in itself.” What really mattered was “our natural reactions of wonder, fear, or perplexity.” To play the game fairly, novelists had to depict people as they really were, and rigorously confine themselves to just one alteration of the world as we know it to be. If anything and everything could happen, the illusion would become muddled and the suspension of disbelief would become impossible.
Sound as this advice appears, Wells did not really follow it in The Time Machine or The Island of Dr. Moreau. These are both tales of other worlds, almost parables, deficient in commonplace detail and teeming with marvels. The best early example of realism yoked to fantasy was rather The Wonderful Visit, mentioned above, relating the sojourn on earth of a winged angel, and not the stuff of scientific romance at all.
But in The Invisible Man, Wells gave us a story steeped in earthly local color, a story all the more vivid and credible for just that reason. The villagers of Iping in Sussex, where the Invisible Man takes lodgings one wintry February afternoon, are everyday folk: the suspicious landlady, her ineffectual husband, the local doctor, the vicar, and all the rest. The reader immediately seizes the gulf yawning between these flawed worthies and the strangely appareled mysterious lodger. Throughout the rest of the novel, realism continues to assert itself, in the persons of the befuddled tramp, Thomas Marvel; the dilettantish but principled scholar, Doctor Kemp; and the stalwart police chief, Colonel Adye. We can see them all in our mind’s eye.
Of course we cannot see Griffin, the Invisible Man. Until the last moment, he is never described by the equally invisible narrator of the story. But we know him by his words and his actions. We encounter a man swift to anger—a driven and obsessed genius who has discovered the secret of invisibility but cannot for all his strenuous efforts figure out how to reverse the effect.
Little by little, Wells skillfully reveals the rage that rules his protagonist. At first, Griffin is almost polite. He demands privacy, but tolerates the people who feed and shelter him. By degrees his manners become rougher. When the village doctor pays him an unwelcome visit, he launches his first physical attack, pinching the doctor’s nose with his invisible thumb and forefinger. No real harm is done. The attack is almost playful. But the doctor is understandably terrified. Soon after, the Invisible Man turns to burglary. From then on, his behavior steadily worsens, climaxing in the violence, cruelty, and terror in “Port Burdock,” Wells’s invention for a suburb of the great port city of Southampton. In the course of these later doings, we also learn from the Invisible Man himself the strange story of how he first achieved invisibility and lived as a common—or shall we say uncommon?—criminal in the heart of London.
A question that should arise in the mind of any reader of The Invisible Man is what Wells himself thinks of the irascible Griffin. The most obvious explanation is that Griffin is just another mad scientist, a descendant of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, and Wells’s own sinister vivisectionist, Dr. Moreau.
Several critics, such as Bernard Bergonzi and Frank McConnell, have taken this approach. Just because their reading of Griffin seems obvious should not rule it out. Wells’s anonymous narrator calls Griffin “malignant” and his experiment “evil.” True, his narrator also expresses a grain of sympathy for the Invisible Man when he is betrayed by his old schoolmate Doctor Kemp, and almost exonerates him after he commits a murder that may have been a simple act of self-defense (see Chapter XXVI below). Yet another critic, Leon Stover, deciphers Griffin as a failed forerunner of the “Open Conspirators,” the superior and possibly ruthless men whom a later and more polemical Wells would nominate to build the world state of his dreams. As even Bergonzi notes, Griffin’s discovery may at one level be seen as a metaphor for the infinite possibilities of science in which Wells always believed. The Invisible Man may have botched everything out of sheer egotism and selfishness, yet he was indisputably a man of genius.
Well and good. All the same, I think it wiser to follow the lead of John Huntington in his study of Wells’s scientific romances, The Logic of Fantasy. Wells spent most of the rest of his life expounding, as clearly and unambiguously as he could, the imperatives of world reconstruction. Nevertheless, in these earliest scientific romances, he was not yet that insistent prophet. Like many an artist before and after him, he reveled in the ironies, contradictions, and paradoxes of human existence. He was a gifted practitioner of what Huntington, citing a later Wellsian source, terms “undirected thought.” In such thought, the artist does not tell us what to believe. Rather, the artist shows us what happened and leaves readers to judge for themselves what to make of the results.
So perhaps this is what I should ask of you, the readers of The Invisible Man. Is Griffin—the former chemistry student of University College, London, and the terrorist of Iping—a one-dimensional fiend or something more complex—even, strange as it may seem, a fellow human being?
