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Table of Contents
From the Pages of The Time Machine
From the Pages of The Invisible Man
Title Page
Copyright Page
H. G. Wells
The World of H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man
Introduction
The Time Machine - AN INVENTION
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
Epilogue
The Invisible Man - A GROTESQUE ROMANCE
I - The Strange Man’s Arrival
II - Mr. Teddy Henfrey’s First Impressions
III - The Thousand and One Bottles
IV - Mr. Cuss Interviews the Stranger
V - The Burglary at the Vicarage
VI - The Furniture That Went Mad
VII - The Unveiling of the Stranger
VIII - In Transit
IX - Mr. Thomas Marvel
X - Mr. Marvel’s Visit to Iping
XI - In the Coach and Horses
XII - The Invisible Man Loses His Temper
XIII - Mr. Marvel Discusses His Resignation
XIV - At Port Stowe
XV - The Man Who Was Running
XVI - In the Jolly Cricketers
XVII - Doctor Kemp’s Visitor
XVIII - The Invisible Man Sleeps
XIX - Certain First Principles
XX - At the House in Great Portland Street
XXI - In Oxford Street
XXII - In the Emporium
XXIII - In Drury Lane
XXIV - The Plan That Failed
XXV - The Hunting of the Invisible Man
XXVI - The Wicksteed Murder
XXVII - The Siege of Kemp’s House
XXVIII - The Hunter Hunted
The Epilogue
Endnotes
Inspired by The Time Machine and The Invisible Man
Comments & Questions
For Further Reading
From the Pages of The Time Machine
“Why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?” (page 6)
There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped. One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone—vanished! (page 9)
“As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing.”
(page 17)
“I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist.” (page 18)
“Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back—changed!” (page 52)
“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.” (page 70)
“Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless.” (page 71)
The future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. (page 81—82)
From the Pages of The Invisible Man
The stranger was undoubtedly an unusually strange sort of stranger.
(page 101)
His goggling spectacles and ghastly bandaged face under the penthouse of his hat came with a disagreeable suddenness out of the darkness.
(page 107)
“I am just an ordinary man—a man you have known—made invisible.”
(page 161)
It was strange to see him smoking; his mouth, and throat, pharynx and nares, became visible as a sort of whirling smoke cast. (page 163)
“Just think of all the things that are transparent and seem not to be so.”
(page 172)
“So little suffices to make us visible one to the other.” (page 172)
“I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man,—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none.” (page 173)
“Alone—it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.” (page 202)
BARNES & NOBLE CLASSICS
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The Time Machine was first published in 1895.
The Invisible Man was first published in 1897.
Originally published in mass market format in 2003 by Barnes & Noble Classics
with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By,
Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.
This trade paperback edition published in 2008.
Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading
Copyright © 2003 by Alfred Mac Adam.
Note on H. G. Wells; The World of H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, and
The Invisible Man; Inspired by The Time Machine and The Invisible Man;
and Comments & Questions
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The Time Machine and The Invisible Man
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H. G. Wells
Social philosopher, utopian, novelist, and “father” of science fiction and science fantasy, Herbert George Wells was born on September 21,1866, in Bromley, Kent. His father was a poor businessman, and young Bertie’s mother had to work as a lady’s maid. Living “below stairs” with his mother at an estate called Uppark, Bertie would sneak into the grand library to read Plato, Swift, and Voltaire, authors who deeply influenced his later works. He showed literary and artistic talent in his early stories and paintings, but the family had limited means, and when he was fourteen years old, Bertie was sent as an apprentice to a dealer in cloth and dry goods, work he disliked.
He held jobs in other trades before winning a scholarship to study biology at the Normal School of Science in London. The eminent biologist T. H. Huxley, a friend and proponent of Darwin, was his teacher; about him Wells later said, “I believed then he was the greatest man I was ever likely to meet.” Under Huxley’s influence, Wells learned the science that would inspire many of his creative works and cultivated the skepticism about the likelihood of human progress that would infuse his writing.
Teaching, textbook writing, and journalism occupied Wells until 1895, when he made his literary debut with the now-legendary novel The Time Machine, which was followed before the end of the century by The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, books that established him as a major writer. Fiercely critical of Victorian mores, he published voluminously, in fiction and nonfiction, on the subjects of politics and social philosophy. Biological evolution does not ensure moral progress, as Wells would repeat throughout his life, during which he witnessed two world wars and the debasement of science for military and political ends.
In addition to social commentary presented in the guise of science fiction, Wells authored comic novels like Love and Mr. Lewisham, Kipps, and The History of Mister Polly that are Dickensian in their scope and feeling, and a feminist novel, Ann Veronica. He wrote specific social commentary in The New Machiavelli, an attack on the socialist Fabian Society, which he had joined and then rejected, and literary parody (of Henry James) in Boon. He wrote textbooks of biology, and his massive The Outline of History was a major international best-seller.
By the time Wells reached middle age, he was admired around the world, and he used his fame to promote his utopian vision, warning that the future promised “Knowledge or extinction.” He met with such preeminent political figures as Lenin, Roosevelt, and Stalin, and continued to publish, travel, and educate during his final years. Herbert George Wells died in London on August 13, 1946.
The World of H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man
1866
Herbert George Wells, known as a child as Bertie, is born on September 21 in Bromley, Kent. His pious parents, who had once been domestic servants, are often on the brink of financial ruin. Bertie’s father, now owner of a china shop, is an excellent cricket player but a bad businessman.
1871
Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found Thereis published. The first books of George Eliot’s
Middlemarchare published. A British Act of Parliament legal izes labor unions. The Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences opens in London.
1879
Wells’s mother takes work as a housekeeper at a nearby estate called Uppark, where she had served as a lady’s maid before her marriage. Bertie lives with her at Uppark, where he reads copi ously from the library.
1880
Bertie’s mother has him become an apprentice to a draper (a dealer in cloth and dry goods). He finds the work unsatisfying yet stays with this position and another for a pharmacist for the next two years.
1882
Charles Darwin dies.
1883
Bertie dislikes retail work and takes a position as an assistant teacher at Midhurst Grammar School. Robert Louis Steven son’s
Treasure Islandis published.
1884
Wells wins a scholarship and enters the Normal School of Sci ence in the South Kensington section of London. His mentor, the eminent biologist and proponent of Darwinism T. H. Hux ley, deeply influences him, introducing him to evolutionary sci ence and skepticism about human progress.
1887
The first Sherlock Holmes story,
A Study in Scarlet,by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is published.
1888
Wells publishes sketches called
The Chronic Argonautsthat later
will become
The Time Machine.He graduates from London University.
1891
He marries his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells. Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Grayand Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the d‘Urbervillesare published.
1893
Wells’s marriage is unhappy. He falls in love with a beautiful young student named Amy Catherine (“Jane”) Robbins. His first published book,
Textbook of Biology,appears. He becomes a full-time writer, known for independence of mind and works that challenge conventional thinking.
1895
After Isabel and H.G. divorce, he marries Jane Robbins. His tireless supporter, she types all of his manuscripts and corre spondence. Wells publishes
The Time Machine,which parodies the English class system and provides a distressing view of the future of human society.
The Stolen Bacillus,a collection of short stories, and
The Wonderful Visit,a science-fiction novel, also appear. In his lifetime, Wells will publish more than eighty books.
1896
Wells publishes
The Island of Dr. Moreau,in which a mad sci entist turns animals into semihuman creatures, and
The Wheels of Chance,about the bicycling craze.
1897
The Faust-like tale The Invisible Man appears. Bram Stoker’s
Draculais published.
1898
Wells publishes
The War of the Worlds,about an invasion of Martians.
1900
In the first years of the century, Wells and Jane host numerous luminaries in their home and actively engage in various politi cal and intellectual debates. Wells publishes a comic novel of lower-middle-class life,
Love and Mr. Lewisham,about a strug gling teacher.
1901
A son, George Philip Wells, is born to Jane and H.G.
The First Men in the Moon,which predicts human travels into outer space, and
Anticipations,in which Wells advances his ideas about social progress, are published. Queen Victoria dies.
1903
A second son, Francis Richard, is born.
Mankind in the Making,another book promoting social progress, is published. Wells joins the socialist Fabian Society, but soon draws fire from
George Bernard Shaw and others for his deviations from the Fabian line. Throughout his life, Wells takes every opportunity to share and implement his dream of a utopian society.
1905
Wells publishes the somewhat autobiographical comic novel
Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul,in which a man receives an unexpected inheritance.
A Modern Utopia,again centered around Well’s ideas about social progress, also appears. George Bernard Shaw’s play
MajorBarbara is published.
1908
Wells resigns from the Fabian Society. He publishes
The War in the Air,which foretells aerial combat.
1909
He publishes
Tono-Bungay,a panoramic and critical picture of English society, and
Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story,a fem inist novel.
1910
Wells publishes an ode to the past in the comic novel
The History of Mr. Polly,in which a shopkeeper changes his life. E. M. Forster’s
Howards Endappears.
1911
In
The New Machiavelli,Wells excoriates the Fabian Society and provides portraits of its notable members. His collection
The Country of the Blind and Other Storiesappears.
1914
World War I begins. Wells and the writer Rebecca West, with whom he has a long affair, have a son, Anthony. Wells travels to Russia for the first time. He publishes
The World Set Free,which predicts the use of the atomic bomb in warfare.
1915
Boon,a novel that satirizes Henry James’s style, is published under the pen name Reginald Bliss; it provokes an acerbic exchange between the two authors. D. H. Lawrence’s
The Rainbowis published.
1916
Wells travels to the war fronts of Italy, Germany, and France. He publishes
Mr. Britling Sees It Through,a realistic portrayal of the English during the war. James Joyce’s
Portraitof the Artist as
a Young Manis published.
1918
Wells creates anti-German information for the Ministry of Pro paganda.
1919
He coauthors, with Viscount Edward Grey,
The Idea of a League of Nations.1920
In an effort to rally supporters to his progressive political agenda, Wells travels again to Russia to meet with Lenin.
Russia in the Shadowsand his immensely popular
The Outline of Historyare published. Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is published.
1922
A Short History of the Worldappears. T. S. Eliot’s
The Wastelandis published. James Joyce’s
Ulyssesis published in Paris.
1927
Jane Wells dies. Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouseis published.
1928
Evelyn Waugh’s
Decline and Fallappears.
1929
Wells publishes
The Common Sense of World Peace.1929 1930
In collaboration with his son, G. P Wells, and biologist Julian Huxley (grandson of T.H. Huxley), he publishes a work on biology called
The Science of Life.1930
W. H. Auden’s Poems is published.
1933
Wells publishes the novel
The Shape of Things to Come,the story of a world war that lasts three decades in which cities are destroyed by aerial bombs.
1934
Wells travels to Moscow to speak with Stalin and returns despondent over the encounter. The writer’s good-natured
Experiment in Autobiography,a portrait of himself and his con temporaries, appears. He visits the United States and confers with Roosevelt.
1935
Based on the novel
The Shape of Things to Come,Wells writes the screenplay for
Things to Come,a film produced by Alexan der Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies.
1936
Things to Comeis released in the United States.
1938
Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of
The War of the Worldssends millions of Americans into panic.
1939
World War II begins.
1945
World War II ends. Wells publishes
Mind at the End of Its Tether,a vision of mankind rejected and destroyed by nature. George Orwell’s
Animal Farmappears.
1946
Herbert George Wells dies in London on August 13.
Introduction
Realist of the Fantastic
The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) are now more than a century old. Yet they endure as literary texts, radio plays, and movies, because they appeal directly to two of our deepest desires: immortality and omnipotence. The time machine would allow us to escape death and gain knowledge of the fate of the earth, while invisibility would enable us to go and come as we please, under the noses of friends and enemies. At the same time, both fictions show us the dangers of fulfilled wishes: The Time Traveller discovers the future of humanity is not bright but hideously dark, while the Invisible Man drowns in the madness brought about by his own experimentation.
Of course, what Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) wanted to express in these fantasies and what generations of readers have made of them are two radically different things. Erroneously labeled “science fiction,” and tricked out in their film versions with all kinds of fanciful devices with flashing lights and ominous buzzers Wells never mentions, they are really tales that enact the author’s theories and speculations about human society, human nature, and natural history in allegorical fashion. That is, the “science” in Wells’s fictions is nothing more than stage machinery. But, ironically, it is the machinery that has come to dominate our collective imagination.
There is nothing unique in this. Think of Gulliver’s Travels (whose long-forgotten original title is Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World), a book that Wells read as a boy and reread throughout his life. In 1726 Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) satirized English political parties, religious quarrels, theories of world government, and science, but his work was so grounded in eighteenth-century British culture that today’s readers need extensive preparation to fathom it. The story of Lemuel Gulliver’s visits to lands populated by giants or intelligent horses has, however, become a staple of children’s literature. The same applies to Robinson Crusoe (1719), by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). Only scholars see the relationship between Crusoe’s shipwreck and Defoe’s ideas on the fate of the middle classes during the Restoration, when Charles II returned to England in 1660. Defoe’s message and all his political intentions have been lost, but his story endures as a wonderful demonstration of self-reliance. In the literature of the United States, we have the example of Herman Melville (1819-1891) and his Moby Dick (1851): Most readers learn about the ambiguous struggle between good and evil embedded in the work long after they’ve read a novel about nineteenth-century whaling and the strange characters engaged in that dangerous work.
Much the same has taken place with Wells’s Time Machine and The Invisible Man. Wells cloaked his ideas about the future of society and the role of science in the world so well that readers simply do not see those issues and instead read his short novels as examples of a kind of fiction based on the simplest of propositions: “What if it were possible to travel through time by means of a machine?” or “What if it were possible to make oneself invisible?” In a world—one we share with Wells despite the fact that more than a hundred years separates the moment he published these two works from our own age—when scientists seem to make discoveries every day, it requires no great leap of imagination, no “willing suspension of disbelief,” to accept the basic premise of each text.
This is what differentiates Wells from Jules Verne (1828-1905), author of Voyage to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Wells, in a 1934 preface to a collection of his early fictions comments on why they are not comparable to Verne’s writings:
These tales have been compared with the work of Jules Verne and there was a disposition on the part of literary journalists at one time to call me the English Jules Verne. As a matter of fact there is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies. His work dealt almost always with actual possibilities of invention and discovery, and he made some remarkable forecasts.... But these stories of mine ... do not pretend to deal with possible things; they are exercises of the imagination in a quite different field. They belong to a class of writing which includes the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the True Histories of Lucian, Peter Schlemil, and the story of Frankenstein.... They are all fantasies; they do not aim to project a serious possibility; they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a good gripping dream (see, in “For Further Reading,” The Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H.G. Wells, p.i).
Wells links himself to a tradition, but at the same time he misleads the reader. It is true, as he says in the same preface, that “The invention is nothing in itself,” by which he means that the applied science of Verne is of no interest in his kind of tale. It is also the reason why rediscoveries of Verne, especially films, are always set in the past: His projections became fact very quickly. By the same token, this explains why Wells’s inventions and their ramifications will always be modern.
This choice of fantasy over plausible scientific projection is also what separates Wells’s kind of fantasy from writing that depends on magic or the supernatural to shock the reader: There are no werewolves or vampires in these novels, and Wells does not break the laws of nature, except in the instance of the basic proposition animating each fiction—time travel or invisibility. This swerves Wells away from authors of the “Gothic” tradition, like Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, or Charles Maturin, whose primary intention is to arouse the reader’s fear. That same intention appears in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), published in the same year as The Invisible Man, though, ironically, vampires have come over the years to have their own symbolic values, from being metaphors about sexuality to being symbols of the way capitalists drink the lifeblood of the proletariat.
If we wonder about Wells’s immediate antecedents, we would probably have to begin, following his lead, with Mary Shelley (1797-1851). Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), despite the myriad films based on it, really presents the problems of creation—artistic or scientific—disconnected from traditional notions of morality or religion: creation for the sake of creation or creation for the sake of ego, an idea quite relevant both to the Time Traveller, whose mysterious machine resembles nothing more than a Victorian motorcycle (if such a thing is imaginable) with no visible mechanism, and to the Invisible Man, who labors to make himself invisible only to satisfy his own selfish needs.
The affinities between Mary Shelley’s protagonist, Frankenstein, whose means for infusing life in a pieced-together body Shelley leaves as vague as the time machine in terms of technique, and Griffin, Wells’s invisible protagonist, are clear: Each isolates himself from society to pursue a scientific goal that can only be understood as a triumph of will. Frankenstein has no real altruistic purpose in creating his monster; he only wants to copy God—like the titan Prometheus in Mary Shelley’s subtitle, who fashions man out of clay—by creating a creature who will adore him as its creator. Griffin at first simply wants to see if he can do in fact what he thinks he can do in theory. Only after he becomes invisible does he become a terrorist who threatens the established order of society.
It is that part of Griffin’s story that most concerns Wells, himself unhappy with the status quo and desirous of bringing about changes in society. What Wells hoped would one day come into existence was a socialist state organized along the lines of a factory, but a factory in which labor and management were a single body. He radically opposed the Marxist idea that current society was based on the opposition between an owning class of capitalists and a working class of proletarians. In fact, The Time Machine is a voyage to a future in which the Marxist concept has become fact and society has evolved into two classes of beings: subterraneans who feed and clothe surface dwellers who spend their lives singing, playing, and making love. The horror of this relationship is that the laborers, the apelike Morlocks, use the pretty but brainless Eloi as food.
Wells was certain that Marxist class struggle would produce a working class that was perfectly organized but concerned only with promoting its own interests. Once a kind of harmonious balance was struck between capitalists and proletarians—once the workers got all they wanted and could somehow manage to tolerate the existence of an idle class of owners—both classes would slowly degenerate into subhumans because their intelligence would no longer be challenged.
Wells clearly had Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward (1888) in mind as he wrote and rewrote The Time Machine, which began in 1888 as a series of sketches called The Chronic Argonauts. In his romance, Bellamy (1850-1898) has his hero fall asleep in 1887 and wake up in the year 2000. State ownership has replaced capitalism, and all citizens work for the state. The transformation of society also brings about the transformation of the people, with the result that morality and culture reach new heights. H. G. Wells was simply not convinced that a communism offering a work-free utopia was the best thing for humanity. In fact, his own puritanical work ethic taught him that such a scheme would result in a society of drones living in a mediocre world kept barely functioning by a well-organized but self-interested working class—Marx’s proletariat. Without a spur to force humanity into making new discoveries and expanding its physical or mental frontiers, Wells felt, we would be content with whatever satisfied our basic needs, but nothing more.
The Time Machine, then, stands as a pessimistic response to the optimism animating nineteenth-century thought and locates Wells squarely in his historical context. Three thinkers—Hegel, Marx, and Darwin—define the optimistic mind-set of the nineteenth century, itself a logical response to the great strides being made by technology and to the lessons if not the realities of the two great revolutions of the late-eighteenth century, that of the United States in 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770—1831) established the predominant concept of how history was thought to be shaped in the nineteenth century. His idea that there is a discernible pattern in history, one in which more and more people enjoy freedom, reflects the European movement away from autocratic, monarchic government to constitutional monarchies in which ordinary citizens are given at least a limited voice in their own governance. Hegel looks back to a past when there is only one free person in society, the autocrat who holds all power, and forward to a time when freedom is shared by many.
How this takes place, Hegel says, is through conflict, the other idea he establishes as a fact of historical thought in the nineteenth century. Hegel’s notion of conflict does not reflect a chaos in which myriad forces strike out at one another but a clash of opposed ideas that crystallize at a certain moment in history, ideas embodied in individuals, parties, and nations. Out of conflict arises a new order, one that combines or synthesizes principles found in both of the opposing forces.
Karl Marx (1818—1883) translated Hegel’s principles into a concrete projection about the future. Observing that technology has acquired a history of its own, that its development is independent of ideology or past history, Marx announced a new era. The nineteenth century, Marx says, is the age of industrialization, in which entrepreneurs and capitalists use industrial technology to organize production for profit. The result of that organization, which, according to Marx, had taken place with astonishing speed, is the creation of a two-class society: those who own the means of production (the capitalist owners of industry) and those who work in their factories (the proletariat). These classes are fundamentally opposed to each other, and their clash will inevitably result in the annihilation of the capitalist class and the triumph of the proletariat, who will seize the means of production and use it for their own benefit. This victory will see the birth of a new world order in which industry and most property will be owned by a state whose only reason for existing will be the well-being of its citizens, a state that will eventually wither away.
Charles Darwin (1809—1882) revolutionized nineteenth-century science with his theory of evolution. Darwin’s idea, that organisms, man included, change over time from one state or condition to another, challenged the theological view that human beings were created by God in His image. Darwin’s principle—that, for example, modern horses began in small animals like eohippus and, over millennia, evolved into equus—declares that evolution is the success of those animals that best meet the challenges of their environment through transmission to successive generations of genetic variations favoring survival—a concept he termed “natural selection.” This theory becomes a lens through which scientists tried to understand the history of the natural world.
It also produced the false corollary “survival of the fittest,” used by those, following Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who sought to apply Darwin’s ideas to human society—so-called “social darwinists”—to show that there are superior and inferior human types. This perversion of Darwinian thought influenced the views of H. G. Wells on society and shows that he was as much a product of his age as he was a shaper of it. That is, Wells, fascinated by technology and science (his intellectual training was almost totally scientific), gathered into himself the progressive, evolutionary theories that dominated the nineteenth century but transfused them with yet another nineteenth-century idea: entropy.
Loosely stated, entropy describes a tendency in dynamic systems to lose energy and degrade. We might think of a car battery as an example: When new, the battery is able to start the automobile and keep its lights burning. Over time, the chemical reaction that produces the electricity in the battery weakens until finally the battery is dead. Speculative thinkers—notably, in the case of Wells, his teacher, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)—applied this idea to nature and humanity. Where Darwin’s ideas of human evolution seemed to open a path leading humanity to an almost angelic state, this theory suggests we are susceptible to decay and decline, an idea Wells puts into practice in his first novel, The Time Machine, in which the Time Traveller discovers humanity some eight hundred thousand years in the future to have degenerated into little more than animals.
So in the last third of the nineteenth century, when Wells was beginning his career, thinking people had begun to question the biological, social, and industrial optimism of the century’s first seventy-five years. At the same time, those final decades could not shake themselves free of a dynamic concept of human and natural history—that is, that change may be for the better or it may be for the worse, but the entire universe is subject to change of some kind, in contradistinction to the Judaic or Christian idea of a stable universe created by God (which He will one day destroy).
Humans, Wells thinks, have it within them to take charge of their history but refuse to do so because of ignorance, fear, or self-interest. Why have a monarchy in Great Britain, when no king or queen could hope to govern a modern nation? There is no rational answer to this question since the idea that someone is “naturally” born to lead a people flies in the face of common sense.
Wells would find himself at odds with traditional society over the course of his entire life. He would be a tireless promoter of educational reform: Why study Latin or Greek, he would argue, when British society, especially at the start of the twentieth century, was so desperately in need of people with scientific training? He would eventually envisage a non-Marxist socialism as the best kind of society. He conceived the ideal social system as a single, globalized nation in which all peoples participate, in which all individuals work within industries governed by boards of directors that regulate production and protect the well-being of workers.
Wells wanted to abolish the notion of class conflict by eliminating class distinctions, an idea that certainly put him at odds with British conservatives and with Marxists as well. What current society needed, Wells felt, was a jolt that would startle people into realizing just how haphazard and disorganized their societies were and stimulate them to create a rational and universal society. Such is the thinking behind his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, in which the invading Martians destroy society and thereby open the way for a new world organization. In real history, Wells hoped that the wholesale destruction of World War I would produce a system of world government so that nation-states would no longer have any reason to be at one another’s throats. It was, he thought, our primitive taste for violence that prevented a better world. In this, as World War II would confirm, he was only too right.
But the H. G. Wells of 1895 was still a young man of twenty-nine struggling to find a way out of poverty and insecurity. He’d recently married for the second time, his first marriage in 1891 to his cousin Isabel Wells having lasted barely two years. Though he and Catherine Robbins (nicknamed Jane) as yet had no children (they would eventually have two sons), Wells was obliged to work nonstop to generate enough income to keep two people alive. As he would say in a 1919 letter to his friend E. S. P Haynes:
Earning a living by writing is a frightful gamble. It depends neither on knowledge nor literary quality but upon secondary considerations of timeliness, mental fashion & so forth almost beyond control. I have been lucky but it took me eight years, while I was teaching & doing anxious journalism, to get established upon a comfortably paying footing (quoted in Norman MacKenzie and Jeanne MacKenzie, H. G. Wells: a Biography, p. 103).
“Anxious journalism” meant writing an article on any subject whatever—from cricket, to swearing, to head colds—and hoping someone would publish it.
It was W.E. Henley, an editor Wells had met in 1893, who gave Wells his big chance. Henley was just about to inaugurate a new magazine, The New Review, and offered to publish The Time Machine, whose earlier, cruder version he’d already seen, as a serial. It was Henley who told Wells to stop talking about time travel and instead take his readers on a voyage through time. He also convinced the book publisher William Heinemann to publish the serial as a volume, securing a contract for Wells that gave him a much-needed £50 advance, a first edition of 10,000 copies, and a 15 percent royalty rate. The serial was a wild success, and the novel a bestseller. H. G. Wells overnight found himself transformed from a hack writer one step ahead of starvation and bill collectors into a prominent author.
But success did not tempt Wells into inactivity. In 1896 his most Swift-inspired novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau, appeared, and in 1897 he published his third science fantasy, The Invisible Man. But these major works are merely the tip of the iceberg: Wells also published a comic novel about the bicycling craze in which he enthusiastically participated, The Wheels of Chance (1896), along with two collections of short stories and a slew of miscellaneous articles.
How could this unhealthy man (he suffered from tuberculosis and became seriously ill in 1887 and once again in 1893), totally untrained in “creative writing,” plying the journalist’s trade just to make ends meet, have both the imagination and the will to write—with no typewriter—so many words, compose so many tales? (True enough, he did have help: His second wife made clean copies of his manuscripts.) But the fact is Wells probably wrote much as he had spoken when he addressed his classes as a young teacher. Just as his lectures would have to be pitched to the level of his students, with a vocabulary they could readily fathom and a sentence structure that would elucidate rather than obfuscate the points he wanted to communicate, his fictions are exercises in clarity, and no less didactic than his lectures. In his satiric essay on Henry James (in his 1915 novel Boon), Wells castigated James for his notoriously convoluted style, comparing it to a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea, and in a letter to James Joyce, whose work he admired but found overly complex, he stated simply, “I want language and statement as simple and clear as possible” (quoted in Michael Foot, The History of Mr. Wells, p. 215). Wells could never espouse the “art-for-art’s -sake” ideal: For him, art—all writing, in fact—had a single purpose, to communicate ideas and provoke change.
Wells was a self-made man: His literary talent earned him immortality. His social thought, expressed in countless fictions and essays, made him a kind of prophet. His views on history, as expressed in his Outline of History (1920), an international bestseller, fostered the very idea of universal history. But while his presence in the twenty-first century imagination remains huge thanks to works like The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, his presence in the social and political discourse of the new century is practically nonexistent.
The reason, simply put, is that Wells’s strength was also his weakness. The great nineteenth-century thinkers whose ideas are still current are those who created a school, a movement, a political party, something that transcended them as individuals. Karl Marx is more than a political philosopher toiling away in the academic wilderness. Sigmund Freud is more than a Viennese physician with newfangled ideas about the workings of the human mind. Both of these individuals gave rise to institutions larger than themselves. This Wells could never do, probably because like his own protagonists he was and would always remain a Romantic, an isolated voice demanding that others follow his ideas but unwilling to roll up his sleeves and dirty his hands in the practical application of his own concepts.
And the triumph and tragedy enacted in the two fictions under discussion here, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, are parallel.
The narrative structure of The Time Machine reflects and enacts Wells’s lifelong dilemma. We have on the one hand the man of science who acts alone, the nameless Time Traveller, and on the other the man who writes for others, the sentimental Hillyer. Why Wells decided to leave his Time Traveller anonymous may reflect the various versions the story passed through, first in 1888, then in 1889, and again in 1892. There the Time Traveller has the allegoric name Dr. Moses Nebogipfel: Moses the Hebrew prophet who leads the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery; Nebo, the mountain from which Moses sees the Promised Land, and “gipfel,” derived from the German for mountaintop. He is, in other words, one of Wells’s many representations of the man of science as prophet, or as Nebogipfel himself puts it:
I discovered that I was ... a man born out of my time—a man thinking the thoughts of a wiser age, doing things and believing things that men now cannot understand, and that in the years ordained to me there was nothing but silence and suffering for my soul—unbroken solitude, man’s bitterest pain. I knew I was an Anachronic Man; my age was still to come (H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention, edited by Leon Stover, p.192).
This sentimental, melodramatic portrait is certainly that of its author Herbert George Wells, here in his guise as visionary.
But the rewriting and reworking, together with W. E. Henley’s editorial intervention, convinced Wells to shift emphasis away from the Time Traveller per se and to focus instead on what the Time Traveller experiences. And what he experiences combines Wells’s hyperbolic vision of Marxist history with the ideas he gleaned from T. H. Huxley and others on the entropy that would eventually extinguish the sun and bring about the end of the world. Thus Wells is pessimistic on two fronts: The “workers paradise” generates a two-class society, idle drones fed and clothed by worker-beasts who feed on them, and the end of the world looms large as the sun dims and the earth freezes to death.
In a 1931 preface to a deluxe edition of The Time Machine, the sixty-five-year-old Wells casts a scornful eye over the novel he published when he was thirty-six:
The story of the Time Machine as distinguished from the idea, “dates” not only in its treatment but in its conception. It seems a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, as he looks it over once more. But it goes as far as his philosophy about human evolution went in those days. The idea of a social differentiation of mankind into Eloi and Morlocks, strikes him now as more than a little crude. In his adolescence Swift had exercised a tremendous fascination upon him and the naive pessimism of this picture of the human future is, like the kindred Island of Doctor Moreau, a clumsy tribute to a master to whom he owes an enormous debt. Moreover, the geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the “inevitable” freezing up of the world—and of life and mankind with it. There was no escape it seemed. The whole game of life would be over in a million years or less (H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1931, pp. ix-x).
Once again, Wells fudges the details. He can dismiss the entropy theory as “dreadful lies,” but he does not explain that his view of the cute, stupid Eloi and the apelike, cannibalistic Morlocks is his extrapolation of what would happen under Marxism. At the same time, his tribute to Swift is genuine, yet another link between Wells and the great tradition of moralizing satirists.
Wells’s casual irony when mocking the fact that science in 1895 promised that the world would be over “in a million years or less” clashes with the Time Traveller’s precise date of his arrival in the future, “the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One A.D.” (p. 26). When the Time Traveller escapes from the Morlocks at the end of chapter X, he moves forward in time, and in chapter XI, reaches the end of his journey, when “more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens” (p.76). So Wells himself found the “million years or less” assessment too short and brought the number up to thirty million. Even here, life persists, if only in the form of some green slime and a disgusting creature somewhere between an octopus and a spider scuttling along the shore of a freezing sea. The Eloi and Morlocks are by then extinct, and the pitiable life-forms that have adapted to the world’s last days are mercifully unconscious of their imminent doom.
For Wells, the tragedy of human and natural entropic evolution is the loss of human consciousness. It is this fall from awareness that Wells uses to characterize the Eloi and the Morlocks. Wells may have derived his visual idea of this ghastly utopia from Hieronymous Bosch’s painting Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500). In that triptych, the left panel shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, while on the right we see Hell. The strange center panel depicts masses of virtually hairless beings, at least one of which is eating a huge piece of fruit (not unlike the Eloi’s “hypertrophied raspberry” on p.24) and playing (often obscenely) with flowers. Like the Eloi and Morlocks, Bosch’s humanity is locked in a mindless repetition of pleasure—the Eloi dance in the sun, and the Morlocks feast on them in the darkness. Neither group is aware of a before or an after, which is why neither group is even slightly interested in finding out who the Time Traveller is, where he came from, or why he is there. He is an anomaly, but these subhumans have no curiosity about him or anything beyond what satisfies their immediate needs.
Wells sees an ironic parallel between nature and human history in The Time Machine: With its needs satisfied, humanity, like the decadents of the fin de siècle will become ever more effeminate, less and less interested in anything whatsoever, until finally its intellect atrophies. So there will have to be a constant goad prodding humanity onward. Wells can only imagine this in terms of cataclysm—war or invasion from another planet—and in his search for a new subject turns his attention back to himself. That is, his Time Traveller is a man obsessed who transforms his obsession—time as the fourth dimension of space—into a fact by inventing a fantastic machine that is capable of moving through time. Wells, following in Mary Shelley’s footsteps, makes not the slightest attempt to explain what energy drives the time machine or even how it is able to traverse time at such amazing speeds.
Wells’s new subject, yet another self-portrait in a distorting mirror, appears in the second fiction in this volume. The Invisible Man uses yet another obsessed man of science, but this time Wells toys with the idea of plausibility. That is, Griffin, the invisible man, explains how he is able to capitalize on his own albinism to reduce the amount of light his body reflects to the point where human eyes cannot see him. It would almost seem as though Wells were succumbing to Jules Verne’s notion of plausibility, but we quickly realize this is not the case. Griffin’s albinism (pp.172—173) is merely the outward sign of his difference from others, a difference we might suppose to be quantitative—some people are lighter-skinned than others—but which turns out to be qualitative. What separates Griffin from the rest of humanity is exactly the element that separates Wells’s early version of the Time Traveller from the rest of humanity: genius.
But genius is intoxicating. It sends the ego into raptures of self-delight and isolates the individual further and further from anything like a human community. This is the tale Wells spins out in The Invisible Man: the gradual metamorphosis of genius into madness. Again, this is not a unique story. The Romantics, especially William Wordsworth (1770—1850) in his poem “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a, Yew Tree” (1795), explore this very theme, while Wells’s model, Mary Shelley, provides him with the nucleus of his novel—the solitary scientist, the potentially dangerous invention pursued for egotistical purposes.
So The Invisible Man is a cautionary tale the author writes for his generation and for himself. When we forget that we too are merely human, when we take ourselves to be something like gods because we can do things ordinary people cannot do, we run the risk of regarding our neighbors with contempt. Wells transfers the role of outsider, which Romanticism had created for the artist, to the scientist in order to show that the truly innovative force in modern society would derive not from humanists but from those trained in science. The retrograde force in society, as Wells preached throughout his life—the mockery of Greek studies in chapter I (p. 7) of The Time Machine is a gentle harbinger of this notion—is the diligent but useless study of dead languages that have no bearing on modern culture. The gap between scientists and humanists persists in our own age, as evidenced by C.P. Snow’s 1959 pamphlet “The Two Cultures,” which shows scientists to be second-class citizens in a society dominated by humanists.
Wells’s ideas about society and the relationship between the scientist and the community remain constant throughout his career, but his literary style does not. The style of The Time Machine is essayistic: Wells leaves his characters and setting so abstract that there is little chance his readers will feel any genuine affinities or antipathies for them. Even his vocabulary is limited, with the word “incontinent” (in its various forms) repeated so often we begin to wonder if it might be some sort of obsession.
The Invisible Man appeared in 1897, only two years after The Time Machine, but the thirty-three-year-old author had become a vastly different man. In the two years between these two novels, Wells produced a prodigious quantity of work: The Wonderful Visit, Select Conversations with an Uncle, and The Stolen Bacillus in 1895, then The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Wheels of Chance in 1896—three novels and two collections of shorter works. The important change here is Wells’s decision to write other kinds of works and not limit himself to fantasy. The Wheels of Chance capitalizes on the bicycling craze and allows the author to recreate oral speech patterns, especially his own Cockney accent. This would cause reviewers to link him to Charles Dickens (1812-1870), who turned lower-class Londoners into picturesque types.
We see the effect of so much writing experience the moment we open The Invisible Man. Mrs. Hall, the landlady of the Coach and Horses Inn in Iping, where Griffin, the Invisible Man, sets up his makeshift laboratory, comes alive as a human presence when she muses on her nephew’s accident:
There was my sister’s son, Tom, jest cut his arm with a scythe, tumbled on it in the ‘ayfield, and bless me! he was three months tied up, sir. You’d hardly believe it. It’s regular given me a dread of a scythe, sir (p.95).
Mrs. Hall’s comic fretting is only marginally related to the story of the Invisible Man, but her language in its sheer ordinariness renders the fiction much more terrifying. That is, we have the linguistic reality of late-nineteenth-century London invaded by the bizarre: The real world is now Wells’s setting, and he invades it with all the violence of the Martians in The War of the Worlds, which he would publish in 1898. This is one of Wells’s most important innovations: The reader need not be transported to the future or to Dr. Moreau’s island laboratory, where evolution is accelerated by science. Now the fantastic strides through the front door of the reader’s house in the form of the Invisible Man.
This technique of making the real world strange also reappears in Wells’s narrator. Unlike Hillyer, the witness-narrator in The Time Machine, the narrator here shifts ambiguously from being an omniscient third-person narrator in true novelistic style to being a reporter. For example, chapter XI (p.136) begins in an explanatory mode: “Now in order clearly to understand what had happened in the inn, it is necessary to go back to the moment when Mr. Marvel first came into view of Mr. Huxter’s window.” The narrator here is in full command of the facts and uses his knowledge to inform the reader. At other times, the narrator leaves much to our imagination:
The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp’s house in a state of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp’s gateway was violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken, and thereafter for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of human perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one can imagine him.... (opening of chapter XXVI, p. 207).
This change of focus reflects the reader’s changing perception of the Invisible Man. We are simultaneously sympathetic to his situation and horrified at the way he can sacrifice a cat (p. 176) to science with no thought of its suffering or steal money entrusted to his father, thus forcing the old man to commit suicide (p. 173). The rambling autobiographical sketch he gives to Kemp (chapters XVII—XXIV) shows him to be more brilliant than the unimaginative Kemp but also unscrupulous, egotistical, and, finally, tyrannical. Mad, either from ingesting chemicals or from the sense of power invisibility confers, Griffin has, as Kemp says, “cut himself off from his kind” (p. 209). He becomes a superman but one who seeks to bend society to his will.
The ending of The Invisible Man is charged with pathos. Surrounded, he is kicked to death (pp. 222-223) by workmen who are afraid and as indifferent to the marvelous fact of Griffin’s invisibility as the Eloi are to the presence of the Time Traveller. He even begs for mercy, something he himself is incapable of bestowing. But here Wells, just as he did in The Time Machine, when the Time Traveller disappears perhaps to return at another time, leaves a thread behind: The Invisible Man’s diaries, useless in the ignorant hands of the drunken Mr. Marvel, may fall into the hands of another scientist, one who may use invisibility as a means to change the world.
Alfred Mac Adam, a professor at Barnard College—Columbia University, teaches Latin American and comparative literature. He is a translator of Latin American fiction and writes extensively on art. Between 1984 and 2002, Mac Adam was the editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, a publication of the Americas Society.
The Time Machine
AN INVENTION
