Time Machine and The Invisible Man (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (39 page)

—July 13, 1895

THE
SPECTATOR

The central notion of Mr. H. G. Wells’s grotesque romance, as he has frankly admitted, has been utilised by Mr. Gilbert in one of the
Bab Ballads,
being that of a man endowed with invisibility but susceptible to heat and cold, and therefore obliged to wear clothes. But while Mr. Gilbert treated the theme in a spirit of fantastic farce, Mr. Wells has worked it out with that sombre humour and remorseless logic which stamp him as a disciple, conscious or unconscious, of the author of
Gulliver
. Swift, however, excelled in the logical conduct to its extreme consequences of some absurd proposition; Mr. Wells’s method is in its essentials much more realistic. He does not posit his invisible man; he tells us how he became invisible as the result of a discovery in physiology based upon actual scientific data, for Mr. Wells is no dabbler but deeply versed in these studies. It is characteristic, again, of his method that his invisible man should be neither a buffoon nor a humourist, but a moody, irritable egotist, with a violent and vindictive temper. Griffin, in short, is really a tragic figure. His dreams of unlimited power are rudely dispelled by experience of the terrible practical drawbacks of his position, his desperate efforts to live in rustic seclusion are baffled by the curiosity of the villagers, and the exigencies of his position gradually accentuate his natural unkindliness until it develops into sheer inhumanity. Theft is followed by murder, the whole countryside is raised against him, and after he has found an asylum for a while in the house of a doctor, a fellow-student, to whom he confides the whole story of his discovery and its futility, the doctor’s suspicions are aroused, information is given to the authorities, and the invisible man takes flight, with the sole desire of revenging himself on his friend. The last scenes of all, in which the invisible man, now inflamed with homicidal mania, besieges the doctor’s house, and is finally hunted down and battered to death by the mob, are as vivid and gruesome as anything that Mr. Wells has done. As, however, he is so strong in realistic detail, we may be allowed to ask whether it is not the case that his invisible man, as an albino, would have been handicapped by short sight. To sum up,
The Invisible Man
is an amazingly clever performance, of engrossing interest throughout; we should call it fascinating were it not that the element of geniality, which lent unexpected charm to
The Wheels of Chance,
is here conspicuously absent.

—September 25, 1897

ARNOLD BENNETT

Like most of Mr. H. G. Wells’s novels and stories,
[The Invisible Man]
is based upon an Idea—the Idea that a man by a scientific process can make himself invisible. The Idea is not a new one—I think I have met with it several times before—but it is worked with an ingenuity, a realism, an inevitableness, which no previous worker in the field of “grotesque romance,” has ever approached, and which surpasses in some respects all Mr. Wells’s former efforts. The strength of Mr. Wells lies in the fact that he is not only a scientist, but a most talented student of character, especially quaint character. He will not only ingeniously describe for you a scientific miracle, but he will set down that miracle in the midst of a country village, sketching with excellent humour the inn-landlady, the blacksmith, the chemist’s apprentice, the doctor, and all the other persons whom the miracle affects. He attacks you before and behind, and the result is that you are compelled to yield absolutely to his weird spells.

The Invisible Man thought he was going to do great things when he devisualised himself (he did, in fact, terrorise a whole district), but he soon found his sad error, and his story is one of failure, growing more pathetic and grimmer as it proceeds; the last few pages are deep tragedy, grotesque but genuine. The theme is developed in a masterly manner. The history of the man’s first hunt in London for clothes and a mask wherewith to hide his invisibility, is a farce dreadful in its significance, but this is nothing to the naked, desperate tragedy of his last struggle against visible mankind. Indeed, the latter half of this book is pure sorrow. The invisible man is no longer grotesque, but human. One completely loses sight of the merely wonderful aspect of the phenomena in watching the dire pathos of his loneliness in a peopled world. Mr. Wells has achieved poetry.

—from
Woman
(September 29, 1897)

 

It was very graceful of you to send me your book—I mean the particular masterpiece entitled
The Time Machine,
after I had so
un
gracefully sought it at your hands. My proper punishment would have been promptly to have to pay for it—and this atonement I should certainly, for my indiscretion, already have made, had this muddy village facilitated the transaction by placing a bookseller’s shop, or stand, in my path. (No Time Machine, as it happens, would suffice to measure the abysmal ages required by the local stationer to get a volume, as he calls it, down. Several, artlessly ordered by me, have been on their way down for months.) So I have had, as the next best thing, to bow my head to the extremity of simply reading you. You are very magnificent. I am beastly critical—but you are in a still higher degree wonderful. I re-write you, much, as I read—which is the highest tribute my damned impertinence can pay an author. I shall now not rest content till I have made up several other deficiencies—grossly accidental—in my perfect acquaintance with you. (Stay your hand—the aids to that extension are precisely the volumes on their way down. You shall cost me something—if it takes all my future—and all your own past.) So I am very particularly and knowingly grateful.

—from a letter to H. G. Wells (January 29, 1900)

1. The
Spectator
points out that in Wells’s view there is a connection between the advancement of technology and a secularization of society Is this dual process inevitable? Is it irreversible?

2. What is it we respond to in literary works based on a conception of the world that is contrary to fact, if not impossible? Think of
Gulliver’s Travels or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Frankenstein
or
The Invisible Man.
Think of video games.

3. In many works of science fiction—
Frankenstein
is one of the best examples—attempts by scientists to improve on nature end in disaster. Some readers will undoubtedly argue that Griffin’s experiment was bound to fail from the beginning. What is the source of this recurrent motif? Conservatism? A sense that the fantasy of invisibility or tremendous power or time travel is itself immoral or worse?

4. Do you agree with the assessment that Wells’s characters lack depth, that he is an indifferent psychologist?

Coren, Michael.
The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H.
G.
Wells.
New York: Atheneum, 1993.

Foot, Michael.
The History of Mr.
Wells. London: Doubleday, 1995.

MacKenzie, Norman, and Jeanne MacKenzie.
H. G. Wells: a Biography.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.

West, Anthony.
H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life.
New York: Random House, 1984.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The First Wells.” In
Borges, a Reader:
A Selection
from the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges
, edited by Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid. New York: Dutton, 1981.

Scheick, William J., ed.
The Critical Response to H. G. Wells.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Suvin, Darko, and Robert M. Philmus, eds.
H. G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction.
Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1977.

Wells, H. G.
The Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H. G. Wells.
With a preface by the author. Originally published as Seven Famous Novels, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934. Reprint: New York: Avenel Books, 1978.

.
The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance: A Critical Text of the 1897 New York First Edition, with an Introduction and
Appendices. Edited by Leon Stover. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,1998.

____.
The Time Machine: An Invention: A Critical Text of the 1895 London First Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices.
Edited by Leon Stover. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996.

————.
The Time Machine.
With a preface by the Author written for this edition; and designs by W. A. Dwiggins. New York: Random House, 1931.