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  The Invisible Man

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was born to lower middle-class parents in straitened circumstances in the Kentish market town of Bromley. He was apprenticed to a draper, a position he loathed, but won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in Kensington, which had been recently established under the leadership of the eminent biologist T. H. Huxley. There he was trained to be amongst the first generation of school science teachers. He did not complete his degree, but did begin to write and edit a student journal. His brief career as a teacher was ended by illness, and he turned to science journalism and reviewing professionally. He finally published The Time Machine as his first book in 1895. This ‘scientific romance’ was enthusiastically received by leading critics and editors and Wells began a whirlwind writing career, often writing several books a year. By 1901 he had completed several of his most famous scientific romances, including The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901).

  After his non-fiction speculations on the year 2000, Anticipations (1901), Wells became a leading social and political commentator. He wrote utopias, comic novels of lower middle-class life, and ‘problem novels’, often on controversial subjects, such as sexual freedom for women in Ann Veronica (1909). He was associated with the liberal-left Fabian Society, although scandalized respectable society with a string of affairs. He also alienated many literary figures, quarrelling with Henry James over the purpose of fiction. Modernists like Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster despised his work and often defined their new style against his. Yet with An Outline of History (1919), his epic and controversial history of the world, Wells became a truly global figure. After the Great War, he campaigned for world government and in the 1930s visited both American and Soviet leaders to press for peaceful solutions. He lived long enough to see the atomic bomb, something he accurately predicted in The World Set Free (1914), used on Japan. One of his last books was called Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945).

  Matthew Beaumont is a Professor in English Literature at University College London. He is the author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens (2015), and The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (2012). He has edited Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance for Oxford World’s Classics.

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  H. G. Wells

  The Invisible Man

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  Matthew Beaumont

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6DP United Kingdom

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  Introduction, Note on the Text, Select Bibliography,

  Explanatory Notes © Matthew Beaumont 2017

  Chronology © Roger Luckhurst 2017

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  First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2017

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  Contents

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of H. G. Wells

  THE INVISIBLE MAN

  Appendix I: The Epilogue

  Appendix II: Variant Endings to Chapter XXVIII

  Explanatory Notes

  Introduction

  Readers who are unfamiliar with the plot may prefer to treat the Introduction as an Afterword.

  ‘The man’s become inhuman, I tell you,’ comments one character as the forces of justice close in on the fugitive known as the Invisible Man; ‘He has cut himself off from his kind’ (p. 114). H. G. Wells’s fourth novel is a gripping tragicomedy that describes the apparently inexorable process whereby its eponymous hero, or anti-hero, a bitter but brilliant scientist called Griffin, who has invented an ingenious means of becoming invisible, aspires initially to superhuman status, but collapses finally into an abject, subhuman state.

  A physicist and former chemist, Griffin is no more than ‘a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college’ (p. 83) when he first apprehends that it might be possible to make the ‘whole fabric’ of his body (p. 82), including in the end his blood, completely colourless and transparent. As he himself points out, he is ‘almost an albino’, ‘with a pink and white face and red eyes’, and this lack of skin pigmentation makes it easier for him to decolourize his tissues (p. 71): ‘ “… I could be Invisible,” I said, suddenly realising what it meant to be an albino with such knowledge’ (p. 82). In addition, his albinism reinforces his embattled sense of being a social outsider. In the nineteenth century, after all, albinos were exhibited at carnivals and fairs, and classed among degenerates. Because of his albinism the Invisible Man is already cut off from his kind.

  Sick of confronting a sense of personal, professional, and social impotence, Griffin is driven, in his dream of making himself invisible, by what Friedrich Nietzsche, exactly a decade before the publication of The Invisible Man, identified as ressentiment  —  the vindictively resentful attitude fostered in the individual as a result of the negation of the self that, as opposed to the ‘noble morality’ of ‘the masters’, is characteristic of ‘slave morality’.1 In this respect, his psychological condition anticipates that of the eponymous character of Wells’s later novel The History of Mr Polly (1910), who hates ‘the whole scheme of life’, which he regards as ‘at once excessive and inadeq
uate of him’, and who consequently falls, each day, ‘into a violent rage and hatred against the outer world’.2 But Griffin is far more malicious than Mr Polly. He is sociopathic. At one point, in order to fund his research, he steals from his own father, who then kills himself because he is secretly in debt.

  Frustrated in his ambitions, Griffin ‘find[s] compensation in an imaginary revenge’, to frame it in terms of Nietzsche’s formulation — his dream of becoming an invisible Übermensch.3 After discovering ‘a general principle of pigments and refraction’, Griffin devotes himself to his obsessive scientific labours in the laboratory he has surreptitiously set up in a cheap apartment in central London; and devises an elaborate method that makes it possible, ‘without changing any other property of matter’, as he puts it in his retrospective narrative, ‘to lower the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air — so far as all practical purposes are concerned’ (p. 80).4 ‘Wounded by the world’, the Invisible Man thus sets out to dominate it through his command of experimental science, and so to make himself one of the ‘masters of the world’.5

  Once he has performed the painful metamorphosis that follows his secretive experiments, Griffin gives full expression to his contempt for ‘the common conventions of humanity’ and the ‘common people’ who embody them (p. 104). Inspired by his ressentiment, the Invisible Man’s vengeful and destructive actions, which culminate in his announcement that he will initiate a Reign of Terror, ensure that he quickly becomes universally feared. He announces ‘the Epoch of the Invisible Man’, and rumours of his terroristic campaign fan out across the nation (p. 119). The police, in response to the Invisible Man’s attempt to implement this terroristic dream, instate ‘a stringent state of siege’ across an area of several hundred square miles surrounding the place in the countryside to which he has fled (p. 116). But this is too late for one man ‘of inoffensive habits and appearance’ whom Griffin beats to death, in ‘a murderous frenzy’, with an iron rod (p. 116): ‘He stopped this quiet man, going quietly home to his midday meal, attacked him, beat down his feeble defences, broke his arm, felled him, and smashed his head to a jelly’ (p. 116). This is not the ‘judicious slaying’ Griffin boasted of making when he insisted on establishing his Reign of Terror; it is a ‘wanton killing’ (p. 110). If he is sociopathic, he is almost psychopathic too. Even the insane moral code to which this monomaniac had hitherto adhered has collapsed.

  Finally, in fulfilment of the function of an ancient scapegoat, the Invisible Man is hunted down and brutally killed in what amounts to a sacrificial ritual performed by the community. ‘As if by irresistible gravitation towards the unpleasant,’ explained one of Wells’s most appreciative contemporaries, the campaigning journalist W. T. Stead, when he came to recapitulate its remorseless plot, ‘the invisible man passes through a series of disastrous experiences, until finally he goes mad and is beaten to death as the only way of putting an end to a homicidal maniac with the abnormal gift of invisibility.’6

  ‘A Grotesque Romance’

  First printed in serial form in Pearson’s Weekly from June to August 1897, then in book form in the autumn of the same year, The Invisible Man is at first sight little more than a novella. The front panel of Pearson’s first English edition is illustrated with the playful, if not facetious, image of a plump but comically incorporeal dressing gown tipping back a tumbler of whisky as it complacently reclines in a wicker armchair. This illustration refers to a scene in which, seeking asylum at the house of a former acquaintance from university — a sober-minded professional scientist called Kemp, who will shortly betray him to the police — Griffin borrows ‘a robe of dingy scarlet’ (p. 72) and sits greedily eating and drinking as he appeals for protection: ‘Kemp stared at the devouring dressing-gown’ (p. 72). The book’s physical appearance is of ‘light fiction’ rather than ‘literature’, to use a booksellers’ distinction.

  The spritely silhouette on the front panel of this edition recalls both the cartoons that accompanied ‘The Perils of Invisibility’, a poem published by W. S. Gilbert in 1870, and its substantive content. Gilbert’s comic ballad is about a corpulent, henpecked husband who persuades a fairy to render him invisible. This has an unforeseen and unfortunate consequence: ‘Old PETER vanished like a shot, | But then — his suit of clothes did not!’7 Instead of liberating him both from his wife and his physical needs, as he had hoped, it enslaves him to them all the more forcefully. Significantly, Wells pointed to ‘The Perils of Invisibility’ as a precedent; but he failed to concede the prior existence of other, more troubling portrayals of invisible beings published in the later nineteenth century, including Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘What Was It?’ (1859), Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Horla’ (1887), George Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson (1891), and C. H. Hinton’s Stella (1895).8

  It seems probable, then, that the casual reader’s first impression of The Invisible Man, on its publication, was that it is simply a mischievous jeux d’esprit. In the subtitle of its first edition, Wells playfully but also rather dismissively identified The Invisible Man as ‘A Grotesque Romance’. It is a slightly disconcerting generic ascription, because it stages a sort of collision between benign and potentially malign associations. But it seems to promise nonetheless that the novel is finally a harmless fantasia. No doubt this was his British publisher C. Arthur Pearson’s hope. One recent critic has contended that, ‘following the barrage of criticism he received upon the publication of The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells might well have been motivated to use comedy as a means of making his third scientific romance less intense than his evolutionary fables’.9 The literary journalist Clement Shorter appeared to confirm the efficacy of this tactic when he concluded his contemporaneous review of the novel with the claim that it ‘is bound to be popular, has not a suspicion of preaching about it, and in a quite unpretentious way will help to pass an amusing hour or so’.10

  Certainly, after The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) — a book that Wells feared was a ‘festival of ’orrors’ — The Invisible Man seems at first disarmingly innocent.11 Its opening chapters are set in Iping, the charmingly unsophisticated village in Sussex, south-east England, to which Griffin escapes, after realizing the appalling physical and psychological cost of his condition, in his desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to restore himself to visibility. The plot is propelled by pratfalls and other farcical incidents; and peopled with Dickensian caricatures that speak in a comically clumsy rural dialect. ‘And what’s ’e doin’ ’ith-out ’is close, than?’ asks the meddlesome landlady of the pub in which the Invisible Man is holed up, ‘’Tas a most curius basness’ (p. 28). Moments later, she is forced to flee from her mysterious guest’s room when bedclothes, clothes, and pieces of furniture are flung at her as if by a malicious poltergeist. The narrative is indeed unpretentiously diverting at this point, as Shorter’s assessment implied. It appears to constitute little more than an affectionate caricature of the idiocy of rural life.

  In later chapters set in Iping, the novelist’s recourse to slapstick evokes even more explicitly the harmless comic conventions of the late Victorian music hall. In ‘The Invisible Man Loses His Temper’, for example, the community’s labourers tumble out of the pub in pursuit of their almost imperceptible protagonist, but are soon sent sprawling about the lane, suddenly conscious that they are ‘involved not in a capture but in a rout’ (p. 53). Griffin has stripped himself naked in order to escape detection, but he has taken the precaution of stealing his neighbours’ clothes and giving a bundle of them to his extremely reluctant accomplice, Mr Marvel, a hapless tramp whose name is itself patently taken from the music-hall tradition. ‘The face of Mr Cuss was angry and resolute,’ remarks the narrator in reference to the local doctor, whose surname also indicates that he is a comic stereotype; ‘but his costume was defective — a sort of limp, white kilt that could only have passed muster in Greece’ (p. 52). Then the narrator delivers the punchline: ‘ “Hold him!” [Cuss] bawled.
“He’s got my trousers! — and every stitch of the vicar’s clothes!” ’ (p. 52). At this point the reader can almost hear the roar of ribald laughter erupting from a music-hall audience.

  As scenes like these insinuate, Wells’s novel also comprises a spryly witty satire of the contemporary fashion for spiritualism. In his disconcerting effects on the susceptible inhabitants of Iping, the Invisible Man resembles a peculiarly anarchic emissary of the spirit-world that acolytes of Madame Blavatsky, the charismatic founder of the Theosophical Society, along with other spiritualist adepts, cultivated during the seances conducted in the late nineteenth century. The 1880s and 1890s, the decades when the Society for Psychical Research was busy applying the principles of positivistic science to the conditions of the seance, were a golden age for ghosts. And for invisible forces more generally. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877), the bible of the theosophical movement, had been littered with references to the invisible: invisible worlds, invisible spirits, invisible spheres, invisible powers, invisible intelligences, and invisible bodies. Invisible forces were fashionable at the fin de siècle.

  Wells directly addressed the theme of spiritualism in two distinct contexts in the mid-1890s: first, his sceptical and highly critical review of Apparitions and Thought Transference (1894), a ‘popular exposition of telepathy’ by Frank Podmore, which appeared in Nature;12 second, his haunting short story ‘Under the Knife’ (1896), where with a certain seriousness he probed the idea that on the threshold of death an individual might have an out-of-body experience. Subsequently, Wells returned to the theme of spiritualism in Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), but this time in a slightly more satirical mood once again. The eponymous hero of this novel, to his exasperation, is in love with a woman whose ‘mother is a spiritualist’ and whose ‘stepfather is a professional Medium’.13