The First Men in the Moon Read online

  oxford world’s classics

  The First Men in the Moon

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was born to lower middle-class parents in straitened circumstances in the London suburb 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).

  Simon J. James is Professor of Victorian Literature and Head of the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He is the author of Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (2012) and Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing (2003). He has also written on Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, and literary criticism.

  oxford world’s classics

  For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles — from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels — the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.

  The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  H. G. Wells

  The First Men in the Moon

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  Simon J. James

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6DP United Kingdom

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

  It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark ofOxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  Introduction, Note on the Text, Select Bibliography, Explanatory Notes © Simon J. James 2017

  Chronology © Roger Luckhurst 2017

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2017

  Impression: 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

  You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

  Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

  198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943472

  ISBN 978–0–19–870504–8

  ebook ISBN 978–0–19–101508–3

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

  Acknowledgements

  I am very grateful to Marten Stromberg, Dennis Sears, Professor Valerie Hotchkiss, and all the staff at the Rare Books and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for the opportunity to speak at an exhibition on representations of life on the moon, and to consult the manuscript drafts of The First Men in the Moon. Thank you also to the staff of the British Library, the National University of Scotland, and Palace Green Library at Durham University. The Introduction has very much gained from the learned and judicious comments of Luciana O’Flaherty at Oxford World’s Classics, and Dr Steven McLean; I am indebted to previous editorial work and annotations in editions produced by Professor Patrick Parrinder, Dr Steven McLean, and Dr David Lake. I am profoundly grateful to Charles Blair, whose tireless work on the manuscript has very much informed my own thinking in preparing this present edition, and who generously shared with me the records of his own transcription. I am also very grateful to members of the H. G. Wells Society for supplying information on early reviews of The First Men in the Moon.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of H. G. Wells

  THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON

  Explanatory Notes

  Introduction

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

  H. G. Wells’s Fantastic Science

  The first publication of The First Men in the Moon, in monthly instalments from December 1900 to August 1901 in the Strand Magazine, marked a significant moment in history, as the telling of the story began in one century and ended in another. Literary critic J. L. Cranfield shrewdly observes that ‘The reader who took in The First Men in the Moon in its original form began the novel as a nineteenth-century Victorian and ended it as a twentieth-century Edwardian.’1 In an often quoted conceit from the 1917 novel The Soul of a Bishop, Wells remembers the turn of the century thus: ‘Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people’s ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.’2 (The April 1901 issue of the Strand sees, alongside an instalment of The First Men in the Moon, a profile of the recently deceased Queen Victoria.)

  While H. G. Wells had a writing career that lasted for over fifty years
, he remains best known today for the four scientific romances he wrote in its very earliest, most imaginative years: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). When writing his Victorian romances, Wells was often in poor health and uncertain about what his own place would be in history. By the 1900s, however, he became simultaneously more optimistic and more pessimistic in imagining the world’s possible futures: optimistic for what could be achieved with greater cooperation and more advanced technology, and pessimistic about the dangerous consequences if humanity failed to take advantage of these opportunities. Wells was acutely and — as his long career went on — increasingly aware of the pace of historical change, and of the place that his own work might play in shaping future changes. At the time at which he began to write The First Men in the Moon, he saw the dawn of the new century as a turning point, from which either progress or catastrophe were imaginable possibilities.

  The representation of imaginary technology in particular gives Wells the opportunity to show humanity either progressing further or extinguishing itself entirely. The potential for technology to destroy, if it fails to renew, the world, is a consistent theme in Wells. The First Men in the Moon’s eccentric and modest boffin Cavor achieves space flight through building a sphere made out of ‘Cavorite’, a material which cuts off the force of gravitation in the same way that different kinds of matter can screen the effects of light, heat, or X-rays.3 Great as this discovery is, when Wells’s fiction shows scientific research being carried out by individuals rather than the state, the results are often calamitous. When Cavor first makes his anti-gravity compound, he very nearly accidentally depopulates the earth: only the direction in which the first piece of Cavorite happens to be pointed prevents the entire atmosphere being sucked into space. Cavor and his fellow protagonist Bedford acknowledge the importance of ‘the purest accident’ (p. 5) in their success: as Bedford puts it, ‘First one fluky start then another’ (p. 77); Cavorite is ‘made at last by accident when Cavor least expected it’ (p. 18). Reproving themselves for failing to take into account the weight of air when inventing an antigravity device, they reflect that ‘this shows you how useless knowledge is unless you apply it’ (p. 21).

  For new knowledge to be applied most usefully, Wells’s social and political writing recommends, science should be governed by the State, ideally a World State, and not by lone eccentric geniuses inattentive to the possible consequences of their experiments. While Cavor is significantly more endearing than the book’s other narrator-protagonist (the caddish Bedford) it is nonetheless a chilling moment when Cavor brushes off the presumed deaths of his assistants at this moment of creation as ‘no great loss’ (p. 22). In works that sketched Wells’s ideal vision of how the world should best take care of its inhabitants and its science, such as A Modern Utopia (1905), scientific research is carried out collaboratively for the common good of humanity, in laboratories sponsored by an imagined utopian world government. While critics such as George Orwell accused Wells of being a technocrat, unthinkingly marching in step with scientific progress, in fact Wells’s fantastic texts frequently show the appalling consequences when new technology is not overseen and used properly.4 The War in the Air (1908), for example, portrays the effects of political development failing to keep pace with technological development: nation states fail to resolve their differences by diplomatic means, and the invention of powered flight results in a devastating aerial war which reduces civilization back to the level of the Iron Age. The Time Traveller, in The Time Machine, goes on a second journey and never comes back; the eponymous villain of The Island of Doctor Moreau is murdered by his own Beast-men, and Griffin, the Invisible Man, by a mob of angry villagers. These scientist figures also fail to share their discoveries with others, or to publish them, and as a consequence of this neglect their discoveries never benefit anybody else. Similarly, in The First Men in the Moon, Cavor is trapped on the moon, and the boy Tommy Simmons (named after a real-life childhood friend of Wells) steals the sphere; consequently, the invention of Cavorite and all its benefits for humankind, including the possibility of interplanetary travel, are lost for ever.

  Composition, Publication, and Reception

  The figure of Cavor himself was at the heart of Wells’s original conception for the book, which was originally intended to be ‘a series of interconnected short stories’, then called ‘The Amazing Adventures of Mr Cavor’. The first two of these stories were sent to his agent J. B. Pinker on 9 March 1899, according to Wells’s biographer David C. Smith, ‘but the Strand’s editor Greenhalgh Smith, liked the work well enough to ask Wells to extend it to ten, and later even more, instalments’.5 Wells scholar Charles Blair and science fiction writer David Lake have both given detailed accounts of the book’s composition.6 The story was substantially revised as Wells wrote it: Bedford was conceived at one stage as an aesthete-poet, at another as a flamboyant, publicity-loving, Anglo-American entrepreneur much like Teddy Ponderevo in Wells’s later Tono-Bungay (1909), and was initially seen in the third person. Wells then settled instead on the cynical bounder who thinks of writing a play to restore his ruined fortunes (Wells’s own efforts at writing for the stage were equally stillborn), and who ends up writing the story of his amazing journey to the moon instead. In revising drafts of the book, Wells worked hard on developing the tone of Bedford’s voice, as he evolves from self-deceiving fool to self-centred knave — a note to self in Wells’s handwritten manuscript adjures Wells to ‘make Bedford a much more brutal person with an initial contempt for Cavor’. Eventually, Bedford emerges as a scoundrel that the reader rather warms to in spite of their better judgement, capable of displaying an almost Wodehouseian wit, as in this moment from the manuscript: ‘The absentmindedness that had just escaped depopulating the terrestrial globe, might at any moment result in some other grave inconvenience. On the other hand I was young, my affairs were in a mess, and I was in just the mood for reckless adventure — with a chance of something good at the end of it.’

  In the published version of the story, only Bedford is able to benefit from ‘something good at the end of it’. Both adventurers are captured by the Selenites, the moon’s intelligent insectoid population. Bedford escapes, but the inventor remains imprisoned on the moon, from where Cavor transmits by radio his impressions of moon life to the earth until he is silenced or, perhaps, murdered by the Selenites. The majority of surviving draft versions, however, have both Bedford and Cavor managing to escape. They are taken first as captives by the Selenites to the moon’s underground sea, where Wells long planned, but never seems to have written, an encounter with a monstrous Kraken. They are later taken by balloon, not as prisoners, but now as ambassadors to the moon city Tycho (the name of a real crater on the moon, after a sixteenth-century Danish astronomer), to meet the moon’s ruler, the Grand Lunar. A combination of Bedford’s imperialist boasting about human warfare and Cavor letting slip that he is the only man capable of producing Cavorite places the two travellers in danger, as the Selenites realize that the two men’s return home would put the moon at risk of invasion from the earth (a kind of reversal of the plot of The War of the Worlds). Both Cavor and Bedford flee to the sphere and successfully return to earth. At one stage, Wells considered having Cavor go back to the sphere and then disappear for ever, like the Time Traveller — but in the majority of the draft material the reason why only one successful journey is ever made to the moon is that Cavor has been so traumatized by his experiences that his mind is no longer capable either of making the journey or of producing another sphere. In this earlier version of the ending, Bedford, while caring for Cavor and hoping for the return of his wits, courts a beautiful Romanian woman who is a guest at the hotel he has bought in Amalfi with the proceeds of the stolen moon gold. (Amalfi remains in the published version as Bedford’s choice of habitation while making a further attempt on his play.)

  Wells was always concerned to maximiz
e the audience, and the revenue, for his books. In the early stages of his career, he would make arrangements for the serialization and then the book publication of a work separately on each side of the Atlantic. He wrote on 21 July 1900 to the editor of the New Magazine, which was considering the American serialization of the story, that ‘it is highly probable that I shall alter the concluding chapter of The First Men in the Moon very considerably in the next month’.7 Inspired by Marconi’s recent successes in sending Morse code messages by means of wireless telegraphy, Wells decided to have Bedford escape but to leave Cavor on the moon, broadcasting his impressions of the Selenites from lunar captivity. This shift of narrator gives the book the opportunity to imagine life on the moon at greater length, and to do so from the perspective, and in the voice, of the more reflective, scientific, rational, and self-effacing Cavor. Wells’s chosen ending focuses the reader’s attention in the final chapters less on the interplanetary imperialist, complacently returned home and counting his ill-gotten gold, and more on the lonely exiled genius, not only the first man in the moon, but the last as well, transmitting his final words to the vast silence of space.

  Later Reception and Adaptation

  In spite of the objections of Jules Verne, who grumbled that his own moon books were more scientifically accurate, The First Men in the Moon was well received in both the English and (following the book’s translation by Henri Davray) French press.8 Reviewers universally praised Wells for the scope of his imaginative reach, comparing him favourably to Verne and Swift. Several reviewers, including G. K. Chesterton, compared the ideas of the book to those propounded in Anticipations, and noted how appealing Wells seemed to find the highly organized structure of Selenite society.9 The Saturday Review predicted that the story would be enjoyed straightforwardly by the juvenile reader, but that for some elder readers, ‘it will appeal with the force of a splendidly contrived nightmare’.10 The reviewer in Nature also praised Wells for the efforts he made to familiarize himself with the extent of scientific knowledge about the moon; more than one reviewer hoped for a sequel that would reveal more about the fate of the characters. In the 1924 preface written for the Atlantic edition of Wells’s works, the author judges this to be the best of all his scientific romances.