The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  2 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Tony Tanner (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), p. 171. For some additional comments on Griffin’s albinism, see David J. Lake, ‘The Whiteness of Griffin and H. G. Wells’s Images of Death’, Science Fiction Studies 8: 1 (1981), pp. 12–18.

  3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, ed. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), p. 22. Nietzsche was first translated into English in 1896, but David S. Thatcher has noted that ‘Nietzschean motifs appear in Wells’s work long before Nietzsche was available in English – certainly before his ideas began to make themselves felt’ – see Nietzsche in England, 1890–1914: The Growth of a Reputation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 82. John Batchelor claims that ‘Wells may not have read [Nietzsche] but was certainly aware of him – see H.G. Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 5. On ressentiment, see too Paul A. Cantor, ‘The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand: H.G. Wells’s Critique of Capitalism’, The American Scholar 68: 3 (1999), p. 99.

  4 H. G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly, ed. Simon J. James (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), pp. 8, 9.

  5 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground and The Gambler, trans. Jane Kentish, ed. Malcolm Jones (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991), p. 14.

  6 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, p. 22.

  7 On the optical science behind Griffin’s experiments, see Philip Ball, Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (London: Bodley Head, 2014), pp. 172–9. ‘The invisibility of H. G. Wells,’ Ball later concludes, ‘in which light is not deviated by a substance because it has a refractive index equal to that of air, is possible in principle but not in practice, at least for an ordinary material’ (p. 257).

  8 These suggestive phrases are taken from Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 1990), p. 250.

  9 H. G. Wells, The Holy Terror (London: Michael Joseph, 1939), pp. 229, 242.

  10 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 278.

  11 W. T. Stead, in H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 61.

  12 Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 279.

  13 Clement Shorter, in H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, pp. 58, 59.

  14 For further details, see Ball, Invisible, pp. 92–3, 124–7. As Ball observes, Pearson’s Weekly printed an interview with Röntgen in April 1896, fourteen months before the same periodical began its serial publication of The Invisible Man.

  15 See Allen W. Grove, ‘Röntgen’s Ghosts: Photography, X-Rays, and the Victorian Imagination’, Literature and Medicine 16: 2 (1997), p. 169.

  16 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 226.

  17 See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998). On Wells’s ‘mad scientists’, see Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 119–55.

  18 John Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man, ed. David Lake (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xvii.

  19 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (London: Victor Gollancz, 1834), vol. 1, p. 138.

  20 Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. and ed. Francis Macdonald Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 45. See also Philip Holt, ‘H. G. Wells and the Ring of Gyges’, Science Fiction Studies 57 (July 1992), pp. 236–47.

  21 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, III. ii. 11–13, in The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 300. See also Roslynn D. Haynes, H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), p. 203.

  22 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), p. 9.

  23 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, eds David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 174–5, 177.

  24 Ibid., p. 176.

  25 The reference here is to George M. Beard, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences: A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881).

  26 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, vol. 1, pp. 311–17.

  27 H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), p. 105.

  28 Michael Sherborne, H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (London: Peter Owen, 2010), p. 124.

  29 Simon J. James, Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 72.

  30 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2006), pp. 52, 7. On this scene as an echo of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, see Chapter 2 above.

  31 On Griffin and the Professor, see Martin Ray, ‘Conrad’s Invisible Professor’, The Conradian 11: 1 (May 1986), pp. 35–41.

  32 Joseph Conrad, letter, in H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, p. 60.

  33 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), pp. 241, 221. Linda Dryden notes that other descriptions of Kurtz – as ‘very little more than a voice’, for example, and ‘indistinct like a vapour exhaled by the earth’ – are also ‘suggestive of Griffin’s insubstantiality’ – see ‘H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad: A Literary Friendship’, in H. G. Wells’s Fin de Siècle: Twenty-First-Century Reflections on the Early H. G. Wells, ed. John S. Partington (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 103–4.

  34 Marcia Ian, ‘Henry James and the Spectacle of Loss: Psychoanalytic Metaphysics’, in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, eds Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 122.

  35 Rachel A. Bowser, ‘Visibility, Interiority, and Temporality in The Invisible Man’, Studies in the Novel, 45: 1 (2013), p. 22.

  36 Wells, The History of Mr Polly, pp. 120, 154.

  37 See Patrick A. McCarthy, ‘Heart of Darkness and the Early Novels of H. G. Wells: Evolution, Anarchy, Entropy’, Journal of Modern Literature 13: 1 (1986), p. 49.

  38 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 89.

  39 Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), p. 119.

  40 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 148.

  41 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 69.

  42 Wells, The History of Mr Polly, p. 127.

  43 William Shakespeare, The History of King Lear, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2001), p. 191.

  44 Grégoire Chamayou, Manhunts: A Philosophical History, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 1–2.

  45 See Giorgio Agamben, ‘A Self-Annihilating Nothing’, in The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 52–8.

  46 See H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance, A Critical Text of the 1897 New York First Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices, ed. Leon Stover (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), p. 208.

  47 Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 278.

  48 Franco Moretti, ‘Dialectic of Fear’, in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 84, 107.

  49 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The First Wells’, in Other Inquisitions, 1937– 1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), p. 86.
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  50 Ibid., p. 87.

  51 See Jorge Luis Borges, ‘H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; The Invisible Man’, one of his ‘Prologues to A Personal Library’, in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 516.

  52 W. S. Gilbert, ‘The Perils of Invisibility’, in More Bab Ballads (London: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 149–53. For an excellent brief overview of the Victorian short stories and novels that make use of the invisibility motif, see Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, p. xvii.

  53 H. G. Wells, ‘Under the Knife’, in Selected Stories of H. G. Wells, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Modern Library, 2004), pp. 61–2.

  5. Wandering

  1 G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011), p. 108. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  2 Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, in Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Everyman, 1978), p. 89.

  3 G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (Cornwall: Stratus, 2001), pp. 49, 57. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  4 William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 94.

  5 Charles Whibley, ‘Introduction’, in Collected Essays of W. P. Ker, vol. 1, ed. Charles Whibley (London: Macmillan, 1925), p. ix.

  6 W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (London: Macmillan, 1897), pp. 6–7. See also W. P. Ker, English Literature: Medieval (London: Williams and Norgate [1912]).

  7 This passage, reproduced by B. Ifor Evans, another of Ker’s students, in W. P. Ker as a Critic of Literature (1955), is cited in Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy, p. 94.

  8 G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World? (New York: Dover, 2007), p. 29.

  9 G. K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions (London: Methuen, 1910), p. 7.

  10 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 47.

  11 G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 39.

  12 Ibid., p. 4.

  13 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Filiquarian, 2007), p. 34.

  14 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Advantages of Having One Leg’, in Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen, 1909), p. 40.

  15 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 97, 98.

  16 Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, pp. 122, 131.

  17 Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten, trans. Christopher Middleton (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999), p. 36.

  18 G. K. Chesterton, ‘“Vulgarised”’, in The Wild Knight and Other Poems, Fourth Edition (London: J. M. Dent, 1914), p. 104.

  19 See G. K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments, ed. D. J. Conlon (Antwerp: Antwerp Studies in English Literature, 1976), p. 402.

  20 Robert Browning, Selected Poems, ed. Daniel Karlin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), pp. 98, 99.

  21 See Daniel Karlin, Browning’s Hatreds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 119–20n., 241.

  22 Browning, Selected Poems, p. 50.

  23 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 287.

  24 Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 175.

  25 G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (Middlesex: Echo Library, 2006), pp. 81–2.

  26 Chesterton, ‘The Advantages of Having One Leg’, p. 42.

  27 Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 81.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Chesterton, ‘The Pessimist’, in The Wild Knight and Other Poems, p. 83.

  30 Browning, ‘Childe Roland’, in Selected Poems, p. 93.

  31 Chesterton, ‘The Wild Knight’, in The Wild Knight and Other Poems, pp. 115–17.

  32 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), p. 73.

  33 Eliot, The Waste Land, p. 75; see Gérard de Nerval, Selected Writings, trans. Richard Sieburth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 363.

  34 Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 81.

  35 Browning, ‘Childe Roland’, p. 95.

  36 Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 81.

  37 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 110.

  38 G. K. Chesterton,’A Defence of Detective Stories’, in The Defendant (London: R. Briley Johnson, 1901), p. 123. ‘The whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected’, he adds in the concluding sentence of the article, in a slightly different proposition, ‘is only a successful knight-errantry.’

  39 Conlon, ed., G. K. Chesterton, p. 145.

  40 This is available at cse.dmu.ac.uk.

  41 Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 57.

  42 G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), p. 108.

  43 On ‘irrealist’ literature, see Michael Löwy, ‘The Current of Critical Irrealism: A Moonlit Enchanted Night’, in Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 193–206.

  44 G. K. Chesterton, ‘Dreams’, in The Coloured Lands (London: Sheed & Ward, 1938), pp. 81–2.

  45 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 80–1.

  46 See Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 12.

  47 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Hegel – Chesterton: German Idealism and Christianity’, in The Symptom, available at lacan.com/zizhegche.htm.

  48 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, in The Complete Poems and Plays, p. 13.

  49 Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, p. 68.

  50 Ibid., p. 70.

  51 Chesterton, Charles Dickens, pp. 23–4.

  52 Ibid., p. 144.

  53 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 3–4.

  54 Samuel Hynes, ‘The Chesterbelloc’, in Edwardian Occasions: Essays on English Writing in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 80.

  55 Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 63.

  56 Raymond Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay’, in The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 18. Chandler’s essay does not refer to Chesterton, but it does refer to his friend E. C. Bentley, author of Trent’s Last Case (1913) and, as I have noted, the dedicatee of The Man Who Was Thursday.

  57 On the disenchantment of this ideal in Chandler’s fiction, see Ernest Fontana, ‘Chivalry and Modernity in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep’, in The Critical Responses to Raymond Chandler, ed. J. K. Van Dover (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 159–75.

  58 Chesterton, ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, pp. 119–20.

  6. Collapsing

  1 Anthony Cummins, ‘Émile Zola’s Cheap English Dress: The Vizetelly Translations, Late-Victorian Print Culture, and the Crisis of Literary Value’, Review of English Studies 60 (2009), p. 130.

  2 Guardian, 3 October 1893, From the Archives, guardian.co. uk/books/2004/jan/03.

  3 Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 752.

  4 Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday, ed. Bill Hutchings (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), p. 214. Hereafter, page numbers from this edition are cited in parenthesis in the text.

  5 Georg Lukács, ‘Narrate or Describe? A Preliminary Discussion of Naturalism and Formalism’, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur D. Kahn (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1971), p. 132.

  6 Ford Madox Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, in The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 265.

  7 See Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); and, for a fictional account of a paranoiac hermeneutic, Foucault’s Pendulum, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1989).

  8 Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p
. 164.

  9 Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City, ed. Alan G. Hill (London: Everyman, 1995), p. 22. Hereafter, page numbers are cited in parenthesis in the text.

  10 Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, trans. Ken Knabb, in Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, eds Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Kelowna, BC: Praxis Press, 2008), p. 23.

  11 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 4.

  12 See Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); see also China Miéville, ‘The Conspiracy of Architecture: Notes on a Modern Anxiety’, Historical Materialism 2 (1998), pp. 1–32.

  13 See Paul Carter, Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia (London: Reaktion, 2002), p. 9 and passim. Carter does not mention Ford in this perceptive, if speculative, account of modernism and agoraphobia.

  14 Quoted in Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 54–5.

  15 Quoted in ibid., p. 56.

  16 Quoted in Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, p. 176.

  17 Quoted in Moser, The Life in the Fiction, p. 56.

  18 David Trotter, ‘The Invention of Agoraphobia’, Victorian Literature and Culture 32 (2004), p. 463. See also David Trotter, ‘Ford against Joyce and Lewis’, in The Uses of Phobia: Essays on Literature and Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 113–22; and, for a fine introduction to Ford, ‘Ford’s Impressionism’, in Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 187–219.

  19 Carl Otto Westphal, Westphal’s ‘Die Agoraphobie’, with Commentary: The Beginnings of Agoraphobia, eds. Terry J. Krappi and Michael T. Schumacher (Langham: University Press of America, 1988), p. 59.

  20 Ibid., p. 86.

  21 J. Headley Neale, ‘Agoraphobia’, The Lancet (19 November 1898), pp. 1322–3.

  22 Cited in Anthony Vidler, ‘Psychopathologies of Modern Space: Metropolitan Fear from Agoraphobia to Estrangement’, in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 15.