H. G. Wells
Page 25
CHAPTER 2
THE FIRST MAKING OF CAVORITE
1. Wealden Hills: Hills of the Kentish Weald.
2. Gratulate me: Congratulate me.
3. caught a tartar: Encountered or got hold of a thing that can be neither controlled nor got rid of. The original Tartars were the combined forces of Central Asian peoples, including Mongols and Turks, who, under the leadership of Ghengis Khan (1202–27) overran much of Asia and Eastern Europe.
CHAPTER 3
THE BUILDING OF THE SPHERE
1. problem about a dumpling: A dumpling is a pudding containing fruit. The ‘problem’ is how the fruit got inside; the solution is that the dough is put round the fruit before the pudding is boiled.
2. Like Jules Verne's apparatus in A Trip to the Moon: In Jules Verne's novel Autour de la lune (Round the Moon), 1870, the astronauts have to dispose of the body of a dead dog. They open one of the glass portholes of their spacecraft, throw the dog out and quickly shut the porthole again. Very little air is lost.
3. old Spanish monopoly in American gold: In the sixteenth century, Spain imported large deposits of gold and other precious metals from its colonies on the American continent. Bedford clearly associates the potential rewards of the Cavorite Empire of his cosmic vision with the benefits imperial powers derive from importing precious goods from their colonies.
4. carbonic acid: Carbon dioxide gas.
5. that array of spectres that once beleaguered Prague: An allusion to ‘The Beleaguered City’ (1839), a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82). At the beginning of the poem, the spectres besiege Prague (capital of the then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic) all night, but flee at the morning prayer-bell. The second half of the poem deals with the story as a metaphor for nightmares – in exactly the way Bedford does.
6. Elham… Canterbury: A village seven miles northeast of Lympne, and approximately eleven miles from Canterbury, a city in east Kent, seat of the archbishop and primate of England.
7. gad-about: Get about. Wells is imitating local Kent dialect.
CHAPTER 4
INSIDE THE SPHERE
1. Tit-Bits… Lloyds' News: Tit-Bits was a popular weekly magazine, founded in 1881. A typical issue included jokes, quizzes, correspondence, short stories and serialized fiction. The magazine ceased publication in 1984. Lloyds' News was another popular weekly, whose exact title, 1849–1902, was Lloyds' Weekly Newspaper.
CHAPTER 9
PROSPECTING BEGINS
1. mountain sickness: Sickness caused by breathing the rarefied air at great heights.
2. operculum: Lid (a term used mostly in biology, for lid-like structures).
3. kopje: A small hill.
4. Gargantuan: Gigantic. The word comes from the name of a giant in Francois Rabelais' Gargantua (1534).
CHAPTER 11
THE MOONCALF PASTURES
1. Selenite: A supposed inhabitant of the moon. The word appears to have first been used by James Howell (? 1593–1666) in c.1645. In a letter taken from the collection of correspondence for which he is now chiefly remembered (Epistolae Hoelianae or Familiar Letters, 1657), Howell wrote that, ‘The sphear of the moon is peopled with Selenites, or Lunary men.’
2. Smithfield: A district in London famous for its meat market.
3. surplus population: In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus wrote that while population increased geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16), food supply increased only arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). This, warned Malthus, creates a surplus population that the food supply is unable to sustain. The potentially disastrous consequences of overpopulation for the human species were seriously debated in the nineteenth century. However, Bedford's intoxicated proclamation that the moon would provide an ideal home for ‘Our poor surplus population’ suggests that Wells is satirizing Malthusian logic.
4. Ess'lent discov'ry, yours, Cavor…’ ‘Scovery of the moon – se’nd on’y to the ‘tato: Excellent discovery of yours, Cavor… Second only to the potato… What do you mean?… Discovery of the moon – second only to the potato.
5. the creashurs o' what we eat and drink: The creatures of what we eat and drink.
6. coralline: Coral-like.
7. White Man's Burden: ‘The White Man's Burden' was the title of a poem by Rudyard Kipling published in The Times on 1 February 1899. The phrase ‘White Man's Burden' refers more generally to the supposed duty of the white race to bring education and western culture to the non-white inhabitants of their colonies.
8. Satraps: Protectors of the country, provincial governors.
9. Nempire Caesar: Emperor Caesar. Julius Caesar ruled the Roman Empire between 100 and 44 BC.
10. B‘in all the newspapers: [We Will] be in all the newspapers.
CHAPTER 12
THE SELENITE'S FACE
1. Hyde Park: A park in central London.
2. Dürer: Albrecht Dürer was a German painter and engraver (1471–1528). While there are occasionally touches of horror in Dürer's work, he is not really famous for inventing monsters.
CHAPTER 13
MR CAVOR MAKES SOME SUGGESTIONS
1. Kepler, with his subvolvani: The subvolvani are the lunar inhabitants of Subvolva, the hemisphere ‘under the Earth' in the Somnium… de astronomia lunari (Dream… of Lunar Astronomy, 1634) of Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). The Dream was only available in Kepler's original Latin text. It is doubtful whether Wells's Latin was good enough to allow him to master the whole of Kepler's text. However, it is possible that one of his friends informed Wells of Kepler's posthumous work.
2…. a paper by the late Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between the planets: This is a reference to an article written by Francis Galton entitled ‘Intelligible Signals Between Neighbouring Stars’, Fortnightly Review n.s. 60 (1896), pp. 657–64. In that article, Galton endeavoured to demonstrate that it was possible to devise signals ‘that are intrinsically intelligible, so that the messages may be deciphered by any intelligent man, or other creature, who has made nearly as much advance in pure and applied science as ourselves' (p. 657). It is precisely by demonstrating his knowledge of such intrinsically intelligible signals that Cavor hopes to ‘demonstrate our possession of a reasonable intelligence' (in the following paragraph) to the Selen-ites. There is a degree of anachronism in this instance, since Galton (b. 1822) lived until 1911.
3. Hypothecate: Hypothesize. The word ‘hypothecate' does not appear in dictionaries in the appropriate sense.
4. gauffre: French for ‘waffle’.
CHAPTER 16
POINTS OF VIEW
1. snakes from Jamrach's loose in a Surbiton villa: Charles Jamrach (1815–91) was a London importer of wild animals who also supplied zoos. Surbiton is a suburb in southwest London.
CHAPTER 18
IN THE SUNLIGHT
1. Saint Gothard: An Alpine pass in Switzerland, with a railway tunnel.
CHAPTER 20
MR BEDFORD IN INFINITE SPACE
1. hyperbolic or parabolic: Open curves, receding to infinity, implying a miss.
2. Chancery Lane: A street in central London.
CHAPTER 21
MR BEDFORD AT LITTLESTONE
1. Brighton: A seaside resort in east Sussex.
2. Littlestone: A small seaside resort on the Kent coast, seven miles south of Lympne.
3. sang-froid: Coolness, self-possession, especially in the face of danger or disturbing circumstances.
4. Boots: A hotel servant who cleans boots and shoes.
5. private Magna Carta of my liberty: A document granting certain rights and privileges to his subjects given in June 1215 by King John of England. Bedford hopes that the gold he has brought back from the moon might similarly guarantee him certain rights.
6. New Romney: A town two miles inland from Littlestone.
7. hundredweight: 112 pounds (50.8 kilograms).
8. Folkestone: A town in Kent, of which Sandgate is a suburb.
&
nbsp; 9. blue book: A commercial directory.
10. government establishment of Lydd: The Lydd Ranges, where the British army tests explosives.
11. Master Tommy Simmons: A light-hearted reference to A. T. Simmons (1865–1921), a friend of Wells's from his time as a student at the Normal School of Science (1884–7). The joke is seemingly completed when Bedford signs his letter to the bank manager with the ‘thoroughly respectable’ name ‘Wells’ (on the previous page).
CHAPTER 22
THE ASTONISHING COMMUNICATION OF MR JULIUS WENDIGEE
1. The Strand Magazine: The First Men in the Moon was indeed serialized, complete with illustrations, in the popular Strand Magazine between November 1900 and August 1901.
2. Amalfi… Algiers: The former is a town on the Bay of Salerno, south Italy, the latter is the capital of Algeria.
3. Mr Tesla: Nikola Tesla was a Serbo-American electrical engineer, 1856–1943. By 1899 he had built a laboratory on a high plateau at Colorado Springs, Colorado. There he became convinced that he had received a radio signal from Mars. This news had certainly leaked out by March 1901, if not before. It is even possible that reports of Tesla's ‘Mars message’ reached Wells by January 1901, inspiring him to write Chapters 22–6.
4. Monte Rosa: An Alpine site on the Italian–Swiss border. At 15,217 feet (4,633 metres), Monte Rosa is one of the highest peaks in Europe.
5. the code in general use: Probably Morse code.
CHAPTER 23
AN ABSTRACT OF THE SIX MESSAGES FIRST RECEIVED FROM MR CAVOR
1. volcanoes: The lunar craters, which are now known to have been caused by impacting meteors, were thought to be of volcanic origin in about 1900. Wells himself makes this assumption in ‘The Visibility of Change in the Moon’, Knowledge 18 (October 1895), pp. 230–31.
2. Mammoth Caves: An extensive system of limestone caverns in Kentucky, USA.
3. Sir Jabez Flap, FRS: A fictitious scientist. It has been suggested that Flap is a covert reference to Sir Robert Ball (1840–1913), a famous popularizer of astronomy in the 1890s.
4. the pun… Gruyère: Wells is mistaken here, since no pun is involved in the saying that ‘the moon is made of green cheese’. ‘Gruyère’ cheese is mentioned here because its holes resemble the cavities in Wells's moon.
CHAPTER 24
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SELENITES
1. the ant is continually brought before my mind: Bedford here makes explicit the analogy between the Selenities and a community of ants. The characterization of the Selenites, and their subterranean habitat, was probably informed by John Lubbock's book Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observations on the Habits of the Social Hymenoptera (1885).
2. Atlas: The Titan supposed to hold up the pillars of the universe, and a mountain range in western North Africa also regarded mythically as supporting the heavens.
3. Somerset House… British Museum Library: The former is a building in the Strand, London, once used to maintain a national registration of births, marriages and deaths, and the latter has now been incorporated into the British Library.
CHAPTER 25
THE GRAND LUNAR
1. Ara Coeli: Latin for ‘Altar of Heaven’. The church of Santa Maria d‘Aracoeli, situated on the highest point of Capitol Hill in Rome, is reached by 124 steps.
2. Huns: One of an Asiatic race of nomads, who invaded Europe in the middle of the fifth century and, under their famous king Attila, overran and ravaged a great part of this continent.
3. Mahomet and the Caliphs: The prophet believed by Muslims to be the channel for the final unfolding of God's revelation to mankind, Mahomet (AD? 570–632) is regarded as the founder of Islam. He began to teach in Mecca in 610, but persecution forced him to flee with his followers to Medina in 622. After several battles, he conquered Mecca (630), establishing principles of Islam all over Arabia.Caliph is the title given in Muslim countries to the principal civil and religious ruler, as successor to Mahomet. Following the death of Mahomet, the Caliphs began to move north. By AD 641, they had defeated the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires and had conquered Syria and Egypt.
4. Crusades: Several Christian military expeditions made in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries to recover Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Muslims.
5. Maxim gun: A single-barrelled quick-firing machine gun with a barrel surrounded by an outer casing filled with water to keep the parts cool. It was invented in 1883 by the American inventor Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim (1840–1916).
6. Battle of Colenso: A battle that occurred during the Boer War (1899–1902). On 15 December 1899, British forces under the command of Sir Redvers Buller were heavily defeated at Colenso in Natal, suffering some 1,100 casualties.
* It is a curious thing that while we were in the sphere we felt not the slightest desire for food nor did we feel the want of it when we abstained. At first we forced our appetites but afterwards we fasted completely. Altogether we did not consume one-twentieth part of the compressed provisions we had brought with us. The amount of carbonic acid we exhaled was also unnaturally low, but why this was so I am quite unable to explain.
* I do not remember seeing any wooden things on the moon; doors, tables, everything corresponding to our terrestrial joinery was made of metal, and I believe for the most part of gold, which as a metal would, of course, naturally recommend itself – other things being equal – on account of the ease in working it and its toughness and durability.