by H. G. Wells
7 (p. 109) Whitsuntide: The week beginning with Whitsunday (“white Sunday,” so named because of the white robes worn by people baptized at that time). Whitsunday is an English name for Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter, a Christian feast that commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on Christ’s disciples, allowing them to speak and be understood by people of many languages.
Chapter V
1 (p. 112) The facts ... came to us chiefly through the medium of the vicar and his wife: Wells now makes his narrator seem like a citizen of Iping.
2 (p. 112) Club festivities: The reference is to a kind of fair in Iping, featuring games of chance and rides.
Chapter VI
1 (p. 114) specific gravity: The reference is to the difference between the density of a substance in pure and impure form. The Halls water down their beer with sarsaparilla.
2 (p. 116) it was afterwards ascertained: The narrator shifts now into the role of historian.
3 (p. 116) ‘Tas sperits: “That’s spirits:’ Mrs. Hall has read about mediums and seances and knows ghosts move furniture.
4 (p. 117) The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government: Wells mocks the British parliamentary system for being all talk and no action.
Chapter VII
1 (p. 119) second-hand ordinary bicycles: The bicycle was a symbol of progress; by mentioning it, Wells notes the modernization taking place even in Iping.
2 (p. 119) union-jacks and royal ensigns (which had originally celebrated the Jubilee): The reference is to national flags and the flags of the monarch, Queen Victoria, hung out to celebrate her fiftieth year on the throne in 1887. For Wells, the monarchy was anachronistic.
Chapter VIII
1 (p. 126) The eighth chapter is exceedingly brief. The narrator deals with his report as if it were a book.
Chapter IX
1 (p. 131) bread and cheese: Whatever Griffin eats remains visible until assimilated or absorbed by his body.
2 (p. 132) I want you to help me.... But you will—must: Griffin chooses the unreliable Mr. Marvel to be his assistant, a hint at his human fallibility. When he announces he is ”a man of power,“ he is interrupted by a sneeze. His true weakness is clear.
Chapter X
1 (p. 135) subsequent proceedings interested him no more: Wells quotes a line from a poem by the humorous American author Bret Harte ( 1836-1902), ”The Society upon the Stanislaus,“ about a fight in a mining-camp bar. Harte was popular at the time in England.
Chapter XII
1 (p. 142) white kilt that could only have passed muster in Greece: A white skirt could only have been thought proper attire for a man in nineteenth-century Greece, where such costumes were worn.
2 (p. 143) But his temper . . . for the mere satisfaction of hurting. Grif fin’s temper is now dangerously short, and he attacks because inflicting pain gives him pleasure.
Chapter XIV
1 (p. 147) Port Stowe: Wells transforms Southampton into a fictitious port.
Chapter XVI
1 (p. 154) conversed in American: Wells implies that American English is another language.
2 (p. 155) what country I’m in: The American knows he is in England, where gun laws are more stringent than in the United States.
Chapter XVII
1 (p. 161) Griffin, of University College: Griffin’s name appears for the first time. A griffin or griffon is a mythological animal of two natures, combining eagle and lion. It may suggest Griffin’s double nature, human and more-than-human. Earlier (p.106) he is called “piebald,” of two colors.
Chapter XVIII
1 (p. 165) It’s grotesque: The word “grotesque” here means horrible. This wording marks the book’s link to the tradition of horror literature going back to the Gothic romances of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, in the style of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
2 (p. 165) I must have a partner: For the second time, Griffin realizes how alone he is and how much he needs help. Kemp is a step above Mr. Marvel, but he too proves unreliable.
3 (p. 168) Then he took an envelope and addressed it to “Colonel Adye, Port Burdock”: Kemp writes a note to the chief of police. Is this because of fear or because he thinks he is acting for the common good? Griffin’s rage on waking would convince Kemp of the latter.
Chapter XIX
1 (p. 170) Chesilstowe: The reference is to a beach on the English Channel where the sea has arranged the gravel in a specific pattern. Griffin may have been inspired by the gravel to see an order or a reality invisible to others—that solid bodies may be made to stop refracting light. He may also see a social reality—namely, that existing society is a chaos which a man of science might transform into order.
2 (p. 170) four dimensions: For Wells’s Time Traveller, the fourth dimension was time; for Griffin it is a theory of color and refraction. Scientific theory coupled with experimentation transforms the scientist into a superior, perhaps dangerous, being.
3 (p. 173) stared out . . . at the stars: Wells’s scientific protagonists often contemplate the stars at moments of inspiration, as if by doing so they came closer to perceiving the secrets of the universe.
4 (p. 173) I robbed the old man—robbed my father: Here Griffin subordinates means to ends. His goal is lofty; his means despicable. He lacks his father’s shame. Note the parallel with Kemp and his letter to the police chief.
Chapter XX
1 (p. 175) his own foolish sentimentality: Griffin regards himself ”beyond good and evil.” He only attends his father’s funeral because of “cant” (low-level decorum or manners). Notice also that Griffin sees a girl he’d known ten years earlier. He rejects her, and love, because he is now a new man, and she is ”a very ordinary per son.”
2 (p. 176) I processed her: Griffin does not hesitate to experiment on the cat. Again, he thinks he is beyond normal sentimentality, but after his cruelty to the cat, he thinks of his father’s funeral. A touch of conscience remains.
3 (p. 176) vivisecting: The dissection of living animals had been against the law since 1876.
4 (p. 178) an old Polish Jew: Wells’s antisemitism was typical of his times. He felt Jews would never join a world community because they could never renounce their separate identity.
5 (p. 182) no doubt it was insured: This is another of Griffin’s acts of rationalized cruelty and antisemitism.
Chapter XXI
1 (p. 185) Pharmaceutical Society’s: The Society was founded in 1841 to represent pharmacists from attacks by parliament.
2 (p. 185) Salvation Army: Founded in 1865 by William Booth, the Salvation Army worked to revive Christianity and fight poverty among London’s poor. Here the members march and the bystanders mock them. Their hymn, ”When Shall We See His Face,” ironically refers to the invisible Griffin.
3 (p. 186) Crusoe’s solitary discovery: In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the protagonist thinks himself alone on his island and then discovers a footprint.
Chapter XXII
1 (p. 190) I began to feel a human being again: Griffin in clothes becomes human again, not godlike or superhuman as he is when invisible, but naked.
2 (p. 190) I lapsed into disorderly dreams of all the fantastic things that had happened during the last few days.... and my father’s open grave: Griffin’s dreams show him to be all too human. Guilty of his father’s death despite his seeming disregard for him, he feels he is being buried alive and becoming invisible along with his father.
Chapter XXIII
1 (p. 197) ”The common conventions of humanity—” “Are all very well for common people”: Griffin thinks invisibility has made him more than human. He does not hesitate to steal or commit acts of violence.
2 (p. 197) dance on the old strings: Griffin refuses to be judged by conventional morality.
3 (p. 200) What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah?: Just as in the Bible, Judges 14, Delilah betrays Samson, any woman knowing Griffin’s secret would betr
ay him.
Chapter XXIV
1 (p. 203) And that invisible man... must now establish a reign of terror. Griffin plans to seize power, but he does not explain what he hopes to accomplish. The Reign of Terror was part of the French Revolution.
Chapter XXV
1 (p. 205) He is mad . . . inhuman: Kemp, a pseudoscientist, condemns Griffin, a mad scientist. Kemp is an agent for the status quo, Griffin an agent for change.
2 (p. 206) It’s unsportsmanlike: Colonel Adye shows himself to be a part of the past because he does not realize he is in a state of war. Kemp reiterates that Griffin is “inhuman,” an attempt to justify any means to capture him.
Chapter XXVI
1 (p. 207) to piece together again his shattered schemes against his species: The narrator seems to agree with Kemp’s assertion that Grif fin is at war with humanity.
2 (p. 209) Mr. Wicksteed was... steward to Lord Burdock: Wicksteed works for an aristocrat, supervising some aspect of his estate. Griffin attacks him, symbolically assaulting a vestige of feudal England.
3 (p. 209) Now this, to the present writer’s mind . . . : Wells again modifies his narrator, introducing not an omniscient narrator but a reporter mystified by Griffin’s seemingly pointless attack. His interpretation of it, a feeble defense of Griffin, is strange. If Griffin was carrying the iron rod and did not want to be seen, he could simply drop it and run off.
Chapter XXVII
1 (p. 211) This is day one of year one of the new epoch.... I am Invisible Man the First: Griffin proclaims himself master of society, eradicates the old calendar—as had the French Revolution and as would the Italian Fascists under Mussolini later—and announces a new era, his own. This is another assault on the status quo, and at the same time an expression of egomania.
2 (p. 215) Promise not to rush the door.... Give a man a chance: Colonel Ayde asks Griffin to “play fair,” not realizing that Griffin respects no rules.
3 (p. 218) Doctor Kemp’s a hero: One policeman thinks Kemp brave; the other, cursing him, thinks exactly the opposite.
Chapter XXVIII
1 (p. 219) Mr. Heelas: Kemp’s neighbor is another embodiment of the status quo. He is also a victim of Griffin’s “reign of terror,” so frightened that, a few paragraphs down, he refuses to let Kemp into his house.
The Epilogue
1 (p. 225) Cobbett: William Cobbett, a nineteenth-century reformer and author of a grammar of the English language, also wrote Rural Rides (1830), descriptions of the English countryside.
2 (p. 226) Hex, little two ... fiddle-de-dee: Mr. Marvel cannot fathom Griffin’s scientific annotations, though he does respect his mind.
3 (p. 226) Adye: Colonel Adye apparently recovered after being shot by Griffin.
Inspired by The Time Machine and The Invisible Man
In the wake of H. G. Wells’s classic novel, traveling through the fourth dimension has become a favorite activity in science-fiction films. Time travel has been evoked to push the story forward or backward in projects as diverse as the Back to the Future trilogy, the Star Trek series, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Terry Gilliam’s films Time Bandits and Twelve Monkeys, two generations of Planet of the Apes, and the Terminator movies.
In 1960 H. G. Wells’s classic novel became a classic film. The Time Machine was produced and directed by George Pal, legendary for his sci-fi films, especially the 1953 adaptation of Wells’s War of the Worlds, which Pal produced and which was nominated for three Academy Awards. Rod Taylor stars in The Time Machine as the young British inventor H. George Wells, whose skeptical friends laugh at the thought of him launching himself into unknown worlds of the future. With an enormous clock as a backdrop, he rides through time, bypassing the two World Wars and a third nuclear and apocalyptic one in the then-future 1967. Wells used his novel to consider the social gap between the idle elite and the impoverished laboring class; Pal explores the Cold War fears of his day. Arriving in the year 802,701, the young scientist first encounters the Eloi race, including the beautiful Weena (Yvette Mimieux), who tells him of the subterranean Morlocks. The adventure culminates in an all-out battle between the effete Eloi and the monstrous Morlocks. The Time Machine earned an Oscar for Best Special Effects, which remain fairly effective even by today’s standards.
In 2002, more than a century after Wells wrote about time travel, his great-grandson Simon Wells directed another film adaptation of The Time Machine. Guy Pearce stars as Alexander Hartdegen, a Columbia professor whose fiancee Emma (Sienna Guillory) is murdered in Central Park. Driven by the hope of traveling to the past to save her, Hartdegen bases his time-defying device upon Einstein’s theories. Unable to rescue Emma, he travels eight thousand centuries into the future to explore the fate of humanity; the great machine (replete with gold fixtures, gauges, levers, mirrors, and glass) hurtles through a landscape that itself whirls and shifts until it finally becomes positively primeval. In this version, the moon has fallen into the earth, which results in Homo sapiens being divided into two races, the Eloi aboveground and the Morlocks in the dark recesses underneath. The future is modeled after Pal’s vision, but the pale-skinned, blonde-haired Eloi of the 1960 film are here replaced by a sturdy, brown-skinned race. The evil leader of the Eloi-eating Morlocks, a species that can leap great distances, is played by a menacing Jeremy Irons. Again, the young scientist falls in love with a beautiful Eloi woman, Mara, played by Samantha Mumba. The humanist Hartdegen teaches Mara to fight back, and she likewise teaches him not to dwell in the past. Stunningly photographed, the film is an apt rejuvenation of and homage to Wells’s classic.
The golden age of horror films featured unforgettable celluloid personalities such as Count Dracula, the Wolf Man, and, perhaps most memorably, the monster from Frankenstein. Often omitted from the list is the title character of H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man, brought to the silver screen in 1933. This horror classic was directed by James Whale, who also directed Frankenstein ( 1931 ) and around whom the 1998 film Gods and Monsters revolves. Given that these weird characters, including the Invisible Man, have appeared in a deluge of increasingly silly sequels and remakes, it is surprising just how faithful Whale’s original film is to Wells’s text. The Invisible Man opens, like the novel, with a mysterious man—his face obscured by bandages, sunglasses, and a false nose—seeking solace from a blizzard in an English pub. The film at first focuses on the bizarre appearance of Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) as he eats his dinner and checks into a room, which he turns into a science lab. After he gives the hostess a taste of his surly manners—he has, after all, been rendered insane by the invisibility drug “monocaine”—a mob of pub boys and police barge into his room. But Griffin outwits them all by shedding his bandages and clothing, and pulling slapstick pranks as he makes his escape. The invisibility is pulled off with entertaining special effects: a bicycle riding itself, footprints appearing in the snow, etc. A young Gloria Stuart (Titanic) plays Griffin’s love interest, Flora Cran ley But the real story lies in the charming spectacle of invisibility itself, a technique that his been duplicated in numerous motion pictures since.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and The Invisible Man through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
THE SPECTATOR
Mr. H. G. Wells has written a very clever story as to the condition of this planet in the year 802,701 A.D., though the two letters A.D. appear to have lost their meaning in that distant date, as indeed they have lost their meaning for not a few even in the comparatively early date at which we al
l live. The story is one based on that rather favourite speculation of modern metaphysicians which supposes time to be at once the most important of the conditions of organic evolution, and the most misleading of subjective illusions. It is, we are told, by the efflux of time that all the modifications of species arise on the one hand, and yet Time is so purely subjective a mode of thought, that a man of searching intellect is supposed to be able to devise the means of travelling in time as well as in space, and visiting, so as to be contemporary with, any age of the world, past or future, so as to become as it were a true “pilgrim of eternity.” This is the dream on which Mr. H. G. Wells has built up his amusing story of “The Time Machine.” A speculative mechanician is supposed to have discovered that the “fourth dimension,” concerning which mathematicians have speculated, is Time, and that with a little ingenuity a man may travel in Time as well as in Space. The Time-traveller of this story invents some hocus-pocus of a machine by the help of which all that belongs or is affixed to that machine may pass into the Future by pressing down one lever, and into the Past by pressing down another. In other words, he can make himself at home with the society of hundreds of thousands of centuries hence, or with the chaos of hundreds of thousands of centuries past, at his pleasure. As a matter of choice, the novelist very judiciously chooses the Future only in which to disport himself. And as we have no means of testing his conceptions of the Future, he is of course at liberty to imagine what he pleases. And he is rather ingenious in his choice of what to imagine. Mr. Wells supposes his Time-traveller to travel forward from A.D. 1895 to A.D. 802,701, and to make acquaintance with the people inhabiting the valley of the Thames (which has, of course, somewhat changed its channel) at that date. He finds a race of pretty and gentle creatures of silken organisations, as it were, and no particular interests or aims, except the love of amusement, inhabiting the surface of the earth, almost all evil passions dead, almost all natural or physical evils overcome, with a serener atmosphere, a brighter sun, lovelier flowers and fruits, no dangerous animals or poisonous vegetables, no angry passions, or tumultuous and grasping selfishness, and only one object of fear. While the race of the surface of the earth has improved away all its dangers and embarrassments (including, apparently, every trace of a religion), the race of the underworld,—the race which has originally sprung from the mining population,—has developed a great dread of light, and a power of vision which can work and carry on all its great engineering operations with a minimum of light. At the same time, by inheriting a state of servitude it has also inherited a cruel contempt for its former masters, who can now resist its attacks only by congregating in crowds during the hours of darkness, for in the daylight, or even in the bright moonlight, they are safe from the attacks of their former serfs.... We may expect with the utmost confidence that if the earth is still in existence in the year 802,701 A.D., either the A.D. will mean a great deal more than it means now, or else its inhabitants will be neither Eloi nor Morlocks. For in that case evil passions will by that time have led to the extinction of races spurred and pricked on by conscience and yet so frivolous or so malignant. Yet Mr. Wells’s fanciful and lively dream is well worth reading, if only because it will draw attention to the great moral and religious factors in human nature which he appears to ignore.