Section 1

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Fontana Modern Novels
H.G.Wells
The Invisible
‘The Invisible Man — of imaginative literature.
to other men. All his dreams of power
The Invisible Manis one of the great classics. i
It is the story of Griffin, the scientist who discovered a potion that made him invisible - are
seemed possible — until he found he could — not make himself reappear. And gradually the drug that had made him invisible began. to drive him towards homicidal mania...

Available in Fontana by the same author
Kipps © The Valley of Spiders
The | Invisible Mian
H. G. Wells
_ With an Introduction by Frank Weils
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First published 1897 | First issued in Fontana Books 1959 _ Seventh Impression September 1974
©H.G. Wells, 1897
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CONDITIONS OF SALE ; ‘This book is sold subject to the endian that it shall not, by way of trade or other-
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HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
tT Gsroros Wetts was born on September gist, 1866 at Bromley, Kent, Destined for the ?P of a draper, he became instead one of the great intellectual lights of his age. %. Sagara Joseph Wells, kept a small hardware and was an enthusiastic professional cricketer. mothe, whose maiden name was Neal, had in domestic service before her marriage. The shop in Bromley High Street never prospered} its income was ee ae Inhove the poverty ; Ba conc young Yietbett Geurec Cats* ki was called) had inherited a taste for reading which he was able to indulge freely at the local - Literary Institute and lending library. He was sent oy. first to some cottage school and to
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“However, he did not satisfy his employers and had _ to leave after one month. For a very brief spell he a ee ee that he was a chemist's assistant at Midhurst one month (January 1881), In April of the | “fme Jer he fund himel ce more a pers 3
honours in zoology at London University. His next
short stories, essays and reviews for periodicals and |
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cals eau atone ‘HERBERT GEORGE “WELLS :
apprentice, this time at Southsea. After two years in this soul-destroying occupation he could bear it ‘no longer and left.
He next obtained a post as assistant master at Midhurst Grammar School, and in 1884 was_ awarded a scholarship (of one guinea a week) at the Normal School of Science (now the Imperial College of Science), South Kensington, London, For three years he studied physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy and biology—the latter under Professor Thomas H. Huxley. On termination of his studies he became assistant master in a school at Holt, North Wales. There he had a severe football accident from the effects of which he suffered for very many years. He returned to London in July 1888, and early in 1889 joined the staff of Henley House School at Kilburn. In October, 1890 he took a B.Sc. degree with first-class
appointment (from 1891-93) was that of a biology - tutor for the University Correspondence College.
In the summer of 1893 a serious hemorrhage of _ the lungs forced him to take a long rest and to adopt a completely sedentary occupation. Around 1891-92. he had contributed essays to various educational | and other journals and in 1893 while he was recuperating from his illness he began to write.
_ magazines, among them The Pall Mall Gazetie, | St. Fames’s Gazette, Black and White, the New Review and The Saturday Review. In 1893 his first major. work A Textbook of Biology was published. The -year 1895 saw the publication of a volume of short oe stories ie Bike pay, a volume of collected |
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HERBERT GEORGE WELLS Tees essays, and of two novels, The Time Machine and The Wonderful Visit. ‘The former established his reputation as a writer of extraordinary power and imagination.
In 1895 also he married Miss Amy Catherine
‘Robbins, a former pupil of his—his first marriage (1891) to a cousin having meanwhile been dissolved. Two sons were subsequently born of his second “marriage (George Philip, 1901, and Frank, 1909). The next few years brought his series of great scientific romances: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898, The First Men in the Moon (1901), as well as many short stories, articles and novels, among them Love and Mr. Lewisham (1901).
In 1900 Wells built himself a house at Sandgate near Folkestone, which remained his home for nearly a decade, in the course of which he rose to a position of world-wide literary fame. There, at Sandgate, he wrote some of his most celebrated works, e.g. Anticipations, a volume of essays on - sociological problems (1901), The Sea Lady (1902), The Food of the Gods (1904), Kipps, A Modern Utopia (both in 1905), In the Days of the Comet (1906), The Was in the Air (1908), Tono Bungay, Anne Veronica (both in 1909), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910).
At the turn of the century, his health having greatly improved, Wells began to make frequent trips to the European Continent and in 1906 he went on his first tour to the United States. In 1903 he joined the Fabian Society, with which he remained actively (though not always harmoniously) connected for a number of years. In 1909 he moved to London, and in 1912 bought a house at
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ideology appropriate to the task of creating a World
a HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
Easton Park near Dunmow, Essex, which oatnad his home until his wife’s death in 1927.
~The New Machiavelli (1911) marks a new departure in Wells’ creative work; the novel of ideas and of problems in which the (fictional) story becomes subordinate to the. sociological and ideological message. The works Marriage (1912), The Passionate Friends (1913), The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914), The Research Magnificent (1915), belong to this category.
Wells supported the first World War as the “War to end War” and in 1918 became for a short time director of Propaganda Policy against - Germany on Lord Northcliffe’s Enemy Propaganda Committee. His most important work, written and published during the war was Mr. Britling sees it Through (1916) which achieved biased sera: popularity.
_ Shortly after the war (1920) he visited Soviet Russia and in 1921 he attended the Washington Conference. In the years to follow he travelled much, and spent many winters away from the rigours of the English climate. Though he continued _ writing novels—his most important novel of the _ inter-war years was The World of William Clissold _(1926)—he concentrated more and more on the propagating of ideas. The main thesis which he expounded during the last two decades of his life _ was that the human race must adapt itself to the material forces it has created, or sig toms The three. great works Outline of History (1920), Science of Life (1929), and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Man- kind (1932), were all designed to popularise the
y State $n his” vicw the oa aivernative toa return ik arene and to final annihilation. In 1934 he _ | “published two volumes of autobiography, Experiment 4 a Living.
The second World War was to him the con- | i teatior that mankind had indeed lost the mastery _
_ over the forces of its own making and was heading _imexorably towards doom. His last work, Mind at \ the End of its Tether (1945), gave expression to oe final mood of despair.
_ Having been ailing for some considerable time, he died in his London home on August 13th, 1946. ae ~ 2
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INTRODUCTION
expressions “Scientific Romances” and
“Science Fiction” do not to-day conjure up
visions of the better type of story telling. Heroes
“now are Supermen, they live on Superfoods, their
_ knowledge is Superscience, and they look like over- stuffed~ pinheads. They never walk, they fly, and their flight, probably carrying a motorcar, a bizarre temple and a Supergirl under one arm, can easily carry them from star to star. The scientific story passed out of literature into strip pictures, and since the disappearance of the silent film and with it the — ability to tell a story in pictures, has now developed a strange literary form of its own where phrases, — sentences, lines and paragraphs have given way to indescriminate balloons, containing spattered globs of language that can, if it is worth doing at all, be read in any order.
It must not be thought that this Superliterature is limited in its scope and variety ; it is not all about Supermen. Sometimes it is about Wondermen, who live on Wonderfoods, who know Wonderscience, and have sexless Wondergirls as their companions. At the beginning of each story the Hero is just an ordinary chap, easily identified as the reader himself, who hears of a crisis and thereupon changes - in a single picture into a Superwonder: his chest
becomes enormous and his body covered with ea muscles (we are reminded of that offer,
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12 INTRODUCTION
that we ignored, when we too could have had a perfect body in forty days or money refunded), he changes at the same time into bathing trunks, a jersey with a common device upon it, and a cloak; but his head, and presumably its contents, remains unchanged in size. Physically he can now do any- thing; he flies through the air, lifts bridges and buildings, darts restlessly from planet to planet, looks through things and lives in a universe where there are no natural laws except that everyone must speak English and crime does not pay, even though our hero is the only policeman. There are Wonder- men, Marvels, Miraclemen, Supermen, Invincible- men and men by many other names, but we cannot in honesty say that they form the basis of any credit to the art of story telling.
I do not think that H. G. Wells was a great student of the Strip-comic genre, but in his own observations on the art of the fantastic story he makes it very clear why his succeed and these others fail: “‘any one can invent human beings inside out,” and “ nothing remains interesting where any- thing may happen.” In each of H. G.’s stories there is only one impossible hypothesis. He argues the plausibility of that hypothesis in the language of the scientist. In bygone days Magic was accepted and a spell was sufficient to make invisibility plausible; in these days there is no magic, but we are willing to accept a phenomenon properly explained, whether we understand the explanation or not. Having made the one hypothesis, it is thrown into an ordinary world; the marvel, the monster, the created fantasy becomes as real and vivid as a dream and inhabits the reader’s own home.
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In the latter half of the nineteenth century the scientific romance was more usually in the form of an imaginary journey. The majority of Jules Verne’s novels take this form; the most successful of them ‘were written in the ten years from 1862 to 1872. He takes his readers with great good nature for a five-week trip in a balloon, to the centre of the earth, ten thousand leagues under the sea, to the north pole and around the world. In 1895 H. G. Wells takes us for our first voyage with him, a journey in the Time Machine. In that same year Georges: Méliés, a great pioneer of ‘la Cinemato- -graphie Started his producnion of his fantastic films. Jules Verne took us Dr (a terre ad la Lune in 1865. H. G. Wells landed on the moon, with The First Men im the Moon, m 1goi and im the following year Georges Méhiés gave us, in his three-hunredeth film, twelve minutes of a trip to the moon.
Jules Verne betieved sincerely that the things he foretold would come about at some time in the future. He wrote saying, ‘I tell you, this will happen!” H. G. Wells accepted, as many then did, that such things would one day be possible; he wrote saying, ‘ when it happens, this is how it will affect you.’ Méliés, the conjuror-comedian, showed us in pictures how ridiculous it would be when we did such remarkable things.
This story of H. G.’s has itself been made as a film, memorable, if for nothing else, for the voice of Claude Rains, a man able and courageous enough to act without face or fingers and who, in his ‘performance, touched the deep tragedy that the Invisible Man had to suffer.
To H. G. it was the effect that scientific progress
14 INTRODUCTION
would have on the world, and the way.in which people would react to the coming wonders, that was of the greatest importance. In The Invisible Man he goes even deeper by studying the effect on the individual. He restates the sad and relentless cruelty of the mob to the unusual, to the hunchback, the cross-eyed, the monster or the pathetic simpleton. He lays before us the despair and loneliness of the mob’s victim, the schizm between the desperate frightened individual out-of-joint and the close unthinking mutually protective herd. Every action on either side takes no count of the other: the outcast is out and without thought or knowledge of the crime there is no forgiveness from the rest. — This novel is more, then, than just a Scientific Romance; it-is the study of a character, a man who strives to make himself unusual and thereby always above his fellow men, a man that sees in himself and his uniqueness a power over others, a man with the very stuff that dictatorship is made of, the man Griffin. He occurs in different forms m other H. G. Wells novels: as Nunez who thinks to be King in the Country of the Blind, and as Rudolph Whitlow who is a Holy Terror from his birth to his death. Griffin stumbles by an accident of his own intellig- ence upon the solution of that impossible hypothesis, that a man can be invisible. Invisibility he achieves without a Cloak, that magic cloak that gives its wearer invisibility and, presumably, its wearer obliges by making the cloak mvisible too. Griffin reaches the power, the dream of power that the thought of invisibility conjures up in his mind, by relentless labour; the invisibility that is his reward is real, it does not touch his clothes, his undigested
INTRODUCTION 95
meals, the mud that spatters him, or the silent snow that settles in his hair. He achieves the logically impossible and is left with a bitter reality, a power ho greater than a help to petty larceny, a power more binding than chains, more empty than releasing death.
To Jules Verne Invisibility would have been an adventure into the unknown. To Méliés a slapstick frolic of trickery and illusion. Here, to H. G. Wells, it is a tragedy. The scientific worker strives con- tinually to give man a greater power to shape his destiny; the individual finds more and more that he holds in*his hands the power of life over death, and in its execution it operates only as a power of death over life. H. G. Wells foresaw the way the World is going and that the very knowledge that points that way, in the hands of single individuals, who being very ordinary and natural animals see themselves getting there first, can compass nothing but their own destruction. Such a one is Griffin, the Invisible Man. This book has in it a story. to be cherished, not only for the understanding of the uniquitous and to-be-pitied ego-centric, but because it is of the golden age of the Scientific Romance. .
- In the fifty years after 1862, when Jules Verne was writing his first ‘ voyages imaginaires,’ scientific. invention was profoundly affecting the way of life of ordinary people. In 1876 Thomas Edison made his first talking machines. In 1879, with J. W. Swan, he made the first practical electric light bulbs. In 1885 Daimler and Benz were working on the first internal combustion engined motorcars. In 1895 Marconi transmitted wireless messages, and in 1901 ‘the first signals were sent and received across the
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Atlantic Ocean. In 1903 the Wright brothers dew in the first successful heavier than air machine. Six years later Bleriot flew across the English Channel.
In those years people saw the coming of the horse- less carriage and in their life-times motorcars became commonplace. The instantaneous message became the everyday tool of the ordinary man. Light and Heat leapt to his fingertips. The normal things of middle-age had been childhood wonders.
In the days of Jules Verne and of the early novels of H. G. Wells scientific discovery and invention was dealing with things that could, like magic, be easily accepted. Their writings dealt with simple physical facts that the reader could grasp and did not have to understand: flying, journeying through space, travelling under the sea, making diamonds, travelling in time. Such things were daily coming true. It was an era of new horizons. The Inventor was concerned with making things go, where they did not go before.
Now, science is too difficult, too broad and too near. It appears that anything is possible so that there is no longer any adventure in simple things, nothing remains interesting where anything may happen. Science fiction can no longer discuss the plain effects of discovery on ordinary people; the ordinary people have experienced too much in their life-times. In 1900 the coming changes were exciting reading. Now we look only for the perfecting of the everyday things that we have already got; we expect to do things faster, more easily and a great deal more expensively tomorrow than we do them today. There are no new horizons—only extended horizons. It is stimulating to reach the top of a mountain and beyond the peak to see a new and