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Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and sometime shopkeeper, his mother a former ladys maid. Although Bertie left school at fourteen to become a drapers apprentice (a life he detested), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893. In 1895, his immediately successful novel The Time Machine rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteachers salary. His other scientific romancesThe Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908)won him distinction as the father of science fiction. Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase the war that will end war to describe World War I, became increasingly disillusioned and focused his efforts on educating mankind with his bestselling Outline of History (1920) and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he bitterly observed: Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supercede me.
W. Warren Wagar is Distinguished Teaching Professor of History Emeritus at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He previously taught at Wellesley College and the University of New Mexico. A Vice President of the H. G. Wells Society, Wagar has published three books on Wells, including H. G. Wells and the World State; an edited anthology, H. G. Wells: Journalism and Prophecy; and a critical edition of Wellss The Open Conspiracy. Other books by Wagar include The City of Man: Prophecies of a World Civilization in 20th-Century Thought, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things, and A Short History of the Future.
Introduction
When The Invisible Man was first published in 1897, Victoria was still Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India. From her reign came the adjective Victorian, suggesting propriety, prudery, stuffiness. Victorians of all ranks minded their manners. Law and order prevailed, at least on the home islands, enforced by elaborately helmeted police. Tennyson and Trollope typified the decorous man of letters. Beneath the surface, passions seethed and resentments festered. Nevertheless, as such things go, the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain was a time of relative tranquility.
Into this peaceable kingdom burst the fantastic tales of a young science teacher and journalist by the good English name of Herbert George Wellswho also had a fair amount of Irish blood on his mothers side. In four brutal novels issued between 1895 and 1898, he stunned the reading public and laid the foundations of a major literary career that spanned the next half century. Ironically, he is remembered today almost entirely for these four early novels: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). The hundred-odd other books he wrote, including dozens of novels and masses of nonfiction, attract few readers. Many were immensely popular in their own day, but at this writing, nearly all are out of print.
One secret of the perennial appeal of the four early novels is their violence, and the rude contrast between their violence and the innocence of their settings. These are extraordinarily dark fictions, which have lost none of their power to terrify, despite all the evil our species has inflicted on itself in intervening generations. In the case of The Invisible Man, what immediately reaches out and grabs us by the throat is the rage of the Invisible Man himselfa rage that may call to mind the misanthropic fantasies of Winston Smith and the grisly proceedings in the Ministry of Truth in George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four. Or-well had a political message to deliver, but what most inspires dread and horror in his readers today, I suspect, is the sadistic rage deeply embedded in some of his chief characters. We fear such anger in others. We also know that it may lurk within ourselves, ready to spring forth whenever we are thwarted by an unhappy turn of events.
The threats posed in the other early novels are somewhat different, but violence is never absent. In The Time Machine, the anonymous inventor journeys to the far future and finds that humankind has degenerated into two subhuman speciesthe ultimate progeny in one case of the capitalists (the Eloi) and in the other case of the working class (the Morlocks). In a reversal of fortunes, the descendants of the working class are now the masters, literally feeding on the flesh of the fragile, half-witted progeny of the former ruling class. When a great pack of these hideously devolved workers assaults the Time Traveller, he batters them with an iron bar in a murderous frenzy and just misses losing his own life. The account of his battle with the Morlocks is one of the more memorable moments in world literature.
The Island of Dr. Moreau offers violence of another order. A researcher on a Pacific island attempts to transform animals into men by excruciatingly painful surgery. He succeeds, up to a point, but is eventually killed by one of his tortured patients. The fauna of the island slowly revert to their bestial natures. The shipwrecked narrator of the story lives in mounting terror of these creatures, but survives and manages to escape from the island. And in what is surely the most violent of the four novels, The War of the Worlds, England is invaded by coldly intelligent octopuslike beings from Mars. Their technology is far superior to humankinds. They conquer the earth, slaughtering vast numbers of its inhabitants in the process. But because they possess no immunity against terrestrial microbes, the Martians are soon annihilated by these unseen enemies. No thanks to human effort, the war of the worlds is won by earth.
The storytelling in all these early novels is peerless. Wellss narrative instincts never failed him. The characters he portrayed, where characterization was needed, are true to life. Yet above all else, it is the raw violence, the pain, the rage, the fear, the visceral horror of his fictions that have drawn one generation of readers after another to their pages and explain their enduring fascination. The tale of The Invisible Man, as we shall see, is no exception.
Who was H. G. Wells? His beginnings are improbable. Unlike almost any other prominent English writer of his time, he hailed from the lowest stratum of the middle class. He was born on September 21, 1866, in the market town of Bromley, in southeastern England. His father was a Bromley shopkeeper who supplemented the family income for many years by playing professional cricket. When young Wellsknown then as Bertiewas only thirteen, his mother was forced by declining financial fortunes to accept a position as housekeeper at a moderately large rural estate in the neighboring county of Sussex. She had once been a ladys maid in the same house, but now she presided over a staff of servants. Wellss father continued to keep his shop in Bromley for a while longer, earning little money.
