Time Machine and The Invisible Man (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

machine or even how it is able to traverse time at such amazing speeds.
    Wells’s new subject, yet another self-portrait in a distorting mirror, appears in the second fiction in this volume. The Invisible Man uses yet another obsessed man of science, but this time Wells toys with the idea of plausibility. That is, Griffin, the invisible man, explains how he is able to capitalize on his own albinism to reduce the amount of light his body reflects to the point where human eyes cannot see him. It would almost seem as though Wells were succumbing to Jules Verne’s notion of plausibility, but we quickly realize this is not the case. Griffin’s albinism (pp.172—173) is merely the outward sign of his difference from others, a difference we might suppose to be quantitative—some people are lighter-skinned than others—but which turns out to be qualitative. What separates Griffin from the rest of humanity is exactly the element that separates Wells’s early version of the Time Traveller from the rest of humanity: genius.
    But genius is intoxicating. It sends the ego into raptures of self-delight and isolates the individual further and further from anything like a human community. This is the tale Wells spins out in The Invisible Man: the gradual metamorphosis of genius into madness. Again, this is not a unique story. The Romantics, especially William Wordsworth (1770—1850) in his poem “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a, Yew Tree” (1795), explore this very theme, while Wells’s model, Mary Shelley, provides him with the nucleus of his novel—the solitary scientist, the potentially dangerous invention pursued for egotistical purposes.
    So The Invisible Man is a cautionary tale the author writes for his generation and for himself. When we forget that we too are merely human, when we take ourselves to be something like gods because we can do things ordinary people cannot do, we run the risk of regarding our neighbors with contempt. Wells transfers the role of outsider, which Romanticism had created for the artist, to the scientist in order to show that the truly innovative force in modern society would derive not from humanists but from those trained in science. The retrograde force in society, as Wells preached throughout his life—the mockery of Greek studies in chapter I (p. 7) of The Time Machine is a gentle harbinger of this notion—is the diligent but useless study of dead languages that have no bearing on modern culture. The gap between scientists and humanists persists in our own age, as evidenced by C.P. Snow’s 1959 pamphlet “The Two Cultures,” which shows scientists to be second-class citizens in a society dominated by humanists.
    Wells’s ideas about society and the relationship between the scientist and the community remain constant throughout his career, but his literary style does not. The style of The Time Machine is essayistic: Wells leaves his characters and setting so abstract that there is little chance his readers will feel any genuine affinities or antipathies for them. Even his vocabulary is limited, with the word “incontinent” (in its various forms) repeated so often we begin to wonder if it might be some sort of obsession.
    The Invisible Man appeared in 1897, only two years after The Time Machine, but the thirty-three-year-old author had become a vastly different man. In the two years between these two novels, Wells produced a prodigious quantity of work: The Wonderful Visit, Select Conversations with an Uncle, and The Stolen Bacillus in 1895, then The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Wheels of Chance in 1896—three novels and two collections of shorter works. The important change here is Wells’s decision to write other kinds of works and not limit himself to fantasy. The Wheels of Chance capitalizes on the bicycling craze and allows the author to recreate oral speech patterns, especially his own Cockney accent. This would cause reviewers to link him to Charles Dickens (1812-1870), who