[Huxter] extended his hand; it seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. ‘I wish you’d keep your fingers out of my eye,’ said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation. ‘The fact is, I’m all here – head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I’m invisible. It’s a confounded nuisance, but I am. That’s no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?’
(The Invisible Man, Chapter 7)
The invisible man in Iping
Since we know the title of the book is The Invisible Man there’s not much mystery about the stranger who turns up one winter night at a West Sussex inn (the Coach and Horses) and books a room, wearing a heavy overcoat with the lapels turned up, a hat and big black glasses, gloves and with the few bits of his skin which ought to be exposed, wrapped in bandages. Not much mystery at all.
The early part of the story is played for laughs, as Wells describes the rural character and foibles of the inhabitants of Iping, the little village the man has come to – snooping Mrs Hall the landlady, bluff Mr Hall, Mr and Mrs Brimstone the vicar and his wife, Teddy Henfrey the clock repair man, and so on.
Mr Cuss the local physician pays a courtesy call on the stranger and is terrified when an apparently empty sleeve reaches out to him and invisible fingers tweak his nose. He flees. Mr and Mrs Bunting are puzzled when someone breaks into the vicarage to steal money from the housekeeping box; they can see a candle being lit and the back door open and shut, but can’t see any burglar. When Mr and Mrs Hall go into the lodger’s apparently empty room they are horrified to see chairs and pillows suddenly levitating of their own accord, as the invisible man tries to frighten them off.
The vicarage burglary (which the invisible man did, indeed, perform: he’s run out of money) takes place the night before Whitsun Monday. This is the day of a big fair in Iping, with itinerant stallholders, a merry-go-round, coconut shies and so on thronging the village high street.
Wells has set it on this date so that there is a big crowd to witness all the shenanigans: the local magistrate and policeman try to serve a warrant on the invisible man for suspected involvement in the burglary, which leads to an impressive bar-room brawl during which the invisible man takes off all his clothes and flees, the rumpus attracting a large crowd of fair-goers.
Once safely out of Iping, the invisible man comes across a tramp, Marvel, in a country lane. He terrifies the man into going to Iping, ordering him to fetch the clothes, bandages, hat, sunglasses and so on that he (Mr Invisible) left behind at the inn. In particular, the invisible man wants the precious volumes of his ‘diary’ in which he’s been making records of his attempts to undo whatever ill-fated experiment it was that made him invisible in the first place.
There is a comic scene where Mr Invisible corners Cuss and Bunting in the small pub parlour and forces them, by threatening them with a poker, to take off their trousers and jackets, which he bundles up and runs off to hand over to Marvel who he told to wait in Iping churchyard.
Meanwhile, the tramp had been spotted breaking into the invisible man’s room by the landlord, landlady, and their faithful friends, and an even bigger hue and cry been raised as half the village chases after him. But these pursuers are felled one by one by the invisible man tripping them up or bundling them over, allowing the tramp to get clean away with his bundles of clothes and books.
All this takes up the first hundred or so pages of the book, during which we are introduced to a sizeable cast of yokels, all of whom are played for laughs, with Wells humorously recreating the lumbering Sussex dialect:
- Mrs Wadgers, the blacksmith
- Mr Jaggers, the cobbler
- Mr Shuckleforth, the magistrate
- Mrs Huxter
- young Archie Harker
- Old Fletcher, whitewashing his front room ceiling
- Bobby Jaffers, the village constable
- Mr Gibbins, the local amateur naturalist, out botanising on the Downs
- Thomas Marvel, the tramp who the invisible man bullies into fetching his things from Iping
But there is also a dark strain running beneath the comedy. When he bullies the tramp to go to Iping to reclaim his belongings, the villagers’ ongoing obtuseness eventually drives the invisible man mad with frustration and, instead of fleeing, he goes on a rampage of destruction.
From the moment when the Invisible Man screamed with rage and Mr. Bunting made his memorable flight up the village, it became impossible to give a consecutive account of affairs in Iping. Possibly the Invisible Man’s original intention was simply to cover Marvel’s retreat with the clothes and books. But his temper, at no time very good, seems to have gone completely at some chance blow, and forthwith he set to smiting and overthrowing, for the mere satisfaction of hurting.
You must figure the street full of running figures, of doors slamming and fights for hiding-places. You must figure the tumult suddenly striking on the unstable equilibrium of old Fletcher’s planks and two chairs – with cataclysmic results. You must figure an appalled couple caught dismally in a swing. And then the whole tumultuous rush has passed and the Iping street with its gauds and flags is deserted save for the still raging unseen, and littered with coconuts, overthrown canvas screens, and the scattered stock in trade of a sweetstuff stall. Everywhere there is a sound of closing shutters and shoving bolts, and the only visible humanity is an occasional flitting eye under a raised eyebrow in the corner of a window pane.
The Invisible Man amused himself for a little while by breaking all the windows in the ‘Coach and Horses’, and then he thrust a street lamp through the parlour window of Mrs. Gribble. He it must have been who cut the telegraph wire to Adderdean just beyond Higgins’ cottage on the Adderdean road. And after that, as his peculiar qualities allowed, he passed out of human perceptions altogether, and he was neither heard, seen, nor felt in Iping any more. He vanished absolutely. (Chapter 12)
It feels like a rural Ealing Comedy, a sort of Titfield Thunderbolt vision of charming Sussex rural life, and Wells even describes it using proto-cinematic techniques – the repeated use of the phrase ‘you must figure’ working like cuts to different camera angles on the mayhem the invisible man has caused.
The fight at the Jolly Cricketers
Having escaped Iping, and reclaimed all his belongings, the invisible man bullies the tramp along the road towards the coastal town of Port Stowe. Here there is another fight. Marvel escapes the man’s clutches long enough to seek refuge in another pub, the Jolly Cricketers, begging the landlord and his handful of customers to protect him. They lock Marvel in a backroom but then hear the back door being forced open and enter the room to see Marvel being strangely pulled backwards as if by invisible hands.
Unfortunately, though, one of the customers is an American, and Americans (apparently), unlike the Brits in the story, freely carry side-arms. Marvel breaks free of his invisible assailant and the American fires his revolver in a spray pattern covering the small courtyard.
Then there is… silence. He has escaped!
The invisible man reveals himself
Meanwhile, up at a villa on the hill above the Jolly Cricketers, one Dr Kemp is working late into the night. Finally going to bed, he notices a blood spot on the linoleum. And then blood on the handle of his bedroom door. And then that his bedsheets have been ripped. It is the invisible man!
But imagine the scene when the invisible man looks at the intruder and realises that he knows Kemp. They were medical students together.
Mr Invisible tells Kemp who he is, the man who’s been in all the newspapers and causing the rumpus down the hill. His name is Griffin.
‘I’m an Invisible Man. It’s no foolishness, and no magic. I really am an Invisible Man. And I want your help. I don’t want to hurt you, but if you behave like a frantic rustic, I must. Don’t you remember me, Kemp? Griffin, of University College?’
‘Let me get up,’ said Kemp. ‘I’ll stop where I am. And let me sit quiet for a minute.’
He sat up and felt his neck.
‘I am Griffin, of University College, and I have made myself invisible. I am just an ordinary man – a man you have known – made invisible.’
‘Griffin?’ said Kemp.
‘Griffin,’ answered the Voice. (Chapter 17)
It takes a long time for Griffin to persuade Kemp that he exists, and that he is invisible, that it isn’t hypnosis or some trick.
Finally, Kemp fetches him food, then lets him sleep. And in the morning there is the big Explanation Scene – like you get in all these kinds of books – the scene where Griffin explains ‘how it all happened’.
Griffin explains how, as a student, he set himself to investigate the properties of matter. He started with common knowledge about light, how it is refracted or reflected by solid objects – and then takes these basic facts and extrapolates them to human cells, themselves mostly made of water and, individually, under a microscope, quite transparent. And so on, until Griffin has persuaded us that one dark and stormy night, he made the fateful discovery of how to make the agglomeration of translucent cells which is a human being – invisible!
But the book is not subtitled ‘A Grotesque Romance’ for nothing. This second half of the book is distinctly different from the first half. Whereas it had mostly been rural hi-jinks in part one, now Wells goes out of his way to make Griffin a repellent disagreeable and angry man.
It seems Griffin loathed and resented being forced to teach in some provincial college to make a living. He loathed his superior who was always sniffing around his experiments. He stole money from his father so he could take rooms in a shabby lodging house in London. But it turns out, in fact, not to have been his father’s money, and, unable to repay it, his father committed suicide. This prompted no remorse in Griffin – the reverse – he vents a bitter diatribe about having to return to the village of his birth for his father’s funeral, his indifference to his memory, his contempt for his one-time girlfriend.
Wells paints Griffin as a type of the sneeringly superior loner, the kind of Raskolnikov-anarchist figure which haunted late 19th century fiction.
Griffin tells Kemp how he worked day and night till he arrived at the brink of the successful experiment. First he makes a wad of cotton wool invisible. Then a stray street cat. And then he takes the potion and exposes himself to the ray which makes him invisible, too.
At this very moment, his landlord comes banging on the door shouting for the rent. Now invisible, Griffin hides and watches the Jewish landlord and his thuggish stepsons break down the door to his room and search it in puzzlement. As soon as they’re gone, he makes a pile of his unneeded papers, straw and bedding and sets it alight. ‘You burned the house down?’ asks Kemp, shocked. ‘Yes, what of it?’ replies Griffin, with typical unconcern.
Wells could have gone a number of ways on this, the elaboration of his fantasy.
His protagonist could have been a naive and innocent experimenter whose experiment went wrong, condemning him to lifelong invisibility and drawing on our sympathy.
Or he could have continued the essentially comic vein of the first half.
Instead there are increasing shades of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the figure of the demented scientist, feverishly working with homemade equipment in a remote garret, a loner shunned by the world and turning violently against it. The debt to Stevenson is reinforced by the way the transformation to invisibility is horribly painful – just like Jekyll’s transformations into Hyde.
‘It was all horrible. I had not expected the suffering. A night of racking anguish, sickness and fainting. I set my teeth, though my skin was presently afire, all my body afire; but I lay there like grim death. I understood now how it was the cat had howled until I chloroformed it. Lucky it was I lived alone and untended in my room. There were times when I sobbed and groaned and talked. But I stuck to it…. I became insensible and woke languid in the darkness.
‘The pain had passed. I thought I was killing myself and I did not care. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them grow clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my transparent eyelids. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last. I gritted my teeth and stayed there to the end. At last only the dead tips of the fingernails remained, pallid and white, and the brown stain of some acid upon my fingers.’ (Chapter 20)
The invisible man abroad in London
The three chapters which recount the invisible man’s adventures in London, after he’s burned down his lodgings, are breathlessly exciting.
It is winter and Griffin quickly discovers all the disadvantages of being invisible. One – he is instantly freezing cold. Two – people and vehicles can’t see him and so are continually banging into him. Three – his feet get muddy and so leave footprints. A couple of street urchins spot these muddy footprints appearing as if by magic as Griffin heads towards Bloomsbury, and they raise a chase after them.
The invisible man is quickly realising that to be invisible is to be chased.
He makes his escape into a department store on Tottenham Court Road, hides, waits till it’s closed up, then feeds and sleeps. Woken by the dawn, he chooses clothes to wear, a wig and a fake nose in an effort to cover every inch of his skin. But he is seen by the shop staff who are opening up, and there is another chase which only ends when Griffin strips naked again and slips out a side door.
Again, it is freezing and Griffin gets muddy feet. Worse, snow falling settles on him, creating a ghostly outline. He hurries towards Drury Lane where there are theatrical costumiers and there is a prolonged scene where he sneaks into the shabby, rundown shop of a costumier, who begins to suspect someone is following him around. This is an intensely imagined and claustrophobic sequence as the increasingly scared man grabs a poker and tries to identify his invisible spectre. It climaxes in a struggle and in which Griffin knocks the shopkeeper unconscious and ties him up. Then selects clothes, hat, bandages, a fake nose, a wig, a hat and sunglasses and once again emerges on the street.
By now Griffin has realised that a busy city is no place for an invisible man, and he makes his plans to decamp down to rural Sussex, stealing money, acquiring luggage and booking a train ticket. And that is where part one of the story commenced, with his arrival in Iping.
So the story is now back in the present: Griffin tells an awestruck Kemp that he has thought long and hard about the advantages invisibility give him and they are really only twofold: the ability to creep up on people and the ability to escape.
It shocked me that he draws the conclusion that the chief conclusion of these capacities will be the ability to kill. To assassinate. To institute a reign of terror!
The reign of terror
Dr Kemp has listened to this long, long telling of Griffin’s story with mounting impatience. Because we, the readers, know that the previous evening, after Griffin had finally gone to sleep, Kemp had sent a note to his neighbour, Colonel Adye, to come with the police.
Now they arrive, are let into the house by the maid, and enter the downstairs. Griffin hears them and realises Kemp has betrayed him. They fight, Griffin pushes Kemp out of the way, bounds down the stairs, knocks over Colonel Adye and runs out the front door.
Kempt and Adye now raise the alarm and organise the police. Proclamations are issued. Posters are distributed. All householders are ordered to lock their doors. Trains are to seal their carriages. All police are to go armed and to begin to beat the bounds within a twenty mile radius. The Invisible Man is on the loose!
The first person narrator explains to us how the evidence of the next 24 hours is patchy, but it appears that Griffin nonetheless got hold of food and rested. However, he then murders a man, a harmless Mr Wicksteed, whose body is found near a gravel pit with the head stove in by an iron bar.
Then Kemp’s housemaid, terrified, brings him a scribbled note the invisible man gave her out of thin air:
You have been amazingly energetic and clever, though what you stand to gain by it I cannot imagine. You are against me. For a whole day you have chased me; you have tried to rob me of a night’s rest. But I have had food in spite of you, I have slept in spite of you, and the game is only beginning. The game is only beginning. There is nothing for it, but to start the Terror. This announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me – the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First. To begin with the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for the sake of example – a man named Kemp. Death starts for him to-day. He may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put on armour if he likes – Death, the unseen Death, is coming. Let him take precautions; it will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar box by midday. The letter will fall in as the postman comes along, then off! The game begins. Death starts. Help him not, my people, lest Death fall upon you also. To-day Kemp is to die. (Chapter 27)
It is difficult what to make of this note, and of the way the plot had developed. We are now a long long way from the comical yokels at the Coach and Horses. The word ‘grotesque’ seems to fit not only the story, but the weird way in which Wells handles it. Griffin has now gone more or less mad.
Moments after receiving the note, Kemp’s house is under siege from unseen hands wielding rocks to smash in the windows and then an axe to smash open the wooden blinds. The narrative has turned into the trope of ‘the besieged house’, which appears in so many subsequent horror and zombie movies.
Kemp and his maid rush round trying to lock all the doors and windows but still the relentless smashing proceeds all the way round the ground floor. Colonel Adye approaches with two policemen and is let into the house by the front door, at the same moment that Griffin breaks in through the back. There is a prolonged fight, with policemen lashing out with pokers. Adye goes out the front to fetch help but is confronted by the invisible man. He pulls a revolver but Griffin wrestles it off him and fires, killing him. Kemp sees all this from an upstairs window. The story has long ago stopped being remotely funny.
Griffin renews his assault on the house and Kemp flees out the back door, running like a maniac downhill into Port Stowe, yelling at everyone that the invisible man is coming!!!. Children run screaming into their homes, mothers bolt front doors – but some workmen laying pipes are slow to react and Grifffin blunders into several of them in his mad pursuit of Kemp.
Once again, being invisible seems to boil down to being pursued, except this time Griffin is not the prey but the hunter.
But, having bumped into a crowd of them, the various tram-men and navvies join in the chase and suddenly Kemp realises they far outnumber his pursuer. Kemp stops, turns and is immediately punched to the floor but, as Griffin aims other blows, the navvies and tram-men are on him, seizing his arms, wrestling him to the ground and then there is a good deal of kicking – with navvies’ steel-capped boots. ‘Enough, enough,’ cries Kemp and kneels by the space where Griffin seems to be.
And then a marvellous thing happens. And although Wells’s psychology, plotting and characterisation may be a little haywire, forced and simplistic throughout this problematic text – he still has a gift for the uncanny, conceiving the weird, imagining the wonderful with great power and conviction.
For the mob has beaten Griffith to death and now… his body reappears. Before the amazed eyes of the crowd that have gathered round the body, Griffin’s invisibility wears off.
Suddenly an old woman, peering under the arm of the big navvy, screamed sharply. ‘Looky there!’ she said, and thrust out a wrinkled finger.
And looking where she pointed, everyone saw, faint and transparent as though it was made of glass, so that veins and arteries and bones and nerves could be distinguished, the outline of a hand, a hand limp and prone. It grew clouded and opaque even as they stared.
‘Hullo!’ cried the constable. ‘Here’s his feet a-showing!’
And so, slowly, beginning at his hands and feet and creeping along his limbs to the vital centres of his body, that strange change continued. It was like the slow spreading of a poison. First came the little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess, and then growing rapidly dense and opaque. Presently they could see his crushed chest and his shoulders, and the dim outline of his drawn and battered features.
When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand erect, there lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a young man about thirty. His hair and brow were white – not grey with age, but white with the whiteness of albinism – and his eyes were like garnets. His hands were clenched, his eyes wide open, and his expression was one of anger and dismay.
‘Cover his face!’ said a man. ‘For Gawd’s sake, cover that face!’ and three little children, pushing forward through the crowd, were suddenly twisted round and sent packing off again. (Chapter 28)
It is one of the oddities of these older books that they can combine being quite preposterous, ridiculous and melodramatic with suddenly, being oddly touching and moving.
Conclusion
The Invisible Man may, on many levels, be twaddle or, more accurately, schoolboy fiction on the Sherlock Holmes level, with a pseudo-scientific kink. But there’s no denying Wells had this great gift for the economical, precise and incredibly vivid description of the marvellous and strange and amazing.
Apparently, the immensely serious modernist poet T.S. Eliot wrote that Wells’s description of the sun rising and shedding its dazzling light across the surface of the moon (in The First Men in the Moon) was ‘quite unforgettable’. The time traveller’s vision of the deserted beach under a dying sun a million years hence has stayed with me ever since I first read it forty years ago.
And although the Invisible Man is a less successful book than either of those, although it is a strange mish-mash of the broadly comical and the grimly homicidal – just the same it, too, contains images of uncanny power.
Related links
Other H.G. Wells reviews
1895 The Time Machine – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come – set in the same London of the future described in The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love but descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1901 The First Men in the Moon – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1906 In the Days of the Comet – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1914 The World Set Free – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
Books & Boots 