Cruelty in 1884. In 1899, he would found the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. See Begg, *Jack the Ripper*, p.119.

55 Begg, *Jack the Ripper*, p.119.

56 [W. T. Stead], 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' (The Report of the *Pall Mall Gazette* Secret Commission), Monday 6 July 1885, p.1. The report was published in four parts on 6, 7, 8, and 10 July 1885. Further page references will be given parenthetically, preceded by the part number.

57 *The Star*, 8 September 1888, quoted in Begg, *Jack the Ripper*, p.155.

58 In Judith Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London* [1992] (London: Virago, 1994), Figure 15, facing p.135. In fact, 'the number of murders committed by Jack the Ripper is disputed'. Begg, *Jack the Ripper*, p.231. There are five so-called canonical victims – i.e. those generally accepted to have been killed by him.

59 Quoted in Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, p.168.

60 Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, p.197.

61 Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, p.198.

62 See, for example, the last full paragraph in Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, p.198.

63 Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, p.126.

64 Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, p.3. Walkowitz concludes her sentence thus: 'and into a cautionary tale for women, a warning that the city was a dangerous place when they transgressed the narrow boundary of home and hearth to enter public space'.

65 Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, pp.205–206.

66 Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, pp.206–207.

67 Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, pp.193–194.

68 Oscar Wilde, *The Picture of Dorian Gray* [1891] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p.48. That Gray refers to '[a] hideous Jew', who was 'such a monster' and has 'an enormous diamond ... in the centre of a soiled shirt' (p.48) illustrates racial – more specifically, anti-Semitic – Othering.

69 Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, p.198.

70 Begg, *Jack the Ripper*, p.x.

71 Begg, *Jack the Ripper*, p.1.

72 George Bernard Shaw, 'Blood Money to Whitechapel', *The Star*, 24 September 1888, quoted in Begg, *Jack the Ripper*, p.2.

73 Begg, *Jack the Ripper*, p.3.
CHAPTER TWO

The Bat and the Beetle

Dracula

‘them there animiles’

Although subsequent representations of Dracula have tended to fix
his alter ego as a vampire bat, in Stoker's 1897 novel itself the animal
analogies are more varied and extensive. Early on, when Jonathan Harker
spies Dracula crawling down the wall of his castle, he compares his host's
movements with those of a lizard (p.35). Shortly afterwards, Dracula
is heard calling to wolves, which seem to answer 'from far and wide'
(p.46), and he throws a child to be consumed by them. Five days later,
Harker hears the howling of these 'allies' of Dracula, 'almost as if the
sound sprang up at the raising of his hand, just as the music of a great
orchestra seems to leap under the baton of the conductor' (p.49). The day
after this, Harker discovers Dracula in his coffin with blood spilling from
his mouth onto his chin and neck: 'he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted
with his repletion' (p.51). Indeed, when in Whitby a bat is seen outside
Lucy's window (p.89), we are left to infer its connection with the recently
arrived Dracula. Much later in the novel, Mina Harker's journal records
Van Helsing's explanation that the vampire 'can transform himself to
wolf' and that 'he can be as bat' (p.223). He also has 'long, sharp, canine
teeth' (p.24). All combine to create this 'monster' (p.51). It is a curious
fact that most adaptations of the story pin down its protagonist to just
one of these incarnations, as though the full range of shape-shifting in
the original is too difficult to deal with.

More worrying than Dracula's bestiality, though, is the beast that
he brings out in those around him. As Thomas Bilder, the hapless
zokeeper, remarks: 'Mind you ... there's a deal of the same nature
in us as in them there animiles' (p.128). It is not simply that Dracula
infects those whom he bites, but that he transforms those who observe
the changes that result. A startling example occurs when Van Helsing
has Dr Seward and Arthur join him in a mission to decapitate Lucy.
The adventure is recounted in the diary of Dr Seward, who records that
'[w]hen Lucy – I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore
her shape – saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat
gives when taken unawares; then her eyes ranged over us'. The eyes are
Lucy's 'in form and colour', but are 'unclean and full of hell-fire, instead
of the pure, gentle orbs we knew'. On seeing them, writes Seward, 'the
remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be
killed, I could have done it with savage delight' (p.197). What alarms is
not so much the manifestation of beastliness in the figure most closely
associated with it, as the 'ordinary' person's capacity for brutal violence.
This is true of many of the texts considered in the present volume.
Seward's display of atavism is the more graphic for its contrast with his
professional status (his social rank, but, more strikingly, his vocation: he
has gone from caring and saving to an urge to kill). His conduct well
illustrates what David Glover has written of Stoker's

constant sense that the divide between the stable and the unstable is itself
unstable, that the line cannot be held. Subjects and nations seem to oscillate
between modernity and atavism, and no science of race or place quite
promises to guarantee the former without the latter.²

The degree of instability is such that even the animal correspondences
are in flux. We have seen how diverse are the bestial attributes of
Dracula, but even the imagery applied to his victims is confused and
contradictory. In the passage that I have just quoted, Lucy is described
as snarling like a cat; later in the same paragraph, she throws to the
ground a child whom she has been clutching and is heard 'growling over
it as a dog growls over a bone' (p.197). We could, of course, dismiss this
sudden shift from the feline to the canine as the result of a talentless
writer's snatching at mixed metaphors. But it would be wrong or at
least unhelpful to make such a judgement: the pervasiveness and range
of animal similes are perfectly in keeping with the themes of the novel
and with the cultural concerns that it addresses and reflects.

While *Dracula* shares with many contemporary texts a morbid
fascination with degeneration and atavism marked by the assumption
of animal characteristics, it does not settle for the straightforward
correspondences that we find in several other works. In keeping with
the malleability of its titular character, Stoker's book exhibits the same
movement from substance to incorporeality that one observes at the
end of *Heart of Darkness*. Dracula, knows Van Helsing, 'cannot flourish
without this diet' of 'the blood of the living'. He
throws no shadow; he make in the mirror no reflect ... He can come in mist
which he create ... but ... the distance he can make this mist is limited,
and it can only be round himself. He come on moonlight rays as elemental
dust. (p.223)

He can ‘become so small’ that he can ‘slip through a hair-breadth space
at the tomb door’. He can, Van Helsing goes on, ‘when once he find his
way, come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it
be bound or even fused up with fire – solder you call it’ (p.223). Van
Helsing’s broken English itself reinforces this sense of transmutation
and dissolution; even the language of narration alters its shape. Such
features point to the distinctiveness of *Dracula*, for this is a work in
which the very form and structure of its narration bear the ambiguities
and instabilities of its theme. David Punter is quite right to point to the
formal inventiveness of the book.³ Apart from Van Helsing’s insecure
command of English, there is, as many critics have observed, the
mix of narrative voices: for example, Harker’s journal, Mina Murray’s
journal, newspaper cuttings, Seward’s diary kept on phonograph, letters
between Mina and Lucy (some of them unopened), Lucy’s diary, and
other correspondence, including by telegram, and so on. Not only do
these provide multiple perspectives, but they constantly interrupt one
another. Each section is short. Many are incomplete. Authority is called
into question by the plurality of accounts, but also by the differences in
kind: they range from young women’s letters to personal journals, from
newspaper stories to scientific record. In the character of these sections,
too, questions of authority are raised; in this case, of the relative weight
of the past and present for ‘[t]hough alluding to the Gothic devices of
lost manuscripts and letters, *Dracula’s* fragments are recorded in the most
modern manner: by typewriter, in shorthand and on phonograph’.⁴ We
might take the latter as an antecedent of what Marina Warner describes
as ‘[t]he ubiquitous electronic voice [that] has become domestic now,
the everyday magic of hearing the voice of someone dead or faraway
... [one of the] powerful recent agents of literary metamorphoses’.⁵ I
shall have more to say about these and other signs of modernity later,
but for now I want only to introduce the idea of movement and the
struggle between past and present; the proposition that ‘[m]odernity’s
progress, threatened by Dracula throughout the novel, is not as secure
as its explanations suggest’.⁶ The insecurity is reflected in the multiple
forms of Dracula as much as in the amorphism of the novel. Botting
puts this well when, having described ‘Dracula’s crossing of boundaries
[as] relentless’, he writes that
Dracula's threat is polymorphousness, both literally, in the shapes he assumes, and symbolically in terms of the distinctions he upsets ... Dracula's fluid, shifting and amorphous shape is ... threatening because it has no singular or stable nature or identity.⁷

We may then contradict Van Helsing's assertion that Dracula 'make in the mirror no reflect' and say that, on the contrary, despite his image not appearing in the mirror, he reflects the culture in and of which Stoker is writing.

The range of avatars has been noted by David Glover, who suggests that

[t]he vampire stands at the threshold between the human and the subhuman and it is entirely appropriate that Dracula and his kind make their mark through their shifting affinities with a variety of nonhuman forms: wolves, lizards, bats, and dogs.

So if we substitute 'straddles' or 'crosses' for 'stands at', then Glover's remark seems quite acceptable. It is not meant as a criticism of Glover's book – which has many interesting things to say about race, politics, and nationalism in Stoker's work – to suggest that the significance of this variety of non-human forms eludes Glover's diagnosis. According to Glover, 'while the vampire's peculiarly perverse polymorphousness is the source of its resistance to representation, making it notoriously difficult to pin down ... its polymorphous perversity is what allows it to proliferate'.⁸ Glover seems quickly propelled towards a postmodern view of this lack of definition and consequently misses some of what is really interesting about it. Noticing that 'in Stoker's imagination at least, Dracula's likeness cannot be captured either by painting or photography', Glover observes that

the vampire continues to reproduce itself in a seemingly endless series of copies, always resourcefully different from previous incarnations, often revising the rules of the game in order to secure a new lease of life, without ever being fully laid to rest.⁹

These interminable metamorphoses contribute to the creature's mythic status. One can feel the temptation to slip into postmodern discourses of simulacra and elusiveness, difference and deferral, but to succumb would be to transport us away from the context of Stoker's writing (something that Glover commendably labours against throughout the rest of his book). The vampire does not resist representation. It encourages it. The assumption of so many forms – and sometimes of no form at all – is what characterises Dracula. The vampire is multiple in shape.
In so many of the texts contemporary with Stoker's novel, there is a relatively straightforward opposition between the human and bestial or the uncomplicated posing of an unanswerable question about where the animal ends and the human begins. *Dracula* is considerably more complex. David Punter judges that 'it belongs securely with *Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray* and *The Island of Doctor Moreau*, while transcending all of them in its development of a symbolic structure in which to carry and deal with contradictions'.¹⁰ A vital part of this symbolic structure is the multiplicity of images. In contrast to Stevenson's, Wilde's, and Wells's texts where the symbols are markers of opposites that cause disturbance when they meet, Stoker's narrative has the added confusion of features that dissolve. It does not rest at a simple forcing together of polarities with the predictable tensions, but shows through mutation that no position is fixed. The normal processes of self-construction against otherness do not work, because neither the self nor the other is stable. Unlike contemporary texts in which the civilised may go native, the civilised and the savage cohabit in both the city and pre-industrial worlds. Moreover, the civilised and the wild, the human and the animal, take on several different shapes.

Sometimes, of course, they are without shape. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of *Dracula* is the movement between the material and immaterial. Unlike Conrad and Wells, however, Stoker seems unwilling to seek refuge in the metaphysical. It is the material that triumphs. In *Heart of Darkness*, the wilderness enters the house of the Intended with Marlow and makes possible the novella's closing vision of eternal nature into which any specific frame must fit. The material, which stands for the commercial, is nullified and reabsorbed by nature. Conrad, I argue elsewhere, is quite deliberately undermining the power of Henry M. Stanley, making of this much-discussed text a more radical or at least a less complicit one than is very commonly supposed.¹¹ But Stoker goes even further. *Dracula* does not turn away from the actualities of modern capitalism; the narrative is packed with its signs.¹² What it does do is restore the supremacy of this material world, while leaving open the possibility of future threat. It is the faith in the material that leads to the narrative rejection of Dracula, but the appeal of the immaterial is so great and enduring that we must turn to the spiritual for confirmation. True, we are reminded by Van Helsing that '[o]ur enemy is not merely spiritual', and Van Helsing's warning here is that Dracula 'has the strength of twenty men' (p.232), but the reminder can serve without distortion as an image of the vampire's ability to cross over between
nature and civilisation. The travels of, to, and from the vampire are vital
to the novel's symbolic structure.

Many critics have recognised the significance of Jonathan Harker's
statement at the start of his journal as he journeys through Europe
towards Dracula's home: 'The impression I had was that we were leaving
the West and entering the East' (p.5). The first border has been crossed.
I shall not open up the cultural baggage of West and East here; it has
already been thoroughly inspected by Said and those whom he has
influenced.

In any event, Stoker reinforces his theme clearly enough. Harker is a
newly qualified solicitor, who has been sent out to explain to Dracula
the purchase of a London estate. This professional practitioner of the law
has researched Transylvania in the British Museum and has 'read that
every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe
of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative
whirlpool'. Speculating that if this turns out to be the case, his 'stay may
be very interesting', Harker soon has 'all sorts of queer dreams' (p.6). A
dog howling under his window disturbs his night and prepares us for
the range of animal imagery that will follow. After a night's stay at the
Golden Krone Hotel, he is warned by his landlady, who learns of his
destination and notes that it is the eve of St. George's Day, that 'all the
evil things in the world will have full sway' (p.8). Seeing that Harker will
not change his plans, she gives him a crucifix, which, Harker writes in
his journal, 'as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard ...
as in some measure idolatrous' (p.8), though he takes it nonetheless, so
as not to alarm or seem rude to her. This is a critical stage in Harker's
journey, as he moves from Western rationalism and the rule of law to
the supernatural. Harker's crossing of the border happens both physically
and symbolically. He has crossed both bodily (by train) and mentally
or imaginatively (by dreams and superstition). Again, the border seems
to be marked by linguistic disturbance (just as Van Helsing's broken
English is the vehicle in which science and superstition ride together).¹³
Here, the landlady who hysterically warns Harker not to go to Dracula's
castle 'was in such an excited state that she seemed to have lost her grip
of what German she knew, and mixed it all up with some other language
which I did not know at all' (p.8). The disruption of language marks
the territory where the supernatural and rational meet, and the fact or
sensation of dreaming marks the cognitive alteration that results from
this encounter. Thus when Harker stands at Dracula's door for the first
time and states that '[i]t all seemed like a horrible nightmare to me' (p.18),
he is expressing much more than a Gothic cliché. His impression is of exactly that mixture of the real and unreal, the rational and fantastic, which gives the book its meaning.

Inside Dracula's castle, Harker discovers the 'vast number of English books ... and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers' from which Dracula has taught himself about the language, society, and culture of England: 'The books were of the most varied kind – history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law – all relating to England and English life and customs and manners' (p.22). This passage is central to Stephen Arata's shrewd argument that Dracula's reading, which 'provides the groundwork for his exploitative invasion of Britain', is an Occidentalism that 'both mimics and reverses the more familiar Orientalism underwriting Western imperial practices'.¹⁴ Like Glover, Arata stresses the Irish context:

> Dracula is to England as Ireland is to England, but, Dracula is to England as England is to Ireland. In Count Dracula, Victorian readers could recognize their culture's imperial ideology mirrored back as a kind of monstrosity.¹⁵

*(The latter is precisely what Wells has the Martians do in *The War of the Worlds*, as we shall see in the next chapter.) Arata has brought out the importance of the travel motif in *Dracula*. He postulates that it has long been a popular ingredient of the Gothic and by highlighting the ideological elements of travel and disrupting Harker's 'tourist perspective at Castle Dracula', Stoker is calling 'into question the entire Orientalist outlook' and expressing 'a telling critique of the Orientalist enterprise through the very structure of his novel'.¹⁶ Like Van Helsing and the fearful landlady, Dracula speaks in a broken tongue, as becomes increasingly apparent, the more he speaks of England. Describing the many hours of pleasure that his books have given him 'ever since I had the idea of going to London', he asserts that:*

> Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. But alas! as yet I only know your tongue through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak. (p.22)

The word order of that last sentence reads somewhat awkwardly; in particular, the phrase 'that I know it to speak' suggests a non-native speaker. That impression is confirmed moments later when Dracula continues: 'But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him
not – and to know not is to care not for’ (p.23); and even more strongly
by his asking Harker, a little later, to ‘tell me when I make error, even
of the smallest, in my speaking’ (p.23). The sense of a middle territory
between the known and unknown is as strongly present here as in the
language spoken by Van Helsing and the landlady. Moreover, Dracula
employs the idea of travel to communicate his progress in English: ‘I
fear that I am but a little way on the road I would travel. True, I know
the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them’
(p.22). In *Dracula*, travel figures both literally and metaphorically. Stoker
emphasises his exploration of intermediate states by making those that
occupy them indeterminate. Botting, Glover, and other critics have done
much to show how contemporary developments in, and responses to,
gender roles underlie the threatening shifts in *Dracula* and are, for the
time being, settled by the novel’s resolution. For example, Alexandra
Warwick has proposed that

[t]he threat that is offered by the de-feminized women is very different from
that embodied by men. This is one of the ‘dreadfulnesses’ of vampirism;
the revelation that gender categories are unstable, and a fear that sounded a
profound echo in the culture of the 1890s, already shaken by such horrors as
the trials of Oscar Wilde and the presence of the New Woman.¹⁷

Yet the challenges to class positions should not be understated either.
Dracula's comment on being a stranger in a strange land has been noted
above, but it is framed by him saying:

> Here I am noble; I am *boyar*; the common people know me, and I am master
> ...I have been so long master that I would be master still – or at least that
> none other should be master of me. (p.23)

To be an anonymous stranger, he says, is ‘not enough for me’ (p.23).
The narrative attitude to authority is clearly ambivalent here. One can
empathise with the fall from power (which was the fate of many members
of the British aristocracy during this period), while one recoils from the
insatiable taste for it, just as the middle classes (like those represented by
Harker and his companions) reacted against their exploitation by those
who would suck their blood.

Class and gender cannot be separated when considering the question
of authority in the text, though the aim of the discussion that follows
is to recover the former. When Dracula momentarily addresses Harker
as 'Harker Jonathan', he quickly apologises for his mistake, explaining:
'I fall into my country's habit of putting your patronymic first' (p.25).
The effect of this inversion and apology for it is to make the patriarchal
nomenclature seem archaic. It distances Britain's social organisation from that of Dracula's country. As Dracula has said shortly before this: 'We are in Transylvania; and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things' (p.23). What happens is that Transylvanian society seems old-fashioned – the patronym is synecdochical of other customs, with the image of the outmoded concentrated in Dracula himself. The text presents to its British readers the feudal as decaying, and there is hardly any more appropriate literary form in which to do this than the Gothic, with its crumbling castles,¹⁸ its empty chambers, its plain, middle-class protagonists,¹⁹ and its aestheticising of the ruined edifices of a once-solid social structure. In part, there is something of the middle-class farewell to the aristocracy in all this, but the temporal detachment can also work more conservatively, relying on self-satisfaction with the progress that has been made. British readers may assure themselves that feudalism has passed away, but their very contentment with this might mask their resistance against further change (notably against that posed by the New Woman). *Dracula* enacts a social tension as the seemingly dead are brought back to life, apparently to be dispatched again.

For all the text's and its critics' protestations that Dracula casts no reflection, the Count's situation reflects the predicament of the British aristocracy with great clarity: 'I myself am of an old family', he says, 'and to live in a new house would kill me' (p.26). Accordingly, Harker has found an old estate at Purfleet for him to purchase, situated 'on a by-road' (p.25) – that is, off the beaten track. The house, which is 'very large', is, says Harker, 'of all periods back' probably 'to mediaeval times' (p.25). The place 'is surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of years'. The old oak and iron gates are 'eaten with rust' and even the 'for sale' notice is 'dilapidated' (p.25), as if it will not enter the new, commercial age. Intriguingly, the very name of the estate repeats the motif of a language that has shifted and whose altered state signifies the unsettled condition of its bearer. The estate's name, Harker tells his host, is 'Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old *Quatre Face*, as the house is four-sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of the compass' (p.25). Language has slipped. The old name has been modified, just as its new occupant will bring it and himself into the new world – a world whose advancements are illustrated by the object that Harker carried with him: a Kodak. Stoker's metonymic use of the brand name as generic – he does not simply write 'camera' – sharpens the impact of
the modern. Of the portion of the house that 'looks like part of a keep', Harker has 'taken with my Kodak views of it from various points', for 'I could not enter it, as I had not the key of the door leading to it from the house' (p.25). This area, which Harker cannot access, is the oldest part of the building. Once again, Harker's failure to examine more than its exterior demonstrates the worrying inability of the past and present to accommodate each other. Near to the house, as if to emphasise the consequences of not achieving the right balance, is 'a private lunatic asylum' (p.25). This struggle to incorporate the past and present is largely what the novel is about. The genre of the Gothic is perfectly suited to it, being 'a thoroughly modern genre', but also 'a repository for everything modernity hoped it had left behind', such as 'feudal tyrants, arbitrary rule, cruel punishment, corrupt monks, menaced virgins, and peasants cowering in superstition'.²⁰

Although the house can be interpreted as a symbol of one's identity, to privilege psychoanalytic readings of *Dracula* is to risk conspiring with the narrative's conservative way out of the problems that it raises. The novel is less about the commingling of universal desires and fears than it is about the specific situation of the middle classes and aristocracy in the 1890s. Just because the text tries clumsily to resolve these particular problems through blatant recourse to a supernatural immensity does not mean that critics should follow suit. When Dracula tells Harker that '[w]e Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the common dead' (p.26), it is a sentiment that is as anachronistic as he who feels it. Such aversion to a democratic repose is disagreeable to Stoker. Harker, too, turns against it once he realises that the Count's 'castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!' (p.28).

Unwarranted subservience to another is also signalled in Renfield's obeisance to Dracula, whom he calls 'the Master' (p.95). Of course, the Count's supernatural powers are great enough for Renfield to have little choice other than to obey him, but when he 'sniff[s] about as a dog does when setting' (p.95), eats flies (p.109) and birds (p.68), and 'lick[s] up, like a dog' the blood that he has drawn from Seward's wrist by stabbing him (p.132), then the extent of his humiliation is sufficient to suggest that no one should exercise the degree of power that Dracula possesses. In Seward's record of Renfield's illness, however, democratic movement seems to be delimited. Suspecting, as does his attendant, that their patient is suffering from 'some sudden form of religious mania' (p.95), Seward writes in his diary – in what reads like a complaint – that '[h]is [Renfield's] attitude to me was the same as that to the attendant; in his
sublime self-feeling the difference between myself and attendant seemed
to him as nothing' (pp.95–96).

Unlike most of the texts discussed in the previous chapter, but like
Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein, Dracula* has survived its era and, like
*Frankenstein*, its political elements have largely been exorcised. Fittingly,
the story of Dracula is one that has been 'freely adapted into a myriad
different forms'.²¹ Even by the end of the twentieth century, there had
been '[a]round 3,000 vampire or vampire-related films ... made so far,
and ... it seems safe to say that their differences are often more striking
than their similarities'.²² Van Helsing spoke more truly than he knew
when he revealed that '[t]he vampire live on, and cannot die by mere
passing of the time' (p.222). Yet Dracula's longevity, like Jekyll and
Hyde's, has been achieved at the cost of his original habitat: the social
and economic factors that moulded him. As Luckhurst remarks with *The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* in mind,

[t]he endless retellings in theatre, film, and television, the constant stream
of rewritings and updating, all take us further away from the original until
it lies forgotten under the rubble of its imitators.²³

*Dracula* was conceived by Stoker in what Luckhurst described as ‘an era
of modernizing ancient systems’. Stoker himself, who followed his father
into the Civil Service, ‘was part of this professionalization’.²⁴ Through
his theatre connections, reviewing, and, in particular, his contact with
Shakespearean actor Henry Irving, who would invite him to become his
business manager at the Lyceum Theatre in London, where he remained
as manager from 1878 to 1898, Stoker ‘utterly transformed his life’.²⁵
He also transformed the Gothic, having ‘borrowed some of the formal
innovations of the ... genre’ and ‘reanimated and redirected [its] tropes
to address the burning issues of the day’.²⁶ Indeed, hailing *Dracula's*
‘fusion of the fake rediscovered manuscript of Gothic convention with
the absolutely contemporary world of technological transcription by
shorthand, typewriter, telegram, and phonograph’, Luckhurst observes
that '[t]he text rattles along at the same speed as the *Orient Express*,
chasing not only the ancient beast but its own modernity'.²⁷

‘Oriental to the finger-tips’: *The Beetle*

Richard Marsh's *The Beetle* was published in the same year as *Dracula*,
but its serialisation began three months before Stoker's novel appeared.
More popular than Stoker's work at the time, but much less familiar
than it now, Marsh's book was in its fifteenth printing in 1913, compared
with *Dracula's* tenth.²⁸ *The Beetle* has much in common with *Dracula*:
it is a type of invasion narrative that exhibits reverse colonisation from
the East; it is overtly sexual, combining the exotic with the erotic; it has
multiple narrators; and class is crucial, as the body politic struggles to
expel the alien from its midst.

Since the story is not so well-known, I shall briefly summarise it
here. It concerns the arrival in London of a sexually indeterminate
worshipper of Isis seeking revenge on politician and future statesman
Paul Lessingham. Twenty years previously, while spending time abroad
at the age of eighteen, having decided that 'I should learn more from
travel than from sojourn at a university' (p.192), Lessingham was seduced
and drugged one night in the native quarter of Cairo by a young woman
who sang in many languages and whose eyes 'had on me a diabolical
effect. They robbed me of my consciousness, of my power of volition, of
my capacity to think, — they made me as wax in her hands' (p.194). The
'Woman of the Songs', one of the 'children of Isis',

wooed my mouth with kisses. I cannot describe to you the sense of horror
and of loathing with which the contact of her lips oppressed me. There was
about her something so unnatural, so inhuman, that I believe even then I
could have destroyed her with as little sense of moral turpitude as if she had
been some noxious insect. (p.195)

Lessingham cannot be sure what really occurred and how much he
imagined:

> The happenings were of such an incredible character, and my condition was
> such an abnormal one, — I was never really myself from the first moment to
> the last — that I have hesitated, and still do hesitate, to assert where, precisely,
> fiction ended and fact began. (p.196)

The sense of his being caught up in the blurring of boundaries is
heightened by his disclosure that he wondered 'if I had crossed the
border line which divides madness from sanity' (p.196). Lessingham's
confused and liminal state is characteristic of the genre in which his
condition is related. Gothic fiction, as Roger Luckhurst observes, 'mixe[s]
up categories of life and death, past and present, reason and fancy,
wakefulness and dream'.²⁹ Marsh's novel depends, even more than
Stoker's, on the juxtaposition of the fantastic and the real.

Lessingham was held for more than two months in that 'horrible den',
scene of 'religious services' in honour of the beetle, which were 'orgies
of nameless horrors' (p.197). Unless he suffered from mirages, he was witness to the sacrifice of naked women (including an Englishwoman), who were 'subjected ... to every variety of outrage of which even the minds of demons could conceive' and then burned alive and their ashes consumed (p.197). When one day he finds that the mesmeric power that the woman holds over him has slipped, he is able to throttle her, until

[o]n a sudden, I felt her slipping from my fingers. Without the slightest warning, in an instant she had vanished, and where, not a moment before, she herself had been, I found myself confronting a monstrous beetle, – a huge, writhing creation of some wild nightmare. (p.199)

The creature dwindles as he stares at it, and he flees.

Lessingham's fiancée is Marjorie Lindon. She is loved by scientist Sidney Atherton, who is hostile towards Lessingham as a result. Marjorie's father is a rich Tory with a sense of his family's importance; Lessingham is on the opposite side of the House and, in Atherton's view, is a Radical. Lessingham first set her pulse racing when she read in the *Times* a report of his speech on the Eight Hours' Bill. The creature kidnaps Marjorie, whom it apparently intends to transport to Egypt for sacrifice. Investigator Augustus Champnell helps track down the creature, who kills unemployed clerk Robert Holt and escapes or dies (its fate is left open) in a train accident in which Marjorie is seriously injured. Marjorie eventually recovers to marry Lessingham (whose real name is concealed by the text in order to reveal his identity, since he and she are now well-known).

The novel is divided into four books. Each is told in the first person and has a different narrator, though we learn at the end that the first book – 'The Surprising Narration of Robert Holt' – was compiled from statements made by Holt to Atherton and Marjorie Lindon. Book II is by Atherton; Book III is told by Marjorie Lindon; Book IV is from the casebook of 'Confidential Agent', the Hon. Augustus Champnell.

Holt's narrative describes his adventures after he has been refused lodging for the night in the casual ward at Hammersmith workhouse. His condition at once reflects the larger state of society. He is now homeless, penniless, friendless, and suffering the ignominy of being turned away from the first casual ward he has approached. He has had only water to drink and a crust of bread to eat over the past three days. Since Holt is newly forced into tramping, we should not be too distracted from the importance of his social transformation by the more fantastic metamorphosis that follows. As Victoria Margree recognises, 'one of the many anxieties with which the novel engages has to do with
the changing nature of the social fabric of Britain, especially as this is
experienced in urban areas'.³⁰

Holt recounts how when he walked away from the workhouse, '[i]n
the darkness and the rain, the locality which I was entering appeared
unfinished. I seemed to be leaving civilisation behind me' (p.6). He
means, on the surface, that he has found an urban wasteland:

> The path was unpaved; the road rough and uneven, as if it had never
> been properly made. Houses were few and far between. Those which I did
> encounter, seemed, in the imperfect light, amid the general desolation, to
> be cottages which were crumbling to decay. (p.6)

Beneath this picture of urban degeneration, it is obvious that a moral
wilderness is being drawn. Such a suggestion would be familiar to readers
of texts on East End life, but Holt's exit from civilisation marks an entry
into the fantastic, so that it is not only social worlds, but artistic realms
that are being swapped as well. Their juxtaposition seems typically
Wellsian.

In the barren landscape Holt discovers a house on its own. It is
detached and twenty or thirty yards away from its nearest neighbour
on either side. 'It was one of those so-called villas which are springing
up in multitudes all round London, and which are let at rentals of
from twenty-five to forty pounds a year' (p.7). It is later described as 'a
tumbledown cheap "villa" in an unfinished cheap neighbourhood, — the
whole place a living monument of the defeat of the speculative builder'
(p.213). At its back there is no yard, garden, or fence, nothing 'to shut
off the house from the wilderness of waste land' (p.214). Holt climbs
into a downstairs room through an open window, but inside feels an
evil presence watching him. In the darkness, he perceives a creature's
eyes advancing towards him, quite low down on the floor. The creature
reaches his boots and

> with a sense of shrinking, horror, nausea, rendering me momentarily more
> helpless, I realised that [it] was beginning to ascend my legs, to climb my
> body. ... It was as though it were some gigantic spider, — a spider of the
> nightmares; a monstrous conception of some dreadful vision. It pressed
> lightly against my clothing with what might, for all the world, have been
> spider's legs. There was an amazing host of them, — I felt the pressure of each
> separate one. They embraced me softly, stickily, as if the creature glued and
> unglued them, each time it moved.

Higher and higher! It had gained my loins. It was moving towards the
pit of my stomach. The helplessness with which I suffered its invasion was
not the least part of my agony, – it was that helplessness which we know in
dreadful dreams ...

...

... It reached my chin, it touched my lips, – and I stood still and bore it all, while it enveloped my face with its huge slimy, evil-smelling body, and embraced me with its myriad legs. (pp.11–12)

At that point, Holt is able to shake the creature off and he runs, shrieking, to the window. A light is struck behind him.

Later in the novel, there will be repeated questions about the sex of the creature, but in passages like the one that I have just quoted there seems to be a heavy air of homosexual rape. It is later disclosed that Holt's assailant is female, but that is not apparent at the time and remains uncertain at various stages. What the assault has in common with *Dracula* is the undefinability of the attacker. Holt is unaware of the identity of his violator. It is not just that he cannot see it clearly, but that it is outside his knowledge and experience. It is strange and cannot be categorised.

Another feature shared with Dracula is its connection with the unEnglish. The person who has struck the light behind Holt is a 'foreigner' and has a 'malicious' voice (p.13). There is also what one may read as a sign of Jewishness (as there is in *Dracula*): 'The nose ... was abnormally large; so extravagant were its dimensions, and so peculiar its shape, it resembled the beak of some bird of prey' (p.14). Curiously, the nose becomes less grotesque two chapters later when its owner's face changes and becomes younger-looking. But the alteration comes too late to prevent one's detection of an affinity with the anti-Semitism of other texts of the decade, including *Dracula* and *Dorian Gray*. When Holt sees this person lying in a bed, he had rather he had left it 'unseen' (p.13). Holt cannot determine its gender and '[i]ndeed at first I doubted if it was anything human'. His decision that it must be a man seems to be made without foundation other than an untenable belief in gendered qualities and conduct: 'afterwards, I knew it to be man, – for this reason, if for no other, that it was impossible such a creature could be feminine' (p.13). His conclusion is not supported by the other characters in the novel or by the narrative itself. The foreigner's gender remains ambiguous.

In the presence of this being, Holt experiences an unmanning in a number of senses. First, he turns round, 'mechanically, like an automaton'. Second, although resenting it 'with secret rage', he is rendered 'invertebrate' (p.13). Third, though this becomes more apparent later, the foreigner's sexual identity renders Holt's own uncertain in relation to it.
This last point is made more explicit after the creature on the bed has spoken to him. In response to its questions, Holt utters words that come not from his own willpower, but from the creature's:

> What he willed that I should say, I said. Just that, and nothing more. For the first time I was no longer a man; my manhood was merged in his. I was, in the extremest sense, an example of passive obedience. (p.14)

The thing to which Holt is forced to submit is, like Dracula, ageless:

> His age I could not guess; such a look I had never imagined. Had he asserted that he had been living through the ages, I should have been forced to admit that, at least, he looked it. And yet I felt that it was quite within the range of possibility that he was no older than myself, — there was a vitality in his eyes which was startling. It might have been that he had been afflicted by some terrible disease, and it was that which had made him so supernaturally ugly. (pp.13–14)

So, this ancient is both beyond and within the age. He (if he it be) is of, and outside, the place. The suggestion of disease combines physical with moral and spiritual malady. It spreads into the contemporary discourses of degeneration — an impression heightened by the observation that the foreigner seems inhuman — '[t]he cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal' (p.14) — and the apparent absence of a chin — the face seems to stop at the mouth, with its 'blubber lips' — creates a deformity that gives the face an 'appearance of something not human'. The eyes, which leave Holt 'enchained, helpless, spell-bound', have 'the bird-like trick of never blinking' (p.14).

Holt's fantastic encounter with the strange creature would not have happened were it not for his unemployment. He has, after all, undergone a transformation himself. When the foreigner asks him 'What are you?' and Holt replies, 'A clerk', his interrogator bites back: 'You look as if you were a clerk' (p.14). (This is followed by the question: 'What sort of clerk are you?'; the reply: 'I am out of a situation'; the scornful response: 'You look as if you were out of a situation'; and the charge that he is a thief, having broken into the house [pp.14–15].) This sharp exchange reveals the knowledge that one is identified with one's job or profession. Without work, one loses one's identity. Holt explains how he came to this end. He swears that he was the victim only of bad luck:

> Misfortune had followed hard upon misfortune. The firm by whom I had been employed for years suspended payment. I obtained a situation with one of their creditors, at a lower salary. They reduced their staff, which entailed
my going. After an interval I obtained a temporary engagement; the occasion
which required my services passed, and I with it. After another, and a longer
interval, I again found temporary employment, the pay for which was but a
mittance. When that was over I could find nothing. (p.15)

That was nine months ago. Since then, he has not earned any money
at all. He has tramped through London in a vain search for work.
It is to us that Holt recounts these events. To his questioner he says
nothing, though he suspects that the foreigner might have ‘read my story,
unspoken though it was’. Of course, if Holt is suppressing this account
because ‘I did not know what it was he wished me to say’, he is also
suppressing the real reason for his ‘descent’ (p.15). That reason must be
the economic conditions that have led to the financial difficulties of his
employers. Holt’s attribution of his fall to mere ill fortune ignores these
structural difficulties, just as capitalism encourages us to take a person’s
standing as proof of their personal qualities. (I concede that Holt’s
insistence that bad luck is solely to blame for his parlous state could be
taken as an overemphatic denial of any other cause and so may lead us
to speculate about his own culpability. Perhaps he has been guilty of
misdemeanours that have cost him his employment, but we can do no
more than surmise. Nor should we take his intrusion into the creature’s
house as evidence of a propensity to thieve: the window was open, the
house seemed empty, and he was merely seeking shelter from the heavy
rain for the night. In any case, we have already seen from other sources
that not only was this an age of unemployment, it was the very period
that gave rise to the term.)

It is important to bear in mind the text's – and Holt's – rootedness in
specific economic conditions when we survey the more fantastic elements
of the narrative. Even more explicitly than in *Dracula*, 'race' informs the
description of the conflict between the alien threat and the Londoners
who fall victim to it. This is especially so in a scene that astonishes with
frank overtones of (male) homosexuality. It occurs straight after Holt
has told us (but not voiced to his questioner) the history of his slide into
unemployment. The ageless man instructs him bluntly to 'Undress!' (p.15)

When he spoke again that was what he said, in those guttural tones of his in
which there was a reminiscence of some foreign land. I obeyed, letting my
sodden, shabby clothes fall anyhow upon the floor. A look came on his face,
as I stood naked in front of him, which, if it was meant for a smile, was a
satyr's smile, and which filled me with a sensation of shuddering repulsion.

‘What a white skin you have, — how white! What would I not give for a
skin as white as that, — ah yes!’ He paused, devouring me with his glances;
then continued. ‘Go to the cupboard; you will find a cloak; put it on.’
(pp.15–16)

The foreigner then commands him to take food and drink, which he
does, ‘cramming myself, I believe, like some famished wolf’, after which
‘that satyr’s grin’ returns to his instructor’s face (p.16). Even without the
allusion to the satyr, the reference to homosexuality would be obvious.
With it, the ‘foreign land’ of which the strange voice is reminiscent
assumes a (homo)sexual identity.

At the climax of this (third) chapter, an implied homosexual act leaves
Holt prone and helpless:

I looked him in the face, – and immediately became conscious, as I did so,
that something was going from me, – the capacity, as it were, to be myself.
His eyes grew larger and larger, till they seemed to fill all space – till I
became lost in their immensity. He moved his hand, doing something to
me, I know not what, as it passed through the air – cutting the solid ground
from underneath my feet, so that I fell headlong to the ground. Where I fell,
there I lay, like a log. (p.16)

The aftermath of the act is rendered clearly in the following chapter,
where animal imagery is deployed to convey Holt's self-disgust. His
coercer throws off Holt's covering, leaving him naked once again, and
prods him with his fingers, 'as if I had been some beast ready for the
butcher's stall' (pp.17–18). And then

whether I was dead or living, I said to myself that this could be nothing
human, – nothing fashioned in God’s image could wear such a shape as
that. Fingers were pressed into my cheeks, they were thrust into my mouth,
they touched my staring eyes, shut my eyelids, then opened them again,
and – horror of horror! – the blubber lips were pressed to mine – the soul
of something evil entered into me in the guise of a kiss. (p.18)

The homosexual inspection and invasion of Holt provokes feelings of
loathing. If we isolate the last clause from the above quotation, the
connotation of homosexual desire and revulsion can be seen even more
directly. If that were not enough, Holt's description of the person who
has felt, prodded, and kissed him as 'this travesty of manhood' makes it
almost explicit (p.18). Spoken two years after the trials of Oscar Wilde,
the words then uttered by the active partner – 'Dead! – dead! – as good
as dead! – and better! We'll have him buried' (p.18) – speak of a social
and moral demise as much as a physical one. Holt's uncertainty about
whether the sentiment is directed at him or at the person who voices it
adds to the sense of shame, corruption, and denial.
The next day there seems to be a repetition of the episode. It is presented as the placing of a hypnotic spell on Holt, but the way in which it is done – with a hand-gesture – and the stirring to life of a previously quiescent Holt portend another bout of homosexual activity:

> He made a movement with his hand, and, directly he did so, it happened as on the previous evening, that a metamorphosis took place in the very abysses of my being. I woke from my torpor, as he put it, I came out of death, and was alive again. I was far, yet, from being my own man; I realised that he exercised on me a degree of mesmeric force which I had never dreamed that one creature could exercise on another; but, at least, I was no longer in doubt as to whether I was or was not dead. I knew I was alive. (p.23)

Holt's metamorphosis is undoubtedly sexual in nature. Even the narrative of hypnosis carries this meaning, being suggested in terms that are both sexual and racial, communicating ideas of submission and inferiority as he is told by the one who has awakened him: 'you are my slave, – at my beck and call, – my familiar spirit, to do with as I will, – you know this, – eh?' And Holt confirms his low position: 'I did know it' (p.23).

It is not only Holt who has undergone a profound alteration or whose change involves a moral judgement. Seeing the man in the bed in the morning, Holt finds him younger, his nose less grotesque, his skin still yellow, but his contours rounded, in possession of a chin, and 'the most astounding novelty' of all

> was that about the face there was something which was essentially feminine; so feminine, indeed, that I wondered if I could by any possibility have blundered, and mistaken a woman for a man; some ghoulish example of her sex, who had so yielded to her depraved instincts as to have become nothing but a ghastly reminiscence of womanhood. (p.22)

Apart from the ambiguity of gender, there is here an unmistakable condemnation of women's sexuality. Women, the text appears to be saying, ought not to have or exhibit active sexual appetites. Somehow, the deeds to which Holt has been, and will further be, subjected are even more depraved if committed by a woman.

After the person of indeterminate sex has made a slave of Holt, he (I shall call him 'he' as the text continues, for the time being, to refer to him as such) commands him to break into the home of Lessingham. Now it is the body politic, in the form of Lessingham, that is threatened or, more accurately, part of the body politic, since Lessingham will later be represented as himself constituting a threat to the established order in the shape of a traditional – indeed, anachronistic – MP, Lindon.
Lessingham's background is a mystery. He represents a new force in politics: one in which one's forebears are irrelevant. But like some of his celebrated real-life counterparts, Lessingham is a politician with a past; one that will be disclosed to us later.

Holt's tormentor observes tenderly that Lessingham is good to look at: 'He is straight, – straight as the mast of a ship, – he is tall, – his skin is white; he is strong ... how strong! – oh yes!' He then gives way to envy and becomes momentarily 'transfigured' by a look of 'savage, frantic longing' (p.25). He accuses Lessingham of being the devil, of falseness and treachery, and promises that the day of vengeance will come. When he tells Holt that he will show him Lessingham's house, '[t]here was about his manner something hardly human; something which, for want of a better phrase, I would call vulpine' (p.26). The man instructs Holt that if Lessingham should discover and obstruct him, he must utter the words: 'THE BEETLE!' As the man speaks these words, the room falls into darkness and Holt feels again the evil presence of the previous night:

> Two bright specks gleamed in front of me; something flopped from off the bed on to the ground; the thing was coming towards me across the floor. It came slowly on, and on, and on. I stood still, speechless in the sickness of my horror. Until, on my bare feet, it touched me with slimy feelers, and my terror lest it should creep up my naked body lent me voice, and I fell shrieking like a soul in agony. (p.28)

The creature retreats, the lamp is illuminated again, and the man lying in bed repeats that he should speak those words if interrupted by Lessingham and that twice will suffice.

Outside the house occupied by the foreigner, Holt realises that '[m]y condition was one of dual personality, – while, physically, I was bound, mentally, to a considerable extent, I was free' (p.30). If the causes of his predicament are unique, his symptoms are not, for we have seen that the split personality is something that afflicts a number of his contemporaries.

Directed by his malevolent guide, Holt beaks into Lessingham's house, study, and bureau, which later he shoots open with a revolver that he has found in the room (leading him to observe that '[s]tatesmen, nowadays, sometimes stand in actual peril of their lives' [p.34]). As Holt grabs a bundle of letters from the drawer he has forced open, Lessingham enters. When Lessingham advances toward him, asking him to hand over the revolver, Holt finds that 'something entered into me, and forced itself from between my lips, so that I said, in a low, hissing voice, which I vow was never mine, "THE BEETLE!"' (pp.36–37). It seems to Holt that the
room turns to darkness and evil is present. Lessingham – the normally
unflappable statesman – cowers against his bookshelves, transformed.
In Holt's words:

> A most extraordinary change had taken place in the expression of his face; in his countenance amazement, fear, and horror seemed struggling for the mastery. I was filled with a most discomforting qualm, as I gazed at the frightened figure in front of me, and realised that it was that of the great Paul Lessingham, the god of my political idolatry. (p.37)

Lessingham's repeated command to Holt to reveal his identity is made in a voice that 'seemed changed; his frenzied, choking accents would hardly have been recognised by either friend or foe' (p.37). He guesses that his intruder is associated with a house in the Rue de Rabagas in Cairo (about which we will learn more later). He attempts to dismiss his time there as 'one of mirage, of delusion, of disease. I was in a condition, mentally and bodily, in which pranks could have been played upon me by any trickster. Such pranks were played. I know that now quite well' (p.38). Driven increasingly anxious and agitated by Holt's continued (forced) silence, Lessingham loses his temper. His discomposure, and the events that have caused it, suggest blackmail. We can hardly infer anything else from his telling Holt: 'Come, I see that you suppose my intentions to be harsher than they really are, – do not let us have a scandal, and a scene, – be sensible! – give me those letters!' (p.41). In a period when political ruin and personal disgrace coincided not infrequently, Lessingham's situation would have readily been identified by readers with some of his celebrated contemporaries. Indeed, Vuohelainen refers to later speculation that Marsh himself 'may have been involved in a financial or sexual disgrace of some kind'.³¹ The supernatural elements of the tale do not detract from the immediate political and social setting. At the end of this chapter, Lessingham and some of his servants rush Holt, who repeats the words 'THE BEETLE!' (p.42). The room is filled with darkness and screams. Horror has come into it, and Holt exits, propelled by he knows not what.

Holt returns, or is returned, to his tormentor's room, to 'that chamber
of my humiliation and my shame'. He feels again the presence of evil
and it is 'as if I had been taken out of the corporeal body to be plunged
into the inner chambers of all nameless sin' (p.45). Something flops
from the bed and comes at him. Holt screams (screams that he seems
to hear sometimes even now, he tells us in a Wellsian aside), and the
 creature slips and slides back across the floor. The lamp is lit again, and
he is stared at by the man on the bed – ‘the dreadful cause of all my agonies’ (p.45).

Again, that person is hard to place sexually. He asks Holt: “Are you not well? Is it not sweet to stand close at my side? You, with your white skin, if I were a woman, would you not take me for a wife?” (p.46). That last question suggests quite strongly that gender identity is both nothing and everything; that a bond exists – whether by force or by desire – and that which is frowned upon by society because it is same-sex would not matter to the participants were it not for society’s disapproval. Holt appears to have been an unwilling participant in this relationship and to have been terrorised into and by it, but the instruments of his subjection have been supernatural horror (the beetle) and hypnotic influence, while the causes that are given for his terror seem code for social unacceptability. Both elements are present in a key homosexual text of the previous decade – the anonymous, privately printed novel *Teleny*, published in 1883. In that novel, the narrator, Camille Des Grieux, remarks that ‘nothing renders people so superstitious as vice’.³² The comment carries more significance than its almost casual utterance would indicate, for those who engage in vice are obliged to mask their activities, both physically and linguistically, by employing a kind of code. Operating thus outside the ‘normal’ conventions, their behaviour and relationships are sometimes communicated and explained via supernatural attraction. For example, the homosexual love that Des Grieux feels for (and practises with) the pianist Teleny is accompanied by a telepathic, mesmeric understanding. Of course, this phenomenon is not unique to homosexual relationships, and the interest in hypnosis, mesmerism, and the occult was widespread and growing at the close of the nineteenth century, but its presence in *Teleny* does establish a connection with *The Beetle* – a connection that, if not intentional, is no less important and, indeed, strengthens the possibility of a reading of Holt’s experiences as an initiation into homosexuality. That link is reinforced even further by a common presence of domination and submission.

When Holt’s oppressive partner asks him if he would take him if he were a woman, Holt thinks:

> There was something about the manner in which this was said which was so essentially feminine that once more I wondered if I could possibly be mistaken in the creature’s sex. I would have given much to have been able to strike him across the face, – or, better, to have taken him by the neck, and thrown him through the window, and rolled him in the mud. (p.46)
Holt cannot physically harm him, because he cannot be sure that he is not a woman.

The man takes Lessingham's letters from Holt and, seeing that they are love letters from Marjorie Lindon, becomes so angry that Holt tells us: 'Never did I suppose that rage could have so possessed a human countenance' (p.47). His 'yellow fangs' show through his parted lips and, while he reads, 'he kept emitting sounds, more resembling yelps and snarls than anything more human, – like some savage beast nursing its pent-up rage' (p.48).

In his 'demoniac' hatred (p.48), the man curses Lessingham and Marjorie Lindon. He then turns his fury against Holt – the 'thief' – and attacks him in a way that implies male rape: 'He leaped, shrieking, off the bed, and sprang at me, clasping my throat with his horrid hands, bearing me backwards on to the floor; I felt his breath mingle with mine and then God, in His mercy, sent oblivion' (p.48).

The next, second, book of *The Beetle* is narrated by inventor and scientist Sydney Atherton (currently experimenting with ingredients for chemical warfare – 'legalised murder' [p.61]), who has declared his love to Marjorie Lindon, only to be told, in confidence, that she is engaged to Paul Lessingham. Her request to Atherton that he support her against the objections that her father will have makes him uncomfortable. Atherton's antipathy to Lessingham is clear and will become more so. He is the one, we will soon learn, who momentarily apprehends Holt as the latter flees Lessingham's house, saying: 'Is that the way to come slithering down the Apostle's pillar? – Is it simple burglary, or simpler murder? – Tell me the glad tidings that you've killed St Paul, and I'll let you go' (p.44). Although Atherton's venom has been made more potent by his jealousy, the names that he sarcastically gives to Lessingham communicate the opposition and subversion of values in this novel. Markers of Christian morality are used abusively.

Another opposition is established in Atherton's narrative: a political one. Marjorie Lindon's father sits on the other side of the House from Lessingham, has 'high-dried Tory notions of his family importance', and a fortune (p.52). Lessingham is a Radical and the differences between him and Lindon reflect the increasingly profound divide between older and newer political and social forces. Along with the Gothic elements of this novel, there is a critical inspection of Lessingham's credentials. Marriage to Marjorie may potentially be a way of reconciling antagonistic camps, but the appearance of the Arab and Atherton's determination to investigate Lessingham's past and the cause of his fear – whether his
motives be to reassure himself that Marjorie is not in danger or hope that the match can be broken, leaving the way open for him to marry her – allow an examination of the Radical as statesman, as well as an inquiry into the relevance of the relationship between private and public faces.

In his laboratory, Atherton receives a visit from the Arab in a scene that sets up a conflict between different ways of knowing the world: the scientific and the supernatural or magical. The Arab seems to have gained admittance by hypnotising Atherton's servant, Edwards. Once Atherton removes his (own) protective mask, an image nicely paralleled in the Arab's brushing aside of 'the hanging folds of the hood of his burnoose', he sees more of his visitor's face:

> I was immediately conscious that in his eyes there was, in an especial degree, what, for want of a better term, one may call the mesmeric quality. That his was one of those morbid organisations which are oftener found, thank goodness, in the east than in the west, and which are apt to exercise an uncanny influence over the weak and the foolish folk with whom they come in contact ... I was, also, conscious that he was taking advantage of the removal of my mask to try his strength on me, – than which he could not have found a tougher job. The sensitive something which is found in the hypnotic subject happens, in me, to be wholly absent. (p.64)

Atherton's scepticism sets up a confrontation between Western science and Eastern magic. He tells the Arab, whom he sees is a mesmerist, that as a scientist he would like to conduct an experiment or two on him. Backing away, the Arab, who has retorted, 'I am nothing, – a shadow!', has in his eyes a 'gleam ... which suggested that he possessed his hideous power to an unusual degree, – that, in the estimation of his own people, he was qualified to take his standing as a regular devil-doctor' (p.64).

The tension between reason and superstition, West and East, intensifies with Atherton's blunt remarks to his visitor:

> 'And, once more, sir, who are you?'

> 'I am of the children of Isis!'

> 'Is that so? – It occurs to me that you have made a slight mistake, – this is London, not a dog-hole in the desert.' (p.64)

The purpose of the Arab's visit has been to tell Atherton that he can help him destroy Lessingham, thus making sure that Marjorie will not marry him.

Straight after the visitor's disappearance, Lessingham calls on Atherton, who wonders at Lessingham's entitlement to be called a gentleman. His doubts may be inspired by jealousy of Marjorie's love for Lessingham,
but they are also part of the wider questioning – often self-questioning – concerning the aptness of the title. Atherton notes to himself that Lessingham is

> a man of position, – destined, probably, to rise much higher; a man of parts,
> – with capacity to make the most of them; not ill-looking; with agreeable
> manners, – when he chose; and he came within the lady’s definition of a
> gentleman ... And yet–! Well, I take it that we are all cads, and that we
> most of us are prigs; for mercy’s sake do not let us all give ourselves away.
>(pp.67–68)

If there seems to be a sneer here at the inadequacy of women's definition of a gentleman, there is also an acknowledgement of men's general failure to *be* gentlemen, unless there is understood to be in that condition a disparity between reality and appearance. Certainly, the fact of this, or worry that it *is* a fact, preoccupies much of the literature of the time. And it is reflected in Atherton's remark that Lessingham 'was dressed as a gentleman should be dressed' (p.68), where the emphasis on the modal verb indicates a shallow reliance on appearance.

Unconsciously, perhaps, but significantly nonetheless, the narrative links this social and class uncertainty with scientific uncertainty by immediately following Atherton's musings with Lessingham's remark that: 'I never enter a place like this, where a man is matching himself with nature, to wrest from her her secrets, without feeling that I am crossing the threshold of the unknown' (p.68). Atherton is just one of many scientists in popular novels to be pushing beyond the boundaries of the known and, possibly, the safe. The link between social and natural disquietude is not accidental: changes in the conception of one affected that of the other.

Such changes find their curious reflection in *The Beetle*, as in other texts of the age. Lessingham questions Atherton about the followers of Isis and the possibility of transmigration; specifically, if it is 'absolutely certain that there could be no foundation of truth in the belief that a priest of Isis – or anyone – assumed after death the form of a beetle?' (p.71). This irruption of the supernatural in the scientist's study is barely suppressed. The cult of Osiris and Isis ('one and the same' [p.69]) cannot safely be assumed to be extinct, since Atherton thinks it 'possible, even probable, that, here and there, in Africa ... homage is paid to Isis, quite in the good old way' (p.70). And, on seeing an illustration of the beetle, 'produced apparently by some process of photogravure ... and ... so dextrously done that the creature seemed alive' (pp.72–73), a
look came on his [Lessingham's] face which, literally, transfigured him. His hat and umbrella fell from his grasp on to the floor. He retreated, gibbering, his hands held out as if to ward something off from him, until he reached the wall on the other side of the room. A more amazing spectacle than he presented I never saw. (p.72)

I am interested not so much in the symbolism of his hat and umbrella falling to the ground (which in a psychoanalytic reading may suggest an unmanning through the drop of these functionally upright accoutrements) as in the reduction of the statesman to a state of animal terror. 'Gibbering' is a breakdown of reason and language that afflicts countless characters in literature of the time. One of the reasons for Lessingham's slide into inarticulacy, beyond the immediate fright he has received from the image of the scarab beetle that reminds him horribly of his supernatural visitor, is that the creature represents a force from which he can hardly free himself. The cause of the scarab's scuttling to London is, we are told, to gain revenge on Lessingham for the murderous destruction that he wrought in making his escape from the captivity in which Isis's followers were holding him in Egypt during his youth. In other words, the beetle stands for the past – his past – and the narrative is really asking whether this statesman-in-the-making can break free of it. The choice of the priest of Isis to symbolise this is especially apt. A leading Egyptologist of the day, E. A. Wallis Budge, would write, four years after *The Beetle*, that: 'The Egyptians believed that a man's fate or destiny was decided before he was born, and that he had no power whatever to alter it.'³³ It was a common observation in anthropological texts of the time that 'primitive' peoples were hopelessly in thrall to their deities and idols. There is clearly a tussle within Lessingham between the dictates of the past and his ability to shape his future; and in this he does, like a true statesman, stand as representative of his age.

So when Atherton helps bring Lessingham round to normality by taking his shoulder and shaking him vigorously and '[m]y touch had on him the effect of seeming to wake him out of a dream, of restoring him to consciousness as against the nightmare horrors with which he was struggling' (p.73), the moment symbolises the suppression of the past and of the supernatural by the modern and science.

Richard Lehan has noted that:

> Fantasy literature in the late Victorian period dealt with the meaning of the past, perhaps because the rate of change during this era was so great that readers desired to get a sense of what needed to be kept at a distance. In these fantasies, the past is often held together by mythic beliefs enforced
through the power of cults. The modern journeyer confronts these beliefs
and tries to demystify them.³⁴

Lehan does not mention *The Beetle*, but it fits his thesis. Apart from
the probability that readers were actually drawn to aspects of the past
because they wanted to mitigate some of the effects of the present (hence
the interest in antiquity, the primitive, spiritualism, ancient religions, and
so on), Lehan has it right, I think. The cult of Isis fits exactly, as do the
modern journeyers, if we take those to be the characters that seek and
pursue the Beetle and its first London victim – the unemployed clerk
who was tramping through the capital in search of a bed.

In this novel and many of its kind, suppression of the past and of the
irrational or extra-rational is never entirely effectual. Nor was it in life,
as the growing fascination in late Victorian and Edwardian times with
spiritualism and the occult testifies. (It still does, of course.) Thus when
Atherton holds up in front of Lessingham the picture of the beetle in
order to show him that it *is* only a picture, Lessingham trembles and
screams that Atherton should destroy it, which the latter has to do before
Lessingham can regain some sense of composure.

Texts like these try to work through the problem of the influence
of the past by reducing it to a question of personal morality. Atherton
asks Marjorie what she knows of Lessingham's private life and when she
insists that he is 'incapable of a dishonest thought or action', he advises
her: 'don't appreciate any man too highly. In the book of every man's
life there is a page which he would wish to keep turned down' (p.78).
This ignores the structural and institutional by diverting attention to the
individual. In fact, the idea of scandal has everything to do with public
matters, since it can only become an issue when there are influential or
consensual views on standards of conduct, which are then challenged
or broken by people's behaviour: in this case and at this time, people
who are politicians, gentlemen, or both. To expose a scandal may be
to discover the inadequacy of public standards and ideas of conduct as
much as, or rather than, to reveal the failings of an individual. In the late
nineteenth century, many of the sexual scandals (in particular) were the
result of unrealistic views of conduct and relationships; unrealistic both
because they did not truly comprehend the state of society and because
they tried falsely to impose irrelevant standards on public individuals.

*The Beetle* underlines the difference between the public and
private face by having Atherton, who has little respect for Members
of Parliament, admire Lessingham's performance in the House of
Commons. Lessingham's skill and self-command belie the terror he
exhibited towards the picture of the beetle. Moreover, the result of his statesman-like speech is that the arguments of others are 'transformed' (p.84). Thus, Lessingham is now the agent, not the victim, of change.

The 'mysterious Egypto-Arabian' (p.95) appears again when Atherton drags Percy Woodville outside his laboratory. Woodville, another unsuccessful suitor of Marjorie's, has accidentally smashed a pallet of Atherton's 'Magic Vapour', which Atherton has been demonstrating to Woodville on a black cat. When the stranger revives the unconscious Woodville by an emphatically narrated kiss of life, we have another strongly (homo)erotic passage, as 'passing his arms beneath his body, [he] extended himself at full length upon his motionless form. Putting his lip to Percy's, he seemed to be pumping life from his own body into the unconscious man's' (p.96). Percy's twitching, his convulsive motions, and the 'rigidity about the muscles of his face' all suggest that this is much more than a kiss of life (p.97).

The man's foreignness is as crucial to this sexual theme as it is to the other forms of threat that he poses. Observing him in the laboratory while Percy recovers outside, Atherton notes:

> The fellow was oriental to the finger-tips ... yet in spite of a pretty wide personal knowledge of oriental people I could not make up my mind as to the exact part of the east from which he came. He was hardly an Arab, he was not a fellah, – he was not, unless I erred, a Mohammedan at all ... So far as looks were concerned, he was not a flattering example of his race, whatever his race might be. The portentous size of his beak-like nose would have been, in itself, sufficient to damn him in any court of beauty. His lips were thick and shapeless, – and this, joined to another peculiarity in his appearance, seemed to suggest that, in his veins there ran more than a streak of negro blood. (p.98)

Swarthy foreigners play an insidious role in colonial fiction and popular invasion narratives of the late nineteenth century. Marsh is evidently depending on a shared understanding of a set of signifiers. The stranger's Egyptian background signals a shiftiness and seediness to British readers. Kelly Hurley makes an interesting point about the particularity of the creature's origin:

> a paranoiac text like *The Beetle* serves to reflect and feed into British suspicion of and contempt for Egyptians during a period of heightened British military activity in Egypt. The perceived inhumanity of the orient becomes a rationale for subjecting it to the humanizing, civilizing process of British colonization ... *The Beetle* inverts the issue of colonization by presenting the East/West conflict in terms of oriental aggression – an oriental incursion,
with white slavery and genocide as its end, into the very heart of London. It then distorts the issue further by representing Egypt as a site not of relatively stable English rule during Lord Cromer's occupation, but of oriental misrule, under which innocent white tourists are kidnapped, tortured, and murdered with impunity. Reversing the territorial actualities, the text transposes the colonized subject into a savage aggressor whose duplicity and desire for mastery swell across the boundaries of the orient into the homeland of civilized England.³⁵

Hurley's political historicism is welcome, and she is surely right to return the focus to Egypt; to correct the inversion of the issue of colonisation. The claim that 'the supernaturally exaggerated representations of the barbaric, primitive Oriental found in *The Beetle* offer a rationale for xenophobia and for a continued British colonial presence within Egypt' may itself be an exaggeration, however.³⁶ The representations are, rather, a reflection of widely held attitudes that resulted from, and contributed towards, the rationale. Hurley seems not to note the racial ambiguity of the passage above. She does draw attention, quite rightly, to other kinds of lack of definition in Marsh's text, but does so in relation to the Beetle itself and to gender. She is correct to write of the follower of Isis that

[s]he is able to cross the boundary between one gendered identity and another, she can cross the boundary separating the human and animal species, and even in her avatar of the Beetle she resists enclosure within the boundary of a definite species classification ... Whatever the Beetle was resists scientific analysis and classification: it can fit into no taxonomy of natural history.³⁷

But this reading distracts from the socio-economic context that is responsible for such preoccupation with undefinability.

The stranger's appearance produces a struggle between old and new powers, between magic and the supernatural on the one hand and science and reason on the other. Although the Egypto-Arab looks like winning this when he is able to revive Woodville – the 'victim of modern science' – earning 'a feeling of quasi-respect' from Atherton (p.97), the latter is able to resist the Oriental's attempts to hypnotise him. Atherton believes his lack of imagination saves him from the mesmeric powers and in turn he deploys against the stranger scientific tricks that so impress him he pronounces himself Atherton's slave after disappearing and reappearing. Atherton counters the Oriental's attempt at hypnotism with a display of electrical power – his machine giving off an eighteen-inch spark. The effect on the stranger is immediate: 'He shook with terror. He salaamed down to the ground.' Atherton finds this alteration 'amusing' (p.102), as, no doubt, would Marsh's readers, for it reproduces the stereotype of
the grovelling Arab. The foreigner may be a worshipper of Isis, but the
'salaaming' is meant to recall the Muslim, his prostration and entreaties
acting as a reassurance to the nation still smarting from the death of
General Gordon in the Sudan just a dozen years previously. Indeed, it
would not be until the year after the publication of Marsh's novel that the
Mahdi's successor, the Khalifa, Abdullah el Taashi, who had ruled the
Sudan from the time of the Mahdi's death six months after the defeat of
Gordon, would be defeated by Kitchener, who had his troops destroy the
Mahdi's tomb. The reduction of the Oriental to a state of prone suppli-
cation offers, in fiction, a victory to compensate for Britain's humiliation
in the Sudan. It performs a symbolic castration, as the threatening male
figure falls to the ground. His cries – 'My lord! – my lord! – have mercy,
oh my lord!' (p.102) – are an imposed recognition of Western superiority.
It is not, however, as straightforward as that. Atherton is not a Lord. We
are not meant to take the foreigner's address literally, but the very fact
that Atherton is not an aristocrat – 'I am a plain man and I use plain
speech' (p.106) – comically underlines the incongruity of the stranger
calling him one. While this further emphasises the anachronistic nature
of the worshipper of Isis, it also highlights the divisions within British
society. Atherton's jealous opposition to Lessingham has covered these
with the cloak of a love story, but they are all about class and the uneasy
relationships between classes.

When Atherton reinforces his hold over the stranger through further
shows of what he calls 'magic' – this time by sprinkling phosphorous
bromide on the floor, creating flames and vapour – the creature seems
to vanish and then reappear, 'prostrated on his knees ... salaaming in
a state of abject terror' and whining: 'I entreat you, my lord, to use me
as your slave!' (p.103). There is something of Caliban's enslavement by
Prospero here. Though the details differ, the enactment of colonial power
has parallels with it.

The Egyptian (as we must assume him to be) explains that he wishes
to gain revenge against Lessingham for having 'spilled the blood of her
who has lain upon his breast'. Seeing that the man's 'words pointed to
what it might be courteous to call an Eastern Romance' (p.103), Atherton
concludes that: 'It was the old tale retold, that to the life of every man
there is a background, – that it is precisely in the unlikeliest cases that
the background's darkest' (p.104). In general terms, it may have been
an old tale, but to Marsh's contemporaries at the end of the nineteenth
century it was immediate and fresh, as a series of sexual scandals became
scandalous because of their class components. It is because of this, no
doubt, that Atherton assures the Egyptian – a little too urgently, one
feels – that ‘the Englishman’s law is no respecter of persons. Show him
to be guilty, and it would hang Paul Lessingham as indifferently, and as
cheerfully, as it would hang Bill Brown’ (p.104).

*The Beetle*, then, presents confusion in many realms. Its disturbance
is simultaneously psychological, social, racial, and temporal. Towards
the end of the novel, Lessingham recalls his captivity in Egypt and tells
Champnell:

> do you know that I am on the verge of madness? Do you know that as I am
> sitting here by your side I am living in a dual world? I am going on and on
> to catch that – that fiend, and I am back again in that Egyptian den, upon
> that couch of rugs, with the Woman of the Songs beside me, and Marjorie
> is being torn and tortured, and burnt before my eyes! God help me! Her
> shrieks are ringing in my ears! (p.249)

We shall see a similar kind of dual vision at the end of H. G. Wells's *The War of the Worlds*, discussed in the next chapter. Whereas many of the narratives discussed in the previous chapter were designed to show a single picture – that of urban deprivation – *Dracula* and *The Beetle* accomplish their effects by having one world intrude upon another. We saw Holt – the unemployed clerk – tramping around the wasteland at the start of the novel. Alongside the realism of that scene, the appearance of the follower of Isis in London forces Lessingham to recall his fantastic experiences that belong to the supernatural, making his past invade the present. The trauma of this depends upon the racialised figure of the worshipper of the old ways and on the bestial manifestation.

As critics have recognised, the Egyptian antagonist stands as a
foreign scapegoat. ‘Marsh’s beetle-human hybrid provides a powerfully
exemplary grotesque embodiment of late Victorian anxieties in so many
ways’, writes Wolfreys,³⁸ who maintains that ‘the beetle- creature is
readable as a disruptive figure, one of prosopopoeia, that rhetorical figure
for giving face or voice to what is unrepresentable. *The Beetle* “gives face”
to everything that is unstable in late imperial culture.’³⁹ If Wolfreys
is right to claim that ‘[t]he text confronts us with irresolvable contra-
dictions’,⁴⁰ then its genre plays its part in that. Roger Luckhurst rightly
observes that ‘genre is less a set of fixed narratives and images and more
a constantly modulating mode – almost a way of thinking’. In the final
decade of the nineteenth century – one that saw the publication of both
*Dracula* and *The Beetle* – ‘the Gothic careers off in numerous, sometimes
contradictory directions, and it is important to have a generous rather
than narrow definition of the genre at a time when it is undergoing rapid
transition'. Noting that one of the icons of the Gothic is the entity that challenges absolute distinctions between the human and beast – another is that between life and death – Luckhurst remarks that: 'It is difficult sometimes to decide if a Gothic text is conservative or subversive for it is often both, simultaneously.'<sup>41</sup> The same can be said of many of the beasts that prowl these pages.

## Notes

1. Bram Stoker, *Dracula* [1897], edited and with an introduction and notes by Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2011), p.128. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

2. David Glover, *Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction* (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p.48. Glover has much to say about Stoker's ambivalence about Ireland and the function that Transylvania may perform as a kind of projection of Ireland.

3. David Punter, *The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day*, vol. 2, *The Modern Gothic* (London: Longman 1996), p.16.

4. Fred Botting, *Gothic* (London: Routledge, 1996), p.147.

5. Marina Warner, *Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.163.

6. Botting, *Gothic*, p.148.

7. Botting, *Gothic*, p.150.

8. Glover, *Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals*, p.137.

9. Glover, *Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals*, p.137.

10. Punter, *The Literature of Terror*, vol. 2, p.16.

11. See Chapter Six of my *Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues 1850–1900* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

12. Cf. Franco Moretti, ‘Dialectic of Fear’, in *Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Form* (London: Verso, 1988), pp.83–108.

13. As Fred Botting has noted: ‘Van Helsing is more than a scientist: he is also a metaphysician who deals with “spiritual pathology” as well as physical disease, a psychic investigator or transcendental doctor ... Van Helsing does not discount superstition and is the first to use sacred objects like the crucifix and the Host. Science involves mysteries and opens on to a more than rational plane in line with Victorian attitudes towards spiritualism and psychic investigation.’ Botting further observes that the ‘fusion of scientific knowledge and religious values is made possible by the demonic threat of Dracula’. See Botting, *Gothic*, p.149.

14. Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: *Dracula* and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, *Victorian Studies* 33, 4 (Summer 1990), 634.

15. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist’, p.634.

16. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist’, p.635.

17. Alexandra Warwick, ‘Vampires and the Empire: Fears and Fictions of the 1890s’, in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, eds, *Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.204–205. See, also, the essays by Phyllis A. Roth and Christopher Craft in *Dracula: New Casebooks*, in Glennis Byron, ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
18 Dracula tells Harker that 'the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements' (p.35).

19 Botting notes a feature of *Dracula* that is so obvious that we might otherwise overlook it: 'The place of a heroine ... is taken by naive young lawyer Harker.' See Botting, *Gothic*, p.146.

20 Roger Luckhurst, 'Introduction', in Bram Stoker, *Dracula* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p.xii.

21 Luckhurst, 'Introduction', p.vii.

22 Ken Gelder, *Reading the Vampire* (London: Routledge, 1994.), p.86.

23 Roger Luckhurst, 'Introduction', in Robert Louis Stevenson, *Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.vii.

24 Luckhurst, 'Introduction', *Dracula*, p.ix.

25 Luckhurst, 'Introduction', *Dracula*, p.ix.

26 Luckhurst, 'Introduction', *Dracula*, pp.xiv, xix.

27 Luckhurst, 'Introduction', *Dracula*, p.xiv.

28 William Baker, 'Introduction', in Richard Marsh, *The Beetle* [1897] (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1994), p.vii. All further references will be to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text. On the reception and popularity of *The Beetle* and for biographical information on Marsh, the pseudonym of Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857-1915), see Minna Vuohelainen, 'Richard Marsh's *The Beetle* (1897): A Late-Victorian Popular Novel', *Working With English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama* 2, 1: Literary Fads and Fashions (2006), 89-100. The novel was first serialised over fifteen weeks from 13 March 1897 in *Answers* under the title *The Peril of Paul Lessingham: The Story of a Haunted Man*. See Vuohelainen, 'Richard Marsh's *The Beetle*', 91.

29 Roger Luckhurst, 'Introduction', in *Late Victorian Gothic Tales* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.xi.

30 Victoria Margree, ""Both in Men's Clothing": Gender, Sovereignty and Insecurity in Richard Marsh's *The Beetle*, *Critical Survey* 19, 2 (2007), 64.

31 Vuohelainen, 'Richard Marsh's *The Beetle*', 90.

32 Anonymous, *Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal* [1883] (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1995), p.8.

33 E. A. Wallis Budge, *Egyptian Magic* [1901] (New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), p.222.

34 Richard Lehan, *The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History* (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), pp.94-95.

35 Kelly Hurley, ""The Inner Chambers of All Nameless Sin": *The Beetle*, Gothic Female Sexuality, and Oriental Barbarism', in Lloyd Davis, ed., *Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature* (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), p.197.

36 Hurley, 'The Inner Chambers', p.198.

37 Hurley, 'The Inner Chambers', p.204.

38 Julian Wolfreys, 'Introduction', in Richard Marsh, *The Beetle* [1897] (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004), p.19.

39 Wolfreys, 'Introduction', *The Beetle*, p.19.

40 Wolfreys, 'Introduction', *The Beetle*, p.33.

41 Luckhurst, 'Introduction', *Late Victorian Gothic Tales*, p.xi.
Morlocks, Martians, and Beast-People

Probably the writer best known for populating his tales of the 1890s with beastly specimens is H. G. Wells. Often hailed as a prophetic figure, Wells is most firmly of his time, his texts born of attempts to come to terms with late nineteenth-century social and cultural anxieties. One can readily apply to Wells Rosemary Jackson's observation that:

> Like any other text, a literary fantasy is produced within, and determined by, its social context. Though it might struggle against the limits of this context, often being articulated upon that very struggle, it cannot be understood in isolation from it.¹

The present chapter is concerned not only to identify the origins of the creatures that reside within Wells's writing, but to examine the form of the narrative vehicle in which they are transported. The focus is on three texts: *The Time Machine* (1895) and its metaphor of time travel; *The War of the Worlds* (1898) and its space travel (with Earth as the destination, rather than the departure point); and *The Island of Doctor Moreau* (1896) as a variant of the castaway voyage. I aim to show that the internal transformations that occur in Wells's tales (that is, the changes that are narrated within them) are complemented by the alterations that Wells effects to their external shape (that is, to the literary genres on which he draws for his scientific romances). Linda Dryden argues that Wells 'took the *fin de siècle* Gothic a stage further by subjecting it to a scientific scrutiny' and that '[i]n the modern Gothic, physical transformation from human to some bestial other is a central trope'.² Wells explicitly relates his metaphors of bodily alteration to social conditions. His linkage of them combines with his experiments in literary form to produce shifts in narrative perspective.

Feeling his way among his words

Like several of Wells's works, *The Time Machine* is usually hailed as an
early science fiction tale.³ In it, the Time Traveller remarks that: 'Time is only a kind of Space.'⁴ The discussion that follows takes up this implied invitation to examine it as a travel narrative and will focus on its beastly imagery.⁵ Like travel writing, science fiction tells us more about the society that produces it than about the world it ostensibly portrays, so Wells's story must be viewed in its fin de siècle context.

With its tale within a tale, the presentation of *The Time Machine* bears similarities to Joseph Conrad's later *Heart of Darkness* (1899, 1902). In the former, the framing narrator has an audience of professional gentlemen: a psychologist, medical man, provincial mayor, doctor, journalist, and an editor – all of whom try to make sense of what they are told, just as the narrator himself does. Wells has the Time Traveller speak about the problems of understanding and communicating what one has seen on one's journey:

> Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! ... how much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe? Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age! (p.40)

Not only does the passage draw attention to the problems of cross-cultural translation and comprehension, as the Traveller pronounces himself unable to convey to his audience more than a little of the differences that he has found, but the image of a bemused African visiting a strange London reverses the direction of movement common in travel writing of the time. In so doing, it introduces the possibility of a different perspective, while the statement that there is little difference between an African and a modern white person defies dominant beliefs. Readers' values are thus questioned and their values destabilised.

The Time Traveller's difficulties in relating his experiences are apparent in his demeanour. The narrator speaks of him 'feeling his way among his words' (p.17) – a suitable image for the cautious linguistic exploration that occurs in *The Time Machine* and other contemporary works. A connection between spatial, verbal, and textual voyaging is thereby made. The early emphasis on finding one's way puts readers on their look-out, too. This is new and uncertain ground and it is in keeping with what Wells commented on in late 1895:

> the modern fanciful method takes the novelist to a new point of view. Stand aside but a little space from the ordinary line of observation, and the relative position of all things changes. There is a new proportion established. You have the world under a totally different aspect. There is profit as well as
novelty in the change of view. That is, in some small way, what I aim at in
my books.⁶

Wells has the main character of *The Time Machine* tell his audience
that the only difference between Time and Space is that *our consciousness
moves along it*" (p.8). His explanation assumes equivalence between
cultural and temporal distance. He draws racial and beastly comparisons
to make his point. Insisting that we can move about in Time, he
comments:

> For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the
> instant of its occurrence. I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back
> for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length
> of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above
> the ground. But a civilized man is better off than a savage in this respect.
> He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope
> that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the
> Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way? (p.10)

The Traveller's subsequent account interrogates the widely and confidently
held idea that the 'savage' and the 'civilised' were separated, both
physically and culturally, as he suggests above. Wells's use of narrative to
demonstrate the problems of distinction and relativity has affinities with
what, nearly a century later, the sociologist Norbert Elias writes of as
the fifth dimension. Elias ascribes to this the standpoint of the observer,
who not only looks on at the four dimensions, but is able to perceive

> the symbolic character of the four dimensions as means of orientation for
> human beings ... who are capable of synthesis and so are in a position to
> have present at the same time in their imagination what takes place succes-
> sively and so never exists simultaneously.⁷

For Elias, this idea of synthesis also remedies the false distinction made
between the natural and the social. Suggesting a model of 'people who
can observe and investigate from different storeys and so from different
perspectives' (i.e. who can appreciate the symbolic character of the four
dimensions), he declares that:

> Time, which on the preceding step was recognizable only as a dimension
> of nature, becomes recognizable, now that society is included in the field of
> view as a subject of knowledge, as a human-made symbol and, moreover, a
> symbol with high object-adequacy.⁸

Although Elias makes little reference to literature, I shall wilfully
misread ‘storey’ as a typographical error for ‘story’ and argue that the
Time Traveller’s movement through the fourth dimension is observed and investigated by Wells, who uses his tale to inspect, from this fifth dimension, the symbolic construction of time in relation to physical, ‘natural’ time. Indeed, Wells shows this quite graphically, demonstrating the impossibility of achieving an easy synthesis. Much of the latter part of his text is taken up with a kind of dialectic between nature and society, and he deliberately avoids neat closure of the tale that would amount to an easy synthesis.

My approach will also draw on Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘chronotope’:

We will give the name *chronotope* (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature ...

In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.⁹

Using his Traveller’s voyages through time, Wells takes existing conditions in the city and projects them forwards within Darwinist and quasi-Marxist terms, framed in fin de siècle mood and imagery. The time travel serves as a defamiliarising device, facilitating scrutiny of contemporary life. As with many 1890s texts, confidence about domestic society and imperial activity is undermined (in this case literally, as we shall see).

When the Traveller first arrives in the future, he wonders what changes may have happened to humanity, whether it might have ‘lost its manliness’ and

developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness – a foul creature to be incontinently slain. (p.23)

The Traveller finds himself potentially in the position of the ‘savage’ – a post-Darwinian reversal, which would underline the fragile basis of any current boasts of superiority. But while assumptions of racial hierarchies are unsettled, gender values are not. ‘Manliness’ is associated with vigour and proposed as the vital quality of humankind. Further evidence of this comes with the appearance of the Eloi. The first one that the Traveller sees is a typical four feet tall, ‘very beautiful and graceful creature, but indescribably frail’. It reminds him of ‘the more beautiful kind of consumptive – that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much’
(p.24). The fragile, sickly type would be familiar to 1890s readers, given the plethora of commentaries on the aesthetes and decadence. The Elois' prettiness is soon equated with a lack of physical and mental strength – a connotation that preserves gender inequalities. Those 'pretty little people' with their 'child-like ease', their lack of facial hair, and their 'Dresden-china type of prettiness' may be superficially attractive (p.25), but when the Traveller realises that they think he came from the sun in a thunderstorm (thus betraying a level of ignorance and superstition commonly attributed to 'primitives'), then the situation becomes more disturbing, as they appear to be the intellectual equal of 'one of our five-year-old children' (p.26). The disjunction between linear time and progress is a shock; for the Traveller to be superior to the Eloi is as great an aberration as for the 'savage' to be superior to 'us'.

The Elois' lack of curiosity matches their unproductiveness (another fault widely attributed to 'savages', signifying at once their alleged lack of forethought and a justification for appropriating their land). The Traveller's 'general impression' of their world was of 'a long-neglected and yet weedless garden' (p.26). Their exclusively fruit diet (horses, cattle, sheep, and dogs are extinct) is also a sign of a loss of vigour; meat often being associated in Wells's time (and not only then) with manliness, though the association was not made uncritically: adherents of vegetarianism denounced meat-eating as degenerate and traced a line from it to cannibalism.¹⁰

The reification of the aesthetic in the Eloi points to an alarming decline in usefulness. Their limitations remind one of Darwin on the probability 'that disuse has been the main agent in rendering organs rudimentary'.¹¹ In the Traveller's attempts to account for this situation, Wells reflects on the problems of interpretation, and it is in this respect that the narrative is written from, so to speak, the fifth dimension.

When the Traveller begins to muse on the condition of the Eloi, his thoughts focus on the uniformity of their appearance. The apparent absence of 'the single house, and possibly even the household' leads him to deduce that he is witnessing a communistic society (p.29). He opines that 'the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force' and that the necessity for them will happily vanish in a more easeful, balanced, and secure society (p.30). We are already seeing the start of this process in our own time, he comments (and he may well have in mind such phenomena as the rise of the New Woman).
Immediately afterwards, the Traveller throws us off balance by admitting that he has since had to revise this speculation, because ‘it fell short of the reality’ (p.30). We infer that future revelations will force further revisions, making us cautious in our reception of the Traveller’s theories. A kind of dialectic is thus set up. We absorb the Traveller’s ‘present’ words, knowing they will be modified by subsequent events.

What the Traveller describes would indicate, to many readers, not progress but regression. Although he has hinted that he is uneasy at the Elois’ mental state, he soon tries to console himself with the thought that he is witnessing the construction of a communistic utopia. However, it would have been widely known that to many social theorists, notably Herbert Spencer, the specialisation of function, which loss the Traveller celebrates, actually constituted the very fact of progress. ‘Life in general has been more heterogeneously manifested as time has advanced’,¹² wrote Spencer in an essay first published in the *Westminster Review* in April 1857: ‘[T]he transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists.’¹³

Where Spencer sees differentiation and hierarchy as vital conditions for civilisation, with the gap between the governing and the governed especially important, the Time Traveller wishes to reverse these markers, associating the desirable simplicity of the primitive with the communist. At this point there is bound to be confusion in most readers’ minds, as there is in the Traveller’s, as to whether society has moved backwards or forwards. Wells uses the Traveller’s successive modifications of interpretation to add to his readers’ uncertainty. Wells’s chronotope, his narrative manipulation of time and space, positions the Traveller as a kind of floating interrogative. The question of the direction of change – advancement or degeneration – is fundamental and the Traveller’s problems of comprehension are induced in part by the continuing debate over existing tendencies in fin de siècle society.

In a volume published thirteen years after *The Time Machine*, Wells dwelt on these concerns, but also included a passage that may be read as a coda on the method he adopted in the earlier story:

> The current syllogistic logic rests on the assumption that either A is B or it is not B. The practical reality is that nothing is permanent; A is always becoming more or less B. But it would seem the human mind cannot manage with that. It has to hold a thing still for a moment before it can think it ... It cannot contemplate things continuously, and so it has to resort to a series of static snapshots. It has to kill motion in order to study it, as a naturalist kills and pins out a butterfly in order to study life.¹⁴
It would seem that Wells allows for this limitation while striving to overcome it. By having the Traveller stop off at a particular point in the future, go briefly further forward, return to tell his tale, then travel again, Wells provides the freeze frame, but does so within a larger picture of process. He supplies both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. He demands that we resist easy assumptions of finitude and of closed fact. For Wells, that which cannot be pinned down is as crucial as that which can:

> Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges ... Every species waggles about in its definition ...

> ... The finest type specimen you can find simply has the characteristic quality a little more rather than a little less.¹⁵

The waggle for Wells is Weena. The emotional affirmation she brings to the tale is clearly meant to transcend the material changes that occur to her and our worlds. Individual variation was the key to Darwin's theory of evolution, something which Wells himself reminds us of: 'it was only with the establishment of Darwin's great generalizations that the hard and fast classificatory system broke down and individuality came to its own'.¹⁶ Wells's use of time travel, emphasising, as it does, indefinability and uncertainty, works against the then-predominant notions of type, essence, and wholeness.

The unreliability of interpretation, exemplified by the Traveller's theorising, makes it hard for readers to be certain about the truth of the Morlocks and the Eloi and of their relation to each other. 'We are “too blind” to understand Nature's meaning', wrote Darwin.¹⁷ As well as the Traveller's reported attempts to understand what he witnesses, there is also the narrator's and his peers' uncertainty as to whether or not to accept the hero's account at all.

## The old needs of the ape

Wells advises against the suppression of appetites (and he probably had little choice, given what was known of his indulgence of his own sexual ones): 'One has to accept these things in oneself ... even if one knows them to be dangerous things, even if one is sure they have an evil side.'¹⁸ The Morlocks would not be the creatures they have become had it not been for the bourgeois Eloi's suppression of their own baser selves and those they made serve them. Like Hyde in Stevenson's tale, the Morlocks represent the return of the psychologically and socially repressed. Wells
was later to refer to the 'old needs of the ape but thinly overlaid by the
acquisitions of the man'¹⁹ – an idea which, although his reference in
the context is principally to sexual urges, nevertheless clearly underlies
the association of the Morlocks with humans' animal instincts. We
can readily apply to the uninquiring Eloi the opening of the following
comment by Wells on curiosity:

> I perceive hypertrophied in myself and many sympathetic human beings
> a passion that many animals certainly possess, the beautiful and fearless
> cousin of fear, Curiosity, that seeks keenly for knowing and feeling. Apart
> from appetites and bodily desires and blind impulses, I want most urgently
> to know and feel, for the sake of knowing and feeling. I want to go round
> corners and see what is there, to cross mountain ranges, to open boxes and
> parcels.²⁰

Actual and intellectual adventure are conjoined here and they find rich
expression in time travel.

In *First and Last Things* Wells would dismiss omniscience. *The Time Machine* dispenses with it. Neither the anonymous framing narrator nor Wells as author is able to supply the positive interpretation the Traveller cannot give. The Traveller, after his initial deductions, becomes a little more restrained in his judgements. He supposes that humanity had continued its fight against disease, discomfort, and danger and gradually attained the climax of the civilising process. But, he thinks, '[s]trength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness' (p.31). The people are housed in splendid shelters and wear gorgeous costume, but seem to be engaged in no toil. He sees no signs of struggle, either social or economic: 'all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone' (p.32). From all this, he thinks it understandable that he should jump at the idea of a social paradise. Knowing, post-Darwin, however, that changes in conditions lead to adaptations to the change, he begins to worry that the frailties he encounters are an inevitable result of the triumph over Nature. He speculates that in the new environment of 'comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness' (p.33). The passage would disturb the Traveller's audience, for it suggests that 'savage' survivals in civilised 'man' are necessary if one is not to sink into idleness and decay.

In an observation redolent of the 1890s, the Time Traveller muses
on decadence. He comments that in conditions of security, energy
'takes to art and eroticism, and then come languor and decay' (p.33).
The Traveller's Social Darwinist view equates lack of struggle with
enervation. All that was left of the artistic impulse, he muses, was the Elois' dancing and singing and their decoration of themselves with flowers and even this would 'fade in the end into a contented inactivity', for '[w]e are kept keen on the grindstone of pain, and necessity' and, it seems to the Traveller, that 'hateful grindstone' had now been broken (p.33). Immediately afterwards, however, he comments that this theory and his idea that the Elois' efforts to control their population rates have succeeded too well, creating a decrease, are very plausible – like most wrong ones.

That the Eloi represent a regression is also apparent from their language, which to the Traveller seems 'excessively simple', with few 'abstract terms', 'little use of figurative language', and sentences usually of only two words (p.39). From this bare description it would be quite obvious, even to those who knew nothing of evolutionary theory, that such linguistic simplicity heralds no great advance in the development of the race. For those acquainted with evolutionary ideas, the connotations would be clearer still. We can again turn to Herbert Spencer for an identification of language with racial development. This is what he says on the matter:

> The lowest form of language is the exclamation, by which an entire idea is vaguely conveyed through a single sound; as among the lower animals ... [T]hat language can be traced down to a form in which nouns and verbs are its only elements, is an established fact. In the gradual multiplication of parts of speech out of these primary ones – in the differentiation of verbs into active and passive, of nouns into abstract and concrete – in the rise of distinctions of mood, tense, person, of number and case – in the formation of auxiliary verbs, of adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles – in the divergence of those orders, genera, species, and varieties of parts of speech by which civilised races express minute modifications of meaning – we see a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous ... [I]t is more especially in virtue of having carried this subdivision of function to a greater extent and completeness, that the English language is superior to all others.²¹

Spencer's robust confidence in this route of progress is challenged by the condition of the Eloi as Wells forces us to confront the possibility of degeneration. (It may also be that by way of the Traveller's changes of mind and fallibility, Wells is questioning the credibility of those travellers whose observations were used as evidence by armchair anthropologists, as well as of those anthropologists who themselves travelled.) The Traveller's fluent relation of his narrative – his vacillation notwithstanding – encloses the alleged linguistic deficiencies of the Eloi just as
other travellers' narratives contained the so-called primitive utterances of
'savages'. The cultural and temporal confusion in Wells's text is caused
by the fact that rather than being our forebears, these inarticulate
simpletons are our descendants. (It should not be forgotten though that
pronominal identification works no less coercively in *The Time Machine*,
pulling readers into the cultural position of the author.)

The theme of degeneration intensifies with the Traveller's nocturnal
glimpse of the white ape-like figures that we come to know as the
Morlocks. His sighting comes the night before another proof of the Elois'
enervated state: their lack of effort to rescue Weena from drowning. The
Traveller himself saves her and is rewarded with her affectionate gift
of a garland of flowers. As he recalls this episode and its aftermath, he
interrupts himself to declare that 'my story slips away from me as I speak
of her' (p.43), a statement that interestingly, if unconsciously, attests to
the destabilising effects of gender. Furthermore, when he later recounts
another episode and remembers that Weena had placed some flowers
in his pocket, not only does he break off his narrative, but the framing
narrator re-emerges in the story for a rare moment:

*The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon the little table. Then he resumed his narrative.* (p.56)

The female presence introduces an emotional quality which, though
sought after by the narrator as a sign of humanity, is nonetheless
dismissed at will as a disruption to rationality and purpose. The Traveller's
intention of bringing Weena back to his present world is thwarted by
her disappearance and probable death, though we must doubt whether
his intention would have been realised in any case, and in this there
are similarities with the unconsummated union of Good and Foulata in
H. Rider Haggard's *King Solomon's Mines* (1885).

When, the night before Weena's rescue, the Traveller dreamily
glimpses the Morlocks, they appear to him as 'white figures' and are
variously described as 'greyish animal[s]' and 'white, ape-like creature[s]
... carrying some dark body' (p.43). Encountering some later, on what
he thinks is his fourth morning, the terms are repeated, but enlarged.
He has an 'imperfect' impression of the creature he sees, but knows 'it
was a dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; [with] flaxen
hair on its head and down its back'. The speed at which it moves means
that he 'cannot even say whether it ran on all-fours, or only with its
forearms held very low' (p.45). When he strikes a match to get a view
of it scuttling down a shaft, it makes him shudder, as '[i]t was so like a human spider!' (p.45).

In *Children of the Ghetto*, published the same year as *The Time Machine*, Israel Zangwill has his narrator recall:

> a dull, squalid, narrow thoroughfare in the East End of London, connecting Spitalfields with Whitechapel, and branching off in blind alleys. In the days when little Esther Ansell trudged its unclean pavements, its extremities were within earshot of the blasphemies from some of the vilest quarters and filthiest rookeries in the capital of the civilized world. Some of these clotted spiders' webs have since been swept away by the besom of the social reformer, and the spiders have scurried off into darker corners.²²

After his sighting of what looks like a human spider, the Time Traveller now has to modify his Social Darwinist reading to account for this new revelation. Doing so leads him in a different direction as he relays his gradual realisation that

> Man had ... differentiated into two distinct animals ... my graceful children of the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation ... [T]his bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages. (p.45)

His new interpretation has the Traveller thinking, too, of the economic environment that may have led to this development as he considers both the physical and social factors that may have resulted in the emergence of this second, subterranean species. He uses the concept of adaptation to the environment as a basis for a kind of Marxist explanation of what he sees, but prefaces this by warning of his theory that he soon felt it inadequate (p.46). The Morlocks' whiteness is seen as a natural reaction to their subterranean life, their pigmentation disappearing in response to the absence of light. The Traveller posits that the Morlocks toil underground for the benefit of the Eloi. He bases his interpretation on a projection from the current state of things, remarking that it seemed very clear to him 'that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer was the key to the whole position' (pp.46–47). He has in mind the present 'tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization'. He lists as examples the Metropolitan Railway in London, the increasing number of new electric railways, subways, and underground workrooms and restaurants. We might add (while we still have some memory of them) the miners who toiled underground to supply society's energy needs.
The Traveller speculates that Industry operated increasingly
underground until the situation which he has found had been reached.
Rhetorically, he asks his contemporaries: 'does not an East-End worker
live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the
natural surfaces of the earth?' (p.47). He also refers to the growing gulf
between the rich and the poor, with the former seeking to distance
themselves further physically and socially from the latter (including by
endogamous marriages, which helps give the biological explanation for
the development of two species). He deduces that above ground are the
Haves, 'pursuing pleasure and comfort, and beauty, and below ground
the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions
of their labour' (p.47). The aristocracy are, literally, on top. Yet despite
asserting of his explanation that he still believes it 'the most plausible
one' (p.48), it is not long before he recants and feels it 'was all wrong'
(p.54).

As befits a (soon-to-be) Fabian, the author seems to share the Traveller's lack of sympathy for, and identification with, the oppressed class. Besides the epithets already given them, the Morlocks are referred to as 'whitened Lemurs' and 'vermin', from whose 'half-bleached', 'pallid', and 'filthy cold' bodies the Traveller recoils (p.49). These reactions precede the Traveller's latest revision to his interpretation of the world in 802,701, which is to propose that the old relationship of dominance by the Eloi has long ended and that they have 'decayed to a mere beautiful futility' (p.54), possessing the earth only on sufferance, since the Morlocks are unable to endure the daylight and have maintained their old habits of service as an unconscious instinct 'because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on the organism' (p.55). The Traveller senses that the Eloi are about to meet their Nemesis. Readers will pick up hints that they are the victims of cannibalism by the Morlocks, though the Traveller appears slow to grasp the implications of his own sightings:

> Even at the time, I remember wondering what large animal could have
> survived to furnish the red joint I saw. It was all very indistinct: the heavy
> smell, the big unmeaning shapes, the obscene figures lurking in the shadows,
> and only waiting for the darkness to come at me again! (p.52)

In the Traveller's greater feeling for the Eloi than for the Morlocks, an
ambivalence is introduced, which parallels that of many middle-class
Socialists' feelings towards the masses; feelings, if not of loathing, then
certainly of distance and anxiety. As Bernard Bergonzi noted in the
early 1960s: 'The Traveller's gradual identification with the beautiful and
aristocratic - if decadent - Eloi against the brutish Morlocks is indicative
of Wells's own attitudes.'²³ No matter how detached and scientific the Traveller tries to be about the dietary habits of the sons of labour – 'These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon – probably saw to the breeding of' – he is unable to maintain an aloofness as '[t]he Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy' (p.59). Far from achieving objectivity, he feels himself stirred into action as he shares their degradation and fear. In a show of atavism, he finds himself longing 'very much to kill a Morlock or so', and it is only a desire not to endanger both Weena and his Time Machine that prevents him from seeking out and 'killing the brutes I heard' (p.63). That last phrase anticipates Kurtz's scrawled postscript in the report which Marlow finds in *Heart of Darkness*. The extent of this victory of passion over science is reinforced by the mention, almost immediately afterwards, of the Traveller's having authored seventeen scientific papers.

That night, when the Morlocks attack the Traveller and Weena (who vanishes and is presumed by the Traveller to have been killed), they are scared off by the fire that the Traveller has started. The art of fire-making was lost to this future world. In a confusion of self-defence and violent repugnance, the Traveller kills at least one of the 'human rats' (p.69) and cripples several more with an iron bar. Whether or not Wells intends the link, it recalls the descriptions of the urban poor as rats that we encountered in Chapter Two of the present study. The following morning the Traveller laughs bitterly at the memory of his innocent optimism at the apparently utopian surroundings. He now gives us his last view of the world of 802,701, but still concedes that it may be wrong. His final theory slightly modifies his previous one. He repeats his idea that humanity, having attained a balanced society with security, slumbered into a state with no social problems. A 'great quiet' had followed, which diminished and then eradicated intellectual activity: 'There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.' The Eloi had 'drifted towards his feeble prettiness' and the Morlocks to 'mere mechanical industry', but this state of affairs lacked the absolute permanency required for stability. When food supplies to the Morlocks were disrupted, they 'turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden', having retained more initiative than the Eloi (p.72). The Morlocks are the ones in control. They hunt the Eloi at will. Wells hints to us that the Morlocks are, literally, feeding off them. It is this, as critics have noted, that makes us shudder when, on his return, the fatigued Traveller is revived by the odour of 'good wholesome meat' (p.79). Such moments give rise to Lee's claim that *The*
*Time Machine* and *The Island of Doctor Moreau* 'ruthlessly dismantle the possibility of holding cannibalism as an "outside" against which we can define our culture'.²⁴ Lee makes the point that

> with the rise of Darwinism, cannibalism could no longer be strictly consigned to the 'outside' realm of the savage other. Now Victorian culture faced the idea that the line between humans and animals might not be one of division but of lineage. For many, this idea triggered the possibility that those animals consumed as meat were not essentially different from the 'we' who ate them.²⁵

It is tempting to read the relationship between the classes psychoana-
lytically: the Morlocks as the id, living underground and adapted to
darkness, the obscene nocturnal creatures; the Eloi afraid of the dark and
subject to attack from the subterranean dwellers. Thus the appearance of
the Morlocks above ground may be read as the return of the repressed.
What interests me more about this image, though, is that, like Melville
before him and Conrad afterwards, Wells questions, even reverses, the
conventionally held moral attributes of whiteness.

After escaping the Morlocks' attempts to trap him inside the pedestal
in which they have kept his machine, the Traveller inadvertently voyages
even further into the remote future, finding scenes of 'abominable
desolation' (p.76) as the earth 'had come to rest with one face to the
sun' (p.75). Wanting to know more of the fate of the planet, he travels
ever further into the future, stopping momentarily every thousand years
or so, observing the dying of the sun. More than thirty million years
on, it is bitterly cold and snowing. An eclipse of the sun is in progress.
The Traveller is unnerved by the silence of the world. The only life he
observes at first is some green slime on the rocks, but then, already
feeling a horror of the darkness (a reminder of the fear felt by the Eloi),
he is sickened by the sight of a solitary large jellyfish-like creature,
hopping about on the shoal.

The Traveller then returns to the present. This brings us back full circle
to the opening of the tale. The guests are all sceptical. Even the curious
flowers and the time machine itself fail to convince. The only person who
seems to have an open mind on what he has heard is the anonymous
narrator. The next day he visits the Traveller to question him further. The
Traveller, clutching a rucksack and a camera, tells the narrator to wait
half an hour, and then he, the Traveller, will have specimens to prove
that he does travel through time. The Traveller shuts his laboratory door,
leaving the narrator to read a newspaper. Going into the laboratory to tell
the Traveller that he has to leave because of an appointment, the narrator
catches a glimpse of the phantasmic figure disappearing. Three years
on, he is still waiting for the Traveller to come back, for '[a]s everybody
knows ... he has never returned' (p.83). The ending resolves nothing. The
protagonist's journey is open-ended. His descriptions and interpretations
of what he sees are clearly culture-bound and he is therefore limited in
what he is able to apprehend of the objects themselves.

Monsters manufactured

*The Island of Doctor Moreau* has as one of its main themes the indeterminate relationship between the bestial and the human.²⁶ It also deliberately confuses the boundaries of realism and romance, producing an example of what Wells called his 'scientific romances', which have been said to 'define a new form'.²⁷ The effect of this generic compound is to have the narrative confusion destabilise the readers and so extend their vision of the world, in Wells's case through the 'cognitive shudder' that Darko Suvin has identified as a characteristic of science fiction.²⁸ It is an example of how the diffusion of Darwinian and post-Darwinian ideas of evolution contributed to the evolution of the novel.²⁹ Not only is it the case that in the late nineteenth century 'Darwinism mutated in a variety of ways',³⁰ but *The Island of Doctor Moreau* has itself been identified as a transitional text in Well's career, evidenced by his divided reactions to it.³¹

The radical implications of Wells's investigation of the problem of
ascertaining the divide between the human and the bestial are lost in
his focus on biological, rather than social conditions. Admittedly, he
comes close to constructing a critical allegory of colonialism: not long
after Prendick has arrived on the island, for example, he observes 'a
man, going on all-fours like a beast!', but who 'had not been naked
as a savage would have been' (p.41). Prendick's exploration of part of
the island echoes the adventures of explorers: 'I began to realize the
hardihood of my expedition among these unknown people' (p.42).
The reader understands more readily than Prendick that the strange
inhabitants cannot easily be classified as 'Other' in the way that explorers
and scientific commentators were wont to label indigenous peoples of
the territories they invaded. Three 'grotesque human figures' (one female,
the others male) that Prendick finds squatting in 'a kind of glade' in a
forest 'were naked, save for swathings of scarlet cloth about the middles,
and their skins were of a dull pinkish drab colour, such as I had seen
in no savages before' (p.43). Their hue makes them, of course, 'white',
as is the case with the sloth-like creature he will meet later, which he
describes as 'a dim pinkish thing' (p.61). The fact that Prendick has
'[n]ever before ... seen such bestial-looking creatures' inverts the usual
terms of colonialism in which animality is commonly ascribed to the
dark-skinned (p.43). The gibbering and chanting of the pink creatures
reinforces this impression.

Yet the possibilities of a sustained critique of colonialism are soon lost
as Wells pursues instead the more general question, asked by Prendick
about the man he had seen on all-fours, ‘the Thing’: ‘What on earth
was he – man or animal?’ (p.45). As the story progresses, Wells directs
this question to the state of humanity as a whole, losing sight of the
possibilities for a subversive reading of colonialism.³² For the moment,
though, the interpretation holds. Prendick finds himself talking to the
‘simian creature’ with the ‘black face’ (p.58). This ‘ape-like companion’,
with ‘his hands hanging down and his jaw thrust forward’ is not out of
keeping with popular representations of black people (p.59). His powers
of speech mark him as a man, but his English is broken. However,
Prendick’s remark on the Beast-People, that ‘I did not know yet how far
they had forgotten the human heritage I ascribed to them’ (p.59), signals
the broader allegory that is to emerge as he takes their condition to be the
result of reversion to a former state. This conclusion will be challenged
by Moreau’s claim that they are improved animals – ‘humanized animals
– triumphs of vivisection’ (p.77) – not deteriorated humans. Although
Moreau’s boast challenges Prendick’s assumption of degeneration, the
very terms of the question mean that the novel ends up allying itself
with contemporary debates about the direction and shape of human
development. This distracts from the more specific issue of colonialism
and the questioning of innate superiority; it has the text ultimately
transcend particular political problems and flatten out into a much more
general comment on the duality of humanity.

When Moreau talks of operations that had already been carried out
by others, such as the grafting of skin and bone, he uses the phrase
‘monsters manufactured’ (p.77) and goes on to tell Prendick that: ‘These
creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new
shapes. To that – to the study of the plasticity of living forms – my life
has been devoted’ (p.78). His study of the ‘plasticity of living forms’ is
a frightening reminder of the mutability of species to which Darwin
had called attention in *The Origin of Species*, where he declared, for
example, that: ‘Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one
living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.’³³
Through the person of Moreau, Wells invites his readers to contemplate
the identity of the power that can – or will – change us. Moreau’s words
also have added significance. It is not only living forms that are plastic,
but social and cultural ones, too. These include literature.

Moreau brags that: ‘It’s not simply the outward form of an animal
I can change. The physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature,
may also be made to undergo an enduring modification’ (p.78). The
link between outer and inner alteration has serious social and literary
implications: social because it relates changes in outer to those in inner
states, thereby calling into question moral absolutes; and literary because
the relationship of the internal to the external has likely consequences
for narration and characterisation (particularly once developments in
psychology are considered).

When Prendick is back in London, he finds that his experiences
on Moreau’s island have left him with a vision that cuts through the
mundane activities around him. As he brings his narrative up to date,
he tells us that he has been troubled for many years by the fear that

> I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also
> another, still passably human, Beast People, animals half-wrought into the
> outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to
> revert, to show first this bestial mark and then that. (p.149)

In the words of Chris Baldick, Prendick is ‘clearly reinterpreting the
struggle for existence in the capitalist metropolis as, only too literally,
the law of the jungle’.³⁴ His perception of the animal truths behind
the show of everyday reality calls into question, by throwing into
relief, the substance of civilisation. But, as Suvin rightly observes of
Wells’s scientific romances of this period, the author’s ‘satisfaction at the
destruction of the false bourgeois idyll is matched by his horror at the
alien forces destroying it’.³⁵ This ambivalence is shown through, and is
a result of, the recognition of the animal within the human and of the
human within the animal.

Suitably for Wells the sexual libertine, the instinct which for authors
of naturalistic novels perverts our humanity threatens to be perverted
by civilised restraint. This is suggested by Prendick’s misanthropy at the
end of the book when he shuns ‘cities and multitudes’ and all but a few
strangers. He ends his story in ‘solitude’, in hope of a celestial refuge
for ‘whatever is more than animal within us’ (p.151). It is also suggested
by a speech of Moreau’s that hints at the threat posed by society in its
manipulation and control of natural instinct:
In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much, indeed, of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion. (p.79)

Here Wells seems to be warning his readers about the social retraining of the human character away from its natural basis, perhaps reflecting contemporary fears of overcivilisation. We are all, Wells appears to be saying, at the mercy of redefinition. Moreau exclaims that '[a] pig may be educated' and that '[t]he mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily'. He maintains that 'the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx ... in the incapacity to frame delicately different sound-symbols by which thought could be sustained' (p.79). Prendick disagrees and it is probable that Wells himself, while showing the impossibility of discerning where animality ends and humanity begins, hopes that his readers will awaken to the harm that could be done by allowing their instincts to be so modified.

Prendick observes that:

> A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence, and I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People, with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels. (p.108)

The beginning of this quotation is a classically naturalistic expression that might equally be at home in Dreiser's *Sister Carrie*, but Wells uses Prendick's dual vision to communicate the alienating effects of not being able to accept the incorporation of the animal and the human; of nature and society. Appropriately, if frustratingly, *The Island of Doctor Moreau*, 'while it may be Wells's most systematic study of the evolutionary dilemma, arrives at no conclusions', and Wells ends up in danger of transferring the conflicts in the book from society to biology.³⁶

Prendick cannot come to terms with the social body. He describes himself thus: 'And even it seemed that I, too, was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain, that sent it to wander alone, like a sheep stricken with the gid' (p.150). Wells struggles to hold together the social and natural and to find a literary style that will demonstrate the plasticity of living forms.
‘Seeing further’: *The War of the Worlds*

Like *The Time Machine*, *The War of the Worlds* (1898) is partly about contemporary social conditions, but it is also, more overtly, about *writing* those conditions. Greater than the imagined war between humans and Martians is the actual conflict between ideas of realism and romance. This is quite apparent in the narrative, in which Wells's strategies clearly have to do with the problem of creating a fresh vision of the mundane. *The War of the Worlds* embodies a battle between forms of writing. On one side, we have realism – the local and everyday – and science; on the other, fantasy and romance. Wells's own description of his work as 'scientific romance' is probably a more accurate term for the outcome than the more popular designation of 'science fiction'. Another label has been supplied by Joseph Conrad, who in a letter to Wells called him 'a realist of the fantastic'.³⁷ Though interesting, this may be less helpful in that it could imply a straightforward transposition of method from one realm to another, whereas the process is more complicated than that.

Whatever name we choose to apply to Wells's method, it is more important to concentrate on its reflection of its present than to beam him up from his world and hail him as some kind of prophet. Stanislaw Lem is right to suggest that the impact of Wells's story was likely to be the stronger for its being published the year after Queen Victoria's Jubilee, though he greatly underestimates the nervousness already existing when he describes that time as

> the apogee of Victorianism, when the British Empire appeared to be the mightiest power on this planet at its very fulcrum of cocksureness, yet bearing within it the seeds of incipient stagnation, when nineteenth-century English bumptiousness had reached a peak of self-satisfaction.³⁸

Fear of international competition, national and imperial decline, and racial and social degeneration was already tangible. Contemporary anxieties about decadence, degeneration, class unrest, and reverse colonisation are more significant than the Martians' function as a defamiliarising device by which these questions can be objectified.

As with *The Time Machine*, the narrative in *The War of the Worlds* seeks a position from which aspects of late nineteenth-century British society can be criticised. In the latter text, space performs the role that time plays in the former. True, the action of the later novel also occurs in the future, but it is a future so near to the readers that the only difference it seems to mark is that it allows for an event yet to occur (the landing of
the Martians) to happen soon: 'early in the twentieth century', remarks the narrator, 'came the great disillusionment'.³⁹ That phrase is crucial to the story. Disillusionment is the subject of the text. The Martians are the means by which the narrator becomes disillusioned. It is a great indictment of his world that it should take the manifestation of such fantastic creatures – 'alien vampires', as Dryden calls them – to endow him with his new insight.⁴⁰ This is how the novel begins:

> No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter ... Yet, across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. (p.9)

Right at the beginning of the novel, then, the readers are offered a reverse perspective. The confidence of the imperialist is attacked. When the narrator undermines the complacency of 'empire over matter', his words refer to the scientific and technological capabilities of Western civilisation, on which the advance of capitalism depended, and to the imperial project. Wells's problem (it becomes his, though initially it is that of the society he is criticising) is that he must travel outside his society in order to find the position from which its stature can be diminished. Christianity cannot supply that vantage point, for 'God was a lie',⁴¹ and Wells wondered:

> Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity? At the test of war, disease, social injustice and every real human distress, it fails – and leaves a cheated victim ... Jesus was some fine sort of man perhaps, the Jewish Messiah was a promise of leadership, but our Saviour of the Trinity is a dressed-up inconsistent effigy of amiability, a monstrous hybrid of man and infinity, making vague promises of helpful miracles for the cheating of simple souls, an ever absent help in times of trouble.⁴²

Nor can science readily offer the critical perspective, because if it did it would then be seen to be in the service of humanity, underlining the very dominance that Wells wishes to question. The answer is found in scientific romance, in the invasion of creatures to which the author gives
scientific plausibility, but whose threat humanity's scientific knowledge is incapable of negating. The narrator does not travel to Mars. Nor in itself does the arrival of the Martians cause the readjustment of perspective in the novel. Civilised humanity is displaced by the Martians' superiority, which is such that conventional views of evolution as having brought Europeans almost to the ultimate point of progress are radically challenged. Wells corrals several bestial images to suggest this: 'we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us' (p.111); 'So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear"' (p.38); 'The bare idea of this [the Martians' injection of the fresh living blood of other creatures into their own veins] is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit' (pp.133-134); "It's just men and ants", says the artilleryman, "There's the ants build their cities, live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until the men want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That's what we are now - just ants. Only ... We're eatable ants"' (p.163); 'I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow, and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house ... I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away' (p.154); 'I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam-engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal' (p.56). These comparisons of civilised humanity with monkeys, lemurs, scared rabbits, soon-to-be extinct dodos, and displaced ants emphasise humans' instability and compel readers to contemplate the effects of imposing their technology upon 'lower' beings. They suggest the vulnerability of humans, projecting globally the fears of decline in British authority that are present in many texts of the decade.

There is a moral, as well as a physical, dislocation to the narrative. In the first chapter, the narrator has this to say about the Martians:

> And before we judge of them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in
the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the
Martians warred in the same spirit? (p.11)⁴³

The invitation to think carefully about the actions we perform under the
banner of progress could hardly be clearer, even if it is driven by fear of
a like retribution, rather than by an altruistic sense of human equality
and liberty. Just as Darwinian theories of race and progress had conflated
physical and moral stature, so Wells (while drawing on them) had to do
likewise in questioning his contemporaries’ self-satisfaction. The critical
tensions within the story have to do with Wells’s desire specifically
to critique ‘our’ (i.e. British) imperialism, while tracing natural laws
applicable to all (and not only to humans). We might note, at this point,
Conrad’s description of the imperialism of ‘our modern Conquistadores’:
‘Their achievement is monstrous enough in all conscience … like that
of a gigantic and obscene beast.’⁴⁴

If one sees the whole of the human race as the hero one closes down
questions that the text leaves open. Not only are we asked to reflect on the
fate of the Tasmanians; there are direct references to rivalry and hostility
between the European powers. The narrator recalls that soon after the
first Martian vessel had landed, '[m]any people had heard of the cylinder,
of course, and talked about it in their leisure, but it certainly did not
make the sensation an ultimatum to Germany would have done' (p.39).

These tensions encourage one to review Catherine Belsey's reading of classic realism – not so much her definition, which 'permits the inclusion of all those fictional forms which create the illusion while we read that what is narrated is “really” and intelligibly happening: *The Hobbit* and *The Rainbow, The War of the Worlds* and *Middlemarch*'⁴⁵ – but her statement on closure:

> Classic realist narrative ... turns on the creation of enigma through the
> precipitation of disorder which throws into disarray the conventional cultural
> and signifying systems. Among the commonest sources of disorder at
> the level of plot in classic realism are murder, war, a journey or love. But
> the story moves inevitably towards *closure* which is also disclosure, the
> dissolution of enigma through the re-establishment of order, recognizable as
> a reinstatement or a development of the order which is understood to have
> preceded the events of the story itself.⁴⁶

One can hardly quarrel with the first half of that passage, but the ending
of *The War of the Worlds* seems not to conform to the rules observed in
the second part. It preserves a dual vision that makes the readers doubt
that either cognitive or social order has been satisfactorily re-established.
The social and moral questioning is achieved by a narrative juxtapo-
sition of the everyday and the fantastic. Critics have frequently commented
on this. It has been intelligently elaborated by Rosemary Jackson in her
discussion of the paraxial area which ‘could be taken to represent the
spectral region of the fantastic, whose imaginary world is neither entirely
“real” (object), nor entirely “unreal” (image), but is located somewhere
indeterminately between the two’.⁴⁷ Wells’s narrator himself draws our
attention to the arrangement, saying: ‘The most extraordinary thing to
my mind, of all the strange and wonderful things that happened upon
that Friday, was the dovetailing of the commonplace habits of our social
order with the first beginnings of the series of events that was to topple
that social order headlong’ (p.39). From this and other utterances it is
clear that the focus of the narrative will not be on the Martians (the
source of disorder) but on the capacity of the social order to respond to
their threat. The narrator must be able to observe both the order and the
challenge to it. To do this he must be positioned within that order, but
also be able to observe it from without. It is important therefore that we
have an idea of the unnamed narrator as both representative and unique.
He moves inside and outside society. This is what he writes of himself:

Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my
experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of
detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from
the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space,
out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me
that night. Here was another side to my dream. (p.36)

Ostensibly these words are provoked by his flight from the Martians’
Heat-Ray, yet one may infer that they are true of his constitution more
generally; that they identify him as precisely the sort of individual who
will be able to give a reading of the situation that is at once involved
and detached. As readers, we have to guard against an easy acceptance
of his self-diagnosis. After all, he can no sooner remove himself from his
time and space than can we or the author. He might wish, like many
writers, to live by the illusion that he possesses a depth of vision others
lack because he has the unusual ability to step outside his everyday
surroundings, but wherever one treads one carries the imprint of one’s
milieu.

Against such activity, however, is set the force of nature, which appears
ultimately irresistible. On the face of it, *The War of the Worlds* treats this
theme in a similar way to *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* and
*Heart of Darkness* in that nature is seen as operating internally as well as
externally. So in Wells's text one concern is the danger of the conquest
of civilisation by pre- (or anti-)social urges. This threat arises not from
the Martians, but from the responses of 'civilised' people to them. The
narrator indicates as much when he relates the details of his flight from
the Martians and their 'pitiless sword of heat'. After falling with the
exhaustion caused by 'the violence of my emotion and of my flight', he

sat up, strangely perplexed. For a moment, perhaps, I could not clearly
understand how I came there. My terror had fallen from me like a garment.
My hat had gone, and my collar had burst away from its stud. A few minutes
before there had only been three real things before me – the immensity of
the night and space and nature, my own feebleness and anguish, and the
near approach of death. Now it was as if something turned over, and the
point of view altered abruptly. There was no sensible transition from one
state of mind to the other. I was immediately the self of every day again, a
decent ordinary citizen. The silent common, the impulse of my flight, the
starting flames, were as if it were a dream. I asked myself had these latter
things indeed happened. I could not credit it. (p.35)

Like Marlow in *Heart of Darkness*, the narrator experiences a vision of the
wilderness invading the civilised world. The signs of everyday existence
are lost in a moment of metaphysical revelation, and are then suddenly
recovered, leaving the narrator with the altered consciousness that affords
him a view of his ordinary self and of the eternity of nature that will
obliterate him. His altered point of view gives him a dual perspective,
which remains with him throughout and beyond the rest of his story.
It is in this sense that the text avoids the act of closure that Belsey
contends is a feature of classic realist narratives. The narrator witnesses
the re-emergence of animal behaviour as panic sets into the multitude
and he hears of the 'savage struggle' (p.66) for places in the special
evacuation trains and of people 'fight[ing] savagely' (p.99) for standing
room in the carriages. The reappearance of these bestial characteristics,
also marked by the failure to observe property rights – 'As they [the
scattered multitudes] grew hungry the rights of property ceased to be
regarded' (p.114) – shakes any lingering certainty that civilised humanity
has reached a secure position at the top of the evolutionary ladder.

At the end of the story, the narrator feels 'an abiding sense of doubt
and insecurity in my mind' (p.192). He tells of how he still witnesses
two worlds:

> I sit in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing
> valley below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about
> me empty and desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass
me, a butcher-boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence ...

I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanized body. (p.192)

This is not the recovery of the established order, but a continuing revision of one's view of reality. The narrator sees through the superficial signs of mundane existence to place these alongside historical and biological truths (if one accepts the Martian invasion as constituting part of the history of his surroundings). He manages to gain a diachronic perspective alongside the synchronic: he can see ordinary everyday activities and how they fit into a larger timescale. This allows him to question the solidity of modern urban life. He has already told us, at the height of the panicked evacuation of the capital, that '[b]y ten o'clock the police organization, and by mid-day even the railway organizations, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that *swift liquefaction of the social body*' (p.99, my emphasis). And he has shown us the metaphysical depth underlying the quotidian in the city, what he calls the 'mockery of life in a galvanized body' (p.192) – a phrase that critics have noted recalls the Martians themselves, perhaps as a kind of objective correlative for the imperialist urban dwellers. The railway that kills or injures the Egyptian invader in Marsh's *The Beetle*, as we saw in Chapter Two, is no threat to the Martians, but the collapse of infrastructure forces a shift in perception. It also illustrates the quality that leads one critic to claim that: 'Of *fin-de-siècle* authors, H.G. Wells best understood historical contingency and the relationship between order and chaos.'⁴⁸

Both author and narrator intend their tale to enlarge if not transform their readers' vision. Near the end of the book the narrator exclaims:

> The broadening of men's views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further. (p.191)

Wells has had to combine elements of realism and romance so that each may be seen more clearly through its estrangement by the intrusion of the other. The narrator's declaration that now we see further might be said to satisfy Lukács's criterion of realism:
If literature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is, and not merely to confine itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface. If a writer strives to represent reality as it truly is, i.e. if he is an authentic realist, then the question of totality plays a decisive role ...

...

... So the crux of the matter is to understand the correct dialectical unity of appearance and essence. What matters is that the slice of life shaped and depicted by the artist and re-experienced by the reader should reveal the relations between appearance and essence without the need for any external commentary.⁴⁹

In *The War of the Worlds* Wells goes some way to showing the surface of life; he provides in his geographical and domestic settings the kind of detail which Henry James called 'solidity of specification' and which, for James, constituted the 'air of reality [which] ... seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel – the merit on which all its other merits ... helplessly and submissively depend'.⁵⁰ But for Wells, this sort of solidity is plainly insufficient.⁵¹ Indeed, his phantasmical imagery makes that supposed solidity insubstantial. In doing this, he opposes appearance and essence quite deliberately and is finally unable to decide between them. His method illustrates the truth of Jackson's observation that:

> Fantasy is not to do with inventing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and *apparently* 'new', absolutely 'other' and different.⁵²

Wells achieves this through the tropes of space travel and the monstrous Martians. Dryden describes the latter as 'a new type of Gothic monster, but one whose inspiration comes from earlier Gothic forms'.⁵³ As with physical entity, so with literary form. Through his dissolution of generic borders Wells's narrative innovations call into question the solidity of his readers' social world. His metaphors of travel and animality play an essential part in this.

## ‘Monkey on a gridiron!’

Wells's treatment of transformation and travel is not confined to his science fiction and gothic tales. His comic romance, *The Wheels of Chance* (1896), tells of the critical adventure that befalls draper's assistant
Mr Hoopdriver during a cycling holiday along the southern coast of England. Hoopdriver finds himself rescuing Jessie Milton, a naïve seventeen- to eighteen-year-old with aspirations to be a New Woman, from Mr Bechamel, a family friend in his early thirties who (unbeknown to her) is already married. Somewhat uncertainly, she has run away with Bechamel from her stepmother. Bechamel 'came into my life, and talked to me of art and literature, and set my brain on fire'.⁵⁴ He promised to help her earn a living by writing (p.98). The transformation Jessie had sought was from sheltered captivity to a life of freedom: 'I wanted to come out into the world, to be a human being – not a thing in a hutch' (p.154). She wants to 'write Books and alter things. To do Good ... to lead a Free Life and Own myself ... to obtain a position as a Journalist' (p.180); to leave conventional Surbiton and to be unconventional.

Although humorously handled, transformation is dealt with no less seriously in this tale than in the others of Wells's discussed in this chapter. Similar connections between money, class, and beastliness are made. Moreover, the ending leaves open the question of whether or not the transformation will ultimately be accomplished. Jessie's rather reluctant restoration to her stereotypically unpleasant stepmother leaves Hoopdriver with only her urging his self-improvement – for which she will send him books – to leave in his mind the possibility of a social advancement that might, in six years' time, make him a suitable match.

Two factors make possible Hoopdriver's (would-be) transformation: his vacation and the encounters with Jessie. Early on in his holiday, the narrator tells us that:

> Only those who toil six long days out of the seven, and all the year round, save for one brief glorious fortnight or ten days in the summer time, know the exquisite sensations of the First Holiday Morning. All the dreary, uninteresting routine drops from you suddenly, your chains fall about your feet. (p.20)

There is a comic tone to the passage, but it is far from flippant: wage labour is a threat to independence, and its gradation can further limit one's freedom. Also, in common with other texts we have examined, self-definition is gendered and identified with masculinity. Thus:

> No more Manchester Department for ten days! Out of Manchester, a Man. The draper Hoopdriver, the Hand, had vanished from existence. Instead was a gentleman, a man of pleasure, with a five-pound note, two sovereigns, and some silver at various convenient points of his person. At any rate as good as a dook, if not precisely in the peerage. (p.29)
But Wells, who had himself been apprenticed to a draper, brings
Hoopdriver down to earth again as, reaching involuntarily for his
money, he takes his right hand off the handlebar and his bicycle violently
swerves towards the cemetery. It is a striking symbol of the social precar-
iousness that Hoopdriver faces should he climb off his saddle. Even so, his
temporary climb sees him differentiate himself from people he regards
as beneath him. Of those who have positioned in the road a half-brick
which he just misses, he thinks: 'Mischievous brutes there were in the
world to put such a thing in the road ... Ought to prosecute a few of
these roughs, and the rest would know better' (p.30).

Another sign of his in-between status comes later when a young boy
calls him '[m]onkey on a gridiron!' (p.40). This occurs as Hoopdriver is
pursuing Jessie and just after the narrator has observed:

> The situation was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment
> over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with
> archaic violence. So Palæolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of
> chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity. (p.39)

This is but a comic treatment of a theme evident in others of Wells's
works and those of many of his contemporaries: the extent to which the
primitive remains intact under the civilised veneer.

Further evidence of class distinction comes when Hoopdriver mentally compares Jessie with his female co-workers: 'She was a real Young Lady. No mistake about that! None of your blooming shop girls' (p.40). But he reminds himself of his own standing: 'What's the good of thinking such things ... I'm only a blessed draper's assistant' (p.41). He notes that she is from a wealthy family: 'Her machine couldn't have cost much under twenty pounds.' Class embarrassment is reinforced by a gender one. Hoopdriver speculates that Jessie is 'one of these here New Women' (p.42), but it is as likely that his awkwardness has as much to do with her being a woman at all as with her being a new one.

With a new-found confidence born of Jessie's trust, Hoopdriver plans
to get Jessie's and Bechamel's bicycles, so that he can escape with her.
His 'intelligence now was a soaring eagle; he swooped on the situation
at once' (p.141). Then, cycling away with Jessie, Hoopdriver 'was in
the world of Romance' (p.150). Under the benediction of the magical
moonlight, 'rode our two wanderers side by side through the transfigured
and transfiguring night' (p.152). Hoopdriver presents an altered self by
giving his name to her as Chris Carrington and later as Benson and
entertaining her wrong guess that he comes from South Africa (pp.188-
189). His escape from his mundane existence is temporary, but dramatic:
in illegal possession of a stolen bicycle, a stolen young lady, and two stolen
names, established with them in an hotel that is quite beyond his means,
and immensely proud of himself in a somnolent way for these incomparable
follies. (p.161)

Reflecting on his inadequacy, Hoopdriver

... wonder[s] what Adam'd think of me – as a specimen. Civilisation, eigh?
Heir of the ages! I'm nothing. I can't do anything. – Sketch a bit. Why
wasn't I made an artist?

‘Beastly cheap, after all, this suit does look in the sunshine.’ (p.174)

It may seem light-hearted, but the phrase ‘heir of the ages’ echoes the
Traveller’s dread inference when he catches sight of a Morlock and
wonders about the destiny of the human race.

When Hoopdriver feels the weight of his lies become too much, he
admits to Jessie that he is not a wealthy South African, but a humble
draper's assistant. He is ashamed of having to be 'just another man's
hand' and had lied to her because 'I wanted somehow to seem more
than I was' (p.248). The previous night he had lain awake, 'thinking
what a got-up imitation of a man I was' (p.249). He complains about
the draper's lot:

It's not a particularly honest nor a particularly useful trade; it's not very high
up; there's no freedom and no leisure – seven to eight-thirty every day in the
week; don't leave much edge to live on, does it? – real workmen laugh at us,
and educated chaps like bank clerks and solicitors' clerks look down on us
... Without capital there's no prospects; one draper in a hundred don't even
earn enough to marry on. (pp.253–254)

Hoopdriver thinks about ‘what I really am, and what I might have been.
Suppose it was all different–’. Jessie tells him to ‘[m]ake it different’,
and her remedy is that classic Victorian prescription: ‘*Work*’ (p.258).
Self-effacing as ever, Hoopdriver, believes it is too late for him to begin
afresh. When they part with the understanding that he will work to
improve himself and Jessie has asked him: ‘What will you be – what
can a man make of himself in six years’ time?’ (p.290), he trips over a
rabbit hole.

John Batchelor's dismissal of *The Wheels of Chance* as 'facetious and superficial' is too harsh, especially as he earlier remarks (while discussing the Time Traveller's machine as based on a bicycle) that Wells 'saw the bicycle as a revolutionary, democratic form of transport which would initiate social change; it was one of the very few activities in which men and women could enjoy each other's company without chaperones'.⁵⁵
Wells himself has pointed to the seriousness of his book, grouping *The Wheels of Chance* with one of a number of works dealing with the 'theme of the floating persona, the dramatized self [that] recurs at various levels of complexity and self-deception'. The 'endeavour to anchor personas to a common conception of reality' has, he writes, been a main strand of interest throughout his life.⁵⁶ He identifies Hoopdriver as one of these personas. He may have in mind Hoopdriver's propensity to fantasise about roles for himself that he plays out in his mind, but the idea of the floating persona can apply equally, whether intentionally or not, to Hoopdriver's social situation.

It could be argued that the lack of fixity applies to genre also: much of the novel has a dramatic feel, with many more passages of dialogue than one finds in several other of Wells's writings from the 1890s. In fact, Wells later wrote (from 1903 to 1904) a play, *Hoopdriver's Holiday*, based on the novel.⁵⁷ Furthermore, in the novel, Wells includes several references to other writers – Conan Doyle, Gissing, Kipling, Ibsen, Schreiner, Besant, Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, Ouida, Shakespeare, and Christina Rossetti – and to ideas about what novels should represent and how. Hoopdriver's imaginative flights – 'His entire life, you must understand, was ... a series of short stories linked only by the general resemblance of their hero' (pp.67–68) – constitute transformations of his everyday existence.

That the novel should be taken seriously is also indicated by the fact that Wells wrote it during a year-and-a-half's residence in Woking, where he also composed *The War of the Worlds* and *The Invisible Man*. He learned to ride his bicycle – ‘a description of [the] state of my legs ... became the opening chapter of the *Wheels of Chance*’ – and ‘[I] wheeled about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians’.⁵⁸ Indeed, we might remember that the Time Traveller’s machine was an ‘adapted bicycle – one of the most common symbols of social liberation in the 1890s’.⁵⁹ It is the perfect image of the ordinary and extraordinary that informs his writing, which in turn alters generic boundaries as it aims to transform our vision.

## Notes

<footnote n="1">1 Rosemary Jackson, *Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion* (London: Routledge, 1981), p.3.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Linda Dryden, *The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells* (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp.147, 164.</footnote>
3 The story was first serialised in *The New Review* in five instalments between January and May 1895 and was published in book form by Heinemann in May of that year. Page references in this chapter are to H. G. Wells, 'The Time Machine', in *Selected Short Stories* (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958) and will be given parenthetically in the text. On the tale's origins in Wells's earlier three-part story, 'The Chronic Argonauts' (1888), see, for example, Lovat Dickson, *H. G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times* (London: Readers Union, Macmillan, 1971), pp.62–63.

4 Wells, 'The Time Machine', p.9.

5 In doing so I draw upon and develop my essay, 'Wells's Fifth Dimension: *The Time Machine* at the Fin de Siècle', in Tracey Hill and Alan Marshall, eds, *Decadence and Danger: Writing, History and the Fin de Siècle* (Bath: Sulis Press, 1997), pp.64–74.

6 Interview with Wells in the *Weekly Sun Literary Supplement*, 1 December 1895, quoted in Dryden, *The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles*, p.148. Dryden observes that the interview appeared as Wells was about to publish *The Island of Doctor Moreau*. It was also, of course, the year that *The Time Machine* was published.

7 Norbert Elias, *Time: An Essay*, Edmund Jephcott, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p.36.

8 Elias, *Time*, p.36.

9 M. M. Bakhtin, 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel', in *The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin*, Michael Holquist, ed., and Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), p.84.

10 One critic has argued that in Wells's work: 'meat becomes both something capable of shaping narrative structure and the visceral evidence of an imperial culture in which social interest is inseparable from appetite and illumination is bound to carnage. In both *The Time Machine* (1895) and *The Island of Doctor Moreau* (1896), the seeker of information ... is figured as a sublimated hunter of human meat.' Michael Parrish Lee, 'Reading Meat in H. G. Wells', *Studies in the Novel* 42, 3 (Fall 2010), 250. On contemporary attacks on meat-eating, see Lee, 'Reading Meat', p.251.

11 Charles Darwin, *The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection*, last (sixth) edition [1872] (London: Watts & Co., n.d.), p.381.

12 Herbert Spencer, 'Progress: Its Law and Cause', in *Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects* (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1911), p.158.

13 Spencer, 'On Progress', p.154.

14 H. G. Wells, *First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life* [1908] (London: Watts & Co., 1929), p.21.

15 Wells, *First and Last Things*, p.16.

16 Wells, *First and Last Things*, pp.27–28.

17 Darwin, *The Origin of Species*, p.400.

18 Wells, *First and Last Things*, p.51.

19 Wells, *First and Last Things*, p.123.

20 Wells, *First and Last Things*, p.53.

21 Spencer, 'On Progress', pp.164–165.

22 Israel Zangwill, *Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People* [1895] (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2004), p.24.

23 Bernard Bergonzi, *The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), p.56.

24 Lee, 'Reading Meat', p.250.
25 Lee, 'Reading Meat', p.251.

26 H. G. Wells, *The Island of Doctor Moreau* [1896] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946), p.148. Further page references to this edition will be given parenthetically.

27 John Huntington, *H. G. Wells and Science Fiction* (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982), p.xi.

28 Darko Suvin, 'Wells as the Turning Point of the SF Tradition', in Bernard Waites et al., eds, *Popular Culture: Past and Present* (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p.132.

29 For more on this influence, see Gillian Beer, *Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction* (London: Ark, 1985), though Beer makes no reference either to American naturalism or to Wells.

30 John Glendening, *The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank* (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p.46.

31 Glendening, *The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels*, p.51. Glendening argues this on thematic and stylistic lines. In the former case, he maintains that Moreau 'appears to announce its author's efforts to extricate himself from the snarls of evolutionary theory' and that '[i]n later works he was free to transmute Lamarckian optimism and Darwinian pessimism into a cautionary vision of a possible ideal future always in doubt'. As regards style and Wells's changing responses to the text, Glendening observes that although '[l]ater in his life Wells characterized the story as a satirical fantasy or romance with a story line not to be taken seriously ... [,] in the immediate wake of its publication [he] argued against critics who had questioned the efficacy of Doctor Moreau's methods of altering animals, contending that they are not unrealistic at all'. Glendening identifies it as situated 'somewhere between realism and satirical fantasy' (p.51).

32 David Punter also identifies the elements of colonial criticism, pointing out that Moreau is 'the white “aristocrat” who presides over a colonial society in which ... fears of reversion ... are ever-present'. David Punter, *The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day*, vol. 2, *The Modern Gothic* (London: Longman, 1996), p.13.

33 Darwin, *The Origin of Species*, p.407.

34 Chris Baldick, *In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p.156.

35 Suvin, 'Wells as the Turning Point', p.129.

36 Huntington, *H. G. Wells*, p.68. Suvin judges this to be the case in all but the 'maturest moments' in Wells's science fiction. Suvin, 'Wells as the Turning Point', p.129.

37 Quoted in John Batchelor, *H. G. Wells* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.22.

38 Stanislaw Lem, 'H. G. Wells's *The War of the Worlds*', in Rhys Garnett and R. J. Ellis, eds, *Science Fiction Roots and Branches: Contemporary Critical Approaches* (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), p.26.

39 H. G. Wells, *The War of the Worlds* [1898] (London: Pan Books Ltd., 1975), p.9. Further references will be given parenthetically and are to this edition.

40 Dryden, *The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles*, p.179.

41 H. G. Wells, *Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Person (Since 1866)* (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1934), p.45.

42 Wells, *Experiment in Autobiography*, p.46.

43 Tasmanians were not, in fact, wiped out to extinction, but survived through
intermixing with whalers and others, though the consequences continue to provoke
difficult questions about racial and cultural purity.

44 Joseph Conrad, letter to R. B. Cunningham Graham, quoted in Baldick, *In Frankenstein's Shadow*, pp.171-172.

45 Catherine Belsey, *Critical Practice* (London: Methuen, 1980), p.51.

46 Belsey, *Critical Practice*, p.70.

47 Jackson, *Fantasy*, p.19.

48 Glendening, *The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels*, p.28.

49 Georg Lukács, 'Realism in the Balance', in *Aesthetics and Politics: Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno* (London: Verso, 1980), pp.33–34.

50 Henry James, 'The Art of Fiction', in Roger Gard, ed., *Henry James: The Critical Muse. Selected Literary Criticism* (London: Penguin, 1987), p.195. This essay was first published in *Longman's Magazine* in 1884. For the details and accuracy of Wells's geographical setting of the story, see Iain Wakeford, 'Wells, Woking and *The War of the Worlds*', *The Wellsian* 14 (Summer 1991), pp.18–29.

51 As he explains in *Experiment in Autobiography*. See p.410 et seq.

52 Jackson, *Fantasy*, p.8.

53 Dryden, *The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles*, p.180.

54 H. G. Wells, *The Wheels of Chance* [1896] (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., n.d.), p.154. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the body of the chapter.

55 Batchelor, *H. G. Wells*, pp.44, 10.

56 Wells, *Experiment in Autobiography*, p.532. The rest of the group he gives as *Research Magnificent*, *Christina Alberta's Father*, and *The Bulpington of Blup*.

57 Batchelor, *H. G. Wells*, p.53.

58 Wells, *Experiment in Autobiography*, p.458.

59 Peter Keating, *The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914* [1989] (London: Fontana Press, 1991), p.357.
‘Beast and man so mixty’:
The Fairy Tales of George MacDonald¹

Fairies might seem to have little in common with the unattractive Beast-People of the preceding chapters, but no matter how different their appearance, they perform something of a similar role. ‘[f]airy tales, are about anything, they are about transformation’,² writes a biographer of George MacDonald (1824–1905), the subject of the present chapter. According to one study of the genre, fairy tales not only symbolise ‘transformation and its borders’ and take a myriad forms, but they ‘can represent cultural as well as personal transitions’.³

MacDonald transformed the fairy tale, taking the traditional form and restructuring it, ‘giving it a moral vision, without killing it’.⁴ Even the very existence of his fairy tales constitutes a type of transformation since he turned to them after writing verse, and ‘the themes which throbbed through its lines were to take other forms, notably in fairy tales and romances’. There were further transformations, moreover, for MacDonald ‘never seemed happy with his books in any form and they changed radically from edition to edition’.⁵

Money was a determinant in MacDonald's writing, also, for he 'turned from writing verse to prose through economic necessity'.⁶ William Raeper quotes him saying in 1893 that: 'I had to write for money, and prose pays the best; and I have had to write hard, too. I have always two novels on the stocks at once – I used to manage three.'⁷ At MacDonald's peak, Raeper records, he was paid between 800 and 1,000 pounds per novel.⁸ Creative imagination and money – the latter ‘the great corrupter’ in his writings⁹ – rub together productively, but also in tension. ‘Riches indubitably favour stupidity ... poverty, mental and moral development’, MacDonald wrote.¹⁰ Like a number of his contemporaries (including the pre-Raphaelites), MacDonald turned to a former age for values he thought wanting in his own:

MacDonald was a vigorous adherent of the nineteenth-century cult of
medievalism, a protest against the materialism of his day. He saw enshrined in medievalism all the virtues which he felt necessary to build a Christian society ... It is easy to see how repulsed MacDonald had been by the *laissez-faire* ethics of selfishness and material gain.¹¹

Although Raeper distinguishes between MacDonald's fairy tales and fantasies, I shall treat both forms alike in this chapter because Raeper sees them both as 'deal[ing] with transformation and plumb[ing] the workings of inner reality', thinks the 'leap from fairy-tale to fantasy a short one, moving from a traditional to a personal structure, but retaining the deeper purpose', and believes MacDonald to be wishing, through his fantasy, 'to transform his readers' relationship with the world'.¹²

Raeper describes MacDonald as 'an explorer of the unconscious'¹³ and observes that '[o]ne of [his] struggles ... was to bring unconscious material to consciousness',¹⁴ an attempt Raeper sees as especially evident in the 1895 work, *Lilith*, which will form the focus of this chapter. This observation, together with the fact that for MacDonald books were 'portals to other worlds',¹⁵ allows us to read MacDonald's writing as constituting another kind of travel. On the face of it, *Lilith* operates as an example of what Mendlesohn labels the 'portal-quest fantasy', in which 'a fantastic world is entered through a portal' and is 'about entry, transition, and negotiation', but Mendlesohn shows that MacDonald's tale is more complicated than this and that it moves between the other four categories of fantasy that she outlines.¹⁶

Like science fiction, fairy tales and fantasy writing are not an escape from social realities, but a projection of them. As Kath Filmer puts it:

> What fantasy does ... is to confront readers with inescapable, perhaps unpalatable, truths about the human condition – cultural, social, psychological and spiritual – and then to posit alternatives which address the particular injustices, inequalities and oppressions with which the writer takes issue ... Far from being escapist, fantasy literature may be at the very least morally discomfiting, its demands uncompromising, its ideals attainable only at great cost – involving self-sacrifice and self-denial, and finally the development and maintenance of an acute social conscience.¹⁷

Sometimes, as in *Lilith*, the protagonists journey between the everyday and the fairy worlds. Even when stories are set entirely in the realm of the fairies, traces of the real are apparent. Far from being a conservative retreat from the mundane, fairy tales possess the potential for radical questioning of it. In the words of U. C. Knoepflmacher:
Addressed to both children and adults, MacDonald's fairy tales enlist paradox, play, and nonsense in a relentless process of destabilizing priorities he wants his readers to question and rethink. The possibilities offered by an elusive yet meaningful alternative order thus replace the dubious certitudes of everyday life.¹⁸

Describing MacDonald's 'life-long distrust of ready-made systems and conventional assumptions', Knoepflmacher compares the author's intent to 're-tailorize' these 'adventitious wrappings' with that of his 'fellow-Scot and mentor', Thomas Carlyle.¹⁹ It is tempting to make something of their shared nationality; to suggest that their marginal position is partly responsible for their unconventional views. Indeed, the present volume implicitly pursues such a line by following this chapter on MacDonald (which includes discussion of Welsh writer Arthur Machen) with one on the Irish writer Oscar Wilde. However, MacDonald and Wilde were very different from each other in their backgrounds, beliefs, and practices, while an Englishman who (in that sense) wrote from the centre, William Morris, wrote radical tales. National and cultural marginality are important, but political views are more so and neither should be automatically equated. In the case of MacDonald, it is true that his 'childhood in the north of Scotland, together with his Scottish ancestry, go far in helping one to understand the man',²⁰ and that, in particular, the rural landscape and, above all, the influence of his religious upbringing are reflected in his writing, but most of his adult life was spent in England. As one of his most thorough biographers warns, 'it is a mistake to read the novels with too keen a biographical eye'.²¹

To MacDonald, multiple shapes are intrinsic to the telling: 'A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean', he stated in an 1893 essay,²² and his wife wrote to a correspondent who admired *Phantastes* that 'he has always told his friends to take any meaning they themselves see in it'.²³ Fixed meanings do not apply:

> A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. He must be an artist indeed who can, in any mode, produce a strict allegory that is not a weariness to the spirit. An allegory must be Mastery or Moorditch.²⁴

This is one reason why MacDonald could exclaim: 'I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five',²⁵ a practice that Knoepflmacher believes led him to hope that he 'might help grownup readers shed their acquired dependence on linear time
and dissolve their sense of spatial constraints'.²⁶ Imagination is key. It is imagination that discovers the laws of history: 'the cycles in which events return, with the reasons of their return, recognizing them notwithstanding metamorphosis'. Without the influence of the imagination, 'no process of recording events can develop into a history'.²⁷ It is superior to intellect.

Oddly mingled

It is worth comparing MacDonald's remarks on the imagination with Arthur Machen's similar comments in his introduction to the 1916 edition of his 1894 story *The Great God Pan*:

> The logical understanding is the prison-house of Wordsworth's supreme and
> magistral ode; it is the house of prudent artifice, of the calculations of means
> to the end; it is the region where things can be done by recipe, where effects
> are all foreseen and intended. It is the house of matter and the house of the
> mechanism. And when youth does anything well or pretty well, it is because
> youth has not wholly been overcast by the shadows of the prison-walls; it is
> because it does not understand.²⁸

Machen says of his tale of a shape-shifting woman with satyric proclivities
that

> since the story was conceived and written in solitude, and came from far off
> lonely days spent in a land [in Wales] remote from London, and from literary
> societies and sodalities ... it stands, not for the ferment of the 'nineties, but
> for the visions that a little boy saw in the late 'sixties and early 'seventies.
> (p.17)

Like MacDonald's, this tale also deals with two worlds. Machen's Dr Raymond, who operates on seventeen-year-old Mary, whom he rescued from the gutter and whose life is, he thinks, therefore his to use as he sees fit, believes in the existence of a real world beyond the illusory everyday one; a world that the ancients, who 'knew what lifting the veil means', called 'seeing the God Pan' (p.32). A brief operation on Mary will allow her to see the God Pan. Almost immediately after the operation, '[t]he muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from head to foot, the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh'. It is described as 'a horrible sight' that has 'Mr. Clarke, the gentleman chosen by Dr Raymond to witness the strange experiment of the God Pan' (p.43) rush forward as Mary falls 'shrieking to the floor'
(p.41). Again we have a text in which respectability and dissolution are conjoined. Clarke is 'a person in whose character caution and curiosity were oddly mingled; in his sober moments he thought of the unusual and the eccentric with undisguised aversion ... yet he secretly hugged a belief in fantasy' (p.43). His 'sole pleasure was in the reading, compiling, and rearranging of what he called his "Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil"' (p.44). In this disjunction between his public and private faces, he resembles many of those secret seekers of sin that we have seen in similar stories, just as Dr Raymond is part of the brotherhood of mad, bad, or misguided scientists that includes Dr Moreau and, at the other end of the century, Dr Frankenstein.

The irruption of nature is at the heart of social panic. (The God Pan gave rise to the word panic.) This is proved again when, one evening in London, Villiers, a graduate of Wadham College and 'eminently well-to-do' (p.55), bumps into his old college friend Charles Herbert, 'his face altered and disfigured by poverty and disgrace' and now a beggar (p.56). Herbert tells Villiers of how his fall followed his marriage to Helen. She is apparently the orphaned child of an English father and an Italian mother, and a

woman, if I can call her a 'woman', [who] corrupted my soul. The night of the wedding I found myself sitting in her bedroom in the hotel, listening to her talk. She was sitting up in bed, and I listened to her as she spoke in her beautiful voice, spoke of things which even now I would not dare whisper in blackest night, though I stood in the midst of wilderness ... In a year ... I was a ruined man, in body and soul. (p.58)

Herbert sold all his property and Helen took all his money before leaving him. Once more the ideas of the unspeakable and namelessness occur. Herbert will not tell Villiers of all that happened; otherwise, '[y]ou would pass the rest of your life, as I pass mine, a haunted man, a man who has seen Hell' – and he thinks his wife did not have a real name, because '[o]nly human beings have names' (p.59). Like other figures that we have looked at, she combines beauty and repulsiveness (p.64). Not long after this meeting with Villiers, Herbert is found dead from, it is presumed, starvation. Four gentlemen also die, apparently by hanging themselves. The narrator makes an explicit comparison with the Ripper murders: 'The police had been forced to confess themselves powerless to arrest or to explain the sordid murders of Whitechapel; but before the horrible suicides of Piccadilly and Mayfair they were dumbfounded' (p.90). A fifth suicide provides a second link with a Mrs Beaumont, whose unique appearance inspires in Austin a 'kind of dim far-off memory, vague but
persistent' (p.93), and whom at least the first and fifth suicides visited shortly before their deaths. The last of these, Crawshaw, had been seen by Villiers just before his death and is described by him as a 'lost soul'. Villiers

could never have supposed that such an infernal medley of passions could have glared out of any human eyes ... the man's outward form remained, but all hell was within it ... when I passed down Ashley Street and heard the closing door, that man no longer belonged to this world; it was a devil's face I looked upon. (p.97)

During the next three weeks, Villiers discovers that Mrs Beaumont, the former Mrs Herbert, and the former Helen Vaughan are one and the same. His inquiries have seen him descend to the social depths. Once more we have another example of a gentleman adventuring into the underworld:

> assuming, as I do assume, that her record was not of the cleanest, it would be pretty certain that at some previous time she must have moved in circles not quite so refined as her present ones. If you see mud on the top of a stream, you may be sure that it was once at the bottom. I went to the bottom. I have always been fond of diving into Queer Street for my amusement, and I found my knowledge of that locality and its inhabitants very useful. (p.103)

In fact, Villiers learns that Mrs Herbert/Beaumont had first been known there as a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old five or six years previously and had stayed a year, gathering sickening and 'nameless infamies' to her name that make even the 'worst den in London too good for her' (p.104). After the Paul Street case, she returned for eight months, then disappeared, and returned again some months before, making regular visits. When Villiers shows Austin a manuscript that details the entertainment Mrs Beaumont provided for her 'choicer guests' (p.106), Austin is horrified. Villiers remarks that: "'Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens.'" He refers to the Great God Pan as

> an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken ... Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. (p.107)
Again there is the meeting of respectability and sin, a conjunction that renders unstable the existing shape of things: 'But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form' (p.107). (Granted, Villiers's speech might mean only that he and Austin have observed this condition in others and that their knowledge of the terror is thus second-hand, but I think that Villiers's earlier speech about diving into Queer Street makes it much more likely that first-hand knowledge is meant.) Villiers determines to offer Mrs Beaumont a choice between hanging herself and being exposed to the police. A note at the end of the book informs the reader that she died in her house on 25 July 1888, suggesting that she took the former option. In the final chapter, appropriately titled 'Fragments', we are presented with the translation of a Latin manuscript found among the papers of the well-known physician Dr Robert Matheson, of Ashley Street, after his death in 1892. The document, dated the day of Mrs Beaumont's death, records Matheson's 'horror and revolting nausea' at what he sees on the bed,

> lying there black like ink, transformed before my eyes. The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve ...

> ... here there was some internal force, of which I knew nothing, that caused dissolution and change.

Here too was all the work by which man had been made repeated before my eyes. I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. The principle of life, which makes organism, always remained, while the outward form changed. (p.114)

At last:

> I saw nothing but a substance as jelly. Then the ladder was ascended again ... [here the MS. is illegible] ... [sic] for one instant I saw a Form, shaped in dimness before me, which I will not farther describe. But the symbol of this form may be seen in ancient sculptures, and in paintings which survived beneath the lava, too foul to be spoken of ... [sic] as a horrible and unspeakable shape, neither man nor beast, was changed into human form, there came finally death. (p.115)

The illegibility of part of the manuscript conveys the sense of the ineffable. A few pages later in a fragment, Dr Raymond informs Clarke