In it Griffin, a young optical physicist, in an ill-timed fit of desperation stemming from his hope for scientific recognition and his inability to cope with people, renders himself invisible. He does this by lowering the refractive index of his body, bleaching his blood, and undergoing a painful and undefined process. His invisibility is total, but it is also a product of science, not magic, and hence is incredibly literal. Undigested food remains visible in Griffin’s body, appearing as a floating murk in the air. The snow and dirt settling on his shoulders make his outline visible again, and he can only be invisible while naked, as clothes cloak his form. The reality of his trick is brutal: naked, cold, terrified of leaving a trace anywhere, Griffin cowers in the streets of London, homeless and totally alone. He is driven mad by the irreversibility of his predicament.

While other writers of his time might have made The Invisible Man into an adventure story, a slapstick romp of illusion, H.G. Wells saw a life of invisibility as it really might be. To be invisible is to be completely cast away from the most fundamental, underlying commonalities between all people: being, onus, and self. Griffin is, by virtue of being unseen, no longer human. And, faced with the hysterical reaction of regular folk to his predicament, he certainly acts accordingly: stealing, verbally abusing people, using fear to overpower the weak, and, near the end, dreaming of a reign of terror, of murder.

In the preface to my edition, George P. Wells (H.G’s son), details the scientifically burgeoning era of his father’s writing. After all, the late 1880s saw the invention of the lightbulb, the radio, the automobile; people could light and heat their homes at the touch of a button, all things that might have seemed like magical fantasies a few decades previous, and things which probably retained a little aura of the magical for many people. There really was a sense of unabashed optimism about science, about technology’s potential to unveil new comforts and wonders for the everyman. Still, Wells saw the darkness. His son writes, “the scientific worker strives continually to give man a greater power to shape his destiny; the individual finds more and more than he holds the power of life over death, only as a power of death over life.” Yikes.

“Why,” said Huxter suddenly, “that’s not a man at all. It’s just empty clothes. Look! You can see down his collar and the linings of his clothes. I could put my arm –“

It’s exactly these kind of juxtapositions — between the commoner and the physicist, the glowing promise of science and its hard-edged underbelly — though, that makes The Invisible Man so potent. Like all of Wells’ early novels, it’s set in the most brass-tacks landscape possible: a provincial England, populated by innkeepers and constables, ordinary folk, gossiping amongst one another as they experience the extraordinary. Wells uses specific, dry language, and it’s a particularity of his style that when he shows us the unbelievable, it’s through the unbelieving eyes of a common bystander (“No ‘ed, I tell ye!”), whose attempts to remain objective in the face of unimaginable horror make the events far more chilling. I can’t help but think of Clarke’s third law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And magic has no being, like an invisible man.

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