The Invisible Man

Summary

Early one February a stranger, wrapped from head to foot, his face hidden by bandages, blue spectacles and a false pink nose, staggers through the snow into the Coach and Horses inn at Iping, a Sussex village, and takes rooms from the landlady, Mrs. Hall. He unpacks crates of bottles, works at chemistry behind a locked door, and snaps at everyone who intrudes. The village gossips: the clockmender Teddy Henfrey, the general practitioner Cuss, the vicar Mr. Bunting and the regulars at the bar all form theories. The vicarage is burgled by someone nobody can see, the furniture in the stranger's room flies at Mr. and Mrs. Hall, and when Mrs. Hall at last demands payment he tears off his wrappings and shows that there is nothing inside them. On Whit Monday he fights off the constable Jaffers and half the village, then vanishes. On the downs he seizes a tramp, Thomas Marvel, as an unwilling servant to carry his clothes, money and three precious notebooks. Marvel runs from him at Port Stowe to the Jolly Cricketers inn in Burdock, and the wounded Invisible Man takes refuge in the house of Dr. Kemp, a scientist he had known as a student. There he reveals himself as Griffin, a young albino physicist of University College who left medicine for the study of light, found a way to make living tissue transparent, robbed his father to finish the work (the father, who had used money not his own, shot himself), tried the drugs on a cat and then on himself in a London lodging, and set fire to the house to hide his traces. His account of London in winter, cold, naked, hunted by dogs and betrayed by snow and mud, hiding in Omniums department store and robbing a costumier in Drury Lane, shows invisibility as a misery more than a power. Griffin asks Kemp to be his confederate in a Reign of Terror; Kemp has already written secretly to Colonel Adye of the Burdock police. Griffin escapes, kills Mr. Wicksteed, the steward of Lord Burdock, with an iron rod, and sends Kemp a letter announcing the first day of his new epoch. He breaks into Kemp's house and shoots Adye, but Kemp runs down the hill into the town, the crowd closes on the unseen attacker, and a navvy's spade and many fists kill him. Slowly his battered body becomes visible on the road. In the epilogue Marvel keeps an inn named The Invisible Man and pores over the unreadable notebooks at night. The novel was serialized in Pearson's Weekly in June and July 1897 and published in book form by C. Arthur Pearson the same year, with the subtitle A Grotesque Romance.

Top Lessons

• Discovery without a conscience

  Griffin's discovery is real and brilliant, but he pursues it in secret, steals from his father to finance it, and never asks what it is for until it is done. Wells shows that a gift for science gives no protection against selfishness; the same mind that solves optical density plans a Reign of Terror. Knowledge needs a moral frame that the knower brings to it.

• The loneliness of being unseen

  Griffin boasts that his great moments came when he was alone, yet invisibility cuts him off from food, clothing, shelter and every human tie. In London he learns that he can take whatever he wants but cannot enjoy any of it. Too late he tells Kemp that a man can do very little alone.

• The ring of Gyges made modern

  Plato asked what a man would do if he could act unseen; Wells answers with a physicist who steals, burns a house, binds a shopkeeper and kills a stranger. The book suggests that the fear of being seen restrains more than we admit, and that character shows most plainly when no one is watching.

• Comedy and terror in one story

  The Iping chapters are rural comedy: gossiping villagers, a vicar in his dressing-gown, a tramp arguing with a voice. The London and Burdock chapters are grim. Wells's mixture, which he called a grotesque romance, lets the reader laugh at the village and then see how small, ordinary people bear the cost of one man's ambition.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Griffin began as a medical student before turning to physics, and his invisibility is produced by drugs and radiation acting on living tissue, so the novel imagines a pharmacological process with a physiology of its own. He tries the method first on a white cat, which howls until he chloroforms it, and then on himself in a London lodging; he describes a night of fever, sickness and fainting and watches his bones, arteries and nerves fade in sequence, an order that the narrator reverses when the dead body reappears. Before the experiment Griffin records exhaustion, apathy and want of sleep after nearly four years' work and calls the project a fixed idea that ruled him, language close to the period's notion of monomania. Kemp, reading the newspaper reports, says the story reads like rage growing to mania, and later calls him mad, inhuman and pure selfishness; whether Griffin is meant as mentally ill or simply wicked is left open, and any modern diagnosis is the reader's interpretation, not Wells's. The village general practitioner Cuss supplies a comic portrait of a country doctor overcome by panic. The story of the father who shot himself after Griffin stole money that was not his is told in one flat sentence, which marks how far Griffin's obsession has narrowed his feeling. For a history-of-medicine reader the book is also an early fictional treatment of self-experimentation and the ethics of a researcher answerable to no one.

• Chapter IV, Mr. Cuss Interviews the Stranger

  The Iping general practitioner forces his way into the stranger's room, grips an empty sleeve and runs to the vicar asking whether he is mad.

• Chapter XIX, Certain First Principles

  Griffin tells of robbing his father to pay for his research and of the father's suicide.

• Chapter XX, At the House in Great Portland Street

  Griffin describes overwork and sleeplessness, the trial of his process on a cat, and the painful night in which his own body becomes transparent.

• Chapter XXVIII, The Hunter Hunted

  After his death Griffin's body reappears from the extremities inward, nerves, then bones and arteries, then flesh and skin.