6. The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand: H.G. Wells's Critique of Capitalism

¹See, for example, Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1961), p. 120 and Richard Hauer Costa, H.G. Wells (Boston: Twayne, 1985), pp. 19–21.

²H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man, David Luke, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 70. All quotations are taken from this Oxford World's Classics edition, with an Introduction by John Sutherland.

³It is surprising how few critics have explored the economic dimension of The Invisible Man. The only one I have been able to find is Roslynn D. Haynes, who, in her H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future: The Influence of Science on His Thought (London: Macmillan, 1980), makes a passing comment on Griffin's “bourgeois mania for financial gain” (p. 203).

⁴The phrase “invisible hand” actually occurs four times in Wells's narrative (see pp. 76, 84, 85, and 90). Given the situation Wells was dealing with, this may have been inevitable, but it might be a covert reference to what is after all Adam Smith's most famous phrase. That Wells was familiar with Smith is evident from the fact that he mentions him in his A Modern Utopia (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1905), p. 85. The only critic I have found who mentions Smith in connection with The Invisible Man is Frank McConnell, The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 114, but he is simply making a general point about the nineteenth-century novel “as capitalist fable.” A precedent for using invisibility to symbolize the power of capitalism can be found in Richard Wagner's opera, Das Rheingold. There the villain Alberich uses the magic of the Tarn-helm to make himself invisible and tyrannize over his fellow dwarves in Nibelheim, forcing them to amass treasure for him. Alberich thus becomes a symbol of the capitalist boss enslaving and exploiting the working class. That this interpretation of Wagner was circulating in Wells's England is evident from George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite, first published in 1898. See especially Shaw's characterization of Alberich's rule over the Nibelungs:

For his gain, hordes of his fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably... lashed to their work by the invisible whip of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims of our “dangerous trades” ever see the shareholders whose power is nevertheless everywhere, driving them to destruction.

Quoted from George Bernard Shaw, Major Critical Essays (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 198. See also p. 205.

⁵Invisible Man, p. 21.

⁶Mistaking Griffin's invisibility for blackness, one of the villagers thinks “he's a kind of half-breed” (p. 18). Wells in effect anticipates the use that Ralph Ellison was to make of invisibility as a symbol in his novel Invisible Man. Ellison may have been the first to realize that Wells was using Griffin's invisibility as a symbol of the way an individual can be marginalized by the prejudices of his society. On the parallels with Ellison, see John Sutherland's “Introduction” in Luke, ed., Invisible Man, p. xxii.

⁷Invisible Man, p. 1.

⁸Ibid., p. 22.

⁹Ibid., p. 20.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 17.

¹¹Ibid., p. 19.

¹²Ibid., p. 11.

¹³Money is one respect in which the big city has already penetrated even this small village; the name of the local bank is the London and Country Banking Company. Money links the country with the city.

¹⁴Invisible Man, p. 93.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 105.

¹⁶Ibid., pp. 105–06.

¹⁷Here is Dostoevsky's underground man strolling along Nevsky Prospect:

I slipped in and out among the promenading crowd in a most unbecoming fashion, continually stepping out of the way of generals, cavalry officers, hussars, ladies.... It was sheer torture, a continuous intolerable sense of humiliation at the idea... that I was nothing but a fly before all that fine society.

The underground man is particularly humiliated by an encounter with an officer he knows: “He also stepped out of the way of generals and personages of rank; but men of my ilk... he simply crushed; he walked right at them, as if there were but empty space before him, and never yielded the way.” Quoted in the translation of Mirra Ginsburg, Notes from Underground (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), pp. 60–61. The situation of the Invisible Man in London literalizes what Dostoevsky presents metaphorically. Ralph Ellison's notion of the invisible man also turns on the idea that his fellow human beings refuse to recognize him: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.... When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” See Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: New American Library, 1952), p. 7. McConnell plausibly argues for the influence of Wells's The Invisible Man on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, “especially in the celebrated last scene of the novel, where the Professor is described as passing, unseen, like a plague among men” (Science Fiction, p. 116).

¹⁸Ibid., p. 110.

¹⁹H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 112. For more on invisibility as an image of modern urban existence, see Sutherland's “Introduction” in Luke, ed., Invisible Man, p. xxvi.

²⁰Invisible Man, p. 100.

²¹Ibid., p. 103.

²²See, for example, ibid., p. 116.

²³Ibid., p. 31.

²⁴Ibid., p. 95.

²⁵For Wells's hostility to suburban development, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2002), especially pp. 118–20.

²⁶Invisible Man, p. 131. See also p. 136: “He was certainly an intensely egotistical and unfeeling man.”

²⁷Ibid., p. 109.

²⁸Ibid., p. 110. Like Wells, Griffin is fascinated by the new phenomenon of the urban department store; he contrasts it with traditional methods of retailing, including no doubt the way business was transacted in country stores:

I was really surprised to observe how rapidly the young men and women whipped away the goods displayed for sale during the day.... Finally all the chairs were turned up on to the counters, leaving the floor clear. Directly each of these young people had done, he or she made promptly for the door with such an expression of animation as I have rarely observed in a shop assistant before. (pp. 111–12)

Griffin is struck by how much faster people work in a department store, but also by how much takes place behind the scenes, out of the sight of the customers. Once again, Wells highlights the “invisibility” in the working of capitalism.

²⁹Ibid., p. 123.

³⁰Ibid., p. 124.

³¹Ibid., p. 1.

³²Ibid., p. 153.

³³Ibid.

³⁴Ibid.

³⁵Experiment in Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 475.

³⁶See Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Life of H.G. Wells: Time Traveller (London: Hogarth Press, 1987), p. 127. Friedrich Hayek offers a brilliant analysis of this atavistic mode of thinking in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

³⁷On this subject, see the excellent analysis in Hayek, Fatal Conceit, pp. 89–105.

³⁸Wells, Utopia, p. 84. In other signs of his hostility to ordinary economic functions, Wells's utopia forbids usury, which he defines as “the lending of money at fixed rates of interest” (p. 287), not exorbitant rates as most people would. In a telltale passage, Wells writes: “The idea of a man growing richer by mere inaction... is profoundly distasteful to Utopian ideas” (p. 287). The order of rulers in this utopia, who are strangely called the samurai, are forbidden to participate in any entrepreneurial activities:

It is felt that to buy simply in order to sell again brings out many unsocial human qualities; it makes a man seek to enhance profits and falsify values, and so the samurai are forbidden to buy to sell on their own account,... unless some process of manufacture changes the nature of the commodity (a mere change in bulk or packing does not suffice), and they are forbidden salesmanship and all its arts. (p. 287)

This is exactly the kind of thinking Hayek identifies as the common man's misunderstanding of the merchant's activities: “That a mere change of hands should lead to a gain in value to all participants, that it need not mean gain to one at the expense of the others... was and is nonetheless intuitively difficult to grasp” (Fatal Conceit, p. 93).

³⁹Signs can be found throughout Wells's writing that he was in fact subtly guided by medieval notions, even in what is probably his single most important statement of his socialist vision and what is explicitly designated as a modern utopia. In describing property ownership, he says that the “World State” will be “the sole landowner of the earth, with... the local municipalities, holding, as it were, feudally under it as landlords” (Wells, Utopia, p. 89). Drawing upon a notion out of feudal Japan, Wells calls the ruling order of the utopia samurai, and compares them to “the Knights Templar” (pp. 159, 174, 277). When Wells speaks of “Utopian chivalry” (p. 310), we begin to realize how much a “boyish conception” (p. 174) of the gallant world of the Middle Ages stands behind his socialist vision.

⁴⁰Wells, Utopia, pp. 128, 172–73.

⁴¹Mr. Marvel seems to speak for Wells when he says of the Invisible Man:

It makes me regular uncomfortable, the bare thought of that chap running about the country!... And just think of the things he might do!... Suppose he wants to rob—who can prevent him? He can trespass, he can burgle, he could walk through a cordon of policeman as easy as me or you could give the slip to a blind man! (pp. 67–68)

⁴²Earlier in the story Griffin is thought to be an Anarchist, specifically “preparing explosives” (p. 20). On Griffin as a terrorist, see Sutherland's “Introduction” in Luke, ed., Invisible Man, p. xxv.

⁴³Invisible Man, p. 134.

⁴⁴Characteristically, Wells's utopia requires a plan to keep all citizens under perfect surveillance: “If the modern Utopia is indeed to be a world of responsible citizens, it must have devised some scheme by which every person in the world can be promptly and certainly recognized, and by which anyone missing can be traced and found” (Wells, Utopia, pp. 162–63). Wells goes on to outline a chilling plan for indexing every person in the world, with “the record of their movement hither and thither, the entry of various material facts, such as marriage, parentage, criminal convictions and the like” (p. 163). Wells recognizes that some people might find this scheme repugnant, but he chastises them as “old-fashioned nineteenth-century” Liberals (p. 165), who do not understand the goodness of government: “The old Liberalism assumed bad government, the more powerful the government the worse it was.... But suppose we do not assume that government is necessarily bad... then we alter the case altogether” (pp. 165–66). Wells's faith in the goodness of government evidently knew no bounds. Here is his remarkable description of Joseph Stalin after an interview with him in 1934: “I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to these qualities it is, and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendency in Russia” (Wells, Autobiography, p. 689).

⁴⁵Invisible Man, p. 134. Earlier Kemp calls for a “council of war” against Griffin (p. 132).

⁴⁶For several of these occasions, see pp. 32, 37, 39, 74, and especially p. 132, where even at this late stage of the story, one of the characters is troubled that the measures being taken against Griffin are “unsportsmanlike.” By contrast with his own characters, Wells seems to have contempt for the traditional liberal respect for individual rights; his narrator offers this comment on the scrupulous way the Iping townspeople deal with Griffin: “The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action” (p. 32).

⁴⁷Invisible Man, p. 152.

⁴⁸For an insightful but somewhat different development of this point, see McConnell, Science Fiction, pp. 123–24.

⁴⁹Invisible Man, p. 133.

⁵⁰Ibid., p. 135.

⁵¹Ibid., p. 136.

⁵²Wells of course is the author of The Invisible Man, and if Griffin momentarily escapes his grasp, he does so only because Wells has chosen to let it happen. In that sense, Wells remains in control of the story. But that control takes the paradoxical form of choosing to lose control of one of his characters—something Wells seldom does in his science fiction. In this case, however, Griffin's elusiveness is strangely appropriate—he is after all an invisible man.

⁵³See Carey's formulation of the point: “the people who occupy Wells's utopias and dystopias are representatives, like the people in [advertisements]. They illustrate a design” (Intellectuals, p. 147).

⁵⁴See Michael Draper, H.G. Wells (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 123: “Wells did not become a genuine scientist or politician but an aesthete, irrationally demanding that life should possess the coherence and closure of a work of art.”

⁵⁵Wells himself sometimes wondered if aesthetic considerations governed his commitment to socialism. In Tono-Bungay, he has his main character observe: “perhaps after all this Socialism to which I had been drawn was only a foolish dream.... Morris and these others played with it wittingly; it gave a zest, a touch of substance, to their aesthetic pleasures” (p. 149).

⁵⁶As we saw above in section VI of “The Poetics of Spontaneous Order,” this model of fiction is by no means universal. Some fiction writers, among them Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, have deliberately incorporated elements of contingency into their narratives in an effort to mirror the contingency of life itself—thereby creating an open-ended form of fiction, which has been brilliantly analyzed by Gary Saul Morson in his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994).

⁵⁷Wells, Utopia, p. 354.

⁵⁸Alexis de Tocqueville came to a similar conclusion in his analysis of the role of men of letters in provoking the French Revolution: “What is a merit in the writer may well be a vice in the statesman and the very qualities which go to make great literature can lead to catastrophic revolutions.” See Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Stuart Gilbert, trans. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), p. 147.

⁵⁹See, for example, p. 133, where Wells writes of Griffin: “we may still imagine and even sympathize a little with the fury the attempted surprise must have occasioned.”

⁶⁰Invisible Man, p. 48.

⁶¹Ibid., p. 120.

⁶²Ibid., p. 93.

⁶³Ibid.

⁶⁴Ibid.

⁶⁵Ibid., p. 94.

⁶⁶Ibid., pp. 93–94.

⁶⁷Ibid., p. 35.

⁶⁸See Antonina Vallentin, H.G. Wells: Prophet of Our Day, Daphne Wood-ward, trans. (New York: John Day, 1950), p. 124.

⁶⁹Invisible Man, p. 125.

⁷⁰Ibid., p. 138.

⁷¹See Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, Life, p. 126.

⁷²Griffin plans on ruling by terror. Ironically, his terrorist campaign gives the government an excuse to impose unprecedented restrictions on the free movements of its citizens. The government is able to exploit the panic Griffin causes to assume new powers for itself. In effect, the government ends up mirroring Griffin in his plan to rule by terror.

⁷³On this subject, see Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1956), especially pp. 48–72 and Hayek, Fatal Conceit, especially pp. 89–105.

⁷⁴For this point illustrated in a contemporary of Wells, see my essay “Oscar Wilde: The Man of Soul Under Socialism,” in James Soderholm, ed., Beauty and the Critic: Aesthetics in an Age of Cultural Studies (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), pp. 74–93, especially pp. 84–87.

⁷⁵Wells's accounts of his own experience as a teacher sound suspiciously like Griffin's. Consider this passage from Autobiography, p. 242 describing his first teaching job:

I realized my career had got into a very awkward cul-desac.... There was nothing for me now but to stick it for at least a year, get some better clothes, save a few pounds, hammer away at my writing, and hope for some chance of escape.... Had that summer weather and my returning health and vigour lasted for ever, I should have slackened slowly from my futile literary efforts and reconciled myself altogether to the role of a second rate secondary teacher.

Wells sounds even more like Griffin in a letter in response to his second teaching assignment: “I have suffered as the son of not very well-to-do and rather illiterate parents at the hands of these scholastic pirates and I do not think I could refrain from the chance of sticking a knife under the ribs of this system of fraud if every friend I had stood on the opposite side” (quoted in Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, Life, p. 80).

⁷⁶For a thoroughgoing treatment of the contempt for the common man and the promotion of an intellectual elite in Wells and other Victorian and modern authors, see Carey, Intellectuals. See also George Watson, The Lost Literature of Socialism (Cambridge, U.K.: Lutterworth, 1998), p. 49.

⁷⁷Invisible Man, p. 71. On Griffin and Kemp as doubles, see Draper, Wells, p. 49. There are, of course, significant differences between Griffin and Kemp. As shown by the reference to the Royal Society, Kemp is more willing than Griffin to work within established scientific channels. Kemp wants Griffin to be like him and pursue a more conventional path as a professional scientist: “Don't be a lone wolf. Publish your results; take the world—take the nation at least—into your confidence” (p. 128).

⁷⁸Invisible Man, p. 77.

⁷⁹For a somewhat different yet parallel interpretation of this passage, see McConnell, Science Fiction, pp. 125–26.

⁸⁰See Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, Life, Illustration 12 (discussed on p. 63), for a remarkable cartoon Wells drew when he was twenty of himself “meditating on his future,” which includes placards proclaiming: “How I Could Save The Nation” and “Wells's Design for a New Framework for Society.”

⁸¹I analyze these developments in the specific case of Oscar Wilde in “Man of Soul,” pp. 74–93. For the connection between Wilde and Wells, see McConnell, Science Fiction, pp. 42–43.

⁸²See Haynes, Wells, p. 83. That is why Wells defines his samurai in A Modern Utopia as an order of “voluntary noblemen” (p. 121). Wells stresses the openness of his aristocratic order, and yet eventually he comes around to admitting that the samurai will become “something of a hereditary class” (p. 299). This is just one more sign that Wells's socialism would take us out of capitalism only to return us to medieval conditions.

⁸³On Nietzsche and Wells, see Sutherland's “Introduction” in Luke, ed., Invisible Man, p. xxv, Carey, Intellectuals, p. 140, Bergonzi, Wells, pp. 9–12, 153, Vallentin, Wells, p. 124, John Reed, The Natural History of H.G. Wells (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982), pp. 238–39, and John Batchelor, H.G. Wells (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 5. In In the Days of the Comet, Wells's narrator, who in many respects is an autobiographical figure, proclaims: “I'm a disciple of Nietzsche” (Seven Science Fiction Novels of H.G. Wells [New York: Dover, 1934], p. 909; bk. I, chap. 4, sec. 4).

⁸⁴Wells's attraction to supermen as leaders of the common herd often gives a fascist cast to his socialism. Although Wells opposed National Socialism as it developed in Germany, the liberal socialist George Orwell detected affinities between Wells's vision of the perfect state and Hitler's: “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there.” See “Wells, Hitler and the World State” in George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), vol. 2, p. 143.

⁸⁵See Carey, Intellectuals, p. 138.