THE SPECULATIONS OF H. G. WELLS AND T. H.

HUXLEY:
A STUDY IN THE RELATIONS OF
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 1880-1896

BRUCE DAVID SOMMERVILLE

A thesis submitted in fulfilment

of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Philosophy

Unit for the History and

Philosophy of Science
University of Sydney
FEBRUARY, 1995

Copyright

1995, 2007 Bruce David Sommerville

ABSTRACT
H. G. Wells's early books are viewed as pseudo-scientific fantasies while
the essays of T. H. Huxley, to whom Wells was indebted, are by contrast
often portrayed as positivist and speculation-free. This thesis aims to
explain and challenge these views by assessing Wells's books as works of
science in the Huxleyan mode. Huxley's philosophy assented to the creation
of speculative hypotheses, a freedom he exploited in Collected Essays (189394). A form of scientific prophecy and the device of the evolutionary
microcosm were also Huxleyan methods. Wells presented similarly imaginative,
quasi-fictional speculations in his science journalism and in The Time
Machine (1895) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) both of which
addressed issues raised by Spencer, Lankester, Weismann, Romanes and Huxley
concerning degeneration, Lamarckism and social Darwinism. Differences in
literary qualities and critical reception between these works are analysed
in terms of the story of detection and Victorian gothic literature using as
a guide R. L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886). Evolutionary narratives, concepts in psychology, atavism and
degeneration, and the dystopian romance contributed to the scientific and
literary qualities of Wells's books and Huxley's Essays. It is concluded
that The Time Machine can be considered a Huxleyan work of science while The
Island of Doctor Moreau is primarily a work of gothic literature.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank two colleagues overseas who have been very helpful in
obtaining information for me: Anne Barrett, College Archivist at the
Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London, and Sylvia
Hardy, in her capacity as Secretary of the H. G. Wells Society in London.
Closer to home, the staff of the inter-library loans department at the State
Library of New South Wales have also helped me obtain documents otherwise
inaccessible.
I wish also to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Michael Shortland, for
his guidance, his constructive criticisms of my work, and his inspirational
discussions.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
1. INTRODUCTION

Wellsian Fantasy and Huxleyan Fact

The Relations of Science and Literature

The Thesis: Wells's Books as Science

A Definition of Huxleyan Science

Methodology

2. HUXLEY, WELLS AND THE METHOD OF ZADIG

Huxley and the Status of Victorian Science

9
9

Huxley on Hypothesis, Observation and Truth

11

The Speculative Method of Zadig

18

Wells and the Method of Zadig

22

3. THE TIME MACHINE

25

An Introduction to The Time Machine

25

Science Journalism and The Time Machine

27

The Time Machine as a Possible World of Degeneration

35

4. THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU

46

An Introduction to Moreau

46

Moreau as a Microcosm of the Struggle for Existence

48

Thesis 1: Exposing Theological Illusions

49

Thesis 2: Creation Without Anaesthetic

53

Degeneration Again

54

Science Journalism, Moreau and the Abandonment of

Lamarckism

57

5. SCIENCE AND HORROR: THE CRITICAL RECEPTION

64

The Critical Reception of The Time Machine

64

The Critical Reception of Moreau

68

Huxley and His Critics

71

Anachronism in the Interpretation of Wells's Books

75

6. DETECTION AND THE GOTHIC: WELLS AND R. L. STEVENSON

Science and the Story of Detection

77
78

Degeneration, Anthropology and Psychology in

Victorian Gothic and Psychomythic Literature
Victorian Gothic and Psychomythic Conventions
iii

83
91

Page
7. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

104

Summary of Results

104

Evolution: Organic, Social and Literary

106

The Romance of the Scientist

110

Conclusion

113

APPENDIX ONE: THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

119

BIBLIOGRAPHY

120

iv

LIST OF TABLES
Page
Table 1. A Correlation of Scientific Theory in Wells's
Science Journalism and The Time Machine

32

Table 2. A Correlation of Scientific Theory in

Wells's Science Journalism and The Island of Doctor Moreau

62

Table 3. Scientific and Literary Characteristics of

Collected Essays, The Time Machine,The Island of Doctor
Moreau and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

104

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. The Comparative Narrative Complexity of Collected
Essays, The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau and
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

100

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Wellsian Fantasy and Huxleyan Fact
Few late Victorian scientific writers have reputations so much at variance as H.
G. Wells and T. H. Huxley. The early works of Wells, such as The Time Machine
(1895) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) are generally considered to be
pseudo-scientific fantasies grounded in myth. Wells is portrayed as using
scientific patter to fool the reader into accepting impossible propositions that
have no scientific value. Huxley and his Collected Essays, despite some recent
revision, are burdened with the opposite image: one of staid adherence to dry
scientific fact, of dealing in absolute truths. These divergent views of the two
men both stem from early but still influential studies: one of Wells's early
"scientific romances" where the emphasis is exclusively on "romance" rather than
"scientific" and one of Huxley in which his essays are declared to be
"antiseptically free from speculation."
If Wells and Huxley had not received such divergent readings their common
enterprise might be thought exceedingly obvious. Wells spent some time studying
under Huxley at the Normal School of Science in 1884 just before Huxley's
retirement. In his autobiography Wells (1934,1:201) describes his year in
Huxley's class as "beyond all question, the most educational year of my life."
The impact of Huxley's teaching in the lecture theatre, the laboratory and in
print was enormous as Wells and his fellow students "clubbed out of our weekly
guineas to buy the Nineteenth Century whenever he rattled Gladstone" (Wells
1901, 211). How could two figures so involved in the scientific milieux of
Victorian London, one as teacher and the other as student, produce works so
supposedly dissimilar? Do these widely accepted views of Huxley and Wells
accurately reflect the relations of science and literature in the 1880s and
1890s?
A close examination of the writing of both men yields a far more plausible
relation. Wells's image as a pseudo-scientific fantasist with his head in the
clouds, and that of Huxley as a model of scientific rectitude with his feet
immovably set on terra firma, conceal the common vein of scientific conjecture
that runs through their works. Critics of Wells's early books undervalue the
scientific theory and modes of scientific expression that inform them, while the
imaginative, indeed speculative, nature of Huxley's essays has been only
recently, but still rarely, acknowledged. By using quasi-fictional methods of
scientific prophecy both Wells and Huxley pursue evolutionary theory into the
1

remotest corners of time and space. Here, where the imaginative pressure is
greatest, the boundaries between science and literature become evanescent.
The Relations of Science and Literature
The present growth of the interdisciplinary area of the relations between
science and literature, within which this study falls, stems partly from recent
developments in the history and philosophy of science. The increased emphasis on
the provisional nature of scientific theories, and the subjective interplay
between theory formation and observation, as well as the revolutionary changes
to which science is subject in history, has led to a reassessment of the
relationship between science and literature. The idea of science as
traditionally involving rigorous deduction and controlled inference is giving
way to one that includes the role of imagination, metaphor and analogy in both
the physical and biological sciences. Emphasis is now placed on the similarity
rather than the difference between mental operations in science and literature,
a development which Stefan Collini (1993, liii) hopes may help lessen the "gulf
of incomprehension" inherent in the two cultures debate.
This more humanistic view of science informs recent research into the relations
of science and literature in the late nineteenth century, particularly that
research exploring the interaction between the science of evolutionary biology
and the Victorian novel. The fictive aspects of the narrative in Charles
Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), particularly the use of analogy,
personification and metaphor, are treated by Gillian Beer in Darwin's Plots
(1983). She also analyses the responses to evolutionary theory in the novels of
Charles Kingsley, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. The way in which fundamental
Darwinian attitudes such as uniformitarianism, change and history,
dysteleological explanation and images of abundance, appear in the works of
novelists not directly influenced by Darwinsuch as Charles Dickens and Anthony
Trollopeis discussed by George Levine in Darwin and the Novelists (1988).
While the influence of Darwin on the work of late nineteenth-century novelists
has been given priority, the relations between evolutionary science and the
imaginative literature of writers such as Wells has received little attention.
The comprehensive survey of the influence of science on Wells's thought by
Roslynn Haynes, H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (1980) still stands
virtually alone in this field. H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and
Science Fiction (1975) by Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes examines the
scientific influences on Wells's early journalism. Peter Morton goes some way
towards achieving a synthesis of Victorian science and literature in The Vital
Science (1984) where the writings of Huxley, Alfred Russel Wallace, Grant Allen
and Wells are treated as parts of an integrated scientific and literary culture.
2

Here, Wells's The Time Machine is discussed as a fictional "biological vision".

Notwithstanding these studies and much other literary criticism, some important
aspects of Wells's works in their relationship to scientific and literary
methods of the day remain neglected. The result is a devaluing of these works as
science and an almost universal acceptance of the dogma that they are simply
myths, fables, allegories or fantasies.
In this thesis I explore the relationship between the writing of Wells and
Huxley with the aim of partly correcting the imbalance of studies of Wells's
work as science, of furthering recent appreciations of Huxley's writing as
imaginative literature and bringing the scientific romance more fully into the
field of the relations between science and literature. This brings me to a
formulation of my thesis.
The Thesis: Wells's Books as Science
While the scientific influences on Wells are indicated by commentators such as
Haynes, Philmus and Hughes and Morton, I wish to make a stronger claim by
proposing that Wells's early works are not simply related to, or derived from,
science but constitute works of science in their own right. More precisely, my
thesis is that Wells's two books The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor
Moreau convey scientific theses using evolutionary theory and a hypothetical,
quasi-fictional form of expression highly cognate with the Collected Essays of
Huxley. This enables us to claim for Wells's books a scientific status equal to
that of Huxley's essays.
As the essays of Huxley are integral to this thesis a definition of precisely
what is meant by the term "science" in the context of Huxley's work is in order.

A Definition of Huxleyan Science

In addition to his formal scientific papers published in the Philosophical
Transactions, Huxley produced a series of works in the form of lectures and
printed essays aimed at the educated public, the scientific community and other
intellectuals. These were written and published over the full span of his career
and were collected in uniform volumes in 1893-94 as Collected Essays. Three
features of these essays are important to an understanding of Victorian science
as practised by Huxley.
(i) Scientific accuracy. Houston Peterson (1932, 81) notes that Huxley's essays
were written with the same regard for truth and lucidity as his lectures before
3

the Royal Institution. Huxley placed great importance on the accurate

presentation of scientific ideas in a form that could be widely understood:
I found that the task of putting the truths learned in the field, the
laboratory and the museum, into a language which, without bating a jot of
scientific accuracy shall be generally intelligible, taxed such scientific
and literary faculty as I possessed to the uttermost. (Essays 8:v)*
This passage also indicates the equally passionate desire of Huxley that his
science should reach a wide audience.
(ii) Audience. Most of Huxley's lectures and essays addressed not only fellow
scientists and the scientific bodies with which he was connected but also the
educated public. Indeed, much scientific discussion was carried on in the public
domain in Victorian England in general periodicals such as the Fortnightly
Review, the Contemporary Review, the Athenaeum, the Nineteenth Century, the
Saturday Review and the Academy. These journals, which include some to which
Huxley regularly contributed, were considered to be an appropriate forum for the
discussion of theoretical problems in biology (Morton 1984, 48-49).
Huxley's lectures provide good examples of his explication of scientific ideas
to this joint audience. Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863) was
originally presented as six Lectures to Working Men in 1860 and two lectures to
the members of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh in 1862. This work
also contains an explicit statement by Huxley of his aim of bringing his ideas
before a scientific and a general audience:

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated
truth; and were these pages addressed to men of science only, I should now
close this Essay. . . .
But desiring, as I do, to reach the wider circle of the intelligent
public [I will continue]. (Essays 7:151)
Man's Place in Nature was thus addressed to both scientists and the wider public
in the form of the audience of working men to whom the lectures were delivered.
This was partly because Huxley wished to combine scientific and social theses.
(iii) Scientific and social theses. Most of Huxley's essays and lectures argue a
thesis rather than simply convey bland facts. Again, Man's Place in Nature
epitomises this characteristic. In this work Huxley draws on his own work on
* Unless stated otherwise, all references to Huxley's essays are to the first edition of the
Collected Essays (Huxley 1893-94), and are shown in the text as (Essays [vol]:[page]).

human and simian anatomy, as well as that of others, to argue against the view
of Richard Owen that the posterior lobe and hippocampus minor is present in the
brain of man but absent in that of apes (di Gregorio 1984, 134-40). In addition
to the specific thesis arguing the classification of man as a Primate, is a
broader, related thesis in which Huxley supports Darwinian evolution, and which
has as its corollary a refutation of conservative scientific and theological
views of man's relationship to the natural world. The work was therefore a
contribution to a specific problem within the scientific community, and, at
least secondarily, a broad appeal to the public recommending Darwinian evolution
(di Gregorio 1984, 152).
These three characteristics of accuracy, audience and argument typify Huxley's
Essays. "On the Methods and Results of Ethnology" (1865), for example, discusses
the ethnological classification of the various races of man, and is both a
scientific argument favouring the zoological over the philological approach to
ethnology, and also an expression of the view that mankind should be studied
using the same criteria which apply to the study of other organisms (di Gregorio
1984, 160-62). In "Lectures on the Structure and Classification of Mammalia"
(1864) Huxley states that he finds no evidence in anthropology for the view put
forward by his rivals, James Hunt, C. C. Blake and Karl Vogt, that the negro
constitutes a separate species and is intermediate between ape and man (di
Gregorio 1984, 168-70). "EmancipationBlack and White" (1865) extends the
discussion of the measurable differences between races to include those between
male and female. The scientific data thus forms part of a wider debate
concerning the social status of women.
In summary, Huxley's Essays combine a regard for scientific accuracy, an appeal
to a broad audience including scientists and the educated public, and the
exposition of a thesis centred on some contemporary debate within the scientific
community but also affecting social issues. This conflation of scientific and
social subject matter and audience typified much Victorian science, perhaps
reaching its acme in Huxley's writing. As Peter Morton (1984, 46) points out,
Huxley's definition of biology as the study of all phenomena exhibited by living
things was chosen to license the biologist's exploration of politics, philosophy
and education.
This very public and careful exposition of scientific and social theses by
Huxley represents the particular form of scientific activity discussed in this
thesis.
Methodology
The study is mainly a historical one that involves analysing the works of Wells
and Huxley in order to determine the aims of their writing, the theses they
5

argue and the methods by which they achieve their goals. I have not provided a
separate review of the literature on Wells and Huxley as this is integrated into
the body of the work.
The thesis opens in Chapter Two with an exposition of Huxley's modern philosophy
and imaginative literary practice. The view of Victorian scientistsespecially
Huxleyas being dogmatic, unimaginative and positivist still persists despite
some recent studies to the contrary. This persistent view is challenged in
regard to Huxley by building on existing works that acknowledge Huxley's use of
imagination and literary techniques. I do this by showing that Huxley, in his
essay "The Progress of Science 1837-1887", is not Baconian, positivist or
crudely realist. He acknowledges the role of imagination and speculative
hypothesising in science, is aware of the limitations of the truth claims of
science and shows an informed concern for scientific change. The prophetic
freedom that this philosophy allowed Huxley is formally stated in his lecture
"On the Method of Zadig" which describes how ratiocination, combined with a
knowledge of existing causes, yields prophecies about events remote in time and
space. The use of this method by both Huxley and Wells in their published essays
and journalism enabled both writers to treat evolutionary theory in a highly
imaginative manner.

The intimate relationship between Wells's science journalism and his first book,
The Time Machine, is analysed in Chapter Three. Fourteen journalistic pieces are
identified as presenting scientific discussions in which a skeletal outline of
The Time Machine can be discerned, making Wells's book virtually coextensive
with his journalism. Moreover, The Time Machine has a structure identical to
that which Wells considered suited to the exposition of science. Indeed, The
Time Machine was a contribution to a debate surrounding Huxley's "Evolution and
Ethics" lecture of 1893. Wells's book employs a quasi-fictional "possible world"
or microcosma device Huxley also used extensively at this timeto argue a
thesis in biological degeneration. Taking all these factors into account, The
Time Machine cannot be dismissed as fantasy.
The received view of Wells's book The Island of Doctor Moreau as an island myth
with satirical and allegorical undertones is questioned in Chapter Four by
arguing that the work was written as an anthropological critique of theology in
support of Huxley. Again using the method of Zadig and a quasi-fictional
microcosm, Wells used this book to advance the view that civilisation has two
main components: one of organic evolution whereby the human race is sculpted by
the cosmic process from lower species, and an artificial component whereby
humans are raised to a social level through tradition and law, such as religious
law. A strong link to Wells's journalism is again found with six essays being
6

identified with Moreau. By its treatment of the artificial factor, the book also
contributed to debate over Weismannism and the discrediting of Lamarckian
evolution. Moreau, however, is also marked by deeper literary qualities which
evoke horror.
The scientific and literary qualities of Wells's books are brought out in
Chapter Five by examining the contemporary critical reception of The Time
Machine and Moreau, as well as Huxley's work. Reviewers of The Time Machine said
nothing about its artistic or literary merits, preferring to discuss its
metaphysical and evolutionary ideas. By contrast, the ideas in Moreau were
buried under an avalanche of horror and repulsion at its ghastly features. Only
one commentator perceived the book's theological critique, while two scientific
commentators questioned the accuracy of Wells's facts. In reviewing Huxley's
Collected Essays and "Evolution and Ethics" the critics either refuted Huxley's
philosophy and science or pressed him into service for their cause. Huxley's
work also evoked artistic comment. Common factors can be seen in the reception
of The Time Machine and Huxley's Essays but not between the latter and Moreau.
The tendency of critics today to group The Time Machine and Moreau together as
allegorical myths is, I suggest, an anachronistic error not supported by the
critical reception of the 1890s.
The strong element of ratiocination in The Time Machine and of horror in Moreau
require analysis in terms of the story of detection and Victorian gothic
literature. This is done in Chapter Six where R. L. Stevenson's The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is used as a literary standard combining aspects of
detection, gothic horror and evolutionary science. The Time Machine has strong
links to the story of detection. This genre owes much to the method of Zadig and
the construction of historical evolutionary narratives. Moreau, like Stevenson's
book, has much greater psychological depth and narrative complexity than The
Time Machine or Huxley's Essays. In conjunction with the use of anthropology and
atavism, these qualities mark out Moreau as a work with strong literary
resemblance to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Summarising the results of this research, I conclude in the final chapter that
The Time Machine has a form very close to Huxley's Essays and thus may be
considered a work of science, while the literary dimensions of Moreau and its
critical reception mark it out primarily as a work of Victorian gothic horror.
The use of microcosms by Wells in The Time Machine and by Huxley in
"Prolegomena" was probably a response to the increasing involvement of evolution
with social questions in late nineteenth-century England which required
innovative means of expression, causing Wells and Huxley to adopt some features
of the dystopian romance. A possible area of future research might be an
examination of how the problem of degeneration also underlies the technocratic
7

utopias of Wells's later works such as A Modern Utopia (1905). The works of
Grant Allen, a writer to whom Wells owed a debt, also deserve analysis in terms
of the interaction of evolution, social questions and literature.
These results indicate that the attempt by critics to treat the literary and
scientific aspects of Wells's work separatelyto concentrate on romance to the
neglect of scienceis ill-advised because the two are so closely compounded.
The view that The Time Machine and Moreau are pseudo-scientific is wrong.
Moreover, the persistent view of Huxley as a speculation-free writer with a
positivist philosophy is at odds with both his philosophy and the highly
speculative, fictive qualities of his work. The cognate enterprises of Wells and
Huxley indicate not so much an exchange of ideas across boundaries but rather a
busy traffic of concepts and methods between science and literature in a common
culture.

CHAPTER TWO
HUXLEY, WELLS AND THE METHOD OF ZADIG
Huxley and the Status of Victorian Science
An early but still influential study of Huxley is William Irvine's Apes, Angels,
and Victorians (1956) where Huxley's writing is said to be "arid" and
"antiseptically free from speculation" (Irvine 1956, 10-11, 24). Huxley's staid,
dogmatic image is nicely conveyed (Irvine 1956, 184-85):
Huxley seems, unlike Darwin, to have read the newspapers seated bolt upright in his
laboratory, with his microscope on one side and his dissecting knives on the other.
He allowed himself no prejudices, no sentimentalities, no illusions. He sometimes
faced facts so courageously that they bent over backwards.

This description burlesques the view that Huxley's stand against the bishops was
as unyielding as the fossiliferous strata and his defence of evolution as dry as
the bones of palaeontology.
This image of Victorian scientists, and Huxley in particular, still informs much
scholarship in the relations between science and literature. Researchers readily
embrace the findings of philosophers of science such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn
and Imre Lakatos, among others, as having, during the twentieth century,
discredited the Baconian account of science, banished positivism and subdued
scientific realism (Dale 1987, 92; Levine 1987, 9-14, 340; Natoli 1989, 24;
Shaffer 1991, xx-xxi). They are, however, less prepared to extend this embrace
to nineteenth-century science. The result is that Victorian science is often
considered, by contrast, to be authoritative, realist, positivist and employing
imagination only reluctantly, a view that informs the introduction to One
Culture by Levine (1987, 12, 22-25).
The reductive conceptions of Victorian science, cultivated partly by the
scientists themselves, are well conveyed by Tess Cosslett as epitomising
selflessness, objectivity, sincerity and devotion to truth. "So the ideal
Victorian scientist was seen as heroically rejecting the easy consolations of
religion and 'preconceived notions', unselfishly suppressing his personal
emotions in order to subordinate himself to the objective truth of Nature"
(Cosslett 1982, 15). This still-popular image of Victorian scientists is not
accurate as Cosslett shows. Both John Tyndall and Huxley, for example, were
aware of the role of imagination as the force that binds together the results of
observation and experiment into unified theories (Cosslett 1982, 25-28).
9

Moreover, Huxley's essays are slowly being recognised as combining scientific

and literary qualities by their appeal to our sense of awe, mystery and beauty,
and in their use of rhetoric, metaphor, personification, humour and poetic
symbolism (Stanley 1957; Blinderman 1962a, 1962b; Gardner 1970).
Although these movements in the literary magma are beginning to soften and crack
the Huxley monolith, his image as an unbending positivist facing facts still
persists. A comparatively recent study of Victorian science by Donald R. Benson,
for example, endeavours to revise the uncritical assumption that nineteenthcentury science was a domain where facts ruled and fictions were excluded.
Benson (1981) considers a set of theoretical statements by six late nineteenthcentury scientists including Tyndall, Karl Pearson and W. B. Carpenter that
demonstrate their recognition of the active participation of mind, the vital
part played by imagination, and the role of language, in science. There is some
irony in the fact that these scientists treated science as an essentially human,
even humane, process while their humanistic counterparts such as Matthew Arnold
and Walter Pater resignedly accepted the reductive popular conceptions of
science, conceptions which many of their twentieth-century counterparts still
accept (Benson 1981, 315). Huxley, however, is omitted from this revision, being
considered an epistemological positivist who, along with Herbert Spencer,
espoused a form of scientific naturalism still akin, albeit in a limited way, to
the objectivist line (Benson 1981, 302-303).
As the views of Irvine, Levine, Benson and Cosslett show, there remains much
equivocation in literary circles as to the status of Victorian science, to
Huxley's philosophy of science and to his literary practice. While some
nineteenth-century scientists are being granted greater recognition as having
had a more sophisticated, and thus a more humanistic, attitude towards both
science and the arts, Huxley remains a stumbling block. Despite earlier
recognition of the imaginative and literary quality of many of Huxley's essays,
a full acknowledgment of the role of speculation and imagination in Victorian
science and in Huxley's science in particular is still withheld.
This problem needs to be resolved for the following reasons. First, Edward
Davenport (1990, 27) argues that there has been an over-reaction in literary
circles to certain perceived types of positivism, both literary and scientific,
which "muddles a complex issue and threatens to quash still fascinating lines of
inquiry". Huxley may be a victim of such an over-reaction. Second, it emerges
from J. Vernon Jenson's study that Huxley's reputation for scientific veracity
and his dogmatic insistence on the absolute demonstration of biological facts
were largely rhetorical devices by which he took the moral high ground from the
bishops in his role as secular theologian removing obstacles in the way of
science (Jensen 1991, 126-42 passim).
10

This was, indeed, precisely the self-image Huxley strove to cultivate in his
lectures and essays where he spoke as "a worshipper of the severe truthfulness
of science" (Huxley 1869, 653). He repeatedly insisted on the mental discipline
and ruthless honesty required of the scientific investigator. In "Agnosticism"
Huxley states that the demands of scientific truth can be met by the rigorous
application of only a single principle. It is a principle as old as Socrates;
the foundation of the Reformation; the great principle of Descartes; it is the
fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively, it may be stated:
In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without
regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do
not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or
demonstrable. (Essays 5:246)

Although the original agnostic, Huxley is only too deeply conscious of how far
he falls short of this ideal.
But to accept his self-made image at face value is to fall victim to the very
rhetoric that was Huxley's forte and which tends to suspend disbelief and carry
us on to his demonstrable, "speculation-free" conclusions. We must therefore be
aware of the pitfalls Huxley's rhetorical strategies pose for us as interpreters
of his work and strive to see what he did as well as what he said.
This chapter addresses Huxley's philosophy of science by examining his 1887
essay "The Progress of Science 1837-1887" and his lecture "On the Method of
Zadig" (1880). The first informs us that Huxley was strongly anti-Baconian,
aware of the theory-dependent nature of observation, inclined to the invention
of speculative hypotheses and alive to the limitations of the truth claims of
science. Huxley's essay on Zadig's method of prophecy authorised the invention
of speculative hypotheses in scientific practice, enabling him to pursue
evolutionary theory into the distant past and remote future. The adoption of an
identical practice by Wells is then discussed in order to show the essential
unity of the literary practice of both writers in their scientific essays. (The
discussion of Wells's scientific romances begins in Chapter Three.)
Huxley on Hypotheses, Observation and Truth
In "The Progress of Science" Huxley advances an anti-Baconian philosophy of
science. He describes Bacon's attempt to summarise the past of physical science
and provide a method to guide its future as "a magnificent failure". The view
that a formulaic kind of method or industry leads to progress in science is the
greatest of delusions for it makes no allowance for "motherwit", the play of
11

genius, or for hypothesising (Essays 1:46-47). Huxley observes:

To anyone who knows the business of investigation practically, Bacon's notion of
establishing a company of investigators to work for "fruits," as if the pursuit of
knowledge were a kind of mining operation and only required well-directed picks and
shovels, seems very strange. (Essays 1:57)

Huxley's main complaint is that Bacon condemned the invention of hypotheses on

the basis of incomplete inductions. The practical and historical reality is
quite otherwise, argues Huxley, for the "anticipation of nature" by the
invention of hypotheses has been "a most efficient, indeed an indispensable,
instrument of scientific progress" (Essays 1:47). The progress of science has
been effected by men such as Galileo, Harvey, Boyle and Newton, "who would have
done their work just as well if neither Bacon nor Descartes had ever propounded
their views respecting the manner in which scientific investigation should be
pursued" (Essays 1:48-49). Huxley's rejection of Bacon's method could not be
more emphatic than when he describes Bacon as "a man of great endowments, who
was so singularly devoid of scientific insight that he could not understand the
value of the work already achieved by the true instaurators of physical science"
(Essays 1:46).
The phrase "anticipation of nature" refers to educated guesswork which involves
going beyond established observations. The idea that hypotheses must be drawn
exclusively from observational data is false: "It is a favourite popular
delusion that the scientific inquirer is under a sort of moral obligation to
abstain from going beyond that generalisation of observed facts which is
absurdly called 'Baconian' induction" (Essays 1:62).
According to Huxley, a scientific theory is not developed by induction from a
collection of facts. A more subtle process is involved, of which the framing of
verifiable hypotheses is an important part. Often based on slender assumptions,
these hypotheses do not necessarily arise from observational data and induction,
but frequently precede them. Indeed, any one who has studied the history of
science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the
"anticipation of Nature," that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though
verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with. (Essays 1:62)
The process of scientific discovery, then, depends on the invention of initial
working hypotheses, often of a speculative nature. Indeed, to refuse to go
beyond fact is never to initiate the process that leads to successful
observation or induction in the first place (Essays 1:62).

12

A Baconian interpretation of science is sometimes associated with the

objectivist view often attributed to nineteenth-century scientists (Benson 1981,
302). Huxley's rejection of Baconian principles is quite clear and this suggests
that a revision of Huxley's position is in order.
Huxley's phrase "the invention of hypotheses" has, indeed, a decidedly
speculative ring to it. His use implies the fabrication of an idea, a
supposition or conjecture, only partly derived from existing knowledge, which
further investigation may verify or contradict. It also implies a veneration for
the scientific imagination. Huxley conveyed this most effectively elsewhere by a
metaphor which compares the body of scientific workers to an army. The army's
advance is facilitated by "clouds of light troops", armed with the weapon of
scientific imagination, whose task is to "make raids into the realm of
ignorance" (Essays 7:271). These light troops are often annihilated or forced to
retreat to the main body of science where they regroup to make fresh skirmishes.
As Donald Watt (1978, 34) notes, this metaphor implies that Huxley saw the
scientific imagination as being rash, daring and courageous. Indeed, the
connotations of movement, exploration, adventure, and risk illustrate how
speculative Huxley considered scientific advance to be. As I show below, it also
hints at how speculative Huxley himself was prepared to be in his own writing.
Three main phases in the development of a scientific theory are distinguished by
Huxley in "The Progress of Science". They are: (1) the determination of the
phenomena of nature through observation and experiment; (2) the determination of
the constant relations between these phenomena, which are expressed as rules or
laws; and (3) the explication of these laws by deduction under the most general
laws of physical science (Essays 1:64). The invention of hypotheses plays its
part in stages two and three. The three stages, however, are an idealisation of
actual practice: no branch of science has ever strictly followed this series but
rather "observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand" (Essays
1:64-65). Again, Huxley acknowledges that speculation may precede, follow or
accompany observation and experiment. He even carries this view to the extreme
of approving of Kepler as "the wildest of guessers" (Essays 1:62).
Huxley's philosophy of science was not, therefore, Baconian but displayed a much
more sophisticated understanding of the role of speculative but verifiable
hypotheses. His comparison of the body of science to an army, however, seems to
indicate a belief that science has a solid core which inexorably advances in a
progressive way. An examination of Huxley's interpretation of the history of
science will clarify whether or not he considered science to be a cumulative
gathering of absolute knowledge.

13

Astronomy provided for Huxley an excellent example of the process of the

invention, the employment, and the eventual rejection of hypotheses. The
geocentric model of the solar system, with its circular orbits, eccentrics and
epicycles, gave way to the Copernican heliocentric system which, after Kepler,
adopted elliptical orbits. Even though the elliptical hypothesis takes no
account of the immensely complicated curve traced in space by the centre of
gravity of a planet, it is an approximation suitable for ordinary purposes.
Newton's corpuscular theory of light, now defunct, and the hypothesis of the
existence of an ether, are further examples of the provisional nature of
scientific knowledge (Essays 1:62-64). "It sounds paradoxical to say that the
attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help
of scientific errors" (Essays 1:63).
Huxley's claim that some sort of "scientific truth" could be attained seems,
however, to imply a belief in an absolute, objective truth. What, therefore, did
Huxley mean when he spoke of truth?
For Huxley, truth was a relative concept. The errors which typify scientific
progress are caused by the limits of our faculties, "while, even within those
limits, we cannot be certain that any observation is absolutely exact and
exhaustive" (Essays 1:63). Thus any given generalisation may be true at one time
but untrue at a later time, when practical developments may enlarge our powers
of observation. What is true at one period of scientific history may not be true
in another (Essays 1:63).
Although truth is subject to change, the concept of the "enlargement of our
powers" seems to imply a closer approximation to the truth as time goes by,
through more accurate observations and the framing of more exact hypotheses. Did
Huxley consider that successive hypotheses have different degrees of truth and
were approaching an absolute truth? He seems to indicate this when he states: "a
doctrine which is untrue absolutely, may, to a very great extent, be susceptible
of an interpretation in accordance with the truth" (Essays 1:63). The assumption
that the planets have circular orbits was true enough at a time in history when
observations were cruder than now. The circular orbit hypothesis was sufficient
to correlate those observations. But the state of observational astronomy in
Kepler's time supported a new truth, namely that of elliptical orbits. Today, it
is a "matter of fact" that the centre of gravity of a planet follows a
complicated undulating line (Essays 1:63-64). Huxley seems to be implying that
continual improvements in our powers of observation result in the correction of
previous hypotheses, yielding a series of generalisations that approach an
absolute truth.

14

Huxley's final word in this section of the text, however, leaves little doubt as
to his view: he states that the idea of absolute truth is another working
hypothesis which provides a basis for a symbolic interpretation of nature:
It may be fairly doubted whether any generalisation, or hypothesis, based upon
physical data is absolutely true, in the sense that a mathematical proposition
is so; but, if its errors can become apparent only outside the limits of
practicable observation, it may be just as usefully adopted for one of the
symbols of that algebra by which we interpret Nature, as if it were absolutely
true. (Essays 1:64)
The existence of an absolute truth, for Huxley, was just a useful assumption
which assists in our interpretation of Nature, and then only within existing
observational limits. In considering Huxley's philosophy, therefore, we should
bear in mind that his statements about truth were conditional on this very
important caveat.
This caveat of the symbolical function of scientific truths had its basis in
Huxley's understanding of the physiology of the sensory nervous system in
animals, as outlined in his address "On the Hypothesis that Animals are
Automata, and its History" (1874). In this controversial essay, Huxley describes
the relation of sensation to consciousness, arguing that the molecular changes
in the brain caused by nervous sensations have only a symbolical relation to the
physical world. Mental images arising as part of the state of consciousness have
no likeness to their external cause but are mere symbols of those external
causes, a view which underlies the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge
(Essays 1:210). A very lucid analogy is employed to convey this idea:
The nervous system stands between consciousness and the assumed external world,
as an interpreter who can talk with his fingers stands between a hidden speaker
and a man who is stone deaf and Realism is equivalent to a belief on the part
of the deaf man, that the speaker must also be talking with his fingers. (Essays
1:211)
The limitations on human knowledge therefore have a physiological basis which
restricts us to the development of an algebra of symbolical terms. This
fundamental limitation on the nature of truth and knowledge necessitates that
science be underpinned by assumed postulates, essentially metaphysical.
In "The Progress of Science" Huxley spells out these assumptions. One postulate
is the objective existence of a material world, comprised of an extended,
impenetrable, mobile substancematter. The universality of the law of causation
is a second postulate which underlies the view that the state of the universe at
15

any given moment is the result of its state at any preceding moment. A third
postulate is that the "laws of Nature", which define the relationship between
phenomena, are "true for all time" (Essays 1:60-61); that is, they operate
uniformly throughout time.
These postulates are the subject of metaphysics rather than physical science and
so cannot be proven: "they are neither self-evident nor are they, strictly
speaking, demonstrable", but their use is justified by the result that they are
verified, or at least not contradicted, by the hypotheses derived from them
(Essays 1:61).
Huxley summarises his view of the progress of science, based on his
understanding of the history of science, in the following terms:
The progress of physical science, since the revival of learning, is largely due to
the fact that men have gradually learned to lay aside the consideration of
unverifiable hypotheses; to guide observation and experiment by verifiable
hypotheses; and to consider the latter, not as ideal truths, the real entities of
an intelligible world behind phenomena, but as a symbolical language, by the aid of
which Nature can be interpreted in terms apprehensible by our intellects. (Essays
1:65)

This very precise statement of his position affirms that Huxley was strongly
anti-Baconian in his belief that science is a conjectural process in which
hypotheses guide observation. Scientific method involves the continual invention
of new hypotheses having the potential to correct or replace the old. New
hypotheses are subject to verification by observation and experiment, these
powers being continually enlarged. The concept of absolute truth entered
Huxley's philosophy only as a convenient assumption, a working hypothesis, a
term in "the algebra of science", which helps give form and direction to periods
of scientific development. His discussion of the major changes that scientific
theories undergo through history, such as the Copernican and Keplerian
revisions, shows an informed concern with the historical processes of scientific
change. His basic postulates were metaphysical. In short, Huxley's philosophy of
science was surprisingly modern and sophisticated and not Baconian, positivist
or crudely realist.
Reductive popular conceptions of science, over-emphasising the power of fact,
under-emphasising the creative role of mind and ignoring the provisional nature
of theory, which were accepted by Victorian humanists and, through them, by
their twentieth-century counterparts (Benson 1981, 315-16) do not accurately
reflect Huxley's conception of science. Along with Pearson, Carpenter and
Tyndall, then, Huxley deserves a more secure place in recent literary revisions
16

of nineteenth-century scientists, such as that undertaken by Benson.

The analysis of science achieved by contemporary philosophers of science moves
scientific statement closer to a literary mode of interpretation (Levine 1987,
17). Unlike Realist accounts of science, recent developments emphasise the
approximate nature of once-confident fact, the unsystematic way in which
evidence is sometimes gathered, the erratic movements in science (which argue
against a progressive interpretation of science), the unverifiability of the
existential reality affirmed by scientific claims and the possibility of both
predictive success and theoretical error of any given theory (Levine 1987, 15).
With this understanding science moves closer to the literary fold for the
following reasons: the observer is no longer considered as separated from the
world and merely commenting objectively upon it but is actively involved in an
interpretation; the consciousness of the observer and the constraints of the
scientists' culture infuse the subjects of science; and the authority of science
is compromised by the failure of the correspondence theory of truth. The
literary relation emerges because "like fiction, like poetry, science, on this
account, achieves its status by virtue of its 'coherence' rather than its
correspondence to external reality" (Levine 1987, 17). Science is seen as an
activity of the imagination rather than a process of cumulative discovery and
the metaphorical content of scientific language is acknowledged.
While not overstating the depth or sophistication of Huxley's philosophy, nor
proposing an equivalence between scientific and literary methods, I believe that
a better understanding of his philosophy permits greater freedom in the
exploration of his essays as speculative literature, informed by a quite modern
philosophy of science.
Ed Block Jr. notes the modernity of Huxley's idea of scientific method and its
importance as an imaginative springboard for his essays. "Each essay" writes
Block (1986, 369), "is an attempt to extend the applicability of the hypothesis
by means of rigorous inductive and deductive reasoning, imaginatively linked by
complex comparisons of process and morphology to the objects of earlier
research." Effectively this means that in his essays Huxley draws out the
implications of evolutionary hypotheses in a logically rigorous way. The
imaginative achievement lies in the mental translation of the hypothesis beyond
the limits of existing observations.
This extension of hypotheses is often highly speculative and constitutes a form
of prophecy. The prophetic activity of the scientist is explicated by Huxley in
his 1880 lecture "On the Method of Zadig". This lecture is a formal statement of
a method used extensively by Huxley in his writing from his earliest essays of
the 1850s and '60s through to those of the 1890s when the essays were published,
17

largely unaltered, in collected form. Developing the observations of Watt,

Cosslett and Block on the role of imagination in Huxley's writing, I show, in
the next section, how this method informed the writing of both Huxley and Wells.
Indeed, it supplied a unifying principle for the work of the two writers in
their expression of scientific ideas in a hypothetical mode.
The Speculative Method of Zadig
In his lecture "On the Method of Zadig" (1880) Huxley defines prophecy as a form
of "outspeaking" in which the seer seeks to impart new knowledge by extending a
knowledge of existing causes into new spheres of time and space. Huxley retells
Voltaire's story of a Babylonian philosopher, Zadig, a man learned in both
natural philosophy and metaphysics. Zadig's main qualities were wisdom,
integrity, and great powers of observation and ratiocination. Zadig displayed
these latter qualities in the tale of "The Dog and the Horse", deducing the
appearance of the Queen's dog and the King's horse from marks and footprints
they had left over the land.
Huxley's admiration for Voltaire's philosopher is understandable enough. Zadig
not only brought intelligence and acute observation to the problems of nature,
but used his wisdom to diffuse conflict between religious sects, dissolve
religious superstition, and extend freedom of belief and action. Huxley's
attacks on theological dogma had much in common with Zadig's programme.
Huxley's lecture on Zadig presents his ratiocinative method as the scientific
method. Scientific prophecy may be retrospective, prospective or spatial; it may
include divination backward in time, forward in time, and of events in distant
places. It is applied predictively in fields such as astronomy and
retrospectively in the disciplines of archaeology, geology and palaeontology
(Essays 4:6-12). These latter historical sciences, writes Huxley, "strive
towards the reconstruction in human imagination of events which have vanished
and ceased to be" (Essays 4:9). As an example, Huxley cites Cuvier's triumphant
prediction that the lower part of a particular fossil embedded in rock would
show the pelvic bones of a marsupial, an inference drawn from the exposed jaw
and teeth (Essays 4:18-19).
The fundamental axiom on which the prophetic method rests is the constancy of
the order of nature which Huxley considered to be the common foundation of all
scientific thought (Essays 4:12). It was also one of Huxley's axioms, as he
shows in his three "Lectures on Evolution" of 1876 in which he explores the
remote past to gather fossil evidence to test three hypotheses concerning the
history of nature. The first two hypothesesthat of the indefinite existence of
the earth and its organisms in their present state, and that of special creation
18

in six daysare not supported by the succession of forms in the stratified

rocks. On the other hand, demonstrative evidence of evolution is found in many
places, such as in fossil remains from the Western Territories of America. The
ancestors of the Equidae (horses, asses and zebras) as they are traced back
through time show an increasing separation of the limbs of the forearm and
foreleg, an increasing number of digits, and modifications of the molar teeth, a
history which "is exactly and precisely that which could have been predicted
from a knowledge of the principles of evolution" (Essays 4:131-32).
A central feature of these lectures is the combination of broad mental sweep and
detail, which correspond to the main elements of the method of Zadig, namely the
imaginative reconstruction on a basis of existing knowledge. The temporal
journey is aided by Huxley employing the device of an imaginary spectator
overseeing the evolution of life, through whose eyes the vision is conveyed. As
if to cap his demonstration, Huxley gives a prophecy of his own. Using the
latest investigations by O. C. Marsh, Huxley infers the existence of an even
earlier ancestor of the horse having four complete toes, with an additional
rudimentary digit, on each foot, a fossil soon discovered (Essays 4:129-32; see
also Rudwick 1972, 252-54).
This trilogy of lectures constitutes an evolutionary tour d'horizon of remote
ages on the basis of existing knowledge. It is matched in Huxley's repertoire
perhaps only by his 1868 lecture "On a Piece of Chalk" which also employs the
method of Zadig to reconstruct the past in imagination (Cosslett 1982, 28-29).
If the dead events of the past can be made to live by the prophetic method, so
can the immanent events of the future. What course would evolution take on the
return of a glacial epoch? Natural selection would favour the lower organisms
over the higher: Cryptogamic vegetation (ferns, mosses, lichens), for example,
over Phanerogamic vegetation (flowering plants), Crustaceans over Insects,
Cetaceans and Seals over Primates (Essays 2:91). Huxley also pondered such an
eventuality in reference to the inevitable heat-death of the earth predicted by
cosmologists. If the "physical philosophers" are correct in their view that the
sun and the earth are cooling, then "the time must come when evolution will mean
adaptation to a universal winter, and all forms of life will die out, except
such low and simple organisms as the Diatom of the arctic and antarctic ice and
the Protococcus of the red snow" (Essays 9:199).
The prophetic vision need not only be displaced in time but may also be
displaced in space. Transferring the vantage point away from earth helps dispel
the anthropocentrism that puts Homo sapiens at the centre of creation. This is
especially useful where Huxley considers our species as an animal with close
evolutionary affinity to the higher apes as in Man's Place in Nature:
19

Let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with
such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and employed in discussing the relations
they bear to a new and singular "erect and featherless biped," which some
enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has
brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a
cask of rum. (Essays 7:95)

Huxley's Essays take his readers into the past and the future, or to distant
locations in space, to draw out evidence for our evolutionary history, to
establish the limits of our powers over nature, and to foreshadow our
possibilities as a species (Essays 7:77-78). Such a program naturally lent
itself to an imaginative and expansive form of scientific writing. A good
example of this can be found in the early essay "On the Advisableness of
Improving Natural Knowledge" (1866) where Huxley breaks the local frame of time
and space to present a vision of scientific achievement:
For, as the astronomers discover in the earth no centre of the universe, but an
eccentric speck, so the naturalists find man to be no centre of the living world,
but one amidst endless modifications of life; and as the astronomer observes the
mark of practically endless time set upon the arrangements of the solar system so
the student of life finds the records of ancient forms of existence peopling the
world for ages, which, in relation to human experience, are infinite. (Essays 1:3738)

This excerpt also displays what Houston Peterson (1932, 12) calls Huxley's
"soaring eloquence" and his ability to crystallise his ideas around a striking
image.
The perspective may also sometimes be one of almost total omniscience, for
example "On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata and its History" where
Huxley argues that neither the consciousness nor the soul can cause changes in
the motion of matter in the brain. The human species and the lower animals alike
are automata, albeit endowed with differing degrees of consciousness. Although
permitting humans consciousness and free will, Huxley states that we are all
nonetheless "parts of the great series of causes and effects which, in unbroken
continuity, compose that which is, and has been, and shall bethe sum of
existence" (Essays 1:244).
A similar effect of omniscience is achieved in the context of "Supernaturalism"
and religion where Huxley suggests the possibility of higher, even omnipotent,
forms of life:

20

Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is easy to people
the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach something practically
indistinguishable from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. If our
intelligence can, in some matters, surely reproduce the past of thousands of years
ago and anticipate the future, thousands of years hence, it is clearly within the
limits of possibility that some greater intellect, even of the same order, may be
able to mirror the whole past and the whole future. (Essays 5:39)

This quite astonishing statement by Huxley has the warrant that his prophecy
adopts "the most rigidly scientific point of view" (Essays 5:39).
Although the passage has some rhetorical baggage, being part of the "Prologue"
to a collection of essays on science and religion, it is significant that Huxley
was willing to stick his scientific neck out so far. Watt (1978, 36-37) remarks
this tension in Huxley's writing and suggests that an "imaginative sense of
fact" (using Pater's phrase) accompanied Huxley's insistence on unadorned truth.
This stress between hypothesis and veracity is underscored when we compare
Huxley's speculative enterprises with his very cautious support for Darwin's
principle of natural selection. In an early review Huxley praises the idea of
natural selection as being a better hypothesis of species transformation than
any other, but "it is quite another matter", Huxley vacillates, "to affirm
absolutely either the truth or falsehood of Mr. Darwin's views at the present
stage of the inquiry" (Essays 2:20).
The tension inherent in this extreme caution on the one hand and extraterrestrial extravagance on the other confirms the comment by Morton (1984, 11)
that the emotional pressure of speculation was very high in the science of the
Victorian period. Tyndall provides another example of this speculative mode of
scientific thought. In his address "The Scientific Use of the Imagination"
(1870) Tyndall ([1870] 1879, 104-106) states that the scientific imagination is
the "architect" of physical theory as it binds the bare data of science together
into causal relations, or theory. As such, the scientific imagination reaches
beyond fact to conjecture and speculation about places distant in time and
space. The researcher "studies the methods of nature in the ages and the worlds
within his reach, in order to shape the course of speculation in antecedent ages
and worlds" (Tyndall [1870] 1879, 129). Another contemporary of Huxley and
Tyndall, E. Ray Lankester, brought to biology an equally imaginative mind. For
Lankester all "true science" deals with speculation and hypothesis, the
biological sciences being especially amenable to the exercise of "Phantasie".
While naturalists are right to reject the view of biology as not being an exact
science, "yet we may boldly admit the truth of the assertion that we biologists
are largely occupied with speculations, hypotheses, and other products of the
imagination" (Lankester 1880, 3).
21

Cyril Bibby, a biographer of Huxley who recognises his speculative bent, notes
how Huxley produced "uninhibited and occasionally audacious hypotheses" as he
refused to be mentally cramped by the limitations of existing knowledge (Bibby
1972, 50-51, 66). Thus, in considering a possible outcome of research in organic
chemistry and physiology, Huxley writes: "I think it would be the height of
presumption for any man to say that the conditions under which matter assumes
the properties we call 'vital' may not, some day, be artificially brought
together" (Essays 8:256). Huxley's scientific imagination was ready to embrace
even the remotest possibility.
The conjectural practices of Huxley, Tyndall and Lankester reveal the amount of
speculative license taken by scientists of the Victorian era and indicate how
the scientific literature of the period evoked a highly imaginative writer of
the stamp of Wells.
Wells and the Method of Zadig
An examination of how Wells used the method of Zadig illustrates the closeness
of the speculative enterprises of Wells and Huxley. The activity of temporal and
spatial prophecy, the construction of speculative hypotheses based on existing
knowledge, the adoption of the technique of the 'imaginary spectator', as well
as the broad imaginative sweep Wells brought to his writing, all demonstrate the
parity between the scientific writing of both men.
Wells's 1891 essay "Zoological Retrogression" employs the data of geology,
palaeontology and embryology to tell the story of human terrestrial ancestry in
the upper Silurian period. Wells (1891, 251) invites the reader "to imagine the
visit of some bodiless Linnaeus to this world" who attempts a classification of
fauna. This disembodied researcher would scarcely suspect that the inheritance
of the earth was vested in an emerging species of mud-fish, swimming in the
pluvial waters or caked in mud on the river banks. The evolutionary stages by
which the skull, skeleton and swimming-bladder became adapted to terrestrial
life is then described, foreshortened in time (Wells 1891, 251-52).
The main theme of the essay, however, is that of evolutionary retrogression. The
developmental stages of the Ascidians, or sea-squirts, tell of an organism
evolving from a relatively complex, active, free-swimming form into a simple,
sessile form, with an associated degeneration of organs. Evolution, warns Wells,
does not always take an upward path. To this extent "Zoological Retrogression"
constitutes an attack on anthropocentrism and evolutionary optimism. The
temporal journey allows us to follow the evolutionary fates of several organisms
through the possibilities of progression, or degeneration, or extinction. "There
22

is, therefore, no guarantee in scientific knowledge of man's permanence or

permanent ascendancy" (Wells 1891, 253). Wells and Huxley in their writing both
take the reader on a journey through time in remarkably similar ways.
William Thomson's estimates of the duration of the sun's life, along with works
on cosmology by Sir Robert Ball and Emerson Reynolds, prompted Wells to consider
the remoter past and future of earth. "Another Basis for Life" (1894a) describes
states where extremes of temperature and differences in chemistry would prevent
the formation of protoplasm and the oxidation of chemical elements vital to
terrestrial life. At the high temperatures of the primordial earth, however,
compounds of silicon and aluminium, which are now inert oxidised matter, "may
conceivably have presented cycles of complicated syntheses, decompositions, and
oxidations essentially parallel to those that underlie our own vital phenomena"
(Wells 1894a, 677). The chemical analogies between silicon and carbon lead Wells
to consider the startling possibility that if "the chemical accompaniments of
life were rehearsed long ago and at far higher temperatures by elements now
inert, it is not such a very long step from this to the supposition that vital,
sub-conscious, and conscious developments may have accompanied such a rehearsal"
(Wells 1894a, 677). The proposal that life may have once existed on earth in its
molten state is quite a daring retrospective prophecy, but scarcely more daring
than those of Huxley.
"Another Basis for Life" also takes the reader to the far end of the earth's
history. Drawing on cosmologists' predictions of the heat-death of the solar
system, a time may be anticipated when the carbon-based organic matter of our
age will become another geological stratum in a frozen world (Wells 1894a, 677):
In that remote future we may anticipate that the former basis of life will form
under the chilly atmosphere a lifeless covering to the dead earth, and that if we
could travel forward in time we should find above the present rocks layers of ice,
solid ammonium carbonate, solid carbon dioxide, a large series of compounds of
carbon with its former contributors to the vital process, once quasi-fluid and
active, but now solid and inert.

As remarkable as these speculations may seem, Wells here merely employs the same
method set out by Huxley in his essay on Zadig: the extension of a knowledge of
existing causes into remote areas of time and space. Wells simply opens the
curtains of time more widely.
From such a wide temporal span the step to an omniscient view is comparatively
small. This view is most apparent in Wells's first major work, The Time Machine.
First published serially in the New Review in 1895 the opening chapter discusses
the concept of a "rigid" four-dimensional universe (Wells 1895g, 100):
23

Perceiving all the present, an omniscient observer would likewise perceive all the
past and all the inevitable future at the same time. Indeed, present and past and
future would be without meaning to such an observer. He would see, as it were, a
Rigid Universe filling space and timea Universe in which things were always the
same. He would see one sole unchanging series of cause and effect to-day and tomorrow and always.

This passage achieves a similar effect to Huxley's speculation concerning an

intelligence capable of knowing the entire past and the entire future. Both
writers portray a deterministic universe where the forces of nature dictate
cosmic and biological evolution.
In the context of omniscient intelligence Huxley considered the possibility of
developing a "Jovian, or Martian, natural history" although he proposed that
such an enterprise would be unproductive (Essays 5:40). Wells, however, did
develop a type of Martian natural history by extrapolating human natural history
into the distant future and transferring the result to the older earth-like
planet. In his 1898 work The War of the Worlds Wells carefully deploys many
features of contemporary evolutionary and cosmological theory to portray the
human race as a biological species being examined by comparatively omniscient
intelligences. Wells's approach is remarkably like that in Huxley's passage
describing omniscient beings and his narrative of "scientific Saturnians".
Humanity is portrayed as "being watched keenly and closely by intelligences
greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own" (Wells 1898, 1). Just as the
superior intellects Huxley hypothesises may have greater powers over the course
of nature, so the Martians plan to intervene in the course of life on earth.
To briefly recapitulate, Huxley was by no means Baconian or positivist in his
philosophy but inclined to the use of speculative hypotheses. Huxley's essay "On
the Method of Zadig" further authorised a speculative, even prophetic, approach
to science. Huxley adopted this method in actual literary practice in his
essays, as did Wells in his science journalism. The highly speculative,
hypothetical and imaginative mode of thought common to both writers provides a
basis for viewing the early books of Wells, such as The Time Machine and The War
of the Worlds, as employing scientific and literary techniques highly cognate
with Huxley's essays.
The focus so far has been on scientific speculation in the essays and journalism
of Huxley and Wells. Attention in the next chapter centres on Wells's first book
The Time Machine (1895). Two aspects of the book are examined: its derivation
from Wells's own science journalism and Wells's use of the "possible world",
another fictive device also found in Huxley's work, as a means of contributing
to an important evolutionary debate of the day.
24

CHAPTER THREE
THE TIME MACHINE
This chapter is divided into three sections. The first provides a brief
introduction to current interpretations of The Time Machine. The second section
shows how The Time Machine adopts the highly speculative, anti-Baconian
hypothesising that typifies not only the essays of Huxley but also Wells's own
scientific articles. The book is shown to be compounded of, and indeed an
extension of, ideas discussed in Wells's science journalism. The Time Machine
also uses the method of Zadig, dialogues and ratiocinative literary techniques
which Wells considered appropriate to the exposition of science.
The third section illustrates Wells's use of a Huxleyan microcosm. This is
approached by exploring a particularly suggestive observation by Block that
Huxley uses a modern form of imaginative construct which anticipates J. B. S.
Haldane's concept of "possible worlds". Huxley's description of two
philosophical death-watch beetles living in a clock and attempting to divine its
workings is one of Block's examples. Huxley's analogical, spatial and
hypothetical methods are seen as "quasi-fictional" techniques that "punctuate
the already richly various structure of individual essays and point to a
fundamentally imaginative mode of perception and thought which puts the stamp of
originality on Huxley's work" (Block 1986, 384). This quasi-fictional technique
is closely allied to the method of scientific prophecy I am examining in Wells's
work and greatly strengthens the hand of both Huxley and Wells in an important
socio-scientific debate of the late nineteenth century. This parity between the
writing of Huxley and Wells casts doubt on the received view of these writers as
being polar opposites in the realm of fact and fantasy.
An Introduction to The Time Machine
During the 1890s Wells produced a large volume of science journalism as well as
major works such as The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The
Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds. The consensus among literary
critics that these early works are myths rests mainly on studies by Bernard
Bergonzi (1976, 39) who emphasises the mythical, fantastic and romantic aspects
of Wells's works:
His early romances, in fact, despite their air of scientific plausibility, are much
more works of pure imagination. They are, in short, fantasies, and the emphasis
should be on "romance" rather than "scientific".

25

As this statement implies, the image of the early books as myth and romance is
associated with a devaluing of their scientific elements, which are considered
to be "pseudo-scientific" (Bergonzi 1961, 33-34) and only incidental to the
literary elements. The scientific language Wells uses is considered to be only
"a kind of rhetoric to ensure the plausibility of his situations" (Bergonzi
1961, 17). Although these judgements of Bergonzi date from the 1960s and '70s
they set the tone for most subsequent criticism of Wells's work.
Literary commentators are united in their appraisal of The Time Machine as being
one of Wells's finest artistic and imaginative works (Bergonzi 1960, 42). There
is, however, less unanimity concerning the meaning of the book. The prevailing
view is neatly summarised by J. R. Hammond (1979, 79-80):
Whilst critics have been unanimous in recognising the literary merits of the work,
opinion is divided as to its meaning. Some commentators have seen the story as a
fable, an allegorical myth rich in satirical undertones. Others see it as a romance
on a par with Stevenson's Treasure Island or Haggard's King Solomon's Minesa
gripping tale of adventure which can be enjoyed by readers of all ages but need not
be studied too closely for hidden symbolisms. My own reading supports the former
view.

The portrayal of The Time Machine as a myth has been emphasised particularly by
Bergonzi (1961, 61), who considers it also to have ironical elements: "The Time
Machine is not only a myth, but an ironic myth, like many other considerable
works of modern literature."
The prevailing opinion sees The Time Machine as a work of pure fiction, a fable,
allegory or myth, or a combination of all these, containing pseudo-scientific or
bogus theoretical arguments which are "no more than a conjuring trick by the
deft writer" (Suvin 1979, 209).
The received view of The Time Machine and other early works by Wells, however,
is questioned by Haynes (1980, 9) who considers Wells "the last great literary
figure to have been so strongly influenced by science." She criticises the
portrayal of Wells's scientific romances as simply "imaginative fairy tales" by
showing the great extent to which science influenced Wells's writing techniques,
his philosophy and the themes he dealt with throughout the whole range of his
writing.
All studies of The Time Machine however, including those that treat its
scientific content, such as those of Haynes and Morton, start out from the
assumption that it is a work of fiction. Thus fictional techniques are ascribed
to it that supposedly create the illusion of reality. We read, for example, that
26

Wells "serves up a bogus theory of time" in a text that "skips over the
paradoxes" and numbs the readers' critical faculties (Morton 1984, 103-104).
While often acknowledging the historical context of The Time Machine in terms of
the development late nineteenth-century biology, commentators rarely examine in
depth its speculative links to the writing of Huxleythe use of the method of
Zadig, for example, or the microcosmand therefore fail, I believe, to
recognise the book's proper scientific value. My aim in this chapter is to carry
the scientific discussions of The Time Machine further by questioning the very
assumption that the work is simply literary fiction influenced by science and
instead attempt to establish its credentials as a work of science.
Science Journalism and The Time Machine
Wells's most productive period as a journalist spanned the years 1891 to 1900
during which he published, under his own name or anonymously, over 200 articles,
many of which (perhaps the majority) dealt with scientific themes in the fields
of evolutionary biology and cosmology. Most appeared in such journals as the
Saturday Review, the Fortnightly Review, the Pall Mall Gazette, Gentleman's
Magazine, Nature and others.
Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes reprint many of these early articles in
H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (1975). Philmus and
Hughes discuss the broad scientific influences on Wells's work in the 1890s and
emphasise the connection between the journalism and the books (Philmus and
Hughes 1975, 2):
All of these are potentially of valuealbeit in varying degreesfor understanding
The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The First Men in the Moon, and
Wells's other achievements in science fiction and for determining the progress of
his thinking that led him to A Modern Utopia and his later social tracts.

The case for an association between Wells's science journalism and books is
grossly understated here, as it is in an earlier bibliographic study by the same
authors where they state that Wells's "model of what the popular exposition of
scientific ideas should be like closely parallels the plan of a number of his
science fantasies" (Hughes and Philmus 1973, 100). These quite important
observations, which point to an essential unity between the journalism and
books, remain understated and undeveloped. The journalism is accepted as being
concerned with the "exposition of scientific ideas" while the books are labelled
as "science fantasies", the assumption being, once again, that they belong to
two different genres of writing. In this section I question this assumption by
examining the scientific concepts, the structure and methods of argumentation
common to The Time Machine and Wells's scientific essays and reviews.
27

While many of Wells's essays bear directly or indirectly on The Time Machine,
four are particularly important in understanding the origin and final form of
the book. They are "Zoological Retrogression", "The Universe Rigid", "The
Extinction of Man" and "Popularising Science".
Wells's essay "Zoological Retrogression", published in the Saturday Review in
1891, provides Wells's first treatment of degeneration. In Degeneration, Culture
and the Novel, William Greenslade (1994, 34) shows how Wells in this and other
essays "questions the teleology at the heart of evolutionary hubris" as part of
an attack on complacency and evolutionary optimism. "Zoological Retrogression"
and its relevance to The Time Machine is discussed in Chapter Two as an example
of the method of Zadig. It has wider relevance in that the concept of biological
degeneration it discusses forms the central idea of The Time Machine.

The

thesis of the book was thus derived from Wells's own scientific writing and was
merely extended and developed in the book. (A more detailed discussion of
degeneration in The Time Machine is given later in this chapter.)
"The Universe Rigid" was written by Wells and submitted to The Fortnightly
Review in 1891. The editor, Frank Harris, declined to publish it as he could
make neither head nor tail of it, so the essay has unfortunately been lost.
However, Wells makes various references to it and its basic content is known to
be a development of the idea of time as the fourth dimension. In his
autobiography Wells (1934, 1:214-5, 356-8) states the relevance of "The Universe
Rigid" to the idea of time as a fourth dimension of space.
The essential arguments of "The Universe Rigid" are believed to be those
reproduced in the opening chapter of the serialised version of The Time Machine
published in the New Review in January 1895 (Philmus and Hughes 1975, 51) and
quoted above on page 24. The Time Traveller expounds his theory to his guests,
proposing that from the vantage point of a higher dimension an omniscient
observer would have no concept of past and future, but that the whole dimension
of time would present itself as a spatial dimension in a physically "rigid"
universe (Wells 1895g, 100). Although this section was deleted in the first book
edition of The Time Machine, the essential idea of time as a fourth dimension of
space informed both the New Review and Heinemann versions. As the Time Traveller
explains to his guests:
For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen,
another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently
sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned
being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing. (TM 5)*

Unless stated otherwise, all references to The Time Machine are to the first English (Heinemann)
edition (Wells 1895h), and are given in parentheses in the text as (TM [page]).

28

An idea that found its most conscientious development in an unpublished work of

science journalism was later transferred to the New Review serial version and to
the book.
Several alarming prognoses for humanity are outlined by Wells in his essay "The
Extinction of Man", which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1894. Wells
(1894d) opens with an attack on the anthropocentric blindness of the human mind,
admonishing that "it is part of the excessive egotism of the human animal that
the bare idea of its extinction seems incredible to it." He argues that the
fossil record shows no really dominant species being succeeded by its own
descendants. At the zenith of their rule the great Mesozoic land and sea
reptiles, for instance, vanished and left no descendants in the geological
record, being almost completely supplanted by the emerging orders of mammals.
While the reason for their demise is uncertain, Wells (1894d) canvasses the
possibility (among others) of degeneration and immediately transfers the lesson
to the human race:
Sometimes, indeed, as in the case of the extinct giants of South America, they
vanished without any considerable rivals, victims of pestilence, famine, or, it may
be, of that cumulative inefficiency that comes of a too undisputed life. So that
the analogy of geology, at any rate, is against this too acceptable view of man's
certain tenure of the earth for the next few million years or so.

The "cumulative inefficiency that comes of a too undisputed life" is another

statement of degeneration which Wells then uses to question the "too acceptable
view" of our evolutionary supremacy.
Wells goes on to speculate about the creatures that evolution may now be
equipping to dispute our place as masters of the planet. He considers ants,
especially those possessing intelligence, to be a possible rival. Or perhaps a
new variety of plague bacillus such as that responsible for the plagues of the
Middle Ages may emerge to take not just a small percentage of the population
"but the entire hundred". Wells sees the oceans as the most likely source of an
evolutionary challenge. Since "experiments" in air breathing are already
occurring among the crustacea, in tropical land crabs for example, "there is no
reason why in the future these creatures should not increase in size and
terrestrial capacity". In the past crustaceans have reached a length of at least
six feet, and "considering their intense pugnacity, a crab of such dimensions
would be as formidable a creature as one could well imagine" (Wells 1894d).
The emergence of giant crabs on the evolutionary scene forms a substantial
segment of Chapter 14 of The Time Machine, "The Further Vision", where the Time
29

Traveller encounters such creatures as he stands on a sloping beach of the dying

planet almost 30 million years hence: "Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder
table," says the Time Traveller, "with its many legs moving slowly and
uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters' whips,
waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its
metallic front?" (TM 137-38)
The evolutionary precariousness of humans, the possibility of our extinction or
degeneration and the emergence of new evolutionary competitors, are common
themes in Wells's early science journalism. While some essays (such as "The
Extinction of Man") were written tongue-in-cheek, being designed to unnerve as
well as to inform, most seem to have been conditioned by a desire to jolt the
reader out of a dangerous anthropocentric complacency (Philmus and Hughes 1975,
x). Wells did this by demonstrating our biological affinity with other animals
and our subjection to the laws of evolution.
Other examples of such essays include "The Man of the Year Million" (Wells,
1893b) which once again applies the concept of degeneration to the human
species, depicting a future in which humans have become virtually all brain,
with degenerate limbs, ears, nose, teeth and jaws; "On Extinction" (Wells 1893c)
which ruthlessly unrolls the long catalogue of extinct classes, orders, families
and species of fauna, speculatively adding Homo sapiens to the list; and "The
Rate of Change in Species" (Wells 1894m) in which Wells draws attention to our
relatively slow rate of breeding and the evolutionary disadvantage this bestows
compared to rapidly breeding animals such as the frog, the Aphis and the rabbit.
These concepts of degeneration, evolutionary struggle and extinction all found a
place in The Time Machine. Moreover, Wells sometimes wrested whole passages from
his essays and placed them, with only stylistic modifications, in the book.
Consider this passage from "The Literature of the Future" (Wells 1893a) and its
counterpart in The Time Machine:
"The Literature of the Future":
Imagine yourself clambering painfully through the narrow passage to the British
Museum reading-room, over the fallen ruins of its walls. Under the great dome all
is silent and dead, save in a distant corner where some intrusive cat has set the
rats scampering, and now sits up and glares at you. A black mantle of dust softens
the outline of seats and tables; vast stalactites of cobwebs and dust hang from the
roof. The floor is knee-deep in torn paper, the dead leaves of the fall of
literature. I would that all my brethren, the oft-rejected, could come with me into
this dusty stillness, and there we would cool our hot hearts.

30

The Time Machine:

Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness. I hesitated,
and then, as I looked round me, I saw that the dust was less abundant and its
surface less even. . . . I went out of that gallery and into another and still
larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with
tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I
presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped
to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. . . . Had I been a literary
man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. (TM 113114)

The extent to which Wells drew on his science journalism in this book is best
illustrated in a table where the relevant journalistic pieces, and the concepts
they contain, are correlated with the relevant sections of The Time Machine.
Such a tabulation, given in Table 1, shows the extent of this debt at a glance
and has the benefit of avoiding laborious repetition. As this table shows, a
complete skeletal outline of The Time Machine can be constructed from issues and
ideas canvassed in the science journalism.
The role of dialogue in The Time Machine. The dialogue that opens The Time
Machine has a similar form and purpose to dialogues in several of Wells's
scientific articles. "The Flat Earth Again" (Wells 1894e), for example, is
composed wholly of a dialogue between "the perverse person", the "schoolmaster",
and the "young lady". The discussion aims at the exposition of scientific ideas
and has the same formality and anonymity that prevails in The Time Machine,
where the Time Traveller attempts to convey a subtle idea to a sceptical
audience that includes the Provincial Mayor, the Psychologist, and the Very
Young Man. "A Talk with Gryllotalpa" (Wells [1887] 1975), "The Foundation Stone
of Civilization" (Wells 1894f) and "The 'Polyphloisballsanskittlograph'" (Wells
1894i) are other scientific articles by Wells comprised largely of dialogues.
The dialogues in these essays and in the opening chapters of The Time Machine
reveal Wells's fundamental beliefs about science. Scientific dialogues convey an
anti-Baconian view of science because they expose a particular philosophy or
theory to several interpretations and therefore to doubt, leaving the reader
with a realisation of how little we know. Pro-Baconian scientific writers avoid
dialogues for this very reasonthat to portray scientists engaged in debate is
to undermine the Baconian stance, which is to conquer nature by works not
conquer adversaries in debate (Curtis 1994, 446-47). In his writing Wells shows
learned characters putting opposite views and often leaves the reader in some
doubt about the validity of the conclusions. Thus, in "The Flat Earth Again",
the perverse person takes an extreme stance in challenging the schoolmaster to

31

Table 1. A correlation of scientific theory in Wells's science journalism and

The Time Machine.

Title
Concept
The Time Machine (page)

"The Universe
The universe as a
The Time Traveller's
Rigid" (1891)
four-dimensional
dialogue with guests
(unpublished).
space-time system.
about space-time (1-9).
"Zoological
Retrogression"
(1891).

Degeneration of nonadaptive organs under

simplified conditions.

Degeneration of humans
under modern conditions
(52-54, 84, 130).

"The New
Optimism"
(1894h).

The differential fitness

of the upper and lower
classes.

The speciation of the

overworld and underground races (80-84).

"Discoveries in
Variation"
(1895c).

Biological "sports" in
plant species with an
excessive number of
floral organs.

The
the
the
the

"The Literature
of the Future"
(1893a).

Speculation about the

obsolescence of books
and libraries.

The ruined library and

decayed books in the
Palace of Green
Porcelain (113-14).

"The Foundation
Stone of Civilization" (1894f).

The rarity of fire in

nature; due to lightning
dew, rotting vegetation.

The rarity of fire in

802,701; its novelty to
Eloi/Morlocks (119-20).

"Another Basis
for Life"
(1894a).

The thermodynamic death

of the earth and its
eventual freezing.

The frozen earth seen by

Time Traveller (134-41)
("The Further Vision").

"The 'Cyclic'
Delusion"
(1894c).

The result of tidal

drag on the rotation
and orbit of earth.

The slowing of the

earth's rotation; the
lessening of the earth's
orbit (135, 140).

"Luminous Plants"
(1894g).

The intense greenness of

plants that grow in conditions of poor light.

The intense green of

vegetation growing under
a dissipating sun (136).

"On Extinction"
(1893c);"The Extinction of Man"
(1894d); "Rate of
Change in Species"
(1894m).

The possibility of the

human species being
displaced by others
including crustacea.

The extinction of the

human species; the giant
crabs which confront the
Time Traveller in the
remote future (137-38).

"The Transit of
Mercury" (1894o).

The transit of Mercury

across the face of the
sun on Nov. 10, 1894.

An eclipse of the sun by

an inner planet in "The
Further Vision" (140).

"Man of the Year

Million" (1893b).

unusual gynaecium of
flowers brought by
Time Traveller from
future (100, 146).

Degeneration of human
The tentacled "round
limbs, ears, nose, jaw
thing" seen by Time Traand teeth; expansion of
veller in "The Further
brain and hands.
Vision" (141).

32

prove that the earth is round: "'I am a Zetetic,' said the perverse person, 'and
the world is flat.'" The arguments that the schoolmaster proffers are challenged
by the temporary Zetetic as being "no more proofs than they are poetry". The
Zetetic's own proof that the earth is round is "quite unknown to the generality
of people" and is "not even found in the text-books of Physical Geography"
(Wells 1894e). The reader is left with the realisation that the proof of such a
simple proposition is fraught with difficulties and is by no means conclusive.
These early essays demonstrate Wells's critical habit of mind and show that
dogmatism and rigidity of thought were anathema to him (Philmus and Hughes 1975,
14-15). Wells carried this practice of questioning dogmatic beliefs to the
extent of querying the grounds and aims of science itself, as in "A Talk with
Gryllotalpa". This very early essay appeared in the Science Schools Journal in
1887 and is also a dialogue. The narrator, "unlearned in the vast mysteries of
physical science", questions the inflexible hubris of Gryllotalpa, one of the
"men of the new learning" (that is, of empirical science). Asking why
Gryllotalpa considers a planetary system to be a greater thing than a man, and
receiving the reply that it is measured to be so in miles and feet and inches,
the narrator provides another perspective: "A sun may be a big thing millions of
miles away, but, surely, here it is not so big as the eye that sees it. Your
duty to aid in the developing of humanity is a vast thing, doubtless, but
nearer, and every day before you, is your duty to serve your neighbour" (Wells
[1887] 1975, 20-21). By confronting a dogmatic form of scientism with a highly
anthropocentric view, Wells introduces a subjective element which questions not
only the claims of science to absolute knowledge, but questions the aims of
science itself.
The philosophical dialogue that opens The Time Machine presents a theory of time
and space opposed to the common view, accepted by his guests, of a threedimensional universe. After some resistance most of the Time Traveller's guests
accept his theory except one dissenter: "'You can show black is white by
argument,' said Filby, 'but you will never convince me.'" (TM 7) The Time
Traveller also makes reference to an opposing point of view: that of the
American mathematician, Professor Simon Newcomb, who holds ideas that the Time
Traveller considers would be accepted only by "foolish people" (TM 3).
The presentation of scientific ideas through dialogue in his journalism and in
The Time Machine reveals Wells's own understanding of the provisional nature of
scientific theory. By permitting the introduction of dissenting points of view,
and by offering a variety of hypotheses for the consideration of the reader,
Wells adopted a sophisticated stance not unlike that of Huxley. The questioning
of contemporary hypotheses in the domain of science indicates a rejection by
Wells of orthodoxy and of authority. Unquestioning deference to authority, even
33

to scientific authority, was not, for Wells, the scientific method (Haynes 1980,
37).
Another essay supporting the identification of The Time Machine with Wells's
science journalism is his article "Popularising Science" which appeared in
Nature in 1894. Here Wells (1894j, 301) outlines his method of presenting
scientific concepts to the public:
The fundamental principles of construction that underlie such stories as Poe's
"Murders in the Rue Morgue," or Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" series, are
precisely those that should guide a scientific writer. . . . First the problem,
then the gradual piecing together of the solution.

The structure of The Time Machine follows these principles. The Time Traveller
on his arrival in the year 802,701 is presented with the puzzle of understanding
the new world. He subsequently pieces together the evolutionary history of the
Eloi and the Morlocks. During his eight days in the future the Time Traveller
constructs three progressively more inclusive theories to explain his
observations. They are:
1.The theory of a social paradise in which the Eloi are seen as the degenerating
descendants of a society that has achieved absolute social and economic
security, a total conquest of nature and an ending of the struggle for existence
(TM 45-55).
2.The theory of a world populated by two species of man, one surface-dwelling
and the other subterranean, both being descendants of the common ancestor who
achieved the social paradise. Geographical isolation has caused speciation and
the perfect balance of the species has caused degeneration. Industry is
underground and the Morlocks are the mechanical servants of the Eloi (TM 80-85).
3.The theory that the Eloi and the Morlocks have arrived at a new relationship
whereby they are engaged in a struggle for existence: Necessity, in the form of
a shortage of food, causes the Morlocks to prey on the Eloi for their meat (TM
97-98, 105). This represents the final form of the theory
(TM 129-31).
By constructing The Time Machine in this way Wells adhered to his own criteria
for the exposition of science as well as demonstrating an anti-Baconian form of
scientific practice. By providing hypotheses that are then modified or corrected
Wells conveyed implicitly, as did Huxley explicitly, a philosophy in which the
formulation of theory is tentative and subject to change. Even the most
developed form of a theory does not represent a truth but merely the best
34

available hypothesis. As the Time Traveller remarks: "It may be as wrong an

explanation as mortal wit could invent. It is how the thing shaped itself to me,
and as that I give it to you." (TM 131)
Wells's preferred method of scientific exposition, where readers are offered a
mystery to solve, a series of "problems to exercise their minds upon" (Wells
1894j, 301) such as appear in the works of Poe and Conan Doyle, reveals a
particular association in Wells's mind between science and a certain branch of
fictional literature. A discussion of The Time Machine and the method of Zadig
in relation to detective fiction is provided in Chapter Six.
In summary, the main features of Wells's science journalism are found also in
The Time Machine: namely, the use of the method of Zadig, the formulation of
speculative hypotheses, the use of topical scientific theories in evolution and
cosmology, the use of dialogue, the presentation of an anti-Baconian philosophy
of science, and the aim of attacking evolutionary optimism. The construction of
the book, whereby a problem is presented for solution, conforms to Wells's own
opinion as to how science should be presented to the public. A skeletal
structure of The Time Machine can be assembled from passages contained in
Wells's science journalism. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the book
is contiguous with Wells's science journalism and not simply "influenced" by it
nor merely has "parallels" to it. The received view that The Time Machine should
be considered myth, a work of science fantasy, or pseudo-scientific is an
extremely parochial view that ignores the book's substantive claim, evidenced
above, to the status of a scientific essay.
This claim is further substantiated below where I show how The Time Machine
presents a thesis that was a contribution to a significant scientific debate of
the day concerning evolutionary optimism. This debate gave rise to Huxley's
essay "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society" (1888), his "Evolution and
Ethics" lecture of 1893, and his subsequent "Evolution and Ethics: Prolegomena"
(1894), as well as Wells's The Time Machine. Huxley's use of quasi-fictional
methods and the development of this technique by Wells formed part of a
significant episode in the history of late nineteenth-century biology.
The Time Machine as a Possible World of Degeneration
The similarity between Huxley's "garden metaphor" and the future age depicted by
Wells in The Time Machine is discussed by Hughes (1977, 58-60) who sees the
utopian world of 802,701 as being an outcome of the "horticultural process"
Huxley described in "Prolegomena". Moreover, the undermining of this utopia by
the evolutionary struggle between the Eloi and the Morlocks parallels the threat
to civilisation posed by biological instinct also discussed by Huxley in this
35

essay (Hughes 1977, 60). This association of The Time Machine and Huxley's
garden metaphoror "possible world" to use Block's formulationis very germane
to this thesis and is a concept developed below.
By taking up the ideas of Block, Hughes and Haynes I show that Wells not only
addressed Huxley's thesis and adopted similar methods, but extended them to
produce a highly imaginative work of science that, in fact, offered a critique
of the views of both Huxley and Spencer. The expression of a cosmic determinism
by Wells, moreover, was more rigorous than that of Huxley, while Huxley's
expression of scientific ideas reached a highly aesthetic level.
Huxley's insistence, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, on the amoral nature of
the cosmic process was a response to a popular optimistic evolutionism in which
evolutionary forces were considered by the educated public and some scientists
to be inherently progressive. Morton (1984, 58) describes it as involving a
belief that nature is in some deep and vaguely comprehended way in alliance with
nineteenth-century man's deepest needs and most noble goals; that, despite all
appearances to the contrary, inevitable progress is built into the fabric of the
universe.
This view found expression in various nineteenth-century scientific and literary
works, especially after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859).
Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Drummond and Winwood Reade, and literary
artists such as George Meredith, all had in common an evolutionism which
involved an acceptance of the main tenets of Darwinian theory coupled to
progressive social doctrines or visions. As early as the 1860s, despite its
negation of inherently progressive or teleological factors in nature, Darwinism
was considered by these writers to be robust enough to support an optimistic
interpretation of evolution (Morton 1984, 53-70).
The progressive interpretation placed on evolutionary theory was discussed by
the Victorian evolutionary psychologist James Sully. In an 1878 paper written
jointly with Huxley, Sully observes that evolution is often held to be almost
"synonymous with progress" especially in terms of moral development. There is a
strong subjective, or anthropocentric, element in progressive evolutionary
doctrines because they assume that there is an increasing value in existence
over time. Nevertheless, since consciousness as manifested in human life is
considered to be the highest phase of development, and as an increase in
happiness and well-being is said to accompany human development, "we do not
greatly err when we speak of evolution as a transition from the lower to the
higher, from the worse to the better" (Sully 1878, 751-52).

36

This progressive view of evolution, argues Sully, leads almost inevitably to an

optimistic one. "That there is a tone of optimism in much of the more popular
exposition of the doctrine of evolution needs not be proved" notes Sully (1878,
772). The theories of Darwin and Spencer, moreover, contain ideas which tend to
support "a cheerful and contented view of things." The optimistic expressions of
evolution are, however, misguided because the pain involved in the struggle for
existence constitutes a large drawback from the progressive gains, and the
principle of natural selection favours a pessimistic view because of the
tendency for organisms to multiply "down to the limits of bare existence" (Sully
1878, 772). These drawbacks enunciated by Sully also formed the basis of
Huxley's criticisms of optimistic evolutionism.
The evolutionary doctrine of biological and social progress was most commonly
associated with Spencer who, in The Man Versus the State, writes (1885, 68):
All these [social] evils which afflict us, and seem to the uninitiated the obvious
consequences of this or that removable cause, are unavoidable attendants on the
adaptation now in progress. Humanity is being pressed against the inexorable
necessities of its new positionis being moulded into harmony with them, and has
to bear the resulting unhappiness as best it can.

Huxley's response to these views was presented in a series of microcosms which

sustain three distinct but related arguments: 1)The cosmic process of evolution
is non-moral; that is, has no inherently moral or immoral features and cannot be
considered progressive; 2) Whatever social perfection may be achieved will be
threatened by a return to struggle due to the pressure of an increasing
population on limited resources; and 3) The struggle for existence in modern
civilisation has for practical purposes ceased and an ethical process has
supplanted it.
The first argument prefaces both "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society"
and "Evolution and Ethics". In the former Huxley condemns the "optimistic dogma"
that the evolutionary state of nature is "the best of all possible worlds" as
being "little better than a libel upon possibility" (Essays 9:196). The evidence
for a benevolent factor in evolutionary progress must be balanced against the
evidence of a malevolent factor; the tendency towards the consummation of
pleasure must be balanced by that of the production of pain. If the skill
displayed by a wolf in tracking a deer, for example, can be considered a
positive feature of nature, it must be weighed against the pain the wolf
inflicts on catching the deer. The study of nature can lead to only one
conclusion: that nature is neither moral nor immoral but non-moral, "a material
logical process accompanied by pleasures and pains, the incidence of which, in
the majority of cases, has not the slightest reference to moral desert" (Essays
37

9:202). In "Evolution and Ethics" Huxley emphasises the evolutionary legacy of

pain and suffering that accompanies the human animal in the struggle for
existence. Success in the struggle is due not only to our sociability, curiosity
and imitativeness but also to our cunning and "ruthless and ferocious
destructiveness." These "ape and tiger" qualities have become defects for
contemporary humans because their intrusion into civilised life "adds pains and
griefs, innumerable and immeasurably great" to those already imposed on us by
the natural state (Essays 9:51-52).
The second argument addressing the application of evolutionary theory to society
is given by Huxley in "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society" and
"Prolegomena" where Huxley invents several quasi-fictional microcosms or
possible worlds to illustrate the Malthusian problem of population pressure on
limited resources. Huxley uses the fiction of a perfect society, Atlantis, to
imagine a world where the production of food exactly meets the wants of the
population, and where the struggle for existence has been abolished. "In that
happy land," writes Huxley, "the natural man would have been finally put down by
the ethical man", and the millennium would have finally set in (Essays 9:206-7).
But this perfect state may only be temporary as any economic disturbance, such
as a shortage of food caused by the pressure of population, would readmit the
forces of Nature and reintroduce struggle. "The Atlantis society might have been
heaven upon earth . . . yet somebody must starve. Reckless Istar, non-moral
Nature, would have riven the ethical fabric" (Essays 9:206-7).
In "Prolegomena" Huxley reiterates this argument by using two more microcosms.
The first is his famous garden metaphor where the state of nature, as it exists
beyond his garden wall, is contrasted with the state of art, as it exists within
his garden wall. Huxley sees the former as epitomising the tendency to
variation, to multiplication without limit, and so to selection of the fittest
in the struggle for existence. The latter epitomises the "horticultural process"
where the intelligence and energy of humans sustains an artificial order (Essays
9:1-15). The next, much more extensive, microcosm is then developed as Huxley
extends the analogy. He tells a story in which human intervention in the state
of nature creates a perfect order, or state of art, secured by the inventions of
modern science. Huxley imagines a group of English colonists establishing a
bridgehead against nature from which the cosmic process is excluded, order
established and artificial selection imposed upon plants, animals and humans:
With every step of this progress in civilization, the colonists would become more
and more independent of the state of nature; more and more, their lives would be
conditioned by a state of art. (Essays 9:19)

38

An omnipotent Administrator is set over this world to select artificially,

according to ideals of beauty and utility, those organisms, human and non-human,
who will share this earthly paradise (Essays 9:16-21).
This garden of Eden, however, would have its serpent: the instinct of
reproduction. Overpopulation would threaten the artificial order so carefully
established. The Administrator would be forced to destroy the superfluous
population or permit the reintroduction of the struggle for existence. The
population pressure on finite resources in contemporary human society will,
therefore, tend either to despotism or struggle, neither of which is
satisfactory to a civilised society (Essays 9:20-23). In each of the microcosms
put forward by Huxley the artificial order ultimately yields to the cosmic
process and struggle resumes. No comfort or cause for optimism can be derived
from the theory of evolution; the cosmic process has little to offer civilised
humanity.
Huxley's alternative to optimistic evolutionismhis third argumentwas to
propose that improvement in the human condition may be aided by cultivating an
existing ethical process in society in opposition to the cosmic process of
evolution in nature. "In place of ruthless self-assertion" writes Huxley of the
ethical process, it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or
treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely
respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to
the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to
survive. (Essays 9:82)
The contrasting of the state of nature to a state of art flags an increased
emphasis on the possibilities of an artificial environment created by humans
through the practical effects of science. This view is expressed in "The
Progress of Science" where Huxley speaks of "a new Nature" created by mechanical
artifice, the employment of new chemicals in manufacture, and the artificial
breeding of plants and animals. The practical outcomes of material science are
transforming Europe and America and protecting the population from pestilence
and famine. They are the foundation of wealth, comfort and security, and
"conduce to physical and moral well-being" (Essays 1:51). Inventions in
transport and telegraphic communications are reducing inequalities between
individuals, classes and nations:
All these gifts of science are aids in the process of levelling up; of removing the
ignorant and baneful prejudices of nation against nation, province against
province, and class against class; of assuring that social order which is the
foundation of progress, which has redeemed Europe from barbarism. (Essays 1:108)

39

In contrast to the romantic and a priori arguments of the social evolutionists,

Huxley's "transformational optimism" lays increasing stress on civil or
artificial history rather than natural history as a basis for ethics and
morality (Paradis 1989, 34-42).
The microcosm in the "Prolegomena" establishes Huxley's view that under the
aegis of science civilisation has banished the cosmic process and replaced it
with an ethical process:
I have endeavoured to show that, when the ethical process has advanced so far as to
secure every member of society in the possession of the means of existence, the
struggle for existence, as between man and man, within that society is, ipso facto,
at an end. And, as it is undeniable that the most highly civilized societies have
substantially reached this position, it follows that, so far as they are concerned,
the struggle for existence can play no important part within them. (Essays 9:36)

It was in the ethical process that Huxley saw our salvation. The energies of the
race must be devoted to improving the "State of Art of an organized polity" in
opposition to the State of Nature, and by which a worthy civilisation may be
developed and sustained for as long as the earth remains habitable (Essays 9:4445).
Huxley's third argument, that the struggle for existence in society has ended,
seems at first glance inconsistent with his second argument that population
pressure is invariably a cause of struggle. Huxley appears on the one hand to
have employed evolutionary theory to support his Malthusian argument on
population, while criticising its use by others. Michael S. Helfand addresses
this problem by proposing that Huxley was attempting to withhold the scientific
weapon of evolution from his political rivals, such as Spencer, Wallace and
Henry George, while at the same time using it to support a Liberal imperialist
political policy then under attack from these social scientists. In attempting
to support the political status quo, "Huxley's separation of social ethics from
natural process was more a rhetorical shift . . . for Huxley constantly
reintroduced the fundamental assumption of natural selection, Malthusian theory"
(Helfand 1977, 176).
Be that as it may, the relationship Huxley established between the cessation of
struggle in society and the role of population increase in natural selection may
be understood as a warning: the struggle for existence has ceased, but could reemerge if the population were to increase beyond the material resources of the
nation. This warning is clearly sounded in "The Struggle for Existence in Human
Society" (Essays 9:209-10).

40

In his essays and books of the 1890s Wells weighed into this debate concerning
the ethics of evolution. Mark R. Hillegas (1961, 656-7) point outs that most of
Wells's early books, including The Time Machine, were designed to "jolt the
English speaking world out of its complacency" by an imaginative presentation of
Huxley's "cosmic pessimism". Wells began his attack on optimistic evolutionism
in his piece "Zoological Retrogression". Many other short, speculative pieces
such as "On Extinction", "The Extinction of Man" and "The Rate of Change in
Species" all sought to undermine Victorian attitudes of security and selfsatisfaction.
Wells did this in The Time Machine by developing the possible world of a Golden
Age very similar to Huxley's microcosms. The world of the year Eight Hundred and
Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One depicts the same opposition of social
perfection yielding to a struggle over limited resources. At first Wells's Time
Traveller believes that a prosecution of the struggle for existence between rich
and poor, the Overworld and the Underworld, has indeed led to a millennium, a
Golden Age:
Life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been
assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No
doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social
question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed. (TM 130)

Although the new conditions of existence constitute a social paradise, the

cultural overtones are subordinate as Wells focuses on the biological results
(Morton 1984, 105). The Time Traveller's theory of a Golden Age is an illusion,
for the idyllic existence of the child-like Overworld people covers a grim
reality: the social perfection the two races once enjoyed has given way first to
speciation, and then to a Darwinian struggle for existence for limited
resources. The Underground species now preys on its degenerating Overworld
competitor. "Mother Necessity," concludes the Time Traveller, "who had been
staved off for a few thousand years, came back" (TM 131).
Wells's microcosm reverses the arguments of the social evolutionists by
depicting, with cool logic, a view of a world where the doctrine of evolutionary
necessity has triumphed. "Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon
the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse,"
says the Time Traveller, "and in the fulness of time Necessity had come home to
him" (TM 105-106). Thus Wells points the argument: if one wishes to apply
evolutionary theory rigorously to existing social conditions one must be
prepared to accept the same evolutionary outcomes that apply to other, lesser,
species.

41

In criticising the view that evolution can be applied prescriptively to human

society, however, Wells gave Huxley only qualified support; for Wells drove his
point home by focussing on the concept of biological degeneration which Huxley
ignored. In The Time Machine Wells presents a paradox concerning the effect of
modern conditions on human evolution, shown by the Time Traveller's theory of
the degeneration of the Overworlders:
I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and
those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of
Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and
intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under
which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions. (TM 53)

The utopian conditions under which the Overworlders live has eliminated the
premium on intelligence and physical strength so important for survival in the
natural world, and the biological degeneration of these traits has inevitably
followed.
The theme of degeneration in The Time Machine was stated in a letter from Wells
to Huxley dated May, 1895, which reads in part (Wells 1895d):
I am sending you a little book that I fancy may be of interest to you. The central
ideaof degeneration following securitywas the outcome of a certain amount of
biological study.

Although degeneration was associated with a wide range of issues of class, race,
gender and fitness in post-Darwinian England (Greenslade 1994), the degeneration
of non-adaptive organs as an outcome of natural selection was most clearly spelt
out by Lankester in his book Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880). Here,
many examples are given of organisms such as various parasites, barnacles, and
Ascidians, which have become adapted to less varied and less complex conditions
of existence and have thus evolved from a complex ancestor to a simpler
descendant. Such less complex conditions may accompany adaptation to parasitism,
immobility, vegetative nutrition, or a reduction in size of an organism. The
human species, too, may be subject to degeneration under civilised conditions
warns Lankester (1880, 61):
It is possible for usjust as the Ascidian throws away its tail and its eye and
sinks into a quiescent state of inferiorityto reject the good gift of reason with
which every child is born, and to degenerate into a contented life of material
enjoyment accompanied by ignorance and superstition.

The use of degeneration by Wells was also informed by the Spencer-RomanesWeismann controversy over the mechanism of degeneration, carried on in the
42

Contemporary Review during 1893, 1894 and 1895. Spencer (1893b) held that the
diminution in the size and efficiency of organs occurs by disuse, which through
the inheritance of acquired characteristics is then passed on from one
generation to the next. In reply, both August Weismann (1893, 332-36) and G. J.
Romanes (1893) considered "Panmixia", or "Cessation of Selection", to be the
primary cause of degeneration. These two terms refer to a statistical argument:
if selection ceases to act on a particular organ due to a change in the
organism's conditions of existence, the natural range of variations in the organ
on the lower side will no longer be eliminated, leading to a decrease in the
mean size and efficiency of the organ.
Degeneration, then, may be a possible, perhaps even inevitable, outcome of the
ameliorated conditions implied by the "levelling up" of Huxley's new Nature, or
the evolution towards perfection that Spencer envisaged. It matters not whether
the millennium is attained by Huxley's cultivation of the State of Art, or by
Spencer's eventual triumph of the fittest, for in either case the longer-term
result will be cessation of selection, degeneration, and the loss of the mental
and physical traits that distinguish us from the lower animals.
Huxley was aware of the importance of degeneration in evolutionary theory
(Essays 9:4, 6, 80-81, 88) and used it as a supplementary weapon in his armoury:
And, again, it is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency
to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodelling
of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of
those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be
upward or downward. Retrogressive is as practicable as progressive metamorphosis.
(Essays 9:199)

This reference to degeneration, however, concerns adaptation to secular cooling,

not to the artificial conditions of civilisation. The problem of degeneration
following security is something Huxley did not address in "Evolution and Ethics"
and associated essaysa rather odd omission considering the topicality of
degeneration. Why Huxley declined to discuss the evolutionary outcome of "the
fitting of as many as possible to survive" is an open question. Perhaps his
preoccupation with the immediate environment and short-term future may reflect a
belief that, given the slowness of evolutionary change, human nature is
practically fixed (Paradis 1989, 32). Nevertheless, the interplay between
evolutionary theory and social theory in these later essays caused Huxley to
fall away somewhat from his usual scientific rigour.
Nowhere near as reticent, Wells the student overreached Huxley the master by
adhering to a biological determinism that Huxley failed to sustain. By strictly
43

applying Darwinian natural selection to modern conditions of existence Wells

pointed out a weakness in the arguments of both Huxley and Spencer.
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing Huxley's reaction to Wells's critique
as it is unlikely that he read itHuxley was quite ill in May 1895 and died the
following month.
Neither Huxley nor Wells, however, equivocated over the longer-term prospects
for the planet. Thomson's prediction of a comparatively short life-span for the
sun indicated the extinction of all life in a few tens of millions of years.
Although "Some work of noble note may yet be done" (Essays 9:86) in the
millennia remaining, Huxley was resigned to the ultimate resumption of the
cosmic process over our domain:
The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations. If, for millions of
years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some time, the summit will be
reached and the downward route will be commenced. The most daring imagination will
hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and intelligence of man can ever
arrest the procession of the great year. (Essays 9:85)

To witness the end Wells moves his Time Traveller forward thirty million years.
Tidal drag has now caused one side of the earth to face an enlarged and cooling
western sun. The atmosphere is thin and cold. A deep twilight broods over the
earth and snow falls continuously over the world. The Time Traveller observes an
eclipse which threatens to extinguish the already diffuse light:
The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the
east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge
of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was
silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of
man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that
makes the background of our livesall that was over. . . . The breeze rose to a
moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In
another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity.
(TM 140-41)

The cosmological predictions of physicists such as Thomson evoked great

intellectual and emotional responses from evolutionary writers such as Huxley
and Wells. Whereas Wells expressed the heat-death of the solar system in quite
moving prose, Huxley went one step further by expressing it poetically. He wrote
an obituary for Tennyson that appeared in the Nineteenth Century in November
1892, the last few lines of which may just as well be called "Ode to
Thermodynamics" (Huxley 1892b, 832):

44

Not thine [mourner] to kneel beside the grassy mound

While dies the western glow; and all around
Is silence: and the shadows closer creep
And whisper softly: All must fall asleep.

The significance of this poetic expression of secular cooling for this

discussion is that it demonstrates Huxley's readiness to extend his scientific
writing a highly aesthetic and emotive literary form. While Wells overreached
Huxley in adhering to a scientific determinism concerning degeneration, Huxley
exceeded Wells in the expression of scientific ideas in a literary form. For
this reason also, then, the portrayal of Huxley as a model of scientific
exactitude and Wells as a peddler of pseudo-scientific fantasy is quite wrong.
The relation of Wells's The Time Machine to his science journalism and to the
essays of Huxley confirms the central argument of this thesis: namely, that
Wells's book is characterised by the same imaginativeindeed speculative
quasi-fictional techniques that typify Huxley's, and indeed his own, scientific
essays and may thus be considered a work of science along Huxleyan lines. Wells
not only engaged with the debate surrounding "Evolution and Ethics" but
developed the discussion with reference to the concept of degeneration following
security. He did this by extending a knowledge of existing causes into the
remote future using a prophetic technique identical to Huxley's method of Zadig
and depicted the result in the form of a possible world similar to those
developed by Huxley in "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society" and
"Prolegomena". Both Wells and Huxley employed remarkably similar fictive devices
in order to contribute to a scientific discussion of the day.
This argument is pursued in the following chapter where I examine, in a similar
light, Wells's second book The Island of Doctor Moreau. Using the method of
Zadig, his own science journalism and an evolutionary microcosm that enables the
evolutionary process to be compactly displayed, Wells supported Huxley in his
clash with the theologians.

45

CHAPTER FOUR
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
An Introduction to Moreau
The Island of Doctor Moreau, written during late 1894 and early 1895, was almost
contemporaneous with its predecessor, The Time Machine. However, unlike the
latter, Moreau did not first appear serially, but in book form, published in
London in April 1896 and then United States in August 1896.
The predominant view emerging from literary criticism of Wells's early works
that has taken place over the last thirty years sees Moreau as a myth with
satirical overtones. While a Huxleyan theme of evolutionary struggle is
recognised, the work is nevertheless placed within the tradition of the English
island myth along with Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Utopia and Treasure
Island (Bergonzi 1961, 106-107, 111). Moreau is also seen as a satire, allegory
or parody on the primitive aspects of human life and the superficiality of
morality (Hammond 1979, 86-88). In science fiction, viewed as a rhetorical
strategy for satiric and utopian fiction, scientific theory is "wrenched" from
its scientific context to become a fiction, fantasy, a myth where "the theory of
man's descent is transformed in the fiction into a hypothesis about his essence"
(Philmus 1970, 125). The perceived allegorical elements of Moreau lend
themselves to its interpretation as a Swiftian satire (Philmus 1993, xxvii) as
well as a parody or fable on the Christian religion in a Darwinian age
(Batchelor 1985, 20-21; Crossley 1986, 33). That the work may be a portrayal, in
the character of Moreau, of the mad scientist, and thus a critique of the
intellectual conceit and superiority of the scientific mind, is another view
(Crossley 1986, 30-32; Haynes 1988, 13-18).
Most commentators make reference to some or all of the interpretations listed
above, as well as acknowledging the importance of Huxley in the development of
Wells's ideas. Indeed, there are several studies that take up Wells's
relationship to Huxley and the relevance of Huxley's essays to Moreau. Warren
Wagar (1961, 62-67 passim) discusses Wells's thought in connection with Huxley's
interpretation of Darwinism, which underlay Wells's fundamental outlook on
nature, human nature and the conditions of human progress. The idea that Moreau
is a representation of Huxley's metaphor of the garden is put forward by Jack
Williamson (1973, 69-76) who writes extensively on the influence of Huxley on
Wells, showing how Huxley's description of the cosmic process of evolution
influenced Wells's depiction of nature in Moreau. Haynes (1980, 25-36) discusses
the relationship between the essays of Huxley and Moreau, including an account
46

of Huxley's views of the cosmic process of evolution and the theological

critique in Moreau. The embodiment of the remorselessness of evolution in the
character of Moreau is also discussed by Haynes (1988, 15-17).
Although the scientific context of Moreau has been examined, such treatments are
rare. As most of the above examples indicate, literary commentators are
primarily concerned with Moreau as a work of mythical literary fiction, a
fantasy, allegory or fable. Its scientific characteristics are treated within
this context and made subsidiary to it. Most researchers follow Bergonzi (1961,
15) in being concerned with Wells "as an imaginative [literary] writer rather
than a purveyor of ideas". Even where Wells is declared to be among "the
scientists and the thinkers" he is still treated in relation to his "fellowartists" such as Conrad, and the romantic literary pattern of criticism is
pursued, as by Parrinder (1970, 6, 16).
The most recent and substantial work on Moreau is The Island of Doctor Moreau: A
Variorum Text, edited by Philmus (1993). In the introduction and appendices
Philmus examines the bibliographic history of the work, provides a complete
annotated variorum text (based on the 1896 American Stone and Kimball edition),
prints Wells's first draft of Moreau, and discusses the origins, influences and
reception of the work, including its relevance to contemporary debates on human
evolution (Philmus 1993, 188-210). Adopting the same perspective as most other
critics, however, Philmus (1993, 197) feels that the literal veracity of the
science in Moreau could only be seriously examined "at the expense of its
satiric meaning".
My aim is to do precisely that: to put aside the context of mythical, satiric
and romantic fiction and focus on the scientific purpose and basis of Moreau in
an attempt to establish its credentials as a work of science. In doing so I draw
upon and extend the work of those researchers mentioned above, particularly
Haynes, Philmus and Williamson. By bringing together these separate treatments
of the scientific aspects of Moreau the book may be assessed as a scientific
essay uniting the method of Zadig, the evolutionary microcosm and Wells's
science journalism, as explicated in the preceding two chapters. I test the
proposition that Wells not only advanced the same theses as Huxley but employed
the same quasi-fictional techniques, in order to produce an extended scientific
critique. In the second section of this chapter I examine (as for The Time
Machine) the extensive relationship between Wells's science journalism and
Moreau. The book and the essays were used as a means to consider and articulate
developments in late nineteenth-century evolutionary science.

47

Moreau as a Microcosm of the Struggle for Existence

A prominent aspect of the essays of Huxley and the early works of Wells is a
recognition of the unremitting pain, suffering and death inherent in the
struggle for existence among animals. While humans may have a more developed
consciousness than the lower animals, our evolution has been accompanied by pain
and suffering just like the brutes. Indeed, because of that higher level of
consciousness the suffering of humanity at the hands of the cosmic process may
be much greater; for, argues Huxley in one essay, every rise in the scale of
being has brought with it a higher sensibility to pain (Essays 5:48). In the
discussion of the evolutionary relations of consciousness, of pleasure and pain,
and their relevance to morality, Huxley again invokes an imaginative microcosm.
He imagines a world where consciousness has evolved, but where neither pleasure
nor pain exist:
Therefore, it would be a justifiable hypothesis that, long after organic evolution
had attained to consciousness, pleasure and pain were still absent. Such a world
would be without either happiness or misery; no act could be punished and none
could be rewarded; and it could have no moral purpose. (Essays 5:47-48)

This marginalisation of pleasure and pain as part of a wider evolutionary

standpoint is a device Huxley used to emphasise the amorality of the cosmic
process. Contrary to the view of many ecclesiastics, pleasure and pain need not
be seen as a part of God's plan, or as a supernaturalistic system of reward for
the just and punishment for the bad. The evolution of pain in general, and its
occurrence in the life of the individual, may just as easily be cosmic
accidents. Similarly, Wells's Doctor Moreau argues:
It may be that save in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust, invisible
long before the nearest star could be attainedit may be, I say, that nowhere else
does this thing called pain occur. (M 47-48)*

Since at least the beginning of the Mesozoic epoch, argues Huxley, "pleasure has
been distributed without reference to merit, and pain inflicted without
reference to demerit, throughout all but a fraction of the higher animals"
(Essays 5:48). As Haynes (1980, 35; 1988, 15-17) notes, the cosmic process is
personified in the physiologist and vivisectionist, Moreau, who attempts to turn
animals into men using physiological, surgical and hypnotic procedures. The
struggle that takes place on Moreau's island is a metaphor for the struggle for
existence, and like the workings of natural selection Moreau is indifferent to
suffering (Haynes 1980, 32-33; Williamson 1973, 80).
*

All references to Moreau are to the Variorum Text (Wells [1896] 1993b) edited by Philmus, and are
shown as (M [page]). Philmus's own comments as expressed in the introduction, appendices, and
notes, are shown as (Philmus 1993, [page]) or similar.

48

The evolutionary history of the human species is temporally contracted into the
eleven months that the narrator, Prendick, spends upon Moreau's island. This
contraction of the results of natural selection into a short time span and
spatial area has the effect of concentrating in the reader's mind the suffering
involved in evolution, as well as reducing the vastness of the processes
involved to a mentally manageable framework of time and space. This feature of
the work is viewed by one critic as a stratagem by Wells "to awaken his readers
to the tense and imaginative involvement befitting a novel-reader" (Haynes 1980,
29). The dramatic qualities, the condensed drama of evolution, that inheres in
this telescoping of time and contraction of space is viewed wholly as a literary
technique to involve the reader of fiction. As I argue in the earlier chapters,
however, the creation of a temporal and spatial microcosm is a technique of
scientific prophecy found frequently in the essays of Huxley and Wells, and in
Moreau more likely serves this end. Again, a knowledge of existing causes, and
an imaginative extension of them into distant locations in time and space, is
used to produce an expansive form of scientific writing.
In the next section we see how in Moreau Wells further developed this technique
to enter the debate between science and theology that was the target of many of
Huxley's later essays. Wells intervened on the side of Huxley by supporting two
crucial theses of Huxley. He did so using the method of Zadig and the technique
of the microcosm.
Thesis 1: Exposing Theological Illusions
Neither Huxley nor Wells harboured any illusions concerning the nature of human
evolution and the present state of evolutionary play. The idea that evolution
involves a tendency to a steady upward improvement in the physical and mental
attributes of the human speciesor a gradual perfection of our social
institutionswas ridiculed by Huxley as an "optimistic dogma . . . little
better than a libel upon possibility" (Essays 9:196).
Huxley's repudiation of the optimistic interpretation of nature was aimed not
only at the evolutionary optimists but also at conservative Christian
theologians and their belief in a higher purpose behind the travails of
humanity. It aimed to discredit any system of beliefs or cult which drew an
optimistic veil over the brute realities of life as revealed by evolutionary
science. For example, in refusing to bow down to Comte's Religion of Humanity,
Huxley writes in "Agnosticism" (1889):
I know of no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of
humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness of
prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He

49

is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes; a blind prey to impulses,
which as often as not lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which
make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with
barren toil and battle. He attains a certain degree of physical comfort, and
develops a more or less workable theory of life, in such favourable situations as
the plains of Mesopotamia or of Egypt, and then, for thousands and thousands of
years, struggles with varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed
and misery, to maintain himself at this point against the greed and ambition of his
fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise persecuting all those who
first try to get him to move on; and when he has moved on a step, foolishly confers
post-mortem deification on his victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who
want to move a step yet farther. And the best men of the best epochs are simply
those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins. (Essays 5:256-57)

This passage is quoted at length for two reasons. First, it displays the
technique of telescoping a large duration of time into a compact statement of
events, by which Huxley takes a wider or more distant view similar to that of an
omniscient observer overseeing a microcosm. Second, it portrays human evolution
in as ruthless a light as possible to dispel the illusions behind those systems
of belief which attempt to glorify humanity.
Although Huxley's criticisms of religion date at least from his clash with
Bishop Wilberforce at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science in 1860, his most sustained attack was mounted after his
retirement from the Normal School of Science and the Royal School of Mines in
late 1884, in a series of articles taking on Gladstone and conservative members
of the English clergy.
In an article published in the Nineteenth Century in November 1885, Gladstone
claimed that the story of creation in the Book of Genesis, as a divine
revelation, was supported by science. Developing the view of Genesis as
describing a four-fold division in the creation of life in the order of (1)
water-population, (2) air-population, (3) land-population, and (4) landpopulation consummated in man, Gladstone (1885, 696) states in his article that
"this same four-fold order is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by
natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and
established fact." He also states that the account of the creation of the
planets and the sun given in Genesis is affirmed in its essentials by modern
cosmology (Gladstone 1885, 697-98). The theory of evolution and Huxley's
doctrine of epiphenomenalism both come under attack as Gladstone (1885, 705-6)
deplores the displacement of mind and spirit from their exalted positions by a
purely physical order.

50

Although the target of this article was the translation of a French work on the
history of religion, nothing could have been better designed to raise Huxley's
hackles than the claim that the story told in Genesis was a "demonstrated
conclusion." Huxley responded with "The Interpreters of Genesis and the
Interpreters of Nature" (1885) where he again goes to the geological record for
evidence of the types of animals and plants known to have existed in the past.
Huxley concludes that the evolution of life occurred in the order of (1) waterpopulation, (2) land-population and (3) air-population; or if insects are
considered to be "fowls" of the air, then the land- and air-populations may be
said to have evolved concurrently (Essays 4:142-52). Moreover, the "pious
opinion" that humans are the acme of creation is insupportable, writes Huxley,
for natural science does not confirm the view that the human species is in any
sense the "latest" product of evolution or its "final achievement" (Essays
4:152-54).
Huxley argues against the view that human beings are in any sense a special
product of creation, or that physical evolution tends to successively higher
grades of being with humans at the pinnacle. His thesis is that the human being
is an animal, an outcome of the same evolutionary process at work upon all other
species. Huxley's essay, moreover, constitutes a refutation of views that are
not supported by natural science but which attempt to impose a "false science".
Huxley states that it is one of the roles of science to combat this: "true
science will continue to fulfil one of her most beneficent functions, that of
relieving men from the burden of false science which is imposed upon them in the
name of religion" (Essays 4:163).
In "The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study" (1886) Huxley provides
a more detailed submission on theology from an anthropological viewpoint.
Drawing on the Hebraic scriptures, other historical studies and his own
observations of Australian aborigines, Huxley argues that the worshipping of
gods has its origin in the primitive belief that people consist of a body and a
spirit, the latter surviving death (Essays 4:296-302). Some spirits are thought
to constitute a powerful force for good or evil. Huxley observes that a
fundamental feature of all religious worshipfrom ancient civilisations as
found in Japan, China, Hindustan, Greece, Rome, and even in the relatively
isolated societies of Tongais "a primitive cult in the shape of a worship of
ancestors, which is essentially an attempt to please, or appease, their ghosts"
(Essays 4:320). This "sciotheism", writes Huxley may be modified into
"monolatry" where ancestor-worship is thrown into the background and one god
becomes raised to eminence who is considered to be a cosmic god; the only god to
whom worship is due on the part of that nation (Essays 4:346-49). A more
elaborate moral code occurs with monolatry, where the god is regarded as one who
punishes any breach of the moral laws or any disrespect shown (Essays 4:349).
51

Although advancing a positive argument regarding the origins of religious

worship, the "Evolution of Theology" was equally a negative attack on
ecclesiastics and theologians for it exposed the primitive and essentially
irrational thought processes that underlie religious dogma by contrasting them
with the clarity and rationality of a scientific account. As Huxley wrote to a
correspondent: "I have no doubt there is a great deal in what you say about the
origin of the myths in Genesis. But my sole point is to get the people who
persist in regarding them as statements of fact to understand that they are
fools" (see L. Huxley 1900, 117). In his theological controversies Huxley's aim
was not simply to counter theological dogma with science, but to ridicule his
enemies in the process.
Quite early in "The Evolution of Theology" Huxley makes clear the antipathy of
religious superstition to his scientific purpose, stating that he is not
interested in theology "as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any
rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment", nor is he
concerned with theology only as "a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find
the pains of life too hard to bear" (Essays 4:287-88).
In Moreau Wells took up Huxley's critique, representing the theological code of
dogmas by the beliefs of the Beast People who populate the island and who have
reached the stage of monolatry. The "fixed ideas" (M 52) that Moreau implants in
their minds through surgery and hypnotism, are supplemented by the "Law", a
system of prohibitions, injunctions and propitiations that the Beast People
ceremoniously recite. These constitute a set of religious taboos:
Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to claw Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men? (M 38)

Coupled with the Law is the belief by the Beast People in a system of
punishments for those who transgress the Law. A quasi-deification of Moreau has
arisen in their limited minds and they see him as a powerful, omnipotent figure
capable of intervention in their lives, often for purposes of retribution:
His is the House of Pain.
His is the Hand that makes.
His is the Hand that wounds.
His is the Hand that heals. (M 38)

This ritualistic formula, and the grey-haired creature who is the Sayer of the
Law, exemplify religious moral codes and the theologians who teach them, and is
52

designed to emphasise the confusion of cause and effect inherent in religious

belief. The Sayer of the Law repeats an "idiotic formula" that has little basis
in logic. The Beast People follow the Law not out of a sense of reason but out
of habit, superstition and fear. The powers they attribute to Moreau are
fantastic and impossible: "His is the lightning flash. . . . His are the stars
in the sky" (M 38).

Here, Wells is not only equating theology and religious

injunction with a simplistic formula that makes no appeal to reason, but is

showing also that there exists a whole series of causes and effects beyond the
understanding of the Beast People, about which they know nothing. Their attempts
to divine the purpose of their creator have given rise to a fantastic web of
superstition incapable of demonstration and which we, as omniscient observers in
our role as reader, clearly perceive to be hopelessly confused. The implication
is that ecclesiastics and theologians are so bounded by their ignorance and
limited powers of reason as to be blind to the greater series of cause and
effect which is the subject of scientific inquiry. Wells portrays the upholders
of Hebraic and Christian dogma as living in a well of ignorance. As the Sayer of
the Law remarks to Prendick: "I sit in the darkness and say the Law" (M 39). The
darkness in which the Sayer of the Law sits may be taken to represent the
intellectual darkness that surrounds theological dogma. Wells, like Huxley,
aimed not only to supply a critique of religion, but to ridicule doctrinaire
theologians.
Thesis 2: Creation Without Anaesthetic
The theme of the indifference of the cosmic process to the suffering of the
higher animals was stressed time after time by Huxley in essays written between
1885 and 1895. As I relate in Chapter Three, Huxley emphasised the amorality of
the cosmic process by comparing the positive and negative featuresthe skill
and painexhibited in nature when a wolf chases and catches a deer. Pain has no
moral purpose and Huxley derided the theological proposition that the struggle
for existence "is a state of probation, and that the seeming injustices and
immoralities of nature will be compensated by-and-by" (Essays 9:198). The study
of nature can lead to only one conclusion: that nature is neither moral nor
immoral, but non-moral.
This view is restated in "An Apologetic Irenicon" (1892) in which Huxley
considers moral providence to be confined to the tiniest fraction the universe;
that is, to the civilised portion of humanity. But beyond that fragment the
predominant reality is the cosmic process, embodied in the struggle for
existence which "is no more righteous or unrighteous than the operation of any
other mechanism" (Huxley 1892a, 568).

53

In Moreau Wells portrays the evolutionary cosmic process as being indifferent to

the propitiatory gestures and systems of belief of its quasi-human products. It
operates without reference to the pain, suffering and death by which it moulds
us. Moreau's refusal to use anaesthetic in his vivisection of animals represents
the indifference of the cosmic process to the suffering of sentient life. As
Moreau blandly confesses to Prendick, "To this day I have never troubled about
the ethics of the matter" (M 49). Prendick understands that Moreau's actions are
without purpose and take no account of morality:
I could have forgiven him a little even if his motive had been only hate. But he
was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless
investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so,
to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. (M 63)

While Huxley states that the procession of events we call nature is "the
incarnation of a faultless logical process, from certain premisses in the past
to an inevitable conclusion in the future" (Essays 9:195), Wells displays a
similar view by equating the events on the island with the workings of "a vast
pitiless Mechanism" (M 64). Not only Prendick, but also "Moreau (by his passion
for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People with
their instincts and mental restrictions" are torn ruthlessly "amid the infinite
complexity of its incessant wheels" (M 64). Our ability to see the Beast People
as mere victims of processes beyond their control is augmented here by the
depiction of Prendick, Moreau and Montgomery as being victims of an even higher
level of cosmic determinism; as being equally subject to the operation of a
mechanical process beyond their control. And the process is the same: that of
evolutionary instinct, manifested in Moreau's curiosity, Montgomery's moral
weaknesses and Prendick's reversion to fear and struggle. Wells transfers the
burden of the brutes to man, as does Huxley. This section of Moreau anticipates
the conclusion of the work where Prendick compares the disorder of the island to
human civilisation (M 86-87).
Degeneration Again
To recapitulate, in Moreau Wells opposes the scientific view of the evolution of
life to the theological view of a Creator of life by depicting the former as an
amoral mechanical process amenable to rational explanation, and the latter as an
irrational web of superstitious beliefs and injunctions. Having established this
inconsistency, Wells extends his thesis by depicting a collapse of religious law
under the stress of biological instinct. Moreau's elaborate biological
procedures have only limited success. The human creatures he creates are
invariably unsatisfactory, and Moreau complains that "as soon as my hand is
taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again"
54

(M 51). The Beast People's efforts to adhere to the Law are undermined
continually by animal instincts:
A series of propositions called the Law (I had already heard them recited) battled
in their minds with the deep-seated, ever-rebellious cravings of their animal
natures. This Law they were ever repeating, I found, and ever breaking (M 52-53).

Their falling away from the civilised ideal is seen in their tendency to assume
the animal state when alone or at night (M 53). The Leopard Man's stalking of
Prendick on his first night on the island (M 27-30), and the mysterious killing
of the rabbits Montgomery had brought to the island (M 57), are the first
intimations of a general collapse. There follows a reversion of the Beast
People, physically, mentally and morally, to their wholly animal state (M 7885).
The figure of Dr Moreau is likened by Williamson to Huxley's Administrator. On
this view, Moreau intervenes in the state of nature to produce an artificial
state of art. His death leads to the re-establishment of the state of nature
(Williamson 1973, 75-76). This interpretation, however, requires some comment
because the pain and suffering Moreau's creatures undergo is hard to reconcile
with order or a state of art. Moreover, the creation of humans from animals
implies an evolutionary, rather than an artificial, movement contracted in time.
Moreau's death and the reversion that ensues represent not just an invasion of
order by disorder, but a biological degeneration, a physical and mental change
in the individual as well as the society.
This declension from a quasi-civilised state to a natural state governed by
instinct is meant to illustrate how close modern Homo sapiens is to its
primitive forebear. Moreau's statement that "Man has been a hundred thousand
[years] in the making" (M 51) is a reference to the minimum duration of the Old
Stone Age during which humans evolved from their ape-like ancestor to a
condition almost identical to modern humans. In Wells's view (1896a, 594) this
is a short time in evolutionary terms, progress since then having been almost
wholly of an artificial kind, the product of "tradition, suggestion, and
reasoned thought." The removal of selective pressure, represented in Moreau by
the death of the vivisector, can lead to biological degeneration and
retrogression, as it does in The Time Machine. Two strands of human development
are therefore set out in Moreauthe evolutionary and the artificial, both of
which constitute a tenuous thread by which civilisation hangs. The artificial
factor in Moreau is represented by the Law of the Beast People and their quasicivilised way of life.

55

Wells therefore presents us with a paradox. The artificial factor is

insufficient to keep the animal in check, yet its removal leads to regressive
behaviour and a collapse of civilised life. Moreover, the removal of the
selective pressure of evolutiona result of modern civilised conditionsleads
to degeneration in any case. In Moreau, Wells does not try to resolve this
dilemmato do so would involve the introduction of further theses that would
complicate his central argument, which is to refute the comforting tenets of
traditional theology by contrasting them with a vision of the human species as
an animal.
These two thesesthat of the scientific baselessness of traditional theological
dogma, and the amorality of the cosmic processsupport one another in Moreau as
they do in Huxley's writing. The grotesque theology of Dr Moreau's Beast People
is opposed to a raw portrayal of humans as a product natural selection, as an
animal attempting to adhere to moral ideals for which the species is illadapted.
While these two complementary theses are found throughout the later writings of
Huxley the following passage from "An Apologetic Irenicon" may have been Wells's
immediate model. Huxley (1892a, 569) dramatises the conflict between instinct
and injunction:
So far as I am able to interpret the evidence which bears upon the evolution of man
as it now stands, there was a stage in that process when, if I may speak
figuratively, the "Weltgeist" repented him that he had made mankind no better than
the brutes, and resolved upon a largely new departure. Up to that time, the
struggle for existence had dominated the way of life of the human, as of the other,
higher brutes; since that time, men have been impelled, with gentle but steady
pressure, to help one another, instead of treading one another mercilessly under
foot; to restrain their lusts, instead of seeking, with all their strength and
cunning, to gratify them; to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the ordered
commonwealth, through which alone the ethical ideal of manhood can be attained,
instead of exploiting social existence for their individual ends. Since that time,
as the price of the high distinction of his changed destiny, man has lost the happy
singleness of aim of the brute; and, from cradle to grave, that which he would not
he does, because the cosmic process carries him away; and that which he would he
does not, because the ethical stream of tendency is still a rill.

These words of Huxley are quoted extensively because they contain, in microcosm,
the essential statement that Wells makes in Moreau.
The argument of this section may be summarised thus: in The Island of Doctor
Moreau Wells again supported Huxley in a scientific debate of the day, this time
involving theology, and did so using a microcosm in which the process of
56

evolution is temporally and spatially contracted. The displacement of the

temporal and spatial framework of evolution to an abbreviated time and space
also illustrates the use of the method of Zadig by providing an omniscient view
and because the declension of the Beast People constitutes a speculative
hypothesis concerning the possibility of social and biological degeneration.
Moreau is therefore at one with its predecessor, The Time Machine, in its
propounding of a scientific thesis and in its use of a mode of expression common
also to Huxley's essays. We see in both works not only the influence of
scientific ideas but the adoption of common techniques of argumentation.
As in The Time Machine there was an extensive interaction between Moreau and
Wells's science journalism, with the journalism not only feeding into the book
but the activity of writing Moreau producing, in turn, scientific essays. Both
book and essays attempted to formulate responses to important developments in
evolutionary theory occurring at this time. The next section explores this
relationship with a view to illustrating the relationship of the two genres in
Moreau.
Science Journalism, Moreau and the Abandonment of Lamarckism
Pain in the evolution of the higher animals is a major theme of Moreau. Pain in
the life of the species and the individual is discussed by Wells in his 1894
essay "The Province of Pain". Wells (1894l) describes how the nerve-ends which
give rise to feelings of pain are most common on the surface of the body and
less so in the muscles and internal organs. Internal pain is less focussed and
less acute than external (surface) pain. Many nervous structures produce no
feelings of pain: those that produce the sensations of sight and sound, for
example, or that maintain the tonic contraction of arteries or the beating or
the heart. The brain itself is incapable of feeling pain when it is cut or even
completely destroyed. The brain, however, is the receptor of much nervous
sensation from other parts of the body and is the seat of the impressions and
associations of pain. Thus an amputated limb, such as the amputated leg of a
frog, will continue to respond to painful stimulation but being disconnected
from the brain could not be considered to feel pain. Pain may also arise
independently from immediate nervous impressions as in the emotions of fear,
jealousy or anger. "Pain independent of sensation is possible, but so is
sensation without pain" (Wells 1894l, 58-59).
It is likely that Wells's knowledge of physiology came from his own scientific
training, both in Huxley's teacher-training course and while obtaining his
B.Sc., as well as from his wider scientific reading and teaching. The knowledge
and experience he gained from his work as a lecturer in biology at University
Tutorial College and as teacher of practical work in dissection for the College
57

were probably the main sources for this discussion. A Fellow of the Zoological
Society, Wells used his knowledge of zoology, anatomy and physiology in his twovolume elementary Textbook of Biology (1893d), which gives detailed dissection
procedures for the rabbit, frog, dogfish and amphioxus, as well as numerous
invertebrates and plants.
The account of sensation and pain in "The Province of Pain", in conjunction with
Wells's own activities in science education and writing, provided the basis for
Chapter 14 of Moreau, "Doctor Moreau Explains". For Moreau pain is a "little
thing" that is less common among living things than we imagine. To emphasise his
point Moreau drives the small blade of a penknife into the muscle of his thigh,
explaining:
The capacity for pain is not needed in the muscle, and it is not placed there, is
but little needed in the skin, and only here and there over the thigh is a spot
capable of feeling pain. . . . Not all living flesh is painful; nor is all nerve,
not even all sensory nerve. There's no tint of pain, real pain, in the sensation of
the optic nerve. If you wound the optic nerve, you merely see flashes of light
just as disease of the auditory nerve merely means a humming in our ears. Plants do
not feel pain, nor the lower animals; it's possible that such animals as the
starfish and crayfish do not feel pain at all. (M 48)

Many of the views Moreau puts forward were taken by Wells from "The Province of
Pain", which concludes on a cosmic note: "Such considerations as these point to
the conclusion that the province of pain is after all a limited and transitory
one; a phase through which life must pass on its evolution from the automatic to
the spiritual; and, so far as we can tell, among all the hosts of space, pain is
found only on the surface of this little planet" (Wells 1894l, 59).
The bulk of Moreau's explanation, however, pertains to the possibilities of
vivisection and the transplantation of tissue. Again, we find a correlation
between Wells's scientific essays and Moreau. In "The Limits of Individual
Plasticity", Wells (1895f, 90) discusses the possibility of surgically modifying
the bodily form and physiological activity of the individual organism, citing
familiar medical procedures such as amputation, the excision of organs and
tissues, and the surgical curing of a squint. Physiological changes may also be
wrought by surgery where secondary changes in pigmentation or the secretion of
fatty tissue follow surgical modification. Vaccination and blood transfusion
provide examples of artificial physiological change. The transfer of living
matter between one animal and another is also discussed where such examples as
the grafting of the cock's spur onto the bull's neck undertaken by Hunter, and
the grafting of skin and bone from a freshly-killed animal into a human subject
to facilitate healing, are cited (Wells 1895f, 90).

58

This essay arose as part of the activity of writing Moreau. Completing his first
draft by Christmas 1894, "The Limits of Individual Plasticity" (appearing in
January 1895) emerged from the Chapter "Doctor Moreau Explains" (Philmus 1993,
xviii, 188). The essay was deployed again in Wells's second draft in the form of
a heavily revised paste-up (Philmus 1993, 149) and was carried through to the
final version. "Doctor Moreau Explains" is a synthesis of "The Province of Pain"
and "The Limits of Individual Plasticity" and contains an explicit statement of
some of the scientific arguments on which Wells's prophetic method relied.
Moreau, however, was written not only as a theological critique in support of
Huxley nor just as a compendium of ideas Wells expressed in his science
journalism, but as part of a complex response to developments in evolutionary
theory involving August Weismann. Again, the debates concerning Spencerian
social evolution, Lamarckism and Weismannism, which inform some aspects of The
Time Machine, also exercised Wells's mind in Moreau and in certain other essays
he published at this time.
In these essays Wells focused on the differences between evolution in nature and
in human society. The view that modern humans are not greatly removed from their
brute ancestors is implicit in Moreau and is explicitly argued by Wells in two
essays that appeared in 1894 and 1896 respectively: "The Rate of Change in
Species" and "Human Evolution: An Artificial Process". The former is an
exposition of the idea that the degree to which a species is capable of
adaptation to new conditions depends partly on its rate of reproduction. Since
natural selection acts on the individuals of each generation of a species, the
rate at which the species turns over new generations will determine how rapidly
the species may adapt to new conditions. The human is one of the most slowly
breeding animals so the "individual adaptability and the subtlety of his
contrivance are no doubt great, but his capacity for change as a species is,
compared with that of the harvest mouse or green-fly, infinitesimal" (Wells
1894m, 656).
The great evolutionary inertia Wells attributed to the human species underlay
his view that modern humans are scarcely any different, biologically, from their
Palaeolithic ancestors. This insight is more fully developed in "Human
Evolution: An Artificial Process". This latter essay, almost certainly an
offshoot of the writing and revision of Moreau (Philmus 1993, 188), should be
considered contiguous with the book. The essay opens by restating the central
argument of the earlier essaythat the rate of reproduction of humans is so
slow that our evolutionary adaptability as a species is extremely low. Wells
adds to this argument additional factors such as the unnatural social restraints
under which modern people reproduce, and the tendency of civilisation to
preserve the unfit, concluding that "it appears to me impossible to believe that
59

man has undergone anything but an infinitesimal alteration in his intrinsic

nature since the age of unpolished stone" (Wells 1896a, 592) (emphasis in
original).
Modern humans, however, are in some ways different from our Palaeolithic
ancestors. Arising originally out of the evolution of speech, the change is
mainly extrinsic: a development of the scope and nature of thought, leading to a
growth in moral suggestion and knowledge (Wells 1896a, 593):
Out of speech, by no process of natural selection, but as a necessary consequence,
arose tradition. With true articulate speech came the possibilities of more complex
co-operations and instructions than had hitherto been possible, more complex
industries than hunting and the chipping of flints, and, at last, after a few
thousand years, came writing, and therewith a tremendous acceleration in the
expansion of that body of knowledge and ideas which is the reality of the civilised
state. [Emphasis added.]

Since the advent of speech, then, the modern human being has advanced by virtue
of an artificial evolution of knowledge and tradition, not by organic evolution.
This conviction is a response to the changing views among biologists concerning
the inheritance of acquired characteristics. While Wells was no dogmatic
Lamarckian (Philmus 1993, xvi) neither did he initially accept Weismann's ideas
concerning the separation of the germ-plasm from the influence of the body. In
December 1894 Wells (1894b) wrote against Weismann's concept of the architecture
of the germ-plasm and criticised his views on use inheritance. As late as
January 1895 Wells (1895b) referred to the "dark speculations as those of
Weismann" in a review of a book on Darwinian theory. Reading Weismann's Essays
upon Heredity at this time Wells began to incorporate some of Weismann's ideas
into his essays (Philmus and Hughes 1975, 107, 132 n1). In March 1895 Wells came
around to Weismann's views stating: "Professor Weissmann [sic] has at least
convinced scientific people of this: that the characters acquired by a parent
are rarely, if ever, transmitted to its offspring" (Wells quoted in Philmus and
Hughes 1975, 10). Thus in Moreau the offspring of the Beast People show "no
evidence of the inheritance of their acquired human characteristics" (M 53), and
in "Human Evolution" Wells (1896a, 590) acknowledges Weismann's "destructive
criticisms of the evidence for the inheritance of acquired characters."
Moreau, written during this change in Wells's thinking, was partly a response to
the debate concerning Weismann's criticisms of Lamarckian inheritance. This is
seen in the two-fold basis for the human condition that Wells presents in
Moreau: (1) a factor of organic evolution whereby the human race is sculpted by
the cosmic process from lower species, represented by Moreau's surgical
60

procedures; and (2) an artificial factor whereby humans are raised to a quasicivilised state, represented by the theological tradition and laws of the Beast
People. The writing of Moreau was at least partially an attempt by Wells to
define the limits of organic evolution and social evolution, of the sphere of
the "culminating ape" and the sphere of "tradition, suggestion, and reasoned
thought" (Philmus 1993, xvii). This became necessary because the overthrow of
the Lamarckian view meant that education and moral tuition could make no
permanent biological impression on the race. In a review of a biological work
Wells (1895a, 411) remarks:
The doubts thrown on the inheritance of acquired characteristics have deprived us
of our trust in education as a means of redemption for decadent families. In our
hearts we all wish that the case was not so, we all hate Death and his handiwork;
but the business of science is not to keep up the courage of men, but to tell the
truth.

The writing of Moreau was just such an attempt to carry out the "business of
science" by delimiting the natural and the artificial, and by putting the view
that a significant part of the artificial factortraditional theological
beliefshave no support in science. Rather, they merely serve as the "padding
of suggested emotional habits necessary to keep the round Palaeolithic savage in
the square hole of the civilised state" (Wells 1896a, 594).
In both Moreau and "Human Evolution: An Artificial Process" we see Wells arguing
against the idea of social evolution as a source of human advancement, and
turning instead to the artificial factor of education, suggestion and tradition
(and declaring his rejection of religion in the process). A similar emphasis on
the artificial factor in the advancement of society can be seen in Huxley's
writings of the early 1890s (Paradis 1989, 32). Huxley, in "Evolution and
Ethics" for example, argued that meaningful improvements in human existence must
not be sought in evolutionary theory, but by our transformation of the state of
nature into the state of art. Wells similarly turned his attention to the
possibilities of education within a form of scientific humanism. Of this shift
in Wells's viewpoint from the biological to the social, and its effect on his
subsequent work, Philmus and Hughes (1975, 185) write:
The shift to scientific humanism meant, for Wells, dropping the issue of whether
biology justifies us in believing man to be by "nature" a beast or a starry
portent, and instead taking upin his histories, utopias, forecasts, and social
novelsthe issue of man in society.

It is clear that Wells used Moreau as a vehicle for working out and stating
developments in his own thoughts about human evolution, Weismannism, and the
inheritance of acquired characteristics, as well as providing a critique of the
61

inadequacies of theology as a guiding moral or social force. Again, we see a

close association between these statements as they appear in Wells's journalism
and in his books. The articles of Wells that bear directly on Moreau are set out
in Table 2.
Table 2. A correlation of scientific theory in Wells's science journalism and
The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Title
Concept
Island of Doctor Moreau

"The Influence of The role of islands in

The actions of Moreau on
Islands on Varia- in the evolution of
an island as a microcosm
tion" (1895e).
new, isolated species.
for selection acting on
isolated species.
"The Limits of
Individual
Plasticity"
(1895f).

The reshaping of an
animal by surgery,
grafting of tissue,
and hypnotism.

The vivisection and

hypnotism of animals to
produce quasi-human
creatures (M 45-52)

"The Province of
Pain" (1894l).

Types of sensation and

pain; their location in
body and nervous system.

Moreau's discussion of
pain in relation to his
vivisection (M 47-48).

"Bio-Optimism"
(1895a).

The alternative of a
painful struggle for existence or degeneration
following security.

The suffering of the

Beast Folk in Moreau's
hands (45-52 passim);
their degeneration after
Moreau's death (M 81-82)

"The Rate of
Change in
Species" (1894m).

The great evolutionary

inertia of humans compared to other species.

The differential rate of

organic and social evolution (see discussion).

"Human Evolution,
An Artificial
Process"
(1896a)

The discrediting of
The two-fold nature of
Lamarckism; the role of
human development,
the artificial factors
organic and artificial,
of tradition, suggestion and the importance of
and thought in human
the latter in seeking
development since the
human advancement (see
new stone age.
discussion).

The writing of Moreau, as of The Time Machine, was thus undertaken by Wells in
conjunction with his science journalism, scientific reading and reviews. In
addition to his use of microcosms and the method of Zadig, the association
between Wells's scientific essays and his books extends also to the arguing of
the same theses and the use of the same scientific data. Most importantly, this
unity extends to the use of these books and essays, together, to work out the
consequences of major changes occurring in evolutionary theory during the last
two decades of the century. For Wells, his own writing formed part of the
scientific enterprise as it affected him and his readers.
There are, however, also important differences, not only between The Time
Machine and Moreau but between the writing of Wells and Huxley. For example,
62

Moreau contains extensive dialogue partly devoted to building character and

relationships, a feature not found in The Time Machine or Huxley's Essays.
Although Huxley is given to personification (Stanley 1957; Blinderman 1962a,
177; Watt 1978, 30) the development of psychological depth in Moreau is much
more extensive than mere personification. The degree of mystery and narrative
complexity differs between The Time Machine, Moreau and Huxley's Essays, as does
the way in which degeneration is used. Finally, the critical reception afforded
The Time Machine and Moreau differed radically, the former being discussed for
its ideas while the critical response to the latter was predominantly one of
horrified revulsion.
These differences are addressed in the following two chapters. First, the
critical reception of both books is analysed in order to establish their
scientific and literary status among Wells's contemporaries. The chapter after
next provides an explanation for these differences in terms of the story of
detection and late Victorian gothic literature. The rather formal, scientific
approach taken so far in this thesis is thus balanced, in the next two chapters,
by literary considerations.

63

CHAPTER FIVE
SCIENCE AND HORROR: THE CRITICAL RECEPTION
To what extent did the writers of Wells's day consider his books to be science,
or literature, or a combination of the two? If The Time Machine and Moreau are
works of science one would expect this to be reflected in the response of
contemporary scientific and literary commentators. An examination of the
critical reception therefore acts as a kind of litmus test of this thesis by
enabling one to gauge the scientific and literary dimensions of these works of
Wells, as well as the Essays of Huxley. The reaction of reviewers to Wells's two
books were quite dissimilarThe Time Machine was received as a work of ideas
rather than of art, while Moreau evoked a horrified response and criticism on
aesthetic grounds.

Huxley's Essays were seen as both science and art. The test

therefore reveals interesting differences and similarities, mainly of a literary

nature. The purpose of this chapter is to identify such differences and
similarities more precisely as a prelude to their exploration in the following
chapter.
The Critical Reception of The Time Machine
Parrinder reprints many reviews of Wells's books in H. G. Wells: The Critical
Heritage (1972), while Ingvald Raknem in H. G. Wells and His Critics (1962)
discusses the reception of Wells's works at length. These two books are the
source for most of the following reviews. The original reviews, however, have
been examined where possible.
The most extensive review of The Time Machine was that of R. H. Hutton which
appeared in the Spectator in July, 1895. His review rather sarcastically
acknowledges Wells's ideas as being based on the "speculations of modern
metaphysicians"

who consider time to be at once "the most important of the

conditions of organic evolution" and also "the most misleading of subjective

illusions" (Hutton 1895, 41). After outlining the content of the book, Hutton
goes on to disagree with its basic tenet of "the unnerving effect of a too great
success in conquering the natural resistance which the physical constitution of
the world presents to our love of ease and pleasure"; that is, of degeneration
following security. The elimination of physical obstacles such as danger,
competition and uncontrolled population growth, would require an intelligence
and energy at odds with the pleasure-loving temperament which the Eloi display.
Moreover, argues Hutton (1895, 42), the development of comfort and ease in
civilised societies does not diminish, but rather increases, acquisitive
behaviour, jealousy, rivalry and war. Hutton's review displays his religious
64

sentiments which lead him to criticise the lack of religious and moral factors
in The Time Machine. A feature of this review and, as I show below, one that
typifies most reviews of the book, is that the scientific and social issues the
book raises are considered worthy of serious reply. Although referring to
Wells's book as a "fanciful and lively dream" and an "amusing story", these
comments are rhetorical and function to depreciate Wells's argument. Another
feature is the reviewer's lack of interest in literary and aesthetic matters:
the review contains no assessment of the book's value as a work of literature,
but rather focuses on Wells's ideas.
Israel Zangwill in his review in Pall Mall Magazine in 1895 concentrates on the
metaphysics of time. The kind of journey through time Wells envisages presents
paradoxes. The Time Traveller's presence in the future creates an historical
reality that will have to be repeated when the year 802,701 comes around,
"though how the long dispersed dust is to be vivified again does not appear"
(Zangwill 1895, 153). Conversely, had the Time Traveller gone backward in time
rather than forward he would have created a false past due to his appearance
there with a machine not yet invented. From an absolute standpoint, if time is
considered a "self-complete" and "immovable" continuum (like Wells's "Universe
Rigid") the introduction of a traveller moving through this continuum is to
"reintroduce the notion of Time which has just been expelled" (Zangwill 1895,
153). Wells's concept of time as the fourth dimension of space capable of
traversion, despite some ingenious metaphysics, will not stand up. The only
concept of time which would permit a vision of the future or past is one in
which time is viewed as an ethereal front perpetually travelling through endless
space, and in which the vibrations of sound and vision continually move outward
from their original source. Thus one might travel in time by moving through
space to intercept the light from a distant star or planet, and may witness its
historical past or future "by travelling actually through space to the point at
which the rays of that year would first strike upon our consciousness" (Zangwill
1895, 154). The review discusses the scientific concepts of the book while
literary matters take a back seat. An element of Swiftian satire is recognised
in The Time Machine and it is pronounced to be "a brilliant little romance". The
only aesthetic comment is that the Time Traveller, "a cool scientific thinker"
behaves "like the hero of a commonplace sensational novel" when he becomes
stranded in time.

Although Zangwill is critical of Wells's idea of time, he

nevertheless considers Wells to have inclined to the "severer and more

scientific form of prophecy". In short, the review concentrates on the
scientific and philosophical, rather than the literary, aspects of the work.
Both Zangwill and Hutton, then, disagree with the evolutionary and metaphysical
arguments put forward by Wells. The crucial point, however, is that these
reviewers are interested in The Time Machine for the ideas it presents, not for
65

any artistic or aesthetic qualities it may have.

Again emphasising the scientific details of The Time Machine, the Saturday
Review contrasts it to other speculative writing ("Fiction" 1895, 87):
Lord Lytton's "Coming Race" was a poor sort of invention, and nothing very much can
be said in favour of "Erewhon." "The Time Machine" is not in their category. To be
sure, the basis of the story is scientifican ingenious notion at that.

The narrative and plot are excellent and interesting, but the book is marked by
"higher qualities", such as imagination and descriptive power. Wells's attack on
evolutionary optimism is recognised and this "heresy" is considered plausible.
The prediction itself and the imaginative scope of the work most impress the
reviewer.
The Time Machine was reviewed in the scientific journal Nature where the
reviewer considered it to be "well worth the attention of the scientific reader"
because it helps to develop an understanding of the possible results of
evolution. Wells's grasp and use of scientific theory is acknowledged: "Cosmical
evolution, it may be remarked, is in some degree subject to mathematical
investigations, and the author appears to be well acquainted with the results
which have been obtained in this direction" ("Our Book Shelf" 1895). Some
reservation is expressed when the reviewer states that the story should not be
taken "too seriously", although the reasons for this are not given. This does
indicate some doubt in the reviewer's mind about the work, although it is
unclear what the doubt pertains to. The mere fact that The Time Machine was
reviewed in Nature at all, however, indicates that it constituted a work of
interest and relevance to the journal's audience. The later interpretations of
Wells's early works, which portray them as romances or myths containing bogus
scientific arguments, ignore this fact. The War of the Worlds (1898) and The
First Men in the Moon (1901) were also reviewed in Nature, while The Island of
Doctor Moreau was discussed in Natural Science. By contrast, Wells's nonscientific works published at this time, such as

The Wheels of Chance (1896)

and Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), were not discussed in these journals. This
suggests that it was only the scientific arguments of Wells's books that
prompted the reviews in science journals. There is no indication that the editor
of Nature would have permitted just any book by Wells to be reviewed in the
journal, but only one "well worth the attention of the scientific reader."
The earlier serial publication of The Time Machine was also briefly noted in
Nature in January, 1895, where the writer refers to Wells's "eccentric story" as
promising plenty of scope for the exercise of the scientific imagination
("Science in the Magazines" 1895).
66

A brief, early notice of the serial publication of The Time Machine appeared in
the Review of Reviews (London). The reviewer describes Wells as "a man of
genius" whose story displays "an imagination as gruesome as that of Poe" ("The
New Review" 1895). The Review of Reviews final notice of the serial is quite
lengthy. It opens by praising Wells's "powerful and imaginative romance" and
continues in a largely expository manner with lengthy quotes. The concern is
primarily with the evolutionary and cosmological predictions Wells makes
concerning the fate of the human species and of the earth. The emphasis on
scientific speculation, at the expense of literary qualities, is again evident
with the focus on the imaginative power of Wells's vision ("How the World Will
Die" 1895).
"No two books could well be more unlike than The Time Machine and The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" proclaims the reviewer for the Daily Chronicle,
but Wells's book is the most "bizarre" contribution to the "domain of pure
fantasy" since Stevenson's "creepy romance" (unsigned review in Parrinder 1972,
38). A passage from the Time Traveller's discourse on the fourth dimension is
quoted as an example of the book's "Poe-like ingenuity". The bare outline of the
book is then presented, followed by a criticism of the description of time
travelling, which the reviewer feels confuses movement in time and movement in
space: the shaking of the machine and its invisibility do not accord with what
one would expect from movement in time only and not space. The highly original
and genuinely imaginative nature of the work is noted. Clearly, this critic
considered the ideas presented to be fantasy and not factually based, but we
should note also that a brief criticism of the idea of time travel was
nevertheless attempted.
In general, the outstanding feature of the six reviews examined here is their
thorough treatment of the scientific or philosophical elements of The Time
Machine and an associated lack of criticism on literary grounds. Words and
phrases such as "ingenious", "scientific", "imagination", "speculations",
"evolution", "mathematical investigations" and "genius" typify the book's
reception. The recognition by these reviewers of Wells's intellectual concerns
quite accurately reflects Wells's approach to writing, which Raknem (1962, 12)
describes as making use of acquired knowledge and accumulated facts, rather than
emotional experiences and human relationships. The claim, however, that
reviewers also touched on the artistic aspects of Wells's early work (Raknem
1962, 14) cannot be supported in regard to The Time Machine.
The two references to the influence of Poe seem, on the one hand to concern the
"gruesome" relationship between the Eloi and Morlocks, and on the other to refer
to the scientific reasoning involved in the Time Traveller's theory of time.

67

Thus the critical reception of The Time Machine centred on the ideas in
evolution and the metaphysics of time rather than on its merits or demerits as
romantic literature. Although sometimes referred to as a "romance", it is more
often classified simply as a "story" or, in one case, "a species of literature"
("Fiction" 1895, 87). The Time Machine was seen as a work of ideas worthy of
serious comment and reply. Reviewed in the pages of Nature it was considered to
be of interest to the scientific reader. This conclusion accords with the
assessment of Parrinder (1972, 8) that "it was Wells's ideas and not the
aesthetic qualities of his story which were felt to invite analysis." This
examination of the contemporary reception of The Time Machine yields a picture
of a book with stronger scientific and philosophical, than literary,
credentials.
The Critical Reception of Moreau.
The imaginative and scientific features of Wells's writing in Moreau were buried
under an avalanche of outrage and horror. Hesitating even to give the book
notice The Times warns the young, and those of good taste or feeble nerves, to
avoid its "loathsome and repulsive" subject. The book is seen as a departure
from common decency in the quest for sensationalism. The theme of the pain and
suffering inherent in the struggle for existence in nature is not lost on the
reviewer, but this depiction of "fair nature" is deplored as being "simple
sacrilege" ("Recent Novels" 1896). Clearly, this reviewer had no sympathy with
Wells's view of nature.
In the Athenaeum Basil Williams (1896, 615) asks rhetorically "how far it is
legitimate to create feelings of disgust in a work of art." The details of
suffering elaborately depicted by Wells have no saving artistic value, being
given merely to arouse horror for its own sake. The characters, who evoke no
personal interest, are used merely as the groundwork for this horror. The work
is neither a legitimate tragedy nor an anti-vivisection tract, but an artistic
failure.
The view that Moreau constituted an anti-vivisectionist tract informs Hutton's
review in the Spectator. Quoting the chapter "Doctor Moreau Explains" at length,
Hutton (1896, 519) considers the scientific basis of the work to be impossible,
but of a "less unworkable order" than the idea of a Time Machine (Hutton also
having reviewed the earlier book).

Wells succeeds in bringing to life in the

mind of the reader Moreau's "half-created monsters" and this is the real
literary achievement of the book. The work is ghastly and gruesome but of great
imaginative and descriptive power, almost rivalling that of Swift. The portrayal
of Moreau's "foul ambition to remake God's creatures" has the effect of
caricaturing the "contempt for animal pain" which enthusiastic vivisectors and
68

physiologists seem to feel (Hutton 1896, 520). Wells's book, therefore, may do
more to make vivisection unpopular than all the efforts of societies formed for
that "wholesome and beneficent end." Again, we see Hutton's religious views
influencing his interpretation: he sees the work as essentially anti-scientific
and as a caricature of the possibilities of vivisection. For this reason,
Hutton's review, by looking beyond the horror, is one of few exceptions to the
adverse criticism that greeted the publication of Moreau.
Another exception is a review which Wells praised as "giving a really
intelligent notice" of Moreau (Wells quoted in Parrinder 1972, 52). Here, the
theological critique of the book is acknowledged when the Guardian reviewer
suggests that it aims to "parody the work of the Creator" so as to "cast
contempt upon the dealings of God with His creatures" (unsigned review in
Parrinder 1972, 53). The ghastly and unpleasant nature of the book is lamented
but its originality, imaginativeness and power are also acknowledged.
A critic writing for the Manchester Guardian in 1896 was one of the few to
address literary matters. The critic was impressed by Wells's vigorous narrative
style and natural dialogue: skilful and subtle touches of detail provide realism
while the characterisation of Moreau and Montgomery is strong. Though the reader
must "sup full of horrors" the reviewer sees a redeeming quality of pathos in
the Beast Folk. Comparisons are made to Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the
"creaking of the machinery" where science and fantasy join. The chapter "Doctor
Moreau Explains" brings the reader too close to a critical state of mind in what
the reviewer regards as a "quasi-scientific" fantasy (unsigned review in
Parrinder 1972, 48-49).
Scarcely mitigated outrage characterises a brief review published in the Speaker
in 1896. Wells surpasses in "gruesome horror" some of the worst contemporary
works, and finds "still lower depths of nastiness, and still cruder
manifestations of fantastic imbecility" than any similar author. Although
Wells's work is highly original, its originality is achieved at the expense of
decency and common sense. Wells forgets the responsibilities of authorship and
degrades his talent (unsigned review in Parrinder 1972, 50). This review is
typical of the denunciations of Moreau (Parrinder 1972, 50).
The attack on the gruesome aspects of Moreau was not confined to literary
critics. Writing in the Saturday Review, P. Chalmers Mitchell (1896, 368)
expresses frank dismay that Wells puts his scientific and artistic talents "to
the most flagitious usury". The screams of pain and terror, the blood, the
bandages, and the details worthy of "a sanitary inspector probing a crowded
graveyard", form the basis of Mitchell's repulsion (1896, 369). The greed of
cheap horrors detracts from the scientific possibilities of the central idea,
69

which are sufficient to form the basis of a story. While Mitchell acknowledges
the scientific foundation of Moreau, however, he considers Wells to have overstepped the bounds of scientific knowledge by appending to the book the
statement that "the manufacture of monstersand perhaps even of quasi-human
monstersis within the possibilities of vivisection" (M 88). Wells is unduly
scaring his readers, writes Mitchell (1896, 369) because "a multitude of
experiments on skin and bone grafting and on transfusion of blood shows that
animal-hybrids cannot be produced in these fashions."
A similar criticism appeared in Natural Science, where the author states that,
from the scientific side, Wells "seems to have allowed his imagination too free
a run in his new story." Recent work discussing transplantation and transfusion
is cited as finding conclusively against the success of transplantation of
tissue from one species to another, the tissues becoming either inert centres
around which new growth takes place or centres of suppuration ("Transplantation
of Living Tissues" 1896,). This note in Natural Science was not a review of
Wells's book, but a reply to one of the scientific arguments it contains. Like
The Time Machine, therefore, Moreau drew attention and comment in scientific
circles. After a delay of almost seven months Wells (1896b) replied to these
criticisms with a letter defending his view of the possibility of cross-species
grafting and citing a paper by Mayo Robson appearing in an 1896 issue of the
British Medical Journal. This paper describes a case where a patient had the use
and sensation of his right arm restored by grafting new nerve tissue from a
rabbit into the severed human nerves. "The case is very encouraging, since it
clearly demonstrates the possibility of restoring continuity of nerves by
grafting" (Robson 1896, 1314). We need not explore the validity of either case,
for such an investigation is bound to be inconclusive.
The response to the publication of Moreau was one of revulsion and horror
critics recognised a strong element of horror in the work but were aesthetically
displeased with its gruesome details. Serious discussions of the ideas in the
book were in the minority. Although Wells had "the intellectual imagination of a
scientific investigator" (Mitchell 1896, 368) the twin themes of the suffering
evolution entails and shortcomings of theological explanation were almost
completely overlooked.
In an 1897 interview Wells complained that Moreau "has been stupidly dealt with
as a mere shockerby people who ought to have known better", almost certainly
a reference to Mitchell's review (Wells quoted in Parrinder 1972, 52). Wells's
complaint, however, was slightly disingenuous for, as I argue below, the work
was written deliberately to evoke the feelings of shock and horror.

70

In any case, the ghastly details of the book blinded critics to the serious
intention behind Moreau (Raknem 1962, 23-25). They were content to state that
they were offended and, with the exception of the Guardian critic, did not
perceive the book's theological relevance or its commentary on evolution and
civilisation. With the publication of Moreau, Wells gained a reputation as a
"Dealer in Horror and Spells", and the gruesome elements in Moreau, The
Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds prevented most literary critics from
discerning the message central to each work (Raknem 1962, 23-34). Wells's views
about the aims of literature, and his way of thinking, were at variance with
those of the reviewers of this period and from Moreau onward they continually
failed to see the deeper meaning in Wells's works, judging them quite
superficially (Raknem 1962, 25).
If the reception of The Time Machine and Moreau were so different from one
another, how do they compare to the critical reception afforded Huxley? The
publication in 1893 of Evolution and Ethics as a booklet and of Huxley's ninevolume Collected Essays in 1893-94 gave scientific and literary commentators an
opportunity to address Huxley's thought and work as a whole. The following
section considers this question with the aim of more fully explicating the
position of Wells in relation to Huxley.
Huxley and His Critics
Since the primary concern here is with the relations of science and literature,
the response to Huxley's work is considered mainly under these two heads. Due to
the antagonism between Huxley and the church, however, criticisms on religious
grounds are also examined.
The Athenaeum placed their review of Evolution and Ethics under the heading of
"Literature". From a literary perspective Huxley's discourse surpassed even his
own previously high standards: "In point of sober eloquence it rises to the best
traditions of English philosophical literature" ("Literature" 1893, 119). The
discursive nature of Huxley's interests, his tendency to embrace the wider
subjects of general culture, acquainted him with modes of thought other than the
scientific.
With the publication of volume one of Collected Essays in late 1893 reviews of
Huxley's whole oeuvre began to appear. Lankester (1894, 311), writing in Nature,
considers Huxley's works to give great pleasure as he deals with organic form
not only as a "mechanical engineer" but as an artist, a "born lover of form."
Moreover, Huxley's own "fascinating presence" is woven into his essays. With
Huxley "style is the man" for "now he is gravely shaking his head, now
compressing his lips with emphasis, and from time to time with a quiet twinkle
71

of the eye making unexpected apologies or protesting that he is of a modest and

peace-loving nature" (Lankester 1894, 310).
Less generously, the Quarterly Review in an 1895 issue remarks how Huxley's
rhetorical strategies constitute a form of theological argumentation. His tone
of authority, indicative and imperative moods, somewhat peremptory humour,
disdain for those who do not agree with him, his sarcastic touches and
challenging voice distinguish him as a "priest" of the Creed of Science
("Professor Huxley's Creed" 1895, 165). These three reviews indicate that
contemporary critics saw Huxley's Essays as having some artistic qualities and
that his literary style was integral to his intellectual aims.
The scientific responses to Evolution and Ethics dissent from Huxley's proposal
that the ethical process is opposed to the cosmic process. Arising from within
human development the ethical process is just as much a part of the cosmic
process as are the methods of the ape and the tiger, so to speak of a battle
between these two processes is absurd (Mitchell 1893, 66). How is it possible,
or even conceivable, one critic asks, that something should arise within the
cosmic process that is in all respects opposed to it? Using one of Huxley's own
analogies it is argued that the ethical process directs and controls the cosmic
process like the control provided by the governor of a steam engine
("Literature" 1893, 119-20).
In a letter to the Athenaeum Spencer wrote to dispel the belief that Evolution
and Ethics was an attack on his own theories. Huxley, writes Spencer, is well
aware of his (Spencer's) views and there is much agreement between him and
Huxley: "We agree that the survival of the fittest is often not survival of the
best. We agree in denouncing the brutal form of the struggle for existence. We
agree that the ethical process is a part of the process of evolution. . . . We
agree in emphasising, as a duty, the effort to mitigate the evils which the
struggle for existence in the social state entails" (Spencer 1893a, 194).
Spencer considers note 19 in the published version of the lecture to be an
admission by Huxley that the ethical process is a product of the cosmic process,
a view which Spencer (1893a, 193) claims to have "perpetually enunciated".
As far as the scientific quality of Huxley's general argument in Evolution and
Ethics, Mitchell considers the address to have no "positive scientific value"
because it uses reasoning from analogy, such as Huxley's likening of the course
of evolution to the growth and death of a bean plant. Reasoning from analogy
"has no place in a constructive system" being a method for politicians and
preachers who use it for rhetorical effect (Mitchell 1893, 64). Clearly,
Mitchell had a philosophy of science at odds with that of Huxley.

72

Not all responses were critical of Huxley's logic or philosophy. The struggle
for existence in society represents a fundamental condition which cannot be
altered, agrees one reviewer. Morality, having evolved from the altruistic
sentiment, can and should be used to "humanise the struggle". Morality should be
directed towards encouraging those qualities which are advantageous to all,
discouraging those which intensify the bitterness of the conflict and minimising
the suffering of those who "lose the game" (Stephen 1893, 169-70).
The publication of Collected Essays caused the spotlight to fall on Huxley's
philosophy as a whole and on what are perceived to be contradictions in his
position on a variety of philosophical, scientific and social issues. The
Quarterly Review declares Huxley's doctrine to be "double-seeming". Outwardly it
is Science, inwardly it is Nescience. Huxley affirms that he is not a
materialist but has given "mighty impetus" to Materialism; he protests that
free-will has not been ousted by science but has "marshalled squadrons" against
free-will and "spirit and spontaneity"; Darwinism puts an end to final causes
and throws back theologians onto uncertain a priori demonstrations, while Huxley
states that evolution has no bearing on theism; although standing by Hume, an
absolute sceptic, Huxley claims to value truth and objectivity highly. Huxley's
principles, laid down in his Essays, are a "tissue of contradictions"
("Professor Huxley's Creed" 1895, 162, 186).
A similar strain informs a Saturday Review article of 1893. Although Huxley
finds nothing to alter in these essays, some of which are almost 30 years old,
the reviewer cannot agree that Huxley's opinions, then or now, are sound. The
"shrieking and scolding" of science against its enemies as seen in Huxley's
essays indicates that science is unsure of itself. Huxley contradicts himself in
two essays concerning education, written 19 years apart, the older arguing in
favour of universal education and the more recent against the theory of equality
and the democratic ideal in general ("Mr. Huxley's Collected Essays" 1893).
Lankester's review, on the other hand, praises Huxley's method and style. His
logic and strong individuality clarifies, sifts, arranges and vivifies
philosophical, biological and political matter alike (Lankester 1894, 310).
Huxley's arguments against the doctrines of Rousseau in the first volume of
Collected Essays are drafted into the critic's own service in a political piece
in the Quarterly Review in 1894. Reformers, socialists and radicals alike,
reject history and operate on an a priori basis, whereas "the truth, of course,
is that no deduction which is sound, or even intelligible, is possible from
purely priori ruminations." Those who wish to explain what nature has to say
about political rights should follow Huxley's example and begin their inquiries
by taking civilisation as it is embodied in experience ("Rousseauism Revived"
1894, 438).
73

Two clear tendencies emerge from these reviews: critics either attacked Huxley
outright or attempted to draft him into their cause. This also typified
religious commentary, where Huxley's treatment of evolution and ethics was
compared to the biblical passages in which the Apostle Paul sets out the
antagonism between the natural and the spiritual ("Professor Huxley and St.
Paul" 1893; "Literature" 1893, 119). The New Testament is cited as propounding
an ethical system in opposition to the cosmic process, although arising from
within the cosmic process from our own shaping and guiding spirit (Mitchell
1893, 66). The spiritual and physical sides of human nature are seen also as
being in an opposite but dynamical relation. The moral improvement of society is
not the result of a physical evolution but of a spiritual evolution that
increases as the former declines. Spiritual evolution will go on beyond the
physical death of the world that Huxley envisages in Evolution and Ethics
("Professor Huxley Among the Prophets" 1893).
Huxley is declared by one reviewer to be the most effective and most popular of
the four British Evangeliststhe Quadrilateral of the gospel of Unbelief, the
other three being Spencer, Darwin and Tyndall ("Professor Huxley's Creed" 1895,
160). Huxley's rhetorical methods and bluntness of speech, especially when
criticising the New and Old Testaments, serve to hurt himself more than his
(religious) opponents. If science cannot be said to deal in truth, if science
does not deal in real acquisitions but in empty symbols, if it does not enable
us to "move along an ascending scale of facts in which we feel ourselves more
and more at home", then at least these things can be said of religion
("Professor Huxley's Creed" 1895, 165-66).
These responses to the publication of Evolution and Ethics and Collected Essays
indicate the extent to which Huxley's reputation conditioned his critical
reception. Those with a religious, political or scientific axe to grind took the
opportunity to oppose or align themselves with Huxley's philosophy, trading on
both sides of his notoriety. Nevertheless, some features of the critical
reception of Wells and Huxley can be jointly assessed: First, the philosophical
and scientific ideas presented by Huxley (such as the opposition of the ethical
process to the cosmic process) were questioned equally, if not more so, than
those put forward by Wells in The Time Machine and Moreau (such as Wells's view
of time, his evolutionary predictions and his statement concerning the grafting
of tissue). Second, Huxley's writing evoked comment on artistic groundshis
literary style, his personal presence, his eloquence and his rhetoric were given
both favourable and unfavourable notice. This cannot be said of The Time
Machine. While there was a modicum of comment on Wells's art in Moreau, the
aesthetic revulsion the work induced had no parallel in the reception of
Huxley's work. In short, Huxley's writing, though challenged on intellectual
grounds, was both science and art, while Wells's, also challenged on
74

intellectual grounds, was science or horror.

Anachronism in the Interpretation of Wells's Books
The difference in critical reception between The Time Machine and Moreau calls
into question the views of many subsequent commentators who regard both these
early works of Wells as myths and fantasies while neglecting their function as
contributions to scientific debate. I wish to suggest that this bias has arisen
because critics of today come to Wells's works as a whole, not necessarily in
the chronological order in which they originally appeared. Thus their perception
of The Time Machine is likely to be conditioned by their existing perceptions of
Moreau and of many other later works by Wells, a situation which could easily
give rise to interpretations of The Time Machine that are anachronistic. This
problem does not apply to contemporary interpretations of Wells's books.
The process is made clear in Raknem's study of Wells and his contemporary
critics: the originality, inventiveness, imaginativeness and descriptive power
of The Time Machine impressed critics, who discussed it as a work of ideas
(Raknem 1962, 15-16). The references to Wells's genius and ingenuity stemmed
from a true appreciation of his skilful use of science (Raknem 1962, 18).
Moreau, on the other hand, was received as a story that was, literally,
monstrous. Wells then became a "professor of the gruesome", a charge which,
although quite wrong, was "sustained by generations of reviewers" (Raknem 1962,
26). "The note so forcibly struck in the reviews of The Island of Dr. Moreau
[sic]", writes Raknem (1962, 26), "was sounded in the criticisms of most of
Wells's later scientific romances and short stories". To this might be added the
following statement: The note so forcibly struck today in criticisms of Moreau
is sounded also in most interpretations of The Time Machine, though not sounded
at the time of the latter's first publication.
The emphasis in discussion on myth, allegory and fantasy in regard to The Time
Machine by present-day literary critics perpetuates, I believe, the reactions of
the early commentators to Wells's work from Moreau onward. Being familiar with
Wells's complete oeuvre, impressed by his literary capacities and by his ability
to evoke strong emotions in the reader, critics of today overlook the scientific
content and rationale of both books. This is clear in the comments of Hammond
(1979, 79-82, 84-87) who considers both The Time Machine and Moreau to be myths
with satirical and allegorical elements, even though they are very different
works. While Hammond's view may be a satisfactory interpretation of Moreau it is
inappropriate to The Time Machine, being at odds with that of Wells's
contemporaries.

75

Apart from the critical reception, the differences between The Time Machine,
Moreau and Huxley's Essays mentioned at the end of the previous chaptersuch as
the role of degeneration, the use of mystery, characterisation, psychological
depth and narrative complexityhave yet to be examined. In the next chapter
these differences are spelt out and analysed from a literary perspective. Using
Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a
literary standard, elements of Victorian gothic and psychomythic literature are
found in Moreau that are largely absent from The Time Machine. Conversely, The
Time Machine is found to have a structure like that of detective fiction which
Moreau does not have. This literary analysis, undertaken in the next chapter,
substantiates the judgements of The Time Machine and Moreau made by Wells's
contemporaries. It also introduces into the discussion the relationship between
literary movements in late nineteenth-century England and the developing
sciences of anthropology, psychology and evolutionary theory as they apply to
these works.

76

CHAPTER SIX
DETECTION AND THE GOTHIC:
WELLS AND R. L. STEVENSON
The difference in reception accorded The Time Machine and Moreau, along with
other scientific and literary qualities, are explored in this chapter in terms
of the development of Victorian gothic and psychomythic literature in late
nineteenth-century England. This literary analysis is required because the
critical reception of each work, particularly Moreau, cannot be accounted for
simply on scientific grounds. The fictive elements common to Huxley and Wells
such as the method of Zadig, the microcosm and the speculative nature of their
writingare insufficient to forge a complete identity between their works and
tell us little about literary similarities and dissimilarities. In this chapter,
questions of theme, mystery, characterisation, narrative structure and
psychological depth in The Time Machine, Moreau and Huxley's Essays are
addressed in order to provide a more comprehensive picture of the relations of
science and literature in the works of Wells and Huxley.
To achieve this analysis a third writer is introduced to provide a literary
standard of comparison. While comparisons of various texts to point out
similarities and differences is, admittedly, somewhat banal, I believe that in
this case the end justifies the means. The result is a clearer account of the
dynamic of scientific and literary practices occurring in these works. This in
turn leads to a freer discussion, and firm but flexible conclusions, in the
following chapter.
R. L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is the text
used for comparison. Stevenson's romance is chosen, first, because it is of the
same literary period as the early works of Wells. Second, the length of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde is comparable to The Time Machine, some of Huxley's
individual essays and, to a lesser extent, Moreauat least more so than, say, a
two-decker novel of the 1890s. Third, elements of the story of detection and of
horror are present in Wells's books, while Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is "located at
the intersection of several genres" including the detective story and the gothic
novel (Hirsch 1988, 223). Finally, Wells and Stevenson are sometimes mentioned
together in contemporary reviews of Wells's books and also in more recent
studies. A comparatively recent and quite influential claim is made that Wells's
early works belong in the same league as Stevenson's romance: "Wells's earlier
fiction is closer to . . . a complex fantasy like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . . .
than it is to the more strictly scientific speculations of Verne" (Bergonzi
1976, 39). In testing this claim, I show that it is wrong in regard to The Time
77

Machine but does ring true in regard to Moreau.

Before beginning, however, a brief overview of the literary consensus on Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde is in order.
John Kelman (1953, 13), in his introduction to the Collins edition of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde, emphasises the profound and ancient problems with which Stevenson
deals in his symbolic representation of the two-fold nature of humanity, of the
conflict of good and evil. This theme lends itself to interpretation as myth. An
early commentator, Leslie Fiedler, writing of Stevenson's complete oeuvre,
describes him as a mythographer: "It is in the realm of myth, which sometimes
overlaps but is not identical with literature, that we must look for clues to
the meaning and unity of Stevenson's work" (Fiedler quoted in Veeder and Hirsch
1988, ix). The myth-symbol interpretation also informs Hammond's treatment of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde as an allegory of good versus evil, rich in symbolisms,
although extending to a study of social hypocrisythat is, of Jekyll's
duplicitous character of outward respectability and inward lust (Hammond 1984).
My approach, by contrast, is to attend to more immediate historical factors,
scientific and literary, to show the dynamic relations between science, in the
form of anthropology, psychology and evolutionary theory, and literature in the
form of detective fiction and Victorian gothic and psychomythic literature. In
the first case there is a distinct relationship between the method of Zadig and
the story of detection, seen clearly in The Time Machine. In the second case,
evolutionary theory acted to modify gothic fiction during the nineteenth
century, a development Block discusses in Rituals of Dis-integration(1993). This
influence can be seen in Moreau. Block's work provides the framework for much of
this chapter.
Science and the Story of Detection
The discussion of the method of Zadig in Chapter Two shows that Huxley
considered the sciences of geology and palaeontology to involve a form of
ratiocination in which a knowledge of existing causes enables the reconstruction
in imagination of events distant in time and space. The method merely reflects
the rapidly growing world view that informed the uniformitarianism of Lyell's
Principles of Geology (1830-33) and a modern conception of evolutionary history
displayed in Darwin's Origin of Species. These scientists provided a type of
historical narrative in which a knowledge of the laws of nature, operating
uniformly throughout time, permitted the mental construction of the past from
the fragmentary geological record (Frank 1989, 365-68). This method is viewed
also by Gillian Beer as a scientific form of historical construction.
Evolutionary theory involved an attention to time, cause and effect which
78

yielded, in turn, a form of hypothetical history. In Darwin's work, for example,

it was the historical or "proto-historical" element that called upon the
imagination as he studied not only existing species but the transformation of
species through time (Beer 1983, 8, 98). The fictive elements in the method
would hardly have been lost on nineteenth-century naturalists such as Darwin and
were not lost on Huxley, as his philosophy of science and practice as scientific
essayist show.
As Darwin regarded the past with his imagination he reconstructed the history of
nature in accordance with his vision. Darwin, "like a detective in a literary
genre that owes much to science" pieced his theory together from fragments and
traces, "building vast structures from seeds and spores and insects and fossils"
(Levine 1988, 1). The historical consciousness Lyell, Cuvier and Darwin created,
whereby events distant in time and space are reconstructed by ratiocinative
techniques, is fundamental also to detective fiction such as the Sherlock Holmes
stories Conan Doyle published later in the century (Frank 1989).
This link between ratiocination, palaeontology and geology, between detection
and the construction of historical narratives, was also acknowledged by both
Huxley and Wells. In a lecture dating back almost to the mid-century Huxley
notes the connection: "A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks
made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier
restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones"
(Essays 3:45-46). In an 1894 review Wells describes the geologist as "the
Sherlock Holmes of science" whose task is the application of all science to the
apparently haphazard arrangement of the earth's surface to produce a coherent
narrative of the earth's history (Wells 1894n).
Wells's statement that the principles of construction that Poe and Conan Doyle
use in their stories of detection should also underlie scientific exposition is
touched on in Chapter Three in regard to the structure of The Time Machine.
Wells's remarks indicate an association in his mind between the ratiocinative
procedures scientists use and those that writers of detective fiction
illustrate. These remarks lead us to expect that where scientific argumentation
is paramount Wells's own works will reflect these procedures. A more detailed
discussion of these principles, as employed in The Time Machine, Moreau and Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde, helps articulate differences between Wells's two books.
John G. Cawelti (1976, 132) outlines the three main requirements of the
classical detective story formula. They are:
1.the presentation of a mystery by the concealment from both the reader and
protagonist of facts about a situation or character. This concealment must
79

remain until the end. Alternatively, in the case of the "inverted procedural
story", the reader must be aware that the facts have been concealed from the
protagonist.
2.The structure and action of the story must centre on an inquiry into these
concealed facts, with the protagonist as the principal inquirer. And,
3.the concealed facts must be revealed at the end.
The Time Machine adheres quite closely to the pattern of the detective story. On
his arrival in the year 802,701 the Time Traveller is immediately presented with
a mystery. On encountering the Eloi, he is surprised to discover that the human
race has not advanced but retrogressed. This unexpected development, and the
dilapidated condition of the buildings, presents a puzzle which the Time
Traveller attempts to solve. He is "watchful for every impression that could
possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendour" of the world (TM
46).
An inquiry by the Time Traveller into this mystery (ostensibly an inquiry into
the whereabouts of his stolen machine) structures the rest of the work. As I
show in Chapter Three, the Time Traveller constructs from his observations a
series of more and more comprehensive hypotheses: that the Eloi are the sole
heirs of the planet, being the degenerating descendants of a utopian
civilisation; that the subterranean Morlocks are the Eloi's industrial servants;
and finally that both races are engaged in a struggle for existence, with the
Morlocks preying on the Eloi. The Time Traveller actively explores the
geographical and biological terrain of this future society, slowly piecing
together his solution. His final theory is confirmed towards the end of the work
(TM 129-131).
The Time Machine thus conforms to the three main characteristics of the
detective formula, as well as conforming to Wells's own published views on the
method of effective scientific exposition. This book, therefore, employs the
method of Zadig and also the techniques of the classical detective story, and
these are related forms. Wells combines both to construct an historical
narrative from fragmentary evidence. Through a succession of hypotheses the Time
Traveller rebuilds the evolutionary history of the race over the time through
which he has travelled. From the point of view of the Time Traveller, these
hypotheses are a historical reconstruction; from the point of view of the
contemporary reader, they are a hypothetical future history based upon a
knowledge of existing laws and observations.

80

Turning to Moreau, the book's bibliographic history is important to

understanding its final form as regards the balance of detective fiction and
gothic qualities. In the first, abandoned, draft of Moreau, Wells followed
Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by concentrating on the solving of a mystery
(Philmus 1993, xx-xxi). There is a series of mystifications as Prendick comes
into contact with various samples of the island's quasi-human population.
Mystery also surrounds the activities of Moreau, secluded in his laboratory.
However, the narrative method of the first draft was inappropriate to Moreau as
it had no proper relation to Wells "invention" or theme: narrative method and
meaning do not co-determine one another here as they do in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(Philmus 1993, xxi).
The published version of Moreau altered the pattern of mystification by partly
adopting the "inverted procedural story" defined by Cawelti, where the reader is
aware that the facts have been concealed from the protagonist. The mystery was
simplified by substituting a straightforward misunderstanding whereby Prendick
imagines that Moreau is animalising humans rather than humanising animals and
this becomes the central problem for Prendick. The story is structured, not
around an inquiry by Prendick into concealed facts, but a growing disjunction
between Prendick's perceptions and the realities around him, of which the reader
is aware. Elements of mystification still exist, for example when Prendick
observes: "What could it all mean? A locked enclosure on a lonely island, a
notorious vivisector, and these crippled and distorted men?" (M 22)

Prendick's

misconception is resolved about halfway through the work in the chapter "Doctor
Moreau Explains", rather than at the end as it would be in the classic detective
formula. The resolution is achieved not through any process of ratiocination,
nor even by any inquiries initiated by Prendick. Rather, he is carried along by
the course of events, a victim of Fate, the "vast, pitiless Mechanism" that
shapes the fabric of existence on the island.
Moreau, therefore, only partly adopts the detective form in its use of the
inverted procedural story, but otherwise truncates or displaces it into other
directions. Those directions include a reliance on descriptive passages, rather
than active inquiry, as the naturalist Prendick recounts his observations of the
Beast People. The characterisation of the Beast People found in the first draft,
where they are depicted, largely through dialogue, as animals attempting to
behave like humans, is replaced in the published version by a more detached
expository prose. The Beast People are now portrayed as humans behaving like
animals, a change that, by challenging behavioural and psychological norms,
evokes a greater sense of horror. The Beast people are endowed not so much with
character as with biological and psychological characteristics. Philmus (1993,
xxvi) argues that, as a result of changes made between the first and final
versions, Wells came to adopt a satiric mode which caused the gothic influence
81

of Stevenson, Poe and Mary Shelley to recede. The greater psychological depth of
the final Moreau, however, as I argue in detail below, rather strengthened its
gothic credentials.
The way in which the detective story formula can be truncated and turned towards
the gothic is more clearly seen in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. This book is very
close to the classic novel of detection (Hirsch 1988, 229). Throughout the work
Utterson offers a series of assumptions, guesses and hypotheses as to the
relationship between Hyde and Jekyll, this being the fundamental mystery. For
example, taking up Lanyon's suggestion, Utterson initially believes that Hyde is
blackmailing Jekyll into making him the beneficiary of his will (JH 8, 19-20,
31)*; he later fears that Jekyll may be sheltering Hyde from the law after the
murder of Sir Danvers Carew (JH 30); that Jekyll has forged a letter purporting
it to be from Hyde (JH 32-34); and finally that Jekyll's seclusion is due to a
deforming malady (JH 47). Utterson's theories arise partly from his own
inquiries, such as his ambushing of Hyde (JH 15-16), his use of Guest's
handwriting skills to analyse Jekyll's forged letter (JH 32-34), and by direct
inquiries of Jekyll himself (JH 29-31). They arise also partly as a response to
events as they unfold, such as Hyde's murder of Carew and Jekyll's increasing
susceptibility to the drug. The resolution of the mystery comes in two stages
toward the end of the work, namely in Lanyon's narrative and in Jekyll's "Full
Statement". The solution, however, comes not through Utterson's efforts but from
the statements of Lanyon and Jekyll. Utterson is not able to deduce the truth
about the Jekyll/Hyde relationship because the mystery is a supernatural one in
the gothic tradition, the ratiocinative elements of the work being the subject
of satire by Stevenson (Hirsch 1988, 234). Although employing the methods and
formal structure of the detective story, these are challenged and undermined by
Romantic gothic attitudes: "The psychological focus and epistemological
scepticism of the gothic deconstructs the detective genre as Stevenson explores
it" (Hirsch 1988, 241).
The meeting of scientific rationalism and Victorian gothic in either Moreau or
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is not, I think, primarily a satiric one. The account
given by Block in Rituals of Dis-integration of the growth of Victorian gothic
literature and the psychomythic tale in relation to developments in evolutionary
and psychological science, is more insightful.
Before turning to Block's account, however, the level of detection in each of
the three works examined here needs summarising: The Time Machine closely
follows the classical detective formula and this implies a close association
between that genre and methods of scientific ratiocination such as the method of
*

All references to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson [1886] 1924) are to
volume four of the Skerryvore Edition, and are shown in the text as (JH [page]).

82

Zadig. Wells certainly accepted such an association and this accounts for his
fusion of Huxleyan and Holmesian methods in The Time Machine. Although not
completely absent from Moreau, the detective formula was largely abandoned with
the first draft as Wells turned towards a mode of exposition in which the
ratiocinative elements were displaced by gothic attitudes.
The difference between The Time Machine and Moreau in the use of the detective
formula is of primary importance and suggests that the former work has deeper
scientific roots than the latter. Indeed, in Moreau Wells had his sights set on
evoking a sense of horror through the use of biological and psychological
atavism or degeneration. Again using Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a guide, the depth
of Victorian gothic influence in Wells's books is assessed, with particular
reference to Moreau, in the remainder of this chapter.
Degeneration, Anthropology and Psychology in Victorian Gothic and Psychomythic
Literature
The influence of Darwinism on Victorian thought and literature as the nineteenth
century progressed can be traced in the rising interest in anthropology,
psychology, mythology and the occult as they related to evolution (Block 1993,
32). The treatises and essays of Darwin, Spencer, Sully and Lewes treated the
origin of mind and emotion in prehuman instincts, while the writings of Cesare
Lombroso, Max Nordau and Wells pushed these speculations into the future. The
result was a reading public attuned to the adaptations of science in literature
within the genre of the psychomythic tale (Block 1993, 33-34). The bridging of
primitive cultures with modern cultures through the study of the origins of
primitive beliefs, as in the work of the anthropologist E. B. Tylor, lent a new
scientific legitimation to folklore, myth, animism, supernaturalism, mental
"otherness" and insanity. Moreover, the notion of a survival or relic of a
primitive past in modern humans became more widely accepted and more commonly
recognised as existing in civilised society (Block 1993, 38-42).
These features of late Victorian science are present in Moreau and an
examination of them serves as a prologue to an exploration of the gothic and
psychomythic conventions at work.
Degeneration and anthropology. In general, the association of modern humans, the
primitive human, and the higher apes, was given legitimacy by Darwinian
evolution, particularly the classification of the human species with primates,
which Huxley specifically argued for in Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
(1863). Here, Huxley discussed the variations in skeletal structure between the
main branches of the human family, and the Gorilla, Chimpanzee, Orang and
Gibbon. Characteristics such as the relative length of the spinal column to the
83

limbs, the shape of the pelvis, the range of cranial capacities, the projection
of the muzzle and the facial angle, the brow prominences, and dentition, are
compared. The range of variation between humans and the gorilla in many of these
traits is less than that between the higher apes and the lower apes, showing
that humans are not significantly different from the higher apes in many of
these traits (Essays 7:98-108). The belief that modern humans, and especially
extant primitive races, have a close evolutionary history with the higher apes
is the central message of Man's Place in Nature. Regression to a similar
primitive mode of existence is a theme central to Moreau as it is to Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde.
Read as a "gothic SF novel", Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde can be interpreted as a case
study in degeneration as a corollary of regressive Darwinism in the human
(Lawler 1988, 252). Post-Darwinian evolutionary theory gave a "new twist" to the
idea of degeneration, as Darwinism put a new light on an existing idea of
reversion to an animal form which, in turn, opened the way to the idea that "if
evolution is a ladder, it may be possible to start moving down it" (Punter 1980,
244). The transformation of Jekyll into Hyde represents a backward step down the
ladder of human evolution. This transformation, brought about by a drug
compounded by Jekyll, is accompanied by physical changes toward the simian form.
Jekyll's friend, Utterson, on first meeting Hyde finds him "hardly human" and
possessing the characteristics of a troglodyte (JH 17). Utterson perceives
something unnameable in Hyde's appearance and general mien. He is aware of
something both familiar and indefinable: "There is something more, if I could
find a name for it" (JH 17). The trait which Utterson struggles to articulate is
one of animalism, heavily disguised by Hyde's apparent humanity. Hyde's murder
of Sir Danvers Carew is carried out with "an ape-like fury" (JH 25); Hyde is
described by Jekyll's butler, Poole, as being "like a monkey" (JH 49) and a
"creature" with a "quick and light way with it" (JH 48). As Poole and Utterson
break down the door to Jekyll's cabinet there arises from inside "a dismal
screech, as of mere animal terror" (JH 51). Hyde is physically smaller than
Jekyll, younger, and walks with a "swing" in his step. These traits all convey
the idea of a reversion to a simian form, to an earlier stage of human
evolution.
Dr Moreau's Beast People also have a close affinity to Huxley's primates and to
Stevenson's Mr Hyde. Moreau's creations are based closely on anthropological
investigations such as those of Huxley. The narrator in Moreau, Prendick,
provides a fairly detailed description of the higher Beast Folk. Moreau's
assistants, for example, have "protruding lower jaws" and bodies abnormally long
compared to the legs, the thigh parts being "short and curiously twisted" (M
17). The man who greets Moreau's launch on arrival at the island "had a large,
almost lipless mouth, extraordinary lank arms, long thin feet, bow legs, and
84

stood with his heavy face thrust forward" (M 17-18). Prendick's later
descriptions of other Beast People amount almost to a specialised natural
history for Moreau has blended one animal with another. However, the
correspondences between anthropologically-defined traits and the higher Beast
People are quite clear and are more detailed than Stevenson's portrayal of Hyde.
The retrogression of the Beast People following Moreau's death represents, as in
The Time Machine, degeneration following security that results in an
evolutionary retrogression. Wells now approaches Stevenson's method, however, by
reaching into the evolutionary past to bring forward lower forms of life.
Prendick recalls: "My Dog-man imperceptibly slipped back to the dog again; day
by day he became dumb, quadrupedal, hairy. I scarcely noticed the transition
from the companion on my right hand to the lurching dog at my side" (M 82). The
human traits Moreau instils in his creatures are gradually overthrown by the
"stubborn beast-flesh" while Prendick is alone with them on the island:
It would be impossible to detail every step of the lapsing of these monstersto
tell how, day by day, the human semblance left them; how they gave up bandagings
and wrappings, abandoned at last every stitch of clothing; how the hair began to
spread over the exposed limbs; how their foreheads fell away and their faces
projected; how the quasi-human intimacy I had permitted myself with some of them in
the first month of my loneliness became a shuddering horror to recall. (M 82)

This inevitable step-by-step declension is reminiscent of Jekyll's gradual

dissolution as he struggles against the encroaching inhumanity of Hyde. The
effect of uniting human and animal in single creatures is the same in each work
an effect of revulsion and horror is achieved by both writers.
The use of degeneration in The Time Machine is quite different to its use in
Moreau. The degeneration of the Overworld people and Undergrounders of the year
802,701 represents an adaptation to altered conditions of existence: to the
utopian conditions of the Eloi's Golden Age and to the subterranean habitat of
the Morlocks. In The Time Machine, therefore, we see the process of natural
selection at work. Evolution here involves a forward movement, or adaptation.
While the Morlocks are "ape-like" (TM 77), with limbs adapted for climbing, they
also have other traits such as owl-like eyes and white skin that are adaptations
to new conditions. Thus the Morlocks are not simply regressive. By contrast,
Wells and Stevenson depict a form of atavism in Moreau and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
where the Beast People and Hyde represent throwbacks to a primitive form. The
difference is one of effect. This approach creates a greater sense of horror
than the forward-looking stance of The Time Machine. Stevenson, by bringing back
from the past in the atavistic Hyde, "the slime of the pit", the "amorphous
dust", that which "was dead, and had no shape" but which still struggles to be
85

born (JH 83), creates a heightened sense of the unknown. The Time Traveller's
disgust of the Morlocks, whom he finds repulsive, also produces a sense of
horror, but of a lesser degree. The two authors bring about a different effect
in these works through this different emphasis.
The presentation of degeneration in Moreau and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde highlights
a difference between The Time Machine and Moreau. The Time Machine is concerned
with the evolutionary future of the species, while Moreau is concerned with the
evolutionary origins of modern humanity: "The Time Traveller explored the
future, . . . but under the scalpel of Moreau it is the human past which
revives" (J. P. Vernier quoted in Philmus 1993, xliv). Although both works draw
heavily and quite accurately on contemporary evolutionary theory, Moreau engages
our feelings of horror by its backward glance, while The Time Machine engages
our intelligence with its speculation about the future.
Degeneration and psychology. Another theme common to Moreau and Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde is mental retrogression. While the physical changes the Beast People and
Jekyll undergo are important in both works, their mental struggle between
outward manner and inner compulsion is salient, particularly to Stevenson's
work. Hyde is a creature of primitive sensibilities, "a necessary component of
human psychology which most would prefer to leave unrealized" (Saposnik 1983,
115).
The gradual development of evolutionist psychology in the second half of the
nineteenth-century is described by L. S. Hearnshaw (1964, 36) as having been
catalysed by the publication of Darwin's two books, The Descent of Man (1871)
and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Darwin's studies
of the mental powers of humans and the lower animals include the psychological
differences between the sexes, courtship behaviour and the emotions. In Man's
Place in Nature Huxley also contributed to this development by supporting the
classification of the human species with the higher apes partly on the basis of
homologous structures in the brain. Although not having an experimental basis,
Spencer's philosophy advanced the study of psychology through his description of
various grades of mental evolution and by the application of dynamical,
evolutionary concepts (Hearnshaw 1964, 44).
During the last quarter of the century an increasing number of textbooks,
treatises and journal articles discussed psychology in the light of evolutionary
theory. Ralph Tymms (1983, 78) notes the role of French experimental
psychologists in establishing the view of the mind as being made up of layers of
consciousness from which different personalities may emerge. James Sully,
working within the tradition of British Associationist psychologists, was
probably a more direct influence on Wells and Stevenson (Block 1982), and he
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stood out among English psychologists in this field. Sully embraced the
evolutionary hypothesis, which for him included Darwin's principal of natural
selection, and Lamarck's doctrine of the inheritance of acquired
characteristics. In his major work The Human Mind, Sully (1892, 32) states that
by
applying this [evolutionary] concept to those psycho-physical arrangements which
constitute the common instinctive base of our mental life, the psychologist can
suggest how, in the course of the evolution of man and his progenitors, certain
arrangements may have been built up.

Certain brain structures in human and animal correspond to various stages in

mental evolution. The brain is considered to be composed of a series of
physiological structures in which ideation and action arise. The earliest
evolved structures give rise to rudimentary animal behaviour while the more
recently evolved structures govern higher, more reflective mental processes,
which usually moderate or control the former (Sully 1893, 357):
The newest conception of the brain is of a hierarchy of organs, the higher and
later evolved seeming to control, and in a measure repress, the functional
activities of the lower and earlier. Translated into psychological language, this
means that what is instinctive, primitive, elemental, in our mental life, is being
continually overborne by the fruit of experience, by the regulative process of
reflection.

The later and higher mental acquisitions that are the most recently evolved,
however, are the least stable and thus "the most liable to be thrown hors de
combat" (Sully 1881, 122-23). The structures controlling higher mental processes
are at risk of being disorganised or disabled whereupon more primitive mental
states obtrude. This happens in dreams when the higher faculties are stupefied
by sleep, and also in cases of mental illness and insanity where "we see the
process of nervous dissolution beginning with these same nervous structures, and
so taking the reverse order of the process of evolution" (Sully 1881, 123).
The debt both Wells and Stevenson owe to Sully, and the relationship between
Sully's writing and Victorian gothic literature, is discussed by Block (1982).
Sully's writing on mental evolution, the phenomenon of double personality, and
the relationship between genius and insanity, form the basis of Stevenson's
characterisation of the Jekyll/Hyde persona. One nineteenth-century view of
genius, to which Sully adhered, was that of a mind marked by great intellect but
also by moral failings, or weakness of the will. Jekyll is just such a man of
genius who dissolves the bonds that unite his psyche releasing a primitive form
of consciousness no longer subject to the will (Block 1982, 455-56). The
duplicitous nature of Jekyll's personality is well-established even before he
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begins his experiments; a desire to achieve honour and distinction is at war

with "a certain impatient gaiety of disposition" and a tendency to conceal his
initially harmless pleasures (JH 65). "Though so profound a double-dealer, I was
in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest;" writes Jekyll.
"I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than
when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the
relief of sorrow or suffering" (JH 65). As Jekyll's experiments advance,
however, his ability to resist taking the powders, to resist the indulgences so
attractive to Hyde, falls away, like the will of an addict before a drug. The
choice is Jekyll's: "But I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those
balancing instincts by which even the worst of us continues to walk with some
degree of steadiness among temptations; and in my case, to be tempted, however
slightly, was to fall" (JH 77).
The connection between genius and insanity, between the morally good and evil,
between the human and the animal, stemmed from the belief of psychologists that
insanity represented a reversion to a primitive state of mind. When volitional
control was wanting, as in cases of mental disease, the mind fell back to a
state representing an earlier stage of evolution, releasing primitive instincts
of selfishness and brutality. These qualities characterise Hyde (Block 1982,
456).
The influence of Sully's brand of evolutionist psychology in Moreau is also
examined by Block (1982) in the context of dual consciousness, regression, and
genius. Although not stated by Block, it is highly probable that Wells studied
psychology under Sully at the College of Preceptors in 1889 and 1891 where Wells
attended courses to improve his educational qualifications (West 1930, 83-89)
and where Sully lectured on the Theory of Education. In his autobiography Wells
(1934, 1:335) states that the subjects of psychology, education and ethics
offered by the College "greatly interested" him, and "superficial though the
standard was, they cleared up my mind upon various issues and started some
valuable trains of thought."
The character of the evil genius is seen in Dr Moreau. His disregard for the
suffering of his creatures in pursuit of his biological investigations, and his
lack of human sympathy, are traits representative of the moral and emotional
failings of the nineteenth-century "demented genius" (Block 1982, 465-66). This
view, however, needs supplementing. As an embodiment of the cosmic process,
Moreau has a role which is more complex than Jekyll/Hyde's embodiment of good
and evil. Moreau is neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral. His indifference
to suffering, illustrated by his refusal to use anaesthetic, does not represent
a program of the infliction of suffering for its own sake, or for the
gratification of perverse pleasures. Rather, it arises from a morally neutral
88

stance, from unconcern, from that lack of anthropocentricity that the cosmic
process displays. We may consider his actions cruel and evil, but that is purely
an interpretation we place on an otherwise morally neutral process. And this is
precisely Wells's point: the evolutionary forces of creation are neither good
nor bad, and the attempt of evolutionary optimists or theologians to attach
moral values to them is invalid. For moral conflict only arises out of the
development of the "artificial factor", the attempt to fit the square peg of the
palaeolithic savage into the round hole of the civilised state. The Jekyll/ Hyde
character, as an embodiment of good and evil, takes up the issue at this point;
where the demands of civilisation are at war with the instincts of the savage.
"It was the curse of mankind . . . that in the agonised womb of consciousness,
these polar twins should be continuously struggling" laments Jekyll (JH 66-67).
Apart from Moreau and the Beast People, the character most strongly affected
psychologically in Moreau is the narrator, Prendick, who undergoes a dissolution
of the personality similar to that of Jekyll. Arriving on Moreau's island
already in a deprived mental and physical state, Prendick's mental degeneration,
after the death of Moreau and Montgomery, parallels the degeneration of the
islanders:
In the retrospect it is strange to remember how soon I fell in with these monsters'
ways. . . . I found their simple scale of honour was based mainly on the capacity
for inflicting trenchant wounds. Indeed, I may saywithout vanity I hopethat I
held something like pre-eminence among them" (M 80).

Prendick's mind assumes the same primitive traits that characterise the Beast
People as the higher cortical areas of his brain are usurped by mental disease,
and as the instinct of self-preservation manifests itself in aggression and
conflict. Prendick's browned skin, matted hair, rags of clothing, and bright
eyes with their "swift alertness of movement" (M 82) make him at one with the
brutish islanders.
Writing of his rescue, Prendick later recalls, "I had to act with the utmost
circumspection to save myself from the suspicion of insanity" (M 86). He
recognises that he has "caught something of the natural wildness" of his
companions and on his return to London seeks the help of a mental specialist (M
86). Prendick is shown to exhibit the symptoms of double personality such as
those described by Sully. The normal mental state is intruded upon by a
secondary state "in which the thoughts, feelings, and the whole personality
become other than they were" (Sully 1893, 361). This substitution of the old
self by a new self constitutes a form of illusion, not unlike dreams and
hallucinations which are composed of fragmentary memories and sensations (Sully
1893, 361-62). Instead of a resumption of normal life Prendick undergoes a
89

strange alteration of personality in which the memories received during the

eleven months spent on Moreau's island obtrude into his old self. Sometimes this
"distant cloud" of memories "spreads until it obscures the whole sky. Then I
look about me at my fellow-men and I go in fear" (M 87). His fellow human beings
take on the appearance of the victims of Moreau's surgery, where the animal
surges up from within them in such a way that Prendick cannot distinguish the
reality from illusion. In a manner reminiscent of Jekyll's surrendering of his
personality to Hyde, and his retreat into the isolation of his cabinet, Prendick
adopts a secluded rural existence, exhibiting a fundamentally different nature
to that of his previous self. Once a naturalist, Prendick now devotes his days
to experiments in chemistry and to the study of astronomy; once an outgoing,
well-travelled man, he now lives a life of seclusion (M 87).
Theories of evolutionist psychology are found also in The Time Machine although
they are less developed than in Moreau or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Eloi race
that the Time Traveller encounters in the year 802,701 represents a degenerate
form of humanity. Their physical and mental atrophy are positive adaptations to
secure conditions of existence, not adaptations brought about by struggle. Thus
their physical and mental traits are child-like rather than brutish. The mental
level of the Eloi is on a par with five-year-old children of the Time
Traveller's own time; the Eloi are good imitators of tone and gesture; and their
simple minds assign a quasi-theological or mythical cause to the Time
Traveller's sudden appearance among them (TM 39). They have a language composed
mainly of noun substantives, verbs and demonstrative pronouns (TM 44) which
typify the early stage of ideational language in the child and early human races
(Romanes 1888, 104-105, 218-20).
We learn little of the mental processes of the Morlocks, except that they are
more curious and aggressive. Their aggression, however, is directed more against
the Eloi than the Time Traveller. Although the Morlocks are creatures to be
dreaded, they are no match for the Time Traveller's intelligence and physical
strength, and produce only a low level of horror. The Eloi are child-like and
placid. Neither species presents the same threat that the Beast People present
to Prendick, or that the evil Hyde presents to the London citizenry. The role of
evolutionist psychology in The Time Machine is less pronounced than in the other
two works.
In summary, the influence of evolutionist theory on the theme and
characterisation of Moreau and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was quite extensive and
illustrates the reliance both authors placed on science as a basis for themes,
descriptive passages and literary practice. The strong similarities between the
two works include not only a common foundation in evolutionary science, but the
evocation of horror by the conjoining of human and animal (or primitive human)
90

within single forms or characters. Just as the gothic elements of Stevenson's

book derive largely from the psychological blurring of personal identity and the
fear of losing control over the self (Hirsch 1988, 241), so Moreau draws a
gothic effect from the erasure of psychological, as well as physical, boundaries
between human and animal. Most importantly, this feature represents another
point of departure between The Time Machine and Moreauthe greater role of
individual psychology in Moreau aligns it with Stevenson's book rather than The
Time Machine in its psychological and aesthetic effect. This judgement is
supported by the following brief analysis of the relative extent of other gothic
and psychomythic elements in Moreau and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Victorian Gothic and Psychomythic Conventions
Elizabeth MacAndrew (1979, 51) remarks of late Victorian gothic literature that
"the methods of the later authors, nonetheless, are demonstrably the same as
those of the early writers of Gothic fiction." Although the methods of gothic
fiction remained fairly constant throughout the nineteenth century, the themes
and characterisations responded to developments in evolutionary biology and
psychology, as shown above. Moreover, the conventions of gothic underwent some
elaboration, for example in the extension of familial relations (Svilpis 1989,
83) and in the greater psychological depth of later works such as Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde, a book whose gothic conventions merge with those of the late Victorian
psychomythic tale (Block 1993, 11).
In addition to a mood of terror shading into horror, the features that Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde share with the traditional gothic romance include: (1) a thematic
focus on sensational mysteries of knowledge and self-knowledge; connected with
(2) a family relation and a series of unspeakable crimes; and (3) narrative
complexity; while also sharing with the psychomythic tale (4) a greater
imaginative intensity and psychological penetration (Block 1993, 11-12). Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde is used here as a model for assessing the extent to which
these conventions were used by Wells. It is found that these characteristics of
late gothic and psychomythic literature deeply inform Moreau, as they do Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but do not greatly inform The Time Machine.
1. The pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge. The emergence of a danger or
threat arising from the pursuit of knowledge or self-knowledge is a familiar
gothic theme. The source of the threat is often the self (as opposed to the
'not-I' or 'other') and this is a major theme of modern fantastic literature. In
this case "danger is seen to originate from the subject, through excessive
knowledge, or rationality, or the mis-application of the human will. This
pattern would be exemplified by Frankenstein, and is repeated in H. G. Wells's
The Island of Dr Moreau [sic], R. L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Edgar
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Allan Poe's Ligeia, [and] Bulwer Lytton's The Haunted and the Haunters" (Jackson
1981, 58).
The obsessive scientific vision of the 'mad scientist' of gothic literature
causes the pursuit of a dangerous path that may result in the death of the
scientist and one or more of the other protagonists. "Possessing a power that
results from his discovery," writes J. E. Svilpis (1989, 69), "he [the
scientist] performs a transgressive experiment whose success causes a poetically
just punishment." The death of Lanyon as a consequence of Jekyll's activities,
Utterson's trauma at the discovery of his friend's secret, as well as the
suicide of Jekyll, duplicate a theme of curiosity "punished" (Block 1993, 1213). We also see these features of the search for knowledge and self-knowledge,
associated with a just punishment, in Moreau. The research of Dr Moreau, his
"mad, aimless investigations" (M 63), drive him to experiment once too often,
and to suffer a grisly fate at the hands of the vivisected puma. Montgomery
meets a similar end when his "vicious sympathy" with the ways of Moreau's
creations are repaid in kind (M 55). Prendick emerges from his experience with
permanent mental scars and a fundamentally changed personality (M 64). In a
manner reminiscent of Gulliver in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, he shuts
himself off from society. Prendick now denies the biological and social form of
self-knowledge that arises from the study of nature and contact with his fellow
human beings. Knowledge is now sought in the study of that which is not human,
the study of the stars: "There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws
of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that
whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope" (M
87). The unspoken possibility of suicide by Prendick after completing his
manuscript must be considered: Prendick's mental imbalance may, as with Jekyll,
have brought about his death.
By contrast, the Time Traveller's journey of discovery into the evolutionary and
cosmological future of the human species is not a transgressive act and has no
corresponding punishment. The knowledge that the Time Traveller brings from the
future, and the lesson this knowledge holds for his complacent middle-class
guests, presents no threat and has no immediate psychological, physical or
social consequences.
2. Familial relations. The close familial or domestic relations of the scientist
in early gothic literature was extended and developed during the nineteenth
century in other directions, primarily personal and social, by later writers so
that "the archetype had been elaborated into an entire discourse that related
science and other fields of endeavour to social and personal contexts in a
complex knot of narrative possibilities" (Svilpis 1989, 83). Wells, among
others, "accepted this legacy from Gothic and Gothic-inspired fiction" (Svilpis
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1989, 83). In the following, the term 'familial' is used in this broader sense
of including personal, social and, indeed, professional relationships.
These familial relationships are present in Moreau. Edward Prendick's story is
introduced by his nephew and heir, Charles Prendick, who claims to have found
the manuscript among his late uncle's papers. He provides brief historical
details concerning the loss of the Lady Vain and his uncle's belated rescue. He
editorialises on the credibility of the account, alerting the reader to the
evidence for and against, and declaring the suspicion of insanity.
While on the island, Prendick, Moreau, Montgomery, and his assistant, M'ling,
constitute a complex group that displays a diversity of relationships. Their
isolated location, shared domestic circumstances, and internal conflicts,
provide a familial matrix within which events unfold. The moral strengths and
weaknesses of each character emerge partly as a result of these relations, such
as Montgomery's liking for M'ling and his desire to have a drunken "Bank
Holiday" with his friend (M 71). By contrast, Moreau views Montgomery's interest
in the affairs of the Beast People with distaste, preferring the seclusion of
his laboratory (M 51). Moreau's authority, both over Montgomery and the Beast
People, is a force for order on the island, and Moreau thus fulfils the role of
head of the island's rather bizarre household. Even Prendick has a reluctant
admiration for Moreau's intellectual and physical stature: "I looked at him, and
saw but a white-faced, white haired man, with calm eyes. Save for his serenity,
the touch of almost beauty that resulted from his set tranquility and his
magnificent build, he might have passed muster among a hundred other comfortable
old gentlemen" (M 51-52).
As a naturalist, Prendick is able to converse in scientific terms with both
Montgomery and Moreau, engaging them both, at different times, in a professional
dialogue (M 7, M 45-52). Prendick's background in biology enables him to not
only understand, but challenge Moreau on scientific and philosophical issues
such as the role of language in ideation (M 47). The familial and personal
relations are thus augmented with a professional relationship between these
three biologists, although each has widely differing scientific and moral views.
Similarly complex familial relationships exist in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The
most significant of these is between Jekyll himself and his alter ego, Hyde, the
latter being mentioned in Jekyll's will as his sole heir (Block 1993, 12).
Jekyll has "more than a father's interest" in Hyde, while Hyde has "more than a
son's indifference" to Jekyll (JH 75). The familial interest also arises in the
gentlemanly and professional relation of Enfield, Utterson, Lanyon, Jekyll and
other "old cronies" (JH 21). Jekyll and Lanyon are scientific colleagues whose
disagreement over scientific matters has resulted in a personal rift between
93

them (JH 13).

These relations are sufficiently strong to enable the story to be told
consecutively from four separate points of view as Jekyll's friends and
colleagues are drawn into a web of mystery as they seek to save Jekyll from the
influence of Hyde. Utterson, in particular, frequently being "the last reputable
acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going men" (JH 3),
has more than just a professional concern for Jekyll.
The familial relations in The Time Machine centre mainly on those between the
Time Traveller and Hillyer, who "was one of the Time Traveller's most constant
guests" (TM 18) and "on easy terms in the house" (TM 148). Hillyer provides the
outer narrative within which the Time Traveller's monologue appears. His
acceptance of the Time Traveller's story shows that he is something of a
disciple, as does his entry into the inner sanctum of the Time Traveller's
laboratory where he is able to touch the machine (TM 149). The Time Traveller's
circle of dining friends, such as the Psychologist, the Provincial Mayor, and
the Medical Man, provide an atmosphere redolent of London social and
intellectual life. These characters, however, are present primarily to provide
an audience for the Time Traveller's discoursevery little, if any, personal or
professional entanglement occurs between the Time Traveller and his guests.
Indeed, the function of familial relations differs between Moreau and Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde on the one hand, and The Time Machine on the other for this reason:
the Time Traveller's guests are passive recipients of his account and do not
participate in the events he describes, whereas in the former two works the
characters are an intimate part of the action and affect the course of events
profoundly. Thus familial relations in Moreau and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde fulfil
their gothic function by drawing other central characters into the transgressive
acts and unspeakable crimes of the protagonists, Dr Moreau and Dr Jekyll
respectively.
These unspeakable crimes are two-fold. They involve, first, a crime against
Nature in which the scientist attempts to go beyond the natural limits of human
knowledge, seen in Jekyll's attempt to dissociate good and evil in the human
psyche, and in Moreau's attempt to create a new form of quasi-human life (in a
manner reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).
Second, one or more very real physical crimes accompanies these activities.
Hyde's trampling of a young girl and his murder of Sir Danvers Carew are among
his crimes against society, crimes in regard to which both Enfield and Utterson
feel impelled to act. In Moreau, we are told that Dr Moreau was forced out of
London after an outcry against his experiments in vivisection (M 21-22),
experiments which he repeats in more extensive fashion on his island retreat.
94

Montgomery, too, is "an outcast from civilisation" as a result of some

unspeakable immoral or criminal act (M 12). As the human and quasi-human
societies on Moreau's island collapse and retrogress into violence and conflict,
Prendick also is drawn into a debased and brutal life.
The familial relations in all three books also structure their narratives. The
narrative complexity and associated psychological dimensions of each work are
examined in the following section.
3, 4. Narrative complexity and psychological penetration. Although the analysis
of narrative complexity is neither a new or particularly insightful technique,
it provides an organising principle for gauging the scientific and literary
dimensions of The Time Machine, Moreau and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Narrative
structure, moreover, has implications for the comparative psychological, and
thus gothic, dimensions of each work and are therefore treated together in this
section.
Narrative complexity and psychological penetration are features common to gothic
literature and the psychomythic tale but find a stronger development in the
latter, more modern, form (Block 1993, 13-15). Psychological depth in Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde, for example, can be viewed as a by-product of narrative structure
because a greater insight into personality is achieved through the multiple
perspectives provided by the shape of the text (Block 1993, 15-16). Stevenson's
book is a complex narrative describing events from four different points of
view. The book opens with Enfield relating "The Story of the Door" to Utterson.
This excites Utterson's curiosity and we then follow events through his eyes
until Jekyll's death. "Dr. Lanyon's Narrative" informs us of his experience of
seeing Hyde transform into Jekyll. We then get the full story of Jekyll's
struggle in his own words in "Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case", the
manuscript found by Utterson after Jekyll's suicide.
This narrative complexity reflects the fragmentation of self that the doubling
of Jekyll's personality involves. Jekyll's personality threatens not only to
split but to fragment when he speculates that "man will be ultimately known for
a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens" (JH 66). Of
this relationship between psychological multifariousness and narrative structure
Block (1993, 16) writes:
The narrative complexity, seen most dramatically in the multiple perspectives or
voices with which the story culminates, enacts precisely that multifariousness.
Jekyll/Hyde is and can be known only through the multiple texts or voices which
recount his story.

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This structural and psychological complexity is achieved partly through the

technique of the 'found manuscript', a convention of gothic literature
(MacAndrew 1979, 110) and the psychomythic tale (Block 1993, 14). With this
technique the reader is carefully positioned in relation to the world described
in the work and a sense is created for the reader of entering a strange world.
In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde the strangeness is accentuated by the mediation of the
story, step by step, through several minds, a feature which indicates that in
late Victorian gothic literature the psychology of human nature had become a
matter of conscious exploration (MacAndrew 1979, 224-25).
The technique of the found manuscript is used by Wells in Moreau, where Edward
Prendick's nephew, Charles Prendick, acts as editor and briefly introduces his
uncle's account. While the nephew's role in Moreau is minor compared to the
extensive manuscripts of Lanyon and Utterson in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the
Introduction fulfils the important function of positioning the reader and serves
as an indicator of how the work is to be read. MacAndrew (1979, 11) comments on
this role of the editor in gothic literature: "The statements these 'editors'
put into their 'prefaces' must not be taken at face value. Rather, they are the
first of many signals alerting us to the kind of reading required of us." The
nephew's Introduction in Moreau, while superficially seeming to support his
uncle's story, in fact subtly undermines it in two ways: first, by declaring
that subsequent information failed to substantiate the account, so that "this
narrative is without confirmation in its most essential particular" (M 3); and
second, by casting doubt on Edward Prendick's sanity. The nephew writes of his
uncle:
He gave such a strange account of himself that he was supposed demented.
Subsequently he alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment of his escape
from the Lady Vain. His case was discussed among psychologists at the time as a
curious instance of the lapse of memory consequent upon physical and mental stress.
(M 3)

The nephew presents evidence that corroborates, as well as evidence that

discredits, his uncle's account. The rather candid Introduction thus swings
between credulity and doubt, leaving the reader in an ambivalent state of mind
towards reality of the account that follows.
The obscuring of the boundaries of phenomenal reality and imaginative states in
Moreau is mediated also through other narrative complications such as Prendick's
time drifting in the open boat of the Lady Vain, his four-day passage with the
aberrant passengers and crew of the Ipecacuanha, and his brief return to the sea
after being set adrift by the captain of the Ipecacuanha. These experiences
create an atmosphere of psychological disorientation before Prendick's main
96

narrative begins. Moreau's island itself, moreover, is "soporifically warm and

suspends Prendick in a trance-like state" forcing him to construct his own
reality by piecing together fragments of sensation (Rainwater 1983, 40). This is
shown by the many references to mental instability, dreams and illusions in the
text. These include descriptions such as "apparition" (M 25, twice); "vague
dread" (M 26); "a mere creation of my disordered imagination" (M 29); "strangely
unreal for all that [the Satyr] cast a shadow" (M 59); "some [Beast People] so
strangely distorted as to resemble nothing but the denizens of our wildest
dreams" (M 59); "I was still inclined to be nervous and break down under any
great stress" (M 76); and "my imagination was running away with me into a morass
of unsubstantial fears" (M 77). Prendick's return to familiar surroundings after
his rescue does not guarantee a return to full psychological reorientation but
rather affirms a permanent alteration of his consciousness (Rainwater 1983, 36).
In the body of the text Moreau offers an extensive narrative, largely
independent of Prendick's, in the Chapter "Doctor Moreau Explains". After
chiding Prendick as being "the most dictatorial guest I ever entertained" (M
45), Moreau provides an esoteric account of his research and a brief history of
his time on the island. This chapter constitutes Moreau's scientific
justification of his research and provides another perspective on events, a
corrective to Prendick's delusory perception that Moreau is animalising humans.
The psychological profile that Wells creates for Prendick is similar to states
of hallucination described by Sully in works such as Illusions: A Psychological
Study (1881) and "The Dream as a Revelation" (1893). The clinical symptoms of
insanity, involving illusion and double personality, are thus derived from the
science of the day, while the psychological effect is achieved by the use of
gothic conventions, including a narrative complexity that obscures phenomenal
and psychological boundaries.
The Time Machine has a simpler narrative structure and less psychological depth
than either Moreau or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The book does, nevertheless, use a
narrative structure that has close links to fantastic literature, namely the
tale within a framework, or tale within a tale. As with the found manuscript,
this convention serves the end of positioning the reader and of opening a door
between the commonplace world and the strange world. The use of an outer
narrator enables the setting to be at once both contemporaneous and strange
(MacAndrew 1979, 112). The frame narrator of The Time Machine, Hillyer,
describes the comfortable after-dinner atmosphere within which the Time
Traveller relates his story. This story is an uninterrupted monologue comprising
an extensive inner core. The story is told primarily from one point of view: the
Time Traveller's. This view, however, is briefly challenged in the Epilogue
where Hillyer doggedly maintains his optimistic outlook despite the Time
97

Traveller's warning of the possibility of evolutionary degeneration: "I, for my

own part," writes Hillyer, "cannot think that these latter days of weak
experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating
time" (TM 152). This narrative structure, however, is unaccompanied by
psychological insight. Wells gives nowhere near as much psychological attention
to the flat and dimensionless characters of The Time Machine as he does to
Prendick and Doctor Moreau, or as much as Stevenson does to Utterson and
Jekyll/Hyde.
In summary, the narrative structures of Moreau and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are
more complex than that of The Time Machine. This complexity helps infuse the two
former works with psychological dimensions that have a depth and quality
characteristic of late Victorian gothic and psychomythic literature.
The comparative unity of Huxley's Essays. To what extent do familial relations,
psychological depth and narrative complexity inform Huxley's work? The choice of
one particular Huxley essay to analyse for these features would be purely
arbitrary, so observations on Huxley's Collected Essays in general, as well as
on "The Progress of Science", "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society",
"Evolution and Ethics", "Prolegomena" and "On the Method of Zadig", are called
for.
"On the Method of Zadig" provides the most complex example being close in
narrative structure to both The Time Machine and Moreau. Huxley begins by
introducing an extensive inner narration which is a quote from Voltaire. Here,
Zadig recounts the events surrounding his deduction of the appearance of the
Queen's dog and the King's horse. The account contains substantial dialogue and
gives us some psychological insight into Zadig, whose candid pursuit of truth
brings him into conflict with authority. Zadig appears as one too honest and
wise for his era. Huxley's introduction of Zadig's own story yields a structure
like that of The Time Machine where Hillyer introduces the Time Traveller's
account of his journey. This common structure is not surprising given that both
works illustrate ratiocinative techniques by providing historical narratives set
in the past and in the future, respectively. It also suggests that Huxley is
sensitive to the fictive nature of such prophecies and perhaps also to their
adoption by writers such as Poe and Conan Doyle. Huxley, however, chooses his
story from Voltaire's Zadig because the work is cited by Cuvier. This enables
Huxley to anchor the story in the history of palaeontology as well as draw on
Voltaire's intellectual and literary prestige.
Moreau and "On the Method of Zadig" also have structural similarities. The
nephew's introduction to Prendick's narration is not unlike Huxley's
introduction to Voltaire's story. Both introduce a manuscript that is somewhat
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doubtful or obscurePrendick's having been accidentally found among his papers

by his nephew, who is uncertain as to its veracity, while Huxley states that
Voltaire's story is based on an obscure, possibly fictional, historical figure
(Essays 4:1-2). "On the Method of Zadig" in fact contains three narrative
levels: a section introducing a doubtful manuscript (Huxley's introductory
comments); the account provided by that manuscript (Voltaire's story); and a
narration by the central character describing his own activities and thought
processes (Zadig's account of his ratiocinative methods). The narrative
complexity of Huxley's lecture is comparable to that of The Time Machine and
Moreau.
This is somewhat different, however, to Huxley's practice in the other four
essays mentioned above where he provides a single narrative based on his own
observations and experience as a naturalist. "Prolegomena" and "The Struggle for
Existence in Human Society" are such narratives, being uninterrupted by
extensive quotations or dialogues. "The Progress of Science" is complicated only
by footnotes in which other scientific researchers, such as Fresnel and Whewell,
are quoted. The endnotes to "Evolution and Ethics" contain extensive quotations
from authoritative sources although the body of the work is, again, a
straightforward first-person narrative. Conversely, other essays,
"Administrative Nihilism" (1871) and "Evolution in Biology" (1878) for example,
have a structure complicated by quotations from several different scientists or
philosophers, the former giving the point of view of six different authorities
and the latter, five. These two essays lie at the other extreme of narrative
complexity in Huxley's writing. This complexity is not accompanied by welldeveloped familial relationships or psychological depth. Although professional
relations, both co-operative and combative, between Huxley and other thinkers
emerge, they do not portray the shared domestic circumstances seen in Moreau,
for example, nor even the personal concern for colleagues exhibited by Utterson
in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The inclusion of other perspectives in Huxley's
essays leads the reader toward a unified view rather than a fragmentary or
disunified view.
Huxley himself is the central figure in most of his essays. The authorities he
quotes serve to strengthen his own views and develop his own image as the
disinterested investigator. The very slight psychological dimension of Huxley's
essays pertains almost entirely to himself. As Lankester notes in his review of
Huxley's Essays, "style is the man", and a definite, if shallow, psychological
profile of Huxley emerges from his essays. We read, for example: "I have no
pretensions to the character of a philanthropist, and I have a special horror of
all sorts of sentimental rhetoric; I am merely trying to deal with facts, to
some extent within my own knowledge, and further evidenced by abundant
testimony, as a naturalist" (Essays 9:216). Huxley's essays are full of the word
99

"I". In addition to their aim of arguing a specific thesis, most of Huxley's

essays are personal testimonials to the efficacy of science in general and of
the evolutionary hypothesis in particular. The tendency for Huxley to put
himself forward as an honest broker for truth accounts for the personal note,
the psychological singularity and comparative narrative unity of his essays, at
least in terms of the literary qualities examined in this chapter.
The relative narrative complexity of each writer's work can be seen clearly in
Figure 1 where the narrative structure, as a reflection of these literary
qualities, is illustrated. The order of arrangement, from Huxley's Essays,
through The Time Machine, Moreau and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, accurately
indicates, I believe, the balance of scientific exposition at the one extreme
and the depth of these literary qualities at the other.

Huxley

Collected Essays

occasional quotation of other authorities

Hillyer

Time Traveller

Edward Prendick

Charles Prendick
Dr Moreau

Enfield
Utterson

Lanyon
Jekyll

The Time Machine

The Island of Doctor

Moreau

Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde

Figure 1. The comparative narrative complexity of Collected Essays, The Time Machine, The
Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. All narrations
are in the first person except those of Enfield and Utterson; however, in the case of
these two, the story is told through their eyes.

100

Does an examination of the critical reception of Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr

Hyde confirm this order of arrangement? Paul Maixner in Robert Louis Stevenson:
The Critical Heritage (1981) reprints and analyses many reviews of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde. The reviewers saw the book primarily as an allegory (and a pessimistic
one at that) illustrating the power of evil to gain ground over the well-meaning
person who yields to temptation. A Poe-like sense of mystery and horror was
often remarked in response to the book's exploration of the human mind. The
scientific details of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, particularly the transformation
using a chemical, were questioned, but it was the struggle between good and evil
that most fascinated reviewers (Maixner 1981, 23-34).
A more detailed look at these reviews is given in Appendix One of this thesis
since only the general results need be presented here. In brief, my own analysis
generally confirms Maixner's summary. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was received
primarily as a moral allegory or parable on the conflict between good and evil
in the individual, symbolised in the Jekyll/Hyde character. The literary merits
of the work were enthusiastically acknowledged: Stevenson's skill and art were
praised as was the powerful and imaginative nature of the work. Mystery and
horror were stressed, several commentators stating that Stevenson had exceeded
Poe on this score. Finally, with the exception of one reviewer, the science in
the work was either overlooked (neither anthropology nor psychology being
mentioned) or was dismissed as a fault, critics believing Stevenson to have
erred in trying to rationalise the transformation process.
The critical commentary on Stevenson's book has relevance to the reception of
Wells's books in three areas: general similarities in reception, scientific
comment, and aesthetic responses to each work. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time
Machine and Moreau were all considered to be highly imaginative, powerful,
ingenious in their use of ideas, and original. Comparisons of both authors to
Poe were frequent and may be put down to these qualities, as well as the
ratiocinative, psychological and gruesome features of each individual work.
Scientific comment in regard to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was similar to that
afforded Moreauin both cases the basis of the work in evolutionary biology and
psychology was overlooked, while the "creaking of the machinery" where science
and fantasy joined was pointed out. The science in Moreau, however, was also
publicly questioned by scientific authorities, an examination to which Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde was not subjected. Aesthetic responses to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and
Moreau centred on the evocation of horror. Stevenson, however, received
favourable comment on his artistic achievement, while Wells provoked aesthetic
revulsion and at least one verdict that the work was an "artistic failure". The
moral parable concerning good and evil was clearly recognised in Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde, while the more sophisticated thesis of Moreau went largely unremarked.
The arguments of The Time Machine, on the other hand, were noted and discussed.
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The primary differences in critical reception, therefore, centre on the

reviewers' aesthetic and intellectual verdicts: put simply, Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde was embraced for its artistic and literary merits as a work of horror;
Moreau was perceived as having little merit either as science or art but its
horrific effect was recognised; and The Time Machine was well received for its
intellectual arguments. This result supports, in a very general way, the main
findings of this chapter, which may now be summarised.
Differences between The Time Machine and Moreau, and between these works and
Huxley's Essays, in their use of mystery, the development of character and
personality, the complexity of the narratives, the use of degeneration and in
their critical reception, noted in Chapters 5 and 6, may be understood by
reference to the literary genres of the story of detection and late Victorian
gothic and psychomythic literature.
The Time Machine adheres closely to the formula of detective fiction, a formula
that Wells considered suited to the exposition of scientific ideas, such as
evolutionary and geological narratives. This genre has close affinities to the
ratiocinative procedures acknowledged by Huxley, in his essay "On the Method of
Zadig", as being characteristic of the scientific method.
In writing Moreau, however, Wells sacrificed mystification and ratiocination to
the conventions of gothic literature. This was achieved using methods remarkably
similar to those of Stevenson in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. On the scientific side,
these methods include the use of theories of degeneration, atavism and
evolutionist psychology. The literary conventions employed include a thematic
focus on the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge, associated with a
transgressive act and a just punishment; extended familial and professional
relations; a series of unspeakable crimes; a high degree of narrative complexity
including the use of the 'found manuscript'; and, as a by-product of the latter,
great psychological penetration. These gothic conventions deeply inform Moreau
but do not inform The Time Machine to any significant degree.
These findings suggest that The Time Machine has closer scientific and literary
ties to Huxley's Essays than to late Victorian gothic literature, such as Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to which Moreau, however, has extensive affinities, both
scientific and literary. The tendency of modern critics (such as that of
Bergonzi) to align Wells's early works en masse with fantasies such as
Stevenson's is thus an oversimplification, and quite inaccurate in regard to The
Time Machine.
In the next (concluding) chapter the overall results of the research are
assessed. As a tentative explanation for the findings, the intersection of
102

scientific and literary qualities in the works of Wells and Huxley is discussed
in terms of their attempt to apply evolutionary theory to social questions.

103

CHAPTER SEVEN
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Summary of Results
In proposing that The Time Machine and Moreau can be considered works of
science, I have attempted to explore their scientific and literary dimensions
through their relationship to Huxley's essays and to late Victorian gothic
literature. I have also taken into account the intimate correlation between
Well's science journalism and these books, as well as their critical reception.
While a quantitative assessment of the balance of science and literature is out
of the question, an order has emerged in regard to certain scientific and
literary characteristics. This order is illustrated in Table 3. Here, an
estimate is given as to whether the works examined adopt particular
characteristics strongly, moderately or slightly. A "+" sign means that the work
partakes significantly, a "o" that the work partakes moderately, and a "-" that
the work does not partake significantly, of the characteristic in question. This
table is meant only to illustrate a regularity emerging from this study and does
not profess accuracy or elegance. Indeed, such a tabulation is rather crude and
reductive. However, it displays in an economical way certain definite relations
that The Time Machine and Moreau bear to the forms of science and literature
analysed in this thesis.
Table 3. Scientific and literary characteristics of Collected Essays, The Time
Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde.
Symbol key:
+ the work partakes significantly of the feature in question;
o the work partakes moderately of the feature in question;
- the work does not partake significantly of the feature in question.
Work
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K

Coll. Essays
+
+
+
+
o
+
o
1
Time Machine

Moreau

Jekyll & Hyde

Column heading key:

A: Scientific theory
B: Method of Zadig
C: Use of microcosms
D: Received as science
E: Received as art
F: Detection/ratiocination

G:
H:
I:
J:
K:

104

Use of dialogue
Quest for knowledge/self-knowledge
Psychological penetration
Familial relations
Narrative complexity

The Time Machine yields a profile close to that of Huxley's Essays in the use of
evolutionary concepts to argue a thesis by employing the method of Zadig and the
microcosm, and by its ratiocinative qualities. The creation by Wells of a work
of scientific and philosophical ideas is reflected in the critical reception.
Literary qualities, however, are also present to a degree: specifically the use
of dialogue, a quest for knowledge, modest familial ties and a slight narrative
complexity. There is little psychological depth. The Time Machine, I believe,
may be accepted as a work of science highly cognate with the Essays of Huxley.
The Island of Doctor Moreau has a profile which is polarised between scientific
and gothic characteristics. Although containing detailed scientific ideas and
employing the same methods of exposition as The Time Machine and Huxley's
Essays, it also has strong Victorian gothic and psychomythic qualities. This is
seen in the dangerous quest for knowledge by Moreau, the familial relations
implicit in the work and its great psychological penetration and narrative
complexity. Moreau very closely approaches Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in its gothic
dimensions.

The results show that Moreau has strong affinities with Victorian

gothic literature and also incorporates solid scientific arguments and methods
of exposition. Although also intending to convey a sophisticated argument, Wells
succeeded in shocking the reader by adopting gothic conventions. This is
supported by Moreau's critical reception which itself was somewhat polarised
between aesthetic comment on the effect of horror, expressed by the majority of
reviewers, and scientific comment questioning the accuracy of Wells's
physiological arguments. This polarisation can be seen in the reaction of a
single reviewer who welcomed the opportunity to say something about Moreau "from
the scientific point of view, as well as from that of a devoted novel-reader"
(Mitchell 1896, 368). The reviewer did just that by expressing shock and dismay
at Wells's "greed of cheap horrors" while also concluding the review with a
flat, dispassionate contradiction of Wells's scientific facts.
Although sufficient differences exist to permit these broad generalisations
about The Time Machine and Moreau in regard to the relations of science and
literature, Wells's books constitute forms that display a certain balance of,
but draw no clear boundary between, scientific and fictional literature. Thus it
is not possible to say where one ends and the other begins. These results
indicate that there was not simply an exchange but a complex intersection of
terms, techniques and ideas between science and literature in late nineteenthcentury England. How this came about and why it took the particular form that it
did in the works of Huxley and Wells, is suggested below. The view is advanced
that the use of a quasi-fictional microcosm or possible world was an attempt to
find a new tool to articulate the extension of the theory of evolution to social
questions.

105

Evolution: Organic, Social and Literary

Mid-nineteenth-century scientists, educated readers and writers shared a common
language. The giants of geology and evolutionary biology, Lyell and Darwin, as
well as other scientific writers such as Lewes, Claude Bernard, Tyndall and
Clifford, shared a non-mathematical literary discourse in their texts which
could be understood by readers not scientifically trained and which could "be
read very much as literary texts" (Beer 1983, 6-7). Not only did readers
understand and respond to the primary works of scientists but scientists
themselves drew on literary, historical and philosophical material in the
formulation of their arguments (Beer 1983, 7). Scientists of the mid- and latenineteenth century did not ignore or deny the affinities between scientific
writing and literature but were rather released by the congruities (Beer 1983,
90).
The use of literary terms in scientific discourses is particularly evident in
the works of expositors such as Huxley and Tyndall. The latter, for example,
considered the cultivated public to be far more attuned to literary works than
scientific and so adopted a style which would gain the interest and sympathy of
the majority who were not scientifically educated, while keeping the science
accurate (Myers 1985, 42). Huxley tells how his efforts to convey the results of
biological research to the public "without bating a jot of scientific accuracy"
taxed his "scientific and literary faculty" to the utmost (Essays 8:v-vi). This
adoption of literary styles, terms and techniques extended to the use of
analogy, personification and metaphor. Both Tyndall and Huxley accepted that the
scientific world view involved much symbolic representation even in the use of
comparatively well-defined terms, such as "law", "force" and "ether", which were
not direct expressions of objective reality (Cosslett 1982, 35).
This relationship between science and literature, however, may not have been
simply a matter of choice. It was, to some extent, forced on the practitioners
of nineteenth-century science, particularly of biological science, by the
innovative nature of their enterprise.
The attempt to articulate new movements in thought can be sometimes obstructed
by the existing language and metaphors of the age. Walter F. Cannon (1968, 15659) shows how this was a problem for Darwin in The Origin of Species as his
vision, and his attempt to express its underlying principle, outstripped the
language of his day. In the Origin, Darwin resorts to a diverse range of
sometimes inconsistent personifications and metaphors. The concept of natural
selection is personified as being equivalent to artificial selection even though
this tells against Darwin's attempt to eliminate teleology from biological
doctrine. Darwin's emphasis on the thriftiness of nature and on
106

uniformitarianism derives partly from economic models and habits: "Save your
pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves" (Cannon 1968, 159). Yet in
formulating a quasi-economic expression of natural law an inconsistency arises
because nature is not all thriftyas Darwin himself acknowledges. Great waste
is inherent in nature as many more individuals are produced than can survive.
Moreover, the concept of the family tree, which Darwin applies to the evolution
of species, differs in many important respects from the conventional family tree
of English society (Cannon 1968, 156-57).
Darwin's Origin has no single consistent metaphor but a grab-bag of metaphors
that he uses at various places throughout the text. In transforming biology it
is not Darwin's logic (which is poor), nor his evidence (which is thin), nor his
rhetoric (which has no uniform structure) that achieves the transformation, but
his intuition expressed as an imaginative vision employing all types of
languages and diverse metaphors (Cannon 1968, 167-72). Although somewhat
overstated, Cannon's argument draws attention to an important aspect of
nineteenth-century biological science: outworn logical and rhetorical structures
were no longer suited for the expression of scientific ideas by Darwin, and his
language was adapted to a vision of life that went beyond the language of his
day.
From this precedent it is reasonable to suppose that similar problems may have
affected developments in evolutionary biology later in the century as it came to
be extended more and more to social questions.
The rise of evolutionary optimism and its counterpart, degenerationism, are
prime examples. Both drew their authority from the evolutionary doctrines of
Darwin and Spencer. They took as their general form a conviction that the
pursuance of the scientific method, given sufficient time, would show that the
laws of nature could encompass human action, both individual and social. The
optimistic view was that natural selection works by and for the good of each
being as physical and mental endowments progress toward perfection, and it
emphasised the Lamarckian aspects of evolution (Dale 1989, 202-203).
Degenerationist social theory constituted a loose assemblage of beliefs
differentiating between the normal and the abnormal, the fit and the unfit, the
civilised and the primitive (Greenslade 1994, 2). It drew on two main
developments in science: the second law of thermodynamics with its implications
for the retrogression and extinction of life on the planet; and a medical and
psychological strand, which gave rise to a growing concern with mental disease.
These two strands, as they blended with social theory in the late nineteenth
century, lent scientific support to "a historicist trope of decline and fall"
(Dale 1989, 205).
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The word "fitness", which Spencer used and Darwin adopted, came to have both
biological and social applications. Like the word "selection", it gained a
cultural dimension. Although not intended as a value-laden term by Darwin,
value-laden meanings crept into the term "fitness" as it gained wide application
to social questions (Greenslade 1994, 36). Discussions concerning the relative
fitness of certain groups led to the casting of degenerative types in the
differences between race and class. The lower classes of England, for example,
were considered to possess physical and mental traits that set them as "races
apart" and the movement across social boundaries began to invoke fear and
resentment (Greenslade 1994, 22).
Both optimistic and degenerationist interpretations of evolution, however, had
to confront Weismann's criticism of the inheritance of acquired characteristics
and the views of the neo-Darwinists. Spencer stuck to his Lamarckian guns,
emphasising the importance of the question for social issues: "As I have before
contended," writes Spencer (1893c, 760) in an essay critical of Weismann, "a
right answer to the question whether acquired characters are or are not
inherited, underlies right beliefs not only in Biology and Psychology, but also
in Education, Ethics, and Politics." As the century progressed there was an
increasing mutual involvement of evolutionary and social issues.
Although never far from the social arena, Huxley's attention, in the late 1880s
and early 1890s, turned increasingly to the social applications of evolutionary
theory. This reflected Huxley's general faith that science could address all
problems including social and political problems (Morton 1984, 41). Huxley's
interest centred on his disagreement with Spencer over the validity of
evolutionary theory as a model for social policy (L. Huxley 1900, 352). This
emerged as a primary concern in Huxley's 1887 essay "The Struggle for Existence
in Human Society", a title which captures the mutual involvement of evolutionary
and social issues. By the time of the "Evolution and Ethics" lecture of 1893,
Huxley's attention had already been, for a number of years, "much directed to
the bearing of modern scientific thought on the problems of morals and politics"
(Essays 9:6). Huxley's fundamental position on the relation of evolution to
morality was summed up in a letter to a correspondent (quoted in L. Huxley,
1900, 360):
There are two very different questions which people fail to discriminate. One is
whether evolution accounts for morality, the other whether the principle of
evolution in general can be adopted as an ethical principle.
The first, of course, I advocate, and have constantly insisted upon. The second I
deny, and reject all so-called evolutional ethics based upon it.

108

The principal criticism directed against Huxley's lecture was that the ethical
process, being a part of the wider cosmic process, cannot be opposed to it.
Huxley lamented his failure to explain properly to his audience "the apparent
paradox that ethical nature, while born of cosmic nature, is necessarily at
enmity with its parent" (Essays 9:viii). Huxley's rectification of this failure
was the reason for his writing the "Prolegomena" to the lecture (L. Huxley 1900,
352-53), both being published together in volume nine of the Collected Essays in
1894.
Thus the "Prolegomena" represents a renewed attempt by Huxley to articulate the
relation of evolutionary theory to social and moral questions, the relation of
the cosmic process to the ethical process. The language of his main attempt
failed, necessitating a restatement in a different form: an essay, written in
the first person, which describes a fictitious microcosm. The socio-scientific
nature of the debate demanded the quasi-fictional mode of expression. Huxley
returned to, and elaborated, the technique he employed effectively in the
earlier "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society" where he used the
microcosm of Atlantis. The criticisms of the "Evolution and Ethics" lecture and
the subsequent writing of "Prolegomena" indicate that Huxley felt the need to
adopt a method that closely approached fictional literary methods to extrapolate
the results of evolutionary factors applied to society. That his argument
refuted the view that evolutionary principles can be adopted as an ethical
principle is incidentalit was the very attempt to articulate the refutation
that drew forth such an approach. This development is identical to that forced
on Darwin where metaphor and personification played an important role. In an
early draft outlining the principle of natural selection, Darwin describes a
fictional "Being" remarkably like Huxley's "Administrator" of the much later
"Prolegomena" (Darwin quoted in Levine 1988, 100):
Let us now suppose a Being with penetration sufficient to perceive differences in
the outer and innermost organization quite imperceptible to man, and with
forethought extending over future centuries to watch with unerring care and select
for any object the offspring of an organism produced under the foregoing
circumstances; I see no conceivable reason why he could not form a new race . . .
adapted to new ends.

Here Darwin not only personifies the biological process of natural selection but
gives it a temporal dimension that anticipates Huxley's treatment of the social
relations of evolution in "Prolegomena".
Just as the history surrounding the writing of "Prolegomena" sheds light on the
interplay of scientific theory and literary technique at this time, so does the
bibliographic history of The Time Machine. The first version of this work, "The
109

Chronic Argonauts", appeared in the Science Schools Journal in 1888, and only
has the bare idea of time travel in common with the final version. "The Chronic
Argonauts" is highly romantic and melodramatic with characters that are
caricatures. Although incomplete, it is evident that the work was intended to
have a highly political theme with little, if any, evolutionary theory. Over the
following seven years, as Wells's scientific education progressed and as he
began participating in the evolutionary discussions of the day through his
journalism, The Time Machine underwent a series of changes in which literary
qualities such as melodrama, realistic dialogue and strong characterisation were
continually sloughed away. Theories and methods of exposition closer to those of
Huxley came to predominate. The result was a highly imaginative discussion of
the social implications of evolution that has great affinity with the discussion
Huxley produced coming from another direction.
Thus the nature of the social speculation in which Wells and Huxley engaged
demanded an imaginative, quasi-fictional presentation keyed to scientific theory
and ratiocinative methods. This is because the depiction of a possible social
outcome as a result of natural laws required a construction in imagination of
social events that have yet to be, just as the depiction of a biological outcome
of natural law required the construction in imagination of events "which have
vanished and ceased to be"; past speciation events in the study of
palaeontology, for example. This combination of scientific and literary forms in
the work of both Wells and Huxley can also be seen in their adoption of some
aspects of the literary romance.
The Romance of the Scientist
The development of the romance in opposition to 'realistic' fiction in late
nineteenth-century Britain is described by Peter Keating in The Haunted Study
(1989). The word "romance" was used in literary discussions of the day to
distinguish highly imaginative writing, such as historical novels, adventure
stories, fantasies, horror stories and scientific stories, from the realist
novel more faithful to life, exemplified in the novels of, say, Henry James,
George Eliot or Joseph Conrad. The term "romance", therefore, covered a wide
range of imaginative literature (Keating 1989, 345-49). As such, the term was
not so much a positive definition as a term of exclusion, a negative definition
that defined what a particular work was not (that is, not a realist novel), more
than what it was.
Within the broad field of romance the division into different genres also
reflected a division among them of time: historical novelists took time past as
their province; science fiction writers, time future; while writers of the
supernatural or occult explored states of consciousness beyond time (Keating
110

1989, 350). When an imaginative writer wished to make a point relevant to

contemporary society the romance was frequently used to set up a process of
extrapolation which the reader was expected to follow (Keating 1989, 350).

"In

Wells's hands, the scientific romance became an imaginative exploration of

possible options, with futuristic prophecies usually functioning as
extrapolations from observable contemporary trends" (Keating 1989, 358). This
process was displayed in the rise of utopian and dystopian romance in Britain
during the last few decades of the century, a development that highlighted the
inability of realism to address political matters convincingly. Unlike the
realist novel, the speculative romance was not concerned so much with fictional
form as with ideas; for example, the future of modern democratic society
(Keating 1989, 356-57).
As an introduction to his discussion of The Time Machine, Morton (1984, 96)
surveys the various utopias and dystopias written in the last three decades of
the century, making a distinction between "geographical" and "temporal"
versions; that is, those visions displaced in space and those displaced in time.
They include Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), Samuel Butler's Erewhon
(1871), Ellis Davis's Pyrna: A Commune (1875), "Nunsoe Green's" A Thousand Years
Hence (1882), W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age (1887), and William Morris's News
from Nowhere (1890). There was a movement away from geographical and towards
temporal utopias as the century progressed, with almost every temporal utopia
treating evolutionary theory (Morton 1984, 97). There was thus an increasing
fictional involvement of evolutionary and social issues in the utopian and
dystopian romance. The level of scientific argumentation and the degree of
scientific veracity in these works is highly variable. Hudson's romances, for
example, are very much exclusive of science: A Crystal Age leaves much
unexplained and fails to unite successfully scientific and literary creativity
(Morton 1984, 71).
The discussions of Keating and Morton enable us envisage a relationship between
the evolutionary microcosms of Wells and Huxley and the fictional romance. The
discussion of social and political issues in this form has a long history
reaching back to Plato's Republic. Both Huxley and Wells were aware of this
tradition. Huxley describes the Republic as "that noble romance" and provides a
quotation and discussion of Plato's views on the mobility of people between
social classes (Essays 1:254-55). Huxley's "Prolegomena" shares some features of
the geographical dystopia. It depicts a society removed from the real world,
governed according to certain principles, the results of which are extrapolated
to show the effect of those principles, and which makes evolutionary biology a
term in the equation. The Time Machine shares some features of the temporal
dystopia, transferred out of the present into future time, to extrapolate the
results of evolutionary laws operating on contemporary social conditions. Both
111

writers adopted the dystopian microcosm to convey evolutionary and social

arguments difficult to articulate in any other way.
In summary, Huxley's "Prolegomena" marked a movement of evolutionary science
towards a literary form which was an attempt to articulate an innovative
application of evolution to social questions. In this way it paralleled, or
perhaps exceeded, Darwin's earlier use of literary devices. Wells's book took
that movement one step further by integrating his evolutionary argument more
fully with the literary form of the romance.
A similar investigation of Wells's other works written in the 1890s would be an
appropriate subject for future research. The Invisible Man, for example, relies
heavily on evolutionist psychology (even more so than Moreau) and would make an
interesting study in individual and social psychology. The meeting of
evolutionary theory and social theory in these early books and essays was the
mere beginning of an association that affected Wells's entire philosophy,
embodied in works such as Anticipations (1901), Mankind in the Making (1903), A
Modern Utopia (1905), The Outline of History (1920), Men Like Gods (1923), Mr.
Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928), The Science of Life (1930), The Work
Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1933), The Shape of Things To Come (1933), The
Croquet Player (1936), Star Begotten (1937) and Mind at the End of Its Tether
(1945).
The central problem for Wells in analysing and anticipating long-term social and
historical developments was the problem of degeneration following security.
Wells's attempt to formulate dynamic rather than static utopias was one response
to this problem. The people of his utopian worlds, and their governing elites,
are continually pitting themselves against the cosmic process, individually and
collectively. Moreover, the high value Wells gives education and science in his
futurist societies serves the purpose of replacing natural selection with a form
of sexual selection for intelligencethose who flourish in Wells's futures are
the brightest: the scientists, teachers and engineers. Thus the core problem of
The Time Machine lies at the root of Wells's entire intellectual and literary
enterprise. A study analysing this aspect of his later works would provide a
valuable addition to the discipline of the relations between science and
literature.
Another writer of the Victorian era whose work requires a detailed study is
Grant Allen. The wide-ranging interests evident in his work include (like those
of Wells) science journalism, science popularisation, social commentary,
literature and romantic fiction. His career exemplifies the relations between
speculative biology and middle-brow fiction that is the subject of Morton's
study. Allen's ability to produce solid scientific works such as Physiological
112

Aesthetics (1877) and The Colour Sense: Its Origin and Development (1879), as
well as his capacities as an accurate expositor of science, drew approval from
both Darwin and Huxley (Morton 1984, 137-39). Wells (1934, 2:546-53)
acknowledged Allen as an early influence: Allen's interest in biology and
socialism, and his status as a scientific writer outside the professional
scientific world, predated Wells's similar situation in the early 1890s. Allen
offered a critique of Galtonian eugenics in "The Child of the Phalanstery", a
short story depicting a society where infanticide is practised and which shows
the same interplay of evolution, social questions and literature displayed in
the writing of Wells and Huxley. Allen's main novel of social criticism is The
Woman Who Did (1895) and his main work of anthropology is The Origin of the Idea
of God (1897). An 1895 article by Allen, "The Mystery of Birth" was an ingenious
attempt to out-flank Weismann by proposing that the influence of acquired
characters on the germ cells is no more mysterious than the continual rebuilding
of the body cells, with all their acquired characters (Allen 1895). A
comparative study of the works of Wells and Allen may be quite revealing in
terms of the relations of science and literature, especially their debts to the
biological and social speculations of Huxley, Spencer and Galton in late
nineteenth-century England.
Conclusion
Within the broad framework of the relations of science and literature I have
endeavoured to question a received view of the early works of Wells which
portrays them as pseudo-scientific fantasies. In doing so, I have attempted to
correct an imbalance in studies of Wells's work which have concentrated largely
on specifically literary features to the neglect of the scientific. As part of
this endeavour I have also questioned an outdated but persistent view of Huxley
as a positivistic, speculation-free thinker and writer. The thesis begins with
this revision in Chapter Two, goes on to examine the relationship between the
speculative writing of Wells and Huxley in the early chapters, concerns itself
with the critical reception of the writing of Wells and Huxley in a middle
chapter, and pursues certain literary points in the later chapters. The overall
movement of the thesis, therefore, is from a fairly strict attention to
scientific and philosophical matters early on to an exploration of literary
qualities towards the end. This movement reflects the development of my own
thoughts and traces a gradual realisation that the scientific and literary
elements in Wells's work are so intimately compounded that neither one can be
treated effectively in isolation from the other.
Therefore, an important general conclusion is that the attempt by critics to
treat the literary aspects of Wells's work separately from the scientific is
ill-advised. In particular, Bergonzi's influential view that the emphasis should
113

be on romance rather than science when studying Wells's early books is an

unfortunate oversimplification. The statements by many critics that the science
in Wells's books is bogus and that these books are pseudo-scientific, are wrong.
Huxley's philosophy of science is not positivist, Baconian or crudely realist,
but is very modern in its appreciation of the role of imagination in the
formulation of hypotheses, of the interplay of hypothesis and observation, of
the potential of new hypotheses to correct or replace the old, and of the
limitations of the truth claims of science. His philosophy displays an informed
concern with the historical processes of scientific change. Speculation is a
very important part of Huxley's philosophy of science. His writing is highly
speculative and extrapolative, and uses quasi-fictional techniques such as the
microcosm.
In drawing specific conclusions regarding The Time Machine and Moreau, the
critical reception of each work has been a decisive influence. Problems of
historical anachronism may thus be minimised. Moreover, the results of other
analyses such as the influence of Wells's journalism, the bibliographic
histories of the works, and the exploration of gothic, psychomythic and romantic
features, all confirm the judgement of Wells's contemporaries.
The Time Machine is largely, but by no means exclusively, a work of evolutionary
science and philosophical ideas, employing principles of construction
appropriate to scientific exposition. The philosophical ideas presented concern
the concept of time as a dimension in a four-dimensional space-time system. The
evolutionary argument concerns the concept of degeneration following security
and was a contribution to socio-evolutionary debates of the 1880s and 1890s
involving Huxley and Spencer. The work was addressed to both a popular and a
scientific audience and reached both. The structure of the work integrates a
philosophical dialogue, the story of detection, the method of Zadig, the
evolutionary microcosm, and the temporal dystopia. The comparatively slight
fictive aspects of the work bring it partly under the scientific romance, but
this may also be considered a genre of ideas.
The Island of Doctor Moreau is largely, but by no means exclusively, a work of
gothic horror. It also partakes of the psychomythic tale, incorporates
scientific concepts and argues scientific theses. These include principles of
physiology, anthropology and psychology. The work has as its central thesis a
critique of theology which uses evolutionary ideas to convey the amorality of
the cosmic process, a thesis probably derived from Huxley. The addressees of the
work seem to be the educated public and the work also reached a scientific
audience. The structure of the work incorporates the evolutionary microcosm and
the geographical dystopia. Although possessing some features of the scientific
114

romance, the narrative complexity of Moreau, its psychological depth, and its
ability to evoke horror bring it within the genre of the late Victorian gothic
horror story.
The tendency for critics today to place The Time Machine and Moreau together in
the same basket as allegory or myth can be understood as an anachronistic error
caused by their interpretation of the former being influenced by their
interpretation of the latter as they view Wells's oeuvre as a whole. This is a
problem that did not arise in regard to The Time Machine with Wells's
contemporary critics.
Results of the present research which bear on the wider question of the
relations between science and literature in late nineteenth-century England
indicate that the use of microcosms by both Huxley and Wells may have had as its
immediate cause innovative developments in evolutionary theory in the last few
decades of the century. Lacking an appropriate method to express the results of
evolutionary theory applied to social questions, Huxley adopted, in "The
Struggle for Existence in Human Society" and "Prolegomena", a technique also
found in the utopian and dystopian romance. Wells carried this integration of
science and romance further in The Time Machine. The greater fictive quality of
Wells's book compared to that of Huxley's essays merely represents a further
step in already established patterns of scientific writing and dystopian
literature.
These conclusions enable us to see Wells not simply as a literary artist
employing scientific data, nor Huxley just as a scientist using literary
devices, but as two thinkers employing common methods to explore new problems.
Thus we need not be dogmatic in classifying their writing as literary fiction or
scientific theory. The expansive literary product that results from the use of
the method of Zadig and the evolutionary microcosm in practised hands displays
an imaginative fictive quality and a logical precision to which each category
alone fails to do justice.
Many existing inquiries into the relations between science and literature see
science as the dominant partner and literature as the receptive partner in a
"unidirectional" relationship where literature accepts and adapts conceptions
from science. An alternative is to explore a common cultural field in which
science and literature develop, with the aim of elucidating a common context for
events in the history of science and literature, an approach offering a more
appropriate model for the relations of science and literature (Shaffer 1991,
xxii-xxiii). John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth (1989, 3) argue in the
introduction to Nature Transfigured that the potential complexity of the terrain
of this field can be more readily appreciated once it is recognised that the
115

boundaries between science and literature are a cultural artefact. The aim,
therefore, should be to explore and map this complex terrain rather than merely
investigate currents flowing across questionable boundaries.
My own research confirms these views by showing how, in one small area, science
and literature engaged each other in a complex imaginative interchange,
borrowing ideas and techniques. To employ a common metaphor, there existed a
busy traffic of scientific and literary goods, a marketplace of concepts and
terms, of methods of thought and expression, rather than a formal trade across
imperial boundaries. The complex exchanges between the scientific essay, science
journalism, extrapolative evolutionary narratives, and the various genres of
romantic and gothic literature, as displayed in the works of Wells, represents
just one intersection in that busy marketplace. It is my hope that this
contribution to an understanding of its economy is of service to other
researchers.

116

APPENDIX ONE
THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
The reviews examined below are those reprinted by Maixner (1981, 199-231).
The Saturday Review declares Stevenson's book to be an "excellent and horrific
and captivating romance" (Lang 1981 [1886], 201-202). The idea of double
personality is not wholly original, Poe having dealt with it in "William
Wilson"; however Stevenson's treatment of it is original, striking and
astonishing. The words "terrible" and "terrific" are used to describe the effect
of terror created by Stevenson. The idea is considered to "[depend] on the
resources of pseudo-science"; while the literary qualities of the work, such as
"the delicate and restrained skill of the treatment of accessories, details, and
character" are praised (Andrew Lang quoted in Maixner 1981, 200-201).
The notice in the Athenaeum criticises Stevenson's impossible and absurd
explanation of how Jekyll turns himself into Hyde: "So good an artist in
fanciful mysteries as Mr. Stevenson should have avoided the mistake of a lengthy
rationalization at all" (E. T. Cook quoted in Maixner 1981, 202-203). Although
describing it as exciting, clearly narrated and interesting, this commentator
sees little scientific merit in the work.
English fiction has been enriched by Stevenson's "weirdly imaginative" and
ingeniously constructed tale. The interest of the story is larger than that of a
mere skilful narrative: it is a marvellous exploration of the deeper recesses of
human nature. Although Stevenson's story may not have been intentionally
ethical, "its impressiveness as a parable is equal to its fascination as a work
of art" (James Ashcroft Noble quoted in Maixner 1981, 205).
Stevenson impressed the anonymous reviewer in The Times with his "very original
genius". The work may either have been a flash of "intuitive psychological
research" or the product of elaborate forethought. The denouement (Jekyll's
"Full Statement") accounts for the mystery "upon strictly scientific grounds,
though the science be the science of problematical futurity"
in Maixner 1981, 205).

(unsigned review

However, on retrospect, Jekyll's case is absurdly and

insanely improbable. The work is reminiscent of the "sombre masterpieces" of

Poe, but deeper than Poe. Stevenson is a master of style who sustains and
excites the sense of mystery and horror. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is "a finished
study in the art of fantastic literature" (unsigned review in Maixner 1981, 206207).
117

The Contemporary Review saw the work a profound allegory, investigating the
meaning of the word "self". The condensed and close-knit workmanship makes it a
work of great power, while demonstrating temperance in art (Julia Wedgewood
quoted in Maixner 1981, 222-21).
The potential of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a pulpit piece is displayed by the
reviewer for the Rock who sees the book as an allegory of the evil struggling to
gain mastery over the honourable, upright character men display to the outside
world. The "thrilling" struggle between Jekyll and Hyde is recounted with
references to the "appalling horror" of Jekyll's position. The book may do a
great deal of good, the reviewer believes, as "a warning to many who are
trifling with sin, unconscious of its awful power to drag them down to the
lowest depths of hell" (unsigned review in Maixner 1981, 227).
In a later discussion of Stevenson's work, Henry James (quoted in Maixner 1981,
308-309) declares it to have "the stamp of a really imaginative production". He
is also struck by the art of the presentation, the ability to hold the reader's
interest, which is the most edifying aspect of shorter fiction. The "machinery
of transformation"that is, the powders which Jekyll concoctsare too explicit
and explanatory to be acceptable.
Some appreciation of natural science in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was shown by
correspondents of Stevenson. J. A. Symonds, although recognising the work as an
allegory which "touches one too closely", also refers to the problem of freewill. He notes how biological science is producing a deterministic view of
individual freedom, stating that the work interests him primarily on that score
(Symonds quoted in Maixner 1981, 210-211).
Letters received by Stevenson from F. W. H. Myers indicate that Myers put a
great deal of thought into the logical consistency of the psychological traits
of Jekyll/Hyde. Myers implored Stevenson to revise and improve the work to
ensure its place among the classics of English literature. Myers' suggestions as
to how the work might be improved mainly concerned perceived inconsistencies in
the Jekyll/Hyde character: he attempted to create a deeper and more coherent
psychological profile for the character. Criticisms were made of some technical
details in psychology, such as the fact that in cases of double personality the
handwriting of one personality cannot be reproduced exactly by the other, as
Stevenson has Hyde do when he writes a letter in Jekyll's hand. Moreover, the
retransformation of Hyde's mind back into that of Jekyll also does not accord
with the concept of community of memory (Myers quoted in Maixner 1981, 215-21).
In reply, Stevenson acknowledged the work's faults, stating that it was
conceived, written, revised, and printed in the space of ten weeks (Stevenson
quoted in Maixner 1981, 219).
118

For a discussion of the critical reception of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in relation

to that of The Time Machine and of Moreau see Chapter Six.

119

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