David Y. Hughes
The Doctor Vivisected
Leon Stover, ed. The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Critical Text of the 1896 First
Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices. The Annotated H.G.
Wells, Vol. 2. McFarland & Company, Inc. (Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640, 800-253-2187),
1996. 289pp. $55.00.
H.G. Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau under the
editorship of Leon Stover is a new wine in the old bottle. Why not? Science fiction is
supposed to induce cognitive estrangement. Stover is an anthropologist and historian, not
by training a literary critic, and he sees Moreau as a doctrinal work of the
first order. Coming in from that angle, little traversed at any time since the revival of
Wells studies some 35 years ago,1 the novelty of Stover's findings is
threefold, and agree with him or not, one cannot but welcome his battling spirit--while
enduring his reckless and tendentious scholarship. His entire editing apparatus is
polemical: the 40-page introduction, the 195 notes (some very long), and the 10 appendices
(themselves annotated). First, he proposes, as I believe no one else has, that Wells
created Doctor Moreau as "a Carlyle-type hero," whose methods are finally
recognized by the narrator, Prendick, "as the only possible way to save civilization
from dooming itself" (169 n157). Concomitantly, he treats the book itself as an
explosive political masterwork embodying a totalitarian methodology which he dubs
"Wellsism." Lastly, absent much work by Wells before Moreau, for the
most part Stover reads "Wellsism" back into it from the future, both from
Wells's later writings and from the historical march of totalitarianism in the half
century until his death in 1946. All this being controversial, I shall be laying out
Stover's case and from time to time arguing against it while equally reviewing it in terms
of scholarship. In physical arrangement, the book itself does not separate out Moreau as
hero from the "Wellsism" that envelops him, nor does it separately treat the
anchoring of "Wellsism" largely in the future. These are my divisions, for
convenience.
1. Doctor Moreau, old-fashioned, unreconstructed hero.
Stover's "Introduction" is divided into sections and furnishes several vignettes
of Moreau that establish him as a figure of commanding determination, self-discipline,
intellectual passion, and devotion to a high ideal. In "Pig Philosophy," Moreau
and Wells are dissociated from Bentham's piggish pleasure principle, and they and their
contempt for "the province of pain"2 are allied with the principled
anti-Benthamite positions of Mill and Carlyle. In "Vivisection Morality," the
steely resolve of Moreau is said to be Wells's retort on Wilkie Collins's squeamish
vivisector, Doctor Benjulia, who sets his animals free, unable to endure their pain, and
then dies of an overdose of an opiate. An appendix contains the relevant Collins passage,
from the antivivisectionist novel, Heart and Science. But most
interesting is "The Sphinx of Sin." Stover's frontispiece is a reproduction of
Gustave Moreau's "Oedipus and the Sphinx." In this striking physical and
psychological depiction, Oedipus figures as sheer intellectual force opposing the lure of
monstrous bestiality, eye to eye. The message is clear that the artist's namesake, Doctor
Moreau, performs his purposive surgeries in the same spirit; and his likeness to the
Oedipus is one more illustration of the selfless heroism of his intellectual passion. The
painting must have been known to Wells, Stover asserts, because he had an interest in art,
the work was widely reproduced, and it had become a literary icon. The "Oedipus and
the Sphinx" connection is illuminating and would remain so even if one were minded to
call it coincidence or Zeitgeist.
Further, Moreau has two personas. He "is at once a
conscious agent of directed evolution in his personal drama ["the nobility of his
vivisection work" (20)], and a personification of the cosmic process in his
allegorical role" (137 nl02). Through the combining of these personas, his prowess is
redoubled, representing both the sweep of the natural processes he personifes and the
"strange colorless delight of [the] intellectual desires" (14) that drive him
to study, harness, and direct these processes. As for Wells, he, too, is heroic in
expressing through Moreau in both these personas--daringly and in bold relief--his
conviction that "Darwin's bio-optimism was false," unless and until
"natural selection" should give way to human guidance through the agency of
science (24).
It is above all through Prendick, the narrator, that
Stover claims the heroism of Moreau. If I gave his edition a subtitle, it would be
"The Education of Edward Prendick," while for his companion edition of The
Time Machine I might recommend "The Ineducability of Hillyer." In the
latter volume, Stover observes that in the end Hillyer, the narrator, "exposes
himself as a sentimental humanist who finds nothing of value in his friend's cautionary
tale."3 But the example of Prendick is the reverse. The following sketch
cannot do justice to Stover's many, long, reciprocating annotations but supplies the main
lines. Prendick's initial status as science amateur (butterfly collector) qualifies him as
a naif, especially since superficially he resembles Moreau. He did some scientific work
(under Huxley); he accepts the "orthodoxy" (90 n40) that there is "nothing
so horrible in vivisection" (7); and, like Moreau, he scorns Montgomery's weaknesses
of drink and of friendliness towards the Beast Folk. But Moreau is an ascetic whose life
is research, and Prendick is a dilettante and preachy abstainer whose "pig
philosophy" teaches moderation to maximize pleasure. Moreover, events have conspired
to unsettle him even before he reaches Moreau's island. To his terror, among other
cruelties at sea, he faced and escaped a sort of casual vivisection by cannibalism, and at
first the happenstance of that experience appears to him to be replicated in the
wantonness of Moreau's surgeries (25, 201 n185).
So much most readers would agree to. But a time comes
when, according to Stover, Prendick goes over to Moreau. Prendick, "the novel's
humanistic foil" (85 n32), looking back as the lone survivor at the end of the book,
has abandoned his "liberal humanitarianism" (180 n164), swayed, as far as his
passive nature permits, by the memory of "the heroic charisma" of
"Jehova-like Moreau" (189 n173; 176 n161), who "represents vanguard
over-man" (159 n144). Having lost his Christian faith when he was forced to fabricate
the dead Moreau's resurrection to keep the Beast Folk in check, he now recalls Moreau's
"veil-piercing discipline" of science (196 n180), the agent of
"psychotherapeutic education" (204 n189), and concludes that Moreau's power to
inflict cruelty "as a therapeutic good is [a power] worthy of worship" (169
nl57). Indeed, even before Moreau's death, it has come to Prendick (in Stover's words)
that the "scheme of things [on the island], its 'painful disorder' [16],...had a
normal constituency in the likes of Montgomery and the Beast People (symbolic for the
whole lot of human beasts), not to mention himself before he came to recognize in Moreau a
paragon of genuine sanity...." So, according to this, the sanity of Moreau exempts
him (and Prendick, who recognizes it) from the "painful disorder" that afflicts
the general run of "human beasts."
One is grateful for this unusually extended treatment of
Prendick as a full-fledged fictional character. However, the passage Stover is annotating
exactly inverts his reading of it, for Prendick's statement exempts no one from irrational
impulsions, let alone elevates Moreau as a paragon of sanity:
I must confess I lost faith in the sanity of the world
when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind fate, a vast pitiless
mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence, and I, Moreau (by his passion
for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People, with their
instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the
infinite complexity of its incessant wheels. (16)
Nothing later relieves this absolute loss of faith.
Prendick merely remarks that he thinks he anticipates "a little" by mentioning
it before narrating the deaths of Moreau and Montgomery and the reversion of the Beast
Folk.4 There is no recovery, either, on his return to England. He withdraws
from "the confusion of cities and multitudes," concluding that "whatever is
more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope" in the study of
"the vast eternal laws of matter" (22). Never much more than a spectator anyway,
now, hoping to escape the entanglements by which "the sanity of the world" is
"torn and crushed," he renounces society and any stake in it.
While on the subject of Prendick and of Stover's
misconstruing of the text, two other difficulties come up, both involving, as it happens,
the use, misuse, or disregard of R.M. Philmus's variorum Moreau. So determined is
Stover to render Prendick Moreau's mouthpiece (only lacking Moreau's will to action) that
he ignores or plays tricks with available textual materials. R.D. Mullen's review of
Stover's Time Machine establishes that his editing is slipshod and intellectually
dishonest.5 These strictures emphatically apply to the Moreau, and the
two examples I give here and one or two later must stand in for a long list. Stover
repeatedly pronounces Wells a punctilious artist. Thus, Moreau "is a
masterpiece of artistic integrity, whose every detail is worth close attention. What
French critics call méthode de texte is applied here..." (ix). Very well.
In a running discussion of fire and cookery carried over seven footnotes,6
Stover ponders the contradiction that Prendick initially says the Beast Folk are without
fire (12), then that they cook (13), and finally that they have lost the art of fire (21).
From this incoherence, he reasons that Prendick, at first observing accurately, then
imagines a mastery that never exists and a fall that never takes place. In short, Prendick
suffers an hallucinatory sense that the Beast Folk are more human than they really are and
later that their fall is greater than it really is (i.e., in 21, "The Reversion of
the Beast Folk"). What Stover fails to take into account is that although in the
Heinemann first edition (his copytext), Prendick tells Moreau, "They talk, build
houses, cook," in the alternative American first edition (the Philmus copytext), he
says simply, "They talk, build houses." With that, psychological elaboration
becomes gratuitous.7 The obvious explanation is that Wells corrected the
discrepancy once and missed it in the other instance (working with different proofs or
different copies of typescript). No need to consult Prendick's mental state. But it may be
relevant that in the earliest surviving draft of Moreau (in Philmus), though the
action breaks off before the "Reversion," the villagers are introduced as easily
the masters of cookery, and a slide back toward beasthood would be tellingly marked by
loss of the art of fire.
A more attentive and less conjectural use of an
unacknowledged textual emendation would have headed off the other elaboration, too. In the
last chapter, Prendick, in the dingy of the Ipecacuanha, is rescued by a ship
from Western Samoa bound for San Francisco. Eleven months earlier the
Ipecacuanha had
left him on Noble's Isle, and now he has the dingy, which has somehow come drifting back,
though the ship itself in the meantime has disappeared, "sailing to its unknown fate
from Banka" (as Stover's text of Prendick's nephew's "Introduction" has
it). Amplifying, Stover writes:
Samoa lies exactly midway between Banka and Noble's Isle,
the two islands linked in symbolic significance by visits of the Ipecacuanha. Such a
geographical point of origin for the vessel that got Prendick returned home seems to
suggest the limits of his philosophical arrival point: halfway between Moreau's
understanding of the world and his own inability to act on it. Does this read too much
into a detail of incidental significance? Yes it does, from the viewpoint of the modern
novel, whose aesthetic is grounded in the proliferation of incidental and meaningless
details for the sake of realism. But in the Victorian thesis novel, especially as
practiced by H.G. Wells, every detail contributes to a closed universe of integral
meaning. (203-04 n187)
But Stover has emended his copytext. Instead of
"Banka," Heinemann has "Banya" (the American first edition has
"Bayna"), but no such name is on the map of the South Seas; in fact,
"Banka" is a conjecture silently adopted by Stover from R.M. Philmus. So no
mortal but Wells could have appreciated the midwayness of Prendick's rescue--or its
symbolism, cloudy at best--until Philmus revealed the coordinates of the
Ipecacuanha's last port of call by rectifying the spelling, enabling Stover to read Wells's mind.
Thus, in matters large and small, Stover is a ruthless
synthesizer. He forces the claim for Moreau's heroism and Prendick's discipleship, just as
he forces these textual details. Wells is not so determinate. In the end, he and the
reader share the relief provided by the aesthetic closure of Prendick's retreat from
terror into quietism, but the cognitive import is equivocal, for the problem of moral
action raised by the novel is left hanging. Stover says that in "H.G. Wells, every
detail contributes to a closed universe of integral meaning," but Wells said:
I suggest a concrete image for the whole world of
a man's thought and knowledge. Imagine a large, clear jelly, in which at all angles and in
all states of simplicity or contortion his ideas are imbedded. They are all valid and
possible ideas as they lie, none in reality incompatible with any.... But our Instrument,
our process of thinking, like a drawing before the discovery of perspective.... appears
capable only of dealing with or reasoning about ideas by projecting them on the same
plane. It will be obvious that a great many things may very well exist together in a solid
jelly, which would be overlapping and incompatible and mutually destructive, when
projected together upon one plane.8
This image may be "closed" (jelled) but it is by
no means "integral," as Stover would have it. Besides, the passage dates from
1903. In the 1890s, however, the incompatibles harbored in Wells's fictions were not
embedded but rather held in suspension, uncrystallized. The cognitive glue of Moreau--the
idea of natural history captured by science using natural history (both of these
personified in the Doctor himself)--is compromised by successive infusions of the visceral
element, the bloodiness. Considered in terms of the lifelong development of "the
whole world of [Wells's] thought and knowledge," Prendick's final trauma and
passivity mark a resting phase or halfway shelter. Soon, Wells would move on to the
utopian discipline of his New Republicans and Samurai. Even so, he retained always a
responsive eye for life's striving sufferers. Generically, they were such as the Beast
Folk, and individually they would be Kipps and Polly.
2. "Wellsism." Wells coined this term, says
Stover, and he apparently used it twice, and only in the unlikely locus of his postumous H.G.
Wells in Love, but both uses (one I cannot find where specified or
elsewhere) are casual and informal. The term is really Stover's, although he never defines
it explicitly, preferring almost always to attach it to some Welisian phrase of his
choice; but the connotations are soon clear, together with Stover's opprobrium. That is,
though Moreau is heroic, he is at the same time the instrument of pernicious
"Wellsism"; so the first step of analysis must be to separate them. Only once do
I find Stover doing so, in that case using sanity as his yardstick. Doctor Moreau is
eminently sane, no Frankenstein he. No, "who is mad is not Moreau but Wells, he and
all the other nineteenth century utopia makers" (128 n85). True, Moreau is
felonious--a fugitive for prior vivisectionist activity-- and indeed he is certainly
wicked. According to Stover, he blackmails Montgomery for homosexuality, he murdered one
of his original Kanaka helpers, and he offers to murder Prendick should he continue to
make himself inconvenient (34, 131 n89 n91). But then, says Stover, wickedness, far from
madness, "is just the quality needed in Wellsian 'makers and rebels'" (132 n91).
All of Wells's work is a "pedagogy of violence" (51) and "a propagandist
'Literature of Power,'" and "The Island of Doctor Moreau is
manifestly a part of that literature" (140 n108).
What is a literature of power? First of all, it is a
scientifically oriented literature: "Moreau [is] done with the very same
aesthetic sensitivity against which its masterful novelistic artistry is mobilized"
(128 n85). Wells is not on the side of the liberal arts in the battle of "the two
cultures," but on the side of science.9 In a crucial unit of his
Introduction, "Chance, Waste, and Pain," Stover locates Wells's preferred model
of human destiny in Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man in opposition to T.H.
Huxley's "Evolution and Ethics." This of course flies in the face of
longstanding critical acceptance of Wells's many acknowledgments of his debt to Huxley.10
But Stover argues that Huxley could have had no deep influence. After all, he was
sceptical of the very possibility of moral progress in the human animal because he
regarded it as split between an ethical self and a savage self and doubted whether the
ethical self could prevail. This sentiment actually moves Huxley into alliance with the
viewpoint of humane letters. So Wells admired Huxley as teacher of the origins of the
savage self, but he chose Reade, who promised the death of that self through the
operations of science learned from the operations of nature. One day, said Reade, science
will enable us to transcend the "vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level
with the beasts" (21). This antihumane prophecy, taken up by Wells, in a nutshell
justifies the mission and fate of Moreau and pinpoints the basic thrust of
"Wellsism." Moreau is an early martyr to the advent of the debestialized,
unitary human being who will one day spring from the labors (or loins) of experimental
science. Moreau is the strong sane hero working the will of science on his titular island
(also known as "Noble's Isle"--a name, says Stover, which is doubtless Wells's
ironic nod to the Noble Savage of romantic myth and equally his sincere acknowledgment of
the actual uplifting of the Beast Folk) (20).
The literature of power is politically oriented, too. Here
are three characterizations of "Wellsism," all I have found in Stover's own
words, though they define only by example or implication:
a Darwinian synthesis [of biological evolution and
cultural, nongenetic evolution of humanity]...informs Wellsism and its program of applied
natural history. (8)
In the past I have been attacked as Hitlerian for
indiscreetly pointing out the genocidal propensities of Wellsism and of utopism in
general. (51)
Not a philosophy, Wellsism is activism.... (140 n108)
Each of these in its context relates to the interest
aroused during the 1890s and after in the potential for eugenic "improvement" of
populations. Stover is adamant that the real agenda of Wells, in the words of his title of
1904, is a science and a politics addressed to Mankind in the Making. In that
context, making humanized animals may be seen as analogous to socializing and educating
human animals, both procedures being highly invasive. Besides, Moreau's explanation of his
aims keeps veering towards a literal conflation of humanizing and superhumanizing. He
laments that his techniques cannot touch "something in the seat of the emotions [:
c]ravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity" (14), and Stover not unreasonably
comments: "The clearest possible indicator that Moreau aims to reform human
nature" (146 n119).
With some justice, too, in the context of eugenics, Stover
conjoins "Wellsism" both with repressive statist ideologies of the 20th century
and with their spiritual begetters, from Plato to Comte. These links could not have been
perceived originally. But he is true to his stated aim of explaining "what the novel
signified to contemporary readers when it first came out" (ix) when he discusses the
teachings of Carlyle, who was prominent still and much admired by Wells in his college
days. Carlyle (though surely in the camp of humane letters) comes in with regard to
"Wellsism" on account of his disdain of "pig philosophy" (its
Benthamite associations of pleasure-pain, mentioned earlier) and for his celebration of
the hero in history, the leader who intuitively shapes destiny towards a New Jerusalem.11
Thus, Moreau is "one of Carlyle's epoch-making strong men of genius" (119 n76),
and somehow he combines this charisma with the technocratic statist mentality. Stover's
other chief contemporary connection is Wells himself. Of 10 appendices, 9 reveal him from
1893 to 1897 defending Moreau or otherwise revolving ideas related to it,12
and clearly the curve of his thought moved from physical to mental/moral to pedagogical
considerations: from the physiology of pain in Text-Book of Biology (1893) to the
concept of sin in "Human Evolution, An Artificial Process" (1896), and at last,
in "Morals and Civilization" (1897), to the "dream of a real and conscious
apparatus of education and moral suggestion...shaping the minds and acts and destinies of
men." This last came more than two years after the inception of Moreau and
the year after its publication, but at the very least it facilitates Stover's
"take" that the Wells who created Moreau's House of Pain already viewed it as
"a prototypical schoolroom" (135 n97).
3. The viewback from the future. The question here
concerns Stover's methodology and its grounds. I shall concentrate almost exclusively on
one exemplary footnote, #107, the first half of which typifies method and the second half,
grounds. Stover begins abruptly, but his readers by now are familiar with his mode of
discourse. Moreau says, "I am a religious man, Prendick" (14), and the following
is the first half of the annotation:
While science is the "religion of the future"
(1917b:76), it is for now the "religious aspect of socialist propaganda"
(1906d:408). In Wellsism, "God is the collective mind and purpose of the human
race" (1917b:61). The New Puritans who worship Him are the "scientific
atheists" (69) of a "world theocracy" (97), and the "world state is
God's church." But He is not the God of humanity itself. "The spirit of man is
jealous, aggressive and patizan. Humanity has greed and competition in grain"
(1919:214), and against that God is opposed; His coming kingdom will bring about "the
end of common humanity" (1937b:201). Unlike other religions, that of the modern state
is "objective" (1931a:34), and "God is no abstraction . . . . He is as real
as a bayonet thrust" (1917b:56)-or the cut of a surgeon's knife in the House of Pain.
(139-40 n107)13
Stover says he writes "for educational
purposes," for the college classroom (ix). But whatever his message, obviously no
student encountering pages of apparatus like this has time or resources--even if Stover's
style encouraged curiosity--to check into the works cited or the dicta rendered. Nor need
I. The passage speaks for itself. The form is self-certifying. The switchbacking dates
scattered parenthetically over the decades testify that after Moreau Wells never
had a new idea but noised the old ones abroad (like one of his trumpet-Selenites). Stover
wears a reader down and never lets up. Even at the end of Moreau comes a final
pedagogical manipulation. In a tailpiece, "Epilogue: The Coming Terror"--cited,
incredibly, as "the novel's Epilogue" (10 n)--Stover remedies a deficiency of
Wells by moralizing the tale. "[T]o be a sincere revolutionary," he writes,
"one must have the nerve of Doctor Moreau, and to say with H.G. Wells [but really
with the narrator of Tono-Bungay], 'I don't like things so human'" (210).
In the second half of note #107 (here slightly condensed),
the grounds of Stover's method become apparent. He views Moreau as propaganda for
socialism of great power and beauty, and its author as a primary ideological warrior at
the edge of the 20th century. From that vantage, he discovers the significance of the book
in Wells's later explicit avowals of statist measures and in the drift of politics towards
totalitarianism between the wars and Wells's reactions to that drift:
Moreau's experimental object is the reform of common
humanity in line with that socialist theory advocated in "Morals and
Civilization" [1897].... With the advent of the Soviet Union, [Wells] saw in its
great social experiment and its world revolutionary designs not only a realization of that
theory; he saw "God, the Captain of the World Republic" ruling there as "a
personification of [Stalin's] Five Year Plan." His deity, "a thoroughly hard
leader," is at last embodied in Stalin himself (1934:574-76). Moreau's failed
experiments finally have paid off, and "the salvation of mankind from misery and
sin" (Appendix Illa) is at hand; the Wellsian "gospel of discipline and
education" preached in the novel (Appendix Illb) has triumphed. [The two Appendices
contain essays by Wells in 1896 and 1897.] (139-40 nl07; in "[Stalin's]" the
brackets are Stover's)
Here, the irony at the expense of Wells's infatuation with
the deity embodied in Stalin is misplaced, badly misplaced, and betrays Stover's own
determination to hunt down Moreau in everything Wells later wrote. Nothing of the
sort is in Experiment in Autobiography. Wells states that his phrase, "God,
the Captain of the World Republic," used some 20 years earlier in Mr. Britling
Sees it Through, was never meant in an orthodox way but more "like a
personification of, let us say, the Five Year Plan. A communist might have accepted him
["God the Captain of the World Republic," "the deity," "the
thoroughly hard leader"] as a metaphor." In 1934, Wells simply updates what a
communist might have thought of this deity in 1915 had there been any communists in power
then. Besides, he explains, he has long since given up his theological phase, anyway.
Here, then, are Stover's grounds. Who imagines Wells's
deity personified by Stalin is not Wells but Stover; he, not Wells, thinks Wells thinks
"Moreau's failed experiments finally have paid off." Years ago, Stover wrote an
intriguing science fiction novel, The Shaving of Karl Marx (1982)14about
Lenin, Wells, and Wells's first five scientific romances. In the novel, not-yet-Lenin
(still merely the nobleman Ulyanov) in Wells's Sandgate home in 1902 imbibes lectures by
Wells on the scientific romances. A fine Wellsian framing "editor" (some years
in 1982's future) publishes letters by Tersoff, fugitive White Russian suspected of
killing pinko colleagues out of professional jealousy and therefore, in full flight,
unable to transmit evidence found in Lenin's copy of Wells's Russia in the Shadows.
Tersoff is colorful, telegraphic, and narrates in the historical present, with
dialogue. Sitting as pupil, not-yet-Lenin learns chapter by chapter how each scientific
romance is a political handbook, and he quickly emerges equipped to become the autocrat in
the Kremlin. Much of the Moreau dialogue reappears in essence in the edition I am
now reviewing, including the doctrine of the "Overman, the first of a coming line of
agents exterior to nature," who will end "Nature's criminal,
non-directional way" and "take control, and save mankind." Thus, by the end
of the book, "the future chairman [Lenin] upstaged by the party theoretician
[Wells]" renounces his devotion to the rule of the proletariat (political pap) and
embraces "cabbage soup statism," when "the whole of society will have
become a single office and a single factory" under "the Party brain" of
"the Central Committee."15
The fiction that The Island of Doctor Moreau is
not fiction makes good science fiction and bad criticism. In his edition of The Time
Machine, Stover affirms that the end of humanity's dreams in the year thirty million
("The Further Vision") is implicitly averted in the film Things to Come by
the conquest of space, accomplishable only by virtue of the kind of leadership that
"subdues the destructive follies of self-interest appealed to in the democratic
socialism of Karl Marx, mankind's chief enemy, from which Wellsism is the only saving
doctrine."16 Then Stover adds: "Contemporary readers of The Time Machine, of
course, were unable to foresee the doctrinal meaning Wells later attached to 'The Further
Vision.'" Had he approached The Island of Doctor Moreau as an imaginative
and fluid work of art to which some of Wells's later didactic writings may be considered
doctrinal attachments, then the work in itself would have been the focus of his
study--though certainly not in literary terms--and would have escaped classfication solely
as a pregnant guide to "Wellsism" in the twentieth century.
NOTES
1. Stover's nearest kin among previous critics is W.
Warren Wagar in H.G. Wells and the World State (New Haven: Yale U Press, 1961), in
that both approach Wells's writings as living political documents.
2. This Wells essay of 1894, which contributes
significantly to the chapter, "Doctor Moreau Explains," is among Stover's
appendices.
3. Leon Stover, The Time Machine: An Invention: A
Critical Text of the 1895 London First Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices (Jefferson,
NC and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1996), 16.
4. Indeed, Stover thinks what Prendick here
"anticipate[s]" is his "affirmation of all this in the final chapter"
(169 n157). If so, the lack of faith in Moreau must remain. 5. R.D. Mullen,
"Scholarship and the Riddle of the Sphinx," SFS 23:368-70, #70, November 1996.
5. R.D. Mullen, “Scholarship and the Riddle of the Sphinx,” SFS 23:368-70, #70, November 1996.
6. 116 n7O, 128 n86, 149 n125, 153 n137, 160 n146, 193
n177, 204 n188.
7. Which edition is "authoritative" is unclear.
Stover uses Heinemann because it has the "Introduction" by Prendick's nephew.
Philmus is based on Stone and Kimball, the American first. Stover (1) says that for
"the verbal changes in the different revisions, there is no substitute for the
monumental variorum text collated by Philmus."
8. "The Scepticism of the Instrument." Wells
addressed the Oxford Philosophical Society on Nov. 8, 1903, and I quote from the text in A
Modern Utopia (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), 389-90.
9. Stover, Time Machine, 12-17.
10. Wells acknowledges Huxley early and late. As to Reade,
David Smith notes that Wells's correspondence of the later 1880s shows him re-reading The
Martyrdom of Man, which became his historiographical model for The Outline of
History (the preface to which so far as I know contains Wells's first public mention
of Reade). See H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal (New Haven: Yale UP,
1986), 14.
11. Recalling his efforts in 1886-87 "to get hold of
all that was implicit in the idea of Socialism," Wells observes that he
"discovered the heady brew of Carlyle's French Revolution."
Experiment in Autobiography (NY: The Macmillann Company, 1934), 194-95.
12. The 10th appendix is the Wilkie Collins excerpt.
13. In order of citation, the texts are God the
Invisible King (3 times), Faults of theFabian, The Undying Fire, Star-Begotten,
What are we to do with our Lives?
14. Leon Stover, The Shaving of Karl Marx (Lake
Forest, IL: The Chiron Press, 1982). For Wells lovers, part of the fun is that Stover
never lets out that the title is Wells's after a fashion. In Russia in the Shadows, in
Vol. 26 of the "Atlantic Edition" of The Works of H.G. Wells (London:
T. Fisher Unwin, 1926), 543, Wells writes that in Russia "I found the
omnipresent images of that beard more and more irritating. A gnawing desire grew
upon me to see Karl Marx shaved. Some day, if I am spared, I will take up shears
and a razor against 'Das
Kapital'; I will write 'The Shaving of Karl Marx.'"
15. Stover, Shaving of Karl Marx, 43, 45, 51,
112, 115.
16. Stover, Time Machine, 15.
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