Arty Calls

Unspeakable experiments

Yesterday I visited Uppark, the house where the young HG Wells' mother was Housekeeper and father was Gardener. This was no idyllic Upstairs Downstairs/Downton Abbey environment and Sarah was eventually dismissed for gossiping about the Featherstonhaugh family. Standing below ground level in the servants quarters with little windows above head height where you can occasionally glimpse the ankles of the rest of humanity you really get a sense of the unseen workers scurrying around in the tunnels to support a few lucky to be born into a different life. Read the young Bertie's Tono Bungay for more direct commentary on Uppark. But what interests me is how that social and moral conflict between two very different views of society is expressed in other contexts like the Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine and the men and beasts in this little horror show.

In some ways this story has dated less well than some (and he really was prolific) because it contains elements of Victorian style melodrama and fear of exotic unknown places where Johnny Foreigner got up to unspeakable things with the natives. But, of course, in other ways it is enormously prescient and raises all those issues of scientific, medical and biological advances and the balance of motivation and benefits. For those of you who haven't read it I won't add any spoilers here but it's a fun little potboiler and acts as an invitation to read some of his more obscure and less known stories many of which are out of copyright and freely available on the web.

The Invisible Man reads in parts like a penny dreadful Victorian newspaper report but there is no doubting Wells' ability to explore fantasy in an engaging realistic way by setting it in contemporary society. He captures the foibles of crowd behaviour but also the corrupting nature of power rested in a single individual.

The Time Machine is probably the best story of this set I read (I'll get around to War of the Worlds shortly). Although it is based around a single individual narrative voice again it contains enough room for a more episodic development and a look at different types of society in different times - both Victorian and fantasy future. There is even space for some post-apocalyptic descriptive dream-like passages. Whereas some of Wells' stories a bit slight, and you can see why they have the novella depth that appeals for film adaptations, the Time Machine is fully rounded in both forms. Which brings me back to Uppark. It is frightening to stand underground there, in the servants' quarters, and think of the people that devoted their working lives so that a lucky few could pass the time in vacuous indolence.