The Inheritors, HG Wells and Science Fiction
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The Inheritors, H. G. Wells and Science Fiction: The Dimensions of the Future On 20 November 1901, Wells wrote to his agent, J. B. Pinker, revealing that “Conrad came along today with Anticipations on the train. He doesn't like it in a friendly & respectful way & would like very much to go for it in two or three articles.”1 Anticipations, Wells first non-fiction book, published as a volume earlier that month in Fortnightly Review, set out, among other things, Wells’s radical ideas for how to secure the future of humanity. Looking back over his career in Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells writes: “Now Anticipations was not only a new start for me, but, it presently became clear, a new thing in general thought” (645). This “new thing” contained such extraordinary and revolutionary proposals that it propelled Wells to Edwardian literary superstardom. The book was an immediate bestseller, and by mid-December 1901 Wells was urging Pinker to bring it out as a cheap paperback.2 In June of the same year William Heinemann had published the second collaborative effort of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story.3 The novel plays with the Wellsian notion that fantastical events might effect a political and social transformation of Britain’s very near future. Yet, unlike their friend Wells, who had begun to promote the potential for humanity to progress and to improve, to evolve into higher beings, Conrad and Ford envisioned an apocalyptic dystopia where humanity would be swept away by a race of people from a fourth dimension, the Inheritors of the title. The world promised by these Inheritors is ruled by a calculating, ascetic political class whose hyper-rational values and beliefs are poised to supersede Victorian sensibility, sensitivity and, what they regard as sentimentality. As Max Saunders argues, the unnamed Fourth Dimensionist woman in The Inheritors is “a personification of very much that new rejection of any traditions of piety, altruism or restraint”: “The novel poses its present—the present of the Boer War—as a crisis; the turn-of-the-century as a turning point” (“Empire of the Future” 132 and 126). Robert Hampson elaborates on this when he asserts that in The Inheritors, this turning point pivots on “the replacement of ‘probity’ and ‘altruism’ of the old-style Toryism by the new Toryism of Joseph Chamberlain, and the replacement of ‘old- fashioned small enterprises’ by ruthless individualism and the ‘gigantic trusts’ of monopoly capitalism” (68). The Inheritors is thus, in many ways, a “condition of England” novel, a timely, but flawed, meditation on Britain’s social and cultural values as the new century dawns. In both fiction and non-fiction respectively, therefore, Conrad and Ford, and their close neighbor H. G. Wells explore the direction humanity would take in the twentieth century. It is almost inconceivable that the three authors did not discuss these ideas during their regular visits to each other; but, as Wells’s letter to Pinker proves, Conrad was not as enthusiastic as the general public about Wells’s propositions. The impact on The Inheritors of Wells’s ideas about the future will be the main focus of this paper. Along the way, it will also unearth the traces of Wells’s scientific writings inscribed in The Inheritors, demonstrating that Conrad and Ford were actively drawing on their friend’s extraordinary imagination to create their own tale of a fantastic near future. However, the inevitable conclusion is that Conrad and Ford had a very different idea of what constitutes “progress,” and that their novel in many ways represents a critique and rebuttal of some of Wells’s more radical utopian visions as expressed in Anticipations.4 The Fourth Dimension The idea of a fourth dimensional space was first articulated by Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an Italian mathematician and astronomer, in the eighteenth century. This idea of an unseen, undetected and undetectable spatial dimension to the universe began to take hold of the literary imagination in the nineteenth century; and thus in his Introduction to The Inheritors David Seed confirms that following the publication of “Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland in 1884 and C. H. Hinton’s Scientific Romances (1884- 86), the term ‘fourth dimension’ had become sufficiently familiar as not to warrant explanation in itself” (xxii).5 Nearly a decade later the possibility of a fourth dimension still mesmerised the general public. In 1893 W. T. Stead, journalist and champion of the occult, wrote: “We are on the eve of the Fourth Dimension; that is what it is!”.6 Stead’s excitement is evidence of what Will Tattersdill describes as “the suggestion that we are on the verge of achieving some great new understanding about the universe, only previously hinted at” (94-5). And indeed, only three years later came the announcement of the discovery of X-rays, a scientific breakthrough that seemed to promise proof of other dimensions, of hidden worlds and alternative universes. Saunders observes that the turn-of-the-century was a time “notoriously beset with anxiety about the changes the future might bring”; and thus The Inheritors was written against the backdrop of a “surge of futurological fiction” from the likes of William Morris and H. G. Wells, both of whom used the idea of dimensional travel to probe possible futures (“Empire of the Future” 131).7 This was also a moment when significant scientific and technological discoveries and advances were being made, and The Inheritors displays a keen consciousness of this zeitgeist, most notably in its use of the possibilities unleashed by the discovery of X-rays and discussions about the possibilities of a fourth spatial dimension. The result is a novel that, in the words of Elaine L. Kleiner, “is an early attempt to codify the form one can now safely label ‘science fiction’” (26).8 The fourth dimension is used in literature to explore the possibility of utopias, of potential futures and the idea of parallel universes inhabited by beings like ourselves, but with differing values and morals. This is made clear very early on in The Inheritors when the woman from the Fourth Dimension entraps the central character, Etchingham Granger, and reveals another plane of existence, beyond the very tangible, very visible Bell Harry Tower of Canterbury Cathedral: One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster—vaster than cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised. The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealized, an unrealizable infinity of space. It was merely momentary. The tower filled its space again and I looked at her. (8) The idea of a fourth dimension is absolutely crucial to the central aim of Conrad and Ford’s novel: an exploration of the values and beliefs that a humane society must adhere to in the face of progress. “The First Idea”: The Inheritors and H. G. Wells Neither Conrad nor Ford had considered writing scientific fantasies before embarking on The Inheritors, but they were both awed by the imaginative audacity of Wells’s writing, and Ford confirms that The Invisible Man (1897), The Sea Lady (1901), “and two short stories called, the one The Man Who Could Work Miracles and the other Fear, made up at that date all the English writing that, acting as it were as a junta, we absolutely admired” (A Personal Remembrance 43).9 Ford’s primary consideration in singling out these stories is form and expression, but, like .Conrad, he was also impressed by Wells’s imagination, as were many of their contemporaries.10 Indeed, Michael Sherborne notes that by the turn of the century Wells had become, despite his relative youth, a kind of figurehead for authors seeking new forms of literary expression: The south coast was home to several authors who did not fit naturally into the British Establishment and who found it agreeable to position themselves some distance from London and enjoy each other's mutual support, perhaps even reciprocal altruism. Ford Madox Hueffer later claimed that all the literary artists in England lived in a three-to-five-mile radius of Wells's house, looking up to him because of his “immense sales, and the gift of leadership”. (138)11 Conrad and Ford were two such authors and Wells’s proximity inevitably had an impact on The Inheritors, as an early reviewer for the Daily Mail on 19 July 1901 confirms: “It is interesting to learn that Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hueffer got the first idea of their book from a striking sentence of Mr. H. G. Wells […]” (in The Inheritors 158). Writing to his agent, J. B. Pinker, just five days before this review, Conrad reveals, “There’s a Daily Mail man coming to see me on Tuesday,” confirming Conrad as the source of this account of “the first idea.” (Collected Letters 2: 341). Saunders is clear that the fourth dimension element of the book was not there in the original manuscript, speculating that Conrad may have “contributed the scientific notion” of another spatial dimension in The Inheritors (A Dual Life 118). Saunders Commented [CD1]: Cut made because the information is not necessary to the argument and covers familiar notes that by 6 October 1899 “Ford had written enough of The Inheritors to try it out ground. on Conrad: he drove over to the Pent ‘with the manuscript of the opening chapters of the novel rather shyly in his pocket,’” and confirms that “as with ‘Seraphina,’ the suggestion of collaborating had come from Conrad” (A Dual Life 120).12 According to Ford, on reading the first chapter, Conrad declared: “What the devil is this? It is très, très, très chic! It is épatant.