H.G. Wells 
The Invisible Man
Why is Griffin cold?
H.G. Wells was keen that his ‘scientific romances’ should be just that – scientific. He devotes a whole section of The Invisible Man (Chapter 19, ‘Certain First Principles’) to authentication of the central concept in the novel. It is, for the lay-reader at least, an extraordinarily plausible performance. ‘Have you already forgotten your physics?’, Griffin asks his old class-mate, Kemp, before launching into a lecture on optics:
Just think of all the things that are transparent and seem not to be so. Paper, for instance, is made up of transparent fibres, and it is white and opaque only for the same reason that a powder of glass is white and opaque. Oil white paper, fill up the interstices between the particles with oil so that there is no longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and it becomes as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but cotton fibre, linen fibre, woody fibre, and bone, Kemp, flesh, Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp, in fact the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and black pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue. So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than water. (Chapter 19)
‘Of course, of course’, responds Kemp, suddenly remembering his undergraduate physics, ‘I was thinking only last night of the sea larvae and all jelly-fish!’
Wells managed to finesse the business about the black pigment in hair by making Griffin albino. But one feature of his invisibility hypothesis continued to bother the author, and evidently remained insolubly inauthentic. As he later explained in a letter to Arnold Bennett:
Any alteration of the refractive index of the eye lenses would make vision impossible. Without such alteration the eyes would be visible as glassy globules. And for vision it is also necessary that there should be visual purple behind the retina and an opaque cornea and iris. On these lines you would get a very effective short story but nothing more.1
There are other irrationalities flawing the central conception of The Invisible Man which Wells seems not to have commented on. The most memorable episode in the novel is Griffin’s recollection to Kemp of how, newly invisible in London, he discovered himself not omnipotent (as he fondly expected) but more wretched than the most destitute of street beggars, wholly impotent, a modern version of Lear’s poor forked animal:
‘But you begin to realise now’, said the Invisible Man, ‘the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter – no covering – to get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make of myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again. (Ch. 23)
This sticks indelibly in the mind. Like Midas, Griffin’s dream of vast power turns to a terrible curse. It is January. What more distressing than to be naked and starving in the cold streets?
And yet, if we think about it, Griffin could have been as comfortably covered and as well fed as any of his visible fellow-Londoners. As he tells Kemp, describing his first experiments, he discovered early on that any fibre, vegetable, or woody matter can be rendered invisible – particularly if it has not been dyed or stained.2 Griffin proves this in his earliest experimental trials:
I needed two little dynamos, and these I worked with a cheap gas engine. My first experiment was with a bit of white wool fabric. It was the strangest thing in the world to see it in the flicker of the flashes soft and white, and then to watch it fade like a wreath of smoke and vanish. (Ch. 20)
Griffin moves on to his neighbour’s white cat, and the white pillow on which the animal’s drugged body is lying – both of which are rendered invisible by his little gas-powered machine.
It is clear that, with a little forethought, Griffin could quite easily make himself an invisible white suit of clothing. He could also render food invisible before eating it, so that its undigested mass did not show up in his otherwise transparent entrails. He could, if he were patient enough, construct himself an invisible house out of invisible wood. If due to the invasions of suspicious neighbours, he had no time to do this in London he might certainly do it during his many weeks at Iping (where, as he tells Kemp, most of his efforts seem to be vainly directed towards finding a chemical formula which will enable him to be visible or invisible at will).
The naked, starving, unhoused Griffin would, logically, seem to be that way not because of any fatal flaw in his science. He could, as has been said, walk around in an invisible three-piece suit, with an invisible top hat on his invisible head, an invisible umbrella to keep himself dry, and an invisible three-course meal in his belly. That he does not avail himself of these amenities may, conceivably, be ascribed to a mental derangement provoked by the excruciating pain of the long dematerialization process.
I had not expected the suffering. A night of racking anguish, sickness and fainting. I set my teeth, though my skin was presently afire; all my body afire; but I lay there like grim death. I understood now how it was the cat had howled until I chloroformed it. Lucky it was I lived alone and untended in my room. There were times when I sobbed and groaned and talked. But I stuck to it … I became insensible and woke languid in the darkness. (Ch. 20)
But, closely examined, Griffin’s derangement seems to originate in the condition of his life well before his agonizing passage into invisibility. His aggrieved sense of alienation evidently began early, probably with the bullying and jeers he attracted as a child, on account of his physical abnormality. It is his physical repulsiveness that strikes those who remember him as an adult. Kemp recalls Griffin at University College as ‘a younger student, almost an albino, six feet high, and broad, with a pink and white face and red eyes – who won the medal for chemistry’. This evidently was six or seven years since. In his last years as a student, and in his first employment as a lecturer in an unfashionable provincial university, Griffin (who, one guesses, has neither men nor women friends) has deteriorated into a condition of clear paranoia:
I kept it [i.e. his discovery] to myself. I had to do my work under frightful disadvantages. Oliver, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas, – he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I went on working. I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous at a blow … To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man, – the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become – this. (Ch. 19)
Griffin, in his maniac delusions of divine superiority, despises humanity. When, therefore, he goes among the London crowds naked and starving it is because, like the self-divested Lear on the heath, he is deliberately refusing to wear the uniform of his herd-like fellow man. He has chosen to strip himself. Nakedness is the sign of his difference, and his godlike superiority over the lesser, visible beings, he despises. He no more needs trousers than Jove or Satan. It is beneath his notice to concern himself with such minutiae.