Quotations from the Bible are from the Authorized Version.
1. Camberwell: District of London south of the Thames, now part of the London Borough of Southwark. The City & South London Railway, London’s first deep underground electric railway, was opened in 1890 although the generators that powered it were not actually in Camberwell, but nearby Stockwell.
2. Carnot’s cycle: Principle formulated by the French physicistNicholas Leonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832), describing the cycles of expansion and contraction in an ideal ‘heat-engine’(engine powered by heat).
3. Azuma-zi: Azuma is a Japanese name (meaning ‘east’), but there is no particular significance here other than to evoke the ‘mysterious East’.
4. Poob-bah: The pompous ‘Lord High Everything Else’ in thepopular comic opera The Mikado (1885) by William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900). This, as with ‘nigger help’ later, is Holroyd’s casual racism, but the story also points towards a more sophisticated unease towards otherraces which Wells and his readers were not free from.
5. Lord Clive… Straits Settlements: Ship named after Robert Clive (1725–74), general whose military victories in India helped establish British rule in the following century. The Straits Settlements were former East India Company-controlled colonial territories along the Strait of Malacca: Penang, and Malacca, in what is now Malaysia, and Singapore.
6. Twelve per cent: The dividend which the railway shareholders were expected to receive.
7. British Solomon: The biblical King Solomon (c. 1000 bc–928 bc), famous for his wisdom, was also associated, especially in Arabic folklore, with stories of supernatural beings. There might also be an echo of the British Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, established as a British protectorate in 1893, as the region of ‘beyond’ from where Azuma-zi might have originated.
8. a meteoric stone: The pre-Islamic Arabs venerated a black stone, said to be of meteoric origin, around which the Kaaba at Meccawas built.
9. anointing of the coils with oil: Applying oil to a body as a mark of respect is a custom in many religions.
1. Wade’s: Investigator (fictional) into the ‘case’ of Davidson.
2. Harlow Technical College… Highgate Archway: Harlow In Essex is over 15 miles north-east from the Highgate Archway. Wells may have been thinking of Holloway although the Northern Polytechnic Institute in Holloway was not opened until 1896.
3. Scott… everyone swore by that personage: Various ‘personages’ have been suggested, from the American Civil War General Win-field Scott (1786–1866) to the author Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). The OED (2nd edn.) gives 1885 as the first instance of ‘Great Scott’ as an exclamation, citing Tinted Venus by F. Anstey (Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856–1934)): ‘Great Scott! I must be bad!’, but the expression seems to have been used in 1864 in Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey, a diary by Private RobertKnox Sneden.
4. hull down: So far away that the hull is below the horizon and cannot be seen.
5. Bishop Berkeley: George Berkeley (1685–1753), Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, ‘idealist’ philosopher who argued against the distinction of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’, suggesting that what we believe existsis a product of our sensory perception or the mind of God.
6. penguins: Only found in the southern hemisphere, giving a clue to the whereabouts of Davidson’s perception.
7. Dogs’ Home… King’s Cross: The Dogs’ Home was founded in Holloway in 1860 and moved to its present location in Battersea, south of the river Thames, in 1871. King’s Cross railway stationis to the south of Camden Town.
8. the special Pall Mall: The Pall Mall Budget (where, of course, this story first appeared) was a weekly supplement to the Pall Mall Gazette, London evening paper.
9. group of stars like a cross: The Southern Cross constellation, only visible from the Southern hemisphere.
10. changing views of a lantern: Projected images from ‘magic lantern’ slides dissolving into one another; a popular entertainmentduring the mid nineteenth century. (See also ‘The Story of thelate Mr Elvesham’.)
11. Fulmar: A possibly fictional naval vessel, named after a sea-bird.
12. Fourth Dimension: Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) begins with a discussion of Time as the Fourth Dimension after Length, Breadth and Thickness, but here and in ‘The Plattner Story’ it isseen more as an extra spatial dimension.
13. Saint Pancras installation: The station (between Euston andKing’s Cross stations on Euston Road) designed by William Henry Barlow (1812–1902) was opened in 1868. It and the associated Midland Grand Hotel (opened 1877), designed by George Gilbert Scott (1811–78), were among the glories of Victorian railway architecture.
1. Periplaneta Hapliia: Latin name for the (fictional) ‘Hapley’s cockroach’.
2. Geological Society: Scholarly and professional society, formed in 1807.
3. burn Sir Ray Lankester at Smith field: Edwin Ray Lankester(1847–1929) was Professor of Zoology at University College London and Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford. A friend of Wells, he wrote the entry on ‘Mollusca’ for the 9the edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1875–89). Criminals, traitors and, during the sixteenth century, heretics were executedat Smithfield Market in the City of London.
4. Royal Entomological Society: Scholarly society dedicated to the study of insects, founded 1833.
5. Chamber of Deputies: The Lower House of the French Parliament, since 1946 known as the National Assembly. French politics in the late nineteenth century was often turbulent, with many short-lived governments.
6. Quart. Journ. Entomological Soc: The Royal Entomological Society issued various ‘Proceedings’ and journals, but nothing with this precise title.
7. along Piccadilly… societies abide: Burlington House in Piccadilly is the home of a number of learned scientific societies, including (until 1968) the Royal Society, as well as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Wells is joking about the artistic community’s ignorance of the scientific world.
8. ‘Island Nights’ Entertainments’: Collection of stories (1893) byRobert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), which includes ‘The Bottle Imp’.
9. Kipling: Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), the popular author of poems, short stories and novels. See also note 3 to ‘The Wild Asses of the Devil’.
10. Besant’s ‘Inner House’: Dystopian novel (1888) by Sir Walter Besant (1836–1901).
11. monograph: The original meaning of ‘monograph’ (now ‘a work in one volume’ – OED) was a treatise on a single specialized subject such as a zoological or botanical species.
1. 4¾d.: Fourpence and three-farthings. In British currency of the time, there were four farthings to a penny, twelve pennies to a shilling and twenty shillings to a pound. ‘Half a crown’ is two shillings and sixpence. A guinea was worth 21 shillings.
2. Bandersnatch: From the poem ‘Jabberwocky’ in Through the Looking Glass (1871) by Lewis Carroll (1832–98). Here, ‘snatch’ evokes the greed of Winslow’s competitors, just as one of his wholesale dealers is named ‘Grab’.
3. Black Care: Term used to signify depression or turn of fortune, from Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 bc)), ‘post equi-tem sedet atra Cura’ (‘Behind the rider sits black care’), Odes 3.1.40.
4. Y.M.C.A.: The Young Men’s Christian Association was foundedin 1844 to encourage the spiritual and educational development (and later, the physical fitness) of young men. Its roots in the drapery trade make it an obvious alternative to the public-house for Winslow.
5. Christian World: Weekly journal which began publishing in 1857.
6. tempering the wind to the shorn retailer: The proverbial expression ‘tempering the wind to the shorn lamb’ refers to a providential act of mercy.
1. Gehenna: The (Greek) name of a valley outside Jerusalem where fires continually burned to consume rubbish and where pagans allegedly sacrificed children (Jeremiah 19:3–6). It became asynonym for Hell in Christian writing.
2. penthouse brows: Overhanging eyebrows, possibly from the libretto to the opera King Arthur (1691) by John Dryden (1631–1700) and Henry Purcell (1659–95), IH.1.30: ‘My Pent-HouseEye-Brows, and my Shaggy Beard’.
3. Hanley and Etruria: Hanley is one of the six ‘Potteries’ towns In Staffordshire which make up the present Stoke-on-Trent. Etruria, west of Hanley, was where Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) settledupon for his pottery factory, and Wells lived there for a few months in 1888. Burslem (mentioned later) is another of the‘Potteries’ towns.
4. season of ‘play’: Term used in industrial relations in the northand midlands to signify lack of work through illness or strike action.
5. Jeddah: Port city in Saudi Arabia, near the holy city of Mecca. The company is probably reminiscent of the Shelton Iron Steel and Coal Company in Etruria.
6. pillars of cloud by day: When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, God guided them ‘by day in a pillar of a cloud… and by night in a pillar of fire’ (Exodus 13:21).
7. Newcastle: Newcastle-under-Lyme, in Staffordshire, just west of the ‘Potteries’ towns.
1. South-Western main line: Constructed in the 1830s, the London and South-Western Railway network ran from Vauxhall in London through Wimbledon, Surbiton and Woking in Surrey toSouthampton on the south coast. A number of suburban railwaysbranched off and connected to this line. From Wimbledon, a lineran via Worcester Park to Leatherhead and Guildford.
2. Maxim: Sir Hiram S. Maxim (1840–1916), inventor of an early machine gun and a pioneer of heavier-than-air flight, on whom Monson, his ‘successor’, is obviously based. In 1894, before acrowd of invited guests which included Wells, Maxim flew two hundred feet before crashing. See also note 10.
3. over Trafalgar Square: Trafalgar Square in central London commemorates the naval victory of the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) where Horatio, Lord Nelson (1758–1805) met his death. As an iconic location it would be expected that the first aircraft would be seen over the square in the same way as French pioneers of aviation in the early 1900s made sure that they were seen near the Eiffel Tower.
4. Isle of Wight trippers: The island on the south coast of England off Southampton, was a popular holiday destination reached by the railway network (line) alluded to earlier. The working – andlower-middle-class ‘trippers’ would be entertained and amusedby Monson’s failures.
5. Romeike: Henry Romeike (dates unknown) was the founder of a press cuttings agency in the 1880s.
6. ceased from troubling: Echo of Job 3:17: ‘There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.’
7. Folly: Often used for a costly and striking but essentially useless enterprise, such as an ornamental building.
8. Esher: Five miles west of Worcester Park.
9. aluminium rod: Although the very light metal aluminium wasfirst extracted in 1825, it was expensive to produce until 1886 when the process of electrolysis was perfected.
10. Lilienthal’s methods: Otto Lilienthal (1848–96), German experimenter with gliders, who died following a crash. His experiments with flying were based upon the close observation of the flight of birds, while Maxim attempted to generate power by other means, such as the propeller. Monson is trying to combine the two methods and keep his aircraft gliding like a gull through mechanical adjustments of the wings and the force generated by the engines and propeller.
11. petroleum: Petroleum (or gasoline), extracted from oil, became increasingly important as a fuel in the second half of the nineteenth century and the development of the internal combustionengine in automobiles boosted the idea of applications in powered flight. The first successful powered flight using a gasoline engine was Orville Wright’s on 17 December 1903.
12. eminent literary people from Haslemere: Haslemere in Surrey is close to Hindhead, where the writers Grant Allen (1848–99) and Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947), friends of Wells, lived.
13. Albert Hall: Concert hall in Kensington, opened 1871 in memory of Prince Albert (1819–61).
14. Imperial Institute: South Kensington, London. Founded 1881 as a museum/research institute. Part of it was incorporated into Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in 1899.
15. Royal College of Science: See note 4 to ‘A Slip under the Microscope’. ‘Formerly’ implies that it was damaged or destroyed in the crash.
1. Regent’s Park Canal: Running through the northern end of Regent’s Park, the canal was constructed in 1816 to connect the Grand Union Canal to the London Docks. The Broad Walk is part of the park’s formal gardens. The ‘crescent’ is Park Crescent between Marylebone Road and Portland Place.
2. a black barge… white horse: The images here may be taken from Greek mythology (souls of the dead were ferried across the River Styx) and the Bible (in Revelation 6:8 Death is described as riding on a ‘pale horse’).
3. winged globes: The symbol of the winged sun disc probably originated in Assyria but was used frequently in ancient Egypt.
4. a thousand years was but a moment: An echo of ‘For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday’ (Psalm 90:4), adapted by Isaac Watts (1674–1748) in the popular hymn ‘Oh God, Our Help In Ages Past’: ‘A thousand ages in thy sight / Are like an evening gone’.
5. the hour had come… a noise of many waters…‘There will be no more pain’: References to Revelation 3:3: ‘thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee’; 19:6: ‘as the voice ofmany waters’; 21:4: ‘neither shall there be any more pain’.
1. News from Nowhere: Utopian novel (1890) by William Morris (1834–96). See also note 15.
2. Oratory clock: At Brompton Oratory, in Brompton Road near the Royal College of Science.
3. mixed classes: Men and women; women were beginning to receive a scientific education in some institutions. The University of London accepted women for graduation in all faculties in 1878. Oxford and Cambridge took until 1920 and 1948 respectively to do the same.
4. College of Science: The Royal College of Science in South Kensington, London, formed in 1881 as the Normal School of Science by amalgamating courses of the Royal School of Mines with the teaching of other science subjects. One of its aims was to train school science teachers. Students from unprivileged backgrounds like Hill (and Wells himself, 1884–7) were recruited by means of state scholarships. The Normal School was renamed the Royal College of Science in 1890 and is now part of Imperial College, London.
5. blue paper: The offer of a scholarship to candidates who haddone well in school examinations.
6. a guinea a week: Something under the average income of a skilled worker.
7. seventh standard of the Board school: The highest class of the Board Schools, established in 1870 to educate working-classchildren.
8. Carlyle: Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), historian and writer on social issues. His books included Sartor Resartus (1833–4; see also note 11 to ‘The New Accelerator’), History of the French Revolution (1837) and On Heroes (1841).
9. a paying student: Paying her own fees, in contrast to Hill who is receiving a State grant.
10. Browning: Robert Browning (1812–89), poet.
11. Harvey Commemoration Medal: An apparently fictional award in memory of William Harvey (1578–1657), who pioneered research into the circulation of the blood.
12. Longfellow… Mrs Hemans: The American poet Henry Wads-worth Longfellow (1807–82), Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) were all ‘canonical’ poets. They are contrasted with more popular versifiers Eliza Cook (1818–89) and Mrs (Felicia) Hemans (1793–1835).
13. ‘mugger’: ‘Crammer’ or ‘swot’ who memorizes facts for examinations rather than learning with full understanding or enjoyment.(But Hill is also being looked down upon by the Oxford man because of his humbler origins.)
14. counted to him for righteousness: Cf. Psalm 106:31: ‘And that was counted unto him for righteousness.’
15. Bernard Shaw’s… Walter Crane’s: George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), playwright and socialist activist, was a friend andrival of Wells. As well as being a novelist, poet, and socialist activist, William Morris’s printing and household designs were issued through his Kelmscott Press and the Morris & Co. design firm. Walter Crane (1845–1915) was celebrated for his children’s book illustrations and his cartoons and art supporting the Socialist cause.
16. ‘dined late’: A characteristic of a ‘gentleman’.
17. finger-bowl shibboleths: Only the wealthy and cultivated used finger-bowls to wash during meals. Judges 12:5–6 relates how the pronunciation of ‘shibboleth’ (Hebrew, ‘ear of grain’) was used to distinguish between the Gileadites and their enemies the Ephramites, who were slaughtered when they could not pass the test. It now refers to specialist jargon or customs used to distinguish members of a privileged group (like Wedderburn) fromoutsiders (like Hill).
18. Ruskin: John Ruskin (1819–1900), art critic and influential writer on social issues. In Sesame and Lilies (1865) he argued that men’s roles were public, while women’s influence was more to be felt in the private sphere, an attitude common in Victoriantimes.
19. aerated bread shop: The Aërated Bread Company began by introducing carbon dioxide into dough, to make the bread rise faster. In 1864 it started to serve food and drink in its shops. The ABC‘tea shops’ introduced into Victorian society a cheap and (forwomen) unthreatening alternative to eating and socializing in the home or public-houses and lasted well into the second half of the twentieth century.
20. Bradlaugh and John Burns: Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91) advocated birth control and was prevented from taking his seat in Parliament for five years because as an atheist he refused to take a religious oath. John Burns (1858–1943) was a socialist and trade union leader who was elected to Parliament in 1892.
21. Hindu god: Like the statue of a Hindu god positioned for all to see.
22. Q. Jour. Mi. Sci.: Quarterly Journal of Mining Science.
23. threepenny or ninepenny classics: Cheap editions of classic books.
24. The Meistersingers: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, an operaby Richard Wagner (1813–83), first performed 1868.
1. Eusapia’s: The medium Eusapia Palladino (1854–1918) was the subject of a number of investigations during the 1880s and 1890s. Numerous reputable scientists (such as the physicist Oliver Lodge (1851–1940)) attended her seances and were convinced of her genuine ability. Others considered her an ingenious but blatant fraudster, and Wells is mocking the alleged gullibility of the scientific investigators who took her side.
2. Alsatian: From the (now) French province of Alsace, on the border of Germany, a large proportion of whose population was of German ancestry. From 1648, the region was ruled by France, but between 1871 and 1918 it was German.
3. a cyclist: Cycling became a craze (in which Wells participated) in the 1890s.
4. cheap ‘Gem’ photographs: Small ‘tintype’ photographs mounted on decorated card, known as ‘Gem’ or ‘American Gem’ pictures, and popular from the late 1870s onwards.
5. Nordau: Max Nordau (1849–1923), whose Degeneration (translated into English 1895) argued that the ‘decadent’ art of the fin de siècle was symbolic of a tendency to hysteria and morbidity.
6. Fourth Dimension: See note 12 to ‘The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes’.
7. Board… schools: See note 7 to ‘A Slip under the Microscope’.
8. the Three Gases: Hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, which Antoine Lavoisier (1777–94) identified as chemical elements.
9. left not a wrack behind: Allusion to The Tempest (1611) by William Shakespeare (1564–1616), IV. 1.156: ‘Leave not a rack behind’.
10. Society for the Investigation of Abnormal Phenomena: A fictional version, perhaps, of the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 to investigate spiritualism and psychic phenomena scientifically.
11. Journal of Anatomy: The journal of the Anatomical Society, founded 1887 and still a major scholarly body.
12. Euclid riders: An exercise in geometry to deduce propositions from previous propositions (from ‘rider’: ‘corollary or addition supplementing, or naturally arising from, something said or written’ (OED)).
13. human heads beneath which a tadpole-like body swung: The heads and underdeveloped bodies are reminiscent of the Martians of The War of the Worlds (1898), and the evolved humans of ‘The Man of the Year Million’ (1893), but the physical description also seems to suggest sperm cells.
14. devil’s dyke: There is a valley in the South Downs called the Devil’s Dyke, and other ‘Devil’s Dykes’ in Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire.
1. Trentham: Wells’s father Joseph worked as a gardener at Trentham Hall, near Stoke-on-Trent, for a brief period following his marriage to Wells’s mother Sarah in 1853.
2. University College, London: Founded 1826, opening up education for a wider social mix than could attend Oxford or Cambridge.
3. Shoolbread’s premises: James Shoolbread & Co. was a furniture supplier in Tottenham Court Road, but the restaurant (Blavitski’s) appears to be fictional.
4. dissolving views: See note 10 to ‘The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes’.
5. Psychical Research Society: The Society for Psychical Research: see note 10 to ‘The Plattner Story’.
6. powers of three: Multiplying three by itself and continually multiplying the product by three.
1. Myers apparatus: Device to absorb carbon dioxide and releasestored oxygen, invented by Henry Fleuss in 1879. By 1900 asimilar system was developed in Britain for escape from sunken submarines. ‘Myers’ may be fictional.
2. Daubrée: French geologist Gabriel Auguste Daubrée (1814–96) worked on metamorphic rocks and the influence of pressure and vulcanism in creating them.
3. eight bells: In naval custom, the 24-hour day, beginning at noon, is divided into five ‘watches’ of four hours with two two-hour afternoon ‘dog watches’. In each watch, after half an hour, a bellis rung, followed by two bells the next half-hour, three the next and so on. ‘Eight bells’ therefore signifies here the end of the Forenoon watch at noon.
4. since the waters were gathered together: The separation of land and sea in the biblical creation account: Genesis 1:9: ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together in one place.’
1. Haploteuthis ferox: A mock scientific name for the invented creature; translated from the Greek and Latin, it means something like ‘Fierce squid’. There are several species of giant squid, including Architeuthus dux, which live at great depths and of which little is known although occasional sightings led to numerous legends and tall tales. Observations during the nineteenth century became more common due to wider exploration of the oceans and a series of unexplained strandings of giant squid on the shores of Newfoundland and of New Zealand. There are few credible instances of people being attacked, although in 1873 a boy is reported to have hacked off a tentacle of a squid which attacked a small boat off the coast of Bell Island, Newfoundland.
2. Prince of Monaco’s discovery: Prince Albert I of Monaco (1848–1922) was an enthusiastic researcher into giant squid and in 1895 described several species including ‘Lepidoteuthis grimaldii’ which bears his family name. He founded the country’s Oceanographic Institute.
3. The downward bend… grotesque suggestion of a face: Reminiscent of the description of the Martians in The War of the Worlds.
4. straw hat and whites: Summer-holiday clothing.
1. thirty shillings: One pound ten shillings, less than a third of the asking price of five pounds. Cave’s claim to his wife that the crystal is worth ‘ten guineas’ is just over twice his asking price.
2. sugar and lemon and so forth: The ‘so forth’ would presumably be gin or brandy or some such alcoholic addition.
3. Pasteur Institute: Medical research institute founded in Paris in 1887 by the French chemist and pioneer of germ theory Louis Pasteur (1822–95).
4. a wide and shining canal: The first clue, along with the reddish cliffs, that this may be Mars. During the 1877 opposition (when the earth is between the sun and Mars, and the two planets are at their closest), the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835–1910) had observed ‘canali’ (channels). Percival Lowell (1855–1916) continued Schiaparelli’s mapping, and argued in his book Mars (1895) that they were probably actual canals, built by Martians. Further evidence of identity is the ‘two small moons’: the two Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, were discovered in 1877.
5. methyl: Methanol (methyl alcohol) or a number of chemicals derived from it, probably used in the preserved animals on sale in Cave’s shop.
6. certain clumsy bipeds: Something like those fed on by the Martians of The War of the Worlds.
7. The Daily Chronicle and Nature: The Daily Chronicle was a Liberal newspaper established in 1872 and merged with the Daily News in 1930. Nature was one of the most important scientific journals of the time, founded in 1869 and still published today.
1. Leith Hill, and Fitch Hill, and Hindhead: Leith Hill (south of Dorking in Surrey) is the highest place in south-east England, and with Pitch Hill and Hindhead, is part of a line of ridges and hills running through Surrey. See also note 12 to ‘The Argonauts of the Air’.
2. Wey: The River Wey is a tributary of the Thames about forty miles long which flows through Godalming and Guildford to the Thames at Weybridge, nine miles west of Epsom.
3. Fifty thousand years ago: In The Outline of History (1920) Wells places the extinct sub-species ‘Neanderthal Man’ as having flourished in Europe fifty thousand years ago, at the height of the Fourth Ice Age. The descriptions of the bodies and customs of the tribe in this story resemble his account of Homo Neander-thalis there.
4. little pointed tips: A mark often used to signify ‘elvish’ or ‘faery’ folk, and suggesting a common belief that tales of such supernatural beings were folk-memories of more ‘primitive’ races of humanity.
5. Epsom Stand: Epsom racecourse, on the North Downs in Surrey, is the home of the Derby, the most important horse race in the British sporting calendar. Wells is pushing the area’s association with horse racing back thousands of years.
1. Neptune: The eighth planet of the solar system, discovered in 1846 after investigations of discrepancies in the apparent orbit of Uranus. It is the furthermost planet (after the redefining of planets in 2006). Its satellite is Triton, and it is now known to have at least seven other moons.
2. Ogilvy: An astronomer of that name is a friend of the narrator of The War of the Worlds.
3. Boers… Hottentots: The Boers were the people of Dutch descent who settled in South Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Gold Coast was the name given to what is now Ghana. ‘Hottentots’ was the name (now seen as pejorative) given to the Khoikhoi people, the native inhabitants of Namibia and Cape Province in South Africa.
4. telegraph… telephone wires: A number of different inventions and improvements developed the electric telegraph in the early nineteenth century. The first successful transatlantic telegraph cable came into operation in 1886. The invention of the telephone is likewise complex, but Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) patented an electro-magnetic telephone in March 1876.
5. throbbing tape: The ‘ticker tape’ used to record telegraph messages.
6. Centrifugal, centripetal: Centrifugal force is the outward force acting on a body that revolves around a central point. Centripetal force is the gravitational force that draws the body towards the centre. In a stable orbit they are equal and opposite forces.
7. the pointers of the Bear: The ‘pointers’ are the stars Dubhe and Merak in Ursa Major (The Great Bear), which point to Polaris, the North Star.
8. the year 1000: When many people believed that the Second Coming of Christ would take place.
9. Greenwich time: ‘Greenwich Mean Time’ is the standard time calculated from the sun’s crossing of the line of longitude running through the observatory at Greenwich, London.
10. mouth of the Indus to the mouths of the Ganges: The Indus flows westwards to the Arabian Sea in what is now Pakistan. The Ganges flows eastwards to the Bay of Bengal.
11. The Martian astronomers: As in ‘The Crystal Egg’, Wells speculates that Mars is an inhabited world. (Martians appear in a more sinister guise in The War of the Worlds.)
1. Torres Vedras: Portuguese town after which were named the Duke of Wellington’s successful lines of defensive forts in the Peninsular War (1808–14).
2. safety-match: Earlier matches could be struck by rubbing against any rough surface. The safety-match needed a specially prepared surface to ignite it, and came into use in Britain after the manufacturers Bryant and May established a factory in 1862.
3. Moses’ rod…Tannhäuser: It was actually Aaron’s’ rod that turned into a serpent in the story told in Exodus 7:9–10, but he cast it down on Moses’s orders. Tannhduser (first performed 1845, revised extensively in 1861) is an opera by Richard Wagner, set in medieval Germany. In Act III the staff of the minstrel-knight Tannhäuser sprouts leaves.
4. Poona-Penang lawyer: Made from the stem of the Malaysian dwarf palm Licuala acutifolia native to Penang off the west coast of Malaysia. ‘Lawyer’ is a dialect word signifying ‘bramble’ but the OED suggests that the term may also be a jocular reference to the use of these canes in settling disputes.
5. Immering: Fictional Sussex village, also used in Love and Mr Lewisham (1900).
6. Mahomet… Yogi’s… Blavatsky: Mohammed (570–632), was the founder of Islam. Yogi is a general term for a Hindu mystic; the capitalization suggests that Wells had a particular adept in mind. Helena Blavatsky (1831–91) was the founder of Theosophy, a religious sect based upon Eastern mysticism and stressing ‘yogic’ powers of mind over matter – hence the later reference to the ‘miracles of Theosophists’ who sometimes claimed psychic abilities.
7. Duke of Argyll: George Douglas Campbell, the 8th Duke of Argyll (1823–1900) was a prominent politician and an opponent of the theory of evolution by natural selection proposed by Charles Darwin (1809–82). He disputed these ideas with Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95), under whom Wells studied and whose work he admired.
8. Sunday, Nov. 10, 1896: That date was actually a Tuesday.
9. Joshua: The biblical prophet Joshua is reputed to have stopped the motion of the sun and moon for a day (Joshua 10:12–13).
10. a thousand miles an hour: In ‘A Theory of Errors: The Altered
Worlds of Fiction’ (Foundation 36 (Summer 1986), pp. 45–57), David Lake points out that there is a contradiction here between this figure and the continued forward movement (as the globe stops) of nine miles per second. He suggests ‘about eleven miles per minute’ as the speed from the latitude of Sussex.
1. Armageddon: The final battle between good and evil or, more loosely, a cataclysmic conflict that brings down a civilization. The Bible refers to Armageddon as a place: ‘And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon’ (Revelation 16:16), which is usually identified with Mount Megiddo in Israel, the site of several battles.
2. Dream States: While Fortnum-Roscoe seems to be a fictional author, there was much interest in dreams and their meaning at this time. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, although it was not translated into English until 1913.
3. pleasure city: In the future described in When the Sleeper ‘Wakes (1899, revised as The Sleeper Awakes (1910)), there are ‘pleasure cities’ or resorts devoted to luxury, one of which seems to be Capri, celebrated as such since the days of the Emperor Tiberius(42 BC–AD 37) and which was still a resort of the rich and famous in the late nineteenth century.
4. Evesham: Changed to ‘Gresham’ in the Atlantic Edition, presumably because Wells had used the name Evesham in The New Machiavelli (1911) for a contemporary political figure.
5. Vesuvius: The volcano which erupted in ad 79, destroying Pompeii. Torre Annunziata and Castellamare are nearby towns on the bay, to the north and south of Pompeii.
6. aeroplanes: Although airships were becoming increasingly successful, powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine was not to be achieved until 1903. (See note 11 to ‘The Argonauts of the Air’.) Powered flight, for Wells, was the symbol of technological progress which, however, brought anxieties about its use in war: see, for instance, The War in the Air (1908).
7. Rhinemouth: At the time of writing of this story, anxieties about a future war with Germany were common although Wells is careful not to specify if his warlike power is Germany. The major port of the Rhine delta is, in fact, Rotterdam in Holland.
8. South-west: Salerno, where the narrator and his companion head for as mentioned later, is actually east and somewhat north of Capri, but they could have changed course.
9. Marina Piccola: The ‘small harbour’, one of the two harbours on the south side of Capri.
10. Cava…Paestum: Trying to find a refuge in Italy, they tried to cross from Salerno to Taranto in south-east Italy, but were turned back crossing the central mountains, ending up at Paestum in the Gulf of Salerno south of the Bay of Naples, the site of a Greek city.
1. guinea: See note 1 to ‘A Catastrophe’.
2. The Strand Magazine: Published 1891–1950, it was one of the most celebrated of the ‘gaslight’ fiction magazines, and where, of course, this story was first published.
3. Mephistophelian: Devilishly sinister; from Mephistopheles, a devil associated with Dr Faustus in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (published 1604) by Christopher Marlowe (1564–93).
4. Upper Sandgate Road: In Folkestone, Kent, where Wells was living at the time.
5. Gibberne’s B Syrup: In Tono-Bungay (1909) Wells was to satirize similar patent medicines.
6. Jews and Orientals: Part of the racial thinking of the time was to assume differences between groups of humanity such as an alleged (and unproven) propensity of some groups to greater intelligence, quickness of thought and shorter life-spans.
7. Harley Street specialist: Harley Street was – and still is – a centre for medical specialists.
8. ‘gas’: Nitrous oxide, or ‘laughing gas’, was used as an anaesthetic from the late eighteenth century.
9. Analysed sounds: The OED has for ‘analysed’, ‘Resolved or reduced to its elements or essential constituents’; the sense is that the sense of hearing is also affected by the change in the perception of time and that they are hearing a kind of generalized mixture of slowed-down sounds which are mostly below the perception level of the human ear.
10. Leas: Promenade offering a panoramic view over Folkestone and the English Channel. The Metropole was one of the country’s most luxurious hotels.
11. that Time Garment of which Carlyle speaks: In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle writes of how we are ‘clothed’ from the real, transcendent reality by the ‘garments’ of the senses, custom, philosophy, and Space and Time. See also note 8 to ‘A Slip under the Microscope’.
1. Jamrach’s: Charles Jamrach (1815 – 91), a dealer in wild animals for zoos and menageries.
2. Santos-Dumont: Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873–1932), Brazilian aviation pioneer.
3. euphuism: Elaborate, affected language as in the prose fiction Euphues (1578) by John Lyly (1553–1606). Wells surely means, though, euphemism, the substitution of a less disagreeable word for a more accurate if offensive one. He makes the same mistake in Chapter Nine of Ann Veronica (1909), but the OED cites instances of other nineteenth-century writers confusing the two words.
4. British Encyclopaedia: The tenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1902–3) had just been issued in thirty-six volumes.
1. Chimborazo: Volcano in Equador. This sentence foreshadows ‘Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, / Took me by the hand’, lines from the poem ‘Romance’ in The Hunter (1916) by W. J. Turner (1889–1946).
2. Mindobamba: And ‘Parascotopetl’ and ‘Arauca’ later, are fictional mountains. Quito, however is the capital of Ecuador, and Yaguachi is a town in southern Ecuador on the river Guayas, north of Guayaquil, the country’s main port. Wells is mixing fictional and real places to create the scene for his imaginary country.
3. old Peru: The Incas, who ruled most of Peru and Ecuador at the time of the conquest by Francisco Pizarro (1478–1541). They were known for their architecture and command of agriculture, and the highly developed political and religious organization made somewhat mysterious by their failure to develop writing.
4. Matterhorn: Mountain in the Alps on the borders of Switzerland and Italy. During the nineteenth century it became a favourite of climbing expeditions, and because of its difficulty was not ascended until 1865.
5. ‘In the Country… is King’: A proverb dating back to at least the sixteenth century.
6. Medina-saroté: There may be a meaning in this name. ‘Medina’ (Arabic) means ‘city’ and is a Spanish place-name and surname. Sarote or Sarotte is a rare variant of Sarah (‘Princess’ in Hebrew). Medina-saroté could therefore mean ‘Princess of the City’.
1. Benjamin Constant, to Badama: Ship either named after the French politician and novelist (1767–1830), or after the Brazilian city named after him. Badama is fictional as are most of the other place names (although there is a Badema in the African country of Guinea). There is a Parahyba or Paraíba river in Brazil which runs through the state of Rio de Janeiro.
2. Sambo: The (now) offensive term ‘Sambo’ may have come from the Spanish ‘zambo’ (bandy-legged) applied to a person of mixed race.
3. a different sort of French: Partly a joke about the state of language teaching in Britain: in Southport, Holroyd may have experienced rigid and narrow lessons. But both he and da Cunha have French as a second language and communication would not automatically have been easy.
4. Saüba: The South American sauba or umbrella ant, referred to earlier as the ‘leaf-cutting ant’, which devastates areas of the forest, is the source for the ants in this story.
5. Capuarana Extension Railway: A railway line opened in Brazil in 1854, but in 1898 a British company took over and extended the Brazilian railway system.
1. North-West Passage: The discovery of a passage around Canada through to the Pacific Ocean and Asia was the dream of many nineteenth-century explorers.
2. Crawshaw major: It was customary when two brothers attended the same public school for the elder to be ‘Major’ (Latin, ‘greater’) and the younger ‘Minor’ (lesser).
3. counting Stonehenge: Many stone circles are associated with legends to the effect that one can never count the stones and get the same answer twice.
4. Tenants’ Redemption Bill: A fictional bill, but reminiscent of the turbulent politics of the time, particularly around the question of employment. 1906, the year of the story’s publication, was notable for a massive Conservative Party defeat by the Liberals, aided by the electoral rise of the Labour Party.
5. Gurker and Ralphs: Representing political leaders of the day: presumably ‘Gurker’ is the Prime Minister.
6. Westminster Gazette: Liberal Newspaper published from 1893 until 1928, when it was merged with the Daily News.
1. anterior equator: I.e. his stomach.
2. King Edward: Edward VII (1841–1910), who reigned from 1901.
3. Kipling: Rudyard Kipling (see note 9 to ‘The Moth’) with whom Wells at times had something of a rivalry for the popular market.
4. went to the bell: Middle-class houses were equipped with a system of bells to summon servants.
5. a stokehole trick: Picked up among his fellow stokers in the furnace-rooms of the steamships (but Hell, of course, is also a location famous for furnaces).
6. a pointed top to his ear: See note 4 to ‘A Story of the Stone Age’.
7. Idylls of Theocritus: The pastoral poems of the Greek poet (c. 310–250 BC).
8. flowers of sulphur: The fine powder obtained by heating sulphur and allowing the vapours to condense.
9. Via Dolorosa: (Latin, ‘The Way of Grief’). The name of a street in Jerusalem, traditionally the route taken by Jesus on his way to his crucifixion.
10. W. E. Gladstone: William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98), Liberal Prime Minister in four governments. He finally resigned as leader in 1894 over the rejection of his bill for Home Rule for Ireland.
11. Sir Edward Carson: (1854–1935), Irish Unionist leader who campaigned against Home Rule for Ireland in the years before the First World War, threatening Protestant resistance in Ulster and establishing the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force. He also took a leading part in Oscar Wilde’s disastrous libel action against the Marquis of Queensberry in 1895.
12. If you went inside—: Wells presented a Utopian underground city of the future, free from germs carried in the open air, in Things to Come, the film based upon The Shape of Things to Come (1933).
13. Jaeger’s: Clothing store in London’s West End, established in 1884 to specialize in ‘healthy’ clothing from wool and other animal fibres, rather than cotton or linen.
A.S.