The Invisible Man Summary: H.G. Wells's Story of Griffin, Science and Madness
What The Invisible Man is about
H. G. Wells published The Invisible Man in 1897, the same year it was serialised in Pearson's Weekly. It is a short science fiction novel built on one idea taken seriously: a scientist works out how to change a body's refractive index to match that of air, so that the body neither absorbs nor reflects light. He performs the procedure on himself. It works. He cannot reverse it.
The book opens in the West Sussex village of Iping during a snowstorm. A stranger arrives at the inn kept by Mr and Mrs Hall. He is wrapped in a wide-brimmed hat, an overcoat and gloves, his face hidden entirely by bandages apart from a prosthetic nose. He wants to be left alone. He is irritable, aggressive and reclusive, he works with chemicals and laboratory apparatus in his rooms, and he only goes out at night. Hundreds of glass bottles arrive for him. The village talks.
What follows is partly a village comedy and partly a chase. Money runs short. The landlady threatens to throw him out. In a fit of temper he reveals his invisibility, strips off his clothes, fights off the police and runs. From there the story moves across the South Downs to the seaside town of Port Burdock, picking up a reluctant accomplice, a shooting, a confession and finally a manhunt.
Wells made a deliberate choice here. The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau both used first-person narrators. The Invisible Man is told in the third person, from outside, so we watch the villagers try to make sense of something they have no language for before we ever hear the scientist explain himself.
The main characters
Griffin is the invisible man. He is an albino former medical student who abandoned medicine for the science of optics. He tested his chemicals first on a cat, then on himself. To cover his tracks he burned down the boarding house where he had been living. He then discovered how badly invisibility suits actual survival in an English winter, stole clothes from a theatrical supply shop on Drury Lane, and went to Iping to try to undo what he had done. He has become an icon of horror fiction, and the reason is simple: he practises random and irresponsible violence, and the book does not soften it.
Thomas Marvel is a tramp whom Griffin coerces into working for him, mainly to retrieve three notebooks containing the records of his experiments. Marvel is frightened, unreliable and a survivor.
Dr Kemp is a former acquaintance from medical school. Griffin, wounded and desperate, takes shelter in Kemp's house by accident and tells him everything. Kemp is the nearest thing the book has to a conscience, and the person Griffin most wants on his side.
Colonel Adye, Port Burdock's chief of police, leads the attempt to bring Griffin in. The Halls, the villagers and the eventual crowd matter too. Wells keeps ordinary people in the frame throughout.
The themes
The central one is what a man does when nobody can see him. Griffin's invisibility strips away not just his body but every social restraint attached to it. Theft becomes easy. So does violence. By the time he reaches Kemp he has been driven insane by the procedure and by what the procedure has cost him, and he is proposing a campaign of terror with himself at its head.
Ambition runs alongside it. Griffin is clever, genuinely so, and the discovery is real. What he lacks is any sense that a discovery carries obligations. He left medicine, which is a caring profession, for optics, which is not, and the book quietly notes the swap.
There is also the question of how a community handles something it cannot understand. The villagers theorise, gossip, bungle and eventually act as a mob. Wells is not sentimental about them either.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the ending fresh. Kemp has already denounced Griffin to the authorities. Griffin escapes and leaves a note naming Kemp as the first man to die in his "Reign of Terror". Kemp sets himself up as bait. In the chase Griffin arms himself with an iron bar and kills a bystander, then shoots Adye and breaks into Kemp's house. Kemp runs for the town and the locals come to his aid. Griffin nearly strangles him, but is cornered and beaten by the crowd, his last words a plea for mercy. Kemp tries to save him and fails. The body becomes visible as he dies, and a policeman has the face covered with a sheet. Marvel, it turns out, has kept the notebooks and the stolen money, and now runs a pub called the Invisible Man Inn. He pores over the notes in private, hoping to repeat the work. He has no chance. Pages were washed clean, the rest is in Greek and Latin, and he cannot read even the basic mathematical symbols.
Why it still matters
The Invisible Man helped establish Wells as the father of science fiction, and it set a pattern that has been copied ever since: one impossible premise, worked through with ordinary people and ordinary consequences. Griffin is the model for the scientist whose brilliance outruns his judgement, and the novel's influence on horror and on film has kept it in print for well over a century. It suits readers who want a short, fast, nasty book that is also arguing about something.
More: More H.G. Wells posters