The First Men in the Moon, H. Wells [latest books to read .TXT] 📗

interconnected short stories’, then called ‘The Amazing Adventures of Mr Cavor’. The first two of these stories were sent to his agent J. B. Pinker on 9 March 1899, according to Wells’s biographer David C. Smith, ‘but the Strand’s editor Greenhalgh Smith, liked the work well enough to ask Wells to extend it to ten, and later even more, instalments’.5 Wells scholar Charles Blair and science fiction writer David Lake have both given detailed accounts of the book’s composition.6 The story was substantially revised as Wells wrote it: Bedford was conceived at one stage as an aesthete-poet, at another as a flamboyant, publicity-loving, Anglo-American entrepreneur much like Teddy Ponderevo in Wells’s later Tono-Bungay (1909), and was initially seen in the third person. Wells then settled instead on the cynical bounder who thinks of writing a play to restore his ruined fortunes (Wells’s own efforts at writing for the stage were equally stillborn), and who ends up writing the story of his amazing journey to the moon instead. In revising drafts of the book, Wells worked hard on developing the tone of Bedford’s voice, as he evolves from self-deceiving fool to self-centred knave — a note to self in Wells’s handwritten manuscript adjures Wells to ‘make Bedford a much more brutal person with an initial contempt for Cavor’. Eventually, Bedford emerges as a scoundrel that the reader rather warms to in spite of their better judgement, capable of displaying an almost Wodehouseian wit, as in this moment from the manuscript: ‘The absentmindedness that had just escaped depopulating the terrestrial globe, might at any moment result in some other grave inconvenience. On the other hand I was young, my affairs were in a mess, and I was in just the mood for reckless adventure — with a chance of something good at the end of it.’

In the published version of the story, only Bedford is able to benefit from ‘something good at the end of it’. Both adventurers are captured by the Selenites, the moon’s intelligent insectoid population. Bedford escapes, but the inventor remains imprisoned on the moon, from where Cavor transmits by radio his impressions of moon life to the earth until he is silenced or, perhaps, murdered by the Selenites. The majority of surviving draft versions, however, have both Bedford and Cavor managing to escape. They are taken first as captives by the Selenites to the moon’s underground sea, where Wells long planned, but never seems to have written, an encounter with a monstrous Kraken. They are later taken by balloon, not as prisoners, but now as ambassadors to the moon city Tycho (the name of a real crater on the moon, after a sixteenth-century Danish astronomer), to meet the moon’s ruler, the Grand Lunar. A combination of Bedford’s imperialist boasting about human warfare and Cavor letting slip that he is the only man capable of producing Cavorite places the two travellers in danger, as the Selenites realize that the two men’s return home would put the moon at risk of invasion from the earth (a kind of reversal of the plot of The War of the Worlds). Both Cavor and Bedford flee to the sphere and successfully return to earth. At one stage, Wells considered having Cavor go back to the sphere and then disappear for ever, like the Time Traveller — but in the majority of the draft material the reason why only one successful journey is ever made to the moon is that Cavor has been so traumatized by his experiences that his mind is no longer capable either of making the journey or of producing another sphere. In this earlier version of the ending, Bedford, while caring for Cavor and hoping for the return of his wits, courts a beautiful Romanian woman who is a guest at the hotel he has bought in Amalfi with the proceeds of the stolen moon gold. (Amalfi remains in the published version as Bedford’s choice of habitation while making a further attempt on his play.)

Wells was always concerned to maximize the audience, and the revenue, for his books. In the early stages of his career, he would make arrangements for the serialization and then the book publication of a work separately on each side of the Atlantic. He wrote on 21 July 1900 to the editor of the New Magazine, which was considering the American serialization of the story, that ‘it is highly probable that I shall alter the concluding chapter of The First Men in the Moon very considerably in the next month’.7 Inspired by Marconi’s recent successes in sending Morse code messages by means of wireless telegraphy, Wells decided to have Bedford escape but to leave Cavor on the moon, broadcasting his impressions of the Selenites from lunar captivity. This shift of narrator gives the book the opportunity to imagine life on the moon at greater length, and to do so from the perspective, and in the voice, of the more reflective, scientific, rational, and self-effacing Cavor. Wells’s chosen ending focuses the reader’s attention in the final chapters less on the interplanetary imperialist, complacently returned home and counting his ill-gotten gold, and more on the lonely exiled genius, not only the first man in the moon, but the last as well, transmitting his final words to the vast silence of space.

Later Reception and Adaptation

In spite of the objections of Jules Verne, who grumbled that his own moon books were more scientifically accurate, The First Men in the Moon was well received in both the English and (following the book’s translation by Henri Davray) French press.8 Reviewers universally praised Wells for the scope of his imaginative reach, comparing him favourably to Verne and Swift. Several reviewers, including G. K. Chesterton, compared the ideas of the book to those propounded in Anticipations, and noted how appealing Wells seemed to find the highly organized structure of Selenite society.9 The Saturday Review predicted that the story would be enjoyed straightforwardly by the juvenile reader, but that for some elder readers, ‘it will appeal with the force of