The First Men in the Moon, H. Wells [latest books to read .TXT] 📗
- Author: H. Wells
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9 G. K. Chesterton, ‘Books to Read’, Pall Mall Magazine 36 (1902), 133-6.
10 ‘History, Adventure, and School Stories’, Saturday Review, suppl. (7 December 1901), pp. x–xii, at p. x.
11 Michael Sherborne, H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (London: Peter Owen, 2010), 245.
12 W. H. G. Armytage, Sir Richard Gregory: His Life and Work (London: Macmillan, 1957), 46–7.
13 François Deloncle, ‘The First Moon-Photographs Taken with the Great Paris Telescope’, Strand Magazine 20 (November 1900), 493–7, at 497.
14 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 116–18.
15 The Cosmopolitan, 33 (1902), 465–71, in Harris Wilson (ed.), Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells: A Record of a Personal and a Literary Friendship, ed. Harris Wilson (London: Hart-Davis, 1960), 260–76, at 266.
16 Ray Stannard Baker, ‘The Building of the “Deutschland” ’, Strand Magazinē– 20 (November 1900), 672–80, at 680. –
17 ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’, in H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism, ed. Patrick Parrinder and Robert Philmus (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 240–5.
18 Correspondence, ed. Smith, i. 457.
19 Peter Kemp, H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape: Biological Imperatives and Imaginative Obsessions (London: Macmillan, 1996), 187–214; J. E. Hodder Williams, ‘Provocations by H. G. Wells’, The Bookman (December 1901), 91–2.
20 McLean, Early Fiction of H. G. Wells, 136.
21 T. S. Eliot, New English Weekly 16 (1940), 237–8, repr. in Parrinder (ed.), H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, 319–22, at 320.
Note on the Text
The First Men in the Moon was originally conceived in 1899 as a series of linked stories around the figure of the scientist Cavor. The story was serialized simultaneously in the Strand Magazine in the UK and The Cosmopolitan in the US. Book publication followed in 1901, again on both sides of the Atlantic, from Newnes and Bowen-Merrill. The book was included in the Atlantic Edition of Wells’s works (volume vi, 1924), and has been continuously reissued since, including in editions from OUP, Everyman, and Penguin.
Previous editions of The First Men in the Moon have tended to take the Atlantic as copy-text, as representing Wells’s final intentions towards the book. Wells was not, however, always the most scrupulous re-editor of his own writing (although his own copy of the Atlantic volume does contain a handwritten correction of the mass of the moon, from an eighth of the earth’s to an eightieth). The Atlantic Edition, printed in America, took Bowen-Merrill as its copy-text. The revisions in this text appear to have been made by American copy-editors rather than by Wells himself; further, in Newnes, Wells makes a number of significant corrections which are not incorporated in the American stemma and provides greater detail in describing the Selenites. A whole page including a chapter division is absent, apparently by accident, in Bowen-Merrill, which also Americanizes some spellings. Later texts are undoubtedly more strictly correct in some variants, but Newnes is undoubtedly more distinctive, with Wells taking characteristic liberties with use of commas, these/those, and the nineteenth-century locution ‘exceeding’ rather than ‘exceedingly’ as an adverb. This edition therefore takes Newnes as copy-text; in consultation with the Atlantic and Strand texts a few small emendations of typographical or punctuation errors or punctuation have been made. ‘Mr.’ has been housestyled to ‘Mr’.
Select Bibliography
Works by H. G. Wells
The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, 4 vols., ed. David C. Smith (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998).
The First Men in the Moon, ed. David Lake (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism, ed. Patrick Parrinder and Robert Philmus (Brighton: Harvester, 1980).
‘Terrestrial: An Unpublished Version of the Ending of The First Men in the Moon’, The Wellsian 37 (2014), 17–30.
Studies
Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Batchelor, John, H. G. Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Blair, Charles, ‘Mr. Wells’s Adventures with Mr. Bedford: Writing The First Men in the Moon’, The Wellsian 37 (2014), 3–14.
Cranfield, J. L., ‘Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and The Strand Magazine’s Long 1901: From Baskerville to the Moon’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 56 (2013), 3–32.
Durkheim, Émile, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984).
Foot, Michael, H. G.: The History of Mr. Wells (London: Black Swan, 1996).
Godwin, Francis, A Voyage to the Moone, ed. William Poole (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2009).
Hammond, John, An H. G. Wells Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).
Haynes, Roslynn D., H. G. Wells, Discoverer of the Future: The Influence of Science on His Thought (New York: New York University Press, 1980).
Huntington, John, The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
James, Simon J., Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Kemp, Peter, H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape: Biological Imperatives and Imaginative Obsessions (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
McConnell, Frank, The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
McLean, Steven, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Nasmyth, James, and Carpenter, James, The Moon: Considered as Planet, a World, and A Satellite (London: John Murray, 1874).
Parrinder, Patrick, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995).
Parrinder, Patrick (ed.), H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1972).
Partington, John S., Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
Partington, John S. (ed.), H. G. Wells in Nature 1893–1946: A Reception Reader (London: Peter Lang, 2008).
Sherborne, Michael, H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (London: Peter Owen, 2010).
Sleigh, Charlotte, Ant (London: Reaktion, 2003).
Smith, David C., H. G. Wells, Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
Suvin, Darko, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983).
Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics
Wells, H. G., The Invisible Man, ed. Matthew Beaumont.
Wells, H. G., The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Darryl Jones.
Wells, H. G., The Time Machine, ed. Roger Luckhurst.
Wells,
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