Copy Book Archive

Pure Selfishness The brilliant but dangerously obsessive Dr Griffin decides that the end justifies the means.
1897
Music: Nikolai Medtner

© Dave Croker, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0. Source

About this picture …

This ‘Brocken Spectre’ was captured on the Welsh border a few miles west of Church Stretton in Shropshire. The phenomenon occurs when the sun shines from behind the viewer onto mist or fog, typically on high ground, casting a shadow onto the water droplets hanging in the air. H.G. Wells’s Dr Griffin notes that an Invisible Man would be “like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity”.

Pure Selfishness
The stories of H.G. Wells repeatedly warn that scientific research can be dangerously obsessive. In the case of Dr Griffin, however, the obsessive had become the psychopathic, as he revealed when telling an old college acquaintance about his own all-consuming project – to turn a man invisible.
Abridged

“TO do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man — the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become — this.

“Anyone, I tell you, would have flung himself upon that research. And I worked three years, and every mountain of difficulty I toiled over showed another from its summit. The infinite details! And the exasperation! A professor, a provincial professor, always prying. ‘When are you going to publish this work of yours?’ was his everlasting question. And the students, the cramped means! And after three years of secrecy and exasperation, I found that to complete it was impossible — impossible.”

“How?” asked Kemp.

“Money,” said the Invisible Man, and went again to stare out of the window. He turned around abruptly. “I robbed the old man — robbed my father. The money was not his, and he shot himself.”

Source

From from ‘The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance’ by H. G. Wells.

Suggested Music

Fairy Tale Op. 51 No. 1 in D minor

Nikolai Medtner (1880-1956)

Performed by Boris Berezovsky.

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IRead it aloud, twice or more. IISummarise it in one sentence of up to 30 words. IIISummarise it in one paragraph of 40-80 words. IVMake notes on the passage, and reconstruct the original from them later on. VJot down any unfamiliar words, and make your own sentences with them later. VIMake a note of any words that surprise or impress you, and ask yourself what meaning they add to the words you would have expected to see. VIITurn any old-fashioned English into modern English. VIIITurn prose into verse, and verse into prose. IXAsk yourself what the author is trying to get you to feel or think. XHow would an artist or a photographer capture the scene? XIHow would a movie director shoot it, or a composer write incidental music for it?

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