Works · Novel · 1897

The Invisible Man

First appeared 12 Jun 1897 – 7 Aug 1897 in Pearson's Weekly

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

Full title: The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance

On a snowy February afternoon a muffled stranger with bandaged face and dark goggles takes rooms at the Coach and Horses in the Sussex village of Iping. He wants no visitors, does chemistry at night, and wrecks his bill and his temper together. When a constable tries to arrest him he unwraps, and there is nothing underneath. The man is Griffin, a brilliant, solitary physicist who has made himself invisible and cannot undo it. Hunted from village to town, he forces a tramp to carry his stolen books and money, and turns to an old college acquaintance, Dr Kemp, who must decide how far to trust him.

You are the only man except some of those fools down there, who knows there is such a thing as an invisible man. You have to be my helper.

Chapter IX (Mr. Thomas Marvel). Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #5230 (Gutenberg text, chapters I to XXVIII plus an Epilogue)

Facts

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia gives the serial run as 12 June to 7 August 1897 in Pearson’s Weekly, with book editions from C. Arthur Pearson (London) and Edward Arnold (New York) in the same year.[1]
The title page carries the subtitle ‘A Grotesque Romance’, and the action opens in the winter quiet of the Sussex village of Iping, whose inhabitants the text calls ‘quiet Sussex villagers’.[2]
Griffin is drawn as an albino: Kemp is told of a fellow student ‘almost an albino, six feet high, and broad, with a pink and white face and red eyes, who won the medal for chemistry’.[2]
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls the novel a second classic study of scientific hubris brought to destruction, after The Island of Doctor Moreau.[1]

Setting

Undated late-Victorian present; the action begins in the Sussex winter[2]

Iping, Sussex
Port Burdock

Themes

Notes on dates 1 note on disputed dates and attribution

Serial dates: the SF Encyclopedia gives 12 June to 7 August 1897; the SFE is followed. The month of the Pearson volume is not established; only 1897 is shown.

Threads

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No sourced relation to an earlier work is recorded.

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No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1897, and the other writers alive when The Invisible Man appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).