---
title: "The Invisible Man"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Man"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:04:39.100039+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Background ==
According to John Sutherland, Wells and his contemporaries such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling "essentially wrote boy's books for grown-ups." Sutherland identifies The Invisible Man as one such book. Wells said that his inspiration for the novella was "The Perils of Invisibility", one of the Bab Ballads by W. S. Gilbert, which includes the couplet "Old Peter vanished like a shot/but then – his suit of clothes did not." Another influence on The Invisible Man was Plato's Republic, a book which had a significant effect on Wells when he read it as an adolescent. In the second book of the Republic, Glaucon recounts the legend of the Ring of Gyges, which posits that, if a man were made invisible and could act with impunity, he would "go about among men with the powers of a god." Wells wrote the original version of the tale between March and June 1896. This version was a 25,000 word short story titled "The Man at the Coach and Horses" with which Wells was dissatisfied, so he extended it.

== Scientific accuracy ==
Russian writer Yakov I. Perelman pointed out in Physics Can Be Fun (1913) that from a scientific point of view, a man made invisible by Griffin's method should have been blind because a human eye works by absorbing incoming light, not letting it through completely. Wells seems to show some awareness of this problem in Chapter 20, where the eyes of an otherwise invisible cat retain visible retinas.

== Legacy ==

The Invisible Man has been adapted for, and referred to in, film, television, audio drama, and comics. Allen Grove, professor of English at Alfred University states,

The Invisible Man has a wealth of progeny. The novel was adapted into comic book form by Classics Illustrated in the 1950s, and by Marvel Comics in 1976. Many writers and film-makers also created sequels to the story, something the novel’s ambiguous ending encourages. Over a dozen movies and television series are based on the novel, including a 1933 James Whale film and a 1984 series by the BBC. The novel has been adapted for radio numerous times, including a 2017 audio version starring John Hurt as the invisible man. It was adapted by playwright Arthur Yorinks in 2009 for WNYC's The Greene Space setting the multimedia play in a New York City homeless shelter. The cultural pervasiveness of The Invisible Man has led to everything from his cameo in an episode of Tom and Jerry to the Queen song "The Invisible Man".

== See also ==

The War of the Worlds – 1898 science fiction novel by H. G. Wells
The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz – 1910 novel by Jules Verne

== References ==

== Bibliography ==
Wells, H. G. (1996), The Invisible Man, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-283195-X
Wells, H. G. (2017a), The Invisible Man, Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-870267-2

== External links ==

The Invisible Man at Standard Ebooks
 The Invisible Man at Project Gutenberg
 The Invisible Man public domain audiobook at LibriVox
3 may 2006 guardian article about Milton and Nicorovici's invention
Horror-Wood: Invisible Man films
Complete copy of The Invisible Man by HG Wells in HTML, ASCII and WORD, archived from the original on 18 April 2021