At the village of Lympne, on the south coast of England, the failed playwright Mr Bedford meets the brilliant inventor Mr Cavor, and together they invade the moon. The First Men in the Moon is both an inspired and imaginative fantasy of space travel and alien life, and a satire of turn-of-the-century Britain and of utopian dreams of a wholly ordered and rational society. This edition examines the book as pivotal in the development of Wells's career, as it both foreshadows and satirises Wells's own imaginings of a perfected and centrally organised society.
- Submitting institution
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University of Durham
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 109106
- Type
- R - Scholarly edition
- DOI
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- Title of edition
- The First Men in the Moon.
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- ISBN
- 9780198705048
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
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- Research group(s)
-
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Simon J. James is the sole editor of this volume. James established the text, wrote a new introduction, and provided notes to annotate the text. This is the most up-to-date, correct and accurate edition of this work. It takes the first British edition as its copy text; most reprints since Wells’s death derive from the American stemma, which does not incorporate authorial corrections, flattens the distinctiveness of Wells’s style and, in some editions, omits two full pages of the original text. James’s edition of is based on consultation of the author’s holograph manuscript, which is held in the H. G. Wells Collection at the Rare Manuscript and Book Collection, University of Illinois. The introduction gives details of the book’s composition, including its shift from third to first person, the incorporation of Marconi-inspired wireless telegraphy partway through the book’s serialization in The Strand, and an unpublished, different version of the ending (which was published separately in the journal The Wellsian, edited by James), in which both protagonists return from the moon. The introduction also places the book in the contexts of Victorian and Edwardian periodical publishing, fantastic literature about life on the moon, and Wells’s political and utopian thought.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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