How Does Hg Wells Use Scientific Investigation In Victorian Literature

Scientific investigation as a motif in Victorian literature served as both a source of inquisitiveness and terror in its youth as an ideological school of thought. Both Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells take time to scientifically dissect these facets of horror and experimentation through literature, by questioning the validity of science and its subsequent effect upon society in their contemporary environment and also those in the ages to come. They each provoke the questions of whether science is something to be feared or admired - or even perhaps both - and ultimately ask the question: how far can we really go until science has gone too far?

The subject of logic in science and the supposed incontrovertibility of scientific investigation very
Taylor discusses the notion that the laboratory settings of much of the gothic fiction of the Victorian era mirrors the preoccupation of the period’s with horror and the unknown facets of this new wave of science (Taylor, 17). Shelley seems to advocate the idea that science and and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge are intrinsically linked as Victor Frankenstein himself claims ‘my father was not scientific and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge’ (Shelley, 28). Noting the paternal blame placed by Frankenstein may reveal fundamental motive behind the sudden rush of scientific investigation in the Victorian period if we are to consider the fathers and ancestor societies to be scientifically ignorant in comparison to the illuminations of modern science. Shelley may perhaps be alluding to the dangers of the arrogance and castigating ideology of new wave individuals of any given subject that they are more intellectual and innovative than any others that have come before
This is followed with the hypothesis that there are concrete rules that humanity ‘accept unthinkingly’ and remain in our unconscious (Philmus, 430), thus while the mode of scientific investigation undertaken in the plot of Wells’ novella may be more than questionable in method, this is besides the fundamentally point of what is being communicated to the readership. We as modern readers, along with our Victorian counterparts in Wells’ own time are asked to look forward and to examine both the pragmatics and morality of our present societal structures. If Wells is to be read as the voice of the time traveller, there are instances of direct reflection on his part on the linear aspect of society’s ritualistic facets. The time traveller quips that the elois’ adoption of a kind of gender fluidity and lack of gender specialisation in their society is something that ‘we see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete’ (Wells, 30). This statement of the time traveller further cements Philmus’ allusion to Wells’ manipulation of the motif of scientific investigation, in that it is perhaps necessary to consider the long term effect of the structures in place for future