ABSTRACT

Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894, just a year before H. G. Wells emerged on the literary scene with his novel of time travel and evolution, The Time Machine (1895). Wells himself wrote an article on Stevenson for the Saturday Review in June 1896, as a kind of retrospective. Entitled 'The Lost Stevenson', the piece effectively damns its subject with faint praise, closing on a note of undisguised hauteur. In his early science fiction novels and short stories, notably The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man, Wells also develops themes and motifs that characterize earlier monomaniacs in novels like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Edward Fawcett's Hartmann the Anarchist (1892). For the structure of his tale of Moreau and his Beast folk, Wells turned to Stevenson. In The Ebb-Tide Herrick, Davis and Huish escape Papeete by stealing what they believe is a full cargo of champagne aboard the schooner, the Farallone.