There followed one word, a quite unmeaning word as it stands: ‘uless.’
And that is all.
It may be he made a hasty attempt to spell ‘useless’ when his fate was close upon him. Whatever it was that was happening about that apparatus we cannot tell. Whatever it was we shall never, I know, receive another message from the moon. For my own part a vivid dream has come to my help, and i see, almost as plainly as though I had seen it in actual fact, a blue-lit shadowy dishevelled Cavor struggling in the grip of these insect Selenites, struggling ever more desperately and hopelessly as they press upon him, shouting, expostulating, perhaps even at last fighting, and being forced backward step by step out of all speech or sign of his fellows, for evermore into the Unknown — into the dark, into that silence that has no end. . . .
Explanatory Notes
All definitions are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
1 Lucian’s Icaromenippus: a dialogue by Syrian-born Greek satirist Lucian (125–80), in which the hero Menippus flies to the heavens with one eagle’s wing and one vulture’s wing, and carries a message from the moon, asking to be rid of philosophers, to Jupiter.
5 lympne: a village on the south coast of Kent, between Hythe and Folkestone. Wells was living in nearby Sandgate when he began writing The First Men in the Moon.
come an ugly cropper: to come a cropper is to fall over or to fail at something.
6 pied-à-terre: ‘A small house, flat, or room (usually in a town) kept as an occasional residence by a person whose permanent home is elsewhere; a secondary residence acting as a base from which to pursue a particular activity’ (OED).
Mrs Bond: under-supplied hostess in a nursery rhyme by illustrator Walter Crane (1845–1915):
‘Oh, what have you got for dinner, Mrs Bond?’
‘There’s beef in the larder, and ducks in the pond;’
‘Dilly, dilly, dilly, dilly, come to be killed,
For you must be stuffed, and my customers filled!’
Sybaris: city in southern Italy from the time of ancient Greece renowned for its luxury.
besoms: brooms made of wooden twigs.
Portus Lemanus: usually given as Portus Lemanis, Lympne’s Roman harbour, of which there are still surviving ruins.
7 Dungeness: a shingle headland to the west of Lympne.
Hastings: a seaside resort on the Sussex coast.
11 undischarged: Bedford is a bankrupt who still owes his creditors money.
13 gasometer: a tank, usually cylindrical, for storing gas.
14 Röntgen Rays: Wilhelm Röntgen, German physicist (1845–1923), discovered the existence of X-rays in 1895.
electric waves of Marconi: Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), Italian inventor, considered to be the inventor of radio, particularly of long-distance transmission.
carbon bisulphide: Now more usually referred to as carbon disulphide, the organic compound CS2.
Kelvin . . . Lodge . . . Pearson: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), Oliver Lodge (1851–1940), both physicists; Karl Pearson (1857–1936), mathematician and the founder of statistics.
14 helium: the second lightest element, detected as a gas in the earth’s atmosphere, first isolated in 1895.
16 V’la tout: French, in full ‘Voilà tout’, literally ‘that’s all’ or ‘that’s everything’, equivalent to ‘and there you are!’
F.R.S. . . . Nature: the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was founded in 1660. To be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society is the highest honour that can be bestowed on a scientist; in 1943, Wells sought, unsuccessfully, for an FRS. Nature, then, as now, is the world’s leading scientific journal, founded in 1869.
18 60° Fahr: 60 degrees Fahrenheit, 15 degrees Celsius.
Wealden Hills: the Weald, literally ‘forest’, is an area of countryside stretching across Kent, Sussex, and Surrey: the Wealden Hills begin at Horsmonden, north of Lympne.
22 floated: offered to investors on the Stock Exchange.
23 Tartar: ‘a rough and violent or irritable and intractable person’ (OED).
24 problem about a dumpling: how to get inside.
25 Jules Verne . . . Moon: in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel, more usually translated as A Trip Around the Moon (1870), by French science fiction writer Jules Verne (1828–1905), the Baltimore Gun Club constructs a giant cannon to fire a manned projectile around the moon.
26 sanatorium: a facility where invalids recuperate, especially through being in the open air.
27 Spanish monopoly: in the sixteenth century, Spain exclusively mined and brought to Europe gold and silver from the New World.
electric light: an unusual way to light a house in a rural area in 1900, when most homes were still lit by gas.
polyhedral: having many faces.
28 carbonic acid: carbon dioxide gas.
funk: a state of panic or shrinking terror.
spectres that once beleaguered Prague: from ‘The Beleagured City’ (1839), by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82):
I have read, in some old, marvellous tale,
Some legend strange and vague,
That a midnight host of spectres pale
Beleaguered the walls of Prague.
29 Elham: a Kent village between Folkestone and Canterbury.
Canterbury: historic cathedral city some 15 miles north of Lympne.
ballooneys: the first manned balloon flights were made late in the eighteenth century, and airships were still in use in the early twentieth.
31 Tit-Bits: Tit-Bits from all the interesting Books, Periodicals, and Newspapers of the World, a magazine composed of short non-fiction and fiction pieces, published by Newnes, also the publisher of the Strand Magazine and The First Men in the Moon.
Lloyd’s News: Wells probably means Lloyd’s List, a weekly shipping journal.
33 apoplectic: an effusion of blood to the brain, resulting in a feeling of dizziness: literally, a rush of blood to the head.
35 hosts of heaven: a biblical phrase for the sun, moon, and all the stars.
36 Cutaway bicycle: a bicycle, usually for men, whose saddle has a shape cut out to make it more comfortable to sit on.
40 pictures or photographs of the moon: photographs of the moon taken by French astronomer M. C. Le Morvan through a powerful telescope were published in the November 1900 issue of the Strand Magazine in which The First Men in the Moon was first serialized.
43 selvedge: a geological border.
50 tenuity: ‘dilute or rarefied condition’ (OED).
51 operculum: lid or cover.
52 leading-strings: now known as ‘baby reins’.
56 kopje: Afrikaans for ‘little hill’.
63 crustacean integument: the natural covering of a crab or a barnacle.
66 surplus population: an echo of An Essay
