I scientific romances di H.G. Wells: variazioni sul tema dello scienziato darwiniano

The status and the figure of the ‘man of science’ dramatically change throughout the xix century, especially after Darwin’s epistemological revolution. At the end of the Victorian Age, in his early Scientific Romances, H.G. Wells, formerly a disciple of T.H. Huxley at the Imperial College, London, challenges the Faustian, darkly romantic side of the scientist and captures a more ‘modern’, basically Darwinian, controversial image of the scientific seeker, as the new hero/victim caught in the interplay of powerful economic and ideological pressures de-structuring the fin-de-siècle bourgeois world. While the knowledge achieved by the Wellsian scientist/explorer turns out to be faulty and ephemeral, his role as a product of the rising popular culture – a figment of the technological imagination – leads the main characters in Wells’ Scientific Romances towards the ultimate defeat and obliteration of their most human values. Thus, paradoxically, the Wellsian man of science reverts either to the parody of a new Ulysses (The Time Traveller, Cavor) or to a horrifying alien creature: the cannibalistic Morlock, the invisible Man, the cruel Vivisectionist, the ruthless Martian invader, the passive but unyielding Selenites