The Time Machine

Extract from new post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… There’s an elegant simplicity to the structure of The Time Machine, developed perfectly in a mere 35,000 words; like several of Wells’ iconic ‘scientific romances’, it is more novella than novel. In a tight framing narrative, an old friend of an unnamed, 40-year-old inventor referred to only as…

Things That Walk

In her book on ‘graveyard hunting,’ The London Burial Grounds (1896), Mrs. Isabella Holmes describes All Souls’ Cemetery at Kensal Green as ‘truly awful,’ decrying ‘its catacombs, its huge mausoleums, family vaults, statues, broken pillars, weeping images, and oceans of tombstones’ (Holmes: 1896, 256).