The Invisible Man The Invisible Man The Invisible Man is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. Originally serialized in "Pearson's Weekly" in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light and thus becomes invisible. He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. An enthusiast of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has
The Invisible Man Griffin's notes; but since they are written in code, he is completely incapable of understanding them. Children's literature was a prominent genre in the 1890s. According to John Sutherland, Wells and his contemporaries such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling "essentially wrote boy's books for grown-ups." Sutherland identifies "The Invisible Man" as one such book. Wells said that his inspiration for the novella was "The Perils of Invisibility," one of the "Bab Ballads" by W. S. Gilbert, which includes the couplet "Old Peter vanished like a shot/but then - his suit of clothes did not." Another