THE SLEEPER
AWAKES
A Revised Edition of
“When the Sleeper Wakes”
H.G.
WELLS
1899
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
When the Sleeper Wakes, whose title I have
now altered to The Sleeper
Awakes, was first published as a book in 1899
after a serial appearance
in the Graphic and one or two American and
colonial periodicals. It is
one of the most ambitious and least satisfactory of
my books, and I have
taken the opportunity afforded by this reprinting
to make a number of
excisions and alterations. Like most of my earlier
work, it was written
under considerable pressure; there are marks of haste
not only in the
writing of the latter part, but in the very construction
of the story.
Except for certain streaks of a slovenliness which
seems to be an almost
unavoidable defect in me, there is little to be ashamed
of in the writing
of the opening portion; but it will be fairly manifest
to the critic that
instead of being put aside and thought over through
a leisurely
interlude, the ill-conceived latter part was pushed
to its end. I was at
that time overworked, and badly in need of a holiday.
In addition to
various necessary journalistic tasks, I had in hand
another book, Love
and Mr. Lewisham, which had taken a very much
stronger hold upon my
affections than this present story. My circumstances
demanded that one or
other should be finished before I took any rest, and
so I wound up the
Sleeper sufficiently to make it a marketable work,
hoping to be able to
revise it before the book printers at any rate got
hold of it. But
fortune was against me. I came back to England
from Italy only to fall
dangerously ill, and I still remember the impotent
rage and strain of my
attempt to put some sort of finish to my story of
Mr. Lewisham, with my
temperature at a hundred and two. I couldn’t
endure the thought of
leaving that book a fragment. I did afterwards
contrive to save it from
the consequences of that febrile spurt—Love
and Mr. Lewisham is indeed
one of my most carefully balanced books—but
the Sleeper escaped me.
It is twelve years now since the Sleeper was written,
and that young man
of thirty-one is already too remote for me to attempt
any very drastic
reconstruction of his work. I have played now
merely the part of an
editorial elder brother: cut out relentlessly
a number of long tiresome
passages that showed all too plainly the fagged, toiling
brain, the heavy
sluggish driven pen, and straightened out certain
indecisions at the
end. Except for that, I have done no more than
hack here and there at
clumsy phrases and repetitions. The worst thing
in the earlier version,
and the thing that rankled most in my mind, was the
treatment of the
relations of Helen Wotton and Graham. Haste in
art is almost always
vulgarisation, and I slipped into the obvious vulgarity
of making what
the newspaper syndicates call a “love interest”
out of Helen. There was
even a clumsy intimation that instead of going up
in the flying-machine
to fight, Graham might have given in to Ostrog, and
married Helen. I have
now removed the suggestion of these uncanny connubialities.
Not the
slightest intimation of any sexual interest could
in truth have arisen
between these two. They loved and kissed one
another, but as a girl and
her heroic grandfather might love, and in a crisis
kiss. I have found it
possible, without any very serious disarrangement,
to clear all that
objectionable stuff out of the story, and so a little
ease my conscience
on the score of this ungainly lapse. I have also,
with a few strokes of
the pen, eliminated certain dishonest and regrettable
suggestions that
the People beat Ostrog. My Graham dies, as all
his kind must die, with no
certainty of either victory or defeat.
Who will win—Ostrog or the People?
A thousand years hence that will
still be just the open question we leave to-day.
H.G. WELLS.
