When the Sleeper Wakes Read Free Page A

not quite available to Wells. So from the start, we experience Graham—the Sleeper—from the outside. He is a stranger who approaches a stranger, and when he falls asleep, we know almost nothing about his life or the lives of those who talk about him. All that we have to interest us is his situation: Sleep deprived, and then asleep for an extraordinarily long time.
    Even when he awakes, we do not experience his sense of loss—we don’t know, when he first realizes how long he has slept,
whom
he misses. Was there someone in particular that he loved? Was there some work that was interrupted? A novelist of our day would probably have made sure we already knew him so well that when he awoke from his sleep, we would experience his sense of loss along with him.
    But that was not Wells’s purpose. It was not the character, but the idea that drew him and that must draw us. That is, we are expected to understand that the passage of centuries in sleep would shock and grieve the character, but we are not expected to share his grief.
    Instead, Wells wants us to see how the world is transformed. Strange machinery whose purpose Graham cannot guess; familiar devices that have been redesigned or mechanized; and things that have not changed at all, but which are now called by different names.
    It is, in fact, the strangeness that is intended to draw the reader through the story—we will want to see the future.
    The odd result of this is to root the story quite firmly in its own time. After all, when Wells makes guesses about the wonders that the future will bring, he depends on the reader’s complete ignorance of that future.
    But we, reading
When the Sleeper Wakes,
have clear knowledge of what actually happened during half of the two centuries that Graham slept. And of course a lot of Wells’s speculation is quite wrong—but much of it is also weirdly right.
    We have not switched to a base-twelve numbering system. The idea seems absurd—why would we switch away from the convenience of counting by tens? But in fact, vast portions of our society have been turned over to two other numbering systems: the two languages of computer programming, the binary (base two) and the hexadecimal (base sixteen). Surely to Wells’s readers such a mathematical shift would have been even more absurd than the duodecimal system he proposes!
    His door that rolls up when people approach it seems odd; but doors that open upon our approach, signal lights that change when we drive over a sensor in the road, and thousands of other machines that automatically anticipate our desires are a routine part of our lives. Wells was wrong in detail, but right in principle.
    Still, the unavoidable effect is for us to experience his future, not as a thrilling or alarming possibility, but as a quaintly old-fashioned vision.
When the Sleeper Wakes
is thus removed from us by the old-fashioned narrative viewpoint and by the inevitable errors in his predictions. The result, for the contemporary reader, is a loss of urgency in the reading. What was once a vision is now a relic—at least, it can seem that way at first.
    Wells is hardly alone in this. Take the opening of Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward,
first published in 1888—another book that predicted the future, and which was so familiar in Wells’s day that in chapter 2 and chapter 7 of
When the Sleeper Wakes,
Wells refers to “Bellamy” as if every reader in his day would know who Bellamy was and what he wrote.
    Here are the opening lines of
Looking Backward:
“I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. ‘What!’ you say, ‘eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fiftyseven, of course.’ I beg pardon, but there is no mistake.”
    To a reader in 1888, this opening would have been fascinating because the implication is that the reader of 1888 is actually living in 1988. But to us, reading this opening in the twenty-first century with both 1888 and 1988 well behind us,