The Invisible Man: a short story by G K Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English critic, poet and novelist who was well known as one of the most colourful and provocative writers of his day. He was seen by many as a latter-day Samuel Johnson, not only for his common sense and incisive wit, but also for his physically large appearance.

“The Invisible Man” was the fifth story written by G K Chesterton about his priest/detective Father Brown. It appeared in his original collection of Father Brown stories, entitled “The Innocence of Father Brown”, in 1911.

The Story

The setting of the story is Camden Town, a district of north London. A young man, John Turnbull Angus, walks into a café and proposes marriage to the waitress, Laura Hope, who appears to be the only member of staff on the premises. One assumes that the two are not complete strangers to each other, but this is not made clear. She turns him down but, because he refuses to take no for an answer, she tells him the story of her complicated love-life.

She had been living at her father’s pub, The Red Fish, which was somewhere out of town, when she had been the subject of marriage proposals from two suitors, neither of whom she found attractive. One was a very short man, almost a dwarf, named Isidore Smythe. The other, tall and thin but with a terrible squint, was James Welkin. Laura did not want to marry either of them, but neither did she want to hurt their feelings, so she came up with the plan of announcing that she could not marry anyone who had not made his way in the world. The two men promptly set off to seek their fortunes as if, in Laura’s words, “they were in some silly fairy-tale”.

A year has passed, and Laura is now running the café but in real fear that she has been tracked down by James Welkin, the suitor with the squint. She keeps hearing his voice when there is no-one to be seen. She has received letters from Isidore Smythe, who is a now successful businessman, but as she reads the letters she can hear Welkin’s distinctive laugh.

Angus hears a noise in the street and walks through into the confectioner’s shop that adjoins the café to find a man who can only be Isidore Smythe. He points out that a strip of paper has been pasted on the shop window bearing the message “If you marry Smythe he will die”. Smythe also mentions that he has had threatening letters left at his flat, but nobody has seen anyone who could have brought them. Angus offers to help Smythe, and Laura, by putting the matter into the hands of a private detective that he knows and who lives nearby. He is Flambeau, a reformed former French master criminal who is a character that appears in many of the Father Brown stories.

Angus escorts Smythe back to his flat, which is on the top floor of Himalaya Mansions. On the way he notices billboard advertisements for the product that has made Smythe his fortune, namely large clockwork dolls that perform household duties under the general name of “Smythe’s Silent Service”.

When they reach Smythe’s flat, Angus notices that the place is full of these machines that perform their functions at the touch of button. He also sees a scrap of paper on the floor with a message that reads: “If you have been to see her today, I shall kill you”.

Angus heads off to fetch Flambeau, but before he leaves he instructs four people, a cleaner, a commissionaire, a policeman and a chestnut seller, to keep a close eye on the premises and report back to him if anyone enters the building while he is away.

Angus finds Flambeau, who is being visited by Father Brown. As the three of them walk back to Himalaya Mansions it starts to snow. On arrival, Angus hears from all four “guards” that nobody has entered the building in his absence, but Father Brown is not so sure, because he can see footprints in the snow that tell a different story.

When  they reach Smythe’s flat they find a bloodstain on the floor but no Smythe. Back on ground level, Father Brown asks the policeman to investigate something on his behalf, and when he returns he says that Smythe’s body has been found in the nearby canal. Father Brown then regrets that he forgot to ask if a light brown sack has also been found.

The solution of the mystery revolves around the fact that, according to Chesterton and Father Brown, people tend to observe only what they expect to regard as being out of the ordinary. Nobody saw anyone enter Himalaya Mansions, although they would all have seen the postman do so but dismissed this occurrence because it was unremarkable. A postman does not count as a person in such a context.

As a postman, James Welkin was able to deliver all the letters and messages to Laura and Isidore Smythe, and to take away the latter’s small body in his postman’s sack. Laura could hear Welkin’s voice but not see Welkin himself, because the voice was remarkable but a postman doing his rounds was not. The murderer was invisible because he was all too visible, being as much a part of the background scenery as the trees and the houses. Even the sight of a postman leaving the building with a sack that was fuller than when he entered was apparently not sufficiently out of the ordinary to attract attention.

Does it work?

It’s a reasonable thought on which to hang a story, but does it really stand up to scrutiny? One thing to bear in mind is that this story was written in Edwardian England when the class system held sway and everyone with any money employed servants to perform menial tasks for them. Chesterton hints at this very strongly with his description of Smythe’s mechanical servants who line the walls until called into service to perform a specific task. There is a telling line here in that they are described as “only automatic machines and nobody would have looked at them twice”. This would have been how many middle-class people regarded their human servants.

However, even if the reader is willing to accept that a middle-class person could regard a postman as an invisible public servant, does this really work in the scenario of the story? The people who are asked to keep a lookout are not middle-class but working-class, and of the same social status as a postman. Would a cleaner or chestnut seller really allow a postman to be invisible in the same way that a much wealthier householder would? The commissionaire actual states that he would ask any man, “duke or dustman”, what his business was on entering the building, but would he really have made a distinction between a dustman and a postman in this regard, even to the extent that the latter  was “invisible” to him?

It is on this point of class distinction that the story rests in terms of its acceptability to the reader. It is probably true to say that it would have been read differently by its original readers in class-ridden England than by members of today’s much more classless society.

© John Welford

A Tradition of 1804: a short story by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is known as the author of a series of lengthy novels, which are not always an easy read. However, he also wrote a considerable number of short stories which modern readers might find more approachable. Here is an account of a particularly brief short story.

A very short story

“A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” was one of the stories published by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) under the title “Wessex Tales”. Although most of the stories had appeared in a collection dated 1888, the final set of seven tales was published in 1912. Of these, “A Tradition of
Eighteen Hundred and Four”, at seven pages long, is easily the shortest. Hardy wrote the date “Christmas 1882” at the end of the story, which was when it first appeared in print (under a slightly different title, with “Legend” for “Tradition”) in an American Christmas annual. 

A summary of the story

The narrator of the story, following an introductory couple of paragraphs in the author’s voice, is “old Solomon Selby”, who retells an experience from when he was a child. After the story has been told, Hardy tells the reader that Solomon has been dead for ten years, so the time gap of about 70 years from then back to the events of the story makes perfect sense.

Solomon says that his father had been a shepherd all his life and lived “out by the Cove”. This can be understood to be Lulworth Cove, on the Dorset coast about midway between Weymouth and Swanage. It is a small, almost circular cove with a narrow entrance that is today a noted feature of the “Jurassic Coast”. As a child, Solomon had lived in a remote shepherd’s cottage, and the years he remembers best were 1803-5, because he was then of an age “when a child’s eyes and ears take in and note down everything about him” and also because those years were at the heart of the Napoleonic Wars between Great Britain and France.

People in England, and especially along the south coast, were particularly worried about the threat of invasion from France. They knew that Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered most of the continent of Western Europe, was intent on defeating Britain. Solomon relates that his father, when droving a flock of ewes to Sussex, had been able to see the French coast and caught sight of the sun glinting on the accoutrements of the vast army that Napoleon had assembled on the beaches and which he was preparing for the invasion. It was believed that some 160,000 men and 15,000 horses would make the crossing on a fleet of 2,000 flat-bottomed boats, which were being built as part of the preparations.

Solomon introduces his uncle Job, a sergeant at foot, who reckoned that the invasion would take place on a calm night, using oars rather than sails. Napoleon’s problem was where he should land his troops, and, according to uncle Job, there was a lot of speculation about where this was likely to be. Most people agreed that the shortest crossing, towards Dover, was the least likely, given that that part of the coast would be the most heavily guarded, but there were plenty of other possibilities. Napoleon’s knowledge of potential landing places and troop concentrations was known to be slight, so people were wary about French spies coming ashore to “case the joint”.

The story then focuses on a night early in the year when the sheep flock needed to be tended right round the clock because the ewes were lambing. Young Solomon was called upon to help his father at such times, standing in for him when the latter needed to rest. On the night in question uncle Job had paid a visit to the house and, when it was Solomon’s turn to go out to the sheep-fold on the hill above the Cove, offered to accompany him. They settled down to rest in some straw with uncle Job telling the boy stories about his past adventures until Solomon fell asleep.

When he woke up, uncle Job had himself fallen asleep and Solomon became aware that there were two men, in military uniform, standing about twenty yards away. He watched by the light of the Moon as they looked at a roll of paper, pointed at various features, and spoke in a language which Solomon could not understand. 

He woke uncle Job and pointed the men out to him, having suspected that they were two French generals come to spy out the lie of the land. However, when uncle Job saw them he soon realised that one of the men was Napoleon Bonaparte himself, which was soon obvious to Solomon when the light from the Frenchmens’ lantern fell on the famous face that the boy had seen so often in pictures.

Uncle Job cursed that he did not have his flintlock pistol with him, and so Napoleon and his companion were able to slip back to their boat and escape, watched by Solomon and his uncle, to a larger boat waiting outside the Cove. Solomon ends his story by simply stating that, having reported the incident, uncle Job heard no more about it, and also saying that the expected invasion never took place. However, he remained convinced that Lulworth Cove was where the French army would have landed had it ever done so.

Could it have happened?

Hardy concludes with a paragraph that states, as mentioned earlier, that Solomon has been dead for ten years, and that his account was not generally believed “due to the incredulity of the age”. 

In his preface to the 1919 edition of “Wessex Tales” Hardy added a note to the effect that this story was purely fictional and that he had always thought it highly improbable, but that he had since been told that the tradition was a real one and that some people believed that Napoleon had actually visited the English coast on a spying mission. It is possible that this legend was not well known in Dorset, where it is hard to imagine that Hardy would not have been aware of it, because Hardy had originally set his story in Sussex and only moved it to Dorset between the different editions of the “Tales”. On the face of it, Sussex, with its long stretches of deserted low-lying coast, seems a more likely location for such an event, and the idea of Napoleon Bonaparte considering the prospect of sending 2,000 boats into Lulworth Cove, which is relatively small, seems little short of bizarre!

As a story, “A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” is not particularly memorable. It contains only one surprise, no characterisation worth mentioning, and little in the way of plot. It is simply a “what if” kind of story that poses a question that is interesting as far as it goes, and it is well written in that it keeps the reader’s interest, but that is probably the most that can be said about it.

© John Welford