• 1 Machines are a recurrent aspect of Wells’s fiction from the 1890s on, not only in his novellas The (...)
• 2 ‘The Cone’ was subsequently collected in The Plattner Story and Others (Methuen & Co., 1897), and l (...)
• 3 It was initially entitled The Chronic Argonauts (Hammond 83).
• 4 Francis D. Klingender’s Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947) focuses on the perception of the i (...)
• 5 Herbert Sussman, for instance, does not include it in his corpus and neither does Tamara Ketabgian.

1In spite of their growing importance in Victorian society, machines and technology are underrepresented in fiction, even in ‘industrial’ or ‘social problem’ novels by Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Disraeli, or George Eliot, for instance. H. G. Wells’s works, especially his short stories and novellas of the 1890s,¹ stand as a notable exception and ‘The Cone’ is a case in point. It was first published in The Unicorn in September 1895,² but its composition dates back to 1888 and was contemporaneous with that of the first draft of The Time Machine (1895).³ ‘The Cone’ shares points in common with previous ‘industrial’ fiction, especially Dickensian, because it evokes the damaging effects of industrialization on humans and the environment, and because of its aesthetic approach to the setting in which the ‘industrial sublime’⁴ is prominent, as, for example, in chapter 45 of The Old Curiosity Shop. But in Wells’s little-known and under-researched story,⁵ these features are inflected in an innovative and pioneering way, firstly because the protagonists, although they are prisoners and victims of their environment, are a far cry from the working-class underdogs of ‘industrial’ fiction.

• 6 The phrase is borrowed from Nils Clausson’s essay, ‘Dickens’s Genera Mixta: What Kind of a Novel Is (...)

2This paper will therefore show how ‘The Cone’ rests on a previous mid-Victorian (cautionary) tradition but radically transforms it, especially because of its marked generic hybridity. Just as Wells called his generically mixed scientific novellas of the 1890s ‘scientific romances’ to refer to the unprecedented alliance of science and realism on the one hand, and the fantastic on the other, we may coin the phrase ‘industrial romance’ for ‘The Cone’ to refer to its genera mixta⁶ status, romance being not only understood in its sentimental sense but, more crucially still, in its generic (and Wellsian) one. The substratum of the short story is actually quite realistic (the industrial world of the 1890s in the Newcastle area) but its hybridity—and its romance aspects—spring from the development of a love (and revenge) plot within this industrial context, the presence of dark Biblical symbolism within the realistic mode, and a metaphoric approach to the human psyche inspired from contemporary psychological research and formulated through a fantastic aesthetics. The realistic descriptive regime is inflected by a form of poetics based on the novel conjunction of the industrial sublime (with its visually and emotionally paroxysmal tonality), and the uncanny that similarly conflates the objective (the setting) and the subjective (interiority). This complex poetics is fostered by images of violence and voracious orality (linked to the industrial sublime) and uncanny figurations of retention and repression. Thus, the representations of the industrial setting and its omnipresent machinery serve as indirect psychological expressions, both of the inner turmoil and unknown depths of an individualized character’s psyche, and of a large-scale collective crisis, so that machinery also turns out to be the tragic paradigm of late Victorian industrial society, as we shall see.

• 7 Butler is of course a notable exception: ‘. . .  Butler in his ‘Book of the Machines’ in Erewhon (1 (...)
• 8 Manlove also evokes Hardy’s novels where ‘the machine is subsumed in the workings of fate against t (...)

4However, in Dickens’s works, and by and large, in Victorian industrial novels, machines are part of the background, subservient to a humanistic message, and are not depicted for their own sake or in detail. Colin Manlove remarks in ‘Charles Kingsley, H. G. Wells, and the Machine in Victorian Fiction’ (1993) that ‘Where the machine appears in the Victorian novel—scarcely any poetry of significance deigns to admit it’ and ‘it is rarely central to the work as fiction’ (213).⁷ He quotes various examples illustrating the peripheral and merely illustrative function of machinery, in E. Gaskell’s North and South (1854–55), in Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844), when a visit to a Manchester factory reveals the ‘more-than-human abilities of the machines and the apparent contentment of their operatives’ (Manlove 213), or in Hard Times that ‘shows us the effect of the machine making people mechanical’ (213).⁸ For Herbert Sussman, ‘. . . Hard Times focuses on the effects of mechanized labor on the workers’ minds. Although the book never describes a factory interior, it abounds with attempts to describe the psychological state of a machine-tender’ (Sussman 67).

• 9 ‘For Ure, not only does the machine serve as a model for the mechanized human body, but the human b (...)

6The presence of this conflation in works of fiction echoes the surprisingly fantastic (and grotesque) images present in contemporary scientific and economic writings on industry, such as Andrew Ure’s The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835)⁹ which uncannily evokes ‘more or less automatic’ machines ‘embodied in the coal-mines’ (11; emphasis added). Chapter 45 of The Old Curiosity Shop is a poetic purple patch resting on a nightmarish modality of the (industrial) sublime, and drawing consistent comparisons between the anthropomorphic components of the industrial landscape and the dehumanized population present in it. The anonymous and collective groups of wild, ragged workers or unemployed men about to go on a rampage are mere ‘figures moving to and fro’ (340) or ‘bands’ (340) whose ‘untamed air’ makes them look like the engines they tend, described as ‘wrathful monsters’ (339). These angry men embody threatening eruptive forces in response to the unremitting violence inflicted on their uncanny doubles, the ‘bodies’ of the enslaved machines ‘shrieking’ and ‘clanking their iron chains’, ‘as if in torment unendurable’ (339). The ‘agonies’ of the engines that ‘spun and writhed like tortured creatures’ (339) indirectly express the pains and bondage of the exploited proletariat and the notion they will sooner or later strike back.

• 10 The deranged, and therefore, potentially dangerous or riotous elephants reappear at least twice, as (...)

7Besides, in The Old Curiosity Shop, when the ‘tall chimneys’ ‘[pour] out their plague of smoke’ (339) and darken the atmosphere ‘[o]n every side and as far as the eye [can] see into the heavy distance’ (338), ‘never ceasing in their black vomit’ so that they make ‘foul the melancholy air’ (339), the hypallage seemingly shifts the burden of ‘melancholy’ from sentient beings onto the air of the industrial cityscape, implicitly suggesting that melancholy has become pervasive and ubiquitous, as the new disease or ‘plague’ (339) of the industrial civilization. In Hard Times, the displaced figuration of ‘melancholy madness’ is also particularly striking, as early as Book I, chapter 5, which presents a panoramic description of Coketown, ‘a town of machinery and tall chimneys’, where ‘the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’ (28).¹⁰

• 11 Raut is first referred to as ‘the man’ and his mistress as ‘the woman’ in the opening paragraphs. L (...)
• 12 Therefore, the woman will remain nameless throughout, and solely identified through her wifely stat (...)

9By the time H. G. Wells had published ‘The Cone’ (1895), the contagious disease had actually spread dramatically. In this short story, melancholy no longer has a figurative (and merely collective) cautionary meaning as the metaphoric disease of machines. It now affects three individualized characters, Horrocks, the manager of ironworks in the Five Towns area in Staffordshire, his unfaithful wife, and her lover Raut, who is an artist (presumably a painter) and also turns out to be Horrocks’s friend. However, these three characters are initially anonymous,¹¹ not because they are part of an anonymous crowd, like the ‘hands’ of industrial novels, but because their nameless status reflects their estrangement from their world, showing that, somehow, their inhuman environment has made them alien. Besides they also have an exemplary dimension¹² and so does the archetypal love triangle they form. Unlike the ‘Hands’ of industrial fiction, they are not members of the proletariat, but, like them—although for different reasons—they live bitterly miserable lives and suffer from melancholy. Their privileged social status is an ironic turn of the screw showing that the disease of the piston elephants has worked its way up to higher social spheres. Horrocks is actually called the ‘ironmaster’ (101), a term whose social implications are illuminated by one of the epigraphs to chapter 8 of Asa Briggs’s Victorian Things: ‘The term ‘ironmaster’ has almost become a synonym in general parlance for a rich man.’ (J. Stephen Jeans’s The Iron Trade of Great Britain (1906); Briggs 289)

• 13 Isaiah 66.14–17 and 66.24.
• 14 The tongue of flame explicitly refers to Last Judgement. Yet, it can also be interpreted as a figur (...)
• 15 The same Biblical connotations inflect a previous description of the ironworks with the image of ‘t (...)

10When the story begins at dusk, Horrocks is not yet back home from work, and Raut and ‘the woman’ are planning an elopement. Raut evokes the disfigured, nightmarish environment they are compelled to live in: ‘“This country was all fresh and beautiful once,” he said; “and now—it is Gehenna. Down that way—nothing but pot-banks and chimneys belching fire and dust into the face of heaven”’ (98). The Biblical reference is quite apt, in many different respects. Gehenna is the sojourn of the sinful dead abandoned by God and condemned to everlasting torment by fire in perpetual darkness.¹³ The woman and her lover are, indeed, sinful and Raut will actually be horribly punished by fire when, in a fit of mad jealousy, Horrocks hurls him into one of his furnaces: a ‘tongue of flame’ (107)¹⁴ is released by the lifted cone shutting the top of the furnace and Raut is burnt to death.¹⁵

• 16 Contrary to John Hammond’s depiction of the character in H. G. Wells and the Short Story (1992), Ho (...)

13Focalization constantly shifts in ‘The Cone’, alternating between unendorsed judgements from the characters themselves—either in direct speech or, more frequently and ambiguously, in free indirect speech—and the narrator’s own authoritative voice that controls the narrative. This dominant voice unobtrusively contradicts some of the subjective assessments of Horrocks as the use of the adverb ‘sententiously’ clearly shows here (98), or when we can tell Raut’s simplistically negative vision of Horrocks as ‘this slouching, scowling monster’ (105) from the narrator’s more nuanced and subtle stance towards this very enigmatic character.¹⁶ The generic hybridity of the short story is actually fostered by these constant and subtle shifts in focalization whereby, when a character’s subjective point of view and/or affectivity control/s the narrative, the fantastic dominates (together with the industrial sublime), whereas the narrator’s more objective and detached stance preserves the realistic regime that remains the frame of the text.

• 17 Despite his association with his industrial machines, Horrocks’s chest, heart and feelings radicall (...)

14Beyond the fact Raut and the wife are quite wrong about Horrocks having no heart, like a machine,¹⁷ their brief dialogue hints at the very complex nature of the industrialist whose dehumanizing association with iron is both adequate and, ironically or even tragically, deceptive. So is his inhuman-sounding name, with its rock-like connotations, that do not correspond to his true nature that is far from unfeeling. Yet, this name prefigures the horror of the murder he will commit.

• 18 The approach to the mechanical in ‘The Cone’ is a far cry from the homely and jocular mood of ‘The (...)

15Horrocks is in more senses than one, a man ‘of iron’ (98), a judgement conflating the figurative and the literal. He is not only an ironmaster but a man of iron because of his strength—as when, on the way to the works, his arm twists into Raut’s ‘with benumbing tightness’ (103) and ‘like a vice’ (104)—and because of his sudden but unflinching determination to get rid of his rival that night. Moreover, his wife’s and Raut’s reductionist vision of him as a man of iron may be reminiscences of the ‘iron man’ (Ure 367), a spinning automaton that Ure extolled in The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835). Andrew Zimmerman’s assessment of it in ‘The Ideology of the Machine and the Spirit of the Factory: Remarx on Babbage and Ure’ (1997) provides the rationale for the two lovers’ own perception of Horrocks: ‘The mechanical human, the automaton, provides a model that allows Ure to speak of humans, machines, and factories as ontologically similar, as uniformly mechanical’ (Zimmerman 13). Raut and the wife are, however, quite mistaken about the ‘ironmaster’. She finds his affinities with the mechanic and his technophilia quite repulsive and alien when she evokes his ‘dreadful theory’ that ‘machinery is beautiful, and everything else in the world ugly’ (100). This ‘theory’, more than a sign of actual technophilia, actually sounds like the compensatory fantasy of a lonely, disillusioned man. So does the sentimental way he describes his huge, powerful furnaces in the masculine and calls one of them his ‘pet’ (103).¹⁸

• 19 Although George Robertson’s painting Nant-y-Glo Iron Works (c. 1788) predates Wells’s story by a hu (...)

16After discovering his wife’s and friend’s betrayal, Horrocks takes Raut on a sort of aesthetic guided tour to ‘show [him] some fine effects of moonlight and smoke’ (99), as he had promised a few days before. The ‘lowering sky’ (98) evoked in the first paragraph of the short story foreshadows Horrocks’s own ‘lowering’ anger and looks just as dark and threatening by the time he takes his long night walk with Raut. If this walk is so angst-ridden—for Raut and above all for the reader—it is because the strong tension that prevails is heightened both by the psychological symbolism of the setting (perceived by the reader) and by the very forceful description of the industrial landscape that probably largely reflects Raut’s own subjective (and aesthetic) perception of it. It is characterized by the pictorial qualities and infernal imagery of the industrial sublime with numerous references to the dark, fiery and fuliginous colours of the ‘landscape’, such as the ‘yellow glare of some late-working factory’ (101), and the ‘colossal’ furnaces, ‘inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames’ (102).¹⁹

• 20 The metaphor of the ‘penthouse’ (a house on a roof or the top floor of a building; a sloping roof b (...)

17During the walk with Horrocks, Raut remembers a first vague and ignored warning, ‘the mere vague jealousy’ that his companion ‘had shown once before’ (105). On the evening when the story begins, when the ironmaster returns home earlier than expected, his deceptive silence and seemingly impassive behaviour prevent Raut and the unfaithful wife from ascertaining the extent of what he has just overheard and more crucially, from fully measuring the violence of his emotional shock. He glides noiselessly into the room, like a ghost, so that ‘In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy figure—silent’ (99). The wife and Raut only see his ‘face dimly in the half-light, with unexpressive dark patches under the penthouse²⁰ brows’ (99; emphasis added), and when he eventually speaks, his voice is ‘colourless’ (99). The fiery colours of the industrial landscape at night consequently provide an indirect expression of the intense, violent feelings that passed unnoticed at Horrocks’s that evening because they were left unsaid and were exclusively conveyed in non-verbal ways.

• 21 Ketabgian here refers to George Man Burrows’s Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Trea (...)

18This descriptive passage is the first direct approach to the wounded character whose tell-tale fiery eyes and clenched hands Raut and the wife are too worried and nervous to pay sufficient attention to. This close-up on Horrocks’s eyes and hands evinces an in-depth understanding of contemporary psychology, and is informed by the Victorian medical approach to melancholy that Tamara Ketabgian deals with in chapter 2 of The Lives of Machines (2011), pointing out that this disorder is ‘identified both with extreme states of feeling and the apparent absence of emotion’ (Ketabgian 56) and that for ‘Bell and Burrows,²¹ rage is never far from dejection’ (57). Indeed, the ‘impassive melancholy’ of the elephant machines of Hard Times, just as the silent, pent-up suffering of Horrocks, ‘[contain] an equally threatening capacity for violence and instability’ (57). They ‘serve as a lexicon for deeply opaque forms of affect’ (Ketabgian 64). The ‘sultry gloom of [Horrocks’s] eyes’ (100) and the ‘grim quiet in his voice’ (100) pertain to these ‘opaque forms of affect’ that Louisa Gradgrind evokes in Hard Times: ‘As her father presses her to marry Bounderby, Louisa comments on Coketown in a figure that applies simultaneously to her own stifled passion and the resentment of the workers: “There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father.”’ (Sussman 63)

• 22 This may be another instance of free indirect speech, conveying Raut’s very negative and condescend (...)

19Wells actually picks up where Dickens left off in Hard Times. Horrocks’s repressed but threatening feelings have much to do with Louisa’s self-assessment and view of Coketown, and with Dickens’s melancholy engine elephant as Ketabgian interprets it. The ironmaster’s powerful build, ‘clumsy figure’ (99)²² and ‘big, clumsy hand[s]’ (100) have something elephant-like but, above all, his life as ironmaster apparently obeys the same ‘machine-like regularity’ (Ketabgian 64) as that of the piston elephant. Yet, this regularity is in no way ‘manageable, predictable, and unmysterious’ (64) just as the direction of the plot and generic affiliation of the text are unexpected and unusual.

• 23 In his paper on Ure, Steve Edwards’s list of some ‘Gothic’ characters such as ‘spectres, alchemists (...)

22In this respect, Wells largely goes beyond the ‘analogy of body and machine’ (18) that Steve Edwards evokes in ‘Factory and Fantasy in Andrew Ure’ (2001), and that ‘has become such a commonplace in capitalistic societies’ (18). ‘The Cone’ is a far cry from the ‘synecdochic substitution’ (22) between workers and hands, whereby the factory is described like a body and humans reified and mechanized, and it radically diverges from gothic, or science fiction scenarios ‘where inanimate objects come to life and run amok’ (29).²³ Manlove justly argues that ‘the machine is given serious treatment’ in genres such as fantasy and science fiction that still ‘relegate[d] it to the literary periphery’ (212). Yet, As Lucy Sheehan contends in ‘Trials of Embodiment: Being a Gothic Body in Mary Barton’ (2012), it would be wrong to think these generic forms ‘obscure historical social reality’ and are inadequate to ‘depict class politics’ (35). Romance does not ‘divert attention from the political’ (36), and ‘the spectre of the Gothic’ unquestionably serves a critical function. Indeed, Wells’s ‘technological’ fiction not only provides a very valuable ‘insight into both the continuing and changing views of the machine in the nineteenth century’ (Manlove 212–13) but its poetics is both strongly political and psychological in its scope.