Utopia from the Rooftops: H.G. Wells, Modernism and the Panorama-City

Abstract

As he slowly wakes up from a two-hundred-year sleep, Graham, the central character in H.G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes (1899, 1910)¹ initially finds his senses assaulted by the extreme nearness of his world: a bit of window frame protrudes towards him; a ‘curious apparatus of rubber’ passes into his yellowed flesh (p. 26); his hand smartly strikes the glassy bubble which envelops his bed. Minutes later, however, Graham has escaped confinement, and stumbling onto a balcony must adjust to a very different prospect. There he obscurely senses a teeming crowd beneath him, while glimpsing ‘vast and vague architectural forms’ in the distance (p. 28). Those ‘vast and vague’ forms of twenty-second century London return a few scenes later when Graham again finds himself at a great height, overlooking

an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in either direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across the huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. (p. 42)