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Graham, a Victorian Englishman who cannot sleep, falls at last into a trance in 1897 and wakes two hundred years later in a gigantic London of glass-roofed…
Graham, a Victorian Englishman who cannot sleep, falls at last into a trance in 1897 and wakes two hundred years later in a gigantic London of glass-roofed streets, moving roadways and flying machines. He discovers that his savings, growing for two centuries, have made him the legal owner of half the world, ruled in his name by a council of trustees while the masses toil in misery below. Hailed by the people as their saviour, he finds himself at the centre of a revolution.
Context and significance
H. G. Wells first published the novel as When the Sleeper Wakes in 1899 and revised it in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes, which is this text. It is one of the first great dystopias of the modern city and influenced films such as Metropolis. Read The Time Machine.
About the author
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.
He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.