‘With envious eyes’: Rabbit-poaching and class conflict in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau

• Autores: James T. Collinge
• Localización: Literature and history, ISSN 0306-1973, Vol. 26, Nº 1, 2017, págs. 39-55
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Allusions to rabbits and poaching recur throughout H. G. Wells's work. In spite of the frequency with which they appear, these motifs remain overlooked within scholarly criticism. This article, by analysing Wells's representations of rabbit-poaching, first considers how nineteenth-century histories of industrialisation and game-crime shape his science fiction. It then explores the contradictory nature of these representations, which both demonise and sympathise with the figure of the rabbit-poacher, providing further insight into the class confusion that recent criticism perceives to characterise Wells's writing in this period.