The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents was published by Methuen in November 1895 — Wells’s first short story collection, appearing in the same year as The Time Machine and The Wonderful Visit. The fifteen stories demonstrate the extraordinary range of Wells’s imagination at twenty-nine: science fiction, horror, social comedy, and philosophical parable, all handled with the compression and invention that would make Wells the most important short story writer in the history of science fiction.
The Collection
The title story sets the tone: an anarchist visits a bacteriologist’s laboratory, steals what he believes is a vial of cholera bacillus, and flees through London in a cab, planning to release it in the water supply. The bacteriologist pursues him, still in his dressing-gown and slippers. The twist — the vial actually contains a harmless bacterium that turns monkeys blue — deflates the anarchist’s grandiose terrorism into farce. But the story’s premise — biological terrorism, a stolen pathogen, a city at risk — was deadly serious in 1895 and remains so.
Other notable stories include:
“The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” — a timid collector acquires a rare orchid that turns out to be carnivorous, trapping him in its tendrils and feeding on his blood. A small masterpiece of botanical horror.
“In the Avu Observatory” — an astronomer in Borneo is attacked through his telescope by a giant flying creature. The story’s power lies in what is not explained: we never learn what the creature is.
“The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes” — a lightning strike causes a man in London to see, instead of his surroundings, a beach on a South Pacific island. Wells speculates about parallel spatial dimensions with the casual confidence of someone who invents new physics for breakfast.
“The Triumphs of a Taxidermist” — a taxidermist confesses to creating fake specimens of extinct and imaginary animals, which are now displayed in museums as the real thing. A wickedly funny story about the fragility of scientific authority.
Themes
Science as adventure — Wells’s scientists are not cold rationalists but men driven by curiosity, often into danger. Science is exciting, and frequently terrifying.
The ordinary disrupted — many of the stories begin in utterly mundane settings — a suburban garden, a railway carriage, a provincial museum — and introduce a single extraordinary element. This technique, borrowed from Wells by virtually every science fiction writer who followed, is used here for the first time at full power.
Collecting The Stolen Bacillus
First edition (Methuen, London, 1895): Blue cloth binding with gilt lettering. No dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine copies: $2,000–$5,000
- Very good: $800–$2,000
- Good: $300–$800
First American edition (Macmillan, New York, 1895): Published the same year. $800–$2,000.
As Wells’s first story collection, published in his breakthrough year, this is a significant Wells first edition. The stories have been anthologized thousands of times, but the original collection has a completeness and coherence that no anthology reproduces.