The Red Room

A child of poor, working class parents, H. G. Wells grew up in Bromley, Kent. His devotion to literature began in 1874; bedridden with a broken leg, Wells’s father brought him books from the library, and he quickly became infatuated with literature’s ability to explore other worlds. Years later, Wells was placed in a draper apprenticeship, a position that would go on to inspire his novels The Wheels of Chance, The History of Mr Polly, and Kipps. When his apprenticeships were unsuccessful, he took up student-teaching positions and eventually earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology, going on to become a full-time teacher for a short period. During his following stint of unemployment, Wells wrote short articles for various journals. His success inspired him to write his first book, The Time Machine, which introduced and popularized the concept of time travel. Though Wells published writing late into his life, his earliest works, those written prior to World War I, are considered his best. Wells died on August 13, 1946. His life and work are commemorated by a plaque at his home in Regent’s Park.

The mid to late 18th century consisted of many advancements in technology and human knowledge. In other words, the world’s mysteries were lessening, and gothic literature became popular in part to make up for the lack of intrigue in contemporary society. Many gothic writers were reacting against the Enlightenment, a contemporary intellectual movement that prioritized gaining knowledge through rationalism. Gothic writers, on the other hand, prioritized severe emotions and the prospect of supernatural entities. “The Red Room,” written and published long after gothic literature’s heyday, combines these rational and emotional schools of thought in a way that was common in Victorian literature.

While much of Wells’s work falls in the genre of science-fiction, some of his work contains gothic elements, which can certainly be found in “The Red Room.” Wells’s The War of the Worlds utilizes such gothic elements—like shock, horror, high emotion, and the combination of the real world and the fictional—to great effect. Aside from Wells’s work, many similar works of gothic fiction predate “The Red Room,” as the height of the genre occurred in the mid to late 18th century. “The Black Veil,” a short story by Charles Dickens, makes use of similar gothic elements, explores macabre imagery and the theme of grief, and also includes an unnamed narrator. Although Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla includes actual supernatural entities, it shares the gothic setting of “The Red Room,” an old castle, and builds similar mystery and suspense. Finally, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published four years prior to “The Red Room,” is a similar examination of the protagonist’s psychological turmoil. While there are elements of horror in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” they are created not by supernatural entities but by the narrator’s unstable psyche. Wells does just the same in “The Red Room.”