When exploring the influence of Hinton's ideas at the turn of the twentieth century, most scholars look to H. G. Wells; he called his own proto-science fictions ‘scientific romances’, after all. Wells's early writings demonstrate his interest in the theory of the fourth dimension, an interest that led to the development of what William J. Scheick has called Wells's ‘splintering frame technique’. While Scheick provides a useful framework for rethinking Wells's later writing, many examinations of Wells's early work are rooted in the reductive ‘history of ideas’ model of criticism. In this chapter, I traverse a selection of Wells's early texts, with an eye not only to Hinton's influence, but to the nascent modernist ‘history of consciousness’ in which both Hinton and Wells participated. For both men, the theory of the fourth dimension appealed as a means of explaining and harnessing the conflicting and disruptive forces unleashed by scientific and technological developments of the nineteenth century, forces that were becoming a source of increasing anxiety at the turn of the century.

I focus primarily on Wells's work up to 1915, from his earliest scientific romances up to his controversial book, Boon, where he publicly attacked Henry James and his literary aesthetic. To begin, I examine his earliest uses of four-dimensional theory in The Time Machine (1894–1895) and The Invisible Man (1897). I focus particularly on The Invisible Man, a text that was clearly influenced by Hinton's Stella (1895). It was to Wells's advantage that he began composing The Invisible Man shortly after Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen discovered X-rays late in 1895.

Like Hinton, Wells turned to cutting-edge visual technologies in his attempt to represent four-dimensional space and subjectivity, and the unprecedented public enthusiasm for X-ray imaging provided Wells with a powerful aid in imagining the unimaginable. X-ray images in particular seemed to provide material evidence that there was a fourth dimension of space, a perspective from which three-dimensional objects were transparent. Tom Gibbons has observed that ‘X-rays […], and their contribution to the anti-materialistic millenarian synthesis, appear largely responsible for the continuous excitement about the Fourth Dimension among the general public and avantgarde painters alike’ at the turn of the twentieth century.