H. G. Wells and The Red Room

David Norton

5th Form English Coursework

Comparison essay

H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells was born in 1866. His first full-length works were Biology and Geography textbooks. He then went on to write The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds and many others. He became known as the Father of Modern Science Fiction.

The Red Room

In The Red Room by H. G. Wells a man goes to a haunted castle and meets three elderly characters living in the castle. These three people refuse to go to the room in the castle that is haunted – The Red Room. The man is brave and fearless at first and goes to the room. The man seems fine to begin with but the darkness of the room bothers him and he tries to illuminate the room in vain.

The first character mentioned in the story is the narrator who is also the main character. He is the typical, cliché fearless man of the horror story and it is obvious from the beginning that he will be the man to suffer the horror of whatever is going to happen due to his fearlessness.

The next characters introduced are “the man with the withered arm”, “the old woman” and “the man with the shade”. These characters are known by these names throughout the story and they are all clichés in themselves: “they seemed to belong to another age, an older age, an age when things spiritual were different from this of ours, less certain: an age when omens and witches were credible, and ghosts beyond denying”

The man with the withered arm is a cliché as he is deformed and makes one wonder what happened to his arm.

The old woman is a cliché because she never moves, she stays sitting in a chair staring into the fire. She is the wise old character.

The man with the shade is a cliché because the shade that he is wearing is covering his eyes, which are seen, when he throws his head back, as small, bright and inflamed. He also coughs and splutters regularly leading one to believe he is ill due to something that has happened to him in the castle.

Some minor characters in the story include: a young dead duke who had fallen down the stairs after exiting The Red Room, “a timid wife and the tragic end that came to her husband’s jest of frightening her” and “her ladyship” who left the three old pensioners in charge of the castle.

The story is written in a gothic horror style with typical clichés, which, when it was written (in 1896), were not known as clichés:

There is the deformed pensioner who has a withered arm. He is the character who is supposed to scare the reader by making one wonder what happened leading him to have such an injury.

There is also the old woman who stares into the fire. She seems unaffected by anything that goes on around her and stays sitting staring into the fire all the time. She is wise but also cynical as she tells the man visiting the castle, “there’s a many things to see when one’s still but eight-and-twenty … a many things to see and sorrow for”. She is the character who is supposed to scare the reader by her wisdom but also the fact that she is wise but still will not venture to The Red Room.

The man with the shade is also of this style as he is “more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first”. He coughs persistently and has “small and bright and inflamed” eyes. He is the character who is supposed to scare the reader by his odd features.

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Darkness is a main factor in the story. From the first scene one imagines a large dark room with an open fire as the only illumination with the corners of the room being dark and the walls of the room dimly lit by the fire: “At the door I turned and looked at them, and saw they were all close together, dark against the firelight”. The man walks away from the housekeeper’s room and he walks down a dark passage: “and my candle flared and made the shadows cower and quiver”, then he walks up a spiral staircase: “and a shadow came sweeping up after me, and one fled before me into the darkness overhead”. He then pushes open a baize-covered door and stood in a corridor illuminated by the moon: “the effect was scarcely what I expected, for the moonlight coming in by the great window on the grand staircase picked out everything in vivid black shadow or silvery illumination”

The décor of the house shows the age in which the story is set but also shows the age of the castle: “deep toned old fashioned furniture of the housekeeper’s room”, “the ornaments and conveniences of the room about them were ghostly – the thoughts of vanished men which still haunted rather than participated in the world of today”. There are baize-covered doors that are not found today and also “two big mirrors in the room, each with a pair of sconces bearing candles”.

There are noises in the castle that set the scene and also reflect the style the story is written in: “the echoes rang up and down the spiral staircase”, “listening to a rustling I fancied I heard”, “the echoing of the stir and crackling of the fire”.

An atmosphere is created in several different ways but all of a gothic horror style: “the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed heavily upon me. It was after midnight that the candle in the alcove suddenly went out, and the black shadow sprang back to its place there”. The story has a lot of description in great detail allowing the reader to imagine the situation and the atmosphere: “The flame vanished as if the wicks had been suddenly nipped between a finger and thumb, leaving the wick neither glowing nor smoking, but black. While I stood gaping, the candle at the foot of the bed went out, and the shadows seemed to take another step towards me”.

The story is written in the first person with the main character also being the narrator. The first line of the story begins: ‘“I can assure you,” said I, “that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me”’. The vast majority of the speech is by the narrator himself. The three other speaking characters do not say a great deal and when they do speak it is in short sentences hinting at what they mean rather than being to the point. It is as if the things the three people know are too terrible to be spoken of.

The language used and the sentence structure is very long-winded along with the use of sub-clauses and lots of punctuation: “I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners in whose charge her ladyship had left the castle, and the deep-toned, old fashioned furniture of the housekeeper’s room in which they foregathered, affected me in spite of my efforts to keep myself at a matter-of-fact phase”.

Also, the language used is somewhat archaic with phrases such as “I fancied I heard” and “I resolved to make a systematic examination of the place at once, and dispel the fanciful suggestions of its obscurity before they obtained a hold upon me”

Onomatopoeia is used a little with words such as “rustling” and “crackling” to help describe the situation.

Metaphors are used regularly and liberally: “my candle was a little tongue of light in its vastness, that failed to pierce the opposite end of the room, and left an ocean of mystery and suggestion beyond its island of light”, “the flames were still dancing between the glowing coals, and splashing red reflections upon the furniture”.

The ending of the story is a slight twist. One expects a more conventional ghost but what is found in the room is fear itself. However, it is suspected from the very start that there is going to be something in the room. Just from the first sentence there is an immediate cause for concern.

I think the story is written well. It is good at building the suspense as the man goes to the room and also it keeps the reader interested as one wants to know what it is in the room. It has lots of clichés but at the time it was written this was a new, scary idea. With the story being so old there is bound to be clichés.

At the time the story was written I think it would have been a very effective story written in a new style for the age it was in.

Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was born in 1916. His family was from Norway but he was born in Wales. He was a children’s storywriter and wrote stories such as Matilda, The Witches and The Twits. He also wrote two autobiographies, Boy and Going Solo. He wrote a lot of tales with a twist.

The Landlady

The story is about a man called Billy Weaver who goes to Bath and looks for somewhere to stay. He is told about a bed and breakfast to which he goes and finds it is owned by an old lady. The plot builds until it becomes quite obvious what happened to the previous guests and he meets a similar fate.

There are only two main characters: Billy Weaver and the landlady of the bed and breakfast. The only other characters are the porter, Mr Greenslade, a person at the Head Office in London that Billy works for, and two men whose names are in the guest book.

The story gives the impression that Billy Weaver is a young businessman eager for success: “He walked briskly down the street. He was trying to do everything briskly these days. Briskness, he had decided, was the one common characteristic of all successful businessmen”. He is in a city he has never been to before with no one there to help him, but he is in control of the situation: “and he was feeling fine”.

From the beginning the landlady seems very welcoming, kind and caring but slightly deranged but he thinks nothing of this: “Now, the fact that his landlady appeared to be slightly off her rocker didn’t worry Billy in the least. After all, she was not only harmless – there was no question about that – but she was also quite obviously a kind and generous soul”. She is fussy about Billy being comfortable and happy: “It is such a comfort to have a hot water bottle in a strange bed with clean sheets, don’t you agree? And you may light the gas fire at any time if you feel chilly”.

The landlady seems lonely and enjoys the company of the guests which stay with her, this can be seen by her talking about previous guests and how much detail she goes into: “Mr Mulholland was also seventeen. But I think he was a trifle shorter than you are, in fact I’m sure he was, and his teeth weren’t quite so white”. The landlady also seems a little too interested in the physical appearance of Billy and her previous guests: “‘And it is such a pleasure, my dear, such a very great pleasure when now and again I open the door and I see someone standing there who is just exactly right’ … her blue eyes travelled slowly all the way down the length of Billy’s body, to his feet and then up again”.

The style the story is written in is very simple and easy to read. It is everyday language and in modern prose with short sentences and colloquial language: “the old girl is slightly dotty”, “‘I should’ve thought you’d be simply swamped with applicants’”

There are virtually no literary devices used in the story: “his skin was just like a baby’s”. The setting is very “normal” but the landlady’s activities implied in the story are not quite so normal.

It can be seen that the story is not set in the 21st Century but it was only written about 40 years ago: “he was wearing a new navy-blue overcoat, a new brown trilby hat, and a new brown suit”.

The story is in a typical Roald Dahl style; a tale with a twist. The ending was not as expected; it leaves one to draw one’s own conclusions but realistically there is only one conclusion to be made.

The story seems like more of a description of an event in a person’s life to begin with and slowly the plot builds up to a twist at the end.

The story is very descriptive, showing exactly what it is like where Billy is: “There were no shops on this wide street that he was walking along, only a line of tall houses on each side, all of them identical. They had porches and pillars and four or five steps going up to their front doors, and it was obvious that once upon a time they had been very swanky residences”.

The dialogue is nothing unusual; it is just like everyday speech between normal people, if a little polite at first. There are no significant comments to be made on the language used.

The story has a very defined start, middle and end with the start describing and setting the scene, the middle telling the story and the end being the twist of the story.

I think the story is easy to read as it is written simply in everyday language, however, there are certain clues that must be figured out to fully understand the twist of the story. The ending is unexpected and becomes clearer as the story unfolds.

There are several likenesses and differences between the stories. For example, both stories deal in mystery and the unexpected, they both draw the reader in slowly as the plot progresses.

There are hints in both stories as to what is going to happen and it is obvious that something is going to happen to the main character. The protagonists in both stories have no real worry or fear about what is going to happen, they don’t quite seem naïve but a little unaware of their fate.

The styles of the stories are very different. The Red Room is very old fashioned and full of clichés whereas The Landlady is not. The Red Room is somewhat of an anticlimax; the ending is not expected but it is not satisfying. On the other hand, The Landlady is also not expected but it slowly dawns on the reader as the true nature of the landlady’s intentions becomes apparent.

The Red Room is written in the first person to give a sense of participation, whereas The Landlady is written in the third person, telling the story of another person’s doom.

The Landlady is much simpler than The Red Room which is very long winded and old-fashioned in its style.

The Landlady misleads to a certain extent whereas in The Red Room it is obvious there is some horror to come.