Finding Cthulhu: The Wells/Lovecraft Connection...

Every year I celebrate Halloween by dedicating the month of October to a different theme. The theme this year is steampunk-related TV, movies, and other media, with a particular focus on the works of H. G. Wells. And I was intrigued when I saw that one of the members of my H. G. Wells appreciation group shared the following image on Facebook...

The image doesn't depict a scene from one of Wells' works. It's actually an illustration from a British tabloid called The Illustrated Police News. But I and other group members immediately associated it with Wells' short, The Sea Raiders (a story about an aggressive species of giant cephalopod attacking hapless Victorians off the English coast), which was first published on December 6th, 1896.

If you look closely at the publication date of the above magazine, you'll see that it predates The Sea Raiders by just a few months, which could mean that it was Wells' original inspiration for the story. And if you can imagine Wells having some success writing about tentacled monsters in 1896, then you might also understand his furthering the idea in what was probably his most successful work, The War Of The Worlds, which began months later as a serialized story in Pearson's Magazine in 1897...

And if you find time to read some of the comments and replies regarding the image of the octopus from The Illustrated Police News in the aforementioned Facebook group, you'll see that one member wondered, "Is it true Lovecraft stole Cthulhu from there?"

I'm not sure if H. P. Lovecraft ever read The Illustrated Police News. But, having coincidentally dedicated a previous year's October to Lovecraft's writing, I am sure that Cthulhu has tentacles. And, because not nearly enough creatures in fiction had tentacles before the works of either author, I started to wonder the same thing. Check out Cthulhu in the image below, as drawn by Lovecraft himself...

So I did a Google search and found an interesting post on Reddit that sites another Wells/Lovecraft connection via another of Wells' shorts, In The Abyss...

The story features an enterprising and upright Victorian gentleman who encounters a race of humanoid deep-sea creatures that closely resemble Lovecraft's Deep Ones in The Shadow Over Innsmouth...

And what makes the aforementioned Reddit post especially interesting is that it also mentions Lovecraft's 28,000-word essay, Supernatural Horror In Literature, in which Lovecraft specifically mentions Thirty Strange Stories, a collection of short stories by H. G. Wells that contains both The Sea Raiders and In The Abyss.

I admit that in the past (like a lot of people), I've really only been familiar with Wells' top-five stories: The War Of The Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island Of Doctor Moreau, and The First Men In The Moon. But seeing any connection between Wells' imagination and Lovecraft's encouraged me to take a closer look at the shorts in Thirty Strange Stories. And, by exercising my own imagination, I found more connections.

Some connections may only seem superficial, but in Wells' short, The Strange Orchid, he compares the roots of a blood-sucking plant to tentacles reaching out for something (they're even described as having leech-like suckers). And in Wells' tale, Under The Knife, the horror suffered by a man having an out-of-body experience is almost purely cosmic, being derived from the vast infinity of the universe and the human race's brief (if not insignificant) time spent in it...

But the connections become more substantial when Wells writes about a man who finds himself stranded in another dimension in The Plattner Story, because Lovecraft wrote about extradimensional horror in Dreams In The Witch House, The Dunwich Horror, and even dimensions apart from ours in The Call Of Cthulhu.

So I wasn't surprised when, as part of my month-long Halloween playlist, I saw similarities between Wells' short, The Crystal Egg (a lesser-known prequel to The War Of The Worlds), and Lovecraft's, The Haunter Of The Dark. The former featuring an egg-shaped object through which observers can view the planet Mars, the latter featuring a shining trapezohedron through which observers can view a multiplicity of worlds, and both objects being two-way conduits through which observers can themselves be viewed by freakishly weird aliens.

And there are more connections still, i.e., in Wells' short, The Story Of The Late Mr. Elvesham, the protagonist finds his own mind/soul usurped by an outside intelligence, which reminds me of the body of Asenath Derby being taken over by her father (Ephraim Waite), who then took over the body of Asenath's husband (Edward Derby) in Lovecraft's short, The Thing On The Doorstep. And Lovecraft used the theme of mind/soul transference again when he wrote about the terrified Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee (whose body was taken over by the mind of an alien) in The Shadow Out Of Time, which in turn reminds me of Mr. Bessel (whose body was taken over by a similarly malevolent entity) in Wells' short, The Stolen Body.

And if you like The Stolen Body, in which the usurped protagonist seeks to communicate through the pineal eye in the brain of a medium...

Then you're sure to enjoy Lovecraft's From Beyond, in which both the protagonist and antagonist can see into other dimensions thanks to an innovative stimulation of the pineal gland...

But before you start giving Wells credit for the whole Cthulhu Mythos, consider this: as part of my steampunk Halloween, I've recently watched an episode of the 1960's TV series, The Wild Wild West, in which the story's villain can move so fast that he can't be seen. Did the author of that episode steal the idea from Wells' 1901 short, The New Accelerator? Or was it stolen from the 1940's comic-book hero, The Flash?

Or was The Flash ripped off from The New Accelerator? Or was The New Accelerator ripped off from Desmond Berthold in Baron Munchausen?

Or was Berthold ripped off from Hermes, the quick-footed messenger of the gods in Greek mythology?

I don't know. But when it comes to the nature of creativity, I don't think A leads to B leads to C in so straight forward a line as fans and scholars might prefer, because even the interpretation of historical fact is a science that's neither black nor white. So at best the history of fiction is a gray web spun with threads of both suspicion and imagination.

What I prefer to believe is that there's a difference between ripping an idea off and being inspired by it. Meaning that although Lovecraft's imagination may have been excited by Wells' tales of extra dimensions and tentacled monsters, and Wells may have been excited by Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland, illustrations in magazines, or even the giant squid in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea...

What makes any author great in their own right is the ability to first see something new in the things they love and to then be able to communicate that something through prose.

To quote Neil Gaiman from his appearance in the 2008 documentary, Lovecraft: Fear Of The Unknown, "It's part of the Lovecraft game... is, you know... it's like... you get it and you wanna add to it and pass it on." The sharing of, adding to, and passing on of his own creative ideas was something Lovecraft encouraged during his lifetime. And I think that's what Cthulhu ultimately is: a creative composite that began in the minds of artists who've been adding to the concept of tentacled beasties for God only knows how long and will continue to pass the idea along for God only knows how many strange æons yet to come.

But in reference to the pouty-faced, cartoon-eyed octopus seen on the cover of the October 17th, 1896 issue of The Illustrated Police News, I think it's hysterical to imagine it as Cthulhu's pappy (and Verne's giant squid as Cthulhu's grandpappy). So, for as long as I have the option, that's what I'll choose to believe.