In addition to a critique of spiritualism, then, The Invisible Man is a critique of scientism (as the late nineteenth-century conviction that scientific method is the secret to understanding the universe later came to be called). It built in particular on contemporary scientific debates about the invisible inspired by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, who accidentally discovered X-rays, sometimes known at this time as the ‘photography of the invisible’, in 1895.22 In The Invisible Man, as one critic has underlined, Griffin ‘acts out the nightmare that X-rays created in the Victorian
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