# Short Fiction — Character guide

> Key figures in Short Fiction by H. G. Wells.

- [Denton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/denton.md): Denton belongs to a hyper-mechanized future where his old-fashioned tastes and romantic attachment to Elizabeth Mwres mark him as an idler and a misfit. His polished accent and soft hands make him an easy target for the 
- [Ugh-lomi](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/ugh-lomi.md): Ugh-lomi lives among a small, fearful people who scavenge and hide, but his imagination reaches toward the powerful horses on the plain and toward Eudena, who watches him with fearful admiration. He stalks the herd with 
- [Eudena](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/eudena.md): Eudena moves through her tribe as a silent figure of watchfulness, tolerated but not powerful, her days spent observing the burrows and the grazing strangers Ugh-lomi longs to join. When the spiteful old woman seizes lit
- [Mr. Ledbetter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-ledbetter.md): Mr. Ledbetter is a clergyman-schoolmaster on a much-needed vacation at Hithergate-on-Sea, where he falls into whisky-fuelled talk about the vanished days of bravery and the burglar as the last true adventurer. He deplore
- [Mr. Fotheringay](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-fotheringay.md): Mr. Fotheringay is an unremarkable shopman whose mind is not complex enough to be paralysed by the strangeness of what he can do, and so he simply experiments: a raised candle, a match willed into being, a glass of water
- [Elizabeth Mwres](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mwres.md): Elizabeth Mwres is the daughter of a man who holds her securities in trust, and her romance with Denton is conducted on borrowed money and old-fashioned tastes — quaint Victorian furniture, real printed books, a child nu
- [Gottfried Plattner](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/gottfried-plattner.md): Plattner belongs to the small, unremarkable world of schoolmasters and provincial routine, the sort of man whose life offers no obvious purchase for the marvellous. Yet his experience of a strange dislocation leaves him 
- [Sidney Davidson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/sidney-davidson.md): Davidson is a young man of ordinary prospects, brother to the narrator's sister, whose life is overturned when his vision splits into two irreconcilable pictures. He is torn between the pull of the haunting phantom islan
- [Nunez](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/nunez.md): Nunez arrives in the valley as an outsider, a man whose sight gives him practical advantages but no standing in a society that has never conceived of vision. His confidence in his own superiority collides with the valley
- [Pollock](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/pollock.md): Pollock is a minor figure in a West African expedition, restless, quick to anger, and already hardened by months of brutality along the Kittam River. His casual desecration of a native idol and his violent encounter with
- [V. Bindon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/v-bindon.md): Bindon moves through the giant city as a man of influence and fashion, changing costumes and pneumatic silhouettes as easily as moods, and courting Elizabeth Mwres with the confidence of a man who believes he can buy any
- [Mr. Bessel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-bessel.md): Bessel is a man of quiet, orderly habits, known to his partner Hart and his friend Vincey as a steady presence in the Albany and St. Paul's Churchyard. When his body is seized by a wandering spirit, his friends are left 
- [Hapley](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/hapley-pawkins.md): Hapley built a European reputation almost entirely as a byproduct of his obsession with discrediting Pawkins, and when the rivalry kills his adversary, the victory curdles into a restless, unfeedable fixation. He tries n
- [Filmer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/filmer.md): Filmer moves through a world of skeptical officials, curious journalists, and ordinary people who cannot decide whether he is a visionary or a menace. His machine is the great gamble of his life, and the tension between 
- [Mr. Cave](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-cave.md): Mr. Cave is a small, henpecked man whose stepdaughter, stepson, and formidable wife all treat his business judgment with open contempt. When a customer offers five pounds for the crystal egg in his window, Cave refuses w
- [Mr. Woodhouse](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/woodhouse.md): Woodhouse moves through the social world of Hammerpond Park, where Lady Aveling's jewellery draws nightly police protection and every stranger is watched. He is drawn into a circle of men — Sant, Porson, Wainwright — who
- [Elstead](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/elstead.md): Elstead is the kind of explorer whose accounts strain credulity even among those inclined to trust him, and his latest descent has produced something he can barely articulate. The tension lies between what he experienced
- [Miss Winchelsea](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/miss-winchelsea.md): Miss Winchelsea is the most refined and self-aware of three English girls abroad, fluent in French on paper but self-conscious in practice, and deeply invested in the idea that travel should be an educated experience. A 
- [Mr. Skelmersdale](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-skelmersdale.md): Skelmersdale is a young shopman who once worked at Aldington Corner, where he disappeared for three weeks and came back with clean cuffs, pockets full of dust, and a moody wretchedness he couldn't explain. His fiancée th
- [Clayton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/clayton.md): Clayton is a member of the Mermaid Club, a man whose incurable artifice as a storyteller makes his companions suspect he's lying even when he insists he isn't. He stayed overnight at the club alone, and now claims to hav
- [Mr. Raut](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/raut.md): Raut is a figure whose life is interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious cone, an object that seems to promise something beyond the mundane. The story places him at the threshold of an encounter that tests his curios
- [Mr. Coombes](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-coombes.md): Coombes is a mild, self-denying shopkeeper whose marriage has curdled into a trap: his wife married him to escape the workroom, and now she and her relatives eat up his capital and his patience. On a Sunday walk through 
- [Mr. Vincey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-vincey.md): Vincey is a man of reason who wakes from a dream convinced that his friend Bessel is in desperate need, and against all logic he dresses and sets out through the deserted streets to find him. What he encounters in Covent
- [Professor Gibberne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/professor-gibberne.md): Gibberne is a celebrated researcher into drugs and the nervous system, a mighty jester with a Mephistophelean face who talks through his work with the narrator over pipes and whisky. He set out to find an all-round stimu
- [Winter Wedderburn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/winter-wedderburn.md): Wedderburn drifts through auction rooms and his own small hothouse, a man so uneventful that his housekeeper dreads his talk of 'something happening.' He has never married, never fallen in love, never broken a bone, and 
- [Mr. Pyecraft](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/pyecraft.md): Pyecraft haunts the smoking-room of his club, rolling from table to table, fixated on his own obesity and convinced that diet and drugs must hold the answer. He fastens onto the narrator with a clinging, suspicious needi
- [Jane](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/jane.md): Jane works in the narrator's household, scrubbing steps with a certain viciousness after William is lured away by an older woman with hair not gold to the roots. She accosts the wedding party in the street, is bundled as
- [Mr. Hinchcliff](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-hinchcliff.md): Hinchcliff shares a canoe and a desperate thirst with Evans, listening to the other man's dream of Chang-hi's pigtail and a hoard of gold. He is the steadier of the two, marking landmarks and measuring the stream while E
- [Holroyd](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/holroyd.md): Holroyd runs the dynamo shed at Camberwell, a bullying, whisky-softened rationalist who likes a helper he can kick and who will not pry into the machinery. He takes on Azuma-zi as a cheap, silent pair of hands and treats
- [Mr. Monson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/monson.md): Monson belongs to a world of engineering schemes and business intrigue, the kind of man whose inventions carry weight in the affairs of cities and armies. His land ironclad is a machine of enormous scale, and the story c
- [Azuma-zi](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/azuma-zi.md): Azuma-zi arrives in London out of the stokehole of the Lord Clive, drawn by tales of a city where even beggars are white, and ends up penniless, half-mute in English, and bullied in a Camberwell dynamo shed. His employer
- [Hooker](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/hooker.md): Hooker moves through a world of laboratories, professional jealousy, and the quiet cruelties men practise on one another in the name of science. His loyalties and his curiosity pull against each other, and the strain sho
- [Mr. Brisher](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-brisher.md): Mr. Brisher — Ledbetter in the tale's own telling — is a schoolmaster in orders, dishevelled, bespectacled, and quietly astonished at his own life, taking a summer rest at Hithergate-on-Sea. Over whisky he joins a talkat
- [Evans](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/evans.md): Evans belongs to the world of greenhouses, collectors, and the quiet commerce of rare plants, where a new specimen is worth more than most men's scruples. He is steady, methodical, and confident in the ordinary rules of 
- [Uya the Cunning](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/uya.md): Uya is the bearded lord of the Sons of Uya, a man whose cunning outlives him in the fear he planted — the old woman still turns to the reed-bed and calls him 'my lord' as though he could answer. His pursuit of Ugh-lomi a
- [Fanny](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/fanny.md): Fanny is one of two daughters escorting 'Ma' to Rome, all of them abroad for the first time, thrilled by Charing Cross and the Channel and the very word Rome. Where her companion Miss Winchelsea suppresses every feeling 
- [Gip](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/gip.md): Gip enters the shop as any ordinary child might, curious and unguarded, while the shopman performs marvels with the calm of a man selling sweets. The tension lies in the gap between the boy's open astonishment and the ad
- [Mr. Teddy Watkins](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-teddy-watkins.md): Mr. Watkins is a professional cracksman of long experience, working the Hammerpond house with his assistant Jim when a stumble in the shrubbery turns the night against him. His shyness, his vanity about his craft, and hi
- [Bailey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/bailey.md): Bailey sits alone in his house, housekeeper and servant away, watching the river traffic drift past as though it were staged for his amusement. His pleasure in distant lives is edged with a certain cool detachment, and h
- [Minnie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/minnie-may.md): Minnie shares a failing draper's business and a cramped life with Sid, whose debts and panic threaten to sell them up. When he breaks down beside her, sobbing that he was a knave to marry her, she soothes him with a soft
- [Captain Gerilleau](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/captain-gerilleau.md): Captain Gerilleau commands a vessel in waters where something stranger than weather is moving, and his professional composure is tested by reports he cannot quite dismiss. He is a man of routine and rank, used to dealing
- [Harringay](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/harringay.md): Harringay is a man of intellectual habits and unsettled temper, the sort who cannot let a grievance lie and whose imagination turns readily toward the forbidden. When temptation arrives in a form suited to his particular
- [Horrocks](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/horrocks.md): Horrocks is the husband standing between Aubrey Vair and the girl Vair has decided to love, a man whose presence transforms a drawing-room flirtation into a moral trap. His jealousy is not theatrical but methodical, and 
- [Aubrey Vair](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/aubrey-vair.md): A man involved in a complicated romance.
- [William](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/william.md): A character in a story of a strange inheritance.
- [Medina-saroti](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/medina-saroti.md): A woman in a story of a strange orchid.
- [Lionel Wallace](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/lionel-wallace.md): A man who finds a door in a wall.
- [Mr. Jacoby Wace](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-jacoby-wace.md): A scientist involved in a strange experiment.
- [Jim Holroyd](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/jim-holroyd.md): A man in a story of a dream of Armageddon.
- [Mr. Clarence](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-clarence.md): A character in a story of love.
- [Mr. Maydig](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-maydig.md): A clergyman who witnesses miracles.
- [Sanderson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/sanderson.md): A character in a story of a strange experiment.
- [Mr. Fison](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/fison.md): A man who encounters sea raiders.
- [Mr. Morris](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mr-morris.md): A man in a story of love and treasure.
- [Wish](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/wish.md): A character in a story of a strange wish.
- [Waterhouse](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/waterhouse.md): A character in a story of a strange experiment.
- [Helen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/helen.md): A woman in a story of love.
- [Mrs. Cave](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mrs-cave.md): The wife of Mr. Cave.
- [Mrs. Green](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/mrs-green.md): A woman in a story of a strange bacillus.
- [Tommy Byles](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/tommy-byles.md): A young man in a story of a strange treasure.
- [Millie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/millie.md): A woman in a story of a strange orchid.
- [Siss](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters/siss.md): A tracker in a prehistoric story.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_25_se/characters