When the Sleeper Wakes
Glossary
"
- "The Boss"
- The title by which ordinary people refer to Ostrog even before the revolution — 'the greatest Boss the world has ever seen' — reflecting his reputation as a shadow power broker long before he moves openly against the Council.
- Related: Ostrog
- "The Old Man Who Knew Everything"
- The elderly stranger Graham encounters in the darkness during Chapter 11, whose rambling, half-reliable account of the Sleeper's history, the Council's rise, and Ostrog's ambitions gives Graham — and the reader — the clearest exposition of the future world's backstory in the entire novel.
- Related: Graham, The Council, Ostrog
A
- Asano
- A Japanese attendant assigned to Graham after the revolution, who accompanies him on his public appearances and helps arrange his entertainments, including kinematographic displays of machinery.
- Related: Lincoln
B
- Babble Machines
- Public loudspeaker devices that broadcast news, propaganda, and announcements throughout the city — the future's mass media, treated by the novel's more skeptical characters (like the old man in Chapter 11) as a shallow, easily-forgotten substitute for real knowledge.
C
- Capri
- The most famous of the Pleasure Cities, mentioned by the old man in Chapter 11 as the likely destination for the drugged double who was displayed as 'the Sleeper' before Graham's true awakening — a place of theatrical spectacle and imported dancers.
- Related: Pleasure Cities
E
- Eadhamite Roads
- The patented road-surfacing technology Warming monopolized, which killed off the old railways within a few decades and became the technical and financial foundation of the fortune that eventually funds the Council's rule.
- Related: Warming
G
- Graham
- The Victorian Englishman who falls into an unnatural, insomnia-driven trance in 1897 and wakes 203 years later to find compound interest has made him, unknowingly, the richest man alive and the nominal ruler of a world he does not recognize.
- Related: The Council, Ostrog
H
- Helen Wotton
- A young woman connected to the Wind-Vane Keepers whose passionate, half-finished warning to Graham at a gathering leaves a deep impression on him, and whose memory increasingly pulls at his attention even amid the spectacle Lincoln arranges to keep him occupied.
- Related: Ostrog
- Hypnotism and "Psychic Surgery"
- A widespread practical technology in Graham's future: hypnotists implant memories, erase unwanted experiences, and train laboring children into 'punctual and trustworthy machine minders' in place of traditional education — a form of mental engineering Graham distrusts as a surrender of personal will.
I
- Isbister
- A wealthy American who, after losing two sons in a boating accident, added a second enormous bequest to Graham's sleeping estate — the second of the two fortunes whose trustees became the Council.
- Related: Warming, The Council
L
- Lincoln
- Ostrog's lieutenant and Graham's near-constant attendant after the revolution, tasked with managing and distracting the newly awakened Sleeper with entertainments, technological marvels, and reassurances while the real business of consolidating power proceeds without him.
- Related: Ostrog, Graham
O
- Ostrog
- The formidable, ambitious leader of the popular movement who arranges Graham's awakening and rescue, using him as a figurehead to topple the Council. Twice rejected for a Council seat himself, Ostrog is the true architect of the revolution — and a man whose appetite for power Graham comes to distrust.
- Related: Graham, The Council, Lincoln
P
- Pleasure Cities
- Domed, artificially lit resorts — Capri chief among them — where the future's wealthy consume spectacle, dancing, and sensation. Wells's vision of leisure culture curdled into narcotic distraction, which Graham repeatedly declines to visit even as it is offered to him as a reward.
- Related: Capri
T
- The 1910 Revision
- Wells later revised this novel as 'The Sleeper Wakes,' making textual changes and softening some of the original 1899 ending. This edition preserves Wells's original, unrevised 1899 text.
- The Aeropile
- The future's flying machine, which Graham becomes enthusiastically devoted to learning after the revolution — one of the few genuine, uncomplicated pleasures he finds in the twenty-second century, offering him both escape and a literal view over the city he nominally rules.
- The Blue Canvas
- The uniform worn by workers of the Labour Company, referenced repeatedly as a marker of the laboring underclass Ostrog mobilizes into an armed force during the revolution — 'all the blue canvas armed and marching,' as the old man in Chapter 11 puts it.
- Related: The Labour Company, Ostrog
- The Council
- The plutocratic body of trustees, originally twelve in number, that has ruled in the sleeping Graham's name for two centuries, accumulating his estate into a global monopoly through politics, currency, and tariffs while keeping the masses pacified and controlled.
- Related: Warming, Isbister, Ostrog
- The Council House
- The seat of the Council's power, site of the climactic struggle late in the novel as Ostrog's forces move to finally and physically end the old order's rule.
- Related: The Council, Ostrog
- The Crow's Nest
- A vantage point from which Graham observes the scale of the popular uprising and the city's vast, tiered architecture during the early days of the revolution, giving both Graham and the reader a panoramic view of the forces in motion.
- Related: The Moving Ways
- The Hall of the Atlas
- One of the vast public spaces of future London that Graham passes through in his early, disoriented exploration of the city — part of Wells's world-building tour of monumental future architecture standing in stark contrast to Victorian London.
- Related: The Moving Ways
- The Labour Company
- The vast organization that clothes, feeds, and regiments London's poor in exchange for their labor, identifiable by their blue canvas uniforms — Wells's extrapolation of workhouse and company-town logic into a future of engineered, total dependency.
- Related: The Blue Canvas, The Council
- The Moving Ways
- London's system of tiered, continuously moving mechanical roadways — some crawling, some running at speed — that has replaced streets and individual transport, and which Graham must learn to navigate as one of the future city's most disorienting features.
- The Red Police
- The Council's uniformed enforcers, deployed against the rebellious crowds during the revolution and repeatedly referenced as the visible face of the old order's violence in the city's streets and ways.
- Related: The Council
- The Trance
- The unexplained, medically inexplicable state of suspended animation Graham falls into after a period of severe insomnia in 1897 — never fully diagnosed even by twenty-second-century medicine, and rumored by some, including the old man in Chapter 11, to have actually been fatal, with an impostor substituted in his place.
- Related: Graham
- The Under Side
- The lower, poorer levels of future London's stratified, multi-tiered city — physically beneath the wealthy's domain in a literalized class hierarchy Graham descends into as the novel's revolution reaches its climax.
- Related: The Labour Company
- The Wind-Vane Control
- The organization responsible for the giant wind vanes that generate and control the city's power supply, and the site of Graham's apartments during his time as figurehead ruler. Ostrog rose through its ranks before his repeated rejection from the Council.
- Related: Ostrog
W
- Warming
- Graham's cousin, a solitary man who made a fortune monopolizing the patent rights to Eadhamite roads and, having no children, left his entire estate to the sleeping Graham under a board of trustees — the original seed of the fortune that becomes the Council's power base.
- Related: The Council, Eadhamite Roads