The Adventures of a Micro-Man was written by “Edwin Pallander,” the pseudonym of Lancelot Francis Sanderson Bayly (1869-1952), an Irishman of independent means and a keen botanist, biologist and musician. The Adventures of a Micro-Man is an interesting example of an instructional novel masquerading as an adventure story.

Doctor Geoffrey Hassler is a scientist of independent means and decent reputation. But when he announces that he has discovered “Microgen,” a gas which dramatically miniaturizes organic matter, he is doubted and mocked. So he gives a demonstration of Microgen’s effectiveness, first shrinking a rose and then reducing Babs, his Persian cat, to a fraction of her normal size. The effect of the gas is only temporary, he explains, and after ten days Babs will return to her normal size. The demonstration causes a sensation, and Doctor Hassler’s reputation is made. But due to an unfortunate accident Doctor Hassler, his friend the Reverend Eden, Hassler’s young friend Gerald, and Hassler’s daughter Muriel, who Gerald is engaged to, are all trapped inside the Microgen mechanism, an enormous air-tight diving bell, and exposed to the gas. They are all miniaturized, with Gerald going from 5'4" to a quarter of an inch tall. Worse still, because Microgen only acts on organic matter, or matter that was once organic, they find that some of their clothes did not make the transition with them. Because they were standing in different parts of the Microgen chamber when they were exposed to the gas, Muriel is in a separate part of the chamber from the men. The men eventually find her, but hunger sets in, and they realize that they are in a difficult situation: no food, no water, and no way to let anyone know that they’ve been diminished, and they’ll have to survive in their miniaturized state for ten days.

The group escapes from the diving bell and makes it outside of Hassler’s house into his garden. But they find that the garden, which to normal human eyes is well tended and placid, is a vast, noisy jungle and the house is an unimaginably huge “monument.” The garden frightens them, a feeling made worse when a monstrous thing bounds toward them: “a vast whirling body nearly 100' in diameter with a panoply of sharp, bristling antennae. A shining black ball the size of a man’s body composed its centre, and the white arms, toothed like mighty saws, thrashed the ground like flails.” When Hassler realizes that what they are looking at is only a normal thistledown, they are all relieved, but they also realize that their perspective truly has changed and that they will have to adjust their thinking. They wander around the “jungle,” enjoying the now enormous flora, from flowers to simple stalks of grass. But when they begin encountering insects, their fear returns. They see Homalota beetles, which are now the size of grizzly bears; the Homalota do not bother the four humans, but when another beetle appears and eats a Homalota the four realize that they must arm themselves as well as find food. The group arms itself with club-like plants and finds small fruits on various plants; the fruits are edible and delicious and slake their hunger. They move on but are beginning to tire, and when they find a walnut shell, which is to them the size of a cathedral, they decide to make it their temporary home. The shell is on the edge of a pond in the garden, and the group makes fire and roasts microscopic, lobster-like creatures which they find in the water of the pond. The group marvel at how large and spectacular looking dewdrops are, at their current size.

The group stays at the walnut shell for a time, but Gerald, venturing out to get some water for Muriel, gets attacked by a spider. Gerald fights the spider off and escapes from it by grabbing a part of a thistledown, which is blown into the air by the wind and carries him with it. He is carried across the garden and eventually lands on a leaf on an island in the pond. Gerald is forced to fight with a gnat, which ends up getting eaten by the same spider which Gerald had escaped from, and then falls onto the water of the pond. He does not drown, however; at his size and weight the water is a springy, hard surface which he can walk across. He returns to the walnut shell, fighting off an ant lion on the way. The group survives on their micro food for a few days longer, and they battle a moth and a spider, but during the battle with the spider Muriel faints, and when the men try to rescue her they are wrapped up by the spider and taken to its nest, high up a stone wall in the garden. The spider leaves them there. They cut their way free of the spider’s webs and then watch the spider, a Lycosa wolf spider, fight a Cinnabarina bee. While the pair battle the humans escape by carefully crawling down the wall. Back on the edge of the pond, but a long way from the walnut shell, they are in need of a home, so when they find an abandoned mussel shell, which at their size is enormous, they decide to rest there. Unfortunately the shell is not abandoned. The mussel is simply too far back into the shell to be noticed. The mussel attacks them. They fight off its tongue, but Gerald is trapped inside the shell when it closes. He fends off the tongue and suffers from the mussel’s acidic juices (which is how it digests) while the others chop their way into the mussel. He is eventually spat out, somewhat the worse for wear and his acid-eaten clothes in a state.

The group observes what seems to be jellyfish in the pond. Muriel is miserable, not enjoying the adventure at all, and Doctor Hassler, though enjoying himself, is not acting in an entirely rational way, either. Gerald and Muriel decide that, trapped as they are together and in love as they are, they are ready to get married, and since one of the quartet is the local curate, Reverend Eden, he can informally marry them. The banns won’t be read, but the marriage will count in the eyes of God, and they can perform the formal ceremony when they return. Doctor Hassler is reluctant to agree to this, but eventually gives in, and the marriage ceremony is performed in a fallen flower. (The marriage is not consummated, naturally, since it wasn’t a church marriage, but emotionally Gerald and Muriel now consider themselves a married couple). Then a storm comes, and the rain floods the garden. The group escapes the rising waters by climbing the garden wall, but on the wall they are attacked by Saldidae (shorebugs). In the middle of the fight they return to their normal size. Unfortunately, Doctor Hassler’s return is delayed; his age means that he recovers from exposure to Microgen much more slowly than the others. Muriel’s father grumbles over the propriety of her unorthodox wedding, but is soothed when they have a proper wedding performed. To commemorate their adventure Muriel and Gerald clip souvenirs from the garden for their wedding album.

If the preceding sounds like something which Isaac Asimov would have written, had he been writing in 1902, that’s because it is. The Adventures of a Micro-Man is an entertaining and mostly successful attempt to teach popular science, specifically domestic flora and fauna, via the vehicle of an adventure story. Bayly writes the story in a competent and professional manner, so that it reads easily, even to modern eyes, and neither the dialogue nor the plot feel dated. (The same cannot be said about the characterization). The ostensible plot of Micro-Man is the love story between Gerald and Muriel, but it is clear that Bayly’s heart was in his descriptions of plants and insects, which he describes colorfully and well. The message of the novel is, as the Reverend Eden says, “such is the lot of man when his science oversteps itself.” Bayly does portray being miniaturized as dangerous, but the novel feels more like a lark than a perilous trip. The descriptions of the insects are often as memorable as the one given above of the thistledown, but Bayly is more interested in playing up the marvelous rather than the horrific.

The Adventures of a Micro-Man is one of the best examples of Victorian science popularization in fiction. Science, during the mid- and late Victorian period, was often purveyed to the public through the popular press, both periodical and fictional. Reader engagement with these popular science articles, stories, and novels was often and perhaps usually active rather than passive, with the “diffusionist model,” of "science as the product of a discrete community of experiments whose findings trickle down to the untutored hoi polloi via the popular press," being “deeply flawed.”¹ Readers were often/usually enthusiastic in their consumption of popularized science, and writer-scientists would often wax complex about their pet scientific subjects—too complex for the modern reader, however. Grant Allen (author of a few series and novels listed on this site) was arguably the great “scientific popularizer” of the nineteenth century.² But Allen’s popularization took place via journalism. The fiction writers who tried to match Allen’s achievements generally produced lackluster, overtly didactic and instructional work. Bayly’s The Adventures of a Micro-Man stands out as arguably the most successful attempt at science popularization in fiction of the Victorian era.

The Adventures of a Micro-Man, even with its dated aspects, is both entertaining and instructional, and, if reprinted, would be popular today with a certain type of intelligent twelve- or thirteen-year-old.

Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

¹ Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, “Introduction,” in Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 3.

² Jonathan Smith, “Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, and the Dissemination of Darwin’s Botany,” in Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 285-304.