Volume 20, Number 18 · November 15, 1973
The Charms of H.G. Wells
By Noel Annan
H.G. Wells
by Norman MacKenzie, by Jeanne MacKenzie
Simon & Schuster, 487 pp., $10.00
Fifty years ago H. G. Wells strode confidently across the English literary landscape. He was coupled in the same breath with Shaw, he was a celebrity who could command with Arnold Bennett the maximum fee for a newspaper article, he was the hero of the new intelligentsia living in garden cities in the south of England and advocating vegetarianism and progressive schools, a Fabian who soared above blue books and did not scorn dreams and visions, the liberator of several generations of schoolboys, an artist whose vitality seemed to be restoring life to the popular Victorian novel, stretching back to Dickens with Mr. Polly and Mr. Lewisham, or surpassing Stevenson's romances with the Time Machine and Dr. Moreau. Wells appeared to be the sage of modernism, all the more agreeable because he discarded the robes and stage properties of the prophet, a man inspiring the new generation to sweep away the corrupt, effete, and stupid upper-class elite and replace them with rational rulers able to discover the scientific remedies for social disease.
Review, 3687 words
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