Other Literary Forms
Beginning with The Time Machine: An Invention (1895) and ending with The War in the Air, and Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted (1908), H. G. Wells wrote nine fantastic, often futuristic novels, which he called scientific romances. Works like The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901), which now fall under the rubric of science fiction, earned Wells the informal place that he shares with Jules Verne as a cofounder of that genre. Wells also wrote more than thirty realistic novels, of which the three most famous are Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905), Tono-Bungay (1908), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). His fiction became increasingly speculative and utopian (or dystopian) after 1920. Wells, assisted by specialists, wrote three encyclopedic works devoted to the history of the universe, to biology, and to economics. The first, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (1920), became a staple of home libraries throughout the world.
Achievements
George Orwell declared that the twenty-five years between The Time Machine and The Outline of History should bear Wells’s name. In fact, the reputation of H. G. Wells gave rise to a term, “Wellsian,” whose mention conveys “the shape of things to come.” Perhaps critic Walter Allen summed up best Wells’s virtues and their defects:I still think [Wells] had the largest natural talent of any English writer of the century. He did not always use it well, but he was a positive cornucopia of ideas. Almost certainly he will look much greater in the future than he does now.
Wells anticipated the League of Nations with his World State and forecast the atom bomb thirty years before Hiroshima.
Other literary forms
H. G. Wells’s short stories appear in several collections, including The Stolen Bacillus, and Other Incidents (1895), Tales of Space and Time (1899), The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories (1911), and A Door in the Wall, and Other Stories (1911). In The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (1920) and Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain Since 1866 (1934), Wells extended his literary range. His sociological essays include A Modern Utopia (1905) and Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945).
Achievements
H. G. Wells is best known for his science-fiction novels, several of which have been adapted as popular films. A socialist and Fabian, he was a spokesman for women’s rights and international peace movements, for which he wrote books of advocacy in essay and fictional form. Wells was also an effective novelist of social satire and comedy.
Discussion Topics
To what extent were the early novels of H. G. Wells aimed at undermining the utopian works of such writers as Edward Bellamy and William Morris?
Does Wells make clear the distinction between the profession of science, which he admired, and its practitioners?
Is the social analysis in Tono-Bungay still effective a century after it was written?
Is the tone in Wells’s novels often unnecessarily pedagogical?
Wells once wrote that he would rather be considered a journalist than an artist. What aspects of Wells’s work seem more journalistic than artistic?
Bibliography
Batchelor, John. H. G. Wells. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985. An important examination of Wells’s work. Includes an index and a bibliography.
Bates, H. E. The Modern Short Story. Boston: The Writer, Inc., 1941. Himself one of England’s finest short-story writers, Bates accords high rank to Wells in the genre and rebuts charges that Wells’s style lacks beauty. Calls Wells a “literary [Thomas] Edison.”
Bergonzi, Bernard. The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of...
(This entire section contains 987 words.)
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the Scientific Romances. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961. Still the most knowledgeable account of the remarkable affinity of Wells’s early fantasies, including his short stories, with the search for new worlds and behavior that characterized the turn of the century. Bergonzi, in a long third chapter, “The Short Stories,” links “The Country of the Blind” and “The Door in the Wall” to Freudian-Jungian tendencies in Wells.
Coren, Michael. The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells. London: Bloomsbury, 1992.
Costa, Richard Hauer. H. G. Wells. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1985. A sympathetic survey of Wells’s career and influence, with an emphasis on the major novels in the context of literary traditions before and after Wells. Includes a chronology, a review of contemporary trends in Wells criticism, notes, an annotated bibliography, and an index.
Costa, Richard Hauer. “Wells and the Cosmic Despair.” The Nation (September, 12, 1966): First essay on “The Country of the Blind” to compare the original version (1904), written in his thirties, with a revision done in his seventies. Wells changes the ending to permit the hero Nunez and his blind lover Medina to escape together to the sighted—the civilized—world, only to find that the woman, her life saved by Nunez’s vision, prefers the simplicity of the valley of the blind to the fearfully complicated Nunez world “that may be beautiful but terrible to see.” Wells’s cosmic pessimism may thus be symbolized.
Foot, Michael. H. G.: The History of Mr. Wells. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995. A wonderfully written, though impressionistic, biography. Foot, a socialist politician himself, is particularly interested in Wells as a founder of British socialism.
Hammond, J. R. An H. G. Wells Chronology. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. A guide to Wells’s life and work. Includes bibliographical references and an index.
Hammond, J. R. An H. G. Wells Companion. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979. Part 1 describes Wells’s background and his literary reputation. Part 2 is an alphabetical listing and annotation of every title Wells published. Part 3 provides succinct discussions of his short stories; part 4 contains a brief discussion of book-length romances, and part 5 addresses individual novels. Part 6 is a key to characters and locations. Includes an appendix on film versions of Wells’s fiction and a bibliography. An indispensable tool for the Wells scholar.
Hammond, John. A Preface to H. G. Wells. New York: Longman, 2001. A sound and concise introduction to Wells, with biographical information and critical analysis.
Haynes, Roslynn D. H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future. London: Macmillan, 1980. This is a thorough study of the influence of science on Wells’s fiction and sociological tracts. It shows how science helped Wells to achieve an analytical perspective on the problems of his time, from art to philosophy. Includes bibliography and index.
Huntington, John, ed. Critical Essays on H. G. Wells. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Essays on his major writings, including Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly as well as discussions of his science fiction and his treatment of social change, utopia, and women. Includes an introduction but no bibliography.
Lynn, Andrea. Shadow Lovers: The Last Affairs of H. G. Wells. Westview, 2002. A lively, but rather narrowly focused, account of Wells’s late-life relationships with three fascinating women.
MacKenzie, Norman, and Jeanne MacKenzie. The Life of H. G. Wells: The Time Traveler. Revised. London: Hogarth, 1987. The most detailed scholarly biography of Wells. The MacKenzies do an excellent job of covering the entire life.
Murray, Brian. H. G. Wells. New York: Continuum, 1990. Literary criticism effectively set into a biographical framework. Generally insightful but marred by an unfounded assertion that Wells was a racist.
Rainwater, Catherine. “Encounters with the ‘White Sphinx’: Poe’s Influence on Some Early Works of H. G. Wells.” English Literature in Transition 26, no. 1 (1983). Wells follows Edgar Allan Poe in blurring the distinction between his characters and their imaginings. Rainwater demonstrates Wells’s debt with “The Red Room,” a Wellsian ghost story which, like Poe’s stories, depends upon a narrator’s altered state of consciousness for its effects.
Rinkel, Gene K., and Margaret E. Rinkel. The Picshuas of H. G. Wells: A Burlesque Diary. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. “Picshuas” is the term Wells used for the sketches and cartoons he used to draw for his second wife, Jane. The sketches are rendered in this book, conveying the dynamics of their relationship and providing readers with fascinating insights into Wells’ psyche and personal life. This work serves as an excellent addition to biographies about Wells’s, and as a complement to his own writing.
Smith, David C. H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal—A Biography. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. A scholarly biography of Wells, covering every aspect of his life and art. Includes very detailed notes and bibliography.
Wells, G. P., ed. H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Edited by Wells’s son, this volume includes writings about his personal and sexual relationships and how they influenced his life and work.
Wells, H. G. Experiment in Autobiography. 2 vols. London: Gollancz, 1934. Like most authors of autobiographies, Wells is sympathetic toward his subject, but these volumes are far more candid than most such works. Any serious study of Wells must start with the autobiography.
West, Anthony. H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life. New York: Random House, 1984. West, Wells’s illegitimate son by Rebecca West, provides a personal yet balanced and judicious account of his father’s life and career.