Amory threw his coat and hat on the floor, loosened his collar, and took a Wells novel at random from the shelf. ‘Wells is sane,’ he thought…
(young Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, page 113)
1890s
1895 The Time Machine – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers that the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade, landing in Surrey and advancing on London, destroying everything with their Heat Rays and Black Smoke, a gripping account told by a terrified survivor
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come – set in the same London of the future described in The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love but descend into poverty and so experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1900s
1900 Love and Mr Lewisham – how the promising working class student Lewisham goes off the rails and ruins his life by falling in love with the uneducated pretty young assistant of a fraudulent ‘medium’, ending with them living in a poky flat and she has a baby
1901 The First Men in the Moon – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites who inhabit it
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul – long, laboured account of boyhood, teens and twenties of the dim protagonist, Arthur Kipps, who escapes from apprenticeship in a soul-destroying haberdasher shop when he inherits a fortune, only to find himself forced to choose between two lovers, his uneducated childhood sweetheart or his ambitious, arty, wood-carving teacher
1906 In the Days of the Comet – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 Tono-Bungay – George Ponderevo’s long account of his boyhood then rise to fortune on the coat tails of his fraudulent huckster uncle Edward, packed with negative analyses of contemporary England and upsetting descriptions of his unhappy marriage and love affairs
1909 Ann Veronica – sympathetic portrait of a young woman rebelling against her conventional father and trying to make her way in London who falls into the clutches of a predatory blackmailer before – disappointingly – falling in love with an intelligent he-man who elopes with her to the continent
1910s
1910 The History of Mr Polly – the funniest of the social comedies, following the mishaps of his cheerful protagonist, Alfred Polly, who, characteristically, marries the wrong woman, endures increasing misery trying to make a go of a small-town haberdashery, until he breaks free and finds happiness with the jolly landlady of a country pub
1911 The New Machiavelli – supposedly a novel about contemporary politics which, in reality, is another defence of free love, a long justification by politician Richard Remington of his decision to abandon his wife and political career in order to run off to the Continent with young graduate Isabel Oliver (transparently based on Wells’s own elopement with the young author Amber Reeves)
1914 The World Set Free – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via the stories of a number of characters who are central to events
About Wells
1920s – Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (1) – Virginia Woolf strongly criticised Wells as one of the Edwardian ‘materialists’ who she was reacting against, three famous essays gathered in this selection, namely Modern Fiction (1919), Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923) and Character in Fiction (1924).
1932 – Stamboul Train by Graham Greene where Wells is satirised in the character of Quin Savory, a popular, middle-brow novelist who is depicted as a ‘populist vulgarian’.
1932 – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, who in letters and notes explained that his dystopia was to some extent a satirical rejection of Wells’s optimistic utopias
1982 The Culminating Ape by Peter Kemp – fascinating, if rather dogged, examination of recurring themes and images in Wells’s writing
2011 A Man of Parts by David Lodge – novel about Wells in old age during the Second World War looking back over his career, focusing mainly on his numerous affairs ,with (as in all Lodge) lots of graphic sex
Books & Boots 