H. G. Wells wrote almost a hundred books, yet he is generally remembered for only a handful of them. He is known above all as a writer who heralded the future, yet throughout his life he clung to fixed attitudes from the Victorian past. He began his career as a draper's apprentice; by the age of forty-five he had secured an international reputation as the author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Kipps and TonoBungay; he went on to establish himself as an influential educator, polemicist, and sage. In this book John Batchelor offers a readable introduction to Wells's huge and varied output as a writer and thinker. He guides the reader through the whole oeuvre, and argues persuasively that at his best Wells was a great artist: a man with a remarkable, restless imagination (not limited, as many critics have implied, merely to his early romances), and with a coherent and responsible theory of fiction.
H. G. Wells wrote almost a hundred books, yet he is generally remembered for only a handful of them. He is known above all as a writer who heralded the future, yet throughout his life he clung to fixed attitudes from the Victorian past. He began his career as a draper's apprentice; by the age of forty-five he had secured an international reputation as the author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Kipps and TonoBungay; he went on to establish himself as an influential educator, polemicist, and sage. In this book John Batchelor offers a readable introduction to Wells's huge and varied output as a writer and thinker. He guides the reader through the whole oeuvre, and argues persuasively that at his best Wells was a great artist: a man with a remarkable, restless imagination (not limited, as many critics have implied, merely to his early romances), and with a coherent and responsible theory of fiction.
1. The romances of the 1890s: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The War of the Worlds; 2. The Edwardian achievement, I: Love and Mr Lewisham, Kipps, The First Men in the Moon, The War in the Air; 3. The Edwardian achievement, II: Tono-Bungay, Ann Veronica, The History of Mr Polly; 4. The decade of struggle: Mr Britling Sees it Through, Boon, 'prig' novels and discussion novels; 5. Wells in the modern world: Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island, The Bulpington of Blup, The Croquet Player, dualism and education.
In this book John Batchelor offers a readable introduction to Wells's huge and varied output as a writer and thinker.
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