A Complete Exposé of this Notorious Literary Humbug

Abstract

Then first we have to realise that this Mr. H.G. Wells, in spite of the inexplicable prestige he has contrived for himself, is an individual of the lowest extraction and the most haphazard education. His origins are too well known for him to conceal, so that he has the impudence to make a merit of them, and his earlier tales and sketches were concerned chiefly with the vulgarest social types. They were something after the manner of Dickens, but Dickens was by far the better educated man. Wells was the son of a bankrupt father, a gardener and professional bowler who had taken to business and failed, and of a mother who consequently had to return to the domestic service in which she had begun her career after the bankruptcy of her father — a post-master who had not kept up with the times when the railways put post-horses out of business.’

‘The Betterave Papers’, The Cornhill Magazine no. 965 (July 1945) pp. 354–63.