Wells and the Novel

Abstract

In his influential essay ‘Technique as Discovery’ Mark Schorer observes: ‘as James grows for us … Wells disappears’.¹ This assessment is based on current critical attitudes towards Wells as a novelist. During his lifetime his novels enjoyed wide popularity but since his death, while his science fiction and short stories continue to be widely read, his reputation as a novelist has been almost totally eclipsed. He himself had no illusions concerning the transitory nature of his fame:

So far as I am concerned I find that thinking about the qualities of my work and my place in the literary world, or the world at large, an unwholesome and unprofitable employment. I have been keenly interested in the discussion of a number of questions, I have been a haphazard and pampered prophet, I have found it amusing and profitable to write stories and — save for an incidental lapse or so — I have never taken any very great pains about writing. I am outside the hierarchy of conscious and deliberate writers altogether. I am the absolute antithesis of Mr James Joyce.²

My conviction is that Wells the novelist, not merely Wells the scientific romancer, or Wells the prophet, or Wells the educator, or Wells the antiutopian utopian, or Wells the thinker, or Wells the saviour, will have his day. If it be not now, yet it will come.

(Robert Bloom, Anatomies of Egotism)

Circumstances have made me think a good deal at different times about the business of writing novels, and what it means, and is, and may be; and I was a professional critic of novels long before I wrote them.

(H. G. Wells, The Contemporary Novel)