Suburban Gardens

Abstract

One of the dominant themes of Wells’s fiction is change. His own life was so much subject to transformation as he disentangled himself from one limiting set of circumstances after another that for the first 30 years of his existence change was the leading motif of his world. As he expressed it in his novel Tono-Bungay: ‘One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one’s stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples.’³¹

But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it.

H. G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly