H G Wells’s The Sea Lady and the Siren Call of the Middlebrow

Abstract

H G Wells’s obituary in The Times states that he was ‘never anything but successful as a writer, and at one time he was possibly the most widely read author in the world’.¹ His obituary in the Times Literary Supplement describes him, as an ‘educator’, who ‘spoke more clearly than any other man to the youth of the world’.² Such accolades may, when taken together, offer an insight into Wells’s creative vision, and the choices he made to be both artistically and socially viable. This chapter will examine this dual purpose in relation to The Sea Lady (1902), a work that depicts the influence of both the Victorian popular taste for the fey and the gothic, while also looking forward to many of the concerns that would come to be associated with modernism: the dissatisfaction with the direction of modern life, in particular the commodification of human beings, the desire for a greater spiritual and sexual freedom, and the move away from the traditional novelistic conclusion to reflect the ongoing nature of life. It will consider Wells as an author driven by his social ideals to reach as wide a readership as possible, and to find a means to consider complex political and cultural tropes in a way that would be popular, but would also be artistically sound. Through a text that was both entertaining and through its depiction of the fantastic, apparently removed from the everyday existence of his reading public, Wells sought to seduce his readers to consider the possibility of what his heroine describes as ‘better dreams’.³ The middlebrow then becomes for Wells a potential siren call, with which to entice his readership to consider another way of life.