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  • Chapter 6 - H. G. Wells

  • from Part II - 1900–1945
  • Edited by Rachel Potter, University of East Anglia, Matthew Taunton, University of East Anglia
  • Book:
    The British Novel of Ideas
    Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024, pp 120-133

  • Summary

    H. G. Wells did not openly identify his fiction as a contribution to the ‘novel of ideas’ until the publication of Babes in the Darkling Wood in 1940. And yet, he arguably did more than any other writer of his time to shape this tradition in Britain and to distinguish its trajectory and priorities from that of the dominant ‘modernist’ tradition. This chapter explores how Wells understood the difference between his own work and that of peers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf the difference between the novel as a disseminator of social, political ideas and the novel as Art. It then investigates the significance of ‘dialogue’ and ‘exposition’ to Wells as a means of embedding these ideas in fiction, moving from Ann Veronica (1909) through lesser known works such as The Undying Fire: A Contemporary Novel (1919), to The Shape of Things to Come (1933).