Nobody would have been more surprised at the current revival of interest in H. G. Wells than Wells himself. “They’re as dead as mutton, you know,” he cheerfully told Somerset Maugham one day while stroking a volume of the Atlantic Edition of his complete works. “They all dealt with matters of topical interest and now that the matters aren’t topical any more they’re unreadable.”
The Second World War gave added force to this offhand remark. “In the public mind,” Anthony West, Wells’s illegitimate son by Rebecca West, has noted, “he [now] stood for everything that the experience of total war and the fascist years had shown to be facile and false in liberal meliorism.” Even Wells himself appeared to jettison the ebullient optimism of his youth at war’s end, arguing in Mind at the End of Its Tether that “the end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.” The inevitable critical eclipse quickly followed Wells’s death in 1946. His serious novels were allowed to go out of print, dismissed by fashionable critics as artistically inferior to the hastily written scientific romances, while his papers ended up at the University of Illinois, there to join the literary remains of other forgotten Edwardians.
Yet a modest Wells revival is apparently under way, one which began with the Virago Press reissue of Ann Veronica, Wells’s 1909 novel about the sexual emancipation of a young woman. It picked up speed when the Hogarth Press
