Preface and acknowledgements

Summary

Wells was a novelist, a romancer, a prophet, a polemicist and a mass of contradictions; a writer who heralded the future but clung to fixed attitudes from the past. At the turn of the century he predicted the invention of the tank, yet during the Second World War he was still engaged in an essentially Victorian struggle between religion and science. Having established a reputation as a major writer between 1895 and 1910 he secured for himself a second, far more influential, reputation as an educator in the 1920s and 1930s following the success of The Outline of History. Yet some of his best novels have never been reprinted and discussion of his writings tends to be focused exclusively on his early work. Wells acted in unconscious complicity with his adversaries; he had a theory of fiction which was coherent and responsible, and which underlies his best work, but he failed to defend it as vigorously as he could have done. This book is a work of advocacy; Wells is a great artist, and those of us who enjoy his work need not feel ashamed of the pleasure that we take in reading him.