This chapter turns its attention to the first years of the Great War. Commencing with a reading of James’s wartime correspondence, its first half charts how the aging author was tormented, in the latter stages of 1914, by the possibility that his life and works might be subjected to retroactive disavowal in light of the conflict he never saw coming. It then discusses two of James’s wartime works, The Middle Years (1917) and The Sense of the Past (1917), focusing on how these texts engage with and reflect upon the prospect of undoing and recasting formative experiences. In its second half, the chapter zooms out slightly and offers a broader investigation of the wartime critical climate within which James’s acts of creative self-interrogation took place. Noting that as the conflict raged on, authors and critics alike became caught up in debates about the purpose of reading in wartime, the chapter draws on Rebecca West’s reviews of James from 1915 and 1916 and analyses her Jamesian novel, The Return of the Solider (1918), to explore the psychological and ethical pressures that were placed on another form of counterfactual consolation: the world into which we can escape through fiction.

Via an analysis of H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, this chapter explores how novels adapted to accommodate the metropolitan spaces of London, and it argues that Wells’s novel links the financialization of the British economy and the cultural turn toward London to the emergence of a new novelistic poetics and to the development of a new novelistic character. Tono-Bungay narrates the rise and fall of Teddy Ponderevo’s financial empire, but the source of drama in the novel is more often the narrator’s inability to reconcile classical novelistic poetics with the logic of value production under finance capitalism and with his experiences in London. The narrator longs for a new mode of representation that can account for the largely imaginary and highly volatile value produced by the financial empire, and he finds inspiration for that new mode of representation in the urban spaces of London.

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).

Chapter 3 details the connection between the utopian novel and vegetarianism. It argues that vegetarianism plays an important role in the two most significant texts in the development of the genre in the late-nineteenth century: Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. It suggests that while H. G. Wells’s conflicted personal views on vegetarianism means that the subject is treated with a marked ambivalence, ultimately benefiting the fiction, the wholehearted endorsement of vegetarianism in Bellamy’s Equality is one element amongst several that reduces the text to little more than didactic screed. Here the important connection between women’s writing and vegetarianism and veganism is brought to the fore in a discussion of the British writer Mrs George Corbett and the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

After World War One, new institutions and gadgets gave reality to a changing landscape of public culture. Therefore, in this chapter, we explore applied science in the inter-war public realm. Society’s usage interacted with officials’ language as public and bureaucratic discussions of applied science intertwined. Talk about applied science connected intimately with an intense discussion of ‘modern civilisation’ to make sense of science too. Amidst anxiety, the separation of pure and applied became important to science’s standing. To some, the process by which scientific research led to a multitude of new gadgets was frighteningly dangerous. To others, science was exploited too slowly due to the historical inadequacy of British industry. Both branch of government and a cathedral of applied science, the Science Museum displayed linkages between science and technical wonders. Debates were conducted over the new radio service and in newspapers, and were contested by bishops as well as politicians.

Chapter 3 begins with a reading of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), a work that marks an epistemic shift in Naipaul’s thinking. The novel does for the plantation diaspora what Balzac did for France. After a careful reading of this triumphal novel, the chapter shows Naipaul’s fascination with modernist compositional features in his much-neglected Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963). Then, suddenly uncompleted mourning creeps in. The product of that deepening melancholic imagination is his “placid” and poetic The Mimic Men (1967). It is a compulsion towards aesthetic design, to qualities by which a work of art is judged, that take him to a very personal engagement with Englishness where Naipaul takes on the challenging discourse of Romanticism (a poetic register co-existing with the high point of British imperialism). In Wordsworth there is the memorable account of the poet meeting a leech gatherer; in The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul encounters his own version of the leech gatherer even as he begins to understand that “Englishness” was always a learning process for both the colonial and the colonized.

Often misread by policy analysts who oppose stem cell research, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau actually presents a balanced view of science, warning against unethical scientists but suggesting ways in which the creation of chimeras would be ethically acceptable. Wells’s novel articulates principles that foreshadow the conditions bioethicists today have proposed for research on human-non-human chimeras, research that could lead to advances in treating Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, organ transplants, and more. Wells’s relation to his mentor, Thomas Huxley, dramatizes the importance of reading literary works in historical perspective and sheds light on disciplinary specialization and the two-culture split.

British writer H. G. Wells was a major advocate for a universal declaration of human rights of the kind later passed in 1948. Wells paid much attention to the importance of knowledge for his era, more than found its way into the actual declaration. At this stage, an enhanced set of epistemic rights that strengthen existing human rights – as part of a fourth generation of human rights – is needed to protect epistemic actorhood in those four roles introduced in Chapter 5. Epistemic rights are already exceedingly important because of the epistemic intrusiveness of digital lifeworlds in Life 2.0, and they should also include a suitably defined right to be forgotten (that is, a right to have certain information removed from easy accessibility through internet searches). If Life 3.0 does emerge, we might also need a right altogether different from what is currently acknowledged as human rights, the right to exercise human intelligence to begin with. The required argument for the validity of the right to the exercise of human intelligence can draw on the secular meaning-of-life literature. I paint with a broad brush when it comes to the detailed content of proposed rights, offering them manifesto-style.

This chapter highlights four (often conflicting) ways in which the scientific, sociological, and literary discourse of the modernist period conceives of radio as constituting identity: by producing a national community, by enabling connections between nations, by extending the bodily nervous system, and by producing a specific kind of individual, the listener. It demonstrates that Woolf takes an active role in conceptualizing and negotiating the future of radio. The first section, ‘Radio Selves’, argues that Woolf’s representations of radio are much more aligned with the idea that radio is a vehicle for internationalism, and the idea that it extends the sensory capacity of the body, than with the conception of a national radio community. The second section considers Woolf’s construction of 'The Listener'. Through an analysis of archival documents about the formation of the BBC’s Listener Research Unit, it identifies resonances between Woolf’s depiction of a responsive audience in Between the Acts and statements by BBC producers promoting the listener’s active participation in the making of radio. The chapter concludes by reading Between the Acts as a utopian fantasy in which thoughts are perfectly communicable and individualities mingle and merge in the ether – a fantasy founded upon the connective power of radio.

All of the historicising of literary modernism in recent decades has brought scholars of literature to a point where the application of a simple test is warranted. We should ask, that is, whether the historical phenomena that made literary modernism what it was also extensively shaped the majority of literary practice delivered in a realist mode. The ‘modernismists’ amongst us must face an uncomfortable possibility: if modernism’s major causes can be found shaping the rest of the literary production of the period which we associate with modernism – that is, those works not commonly deemed modernist – then any intrinsic justification for categorising certain works as ‘modernist’ has disappeared. This chapter looks in detail at the impact of one of the established causes of literary modernism – the shift from individualism to collectivism in European politics during the late nineteenth century – on realist writing, to test the easy assumption that literary modernism was unique in being influenced by collectivist politics. It shows that the distinctiveness, self-consciousness, and sensitivity to the surrounding world that is conventionally ascribed to modernism is, at least, overstated.

Adam Roberts identifies the opposition between plain and excessive styles as a distinguishing feature in the history of science fiction. The chapter considers the rival origins of the genre in Verne and Wells and offers a comprehensive survey of twentieth- and twenty-first-century traditions. Roberts tracks the history of a pared-down, plain style that often runs counter to the excess and scientific detail of the content and sets it alongside a competing, more ambitious, ‘literary’ prose style that has increasingly come into the ascendancy.

Vagrant ‘loafers’ were a preoccupation of novelists and social reformers who saw them as emblematic of social and racial decline during the 1880s and 1890s. This chapter first examines the articles and book-length reports that sought to define and solve the problems of unemployment, inefficiency and vagrancy. These were underwritten by theories of degeneration, social Darwinism and eugenics, ideas that ensured that the vagrant poor were increasingly characterised in ‘scientific’ terms as a biological threat to society and the white ‘imperial’ race. The second half of the chapter examines how this anxiety was expressed in the slum fiction of Arthur Morrison and Margaret Harkness, and in particular how the portrayal of loafers in slum novels and social investigations shaped H. G. Wells’s first dystopia, The Time Machine (1895). Although the influence of social investigation has been noted, Wells’s engagement with the slum novel, and what he perceived to be its failings, has hitherto been overlooked.

This chapter puts Nineteen Eighty-Four in conversation with a literary predecessor who energized Orwell at the very root, H. G. Wells. Considering these two figures side by side, ‘Wells, Orwell, and the Dictator’ thinks, first, about how powerfully Wells had influenced Orwell and, equally, how deeply entangled the two writers were in their consideration of issues around freedom, the state, the individual, and the future. Even if they end up on opposite sides of the spectrum – Wells, a utopian who believed that a united world could leave humanity free, peaceful, and prosperous, and Orwell, an anti-utopian who saw in the trends of the twentieth century an image of humans obliterated by the mechanisms of power – the two share a set of preoccupations about power and the future that motivated their fiction and left a mark on the imaginative life of the twentieth century.

Chapter 1 examines the beginnings of human rights activism in the 1930s and 1940s. It starts with a discussion of the National Council of Civil Liberties, which engaged with the question of human rights but was too close to the Communist Party to embrace them wholeheartedly. The chapter then looks at wartime initiatives, notably the debate over a ‘New Declaration of the Rights of Man‘ launched by H. G. Wells in 1940 and the Atlantic Charter of 1941, before discussing the impact of the formation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Although there was no effective ‘human rights movement‘ in this period, some groups did explore the potential of human rights in their campaigning in the later 1940s. The chapter concludes with the Rev. Michael Scott, who shot to prominence by defending the rights of the Hereros of South West Africa (modern Namibia) at the UN. Scott, it is argued, represented a new kind of political activist: alive to the potential of human rights as a weapon for fighting racial oppression in the postwar world, and able to take advantage of the new international institutions of that world.

The ‘liberal hour’ of 1960s social reform is normally attributed to Labour party leadership (especially by Roy Jenkins) and to liberal Christian campaigning. This chapter challenges the latter, providing evidence for the key role of Humanists and atheists in leading campaigns for abortion law reform, homosexual law reforms, divorce law reform and euthanasia. It provides a general overview of the medical reform network amongst Humanists, plus three case studies: of Madeleine Simms’ attacks on the churches in the cause of abortion law reform; Eustace Chesser’s advocacy of widening sexual knowledge; and Harold Blackham’s inspirational leadership of campaigns for moral education to be added to the English school curriculum in religious education. What emerges is a new understanding of the ideological foundations for secular reform of medical and moral law in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter takes up the friends and enemies of the liberal world order of 1919, beginning with the anti-liberal provocations of the postwar avant-garde. At its center it focuses on the ambivalent relationship of Leonard and Virginia Woolf to liberal internationalism. I propose a new reading of the political Virginia Woolf as a writer devoted to rethinking liberal governance, rather than a critic writing “against empire,” and read her breakthrough anti-bildungsroman, Jacob’s Room, as an extended inquiry into liberal governmental order. I put Woolf’s approach to liberal government in dialogue with H. G. Wells’s World State fiction and his Outline of History, a major intellectual event of the postwar period.