Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture by Simon J. James (review)

H. G. Wells has long occupied a curious place in the literary history of the early twentieth century, positioned as an extremely popular yet myopic outsider whose seeming miscalculation of the post-1910 literary zeitgeist acted in a directly inverse relation to his uncannily accurate technological predictions of the world to come. Wells’s reputation as a literary innovator in this period sunk in opposite relation to his rising stature as a futurologist, a shift whose repercussions for the author’s legacy are, as both Roger Luckhurst and Steven McLean have recently noted, still largely evident in the ways his work is positioned, studied, and debated in the contemporary academy.¹ As Wells’s 1890s scientific romances have risen to increasing prominence in fin-de-siècle studies and syllabi, his late-career textbooks and instrumentalist utopian fictions seem, like Henry James’s plays, Francis Galton’s science fiction, and George Eliot’s poetry, increasingly poised to join the ranks of the great unread.

Simon J. James’s Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture seeks neither to contest the more positive critical assessments of Wells’s early romances nor to aesthetically legitimate the later output— indeed, James asserts in his preface, “Many of the books that Wells wrote are not, simply, very good” (x). Instead, James aims to shape our understanding of this shift, presenting what some might see as a decline in quality or inventiveness as instead the result of Wells’s deliberate, if not wholly successful, choice to divorce his work from the ideological trappings he associated with literary fiction. And far from being a product of mid-career pessimism, James demonstrates, Wells’s skepticism about the aesthetic and the Arnoldian concept of culture was in place from the early 1890s and went on to form a unifying keynote in what might otherwise seem like wholly disparate phases of the author’s career. These convictions won him little favor with his more self-consciously literary contemporaries such as Arthur Machen, who, writing in 1911, negatively compared the experience of reading Wells with the perusal of the Second Book of Euclid: “It is logical and angular; and to the soul of men logic and right angles enthroned in places where they have no business to reign are utter and final destruction, misery, and death. Why? Chiefly because they deny mystery; and mystery is the soul of all life and the salt of all life.”² By the end of James’s impressively comprehensive and wide-ranging study, we understand why Machen’s beloved “mystery” was anathema to an increasingly desperate Wells, terrified that the lack of logical angularity in contemporary social thought, education, and literary fiction was fast pushing humanity to the brink of global catastrophe. The monograph proceeds with an admirable range and rigor that manages to find a place, however fleeting, for almost every one of Wells’s dauntingly large body of novels and a significant portion of the nonfiction. Readers will be hard pressed to find a more conscientious and well-traveled guide through the multiple byways and occasional dead ends of Wells’s prodigious literary output.

James divides his study into five chapters, each devoted to a different phase and corresponding genre of Wells’s career. The first examines the imaginative impact of the 1870 Education Act and its corresponding expansion of the reading public on the young Wells, showing the writer to be convinced of the democratic potential of mass literacy while deeply equivocal about high culture and its dangerous ability to divert the energy and attention required for social reform into sterile solipsism. The key example of this suspicion and eventual antipathy lies in Wells’s well-documented rift with Henry James, dutifully recounted by James with a clarity and detail that will be immensely useful to students hitherto unaware of the relationship between the...