David Y. Hughes
Surfing the Intertext
William J. Scheick, ed. The Critical Response to H.G. Wells. Critical Responses in
Arts and Letters, Number 17. Greenwood Press (800-225-5800), 1995. xvi+194. $55.00.
This year's centennial of The Time Machine will be followed in 1996 by the
half-centennial of Wells's death. A Wells retrospective is timely. Scheick is a
programmatic editor, as I shall show, but it would be difficult to find another with his
combination of general publishing experience and special familiarity with the several
stages of Wells's literary career. Scheick's overall knowledge of Wells was won by
co-editing H.G. Wells: A Reference Guide (1987), the standard directory of all
manner of Wellsiana year by year from 1895 through 1984. Specifically on the early Wells,
Scheick has portions of two of his recent studies, Fictional Structure and Ethics: The
Turn-of-the-Century English Novel (1990) and The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of
the Century (1994). At the other end of Wells's career comes the book that made
Scheick's name among Wells scholars in the first place, The Splintering Frame: The
Later Fiction of H.G. Wells (1984), which articulates the audacious thesis (still
unorthodox) that Wells in his late years was "a remarkable artist and a truly
transitional figure in the development from Victorian to contemporary fiction."1
Scheick introduces the present volume with a concise 17-page history of the critical
response to Wells. This efficient plan, by presenting the critical reactions, necessarily
outlines the writing career. Also, since Scheick deals with a full century by and about
Wells, he stretches Wells's early and middle periods beyond their usual critical
delimitations, bringing the early period past the scientific romances and up to 1905 and
the middle period far past the generally recognized major novels and up to 1919, just
prior to The Outline of History, while still leaving over 25 years for the last
period, plus another 50 years for the posthumous period, "Wells Redivivus." More
about the "Introduction" below. The body of the book is not arranged in strict
accord with these four periods. Wells is treated in chronological order, title by title,
but the commentary is subjoined irrespective of date. For example, the only commentary on The
Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is "redivivus" commentary excerpted from
Bernard Bergonzi's The Early H.G. Wells (1960). There are altogether 23 pieces of
criticism of from 1 to 20 pages each, and an excerpt from Experiment in Autobiography
fore and aft--a nice touch, giving Wells the first and last word. The selected Wells
titles get one or two essays or reviews apiece, beginning with The Wonderful Visit--unaccountably,
The Time Machine gets no exclusive commentary--and concluding with the relations
of Brynhild (1937) and Dolores (1938) to Schopenhauer and Spengler, as
excerpted from The Splintering Frame. In the interval, the commentary involves
more or less all of the major and a good deal of the minor fiction, though regrettable
exceptions are numerous (among others, The War in the Air, Mr. Britling Sees It
Through, The Shape of Things to Come, and above all any of Wells's numerous volumes
of short stories). A list of supplementary criticism published between 1956 and 1994 and
the index round out the book. The supple mentary list reinforces a suspicion that Scheick
can be simply arbitrary. It includes borderline entries like Stephen Gill's exercise in
tertiary criticism,2 The Scientific Romances of H.G. Wells: A Critical
Study (1975), and ignores some standard references such as Suvin and Philmus's
H.G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction (1977) and several more recent critiques and
collections by the likes of Peter Kemp, Robert Crossley, and Patrick Parrinder and
Christopher Rolfe. As to the index, it is indispensable because a number of works--e.g., The
Time Machine, Love and Mr. Lewisham, The First Men in the Moon, Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole
Island--are handled under scattered heads other than their own titles.
Scheick's selections are preponderantly recent and reflect a specific critical bias.
The last comparable collection was Patrick Parrinder's survey, H.G. Wells: The
Critical Heritage (1973), a chronological selection of reviews and criticism by
Wells's contemporaries. Scheick's collection, according to the "Series Foreword"
by Cameron Northouse, seems to promise much the same general plan enlarged to accommodate
some proportion of later criticism. "The focus [of each volume] is basically
historical," Northouse writes, entailing "a strong representation of the major
reviews and articles that have collectively produced the author's...critical
reputation." But then comes an escape clause that permits "new essays on areas
that may not have been adequately dealt with" (xiii). This is Scheick's bolt-hole.
The collection is short compared to Parrinder's, having just 153 pages of body commentary.
Of these 153 pages, 63 are printed for the first time, and another 42 postdate 1980; that
is, 41% of the collective assemblage is hot off the press and another 28% is not much
older. Scheick's judgment in front-loading so blatantly is further suspect (in my opinion
it misses the mark) when 3 essays--38 pages--are given to a former graduate student of
his, Catherine Rainwater, who is not otherwise widely published, thus handing over to her
25% of the showing of what has "collectively produced" (or presumptively will
produce) Wells's critical reputation. On the other hand, certainly newness is a factor in
(market) value, and I shall come back to two or three of the new essays which by
themselves would be worth the price of the book.
The disproportionate length of Rainwater's contributions is consistent with the bias of
Scheick's "Introduction," which is already succinctly conveyed by its subtitle,
"H.G. Wells and the Literate Subconscious." Scheick remarks: "this book
presents the reflections of various Sniffers" (sniffers of influence); or, more
formally, "this commentary collectively traces the history of Wells's reputation from
1895 to 1994 by featuring the theme of influence in the criticism of his work," and,
"the historical review of commentary on Wells's writings in this volume celebrates
authors in communion with each other" (3). Rainwater concurs, having stated elsewhere
that "[modern] writers and critics are not concerned with old-fashioned questions
about `sources,' but with how the `encapsulated' or subsumed material and the text within
which it appears together comprise an intertextual event."3
Accordingly, she seeks single-mindedly in all three of her essays--to the exclusion even
of other purely literary forces--to uncover an early Wells dominated by Poe, a middle-late
Wells engaged in re-visioning Poe, and this mature Wells passing Poe along seemingly via The
Outline--into two or three short stories by Ellen Glasgow (who gets the last essay of
the trio mostly to herself). For Rainwater, no outside force seriously rivals literary
intertextuality. For example, she mentions Wells's "Darwin-influenced notions"
for the sole apparent purpose of referring them to Poe by remarking without amplification
that Poe and Darwin "coexist most sympathetically" in the early Wells's
devolutionary thought (see p. 82 and note 14). Viewing Wells purely as Poe's repository
and re-former and conduit, Rainwater practices the theory Scheick intentionally or
unintentionally conveys, namely, that literary history is nothing but the history
of "authors in communion"--no matter Wells's manifold extraliterary sources and
intentions.
Scheick is not a meticulous editor. I leave aside many instances of slips like
"strangest" for "strongest" (25), "urbanity" for
"inurbanity" (53), "strangely" for "strongly" (62), or
"cultural" for "centurial" (73). What is remarkable in view of
Scheick's "communion of authors," is his penchant for muddling dates, often by
conflating them. For example, in the "Introduction," he conflates two reviews
only three years apart but, in the case of Rebecca West, tantamount to a lifetime. Scheick
writes:
In an essay reprinted in this collection, Rebecca West (Cicely Fairfield) in effect
suggests why Marriage [1912] was so tepidly received. This review, which
approvingly situates Wells among continental realists and naturalists, occasioned the
first meeting between West and Wells. Their subsequent liaison (1913-23) influenced...The
Research Magnificent [1915]. (8)
The review Scheick reprints is the Research review. Somehow he has it mixed up
with the Marriage review, which led to the famous liaison. Somehow, further, he
forgets that the realists and naturalists are in the Research--not the Marriage--review,
and he gets West's drift all wrong. Far from approving, she despises the realists and
naturalists, Tolstoy and Zola ("not clean about love") and instead aligns Wells
with Cervantes and Dostoevsky, writers who know that "the magic force of an idea
depends upon its nakedness" (112). This in 1915, when the liaison had full sway and
Rebecca was basking in the glow of her portrait in Research as "the
wild-haired Amanda of infinite delights" (113), in no way resembles her view of Wells
in 1912, when they had yet to meet and she called him "the Old Maid among
novelists."4
After the "Introduction," the problems with dating multiply because, to begin
with, they inhere in the book's physical format. Not only may the commentary on a given
work be of any date, contemporary or "redivivus," but (in accord with the usual
but not invariable practice of the "Critical Responses" series), whatever the
date may be, none is supplied, except the date of the work criticized. The commentary is
printed without annotation of any sort. Critics separated by up to a hundred years may be
yoked together, with only the acknowledgments at the front of the book to show it. At the
same time, any name or date absent in the commentary itself is invariably supplied, e.g.,
"[William Shakespeare's] Hamlet [1601]" (112). Who can be the intended
reader? Whoever it is, the information is not necessarily reliable. For example, in the
first sentence of the first selection, from Experiment in Autobiography, brackets
(compensating for Wells's context) misplace the master of Uppark, a Regency rake of the
1820s, as a late Victorian: "Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, like many of his class and
time [the 1880s], had been a free-thinker." Other time-slips, more or less trivial,
include acknowledging but never printing an 1895 commentary; printing an unacknowledged
1908 commentary, which consequently remains undated; and misprinting "1892" for
"1902" twice (61) in an essay by John Reed which argues that Wells's The Sea
Lady is a piracy of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea, in part because the
latter was enjoying a London production in 1902, the year Wells published.
But now Scheick's combined inattention to dating and preference for Sniffers positively
compels me to consider a pair of good "old-fashioned questions about 'sources.'"
The first work treated, The Wonderful Visit (1895), gets two short paragraphs
from a contemporary review pointing out that the plots of Wells's novel and Grant Allen's The
British Barbarians are strangely similar. That is all; the next entry passes on to The
Invisible Man. The inference is wide open that Wells lifted the plot of The
Wonderful Visit. But the facts are 1) that Wells published in October, Allen in
November, and 2) that when Wells sent Allen a copy of The Wonderful Visit upon
publication, Allen replied lamenting that The British Barbarians, soon to be
published, has "a very similar idea, and some scenes so absurdly similar that I am
sure to be accused of plagiarism." But, he assured Wells, he had written the book six
years earlier. All this was noted almost 30 years ago in an article of mine that Scheick
has misconstrued.5
What chance of such distortion twice? Incredibly, the treatment of Kipps
(1905) is a virtual replication. A brief excerpt from a contemporary review stands alone.
It reveals that plot entanglements, character delineation, and displacement of
conventional class obstacles that one might think peculiar to Kipps are all to be
found in remarkably similar form in a comedy by R.C. Carton (pen name of Richard Claude
Critchett), entitled Mr. Hopkinson, which was then enjoying a successful run. Here again
are the conditions for piracy and here again no word to the contrary. But the facts turn
out to be 1) that the first- night review of Hopkinson appeared in the Times
of February 22, 1905, whereas Kipps had begun serialization in the Pall Mall Magazine
with the January number, and 2) that the plot similarities that Kipps shares with
Hopkinson already existed in the manuscript of The Wealth of Mr. Waddy, the
massive ur-Kipps that Wells composed between 1898 and 1903 and withheld from
publication during his lifetime.6
Neither of these reviews charges anyone with theft, really, and that implication is due
to Scheick's forgetting that similarities between two simultaneous literary works may be
coincidental--or may reflect the same currents in the same social matrix--until proven
otherwise. However, most of the reprinted essays are more substantial than these two and
aim at something more than a startle reflex. Among the best of those that are not already
reprinted in Parrinder are the anonymous "The Ideas of H.G. Wells" (1908), a
conservative's trenchant criticism of Wells's science and politics; a contemporary review
signed "F.C.F.S." of A Modern Utopia, sympathetic but doubtful of
Wells's efforts to safeguard the integrity of the individual in utopia; an excerpt from
William Bellamy's The Novels of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy: 1890-1910 (1971)
strenuously defending the usually downrated In the Days of the Comet; H.L.
Mencken's review of The History of Mr. Polly; Arnold Bennett's review of The
New Machiavelli; and, at the end, an excerpt from Wells's "The Contemporary
Novel" (1911). (The later fiction is treated mostly in Rainwater's and Scheick's
selections and in the previously unpublished contributions.) Unfortunately, limitation of
space or editorial bias seriously truncates several even of these rather few essays. For
example, Bellamy favorably compares the portrayal of the apocalyptic pastoralization
wrought by the green gas in Comet to the often praised portrayal of the emergent
pastures of sunrise in The First Men in the Moon. This comparison is cut out,
leaving the generalizations it supports--of a therapeutic trend in the Edwardian novel--to
fend for themselves. Scheick's own excerpt from The Splintering Frame, condensed
and cut, is hard to follow, especially since his critical grounds are set out at the
beginning of the book, whereas the excerpt is from the end.
The new selections (ruling out Rainwater on Glasgow as peripheral) are all three of
fresh interest, and among them they examine aspects of the early, the middle, and the
later Wells. The authors of course are Sniffers. John Reed in "H.G. Wells and Mrs
Humphry Ward" investigates a literary connection, in itself somewhat faded, which
goes far towards clarifying the coincidence of the didactic and the romantic in Wells's
early to middle years; Janet Gabler-Hover in "H.G. Wells's and Henry James's Two
Ladies" grounds her comparison of Meanwhile and The Portrait of a Lady
in feminist psychosexual portraits of the two men; and Allan Chavkin in "Mr. Sammler's
War of the Planets" brings remembered aspects of Wells as elderly world planner and
Wells as young romantic into the postwar and Vietnam eras by means of the fragmented
vision of Saul Bellow.
Reed has two modest contributions. Both involve The Sea Lady, more or less.
One, excerpted from The Natural History of H.G. Wells (1982), links The Sea
Lady to Ibsen; the other, the new essay, links this romance and several of Wells's
succeeding novels to Mrs. Humphry Ward. The evidence of Ward's influence in The Sea
Lady is airtight, and the case for Ibsen's presence is strong though circumstantial;
but for Reed the point is that comparison shows Wells is "responsive" to his
sources rather than primarily "assimilative" of them.7 Thus, to
give the barest gist of the Ibsen-Sea Lady correspondence, Ellida in The Lady
from the Sea forgoes the love of a romantic mariner and chooses a marriage of order,
duty, and service, but Wells's Chatteris "responds" by choosing to swim to his
death for the love of a mermaid; or, putting it symbolically, Ellida asks that a mermaid
be painted into a seascape, beached and dying, meanwhile thinking her unromantic marriage
sufficient because she chose it freely, but Chatteris "responds" by renouncing
worldly things for the passionate sea.
In his second and newly printed essay, Reed makes two claims: that Wells frequently
engaged Mrs Humphry Ward's fiction of political and social stasis as "opposite
idea,"8 (often as embodied in Marcella, 1894), and that,
sadly, "the trajectory of Wells's career resembles Mrs Ward's" (108). The first
claim is secured by quotations from Experiment in Autobiography and from several
of Wells's novels of the first 15 years after 1900, notably The Sea Lady and The
New Machiavelli (1910). The theme of these novels, said Wells, is "the harsh
incompatibility of wide public interests with the high, swift rush of imaginative
passion--with considerable sympathy for the passion"; and he added that in The
New Machiavelli "the Marcella-like heroine of The Sea Lady is repeated,
but the mermaid has become a...credible young woman" (103). Reed's other claim may be
incontrovertible, too, but not the implications he draws. No doubt "a younger
generation" saw Wells and Ward similarly: as "preachers" toiling on
"the lower slopes of Olympus," their "practical imaginations" unable
to survive the heights (109). Reed here adopts the view of Henry James, a friend of both
Wells and Ward, who "never really admitted either into the elite circle of true
art" (108); and Reed's satisfaction in James's judgment is intensified, backhandedly,
when he gives Ward the last word on Wells (from A Writer's Recollections, 1918),
which, as Reed notes, sounds "familiar," as if (a greatly less circumspect)
James had penned it himself: "[Wells is] a journalist of very great powers, of
unequal education, and much crudity of mind, who has inadvertently strayed into the
literature of the imagination" (108). In 1995, this is less and less one's view of
Wells as a whole the fifteen or so years up to and after The Sea Lady loom larger
though all but the charge of crudity may do for Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Janet Gabler-Hover's contribution initiates a discussion of Wells's Meanwhile (The
Picture of a Lady) (1927) by asserting that Wells was responding against the
aestheticism of James's Portrait of a Lady (1881), but "the more or less
literal" conjunctions between the two books in themselves interest her little. It is
more than half way through her essay when she gets around to mentioning the presence in Picture
of the American aesthete Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, "who seems meant as a portrait
of Henry James [and]...is pit[ted by Wells] against the larger social awareness and
consciousness of his own stand-in, [the philosopher] Sempack" (155). Thus, she
initially offers no evidence of James's presence except the surmise of a contemporary
reviewer (in the selection preceding hers) and the concurrence of Scheick. Instead, she
plunges immediately into an absorbing psychosexual analysis of the public and private
interaction of the two men in their criticism and correspondence, which, she states,
"once analyzed, provides a context for the discussion of the novels" (147).
Gabler-Hover contends that questions of the role, form, and ideology of the novel as a
literary vehicle--the questions that fuel the familiar critical discourse concerning
Wells's avowed journalism and James's avowed art--are comparatively superficial; a deeper
level is at work. The nub is that James is homosexual, covert, and restrained, and Wells
is heterosexual, overt, and impulsive. Each seemed to the other uncanny. Gabler-Hover
notes also the curious similarity that each had an over-solicitous mother and an
ineffectual or absent father, but she lets the etiologies go, for the most part, because
her primary concern is the record of their mutual discomfiture in their letters. From
these she quotes at length, and, short of doing the same here, I can only say that I am almost
convinced that "it is virtually impossible not to read their sexual selves imprinted
experientially onto their theoretical disagreements" (153). Gabler-Hover never saw a
technical catchword she could resist, but I confess I am delighted that she no more calls
James cher maître than Wells did. In words of one syllable, what makes
the high ground of art is "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," and it is
the heart which determines what she calls the "two rightnesses" of the ways
Wells and James plot their fictions (146).
Even if one were to doubt that Picture is directed as such at Portrait,
Gabler-Hover offers a rewarding comparison of the opposingly concatenated ways that Wells
and James "emplot" the novels, i.e, "strategize their narratives
defensively to mitigate against sexual anxiety" (147). Her view of the ethical
thrusts of the plots has a familiar ring while the grounds she proposes are fresh. She
sees the plots as driven by the fact that the heroine of each gains an impression of a
sexual dalliance involving her husband. In Picture, Cynthia discovers the
indiscretion immediately, then the plot coerces her decision to let the memory go and to
concentrate on the importance of her husband's mission in the larger world. In Portrait,
Isabel gains an impression of a premarital affair, then the plot coerces her discovery
that the impression is correct. That is, Wells's plot first avows sexuality, then forgets
it, as irrelevant, by producing an eclipsing social responsibility that marginalizes and
desexualizes Cynthia as mere nurturer of her husband's mission. James's plot first
conceals, then exposes a sexuality that brings home to Isabel the sense of difference that
people feel in intimacy, a sense of estrangement that checks "the identity of one
partner [being] annihilated by the ego of the other" and "promises the
possibility of psychological exploration and growth" (159). This is an even-handed
analysis; the belief is that the author is implicit in his plot, which he cannot help constructing "to correspond with his own ethical vision, his psychological needs, thus
his very way of being in the world" (157).
In my opinion, Allan Chavkin's "Mr. Sammler's War of the Planets" is by far
the most rewarding of the new contributions. In it Wells is wonderfully
"redivivus." Chavkin assembles and unites the pieces of the significant portrait
of Wells in today's world that lie scattered, distorted, and fragmented in the historical
consciousness of the protagonist of Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1969). Mr.
Sammler, now aged 70, is a Polish Jew who was proud to belong to Wells's circle in the
London of the 1930s, subsequently crawled out of a mass grave in the Holocaust, and is now
afloat in socially and sexually liberated Manhattan in the year of the technological
triumph of the first moon landing. Sammler is poised to compose a major study of Wells, as
he has been for years, which he never brings himself to begin. With Wells always near
Sammler's thoughts, the reader is privy to an ambivalent view of him that reflects the
ironies of history.
We learn or surmise in the course of Sammler's meditation--"the associative
process of Sammler's mind struggling to find what will end its crisis" (42)-- that in
pre-War London he was an assimilated Jew, a believer in the idea of one world, a believer
in enlightened social and technological progress, a believer in the liberation of the
masses. Now he professes to remember Wells, the source of these teachings, "always
with respect," but his feelings run counter. It bothers him that at his age Wells was
"a horny man," who in pursuit of world projects and a universal order
"appeared to need a great amount of copulation" (36)--an observation that gains
by the light of Gabler-Hover's analysis of the Wellsian "plot" that flaunts
sexuality, then produces some eclipsing social responsibility. In the same vein, to
Sammler it seems unjust that the Wells he knew had won fame and fortune by flouting
limitations which in his youth he had acknowledged the limitations imposed by attempting to
be an artist, not a preacher, and by accepting man's finite place in nature. Thus, Sammler
is less than enthusiastic about "The Country of the Blind," because it grew from
a thesis, and, seemingly, about The First Men in the Moon, because space travel
panders to the false dream of the illimitable.
What draws Sammler is the earliest Wells, the Wells of The Time Machine and The
War of the Worlds, especially the latter. Chavkin observes that the narrator of The
War of the Worlds anticipates Sammler's situation. The narrator's intended paper on
the probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilizing process
remains unwritten because the genocidal Martian attack has radically altered his formerly
smug certainty of human progress. In the same way, Sammler's intended study of Wells
remains unwritten because the Holocaust has chastened his formerly complacent vision,
which, ironically, was Wells's vision in the decade Sammler knew him. Chavkin concludes:
"when Sammler abandons the Utopian Wells and jettisons his naive assimilated Jewish
Anglophile self, he is influenced by Wells's dark romanticism of The War of the Worlds
period." By "dark romanticism" I believe Chavkin intends the fact that
Wells brings about the death of the Martians by means of the natural bio-defenses of
mother earth, and thus awakens a sardonic but romantic "faith" in natural
processes, the very processes which had so brutally brought the Martians hunting for a
warmer home; and Mr. Sammler, by the same token, in the end works away from the detachment
he has tried to cultivate and accepts what he calls "this death-burdened, rotting,
spoiled, sullied, exasperating, sinful earth" (40) and at the same time learns to
celebrate "feeling, outgoingness, expressiveness, kindness, heart" (44)--as the
people of London also do at the end of The War of the Worlds.
Scheick promises that "this volume aims to...glimpse the innovation of an author's
production as a kind of Phoenix always emerging from and returning to some communal
identity" (3). Chavkin more than any one other contributor succeeds in fulfilling
this promise, because he shows, through Bellow's Sammler, that the communal identity of
Wells is no merely literary possession. It belongs to the history of our times.
NOTES.
1. The Splintering Frame, ELS Monograph Series No. 31 (British Columbia:
University of Victoria Press), 124; and in a passage from the same book somewhat altered
for the Critical Response (175), Scheick states that Apropos of Dolores
"may well be Wells's grandest literary achievement, especially in the application of
his splintering-frame technique."
2. The phrase is R.D. Mullen's in his notice of Gill in SFS 3:215, #9, July 1976.
3. See original of Rainwater's second essay in Scheick, then entitled "H.G.
Wells's Re-Vision of Poe: The Undying Fire and Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole
Island" (English Literature in Transition, 30:423-36, Number 4, 1987),
423. And what of Rainwater's own "sources"? She omits mention of the
quintessential Sniffer, Ing vald Raknem, whose H.G. Wells and his Critics (George
Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1962) has about 100 pages on "Originality or Plagiarism"
(including 14 pages on Poe in Wells's short stories) and several further pages on Poe in The
Island of Doctor Moreau. Raknem simply states the claims of Wells's contemporary
reviewers, describes them concretely, and considers whether the allegations are
legitimate. See also note 5.
4. Quoted by Gordon Ray in H.G. Wells and Rebecca West (New Haven: Yale UP,
1974), 2.
5. My "H.G. Wells and the Charge of Plagiarism" (Nineteenth Century
Fiction, 1966, 21:85-89) disproved that charge by Raknem (417-19; and see note 3
above), who excerpted the same review as Scheick and found that Wells plagiarized Allen.
Scheick ignores all this but elsewhere cites my reply as supporting that Wells plagiarized
Allen (!!). See Fictional Structure and Ethics (Athens and London: University of
Georgia Press, 1990), 165, note 8.
6. See Harris Wilson, introduction, The Wealth of Mr Waddy, by H.G. Wells
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1969), xi-xxiii.
7. The original on Ibsen in The Natural History of H.G. Wells (Athens, OH:
Ohio UP, 1982), 213-15, is framed by the defining terms "responsive" and
"assimilative," respectively conveying Reed's view that the early Wells played
off sources against each other or against an "opposite idea" whereas the later
Wells practiced straight hortatory exposition. 8. See Robert M. Philmus and David Y.
Hughes, Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction by H.G. Wells (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 105-09.
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