Feeling Like a Clerk in H. G. Wells

Abstract

In three turn-of-the-century novels about clerks and scholarship boys, H. G. Wells illustrates the emotional impact of social hierarchies on individual lives. By portraying the conflicted, class-related emotions of lower-middle-class men, Wells departs from the common contemporary image of the clerk as a figure synonymous with his function. But Wells depicts other emotions--specifically, those associated with domesticity and recklessness--to push against what he sees as the classed nature of emotional lives. He rewrites Victorian domesticity as a zone of sexuality and desire for his lower-middle-class clerks, and he mobilizes an emergent cultural appreciation of recklessness to instill them with vitality. The "significant selves" that develop as a result help to offset their ultimate failure to escape their class.