Martians, Sleepers, Time Travellers and Hearts of Darkness

Abstract

It was H. G. Wells’s anonymous article on An Outcast of the Islands in the Saturday Review on 16 May 1896 that was the catalyst for his friendship with Conrad. Wells was already well known as a writer of scientific fantasies, due to the publication the previous year of The Time Machine, but, as Parrinder and Philmus point out, his literary ambitions went well beyond this. He was a perceptive and witty critic who dealt mercilessly with the ‘sentimental fiction and romantic fantasy which made up the major proportion of the literary diet of the 1890s’: ‘No other reviewer of his time was so consistently successful in sifting the good from the bad and in recognising new talent’ (Parrinder and Philmus 2). Conrad was one such talent, and Wells’s review of his second novel caused Frank Harris’s assistant on the Saturday Review, H. Blanchamp, to inform Wells that ‘The Editor … asks me to tell you that he thinks it one of the best pieces of literary criticism in the English Language’ (Parrinder and Philmus 48 [ellipses in original]). This was high praise indeed: the prodigally talented Wells was delighted, and remembered it to the end of his days.1