Early Twentieth-century Britain Research Articles

Opium and the People. Opiate Use and Drug Control Policy in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England

At first glance and perhaps even for the first few chapters, Opium and the People may seem somewhat heavy going. A book so densely packed with facts and quotes does not make for light and easy reading. However, if you stopped at this point you would be deprived of a myriad of …

Wealth Making in Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century Britain: Industry v. Commerce and Finance

This paper refutes the hypothesis put forward by W.D. Rubinstein that a disproportionately large share of Britain's wealth makers were active in commercial and financial trades in London. We use a data set of businessmen active in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and quantitative methods to show that the pattern of wealth holding was much more diverse than supposed by Rubinstein. A large fortune could be made in a variety of regions and occupations. Big industrialists active in the provinces were equally capable of generating wealth similar in size and significance to the City elite. More generally, London was not the centre of wealth making in this period. Neither was there a subordination of industrial and manufacturing to commercial and financial wealth.

The Universal Library as Modern Utopia: the Information Society of H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was throughout his life fascinated by the civilising potential of library and information networks, in particular their potential for the universal dissemination of knowledge. In the 1920s and 1930s Wells developed various plans for a new type of universal library which he referred to successively as ‘Bibleof civilisation’, ‘World encyclopaedia’, ‘World brain’, and ‘World mind’. Some recent commentators have been tempted to see these as blueprints for contemporary information society and the information superhighway. This paper takes a less speculative approach and argues that Wells's writings about information and knowledge are much more historically specific. It traces his interest in information from his early support for the public library movement through to his encyclopaedism and later technological and bureaucratic utopianism. It concludes that Wells envisioned a information society very different to that promised by the Internet. The ‘World brain’ is, it is claimed, a ‘modern’ utopia in a more precise and historically specific sense: it tells us little about the future but much more about perceptions and ideologies of information and knowledge in early twentieth century Britain.

‘Lift up a Living Nation’: The Political Theology of Georges Bernanos

‘Lift up a Living Nation’: I take these words of G.K. Chesterton’s well- known hymnic poem, ‘O God of Earth and Altar’, as a suitable emblem for a study of Bernanos’ ‘polemical’ works. In fact, the three stanzas of Chesterton’s divine apostrophe — called simply, in the Collected Poems, ‘A Hymn’ - perfectly match the spirit and content of Bernanos’ political writings. Nor is this entirely surprising, for the two writers belong to a stream of intellectual reflection and spiritual endeavour in early twentieth-century England and France, where writers in a Catholic tradition (both Anglo-Catholic and Roman) sought to envisage and commend a new Christendom, on the basis of what was best in the English and French anciens regimes as well as humanity and the Gospel — all with the aim of countering and overcoming that extended cultural and political crisis which in England opened with the Edwardians and ended with the Second World War and in France coincided with the Third Republic and the division of the country between Vichy and the Occupied Zone. It is noteworthy that Chesterton’s ‘hymn’ was first published in The Commonwealth for November 1907 — the very year of Bernanos’ earliest published work, seven short stories on the themes of kingship, childhood and heroic death in the Royalist monthly Le Panache.The prayer in Chesterton’s poem addresses a God who is named at once for the land (‘earth’) and for the traditional cultus of a Christian people (‘altar’). It speaks of the faltering of a political elite, and the disorientation of the masses; the excessive power of money (‘the walls of gold’) and the internal division that follows on party conflict (‘the swords of scorn’).

Party Politics and the Provincial Press in Early Twentieth Century England: The Case of the South West

Based on the evidence of Devon and Cornwall, politicians continued to regard the provincial press as highly influential in determining their readers' party political affiliations well into the twentieth century. Until at least 1914, many of the leading local and regional newspapers were owned by prominent local politicians. After 1918, especially following the amalgamation of the two main Conservative and Liberal papers, local politicians felt keenly their lack of a reliable source of press support. The cost of funding a party political newspaper became too high for all but the richest politicians. Moreover, the status of the provincial press was increasingly undermined by improved rail communications, allowing the national press to compete even in farthest Cornwall. The wireless also reduced the importance of the provincial press from the late 1920s. The real political influence of the provincial press is impossible to assess with any certainty. Newspapermen believed that, despite the often substantial expenditure by politicians, a strongly party political paper was more likely to alienate non-partisan readers, leading to neither political nor commerical success. Modern research also suggests that partisan newspapers are probably only partially successful, doing more to reinforce their readers' existing opinions than to convert non-believers.

The transformation of fiscal reform: reciprocity, modernization, and the fiscal debate within the business community in early twentieth century Britain

ABSTRACTThe debate over Free Trade was central to modem British history. This essay shifts attention from party politics to the changing discourse and perception of state and economy within the business community. It distinguishes three phases in the erosion of liberal political economy: reciprocity, defensive tariff reform, and modernizing protectionism. An analysis of the changing argument for protection points to the emergency of a new politico-economic settlement in the age of war and coordinated capitalism. The Free Trade culture of individualism and market was displaced by a new economic vision of combination and regulation. In political culture, however, state and economy continued to be viewed as separate spheres. Instead of a corporatist system, the new settlement between state and business was marked by a dissociation of economic from political pluralism.

A Soaring Eagle: Alfred Marshall 1842-1924.

Peter Groenewegen’s outstanding new book places the major features of Marshall’s life and work within the rich institutional setting of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. This biography sheds new light on Marshall’s decision to study economics – after dropping mathematics, philosophy and psychology in turn – and the background to his important books, including the Principles of Economics, as well as his government advice over three decades. More than just the life of a major economist, it also deals with economics and mathematics education at Cambridge, contemporary controversies over socialism, imperialism, free trade, eugenics, religious belief, social welfare and the women’s movement.

“Prosecutions…are Always Risky Business”: Labor, Liberals, and the 1912 “Don't Shoot” Prosecutions

In the spring of 1912, the British syndicalist leader Tom Mann was prosecuted under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 for his opposition to the use of troops during the great coal strike. He was convicted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, but an outcry from socialists, trade unionists, and progressives forced the Liberal government to reduce his sentence and release him early from prison. This much is familiar to historians of early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. It is often forgotten, however, that Mann was only one of eight syndicalists and socialists who were prosecuted for their involvement in the “don't shoot” agitation. It is likewise forgotten that Mann went on trial just days before the suffragette leaders Emmeline Pankhurst and Frederick and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence shared a similar fate, amid demands that Sir Edward Carson, the leading opponent of Irish home rule, join them in the dock. Indeed, the Nation, a progressive Liberal weekly, complained that “the country is…getting somewhat tired of political trials.” Perhaps because we assume the relative transparency of the law, historians have failed to scrutinize in detail the origins and outcome of the “don't shoot” prosecutions. George Dangerfield devoted one sentence to them, Elie Halévy a few more; although the “don't shoot” episode has been invoked to symbolize the increasingly fragile relations between Liberalism and the working classes, it continues to receive only brief mention in accounts of Edwardian labor and politics. Even Tom Mann's biographers have shed little new light on his case.

Teacher Training and Changing Professional Identity in Early Twentieth Century England

The character of courses of initial teacher training in the past had an important place in the formation of professional identity and status as well as in the development of practical competence. This was particularly so during moments of fundamental change in the overall pattern of training itself. This historical account focuses on one such period in the early twentieth century, when the institutional emphasis in initial training was moving in a direction wholly opposite to that of today; that is to say, when the predominant site of training was shifting from school to training institution. The account seeks to explore some of the ways in which this change influenced the professional perceptions of training held by those who were entering teaching in the years following the First World War. The study draws principally upon data derived from oral interview with former elementary and secondary school teachers born between 1888 and 1917

Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London, 1870–1939

This is the first scholarly study to focus on Jewish women's experience of childbirth and infant care. In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain there was deep concern about the perceived physical and military deterioration of the nation, reflected in the diminishing birth rate, persistently high infant mortality, and the poor health of the working class, revealed by army recruitment. Many medical practitioners and politicians believed that Jewish mothers were 'model mothers' whose exemplary care of their children offered a solution to these problems. Lara Marks assesses the extent to which the stereotype of Jewish mothers reflected the reality of their experience in East London between 1870 and 1939. Not only did they have to cope with extreme poverty, but as newly arrived immigrants had to deal with linguistic and cultural barriers, as well as the unfamiliarity of local medical facilities. Nevertheless, as Dr Marks shows, Jewish mothers and their infants had clearly indicated by the remarkably low rate of Jewish infant mortality, and she examines the reasons for this. Model Mothers makes important contributions to our knowledge of maternal and infant care in this period and to our understanding of the interactions between ethnicity and health-care.

Heterosexuality, feminism and the freewoman journal in early twentieth-century england [1

Heterosexuality, feminism and the freewoman journal in early twentieth-century england [1

Heterosexuality, feminism and The Freewoman journal in early twentieth-century England [1

Abstract In 1911 a new feminist paper appeared calledThe Freewoman. Its life was short, its circulation small, but its reputation was notorious and its influence of some significance in feminist and radical circles. The paper's notoriety stemmed largely from its open discussion of sex, or rather heterosexuality, since lesbianism and homosexuality were barely mentioned. Combining older feminist concerns with newer sexological concepts, women and men discussed the meaning of sex: the relationship between sex and reproduction, the vices and virtues of birth control, passion, chastity, self-control, masturbation, the spirituality of ideal sex. During this brief moment,The Freewoman discussed sex “loudly and clearly and repeatedly”, to quote Rebecca West: it was to be a long time before feminists were to do so again.

The Myth of Sovereignty: Gender in the Literature of Irish Nationalism

The Myth of Sovereignty: Gender in the Literature of Irish Nationalism Joseph Valente Nineteenth-century imperialism relied for much of its ideological strength upon normative tropologies of gender disjunction, exclusion and stratification. In figuring the conquerors as the exponents of a principle coded and celebrated as masculine (encompassing an aggressive will to historical progress, technical mastery and rational transcendence, et cetera) and the conquered as the embodiment of a principle stereotyped and discounted as female (encompassing a passive repose in organic cyclicality, affective immanence and domestic concerns, et cetera), imperialist discourse has inscribed a vicious symbolic circle in which sexual and socio-economic dominance reflect and authorize one another. Colonial rule and expropriation were naturalized as the latest historical signifiers of an inherently gendered cosmos; gender hierarchy and male control were naturalized as the ultimate referents of the colonial mission. As this dynamic has played itself out in the European incursions into Asia and North Africa, it has been lucidly critiqued under the rubric of Orientalism. Edward Said has famously demonstrated how Western anthropologists, ethnographers, explorers, poets and politicians of the nineteenth century constructed the Oriental as irrational, sensual, available, supine and enigmatic as opposed to the lucid, accurate, energetic and decisive Westerner. 1 But many of these same manichean disjunctions were taken to inform the relationship between imperial Britain and its nearest ward, Ireland. The nexus of the ideological modalities of Orientalism and Gaelophobia finds its personification in the prominent and formidable figure of Arthur “Bloody” Balfour, who was charged on the one hand with justifying British sovereignty in Egypt, which he did in terms of the superior knowledge and rationality of the Anglo-Saxon, and on the other with administering British sovereignty in Ireland, which he did via the brute force of the Coercion Bills. Perhaps nowhere does the link between knowledge and power stand more nakedly revealed. 2 The sexual inflection of socio-economic dominance was unusually explicit in the case of Ireland. First of all, its hybrid status as a metropolitan colony left Ireland especially susceptible of familial metaphors. [End Page 189] Long nicknamed the Sister Isle, Ireland was increasingly imaged in wifely terms as the century wore on, the implied connubial connection with England serving to naturalize that long-standing bone of contention, the Union. Noted historian Oliver MacDonagh writes, The sexual image was in constant use in nineteenth and early twentieth century England to express the dominator’s concept of the relationship between the two islands — with perhaps the Gates [Home Rule] Acts dimly perceived as a sort of counterpart to the Married Woman’s Property Acts and the British retention of the power of political decision subconsciously validated by similar psychological mixtures of assertion and insecurity. Even the Hibernophiles might explain themselves in terms of arch-femininity. Harold Bigbie, the Daily Chronicle journalist, introduced his Home Rule Tract of 1912 with Ireland a young and capable matron seated at her fireside, who raises her gray eyes to the visitor and says, with a whimsical and ingratiating play of laughter on her lips, “I wish to do my own housekeeping.” 3 This genderizing dynamic found further reinforcement in the contemporaneous popularity of crude ethno-anthropological discourses, which switched the symbolic focus from the Irish nation to the Irish race and thereby underwrote a burgeoning Anglo-Saxon supremacism. The supposedly virile efficiency of the Teutonic races was contrasted with what Matthew Arnold called the “nervous exaltation” and “feminine idiosyncracy” of the Celts, which made them, in his eyes, a naturally subordinate race. 4 Such discourses played on and played into the modern, markedly gendered schism of mind and body, thought and feeling, reason and fancy, in order to suggest that the Irish, like women in general, were constitutionally ill-equipped for the dispassionate pursuit of state and social policy and were for that reason properly dispossessed of any real historical agency. Thus, in 1843, for example, The Times was already arguing that the Irish were “a people of acute sensibilities and lively passions, more quick in feeling wrongs than rational in explaining or temperate in addressing them,” and, as such, were ripe to be “fiendishly exploited” by demagogic leaders like Daniel O’Connell. 5 Lord...

Lesbianism, History, and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando

At Bow Street Magistrates Court on 16 November 1928, Sir Chartres Biron ordered destruction of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a polemical novel pleading for social tolerance for lesbianism. It is tempting to think that Hall got into trouble simply for raising issue of lesbianism, since female (as it was then known) was not legally recognized in early twentieth-century Britain. A proposal to extend to women 1885 Labouchere Amendment, which outlawed of gross indecency between men, ran aground in House of Commons in 1921 because, Samuel Hynes speculates, men found it [lesbianism] too gross to deal (375). However, at least two other novels published in autumn of 1928, Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women and, more important, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, clearly broached same subject, yet escaped official censure. Hall's case aggravating factor seems to have been not subject but treatment. Whereas Woolf's fictional biography, like Mackenzie's satire, sets out to make readers laugh, The Well of Loneliness pleads cause of sexual inversion by taking up an aggressively polemical stance. A summary of Judge Biron's ruling in The Times (17 November) suggests that Hall provoked British authorities into legal action by preaching an unacceptable sexual doctrine in an earnest tone that sought to deny possibility of either laughter or moral censure. Conceding that Well some literary merit, and that such a book might even have a moral Biron declared: But in present case there was not one word that suggested that anyone with horrible tendencies described was in least degree blameworthy. All characters were presented as attractive people and put forward with admiration. was even more serious was that certain acts were described in most alluring terms. order to advocate sympathy and tolerance for lesbians, Hall had made sure that her lesbian heroine, Stephen Gordon, appeared above reproach. Ironically, as Hall's biographer Michael Baker has noted, it was by making Stephen virtuous that Hall provoked moral censure (220). If those virtues had been nonexistent, or at least laughable, as in Extraordinary Women, The Well of Loneliness would have passed muster as having, if not a strong moral influence, at least not a bad one. The question of relation between obscenity and literature raised by Judge Biron prompted some musings in diary of Virginia Woolf, who attended Bow Street on 9 November, first day of Hall trial: What is obscenity? is literature? is difference between subject and treatment? (Diary 3:207). Like many other literati, including E. M. Forster and Vita Sackville-West, Woolf went to prepared to take witness stand and speak against obscenity charges. She was not quite as committed to cause of Radclyffe Hall as some recent critics have suggested, however.(1) Like many of her Bloomsbury friends, Woolf seriously doubted Hall's qualifications as an artist, finding her work too polemical. Bloomsbury's reservations ran so deep that eight days before Woolf wrote: Most of our friends are trying to evade witness box; for reasons you may guess. But they generally put it down to weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins (Letters 3: 555). Woolf was relieved to be saved task of defending Hall's novel in court by magistrate's decision that only he, and not defense's array of expert witnesses, could rule whether or not Well was obscene: In what cases is evidence allowable? This last, to my relief, was decided against us: we could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art (Diary 3: 207). When, as she put it, the bloody woman's trial went to appeal on 14 December, Woolf did not attend (Letters 3: 563). Woolf's objections to Well were not limited to an ostensibly aesthetic sphere; they also highlight crucial differences among women in questions of sexual politics, questions which are ultimately inextricable from aesthetic ones. …

The road to 1931: the Conservative party and political realignment in early twentieth-century Britain

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A 'Brave and Daring Folk'? Shopkeepers and Trade Associational Life in Victorian and Edwardian England

Trade associations are generally acknowledged to have occupied a critical position in the shopkeeping community of early twentieth-century England.2 Yet surprisingly historians have made little attempt to reconstruct the precise mechanics of such associational activity.3 This study, which focuses on associational life in one representative provincial centre, Leicester,4 attempts to explain how associationalism both fostered the emergence of a parochial shopkeeping subculture, oriented around specific trades, and transformed shopkeeping politics. First, an investigation of this sub-culture explains the genesis of important structural changes within the business community. Trade solidarity caused shopkeepers to reassess their relationship with other retailers, leading for the first time to the development of divisions within the shopkeeping community based on a collective self-consciousness. The consequence was the gradual emergence of a clear-cut division within the shopkeeping world between two fractions: principal' (specialist) shopkeepers and domestic' (general) shopkeepers. The thrust of the argument is that by the early twentieth century principal shopkeepers emerged as a group whose members drew their social identity from their trade, and its accompanying sub-culture, rather than, as in earlier years, their association with the wider community. Second, local investigation also suggests that late nineteenth-century associationalism was responsible, in large part, for shopkeepers' changing political expectations. An examination of shopkeeper activism in Leicester goes some way to reinterpreting the current orthodoxy that shopkeepers occupied a marginal role in the political life of the nation. Historians such as Geoffrey Crossick and Michael Winstanley argue with some confidence that nineteenth-century British shopkeepers were politically impotent. This was in direct contrast with their continental counterparts who were leaders of right-wing lower-middle-class militancy.5 Certainly, as both Geoffrey Crossick and Michael Winstanley argue, British shopkeepers remained committed to mainstream party politics.6 Both Liberals and Conservatives were sympathetic to shopkeeping concerns by the early twentieth century; however, in a stable community neither party needed shopkeepers as allies against potential threats to the established order.7 This allows Crossick to conclude that as a political force shopkeepers were not essential in Britain.8 However, just because shopkeepers were not required as political saviours does not mean that their political activities should be ignored. Indeed, it is precisely because shopkeepers accepted mainstreampolitics' that their own unique political/trade sub-culture developed as it did in the late nineteenth century.

Popular fiction in England, 1914-1918

While Englishmen were dying by the thousands on the battlefields of Europe, their friends and relations on the home front were reading books of humor, tales of espionage and adventure, colorful romances, and historical swashbucklers. Harold Orel's penetrating book explains why escapist dominated the popular literary market in England throughout the Great War. A large factor, he shows, was the view of publishers, reviewers, booksellers, libraries, literary groups, and the general reading public that escapist was a useful diversion from the inescapable horrors of war. Orel begins with a survey of the British literary world and its attitudes toward the novel at the outbreak of the war. Within a broad social, cultural, and economic context he depicts the fiction industry at a time of extraordinary upheaval, before the triumph of Modernism, when the attitudes and esthetics of writers, the tastes of readers, and the economics of the marketplace were undergoing rapid transformation. Subsequent chapters offer detailed studies of fifteen of the most touted novels of the period and the ways they reflected--or, more often, failed to reflect--the radical changes taking place as they were being written. The writers examined include George Moore, Norman Douglas, Frank Swinnerton, Compton Mackenzie, Mary Webb, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, John Buchan, Alec Waugh, H.G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett. Many of their novels during these years avoid mention of the war that was reshaping their world, or allude to it only obliquely. The book concludes with a review of changes in the publishing world in 1918, the last year of the Great War. In its comprehensive coverage of a wide range of oncepopular but now neglected novels, Orel's authoritative study fills a gap in the cultural and literary history of early twentieth-century England.

The suffragist and the “average woman”

Abstract This paper questions the marginality of women's suffrage to the new social history of women in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. In so doing, it seeks to challenge any notion of the suffragist and the “average woman” as absolutely distinct categories. Its argument draws on two major revisions underway in the historiography of this field: firstly, the growing recognition that “votes for women” was not simply a single-issue, equal rights demand, reflecting only a restricted liberal perspective; secondly, the equally significant insistence on the need to apply more extended definitions of both the “political” and the “public” to women's history in this period. The autobiographical writings of Helena Swanwick, Hannah Mitchell and Mary Gawthorpe, it is argued, suggest that the meaning of the vote lies in the mesh experienced by such suffragists between the politics of ordinary, everyday life and their subsequent involvement in the formal politics of parliament and political parties.

Takling the 'hideous scourge': the creation of the venereal disease treatment centres in early twentieth-century Britain.

This paper explores the history of the 1913 Royal Commission on Venereal Disease (VD) and the creation of the VD treatment centres. Prior to the Royal Commission little provision existed in the UK for the treatment of civilians with VD. The Royal Commission was established in response to increasing pressure from doctors, feminists and the wider social hygiene movement. In 1916 the Commission recommended the creation of state funded VD treatment centres and the provision of moral instruction. Previous historical work has emphasized the Commission's strategy of ‘moral prophylaxis’. It is argued here that the new treatment centres stood at the core of the Commission's prevention strategy. The government accepted the Commission's recommendations and the treatment centres were established from early 1917. The Local Government Board took innovative action in going beyond the Commission's recommendations and compelling local authorities to provide the new VD service. The study concludes that despite the difficulty in assessing their long-term impact on public health, the treatment centres represented a significant extension of state health services.

H. G. Wells edited by Brian Murray, and: H. G. Wells Under Revision: Proceedings of the International H. G. Wells Symposium, London, July 1986 edited by Patrick Parrinder (review)

92Victorian Review mechanics. While individual vignettes abound, the author is content to use such potential as a vehicle for a straightforward discussion oflife in Leeds. There is no real attempt to use the sources to analyze the relationship either between the cemetery and the community, or the Uving and the dead. Furthermore, given the Beckett Street Cemetery's importance as the first municipal cemetery in the kingdom, it is disappointing to discover so little about the complex world of municipal politics. Indeed, an examination of this subject might have prompted the author to assess the decline of the cemetery, and its implications for furthering our understanding of early twentieth-century Britain, in more detail. Finally, as Roy Porter proposes in his admirable, ifshort, introduction to the book: "our forebears celebrated death as the great climax of the mortal life-span of each Christian soul" (ix). Ultimately, this study is concerned less with the implications of this important line of enquiry, than with presenting a pastiche of Ufe, albeit both colorful and pathetic, in Victorian Leeds. Chris Hosgood University ofLethbridge Brian Murray. H. G. WeUs. New York: Continuum, 1990. 190. $18.95 US (cloth). Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe, eds. H. G. WeUs Under Revision: Proceedings ofthe International H. G. Wells Symposium, London, July 1986. London and Toronto: Associated UP, 1990. 263. $35.00 US (cloth). When R G. Wells died in 1946, his obituaries paid tribute to him as the educator of the age. The Times Literary Supplement (17 August 1946) wrote that "there was a time when Wells spoke more clearly than any other man to the youth ofthe world." However, he had been without much of an audience for some years before his death, and after it his reputation virtually disappeared. A few ofwhat he called his scientific romances kept his name alive as did one or two of his social novels, but the rest of his vast output was quickly forgotten. This state of affairs has begun to change in recent years, which have seen an increasing interest in both his work and his Ufe. The two books under review are both evidence of Wells's reviving reputation. Reviews93 Brian Murray's study of Wells is part of a series entitled Literature and Life: British Writers, though it deals primarily with Wells as a novelist rather than as a writer whose work took many other forms. The most successful part of the book is its first chapter, which describes Wells's Ufe and incorporates many references to his work, not only to his novels, but to his essays, his poUtical and educational commentaries, his histories and, of course, his autobiography. For anyone looking for a brief but comprehensive biographical account of Wells, this chapter will be invaluable. It reUes heavily on Wells's own words and is none the worse for that It describes the astonishing range of Wells's work. It contains enough critical observations to keep the reader provoked. Not the least of its strengths is its reference to many of Wells's lesser known works, among them his early stories, his essays, some of his educational commentaries, such as his now largely forgotten Story ofa Great Schoolmaster, and many of his equally forgotten novels, such as The Bulpington ofBlup, God the Invisible King, and The Wonderful Visit. The rest of the book deals only with Wells's novels, with separate chapters on the scientific romances, the Edwardian social novels, the later novels, and his portrayal of, and attitudes to, women. These chapters are largely descriptive, with relatively little criticism or analysis, but they do serve the useful purpose of introducing their readers to much of Wells's work that has been unjustly forgotten. Who nowadays reads The World of William Clissold, The Croquet Player, You Can't be Too Careful? Despite their neglect, Murray makes a persuasive case that they and other of Wells's books remain worth reading. He could, in fact, have included others, such as The Camford Visitation, Babes in a Darkling Wood, and Bealby. However, although Murray successfully introduces us to much of Wells's forgotten fiction, his concentration on the novels means that he has too Uttle to say...