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The Decline and Fall of H.G. Wells
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11003 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1993 |
2,839 Words |
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Michael D. Aeschliman
Michael D. Aeschliman teaches English literature at the
University of Virginia. He is the author of The Restitution of
Man. |
THE INVISIBLE MAN
The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells
Michael Coren
New York: Atheneum, 1993
240 pp., $22.50
Except perhaps for Karl Marx, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was probably the most influential writer in the world for most of the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1919 and 1934 alone his Outline of History sold over two million copies and was translated into numerous languages. He had private interviews with Lenin, Stalin, and two Roosevelts, and his popularizations of a scientific and "progressive" worldview or ideology had a massive influence on his contemporaries.
Yet it is the contention of Michael Coren's fine new study of Wells' life and works that, in Coren's words, "Wells' influence on his own age, and his legacy to those ages to come, were, taken as a whole, pernicious and destructive." This may seem at first a harsh verdict on the most influential educator of the twentieth century the heir and popularizer of Enlightenment rationalism and modern science, though Coren is by no means alone in making this judgment. Even Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, in their standard and outstanding biography, The Life of H.G. Wells: The Time Traveller (1973; rev. ed., 1987), a sympathetic but scrupulously and exhaustively fair work, found it necessary to dwell on, and to condemn, Wells' private life and especially his ruthlessly promiscuous abuse of women, "the corruption of the physical appetite he so rapaciously indulged." Wells set himself up to be a teacher of society a revolutionary cleanser of defunct and decadent ideas, values, and
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