Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ... NOTE Since the ultimate chapter of this work got itself into type there has been published by that ancient and Dickensiated house, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, a pretentious sociological essay entitled ' A Modern Utopia.' The author, Mr. H. G. Wells, is no doubt an exceedingly worthy young man, inasmuch as he has achieved 'first-class honours in Zoology.' All the same, if there be any virtue in the written word, and if Suburbia be a force against which honest people must struggle, one is compelled to consider Mr. Wells in the light of an enemy to society. Being himself of a temperament which is purely suburban, and of a suburban way of thought, it is natural that he should chance upon suburban ruts and plod therein suburbanly. He made his reputation, such as it is, out of a thrice suburbanized science, blown up and eked out with a mechanical suburban imagination. For years Mr. Wells has been 'delighting' countless thousands of suburbans with a formula which suggests in effect that it is not imaginatively impossible for a man to develop a glass cuticle or a woman talking-apparatus all round her head. With fancies of this nature Mr. Wells has repeatedly ravished the readers of Pearson's Magazine and similar organs of culture, which readers are suburban to a soul. And having waxed rich, as suburban riches go, out of these contributions to English letters, Mr. Wells would fain try his hand at prettier game. But he is holden by the cords of his suburbanism, and though he may be quite unconscious of the circumstance, the trail of that suburbanism glisters slimily over every page of his high-pitched sociological essays. In 'A Modern Utopia' he professes himself most anxious to curry favour with the learned, and in proof of this anxiety he offers...