Kipps (1905)

1. Shyness

This ‘Story of a Simple Soul’ is the first bona-fide masterpiece of Wells's comic-pathetic mimetic mode. Lower-middle-class Kipps is a draper's assistant in Folkestone. His life is going nowhere until it is transformed by an out-of-the-blue inheritance of a house and £26,000, and the bulk of the novel explores his various funny and touching fish-out-of-water experiences as he tries to adjust to being so abruptly rich. The funniest and most touching of these involve his hypergamous desires (one of Anthony Burgess's favourite words, that: hypergamy is ‘bedding a woman from a class superior to one's own’). When still a draper Kipps took a woodcarving class on Thursday nights, and fell deeply and hopelessly in love with the young woman who taught it, the beautiful and refined Helen Walshingham. Now that he is rich, and since Helen happens to be financially distressed, he finds himself in a position to propose marriage. She accepts. Kipps is taken in hand by a small circle of the higher-class Folkestonites, in particular a man called Mr Coote, although there is little they can do to raise the tone of Kipps's exuberantly lower-middle-class speech, manner and being.

Kipps is divided into three ‘books’. Book 1 details Kipps's schooldays and his time as a draper's assistant ending, at Chapter 6 ‘The Unexpected’, with his inheritance. Book 2 follows-through into Kipps's new life of wealth and his betrothal to Helen Walshingham; Book 3 is rather disproportionately shorter than the first two, and ties-up the story as (spoiler!) Kipps, feeling increasingly malapropos and miserable, jilts Helen and instead marries his childhood sweetheart and social equal Ann. He then loses almost all his money (the solicitor who had been handling his financial affairs, Helen's younger brother, has speculated it all away) and sets up a little bookshop with what's left. The novel ends happily, with the Kippses new parents, happier as shopkeepers than they ever were as wealthy types, although there's a sort of double-twist, when money Kipps had foolishly put into a theatrical play turns out unexpectedly to have been a golden investment, and he becomes rich again.

But plot-summary really does nothing to convey the flavour of the novel, and it's that flavour that carries the whole: precisely observed, beautifully written, often genuinely funny, touching, charming. Wells renders not one but two whole social milieux out of a weave of specific detail and incident, and has a marvellous eye for the way incongruity parleys embarrassment into a sort of superposition of hilarity and existential agony. Kipps goes through the novel hideously self-conscious and always overwhelmed by the thought of what other people will think of him. In the first third he is worried what better-bred people will think. In the second two thirds it gets worse: he worries what his new friends will think, what Helen will think and what servants, waiters and so on will think of him.

I'd argue this is one of the most remarkable things about Kipps. Quite apart from how droll the book is, how effectively illustrative it is of the social mores of Edwardian English life, how vivid is its characterisation—all those ‘well-made novel’ qualities over which Wells manifests such impressive control—quite apart from all that is the centrality the novel gives to shyness and boredom. I can't think of a better portrait of shyness and boredom in literature. Indeed, when I think how hugely important both those qualities are in most people's lives (my own early existence for instance) I'm rather boggled by their absence from capital-L Literature. I suppose the general bias towards can-do ‘relatable’ heroes and action adventure drowns all that out. But surely the majority of us are not like that. The young Kipps, pre-legacy, is bored by the endless routine of his job in the draper's shop, but even more bored on the days he doesn't have to work.

On Sundays he was obliged to go to church once, and commonly he went twice, for there was nothing else to do. He sat in the free seats at the back; he was too shy to sing, and not always clever enough to keep his place in the prayer-book, and he rarely listened to the sermon. But he had developed a sort of idea that going to church had a tendency to alleviate life. His aunt wanted to have him confirmed, but he evaded this ceremony for some years.

In the intervals between services he walked about Folkestone with an air of looking for something. Folkestone was not so interesting on Sundays as on week-days, because the shops were shut. Sometimes the apprentice next above him would condescend to go with him; but when the apprentice next but one above him condescended to go with the apprentice next above him, then Kipps, being habited as yet in ready-made clothes without tails, and unsuitable therefore to appear in such company, went alone ... He would sometimes walk up and down the Leas between twenty and thirty times after supper, desiring much the courage to speak to some other person in the multitude similarly employed. Almost invariably he ended his Sunday footsore.

He never read a book; there were none for him to read, and, besides ... he had no taste that way. [Kipps, 49-50]

Money ought to alleviate this tedium; but in a way only makes it worse. Kipps's agony at having to make social calls and go to parties, as his fiancée insists he does, is beautifully and painfully rendered. These sections remind me, rather, of Stevie Smith:

Into the dark night
Resignedly I go,
I am not so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know,
I do not fear the night above
As I fear the friends below.

How many of us feel that way! Where are the discussions of shyness as a cultural and personal reality, anyway? Who are the shy heroes of literature? Build that critical and cultural discourse, and maybe Kipps will be recognised as the first great masterpiece of a ubiquitous phenomenon. Towards the end of book 2 Kipps, now rich, and having booked himself into a luxury hotel, is too shy to get himself lunch. The whole scene is a masterpiece in the painful comedy of social awkwardness.

He would have liked something to eat very much now, but his inbred terror of the table was very strong. He did at last get by a porter in uniform towards the dining-room, but at the sight of a number of waiters and tables, with remarkable complications of knives and glasses, terror seized him, and he backed out again, with a mumbled remark to the waiter in the doorway about this not being the way. He hovered in the hall and lounge until he thought the presiding porter regarded him with suspicion, and then went up to his room again by the staircase. [Kipps, 312]

He decides to go to an outside restaurant instead, but that plan goes no better.

He tried to find a place to suit him soon enough. He tried to remember the sort of things Walshingham [his well-bred brother-in-law to be] had ordered. Before all things he didn't want to go into a place and look like a fool ... He drifted on to a neat window with champagne bottles, a dish of asparagus and a framed menu of a two shilling lunch. He was about to enter, when fortunately he perceived two waiters looking at him over the back screen of the window with a most ironical expression, and he sheered off at once. There was a wonderful smell of hot food half way down Fleet Street and a nice looking Tavern with several doors, but he could not decide which door. His nerve was going under the strain. [Kipps, 313]

Of course, if Kipps were nothing more than this sort of endlessly shrinking violet he would get pretty wearing, and more to the point would be too passive and uninteresting to make for a great character. Wells is much cannier than that, threading Kipps's acute, sometimes crippling shyness and embarrassment with strands of a more bumptious, thrusting youthful energy. There are just enough glimpses of this flipabout assertive Kipps (the last thing he says in the novel is: ‘I don't suppose there ever was a chap quite like me before!’—although he does then qualify that with ‘Oo! I dunno’) to ratify Jonathan Frantzen's famous claim, in Purity, that a combination of moral absolutism and a sense of superiority ‘is so often the secret heart of shyness’. The best critical book on this topic that I know is Christopher Ricks's Keats and Embarrassment (Clarendon Press 1984), although it doesn't mention Wells at all. But I'll return to Ricks after a digression on cutting.


2. Cuts

It took a long time for Wells to stitch Kipps together. He started writing the first version in 1898 under the working-title The Wealth of Mr. Waddy. According to Harris Wilson, who has examined the complicated MSS held in the Wells Archive of the University of Illinois Urbana: ‘the six-thousand-odd sheets written intermittently over a period of seven years’ contain ‘literally scores of false starts, digressions, and abandoned episodes.’ In the final published version Part 3 is half the size of Part 1 and a third the size of Part 2, a disproportion that can in part be explained by the fact Wells cut an 11,000-word episode of pretty undiluted political and utopian speculation from this last potion, a reminder that he was working on the final draft of Kipps at the same time as writing Mankind in the Making and A Modern Utopia. ‘Wells, in this episode,’ notes Wilson, ‘slips into the discursive and didactic; his characters are almost forgotten as they expound his own social ideas and criticism’. So we can be glad Wells had the sense to bin the whole lot.

Now, we could take this protracted and repeatedly revised and cut-about genesis as evidence of Wells's looseness of aesthetic construction: chucking, as it were, stuff at the wall of the novel and seeing what stuck. In the Experiment in Autobiography Wells says surprisingly little about Kipps, although it does come up briefly in a section titled ‘Whether I Am A Novelist’ that is mostly given over to a more-or-less self-deprecating account of discussions he had with Henry James over the novelist's art. James, says Wells, had high standards for their respective work: ‘he thought of [the Novel] as an Art Form and of novelists as artists of a very special and exalted type’. Wells insists that he always thought of it on the contrary as a mode of communication, of reaching and teaching people. Indeed he reports that James regretted he found himself unable to take Wells's novels ‘in any aesthetic or “literary” relation at all’, and Wells concedes the point:

Tried by Henry James's standards I doubt if any of my novels can be taken in any other fashion. There are flashes and veins of character duly “treated” and living individuals in many of them, but none that satisfy his requirements fully. A lot of Kipps may pass, some of Tono Bungay, Mr. Britling Sees It Through and Joan and Peter and let me add, I have a weakness for Lady Harman and for Theodore Bulpington and—— But I will not run on. These are pleas in extenuation. The main indictment is sound, that I sketch out scenes and individuals, often quite crudely, and resort even to conventional types and symbols, in order to get on to a discussion of relationships. The important point which I tried to argue with Henry James was that the novel of completely consistent characterization arranged beautifully in a story and painted deep and round and solid, no more exhausts the possibilities of the novel, than the art of Velasquez exhausts the possibilities of the painted picture. [Experiment in Autobiography, 414]

The case for Kipps is made on the basis of its characterisation; and I've mentioned on this blog before the old academic-critical prejudice that prefers James ‘the artist’ to Wells the journalist and sciencefictioneer. And, as before, I'm going to make the case that the long gestation of Kipps indexes not slapdashness but on the contrary, is evidence of a conscious literary artist honing and perfecting a very tightly constructed work of literary art. Regardless of what Wells himself might say.

This tightness of construction depends upon the deployment of a network of thematic and symbolic patterns and textual structures that underlie what seems, on the surface, to be a peripatetic set of narrative episodes loosely accumulated around the central character of Arthur Kipps himself. There are, I would say, five sets of these symbolic-representation nexuses, and I could write a blog post as long as this one (no! please! I hear you cry) about every one of them. I could for instance talk about the theatrical trope, in which scenes from the vulgar theatre, and Chitterlow's ridiculous play about a Beetle, are artfully juxtaposed with the concept of well-bred society as an endless quasi-dramatic performance, the script of which is too complex and baffling for Kipps to learn; or about the way the bicycle is used to trope class consciousness, mobility and power throughout; or about the way the novel uses carefully mapped-out liminal spaces, from basements and side-doors to the beach itself, from hotels to unbuilt houses, to develop its themes; or on a different level I could talk about the way Wells works with a cleverly understated quasi-Joycean set of language games, in which Kipps's non-RP pronunciation is mirrored in, for instance, the Anagram Tea to which, to Kipps's great terror, he is invited.

This repeated mode of estranging words, of turning them from lucid token of communication into baffling blanks, finds its wonderful apotheosis in the novel's conclusion, in which Kipps who doesn't read books ends up a bookseller, and the narrator of Kipps can boast that his novel about Kipps is for sale in Kipps's shop, and Kipps doesn't even realise this because Kipps never reads.

In each of these four cases I would argue that Wells very carefully positions references and allusions not only to unify the text longitudinally, as it were (that is, from the start of the novel to its end), but also to run them in parallel and connect them; such that each nexus of symbolic representation, in its way, combines collectively to adumbrate an overarching theme about, broadly, restraint, obstruction or artificiality on the one hand, and freedom, flow and motion on the other. And in each case, as with the larger texture of the whole novel, there is such a wealth of incidental detail in novel, so many specific qualia invoked in order to create a sense of verisimilitude, of a thickness of representation in the matter of lived experience, it is striking to think how un-random all these details are. He knew how to write, did Wells.

That said, instead of talking in greater detail about those four I want to spend a little time on a fifth unifying principle: the cut. It may be that ‘cutting’  is the key trope by which the novel provides for its own architectonic wholeness, linking the other four previously mentioned and focussing the main force of what the novel is trying to say. Let me explain what I mean.

In a literal sense cut means severing or slicing something, cutting it in half or cutting it open. The word, of course, has other meanings that are relevant to the story of Kipps. Most obviously, to ‘cut’ someone, socially, is pointedly to refuse to engage with them, to snub them, to perform a sort of social exile upon them because they have, in some way, violated the codes of society. These two main meanings of ‘cut’ are joined by a third, which I'll come to in a little while, and together these three coordinate the symbolic narrative of the novel.

Kipps starts with one of its most iconic moments, as adolescent Kipps and his childhood sweetheart, Ann Pornick (literally the girl next door) plight their mutual troth by cutting a sixpenny-piece in two such that each holds half as keepsake of the other (when David Heneker adapted Kipps as hit musical in 1963 he actually renamed it Half a Sixpence). Then early in the novel there are two significant episodes that both involve cuts. First Book 1 chapter 3, at the Woodworking class where Kipps meets and falls in love with his teacher Miss Walshingham, and where, clumsily opening a window, he cuts his wrist.

He turned dolefully. “I'm tremendously sorry,” he said in answer to the accusation in Miss Walshingham's eyes. “I didn't think it would break like that,”—as if he had expected it to break in some quite different and entirely more satisfactory manner. The boy with the gift of wood-carving having stared at Kipps' face for a moment, became involved in a Laocoon struggle with a giggle.

“You've cut your wrist,” said one of the girl friends, standing up and pointing. She was a pleasant-faced, greatly freckled girl, with a helpful disposition, and she said “You've cut your wrist,” as brightly as if she had been a trained nurse.

Kipps looked down, and saw a swift line of scarlet rush down his hand. He perceived the other man student regarding this with magnified eyes. “You have cut your wrist,” said Miss Walshingham, and Kipps regarded his damage with greater interest. [Kipps, 74-75]

This scene extends, drolly enough, for some time; and characters later in the novel refer back to it. Then the next chapter introduces the actor-dramatist manqué Chitterlow, who, riding his bicycle, literally collides with Kipps, knocking him over and cutting open his trousers: ‘“Here's the back of my trouser leg all tore down,” said Kipps, “and I believe I'm bleeding”.’ [91]. Chitterlow invites Kipps back to his digs ostensibly to sew up this cut, although the cut never gets sewn; and this leads directly to Kipps discovering that he has inherited money. In the second half of the novel these physical cuts are replaced by emotional ones. Having randomly acquired enough money to win Miss Walshingham (because of her financially-straitened circumstances), Kipps struggles to fit into her higher-class circles: his accent is still too common, and his fancy new clothes indices of him trying too hard. Walshingham takes it on herself to ‘educate’ him on these matters; Kipps has come calling wearing a fancy silk hat of which he is particularly proud, and for him the best word to describe the experience is cutting:

“And then there's dress,” said Helen, taking up her thread again.

Kipps became pink, but he remained respectfully attentive.

“You don't mind?” she said.

“Oo, no.”

“You mustn't be too—too dressy. It's possible to be over-conventional, over-elaborate. It makes you look like a shop—like a common, well-off person. There's a sort of easiness that is better. A real gentleman looks right, without looking as though he had tried to be right.”

“Jest as though 'e'd put on what came first?” said the pupil, in a faded voice.

“Not exactly that, but a sort of ease.”

Kipps nodded his head intelligently. In his heart he was kicking his silk hat about the room in an ecstasy of disappointment. [Kipps, 243]

She perseveres with this task, to Kipps's continuing, if hidden, distress.

She took him in hand in perfect good faith. She told him things about his accent, she told him things about his bearing, about his costume and his way of looking at things. She thrust the blade of her intelligence into the tenderest corners of Kipps' secret vanity, she slashed his most intimate pride to bleeding tatters. [Kipps, 260-61]

Poor old cut-up Kipps! It's after this, and with a proleptic glimpse of the direction the story is going, that the narrator reverts to the society meaning of the word ‘cut’, with a finely judged gentle comic irony:

Charitable as one may be, one must admit there are people who do things, impossible things; people who place themselves ‘out of it’ in countless ways; people, moreover, who are by a sort of predestination out of it from the beginning, and against these Society has invented a terrible protection for its Cootery, the Cut. The cut is no joke for anyone. It is excommunication. You may be cut by an individual, you may be cut by a set or you may be—and this is so tragic that beautiful romances have been written about it—‘Cut by the County.’ One figures Coote discharging this last duty and cutting somebody—Coote, erect and pale, never speaking, going past with eyes of pitiless slate, lower jaw protruding a little, face pursed up and cold and stiff. [Kipps, 280-81]

‘It never dawned upon Kipps,’ the narrator adds, deadpan, ‘that he would one day have to face this terrible front, to be to Coote not only as one dead, but as one gone more than a stage or so in decay, cut and passed, banned and outcast for ever.’ And as this inevitable catastrophe approaches, Kipps is cut again physically (‘Kipps got up late, cut his chin while shaving, kicked a slipper into his sponge bath and said, “Desh!”’ [300]). He realises he doesn't love Helen, does love Ann, and in a panic he rushes off to London—he cuts and runs, we might say.

Then, after the scene in the London hotel where he is too shy to arrange for his own lunch mentioned above, he comes to an understanding about his own desires. Instead of tying the knot with Helen he cuts it: jilts her and elopes with Ann. All this cutting reaches a kind of climax in the Book 3, after Kipps has married Ann, and just before he discovers he has lost all his money. Kipps goes for a walk in the rain wearing an elaborate macintosh and leggings, but by the time he gets into town the rainclouds have dispersed and the sun is shining brightly: ‘the right thing for such a day as this was a light overcoat and an umbrella’ and the various promenaders, to Kipps's huge embarrassment, look at him oddly. Then he chances upon Coote: his former chaperon into higher society now outraged at Kipps's desertion of Helen, a man whose very name is a variant on the word ‘cut’.

He already felt the most abject and propitiatory of social outcasts when he came upon Coote, and Coote finished him. He passed within a yard of Coote. Coote was coming along towards the Leas, and when Kipps saw him his legs hesitated about their office and he seemed to himself to stagger about all over the footpath. At the sight of him Coote started visibly. Then a sort of rigor vitae passed through his frame, his jaw protruded and errant bubbles of air seemed to escape and run about beneath his loose skin. (Seemed I say—I am perfectly well aware that there is really connective tissue in Coote as in all of us to prevent anything of the sort.) His eyes fixed themselves on the horizon and glazed. As he went by Kipps could hear his even, resolute breathing. He went by, and Kipps staggered on into a universe of dead cats and dust heaps, rind and ashes—cut! Cut! [Kipps, 429]

This reiterated physical and metaphorical cutting is the novel's way of driving home Kipps's disconnection from the corpus civile, at least as that latter quantity is defined by the hidebound old-fashioned pettiness of provincial English respectability. That Kipps is, in some existential, if comico-pathetic, way cut-off from his various dreams is the larger logic of the book. It's why working in a draper's is the ‘right’ way for Wells to start his character's journey,. After all: what does a draper's shop do, except is cut up cloth to sell?

What strikes me as really remarkable is the way this thematic of ‘cutting’ is so sedulously connected by Wells to the other nexuses of semantic-symbolic unity in the novel—so: Kipps's first encounter with the bicycle is when Chitterlow collides with him, cutting his trouser and leg; and the way the Anagram Tea consists of ‘cutting up’ and rearranging words (and the way Kipps himself is cut-up by the experience of it); and the way the landscape is sliced-through or cut-up in ways that actualise the narrative. Even Chitterlow's theatrical ambitions connect to this: for when he has wealth Kipps invests in Chitterlow's absurd play (not because he believes it will succeed but because he thinks he owes Chitterlow for alerting him to the fact of his inheritance). The twist is that right at the end of the novel the play becomes a huge hit, generating enormous amounts of money from which Kipps can then take his cut.

This may appear to you strained, but I stand by it. Quite apart from anything else, it speaks to Wells's decision to change the name of his protagonist from ‘Waddy’ to ‘Kipps’. Now you might believe, as I myself once did, that this name is an Anagram Tea version of [Dic]k[en]s' Pip, since Great Expectations is the ur-novel of the doomed attempt by a good-hearted lower-class lad to turn himself into a gentleman. But I now suggest a different derivation. Kip, kipp or kyppe (plural kips) means ‘the untanned hide of a young or small beast, such as a calf, lamb, or young goat’, and also ‘the leather made from such hide; kip leather’. That is to say it means a fabric that has been literally cut from the body of a young beast. Kip, the young draper's assistant, is named for an artefact of cutting.

There's more to say here, and it brings back the Christopher Ricks book on Keats I mention above. Because, of course, ‘cut’ has another meaning—an indecent one—a meaning also important to this novel: for it is, of course, an old English word for ‘vagina’, the part of the human body that is a sort of cut in the flesh (as opposed to the bulbous extrusion of the male genitals). In Twelfth Night Malvolio picks up the forged-letter he believes to have been written by his mistress Olivia, and declares: ‘by my life, this is my lady's hand: these be her very C's, her U's, and her T's, and thus she makes her great P’. It's not sophisticated humour, although that doesn't mean it isn't funny; and cut at least avoids the sheer aggressive unpleasantness of the word's modern derivative, cunt.

Kipps, as novel, is about a young man caught between the choice of two beautiful women, and it ends with him choosing one, marrying her and fathering a child. So it is, in one unavoidable sense, a novel about sex. But Kipps himself is, as per the code of lower-middle-class respectability, enormously inhibited about sexual matters. Although, at the top of this post, I describe the Kipps/Helen narrative as a drama of hypergamy, ‘bedding a woman from a class superior to one's own’, there is nothing of the bedroom whatsoever in Kipp's yearning after the beautiful Helen. They never kiss; they are rarely even alone together. She is in his eyes more angel than fleshly woman, and the longer their engagement goes on, and the closer Kipps comes to his actual wedding night, the more alarmed he becomes at the prospect. When, as a prelude to jilting her, he runs off to London and stays in the Royal Grand he is prudishly outraged by the ladies' evening attire in the dining room.

He felt he was getting on. He leant back after his soup, a man of the world, and then slowly brought his eyes around to the ladies in evening dress on his right....

He couldn't have thought it!

They were scorchers. Jest a bit of black velvet over the shoulders!

He looked again. One of them was laughing with a glass of wine half raised—wicked-looking woman she was—the other, the black velvet one, was eating bits of bread with nervous quickness and talking fast. [Kipps, 341-42; ellipsis in original]

Staring at the flesh these women are displaying ‘he found a waiter regarding him and blushed deeply. He did not look again for some time, and became confused about his knife and fork over the fish.’ Fish. Ah, OK. ‘His ears became violently red’. This awkwardness, the specifically erotic component of Kipps's vast shyness, is a piece of reportage, reflecting the actual sexual mores of the ‘respectable’ lower middle classes of 1905. It's more than that, though, in the pattern of the novel. It connects with the mystery of Kipps's mother. We gather, without it ever being spelled out in so many words, that young Kipps is raised by his elderly uncle and aunt because his mother (whom he, and we, never meet) had him illegitimately. Conceivably, connecting to the novel's thematic nexuses, she was an actress, which is to say prostitute; somebody living in the liminal spaces of polite society, someone who made her living with her cut. The novel's opening two paragraphs contain, really, all we are told about her:

Until he was nearly arrived at adolescence it did not become clear to Kipps how it was that he was under the care of an aunt and uncle instead of having a father and mother like other boys. Yet he had vague memories of a somewhere else that was not New Romney—of a dim room, a window looking down on white buildings—and of a some one else who talked to forgotten people, and who was his mother. He could not recall her features very distinctly, but he remembered with extreme definition a white dress she wore, with a pattern of little sprigs of flowers and little bows of ribbon upon it, and a girdle of straight-ribbed white ribbon about the waist. Linked with this, he knew not how, were clouded half-obliterated recollections of scenes in which there was weeping, weeping in which he was inscrutably moved to join. Some terrible tall man with a loud voice played a part in these scenes, and either before or after them there were impressions of looking for interminable periods out of the windows of railway trains in the company of these two people....

He knew, though he could not remember that he had ever been told, that a certain faded, wistful face, that looked at him from a plush and gilt framed daguerreotype above the mantel of the "sitting-room," was the face of his mother. But that knowledge did not touch his dim memories with any elucidation. In that photograph she was a girlish figure, leaning against a photographer's stile, and with all the self-conscious shrinking natural to that position. She had curly hair and a face far younger and prettier than any other mother in his experience. She swung a Dolly Varden hat by the string, and looked with obedient respectful eyes on the photographer-gentleman who had commanded the pose. She was very slight and pretty. But the phantom mother that haunted his memory so elusively was not like that, though he could not remember how she differed. Perhaps she was older, or a little less shrinking, or, it may be, only dressed in a different way.... [Kipps, 3-4]

The two ellipses, there, are in the original, indicating—what? Uncertainty? Hesitancy? As in David Copperfield (manifestly an important influence on Wells writing in mundane mode) the sexually alluring young mother is removed from the narrative early on, having been present just long enough to imprint one taboo erotic ideal on the straight male protagonist, which he then spends the rest of the novel working out, through a diremption of desire towards two objects, one pure and elevated and unsexy, the other closer to his own nature and sexy. [It's pretty much the same erotic dynamic as the one I discuss in my account of Love and Mr Lewisham] Perhaps the cut that haunts the cut-and-flayed Kipps throughout his life is the primal cut, the one that made him. A ‘Dolly Varden hat’ is a perfectly respectable style of lady's headwear, named for Dickens's blameless Barnaby Rudge heroine and very popular in the nineteenth-century; but ‘Dolly Varden’ was also cockney rhyming slang for ‘Covent Garden’, famous in the Victorian era for its prostitutes. According to Partridge ‘kip’ was also slang for a brothel.

It's doubtless dangerous to burrow too far down these sorts of rabbit holes. But we can at least agree that sex, in this novel, is simultaneously surface-unspeakable and a palpable below-the-surface force (as it is in a great many 19th- and early 20th century novels, of course). This aspect of the writing is magnified by the fact that Kipps is an unusually sexually immature and shy protagonist. The mere sight of naked shoulders makes his ears burn red. Only in the very last pages, as Kipps holds his new-born son in his trembling arms, does the narrator feel licensed to say: ‘the once rabbit-like soul that had been so amazed by the discovery of “chubes” in the human interior and so shocked by the sight of a woman's shoulder-blades ... was at last facing the greater realities.’ [Kipps, 464]. For most of the novel even the most oblique intimation of matters sexual make him blush fiercely.

I think we can say of Wells what Christopher Ricks says of Keats: ‘Keats as a man and a poet was especially sensitive to, and morally intelligent about, embarrassment’, which state Ricks defines as ‘constrained feeling or manner arising from bashfulness or timidity’ [Ricks, 1, 3]. As with Keats, there is I think something peculiarly English about Wells's apprehension of shyness and embarrassment (Ricks wonders ‘is embarrassment not only a nineteenth-century sentiment but a narrowly English one?’); and two of the larger points about Ricks's argument seem to me to apply particularly well to Wells's Kipps—that this is art that challenges the reader to experience embarrassment, and that the root of this shyness is less social than sexual. For Ricks it is a great strength of Keats that he is

one of the very few erotic poets who have come at embarrassment from a different angle of necessity: from the wish to pass directly through—not to bypass (however principled and perceptive the by passing)—the hotly disconcerting, the potentially ludicrous, distasteful, or blush-inducing. [Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (1984), 68]

One of Ricks's key comparisons is the never-embarrassed suavity of Byron. There are plenty of blushes in Don Juan, Ricks notes, but ‘they never work upon us, as Keats's do, by implicating us in the hot tinglings of sensation; they are always seen from outside ...The limpidity and lucidity of Byron's style act as a cordon sanitaire against contagious embarrassment’ [Ricks, 83]. I'm struck that, mutatis mutandis, we could make a similar distinction between Wells and his friend Henry James. James sees an obliquity, and a complexity, in human sexual affairs, and in his novels such things very rarely run smooth; but we are never embarrassed on behalf of James's characters, I think. Like Byron, although in a different manner, the sheer suavity of his style acts as a cordon sanitaire against such blushing and cringing. Not so Wells: for him the path to his novel's core lies right through those embarrassments. He makes the most of them, and he makes his readers feel them, and he does both things brilliantly. Sexual desire is complex, I think; or it is often so; but embarrassment shares the epithet that characterises Kipps's soul in the subtitle Wells chose for his novel: it is simple.

So where are we? Kipps, whose name encodes having been cut. Kipps who is literally repeatedly cut in the novel, and whose whole social trajectory bends towards the metaphorical cut of higher-society exile. Kipps, whose love life stays true to the cut sixpence he shares with his childhood sweetheart. Kipps whose shyness and embarrassment, in this story of love, marriage, sex and childbirth, is haunted by the ‘cut’ of womanhood. Kipps the novel that took eight years to write, including many reworkings and many passages cut from the draft—most particularly the cutting out of an 11,000 word ‘Masterman’ episode from Part 3. Which is to say, Kipps the novel whose final form carries (in the reduced and chopped-about disproportion of Part 3) the evidence that it has been cut. It is, after all, worth remembering that whilst working on Kipps Wells was also writing A Modern Utopia, in which the vision of utopian possibility ends when ‘the botanist’ meets once again the woman who broke his heart and reverts to the painful truth of things, in which having been cut and its corollary is the very essence of our being-in-the-world: ‘what are we all but scars?,’ he cries, as the two of them tumble back into mundaneness. ‘What is life but a scarring? It's you—you who don't understand! Of course we are covered with scars, we live to be scarred, we are scars! We are the scars of the past!’ [Wells, A Modern Utopia, 301]. Cut to—


3. Tolstoy

An unsigned article in the Saturday Review for 22 April 1905, almost certainly written by Wells, begins: ‘Twenty years ago Tolstoy was hardly known outside Russia. We remember mentioning his existence to an American novelist of first rank, a great admirer of Turgenev, who did not seem inclined to believe that people would soon come to recognise the greater power of Tolstoy. Who has not heard of Tolstoy now?’ The American novelist of first rank must be Henry James, of course. Rosamund Bartlett notes that:

a year after this review was published, Wells would write Tolstoy a fan letter, telling him he had read everything by him he could find in English, about 18 volumes, and that, in his opinion, of all the works he had had the fortune to read, War and Peace and Anna Karenina were the “most magnificent and all-encompassing”. [‘Tolstoy Translated’, FT 8th August 2014]

I can't prove Wells had Tolstoy on his mind writing Kipps, but it seems to me overwhelmingly likely. What is Kipps, after all, except a lower-class, more respectable and sexually continent Pierre? (presumably it is the very blinding obviousness of this observation that has kept it out of the criticism, for I don't know any critics who make this point). Obviously Kipps's inheritance is not wealth on the same sort of scale as Pierre's, and obviously Kipps doesn't live through anything as traumatic as the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. But then again, Tolstoy's interest in Pierre is less to do with the specific nature of those sorts of externals and more with—precisely—the simplicity of his soul, which is delineated via the complex there-and-back-again of his reaction to his personal change in fortunes. It's stating the obvious to note that that's also what Kipps, as a novel, is interested in.

The notion that there is anything Tolstoyan in Wells's writing has, I suppose, gone out of fashion; but the fact that it used to be in fashion—that there used to be a time when books like Marinita Davis's A Study of Tolstoi and H.G. Wells as Educators (Stanford 1929) could be published with, as it were, a straight face—suggests that there is at least something in the comparison. At any rate, and despite the obvious differences in tone between Tolstyan epic dignity and Wellsian social comedy, I'd stand by the idea that Kipps is a Tolstoyan novel.

John Bayley talks about the ‘dynamic absurdity’ of Tolstoy's Pierre (distinguishing this from ‘the merely passive absurdity’ of the novel's non-Russian characters), and it's a good way of describing Kipps too. Like Kipps, Pierre works hard to fit himself into a system which can never be home for him, and one of the saving graces of his simplicity is that, on some level, he always knows this (think of the scene where Pierre is inducted into the Masons, and how awkwardly that goes—at the ceremony ‘a childlike smile of embarrassment, doubt and self-derision appeared on Pierre's face against his will’). But there's a larger Tolstoyan point which bears on Kipps as a novel. Bayley asks: ‘what are the elements of antagonism, as Tolstoy sees it, between French and Russians?’ And he answers:

The Russians represent a family; the French, by contrast, represent a system—the terrible it which Pierre becomes aware of when the Frenchmen whom he thinks he has got to know during his captivity are suddenly revealed as automata, controlled by some impersonal force which is pressing him towards destruction, a force which overrides humanity. [Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (Chatto 1966), 136]

This is a terrific insight, I think, and one that opens the whole of War and Peace to us. And it shines a light into Kipps too, I'd argue. The higher society into which Kipps is thrust is repeatedly characterised by Wells, often hilariously, as a fractal web of abstruse and counter-intuitive rules and conventions. Kipps hopes to navigate it with the help of Mr Coote, and also by poring over books with titles like ‘Manners and Rules of Good Society, by a Member of the Aristocracy’ (‘TWENTY-FIRST EDITION’) and ‘that admirable classic, The Art of Conversing.’ But of course Kipps struggles with these cryptic mazes of systemised behaviour.

Kipps returned with these to his seat, placed the two before him, opened the latter with a sigh and flattened it under his hand. Then with knitted brows he began to read onward from a mark, his lips moving. ... Kipps rubbed his fingers through his hair with an expression of some perplexity and went back to the beginning. [Kipps, 209]

The novel's comedy styles its hero's erotic dilemma this way: as the choice between an arbitrary and artificial system of rules and conventions—Helen—and the quasi-familial closeness of the girl-next-door and Kipps's own social class—Ann. Class in this novel is troped as family: Kipps's closest ally, beyond his actual blood relative uncle and aunt, is Sid, the brother of the woman he marries. It is Sid who finds Kipps wandering hungry through the streets of London because he is too shy to dare the rebarbative systemised rituals of expensive restaurants, invites him home and feeds him mutton. The book rewards spontaneity (like Kipps giving Chitterlow £2000) and deprecates all unspontaneous, regulated and systemised modes of living. We could say, in Tolstoyan mode, that Kipps is Russian, where the world of Helen, Coote and their ilk is French.

That's also a problem, perhaps. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is something quite intensely small-c conservative about Kipps's social message. Dickens's Pip is hardly happy after being remade a gentleman, but Great Expectations at least leaves him a gentleman, and permits him to make the best of things. Wells does the fort-da thing with Kipps's social mobility: sends him up only to return him back to where he started, and the novel's end strongly implies: he's better off where he is. But then Wells's radical ideology went hand in hand with some really quite small-c conservative attitudes. That's not uncommon amongst the political left, I'd say. It's also a pretty Tolystoyan combination of attitudes.

The Imposter: a Tale of the Modern Utopia (2017)

[Note: this blog exists primarily as a record of my read-through of Wells's fiction, and the overwhelming majority of its entries are critical meditations occasioned by specific Wellsian titles. But from time to time I blog other things: accounts of books with Wellsian interest not by Wells, as here, or more rarely short pieces of original fiction that stand as sequels to Wellsian titles, as with this example. In the case of the latter kind of text I'm generally working-out something about the source book via fiction rather than criticism, and the stories have no pretensions beyond actualising that mode of speculative engagement. This piece, for instance, is nothing more a brief pendant to Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905) and my post thereon. That's all.]

:1:

Cade-Gall took the electric express from Saint Petersburg direct to Zurich. He had been detained by problems with the Baltic seaweed harvest longer than he had wanted—a tangle of variously assigned blame and unresolved technical issues after it was discovered the harvesting equipment had not been assembled correctly. The whole affair had interrupted a retreat in which he and two other samurai had been engaged in mapping new high primes, and speculating upon the mathematics underlying that important phenomenon. No matter! He had resolved it, in time. And now he was due his annual week in the wilderness. So he wasted no time on arrival in Zurich, laced his sandals tighter, shouldered his pack and strode out of the station.

He walked the mountains. He bathed in streams so cold they scalded. He ate frugally from his supplies and supplemented that dried diet with berries and grass-seeds and mushrooms. He sat watching sunsets and pondered questions of strength and will and being. On his sixth day he came to Mount Lucendro, its angular head white as a swan, glowering over the damned-up Lake below. He resolved to test himself by climbing it. The cold intensified sharply with altitude, the air was so thin it became only the ghost of air, and the way was sometimes precarious, but he reached the summit eventually and sat, shivering, looking down.

The flank of a glacier, like a frozen hurricane. The world below modeled in miniature. The air bright and clean and smelling of nothing at all, smelling only of cold and of sky.

And from there it was a cautious descent that turned, soon enough, into a pleasant amble along the sinusoidal digressions of the downward path, and so into the valley and along the twilight main road of Ariolo right up to the door of the bright-lit Traveller’s Inn. It was good to get inside. An old-style fire was burning heartily in the grate, cracking its knuckles and being superbly generous with its heat and ruddy light.

Cade-Gall dined on olive-bread spread with some of the richest, creamiest butter he had ever tasted, supplemented with a salad of pepperleaves and spinach, and washed down with a fruit cordial. He stretched in his chair and watched the fire, with that mode of physical exhaustion that complements and sharpens the well-being, as having been well-earned. The inn-keeper added another log to the blaze, and the fireplace growled as the new fuel settled; and steam emerged from the cracks in the block of timber, whistling faintly, and then the log seemed to settle itself and go to sleep.

He was not alone in that comfortable chamber. A group of three young women were sitting together on the far side of the room playing three-handed chess, and a knot of mixed citizenry had gathered in a semi-circle about a second samurai who happened to be there—a man of middle-age who was holding forth, almost after the manner of an actor, concerning some intervention he had been obliged to make on behalf of law and order and against the vagaries of a drunken group who were protesting the pulling-down of some ugly building or other. Cade-Hall looked twice and recognised him, and then shook his head—for a samurai will of course never shirk a duty, no matter how much he or she might prefer to retire to bed and sleep away the weariness and the full-stomach.

So he went over to the fellow, and put a hand on his shoulder, and said: Raine.

Raine twitched and shuddered, danced several steps back.

—Cade-Gall, he cried.

—Citizens, Cade-Gall told the small audience. You must forgive my interruption, but I know this man. Though he dresses as a samurai he has no place in our order. He was expelled for failing the standards of chastity. I am sorry to say he has duped you.

—For God’s sake, man, Raine cried, backing further away, his face mimicking the Tragic Mask. I loved her!

The small audience was astounded.

—Raine, said Cade-Gall severely. You dishonour yourself and your former calling by this behaviour. As I am the law embodied in this place, I have no choice but to take action.

At this Raine darted out of the Inn's main entrance, and Cade-Gall went after him. It was no lengthy chase, for he found Raine sitting on a public bench under the stars, a quarter mile away, sobbing openly. From time to time a bright-lit tram would swoosh past in a crescendo-diminuendo of white noise. Cade-Gall sat down beside him.

—She was a rare soul, Raine said, eventually.

—If your use of the past tense means that she has died, Cade-Gall said gravely, then I offer my commiserations.

Raine turned a face blurred with shadow towards him. Dead? Not dead, no. She has not died. Off, gone, run away. Found some other beau. I was a samurai, man! And once you stripped me of that, what was I? A nothing. Why would she stay, to be with a nothing?

—Ask rather, why would you throw everything away on account of this sexual infatuation?

—I fell in love, said Raine, angling his face away. Such things cannot be legislated. I might have waited, if there had been the chance of her being recruited to the order. But your standards are so … damnably … so …

—What you are doing is wrong, said Cade-Gall. Impersonating a samurai? It must stop. I must have your word of honour that it stops. Have you no dignity?

—I was a samurai! You call it impersonation? But how can I merely impersonate, like a bad actor, when I gave so much of my life to that very calling?

—You left the order.

—Expelled!

—Your actions forced you out. You must take responsibility for that. And now you must move on with your life. You cannot live as an imposter. And, and for what? What good does it do you, anyway?

Another tram, a chandelier of brightness on wheels, rolled down the grooves of the street and away. Raine was on his feet. He turned, as if to say something to Cade-Gall, and thought better of it, and hurried away into the shadows.

The moon was a pale and perfectly circular rock. The stars seeped light. There was a freshness and pleasaunce in the night air.

Cade-Gall started back to the Inn, and spent a further twenty minutes on the telephone to the central records bureau, checking Raine’s index card. It seemed that this was not the first time he had been rebuked for impersonating that which he no longer was. Cade-Gall added his report to the database, recommended Raine be contacted and officially warned-off such mummery in the future, recorded that he had decided to take no specific action against him that day, but that he stood ready to be overruled if another samurai thought this leniency ill-advised. And with that he finally took himself to bed.

The morning’s cold shower was followed by an hour-long run alongside the swift flowing river and back up the far shore, followed in its turn by a breakfast of acorn-coffee and pita and goat’s cheese. This quite put the matter out of his mind.

:2:

He ran into Raine again quite by chance, some months later. Cade-Gall’s experience with marine jurisdiction led to him being called to adjudicate a legal dispute at the English Channel. An enterprising citizen had founded a limited company to build a bridge linking Calais and Dover, thus greatly facilitating travel between London and Paris. with the intention of charging a fee for trains to pass over. There was some question to at what monetary rate—or, according to some parties to the suit, if at all—the World State should lease the seabed for the bridge’s struts and foundations. All judges being samurai, any samurai might stand as judge, and Cade-Gall was specifically requested. So he went, and spent a month listening to depositions, reading submissions and consulting with fellow samurai, before he pronounced his judgment, laying-up a copy of the same in Central Records. It was clear, he said, that the World State owned all land. The fact of being under water did not negate that ownership, or else a heavy blizzard would rob the World State of the land on which the snow fell. But land under a hundred and fifty foot of brine was, of course, not as amenable to development as prime farmland, and therefore he decreed such land be leased at 25% of the standard land value. As with all Modern Utopian legal judgments this was no binding fiat, and could be appealed to another samurai—although absent manifest imbalance in the original judgement, such appeals were unlikely to be upheld. At any rate the bridge builder, and her company, seemed content with his decision. Plans for construction were laid.

Cade-Gall stayed on for a week or so after his work was completed. He was in a clean, small Inn overlooking the sea, and that was where he heard of a fellow going-about impersonating a samurai. This man had, it seemed, gone into an Art exhibition in Saint-Omer and shut it down on grounds of public indecency. Nobody knew why, or in what way the fellow benefitted from his arbitrary intervention. Certainly there had been nothing indecent about the art. The organisers had not been happy, but of course had not thought to query the authority of an individual they assumed was a samurai. It was only when it came up in casual conversation with another samurai that the deception emerged. He was dressed like a samurai, they said, and his whole demeanour seemed … like one of you. Cade-Gall’s name was cross-linked in the central registry as having had prior dealing with Imposter, and the circumstance was still so rare as to occasion a call to him. So Cade-Gall took the train straight to Saint Omer, where he discovered that the fake samurai—who else but Raine?—had done a number of other things: ejected all the houseboats moored along the canal from the town, on no grounds at all (the boats, of course, had gone); requisitioned a museum house from the Old Days to live in, rather than stay in a standard Traveller’s Inn, and several times gathered in public places and restaurants and related tall stories to groups of people: how he had saved a drowning child from a capsizing boat, how he had single-handedly wrestled a bear in Armenia and so enabled a family to flee; how he was involved in research to develop a rocket to fly into space.

The arrival of a real samurai, and the reasons for his coming, went quickly round the town , and Raine fled on the Paris train. Cade-Gall was almost annoyed—he had to meditate for ten minutes in the town square to restore his equanimity. Wouldn’t do to let emotion cloud his actions, of course. But it was provoking. What did Raine think to achieve? Cade-Gall commandeered a plane and flew straight to Paris, arriving over the Central station before his quarry. The flitter overflew the Station zone, where all the various lines ran in parallel to their termini like corduroy. Cade-Gall circled his aerocar round in a wide arc, hornetted it noisily through its descent, threading the Tower of Astronomy and the smaller Eiffel tower—Paris, city of Towers!—to land on the station’s air-platform. He was on the concourse below before the Saint-Omer train pulled in.

Raine clocked him immediately, and his expression tumbled. Cade-Gall saw him shift posture, look from side to side as if about to run off. But he changed his mind, and his shoulders dropped. Raine, the only motionless figure, in all the flow of eager citizens disembarking and hurrying onto the concourse. Cade-Gall walked towards him.

—Raine, he said.

Purely by coincidence, just as he spoke a flock of station pigeons thrust themselves into flight, soared and turned close under the vault of the concourse with a noise like sudden rainfall. Cade-Gall’s hand touched Raine’s left elbow. Come along with me.

—Harp and carp, said Raine, distractedly. But he came.

They crossed half the concourse in silence, as people came and went around them. People saw two samurai walking together and thought nothing of it.

—We talked before, Cade-Gall said. I was plain. I expected you to cease your imposture.

At this, Raine snatched his arm out of Cade-Gall’s grip, and stopped walking. And? he replied, in a loud voice. And?

Cade-Gall stopped, and faced him. The murmur of people chatting to one another as they passed. The drip-drip noise of many footsteps on marble, synchronising and syncopating with their own echoes in that cavernous space. The hum of a two-storey electric train pulling away from the platform rose in pitch, then wowed and shifted again as it receded until it blended with the collective coo of the pigeons overhead, perched back on their spars and ledges. Brightness coming through the transparent canopy. The smell of cleanness, and baked bread, and ozone, and somewhere behind it the odour of lavender.

—Do what? Cade-Gall repeated. Raine, you could do anything. You live in a world where literally anything is possible. You could follow any path, travel to any place, be with any partner. We samurai are the ones whose existences are hemmed in by restriction, by the can-not-do, and the must-not-love, and it is a burden we gladly assume. But you? You have literally the entire world before you. You can do anything, and have anything.

—I can have anything except the thing I want.

—To be a samurai?

—I was a samurai, Raine said, fiercely. You expelled me, because I fell in love. Because I fell in love!

—Because you betrayed your oath. Because you broke the rules. Because you showed no discipline, and without discipline the samurai would be nowhere, and without the samurai the whole beautiful World State would fall!

—I drank, often. Alcohol, I mean. I drank, and was reprimanded. I once broke a woman’s arm when trying to prevent her from shouting at some children who were playing by bouncing a ball off her housewall. I was reprimanded for that, but I was still a samurai after that reprimand. But I fell in love …

—I have, of course, checked your index card. I know about your various infractions. The samurai are not hasty, for our judgments must be sound and enduring. You were increasingly demonstrating your unfitness for your elevated role. You cannot complain that you were expelled.

—You will exile me to an island, said Raine, abruptly sulky.

—I haven’t yet made up my mind, said Cade-Gall. We haven’t made up our mind. But it’s likely. Still, if it happens, you can choose which island, among the various that would be appropriate.

—Better to slay me. To send a samurai to a prison island?

—Not prison, said Cade-Gall, beginning to feel his temper erode. Yet another place where you will be able to do whatever you choose to do. Just like this entire world is a place where you are able to do whatever you choose to do.

—There is but one thing that matters in human life, and I have lost it.

—There are an uncountable number of things that matter in human life, said Cade-Gall. And any and all of them are available to you. Travel. Explore. Invent. Work. Create. Idle, if you choose: loaf and indulge yourself. Or paint, or make music, or build bridges, or start a family, or become an expert sportsman. The whole world is built to make all this easy for you. If there is a blue-devil in your head telling you to be miserable, then you cannot blame it on the samurai. Seize your happiness!

But Raine was not to be mollified.

—Status, he said. That which I had, and which you took from me, and which I shall never have again. Status, and the respect of other people, and human beings looking up to me.

—If it is other people's respect you want, then earn it in some other place than the samurai. Win sporting events and earn it that way. Write a great poem and earn it that way.

—You think I want fame? You are misunderstanding me, and I think you are misunderstanding me on purpose. Mayfly fame? The applause of idiots? Why would I want that? Fame is not status. Only power grants status and only one group in our world possesses power, and you will not readmit me to their ranks.

—This is nonsense, said Cade-Gall, reaching out to take Raine by the elbow again to lead him to the exit. Come along with me.

It did not occur to Cade-Gall that Raine would not comply. He was a samurai, and people always did what he told them. But Raine, instead of falling into step, snatched his arm away, took a stride back, and then launched himself rapidly forward, crushing his torso up against Cade-Gall’s. Raine had slipped the skewer from his sleeve as he took his backward step, and coming forward again he braced its handle against the heel of his palm, such that it slid neatly into a slot between the front and back panels of Cade-Gall's leather torso-armour, just under where the thongs were knotted to tie them together. The point went in just below the bottom rib and pushed through at a slight upward angle. It popped the balloon of Cade-Gall’s pleural sac and trenched a path through the right lung. A centimetre of the blade’s tip punctured the muscle of his heart.

It was so very and so abruptly painful it almost didn’t feel like pain—not, that is, in any way that could be related to earlier experiences of pain. It was a blistering implosion of all the nerve-pathways and his whole upper body. It was unavoidably centred, like acid in the chest, like fire running along all the most tender vesicles of the body, and it did not diminish. Had Cade-Gall wanted to scream he would not have had the breath to do it. The closest he came was a flooded gasp, squeezed-out by Raine's momentum in colliding with him, and a tomato-red drool-line from the left side of his mouth. Then Raine stepped smartly backwards a yard or more, holding both his hands up, like a football player, like a base football player who had performed an illegal tackle, or body-check, and was dishonestly performing his innocence for the crowd, and to try to persuade the referee he had done nothing wrong.

Cade-Gall went down hard onto one knee. The motion levered the blade of the knife, inside his chest, pushing the handle down and pivoting the whole thing against the underside of his bottom rib such that the tip swung up. The point sliced smoothly through cardiac tissue. Great quantities of blood spilled internally from the spasming heart and washed down through his innards. He felt torn wide open inside, as if hands had gripped his viscera and yanked them unstoppably in alternate directions; he felt like somebody had emptied a hot-water-bottle inside his torso. The circulation through his veins and arteries all but stopped. His vision was dazzled by the pain almost to the point of sunburst, but at the same time the edges of his line-of-sight greyed, shrank. Vision began its withdrawal down an apparent shadow-tunnel.

He could hear the world around him with a new acuteness. He had never heard with such clarity in his life before. It was the sudden silencing of blood-noise in the ears, perhaps. It was a preternatural apprehension of the material world just as he teetered on the edge of leaving it forever, perhaps. Whatever the explanation, he heard the curled trill of the pigeons overhead with bizarre precision and force. He heard the scuff and slide of feet on the concourse floor, and the audible agitation of the crowd. He heard Raine saying do not panic, citizens! I am a samurai, as you can see. Somebody has committed a dreadful crime, and nobody will leave the station until the criminal has been apprehended! Attend to what I say, citizens! He heard gasps and murmurs and one elderly man crying out in distress. He heard a single loud bang, as on a drum, a funeral drum presumably, and there was also a reeling, shivering sensation of pressure sharply applied, and he understood, though belatedly, that he had keeled over and that his forehead had struck the stone slabs of the station floor.

A Modern Utopia (1905)

1: The Utopia itself

Another red book from Wells, as you can see from the first edition cover:—two men on a walking holiday in Switzerland (they're not named in the novel, but are versions of Wells  and his friend Graham Wallas, who were on such a tour when Wells conceived the book) slip, somehow, through some kind of kink in space, to the far edge of the galaxy and onto an exact replica of the Earth, 1905, inhabited by exactly the same population as our Earth, but a Utopia. The book's eleven chapters follow the two as they explore this familiar-yet-utterly-different world and society, Wells layering elements of characterisation, backstory and plot with thick slabs of social explanation and infodumping, somewhat after the model, formally speaking, of a parfait. The main character, known only as ‘the Voice’, narrates; his companion, ‘the botanist’, contributes a little to the discussion, but spends much of the novel mooning after an unhappy love-affair back on our Earth, which ended when the woman he loved married another man.

The two stay in a Utopian inn in Switzerland (‘Switz-U-land’ as Wells, disappointingly, omits to call it) and learn about the Utopian conception of freedom, money and property. The whole planet is one State , and everywhere is connected with everywhere via an advanced infrastructure of electric trams, trains, boats and the like. Everyone is guaranteed a basic income, but is free to earn more if they want to. All land is owned by the State but individuals can lease it to build houses, factories and so on. They meet a Utopian dissenter who thinks society should give over and mankind return to a state of Nature, and thereby learn that the Utopian State is perfectly tolerant of recusants. Everyone is vegetarian. Nobody is forced to work, but inducements and rewards mean that productive people enjoy a finer quality of life. We discover what Utopia does with the hopeless cases, decadents and criminals—dumps them on an island somewhere and otherwise leaves them to their own devices—and how sex and having kids are handled (the former is much freer than in our world, the latter more tightly regulated). It's all very clean and sane and rational and it makes my teeth itch to contemplate it, to be honest. I'm sure that's just me.

Utopian society is divided into four ‘classes’: the Poietic, or makers; the Kinetic, or doers; the Dull and the Base (a different four-fold scheme to the one Wells anticipated in, uh, Anticipations). General global mobility of population has done away with nationalism, and Chapter 11, on ‘Race’, goes some way—though not as far as some critics perhaps suggest—towards repudiating the racism of the earlier Wells: all races are welcome provided they live-up to the Utopian ideal. Dig down into the specifics of Wells's ideal state and things get odder. There are, for instance, no pets: ‘the race of cats and dogs [provide] living fastnesses to which such diseases as plague, influenza, catarrhs and the like, can retreat to sally forth again—[and] must pass ...’ This upsets the botanist, who is fond of dogs. What else? Well, fatties are thin on the ground: the visitors clock ‘one or two fat people—they are all the more noticeable because they are rare’, and there are no baldies at all, since ‘the Utopians have brought a sounder physiological science than ours to bear upon regimen.’ I glance in the mirror at my own pot-belly and bald head, and grin nervously at my reflection. Uh-oh!

The Voice and the botanist travel to London, the former to meet his Utopian self, the latter to seek out the Utopian version of the woman who broke his heart back on Earth. Here, as a kind of conceptual climax to the narrative, Wells describes the ‘samurai’, perhaps the book's most famous invention:—Utopia's ruling caste, a form of ‘voluntary nobility’, ‘open to every physically and mentally healthy adult in the Utopian State who will observe its prescribed austere rule of living’. The person wishing to be a samurai ‘must be in sound health, free from certain foul, avoidable, and demoralising diseases, and in good training. We reject men who are fat, or thin and flabby, or whose nerves are shaky’. Members of this select band undertake to maintain themselves in ‘a state of moral and bodily health and efficiency’: no booze, no cigarettes, a compulsory annual one-week solitary trek through the wilderness. There are various, sometimes rather oddly specific interdictions: the samurai must forebear usury and salesmanship; they can't be actors or singers (‘professional mimicry is not only held to be undignified in a man or woman, but to weaken and corrupt the soul’) and they are not allowed to play cricket, of all things. The reason given for this last restriction is that they must represent the best of the best, and that it would be ‘undignified and unpleasant for the samurai to play conspicuously ill, and impossible for them to play so constantly as to keep hand and eye in training against the man who was fool enough and cheap enough to become an expert’. One can't help feeling that Wells's feelings about his own father, in his time a professional cricketer, are creeping-in here.

What else? Samurai need not be celibate, but they must be chaste, and may only marry other samurai; so if a female or male samurai falls in love with a non-samurai they must leave the order. Otherwise this reiterated stress on self-discipline, cold showers and no grubby beards for the men (‘the samurai must bathe in cold water, and the men must shave every day’) can hardly help but strike the modern reader as the very acme of the earnest socialist faux-ascetic lentil-eating fell-walking cliché. Presumably, it didn't strike contemporaries that way. Indeed the evidence on the latter point all runs the other way. Wells was upfront that he styled the samuari order in part to flatter his fellow Fabians, who liked to fantasise that they could becomes the timoniers of the future socialist world-state. When Beatrice Webb thanked him for giving her a copy of the book, he replied (she noted this in her diary): ‘the chapters on the Samurai will pander to all your worse instincts!’ Another Fabian, Sydney Olivier, reviewed the book gushingly in Fabian News, and also wrote to Wells privately ‘I recognise your trumpeting Angel of the Samurai as my desire for the League of Sane Men’. This ruling elite who, the book says, ‘look like Knights Templars, who bear a name that recalls the swordsmen of Japan’ are, to quote the Independent Review [October 1905] ‘in fact, the Platonic “guardians” born again into an age of electricity and statistics’. The frontispiece to the first edition, by Edmund J Sullivan, illustrates a representative member of ‘the Order of the Samurai’ haughtily spurning various allegorical dangers and temptations.

The judgement that this representation misses heroic dignity by a country mile and lands squarely on the ludicrousness of ill-judged cosplay belongs, of course, in the eye of the beholder.

I'll come back to the samurai in a bit, and in particular to the extent to which Wells addresses the very manifest dangers of concentrating so much power in such an elite (‘all political power vests in the samurai: not only are they the only administrators, lawyers, practising doctors, and public officials of almost all kinds, but they are the only voters’) with only the scantiest of checks and balances. Anyone who breaks the samurai's code is expelled, but expelled (of course) by the samurai. Likewise we're told that ‘every ruler and official is put on his trial every three years’, which sounds like a good idea; until we discover that this trial happens before a jury drawn ‘either from the samurai of his municipal area or from the general catalogue of the samurai’. Which is as if to say: your world will vest supreme political power in the SS, but don't worry! Every three years the SS will decide whether the SS is doing a good job!

Anyhow: the Voice discovers that his Utopian double, his better self, is, of course, a samurai, and the two have lengthy, infodumpy conversations. The botanist, meanwhile, tracks down Mary, the woman he loved and lost on our Earth, and discovers her just as she is getting married to ‘one of the samurai, a dark, strong-faced man.’ The botanist's grief and pique break out so strongly it destabilises the whole utopian vision.

He thrusts me weakly back with his long, white hand. “My God!” he says almost forcibly, “what nonsense all this is! All these dreams! All Utopias! There she is―! Oh, but I have dreamt of her! And now―”

A sob catches him. I am really frightened by this time. I still try to keep between him and these Utopians, and to hide his gestures from them.

“It's different here,” I persist. “It's different here. The emotion you feel has no place in it. It's a scar from the earth—the sore scar of your past―”

“And what are we all but scars? What is life but a scarring? It's you—you who don't understand! Of course we are covered with scars, we live to be scarred, we are scars! We are the scars of the past! These dreams, these childish dreams―!”

He does not need to finish his sentence, he waves an unteachable destructive arm.

My Utopia rocks about me.

For a moment the vision of that great courtyard hangs real. There the Utopians live real about me, going to and fro, and the great archway blazes with sunlight from the green gardens by the riverside. The man who is one of the samurai, and his lady, whom the botanist loved on earth, pass out of sight behind the marble flower-set Triton that spouts coolness in the middle of the place. For a moment I see two working men in green tunics sitting on a marble seat in the shadow of the colonnade, and a sweet little silver-haired old lady, clad all in violet, and carrying a book, comes towards us, and lifts a curious eye at the botanist's gestures. And then―

“Scars of the past! Scars of the past! These fanciful, useless dreams!”

§ 2

There is no jerk, no sound, no hint of material shock. We are in London, and clothed in the fashion of the town. The sullen roar of London fills our ears. I see that I am standing beside an iron seat of poor design in that grey and gawky waste of asphalte—Trafalgar Square, and the botanist, with perplexity in his face, stares from me to a poor, shrivelled, dirt-lined old woman—my God! what a neglected thing she is!—who proffers a box of matches.... [Modern Utopia, 301]

And we're home again. The novel ends with the narrator struck by the comparative ugliness, dirtiness and poverty of our world, although he has a sort of vision ‘a towering figure of flame and colour, standing between earth and sky, with a trumpet in his hands, over there above the Haymarket, against the October glow; and when he sounds, all the samurai, all who are samurai in Utopia, will know themselves and one another...’ Patrick Parrinder thinks this a specific allusion ‘to the ending of Book IX of Plato's Republic, which states that “[the city] is laid up as a pattern in heaven, which he who desires may behold, and beholding may set his own house in order”’ [Parrinder, ‘Utopia and Meta-Utopia in H. G. Wells’, Utopian Studies, 1 (1987), 93-4]. Which may well be true; and which brings me to—


2. The Plato's the Thing/Wherein I'll Catch the Conscience of the Utopian-ing

Wells himself thought pretty highly of his own book, all things considered. ‘Although it has never had any great popular sale,’ is how he puts it in the Experiment in Autobiography, ‘A Modern Utopia remains to this day one of the most vital and successful of my books. It is as alive to-day as Mankind in the Making is dead.’ Fair assessment of Mankind, perhaps a touch overgenerous to A Modern Utopia. Not that it's a bad novel, mind. Not at all:

It was the first approach I made to the dialogue form, and I am almost as satisfied with its literary quality as I am with that of The Undying Fire. The trend towards dialogue like the basal notion of the Samurai, marks my debt to Plato. A Modern Utopia, quite as much as that of More, derives frankly from the Republic. [Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (1934), 562]

His contemporaries concurred. The Fabians all loved it. Henry James read it and described himself, with we presume a pinch of Jamesian playfulness, ‘prostrate with admiration’. His brother William was more ingenuous: ‘your virtues are unparalleled and transcendent’, he wrote from the ship that was taking him back to America. ‘In fact you are a jewel and a triumph’. Reviews were overwhelmingly positive: the Independent Review [October 1905] praised the book as an assemblage ‘which neither he nor anyone else had fitted together so ingeniously before’; The Outlook called it ‘a serious and ambitious work challenging comparisons with Plato's Republic [and] More's Utopia’ [29 April 1905]. [Krishan Kumar's excellent Everyman edition of the novel collects together a good spread of these reactions].

The most obviously Platonic feature of Wells's Utopia has been noted: he himself conceded that his samurai are effectively Plato's φύλακας, his ‘guardians’, the main difference being that Plato's ruling caste are selected and educated from youth onwards for their role, where Wells's samurai are self-selecting, provided they reach the exacting standards of the order. Still they fill the same role, and embody the same self-denying severity and absolutism. There are a great many other parallels, some of which may explain the choices Wells makes, as (for instance) the vegetarianism , which surely reflects the vegetarianism of Plato's Kallipolis [Republic 372a-e].

Now this, of course, leaves Wells's social vision open to the sorts of charges that Karl Popper laid at Plato's door in his The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Earlier I suggested Wells's select samurai were in effect an ur-Hitlerian ᛋᛋ (the Schutz in Schutzstaffel carries the, in this context, perfectly Platonic meaning ‘guardian’ or ‘protector’). We might also call them a sort of Jedi (without the ability to do the magical trickery, of course. A sort of Theist religious faith is part of their order, but the samurai are not allowed High Church smells and bells: ‘the samurai will be forbidden the religion of dramatically lit altars, organ music, and incense,’ says Wells sternly, ‘as distinctly as they are forbidden the love of painted women, or the consolations of brandy.’) And as far as that goes, it really is hard to deny Popper's main point, that there's something profoundly authoritarian about Plato's Republic, and Wells's modern version barely conceals a distinct fault-line between its various perorations to freedom and its many apparatuses of absolute authoritarian control.

The meeting of the Voice and the botanist with the ‘man of Nature’ refusenik in chapter 4 stands as an attempt to inoculate Wells's vision against the notion that it is coercive unanimity. Yet both the Utopian heretic and the global polis from which he is reacting share a deeper ideological commitment to cleanness. They just pursue it in different ways. And cleanness is the book's most consistent fixed idea: actual cleanness of people and rooms and cities; metaphorical cleanness of the body politic. The unclean who are banished to islands—‘about such islands patrol boats will go, there will be no freedoms of boat building, and it may be necessary to have armed guards at the creeks and quays’—are not only the criminals, but the decadent, the cheats, the drunkards. And even as Wells is congratulating himself on his utopians' humane-ness by declaring ‘there would be no killing, no lethal chambers’ he adds ‘no doubt Utopia will kill all deformed and monstrous and evilly diseased births ...’ That's from Plato too, of course; Republic 460c announces briskly that the offspring of ‘inferior parents’ as well as the ανάπηρον, which is to say, the disabled or handicapped, will be disposed of to keep the larger body-politic whole and hale.

The real fault line in Wells's book has to do with mobility. Not for the first time in Wells's career, the ability to move freely about is the tacit index of utopian desire. His alt-world, with its globe-spanning networks of rapid electric trams and trains, and its happily nomadic population, is one vision of that possibility. Where Thomas More sequestered his utopia on an island against the hostility of the larger world, Wells inverts that model: his whole world is perfect except for ‘the Island of Incurable Cheats’, ‘Islands of Drink’ and so on. But this larger logic of inversion reveals itself as actually, of course, an ideological play. For just as Wells's Utopians zoom here and there with ideal and total mobility, so they are surveilled with an ideal and total surveillance. Every Utopian is assigned ‘a distinct formula, a number or “scientific name,” under which he or she could be docketed’, and every single citizen is included in this database: ‘the record of their movement hither and thither, the entry of various material facts, such as marriage, parentage, criminal convictions and the like’.

These index cards might conceivably be transparent and so contrived as to give a photographic copy promptly whenever it was needed, and they could have an attachment into which would slip a ticket bearing the name of the locality in which the individual was last reported. A little army of attendants would be at work upon this index day and night. From sub-stations constantly engaged in checking back thumb-marks and numbers, an incessant stream of information would come, of births, of deaths, of arrivals at inns, of applications to post-offices for letters, of tickets taken for long journeys, of criminal convictions, marriages, applications for public doles and the like. A filter of offices would sort the stream, and all day and all night for ever a swarm of clerks would go to and fro correcting this central register, and photographing copies of its entries for transmission to the subordinate local stations, in response to their inquiries. So the inventory of the State would watch its every man and the wide world write its history as the fabric of its destiny flowed on. At last, when the citizen died, would come the last entry of all, his age and the cause of his death and the date and place of his cremation, and his card would be taken out and passed on to the universal pedigree, to a place of greater quiet, to the ever-growing galleries of the records of the dead. [Modern Utopia, 180]

Utopia, says Wells, ‘must square itself to the needs of a migratory population, to an endless coming and going, to a people as fluid and tidal as the sea’; and it's a point he clearly considered worth making more than once: ‘such a record is inevitable if a Modern Utopia is to be achieved.’ Inevitable! The mobilization of Utopian liberty is formally defined by the mobilization of the powers of surveillance to limit Utopian liberty. That's Platonic too: the guardians will, ‘by their surveillance forcibly restrain’ the Kallipolitians [Republic 552e], and Plato explicitly calls them ‘watchdogs’. And it might easily lead discussion down that Benthamite, Foucauldian line of the panopticon and its coercive powers. But instead of that I'm going to suggest a key as-it-were point of difference between Wells's novel and Plato's great work.

In Book 5 of The Republic, the discussion of particulars pauses for a moment whilst Glaucon asks Socrates whether all this chatter is pie-in-the-sky, or whether he believes his Republic will actually become a reality. It's a good question, and one of course relevant to Wells's novel too. Socrates answers by reminding his interlocutors that the purpose of their discussion has been not to establish a polis but to define justice [Republic 472b]. To do so requires describing not only the just man but the just state in which the just man might live, and as such, Socrates says, they are talking about the truth (αλήθεια), not merely about a theory (λέξις). We don't have to buy the full-on ‘Realm of Platonic Forms Of Which Our World Is But A Copy’ idea to see that Wells is doing something similar in his Modern Utopia—but with one vital shift of emphasis. This novel is not so much an attempt to define justice, as it is an attempt to actualise the imagination. It is an invitation to us, as readers, to imagine a better world, and it is to that specific end that it interleaves the strategies of the novel with the strategies of the Fabian tract.

And where the tract-portions of A Modern Utopia are stimulating in either suggestive or irritating ways, the novelistic passages are much better: beautifully written and accomplished and evocative. Perhaps my favourite thing about Wells's Modern Utopia is the way it insinuates the sorts of excitements attendant on a holiday, and especially a holiday in a attractively alien and unfamiliar place, into the drier speculative apprehension of utopian thought. The early chapters are the best on this: the Voice and the botanist walking down out of the alps into clean, well-ordered Utopian towns, and bedding-down in clean, comfortable Utopian inns, all the time thrilled at the myriad open-ended possibilities of the to-come, waiting to be explored on the morrow:

This strange mystery of a world of which I have seen so little as yet—a mountain slope, a twilit road, a traffic of ambiguous vehicles and dim shapes, the window lights of many homes—fills me with curiosities. Figures and incidents come and go, the people we have passed, our landlord, quietly attentive and yet, I feel, with the keenest curiosity peeping from his eyes, the unfamiliar forms of the house parts and furnishings, the unfamiliar courses of the meal. Outside this little bedroom is a world, a whole unimagined world. A thousand million things lie outside in the darkness beyond this lit inn of ours, unthought-of possibilities, overlooked considerations, surprises, riddles, incommensurables, a whole monstrous intricate universe of consequences that I have to do my best to unravel. [Modern Utopia, 41]

It's an invitation to engage Platonic speculations about justice under the aegis of a glorious imaginative openness. And the crisis that propels the two men out of Utopia and back to mundane London is, consequently, an affective, not a rational or conceptual, crisis: a broken heart, a cri de passion, and the botanist's urgent complaint that the non-Utopian sensibility is too crisscrossed with scar-tissue to permit the access to that other imaginative possibility. Issues of social justice, Wells is saying, must come after issues of social affect and social imagination.


3. Money and Irony

So, a coda. Everything I have just said stands, in effect, as an argument against engaging too closely with the minutiae of Wells's Utopian blueprinting. And indeed all that sort of stuff is, by and large, the least interesting aspect of the book, not because Utopianizing is intrinsically uninteresting but because so much of this is simply not original to Wells. On the question of land ownership, A Modern Utopia treads the line between ‘Georgism’ on the one hand, a system, popular with some Radicals and Christian Socialists, in which land continues to be privately owned/managed but is taxed for the benefit of the community, and outright Communism on the other, where private property is abolished altogether. In Wells's book all land is owned by the State, but can be easily obtained by private citizens on 50-year leases. This idea, though, is taken directly from Wells's fellow Fabian Sydney Olivier, who argues for it in Capital and Land (1888). Similarly the Wellsian attitude to private property, which is roughly that ‘strictly personal possessions and shares in business adventures’ will be permitted, but all private property and all debts will end at death, and ‘all land or natural objects or products’, will ‘be the inalienable property of the World State’, has been adopted pretty much whole-cloth out of Graham Wallas (prototype for the novel's ‘botanist’) whose Property Under Socialism (1889) argues pretty-much that case.

Still, there is one specific detail that puzzles me, and that's Wells's Utopian money. Not his proposal for a Universal Basic Income—which seems remarkably timely, today, although in fact it goes back at least to Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice (1797). No: I mean the actual currency: his idea that the global currency should be tied not to reserves of gold, but to reserves of energy. The manufacture of energy would be nationalised, or (I suppose) globalised: ‘heating and lighting and the supply of power for domestic and industrial purposes and for urban and inter-urban communications will all be managed electrically from common generating stations’, run by local authorities but all owned by the World State. Wells proposes a currency in which ‘payment would be no longer be in coinage upon the gold basis, but in notes good for so many thousands or millions of units of energy at one or other of the generating stations.’

Every one of those giant local authorities was to be free to issue energy notes against the security of its surplus of saleable available energy, and to make all its contracts for payment in those notes up to a certain maximum defined by the amount of energy produced and disposed of in that locality in the previous year. This power of issue was to be renewed just as rapidly as the notes came in for redemption. In a world without boundaries, with a population largely migratory and emancipated from locality, the price of the energy notes of these various local bodies would constantly tend to be uniform, because employment would constantly shift into the areas where energy was cheap. Accordingly, the price of so many millions of units of energy at any particular moment in coins of the gold currency would be approximately the same throughout the world. [Modern Utopia, 89]

I may be missing something, but I genuinely fail to see how this would be any kind of improvement. The gold standard already provides this form of stability, compared to those currencies which are not pegged to such a underlying value-system (Wells's anxiety that ‘an unexpected spate of gold production, the discovery of a single nugget as big as St. Paul's, let us say—a quite possible thing—would result in a financial earthquake’ seems, frankly, misplaced; surely interruptions in the power supply would be rather more likely than sudden superfluities of gold?)

As I await schooling on this matter from somebody more expert on questions of currency economics, I'll jot down a theory to be going on with: I don't think Wells has quite grasped the way money operates as a floating signifier, a medium of exchange and store of value as arbitrary as any semiological social construct. The utility of money resides purely in the conventions of its exchange. The fact that gold is (some trivial exceptions aside) perfectly useless has no effect upon that utility, and replacing tokens predicated upon a useless commodity with tokens predicated upon a useful commodity would have no effect upon the fungibility of the money itself.

I'm guessing here, and my guesswork leads into a segue below, that may not convince you, but I wonder if Wells, not entirely cognizant of theories of monetary exchange, just felt in his gut that backing token-money with a really valuable commodity rather than an arbitrarily scarce one would surely just be a good thing to do. I'm not sure the reasoning goes any deeper than that. Wells's instinct says that his Utopia has no room for the arbitrary, the merely conventional, the floating signifier as opposed to the solidly anchored signified. In a way that's a more worrying misprison of how society works than all the proto-SS samurai gubbins.

Which brings me to my conclusion. Critics bracket A Modern Utopia with 1901's Anticipations and 1903's Mankind in the Making as a sort of trilogy of practical blueprints for Utopia. Which makes sense. But although it is, clearly I think, the best of these three titles, A Modern Utopia still suffers from the wholly unironic manner in which Wells goes about his speculations. Irony is rarely welcome in the habitation of the true-hearted Utopian, of course. Some years ago I was invited to deliver a keynote at the peripatetic Utopiales conference; which was a great honour, and gave me the chance to meet some excellent people at the University of Tarragona, that beautiful city. For my lecture I argued for the BBC Children's TV show Teletubbies as a kind of perfection of the utopian ideal, by way of exploring the extent to which Utopia inevitably involves an element of conscious or unconscious infantilisation. At the wine reception after my lecture some of the attendees—mostly other academics, these—came over to chat with me about what I'd been saying, and I had some interesting discussions. But other attendees literally blanked me, in some cases turning their backs on me as I went about the room. These, I discovered, were the actual Utopians: people planning real in-the-world Utopian communities, retired businesspeople who had decided to spend their life savings buying up territory and establishing their preferred pantisocratic or neo-kaliflower or Robert-Owenish villages upon them and so on. They assumed I had been mocking them. I hadn't been, but you can see why they might look on me with injured contempt. And to broaden the point: of course irony is a destabilising quality that is bound to be mistrusted by anybody who wishes to establish absolutes and peg improvement to a steady tabulation. I stand by it, though: irony and its handmaiden laughter is very far from an inessential in this matter.

This is what makes A Modern Utopia stand so much taller, as it were, than either of its two predecessors. It is not ironic about its imagined utopia—on the contrary, it is often desperately earnest and micromanagerial about it—but the form of the novel itself is at least playful, almost (whisper it) postmodern, or at least pomo-avant-la-lettre. Wells addresses the reader directly because he wants to recruit her to his larger theme, the necessity of imagining Utopia, as a vivid and lived-in eventuality, before we theorise Utopia. And the positive upshot of that is that A Modern Utopia shimmers with something that bears at least a family resemblance to irony. And that's a good thing. Although I would say that, wouldn't I?