Stefan Collini’s review of Claire Tomalin’s book on H. G. Wells is very strange indeed. For one thing, he only mentions the book under review in the final paragraph. But more odd still is the refrain with which he begins and ends the review: “It​ can be hard, from this distance, to see what all the fuss was about,” he says in the first sentence; and then he concludes, “Tomalin is a weighty advocate, and her admiration may help to spark a revival in Wells’s reputation, though perhaps even her noted empathy and artistry still cannot quite re-create for us, now, what all the fuss was about.” 

I can easily understand a reader today not thinking highly of Wells’s fiction. But if you can read The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica and fail “to see what all the fuss was about,” I don’t know what to say to you. Wells’s fiction touches on most of the major themes and concerns of British culture in his lifetime, and a failure to grasp this is a failure of readerly and historical imagination. You don’t have to think him a great writer to see that he was a ceaselessly dynamic and provocative figure, even if his ever-more-pompous predictions, warnings, and commandments ended up making him look somewhat ludicrous (as in the caricature of him as Horace Jules in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength). 

I haven’t read Tomalin’s book — devoted just to the first half of Welles’s career — but I have read Adam Roberts’s “literary life” of Wells, which masterfully puts all of Wells’s voluminous writing into proper context. I’ll leave you with a passage from that book: 

As the world has grown bigger and more complex, as well as more complexly interconnected, a kind of socio-technological sublime increasingly threatens to overwhelm our individual subjectivities like Hokusai’s great wave. Steampunk is, inter alia, an attempt to dress technological advance in the habiliments of a more elegant and refined age, and Wells is one of the ways of focalising that. More, this cultural representation — the boyishly mobile and inventive Wells, the Wells of diverting scientific romances and sexual liberation — speaks, in part, to an ill-focused desire to assert ‘the little man’ (less so ‘the little woman’) in the teeth of this intimidating vastness. There is enough of Wells actual life-trajectory in this to give it bite: the physically small individual from small-scale roots who created himself as a world-class writer and thinker. He takes his place alongside other pervasive cultural myths of the small-man who effects great things in a baffling and alarming world — heroic hobbits, magical schoolboys: contemporary iterations of a fundamentally infantalising legendarium of underdoggishness. One need not deprecate these contemporary myths, any more than one need look down on Wells’s extraordinary achievements in the field of science fiction, to think this sells his larger achievement short. If there has been one through-line in the present work it has been that Wells was a literary artist of immense, underappreciated talent, a writer whose literary genius, whilst it must of course be central to a literary biography, deserves to be resurrected in a much broader cultural context too.