Review

Reviewed Work(s): Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture by
Simon J. James
Review by: Christine Ferguson
Source: Utopian Studies , Vol. 24, No. 2 (2013), pp. 355-358
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.24.2.0355

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 Reviews

Simon J. James. Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity,

and the End of Culture.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 248 pp. Cloth, £50,
isbn 978-0-19-960659-7.
Reviewed by Christine Ferguson, University of Glasgow

H. G. Wells has long occupied a curious place in the literary history of the
early twentieth century, positioned as an extremely popular yet myopic out-
sider whose seeming miscalculation of the post-1910 literary zeitgeist acted in
a directly inverse relation to his uncannily accurate technological predictions
of the world to come. Wells’s reputation as a literary innovator in this period
sunk in opposite relation to his rising stature as a futurologist, a shift whose
repercussions for the author’s legacy are, as both Roger Luckhurst and Steven
McLean have recently noted, still largely evident in the ways his work is posi-
tioned, studied, and debated in the contemporary academy.1 As Wells’s 1890s
scientific romances have risen to increasing prominence in fin-de-siècle stud-
ies and syllabi, his late-career textbooks and instrumentalist utopian fictions
seem, like Henry James’s plays, Francis Galton’s science fiction, and George
Eliot’s poetry, increasingly poised to join the ranks of the great unread.
Simon J. James’s Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of
Culture seeks neither to contest the more positive critical assessments of
Wells’s early romances nor to aesthetically legitimate the later output—
indeed, James asserts in his preface, “Many of the books that Wells wrote are
not, simply, very good” (x). Instead, James aims to shape our understanding of
this shift, presenting what some might see as a decline in quality or inventive-
ness as instead the result of Wells’s deliberate, if not wholly successful, choice
to divorce his work from the ideological trappings he associated with literary
fiction. And far from being a product of mid-career pessimism, James dem-
onstrates, Wells’s skepticism about the aesthetic and the Arnoldian concept
of culture was in place from the early 1890s and went on to form a unifying

Utopian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2013

Copyright © 2013. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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Utopian Studies 24.2

keynote in what might otherwise seem like wholly disparate phases of the
author’s career. These convictions won him little favor with his more self-
consciously literary contemporaries such as Arthur Machen, who, writing in
1911, negatively compared the experience of reading Wells with the perusal
of the Second Book of Euclid: “It is logical and angular; and to the soul of
men logic and right angles enthroned in places where they have no business
to reign are utter and final destruction, misery, and death. Why? Chiefly
because they deny mystery; and mystery is the soul of all life and the salt of
all life.”2 By the end of James’s impressively comprehensive and wide-ranging
study, we understand why Machen’s beloved “mystery” was anathema to an
increasingly desperate Wells, terrified that the lack of logical angularity in
contemporary social thought, education, and literary fiction was fast push-
ing humanity to the brink of global catastrophe. The monograph proceeds
with an admirable range and rigor that manages to find a place, however
fleeting, for almost every one of Wells’s dauntingly large body of novels and
a significant portion of the nonfiction. Readers will be hard pressed to find a
more conscientious and well-traveled guide through the multiple byways and
occasional dead ends of Wells’s prodigious literary output.
James divides his study into five chapters, each devoted to a different
phase and corresponding genre of Wells’s career. The first examines the imag-
inative impact of the 1870 Education Act and its corresponding expansion of
the reading public on the young Wells, showing the writer to be convinced of
the democratic potential of mass literacy while deeply equivocal about high
culture and its dangerous ability to divert the energy and attention required
for social reform into sterile solipsism. The key example of this suspicion
and eventual antipathy lies in Wells’s well-documented rift with Henry James,
dutifully recounted by James with a clarity and detail that will be immensely
useful to students hitherto unaware of the relationship between the two
writers. Subsequent chapters address Wells’s radical use of the scientific
romance to question both the political status quo and the nature of linguistic
representation itself; his adoption of a realist narrative style to document art’s
relative impotence in the face of class stratification and evolutionary change;
and finally, in the last two chapters, his attempts to stave off an impending
geopolitical crisis through utopian prescriptions for a better world.
The nearer catastrophe seemed to loom, the more Wells willfully subor-
dinated the qualities of aesthetic originality, expressive variety, and imaginative
transport that had characterized his earlier work to the imperatives of political,
social, and scientific progress. “Veneration of the work of art as epiphenomenon,”
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 Reviews

writes James, became “for Wells a squandering of ­mankind’s evolved potential

for self-development” (195). There is, one might feel, something potentially
perverse and perhaps even self-defeating in Wells’s continued allegiance to the
enterprise of fiction writing given his reservations about its utility. However
much Wells may have preferred to describe himself as a journalist rather than
a novelist in later life (191), or fellow travelers such as Olaf Stapledon may have
chosen to review his books “not as novel[s] . . . but as . . . expression[s] of Wells’s
attitude to mankind,”3 the fact remains that he stuck with novels until the very
end. And novels, even those of the right, instrumentalist kind, as James reminds
us, had very little place in a perfectly realized Wellsian state: “His work imagines
a future in which utopian writing would itself cease to exist; a state which fulfills
individual potential . . . effectively . . . would have no need of the kind of didactic
art that Wells is committed to producing” (139). The fulfillment of the writer’s
ambitious program of world reform thus seemed to lie in the annihilation, or
at least considerable diminishment, of the very vocation through which he had
first gained the authority to speak on mankind’s destiny. Why write anything but
scientific journalism if the novel is at best a lost cause, infinitely inferior to the
topical propaganda that can more easily manipulate the populace into collective
transformation?
Questions and paradoxes such as these represent some of the most inter-
esting facets of Wells’s career, but they remain relatively unplumbed in Maps
of Utopia. This reticence seems partly a result of James’s laudably expansive
scope. Any attempt to encompass such a large portion of Wells’s prolific body
of writing must necessarily limit its lines of inquiry in favor of a summative
vision. Breadth, as I noted earlier, is one of the great strengths of James’s
monograph, yet it can occasionally feel like a weakness when it forces such a
wide body of texts into a relatively unchanging vision of the uses and limita-
tion of literature. A more selective approach to Wells’s publications, perhaps
with an emphasis on those later, routinely underread utopian novels, might
have produced a more polemic and productively controversial study. The
same might be said for James’s use of surrounding critical voices and debates.
The study abounds in secondary reference, leaving one convinced that few if
any other scholars working in Wells studies today have a more knowledge-
able grasp of the current state of the field. Yet James almost never disagrees
with any of the sources he incorporates, leaving us occasionally uncertain
as to how he understands the force of his own intervention. This seems to
me all the more unfortunate as there clearly are new and important lines of
dissent suggested here, albeit embedded and implicit rather than confidently
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Utopian Studies 24.2

f­oregrounded at key flash points throughout the chapters. I found myself

longing for James to pick a fight with someone, even with Wells himself.
A further probing of the discontinuities and contradictions in the writer’s
output, and in the critical industry that has sprung up around it, might have
lent this very good study a more bracing edge.
These minor reservations aside, Maps of Utopia does indicate important
lines of future inquiry for both Wells and utopian studies. Perhaps the most
intriguing of these lies in the possible dialogue between Wells’s own inven-
tive practices of literary political agitation—James quite rightly recognizes
that the author, even if no modernist, was nonetheless a highly experimental
writer—and those of the contemporary European leftist avant-garde, most
particularly Brechtian epic theater, with its similar suspicion of illusion and
catharsis. And if the contribution of Wells’s utopian writings to the central
tendencies of twentieth-century modernism was slight, we might wish to
trace their impact, both formal and ideological, on the subsequent develop-
ment of political propaganda as a literary genre. These fascinating further
contexts for Wells’s body of work are intriguingly augured in James’s impor-
tant new study.

Notes
1. Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 46; Steven McLean,
“‘I Flung Myself into Futurity’: Wells Studies for the Twenty-First Century,” Literature
Compass 8, no. 7 (2011): 476–86, at 481–82, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00818.x, accessed
January 24, 2013.
2. Arthur Machen, “De Omnibus Rebus,” Academy 2062 (November 11, 1911): 592–93,
at 593.
3. Olaf Stapledon, “Some Thoughts on H. G. Wells’s You Can’t Be Too Careful,” in An
Olaf Stapledon Reader, ed. Robert Crossley (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997),
203–5, at 204.

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