MR. WELLS now meets his public in a handsome autographed edition, limited to a thousand and fifty copies for the United States, on an excellent paper and in beautiful and legible type.[1] He is no longer a journalist.
On the brink of his sixtieth birthday he and I have been rereading his works. We have found some defects in them, but we have been charmed by them, and, on the whole, we have been tremendously impressed by them. We have felt with fresh force the central drive and ardor which have been animating his labors these thirty years. We see the great masses of his work arranging themselves in intelligible order as the broad and towering features of an architectural design, imaginative and splendid. In the illuminating introduction to the Atlantic Edition, he interprets his works with good humor, with candor and with many flashes of shrewd critical insight. He establishes points of view from which one can take in his main intention and his total effect.
Mr. Wells's main intention developed against the background of that mid-Victorian England which is described with extraordinary gusto in one of his best and most realistic novels, "Tono-Bungay." Mid-Victorian society, as the young Wells envisaged it,
- ↑ The Works of H. G. Wells, Atlantic Edition, New York, 1924—.
