ENG 335: Science Fiction as Social Criticism: Wells and Conrad

Here are a few notes on H.G. Wells and on the function of description in his fiction taken from Patrick Parrinder’s H.G. Wells in the writers and Critics series published by Capricorn Books in 1977. Parrinder first comments on how Wells, in his novels of British social consciousness, critiques the conditions under which the servant classes labored when they tried to succeed as merchants by leaving service and opening their own retail shops. The following passage, spoken by George Ponderevo, the hero of Wells’s Tono-Bungay, could easily describe the lives of Wells’s parents once they left service and tried to survive as merchants:

My uncle and aunt seemed to me to be leading…dingy lives. They seemed to be adrift in a limitless crowd of dingy people, wearing shabby clothes, living uncomfortably in shabby second-hand houses, going to and fro on pavements that had always a thin veneer of greasy, slippery mud, under grey skies that showed no gleam of hope of anything for them until they died. (quoted in Parrinder 4)

The above passage evidences how Wells used description in his social consciousness novels to evoke his critique of the conditions under which the servant and merchant classes labored. It seems clear that description in his work functions as much to relate social critique as it does to create a realistic sense of scene and place.

The author’s motives in employing descriptive detail in his fiction are further explained through his ongoing debate with Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and other highly regarded novels. Here is Parrinder’s account of that debate followed by Wells’s own comments:

“In his Autobiography, [Wells] recalls how one day he and Conrad lay on the beach near Folkstone, discussing how they would describe a boat lying out in the water. Critics have overwhelmingly taken Conrad’s side, but I [Parrinder] find Wells’s argument equally persuasive:

‘I [Wells] said that in nineteen cases out of twenty I would just let the boat be there in the commonest phrases possible. Unless I wanted the boat to be important I would not give it an outstanding phrase and if I wanted to make it important then the phrase to use would depend on the angle at which the boat became significant….He [Conrad] wanted to see it with a vividness of his own. But I wanted to see it and to see it only in relation to something else—a story, a thesis. And I suppose if I had been pressed about it I would have betrayed a disposition to link that story or thesis to something still more extensive and that to something still more extensive and so ultimately to link it up to my philosophy and my world outlook’.” (Parrinder 14-15)

So for Wells distinctive phrases and detailed description point to the significance of the thing described, identify its relation to a larger issue or thesis and ultimately to his philosophy. His debate with Conrad, then, suggests that Wells saw his fiction as enacting his philosophy, as promoting a social or political critique. As we read his fiction, we should consider how particular moments in his work point to the function of his work as social criticism.