H.G. Wells as a Historian

and significance of H.G. Wells as a historian. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal characteristics of Wells's approach to history, and then to provide evidence that assesses the impact that Wells has had on the presentation of history to the culture. This paper will seek to show that impact has been considerable, since Wells was an important figure in making history accessible to the mass market. Further, as a writer with certain cultural predispositions and attitudes, Wells exercised influence on the writing history with certain cultural predispositions and attitudes. Wells influenced the way history can be at once popularized and made meaningful within the context of social commentary and criticism, and yet still convey generally reliable information.

Until 1919, H.G. Wells's literary reputation rested upon imaginative fiction--science fiction--that predicted fantastic societies and scientific developments such as air travel, time travel, social utopias, and world destruction through cataclysmic wars. In 1919, however, his Outline of History appeared, which was a general survey of the emergence of western civilization from the time of prehistory to the then-current period. In an evaluation of Wells's status as a historian, John Barker connects Wells's two careers as novelist and historian as representing a unified attitude toward the past, present, and future of social and political man

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f destruction are too great, and wisdom in using them that man has shown is too small, for us to have any confidence. Charles Darwin, in the first book he wrote, said: "Certainly no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the widespread and repeated extermination of its inhabitants." It is quite possible that we shall follow the pterodactyls (Wells, V2, 1045). Wells's own writing reflects a spirit of pessimism as well as hopeful optimism. Referring, in a preface to his collected works of science fiction published in the 1930s, to his decision to stop writing science fiction, Wells says he "was becoming too convinced of the strong probability of very strenuous and painful human experiences in the near future to play about with them much more. . . . The world in the presence of cataclysmal realities has no need for fresh cataclysmal fantasies. That game is over. Who wants the invented humours of Mr. Parham in Whitehall (a character in Wells's fiction), when day by day we can watch Mr. Hitler in Germany? What human invention can pit itself against the fantastic fun of the Fates? I am wrong in grumbling at reviewers. Reality had taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supersede me" (Wells, V1, vi
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Approximate Word count = 3204
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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