Definition
Wells’s autobiographical experiences of London strongly marked his thinking about urban experience, and in a career that saw him writing in a wide variety of genres, he frequently made use of representations of London in order to illustrate a thesis.
For H. G. Wells (1866–1946), as for so many late-Victorian writers such as George Gissing, Henry James, Arnold Bennett, and hundreds more, the practice of becoming a writer included the experience of coming to London. For Wells, London loomed especially large not only in his own literary self-fashioning but also within an imagination which would range across questions of social organization, global economics, and the future of the human race hundreds and thousands of years hence (Elber-Aviram 2015).
Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, then a market town in Kent, by the early twentieth century a municipal borough, effectively a part of Greater London. (This process of the city’s expansion and suburbanization of surrounding...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Benczik, Vera. 2016. The urban wasteland in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. In Utopias and dystopias in the fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris: Landscape and space, ed. Emelyne Godfrey. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Elber-Aviram, Hadas. 2015. ‘My own particular city’: H.G. Wells’s fantastical London. The Wellsian 38: 97–120.
Hewitt, Lucy, and Stephen Graham. 2015. Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature. Urban Studies 52: 923–937.
James, Simon J. 2012. Maps of utopia: H. G. Wells, modernity and the end of culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jefferies, Richard. 1885. After London; Or, wild England. London: Cassell & Co..
Morris, William. 2009. In News from nowhere, ed. David Leopold. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taunton, Matthew. 2009. Fictions of the city: Class, culture and mass housing in London and Paris. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wells, H.G. 1894. The Degeneration of the Ravensbourne. Pall Mall Gazette, July 12.
Wells, H.G. 1902. Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought. London: Chapman & Hall.
Wells, H.G. 1906. The future in America: A search after realities. London: Chapman & Hall.
Wells, H.G. 1932. The work, wealth and happiness of mankind. London: Heinemann.
Wells, H.G. 1934. Experiment in autobiography. London: Victor Gollancz.
Wells, H.G. 1994. In When the sleeper wakes, ed. John Lawton. London: J.M. Dent.
Wells, H.G. 2005a. In Ann Veronica, ed. Sita Schutt. London: Penguin.
Wells, H.G. 2005b. In Love and Mr Lewisham, ed. Simon J. James. London: Penguin.
Wells, H.G. 2005c. In The island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Patrick Parrinder. London: Penguin.
Wells, H.G. 2005d. In The first men in the moon, ed. Patrick Parrinder. London: Penguin.
Wells, H.G. 2005e. In The new Machiavelli, ed. Simon J. James. London: Penguin.
Wells, H.G. 2005f. In The time machine, ed. Patrick Parrinder. London: Penguin.
Wells, H.G. 2005g. In The war of the worlds, ed. Patrick Parrinder. London: Penguin.
Wells, H.G. 2005h. In Tono-Bungay, ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Penguin.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
James, S.J. (2022). H. G. Wells’s London. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62419-8_74
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62419-8_74
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62418-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62419-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities