"Glittering Myriads of Men"

H.G. Wells's Speculative Naturalism and the Late-Victorian Urban Sublime

Abstract

This paper interprets Herbert George Wells’s early science-fiction novels as instances of the Late-Victorian urban sublime. The argument suggests that Wells’s works bring into play three strands of the rhetoric of terror and wonder — the oceanic, the gothic, and the neo-classical. Wells depicts cities as boundless fields defying representation, as breeding grounds for evolutionary monsters, or as spectacles of grandeur triggering the elevation of the soul. The paper examines two issues raised by these idioms. First, it examines how Wells’s recourse to the sublime leads us to rethink his status within nineteenth-century urban fiction and British literary naturalism. Secondly, the paper evaluates the impact of the sublime on Wells’s politics. One wonders indeed how urban sublimity relates to Wells’s elitist brand of socialism, and how the politics of the sublime determine Wells’s status as a naturalist author.