The Death of Hope in H.G. Wells

By Lorne Reznowski

H.G. Wells is often portrayed as a utopian visionary, full of hope for man's progress through science and human knowledge. Is this portrayal accurate?

In this book, Lorne Reznowski presents his contention that Wells lost hope in humanity's future. Wells, having no faith in any supernatural order, becomes a tragic figure when the human institutions and ideals he advanced must be reconciled with the tragic events of the first half of the 20th century and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

This writing was presented as Lorne's Master of Arts Thesis English Literature, in 1961, at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312039278

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The Death of Hope in H.G. Wells

The Death of Hope in H.G. Wells

By Lorne A. Reznowski

Copyright © 2014 Lorne Reznowski

All Rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-312-03927-8

Standard Copyright License

Foreword

This thesis was prepared under the guidance of Dr. Emmett O’Grady, of the Department of English at the University of Ottawa.

Reverend Deacon, Dr. Lorne Anthony Reznowski was born January 5, 1929 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Loyola College, Montreal in 1950. He received a Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. in 1957. Lorne received his degree, Master of Arts in English Literature in May 1961 from the University of Ottawa with the submission of this thesis. In 1980 he received a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Ottawa.

Lorne married Dorothy Joan Heslop in 1959. In 1970 he was ordained a Deacon within the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church for the Archeparchy of Winnipeg. Following a long bout with cancer, Lorne passed away November 9, 2011 at his home in Winnipeg, Canada.

In 2011, along with Lorne, we his children began an effort to have the present thesis published and other of our father’s writings, which unfortunately we were not able to complete before his death. This thesis, we believe, is a copy of the one he submitted for his defence. At present, the University of Ottawa no longer has a copy of his master’s thesis, to confirm this hypothesis. Some changes have been made, when needed or appropriate, in this present work from the original copy.

Lorne mentioned that it was Dr. Emmett O’Grady, whom he greatly respected, that suggested the present thesis topic. From Lorne’s memory of the defence of the thesis, he recalled that Dr. O’Grady stated that Lorne had been too critical of H.G. Wells. Be as it may, Lorne presents a compelling critique of Wells, and the contention of the thesis, that Wells’ vision of a utopian future for mankind, void of any supernatural purpose, eventually would lead Wells to despair for mankind, as reflected in Wells’ own writing.

May God grant our parents, Joan and Lorne, Eternal Memory! Vichnaya Pamyat!

And likewise to the great English writer, H.G. Wells, the subject of the following work.

Theodore Reznowski

February 13, 2014

Introduction

The name of H.G. Wells is often considered to be a synonym for hope, inevitable progress and science. In fact that is only true of the earlier Wells. At the end of his life Wells had become a pessimist. This is known and has been commented on in passing by serious thinkers, deliberately or accidentally not mentioned by others, and completely ignored by most.

Joseph Wood Krutch is one of those more perceptive writers who have not chosen to ignore this anomaly. Writing in The American Scholar, he has said:

It so happens that H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw died recently, and within a few years of each other. No two men writing in the English language­­—perhaps no two men writing in any language—had been so widely accepted by literate men as spokesmen for the last phase of the Age of Confidence. In curiously diverse but complementary ways, each had spent half a century telling the world that all was—or at least that all could be—well. Yet both died crying, Woe, woe to the very people whom they had previously reassured. And the astonishing fact is that their complete reversal of opinion passed almost unnoticed. When each said, almost with his dying breath, All is lost, the same public that had once accepted so trustingly their former assurances hardly noticed the about-face, because it had already been taken for granted that Shaw and Wells, like everybody else, had been compelled to make it. (143)

The purpose of this thesis is to trace the decline in Wells from optimism to pessimism and to document that paradoxical transformation. Where others have made passing reference to a change, this thesis will attempt to give chapter and verse in describing the fall from hope.

Although theology will be touched upon, it is not the purpose of this thesis to go into the lengthy and involved theological subtleties that might explain the positions of Wells. It is believed that there is material for investigation in this area that would provide a scholar with ample subject matter for a doctoral thesis. Theology will be considered in this work inasmuch as Wells spent most of his life attacking it.

Five or six of the quotations in this work are very long. The first impulse of the writer of this thesis was to shorten or to delete them completely. Further thought, however, led to the decision to include them in spite of their length. The reason for including them lies in their striking relevance to the mass-thinking of modern man. This thesis is a commentary upon early twentieth century optimism, its widespread acceptance, and in this sense, its tenacious hold upon popular thought in spite of a few clear voices crying out in protest. The student-reader of the cheaper Sunday supplements is often led to believe that the optimistic Wellsian belief in inevitable progress is still the learned approach to these matters. The lengthy quotations mentioned above, from authors of various religious persuasions and from some writers of completely secular background, are included to strengthen the claim that Wells himself fell from the peaks of optimism to the valley of despair.

Chapter I: The Paradox of Wells

One of the paradoxes of modern literature has been this death of hope evidenced in the writings of H.G. Wells. This paradox is all the more amazing in that Wells had long been the spokesman, prophet and high-priest for the avant-garde of the Liberal school. For years he had prophesied and described in some detail the brave new one world towards which we were evolving by means of an inevitable biological process, bringing with it all the blessings of the modern scientific socialist world state. This optimism and belief in progress was not limited to biology but extended to education, economics and politics.

Bishop Fulton Sheen has remarked on this optimism:

In the early writings of Wells, his hope for the man-god was based on a planned world of eugenics, mechanized labor, scientific diet, and progressive education. In his Anticipations he wrote: The nation that produces the largest proportional development of educated and intelligent engineers and agriculturalists, doctors, schoolmasters, will be the dominant nation before the year 2000. In perfect keeping with the spirit of theological liberalism he believed that a time is coming when man as gods will stand on earth as on a footstool and reach their hands among the stars. (346)

Yet towards the end of his life, Wells did a complete about-face. What started out as certain doubts and misgivings about the inevitable success of the evolutionary process gave way to utter hopelessness and despair with regard to the future of mankind. It is this fascinating paradox which will be the subject of this thesis. We will seek to trace the development of this death of hope in Wells and at the same time point out the causes for his final despair.

Wells concerned himself almost exclusively in the latter period of his life with propagandizing on behalf of a world state. He was obsessed with the idea of One World and world government to the degree that few writers had been up to that time. The gospel of world government appears in one form or another in all his significant works of this period. This world state which he envisaged was to be no loose global federation but, in fact, a highly centralized world state to which all existing nations would relinquish their sovereignty. In fact much of Wells’ effort at this time was directed towards undermining the idea of and belief in the sovereignty of individual nations.

The reason for this fanatic and resolute effort on Wells’ part was his belief that the survival of the human race depended upon mankind forming just such a world state. The basis for this belief was biological in that it was solidly grounded on the evolutionary theories which Wells held to throughout his life. He always considered himself a disciple of Darwin and judged all other opinions and schools