H. G. WELLS'S NOVELS, reviewer Edward Shanks once complained, were “not novels” but instead were “a sort of literary mules, doomed to sterility and bad tempers.” Wells's “bastard form will not do,” he maintained (167). Shanks was not alone in his critical judgment. Sir Edmund Gosse, for example, once chastised Wells in a personal letter, scolding him because “you have debased your books by detestable offences against the laws of composition. You have ruined the texture of them by empty didactics and episodical rhetoric of all sorts.”¹

Wells's unorthodox hybrid genres have seemingly always provoked the ire of orthodox literary critics. In this article, I would like to explore a different reading strategy that sees in Wells's genre choices an architectural and political project rather than merely inferior instantiations of an ideal type. Although Wells is most famous for his adventure tales in the style of classical realism, he is less well-known for his self-conscious challenges to the conventional genre distinctions that he had inherited from Victorian literature. I will discuss his novel A Modern Utopia (1905) as one instance of a Wellsian generic hybrid. But as eccentric as Wells's genre use is, I'll argue that it is tellingly symptomatic of an even more pronounced skepticism that he held towards taxonomic categories–philosophically speaking, his position resided far closer to nominalism than to realism. In berating what biologists called the “natural” classification of species, for example, Wells adopted practically any philosophical stance except realism. Consequently, to read H. G. Wells's novels is to appreciate his political and artistic goal of creating a culture that would insulate and buffer itself from the capricious and often cruel laws of Darwinian nature itself. Unlike many other critics, then, I do not read Wells as a proselytizer of Darwinism.² Unorthodox genres and a radical philosophical skepticism were only a few of the tools in the Wellsian rhetorical arsenal that he used to persuade readers away from nature and toward all things artificial.

As a student of biology, Wells certainly knew of the great eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist, Carl von Linné (more widely known as Linnaeus, 1707–78), who had devoted his entire career to the creation of a viable taxonomic scheme for biology. Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, first published in 1735, carefully classified the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. By 1758, the text had already reached ten editions, this last of which contained 1,384 pages in two volumes. The English translation of the posthumous and massive thirteenth edition–“amended and enlarged by the improvements and discoveries of later naturalists and societies,” the title page reminded us–had swollen to a staggering 5,355 pages in seven volumes and took four years to publish. But as much as Wells admired the accomplishments of the great scientific taxonomizer, he foresaw limited success for an analogous project in literature. As Wells wrote in “The Novel of Ideas,”

Despite Wells's argument that fiction has no fixed essence that might be identified through the positivistic methods of science, the passage is still striking if only because Wells immediately attempts what “no really sane man” should: he categorizes literature. Wells's genres, however, bear only slight resemblance to traditionally heralded literary genres–at least those once spoofed by Polonius as “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited” (Hamlet 2.2.392–96). Wells's genres of fiction differ only in degree from that kind of objective, scientific reporting that more widely passes by the name of “non-fiction.” Wells's peculiar genre classifications, at odds with those defended by literary history,³ help to explain why Wells remained vulnerable to attacks from critics like Shanks who saw in Wells's texts only an ill-tempered and monstrous sterility caused by “unnatural” interbreeding between otherwise unproblematic literary genres.

Shanks's use of biological metaphors suggests that literary criticism in the late nineteenth century had already begun to borrow methodologies liberally from the evolutionary sciences. In 1891, for example, American critic William Dean Howells proclaimed in Criticism and Fiction that both the scientist and the literary critic shared taxonomic duties: Howells reminded the neophyte critic that “it is really his business to classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind very much as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study.” Howells found the scathing reviews of surly critics to be quite as absurd and ill-motivated as “the botanist's grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty” (30). Literary scholars, borrowing evolution's discursive vocabulary of “species,” “morphology,” and “inheritance,” often foregrounded precisely these quasi-botanical questions of form, structure, and genres.

After Charles Darwin published his revolutionary On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution too was appropriated as one of the metanarratives of literary criticism. Edmund Gosse admitted in 1898 that “Darwin's great suggestion, of life evolved by the processes of natural selection, is so far-reaching in its effects as to cover not science only, but art and literature as well” (A Short History 359). J. Scott Clark's A Study of English Prose Writers: A Laboratory Method (1898) transformed the classroom into a laboratory and taught young students the stylistics of literary classics in a scientific way; his book was motivated by “the conviction that such a revolution as has taken place in the study of all branches of natural science during the last quarter century is both possible and necessary in the study of English” (viii). The metaphoric description of literary history as a long and complex evolution of forms also gained wide acceptance. John M. Robertson devoted fully half his volume Essays Towards a Critical Method (1889) to an extended discussion of “Science in Criticism.” For Robertson, literary history could be traced through a “main line of evolution” (76)–and, of course, his use of the evolutionary metaphor suggested that aesthetics, too, obeyed the laws of nature and that literary history and the caprices of literary “taste” actually submitted to the very processes of natural selection that redefined life as the “survival of the fittest.”

Thus, a complex parallelism between biological science and literary art helped to buoy up the emerging literary critical edifice at the end of the nineteenth century. But if literary criticism self-consciously borrowed a polished, sophisticated, and quite successful version of scientific methodology–one that turned literary history into an “evolution” and literary success into an aesthetic survival of the “fittest”–it also inherited several of the philosophical quandaries that continued to embattle evolutionary biology. One such puzzle was the difficulty of defining a biological “species,” a seemingly simple taxonomic task but one that had stymied a long line of naturalists. Species theorizers span the entirety of biological history: Charles Darwin, Linnaeus, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Comte de Buffon, John Ray, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Andrea Cesalpino, Edward Topsell. Species taxonomy puzzled even the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle's Historia Animalium was one of the classical works of antiquity to recognize, as did New Critics René Wellek and Austin Warren over two millennia later, that although whales swim they are not fish, and although bats fly they are not birds.⁴

Yet, despite Nature's reluctance to present evidence of its own existence straightforwardly or unambiguously, an accurate classification of species (and, later, of literature) was widely held to be a feasible goal. In this respect, science offered literature a methodological template and any subsequent translation of these methodologies was often invisible enough that they remained unquestioned as they entered new domains. Indeed, literary critics put faith in their genre taxonomies precisely because they perceived such a cavalier success in biology's classification of species: “Does a theory of literary kinds involve the supposition that every work belongs to a kind?” Wellek and Warren asked. “If we were to answer by analogy to the natural world, we should certainly answer ‘yes”’ (216). That species could fall so readily and with such certainty into natural groupings was a fundamental guarantee that an analogous sorting could happen in literary criticism.

H. G. Wells, having studied biology in the 1880s under Thomas Henry Huxley at the South Kensington Normal School for Science, also imported the species problem directly and immediately into both his literature and his philosophy. His approach, however, was precisely opposite to the one that Wellek and Warren would posit forty years later. Presenting a speech before the Oxford Philosophical Society in 1903, Wells drew attention to the problem of proper taxonomies:

Wells's distrust of the “objective” realities of classification places him in a long line of skeptics–including practitioners of philosophical nominalism beginning with John Locke and, following Wells, including much of contemporary postmodernism. The very title of the speech itself, “Scepticism of the Instrument,” is, as Wells intimates throughout, a suspicion directed towards the instrument of human knowledge. More specifically, however, Wells's use of the species analogy draws attention directly to the biological scientist with whom Wells had already by 1903 spent a great deal of time and energy wrestling: Charles Darwin. And Darwin, in turn, had positioned himself in a centuries-long debate that had divided previous natural historians–the battle between “natural” and “artificial” species classifications.

In the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin had self-consciously called attention to the Linnaean classification schema as merely “an artificial means for enunciating, as briefly as possible, general propositions” (413). “I look at the term species,” Darwin wrote,

“This may not be a cheering prospect,” Darwin concluded, “but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species” (485). Scholars like Ernst Mayr and Daniel Dennett have suggested that herein lies one of the important philosophical implications of Darwin's work–namely, that the difficulties surrounding the concept of species have disrupted a straightforward interpretation of biology as one of the philosophically “realistic” sciences.⁵ The very notion of a biological species, some nominalist commentators suggest, was thus “invented” and not “discovered.”⁶ David Hull, for example, argues that “if Darwin's theory is accepted, then neither species nor the properties used to define them are discrete entities” (Philosophy 52).

Darwin's espousal of an “artificial” system for pragmatic purposes while simultaneously holding out for the possibility of an eventual “natural” system echoed a long controversy that had divided the natural history community since at least the Renaissance. Historian David Knight has explained that in artificial systems of classification “we are clearly imposing order on the world rather than discovering some fundamental way in which it is ordered; and our purposes are clear–artificial classifications are justified by their practical end” (23). And so whereas artificial systems have an ad hoc pragmatic purpose–and, consequently, oftentimes fall completely into philosophical nominalism–natural classifications employ the devices of philosophical realism to tell us something about the ways in which the world is really and truly ordered. Indeed, as commentators like Paul Farber have pointed out, the artificial species classifications of Linnaeus and his scientific colleagues were often based upon an animal's superficial external characteristics–the shape of a bird's beak, for example, or the color of its plumage. Such morphological classifications were often deceptively inaccurate and even, as Harriet Ritvo has shown, completely inadequate when confronting anomalies like the platypus–a duck-billed, egg-laying mammal.⁷

Ritvo's study of nineteenth-century scientific classifications, The Platypus and the Mermaid (1997), notes that “the appeal of the platypus to the general public, as to naturalists, seemed rather to depend on its weirdness than on any more positive charm or utility” (4). The same might be said of H. G. Wells's appeal to the reading public.

Anomalies like the platypus and the kangaroo challenged natural science's ability to (as it were) carve nature at the joints. The diverse and bizarre characteristics of these animals seemed to place their species into multiple categories at once or, perhaps even worse, into no category at all. The platypus, as Ritvo narrates, challenged scientific taxonomies and precipitated a crisis among scientists who feared that the natural system of biological classification–and there can be only one, we notice, precisely because it portrays the world “as it really is”–might never be achieved because it remained an illusive philosophic and scientific ideal. The world's diversity, the platypus continually reminds us, seems perpetually to resist our ability to represent it fully within systems of human knowledge. Nevertheless, the path towards natural, objective, scientific knowledge, as historian Phillip Sloan has pointed out, lies in the direction of “a classification of organisms which neither reflects the whimsy of the taxonomist, nor represents simply a utilitarian cataloguing device like the Dewey Decimal system” (2).

H. G. Wells, both whimsical and utilitarian, targeted his philosophy against precisely this system of perfect knowledge and against this seemingly insatiable desire to discover the “natural” classification system. In ranting against what he called “the fallacy of classification,” Wells praised and celebrated “what is quite conceivably a universe of uniques.” Any scientific taxonomy, Wells argued, “can work only by disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or that” (“Scepticism” 344; 348). He continued to rage against what he had once called the fallacy of the common noun.

Indeed, an essay of that very moniker, “The Fallacy of the Common Noun” (subsequently retitled “The Rediscovery of the Unique”), was one of Wells's earliest publications, appearing in the Fortnightly Review in 1891. Even at that very early date, midway between his scientific student days at South Kensington and the literary serialization of his first novel, The Time Machine, Wells's profound skepticism towards classification schemes had already matured. “Human reason,” he argued, “appears as a convenient organic process based on a fundamental happy misconception, and it may…take us away from, rather than towards, the absolute truth of things” (25). In this early article, Wells cast his skepticism widely, lambasting in turn philosophy (a “squirrel's cage”), arithmetic (“When we teach a child to count, we poison its mind almost irrevocably”), the “so-called laws of physics and chemistry,” the atomic theory (a “mental entanglement”), the experimental methods of science (whose “discrepancies…between experimental and theoretical results are frequently extremely startling”) and, finally, morality (“we cannot think of regulating our conduct by wholesale dicta”). “A philanthropist in a hurry might clap a thousand poor souls into ready-made suits all of a size,” Wells proclaimed, “but if he really wanted the people properly clothed he would send them one by one to a tailor” (29). Although Wells would soon begin writing fiction in the manner of the realistic, Victorian fashion–ironically, the fiction for which he is today best remembered–he would eventually outgrow even those particular genre choices and begin sending out his texts to be clothed, metaphorically, one by one.⁸

Human reason, as adequate “a truth-seeking tool as the snout of a pig” (25), would provide little guidance to the interested reader, especially after Wells abandoned the relative generic stability of his early so-called “scientific romances”: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and The First Men in the Moon (1901). Wells, invoking the evolutionary work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace as evidence to support his philosophy of uniques, would challenge and confront the turn-of-the-century critical edifice that borrowed its notion of literary genre from that selfsame evolutionary conception of species. “Contemporary literary criticism,” he proclaimed, “disregards the division of a work altogether; it recognises no unity except the unity of homogeneity & no form for fiction except the sham-real impersonal narrative in the third person, & with the author so to speak masked & gagged” (“Note” 2). Any literary critic who followed William Dean Howells's advice “to classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind” would find many of Wells's texts well-nigh incomprehensible.

While many Wellsian texts might easily illustrate his subsequent and intriguing genre choices, perhaps A Modern Utopia (1905) will serve best here. It was the culminating volume to his carefully planned trilogy of sociological works, preceded by Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1901; often referred to simply as Anticipations) and Mankind in the Making (1903). Wells appended his 1903 “Scepticism of the Instrument” speech to A Modern Utopia and, consequently, interested readers were invited both to share Wells's distrust of classification schemes and to ponder the ways in which Utopias and even a burgeoning Edwardian culture too were comparatively empty signifiers awaiting definition. The novel also demonstrates how self-consciously Wells distanced himself from the utopias that were so popular at the end of the nineteenth century–novels like William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). Wells's focus, as his title itself suggested, emphasized the modernity of the whole endeavor.⁹

His ideas and plans for a reorganized society were informed by the lessons that evolutionary theory had taught and he made full use of those lessons as he struggled to liberate culture from what he saw as the confines of a stifling and complacent Victorianism: “The Utopia of a modern dreamer,” Wells proclaimed, “must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world….[T]he Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic” (5; ch. 1.1).¹⁰ Darwin had insisted, of course, that an ever-changing environment was one of the driving mechanisms of evolution. Likewise, Wells insisted that environment–altered either by nature or humankind or both –would render a static community, however ideal, impossible. Wells's desire to illustrate both the newness of his cultural project and his radical defiance of extant genres permeates A Modern Utopia. But ever since its original publication, befuddled critics have more often than not either resorted to a vague praise for the work's originality or have, after cursorily dismissing the odd narrative structure, analyzed it as a species of political treatise.¹¹

Wells modestly described the novel as an “unworthy but unusual work” (2) and it abounds with examples of the anti-classification argument that Wells had inherited from his biology studies and had pronounced in his articles and speeches. He proclaimed in a prefatory note that “I have written into it as well as I can the heretical metaphysical scepticism upon which all my thinking rests” (vi), deriding, for example, the sociologists he saw around him because “they do not seem capable of the suspicion that the boundaries of species have vanished, and that individuality now carries with it the quality of the unique” (183; ch. 6.2). A Modern Utopia, then, is by design a difficult literary text to classify, although its story is simple enough–a narrator and his companion, a scientist of botany (perhaps the most classificatory of sciences), suddenly find themselves on an alien planet that is, at least physically, identical to Earth. They rapidly discover, however, that this planet's history and social organizations are radically different; they are, in short, utopian. The remainder of the book relates the puzzling new adventures that befall them on this alien planet–including a meeting with the narrator's doppelgänger counterpart. We learn only at the end of the book that the entire escapade has been merely a hypothetical conversation between the two main characters, but the whole has been narrated with such scrupulous (albeit selective) attention to the conventions of literary realism that we feel we've taken a journey as well. Beyond this aspect of the book's relatively straightforward narrative, however, A Modern Utopia presents a number of challenges to the reader, all of which contribute to generic confusion.

The first problem confronting the taxonomic critic is Wells's longish apologia that prefaces the book, in which he discusses the various genre choices he weighed before settling upon the book's final form. The list– noteworthy for both Wells's experimentalism as well as his careful planning –is worth citing at some length if only to demonstrate Wells's self-consciousness about his genre options:

Wells's discomfort with pre-established genres is clear. Ever the progressivist, Wells posits all this as a modern utopia and so the text must demarcate its own generic terrain as far removed as possible from the more traditional, Victorian utopias with which Wells's readers were no doubt familiar. Wells described his work as a hybrid: “The entertainment before you is neither the set drama of the work of fiction you are accustomed to read, nor the set lecturing of the essay you are accustomed to evade, but a hybrid of these two” (2).

A second generic difficulty is caused by A Modern Utopia's convoluted narration. The entire text is presented as a staged reading by still another character, who is referred to simply as “The Owner of the Voice.” While this metacharacter distinctly resembles Wells, we are cautioned that “this Voice, and this is the peculiarity of the matter, is not to be taken as the Voice of the ostensible author who fathers these pages” (1). The staged reading itself is assisted by two other characters: an “intrusive chairman” whose passages of introduction and conclusion are marked in italics, and a “leaner, rather taller, graver and less garrulous man” (3) who runs a slide projector and who is, in effect, the botanist himself. The sheer number of doppelgängers makes one think of a hall of mirrors: Wells resembles, but is not identical to, the Owner of the Voice who in turn resembles, but is not identical to, the main character who resembles, but is not identical to, his Utopian double who lives on a planet “beyond Sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond the flight of a cannon-ball flying for a billion years” (12; ch. 1.3).¹⁴

Evidence from the manuscript of A Modern Utopia corroborates Wells's prefatory suggestion that his novel's arrival at this happy arrangement followed a somewhat tortured path: the first abandoned opening “after the fashion of Peacock's (and Mr. Mallock's) development of the ancient dialogue” had featured an elaborate dinner party with many guests; the subsequent version “resembling a little the double personality of Boswell's Johnson” had introduced a main character named Bob who relayed his utopian thoughts to an interested listener. Not mentioned by Wells in his preface, however, is the existence of yet another version–one demonstrating that before the botanist himself was invented, the second character was actually the reader (perhaps it was the overabundance of second-person pronouns that convinced Wells to abandon it).¹⁵ Despite Wells's repeated attempts to erase himself from these pages, then, readers of A Modern Utopia must nevertheless situate themselves between a complicated quadrumvirate of Wells, the Voice, the nameless protagonist and his Utopian double.

But if the text's narration by committee is not confusing enough (creating what June Deery calls “a recessed narrative with three distinct levels” [218]), Wells toys constantly with established utopian genres–at least those utopian genres that, at the whimsy of the author, sweep all significant problems under the rug to present a static and idyllic society.¹⁶

At times proclaiming himself in full control of the narrative and at others bemoaning that things have gotten out of hand, the main character of A Modern Utopia employs or abandons literary tropes at his leisure. One of the comic antics that threads its way through the novel, for example, is the narrator's escalating antipathy towards the botanist, whom he finds mentally lax, romantic, and mawkish. “I protest, even warmly,” we are told, “that neither he nor his sorrows were in my intention” (26; ch. 1.6). Yet the botanist exists–perhaps a Wellsian jab at turn-of-the-century intentionalist criticism–and the dim-witted scientist incessantly torments the narrator, who continues his lamentable refrain sporadically throughout the book: “I wish I had never brought this introspective carcass, this mental ingrate, with me….I suppose I had no power to leave him behind….The old Utopists never had to encumber themselves with this sort of man” (179; ch. 6.1). Wells, winking at utopian genre conventions, plays a game whose rules are entirely of his own making.

Although our protagonist is hobbled by certain uncontrollable constraints (like the botanist), he is just as likely to wave away other problems that present themselves. Alien geography, for example, poses no problems. Our protagonists cannot get lost because this Utopia is located on “a planet like our planet, the same continents, the same islands, the same oceans and seas” (13; ch. 1.3). Communication with aliens is also a non-issue: “we may suppose [their] language to be sufficiently our own to understand. Indeed, why should we be in Utopia at all, if we could not talk to everyone?” (17; ch. 1.5). And finally, the convention of plot plausibility is abandoned when convenient: “Were this a story, I should tell at length how much we were helped by the good fortune of picking up a Utopian coin of gold, how at last we adventured into the Utopian inn and found it all marvellously easy” (52; ch. 2.4). And since A Modern Utopia is, of course, a story, that is precisely what happens. Wells draws constant attention to the constructedness of his narrative and, in so doing, highlights the artificial conventions of literary genres themselves. Never allowing his readers to suspend willingly their disbelief, Wells transforms the slippery semiotic discrepancy between signifier and signified into an integral part of the narrative itself. Wells stylizes his use of the conventions of literary realism–conventions that, without Wells's sense of irony, would suggest to readers that these events really are happening somewhere else. But, again, Wells's utopia is less a natural thing to be represented by language than it is an artificial thing to be created within language.

Continuing to invent his own generic rules, Wells makes the most of his opportunity to look at himself as a utopian citizen. With a self-congratulatory pat on the back, Wells fashions his utopian doppelgänger into one of the elite citizens of the alien planet. A utopian bureaucrat gives the protagonist his first clue: “almost wearily [he] tells me the facts about my Utopian self. They are a little difficult to understand. He says I am one of the samurai, which sounds Japanese” (169; ch. 5.7). The samurai are perhaps the most famous creations of A Modern Utopia. Resembling the guardians of Plato's Republic, they are the “voluntary nobility” of Utopia (259; ch. 9.1). They occupy the highest and most noble positions of leadership, education, administration, and scientific research. And indeed, why should we be in Utopia at all, if we could not be superior to everyone?

The hall of mirrors game continues as the samurai doppelgänger begins to discuss “my own work”: “there is much dissatisfaction with our isolation of criminals upon islands, and I am analysing the psychology of prison officials and criminals in general with a view to some better scheme” (278; ch. 9.4). Criminal psychology and prison reform had been part of Wells's own work at the turn of the century and he had touched upon it in his previous book, Mankind in the Making. The samurai's mission–and culture's, too, Wells implies–is to economize the efficiency of society. By reducing waste, whether measured as excess by-products, criminals, or the sufferings of the masses, the samurai will lead the way to a better social structure: “And the co-ordination of activities this relatively smaller waste will measure, will be the achieved end for which the order of the samurai was first devised” (262; ch. 9.1).

But here, Wells's fort/da game¹⁷

with generic conventions invariably troubles a dichotomy that seems entirely natural and self-evident–that between Self and Other. We are never quite sure which voice we encounter as “my work” is discussed: Wells's, the Voice's, the main character's, or the samurai's. Wells's radical rethinking of the purposes of classificatory schemes has disrupted (at least in this novel) what may be the most basic, fundamental opposition of all–the boundary between “I” and “not-I.” Instead, Wells has offered us a more complex model of subjectivity. Just as we are unable to follow the Voice to any one body, we are unable to ascribe “my work” to any one individual. Wells's characters seem to be neither bounded by discrete bodies nor delimited by traditional notions of psyche or intent. Instead, we might think of Wells's characters as being linked together, each propagating its own share of the overall argument without claiming ownership or control of the whole–almost as if Wells is forecasting what will come to be known as a parallel series of neural networks: a species of artificial intelligence.

Wells's repeated refusals to create “well-rounded characters” (which drew even E. M. Forster's disdain) suggest that psychologically “deep” characters belong to one of the many illusory categories of fiction and literary criticism.¹⁸

Wells's fiction resists–but does not abandon –such classificatory schemes. Utopia, too, classifies its characters. However, Utopia's system of taxonomizing citizens, “so far unscientific that many individuals fall between or within two or even three of its classes,” is quite content to lump its citizens into groups as long as the procedure is distinctly not scientific. Once the utopian classifications–prosaically labeled Poietic, Kinetic, Dull, and Base– have fulfilled their purposes, they are de-emphasized in favor of other, more immediate political concerns. They do not and cannot, for example, form the foundation of a eugenics program “simply because the intricate interplay of heredity is untraceable and incalculable” (266; ch. 9.2). In Wells's estimation, this taxonomy of people remained far superior to any natural system–especially to any system espoused by the Social Darwinists –because it merely “serve[s] its purpose to determine the broad lines of political organisation” (265). Wells's politics and his literary aesthetics dovetail seamlessly. One might say that Wells's characters belong to species Homo artificialis, not Homo naturalis.

“We know quite clearly,” says the narrator's samurai double, “that civilisation is an artificial arrangement, and that all the physical and emotional instincts of man are too strong, and his natural instinct of restraint too weak, for him to live easily in the civilised State. Civilisation has developed far more rapidly than man has modified” (292; ch. 9.5). The argument he reiterates was not a new one in 1905; indeed, by then evolution had already influenced many turn-of-the-century social and economic thinkers: Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and Thorstein Veblen, for example. But Wells's project differed significantly from theirs. Wells recanted his early support of eugenics (at least partly¹⁹

, and he shunned laissez-faire economics, deriding economic expertise as “becoming enough in a hair-dresser or a fashionable physician, [but] indecent in a philosopher or a man of science” (85–86; ch. 3.3). Refusing to recruit evolution as a justification of social injustice and rampant capitalism (as Sumner had done, for example, in his book What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other [1883]), Wells sought to build a civilization that was insulated and buffered from the ravages and cruelties of Darwinian natural selection.

The problem of A Modern Utopia, then, is the problem of the doppelgänger: how two entities might be superficially the same but yet essentially different. This tension-filled dynamic between Wells's late-Victorian culture and his idealized version–or, in different terms, between a Darwinian-Spencerian “survival of the fittest” and what I'm calling the Wellsian “artificial”–lies at the heart of not only the scientific romances but of his subsequent career work as well. Characters like Prendick in The Island of Doctor Moreau, the Time Traveller in The Time Machine, and the artilleryman in War of the Worlds all argue for civilizations that stave off savage inter-species violence by taking refuge inside human-made, artificial cultural institutions like laws and libraries and museums. A Modern Utopia participates in precisely the same dynamic; it maps the significant political, historical and humanistic changes that Wells envisions for late-Victorian world culture. Wells's fictional text functions as a guidebook to political agendas and transformations, describing the ways in which geography, politics, scientific achievement, and even human nature itself–as oxymoronic as that phrase becomes in Wells's philosophy–will transform themselves when finally removed from the cruel, Darwinian universe. The enterprise was a distinctly imperialistic one–The Time Machine's Morlocks, after all, were never allowed to add their own artifacts to the Palace of Green Porcelain–but Wells could envision no other solution to the problem of world survival.

A Modern Utopia, then, like many of Wells's other texts, maps out a pervasive political transformation of late-Victorian culture. Wells describes the project as if it were nothing more than the creation of a dimensional, architectural space, but part of the fun and challenge of reading a book like A Modern Utopia is coming to terms with that aspect of Wells's architectonics. Utopias are, of course, by definition always elsewhere, and have been so since Thomas More cobbled together the word from the Greek ou (not) and topos (place).²⁰

But however we measure it, the distance between No-Place and Our-Place is exactly the topos that Wells wants most to build and to explore. By situating the reader within the interstices of a complex matrix–between two identical planets, one here and one beyond Sirius; between our dystopia and their utopia; between odd and improbable meetings of an inferior self and a superior doppelgänger; between two cultures sharing one geography but differing radically in philosophy and history and humanism–all these mark out Wells's space of rhetorical persuasion. A Modern Utopia is a carefully crafted document that distances itself from both realist fiction and realist philosophy. The text self-consciously accentuates itself as unique: neither characteristically Victorian nor freshly Edwardian, A Modern Utopia locates itself between genres and between literary periods, shamelessly borrowing from each and all. Invoking evolutionary theory while stressing the inadequacies of strict Darwinism, the text maintains its distance from scientism as well as from sociology. Wells's creation defies the traditional signifying systems of literary genre, criticism and philosophy.

And yet, A Modern Utopia also obeys, interestingly enough, an inexorable logic once the improbable premises and initial starting points are established. In that sense, once readers accept the fantastic premise of a utopian planet-double of our own Earth–and the characters' magical and instantaneous transport to that planet–the rest of the narrative plays itself out as smoothly as a well-designed scientific experiment. Everything proceeds to an inexorable and logical conclusion. Based upon a few assumptions, Wells theorizes an hypothesis and concocts an experiment to test it. As he would argue later, “the charm of a well-conceived character lies, not in knowing its destiny, but in watching its proceedings” (“Contemporary Novel” 362). Defending the conclusions of his modern utopia, Wells insisted that “All this follows inevitably from the general propositions of our Utopian dream. When we made those, we bound ourselves helplessly to come to this” (173; ch. 5.8).

Consequently, if we feel that we must classify them, I'd suggest that Wells's works are perhaps best thought of as literary thought experiments. After all, although Wells maintained a highly cultivated skepticism toward literary genre, he never stopped genuflecting before the altar of scientific experiment. His narrative frameworks resemble a species of rigorous scientific experimentalism, and Wells's emphasis on creating artificial spaces insured that his fictional worlds would, like his modern utopia, approximate ours only superficially but would function quite differently. The inexorable march of Darwinian evolution is held at bay by A Modern Utopia's civic polity. Wells's literature delights in thinking these kinds of alternative spaces into existence–artificial places where one might find a certain intellectual immunity from the somatic concerns of evolution's natural selection: “We are assuming a world identical in every respect with the real planet Earth” he writes, “except for the profoundest differences in the mental content of life” (259; ch. 9.1). Wells's literary thought experiments are attempts to come to terms with that new mental content and to posit innovative ways of immunizing humanity against the “naturalness” of natural selection. Wells desired to become a metaphysician of the artificial.

In its attempts to break with the then-current theories of literary genre, Wells's A Modern Utopia cannot be dismissed as merely a latecomer in the Victorian pageant of utopias. Instead, the novel poses a serious challenge to a turn-of-the-century literary critical edifice that had grounded its own genre security upon the even shakier foundation of biological species theory. Wells's early foray into genre interbreeding would later form a major plank in his twentieth-century aesthetic platform. Speaking before the Times Book Club in 1911, for example, Wells advocated that literary criticism try to resist attempts to “scientize” itself. “Whenever criticism of any art becomes specialised and professional,” he wrote, its adjudicators “begin to emulate the classifications and exact measurements of a science, and to set up ideals and rules as data for such classification and measurements” (“Contemporary” 360). The danger, as Wells had repeatedly pointed out, was the slippery slope of movement from an artificial classification that remained nominalist and descriptive into a more rigid natural classification that became realist and prescriptive. “The novel has been treated as though its form was as well-defined as the sonnet,” he lamented (360). Wells reminded his listeners that novels were not short stories and therefore should be exempt from Edgar Allan Poe's recommendation that they might be read in one sitting. Novels, Wells suggested, should have a “laxer, more spacious form” in which “nothing is irrelevant if the writer's mood is happy” (362–63; 365).

Wells argued that the modern novel, at least in the hands of his friends Joseph Conrad and Arnold Bennett, was beginning only now, a full decade after Victoria's death, to escape the confines of nineteenth-century literary conventions.²¹

A new period of history, Wells insisted, would demand new genres of literature and a hackneyed, dusty, scientized literary criticism could not begin to appreciate–let alone evaluate–the ways in which this new literature might evolve. A revolution in literature called for an accompanying revolution in criticism: “The essential characteristic of this great intellectual revolution which we are living to-day, that revolution of which the revival and restatement of nominalism under the name of pragmatism is the philosophical aspect, consists in the reassertion of the importance of the individual insistence as against the generalisation” (372). Once again, Wells preached the Fallacy of the Common Noun and the reassertion of a universe of uniques. Wells hoped his novels could lend themselves to a larger project, a self-conscious “widening” of human experience: “it is that widening, that increase in the range of understanding, at which I think civilisation is aiming” (376–77). He could think of no other means of “keeping the atmosphere of official life sweet and healthy, except the novel” (374).

Literary criticism did indeed become scientized in precisely the way that Wells feared. As Mary Poovey recounts in her article, “The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism,” literary formalism and the genre of the romantic lyric would reign supreme over twentieth-century literary studies. Claims about the essential nature of fiction and its proper forms would far outnumber interpretations favoring a more Wellsian emphasis on literature's cultural environment and its political efficacy. The advent of the New Criticism ensured that its practitioners, like René Wellek and Austin Warren, could invisibly import the natural categories and methodologies of science directly into literary criticism. Armed with realistic philosophy and an ability to categorize literary genres just like biological species, literary critics could find little to say about a Wellsian universe of uniques in which readers would not be surprised to find (to recall this article's epigraph for a moment) that flying bats are indeed birds and that swimming whales might just turn out to be fish. At just the time when Wells's expanded use of literary genre began to develop, literary criticism re-entrenched itself in generic analyses.

French ornithologist Louis-Pierre Vieillot had once argued that a natural classification of all the world's birds would be impossible as long as undiscovered species remained a possibility. Scientists would need to traverse the entire planet, ensuring once and for all that every species had been accounted for. “Only then,” Vieillot wrote, “would one have [a system] which left nothing to be desired, and this will be the natural system” (qtd. in Farber 84).²²

H. G. Wells's aesthetic, though heavily influenced by science and its methodologies, takes us in a different direction because it holds out for yet undiscovered species of literature. Wells's texts resist the selfsame closure of knowledge that the natural systems of science and taxonomy attempt to gain. The insights Wells shared with his readers about evolution, about rationality, about science and its wondrous and diverse knowledge had been learned originally in Huxley's biology classroom, but through artistic design, had been reshaped into literary forms that appeared to have been bred unnaturally. Wells's interpretation of Darwin's and Huxley's lessons became the groundwork for his career-long fascination with artificiality, with other-worldliness and with what he considered the new, modern possibilities for literature. Nonetheless, always pessimistic about his work's critical reception, Wells once predicted that “as I do not greatly love the ordinary form of novel, the single, rather shapeless flat of homogeneous narrative, so my books will continue in all probability to be demonstrably wrong until the end of my days.”²³ Wilbur Cross's 1930 critical proclamation has largely borne out Wells's point: “It may well be that the Wells who will live longest is the man who wrote most like the Victorians. Such is the irony of Fate” (193).