The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of HG Wells

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

In his preface to this book, Coren accuses “conventional” history of
depicting Wells as “unerringly on the side of the angels” and
promises a corrective biography. What he delivers will not be too
unfamiliar to readers of Antony West and Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie,
though his emphases are not theirs. Wells was a deeply flawed human
being—egocentric, bigoted, and emotionally unreliable, a womanizer and
petty tyrant. His social vision is sometimes anti-Semitic and
proto-fascist.

Wells’s second wife, Amy Catherine, whom he renamed Jane, remained
perfectly obedient and helpful through all her husband’s tirades and
affairs. It is a sign of Coren’s imaginative limitations that he
breaks off a discussion of her personality with the comment, “It is
easier to condemn or to sympathize with Mrs. Wells than it is to
comprehend her.” A different kind of limitation appears in the
tendentious chapter “History and Mr. Belloc,” in which Belloc’s
debate with Wells over The Outline of History is painstakingly
reconstructed; this account gives Belloc’s arguments more importance
than they merit. Coren’s brief final chapter summarizes the charges
against Wells and concludes that there is an indelible stain on the
man’s writing and character.

Admirers of Wells will find this book irritating because of its
treatment of its subject. Scholars will be annoyed by its cavalier
approach to documentation. Coren has undoubtedly consulted all the
collections and persons listed in the acknowledgments, but his footnotes
are vague: they provide no page numbers in citations of published books,
and for unpublished materials they give no titles or document
descriptions, only the name of the collection that houses them. Some
very interesting sources (such as the diary of Governess Meyer, quoted
on page 106) are not documented at all.