I’ve been reading David Lodge’s latest, a fictional biography of H.G. Wells – A Man of Parts. I’m only about a third of the way through at this point, so I can’t speak to the overall quality of the book. Further, I only made it about a third of the way through Author, Author before I had to return the audiobook to the library and I know this book is in some ways a counterpoint to that one (which focused on the life of Henry James.)

H.G. Wells’ involvement in the early development of the Fabian Society is a continuing theme of the book, particularly the fact that it afforded Wells manifold opportunities for fraternization with free-thinking young women. There’s some mention of the enthusiasm for eugenics shared by many of the progressives at the time, as mentioned in Wells’ own Anticipations:

‘The nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss; the nation that succeeds most subtly in checking gambling and the moral decay of women and homes that gambling inevitably entails; the nation that by wise interventions, death duties and the like, contrives to expropriate and extinguish incompetent rich families while leaving individual ambitions free; the nation, in a word, that turns the greatest proportion of its irresponsible adiposity into social muscle, will certainly be the most powerful or dominant nation before the year 2000.’

There really is nothing new under the sun. The magnanimous masturbator seeking to direct his “donor-sexual” energies towards the greater good isn’t that different from the impotent sexologist who surely would have approved of this means of improving upon the gene pool.

From A Man of Parts:

Later that day, before dinner, he (H.G.) went for a stroll with Edith (Bland, who wrote under the pen name E. Nesbit.). They passed beyond the confines of the moat and wandered through the overgrown and largely untended grounds until they came to an old summerhouse, and sat down on an ancient wicker sofa, where a most interesting conversation took place.

‘Why didn’t you like A Modern Utopia the first time you read it?’ he asked her.

‘I didn’t like the idea that married men could have affairs but their wives couldn’t.’

‘You think married women should be able to have affairs too?’

‘No. I don’t think either of them should,’ she said. He was surprised by this answer, which did not accord with what he knew about the history of her marriage, but he could hardly say so. Noting his silence, she said: ‘I mean I know they do, the flesh is weak, the heart is susceptible . . . I won’t claim that Hubert and I have been entirely . . . But I don’t think it should be publicly approved, taken for granted, as it is in your Utopia. I think we must uphold the traditional principle that sexual intercourse should be restricted to married couples.’

‘Even though we know it isn’t?’

‘Yes. If you had daughters like Rosamund you would agree with me. Young girls like her know everything and fear nothing. They don’t believe in religion, they read any books they like, Darwin, Marx, French novels, Havelock Ellis, I wouldn’t be surprised, because we’ve brought them up—I mean liberal progressive people like us have brought our children up—in complete intellectual freedom. It makes them terribly vulnerable.