Scientific Method and Wells’s Credentials

Abstract

While no reader can fail to have been struck by the emphasis on science in Wells’s work, there has been no universal agreement amongst critics as to whether Wells’s thought was consistent with, or influenced by, scientific method. The most interesting point to emerge from a survey of the critical estimates is that while those scientists who are familiar with Wells’s work have for the most part applauded his treatment of scientific interests, even, in a few cases, regarding it as germinal to their own ideas, literary critics, after the first wave of somewhat indiscriminate enthusiasm, have tended to denigrate Wells’s scientific ability and to dismiss his work as, at best, interesting fantasy. Such a strange division of opinion would be worth examining in its own right, but it is especially interesting here for the light it throws on the popular misconceptions of science which Wells was concerned to erase.