‘The difference between us’: Science, Politics and the Human Factor

Abstract

On 16 February 1905 Conrad wrote to Cunninghame Graham that the ‘grave of individual temperaments is being dug by GBS and HGW with hopeful industry. Finità la comedia! Well they may do much but for the saving of the universe I put my faith in the power of folly’ (Collected Letters 3: 217–18). The problem hinted at here, is that, as Karl and Davies assert, Wells was moving away from the scientific romances that emphasized evolutionary possibilities towards a ‘scientific assertiveness’ that ‘clearly worried Conrad’ (Collected Letters 3: 218). Allied to this was Conrad’s distaste for the Fabians with whom Wells was increasingly becoming involved; and, as a pivotal member of the Fabian Society George Bernard Shaw was amongst the foremost of these new political thinkers.² The imaginative brilliance and originality of Wells’s scientific fantasies had thrilled Conrad the writer; but when Wells increasingly allied his ideas about scientific progress to political change, Conrad began to have serious misgivings. Science and politics were to become two of the crucial issues that were to define the differences between Conrad and Wells.

‘… But the dwarf answered: “No; something human is dearer to me than the wealth of all the world.”’

Grimm’s Tales (Preface to ‘Youth’)¹