Wells’s Late Novels: Art and the Rise of Fascism

H. G. Wells was the first British author to write an anti-fascist novel and he was at the forefront of European intellectuals who openly indicted the rise of totalitarian movements. Drawing on the unpublished correspondence between Wells and the former Italian Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti, the chapter investigates Wells’s response to the early fascistizzazione of the Italian State. Following the scandal surrounding the political murder of socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, Wells wrote a series of groundbreaking articles that exposed to an international audience the violence of Mussolini’s regime. At the same time, by drawing connections between Italian Fascism and British politics, Wells’s novelistic output attacked the imperial status quo. The chapter discusses Wells’s “Fascist Trilogy”—three late novels, Meanwhile (1927), The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930), and The Holy Terror (1939)—and contextualizes them in relation to his journalism and contacts with Italian critics of Fascism.