Second paragraph of third chapter:

School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town and outskirts of Bromstead.

I’m gradually working my way through the novels of H.G. Wells, from the most famous to the most obscure, and am now about half-way. This is one of his longer works, whose protagonist emerges from the heart of the middle classes to a Cambridge education, election as a young Liberal MP in the 1906 landslide, and then defects to the Conservatives as a radical new thinker, and also abandons his long-suffering wife for a younger and keener admirer. That last bit, if not the rest, is very clearly drawn from Wells’ own experience, and the emotional passages are poignantly drawn, even if we can’t always sympathise much with the choices made by Wells’ hero.

The political parts, however, are crashingly dull in places; the world has moved on a lot from the hot topics of political debate in 1910, and I can’t believe that Wells’ writing on this was a really attractive feature of the book when it first came out. Of the political issues that we do remember from that time, the suffragette movement is mentioned only as background colour, and Ireland not at all. Wells may perhaps have been hoping to shift the political debate with his fiction, but contemporary reaction seems to have concentrated on the scandalous sex in this novel. (Which as usual is discreetly off-stage.) There’s also a frankly nasty portrait of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, which must have annoyed their many mutual friends.

You can get it here. Next in my sequence of Wells reading is The Wheels of Chance.