The continuing fame enjoyed by H. G. Wells owes itself largely to his two most famous novels, The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Imaginative and daring, these books infuse the reader with a combination of hope and realism: hope for the possibility of a vibrant future that benefits all, and realism about the difficulty of realizing such an aim. Ignored in retellings of Wells’s life and works is that his vision of progress was a distinctly socialist one.

Alongside his novelistic output, Wells engaged tirelessly as a public intellectual, marshaling arguments against the inevitability of capitalist social relations. In “The Misery of Boots,” an address he gave to the Fabian Society in 1905, he conjured up the metaphor of tattered boots which, for Wells, represented the struggles of the working class in a capitalistic society. This unlucky majority can only afford cheaply made boots that wear and degrade under the stress of endless labor. From this he draws two conclusions: commerce and manufacturing should not occur “for the private profit of individuals, but for the good of all,” and that socialists are “the only people who do hold out any hope of far-reaching change that will alter the present state of affairs.”

Though he shared much of the gradualist, progressive vision of the Fabian Society, he eventually left it because he viewed its outlook, which saw socialism as a natural outgrowth of capitalist society, as unscientific and emerging from a middle class unengaged in working-class politics. Science meant for Wells an entire worldview: not the cold, mechanical perspective of social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, but rather the viewpoint that society should always seek to improve through empirical study and reflection, exposing ignorance to the light of knowledge. The Fabians were an “extraordinarily inadequate and feeble organization” to Wells because he viewed them as relying too heavily on grandiose rhetoric at the expense of offering practical solutions to organize the working class and build an effective movement. Both socialism and science contributed to what Wells viewed as the general tendency of historical progress to reveal to humanity that “they are items in a whole vaster, more enduring, and more wonderful than their ancestors ever dreamed or expected.”