SOURCE: Scuriatti, Laura. “A Tale of Two Cities: H. G. Wells's The Door in the Wall, Illustrated by Alvin Langdon Coburn.” The Wellsian, no. 22 (winter 1999): 11-28.

In the following essay, Scuriatti discusses the success of the collaboration of Wells and photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn on the 1911 edition of The Door in the Wall, and Other Stories.

“Our business is to see what we can and render it,” writes H. G. Wells about himself and the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. The sentence, which appears on the first page of the presentation copy of First and Last Things, is the caption to a small caricature-drawing in which Wells depicts himself and the photographer at work in their respective activities. Wells's words seem to hint at a close collaboration and to a shared aesthetic creed. In fact, the two authors only worked together on two occasions: in 1910 H. G. Wells wrote...