under-educated, under-trained, and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class.  A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable.”  And that is the moral we may lay to heart from the presentation of these three quite lovable and quite futile draper’s assistants.  Their stories are told without didacticism; the method displays at its brightest Mr Wells’ intimate knowledge and understanding of the life and speech of the class portrayed; the developments are natural and absorbing enough to hold the interest of the most idle reader; and here and there, perhaps, an intelligent man or woman may be stirred to realise that he or she is in part responsible for the futility of a Hoopdriver or a Kipps, or for the jovial crimes of Mr Polly....

I come now to the six novels which represent most truly the striving, persistent idealism of the mature Wells.  In these books he has come to the mastery of his own technique—­so far as a man may ever master it.  He admits that there remain inexpressible visions, he is apt at times to be overtaken by his own mannerisms (a fault that in no way affects the enjoyment or enlightenment of the average reader), but he has wrought and perfected a delicate instrument of style that is finely adapted to his purpose.  I cannot avoid speaking of “purpose” in relation to these five books, and yet the word is misleading.  I do not mean by it that Mr Wells has ever sat down to write a novel with the deliberate intention of converting an honest reader or so.  But I do mean that he has tried very deliberately to express his own attitude in these books, and that whether or not he was intentionally a propagandist, he has done his utmost to explain and to glorify that attitude of his.  Perhaps I shrink from that word “purpose” too sensitively, because it is so naturally associated in the mind with all that is clumsy and didactic in fiction.  The “novel with a purpose,” as the dreadful phrase has it, is a horrible thing, and none of this five could be so misdescribed.  Nevertheless it is very plain that Mr Wells has deliberately selected his stories and his characters to illustrate certain points of view.  The characters are consistent, and the story growing out of their influences and reactions is never distorted in order to score a point for the maintainer of a theory.  But the preliminary selection cannot be overlooked.  It has, without question, been made in each case to illustrate a thesis.

Ann Veronica (1909) opens an aspect of the sex question that has been amplified in later novels.  The chief person in the story illustrates for us the revolt of young women against the limitations of a certain, the most representative, type of home discipline.  Ann Veronica was a well-educated young woman with that leaning towards biological science which seems an almost necessary element in the make-up of Mr Wells’