Now, this power of creating the semblance of fact out of an ideal was too valuable a thing to be wasted on the making of stories that had no purpose beyond that of interesting or exciting the reader with such imaginations as the Martians, whose only use was to threaten humanity with extinction.  Mr Wells’ own sight of our blindness, our complacent acceptance of the sphere as an oblate or prolate spheroid, might be, he hoped, another of the marvels which we should come to accept through the medium of romance.  So he began tentatively at first to introduce a vivid criticism of the futility of present-day society into his fantasies, and the first and the least of these books was that published in 1899 as When the Sleeper Wakes, a title afterwards changed to The Sleeper Awakes.

In the two opening chapters we find the same delightfully realistic treatment of the unprecedented slowly mingling with the commonplace.  The first appearance of Graham the Sleeper, tormented then by the spectres and doubts that accompany insomnia, is made so credible that we accept his symptoms without the least demur; his condition is merely unusual enough to excite a trembling interest.  Even the passing of his early years of trance does not arouse scepticism.  But then we fall with one terrific plunge into the world of A.D. 2100, and, like Graham, we cannot realise it.  Moreover this changed, developed world has a slightly mechanical air.  The immense enclosed London, imagined by Mr Wells, is no Utopia, yet, like the dream of earlier prophets, it is too logical to entice us into any hallucination; and we come, fatally, to a criticism of the syllogism.

Mr Wells himself has confessed, in a new Preface, that this is “one of the most ambitious and least satisfactory” of his books; and explains that it was written against time, when he was on the verge of a serious illness.  It is superfluous, therefore, to criticise it in detail, but one or two points in relation to the sociological idea must be emphasised.

The main theme is the growing division between Capital and Labour.  The Giant Trust—­managing the funds accumulated in Graham’s name, a trust that has obtained possession of so immense a capital that it controls the chief activities of the world—­is figured in the command of a certain Ostrog, who, with all the dependents that profit by the use of his wealth and such mercenaries as he can hold to himself, represents one party in opposition to the actual workers and producers, generically the People.  The picture is the struggle of our own day in more acute form; the result, in the amended edition, is left open.  “Who will win—­Ostrog or the People?” Mr Wells writes in the Preface referred to above, and answers:  “A thousand years hence that will still be just the open question we leave to-day.”