H. G. Wells’s melancholy: The Anatomy of Frustration

ABSTRACT

H. G. Wells’s 1936 dialogue novel, The Anatomy of Frustration, which reiterates his advocacy for a World State, has received scant critical attention. This article explores the work’s place in Wells’s oeuvre, its narrative structure, its relation to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, and the various ways in which it reveals the substantive contradictions that undergird Wells’s utopian projects. These contradictions are explored – placing them in relation to recent critical debates about Wells’s politics – by focusing on the anti-Semitism evident in The Anatomy of Frustration. I argue in the article that attention to this prejudice allows us to ask important questions about the contradictions evident in Wells’s utopianism.

KEYWORDS:

• H. G. Wells
• The Anatomy of Frustration
• World State: utopianism
• anti-Semitism
• The Anatomy of Melancholy
• melancholy
• satire

When H. G. Wells was interviewed for the monthly periodical, The Young Man, in 1896, he was in high spirits. Published the previous year, his first novel, The Time Machine (1895), had received mixed reviews, but was, by late-Victorian standards, abestseller, and The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and Wheels of Chance (1896) were establishing his place in the London literary scene. Thirteen years earlier, in 1883, Wells had persuaded his parents to release him from his doleful apprenticeship at Hyde’s Drapery Emporium in Southsea. Through the intervention of his mother, Sarah (née Neal), he subsequently secured aposition as apupil–teacher at the National School at Wookey in Somerset (he was dismissed within the year when the headmaster disputed his qualifications). Wells then took up another pupil-teacher position at Midhurst Grammar School, where he taught – enthusiastically but eccentrically – for ayear. In 1884 something life-changing occurred: he won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later The Royal College of Science, now part of Imperial College London). Although he did not complete his bachelor’s degree in science until 1890 (through the University of London External Programme), his time at the Normal School – where he was taught, on occasion, by Thomas Henry Huxley, whom he venerated – consolidated Wells’s Darwinism, which thereafter undergirded his worldview. Wells, without any source of income, began writing short humorous pieces for the Pall Mall Gazette, while drafting The Time Machine, aprocess that took seven years. The novel proved so lucrative that he and his second wife, Amy Catherine Roberts, called ‘Jane’ (he first married his cousin, Isabel, in 1891, but they separated in 1894), were able to move out of their cramped house in Maybury Road, London, into ‘Heatherlea’ in Woking, Surrey. It was there that Wells proudly welcomed the interviewer from The Young Man into his study– his first– and took down from the shelves his copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, declaring it ‘to be his favourite book’ (Sherborne 2010: 116). In 1936, at seventy and at the height of his fame,¹ Wells would publish arejoinder, The Anatomy of Frustration: A Modern Synthesis, a neglected text in his oeuvre.

This article is tryptic. First, having surveyed existing criticism, Itrace the connections between The Anatomy of Frustration and its ur-text, Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. This permits reflections on utopianism as an intrinsically melancholic practice arising from dissatisfaction with the status quo. I then proceed with a description of The Anatomy of Frustration focusing on the anti-Semitism at its centre. This is not in the spirit of j’accuse. Rather, it reveals the fundamental contradictions in the work, which have been identified by scholars in other works by Wells. In my concluding comments, I suggest that Wells’s anti-Semitism is not of the same order as his indictment of other nationalist or ethnic communities, the existence of which threatened his version of a utopian world state.

The reasons for the neglect of The Anatomy of Frustration are varied. Its publication was met with general indifference. Short synoptic announcements were placed in periodicals by Cresset Press in 1936, but the only substantive review I have sourced appeared in 1937 in the American Sociological Review. Sydney Hooks was unimpressed. He criticizes the exuberant dogmatism of Wells’s imagined ‘New Beginning’ and he observes abasic contradiction in the work. ‘The difficulty here is not only, as [Wells] himself admits, that his meaning is oversaid and borders on nonsense, but that such meanings, outside of the historical and concrete contexts, serve as ritualistic premises of other philosophies [Fascism, Communism and Nazism] which Wells abominates’ (1937: 278). Wells was thin-skinned when it came to criticism. Hook’s conclusion to his review of The Anatomy of Frustration must have cut deep: ‘One should read this book for its penetrating asides rather than for its systematic argument’ (1937: 279).

Another reason for the neglect of The Anatomy of Frustration is that it is indeed A Modern Synthesis. It restates and encapsulates utopian ideals with which Wells was already widely identified: governance of a World State by an ascetic, educated elite committed to the ‘scientific’ development of a global society in which specified economic and educational principles and protocols would obtain. He first expounded these precepts in Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1902), in which he argues that a constructive cosmopolitan unity ruled by an elite should supersede nation states, while also casually advocating eugenics. On the advice of his fellow Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, after receiving apersonal letter from his friend, Joseph Conrad, and following F. W. Headley’s negative review of Anticipations in Nature (Partington 2016: chap. 2, n.p.),² Wells ameliorated his totalitarian rhetoric in Mankind in the Making (1903). But, of all his utopian future fictions, Wells is renowned for A Modern Utopia (1905). It imagines the instantaneous and inexplicable translation of two characters, the ‘Owner of the Voice’ and ‘the botanist’, to a planet ‘out beyond Sirius’ (2005: 15) which is geographically identical to Earth, but which has followed a different path of social development. This (essentially Platonic) utopia – set out against earlier authors’ ideal societies – is governed by the ‘Samurai’, who are appointed (rather than democratically elected) based on their potential, education, and accomplishments. This liberal-militant rules a population whose subjectivities have been engineered to be compatible with the highly regulated planetary order. Wells continued to explore and elaborate these ideas in, among other works, The World Set Free (1914), The Salvaging of Civilisation (1921), The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (1933), and The Open Conspiracy (1928). The Anatomy of Frustration advocates social engineering – though with adistinct slant – along lines that were already familiar. Sarah Cole states:

Certainly, by the 1930s, some commentators felt that Wells’s ideal of the world state and his view that war must lead to peace had grown stale and repetitive. Such ajudgment derives, in part, from Wells’s habitual recasting of the familiar dichotomy: either we are doomed as a species or we are saved, and if so, it will be from collectivizing the globe and taking science as our foundation. (2020: 316)

Few critics, then or now, have considered The Anatomy of Frustration as anything other than summation and reiteration.

In contemporary scholarship, The Anatomy of Frustration has been the subject of only one article, Robert M. Philmus’ ‘Revisions of His Past: H. G. Wells’s Anatomy of Frustration’ (1978)– which is largely descriptive, yet circumvents the anti-Semitic tract at the heart of the work. Bryan Cheyette, in his excellent (yet neglected) survey of Wells’s representation of Jews, cites afew lines from The Anatomy of Frustration, but misconstrues entirely the nature of the work (1991: 58–59). In their definitive H. G. Wells: A Biography, Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie comment insightfully, but briefly, on The Anatomy of Frustration (1973: 399, 401–402), noting that the section concerning Jewish culture was, in fact, Wells’s response to accusations that he was anti-Semitic, in part following his 1933 refusal to join a committee being established to counter anti-Semitism in Britain. The gist of the MacKenzies’ defence of Wells is that ‘the Jews are singled out as aspecial example of obstructive nationalism, but the lashing they received was in essence no different from that which H. G. was to mete out to Catholics, monarchists, imperialists and all who appeared to be frustrating the Wellsian plan for salvation’ (1973: 402). In a more recent biography, H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, Michael Sherborne adeptly contextualizes The Anatomy of Frustration in Wells’s oeuvre and, at least, identifies the ‘nadir’ of text to be its ‘attack on Jewish culture as not only the provoker but the model for the messianic delusions of the Nazi movement’ (2010: 311, see Wells Anatomy 1936: 173–183, where this abominable argument is set out). Sherborne dedicates less than a page to the work and defends Wells’s anti-Semitism in weak terms: ‘As ever, [in The Anatomy of Frustration, Wells’s] point, such as it was, concerned culture and not race. He spent much of the year [1936] enthusiastically collaborating with the film–making Korda brothers, the kind of assimilated Jews he admired’ (31). Other biographers and critics mention The Anatomy of Frustration in passing. Even Peter Kemp, who, in H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape: Biological Imperatives and Imaginative Obsessions (1996), refers substantively to the work, treats it as simply another repository of Wells’s evolutionist and eugenic commitments rather than as awork with distinct narrative, rhetorical and polemical features.

Given that Wells published around a hundred books during his lifetime (in addition to myriad newspaper articles, essays, reviews, and anthologized radio broadcasts) it would be churlish to point out critics’ sins of omission, no matter the significance Iaccord The Anatomy of Frustration. I shall not, then, observe that Sarah Cole’s Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (2020), one of the most cogent and considered studies of H. G. Wells to appear in the last decade, does not mention The Anatomy of Frustration even though it would have buttressed or, at least, informed her discussions of Wells’s anti-Semitism, the chronology of his political convictions, and her thoughtful examination of the moral judgements entailed in either vaunting or repudiating Wells. John S.Partington’s seems more as in of commission. His stridently uncritical Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells (2016) sets out to demonstrate that Wells ‘was the first active cosmopolitan of the twentieth century and he designed a cosmopolitan theory of governance that has transformed the lives of much of the world’s population’ (2016: chap.1 n.p.). Partington’s study, which advocates for Wells as the pathfinding British internationalist and humanitarian, fails to mention The Anatomy of Frustration, which is, at several points, trenchant to his unwavering approbation of Wells. More surprisingly, he never mentions Wells’s abiding anti-Semitism which, Iwill argue, is crucial to understanding ‘the prophet’s’ cosmopolitan aspirations – in fact, Partington does not use ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ once his study.³ In his review of Building Cosmopolis, John Robert Reed concludes: ‘Intent on showing the gradual working out of Wells’s scheme for a world government, Partington does not view Wells with any critical doubt’ (2005: 461). Some oversights are benign, others intellectually compromising.

What does The Anatomy of Frustration encompass? Philmus is correct when he states that, ‘in The Anatomy of Frustration (1936), [Wells] embodies novelistic elements in what is preponderantly adiscourse’ (1978: 250). It is one of those works Wells referred to as his ‘dialogue novels’, which, he argued, ‘follow in agreat tradition, the tradition of discussing fundamental human problems in dialogue form’ (Wells, cited in J. R. Hammond 1984: 44). But the ‘dialogue’ in The Anatomy of Frustration is of a particular order. Wells’s work purports to be a synopsis of the eponymous magnum opus – eleven published volumes and three incomplete – authored by (the fictitious) William Burroughs Steele. The frame narrator cites long passages from Steele’s volumes, glosses and interprets them, and evaluates the feasibility of building a World State along Steele’s lines. On occasion, the frame narrator adopts an ironic distance from Steele, whose ‘aggressive diagnosis of the disorders of life’ (Anatomy 1936: 19), he suggests, ‘betrays the lurking contempt of the man of action for the scholar’ (ibid.). The name ‘Steele’ has obvious metaphorical connotations. Yet, the frame narrator, a part from his occasional sense that Steele cuts to the heart of matters too abruptly and adamantly, is an apostle. For this reason, The Anatomy of Frustration is solipsistic: it presents Steele’s utopian vision and a ‘critique’, which amounts to nothing more than an endorsement. The work, as it proceeds, is not only provocative, but is rhetorically coercive; it is an attempt on Wells’s part to compel agreement from the reader. Beneath the mask of dialogism and dialecticism is an unrelenting monologue– Wells’s favourite mode.⁴

William Burroughs Steele, a Harvard graduate, had set aside a successful career as a ‘pioneer biochemist’ (1936: 10) to become a captain of industry. In 1914, before the United States entered the Great War, Steele was ‘in North France engaged in medical relief, and early in 1918 he was badly wounded in the hip and knee’ (1936: 11). This, and subsequent health complications, left him physically disabled but intellectually inspired to ‘write boldly and ably upon internal and foreign politics’ (1936: 11). ‘The War and its consequences roused him from a tacit, optimistic progressivism to a state of penetrating and at times feverish enquiry into social structure and political psychology’ (1936: 11). ‘Feverish’, indeed: Steele began writing his monumental The Anatomy of Frustration in 1922 and was making notes towards completing the last three volumes on the night of his death, twelve years later, from cardiac arrest (caused by taking ‘an overdose of awell–known sedative’ (1936: 12), the frame narrator claims, accidentally). Steele began his work as an imitation of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (c. 1621, altered and incremented versions were published 1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, and the sixth edition, now treated as authoritative, posthumously in 1651). ‘[The Anatomy of Frustration’s] title, its warehouse–like design and plain imitation in the lay–out of the contents enforce that’ (12). But, almost from the start Steele realised that his book had to be not so much a modernization of Burton as a counterpart and repudiation’ (1936: 12). ‘It is impossible to write of life in that tone of despair to–day, says Steele. Exasperation, yes, but melancholy, no. In three hundred years the human mind has changed!’ (1936: 14). However, Steele’s flamboyant distinction between melancholy and exasperation is not perspicuous.

There is avital tradition of literary, philosophical, and theological scholarship concerning Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy⁵ – all Ioffer are shadows. The intersections of the two ‘Anatomies’ are not as superficial as the frame narrator of Wells’s work implies; it is necessary, then, to place them alongside one another. There are distinguished studies of the genealogy of ‘melancholy’, a concept marked by hermeneutic shifts that aggregated an excess of connotations during its long history (see, among others, Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky & Fritz Saxl [1964] 2019; László F. Földénti 2014; Jennifer Radden 2000; and Alina N. Feld 2011). The authors of these studies situate Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy in the knotted history of conceptions of the affliction, its symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments. This is a complicated task: Burton’s vast work, in which he refers to 1 554 authorities,⁶ is encyclopaedic, digressive, prolix, Rabelaisian, often anecdotal, and, at times, unruly. Burton describes his narrative persona, ‘Democritus Junior’, as being like ‘a ranging spaniel that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game’ (2021: 21). He is Burton’s fanciful descendant of Democritus, the ‘laughing’ pre-Socratic Atomist, who lived in Abdera. Burton cites a letter from Hippocrates to Damagetus (who is now regarded as a mediocre epigrammatic poet of the Peloponnesian School). Hippocrates came across Democritus ‘under ashady bower, with abook on his knees, busy at his study, sometimes writing, sometime walking’ (2021: 21).

The subject of his book was melancholy and madness, and about him lay the carcasses of many several beasts, newly by him cut up and anatomized, not that he did contemn God’s creatures, as he told Hippocrates, but to find out the seat of the atra bilis [black bile], or melancholy, whence it proceeds, and how it is engendered in men’s bodies, to the intent that he might better cure it in himself, by his writings and observations teach others how to avoid it. (2021: 21–22)

The Anatomy of Melancholy is Democritus’ heir writing an apologetics of his forbear’s (lost) work. Burton, in his solitude and begrudging celibacy at Brasenose College, Oxford, worked on his masterpiece from 1624 until his death in 1640 for a reason other than his self-proclaimed ‘genius’: ‘[...] write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy’ (2021: 22).

When Ifirst took this task in hand, & quod ait, impellente genio negotium suscepi [and, as he says, Ibegan this enterprise being driven mad by my genius], this Iaimed at, vel ut lenirem animum scribendo, to ease my mind by writing, for I had gravitum cor, foetum caput [a burdened heart, apregnant head], akind of impostume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of, and could imagine no fitter evacuation than this. Besides I might well not refrain, for uber dolor, ibi digitus [where there’s the ache, there’s the finger], one must needs scratch where it itches. (2021: 23)

Melancholy is associated with brooding silence, the evaporation of hypostases, a loss of language (of the will to signification and narrative), and with grieving this privation of meaning.⁷ Burton, besieged by melancholy, found a remedy in writing: organizing meaning, contextualizing and elaborating it, and sometimes playfully dissembling the gobbets he takes from his predecessor’s tracts and treatises. This is consonant with Burton’s lucent remedy for all variations of melancholy: only hard work that is socially purposeful will a meliorate the malady. Aline N. Feld sums up the matter: ‘When Burton exhaustively reviews the different theories of melancholy from antiquity to his own time, as well as the innumerable etiological hypotheses, he ultimately designates idleness as its fundamental existential cause’ (2011: 67).

In The Anatomy of Frustration, H. G. Wells refers only to the first part of Burton’s work, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ (2021: 17–130), which precedes the three ‘Partitions’. While Burton’s rhetorical mode is generally epideictic (to teach and inform), his genre a hybrid of the ‘cento’ (a text assembled from short quotations)⁸ and the anatomy, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ is a sparkling satire of the a buse of power, the insolence of office, warmongering, general ignorance, and the atrophied customs of English life. That he dwells, at length, on ‘socio–political contradictions… the folly of the human condition, [and] universal madness’ (Feld 2011: 64) extends the conception of melancholy. Melancholy arises– not only from an individual’s idleness, lassitude, atra bilis, acedia, alienation or Saturnine influence – but in an absurd world bound to exacerbate it in any a cute person. Steele, in his first volume of The Anatomy of Frustration, describes Burton’s ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ as

[...] the most comprehensive, devastating and hopeless indictment of human folly, injustice, cruelty and unhappiness that has ever been written. It spared neither rulers nor institutions and, going beyond mankind, revealed the writer’s profound despair of the whole world order of nature out of which man has arisen. (15)

We should remind ourselves at this point that utopianism is, by its very nature, satirical. As Darko Suvin defines utopia, it ‘is the verbal construction of a particular quasi–human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to amore perfect principle than in the author’s community [...]’ (Metamorphoses 1979: 49). The utopian ‘mundus inversus’– ‘the axiologically inverted world’ (ibid. 236)– casts light on the inadequacies of the (author’s) present: ‘the explicit utopian construction is the logical obverse of any satire. Utopia explicates what satire implicates, and vice versa’ (ibid. 36). Suvin’s oft-cited conception of utopias implicates nostalgia (see Defined by a Hollow 2010: 185, 230, 239). Wells, who consistently presents his ‘kinetic’, progressive utopias in opposition to the ‘static’⁹ perfect states of Plato, Thomas More, William Morris, and others, is nonetheless nostalgic for the clarity of classical precepts, particularly those set out in Plato’s Republic. In Burton, nostalgia– longing for belonging, for home (the word ‘nostalgia’ was only coined in the mid-eighteenth century)– is a symptom of melancholy. It seems trite to just join the dots at this point: utopianism is, by its nature, a melancholic enterprise.¹⁰ Iwill test this assertion in relation to Wells as Iproceed. ‘Frustration’, for Steele, is amore ‘manly’, active reaction to the folly of humankind, out of which ‘kinetic’ utopian solutions to meaninglessness can be devised. Melancholy entails, not only the abandonment of hope but also the inability to contrive schemes of meaning. But, while they might result in different reactions, both frustration and melancholy conceive human folly in a state of despair. Let us, for now, accept that Steele’s pronouncements about the epistemic differences between the two Anatomies are overstatement;¹¹ that ‘melancholy’, ‘frustration’, ‘nostalgia’, and ‘utopianism’ are adjacent concepts.

Steele, then, does not begin auspiciously, but what are his plans for his ‘New Beginning’? Steele, the frame narrator assures us, ‘can be angry; he can be dismayed and weary to the point of neurasthenia, but he never ceases to be combatant’ (1936: 20). He places himself in the pugnacious ‘rôle of aone–man Royal Commission into the significance of the universe as it has been understood and stated hitherto’ (1936: 22), and he plans its systemic overhaul: ‘Every principal of the world machine must be designed’ (1936: 98–99). ‘Men’, Steele proclaims, ‘have no right to a thousand contrasted faiths and creeds’ (1936: 24); these are ‘merely due to bad education, mental and moral indolence, slovenliness of statement and the failure to clinch issues’ (1936: 24–25). Steele plans to clear up ‘The Mess!’ (1936: 25); ‘to smite lanes of lucidity through that jungle’ (1936: 25). In his third volume, Steele ‘gets together amass of Utopias, revolutionary plans, reconstruction plans, social criticisms, and does what he can to make an extract that shall be the quintessence behind all this discontent, all this hoping and scheming for change’ (1936: 62). From this reportedly extensive survey, he derives three axioms on which his World State will be based: ‘1) Self–merger in a world order, 2) participation in an unending research and adventure, and 3) the attainment of a personal, shared and re–echoed happiness’ (1936: 70). The first is the rub; the second and third are consolations. While Steele concedes the need for individuality, difference will only be countenanced if it lubricates the ‘world machine’.

In all his utopian projects, dozens of polemics and several of his finest novels, Wells is preoccupied with the importance of aliberal education, particularly in the sciences. In The Anatomy of Frustration (arguably, in all his utopias), this commitment turns sinister: ‘The new faith, the Next Beginning, has to be inculcated in every young mind in the world’ (1936: 160). This is stated, earlier in the text, in a slightly less authoritarian register: ‘an understanding of the social life of the species must be the main objective of auniversal education, and the service and protection of the world–commonweal the primary form of moral training’ (1936: 112). When Steele asserts that the new World State ‘must be saturated with the spirit of science’ (1936: 114), the frame narrator explains the theory of knowledge on which global ‘science’ will be based:

Steele means that [his] is the new truth which replaces all previous less perfected truths as anew car replaces an old car, that you have to drop your present religion, your loyalties and your code of behaviour unless they accord with all this, and that you have to make this, which he calls the Next Beginning, your religion, your code of behaviour and your criterion of loyalties. (1936: 123)

Knowledge will progress incrementally and teleologically (through conjecture, proof, or refutation), belated paradigms will be discarded and dissenting scientists will be compelled to contribute to the ‘common–sense, that is to say, the general intelligence, of mankind, in which we all participate’ (1936: 167). This ‘common sense’, Steele claims, entail’s liquidating all particularisms in thought just as it is liquidating the particularisms of nationalism and racial culture’ (1936: 167–168). It will be gathered in an encyclopaedia– an encyclopaedia containing all verified and practical human knowledge was one of Wells’s pet projects. The frame narrator states: ‘The primary weapon we now need in the human flight against frustration is a New Encyclopaedia. If Ihad to invent aname for Steele and his type of thought, I should call him a New Encyclopaedist and his philosophy the “New Encyclopaedism”’ (1936: 140, see also 165–166). Knowledge, in Steele’s World State, will be standardised, gathered, published and disseminated as the basis of education– it will be singular, condoned by authorities, and be the foundation of all practice and development. His The Anatomy of Frustration, Steele asserts curiously, given its idiosyncrasies, ‘is an attempt to assemble the material for apreliminary draft of that encyclopaedic body of facts and ideas upon which a vital world liberalism must be based and without which it can have no effective solidarity’ (1936: 165–166). ‘All men’, the frame narrator pronounces, ‘must think a like and could with proper elucidation be made to think alike, so [Steele] held that, given lucidity, men and women must think in practically identical terms’ (1936: 252).

How will Steele’s World State, duly educated, be governed? Kindred in all salient aspects of the ‘samurai’ in A Modern Utopia, Steele refers to his rulers of the New Beginning as ‘Ironsides’ by disposition (1936: 191) and an ‘Illuminati’ (1936: 254), given their essential cohesion and the ‘open conspiracy’ in which they are engaged– the phrase is taken from Wells’s The Open Conspiracy: Blueprints for a World Revolution, published in 1928, in which a political order very similar to that imagined by Steele is set out in more detail.¹² TheIlluminati are a small collective of ‘sober and religious men and women’– ‘even though their religion is stripped down to that bare psychological adjustment to which Steele’s analysis reduced all his assembled creeds’ (1936: 191). They should be ‘wary of pleasure’, ‘sexually self–controlled’, their ‘imaginations must be lit and sustained by habitual close contact with scientific work. Their habit of mind must be critical’ (1936: 191–192). These cultivated men and women of science – this intellectual, ascetic elite – will rule judiciously but must also be willing to use the utmost force to eliminate any threats to the New Beginning: ‘in an open conflict with an irreconcilable violent antagonist whom one believes to be wrong and mischievously active, where non–resistance would be atacit submission and practical participation, the cool–headed use of force to the pitch of killing and open warfare is not simply allowable but anecessary duty’ (1936: 175). To secure their occupation of the world, the Illuminati must be prepared to destroy any dissenting government – ‘and some may have to be destroyed forcibly, so much the worse’ (1936: 118). ‘There will’, the frame narrator assures us, ‘certainly be battlefields, prisons, shootings and gallows for armed opponents on the way to Steele’s socialist world state’ (1936: 175).

Steele’s ambitions will only be realized if ‘an economic–financial–educational federation of the world’ is established (1936: 118). This will require ‘one monetary method’ (1936: 112), and speculation, shareholding, credit, and usury will be forbidden. While the frame narrator neglects to summarize Steele’s proposed system of taxation or to explain his methods for distributing the federation’s accumulated wealth, he observes that Steele imagines a world in which individuals are protected from the ‘inhumanity of material forces’ (1936: 266). In what is effectively aproposed welfare World State, all (who are components of the machine) will have access to education, food, and healthcare (except the disabled and chronically diseased) and will be protected from the vicissitudes of the market. Steele, while declaring that a‘vast Kultur–Kampf [a ‘Cultural Revolution’] lies between mankind and peace’ (1936: 150), claims throughout the work to be aliberal socialist in the English mould.

Four chapters of The Anatomy of Frustration concern Steele’s views on love – in which he uses ‘Persona’ and ‘Shadow–Lover’ as expository devices. These comprise an acute reflection on the ethics and psychology of love for an individual, as opposed to a love of humankind. They are, however, adigression, with only tangential relevance to Steele’s utopia. I will not discuss them here, although they are probably the most philosophically perspicacious sections of the text, and are artfully, even beautifully, composed. They are also astark contrast to the discussions that follow, particularly those concerning ‘the Jewish problem’, in which love – of any order – is hauntingly absent.

Wells reviled Jews and embeds them across his writing as an alterity which cannot– unless the Jewishness in the Jew is erased – be incorporated in any future flourishing. The defenders of Wells’s utopias make several excuses: a part from Sherborne’s ‘some of his best friends were Jewish’ defence (those friends being cosmopolitan, assimilated Jews), we are told that Wells’s utopias are ‘consistent’ (that his anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism was a logical consequence of the principles that undergird his World State), that he might have chosen any community that seemed to him insular, that we need always to distinguish Wells from his various ‘narrators’, and that the Holocaust had not yet occurred.

In 1933, the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) began setting up makeshift detention centres Konzentrationslagers (concentration camps) in the urban centres of Germany. ‘Unsupervised by the regular police or judicial authorities, they became a byword for brutality’ (Cesarani 2016: 34). This was in the context of the wave of anti-Jewish violence in the spring of 1933. In 1935, by which time anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence was a set piece of Nazism and was universally acknowledged to be so, the race laws were hastily introduced, and by 1936 – theyear of the Berlin Olympics – concentration camps proliferated and were steadily filling up with Jews who had purportedly violated the race laws, many of whom were falsely claimed to be anti-fascist dissidents. Wells, whose anti-Semitism had been amatter of public discussion for decades, followed these developments closely, and The Anatomy of Frustration was, in part, his response.

First, though, let us look back to the representation of Jews and Judaism in some of Wells’s earlier works, for this provides a context for Steele’s New Beginning. This process is inevitably selective, but the instances I cite are at least broadly representative. Anticipations (1901), as I have mentioned, was Wells’s first utopian exertion. It argues bluntly that the emergence of the ‘New Republic’ depends on eugenics, although he ‘does not present […] anything approaching aproperly–worked out extermination policy’ (Carey 1992: 125; see adiscussion of Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses in my conclusion). The New Republic, Wells avers, ‘will tolerate no dark corners where the People of the A byss may fester, no vast diffused dark slums of peasant proprietors, no stagnant plague preservers’ (1992: 316). The oft-cited paragraph from Anticipations, above which the spirit of Francis Galton looms, needs to be quoted again.

It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as awhole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior people are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity. (1992: 289–290)

Even Partington, Wells’s advocate, concedes that here ‘Wells considers reproduction from the point of view of the state and, therefore, advocates the culling of those not of use to the state’ (2016: chap. 2, n.p.). Wells’s ‘People of the Abyss’ include not only the urban poor, the diseased or disabled – the ‘rejected of the white and yellow civilizations’ (Anticipations 1901: 280)– but also ‘a vast proportion of the black and brown races’ (1901: 280). Their existence, according to Wells, begs the question: ‘“What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?”’ (1901: 280). Sarah Cole is correct that Anticipations ‘dates badly, in part because it comes laced with spasms of racism and callous complacency about such matters as the probable mass extermination of the unfit’ (2020: 172).

When it comes to ‘the Jew’, Wells, by anti-Semitic standards, is superficially moderate in Anticipations: the New Republic will ‘treat [the Jew] as any other man’ (1901: 316). He goes further: ‘I really do not understand the exceptional attitude people take up against Jews’ (1901: 317). Wells’s purportedly urbane cosmopolitanism is then substantively undermined by the racist stereotypes that inhere in his comparison of Jews and Gentiles. The comparison is worth quoting in full.

There is something very ugly about many Jewish faces, but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross. The Jew asserts himself in relation to his nationality with a singular tactlessness, but it is hardly for the English to blame that. Many Jews are intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought, and cunning and base in method, but no more so than many Gentiles. The Jew is mentally and physically precocious, and he ages and dies sooner than the average European, but in that and in acertain disingenuousness he is simply on all fours with the short, dark Welsh. He foregathers with those of his own nation, and favours them against the stranger, but so do the Scotch. I see nothing in his curious, dispersed nationality to dread or dislike. He is a remnant and legacy of medievalism, a sentimentalist, perhaps, but no furtive plotter against the present progress of things. (1901: 317)

An analysis of this paragraph would be too obvious; the stereotyped figure of ‘the Jew’ breaks through at every point– he is physically repulsive, money-grubbing, insular (yet transnational), conspiratorial, subversive, dishonest and archaic. Wells distances himself rhetorically from the racist postulate that Jews are vindictive usuaries– ‘It is said that the Jew is incurably aparasite on the apparatus of credit’– but then he gets into full swing: ‘If the Jew has a certain incurable tendency to parasitism, and we make social parasitism impossible, we shall abolish the Jew’ (1901: 316).

In the Days of the Comet (1906), adeus ex machina celestial body transforms the Earth from the abhorrence of Edwardian industrialization, eradicating its devastating effects on society and individuals. Late in the novel, the world miraculously transformed into arather etiolated, bland utopia, influential men responsible for the evils of the past are called to account for the system they perpetuated in the past. The Jew, Gurker, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, with his ‘deep throaty voice, abig nose, acoarse mouth with adrooping everted lower lip, eyes peering amidst folds and wrinkles’ makes his ‘confession for his race’ (1906: 266)

‘We Jews,’ he said, ‘have gone through the system of this world, creating nothing, consolidating many things, destroying much. Our racial self–conceit has been monstrous. We seem to have used our ample coarse intellectuality for no other purpose than to develop and master and maintain the convention of property, to turn life into asort of mercantile chess and spend our winnings grossly. We have had no sense of service to mankind. Beauty which is godhead– we make it apossession.’ (1906: 266–267)

The authority of this confession is accomplished by Well’s ventriloquism: the Jew speaks for himself, of his race’s rapacity, turpitude and ravenous mercantilism– its parasitism.

Wells’s anti-Semitism manifests across his works in various forms.¹³ Jews, Judaism and Zionism were always in his sights; his social and political imagination depended on reckoning with the louring presence of ‘the Jew’. There are too many instances in Wells’s canon to even mention. Isimply chose salient passages from Anticipations and In the Days of the Comet to show something of Wells’s anti-Semitic repertoire; the taxonomy of his prejudice. Yet, his engagement with Jews and Zionism in The Anatomy of Frustration is more serpentine and defensive than had ever been the case before the rise of Nazism. It is, though, as is Wells’s ‘defence’ of Jews in Anticipations, aself-defeating argument.

Steele interrogates ‘the Jewish question’ in his incomplete fifteenth volume, ‘Frustration through the Conflict of Cultural Obsessions’ (1936: 169–184). The frame narrator describes Steele’s departure point: ‘[...] it is for the treatment of Jews that we are most frequently urged to condemn Hitlerism. So Steele sets himself to set out the vexatiousness of the Jew in Germany – and throughout the ages’ (1936: 175–176). The frame narrator’s characterization of Steele as afrank, clearsighted provocateur has worn very thin by this stage. He gives no details of Steele’s historical study of German Jews but encapsulates his conclusions. The first is that ‘the Jew’ ‘stresses acquisitiveness. They are more alert about property, money and the power of money than the run of mankind; they are brighter and cleverer with money. They get, they permeate, they control’ (1936: 176). Wells’s stereotypes persist – thirty-five years after the publication of Anticipations. Second, unlike Gentiles, the Jew ‘is not agood citizen in this sense, that he does not give awhole – hearted allegiance to the institutions, conventions and collective interests and movements of the community in which he finds himself. Neither is he creative in the common interest. He is an alien with an alien mentality [...]’ (1936: 177–178). Wells’s anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are commonly contextualized as simply an instance of his anti-nationalism; that they are alogical extension of the general principles of the New Beginning, the New Republic, the World State. Sarah Cole observes accurately that, for Wells, ‘[n]ations are the source of untold evil in the modern world; this became and remained his mantra. Acosmopolitan to the core, Wells wanted to eradicate nations, replacing patriotism with loyalty to the whole human race’ (1936: 36–37). Although ‘[s]olidarity has been forced upon [the Jews] by the hostility their tradition invoked’ (Frustration 176), their exceptionalism remains insupportable to Steele because it contravenes his cosmopolitan utopianism. Even if individuals ‘repudiate and fight against the clumsy revengefulness, plunderings, outrages and fantastic intimidations of the Nazi method’ this ‘does not close the Jewish problem for you’ (1936: 178). ‘It simply brings you back to the fundamental age–long problem of this nation among the nations, this in–and–out mentality, the essential parasitism of the Jewish mycelium upon the social and cultural organism in which it lives’ (1936: 178).

It must be stated that Wells did not support the ideology or methods of the Nazis: ‘[...] all external persecution, violence and counter–boycotting of the Jews as arace or areligion is barbaric, foredoomed to futility and bound to decivilize the persecutor’ (1936: 181). Nonetheless, Steele relativizes the plight of German and Eastern European Jews. He states that, following his general survey of the history of oppression, he has concluded that ‘[...] hardly ever […] were the persecuted completely in the right. They were really destructive or demoralizing. They were really malicious. […] Generally, there is acase for persecution’ (1936: 173). Steele impugns the Nazis, ‘a Bible–saturated people’, for being ‘ignorant in the mass of modern biology and general history’, which ignorance had led them to ‘take so easily to national egotism, to systematic xenophobia, to self–righteous ideas of conquest and extermination’ (1936: 182). Yet, he ‘understands’ that their ‘frantic rage at economic disadvantages and particularly at the loss and transfer of power through speculative acquisition, may indicate stresses far beyond mere sadistic desire and acraving for loot’ (1936: 109). ‘It is time’, therefore, in Steele’s perverse logic, that ‘the Jews thought themselves out. It might not be a bad thing now if, as a separate culture, they thought themselves out of existence altogether’ (1936: 109).

The crux of the matter, which (purportedly) astonishes even the frame narrator, is that Steele maintains that Jews were responsible for the emergence and character of Nazism: ‘The Jews have been taxed with most sins but never before with begetting the Nazis. But Steele writes of it as if it were self–evident’ (1936: 181–182). Steele argues earlier that we stand to learn from Reich: ‘The raucous voice of the Nazi may be raising issues that might otherwise have remained unscrutinised’ (1936: 108–109). ‘The Jew’, he maintains, ‘makes the biological pace for [Gentiles] at a lower level, unless they impose a handicap on him or resort periodically to some form of pogrom. He grips the property, he secures the appointment. The Gentile feels he is robbed of opportunity by all this alertness. He is baffled and he gives way to anger’ (1936: 177). Steele applauds the Nazis – all their deficiencies aside– for their ‘clear–headedness’, even though Nazism, he claims, has taken from the Jews the notion of divine election, that they are a ‘national ideal of a new Chosen People’ (1936: 184).

In his 1941 benchmark essay, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ (2000: 188–192), George Orwell asks the important question: ‘What is the use of pointing out that aworld state is desirable?’ (2000: 189). He acknowledges Wells’s contribution to the zeitgeist – ‘The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed’ (2000: 192)– but considers the contrivance of singular abstract plans for remaking the world to be both dangerous and self-indulgent because they ignore the ‘energy that actually shapes the world’ (2000: 190). That ‘energy’, Orwell argues, is ‘emotion’: ‘racial pride, leader–worship, religious belief, love of war’ (2000: 190). He was, of course, writing during the Second World War, and the emotions he invokes accord with his deep sense that Hitler must be stopped at all costs. ‘Liberal intellectuals’ indulging in utopian visions, ‘mechanically write off [these emotions] as anachronisms’ and, in doing so have ‘lost all power of action’ (2000: 190). The literary social engineer ignores the ‘muddy middle–ground’ of the quotidian, consisting in histories of affect, countless historical rivalries and affiliations, what Yeats calls ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ (‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’), and individuals’ and communities’ will to difference. Regulating this churned-up territory of creative, variegated individuality – Wells concedes in The Anatomy of Frustration, and more frankly in Anticipations – would require violence on a global scale. Of course, Wells wanted world peace; indeed, that is the signal ambition underlying his utopian projects. He asserts in all of them that this violence would be the birth pangs of the Next Beginning, as Steele refers to it. State violence, in Wells’s (‘kinetic’) New Republics, would have to persist, new mechanisms of biopower contrived, because difference, thankfully, always asserts itself across the maps of politicians’ plans.

The statement in Orwell’s essay that has provoked the ire of Wells’s defenders – and which reiterates the most salient point in Hook’s review of The Anatomy of Frustration– concerns the similarities between Well’s World State and Nazism.

Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is already physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world–view on which his own works are based. (2000: 191–192)

John Partington is appalled: ‘Orwell manages to misinterpret or ignore many of Wells’s key concerns before painting Wells as an unconscious sire of totalitarian regimes and one oblivious to the driving motives behind the average person’ (2016: chap. 1 n.p.). In his study of the evolution of Wells’s World State utopianism, his contributions to the formation of the League of Nations, and his role in promoting universal human rights, Partington (who, again, does not refer to The Anatomy of Frustration at all or mention Wells’s anti-Semitism) glosses over Wells’s motley embrace of eugenics, his fascist logic of governance, his misconstruing indoctrination for education, and his endorsement of biopolitical violence. Yes, in the ocean of text that Wells produced, there are liberal and humanitarian pronouncements, but, as my comments on The Anatomy of Frustration show that, while, over time, Wells ameliorated his totalitarian invective, his will to anatomize the human species (think of Democritus’s carved up animals in the shady bower), diagnose its maladies and effect planetary cures, is, until 1936 at least, racist in its anti-Semitism and authoritarian in spirit and detail. In these regards, Wells never changed.

Partington’s other whipping boy is John Carey– and he is certainly not alone in this. The first of John Carey’s essays on Wells in The Intellectuals and the Masses (‘H. G. Wells Getting Rid of People’), as its title suggests, concerns Wells’s abiding commitment to eugenics. Wells did not think the science of genetics sufficiently advanced to depend on selective breeding for the purification and optimization of the human species– he pointed this out during alecture by Francis Galton in 1904 (see Denahay 2012: 470). John Carey, accurately enough, observes that conviction led Wells – in composing his utopias in Anticipations, The Open Conspiracy, and others – to imagine the ‘dying out’ or, perhaps, genocide of swathes of human populations. Carey states the case too clearly for several critics’ liking. Wells’s ‘essential ideas’ were that:

[...] the profligate fertility and ‘inchoate barbarism’ of the inhabitants of the Orient and Africa are seen as obstacles to any real human progress. In India, North Africa, China and the Far East, Wells regretfully reports, ‘there goes on arapid increase of low–grade population, undersized physically and mentally, and retarding the mechanical development of civilization’. In these ‘decadent communities outside the Atlantic capitalist system’, almost no intelligences would be found, he predicted, capable of grasping his plans for world improvement. (1992: 119, references to The Open Conspiracy).

In his excellent discussion of Wells, Galton and biopower, Martin Danahay claims that Carey makes ‘an extreme case against Wells as akind of genocidal fascist’ (250), and Partington is scornful of Carey’s use of only selected passages from Wells’s works. Partington responds to Carey’s argument that Wells ‘did not pretend that improvements could come about without widespread death and suffering’ (1992: 151) as ‘quite frankly, ridiculous’ (Partington chap.2, n.p.), aless than scholarly rejoinder. Yet, Wells’s will to eliminate populations who refuse to be assimilated persists in the New Republic of The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘The Jews’, who Steele reduces to the obverse of Nazism, are parasites to eradicate. Hopefully, genocide (the ‘clear headedness’ of the Nazis) will not be required – the Jews, forced to assimilate, will hopefully think ‘themselves out of existence’. Further, no other community with ‘adistinctive tradition of behaviour’ (Frustration 1936: 177) can be accommodated in the World State. Despite the anti-racist sentiments Steele expresses, his normative logic is strictly that other races must catch-up (that is, accept Eurocentric, white, liberal, and male conventions of being) or die. Wells was capable, across all his utopian works, of ‘doublethink’. Sarah Cole is direct: George Orwell’s 1984 (1948) was ‘among other things, [a] direct [response] to Wells’s utopianism about aworld government’ (2020: 38).

Carey’ssecond Wells essay in The Intellectuals and the Masses is titled ‘H. G. Wells Against H. G. Wells’. It juxtaposes his tender, gently satirical ‘realist’ novels – both Hammond (1988) and Cole (2020) make acase for considering them Modernist works– with his utopian reprisals. Carey accounts for Wells ceasing to write scientific romances and realist fiction at roughly the same time. ‘The reason is that system replaced freedom as his ruling principle. He had always been torn between system and freedom, and continued to be. But from about 1910 system began to prevail’ (Carey 1992: 146–147). But it was not only across genres that Wells was in two minds. Wells’s New Republic in The Anatomy of Frustration is fashioned from his cosmopolitan humanitarian impulses and his abiding desire for asystematized, ‘scientifically’ derived world order. The latter drags him inevitably towards totalitarian ideologies and methods. Philip Coupland traces the phrase ‘Liberal Fascism’ from the title of a talk Wells presented to the Young Liberals in Oxford in July1932. Wells loved the oxymoron. He set about attempting to demonstrate, in several newspaper articles and lectures ‘how “fascist”– that is elitist, authoritarian and violent – means, could yield “liberal” ends’ (Coupland 2000: 547). Coupland cuts through the contradiction surgically: ‘Every theory of praxis reflects what are understood as the most practical means to achieve adesired end. However, pragmatism in pursuit of adesired utopia can only go so far before contradicting apolitical ideology’s core aims and values and becoming self–defeating’ (2000: 558). This contradiction is writ large in The Anatomy of the Frustration: its dark undercurrents of racism, anti-Semitism and dictatorial control of every aspect of individuals’ lives collapse the liberal house of cards.

At the conclusion of The Anatomy of the Frustration, Wells takes an unlikely turn. He asks of Steele’s collected volumes: ‘Is this conception of a New Model for humanity arational forecast or aself–protective dream?’ (1936: 272). He wonders if Steele, ‘[...] in asort of ecstasy of loneliness and hopelessness, would say that [his vision of the New Beginning] was a dream he chose to wrap around his shivering mind in auniverse of freezing frustration’ (1936: 272). Wells had written of his Experiment in Autobiography in similar terms.

I began this autobiography primarily to reassure myself during a phase of fatigue, restlessness and vexation, and it has achieved its purpose of reassurance. Iwrote myself out of that mood of discontent and forgot myself and amosquito swarm of bothers in writing about my sustaining ideas. (1934: 824)

These are both melancholic conceptions of the writing. It is clear that – like Burton’s ‘Democritus Junior’– Wells was a‘a ranging spaniel’ chasing down anything that caught his attention, but there were things he would not let go. It would be strange to suggest that Wells – asignifier par excellence – suffered from a symbolia, but his compulsive reiteration of utopian solutions to human folly seems a strategy to ward off meaningless; to avoid giving into the darkness that was his constant companion. He would finally give over to despondency. His last work, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945) – written after he was diagnosed with the faulty cardiac valve that would lead to his death the followingyear– is a strange parallel to The Anatomy of Frustration, where a moribund (perhaps suicidal) Steele was feverishly trying to finish his plans for humanity. The world for the weakening Wells had become unfathomable: ‘Events now follow one another in an entirely untrustworthy sequence’ (1945:6). ‘A harsh queerness is coming over things and rush past what we have hitherto been wont to consider the definite limits of hard fact. Hard fact runs away from analysis and does not return’ (1945:8). Predictions had become impossible; plans meaningless. He was giving way to an ‘inescapable [...] sense of mental defeat’ (9), and had unhappily concluded that, ‘The philosophical mind is not what people would call ahealthy buoyant mind’ (1945:7). He died melancholy; his contradictory and compromised webs of utopian hope were no longer able to support him.

In conclusion, Wells’s utopias demand the regularization of subjectivity and culture. While individual difference is countenanced in certain respects, citizens of his World State would all be educated alike, with science being the priority. In terms of cultural difference, for the state to function, all citizens would be required to renounce cultural and ethnic specificity and exceptionalism. Wells is consistent in applying this principle, and it is not only, in his view, Jews who need to overcome their parochialism. But Wells is never as vitriolic in his critique of Catholics, monarchists or ‘nationalists’ as he is in his depiction of perceived Jewish turpitude and arrogance. The Anatomy of Frustration, given the context in which he was writing, includes what is arguably Wells’s most developed and sustained anti-Semitic polemic. It follows that the reading I have presented increments the scholarship by those who have identified the contradictions in Wells’s melancholic utopianism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See Michael Coren’s account (1993: 13–16) of Wells’s seventieth birthday, attended, according to Somerset Maughan, ‘by hundreds of people’, including, among dozens of luminaries, Arnold Bennet (Wells’s close friend), J. B. Priestley, J.M.Barrie, Bernhard Shaw, Jonathan Cape, Hamish Hamilton, Maynard Keynes, A. A. Milne, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, the Chilean Ambassador and PEN representatives from seven countries (Wells was the International President of PEN at the time).

² I have used the Routledge ePub version of Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells (2016), which does not number the pages.

³ ‘Jews’ appears once in the text, in acitation from Wells’s In the Fourth Year (1918), concerning the ‘Jews of Roumania’, although Partington includes in his bibliography Bryan Cheyette’s ‘Beyond Rationality: H. G. Wells and the Jewish Question’, published in the Wellsian (1991: 41–64), the gist of which he avoids.

⁴ I am meticulous throughout this article about not referring to either the frame narrator or Steele as Wells. In his dialogue novels, Wells regularly disperses his voice across various characters and narrators. In The Anatomy of Frustration, Wells weaponizes Steele: aman of the world, he cuts to the quick, while the frame narrator shuffles alongside him in amiable agreement. There is more than enough evidence that Steele’s views are Wells’s spoken sharply– and the few critics who have approached the work all treat Steele as Wells’s ventriloquist’s dummy.

⁵ ‘Melancholy’: Greek μέλαινα χολή, melanos, black and khole, bile, although Burton gives the origin as atra bilis (21). Note that Iuse throughout this paper the new Penguin Classics edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy (2021), superbly introduced, edited, and annotated by Angus Gowland, which deserves to become the standard scholarly edition of the 1651 text. Gowland also includes in-text translations of the Latin epithets and phrases that Burton includes throughout the work.

⁶ Interestingly, of all of these, only one Englishman is cited: Timothie Bright, whose Treatise on Melancholy (1568) influenced Burton in significant regards (see Radden 2000: 119).

⁷ See Julia Kristeva for acompelling analysis of the relation between melancholy, depression and asymbolia (1989: 3–68).

⁸ Susan Wells, in ‘Genres as Species and Spaces: Literary and Rhetorical Genre in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, explores in detail the cento as manifest in Burton’s text (2014: 126–127).

⁹ This distinction, to which Wells endlessly returns, is set out at the beginning of A Modern Utopia (2005: 11–13).

¹⁰ This point was made by Judith Shklar in ‘The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia’ (1965: 367–381) but developed purely a long the lines of Karl Mannheim’s framework presented in Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim 1929).

¹¹ Most of what Steele or the frame narrator say about Burton is facile or incorrect. Steele claims, for instance, that all Burton presented ‘was hatred, scorn and derision for the whole scheme of things in which he found himself. What could one do, he protested with tears in his eyes, but laugh?’ (18). This is untrue even of the ‘Democritus to the Reader’, and all three Partitions express deep compassion for the suffering of others, and gentle guidance as to how they might improve their well-being.

¹² In Anticipations, Wells refers to this ‘Illuminati’ as ‘a sort of outspoken Secret Society’ (1901: 276) and as an ‘informal and open freemasonry’ (1901: 278).

¹³ Critics have addressed anti-Semitism in particular works. Notable among these discussions are Peter Kemp’s mapping of the egregious anti-Semitism in Wells’s 1915 novel, The Research Magnificent (182–183) and Sarah Cole’s elegant reading of George’s relentlessly prejudiced figuration of Jews in Tono–Bungay (295–297).