 First US edition | |
| Author | H. G. Wells |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Michael Joseph (UK) Simon & Schuster (US) |
Publication date | 1939 |
| Pages | 454 |
The Holy Terror is a 1939 work by H. G. Wells that is in part an analysis of fascism and in part a utopian novel.
The Holy Terror presents itself as a biography of Rudolf "Rud" Whitlow, who is born with such an aggressive temperament that scarcely is he born but his monthly nurse exclaims: "It's a Holy Terror!" [1] Rud Whitlow goes on to become the founder of the first world state, long a Wellsian dream.
The Holy Terror is divided into four books. The events of Book One take place in the recognizable recent English past, although Wells warns that "Every person, place and thing in this story—even the countries in which it happens—are fictitious . . . The England, the America, the London in this book are not the England, America and London of geography and journalism, but England, America, and London transposed into imaginative narrative." [2] The novel even takes a futuristic turn and the action of the novel extends into the early 1950s.
Book One describes Rud Whitlow's early life and education, including his years at university, where Richard Carstall, a childhood acquaintance who is the son of the doctor who brought Rud into the world, recognizes and admires Rud's emerging political genius. On a summer walking tour through the English countryside Rud meets Chiffan, a politically seasoned militant activist who is also disenchanted with democracy and left politics. Chiffan becomes a sort of advisor and mentor to Rud Whitlow.
In Book Two, Rud is taken up by a wealthy half-American, Steenhold, who believes in Rud's political future and foots the bill as he gathers a group of like-minded collaborators who work out of "two large flats in Camborne Square just out of the Euston Road." [3] These include Rogers, a boxer who handles security, and Bodisham, an intellectually inclined strategist trained at the London School of Economics who will be the mastermind of the future World Revolution. The Group (as it calls itself) successfully stages a coup to oust from the leadership of the Popular Socialist Party its founder, Lord Horatio Bohun, a character inspired by Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. [4] The putsch does not succeed, however, before a brief imprisonment reveals the cowardice and fear that underlie Rud Whitlow's bold aggressiveness.
In Book Three, Rud and his collaborators purge the party of anti-Semitism and rename it the Common-Sense Movement. Over a twelve-year period they fulfill a project of which Wells had long dreamed and which he described in The Open Conspiracy (1930): the foundation of a world state. Rud regularly visits America to promote his views. Their movement is joined by "a disgruntled military genius and expert" named Reedly and "a brilliant and quite disinterested aeronautical engineer" named Bellacourt. [5] A future chief of secret police named Thirp also joins. [6] By 1944 the Common Man's Party is known everywhere in the world. [7] When the global War of the Ideologies breaks out and develops toward a worldwide stalemate, Rud is able to anticipate a coup on Reedly's part. He uses Bellacourt's control of air power not only to exterminate Reedly, but also to decapitate the military leadership of the various world powers. Steenhold dies in this final conflict, but the others survive to establish, with opportune support from the World Association for the Advancement of Science, "a Common World-State." [8]
Book Four, however, reveals that Rud is not the enlightened leader the world takes "the Director" to be. The fierce aggression in Rud Whitlow's character re-emerges as The Group finds it necessary to mount a propaganda campaign adulating him as a world savior. Stalin-like, Rud develops a taste for secret police and secret prisons. He turns on collaborators who try to restrain him, including Chiffan, who is executed for having dared to warn Whitlow that he is betraying their revolution. [9] Rud is becoming obsessed with the Jews and beginning to plot "an ultimate pogrom," "a cumulative massacre," [10] when Richard Carstall, now a famous physician, is able to take matters into his own hand and kill the dictator in his clinic. But he keeps his deed a secret, and as the book concludes Carstall is discussing with his young son an official history of the World Revolution in which Rud Whitlow is still considered a hero.
Wells, 72, completed reviewing the proofs for The Holy Terror in December 1938, just before embarking on a lecture tour of Australia. [11]
Wells' old friend Richard Gregory, the editor of Nature from 1919 to 1939, "found the message in The Holy Terror alarming, but very true." [12] J.B. Priestly also appreciated the novel and discussed it. [13]
Biographers Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie believe that The Holy Terror demonstrates "the link between the unconscious fears and aggressions which were so marked in [Wells'] youth and the plans for the saving of the world which ran through his adult writing." [14] Similarly, another biographer, Michael Sherborne, sees in the novel "an unhinged psychodrama concerning Wells' own yearnings for extremes of discipline and freedom." [15]
The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution was published in 1928 by H. G. Wells, when he was 62 years old. It was revised and expanded in 1930 with the additional subtitle A Second Version of This Faith of a Modern Man Made More Explicit and Plain. In 1931 a further revised edition appeared titled What Are We to Do with Our Lives? A final version appeared in 1933 under its original title. Many of its ideas are anticipated in Wells's 1926 novel The World of William Clissold.
The Science of Life is a book written by H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G. P. Wells, published in three volumes by The Waverley Publishing Company Ltd in 1929–30, giving a popular account of all major aspects of biology as known in the 1920s. It has been called "the first modern textbook of biology" and "the best popular introduction to the biological sciences". Wells's most recent biographer notes that The Science of Life "is not quite as dated as one might suppose".
New Worlds for Old (1908), which appeared in some later editions with the subtitle "A Plain Account of Modern Socialism," was one of several books and pamphlets that H. G. Wells wrote about the socialist future in the period 1901-1908, while he was engaged in an effort to reform the Fabian Society.
This Misery of Boots is a 1907 political tract by H. G. Wells advocating socialism. Published by the Fabian Society, This Misery of Boots is the expansion of a 1905 essay with the same name. Its five chapters condemn private property in land and means of production and calls for their expropriation by the state "not for profit, but for service."
The Wonderful Visit is an 1895 novel by H. G. Wells. With an angel—a creature of fantasy unlike a religious angel—as protagonist and taking place in contemporary England, the book could be classified as contemporary fantasy, although the genre was not recognised in Wells's time. The Wonderful Visit also has strong satirical themes, gently mocking customs and institutions of Victorian England as well as idealistic rebellion itself.
Mr. Britling Sees It Through is H.G. Wells's "masterpiece of the wartime experience in south eastern England." The novel was published in September 1916.
Meanwhile is a 1927 novel by H. G. Wells set in an Italian villa early in 1926. It was chosen as an alternate selection of the recently founded Book of the Month Club and was translated into a number of languages, including Danish, Norwegian, Polish, and Czech. In England, 30,000 copies sold within two months, and by the summer of 1929 50,000 had been sold.
Select Conversations with an Uncle, published in 1895, was H.G. Wells's first literary publication in book form. It consists of reports of twelve conversations between a fictional witty uncle who has returned to London from South Africa with "a certain affluence," as well as two other conversations.
The New Machiavelli is a 1911 novel by H. G. Wells that was serialised in The English Review in 1910. Because its plot notoriously derived from Wells's affair with Amber Reeves and satirised Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was "the literary scandal of its day".
First and Last Things is a 1908 work of philosophy by H. G. Wells setting forth his beliefs in four "books" entitled "Metaphysics," "Of Belief," "Of General Conduct," and "Some Personal Things." Parts of the book were published in the Independent Magazine in July and August 1908. Wells revised the book extensively in 1917, in response to his religious conversion, but later published a further revision in 1929 that restored much of the book to its earlier form. Its main intellectual influences are Darwinism and certain German thinkers Wells had read, such as August Weismann. The pragmatism of William James, who had become a friend of Wells, was also an influence.
The Passionate Friends is a 1913 novel by H. G. Wells.
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman is a 1914 novel by H. G. Wells.
An Englishman Looks at the World is a 1914 essay collection by H. G. Wells containing journalistic pieces written between 1909 and 1914. The book consists of twenty-six pieces ranging from five to sixty-two pages in length. An American edition was published the same year by Harper and Brothers under the title Social Forces in England and America.
Bealby: A Holiday is a 1915 comic novel by H. G. Wells.
Boon is a 1915 work of literary satire by H. G. Wells. It purports, however, to be by the fictional character Reginald Bliss, and for some time after publication Wells denied authorship. Boon is best known for its part in Wells's debate on the nature of literature with Henry James, who is caricatured in the book. But in Boon Wells also mocks himself, calling into question and ridiculing a notion he held dear—that of humanity's collective consciousness.
The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind by H. G. Wells is the final work of a trilogy of which the first volumes were The Outline of History (1919–1920) and The Science of Life (1929). Wells conceived of the three parts of his trilogy as, respectively, "a survey of history, of the science of life, and of existing conditions." Intended as an unprecedented "picture of all mankind to-day" in all its manifold activities, he called it "the least finished work . . . because it is the most novel." He hoped the volumes would play a role in the open conspiracy to establish a progressive world government that he had been promoting since the mid-1920s.
The Bulpington of Blup, a 1932 novel by H. G. Wells, is a character study analyzing the psychological sources of resistance to Wellsian ideology, and was influenced by Wells's acquaintance with Carl Gustav Jung and his ideas.
All Aboard for Ararat is a 1940 allegorical novella by H. G. Wells that tells a modernized version of the story of Noah and the Flood. Wells was 74 when it was published, and it is the last of his utopian writings.
Certain Personal Matters is an 1897 collection of essays selected by H. G. Wells from among the many short essays and ephemeral pieces he had written since 1893. The book consists of thirty-nine pieces ranging from about eight hundred to two thousand words in length. A one-shilling reprint was issued in 1901 by T. Fisher Unwin.
Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, generally known as Anticipations, was written by H.G. Wells at the age of 34. He later called the book, which became a bestseller, "the keystone to the main arch of my work." His most recent biographer, however, calls the volume "both the starting point and the lowest point in Wells's career as a social thinker."