Certain Personal Matters
1898
Before H.G. Wells became the prophet of alien invasions and time travel, he was something almost more surprising: a very funny essayist chronicling the small indignities of ordinary life. Certain Personal Matters gathers thirty-nine pieces written between 1893 and 1897 for London's magazine market, where short, piquant essays could be read in a handful of minutes and leave readers thinking, 'How true. I have done that myself.' Wells adopts the playful persona of a young, impecunious writer with a wife only obliquely described, using this mask to skewer Victorian pretensions and celebrate the liberation of cheap possessions. The essays range from 'Thoughts on Cheapness and My Aunt Charlotte' (a masterpiece of gentle satire about inherited clutter) to 'On the Choice of a Wife' to 'How I Died' (a comic meditation on mortality). Yet beneath the wit runs a deeper current. Several pieces engage with natural selection and evolution, and 'The Extinction of Man' directly anticipates The War of the Worlds, wondering whether 'the coming terror may be crouching for its spring.' Here is Wells the novelist in embryo, but also Wells at his most human: wry, self-deprecating, and endlessly attentive to the absurdities that bind us all.
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“All people fed mainly on scones become clever.””
— H. G. Wells
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Wells, H. G.. Certain Personal Matters. Lex, lex-books.com/book/certain-personal-matters-33028872-d035-4eec-9ea4-613f6f236b23.Wells, H. G. (1898). Certain Personal Matters. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/certain-personal-matters-33028872-d035-4eec-9ea4-613f6f236b23Wells, H. G.. Certain Personal Matters. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/certain-personal-matters-33028872-d035-4eec-9ea4-613f6f236b23.
