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Primitive modernity: H. G. Wells and the prehistoric man of the 1890s.(Herbert George Wells, Edward Clodd)(Critical essay)

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From: Yearbook of English Studies
Date: 20070101
Author:Pearson, Richard

ABSTRACT

This essay places H. G. Wells in the context of the anthropological and sociological investigations into the origins of man that received great impetus in the late nineteenth century from archaeological finds and ethnographic studies. His knowledge of the work of Edward Clodd on primitive, prehistoric man informs his notion of human intellectual development and evolution. Wells saw himself as a sociologist, but regarded this field as essentially a creative rather than scientific one. Modernity, for Wells, came to require an acceptance of the tensions between ...

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