101 years after publication, this week’s Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is H G Wells’s novel Mr Britling Sees It Through. It was sold to a public who really did not know which way this war would go, in a strange category of literature, the in-war novel: neither pre-war, nor post-war. The author does not know the outcome of a war endured and won (or, much less commonly, a war lost. Apart from Jünger’s Storm of Steel I don’t know German, Italian or indeed Austro-Hungarian literature at all, but there must be novels from those literary traditions dating from 1919 onwards about the war that was lost.) Britain has been fortunate – which is a whopping understatement but the best I can do – in not having been on the losing side in war or invasion since 1066, unless you count Dutch William coming over in the late 17th century but that was by invitation. So British literature of war has always been from the winning side’s perspective, which will nuance how we understand Mr Britling‘s first readers’ responses.
The First World War was the first war to really involve the British civilian population directly, in that they could read about the fighting fairly soon after it had happened, they could hear the guns from France in Kent, they knew their fishing fleet and merchant shipping were in greater danger off-shore than ever before, and they could see the wounded and returning soldiers getting off the trains and boats all round the south and east coasts of England. British cities and towns were bombed from the air for the first time in this war. Wells puts this into this novel, but also notes that this destruction and terror and violence was no different from what the British had inflicted on the peoples of Polynesia and Africa.
Mr Britling is the main character in the novel, and becomes the focalising character – the one through whose perspective we see what happens – about two thirds of the way through. His name is a giveaway for his Everyman symbolic role. He represents the British man sending his son and friend to war, and struggling to understand the changes that have overcome his life. Mr Britling is also H G Wells himself, a famous writer and popular commentator, writing books and articles for the newspapers to explain things to the ordinary man, to make his living. And, as the title of the novel suggests, Mr Britling sees it through. He endures the war, as far as it goes, and suffers terrible changes in his life. He also goes through large changes in his understanding of what the war was for and about. The war breaks through Mr Britling’s sense of being in control and well satisfied with the world as he has arranged it, because a very loud and violent thing is breaking through these paper defences.
Mr Britling has a mistress who has been playing him off against a younger man, but once war begins Mr Britling has no patience with her petulant games, and simply forgets all about her. War is more absorbing to him and his family than her demands, and his self-esteem somehow now doesn’t need the propping up and cossetting that she performed. His secretary Teddy goes to war, so Teddy’s young wife Letty takes over his job, perfectly competently. Mr Britling thus has Letty and her child and her sister Cissie on his hands, as well as his own wife, his three sons and a houseful of servants. His eldest son Hugh joins up secretly, a year under age. His long letters to his father about life in camp and, later, at the Front are extraordinary letters for a wartime novel, because they criticise bitterly the conduct of the officers and the incompetence of the army’s grasp of supplies, catering, training, and tactics. Hugh’s superior officer doesn’t believe in maps or measurements. I don’t know if Wells was using the letters sent him by friends, or whether he was inventing them, but Hugh’s letters sound very similar to those in Siegfried Sassoon’s novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, published long after the war in full possession of the facts about army incompetence. Yet Wells was able to pass these views to the public tucked neatly inside his story, and evaded the Defence of the Realm Act (which prevented newspapers and other public disseminators from printing information prejudicial to the morale of His Majesty’s forces), for which we should all be thankful.
One fascinating aspect of life in wartime rarely covered in fiction of this period is how household finances were affected. Mr and Mrs Britling were of the leisured classes whose income comes mainly from investments placed carefully in banks all over Europe. The war stops payment on many of these. His profession as a pundit suffers when the wartime newspapers and magazines change their editorial policies, so he publishes a great deal less, and makes less from his books than before. His gardener has long gone to a better-paying job, so he is not replaced, the garden is neglected, which affects the impression of prosperity and sufficiency that the Britling world has always had. Not that Mr Britling just sits in his study doing nothing: he is as busy in wartime as he was in the days of peace, but not for pay. He patrols the lanes at night as a special constable, which gives him a lot of time for thinking, and then writing long drafts of a new way to explain the war and to prevent war in the future. Wells’s also wrote long letters to the newspapers complaining about the things that the novel complains about, so there is an obvious connection between his concerns, and how he filled the plot of this novel. Both men are very anxious to work out why this war had happened, since it seemed to have arrived on the doorstep without any warning.
This was a brave book to have published in the midst of war, when the typical British attitude was belligerent, itching to fight back and take revenge of the dastardly enemy who were killing our boys. Wells populates the community of Matchings Easy – the Essex village where Mr Britling lives – with types who represent England and the English. The most noxious and repellently loud of these is Lady Frensham, a great lady of the district,. She is titled, rich, and quite accustomed in the Victorian manner to saying what she thinks and expecting everyone to agree with her. She is intensely, patriotically jingoistic in a bellowing right-is-might sort of way. Her rants about what is really happening in the war, and about the conduct of those around her who do not agree with her views, are stunningly appalling. She is rude, inaccurate, ignorant, demanding, poisonous and violently abusive. She may be the first example of The Jingo Woman in First World War literature – the character who hands out white feathers to any man not in khaki, taking it on herself to apply public humiliation from the safety of her own self-righteous opinions, and knowing that she will never be called on to die for her country in uniform.
Lady Frensham’s views about the Germans are objected to violently by Mr Britling, because he has a different relationship with ‘the Germans’. He had had a lovely summer holiday with German families before the war. He has employed Heinrich, a young German tutor for his younger sons, as a long-term guest in the Britling household. Heinrich is a bit of a joke when the novel begins – so earnest, so organised, so obsessive, and yet so anxious about the prospect of war because it will interrupt his planned trip to an Esperanto conference in Boulogne. Heinrich is obedient and dutiful, and knows that he must study philology because it is what he is expected to do by his professors and parents. He returns to Germany at the beginning of the war in great distress: he does not want to fight, he sees no reason why Germany should want a war, but it is his duty to return. Poor Heinrich is always asking for explanations, but no-one gives him any.
Heinrich is not the only foreigner caught up by the war. The bemused American visitor Mr Direck, who arrives at Matchings Easy in early August to visit Mr Britling, gets thrown out of Germany when he attempts to conduct a private fact-finding mission, and ends up joining the Canadian army because the American army is not planning to fight at the present. His sub-plot is the most conventional part of the novel, with an arrival, a falling in love, a development in character, and a resolution, but that way lie spoilers so I won’t go any further in that direction. Let’s talk about Winston Churchill instead.
You’ll probably know Churchill’s name as Britain’s Prime Minister in the Second World War, but possibly not that he was First Lord of the Admiralty in the First World War, which meant that in the first years of the war he was the politician in charge of the most senior military command. Lady Frensham criticises him roundly for his apparent failings, as did many people in real life, which Wells considered to be simply personal spite. It’s true that Churchill was sacked from his post during the war, though his modernising suggestions for sea and land equipment were later adopted. At one point in the novel Mr Britling whispers to himself, trying to give himself hope that Britain will win this terrible war: ‘We shall fight them in the air … We shall beat them on the seas’. Does that ring a faint bell? In H G Wells’ published letters there is a letter from Winston Churchill congratulating Wells on Mr Britling, which he had just finished reading. In the Second World War one of Churchill’s most famous speeches, on becoming Prime Minister, contains the famous line ‘We shall fight on the beaches’, and also ‘we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air’. It may be that both authors were drawing their declamatory style from earlier sources, possibly the Bible, maybe Shakespeare, but not Latin literature, since Wells did not have that kind of upper-class education. But I contend that Churchill borrowed from H G Wells.
Mr Bitling Sees It Through ends with a powerful essay by Wells, or Britling, that begins as a letter to Heinrich’s parents in Pomerania. But there is simply too much to say, and the letter grows into what Mr Britling calls with exasperation, a dissertation: academic, sweeping, impersonal. He keeps trying again, trying to find the words to write to these German parents whom he has never met when he sends back Heinrich’s violin, to express what he feels about the war. It’s a powerful ending because the casualty figures were rising rapidly in 1916, and thousands of British soldiers were coming back from the war with permanent physical damage, visible war-damage on the streets and in neighbouring houses all around. How can a message of mutual understanding and reconciliation have had any effect at that time? This is not a war book: it’s an anti-war book. Mr Britling’s desperate search for war work, and for a way to explain the war to himself, turns into a personal mission to stop war ever happening again. Teddy’s wife Letty devises a terrible punitive campaign by the world’s women to kill all the generals.
I love this novel because it is so human. There are many wonderful conversations between characters who need things explaining to each other, thus allowing us, one hundred years later, to eavesdrop on what people might have been thinking at the time. I would so much rather read Mr Britling than any modern novel about the war which has been written with the inescapable knowledge of hindsight, as well as modern preoccupations that the Edwardians would never have thought about.
Prepare for high-stakes romantic melodrama, early 1920s style. This 
So you see, this novel is beginning to look like the Pilgrim’s Progress, with the perfect hero undergoing trials of temper, pride, and self-control, and coming out in the right every time. Anthony’s third post is a put-up job, since Anthony has met The Girl. He owns a dog (most Yates heroes own and worship their dogs), which he boards in kennels in the countryside while he’s in service, and goes to visit at weekends for long walks in decent gentlemanly solitude. His dog gets into a fight with another dog, which Anthony breaks up very efficiently (moral: a man who can separate two fighting dogs is admirable), but he accidentally offends the other dog’s owner, while falling head over heels in love with her at first sight. She secretly returns his feelings, but when they accidentally meet again, he is handing the visibly appalling Mrs Slumper into her carriage, while The Girl is awaiting her own servants and carriage.
Is Anthony worth it? His heroism and natural leadership is typical for 1920s popular fiction, as the British ex-officer working with demobbed Other Ranks. At the beginning of Valerie French, the reactions of the demobbed Other Ranks to Anthony the starving and desperate ex-officer in need are extraordinary: not only do they feed him, they take him in their lorry to a pub, where the landlord, on hearing Anthony’s accent, immediately offers him unlimited credit, and then the lorry drivers slip Anthony twenty shillings, pretending the notes had fallen out of his coat. Shortly after this, Anthony inadvertently helps a thief steal a spare wheel off a car, meets a stupendously shouty barrister called Sir Andrew Plague, is instantly trusted despite the evidence, and is rescued from court simply because he looks and sounds like a gentleman. All this demonstrates the importance of class loyalty.
This time in the 
Nadine is Dodo’s daughter, a chain-smoker (which was very daring), and the leader of the pack. She is an appalling flirt and an empty conversationalist: her attitudes are really so much like those of a caricature of the 1920s flapper that I had to check the date of this novel twice. But it really is 1913, and prewar. Nadine and Dodo are both totally egotistical, but they both cheerfully admit this, and expect the world to accept them as they are. They aren’t malevolent at all, they are very concerned that everyone has a nice time and gets what they want. But their efforts to get what they want take priority over the desires of anyone else.
Dodo’s Daughter is also rather interesting if you’re looking for early feminist fiction. Dodo herself is a financially independent woman (thanks to both her former marriage settlements), but she is also an independent woman in terms of making her own decisions, deciding whom she will marry, where she will live, and so on. She keeps having to throw her drunk ex-husband out of the house (that’s the second one, who was a German prince of very Prussian characteristics), and she won’t ask her third husband to do this. She goes downstairs herself and gets rid of the awful tyrant Prussian, time and again.
This 
When Peter leaves school and comes home, he realises with cold horror that his cackling grandfather and demonic violent father are waiting eagerly for him to fall into their bullying, violent, cruel ways. Peter runs off to London and takes a job in a second-hand bookshop. This is a quite a jump in the plot, made possible by the meetings Peter has had in a mysterious junk shop in Treliss, where he encounters the enigmatic, romantic and also mysterious Mr Zanti, who offers him the job. Zanti is a deliberately curious character when he first appears, giving an impression of being all astrakhan coat and dark curling moustaches. He is important because he keeps appearing at all the turns in Peter’s fortunes. Consequently we take him at Peter’s estimation all through the novel: first as a figure of glamour and cosmopolitanism, later as a kind benefactor, then as a hapless victim, and finally as a devoted and loyal friend.
Fortitude is also the first of what would be later grouped together as Walpole’s eight London novels. London is quite clearly the centre of the known world for Walpole’s characters in this novel, with a range of Dickensian socio-economic and class settings. Walpole also added some pointed portraits of people who might well have been of his friends and acquaintances in the literary London of his own day, including Henry James, of whom he was a protegé. But the London parts of Fortitude begin in the 1890s, so as well as recreating his own early successes from the Edwardian period, Walpole also does a nice job of recreating the society that was withdrawing the hem of its garments from The Yellow Book, ten years earlier. Walpole is writing this novel for insiders and for those who wanted recent literary fashions revisited.
What makes this a true novel of 1913, if you ignore the now timeless Gothic bits and the David Copperfield plot, is the secret socialist circle and the anarchist bomb plot. Anarchism had been fashionable in fiction for some time, and Walpole duly inserts an anarchist episode into Fortitude. Closely linked to the Cornish Gothic is the new fashion for rural extravagance, to be made popular by Mary Webb’s novels The Golden Arrow and Gone to Earth, during the First World War. Walpole expends a great deal of effort establishing the character of the big, muscular, simple and faithful farmer and lovelorn suitor Stephen Brant, who waits and suffers for literally decades while the woman he loves is married to another man. Stephen is Peter’s faithful friend and protector, going to extraordinary lengths to keep him alive in moments of danger, and to bring him news from home. But as soon as the woman is free, she and Stephen hop onto a ship for Canada.
It’s not too far-fetched to read Peter as Stephen’s surrogate child and light of his life. Stephen does a fair amount of raging through the winter fields at sunset, recalling very forcibly the Starkadder brothers in Stella Gibbons’s much later Cold Comfort Farm, but he is out of place in London, even in the poorer quarters. There is a cataclysmic scene when Stephen and Mr Zanti and Peter are playing a riotously enjoyable game of romps with Peter’s baby son, and all seems happy and natural and all boys together, until Peter’s wife opens the nursery door and stands there, glaring icily down at them. She disapproves of them playing with the child at all, and she hates everything about Cornwall and Peter’s former life. Stephen is shrunken by her hatred, and he and Mr Zanti slink out of the door.
I don’t think Walpole knew or cared much about women, or babies. He was, as the obituaries in the quality press say, a confirmed bachelor. Clare is an appalling monster because of her weaknesses and improbable characteristics, whereas her mother is a masterwork of socially-sanctioned monstrous behaviour, who calmly moves into her daughter’s marital home at the first sign of trouble, and never leaves until disaster arrives. Compared to these London ladies, the demonic Gothic horror waiting for Peter when he finally returns to the House of Scaw was always going to be a damp squib. Walpole manipulates our expectations and produces a truly surprising, and oddly satisfying ending to the novel.
You can find her novels in print-on-demand editions, and sometimes the genuine second-hand article, and in older public libraries that haven’t yet thrown their less borrowed books into the bin to make room for more computers. Her first novel was published in 1899, and her last in 1944. She was prolific, producing forty novels and short story collections in just over forty years, of the type that would be asked for in libraries between the war as ‘a nice book’. But they’re rare: she was never a top of the range best-seller, and in the Second World War, the bombing raid on London in 1940 that destroyed Paternoster Row and the heart of the book trade also burned all her publisher’s stock. Because of that her books are simply very hard to get hold of. I managed to republish one, The Affairs of John Bolsover, in 
But he is a relatively minor character in this novel, which is about a girl called Keren Ashe, who lives with her father, Dr Ashe the alchemist, in the Forest, south of Colchester in Essex. He is a descendant of Dr Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s alchemist, and Keren’s mother was a gypsy from Bohemia, so Keren has a strange and distinguished bloodline. She works as her father’s lab assistant, and seems perfectly content to do this for the rest of her life, until well-meaning Tobiah mentions to Betsy Shipp in Colchester one day that there is a 17-year old girl growing up wild in the Forest, with no older woman to instruct her on household duties or to see that she does not stray into temptation. Betsy is Dr Ashe’s distant cousin, so she takes Keren to live with her in the town, which seems to be a good plan for all. Dr Ashe disappears shortly afterwards on a secret journey.
Tobiah seems to be the head preacher for all the Dissenting sects, those troublesome Protestants who broke with the Church of England and insist on splitting theological hairs in defining their own religious beliefs, until there are almost more sects than believers. When Tobiah is out of town, Samuel Calderbeck sneaks back in, an ignorant man with a mania about demonic possession and witchcraft. When Betsy goes to London to see her married daughter and the new grandchild, her fussy husband installs his sister, Rachel Shipp, in the house to keep an eye on the maids. Rachel is a Calderbeck enthusiast, and very strong on the girls attending all possible religious services. At one, Keren forgets to kneel down for prayers, because her mind is elsewhere, so after a stern interrogation by Calderbeck and Rachel, it is suspected that she must be possessed. This is not a good time for Keren to be under suspicion of witchcraft, because her sneaky cousin Kate already has a downer on her. Keren can see easily through Kate’s hypochondrical ways, and Kate is very good at being devout when it will do her good. Keren has also been making lapis lazuli, a straightforward alchemical experiment that she has never managed to work accurately before, so when this too is discovered (it was a present for her nice cousin Betty) she is sent straight to her room and locked in, awaiting judgement in the morning.
With hindsight, it is perfectly obvious that Buchan was a born writer. What is not so obvious is that, unlike many of his peers, he ignored the tug of words for over fifteen years before being able to write them full-time. Other novelists got their heads down and did this: it was their job. Buchan tended to write his fiction in the evenings of his day job, and perhaps this less intense application showed in the time it took for him to finally get it together and write the novel that the times, and the public wanted. The market and his developing writing style finally came together in the first months of the First World War and burst upon the waiting world in 1915. The Thirty-Nine Steps really was a breakthrough for him, a masterpiece in many ways. What is interesting about the over-shadowed The Power-House was that it was the last novel but one before The Thirty-Nine Steps, and contains many of the elements that made The Thirty-Nine Steps a winner.
With Nelson’s he had a captive publisher he could persuade to give him good terms, and the novel was short enough not to matter too much if it failed, but Buchan was clearly after more than in-house publishing comfort. He wanted independent fame (and who can blame him?) Blackwood’s Magazine was also a lot more prestigious than Thomas Nelson, which was more known for its Christian and children’s lists. Nelson’s was not a natural home for a best-seller, and Buchan really wanted this. Getting his novel in a magazine for its first publication was also very good business. He’d be paid for that publication, and be paid again if any US magazine wanted to do the same (though, as it happened, no other magazine did reprint The Power-House). He undoubtedly expected that afterwards there would be book publication royalties, but for The Power-House these took their time, because Blackwood didn’t do anything with the story until after The Thirty-Nine Steps had had a massive success, and so The Power-House didn’t appear as a book until 1916. This must have been galling, because it proved, once again, that as a novelist Buchan was not considered (by the prestigious but stuffy and old-fashioned House of Blackwood) to be worth much investment. What Buchan needed was a real hit, and a new publisher, and The Power-House did not give him these. After The Thirty-Nine Steps was a smash success for William Blackwood, despite their almost complete lack of advertising or publicity, Buchan’s next novel went to Hodder & Stoughton, with whom he stayed for the rest of his life.
So why was The Power-House not the kind of book that Blackwood preferred to invest in? It was not steady, reliable, Victorian or safe. It did not rehash Imperial adventures and colonial values. In fact, it did the opposite. A dastardly spy plot is discovered, and an innocent man is being hunted by wicked foreign conspirators in the exotic and very nineteenth-century adventure playground of the Victorians, Bokhara and the Pamirs. But the central joke behind the novel is that all this conventional drama happens off-stage, while the really thrilling events happen in London, on the narrator’s own doorstep. With The Power-House Buchan invented the thriller that could happen to any one of us. The novel’s narrator, Edward Leithen, is a barrister and an MP, he has easy relations with the police and Embassy staff, he has a chauffeur (this was the early period of driving, when a car routinely needed a driver, because the owner didn’t know how to drive), but for all of this, Edward Leithen is One of Us, an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.
Some years ago I wrote a scholarly chapter on how clothes were used as social indicators in the fiction of P G Wodehouse and Dornford Yates. This was for 