H. G. Wells on Victorian Short Stories
Lately I've been wandering down memory lane with H. G. Wells' The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1911). This collection holds, in the words of Wells: "all of the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again." Some are new and some familiar - two of them are personal favorites, which I'll be mentioning in Monday's podcast episode ("Nine Creepy Victorian Short Stories"). In the Introduction, Wells gives us a little recap of the short story form and its writers, as far as it had evolved in the late Victorian era. He praises Kipling, whose writing "opened like window-shutters to reveal the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East." J. M. Barrie also gets a mention, along with Henry James, Stephen Crane, Jerome K. Jerome, and Edith Nesbit. Other contemporaries are listed, whose names are less known to modern readers. Joseph Conrad alone is noted as having, in Wells's eyes, continued in the 20th century...