motor cars. In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows the ‘Poop, poop!’ of the
motor car driven by Mr Toad embodies the unwelcome in modern life.H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells(1866–1946), the son of a small tradesman and professional
cricketer, won a scholarship to study science in South Kensington, and soon burst
into print. He wrote pioneering science fiction in The Time Machine (1895) and
others; a feminist novel,Ann Veronica (1909); a spoof on advertising in Tono-Bungay
(1910); and a social comedy in The History of Mr Polly (1910), about being a draper.
The unhappy Polly, trying to burn himself to death, becomes frightened of the
flames and runs out of the house – and out of his marriage, and his shop, to happi-
ness: a riverside pub. Wells’s belief in progress turned him to tracts and populariza-
tion (The Outline of History, 1920). His last book was entitled Mind at the End of its
Tether (1945), as might have been predicted by G. K. Chesterton, who mistrusted
salvation by the corporate state.The press and G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton(1874–1936) entertained the public on a range of topics from
before the Edwardian decade until his death in 1936. In retrospect he can be seen as
a representative of a valuable type, the imaginative writer of real talent who is also a
campaigning journalist. Such writing goes back as far as Thomas Nashe, and its
practitioners include Defoe, Steele, Johnson, Cobbett, Hazlitt and Dickens. The
Daily Mailwas first published in 1896, priced at a halfpenny when other London
dailies cost a penny. More populist in tone and more concise than its rivals, it soon
had more than half a million readers. Newspapers are driven by their revenue from
advertising, and therefore by fostering consumer consumption. A century after the
appearance of the Mail,The Timesdecided that it would no longer be for ‘top people’
but for the much larger class of newly affluent people, and took the same path. As
the first mass-circulation papers expanded and journalism reached further into the
population, there was an interim in which literature remained central to British
culture,and Bennett,Wells and Shaw flourished, much as serial fiction had flour-
ished in magazines,from Dickens to Hardy. For some decades, journalistic contro-
versy could address ends as well as means. The last influential journalist who was
also an influential writer was the Eton-educated Eric Blair, who wrote from 1934 to
1950 under the more ordinary name of George Orwell.
Chesterton, along with his ally Hilaire Belloc, advocates of Catholic social teach-
ing and the programme of Distributism, jousted regularly in the lists of Fleet Street
with Shaw and Wells, believers in social progress and, later, in the Soviet Union.
Versatile and fluent, G. K. C., as he was known, wrote essays, columns, volumes of
controversy, romances, short stories and poems. Early in his career came fantastic
fiction,The Napoleon of Notting Hillin 1903 and The Man Who Was Thursday: a
Nightmarein 1908,and much verse. As a result of his Heretics(1905),he was chal-
lenged to state his own beliefs, and wrote Orthodoxyin 1908. He developed a
Christian social ideal which combined broad sympathies with a relish for individu-
als,evident in his studies of Dickens and Browning. His democratic liberal instincts
eventually combined with an economics informed by social justice. His Christian
social teaching was neither capitalist nor socialist, criticizing monopoly and plutoc-
racy, but not private property. Property-ownership, Chesterton argued, should be330 12 · ENDS AND BEGINNINGS: 1901–19