Wells (H.G.) In the Days of the Comet
£75
London, Macmillan, 1906.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth, lettered in gilt.
The gentlest apocalypse Wells ever arranged: a comet grazes the Earth, its green vapours dissolve into the atmosphere, and humanity wakes from “the Change” cured of jealousy, war fever, class hatred and the whole armature of pre-comet spite, narrated by a Midlands clerk who went into the Change murderous with sexual jealousy and came out of it sane.
The scandal was immediate and entirely deliberate: the transformed world’s relaxed arrangements in love were read as an endorsement of free love, the Times Literary Supplement huffed, and Wells, then conducting his Fabian campaigns and his private life on similar principles, declined to reassure anybody.
In stock
Slight rubbing and bumping to extremities, but overall very good copy.
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"For my darling Evelyn with best love from Edith", possibly Evelyn Waugh with whom she was well acquainted (she asked him to be her godfather when she converted to Catholicism in 1955); it could however also be her close friend Evelyn Wiel, with whom she stayed in France prior to the Second World War.