There is a great deal to say about HG Wells, possibly because he wrote too much. He was full of himself. His voice adds a huge amount to his fiction and the most important element was energy: the vitality of the man who knows he is intelligent and that, without belonging to the establishment (Wells' mother was a servant), he could make it in the world.
I have just finished Tono Bungay, a novel which I have been meaning to read for some time. It gets great reviews. But I here and there thought - now he is trying to be Dickens - now he is trying to get the effect of Rice Boroughs or Conan Doyle writing an exotic adventure - Conrad even! and he is trying to get away from the limitedness of his world view, his view which is so English and class bound. Even at the end where he tried to describe his vision of England, it is not England he describes but London, and the very centre of London at that.
Having just read (March 2013) about Charlie Chaplin, I see that he and Wells had a huge amount in common. They both grew up poor, insecure and hungry, worked incredibly hard to get success, and became terrible romantic womanisers even as they were trying not to be - but to strip away all that seemed mythical and bunkum and get to the truth. Their private lives were interesting but messy. Chaplin seems always to have liked very young girls, and found older women frightening, and this may be because his mother, at a young age, went insane through malnutrition.
You see in both that pre- WWI physique - short stature, narrow shoulders and chest.
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