The Way the World is Going (First Edition)

WELLS, H. G. (jacket art Mabel Alleyne). The Way the World Is Going: Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead, 26 Articles and a Lecture. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1928.

8vo. Original brown cloth boards. Spine lettered in gilt. Original unclipped dust jacket, designed by Mabel Alleyne. xi, 301 pp. First edition, first printing. Bookseller's sticker to front pastedown. Bibliographic reference: Wells Society 101.

H. G. Wells (1866–1946), already established by 1928 as one of the most widely read writers in the English language and increasingly preoccupied in his later career with social prophecy and political argument rather than the scientific romance that had made his early reputation, gathered in this volume twenty-six articles and a lecture written and delivered across 1927 — pieces originally published in the Sunday Express in Britain and simultaneously in the New York Times in America, giving Wells one of the widest readerships available to any commentator on public affairs in the interwar period. In his opening notes Wells expressed evident frustration at the "editorial interference" that had shaped the articles' original newspaper publication, and the book restores what he considered a more complete and considered version of his argument.

The collection ranges with characteristic Wellsian confidence across politics, science, economics, and social affairs: essays on the nature of Fascism and its trajectory in Italy, on the emerging government of China, on the deficiencies of British parliamentary democracy, and — most strikingly to a reader with the benefit of hindsight — a sustained and gloomy assessment of the League of Nations, which Wells dismissed as "ill-planned and ill-supported" and, as a guarantee against future conflict, "beneath contempt." His prediction of a second global war, made openly in 1927, drew on his conviction that the underlying conditions for catastrophic conflict were as visible in the aftermath of the First World War as they had been in the years before it — a judgment that the following decade would confirm with grim thoroughness, even if the specific antagonists Wells anticipated were not exactly the ones history supplied.

The book represents a marked shift in tone from Wells's earlier collection of similar material, A Year of Prophesying (1925): where that volume retained something of Wells's characteristic reforming optimism, The Way the World Is Going is considerably darker, registering a disillusionment with the postwar settlement and the institutions built to secure it that would only deepen across the remainder of Wells's career. Nature magazine, reviewing the volume on publication, praised Wells's undiminished energy and idealism even as it registered the gathering pessimism of his subject matter, noting that "no trace of cynicism has crept in" despite the darkening substance of his forecasts.

The dust jacket illustration by Mabel Alleyne is a scarce survival in its own right — genuinely uncommon copies retain it in presentable condition, and specialist dealers consistently flag the jacket's fragility and rarity when cataloguing this title.

Very good in very good dust jacket. Dust jacket unclipped, foxing and age toning present to outer and inner faces. Some chips on spine and fore-edge creases. Bindings very good, tight and square. Some minor markings to front cover and some mild weathering to spine creases. Contents near fine, minor age toning on endpapers and edges, some very minor foxing here and there throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000020