Mr Britling Sees it Through

Chosen by Mark Bostridge HG Wells’s Mr Britling Sees it Through has a fair claim to be the most significant British novel about the home front to appear during the First World War. Certainly it was the most popular. Published in September 1916, it immediately struck a chord with the public, running through 13 editions within its first year, while earning widespread critical acclaim. Thomas Hardy considered it the war book that “gives just what we thought and felt at the time”.

Superficially the novel, opening in the summer of 1914, reads like Wells’s own thinly veiled autobiography. Through the eyes of Mr Direck, a US visitor to an Essex village, we first see Mr Britling and his household. Like Wells, Britling is a celebrity author who has a mistress, Mrs Harrowdean, based on Wells’s liaison with Rebecca West. Like Wells, Britling grapples with the idea that the war that breaks out in August may be the war to end wars.

However, the mood of the book changes as Britling hears rumours of the war’s atrocities and experiences loss at first hand. His enthusiasm and sense of idealism falter. Disillusioned, he realises that this is a war like any other, “a wearisome thrusting against a pressure of evils”.

Britling’s son Hugh is killed in the trenches. In the final chapter, Britling attempts to make sense of his death, but words fail him and he breaks off in despair. Nevertheless, Wells leaves his readers with a message of hope: democracy must be perfected, and the “adventurers” who have betrayed mankind “into this morass of hate and blood” must be condemned.

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Mark Bostridge is a writer and critic. His books include The Fateful Year: England 1914 (Viking, 2014)