H.G. Wells: science fiction, socialism and the founding of LSE

What might the “father of science fiction” teach us about the history of British socialism? And how did the politics of one of the world’s most influential fiction writers help LSE become the institution that it is today?

To discuss these questions and more, we are joined by Claire Tomalin for a conversation about her new book, The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World.

Meet our speakers and chair

Olga Sobolev is the Language Co-ordinator of Literature and Russian at LSE's Language Centre. She specialises in comparative literature (British-French-Russian) with particular reference to modernism and British-Russian cultural relations. Along with Angus Wrenn, she has written on HG Wells in her book From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s and in 2018 organised a conference on Wells at LSE.

Claire Tomalin is an English journalist and biographer. The 2018 receipt of the Bodley Medal, she has published internationally renowned biographies on English literary figures including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Her forthcoming title, The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World, examines the early years of one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century.

Angus Wrenn is a Tutorial Fellow at LSE's Language Centre. He specialises in nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century English and comparative literature. Along with Olga Sobolev, he has written on HG Wells in his book From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s and in 2018 organised a conference on Wells at LSE.

Robin Archer is the Director of the postgraduate programme in political sociology and the Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme at LSE.

More about this event

The Ralph Miliband Programme (@rmilibandlse) is one of LSE's most prestigious lecture series and seeks to advance Ralph Miliband's spirit of free social inquiry.

LSE is a centre for the study of the social sciences and this is reflected in its Language Centre (@lselangcentre). Our courses focus on language and society, encouraging you to learn how to use language in the contexts you would like to live, study and work in. We teach people to speak languages, but also teach about language (socio-linguistics and intercultural communication) and offer a range of courses on literature and society.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEHGWells