When the Lamps Went Out: H. G. Wells and his World on the Eve of the War

H. G. Wells Society Conference

27 September 2014

Education Centre, Palace Green Library, Durham University

Plenary speakers:
Professor Matthew Pateman (Sheffield Hallam University)
Megan Shepherd (author of The Madman's Daughter)

This year will see the anniversary of the outbreak of what H. G. Wells optimistically hoped would be 'The War that Will End War'. When the Lamps Went Out is a conference that seeks to take a snapshot of the literary, political and social landscape at the end of the 'long nineteenth century' and the dawn of the First World War. We welcome papers on Wells's Edwardian and early twentieth-century work, on his political and discussion novels, and/or on his journalistic, political, utopian and wargaming writing, and on the legacies of the nineteenth century in the early twentieth. We also invite papers on connections with the writers and people of significance from Wells's circle in this period: such figures may include (but need not be confined to): Elizabeth von Arnim, Arnold Bennett, Edward Carpenter, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Alfred Harmsworth, Violet Hunt, Vernon Lee, C.F.G. Masterman, E. Nesbit, Amber Reeves, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Robins, Robert Ross, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Frederick Soddy, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Rebecca West... We especially welcome proposals for papers on Wells, gender, sexuality and marriage.

26 September 17.30-19.00 Private View of Exhibition: Books for Boys: Heroism, Empire and Adventure at the Dawn of the First World War

27 September

    9.30 Registration
    9.55 Welcome
    10.00-11.10 Professor Matthew Pateman
    11.10-11.30 Coffee
    11.30-13.00 Panels

Panel 1: Political Propheteering

  • Paul Vlitos, ‘Literature and the Business of Life: C.F.G. Masterman as Reader of H.G. Wells’
  • Harry Wood, ‘Competing Prophets: H.G. Wells, George Griffith, and Visions of Future War, 1893-1914’
  • Julia Stapleton, ‘The Battle of Plutocracy: G.K. Chesterton, Wells, Masterman and the Future of British Democracy’

Panel 2 (Deane Room): Cultural Geographies

  • Michael Sherborne, 'Educating Heinrich: H.G. Wells and the Germans 1866-1916'
  • Hadas Elber-Arvam, ‘“My Own Particular City”: H.G. Wells’s Love-hate relationship with London
  • Jan Van Velk, ‘Insight’s Perseverance: Mr. Britling Sees It Through and H.G. Wells’s Two Crises’

13.00-13.45 Lunch

13.45-15.15 Panels

Panel 3: Divisions of Opinion – Writing Opposition

  • Linda Dryden, ‘The Shape of War to Come: Of War and Mr Wells/ Of War and Mr Conrad’
  • Gareth Reeves, ‘An Author Divided? Canonical Anxiety in H.G. Wells’s Edwardian Fiction’
  • Maria Kozyreva, ‘H. G.Wells and G. K. Chesterton - Two Men, Two Worlds’

Panel 4 (Deane Room): War Games

  • Matthew Wraith, ‘Swarming and Multiplying: H.G. Wells, War and Swarm Intelligence’
  • Michael Shallcross, ‘Guiding the Cowboys Back to Reality: H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, Wyndham Lewis, and the Game of War’
  • Mariateresa Franza, ‘“Mankind versus Ironmongery”: Machinery and Wargaming in H.G. Wells’s “The Land Ironclads”’

15.15-15.30 Tea Break

15.30-17.00

Panel 5: Technologies of Tales

  • Rinni Haji-Amran, ‘Towards the Establishment of a World Government: H.G. Wells’s Response to Aeronautical Developments in Britain, 1898-1936’
  • Jeremy Withers, ‘Bert Smallways’s Sandals (and Why They Matter)’
  • Genie Babb, ‘The “Chancy Wheel” of the “Machinery of Fate”: Chance and Change in The Wheels of Chance, The History of Mr. Polly, and Ann Veronica’

17.00-18.15

  • Megan Shepherd (author of The Madman’s Daughter)

Conference Dinner (tbc)

When the Lamps Went Out is a collaboration between Durham University Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, the H. G. Wells Society and the Edwardian Culture Network. Attendance fee is: H G Wells Society members: unwaged £20, waged £30; non-Members: unwaged £25, waged £35. The Wells Society can be joined at: hgwellsusa.50megs.com.

This conference also marks the launch of the exhibition Books for Boys: Heroism, Empire and Adventure at the Dawn of the First World War. Books for Boys tells the story of Britain and Germany in the years leading up to the Great War through showing what the public enjoyed reading. The exhibition will also display late-Victorian and Edwardian maps, toys, uniforms, photographs, pictures, medals, literary memorabilia and other artefacts and ephemera. Conference delegates will be invited to a private view of the exhibition on the evening preceding the conference.

Download the Conference Registration Form Here