Mr. Britling Sees It Through

In the last golden summer of peace, Mr. Britling — a successful, talkative, comfortably self-satisfied English essayist (and unmistakably a version of Wells himself) — keeps an open, happy house at Matching's Easy in the Essex countryside. We meet him through the eyes of an American visitor, the genial Mr. Direck, who finds the Britling household delightful and baffling by turns; among its members is Herr Heinrich, the earnest, harmless young German tutor to Britling's sons. It is the high noon of a civilisation that does not know it is about to end.

Then, in August 1914, the war comes. Heinrich returns weeping to Germany to fight in an army he never wanted to serve; Britling's beloved eldest son Hugh volunteers. The long middle of the novel is the home front itself — the rumours and the newspapers, the recruiting and the waiting, the slow tightening of dread — until the telegram arrives, as it arrived at so many houses, and Hugh is dead. The closing movement follows Mr. Britling through that grief: past his rage and his comfortable old certainties, toward a chastened faith, and toward the unfinished letter he tries to write to the parents of Herr Heinrich, who has also been killed — one grieving father reaching across the enemy line to another.

Written in 1916, in the very middle of the catastrophe and without knowing how it would end, Mr. Britling Sees It Through was a transatlantic bestseller and one of the great records of the civilian war. It is at once a “condition of England” novel of the end of Edwardian complacency, the story of a father's grief and his search for meaning and for God in catastrophe, and — in a year of furious propaganda — a courageous act of reconciliation across the lines that divided the dead.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1916 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword on the book's composition and lasting power, a biographical note on H. G. Wells, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.