The Soul of a Bishop. A Novel (with Just a Little Love in It) about Conscience and Religion and The Real Troubles of Life. INITIALLED BY AUTHOR

Description

Original full green cloth, blind lettering and decor to front board and spine. No dustwrapper. Spine mildly sunned. Bottom board corners slightly pushed in. Top edges trimmed, other edges untrimmed. Slight foxing to fore-edges. 8vo. Hinges sound, endpapers uncracked at gutters. Mild browning to endpapers. Pencil inscription (numbers) to inside rear board. Inscribed in pen by H. G. Wells to half title: ‘More Theology / For the Best of Solicitors / from H. G. W’. Pencil inscription in later hand to inside front board gives likely identification for this ‘best of solicitors’: ‘inscribed to George Whale’. There is no reason to doubt this attribution: George Whale (1849-1925) was a solicitor and close friend of Wells’, who writes in a memorial volume for Whale that he ‘was delighted to go and dine with Whale in that happy home in Regent’s Park whither he went after his second marriage . . . It was a very graceful, pleasant, bookish home’ (Clodd, Shorter and Stephens Whale eds, 1926, George Whale 1849-1925, p. 45). The husband of the novelist Winifred Stephens and himself a ‘well-known figure in London literary circles’ who ‘delighted to gather friends far too numerous to mention’ (ibid, p. 50), Whale was also active in local government (serving as Mayor of Woolwich from 1908-09), an avid bibliophile (there is a neat pencil notation to inside front board, possibly his private classification), a founder member of the Omar Khayyam and Pepys Clubs, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and, most pertinent in the context of Wells’ ‘theology’, a freethinker and secularist, Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association (founded to publish works too anti-religious to find ready publication elsewhere) from 1922 to 1925. He would presumably have taken a particular interest in ‘The Soul of a Bishop’, which together with Wells’ theological tract ‘God the Invisible King’, also published in 1917, marks Wells’ brief re-engagement with Christian belief (albeit of an explicitly anti-Nicene variety, ‘a flaming heresy and not a time-serving compromise’ as Wells himself later put it). Wells later repudiated this approach to faith as a phase of ‘terminological disingenuousness’ in response to the traumas of the First World War, ‘the passionate desire to find some immediate reassurance amidst that whirlwind of disaster’ (Experiment in Autobiography, 1934, p. 578). Robust packaging. Tracking can be added to overseas orders on request.
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