INSCRIBED TO HENRY JAMES
Tales of Space and Time
Harpers, 1900.
First edition. Original sand coloured cloth stamped in dark brown and gilt. Author's presentation copy, inscribed to Henry James on the front blank "Henry James from HG Wells" followed by a small sketch of a cartoon caveman wielding a club, possibly a reference to the story, "A Story of The Stone Age" within the book. A very good copy indeed, with a little wear to the corners and very slight dustiness to the cloth.
A fine association, linking two major writers of the late nineteenth century. Henry James and H. G. Wells appear to have met in 1898. Three years earlier Wells had, as a drama critic, witnessed James's public discomfiture at the first night of Guy Domville, when the gallery booed the American novelist as he came out to take a bow before a fashionable London audience. James wrote to Wells on 20 November 1899 to thank him for the gift of this and another book (publication was November 1899): "These new tales I have already absorbed and, to the best of my powers, assimilated. You fill me with wonder and admiration" (Edel and Ray 62). In 1900, when Wells moved to Spade House, Sandgate, across Romney Marsh from James's house at Rye, the two began to meet with some frequency. They spent long hours in the Lamb House garden or in the library, in endless talk. Their friendship eventually foundered on their fundamental differences of outlook, both social and literary, but this presentation dates from the time when their friendship was in its first flush.
Stock ID: 33852
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