The Croquet Player was published by Chatto & Windus in November 1936 and is the most unsettling of Wells’s late works — a short, tightly constructed parable about the return of barbarism to civilized life. At barely 20,000 words, it is also among his most concentrated: every sentence advances the argument, and the argument is terrifying.
The Novel
The narrator is a croquet player — a man of no occupation, no intellectual curiosity, and no ambition beyond the next lawn party. He is, deliberately, the most complacent person Wells could imagine. While on holiday, he encounters Dr. Doré, a physician who has been working in the Doré marshes (a fictional English fen country), who tells him a disturbing story: the marshes are haunted. Not by ghosts, but by an atmosphere of violence and regression. Animals are becoming more savage. People are reverting to primitive behavior — casual cruelty, unreasoning fear, tribalism. It is as if the primordial past is seeping up through the soil.
The croquet player dismisses this as superstition. Then he meets a psychiatrist, Doré’s friend, who offers a rationalist interpretation that is even more disturbing: this is not a local phenomenon. It is happening everywhere. Humanity is regressing. The thin veneer of civilization is cracking, and the beast underneath is emerging. The psychiatrist points to the political situation — 1936, the year of the Spanish Civil War, the Nuremberg rallies, the Japanese invasion of China — as evidence.
The croquet player, confronted with this argument, does exactly what Wells expects: he refuses to engage, retreats into triviality, and goes back to his game.
Themes
The return of barbarism — writing in 1936, Wells saw fascism not as an aberration but as a reversion: the primal violence that civilization had suppressed was reasserting itself.
Complacency — the croquet player is England: comfortable, cultivated, and deliberately blind to approaching catastrophe.
The fragility of civilization — Wells’s lifelong theme reaches its most pessimistic expression. Civilization is not an achievement but a temporary condition, always at risk of collapse.
Collecting The Croquet Player
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1936): Blue cloth binding with gilt lettering. Dust jacket by Lynton Lamb.
Market values (with dust jacket):
- Fine in dust jacket: $500–$1,200
- Very good in dust jacket: $200–$500
- Without dust jacket: $50–$150
First American edition (Viking, New York, 1937): $200–$600 in dust jacket.
The novella’s brevity and its prophetic quality — it reads now as a warning about the war that would begin three years later — give it a special place among Wells’s later works.