The Wonderful Visit was published by J.M. Dent and Co. in September 1895 — the same year as The Time Machine — and is Wells’s first experiment with social satire, a mode he would later perfect in Kipps and Mr Polly. A vicar in the village of Siddermorton shoots what he believes is a rare bird and discovers he has winged an Angel — a being from another dimension, beautiful, innocent, and entirely unprepared for the reality of late-Victorian England.
The Novel
The Angel is brought to the vicarage and given clothes. He is astonished by everything: by money (“What is it for?”), by class distinctions (“Why does that man touch his hat?”), by the cruelty of hunting, by the misery of the poor, by the ugliness of English domestic architecture. His questions — naive but devastating — expose the absurdity of arrangements that everyone else takes for granted.
The village responds to the Angel with suspicion, hostility, and eventually violence. The doctor wants to study him as a specimen. The squire wants him removed as a social nuisance. The villagers, hearing he has wings, assume he is the Devil. The vicar — a decent but weak man — tries to protect him but cannot resist the pressure of his parish.
The Angel falls in love with a village girl, Delia, who is being exploited by a local farmer. He tries to help her. This act of compassion triggers the final crisis: the village turns against him, his wings (already damaged by the gunshot) are failing, and he dies — or rather, returns to his own dimension, taking Delia with him.
Themes
The outsider — the Angel is Wells’s first outsider figure: someone who sees English society clearly because he does not share its assumptions. This device would recur throughout Wells’s career.
Beauty vs. respectability — the Angel represents aesthetic and moral beauty; the village represents social respectability. They are incompatible. Respectability, in Wells’s view, is the enemy of everything valuable.
Institutional cruelty — the village is not deliberately evil. It is merely conventional. But convention, applied mechanically, produces cruelty — toward the unusual, the beautiful, and the poor.
Collecting The Wonderful Visit
First edition (J.M. Dent and Co., London, 1895): Green cloth binding with gilt lettering. No dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine copies: $2,000–$5,000
- Very good: $800–$2,000
- Good: $300–$800
First American edition (Macmillan, New York, 1895): Published the same year. $800–$2,000.
As one of Wells’s earliest works, published in his annus mirabilis of 1895 (alongside The Time Machine), the novel has significant bibliographic interest even though it is not among his best-known titles.