Joan and Peter

H G Wells (1866-1946) was an English writer, prolific in many genres. He wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography, and even two books of recreational war games. He is best remembered now for his science fiction novels including The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898), but during his own lifetime he was most prominent as a forward-looking social critic and from an early date was an outspoken socialist. His 1918 novel Joan and Peter is at once a satirical portrait of late-Victorian and Edwardian England, a critique of the English educational system on the eve of the First World War, a study of the impact of that war on English society, and a general reflection on the purposes of education. Wells himself regarded it as one of his most ambitious novels. Peter Stublands, born in 1893, is the son of Dolly, a vicar's daughter from a well-off family, and Arthur, a devotee of the Arts and Crafts movement and a Fabian socialist. He is brought up alongside Joan, the daughter of Dolly's brother born outside wedlock and entrusted to the Stublands. When Dolly and Arthur are both drowned, the guardianship of the two children falls first to Arthur's sisters, eccentric suffragettes with radical views, who place them in a 'faddish' school based around the ideas of Froebel and Ruskin, but they are later kidnapped by Dolly's staid Aunt Charlotte whose aim is to educate them more traditionally - with unhappy consequences for the children. When Dolly's cousin Oswald returns from Africa he takes over sole guardianship of Peter and Joan and undertakes to find them the best education possible. As they reach maturity, now both students at Cambridge, Joan and Peter, who have grown up as siblings, discover a deeper feeling for one another. Peter enlists in the Royal Flying Corps at the outset of the war and when he returns home on leave after being wounded Joan reveals her love for him and they marry, looking forward to the emergence of a new World State after the war.