Kipps - H. G. Wells

Kipps
by H. G. Wells
Penguin, 1941 first edition thus, paperback, 288 pp. plus 1 p. adverts
Condition: text unmarked, paper toned with age, front and rear panels good, spine worn with small loss at head and foot. A very scarce Penguin title.

Reception

Kipps eventually became one of Wells's most successful novels, at first it was slow to sell. While 12,000 copies had been sold by the end of 1905, more than a quarter of a million had been sold by the 1920s.

The novel received high praise from , but  complained that it showed "ferocious hostility to about five-sixths of the characters". Wells' biographer David C. Smith calls the novel "a masterpiece" and argued that with Kipps, Wells "is able to claim a permanent place in English fiction, close to, because of the extraordinary humanity of some of the characters, but also because of his ability to invoke a place, a class, a social scene." [Wikipedia]