The Door in the Wall Study Guide

The son of domestic servants, H. G. Wells cultivated a love of reading while bedridden after an injury when he was seven years old. He began his professional life as a science teacher, and his first published work was a biology textbook. His 1895 debut novel, The Time Machine, was an immediate hit, and the first of what he called his “scientific romances,” which also include The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. Though he is best known for his science fiction, he was interested in many genres and also wrote a number of short stories, biographies, and histories. Wells was married two times, and had a number of mistresses throughout his life, including English author Rebecca West. In the later years of his life, he turned his focus to social commentary and championed socialist causes, unsuccessfully running for Parliament as a Labour Party candidate in both 1922 and 1923. Before his death in 1946, his declining health contributed to the pessimism of his later fiction which predicted a hopeless future for humanity.

Wells wrote during the development of English literary modernism in the early twentieth century, though he is not traditionally considered a modernist. The transition of this period from Victorian strictness into modernism’s conscious break with tradition parallels Wallace’s movement from his strict upbringing into the freedom and expression of the garden. Wallace’s practical ideals, instilled in him by his old-fashioned father, are very much Victorian ideals of utilitarian dedication to duty over desire. Following Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, Britain was eager to shake off the conservative structures of the past and embrace new outlooks on culture and politics. In the “Door in the Wall,” Wallace is a political figure in a time of great political change in Britain: in 1906, the Liberals took a significant majority in Parliament, formed the Labour Party, and created a welfare program. Characteristic of this generation was a form of British liberal optimism, emerging also from disillusionment with the attitudes of the Victorian era: the belief that science has so improved the quality of life that there is little left to discover. Wells was a supporter of this optimism at the time of writing “The Door in the Wall.”

“The Door in the Wall” is not the first time Wells explored the idea of a young man who finds and loses a magical world. His 1901 short story “Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland,” like “The Door in the Wall,” is the tale of a regretful man unable to return to Fairy Land, and explores similar themes of a lost golden past and the conflict of ambition and contentment. Stories of doors to magical worlds—known as portal fantasies—are popular in children’s literature such as C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, And the Wardrobe and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. A modern portal fantasy series, Wayward Children by Seanan McGuire, tells the story of children like young Wallace, who experience a traumatic return to their real lives after experiencing a fantasy world and seek to find their doors again. As a pioneer of the science fiction genre, Wells inspired a number of authors, such as post-war author Arthur C. Clarke, and American science fiction legends Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Ursula K. Le Guin. James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, the protagonist of which seeks to return to the peace of Shangri-La, also takes inspiration from “The Door in the Wall.”