H. G. Wells’s melancholy: The Anatomy of Frustration

H. G. Wells's 1936 dialogue novel, The Anatomy of Frustration, which reiterates his advocacy for a World State, has received scant critical attention. This article explores the work's place in Wells's oeuvre, its narrative structure, its relation to Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, and the various ways in which it reveals the substantive contradictions that undergird Wells's utopian projects. These contradictions are explored – placing them in relation to recent critical debates about Wells's politics – by focusing on the anti-Semitism evident in The Anatomy of Frustration. I argue in the article that attention to this prejudice allows us to ask important questions about the contradictions evident in Wells's utopianism.