The Socialist Utopia as Child’s Play: The Games of H. G. Wells and E. Nesbit

The first edition of H. G. Wells’s 1911 publication Floor Games, a manual for a worldbuilding game for children, opens with a declaration: [On a floor] may be made an infinitude of imaginative games, not only keeping boys and girls happy for days together, but building up a framework of spacious and inspiring ideas in them for after life. The British Empire will gain new strength from nursery floors.[1] The concept that child’s play could alter the child’s future —

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The Endowment of Motherhood Wars of the 1900s

Who doesn’t love Mother? Consider two scenarios that faced late Victorian and Edwardian social reformers and opinion makers: working-class mother tending the family’s oh-so-many children while father drinks up his wages at the local public house (I’m thinking of the premise of Reginald Cripps’s Public House Reform); and, moving up a notch, mother pointlessly tending the family’s suburban villa (“The Laurels” of George and Weedon Grossmiths’ Pooter sagas) and anxiously watching one or two children (all the family can afford),

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