"The Man Who Could Work Miracles," by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells (1866-1946)

Our featured selection this month is the H.G. Wells short story "The Man Who Could Work Miracles," first published in 1898 in the Illustrated London News. According to WorldCat.org, the world's largest bibliographic database, it appeared for the first time in book form in the United States in 1899 as part of a Wells story collection entitled Tales of Space and Time, published by Doubleday of  New York.

The story mentions a particular date, Sunday, November 10, 1896, as the day when our protagonist, Mr. Fotheringay, "egged on and inspired by Mr. Maydig [a minister], began to work miracles."  In reality, November 10, 1896 was a Tuesday!  Wells goes on to say, "The reader's attention is specially and definitely called to the date. He will object, probably has already objected, that certain points in this story are improbable, that if  any things of the sort already described had indeed occurred, they would have been in all the papers a year ago."

Is Wells skirting a boundary between fact and fiction?  He was, after all, the original author of the novel The War of the Worlds, about a Martian invasion of Earth. An adaptation of The War of the Worlds was broadcast as a radio drama narrated by the great Orson Welles on October 30, 1938. It created widespread panic among radio listeners fooled by Welles's "Breaking News" approach to the the broadcast. They thought Martians had really begun to invade New Jersey.  By the way, October 30, 1938 was a Sunday!