Standing at this table, I became conscious of the servile Pumblechook in a black cloak and several yards of hat-band, who was alternately stuffing himself, and making obsequious movements to catch my attention. The moment he succeeded, he came over to me (breathing sherry and crumbs) and said in a subdued voice, "May I, dear sir?" and did.

These two funerals did not by any means happen on the same day. One is the funeral of Mr. Polly's father (1920), the other the funeral of Mrs. Gargery in Great Expectations (1860). Yet Wells and Dickens are describing them from the same point of view and even using the same tricks of style (cf. the two vases and the two decanters). They are, both, humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details and whisking the page over irritably. They are generous-minded; they hate shams and enjoy being indignant about them; they are valuable social reformers; they have no notion of confining books to a library shelf. Sometimes the lively surface of their prose scratches like a cheap gramophone record, a certain poorness of quality appears, and the face of the author draws rather too near to that of the reader. In other words, neither of them has much taste: the world of beauty was largely closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells. And there are other parallels—for instance their method of drawing character, but that we shall examine later on. And perhaps the great difference between them is the difference of opportunity offered to an obscure boy of genius a hundred years ago and to a similar boy forty years ago. The difference is all in Wells' favour. He is far better educated than his predecessor; in particular the addition of science has strengthened his mind out of recognition and subdued his hysteria. He registers an improvement in society: Dotheboys Hall has been superseded by the Polytechnic. But he does not register any change in the novelist's art.