This chapter puts Nineteen Eighty-Four in conversation with a literary predecessor who energized Orwell at the very root, H. G. Wells. Considering these two figures side by side, ‘Wells, Orwell, and the Dictator’ thinks, first, about how powerfully Wells had influenced Orwell and, equally, how deeply entangled the two writers were in their consideration of issues around freedom, the state, the individual, and the future. Even if they end up on opposite sides of the spectrum – Wells, a utopian who believed that a united world could leave humanity free, peaceful, and prosperous, and Orwell, an anti-utopian who saw in the trends of the twentieth century an image of humans obliterated by the mechanisms of power – the two share a set of preoccupations about power and the future that motivated their fiction and left a mark on the imaginative life of the twentieth century.

This essay explores father figures who meditate on their relation to a dominant late nineteenth- early twentieth-century construction of active masculinity, or figures who often find themselves uncomfortably far from the era’s gender ideals. Seeing their own lives as “limited” and constrained, or akin to the era’s fears of masculine “overcivilization,” these figures find solace in an imagined trajectory of masculine accomplishment.  Their sons, however, appear to them as promising to restore the family’s depleted vigor, for the younger generation appears as more self-determined and more manly, especially in professional matters. Such meditations on manhood lead to a belief in the developmental potential of the next generation, which promises to supply a long-absent manliness. Not only are the young more active men, engaged in innovative fields that were not available to their elders, but they also seem poised to recover the kind of familial masculine distinction that their elders fear that they forfeited, both for themselves and for their families.