I don't know that I would agree he is above James in "quality." Wells was of course great, but he also put out a lot of trash. James may have been the more limited of the two in tone, topic, and social politics, but his work is of a different caliber in terms of prose, complexity, and coherence.

In particular, his _Outline of History_ is well worth reading for its examination of how the commons (in terms of common pastural areas and so forth shared by a community) were eroded away by the newfangled notion of individual property.

It's on Project Gutenberge, and the Librivox recording may be workable depending on your tolerance for voices and background noise.

Though it's worth noting that the authorship of that text is challenged/potentially problematic --- look up Florence Deeks' copyright challenge.

> Wells was way above James in quality

In all of my twelve years on this godforsaken site, i had never had the displeasure of reading something more wrong; it actually transcends being wrong and, as Pauli would put it, it's not even wrong.

I bet that appreciating what they’re really talking about would require digging into a broader debate about the best approaches to, and attitude toward the writing of, good literature, which was a decades-long topic among a bunch of major figures in literature in the late 19th and early 20th century.

I mean, there are probably always such debates going on to some degree, but this is a specific one that saw James and some fellows on a side opposed to a bunch of other authors. I only know about it because I happen to have read part of a book of criticism of EM Forster earlier this year, and I gather that debate was kinda the major topic among that set for a long while (Forster was on the opposite side of it from James)

I’ve read a fair amount of both, and I think that James is definitely the superior prose stylist. Wells has an interest in social structures that informs a great deal of his plots (especially (The Time Machine). They’re in many ways incomparable if only because their literary projects have very different aims.

In a 1958 collected correspondence between two famous authors, "everyone" has a very specific connotation! "Everyone likely to have picked up this book"

'Kipps', is the novel H G Wells, reportedly considered the most favourite amongst his works.

If you just want to dip in then I can heartily recommend Wells’ short stories, of which he wrote a bunch. Standard Ebooks has a nice edition for free: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/h-g-wells/short-fiction

Definitely do Time Machine first, then his other "classics for a reason" the War of the Worlds, the Invisible Man, the Island of Dr Moreau, and IMO the Food of the Gods. His work tends to have a sort of bipartite structure where the second half diverges quite a bit from the first or there is a major thematic shift partway, usually as a consequence of "committing to the bit." Sometimes it seems like he has lost the plot, other times that he has found it. But the books are extremely readable.

Absolutely everyone should read "The Time Machine." If you prefer, then an unabridged audiobook is great, I recommend putting in the effort to find a reading by Simon Vance. (It isn't a long book.) The first paragraph of The Time Machine, is one of the best introductory paragraphs ever written (in my opinion, obviously.) One relishes the imagery it reveals, as you read it, like a great main course of a fine meal - with delight, flavour and a promise of more.

And it seems, a snob of some standing himself!