Kipps: With an introduction by D.J. Taylor - Tapa dura

You can enjoy the novel as a jolly yarn about faux pas - there's a bit of Kipps in most of us - but you also sense that Wells found its theme a little close to the bone . . . As social inequality threatens to rise, it's hard not to wonder - despite the happy ending - if Kipps belongs to Britain's future as well as its past (GUARDIAN)

A disguised autobiography, an economic clarion call, a successful attempt to extend the English novel's social range . . . [Kipps] is, above all, a horribly funny book, written by a man who still believed that the most effective way of attacking something was to laugh at it (D.J. Taylor)

A Dickensian comedy about one ordinary man's struggle for self-improvement (GUARDIAN)

The novel combines rich comedy and biting social criticism with Dickensian verve (David Lodge Guardian)

First electricity. And then telephones. I feel as if I were living in an H G Wells novel. (Dowager Countess of Grantham, ITV's Downton Abbey written by Julian Fellowes)

Orphaned at an early age, raised by his aunt and uncle, and apprenticed for seven years to a draper, Artie Kipps is stunned to discover upon reading a newspaper advertisement that he is the grandson of a wealthy gentleman and the inheritor of his fortune. Thrown dramatically into the upper classes, he struggles desperately to learn the etiquette and rules of polite society. But as he soon discovers, becoming a `true gentleman' is neither as easy nor as desirable as it at first appears...