Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter contends that newspapers and magazines were pivotal in shaping Wells’s thought and development. It was in periodicals that Wells was first exposed to a wide audience, and nearly all of his vast output reached its initial readers in the pages of a huge variety of ephemeral publications. Tracking Wells’s relationship with the periodicals is important because of the insight it gives us into how his work was first framed, but the chapter also argues here that some of his most famous novels read differently in the knowledge that their author saw himself as “a journalist all the time.” The chapter traces some of the key points in Wells’s relationship with the periodical chronologically, concluding with the assertion that one of his characteristic thematic interests—the link between the strange and the everyday—is likely due to the reciprocal influence between the author and his magazines.</jats:p>