King Ferdinand Charles and H. G. Wells’s View of the Balkan Slavs in 'The World Set Free'

Abstract

The present article deals with the chief villain from The World Set Free, Ferdinand Charles, the king of the Balkans, and also with what the ultimate fate of this character and his Balkan subjects in the novel reveals about H. G. Wells’s view of the Balkan Slavs and their future in the context of this writer’s utopian ideology. What this article essentially shows is that, when it comes to the South Slavs, The World Set Free is a fictional realisation of Wells’s essay ‘Common Sense and the Balkan States’, where Wells clearly distinguished between Balkan kings and common Balkan populaces, with the former characterised as an intolerable threat to the success of a Wellsian global utopia, and the latter as unenlightened but capable of participating in a Wellsian global utopia under the guidance of benevolent western democratic leaders. The disparaging, Balkanist portrayal of King Ferdinand Charles and a far less hostile attitude to his subjects in The World Set Free are in perfect accordance with Wells’s political views expressed in the aforesaid essay. This article also shows what historical figure from the early 20th century Wells’s King Ferdinand Charles was based on.

Keywords

• h. g. wells
• balkan slavs
• king ferdinand charles
• balkanism
• intertextual relations
• liberal view