H. G. Wells 
The New Machiavelli 

The New Machiavelli is a 1911 novel by H. G. Wells that was serialised in The English Review in 1910. Because its plot notoriously derived from Wells’s affair with Amber Reeves and satirised Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was ’the literary scandal of its day’. The New Machiavelli purports to be written in the first person by its protagonist, Richard ‘Dick’ Remington, who has a lifelong passion for ‘statecraft’ and who dreams of recasting the social and political form of the English nation. Remington is a brilliant student at Cambridge, writes several books on political themes, marries a wealthy heiress and enters parliament as a Liberal influenced by the socialism of a couple easily recognisable as the Webbs, only to go over to the Conservatives.