Reception
Though Kipps eventually became one of Wells's most successful novels, at first it was slow to sell. But 12,000 copies had been sold by the end of 1905, and by the 1920s more than a quarter of a million. The novel earned high praise from Henry James, but Arnold Bennett complained that the book showed "ferocious hostility to about five sixths of the characters.". Biographer David C. Smith called the novel "a masterpiece," and argued that with Kipps, The History of Mr Polly, and Tono-Bungay Wells "is able to claim a permanent place in English fiction, close to Dickens, because of the extraordinary humanity of some of the characters, but also because of his ability to invoke a place, a class, a social scene."
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Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)