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

Introduction

The World Set Free is one of the three fictional works of H. G. Wells where this author realistically described a devastating global war as a prelude not to the end of mankind but to a golden, utopian age of man’s civilisation.¹ The view that ‘the next great change in human society would have to come by bloodshed and disaster’ and that ‘humans were too stupid or too conservative’ to be able to attain world peace without first ‘put[ting] their finger into the fire’ (McConnell 24) stood with Wells throughout his utopian activism. Exactly such a view makes the core of this novel, which was written in 1913 and published in 1914, the year that saw the outbreak of World War One (Preface para. 1). In it, mankind is befallen by a total collapse of its economic system because of the discovery of atomic energy, and it then commences a global war characterised by unprecedented destruction. The war ends when humanity witnesses the horrors of atomic warfare and an enterprising Frenchman Leblanc then organises the Council of Brissago which, after some perilous entanglements, eventually succeeds in establishing a world government made up of enlightened statesmen and scientists, a government that, in the coming years, manages to create a lasting, peaceful, and progressive global utopia.

The World Set Free has, so far, not attracted much attention from scholars and literary critics. This is, perhaps, understandable if one takes into account that this novel suffers from a serious lack of imaginative exuberance, which Wells’s early scientific romances had in abundance, and that it is more propagandistic and homiletic than literary in nature (Bergonzi 21). To date, this work of propagandist fiction has been mainly acknowledged on account of its brilliant anticipation of the atomic bomb, perhaps Wells’s ‘most celebrated anticipation’ (McConnell 4), and, to a lesser extent, on account of its anticipation of the League of Nations, even though, historically speaking, the League of Nations eventually did not turn out to be as successful as the Council of Brissago in ensuring the unification and pacification of the whole world. No attention has been paid to the characters from this novel, who, in in spite of not being as memorable as, for instance, Griffin, the Invisible Man, or any of the protagonists from Wells’s masterful early works, should be analysed and examined for a better understanding of Wells’s work and thought.

Character analysis will be exactly the topic of this article, that is, this article will be aimed at analysing one specific character from The World Set Free – namely, King Ferdinand Charles as the book’s chief villain. The article will, specifically, have two objectives. The first objective will be to show that King Ferdinand Charles, judging by the way in which he is portrayed, is loosely based on a real historical figure, while the second objective will be to show that the ultimate fate of King Ferdinand Charles and his people in the novel implicitly reveals Wells’s personal attitude to the South Slavs and to the place they were supposed to occupy in his utopian agenda. Over the course of the imagological analysis of King Ferdinand Charles’s character, this article will rely on Maria Todorova’s theoretical concept of Balkanism, on the historical descriptions of one Balkan monarch from the early 20^th century, and on the intertextual relations between The World Set Free and Wells’s political essays, most notably his 1914 essay ‘Common Sense and the Balkan States’.

The Historical Inspiration for the Character of King Ferdinand Charles

King Ferdinand Charles is the most negative character of The World Set Free. He is the king of the Balkans and the only national sovereign who refuses to join the Council of Brissago and hand over his authority over his Balkan kingdom to the creators of the new utopian world order led by Leblanc and the English king Egbert. The Balkan king stands in stark opposition to the English king who selflessly decides to ‘fling [his] royalty and empire on the table’ (Wells, The World Set Free 158) because he realises that the existence of royal figures and their national states stands in the way of world peace. Contrary to Egbert, a king who willingly becomes an ex-king, Ferdinand Charles selfishly clings to his kingly title and refuses to allow the world government to disempower him and overtake the rule of his country. What is more, after postponing to hand over different levels of power in his country for some time on the grounds of various excuses, he eventually agrees verbally to submit to the will of the Council of Brissago, but his verbal submission turns out to be insincere because, whilst pretending to act in good faith, he dispatches a pair of aviators in an aeroplane with the orders to drop atomic bombs on the assembled conference at Brissago and thus make it possible for him to attain dominion over the whole world, now disarmed due to the ongoing peace negotiations at this Swiss town. In the end, the Balkan king’s insidious coup is thwarted, his secret supplies of atomic bombs are found, and he is executed along with his minister Pestovitch and his three ‘heavily faithful attendants’, as Wells himself refers to the three persons who were aiding the two of them when they were, all together, caught red-handed by the Council of Brissago’s searchers (191). With the death of King Ferdinand Charles, Wells, as the novel’s narrator, makes it abundantly clear that the last major obstacle to the establishment of a global republican utopia has now been removed and that, in the new world, though terribly ravaged by the three-year (1956–1959) world war and its radioactive atomic bombs, continuously exploding even long after the ceasefire, there is to be no more bellicose adventurism which, in Wells’s eyes, was closely related to the feudal, monarchical system.

When it comes to the historical inspiration for Wells’s Ferdinand Charles as the subject of this chapter, it should be first emphasised that the general silence of Wellsian scholars on this matter can be said to be broken by only one example – that of Wikipedia. Wikipedia, unreliable and disreputable as it is in the field of academic research, is nevertheless usually the first thing that modern-day searchers will find on the Internet, whether their search for any possible topic be for scholarly or purely informative purposes. In its article on The World Set Free, Wikipedia states that Wells’s King Ferdinand Charles is a Serbian king (‘The World Set Free’ sec. 2), which is inaccurate, as will be shortly shown. It is, perhaps, strangely ironical that an all-encompassing encyclopaedia such as Wikipedia, which may be said, in a way, to have been prophesied by Wells in his book The World Brain from the late 1930s (Stromberg), is used to spread misinformation about a work of its own forecaster.

Judging by the way in which Ferdinand Charles is portrayed in The World Set Free, this villainous character cannot have been based on any Serbian king, but instead, quite specifically, on the Bulgarian king of the time in which this book was written – namely, King Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, who reigned over this South Slavic nation in the eastern Balkans from 1887 to 1918. There are many clear indications that Wells must have used this royal historical figure as the inspiration for his fictional Balkan ruler in The World Set Free.

It would, perhaps, be best to begin with the appellations that Wells gives his character. The king’s name ‘Ferdinand Charles’ is obviously the anglicised version of one part of Ferdinand I’s full German name, which was ‘Ferdinand Maximilian Karl Leopold Maria’ (‘Ferdinand Karl’ is anglicised into ‘Ferdinand Charles’). Furthermore, another name that Wells uses for his fictional Balkan king is ‘the Slavic fox’ (Wells, The World Set Free 185, 189, 191, 194). This descriptive appellation is related to the historical fact that Ferdinand I of Bulgaria was called ‘Foxy Ferdinand’ because of his ‘reputation of an intriguer, of being “Foxy” and […] Machiavellian’ (Todorova 5; Markovich 43). Such a reputation was based on many things, but most notably on King Ferdinand I’s ‘duplicity over the Macedonian question’, that is, his frequent support to pro-Bulgarian insurgents against Ottoman rule in Macedonia despite his occasional promises to the great powers that he would not provoke armed hostilities there (Markovich 46–49). That was why Ferdinand I of Bulgaria was disliked in the West and ‘was given the image in the European Press of a persistent disturber of European peace’ (49), which corresponds perfectly well to Wells’s portrayal of King Ferdinand Charles as the world’s only national leader who disturbs world peace at the moment when much-needed unity among all the other world leaders has at last been achieved. The third appellation that is of interest here is the title ‘Caesar’, which is how Ferdinand Charles refers to himself in the novel. When, in the course of the book, Wells presents Ferdinand Charles’s plan to dispatch aviators to destroy with atomic bombs ‘the government of idealists and professors […] at Brissago’, the reader finds that what the Balkan king wants to become is ‘the new Caesar, the Master, the Lord of the Earth’ (Wells, The World Set Free 191). The fact that Ferdinand Charles sees himself as a Caesar is comparable to the fact that Bulgaria’s King Ferdinand I dreamed of becoming ‘a new Byzantine emperor’ seated in Constantinople and that he adopted the title of czar, which is the Slavic version of ‘Caesar’ or ‘emperor’ (Markovich 43; Wells, ‘The Future of Monarchy’ 84; Ferdinand of Bulgaria 147–153). Of course, it is clear that, in Wells’s novel, the ambitions of the Balkan king are vastly overblown compared to those of the Bulgarian king, given that the conquest of the whole world by far exceeds in magnitude the establishment of a new Byzantine empire in the Balkans and on the Bosporus.

It is not only Ferdinand Charles’s different appellations that point to this character’s similarity with Ferdinand I of Bulgaria. The physical characteristics of the Slavic fox are also indicative of this similarity. For example, this is how Wells describes the countenance of King Ferdinand Charles: ‘The Slavic fox was of a pallid fairness, he had a remarkably long nose, a thick, short moustache, and small blue eyes that were a little too near together to be pleasant’ (Wells, The World Set Free 191). Especially interesting here is the Slavic fox’s ‘remarkably long nose’ because it is well known that Ferdinand I of the Coburg dynasty, a German king on the throne of Bulgaria, had a large ‘Bourbon’ nose which was heavily caricatured in the western gazettes and newspapers of the late 19^th and early 20^th century (Markovich 43).

Another noteworthy indication of the similarity between Ferdinand Charles and Ferdinand I of Bulgaria is the fact that Wells calls the former’s country ‘a new but romantic monarchy’ (Wells, The World Set Free 190). This may be understood as an allusion to the fact that Ferdinand I was actually the first king of the modern Bulgarian state, and one who had great expansionist ambitions, which is something that Wells, in principle, was vehemently opposed to, regarding military expansionism as a characteristic of medieval times, of times that were supposed to have no place in modern human affairs.

To all these details, it would also be possible to add Wells’s somewhat later references to Ferdinand I of Bulgaria as ‘the most detestable of all Coburgers’ (Wells, ‘The Future of Monarchy’ 84), which reveals almost a personal loathing of this royal figure. Actually, Wells, in general, had a very negative attitude to monarchy and ardently supported republicanism and liberalism, but his animosity seems to have been most notably reserved for the Balkan kings of the time, especially the rulers of the two largest South Slavic kingdoms, Bulgaria and Serbia.² Such a stance was certainly founded on the fact that these two rulers were more or less directly involved in a whole series of atrocious events that the early 20^th-century public in Western Europe was very well familiar with and with which it was disgusted. These atrocious events included the 1895 assassination of Bulgaria’s former prime minister Stefan Stambolov (possible but not proven involvement of King Ferdinand I), the 1903 assassination of Serbia’s King Aleksandar Obrenović (possible but not proven involvement of King Petar Karađorđević), and the protracted bloody warfare in Macedonia which culminated in the Second Balkan War of 1913 between Bulgaria and Serbia (Markovich 42–43, 49–53, 69–70; Todorova 3; The Other Balkan Wars 5). There is little doubt that the general image of the Balkan peoples and their kings created by the western media of the time greatly affected Wells’s decision to choose none other than the then reigning Bulgarian king as a model for his villainous disturber of peace from The World Set Free.

Leaning on the theoretical deliberations of the Bulgarian scholar Maria Todorova, it would be possible to view Wells’s King Ferdinand Charles through the lens of her concept of Balkanism. In other words, when one takes into consideration the fact that King Ferdinand Charles is depicted as a power-hungry, selfish, and warlike opposer of an essentially pacifist, altruist, and republican world government, it becomes clear that this portrayal fits with the West’s tendency to regard the peoples of the Balkans, and especially the Balkan Slavs, as ‘the other of Europe’, as inherently backward, violent and barbaric, as hopelessly bellicose tribes that ‘do not care to conform to the standards of behavio[u]r devised as normative by and for the civili[s]ed world’ (Todorova 3). According to Todorova, this disparaging and prejudiced view of the Balkans came into existence exactly in the early 1900s, especially during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), when Wells was writing The World Set Free, and, in the 1990s, when the western part of the Balkans (ex-Yu territory) again found itself in a vortex of war and devastation, this extremely negative anti-Balkanite sterotype became even more firmly entrenched in the collective mindset of the West (3–6). So, the idea that the Balkanites (especially the Orthodox Slavic ones) are, by nature, non-European in cultural terms and that they do not deserve a place in the family of European or western nations, which was advanced in the West by many western travellers and war correspondents in the Balkans at the time, and perhaps most notably by Mary Edith Durham,³ seems to have found fertile ground in the mind of H. G. Wells, who decided to include it in his novel (6). With his decision to have his villainous Balkan monarch end like a pathetic failure, one that is eventually shot on the spot without a trial, immediately after being caught red-handed with his atomic bombs, Wells conveys the message that not only monarchism as such must give way to republicanism and democracy so that mankind would survive and thrive, but also that South Slavic monarchs are among the political actors who hinder the world’s progress toward that goal the most.

Wells’s portrayal of his Balkan monarch turns out to be extremely negative, even more than was realistic in the context of the political scene of the early 20^th century, because neither of the two Balkan rulers, neither the Bulgarian nor the Serbian one, for all their expansionist ambitions directed not only against the fading Ottoman Empire but also, in the case of the Serbian king, against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ever went any further than their respective ethnic spaces in the Balkans, whereas King Ferdinand Charles is shown as aspiring to conquer no less than the whole world. Perhaps traces of such thinking may be found in some of Wells’s early fictional works, such as ‘The Stolen Bacillus’ (1894) and The Invisible Man (1897), where Wells elaborated upon the idea that even an ostensibly weak individual can threaten the existence of a large community if that individual is immoral and if advanced technology or weapons of mass destruction fall into their hands. However, whether or not it would be possible to trace the evolution of Wells’s thought in this case, two things are certain – first, that Wells’s portrayal of a Balkan political figure in The World Set Free is exaggerated and, second, that this exaggeratedly negative portrayal is not the whole story when it comes to discussing Wells’s stance on the South Slavs in this utopian novel.

The World Set Free and Wells’s View of the Balkan Slavs

Although Wells’s portrayal of a South Slavic character is extremely denigrating, even chauvinistic at first glance, this does not mean that Wells’s personal view of the Balkan Slavs was such in a general sense. In fact, when one pays attention to a couple of details from The World Set Free and brings them into connection with what Wells wrote explicitly about South Slavs the same year in which he published this novel, it becomes possible to argue that The World Set Free does not so much contain a xenophobic attitude to the Balkan Slavs as an implicit benevolent call for their integration into the family of the world’s nations.

The first important detail that needs to be brought to the attention of the reader is the fact that, in the last two chapters of the novel, that is, after the elimination of King Ferdinand Charles and his closest associates, Wells describes the overall progress that mankind has achieved since then without mentioning any of the world’s nations as excluded from the all-encompassing utopian prosperity. The impression that the reader gets is that the Balkan Slavs as a whole were not punished for their king’s serious transgression and that they were integrated into the Wellsian utopia under the leadership of the Council of Brissago on equal terms with all the other peoples of the world. In addition to the absence of any kind of nationality-related discrimination in Wells’s description of mankind’s utopian progress following the defeat of King Ferdinand Charles, what also points to the fact that no punishment was inflicted on the general population of the Balkan kingdom is the fact that the ex-king of England, who might be seen as one of Wells’s three alter egos in the novel (alongside Frederick Barnet and Marcus Karenin), assumes a benevolent attitude to the common populace of the Balkan kingdom immediately after the liquidation of their ruler. What is meant here is that Egbert tells his friend and associate, formerly his royal adviser, Firmin not to bury the executed five renegades near a well because ‘people will have to drink from that well’ (Wells, The World Set Free 209). Given that this scene takes place in an unspecified location in the territory of the Balkan kingdom, it is clear that the ex-king Egbert’s request for the slain transgressors to be buried in the field, away from the source of drinkable water, shows that he, almost in a fatherly manner, takes care of the well-being of the Balkan locals living in the vicinity of the place of Ferdinand Charles’s execution, and that he has no intention of punishing the entire people for the blunders of their national government. The Balkan people at large, as it turns out, are absolved from responsibility as the blame is laid only on the over-ambitious leaders of this country. Ex-King Egbert’s attitude to the Balkanites as a whole is to be taken, of course, as the attitude of the Council of Brissago, where he, together with the Frenchman Leblanc, has played a crucial role in the course of the novel, and also as the attitude of the writer himself, as it has already been mentioned that this fictional Englishman is to be regarded as an exponent of Wells’s own utopian ideology.

There is also one more significant detail which shows that Wells did not intend to incriminate the entire people of the Balkan kingdom for the misconduct of its ruler. This detail is the moment when Wells says that, in his refusal to fully submit his royal prerogatives to the Council of Brissago, King Ferdinand Charles ‘was enthusiastically supported by his subjects, still for the most part an illiterate peasantry, passionately if confusedly patriotic, and so far with no practical knowledge of the effect of atomic bombs’ (185). The phrase ‘an illiterate peasantry, passionately if confusedly patriotic’ is especially important here as it creates the impression that the populace of the Balkan kingdom supported their king out of sheer ignorance, rather than out of any kind of sincere belief in Ferdinand Charles’s ideology which, as everyone can see from Wells’s description, was autocratic and bellicose. As it turns out, the Balkan people are forgiven for their misplaced allegiance on the grounds of their ignorance and confusion and are allowed to join the Wellsian utopia of the whole world, where they will be educated and taught to work together with the rest of the world on constantly improving the general conditions of human life all over the globe.

The stance that the Balkan peoples are fit to be part of not only the Western civilisation but also of the whole world, that is to say, that they should not be shunned and dismissed as hopelessly barbaric by the ‘enlightened’⁴ westerners, is also explicitly present in Wells’s 1914 essay ‘Common Sense and the Balkan States’. In this essay, Wells defended the Balkan Slavs, especially the Bulgarians and Serbs from, as he thought, overly harsh and even hypocritical accusations on the grounds of some of their recent cruel deeds, such as, for example, the two regicides committed by the Serbs in 1903 and 1914 (the assassination of King Aleksandar Obrenović and the Austro-Hungarian heir-apparent Franz Ferdinand) and ‘the endless cruelties and barbarities of the warfare in Macedonia’ (Wells, ‘Common Sense and the Balkan States’ 90). In words that very much resemble his repudiation of the ways of British imperialism from The War of the Worlds,⁵ Wells reminds the English and the Americans that they also committed atrocities in their not so distant past and that they should, therefore, be more forgiving to the Serbs and Bulgarians for their recent misconduct which, according to Wells, is an unavoidable characteristic of the semi-barbaric stage of cultural development that the Balkanites were in at the time (89–92). Wells argues that, contrary to what many English and Americans thought in the early 1900s, the common populaces of Bulgaria and Serbia are capable of ‘participation in the fellowship of European nations’, and, according to him, the only reasonable policy for the British to conduct apropos of the Balkans in the period following the Great War was to support the creation of a new Balkan League that would include not only Serbia and Bulgaria but also Greece and Romania, with Greece receiving Cyprus, Bulgaria enlarged at the expense of Serbia, and Serbia and Romania considerably enlarged at the expense of Austro-Hungarian territory in accordance with the ethnic map of certain areas of this Central European empire (89–96). As Wells believed, the only obstacles to successfully pacifying the Balkans and bringing this, often unstable, peninsula within the pale of Western civilisation are the kings of Serbia and Bulgaria. Wells refers to these two as ‘ambition-pimples upon the fair face of the world’ (Wells, ‘The Need of a New Map of Europe’ 56) and claims that they corrupt the behaviour of their own peoples, whom he believes to be quite teachable in spite of their general ignorance and poor education:

Judging by Wells’s description of the state of affairs in the Balkans at the very beginning of the First World War, it is clear that his stance on the Balkan Slavs was absolutely liberal and contrary to the stance held by most British and Americans, especially conservatives in Britain, who, with regard to the Balkan peninsula, advocated and practised the policy of non-involvement in military terms and even the policy of Turkophilia and Austrophilia in political terms (Todorova 101–102).⁶ It follows naturally that the official Balkan policy of the late 19^th- and early 20^th-century Britain was one of aloofness and against forming any close ties with the newly established independent Orthodox Christian Slavic states in the Balkans (Whitman 56). Opposing the Disraelian conservatives were the Gladstonian liberals who, from the 1870s onwards, advocated Britain’s involvement in Balkan affairs in favour of the Balkan peoples that were, at the time, arduously fighting for their full liberation from Ottoman oppression (Todorova 101; Perkins 31). With his idea that the English and Americans were supposed to clear their minds of irrational and counter-productive contempt for the Orthodox Balkan Slavs and that they should accept these peoples and teach them to become more progressive and less barbaric, Wells was clearly like-minded with the liberals who, unlike the non-Wellsian conservatives, believed in a successful integration of the Balkan Slavs into the Western civilisation, with, it goes without saying, the more advanced westerners guiding the less advanced Balkanites on the ‘right’⁷ path just as a father guides his immature son (Wells, ‘Common Sense and the Balkan States’ 92; Perkins 67). It may be even said that, when it comes to the Balkan question, Wells figures as a very liberal thinker because his belief in the capacity of the Balkanites to catch up with Europe and North America in political, cultural, economic, and technological terms was not considerably affected by the Serbian regicide of 1903 which landed, perhaps, even the most powerful blow to the reputation of Serbia and the Slavic Balkans at large in the eyes of the Western world (Todorova 118).

Towards the end of this discussion about how Wells’s liberal view of the Balkan peoples is implicitly inferable from The World Set Free, it is necessary to mention that Wells’s musings about the Balkans and about the western treatment of them from his essay ‘Common Sense and the Balkan States’, where not only the Bulgarians are mentioned, whose king was chosen as a model for the character of King Ferdinand Charles, but also the Serbs, are absolutely relevant for this analysis of The World Set Free for one simple reason. That reason is the fact that King Ferdinand Charles should not be understood literally as Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, just as Ferdinand Charles’s Balkan kingdom should not be literally understood as the Bulgaria of the early 1900s. Ferdinand Charles was simply inspired by the historical Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, but he is actually a fictional character, one that exists in his own separate fictional realm, outside of historical reality, and the same is with the Slavic fox’s fictional Balkan kingdom, whose borders are not defined in the novel. As a matter of fact, if one takes into consideration the fact that Wells keeps mentioning only the word Balkans in the novel, and never the word Bulgaria (nor Serbia), and that even the Slavic fox’s minister is called Pestovitch, which is clearly not a Bulgarian surname but a Serbo-Montenegrin one, it becomes reasonable to argue that Wells’s rogue kingdom from The World Set Free is some kind of a fictional entity which probably extends over the territories of all the independent South Slavic countries in 1913 (Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro), including, perhaps, even some other areas of the Balkans. Of course, the lack of abundantly clear geographical references precludes a perfectly accurate determination of the Balkan kingdom’s territorial expanse, but the presence of a non-Bulgarian, Serbo-Montenegrin name should be taken as an important element there.

Finally, it might be of some value to comment on the fact that, in The World Set Free, Wells, as has been shown in this article, demonstrated the ability to present two different, mutually opposite stances on the South Slavs. Explicitly, he denounced them through the vilification of their king Ferdinand Charles and his government, but, implicitly, he defended them from what he saw as the Western world’s excessively severe and unfair repudiations. It is not that these opposite attitudes are irreconcilable, for, as has been shown, their reconcilability is perfectly explainable by the fact that Wells saw two different bodies in Balkan Slavic societies – on the one hand, illiterate and ignorant, but, inherently, not so evil common populaces, and, on the other, nationalistic, power-hungry, and immoral kings, who abuse the ignorance and naivety of their subjects and take advantage of their gullibility for their own expansionist goals. However, it is nevertheless indubitable that two different views of the South Slavs are apparent in The World Set Free and that, because of his ability to be somewhat ambiguous in his dealings with political matters, Wells resembles William Shakespeare, arguably the greatest playwright of all time. In some of his plays – for instance, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest – Shakespeare presented confrontations between Europeans and various non-European ‘others’ such as, for example, the Jews (represented by Shylock in The Merchant of Venice) or indigenous tribes of the Americas (represented metaphorically by Caliban in The Tempest). In these two works, the English playwright presented Shylock and Caliban negatively, as opposed to the more positive portrayal of the European characters that they come into clash with. However, the situation is in neither of these two works so clear-cut as both Shylock and Caliban are given voices of their own, they are both allowed to, at least once, tell their European antagonists that it is because of their oppressive behaviour that they are filled with hate and vengefulness (Vaughan 144, 150; Heijes & Schülting 1–2; Петровић 32, 51–53). These complaints, of course, remain without a proper answer in the course of the plays because there is no proper answer to them, given that the wrongs done by the Europeans to the European Jews and American native tribes are indisputable historical facts. So, it may be safely argued that Shakespeare was skilful in producing ambiguous texts when it came to confrontations between different nationalities or cultures, and the same can be said of H. G. Wells, who also skilfully presented two different views of South Slavs in the context of their direct clash with the western establishers of a global utopia, and even merged those two views coherently, into a single whole that does not suffer from any illogicalities.

In this context, it turns out that Brian Aldiss was absolutely right when he referred to Wells as ‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’ (132). Of course, when he wrote this comparison, Aldiss certainly had other, more general things in mind, such as the power of imagination and versatility of oeuvre, but, as it seems, the comparison also stands for such, more specific things as is the ability to be ambiguous about the national question in literary texts.

Conclusion

There is more to The World Set Free than just its aspects of technological and social prophecy. Its characters are also interesting for researchers, and perhaps, most importantly, the novel’s villain, the Balkan king Ferdinand Charles. This article has shown that this character must have been based on a real historical figure from the time in which Wells wrote this book. Wells’s King Ferdinand Charles was, contrary to what Wikipedia says, not a Serbian king, he was even less inspired by the Serbian king on the eve of the First World War, but he was rather inspired by the reigning Bulgarian king of the time, Ferdinand I of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty. As the article has shown, the character of the Slavic fox (as King Ferdinand Charles is otherwise called) was created in the time when Europe, that is, the Western world, had just coined a new disparaging xenophobic term, in addition to Orientalism – namely, Balkanism. Wells’s King Ferdinand Charles is definitely an example of a westerner’s disparaging Balkanist discourse, as this fictional royal figure is portrayed as hopelessly bellicose and power-hungry, which are characteristics that Wells held in low regards and which, in the eyes of early-20^th-century westerners, were mostly associated with the Balkanites because of the atrocities that were going on at that time in Europe’s south-eastern peninsula.

Even though Wells portrayed his South Slavic king very negatively, this does not mean that his general stance on all South Slavs was also negative. As shown in the article, in The World Set Free, Wells implicitly called for a less severe attitude than was common in early-20^th-century Britain, he called for the inclusion of South Slavs into a western-led utopia of the world. This conclusion was reached on the basis of certain details in the text of The World Set Free and also on the basis of the obvious intertextual relationship between this novel and Wells’s 1914 essay ‘Common Sense and the Balkan States’. In fact, it may be argued that The World Set Free is a fictional realisation of Wells’s essayistic ideas about Balkan Slavs from ‘Common Sense and the Balkan States’. Overall, Wells’s view of the Balkan Slavs boils down to a very negative (Balkanist) attitude to South Slavic kings and a far more positive, though clearly patronising, stance on the common populaces of Balkan Slavdom.

In the context of the general opinion in Wells’s own country about the South Slavs in the early 1900s, it is reasonable to say that his stance on the Slavic Balkanites was benevolent and open-minded, in spite of his exaggeratedly negative depiction of King Ferdinand Charles in The World Set Free, because many Britons and, even more widely, westerners, at that time, believed that the common populaces of Orthodox Balkan Slavic kingdoms were hopelessly barbaric and incapable of catching up with the West in cultural terms no matter how benevolent and patient their enlightened tutors might be. The prevalent perception in the West was even that the Balkan kings, for all their vices, were “somewhat more moderate and thoughtful” than their subjects (The Other Balkan Wars 4), for which reason, especially in Britain, no close ties with Orthodox Balkan States were deemed desirable and, in the several decades preceding the outbreak of World War One, British political support was actually given to the empires that were seen as capable of stopping the expansion of Orthodox Slavic Balkan kingdoms – namely, Austria-Hungary and Turkey.

As a final remark, it may be said that, although Wells’s patronising stance on the Balkan Slavs does figure as benevolent in the context of the general Balkanophobia of the Anglo-Saxon world in the early 20^th century, such disparaging portrayals as was his portrayal of King Ferdinand Charles, and even his subjects, to a lesser extent, in The World Set Free should not be perpetuated now or in the future, and in spite of the fact that, in the meantime (between 1913 and today), the Balkans had once again shocked the world with a war of staggering brutality (the Yugoslav Wars). After all, despite their bellicose past and their still uncertain present, the Balkanites share the same human identity with all the other nations of the world, including the western ones that are often seen as the pinnacle of sociocultural evolution, and it is for this reason that any stereotypical representations of Balkan nations and cultures should be fought against, just as, in her book Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova clearly strove to fight against the Balkanist discourse in the West, without ever attempting to refute the Western civilisation’s great cultural and political achievements. So, if this world is to progress towards a better and fairer future, all Balkanist, Orientalist, and other stereotypical representations should remain in the past. This applies, first and foremost, to heavily biased representations of different nationalities, but also to those containing somewhat milder bias. A better world must be built on a foundation of full equality, rather than on a bedrock of national or racial bias, and so global progress in democratic values should definitely be accompanied by a more positive discourse on all Balkan peoples.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.