When H. G. Wells looked back upon his life in Experiment in Autobiography (1934), he remembered the period of his literary apprenticeship with fondness:

New openings in the 1890s provided Wells’ generation from ‘nowhere’ with ample opportunity to embark upon their careers, and the early years of the new century allowed them to consolidate their positions in the publishing trade. Indeed, during the Edwardian period, Wells and his fellow literary newcomers began to take control of the field that they had inherited from their Victorian predecessors. The extent of the shift that had taken place in literary power structures is evident in the ways in which Wells’ fellow former shopmen and ex-clerks were, by the close of the Edwardian decade, occupying key positions not only as writers of fiction, but also as essayists, reviewers, literary agents, editors, illustrators and publishers. A notable feature of this generation was their commitment, both as writers and as facilitators of writing, to raising the profile, in print culture, of the suburban and provincial worlds from which many of them had emerged. Although Wells and his friend Arnold Bennett led the charge to foreground literary representations of modern lower-middle-class life, many like-minded individuals followed in their wake. Beginning with an examination of the Edwardian careers of Bennett and Wells, the archetypal members of their class and generation of authors, this chapter then goes on to consider the emergence on the literary scene of several now-neglected writers, including W. Pett Ridge and Edwin Pugh, whose work was also primarily focused on ‘ordinary’ suburban life. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the role played by the new generation of literary agents and editors in shaping the literature of the day.