High Wages begins in 1905, the year Kipps was published, and Dorothy Whipple covers much of the same territory - there is a focus on the unnecessary hardships of the working poor, and on their vulnerabilities, and on the inequities inherent in a stratified society. The many references to Wells suggest that the similarities between this story and Kipps cannot be inadvertent - High Wages seemed to me an extension of Kipps its premise had been reinterpreted from a female perspective, but it had also been built upon foundations the earlier work provided. His novels are presented as having made a real difference in her life: she is emboldened by having read them, and in one difficult moment - perhaps the most difficult she will ever face - she argues her case successfully by using arguments culled straight from his books. Wells seems something of a hero to the protagonist of High Wages. Mills and mines mills and mines all the way to Manchester, and the brick, the stone, the grass, the very air deadened down to a general drab by the insidious filter of soot. Monstrous slag-heaps, like ranges in a burnt-out hell stretches of waste land rubbed bare to the gritty earth parallel rows of back-to-back dwellings great blocks of mill dwellings, the chimneys belching smoke as thick and black as eternal night itself upstanding skeletons of wheels and pulleys. They had made it but they could not, like God, look and see that it was good. They did well to avert their eyes from the landscape they had made. She could see the occupants of the first-class carriages playing cards, or fallen into unlovely sleep.

High Wages by Dorothy Whipple