An unpublished letter by Miguel de Unamuno has, 90 years on, confirmed a remarkable meeting in London between the Spanish writer and H. G. Wells, author of science-fiction classics such as ‘The War of the Worlds’ and ‘The Time Machine’.
The document has been found in the archive of the Unamuno House-Museum at the University of Salamanca. It is a letter sent by Unamuno to his children on 2 March 1936 from London, in which he explains that he had dinner with Wells and that the two of them went to the cinema afterwards.
The two writers attended a screening of “Things to Come” (“La vida futura”) at the Leicester Square Theatre, a film whose script had been written by Wells himself and which was inspired by his book “The Shape of Things to Come”.
Unamuno recorded that evening in a few lines addressed to his children: “Wells took me to see his film”, he wrote before leaving London to travel to Paris.
A meeting of which only clues existed
Until now there was no direct testimony from Unamuno to confirm the encounter. Researchers had two clues to work with: a poem by the Spanish writer containing references linked to the film’s themes, and a report published by the correspondent of the newspaper “El Sol”.
In 2025, however, a new piece emerged that allowed the story to be reconstructed in more detail: a handwritten invitation from H. G. Wells himself to Unamuno. The British author suggested having dinner at his home on 28 February 1936 and then going to see “Things to Come”. Unamuno was in the United Kingdom at the time to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford.
The letter now discovered confirms that the invitation did not remain merely a proposal and that the two intellectuals did indeed spend the evening together.
The original document will be on display from this Tuesday, 29 September to 30 October in Bilbao, Unamuno’s home city, as part of the exhibition “Let them invent it. Miguel de Unamuno and science”. The show explores the writer’s relationship with science and with some of the leading intellectual figures of his time, among them Albert Einstein, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Santiago Ramón y Cajal and H. G. Wells himself.