The letter that put Unamuno and Wells in the same cinema

For decades, the encounter between Miguel de Unamuno and H. G. Wells had the pleasing vagueness of a literary anecdote: plausible, well sourced, and just incomplete enough to keep archivists busy. That has now changed. A letter written by Unamuno from London on 2 March 1936 removes the guesswork and confirms that the two men spent an evening together, first at dinner and then at the cinema.

The document was found in the archive of the Unamuno House-Museum at the University of Salamanca. Addressed to his children, it says plainly that Unamuno had dinner with Wells and that Wells took him to see his film. The screening was Things to Come, shown at the Leicester Square Theatre in London. Wells had written the screenplay himself, and the film drew on his book The Shape of Things to Come. For once, the paper trail does not merely hint at an intellectual friendship; it records the outing in the blunt style of a man writing home before leaving London for Paris.

Until now, researchers had to work with fragments. There was a poem by Unamuno with references linked to the film’s themes, and there was also a report published by the correspondent of El Sol. Useful, certainly. Enough to suggest a meeting, not enough to prove the evening unfolded as suspected. Then came a handwritten invitation from Wells, surfaced in 2025, proposing dinner at his home on 28 February 1936 and a visit to Things to Come afterwards. The newly found letter now shows that the invitation was not just a polite gesture filed away and forgotten. It was acted on.

The timing fits neatly with Unamuno’s stay in the United Kingdom, where he had gone to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. The London note, brief as it is, closes the circle: dinner, cinema, departure for Paris. No dramatic revelation, no thunderclap from the archives, just the kind of confirmation historians tend to value and the rest of us tend to underrate until it is missing.

The original document will go on display in Bilbao, Unamuno’s home city, from 29 September to 30 October 2026 as part of the exhibition Let them invent it. Miguel de Unamuno and science. The show examines his relationship with science and places him alongside figures such as Albert Einstein, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Wells himself. Museums like to dress this up as discovery. In truth, they mostly do something more useful: they remind us that the record is often sloppier than the legend, and sometimes considerably more interesting.

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com