Wells wasn't a Marxist; he was, if anything closer to the ideals of Lascelles or the idealistic socialism of William Morris. Which is one of my major problems with the idea of steampunk-as-critique; very few people I've come across on the steampunk side seem to know enough about the era for their critiques to be bouncing off anything solid. Take corsets as outer-wear. The radical Victorian - the New Woman of the nineties, say - wanted to get away from everything corsets symbolised. Generally, you see radical feminist dialogue of the era comparing corsets to foot-binding in China - a comparison fraught with both promise and issues in terms of radical analysis but which basically comes down to a persepctive in which the female body is radically mutilated and the woman within the clothing is forced to become complicit in her own mutilation to suit not only the male gaze but (senior) female public opinion. There's lots you can do with corsets, but wearing them visibly isn't - it seems to me - much of a critique compared to the impact a Victorian woman could provoke by visibly not wearing them at all.