The Wonderful Visit also has strong satirical themes, gently mocking customs and institutions of Victorian England as well as idealistic rebellion itself.

The angel's one talent is his divine violin-playing, but he is discredited at a reception that Lady Hammergallow agrees to host when it is discovered that he cannot read music and confides to a sympathetic listener that he has taken an interest in the vicar's serving girl, Delia.

After the angel destroys some barbed wire on a local baronet's property, Sir John Gotch gives the vicar one week to send him away before he begins proceedings against him.

"Then in a flash he saw it all, saw this grim little world of battle and cruelty, transfigured in a splendour that outshone the Angelic Land, suffused suddenly and insupportably glorious with the wonderful light of Love and Self-Sacrifice.

[10] In 1907 George Bernard Shaw discouraged Wells from thoughts he had long harboured of turning the book into a play; at least four attempts to dramatise the work—some of them realised, some not—seem to have been made, in 1896, 1900, 1921, and 1934.

"[12] Joseph Conrad, whom Wells met when he reviewed his early work favourably, admired The Wonderful Visit and wrote to him to praise his "imagination so unbounded and so brilliant.

An operatic adaptation, La visita meravigliosa, by Nino Rota, premiered in 1970; an excerpt from the work was performed at Federico Fellini's funeral in 1993.