H.G. Wells

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Current revision as of 04:23, 18 April 2011

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 –) is an English author, best known for his work in the scientific romance genre. He is also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, and has written a number of text books. Wells has long been an outspoken socialist and sympathetic to pacifist views, although he supported the Weltkrieg once it was under way, and his later works have became increasingly political and didactic. His middle-period novels (1900–1920) were less scientific-romantic; covering lower-middle class life and the "New Woman" and the Suffragettes. He lives in London in the Union of Britain.

Early life

Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 47 High Street, Bromley, in the county of Kent, on 21 September 1866. Called "Bertie" in the family, he was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells (a former domestic gardener, and at the time a shopkeeper and amateur cricketer) and his wife Sarah Neal (a former domestic servant). The family was of the impoverished lower middle class. An inheritance had allowed the family to acquire a shop in which they sold china and sporting goods, although it failed to prosper: the stock was old and worn out, and the location was poor. He managed to earn a meagre income, but little of it came from the shop; Joseph received an unsteady amount of money from playing professional cricket for the Kent county team. Payment for skilled bowlers and batsmen came from voluntary donations afterward, or from small payments from the clubs where matches were played.

A defining incident of young Wells's life was an accident he had in 1874, which left him bedridden with a broken leg. To pass the time he started reading books from the local library, brought to him by his father. He soon became devoted to the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access; they also stimulated his desire to write. Later that year he entered Thomas Morley's Commercial Academy, a private school founded in 1849 following the bankruptcy of Morley's earlier school. The teaching was erratic, the curriculum mostly focused, Wells later said, on producing copperplate handwriting and doing the sort of sums useful to tradesmen. Wells continued at Morley's Academy until 1880. In 1877, his father, Joseph Wells, fractured his thigh. The accident effectively put an end to Joseph's career as a cricketer, and his subsequent earnings as a shopkeeper were not enough to compensate for the loss of the primary source of family income.

No longer able to support themselves financially, the family instead sought to place their sons as apprentices in various occupations. From 1880 to 1883, Wells had an unhappy apprenticeship as a draper at the Southsea Drapery Emporium, Hyde's. His experiences at Hyde's were later used as inspiration for some of his novel material The Wheels of Chance and Kipps, which delve into the life of a draper's apprentice as well as providing a critique of the world's distribution of wealth.

Herbert's parents' marriage was a turbulent relationship: due primarily to his mother being a Protestant and his father a self-confessed freethinker. When his mother returned to work as a lady's maid (at Uppark, a country house in Sussex), one of the conditions of work was that she would not be permitted to have living space for her husband and children. Thereafter, she and Joseph lived separate lives: though they never divorced and neither ever developed extramarital liaisons. As a consequence, Herbert's personal troubles increased as he subsequently failed as a draper and also, later, as a chemist's assistant. After each failure, he would arrive at Uppark "the bad shilling back again!" as he said and stay there until a fresh start could be arranged for him. Fortunately for Herbert, Uppark had a magnificent library in which he immersed himself, reading many classic works, including Plato's Republic, and More's Utopia. This would be the beginning of Herbert George Wells's venture into literature.

Teacher

In October 1879 Wells's mother arranged through a distant relative, Arthur Williams, for him to join the National School at Wookey in Somerset as a pupil-teacher, a senior pupil who acted as a teacher of younger children. In December that year, however, Williams was dismissed for irregularities in his qualifications and Wells was returned to Uppark. After a short apprenticeship at a chemist in nearby Midhurst, and an even shorter stay as a boarder at Midhurst Grammar School, he signed his apprenticeship papers at Hyde's. In 1883 Wells persuaded his parents to release him from the apprenticeship, taking an opportunity offered by Midhurst Grammar School again to become a pupil-teacher; his proficiency in Latin and Science during his previous, short stay had been remembered.

The years he spent in Southsea had been the most miserable of his life to that point, but his good fortune at securing a position at Midhurst Grammar School meant that Wells could continue his self-education in earnest. The following year, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (in 1890 it became the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, but it was renamed following the 1925 British Revolution,) in London, studying biology under Thomas Henry Huxley. As an alumnus, he later helped to set up the Royal College of Science Association, of which he became the first president in 1909. Wells studied in his new school until 1887 with a weekly allowance of twenty-one shillings (a guinea) thanks to his scholarship. This ought to have been a comfortable sum of money (at the time many working class families had "round about a pound a week" as their entire household income) Some of the text is available online. yet in his Experiment in Autobiography, Wells speaks of constantly being hungry, and indeed, photographs of him at the time show a youth so thin and malnourished.

He soon entered the Debating Society of the school. These years mark the beginning of his interest in a possible reformation of society. At first approaching the subject through The Republic by Plato, he soon turned to contemporary ideas of socialism as expressed by the recently formed Fabian Society and free lectures delivered at Kelmscott House, the home of William Morris. He was also among the founders of The Science School Journal, a school magazine which allowed him to express his views on literature and society, as well as trying his hand at fiction: the first version of his novel The Time Machine was published in the journal under the title, The Chronic Argonauts. The school year 1886–1887 was the last year of his studies. In spite of having previously successfully passed his exams in both Biology and Physics, his lack of interest in Geology resulted in his failure to pass and the subsequent loss of his scholarship.

It was not until 1890 that Wells earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the [University of London External Programme. In 1889–90 he managed to find a post as a teacher at Henley House School where he taught and admired A. A. Milne.

Upon leaving the Normal School of Science, Wells was left without a source of income. His aunt Mary—his father's sister-in-law—invited him to stay with her for a while, which solved his immediate problem of accommodation. During his stay at his aunt's residence, he grew increasingly interested in her daughter, Isabel. He would later go on to court her.

Personal life

H. G. Wells's home in the mid-1890s: 143 Maybury Road, Woking

In 1891 Wells married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells, but left her in 1894 for one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (known as Jane), whom he married in 1895.[9] He had two sons with Amy Catherine: George Philip (known as "Gip") in 1901 (d.1985) and Frank Richard in 1903.

During his marriage to Amy Robbins, Wells had affairs with a number of women, including the American birth-control activist Margaret Sanger and novelist Elizabeth von Arnim. In 1909 he had a daughter, Anna-Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves, whose parents, William and Maud Pember Reeves, he had met through the Fabian Society; and in 1914, a son, Anthony West (1914–1987), by the novelist and feminist Rebecca West, twenty-six years his junior.[12] Despite Amy Catherine's knowledge of some of these affairs, she remained married to Wells until her death in 1927.[10] Wells also had affairs with Odette Keun and Moura Budberg.

"I was never a great amourist", Wells wrote in Experiment in Autobiography (1934), "though I have loved several people very deeply."

Writer

Wells's first non-fiction bestseller was Anticipations (1901). When originally serialised in a magazine it was subtitled, "An Experiment in Prophecy", and is considered his most explicitly futuristic work. Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is interesting both for its hits (; moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom;) and its misses (he did not expect successful aircraft before 1950, he thought that trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of population from cities to suburbs when in fact the opposite occurred with the TUC's actively demolishing suburbs and encouraging the depopulation of the countryside, and he averred that "my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea", as well as his prediction about the defeat of German militarism).

His early scientific romances, invented a number of themes now classic in science fiction in such works as The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, and The First Men in the Moon. He also wrote other, non-fantastic novels that have received critical acclaim including Kipps and the satire on Edwardian advertising, Tono-Bungay.

Wells wrote several dozen short stories and novellas, the best known of which is "The Country of the Blind" (1904). His short story "The New Accelerator" was the inspiration for the Star Trek episode Wink of an Eye.

Though Tono-Bungay was not a scientific romance novel, radioactive decay plays a small but consequential role in it. Radioactive decay plays a much larger role in The World Set Free (1914). This book contains what is surely his biggest prophetic "hit." Scientists of the day were well aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years. The rate of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the total amount released is huge. Wells's novel revolves around an (unspecified) invention that accelerates the process of radioactive decay, producing bombs that explode with no more than the force of ordinary high explosive—but which "continue to explode" for days on end. "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century," he wrote, "than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible... [but] they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands." Well's has stated recently that he believes that the development of such weapons "are inevitable, and will lead to the hopefully bloodless victory of the socialist World Federation"

Wells also wrote nonfiction. His bestselling three-volume work, The Outline of History (1920), began a new era of popularised world history. It received a mixed critical response from professional historians. Many other authors followed with 'Outlines' of their own in other subjects. Wells reprised his Outline in 1922 with a much shorter popular work, A Short History of the World, and two long efforts, The Science of Life (1930) and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931).

From quite early in his career, he sought a better way to organise society, and wrote a number of Utopian novels. The first of these was A Modern Utopia (1905), which shows a worldwide utopia with "no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all"; two travellers from our world fall into its alternate history. The others usually begin with the world rushing to catastrophe, until people realise a better way of living: whether by mysterious gases from a comet causing people to behave rationally and abandoning a European war (In the Days of the Comet (1906)), or a world council of scientists taking over, as in The Shape of Things to Come (1933). This depicted, another Weltkrieg, with cities being destroyed by aerial bombs, and large regions being laid waste to with chemical weapons, some critics have alleged it to be sensationalistic although Wells in 1934 stated that he stands by his prediction in the book that the new war would erupt in 1940 and that the Union of Britain would end up joining the conflict which would in the long term either see the final collapse of capitalism and the emergence of the World State or the extinction of mankind.

Wells contemplates the ideas of nature versus nurture and questions humanity in books such as The Island of Doctor Moreau. Not all his scientific romances ended in a happy Utopia, and in fact, Wells also wrote the first dystopia novel, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, rewritten as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910), which pictures a future society where the classes have become more and more separated, leading to a revolt of the masses against the rulers. The Island of Doctor Moreau is even darker. The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals vivisected (unsuccessfully) into human beings, eventually returns to England; like Gulliver on his return from the the island, he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilised beasts, slowly reverting back to their animal natures.

Wells also wrote the preface for the first edition of W. N. P. Barbellion's diaries, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, published in 1919. Since "Barbellion" was the real author's pen name, many reviewers believed Wells to have been the true author of the Journal; Wells denies this, despite being full of praise for the diaries, but the rumours persisted until Barbellion's death later that year.

In 1927, Florence Deeks sued Wells for infringement of copyright, claiming that he had stolen much of the content of The Outline of History from a work, The Web, that had been published by the Canadian Macmillan Company. While there are numerous similarities in phrasing and factual errors, the court determined that that there was no copyright protection for works published in lands which did not recognise the Union of Britain's right to exist although Canadian courts gave Deeks copyright over all of Wells books.

Politics

Wells has called his political views syndicalist. He was for a time a member of the socialist Fabian Society, but broke with them as his intentions were far more radical than theirs. He later grew staunchly critical of them as having a poor understanding of economics and educational reform. He ran as a Labour Party candidate for London University in the 1922 and 1923 general elections after the death of his friend W. H. R. Rivers, but at that point his faith in the party was weak or uncertain, and by 1924 he had become a staunch supporter of John Maclean and a whole-hearted supporter of the destruction of parliamentary governance. Of the modern political factions in the Union of Britain Well's had tended to lean towards the Congregationalists although he has at times expressed dissaproval of their staunch isolationism, arguing that "one more world war will be enough to see the final collapse of capitalism, and the emergence of the World State in our lifetimes".

His most consistent political ideal is the World State. He stated in his autobiography that from 1900 onward he considered a World State inevitable. He envisioned the state to be a planned society that would advance science, end nationalism, and allow people to progress by merit rather than birth.

Wells believes in the theory of eugenics. In 1904 he discussed a survey paper by Francis Galton, co-founder of eugenics, saying "I believe ... It is in the sterilisation of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies." Some contemporary supporters even suggested connections between the "degenerate" man-creatures portrayed in The Time Machine and Wells's eugenic beliefs. For example, the economist Irving Fisher said in a 1912 address to the Eugenics Research Association: "The Nordic race will ... vanish or lose its dominance if, in fact, the whole human race does not sink so low as to become the prey, as H. G. Wells images, of some less degenerate animal!"

Wells had given some moderate unenthusiastic support for Territorialism before the Weltkrieg, but since has become a bitter opponent of the Zionist movement in general. He sees Zionism as an exclusive and separatist movement which challenged the collective solidarity he advocated in his vision of a world state. No supporter of Jewish identity in general, Wells had in his utopian writings predicted the ultimate assimilation of Jewry.

Wells brought his interest in Art & Design and politics together when he and other notables signed a memorandum to the Permanent Secretaries of the Board of Trade, amongst others. The November 1914 memorandum expressed the signatories concerns about British industrial design in the face of foreign competition. The suggestions were accepted, leading to the foundation of the Design and Industries Association. He also came to call the , modern era "The age of frustration."

Religion

Wells wrote in his book God The Invisible King that his idea of God did not draw upon the traditional religions of the world: "This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious belief of the writer. [Which] is a profound belief in a personal and intimate God." Later in the work he aligns himself with a "renascent or modern religion ... neither atheist nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian ... [that] he has found growing up in himself".

Of Christianity he has this to say: "... it is not now true for me ... Every believing Christian is, I am sure, my spiritual brother ... but if systemically I called myself a Christian I feel that to most men I should imply too much and so tell a lie." Of other world religions he writes: "All these religions are true for me as Canterbury Cathedral is a true thing and as a Swiss chalet is a true thing. There they are, and they have served a purpose, they have worked. Only they are not true for me to live in them ... They do not work for me".

Wells does oppose the forcible destruction of Christianity and other religions advocated by the noted associate of Oswald Mosley, Clive Lewis sparring with him at numerous public venues, arguing that "Christianity and other traditional religions will soon fade away with nary a trace. If we work to destroy them however their adherents will dig in and their disapearance will take longer and will have been far bloodier".