H G Wells

Background

Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was born in Bromley, 21 September 1866, to a working-class family. His father, Joseph Wells, was an unsuccessful shopkeeper, and his mother, Sarah Neal, was a maid and housekeeper. Throughout his life, Wells remained conscious of his class origin.

At the age of fourteen, Wells left school. For two years he endured an unhappy apprenticeship to a draper. However, his fortunes improved when his mother was appointed head of the domestic staff at the grand, eighteenth-century country house of Uppark in Sussex. The young Wells, who had already developed a keen interest in reading, enjoyed access to the impressive aristocratic library at Uppark. In particular, a copy of Plato’s Republic had a formative influence on his political thinking.

At seventeen, he attended Midhurst Grammar School and then obtained a government scholarship to train as a science teacher at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, London. He studied biology, geology, zoology, physics, astrophysics, mathematics and geometrical drawing. Under the inspired teaching of T H Huxley (the leading Victorian research scientist), Wells began to excel as a student. Huxley was a personal friend of Charles Darwin, the latter having recently published his controversial theory of Evolution. Huxley’s retirement, however, left Wells with teachers whom he found mediocre. His academic studies suffered as Wells turned to personal literary interests, such as reading Carlyle and Blake.

Instead of studying, Wells spent long hours at meetings of Britain's infant socialist movement and the college debating society. It was a paper that a fellow student presented about four-dimensional spaces that gave Wells an ‘inkling of a machine…that shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time’. He published an early speculation on the topic in his college’s Science Schools Journal. However, so diverted had he become from his academic studies that, in 1887, Wells left college without graduating.

Nonetheless, while teaching science and mathematics at Henley House school, Kilburn – ‘teaching fools in a provincial college’ – he found time to study for a BSc degree, graduating with a First in 1890.

Wells’ marriage to his cousin, Isabel, in 1891, was a tempestuous episode, which ended in divorce three years later. Then, within a year, success as a writer gave him the financial means to marry Amy Catherine Robbins, a former pupil.

Time Machine
After a few years of modest success as a freelance journalist, Wells reworked his story about time travel – The Chronic Argonauts – which he had originally published in his Science Schools Journal. Previously, time travel had existed simply as fantasy fiction. Wells’ story was published (1895) as the allegorical scientific romance, The Time Machine; a parody of English class division (appalling living and working conditions of the working class contrasting with the life of ease enjoyed by the wealthy), and satirical caution that human progress is not inevitable.

With his sudden recognition as a writer of note together with an enhanced income, Wells redoubled his explorations of scientific fantasy to examine political and social issues: The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897).

Novelists had been predicting a European war since George Chesney had published The Battle of Dorking (1871). Germany had been unified and militarised. Then, in 1894, a report by an Italian astronomer of ‘canali’ (channels) on Mars was misinterpreted as ‘canals’, prompting public speculation about the existence of Martians. (The Suez Canal had been completed in 1869.) Another contemporary observer reported seeing a peculiar light on Mars. Shortly afterwards, the pen of the scientific romancer produced The War of the Worlds (1898).

Wells is often acknowledged as the ‘Father of Science Fiction’ for originating the major conventions of the sci-fi genre, such as the time machine, mass hysteria, and intelligent extra-terrestrials invading Earth.

With the novel Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) Wells strengthened his reputation as a serious writer. His prophetic description of space flight methodology in The First Men in the Moon (1901), though generally popular, left novelist Jules Verne unimpressed and calling for Wells’ writing to change direction. Wells took notice and resolved to abandon scientific romance in preference for serious political philosophy and social commentary.

Wells’ exploration of utopian politics, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1901), envisaged the future master race of a rigid global society, politically engineered through racial selection and extermination ‘of the weak and sensual’.

For a brief period, Wells craved influence within London’s socialist Fabian Society, but quarrels with its members soon led to Wells’ resignation. Several of the Fabians were employed as characters in Wells’ 1911 novel about social reform, The New Machiavelli. However, membership of the Liberals’ Reform Club boosted his ego, intensely satisfying him that, at long last, he had found favour with the Establishment.

In A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells argued for a world that would have no poverty, war or oppression. The following year he travelled to New York and published Socialism and the Family. His most ambitious social novel was the somewhat autobiographical Tono-Bungay (1909), which attacked the disorder that irresponsible capitalism could wreak on society. Wells drew successfully on his lower-middle-class background for novels about a struggling teacher – Kipps (1905) and a draper’s assistant – The History of Mr Polly (1910).

Atomic war
Wells returned to the scientific romance genre with The World Set Free (1914). Though a comparatively poor piece of writing, this is a particularly notable work. Envisaging a major world war – where warplanes drop atomic bombs – Wells was exploring implications of the 1902 discovery of uranium disintegration. He foresaw the devastating potential of new weaponry if a practical fission method were found. Still, 1914 was an unfortunate date for publication of a horrific story about world war and the book was poorly received.

However, in 1934 when research physicist Leo Szilard discovered how to harness atomic energy, he recalled his terror on reading Wells’ World Set Free: ‘Knowing what this would mean – and I knew it because I had read H G Wells – I did not want this patent to become public. The only way to keep it from becoming public was to assign it to the Government.’ As a Hungarian Jew, Szilard had fled Nazi Europe and sought refuge in England, so he entrusted his discovery about practical fission to the British Admiralty.

The mechanised weaponry that Wells anticipated in his scientific writings – such as the tank – became a horrible reality in the weaponry of the Great War (1914–18). In fact, it was Wells who coined the famous description of the Great War as ‘The war that will end war’. For a while, he was chairman of the government’s Committee for Propaganda in Enemy Country.

Campaigning strongly for a new world order, he was initially excited by the communist revolution in Russia (1917). Disillusioned by his meeting with Lenin in Russia, he threw his energies into support for the concept of world government through the League of Nations. Arnold Bennett advised him to abandon his involvement with the League’s bureaucratic committees and say what he had to as a writer. Wells heeded the advice.

 H G Wells

With a wide team of specialists advising him, Wells compiled the two volume Outline of History (1920), arguing that every age had produced a ruling elite and that humankind’s progress lay in education. So phenomenally popular was this book that an abridged version, A Short History of the World, quickly followed (1923). Though Outline of History was widely acclaimed, Hilaire Belloc publicly demolished the work (and almost Wells, too) in a series of stinging criticisms.

Labour MP, Jennie Lee, was appalled to discover that Wells, whom she had admired, appeared to be ‘totally indifferent’ to the social deprivation of the working class. After a frustrating day in Parliament, in 1929, struggling with serious issues affecting the working class, Lee encountered Wells at a dinner party, only to observe that Wells’ sole concern was with the state of history teaching in schools! (Like most who heard Wells lecture, Lee was not impressed with Wells’ high-pitched, squeaking voice.)

In 1933, Wells published his final major novel, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution, in which he warned of an apocalyptic world war before a new utopian world state would emerge, spearheaded by a visionary elite. Within three years, Alexander Korda brought Wells’ screenplay of the novel to the cinema screen in the most expensive film production of the decade. Despite the acting talents of Ralph Richardson, Raymond Massey and Ann Todd, Things To Come was not a great cinema success, though it did contribute to Britain’s rearmament debate of the 1930s and was an important moment in the history of science-fiction filmmaking.

In 1934, Wells visited Washington to discuss world order with President Roosevelt and, almost immediately afterwards, Moscow to discuss Soviet socialism with Stalin. Many observers criticised Wells’ apparent disregard of alarming reports circulating about the real state of Stalin’s Russia. 1934 also saw the publication of Wells’ life story and personal philosophy in Experiment in Autobiography.

Among his many writings, Wells had predicted such destructive technologies as chemical warfare, tanks, aerial bombing, nuclear war, laser-type weaponry and industrial robots. To the end, he remained pessimistic about human nature and foresaw only a bleak future for mankind. Something of the awful future he had so often written and lectured about materialised with the Second World War and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan (August 1945). A year later – 13 August 1946 – H G Wells died, aged 80.