Herbert George
Wells (September
21, 1866 – August 13, 1946) was a British
writer best known for his science fiction novels such as The
War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
Herbert George was the
fourth and last son born at 58 The High Street, Bromley to Joseph Wells,
a former domestic gardener and at the time shopkeeper and cricketer and
his wife Sarah Neal, a former domestic servant and occasional housekeeper. Both
parents were members of the working class, but aspired to lower-middle-classness. An inheritance allowed them to purchase a china
shop, which, after they had bought it, they realized would never be a paying propostion. The stock was old and worn out, the location
poor. They managed to earn a meagre income, but little of it came from the
shop. Joseph sold cricket bats and balls and other equipment at the
matches he played at, and received an unsteady amount of money from the
matches, for in those days there were no professional cricketers, and
payment for skilled bowlers and batters came from passing the hat afterwards or
from small honoraria from the clubs where matches were played.
A defining incident of
young Herbert George's life is said to be an accident he had in 1874
when he was eight years old. The accident left him for a time bedridden with a
broken leg. To pass the time, he started reading and soon became devoted to the
other worlds and lives to which books gave him access; it also stimulated his
desire to write. Later that year he entered the Commercial Academy of Thomas
Morley, a Scotsman, who had founded the school in 1849, when an earlier one at
which he had taught went bankrupt. The teaching was erratic, the curriculum
mostly focused, Wells said later, on producing copper-plate handwriting and
doing the sort of sums useful to tradesmen. Wells continued at Morley's Academy
until 1880. But in 1877 another accident had affected his life.
This time it had happened to his father, leaving Joseph Wells with a fractured
thigh. The accident effectively put an end to Joseph's career as a cricketer,
and his earnings as a shopkeeper were not enough to compensate for the loss.
No longer able to
support themselves financially, they instead sought to place their boys as
apprentices to various professions. At the time it was a usual method for young
employees to learn their trade working under a more experienced employer. In
time they should be able to practise their trade for themselves. From 1881
to 1883 Herbert George had an unhappy apprenticeship as a draper at the Southsea Drapery Emporium. His experiences were later used
as inspiration for his novel Kipps, which
described the life of a draper's apprentice as well as being a critique of the
world's distribution of wealth.
Wells' mother and
father had never got along with one another particularly well (she was a pious
Protestant, he a hen-pecked freethinker), and when she went back to work as a
ladies maid (at Uppark, a country house) one of the
conditions of work was that she would not have space for husband or children;
thereafter, she and Joseph lived separate lives, though they never divorced and
neither ever developed any other liaison. Herbert George not only failed at
being a draper, he failed at several other apprenticeships, and each time 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 Wells, Uppark
had a magnificent library in which he immersed himself.
In 1883 his
employer dismissed him, claiming to be dissatisfied with him. The young man was
reportedly not displeased with this ending to his apprenticeship. Later that
year, he became a teacher at
He soon entered the
Debating Society of his school. These years mark the beginning of his interest
in a possible reformation of society. At first approaching the subject through
studying The Republic by Plato, he soon turned to his
contemporary ideas of socialism as expressed by the recently formed Fabian Society. 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. The school year 1886–1887
became the last year of his studies. 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 loss of his scholarship.
Herbert George was
left without a source of income for a while. His aunt Mary, a cousin of his
father, invited him to stay with her for a while, so at least he did not face
the problem of housing. During his stay with his aunt, he grew interested in
her daughter, Isabel.
In 1891 Wells
married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells, but left her in 1894 for one of
his students, Amy Catherine, whom he married in 1895. He had two sons by
Amy: George Philip in 1901 and Frank Richard in 1903.{{fn|1}}
During his marriage to
Amy, Wells had liaisons with a number of women, including American birth
control activist Margaret Sanger.{{fn|2}}
He had a daughter with writer Amber Reeves in 1909{{fn|1}} and in
"I was never a
great amorist," Wells wrote in An Experiment in Autobiography (1934), "though I have loved several people
very deeply."
Seeking a more
structured way to play war games, H.G. Wells wrote Floor Games (1911)
followed by Little Wars (1913). Little Wars is recognised
today as the first recreational wargame and
Wells is regarded by gamers and hobbyists as "the Father of Miniature Wargaming."
Wells' first
bestseller was Anticipations, published in 1901. Perhaps his most
explicitly futuristic work, it bore the subtitle "An Experiment in
Prophecy" when originally serialised in a magazine. The book is
interesting both for its hits (trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of
population from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and
women seek greater sexual freedom) and its misses ("my imagination refuses
to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder
at sea"). He also visualized the elimination of all non-white people to
make way for the utopian future ("And how will the
His early novels,
called "scientific romances", invented a number of themes now
classic in science fiction in such works as The Time Machine, The
Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds (which have all been
made into films) and are often thought of as being influenced by the works of Jules
Verne. He also wrote other, non-fantastic novels which have received critical
acclaim, including the satire on Edwardian advertising Tono-Bungay
and Kipps.
Though not a
science-fiction novel, radioactive decay plays a small but consequential role
in Tono-Bungay. It 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 for thousands of years. The rate
of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the total amount
released is huge. Wells' 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... they did not
see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands." Leó Szilárd
acknowledged that the book inspired him to theorise the nuclear chain reaction.
Wells also wrote
nonfiction. His classic two-volume work The Outline of History (1920)
set a new standard and direction for popularised scholarship. Many other
authors followed with 'Outlines' of their own in other subjects. Wells followed
it in 1922 by a much shorter popular work, A Short History of the
World. The 'Outlines' became sufficiently common for James Thurber
to parody the trend in his humorous essay An Outline of Scientists.
From quite early in
his career, he sought a better way to organise society, and wrote a number of Utopian
novels. Usually starting 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 (In the Days of the Comet), or a
world council of scientists taking over, as in The Shape of Things to
Come (1933), which he later adapted for the 1936 Alexander
Korda film, Things to Come. This depicted,
all too accurately, the impending World War, with cities being destroyed
by aerial bombs.
Wells contemplates the
ideas of Nature vs Nurture and questions humanity in
books like The Island of Dr. Moreau. Not all his scientific romances
ended in a happy Utopia, as the dystopian When
the Sleeper Awakes shows. The Island of Dr. Moreau is even
darker. The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals vivisected
(unsuccessfully) into human beings, eventually returns to
He called his
political views socialist, and with his fondness for Utopia, he was at first
quite sympathetic to Lenin's attempts at reconstructing the shattered Russian
economy, as his account of a visit (Russia in the Shadows 1920)
shows. But he grew disillusioned at the doctrinal rigidity of the Bolsheviks,
and after meeting Stalin grew convinced the whole enterprise had gone
horribly wrong.{{fn|4}}
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 always denied 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 plagiarism, claiming that he
had stolen much of the content of The Outline of History from a work she
had submitted to Macmillan & Sons, his North American publisher, but who
held onto the manuscript for eight months before rejecting it. Despite numerous
similarities in phrasing and factual errors, the court found Wells not guilty.
In 1938, he
published a collection of essays on the future organisation of knowledge and
education, titled World Brain, including the essay The Idea of a
Permanent World Encyclopaedia.
Near the end of the
Second World War Allied forces discovered that the SS had compiled lists
of intellectuals and politicians slated for immediate liquidation upon the
invasion of
In his later years, he
grew increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for humanity (mostly because
of the Second World War) as the title of his last book, Mind at the
End of its Tether suggests. His later books are often thought to do more
preaching than storytelling or lack the energy and invention of his earlier
works. One critic complained: "He sold his birthright for a pot of
message".{{fn|5}}
His last words were,
"I'm all right".
H.G. Wells – Biography 29-10-08
http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/h.-g.-wells/biography.html
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