The T

The T.O. spinster who took on H.G. Wells

On a Monday morning in mid-December 1920, Toronto amateur historian Florence Deeks strode with purpose through the main floor of the T. Eaton Co. store at Yonge and Queen Sts. She ignored the counters stacked high with Christmas wares and headed straight for the bookstore and the pile of the latest book written by H.G. Wells.

Deeks, then 55, had read an excerpt of Wells’ Outline of History in the latest issue of Saturday Night magazine. She was struck not only by the glowing review, but by the many apparent similarities between the two-volume work and one she had submitted to Macmillan of Canada about 18 months earlier.

Deeks paid $12 for the set, boarded a streetcar and made her way to her Farnham Ave. home, a few blocks south of St. Clair Ave.

There she pored over Wells’ book and her curiosity turned to alarm, then dread. It was not just the ideas that seemed similar, but the structure, things she had left out of her work and even the mistakes she had made. Deeks had spent four years in the Toronto Public Library writing The Web, a clumsily titled, if earnest, account of world history that, for the first time, included the role of women. The more of Wells’ book she read, the angrier she became.

This sense of indignation would eventually trigger a 10-year quest by Deeks to bring Wells to justice for what she claimed was his "literary piracy" of her work.

If the lawsuit against Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code earlier this year was the plagiarism case of the year, Deeks’ struggle against Wells remains the case of the 20th century. Wells had already written such sci-fi classics as The Invisible Man, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. His 1,300-page Outline of History would sell 2 million copies and cement his reputation even though one writer described it as the biggest, must-have, unread work of its time. Yet for almost a decade Deeks would hound him in the courts on two continents, a pursuit Toronto historian Donald Jones described as “one of the strangest and most drawn-out court cases in the history of British jurisprudence.”

The story begins in 1914. Deeks was single and a well-to-do graduate of Victoria College. She was a sometime journalist and amateur writer and by all accounts a woman of little humour and not much artistic spark. She was a devout Methodist with all the moral rigour that implies, living in comfort supported by her brother who owned a Toronto construction company.

In mid-1918 she delivered her manuscript to Macmillan and nine months later it was returned. Despondent about the rejection, Deeks put the package aside.

The more Deeks read of Wells’ book, the more she recognized a similarity in structure and content. She dug out her manuscript and found that it had been returned smudged and stained; paragraphs were marked and pages worn with the corners turned down. After a thorough comparison, she also saw similar arguments and mistakes.

She consulted experts who assured her she wasn’t crazy and after five years of preparation launched her suit in 1925. It was front-page news: Wells, the literary giant, challenged by a Toronto spinster. It seemed so ludicrous.

The story is captured wonderfully in The Spinster and the Prophet, a 20th-century literary whodunit by Brian McKillop. The Carleton University professor believes Wells used Deeks’ manuscript as a framework to build his own book and that his work is based on her structure, though not her words. McKillop believes Macmillan in Toronto passed Deeks’ manuscript to a friend of Wells in England to curry favour with Wells, hoping that when the book was completed he would publish it through Macmillan.

It would have been an innocent thing, McKillop says. The Web was a roughly written book by an unknown female author writing under a pseudonym with an amateur's skill. Wells would would have had a typescript of 500 pages that happened to be just on the topic when he was desperate for information — a Coles Notes outline to be fleshed out in his own unique style.

Some authors, including Toronto’s Michael Coren, a Wells biographer, maintains he had an army of researchers to write the Outline of History, many of whom are mentioned in the preface. This would explain how Wells was able to research and write the equivalent of four good-sized books in a little over a year. McKillop argues that Wells paid these men on a retainer to use their names to give the book a veneer of authority. He believes they wrote little or nothing.

And in answer to the question of why Wells would think he could take somebody else’s work and use it, McKillop says it is consistent with the 19th and early 20th century notion that history, like art, was a constant reinterpretation of great events with facts recast in a new light.

In the course of his research, McKillop did not uncover a key document that in a court case would have convicted Wells and believes the judges were correct in dismissing Deeks’ claim. The circumstantial evidence is strong, but "unless you have a smoking gun, all the other similarities don’t matter," he says.

“It boiled down to the reputation of a great man of letters against the nonexistent reputation of an unknown woman. Nobody could comprehend that this could be true.”

Deeks lost her final battle in a British court in 1932. By then her brother had died and she was acting as her own legal counsel. At one point during the three-day hearing she fainted.

Deeks continued to try to have her work published. When told by one New York publisher that The Web was too much like Wells’ book, she sadly removed the references to women — the idea that first compelled her to write it. It was still rejected.

Perhaps ashamed by this personal betrayal, she wrote another book, which is in her archival effects in the Baldwin Room at the Metro Toronto Reference Library. “It is a very pristine manuscript and has never been read,” says McKillop. It is called The History of Women.

Florence Deeks died in June 1959. She was 94. Wells predeceased her by 13 years

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Sources of information:

The start.com- 19.10.2008 The T.O. spinster who took on H.G. Wells.sept. 21.sept.2006

< http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/96228>

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