Wells springs to life
The Young H G Wells: Changing the World By Claire Tomalin Viking £20
The young H G Wells established his career as a novelist with his extraordinary scientific romance The
Time Machine.
The book, first published in 1895, was conceived when he was a student. The sales were sensational: this unknown young writer had found a wonderful concept with which to dazzle his public.
‘I doubt if anyone forgets their first reading of The Time Machine,’ says Tomalin.
Indeed, the freshness, daring and complete originality of the book are long-lasting in its readers’ minds. It projects the class divisions of late Victorian England forward to the year 802701. The Morlocks, the terrifying underground creatures of the remote future world, are descended from the Victorian working class. And the Eloi are descended from the cultivated and privileged upper class. These two levels of humanity have evolved into separate branches of mankind.
The young Wells had personal experience of the separate settings
in which these classes lived. His father kept a desperate and failing small shop in Bromley where his children lived in a dark basement, while his mother moved out when she was offered a job as a housekeeper at Uppark, a great country house in Kent. The disparity between these two settings contributed to Wells’s invention of a future world in which the underground Morlocks farm the Eloi, the descendants of the upper class, and eat them.
The War of the Worlds, first published in serial form in 1897, reflects the expansion of the British Empire. The Martians arrive on earth to colonise it. They settle on the smug south-west London commuter belt in Horsell, near Woking. It was an exhilarating target for Wells. Through the mouthpiece of a sturdy soldier, he revels in the disappearance of all the amenities to which this prosperous middle class have become accustomed, such as ‘nice little feeds in restaurants’.
Feeding is again a theme: the Martian invaders feed themselves by blood transfusion from humans. This is their undoing. They have no resistance to the microbes and infections common to lateVictorian England, and are wiped out.
Tomalin shows how English class distinction propelled Wells’s perception of himself as a small child. His mother sent him to a ‘dame school’, with an admonishment not to mix with ‘rough or common boys’. The rough and the common in society and their threat to good order are felt intensely in The History of Mr Polly. Wells’s sturdy antihero saves himself from the fate of Wells’s father by setting fire to his own failing shop. He settles himself in the Potwell Inn, a pub based on a place Wells remembered fondly from his childhood. Mr Polly’s central discovery is that if life does not please you, you can change it.
When Wells was eight years old, images of Britannia and France as lightly clothed women aroused his sexual desire: ‘When I went to bed, I used to pillow my head on their great arms and breasts.’ In this early start, Claire Tomalin sees the basis of his ‘unhesitating sense of entitlement’ in adult sexual encounters.
His need for freedom seems an overriding theme. In his first relationship, with his cousin Isabel, he was ‘almost entirely faithful’ during the six years of their engagement but embarked on ‘enterprising promiscuity’ once they were married. This established a pattern for life: ‘long and passionate affairs’ as well as casual encounters.
Claire Tomalin feels that most of the affairs were with women strong enough to cope, though she shows appropriate sympathy for Wells’s second wife, Jane. She quietly made a life of her own while he spent time ‘in the sun’ with his other partners, leaving Jane ‘to put a good face on the situation’.
Tomalin writes accurately that the best of Wells’s books will ‘go on being read for generations’; that he had a central passion for social equality and for a government of Britain dedicated to making a better life for all its citizens.
There is sadness in the story of his quarrel with Henry James. It is hard to see Wells’s behaviour as anything other than cruel. Tomalin handles this matter with delicacy and restraint. James had befriended Wells and applauded his work but had also published his reservations about Wells’s methods. Wells did not share James’s dedication to the novel as an artistic form. In Boon (1911), Wells published a merciless, though very funny, parody of James’s literary manner. The friendship could not survive this, and it was naïve of Wells to imagine that it might.
This is a fresh, stimulating and admirably controlled biography, giving a clear sense of the development of one of our most remarkable writers.