Great Britons
Margaret Brecknell on HG Wells
HG WELLS died 75 years ago in August 1946, but he lived long enough to see the atomic bomb become a reality, a development he had foretold in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. However, this novelist, social commentator and visionary thinker still dreamed of a world in which nations would come together to build a brighter future.
Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 above a small china shop owned by his parents, on Bromley High Street in Kent. The business never prospered and Wells would later describe the conditions of the home in which he grew up as “quite dreadful”. He recalled, “The house was infested with bugs. They harboured in the wooden bedsteads and lurked between the layers of wallpaper that peeled from the walls.”
Having received only a basic education at a local school, Wells was sent out into the world as a teenager to become a draper’s apprentice in Windsor. He hated it, preferring to spend his time reading the classics, and was dismissed by his employer for being “untidy and troublesome”.
He was more fortunate in his second placement as a pharmaceutical assistant in Sussex, but his family could not afford to keep him there and, instead, he was compelled to endure a further two miserable years as a draper’s assistant in Southsea.
His views on the class system first began to take shape during this period. He later recalled his resentment at being “marched off” before the age of 15 “to what was plainly a dreary and hopeless life, while other boys, no better in quality than myself, were enjoying all the advantages . . . of the public school and university.”
Eventually, after writing in desperation to Horace Byatt, a headmaster whom he had met and impressed during his time in Sussex, Wells was offered a position as a pupil teacher at Midhurst Grammar School. A year later, in 1884, he won a scholarship to study at the School of Science in South Kensington.
In his first year at the college, later described by Wells as “the most educational year of my life”, he was taught by the eminent biologist Thomas Huxley. Huxley would have a profound influence on his future writing, but the college’s other lecturers failed to stimulate the interest of the young Wells and he failed his final examinations.
Wells eventually obtained his degree in 1890 and for the following three years worked as a tutor at the University Correspondence College. By this juncture he had already embarked on his writing career, contributing humorous articles to journals like the Pall Mall Gazette to supplement his income. Wells evidently found the teaching profession only slightly more tolerable than shop work, but it was only when he suffered a serious bout of ill health in 1893 that he took the decision to give up teaching and concentrate full-time on his writing.
In 1895 the novel which would make Wells’s name was published.
The Time Machine was quite unlike anything that had gone before. Ostensibly a tale of an intrepid time traveller who ends up in the far-distant future, Wells incorporated his own views on social inequality into the narrative. An analysis in the influential
Review of Reviews, in which the novel was hailed as “the work of a man of genius”, did much to cement Wells’s growing reputation.
There followed in quick succession the classic science fiction works for which the author is best-known today. With an early oeuvre that includes The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), it is little wonder that Wells became so popular so quickly, though he always described his science fiction novels as “scientific romances”.
The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest works of fiction to feature a human conflict with alien invaders. Wells draws an interesting parallel between the actions of the Martian aggressors and contemporary events. “Before we judge them too harshly,” he wrote, “we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals such as the vanished bison and dodo, but upon its own races . . . Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”
Wells took his work in a quite different direction in the semiautobiographical Kipps (1905) and
The History of Mr Polly (1910), drawing heavily on the tradition of social satire exemplified by the work of Charles Dickens for inspiration. Literary critic HL Mencken published a glowing review of Mr Polly in the 1910 issue of the US magazine, The Smart Set, commenting that, “I have no hesitation whatever in saying that Wells entertains me far more agreeably than Dickens.”
Wells believed that by predicting the way in which technological developments would shape the future world, it would be possible “to rescue human society from the net of traditions in which it is entangled” and search for a better outcome.
Some of the predictions which
Wells made over a century ago have proved to be uncannily accurate. In Anticipations (1901) he set out to forecast “the way in which things will probably go in this new century”. He foresaw “the abolition of distance” because of developments in rail and road transport, as well as predicting – at a time when aviation was still in its infancy – that future wars would be won “by command of the air”. In The Land of the Ironclads (1903) Wells described an armoured fighting vehicle, more than a decade before tanks became a reality.
As early as 1899 Wells foresaw the development of television as a means of mass entertainment. In his futuristic novel The Sleeper Awakes, he writes,
“On the flat surface was a little picture, vividly coloured, of figures that moved, and conversed in clear small voices.”
Many of Wells’s later novels such as Men Like Gods (1923) are set in an alternative utopian future. The author himself saw this as a way of communicating his ideas on how to create a better world rather than as a vehicle for Nostradamus-like prophecies. However, one cannot help being struck by this passage from Men Like Gods:
“A message is sent to the station of the district in which the recipient is known to be, and there it waits until he chooses to tap his accumulated messages . . . Then he talks back to the senders and dispatches any other messages he wishes. The transmission is wireless.”
In his vision of a utopian future, Wells believed that every individual should have the right to enjoy a life free of any constraints put upon them by a judgemental society. In his own private life the author appears to have embraced the idea of “free love”, more associated with the “Swinging Sixties” than the strait-laced Edwardian era. Throughout his 32-year marriage to his long-suffering second wife Jane, Wells is known to have had a series of affairs.
As an internationally famous author and intellectual thinker, Wells was welcomed across the world. He was heavily involved in the early socialist movement in the UK, and on his first visit to the US in 1906, the author met
President Theodore Roosevelt, and in 1920 on a visit to Russia he met with Lenin and Trotsky.
In 1934, in Wells’s own words, “I took it into my head to see and compare President Franklin Roosevelt and Mr Stalin. I wanted to form an opinion of just much how these two brains were working in the direction of this socialist world-state that I believe to be the only hopeful destination for mankind.”
In The World Set Free, Wells predicted that the devastation caused by the development of an atomic bomb would shock people into a new way of living, but sadly human nature has little changed. Today he is best remembered for his “scientific romances”, and many of his books have been adapted for TV and film. It seems fitting that the hope for a better world found in his works is now conveyed by the kind of future technology he believed could effect such change. Perhaps it still will.