H G Wells Omnibus, page 370
Wells also wrote nonfiction. Wells’s first nonfiction bestseller was Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901). When originally serialised in a magazine it was subtitled, “An Experiment in Prophecy”, and is considered his most explicitly futuristic work. It offered the immediate political message of the privileged sections of society continuing to bar capable men from other classes from advancement until war would force a need to employ those most able, rather than the traditional upper classes, as leaders. Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is interesting both for its hits (trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of populations from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom; the defeat of German militarism, and the existence of a European Union) and its misses (he did not expect successful aircraft before 1950, and averred that “my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea”).
His bestselling two-volume work, The Outline of History (1920), began a new era of popularised world history. It received a mixed critical response from professional historians. However, it was very popular amongst the general population and made Wells a rich man. Many other authors followed with “Outlines” of their own in other subjects. Wells reprised his Outline in 1922 with a much shorter popular work, A Short History of the World, and two long efforts, The Science of Life (1930) and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931). The “Outlines” became sufficiently common for James Thurber to parody the trend in his humorous essay, “An Outline of Scientists”—indeed, Wells’s Outline of History remains in print with a new 2005 edition, while A Short History of the World has been re-edited (2006).
From quite early in his career, he sought a better way to organise society, and wrote a number of Utopian novels. The first of these was A Modern Utopia (1905), which shows a worldwide utopia with “no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all”; two travellers from our world fall into its alternate history. The others usually begin 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 and abandoning a European war (In the Days of the Comet (1906)), 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. He also portrayed the rise of fascist dictators in The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930) and The Holy Terror (1939). Men Like Gods (1923) is also a utopian novel. Wells in this period was regarded as an enormously influential figure; the critic Malcolm Cowley stated “by the time he was forty, his influence was wider than any other living English writer”.
Wells contemplates the ideas of nature and nurture and questions humanity in books such as The Island of Doctor Moreau. Not all his scientific romances ended in a Utopia, and Wells also wrote a dystopian novel, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, rewritten as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910), which pictures a future society where the classes have become more and more separated, leading to a revolt of the masses against the rulers. The Island of Doctor Moreau is even darker. The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals vivisected (unsuccessfully) into human beings, eventually returns to England; like Gulliver on his return from the Houyhnhnms, he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilised beasts, slowly reverting to their animal natures.
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 a Canadian citizen, Florence Deeks (1864–1959), unsuccessfully sued Wells for infringement of copyright and breach of trust, claiming that much of The Outline of History had been plagiarised from her unpublished manuscript, The Web of the World’s Romance, which had spent nearly nine months in the hands of Wells’s Canadian publisher, Macmillan Canada.
In 2000, A. B. McKillop, a professor of history at Carleton University and a leading Canadian historian, produced a book on the Deeks versus Wells case, called The Spinster & The Prophet: Florence Deeks, H. G. Wells, and the Mystery of the Purloined Past. McKillop had been researching another Canadian historical figure when he came across information relating to this, and intrigued, followed through with this book. According to McKillop, the lawsuit was unsuccessful due to the prejudice against a woman suing a well-known and famous male author; McKillop paints a detailed story based on the circumstantial evidence of the case, and suggests that in a more modern court, she would have been successful.
Deeks’s manuscript was apparently sent to MacMillan and Company, UK, to check that references to other works did not violate copyright. It appeared to go through the hands of one of the editors in the UK who passed it onto Wells, as he knew Wells was thinking of a similar project. The net result was that Deeks’s eventually rejected work came back and when it was eventually opened, it was found “soiled, thumbed, worn and torn, with over a dozen pages turned down at the corners, and many others creased as if having been bent back in use”. When she compared her work to The Outline of History in the winter of 1920–21 she found remarkable similarities, exact text similarities, and the same errors and omissions that marred her work, also in Wells’s.
In 2004, Denis N. Magnusson, Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Law, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, had published in Queen’s Law Journal an article on Deeks v. Wells. This re-examines the case in relation to McKillop’s book (described as “a novel” in the editorial introduction). While having some sympathy for Deeks, he “challenges the outpouring of public support” for her. He argues that she had a weak case that was not well presented, and though she may have met with sexism from her lawyers, she did receive a fair trial. He goes on to say that the law applied is essentially the same law that would be applied to a similar case today (i.e., 2004).
In 1933 Wells predicted in The Shape of Things to Come that the world war he feared would begin in January 1940, a prediction which ultimately came true four months early, in September 1939, with the outbreak of World War II.
In 1936, before the Royal Institution, Wells called for the compilation of a constantly growing and changing World Encyclopaedia, to be reviewed by outstanding authorities and made accessible to every human being. In 1938, he published a collection of essays on the future organisation of knowledge and education, World Brain, including the essay, “The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia”.
Prior to 1933, Wells’s books were widely read in Germany and Austria, and most of his science fiction works had been translated shortly after publication. By 1933 he had attracted the attention of German officials because of his criticism of the political situation in Germany, and on 10 May 1933, Wells’s books were burned by the Nazi youth in Berlin’s Opernplatz, and his works were banned from libraries and bookstores. Wells, as president of PEN International (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), angered the Nazis by overseeing the expulsion of the German PEN club from the international body in 1934 following the German PEN’s refusal to admit non-Aryan writers to its membership. At a PEN conference in Ragusa, Wells refused to yield to Nazi sympathisers who demanded that the exiled author Ernst Toller be prevented from speaking. Near the end of the World War II, Allied forces discovered that the SS had compiled lists of people slated for immediate arrest during the invasion of Britain in the abandoned Operation Sea Lion, with Wells included in the alphabetical list of “The Black Book”.
Seeking a more structured way to play war games, Wells also wrote Floor Games (1911) followed by Little Wars (1913). Little Wars is recognised today as the first recreational war game and Wells is regarded by gamers and hobbyists as “the Father of Miniature War Gaming”.
Political Views
The Fabian Society
Wells called his political views socialist. He was for a time a member of the socialist Fabian Society, but broke with them as his creative political imagination, matching the originality shown in his fiction, outran theirs. He later grew staunchly critical of them as having a poor understanding of economics and educational reform. He ran as a Labour Party candidate for London University in the 1922 and 1923 general elections after the death of his friend W. H. R. Rivers, but at that point his faith in the party was weak or uncertain.
Class
Social class was a theme in Wells’s The Time Machine in which the Time Traveller speaks of the future world, with its two races, as having evolved from:
“the gradual widening of the present (19th century) merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer. … Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth? Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people … is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion.”
Wells has this very same Time Traveller, reflecting his own socialist leanings, refer in a tongue-in-cheek manner to an imagined world of stark class division as “perfect” and with no social problem unsolved. His Time Traveller thus highlights how strict class division leads to the eventual downfall of the human race:
“Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved.”
In his book The Way the World is Going, Wells called for a non-Marxist form of socialism that would avoid both class war and conflict between nations.
Democracy
Fred Siegel of the center-right Manhattan Institute wrote of Wells’s unflattering take on American democracy: “Wells was appalled by the decentralised nature of America’s locally oriented party and country-courthouse politics. He was aghast at the flamboyantly corrupt political machines of the big cities, unchecked by a gentry that might uphold civilised standards. He thought American democracy went too far in providing leeway to the poltroons who ran the political machines and the ‘fools’ who supported them.” Siegel goes on to note Wells’s dislike of America’s not allowing African Americans to vote.
World Government
Wells’s most consistent political ideal was the World State. He stated in his autobiography that from 1900 onward he considered a World State inevitable. He envisioned the state to be a planned society that would advance science, end nationalism, and allow people to progress by merit rather than birth. Wells’s 1928 book The Open Conspiracy argued that groups of campaigners should advocate a “world commonwealth”, governed by a scientific elite, that would work to eliminate problems such as poverty and warfare. In 1932, Wells told Young Liberals at the University of Oxford that progressive leaders must become liberal fascists who would “compete in their enthusiasm and self-sacrifice” against the advocates of dictatorship. In 1940, Wells published a book called The New World Order that outlined his plan as to how a World Government would be set up. In The New World Order, Wells admitted that the establishment of such a government could take a long time, and be created in a piecemeal fashion.
Eugenics
Some of Wells’s early science fiction works reflect his thoughts about the degeneration of humanity. Wells doubted whether human knowledge had advanced sufficiently for eugenics to be successful. In 1904 he discussed a survey paper by Francis Galton, co-founder of eugenics, saying, “I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies … It is in the sterilisation of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies”. In his 1940 book The Rights of Man: Or What Are We Fighting For? Wells included among the human rights he believed should be available to all people, “a prohibition on mutilation, sterilization, torture, and any bodily punishment”.
Race
Wells’s 1906 book The Future in America, contains a chapter, “The Tragedy of Colour”, which discusses the problems facing black Americans. While writing the book, Wells met with Booker T. Washington, who provided him with much of his information for the book. Wells praised the “heroic” resolve of black Americans, stating he doubted if the US could:
“show any thing finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast effort hundreds of black and coloured men are making to-day to live blamelessly, honourably, and patiently, getting for themselves what scraps of refinement, learning, and beauty they may, keeping their hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied.”
In his 1916 book What Is Coming? Wells states, “I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother, though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose”.
In The Outline of History, Wells argued against the idea of “racial purity”, stating: “Mankind from the point of view of a biologist is an animal species in a state of arrested differentiation and possible admixture. … [A]ll races are more or less mixed”.
In 1931 Wells was one of several signatories to a letter in Britain (along with 33 British MPs) protesting against the death sentence passed upon the African-American Scottsboro Boys.
In 1943 Wells wrote an article for the Evening Standard, “What a Zulu Thinks of the English”, prompted by receiving a letter from a Zulu soldier, Lance Corporal Aaron Hlope. Wells’s article was a strong attack on anti-black discrimination in South Africa. Wells claimed he had “the utmost contempt and indignation for the unfairness of the handicaps put upon men of colour”. Wells also denounced the South African government as a “petty white tyranny”.
Zionism
Regarding the Jewish people, Wells was relatively cosmopolitan: “There is something very ugly about many Jewish faces, but there are gentile faces just as coarse and gross.” Wells had given some moderate, unenthusiastic support for Territorialism before the First World War, but later became a bitter opponent of the Zionist movement in general. He saw Zionism as an exclusive and separatist movement which challenged the collective solidarity he advocated in his vision of a world state. The Jews themselves were responsible for anti-Semitism due to their ancient irrational ritual, self-exclusion and the concept of the Chosen people:
“Today… these implacable nationalists are still conspicuously seeking suitable regions … where, pursuing an ancient and irrational ritual so far as it suits them, they can sustain a solidarity foreign and uncongenial to all the people about them… No country wants them on such conditions. Why should any country want these inassimilable aliens bent on preserving their distinctness?”
The Chosen people idea took a “form of a persistent organised attitude of self-exclusion from the common fellowship of the world … Everywhere the same reaction occurs and everywhere the Jew expresses his astonishment. Not only Christians but Turks have resorted to pogroms.” No other result could be from the Chosen people idea associating with Nazism:
“[I]t is essentially a bad tradition, and the fact that for two thousand years the Jews on the whole have been roughly treated by the rest of mankind does not make it any less bad … people are apt to catch up and repeat phrases about the nobility in the Book of Isaiah on the strength of a few chance quotations torn from their context. But let the reader take that book and read for himself straightforwardly, and note the setting of theses fragments. Much of it is ferocious; extraordinarily like the rantings of some Nazi propagandist.”
No supporter of Jewish identity in general, Wells had in his utopian writings predicted the ultimate assimilation of the Jewish people. In notes to accompany his biographical novel A Man of Parts David Lodge describes how Wells came to regret his attitudes to the Jews as he became more aware of the extent of the Nazi atrocities. This included a letter of apology written to Chaim Weizmann for earlier statements he had made.
First World War
He supported Britain in the First World War in his 1914 article, “Why Britain Went To War”, despite his many criticisms of British policy, and opposed, in 1916, moves for an early peace. In an essay published that year he acknowledged that he could not understand those British pacifists who were reconciled to “handing over great blocks of the black and coloured races to the [German Empire] to exploit and experiment upon” and that the extent of his own pacifism depended in the first instance upon an armed peace, with “England keep[ing] to England and Germany to Germany”. State boundaries would be established according to natural ethnic affinities, rather than by planners in distant imperial capitals, and overseen by his envisaged world alliance of states.
Japan
Wells described his impression of Shintoism: “To the Western mind accustomed to a widely different system of myths and absurdities, this reads like monstrous nonsense. But it is wiser not to say that in Japan.” He emphasised the brutality of the Japanese tradition. Forty-seven Ronin, for example, “is the heroic consummation of a vendetta, ending, after the decapitation of the initiator of the feud, with the hara-kiri of these forty-seven heroes.” Having such traditions, the Japanese should not complain about the “aggressive” external world from which Japan was no longer ringed-in: “Perry’s guns in 1853 aroused that ringed-in Japan of blood feuds, hara-kiri, and heroic decapitations to the existence of a dangerous and aggressive outer world.”
