H G Wells Omnibus, page 402
Teaching, textbook writing, and journalism occupied Wells until 1895, when he made his literary debut with the now-legendary novel The Time Machine, which was followed before the end of the century by The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, books that established him as a major writer. Fiercely critical of Victorian mores, he published voluminously, in fiction and nonfiction, on the subjects of politics and social philosophy. Biological evolution does not ensure moral progress, as Wells would repeat throughout his life, during which he witnessed two world wars and the debasement of science for military and political ends.
In addition to social commentary presented in the guise of science fiction, Wells authored comic novels like Love and Mr. Lewisham, Kipps, and The History of Mister Polly that are Dickensian in their scope and feeling, and a feminist novel, Ann Veronica. He wrote specific social commentary in The New Machiavelli, an attack on the socialist Fabian Society, which he had joined and then rejected, and literary parody (of Henry James) in Boon. He wrote textbooks of biology, and his massive The Outline of History was a major international best-seller.
By the time Wells reached middle age, he was admired around the world, and he used his fame to promote his utopian vision, warning that the future promised “Knowledge or extinction.” He met with such preeminent political figures as Lenin, Roosevelt, and Stalin and continued to publish, travel, and educate during his final years. Herbert George Wells died in London on August 13, 1946.
The World of H. G. Wells andThe
War of the Worlds
1866 Herbert George Wells, known as a child as Bertie, is born on September 21 in Bromley, Kent. His pious parents, who had once been domestic servants, are often on the brink of financial ruin. Bertie’s father, now owner of a china shop, is an excellent cricket player but a bad businessman.
1871 Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There is published. The first books of George Eliot’s Middlemarch are published. A British Act of Parliament legalizes labor unions. The Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences opens in London.
1879 Wells’s mother takes work as a housekeeper at a nearby estate called Uppark, where she had served as a lady’s maid before her marriage. Bertie lives with her at Uppark, where he reads copiously from the library.
1880 Bertie’s mother has him become an apprentice to a draper (a dealer in cloth and dry goods). He finds the work unsatisfying yet stays with this position and another for a pharmacist for the next two years.
1882 Charles Darwin dies.
1883 Bertie dislikes retail work and takes a position as an assistant teacher at Midhurst Grammar School. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is published.
1884 Wells wins a scholarship and enters the Normal School of Science in the South Kensington section of London. His mentor, the eminent biologist and proponent of Darwinism T. H. Huxley, deeply influences him, introducing him to evolutionary science and skepticism about human progress.
1887 The first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is published.
1888 Wells publishes sketches called The Chronic Argonauts that later will become The Time Machine. He graduates from London University.
1891 He marries his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d‘Urbervilles are published.
1893 Wells’s marriage is unhappy. He falls in love with a beautiful young student named Amy Catherine (“Jane”) Robbins. His first published book, Textbook of Biology, appears. He becomes a full-time writer, known for independence of mind and works that challenge conventional thinking.
1895 After Isabel and H. G. divorce, he marries Jane Robbins. His tireless supporter, she types all of his manuscripts and correspondence. Wells publishes The Time Machine, which parodies the English class system and provides a distressing view of the future of human society. The Stolen Bacillus, a collection of short stories, and The Wonderful Visit, a science- fiction novel, also appear. In his lifetime, Wells will publish more than eighty books.
1896 Wells publishes The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a mad scientist turns animals into semihuman creatures, and The Wheels of Chance, about the bicycling craze.
1897 The Faust-like tale The Invisible Man appears. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.
1898 Wells publishes The War of the Worlds, about an invasion of Martians.
1900 In the first years of the century, Wells and Jane host numerous luminaries in their home and actively engage in various political and intellectual debates. Wells publishes a comic novel of lower-middle-class life, Love and Mr. Lewisham, about a struggling teacher.
1901 A son, George Philip Wells, is born to Jane and H. G. The First Men in the Moon, which predicts human travels into outer space, and Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, in which Wells advances his ideas about social progress, are published. Queen Victoria dies.
1903 A second son, Francis Richard, is born. Mankind in the Making, another book promoting social progress, is published. Wells joins the socialist Fabian Society, but soon draws fire from George Bernard Shaw and others for his deviations from the Fabian line. Throughout his life, Wells takes every opportunity to share and implement his dream of a utopian society.
1905 Wells publishes the somewhat autobiographical comic novel Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul, in which a man receives an unexpected inheritance. A Modern Utopia, again centered around Wells’ ideas about social progress, also appears. George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara is published.
1908 Wells resigns from the Fabian Society. He publishes The War in the Air, which foretells aerial combat.
1909 He publishes Tono-Bungay, a panoramic and critical picture of English society, and Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story, a feminist novel.
1910 Wells publishes an ode to the past in the comic novel The History of Mr. Polly, in which a shopkeeper changes his life. E. M. Forster’s Howards End appears.
1911 In The New Machiavelli, Wells excoriates the Fabian Society and provides portraits of its notable members. His collection The Country of the Blind and Other Stories appears.
1914 World War I begins. Wells and the writer Rebecca West, with whom he has a long affair, have a son, Anthony. Wells travels to Russia for the first time. He publishes The World Set Free, which predicts the use of the atomic bomb in warfare.
1915 Boon, a novel that satirizes Henry James’s style, is published under the pen name Reginald Bliss; it provokes an acerbic exchange between the two authors. D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow is published.
1916 Wells travels to the war fronts of Italy, Germany, and France. He publishes Mr. Britling Sees It Through, a realistic portrayal of the English during the war. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is published.
1918 Wells creates anti-German information for the Ministry of Propaganda.
1919 He coauthors, with Viscount Edward Grey, The Idea of a League of Nations.
1920 In an effort to rally’supporters to his progressive political agenda, Wells travels again to Russia to meet with Lenin. Russia in the Shadows and his immensely popular The Outline of History are published. Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is published.
1922 A Short History of the World appears. T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is published. James Joyce’s Ulysses is published in Paris.
1927 Jane Wells dies. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is published.
1928 Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall appears.
1929 Wells publishes The Common Sense of World Peace.
1929-1930 In collaboration with his son, G. P. Wells, and biologist Julian ‘Huxley (grandson of T. H. Huxley), he publishes a work on biology called The Science of Life.
1930 W. H. Auden’s Poems is published.
1933 Wells publishes the novel The Shape of Things to Come, the story of a world war that lasts three decades in which cities are destroyed by aerial bombs.
1934 Wells travels to Moscow to speak with Stalin and returns despondent over the encounter. The writer’s good-natured Experiment in Autobiography, a portrait of himself and his contemporaries, appears. He visits the United States and confers with Roosevelt.
1935 Based on the novel The Shape of Things to Come, Wells writes the screenplay for Things to Come, a film produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies.
1936 Things to Come is released in the United States.
1938 Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds sends millions of Americans into panic.
1939 World War II begins.
1945 World War II ends. Wells publishes Mind at the End of Its Tether, a vision of mankind rejected and destroyed by nature. George Orwell’s Animal Farm appears.
1946 Herbert George Wells dies in London on August 13.
Introduction
In 1895 Herbert George Wells learned to ride a bicycle. Hardly an unusual occurrence, for the twenty-nine-year-old Wells it represented a major accomplishment and a tremendous liberation. Wells had always been physically weak—his lungs hemorrhaged on more than one occasion—and he further punished his constitution by cramming for examinations in order to extricate himself from abject poverty and boring jobs with no future. The bicycle, by 1895 so popular in England that manufacturers could not keep pace with demand, revealed to Wells and countless thousands of others that using a body—even a not especially strong body—to propel a machine could free them from dependence on collective modes of transportation. People could now travel at their own speed, wherever and whenever they chose.
The bicycle is also symbolic of Wells’s solitary individuality—even later when he designed a tandem bicycle so he and his wife could ride together, he made sure he would do the steering. By becoming a writer, Wells liberated himself from family and employers, but like a bicyclist, his success depended entirely on his own efforts and willpower. If he crashed, he would have no one to blame but himself. In this sense, Wells is the ultimate expression of nineteenth-century individualism: the solitary Romantic at odds with things as they are, the visionary able to see things to which others are blind, the self-made man who owes nothing to anyone yet concerns himself with the future of all mankind.
Conscious that the industrial revolution had utterly transformed Europe, Wells became obsessed with the idea that society too could be made into a smoothly functioning, efficient, and productive machine. Aware, as relatively few were, of socialism, Wells was convinced that a new and better social order could be devised, though he did not believe in the “workers’ paradise” utopia promised by Karl Marx (1818-1883). In fact, the nightmare future of The Time Machine (1895) is Wells’s version of that Marxist utopia, a world where the former workers (the Morlocks) eat the former capitalist class (the Eloi). Wells distrusted utopias precisely because he believed they deprive humanity of goals and render it complacent and, ultimately, stupid. His solution was unremitting work, production, and competition.
Wells realized he was living in an age of transition and concluded that industrialization would invalidate traditional forms of government—from monarchy to democracy—but he was only too aware that technological advances would occur much more rapidly than would social evolution, that an undisciplined, anarchic humanity equipped with modern machines would be like a child playing with a loaded pistol. All of his writing has, then, a double focus: On the one hand, it points out the shortcomings of the current age, while on the other, it seeks to orient the present in the direction the author deems proper. So Wells is something very different from a prophet, who tells what the future will be: He is a social planner who offers a model of what it should be.
The differences between England in the late-nineteenth century—especially its last five years, when Wells produced The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Wheels of Chance (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), and Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), along with myriad short stories and journalistic essays—and England after World War I are radical. From today’s perspective, England in 1895 is an only partially modern country: There was gas for lighting, at least in municipal areas, and a rail network that connected the entire country. This meant that while Wells could get to London from Woking by train, he would still have to rely on horse-drawn carriages for local travel. This was true even in London and applied as well to the transportation of goods and objects, so the nineteenth century actually ended at the railroad station, and an earlier age began just outside it.
This simple fact marks just one of the significant differences between life in the late 1800s and what it would become over the course of the next half-century. If, like Wells’s Time Traveller, we could visit London in 1895, we would be shocked at its utter filthiness and dismayed by streets fouled with the manure of countless horses, making walking fetid and hazardous. We would quickly discover that the water supply, especially in densely populated areas, was dangerous, since modern sewage systems required extensive and expensive construction no government was prepared to finance. The poor, the vast majority of the population, lived thoroughly unhealthy and, usually, short lives. They had no sanitary facilities, drew water from public pumps, and bathed very infrequently. Consequently, lice, fleas, and other parasites were commonplace, as were the diseases they transmitted. This, coupled with air made opaque by coal smoke (the famous London fog), made urban life uncomfortable and poisonous. With the gradual development of pure water delivery systems, sewage systems, standards of hygiene, and public health inspections, the quality of life improved for everyone, but chamber pots, which we are likely to regard as ancient, quaint artifacts, remained in common use, especially in the country, until well into the twentieth century. Here is Wells, in his 1907 suite of socialist essays New Worlds for Old, commenting on the 1905 Report of the Education Committee of the London County Council:
Taking want of personal cleanliness as the next indication of neglect at home [he’d already commented on the inadequate clothing worn by poor children], 11 per cent of the boys are reported as “very dirty and verminous.” … Eleven per cent verminous; think what it means! Think what the homes must be like from which these poor little wretches come! Better perhaps than the country cottage where the cesspool drains into the water-supply and the henhouse vermin invades the home, but surely intolerable beside our comforts.1
These public health problems, along with alcoholism, a problem as serious then as drug abuse is today, infuriated Wells because he thought social management and technology could eliminate them. But it would be a mistake to think Wells felt sorry for the poor because he had lived in poverty as a boy and felt he could better their lot. Actually, he felt contempt for the poor and, by 1895, has left his poverty behind forever: He earns almost 800 pounds per year from his writing, enough to put him solidly in the middle class. But he does have expenses: He is freshly divorced from his first wife, Isabel, and paying her 100 pounds per year in alimony. He is also supporting his parents—another 60 pounds. To make ends meet, to have a larger living space, and to exempt himself from a too-busy social life that distracted him from his almost superhuman writing schedule, he moves to the county of Surrey—just southwest of London County and bordered on the north by the river Thames—and resides in the town of Woking on the London and South-Western railway line. It is in Woking that he produces his bicycling novel The Wheels of Chance, as well as The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and any number of short pieces, fiction and nonfiction. Wells describes his move to Woking in his 1934 Experiment in Autobiography:
Our withdrawal to Woking was a fairly cheerful adventure. Woking was the site of the first crematorium but few of our friends made more than five or six jokes about that. We borrowed a hundred pounds by a mortgage on Mrs. Robbins’ [his mother-in-law] house in Putney and with that hundred pounds, believe it or not, we furnished a small resolute semi-detached villa with a minute greenhouse in the Maybury Road facing the railway line, where all night long the goods trains shunted and bumped and clattered—without serious effect upon our healthy slumbers….In all directions stretched open and undeveloped heath land, so that we could walk and presently learn to ride bicycles and restore our broken contact with the open air. There I planned and wrote the War of the Worlds, the Wheels of Chance and the Invisible Man. I learnt to ride my bicycle upon sandy tracks with none but God to help me; he chastened me considerably in the process, and after a fall one day I wrote down a description of the state of my legs which became the opening chapter of the Wheels of Chance.2
The poverty of his early years—like the protagonist of The Wheels of Chance, he was apprenticed to a draper in 1880, worked a seventy-hour week, lived in a dormitory, and ate unhealthy food—coupled with his scientific training at the Normal School of Science, where he was a scholarship student, made him acutely aware of the shortcomings of sanitary conditions in England, so that when he oversaw the construction of his first house, Spade House, in 1900, he made certain it would be as modern a structure as possible, especially with regard to plumbing.
Knowing exactly where Wells lived in 1895 is essential for an understanding of The War of the Worlds because he minutely explored the area around Woking by bicycle and made it the setting for his romance, as he says in a letter in which he comments on the first, magazine version of the novel:
I’m doing the dearest little serial for Pearson’s new magazine in which I completely wreck and sack Woking—killing my neighbors in painful and eccentric ways—then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, which I sack, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity.3
