H G Wells Omnibus, page 721
“My lord!” said the little man.
“No,” said the master. “No!”
He stood up sharply as the little man moved. For a minute perhaps they faced one another. Overhead the spiders’ balls went driving. There was a quick movement among the pebbles; a running of feet, a cry of despair, a gasp and a blow…
Towards nightfall the wind fell. The sun set in a calm serenity, and the man who had once possessed the silver bridle came at last very cautiously and by an easy slope out of the ravine again; but now he led the white horse that once belonged to the little man. He would have gone back to his horse to get his silver-mounted bridle again, but he feared night and a quickening breeze might still find him in the valley, and besides, he disliked greatly to think he might discover his horse all swathed in cobwebs and perhaps unpleasantly eaten.
And as he thought of those cobwebs, and of all the dangers he had been through, and the manner in which he had been preserved that day, his hand sought a little reliquary that hung about his neck, and he clasped it for a moment with heartfelt gratitude. As he did so his eyes went across the valley.
“I was hot with passion,” he said, “and now she has met her reward. They also, no doubt—”
And behold! far away out of the wooded slopes across the valley, but in the clearness of the sunset, distinct and unmistakable, he saw a little spire of smoke.
At that his expression of serene resignation changed to an amazed anger. Smoke? He turned the head of the white horse about, and hesitated. And as he did so a little rustle of air went through the grass about him. Far away upon some reeds swayed a tattered sheet of grey. He looked at the cobwebs; he looked at the smoke.
“Perhaps, after all, it is not them,” he said at last.
But he knew better.
After he had stared at the smoke for some time, he mounted the white horse.
As he rode, he picked his way amidst stranded masses of web. For some reason there were many dead spiders on the ground, and those that lived feasted guiltily on their fellows. At the sound of his horse’s hoofs they fled.
Their time had passed. From the ground, without either a wind to carry them or a winding-sheet ready, these things, for all their poison, could do him little evil.
He flicked with his belt at those he fancied came too near. Once, where a number ran together over a bare place, he was minded to dismount and trample them with his boots, but this impulse he overcame. Ever and again he turned in his saddle, and looked back at the smoke.
“Spiders,” he muttered over and over again. “Spiders. Well, well… The next time I must spin a web.”
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Praise for H. G. WELLS
“Wells almost rivals Swift.” —Spectator (U.K.)
“Wells is less a man of letters than a literature.”
—JORGE LUIS BORGES, author of Ficciones, Labyrinths, and The Aleph
“Thinking people are in some sense Wells’s own creation… . The minds of us all, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”
—GEORGE ORWELL, author of 1984 and Animal Farm
“I have the highest respect for Wells’s imaginative genius.”
—JULES VERNE, author of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, and A Journey to the Center of the Earth
“Still fresh and enjoyable… . Wells’s scientific romances were not youthful aberrations or escapist fantasies, but works of art with unique relevance for our times… . He believed—though not blindly—that men were capable of improvement and might one day build sane and peaceful societies on all the worlds that lay within their reach. We need this faith now, as never before, in the history of our species.”
—ARTHUR C. CLARKE, honorary vice president of the H. G. WELLS SOCIETY, and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey
“Wells contrives to give over humanity into the clutches of the Impossible and yet manages to keep it down (or up) to its humanity, to its flesh, blood, sorrow, folly.”
—JOSEPH CONRAD, author of Heart of Darkness
Wells’s greatest gift was his ability to range widely through this world, inventing characters whose actions mirror the enormous social anxiety and who each represent a class caught in flux… . Wells’s efforts seem touchingly brave and might serve as a model for those who want to expand, once more, the province of the novel.”
—ANDREA BARRETT, National Book Award-winning author of The Voyage of the Narwhal and Ship Fever
“I personally consider the greatest of English living writers to be H. G. Wells.”
—UPTON SINCLAIR, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Jungle and Mental Radio
“[Wells’s novels] achieve a near poetry which makes them part of the popular mythology of their age… . The best of his work has a vitality, a verve, an imaginative compulsion unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries.”
—N. C. NICHOLSON, author of H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells from the Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
The H. G. Wells Reader
A Complete Anthology from
Science Fiction to Social Satire
Edited by John Huntington
First Taylor Trade Publishing edition 2003
This Taylor Trade Publishing paperback edition of The H. G. Wells Reader is an original publication. It is published by arrangement with the editor.
Copyright © 2003 by John Huntington
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
Published by Taylor Trade Publishing
A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200
Lanham, Maryland 20706
Distributed by National Book Network
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866–1946
The H.G. Wells reader : a complete anthology from science fiction to social satire / edited by John Huntington.—1st Taylor Trade Pub. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-87833-306-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN: 978-0-87833-306-6
1. Science fiction, English. 2. Satire, English. I. Huntington, John, 1940– II. Title.
PR5772 .H865 2003
823’.912—dc21
2003002119
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z.39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Contents
Introduction
Chronology
1 “The Stolen Bacillus” (1894)
2 “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist” (1894)
3 “Æpornis Island” (1894)
4 from The Time Machine (from chapters 4, 14, 15 and the epilogue) (1895)
5 from The Wheels of Chance (chapters 28–29) (1895)
6 from The Island of Doctor Moreau (from chapters 12 and 16) (1896)
7 from The Invisible Man (chapters 5–7) (1897)
8 from The War of the Worlds (book 1, chapters 1, 2, 5, 13, and 17; book 2, chapter 8) (1898)
9 from The First Men in the Moon (chapter 6 to the end) (1901)
10 from The Food of the Gods (from chapters 2 and 3) (1904)
11 “The Country of the Blind” (1904)
12 from In the Days of the Comet (book 1; book 2, from chapters 1 and 3; book 3, from chapters 1 and 3, and the epilogue) (1906)
13 from Tono-Bungay (book 2, chapter 2; book 4, chapter 3) (1909)
14 The History of Mr. Polly (1910)
A Note on Sources
Bibliography
Introduction
For the first half of the twentieth century H. G. Wells was a tremendously popular fiction writer, an influential thinker, and a widely heeded voice of insight and rationality. George Orwell’s remark that Wells was too sane to be of much help in the dark years of the late 1930s follows his acknowledgment that for young people at the time Wells had been the most important writer in the first twenty years of the century. The comment also implies that it is in relation to Wells that one can calibrate the crises in modern history. Wells’s opinions on biology, on the novel, on politics, on sexuality startled and made people rethink their ideas.
As the works included here should amply demonstrate, Wells’s fiction renders with complexity, intelligence, and flair crucial modern situations. At the most obvious, he engages increasingly serious issues of technology and the possibilities of the future. He is an important Darwinian. He may be the greatest English utopianist. He has few rivals as a comic writer. Finally—though this is a quality that is seldom acknowledged as a virtue—he brings to the level of art the experience and understanding of the lower classes. Only Dickens is his match in this respect. Put these virtues together and you have an art full of the richness we associate with the great realist novels, enlivened by an ironic intelligence of the first order, and engaged on important subjects even when most fanciful.
♦
Wells lived an extraordinarily full life whose early parts are especially important for an understanding of his angle of vision and as a measure of his accomplishment. By all rights, given his class origins, his parents’ vision, and his upbringing, he should have frittered his life away as a clerk who might rise to middle-level manager. He is, in a very special sense, a “self-made man,” not in the usual American sense of amassing a fortune for himself (though he did that, too), but in the sense that through intelligence and will he fashioned a poor, small, sickly boy into a figure of worldwide intellectual influence.
Sarah Wells’s dream was to establish her son’s secure future by apprenticing him as a draper’s assistant in a department store. Sarah herself was the head domestic servant at Up Park, a large country house which, though it offered the young Wells a good library, also, especially with its tunnel from the kitchen to the main house, came to symbolize for him oppression and inefficiency. Sarah Wells soon got H. G. a place in an emporium, and when he was dismissed after a brief tenure she pulled all the strings at her disposal to get him another place. This one he endured for two years. He finally insisted against both his parents’ wishes that he be allowed to go to school, and an arrangement was established with Horace Byatt, who ran a school for boys, that Wells, a very bright boy, could attend as an assistant teacher. Byatt and he developed a scheme whereby Wells would teach himself a subject by cramming from textbooks, then take a national exam on the subject, and by doing exceptionally well earn scholarship money for the school. Both parties benefited: Byatt financially, and Wells by obtaining an education, and even more, by teaching himself that he could get along by using his mind.
♦
This period of intellectual scramble paid off when Wells earned a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, the technical college recently established as the model for a new kind of scientific education by T. H. Huxley, from the beginning the greatest defender of Darwin’s theory of evolution. During his first year Wells studied biology under Huxley himself, and much later in his Experiment in Autobiography he would call it “the most educational year of my life.” The next two years were less exciting, and Wells’s academic work declined—in part due to poorer teachers (Huxley would be a hard act to follow), and in part due to an understandable burnout. Wells managed to get a degree, but he left the college doubting that he wanted a career in science. For the next few years he made a living tutoring medical students in biology, and his very first book was a textbook on the subject.
Biology was not Wells’s only interest during this period, however. He also began writing imaginative fiction for the college literary magazine, and the very first beginning draft of The Time Machine was published in The Science Schools Journal in 1888 as “The Chronic Argonauts.” He also fell in love with his cousin, Isabel, and in 1891 he married her and set up a house in which they lived with her mother. In 1894, after an affair with a former student, Amy Catherine Robbins, Wells divorced Isabel and married Miss Robbins, whom he always called “Jane.” The marriage lasted until Jane’s death in 1928, and, despite Wells’s fame and his promiscuity, she maintained a comfortable and stable household on which he much depended.
♦
During this early period Wells cobbled together a living with teaching and writing. Although in poor health and overworked, he nevertheless published a number of articles on science, especially on Darwinism, put out a steady stream of literary reviews, and developed his own comic voice in witty sketches. In the fall of 1894, at the encouragement of W. E. Henley, he again set to work on The Time Machine, which he published first serially and then as a book in 1895. It was greeted with great acclaim, and Wells’s life changed. Writing “for dear life,” he produced in the next five years the body of work that would establish the genre he called “the scientific romance”: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1896), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901), as well as three collections of short stories, most of which are in the imaginative-scientific mode that he was inventing. He also, it should be noted, found time to write, in addition to numerous articles and reviews, three other novels: The Wonderful Visit (1895), about an angel who accidentally comes to earth; The Wheels of Chance (1896), the comic story of a draper’s assistant on a cycling holiday; and the autobiographical Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900).
Wells’s restless imagination prevented his contenting himself with the success of a genre fiction writer. In 1901, with the publication of Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, he opened up a new dimension of his talent. This vision of the world 100 years later—with detailed descriptions of vastly improved transportation, the growth of suburbs, and a new generosity of mind arising from the emancipation from hard labor—earned him a second reputation as a forecaster. The book is often cited as the first such work in the forecasting genre. On the basis of this book Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the leaders of The Fabian Society, chose to pursue his acquaintance, and for the next six years he was an active and influential—and disruptive—member of the Society. The possibility of actually guiding social change led to a new direction in Wells’s work. He began to write Socialist tracts, such as Mankind in the Making (1903), New Worlds for Old (1908), and the brilliant pamphlet “This Misery of Boots” (1907). In addition, he increasingly indulged his utopian proclivities, not only in A Modern Utopia (1905), but in novels like The Food of the Gods (1904) and In the Days of the Comet (1906), which start from a familiar scientific romance or social narrative but culminate in a wholly new world.
♦
In 1908 Wells outraged the Fabian society by engaging in a love affair with Amber Reeves, a Cambridge student and daughter of two members of the Society. The affair was, in one respect, a consequence of ideas about what used to be called “free love” that Wells had begun to preach in A Modern Utopia and In the Days of the Comet. From this time forth Wells became promiscuous, and, with the agreement of Jane, he often kept another house. When the young Rebecca West wrote a dismissive review of Wells’s 1911 novel, Marriage, they became acquainted, fell rapturously in love, soon had a son (Anthony West, who became a novelist in his own right and wrote an admiring memoir about his father), and stayed together for ten years. The breakup, when it finally came in 1922, was acrimonious.
Wells’s life was a long one: after the breakup with West he still had twenty-four productive years ahead. He lived long enough to hear of the defeat of fascism and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In the 1920s and 1930s he devoted himself increasingly to a massive educational project, a “Bible of Civilization.” The Outline of History (1920), The Science of Life (1930), and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931), the last two written in collaboration, were huge encyclopedic works intended to offer the common reader insight into areas of thought that are important for thinking through the possibilities of the future. Although he continued to write fiction steadily, he was recognized in those last decades less as a novelist than as a public intellectual of worldwide reputation and many interests. As totalitarian censorship and persecution became more prevalent, Wells served as international president of the PEN club. In 1939, as discussion of the establishment of the United Nations began, he served as the first chairman of the commission that eventually, under the chairmanship of Lord Stankey, issued “The Declaration of Human Rights.” In the early 1940s he wrote polemical articles about the state of Europe and the war, but by 1945 he had lost some crucial element of energy and optimism. Mind at the End of Its Tether, Wells’s last book, despairs about the future.
