H G Wells Omnibus, page 826
So frankly I spread my little equipment of fundamental assumptions before you, heartily glad of the opportunity you have given me of taking them out, of looking at them with the particularity the presence of hearers ensures, and of hearing the impression they make upon you. Of course, such a sketch must have an inevitable crudity of effect. The time I had for it—I mean the time I was able to give in preparation—was altogether too limited for any exhaustive finish of presentation; but I think on the whole I have got the main lines of this sketch map of my mental basis true. Whether I have made myself comprehensible is a different question altogether. It is for you rather than me to say how this sketch map of mine lies with regard to your own more systematic cartography… .
Here followed certain comments upon Personal Idealism, and Mr. F. C. S. Schiller’s Humanism, of no particular value.
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Anthem Anthem is a dystopian fiction novella by Ayn Rand, first published in 1938. It takes place at some unspecified future date when mankind has entered another dark age as a result of the evils of irrationality and collectivism and the weaknesses of socialistic thinking and economics. Technological advancement is now carefully planned (when it is allowed to occur at all) and the concept of individuality has been eliminated (for example, the word “I” has disappeared from the language). As is common in her work, Rand draws a clear distinction between the “socialist/communal” values of equality and brotherhood and the “productive/capitalist” values of achievement and individuality.
Many of the novella’s core themes, such as the struggle between individualism and collectivism, are echoed in Rand’s later books, such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. However, the style of “Anthem” is unique among Rand’s work, more narrative-centered and economical, lacking the intense didactic expressions of philosophical abstraction that occur in later works. It is probably her most accessible work.
H. G. Wells
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Tales of Space and Time A collection of short stories: “The Crystal Egg”, “The Star”, “A Story of the Stone Age”, “A Story of the Days to Come” & “The Man who could Work Miracles”
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The Time Machine The book’s protagonist is an amateur inventor or scientist living in London who is never named; he is identified simply as The Time Traveller. Having demonstrated to friends using a miniature model that time is a fourth dimension, and that a suitable apparatus can move back and forth in this fourth dimension, he builds a full-scale model capable of carrying himself. He sets off on a journey into the future.
H. G. Wells
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The Sleeper Awakes The Sleeper Awakes is H. G. Wells’s wildly imaginative story of London in the twenty-second century and the man who by accident becomes owner and master of the world. In 1897 a Victorian gentleman falls into a sleep from which he cannot be waked. During his two centuries of slumber he becomes the Sleeper, the most well known and powerful person in the world. All property is bequeathed to the Sleeper to be administered by a Council on his behalf. The common people, increasingly oppressed, view the Sleeper as a mythical liberator whose awakening will free them from misery.
The Sleeper awakes in 2100 to a futuristic London adorned with wondrous technological trappings yet staggering under social injustice and escalating unrest. His awakening sends shock waves throughout London, from the highest meetings of the Council to the workers laboring in factories in the bowels of the city. Daring rescues and villainous treachery abound as workers and capitalists fight desperately for control of the Sleeper.
H. G. Wells
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The Island of Dr. Moreau Edward Prendick is shipwrecked in the Pacific. Rescued by Doctor Moreau’s assistant he is taken to the doctor’s island home where he discovers the doctor has been experimenting on the animal inhabitants of the island, creating bizarre proto-humans…
H. G. Wells
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The War of the Worlds The War of the Worlds (1898), by H. G. Wells, is an early science fiction novel which describes an invasion of England by aliens from Mars. It is one of the earliest and best-known depictions of an alien invasion of Earth, and has influenced many others, as well as spawning several films, radio dramas, comic book adaptations, and a television series based on the story. The 1938 radio broadcast caused public outcry against the episode, as many listeners believed that an actual Martian invasion was in progress, a notable example of mass hysteria.
H. G. Wells
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The Invisible Man The Invisible Man is an 1897 science fiction novella by H.G. Wells. Wells’ novel was originally serialised in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897, and published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who theorises that if a person’s refractive index is changed to exactly that of air and his body does not absorb or reflect light, then he will be invisible. He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but cannot become visible again, becoming mentally unstable as a result.
H. G. Wells
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The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth Two scientists devise a compound that produces enormous plants, animals — and humans! The chilling results are disastrous.
H. G. Wells
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The First Men in the Moon The novel tells the story of a journey to the moon by the impecunious businessman Mr Bedford and the brilliant but eccentric scientist Dr Cavor. On arrival, Bedford and Cavor find the moon inhabited by a race of moon-folk the two call “Selenites.” The novel can also be read as a critique of prevailing political opinions from the turn of the century, particularly of imperialism.
Hammurabi
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The Code of Hammurabi The Code of Hammurabi (Codex Hammurabi) is a well-preserved ancient law code, created ca. 1790 BC (middle chronology) in ancient Babylon. It was enacted by the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi. One nearly complete example of the Code survives today, inscribed on a seven foot, four inch tall basalt stele in the Akkadian language in the cuneiform script. One of the first written codes of law in recorded history. These laws were written on a stone tablet standing over eight feet tall (2.4 meters) that was found in 1901.
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Food for the mind
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD
H. G. WELLS, the third son of a small shopkeeper, was born in Bromley in 1866. After two years’ apprenticeship in a draper’s shop, he became a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and won a scholarship to study under T. H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. He taught biology before becoming a professional writer and journalist. He wrote more than a hundred books, including novels, essays, histories and programmes for world regeneration.
Wells, who rose from obscurity to world fame, had an emotionally and intellectually turbulent life. His prophetic imagination was first displayed in pioneering works of science fiction such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Later he became an apostle of socialism, science and progress, whose anticipations of a future world state include The Shape of Things to Come (1933). His controversial views on sexual equality and women’s rights were expressed in the novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). He was, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘an important liberator of thought and action’.
Wells drew on his own early struggles in many of his best novels, including Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). His educational works, some written in collaboration, include The Outline of History (1920) and The Science of Life (1930). His Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., 1934) reviews his world. He died in London in 1946.
NORMAN STONE is Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara. For the period 1984–97 he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Professor Stone’s numerous publications include The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (1975), Europe Transformed 1878–1919 (1983), The Other Russia (1990) and The Russian Chronicles (1990).
MICHAEL SHERBORNE is Curriculum Manager of English and Humanities at Luton Sixth Form College. He is a former Chairman of the H. G. Wells Society and a former editor of the Wellsian. He has edited Wells’s The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1996) and – under his previous name, Michael Draper – has written Modern Novelists: H. G. Wells (1987), which was based on his Ph.D. thesis. He is also the author of study guides to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2000), Brave New World (2000) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (2001).
H. G. WELLS
A Short History of the World
Edited with Notes by MICHAEL SHERBORNE
With an Introduction by NORMAN STONE
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First published 1922
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2006
1
Text copyright © the Literary Executors of the Estate of H. G. Wells
Biographical Note, Further Reading copyright © Patrick Parrinder, 2005
Introduction copyright © Norman Stone, 1991
Note on the Text, Notes copyright © Michael Sherborne, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192219-5
Contents
Biographical Note
Introduction
Further Reading
Note on the Text
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Notes
Biographical Note
Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 at Bromley, Kent, a small market town soon to be swallowed up by the suburban growth of outer London. His father, formerly a professional gardener and a county cricketer renowned for his fast bowling, owned a small business in Bromley High Street selling china goods and cricket bats. The house was grandly known as Atlas House, but the centre of family life was a cramped basement kitchen underneath the shop. Soon Joseph Wells’s cricketing days were cut short by a broken leg, and the family fortunes looked bleak.
Young ‘Bertie’ Wells had already shown great academic promise, but when he was thirteen his family broke up and he was forced to earn his own living. His father was bankrupt, and his mother left home to become resident housekeeper at Uppark, the great Sussex country house where she had worked as a lady’s maid before her marriage. Wells was taken out of school to follow his two elder brothers into the drapery trade. After serving briefly as a pupil-teacher and a pharmacist’s assistant, in 1881 he was apprenticed to a department store in Southsea, working a thirteen-hour day and sleeping in a dormitory with his fellow-apprentices. This was the unhappiest period of his life, though he would later revisit it in comic romances such as Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Kipps and Polly both manage to escape from their servitude as drapers, and in 1883, helped by his long-suffering mother, Wells cancelled his indentures and obtained a post as teaching assistant at Midhurst Grammar School near Uppark. His intellectual development, long held back, now progressed astonishingly. He passed a series of examinations in science subjects and, in September 1884, entered the Normal School of Science, South Kensington (later to become part of Imperial College of Science and Technology) on a government scholarship.
Wells was a born teacher, as many of his books would show, and at first he was an enthusiastic student. He had the good fortune to be taught biology and zoology by one of the most influential scientific thinkers of the Victorian age, Darwin’s friend and supporter T. H. Huxley. Wells never forgot Huxley’s teaching, but the other professors were more humdrum, and his interest in their courses rapidly waned. He scraped through second-year physics, but failed his third-year geology exam and left South Kensington in 1887 without taking a degree. He was thrilled by the theoretical framework and imaginative horizons of natural science, but impatient of practical detail and the grinding, routine tasks of laboratory work. He cut his classes and spent his time reading literature and history, satisfying the curiosity he had earlier felt while exploring the long-neglected library at Uppark. He started a college magazine, the Science Schools Journal, and argued for socialism in student debates.
In the summer of 1887 Wells became science master at a small private school in North Wales, but a few weeks later he was knocked down and injured by one of his pupils on the football field. Sickly and undernourished as a result of three years of student poverty, he suffered severe kidney and lung damage. After months of convalescence at Uppark he was able to return to science teaching at Henley House School, Kilburn. In 1890 he passed his University of London B.Sc. (Hons.) with a first class in zoology and obtained a post as a biology tutor for the University Correspondence College. In 1891 he married his cousin Isabel Wells, but they had little in common and soon Wells fell in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (usually known as ‘Jane’). They started living together in 1893, and married two years later when his divorce came through.
During his years as a biology tutor Wells slowly began making his way as a writer and journalist. He wrote for the Educational Times, edited the University Correspondent, and in 1891 published a philosophical essay, ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, in the prestigious Fortnightly Review. His first book was a Textbook of Biology (1893). But no sooner was it published than his health again collapsed, forcing him to give up teaching and rely entirely on his literary earnings. His future seemed highly precarious, yet soon he was in regular demand as a writer of short stories and humorous essays for the burgeoning newspapers and magazines of the period. He became a fiction reviewer and, for a short period in 1895, a theatre critic.
Ever since his student days Wells had worked intermittently on a story about time-travelling and the possible future of the human race. An early version was published in the Science Schools Journal as ‘The Chronic Argonauts’, but now, after numerous redrafts and much encouragement from the poet and editor W. E. Henley, it finally took shape as The Time Machine (1895). Its success was instantaneous, and while it was running as a magazine serial Wells was already being spoken of as a ‘man of genius’. He was celebrated as the inventor of the ‘scientific romance’, a combination of adventure novel and philosophical tale in which the hero becomes involved in a life-and-death struggle resulting from some unforeseen scientific development. There was now a ready market for his fiction, and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; later revised as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910), The First Men in the Moon (1901) and several other volumes followed quickly from his pen.
By the turn of the twentieth century Wells was established as a popular author in England and America, and his books were rapidly being translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian and other European languages. Already his fame had begun to eclipse that of his predecessor in scientific romance, the French author Jules Verne, who had dominated the field since the 1860s. But Wells, an increasingly self-conscious artist, had larger ambitions than to go down in history as a boys’ adventure novelist like Jules Verne. Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) was his first attempt at realistic fiction, comic in spirit and manifestly reflecting his own experiences as a student and teacher. By the end of the Edwardian decade, when he wrote his ‘Condition of England’ novels Tono-Bungay (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911), Wells had become one of the leading novelists of his day, the friend and rival of such literary figures as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and Henry James.
