A Preface to H G Wells

John R. Hammond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582404724
• eBook ISBN: 9781317877004
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

John Hammond offers an introduction to the life and work of H G Wells which is of interest and value to both the student and the general reader.  Although Wells is studied at undergradute level there is no introductory text available as yet, instead students can only consult full length detailed biographies.   John Hammond provides a concise overview allowing the student to read  Wells with greater critical appreciation and to undertand the main areas of discussion and disagreement concerning the author.

Part One
The Writer and His Setting

The Wells Family

Chronological table

Chapter 1
His Life and Times

H.G. Wells was a man of many parts. He was a novelist, a short story writer and the author of a series of scientific romances which are known throughout the world. At the same time he was a popular educator who wrote an Outline of History and A Short History of the World and numerous books on sociology, politics and philosophy. He was a feminist, a humanist and a tireless campaigner for freedom of thought and expression. He produced more than a hundred books and pamphlets in a literary career which extended for more than half a century; several of his works have been continuously in print since their first publication more than a hundred years ago.

The period covered by his lite (1866—1946) was one of unprecedented change. He was born into a world before the motor car, the aeroplane, the telephone and television. He lived to see the First and Second World Wars, the first computers and the dawn of the nuclear age. Many of the changes witnessed in his lifetime — the invention of the aeroplane and the atomic bomb, the emancipation of women, total warfare and the growth of the world community — had been foreseen in his novels and stories long before they came to fruition.

His life is one of many paradoxes. The author of some deeply pessimistic fables including The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, his name has become synonymous with a belief in the inevitability of progress and the view that science is a panacea for all human ills. A painstaking craftsman who frequently revised his work before he was satisfied, he is widely regarded as a facile writer who took little trouble over his work. The son of a gardener and a lady's maid, he rose to become a world figure whose novels and journalism commanded an audience of millions.

Early years

Herbert George Wells was born at Bromley, Kent on 21 September 1866. Bromley today is a suburb of London but in mid-Victorian times it was a small market town with an identity of its own. Situated twelve miles from London — three or four hours' walking before the advent of the railway — Bromley was a rural community, pleasantly situated above the valley of the river Ravensbourne. His parents, Joseph and Sarah Wells, came to live there in 1855 unaware that the town was about to be changed irrevocably by the coming of the railway.

Joseph Wells was born at Penshurst, Kent on 14 July 1828, the son of the head gardener to Lord de Lisle at Penshurst Place. He was trained to his father's profession and held a number of transitory appointments as a gardener between 1847 and 1851. Contemporary photographs show him to have been a jovial-looking man with a short crisp beard, an upright bearing and penetrating eyes. He held decided opinions and was not afraid to voice them; it is this characteristic, one suspects, which did not endear him to his employers. In June 1851 he was engaged as gardener by Miss Featherstonhaugh of Uppark, Sussex and there he remained for two years. It was at Uppark that he met Sarah Neal, a quiet, gentle woman, five years older than himself who was employed at the great house as a lady's maid. Uppark was by no means typical of country houses of that era. It was a microcosm of an earlier age, frozen in a time warp. The house, which was built circa 1690, stands in a commanding position overlooking the village of South Harting and the great ridge of the South Downs. Surrounded by walled gardens, a deer park and undulating countryside it was remote from urbanisation or any intrusive influence.

Sarah Neal was born in 1822, the daughter of George Neal, an innkeeper first at Chichester and then at Midhurst, Sussex. She attended a finishing school for young ladies at Chichester where she learned to write in copperplate handwriting, to read, to do arithmetic and elementary geography. After leaving school she had four years' apprenticeship as a dressmaker, then went into service as a lady's maid in various parts of England and Ireland before being appointed personal maid to Frances Bullock at Uppark in September 1850.

A contemporary of Joseph and Sarah who knew them both records that Joseph was 'a dictatorial, overbearing man, quite overawing his delicately made and lady-like wife. On the face of it, the engagement between this oddly matched couple does seem unusual. Joseph was an out-of-doors man, vigorous, sceptical and unconventional. Sarah was small, quietly spoken and self-effacing, determined to do her duty and to know her place in a rigidly hierarchical world.

Wells's mother, Sarah Wells, nee Neal, housekeeper at Uppark

In 1853 Sarah's world collapsed about her. She left her post at Uppark to look after her invalid mother; her parents died within a few weeks of each other and she discovered to her horror that her father had been heavily in debt. The inn and all her parents' possessions had to be sold in order to meet the creditors' demands. With no home and no situation Sarah evidently felt she had little alternative but to accept Joe's offer of marriage. They were married at St Stephen's Church, London on 22 November 1853, seventeen days after her mother's death. The marriage certificate records Joseph's occupation simply as 'gardener'.

Wells's father, Joseph Wells, shopkeeper at Bromley

In August 1855 Joseph lost his situation and the couple were homeless for a time. At this point George Wells (a cousin of Joseph's father) offered what seemed to be a solution to their crisis. He owned a china and glassware shop at 47 High Street, Bromley (pretentiously named Atlas House) which they could purchase, if they wished, on attractively easy terms. Joseph took little time to consider. He spent all his savings and reserves on acquiring the business and, together with his wife and infant daughter, moved into the shop. For the first time in his life he was master of his destiny.

It seems clear that the shop survived only in the most precarious way, for Joseph was no businessman. Had he had more business acumen and drive the venture would probably have succeeded. As it was, the shop simply ticked over, drifting on from year to year until Joseph was finally sold up (May 1887) for failing to pay his quarterly rent. Wells recorded of his father: 'he had a light and cheerful disposition, and a large part of his waking energy was spent in evading disagreeable realisations'. Much of the work of running the shop and managing the home fell to Sarah, for Joseph was frequently absent, but Sarah was a woman of some determination and did her utmost to keep up appearances. It was into this home that Frank (1857) and Fred (1862) were born, and finally Herbert George.

H. G. (or Bert as he was usually called) was thus the youngest of their four children. Sarah's beloved daughter Fanny died suddenly and tragically of appendicitis in 1864, whereupon she heaped all her devotion on her youngest son in the hope that he would grow up, like Fanny, a model of infant piety. In this she was to be cruelly disappointed. Bert inherited much of his father's scepticism and wilfulness, and displayed little interest in the religious beliefs which were so important to her. At the same time he inevitably spent much time in her company and his early vision of the world derived largely from her teachings. Throughout her life the relationship between mother and son was a complex mixture of exasperation and love.

Young Bert was sent to a dame school at 8 South Street, Bromley (1871—2) where he learned to read and do simple arithmetic, and then became a pupil at Mr Thomas Morley's Academy situated further up the High Street. Here he remained for 6 years (1874—80). Between leaving the dame school and becoming a day boy at Morley's Academy there occurred an interregnum of crucial importance to his life. In 1874, when he was aged 7, he sustained a fractured leg (the bone was badly set by the local doctor and had to be rebroken and set again). This necessitated a lengthy convalescence and his absence from all active games. During these months of enforced idleness he discovered the pleasures of reading and would let his imagination soar over Wood's Natural History, the works of Washington Irving and bound volumes of Punch and Fun. Joseph Wells had a taste for reading and would bring books home from sales' or from the Bromley Literary Institute. Thomas Morley, an irascible Scot, was a strict disciplinarian with little patience with dullards. With pupils who showed promise he was however prepared to make an effort and he soon singled out Wells as a boy of exceptional gifts, encouraging him in the solution of mathematical and grammatical problems. By the time he had left the school at the age of 13 Wells had acquired the basis of an education but was still intensely curious about the world of science and discovery unfolding all about him. Throughout his school years he supplemented his daytime learning with perfervid reading at home. Among the books he recalled particularly was the poetry of Sir Walter Scott. Chaucer, Humboldt's Cosmos, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Captain Cook's Travels and Grote's History of Greece. He was also dipping eagerly into Dickens's novels and imbibing a fascination with literature which remained with him throughout his life. A humorous story of some 100 pages, The Desert Daisy, written and illustrated by Wells at the age of 12 or 13, survived among his papers and was published in facsimile in 1957.

In 1877 disaster came to the Wells family and necessitated the breakup of the household. Joseph fell one Sunday morning and broke his leg while attempting to prune a grapevine which grew against the back of the house. It soon became clear that from now on, though he could walk, he would be permanently and heavily lame. His lameness meant that his days as a cricketer and coach were over and thus the shop's income, at best a meagre one, was severely reduced. Frank and Fred were by this time apprenticed to the drapery trade, for Sarah's overriding ambition for her sons was that they should be drapers — this she considered to be a gentlemanly and respectable occupation. It was decided that Bert must follow in his brothers' footsteps as soon as his schooling could be terminated. At this point, Wells recalled later, 'the heavens opened and a great light shone on Mrs Sarah Wells'. Sarah's former employer, Frances Bullock, had inherited Uppark on the death of Lady Featherstonhaugh. She was in need of a housekeeper and wrote to her former maid offering her the post. This seemed to be the solution to all Sarah's worries. She had always hated Bromley and her life of drudgery in the shop, and the chance of leaving all this behind her and returning to Uppark where she had been so happy must have come to her like the answer to her dreams. She decided to accept the offer, having little compunction in leaving Joe behind to run the shop on his own and thrusting Bert out into the world (June 1880) to become a draper's apprentice at Windsor. Sarah became housekeeper at Uppark in the summer of 1880 and continued in that capacity until February 1893.

Young Wells's arrival at Windsor as a shop assistant 'on trial' was the first of a series of false starts in life. Shop assistants at that time had to work a thirteen-hour day, from 7.30 am to 8.30 pm (the Shop Hours Act limiting the working week to seventy-four hours was not introduced until 1892, and weekly half-day holidays for employees did not become compulsory until 1911). To the 13-year-old Wells, cut off from his schooling just when his curiosity and imagination had been most aroused, the days must have seemed endless. On his own admission, however, he was clearly a misfit as a draper, displaying little or no aptitude for the work and making it all too clear that his interests lay elsewhere. He proved so unsuitable as a draper that at the end of the trial month his employers rejected him, finding him 'untidy and troublesome'.

His next false start was to be sent to Wookey in Somerset, where a distant relative of his mother's, Alfred Williams, was the only schoolmaster at the National School. The plan was that Wells would live at the school house while his 'Uncle' Williams coached him to be an usher (or pupil-teacher as they were then termed). This plan also came to grief after only three months. An inspector discovered that Williams's certificates were suspect. The Schoolmaster was dismissed and Bert had to pack his bags once more.

For a while his mother was at a loss what to do with him and he spent some weeks at Uppark, reading voraciously, going for long walks, exploring the house and building a miniature theatre to entertain the maids with a shadow play in the housekeeper's room. A snowstorm kept him housebound for a fortnight and he produced a facetious newspaper, The Uppark Alarmist, to keep the servants entertained. Uppark possessed a fine eclectic library, once the property of Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh who had been a freethinker. Many of his books had been relegated to an attic and Wells was allowed to rout among these abandoned volumes. Here he discovered Paine's Rights of Man, an unexpurgated edition of Gulliver's Travels, Johnson's Rasselas and William Beckford's Vathek. He dipped into Gibbon and Plutarch's Lives, and improved his French by reading Voltaire's Candide in the original. Here he also discovered a forgotten Gregorian telescope, pieced it together through a process of trial and error, and was found by his mother in the small hours studying the craters of the moon. It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact of Uppark on Wells's imagination, indeed it would not be too much to say that it was the greatest single influence on his early life. The great house with its deer park and woodlands, its library and paintings, its air of leisured civilisation, affected him enormously and played a considerable part in stimulating his imagination. The house also made a deep impression on him because of its rigid hierarchical structure of staff and servants, and the sharp contrast between life above and below stairs. In the basement is a series of underground passages constructed in 1810 to link the kitchen with the service stairs. These tunnels are ventilated by deep shafts letting in light from the surface. As a boy he would have been very familiar with this system of tunnels and may well have derived the idea of the Morlocks with their underground passages from this eerie below-stairs world.

Uppark, West Sussex, the 'Bladesover House' of Tono-Bungay

Later he was to portray Uppark as Bladesover House in Tono-Bungay, Burnmore Park in The Passionate Friends and Mowbray in The World of William Clissold. Its effect on a 14-year-old boy who had spent all his life in Bromley had the force of a revelation. It awakened him to the importance of social relationships and led him to speculate about the country house and its role in English history. Throughout his mother's tenure as housekeeper he spent many of his holidays at the house, familiarising himself more and more with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Series Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE: THE WRITER AND HIS SETTING
• PART TWO: CRITICAL COMMENTARY
• PART THREE: REFERENCE SECTION
• Further reading and reference
• Index
• Index of Well's Works