Herbert George Wells was born upstairs at ‘Atlas House’, a crockery and glassware shop run by his parents at 162 High Street Bromley in what was then Kent but is now Greater London. The massive expansion of the metropolis, inexorably swallowing land from its surrounding counties, stands as objective correlative to the changes of the intervening century-and-a-half, a tide of increasing urbanisation and technological development that Wells in his writing, of course, anticipated.

Bertie , as he was known in the family, was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells, formerly a domestic gardener, by this time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer, and his wife, Sarah Wells née Neal, who had worked in domestic service. Both were relatively old when Bertie was born. Sarah, born in 1822, was approaching her 44th birthday when she went into labour, a parlous age to give birth, even today. Joseph was a few years younger: born in 1828, the son of the head gardener at Penshurst Place in West Kent. In his son’s words, Joseph ‘grew up to gardening and cricket, and remained an out-of-doors, open-air man to the day of his death’. He could read and do rudimentary sums, but this was the limit of his book-learning. He was, however, a remarkably talented cricketer. At this time, the sport was divided into upper-class ‘gentlemen’ and lower-class ‘players’, and payment for the latter was ex gratia, which made it hard to make a living at the game. But Joseph Wells still has a place in the cricketing history books as the first bowler ever to take four wickets in four consecutive balls in a first-class match—a fantastically rare bowling achievement. This feat occurred when Kent played Sussex at Brighton in 1862, and one of the four wickets Wells took was Spencer Austen-Leigh’s—Jane Austen’s great-nephew—which provides a connection, howsoever tenuous, between Pride and Prejudice and War of the Worlds. Cricketing is a seasonal sport and income from it in the nineteenth century much too precarious to live upon, so Joseph Wells also undertook manual work. It was whilst working in the gardens at Uppark, a stately home in West Sussex near the Hampshire border that he met and courted Sarah Neal, then a lady’s maid.

Sarah , though also lower-middle-class, was a notch or two socially superior to her future husband. Her father, a Chichester innkeeper, had found the money for more extensive schooling than was usually the case for women of her class in the mid-nineteenth century, which meant she was more literate and refined than Joe and also more religious. Indeed, friction between Sarah’s devout low church Anglicanism and Joseph’s freethinking agnosticism made the marriage troublesome, as did the fundamental mismatch of their personalities. Their first child, a girl called Frances, was born in 1856. After a period in which Joe proved unable to settle at a variety of country-house gardening jobs, the two moved to Bromley. Joe had inherited a £100 on the death of his father and the two of them used this money to acquire Atlas House from Joe’s cousin George Wells and furnish it with china crockery and glassware. Neither had any experience as shopkeepers and though Sarah was less feckless than Joseph, the shop, ill-situated and unprepossessing, did not prosper. Joseph’s cricket occasionally supplemented the family income and, hoping to improve matters, Joseph began to stock cricket bats, balls and gear alongside the crockery; a strange combination of saleables that did little to attract customers.

After their daughter two boys were born to the couple—Frank in 1857 and Fred in 1862—before their first-born, little Frances, died in 1864. H.G. Wells later said that ‘deep down in my mother’s heart something was broken when my sister died two years and more before I was born. Her simple faith was cracked then and its reality spilled away’ [Experiment in Autobiography , 44]. Sarah’s anxiety at being able to support the family, and her increasing estrangement from her husband, were compounded by her proneness to what we would nowadays call depression. Joseph was often away, and after Herbert George’s birth in 1866, his parents took to sleeping in separate rooms: the back bedroom for Sarah and a front room for Joe. Wells later wrote that ‘this separation was, I think, their form of birth control’.

A broken leg marked a turning point in young H.G.’s life. In the summer of 1874, when he was seven and playing outside, one of his father’s friends, a man called Sutton, picked him up and tossed him in the air, accidentally dropping him. Wells landed across a tent peg and broke his tibia. Weeks of convalescence followed—the bone, badly set, had to be re-broken and reset. It was time which Wells spent in bed reading. His father brought him books home from the Bromley Institute. ‘I cannot recall now many of the titles of the books I read, I devoured them so fast’ he later noted. Amongst the ones he could remember were books of imperial adventure, Wood’s Natural History, histories of the Duke of Wellington and the American Civil War, the works of Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper as well as ‘the bound volumes of Punch’:

The bound periodicals with their political cartoons and their quaint details played a curious part in developing my imaginative framework. My ideas of political and international relations were moulded very greatly by the big figures of John Bull and Uncle Sam… And across the political scene also marched tall and lovely feminine figures, Britannia, Erin, Columbia, La France, bare armed, bare necked, showing beautiful bare bosoms, revealing shining thighs, wearing garments that were a revelation in an age of flounces and crinolines. My first consciousness of women, my first stirrings of desire were roused by these heroic divinities. I became woman-conscious from those days onward. [Experiment in Autobiography , 55]

Wells received his first formal education 1874–80 at Thomas Morley’s Commercial Academy, a private school only a few doors down Bromley High Street from Atlas House. Wells’s two older brothers were apprenticed into the draper’s trade. Then, in 1877, Joseph Wells fell from a garden trellis and broke his leg so badly it put an end to his career as a cricketer. The subsequent reduction in family income took a toll on the family. Sarah could rarely afford to buy meat; bills went unpaid. When Frank finished his apprenticeship and took his first proper job as a draper’s assistant (at a meagre 10 shillings a week) he gave Sarah money to buy young Bertie boots and she wept with relief. Joseph’s accident left him sullen and withdrawn, and it was this emotional breakdown of the marriage, as much as Sarah’s need to earn money, that led to their final separation. Sarah was still fondly remembered by the family at Uppark and in 1880 was offered the job of housekeeper, which she took, leaving Atlas House for good and moving to West Sussex.

Bertie, 14 now, was apprenticed to a draper’s shop as his brothers had been before him: an upmarket establishment in Windsor called Rodgers and Denyer. Apprentices lived in, worked from 7:30 am until 8:30 pm 6 days a week and received sixpence pocket-money. Wells’s portrait of this life in Kipps is a vivid account of the boredom and drudgery involved. Constitutionally unsuited to the life, he soon lost this position and for a time he worked as a pupil-teacher in Wookey, in Somerset, a school run by a distant relative called Alfred Williams—a larger-than-life character with a hook for a hand and the booming jollity of a natural confidence-man. But Uncle Williams’s educational credentials were forgeries and Government Inspectors deprived him of the school in 1880. Wells returned to his mother at Uppark. He spent the winter of 1880–81 expanding his reading. Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, the house’s quondam owner, ‘had been a free-thinker, and the rooms downstairs abounded in bold and enlightening books’.

I was allowed to borrow volumes and carry them off to my room. Then or later, I cannot now recall when, I improved my halting French with Voltaire’s lucid prose, I read such books as Vathek and Rasselas, I nibbled at Tom Paine, I devoured an unexpurgated Gulliver’s Travels and I found Plato’s Republic. That last was a very releasing book indeed for my mind, I had learnt the trick of mocking at law and custom from Uncle Williams… Here was the amazing and heartening suggestion that the whole fabric of law, custom and worship, which seemed so invincibly established, might be cast into the melting pot and made anew. [Experiment in Autobiography, 106–7]

This is Wells looking back in 1934, and his stress on Swift and Plato reflects a desire to dignify his intellectual pedigree in the light of the non-fictional and utopian work he had done in the twentieth century. What is not mentioned here, because he was so ubiquitous a figure that he went without saying, was Dickens, whom Wells read often and intently. He went on to be much more of a Dickensian writer of fiction than he was a Swiftian or Platonic one.

Young Wells, however, could not be allowed to rest idle. His mother arranged for a new apprenticeship, this time at a chemist’s shop in Midhurst, a West Sussex village a few miles from Uppark: Samuel Cowap’s emporium in Church Hill. Wells started for a trial period of 1 month, during which his deficiency in Latin—considered a necessity for a dispensing chemist—was addressed by lessons in Midhurst Grammar School under the tutelage of Horace Byatt. The apprenticeship at the chemist’s was never articled, but after his trial month in the shop came to an end the young Wells stayed on at Byatt’s school. He hurried through the curriculum, eager to learn, but his mother was set upon his learning a trade as his older brothers had before him. She arranged a second draper’s apprenticeship, at Edwin Hyde’s shop on the King’s Road at Southsea, on the Hampshire coastline. Wells protested but had no choice in the matter and took up his position in May 1881—more 13-hour days, more being constantly harassed and chivvied by superiors, more rounds of mind-dulling drudge work. Wells endured this labour for 2 years—a remarkable stretch of time, in retrospect—experiencing bouts of depression and suicidal ideation. He dreamt of leaving, but his mother had paid Hyde a bond of £40, a large sum, and he did not feel he could.

It is worth pausing for a moment on this development. We are likely to read Wells’s life teleologically, as it were—with, that is, a sense of where it was going. From that perspective, these adolescent experiences of Wells’s, though clearly detours from the true path his life would take, at least provided valuable raw material from which some of his best, and most influential, writing would later be crafted. We might even take this fact as providing a redemption of and therefore justification for the existential misery entailed. But life is not lived retrospectively, and for Wells’s 2 years of misery, at this key early stage in his life, meant that a consciousness of existential frustration became constitutive of his larger being-in-the-world. This is evident in various practical senses. He was always afterwards motivated to work both hard and tirelessly, to avoid falling back into any such state of powerlessness, and it left him with a lifelong sympathy for the disempowered underclasses of the world. But it is also evident psycho-sexually. Frustration is, after all, the plastic idiom of desire, and Wells’s desiring appetites were on a scale to dwarf those of many people. The contrast with Dickens, aforementioned, is instructive: two hugely successful novelists, both from lower-middle-class backgrounds, both driven by a ferocious work ethic and social conscience, and both marked by a sense of having been banished, at a young age, into a work environment as demeaning as it was exhausting. For Dickens, this was his experience working in a Blacking Factory in the 1820s, something he fictionalised in David Copperfield. But the differences, as well as the similarities, are interesting: Dickens resented his experience bitterly and felt so acute a shame about the episode that he kept it secret from everybody (including his wife) with the one exception of his best friend John Forster. More, he blamed his mother: the abortive autobiographical fragment Dickens drafted, and which Forster published for the first time in his Life of Dickens (1872), ends: ‘my father said I should go back no more, and should go to school. I do not write resentfully or angrily: for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am: but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.’ Wells, though the experience of apprenticeship made him miserable, never resented it in this fashion, and certainly never felt it to be intrinsically shameful. Nor did he blame his mother, with whom he was extremely close all through his life. He did not feel as catastrophically abandoned as Dickens had done, and when he fictionalises the experience in Kipps and elsewhere, the tone is neither resentful nor shamed.

At any rate, the draper’s life proved increasingly intolerable. Two years in, with 2 years of his apprenticeship still remaining, matters finally came to a crisis. Sixteen-year-old Wells screwed his courage up and left. By mid-1883 his indentures at Hyde’s had been cancelled and Bertie began a new life as a student-teacher at Midhurst School.

Wells was much certainly better suited to teaching than he had been to drapery. He worked hard at Midhurst, cramming the school’s older boys for examinations attached to a governmental scheme to train science teachers. The school received money for pupils who passed the government’s exams—£4 for an advanced pass, less for a bare pass—and Wells successfully guided several pupils to the highest marks. Indeed he did so well in this line that in 1884 the 18-year-old Wells was himself offered a government-funded scholarship to attend the Normal School in South Kensington to study science. ‘Normal Schools’, based on the model of the French Écoles Normales, were so called because they sought to instil and reinforce certain norms in their students—most were in fact what we now call ‘teacher-training colleges’. Thomas Henry Huxley, the famous scientist and evolutionary theorist, known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, had established the South Kensington school and Wells, when he took up his place, was taught biology and chemistry by Huxley himself, as well as by various other teachers and laboratory demonstrators. Wells never got to know Huxley beyond saying ‘good morning’ to him whilst holding open the door for him to pass through, but he later declared him ‘the greatest man’ he ever met. ‘I was under the shadow of Huxley, the acutest observer, the ablest generalizer, the great teacher, the most lucid and valiant of controversialists,’ Wells recalled in his Autobiography. ‘I had been assigned to his course in Elementary Biology and afterwards I was to go on with Zoology under him’ adding ‘that year I spent in Huxley’s class, was beyond all question, the most educational year of my l...