H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, then a market town in Kent and now part of south east London. His father, Joseph Wells, kept an unprofitable china shop and earned extra money as a professional cricketer; his mother, Sarah, had worked as a lady's maid. Money was always short in the household, and the family's precarious grip on lower middle class respectability marked the boy's outlook for life ^[1].

A broken leg at the age of seven, by his own later account, changed everything. Confined to bed for weeks, the young Wells read whatever books his father could carry home from the local institute, and the habit never left him. When the shop finally failed and his father fractured his thigh in 1877, ending the cricket income, Sarah Wells returned to service as housekeeper at Uppark, a country house in Sussex. Her son's visits there gave him the run of a substantial library, where he encountered Plato, Swift, and Voltaire ^[1].

Formal schooling was patchy. Wells attended Thomas Morley's Commercial Academy in Bromley, then endured a series of apprenticeships his mother arranged: first to a draper, then briefly to a chemist, then again to a draper at Southsea. He loathed the drapery trade, working thirteen hour days and sleeping in a dormitory, and the experience later supplied raw material for comic novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly ^[2]. In 1883 he talked his way out of his indentures and took a post as a pupil teacher at Midhurst Grammar School, a first step toward the education he wanted.

In 1884 Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, later absorbed into Imperial College London. There he studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's great champion, and the year spent in Huxley's classroom gave Wells the evolutionary frame of mind that runs through nearly all his fiction ^[3]. He lost interest in the later stages of the course, failed his geology examinations, and left in 1887 without completing the degree, though he took an external University of London BSc in zoology in 1890.

The years that followed were hard. Wells taught in private schools, suffered a crushed kidney after a football incident with pupils, and was repeatedly laid low by lung haemorrhages that doctors treated as tubercular. Ill health pushed him away from teaching and toward the pen. He wrote a biology textbook, coached correspondence students, and began placing humorous essays and scientific journalism in London papers, including the Pall Mall Gazette ^[2].

His breakthrough came in 1895. The Time Machine, serialised in the New Review and then published as a book, condensed years of thinking about evolution, class, and deep time into a short, unsettling narrative. Reviewers compared the unknown author to Swift, and Wells followed the success at an astonishing pace: The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1896, The Invisible Man in 1897, The War of the Worlds in 1898, and The First Men in the Moon in 1901 ^[3]. He called these books scientific romances. Later generations would call them the founding texts of science fiction.

Any account of H. G. Wells achievements has to begin with the scientific romances, which introduced ideas that became permanent fixtures of the modern imagination: time travel by machine, alien invasion, invisibility as a scientific experiment gone wrong, and genetic manipulation of animals into people. The War of the Worlds, with Martians landing on Horsell Common in Surrey, has never been out of print and inspired Orson Welles's famous 1938 American radio adaptation ^[4].

Wells refused to stay inside the genre he had created. Between 1900 and 1910 he produced realistic social comedies drawn from his own early struggles, including Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909), and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Critics of the day, among them Henry James, rated these novels highly, and Tono-Bungay in particular is often judged his most accomplished piece of literary fiction ^[2].

He was equally influential as a thinker about the future. Anticipations (1901) made him famous as a forecaster; A Modern Utopia (1905) set out his hopes for a planned world state; and The World Set Free (1914) imagined atomic bombs three decades before Hiroshima, a book the physicist Leo Szilard later credited with shaping his thinking about nuclear chain reactions ^[5]. During the First World War Wells popularised the phrase describing it as the war that will end war. Afterwards he attempted something larger still: The Outline of History (1920), a single narrative of humanity from its origins onward, sold more than two million copies and made him wealthy ^[1]. With his son G. P. Wells and Julian Huxley he followed it with The Science of Life (1930), an ambitious survey of biology for general readers.

Wells married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells in 1891, but the marriage failed quickly. In 1894 he ran off with Amy Catherine Robbins, a former student he called Jane, and they married in 1895 after his divorce. Jane remained his wife until her death in 1927, managing his household and much of his business affairs while tolerating, by explicit agreement, his many affairs ^[1].

Those affairs were numerous and sometimes scandalous. Wells had a son, Anthony West, with the writer Rebecca West in 1914, and another child, Anna Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves in 1909. Later companions included the Russian aristocrat Moura Budberg, who refused to marry him. Anthony West eventually wrote a searching biography of his father, H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life, published in 1984 ^[6].

Politically, Wells joined the Fabian Society in 1903 and tried, with characteristic impatience, to take it over and remake it as a mass movement. He lost the fight with George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs and resigned in 1908, an episode he satirised in his novel The New Machiavelli ^[2]. He stood twice for Parliament as a Labour candidate for London University, in 1922 and 1923, and lost both times. He interviewed Lenin in 1920 and Stalin in 1934, and argued face to face with both about the future of socialism ^[1].

The 1930s turned Wells into a global campaigner. He lectured across America, broadcast on radio, and pressed his case for a world encyclopedia and a unified world order in books such as The Open Conspiracy (1928) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933). The 1936 film Things to Come, for which he wrote the screenplay for Alexander Korda's production, brought his vision of destruction and technocratic rebuilding to cinema audiences ^[4].

His warnings grew darker as fascism spread. Wells had a hostile exchange with the Nazi regime, and his books were among those burned in Germany in 1933. In 1940 he published The Rights of Man, a short book arguing for a declaration of fundamental human rights; scholars have traced its influence on the drafting climate that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 ^[5].

Wells spent the Second World War in his house at 13 Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park, refusing to leave London during the bombing. He completed a doctorate in science at the University of London in 1943 with a thesis on the illusion of individuality. His final book, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), was bleak, questioning whether humanity could adapt fast enough to survive. He died at home on August 13, 1946, at the age of 79, and was cremated at Golders Green, his ashes later scattered at sea off the south coast of England ^[1].

Wells is remembered first as one of the two founders, with Jules Verne, of science fiction, though he disliked comparisons between them. Verne, he said, dealt in actual possibilities of invention, while his own stories used a single fantastic assumption to examine human nature. Writers from Yevgeny Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley to George Orwell wrote with him, and often against him: Orwell's essay Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941) attacked his faith in rational planning even while acknowledging his enormous influence on a generation ^[7].

His predictions gave him a second reputation as a prophet. Aerial bombing, tank warfare (foreshadowed in his 1903 story The Land Ironclads), atomic weapons, and something like the World Wide Web (his World Brain essays of 1938 proposed a permanent universal encyclopedia) all appeared in his work before they appeared in the world ^[5]. Winston Churchill was a lifelong reader who borrowed phrases from him, and Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times without winning ^[3].

The institutions of his life keep his memory active. The H. G. Wells Society, founded in 1960, promotes study of his work; Bromley commemorates its most famous son; and the crater Wells on the far side of the Moon carries his name. For readers asking who was H. G. Wells, the simplest answer is still the best: a draper's apprentice who taught himself into science, invented much of the modern future, and never stopped arguing about how humanity should live in it. Any honest H. G. Wells biography ends with the sheer scale of the output, roughly a hundred books across fiction, history, science, and politics, most of them written in the conviction that the human story is, as he put it in The Outline of History, a race between education and catastrophe ^[1].