Background

Herbert George Wells was born on September 21, 1866 in Bromley, Kent, United Kingdom. His origins were lower middle class; his father, Joseph Wells, being a semiprofessional cricket player and his mother, Sarah Neal, an intermittent housekeeper. He grew up under the continual threat of poverty.

Education

At the age of 7 Wells entered Morley's School in Bromley, leaving at the age of 14. From 1884 he studied at the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, now part of Imperial College London) in South Kensington under the biologist T. H. Huxley. He left Kensington without a degree in 1887. Three years later he received a degree in science from the University of London.

Career

In 1880 Wells became apprenticed to a draper. He rebelled against this fate in 1883 and persuaded his parents to release him from the apprenticeship, taking an opportunity offered by Midhurst Grammar School again to become a pupil–teacher; his proficiency in Latin and science during his earlier short stay had been remembered. After a year of teaching at school he won a scholarship to continue his studies. In 1887 he returned to teaching in private schools for three years.

In 1891 Wells began teaching at a correspondence college in London. The same year he published his article "The Rediscovery of the Unique" in the Fortnightly Review. After three years of writing on educational topics, he published his first novel, The Time Machine. A series of scientific fantasies followed The Time Machine: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Awakes (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908).

Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Wells's first nonscience fiction novel, concerned the relationship of men and women and introduced sex as an integral part of that relationship. His semiautobiographical novels continued with Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910).

During World War I Wells became an expert publicist, particularly in Mr. Britling Sees It Through. The intention of The Outline of History (1920) was to "show plainly to the general intelligence, how inevitable, if civilization was to continue, was the growth of political, social, and economic organizations into world federation." After the Outline's appearance, Wells led an increasingly public life, expressing his opinions through syndicated articles. The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928) urged the case for an integrated global civilization.

Experiment in Autobiography (1934) was "an enormous reel of self-justification." Wells continued to average two titles a year. Apropos of Delores (1938) was a hilarious tribute to a former mistress. Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), his last book, was a vision of the future as nightmare.

Achievements

• Herbert Wells is remembered as an author, historian and champion of certain social and political ideals. So many of his predictions for the future came true in the ensuing years that he is sometimes called "the Father of Futurism." Although he is best known for his works of science fiction, he was also an imaginative social thinker, working assiduously to remove all vestiges of Victorian social, moral, and religious attitudes from 20th-century life.
  
  Between 1895 and his death Wells wrote approximately 40 novels and volumes of stories, more than 10 works of personal reactions to philosophic problems and as many on social reconstruction, 2 histories of the world, about 30 volumes of political and social prophecy, more than 30 pamphlets dealing with the Fabian Society, armament, nationalism, world peace, and similar subjects, 3 books for children, and an autobiography.

Works

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  • Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress: Upon Human Life and Thought

    (In 1901, the great writer and social critic attempted to ...)

    1901
  • Kipps

    (Orphaned at an early age, raised by his aunt and uncle, a...)

    1905
  • The Island of Dr. Moreau

    (This novel, one of his first forays into the science fict...)

    1896
  • The War in the Air

    (The author tells us in this book, as he has told us in ot...)

    1907
  • The Invisible Man

    (The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist wh...)

    1897
  • The Sleeper Awakes

    (A fascinating and prescient account of a future dominated...)

    1899
  • The Red Room

    (This collection of literature attempts to compile many of...)

    1896
  • The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents

    (Ranging from a plot to wipe out London through biological...)

    1895
  • A Modern Utopia

    (In A Modern Utopia, two travelers fall into a space-warp ...)

    1905
  • In the Days of the Comet

    (In the Days of the Comet uses the vapors of a comet to tr...)

    1906
  • The World Set Free

    (The book foreshadows nuclear warfare years before researc...)

    1914
  • Tono-Bungay

    (Presented as a miraculous cure-all, Tono-Bungay is in fac...)

    1908
  • The Shape of Things to Come

    (A classic example of Wellsian prophesy, this volume is hi...)

    1933
  • The First Men in the Moon

    (The novel tells the story of a journey to the moon by the...)

    1901
  • Love and Mr Lewisham

    (Young, impoverished, and ambitious science student Mr. Le...)

    1899
  • Men Like Gods

    (It features a utopian parallel universe. The hero of the...)

    1923
  • Love and Mr. Lewisham

    (Plot At the beginning of the novel, Mr. Lewisham is an 18...)

    1899
  • The History of Mr Polly

    (Mr. Polly is an ordinary middle-aged man who is tired of ...)

    1910
  • The Food of the Gods

    (Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood were amongst that ne...)

    1904
  • Mankind in the Making 1903
  • The History of Mr. Polly 1910
  • The Outline of History 1920
  • Mr. Britling Sees It Through 1916
  • The New Machiavelli 1910
  • The Outline of History 1920
  • Ann Veronica 1909
  • The Country of the Blind 1904
  • The Wheels of Chance 1895
  • The Wonderful Visit 1895
  • God The Invisible King 1917
  • The Croquet Player 1936
  • The Research Magnificent 1915
  • Tales of Space and Time 1899
  • The Soul of a Bishop 1917
  • The Passionate Friends 1913

Religion

Wells aligned himself with a "renascent or modern religion ... neither atheist nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian ... [that] he has found growing up in himself".

Politics

As his novels indicate, Wells was hostile to the Victorian social and moral orders. His criticism became explicit as his involvement with radical causes grew. Wells as prophet wrote Anticipations (1901), Mankind in the Making (1903), and A Modern Utopia (1905). He joined the Fabian Society, a socialist group that included George Bernard Shaw and Sydney Webb, in 1903; after an unsuccessful attempt four years later to turn Fabianism to mass propaganda and political action, Wells resigned. The New Machiavelli (1911), a novel, was a response to his experience in the society. After The New Machiavelli he began producing dialogue novels that expressed his current preoccupations. His Boon (1915) parodied the late style of Henry James.

"The Socialist (asks) what freedom is there today for the vast majority of mankind? They are free to do nothing but work for a bare subsistence all their lives, they may not go freely about the earth even, but are prosecuted for trespassing upon the health-giving breast of our universal mother. Consider the clerks and girls who hurry to their work of a morning across Brooklyn Bridge in New York, or Hungerford Bridge in London; go and see them, study their faces. They are free, with a freedom Socialism would destroy. Consider the poor painted girls who pursue bread with nameless indignities through our streets at night. They are free by the current standard. And the poor half-starved wretches struggling with the impossible stint of oakum in a casual ward, they too are free! The nimble footman is free, the crushed porter between the trucks is free, the woman in the mill, the child in the mine. Ask them! They will tell you how free they are."

Views

Quotations: "We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams."

"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."

"If you fell down yesterday, stand up today."

"The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it."

"Our true nationality is mankind."

"Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are."

"Advertising is legalized lying."

"If we don't end war, war will end us."

"Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change."

"We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence."

"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race."

"It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning."

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

"Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel."

"If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it."

"Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life."

"once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely."

"What really matters is what you do with what you have."

"It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening."

"What on earth would a man do with himself, if something did not stand in his way?"

Membership

Wells became a member of the Fabian Society in 1903.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Brian Aldiss: "Wells is the Prospero of all the brave new worlds of the mind, and the Shakespeare of science fiction."
  
  Kingsley Amis: "Wells occupies an honoured place in science fiction. Without him, indeed, I can't see how any of it could have happened."
  
  Jacques Barzun: "Mr. Wells is not shrinking back to a mossy political liberalism; he is expressing the clear-eyed conclusions of one abreast with his own latest experience. He has seen it demonstrated all over Europe and Asia that however much the world wants order, it cannot get it by mere violence and the magic of symbols. He has seen that however splendid fanatical dogmatism may feel internally to the possessor, it is the quickest way to chaos externally."
  
  Don D'Ammassa: "The influence of H. G. Wells on other science fiction writers is immeasurable. His work is widely known far beyond the boundaries of the genre, and to a great extent the creators of all novels and films of alien invasions, time travel, or invisibility are at least partly in his debt."
  
  T. S. Eliot: "Wells' faith in knowledge and reason, in brief, excluded too large, too central a portion of human experience. He was for all that a very great figure of his epoch, a formative influence upon the minds and imagination of countless men and women, of society itself, and our debt to him cannot but be sincerely and gratefully acknowledged at this fateful moment of history in which we live and in some measure he foresaw."
  
  Fred Siegel: "It was Wells who made it respectable, even before World War I, for liberals in England and America to demean their own native democratic culture in the name of an imagined antidemocratic World State."

Connections

In 1891 Wells married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells. However, three years later he left her for Amy Catherine Robbins, one of his students at the University Correspondence College, whom he married in 1895. With Robbins, he had two children, George Philip ("Gip"), born in 1901, and Frank Richard, born in 1903.

Wells also went on to become the father of at least two confirmed illegitimate children as the result of the numerous affairs he had during his second marriage. In 1909 he had a daughter, Anna-Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves, and in 1914, he had a third son, Anthony, with the writer Rebecca West.

Father:

Joseph Wells

Joseph Wells (14 July 1828 – 14 October 1910) was an English cricketer.

Mother:

Sarah Neal

Spouse:

Amy Catherine Robbins

child:

George Philip Wells

George Philip Wells (17 July 1901 – 27 September 1985), son of the British science fiction author H. G. Wells, was a zoologist and author. He co-authored, with his father and Julian Huxley, The Science of Life.

child:

Frank Richard Wells

child:

Anna-Jane Kennard

child:

Anthony West

Anthony West (4 August 1914 – 27 December 1987) was a British author and literary critic.

ex-spouse:

Isabel Mary Wells

Partner:

Rebecca West

Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield DBE (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer.

Partner:

Amber Reeves

Amber Blanco White (née Reeves; 1 July 1887 – 26 December 1981) was a British feminist writer and scholar.

References

• H. G. Wells: Personality Character Topography
  1922
• H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life An unlikely lothario, one of the most successful writers of his time, a figure at the heart of the age's political and artistic debates, H. G. Wells's life is a great story in its own right.
  2010
• H.G. Wells, Desperately Mortal This biography focuses on the literary figure's enormously active public career and his intellectual and creative achievements, reveals how this classic womanizer remained consistently attractive to feminists, and examines his relationship with pivotal figures.
  1986
• The World of H.G. Wells This book is devoted to literary achievements and life of world-wide famous British author H.G. Wells and is written by cultural historian Van Wyck Brooks.
  1915