Wells, H. G.

Wells, H. G. ( Herbert George Wells) (1866–1946), the son of an unsuccessful small tradesman, was apprenticed to a draper in early life, a period reflected in several of his novels. For some years, in poor health, he struggled as a teacher, studying and writing articles in his spare time. In 1903 he joined the Fabian Society, but was soon at odds with it, his sponsor G. B. Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. His literary output was vast and extremely varied. As a novelist he is perhaps best remembered for his scientific romances, among the earliest products of the new genre of science fiction. The first, The Time Machine (1895), is a social allegory set in the year 802701, describing a society divided into two classes, the subterranean workers, called Morlocks, and the decadent Eloi. This was followed by The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898, a powerful and apocalyptic vision of the world invaded by Martians), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901), Men Like Gods (1923), and others. Another group of novels evokes in comic and realistic style the lower-middle-class world of his youth. Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) tells the story of a struggling teacher; Kipps (1905) that of an aspiring draper's assistant; The History of Mr Polly (1910) recounts the adventures of an inefficient shopkeeper who liberates himself by burning down his own shop and bolting for freedom, which he discovers as man-of-all-work at the Potwell Inn.

Among his other novels, Ann Veronica (1909) is a feminist tract about a girl who defies her father and conventional morality by running off with the man she loves. Tono-Bungay (1909) is a picture of English society in dissolution, and of the advent of a new class of rich, embodied in Uncle Ponderevo, an entrepreneur intent on peddling a worthless patent medicine. The Country of the Blind, and other stories (1911), his fifth collection of short stories, contains the memorable ‘The Door in the Wall’. The New Machiavelli (1911), about a politician involved in sexual scandal, was seen to mark a decline in his creative power, evident in later novels, which include Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and The World of William Clissold (1926). He continued to reach a huge audience, with his massive The Outline of History (1920) and its shorter offspring A Short History of the World (1922), and with many works of scientific and political speculation (including The Shape of Things to Come, 1933); the dark pessimism of his last prediction, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), may be seen in the context of his own ill health and the course of the Second World War.

His Experiment in Autobiography (1934) is a striking portrait of himself, his contemporaries (including Arnold Bennett, Gissing, and the Fabians), and their times.