H G Wells

Wells, H. G. (1866–1946). Shopkeeper's son who jumped the counter to become successful author and eventually teacher‐at‐large to the human race. A scholarship to what is now Imperial College, London, where he studied under T. H. Huxley, suggested the power of science to make us free, though it was an imaginative energy which fuelled his early romances The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Moving in literary and Fabian circles, he saw the novel as a medium for discussing contemporary problems. The best‐selling Outline of History (1920) offered mankind ‘salvation by history’, lasting world peace only to be secured by learning its lessons.

H. G. Wells (Herbert George Wells), 1866-1946, English author. Although he is probably best remembered 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. He was apprenticed to a draper at 14 and was later able through grants and scholarships to attend the Univ. of London (grad. 1888). Inspired by the teaching of T. H. Huxley , Wells taught biology until 1893, when he began his career as a novelist. His early books, full of fantasy and fascinating pseudoscientific speculations, exemplify the political and social beliefs of his time. They include The Time Machine (1895), The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).

In the novels of his middle period Wells turned from the fantastic to the realistic, delineating with great energy and color the world he lived in. These books, considered his finest achievement, include Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). His later books are primarily novels of ideas in which he sets forth his view of the plans and concessions individuals must make in order to survive. Included among these final works, which became increasingly pessimistic as Wells aged, are The World of William Clissold (1926), The Shape of Things to Come (1933), World Brain (1938), and Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945). His other works include the immensely popular Outline of History (1920) and The Science of Life (1929), which was written in collaboration with his son G. P. Wells and Julian Huxley.

Bibliography: See his Experiment in Autobiography (1934); biographies by L. Dickson (1969) and N. and J. MacKenzie (1973); studies by F. McConnell (1981), J. Huntington (1982), J. R. Hammond (1988), and D. Smith (1988).

Wells, H. G. (1866–1946). Shopkeeper's son who jumped the counter to become successful author and eventually teacher-at-large to the human race. A scholarship to what is now Imperial College, London, where he studied under T. H. Huxley, suggested the power of science to make us free, though it was an imaginative energy which fuelled his early romances The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Moving in literary and Fabian circles, he saw the novel as a medium for discussing problems ‘raised in such bristling multitude by our contemporary social development’. Perhaps no one did more to shape that development, and after the First World War he increasingly abandoned fiction for analysis and exhortation. The best-selling Outline of History (1920) offered mankind ‘salvation by history’, lasting world peace only to be secured by learning its lessons. Yet Wells's faith in human potential was not blind to obstacles to be overcome, and in the novels too comedy and pessimism are mingled.

John Saunders