WELLS, H. G.

WELLS, H. G. (1866–1946), British novelist, journalist, historian, sociologist, and futurologist.

Herbert George Wells was born into an impoverished lower-middle-class family and was apprenticed to a draper at age fourteen. He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (now part of Imperial College, London), where he studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895). Subsequently, he worked as a teacher and then as a journalist, producing a series of scientific speculations for a number of leading periodicals including the Fortnightly Review and Nature.

Wells began his varied and prolific literary career with a succession of "scientific romances," which are generally acknowledged as the pioneers of science fiction. The Time Machine (1895) is a fable set in the year 802701 and portrays the split of the human race into two species—the dainty Eloi and the monstrous, subterranean Morlocks—along class lines. This was followed by The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and other works. These works were inspired by the reassessment of humanity's place in nature initiated by the theory of natural selection described by Charles Darwin (1809–1882). They display Wells's lifelong preoccupation with evolutionary time and contain, to varying degrees, social allegory, foreboding about the future (often arising out of the laws of thermodynamics), and an assessment of the impact of scientific advancement upon the social order. Wells's output as a scientific romancer was paralleled by a series of fantastic novels, notably The Wonderful Visit (1895) and The Sea Lady (1902). In the 1890s, he also embarked upon a career as the author of such unforgettable short stories as "The Stolen Bacillus" (1893), "The Red Room" (1896), and "The Door in the Wall" (1906).

After 1900, Wells diversified his energies into a number of fields. His determination to establish himself as a mainstream novelist began with Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900) and culminated in Tono-Bungay (1909). In Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr. Polly (1910), Wells displayed considerable sympathy for the "little man." Ann Veronica (1909), which considers sexual equality and the issue of women's rights, caused considerable controversy. He famously feuded with Henry James (1843–1916), whom he ruthlessly caricatured in Boon (1915). Wells's insistence that novelists should fulfill a didactic purpose, rather than indulge in art for art's sake, also caused his estrangement from Joseph Conrad (1857–1924). Anticipations (1902), his first major work of futurology, examined the scientific and social trends that might shape the twentieth century. Wells joined the Fabian Society in 1903, but severed relations after a polemical exchange with leading members George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Beatrice Potter Webb (1858–1943), and Sidney James Webb (1859–1947); he depicted the Fabians in The New Machiavelli (1911). During his Fabian period, Wells wrote A Modern Utopia (1905), which established the popular conception of him as one of the twentieth century's few unequivocally utopian writers. Wells foresaw many of the advancements in modern warfare, including the use of poison gas in World War I (In The War of the Worlds [1898]) and the development of the tank (in the short story "The Land Ironclads" [1904]). In The World Set Free (1913), he predicted the atomic bomb.

Wells was an outspoken critic of the League of Nations but campaigned tirelessly towards global unification, which he saw as the only alternative to annihilating conflict. He was pivotal to the Sankey Declaration on the Rights of Man, a precursor of the United Nations Charter. Wells's readership as a novelist declined in the 1920s, as attention turned to younger novelists such as Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and James Joyce (1882–1941). However, he continued to reach a vast audience, particularly with The Outline of History (1920, abridged as A Short History of the World, 1922). Wells saw human history as a "race between education and catastrophe," and increasingly endeavored to facilitate the synthesis of existing nations into a "World State." Wells famously debated with world leaders, including U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945). He met with Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) in 1920 and with Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), in 1934. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come (1933, with its cinematic version, Things to Come, appearing in 1936), confirmed his status as a great popularizer of scientific and political ideas. Wells's last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), is a deeply pessimistic vision of humanity, which should be understood as a despairing response to the outcome of World War II. His Experiment in Autobiography (1934) is a lively account of Wells's involvement in the controversies of his own age.

See alsoFabians; science and Technology; Verne, Jules.

bibliography

Haynes, Roslynn D. H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future. New York, 1980.

MacKenzie, Norman, and Jeanne MacKenzie. The Time Traveller: The Life of H. G. Wells. London, 1973.

Parrinder, Patrick. Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy. Syracuse, N.Y., 1995.

Partington, John S. Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells. Aldershot, U.K., 2003.

Steven McLean