Wells, H. G.

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H. G. Wells

Born September 21, 1866 (Bromley, Kent, England)

Died August 13, 1946 (London, England)

British writer

British writer H. G. Wells made significant contributions to the literary genre of science fiction. Although science fiction was not new to the modern age—scholars have traced its roots back to ancient mythology—writers of scientific fantasy had a profound influence in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For instance, spaceflight pioneers Hermann Oberth (1894–1989; see entry) and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935; see entry) read science-fiction novels and stories by such writers as Wells and French novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905). Most writers at that time, however, concentrated mainly on bizarre tales of alien beings, spaceships, and trips to the Moon and other worlds.

"Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance."

The War of the Worlds

A committed socialist (advocate of state control of production and services), Wells provided an added dimension in his novels, which he called scientific romances: He depicted the dark side of human nature and warned about the misuse of technology. In these and other works he predicted devastating global conflicts, the development of atomic weaponry, and the advent of chemical warfare. Wells is best remembered today for four of his early science-fiction novels—The Time

Machine: An Invention, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance, and The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility. During an extremely prolific career that spanned fifty years, Wells wrote other types of novels as well as social criticism, journalism, literary criticism, film scripts, and political manifestos (statements of belief).

Education shapes his ideas

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. He was the youngest of three sons of Joseph Wells and Sarah Neal Wells. Joseph was a well-known cricket player who worked as a gardener for an upper-class employer, and he had once been an unsuccessful shopkeeper. Sarah Wells was a housekeeper and lady's maid who wanted a better life for her sons. Wells entered Morley's School in Bromley at age seven. In 1880, at his mother's insistence, he left when he was fourteen to become an apprentice to a draper (a clothing and dry goods merchant). Wells hated the job, and three years later his mother let him take a pupil-teacher position at a private school. In 1884 he won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science at South Kensington. Although he studied all branches of science, he was interested only in the classes taught by biologist Thomas Huxley (1825–1895), one of the founders of the school. (A biologist is a scientist who studies living organisms.)

Wells's thinking was shaped by Huxley, who supported the theory of evolution, which states that species (forms of life) evolve through natural selection (survival of dominant traits) over long periods of time. This idea was controversial because it contradicted the teachings of the Christian religion, which stated that all of nature was created at the beginning of time by a divine being. Huxley's students, including Wells, came to think of science in general and biology in particular as revolutionary, and they began to question previously held views. Huxley's definition of biology also took in social and cultural studies, now classified as sociology (the science of social institutions and other aspects of society) and anthropology (the study of human cultures), providing the basis for Wells's later political views.

The Normal School was important for Wells because it gave him a way to escape his lower-middle-class origins by obtaining a higher education. Schools like Oxford and Cambridge, where scholarships were usually limited to the sons of gentlemen, were far beyond the means of families like the Wellses. In addition, these elite schools tended to concentrate on classics and humanities (Latin, Greek, theology, and literature) rather than on the sciences, which were regarded as lower-class studies. Even after Wells became famous, with a worldwide reputation, some of his contemporaries regarded him as a "counter-jumper," a former draper's assistant unworthy of being ranked among the great men of the British nation.

Begins writing career

Wells left Kensington without a degree in 1887 and returned to teaching in private schools in London and Wales for three years. While living in Wales, a serious sports injury prevented him from returning to teaching full time. One of his kidneys was severely damaged and his lungs hemorrhaged (bled excessively), the latter leading to tuberculosis (a severe lung infection) from which he suffered for the rest of his life. Wells received his degree from the University of London in 1890, and the next year he married his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells. Settling with his wife in a suburb of London, he began teaching at a correspondence college and writing articles on education. In 1893 he suffered another severe lung hemorrhage that eventually forced him to leave teaching altogether. As he slowly recovered, he struck up a close friendship with one of his biology students, Amy Catherine Robbins. Wells obtained a divorce from Isabel in 1895 and married Robbins the same year.

Wells had not planned to make his living by writing, but his bouts of tuberculosis left him few other options. His work for newspapers and magazines led to a position as fiction reviewer for the English Saturday Review magazine. He worked at this job for three years but gave it up to concentrate on his own writing. His first project was to revise and expand a story he had published in his college paper in 1888, under the title "The Chronic Argonauts." In 1895 he published the story as The Time Machine, the first of his scientific novels. The Time Machine tells the tale of an inventor, known only as the Time Traveller, who creates a machine that can navigate into the past or into the future. When the machine is completed, the Time Traveller takes a journey into the distant future, to the year 802,701 c.e. He discovers a world inhabited by pretty, childlike beings called the Eloi, who enjoy lives of pure leisure. He also discovers an underworld inhabited by the Morlocks. The Morlocks manage the technology that keeps the Eloi in comfort and in turn use the Eloi as a food source. The Time Traveller makes friends with an Eloi named Weena and loses the time machine to the Morlocks. After returning to share his story with his friends on Earth, he starts on another voyage in time. He is never seen again.

In Wells's second scientific novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), a young diplomat is found floating adrift after

a tragic shipwreck. His rescuer is an assistant of the infamous Doctor Moreau, a scientist who fled his homeland because of charges of unethical treatment of animals. Moreau has created half-human and half-animal Beast People by means of a surgical process that involves assembling body parts with plastic surgery. The Beast People are frightened of him and worship him only so they can hold onto their human characteristics. After Moreau's death, the Beast People return to being animals. Wells's next novel, The Invisible Man (1897) is about a character named Griffin who, like Moreau, is a "mad scientist." Griffin invents a way to make skin, bones, and blood invisible. He then uses the formula on himself so he can go anywhere and threaten anyone without being seen. He can never become visible again, however, and he goes insane.

Today, Wells is best known for The War of the Worlds (1898), which describes a Martian invasion of Earth. The story takes place over a ten-day period in England during the late nineteenth century. As the novel opens, astronomers observe a series of large explosions on the surface of the planet Mars. Within a few days, huge cylinder-shaped objects begin landing outside London. From the cylinders emerge the Martians: giant octopuslike creatures possessed of greatly superior technology. The Martians attack and drive the inhabitants of London out of the city. Only two or three Martians are killed by resisting people, but suddenly they begin to die from the Earth's microorganisms (bacteria), which cause them to rot and decay. Forty years later The War of the Worlds was the basis of one of the most memorable events of the twentieth century: On an October evening in 1938, the actor Orson Welles (1825–1895) and his Mercury Theater players broadcast a live radio dramatization of the novel. The performance was so realistic that listeners in New Jersey fled their homes in panic, believing they were actually being invaded by Martians.

Promotes worldwide socialism

Wells considered his scientific romances to be unimportant, and most critics agreed with him at the time. Wells was more respected for his comic novels, including Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr. Polly (1909), and his social criticism, such as Tono-Bungay (1908). These works gained Wells a reputation as the foremost British novelist of the early twentieth century. He wrote his best science fiction before 1901, when he was firmly established as a professional writer. By that time he had earned enough from sales of his writing to build a home, Spade House, near the English coast in the county of Kent. As social conditions in England changed, his novels became less relevant. He turned instead to a long, drawn-out campaign to promote worldwide socialism, but the works he wrote in support of socialism were not taken seriously.

The War of the Worlds

In this excerpt from Chapter 4 of The War of the Worlds, the narrator expresses his horror upon seeing Martians for the first time.

I think everyone expected to see a man emerge—possibly something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man. I know I did. But, looking, I presently saw something stirring within the shadow: greyish billowy movements, one above another, and then two luminous disklike eyes. Then something resembling a little grey snake, about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the writhing middle, and wriggled in the air towards me—and then another….
A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.
Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.
Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

Wells had more success with Outline of History (1920), which he wrote with the assistance of prominent advisors. It was the first attempt to present the story of human existence using biological, anthropological, and sociological studies. It proposed world socialism as a means of promoting world peace. If The Outline of History was taught in schools, Wells believed, people would reject such empty values as nationalism and patriotism in favor of a world society based on socialism. The work was enormously popular. History for Wells was not simply a story about the past, however, and he revealed his ideas and hopes for the future in a film script, The Shape of Things to Come. The motion picture was filmed by director Alexander Korda (1893–1956) in 1936. It was the first big-budget science-fiction film, an ancestor of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. Things to Come failed at box offices, mainly because its message about the "war to end all wars" was regarded as unconvincing and meaningless.

Wells lived mainly in France between the years 1924 and 1933, but he had returned to London by the outbreak of World War II (1939–45). During the German blitz (air bombardment) he refused to be driven out of the city, remaining at his house in Regent's Park. He contributed to the war effort with the book The Rights of Man (1940), which later formed the basis for the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights. Although Wells made lasting contributions to the problem of human rights abuses, his last book, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), expressed his gloomy outlook about the future of the human race. He died in London on August 13, 1946. His body was cremated in accordance with his wishes, and his ashes were scattered over the English Channel. In the 1960s Wells's science-fiction novels finally began receiving serious attention.

For More Information

Books

Wells, H.G. The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (first published serially in Pearson's Weekly, June–July, 1897). New York: Arnold, 1897; large print edition, Waterville, ME: G. K. Hall (Thorndike), 1996; edited by David Lake, with an introduction by John Sutherland, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Wells, H.G. The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility. New York: Stone & Kimball, 1896; expanded, with notes by Leon E. Stover, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996.

Wells, H.G. The Time Machine: An Invention (first published in Science Schools Journal as "The Chronic Argonauts," 1888). London: Heinemann, 1895, and New York: Holt, 1895; reprinted, New York: Dover, 1995.

Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds (first published serially in Pearson's Magazine, April-December, 1897). New York: Harper, 1898; large print edition, Waterville, ME: G. K. Hall (Thorndike), 1995.

Periodicals

Achenbach, Joel. "The World According to Wells." Smithsonian (April 2001): p. 110.

Web Sites

The Complete War of the Worlds Web site.http://www.war-of-the-worlds.org (accessed on June 29, 2004).

Wells, H. G. "Chapter Four: The Cylinder Opens." The War of the Worlds.http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/warworlds/4/ (accessed on June 30, 2004).