The Young HG Wells:
Changing The World
by Claire Tomalin 

Viking, £20, 272 pages 

It’s hard to get a sense, 100 and more years on, of quite what a big deal HG Wells was in his day: not simply the author of a handful of pioneering and much-adapted science-fiction stories, but a political agitator whose prophecies and prescriptions were deeply influential, and a linchpin of the pre-war literary scene. Claire Tomalin’s new book – which focuses on the young (or youngish) Wells because, as she says with winning candour, though he lived until 1946, all the good stuff was done by the First World War – opens with a description of two 11-year old schoolmates in 1914 who were obsessed with Wells. They were (or became) Cyril Connolly and George Orwell, and the former is quoted to the effect that “the minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed”.

He was a self-made man; both inside and outside the English class system of the time. His Brigadoon was Uppark, the country estate where his mother was a lady’s maid and where he sometimes stayed as a child. He sallied out from the servants’ quarters to raid its library. He defied family expectations of a career in drapery to become a schoolmaster and skipped out on that to study biology under TH Huxley in London. He was weedy and sickly – a rugby accident all but did for one of his lungs – so in the long run, science and schoolmastering were out. In due course, he found he was shifting  for himself in Grub Street.

He was well suited to it. Wells worked extraordinarily hard and wrote extraordinarily fast. Stories, articles and books poured out of him, and once The Time Machine established him, there was no let-up, and he was ruthlessly unsentimental in his dealings with agents and publishers. Tomalin from time to time acknowledges that even his remarkable books might have been better if he’d dashed them off less quickly. That approach, though, didn’t prevent him from enjoying long and generally respectful friendships with Stephen Crane, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett and Ford Madox Ford – at least some of whom were a bit more precious about their art.

The other strand to his life – and writing – was his commitment to atheism, socialism and a disregard for the bourgeois pieties. The essays in Anticipations were, he said, “designed to undermine and destroy the monarchy, monogamy and respectability – and the British Empire, all under the guise of a speculation about motor cars and electric heating”. Tomalin unearths and quotes at length, too, a marvellous 1907 essay on “This Misery of Boots” – using footwear as a metonym for the immiseration of capitalist life – which strikes a tone that you can later see in Orwell. He fell in (and over the years, out) with the Fabians. These included the very posh socialists, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and through his association with them this writer, hell-bent on overturning the established order, found himself breaking bread with the Prime Minister and befriending Winston Churchill.

Wells, in Tomalin’s account, was a fascinatingly mixed character. He was naïve, utopian, generous, ambitious, disputatious, prone to telling whoppers – and, of course, hilariously goatish. He absolutely thirsted for sexual consummation as an adolescent; and went on thirsting. First, he married his cousin Isabel essentially to make it possible to have sex with her; and when she proved unresponsive he, in due course, traded her in for one of his students, Amy.

Weirdly and controllingly, he rechristened Amy “Jane”. He insisted that their marriage was to be an open one, and thereafter jumped into bed with anyone who would have him (lots would – “his body smelt deliciously of honey”, apparently), while expecting Jane to be a meek and conscientious helpmeet. He did a bunk for a bit of me-time, leaving no forwarding address, immediately after she gave birth. His seduction of Amber Reeves – the student daughter of family friends – was only the most dramatic and turbulent of his affairs. It’s not hard to see why Jane became rather glum.

Tomalin’s account of all this sexual, political and literary turmoil is spiced with apt quotation and animated with great sympathy and shrewdness. When it comes to the affair with Amber, for instance, she’s keener to record than to judge (she offers three different possible constructions you could put on the moral calculus of their relationship, and at least on the face of it invites you to take your pick). And her enthusiasm for the work – this isn’t a literary-critical book so much as a conversational one – makes a good case that, 100 and more years on, we should see HG Wells as a big deal.  

Sam Leith is a freelance journalist. His most recent book, Write to the Point, is published by Profile Books.

This article first appeared in the November 2021 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.

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