H. G. Wells | Page 2

daughter of an innkeeper at Midhurst and had been
in service as a lady's maid before her marriage. Joseph Wells had had a
more distinguished career. He had been a great Kent bowler in the early
sixties, and it must have been, I think, only the year before the subject
of our essay appeared at Bromley that his father took four wickets with
consecutive balls and created a new record in the annals of cricket. The
late Sir Francis Galton might have made something out of this ancestry;
I must confess that it is entirely beyond my powers, although I make
the reservation that we know little of the abilities of H.G. Wells' mother.
She has not figured as a recognisable portrait in any of his novels.
The Bromley shop, like most of its kind, was a failure. Moderate
success might have meant a Grammar School for young Wells, and the
temptations of property, but Fate gave our young radical another twist
by thrusting him temporarily within sight of an alien and magnificent
prosperity, where as the son of the housekeeper at Up Park, near
Petersfield, he might recognise his immense separation from the
members of the ruling class, as described in Tono-Bungay.
After that came "the drapery," first at Windsor and then at Southsea;
but we have no autobiography of this period, only the details of the

trade and its circumstances. For neither Hoopdriver, nor Kipps, nor
Polly could have qualified for the post of assistant at Midhurst
Grammar School, a position that H.G. Wells obtained at sixteen after
he had broken his indentures with the Southsea draper.
At this point we come up with Mr Lewisham, and may follow him in
his experiences after he obtained what was, in fact, a scholarship at the
Normal School of Science, South Kensington; but we drop that hero
again before his premature marriage and failure, to follow the
uncharted course of Wells obtaining his B.Sc. with first-class honours;
passing to an assistant-mastership at the Henley House School, St
John's Wood, and so coming by way of tutor, lecturer and demonstrator
to the beginnings of journalism, to the breaking of a blood-vessel and
thence, without further diversion, to the trade of letters, somewhere in
the summer of 1893.
I lave taken as my text the normality of Mr Wells, on the understanding
that I shall define the essential term as I will; and this brief outline of
his early experiences may help to show, _inter alia_, that he viewed life
from many angles before he was twenty-seven. That he had the
capacity so to see life was either a lucky accident or due to some
untraceable composition of heredity. That he kept his power was an
effect of his casual education. He was fortunate enough to escape
training in his observation of the sphere.
Persistent repetition will finally influence the young mind, however
gifted, and if Mr Wells had been subject to the discipline of what may
be called an efficient education, he might have seen his sphere at the
age of twenty-seven as slightly flattened--whether it appeared oblate or
prolate is no consequence--and I could not have crowned him with the
designation that heads this Introduction.
He is, in fact, normal just in so far as his gift of vision was undistorted
by the precepts and dogmas of his parents, teachers and early
companions.

II
THE ROMANCES
Mr Wells' romances have little or nothing in common with those of
Jules Verne, not even that peculiar quality of romance which revels in
the impossible. The heroes of Jules Verne were idealised creatures
making use of some wonderful invention for their own purposes; and
the future of mankind was of no account in the balance against the lust
for adventure under new mechanical conditions. Also, Jules Verne's
imagination was at the same time mathematical and Latin; and he was
entirely uninfluenced by the writings of Comte.
Mr Wells' experiments with the relatively improbable have become
increasingly involved with the social problem, and it would be possible
to trace the growth of his opinions from this evidence alone, even if we
had not the valuable commentary afforded by his novels and his essays
in sociology. But his interest in the present and future welfare of man
would not in the first place have prompted him to the writing of
romance (unless it had been cast in the severely allegorical form of The
Pilgrim's Progress), and if we are to account for that ebullition, we
shall be driven--like Darwin with his confounding peacock--to take
refuge in some theory of exuberance. The later works have been so
defensive and, in one sense, didactic that one is apt to forget that many
of the earlier books, and all the short stories, must have originated in
the effervescence of creative