Kipps

Kipps
The Story of a Simple Soul
H.G. Wells

1922

CONTENTS
BOOK 1
THE MAKING OF KIPPS
1 The little Shop at New Romney
2 The Emporium
3 The Woodcarving Class
4 Chitterlow
5 'Swapped'!
6 The Unexpected
BOOK 2
MR. COOTE THE CHAPERON
1 The New Conditions
2 The Walshinghams

3 Engaged
4 The Bicycle Manufacturer
5 The Pupil Lover
6 Discords
7 London
8 Kipps enters Society
9 The Labyrinthodon
BOOK 3
KIPPSES
1 The Housing Problem
2 The Callers
3 Terminations
~~~
BOOK ONE THE MAKING OF KIPPS
~~~
CHAPTER THE
FIRST
The little Shop at New Romney

1

UNTIL he was nearly arrived at manhood, it did not become clear to
Kipps how it was that he had come into the care of an aunt and uncle
instead of having a father and mother like other little boys. He had
vague memories of a somewhere else, a dim room, a window looking
down on white buildings, and of a some one else who talked to
forgotten people and who was his mother. He could not recall her
features very distinctly, but he remembered with extreme definition a
white dress she wore, with a pattern of little sprigs of flowers and little
bows upon it, and a girdle of straight-ribbed white ribbon about the
waist. Linked with this, he knew not how, were clouded
half-obliterated recollections of scenes in which there was weeping,
weeping in which he was inscrutably moved to join. Some terrible tall
man with a loud voice played a part in these scenes, and, either before
or after them, there were impressions of looking for interminable
periods out of the window of railway trains in the company of these
two people.
He knew, though he could not remember that he had ever been told,
that a certain faded wistful face that looked at him from a plush and gilt
framed daguerreotype above the mantel of the 'sitting-room' was the
face of his mother. But that knowledge did not touch his dim memories
with any elucidation. In that photograph she was a girlish figure,
leaning against a photographer's stile, and with all the self-conscious
shrinking natural to that position. She had curly hair and a face far
younger and prettier than any other mother in his experience. She
swung a Dolly Varden hat by the string, and looked with obedient,
respectful eyes on the photographer-gentleman who had commanded
the pose. She was very slight and pretty. But the phantom mother that
haunted his memory so elusively was not like that, though he could not
remember how she differed.
Perhaps she was older or a little less shrinking, or, it may be, only
dressed in a different way...
It is clear she handed him over to his aunt and uncle at New Romney
with explicit directions and a certain endowment. One gathers she had
something of that fine sense of social distinctions that subsequently

played so large a part in Kipps' career. He was not to go to a 'Common'
school, she provided, but to a certain seminary in Hastings, that was not
only a 'middle-class academy' with mortar-boards and every evidence
of a higher social tone, but also remarkably cheap. She seems to have
been animated by the desire to do her best for Kipps even at a certain
sacrifice of herself, as though Kipps were in some way a superior sort
of person. She sent pocket-money to him from time to time for a year
or more after Hastings had begun for him, but her face he never saw in
the days of his lucid memory.
His aunt and uncle were already high on the hill of life when first he
came to them. They had married for comfort in the evening or, at any
rate, in the late afternoon of their days. They were at first no more then
vague figures in the background of proximate realities, such realities as
familiar chairs and tables, quiet to ride and drive, the newel of the
staircase, kitchen furniture, pieces of firewood, the boiler tap, old
newspapers, the cat, the High Street, the back-yard and the flat fields
that are always so near in that little town. He knew all the stones in the
yard individually, the creeper in the corner, the dustbin and the mossy
wall, better than many men know the faces of their wives. There was a
corner under the ironing-board which, by means of a shawl, could be
made, under propitious gods, a very decent cubby-house, a corner that
served him for several years as the indisputable hub of the world, and
the stringy places in the carpet, the knots upon the dresser, and the
several corners of the rag hearthrug his uncle had made, became
essential parts of his mental foundations.