H. G. Wells

Scientific Romancer, World Planner

A draper’s apprentice taught by Huxley who invented the time machine, then spent forty years planning the world: utopias, a bestselling history, eugenic lapses, a rights charter.

One Impossible Thing: Grants one wild premise, then keeps every other detail ordinary and exact.
Modus Vivendi: A treaty with his wife Jane left him free for passades; several became affairs.
Plan the Planet: Wrote humanity a history, a rights charter and an encyclopaedia, mostly unasked.

18661946

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H. G. Wells

Novelist, Forecaster & World Planner

History of computing · A world that thinks together Start hereThe Time MachineStart here: a hundred-odd pages in which a Victorian inventor proposes three theories of the year 802,701 and watches each one fail. Notice how the class-war explanation—Haves above ground, Have-nots below—is only the middle step.Read the novel

Herbert George Wells came out of a failing shop and a drapery dormitory, learned evolution from T. H. Huxley, and in 1895 invented the time machine. Then he dropped the story and kept the method: Anticipations (1901) extrapolated the twentieth century directly, eugenic killing included, and for the next forty years he tried to plan the world—through the Fabian Society, a bestselling history of everything, a world encyclopaedia and a declaration of rights. He did it while living by a frank arrangement with his wife that left room for Amber Reeves, Rebecca West, Moura Budberg and others, and two children outside the marriage. The page follows the turn, the quarrels and the record in his own words.

1866–1887

From the drapery dormitory to Huxley’s laboratory

Wells was born on 21 September 1866 above Atlas House, a china-and-cricket-goods shop in Bromley, Kent, that never paid. His father Joseph, a former gardener, made what he could as a professional cricketer for Kent; when he broke his thigh in 1877 that income went, and Wells’s mother Sarah, a former lady’s maid, went back into service at Uppark, a Sussex country house whose library the boy raided. The family’s plan for him was a trade.

From 1881 to 1883 he was an apprentice at Edwin Hyde’s Southsea Drapery Emporium. In his own account the apprentices were roused at seven, cleaned windows and dusted before eight, and spent the day fetching, folding and refolding stock; holding up lace curtains for a dithering customer, “storms of hatred and revolutionary fervour went on behind the apathetic mask of the junior apprentice.” He called the two years “the most unhappy hopeless period of my life,” broke his four-year indenture, and became a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School. The drapery later became Kipps and Mr Polly.

In 1884 a scholarship worth a guinea a week took him to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. Huxley’s elementary biology course—dissection, homologies, “a grammar of form and a criticism of fact”—was, he wrote, “beyond all question, the most educational year of my life.” Physics and geology under lesser teachers bored him; by his own description he became “notoriously unruly,” spent his energy on the debating society, socialism and the Science Schools Journal, and failed the final geology examination in 1887.

Teaching at Holt Academy in Wales that year, he was flattened by a pupil at football and found himself passing blood: the doctor diagnosed a crushed kidney. Lung haemorrhages followed and were taken for consumption. Wells later described five years of “misleading diagnoses,” each of which he planned his life around; as late as 1900 he built a house on one floor expecting a bath-chair.

1888–1898

Three wrong theories of the year 802,701

He scraped a living teaching (A. A. Milne was a pupil at Henley House), took a London BSc in 1890, wrote a Text-Book of Biology (1893) and turned out journalism. In 1891 he married his cousin Isabel; in 1894 he left her for his student Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he called Jane, and married her in October 1895. A time-travel story first tried in the Science Schools Journal as “The Chronic Argonauts” (1888) was rewritten for W. E. Henley’s National Observer in 1894, serialised in Henley’s New Review from January to May 1895, and published as The Time Machine by Holt in New York on 7 May and Heinemann in London on 29 May. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), whose Martians land near the Woking house where he and Jane lived, followed at speed.

The Time Machine is built as an argument. The Traveller tells a sceptical dinner party—a Psychologist, a Medical Man, red-haired Filby—how he tried to explain the world of 802,701 and failed three times. Seeing palaces but no cottages he thinks “‘Communism’,” and supposes the soft little Eloi are a people whose population checks “succeeded too well”: “plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!” Ventilation shafts and the pale Morlocks give him a second theory, extrapolated from the Metropolitan Railway, underground workrooms and the rich closing off the countryside: “the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer,” Haves above and Have-nots below. Then he sees meat in the Underworld. The third theory is that the Eloi are “mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon.”

The famous class allegory is therefore the middle step of a demonstration, not its conclusion; every theory arrives hedged—“My explanation may be absolutely wrong”—and the Traveller brings back only two strange white flowers as evidence. The book teaches a reader to watch a plausible social extrapolation break against a fact. Its narrator ends on a choice rather than a forecast: if progress is a heap that must fall on its makers, “it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” In a 1934 preface Wells gave the rule behind the scientific romances: after the single impossible assumption, keep “everything else human and real.”

The Time MachineStart here: a hundred-odd pages in which a Victorian inventor proposes three theories of the year 802,701 and watches each one fail. Notice how the class-war explanation—Haves above ground, Have-nots below—is only the middle step.Read the novel

1900–1908

The keystone: Anticipations and the Fabian storm

At Spade House, the house at Sandgate he built for an invalid’s life, Wells began the book he later called “the keystone to the main arch of my work.” Anticipations was serialised in the Fortnightly Review from April 1901 and appeared as a book in November. There is no Traveller and no dinner party; the extrapolation is made in Wells’s own voice. It starts with locomotion: once motor vehicles on special roads raise the speed at which a worker can travel, cities will dissolve into suburban “urban regions”; the old order of gentry and labourers will break into shareholders, “the abyss” and a capable class of engineers and administrators; democracy is, as he later summarised it, “the political expression of a phase of social liquefaction”; and that capable class will at last “consciously” become the State—a New Republic heading for a world state. Wells himself later judged the chapters on democracy and synthesis “the most imperfect and the most interesting,” and admitted his great miss: he had predicted Russia would be “only another and vaster Ireland.”

The last chapter must be quoted, not summarised. The New Republic will check the multiplication of “those who fall behind a certain standard of social efficiency”; Wells foresees “this euthanasia of the weak and sensual” and judges that “to kill under the seemly conditions science will afford is a far less offensive thing” than punishment by pain. He insists the new state will treat people “certainly not as races,” admitting “white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be the test”—and then asks what of “those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.” The same pages refuse special treatment for Jews while entertaining the charge that the Jew is a “parasite on the apparatus of credit.”

Wells did not stay exactly there, but the record moves slowly. By his own 1934 account Mankind in the Making (1903) was worth reading only for its “squashing of ‘Positive Eugenics’,” the breeding of the best. Yet on 16 May 1904, replying to Francis Galton at the Sociological Society, he said: “It is in the sterilisation of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.” Readers who now call him a prophet of progress should hold both texts in view.

Anticipations made him famous among reformers, and he joined the Fabian Society in February 1903. A Modern Utopia (1905) invented a voluntary ruling order, the Samurai, and Wells set out to turn the Fabians into one. His paper “The Faults of the Fabian” (9 February 1906) mocked the society as “still half a drawing-room society” lodged in a “cellar”—short, as Pease summarised it, of imaginative megalomania; a reform committee followed, and in December 1906 at Essex Hall he moved an amendment in a speech of an hour and a quarter. George Bernard Shaw answered that it amounted to a vote of no confidence in the old leadership, and Wells withdrew it. Edward Pease, the secretary and one of that “Old Gang,” wrote that Wells was “a masterful person, very fond of his own way, very uncertain what that way was.” Wells resigned in September 1908 and later called it the “storm in the Fabian tea-cup,” confessing “bad judgment, gusty impulse and real inexcusable vanity.”

Anticipations artwork — Read the 1902 edition

1905–1918

A treaty with Jane, and what it cost

Wells described the arrangement plainly in his autobiography: “My compromise with Jane developed after 1900”—a modus vivendi that left room for “the far more frequent escapades of a Don Juan among the intelligentsia.” “In theory, I was now to have passades,” he wrote; in practice they became affairs. Jane stayed, and went on working with him. Wells admitted the arrangement was “by no means a perfect arrangement.”

Amber Reeves was the daughter of the Fabians William and Maud Pember Reeves and a Newnham student who took a double first in 1908. Their affair became open; she was pregnant by the spring of 1909, they spent some months together at Le Touquet, and in 1909 she married the lawyer G. R. Blanco White—“I did not arrange to marry Rivers; he arranged it with H.G.,” she later said. Their daughter Anna-Jane was born on 31 December 1909 and learned who her father was at eighteen. Macmillan refused Ann Veronica, the novel Wells drew from the affair; T. Fisher Unwin published it that autumn. When Beatrice Webb condemned the affair, Wells caricatured the Webbs as Altiora and Oscar Bailey in The New Machiavelli (1911); Webb wrote that the book laid bare “his total incapacity for decent conduct.”

The best fiction of these years is social comedy rather than prophecy: Kipps (1905), the drapery transformed; Tono-Bungay (1909), a worthless patent medicine building a fortune and an empire of advertising; The History of Mr Polly (1910). In 1912 the young critic Rebecca West called him “the Old Maid among novelists” in The Freewoman; he invited her to lunch, they became lovers late in 1913, and their son Anthony West was born on 4 August 1914, the day Britain entered the war. The relationship lasted about ten years. Anthony later wrote a novel, Heritage (1955), about the son of two famous unmarried parents, which West never forgave, and in 1984 a biography of his father.

The World Set Free (1914), dedicated to the radiochemist Frederick Soddy, imagined “atomic bombs” that keep exploding for days; Leo Szilárd later wrote that reading it in 1932 had made “a very great impression” on him. When war came Wells wrote The War That Will End War (1914), coining the phrase, and in 1918 he worked for the government propaganda bureau at Wellington House.

Tono-Bungay artwork — Read the 1909 edition

1918–1932

A history of everything, and a woman who said it was hers

After the war Wells decided that world peace needed a common history and, when no professional historian would write one, wrote it himself, mainly between October 1918 and November 1919, with Jane researching, typing and criticising. The title page of The Outline of History credits “the advice and editorial help” of Ernest Barker, Sir H. H. Johnston, Sir E. Ray Lankester and Gilbert Murray, with maps and drawings by J. F. Horrabin; the acknowledgements thank dozens more, among them his son G. P. Wells and “Miss Rebecca West.” Its preface states the thesis: “there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas.” It appeared in fortnightly parts from 22 November 1919 and as a book in 1920, sold in the millions and made him rich. Its most quoted sentence comes near the end: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

In Toronto, Florence Deeks, a teacher who had written a world history emphasising women, The Web of the World’s Romance, read the Outline and saw her book in it. She had left the manuscript with the Macmillan Company of Canada on 8 August 1918 and did not get it back until April 1919—the months Wells was writing. She sued Wells and his publishers; Mr Justice Raney dismissed the case, the Ontario appeal court agreed, and she argued her final appeal to the Privy Council in person. On 3 November 1932 Lord Atkin let her open her case at length despite two concurrent findings, accepted the sworn evidence of Wells, Macmillan’s editor and Sir Frederick Macmillan that the manuscript never left Canada and that Wells had never seen it, and held that textual parallels would need to be “of the most cogent force” to outweigh that. The historian A. B. McKillop (2000) argues she was wronged; the legal scholar Denis Magnusson (2004) replies that her case was weak and fairly tried. No copying has been proved.

In September 1920 Wells went to Soviet Russia with his elder son, stayed with Maxim Gorky in Petrograd and interviewed Lenin. In Russia in the Shadows he described his guide and interpreter only as a lady he had met in 1914, “the niece of a former Russian Ambassador,” imprisoned five times by the Bolsheviks. She was Moura Benckendorff, later Baroness Budberg, Gorky’s secretary and companion; she and Wells slept together on that visit. He stood for Parliament as Labour candidate for London University in 1922 and 1923 and lost. Jane died on 6 October 1927; from 1924 to 1933 he shared a house at Grasse, in Provence, with the writer Odette Keun, and published his manifesto for a world-ordering elite, The Open Conspiracy, in 1928.

The Outline of History artwork — Read the 1920 edition

1933–1946

World Brain, the Rights of Man, and the end of the tether

The Shape of Things to Come (1933) imagined a world war beginning in 1940 and a dictatorship of airmen and technicians rebuilding the world; Wells wrote the screenplay for Alexander Korda’s film Things to Come (1936), directed by William Cameron Menzies. The Nazis burned his books in May 1933, and as president of PEN he backed the expulsion of the German centre in 1934 for refusing to admit non-Aryan writers. That July he interviewed Stalin for the New Statesman. Moura Budberg settled in London and resumed their affair; she nursed him at the end but repeatedly refused to marry him, and MI5 spent years watching her as a suspected Soviet agent.

World Brain gathers the lectures of 1936–37, beginning at the Royal Institution on 20 November 1936. Its mechanism is specific. A modern encyclopaedia should not be “a row of volumes printed and published once for all” but “a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarised, digested, clarified and compared,” in continual correspondence with universities, surveys and statistical bureaux. Its content would be “selections, extracts, quotations, very carefully assembled with the approval of outstanding authorities”—“not a miscellany, but a concentration, a clarification and a synthesis”—backed, he hoped, by “microscopic libraries of record” on microfilm, and the organisation would “centralise mentally but perhaps not physically,” possibly duplicated as “a network.” The obvious question, which Wells never settled, is who chooses the authorities.

In 1940 the Daily Herald and the National Peace Council convened a committee chaired by the former Lord Chancellor Lord Sankey; Wells, its most active member, drafted the declaration it published, and set it out with his commentary in the Penguin Special The Rights of Man. Its ninth clause reads: “no man shall be subjected to any sort of mutilation or sterilisation except with his own deliberate consent, freely given.” The commentary declares genetics not “sufficiently sure of itself” for compulsory sterilisation and says “human nature as it is at present revolts against the idea of sterilisation without consent.” Thirty-nine years after Anticipations, the argument against coercion still rests partly on the science being unready. John Humphrey, who prepared the UN Secretariat’s first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is reported to have listed the Sankey declaration and a Wells text among the sources he consulted.

His last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), entertains the thought that humanity may be replaced by some other species. Wells died at 13 Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, on 13 August 1946; his ashes were scattered off the Dorset coast. Read The Time Machine and World Brain together: the first is a machine for doubting extrapolation, the second an extrapolation that asks to be trusted.