WELLS, H.G. (1866–1946)

WELLS, H.G. (1866–1946)

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, on 21 September 1866. His father, Joseph, was a small-shopkeeper and professional cricketer, and his mother, Sarah, was a housewife. In 1880, following the disablement of Joseph three years earlier that ended his cricketing career, Sarah became a housekeeper at Up Park in Sussex. Joseph, following seven years of impoverishment, moved to a cottage in Nyewoods, Sussex, in 1887 where

he lived on an allowance from his wife until she joined him there in 1893. It was precisely during this period of familial disruption that Wells’s early education came to an abrupt end and he was thrust into the world of employment.

Wells’s early education took place at Mrs Knott’s Dame School (c.1872–4) and Thomas Morley’s Academy (1874–80) in Bromley, before he was apprenticed at the age of 14 to the drapery trade. Between 1880 and 1883, he worked in two drapery emporia (Windsor and Southsea), as a pupil-teacher in Wookey and as a chemisfs assistant in Midhurst. In 1883 Wells returned to education as a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School where he became a prize student, winning a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. It was as a result of his education at the Normal School (1884–7) that Wells developed as an independent thinker, progressing over the next 30 years from being a religious sceptic and an unaffiliated socialist, to being an advocate of Darwinian evolution, a statist socialist, a reform-eugenicist and a propagandist for world government.

Wells’s arrival in South Kensington brought him into contact with two key influences that left their impressions on him for the rest of his life: Darwinism (see DARWIN, CHARLES) and socialism.

Although Wells only studied under T.H.HUXLEY at South Kensington for three months in 1884, he claimed on more than one occasion that Huxley had a profound influence on the way he viewed the world, and he expressed the opinion that Huxley was

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the greatest man he had ever met. As well as introducing Wells to Darwinian evolution, Huxley infused Darwin’s theory with an ethical code that convinced Wells not only that humankind was able to influence the course of its own evolution, but also that humanity had a duty to see that its evolution was progressive and for the benefit of the species as a whole. Thus, unique amongst socialists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wells arrived at a collectivist philosophy from a biological perspective.

As well as discovering Huxley’s theory of ‘ethical evolution’ at South Kensington, Wells also donned a red tie within months of his move to the capital, reading Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) and Plato’s Republic (360 BCE), and attending socialist lectures. He was an occasional visitor to Kelmscott House, hearing the likes of WILLAM MORRIS and GEORGE BERNARD SHAW as well as other socialist speakers, and on at least two occasions, in 1886 and 1889, he presented papers to the Debating Society of the Normal School, defending socialism and advocating state control of ‘production, distribution and defence’.

Although Wells’s socialism and Darwinism were fairly naïve during the 1880s, he nonetheless applied them as best he could to his early literary efforts. In 1884 he founded and edited a college magazine, the Science Schools Journal, in which were published the abstracts of his aforementioned Debating Society papers on socialism. In addition, in 1887, he published a fragment of a text entitled ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ that addressed both the possibilities and fears of science, and, in a later draft of the story, retitled The Time Machine (1895), he merged evolutionary theory and socialism to project a classridden, devolving society doomed to ultimate extinction as a result of its rejection of ‘ethical evolution’ and the class harmony inherent in Huxley’s philosophy.

In 1887 Wells left the Normal School of Science, having failed his science degree, and took a job as an assistant schoolmaster at Holt Academy in north Wales. After four months, however, he departed that post, having suffered a crushed kidney in a footballing accident. After a year of convalescence in which he earned an income by drawing biological diagrams and doing occasional supply teaching, Wells took up a second assistant master’s post, at Henley House School in Kilburn, in January 1889.

His return to the capital enabled Wells to take up his studies once again, and he enrolled for the relevant examinations to become a Licentiate of the College of Preceptors. His work for the licentiate was also useful preparation for his second attempt at gaining his bachelor’s degree in science, which he passed in 1890 with first-class honours in Zoology and second-class honours in Geology, earning himself a fellowship in the Zoological Society.

In 1890 Wells quit his post at Henley House School, and became a tutor with the University Correspondence College, ‘coaching’ students to pass university examinations in Biology and Geology. Simultaneously, he continued to study, now for a Fellowship of the College of Preceptors, which he acquired in December 1890, winning the Doreck Scholarship Prize for his work on the theory and practice of education.

From 1891 Wells combined his academic knowledge of educational and biological philosophy with an eloquent literary style and began producing a stream of essays that he published in both popular and specialist journals throughout the 1890s, including the Pall Mall Gazette, the Saturday Review and the Educational Times. His first literary success occurred with the publication of ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’ in the Fortnightly Review in February 1891. Although his follow-up essay, ‘The Universe Rigid’, was

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rejected a few months later by the Fortnightly’s editor, Frank Harris, nonetheless this break into paid journalism proved to be the beginning of a fabulously lucrative career.

Not only were Wells’s fears of poverty put behind him from 1891, but also his concentration on essay-writing allowed him to apply his evolutionary philosophy to daily life. Thus, ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’ argued against the common late-Victorian practice of classification, asserting that all things are unique and that classification ought only to be a rough guide for generalizing, inapplicable to the individual. This assertion of the unique became a fundamental tenet of Wells’s philosophy and one that he reiterated throughout his life in such works as The Discovery of the Future (1902), ‘Skepticism of the Instrument’ (1904), First and Last Things (1908), The Conquest of Time (1942) and ‘The Illusion of Personality’ (1944).

Another important aspect of Wells’s thought developed through his journalism was evolution and humanity’s control over its own change, both mental and physical. In ‘The Limits of Individual Plasticity’ (1895), Wells argued that improvements in surgical and educational techniques meant that there was no limit to the changes that doctors and teachers could achieve to the physical and mental structure of a human being. Wells cites skin grafting, blood transfusion and hypnotism as preliminary examples of what might ultimately lead to the transformation of the human species. His belief in the power of such physical and mental manipulation was reasserted in his essays ‘The Province of Pain’ (1894), ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’ (1896) and ‘Morals and Civilisation’ (1897), as well as in such later writings as The Way the World is Going (1927) and The Science of Life (1930) in which he discusses Pavlov’s and Metchnikoff’s very different experiments in Russia. Wells’s late-Victorian interest in human evolution also clearly fed into his later thoughts on eugenics, to be discussed below.

Although Wells was a declared socialist from 1884 (even considering joining the Fabian Society five years later), he was careful not to write overtly ideological essays during his journalistic apprenticeship of the 1890s. Nonetheless socialistic thinking can

be detected in some his writing. An early example is ‘Ancient Experiments in Co- operation’, published in 1892, in which he argues that evolutionary success has largely come to those species that practice a high degree of co-operation. Wells later applied this analysis, showing the consequences of its opposite, in The Time Machine in which the Time Traveller initially assumes a successful communist society when he encounters the Eloi, a species free from toil and living in seeming peace, equality and plenty, only to be disappointed to learn that the Eloi are farmed and devoured by the Morlocks, the underworld heirs of the working class who have risen against their erstwhile middle-class exploiters. Not only does The Time Machine demonstrate the desirability of social harmony, but also it suggests, with the death of the planet at the close of the novella, that class division will ultimately lead to the extinction of the species.

Wells implicitly attacks social division in several of his other early science fiction novels, demonstrating the benefits of co-operation to defeat terrorism in The Invisible Man (1897) and portraying the evils of class division in The First Men in the Moon (1901) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). Class fusion leading to social harmony is also portrayed in such works as The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), in which scientific advance is harnessed for the benefit of human progress, and The Labour Unrest and The Great State (both 1912), which argue for class co-

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operation to end the contemporary labour unrest and achieve a classless ‘great state’ based on labour conscription and industrial guilds.

If such notions of class harmony seem antithetical to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialism, it was absolutely fundamental to Wells’s own political philosophy. Although no believer in automatic progress, Wells understood that human improvement could only be achieved through harnessing the power of science and applying it to human needs. The mechanical progress achieved during the nineteenth century suggested to Wells that further scientific advance could result in not so much the reconstitution of class relations as the dissolution of class altogether. In Wells’s opinion, there was no longer a need for a toiling class and he abhorred the existence of a leisure class. For him, the future belonged to the technical-scientific class of mechanics and engineers. This did not mean the emergence of a new elite, but the synthesis of all the old classes into a society of purpose differentiated by temperamental differences alone. Such temperamental differences would be reflected in artistic expression and personal taste, and would also determine educational preference and occupational choice. Wells presented his notions of temperamental classification (applicable to groups but never, in such a fluid society as he envisaged, to the individual) in such works as Anticipations (1901), A Modern Utopia (1905) and Phoenix (1942).

Although the basis of Wells’s social and political thought can be identified in his late- Victorian journalism and in his early scientific romances, it was with the publication of Anticipations of the Reaction of Scientific and Mechanical Progress upon Human Life and Thought in 1901 that he began applying his ideas to the question of social reform. And, significantly, in Anticipations Wells also considered for the first time the possible application of eugenics to social reform.

In Anticipations, Wells cites overpopulation, and more particularly the abundance of ‘poor quality’ births, as a major problem for the twentieth-century statesman. Wells argues that ‘efficiency’ ought to be the test of parentage and he excludes a wide span of the population from reproduction. Thus, ‘congenital invalids’, habitual drunkards, the long-term unemployed and the mentally ill ought to be prevented from procreating through sterilization, and children that are born to them ought either to be taken into care or destroyed, depending upon their condition. Beyond these recommendations, Wells says little in Anticipations about social reform. Two years later, in Mankind in the Making (1903), Wells heavily revises his eugenic position. In that work, he argues for the expansion of educational opportunities to all in society, and believes poor parents ought to be offered training in parenthood. Furthermore, he cites low pay, underemployment and poor-quality housing as the prime reasons for the stunted growth (both mental and physical) of many working-class children. Wells rejects out of hand the possibilities of positive eugenics but he avoids the question of negative eugenics altogether. This is put right in his next work to discuss social conditions, A Modern Utopia. There Wells reasserts the need for improved education, and advocates state regulation of housing conditions and a minimum wage. He suggests the possibility of voluntary eugenics through the maintenance of state files on all individuals, accessible by potential spouses, and he suggests that marriage ought to be illegal until individuals earned a minimum wage and were proved free of transmissible diseases and had expurgated their criminal offences. By 1908, with the publication of his socialist opus, New Worlds for Old (which Wells wrote as an alternative to the Fabian Essays following his unsuccessful attempt to

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reform the Fabian Society between 1903 and 1906), eugenics has been entirely superseded in Wells’s thought by social reform proposals centred on education, health, employment and housing. (Eugenics does re-emerge in Wells’s thought in the early 1930s with the publication of The Science of Life (1930) and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932), only to be finally rejected in The Rights of Man (1940).) The major factors in Wells’s social reform proposals of the Edwardian period were the establishment of a minimum wage, the ‘endowment of motherhood’, compulsory education to the age of 16, slum clearance and greater regulation of housing.

Although social reform and political theory were important aspects of Wells’s thought during the Edwardian period, he is best remembered for his internationalism, which developed from 1901 and absorbed much of his energy during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In Anticipations Wells prophesied that by the year 2000 there would be five major power blocs in the world; an Anglo-Saxon grouping, a union of the ‘Latin’ peoples, an East Asian union, a European union and a ‘Slavic’ union. Although Wells favoured such transnational developments, he saw them as simply being steps towards the emergence of

a ‘world state at peace within itself’. In 1905, he presented a model of what such a world state might ultimately look like in A Modern Utopia, and in The World Set Free he presented a possible scenario of how such a world state might come about. Throughout the rest of his life, Wells became more and more insistent on the need for a world state, even declaring that the nation-state was the cause of many of the world’s problems and would have to be totally superseded in the ultimate global settlement. As a result of the Great War, therefore, Wells’s internationalism gave way to a more comprehensive cosmopolitanism, and from 1923, with the publication of Men Like Gods, he rejected any notion of a world parliament in favour of a functional model of world order, based on global corporations having complete sovereignty over their specific functions, though with no corporation becoming dominant over several functions. The only supplements Wells made to this model of global order between 1923 and his death in 1946 were the creation of a world encyclopedia to supply all citizens with instantaneous information about anything they desired to know (see The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind), the advocacy of a ‘Rights of Man’ charter to protect human rights in the face of potential corporate tyranny (see The Rights of Man) and the establishment of multi-tiered juries (from local to global) to consider the organization of affairs and outlaw practices that ran counter to the ‘Rights of Man’ charter (see Phoenix).

Wells always maintained that his thought was not original but that his special role was as a synthesizer and popularizer of ideas. Nonetheless, it is possible to argue that Wells made an important contribution to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. He was the first thinker to arrive at a collectivist socialist philosophy through the interpretation of Darwinian evolution. He rejected the notion of ‘races’ and believed that human advance could only be achieved through a focus on the human race as a whole. Although he rejected the notion of automatic progress, he firmly believed that scientific advance was central to the creation of a peaceful, equalitarian world state. And finally, scorning racial and class division in favour of global harmony, he recognized the futility of socialism based upon class-war and nationalism, and favoured a regulated corporatism in a global service economy, in which education, human rights and popular juries would ensure the protection of individual interests in a world efficiently managed by global corporate bodies.

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Despite a lifetime of campaigning for his unique brand of global socialism, Wells died

a frustrated man on 13 August 1946. His last published volume, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), is often cited as an example of his ultimate despair with humanity and its future.