H. G. Wells

Life

Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent, the son of a shopkeeper and a former lady’s maid. The family was poor, and he was apprenticed as a draper at thirteen, a trade he hated and later satirized. A scholarship took him to the Normal School of Science in London in 1884, where he studied biology under T. H. Huxley, and he worked as a teacher while writing textbooks and journalism.

The Time Machine (1895) made his name, and he followed it quickly with The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). These “scientific romances,” as he called them, established most of the themes of modern science fiction: time travel, alien invasion, genetic manipulation, and invisibility. From the early 1900s he turned to comic novels of lower-middle-class life, including Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr. Polly (1910), and to social and political writing. He was briefly a member of the Fabian Society and argued throughout his life for world government and planned social reform.

Wells wrote more than fifty novels and a great deal of nonfiction, including The Outline of History (1920), a popular world history that sold in enormous numbers. He died in London in 1946.

Literary significance

Wells is one of the founders of science fiction as a genre, and with Jules Verne he is the writer most often credited with establishing it. Where Verne tried to stay within the plausible, Wells was willing to grant one impossible premise and then follow it out with scientific rigor, which has been the dominant method ever since. His early novels are also pointed social criticism, applying the ideas of Darwin and Huxley to the class structure of Victorian Britain. His later reputation as a prophet and public intellectual has faded; the early novels have not.

Where to start

The Time Machine is short and complete and shows his method at its most concentrated. The War of the Worlds, a few years later, is the fuller novel and the more influential one.