H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 at Atlas House in Bromley, Kent, and died on 13 August 1946. Known to his family as “Bertie,” he was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells, a former domestic gardener who became a shopkeeper and professional cricketer, and Sarah Neal, a former domestic servant. Wells grew up in a household under financial strain. The family shop, which sold china and sporting goods, did not prosper, and his father’s cricket earnings were unsteady. When Joseph fractured his femur in 1877, the family lost its main source of income.

A broken leg in 1874 helped shape Wells’s life in an unexpected way. Bedridden, he began reading books from the local library, brought to him by his father, and became devoted to the other worlds and lives that books opened to him. His schooling was uneven, and as a teenager he was placed in apprenticeships, including an unhappy period from 1880 to 1883 at Hyde’s Drapery Emporium in Southsea. There he worked thirteen-hour days and slept in a dormitory with other apprentices. Those experiences later fed into novels such as The Wheels of Chance, The History of Mr Polly, and Kipps, which describe lower-middle-class English life and criticize the distribution of wealth.

Wells became one of the most prolific English writers of his age, producing more than forty novels and dozens of short stories, along with nonfiction in social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. He is most known for his science fiction, and has sometimes been called the “father of science fiction,” a title also associated with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His best-known works include The Time Machine (1895), his first novella, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The War in the Air (1907), and When the Sleeper Wakes (1910). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

His fiction often made the fantastic feel close at hand by placing ordinary detail beside one extraordinary assumption, an approach later called “Wells’s law.” Joseph Conrad greeted him in 1898 as “O Realist of the Fantastic!” Wells imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering before such subjects were common in the genre. As a futurist, he also foresaw aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television, and something resembling the World Wide Web. Brian Aldiss called him the “Shakespeare of science fiction,” while Charles Fort called him a “wild talent.”

Wells’s thinking was shaped by science, politics, and the pressures of class. His earliest specialized training was in biology, and his ethical ideas developed in a Darwinian context. From a young age he was an outspoken socialist, and he often, though not always, sympathized with pacifist views. For much of his adult life he also advocated eugenics and involuntary euthanasia, views he had largely recanted by 1940. In later years he wrote less fiction and more works setting out his political and social views, sometimes giving his profession as journalist. A diabetic, he co-founded The Diabetic Association, later Diabetes UK, in 1934. Wells’s words still matter to readers because they join curiosity with social argument: he looked at ordinary life, imagined what might be coming, and asked what kind of future people were making for themselves.