H. G. Wells

1903 portrait by Hollyer, from VAM

Herbert George Wells was born Sept. 21, 1966 in Bromley, Kent, a small market town 12 miles from London. He grew up in the lower middle class home of Sarah and shopkeeper Joseph Wells, spending much time in Sarah's underground kitchen. He served for years as a draper's apprentice working in a dark and dismal building 12 hours a day, "the most miserable years of my life." In 1884 he began at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington studying biology with "Darwin's Bulldog" T. H. Huxley but failed to obtain a degree after three years and left the school. He worked as a teacher for five years and began writing essays and short stories for New Grubb Street journals such as the Pall Mall Gazette and The National Observer. He prospered in the age of the New Journalism and his income grew from an occasional 5 guineas per article in 1893 to an annual income of over 1000 guineas three years later. He divorced his first wife Isabel Wells, a cousin, and married Amy Catherine Robbins, or "Jane" as he would call her, in 1895. He devoted himself to a literary career, publishing his first novel, The Time Machine, in May 1895. This was followed by The Wonderful Visit, The Stolen Bacillus, The island of Doctor Moreau, and The Wheels of Chance based on the bicycle craze of the 1890s. In 1896 he began writing War of the Worlds that was serialized in Pearson's and Cosmopolitan in 1897, and published as a novel in 1898. In 1899 he decided to settle at Sandgate and built his Spade House where he would live and write for the next decade. In 1906 he visited the United States and published The Future in America. In 1908 he published The War in the Air. In 1913 he began his long affair with Rebecca West, visited Russia in 1914, and published The World Set Free that predicted a world war fought with nuclear weapons. He toured the battlefields of France and Italy in 1916. In 1918 he joined Lord Northcliffe's Ministry of Information. In 1919 he supported the League of Nations, and attended the Washington Disarmament Conference in 1921. He moved to London in 1933 and published The Shape of Things to Come that predicted a world war in 1940 among divided nations followed by disease and anarchy and the rebuilding of a new united civilization by technical experts by the year 2105. In 1934 he met Stalin in Russia and in 1935 he met FDR on a visit to the U.S. and wrote The New America: The New World. He joined with producer Alexander Korda and director Cameron Menzies on the film Things to Come that was released in Feb. 1936 starring Ralph Richardson, Raymond Massey, Ann Todd. The film began with an air raid on rural England, and concluded with the reconstruction of underground cities after a world war conveying the message that science could save mankind. However, Wells was not happy with the simplistic message. He remained in London in 1940 during the blitz and helped draft the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man that would be incorporated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 by the United Nations. He went on a lecture tour in the U.S. in the fall of 1940 and spoke on the need for the U.S. and Russia to work together to create world peace. He died Aug. 13, 1946 at age 79.

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revised 6/23/05 by Steven Schoenherr at the University of San Diego | Filmnotes | on reserve