Notes on Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
by Websafe Studio
Last Update: 10-29-09

Introduction
    The writer George Gissing (1857-1903), a close friend of Wells and a subject of my intensive study, exhorted his younger siblings, in his letters to them, always to take notes on their reading. It is in that spirit that I offer this ongoing effort. I hope that these capsule reviews will whet the modern reader's appetite for Wells' work, and, by extension, that of other nineteenth-century authors.

Novels and Novellas
    The Time Machine (1895)
    First published in serial form; one readily notes the cliffhangers which end each chapter. Of particular interest is the Platonic-dialogue-style examination of the dimensions, which takes place at the beginning of the story, between the Time Traveller (never named in the text) and his dinner guests (also unnamed).
    As with many of Wells' works, and with much nineteenth-century fiction, the literary device called "framing" is used: The bulk of the piece is an extended flashback (as is any story recounted at a dinner table) which is "framed" at start and end by a narrator who is not the story's protagonist.

    The Wonderful Visit (1895)
    An angel falls to earth (though nowhere is it implied that he's committed the sin of pride), downed by the accidental gunshot of a country vicar, who mistakes him for an exotic bird. (In one of many authorial intrusions, Wells explains that this is not an angel from the Bible, but one from the realm of art and mythic imagination, whose marvelous world includes griffins and unicorns as well.)
    While visiting the vicar, the angel struggles to understand the earthly world, in which pain, hunger, cruelty and death appear to reign supreme. Gradually, the fallen nature of our world erodes him, till he is driven to an act of cruelty himself. A spontaneous act of sacrifice which follows may restore him to his rightful place, however.
    The pleasure of reading this satirical morality tale is marred by its lengthy authorial asides, over-explanation and heavy-handed whimsy. Had Wells edited out these jarring elements, this novella would stand among his most entertaining productions.

    The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
    Truly horrible, but with a gravitas absent from today's hollow-souled macabre fiction. Probably reveals Wells' belief in eugenics.

    The Invisible Man (1897)
    The first section of this sad, powerful story of a loner turned against society at large gives little hint of how dark it will become. Told by a non-omniscient narrator, it begins as a farcical account of a set of blundering English villagers perplexed by the abrupt appearance of a shrouded and muffled visitor whose face is wrapped in bandages.
    There is a long middle section -- a framed recounting, to an old friend, of the visitor's back story -- in which the tone becomes more serious, haunting and threatening.
    The final section reverts to the narrator's voice, and becomes an experience of stark, suspenseful horror.
    The Invisible Man, though often acting with startlingly ruthless criminality, is yet made into a compelling anti-hero by Wells, who, through the narrator, pleads sympathy and understanding for a man at once crazed predator and Christlike victim.

    The War of the Worlds (1898)
    In the late summer of 1894, the inhabitants of the planet Mars fire a huge gun at the planet Earth, thus sending an invading force of about fifty Martians (plus their high-tech weaponry and equipment) in giant cylinders which crash-land near small towns in southwest England. A crowd of eager sightseers gathers around the first cylinder, along with the narrator (a writer of "speculative philosophy") and several astronomers.
    When the cylinder opens, the Martians are seen to be "ugly brutes": octopoid creatures with staring eyes, beaklike mouths, oily brown skin and masses of tentacles. They quickly demonstrate their hostile power by wiping out the welcome party which approaches them in their pit.
    The book is chiefly an account of the narrator's terrified flight from the Martians, first to a nearby town to place his wife with his cousins, and then chiefly alone, struggling to survive the invaders' terrible advance. he also gives his brother's account of the intensity and desperation of the mass exodus from London.
    As in any war, the forms of ordinary life are swept away, and civilization is shown to be but a fragile veneer as people struggle with hunger, thirst, exhaustion, terror, and the opportunities for looting (and worse) as they turn violently on each other.
    Through his narrator, Wells brings out the parallel between the superiorly intelligent Martians' takeover of humanity for their own purposes, and humanity's subjection of domestic animals. (He might also have made more fo a comparison to the British Empire and its merciless campaign of colonization, but he touches on it only glancingly, methioning the extermination of the Tasmanians by European immigrants.)
    This powerful, emotionally affecting work, which well deserves its status as science-fiction classic, left me with a familiar question hanging at the back of my mind: Why are so many tales of extraterrestrial contact stories of invasion? Wells' narrator postulates that the competitive, Darwinian struggle for existence drives intelligent beings to become both more intelligent and more "cold-hearted" as they evolve. One wonders if this is true, or merely another rationalization to explain the male craving for domination and conquest?

    Love and Mr. Lewisham (1899)
    Draws heavily on Wells' late youth studying science under T.H. Huxley.

    Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905)
    A cross between Dickens and Twain, another fictionalized account of Wells' boyhood apprenticeship.

    Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story (1909)
    Though the twenty-two-year-old heroine of this coming-of-age novel defies her strict father and old-fashioned aunt to become a serious biology student in a London college, and to join the women's suffrage movement, when she falls passionately in love, she reverts to tradition and puts her man before everything else.
    Not just the women's movement, but Fabianism, vegetarianism and other such reformist trends are satirized with characters showing their ridiculous or extremist side.
    The novel is somewhat unevenly written, descending at times to sentimental cliche, but as a story is highly engaging; the best scenes take place in and around her biology classes, where she debates ideas with other students and their instructor. These scenes are well observed and psychologically penetrating. However, the ending of the book rings false, with too many threads dropped inexplicably, and a startling success which seems pasted on.

    The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1915)
    Slightly Jamesian novel of a lovely young woman married to a grasping industrialist. The title character is clearly patterned after Rebecca West.

Short Stories
    The Flying Man (1893)
    Over whisky and soda, a wryly stoic British lieutenant reveals to an irascibly skeptical ethnologist how the legend that he can fly by night on great black wings got started among the local mountain tribes.
    
    Aepyornis Island (1894)
    Giant birds and a brute of an "explorer." A "framed" story. (Note: The aepyornis was real; the name means "the bird as big as a mountain.")

    A Deal in Ostriches (1894)
    A taxidermist tells the story of how an ostrich may or may not have swallowed the diamond from an Indian lord's turban. Displays the standard British contempt for the "Hindoo."

    The Diamond Maker (1894)
    Small gem of a story which could describe not just its hero (a man who, working in isolation, has sacrificed all he has to perfect a method of making artificial diamonds), but all dreamers, inventors, artists and scientists on mad, monomaniac quests resulting in great discoveries -- at great price.
    
    The Flowering of the Strange Orchid (1894), aka The Strange Orchid
    Horror/suspense, with foreshadowing contributed by one of Wells' typical wife characters, both squeamish and maternally condescending.

    In the Avu Observatory (1894)
    A giant dark creature blunders through the slit of an astronomical observatory in Borneo and attacks the chief observer's assistant in the course of his nighttime vigil. There seems to be no plot or point to this story except to provide the reader with thrills of disgust and of horror.

    In the Modern Vein: An Unsympathetic Love Story (1894)
    Extremely funny piece which punctures and deflates both literary pretensions and the illusions of romantic love. The wife in this story exemplifies maternal condescension to the extreme.

    The Jilting of Jane (1894)
    Not-very-funny genre piece about the struggle for status and social position, what we now call "upward mobility."

    The Lord of the Dynamos (1894)
    An ugly note of racism sounds throughout this story of a laborer from an unspecified Asian or African country and his brutal, abusive white boss, the head electrician who manages the dynamos which power an electric railway. In a way, the main character is really the head dynamo, described in lavish detail, which the animist-minded laborer comes to worship as a god.

    The Stolen Bacillus (1894)
    Wells' condescendingly maternal wife type plays a bigger role than usual in this prescient story of potential biological warfare. Though the piece is weakened by an unlikely twist ending, there is an excellent passage from the antagonist's POV which shows that Wells well understood the roots of criminal motivation.

    The Treasure in the Forest (1894)
    Two "British wastrels" in a canoe make their slow, careful way along a river and into the depths of a tropical forest in search of a treasure in gold. In a spirit of casual, unquestioning racism and sheer greed, one of them has murdered the Chinese man who buried the treasure. However, a hideous comeuppance awaits the unsavory pair, at their very moment of triumph.

    The Triumphs of a Taxidermist (1894)
    A taxidermist gloatingly recounts how he and his colleagues have "forged" many specimens of giant birds, such as the dodo and great auk, and their eggs as well. Played strictly for laughs, there is no awareness in this story of the blind cruelty of Man's hunting such birds to extinction.

    The Argonauts of the Air (1895)
    Vivid moment in the history of the invention of airplanes, which is presented as an heroic endeavor of rightful conquest. The primary character, a millionaire inventor eager to prove himself, is skilfully contrasted with his chief engineer, a laconic and methodical sort absorbed in the process of creation itself. Of particular interest are the descriptions of the huge "flight cage" which has contained the experimental machine's trajectory.

    A Catastrophe (1895)
    An absurdly unlikely deus ex machina turn of events lifts a smalltime shop owner and his wife out of the depths of financial despair. Highly specific details of the shop's merchandise, prices and procedures likely recall Wells' youthful experience as an apprentice in a draper's establishment.

    The Cone (1895)
    Charged with a grim foreboding and fatalism similar to that found in Thomas Hardy, this nightmare story of a giant ironworks is painted in infernal reds and blacks which mirror the rage boiling in the heart of a jealous husband.

    Le Mari Terrible (1895)
    Disillusioning social satire of an upper-middle-class tea party at which a cynical young man flirts with his pretty hostess, under the bored eye of her even more cynical husband. One is left with the trapped sense that the posturing of the two intriguers will continue indefinitely, even after being subject to exposure and analysis.

    The Moth (1895) aka A Moth (Genus Unknown)
    Poe-like story of obsession and shadowy retribution for an even more shadowy "crime," of which the ethics could be long debated. Begins with a light, ironic tone, as the narrator parodies the world of academic research (specifically entomology). This switches to third person for the voice of the protagonist (where the story becomes steadily darker), modulates briefly to his landlady's POV, then turns back to the narrator's dispassionate recounting, and ends with a sardonic quip.

    Pollock and the Porroh Man (1895)
    A selfish and dissolute young Englishman, after a number of acts of violence, is pursued from West Africa to his native shore by a horrible apparition with which he becomes increasingly obsessed, seeing it in both waking life and dreams. Reminiscent of 1902 story The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs and the stories of W. Somerset Maugham, this cautionary tale could be viewed as the haunting of the British mind by its crimes of colonialism.

    The Reconciliation (1895)
    A very short, very horrible story about two old friends who have become enemies -- ostensibly over a woman -- and the rage in Man that lurks just below the surface, and is brought out by the disinhibition of alcohol. Couched in a fairly remote third-person view, this story makes one doubt Wells' pacifism.

    The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (1895) aka The Story of Davidson's Eyes
    In the laboratory of a technical college, a young man is suddenly visited with an extended "remote-viewing" experience which convinces him that he is actually on a distant beach.

    The Apple (1896)
    The legend-filled mountains of Armenia contrast with the mundane atmosphere of a Sussex railway carriage as a mysterious stranger returning from abroad proffers, to a newly appointed schoolmaster, a golden fruit which may or may not descend from the original Tree of Knowledge. Both the stranger and the schoolmaster, in their hesitation to eat this fruit, raise the question of whether such all-seeing knowledge would be the ultimate prize, or an embarrassingly inconvenient disruption of ordinary life.

    In the Abyss (1896)
    Man presses -- and is mightily pressed in return -- into the deep undersea, five miles down, by means of a faintly clownish-sounding bathysphere, with its two windows like big eyes and its highly padded interior. The "frame" of this story, quite long at the beginning and much briefer at the end, encloses a third-person account of one explorer's astonishing discovery.

    The Plattner Story (1896)
    Begins as a very funny satire on a stolid young schoolmaster subjected to a fantastical occurrence, then shifts in tone to a vignette of Dickensian melancholy and moral import.

    The Purple Pileus (1896)
    A "little man," a sort of henpecked, Cockney Walter Mitty, gains a new ability to self-assert (or dominate) after ingesting a wild purple fungus he finds in the woods.

    The Rajah's Treasure (1896)
    Told as a Kiplingesque folk tale, this story of a "petty Rajah" and his hidden treasure combines an enjoyment of the "exotic" with the typical condescension and contempt of British rule in India. See if you can guess what's hidden in the Rajah's indestructible iron safe.

    The Red Room (1896)
    Ghost story featuring a skeptical protagonist who aims to debunk the legend of of a haunted castle chamber. Through this narrator, Wells reveals what seems his own disgust with the depredations of old age, represented by a trio of old retainers in various states of decrepitude and decay.

    The Sea Raiders (1896)
    Giant octopoid sea creatures threaten England's southwest coast, and a rather ordinary man is spurred to heroic heights in his attempt to save himself and others from their deadly tentacles.

    A Slip Under the Microscope (1896)
    A group of biology students at a scientific college mixes age, gender and social class in a way still unusual in Wells' youth. The protagonist, a young man who is the son of a cobbler, is hard-working and fiercely ambitious, hoping to transcend his humble origins through his college achievements. Wells shows clear, accurate psychological insight into the craving to increase social status, even at risk to one's personal morality.   

    The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham (1896)
    A fantastic exchange suffered by the first-person protagonist causes him to reflect, with visceral fear and disgust, on the depressing physical realities of old age. Favored themes of the late nineteenth century make their appearance, including questions of inheritance, powerful and mysterious philtres, the occult and hypnosis.

    Under the Knife (1896)
    The narrator undergoes a liver operation, with chloroform used as anaesthetic, and has a profoundly cosmic out-of-body experience which allows Wells to speculate on the nature of the universe. Exceptionally well written, with a depth of psychological perspective unusual for such a young author.

    The Crystal Egg (1897)
    Little old junk-shop proprietor sees marvels thru luminous crystal "en rapport" w/similar on Mars. Details of the Martians and their landscape parallel, but do not match exactly, their description in The War of the Worlds.

    The Lost Inheritance (1897)
    After receiving a large inheritance, the main character's uncle spends his life writing "edifying literature" that no one wants to read. The mystery of the story is why his nephew, who claims to have inherited his uncle's fortune, is now a shabby, unattractive tavern drinker with an unexplained glass eye.
         
    The Star (1897)
    Flaming celestial body orbits near Earth, mass destruction ensues, tidal waves, earthquakes; fine writing style.

    A Story of the Stone Age (1897)
    Fifty thousand years ago, early humans fight for their lives in an England with rhinoceri. Action-filmish, but beautiful descriptions of a primal land.

   Jimmy Goggles the God (1898)
    Extremely racist account, couched in colorful Cockney slang, told by a sea-diving opportunist about a sunken gold fortune and the Papuan tribe who, on encountering him in his diving outfit, take him for a god. Includes interesting, specific description of the physical discomfort of deep-sea diving at the time.

    The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1898)
    Reminiscent of the folktale The Fisherman's Wife in its continuous swelling of hubris and power, this highly comic tale invites the reader's speculation on how to handle the sudden, unexpected ability to sculpt reality.

    The Stolen Body (1898)
    Marvelous fin-de-siècle fun re thought transfer & "living apparitions."

    A Dream of Armageddon (1901)
    Tormented man on train recounts strange dream series set three hundred years in the future.

    Filmer (1901)
    Account of an aeronautical inventor features that particular strain of British put-down humor, so cutting and so on target.

    Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland (1901)
    Unsophisticated village youth spends time in an exquisitely sylvan Fairyland and is forever changed. The tale is told by a worldly and educated narrator who, visiting the village years later, encounters him in a shop.

    The New Accelerator (1901)
    Would you take an experimental drug which caused your system to operate at a thousand times normal speed? Its inventor and his friend do, in this presciently cinematic story, and venture forth for their field test into a decorous park complete with a band playing, promenaders, and an old lady with parasol and lapdog, who all appear frozen in time.

    The Loyalty of Esau Common (1902)
    A young man very like Wells studies the "great game" of war. Wells' resentment of his own "low" birth a constant theme throughout.

    The Land Ironclads (1903)
    Told mostly from the viewpoint of a war correspondent present at an unspecified battle, predicts the invention of tank warfare. Interesting contrast between a physically powerful infantry (i.e., working class men) pitted against an engineer class, who are removed from the immediacy of combat and thus can objectify their enemy.

    The Truth About Pyecraft (1903)
    Extended joke of a tale featuring what feels, inescapably, like Wells' own repulsion at gluttony and obesity, expressed through a highly unsympathetic narrator.

    The Valley of the Spiders (1903)
    Perplexing subtext seems to lurk beneath mournful disgust, as "little man" opposes master.

    The Country of the Blind (1904)
    Highly imaginative fable, written in Kiplingesque style, of a lost clan in Peru who, being born blind for many generations, have adapted not only their entire physical environment and way of life to allow for this, but their very philosophy and cosmology. When a brashly opportunistic young mountaineer -- a sighted man -- discovers their valley through accident, he finds that, not only is sight not the immediate advantage he thought it would be, but the clan does not even believe that sight exists.

    The Door in the Wall (1906)
    A mysterious portal, which appears only intermittently during the course of the hero's life, opens into an Edenic parallel realm resembling the fairytale illustrations of Walter Crane and Howard Pyle. Readers must decide if the unexpected ending portrays a tragedy or a dream fulfilled.

    Little Mother up the Mörderberg (1910)
    Efficient, high-keyed hilarity w/unreliable narrator reminiscent of Bertie Wooster.

    The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic (1915)
    Satire on overacting which must have been written after Wells had watched one too many ham-acted stage melodramas. Could prove to be enjoyable and relevant reading after viewing a popular silent-film series such as The Perils of Pauline.

    The Grisly Folk (1921)
    No real plot animates this meditation on possible encounters between the "true men" of thirty thousand years ago and the much older race of Neanderthals. The word "grisly" in the title refers to the likelihood of Neanderthals being covered with a coat of bristly hair; but it could also be taken in the sense of "gruesome," as Wells speculates that Neanderthals hunted and ate the children of the "true men."

    The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper (1932)
    A mysterious newspaper from forty years in the future (i.e. 1971) turns up and reveals technological advances, political change and marvelous fashions.

Secondary Sources
    H.G. Wells and Rebecca West (1974), by Gordon N. Ray
    Account of Wells' ten-year liaison with English writer Rebecca West (1892-1983). The affair began in 1913, when West was twenty and Wells forty-six. He did not divorce his wife (Amy Catherine Robbins, nicknamed "Jane' by Wells), but merely added West to his menage, though compartmentalized and at a distance.
    The book touches briefly on Wells' other liaisons, which were numerous; for example, he broke with writer Countess Russell (Elizabeth von Arnim) in order to focus on West.
    Though author Ray maintains a reasonable, scholarly objectivity throughout, he cannot refrain from criticizing Wells' frequent acts of selfishness, bad temper and outright emotional cruelty during the course of the affair (which also offered both parties an experience of passionate love, sentimental tenderness and stimulating intellectual friendship). Ray does not speculate on probable psychological roots of their dynamic, but he does mention that West's father deserted her family, which could readily account for her need of an elder male figure of central importance.

    Rebecca West: A Life (1987), by Victoria Glendinning
    Part Two, "Panther," covers the liaison between Wells and West. Both writers (and their son Anthony as well) come off looking worse than in Gordon Ray's 1974 book. Glendinning points out many places where accounts of events conflict, and postulates that West practiced a kind of "novelization" of her life. But Glendinning also asserts that Wells lied to cover up scandal, notably in the sensational Frau Gatternigg affair, in which a young Austrian woman made a suicidal gesture in his flat. According to both Glendinning and Ray, this incident served to underline West's resolve to make the final break with Wells.

    Wells bibliography at Fantastic Fiction