HG Wells
When Michael Foot unveiled a blue plaque at the Children’s House recently, he belatedly marked a contribution to the welfare of young East Enders by one of the greatest visionaries of our time. But if HG Wells had been able to see into the future to the ceremony in Bruce Road, Bow last month he would probably have been horrified. For though Wells declared the Children’s House “one of the most promising things I have come across in a long time,” he didn’t want his good works advertised. That ensured his name was kept out of the list of “friends” or financial contributors, part of Wells’ resistance to what he called “benevolent picnicking.” Unlike many philanthropists of the Edwardian era, HG liked to do his good works quietly.
Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 in Bromley, Kent and it was a childhood that would shape his attitude to the world, to the working classes and would feed some of his greatest novels. His father, Joseph, ran a small, hardware shop in the town and had a career as a professional cricketer, pouring more of his energies and imagination into natural history and the family garden, growing a grapevine against the back of the ramshackle family home in Bromley High Street. For his mother, meanwhile, life was one long struggle. If she thought her marriage to Joseph had lifted her out of the drudgery she had endured working in domestic service she was mistaken. The house was dirty, ugly and infested with bugs and Joseph’s hardware business was virtually bankrupt.
Wells wrote that “vast unsuspected forces beyond her ken were destroying the social order . . . to which all her beliefs were attuned and on which all her confidence was based.” She wasn’t alone. While many Victorians eagerly embraced the new age of science and discovery – HG was born just 15 years after the Great Exhibition with its celebration of technology and innovation – many others could only see the old order crumbling away. But the young Herbert was firmly in the former camp. He eagerly devoured the miscellaneous books that Joseph brought home from the Literary Institute: the life of the Duke of Wellington, geographies, copies of Punch and, most crucial of all, Wood’s Natural History.
At the age of seven Herbert was confined to bed for weeks after breaking his leg and studied Wood’s voraciously. “But the book made me forget my splints, my mind was born anew,” he wrote later. Wells began to realise that nature had rules and orders. At a time when “it would have been improper to mention evolution in a book intended for family reading” the young Wells had uncovered the theory for himself. After a false start as an apprentice draper, Wells went to study at the Normal School of Science, in Kensington. He began writing on science and eugenics and was obsessed with the future and the new sciences’ effects on mankind. Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905) show the way his mind was working. But if the title of The War That Will End All War (1914) was an optimistic prediction, the reality of the carnage of the Great War directed Wells to peace. He travelled to meet Lenin, Stalin and FD Roosevelt and formed his idea of a League of Nations.
Today Wells is famous for his science fiction – generations have been delighted by books and films of The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man. But it was perhaps his fierce campaigning on human rights that is HG’s greatest legacy to the 20th century. On 10 December 1948, three years after Wells’ death, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. HG Wells – the man who predicted so much of the future – had succeeded in making it. lWith thanks to Rose Tilly at the HG Wells Society. Tel 0171-481 0766.