On the Humble Childhood Beginnings of H.G. Wells
Claire Tomalin Recounts the Early Years of a Sci-Fi Pioneer
As long as he had to return to Hyde’s Drapery Emporium in Southsea, the young H.G. Wells remained wretched, knowing that his life was being wasted as he spent day after day folding and unfolding bales of cloth, serving customers, struggling with the parcels he never learned to do up neatly. He escaped when he could to read, and stretched the time it took to make any errand he was sent on last for as long as he dared to make it. The passing months did not resign him to his fate but increased his unhappiness and resentment, as he saw his ambitions and hopes fading further out of reach.
Yet Wells was too strongly motivated to give up. He saw that he had to work out his own means of escape—but how? A glimpse of light came through a sympathetic fellow clerk who noticed him studying Latin and said something about schools employing ushers—apprentice teachers who were also still students. Wells thought about this and then sent off an appeal to the headmaster at the grammar school in Midhurst, Mr. Byatt. Would he consider taking him on as an usher? To his joy Byatt wrote back, saying he might—but with no mention of pay. How could Wells proceed when he had wasted the money spent by his parents on his apprenticeship at Hyde’s? When he raised the matter with his mother, she wept and told him to pray for help. Even his father failed to support his new plan.
Then Byatt wrote again, this time offering to pay him twenty pounds for one year, and twice as much for a second. He encouraged Wells further by asking him to come over, giving him a good dinner and suggesting cheap and agreeable lodgings near the school that he might share with another assistant master. Wells pointed out to his mother that a schoolmaster’s clothes would cost half as much as what was needed for a draper’s outfits, which had to be very smart—and, he went on, a schoolmaster had a prospect of rising to a good position in the world, while a draper’s assistant had no such hope. It was a matter of urgency, he insisted: to become a schoolmaster, “I must begin at once . . . Which would you prefer?” he asked her.
At this point he got himself into serious trouble at the shop for disobeying orders. Whether he had done it on purpose or only carelessly, the humiliating prospect of punishment made his current existence even harder to bear. By now he was so anxious and distressed that the idea of killing himself rather than having to face punishment came into his head.
He soon discarded that plan. But he saw that he could threaten his mother with the idea, took action and set up a dramatic situation. On the next Sunday morning—this was in July 1883—he walked the 17 miles from Southsea to Uppark and waited close to the path always taken by his mother as she returned from church in Harting at the bottom of the hill. As she appeared with her fellow churchgoers, he signaled to her, took her aside, and told her he was determined to leave the drapery and become an usher in a school instead. When she protested, he insisted that he was ready to kill himself unless she agreed: a life of torture, he said, was not worth living. Evidently he spoke with enough force to convince her that he meant what he said, and with this, surprisingly, she did at last give way. She agreed to pay the money necessary to cancel his indentures, drawing on her savings. He could leave Hyde’s.
He walked back to Southsea and triumphantly announced that he would be leaving, and with his mother’s agreement. His father withheld consent for some days, and Wells was urged to stay on to help with the summer sales. He refused, managed to persuade his father and left on the last day of July. His intention was to devote August to reading. On the train to Midhurst he found himself too excited to read, and instead, being alone in his carriage, he performed a celebratory song and dance. His rejoicing was fully justified, because now at last he was on the path toward becoming what he wanted to be, and was confident he could become—an educated man who could hold his own in any company.
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The lodgings Mr. Byatt had recommended were in North Street, a few steps from the grammar school, let out by the good-natured Mrs. Walton, who ran a sweet shop on the ground floor; and there, before the start of term, he set himself a program of work that filled almost every moment of his day. It allowed no reading of fiction or playing of games, and included a one-hour daily walk to be made at the speed of four miles an hour. He supposedly described a program of this kind in a novel he wrote almost twenty years later, Love and Mr. Lewisham, in which his hero pins up maxims on the wall of his room—“Who would control others must first control himself,” “Knowledge is power”—alongside a list of French irregular verbs and a time-table that he called a “Schema.” It listed “French until eight,” breakfast in twenty minutes, then learning extracts from Shakespeare for 25.
There was also Latin composition and literature. In the novel Mr. Lewisham is distracted by a passing pretty girl, but in life Wells let himself be distracted by nothing. A bonus at his lodging house was that Mrs. Walton served him meals of rich meat stews and puddings of fruit and custard. He described it as the first good food he had ever eaten, which cannot be entirely true, but was part of his sense of having at last escaped and arrived where he wanted to be. He needed feeding: he was about to be 17, and still small and skinny.
He had begun to understand what his own capacities were: to learn fast, to plan his work, to observe people about him, to know what he value most, to fight for what he wanted and to win.He had begun to understand what his own capacities were: to learn fast, to plan his work, to observe people about him, to know what he value most, to fight for what he wanted and to win. He knew he enjoyed good conversation, difficult books, intellectual puzzles and challenges, and the beauty of the natural world—and that he hated unrewarding labor, dull company, religion, bad food, ugly suburbs. He noticed the world around him with exceptional vividness and thought about it, interested in the contrast between the familiar muddled suburban sprawl of Bromley he had come to hate, and the neat, coherent layout of Midhurst, with its medieval and Tudor buildings, small squares and gently hilly streets from which you rarely lose sight of the surrounding countryside of heathland, woods and fields, and the Downs tempting you upward. He wrote later that all his memories of Midhurst were full of sunshine—it answered to his love of light, sun, open spaces and hills, and windows with views.
Not long before the start of term in September 1883 his fellow teacher Harris arrived. They took walks together, aiming at four miles an hour, just about managing to talk, their shabby clothes dignified by the mortar boards on their heads. Term started, and Wells was asked to teach in the main classroom, where Byatt presided and gave him advice on teaching methods. When Wells was not teaching, he was studying: physics, biology and anatomy, mathematics, chemistry, geology. Byatt gave him what were called special evening classes, for which he provided him with whatever textbooks he could find for each of these subjects; and, since he was not able to teach any of the science Wells was eager to learn, he sat writing letters while his usher worked his way through the books. In this fashion Wells managed to take in the outlines of the physical and biological sciences. By his own account he learned without much difficulty, and did extra work on brain anatomy and electricity. Lightly as he described this process, it cannot have been an easy way to learn.
Still, he progressed steadily and with a determination to do well strengthened by a discovery he had made and kept to himself: that the Department of Education, hoping to encourage better science teaching, was offering scholarships for a four-year course at the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science) in South Kensington, London, to those who achieved the best results in the May examinations—Normal Schools were teacher-training colleges where they could work for a university degree. Without saying a word to anyone at the grammar school or his family, Wells filled out the application form and sent it off.
He had to deal with an infuriating distraction when Byatt told him that every teacher in the school was obliged to be a member of the Church of England. Protest as he might, it was clear that he could not continue teaching without being confirmed and taking the sacrament. He was sent to the curate, another young man living in lodgings, and argued with him until he realized it was simpler to pretend to accept what he did not believe. The one good result as far as he was concerned was his mother’s delight. He retained a sense of resentment and distrust of the Church throughout his life.
May came, he sat the exams, and soon heard that he had done outstandingly well in them—so well that he was awarded a studentship for a year to study biology under Professor Thomas H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science. He was to be given his fare to London and a guinea a week to live on there for a year, with a good chance of renewing the scholarship for a further two years.
This was an extraordinary achievement under the circumstances. Byatt heard of his success with mixed feelings. He was surprised and proud, but he did not want to lose his usher, and did his best to persuade him to stay for another year on a doubled salary. There was of course no chance that Wells would even consider this.
In July 1884 Wells wrote to his mother, “We break up on the 25th July . . . Will there be any chance of a week at Uppark before I go to Bromley” (i.e., to his father)—followed by “HOORAY!” He was at Uppark both before and after Bromley—he wrote again in late August to his mother, saying, “I should like very much a short holiday at Up Park before I settle down.” There he enjoyed the summer weather and reading, much of it outside, lying in the grass. He also enjoyed his time with his father, now bearded and lame but still active, camping out in Atlas House, getting books from the Literary Institute, still selling cricket goods, and making rather better meals than his wife had ever managed. They got on well together. He made his son help about the house and one day took him to Penshurst to show him where he had been a boy. Wells was impressed both by his father’s lack of worldly ambition and by his knowledge of the natural world, as he showed sights he would not have found by himself: a trout in the river, and a kingfisher flashing by.
His brother Frank surprised him too. Wells’s success in escaping from shop life had made Frank think about his own position and presently he decided that he would also throw up work as a draper. He had no high ambitions and simply decided to live without a formal job. Having developed some skills of his own, he embarked on an itinerant life, moving from place to place, first on foot, then on a bicycle, repairing clocks, selling watches, sometimes dealing in furniture. Rural England still allowed such freedom: cars had not yet arrived, and there was space in which to wander and camp out.
Frank always kept in touch with his parents and younger brother, and did occasional odd jobs such as putting up shelves for them; and later, when Wells was married, he sometimes joined him and his wife for holidays—he went over to Boulogne with them, his first visit abroad. He remained a bachelor, and was content to be poor and free, although he descended on his father when he needed somewhere to stay; and, as the years went by and things got more difficult, he effectively ended up living with him. Wells admired his refusal to pursue worldly success or money. He called his second son after him, and paid tribute to him in his novel The History of Mr. Polly, the story of a small shopkeeper who burns down his own shop and escapes into a life of freedom in the English countryside. Wells understood the impulse to escape well enough, not only writing about it but also occasionally succumbing to it himself.
His parents’ failure to help him to get higher education did not alter his affection for them. Perhaps he realized that such a thing was outside the scope of their imagination of what life could be; and, once he had achieved his object in getting to college, he simply forgave them. He had done it, they were proud of him, and that was enough—and he later wrote thanking them for their early care. He supported them financially as soon as he could, and then bought them a house. It was the behavior of a model son.
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Excerpted from The Young H. G. Wells by Claire Tomalin. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Penguin Press. Copyright © 2021 by Claire Tomalin.