The War Inside H. G. Wells

In his nonfiction, he laid out a vision of endless human progress. In his fiction, he foretold a darker truth.

By Adam Gopnik, THE NEW YORKER, A Critic at Large

November 15, 2021

Illustration by Nina Bunjevac

Wells’s worldly thinking was chastened by the clarity of his romantic imagination.

H. G. Wells is remembered today mostly as the author of four visionary science-fiction perennials with premises so simple and strong that they can sustain any amount of retelling: “The War of the Worlds,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Time Machine,” and “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Social historians recall Wells as one of the brighter technological optimists and left-wing polemicists of the early part of the twentieth century. He is also remembered, among Brits with a taste for evergreen gossip, as perhaps the most erotically adventurous man of his generation, the satyr of the socialists. “I have done what I pleased,” he wrote. “Every bit of sexual impulse in me has expressed itself.” The case is sometimes even made that Wells invented the word “sex”—that he pioneered its modern use, in his 1900 novel, “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” as a shorthand for the totality of the activity. Like most “first use” claims—the number of words that Shakespeare supposedly used first has decreased as Elizabethan data banks have enlarged—this is probably overstated, but Wells certainly made the word, well, sticky. A case can even be made—indeed, to make it you can draw on Claire Tomalin’s new biography, “The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the World” (Penguin Press)—that his eroticism was in no small part feminist in its promotion of a woman’s right to choose her own sexual partners, unconstrained by the strictures of a father or a husband.

Wells was a very big deal in his day. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, named his oldest son Wells before he’d ever met the man. But Wells got hit hard by fate. First, after two World Wars, his belief in perpetual progress came to seem fatuous, and then, in the age of Woolf and Joyce, his Victorian style looked baggy and gassy. Even an affectionate fictional portrait by David Lodge, “A Man of Parts” (2011), gives us a Wells who’s more a left-wing Toad of Toad Hall than a coherent artist. In the surviving newsreels that feature him, we see a portly little pundit whose pie-faced, high-pitched, condescending singsong tones make him sound like a “Beyond the Fringe” character. This guy was the Fabio of the Fabians? Apparently so—a reminder that erotic charisma is a spell cast by action, not a collection of enumerable traits.

Yet Wells’s life is so diverting, to use an old-fashioned word, that we can overlook the running current of his literary career. He didn’t just dabble in fantasy; he made the idea of extrapolating the future from the present a foundation of modern sensibility. Though there is a note of strenuous optimism in his political writing—as in the 1920 “The Outline of History,” a standard document of technological boosterism for two generations, or in his 1938 collection, “World Brain,” which eerily anticipates the World Wide Web and Google—he struck a still more strenuous note of pessimism in his early science-fiction books.

The contradictions of materialism was his great theme. He was captivated by the arrival of a completely discontinuous force in the world. He called it “power,” meaning something like industrial energy, and tried to trace its transformation of what had been a manual-labor agricultural planet, with his tiny rain-swept island suddenly emerging as a steam engine pulling other nations behind it. This revolution in power, he realized, would have psychological as much as political effects. In this way, his sexual obsessions, instead of dangling comically around his head like a cap and bells, are part of what makes him an interesting and prescient writer. He saw sex as a humanizing force, not as a bestial one. In Lodge’s novel, Wells plays a kind of Peter Sellers role, moving from one hapless assignation to the next in trains and garden sheds and one-room cottages, stopping to make pious progressive speeches while seeing only the shapely ladies who have gathered to listen. This is funny but not entirely fair. Sex is to Wells what the speed of light was to Einstein, at about the same time: the universal constant that would remain the same no matter how the frame of reference around it altered. A new wave of modernity would burst through barriers; but where others revelled in the sound of breaking glass Wells also saw the sharp shards lying all over the ground.

To read Tomalin’s fine new biography alongside the David Lodge novel is an exercise in overlaid maps: they chart the same journey but with different compass orientations. Add Wells’s 1911 novel, “The New Machiavelli,” a lightly fictionalized account of his rise and early crises, told by an alter ego named Richard Remington, and you have yet a third overlay. (The title of the novel refers not to our usual sense of “Machiavellian,” the use of cunning in pursuit of power, but instead to the condition of writing about politics while in exile, Machiavelli having been banished from Florence, as Remington, who becomes what we now call “cancelled,” is from London.) All three works tell the story of Wells’s ascent to the very top of the political and intellectual establishment in his time, and all three make a special survey of his love affair with the brilliant Amber Reeves.

It was a vertiginous and sudden ascent. Wells, born in 1866, was a lower-middle-class boy who wanted to become someone of the same scale and sort as his sometime friend Bertrand Russell—a university wit, a man of science, a popularizer, a magus of the mind. (And, like Russell, a Don Juan.) Yet he suffered a cruel variety of class prejudice. To go from proletariat or peasant class to popularity is a sound English form of elevation, of the Dick Whittington kind; Wells had a harder climb, from the more despised servant class into the intellectual upper crust. Truly poor people are, for snobs, out of sight, and it’s a nice surprise to see them suddenly successful. But maids and grocers are too much in sight already, so one is only embarrassed by their success. The point of a class system is to make those immediately adjacent to their superiors conscious of their place. (In Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” Higgins never thinks of making one of the servants in the house into a lady—that is for a Cockney flower girl.)

Wells’s parents, as he was acutely aware, were themselves household servants, who then became shopkeepers and apprenticed Wells to a draper when he was fourteen. Through his own exertions, he managed to get into a decent school and begin his adventures. He won a college scholarship to study biology, receiving an education that, though lower in status than the classical kind, proved ultimately more valuable, introducing him to scientific speculation. Early on, he was conscious of how scientific and industrial energy was pulsating through the world, and this was made all the more vivid by being poised against a class system still rooted in premodern prejudices and an educational system still rooted in teaching two dead languages to the upper reaches of that class system. “Something got hold of the world, something that was destined to alter the scale of every human affair,” Remington reflects in “The New Machiavelli.” “That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to improve material things. Without warning or preparation, increment involving countless possibilities of further increment was coming to the strength of horses and men. ‘Power,’ all unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins of the social body.”

Wells’s elevation was made easier by the booming press of the time. P. G. Wodehouse, who was, improbably, a good friend of Wells’s, recalled, “There were so many morning papers and evening papers and weekly papers and monthly magazines that you were practically sure of landing your whimsical article on ‘The Language of Flowers’ or your parody of Omar Khayyám somewhere or other after about say thirty-five shots.” Wells, after a stint as a science teacher at a private school in London, was recruited as a book reviewer and a drama critic. It was in the latter capacity that, on the opening night of Henry James’s doomed play “Guy Domville,” in January of 1895, he bumped into the only critic not in evening clothes, a young Irishman named Bernard Shaw, and a friendship began.

It was Shaw who helped introduce Wells to the group that the novelist helped make famous, and that proved the real watershed of his life: the Fabian Society. The Fabians were incrementalist socialists—the name came from a Roman general famous for avoiding pitched battles and defeating his enemy through attrition—and were very much under the sway of the remarkable couple Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Even as Wells became an advocate of their creed, science-fiction classics poured out of him: “The Time Machine,” in 1895; “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” in 1896; “The Invisible Man,” in 1897; “The War of the Worlds,” in 1898; and “The First Men in the Moon,” in 1901. (The sequence was interrupted by the publication of that Dickensian novel of the lower-middle classes “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” in 1900.)

Cartoon by William Haefeli

“Just get yourself a sweater and a nice, warm laptop.”

Productivity in literature is more a sleight of hand than a triumph of will. Write only three pages a day, and you will look as industrious as the ant. Once a writer has found a voice, it is a question of finding the daily energy to drill down and make it flow again. Wells, with his fluid but far from meticulous style—Lodge has a funny scene in which one of Wells’s lovers breaks off mid-assignation to complain about his sentences—had plenty of time to write a book a year and still engage in his other preoccupations, love and work within the Fabian circle.

The Fabians had a reputation for self-righteousness and for supporting the rights of working men without knowing any; even understanding the name of the society depended on a classical education. But they recognized in Wells a potent voice. The Webbs were a very odd couple indeed, both compelling and absurd; they had an affectionate, evidently sexless marriage (“It is the head only that I am marrying,” Beatrice confided in her diary), and, a rarer thing, were said to be sexless outside of marriage, too. Wells’s own segments of the Fabian circle carried on in that weird British way in which everybody sleeps with everybody, no one breaks off with anyone else, but nobody seems particularly happy about it all.

His constant affairs with what Tomalin calls “attractive and high-spirited Fabian girls” led to roundelays of misunderstanding. In an episode from 1907, Clifford Sharp, the first editor of The New Statesman, learned that Wells was urging Sharp’s beloved Rosamund Bland to go off on an escapade with him. Sharp then notified Rosamund’s father, Hubert Bland, a newspaper columnist and a fellow-Fabian who shared his suburban house with six children by three women, two of whom he still lived with, including his wife, Edith Nesbit. Sharp and Bland confronted Rosamund and Wells “on the platform at Paddington, poised to take a train on their way to France,” Tomalin writes. “Bland struck Wells a blow and forced Rosamund to go home with him.” Edith then wrote to Wells’s wife, Jane, “complaining of Wells’ behavior. Shaw tried to calm everyone down.”

Wells was unapologetic about his erotic attachments. They were endured by Jane, a former student of his, a woman whose picture appears next to “long suffering” in the dictionary. (This was Wells’s second marriage; his first, to a cousin, lasted three years.) Tomalin suggests that there was “a formal agreement between them, by which Jane agreed not to be jealous of what he called passades—meaning light-hearted sexual encounters—while he in exchange seems to have assured her that the marriage would never be in danger.” But Tomalin wonders what Jane really made of his “long drawn-out love affairs with other women who did their best to monopolize him, bore him children and tried to persuade him to get a divorce.” She concludes, “All this hardly bears thinking of.”

His involvement with a twenty-one-year-old Cambridge student, Amber Reeves, cannot be passed over as a passade. Staggeringly beautiful—beauty tends to dull or date in vintage photographs; hers doesn’t—and legendarily brilliant (she got a double first at Cambridge), she was called Dusa, short for Medusa, by Wells. The Medusa of mythology petrified warriors with her glance. Medusa seems to be the name male writers give to any curly-haired woman who looks their way and makes them weak, even when the paralysis she induces is merely their own indecision rising to the surface.

Amber was a femme fatale only to those who were looking for fatality. What comes through in Tomalin’s biography, and in the more reflective parts of Wells’s “The New Machiavelli,” is that she was an exceptionally self-possessed woman who was clear in her ambitions and her appetites, chose her lovers from among people she admired, and wanted only to love Wells, without further encumbrances. Having become pregnant by him, she chose to marry one of her innumerable admirers rather than have the child alone. She remained in this marriage for the rest of her life and had a first-rate career as an educator and an author.

In “The New Machiavelli,” Amber becomes the character Isabel—oddly, the name of Wells’s first wife—and Wells makes their affair, and her eventual pregnancy, far more melodramatic than it was in life. The revelation of their relationship ends Remington’s career as a left-wing M.P., and he and Isabel must flee England for Italy. Wells is excellent on the emotional pressure, a kind still familiar today, of a public scandal on its victims:

I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly one’s confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of inaudible accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out into the open, separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you, turns aside its face. Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step of flat repudiation. I became doubtful about the return of a nod, retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto spread to the world.

Remington is a British politician, and, in that way, his fate makes some sense. Wells wasn’t in Parliament, but he was a public man and political figure, and the scandal barely winged him. There were painful, nasty newspaper notices. But nothing really happened: Reeves had the baby and her marriage of convenience and her work, and Wells had the gossip and his marriage of convenience and his work.

Why did he feel so compelled to imagine the worst? Partly from dramatic necessity: a story that ends with scandal and exile is a better story than one that ends with domestic embarrassment and scolding words in a newspaper. But also because Wells’s chief imaginative gift was to extrapolate the worst that could happen if we abandoned ourselves to a romantic idea. What if he had fled for Italy with Amber?

Wells has been wildly misrepresented as a hyper-rationalist, inclined to believe narrowly in systematic organization and procedural oversight. In “The New Machiavelli,” he offers what he pretended was an affectionate caricature of the Webbs as Oscar and Altiora Bailey; his ego allowed him to mistake his malice for mere joshing. Yet a key passage in his novel is the deeply felt and lucid revelation of all that the Bailey ideology cannot contain or understand:

At the Baileys’ one always seemed to be getting one’s hands on the very strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected to affect this “type” and that; statistics marched by you with sin and shame and injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable percentages . . . .

And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into the limitless grimy chaos of London streets. . . . Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire uncle out for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with prostitutes, you passed young lovers pairing with an entire disregard of the social suitability of the “types” they might blend or create, you saw men leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you knew for the “type” that will charge with fixed bayonets into the face of death, and you found yourself unable to imagine little Bailey achieving either drunkenness or the careless defiance of annihilation.

In 1911, Wells published, alongside “The New Machiavelli,” a collection of fantasy tales, including the greatest story he ever wrote, “The Door in the Wall.” The story, which combines Mary Poppins-like elements with “Twilight Zone” ones, is about a distinguished man of state who turns out to have been haunted, since boyhood, by a vision. As a child, he explains to the narrator, he took a wrong turn down a street in West Kensington and wandered into a fantastic garden, complete with a pair of huge, velvety panthers:

One looked up and came towards me, a little curious as it seemed. It came right up to me, rubbed its soft round ear very gently against the small hand I held out and purred. It was, I tell you, an enchanted garden. I know. And the size? Oh! it stretched far and wide, this way and that. I believe there were hills far away. Heaven knows where West Kensington had suddenly got to. And somehow it was just like coming home.

Near the end of the story, he falls to his death in a London construction site that he mistakes for a way back to the garden. “At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end,” the narrator reflects, of the statesman’s vision. “But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death. But did he see like that?”

When Wells’s imagination truly got to work, it was usually to consider, against all his progressivism, what would happen if you abandoned yourself to an irrational passion. Typically, it leads to what looks to others like self-destruction. In another story from the same prewar period, “The Sea Lady,” a mermaid washes up on a pebbly British beach to seduce a respectable man, eventually bringing him into her underwater world. What distinguishes this tale, told in a comic vein, from the symbolist vein of the femme-fatale tale, is the carefree nature of the man’s leap. He may drown with his mermaid; he doesn’t mind.

It is here that Wells’s sexual energies and excesses connect to his central creative act, the invention of modern science fiction. His classic works might almost have been written by G. K. Chesterton or C. S. Lewis—that is, by the most mystical-minded critics of Fabian progressivism. In “The Time Machine,” the future world is divided into the realms of the Eloi, the fastidious fruit-eaters that live above ground, and the Morlocks, the proletariat that labor underground. This seems at first like an extrapolation of the British class conflicts that Wells knew—a cosseted upper class and the brutalized working masses. But it turns out that the gentle Eloi are merely cattle, being ranched for consumption by the dominant Morlocks. This is far from an acceptable Fabian moral, where the laws of history would produce a more egalitarian society. Nor is it even a Fabian warning of what will happen if things are not fixed. It is instead a dark dystopian joke, a mordant allegory—a case where, in the best sense, Wells’s imagination ran away with him.

Cartoon by Jason Patterson

What links his sci-fi and his sexual imaginings is a fascination with conjuring the ultimate. What if the spacemen came? What if you slept with whomever you wanted? The common fuel of romantic excess illuminates the machines and animates the Martians. In the final vision of planet Earth, a vast insect dominates a parched landscape. But, having envisaged the ultimate, Wells knew how to draw back to the close at hand. If the extravagance of his imagination made him famous, the precision of his description makes him live. He gave a very big subject an almost pointillist treatment. This made him incorporate human fragility into the technological future. When he thought of an invisible man, he thought of all that would be necessary to hide his transparency: the costume of bandages and hat and trenchcoat that have remained the Invisible Man iconography ever since.

Wells was less a scientific optimist than a psychological realist. The theme of his work is continuity: everything will change, and nothing will change. We will go to Mars with the same lusts and jealousies that we had on Earth, and the Martians, when they come for us, will treat us just as we treated the Maoris. Though Wells thought that our freedom to have sex would expand, he didn’t think that the nature of desire itself would change, or that erotic liberation would rescue us.

In real life, Wells wrote Amber Reeves a letter near the end of their affair, which he may or may not have mailed, laying out what would likely happen if they did run away together. Although it’s full of passion and appreciation—he’ll do it if she wants to!—his catalogue of everything that they wouldn’t be able to do and of all the drawbacks they would face (not least being condemned to lifelong fidelity) makes his hesitation plain. As Tomalin points out, Amber was perfectly content with her devoted husband, and went on to a life of scholarship and public service, never turning on her lover but never again needing him, either.

Wells persisted, as a writer and a pundit, past the stopping point of both Tomalin’s biography and Lodge’s novel, which end with the coming of the Great War, when Wells was in his late forties. But, like Shaw, he was never again as central to his time. Chesterton, in a jest of genius, or at least a jest borrowed with genius, said that Wells “had sold his talent for a pot of message.” It is telling that, after the war, he was unable to write a memorable work of fantasy, though he often tried. His most notable effort, “The Shape of Things to Come” (1933), is a futurist fable, later made into a movie, that gets many big things wrong: the secular World Police descend to shut down Mecca, the Nazis are too disorganized to persecute the Jews, and the Germans are outmatched by the Poles. As Orwell said once, Wells was too sane a man to understand twentieth-century craziness; the world had outstripped his imagination. (The movie, “Things to Come,” released in 1936, is notable chiefly for Vincent Korda’s sleek designs.)

Wells never stopped writing—or loving, for that matter. His most famous engagement, beginning not long after the end of his love affair with Amber Reeves, was with Rebecca West, the formidable author of “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” the still matchless study of the mystique of the Balkans. (She also covered the Nuremberg trials for this magazine.) Wells was the father of her son Anthony West, who wrote a more or less affectionate biography of his father, and a more or less discontented novel, in the same thinly disguised vein as Wells’s “The New Machiavelli,” about his mother. (He then reviewed books for this magazine for three decades; literary circles tend to row tight.) Later, Wells had a long love affair with the Dutch travel writer Odette Keun. Wodehouse, on a visit to the house in the South of France which Wells shared with her, was so appalled by a sentimental placard reading “Two Lovers Built This House” that he included a reference to it in “The Code of the Woosters.”

Wells lived until 1946, long enough to see his surprisingly passionate fan Winston Churchill in power and winning a “war by air” of the kind Wells had imagined. Churchill wrote before the war that, on first reading “Time Machine,” “I shouted with joy. Then I read all his books. I have read them all over since. I could pass an examination in them. . . . Here are prophecies of the future, not a few of which we have lived to verify and endure.” Proof of Churchill’s catholic taste, and also of the appeal, beyond political categories, of Wells’s imagination. Wells also lived long enough to see the Labour Party he had been in the vanguard of for half a century take power in 1945 and impose socialist policies of the kind he had long envisioned—though not long enough to see Churchill return to power after the equivocal results of that victory. A sign of changing London mores: the house where Wells lived and died, near Regents Park, a fine house for a writer in his time, though not one thought resplendent or ostentatious, sold last year for eighteen million dollars. The class system that Wells faced as a London child has been replaced by an oligarchic system, squeezing out even the upper-middle professional class to which Wells ascended, and the Fabians belonged.

Most of us believe—as we upgrade our iPhones and, for that matter, welcome a newfangled vaccine—in some form of technological optimism, however hedged. Wells’s science fiction remains a warning against the excesses of that faith: What if we build a future world where social division gets worse, not better? What if the higher civilization is out to get us, not help us? What if invisibility isolates rather than liberates you? The sometimes self-pleased materialism of Wells’s worldly views was chastened by the clarity of his romantic imagination; the progressivism of his Fabian tenets was buffered by the pessimism of his fiction.

No one was as right about as much, no one could have been utterly wrong about more. In “The New Machiavelli,” Wells accurately predicted that Great Britain would leave India peacefully once an indigenous liberation movement arose—and catastrophically assured his readers, three years before the Great War, that no military confrontation with Germany was possible. Still, punditry passes; poetry remains. It is touching to learn that people as practical and dans le vrai as the Fabians could still be passionate lovers of the verse and the drawings of William Blake, and part of the Zeitgeist that made his “Jerusalem” a hymn of the left, first for the suffragettes and eventually for the Labour Party. “Till we have built Jerusalem / In Englands green & pleasant Land.” Everything that was standing in the way of that New Jerusalem is essentially gone: the World Brain has arrived; no serious impediments to divorce or, for that matter, to free love remain; if social equality is still remote, it is much greater than any that Wells’s laboring parents could have known; the dark satanic mills are silent or else shipped off to China. And yet we are as we were. Maybe, as Wells would have insisted polemically, Blake’s Jerusalem still waits to be built. Or maybe, as he would have known poetically, this is just what Jerusalem looks like after you build it. The shining next is our lamplit now, and always will be.

A house divided against itself cannot stand, but a writer who is not divided against himself has little chance of enduring. We love Dickens for darkness and domesticity together; we are drawn to George Eliot for her cool wide-screen view and her closeup tenderness; we delight in Jane Austen for her lack of sentimentality about human relations and her happy affirmation of the relations that remain after the sentimentality is drained off.

Wells is not an integrated writer, whose politics and imagination move hand in hand. He is someone who has the ability to envisage the worst—to see that nothing works out as one would have hoped—but gets up and tries to do his best. He foretold a future in which intellectuals were cannibalized by construction workers, and then everyone got devoured by a big bug. Yet he went on working to improve the municipal sewers. That’s the paradox of H. G. Wells, an optimistic credo constantly belied by mystical intuitions. His subject is the fateful pressure of the romantic imagination on dutiful progressivism; his liberal worthies lose their careers, and lives, to the lure of romantic entanglement—are drawn to their deaths by the panthers of childhood, by the women of the sea. Then they wake up and are worthy again. His great question was how, in the epoch of sex and science, public-spirited people can make peace with their private passions. Leaving it unanswered, he reminds us that it is unanswerable. ♦

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.”