David Lodge on H.G. Wells

HG Wells, author of more than 100 books, was also a prophet of the sexual revolution. David Lodge delves into his many affairs and DJ Taylor considers his literary achievement for the Guardian.

In the article...

I already knew something of Wells's life from writing literary criticism about his work, but the more deeply I looked into it the more astonishingly rich in human and historical interest it appeared. Beginning inauspiciously (he was the son of unsuccessful shopkeepers and was apprenticed to the drapery trade at the age of 14), it stretched from 1866 to 1946, a period of global political turmoil, including two world wars, in which he played a public role. The bibliography of his published work contains some 3,000 items, including more than 100 books. He met and conversed with nearly every well-known statesman and writer of his time, and in his science fiction and speculative prose he foresaw the invention of, among other things, television, tanks, aerial warfare and the atom bomb. He made a strenuous effort to direct the Fabian Society towards his own idiosyncratic model of socialism (an updated version of Plato's Republic), nearly destroying it in the process, and worked selflessly if vainly all his life for the cause of world government. His Outline of History, published in 1920, was an ambitious attempt to "teach the peoples of the world . . . that they are all engaged in a common work, that they have sprung from common origins, and all are contributing some special service to the general end". It was a global bestseller.

"Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century," George Orwell wrote in 1941, "are in some sense Wells's own creation." Between the wars, however, his influence gradually declined, along with the quality of his writing. The triumph of literary modernism in the 1920s made his work look old-fashioned, and the novels that have retained classic status, such as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr Polly, all belong to the first 15 years of his long literary career. His mind remained fertile with new ideas – in the late 30s, for instance, he proposed something he called the "World Brain", an enormous bank of human knowledge stored on microfilm and transported free to users by aeroplane, which needed only the invention of the microchip to resemble the internet – but the world paid diminishing attention to them. There was pathos in his own sense of this neglect in his last years, and in his deepening pessimism about the fate of the human race, epitomised in the title of his last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether.