Book of the week: The Young H.G. Wells by Claire Tomalin

“Nobody predicted the 21st

“Nobody predicted the 21st century better than H.G. Wells,” said
Kathryn Hughes in the Daily Mail^[1]. Born “when Queen
Victoria was still youngish”, he wrote a series of bestselling
page-turners about “men on the Moon, environmental disaster, class
war” and racial oppression – as well as “Martians invading the
Earth”.

He was the product of a “working-class family of limited means”:
his father was a shopkeeper in Bromley, his mother a lady’s maid.
Wells was a sickly child who essentially educated himself by
“reading books in bed while recovering from life-threatening lung
infections”. Yet he triumphantly surmounted these obstacles,
becoming an astonishingly prolific author, as well as a “passionate
socialist” and a relentless erotic adventurer (today, he would
probably be branded a “sex addict”). In this “compulsively
readable” biography, Claire Tomalin shows how Wells’s early
experiences helped turn him into the “great prophet of the modern
age”.

Focusing on his first four decades, The Young H.G.
Wells gives its “keenest attention” to its subject’s
personal relationships, said John Carey in The Sunday
Times^[2]. Wells didn’t let two
marriages (the first to his cousin Isabel, the second to one of his
former students, Amy Robbins) stand in the way of his promiscuous
nature. Women found him irresistibly attractive – he “smelt
deliciously of honey”, one said – and his many lovers included
Rebecca West, with whom he fathered a son.

Being his wife can’t have been fun, said Anthony Cummins in
The Observer^[3]: Robbins – whom Wells
insisted on calling Jane – was even cajoled into buying clothes for
another lover’s baby. Tomalin sometimes sounds as if she approves
of such behaviour: Wells, she writes, “knew how to… enjoy women and
the world” – words that “sit ill” with the shabby conduct she
skilfully portrays.

I found all the “love stuff” a bit of a drag, said Laura Freeman
in The Times^[4]. By contrast, “the book
stuff soars”. Wells was astonishingly versatile as a writer,
churning out novels, short stories and reams of journalism as well
as hard-hitting polemics (his anti-poverty tract, The
Misery of Boots, can still “send a shiver up the spine”). He
mixed with the likes of Henry James, George Gissing and Arnold
Bennett.

“To this day, no one fully understands how one man, albeit a
genius, was able to write so much and so well,” said Michael Dirda
in The Washington
Post^[5]. For a “compact
overview” of this “endlessly fascinating man and writer”, Tomalin’s
biography is “hard to beat”.

Viking 256pp £20; The Week
Bookshop^[6] £15.99

The Week Bookshop

To order this title or any other book in print,
visit theweekbookshop.co.uk^[7], or speak to a
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