Table Of ContentH. G. WELLS: DISCOVERER OF THE FUTURE
H. G. WELLS:
DISCOVERER OF
THE FUTURE
THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE
ON HIS THOUGHT
Roslynn D. Haynes
© R. D. Haynes 198o
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1980 978-0-333-27186-5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Haynes, R. D.
H. G. Wells, discoverer of the future
1. Wells, Herbert George- Knowledge-Science
I. Title
PRs778.S/
ISBN 978-1-349-04870-o ISBN 978-1-349-04868-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04868-7
This book is sold subject
to the standard conditions
rif the Net Book Agreement
For Raymond, Nicola and Rowena
and for my parents
Contents
Priface IX
Acknowledgments XI
Introduction
Part I Wells's Scientific Background. Scientist or
Visionary? 9
I The Conversion to Science I I
2 Scientific Method and Wells's Credentials 39
Part II Science in Society 67
3 Science and Technology 69
4 Science and Government-the W ellsian Utopia 82
5 Waste and Disorder or Order and Uniformity? I I2
6 Free Will and Predestination: Freedom and Limitation I27
7 Science as Myth and Mysticism I43
Part III Science and the Approach to Characterisation I6I
8 Wells's Concept of the Individual I63
9 The Scientist as a Literary Character I 97
Part IV Wells's Techniques and his Approach to Art 2I9
I o Techniques of Persuasion and Presentation 22 I
I I Art, Science and Structure: the Debate with Henry
James 24I
Notes 253
Bibliography 268
Index 281
Vll
Preface
As a scientist who defected to the literary camp I have long been
struck by the profound effect that scientific developments had on
the literature of the nineteenth century, and the lamentable lack of
such cross-fertilisation in the twentieth.
H. G. Wells was the last great literary figure to have been so
strongly influenced by science. Not only did contemporary theories
contribute ideas to his books, but he, in turn, predicted so many
consequences of current scientific knowledge that he had the
misfortune to be hailed as a prophet. His scientific romances, short
stories, novels, blueprints for utopia, his history of the world and
encyclopaedic textbooks ofbiology, sociology and economics, made
him the most widely read author in the language, and secured him
the respect of even Roosevelt and Stalin.
But if a prophet can be said to be without honour in his own
country, he is even more bereft of it in the next generation, and
Wells is no exception. The reprisals taken by the generation
following him have been severe. In their zeal to show how gullible
their fathers were, critics have reduced Wells's scientific romances
to the status of imaginative fairy tales which merely pretend to
authenticity by a scattering of scientific terms. The utopian and
sociological novels have fared still worse. They do not win even the
minor award for imaginative merit, but are rejected on grounds of
both form and content.
Whatever the immediate outcome of the controversy between
Wells and Henry James about the novel form, James succeeded in
the long term in converting the more influential critics to his own
artistic criteria, which could not accommodate Wells's writings. In
addition, since the 1930s, utopias have become universally suspect,
for it is assumed that they are all merely cowardly fronts for a brave
new world, or a 1984 concentration camp.
It is the purpose of this book to trace the actual extent of the
scientific influence on Wells's thought, not only as it appears in the
scientific romances, but in the character novels and utopian works
as well.
IX
Preface
X
As a result of this influence, Wells was a prophet, not merely in the
popular sense of having predicted space travel, processed food and
the Common Market, but in the wider sense of being able to think in
a completely new way about the future-to be, as it were, at home in
the future. Such a way of thinking freed him, as he immediately
realised, from much of the seemingly iron-bound determinism
under which nineteenth-century novelists had laboured; it provided
a new perspective from which to view man in his personal and social
relationships.
Any balanced assessment of Wells's contribution to literature
must take account of his sins against the canons ofform, but it should
not neglect his enthusiastic attempts to break the mind-forged
manacles of the present.
December 1978 R.D.H.
Acknowledgments
It is a great pleasure to be able to thank Dr Peter Keating of the
University of Edinburgh for the stimulating discussion and helpful
comments which accompanied the preliminary stages of this book.
Throughout all stages of its gestation I have been blessed with the
encouragement and enthusiastic support of my parents and two
daughters, and especially of my husband, who has in addition
contributed everything from exhaustive discussions on relativity to
exhausting bouts of household management.
The author and publishers wish to thank the Executors of the
Estate of H. G. Wells and Professor G. P. Wells for permission to
quote from the works of H. G. Wells.
XI
Introduction
H. G. Wells was one of the first professional writers of fiction to have
had a formal scientific education and the first for whom the role of
science in society was a primary question, for in his case this
qualification was no mere optional extra-the icing, as it were, on
the literary cake; on the contrary it formed perhaps the basic
ingredient in the strange and diverse mixture of his thought. Before
he enrolled as a science student Wells's only literary output was
fourteen copies of 'The Up Park Alarmist', a mock daily newspaper
written, as he later said, 'on what was properly kitchen paper', for
the amusement of the 'below stairs' staff and satirising the trivia of
Up Park, the stately home where his mother was housekeeper. It
was a measure of the environment in which he had grown up that
even this insignificant performance was regarded as a cause for some
pride on the part ofWells and, one suspects, for trepidation at such
daring on the part of his mother. Yet after, and very largely because
of, his years at the South Kensington Normal School for Science,
Wells became the most prolific author of any stature in his
generation, and certainly the most widely read of his con
temporaries. His influence on the younger writers of his day was
immense, firstly as a model for emulation in their revolution against
the establishment, and subsequently as a tradition against whom it
seemed to them obligatory to react. George Orwell, who was by no
means uncritical of Wells's philosophy, wrote in 1941:
Thinking people who were born about the beginning of the
century are in some sense Wells's own creation. How much
influence any writer has, and especially a 'popular' writer whose
work takes effect quickly, is questionable, but I doubt whether
anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any
rate in the English language, influenced the young so much. The
minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be
perceptively different if Wells had never existed.1
