The Young HG Wells: Changing the World by Claire Tomalin, reviewed by Mark Smith

Viking, £20

Review by Mark Smith

Claire Tomalin’s day job is telling the stories of Britain’s greatest literary heroes and she does it brilliantly: her ability to summon up her subjects in vivid colour is extraordinary. Years after reading it, I can still see Pepys’s swagger in her book The Unequalled Self and remain slightly awkward about his encounters in the alleys of London. I can also still feel the intense anxiety of a great writer in Charles Dickens: A Life. The stories Tomalin tells are never just facts arranged chronologically, they are portraits of the dead who breathe again.

The same applies to Tomalin’s latest work, The Young HG Wells, a short biography of an extraordinary writer emerging from unexpected circumstances. Herbert grew up in poverty and from the moment Tomalin describes him going without lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays and walking for miles to get to school, you feel great sympathy for him. You do not necessarily like him though, which is one of the most interesting threads in an intriguing, and colourful book.

A still from the 1953 film, 'The War Of The Worlds,' directed by Byron Haskin, based on HG Wells's eponymousnovel. (Photo by Paramount Pictures/Courtesy of Getty Images).

The reasons you may struggle to like Wells are complicated. As Tomalin points out, he was a surprising and provocative writer, and we may have taken that for granted recently. His most famous stories – The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man – are constantly being turned into (often not very good) movies and perhaps that familiarity makes us forget how remarkable he was. Not only did he come up with most of the big tropes of science-fiction, his visions of possible futures were a great influence on the young and still are. It was George Orwell who said that if Wells had never existed, our minds would be perceptibly different.

But Wells’s great skill as a writer, novelist and forecaster of the future is complicated by his sometimes troubling opinions and behaviour. For example, Anticipations, his book of essays on the future published in 1901, imagines a society many would support: republican, atheist, and free of nationalism. “No God, no King, no nationality,” he wrote. The problem is that Wells’s book also imagines a future human race that’s divided into two, a la Time Machine, and that the “people of the Abyss” would have to die out. The people of the Abyss, he suggests, might include Black, Asian and other non-white ethnicities.

To be fair to Wells – and Tomalin is very fair to him throughout (it’s obvious she likes him a lot) – the young novelist later wrote approvingly of a multiracial society but there are other areas of his life that may lead you to ask: do I like this man? His attitude to women for example. A future in which women had the vote was never one he particularly imagined or cared about, but he did imagine a future free of “sexual guilt” in which men and women were happy to share their wives, husbands or lovers.

Some modern readers will probably sympathise with what he says here about relationships, particularly the more conservative conventions of marriage: “why should a sane healthy women be covered up in white gauze like the confectionary in a shop window?” he asked. But as well as advocating free love, he practised it, having obtained his wife Jane’s permission. However, Tomalin makes it clear that Jane was the woman who suffered most on Wells’s account. She patiently agreed to whatever he asked of her, but as the years went by found herself abandoned for ever longer periods.

Tomalin does not shy away from any of this – Wells, she says, was a bad husband and an unreliable lover but her admiration for his more positive qualities gives her book great warmth and charm. A biographer does not necessarily have to like their subject but perhaps it helps: Tomalin above all sees Wells as ambitious, hard-working, original and, in his views on poverty, society and class, a caring man who favoured the emerging socialist ideas. Wells, in Tomalin’s eyes, was a man who imagined a future of monsters but also a future of equality.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of her book, though, will be to point us back to Wells’s novels and other works and remind us to re-read the greatest ones or read for the first time the ones we haven’t tried. Tono-Bungay for example, which is the story of the son of a housekeeper who rises up the social ladder, as Wells himself did. Tomalin’s passion for this book is infectious – it has never become a classic at the level of Dickens or Hardy, she says, but if you read it, you will be amazed to find how good it is.

It is enthusiasm like this that gives The Young HG Wells much of its colour but also its purpose. Tomalin recognises that there’s quite a bit we may know about the Wellsian canon – monsters emerging from space ships, a man whose bandages hide a secret, and so forth – but mainly she is seeking to remind us of his brilliance as a writer and a man pointing forwards.

Some of the predictions he made, obviously, have not come to pass – “we’ll have a republic in 12 years” he said in 1911. But others have come true, for good and bad. In his story The Land Ironclads, he predicted tanks. His book The Rights of Man was one of the sources for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And William Beveridge, chief architect of the welfare state, spoke of the influence that Wells’s ideas had on him. Wells, he said, was a “volcano in perpetual eruption of burning thoughts”.

But in the end, perhaps, it’s the Wellsian ideas that are yet to come true that are the most intriguing part of Tomalin’s book. He dreamed of an end to marriage – it is still with us. He imagined a peaceful world government – we’re still waiting. And most intriguingly of all, he wrote of the day when human and alien will meet. Any or all of them may yet happen. Until then, we have the strange, great and sometimes troubling novels of HG Wells.