Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.   

      H.G.WELLS CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL NOVELS

           

            It all began with my reading of all the novels of David Lodge. His last novel was an account of the sex-life of H.G.Wells (1866-1946), A Man of Parts (see All You Need to Know About the Novels of David Lodge, Part Three). This led me to re-read Wells’ Ann Veronica, the novel which was most directly inspired by one of Wells’ many extra-marital affairs. Prior to this, the only novel by Wells which I had dissected on this blog was Tono Bungay. Of course I had, as a teenager, read many of Wells’ novels, especially the science-fiction ones, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, When the Sleeper Wakes, The Food of the Gods, and more. In other words, the Wells novels that are best remembered by the general reading public. But I wanted to see how well Wells stood up to a more adult reading. How to go about this? Herbert George Wells turned out books at an alarming rate for more than half a century. He wrote about one hundred novels, collections of short stories, speculative pieces and popularisations of science. The general consensus is that the novels of his last two decades (from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s) showed a decline in quality. They tend to be passed over even by the man’s admirers. I certainly wasn’t going to tramp my way through his entire oeuvre. What I decided to do was to read (in some cases to re-read) the nine books by Wells that happen to be on my bookshelves. They are a varied bunch.

            This posting I’m dealing with what I call Wells’ “contemporary social” novels, by which I mean novels in which Wells wrote about England as it was in his own lifetime. Next posting I will deal with a very few of his speculative and science-fiction works. Simply because they are a random selection, they might give us a fair sampling of Wells’ work.

Here goes.

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Wells had already had six novels published when he produced Love and Mr Lewisham (serialised 1899-1900; first published in book form 1900), but it was only his second novel to step outside science fiction. By design, it is in many ways a charmingly naïve story of a young man and young love. It is subtitled “The Story of a Very Young Couple”. When we first meet him, Lewisham (we are never given his first name) is eighteen-years-old, working as an assistant teacher at a small prep school in the country, and having big plans to rise in the world by hard work. But he falls in (puppy) love with beautiful Ethel Henderson who happens to be visiting her relatives in the country. And because he takes a walk with her, he is expelled from his teaching post – reflecting the strict mores of the 1880s in which the novel is set. Junior, unmarried  assistant teachers are not supposed to fraternise with young women. Ethel disappears back to London.

Three years go by. Now aged twenty-one, Lewisham has won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, and is attempting to study hard. But there are distractions. One is the call of the opposite sex. A student older than he, the intellectual Alice Heydinger, takes an interest in him. Spiritualism is still attractive to many people – as it still was when Wells was writing this – and the sceptical Lewisham goes with Alice and an even more sceptical fellow student to a séance, partly in the hope of having its fraudulence exposed. And indeed Lewisham’s pal does expose the trickery of Chaffery, the medium. But shockingly, the long-lost Ethel Henderson is not only present at the séance but proves to be the step-daughter of Chaffery and apparently complicit in his fraudulence.

Here Wells discreetly shows that sexual attraction can override intellectual concerns. Lewisham rejects the intellectual Alice and is once again in love with Ethel. Indeed, nearly penniless student that he is, he marries her, without telling any of his fellow-students or teachers. What develops is, I think, the heart of the novel. Wells does not satirise Lewisham’s and Ethel’s marriage or ridicule their love, but he shows how romantic dreams of cohabitation can run up against hard economic realities. For having a wife to support means that Lewisham has to earn a real income. His attempts to get a teaching position are thwarted, and his attempts to make Ethel a “typewriter” (i.e. typist) come to naught. Their first weeks together are married bliss, but then quarrels begin. At one point, Lewisham is even tempted to go back to Alice Heydinger. Though Lewisham more-or-less weans Ethel from spiritualism, her stepfather Chaffery still hangs around the young couple, often engaging in clever and deceitful monologues to justify his charlatanry. Lewisham is at a low ebb, having had once again to set aside his big ambitions. But when a major crisis hits Ethel’s family, Lewisham realizes that it is his duty to support Ethel and her mother. He must lower his sights and get on with it.

And that is where Wells leaves him. At one and the same time Wells is suggesting that Lewisham has now fully grown up by taking on responsibility; but that the rest of his life is going to be drudgery and hard grind. Be careful when you take on the responsibility of marriage and beware of youthful romanticising.

For the record, much of this story is strongly autobiographical. As a young man, Wells did teach at a country prep school, was a student at the Normal School of Science in London, and did make a youthful marriage. But of course, monogamy proved not to be his thing.

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It is hard to approach Kipps (first published in 1905) without preconceptions. It is far and away the most popular and “best-loved” of Wells’s non-science-fiction novels. A film version was made of Kipps (Michael Redgrave in the lead) in 1941 and was apparently a popular success at the time. It has been turned into a TV serial a number of times. It was musicalised and then filmed as Half a Sixpence (Tommy Steele in the lead) in 1967. Also, it was Wells’ own favourite among his novels and, as was not the case with many of his novels, he laboured over it for years, frequently re-writing it.

I admit that I first encountered Kipps as a teenager after watching Half a Sixpence. Only later did I read Kipps and discover that the musical version was (inevitably) only intermittently like the novel. Now I re-read it with older eyes.

The course of the tale is as familiar as a fable. Poor man is given sudden, unexpected wealth. Poor man is now rich man and moves into high society, but he is uncomfortable there. Rich man suddenly loses his money and finds happiness among the type of people he grew up with.

This is the trajectory of Arthur (“Artie”) Kipps, who moves from the drudgery of upper-working-class labour as a draper’s apprentice to a life among the fashionable middle-classes who fawn on him for his money. For a while he is seduced by his wealth, though he never gets the hang of polite table manners and the shibboleths that come with bourgeois pretensions. He even forgets his “childhood sweetheart” Ann Pornick and becomes engaged to Helen Walsingham, whose class could probably be described as shabby genteel – middle-class manners and pretensions but little money. It is never made clear whether she has any true feeling for Kipps beyond his money, but she is civil to him, and is always attempting to “improve” him. To Arthur Kipps’ credit, he realises how false the life he is leading is, and he goes back to Ann even before he loses his wealth. This is, after all, a comedy, so Wells gives Arthur and Ann a happy ending. After he loses most of his wealth, Arthur Kipps still has just enough to marry Ann, set up as a shop-keeper and have a happy life without being nagged at for his manners.

Of course Wells satirises class distinctions and (at least in this novel) the inanity of middle-class people who are interested only in status and ease. En route and incidentally, he gives a very ambiguous account (is it satirical or not?) of the young men who are Kipps’ original peers and who talk eagerly of socialism and the state of society. Apparently Wells was going to include much more of this, but decided to jettison it as he reached his final draft.

It is not unusual for this novel, and some others that Wells produced at about the same time, to be called “Dickensian”. There is a profusion of physical detail, observed minutely in the depiction of the third-rate school the boy Arthur Kipps has to attend, and the drapery emporium where he is apprenticed. You can smell the smells of battered textbooks and greasy blackboards at the school; you can hear the sounds and measure the ribbons, dresses and frippery of the draper’s shop. Wells had clearly learned much from Dickens. Chitterlow, the boastful actor and self-declared playwright whom Kipps meets before he has wealth, is very much a character out of Dickens – a rowdier version of somebody like Dick Swiveller, who seems a cad but in the end makes good.

Regrettably these, the best and most interesting parts of the novel, are in the first six chapters. For as the novel progresses, Kipps himself becomes less and less interesting and flatter as a character, despite his exemplary travails with polite society. Why is this? The novel is subtitled “The Story of a Simple Soul” and Kipps is certainly that. Wells appears to regard him as somebody from his own (original) class. Wells’ own first paid employment was as a draper’s apprentice  - a position which he hated. But Kipps is like Wells without Wells’s intellect. He is so simple as to be unaware of the way people take advantage of him. We sympathise with his eventual desire for an unostentatious life. But his concluding declaration (on the novel’s last page) “What a Rum Go everything is” as an extremely banal summary of what he has experienced.

Should we blame it on the mode of narration? Kipps is mainly written in what I was taught to call the “third-person-limited” narrative voice. It’s in the third-person, but the only character whose thoughts are shared with us is Kipps. And his thoughts are not very enlightening. Therefore Wells frequently butts in to give his own first-person commentary. More and more, Arthur Kipps becomes a “case” whom Wells is dissecting. Wit and vigour of parts of the novel notwithstanding, Kipps himself dies on the page.

I’m aware that the novel is often called a “masterpiece”, but on this one I’m prepared to be a heretic.

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The History of Mr Polly (written in 1909; first published in 1910) is, as I judge it, both Wells’ funniest and his most anarchic novel. Love and Mr Lewisham had a young man eventually settling down to married life, albeit with misgivings. Kipps had a man eventually finding peace and stability in owning and running a shop. But The History of Mr Polly has a man bored with a marriage that quickly went sour, bored with managing an unprofitable shop, and running away from both. Though Wells denied it, there is once again an autobiographical element to this novel with its lower-middle-class setting. Alfred Polly goes through a period as a draper’s assistant, as Wells did. Mr Polly is introduced to us as he nears the age of 40. Wells was 44 when he wrote the novel. The novel often considers what it is to become middle-aged and how one might, at that age, look back on life so far and wonder if it added up to anything. I also note that by 1909, Wells had already divorced his first wife and had settled down with his second wife, who allowed him to have many affairs. The History of Mr Polly was Wells’ next novel after Ann Veronica, his fictionalised account of one of his affairs, and its attitude towards marriage is dismissive

Like Kipps, the novel is written in the “third-person limited” narrative voice, with only the thoughts of the protagonist being revealed but with Wells often dropping in with his own first-person analyses and commentary. Unlike Arthur Kipps, however, Alfred Polly does have some internal life, even if he is a shy, hesitant, quixotic dreamer who has spent most of his life being pushed along by events. He escapes reality by romanticising it. His desire to be impressive and make a mark in the world is signalled by his pretentious habit of making up words which are not quite correct. This is both funny and the mark of a dreamer who has limited education but who wants to be somebody important.

A legacy makes Mr Polly, to his cousins the Larkins, an attractive target for marriage. Mr Polly is more-or-less bullied into marrying Miriam Larkins. Miriam desires the respectability of owning a shop. They buy a shop. But it is not profitable and neither are the other shops in their small town. Mr Polly is sick of his bullying wife. Mr Polly often, and needlessly, quarrels with other shop-keepers in his street. Mr Polly is bored, bored, bored with shop-keeping and even the constant reading of romantic adventure novels no longer soothes him. So, cheerfully embracing criminality,  Mr Polly decides upon arson and suicide. He will burn down his shop, making it look like an accident and therefore allowing Miriam to benefit by an insurance pay-out. And in the process he will kill himself.  Except that he bungles it, doesn’t kill himself, accidentally sets on fire not only his own shop but a number of neighbouring shops as well, and is seen as a hero when he rescues somebody from the fire. And the local shopkeepers aren’t too upset as they will also benefit from insurance pay-outs, which will mean more income than their failing businesses have ever yielded.

Knowing Miriam will be comfortably set up, Mr Polly now simply runs away, and after spending some time as a tramp, finds his ideal home in a rural, riverside inn. He likes the plump woman who runs it. She likes him. But there is a snag as a violent relative of the plump woman, “Uncle Jim”, regularly drops in at the inn, smashes it up, and terrorises any visitors. So the last quarter of the novel concerns meek Mr Polly’s titanic battles with this brawny thug, whom he eventually drives away for good. It is implied, but not specifically stated, that Mr Polly causes “Uncle Jim’s” death. Mr Polly has ended up in the type of fantasy world he so often dreamt of – the knight who kills the ogre and then lives happily in a rural setting, far from the pinched town life of a shopkeeper. This is wonderful wish-fulfilment for the dreamer.

Now think about the elements of this story, even if told in comic form. Arson. Attempted suicide. Desertion of wife. Cohabitation with another woman. Possible manslaughter. You see what I mean by anarchic?

Quite accurately this novel has, like Kipps, often been described as “Dickensian”. There is not only the rough-and-tumble of Mr Polly’s final battles, but those detailed descriptions of specific settings, that broad, caricatured colloquial dialogue and those wild flights of imagination. The scenes of the funeral feast after the death of Mr Polly’s father; the wooing of Mr Polly by the avaricious Larkins family; and the uncomfortable nature of  Miriam’s and Mr Polly’s wedding feast, are all conveyed in dialogue pitched halfway between Sam Weller and Harold Skimpole.  Both satire and parody are here – the un-romantic nature of Miriam’s and Mr Polly’s actual wedding ceremony, and the deflation of Mr Polly’s day-dreaming in the episode where he idolises a schoolgirl he finds sitting on a wall and addresses her as if he were a knight errant.

Social commentary is hinted at occasionally in this novel, but more than anything it is Wells allowing his imagination to run both wildly and irresponsibly. There are no plans to improve the world. I’ve decided that, outside his best science-fiction, it is the best and most entertaining novel he ever wrote, and certainly my favourite.

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Alas, the very next novel Wells wrote, The New Machiavelli (serialised 1910; published in book form 1911), and also the very next novel by Wells on my bookshelf,  is a very bad novel indeed: laborious, overblown, rambling, filled with windy orations, self-pity and self-justification and (580 pages in the early edition I have) far too long for what it has to say.

It is told in the first person as the confessions of one Richard Remington who is transparently the voice of Wells himself and who conveys his pet theories, even if some of Remington’s life experiences are not Wells’ own.

There is some interest in the novel’s opening sections where Remington gives a detailed account of the shabby, run-down suburb he grew up in, some vigorous critique of the antiquated teaching of Latin and Greek in the private school he attended, and a believable version of his time as a student at Cambridge (which was not part of Wells’ life story) where eager undergraduates theorise about this new-fangled Socialism thing and Richard Remington is for the first time deeply attracted to the female sex.

This sets up the novel’s two prime concerns – politics and sex.

On a holiday in Switzerland, young Remington seduces an older woman and believes he has now become a man. Much of what follows would have been shocking to readers of 1910. His explicit loss of virginity is followed by his use of a prostitute for sexual relief and further followed by his casual seduction of a married woman. In one episode he talks to a crass industrialist who defends his unsafe production practices and claims that rumours about lead poisoning in his factory are pure exaggeration… and besides, says the industrialist, some of the young women who are factory hands really like lead poisoning because it brings on abortions. Anyway, Remington falls in love with, and marries, intellectual Margaret Seddon, which is very satisfactory for him as she is a wealthy heiress and he can now enjoy financial stability and independence as he launches into politics.

And here we come to what is worst in this overlong novel. From the beginning, Remington has trumpeted his dislike of “muddle”, a term he uses repeatedly. He wants society to be logically and rationally reorganised. He admires those who have a totally pragmatic view of statecraft and state-building, hence his admiration of Niccolo Machiavelli and the conceit that he is the New Machiavelli. But his ideas are at best vaguely messianic. Naturally he begins by embracing “progressive” ideas, and gets elected to parliament as a Liberal. But he falls out with the Liberals and transfers his loyalties to the Conservatives, now declaring: “I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to the conception of a constructive aristocracy.” (Book 3, Chapter 4) All the evidence is that he dislikes committee meetings, the politics of consensus, the rational tabulation of statistics etc. and wants strong and forceful people who can get things done by exercise of sheer power. To a modern reader this sounds awfully like a rejection of democracy in any form. Be it noted, too, that like many “progressive” people of his era, he thinks the British Empire is the key to world peace and progress and he advocates eugenics to weed out unworthy and feeble children. As an historian, I found much of this a very interesting window on a world long gone, and far be it for me (or you) to feel smug about attitudes that were taken for granted over a hundred years ago. But the literary critic in me was appalled by page after page of Wells’ windy rhetoric, exposition and explanation, especially when he refers to specific parliamentary manoeuvres that now mean nothing to us.

Then there is the matter of sex. As he did in Ann Veronica, Wells fictionalises his affair with Amber Reeves, here called Isabel Rivers (although, if you’re quick enough, you’ll find him twice telling us that she has “amber-coloured eyes”). As a married man, Richard Remington’s open affair with young Isabel causes a scandal and the novel ends with him having to throw up his political career as he deserts his wife Margaret and runs off with Isabel. And this is where the self-pity gushes out in buckets. Of course there is some truth in Remington-Wells’s attack on sexual hypocrisy, where affairs are sanctioned so long as they are pursued discreetly and not in the public eye. So Remington-Wells presents himself as the sexual liberator who is only being honest and who is in the business of freeing women from burdensome monogamy. This is made clear in the peculiar way Remington, when still a politician, promotes a “mothers’ endowment scheme”. It will enable single mothers to produce eugenically-acceptable children, with the help of any number of men, and without any stigma attached.

If all this made the novel a scandal in 1911, just as scandalous was Wells’s depiction of the couple Oscar and Altiora Bailey, very clearly caricatures of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Remington-Wells paints then as essentially snobbish, too obsessed with researching statistics than with actually getting anything useful done, and dominating a complacent society that shared their attitudes. This was Wells’ attack on both the Webbs and the Fabian Society, from which he had dissociated himself.

The self-confident, self-centred egotism of Richard Remington made me wonder at certain points if Wells wasn’t writing ironically. But Wells didn’t do irony – much less “unreliable narrators” – and this bloated novel bares the author himself.

I am aware that on its first appearance The New Machiavelli was admired by some major literary figures of the day. In the early edition of the novel that I have (the second “impression” of 1911), two pages of positive reviews are quoted, all saying what a vital and impressive book it is. Alas, this proves only how, then as now, reviewers and even illustrious literary figures can be caught up in the topicality and novelty of something and mistake it for great writing. I am reminded of so many novels by George Meredith (see the review on this blog of Diana of the Crossways), once regarded as classics but now essentially unreadable by their focus on topical mores and the minutiae of politics that now mean little to us. On top of which The New Machiavelli is just so badly written. New editions of it are still published (Penguin Modern Classics etc.) but it is understandable that it is not a favourite of the reading public.

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Now why did I next read a novel as bad and forgettable as one you’ve probably never heard of -  The Dream?

I read it because it happened to be the next novel by H.G.Wells on my shelf. The Dream was first published in 1924 when Wells was well past his glory days as a novelist. True, after he wrote The New Machiavelli he continued to churn out novels for many years. Some of them were very popular in their day – such as The Passionate Friends in 1913, and his reaction to what we now call the First World War, Mr Britling Sees It Through in 1916. But his novels became more and more preachy, more and more platforms for Wells’ ideas and less and less credible as reading for adults.

The Dream is simply a case in point.

Two thousand years in the future, science has triumphed over superstition, human society is planned rationally, human relations are perfect and jealousy never happens as there is Free Love and open and frank teaching about sex. But a man has a dream which takes him back to the early 20^th century. He finds himself recalling and living the life of a Henry Mortimer Smith, a poor fellow who lives in the muddled and unorganized society of England. (They simply didn’t know how to plan back then, say the people of the future). Population is growing too fast and there are slums expanding to house all these superfluous people. (They didn’t know about birth control, say the people of the future). Henry Mortimer Smith’s sister runs away from home and lives a comfortable life as the “kept woman” of a rich man – but her family condemn her for this. (They didn’t know about Free Love and how much better things are when married men may also love other women, say the people of the future.) Henry Mortimer Smith falls in love and marries, but then goes off to fight in the Great War. (They didn’t know our world of universal rational peace, say the people of the future.) When Smith returns,  his wife has had an affair with another man and a baby is born. Smith is outraged, casts off his wife, divorces her, marries another woman and then, through a long series of events, regrets what he has done. (Oh if only they knew about rational love and universal sympathy, say the people of the future.)

And so on and so on and so preachingly on. The framing device of people in the far future is not really predictive or visionary. It is simply Wells giving his own commentary and laying it over what is otherwise one of what I have called his “contemporary social novels” – novels concerning the England of his own time.

Next posting I will look at a couple of Wells’ really predictive science fiction, his stab at a general philosophy, and his best known attempt to imagine how the future would turn out.